4,147 karma · joined January 17, 2012
Really? Because tens (hundreds) of millions of people found it _totally acceptable_ and made that phone the top selling phone.
Not to mention that they found that the "issue" was a non issue in practice.
I'm inclined to call this out.
If it made business sense, Steve would have done the exact same thing. Especially if Apple had no choice to continue using Google Maps (because of Google demands, etc).
Even worse regressions have happened under Steve's watch because they HAD to happen. E.g the move from PowerPC to Intel meant that all existing third party programs made until then had to run in a subpar, emulated, environment (Rosetta). Steve went along, because there was no way they could continue using PowerPC and still have a mobile processor roadmap.
Yes, that clears it up totally...
(Actually less, if you factor in the constrains of the specific key the tune is in, but let's be maximalist and get an upper bound).
Now, a melody also comes with a rhythm / syncopation pattern, but let's just count simple 8th notes in our test case (one can consider a whole note as 8 consecutive "legato" 8th notes of the same pitch for our purposes).
How many bars? 8 bars might be a good starting point (many pop verses are that, eg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-two-bar_form ).
So, that would gives us: 8 bars * 8 eights with 24 notes for each eight, which gives us roughly: (8*8)^24 different melodies.
Which is like, a lot, man (think 40-figure range).
In practice it could be from much less (considering key constraints which limits the notes you could use) to much more (considering higher than 2 octaves Zappa or avant-guard like melodies, durations shorter than 8ths, etc).
Another major factor is the "melodic quality" of the melody, which is kinda subjective. 8 bars of 8th C notes, for example, wouldn't be that interesting, and many people would not even consider them a melody.
Still that would leave billions of quality melodies in the millions of trillions of possible melodies.
Putting more care in the LATEST offering. Putting more care in older versions if a loosing proposition.
And it's not just a "throw more people / money at it" problem. After some point the complexity of legacy support grows exponentially and the code suffers (or gets hold back).
>Car makers don't stop making spare parts a couple of years after a new model comes out. If they did no one would buy them.
5 years in computing is like 20 car years...
But, half-joking aside, it's dangerous to run old browsers with no security updates. It might not have bitten you, and it might never bit you (like how you can run off a red light lots of times and you might not crash into anyone).
That doesn't make it less dangerous than running a browser WITH security updates.
That's not how it works.
You either go on with the program or you get left behind.
>Eventually I was not able to run safari anymore which I have never forgiven them for.
You could run your old Safari just perfect. You just couldn't run the latest versions. Which you kind of caused on yourself.
Especially since the OS went to some major transitions to more modern technologies and APIs, which you opted out from.
>In my view Apple is charging users for service packs.
Sure, because the progress in any other OS has a much higher rate, and those features come for free...
(Not to mention that OS X versions cost 1/3 of what Windows versions costed, and now cost 1/8 of that, PLUS you can install the same bought version in multiple machines, so, more like 1/16 of Windows).
Constantly as in once every 3-4 months? Because that's the usual rate of point updates.
The alternative is what? Not having the latest stability and security fixes?
No, it helps getting technology ahead. Instead of, you know, having hundreds of millions of people still using Windows XP, as they do.
Plus, what "fallout"? Each release has some issues for some people in some use cases, but that is irrespective of some 5 year older release getting deprecated or not. And the issues --which don't affect all, usually just a small minority, e.g the Vagrant users as of late-- get ironed out eventually with point releases.
(1) Being "already set up for testing" for an older OS version
and
(2) continuing to use the testing setup for that version in addition to ever increasing new test setups (for 10.6, 10.7. 10.8 etc) and codepaths
is not the same thing.
As you get newer OSs to support, maintaining older testing setups means more work, and more IFDEFS and such in the code.
Especially when you are accomplished at complete irrelevant fields that one you are blathering about...
Yes, and Michael Jackson avoided germs at all costs, and slept in oxygen tanks. I wonder how that worked out...
I'm not assuming it's some general law. I know that it happens in lots of real life situations.
E.g people throwing the baby (idea) along with the bathwater (hypocrite).
No, it's not the detrimental one at all. 1 person doing a bad thing (e.g farting in a room) is not at all the same as 100 persons doing a bad thing (e.g farting in a room).
>Therefore, in the end it doesn't matter if one of them or all of them does the bad thing. So, the fact that the visionary was a hypocrite has doomed them all.
No, it's their giving importance not to the idea of doing the good thing but to the consistency of the visionary that doomed them all. That's the whole point of the article.
>Only when the visionary is not a hypocrite can they all be saved.
No, they can also be saved if they STOP being obsessed with consistency in the visionary, and instead evaluate the visionary's ideas _in themselves_ and in how they benefit them all.
>The best thing for the self-interest of the people involved was to individually decide to leave the room.
In that thought experiment, as in lots of situations in life, there is no "leaving the room". Say, the room is earth, and the visionary is some early ecologist. If someone finds out that he doesn't recycle it shouldn't translate to "oh, hypocrisy, we shouldn't recycle either".
It would much better translate to: "Hmm, the guy doesn't do what he preaches, but we will continue doing it because it does good. He is a hypocrite, but, hey, at least the guy told us about the necessity of doing this thing in the first place, something we haven't figured at the time.".
But that's not a knee-jerk reaction, so it is too much to ask from some people.
Yes, this is where THINKING comes in.
First step, stop caring about anything specific about the person that gave you the advice, and only consider the advice.
Second step, try to think if it's good advice, in itself. If it is, follow it.
The guy being a hypocrite or not should not come into play at all. Neither should trust.
You should not follow some advice because you trust the guy who suggested it to you. You should follow it because you evaluated it.
Succeeded as in "they got lots of users". Not succeeded as in "they made lots of money".
Twitter mostly cares for the second, it's not a non profit service.
He probably means the classic "I'm not racist, I have black friends and all, but blacks in general do [this and that]".
Which is often considered a classic example of hypocrisy but I don't think it is. In a lot of cases it's not even racism.
E.g a guy could have Mexican friends (in the US or Mexico) but be against mexican illegal immigrants.
This is often taken to mean he is racist, but in actuality he is against illegal immigration, not against a race in general (he might consider that low end jobs are numbered, or that wages in those jobs are getting lower due to increased competition from illegal immigrants, or that lots of hungry, unemployed opportunity seekers from Mexico could resort to crime to feed themselves etc).
Still, not a good argument.
Their view could be right, whether they do really believe it or not.
E.g a politician could say "don't steal", and he could be stealing himself. That he is hypocritical about it, doesn't mean stealing is "probably" right.
You just gave a perfect example of the narrow minded logic explained in the article, that cares not what is good for them to do, but if the guy that advocates it is "consistent".
Not to mention the other three paragraphs I quoted, that explain why "avoiding being hypocritical" is not always possible.
To put it in very crude way, if you see a beaten-down meth addict telling you "just say no to meth", I'd say DO listen to him, even if he's doing it.
Fixing map data is.
What insight?
Apple makes most of their stuff themselves -- or gets them from multiple sources.
Maps were an exception, as a key technology that was in the hands of a competitor.
But not because Apple could help it at the time: they made a foray into a new territory, mobile phones, and Google had all the available technology and was a non competitor at the time (the first Android phone was out a year later, Oct 2008).
It's a few years that they have already started the process of moving to something of their own. They bought some mapping companies, etc. Something forced their hands to make the switch before that was over.
In any case, you can't just jump over 8+ years of refinements that Google maps have (not to mention all the "driving endless miles for Google Street View and road info, etc).
People don't go around saying: "this latte cost me $48 dollars -- $8 dollars for the latte and 1 hour of my time ordering and drinking it at Starbucks".
Not to mention that people also have free time. It's not as if you're making money when you are off of work (except if you have a passive income scheme, in which case you keep making them even while you go around shooting a movie).
philipbloom.co.uk
Philip Bloom has become kind of the Paul Graham of the "DSLR video shooting" movement.
But that's too bad. Better to do what a hypocrite proposes if it's the right thing, than to ignore it because of what he does.
Here's a nice article on the topic:
There are many reasons a charge of hypocrisy might be reactionary and counter-productive. First of all, the hypocrisy mindset pays too much attention to people's personal lives and too little to their programmatic or ideological outlook. If someone is a visionary, or is trying to solve a widespread problem, it's likely that his personal life will reflect the problem whereas his policies will reflect the solution. It would then be pretty stupid to accuse him of saying one thing and doing another -- especially if everyone were pretty much in the same boat, at least until an alternative infrastructure is set up. A charge of hypocrisy might well be a pre-emptive strike designed to stymie future solutions to universal problems.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds. Wanting things to be less complex, and wanting people and societies to be without internal contradictions is understandable, but small-minded. It ignores the fact that it is often only by sinning ourselves that we can learn exactly why sinning is bad. At a certain point we are all saying one thing and doing another. This is, apart from anything else, a sure sign of our complexity, and of our capacity to rise above our current way of living and search for alternatives, no matter how deeply we're mired. Allow it, brothers!
We often strike down people with a spotted reputation only to replace them with people who are unapologetically evil. We hate to be preached at so much that we ignore the sermons we need to hear and prefer unalloyed corruption. At least it's consistent, right? At least there's no hypocrisy there! At least change is taken off the agenda! Thank Christ "hypocrisy" has absolved us of the need to feel wrong, and to make a painful change!
There are 100 people in a room, all doing A Bad Thing. They know it's a bad thing, a thing that will damage the room and everyone in it, but they can't stop. Suddenly a Visionary makes a powerful and moving speech. "We must stop doing The Bad Thing!" he says. His speech is effective: everyone stops. Except the Visionary himself, who keeps doing it. This, however, is a minor detail: the room is a better, safer place. Instead of 100 people doing The Bad Thing, only one is doing it. Suddenly a Commentator gets up. "Suckers!" he shouts. "You've stopped doing The Bad Thing, but the man who made you stop still does it! You've been had... by a hypocrite!" Soon everyone in the room is doing The Bad Thing again.
But tell me, please, who has damaged the room more, the Visionary or the Commentator? Who has the best chance of helping the room?
Only those two are in totally unrelated fields, namely some railway clock and a mobile phone.
1) Apple didn't copy the design to make it's own clock rip-off. It is for a very tiny part of their original product.
2) Apple didn't copy the design to sell more iPhones.
3) The design is famous. It's not like Apple sneakily copied it thinking no one will notice.
4) It's a common "click of the eye" gesture to design-savvy public, like their basing their podcast app to classic 60's design, etc.
So not the same thing with default values at all.
With this struct interface you just implement "optional" values...
More often than not, yes. Open-sourcing is where lots of commercial products go to die.
>It's such a shame that it and Linux have no future -- after all, they're open source, "and presumed abandoned."
Ho ho, I appreciate the sarcasm, but it's misplaced. Linux was open source all along and carrying on a gigantic community. LibreOffice too.
Projects like TextMate usually don't fare as well when open sourced. There are lots of examples.