The Reality Distortion Field is strong with this one. All the other smartphone APIs can handle backgrounding applications, why can't the iPhone?
Because the kernel doesn't have swap space and cpu power and ram are incredibly limited.
Won't let user-created apps go into the background? It's that darn battery again! Forget that all other smartphones can do this and have even figured out that sending a "suspend" notification to applications when they go out of the foreground helps nullify battery usage by, you know, SUSPENDING the application until it is resumed.
If an app is suspended, then it isn't processing anything in the background. If it's not processing anything in the background, then there's no reason that it can't be quit. Just save the app's state to flash and pick up where you left off when it reopens. Flash storage is not "slow" like a hard disk.
The technical reason for doing it this way is to conserve ram. The iPhone's kernel doesn't swap ram into flash, so wasting ram on an app that isn't running is ridiculous. Another way of thinking about it is a well designed app is never quit- it's just suspending itself into flash on a "quit notification". If you're talking about apps that aren't running it's really just semantics at a certain point.
If you're talking about apps that are running, then you run into battery and network issues. The single biggest network issue that people keep forgetting is: You can't receive phone calls while a connection is active. So having networking apps running in the background on an EDGE based iPhone is a very very bad idea.
Apple just wants to lock down the platform as much as possible, that's all there is to it.
Agreed. But this is totally separate from the complaints about background apps.
People keep beating this drum and it's ridiculous. Battery life and phone performance are major concerns. When I say phone performance, I mean making and receiving phone calls.
The developers that want background apps are primarily interested in developing network based applications. It's an awful idea to have network apps running in the background. The limitations of EDGE prevent phone calls and text messages from being received or sent while a network connection is active. In short: A constantly active IM client (just receiving things like your buddies' away messages) would severely limit your ability to receive phone calls. If you had 2 or more apps like this running, you would effectively disable the phone part of your phone.
If you're developing an app that's processing data in the background, then you're killing the battery. The smooth graphics and animation have people convinced the iPhone is a more powerful device than it actually is. It's actually a very limited device in terms of cpu, ram and power. Keep in mind that playing a tiny video stream kills that battery, and it's doing that with dedicated hardware.
Mostly it seems that a few developers are upset because they can't simply port their code to the iPhone and start collecting bags of money- that's because the iPhone requires a different mindset for programming. It has very little ram, but a lot of immediate storage space. This is a huge mental shift. If you store your app state in reasonable format in flash ram, and treat main memory as if it were a processor cache, there's no reason your app can't stop and start on a dime. Storage isn't slow, so there's no need to keep everything in ram. If a user isn't interacting with your application, then why should it be in ram? Save the state to flash and you can get everything you need back instantly when the user starts your app again.
I think it should either be ok for all players to have internal APIs or not ok for all players. I mean, if we say that right now it's ok for Apple to do this because they are not a monopoly, what happens if they do become one?
People are getting very confused because they are equating WebKit with Safari. They are not the same.
WebKit is a system framework that any application can use to render html, xhtml, css, etc. (Think system library like QuickTIme.)
Safari is a web browser application built using a number of system libraries including WebKit. (Think QuickTime Player.)
WebKit is the part that's accessing undocumented APIs. To complain a system library can access internal parts of the system is ridiculous-- most system libraries wouldn't be very useful if they couldn't. Anyone is free to use this system library in their application.
I think the author of the article and David Hyatt's response were written assuming people understood this distinction, probably because neither were written to be posted on Slashdot.
People should buy products (hardware, software, whatever) based on the CURRENT feature set. Not based on promised upgrades, that is a nice extra but not relevant.
In this case you're saying people should buy a player and assume they can only play movies that have already been released. THAT I'm going to have to totally disagree with. The players were not sold to early adopters as "able to play the 50 movies currently on the market." They were sold as being able to play Blu-Ray discs.
Your post seems to miss the point of the lawsuit: These players aren't choking on the special features, they can't play entire discs. Wired seems to think this is because the DRM was not finalized when these players were produced and now it can't be updated. (http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/02/samsung-sued-ov.html)
- Apple recently hired a television crew for... something. According to a Mac rumors site.
- Broadcom has started sampling a new lower power 3G chip. Which is implied to be a panacea, completely ignoring that redesigning the iPhone is more complicated than popping in a new chip -- there are antennas to redesign and software that has to be rewritten just to start -- and the chip isn't even shipping yet.
- "Apple can't wait much longer." The author uses this argument several times, backing it up with AT&T's plans to roll out 3G to more cities by the end of 2008.
Hasn't it occurred to anyone that it's going to take 6 months for the FCC to test a new iPhone and no one has turned up anything to show the FCC has even started this yet?
Sports bars that have satellite TV or cable TV (most do) pay extra for public viewing service, so they've indirectly already chipped in to the NFL AND are counted in the ratings. (As accurately as the ratings count anything anyway.)
Why would it raise concerns about the GPL in particular? If the GPL can be revoked after the fact, then *any* software license (proprietary, FOSS or whatever) could likewise be revoked. Any 3rd party code of any kind in commercial applications would be at similar risk
Which is why most EULAs specifically state that the license is revokable. (Usually for any reason the licensor feels like.) Because it's not assumed a license is revokable unless it says so. Licenses for SDKs generally don't include that, because no one wants to build on top of a rug that can be yanked out from under them.
Back in 2000, if you installed MacsBug on a Mac you couldn't play DVDs. When you opened the DVD Player you got an error message telling you a debugger was installed. In these pre-memory protection days, MacsBug was the only debugger low-level enough to catch a whole mess of problems. Unfortunately, MacsBug was loaded when the system booted, so the only way to play a DVD was to remove MacsBug and restart your machine.
Long time Mac developer ally Bare Bones Software (they have a great text editor) created a patch that "fixed" this limitation. AFAIK, Apple never said anything about their patch and just quietly let it exist. http://www.macobserver.com/news/00/april/000418/dvdplayerhelper.shtml
This whole message mess came about because Macrovision didn't want people disabling their protection on video-output (there were Macs you could literally plug into VCRs then), and I suspect it was also to guard the CSS "encryption."
When Blu-ray movies finally show up in Macs, this kind of thing is probably going to get a lot worse than patches to D-Trace.
I'll still argue that the biggest weaknesses with Macs is the "we have decided what you need, and that's exactly what you get" attitude.... To wit - my preference for a Delete key instead of dragging files to a trash icon is not a weakness on my part, it's a more than reasonable preference. Regardless of all the keyboard options and such, there are many times when I simply prefer to press Delete.
Press the [command] key and hit Delete when a file is selected. It will be moved to the Trash. (And you'll hear the Trash can sound to confirm that something has been trashed.)
If you stick with the assumption there's only going to be one way to do something, you probably won't seriously look for an alternative. This is a large part of what keeps Windows on top. (Not just against Macs, but against Linux and other OSes that have come before.)
I think perhaps it's more about why there are no 3rd party iTunes stores?
Amazon.com. Buy mp3 music and their downloader will automatically load it into iTunes for you. I'm not sure how much more 3rd party and iTunes friendly you can get.
Part of the reason they don't need to limit what customers can do with the machines is they have an automated system that formats and restores a fresh image of the hard drive every night. So no matter how badly a customer screws up the software on a machine, it'll be bright and fresh the next morning. I'm pretty sure they can also do this with the push of a button if an employee spots a machine that has been fiddled with. I think this does wonders for their "it just works" image.
Go into any other big box retailer and admire the desktop punishment you can see all over the demo machines. Frequently the machines won't even boot up.
> I worry about this as a precedent. If we keep going down this route, eventually media purchases
> will be tied to a single device, using digital hardware IDs. I could see a day when you buy a movie,
> and only have "rights" to play it on one specific DVD player.
Come on, that'll never happen. Next thing you'll be telling me that in the future when I try to buy a book it'll be tied to a single device!
The summary makes it sound like GPS is being removed from the phone, but the article says in first paragraph "...the US carrier has been successful in their attempts to lockdown the GPS functionality in their upcoming BlackBerry 8820 so that the only functioning 3rd party software will be TeleNav."
Not the same thing. "Only functioning 3rd party software", means you should be able to use TeleNav and any 1st party software (ie. whatever RIM has.)
Note: TMobile.com doesn't advertise (or even list as a feature) the GPS functionality on the BlackBerry 8800 that it is selling.
Of course there's no doubt this unbiased reporting from "BLACKBERRYCOOL" written by someone who admits to interviewing people while drunk (http://www.blackberrycool.com/2007/05/09/004387/) is totally accurate.
The real genius of this move is that all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players require a network connection. That way the first time you BUY A NEW MOVIE and it zaps your player, you can go out on the Internet and look for another source of movies.
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Because the kernel doesn't have swap space and cpu power and ram are incredibly limited.
If an app is suspended, then it isn't processing anything in the background. If it's not processing anything in the background, then there's no reason that it can't be quit. Just save the app's state to flash and pick up where you left off when it reopens. Flash storage is not "slow" like a hard disk.
The technical reason for doing it this way is to conserve ram. The iPhone's kernel doesn't swap ram into flash, so wasting ram on an app that isn't running is ridiculous. Another way of thinking about it is a well designed app is never quit- it's just suspending itself into flash on a "quit notification". If you're talking about apps that aren't running it's really just semantics at a certain point.
If you're talking about apps that are running, then you run into battery and network issues. The single biggest network issue that people keep forgetting is: You can't receive phone calls while a connection is active. So having networking apps running in the background on an EDGE based iPhone is a very very bad idea.
Agreed. But this is totally separate from the complaints about background apps.
People keep beating this drum and it's ridiculous. Battery life and phone performance are major concerns. When I say phone performance, I mean making and receiving phone calls.
The developers that want background apps are primarily interested in developing network based applications. It's an awful idea to have network apps running in the background. The limitations of EDGE prevent phone calls and text messages from being received or sent while a network connection is active. In short: A constantly active IM client (just receiving things like your buddies' away messages) would severely limit your ability to receive phone calls. If you had 2 or more apps like this running, you would effectively disable the phone part of your phone.
If you're developing an app that's processing data in the background, then you're killing the battery. The smooth graphics and animation have people convinced the iPhone is a more powerful device than it actually is. It's actually a very limited device in terms of cpu, ram and power. Keep in mind that playing a tiny video stream kills that battery, and it's doing that with dedicated hardware.
Mostly it seems that a few developers are upset because they can't simply port their code to the iPhone and start collecting bags of money- that's because the iPhone requires a different mindset for programming. It has very little ram, but a lot of immediate storage space. This is a huge mental shift. If you store your app state in reasonable format in flash ram, and treat main memory as if it were a processor cache, there's no reason your app can't stop and start on a dime. Storage isn't slow, so there's no need to keep everything in ram. If a user isn't interacting with your application, then why should it be in ram? Save the state to flash and you can get everything you need back instantly when the user starts your app again.
People are getting very confused because they are equating WebKit with Safari. They are not the same.
WebKit is a system framework that any application can use to render html, xhtml, css, etc. (Think system library like QuickTIme.)
Safari is a web browser application built using a number of system libraries including WebKit. (Think QuickTime Player.)
WebKit is the part that's accessing undocumented APIs. To complain a system library can access internal parts of the system is ridiculous-- most system libraries wouldn't be very useful if they couldn't. Anyone is free to use this system library in their application.
I think the author of the article and David Hyatt's response were written assuming people understood this distinction, probably because neither were written to be posted on Slashdot.
I'll be able to get real work done for an extra 1-3 weeks before I starting hacking my phone.
In this case you're saying people should buy a player and assume they can only play movies that have already been released. THAT I'm going to have to totally disagree with. The players were not sold to early adopters as "able to play the 50 movies currently on the market." They were sold as being able to play Blu-Ray discs.
Your post seems to miss the point of the lawsuit: These players aren't choking on the special features, they can't play entire discs. Wired seems to think this is because the DRM was not finalized when these players were produced and now it can't be updated. (http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/02/samsung-sued-ov.html)
This only point of this article seems to be don't buy an iPhone. Even the headline is designed to taunt people that already bought one.
What evidence does the article provide?
- AT&T said a new iPhone was coming in 2008. Of course this leaves 10 more months assuming that AT&T even knows what Apple is working on which previous reports have said they don't. http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone
- Apple recently hired a television crew for... something. According to a Mac rumors site.
- Broadcom has started sampling a new lower power 3G chip. Which is implied to be a panacea, completely ignoring that redesigning the iPhone is more complicated than popping in a new chip -- there are antennas to redesign and software that has to be rewritten just to start -- and the chip isn't even shipping yet.
- "Apple can't wait much longer." The author uses this argument several times, backing it up with AT&T's plans to roll out 3G to more cities by the end of 2008.
Hasn't it occurred to anyone that it's going to take 6 months for the FCC to test a new iPhone and no one has turned up anything to show the FCC has even started this yet?
1. Cut underseas telecommunications cables.
2. ???
3. Profit!
We're all worried because someone else seems to have figured out step 2.
Or does someone benefit because they now have the ability to poke through all the traffic that is now being rerouted through their borders?
Sports bars that have satellite TV or cable TV (most do) pay extra for public viewing service, so they've indirectly already chipped in to the NFL AND are counted in the ratings. (As accurately as the ratings count anything anyway.)
DirectTV's commercial use rates start out at just around double the home rates (for 1-50 people in your bar) and scale up. http://www.directv.com/images/Directv%20For%20Business/Bars_And_Restaurants/Bars_and_Restaurants_Public_Viewing_Packages.pdf Getting local channels (like your local FOX affiliate) costs extra.
Churches, as a non-profit, can subscribe to cheaper home services.
You also can't underestimate how much more effective advertising is on drunk people.
Which is why most EULAs specifically state that the license is revokable. (Usually for any reason the licensor feels like.) Because it's not assumed a license is revokable unless it says so. Licenses for SDKs generally don't include that, because no one wants to build on top of a rug that can be yanked out from under them.
Back in 2000, if you installed MacsBug on a Mac you couldn't play DVDs. When you opened the DVD Player you got an error message telling you a debugger was installed. In these pre-memory protection days, MacsBug was the only debugger low-level enough to catch a whole mess of problems. Unfortunately, MacsBug was loaded when the system booted, so the only way to play a DVD was to remove MacsBug and restart your machine.
Long time Mac developer ally Bare Bones Software (they have a great text editor) created a patch that "fixed" this limitation. AFAIK, Apple never said anything about their patch and just quietly let it exist. http://www.macobserver.com/news/00/april/000418/dvdplayerhelper.shtml
This whole message mess came about because Macrovision didn't want people disabling their protection on video-output (there were Macs you could literally plug into VCRs then), and I suspect it was also to guard the CSS "encryption."
When Blu-ray movies finally show up in Macs, this kind of thing is probably going to get a lot worse than patches to D-Trace.
Press the [command] key and hit Delete when a file is selected. It will be moved to the Trash. (And you'll hear the Trash can sound to confirm that something has been trashed.)
If you stick with the assumption there's only going to be one way to do something, you probably won't seriously look for an alternative. This is a large part of what keeps Windows on top. (Not just against Macs, but against Linux and other OSes that have come before.)
Amazon.com. Buy mp3 music and their downloader will automatically load it into iTunes for you. I'm not sure how much more 3rd party and iTunes friendly you can get.
Part of the reason they don't need to limit what customers can do with the machines is they have an automated system that formats and restores a fresh image of the hard drive every night. So no matter how badly a customer screws up the software on a machine, it'll be bright and fresh the next morning. I'm pretty sure they can also do this with the push of a button if an employee spots a machine that has been fiddled with. I think this does wonders for their "it just works" image.
Go into any other big box retailer and admire the desktop punishment you can see all over the demo machines. Frequently the machines won't even boot up.
Or maybe this proves that people aren't capable of focusing on the requirements of a science experiment while falling?
> I worry about this as a precedent. If we keep going down this route, eventually media purchases
> will be tied to a single device, using digital hardware IDs. I could see a day when you buy a movie,
> and only have "rights" to play it on one specific DVD player.
Come on, that'll never happen. Next thing you'll be telling me that in the future when I try to buy a book it'll be tied to a single device!
The summary makes it sound like GPS is being removed from the phone, but the article says in first paragraph "...the US carrier has been successful in their attempts to lockdown the GPS functionality in their upcoming BlackBerry 8820 so that the only functioning 3rd party software will be TeleNav."
Not the same thing. "Only functioning 3rd party software", means you should be able to use TeleNav and any 1st party software (ie. whatever RIM has.)
Note: TMobile.com doesn't advertise (or even list as a feature) the GPS functionality on the BlackBerry 8800 that it is selling.
Of course there's no doubt this unbiased reporting from "BLACKBERRYCOOL" written by someone who admits to interviewing people while drunk (http://www.blackberrycool.com/2007/05/09/004387/) is totally accurate.
The real genius of this move is that all Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players require a network connection. That way the first time you BUY A NEW MOVIE and it zaps your player, you can go out on the Internet and look for another source of movies.
People on slashdot are generally smart... I think it's going to be a while before the average movie-goer realizes tricks like these are being used.
I work in the industry and according to a recent survery the average American still thinks the actors write the lines.
The city of Boston can't admit they made a mistake because if they said they screwed up and let the whole thing go then the MARKETERS WILL HAVE WON.