While being able to build a custom OSX86 box would be nice, I actually can understand part of why Apple does this.
Mac OS X has a very, very small number of drivers. Arguably, this is a good thing. By tightly controlling the hardware, Apple can really go over the driver code with a fine-toothed comb and make sure it's solid and will not take the OS down.
Microsoft doesn't have this option... a good portion of the reason Windows crashes is not Microsoft's own fault, but some third-party driver, half the time from Korea. Microsoft can try to examine and certify drivers, but even they just don't have the resources to manage the whole tide, especially testing things in combination. Add to that crappy generic clone video and audio cards, where the problem could even be in the HARDWARE...
While controlling the hardware tightly comes across as unfriendly, this also allows Apple to keep Mac OS X pretty solid and stable. I grant you that's definitely not their only reasoning there -- far from it -- but is the one that I actually find somewhat valid.
They said in the talk that if you choose to make your app free on the App Store, there's no charge to either the end user or to the developer. (Other than the initial one-time $99 free to get on board with the App Store and get your application signing certificate.) So they already addressed that.
In fairness, reusing XML for any sort of structured configuration file (heavy emphasis on the 'structured') is just the simplest approach when you already have code to parse XML in the program. Otherwise, you have to reinvent the wheel (because doing structured data that has any sort of nesting more than one level deep in.ini/.conf type files is a royal pain).
I think what has always made Levine's games so compelling is the overall presentation and atmosphere. The System Shock games were hardly the first FPS games with RPG elements, so they were not really genre-defining in that way.
But they manage atmosphere better than almost anything. So many FPS are just 'throw a horde of monsters/enemy-soldiers/robots/aliens at you!' The Shock games have rarely been about massive combat, but instead about atmosphere and tension. You may wander for a while without encountering anything, but hearing noises nearby... screams... and then you might stumble into a bunch of enemies fighting among themselves, only to have them turn on you.
In System Shock, you would step into the little elevators to get between floors, and would sometimes find yourself letting out a breath you hadn't realized you were holding. (And the contrast between the horrors outside and the soft, soothing muzak of the elevator was almost like emotional whiplash at times.)
In Bioshock, there's a beautiful (but overgrown) garden area, for instance. But you cannot really just relax and enjoy the view; there's the sound of something moving through the bushes, and shadows on the wall seem to sometimes contain a figure seen only briefly, as if out of the corner of your eye. You hear a splicer murmuring threats... but you aren't certain where they are. They're not right there, but they're clearly nearby. Watching. Waiting. Taunting...
So while System Shock and Bioshock were not really pushing the envelope in terms of technology, fans of the series tend to feel that they push the envelope in terms of pacing, storytelling, and drawing you into the game.
Nothing prevents some other studio (who doesn't have a contract with the writer's guild) from making movies using non-guild writers. There is no law that binds them, only contracts. Hence independent studios. People just out of school, or doing this on the side, running their films on a shoestring budget. They generally are not part of the big guilds, after all! But they're not part of the big studios that have the contracts with the writers' guilds, so even if they continue to work now, that doesn't go against the strike.
True, but the video game industry has also in large part moved to the gaming consoles, where piracy is not as widespread. (The requirement to physically modify your console is generally a higher bar to entry.)
It's not quite the same thing. The example given by another poster of Japanese cellular phones (which can function as something akin to credit cards, train passes, and generally do the sorts of things our wireless providers are not yet dreaming of) is more accurate.
What I find sad is less specifically that Apple's patenting this and more that we've come to a situation where companies HAVE to try and patent anything they do in litigational self-defense, lest they end up like RIM with the endless stream of "Your Blackberry infringes on our never-used patent, you pay us money now!" lawsuits they suffer. Half of the meaningless patents we see these days are for protecting some process, specifically so that someone ELSE doesn't patent it and try to sue you. (And probably the other half are specifically being patented in hopes that eventually someone will have actionable infringement and can be sued.)
This totally misses the point of what the patent system was intended for, and absolutely nobody wins. But the fact that the patent system is fundamentally broken at this point is not exactly news...
While here in the states Yahoo just sells rebranded AT&T broadband, in Asia, Yahoo is a major broadband provider.
I don't know about China specifically, but they're one of the faster, more reliable broadband services in Japan, and offer something not unlike Verizon FiOS. Including a broadband television service.
Bah. My bad; I thought the re-integration had actually already occurred or was in-progress (I haven't had time to follow WebKit stuff since the discussion happened).
As I said, hit the "Customize" button when installing OS X and you can uncheck the BSD-subsystem. See, no Unix there, OK? The OS and apps will still run fine.
You are partly right. In the early builds, OS X had an optional BSD subsystem which you could pick to install or not. (Which was the BSD userland goo, and a legacy of NeXTStep having BSD bolted on at the corner.) Choosing not to install the BSD subsystem would not break the world, though bits and pieces of BSD were still in 'Essential system software.' (Various libraries and suchnot.)
Since Tiger, however, the BSD subsystem is no longer able to be separated from the system; there's no longer a 'BSD Subsystem' package, and trying to remove the BSD stuff would break, well, everything; the Custom Installs in Mac OS X 10.4 knowledge base article at Apple sums this up with the simple 'BSD subsystem is always installed' note. This is true of Leopard as well; there's no longer separation between subsystem and OS.
In addition, as was mentioned by other posters, Leopard actually fully conforms to the Single Unix Specification and the POSIX standards right out of box, so quite legitimately can call itself a UNIX system. But you are absolutely right that previous versions of Mac OS X were not eligible, and could at best have been called 'UNIX-like' (and with the earliest versions, even that much only if you were feeling very generous).
Mac OS X does come with Safari bundled, yes. However, Safari and Konqueror are in many ways the same browser; both are based on the open source WebKit, and it is possible for a user to compile a new copy of WebKit and replace Safari. (Witness the nightly builds at the Surfin' Safari blog, for instance.)
The issue I have usually heard from a web-design standpoint is that Internet Explorer is the only pre-installed option on Windows (meaning many people never bother to switch to another browser), is not remotely standards compliant (meaning web designers have to do all kinds of fun workarounds for IE compatibility) and is not open source, so (unlike the Linux and OS X situations) industrious end-users cannot simply go in and fix any HTML/CSS standards compliance bugs in the default-browser-flavor themselves.
That's how I read the Opera suit, though admittedly only one possible interpretation... "either make your browser play nice with the rest of the world, or offer other default browsers that do."
Without really knowing what happened behind closed doors there... I suspect the issue is less desktop browsers and more mobile browsers. Nokia (with the S60 browser) and Apple (with Safari Mobile) both use WebKit on their phones, thus being two of the only handset providers to need to deal with 'the real web' on small portable devices... as a developer, I can see trying to embed the OGG container format and the Vorbis codec into a mobile browser being a pain-in-the-ass. (And yes, even if 'optional,' I'm fairly sure they'd want to support it.)
This is a little ironic, given we have two companies whose browser team (both use WebKit, after all) love to blog about 'why can't we have some solid standards,' and about how there is no one true standard for images, embedded documents, etc. I think Apple and Nokia are shooting themselves in the foot here rather than taking the opportunity to run with standardizing other things (image formats,/page encoding character-sets/, etc.).
But I think this is less nefarious/evil and more just short-sighted focus on one problematic area of implementation rather than on the overall gains.
Er, I am a software developer who has to work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (XP and Vista). And believe me, Linux and Mac OS X have both changed drastically under the hood since their initial releases. Look at Linux kernel version 0.9 versus the kernel 2.6 series; device access methods are vastly improved, memory management is a whole ton better, and outside of the kernel, the libraries in userland have moved forward quite frequently. As for OS X, Mac OS X 10.0 was damn near unusable for anything except legacy NeXTStep software, but 10.5 is actually the least-painful OS to develop for of any I deal with. (Not trying to show bias, just that Leopard's system APIs are very polished even compared to Tiger, and I personally find the developer documentation less painful to wade through than Vista's.)
Many changes in Vista are simply immediately apparent to even end-users, because there is a ton of new eye-candy (in addition to the extensive under-the-hood reworkings). Leopard, most of the important changes are under-the-hood modifications (better access to filesystem, such as the FSEvents API, the new 64-bit throughout setup, system self-signing of downloaded applications, etc.), with less new eye-candy, but speaking as a developer, there are some equally sweeping changes under the hood.
Every operating system progresses as time goes on, as long as it is still in active development. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...
On the agile, small-functions stuff, there is a reason that agile programming is mostly meant for languages like Java; most agile teams have testing harnesses which will tell them when a small function is no longer used, or how many places a small function is used. This does not solve the 'forest for the trees' problem, but does at least eliminate the fear of deleting small orphaned functions.
I do otherwise agree with all your points; the best place is a middle ground between agile's self-documenting and the traditional ZOMG COMMENTS. At my (non-agile) workplace, we document at the top of each function what the function does and what it takes and returns, as well as documenting any complex or unintuitive block of code within a function. (The ideal would be to avoid unintuitive code entirely, of course, but this is not always possible when dealing with things like VoIP goo.)
I think what they mean by 'open' is that any AT&T customer with an unlocked GSM phone can use that phone on the AT&T network. Which is true; I could take an AT&T SIM and put it into my unlocked O2 Xda IIs, and be online with AT&T just fine. This is true of any GSM network by definition, which I think was AT&T's point.
Verizon's making a big fuss about 'okay, we are going to let people use phones they DIDN'T BUY FROM US on our network! WOW!' And AT&T's response is, 'Congratulations, welcome to the world of things GSM customers take for granted.' (Which, yes, is a little silly that GSM networks will make a deal about how you can use phones they didn't sell you on their networks, but will lock down any phones they do sell you so you cannot use them on other networks.)
Roaming for customers of other networks is a whole different -- and often, more depressing -- story.
No, I meant DRM-encumbered PDFs, such as those you download from Wowio and other places. Preview will only show you the non-DRM pages (the advertisements at the beginning and end) rather than all the pages in the middle. Adobe Reader can view the full set of pages.
Add to that that, unlike engineers, newspaper reporters/editors, script-writers do not have steady work. Even within writing, a reporter (or an editor) knows that the paper keeps coming out, and thus they are still needed. Many times the reporter is paid a salary, or at least not paid some small per-article fee and told they will get more money if that issue of the paper sells well. And they certainly don't wonder 'will this paper be renewed for next season?' or whatever. They have more permanence to their job.
Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.
A better example would be novel writers, I think; if you end up in a 2-3 year dry spell without another novel published, you darn well still want royalty payments on any copies of the last one that are still being sold! If you were a novelist and your publisher somehow decided to sell the book as an eBook and went 'oh, but we're not going to pay you for that,' there would be outcry, dismay and rage. (This is why novel/story rights get laid out pretty clearly in a given contract!)
The exception, unfortunately, is if you run across any DRM-encumbered PDF. Preview cannot display those; the only reason to have Reader around, as far as I can tell, is for those very rare situations where you have a DRM-encumbered PDF to view.
This is very true, and also why smart companies now release limited versions of their software free or cheaply. To use your example, Maya now has Maya Personal Learning Edition, which is a free download. Does everything Maya does, but puts a small watermark in the corner of renders. For kids looking to toy with 3D software (or people just curious), Maya provided a way for them to do so legally.
See, I think this is where we'll probably have to agree to disagree. I love my iPhone -- best smartphone I have ever owned, and a kickass all-in-one device to replace nearly everything I carry -- and I have even tried two of the iPhone eBook readers. And in a pinch, they work fine.
But I can't really just settle down on a train and lose myself in a book on the iPhone the same way I can with a paperback... or with my friend's Sony Reader that I tried. The Sony Reader has issues and problems, but the form-factor (and the overall e-Ink look/feel) do help some people -- me, anyway -- lose themselves in a book more like with a paper one.
The iPhone is a perfectly/capable/ electronic reader, but the small screen does not -- at least for me -- allow me to just lay down on my bed, settle into a seat on a train, and just hold the book and/read/ like I do with a paperback. I think I'm not the only one with this issue, and I expect that is what the eBook reader people are trying to address.:)
Agreed. The iPhone is a great phone (and general information-finding device), but peering at it for long periods of time on that tiny screen? No good, not for book-reading. This isn't to say that an iPhone-like solution might not be a really amazing reader... but the iPhone and the Kindle are trying to solve very different problems.
And as much as 'all-in-one' devices can be nice, sometimes you just make 'all' features suffer by cramming them into 'one' device. I think this is one of those cases; an eBook reader is meant to replace a book, which means it has different requirements (in terms of readability, power-use and form-factor). Trying to cram the functionality into other devices means the functionality suffers.
There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.
This isn't an 'Apple is better, Microsoft is evil,' I think, more just an observation that Microsoft will roll all their significant (non-security) updates to an operating system into one or two big updates more widely-spaced, while Apple has a history of making a lot of little point-release updates over the course of an operating system's life.
One method isn't necessarily 'better' or 'worse' (Tiger could be a headache-inducing moving target for a programmer at times, with developers surrendering and arbitrarily going 'This will only run on 10.4.3 or higher,' or 'this will only run on 10.4.8 or higher' and so on), but I think the gist of the comment is that early adopting with Apple is slightly less of a risk since there's a higher likelihood of point-releases to address issues quickly after release.
Actually, yes. I know a few people who, more or less, said that. Or rather, friends who bought the phone right away and when asked if they'd known that there would be third-party apps down the road after a price cut, said, "Oh... well, if I had known that, I might have waited and bought closer to the SDK release." Also some friends who did web-apps for iPhone and went, "Oh, well, if I had known there was going to be a native SDK, I probably would have waited and not bothered with making this web version."
I am not saying that it makes any sort of logical sense. I am saying that in my experience at least some percentage of users thinks that way, and that Steve Jobs -- like him or hate him -- seems to know how to play to that audience. So, I cannot believe this announcement is a sudden change-of-heart with no road behind it, as opposed to a calculated decision to hold off on the announcement until now for some reason. My guess as to that reason may be WRONG, but that's my read on it.
As some of the hacker community will readily point out, splitting open Springboard (the Finder/shell equivalent) in the iPhone, you discover Springboard always had some support for additional applications... and going forward, more was added. In 1.1.1, Springboard even added code added that supported multiple pages of applications... a pretty clear indication that either Apple was planning to add a LOT more apps, or were thinking of third-party dev.
There were lots of other little clues people found that the iPhone had either had plans for a third-party SDK which was scuttled, or had a third-party SDK in the works but not yet announced. So I admit, I am with the folks who are saying that Jobs probably had this planned from day one, but held off on the announcements until closer to the SDK/security methods being sorted out for marketing/publicity/spin reasons.
3 months after the phone was released is not a huge waiting period, but if he'd announced ahead of time that the iPhone would have a native SDK in February, lots of folks would have waited both on buying phones and on doing iPhone development. Instead, now we have hackers who have already worked on third-party native apps, there's all kinds of web-apps to keep those who won't jailbreak busy in the meantime.
Love him or hate him, one thing Jobs knows how to do is build anticipation, and manage publicity. He'll take bad press for a while simply so that he can sit on some announcement to greatest spin effect.
Honestly, I cannot blame Apple for making that statement. Speaking as someone involved in the iPhone hacking community, the SIM unlock/does/ actually modify the 'hardware' in some sense. The difference between jailbreak and SIM-unlock is like the difference between installing a different OS on your PC (which is relatively harmless and should still be covered), or ripping out the BIOS and installing a homebrew (which, really, you cannot expect to still be covered). This is why the change 'sticks' even if you do a restore; you have actually modified the hardware setup.
The unlock came out basically in the eleventh hour before the new firmware, and could legitimately muck up patching of things if Apple needed to do so. I suspect Apple took a look at this, realized they were not going to have time to account for it (nor, likely, did they want to spend the time/money to do so), and released a 'CYA' statement about not guaranteeing the new update will not brick the phone.
Unfortunately, their 'we will not guarantee this does not brick your phone if you have modified it' has come across more like 'your phone WILL brick, ZOMG.' So the PR aspect could definitely have been handled better; less scare-tactic, more information, since presumably undoing the lock and restoring the iPhone to proper SIM-locked mode will allow the update to apply properly.
But honestly, if you got a new firmware for your computer mainboard after you had re-flashed bits with homebrew code, I am pretty sure that might well not work so smoothly as an upgrade, either.
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While being able to build a custom OSX86 box would be nice, I actually can understand part of why Apple does this.
Mac OS X has a very, very small number of drivers. Arguably, this is a good thing. By tightly controlling the hardware, Apple can really go over the driver code with a fine-toothed comb and make sure it's solid and will not take the OS down.
Microsoft doesn't have this option... a good portion of the reason Windows crashes is not Microsoft's own fault, but some third-party driver, half the time from Korea. Microsoft can try to examine and certify drivers, but even they just don't have the resources to manage the whole tide, especially testing things in combination. Add to that crappy generic clone video and audio cards, where the problem could even be in the HARDWARE...
While controlling the hardware tightly comes across as unfriendly, this also allows Apple to keep Mac OS X pretty solid and stable. I grant you that's definitely not their only reasoning there -- far from it -- but is the one that I actually find somewhat valid.
They said in the talk that if you choose to make your app free on the App Store, there's no charge to either the end user or to the developer. (Other than the initial one-time $99 free to get on board with the App Store and get your application signing certificate.) So they already addressed that.
In fairness, reusing XML for any sort of structured configuration file (heavy emphasis on the 'structured') is just the simplest approach when you already have code to parse XML in the program. Otherwise, you have to reinvent the wheel (because doing structured data that has any sort of nesting more than one level deep in .ini/.conf type files is a royal pain).
I think what has always made Levine's games so compelling is the overall presentation and atmosphere. The System Shock games were hardly the first FPS games with RPG elements, so they were not really genre-defining in that way.
But they manage atmosphere better than almost anything. So many FPS are just 'throw a horde of monsters/enemy-soldiers/robots/aliens at you!' The Shock games have rarely been about massive combat, but instead about atmosphere and tension. You may wander for a while without encountering anything, but hearing noises nearby... screams... and then you might stumble into a bunch of enemies fighting among themselves, only to have them turn on you.
In System Shock, you would step into the little elevators to get between floors, and would sometimes find yourself letting out a breath you hadn't realized you were holding. (And the contrast between the horrors outside and the soft, soothing muzak of the elevator was almost like emotional whiplash at times.)
In Bioshock, there's a beautiful (but overgrown) garden area, for instance. But you cannot really just relax and enjoy the view; there's the sound of something moving through the bushes, and shadows on the wall seem to sometimes contain a figure seen only briefly, as if out of the corner of your eye. You hear a splicer murmuring threats... but you aren't certain where they are. They're not right there, but they're clearly nearby. Watching. Waiting. Taunting...
So while System Shock and Bioshock were not really pushing the envelope in terms of technology, fans of the series tend to feel that they push the envelope in terms of pacing, storytelling, and drawing you into the game.
True, but the video game industry has also in large part moved to the gaming consoles, where piracy is not as widespread. (The requirement to physically modify your console is generally a higher bar to entry.)
It's not quite the same thing. The example given by another poster of Japanese cellular phones (which can function as something akin to credit cards, train passes, and generally do the sorts of things our wireless providers are not yet dreaming of) is more accurate.
What I find sad is less specifically that Apple's patenting this and more that we've come to a situation where companies HAVE to try and patent anything they do in litigational self-defense, lest they end up like RIM with the endless stream of "Your Blackberry infringes on our never-used patent, you pay us money now!" lawsuits they suffer. Half of the meaningless patents we see these days are for protecting some process, specifically so that someone ELSE doesn't patent it and try to sue you. (And probably the other half are specifically being patented in hopes that eventually someone will have actionable infringement and can be sued.)
This totally misses the point of what the patent system was intended for, and absolutely nobody wins. But the fact that the patent system is fundamentally broken at this point is not exactly news...
While here in the states Yahoo just sells rebranded AT&T broadband, in Asia, Yahoo is a major broadband provider.
I don't know about China specifically, but they're one of the faster, more reliable broadband services in Japan, and offer something not unlike Verizon FiOS. Including a broadband television service.
Bah. My bad; I thought the re-integration had actually already occurred or was in-progress (I haven't had time to follow WebKit stuff since the discussion happened).
As I said, hit the "Customize" button when installing OS X and you can uncheck the BSD-subsystem. See, no Unix there, OK? The OS and apps will still run fine.
You are partly right. In the early builds, OS X had an optional BSD subsystem which you could pick to install or not. (Which was the BSD userland goo, and a legacy of NeXTStep having BSD bolted on at the corner.) Choosing not to install the BSD subsystem would not break the world, though bits and pieces of BSD were still in 'Essential system software.' (Various libraries and suchnot.)
Since Tiger, however, the BSD subsystem is no longer able to be separated from the system; there's no longer a 'BSD Subsystem' package, and trying to remove the BSD stuff would break, well, everything; the Custom Installs in Mac OS X 10.4 knowledge base article at Apple sums this up with the simple 'BSD subsystem is always installed' note. This is true of Leopard as well; there's no longer separation between subsystem and OS.
In addition, as was mentioned by other posters, Leopard actually fully conforms to the Single Unix Specification and the POSIX standards right out of box, so quite legitimately can call itself a UNIX system. But you are absolutely right that previous versions of Mac OS X were not eligible, and could at best have been called 'UNIX-like' (and with the earliest versions, even that much only if you were feeling very generous).
Mac OS X does come with Safari bundled, yes. However, Safari and Konqueror are in many ways the same browser; both are based on the open source WebKit, and it is possible for a user to compile a new copy of WebKit and replace Safari. (Witness the nightly builds at the Surfin' Safari blog, for instance.)
The issue I have usually heard from a web-design standpoint is that Internet Explorer is the only pre-installed option on Windows (meaning many people never bother to switch to another browser), is not remotely standards compliant (meaning web designers have to do all kinds of fun workarounds for IE compatibility) and is not open source, so (unlike the Linux and OS X situations) industrious end-users cannot simply go in and fix any HTML/CSS standards compliance bugs in the default-browser-flavor themselves.
That's how I read the Opera suit, though admittedly only one possible interpretation... "either make your browser play nice with the rest of the world, or offer other default browsers that do."
Without really knowing what happened behind closed doors there... I suspect the issue is less desktop browsers and more mobile browsers. Nokia (with the S60 browser) and Apple (with Safari Mobile) both use WebKit on their phones, thus being two of the only handset providers to need to deal with 'the real web' on small portable devices... as a developer, I can see trying to embed the OGG container format and the Vorbis codec into a mobile browser being a pain-in-the-ass. (And yes, even if 'optional,' I'm fairly sure they'd want to support it.)
/page encoding character-sets/, etc.).
This is a little ironic, given we have two companies whose browser team (both use WebKit, after all) love to blog about 'why can't we have some solid standards,' and about how there is no one true standard for images, embedded documents, etc. I think Apple and Nokia are shooting themselves in the foot here rather than taking the opportunity to run with standardizing other things (image formats,
But I think this is less nefarious/evil and more just short-sighted focus on one problematic area of implementation rather than on the overall gains.
Er, I am a software developer who has to work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (XP and Vista). And believe me, Linux and Mac OS X have both changed drastically under the hood since their initial releases. Look at Linux kernel version 0.9 versus the kernel 2.6 series; device access methods are vastly improved, memory management is a whole ton better, and outside of the kernel, the libraries in userland have moved forward quite frequently. As for OS X, Mac OS X 10.0 was damn near unusable for anything except legacy NeXTStep software, but 10.5 is actually the least-painful OS to develop for of any I deal with. (Not trying to show bias, just that Leopard's system APIs are very polished even compared to Tiger, and I personally find the developer documentation less painful to wade through than Vista's.)
Many changes in Vista are simply immediately apparent to even end-users, because there is a ton of new eye-candy (in addition to the extensive under-the-hood reworkings). Leopard, most of the important changes are under-the-hood modifications (better access to filesystem, such as the FSEvents API, the new 64-bit throughout setup, system self-signing of downloaded applications, etc.), with less new eye-candy, but speaking as a developer, there are some equally sweeping changes under the hood.
Every operating system progresses as time goes on, as long as it is still in active development. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X...
On the agile, small-functions stuff, there is a reason that agile programming is mostly meant for languages like Java; most agile teams have testing harnesses which will tell them when a small function is no longer used, or how many places a small function is used. This does not solve the 'forest for the trees' problem, but does at least eliminate the fear of deleting small orphaned functions.
I do otherwise agree with all your points; the best place is a middle ground between agile's self-documenting and the traditional ZOMG COMMENTS. At my (non-agile) workplace, we document at the top of each function what the function does and what it takes and returns, as well as documenting any complex or unintuitive block of code within a function. (The ideal would be to avoid unintuitive code entirely, of course, but this is not always possible when dealing with things like VoIP goo.)
I think what they mean by 'open' is that any AT&T customer with an unlocked GSM phone can use that phone on the AT&T network. Which is true; I could take an AT&T SIM and put it into my unlocked O2 Xda IIs, and be online with AT&T just fine. This is true of any GSM network by definition, which I think was AT&T's point.
Verizon's making a big fuss about 'okay, we are going to let people use phones they DIDN'T BUY FROM US on our network! WOW!' And AT&T's response is, 'Congratulations, welcome to the world of things GSM customers take for granted.' (Which, yes, is a little silly that GSM networks will make a deal about how you can use phones they didn't sell you on their networks, but will lock down any phones they do sell you so you cannot use them on other networks.)
Roaming for customers of other networks is a whole different -- and often, more depressing -- story.
No, I meant DRM-encumbered PDFs, such as those you download from Wowio and other places. Preview will only show you the non-DRM pages (the advertisements at the beginning and end) rather than all the pages in the middle. Adobe Reader can view the full set of pages.
Add to that that, unlike engineers, newspaper reporters/editors, script-writers do not have steady work. Even within writing, a reporter (or an editor) knows that the paper keeps coming out, and thus they are still needed. Many times the reporter is paid a salary, or at least not paid some small per-article fee and told they will get more money if that issue of the paper sells well. And they certainly don't wonder 'will this paper be renewed for next season?' or whatever. They have more permanence to their job.
Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.
A better example would be novel writers, I think; if you end up in a 2-3 year dry spell without another novel published, you darn well still want royalty payments on any copies of the last one that are still being sold! If you were a novelist and your publisher somehow decided to sell the book as an eBook and went 'oh, but we're not going to pay you for that,' there would be outcry, dismay and rage. (This is why novel/story rights get laid out pretty clearly in a given contract!)
The exception, unfortunately, is if you run across any DRM-encumbered PDF. Preview cannot display those; the only reason to have Reader around, as far as I can tell, is for those very rare situations where you have a DRM-encumbered PDF to view.
This is very true, and also why smart companies now release limited versions of their software free or cheaply. To use your example, Maya now has Maya Personal Learning Edition, which is a free download. Does everything Maya does, but puts a small watermark in the corner of renders. For kids looking to toy with 3D software (or people just curious), Maya provided a way for them to do so legally.
See, I think this is where we'll probably have to agree to disagree. I love my iPhone -- best smartphone I have ever owned, and a kickass all-in-one device to replace nearly everything I carry -- and I have even tried two of the iPhone eBook readers. And in a pinch, they work fine.
/capable/ electronic reader, but the small screen does not -- at least for me -- allow me to just lay down on my bed, settle into a seat on a train, and just hold the book and /read/ like I do with a paperback. I think I'm not the only one with this issue, and I expect that is what the eBook reader people are trying to address. :)
But I can't really just settle down on a train and lose myself in a book on the iPhone the same way I can with a paperback... or with my friend's Sony Reader that I tried. The Sony Reader has issues and problems, but the form-factor (and the overall e-Ink look/feel) do help some people -- me, anyway -- lose themselves in a book more like with a paper one.
The iPhone is a perfectly
Agreed. The iPhone is a great phone (and general information-finding device), but peering at it for long periods of time on that tiny screen? No good, not for book-reading. This isn't to say that an iPhone-like solution might not be a really amazing reader... but the iPhone and the Kindle are trying to solve very different problems.
And as much as 'all-in-one' devices can be nice, sometimes you just make 'all' features suffer by cramming them into 'one' device. I think this is one of those cases; an eBook reader is meant to replace a book, which means it has different requirements (in terms of readability, power-use and form-factor). Trying to cram the functionality into other devices means the functionality suffers.
There's often a lot of unwarranted blind "ZOMG Microsoft is evil!" or blindness to Apple's flaws due to the Reality Distortion Zone, but in this case I think the earlier posters were saying they're less concerned about issues in Leopard because they expect a 10.5.1 or 10.5.2 fairly quickly after release based on user-reported issues, where they have no such assurance of any significant Vista improvements until Vista SP1.
This isn't an 'Apple is better, Microsoft is evil,' I think, more just an observation that Microsoft will roll all their significant (non-security) updates to an operating system into one or two big updates more widely-spaced, while Apple has a history of making a lot of little point-release updates over the course of an operating system's life.
One method isn't necessarily 'better' or 'worse' (Tiger could be a headache-inducing moving target for a programmer at times, with developers surrendering and arbitrarily going 'This will only run on 10.4.3 or higher,' or 'this will only run on 10.4.8 or higher' and so on), but I think the gist of the comment is that early adopting with Apple is slightly less of a risk since there's a higher likelihood of point-releases to address issues quickly after release.
Actually, yes. I know a few people who, more or less, said that. Or rather, friends who bought the phone right away and when asked if they'd known that there would be third-party apps down the road after a price cut, said, "Oh... well, if I had known that, I might have waited and bought closer to the SDK release." Also some friends who did web-apps for iPhone and went, "Oh, well, if I had known there was going to be a native SDK, I probably would have waited and not bothered with making this web version."
:)
I am not saying that it makes any sort of logical sense. I am saying that in my experience at least some percentage of users thinks that way, and that Steve Jobs -- like him or hate him -- seems to know how to play to that audience. So, I cannot believe this announcement is a sudden change-of-heart with no road behind it, as opposed to a calculated decision to hold off on the announcement until now for some reason. My guess as to that reason may be WRONG, but that's my read on it.
Just my $0.02, anyway.
As some of the hacker community will readily point out, splitting open Springboard (the Finder/shell equivalent) in the iPhone, you discover Springboard always had some support for additional applications... and going forward, more was added. In 1.1.1, Springboard even added code added that supported multiple pages of applications... a pretty clear indication that either Apple was planning to add a LOT more apps, or were thinking of third-party dev.
There were lots of other little clues people found that the iPhone had either had plans for a third-party SDK which was scuttled, or had a third-party SDK in the works but not yet announced. So I admit, I am with the folks who are saying that Jobs probably had this planned from day one, but held off on the announcements until closer to the SDK/security methods being sorted out for marketing/publicity/spin reasons.
3 months after the phone was released is not a huge waiting period, but if he'd announced ahead of time that the iPhone would have a native SDK in February, lots of folks would have waited both on buying phones and on doing iPhone development. Instead, now we have hackers who have already worked on third-party native apps, there's all kinds of web-apps to keep those who won't jailbreak busy in the meantime.
Love him or hate him, one thing Jobs knows how to do is build anticipation, and manage publicity. He'll take bad press for a while simply so that he can sit on some announcement to greatest spin effect.
Honestly, I cannot blame Apple for making that statement. Speaking as someone involved in the iPhone hacking community, the SIM unlock /does/ actually modify the 'hardware' in some sense. The difference between jailbreak and SIM-unlock is like the difference between installing a different OS on your PC (which is relatively harmless and should still be covered), or ripping out the BIOS and installing a homebrew (which, really, you cannot expect to still be covered). This is why the change 'sticks' even if you do a restore; you have actually modified the hardware setup.
The unlock came out basically in the eleventh hour before the new firmware, and could legitimately muck up patching of things if Apple needed to do so. I suspect Apple took a look at this, realized they were not going to have time to account for it (nor, likely, did they want to spend the time/money to do so), and released a 'CYA' statement about not guaranteeing the new update will not brick the phone.
Unfortunately, their 'we will not guarantee this does not brick your phone if you have modified it' has come across more like 'your phone WILL brick, ZOMG.' So the PR aspect could definitely have been handled better; less scare-tactic, more information, since presumably undoing the lock and restoring the iPhone to proper SIM-locked mode will allow the update to apply properly.
But honestly, if you got a new firmware for your computer mainboard after you had re-flashed bits with homebrew code, I am pretty sure that might well not work so smoothly as an upgrade, either.