In the last thousand years, until recently, there were no Jews in the Muslim world because all the Jews in those areas were slaughtered and persecuted even longer ago and Jews didn't move back in. Even the Muslim world has calmed its ways a bit in this last millennium.
This is a very common misconception. It is not true. Until about the beginning of the 20th century (1900 ad) Jews lived in the Middle East and in other Muslim countries in the area in relative peace.
Animosity between Arab and Muslim countries (Iran is a Muslim country but IS NOT an Arab country) increased greatly in the last century for a variety of reasons. The creation of the state of Israel and the handling of some of the non-Jews living in that reason prior is one of the issues. Israel has done what it thinks is best* to ensure the continued existence of the state of Israel, and as they still exist 60 years later, they have been successful so far. Israel puts its own interests above the interests of the region. Why should they do anything else? Why should any nation state do anything else?
*This includes maintaining a very strong military, which they have used to defend themselves from foreign aggression as well as to be aggressors in preemptive wars and doing preemptive military strikes that they felt were in the interests of Israel. Includes using assassination as one of their options. Includes developing strong alliances with countries that can help them (most notably the USA). Includes expanding their borders into areas that are strategically significant.
Are you kidding? For like the last 5 or 6 years the only thing theyve produced is WoW. Which strikes me as the bastard offspring of a RPG and facebook. Its a disgusting game designed to force players to pay them monthly to continue playing.
I agree with your sentiments. Its also possibly the best game in the mmo genre, which is designed to force players to pay the mmo owner monthly to continue playing. I don't really play lots of mmo's, and didn't play wow for very long (in comparison to others), but thought it was the funnest and most well polished mmo I have tried (there might be better, I dont know). So they did good for themselves in the mmo genre. That it is a shitty genre that consumes the lives of those that really get into it is not blizz's fault.
You might call me a Blizzard fanboy. I don't consider myself a fanboy of anything, but I think Blizzard has produced nothing but excellent PC games. Not a single bad one. All 7 of the games they released have been fun, well polished, well supported, and ran decently on older hardware. SC2 is really good. I uninstalled it yesterday because the network-centricity of it is pissing me off. I have a fast computer. I should not have to sit and wait for things to load when I hit the custom maps folder icon (on single player), as the custom maps I have already paid and I assume downloaded, should be on my local machine. Instead I wait for it to do whatever network activity it does to monitor me playing a single player custom map. And then beyond that it just gets worse. This is the first time I personally think I agree with the argument that I would be getting a better product if I find a hacked/cracked version of the game that doesn't do all this network garbage when I just want to start the game from my OS, load a map, and play single player.
It would also be nice to be able to change my account name when on multiplayer. Or even better to just let me make up new account names and start with a 0-0 record, so that I can learn other races in the game without lowering my rating with my main race (as I would lose lots of games and get stomped playing zerg for the first time when I am say at the gold or platinum level with protoss.)
Jobs also criticized the Android Marketplace, pointing out that there are at least three other app stores being launched by vendors, causing confusion for users and work for developers. "This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,"
Yes, because people have proven that having more than one drug store, supermarket, or fast food chain inevitably disorients them and fouls up their lives. Oh, wait.
Your analogy is not completely isomorphic. If a food or drug manufacturer makes a product, they can directly sell it to any drug store, supermarket or fast food chain. Because the process of eating is the same for all people. You put food in one end, some hours later poop comes out the other end, the details are hidden by the black box of the digestive system.
Computer software is different. Unless there is a 100% agreed upon and followed standard in a hardware/software ecosystem, then different versions of the software will have to exist to account for the various hardware/software configurations. Apple's phone ecosystem is a completely closed and controlled system. A developer has to decide which is the minimum hardware configuration he wants to support (the 1, 2, 3, 3gs or whatever, or the 4) and code from there, knowing it will work on ALL phones that use that version of the OS or higher. Or they can code a reduced feature/functionality/blingbling branch to hit the early version(s) of IOS that don't support all the stuff they want. That is the extent of it.
The situation with Android is a little different. There are many different hardware configurations to support, and many different modifications or branches or forks or implemented features or extensions of the base OS. Having multiple stores will be good for a consumer. I can go to APP store X which I know verifies that all apps work with my version of Android (hopefully). As a developer I know have to ensure that my app meets the quality/interoperability standards of APP store X. But...... I have to QA again and possibly change code to meet the requirements of APP store Y. And again for APP store Z. And so on. Its not good for me as a developer unless I only want to target APP store X, which cuts the market for my apps way down. Or I can use some sort of multiplatform development kit/framework which will do the work of making cross platform/hardware binaries of whatever I am developing, which has its own limitations and trade offs.
So in summary, Steve Jobs does have a point about this and is not spouting straight bullshit. This time.
Anybody with actual apple phone and android phone development under their belt have anything to chime in with, one way or another? Not geek fan-boys of either system, but nerds with useful knowledge and experience to share?
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones