Your analogy is illuminating, perhaps in more ways that you intend. If you write a book for a publisher, you can always shop it around as many publishers as you like till you find a buyer. If the book is good, presumably someone will like it.
Unfortunately if you write an app for iOS and Apple don't like it, you're out of luck. Or say you write the app, they like it, and then they don't like it : http://www.groundhog.com.au/myframe/. All that work you did for 6 months and thought was a success is now worthless, and you also have lots of disappointed customers.
The equivalent would be Bedford St. Martin's requiring you to write a novel in their own dialect of Klingon, which they will then translate for their customers. Your time spent learning Klingon and doing that is a sunk cost if they then decide they don't like it they will stop translating/selling it, and from time to time they change the rules as to what words are acceptable on a whim, so old novels are constantly being removed from publication. They also have a tendency to reject novels which they feel are too close to those their founder has written or is in the process of writing (which he also publishes through them in competition with yours). Sometimes phrases from your novels crop up in the founder's, but hey, what can you do, they own you...
Suddenly, writing for Bedford St. Martin's is a slightly worrying prospect, no matter how many customers they have.
It's certainly nothing new, and Apple's hyperbole is frankly a little silly (or sickening, if you expect honesty from them I guess), however there are three things that might help this take off -
Free - 3G videocalls cost money
Ubiquity - having the ability to do free video chats on tens of millions of devices
An open protocol - that means video chats with people on Nokia phones (for example) if Nokia choose to support it, or Skype, or Google
I agree this isn't in any way revolutionary or new, but it is an interesting step from Apple, and one I might use for chats with family and possibly some friends if I get one of the new phones and the protocol takes off. 3G video calling was always just a way to screw more money out of consumers, whereas this is free and internet based. I did expect at least interop with iChat, but presumably that will come soon.
You're being disingenuous here. Ad hoc is limited to 100 devices, and is not a serious distribution mechanism. It's for betas specifically, and if Apple chose they could easily pull the distribution certificate you have to pay for from them to do it, on a whim. In addition, it is limited to 100 devices per year per developer account (not per app), with no replacements allowed once devices have been added. You also can't use any tools that you wish - this is specifically barred by the SDK agreement you signed up for if you paid $99 (as is using ad-hoc for stuff other than betas).
You're not allowed to distribute software for the iPhone in any meaningful sense without going through the app store. The only distribution mechanism which is free of control is HTML on a web server, which is also typically free of remuneration and limited in performance/access to device features. For most developers, that makes it far less interesting. There's a reason almost all the serious development is going through the app store, in spite of the hassles.
I understand Apple's inclination to control what goes on their store, but let's be honest about what they allow and the restrictions they have in place. They could do a much better job of enforcing standards on the app store while giving leeway to developers, and will only improve if their feet are held to the fire by truly critical users.
Or is it okay to let a company like Apple accrue the benefits of outsourcing (i.e. lower prices, more flexible manufacturing, etc.) while ignoring negative consequences (i.e. environmental damage, inhumane working conditions, etc.)?
I think the real question, which we are all studiously avoiding in blaming Apple or Foxconn is this:
Is it OK for the population of the 1st world to accrue the benefits of a lifestyle where almost everything we own, from shoes to iPads, is made by people working for a pittance in another country, while ignoring the negative consequences for others?
I wonder how well OS-X will[sic] fare on a fully-featured tablet en how well Windows Mobile works on a feature-poor iPad-style tablet.
Full OS X with the aqua UI will never appear on tablets because that wouldn't work. I imagine Apple tried it years ago and that was the impetus for coming up with iPhone OS. Windows mobile would work as well as it works elsewhere - poorly. There's a reason Windows Mobile is bleeding marketshare in the smartphone segment.
All it proves is that the iPhone OS works on an iPhone-without-the-phone and that Windows doesn't work on laptops-without-a-keyboard.
Well, yes. Exactly. Ergo Windows 7 slates won't work well.
You do realize that there are these things called "bluetooth keyboards and mice" that let you add a keyboard and mouse to a tablet in a case where you'd really need it, right?
If that's how you think a tablet should work, why not just buy a laptop?
Bullshit. I said that the fact that companies ridiculously overprice tablet pc's has kept them from becoming popular. Your response was "Not at all". Ergo, you are saying price has no impact on people's purchasing decisions.
Not at all (see how that works?). Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they believe exactly the antithesis of your thesis. They might just think other things are more important.
In this case he's saying it's all about the UI, more than the price (though that's not to say the price has no impact, or even that it is not a strong factor, just not the strongest).
The past decade is only worth so much, there has not been a slim, finger-friendly tablet computer that runs Windows, at those at least seem like they might be decent differentiators for the form factor
Perhaps that's because Windows in its current form is not conducive to a slim, finger-friendly tablet computer. There's a good reason HP bought webos and Microsoft cancelled Courier, and that reason is Windows is not (in its current form) adaptable to that form factor.
I guarantee you HP tried making a slate with Windows first - they were even showing it off as a concept with Ballmer, so for them to then use WebOS for new products tells you something about how well that has gone.
Withholding the facts is, BY DEFINITION, suppressing the truth.
Time dedicated to education is finite, therefore education can never present *all* the facts, even about a very limited subject. By your argument all education suppresses the truth. Education also imparts a small part of the truth to people who previously knew even less of it.
This is an argument over which facts (and which interpretations of them, but mostly which facts) are relevant enough to teach our children.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to a balanced truth about the world which we can collectively impart to our children, but you should at least accept that truth is limited by the time available to discover it and the time available to teach it.
Moore's 'law' isn't a law of nature (or of humans) in any meaningful sense. It's a conjecture, a guess, a prediction, and nothing more. Why people who are supposedly rational cling to it as some unchanging constant of nature mystifies me. Why even bother to argue about whether it is true or not? It's already completely out of date, in that he wisely limited his guess to 10 years, up to 001975.
If Moore's conjecture is broken, or has already been, so what? Have any fundamental laws of physics been violated, has our understanding of the world changed one iota? It was an interesting guess in its time about the progress of technology, and was not, so far as I know, intended to last forever.
Absolutely. Over the long term, we can expect far more massive changes than a few metres of sea level rise, but the long term is millions of years, not 100 years. I'm quite familiar with the climate record thanks.
The speed of change is important, and the sort of rises projected (1m in 100 years) are very very rapid in comparison to those in the climate record (as far as we know), except perhaps the ones which led to the extinction of half the world's fauna, like the K-T boundary event - not a very promising precedent. The projected changes to sea level and temperature would certainly cause massive upheaval given our current populations and distribution.
Nothing you've said here is science: it is economic and political opinion.
I couldn't agree more. We are after all on an internet forum, and I wouldn't expect my comments to have any more weight than anyone else's, and certainly not to be taken as 'science' of some kind. I don't recall every making a claim that they were science though. I'm not aware of any science posted as comments to slashdot.
This is the problem with the AGW debate (one of them, anyway): mixing of hysterical speculation about economics and politics with some reasonably ok science. The science is reasonably ok--just not nearly solid enough to justify the hysterical speculations.
The comment wasn't speculating or hysterical (nice use of emotive language there to try to polarise debate). Sea level rise is an obvious consequence of a warming climate, and one which has seen an awful lot of scientific studies estimating its possible effects. Here's one, as an example:
If we have a rapidly warming climate, the changes could be around 1-2m of rise within a century - that is very rapid in geological terms so far as we know. As you can see from this graphic from Nasa, the results would be dramatic -
and incredibly expensive to mitigate, given the amount of land involved. We'd probably end up giving up on huge areas which are currently densely populated.
Of course there have been many climate changes in the past of much greater magnitude, but all of them happened very slowly in comparison, except perhaps those which resulted in mass extinctions like the K-T boundary (hard to say for sure). If this was over 1000 years, it would be easier to work with the changes, but over 100 years, such a change in coastlines would lead to massive upheavals, given that most humans live along coastlines, many in countries without the resources to mount flood defences.
So the question is really has mankind affected the climate recently - given the proven connection between greenhouse gases/particulates from volcanoes and climate, and the huge amounts of particulates and greenhouse gases we have been producing over the last couple of centuries, I'd say the correlation is pretty solid. A lot of real scientists (whose job it is to study these phenomenon) agree. You may not. Regardless, we're going to have to face our dependency on fossil fuels sooner rather than later, so I'm not too worried, but it will be a massive challenge, and we may as well start now.
They did both come up with the idea of the atom [wikipedia.org], after all.
Atomism is a greek concept, not Roman, also, it was not a commonly accepted theory, far less so than say elements/humours.
You can easily over-interpret translations of older texts; that text by Varro could just as easily have been talking about dust mites rather than viruses/bacteria. I don't think it's fair to compare speculation in this case with the more thorough understanding we have of bacteria.
To scientists, the theory is this: adding CO2 to the atmosphere will somewhat warm the atmosphere. This may cause some minor changes in the earth's climate system.
Several degrees of warming is not trivial, it would result in sea level rises large enough to wipe out many coastal areas which are currently heavily populated - parts of Florida, Bangladesh, India, Bangkok, etc, etc, quite apart from other changes possibly precipitated by the loss of the ice caps. Changes to mitigate the sea level rise after the fact will be hugely expensive, more so than adjusting our behaviour now in my opinion. In addition to this, our reliance on fossil fuels is soon to become a large problem, as they start to run out. Oil, Coal and Gas will probably run out this century, or become incredibly expensive, so we have to deal with these issues for other reasons too.
There are plenty of reasons to respond rationally to the very rapid changes in climate (rapid in geological terms) over the last few centuries, whether you accept they are man-made or not. They are not minor problems, and will probably constitute the largest problems we have to face this century.
Don't you think, that the reason iPhones are close to perfect, is because of the super-tight approval process.... Not only in the App Store, but also in the build and design of it.
Having experienced the App store approval process and used an iPhone. Absolutely not to the first point, and a resounding yes to the second point (the build and design of the OS and phone).
The OS, UI and tight design (not tight controls on apps) are what sets it apart.
There are no tight controls on app quality, quite the reverse (just look at all the terrible apps on the store), but there are bizarre, inconsistent, constantly changing controls on app functionality/use.
the censorship of his work should be denigrated.[sic]
No, Apple denigrated [sic] themselves long ago, and Steve's fans continuously denigrate themselves by supporting his behavior with their wallet.
Denigrate means to criticise unfairly - to defame or disparage, it doesn't mean criticised (as in the first quote), or demean - sinking to a low level (as in your quote).
As to the censorship, I agree Apple are making themselves look silly, and will eventually drive customers away as a result of their obsession with control over their new platform.
Flash content on the web represents a very large and significant portion of contemporary web experience.
Not my web experience. I use a flash blocker, and rarely disable it. Mostly flash is used for ads on the sites I visit. Use it for YouTube, and the Adobe store (which for some bizarre reason has even the scrollbars in flash!). This is on a desktop computer where I can easily use flash if necessary, but I choose not to. Usually if I encounter a site which is all flash, I just don't bother - the biggest offenders are restaurant websites who were conned by some flash-only designer into having a flash only site.
Flash deserves to die and I'm sure we'll see it gradually fade away (like other plugins before it) as HTML grows to encompass all the things it could do. A lot of big sites are already planning to move to HTML for iPad (NYTimes, Time, YouTube etc).
I don't really want flash on a phone/tablet, particularly if I can't turn it off, and given the sales of the iPad and iPhone, it seems not many other people do either.
Whem Microsoft "breaks" the internet with its intentionally wounded implementation of HTML and CSS support, most of us understand the harm it causes.
Microsoft did this to replace an open internet with their tools, Apple are doing this to avoid the web getting locked in to closed Adobe tools - there is a big difference in motivation and effect in this case (though they are similar corporations in many other ways).
Wrong. In case you had not noticed, Apple is not always strict on adherence to rules. And if you simply take a step back away from the document and use common sense, you will understand what will happen vs. what the document (which can change at any time) says NOW.
I said nothing about Apple's inconsistent application of their own rules, I said the language of the agreement is quite clear, though I'm glad you brought up their behaviour. Apple have not been using common sense in applying their app store rules, and I see no reason for them to start now. You have highlighted the worst part of this for developers - the uncertainty. I certainly would not bet my career on the continued benevolence of Apple, when their agreement explicitly outlaws certain uses.
Apple is not stupid. If literal adherence to this rule hurts the platform (and losing Unity would I think hurt the platform) then Apple will re-work the thing to allow Unity but disallow other kinds of cross-platform application frameworks.
Your faith in the corporation Apple's moral rectitude is touching. Would you be willing to bet 6 months of your life on that assertion? That's what Apple are asking developers to do - trust them, and frankly, for a lot of people (myself included), that trust is being eroded with every arrogant, self-serving decision Apple makes.
This clause was probably translated by the lawyers from some instruction from Jobs like: 'we don't want Adobe to muscle in on our platform and mess it up, how can we screw Adobe and stop them deploying on our platform?'. If other developers get screwed over by it, or we stop potentially useful scripting languages being used on the phone, well, that's life as far as Apple is concerned and developers and users can just put up with it.
The reason people are getting worked up about this is not the particular use case, it's the arrogance displayed by Apple, which has been evident since they first started by saying - if you want to develop for our platform, use web pages. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but the only reason they will reverse decisions like this is enough people stand up to them and tell them they're wrong. People who support everything they do are not helping anyone, least of all themselves or Apple.
Unity (popular game engine) might seem like a grey area, but if Apples motivation is quality of applications you simply cannot ban game engines, sine everyone having to write an engine from scratch would lower, not raise, overall quality. If for no other reeason than the pull of the game industry game engines should be OK.
The language of the agreement is quite clear. If the app was not all *originally* written in Obj-C, C or C++, it is unacceptable. There is no linkage with app quailty, game engines, or anything else except in your head.
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
This clause is insane, and to accept it by saying 'oh well, I'm sure Apple will do the sane thing on this insane clause' is really quite optimistic given their terrible record on consistency. There's a reason the word 'originally' is in there, and if they don't want it to mean that, they wouldn't have put it in.
Probably we'll find Apple will be as hypocritical on this as they were with Google Voice and many other apps. They'll reject whatever they feel like (but not big-money developers' apps) and leave it to fans to concoct spurious ad-hoc justifications of their mysterious actions which attempt to see reason in what is an arbitrary decision based entirely on what suits Apple at that moment.
There really is no comparison to the trite crap like Avatar which gets churned out by mainstream studios.
I could not have cared less about how good the plot was, or if there was a plot at all. It was a 3 hour light show and it was great....Avatar on the other hand, if I spent $2 to see it on my TV at home I'd feel ripped off.
QED.
You pay good money to see a 3 hour light show? How far we have fallen. It is a con in that you were charged way more for a gimmick, glommed on to a shitty film (for all values of film apart from 'light show', as you admit), which was not worth the extra money IMHO.
Still, to the extent that you feel it was worth it, that's fine by me, I just object to people talking about 3D as if it is inevitable progress, or as if those who find it as pointless as it seemed in 1983 have some medical problem.
So get over your sense of outrage. It isn't just Apple. And if you don't like it, don't buy their stuff or develop for it. They don't have a monopoly, so you are free to go to their competitors (Android/MeeGo).
We will stop developing for it. And you won't like it, because your favourite apps will stop getting updates and migrate to other platforms. I say this as a previously committed iPhone developer, who is now on the fence about supporting this platform in future because of Apple's tyrannical and arbitrary rule *changes*. When the goalposts constantly shift, it seems pointless to commit to a platform.
Android is looking far more attractive by the day as the frankly bizarre decisions from Apple just keep on coming. Soon no doubt it'll be Obj-C only and not C or C++, which according to you would be just fine as, well, Microsoft does it too. By the time your defence of Apple's behaviour is 'Well, they're no more evil than Microsoft', you know they have fallen a long long way.
This move has no technical basis (regardless of whatever psuedo-technobabble Jobs spouts to attempt to justify it). It was purely to shaft Adobe several days before their announcement of Flash apps on iPhone, and Apple doesn't seem to care about all the game developers and others who they will be banning as a consequence (anything using lua, anything translating to Obj-c). Those are strictly collateral damage because Apple wanted to send Adobe a message.
The disregard for their customers and developers is shocking, but what is more shocking is that people will stand up and defend them for it!
If anyone else out there, like I did, suspects 3D is a giant con then perhaps a trip to the optometrist is due'"
Or perhaps it really is a giant con. 3D *is* a gimmick promoted by an industry which has run out of ideas, and will die a death like 'stereovision' before it. I can see the 3D effects, and have no interest in it.
Just as Jaws had a 3D version almost 30 years ago, there will be the occasional film which uses 3D now and then, but to imply that all films must use 3D from now or that people need 'vision therapy' to watch crappy 3D movies is preposterous, particularly since the best recent example of its use are films like Avatar and Clash of Titans which are not worth watching the first place. It's not like colour or sound which make film more engaging and bring it closer to real life, it's a silly add-on which distracts rather than helps to immerse. Let me know when they actually have holographic projection and I'll be interested in a real advancement in the technology.
Go watch something like Memento, Le notti di Cabiria, Psycho, Les Enfants du Paradis, Hotel Rwanda, The Lives Of Others, Read my lips, Downfall, Ghandi, Oliver or Mississippi Burning and compare it to one of these blockbusters in 3D. There really is no comparison to the trite crap like Avatar which gets churned out by mainstream studios.
That makes it a fair exchange. However, when you are paying for a phone, phone service, and the application, and still see ads
There is no suggestion of this or encouragement of this from Apple in the iAd announcement. What we do have is many free apps which include ads as a way to support development, and Apple wants some of that money. No big deal. No change for users, it just means Apple is running the ads service. Look for them to abuse their power as platform vendor to start squeezing out other options for displaying ads though.
The only time this would be acceptable would be for free apps that would otherwise cost money.
That's exactly where ads are used just now. If you buy an app and are shown ads, I'd suggest you complain vociferously, write a review and switch to a competing app - I know I would. The marketplace will sort this out *if your hypothetical situation arises*, and all this SDK adds is an easy way of adding ads to your app. If Apple start actually showing ads to users in other places (the phone app, etc), just get another phone (Android is definitely catching up).
I'd be far more worried about the control-freakery shown over the use of things like.NET or Flash to develop for the phone, and app submissions in general. Apple really need to let go on that side of things and accept that not everyone wants to use their tools all the time. That's going to hurt the platform and increase the perception of it as a walled garden with walls which move arbitrarily amongst devs.
I don't particularly want flash games on my phone, but some people do, and worse than that, perfectly legitimate systems like scripting in games and emulators will be completely crippled by this. It's a really bad move by Apple.
Re:Here come the DRM whiners
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Apple iPad Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The gp was talking about tablet devices, and of those only the iPad from Apple doesn't support multitasking, afaik.
The iPad does support multitasking various apps (the iPod app, the mail app, Safari), but not third party apps. So if you wanted to test multitasking on it, you could. However that's not really the issue here, performance is the issue, whether multitasking or not.
Android runs on various tablets, and I suspect Web OS (if it lasts that long) will too. There's a reason tablets tend to run mobile OSs - it's because they're a similar class of device to phones. Netbooks are coming from the other direction, and are yet another distinct category.
You're talking about mobile touchscreen devices, which is a completely different class of devices.
I disagree. The iPad is pretty much an iPod touch with a bigger screen, better processor etc. The OS is almost exactly the same, and soon enough they will be exactly the same OS. As far as performance, hardware and UI goes the iPad is far closer to an iPod/iPhone that it is to desktop computers.
But to drag this back to the point, UI responsiveness is vital to this sort of device (mobile phone, mobile music player, or mobile reading device), and it's a useful metric of quality, far more useful than comparing chips in isolation.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is illuminating, perhaps in more ways that you intend. If you write a book for a publisher, you can always shop it around as many publishers as you like till you find a buyer. If the book is good, presumably someone will like it.
Unfortunately if you write an app for iOS and Apple don't like it, you're out of luck. Or say you write the app, they like it, and then they don't like it : http://www.groundhog.com.au/myframe/. All that work you did for 6 months and thought was a success is now worthless, and you also have lots of disappointed customers.
The equivalent would be Bedford St. Martin's requiring you to write a novel in their own dialect of Klingon, which they will then translate for their customers. Your time spent learning Klingon and doing that is a sunk cost if they then decide they don't like it they will stop translating/selling it, and from time to time they change the rules as to what words are acceptable on a whim, so old novels are constantly being removed from publication. They also have a tendency to reject novels which they feel are too close to those their founder has written or is in the process of writing (which he also publishes through them in competition with yours). Sometimes phrases from your novels crop up in the founder's, but hey, what can you do, they own you...
Suddenly, writing for Bedford St. Martin's is a slightly worrying prospect, no matter how many customers they have.
It's certainly nothing new, and Apple's hyperbole is frankly a little silly (or sickening, if you expect honesty from them I guess), however there are three things that might help this take off -
I agree this isn't in any way revolutionary or new, but it is an interesting step from Apple, and one I might use for chats with family and possibly some friends if I get one of the new phones and the protocol takes off. 3G video calling was always just a way to screw more money out of consumers, whereas this is free and internet based. I did expect at least interop with iChat, but presumably that will come soon.
Ad hoc is no holds barred.
You're being disingenuous here. Ad hoc is limited to 100 devices, and is not a serious distribution mechanism. It's for betas specifically, and if Apple chose they could easily pull the distribution certificate you have to pay for from them to do it, on a whim. In addition, it is limited to 100 devices per year per developer account (not per app), with no replacements allowed once devices have been added. You also can't use any tools that you wish - this is specifically barred by the SDK agreement you signed up for if you paid $99 (as is using ad-hoc for stuff other than betas).
You're not allowed to distribute software for the iPhone in any meaningful sense without going through the app store. The only distribution mechanism which is free of control is HTML on a web server, which is also typically free of remuneration and limited in performance/access to device features. For most developers, that makes it far less interesting. There's a reason almost all the serious development is going through the app store, in spite of the hassles.
I understand Apple's inclination to control what goes on their store, but let's be honest about what they allow and the restrictions they have in place. They could do a much better job of enforcing standards on the app store while giving leeway to developers, and will only improve if their feet are held to the fire by truly critical users.
@font-face
Or is it okay to let a company like Apple accrue the benefits of outsourcing (i.e. lower prices, more flexible manufacturing, etc.) while ignoring negative consequences (i.e. environmental damage, inhumane working conditions, etc.)?
I think the real question, which we are all studiously avoiding in blaming Apple or Foxconn is this:
Is it OK for the population of the 1st world to accrue the benefits of a lifestyle where almost everything we own, from shoes to iPads, is made by people working for a pittance in another country, while ignoring the negative consequences for others?
I wonder how well OS-X will[sic] fare on a fully-featured tablet en how well Windows Mobile works on a feature-poor iPad-style tablet.
Full OS X with the aqua UI will never appear on tablets because that wouldn't work. I imagine Apple tried it years ago and that was the impetus for coming up with iPhone OS. Windows mobile would work as well as it works elsewhere - poorly. There's a reason Windows Mobile is bleeding marketshare in the smartphone segment.
All it proves is that the iPhone OS works on an iPhone-without-the-phone and that Windows doesn't work on laptops-without-a-keyboard.
Well, yes. Exactly. Ergo Windows 7 slates won't work well.
You do realize that there are these things called "bluetooth keyboards and mice" that let you add a keyboard and mouse to a tablet in a case where you'd really need it, right?
If that's how you think a tablet should work, why not just buy a laptop?
Bullshit. I said that the fact that companies ridiculously overprice tablet pc's has kept them from becoming popular. Your response was "Not at all". Ergo, you are saying price has no impact on people's purchasing decisions.
Not at all (see how that works?). Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they believe exactly the antithesis of your thesis. They might just think other things are more important.
In this case he's saying it's all about the UI, more than the price (though that's not to say the price has no impact, or even that it is not a strong factor, just not the strongest).
The past decade is only worth so much, there has not been a slim, finger-friendly tablet computer that runs Windows, at those at least seem like they might be decent differentiators for the form factor
Perhaps that's because Windows in its current form is not conducive to a slim, finger-friendly tablet computer. There's a good reason HP bought webos and Microsoft cancelled Courier, and that reason is Windows is not (in its current form) adaptable to that form factor.
I guarantee you HP tried making a slate with Windows first - they were even showing it off as a concept with Ballmer, so for them to then use WebOS for new products tells you something about how well that has gone.
Withholding the facts is, BY DEFINITION, suppressing the truth.
Time dedicated to education is finite, therefore education can never present *all* the facts, even about a very limited subject. By your argument all education suppresses the truth. Education also imparts a small part of the truth to people who previously knew even less of it.
This is an argument over which facts (and which interpretations of them, but mostly which facts) are relevant enough to teach our children.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to a balanced truth about the world which we can collectively impart to our children, but you should at least accept that truth is limited by the time available to discover it and the time available to teach it.
Moore's law
Moore's 'law' isn't a law of nature (or of humans) in any meaningful sense. It's a conjecture, a guess, a prediction, and nothing more. Why people who are supposedly rational cling to it as some unchanging constant of nature mystifies me. Why even bother to argue about whether it is true or not? It's already completely out of date, in that he wisely limited his guess to 10 years, up to 001975.
If Moore's conjecture is broken, or has already been, so what? Have any fundamental laws of physics been violated, has our understanding of the world changed one iota? It was an interesting guess in its time about the progress of technology, and was not, so far as I know, intended to last forever.
Climate change is a given...Over the long term.
Absolutely. Over the long term, we can expect far more massive changes than a few metres of sea level rise, but the long term is millions of years, not 100 years. I'm quite familiar with the climate record thanks.
The speed of change is important, and the sort of rises projected (1m in 100 years) are very very rapid in comparison to those in the climate record (as far as we know), except perhaps the ones which led to the extinction of half the world's fauna, like the K-T boundary event - not a very promising precedent. The projected changes to sea level and temperature would certainly cause massive upheaval given our current populations and distribution.
Nothing you've said here is science: it is economic and political opinion.
I couldn't agree more. We are after all on an internet forum, and I wouldn't expect my comments to have any more weight than anyone else's, and certainly not to be taken as 'science' of some kind. I don't recall every making a claim that they were science though. I'm not aware of any science posted as comments to slashdot.
This is the problem with the AGW debate (one of them, anyway): mixing of hysterical speculation about economics and politics with some reasonably ok science. The science is reasonably ok--just not nearly solid enough to justify the hysterical speculations.
The comment wasn't speculating or hysterical (nice use of emotive language there to try to polarise debate). Sea level rise is an obvious consequence of a warming climate, and one which has seen an awful lot of scientific studies estimating its possible effects. Here's one, as an example:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/12/04/0907765106.full.pdf
If we have a rapidly warming climate, the changes could be around 1-2m of rise within a century - that is very rapid in geological terms so far as we know. As you can see from this graphic from Nasa, the results would be dramatic -
http://sos.noaa.gov/videos/sea_level4.mov
and incredibly expensive to mitigate, given the amount of land involved. We'd probably end up giving up on huge areas which are currently densely populated.
Of course there have been many climate changes in the past of much greater magnitude, but all of them happened very slowly in comparison, except perhaps those which resulted in mass extinctions like the K-T boundary (hard to say for sure). If this was over 1000 years, it would be easier to work with the changes, but over 100 years, such a change in coastlines would lead to massive upheavals, given that most humans live along coastlines, many in countries without the resources to mount flood defences.
So the question is really has mankind affected the climate recently - given the proven connection between greenhouse gases/particulates from volcanoes and climate, and the huge amounts of particulates and greenhouse gases we have been producing over the last couple of centuries, I'd say the correlation is pretty solid. A lot of real scientists (whose job it is to study these phenomenon) agree. You may not. Regardless, we're going to have to face our dependency on fossil fuels sooner rather than later, so I'm not too worried, but it will be a massive challenge, and we may as well start now.
They did both come up with the idea of the atom [wikipedia.org], after all.
Atomism is a greek concept, not Roman, also, it was not a commonly accepted theory, far less so than say elements/humours.
You can easily over-interpret translations of older texts; that text by Varro could just as easily have been talking about dust mites rather than viruses/bacteria. I don't think it's fair to compare speculation in this case with the more thorough understanding we have of bacteria.
To scientists, the theory is this: adding CO2 to the atmosphere will somewhat warm the atmosphere. This may cause some minor changes in the earth's climate system.
Several degrees of warming is not trivial, it would result in sea level rises large enough to wipe out many coastal areas which are currently heavily populated - parts of Florida, Bangladesh, India, Bangkok, etc, etc, quite apart from other changes possibly precipitated by the loss of the ice caps. Changes to mitigate the sea level rise after the fact will be hugely expensive, more so than adjusting our behaviour now in my opinion. In addition to this, our reliance on fossil fuels is soon to become a large problem, as they start to run out. Oil, Coal and Gas will probably run out this century, or become incredibly expensive, so we have to deal with these issues for other reasons too.
There are plenty of reasons to respond rationally to the very rapid changes in climate (rapid in geological terms) over the last few centuries, whether you accept they are man-made or not. They are not minor problems, and will probably constitute the largest problems we have to face this century.
Don't you think, that the reason iPhones are close to perfect, is because of the super-tight approval process.... Not only in the App Store, but also in the build and design of it.
Having experienced the App store approval process and used an iPhone. Absolutely not to the first point, and a resounding yes to the second point (the build and design of the OS and phone).
The OS, UI and tight design (not tight controls on apps) are what sets it apart.
There are no tight controls on app quality, quite the reverse (just look at all the terrible apps on the store), but there are bizarre, inconsistent, constantly changing controls on app functionality/use.
the censorship of his work should be denigrated.[sic]
No, Apple denigrated [sic] themselves long ago, and Steve's fans continuously denigrate themselves by supporting his behavior with their wallet.
Denigrate means to criticise unfairly - to defame or disparage, it doesn't mean criticised (as in the first quote), or demean - sinking to a low level (as in your quote).
As to the censorship, I agree Apple are making themselves look silly, and will eventually drive customers away as a result of their obsession with control over their new platform.
Flash content on the web represents a very large and significant portion of contemporary web experience.
Not my web experience. I use a flash blocker, and rarely disable it. Mostly flash is used for ads on the sites I visit. Use it for YouTube, and the Adobe store (which for some bizarre reason has even the scrollbars in flash!). This is on a desktop computer where I can easily use flash if necessary, but I choose not to. Usually if I encounter a site which is all flash, I just don't bother - the biggest offenders are restaurant websites who were conned by some flash-only designer into having a flash only site.
Flash deserves to die and I'm sure we'll see it gradually fade away (like other plugins before it) as HTML grows to encompass all the things it could do. A lot of big sites are already planning to move to HTML for iPad (NYTimes, Time, YouTube etc).
I don't really want flash on a phone/tablet, particularly if I can't turn it off, and given the sales of the iPad and iPhone, it seems not many other people do either.
Whem Microsoft "breaks" the internet with its intentionally wounded implementation of HTML and CSS support, most of us understand the harm it causes.
Microsoft did this to replace an open internet with their tools, Apple are doing this to avoid the web getting locked in to closed Adobe tools - there is a big difference in motivation and effect in this case (though they are similar corporations in many other ways).
The language of the agreement is quite clear.
Wrong. In case you had not noticed, Apple is not always strict on adherence to rules. And if you simply take a step back away from the document and use common sense, you will understand what will happen vs. what the document (which can change at any time) says NOW.
I said nothing about Apple's inconsistent application of their own rules, I said the language of the agreement is quite clear, though I'm glad you brought up their behaviour. Apple have not been using common sense in applying their app store rules, and I see no reason for them to start now. You have highlighted the worst part of this for developers - the uncertainty. I certainly would not bet my career on the continued benevolence of Apple, when their agreement explicitly outlaws certain uses.
Apple is not stupid. If literal adherence to this rule hurts the platform (and losing Unity would I think hurt the platform) then Apple will re-work the thing to allow Unity but disallow other kinds of cross-platform application frameworks.
Your faith in the corporation Apple's moral rectitude is touching. Would you be willing to bet 6 months of your life on that assertion? That's what Apple are asking developers to do - trust them, and frankly, for a lot of people (myself included), that trust is being eroded with every arrogant, self-serving decision Apple makes.
This clause was probably translated by the lawyers from some instruction from Jobs like: 'we don't want Adobe to muscle in on our platform and mess it up, how can we screw Adobe and stop them deploying on our platform?'. If other developers get screwed over by it, or we stop potentially useful scripting languages being used on the phone, well, that's life as far as Apple is concerned and developers and users can just put up with it.
The reason people are getting worked up about this is not the particular use case, it's the arrogance displayed by Apple, which has been evident since they first started by saying - if you want to develop for our platform, use web pages. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but the only reason they will reverse decisions like this is enough people stand up to them and tell them they're wrong. People who support everything they do are not helping anyone, least of all themselves or Apple.
Unity (popular game engine) might seem like a grey area, but if Apples motivation is quality of applications you simply cannot ban game engines, sine everyone having to write an engine from scratch would lower, not raise, overall quality. If for no other reeason than the pull of the game industry game engines should be OK.
The language of the agreement is quite clear. If the app was not all *originally* written in Obj-C, C or C++, it is unacceptable. There is no linkage with app quailty, game engines, or anything else except in your head.
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
This clause is insane, and to accept it by saying 'oh well, I'm sure Apple will do the sane thing on this insane clause' is really quite optimistic given their terrible record on consistency. There's a reason the word 'originally' is in there, and if they don't want it to mean that, they wouldn't have put it in.
Probably we'll find Apple will be as hypocritical on this as they were with Google Voice and many other apps. They'll reject whatever they feel like (but not big-money developers' apps) and leave it to fans to concoct spurious ad-hoc justifications of their mysterious actions which attempt to see reason in what is an arbitrary decision based entirely on what suits Apple at that moment.
There really is no comparison to the trite crap like Avatar which gets churned out by mainstream studios.
I could not have cared less about how good the plot was, or if there was a plot at all. It was a 3 hour light show and it was great....Avatar on the other hand, if I spent $2 to see it on my TV at home I'd feel ripped off.
QED.
You pay good money to see a 3 hour light show? How far we have fallen. It is a con in that you were charged way more for a gimmick, glommed on to a shitty film (for all values of film apart from 'light show', as you admit), which was not worth the extra money IMHO.
Still, to the extent that you feel it was worth it, that's fine by me, I just object to people talking about 3D as if it is inevitable progress, or as if those who find it as pointless as it seemed in 1983 have some medical problem.
So get over your sense of outrage. It isn't just Apple. And if you don't like it, don't buy their stuff or develop for it. They don't have a monopoly, so you are free to go to their competitors (Android/MeeGo).
We will stop developing for it. And you won't like it, because your favourite apps will stop getting updates and migrate to other platforms. I say this as a previously committed iPhone developer, who is now on the fence about supporting this platform in future because of Apple's tyrannical and arbitrary rule *changes*. When the goalposts constantly shift, it seems pointless to commit to a platform.
Android is looking far more attractive by the day as the frankly bizarre decisions from Apple just keep on coming. Soon no doubt it'll be Obj-C only and not C or C++, which according to you would be just fine as, well, Microsoft does it too. By the time your defence of Apple's behaviour is 'Well, they're no more evil than Microsoft', you know they have fallen a long long way.
This move has no technical basis (regardless of whatever psuedo-technobabble Jobs spouts to attempt to justify it). It was purely to shaft Adobe several days before their announcement of Flash apps on iPhone, and Apple doesn't seem to care about all the game developers and others who they will be banning as a consequence (anything using lua, anything translating to Obj-c). Those are strictly collateral damage because Apple wanted to send Adobe a message.
The disregard for their customers and developers is shocking, but what is more shocking is that people will stand up and defend them for it!
If anyone else out there, like I did, suspects 3D is a giant con then perhaps a trip to the optometrist is due'"
Or perhaps it really is a giant con. 3D *is* a gimmick promoted by an industry which has run out of ideas, and will die a death like 'stereovision' before it. I can see the 3D effects, and have no interest in it.
Just as Jaws had a 3D version almost 30 years ago, there will be the occasional film which uses 3D now and then, but to imply that all films must use 3D from now or that people need 'vision therapy' to watch crappy 3D movies is preposterous, particularly since the best recent example of its use are films like Avatar and Clash of Titans which are not worth watching the first place. It's not like colour or sound which make film more engaging and bring it closer to real life, it's a silly add-on which distracts rather than helps to immerse. Let me know when they actually have holographic projection and I'll be interested in a real advancement in the technology.
Go watch something like Memento, Le notti di Cabiria, Psycho, Les Enfants du Paradis, Hotel Rwanda, The Lives Of Others, Read my lips, Downfall, Ghandi, Oliver or Mississippi Burning and compare it to one of these blockbusters in 3D. There really is no comparison to the trite crap like Avatar which gets churned out by mainstream studios.
That makes it a fair exchange. However, when you are paying for a phone, phone service, and the application, and still see ads
There is no suggestion of this or encouragement of this from Apple in the iAd announcement. What we do have is many free apps which include ads as a way to support development, and Apple wants some of that money. No big deal. No change for users, it just means Apple is running the ads service. Look for them to abuse their power as platform vendor to start squeezing out other options for displaying ads though.
The only time this would be acceptable would be for free apps that would otherwise cost money.
That's exactly where ads are used just now. If you buy an app and are shown ads, I'd suggest you complain vociferously, write a review and switch to a competing app - I know I would. The marketplace will sort this out *if your hypothetical situation arises*, and all this SDK adds is an easy way of adding ads to your app. If Apple start actually showing ads to users in other places (the phone app, etc), just get another phone (Android is definitely catching up).
I'd be far more worried about the control-freakery shown over the use of things like .NET or Flash to develop for the phone, and app submissions in general. Apple really need to let go on that side of things and accept that not everyone wants to use their tools all the time. That's going to hurt the platform and increase the perception of it as a walled garden with walls which move arbitrarily amongst devs.
I don't particularly want flash games on my phone, but some people do, and worse than that, perfectly legitimate systems like scripting in games and emulators will be completely crippled by this. It's a really bad move by Apple.
The gp was talking about tablet devices, and of those only the iPad from Apple doesn't support multitasking, afaik.
The iPad does support multitasking various apps (the iPod app, the mail app, Safari), but not third party apps. So if you wanted to test multitasking on it, you could. However that's not really the issue here, performance is the issue, whether multitasking or not.
Android runs on various tablets, and I suspect Web OS (if it lasts that long) will too. There's a reason tablets tend to run mobile OSs - it's because they're a similar class of device to phones. Netbooks are coming from the other direction, and are yet another distinct category.
You're talking about mobile touchscreen devices, which is a completely different class of devices.
I disagree. The iPad is pretty much an iPod touch with a bigger screen, better processor etc. The OS is almost exactly the same, and soon enough they will be exactly the same OS. As far as performance, hardware and UI goes the iPad is far closer to an iPod/iPhone that it is to desktop computers.
But to drag this back to the point, UI responsiveness is vital to this sort of device (mobile phone, mobile music player, or mobile reading device), and it's a useful metric of quality, far more useful than comparing chips in isolation.