Up until 2 months ago I was working at a mechanical engineering firm as a software developer, full to the brim with certified engineers. There was nothing special about them, I had to learn their trade to build systems to support them in their role, and I helped them obtain a number of patents because none of their engineers were competent enough in math to know what math they needed to solve which problem.
I'm not saying engineers aren't in the upper tiers when it comes to intelligence, but they're no more special than physicists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, developers and the like yet for some reason they have this overblown image of themselves as special.
I'm not even saying certification for professions like this are a bad thing, particularly where safety is critical a lot of the time. But fundamentally what bugs me is the "You can't call yourself a software engineer" mentality - why? software engineering isn't any less skilled or difficult than the likes of mechanical, and civil engineering etc.
Scientists, mathematicians et al. don't feel the need to protect their titles with such zeal - if you need to check someone's credentials then "chartered" as a prefix for those who genuinely are is a good enough distinction. But pretending that the meaning of terms shouldn't change as the world does, for a specific profession for whom the meaning of the name of that profession has changed drastically from it's original rail related origins anyway just stinks of pettiness, and arrogance. I just can't help but feel such engineers who feel this way should simply get the fuck over themselves, they're not special.
Apart from the fact resources are finite, and whilst such crimes go unsolved chasing copyright infringement cases necessarily detracts from the other.
That's before you even look at who pays for it, go survey a large number of tax payers, I think you'll struggle to find any real support for the idea that their tax money should be used to chase pirates rather than be used to deal with unsolved crimes, increase pro-active policing numbers, or even divert money to things like better public healthcare.
If the music/movie industry is willing to spend extra millions funding the police? Sure, maybe then. But I don't think you'll find they're willing, because really, the losses from piracy aren't enough to make it worth it, unless someone else is footing the bill on their behalf of course.
Except the Galaxy S2, Samsung's best selling smartphone that has alone shifted as many units as the iPhone 4 in the same period sells for the same price, but unlike Apple, Samsung manufactures themselves without the need for outsourcing so don't worry about the profit the manufacturer makes because they are the manufacturer such that in other words, Samsung is selling as many, but will be making far more per unit.
I had an HTC Magic, it was a really good phone when I got it, ran Android 1.5, and I enjoyed using it, upgrade to Android 1.6 came out, and it was still great. As Android was going under rapid change at that point though, I saw Android 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 come out and wondered why Vodafone wouldn't give me 2.2. Eventually, quite late on they finally bowed to customer demand and complaints for us, and releases 2.2. Well, it wasn't pretty. The phone became painfully slow, and half the apps I wanted Android 2.2 for couldn't run well enough on it anyway like Angry Birds.
I ended up buying a ZTE Blade for £90 with no contract, because they're that cheap. I could install 2.2 on it, ran Angry Birds etc. okay, and really, I still paid less than I would've for an iPhone 3GS at contract start yet still had a better phone because with it's AMOLED screen etc. and the 3GS' older processor it was just better specced in most ways.
I used to think there should be a fixed period on Android upgrades too like 2 years, but it just wont work. Android is such a varied ecosystem, you just can't do that. Upgrades should only be available if they're comfortable enough to use on the device and that criteria is good enough, otherwise customers get lumped with unusable handsets.
So yeah, I used to agree with you, I had my phone and wondered why I wasn't getting upgrades for it, I bitched and moaned with everyone else at Vodafone and they relented and gave us it, it was a waste of time anyway because all it did is made me realise I needed a new phone.
Stuck in a 2 year contract? yeah, that's shitty, but personally I'd never be stupid enough to sign up to a 2 year contract, it's just too long. I don't even go for 18months if I can help it, but then, perhaps this is because I've been buying smartphones since the Nokia 7650 came out in 2002, and normal phones since long before that, and 12 months has always been the norm for me.
How well your cellphone is going to age and if you'll need to replace it before then is something you should factor into whether you sign for a 2 year contract in the first place. That's particularly important with the speed the market is moving currently. Phone companies are sharks, simply guaranteeing upgrades for the length of the contract wont save people, what about the idiot that signs up to a 2 year contract choosing a last gen near end of line phone because they thought it was "cute" and had no idea about how under specced it was to alternatives they could've picked? Should even they be supported even though their phone probably wont be fit to run the latest and greatest even almost at the point of sale? The phone company wont warn you, they just see a small fortune they can milk out of you because you're going to be paying them a few hundred quid in profit because you chose a £100 phone instead of a £500 phone.
We need to be careful companies aren't just shirking their responsibility to provide upgrades where they work, but in my experience if they aren't releasing an upgrade there's generally good reason for it. It is in their interests for you to have the latest features where it's feasible after all, because the more you can do with your phone, the more you will use it, and the more profit they'll rack up out of your voice and data usage.
No but having and enforcing rules against loss of life is much more important than having and enforcing rules to stop a bunch of kids downloading movies and MP3s which still has debatable consequences - quite potentially positive in that the kids may not have had money to buy the content in the first place, but by accessing the content anyway may potentially learn something, particularly if it's a factual based film.
There's a question of whether piracy is even a bad thing still, despite the MPAA/RIAA ranting on the topic it's far from proven that it is bad.
I'll leave you to figure out which is which, it shouldn't be too hard.
Oh, and a few people? try something more like 30 out of the 32million or whatever people in the UK that drive. Hardly just a "few". Don't try and pretend only a "few" people have never broken the speed limit, never run a red light even if by a fraction of a second, never driven with a tyre tread below the legal limit, never driven with two bulbs out, never undertaken because the fast lane slowed suddenly, never failed to indicate properly, never gone the wrong way down a poorly signed one way street, forgotten to renew their insurance/tax disc by even just a day. Really, there's so many things that might catch people out even if just once, even if by accident, that you'll struggle to find anyone who hasn't broken the law on the road. Mostly it's no problem because they happen to be able to get out of the situation safely, or because other road users manage to avoid the hazard caused, but sometimes, just sometimes, that isn't the case, and someone dies.
One might argue that the roads, being created as safe as they are, are as much designed in such a way that they aid speeding as indexing sites are to support piracy. That is after all why an MP recently suggested we look at raising the UK's speed limit on some roads- because they're safe enough to break the current speed limit on.
Just block external telcos that don't behave altogether until they can get their act together.
Being unable to route calls to a major country like the UK would be enough to destroy any such telco pretty quickly as it's real legit customers bugger off elsewhere. Even better if BT can team up with European/US telcos and implement the ban Europe/US wide.
Let's be honest, this is basically what the MPAA et al. are pushing on the internet, so if it can be done there why can't it be done for things that the general population actually WOULD like like spam phone calls? I think this is the GP's point.
Nothing gives politicians a hardon more than hanging round with a rock star or hollywood star whilst they think about what it'll do for their ratings.
Hanging round with Larry and Sergei? Not so much.
Until tech starts giving politicians what they want, be it improved ratings, bribes, a signed copy of some famous twat's guitar, that sort of thing, then it'll always come second place to the likes of hollywood which absolutely excels in corrupt practices.
It's not just Jobs, what you say sums up why Gates, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg also managed to build such massively succesful companies.
It's the difference between having a business person at the top, and a person who actually cares about the product.
Business people do wonders in terms of short term profit gains by outsourcing, by laying people off and so forth, but are meaningless in the long term because they've gone by the time the long term negative effects hit such as having customers ticked off and leaving you because of your dire outsourced support, or your inability to produce decent new products because you ditched all your highly skilled long term staff for a cheaper army of outsourced devs or inexperienced fresh graduates.
It's not that Steve had some special quality in this respect, just that Apple as a company made the right decision as to what kind of leader you need to make such a company succede - a leader who is actually genuinely interested and enthusiastic about the product you sell and the future of the industry you are in.
This is also why Google had to drop Schmidt as the CEO and hand the reigns back to Larry and Sergei, Schmidt has in the last decade or so just because too much of a business person, and not enough of a technologist, and it was dragging Google down and holding them back.
I think you're giving them too much credit. Their systems have always been developed and managed in a disturbingly amateur manner, and it seemed clear this was going to come and bite them one day.
Really, when the quality of their supporting staff is about the same as their journalists (i.e. really really bad), what can you expect?
Companies should firstly stop employing monkeys to manage systems that said companies are opening themselves up to legal action if they aren't protected properly.
I'd rather other companies didn't follow the example of The Register. I'd rather other companies follow the example of companies that don't employ monkeys, and avoid suffering data leaks altogether. There's plenty such companies out there, they're the ones that we don't hear in news stories like this.
Please, let's stop pretending it's okay to fuck up like this as long as you behave yourself afterwards. Sure some mistakes are unavoidable and then how you behave after is what matters, this isn't one of those unavoidable mistakes, it was more than avoidable by making sure staff with access to such systems are at least half-way competent.
One thing that amazes me when people talk about prior art/device evolution is how many people ignore the likes of Compaq/HPs old line of iPaqs. The iPhone etc. is more an advancement/clone of these than anything. Hell, even the name is close.
Jobs made a similarly dumb comment about Netbooks too for what it's worth. They really missed the boat on that one, Apple could've taken that market with ease.
C# got optional dynamic typing in version 4 with the DLR, although the DLR is really a set of libraries that just helps with building the required expression tree at run time to allow the dynamic behaviour.
I do somewhat agree though that I don't see how this gives it any more of the benefits of Python and Ruby than it already had.
Even outside the context of the copying of Xerox's ideas it's rediculous. Apart from it's UI the iPhone borrowed heavily in every other way from existing phones, or is Job's saying only UIs aren't allowed to have ideas that are a natural progression be utilised in other devices? Even assuming that's the case the iPhone's UI was hardly that groundbreaking, some Windows XP tablets had single click icons and an auto-hiding start bar enabled by default when I tried them as far back as 2003, so single pressing the Windows desktop icons worked in pretty much the same way. If anything the iPhone's standout was merely about polish on existing ideas, why should anyone see Android as any different?
Of course, the hypocrisy becomes even more galling when you consider iOS5 is full of features copied from Android.
People who genuinely care about contributing to society like Newton instead use quotes such as the classic "standing on the shoulders of giants" (or however you believe it was originally phrased). They don't have an easily dented ego, they just care about making things better whether improving existing things or coming up with new. This to me just reaffirms that Jobs was an arrogant selfish dick with no care for anything other than his own ego.
I don't know what the point in releasing these quotes is now though, I'm not one for painting an unrealistic angelic picture of someone just because they're dead, but I also understand that some people would rather any criticism of him at least waits a while until after he's dead. Were these quotes designed to rally anti-Android sentiment by Apple? or were they leaked as a counter to Steve's post-death saint like image painted by the media?
I suspect people will respond to these quotes based largely on their pre-defined thoughts about Steve anyway, but something strikes me as a little tasteless about digging into them right now, when Apple vs. Android and arguably Steve's death can still be considered current events. It strikes me as a rather misguided attempt to exploit his death one way or another.
Of course, the other possibility is it's merely about drumming up profits for whoever is publishing his autobiography, but there you have it I guess. Anyone know who is getting the profits for that now? As a somewhat related aside, anyone know what happened to Steve's fortunes? have they all just gone to his family, or did he finally do something charitable with his departing wishes?
"It does not excuse direct military intervention in a foreign country to blindly support one side in a civil war"
It does if the side of the civil war being supported is an overwhelming majority of the population being supressed only by superior military force as has clearly been the case in Libya.
It's simply unacceptable to sit by whilst the vast majority of a population is supressed by a dwarfed authoritarian minority.
For what it's worth, whilst many human rights organisations like Amnesty have indeed found evidence of human rights abuses amongst the rebels, they've also said it's not systemic as was the case with Gaddafi's regime and that the incidents were generally isolated. I fully agree where they've happened they should be dealt with, but to suggest they're a reason why we shouldn't have intervened? That doesn't even make sense - if you're arguing that we want to remove human rights abuses in this world because they're a bad thing then how can not intervening have possibly been a better option when under Gaddafi's regime such abuses were systemic, were far more horrific, had been going on for 40 years, and were rapidly escalating in the face of civilians protesting back against them?
"If you remember how it went on early in the conflict (but already after NATO air forces intervened), that's pretty much how it went already."
Not really, NATO didn't defeat Gadaffi's armour etc. overnight, it took months, and the turnaround correlated nicely with that. When the contrast in military technology was balanced the rebels became the clear winning force.
"In a modern conflict, the side with uncontested air support wins, period."
Really? The West has "won" without a shred of doubt in Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems a massive stretch to suggest air power works better in Urban settings than in mountains and forests. Particularly with the increased threat of collateral damage in urban settings. Even if your argument held true it makes no sense in the context of Iraq which is about as close to Libya as you can get by way of terrain, and guess what really got Iraq to the point where a pullout was feasible because there had at last become some semblance of an improvement there? feet on the ground, coupled with a shift in the will of the people.
Really, that's what matters, that's why things worked out in Libya - the people wanted it.
The issues the rebels have faced can be put down entirely to the challenges a civilian formed rebellion faces when fighting a well trained loyal military armed with modern Western supplied weaponry (i.e. French mobile artillery).
If Gaddafi genuinely had support from a large (as in a non-negligible percentage of the population) civilian base then that civilian base backed up by the military would've easily defeated the rebels even with NATO airpower. NATO airpower however allowed guerilla warfare to win out, and if we've learn anything from Iraq and Afghanistan it doesn't matter how high tech and well equipped you are when you're forced into guerilla warfare it's ultimately the will of the people engaging in it that win out. The very fact guerilla warfare clearly won out against Gaddafi demonstrates the majority will of the people.
I'm not saying Gaddafi didn't have supporters, but more that the level of support he had was not large enough to hold sway over the majority of the population in the end. Many people were predicting the rebels would never take Tripoli because it was full of Gadaffi supporters and tribal alliances would ruin it, but it turns out that other than Sirte and a bunch of smaller towns that he didn't actually have much support after all. So much for the people of Benghazi, Tripoli and the Western tribes being unwilling to work together, it seems they've excelled at doing precisely that. Their coordinated assault on Tripoli and subsequent capture was incredible and it caught even the Gaddaffi's by suprise.
One final point is that even his military weren't completely supportive of him in the end, part of the success in Tripoli was that before the rebels arrived they had managed to get a major military leader in Tripoli to agree that if the rebels made it there, he would defect to them with his forces to avoid bloodshed. He did precisely that - even some of his supporters were only such because they feared the alternative whilst being sat in range of his secret police et al.
The point is this, Android apps work pretty well across all those devices, the fragmentation trolling implied the difficulty of developing across a fragmented device base was a major barrier which it clearly isn't.
The reason I point out it's now more of an issue for iOS because they didn't plan for it is illustrated nicely by the common example of iOS' method of dealing with the large iPad screen vs. the iPhone screen such that it only uses a small percentage of the screen space and leaves the rest black, or horribly pixelates the app by just doubling the size of the pixels. That needn't have ever been the case if they'd planned for the fact that their screen resolution etc. wasn't always going to remain static - progress being inevitable is a bit of a no brainer, yet Apple missed this and tried to spin it as them avoiding the fragmentation issue by only having a single standardised spec. That wasn't going to work for ever, Android's planning for it from the outset in the design of it's APIs paid off such that it is much more supportive of development of a single app that plays nicely across many specs. iOS is only struggling more and more with this as they release more fragmented devices, whilst Android seems to be getting more and more polished as time goes on despite having an order of magnitude more variants.
It's not that Android doesn't have fragmentation, it's simply that it's far superior at handling it, because it always knew it'd have to.
Hey, don't generalise against liberals. I'm a liberal and I agree with you minus the anti-liberal stuff.
The problem isn't liberals, it's just that some people whatever their political leaning are complete idiots. Look at Sarah Palin, it sure as hell aint because she's a liberal that she's so stupid.
Yeah, that's why the majority of Libyans were happy to step up and overthrow him.
Or are you going to extend your conspiracy theory into suggesting the west has succesfully manipulated the thoughts of an entire nation and they couldn't possibly have come to the conclusion they wanted rid all by themselves?
The people decided they wanted rid long before NATO stepped in, the only reason they failed to that point is because Gaddafi was bringing in foreign mercenairies and using overwhelming military force against the majority of civilians who wanted rid.
There's a good reason cities as massive as Tripoli fell against Gaddafi so quickly once the military threat vanished - because no one wanted him.
Right, so dependent on it that since action in Libya European oil prices have actually largely stabilised rather than increased as would be the case if it was such an important source?
It's nothing to do with the fact European leaders waking up and realising he was a bad man, they knew this all along. It was about the fact the Libyan people and Arab/Middle Eastern people in general were ready to rise up, that was the fundamental turning point. Apparently you missed that rather major section in the news for the last 9 months+
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What's with Engineers and their arrogance?
Up until 2 months ago I was working at a mechanical engineering firm as a software developer, full to the brim with certified engineers. There was nothing special about them, I had to learn their trade to build systems to support them in their role, and I helped them obtain a number of patents because none of their engineers were competent enough in math to know what math they needed to solve which problem.
I'm not saying engineers aren't in the upper tiers when it comes to intelligence, but they're no more special than physicists, biologists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, developers and the like yet for some reason they have this overblown image of themselves as special.
I'm not even saying certification for professions like this are a bad thing, particularly where safety is critical a lot of the time. But fundamentally what bugs me is the "You can't call yourself a software engineer" mentality - why? software engineering isn't any less skilled or difficult than the likes of mechanical, and civil engineering etc.
Scientists, mathematicians et al. don't feel the need to protect their titles with such zeal - if you need to check someone's credentials then "chartered" as a prefix for those who genuinely are is a good enough distinction. But pretending that the meaning of terms shouldn't change as the world does, for a specific profession for whom the meaning of the name of that profession has changed drastically from it's original rail related origins anyway just stinks of pettiness, and arrogance. I just can't help but feel such engineers who feel this way should simply get the fuck over themselves, they're not special.
Apart from the fact resources are finite, and whilst such crimes go unsolved chasing copyright infringement cases necessarily detracts from the other.
That's before you even look at who pays for it, go survey a large number of tax payers, I think you'll struggle to find any real support for the idea that their tax money should be used to chase pirates rather than be used to deal with unsolved crimes, increase pro-active policing numbers, or even divert money to things like better public healthcare.
If the music/movie industry is willing to spend extra millions funding the police? Sure, maybe then. But I don't think you'll find they're willing, because really, the losses from piracy aren't enough to make it worth it, unless someone else is footing the bill on their behalf of course.
Which if true, ironically makes them even more vulnerable to the likes of anonymous.
Except the Galaxy S2, Samsung's best selling smartphone that has alone shifted as many units as the iPhone 4 in the same period sells for the same price, but unlike Apple, Samsung manufactures themselves without the need for outsourcing so don't worry about the profit the manufacturer makes because they are the manufacturer such that in other words, Samsung is selling as many, but will be making far more per unit.
I had an HTC Magic, it was a really good phone when I got it, ran Android 1.5, and I enjoyed using it, upgrade to Android 1.6 came out, and it was still great. As Android was going under rapid change at that point though, I saw Android 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 come out and wondered why Vodafone wouldn't give me 2.2. Eventually, quite late on they finally bowed to customer demand and complaints for us, and releases 2.2. Well, it wasn't pretty. The phone became painfully slow, and half the apps I wanted Android 2.2 for couldn't run well enough on it anyway like Angry Birds.
I ended up buying a ZTE Blade for £90 with no contract, because they're that cheap. I could install 2.2 on it, ran Angry Birds etc. okay, and really, I still paid less than I would've for an iPhone 3GS at contract start yet still had a better phone because with it's AMOLED screen etc. and the 3GS' older processor it was just better specced in most ways.
I used to think there should be a fixed period on Android upgrades too like 2 years, but it just wont work. Android is such a varied ecosystem, you just can't do that. Upgrades should only be available if they're comfortable enough to use on the device and that criteria is good enough, otherwise customers get lumped with unusable handsets.
So yeah, I used to agree with you, I had my phone and wondered why I wasn't getting upgrades for it, I bitched and moaned with everyone else at Vodafone and they relented and gave us it, it was a waste of time anyway because all it did is made me realise I needed a new phone.
Stuck in a 2 year contract? yeah, that's shitty, but personally I'd never be stupid enough to sign up to a 2 year contract, it's just too long. I don't even go for 18months if I can help it, but then, perhaps this is because I've been buying smartphones since the Nokia 7650 came out in 2002, and normal phones since long before that, and 12 months has always been the norm for me.
How well your cellphone is going to age and if you'll need to replace it before then is something you should factor into whether you sign for a 2 year contract in the first place. That's particularly important with the speed the market is moving currently. Phone companies are sharks, simply guaranteeing upgrades for the length of the contract wont save people, what about the idiot that signs up to a 2 year contract choosing a last gen near end of line phone because they thought it was "cute" and had no idea about how under specced it was to alternatives they could've picked? Should even they be supported even though their phone probably wont be fit to run the latest and greatest even almost at the point of sale? The phone company wont warn you, they just see a small fortune they can milk out of you because you're going to be paying them a few hundred quid in profit because you chose a £100 phone instead of a £500 phone.
We need to be careful companies aren't just shirking their responsibility to provide upgrades where they work, but in my experience if they aren't releasing an upgrade there's generally good reason for it. It is in their interests for you to have the latest features where it's feasible after all, because the more you can do with your phone, the more you will use it, and the more profit they'll rack up out of your voice and data usage.
No but having and enforcing rules against loss of life is much more important than having and enforcing rules to stop a bunch of kids downloading movies and MP3s which still has debatable consequences - quite potentially positive in that the kids may not have had money to buy the content in the first place, but by accessing the content anyway may potentially learn something, particularly if it's a factual based film.
There's a question of whether piracy is even a bad thing still, despite the MPAA/RIAA ranting on the topic it's far from proven that it is bad.
Yes, one can cause loss of life, the other can't.
I'll leave you to figure out which is which, it shouldn't be too hard.
Oh, and a few people? try something more like 30 out of the 32million or whatever people in the UK that drive. Hardly just a "few". Don't try and pretend only a "few" people have never broken the speed limit, never run a red light even if by a fraction of a second, never driven with a tyre tread below the legal limit, never driven with two bulbs out, never undertaken because the fast lane slowed suddenly, never failed to indicate properly, never gone the wrong way down a poorly signed one way street, forgotten to renew their insurance/tax disc by even just a day. Really, there's so many things that might catch people out even if just once, even if by accident, that you'll struggle to find anyone who hasn't broken the law on the road. Mostly it's no problem because they happen to be able to get out of the situation safely, or because other road users manage to avoid the hazard caused, but sometimes, just sometimes, that isn't the case, and someone dies.
One might argue that the roads, being created as safe as they are, are as much designed in such a way that they aid speeding as indexing sites are to support piracy. That is after all why an MP recently suggested we look at raising the UK's speed limit on some roads- because they're safe enough to break the current speed limit on.
Just block external telcos that don't behave altogether until they can get their act together.
Being unable to route calls to a major country like the UK would be enough to destroy any such telco pretty quickly as it's real legit customers bugger off elsewhere. Even better if BT can team up with European/US telcos and implement the ban Europe/US wide.
Let's be honest, this is basically what the MPAA et al. are pushing on the internet, so if it can be done there why can't it be done for things that the general population actually WOULD like like spam phone calls? I think this is the GP's point.
No we wont.
Nothing gives politicians a hardon more than hanging round with a rock star or hollywood star whilst they think about what it'll do for their ratings.
Hanging round with Larry and Sergei? Not so much.
Until tech starts giving politicians what they want, be it improved ratings, bribes, a signed copy of some famous twat's guitar, that sort of thing, then it'll always come second place to the likes of hollywood which absolutely excels in corrupt practices.
It's not just Jobs, what you say sums up why Gates, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg also managed to build such massively succesful companies.
It's the difference between having a business person at the top, and a person who actually cares about the product.
Business people do wonders in terms of short term profit gains by outsourcing, by laying people off and so forth, but are meaningless in the long term because they've gone by the time the long term negative effects hit such as having customers ticked off and leaving you because of your dire outsourced support, or your inability to produce decent new products because you ditched all your highly skilled long term staff for a cheaper army of outsourced devs or inexperienced fresh graduates.
It's not that Steve had some special quality in this respect, just that Apple as a company made the right decision as to what kind of leader you need to make such a company succede - a leader who is actually genuinely interested and enthusiastic about the product you sell and the future of the industry you are in.
This is also why Google had to drop Schmidt as the CEO and hand the reigns back to Larry and Sergei, Schmidt has in the last decade or so just because too much of a business person, and not enough of a technologist, and it was dragging Google down and holding them back.
I think you're giving them too much credit. Their systems have always been developed and managed in a disturbingly amateur manner, and it seemed clear this was going to come and bite them one day.
Really, when the quality of their supporting staff is about the same as their journalists (i.e. really really bad), what can you expect?
Companies should firstly stop employing monkeys to manage systems that said companies are opening themselves up to legal action if they aren't protected properly.
I'd rather other companies didn't follow the example of The Register. I'd rather other companies follow the example of companies that don't employ monkeys, and avoid suffering data leaks altogether. There's plenty such companies out there, they're the ones that we don't hear in news stories like this.
Please, let's stop pretending it's okay to fuck up like this as long as you behave yourself afterwards. Sure some mistakes are unavoidable and then how you behave after is what matters, this isn't one of those unavoidable mistakes, it was more than avoidable by making sure staff with access to such systems are at least half-way competent.
Last I checked the iMac wasn't a mobile device, let alone a phone.
Or not, because everything you said is partisan, and your own opinion, and many of us don't see it this way.
Still, you keep asserting your world view is everyone's world view if it makes you feel better about yourself.
They bought in multi-touch too.
One thing that amazes me when people talk about prior art/device evolution is how many people ignore the likes of Compaq/HPs old line of iPaqs. The iPhone etc. is more an advancement/clone of these than anything. Hell, even the name is close.
Jobs made a similarly dumb comment about Netbooks too for what it's worth. They really missed the boat on that one, Apple could've taken that market with ease.
It's worth noting that original iPhone didn't do very well either, despite the hype.
They only shifted 6 million units before the 3G came out, even Nokia's N95 sold double that in the same period.
That 6 million figure is from Apple's own financial reports too btw.
C# got optional dynamic typing in version 4 with the DLR, although the DLR is really a set of libraries that just helps with building the required expression tree at run time to allow the dynamic behaviour.
I do somewhat agree though that I don't see how this gives it any more of the benefits of Python and Ruby than it already had.
Even outside the context of the copying of Xerox's ideas it's rediculous. Apart from it's UI the iPhone borrowed heavily in every other way from existing phones, or is Job's saying only UIs aren't allowed to have ideas that are a natural progression be utilised in other devices? Even assuming that's the case the iPhone's UI was hardly that groundbreaking, some Windows XP tablets had single click icons and an auto-hiding start bar enabled by default when I tried them as far back as 2003, so single pressing the Windows desktop icons worked in pretty much the same way. If anything the iPhone's standout was merely about polish on existing ideas, why should anyone see Android as any different?
Of course, the hypocrisy becomes even more galling when you consider iOS5 is full of features copied from Android.
People who genuinely care about contributing to society like Newton instead use quotes such as the classic "standing on the shoulders of giants" (or however you believe it was originally phrased). They don't have an easily dented ego, they just care about making things better whether improving existing things or coming up with new. This to me just reaffirms that Jobs was an arrogant selfish dick with no care for anything other than his own ego.
I don't know what the point in releasing these quotes is now though, I'm not one for painting an unrealistic angelic picture of someone just because they're dead, but I also understand that some people would rather any criticism of him at least waits a while until after he's dead. Were these quotes designed to rally anti-Android sentiment by Apple? or were they leaked as a counter to Steve's post-death saint like image painted by the media?
I suspect people will respond to these quotes based largely on their pre-defined thoughts about Steve anyway, but something strikes me as a little tasteless about digging into them right now, when Apple vs. Android and arguably Steve's death can still be considered current events. It strikes me as a rather misguided attempt to exploit his death one way or another.
Of course, the other possibility is it's merely about drumming up profits for whoever is publishing his autobiography, but there you have it I guess. Anyone know who is getting the profits for that now? As a somewhat related aside, anyone know what happened to Steve's fortunes? have they all just gone to his family, or did he finally do something charitable with his departing wishes?
"It does not excuse direct military intervention in a foreign country to blindly support one side in a civil war"
It does if the side of the civil war being supported is an overwhelming majority of the population being supressed only by superior military force as has clearly been the case in Libya.
It's simply unacceptable to sit by whilst the vast majority of a population is supressed by a dwarfed authoritarian minority.
For what it's worth, whilst many human rights organisations like Amnesty have indeed found evidence of human rights abuses amongst the rebels, they've also said it's not systemic as was the case with Gaddafi's regime and that the incidents were generally isolated. I fully agree where they've happened they should be dealt with, but to suggest they're a reason why we shouldn't have intervened? That doesn't even make sense - if you're arguing that we want to remove human rights abuses in this world because they're a bad thing then how can not intervening have possibly been a better option when under Gaddafi's regime such abuses were systemic, were far more horrific, had been going on for 40 years, and were rapidly escalating in the face of civilians protesting back against them?
"If you remember how it went on early in the conflict (but already after NATO air forces intervened), that's pretty much how it went already."
Not really, NATO didn't defeat Gadaffi's armour etc. overnight, it took months, and the turnaround correlated nicely with that. When the contrast in military technology was balanced the rebels became the clear winning force.
"In a modern conflict, the side with uncontested air support wins, period."
Really? The West has "won" without a shred of doubt in Iraq and Afghanistan? It seems a massive stretch to suggest air power works better in Urban settings than in mountains and forests. Particularly with the increased threat of collateral damage in urban settings. Even if your argument held true it makes no sense in the context of Iraq which is about as close to Libya as you can get by way of terrain, and guess what really got Iraq to the point where a pullout was feasible because there had at last become some semblance of an improvement there? feet on the ground, coupled with a shift in the will of the people.
Really, that's what matters, that's why things worked out in Libya - the people wanted it.
The issues the rebels have faced can be put down entirely to the challenges a civilian formed rebellion faces when fighting a well trained loyal military armed with modern Western supplied weaponry (i.e. French mobile artillery).
If Gaddafi genuinely had support from a large (as in a non-negligible percentage of the population) civilian base then that civilian base backed up by the military would've easily defeated the rebels even with NATO airpower. NATO airpower however allowed guerilla warfare to win out, and if we've learn anything from Iraq and Afghanistan it doesn't matter how high tech and well equipped you are when you're forced into guerilla warfare it's ultimately the will of the people engaging in it that win out. The very fact guerilla warfare clearly won out against Gaddafi demonstrates the majority will of the people.
I'm not saying Gaddafi didn't have supporters, but more that the level of support he had was not large enough to hold sway over the majority of the population in the end. Many people were predicting the rebels would never take Tripoli because it was full of Gadaffi supporters and tribal alliances would ruin it, but it turns out that other than Sirte and a bunch of smaller towns that he didn't actually have much support after all. So much for the people of Benghazi, Tripoli and the Western tribes being unwilling to work together, it seems they've excelled at doing precisely that. Their coordinated assault on Tripoli and subsequent capture was incredible and it caught even the Gaddaffi's by suprise.
One final point is that even his military weren't completely supportive of him in the end, part of the success in Tripoli was that before the rebels arrived they had managed to get a major military leader in Tripoli to agree that if the rebels made it there, he would defect to them with his forces to avoid bloodshed. He did precisely that - even some of his supporters were only such because they feared the alternative whilst being sat in range of his secret police et al.
The point is this, Android apps work pretty well across all those devices, the fragmentation trolling implied the difficulty of developing across a fragmented device base was a major barrier which it clearly isn't.
The reason I point out it's now more of an issue for iOS because they didn't plan for it is illustrated nicely by the common example of iOS' method of dealing with the large iPad screen vs. the iPhone screen such that it only uses a small percentage of the screen space and leaves the rest black, or horribly pixelates the app by just doubling the size of the pixels. That needn't have ever been the case if they'd planned for the fact that their screen resolution etc. wasn't always going to remain static - progress being inevitable is a bit of a no brainer, yet Apple missed this and tried to spin it as them avoiding the fragmentation issue by only having a single standardised spec. That wasn't going to work for ever, Android's planning for it from the outset in the design of it's APIs paid off such that it is much more supportive of development of a single app that plays nicely across many specs. iOS is only struggling more and more with this as they release more fragmented devices, whilst Android seems to be getting more and more polished as time goes on despite having an order of magnitude more variants.
It's not that Android doesn't have fragmentation, it's simply that it's far superior at handling it, because it always knew it'd have to.
Hey, don't generalise against liberals. I'm a liberal and I agree with you minus the anti-liberal stuff.
The problem isn't liberals, it's just that some people whatever their political leaning are complete idiots. Look at Sarah Palin, it sure as hell aint because she's a liberal that she's so stupid.
Yeah, that's why the majority of Libyans were happy to step up and overthrow him.
Or are you going to extend your conspiracy theory into suggesting the west has succesfully manipulated the thoughts of an entire nation and they couldn't possibly have come to the conclusion they wanted rid all by themselves?
The people decided they wanted rid long before NATO stepped in, the only reason they failed to that point is because Gaddafi was bringing in foreign mercenairies and using overwhelming military force against the majority of civilians who wanted rid.
There's a good reason cities as massive as Tripoli fell against Gaddafi so quickly once the military threat vanished - because no one wanted him.
Right, so dependent on it that since action in Libya European oil prices have actually largely stabilised rather than increased as would be the case if it was such an important source?
It's nothing to do with the fact European leaders waking up and realising he was a bad man, they knew this all along. It was about the fact the Libyan people and Arab/Middle Eastern people in general were ready to rise up, that was the fundamental turning point. Apparently you missed that rather major section in the news for the last 9 months+