Whether this is due to a bias against Microsoft, or not, is beside the point. It's a realistic bias, given their history of dirty tricks. Gray is saying that he doesn't need to show that the leopard has changed his shorts. My response to his article hasn't shown up yet, so I'll repost it here...
"As far as recounting the entire history of Microsoft legal activity, again, it's not really something that is helpful."
If you want to convince people that the leopard has changed his shorts, you have to show people what the shorts look like on the leopard. Microsoft has a higher barrier to acceptance than IBM or Sun because Microsoft has a history of behaving worse than IBM and Sun. To overcome that barrier, Microsoft may have to make stronger commitments, show conclusively that they are stronger, and show that they can stand behind them. This may be unfair to you, personally, and to the people you're working with, but you can't just pretend the leopard isn't in the room.
If Microsoft is unwilling to have OOXML go through at least as rigorous a review as ODF before standardization, then how on earth can Patrick expect that they'll hang around after standardization. One OOXML is standard, the pressure is off.
Doesn't anyone remember Microsoft's response to FIPS-151?
You know, the "POSIX Subsystem" in NT? The one that's so useless that there have been three independent re-implementations of POSIX functionality on top of the WIN32 subsystem instead? Microsoft eventually bought a company that did their own *extension* of the POSIX subsystem into something that was actually usable for real work, but they released it reluctantly and in an obscure package, and only use it where they have to (for example in the Hotmail conversion to NT). They won't even take advantage of it where it can solve real security problems for them (for example by taking on the "exec" API to resolve the recurring problems with ShellExecute in Win32).
And that's something with strong and continuing customer demand!
Do you live in a geodesic dome? Do you have an electric car? How about your mower, does it hover or run on wheels? Do you have a roomba, or a plain old vacuum cleaner? We all have areas we're interested in and areas we don't care much about, and select the technology we use appropriately.
First, he only "said" half a dozen words through the interface, that's hardly enough to identify someone's voice. Second, voice synthesis does fake dynamics. It doesn't get it from anywhere, it makes it up from the sentence structure.
In fact the first thing he "said" though the interface sounded very much like Apple's voice synth on the Mac.
That's a bit of a catch-22. I wonder what it will take to get nVidia interested in serious raytracing hardware, when it'll take serious raytracing hardware (I'm talking about something like SaarCOR fabbed in silicon in 2008, instead of an FPGA in 2005) to get game developers interested in it?
I'm getting kind of tired of amateur psychologists (if you're a professional psychologist I apologize in advance for inadvertently denigrating your professional status) interpreting someone's brief comment, followed by a clarification, as backpedalling, flanneling, or otherwise trying to rewrite history. It's too easy a shot.
No, I'm not the OP's sock puppet.
I'm mostly reacting to some random mod's idea that that was a "+1 Interesting" post.:p
Heterogeneous/distributed microkernels. Each process runs on a core that supports its instruction set, and communicates with other processes using lightweight messages. Could see QNX suddenly becoming much more important.
If Apple's iPhone was in a monopoly position, maybe, but not only is it not even vaguely the majority of the market, it's not even vaguely in that position on AT&T's network.
As for net neutrality, Apple isn't even the network provider... AT&T is. Apple restricting access to their phone no more violates network neutrality than Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft restricting access to their consoles.
The iPhone is to a real "smartphone" as a Playstation or XBox is to a PC. There's a place for both in the market, and expecting the iPhone to do anything a Treo or iPaq does is like expecting to replace your PC with a Wii or a Tivo. And for some people that works out fine, they don't need a smartphone. For the rest, if you don't want a "console smartphone", then buy something else.
The referenced article isn't announcing that there really is a market for mobile broadband... that's obvious: I signed up for Omnisky when that was the only option, and have found wifi less useful when travelling... it's making the prediction that cellphones will replace hotspots. The fact that there's a market for mobile broadband doesn't mean that there's no market for wifi hotspots. That's like arguing that broadcast TV will put cable out of business, or vice versa...
Me too. And even with it disabled the damn phone keeps asking me to turn it on. Right, like I'm going to bother to go online at their inflated prices on their crippled web browser on a phone where they have disabled the USB port so I can't used it as a modem.
The idea of having to use Microsoft APIs to program future computers because the vendors only document how to get DirectX to work doesn't exactly thrill me. I think panic is perhaps too strong a word, but sheesh...
Implementing Piclens as a Firefox extension is neat, I guess, but if they made it a regular browser plugin it would not only work in any browser but it would avoid promoting the insecure XPI installation model.
(OK, XPI is no ActiveX, but it's a bad design because it still trains people to trust unsandboxed web content)
Are we talking about a copy of the code of the game, or are we talking about the look-and-feel copyright of the game play? Is this a matter of them downloading the flash and modifying it, or is this just a workalike?
Regardless of the details of copyright law in China, or in the US, is this violation something we should be concerned about or is it something we would expect the LPF to be defending if it happened in another context?
Those bastards at Apple are trying to keep use from using all those great Java apps we love so much.
This isn't about Apple being "bastards". There are some perfectly good reasons why they might not want to provide users full access to the iPhone. The original suspicion I had was that there didn't seem to be any hardware protection for the software radio, so a malicious application could easily use the iPhone to screw with the cell network. Steve Jobs experience with the phone system would make that kind of possibility very obvious to him.
This also isn't about Java, it's about all open toolkits. They didn't say "we won't allow Java", they said "we won't allow any interpreters other than the ones we approve of". That not only includes Flash, which is huge, but also Apple's own Applescript, which is pretty damn popular on the Mac.
They want to control application access - but they release an sdk.
They release an SDK that can not be used to create applications that can be distributed by anyone but Apple.
And regarding foot-dragging, how many months ago was the iphone released?
Every actual smartphone that I know of had SDKs before launch.
Can you honestly say it's foot-dragging or a staged schedule?
Given that Apple originally said that the only SDK was going to be via Javascript applets, and that it's only been after massive pushback by the community, I think I can honestly say it's foot-dragging.
It's called Code Access Security and it ensures that the calling code cannot exceed it's bounds as configured by a serious of very granular permissions applied to a variety of "zones" determines by a set of mechanisms including the origin of the assembly,
Wait a second here...
Another poster has just stated that Microsoft is NOT using "security zones" for Silverlight.
You're saying that they ARE using them for.NET.
Does this mean that you're mistaken, or that he's being disingenuous (for example, he means Silverlight doesn't implement security zones but it's built on code that does).
In theory, perhaps, but I'm talking about the real software that might be actually deployed. Java can be run JIT but isn't in Sun's implementation. CIL can be run in an interpreter but isn't in Microsoft's implementation. There is no widespread use of unsandboxed Java except through explicit installation of Java applications, and no active effort to change that, but Microsoft has been pushing for widespread use of ActiveX (with both native code and.NET) outside the sandbox for the past decade.
Silverlight does not grant security privileges to applets based on IE Zone settings.
Given Microsoft's relentless push for the integration of the browser and the desktop, something they risked having the company broken up to retain, I have no reason to believe that this is anything but temporary.
Sun had to prove they could handle security, and they didn't have a history of creating the biggest security design cockup on the internet. Why should Microsoft get a pass?
So basically this SDK isn't going to let even developers open up their own iPhones, and Jailbreak will continue to be a necessity to use an iPhone as a regular smartphone. Even PalmOS, limited as it is, provides a better environment.
Oh well.
I hope Apple is not going to make the mistake of trying to push the idea that a leaky OS level sandbox is a free pass for security, the way Microsoft has.
I'm not sure what you're aiming at here, but.NET (and, by extension, Silverlight) has a sandbox security model;
CIL is not run in a sandboxed interpreter like Java, it's just an intermediate form for native code.
And I did not consider the JVM security model acceptable when it was first introduced. Making part of the sandbox dependent on the class model was a very dangerous step, and it's only been the years of secure Java implementations that demonstrate that Sun's design is secure. And Sun's design does not include a mechanism for a Java applet to acquire rights outside the sandbox simply by the "zone" it's in.
Microsoft may be able to prove that they have got it right this time. But they will need to prove it, as Sun did.
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at.
The iPhone already has two different APIs: Cocoa and Webkit. Until now, only the Webkit API was available, and now that they are releasing Cocoa they're releasing it under very tight controls and setting up extreme limitations in what Cocoa applications are going to be allowed to do... enforced by contract rather than software, but still limitations. One of those limitations is that third parties are not to provide their own interpreters (like Java). Apple is not just not implementing Java, they seem to want to prevent it or any other development environment than theirs from being available on the iPhone.
That's nothing to do with support costs. That's all about control.
Slashdot Mirror
Yah, I'd like to see them do the same curve fit for commercial software. If it's not also exponential I'll eat your hat.
(not mine, it's icky)
Leopard ... spots. Not shorts. Leopards don't typically wear shorts.
I have no idea who Rudyard Kipling is, either!
Whether this is due to a bias against Microsoft, or not, is beside the point. It's a realistic bias, given their history of dirty tricks. Gray is saying that he doesn't need to show that the leopard has changed his shorts. My response to his article hasn't shown up yet, so I'll repost it here...
"As far as recounting the entire history of Microsoft legal activity, again, it's not really something that is helpful."
If you want to convince people that the leopard has changed his shorts, you have to show people what the shorts look like on the leopard. Microsoft has a higher barrier to acceptance than IBM or Sun because Microsoft has a history of behaving worse than IBM and Sun. To overcome that barrier, Microsoft may have to make stronger commitments, show conclusively that they are stronger, and show that they can stand behind them. This may be unfair to you, personally, and to the people you're working with, but you can't just pretend the leopard isn't in the room.
If Microsoft is unwilling to have OOXML go through at least as rigorous a review as ODF before standardization, then how on earth can Patrick expect that they'll hang around after standardization. One OOXML is standard, the pressure is off.
Doesn't anyone remember Microsoft's response to FIPS-151?
You know, the "POSIX Subsystem" in NT? The one that's so useless that there have been three independent re-implementations of POSIX functionality on top of the WIN32 subsystem instead? Microsoft eventually bought a company that did their own *extension* of the POSIX subsystem into something that was actually usable for real work, but they released it reluctantly and in an obscure package, and only use it where they have to (for example in the Hotmail conversion to NT). They won't even take advantage of it where it can solve real security problems for them (for example by taking on the "exec" API to resolve the recurring problems with ShellExecute in Win32).
And that's something with strong and continuing customer demand!
Do you live in a geodesic dome? Do you have an electric car? How about your mower, does it hover or run on wheels? Do you have a roomba, or a plain old vacuum cleaner? We all have areas we're interested in and areas we don't care much about, and select the technology we use appropriately.
First, he only "said" half a dozen words through the interface, that's hardly enough to identify someone's voice. Second, voice synthesis does fake dynamics. It doesn't get it from anywhere, it makes it up from the sentence structure.
In fact the first thing he "said" though the interface sounded very much like Apple's voice synth on the Mac.
That's a bit of a catch-22. I wonder what it will take to get nVidia interested in serious raytracing hardware, when it'll take serious raytracing hardware (I'm talking about something like SaarCOR fabbed in silicon in 2008, instead of an FPGA in 2005) to get game developers interested in it?
I'm getting kind of tired of amateur psychologists (if you're a professional psychologist I apologize in advance for inadvertently denigrating your professional status) interpreting someone's brief comment, followed by a clarification, as backpedalling, flanneling, or otherwise trying to rewrite history. It's too easy a shot.
:p
No, I'm not the OP's sock puppet.
I'm mostly reacting to some random mod's idea that that was a "+1 Interesting" post.
... except there's no money in them.
Heterogeneous/distributed microkernels. Each process runs on a core that supports its instruction set, and communicates with other processes using lightweight messages. Could see QNX suddenly becoming much more important.
If Apple's iPhone was in a monopoly position, maybe, but not only is it not even vaguely the majority of the market, it's not even vaguely in that position on AT&T's network.
As for net neutrality, Apple isn't even the network provider... AT&T is. Apple restricting access to their phone no more violates network neutrality than Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft restricting access to their consoles.
The iPhone is to a real "smartphone" as a Playstation or XBox is to a PC. There's a place for both in the market, and expecting the iPhone to do anything a Treo or iPaq does is like expecting to replace your PC with a Wii or a Tivo. And for some people that works out fine, they don't need a smartphone. For the rest, if you don't want a "console smartphone", then buy something else.
I think you're missing the point.
... that's obvious: I signed up for Omnisky when that was the only option, and have found wifi less useful when travelling ... it's making the prediction that cellphones will replace hotspots. The fact that there's a market for mobile broadband doesn't mean that there's no market for wifi hotspots. That's like arguing that broadcast TV will put cable out of business, or vice versa...
The referenced article isn't announcing that there really is a market for mobile broadband
Me too. And even with it disabled the damn phone keeps asking me to turn it on. Right, like I'm going to bother to go online at their inflated prices on their crippled web browser on a phone where they have disabled the USB port so I can't used it as a modem.
I was briefly excited until I realized that this had nothing to do with multi-format eBooks.
Guess I'll stick with Fictionwise and Baen for a while more.
The idea of having to use Microsoft APIs to program future computers because the vendors only document how to get DirectX to work doesn't exactly thrill me. I think panic is perhaps too strong a word, but sheesh...
Implementing Piclens as a Firefox extension is neat, I guess, but if they made it a regular browser plugin it would not only work in any browser but it would avoid promoting the insecure XPI installation model.
(OK, XPI is no ActiveX, but it's a bad design because it still trains people to trust unsandboxed web content)
Never mind, they seem to be using the same code and graphics. That's a blatant ripoff.
Are we talking about a copy of the code of the game, or are we talking about the look-and-feel copyright of the game play? Is this a matter of them downloading the flash and modifying it, or is this just a workalike?
Regardless of the details of copyright law in China, or in the US, is this violation something we should be concerned about or is it something we would expect the LPF to be defending if it happened in another context?
Those bastards at Apple are trying to keep use from using all those great Java apps we love so much.
This isn't about Apple being "bastards". There are some perfectly good reasons why they might not want to provide users full access to the iPhone. The original suspicion I had was that there didn't seem to be any hardware protection for the software radio, so a malicious application could easily use the iPhone to screw with the cell network. Steve Jobs experience with the phone system would make that kind of possibility very obvious to him.
This also isn't about Java, it's about all open toolkits. They didn't say "we won't allow Java", they said "we won't allow any interpreters other than the ones we approve of". That not only includes Flash, which is huge, but also Apple's own Applescript, which is pretty damn popular on the Mac.
They want to control application access - but they release an sdk.
They release an SDK that can not be used to create applications that can be distributed by anyone but Apple.
And regarding foot-dragging, how many months ago was the iphone released?
Every actual smartphone that I know of had SDKs before launch.
Can you honestly say it's foot-dragging or a staged schedule?
Given that Apple originally said that the only SDK was going to be via Javascript applets, and that it's only been after massive pushback by the community, I think I can honestly say it's foot-dragging.
It's called Code Access Security and it ensures that the calling code cannot exceed it's bounds as configured by a serious of very granular permissions applied to a variety of "zones" determines by a set of mechanisms including the origin of the assembly,
.NET.
Wait a second here...
Another poster has just stated that Microsoft is NOT using "security zones" for Silverlight.
You're saying that they ARE using them for
Does this mean that you're mistaken, or that he's being disingenuous (for example, he means Silverlight doesn't implement security zones but it's built on code that does).
In theory, perhaps, but I'm talking about the real software that might be actually deployed. Java can be run JIT but isn't in Sun's implementation. CIL can be run in an interpreter but isn't in Microsoft's implementation. There is no widespread use of unsandboxed Java except through explicit installation of Java applications, and no active effort to change that, but Microsoft has been pushing for widespread use of ActiveX (with both native code and .NET) outside the sandbox for the past decade.
Silverlight does not grant security privileges to applets based on IE Zone settings.
Given Microsoft's relentless push for the integration of the browser and the desktop, something they risked having the company broken up to retain, I have no reason to believe that this is anything but temporary.
Sun had to prove they could handle security, and they didn't have a history of creating the biggest security design cockup on the internet. Why should Microsoft get a pass?
So basically this SDK isn't going to let even developers open up their own iPhones, and Jailbreak will continue to be a necessity to use an iPhone as a regular smartphone. Even PalmOS, limited as it is, provides a better environment.
Oh well.
I hope Apple is not going to make the mistake of trying to push the idea that a leaky OS level sandbox is a free pass for security, the way Microsoft has.
I'm not sure what you're aiming at here, but .NET (and, by extension, Silverlight) has a sandbox security model;
CIL is not run in a sandboxed interpreter like Java, it's just an intermediate form for native code.
And I did not consider the JVM security model acceptable when it was first introduced. Making part of the sandbox dependent on the class model was a very dangerous step, and it's only been the years of secure Java implementations that demonstrate that Sun's design is secure. And Sun's design does not include a mechanism for a Java applet to acquire rights outside the sandbox simply by the "zone" it's in.
Microsoft may be able to prove that they have got it right this time. But they will need to prove it, as Sun did.
I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at.
The iPhone already has two different APIs: Cocoa and Webkit. Until now, only the Webkit API was available, and now that they are releasing Cocoa they're releasing it under very tight controls and setting up extreme limitations in what Cocoa applications are going to be allowed to do... enforced by contract rather than software, but still limitations. One of those limitations is that third parties are not to provide their own interpreters (like Java). Apple is not just not implementing Java, they seem to want to prevent it or any other development environment than theirs from being available on the iPhone.
That's nothing to do with support costs. That's all about control.