How, exactly, do you kill a civilian with a terrorist? Do you drop the terrorists - like bombs - from a high altitude in order to crush the civilians? Perhaps you use the dismembered limbs of the terrorists to beat the civilians to death? Maybe something more like the Human Cannonball routine, except with terrorist corpses?
So for those of you reading this, I will offer you an alternative to what the blog suggests. I imagine most developers (even agile developers) have a system for tracking completed requirements and also for fixing reported errors/bugs. If you spend your time chewing up those outstanding items and forget about all this near-Machiavellian bullshit manipulation Spiegel is proposing then you've got nothing to worry about. If your manager wants to fire you, just pull up the numbers if he or she hasn't already and show them. You can't fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements. It's that simple. Skip the drama and get to work.
That's a double-edged sword though. You might think it would be great if you were simply judged based on a metric like how many bugs you fixed or how many requirements you completed the code for, but metrics like that can also hurt productivity. If employees know they are being judged by these metrics, they will often search for ways to inflate their appearance as far as the metric is concerned. This almost always comes at the cost of actual quality, and can really get in the way.
Managers that know this tendency might very well fire a developer that's leading in resolutions and completed requirements if that manager goes beyond the metric to see the real quality of the work that developer does. Not that I disagree with your final point (skip the drama and get to work), but ass kissers and bullshit artists often make it difficult to do.
I like to read some of the realistic sounding reviews at every level. The crazies go both ways, and as long as you can pick them out you can get a pretty good overview of the product.
As nerdy as it is, I think the real reviews of a product tend to make a normal distribution (bell curve).
It looks like the paragraph Palm is referencing can be found towards the top of the second page of the USB-IF Membership Application, specifically this sentence:
Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID Numbers and associated Product ID Numbers are strictly prohibited.
Although, at the same time, the way Palm restored iTunes syncing with the Pre was to have it use Apple's Vendor ID Number, which is also expressly prohibited by another couple of sentences in the very same paragraph:
Each Vendor ID Number is assigned to one company for its sole and exclusive use, along with associated Product ID Numbers. They may not be sold, transferred, or used by others, directly or indirectly, except in special circumstances and then only upon prior written approval by USB-IF.
So unless Palm has already acquired said written approval from the USB-IF, they are also in violation of their agreement.
It looks to me like Palm is very clearly in the wrong, and that Apple may or may not be, depending on who gets to be the official interpreter of the phrase "unauthorized use." I have to say, in a world where "ID" is normally short for "identification," using a "Vendor ID Number" to identify devices that came from that vendor sounds pretty standard.
If we allow this type of behavior in a very short time we will see vehicles which can only be refueled at specific gas stations.
This analogy is flawed. To make the analogy sound, the car manufacturers would also have to own the gas stations.
Appliances which can only be repaired by authorized vendors.
Actually, I think we already have this one. Many gadgets will require you to go to someone who is authorized to deal with them correctly. Just google "Authorized Service Provider" (Apparently, even Hot Wheels is in on this one). Similarly, many things can only be sold by authorized sellers, such as cell phones. We may not like it all the time, but this is how business works.
It is not technically impossible for iTunes to sync with other devices, when functionality like that is removed, you have a right to be mad.
Apple has not only acted in a completely legal manner, it has also acted in a completely logical manner, from a business perspective. You may not like it, but they are completely within their rights to do what they have done, and there is really nothing that can or will be done about it, at least not by Apple.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.