I fail to follow your logic. The iPhone and iPod were also introduced into supposedly very crowded spaces with lots of competitors who have been doing it much longer than Apple has. Why would this factor alone somehow predict the iPad's success or failure?
They're arbitrarily limiting development tools to crappy ones (like Objective C). So I can't use my existing skill set (Java programming for the enterprise) at home to write apps for Apple.
Yet somehow thousands of developers found a way and published over 180,000 apps since just February of 2008 (plus who knows how many more unpublished apps), not to mention Apple itself producing the iPhone with these tools. Hey, if you don't want to do it, don't, but don't feel like you need to make up hilarious excuses. There's nothing "arbitrary" about the choice of Objective C: it's the native language of the iPhone SDK and the Cocoa/NeXTStep platforms it descended from.
Now, if you're a Java programmer because you couldn't understand pointers and memory allocation, then Objective C may indeed be hard for you. Otherwise, it's a matter of finding equivalent ways to solve many of the same programming problems. How much time, exactly, have you spent trying out Objective C?
I happen to side with the latter group and find that despicable under the assumption that it would not take much to get Java or Flash running on an iPad.
Good thing this assumption is so easy to prove, what with all those sub-GHz mobile devices running Java and Flash at high speed and reliability.
Wow, that caused quite a sub-thread to form, when my original point was exceedingly simple. If you spend money on the military, you'll have some guns and missiles by the end of it. If you spend money on social security and such, you'll have those services. Just because government got "bigger" either way doesn't mean that you should discount the differences between the two results, especially if you come to really need one or the other.
What is now called "right" wants to expand government for the purposes of defense and national security. What is now called "left" wants to expand government for the purposes of social engineering and entitlements. The result is the same and the two ideologies are little more than excuses or justifications.
How are are the results "the same"? The US government already spends some 41.5% of the world's military expenditures, and probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces. It also spends a lot of money on social security, medicare, and soon health care, and the results of those programs are people who might survive job loss, illness, or old age. Now, which one you care about more depends on your political views, but it does matter where the government is big.
Your car analogy is a good one, let's take it further. Now let's assume that most people like to add parts to their car engines without any understanding, just like today's computer users download random crap on the Internet to install. You assume that people will fall into two camps: knowledgeable ones who pop the hood to tinker, and ignorant ones who leave it entirely alone. Your assumption is largely correct with cars (although a relative has been asked by his mechanic to stop tinkering), but quite wrong with computers.
Palm got stuck. When the time came for color screens and faster processors, they were both unable to help developers easily port apps forward, and unable to deliver a "clean break" new OS that was sufficiently better than the old one. One shining example of this is that on some Sony Clies that have color screens at double the resolution, the OS UI itself was pixel-doubled, while some apps (that display photos, for instance) were specially written to take advantage, precisely the opposite of what you want to have happen.
It's instructive to look at how Apple went from MacOS 9 to MacOS X, providing Classic as a bridge for (most) older apps, while the benefits of MacOS X was plainly obvious. Apple then hopped again from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and provided Rosetta for (most of) the stragglers. The PowerPC G4 was the best chip Apple could find for its laptops, and it was lagging behind Intel products horribly, so the benefits of the switch was also obvious.
This is not an easy problem. Many otherwise successful software products have failed to cross major boundaries. Older folks might remember a number of successful or even dominant MS-DOS applications that died switching to Windows.
But they have no problem with what is essentially police state regulation. You can't have salt. You can't put Toys in Happy Meals. You can't, you can't, you can't.
Oh, I think the Happy Meal Ban is a stupid law, but I was speaking in abstract. If all else fails, even a free country resorts to curtailing freedoms to serve a purpose. This is why Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and it's more or less the same logic that led Bush to warrantless wiretaps. The difference (and there can be a big one) is how dire you consider the threat, and what freedom is being curtailed.
For example, we don't have the freedom to carry firearms onto airplanes. That's because the risk is pretty high, and the loss something we generally consider acceptable. In other words, laws of this sort should be evaluated individually on what we gain and what we lose, rather than knee-jerk "totalitarian dictator!" reactions. Particularly when the name-calling doesn't come with a plausible solution to the problem at hand.
It's easy to call people names. It's harder to come up with viable solutions to the problem of widespread obesity. jd's point is basically sound: if something threatens society, and light-handed mechanisms like the free market or personal responsibility or morality or religion can't seem to solve it, you will either have to continue suffering the problem or use heavy-handed mechanisms like government intervention. The difference is that a totalitarian regime uses that as its first option, while a free society uses it as its last.
Obesity is not just a personal problem. It results in a host of health issues that make health care more expensive for everyone else. You can say: "just don't insure them if they won't be responsible," but that's just a good soundbite, not a solution to the problem.
You'd have to explain what you mean by 'naked capitalism' and how it could be seen as a bad thing.
Sure. The health care system is an excellent example. For-profit health care, by definition, means that they don't provide services to people who can't pay. It may also mean that they prioritize services to those who can pay more, even if it means leaving you bleeding on the floor while they take care of a richer guy's fungal infection. It may mean that doctors prescribe the kind of care that will make them the most money, rather than the one that actually cures you (or lets you die in peace.) This is "naked capitalism."
In reality, we require hospitals to treat all victims of emergencies. We require doctors to take an oath to put their patient's welfare first (and take away licenses if they don't). This is society restraining the market so that we have something humane.
Try losing their security clearance, being court marshaled and a probable investigation into 1) what motive you had removing classified material 2) where it was going and 3) how many other violations you knowingly committed.
In 1999, Dr. Wen Ho Lee was indicted for stealing nuclear secrets. He was kept in solitary confinement for nine months, and ultimately convicted of just one count of mishandling sensitive documents. Judge James A. Parker and President Clinton both apologized for his treatment by the prosecution, and he later received $1.6M in settlements. This is obviously an unusual case of overzealous prosecution, but should also give an idea how seriously they can take this sort of breach.
Our advantage isn't in being individuals, it's in being scary-smart. Crows are individualistic, intelligent animals that have tools, teaching behavior, etc., and they aren't building rockets either. But they aren't as smart as us, and neither are ants.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. The moon shot was a huge project that a quick search tells me involved some 400,000 individually-intelligent people working together, which is not something that any practical number of ants or crows can do. Those 400,000 are in turn funded by the work of a hundred million individually-intelligent taxpayers doing their various jobs.
While a bridge may be in relative scale a similar accomplishment for ants, the fact is that we're talking about an accomplishment (planetary or interstellar travel) in the absolute scale that they can't accomplish, which is hansraj's original point.
The fact is that ants haven't built rockets, while we have. We can build rockets because we can manipulate tools efficiently, because we can communicate highly abstract concepts with each other, and because we can identify and train people with special rocket-building talents. We don't have any examples where less-capable individuals are able to accomplish what we have, so I think the case that highly-talented individuals are required still stands.
Don't count on it. The US military is only a few decades ahead of the Iraqi in weapons technology and training, yet they sliced through Iraqi defenses in a matter of weeks. Axis military technology was at best a few years ahead, and by the end of WWII, the best aircraft were already built by the Allies. I think your point is better served by the massive human sacrifices of the Russians in WWII, or perhaps the Chinese "human waves" in the Korean War, but even then there were at least guns on both sides.
Are you expecting little green men to actually land and fight mano a mano? Why would they?
I'm talking about developer lock-in, not user lock-in.
The theory is that if Flash was a first-class citizen on iPhone and Android and other smartphone platforms, a developer could just write to it. By banning Flash, a developer must write two or three versions of the app, which makes them more likely to just concentrate on an iPhone version.
What does Google gain from people using its free apps on other platforms?
Wait, so when Apple attempted to lock you in by banning Flash, did you also ask the same question?
I'm not saying Google is evil or anything like that. I'm saying that if we're only supposed to consider Google's self interest, then don't complain if Apple or Microsoft or Oracle looks out for itself.
...short review periods before votes on multi-thousand page legislation
HR 3590 is indeed 2,074 pages long, but if you actually go look at the document yourself (really, please do), you'll see that after the actual bill begins on page 15, there are only 25 or so lines of text per page, set in a big font, and the margins and line numbering consume about 40% of the width of the page. Don't let misleading talking points stick in your head.
Because FOSS in general hasn't been as good or better an alternative. Note that "better" involves more than just technical aspects, and includes marketing and support. Geeks don't need those things, but normal people do.
But let's take a closer look. Remember Solaris and HP-UX and Irix? Much of commercial Unix has been replaced by Linux and other free alternatives, and it's hard to imagine anybody going into the server OS market now, when even Microsoft feels the heat. How about web browsers? It's a significant piece of software, and really ought to cost money, but between Mozilla and KHTML/WebKit, the ability to make money from a browser is greatly diminished. Would you invest in a startup that wants to write a new browser?
Now, note that I don't know if this is all going to be a net gain or loss for society. I'm just saying that even freebies may have invisible costs.
I'm not about to start complaining about them until I feel like I'm being coerced somehow into opening my wallet for them.
While Google search is dominant, and perhaps arguably a monopoly, I agree that it has certainly not leveraged that market power in anti-competitive ways. However, just because they give you all these goodies for free doesn't mean you shouldn't be wary, because even free things distort the market in some way. Google's high quality and free services generally destroy the markets for those services, because few others can compete, as Google doesn't need the money and you do. IOW, Google can unintentionally squish something that might have been really cool, and that invisible loss may ultimately not be in the public good.
If somebody gave out free vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream, it may be impossible to start and sustain a for-profit ice cream business by selling other flavors. And then we'll only ever have three (free) flavors.
Sometimes being pedantic doesn't get you closer to the truth. I'm merely pointing out that the technology most directly related to Google's main source of income is closed source, therefore Google is not a good example of a company that makes money by open sourcing software.
Yes, and the "unlimited" data plans are now also available to Windows Mobile phones, so why hasn't usage skyrocketed? Why does Microsoft feel like they have to rewrite Windows Mobile in order to compete?
Yes, it's quite important that a laptop can be used for work like a desktop. However, my point is that the form factor allows a laptop to do things that a desktop cannot, so it's wrong to dismiss the weight difference as a mere quantitative difference. In fact, once it got light enough it became its own product category.
Do you remember the bad days in the late 80s / early 90s when [...] 'portable machine' meant you had a tiny incompatible screen which wouldn't run desktop software
Yes, which is exactly my point. Those machines are lighter desktops, not laptops. That's why they're merely a footnote of history, instead of a vibrant product category.
You might notice I made no statement about Windows Mobile in general, only that in phones it did not become a widely used mobile data device. All I'm pointing out is that "success" - a nebulous word - is better measured by actual usage, instead of counting the number of units sold. Accountants will count sales, but history will look at usage.
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I fail to follow your logic. The iPhone and iPod were also introduced into supposedly very crowded spaces with lots of competitors who have been doing it much longer than Apple has. Why would this factor alone somehow predict the iPad's success or failure?
Yet somehow thousands of developers found a way and published over 180,000 apps since just February of 2008 (plus who knows how many more unpublished apps), not to mention Apple itself producing the iPhone with these tools. Hey, if you don't want to do it, don't, but don't feel like you need to make up hilarious excuses. There's nothing "arbitrary" about the choice of Objective C: it's the native language of the iPhone SDK and the Cocoa/NeXTStep platforms it descended from.
Now, if you're a Java programmer because you couldn't understand pointers and memory allocation, then Objective C may indeed be hard for you. Otherwise, it's a matter of finding equivalent ways to solve many of the same programming problems. How much time, exactly, have you spent trying out Objective C?
Good thing this assumption is so easy to prove, what with all those sub-GHz mobile devices running Java and Flash at high speed and reliability.
You'll need to first define what a "general purpose computer" is.
Wow, that caused quite a sub-thread to form, when my original point was exceedingly simple. If you spend money on the military, you'll have some guns and missiles by the end of it. If you spend money on social security and such, you'll have those services. Just because government got "bigger" either way doesn't mean that you should discount the differences between the two results, especially if you come to really need one or the other.
How are are the results "the same"? The US government already spends some 41.5% of the world's military expenditures, and probably has the best traditional (meaning, for nation-versus-nation wars) forces. It also spends a lot of money on social security, medicare, and soon health care, and the results of those programs are people who might survive job loss, illness, or old age. Now, which one you care about more depends on your political views, but it does matter where the government is big.
Your car analogy is a good one, let's take it further. Now let's assume that most people like to add parts to their car engines without any understanding, just like today's computer users download random crap on the Internet to install. You assume that people will fall into two camps: knowledgeable ones who pop the hood to tinker, and ignorant ones who leave it entirely alone. Your assumption is largely correct with cars (although a relative has been asked by his mechanic to stop tinkering), but quite wrong with computers.
Palm got stuck. When the time came for color screens and faster processors, they were both unable to help developers easily port apps forward, and unable to deliver a "clean break" new OS that was sufficiently better than the old one. One shining example of this is that on some Sony Clies that have color screens at double the resolution, the OS UI itself was pixel-doubled, while some apps (that display photos, for instance) were specially written to take advantage, precisely the opposite of what you want to have happen.
It's instructive to look at how Apple went from MacOS 9 to MacOS X, providing Classic as a bridge for (most) older apps, while the benefits of MacOS X was plainly obvious. Apple then hopped again from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, and provided Rosetta for (most of) the stragglers. The PowerPC G4 was the best chip Apple could find for its laptops, and it was lagging behind Intel products horribly, so the benefits of the switch was also obvious.
This is not an easy problem. Many otherwise successful software products have failed to cross major boundaries. Older folks might remember a number of successful or even dominant MS-DOS applications that died switching to Windows.
Oh, I think the Happy Meal Ban is a stupid law, but I was speaking in abstract. If all else fails, even a free country resorts to curtailing freedoms to serve a purpose. This is why Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and it's more or less the same logic that led Bush to warrantless wiretaps. The difference (and there can be a big one) is how dire you consider the threat, and what freedom is being curtailed.
For example, we don't have the freedom to carry firearms onto airplanes. That's because the risk is pretty high, and the loss something we generally consider acceptable. In other words, laws of this sort should be evaluated individually on what we gain and what we lose, rather than knee-jerk "totalitarian dictator!" reactions. Particularly when the name-calling doesn't come with a plausible solution to the problem at hand.
It's easy to call people names. It's harder to come up with viable solutions to the problem of widespread obesity. jd's point is basically sound: if something threatens society, and light-handed mechanisms like the free market or personal responsibility or morality or religion can't seem to solve it, you will either have to continue suffering the problem or use heavy-handed mechanisms like government intervention. The difference is that a totalitarian regime uses that as its first option, while a free society uses it as its last.
Obesity is not just a personal problem. It results in a host of health issues that make health care more expensive for everyone else. You can say: "just don't insure them if they won't be responsible," but that's just a good soundbite, not a solution to the problem.
Sure. The health care system is an excellent example. For-profit health care, by definition, means that they don't provide services to people who can't pay. It may also mean that they prioritize services to those who can pay more, even if it means leaving you bleeding on the floor while they take care of a richer guy's fungal infection. It may mean that doctors prescribe the kind of care that will make them the most money, rather than the one that actually cures you (or lets you die in peace.) This is "naked capitalism."
In reality, we require hospitals to treat all victims of emergencies. We require doctors to take an oath to put their patient's welfare first (and take away licenses if they don't). This is society restraining the market so that we have something humane.
In 1999, Dr. Wen Ho Lee was indicted for stealing nuclear secrets. He was kept in solitary confinement for nine months, and ultimately convicted of just one count of mishandling sensitive documents. Judge James A. Parker and President Clinton both apologized for his treatment by the prosecution, and he later received $1.6M in settlements. This is obviously an unusual case of overzealous prosecution, but should also give an idea how seriously they can take this sort of breach.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. The moon shot was a huge project that a quick search tells me involved some 400,000 individually-intelligent people working together, which is not something that any practical number of ants or crows can do. Those 400,000 are in turn funded by the work of a hundred million individually-intelligent taxpayers doing their various jobs.
While a bridge may be in relative scale a similar accomplishment for ants, the fact is that we're talking about an accomplishment (planetary or interstellar travel) in the absolute scale that they can't accomplish, which is hansraj's original point.
The fact is that ants haven't built rockets, while we have. We can build rockets because we can manipulate tools efficiently, because we can communicate highly abstract concepts with each other, and because we can identify and train people with special rocket-building talents. We don't have any examples where less-capable individuals are able to accomplish what we have, so I think the case that highly-talented individuals are required still stands.
Don't count on it. The US military is only a few decades ahead of the Iraqi in weapons technology and training, yet they sliced through Iraqi defenses in a matter of weeks. Axis military technology was at best a few years ahead, and by the end of WWII, the best aircraft were already built by the Allies. I think your point is better served by the massive human sacrifices of the Russians in WWII, or perhaps the Chinese "human waves" in the Korean War, but even then there were at least guns on both sides.
Are you expecting little green men to actually land and fight mano a mano? Why would they?
I'm talking about developer lock-in, not user lock-in.
The theory is that if Flash was a first-class citizen on iPhone and Android and other smartphone platforms, a developer could just write to it. By banning Flash, a developer must write two or three versions of the app, which makes them more likely to just concentrate on an iPhone version.
Wait, so when Apple attempted to lock you in by banning Flash, did you also ask the same question?
I'm not saying Google is evil or anything like that. I'm saying that if we're only supposed to consider Google's self interest, then don't complain if Apple or Microsoft or Oracle looks out for itself.
HR 3590 is indeed 2,074 pages long, but if you actually go look at the document yourself (really, please do), you'll see that after the actual bill begins on page 15, there are only 25 or so lines of text per page, set in a big font, and the margins and line numbering consume about 40% of the width of the page. Don't let misleading talking points stick in your head.
Because FOSS in general hasn't been as good or better an alternative. Note that "better" involves more than just technical aspects, and includes marketing and support. Geeks don't need those things, but normal people do.
But let's take a closer look. Remember Solaris and HP-UX and Irix? Much of commercial Unix has been replaced by Linux and other free alternatives, and it's hard to imagine anybody going into the server OS market now, when even Microsoft feels the heat. How about web browsers? It's a significant piece of software, and really ought to cost money, but between Mozilla and KHTML/WebKit, the ability to make money from a browser is greatly diminished. Would you invest in a startup that wants to write a new browser?
Now, note that I don't know if this is all going to be a net gain or loss for society. I'm just saying that even freebies may have invisible costs.
While Google search is dominant, and perhaps arguably a monopoly, I agree that it has certainly not leveraged that market power in anti-competitive ways. However, just because they give you all these goodies for free doesn't mean you shouldn't be wary, because even free things distort the market in some way. Google's high quality and free services generally destroy the markets for those services, because few others can compete, as Google doesn't need the money and you do. IOW, Google can unintentionally squish something that might have been really cool, and that invisible loss may ultimately not be in the public good.
If somebody gave out free vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate ice cream, it may be impossible to start and sustain a for-profit ice cream business by selling other flavors. And then we'll only ever have three (free) flavors.
Sometimes being pedantic doesn't get you closer to the truth. I'm merely pointing out that the technology most directly related to Google's main source of income is closed source, therefore Google is not a good example of a company that makes money by open sourcing software.
...except the part that actually makes money: search.
Yes, and the "unlimited" data plans are now also available to Windows Mobile phones, so why hasn't usage skyrocketed? Why does Microsoft feel like they have to rewrite Windows Mobile in order to compete?
Yes, it's quite important that a laptop can be used for work like a desktop. However, my point is that the form factor allows a laptop to do things that a desktop cannot, so it's wrong to dismiss the weight difference as a mere quantitative difference. In fact, once it got light enough it became its own product category.
Yes, which is exactly my point. Those machines are lighter desktops, not laptops. That's why they're merely a footnote of history, instead of a vibrant product category.
You might notice I made no statement about Windows Mobile in general, only that in phones it did not become a widely used mobile data device. All I'm pointing out is that "success" - a nebulous word - is better measured by actual usage, instead of counting the number of units sold. Accountants will count sales, but history will look at usage.