Technically, the e2fsck isn't even needed. I'm fairly sure the tune2fs can be done on a mounted filesystem, which means you can run that, then edit fstab so the fs mounts as ext4, then reboot -- much more convenient to do all filesystems (including root) like that. Then, each write is going to take advantage of the new tweaks, so you convert slowly, instead of all at once.
I prefer your way, but then, I don't have many machines that I can't take down for a few hours if I need to.
I'm not seeing FreeBSD or Solaris getting btrfs in the first place. Barring some serious efforts on the part of the btrfs team, this just isn't going to happen -- btrfs, being in Linux, would be GPL'd.
But it is a replacement in that I would rather be using Linux than either FreeBSD or Solaris, so if btrfs can do what ZFS does, maybe even improve on it a little, I'm going to be very, very happy.
It is, however, the easiest way to describe what the point of having both btrfs and ext4 is. Ext4 is actually a simple, natural progression from ext3, and you can upgrade from ext3 to ext4, in-place, with no surprises and expect everything to work exactly as it always has, only better. Btrfs is at least modeled on ZFS (and Reiser4) and isn't stable yet -- and even when it is, the biggest draw is going to be people who really want ZFS, but also want Linux. For anyone currently using ext4, I doubt it's going to be that compelling of an upgrade, though again, it's likely to be simple, natural, in-place, and with few surprises.
The big things that XFS always had just built in were:
Extended attributes, including ACLs. Even ext3 has these now, though you at least need to set the mount options properly (and maybe even tune the fs itself), but XFS just had them built in.
Lazy allocation / Allocate on flush. Here, XFS wins with files of any size. Essentially, the idea is that you let stuff buffer until you have to write, either from memory pressure or from a sync() call (or fsync, really), then you write a bunch of stuff all at once. You delay allocating them until that final flush -- that is, you allocate them in terms of what df shows, but you don't decide where they go until then. This helps a lot with fragmentation, and probably even with overall write performance. Where you run into trouble is when you have something really aggressive, like Reiser4, where it'll happily buffer hundreds of megabytes, gigabytes even, over several hours, until something forces a write -- for one, unless you handle fsync specially, it's going to really, really suck.
My favorite hack about lazy allocation, which I've never been able to confirm whether or not this is actually done, is the idea that if you were to create a tempfile, then delete it before anything's flushed, you'd never touch the disk. There are all kinds of tweaks where we put things on a tmpfs -- I know Ubuntu does it for/dev,/var/run, and/var/lock, for instance, and I know people sometimes put stuff in/tmp -- but none of these things would technically be required in that case. Make it more aggressive, and you have the possibility of unpacking a tarball, compiling, installing, then nuking the tarball and compilation directory, without anything except the actual binaries ever touching the disk.
Journaling. Back in the day, there were really only two filesystems in the game for this: XFS and ReiserFS. (I might be forgetting about JFS, but that's because I don't really know when that became viable.) ReiserFS is still one of the best with small files, which is probably why you're thinking you'd use XFS for larger filesystems.
Snapshot support. You could (in a very temporary way) force XFS into a momentarily-consistent on-disk state, with all writes blocking, meaning you get a more consistent LVM snapshot.
Online growing -- I think ReiserFS did this, too, and I'm fairly sure ext2/3/4 do now. Not really useful unless you're running on top of something like LVM, but if you are, you could (in theory) shove a new disk into a hotplug system, add it to LVM as a new physical volume, grow your XFS device, and then grow the filesystem onto it. This would also be useful in an environment like Amazon EC2, if Amazon were to allow EBS (Elastic Block Storage) devices to be expanded online -- but even if they don't, you could probably do similar LVM or RAID hacks to accomplish the same thing.
Good at big IO and big files. Media, databases, anything where you've got large files that you need to have reliably fast IO to -- you can have guaranteed throughput, direct IO, etc. Uses extents for allocation, so the more contiguous your files are (and thus, the less fragmented), the less space and overhead you waste on allocation.
64-bit, with massive max sizes. By the time my filesystem gets to 8 terabytes, I'm not going to want to switch filesystems to make jump to 16.
Online defragmentation. Yes, yes, we know, Linux filesystems don't tend to get as fragmented. It can still be useful.
Rock-solid with most (if not all) of the above on IRIX, and I've heard it described as "They ported Linux to XFS, not the other way around."
I'll admit, I peeked at Wikipedia and was reminded of a few more things, including some that I never really cared about, but XFS is a pretty big, solid filesystem. Less than half of what I just listed is true for JFS, though a lot more have since become true for ext3, and I now see very little advantage to XFS over ext4. However, it has historically been bad at lots of metadata updates, which is what you see when working with lots of small files.
Ext4 is stable now, and was an easy upgrade from ext3, both in terms of development and in terms of converting your existing filesystems -- one command, and then just remount as ext4, no time-consuming and dangerous conversion needed.
BtrFS looks to be better than ext4 in every way except the above -- and I haven't been following it for awhile, so as far as I know, btrfs might be rock-solid stable by now.
Put another way, ext4 is a replacement for ext3, whereas btrfs is a replacement for zfs.
I did it for fun, just because newer Javascript Engines are fast enough to do complicated things. Real use could be:
Benchmarking of Javascript engines (how much time takes your Javascript engine to boot Linux ?). For this particular application, efficient handling of 32 bit signed and unsigned integers and of typed arrays is important.
Client side processing using an x86 library, for example for cryptographic purposes. For such application, the x86 emulator can be modified to provide an API to load x86 dynamic libraries and to provide a js-ctypes like API to call the C/C++ functions from javascript.
A more advanced version would allow to use old DOS PC software such as games.
Of these, I suppose the benchmark is the really useful part. I suppose it'd make a nice fallback for Google's Native Client, which seems like a much better approach for using an x86 library if you need it -- and after all, if you have an x86 library, it's probably portable to x86_64, ppc, arm, etc. Old DOS games are probably better handled by DOSbox, though I guess it would be cool if someone got that to work.
It is cool as a tech demo, and as a benchmark, but I don't really see it being useful.
My laptop has 1920x1200, and it's about a 15". Expensive, and not everyone can read it that small, but it works well for me.
Oh, and I have a second 1920x1200 monitor that I plug into it. I think I've just about hit my limit in terms of how much screen space makes a difference, but it does make a difference and I do notice.
It may well be ego and entitlement, but it's also comfort and (arguably) productivity.
And it's an incredibly minor expense to make your developers happy. How much do monitors cost these days? Mine cost something like $500, and it's a 24" 1920x1200. You're going to spend, what, at least $40,000/year on a developer, and you're not willing to spend $500 once to make them happy? That's a red flag for me.
Put another way: Am I actually more productive or even measurably more comfortable in a nice office chair than a folding chair? Probably not -- in fact, if I'm coding, I'm probably not going to notice or care unless it's dramatically uncomfortable. But if I come for an interview and your developers are sitting in folding chairs, I'm probably not coming back.
I don't find it that useful -- I often will bring my laptop somewhere and do some hacking, and I don't find it terribly unpleasant.
But I definitely agree with GP. No matter how small a productivity boost, if the developers love them that much, and they're that cheap, do it. It's like 1 gig of RAM vs 4 (or 4 vs 16 if you're doing anything with Oracle) -- yeah, I could probably do most of what I do now in 1 gig of RAM (less, if I tweaked my machine more aggressively), but even at Apple's worst prices, the upgrade to 4 is easily worth it just to make me happy.
I'm the same way. Not only do I find that for most casual use, I barely need virtual desktops at all -- browser + IM + terminals + a game all on-screen at once -- but for work, being able to glance over at docs, or at top, or at whatever else I was doing, is much better than having to bounce to another desktop and back.
Note that my use of "better" here is purely subjective. It may just be more pleasant, and not more productive at all, but "more pleasant" is more than enough reason to justify something as cheap as a monitor.
Aside from the "testing windows in all configurations" possibility (I'm not often a GUI programmer), it's definitely appealing to think that I could watch 4:3 or 16:9 movies fullscreen. Or, more practically (for work, anyway), I could put docs on the vertical screen, an editor (or several) on the square screen, and terminals/IM/other crap on the widescreen -- though I'm not sure what would be perfectly optimal, I definitely like the idea of a browser/docs/etc on the vertical screen.
That depends how your space is constrained. When my father got his first HDTV, he got one which was at least as tall as his old one, but ended up cutting away chunks of the cabinet it was in to make room for the sides.
After all, walls tend to be wider than they are tall.
I also don't mind the phenomenon with laptops, either -- in this case, portability matters, and my laptop is significantly easier to deal with being wider and shorter than it would be if it was closer to a square.
It certainly seems like, at least for English text (and anything else ltr or rtl instead of vertical), the optimal size for a column is relatively narrow. You want it to be wide enough that you don't have to scroll too much, but multiple studies have shown that it's easier to read a narrow column than a wide column.
I tend to like using just a little more than half of a single monitor for my web browser. Nice balance between fullscreen (unreadable) and narrow enough that crappy layouts start to scroll.
Half-Life was the first game to have the cutscenes be continuous with the gameplay (there's no break, and there's no shift in view), but the cutscenes are still segregated from gameplay.
Not quite. That may be true of Half-Life 2, and certainly of the one or two cutscenes in Half-Life. But the trick of these games -- and you see it in the Portal series, also -- is that the majority of the plot and exposition unfolds without needing to take you into a cutscene, or out of the gameplay at all. I think Half-Life actually did this best, because so little of it was verbal -- you would find things out by looking around at the environment, or by actually doing things.
My favorite, I think, was discovering the houndeye kennels in Half-Life. (I suppose that was a spoiler, sorry, but it's been over a decade.) There wasn't so much as a sign, certainly no exposition of any kind, and other, more recent games might've had some sort of musical cue or even a five-second cutscene showing the expression on the main character's face. But it was the expression on my face -- my jaw dropped -- they've been studying these things for... months, maybe! Maybe I tore the gateway open to where aliens just warp in anywhere, but they knew what these things were and where they came from... And the game itself didn't have to say a word.
An English teacher once said to me, "Show, don't tell." That's as true for writing now as it was then, but it applies even more so to games.
While I love it when a believer is able to rise above what's in their holy books, and I really hesitate to make an issue out of it -- it's not like I want you to be more puritanical, let alone start stoning your children -- I'm not sure you can really say this honestly:
I don't think, biblical views saw it ever different (just think about it, what did adam and eve do?
It's not clear what they did before knowledge of good and evil, but once they ate the fruit and gained such knowledge, they immediately covered their nakedness out of shame. If sex is natural and a great thing, why would they cover their nakedness?
I'm not suggesting that nudism makes sense now (or that it doesn't), but who, exactly, were they trying to cover themselves from? Each other? God? I wonder which is more absurd -- trying to hide from an all-knowing being, or trying to hide from someone you've been perfectly comfortable with naked (and perhaps more) for as long as the two of you have existed.
The subtext is pretty clear, however: Your bodies are inherently shameful. The only reason you would think otherwise is if you were naive enough not to know any better.
In fact, the bible does address pervertion,
According to the Bible, homosexuality is perversion, on par with bestiality, and quite a bit worse than rape.
it never adresses sex.
Of course it does. Aside from the above, we see all sorts of fuss made about virgins (keep only the virgin girls of the Midianites, kill those who've lain with a man), we also have the Story of Onan -- when God tells you to get someone pregnant, you do not pull out, and this is where the Catholics get their ideas about birth control, though they are, of course, missing the point. There are also pages and pages of laws about how a wet dream will make certain things unclean, and you can't enter the sanctuary if your junk is damaged, and oh, the foreskins...
Reading the Bible, it almost seems like God is obsessed with sex.
However, you will notice, porn is not about real sex... Real sex however includes intimacy, relationship, trust.
These aren't mutually exclusive, though they are fantastically rare. And I'm not sure I agree with you about "real sex" -- that sounds almost exactly like a No True Scotsman -- but that's really just bickering about your terms, and you can have the terms if you like.
You see a lot of religious teachers suffer from personal affairs in their life, including those personal pains in their teachings. I take them as a warning, as for being addicted to porn, or losing touch with sexuality in terms of relationship can damage people in great effect.
I'm not sure being "addicted to porn" or "losing touch with sexuality" is what was happening with, say, Ted Haggard. I think what was happening is his religion had taught him to be ashamed of his sexual identity.
But to go so far as saying: its not bad at all to be sexually centered and have no self control - thats just ridiculous.
That's the problem -- lack of self-control. I see no problem at all with being "sexually centered" -- as Wash says, "Some people juggle geese!" There are all kinds of things you could live for.
I would not feel worse after a cigarette, than after watching porn,
I would. The cigarette is actually unhealthy, physically -- I would actually be damaging my body, even if it wasn't physically addictive. There's nothing about porn itself which could be physically addictive, certainly nothing that you wouldn't find in actual intercourse -- do you feel similarly bad after sex?
I don't know if you get this idea from religion, but it doesn't seem far off from the kind of pattern that we see with, say, Ted Haggard -- ashamed of his homosexuality, vocally and publicly working against gay rights in between se
Which again makes the browser completely irrelevant to this conversation.
That might explain why I didn't mention the browser, no?
Then we've gone pretty far offtopic.
...but they don't get my credit cards, SSN, email, etc.
You sure?
As sure as I reasonably can be. Where would they get them from?
You said it.. trust no one.. Trust nothing you can't verify..
These are contradictory statements, unless you're going to claim you can't verify anyone or anything.
until you can verify it, you won't convince me that you have any privacy in networked communications...
I can verify, through at least one open source implementation, how SSL works, at every level. I know precisely what the risks are before I deem them acceptable.
I can verify the security of any browser I choose, and what it allows or doesn't allow. I can verify the security of every plugin I allow except Flash, and I can verify the security of my OS down to the kernel level.
I have to trust nVidia anyway, they've got hardware on my machine, so a proprietary driver isn't exactly giving them more control than they already have. It is true that I'm trusting Adobe more than I'd like to -- however, I can verify when Flash is running and when it isn't, and it isn't running on the Blackboard pages. Moreover, Chrome and Chromium can and do sandbox Flash.
All of this tells me two things:
First, it is unlikely that anyone but my university has access to my Blackboard account, and incredibly unlikely that anyone beyond them and Blackboard have that access; the high risk would be other students eavesdropping on the local wireless, and SSL pretty much kills that possibility -- it is again incredibly unlikely that my fellow students have successfully obtained a certificate, and not terribly likely that they even have the motivation. On top of all of this, I don't have a choice; this university requires me to use the network for at least this much.
Second, it is incredibly unlikely that anyone at my university or at Blackboard has the means or motive to use Blackboard itself to gain access to my machine. I certainly haven't allowed it to install anything, and since the upgrade from WebCT, Blackboard itself doesn't need any plugins -- WebCT would ask for Java, which I'd generally deny.
Finally...
A rubber stamped warrant is all it takes to hang you high.
I doubt you could find many places where a rubber-stamped warrant would cause more harm to me because I use the Internet, or even because I use various networked services, than it would anyway simply by being a citizen.
Let's suppose, for a moment, that I rant against the government (I don't, much) and otherwise draw enough attention to myself that the government is interested in eavesdropping on me. Let's suppose, in addition, that I don't use the Internet more than I absolutely have to, that any computers with data I value are generally kept disconnected, and that I do all my ranting in the town square, so as to avoid the Internet.
I'm still drawing sufficient attention to myself that, in your rubber-stamp scenario, what stops them from simply gaining a warrant to my house and pulling my data off my local machines just as easily as if I had stored them remotely?
Local encryption, sure. Well, I can encrypt the data I store elsewhere, also, and I frequently do, but that does very little -- I can be legally compelled to give up those keys. If I use something like rubberhose or Truecrypt, I'm really just making things worse for myself -- they can never prove I've given them everything I know, so they can just keep torturing me until they're satisfied.
Or, I could take the slightly less paranoid approach and simply be aware of where my data lives and what the risks are in each location. The st
Yes, let's. Of course, on the other hand, you have to hope Google hasn't lost your email or isn't down when you need it, don't you?
That's a bit unfair, don't you think? Aside from how rare this is, if we can assume savvy users are going to back things up, why wouldn't we assume those same users know how to backup gmail?
You can certainly avoid doing it over channels like the Internet, though,
Not if you're going to be as paranoid as you'd like to be. How do you know a given local app isn't phoning home with your data? How do you know your hardware isn't lying to you about it?
For that matter, if you're going to avoid executing software which has come to you through the Internet, you aren't going to be patching, which means you're likely to be executing other software which has come to you through the Internet. The only way that is possibly a win for you is when you unplug from the Internet entirely, in which case, you're now putting your data at risk through, at a minimum, reliability issues -- not all of those patches (delivered through the Internet, remember?) are for security alone.
The good news is you can have control over them, because they're not Internet apps, and further, can be kept off the net with tools like Little Snitch, virtual machines, simply not connecting the host hardware to the Internet at all, et al.
Some web apps have an offline mode. Your issue isn't with the Web itself, it's with the application being remote.
If your data is exposed, and you understand how things actually work -- it's your fault. Period.
That's a bit like saying if you know the traffic statistics and you still get in a car accident, it's your fault for not driving a tank. Your solution does work, but it comes at a monetary cost (you need at least two machines) and a convenience cost -- kind of like a tank.
For instance, do you order anything online? Anything at all?
If so, where from? Your nettop isn't supposed to have anything important on it. Your desktop isn't supposed to be connected.
If not, congrats, you're a Luddite. But hey, at least you aren't also a moron... unless you order things over the phone, in which case, what makes you think the phone is more secure than the Internet?
You don't have to deal with Youtube's censorious behavior, invasive ads, or the incredible low resolution mass of 99.99% drivel they call content.
Let's see, one at a time:
First, censorious behavior is kind of irrelevant. YouTube is one of many sites which deliver video this way; by not having Flash, you miss all of them which aren't already on HTML5 -- and by not having JavaScript, you miss those, too. It's a bit like boycotting paper because some newspapers censor their content.
Second, they support 1080p, so "incredible low-resolution" isn't that relevant. "Drivel" is similar to what you suggested before -- this is a bit like giving up on the Web because MySpace exists. There is, in fact, good content on YouTube, both in terms of picture quality, and in terms of, well, content.
As for taxes, no need to do those online, and not a good idea, either.
Yes, it was so much easier filling them out by hand. I really enjoyed having to do all the calculations manually, while flipping through pages of related material rather than hitting ctrl+F. Also, I hate trees.
I don't actually see a problem with doing taxes online. I don't like that they've implemented it on top of Flash, but it still beats paper.
See, you've been conditioned to think it's ok to put your financial information online.
Couldn't be that I thought for myself and decided it was an acceptable risk?
Just keep pretending SSL protects you.
SSL to a.gov domain, over a wired connection... Yeah, it pretty much does. Go ahea
Which again makes the browser completely irrelevant to this conversation.
If they've pwned my hardware, or my OS, or anything else that runs at Ring 0 or better, I'm fucked. Hell, even if it's not in Ring 0, if it just has root, I'm fucked. May as well give up and go home. I have no choice but to trust those who have that amount of control over my machine.
However, I don't have to trust more than that. For instance, so far as I know, Blackboard hasn't contributed to any of the hardware or root-level software on my machine. Thus, when I run Blackboard software in my browser, it's reasonably contained -- I am trusting them with no more than I have to. Which is still considerable, given that my grades do depend on their software functioning sanely, but they don't get my credit cards, SSN, email, etc.
Really, what was your point? I'm naive for trusting the bare minimum, instead of no one at all?
And how's that? Barring a vulnerability in the browser, that's not going to happen. Barring a massive conspiracy through a fairly large open source community, that vulnerability is not going to be deliberate.
insightful users (a minority, as always) will resist this trend with traditional in-machine applications and fully local storage of data.
Let's hope those insightful users are also insightful enough to actually have backups.
The key issue is: Putting your data in the hands of those you don't know is a uniformly bad idea. So is giving control of your computer's execution to those you don't know.
And it's not possible to avoid both of these, sorry. In fact, it's not possible to avoid the latter at all.
The good news is that we have a broad set of extremely powerful applications available to us that run well in the local environment.
The bad news is that any local application has at least as much access as these web apps do.
To help protect yourself, I suggest beginning by disabling flash,
Thus "protecting" yourself from YouTube, FreeFillableForms (the only way to file US taxes online that I know of), etc.
scripting
Thus "protecting" yourself from things like Gmail, Google Instant Search, and... Do I really need to spell it out? I get the noscript mentality, but disabling these things entirely is both paranoid and backwards. It's a bit like unplugging your machine from the Internet -- sure, it's more secure, but it's also much less useful.
As a side benefit, surfing is much more pleasant without pop-overs, flash ads,
For which we have more specific approaches, like Adblock.
Neither Google or any other corporation has your best interests in mind.
It does help when their interests are aligned with yours, however, and this usually isn't hard to determine. But I'm again at a loss to how you get from that understanding to railing against applications in the browser. The browser application has only the data I allow it. The local application, unless I take great pains to sandbox it, has access to everything I have locally and the network. I can understand wanting to be sure your data is stored safely, whatever "safely" means to you -- I care less about privacy and more about reliability, but you can tweak both knobs as you like. But given the choice between an application that runs locally, and one which runs in the browser, which is already a sandbox, I'll choose the browser app every time unless I have a compelling reason to trust the application and sensitive data I don't want to leave my machine -- and even in that case, it's possible to run some web apps offline and, at the user's discretion, give them more access than any arbitrary web app should.
Well that's the point - if he owned the device he *probably* wouldn't be complaining about it.
In other words, it's the complaining itself that you have a problem with? Everyone who disagrees with you is automatically a self-righteous douchebag?
That seems a little... erm... self-righteous and douchey.
I certainly don't agree with that model and I'm glad it was legally defeated but I can't blame them for trying...
I can't agree with that. I'm glad it was legally defeated, but it was asinine of them to try. It's a bit like saying, "I don't like the business model of working game developers 80-100 hours a week all the time, and I'm glad it was legally defeated, but I can't blame them for trying. No, fuck EA for trying that, and fuck Apple for trying to make it illegal for me to do what I want with my hardware.
The Android OS isn't really even comparable to iOS as iOS devices come in only one flavor of operation
iPhone, iPad, multiple versions of each?
Apple's App Store isn't much different than the Market on my girlfriend's DroidX.
The relevant question is whether your girlfriend's DroidX allows third-party sources. Restricted root access isn't nearly as relevant, though it is nice that it's not only possible to root most Android devices, but there's an entirely open source suite of software to replace whatever they come with. Short of porting Android to iPhone, I don't see that happening with an iDevice, and I don't see the point of porting Android to iPhone when I can get a device it already works with.
those most certainly cater to a different audience than the iOS line by the simple fact that they DO have unlocked software sources.
Wait, what?
How many people do you honestly think would deliberately avoid those devices and choose an iOS device because of the unlocked software sources?
Price point is irrelevant.
Is it? It's kind of adding insult to injury if you're paying more for less.
A locked-down device having more or less functionality is entirely a matter of opinion.
Actually, it's a matter of evidence -- which device has more and better apps? Except that the one which is locked down will always be limited in that regard. The one which is open can be improved by anyone, without needing anyone else's say-so.
Like I said, it's unfortunate that there's no "best of both worlds."
Unless there's somewhere iOS is massively more usable than Android right now -- and that's not what I'm hearing, at least for phones -- it seems like an Android device is that best of both worlds. Indeed, if price point is irrelevant, then an unlocked, deliberately open Android device is the best of both worlds -- you can stick to the market if you like, and I can install crazy shit from the Internet if I like.
I can't speak for the OP, but I generally find hypocrites more pleasant than self-righteous douchebags.
Really? That's odd. I actually find Fred Phelps refreshingly honest in that, as abhorrent as his beliefs seem to be, they are at least consistent with his book.
Besides, every single person on the planet is a hypocrite about something...
That's unsubstantiated bullshit.
But that's a straw man argument anyway. The impression I got was that the OP was simply calling him a self-righteous douchebag, not that he wanted him to buy anything from Apple.
That the OP was calling him a self-righteous douchebag suggests that the OP would prefer an alternative. The only alternatives I see are either not having that opinion yet not owning an iPhone (which might still qualify as 'self-righteous douchebag' by OP's criteria), or owning an iPhone while having that opinion, which would be hypocritical.
I don't see how it can be a strawman when it is both a logical conclusion of OP's line of reasoning, and something I phrased deliberately as a question. Rhetorical or not, I'm open to a valid response. I don't see one.
That's unsubstantiated bullshit. Apple is *not* trying to make it illegal,
Then why do they deliberately prohibit exactly this sort of thing in every license they can make you sign? If it is legal now, it is legal by overruling what Apple has already explicitly tried to do.
and they are not moving their desktop OS towards the same "walled garden".
The Mac App Store doesn't seem suggestive of that?
Nothing Apple is doing today indicates they will *ever* remove the ability to run arbitrary software from Mac OS X.
Nothing conclusively, but the way they've handled the iPad certainly suggests that they'd love nothing more. Whether or not they actually will remains to be seen.
However, it's not entirely unprecedented -- Microsoft did exactly this with Windows Mobile. Older versions let you install anything you want from any source, while newer versions are deliberately more locked down, following the iPhone's lead. Yes, I realize Windows Mobile doesn't run on the desktop, but that's not the point -- Microsoft took a previously open platform and closed it.
I don't think I claimed that this is actually what they will do, but the Mac App Store is a step in that direction.
Aside from the fact that analogies are, by their very nature, not required to be completely 100% equivalent to the thing they are compared to, how does Android "kill it"?
Because, as I said:
You can't say an Android phone isn't intended for the same things -- both Android and iOS are targeting the exact same users, use cases, etc.
Since this is the point we actually disagree on, let's talk about that:
Not really. Android is more targeted at nerds and handset manufacturers, iOS is more targeted at normal people.
I'm not sure quite what you're saying here.
Are you claiming that "normal people" don't buy Android phones? Then how is Android outselling iOS by such a wide margin?
Or are you claiming that normal people don't download the Android OS themselves? If so, you need to demonstrate that normal people buy or download iOS themselves. Otherwise, I can claim iOS is more targeted at one particular handset manufacturer (Apple). I suppose we could take a step back and compare phones to phones instead of OSes to OSes, but then we have the same problem we did before: Android phones are outselling iPhones.
I don't see any possible way you can be right here, unless you're going to claim that there are enough geeks buying Android phones to make up the difference.
If we can establish that Android and iOS are actually competing in the same market -- and it's really quite p
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Technically, the e2fsck isn't even needed. I'm fairly sure the tune2fs can be done on a mounted filesystem, which means you can run that, then edit fstab so the fs mounts as ext4, then reboot -- much more convenient to do all filesystems (including root) like that. Then, each write is going to take advantage of the new tweaks, so you convert slowly, instead of all at once.
I prefer your way, but then, I don't have many machines that I can't take down for a few hours if I need to.
I'm not seeing FreeBSD or Solaris getting btrfs in the first place. Barring some serious efforts on the part of the btrfs team, this just isn't going to happen -- btrfs, being in Linux, would be GPL'd.
But it is a replacement in that I would rather be using Linux than either FreeBSD or Solaris, so if btrfs can do what ZFS does, maybe even improve on it a little, I'm going to be very, very happy.
It is, however, the easiest way to describe what the point of having both btrfs and ext4 is. Ext4 is actually a simple, natural progression from ext3, and you can upgrade from ext3 to ext4, in-place, with no surprises and expect everything to work exactly as it always has, only better. Btrfs is at least modeled on ZFS (and Reiser4) and isn't stable yet -- and even when it is, the biggest draw is going to be people who really want ZFS, but also want Linux. For anyone currently using ext4, I doubt it's going to be that compelling of an upgrade, though again, it's likely to be simple, natural, in-place, and with few surprises.
The big things that XFS always had just built in were:
Extended attributes, including ACLs. Even ext3 has these now, though you at least need to set the mount options properly (and maybe even tune the fs itself), but XFS just had them built in.
Lazy allocation / Allocate on flush. Here, XFS wins with files of any size. Essentially, the idea is that you let stuff buffer until you have to write, either from memory pressure or from a sync() call (or fsync, really), then you write a bunch of stuff all at once. You delay allocating them until that final flush -- that is, you allocate them in terms of what df shows, but you don't decide where they go until then. This helps a lot with fragmentation, and probably even with overall write performance. Where you run into trouble is when you have something really aggressive, like Reiser4, where it'll happily buffer hundreds of megabytes, gigabytes even, over several hours, until something forces a write -- for one, unless you handle fsync specially, it's going to really, really suck.
My favorite hack about lazy allocation, which I've never been able to confirm whether or not this is actually done, is the idea that if you were to create a tempfile, then delete it before anything's flushed, you'd never touch the disk. There are all kinds of tweaks where we put things on a tmpfs -- I know Ubuntu does it for /dev, /var/run, and /var/lock, for instance, and I know people sometimes put stuff in /tmp -- but none of these things would technically be required in that case. Make it more aggressive, and you have the possibility of unpacking a tarball, compiling, installing, then nuking the tarball and compilation directory, without anything except the actual binaries ever touching the disk.
Journaling. Back in the day, there were really only two filesystems in the game for this: XFS and ReiserFS. (I might be forgetting about JFS, but that's because I don't really know when that became viable.) ReiserFS is still one of the best with small files, which is probably why you're thinking you'd use XFS for larger filesystems.
Snapshot support. You could (in a very temporary way) force XFS into a momentarily-consistent on-disk state, with all writes blocking, meaning you get a more consistent LVM snapshot.
Online growing -- I think ReiserFS did this, too, and I'm fairly sure ext2/3/4 do now. Not really useful unless you're running on top of something like LVM, but if you are, you could (in theory) shove a new disk into a hotplug system, add it to LVM as a new physical volume, grow your XFS device, and then grow the filesystem onto it. This would also be useful in an environment like Amazon EC2, if Amazon were to allow EBS (Elastic Block Storage) devices to be expanded online -- but even if they don't, you could probably do similar LVM or RAID hacks to accomplish the same thing.
Good at big IO and big files. Media, databases, anything where you've got large files that you need to have reliably fast IO to -- you can have guaranteed throughput, direct IO, etc. Uses extents for allocation, so the more contiguous your files are (and thus, the less fragmented), the less space and overhead you waste on allocation.
64-bit, with massive max sizes. By the time my filesystem gets to 8 terabytes, I'm not going to want to switch filesystems to make jump to 16.
Online defragmentation. Yes, yes, we know, Linux filesystems don't tend to get as fragmented. It can still be useful.
Rock-solid with most (if not all) of the above on IRIX, and I've heard it described as "They ported Linux to XFS, not the other way around."
I'll admit, I peeked at Wikipedia and was reminded of a few more things, including some that I never really cared about, but XFS is a pretty big, solid filesystem. Less than half of what I just listed is true for JFS, though a lot more have since become true for ext3, and I now see very little advantage to XFS over ext4. However, it has historically been bad at lots of metadata updates, which is what you see when working with lots of small files.
Ext4 is stable now, and was an easy upgrade from ext3, both in terms of development and in terms of converting your existing filesystems -- one command, and then just remount as ext4, no time-consuming and dangerous conversion needed.
BtrFS looks to be better than ext4 in every way except the above -- and I haven't been following it for awhile, so as far as I know, btrfs might be rock-solid stable by now.
Put another way, ext4 is a replacement for ext3, whereas btrfs is a replacement for zfs.
...but because of ridiculousness.
From TFA:
What's the use ?
I did it for fun, just because newer Javascript Engines are fast enough to do complicated things. Real use could be:
Of these, I suppose the benchmark is the really useful part. I suppose it'd make a nice fallback for Google's Native Client, which seems like a much better approach for using an x86 library if you need it -- and after all, if you have an x86 library, it's probably portable to x86_64, ppc, arm, etc. Old DOS games are probably better handled by DOSbox, though I guess it would be cool if someone got that to work.
It is cool as a tech demo, and as a benchmark, but I don't really see it being useful.
Or a browser? ...nah, Apache is more feasible.
My laptop has 1920x1200, and it's about a 15". Expensive, and not everyone can read it that small, but it works well for me.
Oh, and I have a second 1920x1200 monitor that I plug into it. I think I've just about hit my limit in terms of how much screen space makes a difference, but it does make a difference and I do notice.
It may well be ego and entitlement, but it's also comfort and (arguably) productivity.
And it's an incredibly minor expense to make your developers happy. How much do monitors cost these days? Mine cost something like $500, and it's a 24" 1920x1200. You're going to spend, what, at least $40,000/year on a developer, and you're not willing to spend $500 once to make them happy? That's a red flag for me.
Put another way: Am I actually more productive or even measurably more comfortable in a nice office chair than a folding chair? Probably not -- in fact, if I'm coding, I'm probably not going to notice or care unless it's dramatically uncomfortable. But if I come for an interview and your developers are sitting in folding chairs, I'm probably not coming back.
I don't find it that useful -- I often will bring my laptop somewhere and do some hacking, and I don't find it terribly unpleasant.
But I definitely agree with GP. No matter how small a productivity boost, if the developers love them that much, and they're that cheap, do it. It's like 1 gig of RAM vs 4 (or 4 vs 16 if you're doing anything with Oracle) -- yeah, I could probably do most of what I do now in 1 gig of RAM (less, if I tweaked my machine more aggressively), but even at Apple's worst prices, the upgrade to 4 is easily worth it just to make me happy.
I'm the same way. Not only do I find that for most casual use, I barely need virtual desktops at all -- browser + IM + terminals + a game all on-screen at once -- but for work, being able to glance over at docs, or at top, or at whatever else I was doing, is much better than having to bounce to another desktop and back.
Note that my use of "better" here is purely subjective. It may just be more pleasant, and not more productive at all, but "more pleasant" is more than enough reason to justify something as cheap as a monitor.
While I agree it's sometimes nice, or just to take a break...
How is coding "monotonous"? If that's the case, I have to imagine you're Doing It Wrong.
Aside from the "testing windows in all configurations" possibility (I'm not often a GUI programmer), it's definitely appealing to think that I could watch 4:3 or 16:9 movies fullscreen. Or, more practically (for work, anyway), I could put docs on the vertical screen, an editor (or several) on the square screen, and terminals/IM/other crap on the widescreen -- though I'm not sure what would be perfectly optimal, I definitely like the idea of a browser/docs/etc on the vertical screen.
That depends how your space is constrained. When my father got his first HDTV, he got one which was at least as tall as his old one, but ended up cutting away chunks of the cabinet it was in to make room for the sides.
After all, walls tend to be wider than they are tall.
I also don't mind the phenomenon with laptops, either -- in this case, portability matters, and my laptop is significantly easier to deal with being wider and shorter than it would be if it was closer to a square.
It certainly seems like, at least for English text (and anything else ltr or rtl instead of vertical), the optimal size for a column is relatively narrow. You want it to be wide enough that you don't have to scroll too much, but multiple studies have shown that it's easier to read a narrow column than a wide column.
I tend to like using just a little more than half of a single monitor for my web browser. Nice balance between fullscreen (unreadable) and narrow enough that crappy layouts start to scroll.
Since they started messing with it, it hasn't stopped being fucked up in Chrome. Pretty much ever since the rounded corners.
Half-Life was the first game to have the cutscenes be continuous with the gameplay (there's no break, and there's no shift in view), but the cutscenes are still segregated from gameplay.
Not quite. That may be true of Half-Life 2, and certainly of the one or two cutscenes in Half-Life. But the trick of these games -- and you see it in the Portal series, also -- is that the majority of the plot and exposition unfolds without needing to take you into a cutscene, or out of the gameplay at all. I think Half-Life actually did this best, because so little of it was verbal -- you would find things out by looking around at the environment, or by actually doing things.
My favorite, I think, was discovering the houndeye kennels in Half-Life. (I suppose that was a spoiler, sorry, but it's been over a decade.) There wasn't so much as a sign, certainly no exposition of any kind, and other, more recent games might've had some sort of musical cue or even a five-second cutscene showing the expression on the main character's face. But it was the expression on my face -- my jaw dropped -- they've been studying these things for... months, maybe! Maybe I tore the gateway open to where aliens just warp in anywhere, but they knew what these things were and where they came from... And the game itself didn't have to say a word.
An English teacher once said to me, "Show, don't tell." That's as true for writing now as it was then, but it applies even more so to games.
While I love it when a believer is able to rise above what's in their holy books, and I really hesitate to make an issue out of it -- it's not like I want you to be more puritanical, let alone start stoning your children -- I'm not sure you can really say this honestly:
I don't think, biblical views saw it ever different (just think about it, what did adam and eve do?
It's not clear what they did before knowledge of good and evil, but once they ate the fruit and gained such knowledge, they immediately covered their nakedness out of shame. If sex is natural and a great thing, why would they cover their nakedness?
I'm not suggesting that nudism makes sense now (or that it doesn't), but who, exactly, were they trying to cover themselves from? Each other? God? I wonder which is more absurd -- trying to hide from an all-knowing being, or trying to hide from someone you've been perfectly comfortable with naked (and perhaps more) for as long as the two of you have existed.
The subtext is pretty clear, however: Your bodies are inherently shameful. The only reason you would think otherwise is if you were naive enough not to know any better.
In fact, the bible does address pervertion,
According to the Bible, homosexuality is perversion, on par with bestiality, and quite a bit worse than rape.
it never adresses sex.
Of course it does. Aside from the above, we see all sorts of fuss made about virgins (keep only the virgin girls of the Midianites, kill those who've lain with a man), we also have the Story of Onan -- when God tells you to get someone pregnant, you do not pull out, and this is where the Catholics get their ideas about birth control, though they are, of course, missing the point. There are also pages and pages of laws about how a wet dream will make certain things unclean, and you can't enter the sanctuary if your junk is damaged, and oh, the foreskins...
Reading the Bible, it almost seems like God is obsessed with sex.
However, you will notice, porn is not about real sex... Real sex however includes intimacy, relationship, trust.
These aren't mutually exclusive, though they are fantastically rare. And I'm not sure I agree with you about "real sex" -- that sounds almost exactly like a No True Scotsman -- but that's really just bickering about your terms, and you can have the terms if you like.
You see a lot of religious teachers suffer from personal affairs in their life, including those personal pains in their teachings. I take them as a warning, as for being addicted to porn, or losing touch with sexuality in terms of relationship can damage people in great effect.
I'm not sure being "addicted to porn" or "losing touch with sexuality" is what was happening with, say, Ted Haggard. I think what was happening is his religion had taught him to be ashamed of his sexual identity.
But to go so far as saying: its not bad at all to be sexually centered and have no self control - thats just ridiculous.
That's the problem -- lack of self-control. I see no problem at all with being "sexually centered" -- as Wash says, "Some people juggle geese!" There are all kinds of things you could live for.
I would not feel worse after a cigarette, than after watching porn,
I would. The cigarette is actually unhealthy, physically -- I would actually be damaging my body, even if it wasn't physically addictive. There's nothing about porn itself which could be physically addictive, certainly nothing that you wouldn't find in actual intercourse -- do you feel similarly bad after sex?
I don't know if you get this idea from religion, but it doesn't seem far off from the kind of pattern that we see with, say, Ted Haggard -- ashamed of his homosexuality, vocally and publicly working against gay rights in between se
Which again makes the browser completely irrelevant to this conversation.
That might explain why I didn't mention the browser, no?
Then we've gone pretty far offtopic.
...but they don't get my credit cards, SSN, email, etc.
You sure?
As sure as I reasonably can be. Where would they get them from?
You said it.. trust no one.. Trust nothing you can't verify..
These are contradictory statements, unless you're going to claim you can't verify anyone or anything.
until you can verify it, you won't convince me that you have any privacy in networked communications...
I can verify, through at least one open source implementation, how SSL works, at every level. I know precisely what the risks are before I deem them acceptable.
I can verify the security of any browser I choose, and what it allows or doesn't allow. I can verify the security of every plugin I allow except Flash, and I can verify the security of my OS down to the kernel level.
I have to trust nVidia anyway, they've got hardware on my machine, so a proprietary driver isn't exactly giving them more control than they already have. It is true that I'm trusting Adobe more than I'd like to -- however, I can verify when Flash is running and when it isn't, and it isn't running on the Blackboard pages. Moreover, Chrome and Chromium can and do sandbox Flash.
All of this tells me two things:
First, it is unlikely that anyone but my university has access to my Blackboard account, and incredibly unlikely that anyone beyond them and Blackboard have that access; the high risk would be other students eavesdropping on the local wireless, and SSL pretty much kills that possibility -- it is again incredibly unlikely that my fellow students have successfully obtained a certificate, and not terribly likely that they even have the motivation. On top of all of this, I don't have a choice; this university requires me to use the network for at least this much.
Second, it is incredibly unlikely that anyone at my university or at Blackboard has the means or motive to use Blackboard itself to gain access to my machine. I certainly haven't allowed it to install anything, and since the upgrade from WebCT, Blackboard itself doesn't need any plugins -- WebCT would ask for Java, which I'd generally deny.
Finally...
A rubber stamped warrant is all it takes to hang you high.
I doubt you could find many places where a rubber-stamped warrant would cause more harm to me because I use the Internet, or even because I use various networked services, than it would anyway simply by being a citizen.
Let's suppose, for a moment, that I rant against the government (I don't, much) and otherwise draw enough attention to myself that the government is interested in eavesdropping on me. Let's suppose, in addition, that I don't use the Internet more than I absolutely have to, that any computers with data I value are generally kept disconnected, and that I do all my ranting in the town square, so as to avoid the Internet.
I'm still drawing sufficient attention to myself that, in your rubber-stamp scenario, what stops them from simply gaining a warrant to my house and pulling my data off my local machines just as easily as if I had stored them remotely?
Local encryption, sure. Well, I can encrypt the data I store elsewhere, also, and I frequently do, but that does very little -- I can be legally compelled to give up those keys. If I use something like rubberhose or Truecrypt, I'm really just making things worse for myself -- they can never prove I've given them everything I know, so they can just keep torturing me until they're satisfied.
Or, I could take the slightly less paranoid approach and simply be aware of where my data lives and what the risks are in each location. The st
Yes, let's. Of course, on the other hand, you have to hope Google hasn't lost your email or isn't down when you need it, don't you?
That's a bit unfair, don't you think? Aside from how rare this is, if we can assume savvy users are going to back things up, why wouldn't we assume those same users know how to backup gmail?
You can certainly avoid doing it over channels like the Internet, though,
Not if you're going to be as paranoid as you'd like to be. How do you know a given local app isn't phoning home with your data? How do you know your hardware isn't lying to you about it?
For that matter, if you're going to avoid executing software which has come to you through the Internet, you aren't going to be patching, which means you're likely to be executing other software which has come to you through the Internet. The only way that is possibly a win for you is when you unplug from the Internet entirely, in which case, you're now putting your data at risk through, at a minimum, reliability issues -- not all of those patches (delivered through the Internet, remember?) are for security alone.
The good news is you can have control over them, because they're not Internet apps, and further, can be kept off the net with tools like Little Snitch, virtual machines, simply not connecting the host hardware to the Internet at all, et al.
Some web apps have an offline mode. Your issue isn't with the Web itself, it's with the application being remote.
If your data is exposed, and you understand how things actually work -- it's your fault. Period.
That's a bit like saying if you know the traffic statistics and you still get in a car accident, it's your fault for not driving a tank. Your solution does work, but it comes at a monetary cost (you need at least two machines) and a convenience cost -- kind of like a tank.
For instance, do you order anything online? Anything at all?
If so, where from? Your nettop isn't supposed to have anything important on it. Your desktop isn't supposed to be connected.
If not, congrats, you're a Luddite. But hey, at least you aren't also a moron... unless you order things over the phone, in which case, what makes you think the phone is more secure than the Internet?
You don't have to deal with Youtube's censorious behavior, invasive ads, or the incredible low resolution mass of 99.99% drivel they call content.
Let's see, one at a time:
First, censorious behavior is kind of irrelevant. YouTube is one of many sites which deliver video this way; by not having Flash, you miss all of them which aren't already on HTML5 -- and by not having JavaScript, you miss those, too. It's a bit like boycotting paper because some newspapers censor their content.
Second, they support 1080p, so "incredible low-resolution" isn't that relevant. "Drivel" is similar to what you suggested before -- this is a bit like giving up on the Web because MySpace exists. There is, in fact, good content on YouTube, both in terms of picture quality, and in terms of, well, content.
As for taxes, no need to do those online, and not a good idea, either.
Yes, it was so much easier filling them out by hand. I really enjoyed having to do all the calculations manually, while flipping through pages of related material rather than hitting ctrl+F. Also, I hate trees.
I don't actually see a problem with doing taxes online. I don't like that they've implemented it on top of Flash, but it still beats paper.
See, you've been conditioned to think it's ok to put your financial information online.
Couldn't be that I thought for myself and decided it was an acceptable risk?
Just keep pretending SSL protects you.
SSL to a .gov domain, over a wired connection... Yeah, it pretty much does. Go ahea
Which again makes the browser completely irrelevant to this conversation.
If they've pwned my hardware, or my OS, or anything else that runs at Ring 0 or better, I'm fucked. Hell, even if it's not in Ring 0, if it just has root, I'm fucked. May as well give up and go home. I have no choice but to trust those who have that amount of control over my machine.
However, I don't have to trust more than that. For instance, so far as I know, Blackboard hasn't contributed to any of the hardware or root-level software on my machine. Thus, when I run Blackboard software in my browser, it's reasonably contained -- I am trusting them with no more than I have to. Which is still considerable, given that my grades do depend on their software functioning sanely, but they don't get my credit cards, SSN, email, etc.
Really, what was your point? I'm naive for trusting the bare minimum, instead of no one at all?
And how's that? Barring a vulnerability in the browser, that's not going to happen. Barring a massive conspiracy through a fairly large open source community, that vulnerability is not going to be deliberate.
Do I really need to spell this out?
insightful users (a minority, as always) will resist this trend with traditional in-machine applications and fully local storage of data.
Let's hope those insightful users are also insightful enough to actually have backups.
The key issue is: Putting your data in the hands of those you don't know is a uniformly bad idea. So is giving control of your computer's execution to those you don't know.
And it's not possible to avoid both of these, sorry. In fact, it's not possible to avoid the latter at all.
The good news is that we have a broad set of extremely powerful applications available to us that run well in the local environment.
The bad news is that any local application has at least as much access as these web apps do.
To help protect yourself, I suggest beginning by disabling flash,
Thus "protecting" yourself from YouTube, FreeFillableForms (the only way to file US taxes online that I know of), etc.
scripting
Thus "protecting" yourself from things like Gmail, Google Instant Search, and... Do I really need to spell it out? I get the noscript mentality, but disabling these things entirely is both paranoid and backwards. It's a bit like unplugging your machine from the Internet -- sure, it's more secure, but it's also much less useful.
As a side benefit, surfing is much more pleasant without pop-overs, flash ads,
For which we have more specific approaches, like Adblock.
Neither Google or any other corporation has your best interests in mind.
It does help when their interests are aligned with yours, however, and this usually isn't hard to determine. But I'm again at a loss to how you get from that understanding to railing against applications in the browser. The browser application has only the data I allow it. The local application, unless I take great pains to sandbox it, has access to everything I have locally and the network. I can understand wanting to be sure your data is stored safely, whatever "safely" means to you -- I care less about privacy and more about reliability, but you can tweak both knobs as you like. But given the choice between an application that runs locally, and one which runs in the browser, which is already a sandbox, I'll choose the browser app every time unless I have a compelling reason to trust the application and sensitive data I don't want to leave my machine -- and even in that case, it's possible to run some web apps offline and, at the user's discretion, give them more access than any arbitrary web app should.
Well that's the point - if he owned the device he *probably* wouldn't be complaining about it.
In other words, it's the complaining itself that you have a problem with? Everyone who disagrees with you is automatically a self-righteous douchebag?
That seems a little... erm... self-righteous and douchey.
I certainly don't agree with that model and I'm glad it was legally defeated but I can't blame them for trying...
I can't agree with that. I'm glad it was legally defeated, but it was asinine of them to try. It's a bit like saying, "I don't like the business model of working game developers 80-100 hours a week all the time, and I'm glad it was legally defeated, but I can't blame them for trying. No, fuck EA for trying that, and fuck Apple for trying to make it illegal for me to do what I want with my hardware.
The Android OS isn't really even comparable to iOS as iOS devices come in only one flavor of operation
iPhone, iPad, multiple versions of each?
Apple's App Store isn't much different than the Market on my girlfriend's DroidX.
The relevant question is whether your girlfriend's DroidX allows third-party sources. Restricted root access isn't nearly as relevant, though it is nice that it's not only possible to root most Android devices, but there's an entirely open source suite of software to replace whatever they come with. Short of porting Android to iPhone, I don't see that happening with an iDevice, and I don't see the point of porting Android to iPhone when I can get a device it already works with.
those most certainly cater to a different audience than the iOS line by the simple fact that they DO have unlocked software sources.
Wait, what?
How many people do you honestly think would deliberately avoid those devices and choose an iOS device because of the unlocked software sources?
Price point is irrelevant.
Is it? It's kind of adding insult to injury if you're paying more for less.
A locked-down device having more or less functionality is entirely a matter of opinion.
Actually, it's a matter of evidence -- which device has more and better apps? Except that the one which is locked down will always be limited in that regard. The one which is open can be improved by anyone, without needing anyone else's say-so.
Like I said, it's unfortunate that there's no "best of both worlds."
Unless there's somewhere iOS is massively more usable than Android right now -- and that's not what I'm hearing, at least for phones -- it seems like an Android device is that best of both worlds. Indeed, if price point is irrelevant, then an unlocked, deliberately open Android device is the best of both worlds -- you can stick to the market if you like, and I can install crazy shit from the Internet if I like.
I can't speak for the OP, but I generally find hypocrites more pleasant than self-righteous douchebags.
Really? That's odd. I actually find Fred Phelps refreshingly honest in that, as abhorrent as his beliefs seem to be, they are at least consistent with his book.
Besides, every single person on the planet is a hypocrite about something...
That's unsubstantiated bullshit.
But that's a straw man argument anyway. The impression I got was that the OP was simply calling him a self-righteous douchebag, not that he wanted him to buy anything from Apple.
That the OP was calling him a self-righteous douchebag suggests that the OP would prefer an alternative. The only alternatives I see are either not having that opinion yet not owning an iPhone (which might still qualify as 'self-righteous douchebag' by OP's criteria), or owning an iPhone while having that opinion, which would be hypocritical.
I don't see how it can be a strawman when it is both a logical conclusion of OP's line of reasoning, and something I phrased deliberately as a question. Rhetorical or not, I'm open to a valid response. I don't see one.
That's unsubstantiated bullshit. Apple is *not* trying to make it illegal,
Then why do they deliberately prohibit exactly this sort of thing in every license they can make you sign? If it is legal now, it is legal by overruling what Apple has already explicitly tried to do.
and they are not moving their desktop OS towards the same "walled garden".
The Mac App Store doesn't seem suggestive of that?
Nothing Apple is doing today indicates they will *ever* remove the ability to run arbitrary software from Mac OS X.
Nothing conclusively, but the way they've handled the iPad certainly suggests that they'd love nothing more. Whether or not they actually will remains to be seen.
However, it's not entirely unprecedented -- Microsoft did exactly this with Windows Mobile. Older versions let you install anything you want from any source, while newer versions are deliberately more locked down, following the iPhone's lead. Yes, I realize Windows Mobile doesn't run on the desktop, but that's not the point -- Microsoft took a previously open platform and closed it.
I don't think I claimed that this is actually what they will do, but the Mac App Store is a step in that direction.
Aside from the fact that analogies are, by their very nature, not required to be completely 100% equivalent to the thing they are compared to, how does Android "kill it"?
Because, as I said:
You can't say an Android phone isn't intended for the same things -- both Android and iOS are targeting the exact same users, use cases, etc.
Since this is the point we actually disagree on, let's talk about that:
Not really. Android is more targeted at nerds and handset manufacturers, iOS is more targeted at normal people.
I'm not sure quite what you're saying here.
Are you claiming that "normal people" don't buy Android phones? Then how is Android outselling iOS by such a wide margin?
Or are you claiming that normal people don't download the Android OS themselves? If so, you need to demonstrate that normal people buy or download iOS themselves. Otherwise, I can claim iOS is more targeted at one particular handset manufacturer (Apple). I suppose we could take a step back and compare phones to phones instead of OSes to OSes, but then we have the same problem we did before: Android phones are outselling iPhones.
I don't see any possible way you can be right here, unless you're going to claim that there are enough geeks buying Android phones to make up the difference.
If we can establish that Android and iOS are actually competing in the same market -- and it's really quite p