Apple's brand may be quite valuable now, but back in the aforementioned mid-nineties, it was quite a different story. They were on the verge of bankrupcy and brought Jobs in to try to sort things out (which he clearly excelled at). Allowing Mac clones was at the time an act of desperation, to try to squeeze out a little extra buck on OEM software sales and get more Apple software into the homes of consumers.

But I do agree that the clones were mostly junk, and as soon as Apple saw that it was hurting their brand more than anything, they immediately stopped licensing them.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I remember back on Usenet, the masses were decrying the commercialization of the Internet. Everyone said it would ruin the internet, the minute big corporations figured out what this newfangled superhighway thingie was, and more importantly, how to profit off of it.

Such a paradox it created. "Hey great, I can click one button and a product shows up two days later! How convenient!" "But on the other hand, I don't want ads all over the web!" Hmm....

It started with banner ads. Then pop-ups. Then shady redirects. Now, anti-net neutrality, pro-DRM lawyers are being appointed to the cabinet and white house staff. So now, they will profit over who gets to even be on the internet, and to what extent their voice can be heard. I remember back in the mid-nineties (couldn't find the story on Google with a cursory search) when Toyota Corp forced a man named Toyota to give up the domain name he had registered long before, toyota.com. The courts figured Toyota was in the right. Toyota has the RIGHT to make money off the internet, and this man whose name is Toyota and had owned the domain for years, had no right to it. The guy was not even close to a squatter. That was a tipping point, in my mind.

Thanks a lot, corporate America, with your greed-driven money orgy. You ruined it for all of us.

Agreed, and also to your parent, also agreed.

I think part of the problem is that as Americans we're ENTITLED to a cushy job with very high pay and a luxury sports sedan. Anything less would not be like what TV has always told us we are supposed to have. (I do find some irony that you're beaming that propaganda to the next set of 'rugrats' when you leave with a smile, LOL) But anyway I like those nice things too, and luckily work a job where I can afford some of them. But obviously you need to have the TIME to yourself to enjoy them, so if you are an indentured servant it's hard to do that.

What makes most of us indentured? Health insurance. If it weren't for that one simple thing, Americans would be largely happier, as it would give us more flexibility to change jobs or careers, even if it meant no job for a few months. I could pull of six months of no or minimal income but the health insurance is the deal breaker. Esp if you have any recurring issues (aka prior conditions).

Anyway, I found the article to be quite poignant personally, because a lot of what he said is how i feel about my (and so many others') career right now. I commend you for doing what you did. A job where you see some tangible result at the end of a hard day must be really rewarding. I want to fall into that category.

The author made it a point to explicitly distinguish skilled trade labor from assembly line work.

I think a lot of people DON'T WANT choice. And what I mean by that is, they want there to be one way to do something, one app to use for this, one process for doing that. Apple has always marketed and positioned themselves as a platform for simplicity and an easy user experience.

Windows / Linux provide you with a billion choices for how to do everything. A lot of the software you need, doesn't come on the OS, you are forced to go out and research all the choices and choose one, usually uninformed (for the general public). With Apple, you get almost all of what you need (for most people, it's all you need) in the OS, and they make it such that there is only one right way to do something and it walks you right though.

And if you're not an old-school geek, you don't have the notion that a lack of complete flexibility and choice is a bad thing. You just want to get online, do what you need to do, and be done. You don't have to go through the analysis paralysis of choosing all your software, buying it, and hoping it's the right choice.

I don't think anyone's saying anything about scientists PUTTING lithium into the water. They went around and measured levels of lithium already in the water and found that the areas with higher levels had less suicides. Seems like other factors could be at play here too, considering that geographic areas are often different from one another in many societal aspects.

That's an interesting story. I vaguely recall hearing about the Therac incident somewhere, but never knew the story. What a horrible and tragic thing to happen. Never underestimate the power of greed, I guess.

I don't necessarily "think it's OK". I didn't write an editorial, I just outlined why this is what it is, as it seemed a lot of the commenters were under informed on what the article is referring to.

Also, as per usual, the media uses sensationalist wording. Most of the "medical devices" in question here are not something attached to your body where you will die if it crashes. Most of what this is referring to are clinical workstations used for doing all sorts of work related to medical care. For example, a workstation that interfaces to some sort of scanner to set up and initiate a scan. Or a workstation that crunches data that comes off some piece of medical hardware. Most devices that physically touch you and control something which can harm a person are coded in hardware, not windows, and have hardware in place to prevent such a thing from harming someone.

Please realize that the FDA must approve ANY piece of hardware that comes in contact with a human and the process is EXTREMELY restrictive and scrutinizing (and expensive). It's actually one gov't institution that I feel really does protect people in a lot of ways.

black helicopters should be hovering above your house right... about... NOW

I hate to reply to my own comment, but I forgot to add something.

5) Why don't sysadmins at the hospitals disable filesharing and enforce stronger policies on these devices?
      - usually the vendor contract explicitly states that modifying the systems in such a way will void your $50,000 annual support contract on your $3 million scanner. Scanner is broken? Tough shit, you voided your contract. Buy a new one.

1) Vendors of these devices almost across the board disallow local IT admins to put any windows patches on the machines
    - this is due to FDA requirements for approval, and the vendor is "covering" themselves
    - also, they usually have a list of "qualified updates" that is usually MONTHS behind MS's patch cycle (not surprising given the sheer number and speed of holes that are found)
    - usually the vendors claim that THEY will apply patches regularly, in practice, they almost NEVER do

2) Vendors typically disallow these machines to be on the active directory
    - this is because they can't stand troubleshooting/supporting issues in their software due to GPO's being pushed down, software management software, etc etc

3) To everyone screaming how idiotic it is that medical devices have Windows on them: you may be a geek, but have clearly never worked in a real enterprise environment. Windows is embedded on so many devices in the world (medical and otherwise) that you would never even know existed. Why? Because it's widely supported, has huge hardware support, and is surprisingly OPEN to developers to hack it into whatever they need it to be. And windows programmers are a dime a dozen.

4) To everyone screaming how idiotic it is that medical devices are connected to the internet getting infected - Do you even know how Conficker spreads? It spreads quite easily across a LAN, attaching to Windows file shares. See MS08-067 for more info. Many of these devices are on a LAN with no DNS (although plenty are on the 'net). Why? Again, because vendors insist that they be connected so they can VPN in and support them (often using LogMeIn, Webex etc).

Dude, its not like thats some exotic fastener that takes an act of corporate espionage to get the tools for. Ace is the place.

And for the record, it's Torx, not torques.

Wow, bitter much???

Seriously, it's folks like you who contribute to our divided country. How can you possibly state that people wouldn't or shouldn't care about acts of terrorism on American lives simply because they reside somewhere that you don't like the culture or politics (or whatever crack pot reason you have).

It's diversity that makes America great.

Stop trolling.

I'd put money that they will call this an act of terrorism if they catch the parties responsible. These folks are going to get pinned to the wall. Especially since they have disrupted infrastructure and broken the 911 system.

But other than that, isn't NZ pretty f'in awesome?