The netflix software is crippled, but that is netflix's fault.
Is it really Netflix fault though or is the Android platform's problem ? After all this is a free app and testing cost money so what are the alternatives :
- only a limited number the most popular devices get tested and approved because after that the cost/benefit ration drops - you release for all phones but post a list of "minimum system requirements" and we're back in the Windows world of software running crapily or not at all on some systems because it was coded to some high end hardware. And ordinary joe's are screwed because they're expected to learn how much memory their phone has or what GPU chip.
Netflix has chosen the first option which is the most sensible right now on Android if you still want to do some quality assurance.
Yeah I'm a Unix sysadmin, I know all about the "grown up world." This is a phone we're talking about though, it's supposed to just fucking work. I'm not going to spend my free time babysitting another computer, I already have plenty of those.
HTML5 relies on the codecs present in the end user's web browser. Browsers included with an operating system support only patented MPEG codecs; other browsers support only Free codecs. Do you expect Google to transcode all uploads between Vorbis and AAC?
"Other browsers" being just Firefox I guess which has zero presence on mobile devices. Yet somehow Amazon's player works on Firefox : "Cloud Player for the web works on IE 8 and above, Firefox 3.5 and above, Chrome, and Safari. There is no Opera support. And Flash is required (but for uploads only)." Admittedly I hadn't really thought about the implementation details but there obviously must be a way.
Yes, but for now the only way to access the service is to have a supported Android device or a Flash-enabled device. It's odd that a web company like Google would deliberately limit its service like that when using pure HTML5 technologies would have provided a much larger potential audience, including mobile devices for which there might not be any apps developed. Amazon's Cloud Player for example does work on iOS devices and that's their largest competitor for now.
It's rumored Apple bought the "iCloud" domain name to do this sort of thing. We'll have to wait and see though, Apple traditionally sucks at doing web based stuff.
From the system requirements : "The latest version of Adobe Flash Player must be installed and enabled in your browser (Flash is included with Google Chrome)."
So it's going to be a non-starter for a lot of devices including of course iOS devices but a lot of others too. So right of the bat they go out of their way to alienate literally millions of potential users. Not a good way to dive into a market that has a lot of big players going into it including Amazon and potentially Apple who are rumored, as they always are, to be working on something similar.
Apple's have only gotten out of the 2% of computers in the last 2 or 3 years. Even now they struggle to get 5% worldwide.
This Ars Technica article has Apple at 10% market share in the US, this one has it at 14%. That's a lot of macs. Apple is one of the few companies that have consistently seen their market share grow the last few years in a floundering market.
Then there's Apple's strength in certain niches, like on college campuses :
"According to the Office of Information Technology (OIT), 45 percent of computers purchased this year were Macs, more than in any previous year. In 2003, when this year's seniors arrived on campus, just 15 percent of them chose Macs. The next year, a quarter of incoming freshmen did, and the year after that, 38 percent."
That's a 2006 article and personally I have seen no reversal of that trend, quite the opposite actually. And you'd expect colleges to be hotspots of all kinds of mischief like hacking and exploits.
Take note of the last one. IOS drops that cost a lot, making malware on phones economically viable. Further more, IOS has proven itself to be quite vulnerable in the past, you do know that jailbreaking is done by exploiting a vulnerability dont you. Feel free to use the "jailbreak me" PDF vulnerability as an example. The only reason it hasn't been exploited is because there's more profit in Windows malware.
iOS has had a few exploits and yet we've had only 1 or 2 actual (and amateurish) attacks out in the wild impacting very few people (only jailbreakers with default passwords.) Only twice has there been a remote exploit and both were promptly patched by Apple, the rest have been pretty complicated hacks that require reinstalling the device or putting it in recovery mode. That's a pretty good security record, as good as any device or OS out there.
I don't buy your explanation that it's not economically viable. 120 million of these devices have been sold, mostly to reasonably well off people. That's a huge "market" for exploits.
Claiming you are automagically protected when you've never even been attacked is naive at best. It's like Lisa's (Simpson) tiger repelling rock, you cant use the fact that there are no tigers around the rock as proof of it's tiger repelling abilities.
That's not what I said, no-one claims macs are "magically immune". What I said was that people have been predicting a deluge of viruses and malware for mac for a decade now and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later they might be right, just like the people who say "repent, the end is nigh" might be right someday. In the mean time rehashing old arguments that haven't actually been proven to be true in reality is a waste of time. Reality is the ultimate test of the theory.
Because Apple hasn't attracted any interest in the past decade during its meteoric rise in popularity ? Please. The year of the "Mac Attacks" had been coming for almost as long as the year of the Linux desktop.
Nope only on install. On drop the library installer can run. As to your virus suggestion, these libraries would come from a central signed repo.
That would require network access on install, like some crazy DRM schemes. Not usable in all circumstances, still unnecessarily complicates something which should be easy and straight forward.
So you are some sort of time traveler from the 90s? This is a solved issue in many ways.
We learn the past today to prevent making the same mistakes in future.
What's not to like is the security nightmare that the application bundle presents. It guarantees old outdated and insecure libraries and third party code is available for privilege escalation.
For the majority of apps this is a non issue since a lot of popular and useful libraries are included in the OS but like I said before it is a trade-off. I prefer the apps to update themselves (or you could have something like the Mac App Store do it) if they use some library that doesn't ship with the OS, you prefer it the other way. Both have their pros and cons.
I think it looks good to the novice, but is a terrible idea for anyone beyond that level. Like pretty much all Mac products.
Gee, thanks for the casual insult there. I'm a Unix sys admin so I'd like to think I'm a bit beyond the novice level. I also see a LOT of Apple products used among my colleagues so I don't think you're right about their appeal.
It really would not be that hard to have the OS install libraries needed for an application when it is dragged to the desktop. That would give the user the appearance of this bundled functionality without all the downsides. Appearance is all that matters to them anyway.
Not only is your idea overly complicated (long live KISS) but it's a good way to install all kinds of nasty stuff like viruses, people would have to give administrative passwords every time they first launch an app (so you can't just launch an app from a USB stick on a computer you don't own) and then there's the problem of multiple, possibly incompatible versions of libraries being installed by different apps. Sounds like a headache. FYI the application bundle, far from being dreamed up by appearances obsessed nitwits as you seem to assume, is a venerable technology going back to NextStep and RiscOS. It's a proven technology that's easy and user friendly. What's not to like ?
It's a trade-off. I rather like it myself. One the one hand OS libraries get loaded dynamically and get updated automatically and relatively rarely used libraries get bundled with the app so it becomes a self contained package. I love being able to just drag apps from one mac to the other, even between OS versions (and even between architectures if it's a universal app) and just having it work. Clean and easy. It's one of those typical mac things I guess: you either love it or can't stand it.
Any of them have a GUI that will allow installation and removal of apps? Something that's even close to as polished as Mac App Store or Synaptic?
There was a GUI for Fink I believe, I don't use Fink myself
For instance, free automatic updates that will fix a security fix in a library that is shared by many GPL apps without having to update all the apps.
That's not how OSX app folders work for GUI apps, the OSX apps are self contained folders that include all dependencies minus the ones that are installed as part of the system. The OS does come with a ton of open source libraries and they are updated by the OS updates.
With the advent of App Store for OS X and problems getting GPL software in app stores (how to distribute source?), what is needed is an open source app store.
Can someone port Synaptic (or any other repository-based system) to OS X and Windows? The benefits are huge and should be obvious.
I'm not a programmer, but wouldn't mind paying a token sum to get a free app store for OS X.
You've already got 3 repository type systems for OSX : Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew.
That's why this is in addition to the traditional DVD which will still be sold. Also if they distribute it as a dmg image you can probably load it onto a USB drive and install from that, that's in fact quite a common way to install OSX on hackintosh netbooks.
This is just the latest attempt to promote the Mac app store, but it's also another step toward what's ultimately coming. Mac computers will one day be every bit as closed off as iPhones and iPads, with all software having to come through the Mac app store the same way it has to now with the iPhone/iPad app stores.
It's also eating their own dog food and getting the OS upgrade over the internet seems like a good thing: less pollution, no waiting, etc. Apps downloaded through the Mac App Store are regular files just like those downloaded from anywhere else. I'm guessing this software update will be just an image stored somewhere on your hard disk. I won't say Apple would never do what you're suggesting but I will say they can't. You can't get the toothpaste back into the tube. If they truly wanted to do what you describe they'd have to replace computers entirely with iOS based devices, I can't see that happening.
If you are talking about the OS, the latest image is found in "~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates" no need to image the entire thing each time. Stuff like baseband is downloaded when it gets upgraded to flash onto the phone, again no need to sync it every time.
What about licenses and DRM which tie purchases to device, meaning restoring to a different device you can lose your data. (Don't care if it allos 2, or 3 or 5 devices....bottom line if you have trouble with your phone you can lose more than the worth of the phone).
Give me an actual example of this, it doesn't exist (on iOS devices at least.) I can't even think of a third party app that does this.
You're living in fanboy fantasy land! It's rotten tomatoes from the cheap seats.
Stooping to cheap and meaningless insults like "fanboy" is an automatic defeat. Stick to rational arguments please.
Whenever they're reporting on Apple related news Slashdot turns into a sort of techie version of Fox News, ignoring basic established facts in favor of their own predetermined truth. It's mind boggling really. You don't have to like Apple but ignoring the facts is no way for a geek to behave.
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone.
"'untrackerd' Cydia Tweak stops iOS Location Data Storing."
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous. iPhone 3G was supported from july 2008 to march 2011, that's nearly 3 years worth of OS updates for that model of phone. Its successor, the iPhone 3GS, was released june 2009 at which time the writing was on the wall for the older hardware but it was supported well after that.
Slashdot Mirror
The netflix software is crippled, but that is netflix's fault.
Is it really Netflix fault though or is the Android platform's problem ? After all this is a free app and testing cost money so what are the alternatives :
- only a limited number the most popular devices get tested and approved because after that the cost/benefit ration drops
- you release for all phones but post a list of "minimum system requirements" and we're back in the Windows world of software running crapily or not at all on some systems because it was coded to some high end hardware. And ordinary joe's are screwed because they're expected to learn how much memory their phone has or what GPU chip.
Netflix has chosen the first option which is the most sensible right now on Android if you still want to do some quality assurance.
But given that pretty much the only Flash I use is youtube, gnash ought to suffice.
Have you considered using the Youtube HTML5 beta ?
Yeah I'm a Unix sysadmin, I know all about the "grown up world." This is a phone we're talking about though, it's supposed to just fucking work. I'm not going to spend my free time babysitting another computer, I already have plenty of those.
Having to root your phone and trick software into running on your device isn't crippled ?
edit a text file and reboot.
Android, bringing you all the features you loved from the good old days of DOS.
Unless you root it...
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/how-to-install-netflix-on-most-android-devices/
... and accept that you're running it on an untested combination of software and hardware with no guarantee as to performance and no support.
HTML5 relies on the codecs present in the end user's web browser. Browsers included with an operating system support only patented MPEG codecs; other browsers support only Free codecs. Do you expect Google to transcode all uploads between Vorbis and AAC?
"Other browsers" being just Firefox I guess which has zero presence on mobile devices. Yet somehow Amazon's player works on Firefox : "Cloud Player for the web works on IE 8 and above, Firefox 3.5 and above, Chrome, and Safari. There is no Opera support. And Flash is required (but for uploads only)." Admittedly I hadn't really thought about the implementation details but there obviously must be a way.
Yes, but for now the only way to access the service is to have a supported Android device or a Flash-enabled device. It's odd that a web company like Google would deliberately limit its service like that when using pure HTML5 technologies would have provided a much larger potential audience, including mobile devices for which there might not be any apps developed. Amazon's Cloud Player for example does work on iOS devices and that's their largest competitor for now.
It's rumored Apple bought the "iCloud" domain name to do this sort of thing. We'll have to wait and see though, Apple traditionally sucks at doing web based stuff.
From the system requirements : "The latest version of Adobe Flash Player must be installed and enabled in your browser (Flash is included with Google Chrome)."
So it's going to be a non-starter for a lot of devices including of course iOS devices but a lot of others too. So right of the bat they go out of their way to alienate literally millions of potential users. Not a good way to dive into a market that has a lot of big players going into it including Amazon and potentially Apple who are rumored, as they always are, to be working on something similar.
Apple's have only gotten out of the 2% of computers in the last 2 or 3 years. Even now they struggle to get 5% worldwide.
This Ars Technica article has Apple at 10% market share in the US, this one has it at 14%. That's a lot of macs. Apple is one of the few companies that have consistently seen their market share grow the last few years in a floundering market.
Then there's Apple's strength in certain niches, like on college campuses :
"According to the Office of Information Technology (OIT), 45 percent of computers purchased this year were Macs, more than in any previous year. In 2003, when this year's seniors arrived on campus, just 15 percent of them chose Macs. The next year, a quarter of incoming freshmen did, and the year after that, 38 percent."
That's a 2006 article and personally I have seen no reversal of that trend, quite the opposite actually. And you'd expect colleges to be hotspots of all kinds of mischief like hacking and exploits.
Take note of the last one. IOS drops that cost a lot, making malware on phones economically viable. Further more, IOS has proven itself to be quite vulnerable in the past, you do know that jailbreaking is done by exploiting a vulnerability dont you. Feel free to use the "jailbreak me" PDF vulnerability as an example. The only reason it hasn't been exploited is because there's more profit in Windows malware.
iOS has had a few exploits and yet we've had only 1 or 2 actual (and amateurish) attacks out in the wild impacting very few people (only jailbreakers with default passwords.) Only twice has there been a remote exploit and both were promptly patched by Apple, the rest have been pretty complicated hacks that require reinstalling the device or putting it in recovery mode. That's a pretty good security record, as good as any device or OS out there.
I don't buy your explanation that it's not economically viable. 120 million of these devices have been sold, mostly to reasonably well off people. That's a huge "market" for exploits.
Claiming you are automagically protected when you've never even been attacked is naive at best. It's like Lisa's (Simpson) tiger repelling rock, you cant use the fact that there are no tigers around the rock as proof of it's tiger repelling abilities.
That's not what I said, no-one claims macs are "magically immune". What I said was that people have been predicting a deluge of viruses and malware for mac for a decade now and it hasn't happened. Sooner or later they might be right, just like the people who say "repent, the end is nigh" might be right someday. In the mean time rehashing old arguments that haven't actually been proven to be true in reality is a waste of time. Reality is the ultimate test of the theory.
Because Apple hasn't attracted any interest in the past decade during its meteoric rise in popularity ? Please. The year of the "Mac Attacks" had been coming for almost as long as the year of the Linux desktop.
That would be illegal. That's the advantage of Open Source, and why it runs Linux.
Only if you believe EULA's are enforceable. I wouldn't try selling the thing with OSX but for personal use, why not.
Stop procrastinating and gives us our damn Elite 4 already.
Nope only on install. On drop the library installer can run. As to your virus suggestion, these libraries would come from a central signed repo.
That would require network access on install, like some crazy DRM schemes. Not usable in all circumstances, still unnecessarily complicates something which should be easy and straight forward.
So you are some sort of time traveler from the 90s? This is a solved issue in many ways.
We learn the past today to prevent making the same mistakes in future.
What's not to like is the security nightmare that the application bundle presents. It guarantees old outdated and insecure libraries and third party code is available for privilege escalation.
For the majority of apps this is a non issue since a lot of popular and useful libraries are included in the OS but like I said before it is a trade-off. I prefer the apps to update themselves (or you could have something like the Mac App Store do it) if they use some library that doesn't ship with the OS, you prefer it the other way. Both have their pros and cons.
I think it looks good to the novice, but is a terrible idea for anyone beyond that level. Like pretty much all Mac products.
Gee, thanks for the casual insult there. I'm a Unix sys admin so I'd like to think I'm a bit beyond the novice level. I also see a LOT of Apple products used among my colleagues so I don't think you're right about their appeal.
It really would not be that hard to have the OS install libraries needed for an application when it is dragged to the desktop. That would give the user the appearance of this bundled functionality without all the downsides. Appearance is all that matters to them anyway.
Not only is your idea overly complicated (long live KISS) but it's a good way to install all kinds of nasty stuff like viruses, people would have to give administrative passwords every time they first launch an app (so you can't just launch an app from a USB stick on a computer you don't own) and then there's the problem of multiple, possibly incompatible versions of libraries being installed by different apps. Sounds like a headache. FYI the application bundle, far from being dreamed up by appearances obsessed nitwits as you seem to assume, is a venerable technology going back to NextStep and RiscOS. It's a proven technology that's easy and user friendly. What's not to like ?
It's a trade-off. I rather like it myself. One the one hand OS libraries get loaded dynamically and get updated automatically and relatively rarely used libraries get bundled with the app so it becomes a self contained package. I love being able to just drag apps from one mac to the other, even between OS versions (and even between architectures if it's a universal app) and just having it work. Clean and easy. It's one of those typical mac things I guess: you either love it or can't stand it.
Any of them have a GUI that will allow installation and removal of apps? Something that's even close to as polished as Mac App Store or Synaptic?
There was a GUI for Fink I believe, I don't use Fink myself
For instance, free automatic updates that will fix a security fix in a library that is shared by many GPL apps without having to update all the apps.
That's not how OSX app folders work for GUI apps, the OSX apps are self contained folders that include all dependencies minus the ones that are installed as part of the system. The OS does come with a ton of open source libraries and they are updated by the OS updates.
With the advent of App Store for OS X and problems getting GPL software in app stores (how to distribute source?), what is needed is an open source app store.
Can someone port Synaptic (or any other repository-based system) to OS X and Windows? The benefits are huge and should be obvious.
I'm not a programmer, but wouldn't mind paying a token sum to get a free app store for OS X.
You've already got 3 repository type systems for OSX : Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew.
That's why this is in addition to the traditional DVD which will still be sold. Also if they distribute it as a dmg image you can probably load it onto a USB drive and install from that, that's in fact quite a common way to install OSX on hackintosh netbooks.
This is just the latest attempt to promote the Mac app store, but it's also another step toward what's ultimately coming. Mac computers will one day be every bit as closed off as iPhones and iPads, with all software having to come through the Mac app store the same way it has to now with the iPhone/iPad app stores.
It's also eating their own dog food and getting the OS upgrade over the internet seems like a good thing: less pollution, no waiting, etc. Apps downloaded through the Mac App Store are regular files just like those downloaded from anywhere else. I'm guessing this software update will be just an image stored somewhere on your hard disk. I won't say Apple would never do what you're suggesting but I will say they can't. You can't get the toothpaste back into the tube. If they truly wanted to do what you describe they'd have to replace computers entirely with iOS based devices, I can't see that happening.
Yeah? They sync firmware?
If you are talking about the OS, the latest image is found in "~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates" no need to image the entire thing each time. Stuff like baseband is downloaded when it gets upgraded to flash onto the phone, again no need to sync it every time.
What about licenses and DRM which tie purchases to device, meaning restoring to a different device you can lose your data. (Don't care if it allos 2, or 3 or 5 devices....bottom line if you have trouble with your phone you can lose more than the worth of the phone).
Give me an actual example of this, it doesn't exist (on iOS devices at least.) I can't even think of a third party app that does this.
You're living in fanboy fantasy land! It's rotten tomatoes from the cheap seats.
Stooping to cheap and meaningless insults like "fanboy" is an automatic defeat. Stick to rational arguments please.
Whenever they're reporting on Apple related news Slashdot turns into a sort of techie version of Fox News, ignoring basic established facts in favor of their own predetermined truth. It's mind boggling really. You don't have to like Apple but ignoring the facts is no way for a geek to behave.
If you bought your iPhone between Jul 11, 2008 and Jun 7, 2009 (and perhaps after that date) you have an iPhone 3G and you're going to have this bug as long you own the phone.
"'untrackerd' Cydia Tweak stops iOS Location Data Storing."
1) Other manufacturers can be bad, so Apple should be too
No but ragging on the one which actually comes out ahead of most, if not all, manufacturers in terms of official support is disingenuous. iPhone 3G was supported from july 2008 to march 2011, that's nearly 3 years worth of OS updates for that model of phone. Its successor, the iPhone 3GS, was released june 2009 at which time the writing was on the wall for the older hardware but it was supported well after that.