Rumours
How long did it take again, for the one about the Apple tablet to become true?
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Ok, not exactly, and there are many variants. But I guess that people doing open source should expect their code to be used, possibly even by soulless corporations like Micro^H^H^H^H^HGoog^H^H^H^HApple.
Telling the Readability project people would have been polite, but hey...
There is a perfectly good reason to cut prices, even for nasty greedy corporation, and that is to grab more market share. Then of course, they claim that 65% of customers do not use more than 200MB on average, but that could well mean they all use more every three months.
So far, I have mostly seen two types of reaction:
"How dare they!? How can I watch three hours a day of video with only 2GB?"
and
"Cool! I use less than 50MB anyway, welcome to low bills!"
Anyway, to those who gloat at the misfortune of AT&T customers, beware: Your turn WILL come.
The question is WHEN, not IF, other telcos will follow.
I believe the regulator is a little bit to hasty in claiming that the protection of private data does not apply when giving it to the regulator. In the United States, I have absolutely no doubt that this would lead to a class action, especially with such fat targets as Google and the government.
How to mix better the disadvantages of both languages? Significant whitespace PLUS mandatory brackets PLUS apparently, implicit semi-colons. Add a bit of Perl do-what-I-mean, and maybe, who knows, undefined behavior, in the good ol' C tradition.
Do they have compiler macros too!?
Why do you stop at music? Why don't you claim that nobody should ever earn a salary, because they should just do what they like and give it away for free?
...Maybe it could be because you earn a salary yourself, and are not willing to give it up?
You mean you are doing your job for the money? Why don't you quit your job, forgo your salary and do something you ENJOY, you capitalist pig?
6 or 8 suicides on a workforce of 300'000 people?
The suicide rate in China is around 13 per 100'000, according to the Wikicult.
If the company had only 8 suicides this year, they are already way under the national average.
It might well be that people suicide for reasons that are entirely unrelated to their job, you know...
They had spent untold millions to build it, why not just spend an extra million to test it, just to see if it works? Anyway, the budget must have already been attributed for this test long ago.
And really, it makes no sense to spend 99% of your budget to build something, then throw away the result without checking if it works, just to save the remaining 1%. It is almost certain that the knowledge will be useful at some point, even if not for this particular project.
Basically, Microsoft can lean on about any company in the world, and say:
"We think that maybe you owe us money. Now there's the easy way, and that is very easy. You pay a license fee, and that's the end of it.
Of course, you can also try the hard way. We have plenty of lawyers. We have plenty of money and we think nothing of a ten-years long legal battle, which would take 50% of your resources, and 0.1% of ours. Now which will it be?"
Schoolyard bully... On the other hand, Vetinari would be proud.
Gizmodo is getting advertisement like never before, and I am sure that Jason Chen himself is not regretting for a minute whatever it was that he did. As an aspirant journalist, he will likely consider it as a badge of honor. I doubt very much he will end up in jail, especially since he did eventually give back the iPhone.
After all, since they can find people who actually buy it... Why not?
I am willing to bet that somebody at Microsoft made estimations, for each pricing, of how many people would buy versus would pirate it. And they put the price where they thought they would earn the most MONEY. Actually quite reasonable.
All right, I think I get it. Apple does not want apps based on Flash, because it would flood the iTunes stores with apps of "lower quality of experience" that would bring down the level of apps as a whole.
Fair enough, I guess. There may be 100'000 apps already, but there are millions of Flash games. And it would certainly be a let-down if people start saying that apps are just like flash games on the web, except you need to pay for them.
...Of course, that might be ignoring the fart apps, but I do get that if you have a very rosy-colored view of what an app should be, you might turn up your nose at flash games.
Is it that hard to make a pre-compiler that would read a flash app and output the equivalent in Objective-C code? Is Apple going to study every code and try to guess whether it was translated or not? Silly me, of course Apple would. But would they really be able to tell the difference? There is no end to the obfuscation you could go to in order to make it look like a human being typed the code from scratch.
I can imagine Apple starting to randomly refuse apps because they look like they might have been translated...