That said, have they ever refused to parody or ridicule someone or something? Is there anything that is "sacred" to them?
Watch the "all about Mormons" episode, and pay very careful attention to the last five minutes.
They go out of their way to essentially say: "This thing we're making fun of? Yeah, well, you shouldn't lose respect of it because we made fun of it. In fact a lot of its members are really perfectly fine people who you should respect, and we're jackasses for making fun of them. We'll do it anyway, but we wanted to make sure that everyone knows we're aware that we're being jackasses for making fun of them."
That is their version of "sacred". And I respect the hell out of them for it.
It almost plays on my iPad. The UI loads. There's some problem loading data.
On my desktop I started picking it apart. The front page seems to be some enormously complex JavaScript, and that JavaScript does not contain "object" in it at all anywhere.
Note that with digital delivery systems, you very often can't pay with a credit card. On the XBox, you may buy points with a credit card, but then you have a points balance, and the points are what you actually use for your purchases.
Look at the XBox 360's indie game market. That's the hobbyist/indy storefront for games people write with the XNA tools.
Every single game there gets a free demo, in that you can download every one of them for free. Even if the developer didn't code in any "demo" logic, if you don't pay, you get to run the game in a mode where it can't save any state and it auto-terminates after a short while.
A demo like that is cheap to implement. It's also something that, while the developers may not want to provide it, the people you buy your games from directly need for it to be there. Especially with digital delivery.
With digital delivery, there's no return policy, no trade-ins, no used game sales. This means if you shell out for an awful game, you're stuck with it. If I'm a digital delivery storefront, I'm going to want to entice people to buy games through me. The first time they buy an awful game and can't do anything about it, that's going to dramatically lower the odds that they'll buy any games in the future. The developer of that one game may not care -- they may be delighted, they got their cash -- but the storefront owner is going to care a lot, because they have an ongoing relationship with the customer.
And so you'll see things like the mandatory free demo we get with XBLA and "indie games" (perhaps coupled with the low-cost demo implementation you get for the "indie games").
(Honestly, I expect this mandatory demo policy to even make it to the iPhone app store at some point.)
I was actually very surprised that Apple is even making a keyboard dock, as it makes it look more like a laptop.
You may have just explained why the keyboard dock forces the iPad into portrait mode instead of landscape, and why the "Pages" word processor only exposes all of its features if you're using it in portrait mode. When the thing is actually attached to its dock, standing there with a screen that's taller than it is wide, and an extreme mismatch between the width of the display and the width of the keyboard, you cannot mistake it for a laptop.
Three devices I have with Flash runtimes on them are my MacBook Pro, my Wii, and my Chumby. And there is very little content that will work completely properly on any two of those devices, let alone all three.
The second main question, aside from "how are they going to process the flash?" is "How is it 'clientless'?". Even when dealing with the most trivial case(.swf player object being used as an embedded player for an h.264 video whose URL is clearly evident in the page source), their software is going to have to get a word in, to rewrite the page, removing the EMBED and replacing it with an HTML5 VIDEO widget with the appropriate video URL.
Well. The easiest way to do that would be to sell their service not to the end-users, but to the content-providers. "Got flash video content? Want iPhone users to see it? Don't have time to rebuild it as HTML5? Just use this JavaScript library instead of the embedding mechanism you normally use, and..."
It wouldn't let an end-user browse to an arbitrary flash site and see everything. It would let a flash site be browsed to by an arbitrary end-user. That's probably the better business angle anyway, in terms of which party is more willing to spend actual money for this capability. And this also lets them avoid looking bad, by simply not deploying their product for flash that their product doesn't work well with. I bet this is how they end up doing it.
Actually, Opera has now demonstrated that Flash could be provided in an iPhone browser, and exactly how.
They just have to do exactly the same thing Opera mini does. Or that iSSH/X11 does. Provide a dumb "terminal server" to which you simply stream the display of an application that's running elsewhere.
I can get Flash on my iPad today, by using iSSH/X11, connecting to a server running an X11-based browser with a Flash plugin, and starting it up. This is close to what Opera mini does, if you think about it.
Adobe could make this more seamless by providing their own "flash proxy server" that content providers could install to run the flash server-side. I'd bet real money that Apple would approve an app based on interacting with that, just like they approved iSSH/X11, Opera mini, Citrix, and WebEx. It's the same thing!
But Adobe won't do that. Adobe is going to pretend there are no alternatives to installing the interpreted Flash runtime on the end-device, and is going to get into a staring contest with Apple. This hurts Flash developers. Adobe is pretending that all of the blame for that damage falls upon Apple's shoulders. But personally, I blame Adobe even more than Apple for letting things get to this point.
There's more than one kind of fragmentation. One is certainly the sort you're talking about (and that's the one that did the most damage to J2ME). But another is fragmentation of the market. If most Android device users get used to only buying from whatever app store is the default on their own device, how many business relationships is a developer going to have to maintain in order to sell their wares? How many distinct certification processes are they going to have to go through?
With the degree to which Android is open, I do not know what leverage Google has for preventing operators and handset manufacturers from locking applications out of their devices.
It's not a reverse. He's not predicting that gaming will go back to PCs. He's saying that gaming won't be tied to any specific platform at all.
In other words, if we ended up with a world where every game ran on every console, every computer (PC/Mac/Linux), and every mobile device (PSP, DS, iPhone, Android, WP7), we'd be right where he predicted.
We get a lesser version of that today with cross-platform titles. I haven't seen PC gamers express much happiness at how that's turning out for them.
Think for yourself. Do you want a 'computer' that only allows you to do what they want you to do? Do you want people who offer this to get your money and drive the market further in that direction? So give me a realistic choice, then.
Do I want a "computer" that limits what I do excessively? No, I do not, but I will accept that in order to get a certain level of reliability, performance (including battery performance), consistency across applications with regard to behavior/interface, and so on. Give me a way to get what I want without making that tradeoff and there's a good chance I'll take it. But until some realistic options are available to me, I will remain an iPhone user and I'll at least seriously consider an iPad.
Basically, yes, I agree that the limits you are arguing against are a negative factor, but they're simply not the most important factor to me, and the wins in other areas are the reason I make the purchase decisions I do. Android has promise, it really does! Let's see the Android response to the iPad.
So, if you use Google for search, you can buy a "Google search appliance" and install it in your machine room and use that to provide your service.
I really, really want the same thing for Google Apps. The question of whether storing a document in "Google Docs" violates FERPA or something simply doesn't come up if the box is sealed in a room on a private network that you have tight control over. Running our own GMail and Google Calendar server appliances in our machine room just wouldn't make the lawyers nearly as nervous as a move to "the cloud".
The first test file contained code essentially saying "if you're on a windows box, run cmd.exe". This one says "if you're on windows, run calc.exe, and if you're on Unix, run xcalc, and if you're on MacOS, run Calculator.app". So regardless of platform, if you load this PDF and see a calculator come up, well, you've learned something.
As it happens, the PDF also contains real content that describes expected behaviors with a couple of readers. Apple's "Preview" isn't vulnerable because it doesn't implement the/Launch command at all! But Adobe's reader on MacOS is vulnerable.
But they didn't patent the concept of multitouch technology. They even point out that that's covered by a different patent. They covered the concept of using multitouch to do certain things and for certain purposes.
Basic multitouch tech, including capacitive, is decades old. Here, look at this:
He points out that capacitive touchpad tech predates personal computers, having been used in music synth before the advent of personal computing. And he discusses a working multitouch display in 1984. And there was a capacitive multitouch pad for computers in 1985.
The basic multitouch tech isn't really an issue, there is too much prior art that is too old and well-documented. Seems like this is all about using multitouch in certain specific ways. It seems to me that this is more like the Amazon one-click patent -- it's not about patenting "clicking a button once", but "clicking a button once as a part of this elaborate process we're discussing".
Oh, I think it's applicable against Apple, specifically relating to multitouch gestures on the MacBook trackpad.
But I don't think it's applicable with regard to the iPhone because we're not talking about an input device operating in a mouse-like environment, with cursors and conventions about right-clicking and stuff like that. We're not talking about adapting multitouch, we're talking about an interface designed from the ground up with multitouch. And that's why I think this specific patent may not apply in this specific case.
You have two snipers. Both intend to shoot blameless strangers in a parking lot. One is very good and hits their target. The other is inept and misses.
Are they both morally wrong?
Apparently, if I understand the assertion, folks without the magnetic manipulation would consider both "wrong". But folks who have had the magnetic treatment would have increased odds of judging the inept sniper to be blameless, since no actually harm occurred.
From the MIT article: "they found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions".
They don't appear to have claimed a general change to moral judgments of all types. They're saying that people were less able to make moral judgments that involved modeling someone else's internal state.
What it sounds like to me is, someone found humanity's Asperger switch.
1) Bit misleading IMO to talk about this in terms of a "multi-touch tech" company using "their" patents. The patent in question was granted in 1998... to Logitech (it was applied-for in 1996). The patent has changed hands since then. This company didn't acquire the patents in question until something like 2008.
2) Having read the patent, I don't think the iPhone and iPad infringe. Go read the actual text. Looks to me like it actually relates to touchpads attached to computers, used in an environment that was built around the mouse, and how to use multitouch gestures to improve trackpad functionality. So, yeah, if the patent is legit and all, I absolutely think the MacBook that lets you scroll with two fingers (emulating a mouse wheel) would infringe. But I don't think the iPhone or iPad (which were not designed around mice and don't really have a concept of a cursor as such) necessarily infringe.
Of course, IANAL, so nobody should trust me. Go read it yourself! Especially if you're a lawyer.
So the problem is that two different CAs could issue certs for the same host, and some have essentially back doors?
Know what I'd like to see? How about a DNS TXT record that tells you what the real, trusted CA for a given site is? Like, let people assert "for my domain, do not trust any certs unless they come from this particular CA", using DNS as an out-of-band channel that would have to be compromised separately from the SSL negotiation.
Wouldn't that be relatively easy to implement (for those who care to), and reasonably effective against anyone who can't compromise the root DNS servers?
Facebook makes the safe way to do things extremely annoying.
If you hide/ignore the application, you do not see its output. But that is the only change in the relationship between you and that application. Any information about you that your friends expose to their applications still gets through to it.
To eliminate that, you have to actually click through to the application itself and click on "block this application". Anything less than that is potentially unsafe. Both Facebook and the app owners hate it when you do that, but that's what you have to do to completely cut yourself off from these apps.
The real flaw is, I don't want a "default permitted" policy with an explicit blacklist. I want a "default denied" policy with an explicit whitelist. Alas, even using this script doesn't accomplish that, as it only does the "hide" step, not the "block" step (from what I can see). So I fear using this script is actually worse than nothing, because it only prevents me from seeing the stupid apps, which prevents me from discovering new things that I need to explicitly block.
I don't know if anyone else around here remembers the state of slate/pen computing in the mid-to-late 90s, but there used to be a company called "General Magic" that made a touch-based graphical operating system for handhelds named "Magic Cap".
As the company kinda fell apart, there was an effort by some of the developers to open source it. But their intellectual property had been sold to Intellectual Ventures, because of some agent technology their stuff included. (Basically, imagine setting up a search on the handheld, and then briefly connecting to the internet to let your "search agent" run around inside a cloud, analyzing data and performing calculations. Then you reconnect and your agent comes back to you and presents the stuff on your handheld.)
Intellectual Ventures never really wanted most of the Magic Cap stuff. But they've made it so difficult to disentangle that the developers eventually gave up. Here's a writeup from one of the people involved.
General Magic made a graphical OS designed for handheld touch-based use, not based on a port of a desktop OS. And the people who built it tried to open-soruce it, but were blocked by Intellectual Ventures. If things had worked out differently, we might have had some really interesting work going on in the slate area long before the advent of the iPad.
(Heck. I'd love to run MagicCap on an iPad. It's the perfect hardware platform for it. I have three MagicCap devices myself.)
Slashdot Mirror
That said, have they ever refused to parody or ridicule someone or something? Is there anything that is "sacred" to them?
Watch the "all about Mormons" episode, and pay very careful attention to the last five minutes.
They go out of their way to essentially say: "This thing we're making fun of? Yeah, well, you shouldn't lose respect of it because we made fun of it. In fact a lot of its members are really perfectly fine people who you should respect, and we're jackasses for making fun of them. We'll do it anyway, but we wanted to make sure that everyone knows we're aware that we're being jackasses for making fun of them."
That is their version of "sacred". And I respect the hell out of them for it.
It almost plays on my iPad. The UI loads. There's some problem loading data.
On my desktop I started picking it apart. The front page seems to be some enormously complex JavaScript, and that JavaScript does not contain "object" in it at all anywhere.
Neat! I kinda bet Adobe is a bit concerned.
Done any XBox 360 development lately?
What about Windows Phone 7?
Note that with digital delivery systems, you very often can't pay with a credit card. On the XBox, you may buy points with a credit card, but then you have a points balance, and the points are what you actually use for your purchases.
Look at the XBox 360's indie game market. That's the hobbyist/indy storefront for games people write with the XNA tools.
Every single game there gets a free demo, in that you can download every one of them for free. Even if the developer didn't code in any "demo" logic, if you don't pay, you get to run the game in a mode where it can't save any state and it auto-terminates after a short while.
A demo like that is cheap to implement. It's also something that, while the developers may not want to provide it, the people you buy your games from directly need for it to be there. Especially with digital delivery.
With digital delivery, there's no return policy, no trade-ins, no used game sales. This means if you shell out for an awful game, you're stuck with it. If I'm a digital delivery storefront, I'm going to want to entice people to buy games through me. The first time they buy an awful game and can't do anything about it, that's going to dramatically lower the odds that they'll buy any games in the future. The developer of that one game may not care -- they may be delighted, they got their cash -- but the storefront owner is going to care a lot, because they have an ongoing relationship with the customer.
And so you'll see things like the mandatory free demo we get with XBLA and "indie games" (perhaps coupled with the low-cost demo implementation you get for the "indie games").
(Honestly, I expect this mandatory demo policy to even make it to the iPhone app store at some point.)
I was actually very surprised that Apple is even making a keyboard dock, as it makes it look more like a laptop.
You may have just explained why the keyboard dock forces the iPad into portrait mode instead of landscape, and why the "Pages" word processor only exposes all of its features if you're using it in portrait mode. When the thing is actually attached to its dock, standing there with a screen that's taller than it is wide, and an extreme mismatch between the width of the display and the width of the keyboard, you cannot mistake it for a laptop.
Three devices I have with Flash runtimes on them are my MacBook Pro, my Wii, and my Chumby. And there is very little content that will work completely properly on any two of those devices, let alone all three.
The second main question, aside from "how are they going to process the flash?" is "How is it 'clientless'?". Even when dealing with the most trivial case(.swf player object being used as an embedded player for an h.264 video whose URL is clearly evident in the page source), their software is going to have to get a word in, to rewrite the page, removing the EMBED and replacing it with an HTML5 VIDEO widget with the appropriate video URL.
Well. The easiest way to do that would be to sell their service not to the end-users, but to the content-providers. "Got flash video content? Want iPhone users to see it? Don't have time to rebuild it as HTML5? Just use this JavaScript library instead of the embedding mechanism you normally use, and..."
It wouldn't let an end-user browse to an arbitrary flash site and see everything. It would let a flash site be browsed to by an arbitrary end-user. That's probably the better business angle anyway, in terms of which party is more willing to spend actual money for this capability. And this also lets them avoid looking bad, by simply not deploying their product for flash that their product doesn't work well with. I bet this is how they end up doing it.
HA! And now Skyfire has promised to deliver exactly this:
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-20002426-12.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Actually, Opera has now demonstrated that Flash could be provided in an iPhone browser, and exactly how.
They just have to do exactly the same thing Opera mini does. Or that iSSH/X11 does. Provide a dumb "terminal server" to which you simply stream the display of an application that's running elsewhere.
I can get Flash on my iPad today, by using iSSH/X11, connecting to a server running an X11-based browser with a Flash plugin, and starting it up. This is close to what Opera mini does, if you think about it.
Adobe could make this more seamless by providing their own "flash proxy server" that content providers could install to run the flash server-side. I'd bet real money that Apple would approve an app based on interacting with that, just like they approved iSSH/X11, Opera mini, Citrix, and WebEx. It's the same thing!
But Adobe won't do that. Adobe is going to pretend there are no alternatives to installing the interpreted Flash runtime on the end-device, and is going to get into a staring contest with Apple. This hurts Flash developers. Adobe is pretending that all of the blame for that damage falls upon Apple's shoulders. But personally, I blame Adobe even more than Apple for letting things get to this point.
Its funny to think about the tears of rage spewing forth inside of mom's basements across the world over something so trivial.
Well. And in Adobe's basement.
There's more than one kind of fragmentation. One is certainly the sort you're talking about (and that's the one that did the most damage to J2ME). But another is fragmentation of the market. If most Android device users get used to only buying from whatever app store is the default on their own device, how many business relationships is a developer going to have to maintain in order to sell their wares? How many distinct certification processes are they going to have to go through?
With the degree to which Android is open, I do not know what leverage Google has for preventing operators and handset manufacturers from locking applications out of their devices.
It's not a reverse. He's not predicting that gaming will go back to PCs. He's saying that gaming won't be tied to any specific platform at all.
In other words, if we ended up with a world where every game ran on every console, every computer (PC/Mac/Linux), and every mobile device (PSP, DS, iPhone, Android, WP7), we'd be right where he predicted.
We get a lesser version of that today with cross-platform titles. I haven't seen PC gamers express much happiness at how that's turning out for them.
Think for yourself. Do you want a 'computer' that only allows you to do what they want you to do? Do you want people who offer this to get your money and drive the market further in that direction?
So give me a realistic choice, then.
Do I want a "computer" that limits what I do excessively? No, I do not, but I will accept that in order to get a certain level of reliability, performance (including battery performance), consistency across applications with regard to behavior/interface, and so on. Give me a way to get what I want without making that tradeoff and there's a good chance I'll take it. But until some realistic options are available to me, I will remain an iPhone user and I'll at least seriously consider an iPad.
Basically, yes, I agree that the limits you are arguing against are a negative factor, but they're simply not the most important factor to me, and the wins in other areas are the reason I make the purchase decisions I do. Android has promise, it really does! Let's see the Android response to the iPad.
So, if you use Google for search, you can buy a "Google search appliance" and install it in your machine room and use that to provide your service.
I really, really want the same thing for Google Apps. The question of whether storing a document in "Google Docs" violates FERPA or something simply doesn't come up if the box is sealed in a room on a private network that you have tight control over. Running our own GMail and Google Calendar server appliances in our machine room just wouldn't make the lawyers nearly as nervous as a move to "the cloud".
Someone came up with a better test file, here:
http://seclabs.org/fred/docs/sstic09/samples/actions/launch/calc.pdf
The first test file contained code essentially saying "if you're on a windows box, run cmd.exe". This one says "if you're on windows, run calc.exe, and if you're on Unix, run xcalc, and if you're on MacOS, run Calculator.app". So regardless of platform, if you load this PDF and see a calculator come up, well, you've learned something.
As it happens, the PDF also contains real content that describes expected behaviors with a couple of readers. Apple's "Preview" isn't vulnerable because it doesn't implement the /Launch command at all! But Adobe's reader on MacOS is vulnerable.
But they didn't patent the concept of multitouch technology. They even point out that that's covered by a different patent. They covered the concept of using multitouch to do certain things and for certain purposes.
Basic multitouch tech, including capacitive, is decades old. Here, look at this:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
He points out that capacitive touchpad tech predates personal computers, having been used in music synth before the advent of personal computing. And he discusses a working multitouch display in 1984. And there was a capacitive multitouch pad for computers in 1985.
The basic multitouch tech isn't really an issue, there is too much prior art that is too old and well-documented. Seems like this is all about using multitouch in certain specific ways. It seems to me that this is more like the Amazon one-click patent -- it's not about patenting "clicking a button once", but "clicking a button once as a part of this elaborate process we're discussing".
And a headache is not a symptom of brain cancer, or blunt force trauma, or stuffed sinuses. It's a symptom of a hangover.
Oh, I think it's applicable against Apple, specifically relating to multitouch gestures on the MacBook trackpad.
But I don't think it's applicable with regard to the iPhone because we're not talking about an input device operating in a mouse-like environment, with cursors and conventions about right-clicking and stuff like that. We're not talking about adapting multitouch, we're talking about an interface designed from the ground up with multitouch. And that's why I think this specific patent may not apply in this specific case.
But don't trust me. Read it yourself.
Sometimes, the difference is simply luck.
You have two snipers. Both intend to shoot blameless strangers in a parking lot. One is very good and hits their target. The other is inept and misses.
Are they both morally wrong?
Apparently, if I understand the assertion, folks without the magnetic manipulation would consider both "wrong". But folks who have had the magnetic treatment would have increased odds of judging the inept sniper to be blameless, since no actually harm occurred.
From the MIT article: "they found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions".
They don't appear to have claimed a general change to moral judgments of all types. They're saying that people were less able to make moral judgments that involved modeling someone else's internal state.
What it sounds like to me is, someone found humanity's Asperger switch.
1) Bit misleading IMO to talk about this in terms of a "multi-touch tech" company using "their" patents. The patent in question was granted in 1998... to Logitech (it was applied-for in 1996). The patent has changed hands since then. This company didn't acquire the patents in question until something like 2008.
2) Having read the patent, I don't think the iPhone and iPad infringe. Go read the actual text. Looks to me like it actually relates to touchpads attached to computers, used in an environment that was built around the mouse, and how to use multitouch gestures to improve trackpad functionality. So, yeah, if the patent is legit and all, I absolutely think the MacBook that lets you scroll with two fingers (emulating a mouse wheel) would infringe. But I don't think the iPhone or iPad (which were not designed around mice and don't really have a concept of a cursor as such) necessarily infringe.
Of course, IANAL, so nobody should trust me. Go read it yourself! Especially if you're a lawyer.
So the problem is that two different CAs could issue certs for the same host, and some have essentially back doors?
Know what I'd like to see? How about a DNS TXT record that tells you what the real, trusted CA for a given site is? Like, let people assert "for my domain, do not trust any certs unless they come from this particular CA", using DNS as an out-of-band channel that would have to be compromised separately from the SSL negotiation.
Wouldn't that be relatively easy to implement (for those who care to), and reasonably effective against anyone who can't compromise the root DNS servers?
FYI, this isn't the safe way to do things.
Facebook makes the safe way to do things extremely annoying.
If you hide/ignore the application, you do not see its output. But that is the only change in the relationship between you and that application. Any information about you that your friends expose to their applications still gets through to it.
To eliminate that, you have to actually click through to the application itself and click on "block this application". Anything less than that is potentially unsafe. Both Facebook and the app owners hate it when you do that, but that's what you have to do to completely cut yourself off from these apps.
The real flaw is, I don't want a "default permitted" policy with an explicit blacklist. I want a "default denied" policy with an explicit whitelist. Alas, even using this script doesn't accomplish that, as it only does the "hide" step, not the "block" step (from what I can see). So I fear using this script is actually worse than nothing, because it only prevents me from seeing the stupid apps, which prevents me from discovering new things that I need to explicitly block.
I don't know if anyone else around here remembers the state of slate/pen computing in the mid-to-late 90s, but there used to be a company called "General Magic" that made a touch-based graphical operating system for handhelds named "Magic Cap".
As the company kinda fell apart, there was an effort by some of the developers to open source it. But their intellectual property had been sold to Intellectual Ventures, because of some agent technology their stuff included. (Basically, imagine setting up a search on the handheld, and then briefly connecting to the internet to let your "search agent" run around inside a cloud, analyzing data and performing calculations. Then you reconnect and your agent comes back to you and presents the stuff on your handheld.)
Intellectual Ventures never really wanted most of the Magic Cap stuff. But they've made it so difficult to disentangle that the developers eventually gave up. Here's a writeup from one of the people involved.
http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/faqs/the_future_of_magic_cap
General Magic made a graphical OS designed for handheld touch-based use, not based on a port of a desktop OS. And the people who built it tried to open-soruce it, but were blocked by Intellectual Ventures. If things had worked out differently, we might have had some really interesting work going on in the slate area long before the advent of the iPad.
(Heck. I'd love to run MagicCap on an iPad. It's the perfect hardware platform for it. I have three MagicCap devices myself.)