auxio

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

Evidence of precisely what I've been saying about the relationship between Apple and Google. They haven't been the enemies some here would like to believe they are for years, working together in many areas.

Some fans might hate, be silly, and be destructive, but the two companies respect each other and have for a long time.  

While I dislike Google's fundamental business model, and think they've put some people with very questionable ethics in charge (e.g. Andy Rubin), which has caused them to choose the low road (cloning + litigation) rather than the high road (licensing/purchasing) to obtain existing technology they need for their products, I certainly respect a lot of technology they've created just as I'm sure people at Apple do. Just like Apple, they hire brilliant people and enable them to do amazing things.

I just wish that, at a fundamental level, their business was driven by purely that technology advancing humanity and making the world a better place. It would be interesting to count the man hours they've spent analyzing and developing technology to better gather information about people and process it for the purposes of making their advertising business more lucrative. And looking at places where they could have made their services more efficient and easy to use, but didn't because it would mean they get less data from people. Though it's certainly not as bad as social media companies using psychology to keep people locked in and addicted to their services.

Anyway, nothing is black and white. There are great people at both Google and Apple, I just personally don't believe surveillance Capitalism is a good path forward, and I think the ethics Jobs imparted at Apple have kept it off that path as much as possible.

In fairness, the income from ad services has funded a lot of technologies and advancements that benefit society at large, more so than Google:

Health and human longetivity
Disease research and treatments
Genomic analysis
Cancer detection
Flood forecasting
Climate and weather prediction
Research into improving construction and processes
Wildfire detection and prediction
Quantum computing
Robotics,
Coding languages
Open-source software development and standards....

It's a very long list. 

Apple and many other tech companies (including ones I've worked for) are involved in those same areas too. These technologies aren't developed in a vacuum by any one person or company. Like I said, there are plenty of good people and good work being done by both companies, and I certainly respect that.

That said, all of the positive work being done doesn't wipe from my mind the negative actions which turned me off Google in the first place. And I still don't believe that people should be surveilled without their consent and understanding of what it's being used for. If there's nothing to hide, just be completely open and honest about everything from the get go.

Understood, even if Apple is good with it, no one else is required to be.  Yours is a very valid opinion, and one that's shared by others. 

That's the difficult thing about a business: you can't always take sides in a debate, as much as the people within the company might like to, because you always need to consider whether it's your place to do so and how it could affect your business. For example, the "Android is a giant tracking device" slide from an internal presentation at Apple. I'm sure there are many people at Apple who feel the same way, but because Google is a business partner, they wouldn't officially make that statement.

For myself personally, I've always been against exploitation of any kind. I feel like many in the tech industry are quite proud of being able to use their knowledge and relative intelligence (relative in the sense of knowing a lot about technology, but not so much about things like empathy and human connection) to pull one over on people who don't understand technology. Or are proud of finding ways of getting things for free using loopholes in the law, or lack of laws, no matter what it costs others. These are things I'll always call out as unfair and unethical because I'm on the side of humanity rather than the mindless pursuit of money (as Jobs put it, "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't interest me"). Building connections, respecting the work of, and being fair to others rather than trying to find ways to scam or exploit them. Setting good examples for future generations, and trying to leave the world in a better state than when you came into it.

gatorguy said:

auxio said:

gatorguy said:

Evidence of precisely what I've been saying about the relationship between Apple and Google. They haven't been the enemies some here would like to believe they are for years, working together in many areas.

Some fans might hate, be silly, and be destructive, but the two companies respect each other and have for a long time.  

While I dislike Google's fundamental business model, and think they've put some people with very questionable ethics in charge (e.g. Andy Rubin), which has caused them to choose the low road (cloning + litigation) rather than the high road (licensing/purchasing) to obtain existing technology they need for their products, I certainly respect a lot of technology they've created just as I'm sure people at Apple do. Just like Apple, they hire brilliant people and enable them to do amazing things.

I just wish that, at a fundamental level, their business was driven by purely that technology advancing humanity and making the world a better place. It would be interesting to count the man hours they've spent analyzing and developing technology to better gather information about people and process it for the purposes of making their advertising business more lucrative. And looking at places where they could have made their services more efficient and easy to use, but didn't because it would mean they get less data from people. Though it's certainly not as bad as social media companies using psychology to keep people locked in and addicted to their services.

Anyway, nothing is black and white. There are great people at both Google and Apple, I just personally don't believe surveillance Capitalism is a good path forward, and I think the ethics Jobs imparted at Apple have kept it off that path as much as possible.

In fairness, the income from ad services has funded a lot of technologies and advancements that benefit society at large, more so than Google:

Health and human longetivity
Disease research and treatments
Genomic analysis
Cancer detection
Flood forecasting
Climate and weather prediction
Research into improving construction and processes
Wildfire detection and prediction
Quantum computing
Robotics,
Coding languages
Open-source software development and standards....

It's a very long list. 

Apple and many other tech companies (including ones I've worked for) are involved in those same areas too. These technologies aren't developed in a vacuum by any one person or company. Like I said, there are plenty of good people and good work being done by both companies, and I certainly respect that.

That said, all of the positive work being done doesn't wipe from my mind the negative actions which turned me off Google in the first place. And I still don't believe that people should be surveilled without their consent and understanding of what it's being used for. If there's nothing to hide, just be completely open and honest about everything from the get go.

gatorguy said:

Evidence of precisely what I've been saying about the relationship between Apple and Google. They haven't been the enemies some here would like to believe they are for years, working together in many areas.

Some fans might hate, be silly, and be destructive, but the two companies respect each other and have for a long time.  

While I dislike Google's fundamental business model, and think they've put some people with very questionable ethics in charge (e.g. Andy Rubin), which has caused them to choose the low road (cloning + litigation) rather than the high road (licensing/purchasing) to obtain existing technology they need for their products, I certainly respect a lot of technology they've created just as I'm sure people at Apple do. Just like Apple, they hire brilliant people and enable them to do amazing things.

I just wish that, at a fundamental level, their business was driven by purely that technology advancing humanity and making the world a better place. It would be interesting to count the man hours they've spent analyzing and developing technology to better gather information about people and process it for the purposes of making their advertising business more lucrative. And looking at places where they could have made their services more efficient and easy to use, but didn't because it would mean they get less data from people. Though it's certainly not as bad as social media companies using psychology to keep people locked in and addicted to their services.

Anyway, nothing is black and white. There are great people at both Google and Apple, I just personally don't believe surveillance Capitalism is a good path forward, and I think the ethics Jobs imparted at Apple have kept it off that path as much as possible.

Cesar Battistini Maziero said:

What a great gift! A game that doesn’t work. 

Lazy. 

Exactly. They should have just released the source code the same way ID did with Quake. That way enthusiasts could port it to the latest Macs.

Honkers said:

xyzzy01 said:

A great game, and also a symbol of one thing I don't like about Apple: Bad backwards compatibility. My Steam library is full of games that can no longer be played on my Mac(shipped as 32-bit), and almost all of my remaining library will be lost when Apple no longer ships x86_64-compatibility.

I really wish they'd ship compatibility containers that would let us run these old applications in runtimes from when they were released.

Hear hear!

Modern Macs have better support for legacy Windows software than the Mac back catalogue. And people wonder why Apple struggles to attract games publishers.

I disagree. I want Apple to keep pushing things forward and creating products which make technology easier to use and improve our lives. There are only so many hours of work the engineers at Apple are capable of, and I'd rather they spent it improving things rather than preserving past states. Those who want to preserve the past are welcome to pick up old hardware and continue to work on it and form preservation societies. Or create those translation layers which allow old software to work on new hardware. It's not trivial work.

As for attracting game publishers, any software development company knows that you need to maintain compatibility and/or port your software. Even if they create a game for consoles, when the next version of that console comes out, they need to decide whether to port the game to that new version or drop it. The main reason why they don't create games for Mac is that there just aren't as many gamers who buy a Mac. Apple has always focused on making the Mac a creator's platform (see Jobs' "bicycle for the mind" speech) and games have really been an afterthought. Maybe that'll change though if/when the Apple TV inherits the power of the M-series chips.