That Lost 4G Phone | Hacker News Reader

That Lost 4G Phone

dilbert.com

211 pointsalexitosrv46 comments

More interesting than the comics (which came off a bit forced to me) is the following:

>I worried that the story would become stale before my comics would work through the pipeline. I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month, perhaps a bit sooner, but I've never tested it.

A month to go from the final draft of a black-and-white, three-panel, line-drawn comic to publication in a daily newspaper. A month!

And people wonder why newspapers are gradually becoming irrelevant.

I think what he was trying to say is that he has a 1 month worth of comics done that are waiting to be published, and if he would sent a new one it would get it's turn in one month ...

No, he had it right.

"I think the soonest I can get something published is in about a month ... it wasn't worth the extra friction to push them to the front of the line"

So if he had made a big push, he could have gotten them published in a month. He goes on to say when it would be published if he submitted it at the end of his queue.

"And it would be June 18th before they ran in their normal position, which seemed too far in the future."

This is more a commentary on the inefficiency of his distributor than it is a commentary on newspapers themselves. It's not like it takes a month to get other things into a newspaper (since by definition 99% of stuff in the newspaper was written in the previous 24 hours).

It may be slow, but the process for comics and articles are quite different. Comics go through multiple layers of distribution (possibly translation, colouring, lettering and the like through multiple hands) before they are published, in many different newspapers simulatenosly.

The process for getting comics published is focused on groups of comics as well, so rather then send one Dilbert comic a day, the distributor will take at least a weeks worth of strips, possibly a month's worth at once, and that bundle will be sent out.

Editiorial cartoons are much faster (next day) but they tend to be done for a single publication, or at least a small family of publications.

(edit: Add colouring, lettering)

"That's a coincidence because I sell other people's belongings"

Well put.

IIRC, the guy tried several times to return it to Apple, and they kept ignoring him. And he waited three weeks before selling it, giving them ample time to get in touch with him if it was really theirs. Since Apple remotely bricked it, he had no way of getting in touch with Gray or any of his friends/colleagues directly.

So it really seems like the guy's options were to sell it to Gizmodo, or let it sit in a drawer forever. If the account above is accurate, then I don't think it's fair to imply the guy was acting in bad faith.

Then how did Gizmodo find out it was Gray's? Seems like someone knew that along the way and could have tried that avenue.

  just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook.
  And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer,
  Gray Powell.

Or to send it to Apple in a simple padded mailer. Or to bring it to the police. Seriously, his "only option" was to tell it to a gossip blog for thousands of dollars?

So Apple loses this thing that's worth a lot to them. Critical "trade secrets". He tries to return it, they don't say anything. He could give the super-valuable thing he recovered back to him for free, but why should he? What obligation does he have to work for Apple for free?

Instead, he decided to cash in. Seems reasonable to me.

> "He could give the super-valuable thing he recovered back to him for free, but why should he?"

Because it's illegal to keep it - if he knows who it belongs to he is legally compelled to return it to its owner.

Them pesky laws, always getting in the way of profit.

Arguably, Apple didn't want the phone, since he tried to return it and they didn't care. So, he eBayed it. (Or the moral equivalent thereof.)

It's fundamentally the same as the classic "found wallet". If it isn't claimed, it reverts to "finders keepers". So I have no idea why people are voting you down.

Not from a legal perspective.

If you turn it into the police, and it isn't found...

See, I'm not sure he actually tried to return it.

He didn't give it to the establishment he found it at. He didn't even contact the bar to see if the owner has been around to claim it.

He knew the full name and Facebook profile of the owner, based on the app on the phone before it was bricked. No attempt was made to contact this guy, despite the fact that he's dead simple to find on LinkedIn, Facebook (!), Twitter, etc.

He didn't turn it into any sort of law enforcement or other lost and found service.

What did he do? He called a few numbers where it's practically guaranteed people wouldn't believe he had a prototype iPhone. Any avenue where the phone had a reasonable chance of being actually returned was ignored. This looks highly suspicious. I would argue he is legally culpable for the phone's theft (but IANAL), but in either case I do not think this guy can claim that he tried to return the phone in good faith.

Actually, he admits that he got Gray's full name and facebook account before the phone was bricked. It sounds like he called the Apple places least likely to believe him just so he would have some plausible sob story to tell.

He had the owner's full name for God's sake. This isn't that hard.

If I find something at a bar I give it to the bartender. I mean, come one, the guy either has no common sense or didn't intend on returning it to anyone. My guess is the only reason he called Apple once he figured out it was a prototype was to extort some kind of finders fee.

Do we know "the guy" is not the bartender?

I never considered that, but if I recall correctly the engineer that lost the phone claims to have called the bar repeatedly looking for the phone. Of course, that doesn't rule out the bartender. Since the phone looked like a regular iPhone in a case I suspect no one would have paid any attention to it unless they planned on flipping it.

Also, why didn't Apple use the "Find My iPhone" feature of MobileMe to track it down? Lots of things don't add up in this whole ordeal...

If it was running 4.0 Beta then that feature doesn't work. Not sure about remotely wiping though

"So it really seems like the guy's options were to sell it to Gizmodo, or let it sit in a drawer forever."

Or give it to the establishment where it was found, or give it to the police. You know, the obvious things that everybody else in the entire world has always done with lost and found items instead of taking them home.

ha! you are joking. his options 1. mail it to apple 2. facebook gray 3. take it to the apple store and talk to a manager 4. take it back to the bar where he "found" it and gray called a million times to see if it was returned. 5. sell it to gizmodo for $5000.

ah! i see why he chose option 5.

So while the #2 link at the moment is HN 3 years ago and we say hey, those links were interesting back then.

And over here at #1, we have 88 votes for a comic strip. With the top comment saying 'well put'

I like Dilbert as much as anyone else. But ask yourself: did you learn anything? Long lasting interest doesn't come cheap. Some may say, 'hey, lighten up', but I'd say, 'hey, we already have reddit'.

Someday, you will learn that life is long enough to both learn and have fun.

sigh yes. By stating something that no one's going to dispute--myself included (I mean, who doesn't want to learn and have fun at the same time?), it diminishes what I was getting at.

In the case of dilbert comics, it was fun, but didn't learn much. That's what I'm against. Sure, there are other things that are also learning and fun, which is great.

If fun is sugar and learning is fiber in cereal, all I'm saying is beware eating sugar-only cereal. If you want sugar-only, we've got reddit. Important thing is to have the fiber, regardless of sugar or not.

Am I the only one who doesn't find it funny? Not because I don't think jokes should be made about the situation, but rather because I think those particular jokes aren't very good.

I think my chuckling might be disturbing my office mate.

i found the punchline to the first one pretty amusing

The last line of the blog post "Remember that I'm in the parody business and not the truth business." was the funniest part. Otherwise I got the same amount of boredom from the comic as I did from iPhone-gate.

It guess it just came off as strange to me because it's a stretch in terms of scope. For the comic's history, the jokes have generally implied that Dilbert's unnamed employer produces some kind of sprawling enterprise software, maybe with a consumer version, and to suddenly have them building next-gen smartphones is jarring enough to distract from the gag.

There is something cool about seeing a never-to-be-printed Dilbert strip, though.

I was always under the impression that Dilbert's company was some sort of sprawling conglomerate like G.E. that produces all sorts of products. Dilbert and his coworkers seem to bounce pretty freely between hardware and software products.

Also, I don't think continuity is one of Scott's goals at all. In fact, I suddenly realized how absurd it was to be discussing what is and isn't Dilbert Canon.

There's no Dilbert canon at all. Adams even draws Dilbert's mouth now and then.

Scott's sense of humor isn't really laugh-out-loud-funny, but more of a weird tickle deep inside your mind. It's more "eerily amusing" than "funny". I think if you read blog or comics often, it'll grow on you :)

I thought the second one was stronger; the punchline of the first was very forced.

I thought the first one was better than the second one.

Overall I've found Dilbert to be very hit and miss over time. There are some real gems out there but there's also quite a few which miss the mark.

Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

> Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.

Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.

The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.

The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.

I think those were drafts. The Dilbert strips are created using some computer illustration software (Adams even has his own private font that he uses for lettering the strip). So changing the punchlines to something funny wouldn't have taken too much effort.

Apart from coming up with the funny punchline, that is.

Take a moment to marvel at the fact that I didn't need to add anything to the story as it has been told in the media. All it really needed was Wally.

That's all a lot of things need... Half his genius seems to be simply applying Wally to the right circumstances.

I liked the following idea (from a commenter on the site) better than the originals:

> Alternatively, it could be funny if Wally became a hero at work when he suddenly delivers an amazing 4G phone that finally makes the company successful - right up until the time it's discovered that he didn't actually develop it, but found it on the counter at the coffee shop.

Kinda ruined it when he has to explain it.

Way too literal in the first place, should have made some kind of parallel.

His stuff is often very literal, you just never worked for the company he was writing about (former Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T employee here).

Excellent. The facial expressions and choice of characters are just perfect.

I love Dilbert - this cartoons from the post are brilliant =)

Funniest Dilbert episodes I've read in a while.

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