The article is insane. Apple processes credit cards in exchange for applications it sells on its stores. It acts as reviewer, agent, payment processor and takes a percentage of proceeds. They are not common carriers of applications. There is not a court in the United States and I suspect in most other places in the world that wouldn't consider them liable for what is sold in the online Apple Store. They simply cannot adopt a policy of non-censorship.
I would like to see a more open process but total freedom isn't possible with their model.
I think Paypal and iTunes are broad enough that they should fall under banking laws. The FDIC so far is of the opinion that if you don't hold customer money you don't need to be chartered like a bank.
This is a vanilla Gnome 3 with Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu / Unity is a Gnome distribution so not too much has to change. The main issue of controversy I can think of specific to this product is whether this should exist as a distribution, and not just a package at all, and I did see a few posts on either side of that one. But mostly I don't see much to discuss. This wouldn't have been a bad article for/. to just skip.
But if we are going to discuss it, in theory the real controversy should be over Ubuntu Unity vs. Ubuntu / Gnome 3. Now that would work if we had more Unity and Gnome 3 people, and we might by say 2014 (assuming both project survive this war, which I'm not sure of). The problem for/. is the people most interested in discussion that are former Gnome 2 / Ubuntu users; young power users hate OS change, and the people who learned Unix from Ubuntu are still very raw emotionally about this direction. And so you were right in our point that this would lead to a non productive conversation with people who hate both Unity and Gnome 3.
Where I disagreed with your angry post, was about the fact that this was simply a discussion of personal preferences and that Gnome's actions were not political. I don't think this is about personal preferences. What the appropriate degree of community sanction is for Gnome is a political issue it is not about personal preference. If Gnome gets demoted to a minor side project with a small following then it becomes about personal preference.
Is there a way to use iOS without iTunes, because iTunes does, by default, require personal information. Is there a way to set up iTunes and purchase apps for iOS without giving up any personal information?
Unless you are on an enterprise account there is no tracking between accounts and what you buy. The only company with that information is Apple and Apple doesn't sell data. Its sort of like worrying about privacy from the bank that's running your credit cards.
I have yet to hear any good reason why other systray/notification area apps are not allowed
Because Gnome is a GUI. GUIs are free to set standards. They've defined a standard notification system. It makes it easier for application developers if they can be assured that if they use the Gnome API for notifications everything will work fine.
That's the reason. That's the reason any OS sets any standard.
Also the fact that the dynamic nature of them means that things are not always in the same place.
The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.
Mark Shuttleworth doesn't agree with you. He think the biggest value for Ubuntu is the potential. He's not looking to be the most popular distribution in a 1% marketshare OSes. You may not like it, but understand where you stand. Both Canonical and the Gnome Foundation are very unhappy with the blown opportunities of the last decade.
I had trouble even with Mint, where graphics acceleration plain and simply wouldn't work with my AMD switchable graphics setup (it's shitty on Windows, imagine on Linux).
The Linux kernel and the graphical subsystem don't support switchable graphics. There are about a 1/2 dozen good projects to get this to work on X. In theory this should be doable that is to say that is probably possible to paste together a working solution. Alex Williamson is doing so great stuff with this, and deserves appreciation. But it will be some time before any distribution has this all working.
The correct advice for Linux in 2012 is to
a) Control this directly from the command line b) Pick one of the two graphics modes and just stick with it. c) Pick a switching solution and understand at best this is an early beta.
That could be true. Apple's numbers are low if you go '06 or before. And we do see lots of XP on there. That's a good point. What percentage of say 6-10 year computers do you think there are?
That would actually explain it. You have a point the sales figures are for Apple Computers vs. Microsoft OEM's while the usage figures are for OSes. I'd be shocked though if a substantial fraction of Apple customers are blowing away OSX or even using Windows in a VM regularly. OTOH I've heard the move from PowerPC to Intel did a ton for Apple sales, so perhaps I'm underestimating.
I have some questions about both the data and the summary.
In the July to August time frame the data has 1% of the users moving to "other". I'm assuming that 1% is some mixture of Windows 8 and OSX 10.8 betas because I can't think of any other big events that happened between July and August. Which means the math is likely off in the summary.
As an aside in the source data I have problems OSX being well above 8% (now at 12%) of sales and the figure for market share being around 6-7%. I'd love to see some breakdown that explicates the discrepancy between sales figures and usage figures when they show up, because they are rather common.
I happen to like Gnome 3 as well. On the other hand the Gnome community quite aggressively aimed to be the standard Linux desktop, not some obscure piece of software. Obscure software has the right to do what it wants. Public utilities have an obligation towards the public good. They were the ones that wanted this degree of focus. And as the standard desktop for free software they then decided on a development path that alienated their most important distributer (Canonical) technical directions that upset freedesktop project, and alienated their user base.
I'd like it if the discussion of Gnome 3 were a bit more mature. But your rant about personal preferences is out of place. The issues with Gnome 3 were not about personal preference. They are by their very nature political.
Mostly if you are using Gnome 3 on Gnome 2 style hardware it might very well be a downgrade. Where Gnome 3 will shine is in more versatile form factors. Other than that:
1) Integrated messaging and notifications. 2) Much better handling of virtual desktops.
Maybe. Most of the stuff the enterprise SDK does is open source. No one so far has wanted to use to maintain their own one without any tech support.
But fine you can throw that at the end. But that has nothing to do with the right to install software , but rather the right to certify developers who have the right to sign software....
How are you going to keep the sharepoint reader from never becoming an arbitrary TCP hole? It is just an application, and applications can contain vulnerabilities/etc.
The application has a very narrow gate. For example only taking a URL and a file name and returning a file. It doesn't offer a wide target. At the same time the sharepoint reader doesn't have all ports access to the TCP/IP system it only has a limited group of ports. Finally of course Apple can disable it on any vulnerability.
However, the fact is that they still can't install their OWN software on their devices. That is software they didn't receive from Apple, or somebody given permission to distribute software by Apple.
And that's false. True would be
However, the fact is that while they use Apple as a signing authority they still can't install their OWN software on their devices. That is software they didn't receive from Apple, or somebody given permission to distribute software by Apple. If however they choose another signing authority then that authority has the ability to set policy
Your original point was "Why should I have to pay somebody to install my own software on my own computer?" And the answer is you don't. Only if you throw in about 50 other conditions do you end up having to do this. And that's been my point. You need to to add a whole bunch of other conditions, and you aren't accurately portraying the situation. It is a gross misrepresentation to pretend that Apple prevents you from doing things they write software, create supporting documentation and provide live customer service to allow you to do. It is you who has decided to add additional criteria to not allow you to use this wealth of resources and multiplicity of means. It is like claiming that the government refuses to let you fly on an airplane without bothering to mention you are refusing to buy tickets.
Rephrasing your question in a way that's accurate would read something like:
"Why should a person who wants to have Apple act as their software certification service but also wants to run arbitrary code on their device need to register with Apple as someone who should be empowered to run arbitrary code?" Which of course immediately makes it clear how contradictory this is. For the vast majority of users arbitrary code is just another names for virus and worms, this should be be turned off by default. "permission" is turning it on for people for whom it makes sense to open this rather dangerous door.
Think about what you're saying. Word already can open files via WebDAV, or from sharepoint sites. So, you'd have to strip out this functionality to get rid of the need for network access.
No, the way this already works on iOS is Word would make a request to another service that would do this. Word would have a registered permission to request Word files of type A, B and C using protocols D, E and F from another service. That allows Word to fetch (and save) appropriate documents but not the ability to open arbitrary ports or pass arbitrary packets. You could even compound this by having the external service maintain a list of acceptable locations. This way the end user gets something like:c"Word is attempting to access hackerstore.placeinchina.ca should this be added to the acceptable locations list?"
Even if you bundle the sharepoint reader in with word, Apple is going to require the sharepoint reader not be modifiable from within Word so it never does become an arbitrary TCP hole. Getting to the other post, this is why Apple's role is so important. They can enforce good practice.
If somebody is trying to do corporate espionage then only being able to open files normally opened by Word/Excel/etc is more than enough - what do you think was used to create those documents in the first place?
There is nothing the security system can do about that. Pretty much if they person gets the infected file and then approves the transfer off their system to hackerstore.placeinchina.ca they lose their word docs.
And as far as bitcoin goes - it is just a program executing instructions. It wouldn't need extensive background processes, though it would likely consume a lot of CPU-time. A CPU quota would do it, but it seems unlikely that this will be implemented.
It would need to be consuming CPU in the background. That's the point. One of the big differences between iOS and Android is that iOS doesn't allow for programs to run background tasks. Applications can request specific background services from other parts of the system, but they themselves can't run their own code in the background.
That's more or less what they are in the USA. But in the US workers are subject to a lot of propaganda. Further we have a culture of individualism that conflicts with the basic understanding that to management their employees are cogs.
This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter?
Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare. Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.
Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing. KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.
The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.
Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.
That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues. Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding. That's why Open Office for OSX had to create an entire OSX GUI layer and Open Office for Windows had to create an entire Windows GUI and that still isn't really good enough and is holding them back.
They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.
I understand what happened. The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well. For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.
KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).
I understand the issue and why people were unhappy and wanted Gnome. Personally I thought at the time and still do that people creating commercial software being required to support the Linux widget set is a good idea. The GNU problem I think could have been solved by the KDE group if they had more time.
To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.
Yes but then they didn't do that. Almost immediately the Gnome people essentially reinvented a bad C++ to write Gnome in because they needed more structure. I'd consider the language issues a design flaw in Gnome.
This is one of the areas where OSX is fantastic. Applications are directories. Menus and so forth are semi-structured editable files. You can manipulate them a little bit by hand or by using interface builder. On the other hand the GUI presents the entire Application directory as a single icon. So you can't accidentally hit any of this structure.
Lets people who know what they are doing customize and keeps the 70 year old aunt out.
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The article is insane. Apple processes credit cards in exchange for applications it sells on its stores. It acts as reviewer, agent, payment processor and takes a percentage of proceeds. They are not common carriers of applications. There is not a court in the United States and I suspect in most other places in the world that wouldn't consider them liable for what is sold in the online Apple Store. They simply cannot adopt a policy of non-censorship.
I would like to see a more open process but total freedom isn't possible with their model.
This user 2 comments in their history both the same with no content.
Repulsive on the part of Microsoft.
Where are you getting these numbers from?
I think Paypal and iTunes are broad enough that they should fall under banking laws. The FDIC so far is of the opinion that if you don't hold customer money you don't need to be chartered like a bank.
This is a vanilla Gnome 3 with Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu / Unity is a Gnome distribution so not too much has to change. The main issue of controversy I can think of specific to this product is whether this should exist as a distribution, and not just a package at all, and I did see a few posts on either side of that one. But mostly I don't see much to discuss. This wouldn't have been a bad article for /. to just skip.
But if we are going to discuss it, in theory the real controversy should be over Ubuntu Unity vs. Ubuntu / Gnome 3. Now that would work if we had more Unity and Gnome 3 people, and we might by say 2014 (assuming both project survive this war, which I'm not sure of). The problem for /. is the people most interested in discussion that are former Gnome 2 / Ubuntu users; young power users hate OS change, and the people who learned Unix from Ubuntu are still very raw emotionally about this direction. And so you were right in our point that this would lead to a non productive conversation with people who hate both Unity and Gnome 3.
Where I disagreed with your angry post, was about the fact that this was simply a discussion of personal preferences and that Gnome's actions were not political. I don't think this is about personal preferences. What the appropriate degree of community sanction is for Gnome is a political issue it is not about personal preference. If Gnome gets demoted to a minor side project with a small following then it becomes about personal preference.
Is there a way to use iOS without iTunes, because iTunes does, by default, require personal information. Is there a way to set up iTunes and purchase apps for iOS without giving up any personal information?
Unless you are on an enterprise account there is no tracking between accounts and what you buy. The only company with that information is Apple and Apple doesn't sell data. Its sort of like worrying about privacy from the bank that's running your credit cards.
I have yet to hear any good reason why other systray/notification area apps are not allowed
Because Gnome is a GUI. GUIs are free to set standards. They've defined a standard notification system. It makes it easier for application developers if they can be assured that if they use the Gnome API for notifications everything will work fine.
That's the reason. That's the reason any OS sets any standard.
Also the fact that the dynamic nature of them means that things are not always in the same place.
I can see that. That's true.
The biggest value for Ubuntu/Canonical is the user base. Make them angry to loose both them and your value.
Mark Shuttleworth doesn't agree with you. He think the biggest value for Ubuntu is the potential. He's not looking to be the most popular distribution in a 1% marketshare OSes. You may not like it, but understand where you stand. Both Canonical and the Gnome Foundation are very unhappy with the blown opportunities of the last decade.
I had trouble even with Mint, where graphics acceleration plain and simply wouldn't work with my AMD switchable graphics setup (it's shitty on Windows, imagine on Linux).
The Linux kernel and the graphical subsystem don't support switchable graphics. There are about a 1/2 dozen good projects to get this to work on X. In theory this should be doable that is to say that is probably possible to paste together a working solution. Alex Williamson is doing so great stuff with this, and deserves appreciation. But it will be some time before any distribution has this all working.
The correct advice for Linux in 2012 is to
a) Control this directly from the command line
b) Pick one of the two graphics modes and just stick with it.
c) Pick a switching solution and understand at best this is an early beta.
I don't. The software is all pretty much generic on Linux at this point. Distributions only offer two things:
a) How they tweak the software and integrate it
b) How they configure their repository
Given that (a) is a good reason to switch.
Integrated messaging and notifications if you use our approved messaging client
No any Gnome 3 messaging and notification system would work. If by approved you mean it has to use the OS API's well yeah.
And most folks seem to think the virtual desktop stuff is actually far, far worse.
I haven't seen a good debate on this anywhere. Do you have a link?
That could be true. Apple's numbers are low if you go '06 or before. And we do see lots of XP on there. That's a good point. What percentage of say 6-10 year computers do you think there are?
They hit for the first time 3Q07 and 1Q08 they hit and stayed above it.
That would actually explain it. You have a point the sales figures are for Apple Computers vs. Microsoft OEM's while the usage figures are for OSes. I'd be shocked though if a substantial fraction of Apple customers are blowing away OSX or even using Windows in a VM regularly. OTOH I've heard the move from PowerPC to Intel did a ton for Apple sales, so perhaps I'm underestimating.
I have some questions about both the data and the summary.
In the July to August time frame the data has 1% of the users moving to "other". I'm assuming that 1% is some mixture of Windows 8 and OSX 10.8 betas because I can't think of any other big events that happened between July and August. Which means the math is likely off in the summary.
As an aside in the source data I have problems OSX being well above 8% (now at 12%) of sales and the figure for market share being around 6-7%. I'd love to see some breakdown that explicates the discrepancy between sales figures and usage figures when they show up, because they are rather common.
I happen to like Gnome 3 as well. On the other hand the Gnome community quite aggressively aimed to be the standard Linux desktop, not some obscure piece of software. Obscure software has the right to do what it wants. Public utilities have an obligation towards the public good. They were the ones that wanted this degree of focus. And as the standard desktop for free software they then decided on a development path that alienated their most important distributer (Canonical) technical directions that upset freedesktop project, and alienated their user base.
I'd like it if the discussion of Gnome 3 were a bit more mature. But your rant about personal preferences is out of place. The issues with Gnome 3 were not about personal preference. They are by their very nature political.
Mostly if you are using Gnome 3 on Gnome 2 style hardware it might very well be a downgrade. Where Gnome 3 will shine is in more versatile form factors. Other than that:
1) Integrated messaging and notifications.
2) Much better handling of virtual desktops.
Is about it.
Maybe. Most of the stuff the enterprise SDK does is open source. No one so far has wanted to use to maintain their own one without any tech support.
But fine you can throw that at the end. But that has nothing to do with the right to install software , but rather the right to certify developers who have the right to sign software ....
How are you going to keep the sharepoint reader from never becoming an arbitrary TCP hole? It is just an application, and applications can contain vulnerabilities/etc.
The application has a very narrow gate. For example only taking a URL and a file name and returning a file. It doesn't offer a wide target. At the same time the sharepoint reader doesn't have all ports access to the TCP/IP system it only has a limited group of ports. Finally of course Apple can disable it on any vulnerability.
However, the fact is that they still can't install their OWN software on their devices. That is software they didn't receive from Apple, or somebody given permission to distribute software by Apple.
And that's false. True would be
However, the fact is that while they use Apple as a signing authority they still can't install their OWN software on their devices. That is software they didn't receive from Apple, or somebody given permission to distribute software by Apple. If however they choose another signing authority then that authority has the ability to set policy
____
Your original point was "Why should I have to pay somebody to install my own software on my own computer?" And the answer is you don't. Only if you throw in about 50 other conditions do you end up having to do this. And that's been my point. You need to to add a whole bunch of other conditions, and you aren't accurately portraying the situation. It is a gross misrepresentation to pretend that Apple prevents you from doing things they write software, create supporting documentation and provide live customer service to allow you to do. It is you who has decided to add additional criteria to not allow you to use this wealth of resources and multiplicity of means. It is like claiming that the government refuses to let you fly on an airplane without bothering to mention you are refusing to buy tickets.
Rephrasing your question in a way that's accurate would read something like:
"Why should a person who wants to have Apple act as their software certification service but also wants to run arbitrary code on their device need to register with Apple as someone who should be empowered to run arbitrary code?" Which of course immediately makes it clear how contradictory this is. For the vast majority of users arbitrary code is just another names for virus and worms, this should be be turned off by default. "permission" is turning it on for people for whom it makes sense to open this rather dangerous door.
Think about what you're saying. Word already can open files via WebDAV, or from sharepoint sites. So, you'd have to strip out this functionality to get rid of the need for network access.
No, the way this already works on iOS is Word would make a request to another service that would do this. Word would have a registered permission to request Word files of type A, B and C using protocols D, E and F from another service. That allows Word to fetch (and save) appropriate documents but not the ability to open arbitrary ports or pass arbitrary packets. You could even compound this by having the external service maintain a list of acceptable locations. This way the end user gets something like:c"Word is attempting to access hackerstore.placeinchina.ca should this be added to the acceptable locations list?"
Even if you bundle the sharepoint reader in with word, Apple is going to require the sharepoint reader not be modifiable from within Word so it never does become an arbitrary TCP hole. Getting to the other post, this is why Apple's role is so important. They can enforce good practice.
If somebody is trying to do corporate espionage then only being able to open files normally opened by Word/Excel/etc is more than enough - what do you think was used to create those documents in the first place?
There is nothing the security system can do about that. Pretty much if they person gets the infected file and then approves the transfer off their system to hackerstore.placeinchina.ca they lose their word docs.
And as far as bitcoin goes - it is just a program executing instructions. It wouldn't need extensive background processes, though it would likely consume a lot of CPU-time. A CPU quota would do it, but it seems unlikely that this will be implemented.
It would need to be consuming CPU in the background. That's the point. One of the big differences between iOS and Android is that iOS doesn't allow for programs to run background tasks. Applications can request specific background services from other parts of the system, but they themselves can't run their own code in the background.
That's more or less what they are in the USA. But in the US workers are subject to a lot of propaganda. Further we have a culture of individualism that conflicts with the basic understanding that to management their employees are cogs.
This is what I don't understand; why should there only be one desktop? Why do people think in terms of increasing Linux's market share? What does it matter?
Because applications require money or money equivalents like time doing boring stuff. To get that money Linux needs marketshare. Firefox got up to about 5% share because AOL wanted a browser alternative. It was able to crack the IE monopoly because it was able to rapidly gain share to generate Google advertising revenue.
Open Office was interesting to Sun because it offered the potential to do something similar to the Microsoft Office monopoly. Its failure to gain share is why it is no longer funded and isn't advancing. KDE back in the early 2000s was getting money from the German government. KDE's success in gaining share would have translated into permanent funding.
The success of LAMP is the reason that is a Linux as at all.
Every major distribution carries the libraries for both GNOME and KDE, so developers can write for either one and it will still work for everyone. Rooting for one or the other is no different than rooting for a football team.
That's a slightly different definition of share. And no they don't work for everyone. Being a native application is really important to look and feel issues and integration issues. Particularly on a desktop where you want: cut and paste to work with complex objects all the way up to object linking and embedding. That's why Open Office for OSX had to create an entire OSX GUI layer and Open Office for Windows had to create an entire Windows GUI and that still isn't really good enough and is holding them back.
They were resolved when TrollTech changed the license of QT, long after the GNOME project was underway.
I understand what happened. The point was in an alternative history where Gnome isn't as aggressive and I think these things work out just as well. For example perhaps KDE gets control of their code base so they can relicense the code. Or they assert standing and make an explicit exception for use with QT in the license.
KDE could run on Linux, sure, but it wasn't free enough for the GNU project or the commercial Linux companies (since you had to purchase a license to write commercial software with it).
I understand the issue and why people were unhappy and wanted Gnome. Personally I thought at the time and still do that people creating commercial software being required to support the Linux widget set is a good idea. The GNU problem I think could have been solved by the KDE group if they had more time.
To a lesser extent, you also had the language problem; QT and the KDE libs are all C++ libraries, and UNIX has always been the haven for C programmers - a lot of developers balked at working with it and preferred something more traditional.
Yes but then they didn't do that. Almost immediately the Gnome people essentially reinvented a bad C++ to write Gnome in because they needed more structure. I'd consider the language issues a design flaw in Gnome.
This is one of the areas where OSX is fantastic. Applications are directories. Menus and so forth are semi-structured editable files. You can manipulate them a little bit by hand or by using interface builder. On the other hand the GUI presents the entire Application directory as a single icon. So you can't accidentally hit any of this structure.
Lets people who know what they are doing customize and keeps the 70 year old aunt out.