The thing is, I think something like the iPhone needs to have fairly tight control as it's limited memory, limited battery, limited processor power. It's usually fairly obvious on a general-purpose computer what is causing the crashes; my experience with the Palm Tx is that it was often not obvious what was causing crashes or draining the battery, so I'm very happy with a controlled environment on the iPhone.
Good stuff. By the way, what did you mean about running out of memory? I've never had that problem and I regularly have Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Photoshop running with seriously large files. Did you mean hard drive space?
Yes! Bang on. I have to say, I'm really grateful to the people who've put so much into FOSS, but after 10 years I'm right with you. I replaced my Ubuntu desktop and laptop with a Mac Mini 2 years ago, and since then I've upgraded twice and now have a MacBook Pro for me, MacBook for my wife, an iPhone each with calendar syncing between the 4 devices, and I'm really happy. It all works great, I've so far never had a breakage after running software update, and I actually enjoy using a computer again.
I'm just about to put an order in to replace my MythTV setup (backend in the outhouse, frontend in the living room) with a Sky+ HD hardware DVR. Every upgrade of Ubuntu breaks something, and MythTV still has random breakage. I never thought I would have a fully closed/proprietary setup, but in all honesty I don't have the time to spend my saturdays messing around with stuff any more. If there was a polished and rock solid semi-proprietary turnkey MythTV setup available I'd go for it, but I don't think there is.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
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Lost Ends
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I don't think they'll help you get the lift, but they will help replace lost salt and protein after using the matter transference beam.
OS X didn't borrow any GUI from FreeBSD. You're confusing the UI and the underlying OS services. The UI came from NextSTEP. And, by the way, Apple invented some of the key features of modern GUIs: overlapping windows, pull-down (non-modal) menus, dialog boxes all were invented for the Mac and/or Lisa.
'Copying' a human being is a completely different thing. Any copying an identity is about passing of and impersonating, again a completely different thing.
Woah... I've read very few comments on this site in favour of the theft of music and movies. Are you making the mistake of confusing theft and copyright violation?
How can downloading something be stealing? If I came to your house and made off with a print, that would be stealing. If you have a DVD with images on and I take it, that might be stealing. It's impossible to steal by downloading. I think you're confusing theft with copyright violation, which seems to be a common yet bizarre misapprehension.
Nowhere in the linked page does it suggest that the legal system of any country considers it to be stealing to take photographs of objects, publicly displayed or otherwise. It appears that some countries might consider it copyright violation, which has absolutely nothing to do with stealing (nor does it have anything to do with rape, murder or libel, just to be thorough).
Yeahhhhh... but the notion of model rights and the use of objects, etc., are all made up. There's no logical reason that things work that way, other than it's convenient and at the moment presumed to be of benefit to society. By the way, although I don't agree with a website reproducing your works without permission, it isn't stealing - for the same reason it isn't rape, arson or libel either.
Actually, it kind of does. If you have a null hypothesis "there is no link between cellphone use and brain cancer" then an inconclusive result would fail to disprove the null hypothesis and therefore affirm it. This is based on choosing a null hypothesis that is based on the sensible default position, which in this study is fine as long as you're the kind of person who is willing/capable of understanding that we are constantly bathed in all sorts of EM radiation of which cellphones only play a small part and that the default position from a conventional understanding of physics is that they're likely to be harmless.
It's also based on the idea that, for a risk factor for cancer(s) significant enough to be worth worrying about, we would expect to see an obvious and conclusive result. For instance, when testing the null hypothesis "there is no like between smoking and lung cancer", the observed data would overwhelmingly reject the null hypothesis. The reality is that there's all sorts of things that people think cause cancer, and many of them may do (e.g. drinking hot drinks regularly is linked with oral cancer) but most of the risk factors aren't significant to be worth worrying about.
Installing another OS on the PS3 was officially supported and advertised as a feature. Access to Sony's servers for multiplayer online gaming was officially supported and advertised as a feature. By releasing this patch, they've made the two things mutually exclusive, which is a breach of contract either way.
That depends entirely on step 2. If Alice was hired to, e.g. develop the website for Bob's company, and she used a MS SQL Server database, the employer would understand that they bought a license to use MS-SQL and don't actually own it. If Alice instead used MySQL, the employer would probably still understand that they are using someone else's software. Suppose Alice wrote an extension to MySQL in order to make the website more efficient - would Bob's company own the code that Alice has written? I think the answer is - it depends.
Going back to the beginning, suppose Alice wrote detailed notes on how to set up something complicated with MS-SQL, in order to keep her on the right track whilst setting up the server for Bob's company. When the contract is over, Alice then publishes that as a book. Should Bob's company claim that those notes should actually belong to them? I think the answer is - it depends.
That's why you need a contract in the first place. My understanding is, that in most industries a company would expect to pay a huge amount extra for exclusivity on a bespoke work. If I hire someone to come and install a conservatory on my house, and they come up with some good ideas during that install, I don't expect them to hand over all the plans and promise to forget the ideas when they finish the job. If you hire in contractors to design and build something, usually you have to pay a lot more to own the design as well as that specific implementation.
Well, not necessarily so. If you're coding something that links agains some libraries in Linux, there's a good chance that some of them will be LGPL anyway. For the rest, if you've linked against something that's difficult to rewrite then you can contact the original author(s) and ask if they will license it to you under some other terms. If it's something relatively easy to rewrite then just go ahead and rewrite it.
That's the big fallacy of the 'viral' GPL - it's a license, not the license for a given bit of code; in other words, the copyright owners of that code are at liberty to sell or give away some other license if they so choose. The only time people and companies every get in trouble is when they rush into using other people's code and then try to sort out licensing and copyright further down the line, which is just as problematic for non-free code.
And the same goes for the computer sitting in the dashboard of my car. It's got a fairly high-res touch screen and a DVD-ROM drive. But I don't see posts all over Ford websites complaining that you can't install Flash. In 2-3 years this will be a non-issue, the geeks will have finally caught up with the rest of the world in recognising a different class of computing appliance.
No, it's not a general-purpose computer. You're making the engineering/geek mistake of confusing the underlying raw specs of a device with its actual designed/marketed/sold-for purpose. My refrigerator contains an air compressor, but I don't moan that it doesn't have a socket for me to connect up my inflatable boat to pump it up (yes I know it pumps freon not air, it's an illustration).
The fact that you can use an Xbox or iPhone or PS3 for general-purpose computing doesn't change the fact that that's not what it's designed for. If you want to buy something and hack it, that's fine, but don't complain the the iPhone doesn't let you do this that or the other just because the underlying hardware could support that.
Many, many devices on the market from cars to central heating systems have an x86 based computer inside them, or some other relatively mainstream Arm or PowerPC, but everyone 'gets' that the limitations are designed-in. For some reason, because the iPhone has a screen and a web browser, everyone seems to be upset that Apple doesn't support it like a general-purpose OS.
I'm glad my iPhone has a locked-down App store, I had a Palm TX before that and suffered crashes from badly programmed apps all the time. Number of crashes in 18 months of iPhone usage? 0.
No, it's not. Really. Are you being disingenuous or do you actually not get it? It's like being a geek who usually carries a Swiss Army Knife, going into a shop and buying a really nice bush knife, then complaining that it doesn't have a cork screw. The iPhone/iPad are a minimal OS with a web browser that also support limited, locked-down and fairly small applications, and the iPhone also does voice calls.
*Grrr*- look, there's thousands of games available for the Xbox, does that make it a general-purpose computer too? Since the rise of the home microcomputer, geeks have been used to installing whatever applications they wanted and hacking the system in any way they wanted. The iPhone/iPad have changed that, and follow a games-console paradigm - you can have anything you want as long as Apple approves of it - which as you say still leads to a huge amount of choice, just not the sort of freedom most geeks expect from a desktop PC. It's not general-purpose in the sense that it can't easily be applied to whatever purpose you want: it really has three purposes: make and receive phone calls, access the web, install and run Apple-approved apps.
It's an Internet Appliance. Remember about 10 years ago, they were going to be all the rage? Well it's finally happened. It's a closed environment, designed for a specific set of tasks, and designed to be easily used. The 'limitations' perceived by geeks are deliberate, and seen as an advantage by most non-geeks. Think about the original XBox - fairly generic PC hardware in a custom case, totally limited in what you can do with it but excellent for playing games when connected up to your TV. The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
Actually, you pay $99 to release native apps for the iPhone. You can sign up and download the dev environment for free. It's not immediately obvious, but I have it sitting here in my downloads folder after a bit of circular link-following on Apple's site.
Read carefully: the iPad/iPhone is NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER. Why is this so hard to grasp for the vocal minority of Apple-complainers on Slashdot?
No it's not. I have the full X-Code package for developing on desktop OSX and iPhone, I downloaded it from the developer's area of Apple's website after registering for free. You only pay if you wish to release software via the App Store for the iPhone/iPad. $99 seems very reasonable to me as a fee for use of the libraries and access to the App store. Many development environments (e.g. Flash) require you to pay up-front whether you release or not.
Surprisingly, you are required to run OSX to run Apple's development environment, just like you are required to run Windows to run Microsoft's development environments. Code can be written for OSX using freely available tools and libraries on the OS of your choice, which will run from the command line or graphically via one of the cross-platform UI libraries. If you want to link against Apple's libraries you will need to use their OS, which I think is true of the Windows APIs too.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, I think something like the iPhone needs to have fairly tight control as it's limited memory, limited battery, limited processor power. It's usually fairly obvious on a general-purpose computer what is causing the crashes; my experience with the Palm Tx is that it was often not obvious what was causing crashes or draining the battery, so I'm very happy with a controlled environment on the iPhone.
Good stuff. By the way, what did you mean about running out of memory? I've never had that problem and I regularly have Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Photoshop running with seriously large files. Did you mean hard drive space?
Yes! Bang on. I have to say, I'm really grateful to the people who've put so much into FOSS, but after 10 years I'm right with you. I replaced my Ubuntu desktop and laptop with a Mac Mini 2 years ago, and since then I've upgraded twice and now have a MacBook Pro for me, MacBook for my wife, an iPhone each with calendar syncing between the 4 devices, and I'm really happy. It all works great, I've so far never had a breakage after running software update, and I actually enjoy using a computer again.
I'm just about to put an order in to replace my MythTV setup (backend in the outhouse, frontend in the living room) with a Sky+ HD hardware DVR. Every upgrade of Ubuntu breaks something, and MythTV still has random breakage. I never thought I would have a fully closed/proprietary setup, but in all honesty I don't have the time to spend my saturdays messing around with stuff any more. If there was a polished and rock solid semi-proprietary turnkey MythTV setup available I'd go for it, but I don't think there is.
I don't think they'll help you get the lift, but they will help replace lost salt and protein after using the matter transference beam.
What on earth is sand-script?
OS X didn't borrow any GUI from FreeBSD. You're confusing the UI and the underlying OS services. The UI came from NextSTEP. And, by the way, Apple invented some of the key features of modern GUIs: overlapping windows, pull-down (non-modal) menus, dialog boxes all were invented for the Mac and/or Lisa.
'Copying' a human being is a completely different thing. Any copying an identity is about passing of and impersonating, again a completely different thing.
Woah... I've read very few comments on this site in favour of the theft of music and movies. Are you making the mistake of confusing theft and copyright violation?
How do you think Google Image Search works? Do you think that the little thumbnails are all generated on the fly for every search every time?
How can downloading something be stealing? If I came to your house and made off with a print, that would be stealing. If you have a DVD with images on and I take it, that might be stealing. It's impossible to steal by downloading. I think you're confusing theft with copyright violation, which seems to be a common yet bizarre misapprehension.
Nowhere in the linked page does it suggest that the legal system of any country considers it to be stealing to take photographs of objects, publicly displayed or otherwise. It appears that some countries might consider it copyright violation, which has absolutely nothing to do with stealing (nor does it have anything to do with rape, murder or libel, just to be thorough).
Yeahhhhh... but the notion of model rights and the use of objects, etc., are all made up. There's no logical reason that things work that way, other than it's convenient and at the moment presumed to be of benefit to society. By the way, although I don't agree with a website reproducing your works without permission, it isn't stealing - for the same reason it isn't rape, arson or libel either.
Actually, it kind of does. If you have a null hypothesis "there is no link between cellphone use and brain cancer" then an inconclusive result would fail to disprove the null hypothesis and therefore affirm it. This is based on choosing a null hypothesis that is based on the sensible default position, which in this study is fine as long as you're the kind of person who is willing/capable of understanding that we are constantly bathed in all sorts of EM radiation of which cellphones only play a small part and that the default position from a conventional understanding of physics is that they're likely to be harmless.
It's also based on the idea that, for a risk factor for cancer(s) significant enough to be worth worrying about, we would expect to see an obvious and conclusive result. For instance, when testing the null hypothesis "there is no like between smoking and lung cancer", the observed data would overwhelmingly reject the null hypothesis. The reality is that there's all sorts of things that people think cause cancer, and many of them may do (e.g. drinking hot drinks regularly is linked with oral cancer) but most of the risk factors aren't significant to be worth worrying about.
Installing another OS on the PS3 was officially supported and advertised as a feature. Access to Sony's servers for multiplayer online gaming was officially supported and advertised as a feature. By releasing this patch, they've made the two things mutually exclusive, which is a breach of contract either way.
That depends entirely on step 2. If Alice was hired to, e.g. develop the website for Bob's company, and she used a MS SQL Server database, the employer would understand that they bought a license to use MS-SQL and don't actually own it. If Alice instead used MySQL, the employer would probably still understand that they are using someone else's software. Suppose Alice wrote an extension to MySQL in order to make the website more efficient - would Bob's company own the code that Alice has written? I think the answer is - it depends.
Going back to the beginning, suppose Alice wrote detailed notes on how to set up something complicated with MS-SQL, in order to keep her on the right track whilst setting up the server for Bob's company. When the contract is over, Alice then publishes that as a book. Should Bob's company claim that those notes should actually belong to them? I think the answer is - it depends.
That's why you need a contract in the first place. My understanding is, that in most industries a company would expect to pay a huge amount extra for exclusivity on a bespoke work. If I hire someone to come and install a conservatory on my house, and they come up with some good ideas during that install, I don't expect them to hand over all the plans and promise to forget the ideas when they finish the job. If you hire in contractors to design and build something, usually you have to pay a lot more to own the design as well as that specific implementation.
Well, not necessarily so. If you're coding something that links agains some libraries in Linux, there's a good chance that some of them will be LGPL anyway. For the rest, if you've linked against something that's difficult to rewrite then you can contact the original author(s) and ask if they will license it to you under some other terms. If it's something relatively easy to rewrite then just go ahead and rewrite it.
That's the big fallacy of the 'viral' GPL - it's a license, not the license for a given bit of code; in other words, the copyright owners of that code are at liberty to sell or give away some other license if they so choose. The only time people and companies every get in trouble is when they rush into using other people's code and then try to sort out licensing and copyright further down the line, which is just as problematic for non-free code.
Damn, you're right, I'm off to hack the general-purpose computer in the centre console of my car so that it can run Flash.
And the same goes for the computer sitting in the dashboard of my car. It's got a fairly high-res touch screen and a DVD-ROM drive. But I don't see posts all over Ford websites complaining that you can't install Flash. In 2-3 years this will be a non-issue, the geeks will have finally caught up with the rest of the world in recognising a different class of computing appliance.
No, it's not a general-purpose computer. You're making the engineering/geek mistake of confusing the underlying raw specs of a device with its actual designed/marketed/sold-for purpose. My refrigerator contains an air compressor, but I don't moan that it doesn't have a socket for me to connect up my inflatable boat to pump it up (yes I know it pumps freon not air, it's an illustration).
The fact that you can use an Xbox or iPhone or PS3 for general-purpose computing doesn't change the fact that that's not what it's designed for. If you want to buy something and hack it, that's fine, but don't complain the the iPhone doesn't let you do this that or the other just because the underlying hardware could support that.
Many, many devices on the market from cars to central heating systems have an x86 based computer inside them, or some other relatively mainstream Arm or PowerPC, but everyone 'gets' that the limitations are designed-in. For some reason, because the iPhone has a screen and a web browser, everyone seems to be upset that Apple doesn't support it like a general-purpose OS.
I'm glad my iPhone has a locked-down App store, I had a Palm TX before that and suffered crashes from badly programmed apps all the time. Number of crashes in 18 months of iPhone usage? 0.
No, it's not. Really. Are you being disingenuous or do you actually not get it? It's like being a geek who usually carries a Swiss Army Knife, going into a shop and buying a really nice bush knife, then complaining that it doesn't have a cork screw. The iPhone/iPad are a minimal OS with a web browser that also support limited, locked-down and fairly small applications, and the iPhone also does voice calls.
*Grrr*- look, there's thousands of games available for the Xbox, does that make it a general-purpose computer too? Since the rise of the home microcomputer, geeks have been used to installing whatever applications they wanted and hacking the system in any way they wanted. The iPhone/iPad have changed that, and follow a games-console paradigm - you can have anything you want as long as Apple approves of it - which as you say still leads to a huge amount of choice, just not the sort of freedom most geeks expect from a desktop PC. It's not general-purpose in the sense that it can't easily be applied to whatever purpose you want: it really has three purposes: make and receive phone calls, access the web, install and run Apple-approved apps.
It's an Internet Appliance. Remember about 10 years ago, they were going to be all the rage? Well it's finally happened. It's a closed environment, designed for a specific set of tasks, and designed to be easily used. The 'limitations' perceived by geeks are deliberate, and seen as an advantage by most non-geeks. Think about the original XBox - fairly generic PC hardware in a custom case, totally limited in what you can do with it but excellent for playing games when connected up to your TV. The iPad is designed for sitting in bed with a coffee and browsing the day's news, not for installing Open Office and hacking the Linux kernel.
Actually, you pay $99 to release native apps for the iPhone. You can sign up and download the dev environment for free. It's not immediately obvious, but I have it sitting here in my downloads folder after a bit of circular link-following on Apple's site.
Read carefully: the iPad/iPhone is NOT A GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTER. Why is this so hard to grasp for the vocal minority of Apple-complainers on Slashdot?
No it's not. I have the full X-Code package for developing on desktop OSX and iPhone, I downloaded it from the developer's area of Apple's website after registering for free. You only pay if you wish to release software via the App Store for the iPhone/iPad. $99 seems very reasonable to me as a fee for use of the libraries and access to the App store. Many development environments (e.g. Flash) require you to pay up-front whether you release or not.
Surprisingly, you are required to run OSX to run Apple's development environment, just like you are required to run Windows to run Microsoft's development environments. Code can be written for OSX using freely available tools and libraries on the OS of your choice, which will run from the command line or graphically via one of the cross-platform UI libraries. If you want to link against Apple's libraries you will need to use their OS, which I think is true of the Windows APIs too.