...While not being the "you can buy from any store as long as its ours" as you have with iOS, it is quickly going that way. What they are saying is Apple can remotely control which applications/developers are allowed on your Mac by updating a daily database....They are slowly getting more limiting in what they allow their users to do, all in the name of "Security", at the expense of end user freedom. There's also some arguments about the nature of the application development for Apple platforms, including sandboxing (which developers complain limits capability and forces rearchitecting their code), and the registration as a certified developer, for a fee and Apple gets a 30% cut of your sales.
Thats all very exciting but doesn't really match the reality on the ground.
I can write anything I like. Yes, the mac is a proprietary platform so I can't dig around inside kernel datastructures as easily as I could under linux, but I acknowledge that's the price I pay for a proprietary platform. But I can write and sell or distribute for free apps that poke around and use undocumented features, stray outside the sandboxes etc. Apple has made no effort to restrict that over multiple OS releases and I don't see why it would be in their interest to do so. In fact the largest vendors for the Apple platform, Adobe and Microsoft, don't use the app store, don't pay the 30% tax and don't use sandboxed apps.
Some developers do use the app store and some both use it and distribute from their own web site. It's just hard to see how this is a problem.
Apple can be assholes, no question about it: only app store apps can use iCloud -- though it doesn't work well so this is hardly a restriction! -- and yes you have to obey the sandbox restrictions to use the app store. OK.
Oh, and really, is the sandboxing more extreme than linux security domains (e.g. kernel/user space)? In fact it's easier to program for than managing SELINUX. Even though I write code for in house use I stay in the sandboxes too because it helps me write more robust code. But I don't have to if I don't want to.
The walled garden is in apps....As far as app protocols go, you conveniently omit those that would disprove your point, such as iMessage and iBooks.
Err, nothing stops you from using other chat apps. Sadly iMessage isn't open, but neither is Skype (nor apparently google talk any more either) and they don't seem to cause people to froth at the mouth. And there are plenty of jabber clients (actually the apple messages app speaks jabber fine too).
And they have their stupid proprietary book format, but most of the books they sell are ordinary epubs. That's true of the iTunes store -- they prefer their own proprietary lossless format, but you can use all the mp3s you want (and even make them, by jumping through some hoops).
I know this makes me sound like some sort of apple apologist, but I have plenty of reasons to criticize them. I just don't get the "walled garden" thing, at least, when compared to most alternatives. It feels like a lazy trope.
For me the "walls" in OSX relate to the self imposed limitations of the OS itself and the fact that there's very few realistic alternatives to Apple's software for many situations.
If you're running a proprietary OS yes the set of options you can tweak (focus follows mouse) are limited, though the complexity and gratuitous hair (I'm looking at you systems) of Linux limit that too for most if not all people.
I have a ton of third party programs on my mac so I'm not sure what you mean about few realistic alternatives.
I'm not saying this as some rabid mac fan, I just think it sucks less than the desktop alternatives. For servers I use Linux and bsd.
I am puzzled by this common complaint, that the Mac is a "walled garden" (not talking about iOS). I can write any program (mostly I write posix code in fact), and download any app I like from the web. I am really not sure why the Mac is any more a "walled garden" than Windows is. Arguably less, since things like mail are kept in flat ascii files rather than some proprietary database as does Outlook. Mail speaks ordinary IMAP and POP (and has an adaptation for Gmail's aberrant implementation). The calendar can subscribe to various sources, and apple's in house service exports its data in a standard format. So where's the walled garden?
This is not an attempt at starting a flame fest, it's a genuine question.
(I could prefer more support for plug ins (e.g. in itunes) but apple is hardly alone here).
Interesting. <joke>Sounds like the broadcasters should just switch off their towers and collect the cable fees.</joke>
(I assume the fee comes from some sort of "must carry" in the area supposedly reached by the towers, and if they switched off the towers the cable providers would simply drop them.)
If you read the plaintiff's pleading before the court (quoted here):
The decision below has far-reaching adverse consequences for the broadcast television industry, making the need for this Court’s review urgent and acute. The decision already is having a transformative effect on the industry. Industry participants will not and cannot afford to wait for something of this magnitude to percolate before responding to new business realities. And once Aereo’s technology is entrenched and the industry has restructured itself in response, a ruling by this Court in Petitioners’ favor will come too late. The disruption threatened by Aereo will produce changes that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.
They are explicitly saying "our business is changing and we want the courts to stop things because creative destruction is unfair." They are not even pretending that they are trying to do something in the public's interest; they are nakedly asking the court to save the entrenched interest. Pathetic assholes.
I firmly believe that what Aereo does is, strictly speaking, legal, but hardly fair play...
Aereo is essentially a leech on the system.
I can't understand how they could be considered leeches:
They connect viewers to broadcasters that the broadcasters would not otherwise be able to reach, and at no extra cost to the broadcaster
They stand on their heads with this crazy device so that each subscriber has an antenna, same as if the antenna were directly attached to the subscriber's TV.
In what way is this being a "leech"? If anything it's a service to the local broadcaster. In fact if you think of it, if Aero becomes successful, the broadcaster could save money by lowering the broadcast power.
Now to add to the "If dogs ran the world" internet meme [*], if dogs could do architecture, the orientation of the bathroom would be decided first, before anything else.
(holy, err, shit: I looked up "feng shui bathroom" and not only do those clowns talk about bathrooms, the first hit says "Bathrooms do tend to leak energy, as well as easily accumulate lower vibrations". Appropriately, that load of, well, shit, comes from "about.com").
Your ISP can still spoof the DNS responses. That's what hotels do.
But assuming they don't, no reason not to just run your own cacheing DNS resolver on your local network. It's very easy to do and might even be faster than third parties like GOOG, OpenDNS or Nominum. Certainly faster for people who determine your location via DNS resolver address.
(That Hiroku article is bizarre. Tip: "root domain" means something different. You can put a CNAME on any name. And why would one sort require hard coding your IP address???)
...at some point there will be far too much "literature" even in a very narrow academic specialty for any human to make use of...It's not that we need a good ol' roaring book-burning now and then like at Alexandria long ago, but...
Back when I was a pre-computing history undergraduate [*] I did hear some people express the opinion that it was a feature that so much old info was _lost_ — so what was left was managable. For example, it’s quite reasonable to read 100% of the surviving literature in old French — I’ve done it, as have many others — because there’s so little. And so that “language” (really a language in transition over centuries) is super frozen, far more than Latin is. Its grammar is relatively simple because we don’t have examples of several possible tenses.
But fortunately that kind of thinking is fading out. I am sure we will get to the point where programs will simply read the libraries for us, and hardly any (or no) primary sources will be consulted, a la Asimov’s Empire in decline. These tools are already in their nascence, whether they are the google n-gram tool, the facebook, or shotgun sequencing of DNA.
[*] by which I don’t mean that computer science didn’t exist, only that computing had not yet affected the study of history.
War Games featured an IMSAI 8080 with 8" floppies. Why they chose that computer is unknown, since no one really was using those machines by the time of filming.
Because it had a front panel, so it would "look like a computer". Hardly anyone had any home computer so they could have simply used a mockup (like the WOPR) and nobody would have commented, even us nerds.
$10M? For a company (well, a division of EMC, anyway) whose very existence depends on their reputation and ability to keep secrets safe?
RSA was an independent company at the time, and quite small. This was probably a significant deal, especially for the government division.
Plus I believe TFA (can't reload it now) said it was handled by the executives directly; the technical team was not involved. So Jim Bizdos may not even have understood what he was getting into. For if he had I would bet he would have asked for more....
Do you remember that South Park episode where the parents would get their kids with other sick kids for them to also get sick? Well, there is some truth to it...
Strange that that is considered bizarre enough for south park. My mum is an M.D. and when I was a kid she had me go play with one of her patients (a kid) who had chicken pox, so I would get it. (In the 60s, in a small town, there wasn’t much medical privacy...or many doctors).
Why yes, now you ask: I assume she did this to help me, but perhaps my judgement isn't good.
...so I never understood why poor people vote conservative
You appear to subscribe to the idea (going back most famously to Burke) that "the people" will just vote more of others' money to themselves until everything breaks down. Apart from the subtle reasons why that end is not guaranteed, there are perfectly rational reasons not to simply vote the party that offers the most of other peoples' money:
You may believe that taxes are unattainably high (or close thereto), so that you would prefer not to make thinks worse and ultimately lose what benefits you will get.
You believe that you are only temporarily on the receiving end and that you will soon be out of that, so you don't want to support making things worse for you in the future.
You think support is bad, even though you get it yourself (this was the case, for example, of Ayn Rand who happily collected social security etc).
You think most of the benefits are going to people you don't like/don't deserve it (unlike you)/are different and/or you support cuts that affect others.
Variants of these are used by the republicans, and for that matter the democrats too.
In every western democracy I've been in there's a clear cut bias, rich white people vote right and all the multi-coloured worker-bees vote left. Why is the US the opposite?
My personal experience is only in France, Germany, Australia and the US but I think this distinction you describe is clear only in France, if anywhere at all.
His father and grandfather died in the saddle of natural causes.
And actually, unfortunately, plenty of others do too, e.g. Franco, Salazar, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot... And if you include the ones ousted but not killed (e.g. Duvalier, Amin, Pinochet) the list gets even longer.
(not killing dictators is actually important because if killing them is the only way to get rid of them they will hold on more tightly. The means of bribing them by letting them keep some ill-gotten gains is justified by the ends).
I think the key is the word "printer". Look what happened with printing. "Printer" used to be the name of a job (as was "computer") and being a printer was a respectable and valuable trade. Computer printers used to be terrible chain or belt devices. Later they were replaced by the cheaper and about as bad dot matrix systems. But over time they improved, until now the print shops that all big companies and government departments had down in the basement are gone. The printing businesses downtown are mostly gone -- the few that stay in business do specialized tasks.
Cheap, ubiquitous assembly will become common, just as cheap word processing became common. And like word processing I expect more custom and on-demand parts -- perhaps to start just phone cases and replacement parts for that umbrella (the 3D equivalent of early Word Perfect documents with lots of italics). But soon enough we'll print out plenty of stuff that we today would buy, if it is even available, just as we generate all sorts of documents.
And just as with printing, where we print less and less, perhaps we'll use less and less when we can fix or reuse things instead of throwing them all away.
(and to think I used to consider "3D printer" a terminological overreach...at least I can learn from the past)
Seriously, I've had like 5 diseases (measles, mumps, varicella, rubella and influenzaa) as a child...and I'm still alive and quite healthy with ZERO side effects of having had those diseases.
Do you know you've had zero side effects? My dad's heard valve was damaged by measles (no vaccine when he was a kid) and he didn't know until he was in his 50s and it stopped functioning properly.
In any case I've ridden in cars and jet aircraft without seat belts and am still around but that doesn't mean I don't use them when they've available.
Big pharma marketing has apparently been successful in creating a nation of hypochondriacs.
Actually vaccines aren't big moneymakers and in in fact stopped being produced at all in the US until Congress stepped in.
Your subject line raises an interesting point: I'd never before recognized that the Koch brothers' advertising and astroturfing is just a DDoS of the airwaves (and public discourse).
I already knew it is evil, but this takes it to a new level!
Slashdot Mirror
...While not being the "you can buy from any store as long as its ours" as you have with iOS, it is quickly going that way. What they are saying is Apple can remotely control which applications/developers are allowed on your Mac by updating a daily database....They are slowly getting more limiting in what they allow their users to do, all in the name of "Security", at the expense of end user freedom. There's also some arguments about the nature of the application development for Apple platforms, including sandboxing (which developers complain limits capability and forces rearchitecting their code), and the registration as a certified developer, for a fee and Apple gets a 30% cut of your sales.
Thats all very exciting but doesn't really match the reality on the ground.
I can write anything I like. Yes, the mac is a proprietary platform so I can't dig around inside kernel datastructures as easily as I could under linux, but I acknowledge that's the price I pay for a proprietary platform. But I can write and sell or distribute for free apps that poke around and use undocumented features, stray outside the sandboxes etc. Apple has made no effort to restrict that over multiple OS releases and I don't see why it would be in their interest to do so. In fact the largest vendors for the Apple platform, Adobe and Microsoft, don't use the app store, don't pay the 30% tax and don't use sandboxed apps.
Some developers do use the app store and some both use it and distribute from their own web site. It's just hard to see how this is a problem.
Apple can be assholes, no question about it: only app store apps can use iCloud -- though it doesn't work well so this is hardly a restriction! -- and yes you have to obey the sandbox restrictions to use the app store. OK.
Oh, and really, is the sandboxing more extreme than linux security domains (e.g. kernel/user space)? In fact it's easier to program for than managing SELINUX. Even though I write code for in house use I stay in the sandboxes too because it helps me write more robust code. But I don't have to if I don't want to.
The walled garden is in apps....As far as app protocols go, you conveniently omit those that would disprove your point, such as iMessage and iBooks.
Err, nothing stops you from using other chat apps. Sadly iMessage isn't open, but neither is Skype (nor apparently google talk any more either) and they don't seem to cause people to froth at the mouth. And there are plenty of jabber clients (actually the apple messages app speaks jabber fine too).
And they have their stupid proprietary book format, but most of the books they sell are ordinary epubs. That's true of the iTunes store -- they prefer their own proprietary lossless format, but you can use all the mp3s you want (and even make them, by jumping through some hoops).
I know this makes me sound like some sort of apple apologist, but I have plenty of reasons to criticize them. I just don't get the "walled garden" thing, at least, when compared to most alternatives. It feels like a lazy trope.
For me the "walls" in OSX relate to the self imposed limitations of the OS itself and the fact that there's very few realistic alternatives to Apple's software for many situations.
If you're running a proprietary OS yes the set of options you can tweak (focus follows mouse) are limited, though the complexity and gratuitous hair (I'm looking at you systems) of Linux limit that too for most if not all people.
I have a ton of third party programs on my mac so I'm not sure what you mean about few realistic alternatives.
I'm not saying this as some rabid mac fan, I just think it sucks less than the desktop alternatives. For servers I use Linux and bsd.
...attempts to mimic apple's walled garden...
I am puzzled by this common complaint, that the Mac is a "walled garden" (not talking about iOS). I can write any program (mostly I write posix code in fact), and download any app I like from the web. I am really not sure why the Mac is any more a "walled garden" than Windows is. Arguably less, since things like mail are kept in flat ascii files rather than some proprietary database as does Outlook. Mail speaks ordinary IMAP and POP (and has an adaptation for Gmail's aberrant implementation). The calendar can subscribe to various sources, and apple's in house service exports its data in a standard format. So where's the walled garden?
This is not an attempt at starting a flame fest, it's a genuine question.
(I could prefer more support for plug ins (e.g. in itunes) but apple is hardly alone here).
Interesting. <joke>Sounds like the broadcasters should just switch off their towers and collect the cable fees.</joke>
(I assume the fee comes from some sort of "must carry" in the area supposedly reached by the towers, and if they switched off the towers the cable providers would simply drop them.)
If you read the plaintiff's pleading before the court (quoted here):
They are explicitly saying "our business is changing and we want the courts to stop things because creative destruction is unfair." They are not even pretending that they are trying to do something in the public's interest; they are nakedly asking the court to save the entrenched interest. Pathetic assholes.
I firmly believe that what Aereo does is, strictly speaking, legal, but hardly fair play...
Aereo is essentially a leech on the system.
I can't understand how they could be considered leeches:
In what way is this being a "leech"? If anything it's a service to the local broadcaster. In fact if you think of it, if Aero becomes successful, the broadcaster could save money by lowering the broadcast power.
Now to add to the "If dogs ran the world" internet meme [*], if dogs could do architecture, the orientation of the bathroom would be decided first, before anything else.
(holy, err, shit: I looked up "feng shui bathroom" and not only do those clowns talk about bathrooms, the first hit says "Bathrooms do tend to leak energy, as well as easily accumulate lower vibrations". Appropriately, that load of, well, shit, comes from "about.com").
[*] OK OK I know that the Internet is really made of cats but before the feline coup d'etat the dogs had staked out their claim for the internet ur-meme.
Your ISP can still spoof the DNS responses. That's what hotels do.
But assuming they don't, no reason not to just run your own cacheing DNS resolver on your local network. It's very easy to do and might even be faster than third parties like GOOG, OpenDNS or Nominum. Certainly faster for people who determine your location via DNS resolver address.
(That Hiroku article is bizarre. Tip: "root domain" means something different. You can put a CNAME on any name. And why would one sort require hard coding your IP address???)
The prison had such good spammer filtering in place that they couldn't even see him leave....
...at some point there will be far too much "literature" even in a very narrow academic specialty for any human to make use of...It's not that we need a good ol' roaring book-burning now and then like at Alexandria long ago, but ...
Back when I was a pre-computing history undergraduate [*] I did hear some people express the opinion that it was a feature that so much old info was _lost_ — so what was left was managable. For example, it’s quite reasonable to read 100% of the surviving literature in old French — I’ve done it, as have many others — because there’s so little. And so that “language” (really a language in transition over centuries) is super frozen, far more than Latin is. Its grammar is relatively simple because we don’t have examples of several possible tenses.
But fortunately that kind of thinking is fading out. I am sure we will get to the point where programs will simply read the libraries for us, and hardly any (or no) primary sources will be consulted, a la Asimov’s Empire in decline. These tools are already in their nascence, whether they are the google n-gram tool, the facebook, or shotgun sequencing of DNA.
[*] by which I don’t mean that computer science didn’t exist, only that computing had not yet affected the study of history.
In the 1970s, the PDP-8 (plus Decwriter) in Three Days of the Condor was important to the plot, and seemed to be used in a realistic way.
In the 1980s Real Genius featured Symbolics 3600 (Lisp machines) which cult favorites at the time.
War Games featured an IMSAI 8080 with 8" floppies. Why they chose that computer is unknown, since no one really was using those machines by the time of filming.
Because it had a front panel, so it would "look like a computer". Hardly anyone had any home computer so they could have simply used a mockup (like the WOPR) and nobody would have commented, even us nerds.
Demon seed ... say hi.
Is that what it was trying to do? Something of a communication gap there.
Conversation is simply a different kind of "intercourse". The scriptwriters simply became confused, that's all.
$10M? For a company (well, a division of EMC, anyway) whose very existence depends on their reputation and ability to keep secrets safe?
RSA was an independent company at the time, and quite small. This was probably a significant deal, especially for the government division.
Plus I believe TFA (can't reload it now) said it was handled by the executives directly; the technical team was not involved. So Jim Bizdos may not even have understood what he was getting into. For if he had I would bet he would have asked for more....
Oh for mod points: I would mod this "Informative"
Yep, now you just have shingles to look forward to. Thank goodness for vaccines.
The vaccine didn't exist 40 years ago!
Do you remember that South Park episode where the parents would get their kids with other sick kids for them to also get sick? Well, there is some truth to it...
Strange that that is considered bizarre enough for south park. My mum is an M.D. and when I was a kid she had me go play with one of her patients (a kid) who had chicken pox, so I would get it. (In the 60s, in a small town, there wasn’t much medical privacy...or many doctors).
Why yes, now you ask: I assume she did this to help me, but perhaps my judgement isn't good.
Ie, becoming immune to bleach would be sort of like if a bacteria became immune to breaching the cell wall with a needle.
...which is kinda the point of sporulation, or for becoming multicellular for that matter!!
...so I never understood why poor people vote conservative
You appear to subscribe to the idea (going back most famously to Burke) that "the people" will just vote more of others' money to themselves until everything breaks down. Apart from the subtle reasons why that end is not guaranteed, there are perfectly rational reasons not to simply vote the party that offers the most of other peoples' money:
Variants of these are used by the republicans, and for that matter the democrats too.
In every western democracy I've been in there's a clear cut bias, rich white people vote right and all the multi-coloured worker-bees vote left. Why is the US the opposite?
My personal experience is only in France, Germany, Australia and the US but I think this distinction you describe is clear only in France, if anywhere at all.
You seem to be keeping score better than I have
Well, everyone needs a hobby. My other is the Missing Children -- I have quite a collection!
Dictators rarely die of natural causes
His father and grandfather died in the saddle of natural causes.
And actually, unfortunately, plenty of others do too, e.g. Franco, Salazar, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot... And if you include the ones ousted but not killed (e.g. Duvalier, Amin, Pinochet) the list gets even longer.
(not killing dictators is actually important because if killing them is the only way to get rid of them they will hold on more tightly. The means of bribing them by letting them keep some ill-gotten gains is justified by the ends).
I think the key is the word "printer". Look what happened with printing. "Printer" used to be the name of a job (as was "computer") and being a printer was a respectable and valuable trade. Computer printers used to be terrible chain or belt devices. Later they were replaced by the cheaper and about as bad dot matrix systems. But over time they improved, until now the print shops that all big companies and government departments had down in the basement are gone. The printing businesses downtown are mostly gone -- the few that stay in business do specialized tasks.
Cheap, ubiquitous assembly will become common, just as cheap word processing became common. And like word processing I expect more custom and on-demand parts -- perhaps to start just phone cases and replacement parts for that umbrella (the 3D equivalent of early Word Perfect documents with lots of italics). But soon enough we'll print out plenty of stuff that we today would buy, if it is even available, just as we generate all sorts of documents.
And just as with printing, where we print less and less, perhaps we'll use less and less when we can fix or reuse things instead of throwing them all away.
(and to think I used to consider "3D printer" a terminological overreach...at least I can learn from the past)
Seriously, I've had like 5 diseases (measles, mumps, varicella, rubella and influenzaa) as a child...and I'm still alive and quite healthy with ZERO side effects of having had those diseases.
Do you know you've had zero side effects? My dad's heard valve was damaged by measles (no vaccine when he was a kid) and he didn't know until he was in his 50s and it stopped functioning properly.
In any case I've ridden in cars and jet aircraft without seat belts and am still around but that doesn't mean I don't use them when they've available.
Big pharma marketing has apparently been successful in creating a nation of hypochondriacs.
Actually vaccines aren't big moneymakers and in in fact stopped being produced at all in the US until Congress stepped in.
Your subject line raises an interesting point: I'd never before recognized that the Koch brothers' advertising and astroturfing is just a DDoS of the airwaves (and public discourse).
I already knew it is evil, but this takes it to a new level!