I agree Facebook was way overpriced, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a "social chit chat and picture website". It has replaced email and even the web for many people. Its value is in advertising, and Zuckerberg's goal is to replace Google as the internet's #1 advertiser. One of Facebook's problems is that mobile advertising doesn't perform as well as web advertising (which itself is on a downward trend), which is why they lowered their revenue forecast.
Wrong wrong wrong, even if you pay the $99 for a developer membership you still can't use those APIs if you don't sell your app through the store...nice try retard!
Another move of the goalpost. You started out by saying Apple provided hosting services for non-paid developers, and that was wrong. Now you're talking about how you can't use the APIs if you aren't approved through the store, which is incidental to the fact that you still need a paid developer membership to use the APIs in the first place, complete with signed entitlements.
You're so out of it that you don't even realize that bringing up the app store refutes your earlier argument--which you've suddenly abandoned--about users paying for iCloud's sync services through the purchase of extra disk space, because being on the app store means that not only do you have to be a paid developer, but Apple gets a cut of any purchase price. Hey, it's almost as if that money goes toward the services the app is using.
Rubbish again, you're so full of shit you don't even understand the issue. It's nothing to do with whether you are a paying apple developer, it's about whether you sell it in the app store, even if you are a paid developer you still can't necessarily use those APIs!
In your quest for a foothold, you've decided you're going to latch on the app store, an argument you weren't even making before. Nothing you're saying refutes the fact that one must be a paid developer to use the iCloud APIs. Whether or not the developer actually uses them is irrelevant.
That puppetmaster reveal is coming any moment now!
You're only saying that because you can't refute it
No, because it really is irrelevant. In your attempt to scrape any last shred of a point out of your refuted argument about Apple providing iCloud services for free apps, it's the only thing you could find to stubbornly stand behind to make yourself feel right about something.
it's all part of iCloud
The part of iCloud we were discussing was the developer APIs, which require a paid developer membership to use. You said Apple was paying for hosting fees for apps not in the paid developer program, remember? Thought you might need a little reminder after all your goalpost-moving.
you're trying to separate them and say that use of the APIs is charged to and paid for by the developer through the developer fees (even though the fees haven't changed)
You keep going on about the fees not changing as if that somehow proves something. Apple only provides iCloud API access to paying developers; that really should be the end of the argument, but, well, you're you.
while the storage part of iCloud is paid for by the user. So where's the proof? Given that the developer fees haven't changed it certainly looks like you're wrong.
iCloud storage is free. The only purchase on the part of users is the extra storage beyond the free 5GB. iCloud is more than file storage and doesn't require any fees from users, which you keep ignoring because you don't actually have an argument at this point. You're floundering along looking for a foothold and will probably pull out some puppetmaster/trolling schtick at any moment once you realize there's no other way out.
No it isn't, the hosting needs to be paid for whether you use it through apps or not, and when the initial free storage is full any more isn't funded by apps it's funded by the user.
iCloud integration is more than disk storage. The expanded disk space is irrelevant to the argument and is a separate product from the sync APIs.
Which is irrelevant because the user pays for the data anyway, otherwise they wouldn't charge for storage because - as you posit - that comes out of the developer fee.
It isn't irrelevant--you claimed it, and it was wrong. You're focused on user disk storage when it's only relevant to the iCloud APIs as a location for persistent stores (and even then, a highly restricted one). But iCloud is more than just an online disk drive, a point you keep ignoring.
This tangent about user backups is irrelevant. You originally said that Apple pays hosting expenses for apps from which they derive no income, but that's not true because only paid developers can integrate with iCloud. There's more to app iCloud integration than simply storing files; it's an active syncing service that pushes out to all configured devices.
Another go-nowhere project from Microsoft's social research group Fuse Labs, following in the footsteps of Live Labs, a previous group that disbanded in 2010. Anyone remember Pivot? Deepfish? Listas? Photosynth? And about 10 other discontinued products.
We all know this will be swept under the rug and forgotten faster than you can say "Google Wave", but it's amusing seeing Betteridge's Law of Headlines at play in the coverage, such as this gem from Fox News: "Is this the next Facebook? Microsoft unveils so.cl social network" The best part is that the article spends its first six paragraphs definitely answering its own headline with a no. Mainstream tech coverage is barely above tabloids.
iCloud's introduction date is irrelevant. Apple has a revenue stream coming from members of the developer program, and paying members are the only ones who can take advantage of Apple's online services. For instance, they're also the only ones who can use push notifications. Put two and two together.
The statement about storage allotment doesn't make sense, because if a developer doesn't use iCloud in their app because they didn't pay for the developer program, then obviously the storage will instead be used by some other app that did pay.
I don't know...I don't think freedom of travel and freedom from unreasonable search is being violated, as you're not being barred from travelling and you're not being searched. And I don't necessarily believe the legality of something changes simply because technology can do what humans can't. That argument of scale is the same argument the RIAA makes to differentiate P2P technology and 80s tape-trading.
I mean, I'd prefer not to be scanned, but I just don't feel like my rights are being violated if it's known that I'm driving down the freeway, after having driven through who knows how many security cameras at intersections and shown my photo ID who knows how many times just to buy beer and M-rated videogames. I'm usually an anti-government surveillance guy, but I don't feel as if I'm giving up more information than I usually do.
Not saying you're wrong or trying to argue with you. I agree with you that the storage is the real issue here, and I think two years is too long. The scanning itself just doesn't bother me for some reason. But it's possible other posters will make convincing arguments that could change my mind.
The two-year storage is really the only part that bothers me. But the actual scanning doesn't, for some reason. I guess because people see my license plate every day anyway. It's a pretty public thing already, and it's government-issued so the only data being collected that they don't already have is my location, but again, any driver on the freeway can already see me. I don't know; usually I'm against most kinds of data harvesting, but for some reason this doesn't bug me as much. I guess because driving in your vehicle is such a publicly identifiable thing anyway, and it is on government property.
Management doesn't know shit. Taking short breaks isn't slacking off, and studies have shown that such breaks improve worker productivity.
Management's problem is that it sees everything through a veil of pie charts and graphs, and if someone spends five minutes looking at pictures of their kids on Facebook, it must mean 0.2058% less revenue. Gotta fret over those graphs and spreadsheets.
Also, yeeeaah, can you come in on Sunday, too? We lost some people and need to catch up. Thaaaanks.
Yes, heaven forbid your employees take 10 minutes off from their monotonous cubicle hellholes to communicate a little with friends and family. It's not like studies have shown that more worker breaks increase productivity or anything. Henry Ford actually told his workers to work less because they got more done.
Well, of course they want participation. Participation means more information.
Google should focus on making their search engine better while thinking up the next big thing. Unfortunately, Google is so engineering-driven that it has a hard time understanding people. Even the use of "+1" comes off as mathematical and robotic. Grandma doesn't want to "+1 something".
Engineers often have trouble seeing their own work objectively, and they're afraid to apply human intuition in place of sampling data (e.g., the infamous 41 shades of blue). Google needs to change its culture so that it places greater emphasis on design and human interaction rather than technical impressiveness.
Neat, but is it surprising that transportation systems designed for the exact same purpose become mathematically similar over time? I'd be surprised if there wasn't emergent similarity in all urban transportation networks.
The engineer giving the talk mentioned that GCC eventually got precompiled headers over a decade after he had asked Stallman for the feature and after NeXTStep had already invested significant work in creating DevKit to work around GCC's limitations. It was those kinds of political moves that drove Apple to initiate the Clang project once LLVM came along.
It's not relevant how many use OS X for server tasks, because that isn't Apple's target market. Apple's XNU kernel is a mix of Mach and monolithic kernel features hand-tuned specifically for typical end-users. You can run certain kernel benchmarks and find that XNU is slower for certain things, but Apple isn't interested in working on them because it turns out they aren't useful benchmarks for the use cases they are aiming for, and I think that's a respectable position to take.
Besides, other factors contribute to performance bottlenecks, such as drivers. For example, Android isn't competitive with iOS when it comes to low-latency audio tasks even though Android is running on a server-class kernel like Linux and iOS is running XNU, a kernel whose performance you claim sucks. Like the other poster said, fretting over what kernel you're running just isn't all that relevant anymore given all the factors that ultimately contribute to a user's experience on a given platform.
Which is hilarious because it is the BSD fundamentalists who are re-implementing huge projects just to avoid a license they don't like for no reason other than poltical correctness.
Clang also addresses the lack of modularity in GCC. One of Apple's Clang engineers gave a talk several years ago about how at NeXTStep in the early 90s, he asked Stallman to implement precompiled headers in GCC. Stallman refused on political grounds. GCC was also intentionally obfuscated to make it difficult to integrate with. It's a clear example of rigid religious ideology standing in the way of and given prominence over technological progress.
After all these years of BSD code existing and thriving without issue, it's amazing that people still spread this kind of fearmongering despite the fact that this scenario has never come true.
The original code and its contributors don't magically disappear the moment a company makes a closed change. And if a company makes contributions it doesn't show anyone, you're free to make your own open contribution that competes with it. In fact, it's in company's best interests to rely on open contributions, because they don't want to waste time and manpower on, say, maintaining a compiler. This has proven to be the case with Clang. There hasn't been some evil proprietary fork that somehow ruined the world--and even if there was, people would just contribute free versions of the fork's features to the main tree. Companies are smart enough to know that this would happen and therefore realize that closed contributions of major features would be wasted effort.
One example would be integrating the compiler with its own custom tools. Whether or not you consider this to be a sabotaged version depends on if you believe BSD-licensed source code suddenly disappears from existence the moment a company uses it for something.
One of the FreeBSD developers gave a talk about this. FreeBSD has commercial users, and the new GCC just wouldn't have been an option for them. The older license-compatible version still in FreeBSD wasn't receiving updates, and it was beginning to affect developers too greatly.
Whether this compiler switch is a good thing or not depends on how much you hate the idea of commercial vendors using open source. GCC's strictness is admiral from an ideological perspective, but certainly not from a practical one. It should be noted that even Linus Torvalds adheres to a more pragmatic worldview:
There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.
It's pretty damning when Linus himself no longer refers to Linux as free software because he doesn't like the extremism of the free software movement. And why should he? He's an engineer, not a religious fundamentalist.
I've heard positive and negative claims regarding this. Certainly, Apple thinks it's production-ready (I think it was Xcode 4.2 that they stopped shipping GCC). Do you have a link showing that generated code is significantly worse? Which versions were compared?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree Facebook was way overpriced, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a "social chit chat and picture website". It has replaced email and even the web for many people. Its value is in advertising, and Zuckerberg's goal is to replace Google as the internet's #1 advertiser. One of Facebook's problems is that mobile advertising doesn't perform as well as web advertising (which itself is on a downward trend), which is why they lowered their revenue forecast.
Wrong wrong wrong, even if you pay the $99 for a developer membership you still can't use those APIs if you don't sell your app through the store...nice try retard!
Another move of the goalpost. You started out by saying Apple provided hosting services for non-paid developers, and that was wrong. Now you're talking about how you can't use the APIs if you aren't approved through the store, which is incidental to the fact that you still need a paid developer membership to use the APIs in the first place, complete with signed entitlements.
You're so out of it that you don't even realize that bringing up the app store refutes your earlier argument--which you've suddenly abandoned--about users paying for iCloud's sync services through the purchase of extra disk space, because being on the app store means that not only do you have to be a paid developer, but Apple gets a cut of any purchase price. Hey, it's almost as if that money goes toward the services the app is using.
Rubbish again, you're so full of shit you don't even understand the issue. It's nothing to do with whether you are a paying apple developer, it's about whether you sell it in the app store, even if you are a paid developer you still can't necessarily use those APIs!
In your quest for a foothold, you've decided you're going to latch on the app store, an argument you weren't even making before. Nothing you're saying refutes the fact that one must be a paid developer to use the iCloud APIs. Whether or not the developer actually uses them is irrelevant.
That puppetmaster reveal is coming any moment now!
You're bad at this. Next.
You're only saying that because you can't refute it
No, because it really is irrelevant. In your attempt to scrape any last shred of a point out of your refuted argument about Apple providing iCloud services for free apps, it's the only thing you could find to stubbornly stand behind to make yourself feel right about something.
it's all part of iCloud
The part of iCloud we were discussing was the developer APIs, which require a paid developer membership to use. You said Apple was paying for hosting fees for apps not in the paid developer program, remember? Thought you might need a little reminder after all your goalpost-moving.
you're trying to separate them and say that use of the APIs is charged to and paid for by the developer through the developer fees (even though the fees haven't changed)
You keep going on about the fees not changing as if that somehow proves something. Apple only provides iCloud API access to paying developers; that really should be the end of the argument, but, well, you're you.
while the storage part of iCloud is paid for by the user. So where's the proof? Given that the developer fees haven't changed it certainly looks like you're wrong.
iCloud storage is free. The only purchase on the part of users is the extra storage beyond the free 5GB. iCloud is more than file storage and doesn't require any fees from users, which you keep ignoring because you don't actually have an argument at this point. You're floundering along looking for a foothold and will probably pull out some puppetmaster/trolling schtick at any moment once you realize there's no other way out.
Next.
No it isn't, the hosting needs to be paid for whether you use it through apps or not, and when the initial free storage is full any more isn't funded by apps it's funded by the user.
iCloud integration is more than disk storage. The expanded disk space is irrelevant to the argument and is a separate product from the sync APIs.
Which is irrelevant because the user pays for the data anyway, otherwise they wouldn't charge for storage because - as you posit - that comes out of the developer fee.
It isn't irrelevant--you claimed it, and it was wrong. You're focused on user disk storage when it's only relevant to the iCloud APIs as a location for persistent stores (and even then, a highly restricted one). But iCloud is more than just an online disk drive, a point you keep ignoring.
This tangent about user backups is irrelevant. You originally said that Apple pays hosting expenses for apps from which they derive no income, but that's not true because only paid developers can integrate with iCloud. There's more to app iCloud integration than simply storing files; it's an active syncing service that pushes out to all configured devices.
And if you ship an app that doesn't use the space, someone else's will.
Another go-nowhere project from Microsoft's social research group Fuse Labs, following in the footsteps of Live Labs, a previous group that disbanded in 2010. Anyone remember Pivot? Deepfish? Listas? Photosynth? And about 10 other discontinued products.
We all know this will be swept under the rug and forgotten faster than you can say "Google Wave", but it's amusing seeing Betteridge's Law of Headlines at play in the coverage, such as this gem from Fox News: "Is this the next Facebook? Microsoft unveils so.cl social network" The best part is that the article spends its first six paragraphs definitely answering its own headline with a no. Mainstream tech coverage is barely above tabloids.
There's a bunch of raw imagery up from Cassini at the CICLOPS imaging lab site here.
iCloud's introduction date is irrelevant. Apple has a revenue stream coming from members of the developer program, and paying members are the only ones who can take advantage of Apple's online services. For instance, they're also the only ones who can use push notifications. Put two and two together.
The statement about storage allotment doesn't make sense, because if a developer doesn't use iCloud in their app because they didn't pay for the developer program, then obviously the storage will instead be used by some other app that did pay.
App store hosting requires being a member of the $100/year developer program regardless of app pricing.
I don't know...I don't think freedom of travel and freedom from unreasonable search is being violated, as you're not being barred from travelling and you're not being searched. And I don't necessarily believe the legality of something changes simply because technology can do what humans can't. That argument of scale is the same argument the RIAA makes to differentiate P2P technology and 80s tape-trading.
I mean, I'd prefer not to be scanned, but I just don't feel like my rights are being violated if it's known that I'm driving down the freeway, after having driven through who knows how many security cameras at intersections and shown my photo ID who knows how many times just to buy beer and M-rated videogames. I'm usually an anti-government surveillance guy, but I don't feel as if I'm giving up more information than I usually do.
Not saying you're wrong or trying to argue with you. I agree with you that the storage is the real issue here, and I think two years is too long. The scanning itself just doesn't bother me for some reason. But it's possible other posters will make convincing arguments that could change my mind.
The two-year storage is really the only part that bothers me. But the actual scanning doesn't, for some reason. I guess because people see my license plate every day anyway. It's a pretty public thing already, and it's government-issued so the only data being collected that they don't already have is my location, but again, any driver on the freeway can already see me. I don't know; usually I'm against most kinds of data harvesting, but for some reason this doesn't bug me as much. I guess because driving in your vehicle is such a publicly identifiable thing anyway, and it is on government property.
So Apple should pay hosting fees for apps not sold through their store? How does that make sense?
Just your friendly neighborhood reminder that Origin tracks your hardware, installed applications, software usage habits and more with no way to opt-out, unlike Steam. This is the new games industry.
Management doesn't know shit. Taking short breaks isn't slacking off, and studies have shown that such breaks improve worker productivity.
Management's problem is that it sees everything through a veil of pie charts and graphs, and if someone spends five minutes looking at pictures of their kids on Facebook, it must mean 0.2058% less revenue. Gotta fret over those graphs and spreadsheets.
Also, yeeeaah, can you come in on Sunday, too? We lost some people and need to catch up. Thaaaanks.
Yes, heaven forbid your employees take 10 minutes off from their monotonous cubicle hellholes to communicate a little with friends and family. It's not like studies have shown that more worker breaks increase productivity or anything. Henry Ford actually told his workers to work less because they got more done.
Well, of course they want participation. Participation means more information.
Google should focus on making their search engine better while thinking up the next big thing. Unfortunately, Google is so engineering-driven that it has a hard time understanding people. Even the use of "+1" comes off as mathematical and robotic. Grandma doesn't want to "+1 something".
Engineers often have trouble seeing their own work objectively, and they're afraid to apply human intuition in place of sampling data (e.g., the infamous 41 shades of blue). Google needs to change its culture so that it places greater emphasis on design and human interaction rather than technical impressiveness.
Neat, but is it surprising that transportation systems designed for the exact same purpose become mathematically similar over time? I'd be surprised if there wasn't emergent similarity in all urban transportation networks.
The engineer giving the talk mentioned that GCC eventually got precompiled headers over a decade after he had asked Stallman for the feature and after NeXTStep had already invested significant work in creating DevKit to work around GCC's limitations. It was those kinds of political moves that drove Apple to initiate the Clang project once LLVM came along.
It's not relevant how many use OS X for server tasks, because that isn't Apple's target market. Apple's XNU kernel is a mix of Mach and monolithic kernel features hand-tuned specifically for typical end-users. You can run certain kernel benchmarks and find that XNU is slower for certain things, but Apple isn't interested in working on them because it turns out they aren't useful benchmarks for the use cases they are aiming for, and I think that's a respectable position to take.
Besides, other factors contribute to performance bottlenecks, such as drivers. For example, Android isn't competitive with iOS when it comes to low-latency audio tasks even though Android is running on a server-class kernel like Linux and iOS is running XNU, a kernel whose performance you claim sucks. Like the other poster said, fretting over what kernel you're running just isn't all that relevant anymore given all the factors that ultimately contribute to a user's experience on a given platform.
Which is hilarious because it is the BSD fundamentalists who are re-implementing huge projects just to avoid a license they don't like for no reason other than poltical correctness.
Clang also addresses the lack of modularity in GCC. One of Apple's Clang engineers gave a talk several years ago about how at NeXTStep in the early 90s, he asked Stallman to implement precompiled headers in GCC. Stallman refused on political grounds. GCC was also intentionally obfuscated to make it difficult to integrate with. It's a clear example of rigid religious ideology standing in the way of and given prominence over technological progress.
After all these years of BSD code existing and thriving without issue, it's amazing that people still spread this kind of fearmongering despite the fact that this scenario has never come true.
The original code and its contributors don't magically disappear the moment a company makes a closed change. And if a company makes contributions it doesn't show anyone, you're free to make your own open contribution that competes with it. In fact, it's in company's best interests to rely on open contributions, because they don't want to waste time and manpower on, say, maintaining a compiler. This has proven to be the case with Clang. There hasn't been some evil proprietary fork that somehow ruined the world--and even if there was, people would just contribute free versions of the fork's features to the main tree. Companies are smart enough to know that this would happen and therefore realize that closed contributions of major features would be wasted effort.
One example would be integrating the compiler with its own custom tools. Whether or not you consider this to be a sabotaged version depends on if you believe BSD-licensed source code suddenly disappears from existence the moment a company uses it for something.
One of the FreeBSD developers gave a talk about this. FreeBSD has commercial users, and the new GCC just wouldn't have been an option for them. The older license-compatible version still in FreeBSD wasn't receiving updates, and it was beginning to affect developers too greatly.
Whether this compiler switch is a good thing or not depends on how much you hate the idea of commercial vendors using open source. GCC's strictness is admiral from an ideological perspective, but certainly not from a practical one. It should be noted that even Linus Torvalds adheres to a more pragmatic worldview:
There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.
It's pretty damning when Linus himself no longer refers to Linux as free software because he doesn't like the extremism of the free software movement. And why should he? He's an engineer, not a religious fundamentalist.
I've heard positive and negative claims regarding this. Certainly, Apple thinks it's production-ready (I think it was Xcode 4.2 that they stopped shipping GCC). Do you have a link showing that generated code is significantly worse? Which versions were compared?