I also use Adblock (I'm sure that a lot of this audience does), but try to use it responsibly. If you completely Adblock pages that you like that rely largely in ad revenue to stay afloat, you are ensuring that the level of service will degrade or that other (possibly more invasive) methods of generating revenue will be implemented. For sites you want to keep going (e.g. slashdot), especially ones with well-targeted ads, remember the white-list option.
I still don't get the supposed benefit of "well-targeted" ads. Every time I hear that phrase I think of the book/movie Minority Report.
As for sites like slashdot shutting down... meh. I like slashdot and all, but quite frankly, if it went under because a few people who don't like to see ads block them, then so be it. There was an internet before massive amounts of advertising. There will continue to be an internet with massive amounts of ad blocking. If they invent more invasive methods, we'll block those too and you suckers who feel morally obligated to look at them will just have to suck it up.
So, while this would be problematic for SourceForge, it shouldn't be a problem for you and ten of your closest developer buddies to band together. If there are ten of you, that would only be $9.99 each for a cert, $29.90 for the enterprise cert.
I've only been involved in a couple OSS projects, but I must say that I've never sensed them as a close knit group of developer "buddies." ON the contrary, they seem to be very loosely knit group of near strangers with many developers/contributers coming and going over time. Often there's just one real "owner" of the project who would have to be the one buying the certs. And he'd probably be pretty paranoid about those certs getting out, and therefore reluctant to give it out to people who might want to contribute.
It does seem weird to me that development and publishing are tied to the same cert. That seems like it would be problematic for companies who want to have many developers working on applications, but want the company itself to be the interface to the store.
You could, as a company, puchase multiple certs. One for developers which, if it gets out and is revoked, won't affect the cert used to publish the software to the online store. Which ruins the idea of haivng a non-profit org saving OSS developers from having to buy a certain because they'd need their own to develop anyway. They might as well skip the publisher middleman and publish themselves. Not very OSS friendly.
I agree that some discrimination in that regard will happen and probably should happen, but i think it is more likely that generally anyone who is willing to pay the fee will be allowed to publish anything that doesn't violate one of the rules. If you do something inappropriate, they'll kill your cert. I would suspect that their issues will be reactive more than proactive.
So basically it becomes an extra source of revenue for Apple with little added security for end users. Yay! Way to treat your developers...
Offtopic, but that got me wondering. Who is more evil. Catbert or Dogbert? I'm going to say Dogbert because he seeks to rule world. Catbert seems far less ambitious in his evil.
Would Apple allow a single organization with a single cert to proxy for an unknown set of developers?
You mean like a corporation?
Presumably a corporation isn't giving its cert out to every developer. Or if they do, the developers probably have some formal contract which would hold them legally accountable for leaking the cert. I don't know if you've ever worked on an OSS project before, but it is nothing like a corporation (the big ones like Mozilla being exceptions, of course).
Seems like that woudl kind of defeat the purpose of signing the apps. Presumably it is to provide security and accountability, no?
I would say it provides the same security and accountability. If you publish an app under your cert and it is a problem, they'll probably revoke your cert and all of the applications under your cert will probably be removed from the store. I suspect all of the developers publishing through you will hold you accountable for that.
Why would the developers publishing through me hold ME accountable if it was someone else who released the problematic software? Am I responsible for auditing every single line of code that goes through? Who would take on that kind of responsibility? Even Linus Torvalds is only partially responsible for the Linux kernel as it is released.
There's fundamentally no way for the store to know that your publishing organisation isn't publishing applications it created or were created by its employees or contractors if you don't tell them.
Perhaps not, but Apple can and should be selective about who they think is going to be well behaved in that regard. If your name is Adobe, there'll be no question. If your name is iPhone Confederated Open Source Developers League, there'll probably be some issues.
Anything is doable, as long as you do things correctly. You not wanting to have your own certificate revoked is a good control point. You can create a virtual entity that your friends work under, and as long as nothing bad comes from it and you consistly use that entity for labelling your software, I doubt anyone would raise an eyebrow. --
Somehow I doubt Apple is going to certify some random "virtual entity" in the first place. I certainly wouldn't trust the system if they did. Revoking a certificates is purely reactive.
It is the principle of the matter. It isn't a question of whether I CAN afford it. It is whether I would bother as a potential free software developer. It just isn't conducive to open development.
And there's still the issue of whether or not it will be easy for others who might want to use the source for their own purposes. Does everyone need a cert to tinker with my program?
Anyway, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'd probably just keep jailbreaking the damn thing to keep options open. Plus, bypassing security is fun.:-)
At least for $500 I am getting something that I couldn't otherwise get for free. A $99 cert is an arbitrary barrier to OSS that has no value to me. I wouldn't buy it just on principle. And I'm sure many OSS developers feel that way. I'm am betting that hacked phones will continue to be the preferred route for OSS if there is no other way to develop and install free software for *free*.
Certificate != DRM. A signature simply says that you certify that you are indeed the creator of the software. On the other hand DRM says you can only use this software after having handed over a limb, or something of the sorts.
Any intentional obstacle to freely using software/hardware that you've legally obtained is DRM.
As for the $99 fee, technically there is nothing stoping you getting together with a bunch of friends and using the same signature.
I would imagine that you'd have a contract with Apple saying that you won't do that. And if you did, Apple would probably just revoke it. What good is a cert, from a security and accountability perspective, if it is being passed around the internet to random "friends" of yours?
Anyone can buy a certificate for $50, and then sign anything they like, including open-source programs they've downloaded. I think it's reasonable to require people to do this.
No, it is totally unreasonable and contrary to the spirit of OSS. OSS needs to be completely free to use, modify, and distribute. Otherwise it cannot and will not thrive.
Apple will be providing a iPhone emulator, so people can still run your application, just not on their iPhone.
Not good enough.
However, IANAL. I'm positive if there is a problem, the FSF can be expected to kick up a fuss before the final release of applications. I imagine OSS would more or less dry up on the platform before anyone bothered with legal action.
Either that, or people will just continue to hack the devices.
You can always distribute the source on your own website. Or sourceforge.net for that matter.
Perhaps you're not understanding the whole Open Source thing. Do you think that OSS enthusiasts just like to have a copy of the source code for light nighttime reading? Do you thik source code is something that LInux users like to be able to say they have but otherwise do nothing with it?
Just having the source is useless if you can't tinker with it, compile it, and install it yourself. If I had to buy my own $99 cert just to get the privilege of running my own version of an open source app, I probably wouldn't bother. OSS cannot thrive under these conditions.
I don't see any incompatibility just because the tools used to compile the app cost a fee. The important thing is the source code after all.
What good is having the source if you have no way to install it on the device after you modify it and compile it? How do you test your modifications? Do you compile it, buy a $99 cert for yourself and then "distribute" it to yourself through Apple?
Sounds like they're stiffling free software.
The interesting thing is that do distribute it, someone has to have "the" key you'd distribute with - but you could set that up as some kind of non-profit entity to control distribution of something open.
Would Apple allow a single organization with a single cert to proxy for an unknown set of developers? Seems like that woudl kind of defeat the purpose of signing the apps. Presumably it is to provide security and accountability, no?
I bet we'll continue to see hacks to open up the devices to free software.
How much do you actually use your health insurance? Healthcare in the US is fine if you a) happen to have a full time job with benefits or can afford it on your own (not likely if you don't have the full time job) and b) don't spend a lot of time in and out of doctors offices. Once you start using doctors on a semi-regular basis, the bills add up quick between the copays, deductibles, and things your insurance just won't cover.
I currently owe thousands of dollars to doctors offices and hospitals. My household also spends over a hundred dollars a month in prescriptions. It sucks big time. And I make a decent living. I can't imagine how horrible it must be to not have insurance and know that you can really only see a doctor if it is a life and death situation... and then you'll probably just have to cut and run on the bill.
The idea of healthcare as a "business" and health plans as "insurance" is fundamentally broken. I don't know if sociallized medicine is any better, but I do know that the system we have in the US is broken in so many ways it just isn't funny.
My experience is that there is a lot one can salvage from a web app when moving from one platform to another. All that HTML and CSS takes a long time to develop for a presentable public site. Intranet apps, however, can be a little more rough around the edges. I probably spend more time on that in the long run that anything else. Tweaking things to get it right. Also, you've probably already got another big part of the work done for you: just designing the behavior/specs of the app. You might even have a usable database schema. I, personally, find that the backend code practically writes itself once you know exactly what you need it to do and start with a sane web framework.
The last app I ported from PHP to RoR went pretty quickly. And I was only just starting with Ruby and Rails.
Yeah, but you can always strip it. Although most people don't want to see an obese binary in the nude.
Amusingly, the command to slim down binaries is called "lipo."
Can also be used to create a fat binary from two arch specific binaries (including libraries). I've actually done this with the Novell Groupwise client for OS X. They distribute two different programs for PPC and Intel. I made it universal.
Schizoaffective disorder.. familiar with it (my ex GF also diagnosed with it). It's for someone who has episodes with schizophrenic symptoms.. It's quite a controversial diagnoses, and treatment is all over the map,.. basically doctors experimenting with the "drug of the moment"
Not much different than most other mental disorders.
I apologize for saying you don't know what your talking about.. I totally agree that doctors don't understand what's going on completely.. however, there is obviously something there with the brain chemistry.
Something... but what, exactly? Nobody knows. So they say "chemical imbalance" as a catch-all which doesn't even mean anything because we haven't yet defined what the "balance" should be.
As to schizophrenia, it runs in families, so there is something genetic going on... My ex GF had it rampant in her family.. although this was not her diagnoses. She is a difficult case.. She has schizophrenia in her family, had childhood trauma (her uncle killed himself in front of her), got into alcohol and drugs as a teen, including acid... so how do you figure out any cause with all that ??
Hey! I like acid!:-)
One other observation... I knew a normal woman (whatever normal is), who got into meth, and in a matter of months she was talking to aliens, and absolutely was showing schizophrenic symptoms... has nothing to do with your wife, or my ex GF, but just shows how some people can mess themselves up with that crap.
Yes, meth is neurotoxic. That stuff will mess you up if you take it long enough. Probably the worst recreational drug out there next to possibly PCP. Though there's not too many PCP users these days, AFAIK.
As I understand it, Flash pretty much fails at 64bit on EVERY platform. Maybe not Macs (my knowledge of them is quite limited), but I definitely have memories of Windows Vista 64 having a hard time of it. Pretty much it's 32bit wrapper'd version or bust.
32bit vs. 64bit has always been nearly completely transparent to the user on Macs (remember the G5 is 64bit). So it is possible to design a system where the differences are hidden. But of course a lot of that transparency is due to Apple having control over the hardware and drivers. It also helps that building and distributing multi-architecture binaries on the OS X is trivial. You can have one binary that works natively on ppc32, ppc64, x86, and x86_64 with just a couple options selected in Xcode. Or gcc flags, if you're building stuff on the commandline.
uhhh.. sure. The levels of Dopamines and Serotonin produced in the brain are measurable. Too much or not enough of either of these and your all over the place mood wise. Too much Dopamine leads to Psychotic behavior and schizophrenia... too little and you become unmotivated and apathetic...
You're wrong. Too much dopamine does not necessarily lead to psychotic behavior. It is merely associated with psychotic behavior. Correlation is not causation. The reality is that doctors and scientists don't really know what causes schitzophrenia. They only know that drugs that affect certain neurotransmitters can have some effect on it. That's all they really know. So they call it a "chemical imbalance." WHich is totally meaningless. It is like calling someone "crazy." It is only generally descriptive of some set of behaviors.
with Serotonin, too much or too little puts you at opposite ends of the scale.. depression and mania... it IS a balancing act with the drugs treating (as best they can) the depression until the scale is tipped and mania sets in... and manic behavior is not fun either.
Again, doctors don't really know what causes depression or mania. They merely know that there are certain neurotransmitters that are vaguely associated with the behavior. There's not definite relationships.
Whether or not you want to believe it.. there are parts of the brain that regulate these chemicals, and in some people it's broken.. just like people with diabetes have a broken pancreas.
Right, but how often do you hear diabetics described as having a "chemical imbalance?" You don't because doctors understand the nature of diabetes a lot better than they understand mental disorders.
Dude.. I lived with someone suffering with it.. congratulations to you for having a healthy brain.. but you do not know what your talking about.
My wife has schizoaffective disorder and depression and it frustrating how little doctors know about how to treat her. She's on a cocktail of drugs with marginal effectiveness. If only it was was a simple matter of reducing some dopamine here and increasing some serotonin there.
More of Ron Paul being hated for his (insignificant) virtues rather than his (plentiful) vices. Like many on the left, you seem to not be able to discern economic power from political power. The biggest, nastiest, most impersonal corporation can never *force* you to act against your own nature and trade with it; they can only entice.
Perhaps not force you, but having unregulated monopolies on essential products and services is pretty darn close. Now what do you think happens when monopolies spread to media? Don't they essentially get political power?
Now, I will concede, as a result of the horrific government violations of rights in the economic sector, some businessmen (who probably couldn't have put a lemonade stand in the black otherwise) are able to use pull to gain favors and bring ruin to their fellows. This pull did not originate in the businessmen, it is now and has always been the sole function of government.
Bullshit. Businessmen, as a rule, will do anything and everything they can get away with to ruin their peers and abuse labor. It is "just business, nothing personal." This tendency finds it source in the greed of men. Government has nothing to do with it.
Achieve a proper separation of economics and state, under a proper, objective law, and the pull dries up.
I can see ultra-capacitors also being useful for charging an electric car quickly at home. Where most homes don't really have adequate wiring/transformers to charge an electric vehicle in a reasonable amount of time. With an ultra-capacitor installed in your home, you can give your car a good initial boost without drawing too much from your house electrical wiring all at once. Of course, longer charges would be necessary to top off the battery once the cap is drained, but at least you can get that initial boost.
I have replaced Safari with FireFox on every friend and family mac I get my hands on. Re-theme it, copy and paste the icon resource, and they don't notice the change!
And with Firefox 3, you don't even need a theme. They look very similar now. Firefox 3 even seems to use the Aqua style widgets.
If anything pierces the dielectric, all the energy stored in the capacitor will discharge violently in milliseconds.
There's still internal resistance, ya know. I imagine it being more along the lines of a meltdown. A molten capacitor burning/melting a hole right down through the car onto the road.
Would be interesting to test, anyway. Maybe a job for the Mythbusters?
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't get the supposed benefit of "well-targeted" ads. Every time I hear that phrase I think of the book/movie Minority Report.
As for sites like slashdot shutting down... meh. I like slashdot and all, but quite frankly, if it went under because a few people who don't like to see ads block them, then so be it. There was an internet before massive amounts of advertising. There will continue to be an internet with massive amounts of ad blocking. If they invent more invasive methods, we'll block those too and you suckers who feel morally obligated to look at them will just have to suck it up.
-matthew
I've only been involved in a couple OSS projects, but I must say that I've never sensed them as a close knit group of developer "buddies." ON the contrary, they seem to be very loosely knit group of near strangers with many developers/contributers coming and going over time. Often there's just one real "owner" of the project who would have to be the one buying the certs. And he'd probably be pretty paranoid about those certs getting out, and therefore reluctant to give it out to people who might want to contribute.
Not very OSS friendly at all.
You could, as a company, puchase multiple certs. One for developers which, if it gets out and is revoked, won't affect the cert used to publish the software to the online store. Which ruins the idea of haivng a non-profit org saving OSS developers from having to buy a certain because they'd need their own to develop anyway. They might as well skip the publisher middleman and publish themselves. Not very OSS friendly.
So basically it becomes an extra source of revenue for Apple with little added security for end users. Yay! Way to treat your developers...
Offtopic, but that got me wondering. Who is more evil. Catbert or Dogbert? I'm going to say Dogbert because he seeks to rule world. Catbert seems far less ambitious in his evil.
Presumably a corporation isn't giving its cert out to every developer. Or if they do, the developers probably have some formal contract which would hold them legally accountable for leaking the cert. I don't know if you've ever worked on an OSS project before, but it is nothing like a corporation (the big ones like Mozilla being exceptions, of course).
Why would the developers publishing through me hold ME accountable if it was someone else who released the problematic software? Am I responsible for auditing every single line of code that goes through? Who would take on that kind of responsibility? Even Linus Torvalds is only partially responsible for the Linux kernel as it is released.
Perhaps not, but Apple can and should be selective about who they think is going to be well behaved in that regard. If your name is Adobe, there'll be no question. If your name is iPhone Confederated Open Source Developers League, there'll probably be some issues.
-matthew
Somehow I doubt Apple is going to certify some random "virtual entity" in the first place. I certainly wouldn't trust the system if they did. Revoking a certificates is purely reactive.
It is the principle of the matter. It isn't a question of whether I CAN afford it. It is whether I would bother as a potential free software developer. It just isn't conducive to open development.
:-)
And there's still the issue of whether or not it will be easy for others who might want to use the source for their own purposes. Does everyone need a cert to tinker with my program?
Anyway, it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'd probably just keep jailbreaking the damn thing to keep options open. Plus, bypassing security is fun.
At least for $500 I am getting something that I couldn't otherwise get for free. A $99 cert is an arbitrary barrier to OSS that has no value to me. I wouldn't buy it just on principle. And I'm sure many OSS developers feel that way. I'm am betting that hacked phones will continue to be the preferred route for OSS if there is no other way to develop and install free software for *free*.
Any intentional obstacle to freely using software/hardware that you've legally obtained is DRM.
I would imagine that you'd have a contract with Apple saying that you won't do that. And if you did, Apple would probably just revoke it. What good is a cert, from a security and accountability perspective, if it is being passed around the internet to random "friends" of yours?
-matthew
I imagine OSS would more or less dry up on the platform before anyone bothered with legal action.
Either that, or people will just continue to hack the devices
No, it is totally unreasonable and contrary to the spirit of OSS. OSS needs to be completely free to use, modify, and distribute. Otherwise it cannot and will not thrive.
Not good enough.
Perhaps you're not understanding the whole Open Source thing. Do you think that OSS enthusiasts just like to have a copy of the source code for light nighttime reading? Do you thik source code is something that LInux users like to be able to say they have but otherwise do nothing with it?
Just having the source is useless if you can't tinker with it, compile it, and install it yourself. If I had to buy my own $99 cert just to get the privilege of running my own version of an open source app, I probably wouldn't bother. OSS cannot thrive under these conditions.
-matthew
What good is having the source if you have no way to install it on the device after you modify it and compile it? How do you test your modifications? Do you compile it, buy a $99 cert for yourself and then "distribute" it to yourself through Apple?
Sounds like they're stiffling free software.
Would Apple allow a single organization with a single cert to proxy for an unknown set of developers? Seems like that woudl kind of defeat the purpose of signing the apps. Presumably it is to provide security and accountability, no?
I bet we'll continue to see hacks to open up the devices to free software.
-matthew
How much do you actually use your health insurance? Healthcare in the US is fine if you a) happen to have a full time job with benefits or can afford it on your own (not likely if you don't have the full time job) and b) don't spend a lot of time in and out of doctors offices. Once you start using doctors on a semi-regular basis, the bills add up quick between the copays, deductibles, and things your insurance just won't cover.
I currently owe thousands of dollars to doctors offices and hospitals. My household also spends over a hundred dollars a month in prescriptions. It sucks big time. And I make a decent living. I can't imagine how horrible it must be to not have insurance and know that you can really only see a doctor if it is a life and death situation... and then you'll probably just have to cut and run on the bill.
The idea of healthcare as a "business" and health plans as "insurance" is fundamentally broken. I don't know if sociallized medicine is any better, but I do know that the system we have in the US is broken in so many ways it just isn't funny.
My experience is that there is a lot one can salvage from a web app when moving from one platform to another. All that HTML and CSS takes a long time to develop for a presentable public site. Intranet apps, however, can be a little more rough around the edges. I probably spend more time on that in the long run that anything else. Tweaking things to get it right. Also, you've probably already got another big part of the work done for you: just designing the behavior/specs of the app. You might even have a usable database schema. I, personally, find that the backend code practically writes itself once you know exactly what you need it to do and start with a sane web framework.
The last app I ported from PHP to RoR went pretty quickly. And I was only just starting with Ruby and Rails.
Yeah, but you can always strip it. Although most people don't want to see an obese binary in the nude.
Amusingly, the command to slim down binaries is called "lipo."
Can also be used to create a fat binary from two arch specific binaries (including libraries). I've actually done this with the Novell Groupwise client for OS X. They distribute two different programs for PPC and Intel. I made it universal.
Not much different than most other mental disorders.
Something... but what, exactly? Nobody knows. So they say "chemical imbalance" as a catch-all which doesn't even mean anything because we haven't yet defined what the "balance" should be.
Hey! I like acid!
Yes, meth is neurotoxic. That stuff will mess you up if you take it long enough. Probably the worst recreational drug out there next to possibly PCP. Though there's not too many PCP users these days, AFAIK.
-matthew
It isn't Firefox vs. IE. It is IE vs. All other browsers that seem to be reasonably consistent with each other.
32bit vs. 64bit has always been nearly completely transparent to the user on Macs (remember the G5 is 64bit). So it is possible to design a system where the differences are hidden. But of course a lot of that transparency is due to Apple having control over the hardware and drivers. It also helps that building and distributing multi-architecture binaries on the OS X is trivial. You can have one binary that works natively on ppc32, ppc64, x86, and x86_64 with just a couple options selected in Xcode. Or gcc flags, if you're building stuff on the commandline.
-matthew
You're wrong. Too much dopamine does not necessarily lead to psychotic behavior. It is merely associated with psychotic behavior. Correlation is not causation. The reality is that doctors and scientists don't really know what causes schitzophrenia. They only know that drugs that affect certain neurotransmitters can have some effect on it. That's all they really know. So they call it a "chemical imbalance." WHich is totally meaningless. It is like calling someone "crazy." It is only generally descriptive of some set of behaviors.
Again, doctors don't really know what causes depression or mania. They merely know that there are certain neurotransmitters that are vaguely associated with the behavior. There's not definite relationships.
Right, but how often do you hear diabetics described as having a "chemical imbalance?" You don't because doctors understand the nature of diabetes a lot better than they understand mental disorders.
My wife has schizoaffective disorder and depression and it frustrating how little doctors know about how to treat her. She's on a cocktail of drugs with marginal effectiveness. If only it was was a simple matter of reducing some dopamine here and increasing some serotonin there.
-matthew
Perhaps not force you, but having unregulated monopolies on essential products and services is pretty darn close. Now what do you think happens when monopolies spread to media? Don't they essentially get political power?
Bullshit. Businessmen, as a rule, will do anything and everything they can get away with to ruin their peers and abuse labor. It is "just business, nothing personal." This tendency finds it source in the greed of men. Government has nothing to do with it.
Like balancing a pencil on its tip.
-matthew
I can see ultra-capacitors also being useful for charging an electric car quickly at home. Where most homes don't really have adequate wiring/transformers to charge an electric vehicle in a reasonable amount of time. With an ultra-capacitor installed in your home, you can give your car a good initial boost without drawing too much from your house electrical wiring all at once. Of course, longer charges would be necessary to top off the battery once the cap is drained, but at least you can get that initial boost.
All 640k of it!
And with Firefox 3, you don't even need a theme. They look very similar now. Firefox 3 even seems to use the Aqua style widgets.
-matthew
There's still internal resistance, ya know. I imagine it being more along the lines of a meltdown. A molten capacitor burning/melting a hole right down through the car onto the road.
Would be interesting to test, anyway. Maybe a job for the Mythbusters?