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iPad Is a "Huge Step Backward"
An anonymous reader writes "FSF's John Sullivan launches the Defective by Design campaign and petition to rain on Steve's parade, barely minutes out of the starting gate. 'This is a huge step backward in the history of computing,' said FSF's Holmes Wilson, 'If the first personal computers required permission from the manufacturer for each new program or new feature, the history of computing would be as dismally totalitarian as the milieu in Apple's famous Super Bowl ad.' The iPad has DRM writ large: you can only install what Apple says you may, and 'computing' goes consumer mainstream — no more twiddling, just sit back, spend your money, and watch the show — while we allow you to." What is clear is that the rise of the App Store removes control of the computer from the user. It makes me wonder what the next generation of OS X will look like.
First, the FSF needs to convince us average users need to have control. Why should average users have control over their computer? Isn't this what got us the virus nightmare in Windows?
Doesn't migrating to the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch model mean that social engineering has much less of an impact to the security of a system? I would think this would be a good thing.
I don't think Mac OS X will ever go away from giving you the control it does (and it is quite nice), but Mac OS X is not appropriate on a device like the iPad.
In fact, I would compare the iPad to the upcoming yet-to-be-made Chromium netbook. The vision Google laid out for their device is pretty much exactly the same as Apple's vision of the iPad. Except that Apple is actually _less_ connected in to your device than Google would be.
Sure, this is bad for the FSF, but what alternative vision of computing do they offer?
Attacking Apple's products is one thing. Why not create your own open source tablet to compete, and let the marketplace decide?
And there's no chance whatsoever that this will ever happen to Mac OS X, so don't lose sleep over it.
Really? I can totally see Apple releasing a new mac mini with this OS because *it just works*. Then putting a premium on future machines with the OSX variant. I think the saddest part is that for a large portion of the population, that's probably best. Would we have such large bot nets if every Joe could only get their stuff from one place? Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?
I'm not sure how Apple's DRMs are more of a choice than any DRMs are.
If users like the idea of being locked into the store, fine. RMS, the EFF, Slashdot, "whine" by showing people the bars they are getting into. I must say that I never heard Apple bragging that they locked in users or that it was hard to get the kind of apps you like for their devices. For that I thank those "whiners".
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I was disappointed to see the iPad following the App Store model rather than full-on Mac OS X. On my MacBook Pro, or my wife's iMac, I feel like I get the best of both worlds: a nice consistant "just-works" gui with all the power/control I might need just a terminal window away.
FSF is very much on target with the locked-down AppStore model being the biggest threat to user freedom that we've ever seen, bigger than software patents. It's "Tivo-ization" writ large.
What I don't get about this is why you can't do any of these things with a laptop and why it's better to carry around a device with an unprotected screen instead. I just cannot imagine using one of these tablets and I can't imagine it having the mass market appeal that makes, say, the iPod or the iPhone the success that they are.
[FUCK BETA]
"We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on." - Steve Jobs, Interview in Macworld magazine, February 2004
Steve used to preach that you could tell simply by looking at someones posture whether they were consuming or creating. The hacker bent over his keyboard is a boon to society while the couch potato leaning waayy back is a drain.
Meanwhile, he introduces the iPad while leaning back in an easy chair and telling us how easy it is to buy and consume web pages, music, movies, books from the iTunes store. And it's all DRM infested, right down to the software you may or may not be allowed to run on it.
Consume, consume, consume.
if freedom can only be preserved by removing choice
George Orwell just called and he wants NewSpeak back. Did you honestly think about that as you were typing it?
This is why I just can't take free software advocates seriously. Yes I use (and support) some free software, but apparently RMS and the FSF have bought into the whole "we had to destroy the village to save it" mentality.
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Microsoft wanted money for its products. Google just wants to know a lot about you. Most people don't care about privacy. So Google is shaping up to be Microsoft+{Nielsen+Gallup}+{Madison Avenue} all rolled into one.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I don't see what the iPad has to do with OS X. The iPhone OS is built for a completely different purpose than OS X is. iPads are meant to do a relatively few things (read books, consume media, browse web, play games, etc.) very well and intuitively. OS X does a lot of things very well and is incredibly powerful. In our neuroimaging lab we used to run Linux as our main processing OS (we still use it a lot) but we are transitioning over to OS X because we can do everything we need to do that Linux can do plus much more.
As someone in academia, the iPad would be perfect for much of what I do. I can take notes on it (including notes when I do therapy or psychological assessments), check my email, write papers and reports, read articles and books, listen to music, run all sorts of other apps (including terminal ones with ssh support), transfer and display brain images, and more. With the right adapter I could use the iPad to run Keynote presentations from.
I do some of these things on my iPod Touch - I use it all the time for my work - but the screen size limits some of what I can do. Could a netbook meet my needs? To some degree but the tablet form factor of the iPad is key for me. I could purchase a different tablet computer but again, their form factors are larger than the iPad. Plus, they usually cost more.
Besides, the iPad is competing with the Kindle to some degree and a Kindle with a 9.7" screen is only $10 cheaper than the iPad. I know the smaller Kindle is slightly more than 1/2 the price of the iPad but it does far less than 1/2 of what the iPad does (but the Kindle is very good at what it is designed to do, so I hear).
I'll probably purchase an iPad - maybe not this 1st rev. but possibly when it is updated in a year or two. I think Apple is going to sell a lot of them.
if we've learned anything from the iPhone and iPod it's that Apple has tremendous influence in driving the standards of consumer electronics
have they driven standards? they produce a bunch of proprietary devices that lock you into using another one of apple's proprietary devices whenever they can. itunes is a completely closed ecosystem. the app store is locked down. their media devices don't use open formats.
firewire?
what did i miss?
Now wait a minute. Before all the FOSS types get into a slathering fury (oops, too late), consider:
- The SDK is free. Free! Download it and start developing apps already.
- Distribution is free. Free! There's nothing stopping you from signing up and giving away your self-righteous apps for no cost; include the source code or a link thereto if you like. And if you do want to make a buck (er, $0.99) off each copy of your app, that costs you a measly $99/year (surely your app is good enough to get a hundred people to buy it, right?).
- The much-defamed App Store censors mostly just take a cursory glance at each submission to make sure the app is well-behaved (not malicious or destructively stupid) and socially acceptable to all audiences (how much FOSS pr*n are you planning to develop, eh?). Is it really too much to ask that someone double-check your work for brokenness before spreading it to the unwashed masses? Have you _seen_ what got thru that process unabated?
OK, so it isn't totally completely unquestionably end-to-end FOSS. I'll understand if RMS doesn't approve, but that's his shtick, not ours.
- App Store is the only distribution process. Well, except that you could publish your source code and let anyone with the SDK compile & run it sans censors.
- DRM everywhere. Well, not really - seems you can put whatever content you want on it via iTunes (music is not DRMed anymore, remember? and I shouldn't have to say anything about videos, right?) and the SDK. I expect the iBook stuff will prove the same: minimal-if-any DRM, easily circumvented.
And what does the RMS-approved FOSS get you? ..." isn't preferable to "it just works" for most users, including most of us geeks who don't want to have to screw around with your app which wasn't even given a cursory independent stamp of "not blatantly broken".
- Android is showing diminishing quality of apps with increasing conflict. Windows has been there forever.
- "Oh, you just need to
You want choice, you have choice: get a Droid. A lot of us appreciate a little formalized cooperation, at trivial cost, to ensure stupid code doesn't run rampant.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Oh, for the love of christ, get over yourself. People are sheep because they don't want to spend time and energy maintaining their gadgets, they just want to use them?
YOU are the sheep because you think that defective gadgets - ones where you need to spend time and energy on maintenance that a PROPERLY designed gadget wouldn't require - somehow makes you a better person. Rather than holding the people who design and sell those faulty gadgets responsible for releasing a shitty product, you instead seem to think it is a *virtue* that you're willing to put up with a crappy device that requires you to spend tons of time on tasks unrelated to what you want to do just so you can use their devices. You actually think it's a *good* thing that you have to do this!
Talk about being a brainwashed sheep!
I want tools that DO WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO with a minimal amount of hassle and that don't require me to spend tons of time making sure they're in good shape before I use them. When I want to use a web enabled device, I want to just surf the goddamn web. I don't want to spend 30 minutes checking for the latest viruses and exploits, scanning my system, and dealing with all that bullshit - I just want to surf the web and do whatever it is I'm going to do there. When I want to install an application on my computer I don't want to have to dick around with making sure permissions are right or that all dependencies are met or any of that - I just want to click as few buttons as possible and then use the application.
Please, though, feel free to continue to imagine that you're somehow better than everyone else because your time is worth so little to you that you're more than happy to spend your time making up for the failures of the people who provide you with gadgets and software to do their jobs better. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be getting actual work done or having fun with our gadgets. If not wasting my time doing bunches of routine maintenance tasks with my electronics makes me a sheep, then baa baa baa, guilty as charged.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
These artificial limitations that Apple puts in place are completely unnecessary, and unjustifiable.
Maybe if I use a car analogy, you'd understand it better. These days, virtually every consumer-grade vehicle has a gas tank that can be filled at virtually any gas station. If you want to buy from one station instead of another, you're perfectly free to do so. After all, there's no justifiable reason to put any limitations in place. It's your car, you should be able to fill it up however and wherever you want.
I'll run with your car analogy.
On one hand, you could justify Apple as making a car that your mom can drive. All the futzy-bits are taken away. Put gas in it. Go for scheduled maintenance. Make sure your oil is changed. It just works without needing to know the details. A PC would be more like the old muscle cars grease monkeys would constantly be tinkering with, adjusting the points and timing and always under the hood with a wrench and pliers. Anything that takes away control from a grease monkey would be hateful to them. All the black box stuff on cars today, grease monkeys hate that. But it makes grandma's life easier.
The market would be fine if there was room for tweaking cars and no-tweak cars. Unfortunately the trend is to run with more computers, more specialized tools, and more barriers to entry. An independent mechanic has to spend $20k on diagnostic tools. There's no reason why a common laptop shouldn't be able to plug into the car via USB to read the codes but they charge big bucks because they can. It keeps the little guys out of the business. And there's all manner of specialized tools required to work on the cars rather than designing to do the most work with the least number of tools possible.
I applaud moves that simplify things for one segment of consumers while leaving options open for others. What I don't like is when a move signifies an industry trend that will eventually remove options.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'm more interested in what you believe that you can do with the iPad, that you cannot do with any of the slates that were brought out at CES? From what I can tell, the only thing you get with the iPad is the app-store.
Yes, you can load your own documents on the iPad. Unlike an iPod / iPhone, the iPad has a "shared folder" that is accessible to all applications, and that you can load your own files into via USB:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the_ipad_an_inside-the-park_home_run/
(near the bottom)
"I have begun to look over what's new in iPhone OS 3.2 SDK. It offers some positive signs. In particular, applications will be able to "share" documents they create using a new file-sharing support feature. All documents to be shared are placed in a Shared Directory, which will mount on the desktop when the device is connected to a computer. This works independently of iTunes syncing."
I have an iPhone dev account and have confirmed this in the SDK myself. So yes, you can load your own documents onto it.
You think Apple doesn't have people analysing places like Slashdot?
It's 2010. The producers of Lost study Lost fan forums, and make agile changes to the show in according to what they find.
If the makers of a TV programme do that, surely savvy makers of gadgets study comments on prominent tech blogs.
But you can't help but notice how the things went horribly wrong :
Apple in 1984 :
"Hey, don't be a sheeple like everybody else ! Don't let an evil corporation decide what you should do ! Buy our Macintosches and get a product that will let you think in any innovative way you want !"
Apple, 25 years later :
"Hey, wan't to be as cool and as hip as all the other cool guys ? Go buy our iTrendy iProducts ! Just don't do anything silly with them. We decide what goes on an iPhone/iPod/iPad, because we know what's good for you. We select which are the best application, we select which feature another studio can use if they want to innovate. (WARNING: attempt to circumvent this limitation to do what you want the device in creative new ways may infringe the terms on your contract/make your plan cancelled/violate the DMCA/voids the Warranty/exposes you to viruses)"
If you told 1984-era Steve Jobs how the iProducts work, he would probably never believe you that he'll be leading a company doing that.
I agree that the iP*s are appliances. It's just weird whan a company which spent so much effort creating a public image which was all about freedom (from corporation) has turned into a corporation whose most popular product is precisely controlled in terms of what can go on it. And is actively doing everything possible to make this situation remain so.
Meanwhile other appliances have been very successful without the need to restricting users' freedom. Both old devices (such as those based on PalmOS and Windows CE) and modern devices (like the latest running WebOs) have been made in a way where the user can get administrative right on any model out-of-the-box (not only special "developer" models) and use them to do what pleases them without arbitrary restriction by the manufacturer (old PalmOS where single-task OSes. Nonetheless, methods existed to have some background tasks anyway, and Palm never did anything to prevent this. Unlike with the iP*s). This never did prevent these devices to be successful.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]