I don't see why everything you mentioned can't be built for the iPhone. I think people are getting too hung up on the notion that everything on the iPhone MUST be run from a remote server. There's really no reason to make that assumption. People seem to be assuming (again for no reason) that there is no local storage. All that has been said is that user apps would be sandboxed so they don't trash other data. At the very minimum, Safari qould have to support cookies just to function as a modern web browser!
There's no reason you couldn't build a notetaking app, a password app, an eBook app, a contact manager, a to-do list, etc. I did Palm OS development for a few years and pretty much everything I ever built could be made as an app in a web browser today. I can't think of any major PDA 3rd party application that couldn't be (other than something system-level like launchers or hacking the power switch, but Apple is all about user interface, so I wouldn't expect that sort of thing to be changeable or even desirable to change at any low level to Apple's target market.)
the stockholders also expect their CEO to act in a certain way and if they think that the CEO's contrariness is affecting their stocks... it still makes Jobs look like a spoiled brat;
Yeah, it's definitely affecting shareholder confidence. I mean, Apple is only repeatedly considered one of the most effective companies of any industry anywhere on Earth at marketing.
I think the disconnect is that you're thinking like a geek who took psych 101. Jobs is thinking like a CEO who has marketed some of the most successful products in the history of modern industry, and he has done so precisely by controlling the message 100%. You'll forgive the stockholders if his actual financial and market success trumps your theories about him shooting from the hip rather than thinking through the ramifications of every deal he makes.
The fact that it is even possible for Apple to get news coverage on an almost daily basis (hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising, in a format that people consider more trustworthy than actual advertising!) is due entirely to Apple controlling the timing of every product they announce down to the hour of day. Kicking an easily replaceable vendor to the curb for a year to ensure you keep those hundreds of millions in free advertising is hardly a net financial loss.
It probably cost Apple a few hundred hours of unexpected labor to change advertising/documentation when the ATI deal was canceled, but I'm sure ATI had some 'splainin to do to THEIR stockholders as to why they had a warehouse full of components that were gathering cobwebs because some employee nullified a multi-million dollar contract by violating a simple confidentiality clause.
God save us from libertarians who only look at long-term effects. Yes, ultimately the market will determine the winner, in the meantime the discount airline with no security and maintenance will crash how many planes into innocent people's homes?
I guess the dead people will never fly that airline, so the market wins again!
In other words, if they had said "we're going to create these standards and we're going to pay to implement them" it would rather quickly be followed by "and this increase in taxes collected from each state is how."
Well, yes, that IS the point.
The governor and state legislators don't want to be blamed for raising taxes to pay for something they never wanted and had no say in.
If the federal government wants a particular program, then the elected federal officials who want it should also be the ones who have to raise taxes to pay for it. That way when voters get pissed off about the tax increase, they blame the right person on election day.
As tempting as it is for those espousing conservative political views to blame the New Deal, it actually stems from 1913
I would think that is was more a direct result of the US Civil War. Let's face it, the Civil War forever changed the de facto balance of power between the federal government and the states (for both good and ill). It was, ultimately, the federal government saying that states do not have the ultimate right to say "no" to something simply because they disagree.
the interesting part isn't the number so much as whatever definition they came up with of 'victory'.
Indeed, if she's figured out what victory in Iraq is, she should probably let everyone else know, because she seems to be the only person on Earth who even knows what the goal is at this point.
For instance, the Vietnam war is a success if you consider the objective to be standing up to and halting the spread of worldwide communism
Except that even that measure of "success" assumes there was any correlation whatsoever between Vietnam and what other countries would do. That seems to be the biggest stumbling block of all political leaders in the west for the past 50 years -- just assuming with no reason whatsoever that some massively overarching goal has some direct relationship to the military conflict du jour.
I think you outthought yourself on your logic. There's no reason a state that has a net outflow of money should be any more excited about unfunded mandates than states with a net inflow. That's the kind of logic that says if something is on sale, you should buy it whether you need it or not, since after all you're "saving" money.
Why would building a web browser for Windows be any harder than building a web browser for OSX or Linux?
Because it is different? It may shock you to find out that file handling is different on different OSes. If you're not aware of the security pitfalls on each one, then every time you go to a new OS you'll have to learn the hard way.
It certainly does not help that the MS specifications for file handling are in fact the insecure way to do things, which is no big deal when developing a local application. But obviously developing a web browser requires an additional knowledge of the security issues relevant to the platform beyond what the docs provide.
I don't know when YOU started using different web browsers, but Opera, Firefox, IE, Mosaic, and Navigator all had significant security problems early in their development.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was particularly skilled at delivering speedy or well-integrated Windows apps (I'm certainly not impressed by them), but to criticize them for following the specs for file handling and then being bitten by problems on a beta product is a little hyper-critical.
I think we could at least wait until the product is actually 1.0 before we start lighting torches and storming the castle.
Could you imagine the screams of outrage if Microsoft, Mozilla or Opera would have released a beta browser with those kinds of problems?
I'm quite certain the beta version of Firefox 1.0 and IE 1.0 both had lots and lots of security holes and bugs. I don't think anyone is shocked at all when there are major bugs in the Firefox betas (I certainly don't think anyone is recommending you use the current Firefox 3.0 for production use).
This is the first web browser Apple has ever written for Windows. I would be flabbergasted if it didn't have all sorts of problems well into the 2.0 version. I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use it as their daily browser, and I don't think Apple expects them to right now either -- it's an IDE for the iPhone.
apple threatened to sue if he disassembled the airport,
Yeah, the only problem is that he is the only security researcher on Earth who has ever even claimed to be told this by Apple, and he has provided no evidence whatsoever of this supposed threat. Somehow everyone else who notifies apple of vulnerabilities and even demonstrates them later has managed to not get sued or taken out by thugs in a back alley.
Basically he has posited a grand conspiracy with nothing but his own word that it exists. Nobody else who deals with the same people at the same company in the same manner has any idea WTF this guy is talking about.
because the adversary is likely to manipulate every one of those sources? Again, this is not to say that the allegations lack basis, just to say that allegations are made for more than strictly factual reasons.
I think if Al Quiada is able to get active-duty American soldiers to confess to things they didn't do and volunteer to serve life serving hard labor in a military prison, implicate their fellow soldiers for things they didn't do, and have them shoot photographs of things they didn't do, we have bigger things to worry about than bias in the major news networks.
The whole point of evidence is that it is evidence regardless of the motivation behind offering it. We set our entire court system up to encourage people to drag up damaging evidence because they wanted to bury the other asshole, not out of some altruistic desire to see the truth set free.
You are making the assumption that all data on any particular tape expires at the same time. If that assumption is not valid, then you've got a lot of work ahead of you.
Yeah, and the annoying USDA for some reason requires that we keep track of when meat is a certain age! The entire meat industry will collapse, because there's certainly no way to organize it in advance of storage or anything -- we just throw it all in a warehouse at random and pull out whatever is most convenient when we sell it! I'm sure our customers will understand when they get food poisoning that it was the government's fault.
what do you think precludes the media from itself being used as an information warfare channel by the adversary? Or, why should I trust any of the TLA networks?
Why trust them? I would think photographs, eyewitnesses and confessions should be enough evidence of wrongdoing to show anyone truly interested in the truth.
Imagine that realdolls [www.realdolls] are actually a scientific project from aliens, equipped with cameras and wireless transmitters, for the sake of studying human replication behaviour. Now imagine the kind of image these aliens would get from human replication behaviour
King Xyylax! We have studied the human mating behavior for years and now know precisely how it happens! Once the woman is boiled, coitus is brief, then the woman is doused in bleach before she is thrown in a closet and covered with dirty clothes. Then the male weeps uncontrollably for several minutes before falling asleep. Invasion should be simple.
Unfortunately, just scanning a work means that the scan itself has a copyright.
Similarly, you can't bring a camera into most museums because it is only by restricting photography that museums can control who has the ability to reproduce paintings they own (after all, a 400-year old painting is well out of copyright).
I find it funny that they are saying the material will be provided in a manner consistent with copyright law
I think the whole point of going to these large academic libraries is that they have books that are unquestionably in the public domain -- entire rooms full of books 100+ years old of which only a handful of copies exist worldwide, and are available only in very limited contexts even when they are already digitized. Using the tools and distribution of Google, these materials can actually be shared easily to anyone who wants to research the differences between the many translations of the Bible in the 18th century.
Let's face it, if Google wants to post a John Grisham novel, they don't exactly need to get Harvard to scan it for them.
The EFF has since admitted that the other unknown blocks were just more metadata used by iTunes. The obvious user information is the only identifying information in the files.
There are a hundred ways to remove that data, and I have no doubt within another week or two someone will create an app whose sole purpose is to make all the files you have look like they were bought by Jack Valanti @RIAA.com.
I really can't imagine any way Apple could have made this any LESS innocuous while still being able to tell the music companies with a straight face "of course the files have the purchaser's account information in them!"
Um, what? There's nothing "snooty" about saying the Gimp is an RGB editing program, that's what it is. I even said that if all you ever need to do is web graphics it may be all you ever need (though again, I think there are better and more well-designed programs if that is the feature set you need).
I do plenty of web graphics professionally, I can't imagine how you managed to infer that I'm criticizing anyone who does them (or that I "don't understand" the web -- what does that even mean? There hasn't been much tricky on a technical level about doing web graphics since we managed to break out of the 216 color palette.) But I also do print, and video, and lots of other stuff. If someone needs to do all those things, then they're probably best served by learning tools capable of doing all those things, rather than needing to learn a totally new tool for each field when there's so much conceptual and procedural overlap between them.
I forgot to mention what would be a fairly critical shortcoming to many home users (though I doubt many are using paid versions of Photoshop) -- printing photos from their digital cameras. The use of color profiles, print profiles, transforms and intents are what make it possible for someone to edit their photo onscreen and then send it to any printer on any paper and get fantastic results the first time, even when switching inksets or paper stock.
Hey, if you like the Gimp, knock yourself out. But if someone asks why it isn't embraced by the prosumer/professional community, I'm not going to hold their hand and lie to them that it's all a big conspiracy to keep the Gimp down.
Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.
Well, there will always be a compromise between mean capacity and peak capacity. Expecting everyone with RR to be able to download NNTP feeds at full-speed at prime-time is not reasonable for any consumer service that will be affordable. But if I'm downloading at 3am and there is plenty of unused capacity that i'm capable of having, I certainly expect it not to be slowed down by RoadRunner just because they like the idea of slowing down bandwidth-intensive stuff.
I always here this complaint about Gimp, but I never really understand why people whine about this. Isn't CMYK only important if you're doing printing, as printing uses CMYK?
It is representative of the complete lack of any real understanding of color in the Gimp -- it is just an RGB pixel editing program.
Of course there's nothing wrong with just being an RGB pixel editing program, and if all you're doing are web graphics where you know exactly what RGB or HEX values to use, it might be all you ever need (though I'd argue there are much better, simpler programs than the bloated and convoluted Gimp --it's the graphics editing program by programmers and for programmers).
Photoshop treats RGB as merely one of many color spaces (internally, everything is Lab) -- it actually understands color as a property that can (and is) be manipulated and perceived in many ways by different devices, uses, and applications. 255,255,255 is not the same color on my LCD as it is on my CRT as it is on my TV and definitely not as it is on paper.
The use of color spaces, profiles, and intents are all pretty fundamental to work that is more advanced than web graphics. Anyone working with graphics regularly has to determine if it makes sense to learn a program they can use on any job they get, or to learn one that is only good right now but will have to be completely forgotten if they ever go to work at a new job (and for all the presence of the web, printed advertisements are still 90% of the money in the graphics business).
I think you're thinking of Live Picture, but Aldus Photostyler was quite popular even after LP disappeared, and it was on a par with Photoshop overall until it died and was mostly rolled into Photoshop.
I actually did quite a few professional jobs in Painter back in the mid 90s, using the "recording" feature in a way like LP used to work. I'd do a whole page at 50-75dpi while recording, then play it back on a 266dpi image overnight and have a (MASSIVE!) 50-100MB file waiting in the morning. Now I'm lucky if I can archive an afternoon's work on a DVD:)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see why everything you mentioned can't be built for the iPhone. I think people are getting too hung up on the notion that everything on the iPhone MUST be run from a remote server. There's really no reason to make that assumption. People seem to be assuming (again for no reason) that there is no local storage. All that has been said is that user apps would be sandboxed so they don't trash other data. At the very minimum, Safari qould have to support cookies just to function as a modern web browser!
There's no reason you couldn't build a notetaking app, a password app, an eBook app, a contact manager, a to-do list, etc. I did Palm OS development for a few years and pretty much everything I ever built could be made as an app in a web browser today. I can't think of any major PDA 3rd party application that couldn't be (other than something system-level like launchers or hacking the power switch, but Apple is all about user interface, so I wouldn't expect that sort of thing to be changeable or even desirable to change at any low level to Apple's target market.)
Yeah, it's definitely affecting shareholder confidence. I mean, Apple is only repeatedly considered one of the most effective companies of any industry anywhere on Earth at marketing.
I think the disconnect is that you're thinking like a geek who took psych 101. Jobs is thinking like a CEO who has marketed some of the most successful products in the history of modern industry, and he has done so precisely by controlling the message 100%. You'll forgive the stockholders if his actual financial and market success trumps your theories about him shooting from the hip rather than thinking through the ramifications of every deal he makes.
The fact that it is even possible for Apple to get news coverage on an almost daily basis (hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertising, in a format that people consider more trustworthy than actual advertising!) is due entirely to Apple controlling the timing of every product they announce down to the hour of day. Kicking an easily replaceable vendor to the curb for a year to ensure you keep those hundreds of millions in free advertising is hardly a net financial loss.
It probably cost Apple a few hundred hours of unexpected labor to change advertising/documentation when the ATI deal was canceled, but I'm sure ATI had some 'splainin to do to THEIR stockholders as to why they had a warehouse full of components that were gathering cobwebs because some employee nullified a multi-million dollar contract by violating a simple confidentiality clause.
having things manufactured overseas is quite different from saying "oh, they're just selling the same box everyone else is!"
Well then he must be lying if he doesn't remember what his parents paid for his passport when he was an infant!
God save us from libertarians who only look at long-term effects. Yes, ultimately the market will determine the winner, in the meantime the discount airline with no security and maintenance will crash how many planes into innocent people's homes?
I guess the dead people will never fly that airline, so the market wins again!
Well, yes, that IS the point.
The governor and state legislators don't want to be blamed for raising taxes to pay for something they never wanted and had no say in.
If the federal government wants a particular program, then the elected federal officials who want it should also be the ones who have to raise taxes to pay for it. That way when voters get pissed off about the tax increase, they blame the right person on election day.
I would think that is was more a direct result of the US Civil War. Let's face it, the Civil War forever changed the de facto balance of power between the federal government and the states (for both good and ill). It was, ultimately, the federal government saying that states do not have the ultimate right to say "no" to something simply because they disagree.
Indeed, if she's figured out what victory in Iraq is, she should probably let everyone else know, because she seems to be the only person on Earth who even knows what the goal is at this point.
Except that even that measure of "success" assumes there was any correlation whatsoever between Vietnam and what other countries would do. That seems to be the biggest stumbling block of all political leaders in the west for the past 50 years -- just assuming with no reason whatsoever that some massively overarching goal has some direct relationship to the military conflict du jour.
I think you outthought yourself on your logic. There's no reason a state that has a net outflow of money should be any more excited about unfunded mandates than states with a net inflow. That's the kind of logic that says if something is on sale, you should buy it whether you need it or not, since after all you're "saving" money.
Because it is different? It may shock you to find out that file handling is different on different OSes. If you're not aware of the security pitfalls on each one, then every time you go to a new OS you'll have to learn the hard way.
It certainly does not help that the MS specifications for file handling are in fact the insecure way to do things, which is no big deal when developing a local application. But obviously developing a web browser requires an additional knowledge of the security issues relevant to the platform beyond what the docs provide.
I don't know when YOU started using different web browsers, but Opera, Firefox, IE, Mosaic, and Navigator all had significant security problems early in their development.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed Apple was particularly skilled at delivering speedy or well-integrated Windows apps (I'm certainly not impressed by them), but to criticize them for following the specs for file handling and then being bitten by problems on a beta product is a little hyper-critical.
I think we could at least wait until the product is actually 1.0 before we start lighting torches and storming the castle.
I'm quite certain the beta version of Firefox 1.0 and IE 1.0 both had lots and lots of security holes and bugs. I don't think anyone is shocked at all when there are major bugs in the Firefox betas (I certainly don't think anyone is recommending you use the current Firefox 3.0 for production use).
This is the first web browser Apple has ever written for Windows. I would be flabbergasted if it didn't have all sorts of problems well into the 2.0 version. I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to use it as their daily browser, and I don't think Apple expects them to right now either -- it's an IDE for the iPhone.
Yeah, the only problem is that he is the only security researcher on Earth who has ever even claimed to be told this by Apple, and he has provided no evidence whatsoever of this supposed threat. Somehow everyone else who notifies apple of vulnerabilities and even demonstrates them later has managed to not get sued or taken out by thugs in a back alley.
Basically he has posited a grand conspiracy with nothing but his own word that it exists. Nobody else who deals with the same people at the same company in the same manner has any idea WTF this guy is talking about.
I think if Al Quiada is able to get active-duty American soldiers to confess to things they didn't do and volunteer to serve life serving hard labor in a military prison, implicate their fellow soldiers for things they didn't do, and have them shoot photographs of things they didn't do, we have bigger things to worry about than bias in the major news networks.
The whole point of evidence is that it is evidence regardless of the motivation behind offering it. We set our entire court system up to encourage people to drag up damaging evidence because they wanted to bury the other asshole, not out of some altruistic desire to see the truth set free.
Yeah, and the annoying USDA for some reason requires that we keep track of when meat is a certain age! The entire meat industry will collapse, because there's certainly no way to organize it in advance of storage or anything -- we just throw it all in a warehouse at random and pull out whatever is most convenient when we sell it! I'm sure our customers will understand when they get food poisoning that it was the government's fault.
Great, now you have a huge image with massive amounts of noisy gray. What's the next step?
Why trust them? I would think photographs, eyewitnesses and confessions should be enough evidence of wrongdoing to show anyone truly interested in the truth.
King Xyylax! We have studied the human mating behavior for years and now know precisely how it happens! Once the woman is boiled, coitus is brief, then the woman is doused in bleach before she is thrown in a closet and covered with dirty clothes. Then the male weeps uncontrollably for several minutes before falling asleep. Invasion should be simple.
Unfortunately, just scanning a work means that the scan itself has a copyright.
Similarly, you can't bring a camera into most museums because it is only by restricting photography that museums can control who has the ability to reproduce paintings they own (after all, a 400-year old painting is well out of copyright).
I think the whole point of going to these large academic libraries is that they have books that are unquestionably in the public domain -- entire rooms full of books 100+ years old of which only a handful of copies exist worldwide, and are available only in very limited contexts even when they are already digitized. Using the tools and distribution of Google, these materials can actually be shared easily to anyone who wants to research the differences between the many translations of the Bible in the 18th century.
Let's face it, if Google wants to post a John Grisham novel, they don't exactly need to get Harvard to scan it for them.
The EFF has since admitted that the other unknown blocks were just more metadata used by iTunes. The obvious user information is the only identifying information in the files.
There are a hundred ways to remove that data, and I have no doubt within another week or two someone will create an app whose sole purpose is to make all the files you have look like they were bought by Jack Valanti @RIAA.com.
I really can't imagine any way Apple could have made this any LESS innocuous while still being able to tell the music companies with a straight face "of course the files have the purchaser's account information in them!"
Um, what? There's nothing "snooty" about saying the Gimp is an RGB editing program, that's what it is. I even said that if all you ever need to do is web graphics it may be all you ever need (though again, I think there are better and more well-designed programs if that is the feature set you need).
I do plenty of web graphics professionally, I can't imagine how you managed to infer that I'm criticizing anyone who does them (or that I "don't understand" the web -- what does that even mean? There hasn't been much tricky on a technical level about doing web graphics since we managed to break out of the 216 color palette.) But I also do print, and video, and lots of other stuff. If someone needs to do all those things, then they're probably best served by learning tools capable of doing all those things, rather than needing to learn a totally new tool for each field when there's so much conceptual and procedural overlap between them.
I forgot to mention what would be a fairly critical shortcoming to many home users (though I doubt many are using paid versions of Photoshop) -- printing photos from their digital cameras. The use of color profiles, print profiles, transforms and intents are what make it possible for someone to edit their photo onscreen and then send it to any printer on any paper and get fantastic results the first time, even when switching inksets or paper stock.
Hey, if you like the Gimp, knock yourself out. But if someone asks why it isn't embraced by the prosumer/professional community, I'm not going to hold their hand and lie to them that it's all a big conspiracy to keep the Gimp down.
Well, there will always be a compromise between mean capacity and peak capacity. Expecting everyone with RR to be able to download NNTP feeds at full-speed at prime-time is not reasonable for any consumer service that will be affordable. But if I'm downloading at 3am and there is plenty of unused capacity that i'm capable of having, I certainly expect it not to be slowed down by RoadRunner just because they like the idea of slowing down bandwidth-intensive stuff.
It is representative of the complete lack of any real understanding of color in the Gimp -- it is just an RGB pixel editing program.
Of course there's nothing wrong with just being an RGB pixel editing program, and if all you're doing are web graphics where you know exactly what RGB or HEX values to use, it might be all you ever need (though I'd argue there are much better, simpler programs than the bloated and convoluted Gimp --it's the graphics editing program by programmers and for programmers).
Photoshop treats RGB as merely one of many color spaces (internally, everything is Lab) -- it actually understands color as a property that can (and is) be manipulated and perceived in many ways by different devices, uses, and applications. 255,255,255 is not the same color on my LCD as it is on my CRT as it is on my TV and definitely not as it is on paper.
The use of color spaces, profiles, and intents are all pretty fundamental to work that is more advanced than web graphics. Anyone working with graphics regularly has to determine if it makes sense to learn a program they can use on any job they get, or to learn one that is only good right now but will have to be completely forgotten if they ever go to work at a new job (and for all the presence of the web, printed advertisements are still 90% of the money in the graphics business).
I think you're thinking of Live Picture, but Aldus Photostyler was quite popular even after LP disappeared, and it was on a par with Photoshop overall until it died and was mostly rolled into Photoshop.
I actually did quite a few professional jobs in Painter back in the mid 90s, using the "recording" feature in a way like LP used to work. I'd do a whole page at 50-75dpi while recording, then play it back on a 266dpi image overnight and have a (MASSIVE!) 50-100MB file waiting in the morning. Now I'm lucky if I can archive an afternoon's work on a DVD