That's what's said publicly, but really it's about control. Consider DVD region coding; that has nothing to do with copy protection, it's just enforcing market segmentation.
How could a serious hardware and OS vendor support and maintain a platform that consists of bit of code here and there, and apps over which they have no control and zero insight?
Yeah, I'd hate it if my Macs would just run programs that I got from anywhere.
I think many of us don't want another Windows hell.
"Windows hell" and "only vendor-approved applications can run" is a false dichotomy.
Most people won't buy the iPhone because they need a new toy that may or may not work, but because they need all the functionality and usefulness the iPhone provides. Do you see what I mean?
Honestly, no. Defenders of Apple's stranglehold on iPhone development seem to use self-contradictory arguments: - Customers buy iPhones because they want a phone that works every time, and have no desire to install software that might destabilize it. - If there's any way to run non-Apple-approved apps, these same users will be constantly downloading stuff from dodgy Elbonian sites and getting infected with viruses and malware.
Apple does not care what geeks want. Ever since the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" days, Apple has been mostly ignoring the geek community
That's certainly true if you look at their public messages, but then we don't care about marketing, right? If you look at what they actually do, Apple directs quite a bit of resources toward geeks. OS X ships with bash, Apache, ssh, Perl, Python, and Ruby out of the box; Leopard even adds Ruby on Rails and numpy and wxPython. Xcode is included with every copy of the OS, and there are no restrictions on what kind of Mac apps you can create. That's why their strict control over iPhone development is so disappointing; it's not business as usual.
The really disturbing part is that every alleged benefit to the user from Apple's control applies equally well if not more so to OS X apps; for example you're more likely to have sensitive financial information on your Mac than your iPhone. By Apple's current logic, we should only be able to run "approved" apps on Macs as well as iPhones.
It seems like when you say "the iPhone is nothing but another phone" every Apple apologist in the world jumps all over you telling you that the iPhone is actually a full blown computer. But as soon as you want to do something crazy like, say, run more than one program at once, you hear "Well, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. .."
Absolutely correct. It's even more absurd when considering the iPod touch.
Why is it that 99% of the developer reaction I've seen has been enthusiastically positive, and yet the spin here is so negative?
For established Mac developers it's a great deal. Apple handles the distribution and payment processing, and they don't have to worry about competing with open source weenies. But hobbyists get shut out (apparently even if you try to pay Apple for a certificate, there's no guarantee they'll give you one), and end users get nickeled and dimed for apps that would have free equivalents in a competitive market.
When the competitive landscape in the cellphone world changes and the carriers just become dumb pipes, Apple will be the first to drop stupid restrictions
That would be nice, although I'm skeptical since lots of other AT&T phones don't have these kinds of restrictions.
(An interesting but unrelated thought: if open-source contributors are mostly professional programmers, what happens when the market for for-profit software dies?)
It never will. The large majority of professional programmers are not writing shrink-wrapped apps to be sold; they're writing custom code that never leaves their company. Even if software copyrights were abolished entirely, there would still be development jobs.
People's standards of living are higher - more software on the same budget - at the alleged cost of programming jobs. Think of FOSS as the WalMart of software.
Heh. That's pretty much accurate, and may give headaches to the economic liberals here. And "alleged" is key. Thought experiment: In a parallel world, free software never became popular; if somebody wants a website they have to pay thousands of dollars for HTTP servers, compilers, scripting tools, and databases. Is their demand for programmers higher or lower than in our world?
If they had AI that could run on fast computers, then they'd have AI that could run on slow computers, just slowly.
True. But fast computers may help quite a bit in developing AI. This simulation of 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses took 50 days to process one second of simulation-time. An interesting proof of concept, but not exactly ideal for experimentation; you get 7 tests a year. But increase the CPU power by 1000x, and now it only takes an hour to simulate a second and you get to do a lot more tweaking.
But any argument for the implementation of the FairTax, that does not address the issue of eliminating the thousands of jobs in the accounting industry across the country caused by the elimination of federal income taxes, is not worth discussing.
We can pay them to dig and then refill holes, and be no worse off than before. Or we can let them get new jobs actually doing something productive, just like the millions of past workers whose prior jobs were rendered obsolete.
The thing in Iraq doesn't seem to be about much other than oil, as usual?
Pretty much, but our economies run on oil, so ensuring its availability is vital to protecting our standard of living and quality of life. That's not to say that what we're doing in Iraq is conducive to that goal, and certainly it should be a top priority to reduce our dependence (see sig), but as it stands now , "for oil" is a pretty good motivation to do something.
Predictions like this have been made in past, and not even come close. This one is no different.
The difference is that in 20 years we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
The bottom line is that humans process some information in a non-representational way, while computers must operate representationally.
What prevents a computer from emulating this "non-representational" processing? Or is the human brain not subject to the laws of physics?
we aren't even close to the processing power of the human brain.
We aren't that far off. Estimates for the computational power of the human brain are around 10**16 operations per second. Supercomputers today do roughly 10**14, and Moore's Law increases the exponent by 1 every 5 years. Even if we have to simulate the brain's neurons by brute force and the simulation has 99% overhead, we'll be there in 20 years. (Assuming Moore's Law doesn't hit physical limits).
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
a single person is just not worth over a million bucks a year
I might even expect my cost to drop, considering that I'm currently subsidizing the heavy users.
Good one. Wait, are you actually serious?
I support it because the new pricing scheme more accurately aligns "price" with "resources consumed".
Do you have any idea what the marginal cost of bandwidth is? Every estimate I've seen is under under 10 cents per GB. I'd have no problem paying that, but the proposals here are orders of magnitude more, which would make the price *less* aligned with resources used. This is a monopolistic money grab made possible by lack of competition, not an economically efficient pricing system.
I think iPhones are a bit more constrained in some ways, it's a portable computer, but a handset platform like that doesn't necessarily have hardware preemptive multitasking to assure that the device can recover from an errant program.
It's running a Darwin kernel, so it certainly has preemptive multitasking and memory protection. In my limited experience writing iPhone apps, if you stomp on an invalid memory location the app just dies and it goes back to the main screen
If higher level programming languages are really "more productive" than low level programming languages, then why aren't you advocating teaching the highest-level programming languages like Python (which is almost pseudo-code), or Lisp?
That's exactly what I advocate. Preferably something like Python instead of Lisp; "pure" functional languages often make hard things easy but easy things hard.
Are you actually disagreeing that Python is more productive than C?
First, you defeat your point to an extent by arguing for the use of a language-independent concept (map/functional programming) in an argument for knowing the strengths of a particular language.
The lack of first-class functions/methods in Java makes functional-style programming unnecessarily difficult.
Second, some of the least readable and understandable code I've seen out there is map statements. They simply cannot be parsed in any linguistically easy way and can't be read quickly by any person who hasn't spent a long time using map.
newvalues = map(lambda x: x+2, values) vs newvalues = [] for v in values:
newvalues.append(v+2)
The map is shorter, less cluttered, has less potential for bugs, and ultimately easier to understand once you understand what map and lambda do. Which shouldn't take a long time for a competent programmer.
(Yes, Python's list comprehensions would be even better here).
I've said this before here, but my experience with "free" DVD ripping/re-encoding software has totally changed my mind about the whole "free and open" software movement.
That's a really bad category to be drawing conclusions from. Thanks to idiotic IP laws, DVD rippers are essentially illegal and can't be produced by established (and therefore sue-able) entities like the Apache or Python organizations, nor included in Linux distributions by default. Although FWIW Handbrake is an excellent open source ripper.
That might actually be clever. They could have been looking for the *lack* of a confused reaction as an indication that you had prepared fabrications in advance.
$80 per household spent on health care will give you a much greater ROI than 80$ spent on TVs.
That is far from clear. There are indications that the marginal value of health care spending is roughly zero. (On the other hand, research might be more productive).
But that's only if the return you're looking for is public welfare and not corporate enrichment.
but what if you value the environment, or equality, or some other parameter that goes beyond price for items? Was 2007 still a great year?
Environment: hybrids becoming much more popular, increasing support for carbon taxes and nuclear power (which unlike Kyoto might actually work) CFLs and energy-efficient computers taking off, so not that bad overall. Equality: the "price for items" that you dismiss is actually a key indicator. What percentage of the population can afford an HDTV now as compared to 5 years ago?
Speeding on anything but the highway is largely useless, and always dangerous. One spot maybe two is only 10 seconds you saved. On the highway it can add up to 15-20 minutes worth, but with regular traffic, with lights it's almost never worth it.
True *if* the lights are calibrated well. There's a couple around me where when the first one turns green, if you drive at the limit you'll arrive at the next just when it turns red, and it's a long cycle. Unfortunately, speeding there pays off.
Re:I have one, thinking about selling it
on
Where are Wii?
·
· Score: 1
I didn't want to screw anyone, so I put it up there for retail.
There's a good change you sold it to a scalper who's going to mark it up and resell it. There's nothing wrong with charging what buyers are willing to pay; in fact doing so helps get products to those who value them most. If that makes you feel guilty you can always donate your "profits" to charity.
The GPL spirit has always been against that and is more I share so you share.
The GPL has always supported private modifications without requiring providing the source. In fact the FSF criticized the inital version of Apple's open source license because it required publishing private changes.
Slashdot Mirror
DRM is about copy-protection.
That's what's said publicly, but really it's about control. Consider DVD region coding; that has nothing to do with copy protection, it's just enforcing market segmentation.
How could a serious hardware and OS vendor support and maintain a platform that consists of bit of code here and there, and apps over which they have no control and zero insight?
Yeah, I'd hate it if my Macs would just run programs that I got from anywhere.
I think many of us don't want another Windows hell.
"Windows hell" and "only vendor-approved applications can run" is a false dichotomy.
Most people won't buy the iPhone because they need a new toy that may or may not work, but because they need all the functionality and usefulness the iPhone provides. Do you see what I mean?
Honestly, no. Defenders of Apple's stranglehold on iPhone development seem to use self-contradictory arguments:
- Customers buy iPhones because they want a phone that works every time, and have no desire to install software that might destabilize it.
- If there's any way to run non-Apple-approved apps, these same users will be constantly downloading stuff from dodgy Elbonian sites and getting infected with viruses and malware.
Apple does not care what geeks want. Ever since the "No wireless, less space than a Nomad" days, Apple has been mostly ignoring the geek community
That's certainly true if you look at their public messages, but then we don't care about marketing, right? If you look at what they actually do, Apple directs quite a bit of resources toward geeks. OS X ships with bash, Apache, ssh, Perl, Python, and Ruby out of the box; Leopard even adds Ruby on Rails and numpy and wxPython. Xcode is included with every copy of the OS, and there are no restrictions on what kind of Mac apps you can create. That's why their strict control over iPhone development is so disappointing; it's not business as usual.
The really disturbing part is that every alleged benefit to the user from Apple's control applies equally well if not more so to OS X apps; for example you're more likely to have sensitive financial information on your Mac than your iPhone. By Apple's current logic, we should only be able to run "approved" apps on Macs as well as iPhones.
It seems like when you say "the iPhone is nothing but another phone" every Apple apologist in the world jumps all over you telling you that the iPhone is actually a full blown computer. But as soon as you want to do something crazy like, say, run more than one program at once, you hear "Well, the iPhone is first and foremost a phone. . ."
Absolutely correct. It's even more absurd when considering the iPod touch.
Why is it that 99% of the developer reaction I've seen has been enthusiastically positive, and yet the spin here is so negative?
For established Mac developers it's a great deal. Apple handles the distribution and payment processing, and they don't have to worry about competing with open source weenies. But hobbyists get shut out (apparently even if you try to pay Apple for a certificate, there's no guarantee they'll give you one), and end users get nickeled and dimed for apps that would have free equivalents in a competitive market.
When the competitive landscape in the cellphone world changes and the carriers just become dumb pipes, Apple will be the first to drop stupid restrictions
That would be nice, although I'm skeptical since lots of other AT&T phones don't have these kinds of restrictions.
(An interesting but unrelated thought: if open-source contributors are mostly professional programmers, what happens when the market for for-profit software dies?)
It never will. The large majority of professional programmers are not writing shrink-wrapped apps to be sold; they're writing custom code that never leaves their company. Even if software copyrights were abolished entirely, there would still be development jobs.
People's standards of living are higher - more software on the same budget - at the alleged cost of programming jobs. Think of FOSS as the WalMart of software.
Heh. That's pretty much accurate, and may give headaches to the economic liberals here. And "alleged" is key. Thought experiment: In a parallel world, free software never became popular; if somebody wants a website they have to pay thousands of dollars for HTTP servers, compilers, scripting tools, and databases. Is their demand for programmers higher or lower than in our world?
If they had AI that could run on fast computers, then they'd have AI that could run on slow computers, just slowly.
True. But fast computers may help quite a bit in developing AI. This simulation of 100 billion neurons and a quadrillion synapses took 50 days to process one second of simulation-time. An interesting proof of concept, but not exactly ideal for experimentation; you get 7 tests a year. But increase the CPU power by 1000x, and now it only takes an hour to simulate a second and you get to do a lot more tweaking.
But any argument for the implementation of the FairTax, that does not address the issue of eliminating the thousands of jobs in the accounting industry across the country caused by the elimination of federal income taxes, is not worth discussing.
We can pay them to dig and then refill holes, and be no worse off than before. Or we can let them get new jobs actually doing something productive, just like the millions of past workers whose prior jobs were rendered obsolete.
The thing in Iraq doesn't seem to be about much other than oil, as usual?
Pretty much, but our economies run on oil, so ensuring its availability is vital to protecting our standard of living and quality of life. That's not to say that what we're doing in Iraq is conducive to that goal, and certainly it should be a top priority to reduce our dependence (see sig), but as it stands now , "for oil" is a pretty good motivation to do something.
Predictions like this have been made in past, and not even come close. This one is no different.
The difference is that in 20 years we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
The bottom line is that humans process some information in a non-representational way, while computers must operate representationally.
What prevents a computer from emulating this "non-representational" processing? Or is the human brain not subject to the laws of physics?
we aren't even close to the processing power of the human brain.
We aren't that far off. Estimates for the computational power of the human brain are around 10**16 operations per second. Supercomputers today do roughly 10**14, and Moore's Law increases the exponent by 1 every 5 years. Even if we have to simulate the brain's neurons by brute force and the simulation has 99% overhead, we'll be there in 20 years. (Assuming Moore's Law doesn't hit physical limits).
a single person is just not worth over a million bucks a year
As an Apple shareholder, I disagree.
I might even expect my cost to drop, considering that I'm currently subsidizing the heavy users.
Good one. Wait, are you actually serious?
I support it because the new pricing scheme more accurately aligns "price" with "resources consumed".
Do you have any idea what the marginal cost of bandwidth is? Every estimate I've seen is under under 10 cents per GB. I'd have no problem paying that, but the proposals here are orders of magnitude more, which would make the price *less* aligned with resources used. This is a monopolistic money grab made possible by lack of competition, not an economically efficient pricing system.
I think iPhones are a bit more constrained in some ways, it's a portable computer, but a handset platform like that doesn't necessarily have hardware preemptive multitasking to assure that the device can recover from an errant program.
It's running a Darwin kernel, so it certainly has preemptive multitasking and memory protection. In my limited experience writing iPhone apps, if you stomp on an invalid memory location the app just dies and it goes back to the main screen
Then use a different language that supports your pet features.
Exactly. Although having functions as first-class values isn't exactly a "pet" feature; even C does it via function pointers.
First-class functions are a procedural hack and don't really belong in a truly OO design in the first place.
Huh? Functions as objects work quite well in Python, Ruby, Javascript, and plenty of other OO languages. This sounds like a blub argument.
I find the second block to read much more clearly
Each individual fragment may be easier to read, but the actual *purpose* of the code is obscured because of the unnecessary details.
if the guy who wrote it got hit by a bus I wouldn't need to make sure the next guy knew what map and lambda did.
Don't hire bad programmers.
If higher level programming languages are really "more productive" than low level programming languages, then why aren't you advocating teaching the highest-level programming languages like Python (which is almost pseudo-code), or Lisp?
That's exactly what I advocate. Preferably something like Python instead of Lisp; "pure" functional languages often make hard things easy but easy things hard.
Are you actually disagreeing that Python is more productive than C?
First, you defeat your point to an extent by arguing for the use of a language-independent concept (map/functional programming) in an argument for knowing the strengths of a particular language.
The lack of first-class functions/methods in Java makes functional-style programming unnecessarily difficult.
Second, some of the least readable and understandable code I've seen out there is map statements. They simply cannot be parsed in any linguistically easy way and can't be read quickly by any person who hasn't spent a long time using map.
newvalues = map(lambda x: x+2, values)
vs
newvalues = []
for v in values:
newvalues.append(v+2)
The map is shorter, less cluttered, has less potential for bugs, and ultimately easier to understand once you understand what map and lambda do. Which shouldn't take a long time for a competent programmer.
(Yes, Python's list comprehensions would be even better here).
I've said this before here, but my experience with "free" DVD ripping/re-encoding software has totally changed my mind about the whole "free and open" software movement.
That's a really bad category to be drawing conclusions from. Thanks to idiotic IP laws, DVD rippers are essentially illegal and can't be produced by established (and therefore sue-able) entities like the Apache or Python organizations, nor included in Linux distributions by default. Although FWIW Handbrake is an excellent open source ripper.
"Which one of you wasn't born in the US?"
That might actually be clever. They could have been looking for the *lack* of a confused reaction as an indication that you had prepared fabrications in advance.
$80 per household spent on health care will give you a much greater ROI than 80$ spent on TVs.
That is far from clear. There are indications that the marginal value of health care spending is roughly zero. (On the other hand, research might be more productive).
But that's only if the return you're looking for is public welfare and not corporate enrichment.
People actually do enjoy watching TV.
but what if you value the environment, or equality, or some other parameter that goes beyond price for items? Was 2007 still a great year?
Environment: hybrids becoming much more popular, increasing support for carbon taxes and nuclear power (which unlike Kyoto might actually work) CFLs and energy-efficient computers taking off, so not that bad overall. Equality: the "price for items" that you dismiss is actually a key indicator. What percentage of the population can afford an HDTV now as compared to 5 years ago?
Speeding on anything but the highway is largely useless, and always dangerous. One spot maybe two is only 10 seconds you saved. On the highway it can add up to 15-20 minutes worth, but with regular traffic, with lights it's almost never worth it.
True *if* the lights are calibrated well. There's a couple around me where when the first one turns green, if you drive at the limit you'll arrive at the next just when it turns red, and it's a long cycle. Unfortunately, speeding there pays off.
I didn't want to screw anyone, so I put it up there for retail.
There's a good change you sold it to a scalper who's going to mark it up and resell it. There's nothing wrong with charging what buyers are willing to pay; in fact doing so helps get products to those who value them most. If that makes you feel guilty you can always donate your "profits" to charity.
Some of his views I don't agree with, such as that we should eliminate the Department of Education or some of the other highly neccessary departments
I don't know, was education significantly worse before 1980?
but on the whole I think we need to return to the Constitution as the governing body of our nation.
It's certainly worth a shot.
The GPL spirit has always been against that and is more I share so you share.
The GPL has always supported private modifications without requiring providing the source. In fact the FSF criticized the inital version of Apple's open source license because it required publishing private changes.