That's getting progressively harder as Apple adds more "security" to iPhone updates. Also Apple's official position is that jailbreakers are criminals. It's looking like my next phone will be running Android.
That is far from clear. It's obviously hard to determine the counterfactual numbers, but there are estimates that FDA testing delays kill many more people than they save. And in the case of a terminal illness like ALS, there's a substantially reduced downside if the treatment turns out to be harmful so it makes sense to be more aggressive.
How many lives are an acceptable sacrifice for "cheap" and "clean" power?
More than zero, which is the number of deaths due to nuclear power accidents in the US to date.
What is your solution? Presumably it starts with the immediate decommissioning of all existing nuclear plants worldwide, since if current designs are too dangerous it must be an absolute miracle that we've survived for decades with designs from the 50s. Do we keep using coal, which by any objective standard is far worse than nuclear power? Should we continue to have our economy dependent on the actions of theocrats of questionable sanity in the middle of terrorist-infested hellholes? Or do you think we're voluntarily going to give up our Xboxes and suburban homes and Live in Harmony with Gaia?
It's easy to minimize any technological change. When it's first invented in year X: "that's useless, it's too expensive/impractical/complex for normal people". In year X+n when it's become cheap and practical: "so what, we had that back in X".
None of this seems incredible or revolutionary because Star Trek and Popular Science taught us to expect more. We want our home robots, our flying cars, our pie-in-the-sky implausible and uneconomic dreams because that's what we were promised as children.
Exactly right. We can imagine far more today than we could 50 or 200 years ago. In 1700, hardly anyone would have ever conceived of an electric light bulb. Before the transistor, the idea of a computer in every home was ludicrous. Today, we can see that Mars colonies and true artificial intelligence and vastly improved health are possible in principle. We're now in a phase of more practical than theoretical advancements, and I believe that the notion that progress is slower is primarily because we can see more clearly where we're going.
Maybe if that party would STFU we might have more consumer rights in the U.S. and we might have more control over our own products.
Yeah, shame about those Republican presidents who signed the DMCA and think that $2 million is an appropriate fine for sharing a few dozen songs. Oh wait.
The Dragon book, which is pretty much the standard CS book on compilers, defines strongly typed as "a language where type errors cannot occur at runtime". With this definition, Python is certainly not strongly typed.
Java may not be fun or sexy, but on the other hand it is intended to be strict to make it easy to maintain in the long run.
Most of Java's annoying verbosity is not due to its strictness. It could add closures, real method objects, collection literals, properties, and map/filter without giving up strong static typing.
And if you're using a computer for mission critical work you probably don't want to install unnecessary software on it either. That's not a justification for the manufacturer to preemptively make that decision for you.
There are between 8-9 million U.S. citizens who Want health insurance, but cannot afford it. Rather than punish the other ~290 million by forcing them all into an Uncle Sam monopoly with rampant rationing and loss of privacy/control, I think a better solution is simply to take the existing medicare program and extend it to include the 8 milion poor persons.
I agree. It seems like many on the left are opposed to direct welfare, often because they think that would reduce public support. So instead we get these convoluted schemes that go far out of the way to hide the welfare component, which typically makes them less efficient. (For example, retired investment bankers get bigger Social Security checks than schoolteachers). "Community rating" and long mandatory coverage lists are just hidden subsidies from the healthy to the sick, when they should really go from the rich to the poor.
Separately, I'd like to get rid of the idiotic system of tying health insurance to employment; which could mostly be done by stopping subsidizing employer-provided insurance at the expense of individual coverage.
Apple has always known this, but it had no choice with the iTMS to start with - they needed the product to sell, and the music industry would not give it to them without the DRM.
Actually Apple probably liked the DRM in the beginning. It gave them lock-in with iPods by threatening customers with the loss of their purchased music if they switched to a different player. That in turn gave them near-monopsony power with the labels, who realized too late that they had shot themselves in the foot yet again. That's why they tried to pull stuff like letting Amazon sell DRM-free music while still requiring it for iTunes. (Yet another example of how DRM is much more about control than piracy). Once Apple had established dominance, it made sense to drop DRM so that their products would be more appealing to customers.
But your praise for the "hack and pirate" community ignores the fact that the iPhone is a superbly designed device. The "hacked" version would be OpenMoko, and they aren't doing as well.
OpenMoko doesn't suck because it can run arbitrary apps; it sucks because the user interface is awful. An iPhone with a switch buried in the settings app to allow unsigned/unapproved apps (most Cydia apps are in fact signed) wouldn't make its design any worse.
Also... just wait until malware applications from the 3rd party Application Store begin to ship. It won't take long for rootkits to disable the "return to factory conditions" feature and then Apple stores around the country will need to re-flash the ROMs on the "broken phones" for thousands of "hack and pirate" customers.
Why hasn't this happened on the many phones that can run unapproved apps?
No, sir. There are important distinctions from "Freedom to use a device how it's designed" and the "hack and pirate" method. For what it's worth... Microsoft sells the "hack and pirate" method and it's set the computer world back 25 years in terms of security and usability.
What does that mean? You want the OS or hardware vendor to be able to decide what you can do, and trust that they'll do so responsibly? That gets a bigger "no sir" from me.
A could always lead to a result of B, but A could be extremely rare and B could be very common and almost always caused by non-A events. For example I'd expect the rate of lethal shark attacks in a state to be uncorrelated with the overall death rate.
Sure, the source is free...but the dev kit is not ($99 I think?) nor is the Mac you are required to own to run the dev kit at all. Even if you gave the app away, this point would still stand.
Er, what open source software doesn't require you to own anything else in order to run or modify it?
Apple controls it, so there's little reason to believe someone else improving it a bit and publishing it again would be allowed to
Anyone can improve it and publish their new version. Probably not on the app store, but that doesn't matter. If I sell open source software on my website, I have no obligation to list your modified version alongside mine.
This application of the GPL does not force Apple to make the dev kit "free", the iPhone OS "free", or development on the iPhone "free". In fact if it's actually any good it promotes the closed nature of the iPhone
That's not at all clear. Maybe users will see that the source code is freely available and then start asking intelligent questions about why Apple is preventing them from experimenting with it on their own hardware.
From the GPL "You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee." You're charging a fee for something else.
You can charge whatever you want. RMS was charging people $150 for copies of Emacs, which is far more than the cost of the "physical act" of copying.
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable." Notice that last part, "installation of the executable?"
Notice the penultimate part, "scripts to control". That would be the Xcode project files, which he's including.
So, YOU have to give me the right to put an app in the App Store (you can't unless you're Apple) or the right to use the iPhone SDK (you can't unless you're Apple).
No. If that were the case, there could be no GPL software for OS X or Windows. It's your responsibility to get your build environment set up, and the GPL makes no promises that that will be free or easy.
I do understand why some people are uneasy about this; in the case of the iPhone there's a completely artificial barrier to development, as opposed to the inherent "barriers" of needing access to a computer and compiler and so forth, but as far as I can tell that makes no difference for the GPL.
The TiVo situation is different is because TiVo prevents you from running custom code period. Apple charging $100 to licence the platform is no different to Microsoft charging money for Windows and having GPL apps run on it.
It's a tricky situation. What if TiVo distributes GPL3 code on their locked down boxes, provides the source, and offers to sell you an unlocked unit for $1 million?
What you do is have the bailouts...and make the top 1% pay for them.
The effect of that would be a massive wealth transfer from the owners of well-run companies (e.g. Apple and Google) to the owners of companies that were horribly run. That doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
They're a business. They are allowed to be anti-competitive.
And we're allowed to say that sucks for developers and users. And fanboys like you are allowed to mindlessly defend everything Apple does. Everybody wins.
They don't want to be a vendor of a commodity, where all all perform to a lowest common denominator. Neither do iPhone users want that.
I'm glad you took the time to survey all iPhone owners to determine that they would be grievously offended by apps using the documented API of UIWebView. This is especially amusing since the party line before the SDK came out was that web apps were all anybody needed and those evil hackers trying to write native apps were going to bring down the cell network. But I forgot, we've always been at war with Eastasia.
This guy did it because he was too lazy to learn the official iPhone API. Too bad. Good developers have more sense.
Good developers don't needlessly tie themselves to a single platform.
The mistake wasn't in rejecting your app, it was in approving any other apps that used PhoneGap in the first place.
What is your reasoning for this? The guidelines say "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)". PhoneGap apps should pass on both counts: they don't "download" any code because the HTML and Javascript is all local (assuming that online mode is disabled), and the Javascript is interpreted only by the published UIWebView API.
Massively offtopic, but killing off a large precentage of the population may or may not be good for the survivors (I very much suspect not); it is definitely bad for the victims. And curing aging doesn't imply immortality, if overpopulation would be an insurmountable problem there's always the Logan's Run scenario. The idea is to eliminate the tremendous costs in both dollars and happiness caused by the deterioration of health due to aging.
It would only be capricious of Apple if they have no reason for rejecting PhoneGap apps. Clearly they DO have reasons.
The guy in the alley wearing a tinfoil hat and babbling about aliens has reasons too; the question is whether they are legitimate. Of the potential reasons in the article, #1 and #2 appear to be factually incorrect, and #3 (not wanting cross-platform apps) is blatantly anticompetitive and hostile to both developers and users. Unfortunately it's also the most likely given their refusal to explain in any detail; it's not something they would want to publicly admit. Good thing they have plenty of fanboys to give them a pass.
I have an iPhone app successfully published, and that doesn't change that fact that Apple's actions in this case are complete BS.
This guy ignores the reasons stated for rejection
The reasons are incoherent. PhoneGap is not an "external API" any more than any other piece of open source code is. Maybe you don't care as long as your apps get approved, but I find it ridiculous and harmful to the platform, speaking as both an iPhone user and developer.
If you'd spent more time writing the application, and less time submitting inferior crap
Yeah, what an idiot he is for trying to use existing working code rather than reinventing the wheel. Apple is blatantly disregarding their own rules with the PhoneGap rejections. It may be their right to act in such a capricious manner; it's also our right to call them on it.
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That's getting progressively harder as Apple adds more "security" to iPhone updates. Also Apple's official position is that jailbreakers are criminals. It's looking like my next phone will be running Android.
No. For the same reason that paying people to dig holes and refill them isn't a useful solution to unemployment.
That is far from clear. It's obviously hard to determine the counterfactual numbers, but there are estimates that FDA testing delays kill many more people than they save. And in the case of a terminal illness like ALS, there's a substantially reduced downside if the treatment turns out to be harmful so it makes sense to be more aggressive.
How many lives are an acceptable sacrifice for "cheap" and "clean" power?
More than zero, which is the number of deaths due to nuclear power accidents in the US to date.
What is your solution? Presumably it starts with the immediate decommissioning of all existing nuclear plants worldwide, since if current designs are too dangerous it must be an absolute miracle that we've survived for decades with designs from the 50s. Do we keep using coal, which by any objective standard is far worse than nuclear power? Should we continue to have our economy dependent on the actions of theocrats of questionable sanity in the middle of terrorist-infested hellholes? Or do you think we're voluntarily going to give up our Xboxes and suburban homes and Live in Harmony with Gaia?
It's easy to minimize any technological change. When it's first invented in year X: "that's useless, it's too expensive/impractical/complex for normal people". In year X+n when it's become cheap and practical: "so what, we had that back in X".
+1 virtual mod.
Exactly right. We can imagine far more today than we could 50 or 200 years ago. In 1700, hardly anyone would have ever conceived of an electric light bulb. Before the transistor, the idea of a computer in every home was ludicrous. Today, we can see that Mars colonies and true artificial intelligence and vastly improved health are possible in principle. We're now in a phase of more practical than theoretical advancements, and I believe that the notion that progress is slower is primarily because we can see more clearly where we're going.
Maybe if that party would STFU we might have more consumer rights in the U.S. and we might have more control over our own products.
Yeah, shame about those Republican presidents who signed the DMCA and think that $2 million is an appropriate fine for sharing a few dozen songs. Oh wait.
The Dragon book, which is pretty much the standard CS book on compilers, defines strongly typed as "a language where type errors cannot occur at runtime". With this definition, Python is certainly not strongly typed.
Neither is Java.
Java may not be fun or sexy, but on the other hand it is intended to be strict to make it easy to maintain in the long run.
Most of Java's annoying verbosity is not due to its strictness. It could add closures, real method objects, collection literals, properties, and map/filter without giving up strong static typing.
And if you're using a computer for mission critical work you probably don't want to install unnecessary software on it either. That's not a justification for the manufacturer to preemptively make that decision for you.
There are between 8-9 million U.S. citizens who Want health insurance, but cannot afford it. Rather than punish the other ~290 million by forcing them all into an Uncle Sam monopoly with rampant rationing and loss of privacy/control, I think a better solution is simply to take the existing medicare program and extend it to include the 8 milion poor persons.
I agree. It seems like many on the left are opposed to direct welfare, often because they think that would reduce public support. So instead we get these convoluted schemes that go far out of the way to hide the welfare component, which typically makes them less efficient. (For example, retired investment bankers get bigger Social Security checks than schoolteachers). "Community rating" and long mandatory coverage lists are just hidden subsidies from the healthy to the sick, when they should really go from the rich to the poor.
Separately, I'd like to get rid of the idiotic system of tying health insurance to employment; which could mostly be done by stopping subsidizing employer-provided insurance at the expense of individual coverage.
Apple has always known this, but it had no choice with the iTMS to start with - they needed the product to sell, and the music industry would not give it to them without the DRM.
Actually Apple probably liked the DRM in the beginning. It gave them lock-in with iPods by threatening customers with the loss of their purchased music if they switched to a different player. That in turn gave them near-monopsony power with the labels, who realized too late that they had shot themselves in the foot yet again. That's why they tried to pull stuff like letting Amazon sell DRM-free music while still requiring it for iTunes. (Yet another example of how DRM is much more about control than piracy). Once Apple had established dominance, it made sense to drop DRM so that their products would be more appealing to customers.
But your praise for the "hack and pirate" community ignores the fact that the iPhone is a superbly designed device. The "hacked" version would be OpenMoko, and they aren't doing as well.
OpenMoko doesn't suck because it can run arbitrary apps; it sucks because the user interface is awful. An iPhone with a switch buried in the settings app to allow unsigned/unapproved apps (most Cydia apps are in fact signed) wouldn't make its design any worse.
Also... just wait until malware applications from the 3rd party Application Store begin to ship. It won't take long for rootkits to disable the "return to factory conditions" feature and then Apple stores around the country will need to re-flash the ROMs on the "broken phones" for thousands of "hack and pirate" customers.
Why hasn't this happened on the many phones that can run unapproved apps?
No, sir. There are important distinctions from "Freedom to use a device how it's designed" and the "hack and pirate" method. For what it's worth... Microsoft sells the "hack and pirate" method and it's set the computer world back 25 years in terms of security and usability.
What does that mean? You want the OS or hardware vendor to be able to decide what you can do, and trust that they'll do so responsibly? That gets a bigger "no sir" from me.
Anyone with a modern cable or DSL connection that ranges in the 5-6mbit range isn't going to see this lag you speak of.
Latency, not bandwidth.
A could always lead to a result of B, but A could be extremely rare and B could be very common and almost always caused by non-A events. For example I'd expect the rate of lethal shark attacks in a state to be uncorrelated with the overall death rate.
Er, what open source software doesn't require you to own anything else in order to run or modify it?
Anyone can improve it and publish their new version. Probably not on the app store, but that doesn't matter. If I sell open source software on my website, I have no obligation to list your modified version alongside mine.
That's not at all clear. Maybe users will see that the source code is freely available and then start asking intelligent questions about why Apple is preventing them from experimenting with it on their own hardware.
You can charge whatever you want. RMS was charging people $150 for copies of Emacs, which is far more than the cost of the "physical act" of copying.
Notice the penultimate part, "scripts to control". That would be the Xcode project files, which he's including.
No. If that were the case, there could be no GPL software for OS X or Windows. It's your responsibility to get your build environment set up, and the GPL makes no promises that that will be free or easy.
I do understand why some people are uneasy about this; in the case of the iPhone there's a completely artificial barrier to development, as opposed to the inherent "barriers" of needing access to a computer and compiler and so forth, but as far as I can tell that makes no difference for the GPL.
It's a tricky situation. What if TiVo distributes GPL3 code on their locked down boxes, provides the source, and offers to sell you an unlocked unit for $1 million?
What you do is have the bailouts...and make the top 1% pay for them.
The effect of that would be a massive wealth transfer from the owners of well-run companies (e.g. Apple and Google) to the owners of companies that were horribly run. That doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
They're a business. They are allowed to be anti-competitive.
And we're allowed to say that sucks for developers and users. And fanboys like you are allowed to mindlessly defend everything Apple does. Everybody wins.
They don't want to be a vendor of a commodity, where all all perform to a lowest common denominator. Neither do iPhone users want that.
I'm glad you took the time to survey all iPhone owners to determine that they would be grievously offended by apps using the documented API of UIWebView. This is especially amusing since the party line before the SDK came out was that web apps were all anybody needed and those evil hackers trying to write native apps were going to bring down the cell network. But I forgot, we've always been at war with Eastasia.
This guy did it because he was too lazy to learn the official iPhone API. Too bad. Good developers have more sense.
Good developers don't needlessly tie themselves to a single platform.
The mistake wasn't in rejecting your app, it was in approving any other apps that used PhoneGap in the first place.
What is your reasoning for this? The guidelines say "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)". PhoneGap apps should pass on both counts: they don't "download" any code because the HTML and Javascript is all local (assuming that online mode is disabled), and the Javascript is interpreted only by the published UIWebView API.
Massively offtopic, but killing off a large precentage of the population may or may not be good for the survivors (I very much suspect not); it is definitely bad for the victims. And curing aging doesn't imply immortality, if overpopulation would be an insurmountable problem there's always the Logan's Run scenario. The idea is to eliminate the tremendous costs in both dollars and happiness caused by the deterioration of health due to aging.
It would only be capricious of Apple if they have no reason for rejecting PhoneGap apps. Clearly they DO have reasons.
The guy in the alley wearing a tinfoil hat and babbling about aliens has reasons too; the question is whether they are legitimate. Of the potential reasons in the article, #1 and #2 appear to be factually incorrect, and #3 (not wanting cross-platform apps) is blatantly anticompetitive and hostile to both developers and users. Unfortunately it's also the most likely given their refusal to explain in any detail; it's not something they would want to publicly admit. Good thing they have plenty of fanboys to give them a pass.
I have an iPhone app successfully published, and that doesn't change that fact that Apple's actions in this case are complete BS.
This guy ignores the reasons stated for rejection
The reasons are incoherent. PhoneGap is not an "external API" any more than any other piece of open source code is. Maybe you don't care as long as your apps get approved, but I find it ridiculous and harmful to the platform, speaking as both an iPhone user and developer.
If you'd spent more time writing the application, and less time submitting inferior crap
Yeah, what an idiot he is for trying to use existing working code rather than reinventing the wheel. Apple is blatantly disregarding their own rules with the PhoneGap rejections. It may be their right to act in such a capricious manner; it's also our right to call them on it.