many of us stand to lose something personal that matters to us.
?? Really? Where's your local backup? YT is a distribution system. If YT (or your other cloud provider) goes bust/away for a day/ever, then you're back to sneakernet or torrents or floppies or something.
At least when it came to my own situation, I wasn't talking exclusively about the content itself with that comment. I was talking about the whole package of what YouTube provides, as well as the sunk cost in terms of the time we've spent setting things up how they are now. As you said, it's an easy distribution system, which is in large part because it's available via the most ubiquitous delivery platform in the history of humanity (the world wide web). Having that level of availability is incredibly important given that we're serving an audience that includes college students and centenarians. You mention floppies and torrents, but those aren't viable distribution options if you're trying to reach a general audience with video, which I suspect you already knew.
Sneakernet is more viable, and up until a few years ago that was actually how we did things, but it was feasible at the time because we were only doing audio. We simply burned a few cassettes/CDs after the service and handed them off to family members or others who would be seeing the infirm that week. It generally worked, but it took a lot of manpower (e.g. babysitting burners, delivery, etc.), had ongoing material costs (even the cost of CDs gets scrutinized at cash-strapped churches, not to mention the cost of duplicators/burners), and only the sermon audio was included (see the previous post regarding CCLI licensing). It was worse in pretty much every way than what we have today, since equipment would break down and family members would frequently either lose the CD or forget to hand them off to the people who needed them.
If we wanted to go back to sneakernet today while maintaining video, however, it'd be worse. Burning video to DVDs takes substantially longer, meaning we likely wouldn't be able to have the DVDs ready right after the service. At that point, we'd need to figure out some sort of alternative way to deliver things (e.g. have dedicated delivery people?). Relatedly, while we got a lot of pushback when we moved from cassettes to CDs around 1999, there wasn't even a peep when we stopped burning CDs and started pointing people to the MP3s on the website in 2017. Virtually everyone has a connection to the Internet at this point (if for no other reason than to be able to FaceTime/Skype with grandkids) or else has a family member who visits with a smartphone, but we still have church members who never saw a point in upgrading from VHS and whose eyes glaze over if you mention Windows Media Player or VLC. You can give them a link and they'll be fine, but hand them a DVD and they'll wonder why it doesn't work in their CD player.
There's a massive cost and convenience savings that comes from being able to just tell everyone "go to the church website and click on the video you want to watch". Theoretically, we could switch to Vimeo or another hosting site, as you suggested, but that wouldn't be an insignificant cost to us in terms of hours spent reuploading, retagging, and relinking videos. Calling it a hassle is putting it lightly.
I'd think that there would be a ton of christian music out of copyright, it's not like christian music is a recent invention.
That's true, but then you're limiting yourself to hymns, more or less. That's fine if the church is going for a more traditional style of worship, but a lot of churches prefer either a mixed or contemporary style, both of which will almost certainly incorporate more recent songs.
But yes, I quite agree that the copyright situation is out of hand. I'm actually a big fan of the idea I've seen floated in the comments around here before, where the base term is reduced to something like 14 years, there's the option to extend every few years for as long as the rights holder wants, but each extension costs exponentially more than the last. It forces people to either use those rights productively (i.e. get their money's worth) or else release the rights to the public domain, either of which is a net win for society.
For songs not in the public domain, yeah. The classic hymns are pretty much all in the public domain, so you can sing Amazing Grace or what have you, but try to sing anything from basically the last century and you'll need a CCLI license. From what I recall, their prices are actually fairly reasonable, since they understand that their target audience generally isn't flush with cash.
You do realize that YouTube is used by people for all sorts of reasons, right?
A few years back, a plumber I called out was telling me about posting videos on YouTube. His business was already doing just fine, but he was passionate about plumbing and wanted to see more people feel comfortable doing simple repairs. Let's suppose that he talked to a musician and procured the rights to use one of their tracks as a backing track for his videos. A few months later, what's to stop someone else with the rights to that music from making a claim against him? Enough fo those, and all of his videos could be taken down.
There were reports just last week of a Star Wars video that had its audio stripped out (to highlight the importance of John Williams' music) getting hit with a copyright strike by a company that has some of the rights to Star Wars music, despite the fact that all of the audio had been subbed for sounds the video's author made himself.
For me, this stuff actually matters.
Besides posting YouTube videos for fun with some friends (we have a few thousand subscribers to our Let's Play channel, but have turned off monetization since we're just in it for fun), I also post sermon videos for the church I attend. They're nothing fancy, but it's something we can do to include ill and infirm people in the weekly happenings of the church. We've recently been talking about livestreaming, as well as expanding it to cover the entire service. Expanding it would mean needing to procure the rights to stream musical performances for the various hymns and choruses we sing (we're already properly licensed to perform them, just not to stream those performances). Licensing for Christian music almost always goes through the CCLI, but there are a lot of new musicians cropping up all the time, and it's conceivable that not all of them understand the intricacies of licensing. It's conceivable as well that despite being properly licensed to perform and stream a performance of a song, some artist or other rights holder may be unaware of our license with the CCLI and initiate a strike against us, or else some ne'er-do-well may try to extort us.
Given that we risk losing access to years' worth of prior content, these aren't small questions. What happens to my plumber's videos or my church's videos may be small potatoes to you, but multiply that by everyone else at risk and it becomes clear that many of us stand to lose something personal that matters to us.
Hold up. There's a very important adjective missing from anything you've just said: informed. Where was the informed consent?
Sure, users may be willing to consent, but how many of them actually understood what they were consenting to? Is it valid consent if the other person mumbles inaudibly that they have HIV? Is it valid consent if Facebook buries in the middle of 400 pages of legalese that they'll have unfettered access to absolutely everything you do on the device, not just your browsing? And given that this consent takes the form of a provision profile, how much of it was actually reaffirmed after the GDPR went into effect?
Separately, how many users even knew who they were getting into bed with in the first place? TechCrunch listed off a number of other companies that lured users in on behalf of Facebook. It wasn't until the last stage of signing up that there was any indication whatsoever that Facebook was involved in any capacity. That's like consenting to have sex with one person, but right as you're about to do the deed, they turn off the lights and pull a switcheroo with a disease-riddled prostitute. If you happened to be looking at just the right moment, you might have caught it and had a chance to say "no". Otherwise, however, the only way you'd find out is if someone put a light on the situation.
(Quick aside: I have far less to complain about Google's handling of this situation than Facebook's. Google abused their enterprise license by allowing customers to use the app, so they're not in the clear there, but they acknowledged the error and took the app down immediately when news broke. It also sounds like your (current? former?) employer never requested as much access in the first place, thus reducing the severity of any privacy violations that may have taken place.)
So why is that restriction in place? It doesn't need to be.
Your statement is predicated on a willingness to compromise certain priorities. I presume Apple wants to provide certain minimum guarantees with regards to reliability and security and that they view those restrictions as a necessity in order to provide them. If that's the case, then they have no choice but to have those restrictions in place. You may think otherwise, but that seems to be because your priorities are misaligned with theirs, so you're having trouble understanding their perspective.
If I want to run a Facebook app on it, that's my business. Not Apple's.
Asserting a falsehood does not make it true, but if you think that it should be true that the apps you install are your business and yours alone, there are different platforms making different tradeoffs that would almost certainly better align with the ideology you're expressing. It sounds like you'd be better served going with one of them. I don't say that dismissively. I'm genuinely suggesting that I think it'd be the best course of action for you.
Predicting that a market would become saturated isn't remarkable in the least. It's been a foregone conclusion ever since it became clear that smartphones were replacing dumb phones. Predicting when, however? Kudos to you if you were accurately predicting this timing as far back as the iPhone 4. That said, I think you may be a bit off when it comes to your notion that consumers see no difference between iOS and Android, and that's true regardless of which platform you favor.
Both iOS and Android have retention rates around or above 90%, suggesting that consumers are very loyal to (or locked in by, depending on your views) their platform of choice. If the number of differentiating factors was decreasing, as you suggest, we would expect to see a drop-off in retention rates, but instead what we've been seeing these last few years is an increase for both platforms. Contrary to your notion that each side is nothing special, it would seem that people have chosen their platforms and most of them can't see themselves switching.
By "pulled for any reason", you apparently mean "flagrantly disregarded the cardinal rule of the license, which is spelled out in plain language in the subtitle, first paragraph, second paragraph, definitions, appropriate use section, etc. of the license to which they agreed". The license Facebook agreed to is subtitled "for in-house, internal use applications". It really couldn't be any clearer. You can make apps for internal use, so long as they remain internal.
I'd be freaking out if my enterprise app was based in i devices right now.
Why? Are you breaking the cardinal rule of the license as well? Apple continues to let companies make internal apps to do anything those companies feel like, so long as those apps remain internal. Facebook broke the cardinal rule, so their certificate was revoked. No one using the license in good faith is in any sort of danger here.
Apple didn't ban Facebook's app because it was spying on users or because it was offensive. Apple banned Facebook's app because it was being used by end users. Except in some VERY narrow cases that don't apply here, end users are expressly forbidden from using apps licensed under the terms of the Apple Developer Enterprise License Agreement—which is appropriately subtitled "(for in-house, internal use applications)"—that Facebook agreed to.
Companies are welcome to make anything they want for internal purposes, be it an app for inventory management, an app to order food from the in-house cafeteria, or an app to make coordinating human sacrifices to Satan easier, so long as the app remains internal. Facebook broke that cardinal rule.
Replying to myself since a lot of people seem to be under the woefully incorrect impression that Apple's license terms are in some way vague about this stuff. They aren't. Not at all. Facebook agreed to the Apple Developer Enterprise License Agreement, which—I can't make this stuff up—is actually subtitled "(for in-house, internal use applications)". I'm not even kidding. And it appears it was last updated in October, well before this scandal made the news.
Emphasis is mine unless otherwise noted.
The Purpose section, right at the top of the document, starts with:
Your company [...] would like to use the Apple Software (as defined below) to develop one or more Internal Use Applications (as defined below) for Apple-branded products[...] and to deploy these Applications only for internal use within Your company [...]
In the very next paragraph is this note:
Note: This Program is for internal use, custom applications that are developed by You for Your specific business purposes and only for use by Your employees and, in limited cases, by certain other parties as set forth herein.
So how do they define "Internal Use Application"? Like this:
“Internal Use Application” means a software program [...] that is developed by You on a custom basis for Your own business purposes (e.g., an inventory app specific to Your business) [...] and solely for internal use by Your Employees or Permitted Users, or as otherwise expressly permitted in Section 2.1(f). Except as otherwise expressly permitted herein, specifically excluded from Internal Use Applications are any programs or applications that may be used, distributed, or otherwise made available to other companies, contractors [...], distributors, vendors, resellers, end-users or members of the general public.
So, basically, you can't distribute your apps outside your company. But just in case someone thinks they're being sly with mention of "Permitted Users" and "Section 2.1(f)":
“Permitted Users” means employees and contractors of Your Permitted Entity who have written and binding agreements with You or Your Permitted Entity to protect Your Internal Use Application from unauthorized use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.
I.e. Not the sorts of people who were using the app in question. Not at all. And what about Section 2.1(f)? Section 2.1 lists out the comprehensive set of acceptable uses. They basically boil down to these: - 2.1(a)(b)(c)(d)(g): Developers/testers working on the app are allowed to do typical developer/tester stuff for development/testing purposes - 2.1(e): Your company's employees can install provisioning profiles to use the app for internal use only - 2.1(f): Your customers can use the app, but only when they are "on [y]our physical premises" or under "the direct supervision and physical control of [y]our [e]mployees"
And then right after that section, they add:
Except as set forth in Section 2.1, You may not use, distribute or otherwise make Your Internal Use Applications available to Your Customers or to any third parties in any way
All of which is to say, Apple really couldn't get more explicit about the fact that this license is only for internal use only, which Facebook was grossly and flagrantly violating. The only way they couldn't have known better was if Facebook literally skipped the bolded subtitle of the document, the first paragraph, the second paragraph, all of the definitions of terms, and a section that was pointed to numerous times throughout the document that spells out appropriate uses.
You make it sound as if Apple arbitrarily reached out and nuked an app. They didn’t. They nuked a app that showed a flagrant disregard for the rules that everyone had agreed to.
Facebook broke specific terms in the license that say enterprise apps are expressly disallowed from being used by customers unless they are being supervised physically by an employee or are being operated on the company’s premises. Facebook made no attempt at abiding by the rules and engaged in behavior that many people are suggesting may actually have been criminal in nature.
But hey, if you want to shill for them and blame Apple, go ahead.
Eh, shuffling 200 people (reports said “laid off” in the headlines, but then said they would be moved within the company, which isn’t what a layoff is) off a multi-thousand person project isn’t exactly winding down to me, especially considering they just promoted a new guy to be over it. Sounds more like a restructuring to better fit the new guy’s preferred approach.
But yeah, their current markets are basically saturated. It’s a question now of whether or not they can figure out what’s next and reinvent the company once again or not.
Yeah, it's their second most profitable quarter ever, second only to their year-ago quarter, which was the most profitable quarter in history, not just for Apple, but for any company ever.
Doomed!
If only we could all be doomed so successfully...
Sarcasm aside, they actually are doomed in the grand scheme of things, the same as Sears was doomed 50 years ago. This may be what we look back on in 10 or 20 years and say was "peak Apple", but it's hard to say anything with certainty now.
That doesn't make sense, and doesn't even align with other review sites (7.4 out of 10 on IMDB) but 98% on RT.
Actually, it does, but you're confused because you're comparing apples to oranges and expecting things to match.
IMDb is a wiki and its scores are based solely on user reviews, whereas Rotten Tomatoes uses critic reviews for its top-line rating. Apples and oranges. That doesn't mean Rotten Tomatoes lacks user reviews, however. In fact, if you check the Audience Score for Lady Bird on Rotten Tomatoes, you'll see that it's at 79%, pretty much spot-on with IMDb's 7.4/10.
You clearly prefer user reviews. I actually find them to be a rather mediocre indication of a film's quality, particularly when it comes to blockbusters, given that fans and foes of a franchise/cast/crew will leave reviews without any regard for the merits of a particular film (e.g. most entries in the widely-maligned Transformers franchise have user scores far in abundance of what is merited). Even at their best, I generally find that user scores are only useful to answer the question of whether or not a film is entertaining, but entertainment value is a rather shallow assessment of a film's merit, and in most cases should merely be one metric considered among many. User scores generally don't speak to the the overall quality of the film, whereas critics frequently try to address the topic of whether or not a film is an exemplar within its genre.
In the "BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME" list (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/), 7 of the top 10 movies are from 2017/18.
If that's the only evidence you have for your conspiracy theory, you're running short on facts. I already explained why what you're talking about is a feature, not a bug (see (C) above). If you want to suggest that a fully-disclosed, common sense bias in a formula is an indication that Rotten Tomatoes is bought-and-paid-for by the industry, that's your choice, but that's a rather weak foundation on which to stand.
B) If you hover over the ? on the Best of RT page, you'll see that their Adjusted Score is calculated using a Bayesian formula that's designed to account for variations in the number of reviewers per movie. I.e. More reviewers in agreement will result in a higher Adjusted Score. As such, it should be fairly obvious that their Adjusted Score will be biased towards more recent films (i.e. ones with more reviews).
C) A bias towards more recent films is a feature, not a bug, given that it helps their users discover films they haven't yet seen that are more likely to be available, which is basically the entire point of Rotten Tomatoes. They aren't the AFI, BAFTA, or Academy. They make no claim to being the arbiters of all that is good in film.
D) Despite the bias, the top 10 still contains three films (The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Third Man) from the last century, and every set of 10 after that contains 4 to 7 films from the last century, suggesting that it's still doing a pretty good job at bubbling up the best films, even if they're not necessarily ranked in the top 100 in the order we might think they should be.
But, perhaps most importantly, your argument is missing the point entirely. The question of good vs. great—should Black Panther be ranked higher than Citizen Kane?—doesn't matter when we're talking about the overall quality of streaming libraries. What matters is whether they do a good job at distinguishing good vs. bad—that they correctly labeled Black Panther and Citizen Kane as "Certified Fresh" while not giving that label to most of the schlock that comes out each day. Towards that end, it seems like Certified Fresh is a decent indicator of quality, even if you (and I, just to be clear) might disagree with how they rank individual films within the Certified Fresh set.
One of the more obvious ones was the sapphire manufacturer that tooled up to be a phone glass supplier, and was driven out of business when they only got a fraction of the expected business.
While I don't disagree with your overarching point, the way you describe it is not what happened. That sapphire manufacturer bankrupted itself by overpromising and underdelivering on a contract that they bet the company on. Simple as that. Apple not only upheld its end of the agreement with that manufacturer, it went above and beyond what was contractually required. It was only after months of missed deadlines and delays that Apple finally refused to fund the failed initiative any further, which ended up being a lose-lose for everyone involved, since the manufacturer went bankrupt and Apple only got back a small fraction of what they put in.
More or less, Apple wanted sapphires that could be used for iPhone displays, presumably for the following year's iPhone. They went to the manufacturer and offered to front the manufacturer a large sum of money (for the capital expense involved with buying furnaces and other equipment) if the manufacturer agreed to ramp up production according to a rather aggressive timetable, with additional funding coming in stages as the manufacturer hit various milestones. Pretty standard stuff. As a nice bonus, there was the promise of a massive purchase order if the manufacturer succeeded in fully ramping up.
After the manufacturer failed to produce just one sapphire boule to spec by the original deadline, Apple could have pulled out, but they didn't. Instead, the timetable was renegotiated and Apple agreed to fund the next stage of development. The manufacturer eventually produced a boule to spec, but then they couldn't hit the yield levels they had promised with the revised timetable. Once again, Apple could have pulled out, but they didn't. They negotiated a revised-revised timetable and funded the next stage of development, though there was apparently a rather stern warning this time (the manufacturer is quoted in bankruptcy court proceedings as claiming that an Apple exec told them it was "time to put on your big boy pants"). After the manufacturer failed to meet yield milestones according to the revised-revised timetable, Apple refused to fund it any further. There was no hope that production could ramp up in time for their uses, so they put the final nail in the coffin.
At that point, the manufacturer was sunk. They had bet the company on receiving the purchase order so that they could repay the money that Apple had fronted them. Without the purchase order, they had no hope of repaying Apple, so the company went bankrupt and Apple ended up being the owner of a large building (which they turned into a data center) and a lot of sapphire furnaces that they didn't have a clue how to use. Again, it was a lose-lose for everyone involved, despite Apple going above and beyond what they had originally agreed to do. If the original timetable was too aggressive, the manufacturer could have simply said "no" and the whole situation could have been avoided, but instead they bet the company on something that they couldn't deliver.
While Apple is a very demanding customer, and they do indeed make insane demands, the only ones obligated to accede to insane demands are the ones who agreed to fulfill those insane demands. No one is forcing companies to get into bed with Apple, and if yours is the only one in the world with the know-how to do what's being asked, you shouldn't agree to terms that you can't keep, and you certainly shouldn't bet the company on it. That's just bad business.
Trucks often pay a significant fee for their use of highways.
Not unless it’s a tollway, they don’t.
FedEx trucks don’t get pulled over as they cross state or local boundaries to pay fees. They might get pulled over for inspections, and there may be fines for not abiding by regulations, and there may be taxes on the sale or ownership of vehicles in different jurisdictions, but no one is paying a usage fee for public highways. That isn’t a thing anywhere in the US. Nor is it illegal for them to be using public resources, which is what the OP was suggesting was the case.
Using robots to deliver packages via sidewalks is a private taking of a public good (sidewalk). It is illegal.
How did this nonsense get modded up? Are you going to tell me that UPS and FedEx delivery trucks are illegal too because they drive on public roads? I imagine freight air transport or even passenger transport is illegal, since the airways are a publicly-owned resource?
Generally speaking, private companies can use public access. At worst, they made need a license to do so in the case of local ordinances.
I would imagine it's just as good as Chrome, given that they're both built on Chromium. The only reference I could find to it having issues was a Stack Overflow thread from 2009, which was back when they were still using their own rendering engine.
Take what's good and keep going without Google. I wanted to get away from Chrome awhile back, so I spent a few weeks with each of the major browsers before eventually settling on Opera, in large part because I found the extensions for Safari, Firefox, and others to be lacking in comparison (Opera can natively run nearly all Chrome extensions). If Google is breaking what sets Chromium apart, it sounds like it's time to take Chromium out of their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
many of us stand to lose something personal that matters to us.
?? Really? Where's your local backup? YT is a distribution system. If YT (or your other cloud provider) goes bust/away for a day/ever, then you're back to sneakernet or torrents or floppies or something.
At least when it came to my own situation, I wasn't talking exclusively about the content itself with that comment. I was talking about the whole package of what YouTube provides, as well as the sunk cost in terms of the time we've spent setting things up how they are now. As you said, it's an easy distribution system, which is in large part because it's available via the most ubiquitous delivery platform in the history of humanity (the world wide web). Having that level of availability is incredibly important given that we're serving an audience that includes college students and centenarians. You mention floppies and torrents, but those aren't viable distribution options if you're trying to reach a general audience with video, which I suspect you already knew.
Sneakernet is more viable, and up until a few years ago that was actually how we did things, but it was feasible at the time because we were only doing audio. We simply burned a few cassettes/CDs after the service and handed them off to family members or others who would be seeing the infirm that week. It generally worked, but it took a lot of manpower (e.g. babysitting burners, delivery, etc.), had ongoing material costs (even the cost of CDs gets scrutinized at cash-strapped churches, not to mention the cost of duplicators/burners), and only the sermon audio was included (see the previous post regarding CCLI licensing). It was worse in pretty much every way than what we have today, since equipment would break down and family members would frequently either lose the CD or forget to hand them off to the people who needed them.
If we wanted to go back to sneakernet today while maintaining video, however, it'd be worse. Burning video to DVDs takes substantially longer, meaning we likely wouldn't be able to have the DVDs ready right after the service. At that point, we'd need to figure out some sort of alternative way to deliver things (e.g. have dedicated delivery people?). Relatedly, while we got a lot of pushback when we moved from cassettes to CDs around 1999, there wasn't even a peep when we stopped burning CDs and started pointing people to the MP3s on the website in 2017. Virtually everyone has a connection to the Internet at this point (if for no other reason than to be able to FaceTime/Skype with grandkids) or else has a family member who visits with a smartphone, but we still have church members who never saw a point in upgrading from VHS and whose eyes glaze over if you mention Windows Media Player or VLC. You can give them a link and they'll be fine, but hand them a DVD and they'll wonder why it doesn't work in their CD player.
There's a massive cost and convenience savings that comes from being able to just tell everyone "go to the church website and click on the video you want to watch". Theoretically, we could switch to Vimeo or another hosting site, as you suggested, but that wouldn't be an insignificant cost to us in terms of hours spent reuploading, retagging, and relinking videos. Calling it a hassle is putting it lightly.
I'd think that there would be a ton of christian music out of copyright, it's not like christian music is a recent invention.
That's true, but then you're limiting yourself to hymns, more or less. That's fine if the church is going for a more traditional style of worship, but a lot of churches prefer either a mixed or contemporary style, both of which will almost certainly incorporate more recent songs.
But yes, I quite agree that the copyright situation is out of hand. I'm actually a big fan of the idea I've seen floated in the comments around here before, where the base term is reduced to something like 14 years, there's the option to extend every few years for as long as the rights holder wants, but each extension costs exponentially more than the last. It forces people to either use those rights productively (i.e. get their money's worth) or else release the rights to the public domain, either of which is a net win for society.
For songs not in the public domain, yeah. The classic hymns are pretty much all in the public domain, so you can sing Amazing Grace or what have you, but try to sing anything from basically the last century and you'll need a CCLI license. From what I recall, their prices are actually fairly reasonable, since they understand that their target audience generally isn't flush with cash.
You do realize that YouTube is used by people for all sorts of reasons, right?
A few years back, a plumber I called out was telling me about posting videos on YouTube. His business was already doing just fine, but he was passionate about plumbing and wanted to see more people feel comfortable doing simple repairs. Let's suppose that he talked to a musician and procured the rights to use one of their tracks as a backing track for his videos. A few months later, what's to stop someone else with the rights to that music from making a claim against him? Enough fo those, and all of his videos could be taken down.
There were reports just last week of a Star Wars video that had its audio stripped out (to highlight the importance of John Williams' music) getting hit with a copyright strike by a company that has some of the rights to Star Wars music, despite the fact that all of the audio had been subbed for sounds the video's author made himself.
For me, this stuff actually matters.
Besides posting YouTube videos for fun with some friends (we have a few thousand subscribers to our Let's Play channel, but have turned off monetization since we're just in it for fun), I also post sermon videos for the church I attend. They're nothing fancy, but it's something we can do to include ill and infirm people in the weekly happenings of the church. We've recently been talking about livestreaming, as well as expanding it to cover the entire service. Expanding it would mean needing to procure the rights to stream musical performances for the various hymns and choruses we sing (we're already properly licensed to perform them, just not to stream those performances). Licensing for Christian music almost always goes through the CCLI, but there are a lot of new musicians cropping up all the time, and it's conceivable that not all of them understand the intricacies of licensing. It's conceivable as well that despite being properly licensed to perform and stream a performance of a song, some artist or other rights holder may be unaware of our license with the CCLI and initiate a strike against us, or else some ne'er-do-well may try to extort us.
Given that we risk losing access to years' worth of prior content, these aren't small questions. What happens to my plumber's videos or my church's videos may be small potatoes to you, but multiply that by everyone else at risk and it becomes clear that many of us stand to lose something personal that matters to us.
Hold up. There's a very important adjective missing from anything you've just said: informed. Where was the informed consent?
Sure, users may be willing to consent, but how many of them actually understood what they were consenting to? Is it valid consent if the other person mumbles inaudibly that they have HIV? Is it valid consent if Facebook buries in the middle of 400 pages of legalese that they'll have unfettered access to absolutely everything you do on the device, not just your browsing? And given that this consent takes the form of a provision profile, how much of it was actually reaffirmed after the GDPR went into effect?
Separately, how many users even knew who they were getting into bed with in the first place? TechCrunch listed off a number of other companies that lured users in on behalf of Facebook. It wasn't until the last stage of signing up that there was any indication whatsoever that Facebook was involved in any capacity. That's like consenting to have sex with one person, but right as you're about to do the deed, they turn off the lights and pull a switcheroo with a disease-riddled prostitute. If you happened to be looking at just the right moment, you might have caught it and had a chance to say "no". Otherwise, however, the only way you'd find out is if someone put a light on the situation.
(Quick aside: I have far less to complain about Google's handling of this situation than Facebook's. Google abused their enterprise license by allowing customers to use the app, so they're not in the clear there, but they acknowledged the error and took the app down immediately when news broke. It also sounds like your (current? former?) employer never requested as much access in the first place, thus reducing the severity of any privacy violations that may have taken place.)
Consent doesn't mean much if it isn't informed.
So why is that restriction in place? It doesn't need to be.
Your statement is predicated on a willingness to compromise certain priorities. I presume Apple wants to provide certain minimum guarantees with regards to reliability and security and that they view those restrictions as a necessity in order to provide them. If that's the case, then they have no choice but to have those restrictions in place. You may think otherwise, but that seems to be because your priorities are misaligned with theirs, so you're having trouble understanding their perspective.
If I want to run a Facebook app on it, that's my business. Not Apple's.
Asserting a falsehood does not make it true, but if you think that it should be true that the apps you install are your business and yours alone, there are different platforms making different tradeoffs that would almost certainly better align with the ideology you're expressing. It sounds like you'd be better served going with one of them. I don't say that dismissively. I'm genuinely suggesting that I think it'd be the best course of action for you.
I don't think you understand how enterprise provisioning profiles work, given that they can bypass permissions altogether.
Predicting that a market would become saturated isn't remarkable in the least. It's been a foregone conclusion ever since it became clear that smartphones were replacing dumb phones. Predicting when, however? Kudos to you if you were accurately predicting this timing as far back as the iPhone 4. That said, I think you may be a bit off when it comes to your notion that consumers see no difference between iOS and Android, and that's true regardless of which platform you favor.
Both iOS and Android have retention rates around or above 90%, suggesting that consumers are very loyal to (or locked in by, depending on your views) their platform of choice. If the number of differentiating factors was decreasing, as you suggest, we would expect to see a drop-off in retention rates, but instead what we've been seeing these last few years is an increase for both platforms. Contrary to your notion that each side is nothing special, it would seem that people have chosen their platforms and most of them can't see themselves switching.
By "pulled for any reason", you apparently mean "flagrantly disregarded the cardinal rule of the license, which is spelled out in plain language in the subtitle, first paragraph, second paragraph, definitions, appropriate use section, etc. of the license to which they agreed". The license Facebook agreed to is subtitled "for in-house, internal use applications". It really couldn't be any clearer. You can make apps for internal use, so long as they remain internal.
I'd be freaking out if my enterprise app was based in i devices right now.
Why? Are you breaking the cardinal rule of the license as well? Apple continues to let companies make internal apps to do anything those companies feel like, so long as those apps remain internal. Facebook broke the cardinal rule, so their certificate was revoked. No one using the license in good faith is in any sort of danger here.
Apple didn't ban Facebook's app because it was spying on users or because it was offensive. Apple banned Facebook's app because it was being used by end users. Except in some VERY narrow cases that don't apply here, end users are expressly forbidden from using apps licensed under the terms of the Apple Developer Enterprise License Agreement—which is appropriately subtitled "(for in-house, internal use applications)"—that Facebook agreed to.
Companies are welcome to make anything they want for internal purposes, be it an app for inventory management, an app to order food from the in-house cafeteria, or an app to make coordinating human sacrifices to Satan easier, so long as the app remains internal. Facebook broke that cardinal rule.
Replying to myself since a lot of people seem to be under the woefully incorrect impression that Apple's license terms are in some way vague about this stuff. They aren't. Not at all. Facebook agreed to the Apple Developer Enterprise License Agreement, which—I can't make this stuff up—is actually subtitled "(for in-house, internal use applications)". I'm not even kidding. And it appears it was last updated in October, well before this scandal made the news.
Emphasis is mine unless otherwise noted.
The Purpose section, right at the top of the document, starts with:
Your company [...] would like to use the Apple Software (as defined below) to develop one or more Internal Use Applications (as defined below) for Apple-branded products[...] and to deploy these Applications only for internal use within Your company [...]
In the very next paragraph is this note:
Note: This Program is for internal use, custom applications that are developed by You for Your specific business purposes and only for use by Your employees and, in limited cases, by certain other parties as set forth herein.
So how do they define "Internal Use Application"? Like this:
“Internal Use Application” means a software program [...] that is developed by You on a custom basis for Your own business purposes (e.g., an inventory app specific to Your business) [...] and solely for internal use by Your Employees or Permitted Users, or as otherwise expressly permitted in Section 2.1(f). Except as otherwise expressly permitted herein, specifically excluded from Internal Use Applications are any programs or applications that may be used, distributed, or otherwise made available to other companies, contractors [...], distributors, vendors, resellers, end-users or members of the general public.
So, basically, you can't distribute your apps outside your company. But just in case someone thinks they're being sly with mention of "Permitted Users" and "Section 2.1(f)":
“Permitted Users” means employees and contractors of Your Permitted Entity who have written and binding agreements with You or Your Permitted Entity to protect Your Internal Use Application from unauthorized use in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.
I.e. Not the sorts of people who were using the app in question. Not at all. And what about Section 2.1(f)? Section 2.1 lists out the comprehensive set of acceptable uses. They basically boil down to these:
- 2.1(a)(b)(c)(d)(g): Developers/testers working on the app are allowed to do typical developer/tester stuff for development/testing purposes
- 2.1(e): Your company's employees can install provisioning profiles to use the app for internal use only
- 2.1(f): Your customers can use the app, but only when they are "on [y]our physical premises" or under "the direct supervision and physical control of [y]our [e]mployees"
And then right after that section, they add:
Except as set forth in Section 2.1, You may not use, distribute or otherwise make Your Internal Use Applications available to Your Customers or to any third parties in any way
All of which is to say, Apple really couldn't get more explicit about the fact that this license is only for internal use only, which Facebook was grossly and flagrantly violating. The only way they couldn't have known better was if Facebook literally skipped the bolded subtitle of the document, the first paragraph, the second paragraph, all of the definitions of terms, and a section that was pointed to numerous times throughout the document that spells out appropriate uses.
You make it sound as if Apple arbitrarily reached out and nuked an app. They didn’t. They nuked a app that showed a flagrant disregard for the rules that everyone had agreed to.
Facebook broke specific terms in the license that say enterprise apps are expressly disallowed from being used by customers unless they are being supervised physically by an employee or are being operated on the company’s premises. Facebook made no attempt at abiding by the rules and engaged in behavior that many people are suggesting may actually have been criminal in nature.
But hey, if you want to shill for them and blame Apple, go ahead.
Eh, shuffling 200 people (reports said “laid off” in the headlines, but then said they would be moved within the company, which isn’t what a layoff is) off a multi-thousand person project isn’t exactly winding down to me, especially considering they just promoted a new guy to be over it. Sounds more like a restructuring to better fit the new guy’s preferred approach.
But yeah, their current markets are basically saturated. It’s a question now of whether or not they can figure out what’s next and reinvent the company once again or not.
Even in Texas, Facebook isn’t considered a party to the conversation. It’d be illegal wiretapping.
Yeah, it's their second most profitable quarter ever, second only to their year-ago quarter, which was the most profitable quarter in history, not just for Apple, but for any company ever.
Doomed!
If only we could all be doomed so successfully...
Sarcasm aside, they actually are doomed in the grand scheme of things, the same as Sears was doomed 50 years ago. This may be what we look back on in 10 or 20 years and say was "peak Apple", but it's hard to say anything with certainty now.
That doesn't make sense, and doesn't even align with other review sites (7.4 out of 10 on IMDB) but 98% on RT.
Actually, it does, but you're confused because you're comparing apples to oranges and expecting things to match.
IMDb is a wiki and its scores are based solely on user reviews, whereas Rotten Tomatoes uses critic reviews for its top-line rating. Apples and oranges. That doesn't mean Rotten Tomatoes lacks user reviews, however. In fact, if you check the Audience Score for Lady Bird on Rotten Tomatoes, you'll see that it's at 79%, pretty much spot-on with IMDb's 7.4/10.
You clearly prefer user reviews. I actually find them to be a rather mediocre indication of a film's quality, particularly when it comes to blockbusters, given that fans and foes of a franchise/cast/crew will leave reviews without any regard for the merits of a particular film (e.g. most entries in the widely-maligned Transformers franchise have user scores far in abundance of what is merited). Even at their best, I generally find that user scores are only useful to answer the question of whether or not a film is entertaining, but entertainment value is a rather shallow assessment of a film's merit, and in most cases should merely be one metric considered among many. User scores generally don't speak to the the overall quality of the film, whereas critics frequently try to address the topic of whether or not a film is an exemplar within its genre.
In the "BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME" list (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top/), 7 of the top 10 movies are from 2017/18.
If that's the only evidence you have for your conspiracy theory, you're running short on facts. I already explained why what you're talking about is a feature, not a bug (see (C) above). If you want to suggest that a fully-disclosed, common sense bias in a formula is an indication that Rotten Tomatoes is bought-and-paid-for by the industry, that's your choice, but that's a rather weak foundation on which to stand.
The top rated movie of ALL TIME on Rotten Tomatoes is "Black Panther". So....yeah.
A) Actually, it's not. It's the top ranked using their "Adjusted Score", but it's not the top rated, which should have been obvious, given that it has a 97% rating currently and there are plenty of films with a 100% rating.
B) If you hover over the ? on the Best of RT page, you'll see that their Adjusted Score is calculated using a Bayesian formula that's designed to account for variations in the number of reviewers per movie. I.e. More reviewers in agreement will result in a higher Adjusted Score. As such, it should be fairly obvious that their Adjusted Score will be biased towards more recent films (i.e. ones with more reviews).
C) A bias towards more recent films is a feature, not a bug, given that it helps their users discover films they haven't yet seen that are more likely to be available, which is basically the entire point of Rotten Tomatoes. They aren't the AFI, BAFTA, or Academy. They make no claim to being the arbiters of all that is good in film.
D) Despite the bias, the top 10 still contains three films (The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Third Man) from the last century, and every set of 10 after that contains 4 to 7 films from the last century, suggesting that it's still doing a pretty good job at bubbling up the best films, even if they're not necessarily ranked in the top 100 in the order we might think they should be.
But, perhaps most importantly, your argument is missing the point entirely. The question of good vs. great—should Black Panther be ranked higher than Citizen Kane?—doesn't matter when we're talking about the overall quality of streaming libraries. What matters is whether they do a good job at distinguishing good vs. bad—that they correctly labeled Black Panther and Citizen Kane as "Certified Fresh" while not giving that label to most of the schlock that comes out each day. Towards that end, it seems like Certified Fresh is a decent indicator of quality, even if you (and I, just to be clear) might disagree with how they rank individual films within the Certified Fresh set.
One of the more obvious ones was the sapphire manufacturer that tooled up to be a phone glass supplier, and was driven out of business when they only got a fraction of the expected business.
While I don't disagree with your overarching point, the way you describe it is not what happened. That sapphire manufacturer bankrupted itself by overpromising and underdelivering on a contract that they bet the company on. Simple as that. Apple not only upheld its end of the agreement with that manufacturer, it went above and beyond what was contractually required. It was only after months of missed deadlines and delays that Apple finally refused to fund the failed initiative any further, which ended up being a lose-lose for everyone involved, since the manufacturer went bankrupt and Apple only got back a small fraction of what they put in.
More or less, Apple wanted sapphires that could be used for iPhone displays, presumably for the following year's iPhone. They went to the manufacturer and offered to front the manufacturer a large sum of money (for the capital expense involved with buying furnaces and other equipment) if the manufacturer agreed to ramp up production according to a rather aggressive timetable, with additional funding coming in stages as the manufacturer hit various milestones. Pretty standard stuff. As a nice bonus, there was the promise of a massive purchase order if the manufacturer succeeded in fully ramping up.
After the manufacturer failed to produce just one sapphire boule to spec by the original deadline, Apple could have pulled out, but they didn't. Instead, the timetable was renegotiated and Apple agreed to fund the next stage of development. The manufacturer eventually produced a boule to spec, but then they couldn't hit the yield levels they had promised with the revised timetable. Once again, Apple could have pulled out, but they didn't. They negotiated a revised-revised timetable and funded the next stage of development, though there was apparently a rather stern warning this time (the manufacturer is quoted in bankruptcy court proceedings as claiming that an Apple exec told them it was "time to put on your big boy pants"). After the manufacturer failed to meet yield milestones according to the revised-revised timetable, Apple refused to fund it any further. There was no hope that production could ramp up in time for their uses, so they put the final nail in the coffin.
At that point, the manufacturer was sunk. They had bet the company on receiving the purchase order so that they could repay the money that Apple had fronted them. Without the purchase order, they had no hope of repaying Apple, so the company went bankrupt and Apple ended up being the owner of a large building (which they turned into a data center) and a lot of sapphire furnaces that they didn't have a clue how to use. Again, it was a lose-lose for everyone involved, despite Apple going above and beyond what they had originally agreed to do. If the original timetable was too aggressive, the manufacturer could have simply said "no" and the whole situation could have been avoided, but instead they bet the company on something that they couldn't deliver.
While Apple is a very demanding customer, and they do indeed make insane demands, the only ones obligated to accede to insane demands are the ones who agreed to fulfill those insane demands. No one is forcing companies to get into bed with Apple, and if yours is the only one in the world with the know-how to do what's being asked, you shouldn't agree to terms that you can't keep, and you certainly shouldn't bet the company on it. That's just bad business.
Reading the article is like looking at how the sausage is made: it leaves you with questions you don’t want answered.
Trucks often pay a significant fee for their use of highways.
Not unless it’s a tollway, they don’t.
FedEx trucks don’t get pulled over as they cross state or local boundaries to pay fees. They might get pulled over for inspections, and there may be fines for not abiding by regulations, and there may be taxes on the sale or ownership of vehicles in different jurisdictions, but no one is paying a usage fee for public highways. That isn’t a thing anywhere in the US. Nor is it illegal for them to be using public resources, which is what the OP was suggesting was the case.
Using robots to deliver packages via sidewalks is a private taking of a public good (sidewalk). It is illegal.
How did this nonsense get modded up? Are you going to tell me that UPS and FedEx delivery trucks are illegal too because they drive on public roads? I imagine freight air transport or even passenger transport is illegal, since the airways are a publicly-owned resource?
Generally speaking, private companies can use public access. At worst, they made need a license to do so in the case of local ordinances.
Quite a bit of the original talent has indeed moved on since the Wii days when the third installment was released.
I would imagine it's just as good as Chrome, given that they're both built on Chromium. The only reference I could find to it having issues was a Stack Overflow thread from 2009, which was back when they were still using their own rendering engine.
Take what's good and keep going without Google. I wanted to get away from Chrome awhile back, so I spent a few weeks with each of the major browsers before eventually settling on Opera, in large part because I found the extensions for Safari, Firefox, and others to be lacking in comparison (Opera can natively run nearly all Chrome extensions). If Google is breaking what sets Chromium apart, it sounds like it's time to take Chromium out of their hands.
And mine. The timing of this story seems awfully coincidental after Google's bad PR yesterday with the proposed Chromium changes.