If you're browsing without adblock, you're encouraging that sort of ad-based-revenue driven escalation of advertising intrusiveness.
I disagree. I don't mind ads, mostly. But am I ever going to buy Framemaker? Am I ever going to use Groupon? Am I ever going to deploy IBM's application virtualization infrastructure to my cloud? No. The problem is that this ad network sucks, in almost every dimension. I'm pretty sure that this is the worst ad network that I see on regular basis. (OK, maybe Conde Naste's "let's cover the entire page of our own content with an ad" is worse, but not by much. At least it's just one click to get rid of it.) It seems painfully obvious to me, but I'll say it out loud -- If your ads make your content worse, accepting them is a bad move. Find another way.
I am kind of astounded at how easily people give away access to their email accounts, no matter how harmless the intent of the email is. I got swamped by invites from facebook when several of my friends gave it access to their address books. Now that's just annoying, but is this guy's security up to the same level as gmail's? I tend to doubt it...
As an aside, what the hell happened to slashdot? A couple days ago it was its usual tolerable self, but now I have the most garish ads for Adobe authoring tools and groupon and nonsensical cloud virtualization things, and it's slow as hell. I am happy to co-exist with ads if they pay the bills, but these ads kind of ruin everything. Is slashdot on its last legs?
Currently, it only supports a subset of the features that JPEG has. It lacks support for any color representation other than 4:2:0 YCrCb. JPEG supports 4:4:4 as well as other color representations like CMYK. WebP also seems to lack support for EXIF data and ICC color profiles, both of which have be come quite important for photography. Further, it has yet to include any features missing from JPEG like alpha channel support.
[...]
Every image format that becomes “part of the Web platform” exacts a cost for all time: all clients have to support that format forever, and there's also a cost for authors having to choose which format is best for them. This cost is no less for WebP than any other format because progressive decoding requires using a separate library instead of reusing the existing WebM decoder. This gives additional security risk but also eliminates much of the benefit of having bitstream compatibility with WebM. It makes me wonder, why not just change the bitstream so that it's more suitable for a still image codec?
Yes, you are still buying like an idiot. No offense meant, just using your own words in the hopes it proves a point, and trying to 'rationalize it away' to not be one of those silly audiophiles, is actually exactly what is making you one.
I must have mis-represented myself in my original post. I am not talking about buying $1,000 speaker cables. I am talking about buying $25 RCA cables rather than $2 RCA cables. I don't have the willpower to endure an ebay/craigslist trawl for cables to save $10. I just go to amazon and find something that looks decent, and it's usually ~10x the price of the cheapest cable, and I buy that. It's not about the money, it's about the inevitable time and hassle that dealing with junk entails.
Yes, I've had cables that failed. They did not spontaneously combust, but I change the wiring in my stereo about 6 times a year, I have kids, and the crappy stuff breaks down surprisingly fast. I am not trying to make a financial case for this. I am just saying that, in my experience, it worth the extra couple $10s to get decent build quality such that the stuff will last a lifetime, and the stout stuff is inevitably marketed as "audiophile grade".
Sorry if I wasn't clear -- I was not referring to speaker cables. I have plain 16 gauge copper for my speakers, and it works fine. I got it in 1993 or so for about $10 probably, and it's been perfectly durable and sounds great. I was referring to interconnects such as RCA or HDMI or VGA. Cheap RCA cables are junk and break easily. I will gladly pay the $20 premium for "audiophile" RCA cables if they will have superior build quality. I know they do not offer "higher resolution" or "increased dynamic range", but I still end up buying cables marketed as such.
Even if the financial calculus says that it is cheaper to just replace broken cables every 5 years, I just don't want that hassle.
I keep asking myself how I can get some of that idiot money.
Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff. Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.
Are we really basing our opinions of Newt Gingrich on the fact that his Amazon account has "recommended" a book by Feynman?
By that measurement, my recommendation of Barry Cooper's biography of Beethoven qualifies me to conduct the Chicago Symphony and to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
But I'm a bit suspicious of Gingrich's recommendations ever since in an interview on Fox News he said he read Plato in the original Latin.
Personally, I'm glad Gingrich is running for president. It should be good for some lulz. [...]
Clearly, he's got the right stuff to be a Republican front runner.
What flamebait. You may not agree with his politics, and his personal life may abhor you, but it seems perfectly valid to assess someone's intellectual capacity based on something like this. You don't have to vote for him, but this may be an interesting find for someone choosing between Sarah "I read them all" Palin and this guy. He clearly is a sharp man.
Apple now doesn't include Flash or Java by default
I have an Air from a couple months ago, and it came with Java right there in/usr/bin/. I haven't installed Lion yet, but I would be surprised if Java was absent. It's not impossible, but that would be a fairly sudden removal.
I am a marginally affluent adult with children, and I struggle to understand why I should store paper documents at all.
I keep a stack of maintenance records for my car, because I will probably sell it some day, and the future owner may want that. But I will never actually refer to any of these, even if there is a question about the state of my car. I will just have it re-evaluated at that time.
I don't get any financial statements in the mail, because the institutions store them as pdfs for me. I trust them to keep accurate records. Every day I throw out practically everything that arrives in my mailbox. Occasionally I will get a personal correspondence or an actually-informative message from a financial institution.
I don't keep the records of my interactions with the government (parking tickets, licences, etc). It just doesn't seem worth the effort compared to the potential risk of some misunderstanding occurring.
I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.
I don't keep correspondences with my children's school, because I can't imagine a reason that I would ever need to refer to that. I read them, respond as appropriate, then they go straight into the trash.
I keep documents regarding real estate ownership, but in the ~10 years of doing so, I have never referred to any of these.
So I have a couple of unsorted write-only streams of files for certain things, but everything else is either digital or thrown away. I can imagine scenarios where magically having a certain document might make things easier or simpler for me, but none of these scenarios have ever occurred to me or anyone I know. Nor do I imagine that is worth the 1-2 hours per week it would take to maintain something like that. I would rather spend that time with my kids or my friends focusing on the present.
They could just overwrite each time if there was no collection data set being accumulated. The last location ought to do it for most applications. I could see the last ten locations where there are a lot of towers and you're using GPS. But a history is a different thing. And we don't know that any of the applications use the data, and we don't know that they don't. The only evidence seen so far is that it's a history-- a long history.
I don't think anyone would argue with your point.
Was the coder THAT sloppy?
This strikes me as something that you have to have work this way during the test phase of the phone. Possibly it's a "// TODO" that never got done. Possibly it's just a bug. It's not a huge surprise coming from Apple -- they seem to have one of the least rigorous coding practice in the industry.
In the scheme of things this doesn't seem like the end of the world. If you are in the habit of leaving your phone backups available on an unlocked workstation, I suspect you have bigger problems than revealing your location. For sure it should be fixed.
Then why did they come out with a statement last week saying they *had* to track users to give them the best experience? I'm not buying what Steve's selling.
They didn't. Last June they said something to the effect of, "If users opt-in to location services, they are opting in us collecting that information. This is the only way for this system to work." This came up last week in the hubbub about the tower data being stored in perpetuity on the phone. But these are completely separate issues.
AFAIK, there is no evidence that the tower data is being transmitted anywhere, so it is reasonable for Apple to say that they don't track anyone. They made a device that privately stores this data. I don't think anyone thinks that the way this data is being stored is the right way to do it, but just because the device stores that data, that doesn't mean that Apple is "tracking" you.
but you're comlaining about getting a ticket for doing something illegal, because the exact extent to which you were violating the law was off by a fraction?
It seems like he's complaining about a policy/protocol violation by the police. Similar in nature (but not in magnitude) to coming home and finding your house ransacked by the police and then getting arrested for having a joint on your coffee table. If the machines aren't supposed to be clocking him and taking his picture and mailing him a ticket, it seems perfectly legitimate to complain about that when they do.
When is this "cloud everything" fad going to be over? It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)
Cloud computing is not a fad and it's not "a data center that someone else runs for you". It's a way to use resources using strategies that have emerged and become feasible only recently. Google, Amazon, and others have been running giant internal clouds for years, and recently have begun renting them out. For most folks, using these third-party off-site infrastructures is the best way to go. For others, it doesn't work but they don't have the in-house expertise or time/money/focus to roll their own. This is where VMware and Rackspace and Redhat come in -- they give you a simple way to create your own internal setup.
your average iPhone consumer will only know that 'more pixels' = 'better'.
Your average iPhone user will, however, quickly realize that photos suck if the sensor is too small. Apple never makes stuff to compete in checklists, they make stuff they believe will be regarded as high-quality. Apple would never slap an "8 megapixels!" sticker on the iPhone in hopes that it would appeal to more people. Apple's stuff is nearly always the worst spec'ed stuff on the market, yet it is also the most coveted and they consistently have the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. They know how to put stuff together for real life.
I don't know enough about the technology to comment on whether a good-quality 8MP camera is feasible in this size, but Apple will never build something that sucks just so they can have a higher number in some feature table.
To be fair, knowing the difference between Topeka and Kansas City is like knowing the difference between the various Zune devices.
It's not like they were confusing Kansas City, Missouri with Kansas City, Kansas. This isn't even a geography problem -- the two cities have completely different and unambiguous names. It's a string comparison failure.
I never did understand the removal of the twin towers from things either. Do we really want to show our respect to those that passed by trying to erase any mention or footage of the buildings?
It is sympathy for those who directly experienced the incidents. The towers only fell once. People have only been exposed to deadly amounts of radiation a handful of times in the last 100 years (more or less).
As horrible as it is, people die in earthquakes and tsunamis regularly. It happens. And one incident doesn't necessarily evoke another. It's just part of life on Earth.
I'm a reasonably well adjusted adult with a reasonably sane outlook on life, and I am glad that the WTC was erased from popular media for a time, because I knew a lot of people who died there. Seeing the towers during that time in a fictional or humorous way would just bring me to tears for my friends who died.
If you are far removed from these traumas, that's fine. You can still watch these episodes on dvd or similar. And they will probably air them again in a year or so. And that's fine.
The question is WHY did he choose to devote time to that language. There are a few reasonable answers, but most come down to poor decisions.
.Net is way more than a language. That said, C# is one of the best general-purpose languages out there. It's far ahead of Java and Ruby. Only Python really competes for general purpose stuff.
.Net/C# would never be my first choice for any personal project, because the Windows complexity overhead is too high. But if you already have, say, a managed farm of Windows VMs, it's a no brainer to write an app using.Net/C#/MVC. I've done it at work many times. It works great assuming you can manage all the crap that comes along with Windows.
For personal stuff I usually go to Rails or Django or App Engine, simply because deployment and hosting is so much easier. If someone chooses to shred my resume because I've worked on large.Net projects, that seems kind of retarded.
I worry about one single organization controlling all the aspects of this. Wouldn't it be better to publish an API and/or data format and have third-party fleets (fed-ex, taxis, bus operators, etc) collect the data for a fee? It seems like having layers of boundaries would help prevent abuse, particularly if the data was somehow intrinsically open. It also seems like sourcing the data from disinterested third parties could potentially lead to better/more data if the numbers work out right.
Fair enough, but you can also read the transcript where Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer tells shareholders pretty much the same exact thing. I guess he could be lying, but that would be a much more serious thing than telling tall tales at a press event.
At first Apple wanted apps through safari. This might have been good as the Apps would work on any device, and Apple would have no lockin. But developers and users wanted native apps. So we have the App store, with lockin, and large cuts for Apple.
So what do we have now. Natives Apps that run in he browser. If lockin and Apple rules are such an issue, then why no run he app in a browser? Probably because most develpers like the lockin and he profit opportunities i provides. They my bitch about Apple, but they are not exacty running away.
If you look at the docs and the API that Apple provides for iOS, it's very clear that it was always their intention to provide a mechanism for native apps. Perhaps it was not ready when the first iPhone shipped, or perhaps there is some other reason. But it is not conceivable that the SDK/AppStore/etc was created in under a year due to developer demand.
We don't have "native apps that run in the browser". We have a Cocoa class called UIWebView which native apps can use to render html. There are all kinds of valid reasons for an app to do this. Sure, there are some apps that are *only* a UIWebView with static URLs, but they are the exception not the rule. And I'm pretty sure those are quick to be uninstalled. What we do have is the ability for a user to add a bookmark to their home screen, which basically creates an iOS app with an embedded UIWebView.
There are theories that the API, and therefore "URLs on the home screen", don't use the improved Nitro JS engine because it uses JIT, and would be susceptible to script poisoning attacks, since the App author has full access to the processes memory space. There are theories that Apple is putting this JITing out-of-process, which would mitigate or obviate these attacks. This seems to be the reason that apps that use UIWebView get the older, slower JS engine.
In any case, this has nothing to do with lockin, or profits for Apple. If you look at the actual numbers, you will see that the AppStore is a break-even affair for Apple. The only reason they have it is because customers want it, therefore it makes their hardware "more better".
Apple were not the first into either of those markets, so I don't know why you'd say "follow Apple".
You are following whoever is in front of you, regardless of whether that person is at the front of the line. Apple went, then Microsoft went. So Microsoft followed Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're browsing without adblock, you're encouraging that sort of ad-based-revenue driven escalation of advertising intrusiveness.
I disagree. I don't mind ads, mostly. But am I ever going to buy Framemaker? Am I ever going to use Groupon? Am I ever going to deploy IBM's application virtualization infrastructure to my cloud? No. The problem is that this ad network sucks, in almost every dimension. I'm pretty sure that this is the worst ad network that I see on regular basis. (OK, maybe Conde Naste's "let's cover the entire page of our own content with an ad" is worse, but not by much. At least it's just one click to get rid of it.) It seems painfully obvious to me, but I'll say it out loud -- If your ads make your content worse, accepting them is a bad move. Find another way.
As an aside, what the hell happened to slashdot? A couple days ago it was its usual tolerable self, but now I have the most garish ads for Adobe authoring tools and groupon and nonsensical cloud virtualization things, and it's slow as hell. I am happy to co-exist with ads if they pay the bills, but these ads kind of ruin everything. Is slashdot on its last legs?
Currently, it only supports a subset of the features that JPEG has. It lacks support for any color representation other than 4:2:0 YCrCb. JPEG supports 4:4:4 as well as other color representations like CMYK. WebP also seems to lack support for EXIF data and ICC color profiles, both of which have be come quite important for photography. Further, it has yet to include any features missing from JPEG like alpha channel support.
[...]
Every image format that becomes “part of the Web platform” exacts a cost for all time: all clients have to support that format forever, and there's also a cost for authors having to choose which format is best for them. This cost is no less for WebP than any other format because progressive decoding requires using a separate library instead of reusing the existing WebM decoder. This gives additional security risk but also eliminates much of the benefit of having bitstream compatibility with WebM. It makes me wonder, why not just change the bitstream so that it's more suitable for a still image codec?
WebP, by Jeff Muizelaar.
Yes, you are still buying like an idiot. No offense meant, just using your own words in the hopes it proves a point, and trying to 'rationalize it away' to not be one of those silly audiophiles, is actually exactly what is making you one.
I must have mis-represented myself in my original post. I am not talking about buying $1,000 speaker cables. I am talking about buying $25 RCA cables rather than $2 RCA cables. I don't have the willpower to endure an ebay/craigslist trawl for cables to save $10. I just go to amazon and find something that looks decent, and it's usually ~10x the price of the cheapest cable, and I buy that. It's not about the money, it's about the inevitable time and hassle that dealing with junk entails.
Yes, I've had cables that failed. They did not spontaneously combust, but I change the wiring in my stereo about 6 times a year, I have kids, and the crappy stuff breaks down surprisingly fast. I am not trying to make a financial case for this. I am just saying that, in my experience, it worth the extra couple $10s to get decent build quality such that the stuff will last a lifetime, and the stout stuff is inevitably marketed as "audiophile grade".
Or you can just order from a vendor that doesn't bullshit.
Plug: http://www.bluejeanscable.com/
Thank you for that link, that place looks awesome. I will definitely return there the next time I need a cable.
16 gauge zip cord works just fine...
Sorry if I wasn't clear -- I was not referring to speaker cables. I have plain 16 gauge copper for my speakers, and it works fine. I got it in 1993 or so for about $10 probably, and it's been perfectly durable and sounds great. I was referring to interconnects such as RCA or HDMI or VGA. Cheap RCA cables are junk and break easily. I will gladly pay the $20 premium for "audiophile" RCA cables if they will have superior build quality. I know they do not offer "higher resolution" or "increased dynamic range", but I still end up buying cables marketed as such.
Even if the financial calculus says that it is cheaper to just replace broken cables every 5 years, I just don't want that hassle.
I keep asking myself how I can get some of that idiot money.
Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff. Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.
Are we really basing our opinions of Newt Gingrich on the fact that his Amazon account has "recommended" a book by Feynman?
By that measurement, my recommendation of Barry Cooper's biography of Beethoven qualifies me to conduct the Chicago Symphony and to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
But I'm a bit suspicious of Gingrich's recommendations ever since in an interview on Fox News he said he read Plato in the original Latin.
Personally, I'm glad Gingrich is running for president. It should be good for some lulz. [...]
Clearly, he's got the right stuff to be a Republican front runner.
What flamebait. You may not agree with his politics, and his personal life may abhor you, but it seems perfectly valid to assess someone's intellectual capacity based on something like this. You don't have to vote for him, but this may be an interesting find for someone choosing between Sarah "I read them all" Palin and this guy. He clearly is a sharp man.
Apple now doesn't include Flash or Java by default
I have an Air from a couple months ago, and it came with Java right there in /usr/bin/. I haven't installed Lion yet, but I would be surprised if Java was absent. It's not impossible, but that would be a fairly sudden removal.
I keep a stack of maintenance records for my car, because I will probably sell it some day, and the future owner may want that. But I will never actually refer to any of these, even if there is a question about the state of my car. I will just have it re-evaluated at that time.
I don't get any financial statements in the mail, because the institutions store them as pdfs for me. I trust them to keep accurate records. Every day I throw out practically everything that arrives in my mailbox. Occasionally I will get a personal correspondence or an actually-informative message from a financial institution.
I don't keep the records of my interactions with the government (parking tickets, licences, etc). It just doesn't seem worth the effort compared to the potential risk of some misunderstanding occurring.
I don't keep medical bills or documents, because I trust my doctors to keep an accurate medical record. And even if they fail to do so, I don't see a strong reason to care about that.
I don't keep correspondences with my children's school, because I can't imagine a reason that I would ever need to refer to that. I read them, respond as appropriate, then they go straight into the trash.
I keep documents regarding real estate ownership, but in the ~10 years of doing so, I have never referred to any of these.
So I have a couple of unsorted write-only streams of files for certain things, but everything else is either digital or thrown away. I can imagine scenarios where magically having a certain document might make things easier or simpler for me, but none of these scenarios have ever occurred to me or anyone I know. Nor do I imagine that is worth the 1-2 hours per week it would take to maintain something like that. I would rather spend that time with my kids or my friends focusing on the present.
Is this unusual?
They could just overwrite each time if there was no collection data set being accumulated. The last location ought to do it for most applications. I could see the last ten locations where there are a lot of towers and you're using GPS. But a history is a different thing. And we don't know that any of the applications use the data, and we don't know that they don't. The only evidence seen so far is that it's a history-- a long history.
I don't think anyone would argue with your point.
Was the coder THAT sloppy?
This strikes me as something that you have to have work this way during the test phase of the phone. Possibly it's a "// TODO" that never got done. Possibly it's just a bug. It's not a huge surprise coming from Apple -- they seem to have one of the least rigorous coding practice in the industry.
In the scheme of things this doesn't seem like the end of the world. If you are in the habit of leaving your phone backups available on an unlocked workstation, I suspect you have bigger problems than revealing your location. For sure it should be fixed.
Then why did they come out with a statement last week saying they *had* to track users to give them the best experience? I'm not buying what Steve's selling.
They didn't. Last June they said something to the effect of, "If users opt-in to location services, they are opting in us collecting that information. This is the only way for this system to work." This came up last week in the hubbub about the tower data being stored in perpetuity on the phone. But these are completely separate issues.
AFAIK, there is no evidence that the tower data is being transmitted anywhere, so it is reasonable for Apple to say that they don't track anyone. They made a device that privately stores this data. I don't think anyone thinks that the way this data is being stored is the right way to do it, but just because the device stores that data, that doesn't mean that Apple is "tracking" you.
but you're comlaining about getting a ticket for doing something illegal, because the exact extent to which you were violating the law was off by a fraction?
It seems like he's complaining about a policy/protocol violation by the police. Similar in nature (but not in magnitude) to coming home and finding your house ransacked by the police and then getting arrested for having a joint on your coffee table. If the machines aren't supposed to be clocking him and taking his picture and mailing him a ticket, it seems perfectly legitimate to complain about that when they do.
When is this "cloud everything" fad going to be over? It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)
Cloud computing is not a fad and it's not "a data center that someone else runs for you". It's a way to use resources using strategies that have emerged and become feasible only recently. Google, Amazon, and others have been running giant internal clouds for years, and recently have begun renting them out. For most folks, using these third-party off-site infrastructures is the best way to go. For others, it doesn't work but they don't have the in-house expertise or time/money/focus to roll their own. This is where VMware and Rackspace and Redhat come in -- they give you a simple way to create your own internal setup.
If you want your E-mail to be private, encrypt it [...], and even then, there's a good chance others can intercept the key and read it anyway.
Would you care to expand on that? I was under the impression that both smime and key-pair encryption are pretty solid.
The XBOX 360 begs to differ.
Every week more Android phones ship than all the XBoxes that ship in an entire year.
your average iPhone consumer will only know that 'more pixels' = 'better'.
Your average iPhone user will, however, quickly realize that photos suck if the sensor is too small. Apple never makes stuff to compete in checklists, they make stuff they believe will be regarded as high-quality. Apple would never slap an "8 megapixels!" sticker on the iPhone in hopes that it would appeal to more people. Apple's stuff is nearly always the worst spec'ed stuff on the market, yet it is also the most coveted and they consistently have the highest customer satisfaction in the industry. They know how to put stuff together for real life.
I don't know enough about the technology to comment on whether a good-quality 8MP camera is feasible in this size, but Apple will never build something that sucks just so they can have a higher number in some feature table.
Geography, Americans suck at it.
To be fair, knowing the difference between Topeka and Kansas City is like knowing the difference between the various Zune devices.
It's not like they were confusing Kansas City, Missouri with Kansas City, Kansas. This isn't even a geography problem -- the two cities have completely different and unambiguous names. It's a string comparison failure.
I never did understand the removal of the twin towers from things either. Do we really want to show our respect to those that passed by trying to erase any mention or footage of the buildings?
It is sympathy for those who directly experienced the incidents. The towers only fell once. People have only been exposed to deadly amounts of radiation a handful of times in the last 100 years (more or less).
As horrible as it is, people die in earthquakes and tsunamis regularly. It happens. And one incident doesn't necessarily evoke another. It's just part of life on Earth.
I'm a reasonably well adjusted adult with a reasonably sane outlook on life, and I am glad that the WTC was erased from popular media for a time, because I knew a lot of people who died there. Seeing the towers during that time in a fictional or humorous way would just bring me to tears for my friends who died.
If you are far removed from these traumas, that's fine. You can still watch these episodes on dvd or similar. And they will probably air them again in a year or so. And that's fine.
The question is WHY did he choose to devote time to that language. There are a few reasonable answers, but most come down to poor decisions.
.Net is way more than a language. That said, C# is one of the best general-purpose languages out there. It's far ahead of Java and Ruby. Only Python really competes for general purpose stuff.
For personal stuff I usually go to Rails or Django or App Engine, simply because deployment and hosting is so much easier. If someone chooses to shred my resume because I've worked on large .Net projects, that seems kind of retarded.
I worry about one single organization controlling all the aspects of this. Wouldn't it be better to publish an API and/or data format and have third-party fleets (fed-ex, taxis, bus operators, etc) collect the data for a fee? It seems like having layers of boundaries would help prevent abuse, particularly if the data was somehow intrinsically open. It also seems like sourcing the data from disinterested third parties could potentially lead to better/more data if the numbers work out right.
Fair enough, but you can also read the transcript where Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer tells shareholders pretty much the same exact thing. I guess he could be lying, but that would be a much more serious thing than telling tall tales at a press event.
If you look at the actual numbers, you will see that the AppStore is a break-even affair for Apple.
How does one go about doing this? Everything I have read has been speculation. As far as I can tell, no numbers have actually been released.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/23/app-store-1-of-apples-gross-profit/
At first Apple wanted apps through safari. This might have been good as the Apps would work on any device, and Apple would have no lockin. But developers and users wanted native apps. So we have the App store, with lockin, and large cuts for Apple.
So what do we have now. Natives Apps that run in he browser. If lockin and Apple rules are such an issue, then why no run he app in a browser? Probably because most develpers like the lockin and he profit opportunities i provides. They my bitch about Apple, but they are not exacty running away.
If you look at the docs and the API that Apple provides for iOS, it's very clear that it was always their intention to provide a mechanism for native apps. Perhaps it was not ready when the first iPhone shipped, or perhaps there is some other reason. But it is not conceivable that the SDK/AppStore/etc was created in under a year due to developer demand.
We don't have "native apps that run in the browser". We have a Cocoa class called UIWebView which native apps can use to render html. There are all kinds of valid reasons for an app to do this. Sure, there are some apps that are *only* a UIWebView with static URLs, but they are the exception not the rule. And I'm pretty sure those are quick to be uninstalled. What we do have is the ability for a user to add a bookmark to their home screen, which basically creates an iOS app with an embedded UIWebView.
There are theories that the API, and therefore "URLs on the home screen", don't use the improved Nitro JS engine because it uses JIT, and would be susceptible to script poisoning attacks, since the App author has full access to the processes memory space. There are theories that Apple is putting this JITing out-of-process, which would mitigate or obviate these attacks. This seems to be the reason that apps that use UIWebView get the older, slower JS engine.
In any case, this has nothing to do with lockin, or profits for Apple. If you look at the actual numbers, you will see that the AppStore is a break-even affair for Apple. The only reason they have it is because customers want it, therefore it makes their hardware "more better".
Apple were not the first into either of those markets, so I don't know why you'd say "follow Apple".
You are following whoever is in front of you, regardless of whether that person is at the front of the line. Apple went, then Microsoft went. So Microsoft followed Apple.