Apple takes an existing third party product (music) and resells it in a form where it can only play on Apple-produced devices. This is done by deliberately encrypting the music. They also put arbitrary limits on how you can use the product, like number of devices you can play your music on.
These rules are dictated entirely by Apple, and they are enforced by a layer of technology added to the original product sold, a layer which has never existed before, and which can be argued, was only added to give Apple sole rights of what could be done with the product, even after it left the store.
So while the outcome is technically the same as only being able to run Windows programs under the Windows operating system, Microsoft did not take an existing product and changed the rules of the game to provide Windows with a monopoly for running Windows software. If Microsoft did take active measures to prevent software from running e.g. under Wine, then they would be target for the same complaints as Apple has been subjected to.
The logic is this: most bugs do not take years or even days to track down. Most bugs can be fixed in minutes
And all those bugs have already been fixed. Those which are left are those which are hard to track down, require substantial code rewrites to be fixed, or are seen as harmless by the software creator.
Go to any larger project and search their bug database and you will find hundreds if not thousands of open bugs.
I think the consistency issue you bring up is mostly related to non-Cocoa applications.
At least all the Cocoa applications I use (which are basically all the applications I use except iTunes and Finder) respect my ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict file.
The mouse click normally "falls through" (instead of being absorbed) when the click (on an inactive window) falls onto a non-dangerous control (such as a button) -- but I agree that this seems inconsistent to the user who hasn't read AHIG.
As for not being able to scroll in your API docs, try holding down the command key while you click the scroll bar in the inactive window. This will send the mouse actions to the window, without activating it.
So I wonder, if I edit the syntax highlighting rules of my editor to also highlight textual numbers (it already does the pure integers), will I or the author of my text editor be in trouble?:)
The thread started by someone using cookies to track conversion rate, and then your (?) example about seeing when the visitor goes to the competitor etc.
This is only possible if the two work together (in which case they're probably partners and not competitors, that happens with gas stations and supermarkets as well), or they both work with a 3rd party which has stuff on both sites (and isn't blocked by the UA, which e.g. doubleclick.com is by default in many browsers;) ).
But in the case of a 3rd party, the info gathered would be anonymous, so that's no different than e.g. Coca Cola knowing how many sales are made on each gas station etc., or even VISA or another credit card company, who does actually have personal info and can easily track cross-store/site sales.
When I go to the gas station, the attendant does not put a tracking device on the car that keeps track of everything I look at in the store and allows him to take note of whether I stop off for gas with one of his competitors
Cookies doesn't work like that -- and many gas stations, supermarkets etc. actually do keep track of what you do in their store, that's part of the reason why they have member cards (and give discounts to members), i.e. it makes it possible for them to get a purchase history for their customers, even when the customers pay with cash.
As for your statement: "GTK could easily be replaced by Cocoa or Win32 here". It makes me think you have never used more than one GUI framework, or tried a Java, Qt, Python (using e.g. wxWidgets) application etc. on OS X.
Native look'n'feel is only achieved by writing the application for the actual platform (often using platform frameworks, or replicating 99% of their functionality), since there are so many differences, and you can't address it by designing a cross-platform framework, it has been tried again and again.
The browser (HTML/DOM/CSS) actually is the best cross-platform framework.
That's a good point, but I think I'll give them a little more time before I start submitting things like this as bugs -- I'm a developer myself, and generally don't like being told the obvious. I'm sure that the GCC developers are aware of the performance compared to 3.3.
I find this hard to believe myself, but I was told that GCC4 does no or little inlining, that would explain why my code is 25% smaller, and certainly why it's twice as slow (I'd think it'd be slower, since as mentioned, this is a lot of iterators, smart pointers and such), so if this is really true, then it's probably just a matter of time before they get this fixed
I should do some tests to verify the inline claim, just haven't had time yet!:)
I have a 27 KLOC project which is a lot of modern C++ (as in templates, iterators, traits, smart pointers, generic algorithms a.s.o.) and not optimized for any particular compiler.
My crude results (on PPC) is: 25% smaller code, but twice as slow as GCC 3.3.
I haven't followed the GCC development so I don't know which state it's currently in or what's planned for the future. But I guess it'll only get better from here.
If this was a bunch of computer geeks reenacting various keynote speeches held by Steve Jobs, maybe dressed in a black turtleneck, I think you'd see this in a different light -- it's about having fun!
When you're dealing with something that is so obviously stupid and fraudulent it's very easy to say "if people are stupid enough to buy this crap then they deserve to get ripped off".
Furthermore his question about why no-one did this before 1996 is wrong. Electronic Arts did IFF in 1985 for the exact same purpose: interchange of data between applications and computers.
This is the stupidest arguments ever -- why is this moderated as informative?
If this is how you judge technology you'll never jump on a new thing, because the existing one has broader support, more developers, more employers etc.
Stupid stupid stupid!
XSLT is a piece of cake?
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Effective XML
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· Score: 1
Need to convert XML into SQL INSERTS? Piece of cake.
Not sure I agree. I had to convert the XML log from subversion into an RSS feed (which is also XML) but while I did use XSLT for 99% of the transformation, I still had to pipe it through perl to do a few things that XSLT couldn't, since it doesn't even do simple string replacements (only translation from one character to another).
And the stuff it did do for me, I wouldn't call that a piece of cake, more like a lot of complexity for something which should have been trivial.
I am still unconvinced that adding more data automatically increase the probability of collision.
It doesn't, but each byte you add/change in the message results in a new hash value. So imagine we find the bytes that needs to be added to our fake message, in order for it to hash to the same value as the message the victim signed.
Problem is that we can't just add random bytes to our fake message, since that would show, but we could hide all these bytes in e.g. the BMP of our company logo (or actually just in any bitmap in the image with the palette set to all white).
So basically adding a large bitmap to the contract gives us a lot of bytes that we can change w/o the victim noticing it.
I have something similar, I get the feeling of "something needs my attention" e.g. when I have something cooking in the kitchen, something is on TV that I wanted to see, or when it's approximately 10 minutes since I pored boiling water on the tea leaves.
While this is probably just associative learning, I've had the feeling for different things, and when the feeling hits, I rarely remember what it is that I need to attend to.
The feeling gets stronger if I don't act on it.
Re:Bad statistics jokes
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 1
A statistician discovered that the probability of a bomb being on board a given aircraft was alarmingly high
A bit pedantic, but when I read this part I first thought the joke was about military plains being part of the data.
And I'm not saying F/OSS shouldn't. I'm saying that non-free software should, because it gives us something that F/OSS can't always handle.
I have one last thing for you to think about. What happens to your software if you were to die suddenly?
People close to me have access to the source. But would my software exist if I couldn't have sold it as non-free? That's the question I've been asking.
Pointing out flaws in closed software is unnecessary, as I expressed in my first comment, I do like and believe in the ideals behind F/OSS -- it's just not practical for people like me (startups who write consumer software). The only thing I'm getting from your replies is that you think non-free software is unpractical as well, but for other reasons. But you won't get far with that argument, cause it works for me (so far)!:)
But if/when I have earned "enough" I certainly will experiment with making it free (as in speech), since the risk of losing paying customers is then hopefully less of an actual problem.
The probelm is that many 'small' software shops couldn't exist without being a part time job for one person.
No, this is neither the problem or the issue. There are many shareware shops who can survive with 1-4 products and a small staff. And the issue being discussed is whether everything should be F/OSS. RMS says it should, I interpreted the comment I replied to as it should, and the article this thread springs from said it should.
Your only hope is that nobody desires a free version of your simple little program. The moment somebody does what happens to you.
I think the chance of someone seeing my program and saying, boy, I'll just spend 1,000+ hours of my spare time to do a replica, is small.
Big companies are just as likely to screw over as F/OSS is.
Which is completely besides the point of software having to be free. It sounds like you try to argue that: "small software companies can't make it today, so they shouldn't even try". And by that, there is no need to even consider a profitable F/OSS model, because there is no profit in software (for small companies).
I guess it depends on what you want. Not everybody wants money.
But everyone wants to pay their expenses, and that's all I want. My choice is either get a job for some company and spend my sparetime writing free software, or write non-free software full time and sell it for enough to cover my expenses.
I certainly have a much more forfilling job if it is writing my own software full time, and I honestly believe the users of my product benefits and appreciates this.
And that's why I think the proponents of making all software F/OSS and refusing to use/work on non-free software is overlooking something very important.
Many governments fund artists, because these often have a hard time making a living doing their art. Software does not receive government funding, but is by many compared to art, seeing how other peoples software can be very inspirational, helps raise the collective bar, introduces new ideas etc. If you remove (or severely limit) the oppotunity for startups to earn money on their software, I think there needs to be a plan to ensure that we do not lose the innovation that non-free software after all does bring to the marked -- look at how inspirational OS X has been, do you think something like that would exists if we decided that F/OSS was the only software we would run (as RMS wants it)?
The best way is to make it obviously clear that the future of the project depends on users' money
From all what I've heard and read, appealing to people like that just doesn't work:(
Another way would be to offer a "pay per feature" system, where users could pay you to get a feature included in your editor for a price.
Try to calculate what a feature actually costs in programmer hours. And who should pay for the features already in the product? or the time spent on support?
You can't run a software company off of one small piece of softare
But I need to start somewhere.
Now the better question is how do you expect to make money in that market? [...] You need to either build customised software for companies on contract terms, or build lot's of software packages.
My desire is to write my own software on my own terms. As of such I'm not in it for the money. If I can make a living doing this, I think most would agree that I should follow my dream! And to answer your question; I did sell more than a few hunded and reached the break-even point.
RMS and many of the other commenting on this topic has another dream, a dream where all software is F/OSS and people should refuse to use or work on non-free software.
My comment was ment to say that the only reason you can get a job at a company writing F/OSS today is that this company has many alternative revenue sources. I'm a startup so I do not have these alternatives.
So are you suggesting that I should drop my passion for writing my own software (full time) and instead build software for single clients just to honer the "don't work on non-free software" directive?
If you do, I think this is downright stupid - it means that all new software will come from either companies who can afford to develop it as free software, or from people who spend their sparetime on it (and has a job to cover their expenses).
While this will give us plenty of software, the majority of software users who do not mind paying for the tools they use, and do not need (or even have the ability) to modify the source of the tools they use, will lose an alternative.
So while I certainly do share RMS's ideal about all software being free, I think it's unrealistic until we find a way to have free (as in speech) software still be commercial.
And that was sort of my question in my comment, how do we do that? and saying that I just shouldn't write consumer software and instead write for single clients that will allow me to make it F/OSS is not a solution - my "dream" is not just to program for a living, I'm driven by a need to improve the tools I use which I think needs improvements.
And let me end by saying, before I took 5 months off to write TextMate I was offered a job writing an XForms extension/plugin for Mozilla (which would of course be F/OSS). Instead I did TextMate as shareware - RMS would think I made a mistake, but with the fear of sounding arrogant, many have benefitted from my choice. Take a look at the reviews/comments I link to on my page, there really was a need for the product, and so far all the F/OSS solutions had failed.
If you work for a reasonable enlightened company [yes, there are a few], they can see that most of the software generated internally has no value as a sales proposition
What if you want to succeed as an independent software vendor? I recently released a text editor for OS X. I wrote it out of love, but I still require people to pay for it, because the amount of work involved in such a project is not just something I can do on sundays.
I really do like the free (as in speech) ideal, but I have a hard time seeing how I can release all the source I have written and still ensure that people will pay me for my (continued) work.
So how does F/OSS apply to startups? it's fine if you can be backed up by a big company, but most likely that company can pay your salery because they have other closed source products.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple takes an existing third party product (music) and resells it in a form where it can only play on Apple-produced devices. This is done by deliberately encrypting the music. They also put arbitrary limits on how you can use the product, like number of devices you can play your music on.
These rules are dictated entirely by Apple, and they are enforced by a layer of technology added to the original product sold, a layer which has never existed before, and which can be argued, was only added to give Apple sole rights of what could be done with the product, even after it left the store.
So while the outcome is technically the same as only being able to run Windows programs under the Windows operating system, Microsoft did not take an existing product and changed the rules of the game to provide Windows with a monopoly for running Windows software. If Microsoft did take active measures to prevent software from running e.g. under Wine, then they would be target for the same complaints as Apple has been subjected to.
The logic is this: most bugs do not take years or even days to track down. Most bugs can be fixed in minutes
And all those bugs have already been fixed. Those which are left are those which are hard to track down, require substantial code rewrites to be fixed, or are seen as harmless by the software creator.
Go to any larger project and search their bug database and you will find hundreds if not thousands of open bugs.
I think the consistency issue you bring up is mostly related to non-Cocoa applications.
At least all the Cocoa applications I use (which are basically all the applications I use except iTunes and Finder) respect my ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBindings.dict file.
The mouse click normally "falls through" (instead of being absorbed) when the click (on an inactive window) falls onto a non-dangerous control (such as a button) -- but I agree that this seems inconsistent to the user who hasn't read AHIG.
As for not being able to scroll in your API docs, try holding down the command key while you click the scroll bar in the inactive window. This will send the mouse actions to the window, without activating it.
So this is basically syntax highlighting.
So I wonder, if I edit the syntax highlighting rules of my editor to also highlight textual numbers (it already does the pure integers), will I or the author of my text editor be in trouble? :)
The thread started by someone using cookies to track conversion rate, and then your (?) example about seeing when the visitor goes to the competitor etc.
This is only possible if the two work together (in which case they're probably partners and not competitors, that happens with gas stations and supermarkets as well), or they both work with a 3rd party which has stuff on both sites (and isn't blocked by the UA, which e.g. doubleclick.com is by default in many browsers ;) ).
But in the case of a 3rd party, the info gathered would be anonymous, so that's no different than e.g. Coca Cola knowing how many sales are made on each gas station etc., or even VISA or another credit card company, who does actually have personal info and can easily track cross-store/site sales.
And what's with the insulting language?
When I go to the gas station, the attendant does not put a tracking device on the car that keeps track of everything I look at in the store and allows him to take note of whether I stop off for gas with one of his competitors
Cookies doesn't work like that -- and many gas stations, supermarkets etc. actually do keep track of what you do in their store, that's part of the reason why they have member cards (and give discounts to members), i.e. it makes it possible for them to get a purchase history for their customers, even when the customers pay with cash.
Will this drastically improve development time? Or is it just FuD like all the other 'promising' stuff we've seen?
FUD is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about your competitors product.
Maybe RoR spreads FUD about J2EE, but a product itself cannot be FUD...
Sounds like you want either Java Web Start or wxWidgets.
As for your statement: "GTK could easily be replaced by Cocoa or Win32 here". It makes me think you have never used more than one GUI framework, or tried a Java, Qt, Python (using e.g. wxWidgets) application etc. on OS X.
Native look'n'feel is only achieved by writing the application for the actual platform (often using platform frameworks, or replicating 99% of their functionality), since there are so many differences, and you can't address it by designing a cross-platform framework, it has been tried again and again.
The browser (HTML/DOM/CSS) actually is the best cross-platform framework.
That's a good point, but I think I'll give them a little more time before I start submitting things like this as bugs -- I'm a developer myself, and generally don't like being told the obvious. I'm sure that the GCC developers are aware of the performance compared to 3.3.
I find this hard to believe myself, but I was told that GCC4 does no or little inlining, that would explain why my code is 25% smaller, and certainly why it's twice as slow (I'd think it'd be slower, since as mentioned, this is a lot of iterators, smart pointers and such), so if this is really true, then it's probably just a matter of time before they get this fixed
I should do some tests to verify the inline claim, just haven't had time yet! :)
I have a 27 KLOC project which is a lot of modern C++ (as in templates, iterators, traits, smart pointers, generic algorithms a.s.o.) and not optimized for any particular compiler.
My crude results (on PPC) is: 25% smaller code, but twice as slow as GCC 3.3.
I haven't followed the GCC development so I don't know which state it's currently in or what's planned for the future. But I guess it'll only get better from here.
Half the fun with these parodies are the persons who can't tell that they are parodies and react with outrage.
If this was a bunch of computer geeks reenacting various keynote speeches held by Steve Jobs, maybe dressed in a black turtleneck, I think you'd see this in a different light -- it's about having fun!
For computer-literate people Macs are great because you have a real unix with all the shell commands.
Like the lottery? :)
Furthermore his question about why no-one did this before 1996 is wrong. Electronic Arts did IFF in 1985 for the exact same purpose: interchange of data between applications and computers.
This is the stupidest arguments ever -- why is this moderated as informative? If this is how you judge technology you'll never jump on a new thing, because the existing one has broader support, more developers, more employers etc. Stupid stupid stupid!
Not sure I agree. I had to convert the XML log from subversion into an RSS feed (which is also XML) but while I did use XSLT for 99% of the transformation, I still had to pipe it through perl to do a few things that XSLT couldn't, since it doesn't even do simple string replacements (only translation from one character to another).
And the stuff it did do for me, I wouldn't call that a piece of cake, more like a lot of complexity for something which should have been trivial.
It doesn't, but each byte you add/change in the message results in a new hash value. So imagine we find the bytes that needs to be added to our fake message, in order for it to hash to the same value as the message the victim signed.
Problem is that we can't just add random bytes to our fake message, since that would show, but we could hide all these bytes in e.g. the BMP of our company logo (or actually just in any bitmap in the image with the palette set to all white).
So basically adding a large bitmap to the contract gives us a lot of bytes that we can change w/o the victim noticing it.
I have something similar, I get the feeling of "something needs my attention" e.g. when I have something cooking in the kitchen, something is on TV that I wanted to see, or when it's approximately 10 minutes since I pored boiling water on the tea leaves.
While this is probably just associative learning, I've had the feeling for different things, and when the feeling hits, I rarely remember what it is that I need to attend to.
The feeling gets stronger if I don't act on it.
A bit pedantic, but when I read this part I first thought the joke was about military plains being part of the data.
I did LOL when I read the last bit of the joke! :)
If F/OSS didn't exist neither would OS X.
And I'm not saying F/OSS shouldn't. I'm saying that non-free software should, because it gives us something that F/OSS can't always handle.
I have one last thing for you to think about. What happens to your software if you were to die suddenly?
People close to me have access to the source. But would my software exist if I couldn't have sold it as non-free? That's the question I've been asking.
Pointing out flaws in closed software is unnecessary, as I expressed in my first comment, I do like and believe in the ideals behind F/OSS -- it's just not practical for people like me (startups who write consumer software). The only thing I'm getting from your replies is that you think non-free software is unpractical as well, but for other reasons. But you won't get far with that argument, cause it works for me (so far)! :)
But if/when I have earned "enough" I certainly will experiment with making it free (as in speech), since the risk of losing paying customers is then hopefully less of an actual problem.
The probelm is that many 'small' software shops couldn't exist without being a part time job for one person.
No, this is neither the problem or the issue. There are many shareware shops who can survive with 1-4 products and a small staff. And the issue being discussed is whether everything should be F/OSS. RMS says it should, I interpreted the comment I replied to as it should, and the article this thread springs from said it should.
Your only hope is that nobody desires a free version of your simple little program. The moment somebody does what happens to you.
I think the chance of someone seeing my program and saying, boy, I'll just spend 1,000+ hours of my spare time to do a replica, is small.
Big companies are just as likely to screw over as F/OSS is.
Which is completely besides the point of software having to be free. It sounds like you try to argue that: "small software companies can't make it today, so they shouldn't even try". And by that, there is no need to even consider a profitable F/OSS model, because there is no profit in software (for small companies).
I guess it depends on what you want. Not everybody wants money.
But everyone wants to pay their expenses, and that's all I want. My choice is either get a job for some company and spend my sparetime writing free software, or write non-free software full time and sell it for enough to cover my expenses.
I certainly have a much more forfilling job if it is writing my own software full time, and I honestly believe the users of my product benefits and appreciates this.
And that's why I think the proponents of making all software F/OSS and refusing to use/work on non-free software is overlooking something very important.
Many governments fund artists, because these often have a hard time making a living doing their art. Software does not receive government funding, but is by many compared to art, seeing how other peoples software can be very inspirational, helps raise the collective bar, introduces new ideas etc. If you remove (or severely limit) the oppotunity for startups to earn money on their software, I think there needs to be a plan to ensure that we do not lose the innovation that non-free software after all does bring to the marked -- look at how inspirational OS X has been, do you think something like that would exists if we decided that F/OSS was the only software we would run (as RMS wants it)?
From all what I've heard and read, appealing to people like that just doesn't work :(
Another way would be to offer a "pay per feature" system, where users could pay you to get a feature included in your editor for a price.Try to calculate what a feature actually costs in programmer hours. And who should pay for the features already in the product? or the time spent on support?
You can't run a software company off of one small piece of softare
But I need to start somewhere.
Now the better question is how do you expect to make money in that market? [...] You need to either build customised software for companies on contract terms, or build lot's of software packages.
My desire is to write my own software on my own terms. As of such I'm not in it for the money. If I can make a living doing this, I think most would agree that I should follow my dream! And to answer your question; I did sell more than a few hunded and reached the break-even point.
RMS and many of the other commenting on this topic has another dream, a dream where all software is F/OSS and people should refuse to use or work on non-free software.
My comment was ment to say that the only reason you can get a job at a company writing F/OSS today is that this company has many alternative revenue sources. I'm a startup so I do not have these alternatives.
So are you suggesting that I should drop my passion for writing my own software (full time) and instead build software for single clients just to honer the "don't work on non-free software" directive?
If you do, I think this is downright stupid - it means that all new software will come from either companies who can afford to develop it as free software, or from people who spend their sparetime on it (and has a job to cover their expenses).
While this will give us plenty of software, the majority of software users who do not mind paying for the tools they use, and do not need (or even have the ability) to modify the source of the tools they use, will lose an alternative.
So while I certainly do share RMS's ideal about all software being free, I think it's unrealistic until we find a way to have free (as in speech) software still be commercial.
And that was sort of my question in my comment, how do we do that? and saying that I just shouldn't write consumer software and instead write for single clients that will allow me to make it F/OSS is not a solution - my "dream" is not just to program for a living, I'm driven by a need to improve the tools I use which I think needs improvements.
And let me end by saying, before I took 5 months off to write TextMate I was offered a job writing an XForms extension/plugin for Mozilla (which would of course be F/OSS). Instead I did TextMate as shareware - RMS would think I made a mistake, but with the fear of sounding arrogant, many have benefitted from my choice. Take a look at the reviews/comments I link to on my page, there really was a need for the product, and so far all the F/OSS solutions had failed.
If you work for a reasonable enlightened company [yes, there are a few], they can see that most of the software generated internally has no value as a sales proposition
What if you want to succeed as an independent software vendor? I recently released a text editor for OS X. I wrote it out of love, but I still require people to pay for it, because the amount of work involved in such a project is not just something I can do on sundays.
I really do like the free (as in speech) ideal, but I have a hard time seeing how I can release all the source I have written and still ensure that people will pay me for my (continued) work.
So how does F/OSS apply to startups? it's fine if you can be backed up by a big company, but most likely that company can pay your salery because they have other closed source products.