There is no shortage of restaurants, many of which don't allow smoking now. That has only been the case in the past few years, and it could reasonably be argued that California's smoking ban played a major role in making that happen. Prior to that, the argument from restaurants when people complained about smoking was invariably the same---that if they prohibited smoking, they would lose customers. I quite literally heard that same argument several *hundred* times across several states. When California banned smoking in restaurants and the exact opposite happened---a consistent increase in the number of people going to restaurants---that tired old argument fell apart. Suddenly we saw restaurants in other places start to test the waters to see if smoke-free restaurants worked, and sure enough, they generally did.
I can count the number of smoke-free restaurants I had seen prior to 1994 on one hand. In fact, I don't even need a single finger. Now, I have a hard time thinking of any restaurants I've been to recently that aren't smoke-free.
California repeated this with bars a few years later, and not long thereafter, restaurant chains with bars started prohibiting smoking in their bars once they saw that banning smoking in California's bars wasn't driving away business.
So while smoking bans may not have to happen everywhere to protect the workers, evidence suggests that it had to happen somewhere just to get the ball rolling.
There are already laws making it illegal to drink alcohol on the beach for the same reason. Unless you're campaigning to get those laws overturned, you're just blowing smoke.
Let me turn that around on you. Nobody forced those people to work in coal mines without proper lung protection. Nobody forced those people to work in asbestos mines without protection. We have laws to protect workers because they are generally not in a position to protect themselves. When you need money, you can't afford to refuse to work in a place that allows smoking. If you think otherwise, that probably means you have never been poor enough to understand.
Regarding the city streets, that smoke turns into dirty-looking sidewalks from the tar, cigarette butts floating up on the beach and in our streams, and other environmental harm that goes way beyond the immediate harm to people nearby. As far as I'm concerned, if people want to smoke in their own homes, that's okay. As soon as they inflict it on other people, they're crossing a line. People don't choose to be asthmatic, and they don't wear big signs that say "stay away from me if you smoke". I would argue that nobody forced the smokers to smoke around other people, but they do, and often without caring who it offends or even makes sick. And *that* is why people fight back and pass laws about smoking in public places. It's because smokers egregiously abused their rights and harmed others.
A. The only reason for the higher death rate in young people is that we're seeing significant immunity in older people as a result of exposure to several similar strains in the past. Therefore, the proportional death rate in young people is high because they're the only ones getting it. The odds of dying from it if you catch it are not much higher than seasonal flu---less than a factor of two or so in the U.S., IIRC, which is bad, but not "kills a third of the population" bad or anything.
B. We're seeing mutations just like seasonal flu, but no sudden mutation to being highly fatal. If anything, it seems to be getting milder with time. And if we saw that sort of mutation occur, odds are good that the protein coat would change enough to render any existing vaccine ineffectual anyway.
Why would Microsoft decide to release nightly builds, which are inherently unstable, to a public that loves to pick on MS for producing unstable software?
Simple. It means that bugs get found and fixed early before too much code depends on the incorrect behavior. The inability to fix bugs without breaking things has always been IE's greatest weakness.
A long release schedule ensures that Microsoft has to find and squash every bug themselves to make a single presentable product that will have a better reputation than your average nightly build. It ensures developers see only a stable standard and worry that this year's version will have different quirks than last year's version and that they won't find out until it is too late to do anything except hack workarounds for the browser bugs into their site. What harm would nightly releases cause Microsoft [elided] that the standard alpha/beta/release schedule does not?
FTFY.
The whole point of nightly builds is so that the developer community can check early and often to see how browser changes will affect them. By the time a public beta comes out, the software is baked and only critical bugs are likely to get fixed. Browser vendors have limited testing resources and cannot practically test every website. Nightly builds allow developers to test their sites, spot places where a browser deviates from W3C-compliant behavior, and file bugs early enough that they actually stand some chance of being fixed instead of having to hack around the browser's bugs for an entire release cycle (and often for years after that since many people don't bother to upgrade their browsers). And when a browser is rolling out new features like HTML5 and CSS3 bits, nightly builds provide invaluable feedback from real-world testers trying to integrate the functionality into their own projects. Sometimes they find bugs, but quite often they find problems with the specification itself that need to be addressed across all browsers. That's something that doesn't work nearly as well without the rapid feedback of a nightly build program. Significant flaws in the specification will almost certainly never get fixed at all if the browser that first introduces those features doesn't bother to show them to web developers until the features are mostly baked.
Basically, web browsers are just a giant public API, and need to be handled in the same way as any other API review. When you create a new API, you get an initial review, then you get other folks to dogfood the API within your company, then you seed it to developers really early and often so that they can test and experiment with the API more broadly, then a couple years later, you publish the final API and make it publicly available. Nightly builds are the seed phase, just with broader distribution because the developer base (web developers) and the installed software base (web sites) are both at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger, and more frequent because the rate of developer-critical changes in a browser tends to be much more rapid than the rate of change in any single OS-level API.
Also, nightly builds keep you honest. They reduce the risk of multi-month delays in getting out a usable release by forcing developers to keep preliminary code cleanly compartmentalized so that it can be easily disabled. This ensures that you don't have long periods of time in which the nightly builds don't build, don't function usably, etc., thus shortening your bake cycles considerably.
So there are a lot of ways that nightly builds would be beneficial, not just for web developers, but for Microsoft as well.
Car analogy would be that I tend to buy an SUV, most people buy a Camry, and Google thinks everyone should be happy riding a children's bicycle with training wheels.:-D
Seriously, even if I were just doing email and other light duty stuff with my laptop, I'd still probably throw it across the room within a day if I had to put up with web apps.
Actually, with the iPhone, you can write an offline web app that gets stored entirely on the device and will work without infrastructure, but still retains the ability to update itself when you are connected to infrastructure. You can then use HTML5 local storage or SQL storage to store the data on the device, and upload it when you have access to infrastructure. I'd expect other web-enabled devices to start supporting this functionality in the near future if they don't already, since it's part of the HTML5 standardization effort.
There are many kinds of applications that just won't ever run in the cloud, and we'll always need powerful desktop-ish machines with full-featured OSes
Here's something that should be a real concern for geeks. Right now, the ordinary desktop users who don't really need a powerful computer are buying computers. This means that due to economies of scale, the cost of computers is relatively cheap. Imagine what will happen to the price of "powerful desktop-ish machines with full-featured OSes" if 90% of the computing market suddenly starts using these toys. Start preparing to go back to the days of $15,000 computers. Just saying.:-)
You're joking, right? I do multitrack audio editing and video editing. It's not at all uncommon for my machine to be playing back 40 channels of 96 kHz/24-bit uncompressed audio in parallel while recording 16 channels of new content. That comes out to 37 Mbit/sec. up and 92 Mbit/sec down. And that's just the real time requirements. Add network latency to that and you'd need to at *least* triple those numbers. So yeah, 2Mb/sec. should be enough for anybody. Not even in the ballpark. Not even in the same country as the ballpark.
And even if they get the performance up there and the latency down, it would have to be *reliably* that fast, which means basically a dedicated hard drive in the data center per user. And then where are you? In the same place as you are with a local hard drive, only it is out of your control.
Not to mention that any company building such an infrastructure would invariably charge for storage at exorbitant prices. When I'm actively working on projects, my storage needs are somewhere around a terabyte per year. Care to guess what I'd pay storing that in the cloud?
The day I am forced to trust my data to somebody else's inadequate backup processes, trust my ability to get things done to an unreliable network without performance guarantees, and trust my data to be locked to some cloud provider's proprietary web application is the day I stop using computers. It's like asking people to go back to dumb terminals and mainframes, just with prettier graphics on the dumb terminals. Not going to fly.
As for web applications, speaking as somebody who writes web apps regularly, I could rant for a year on the things that web apps cannot feasibly achieve. Real-time audio processing is just the tip of the iceberg. The day I see Final Cut Studio written as a web application, I'll consider the possibility that a HD-free computer might *MIGHT* be a possibility. But that's not going to happen because JavaScript is fundamentally inadequate for such purposes no matter how fast it gets. Among other things, it has no real concurrent execution, no synchronization, etc., which means that you're basically limited to doing one thing at a time. That is an absolute show stopper for writing most serious applications in JavaScript unless you are willing to write your own scheduler and what amounts to a lightweight OS on top of it, and if you're doing that, why not cut out the middlemen? Oh, and while you're running that lightweight OS on top of JavaScript, there's no way to force the DOM to repaint, so no user interface interaction for you.
Sorry, Google, but a computing device without local storage and native code execution is NOT a computer. It's a toy. Period.
If I were writing an app like that for the iPhone, I would want the ability to rapidly change the application, which an installed app just doesn't provide. Instead, I'd write it as a web app and save it to the home screen. That sort of application doesn't need any real access to the iPhone hardware anyway, so why bother writing a native app? More to the point, by writing it as a web app, you could load different stylesheets on different mobile devices, laptops, etc, making the incremental cost of deploying on iPhone versus Crackberry versus WebOS pretty negligible.
Hear, hear. Photoshop CS3 installed in a *^$#@&@& disk image to work around Adobe's sloppy programming. I won't pay Adobe another dime for upgrades until they fix this. And when a Mac OS X update causes it to break, I have a Pixelmator license and will simply stop using Photoshop entirely. I prefer Photoshop, but not enough to drop several hundred bucks on an upgrade that wastes three *@&$^*(&$ DAYS of my time just to get it installed in a crude, hackish fashion. Life's too short.
If you have a single advertiser paying you $1,000 to advertise their product, how many developer accounts does that buy? What if you have a single advertiser paying you $10,000? What if you have 100 advertisers paying you $10,000?
When you're talking about ads delivered via an unknown ad network with low click-through rate, you would be lucky to fetch a hundredth of a cent per eyeball. Thus, if the average user deletes it after the fifth ad in too short a time period, then each user provides 5 hundredths of a cent. To cover the cost of your $100 sign-up, you'd have to get 200,000 people to download it. That's about one out of every 200 iPhone and iPod touch users on the planet downloading an app whose reviews all say "this app is nothing but an ad viewer". So unless you find some way to advertise it massively, you're not going to make money that way, and if you do advertise it massively just to sell ad hits from a couple of complete idiot sponsors, why not just skip the iPhone step and advertise those other company's products directly instead?
All of your criticisms seem to boil down to "If a whole bunch of protections break down to an almost comically infeasible extent and if Apple is severely corrupt, then bad things will happen." If all those things happen and this patent turns into a giant nightmare for consumers, then I will agree that the patent is bad. Until then, your arguments are pure speculation, and this is merely a patent with the potential to do good (providing a reliable revenue stream for free demos of real apps) or do harm (forcing lots of unsuspecting users to watch lots of ads and get nothing of value in return), no worse than any of the other software patents (which I consider to be harmful by definition, regardless of their subject).
What pray-tell, directly disadvantages the average citizen if they were to be watched at all times?
Simple. There are many things that are not illegal but are still problematic.
Your wife wants to know why you have been getting home so late every night. She checks the cameras at your office and sees you drive out at 5:00, then park in front of a pay-by-the-hour hotel and meet a woman who is old enough to be your daughter.
Your boss asks why you were late to work. You tell him or her that traffic was bad. Your boss looks at the traffic records and sees that you left home late because you overslept.
You have a car accident because someone pulls out in front of you. The accident is not caught on tape, but about half a minute earlier, you are caught on tape traveling over the speed limit. The person who pulled out in front of you manages to get you blamed for the wreck even though you were not speeding at the time.
You are a pizza delivery boy. You deliver a pizza to the house of a mob informant. The mob informant is later found dead. The only person seen on video approaching the house (from the front) is you. There are no cameras pointing to the back of the house and no signs of forced entry. Guess who gets charged.
Someone gets murdered in a neighborhood along your drive to work. The neighbors see a person who vaguely matches your description get into a white minivan of unknown make. You also drive a white minivan. You happen to drive past a security camera that puts you a block away from the scene of the crime shortly afterwards, traveling away from the location of the crime. You have no connection with the victim, so you would not have been a suspect otherwise, but now the witnesses pick out your car in a lineup and they arrest you under suspicion of murder.
Put simply, there's a reason that you have to have probable cause for searches and seizures. It is specifically to prevent people who are unlikely to have any association with the crime from being charged due to random circumstance. Cameras significantly increase the risk of random circumstantial evidence being available and being introduced.
Also, the temptation is too great to use these sorts of technologies to try to have perfect prosecution of every crime down to the smallest infraction, which invariably causes serious harm to society. For example, in Eureka, CA, you aren't allowed to kiss a woman if you are wearing a mustache. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of these silly laws on the books. Were it possible to record everybody doing everything, then everyone would have record of these pointless crimes. Make the wrong person mad and suddenly they can abuse that to fine you $150 for picking up litter in a national forest in New Hampshire... or worse, fine you for driving your car on a Sunday. (Apparently, operating machinery on a Sunday is illegal in New Hampshire.)
And surveillance doesn't generally prevent crime. It just shifts it to some other place that isn't being watched so carefully. It's just like burglar alarms. They don't prevent people from breaking into houses. They just cause people to break into other people's houses. Unless they are ubiquitous, they are useless, and if they are ubiquitous, they are also prone to abuse.
Finally, people tend to act in ways that mimic how they are expected to act. If you treat people like they are law-abiding citizens, most non-sociopaths will behave accordingly. If you treat people like criminals, a fair number of people without any natural criminal tendency will tend to act the part. Don't believe me? Check out the Stanford prison experiment. Thus, a surveillance society is likely to result in a higher crime rate in the long run, not a lower rate.
You roll it back at the point when you catch the bug. If you maintain both in parallel for several months as I suggested, then the odds of missing an important bug are fairly low.
You seem to assume that Apple is only patenting things so that they can stop others from doing them instead of doing them themselves,
I am assuming nothing. I never suggested a motive for Apple filing for that patent. I merely said I could see two possible positive uses for this patent, and that preventing other companies from doing it would improve the industry as a whole. You disagreed with that statement, which seemed pretty bizarre coming from someone who is anti-advertising. I assume you merely misunderstood me.
If you think a spammer is going to post a single app, let it get rated down, and go away to find something else to do, then you're incredibly naive.
First, f you read my original post, you would understand that I said this would be okay if it were used by REAL apps that offer TWO versions, one ad-supported, one not. Not scammers who create an app solely to sell advertising. I think it's safe to say the latter would probably not get past app review in the first place unless it did significantly more than show a bunch of ads, and if an app does do significantly more than show ads, then that means it takes significant time to create the software. You have to factor that into the equation. It's not like they could just turn around and create a new one overnight when people rate it badly.
Second, even if they did sneak a useless app that abused such advertising functionality past app review once, I doubt they would be able to do it twice with the same developer account. So you're basically saying that scammers would repeatedly spend a hundred bucks on new accounts just to gain ad revenue. They would have to sell a LOT of ads to cover that cost. It seems unlikely that they would break even....
Between you and I, there's only one of us arguing that mandatory ads are a good thing.
No, actually you did, too. I said that by patenting it, they were preventing the use of this concept by other companies in the industry that might use it in really awful ways. I said that this improved the industry. You said that forcing the industry to behave the way I want it (without forced ads for making phone calls, etc.) was not improving the industry. Therefore, you effectively said that you want companies to do things like this in an abusive way. You can't have it both ways....
Yeah, spammers and scammers really seem to care about their reputation.
The fact that you haven't ever owned an iPhone means you don't know what you're talking about. When you have a closed ecosystem like the iPhone with only one app store, ratings can make or break your download rate even for free apps. And when people delete apps from their iPhones, they are asked to rate the apps right then. If they're angry about having been forced to watch a bunch of ads, the app's ratings will decline rapidly, and the app will stop getting downloaded equally rapidly.
Therefore, abuses like you are suggesting would entirely be a self-correcting problem, as I said.
Maybe in some places.... If California did it, though, it would probably not have that effect. Why? For retail businesses, no business can afford to lose more than an eighth of their revenue. For non-retail businesses, the cost of moving is not insignificant, and there are often sizable advantages to this area in terms of being able to attract talented workers. Try starting your computer company in Bucksnort, TN and we'll see if anybody takes you seriously.
Sure, businesses talk big and bluster about how they would leave if their taxes go up. The reality, though, is that these are mostly idle threats, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Worst comes to worst, you might have to progressively introduce these taxation changes over the course of 20 years. If you start to see businesses leaving in droves, then you'd pull back from the edge a bit and don't proceed any further. Easy enough.
But, since there would be a huge tax burden on businesses, no one would be able to enter the market and there would be no competition except among already established players. Excellent plan!
Actually, the reverse is likely true. We give tax breaks on corporate income taxes to small businesses precisely to make it easier for new competition to enter the markets. There's no reason for that not to continue.
Further, the smaller shops could be in an even better position than they are now because all of the taxation on the goods they sell would fall under a potentially progressive income tax system instead of an unforgiving flat sales tax.
Finally, it is well understood that regressive taxes like sales tax impact poorer people harder than richer people. The same is true to a lesser degree for companies. Small companies spend most of their income buying stuff. Much of that is stuff that they buy for resale, so they don't pay sales tax on that. However, they do pay sales tax on anything that they buy for use in their business---computers, cash registers, shopping carts, grocery bags, shelves... you name it. When a company starts up, that's a huge chunk of their startup cost.
Small companies, and particularly new companies, pay a disproportionately large amount of their income in sales tax when compared with larger companies. By eliminating that sales tax and replacing it with income tax, even with a flat rate of income tax, smaller companies are still inherently going to pay less and lager companies are going to pay more than they do now. Also, because they can then pass on those lower rates to people who buy from them, it actually helps level the playing field and make it easier for them to compete with other companies that are well established.
While you're at it, how about shifting from regressive taxes that people try to avoid like sales tax and bring in all your revenue from taxes that are easy to audit, hard to avoid, and aren't so highly dependent on the whims of the consumer. If all of our taxes came from taxation on businesses instead of on individuals, we'd have some inflation for a while and would eventually have about the same buying power after taxes, but we wouldn't feel like we were getting screwed by the government. Instead, we'd feel like we were getting screwed by businesses, and we'd see a serious push for more competition and innovation that would drive our economy forward.
Further, people making their money off of the hard work of others would be impacted the hardest because they would see lower returns on their stock options. And people at or near the bottom would have more buying power than they do now, which is good because they're the ones who actually spend money and keep the economy moving.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no shortage of restaurants, many of which don't allow smoking now. That has only been the case in the past few years, and it could reasonably be argued that California's smoking ban played a major role in making that happen. Prior to that, the argument from restaurants when people complained about smoking was invariably the same---that if they prohibited smoking, they would lose customers. I quite literally heard that same argument several *hundred* times across several states. When California banned smoking in restaurants and the exact opposite happened---a consistent increase in the number of people going to restaurants---that tired old argument fell apart. Suddenly we saw restaurants in other places start to test the waters to see if smoke-free restaurants worked, and sure enough, they generally did.
I can count the number of smoke-free restaurants I had seen prior to 1994 on one hand. In fact, I don't even need a single finger. Now, I have a hard time thinking of any restaurants I've been to recently that aren't smoke-free.
California repeated this with bars a few years later, and not long thereafter, restaurant chains with bars started prohibiting smoking in their bars once they saw that banning smoking in California's bars wasn't driving away business.
So while smoking bans may not have to happen everywhere to protect the workers, evidence suggests that it had to happen somewhere just to get the ball rolling.
There are already laws making it illegal to drink alcohol on the beach for the same reason. Unless you're campaigning to get those laws overturned, you're just blowing smoke.
Let me turn that around on you. Nobody forced those people to work in coal mines without proper lung protection. Nobody forced those people to work in asbestos mines without protection. We have laws to protect workers because they are generally not in a position to protect themselves. When you need money, you can't afford to refuse to work in a place that allows smoking. If you think otherwise, that probably means you have never been poor enough to understand.
Regarding the city streets, that smoke turns into dirty-looking sidewalks from the tar, cigarette butts floating up on the beach and in our streams, and other environmental harm that goes way beyond the immediate harm to people nearby. As far as I'm concerned, if people want to smoke in their own homes, that's okay. As soon as they inflict it on other people, they're crossing a line. People don't choose to be asthmatic, and they don't wear big signs that say "stay away from me if you smoke". I would argue that nobody forced the smokers to smoke around other people, but they do, and often without caring who it offends or even makes sick. And *that* is why people fight back and pass laws about smoking in public places. It's because smokers egregiously abused their rights and harmed others.
In a "flying through the window and getting hit by the concrete wall" sense.
Except that:
A. The only reason for the higher death rate in young people is that we're seeing significant immunity in older people as a result of exposure to several similar strains in the past. Therefore, the proportional death rate in young people is high because they're the only ones getting it. The odds of dying from it if you catch it are not much higher than seasonal flu---less than a factor of two or so in the U.S., IIRC, which is bad, but not "kills a third of the population" bad or anything.
B. We're seeing mutations just like seasonal flu, but no sudden mutation to being highly fatal. If anything, it seems to be getting milder with time. And if we saw that sort of mutation occur, odds are good that the protein coat would change enough to render any existing vaccine ineffectual anyway.
Those aren't true conservatives. They're neocons. There's a difference. :-)
A true conservative talks about a smaller government and means it.
Sort of like a cloud, but definitely not written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. :-D
Not that you couldn't write a ray tracer in JavaScript, but....
Simple. It means that bugs get found and fixed early before too much code depends on the incorrect behavior. The inability to fix bugs without breaking things has always been IE's greatest weakness.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1451976&cid=30178810
A long release schedule ensures that Microsoft has to find and squash every bug themselves to make a single presentable product that will have a better reputation than your average nightly build. It ensures developers see only a stable standard and worry that this year's version will have different quirks than last year's version and that they won't find out until it is too late to do anything except hack workarounds for the browser bugs into their site. What harm would nightly releases cause Microsoft [elided] that the standard alpha/beta/release schedule does not?
FTFY.
The whole point of nightly builds is so that the developer community can check early and often to see how browser changes will affect them. By the time a public beta comes out, the software is baked and only critical bugs are likely to get fixed. Browser vendors have limited testing resources and cannot practically test every website. Nightly builds allow developers to test their sites, spot places where a browser deviates from W3C-compliant behavior, and file bugs early enough that they actually stand some chance of being fixed instead of having to hack around the browser's bugs for an entire release cycle (and often for years after that since many people don't bother to upgrade their browsers). And when a browser is rolling out new features like HTML5 and CSS3 bits, nightly builds provide invaluable feedback from real-world testers trying to integrate the functionality into their own projects. Sometimes they find bugs, but quite often they find problems with the specification itself that need to be addressed across all browsers. That's something that doesn't work nearly as well without the rapid feedback of a nightly build program. Significant flaws in the specification will almost certainly never get fixed at all if the browser that first introduces those features doesn't bother to show them to web developers until the features are mostly baked.
Basically, web browsers are just a giant public API, and need to be handled in the same way as any other API review. When you create a new API, you get an initial review, then you get other folks to dogfood the API within your company, then you seed it to developers really early and often so that they can test and experiment with the API more broadly, then a couple years later, you publish the final API and make it publicly available. Nightly builds are the seed phase, just with broader distribution because the developer base (web developers) and the installed software base (web sites) are both at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger, and more frequent because the rate of developer-critical changes in a browser tends to be much more rapid than the rate of change in any single OS-level API.
Also, nightly builds keep you honest. They reduce the risk of multi-month delays in getting out a usable release by forcing developers to keep preliminary code cleanly compartmentalized so that it can be easily disabled. This ensures that you don't have long periods of time in which the nightly builds don't build, don't function usably, etc., thus shortening your bake cycles considerably.
So there are a lot of ways that nightly builds would be beneficial, not just for web developers, but for Microsoft as well.
Car analogy would be that I tend to buy an SUV, most people buy a Camry, and Google thinks everyone should be happy riding a children's bicycle with training wheels. :-D
Seriously, even if I were just doing email and other light duty stuff with my laptop, I'd still probably throw it across the room within a day if I had to put up with web apps.
Actually, with the iPhone, you can write an offline web app that gets stored entirely on the device and will work without infrastructure, but still retains the ability to update itself when you are connected to infrastructure. You can then use HTML5 local storage or SQL storage to store the data on the device, and upload it when you have access to infrastructure. I'd expect other web-enabled devices to start supporting this functionality in the near future if they don't already, since it's part of the HTML5 standardization effort.
Here's something that should be a real concern for geeks. Right now, the ordinary desktop users who don't really need a powerful computer are buying computers. This means that due to economies of scale, the cost of computers is relatively cheap. Imagine what will happen to the price of "powerful desktop-ish machines with full-featured OSes" if 90% of the computing market suddenly starts using these toys. Start preparing to go back to the days of $15,000 computers. Just saying. :-)
You're joking, right? I do multitrack audio editing and video editing. It's not at all uncommon for my machine to be playing back 40 channels of 96 kHz/24-bit uncompressed audio in parallel while recording 16 channels of new content. That comes out to 37 Mbit/sec. up and 92 Mbit/sec down. And that's just the real time requirements. Add network latency to that and you'd need to at *least* triple those numbers. So yeah, 2Mb/sec. should be enough for anybody. Not even in the ballpark. Not even in the same country as the ballpark.
And even if they get the performance up there and the latency down, it would have to be *reliably* that fast, which means basically a dedicated hard drive in the data center per user. And then where are you? In the same place as you are with a local hard drive, only it is out of your control.
Not to mention that any company building such an infrastructure would invariably charge for storage at exorbitant prices. When I'm actively working on projects, my storage needs are somewhere around a terabyte per year. Care to guess what I'd pay storing that in the cloud?
The day I am forced to trust my data to somebody else's inadequate backup processes, trust my ability to get things done to an unreliable network without performance guarantees, and trust my data to be locked to some cloud provider's proprietary web application is the day I stop using computers. It's like asking people to go back to dumb terminals and mainframes, just with prettier graphics on the dumb terminals. Not going to fly.
As for web applications, speaking as somebody who writes web apps regularly, I could rant for a year on the things that web apps cannot feasibly achieve. Real-time audio processing is just the tip of the iceberg. The day I see Final Cut Studio written as a web application, I'll consider the possibility that a HD-free computer might *MIGHT* be a possibility. But that's not going to happen because JavaScript is fundamentally inadequate for such purposes no matter how fast it gets. Among other things, it has no real concurrent execution, no synchronization, etc., which means that you're basically limited to doing one thing at a time. That is an absolute show stopper for writing most serious applications in JavaScript unless you are willing to write your own scheduler and what amounts to a lightweight OS on top of it, and if you're doing that, why not cut out the middlemen? Oh, and while you're running that lightweight OS on top of JavaScript, there's no way to force the DOM to repaint, so no user interface interaction for you.
Sorry, Google, but a computing device without local storage and native code execution is NOT a computer. It's a toy. Period.
Just out of curiosity, can you give us a hint about what the app did?
If I were writing an app like that for the iPhone, I would want the ability to rapidly change the application, which an installed app just doesn't provide. Instead, I'd write it as a web app and save it to the home screen. That sort of application doesn't need any real access to the iPhone hardware anyway, so why bother writing a native app? More to the point, by writing it as a web app, you could load different stylesheets on different mobile devices, laptops, etc, making the incremental cost of deploying on iPhone versus Crackberry versus WebOS pretty negligible.
Hear, hear. Photoshop CS3 installed in a *^$#@&@& disk image to work around Adobe's sloppy programming. I won't pay Adobe another dime for upgrades until they fix this. And when a Mac OS X update causes it to break, I have a Pixelmator license and will simply stop using Photoshop entirely. I prefer Photoshop, but not enough to drop several hundred bucks on an upgrade that wastes three *@&$^*(&$ DAYS of my time just to get it installed in a crude, hackish fashion. Life's too short.
Appropriate that the ultimate instruction would also be a wildcard (*) in ASCII.
And speaking of your drums, on Apple II, it's rotate accumulator left, the ROL instruction.
How curious.
That's a a pretty far-fetched "if" there. The iPhone platform isn't big enough for you to make that kind of money off advertising in any short period of time. Even most paid apps don't make that much money, according to http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/10/iphone-app-store-s-brutal-reality-get-viral-or-don-t-quit-your-day-job. That's talking about apps that make the developer close to a buck apiece.
When you're talking about ads delivered via an unknown ad network with low click-through rate, you would be lucky to fetch a hundredth of a cent per eyeball. Thus, if the average user deletes it after the fifth ad in too short a time period, then each user provides 5 hundredths of a cent. To cover the cost of your $100 sign-up, you'd have to get 200,000 people to download it. That's about one out of every 200 iPhone and iPod touch users on the planet downloading an app whose reviews all say "this app is nothing but an ad viewer". So unless you find some way to advertise it massively, you're not going to make money that way, and if you do advertise it massively just to sell ad hits from a couple of complete idiot sponsors, why not just skip the iPhone step and advertise those other company's products directly instead?
All of your criticisms seem to boil down to "If a whole bunch of protections break down to an almost comically infeasible extent and if Apple is severely corrupt, then bad things will happen." If all those things happen and this patent turns into a giant nightmare for consumers, then I will agree that the patent is bad. Until then, your arguments are pure speculation, and this is merely a patent with the potential to do good (providing a reliable revenue stream for free demos of real apps) or do harm (forcing lots of unsuspecting users to watch lots of ads and get nothing of value in return), no worse than any of the other software patents (which I consider to be harmful by definition, regardless of their subject).
Simple. There are many things that are not illegal but are still problematic.
Your wife wants to know why you have been getting home so late every night. She checks the cameras at your office and sees you drive out at 5:00, then park in front of a pay-by-the-hour hotel and meet a woman who is old enough to be your daughter.
Your boss asks why you were late to work. You tell him or her that traffic was bad. Your boss looks at the traffic records and sees that you left home late because you overslept.
You have a car accident because someone pulls out in front of you. The accident is not caught on tape, but about half a minute earlier, you are caught on tape traveling over the speed limit. The person who pulled out in front of you manages to get you blamed for the wreck even though you were not speeding at the time.
You are a pizza delivery boy. You deliver a pizza to the house of a mob informant. The mob informant is later found dead. The only person seen on video approaching the house (from the front) is you. There are no cameras pointing to the back of the house and no signs of forced entry. Guess who gets charged.
Someone gets murdered in a neighborhood along your drive to work. The neighbors see a person who vaguely matches your description get into a white minivan of unknown make. You also drive a white minivan. You happen to drive past a security camera that puts you a block away from the scene of the crime shortly afterwards, traveling away from the location of the crime. You have no connection with the victim, so you would not have been a suspect otherwise, but now the witnesses pick out your car in a lineup and they arrest you under suspicion of murder.
Put simply, there's a reason that you have to have probable cause for searches and seizures. It is specifically to prevent people who are unlikely to have any association with the crime from being charged due to random circumstance. Cameras significantly increase the risk of random circumstantial evidence being available and being introduced.
Also, the temptation is too great to use these sorts of technologies to try to have perfect prosecution of every crime down to the smallest infraction, which invariably causes serious harm to society. For example, in Eureka, CA, you aren't allowed to kiss a woman if you are wearing a mustache. There are tens or even hundreds of thousands of these silly laws on the books. Were it possible to record everybody doing everything, then everyone would have record of these pointless crimes. Make the wrong person mad and suddenly they can abuse that to fine you $150 for picking up litter in a national forest in New Hampshire... or worse, fine you for driving your car on a Sunday. (Apparently, operating machinery on a Sunday is illegal in New Hampshire.)
And surveillance doesn't generally prevent crime. It just shifts it to some other place that isn't being watched so carefully. It's just like burglar alarms. They don't prevent people from breaking into houses. They just cause people to break into other people's houses. Unless they are ubiquitous, they are useless, and if they are ubiquitous, they are also prone to abuse.
Finally, people tend to act in ways that mimic how they are expected to act. If you treat people like they are law-abiding citizens, most non-sociopaths will behave accordingly. If you treat people like criminals, a fair number of people without any natural criminal tendency will tend to act the part. Don't believe me? Check out the Stanford prison experiment. Thus, a surveillance society is likely to result in a higher crime rate in the long run, not a lower rate.
You roll it back at the point when you catch the bug. If you maintain both in parallel for several months as I suggested, then the odds of missing an important bug are fairly low.
I am assuming nothing. I never suggested a motive for Apple filing for that patent. I merely said I could see two possible positive uses for this patent, and that preventing other companies from doing it would improve the industry as a whole. You disagreed with that statement, which seemed pretty bizarre coming from someone who is anti-advertising. I assume you merely misunderstood me.
First, f you read my original post, you would understand that I said this would be okay if it were used by REAL apps that offer TWO versions, one ad-supported, one not. Not scammers who create an app solely to sell advertising. I think it's safe to say the latter would probably not get past app review in the first place unless it did significantly more than show a bunch of ads, and if an app does do significantly more than show ads, then that means it takes significant time to create the software. You have to factor that into the equation. It's not like they could just turn around and create a new one overnight when people rate it badly.
Second, even if they did sneak a useless app that abused such advertising functionality past app review once, I doubt they would be able to do it twice with the same developer account. So you're basically saying that scammers would repeatedly spend a hundred bucks on new accounts just to gain ad revenue. They would have to sell a LOT of ads to cover that cost. It seems unlikely that they would break even....
No, actually you did, too. I said that by patenting it, they were preventing the use of this concept by other companies in the industry that might use it in really awful ways. I said that this improved the industry. You said that forcing the industry to behave the way I want it (without forced ads for making phone calls, etc.) was not improving the industry. Therefore, you effectively said that you want companies to do things like this in an abusive way. You can't have it both ways....
The fact that you haven't ever owned an iPhone means you don't know what you're talking about. When you have a closed ecosystem like the iPhone with only one app store, ratings can make or break your download rate even for free apps. And when people delete apps from their iPhones, they are asked to rate the apps right then. If they're angry about having been forced to watch a bunch of ads, the app's ratings will decline rapidly, and the app will stop getting downloaded equally rapidly.
Therefore, abuses like you are suggesting would entirely be a self-correcting problem, as I said.
Maybe in some places.... If California did it, though, it would probably not have that effect. Why? For retail businesses, no business can afford to lose more than an eighth of their revenue. For non-retail businesses, the cost of moving is not insignificant, and there are often sizable advantages to this area in terms of being able to attract talented workers. Try starting your computer company in Bucksnort, TN and we'll see if anybody takes you seriously.
Sure, businesses talk big and bluster about how they would leave if their taxes go up. The reality, though, is that these are mostly idle threats, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Worst comes to worst, you might have to progressively introduce these taxation changes over the course of 20 years. If you start to see businesses leaving in droves, then you'd pull back from the edge a bit and don't proceed any further. Easy enough.
Actually, the reverse is likely true. We give tax breaks on corporate income taxes to small businesses precisely to make it easier for new competition to enter the markets. There's no reason for that not to continue.
Further, the smaller shops could be in an even better position than they are now because all of the taxation on the goods they sell would fall under a potentially progressive income tax system instead of an unforgiving flat sales tax.
Finally, it is well understood that regressive taxes like sales tax impact poorer people harder than richer people. The same is true to a lesser degree for companies. Small companies spend most of their income buying stuff. Much of that is stuff that they buy for resale, so they don't pay sales tax on that. However, they do pay sales tax on anything that they buy for use in their business---computers, cash registers, shopping carts, grocery bags, shelves... you name it. When a company starts up, that's a huge chunk of their startup cost.
Small companies, and particularly new companies, pay a disproportionately large amount of their income in sales tax when compared with larger companies. By eliminating that sales tax and replacing it with income tax, even with a flat rate of income tax, smaller companies are still inherently going to pay less and lager companies are going to pay more than they do now. Also, because they can then pass on those lower rates to people who buy from them, it actually helps level the playing field and make it easier for them to compete with other companies that are well established.
While you're at it, how about shifting from regressive taxes that people try to avoid like sales tax and bring in all your revenue from taxes that are easy to audit, hard to avoid, and aren't so highly dependent on the whims of the consumer. If all of our taxes came from taxation on businesses instead of on individuals, we'd have some inflation for a while and would eventually have about the same buying power after taxes, but we wouldn't feel like we were getting screwed by the government. Instead, we'd feel like we were getting screwed by businesses, and we'd see a serious push for more competition and innovation that would drive our economy forward.
Further, people making their money off of the hard work of others would be impacted the hardest because they would see lower returns on their stock options. And people at or near the bottom would have more buying power than they do now, which is good because they're the ones who actually spend money and keep the economy moving.
I dub this plan "trickle down taxation".