You can call it creating a "derived work" if you want
So why does it matter whether you have read the IBM TRM or not? Derive from IBM source / derive from IBM object.
It doesn't matter that you call it: It was perfectly legal
The term you are not looking for is "irrelevant", not "legal".
Sony v. Connectix in 1999 finally confirmed that the whole "copying is determined by whether the code has been viewed" is bullshit. Connectix openly admitted to looking at object code directly and freely in order to produce an emulator. Sony failed because Sony could not prove that the protected creative aspect of Sony's work had been copied by Connectix.
IBM's mock lawsuit against Compaq (I say "mock" because it expended pretty much no resources by IBM standards, and probably existed only to placate certain investors) failed because Compaq did a good job of creating a BIOS which looked nothing like IBM's BIOS, even while behaving like IBM's BIOS and created by looking at IBM's BIOS.
Compaq never made any secret about what it was doing or the steps it took when to do it. This is a well-established legal area.
The lie here is in claiming not to have read the TRMs, and the misdirection is in giving the impression that whether it's legal depends on whether the TRMs were read. The lie to the technically inexperienced court is in claiming that you didn't essentially copy the IBM BIOS in all but machine code byte order.
Reverse engineering is completely legal if done properly. Deal with it.
Everything non-criminal is completely legal if done sufficiently sneakily and with no private party sufficiently interested in stopping you. What kind of a stupid argument is this?
Yesterday on/. I was a "thief" for blocking iAds, today I'm a "troll" for suggesting that studying object code to create a derived work is creating a derived work.
Welcome to the contradictory world of freetards: where everything's fair game until you start using their stuff.
That's more than just a story and this is lore only to people who hadn't lived it.
Which is why I said it's "at least approaching honest". I can read the Bible and give you a blow-by-blow account; a story you create based on the account will still be a derived work, no matter how much you lie about how irrelevant and vague my account was.
It was not hard to find programmers who hadn't seen the tech ref manual.
How did you find them? "Right, you seem good for this job... but before we hire you and pay you a very good wage, tell me, have you read this book? Try not to let the fact that a 'yes' will deny you the job influence the answer."
(The weird thing is that both reading the book and disassembling the binary imply creating a derived work. Back to the Bible example, "I only read the published Harry Potter book, not Rowling's drafts," isn't a rational defence to the accusation that you created a derived work.)
I said *disassembled*, with a debugger. That's not reading the source code in the books, which I had no access to.
Which is reading the original code and confirmation that you created a derived work. You can pretend until your grave that the interaction between the "did read IBM BIOS" and "didn't read IBM BIOS" group was in some way so specific and perfect that Compaq couldn't be regarded as creating a derived work, but it's conceptual nonsense. You personally didn't create a derived work, but Compaq as a whole created a derived work.
What is more, by reading the book source you would make both understanding the code easier and avoiding accidental duplication of IBM cunning easier. And once you'd read the code there would be no reason not to read the book: either way you were basing your work on direct study of IBM code.
Look, you're either a troll or know nothing about this topic.
Only one of us is an AC pretending to be the key technical member of the PC clone revolution.
Obscure in what sense? Everyone knew about them, and anyone who wanted to do any serious low-level work with the IBM PC would have an original copy or get ready for this a photocopy of relevant parts. You (or, more accurately, the person you're playing on the Internet) had access, and you know it.
especially when reverse engineering was plenty fun work anyway. It was like solving a puzzle.
Oh, well, of course, businesses routinely tell their employees to make their work harder and more error-prone because it's "plenty fun" and "like solving a puzzle".
Look. You read the original code. You admit to reading the original code. You observed techniques in the original code. You observed quirks in the original code. You then admit that (behind closed doors) you liaised with people who wrote a derived version of that code. It is completely dishonest to claim other than you produced a derived work of the IBM BIOS.
At any rate, I have no doubt that IBM had their lawyers pore over every byte of the Compaq BIOS looking for evidence of copying. If there had been any, they would have stomped Compaq off the map.
It's quite easy to produce something which looks byte-for-byte quite different while essentially being a copy of original code - but you have to look at the original to do this. If you don't look at original code, you are going to quite incidentally and accidentally produce very similar routines (see the Linux vs SCO fiasco) by the nature of coding.
Anyway, lawyers are not programmers and IBM may not have wanted to stop Compaq. Your persona is just a lowly engineer and has no special insight into the ties between the firms.
If none of that had happened anywhere, all systems from different vendors would still be totally incompatible and proprietary
The dominance of the IBM PC architecture is probably one of the worst things to happen to computing and there were so many better architectures (some of them quite open) which could have won over. Thanks for nothing.
(1) You're an AC and you could just be making everything up - indeed, it's quite likely, as you've given enough detail about your role that you could be identified;
(2) If you actually were involved in writing Compaq BIOS code, there is no way in hell you'd wander into Slashdot almost two decades later to admit that Compaq BIOS writers read IBM BIOS source - you were part of the initial lie, and repeating the lie a few years isn't new proof of anything;
(3) You're introducing another variant of my parenthesised story, which essentially comes down to the corporation making a derived work of the IBM BIOS but with a split of responsibility between readers and writers. Moreover, you, AC, are claiming to the be lynchpin of the whole PC clone age: the guy who read the IBM BIOS in response to Compaq BIOS writers' questions but only gave answers in such a magic way as to not give rise to accusations of copyright abuse.
Compaq developers worked out a way to make those bytes at that address appear in part of an actual executable code sequence instead.
So? If they'd reverse engineered user code they'd be able to find out that the string needs to be there and could have legitimately inserted the string as straight data. But it's all part of the bullshit to distract with some convoluted aside, eh?
Compaq had administrative staff remove the BIOS listings from all IBM tech ref manuals before they were given to the engineers.
This bit is especially hilarious. It must have been during the "fascist totalitarianism" days of Reaganism when it was completely impossible to get hold of books which weren't in some specific location on some specially designated shelf. And may God have mercy on your soul if you had read a copy of forbidden tomes (available for purchase by anyone without NDA) before employment or in the evenings at home.
You'll notice how everything else which switches from analog to digital manages to provide better quality in less bandwidth.
Better quality under ideal or manageable noise conditions. For weak or noisy video and audio, compressed digital collapses while analogue is often perceptible thanks to the human brain.
I look out to my right over a beautiful lawn and all sorts of analogue distortions are created: through my imperfect eyes since I'm short-sighted, through the imperfect glass on the decades-old windows, through the difference in intensities between indoors and shadowed and unshadowed patches of outdoors. But I still perceive a beautiful lawn. If I suddenly hear a tweeting then I know instantly that movement in the corner of my eye is a bird, and I can surmise its orientation even though - when I look straight at it - I can't actually highlight a beak or a tail at all.
If the human brain can provide so many extra dB of SNR because of its superior error correction,
Again, you're trying to simplify the human brain into some primitive engineer's noise filter. One can describe something about the behaviours of the brain and a little about how they're effected, but we're nowhere near to quantitative measurements.
why did anything go digital?
Sometimes because it's more accurate and efficient under sufficiently predictable conditions. Other times because compression enables the government and its partners to extract more revenue. The whole "digital is always better" is simply a lie - yet kids from the very start of their engineering education are taught that analog is somehow archaic / obsolete / superceded. Now, Sometimes digital is trivially better to implement. Other times it's a toss-up depending on technical and non-technical factors. In the case of FM vs digital radio, it's simply false on both counts.
In fact Compaq hired engineers specifically for the fact they had never seen IBM BIOS code.
This is one of the great hilarities of PC lore, and obvious bullshit as the code was published to the public. Anyone with the technical expertise to write a BIOS would have incidentally flipped through the pages of the IBM tech ref manual which contained the source. And the idea that this key book to early '80s PC tech (still worryingly relevant today!) was somehow missing from all the bookshelves reachable by the Compaq BIOS writing department is just silly.
Put a group of men working for money in a room, offer them enough money and they will deny anything. Perhaps the PC clone world would be far more tolerable if everyone had acknowledged that it was born on a simple act of idea and expression "piracy" (see also Microsoft).
(The story sometimes is described as: group A saw the code, wrote up a description of the code, then showed only the description to group B. This is at least approaching honest.)
So nothing is in public view - and you're bitching that it's not.
Offering a TV programme for free-to-air watching = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Offering a web page for free download = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Offering an app for free download = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Your sense of entitlement to modify how people behave when you put something in public view = unconscionable.
If you want money for your art, just ask for it. If you want to distribute a shareware style trial version, you can put a feature/time limit in it or just politely request that people pay if they find it useful. I'm not here claiming some right to the full version just because I have the trial version, just asserting my freedom to not have my device and/or eyeballs controlled by you.
To conclude, I don't know about your world, but in mine people give reward because they think it's deserved, not because they're forced to. You must live in a horrible environment where everyone's so begrudging!
You have better manners on Macrumors. And you used to be quite reasonable before you got seduced by the fanboy environment.
If you don't want to see these adverts, don't download apps that show advertisement.
Why is it only in the Apple community that I get:
All options provided by your ingenuity rather than Apple are invalid and/or immoral;
If you don't like it, don't speak up about it - just get out of our clubhouse?
There is no f***ing way that Apple builds an infrastructure so that you see advertisements that are vetted from advertisers guaranteed to actually make payments to the developer and then allows some app to interfere with this.
So Apple creates for itself this conflict of interest, it's absolutely clear that it's taking advantage of it, and that's absolutely fine with you. How.. Apple.
This is like the way over 90% of Google's revenue is from ads so on its own browser platform it doesn't allow and host ad blocking extensions. Oh, wait, no.
if Apple wanted to allow iAd blocking then it would be part of the OS.
You're probably right there. Apple has a tendency not to like competing solutions on its iPhone, especially ones with more tweakability than Apple's own.
They don't because developers need money to produce apps.
Well, they need to pay Apple $99/year, yeah, but apart from that, not much more than any other decent development system. And you're surely not judging the App Store by the quantity of apps?
And yet, in this thread, there is a huge number of responses that basically equate ad blocking on iPhone to stealing...
"Troll" here. The opinion of Apple-using/.ers may not represent the opinion of/.ers in general.
One of the more interesting ways you can waste your time in life is to guess which choir a particular speaker will attract. And if you utter something which is canon for the religion ("as a geek I entirely recommend and use ad-blockers") but heresy for the denomination ("as an Apple user I find ad-blocking to be stealing"), you'll get fairly passionate responses. The same applies IME with real religion.
Maybe it's a combination of feeling outnumbered, wanting to stand out, and knowing that your argument is tenuous and possibly comes only from self-interest (lots of small-time App store developers). Or maybe it's Sunday and everyone's trying to get away from the fucking football.
Oooh, this is ironic? You've been arguing that Apple REQUIRES you to watch ads, now you're arguing that they DON'T require you to look at ads?
You asserted that I agreed to it when I signed up. I was just asking for evidence that I agreed.
Apple MIGHT do something wrong, so Apple WILL Do something wrong. I don't buy it here:)
The knife example is fairly irrelevant unless the CEO of Knives Inc willingly becomes Secretary of Defense, or something.
Now Apple's had a history of rule-swaying in approvals based, among other things, on whether it's perceived the submitter as a direct competitor and whether it's been lambasted in the press (if I were writing an article, "On interpreters and Pulitzers" would be its title). Apple's now willingly added another variable to the sordid mix: ad revenue.
A few weeks of data and a few hours of number-crunching will identify which developers / genres of developers are most profitable not in terms of app purchases but in terms of ad-click behaviour of users. And, oh wait, big sponsors don't like that developer - how can we reinterpret/tweak the rules? Yes, better to speed feature development and approval for sponsors, just as Google is ultimately a data-mining operation and ad broker - and by hell does this show!
tl;dr Apple wants a slice of moist, cheap Google pie.
Wikipedia has an article on the ad hom if you're unclear on
Wikipedia is precisely where you do not go if you're unclear on anything. It seems to have gone completely wild in extending the definition of "ad hominem" - mostly uncited, naturally - but it's managed to be at least correct in: "argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise" IOW, it is not ad hominem to imply, "If Apple acts that way, then Apple is totalitarian." Nor is it so to imply, "How typically ad hominem of Apple!" as long as I'm not using the predictability of Apple's behaviour as part of the argument.
why throwing the accusation of "totalitarianism" around the way you did is an ad hom.
Apple is leaning toward absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution. The definition is apt.
I haven't seen any of those STFUs you mention
Oh, Joe something I think a few posts down, and an "asshole" from vijay. lol, internet.
But you DID agree to them when you signed onto the App store!
(1) Paste App store agreement term requiring me to look at ads;
(2) Explain way in which agreement with Apple becomes agreement with third party developer;
(3) Justify validity of general terms in click-through agreements, especially increased restrictions after purchase.
You didn't answer earlier what the ethical conflict is?
Except for the conflict of interest between ad broker and app distributor.
You're the monopoly distributor for add-ons for some system and you're now the major ad broker for some system. What possible ways could Apple's involvement in one area affect Apple's decisions in the other?
It's a win-win for Apple.
Erm, yes? It's always a "win" when you can convince or force people to refuse choices other than yours.
You say, I'm not entitled to ask to people pay $1 to see the art OR watch the ad and see the art.
Oh, not at all, you're absolutely entitled to ask people for whatever you want. You're just not entitled to force people to choose one from your list of choices.
So, you instead find a way to see the art without paying or watching the ad. And this is my fault for creating the art because it's an expression of an idea that just exists.
It's not your fault at all. The art was there, say in plain view from the entrance, and I chose to take a glimpse. It's entirely my fault that I saw it.
Wait, no, there is no "fault". You put something somewhere and I used my eyes to see it. It seems your hand is working and my eyes are working. Excellent!
even though you got something out of it.
I get something out of the air, but I don't owe the air anything. It's just there. I haven't taken it from you, have I? Actually, I lie, I've reduced the amount of air available to you - but I haven't taken any of your art when I glimpsed it from across the hall.
Ah, kids today, always thinking that someone is owed something and trying so hard to convince the world that it's them.
Now, if you want me to pay for your software, ask me to pay for your software and I'll make up my mind. But give me a free version which shows ads and I'll just block the ads!
are there any security implications with allowing any 3rd-party app to add/change/alter/update firewall/routing rules
We have a lawyer in the house.
"Are there any possible dangers with knife ownership?" "Yes." "Aha, so knives/are/ dangerous and knife ownership should be outlawed!"
The answer is, of course, "yes" - and the answer is "yes" with every single piece of software you introduce on any device.
"Is it too dangerous to allow sane adults to buy a knife which has not been discovered to have unsuspected safety issues?" "Of course not, idiot."
There is no reasonable danger whatever in providing firewall software which allows me to block particular servers. There is no reasonable danger in providing firewall software which allows me to fully reconfigure packet filtering and routing, as long as clear warnings are provided in the user interface.
Similarly, if you sell a sane adult a knife with the warning, "stabbing yourself with this knife may kill you" then it's unreasonable to argue that the knife should not be sold on the grounds that someone will both ignore their sense and the clear warning.
But, while we're nanny-stating, we really ought to remove the web browser from the iPhone - you can use that to enter your credit card details on every form on every site on the WWW if you have the time. The humanity!
Hardly the same thing as a program taking cycles (btw, the iPhone sends signals that requires programs to for instance release memory
Does it do it properly across the range of contended resources like, say, VMS systems have always done? I.e. are programs allocated CPU / memory / disk / etc limits? And, if iOS has more finely grained privilege control and resource limits than I've read about, why can't this privilege control include the ability to firewall out servers without including the ability to, say, allow free access to the telnet port?
Throwing out the canard of "Oh, surely Apple isn't so totalitarian as to..." doesn't change the fact that it's an ad hominem
Argh. An ad hominem is an accusation about the character which is used to support an argument. I'm using an argument to judge the character.
I haven't really seen any vitriol other than yours...?
Well, perhaps my acerbic prose appears more vitriolic than those who respond with "asshole", "stfu" and ALL CAPS. But the vitriol of denial I accused all y'all of, i.e. the inability to just say "sorry, Apple won't allow that" without some proselytism on the Apple Way and the evil of people who refuse to look at adverts... woohoo!
You choices right now are: (1) Send me $100; (2) Cut off all your hair. See, it sounds just as ridiculous when I give you arbitrary instructions on what you can and cannot do.
My choice is to download apps and not view adverts. I can do this by jailbreaking and firewalling off the ad servers, but I want it to be simple for those who aren't technically minded. Apple are pretty much alone in the computing market by demonstrating an approach so totalitarian as to not permit this.
APPLE REQUIRES YOU TO CLICK ON AND WATCH ADS!
No, it doesn't require you to click on ads. Keep up.
I personally have no problem with ads and even less with iAds which have so far been extremely unintrusive.
That's great news for you. I respect your freedom to watch iAds all day long.
I'll respond to this, but first, are you a software developer or programmer?
We'll say "yes" in the hope that you'll provide at least a moderately sophisticated argument.
You absolutely have. When your first post disingenuously asks a questions you clearly already knew the answer to, calling Apple totalitarian what exactly do you think you're doing?
None of this is ad hominem. You may want to review your dictionary of logic.
(I also had no concrete answer until after I'd posted. The vitriol of denial added credence to my fear, of course.)
And you outright say you have no problems taking things for free that weren't meant to be free, directly or indirectly. Get over your lazy sense of entitlement.
How can a thing - in this case, the expression of an idea - mean to be anything? It just exists. You're not even making any sense.
In the US, you have a limited monopoly on the distribution of a subset of sufficiently original ideas and expressions. It is not even something you are inherently entitled to; it is merely what you are granted by society for promotion of sciences and the useful arts.
You are entitled to nothing, especially not to force other people to do things. This includes a lack of entitlement to force my eyes to look at adverts.
Apple / iOS doesn't allow ANY programs that affect other running programs like that. I would think that would generally be seen as a huge security flaw!
Yeah, allowing a firewall is a huge security flaw because it may affect the behaviour of other software... seriously, are you even thinking what you're saying? In other news, every piece of software negatively affects every other because there is contention for CPU, memory, storage space and battery power.
Your rants and ad hominems in this thread imply otherwise.
Feel free to point 'em out. I've criticised the Apple community but I've not criticised the community as a basis for another argument.
Pay attention. The issue I have with Apple is their not admitting iAds-blocking apps to the store. They are thus requiring you to view ads if you want to remain in their walled garden and enjoy the full range of apps.
"Stop enjoying the full range of apps, then!" is a cowardly answer from someone who walks away from the first sign of battle with the glimmer of defeat in his eye, content to do only precisely as he is told. It's also not addressing the fact that Apple's requiring you to watch ads as a condition of fully enjoying the App store.
Apple's partnership (i.e. profit-sharing) with developers on the iAds programme is also ethically questionable, but I wasn't raising that.
Slashdot Mirror
You can call it creating a "derived work" if you want
So why does it matter whether you have read the IBM TRM or not? Derive from IBM source / derive from IBM object.
It doesn't matter that you call it: It was perfectly legal
The term you are not looking for is "irrelevant", not "legal".
Sony v. Connectix in 1999 finally confirmed that the whole "copying is determined by whether the code has been viewed" is bullshit. Connectix openly admitted to looking at object code directly and freely in order to produce an emulator. Sony failed because Sony could not prove that the protected creative aspect of Sony's work had been copied by Connectix.
IBM's mock lawsuit against Compaq (I say "mock" because it expended pretty much no resources by IBM standards, and probably existed only to placate certain investors) failed because Compaq did a good job of creating a BIOS which looked nothing like IBM's BIOS, even while behaving like IBM's BIOS and created by looking at IBM's BIOS.
Compaq never made any secret about what it was doing or the steps it took when to do it. This is a well-established legal area.
The lie here is in claiming not to have read the TRMs, and the misdirection is in giving the impression that whether it's legal depends on whether the TRMs were read. The lie to the technically inexperienced court is in claiming that you didn't essentially copy the IBM BIOS in all but machine code byte order.
Reverse engineering is completely legal if done properly. Deal with it.
Everything non-criminal is completely legal if done sufficiently sneakily and with no private party sufficiently interested in stopping you. What kind of a stupid argument is this?
Yesterday on /. I was a "thief" for blocking iAds, today I'm a "troll" for suggesting that studying object code to create a derived work is creating a derived work.
Welcome to the contradictory world of freetards: where everything's fair game until you start using their stuff.
That's more than just a story and this is lore only to people who hadn't lived it.
Which is why I said it's "at least approaching honest". I can read the Bible and give you a blow-by-blow account; a story you create based on the account will still be a derived work, no matter how much you lie about how irrelevant and vague my account was.
It was not hard to find programmers who hadn't seen the tech ref manual.
How did you find them? "Right, you seem good for this job... but before we hire you and pay you a very good wage, tell me, have you read this book? Try not to let the fact that a 'yes' will deny you the job influence the answer."
(The weird thing is that both reading the book and disassembling the binary imply creating a derived work. Back to the Bible example, "I only read the published Harry Potter book, not Rowling's drafts," isn't a rational defence to the accusation that you created a derived work.)
I said *disassembled*, with a debugger. That's not reading the source code in the books, which I had no access to.
Which is reading the original code and confirmation that you created a derived work. You can pretend until your grave that the interaction between the "did read IBM BIOS" and "didn't read IBM BIOS" group was in some way so specific and perfect that Compaq couldn't be regarded as creating a derived work, but it's conceptual nonsense. You personally didn't create a derived work, but Compaq as a whole created a derived work.
What is more, by reading the book source you would make both understanding the code easier and avoiding accidental duplication of IBM cunning easier. And once you'd read the code there would be no reason not to read the book: either way you were basing your work on direct study of IBM code.
Look, you're either a troll or know nothing about this topic.
Only one of us is an AC pretending to be the key technical member of the PC clone revolution.
The books were rather obscure and very pricey.
Obscure in what sense? Everyone knew about them, and anyone who wanted to do any serious low-level work with the IBM PC would have an original copy or get ready for this a photocopy of relevant parts. You (or, more accurately, the person you're playing on the Internet) had access, and you know it.
especially when reverse engineering was plenty fun work anyway. It was like solving a puzzle.
Oh, well, of course, businesses routinely tell their employees to make their work harder and more error-prone because it's "plenty fun" and "like solving a puzzle".
Look. You read the original code. You admit to reading the original code. You observed techniques in the original code. You observed quirks in the original code. You then admit that (behind closed doors) you liaised with people who wrote a derived version of that code. It is completely dishonest to claim other than you produced a derived work of the IBM BIOS.
At any rate, I have no doubt that IBM had their lawyers pore over every byte of the Compaq BIOS looking for evidence of copying. If there had been any, they would have stomped Compaq off the map.
It's quite easy to produce something which looks byte-for-byte quite different while essentially being a copy of original code - but you have to look at the original to do this. If you don't look at original code, you are going to quite incidentally and accidentally produce very similar routines (see the Linux vs SCO fiasco) by the nature of coding.
Anyway, lawyers are not programmers and IBM may not have wanted to stop Compaq. Your persona is just a lowly engineer and has no special insight into the ties between the firms.
If none of that had happened anywhere, all systems from different vendors would still be totally incompatible and proprietary
The dominance of the IBM PC architecture is probably one of the worst things to happen to computing and there were so many better architectures (some of them quite open) which could have won over. Thanks for nothing.
I wish Apple or Linux supported a base system for ten years.
$1.20 says they'll continue releasing critical updates as they've done for a while for "retired" service packs in the past.
while the majority of windows XP users still haven't upgraded to SP3
Evidence?
(1) You're an AC and you could just be making everything up - indeed, it's quite likely, as you've given enough detail about your role that you could be identified;
(2) If you actually were involved in writing Compaq BIOS code, there is no way in hell you'd wander into Slashdot almost two decades later to admit that Compaq BIOS writers read IBM BIOS source - you were part of the initial lie, and repeating the lie a few years isn't new proof of anything;
(3) You're introducing another variant of my parenthesised story, which essentially comes down to the corporation making a derived work of the IBM BIOS but with a split of responsibility between readers and writers. Moreover, you, AC, are claiming to the be lynchpin of the whole PC clone age: the guy who read the IBM BIOS in response to Compaq BIOS writers' questions but only gave answers in such a magic way as to not give rise to accusations of copyright abuse.
Compaq developers worked out a way to make those bytes at that address appear in part of an actual executable code sequence instead.
So? If they'd reverse engineered user code they'd be able to find out that the string needs to be there and could have legitimately inserted the string as straight data. But it's all part of the bullshit to distract with some convoluted aside, eh?
Compaq had administrative staff remove the BIOS listings from all IBM tech ref manuals before they were given to the engineers.
This bit is especially hilarious. It must have been during the "fascist totalitarianism" days of Reaganism when it was completely impossible to get hold of books which weren't in some specific location on some specially designated shelf. And may God have mercy on your soul if you had read a copy of forbidden tomes (available for purchase by anyone without NDA) before employment or in the evenings at home.
You're a cheap fuck, we got it.
When it comes to not giving money to aggressive beggars, yup.
You'll notice how everything else which switches from analog to digital manages to provide better quality in less bandwidth.
Better quality under ideal or manageable noise conditions. For weak or noisy video and audio, compressed digital collapses while analogue is often perceptible thanks to the human brain.
I look out to my right over a beautiful lawn and all sorts of analogue distortions are created: through my imperfect eyes since I'm short-sighted, through the imperfect glass on the decades-old windows, through the difference in intensities between indoors and shadowed and unshadowed patches of outdoors. But I still perceive a beautiful lawn. If I suddenly hear a tweeting then I know instantly that movement in the corner of my eye is a bird, and I can surmise its orientation even though - when I look straight at it - I can't actually highlight a beak or a tail at all.
If the human brain can provide so many extra dB of SNR because of its superior error correction,
Again, you're trying to simplify the human brain into some primitive engineer's noise filter. One can describe something about the behaviours of the brain and a little about how they're effected, but we're nowhere near to quantitative measurements.
why did anything go digital?
Sometimes because it's more accurate and efficient under sufficiently predictable conditions. Other times because compression enables the government and its partners to extract more revenue. The whole "digital is always better" is simply a lie - yet kids from the very start of their engineering education are taught that analog is somehow archaic / obsolete / superceded. Now, Sometimes digital is trivially better to implement. Other times it's a toss-up depending on technical and non-technical factors. In the case of FM vs digital radio, it's simply false on both counts.
In fact Compaq hired engineers specifically for the fact they had never seen IBM BIOS code.
This is one of the great hilarities of PC lore, and obvious bullshit as the code was published to the public. Anyone with the technical expertise to write a BIOS would have incidentally flipped through the pages of the IBM tech ref manual which contained the source. And the idea that this key book to early '80s PC tech (still worryingly relevant today!) was somehow missing from all the bookshelves reachable by the Compaq BIOS writing department is just silly.
Put a group of men working for money in a room, offer them enough money and they will deny anything. Perhaps the PC clone world would be far more tolerable if everyone had acknowledged that it was born on a simple act of idea and expression "piracy" (see also Microsoft).
(The story sometimes is described as: group A saw the code, wrote up a description of the code, then showed only the description to group B. This is at least approaching honest.)
So nothing is in public view - and you're bitching that it's not.
Offering a TV programme for free-to-air watching = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Offering a web page for free download = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Offering an app for free download = in public view. Ads or no ads.
Your sense of entitlement to modify how people behave when you put something in public view = unconscionable.
If you want money for your art, just ask for it. If you want to distribute a shareware style trial version, you can put a feature/time limit in it or just politely request that people pay if they find it useful. I'm not here claiming some right to the full version just because I have the trial version, just asserting my freedom to not have my device and/or eyeballs controlled by you.
To conclude, I don't know about your world, but in mine people give reward because they think it's deserved, not because they're forced to. You must live in a horrible environment where everyone's so begrudging!
God, you are so stupid.
You have better manners on Macrumors. And you used to be quite reasonable before you got seduced by the fanboy environment.
If you don't want to see these adverts, don't download apps that show advertisement.
Why is it only in the Apple community that I get:
There is no f***ing way that Apple builds an infrastructure so that you see advertisements that are vetted from advertisers guaranteed to actually make payments to the developer and then allows some app to interfere with this.
So Apple creates for itself this conflict of interest, it's absolutely clear that it's taking advantage of it, and that's absolutely fine with you. How.. Apple.
This is like the way over 90% of Google's revenue is from ads so on its own browser platform it doesn't allow and host ad blocking extensions. Oh, wait, no.
(and before y'all axe)
if Apple wanted to allow iAd blocking then it would be part of the OS.
You're probably right there. Apple has a tendency not to like competing solutions on its iPhone, especially ones with more tweakability than Apple's own.
They don't because developers need money to produce apps.
Well, they need to pay Apple $99/year, yeah, but apart from that, not much more than any other decent development system. And you're surely not judging the App Store by the quantity of apps?
And yet, in this thread, there is a huge number of responses that basically equate ad blocking on iPhone to stealing...
"Troll" here. The opinion of Apple-using /.ers may not represent the opinion of /.ers in general.
One of the more interesting ways you can waste your time in life is to guess which choir a particular speaker will attract. And if you utter something which is canon for the religion ("as a geek I entirely recommend and use ad-blockers") but heresy for the denomination ("as an Apple user I find ad-blocking to be stealing"), you'll get fairly passionate responses. The same applies IME with real religion.
Maybe it's a combination of feeling outnumbered, wanting to stand out, and knowing that your argument is tenuous and possibly comes only from self-interest (lots of small-time App store developers). Or maybe it's Sunday and everyone's trying to get away from the fucking football.
You didn't like my VPN solution which afaict is perfectly legal, perfectly by the license, and nobody would try to stop you doing?
It's cool - I do like and do use. I was really asking the question on behalf of those who don't know how to set up a VPN / jailbreak / etc.
Oooh, this is ironic? You've been arguing that Apple REQUIRES you to watch ads, now you're arguing that they DON'T require you to look at ads?
You asserted that I agreed to it when I signed up. I was just asking for evidence that I agreed.
Apple MIGHT do something wrong, so Apple WILL Do something wrong. I don't buy it here :)
The knife example is fairly irrelevant unless the CEO of Knives Inc willingly becomes Secretary of Defense, or something.
Now Apple's had a history of rule-swaying in approvals based, among other things, on whether it's perceived the submitter as a direct competitor and whether it's been lambasted in the press (if I were writing an article, "On interpreters and Pulitzers" would be its title). Apple's now willingly added another variable to the sordid mix: ad revenue.
A few weeks of data and a few hours of number-crunching will identify which developers / genres of developers are most profitable not in terms of app purchases but in terms of ad-click behaviour of users. And, oh wait, big sponsors don't like that developer - how can we reinterpret/tweak the rules? Yes, better to speed feature development and approval for sponsors, just as Google is ultimately a data-mining operation and ad broker - and by hell does this show!
tl;dr Apple wants a slice of moist, cheap Google pie.
Wikipedia has an article on the ad hom if you're unclear on
Wikipedia is precisely where you do not go if you're unclear on anything. It seems to have gone completely wild in extending the definition of "ad hominem" - mostly uncited, naturally - but it's managed to be at least correct in:
"argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), is an attempt to persuade which links the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise"
IOW, it is not ad hominem to imply, "If Apple acts that way, then Apple is totalitarian." Nor is it so to imply, "How typically ad hominem of Apple!" as long as I'm not using the predictability of Apple's behaviour as part of the argument.
why throwing the accusation of "totalitarianism" around the way you did is an ad hom.
Apple is leaning toward absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution. The definition is apt.
I haven't seen any of those STFUs you mention
Oh, Joe something I think a few posts down, and an "asshole" from vijay. lol, internet.
But you DID agree to them when you signed onto the App store!
(1) Paste App store agreement term requiring me to look at ads;
(2) Explain way in which agreement with Apple becomes agreement with third party developer;
(3) Justify validity of general terms in click-through agreements, especially increased restrictions after purchase.
You didn't answer earlier what the ethical conflict is?
Except for the conflict of interest between ad broker and app distributor.
You're the monopoly distributor for add-ons for some system and you're now the major ad broker for some system. What possible ways could Apple's involvement in one area affect Apple's decisions in the other?
It's a win-win for Apple.
Erm, yes? It's always a "win" when you can convince or force people to refuse choices other than yours.
(Why do I want Apple to "win"?)
You say, I'm not entitled to ask to people pay $1 to see the art OR watch the ad and see the art.
Oh, not at all, you're absolutely entitled to ask people for whatever you want. You're just not entitled to force people to choose one from your list of choices.
So, you instead find a way to see the art without paying or watching the ad. And this is my fault for creating the art because it's an expression of an idea that just exists.
It's not your fault at all. The art was there, say in plain view from the entrance, and I chose to take a glimpse. It's entirely my fault that I saw it.
Wait, no, there is no "fault". You put something somewhere and I used my eyes to see it. It seems your hand is working and my eyes are working. Excellent!
even though you got something out of it.
I get something out of the air, but I don't owe the air anything. It's just there. I haven't taken it from you, have I? Actually, I lie, I've reduced the amount of air available to you - but I haven't taken any of your art when I glimpsed it from across the hall.
Ah, kids today, always thinking that someone is owed something and trying so hard to convince the world that it's them.
Now, if you want me to pay for your software, ask me to pay for your software and I'll make up my mind. But give me a free version which shows ads and I'll just block the ads!
Non sequitur.
Exhaustive list of options I never agreed to / exhaustive list of options you never agreed to.
Really? Can you do it on Android or Symbian or WebOS?
Android: apk upload to my site, URL provision to the world, click. For example. (the use of Google Code is incidental)
The base iAd banners are no different from banner ads that have been in apps for 3+ years now.
Except for the conflict of interest between ad broker and app distributor.
are there any security implications with allowing any 3rd-party app to add/change/alter/update firewall/routing rules
We have a lawyer in the house.
"Are there any possible dangers with knife ownership?" /are/ dangerous and knife ownership should be outlawed!"
"Yes."
"Aha, so knives
The answer is, of course, "yes" - and the answer is "yes" with every single piece of software you introduce on any device.
"Is it too dangerous to allow sane adults to buy a knife which has not been discovered to have unsuspected safety issues?"
"Of course not, idiot."
There is no reasonable danger whatever in providing firewall software which allows me to block particular servers. There is no reasonable danger in providing firewall software which allows me to fully reconfigure packet filtering and routing, as long as clear warnings are provided in the user interface.
Similarly, if you sell a sane adult a knife with the warning, "stabbing yourself with this knife may kill you" then it's unreasonable to argue that the knife should not be sold on the grounds that someone will both ignore their sense and the clear warning.
But, while we're nanny-stating, we really ought to remove the web browser from the iPhone - you can use that to enter your credit card details on every form on every site on the WWW if you have the time. The humanity!
Hardly the same thing as a program taking cycles (btw, the iPhone sends signals that requires programs to for instance release memory
Does it do it properly across the range of contended resources like, say, VMS systems have always done? I.e. are programs allocated CPU / memory / disk / etc limits? And, if iOS has more finely grained privilege control and resource limits than I've read about, why can't this privilege control include the ability to firewall out servers without including the ability to, say, allow free access to the telnet port?
Throwing out the canard of "Oh, surely Apple isn't so totalitarian as to ..." doesn't change the fact that it's an ad hominem
Argh. An ad hominem is an accusation about the character which is used to support an argument. I'm using an argument to judge the character.
I haven't really seen any vitriol other than yours...?
Well, perhaps my acerbic prose appears more vitriolic than those who respond with "asshole", "stfu" and ALL CAPS. But the vitriol of denial I accused all y'all of, i.e. the inability to just say "sorry, Apple won't allow that" without some proselytism on the Apple Way and the evil of people who refuse to look at adverts... woohoo!
The choice on the app store is
You choices right now are:
(1) Send me $100;
(2) Cut off all your hair.
See, it sounds just as ridiculous when I give you arbitrary instructions on what you can and cannot do.
My choice is to download apps and not view adverts. I can do this by jailbreaking and firewalling off the ad servers, but I want it to be simple for those who aren't technically minded. Apple are pretty much alone in the computing market by demonstrating an approach so totalitarian as to not permit this.
APPLE REQUIRES YOU TO CLICK ON AND WATCH ADS!
No, it doesn't require you to click on ads. Keep up.
I personally have no problem with ads and even less with iAds which have so far been extremely unintrusive.
That's great news for you. I respect your freedom to watch iAds all day long.
I'll respond to this, but first, are you a software developer or programmer?
We'll say "yes" in the hope that you'll provide at least a moderately sophisticated argument.
You absolutely have. When your first post disingenuously asks a questions you clearly already knew the answer to, calling Apple totalitarian what exactly do you think you're doing?
None of this is ad hominem. You may want to review your dictionary of logic.
(I also had no concrete answer until after I'd posted. The vitriol of denial added credence to my fear, of course.)
And you outright say you have no problems taking things for free that weren't meant to be free, directly or indirectly. Get over your lazy sense of entitlement.
How can a thing - in this case, the expression of an idea - mean to be anything? It just exists. You're not even making any sense.
In the US, you have a limited monopoly on the distribution of a subset of sufficiently original ideas and expressions. It is not even something you are inherently entitled to; it is merely what you are granted by society for promotion of sciences and the useful arts.
You are entitled to nothing, especially not to force other people to do things. This includes a lack of entitlement to force my eyes to look at adverts.
Apple / iOS doesn't allow ANY programs that affect other running programs like that. I would think that would generally be seen as a huge security flaw!
Yeah, allowing a firewall is a huge security flaw because it may affect the behaviour of other software... seriously, are you even thinking what you're saying? In other news, every piece of software negatively affects every other because there is contention for CPU, memory, storage space and battery power.
Your rants and ad hominems in this thread imply otherwise.
Feel free to point 'em out. I've criticised the Apple community but I've not criticised the community as a basis for another argument.
Pay attention. The issue I have with Apple is their not admitting iAds-blocking apps to the store. They are thus requiring you to view ads if you want to remain in their walled garden and enjoy the full range of apps.
"Stop enjoying the full range of apps, then!" is a cowardly answer from someone who walks away from the first sign of battle with the glimmer of defeat in his eye, content to do only precisely as he is told. It's also not addressing the fact that Apple's requiring you to watch ads as a condition of fully enjoying the App store.
Apple's partnership (i.e. profit-sharing) with developers on the iAds programme is also ethically questionable, but I wasn't raising that.