We want source code under an open source license so that when a dickhead company like Oracle gets a hold of Solaris and Java, we can still continue to use it (which includes fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to the platforms we like).
And even if I wanted to use closed source software, on my lists of companies to trust, Oracle would rank near the bottom.
I cannot fathom how people can fail to understand that it's Apple's store
But it's my hardware. I can't fathom how you can fail to understand that I have a right to install on my hardware whatever software I like.
If you don't like it, stop using your iPhone/iPad/iWhatever, use something else, and get on with your life.
Unfortunately, some apps are only available for their platforms, just like some desktop apps are only available for Windows. That's not because either the developers or users want it that way, but because sleazy companies like Apple and Microsoft are not playing fair.
Having a monopoly is not illegal, but it's undesirable economically. That's why the government may have a compelling interest to intervene. And, of course, arguably Apple is abusing its monopoly unfairly.
When the EDGE iPhone first came out, it was revolutionary carrying only the default 20 apps because it was doing things that it's at-the-time competitors couldn't do
Technically, iPhone has never done anything significant that their competitors couldn't do. iPhone did manage to attract a lot of developers. Apple's near monopoly on the mobile app market in the US is similar to what happened with Microsoft DOS/Windows.
supression != unwilling to use my resources to help you.
It's not "Apple's resources", it is my resources when I own an iPhone. It's also not Apple's resources in another sense, because much of their software is based on open source software.
Do you seriously believe that every printing press, web server, megaphone, etc. has to convey your message when you demand it?
No. But I bought the hardware and I bought the software, so I should have the right to install and run whatever I want to, without technical or legal interference from Apple.
What Apple is doing is a threat to freedom of speech, freedom to program, and ultimately our political freedoms. It needs to stop. Apple isn't going to stop voluntarily, so we need laws.
We really need something like "common carrier" rules for operating system and hardware vendors. The people who provide the wires and the devices should not be allowed to determine the content.
For one thing, Civilization was designed as a macro-level version of SimCity.
It was also designed 20 years after the first turn-based strategy game, curiously also called Civilization (also Empire), and years after the first graphical game of this type. And Civilization copied liberally from a board game of the same name.
Civilization was first released in 1991, 15 years after the Empire game. It was neither the first computer-based turn-based strategy game, nor the first graphical game of this type. It also "borrowed" lots of ideas from the board game Civilization.
It's nice that Meier introduced the PC masses to these kinds of games and made a lot of money doing so. But let's give credit to the pioneers, not to the people who copied them.
I found the Civ games to be pretty dull derivatives of various UNIX simulation games, including some world and space conquest games. I don't think Sid Meier really deserves that much credit.
I'm failing to see any sort of logical reason why you think the CLR runs faster than compiled code?
There are a whole bunch of reasons, such as inlining method calls and runtime optimizations. But the biggest reason is probably that with the CLR, applications can safely run in a single address space. That means much faster startup, better integration, and much lower memory usage.
They have a tool chain that makes nicely optimized compiled code from multiple processors.
They have a bunch of cross compilation tools, but if they started shipping different architectures for different versions of iPad, they'd be in serious trouble because one binary wouldn't run on all of them anymore. The emulation they were using for the PPC/Intel switch would be too heavy-weight for mobile devices. The real solution is to run a virtual machine. CLR, Dalvik, and LLVM are the best ones around, but the iPad/iPod seems to be using LLVM only for compile-time optimization (meaning that the binaries are still processor dependent). The real problem Apple has is their obsolete programming language, Objective-C. There are many things Apple cannot do and never will be able to do in Objective-C, and it also impedes their ability to move to new platforms.
This is why people like Taco make "lame" comments, because it isn't about Ghz, Giga, Tera or anything else, it is about being useful without being hassled. My wife doesn't care about specs, she cares about doing stuff, and it being easy.
Indeed. And Apple's compilers, programming languages, and runtimes don't support that very well. The fact that their systems work as well as they do is due to elbow grease and draconian management. Google and Microsoft have the better architectures, but I suppose they get a bit lazy on the polish.
AFAIK, XCode still uses gcc. That means Apple is required to distribute their code generator. Furthermore, if Apple wanted to be able to switch architecture, ditching their obsolete Objective-C based platform for a more modern platform would be the first thing they should do. Something like the CLR would give them better performance and complete machine independence.
No, Apple has been doing what they are doing because they want to restrict competition and screw their customers, plain and simple.
Yes, we do feel threatened by Apple because Apple has been playing evil tricks since the 1980's. They tried through legal tricks to become the only company making GUIs, using technology they copied from others. And they're trying to pull the same thing with iPad and iPhone. At the same time, they misrepresent where their technologies are coming from, and people like you believe them.
Yes, we're worried and we're outraged, and we have a right to be.
The price and weight for tablet computers has finally come down far enough that it's worth having one.
It's still kind of pricey, which is why only a company like Apple can put out a product. In 6-12 months, there are going to be plenty of cheap and high quality competitors.
The real innovation here is in battery life, electronics, and screens.
So Apache, PHP, sendmail, BIND, Perl, Imagemagick, OpenSSH and OpenSSL (to name a few permissive-license software projects) haven't been embraced by 'the enterprise' because they aren't GPL, right?
Despite their popularity, those are really lousy pieces of software: a pain to configure, inefficient, obscure. Perhaps that's related to their license: companies just made their internal improvements and have had no incentive to contribute to them.
Taking a BSD licensed program with source and adding your own proprietary extensions doesn't make the original source code disappear, or any less free.
What good is the original software if you can't run it anywhere? Look at XBox, iPhone OS, Zune, PS3: all of those include BSD-licensed software, but those companies are using it to kill software development. If the current trend continues, it won't matter if you still have your outdated BSD code sitting on an old disk somewhere, these companies will have used it to transform the computing world into their own walled gardens, and they used your code to lower their costs for doing it.
The BSD and MIT licenses don't maximize the freedoms of the people who actually count: the original software developers and the end users. In particular, as an end user, I don't have the freedom to inspect, modify, and redistribute the code for the software I use. In return, you grant some other people the freedom to make money of software they didn't develop.
Your argument is like saying that striking laws against murder and theft from the books grants people more freedom. But that impinges my freedom to live free from harm. Or, if you persist in abusing the term "freedom", then one simply has to say: your kind of freedom is not desirable.
freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 0
GPL license:
freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 3
Clearly, the freedom I get with the GPL is bigger than the freedom I get with the BSD license.
Your so-called freedoms are the "freedom" of people who didn't contribute to the software to restrict other people from modifying and redistributing the software. Sometimes software developers grant these additional freedoms in order to achieve some other goals, but they are of no intrinsic value to the developer or the user.
By analogy, if we legalized fraud and murder, people would have more freedom, but that doesn't make legalizing fraud and murder desirable.
If i was passing by, and i sneezed, and she "developed" her problem then, would I be libable for her problems.
Maybe you could claim that you developed severe psychological trauma, sinus problems, and a failed marriage because her presence inhibited your ability to sneeze freely; I think you might be able to get a few million dollars out of her in compensation:-)
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We want source code under an open source license so that when a dickhead company like Oracle gets a hold of Solaris and Java, we can still continue to use it (which includes fixing bugs, enhancing it, and porting it to the platforms we like).
And even if I wanted to use closed source software, on my lists of companies to trust, Oracle would rank near the bottom.
I cannot fathom how people can fail to understand that it's Apple's store
But it's my hardware. I can't fathom how you can fail to understand that I have a right to install on my hardware whatever software I like.
If you don't like it, stop using your iPhone/iPad/iWhatever, use something else, and get on with your life.
Unfortunately, some apps are only available for their platforms, just like some desktop apps are only available for Windows. That's not because either the developers or users want it that way, but because sleazy companies like Apple and Microsoft are not playing fair.
Apple hasn't changed the rules you agreed to when you bought the product, no mater how much the market has changed
I didn't agree to any rules.
But Apple certainly has changed their rules for what they approve and what developers can and cannot do.
Having a monopoly is not illegal, but it's undesirable economically. That's why the government may have a compelling interest to intervene. And, of course, arguably Apple is abusing its monopoly unfairly.
When the EDGE iPhone first came out, it was revolutionary carrying only the default 20 apps because it was doing things that it's at-the-time competitors couldn't do
Technically, iPhone has never done anything significant that their competitors couldn't do. iPhone did manage to attract a lot of developers. Apple's near monopoly on the mobile app market in the US is similar to what happened with Microsoft DOS/Windows.
You say Apple has the monopoly on WHAT? It's own store?
Apple has a near monopoly on the mobile app market because their store is almost the entire market.
Answer the question: is it censorship whenever someone refuses to publish someone else's work? Give a yes or no answer,
No, not always.
But in this case, it is.
supression != unwilling to use my resources to help you.
It's not "Apple's resources", it is my resources when I own an iPhone. It's also not Apple's resources in another sense, because much of their software is based on open source software.
Do you seriously believe that every printing press, web server, megaphone, etc. has to convey your message when you demand it?
No. But I bought the hardware and I bought the software, so I should have the right to install and run whatever I want to, without technical or legal interference from Apple.
I don't think it matters to 99.999% of people
And that's why keep talking about it: so that it does start mattering to more people.
What Apple is doing is a threat to freedom of speech, freedom to program, and ultimately our political freedoms. It needs to stop. Apple isn't going to stop voluntarily, so we need laws.
We really need something like "common carrier" rules for operating system and hardware vendors. The people who provide the wires and the devices should not be allowed to determine the content.
For one thing, Civilization was designed as a macro-level version of SimCity.
It was also designed 20 years after the first turn-based strategy game, curiously also called Civilization (also Empire), and years after the first graphical game of this type. And Civilization copied liberally from a board game of the same name.
Empire was first developed in 1971, and in 1973 renamed Civilization. There were numerous other versions afterwards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Classic_(computer_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire_(computer_game)
xconq was a clone of Empire, later extended, and first released in 1987, and with a graphical user interface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xconq
Civilization was first released in 1991, 15 years after the Empire game. It was neither the first computer-based turn-based strategy game, nor the first graphical game of this type. It also "borrowed" lots of ideas from the board game Civilization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(computer_game)
It's nice that Meier introduced the PC masses to these kinds of games and made a lot of money doing so. But let's give credit to the pioneers, not to the people who copied them.
I found the Civ games to be pretty dull derivatives of various UNIX simulation games, including some world and space conquest games. I don't think Sid Meier really deserves that much credit.
I'm failing to see any sort of logical reason why you think the CLR runs faster than compiled code?
There are a whole bunch of reasons, such as inlining method calls and runtime optimizations. But the biggest reason is probably that with the CLR, applications can safely run in a single address space. That means much faster startup, better integration, and much lower memory usage.
Yup, but they don't seem to be using it yet as a virtual machine. But LLVM won't fix Objective-C semantics.
They have a tool chain that makes nicely optimized compiled code from multiple processors.
They have a bunch of cross compilation tools, but if they started shipping different architectures for different versions of iPad, they'd be in serious trouble because one binary wouldn't run on all of them anymore. The emulation they were using for the PPC/Intel switch would be too heavy-weight for mobile devices. The real solution is to run a virtual machine. CLR, Dalvik, and LLVM are the best ones around, but the iPad/iPod seems to be using LLVM only for compile-time optimization (meaning that the binaries are still processor dependent). The real problem Apple has is their obsolete programming language, Objective-C. There are many things Apple cannot do and never will be able to do in Objective-C, and it also impedes their ability to move to new platforms.
This is why people like Taco make "lame" comments, because it isn't about Ghz, Giga, Tera or anything else, it is about being useful without being hassled. My wife doesn't care about specs, she cares about doing stuff, and it being easy.
Indeed. And Apple's compilers, programming languages, and runtimes don't support that very well. The fact that their systems work as well as they do is due to elbow grease and draconian management. Google and Microsoft have the better architectures, but I suppose they get a bit lazy on the polish.
AFAIK, XCode still uses gcc. That means Apple is required to distribute their code generator. Furthermore, if Apple wanted to be able to switch architecture, ditching their obsolete Objective-C based platform for a more modern platform would be the first thing they should do. Something like the CLR would give them better performance and complete machine independence.
No, Apple has been doing what they are doing because they want to restrict competition and screw their customers, plain and simple.
Motion is a strong cue for 3D. Furthermore, stereo vision doesn't really work beyond a few yards anyway.
The real problem with these kinds of setups (and why you don't see them more) is that they only work for one person at a time.
Yes, we do feel threatened by Apple because Apple has been playing evil tricks since the 1980's. They tried through legal tricks to become the only company making GUIs, using technology they copied from others. And they're trying to pull the same thing with iPad and iPhone. At the same time, they misrepresent where their technologies are coming from, and people like you believe them.
Yes, we're worried and we're outraged, and we have a right to be.
The price and weight for tablet computers has finally come down far enough that it's worth having one.
It's still kind of pricey, which is why only a company like Apple can put out a product. In 6-12 months, there are going to be plenty of cheap and high quality competitors.
The real innovation here is in battery life, electronics, and screens.
"Oh please, people have been making yellow snow cones for years!"
Are you saying they haven't?
So Apache, PHP, sendmail, BIND, Perl, Imagemagick, OpenSSH and OpenSSL (to name a few permissive-license software projects) haven't been embraced by 'the enterprise' because they aren't GPL, right?
Despite their popularity, those are really lousy pieces of software: a pain to configure, inefficient, obscure. Perhaps that's related to their license: companies just made their internal improvements and have had no incentive to contribute to them.
Taking a BSD licensed program with source and adding your own proprietary extensions doesn't make the original source code disappear, or any less free.
What good is the original software if you can't run it anywhere? Look at XBox, iPhone OS, Zune, PS3: all of those include BSD-licensed software, but those companies are using it to kill software development. If the current trend continues, it won't matter if you still have your outdated BSD code sitting on an old disk somewhere, these companies will have used it to transform the computing world into their own walled gardens, and they used your code to lower their costs for doing it.
The BSD and MIT licenses don't maximize the freedoms of the people who actually count: the original software developers and the end users. In particular, as an end user, I don't have the freedom to inspect, modify, and redistribute the code for the software I use. In return, you grant some other people the freedom to make money of software they didn't develop.
Your argument is like saying that striking laws against murder and theft from the books grants people more freedom. But that impinges my freedom to live free from harm. Or, if you persist in abusing the term "freedom", then one simply has to say: your kind of freedom is not desirable.
BSD license:
freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 0
GPL license:
freedom to see, modify, and redistribute the source code of an application that I use = 3
Clearly, the freedom I get with the GPL is bigger than the freedom I get with the BSD license.
Your so-called freedoms are the "freedom" of people who didn't contribute to the software to restrict other people from modifying and redistributing the software. Sometimes software developers grant these additional freedoms in order to achieve some other goals, but they are of no intrinsic value to the developer or the user.
By analogy, if we legalized fraud and murder, people would have more freedom, but that doesn't make legalizing fraud and murder desirable.
If i was passing by, and i sneezed, and she "developed" her problem then, would I be libable for her problems.
Maybe you could claim that you developed severe psychological trauma, sinus problems, and a failed marriage because her presence inhibited your ability to sneeze freely; I think you might be able to get a few million dollars out of her in compensation :-)