> We are starting now to see the 'power of Java' (read fragmentation) with Verizon pushing their version of Android, Google/Nexus One another, HTC Sense another. Welcome to the world of (slow - for now) Java on mobile.
Total FUD. The fragmentation "issue" on android has nothing whatsoever to do with Java. It's a side effect of *freedom* and *choice*, something that is naturally hard for Apple enthusiasts to understand.
Java performance on Android is absolutely top notch - to the point where almost nobody bothers to use the NDK because there's almost never a need to.
All these arguments about JVM security are complete FUD. Android happily supports and ecosystem where multiple apps run together and work just fine. Apple could clearly have pulled this off if they wanted to, it's not about technology. They just don't want to because they are about lock-in, control and money for Apple first, openness and freedom second.
> put the available feature set and performance of applications behind a bottleneck that Apple does not control
Ah, excuse #2. Except that Apple makes the JVM for Macs, so presumably they would for iPhoneOS too. They could control any performance aspect they like of it.
Just face up to it: Apple simply doesn't want any technology that undermines total and absolute control of their OS for *commercial* reasons.
Just like Apple can revoke the key of a single application in the app store, so to can the key of an applet or webstart application be revoked. In fact, java applications can be signed down to jar file level.
Ability to revoke individual applications is not a reason to refuse java. And since Apple themselves produce the JVM on Macs neither is the excuse about needing to control security. They can issue a patch any time they like for their own JVM.
The part about how bad flash was because it was not touch aware was sickening. The entire web is not touch aware. Rollover effects are a mainstay of nearly every modern web site. Steve created a device that doesn't support a basic feature of the modern web. He then got up on stage an paraded around extolling how his device was "the entire web". And now he singles out a single web technology and blames it for not supporting his device. There are levels upon levels of hypocrisy in this man.
The most striking thing about Steve's post was how weak and lame it actually comes across. Like the popular guy when a new cool kid comes along and all his friends leave and stands there saying "Guys... guys... uh... guys?"
> I guess I've been deluding myself... I thought Apple wanted to kill flash for the same reasons everyone else wants to...
Yep, you've been deluding yourself. Apple wants no flash on the iPhoneOS because they want 100% control of the app store and platform - both for commercial (profit,$$$) and aesthetic reasons.
Just ask yourself this simple question: if Flash had been supported on the iPhone from day 1, how many of those apps now in the app store would instead be cross platform Flash apps, available to desktop, blackberries, symbian, android, etc.? My guess is that fully 70% of the apps currently in the app store would be absent.
It's not fraud. They explicitly tell you in their terms of use that they may change their terms of use any time they like. They are totally 100% up front about it. It couldn't be less fraudulent.
Furthermore, these kind of clauses are included in TOS as a kind of necessity to limit liability. Companies need the ability to change or place limits on how their services are used if and when they find people abusing them in unexpected ways. If we could not have such agreements it would be nearly impossible to start small online companies of any kind.
This kind of clause trades on a pact of trust between the user and the service provider. The user "trusts" the service provider not to do anything "evil" with the power that they give them. The problem here is that, just like Wall st and the banks, it turns out that the "free market" that lets people ditch the service when it *does* abuse the trust doesn't seem to be working. People do not leave Facebook when it turns hostile on them - they have no choice, because all their data, friends and social life are bound up in it.
If there is to be regulation, I would like it to be around data portability. If a service collects data provided by a user then it *must* provide an open and transparent way to export that data in a machine readable format. This would allow alternative Facebooks to spring up and then we'd truly see a competition between who has the best service that is most in the consumer's interest.
> most of the Facebook users didn't closed their account when it happened.
Which is actually a cousin of the problem that Facebook is a walled garden that sucks information in but won't let it out. If people could just hit an 'export' button (or an 'import' button at another site) and get everything out of Facebook and maintain their existing connections then people probably would leave. But they can't, so they don't.
And this is why most of us geeks keep whining about 'portability' and 'walled gardens' and getting dismissed as a annoying whining geeks all the time. But this is where it matters, in the end.
Wow, as a fellow N1 owner I have no issues with the touch screen or the bluetooth. Perhaps I'm still in the honeymoon phase with the phone (only 1 month old), but I really can't correlate with anything you said. The only thing that's an obvious disadvantage to the iPhone is the lack of "polish" in certain areas - but the additional functions more than make up for that.
> Of course they want to sell a lot of Nexus One's (and reap the cash rewards of that success)
Actually, I've come to the conclusion that they want Nexus one to fill a specific niche and to set a bar for the quality of what they expect out of other manufacturers, but they are not trying to actually take over the world or to really make a lot of money with it. The whole point of it is to inspire HTC and other vendors to come out with *better* phones than the N1 which sell *more* and therefore raise the quality of the whole ecosystem. If the N1 turns out to be just a minority player because all the other android phones are better then I think Google will consider it a success.
> You load an entire Java VM, and an interpreted language on top of that, just to create a systray notification?
Sure, why not? Scripting has never been about efficiency. It takes about 150ms to kickstart the JVM so I certainly wouldn't put it in the middle of a tight loop, but for a notification at the end of (or during) a long running script it's no problem. The main point is it's cross platform and simple and a handy tool to throw in your toolbox.
You can't compare a language to a framework. There are lots of nice light weight frameworks for Java that make web development quite pleasant. (Stripes is one, for example). The Java language is a bit cumbersome, but given the options for running other languages on the JVM this should not steer anyone away from the Java ecosystem which is awesome for everything server side.
One of my recent discoveries has been using Groovy to add UI effects to scripts, via the Java libraries it has access to. For example, if a script completes, it's really easy to add a notification to the system tray:
What I don't understand about this notion of "monopoly" is that it depends totally on what market segment you pick. For example, Apple has a monopoly on app stores for iPhone OS. Nobody else can make one. They can set their app store margins without regard for what competitors are doing, because there are no competitors. Yet they are not considered a monopoly of app stores for iPhone OS. They are also a monopoly with respect to browser software on iPhone OS. If you zoom in enough on any aspect of a company's business they will usually turn out to have a monopoly somewhere. It's just the nature of a competitive market place. Alternatively if you zoom out enough nobody will have a monopoly. Microsoft may have had a "monopoly" over operating systems software, but if we zoom out and ask if they had a monopoly over the IT industry the answer would probably be no, because there are so many areas they don't even compete in (eg: motherboards).
So who chooses how far we zoom in or out in deciding if someone is a monopolist?
> To me, it makes no sense to tax the artificial economic entity
Well, there's your problem. The supreme court says they aren't artificial - they have all the rights of people. Oh except they are super human, immortal, can be in hundreds or thousands of places at the same time, etc. So perhaps I agree with you that we shouldn't tax them, but only if you also abolish all the rights of corporations at the same time (rights to own property, patents, etc.)
As long as they assert to have the rights of invdividuals I think they should be taxed as individuals, including having their "location" for tax purposes determined by the base of their economic activity and not by some arbitrary decision made to optimize tax.
Well, you're engaging in a whole different argument about whether passive pedophilia is dangerous or not. You appear have a view about that. It doesn't really matter. Linking the argument against censorship to the notion that consumption of child sex abuse material is harmless would be horrifically destructive to the cause. It would alienate a substantial portion of people who are against censorship and validate the bizarre accusation that continually gets made that people opposing the filter are sympathetic to child abusers.
The problem is that it *may* work. As in, they will turn it on, filtering 500 web sites, tell the populace that they are now safe from internet child porn and the ignorant masses will notice nothing different and vote for the government for doing the right thing.
Nobody will notice that it is completely ineffective, or that it entrenches use of secure P2P channels by pedophiles so that it becomes infinitely harder to track them down. Nobody will give the slightest thought to the fact that infrastructure is now in place for a future government to do any kind of censorship or even monitoring and interception that it wants. It won't be for 10 years until anybody notices anything bad about this whole thing. And by the time bad things do happen, Conroy and the whole crowd who vote this thing in will be long gone.
The problem is that web site polls are massively biased towards tech savvy people who understand what a load of rubbish this idea is. When they do more general polls they come up with 70% in favor. I really hope that it starts to change as people understand more of the details of the filter policy and just how bad it is (it's not just generically bad - it's bad even amongst censorship policies. Even people in favor of internet censorship should oppose this particular version of it).
You can do even better than that. I've reported the ACMA web site to ACMA because it contains a dangerous conspiracy to overthrow democracy in Australia by restricting free speech. The actually even processed the request and sent me a response. I think reporting their web site to themselves is a good way to protest. If we can get it reported some thousands of times by separate individuals then we can start to ask why this web site is still legal when it is offensive to thousands of Australians. Go do it.
I don't think so. I think even the bare mention of this at diplomatic levels will have more effect than all the protest from the Australian public put together. Censorship is a big deal in the US right now because of Google and China and Australia going ahead with it will make it measurably more difficult for US companies in China because China will (and already has) cited Australia as an example to defend their policy.
> It's MY data... give it to ME, and let ME decide what to do with it.
Do you realize that you have everything you want? health providers are legally mandated to give you your health data under HIPAA. Just walk in and tell them you are making a request for a copy of your records as obliged under HIPAA.
Then you can sit back contemplate the stack of random paper and obscure electronic binary formats that they give you and wonder how to read it, and you will realize that the actual problem here is about formats and standardization, not access.
> If we could have some sort of quality assurance for the applications, OS, and hardware that are keeping track of these records
Your QA is called HIPAA and it enforces a whole slew of requirements on to software vendors who supply software that manages medical information.
The interesting issue, however, is that Google sidestepped HIPAA and forces users to voluntarily move their records out side of it. The requirements of HIPAA are very sane and simple - stuff like data should be transferred over SSL, data at rest should be encrypted, passwords should not be shared, etc. The fact that Google chose not to be HIPAA compliant is quite strange to me. I can understand they do not want to be sued or taken to court (criminal liability). However it really doesn't look convincing that they won't do the simple things outlined in HIPAA.
I find "cannot afford" argument an interesting one. I want to do brain surgery but I "cannot afford" the proper equipment, liability insurance or to go to medical school. Does that make it ok for me to just go ahead and do it?
The real argument is that the DMCA safe harbour provisions should cover them. That coverage may be contingent on the practicality argument, and perhaps that is why the argument gets made. However in and of itself, being unable to afford to do something really buys you nothing in and of itself. If you can't afford to do something in a way compliant with the law then you just shouldn't do it. You have to have something more. In this case, it's the DMCA, and that is what the real argument is about.
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> We are starting now to see the 'power of Java' (read fragmentation) with Verizon pushing their version of Android, Google/Nexus One another, HTC Sense another. Welcome to the world of (slow - for now) Java on mobile.
Total FUD. The fragmentation "issue" on android has nothing whatsoever to do with Java. It's a side effect of *freedom* and *choice*, something that is naturally hard for Apple enthusiasts to understand.
Java performance on Android is absolutely top notch - to the point where almost nobody bothers to use the NDK because there's almost never a need to.
All these arguments about JVM security are complete FUD. Android happily supports and ecosystem where multiple apps run together and work just fine. Apple could clearly have pulled this off if they wanted to, it's not about technology. They just don't want to because they are about lock-in, control and money for Apple first, openness and freedom second.
> put the available feature set and performance of applications behind a bottleneck that Apple does not control
Ah, excuse #2. Except that Apple makes the JVM for Macs, so presumably they would for iPhoneOS too. They could control any performance aspect they like of it.
Just face up to it: Apple simply doesn't want any technology that undermines total and absolute control of their OS for *commercial* reasons.
You need to learn a little bit about signing.
Just like Apple can revoke the key of a single application in the app store, so to can the key of an applet or webstart application be revoked. In fact, java applications can be signed down to jar file level.
Ability to revoke individual applications is not a reason to refuse java. And since Apple themselves produce the JVM on Macs neither is the excuse about needing to control security. They can issue a patch any time they like for their own JVM.
100% right.
The part about how bad flash was because it was not touch aware was sickening. The entire web is not touch aware. Rollover effects are a mainstay of nearly every modern web site. Steve created a device that doesn't support a basic feature of the modern web. He then got up on stage an paraded around extolling how his device was "the entire web". And now he singles out a single web technology and blames it for not supporting his device. There are levels upon levels of hypocrisy in this man.
The most striking thing about Steve's post was how weak and lame it actually comes across. Like the popular guy when a new cool kid comes along and all his friends leave and stands there saying "Guys... guys... uh... guys?"
> I guess I've been deluding myself... I thought Apple wanted to kill flash for the same reasons everyone else wants to...
Yep, you've been deluding yourself. Apple wants no flash on the iPhoneOS because they want 100% control of the app store and platform - both for commercial (profit,$$$) and aesthetic reasons.
Just ask yourself this simple question: if Flash had been supported on the iPhone from day 1, how many of those apps now in the app store would instead be cross platform Flash apps, available to desktop, blackberries, symbian, android, etc.? My guess is that fully 70% of the apps currently in the app store would be absent.
It's not fraud. They explicitly tell you in their terms of use that they may change their terms of use any time they like. They are totally 100% up front about it. It couldn't be less fraudulent.
Furthermore, these kind of clauses are included in TOS as a kind of necessity to limit liability. Companies need the ability to change or place limits on how their services are used if and when they find people abusing them in unexpected ways. If we could not have such agreements it would be nearly impossible to start small online companies of any kind.
This kind of clause trades on a pact of trust between the user and the service provider. The user "trusts" the service provider not to do anything "evil" with the power that they give them. The problem here is that, just like Wall st and the banks, it turns out that the "free market" that lets people ditch the service when it *does* abuse the trust doesn't seem to be working. People do not leave Facebook when it turns hostile on them - they have no choice, because all their data, friends and social life are bound up in it.
If there is to be regulation, I would like it to be around data portability. If a service collects data provided by a user then it *must* provide an open and transparent way to export that data in a machine readable format. This would allow alternative Facebooks to spring up and then we'd truly see a competition between who has the best service that is most in the consumer's interest.
> most of the Facebook users didn't closed their account when it happened.
Which is actually a cousin of the problem that Facebook is a walled garden that sucks information in but won't let it out. If people could just hit an 'export' button (or an 'import' button at another site) and get everything out of Facebook and maintain their existing connections then people probably would leave. But they can't, so they don't.
And this is why most of us geeks keep whining about 'portability' and 'walled gardens' and getting dismissed as a annoying whining geeks all the time. But this is where it matters, in the end.
Wow, as a fellow N1 owner I have no issues with the touch screen or the bluetooth. Perhaps I'm still in the honeymoon phase with the phone (only 1 month old), but I really can't correlate with anything you said. The only thing that's an obvious disadvantage to the iPhone is the lack of "polish" in certain areas - but the additional functions more than make up for that.
> Of course they want to sell a lot of Nexus One's (and reap the cash rewards of that success)
Actually, I've come to the conclusion that they want Nexus one to fill a specific niche and to set a bar for the quality of what they expect out of other manufacturers, but they are not trying to actually take over the world or to really make a lot of money with it. The whole point of it is to inspire HTC and other vendors to come out with *better* phones than the N1 which sell *more* and therefore raise the quality of the whole ecosystem. If the N1 turns out to be just a minority player because all the other android phones are better then I think Google will consider it a success.
Sure, why not? Scripting has never been about efficiency. It takes about 150ms to kickstart the JVM so I certainly wouldn't put it in the middle of a tight loop, but for a notification at the end of (or during) a long running script it's no problem. The main point is it's cross platform and simple and a handy tool to throw in your toolbox.
You can't compare a language to a framework. There are lots of nice light weight frameworks for Java that make web development quite pleasant. (Stripes is one, for example). The Java language is a bit cumbersome, but given the options for running other languages on the JVM this should not steer anyone away from the Java ecosystem which is awesome for everything server side.
One of my recent discoveries has been using Groovy to add UI effects to scripts, via the Java libraries it has access to. For example, if a script completes, it's really easy to add a notification to the system tray:
def image = Toolkit.defaultToolkit.getImage("some_image.png")
def trayIcon = new TrayIcon(image,"Script")
SystemTray.systemTray.add(trayIcon)
trayIcon.displayMessage("Script Completed", "", TrayIcon.MessageType.INFO)
What I don't understand about this notion of "monopoly" is that it depends totally on what market segment you pick. For example, Apple has a monopoly on app stores for iPhone OS. Nobody else can make one. They can set their app store margins without regard for what competitors are doing, because there are no competitors. Yet they are not considered a monopoly of app stores for iPhone OS. They are also a monopoly with respect to browser software on iPhone OS. If you zoom in enough on any aspect of a company's business they will usually turn out to have a monopoly somewhere. It's just the nature of a competitive market place. Alternatively if you zoom out enough nobody will have a monopoly. Microsoft may have had a "monopoly" over operating systems software, but if we zoom out and ask if they had a monopoly over the IT industry the answer would probably be no, because there are so many areas they don't even compete in (eg: motherboards). So who chooses how far we zoom in or out in deciding if someone is a monopolist?
So, Mark, you say Facebook have a reasonable expectation for privacy of its data? Isn't privacy passe now? Or did I hear you wrong?
Well, there's your problem. The supreme court says they aren't artificial - they have all the rights of people. Oh except they are super human, immortal, can be in hundreds or thousands of places at the same time, etc. So perhaps I agree with you that we shouldn't tax them, but only if you also abolish all the rights of corporations at the same time (rights to own property, patents, etc.)
As long as they assert to have the rights of invdividuals I think they should be taxed as individuals, including having their "location" for tax purposes determined by the base of their economic activity and not by some arbitrary decision made to optimize tax.
Well, you're engaging in a whole different argument about whether passive pedophilia is dangerous or not. You appear have a view about that. It doesn't really matter. Linking the argument against censorship to the notion that consumption of child sex abuse material is harmless would be horrifically destructive to the cause. It would alienate a substantial portion of people who are against censorship and validate the bizarre accusation that continually gets made that people opposing the filter are sympathetic to child abusers.
Nobody will notice that it is completely ineffective, or that it entrenches use of secure P2P channels by pedophiles so that it becomes infinitely harder to track them down. Nobody will give the slightest thought to the fact that infrastructure is now in place for a future government to do any kind of censorship or even monitoring and interception that it wants. It won't be for 10 years until anybody notices anything bad about this whole thing. And by the time bad things do happen, Conroy and the whole crowd who vote this thing in will be long gone.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
The problem is that web site polls are massively biased towards tech savvy people who understand what a load of rubbish this idea is. When they do more general polls they come up with 70% in favor. I really hope that it starts to change as people understand more of the details of the filter policy and just how bad it is (it's not just generically bad - it's bad even amongst censorship policies. Even people in favor of internet censorship should oppose this particular version of it).
You can do even better than that. I've reported the ACMA web site to ACMA because it contains a dangerous conspiracy to overthrow democracy in Australia by restricting free speech. The actually even processed the request and sent me a response. I think reporting their web site to themselves is a good way to protest. If we can get it reported some thousands of times by separate individuals then we can start to ask why this web site is still legal when it is offensive to thousands of Australians. Go do it.
I don't think so. I think even the bare mention of this at diplomatic levels will have more effect than all the protest from the Australian public put together. Censorship is a big deal in the US right now because of Google and China and Australia going ahead with it will make it measurably more difficult for US companies in China because China will (and already has) cited Australia as an example to defend their policy.
Do you realize that you have everything you want? health providers are legally mandated to give you your health data under HIPAA. Just walk in and tell them you are making a request for a copy of your records as obliged under HIPAA.
Then you can sit back contemplate the stack of random paper and obscure electronic binary formats that they give you and wonder how to read it, and you will realize that the actual problem here is about formats and standardization, not access.
Your QA is called HIPAA and it enforces a whole slew of requirements on to software vendors who supply software that manages medical information.
The interesting issue, however, is that Google sidestepped HIPAA and forces users to voluntarily move their records out side of it. The requirements of HIPAA are very sane and simple - stuff like data should be transferred over SSL, data at rest should be encrypted, passwords should not be shared, etc. The fact that Google chose not to be HIPAA compliant is quite strange to me. I can understand they do not want to be sued or taken to court (criminal liability). However it really doesn't look convincing that they won't do the simple things outlined in HIPAA.
The real argument is that the DMCA safe harbour provisions should cover them. That coverage may be contingent on the practicality argument, and perhaps that is why the argument gets made. However in and of itself, being unable to afford to do something really buys you nothing in and of itself. If you can't afford to do something in a way compliant with the law then you just shouldn't do it. You have to have something more. In this case, it's the DMCA, and that is what the real argument is about.