It's neither. It's business. If something costs too much to sustain it given the game turnover and the fact that the publishers only make money on the original sale, they have to find some other way to get paid for it. Subscription could work, but it's a hassle and most people won't subscribe to more than a few services. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to be compensated for valuable content to me.
1.) These phones CAN work on all those networks. So this restriction is completely artificial.
I'm no expert, but I don't think this is true. Isn't AT&T the only major GSM-based provider in the US? The iPhone certainly doesn't do CDMA, PCS, or whatnot. Besides, I still don't see why it should be illegal for two non-monopolies to tie products together. Apple has less than 1% of the cellphone market and AT&T exists in a competitive environment as well.
Because that's not the definition of "steal". Slashdot loves to try to assert the semantic fallacy that it's not stealing if no one loses anything.
From m-w.com: Steal: [...] transitive verb 1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully Appropriate: [...] 3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
One can debate "wrongfully" in some usages of "steal", but in this case I think it's pretty clear it was "Made use of without authority and wrongfully". Thus stealing.
True, but I was thinking more about forestation of previously open land. For an area which has been without a forest for a century or two, re-introducing trees doesn't necessarily instantly make everything better. It could significantly limit the surface freshwater and change the albedo... I'm not against forests, I'm just saying there may be a role for an artificial solar-powered carbon-scrubber in an ecologically friendly deployment. And that "Just Add Trees!" isn't necessarily the answer to everything.
A forest consumes and locks up huge amounts of fresh water, though. Being able to scrub CO2 with sunlight alone might be significantly better for the environment in some areas than needing the sun and water together.
I think bandwidth has gotten to the point where you can't measure your capacity by assuming you'll be consuming 100% of the bandwidth all the time. Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.
I really, really appreciate that I can get 20Mb down and 5Mb up whenever I need it, even if I don't transmit 250GB a month. It's dramatically better than having a 800kbps line that I can max out 100% of the time.
You have to love it when a common joke on Slashdot - that of patenting the process of patenting ideas - has finally come to pass.
In Soviet Russia, the process of patenting ideas patents you! If patents were cars, this would be like patenting blank areas on your road atlas. And does this patent application run linux?
" On the iPhone, scanning a 1D barcode is slow and unreliable. But the G1's improved optics and Android's improved access to image scans has made 1D scanning quick and useful,"
[citation needed]. 2 megapixel is more than enough to scan a 2D barcode, and the iPhones optics are quite reasonable. If the iPhone scanning is actually "slow and unreliable" (I have no evidence of this) it's simply because of the algorithm that the third party developer is using.
For what it's worth, though, the iPhone has 7 scanners on the App Store when you search for "barcode" and all seem to revolve around one kind of 2D bar code or another (EZcode, DataMatrix, QR Code, ShotCode, Blotcode, etc). The reviews seem to indicate the iPhone is quite good at scanning them.
Basically, the article submitter appears to be another anti-iPhone troll, which is too bad because for me it detracts from his main point about bar code ubiquity.
I suspect the sale of DRMed music still exceeds the sale of non-DRMed music, thanks to the music label's insistence on Apple DRM'ing their music.
There, fixed that for ya. It's all up to the music labels. The only reason Amazon can sell DRM-free music is because the labels let them. And they don't let Apple, because they want Amazon to emerge as a competitor. Once distribution becomes a commodity again, the labels (who have a monopoly over the content) can jack prices back up. Right now it's Apple vs. the labels keeping prices in check. When the labels induce Amazon's success, it will be the consumers against the labels directly... and we know who will win then.
Sure, but the article tried to make a point that Google uses command-line programs while Apple has a proprietary IDE and thus Google is more open. In that sense, it's worth pointing out that all Apple's tools are also command-line tools running on top of their UNIX OS, and the IDE is just another shell.
That's a good point and probably true, especially for developing for the Simulator. In fact even the helper apps (like converting to iPhone-preferred audio formats) are all command line tools. However, it seems like it would be a huge amount of work for little gain to unhook it from XCode, but I would be surprised if it couldn't be done once you figure out the zillion-and-one configuration issues.
I know we're all under NDA, but I've had very little problems with debugger integration. There's sometimes the frustrating unexplained BAD_ACCESS, but in general I can see threads, allocations, I/O, memory leaks, locks, allocations, SQL reads/writes/locks, OpenGL monitors, etc etc etc. I thought it was pretty impressive myself. Gotta love DTrace.
Yeah, almost all the metrics mentioned in the summary are irrelevant. Objective-C is something you can probably pick up in an afternoon. It's simpler than most modern scripting languages. And if you are unable to do so, as an iPhone owner I'd say please go write your app for Google anyway.
They mention ADC "membership" as if it's anything other than a free web sign-up. It's true that you need to pay $99 to be able to put the app on a real device, though. But in exchange for the $99 you get 2 incident reports in which you can talk to actual Apple engineers and access to a worldwide marketplace tied to the most successful digital media store in history.
And... in the end, there's really no SDK shoot out in the article. Which platform is, in the end, easier to develop for? Yes, Apple does a lot of stuff proprietary-- but is it better? Interface Builder is pretty frikkin awesome. The integration of the debugger and ability to run DTrace with a sweet UI remotely on the device is very nice. There are GL ES performance monitors, database monitors, etc etc etc. Yes, you can use Eclipse with Android and someday some developers might write plugins for it, but does that really make up for all these tools? I'm curious to find out. Someone should write an article...
1. You agree to the NDA when you pay your $99 bill and join the program. If they accept your electronic "signature" for charging $99 to your credit card, it's hard to argue that that same agreement doesn't apply to the other contract involved in the same transaction. And taking away the ability to charge a credit card online would kind of put a damper on ecommerce.
2. From what I understand, these correspondences were ALWAYS covered by that same NDA. It's just that developers, either through ignorance or anger, violated the NDA and posted the rejection letters in the past. This is simply Apple reminding the developers what they agreed to. If you don't like it, don't join the program... there are alternatives (none good ones, but they're there.)
3. So 4 out of about 4000 apps have been rejected so far. 0.4%. I don't think it's time to panic yet.
My guess is that this article is just flat-out wrong. I know when I plug my iPhone into my Mac it backs it up, syncs all my contacts, music, and apps, and shows me a preview of all the photos on the phone and asks me if I want to download them in iPhoto. My guess is more than 50% of folks know how to click the "Import" button. It's true that most iPhone users are Windows users, but even there it's pretty easy to sync.
I think Google has selective attention that completely excludes the iPhone right now.
When I lived out in the south bay area of California in 2003, I had both Dish Network and an OTA digital ATSC decoder attached to an HD set and amplified rabbit ears. First of all, I never lost the Dish Network signal to rain, so I have to assume folks who complain about extremely touchy satellite signals had them badly installed or adjusted or that somehow DirecTV is worse). Secondly, digital seemed very impervious to blockage and weather. The forward error correction did a great job pulling a signal out of almost anything. The biggest problem was multi-path. At least in the decoders of 5 years ago, ghosted signals caused by reflections against mountains (they don't call it silicon *valley* for nothing) reaching the antenna at slightly different times on the same frequency seemed to really play games with the reception, making the orientation as important as the location for the antenna.
As for getting the notice out in an emergency, reverse-911 seems to work really well. Living in NJ, we got a message about Tropical Storm Hanna coming in 24 hours ahead of time as a recorded message on the telephone. I don't have much worries that the digital TV conversion is going to cause issues in that area.
The Mac, having 4-channel wave sound from the beginning, went one better than the PC when it came to the startup failure beep. While the PC would beep out some sequence of single notes indicating hardware errors, the Mac would simply play one chord. A successful bootup was a pleasant chime (sometimes heard on Futurama or other shows when something boots up). However, hardware errors not only produced the sad mac, but a discordant anti-chime. For those with good ears, it was sometimes possible to diagnose some errors by the particular musical dissonance. In particular, some familiar with upgrading the Mac Plus became familiar with a chord indicating bad RAM.
Copyrights last virtually forever. Patents last 10 years and can be extended 10 years. They're very different. A Copyright only covers the specific code as written, while patents cover novel and non-obvious ideas.
I don't have any problem whatsoever with software patents, myself. I don't understand why some folks insist on painting such a strong wall between a mechanism implemented in a Turing machine versus one implemented with wood and metal. It's the idea that's novel and non-obvious, and the substrate (be it a Turing machine or "reality") is only incidental.
The real problem with software patents as they stand are the bar being set too low for "non-obvious". In addition, ideas that were implemented in one domain shouldn't get a patent on a new domain if they're substantially unchanged simply for being re-implemented there. That being said, I think a lot of the "problems" we're having now will work themselves out once the land-grab for IP rights for doing things on the still relatively immature internet expires.
GoDaddy offers this service much cheaper, I think, with at least as many features. If only I could make heads or tails of their site anymore... it's so fully of crap these days it's hard to find the actual stuff you want to buy.
It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems.
I'm willing to give them a pass for embedded systems. That field is inherently more specialized than general application programming that you really do need someone who knows how to think that way. And there are enough "gotchas" in each specific language in the embedded space that you want someone with at least reasonable familiarity with both embedded and the particular embedded language.
On the other hand, I don't know any company worth working for that wouldn't figure out a way to bring really good people on board even if they don't specifically meet the checklist. It's showing them that you're really good that's the trick. Fortunately there are lots of opportunities there lately, from Apple's App Store to various high-profile open-source projects to get your name out there.
Any candidate who never bends to the realities of the situation would be a pretty horrible leader. Using votes on particular bills in Congress as evidence that someone supports or is against various philosophies is pretty disingenuous. Have you READ any of those bills?
Anyway, they're good books, and even if you end up rejecting the evidence you should at least be familiar with it.
That whole "Community Organizer" thing. Really-- the answer to your question is in the books, which is why I suggested reading them. They're easy reads and enjoyable stories of their own accord.
If you're going to assert that neither candidate really wants to change anything you should at least examine the evidence even if you choose to reject it.
Slashdot Mirror
This in not the right strategy this is greed.
It's neither. It's business. If something costs too much to sustain it given the game turnover and the fact that the publishers only make money on the original sale, they have to find some other way to get paid for it. Subscription could work, but it's a hassle and most people won't subscribe to more than a few services. This seems like a pretty reasonable way to be compensated for valuable content to me.
1.) These phones CAN work on all those networks. So this restriction is completely artificial.
I'm no expert, but I don't think this is true. Isn't AT&T the only major GSM-based provider in the US? The iPhone certainly doesn't do CDMA, PCS, or whatnot. Besides, I still don't see why it should be illegal for two non-monopolies to tie products together. Apple has less than 1% of the cellphone market and AT&T exists in a competitive environment as well.
Because that's not the definition of "steal". Slashdot loves to try to assert the semantic fallacy that it's not stealing if no one loses anything.
From m-w.com:
Steal: [...] transitive verb 1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Appropriate: [...] 3 : to take or make use of without authority or right
One can debate "wrongfully" in some usages of "steal", but in this case I think it's pretty clear it was "Made use of without authority and wrongfully". Thus stealing.
True, but I was thinking more about forestation of previously open land. For an area which has been without a forest for a century or two, re-introducing trees doesn't necessarily instantly make everything better. It could significantly limit the surface freshwater and change the albedo... I'm not against forests, I'm just saying there may be a role for an artificial solar-powered carbon-scrubber in an ecologically friendly deployment. And that "Just Add Trees!" isn't necessarily the answer to everything.
A forest consumes and locks up huge amounts of fresh water, though. Being able to scrub CO2 with sunlight alone might be significantly better for the environment in some areas than needing the sun and water together.
Do they? Oops... I use OpenDNS and hadn't realized that.
I think bandwidth has gotten to the point where you can't measure your capacity by assuming you'll be consuming 100% of the bandwidth all the time. Take electricity... no one seems to be bothered by the fact that if everyone consumed even 50% of their capacity at the same time the system would die a flaming death. And very few people even think about consuming 100% of the electricity available to their home.
I really, really appreciate that I can get 20Mb down and 5Mb up whenever I need it, even if I don't transmit 250GB a month. It's dramatically better than having a 800kbps line that I can max out 100% of the time.
FiOS has really nice service in most of New Jersey...
You have to love it when a common joke on Slashdot - that of patenting the process of patenting ideas - has finally come to pass.
In Soviet Russia, the process of patenting ideas patents you! If patents were cars, this would be like patenting blank areas on your road atlas. And does this patent application run linux?
" On the iPhone, scanning a 1D barcode is slow and unreliable. But the G1's improved optics and Android's improved access to image scans has made 1D scanning quick and useful,"
[citation needed]. 2 megapixel is more than enough to scan a 2D barcode, and the iPhones optics are quite reasonable. If the iPhone scanning is actually "slow and unreliable" (I have no evidence of this) it's simply because of the algorithm that the third party developer is using.
For what it's worth, though, the iPhone has 7 scanners on the App Store when you search for "barcode" and all seem to revolve around one kind of 2D bar code or another (EZcode, DataMatrix, QR Code, ShotCode, Blotcode, etc). The reviews seem to indicate the iPhone is quite good at scanning them.
Basically, the article submitter appears to be another anti-iPhone troll, which is too bad because for me it detracts from his main point about bar code ubiquity.
I suspect the sale of DRMed music still exceeds the sale of non-DRMed music, thanks to the music label's insistence on Apple DRM'ing their music.
There, fixed that for ya. It's all up to the music labels. The only reason Amazon can sell DRM-free music is because the labels let them. And they don't let Apple, because they want Amazon to emerge as a competitor. Once distribution becomes a commodity again, the labels (who have a monopoly over the content) can jack prices back up. Right now it's Apple vs. the labels keeping prices in check. When the labels induce Amazon's success, it will be the consumers against the labels directly... and we know who will win then.
Sure, but the article tried to make a point that Google uses command-line programs while Apple has a proprietary IDE and thus Google is more open. In that sense, it's worth pointing out that all Apple's tools are also command-line tools running on top of their UNIX OS, and the IDE is just another shell.
That's a good point and probably true, especially for developing for the Simulator. In fact even the helper apps (like converting to iPhone-preferred audio formats) are all command line tools. However, it seems like it would be a huge amount of work for little gain to unhook it from XCode, but I would be surprised if it couldn't be done once you figure out the zillion-and-one configuration issues.
I know we're all under NDA, but I've had very little problems with debugger integration. There's sometimes the frustrating unexplained BAD_ACCESS, but in general I can see threads, allocations, I/O, memory leaks, locks, allocations, SQL reads/writes/locks, OpenGL monitors, etc etc etc. I thought it was pretty impressive myself. Gotta love DTrace.
Yeah, almost all the metrics mentioned in the summary are irrelevant. Objective-C is something you can probably pick up in an afternoon. It's simpler than most modern scripting languages. And if you are unable to do so, as an iPhone owner I'd say please go write your app for Google anyway.
They mention ADC "membership" as if it's anything other than a free web sign-up. It's true that you need to pay $99 to be able to put the app on a real device, though. But in exchange for the $99 you get 2 incident reports in which you can talk to actual Apple engineers and access to a worldwide marketplace tied to the most successful digital media store in history.
And... in the end, there's really no SDK shoot out in the article. Which platform is, in the end, easier to develop for? Yes, Apple does a lot of stuff proprietary-- but is it better? Interface Builder is pretty frikkin awesome. The integration of the debugger and ability to run DTrace with a sweet UI remotely on the device is very nice. There are GL ES performance monitors, database monitors, etc etc etc. Yes, you can use Eclipse with Android and someday some developers might write plugins for it, but does that really make up for all these tools? I'm curious to find out. Someone should write an article...
Google hasn't "changed the definition"... no one else is using it like Google uses it.
They're just using the word wrong.
1. You agree to the NDA when you pay your $99 bill and join the program. If they accept your electronic "signature" for charging $99 to your credit card, it's hard to argue that that same agreement doesn't apply to the other contract involved in the same transaction. And taking away the ability to charge a credit card online would kind of put a damper on ecommerce.
2. From what I understand, these correspondences were ALWAYS covered by that same NDA. It's just that developers, either through ignorance or anger, violated the NDA and posted the rejection letters in the past. This is simply Apple reminding the developers what they agreed to. If you don't like it, don't join the program... there are alternatives (none good ones, but they're there.)
3. So 4 out of about 4000 apps have been rejected so far. 0.4%. I don't think it's time to panic yet.
My guess is that this article is just flat-out wrong. I know when I plug my iPhone into my Mac it backs it up, syncs all my contacts, music, and apps, and shows me a preview of all the photos on the phone and asks me if I want to download them in iPhoto. My guess is more than 50% of folks know how to click the "Import" button. It's true that most iPhone users are Windows users, but even there it's pretty easy to sync.
I think Google has selective attention that completely excludes the iPhone right now.
When I lived out in the south bay area of California in 2003, I had both Dish Network and an OTA digital ATSC decoder attached to an HD set and amplified rabbit ears. First of all, I never lost the Dish Network signal to rain, so I have to assume folks who complain about extremely touchy satellite signals had them badly installed or adjusted or that somehow DirecTV is worse). Secondly, digital seemed very impervious to blockage and weather. The forward error correction did a great job pulling a signal out of almost anything. The biggest problem was multi-path. At least in the decoders of 5 years ago, ghosted signals caused by reflections against mountains (they don't call it silicon *valley* for nothing) reaching the antenna at slightly different times on the same frequency seemed to really play games with the reception, making the orientation as important as the location for the antenna.
As for getting the notice out in an emergency, reverse-911 seems to work really well. Living in NJ, we got a message about Tropical Storm Hanna coming in 24 hours ahead of time as a recorded message on the telephone. I don't have much worries that the digital TV conversion is going to cause issues in that area.
The Mac, having 4-channel wave sound from the beginning, went one better than the PC when it came to the startup failure beep. While the PC would beep out some sequence of single notes indicating hardware errors, the Mac would simply play one chord. A successful bootup was a pleasant chime (sometimes heard on Futurama or other shows when something boots up). However, hardware errors not only produced the sad mac, but a discordant anti-chime. For those with good ears, it was sometimes possible to diagnose some errors by the particular musical dissonance. In particular, some familiar with upgrading the Mac Plus became familiar with a chord indicating bad RAM.
Good times.
Copyrights last virtually forever. Patents last 10 years and can be extended 10 years. They're very different. A Copyright only covers the specific code as written, while patents cover novel and non-obvious ideas.
I don't have any problem whatsoever with software patents, myself. I don't understand why some folks insist on painting such a strong wall between a mechanism implemented in a Turing machine versus one implemented with wood and metal. It's the idea that's novel and non-obvious, and the substrate (be it a Turing machine or "reality") is only incidental.
The real problem with software patents as they stand are the bar being set too low for "non-obvious". In addition, ideas that were implemented in one domain shouldn't get a patent on a new domain if they're substantially unchanged simply for being re-implemented there. That being said, I think a lot of the "problems" we're having now will work themselves out once the land-grab for IP rights for doing things on the still relatively immature internet expires.
GoDaddy offers this service much cheaper, I think, with at least as many features. If only I could make heads or tails of their site anymore... it's so fully of crap these days it's hard to find the actual stuff you want to buy.
It's no longer enough to be a C++ Programmer for example, if they're hiring a C++ Programmer for Embedded Systems.
I'm willing to give them a pass for embedded systems. That field is inherently more specialized than general application programming that you really do need someone who knows how to think that way. And there are enough "gotchas" in each specific language in the embedded space that you want someone with at least reasonable familiarity with both embedded and the particular embedded language.
On the other hand, I don't know any company worth working for that wouldn't figure out a way to bring really good people on board even if they don't specifically meet the checklist. It's showing them that you're really good that's the trick. Fortunately there are lots of opportunities there lately, from Apple's App Store to various high-profile open-source projects to get your name out there.
Any candidate who never bends to the realities of the situation would be a pretty horrible leader. Using votes on particular bills in Congress as evidence that someone supports or is against various philosophies is pretty disingenuous. Have you READ any of those bills?
Anyway, they're good books, and even if you end up rejecting the evidence you should at least be familiar with it.
That whole "Community Organizer" thing. Really-- the answer to your question is in the books, which is why I suggested reading them. They're easy reads and enjoyable stories of their own accord.
If you're going to assert that neither candidate really wants to change anything you should at least examine the evidence even if you choose to reject it.
Read Obama's books then come back and tell me that. If you haven't, you're just as uninformed as anyone.