The rest of your post was a little too tin-foil, but this part was interesting, so I'll comment:
LOL... so I'm "free" to write and use whatever software I want, as long as I don't spread it around? Do you even understand how ridiculous that is? It's like a typewriter manufacturer dictating what kinds of books can be written using their machine. It's *mine*, I bought it, so I'll write what I want and do with it what I want, thank you.
As the software author, you're free to write what you want and distribute it as you want. If you want to be on the official AppStore, you have to go through Apple. If you don't, then you have to convince people to whom you're selling software to jailbreak their phones.
I don't think this is a legal or ethical grey area at all. They are absolutely clear and up-front about this, and anyone who doesn't know what they're getting into when they buy is blind, deaf and dumb, and even they can return the damn thing.
I would take a different stance if they did something so that jailbreaking caused the thing to be irreparably bricked. But since it's so easy, and since their only level of enforcement at this time is to say, "Don't do it," it's up to owners to say, "Duly noted."
To use a car metaphor, buy a VW Beetle and ask them if you can go off-roading with it. They'll tell you not to do it. If you say, "I'll get big shocks and knobby tires", they--and your insurance company--will tell you that it's not supported. If you do it anyway, and take it to a location where it's legal to do that kind of driving, VW's not going to stop you.
Same thing here. Difference is that VW will actually void your warranty. With Apple, you can re-set to factory defaults and everything's still intact.
Why? Just because something has an engine and wheels doesn't mean it's freeway legal, or even street legal. They've built a product and they're selling it in a particular circumstance. You can modify it as much as you want, but they don't have to support that if they don't want to.
Jailbreaking is simple, and even Woz does it. If you don't want to do that, don't buy the phone. Or if you do, quit yer whining.
I have no great love of corporations, but they can sell whatever they want, as long as they don't make false claims about it. When the iPhone came out, they were clear that there were no 3rd party apps, no SDK, and people still flocked to the phone. They knew sales would go through the roof when they introduced the SDK, and they did, and that addressed the needs of 99% of people who would buy the thing. The rest can take two seconds and jailbreak it and give up their support until and unless they reset it to factory defaults. What's the big whoop?
I had hundreds of games on my C64, and while I never played your fargo sword game, the only BASIC involved in the great majority--and certainly anything that required anything like speed--was in the boot loader.
Hence the use of the word "typically". Perhaps I went a bit overboard saying that "only the cheesiest" were written in Basic, but the only commercial game I remember owning that was written in BASIC was a math learning program. And it sucked big honking wieners.
I'll bet someone has to wax his palms before going out...
Joking aside, I wish it weren't the case that people accept a difference between "facts" and "true facts". Facts that aren't true aren't facts. They're fallacies.
Sigh. I'm not snarking you; I'm simply bemoaning the fact that your comment reflects a depressing trend.
Again, I think you'd be much better off leaving fair use (and your criticisms of it) aside
To be fair--pun intended--I don't think the OP has any great hatred of fair use. My impression is that s/he just doesn't think that it's well-defined enough to depend on, much less teach to children. To his/her point in an above thread, it's true that your ability to make a fair use defense often does depend on the lawyer you can afford.
Of course, this is true for many things. See OJ Simpson for more detail.
But most of all, I agree with the poster who talked about teaching critical thinking to children, so they can't be indoctrinated. Neither by the corporate overlords, nor the "information wants to be free" set. Learn what's going on, make your decisions, and take responsibility for them. It's not that hard.
Teaching critical thinking does not require spelling out all sides to every issue. To take your union example, a child who has learned to think critically might, during a lesson on the virtues of unions, come up with the following thought:
"If unions were established to protect individuals from the corruption and/or inhumanity associated with large and/or profit-making organizations, does it not follow that a union which grows large enough or profitable enough may itself become inhumane or corrupt?"
If the teacher presiding over that conversation rewards that student by encouraging further discourse, who knows? Maybe the problems of greed and corruption will be resolved in a generation.
And with regards to World War II, there were many more than two sides. But I'm curious as to what you are referring to as presenting the other of "both sides"? If you're referring to the Nazi perspective, I think that a lot of that information is clearly made available, at least in reasonably good schools. The only way I as a parent would get in the way would be if a teacher tried to actually justify the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, the elderly and infirm and other "deviants".
If you're referring to imperial Japan's perspective, well, all you have to do is look at the flag from that era to know what they were thinking. If you're thinking about Italy, the red-headed step-child of Axis powers, well, all you have to do is watch any Keystone Capers flick to understand what they were thinking.
And the funny thing is that at least ASCAP is, or at least was historically, a good guy. They were created to ensure that artists didn't get ripped off by huge corporations. For example, Little Richard had his songs used in movies and commercials and TV shows without his permission and without compensation. A great example is Disney's Donald Duck dancing around singing about having "a girl named Daisy; you know she drives me crazy!"
So the ASCAP enforcement of performance payment went into place to ensure that companies like Disney, who made a mint on artist content, had to pay for it. The idea that they're using it now to try to get additional profit from people who are trying to decide whether to buy a song is just ridiculous.
Reminds me of something my father told me about. He's in the cyclotron (atom smashers, for medical purposes) business, and back in the 70s, the control systems for his machines were run on PDP 11s.
Well, the old computers have all died over the years, but some of that equipment is still running, albeit with it's third owner. Y'know, Sloan Kettering upgrades and sells their cyclotron to UCLA. UCLA upgrades and sells it to University of Shanghai. Shanghai sells it to a hospital in Java...
Anyway, the same control software is being used; they're just running PDP 11 emulators in a Windows context.
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
Your call.
D: Move the server offshore and pirate other people's work.
For a long time when the Mac came out you couldn't "talk" to the hardware directly
Man, the last time I wanted to talk to the hardware directly was on a C64, appropriately enough. Why would you want to do that on a modern, multitasking system? Are you building some sort of dedicated control console for which the overhead of an OS/abstraction layer is not acceptable?
Apple the corporation has always made a lot of money by taking away little bits of freedom here and there
They wouldn't make any money doing that if there weren't some sort of trade-off. They make things easier and more reliable for people. If you don't build in some limits while you're doing that, you end up with a system that is prime host territory for viruses and trojans.
Besides, as others have pointed out, they're not all evil. Want to develop for the Mac? Xcode and their docs are free as in beer. Want to develop for the iPhone? If you just want to do it yourself and only to your own phone, it's free. It's only if you want to distribute it to the general public that it costs anything.
Don't forget: people choose the iPhone. They chose it even when there was no app store, no third-party development. The only reason this is an interesting topic of discussion is that it's the most popular phone out there. And with the cost of ownership, they're not exactly forcing anyone to buy...
That is cool. I remember seeing ads for one that did what you describe. My recollection, however, was that the object code that came out of such assemblers back in those days was so bloated and inefficient that it was sometimes not much faster than using the interpreted BASIC.
Of course, maybe I'm recalling theoretical hyperbole more than fact...
SID II, baby! I think it could support up to four simultaneous distinct tones, each with their own pitch, timbre and ADSR envelope. When they built the Amiga, its sound was effectively just two SID II chips, for stereo, IIRC.
Particularly one whose games all depend upon an interpreted language
C64 games typically were not written in BASIC, as the performance of BASIC sucked. Only the cheesiest type-it-in-yourself games were implemented this way.
Most games were written in 6510 assembly, which was a very simple label-abstraction above 6510 machine language. Basically, the "assembling" process just changed the commands, like 'JSR' (jump to subroutine) to their binary equivalents (in this case, 00010000), and made sure that all two-byte numbers were big-endian. So JSR $FFD2, the command to print a byte to the screen became (in decimal) 032 210 255.
Some assemblers were a little more advanced, with macros and the like so you could label a subroutine and it would substitute the appropriate register address, but I never believed in those. I edited my code directly to the bits, damn it!
How exactly does OS X compete on the desktop once you consider even marginal gaming?
Who cares about gaming? I use my Mac for work. I thought that the historical argument against Macs was that they weren't ready for serious business computing, but now it seems like the strongst argument anyone has is that the games are better on Windows.
Anyone who chooses their computing platform purely or even primarily based on gaming has childish priorities.
I still prefer linux, but every time i go through something like this, a part of me wishes I had gone for dual-booting with windows.
So why don't you? If you're on x86, there's no reason you can't bop over to BestBuy and bring home a copy of Windows instead of writing dubious contrarian posts in this thread? I mean you play the part of a frustrated Linux adherent pretty well, but the fact that you conveniently left out model numbers for your webcam and TV tuner makes me think that you're a 'turfer for MS.
Me, I use a Commodore 64 with GEOS, so I just stay above the fray.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL... so I'm "free" to write and use whatever software I want, as long as I don't spread it around? Do you even understand how ridiculous that is? It's like a typewriter manufacturer dictating what kinds of books can be written using their machine. It's *mine*, I bought it, so I'll write what I want and do with it what I want, thank you.
As the software author, you're free to write what you want and distribute it as you want. If you want to be on the official AppStore, you have to go through Apple. If you don't, then you have to convince people to whom you're selling software to jailbreak their phones.
I don't think this is a legal or ethical grey area at all. They are absolutely clear and up-front about this, and anyone who doesn't know what they're getting into when they buy is blind, deaf and dumb, and even they can return the damn thing.
I would take a different stance if they did something so that jailbreaking caused the thing to be irreparably bricked. But since it's so easy, and since their only level of enforcement at this time is to say, "Don't do it," it's up to owners to say, "Duly noted."
To use a car metaphor, buy a VW Beetle and ask them if you can go off-roading with it. They'll tell you not to do it. If you say, "I'll get big shocks and knobby tires", they--and your insurance company--will tell you that it's not supported. If you do it anyway, and take it to a location where it's legal to do that kind of driving, VW's not going to stop you.
Same thing here. Difference is that VW will actually void your warranty. With Apple, you can re-set to factory defaults and everything's still intact.
Why? Just because something has an engine and wheels doesn't mean it's freeway legal, or even street legal. They've built a product and they're selling it in a particular circumstance. You can modify it as much as you want, but they don't have to support that if they don't want to.
Jailbreaking is simple, and even Woz does it. If you don't want to do that, don't buy the phone. Or if you do, quit yer whining.
I have no great love of corporations, but they can sell whatever they want, as long as they don't make false claims about it. When the iPhone came out, they were clear that there were no 3rd party apps, no SDK, and people still flocked to the phone. They knew sales would go through the roof when they introduced the SDK, and they did, and that addressed the needs of 99% of people who would buy the thing. The rest can take two seconds and jailbreak it and give up their support until and unless they reset it to factory defaults. What's the big whoop?
I had hundreds of games on my C64, and while I never played your fargo sword game, the only BASIC involved in the great majority--and certainly anything that required anything like speed--was in the boot loader.
Hence the use of the word "typically". Perhaps I went a bit overboard saying that "only the cheesiest" were written in Basic, but the only commercial game I remember owning that was written in BASIC was a math learning program. And it sucked big honking wieners.
Moreover the second is stating a TRUE fact
I'll bet someone has to wax his palms before going out...
Joking aside, I wish it weren't the case that people accept a difference between "facts" and "true facts". Facts that aren't true aren't facts. They're fallacies.
Sigh. I'm not snarking you; I'm simply bemoaning the fact that your comment reflects a depressing trend.
Again, I think you'd be much better off leaving fair use (and your criticisms of it) aside
To be fair--pun intended--I don't think the OP has any great hatred of fair use. My impression is that s/he just doesn't think that it's well-defined enough to depend on, much less teach to children. To his/her point in an above thread, it's true that your ability to make a fair use defense often does depend on the lawyer you can afford.
Of course, this is true for many things. See OJ Simpson for more detail.
But most of all, I agree with the poster who talked about teaching critical thinking to children, so they can't be indoctrinated. Neither by the corporate overlords, nor the "information wants to be free" set. Learn what's going on, make your decisions, and take responsibility for them. It's not that hard.
Teaching critical thinking does not require spelling out all sides to every issue. To take your union example, a child who has learned to think critically might, during a lesson on the virtues of unions, come up with the following thought:
"If unions were established to protect individuals from the corruption and/or inhumanity associated with large and/or profit-making organizations, does it not follow that a union which grows large enough or profitable enough may itself become inhumane or corrupt?"
If the teacher presiding over that conversation rewards that student by encouraging further discourse, who knows? Maybe the problems of greed and corruption will be resolved in a generation.
And with regards to World War II, there were many more than two sides. But I'm curious as to what you are referring to as presenting the other of "both sides"? If you're referring to the Nazi perspective, I think that a lot of that information is clearly made available, at least in reasonably good schools. The only way I as a parent would get in the way would be if a teacher tried to actually justify the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, the elderly and infirm and other "deviants".
If you're referring to imperial Japan's perspective, well, all you have to do is look at the flag from that era to know what they were thinking. If you're thinking about Italy, the red-headed step-child of Axis powers, well, all you have to do is watch any Keystone Capers flick to understand what they were thinking.
Erm, no. Almost 18, not over 20.
10k? This is Gene Roddenberry, man. His fans will pay $10k for a ripped shirt stained with Shatner's sweat. I'll bet this could clear a quarter mil.
And the funny thing is that at least ASCAP is, or at least was historically, a good guy. They were created to ensure that artists didn't get ripped off by huge corporations. For example, Little Richard had his songs used in movies and commercials and TV shows without his permission and without compensation. A great example is Disney's Donald Duck dancing around singing about having "a girl named Daisy; you know she drives me crazy!"
So the ASCAP enforcement of performance payment went into place to ensure that companies like Disney, who made a mint on artist content, had to pay for it. The idea that they're using it now to try to get additional profit from people who are trying to decide whether to buy a song is just ridiculous.
Reminds me of something my father told me about. He's in the cyclotron (atom smashers, for medical purposes) business, and back in the 70s, the control systems for his machines were run on PDP 11s.
Well, the old computers have all died over the years, but some of that equipment is still running, albeit with it's third owner. Y'know, Sloan Kettering upgrades and sells their cyclotron to UCLA. UCLA upgrades and sells it to University of Shanghai. Shanghai sells it to a hospital in Java...
Anyway, the same control software is being used; they're just running PDP 11 emulators in a Windows context.
Are you the friend?
I read that book. Something about a new testimony or something. What I learned is that we're all sinners.
thus generally fade from the caches of the Interwebs
All due respect to Vegas, what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet...
we can do whatever we want with them....
What alternative do you suggest?
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
Your call.
D: Move the server offshore and pirate other people's work.
E. Profit!
Fouled? Like a baseball?
You were recording those?
And you can. Jail break it. End of story.
For a long time when the Mac came out you couldn't "talk" to the hardware directly
Man, the last time I wanted to talk to the hardware directly was on a C64, appropriately enough. Why would you want to do that on a modern, multitasking system? Are you building some sort of dedicated control console for which the overhead of an OS/abstraction layer is not acceptable?
Apple the corporation has always made a lot of money by taking away little bits of freedom here and there
They wouldn't make any money doing that if there weren't some sort of trade-off. They make things easier and more reliable for people. If you don't build in some limits while you're doing that, you end up with a system that is prime host territory for viruses and trojans.
Besides, as others have pointed out, they're not all evil. Want to develop for the Mac? Xcode and their docs are free as in beer. Want to develop for the iPhone? If you just want to do it yourself and only to your own phone, it's free. It's only if you want to distribute it to the general public that it costs anything.
Don't forget: people choose the iPhone. They chose it even when there was no app store, no third-party development. The only reason this is an interesting topic of discussion is that it's the most popular phone out there. And with the cost of ownership, they're not exactly forcing anyone to buy...
It's not called "jailbreaking". It's called "Run/Stop - Restore".
That is cool. I remember seeing ads for one that did what you describe. My recollection, however, was that the object code that came out of such assemblers back in those days was so bloated and inefficient that it was sometimes not much faster than using the interpreted BASIC.
Of course, maybe I'm recalling theoretical hyperbole more than fact...
SID II, baby! I think it could support up to four simultaneous distinct tones, each with their own pitch, timbre and ADSR envelope. When they built the Amiga, its sound was effectively just two SID II chips, for stereo, IIRC.
Sprites were awesome, weren't they?
Particularly one whose games all depend upon an interpreted language
C64 games typically were not written in BASIC, as the performance of BASIC sucked. Only the cheesiest type-it-in-yourself games were implemented this way.
Most games were written in 6510 assembly, which was a very simple label-abstraction above 6510 machine language. Basically, the "assembling" process just changed the commands, like 'JSR' (jump to subroutine) to their binary equivalents (in this case, 00010000), and made sure that all two-byte numbers were big-endian. So JSR $FFD2, the command to print a byte to the screen became (in decimal) 032 210 255.
Some assemblers were a little more advanced, with macros and the like so you could label a subroutine and it would substitute the appropriate register address, but I never believed in those. I edited my code directly to the bits, damn it!
...a C64 SDK so that people could bundle up their favorite archived games or write their own to be included in the software library for this package.
How exactly does OS X compete on the desktop once you consider even marginal gaming?
Who cares about gaming? I use my Mac for work. I thought that the historical argument against Macs was that they weren't ready for serious business computing, but now it seems like the strongst argument anyone has is that the games are better on Windows.
Anyone who chooses their computing platform purely or even primarily based on gaming has childish priorities.
I still prefer linux, but every time i go through something like this, a part of me wishes I had gone for dual-booting with windows.
So why don't you? If you're on x86, there's no reason you can't bop over to BestBuy and bring home a copy of Windows instead of writing dubious contrarian posts in this thread? I mean you play the part of a frustrated Linux adherent pretty well, but the fact that you conveniently left out model numbers for your webcam and TV tuner makes me think that you're a 'turfer for MS. Me, I use a Commodore 64 with GEOS, so I just stay above the fray.