Apologies for the double post, somehow must have clicked anonymous the first time I posted this.
Let me see if I can draw out your argument to its logical conclusion. Correct me if I misstate your views, or if an additional fact I provide means you will have to add additional nuance or caveats to your original point.
Your argument: If you sell something and advertise it not as a computer, but as a device, you have no obligation, moral or legal, to make it more open to 3rd party development.
Hypothetical: Year is 2018. The iPhone 15G controls 95% of the consumer computing market. General purpose computers are relegated to niche status, only owned by corporations that need major processing power and enthusiasts. The iPhone has followed the example set by gaming consoles, and is completely locked down, with no security holes realistically accessible to the average consumer. Apple has continued its policies regarding controlling what software can, and cannot, run on its device. The iPhone 15G satisfies all mainstream computing requirements, but Apple denies any software it considers offensive, including software that states any political message that does not align with Apple's, or competes with Apple in any way.
Logical Conclusion: You are totally okay with this situation, and any consumer that complains suffers from an entitlement complex, as Apple never advertised the iPhone as a general computing platform.
Are you seriously arguing that Apple copied Microsoft's XNA model for the iPhone? Do you seriously believe that the XNA model in any way, shape, or form, influenced Apple's design decisions on the iPhone?
I know this is Slashdot, and everyone loves to try and shift all negative blame onto Microsoft, but this is even moderated informative?
The average person, even the above-average intelligent person such as those you find on this fine website, drastically undervalues hazy and amorphous future benefits such as freedom.
We have a Constitution, because if given half a chance, at every opportunity, ordinary men, and the greedy leaders who prod them on, would sell freedom up a creek for a little temporary gain.
If the average man would sell his freedom of speech away for pennies, what do you think he would sell something even more vague and speculative for, such as the freedom of others to innovate and create new products that may interest him?
The fact is, freedom does not make a very good bullet point on marketing materials, and arguing that it is not important because the OpenMoko failed is ridiculous.
The only reason we have any freedom at all is because freedom is something that can be idealistically assigned an out-sized value, such that some people do all the caring for the rest of mankind.
The PC is going to become a niche product. It's only a question of when and not if.
We've already seen this once when desktops were turned into a niche product by laptops. Laptops already have "good enough" power for anything any mainstream user needs.
When a mobile phone has the same power as your current general purpose computer, what do you think the sales of general purpose computers is going to look like?
Bearing in mind that cutting edge mobile phones can already be hooked up to external keyboards and monitors.
You say you don't care about Apple's draconian actions in your original post.
You then respond to me and imply that you would care if they had an illegal monopoly.
So would it be accurate to characterize your belief as you only care about things, and think they're bad, if they're illegal? For example, if it were legal to have a monopoly, you would not care if a company had a monopoly and exercised it in an anti-competitive fashion?
Personally, I find things good or bad, generally irrespective of what the law says about them, and in turn believe good governance is trying to align the laws with the populace's beliefs on what is good and bad.
In this case, I see actions by Apple, that are plainly anti-competitive, and add nothing to society, and add nothing to anyone except themselves. It may be legal (I am taking no position on that), but despite that, I still believe that Apple's actions are bad, and should be discouraged.
The best way to keep Apple from having a monopoly is not "to not buy an iPhone". It is to not buy an iPhone, to raise attention to Apple, to call them out on their bad behavior, and to not give bad guys a free pass simply because they are complying with the letter of the law.
Hypothetical: Fast forward 10 years, iPhone has replaced general computing market. Apple calls iPhone an embedded device, and bans software that makes political points it does not agree with, or that competes with Apple.
Apple's decision to call the iPhone an embedded device still final word on the subject? Yes/No Calling device an embedded device is arbitrary? Yes/No Grim digital dark age for humanity? Yes/No Makes anything that Microsoft has done in the past look like peanuts? Yes/No
Unless you're referring to the word monopoly by its legal definition, which would not be relevant to discussions of whether what Apple does ought to be considered a problem, how you define whether something is a monopoly is crucially important.
Everyone loves to trot out that Nokia owns something like 50% of the global market for smartphones. Then they gleefully point out, Apple isn't a monopoly!
However, you take the players that are bigger than Apple on the market, and you examine their products. Nokia's so-called smartphones are not used as smartphones by the vast majority of their users. What percentage of Nokia users have ever installed a program on their phone? Likewise Blackberry's so-called smartphones are used basically as email/messenger terminals. The only significant installed programs on Blackberry's are those that are pre-installed by the corporation's IT department.
The only major player besides Apple in the real general purpose mobile computing device market is Google Android. However, despite their recent uptick in sales, at the moment, if we were to look at installed base of Android and iPhone OS mobile devices, iPhone OS is in a monopoly position.
It may not be a legally cognizable category to act upon (yet), but the real market we need to be looking at is mobile general computing products. Mobile computing very likely will replace what we now call desktop computing in the future, and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves in a situation where what we can run on our computers is in the hands of a single company that has exercised power ruthlessly in the past.
Long story short, Apple is a monopoly in an emerging market that looks like it will be incredibly important in the future. When it acts like a dick with the power that it has now, I'm going to try to convince others to consider Apple's business practices as a bad thing.
Calling the iPhone and especially the iPad an embedded device is an arbitrary distinction.
Does anyone doubt mobile devices will continue to get more capable over time?
Unlike other devices which are called embedded devices, no matter how much more powerful a game console gets, it's unlikely to be positioned in a manner that will displace the general computing market.
In contrast, if the iPhone or iPad was as powerful as your desktop computer is now, why would it NOT replace the general computing market? Laptops have already eviscerated the market for desktop computers. The only obstacles would be user interface, and you can already hook external input and output to these things.
Just as desktops will always have some niche place in the market, I'm sure what are currently general purpose computers will always have some place in the market. However, if 95% of the market has been dominated by the iPhone 15G, that is going to be a grim digital dark age for humanity, that will make anything Microsoft did in the past look like peanuts.
If we were all guaranteed with a crystal ball that Apple would forever remain a niche player and that the iPhone/iPad mobile ecosystem would not become the dominant paradigm of mobile computing, then I would agree with you. However, given Apple's current trajectory, this conclusion is by no means clear to me. So in the meantime, I am trying to prevent that from happening, but raising attention to the bad things that would happen if Apple's current growth continues unimpeded.
This is about rights and freedoms. Freedom of choice is meaningless if when the time comes to make a choice, there is only one thing to choose from.
I hate it when people trot out that tired convicted monopolist argument.
So if tomorrow the Supreme Court found Apple to be a monopolist with regards to smartphones (setting aside all plausibility arguments as to such, this is a hypothetical), I presume that would make you say what Apple is doing is wrong?
I somehow doubt that would be the case for most people that raise the convicted monopolist argument.
Maemo/MeeGo seems awesome, but I think it's just a sad case of too little, too late.
There's only one phone that runs Maemo, the Nokia N900, and none that run its successor MeeGo. Nokia's recently announced new flagship phones are all running Symbian.
I really like the concept of a truly open OS on a smartphone, but I haven't even ever seen one in person.
At this point I'd rather take and lend my support to something that is 80% as good (Android arguably) that actually has a shot at success in the marketplace rather than hold out for something perfect that is way too late to the party.
I dunno where the definition of everywhere is, but Sprint is second only to Verizon in New York city coverage. Maintained Internet radio streaming without any trouble all the way on a drive between NYC and Boston.
Furthermore, all modern Sprint plans come with free roaming, which means you effectively get Sprint + Verizon's coverage.
Really? I've been playing FPS since Wolfenstein, and I thought that the switch to move grenades onto their own key was a stroke of brilliance.
Grenades in FPS aren't used like other weapons, and having to switch to them like they were another weapon and then use some complex grenade interface meant that I generally never used them at all in old games.
Having them on their own key meant I could use them to supplement shooting with a gun, which made them fun/easier to use and meant I actually used them.
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
In a sense, it is in the Constitution. It is the natural result of a winner-take-all voting system where voters' preferences are distributed like a bell curve.
Having three (or more) parties is inherently unstable. It will always be in the interest of any party to capture more of the moderate vote (the middle of the bell curve) since that's where most of the voters are. Therefore, the party will move towards the middle. This can quite easily be seen in the change the parties make from primary season to election season.
One party will position itself as slightly to one side of the middle, and the other will position itself slightly to the other side of the middle, each laying claim to that entire side of the bell curve.
If there is a third party, it will find itself either pinched between the two, or on the fringe. If the third party is successful, then one of the two original parties will be either pinched between or on the fringe. So you can have a third party, but since this configuration is unstable, one of the parties will be eliminated. This is exactly what we have seen in American history.
So it might not be directly required by the Constitution, but as long as we have the winner-takes-all voting system, it is the inevitable result.
I once thought as you did about Starcraft. I thought it was basically real time tactics and click speed contests. Then I watched some pro replays on Youtube, and realized how wrong I was.
The Starcraft community refers to strategy as macro, and tactics as micro, and it's widely understood that both are essential ingredients to play well. You can see games where someone micro's masterfully, but they don't have a big enough picture view of the game and get absolutely slaughtered.
What are they imitating blindly in the hopes of achieving a result?
The only thing I could possibly see an analogy to is that you're saying they're imitating the West in the hopes of achieving something (I dunno, success as a nation?) by lionizing pro sports players. Seems like a stretch to me though, since no one would say anything like that about the popularity of soccer in Korea.
You can build a large stadium for Starcraft, but unlike pro sports, seeing it live on a screen strikes me as almost the same experience to seeing it at home on one of the Starcraft channels, which would significantly decrease demand to go see live matches.
The fact that the market for Starcraft viewing there can support a (more than one I heard?) Starcraft channel seems quite significant.
It's not dispositive, but I'd point out that South Korea's population is about 50 million, versus just over 300 million for the United States. I wonder if the US was that size, and there were only two significant cities were New York and Boston, if we would still need as large of stadiums for ours sports.
If the government banned everyone from making colas because it would cause marketplace confusion by duplicating functionality with Coke, that would be draconian. If the government banned everyone from making things called Coca Cola (other than Coke) because it would cause marketplace confusion by confusing customers as to which one is which product, that is probably good policy and is why we have trademarks.
Similarly, when Apple prevents people from making applications that duplicate functionality, people call it draconian. When Apple prevents people from making applications that include the word Apple, nobody complains.
Even though the words "marketplace confusion" remain the same, they refer to different types of confusion.
While Diablo 2 has a lot of its spiritual roots in the rogue-likes, it's quite different in some ways as well.
For example, a lot of the time-based spells or abilities simply can't be modeled by a rogue-like which necessarily is turn based. For example, I've never played a rogue-like where dodging enemy attacks is a significant part, whereas I recall that was rather important in Diablo. Even if dodging were a part of a rogue-like, it'd be pretty awkward in a turn-based game. Diablo's real-time nature introduces an action element that is wholly different from rogue-likes, though whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste.
Also, a lot of rogue-likes (like the Anonymous Coward alluded to) equate depth with memorization grinding of experimentation (or more realistically reading the source). Results are often unforeseeable prior to occurring, which I always found a bit frustrating (of course kicking sinks is a great way to find rings!).
It is totally different for Apple to not allow developers to duplicate functionality of existing applications (ostensibly to avoid marketplace confusion) than if Google (hypothetically) were to use its trademark on the word Android to prevent users of Android from naming their devices confusingly similar names.
Um, actually I think you're thinking of the ads for the Droid, which is actually just a particular Android device made by Motorola and marketed by Verizon. It was the one with the really macho ads everywhere.
I don't know what Google was thinking allowing one of their OS users to brand their device the Droid, total marketplace confusion.
Slashdot Mirror
Apologies for the double post, somehow must have clicked anonymous the first time I posted this.
Let me see if I can draw out your argument to its logical conclusion. Correct me if I misstate your views, or if an additional fact I provide means you will have to add additional nuance or caveats to your original point.
Your argument:
If you sell something and advertise it not as a computer, but as a device, you have no obligation, moral or legal, to make it more open to 3rd party development.
Hypothetical:
Year is 2018. The iPhone 15G controls 95% of the consumer computing market. General purpose computers are relegated to niche status, only owned by corporations that need major processing power and enthusiasts. The iPhone has followed the example set by gaming consoles, and is completely locked down, with no security holes realistically accessible to the average consumer. Apple has continued its policies regarding controlling what software can, and cannot, run on its device. The iPhone 15G satisfies all mainstream computing requirements, but Apple denies any software it considers offensive, including software that states any political message that does not align with Apple's, or competes with Apple in any way.
Logical Conclusion:
You are totally okay with this situation, and any consumer that complains suffers from an entitlement complex, as Apple never advertised the iPhone as a general computing platform.
Are you seriously arguing that Apple copied Microsoft's XNA model for the iPhone? Do you seriously believe that the XNA model in any way, shape, or form, influenced Apple's design decisions on the iPhone?
I know this is Slashdot, and everyone loves to try and shift all negative blame onto Microsoft, but this is even moderated informative?
The average person, even the above-average intelligent person such as those you find on this fine website, drastically undervalues hazy and amorphous future benefits such as freedom.
We have a Constitution, because if given half a chance, at every opportunity, ordinary men, and the greedy leaders who prod them on, would sell freedom up a creek for a little temporary gain.
If the average man would sell his freedom of speech away for pennies, what do you think he would sell something even more vague and speculative for, such as the freedom of others to innovate and create new products that may interest him?
The fact is, freedom does not make a very good bullet point on marketing materials, and arguing that it is not important because the OpenMoko failed is ridiculous.
The only reason we have any freedom at all is because freedom is something that can be idealistically assigned an out-sized value, such that some people do all the caring for the rest of mankind.
The PC is going to become a niche product. It's only a question of when and not if.
We've already seen this once when desktops were turned into a niche product by laptops. Laptops already have "good enough" power for anything any mainstream user needs.
When a mobile phone has the same power as your current general purpose computer, what do you think the sales of general purpose computers is going to look like?
Bearing in mind that cutting edge mobile phones can already be hooked up to external keyboards and monitors.
You say you don't care about Apple's draconian actions in your original post.
You then respond to me and imply that you would care if they had an illegal monopoly.
So would it be accurate to characterize your belief as you only care about things, and think they're bad, if they're illegal? For example, if it were legal to have a monopoly, you would not care if a company had a monopoly and exercised it in an anti-competitive fashion?
Personally, I find things good or bad, generally irrespective of what the law says about them, and in turn believe good governance is trying to align the laws with the populace's beliefs on what is good and bad.
In this case, I see actions by Apple, that are plainly anti-competitive, and add nothing to society, and add nothing to anyone except themselves. It may be legal (I am taking no position on that), but despite that, I still believe that Apple's actions are bad, and should be discouraged.
The best way to keep Apple from having a monopoly is not "to not buy an iPhone". It is to not buy an iPhone, to raise attention to Apple, to call them out on their bad behavior, and to not give bad guys a free pass simply because they are complying with the letter of the law.
Hypothetical:
Fast forward 10 years, iPhone has replaced general computing market. Apple calls iPhone an embedded device, and bans software that makes political points it does not agree with, or that competes with Apple.
Apple's decision to call the iPhone an embedded device still final word on the subject? Yes/No
Calling device an embedded device is arbitrary? Yes/No
Grim digital dark age for humanity? Yes/No
Makes anything that Microsoft has done in the past look like peanuts? Yes/No
Unless you're referring to the word monopoly by its legal definition, which would not be relevant to discussions of whether what Apple does ought to be considered a problem, how you define whether something is a monopoly is crucially important.
Everyone loves to trot out that Nokia owns something like 50% of the global market for smartphones. Then they gleefully point out, Apple isn't a monopoly!
However, you take the players that are bigger than Apple on the market, and you examine their products. Nokia's so-called smartphones are not used as smartphones by the vast majority of their users. What percentage of Nokia users have ever installed a program on their phone? Likewise Blackberry's so-called smartphones are used basically as email/messenger terminals. The only significant installed programs on Blackberry's are those that are pre-installed by the corporation's IT department.
The only major player besides Apple in the real general purpose mobile computing device market is Google Android. However, despite their recent uptick in sales, at the moment, if we were to look at installed base of Android and iPhone OS mobile devices, iPhone OS is in a monopoly position.
It may not be a legally cognizable category to act upon (yet), but the real market we need to be looking at is mobile general computing products. Mobile computing very likely will replace what we now call desktop computing in the future, and if current trends continue, we may find ourselves in a situation where what we can run on our computers is in the hands of a single company that has exercised power ruthlessly in the past.
Long story short, Apple is a monopoly in an emerging market that looks like it will be incredibly important in the future. When it acts like a dick with the power that it has now, I'm going to try to convince others to consider Apple's business practices as a bad thing.
Calling the iPhone and especially the iPad an embedded device is an arbitrary distinction.
Does anyone doubt mobile devices will continue to get more capable over time?
Unlike other devices which are called embedded devices, no matter how much more powerful a game console gets, it's unlikely to be positioned in a manner that will displace the general computing market.
In contrast, if the iPhone or iPad was as powerful as your desktop computer is now, why would it NOT replace the general computing market? Laptops have already eviscerated the market for desktop computers. The only obstacles would be user interface, and you can already hook external input and output to these things.
Just as desktops will always have some niche place in the market, I'm sure what are currently general purpose computers will always have some place in the market. However, if 95% of the market has been dominated by the iPhone 15G, that is going to be a grim digital dark age for humanity, that will make anything Microsoft did in the past look like peanuts.
If we were all guaranteed with a crystal ball that Apple would forever remain a niche player and that the iPhone/iPad mobile ecosystem would not become the dominant paradigm of mobile computing, then I would agree with you. However, given Apple's current trajectory, this conclusion is by no means clear to me. So in the meantime, I am trying to prevent that from happening, but raising attention to the bad things that would happen if Apple's current growth continues unimpeded.
This is about rights and freedoms. Freedom of choice is meaningless if when the time comes to make a choice, there is only one thing to choose from.
I hate it when people trot out that tired convicted monopolist argument.
So if tomorrow the Supreme Court found Apple to be a monopolist with regards to smartphones (setting aside all plausibility arguments as to such, this is a hypothetical), I presume that would make you say what Apple is doing is wrong?
I somehow doubt that would be the case for most people that raise the convicted monopolist argument.
Legality is not the same as morality.
Maemo/MeeGo seems awesome, but I think it's just a sad case of too little, too late.
There's only one phone that runs Maemo, the Nokia N900, and none that run its successor MeeGo. Nokia's recently announced new flagship phones are all running Symbian.
I really like the concept of a truly open OS on a smartphone, but I haven't even ever seen one in person.
At this point I'd rather take and lend my support to something that is 80% as good (Android arguably) that actually has a shot at success in the marketplace rather than hold out for something perfect that is way too late to the party.
I dunno where the definition of everywhere is, but Sprint is second only to Verizon in New York city coverage. Maintained Internet radio streaming without any trouble all the way on a drive between NYC and Boston.
Furthermore, all modern Sprint plans come with free roaming, which means you effectively get Sprint + Verizon's coverage.
I haven't had any problems with Sprint coverage.
Really? I've been playing FPS since Wolfenstein, and I thought that the switch to move grenades onto their own key was a stroke of brilliance.
Grenades in FPS aren't used like other weapons, and having to switch to them like they were another weapon and then use some complex grenade interface meant that I generally never used them at all in old games.
Having them on their own key meant I could use them to supplement shooting with a gun, which made them fun/easier to use and meant I actually used them.
No, you won't find any reference to a "two party system" in the constitution or anywhere in U.S. law. We have a defacto two party system only because too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe there is no third (or 4th-nth) option.
In a sense, it is in the Constitution. It is the natural result of a winner-take-all voting system where voters' preferences are distributed like a bell curve.
Having three (or more) parties is inherently unstable. It will always be in the interest of any party to capture more of the moderate vote (the middle of the bell curve) since that's where most of the voters are. Therefore, the party will move towards the middle. This can quite easily be seen in the change the parties make from primary season to election season.
One party will position itself as slightly to one side of the middle, and the other will position itself slightly to the other side of the middle, each laying claim to that entire side of the bell curve.
If there is a third party, it will find itself either pinched between the two, or on the fringe. If the third party is successful, then one of the two original parties will be either pinched between or on the fringe. So you can have a third party, but since this configuration is unstable, one of the parties will be eliminated. This is exactly what we have seen in American history.
So it might not be directly required by the Constitution, but as long as we have the winner-takes-all voting system, it is the inevitable result.
I once thought as you did about Starcraft. I thought it was basically real time tactics and click speed contests. Then I watched some pro replays on Youtube, and realized how wrong I was.
The Starcraft community refers to strategy as macro, and tactics as micro, and it's widely understood that both are essential ingredients to play well. You can see games where someone micro's masterfully, but they don't have a big enough picture view of the game and get absolutely slaughtered.
Cargo cults? I don't see it, at all.
What are they imitating blindly in the hopes of achieving a result?
The only thing I could possibly see an analogy to is that you're saying they're imitating the West in the hopes of achieving something (I dunno, success as a nation?) by lionizing pro sports players. Seems like a stretch to me though, since no one would say anything like that about the popularity of soccer in Korea.
Or some of them committed the heinous "crimes" of public urination.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2007-03-21/news/VOFFENDER21_1_matamoros-deltona-incident
You can build a large stadium for Starcraft, but unlike pro sports, seeing it live on a screen strikes me as almost the same experience to seeing it at home on one of the Starcraft channels, which would significantly decrease demand to go see live matches.
The fact that the market for Starcraft viewing there can support a (more than one I heard?) Starcraft channel seems quite significant.
It's not dispositive, but I'd point out that South Korea's population is about 50 million, versus just over 300 million for the United States. I wonder if the US was that size, and there were only two significant cities were New York and Boston, if we would still need as large of stadiums for ours sports.
Posting to remove moderation mistake
I know you're joking, but seriously, how would something like this even work?
As far as I know, there's no Great Firewall of China style ISP-level filter here in America. So how would they even enforce a blackout of a website?
Man, are you for real or are you trolling me?
Let's do an analogy.
If the government banned everyone from making colas because it would cause marketplace confusion by duplicating functionality with Coke, that would be draconian. If the government banned everyone from making things called Coca Cola (other than Coke) because it would cause marketplace confusion by confusing customers as to which one is which product, that is probably good policy and is why we have trademarks.
Similarly, when Apple prevents people from making applications that duplicate functionality, people call it draconian. When Apple prevents people from making applications that include the word Apple, nobody complains.
Even though the words "marketplace confusion" remain the same, they refer to different types of confusion.
While Diablo 2 has a lot of its spiritual roots in the rogue-likes, it's quite different in some ways as well.
For example, a lot of the time-based spells or abilities simply can't be modeled by a rogue-like which necessarily is turn based. For example, I've never played a rogue-like where dodging enemy attacks is a significant part, whereas I recall that was rather important in Diablo. Even if dodging were a part of a rogue-like, it'd be pretty awkward in a turn-based game. Diablo's real-time nature introduces an action element that is wholly different from rogue-likes, though whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste.
Also, a lot of rogue-likes (like the Anonymous Coward alluded to) equate depth with memorization grinding of experimentation (or more realistically reading the source). Results are often unforeseeable prior to occurring, which I always found a bit frustrating (of course kicking sinks is a great way to find rings!).
It is totally different for Apple to not allow developers to duplicate functionality of existing applications (ostensibly to avoid marketplace confusion) than if Google (hypothetically) were to use its trademark on the word Android to prevent users of Android from naming their devices confusingly similar names.
There are more ways to pay for something than with cash.
Um, actually I think you're thinking of the ads for the Droid, which is actually just a particular Android device made by Motorola and marketed by Verizon. It was the one with the really macho ads everywhere.
I don't know what Google was thinking allowing one of their OS users to brand their device the Droid, total marketplace confusion.
The Palm Pre is Verizon's smartphone for women:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/04/verizon-advertising-says-droid-is-for-men-pre-is-for-women-vid/