Happened to me. I had a powerbook that Apple totally failed to support, within warranty, they just completely dropped the ball because applecare doesn't count if the pc ever left the USA. Uh..what? Not how I read the contract, so I complained.
I called, got nothing. I got escalated, got nothing. So I wrote him a letter, directly. (My usual theory is that by contacting the CEO, you get "Received Office of the CEO" stamped on your letter before customer service gets it, which never hurts.) In this case I got to a Steve assistant.
At the time I was working in the purchasing department of a large midwestern university. I totally misrepresented my level of authority and told his assistant that not a single Apple purchase order would be signed ever again if they didn't honor their obligations. She promised to check back with me.
An hour later, I got a call. "Hi. This is Steve. We are going to send another Powerbook out right away. OK?" Caught in the reality distortion field, I was powerless.
Ballmer just defines ball game differently than you do.
Lots of love, low sales is success for some.
He would (obviously) prefer little love, high sales.
I suspect that what Mac has is the notion that by buying the 2% solution, you are smarter than us dolts in the 98%. If you can convince your customers that they are a member of an elite, you can sell them anything.
The excerpt quoted on CLTV (it was on at the falafil shop) was about shooting up some place with twin P90s (some kind of gun?) then having sex with the corpses.
You also don't have to trust your ASP with your data.
Or if you do host your data with somebody else, you can use public key encryption and not trust them with the access to your data, keeping your private key on your system.
Add to that you need to trust the person holding your data. You need to trust them not to lose it and not to use it.
We designed our app as a desktop application because we don't think our customers should trust us with their data. Because we went with a public key system, we can't use the data, but we also can't use a web app (without doing something horrific with ActiveX or a plugin.).
So there are some places where only client side computing work.
Or the gas company telling doormen/security guards not to let in people claiming to be from the gas company unless they have official badges.
Since the scammers are "collecting bills" in person, taking money from the building tenants and also goofing up the real bills.
Or something like that.
The monkeyboy dance was goofy, but the man got his point across: we care about developers. True or not, lunatic or not, it was a compelling performance, which is what he wanted from it.
Or the third possibility that spam is more like MLM:
There is no money in spam, just in selling spam tools and spam lists to suckers who think they can make money off spamming people.
I suggest that email lists have outlived their usefullness. They were great in 1991, but the email channel is a lot noiser than it used to be. We also have better tools for carrying on public conversation. Web based forums are better for public conversation than email lists. Rss keeps you in touch with developments as often as your RSS reader refreshes.
Let's ditch email lists for rss+forums. They are better tools for the job.
On the other side of things, we stopped using AdSense because so many "hits" were from link farms. Google didn't care. They took our money just the same.
We would get a bunch of traffic from obvious junk sites, rreport it, and get a chipper automated email from Google Marketing telling us how awesome AdSense is and how we should definitely use it. It was only pennies at a time, but even then it was money wasted.
Clearly, they need to get on top of this issue somehow.
Don't they have an ideological belief against big offices for execs? I thought they only came in one size and Bill had to be badgered just to move into a "double."
If you are into pain, or want to do your own custom webcontrols, you easily override the methods in ASP.NET controls to do it all manually. Sharepoint developers know all about this fun.
Any specifics on the nightmare? We use MSDE all over the place and it works great, provided your sysadmins aren't the sort who install server grade database engines with network access enabled and root passwords blank.
Get yourself working for a company for the summer. Accept just enough pay to keep a roof (maybe even your parent's) over your head and to keep you in beer and skittles. In exchange learn how to actually do the job you think you are training for.
By no means accept just any internship. Even if you like the name on the door, do your research. The best way to do this is to get clear in your own mind what you want to learn before you apply for the internship. Go into the interview with a plan and see if the company can provide what you want. Sometimes the right answer is a huge firm with formal mentoring. Sometimes the answer is a tiny firm where they will accomodate your individual needs and talents.
We try to give our interns real for profit projects or at least internal projects. Nobody is well paid, but they learn a lot. They tell us that in their exit interviews and their code sure looks a lot better in August than it did in June!
It is also, in large measure because people want to be part of an aesthetic elite. They want to be smarter than the masses. They want to belong to a club.
Apple is smart enough to be that club's totem. They have managed to get people to invest their desire to be smugly superior in a product and in Apple's products at that.
There are no flaming fanboys who defend, say, Wusthoff kitchen knives, regardless of the quality of those tools. Clearly, Apple has managed to insinuate itself in people's need to think themselves smarter than others in a way that other sold at a preimum products haven't.
This makes them largely immune to network effects: They can have 3% of the market (or whatever) and not find themselves made irrelevant by their competitor's 95% share. In a "rational" calculation, you would be a fool to ensure that your version of most consumer software products will be thrown together as an afterthought, after the larger market had been satisfied. Or built for your platform without the benefit of economies of scale. By exploiting people's needs to think themselves smarter than the herd, Apple has turned this drawback into an advantage.
The curve and big sample is a compelling explanation.
Here's one approach to stopping the crooks: Increase their false positive rate: give them bogus bank account info by the thousands to clog up their phishing sites.
So what if they get 1 sucker. They also get 90,000 liars. What to do? Try every login by hand? Use an automated tool that fails 99.999% of the time and probably catches the attention of security people?
Wasn't there a javascript tool hacked up for populating mortagage spam sites with bogus data? I can't find the article now, but if memory serves, the spammers offered to pay the author to stop. If I was Chase, or PayPal, I'd budget a couple of programmers to build a distributed phisher thwarting screen saver. Build a list of phishing emails, share the sites, and use some nasty screen scraping algorithm to fill their databases with junk. It could run in the background like a vigilante SETI.
What is striking is how little he said on the subject. Either Forbes edited him down a lot, or it just wasn't a major portion of the conversation. He didn't even bring it up. The interviewer did. Why is this front page news again?
re: Coming up with enough features to justify
Have you seen the previews? The UI is a radical departure from what Office (and the rest) have been doing with GUIs for the past 15 years.
If anything, the problem won't be "this isn't any different from 2003." It will be "this is too different from 2003."
Slashdot Mirror
Happened to me. I had a powerbook that Apple totally failed to support, within warranty, they just completely dropped the ball because applecare doesn't count if the pc ever left the USA. Uh..what? Not how I read the contract, so I complained.
I called, got nothing. I got escalated, got nothing. So I wrote him a letter, directly. (My usual theory is that by contacting the CEO, you get "Received Office of the CEO" stamped on your letter before customer service gets it, which never hurts.) In this case I got to a Steve assistant.
At the time I was working in the purchasing department of a large midwestern university. I totally misrepresented my level of authority and told his assistant that not a single Apple purchase order would be signed ever again if they didn't honor their obligations. She promised to check back with me.
An hour later, I got a call. "Hi. This is Steve. We are going to send another Powerbook out right away. OK?" Caught in the reality distortion field, I was powerless.
Ballmer just defines ball game differently than you do. Lots of love, low sales is success for some. He would (obviously) prefer little love, high sales.
I suspect that what Mac has is the notion that by buying the 2% solution, you are smarter than us dolts in the 98%. If you can convince your customers that they are a member of an elite, you can sell them anything.
Well, maybe not an iproduct, but close.
I speak as a former member of the cult who got seduced by the fact that the Windows market is thirty times the size of the Mac market.
I read it as "security determined by sponsorship" as "security will be handled by whoever does it for free."
The excerpt quoted on CLTV (it was on at the falafil shop) was about shooting up some place with twin P90s (some kind of gun?) then having sex with the corpses.
Somebody needs a hug and a cookie.
A writeup that is totally inaccurate and furthers an agenda unrelated to the original article? On Slashdot??
You also don't have to trust your ASP with your data.
Or if you do host your data with somebody else, you can use public key encryption and not trust them with the access to your data, keeping your private key on your system.
Add to that you need to trust the person holding your data. You need to trust them not to lose it and not to use it.
We designed our app as a desktop application because we don't think our customers should trust us with their data. Because we went with a public key system, we can't use the data, but we also can't use a web app (without doing something horrific with ActiveX or a plugin.).
So there are some places where only client side computing work.
Or the gas company telling doormen/security guards not to let in people claiming to be from the gas company unless they have official badges. Since the scammers are "collecting bills" in person, taking money from the building tenants and also goofing up the real bills. Or something like that.
The monkeyboy dance was goofy, but the man got his point across: we care about developers. True or not, lunatic or not, it was a compelling performance, which is what he wanted from it.
>as long as they didn't...
Nah, there would still be sputtering outrage. They are damned if the do and damned if they don't.
Or the third possibility that spam is more like MLM: There is no money in spam, just in selling spam tools and spam lists to suckers who think they can make money off spamming people.
I suggest that email lists have outlived their usefullness. They were great in 1991, but the email channel is a lot noiser than it used to be. We also have better tools for carrying on public conversation. Web based forums are better for public conversation than email lists. Rss keeps you in touch with developments as often as your RSS reader refreshes.
Let's ditch email lists for rss+forums. They are better tools for the job.
On the other side of things, we stopped using AdSense because so many "hits" were from link farms. Google didn't care. They took our money just the same.
We would get a bunch of traffic from obvious junk sites, rreport it, and get a chipper automated email from Google Marketing telling us how awesome AdSense is and how we should definitely use it. It was only pennies at a time, but even then it was money wasted.
Clearly, they need to get on top of this issue somehow.
Don't they have an ideological belief against big offices for execs? I thought they only came in one size and Bill had to be badgered just to move into a "double."
If you are into pain, or want to do your own custom webcontrols, you easily override the methods in ASP.NET controls to do it all manually. Sharepoint developers know all about this fun.
Any specifics on the nightmare? We use MSDE all over the place and it works great, provided your sysadmins aren't the sort who install server grade database engines with network access enabled and root passwords blank.
Get yourself working for a company for the summer. Accept just enough pay to keep a roof (maybe even your parent's) over your head and to keep you in beer and skittles. In exchange learn how to actually do the job you think you are training for.
By no means accept just any internship. Even if you like the name on the door, do your research. The best way to do this is to get clear in your own mind what you want to learn before you apply for the internship. Go into the interview with a plan and see if the company can provide what you want. Sometimes the right answer is a huge firm with formal mentoring. Sometimes the answer is a tiny firm where they will accomodate your individual needs and talents.
We try to give our interns real for profit projects or at least internal projects. Nobody is well paid, but they learn a lot. They tell us that in their exit interviews and their code sure looks a lot better in August than it did in June!
It is also, in large measure because people want to be part of an aesthetic elite. They want to be smarter than the masses. They want to belong to a club.
Apple is smart enough to be that club's totem. They have managed to get people to invest their desire to be smugly superior in a product and in Apple's products at that.
There are no flaming fanboys who defend, say, Wusthoff kitchen knives, regardless of the quality of those tools. Clearly, Apple has managed to insinuate itself in people's need to think themselves smarter than others in a way that other sold at a preimum products haven't.
This makes them largely immune to network effects: They can have 3% of the market (or whatever) and not find themselves made irrelevant by their competitor's 95% share. In a "rational" calculation, you would be a fool to ensure that your version of most consumer software products will be thrown together as an afterthought, after the larger market had been satisfied. Or built for your platform without the benefit of economies of scale. By exploiting people's needs to think themselves smarter than the herd, Apple has turned this drawback into an advantage.
The curve and big sample is a compelling explanation.
Here's one approach to stopping the crooks: Increase their false positive rate: give them bogus bank account info by the thousands to clog up their phishing sites.
So what if they get 1 sucker. They also get 90,000 liars. What to do? Try every login by hand? Use an automated tool that fails 99.999% of the time and probably catches the attention of security people?
Wasn't there a javascript tool hacked up for populating mortagage spam sites with bogus data? I can't find the article now, but if memory serves, the spammers offered to pay the author to stop. If I was Chase, or PayPal, I'd budget a couple of programmers to build a distributed phisher thwarting screen saver. Build a list of phishing emails, share the sites, and use some nasty screen scraping algorithm to fill their databases with junk. It could run in the background like a vigilante SETI.
What is striking is how little he said on the subject. Either Forbes edited him down a lot, or it just wasn't a major portion of the conversation. He didn't even bring it up. The interviewer did. Why is this front page news again?
re: Coming up with enough features to justify
Have you seen the previews? The UI is a radical departure from what Office (and the rest) have been doing with GUIs for the past 15 years.
If anything, the problem won't be "this isn't any different from 2003." It will be "this is too different from 2003."