As was pointed out the last couple times this article was posted, this is an ad hominem fallacy.
Criticism should be judged on its merit, not based on ones opinion of critics.
Jose Canseco is completely nuts and an asshole to boot (go check his Twitter feed for a few minutes of fun), but that doesn't mean his claims about the steroid era in baseball are meritless.
Well, first, most of the ranting on both sides is specious and fallacious. One of the lines in all this grandstanding, though, is pretty funny. This isn't dialectical interrogation of Truth going on here.
Second, it's not fallacious if the point of the discussion is to explore what makes success. The criticism is, "You're not a revolution." Jobs' point is: OK, so show me what is.
Lastly, to the extend this is a debate, Jobs beasted him on that question: Apple created app warehousing that seems to work. Having seen the collapse of such models in the past, and seeing so many people scramble to get on the gravy-train, I'd say the shift is pretty revolutionary.
Pointing out a logical fallacy that, when used by an accomplished person against a critic who is not accomplished in the same field, is quite heavy handed, does not mean I'm engaged in "a dialectical interrogation of Truth".
> As was pointed out the last couple times this article was posted, this is an ad hominem fallacy.
Not ad hominem - it was a "by the way..." in a private email after a long exchange explaining his motivations and position first. And I think it's a fair criticism - I believe in looking at the messenger as well as the message. It probably should be 95% message and 5% messenger, but you ought to take criticism a lot seriously from people who are out doing important stuff in your field, and slightly less seriously from people who never have.
So I wouldn't call it ad hominem. It is quite blunt, though. I don't know, I'm not normally a Steve Jobs fan, but I liked that quote myself.
Ad hominem doesn't mean "a public attack". It simply means arguing that a point is invalid/less valid because of who is making it.
Or as Wikipedia says: "attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise." -- in this case, the characteristic is "has not done something great in the eyes of Jobs".
It's definitely an important quote. It goes pretty well with the whole "freedom from porn" and "no one is forcing you to use iPad or develop for it" attitude. It shows how good Jobs is at sophistry.
I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.
Oh yeah, the doublespeak is definitely grand, too. But Tate's rambling responses fall short in comparison to Jobs' eloquence.
Look: most people want something mostly simple and mostly worry-free and mostly nice-looking. Apple thinks the best way to deliver that is to present apps using their approach. The increased competition they face means their ideas are being tested, and we'll find out who wins.
For instance, the iPhone OS fragmentation is an additional hit to what had been a very clean development space. That, the closed approach to app approval, and other constraints make it less attractive to develop in that space. But ultimately, saying, "I don't like how you run your app store" is all fine and good: don't develop there. But absent an equally successful alternative, it's a bit early to call the game against Apple.
> I don't need to be able to build cars to recognize that something's wrong with mine. I also don't need to be an entrepreneur or an executive to spot one company trying to muscle another out of a market. So much about criticizing other people's work and belittling their motivations.
Actually, I disagree. I think you run the risk of missing important details if you're doing an untrained analysis.
For instance, a layman might say - "Look how busy Amazon.com is - it could be so prettier with a more minimalistic interface!" They might not realize that Amazon are fanatical about split testing to get things to a minute detail. Amazon is a busy site, but it does what it's trying to do remarkably well. Someone untrained in web design could say "I don't need to be a web designer to spot an ugly website that's too busy." But they'd be looking at it entirely the wrong way.
Not being trained in something will certainly prevent you from giving an expert opinion on it, but that's not what I was saying.
Someone untrained in web design could also say "I don't like Amazon's look", just like someone who has no idea about why Flash is not allowed on iPad would notice that his favorite casual web game portal is not working on his iPad. Or, to use my simple example, if I don't know jack about car engines (and I don't), I can still tell that somethings wrong if the engine sounds 10x louder than usually or if there's a funny smell coming out from under the hood. There's more than a single step from that to telling my mechanic that "my conbobatron is confusticated".
Not really. I'm pretty sure Disney keeps their theme parks as porn-free as they can. I bet Target, Walmart, and Toys-R-Us do a pretty good job of keeping their stores porn-free. The App Store isn't doing anything that brick-and-mortar businesses haven't been doing for a long time.
...so y'all have hopes of disposing of the status quo of being able to take your daughter shopping without having to explain to her why those three men in the picture were filling all holes on that nice lady?
Speaking as someone who has no issue with porn, and who has shamelessly rubbed a few out to some in my day, I've got to say that being able to point mobile Safari anywhere I want to, and to sync pictures and movies if I'm so inclined, is sufficient for me.
Not having porn in the App Store is no more a blow against high hopes for the internet than is not having porn at overstock.com.
It's not like that. Unless you actively seek porn, you won't find it, be it in the web, be it in mobile applications for platforms other than Apple's.
The right analogy is your daughter being unable to find porn when she actively and deliberately seeks and want it because some authority deemed it immoral and banned its production.
This is not what I expected from Apple and not what I want for the future.
Even if you buy the claim that there is no keyword overlap between porn & non-porn queries (which I don't) and that porn purveyors don't love to spam keyword space (which I don't) you still have to consider this:
...and that if a parent busts their child searching for it and finding it, the puritan parent is as likely to go after the store as they are to deal with their child.
Allowing porn apps into the store is a messy business proposition. I'm only surprised it didn't get shot down sooner. Not expecting the same policy from any brand of their magnitude is naïve.
And, I have to say, desiring to have porn distributed as executable code is a crazy thing to wish for. I wouldn't even trust it in a sandbox. No industry abuses APIs more than those guys.
> the puritan parent is as likely to go after the store as they are to deal with their child.
And that is one of the dangerous slopes we can see. It's not the store owner's responsibility to educate the kid - that's what parents are for. And the puritan parent has no right to prevent my kids from getting what I allow them to get.
And it's not only about porn. Apple must clearly draw the line it will not cross. Today it's porn, emulators and anything that's cross-compiled. A cartoonist was blocked already (and unblocked after that). Would a network anonymizer be allowed? For how long?
Ok, think of it this way: imagine that you're pitching the idea of allowing porn apps into the App Store. How do you convince the board of directors that porn should be associated with the brand? You'll have to do better than slippery slope alarmism. So what do you say to make your business case?
The only reason they would be associated with porn now is that they took a stance against porn in the first place.
Of all apps, only a small fraction of them would end up being porn - present approval process could still happen. Adult content would also be segregated into an adult store - with separate authorization processes so if puritan parents decide to make it difficult for their offspring to get porn, difficult it would be.
And, most of all, this is not about porn - it's about the notion of a walled garden as being desirable. It's, like someone mentioned, that garden of pure ideology.
Jobs, now, is the Big Brother on the screen. It's up to us to wield the hammers.
I see no contradiction. All you would see is applications the account owner deem appropriate for you. It would be no more associated with porn than it is with, say, books.
I guess that's why you're not in charge of brand management.
Among the tech-geek demographic the iPhone is already associated with farting applications. It's a common way to deride the quality of apps at the store when someone gets their knickers in a twist about the reasons Jobs gave for section 3.3.1 - and that's just a current event.
Imagine running an adult store for a decade. People talk. People read. Hiding an adult store behind an individual's preferences would not prevent word from getting out.
I guarantee you that if Disney tried to run a triple-X store in the way you suggest that knowledge of it would get out and it would cause an enormous shit-storm.
Everything any customer experiences that fires a neuron linked to your name or your logo or your products is associated with your brand.
Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems that lately it has been pretty popular to post other peoples e-mail conversations (see the whole TechCrunch vs. Fortune post a while back). I'm starting to think you shouldn't e-mail anyone who runs a major tech blog unless you want to see it made public.
I have always thought that the basic rule of email civility was that emails are private unless permission to post publicly is explicitly granted.
I don't think bloggers of any kind have a special exemption, major or minor. It's simple courtesy to ask "May I quote you on this?" I try to remember to do it and I apologize if I've fallen short of this standard. Old-school reporters are usually make it clear when a conversation is "On the record."
If I got an email response from Steve Jobs I would probably want to talk about it, but I wouldn't post it anywhere without asking first. The furthest I would go is to paraphrase it: "He emailed to tell me to take my talk of proprietary platform development being akin to sharecropping and shove it up my USB port."
So what I would say is that lately people have been pretty un-civil about private emails. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed when I see it anywhere, regardless of who is doing the quoting or who is being quoted.
1. The police are not jackboots. Please don't Godwin a thread right off the bat.
2. If you are speaking of the search of a Gizmodo editors premises, this was conducted to gather evidence with respect to the alleged purchase of stolen physical property, not over IP.
As far as "it" is concerned, I'm with Steve. If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly. If you aren't home when they arrive with the search warrant, I expect them to behave exactly the same way with your door as they would with anyone else.
The whole busting in the door thing would be far more effective rhetoric if the editor in question had been home and the police had burst in with guns drawn and executed a high-risk takedown. That isn't what happened. They knocked, there was no-one home, they entered the property to execute their search warrent.
The United States police forces are in severe need of reform, and I'll be calling them Jackboots until the day that reform happens. Kicking in doors for IP claims? Hmmm.
(P.S. I love you Raganwald, you rawk, now just please consider the need for police reform in the United States, and whether the militarization of civilian peace officers and what they've done with that militarization over the past two decades makes it reasonable to call them the descriptive term "Jackboots". Okay, fine then, I'll try to think of something, hmmm, Agents of Oppression? Corrupt Cops? Power Hungry Monsters? Dicks with Guns? Please help me here, what's a good term? ;-)
(P.P.S. So, if Apple steals an idea from me, can I get the coppers to visit Steve with a warrant? How about just one of his employees? Why not? Apple has more important claims than mine? Why? Break that down, the 5 whys method will help.)
If you traffic in stolen physical objects, I want the police to investigate thoroughly.
You're probably right, but the objection I agree with is the priority that Jobs/Apple got because of who Steve is. They wouldn't bust down the door for just anyone. If some small startup complained that a prototype was stolen, the police would not have acted so promptly and decisively.
And that's the problem I have with this. The response should have been proportional to the crime: it should have been "well, we have a lot of other complaints right now, and this isn't going to affect much of anything. Sorry." -- not "SIR YES SIR! We'll bust that door down forthwith, sir!"
Yes, because the stolen prototype is just about Steve's ego, and not, for example, about calming the fears of the economic powerhouses of the entire area (and state).
I'm sure all the other silicon valley co's would sleep better knowing that, if one of their prototypes (physical or otherwise) got "lost" and then sold to a news outlet, nothing would happen legally.
The "finder" and "buyer" appear to have committed a crime. Asking the police to investigate a crime is not exactly fascism. I think you'll find, in fact, that it's the very definition of probity.
And the very fact that there's a special tech-related crimes task force shows you that the area govt knows it has to protect its economic powerhouses, and is eager to do so.
If you want to be wise, you have to think beyond your narrow little window. Things do not just happen to one person, or one company, they happen in a system.
