What about artists though? I'd gladly pay money if it actually went to artists.
Paying companies who may or may not represent the artists I listen to, and may or may not have a oppressive contract with the artists I listen to, seems like a perfect example of rent seeking. IMO, it is extortion. Especially since you are paying it to avoid legal hassle. Maybe we should all incorporate as Music Labels and get a slice of the pie.
Really though, it comes down to ease of use and lack of DRM -- aka providing a superior experience. I have discovered that, I don't feel the need to pirate games or music now that Steam* and Amazon are around.
I'm in no hurry to legalize file sharing though, unless there's a good proposal for making sure artists actually get paid.
Also, who buys CDs anymore?
* Yes Steam has DRM, but it succeeds in the ease of use and superior experience categories at least, offering hosted (I hate the word cloud but it fits here) flexibility in exchange for the DRM.
I have an N1 so yes, I have seen the speed of it, and its far from abysmal. I also think it's 'cooler' to hate on flash these days for whatever that's worth so spare us the lone voice angle. But my point was.that it runs well enough for.people to want to use it. But if you really want something more objective, as of right now Flash player has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on the android market. With over 13 k reviews. This is a higher rating than last.FM and Pandora. It may run poorly on a Milestone thoguh are you on froyo yet?
How fast do you expec it to run. Btw saying someone is delusional or a fanboy means you are either a) lying about the performance or b) immature and judgemental about differing opinions reducing them into categories you understand.
milliseconds of latency on every single executed flash bytecode instruction... billions and billions and billions of them, all of which also require electricity that will be drained from the battery.
show me a flash application that can't be written natively and function better and use less resources.
show me a flash application that without it, your phone is useless.
Seems the mods are taking the axe to your posts (from two accounts?) but I wanted to reply to this one.
Interpreted code doesn't need to function as fast as native code in order to be good or useful. Look at JavaScript/Java/Python/Lisp/PHP/C#. And the software: Open Office, Eclipse, etc, etc. There are endless examples. Google Docs, Desktop Tower Defense.
The beauty of interpreted code is that it opens up a platform to developers who think differently about how they write code. And who prefer different tools. It enables rapid prototyping. And, if the end result is good, it doesn't matter if a native app is a tiny bit faster or uses a tiny bit less resources. (You really have no idea how fast Flash is on an N1 or how much battery is uses either though, do you?)
Nothing needs to be essential to a phone in order for a user to have the opportunity to try it out. How many fart apps are essential to the phone? Are you really arguing Apple should be protecting it's users from everything it deems non-essential?
Three months is pretty long compared to directly uploading somewhere the user can download immediately.
Really though, what I mean is that it's a good thing the carrier controlled platforms are going the way of the Dodo. But let's hope they aren't just replaced with equally evil rent-seekers. Hopefully it's enough of a wedge to pry control of the devices away from them over the next 10 to 20 years and make device portability a reality too. I do give Apple a lot of credit though in that they caused so much love for their devices, AT&T was forced to start allowing things they never would have used to allow (like an app store not controlled by AT&T). But when you see Apple doing stuff like this, it should be clear we have a long bumpy road ahead with new players trying to control the market while others ebb. But hopefully the end result will be that these phones are ours and the Wireless cos are just dumb carriers.
look at windows... the root cause of most problems is the requirement to keep legacy software supported...
What does that have to do with interpreted code?
Isnt it equally likely a ton of app developers could be slow to re-factor out deprecated APIs as it is for a platform of interpreted code?
And latency? Really? It's simply about protecting profits. Go watch Flash running on a Nexus One and tell me Apple is saving the world from those milliseconds of latency.
This whole thing is about profit. The really isn't anything complicated about it. The mental gymnastics some people go through to justify it really amaze me sometimes though.
There are some fantastic things about iPhone and Apple's tech and even advantages to the draconian locked down system. But 'saving' users from interpreted code isn't one of them.
In his blog post about it he has this "aw shucks, time to go write some apps Apple will approve" attitude.
It strikes me as the psycho ex gf/bf who cant accept Apple broke up with them and refuses to mail order a new Android companion (or at least get a RIM job)
/yeah, this post went in a completely different direction from where it started
So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked?
Well, what do you think? Were illegal services all fine and dandy beforehand? Use your brain.
And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...
OK, so throw out the baby with the bathwater. Also, that's pretty off-topic.
Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.
Huh? Are employees consumers?
Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.
This isn't the great firewall of China, in fact it's quite the opposite but "government bad! government will make you sorry!" is not a compelling argument.
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
Comcast won in the end in case you forgot here's a link, and they were resetting traffic with RST packets. If you dont think that was a test of what they could get away with, you're crazy. It was precedent setting.
"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.
I'm sorry this is going to sound rude but.... your post was either a complete troll or one of the stupidest things I have read on Slashdot in a long time. You warn of fixing a problem that doesn't exist and try proving your point with a bunch of unrelated "what-if" scenarios peppered with existential "you'll be sorry" fear mongering.
Here's a frightening thought, what happens when the marketroids realize they could combine this tech with the old "make the ad fall out of the magazine on purpose" trick.
Brilliant!
Re:Not remotely similar to the Microsoft situation
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 1
You are right, there are C/C++ compilers for the NDK, but that doesnt make code for Dalvik, it makes native binaries that your Dalvik-Java can interact with via the SDK/Android APIs.
Interesting distinction, imo.
Re:Not remotely similar to the Microsoft situation
on
The Case For Oracle
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Additionally, if you can do it the other way around, then it's really not Java language programming.
Enter Dalvik, stage left.
The VM in Android (Dalvik) is said to be a 'clean room' reverse engineering of a JVM and is not an actual JVM. In fact it does not run.class or.jar files but runs.apk and.dex files which are a format compiled from code written in Java (or C, C++, etc). How big of a difference this makes legally is debatable, but there has been precedent and it's in Google's favor.
So are you bound by Java licensing if you used it to cross compile into C? What about software that converted all your Java to Ruby? I'm not sure, but food for thought. Could they not just make the case that they are having developers code dex files, but are letting them write those dex files in Java and converting it for them? Sounds very semantic I know but this seems to be what the lawsuit comes down to. If I made a platform with custom apis and functions, could I not tell people that they can code in C# and I will convert their code to my format if they want? To me, neither side has a open and shut case here. The trademark question may only come into play if they wre claiming it as a Java Platform (and using the little coffee cup logo, etc). Simply metioning the name Java isn't infringing a trademark as far as I know.
The real question are the patents, which look, at a cursory glance, to be ridiculous:
* Protection Domains to Provide Security in a Computer System (2000)
* Controlling Access to a Resource (2000)
* Method and Apparatus for Preprocessing and Packaging Class Files (1999)
* System and Method for Dynamic Preloading of Classes through Memory Space Cloning of a Master Runtime System Process (2008)
* Method and Apparatus for Resolving Data References in Generate Code (2003)
* Interpreting Functions Utilizing a Hybrid of Virtual and Native Machine Instructions (2005)
* Method and System for Performing Static Initialization (2000)
I did find it funny though, that Google had criticized Sun in the past for letting Java fall apart amidst (paraphrasing here) a sea of lawsuits and trademark infringement claims.
Well that was a better post but you finished it with the same stupid line. Still maybe now you will ponder who it does help. And the.real question, is it really utility that is being maximized, or is it just profitability? You also still missed the defacto collusion point.
IIRC this has to do with the API change from 1.5 and earlier to 1.6 and later. Because that permission never existed in 1.6, any app targeting that platform will show as requesting the permission on 2.0+
The problem is that it comes up for any dev targeting 1.5 and earlier, so it comes up pretty often. Google probably could have handled the permissions differently but I cant think of any better ways off the top of my head at the moment.
No, the idea of free markets working effectively was sold with the idea of competition driving innovation. You seem to have completely missed that and instead reverted back to a knuckle dragger unicorn insult in order to mis-characterize what I said.
You may not really be a jerk or an idiot, but that was a really moronic reply. Sorry. Not sure if you will even see this but it bothers me when people are trying to have an intelligent conversation and it gets dragged down to unicorns and bullshit like your reply.
I'd be happy to discuss further but you need to show that you can formulate a thought besides "well the free market didnt promise unicorns" Give me a fscking break.
While I agree with you to some extent, maybe it helps to play Devil's Advocate: so what's the alternative? As far as publishers go, I can really only think of one or two who don't treat their customers like absolute garbage. Activision, THQ, EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Rockstar/Take Two -- all behave like money grubbing jerks who seem only to be interested in squeezing every dime out of you. Only Valve and Bioware seem to provide decent value to me; but even they are trying and take from the honey pot once too often. Bioware recently released updates for Dragon Age which put new locations on a map that you use in-game -- except these are just place holder locations whose intention is to drive people to buy DLC. It seems that in the consumer versus business scenario, the choice is to put up with maltreatment at the hands of a corporation, or to not game. Not ideal exactly. It's also hard to see a way out of this dynamic any time soon.
There's a limit where consumers will put up with some amounts of unfairness in order to get their media. The corporations know this and push that envelope ever higher. And like anything, consumers become desensitized to the previous level over time.
So I don't think this is the kind of Free Market envisioned by Milton Friedman et al, where consumer choice drives innovation and competition. If that were the case, consumers should be getting ever more for less, not the same products subdivided into "micro products" they end up paying more for. What we're seeing here is innovation in ways to screw over the consumer, not innovation in the games themselves. And when the entire industry does it, you have a sort of de-facto collusion.
Now this is all very speculative, fatalistic, one-sided opinion on my part. I recognize also there are quite a few exceptions. Still, it's hard for me to come to any other conclusion when every single game these days has a half dozen silly DLC add-ons half of which seem like they were carved out of the actual game. The only way to fight back does seem to be not to bother with add-ons, or only ever buy them if they are really worth paying extra for the game. It's just that fighting back hardly ever seems worth it.
Oh I agree 100% (was just joking above). I always think the best example though, for explaining net neutrality to people unfamiliar with it is to talk about video on demand services. When I'm trying to teach them why a neutral net is important, I point to the fact that, for example, both Netflix and Comcast offer video on demand. But only one company is an ISP and in a position to affect the quality of the other's business by capping or slowing bandwidth. This tends to help people grok net neutrality faster than aligning it with the interests of facebook and flickr.
Seems they have had some decently grand failures too as of late. WP7 looks almost dead out of the gate, Kin was dead out of the gate and they killed Courier before ever seeing the gate. Couple that with continual loss of browser share versus Firefox, and you have some pretty bad failures. While Windows 7 did well I think many havent forgotten how badly Vista sold. Now, being MS I'm sure they had quite a few spectacular failures over the years but it seems they are pretty inept at reading the marketplace as of late. Though they seem to be doing OK with Xbox.
Still, the thing that bums me is that Courier could have been so great.
Indeed -- or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of Android community websites where this question has been answered 100 times already. I'm sorry, but Ask Slashdot has gone down the tubes (or series thereof). This is a question one could Google and find the answer to in less than a minute. This is supposed to be "news for nerds", not "common questions for laymen & kdawson."
Rooting and replacing the bootloader/ROM are completely different though. I thinks most people who know about the situation expected it would be rooted. The huge barrier that Motorola put up with the eFuse is still there however. And it's still going to be nearly impossible to circumvent. Key word being nearly.
As far as I can tell even now the Motorola Milestone (the european version of the original Droid) still hasn't gotten past the signed ROM requirement of it's boot loader even though it too has been rooted.
Slashdot Mirror
What about artists though? I'd gladly pay money if it actually went to artists.
Paying companies who may or may not represent the artists I listen to, and may or may not have a oppressive contract with the artists I listen to, seems like a perfect example of rent seeking. IMO, it is extortion. Especially since you are paying it to avoid legal hassle. Maybe we should all incorporate as Music Labels and get a slice of the pie.
Really though, it comes down to ease of use and lack of DRM -- aka providing a superior experience. I have discovered that, I don't feel the need to pirate games or music now that Steam* and Amazon are around.
I'm in no hurry to legalize file sharing though, unless there's a good proposal for making sure artists actually get paid.
Also, who buys CDs anymore?
* Yes Steam has DRM, but it succeeds in the ease of use and superior experience categories at least, offering hosted (I hate the word cloud but it fits here) flexibility in exchange for the DRM.
Indeed. And as the Apple PDF exploit showed, Android is in trouble.
I have an N1 so yes, I have seen the speed of it, and its far from abysmal. I also think it's 'cooler' to hate on flash these days for whatever that's worth so spare us the lone voice angle. But my point was.that it runs well enough for.people to want to use it. But if you really want something more objective, as of right now Flash player has a 4.5 out of 5 star rating on the android market. With over 13 k reviews. This is a higher rating than last.FM and Pandora. It may run poorly on a Milestone thoguh are you on froyo yet? How fast do you expec it to run. Btw saying someone is delusional or a fanboy means you are either a) lying about the performance or b) immature and judgemental about differing opinions reducing them into categories you understand.
milliseconds of latency on every single executed flash bytecode instruction... billions and billions and billions of them, all of which also require electricity that will be drained from the battery.
show me a flash application that can't be written natively and function better and use less resources.
show me a flash application that without it, your phone is useless.
Seems the mods are taking the axe to your posts (from two accounts?) but I wanted to reply to this one.
Interpreted code doesn't need to function as fast as native code in order to be good or useful. Look at JavaScript/Java/Python/Lisp/PHP/C#. And the software: Open Office, Eclipse, etc, etc. There are endless examples. Google Docs, Desktop Tower Defense.
The beauty of interpreted code is that it opens up a platform to developers who think differently about how they write code. And who prefer different tools. It enables rapid prototyping. And, if the end result is good, it doesn't matter if a native app is a tiny bit faster or uses a tiny bit less resources. (You really have no idea how fast Flash is on an N1 or how much battery is uses either though, do you?)
Nothing needs to be essential to a phone in order for a user to have the opportunity to try it out. How many fart apps are essential to the phone? Are you really arguing Apple should be protecting it's users from everything it deems non-essential?
Three months is pretty long compared to directly uploading somewhere the user can download immediately.
Really though, what I mean is that it's a good thing the carrier controlled platforms are going the way of the Dodo. But let's hope they aren't just replaced with equally evil rent-seekers. Hopefully it's enough of a wedge to pry control of the devices away from them over the next 10 to 20 years and make device portability a reality too. I do give Apple a lot of credit though in that they caused so much love for their devices, AT&T was forced to start allowing things they never would have used to allow (like an app store not controlled by AT&T). But when you see Apple doing stuff like this, it should be clear we have a long bumpy road ahead with new players trying to control the market while others ebb. But hopefully the end result will be that these phones are ours and the Wireless cos are just dumb carriers.
look at windows... the root cause of most problems is the requirement to keep legacy software supported...
What does that have to do with interpreted code?
Isnt it equally likely a ton of app developers could be slow to re-factor out deprecated APIs as it is for a platform of interpreted code?
And latency? Really? It's simply about protecting profits. Go watch Flash running on a Nexus One and tell me Apple is saving the world from those milliseconds of latency.
This whole thing is about profit. The really isn't anything complicated about it. The mental gymnastics some people go through to justify it really amaze me sometimes though.
There are some fantastic things about iPhone and Apple's tech and even advantages to the draconian locked down system. But 'saving' users from interpreted code isn't one of them.
In his blog post about it he has this "aw shucks, time to go write some apps Apple will approve" attitude.
/yeah, this post went in a completely different direction from where it started
It strikes me as the psycho ex gf/bf who cant accept Apple broke up with them and refuses to mail order a new Android companion (or at least get a RIM job)
So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked?
Well, what do you think? Were illegal services all fine and dandy beforehand? Use your brain.
And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...
OK, so throw out the baby with the bathwater. Also, that's pretty off-topic.
Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.
Huh? Are employees consumers?
Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.
This isn't the great firewall of China, in fact it's quite the opposite but "government bad! government will make you sorry!" is not a compelling argument.
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
Comcast won in the end in case you forgot here's a link, and they were resetting traffic with RST packets. If you dont think that was a test of what they could get away with, you're crazy. It was precedent setting.
"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.
I'm sorry this is going to sound rude but.... your post was either a complete troll or one of the stupidest things I have read on Slashdot in a long time. You warn of fixing a problem that doesn't exist and try proving your point with a bunch of unrelated "what-if" scenarios peppered with existential "you'll be sorry" fear mongering.
Here's a frightening thought, what happens when the marketroids realize they could combine this tech with the old "make the ad fall out of the magazine on purpose" trick.
Brilliant!
You are right, there are C/C++ compilers for the NDK, but that doesnt make code for Dalvik, it makes native binaries that your Dalvik-Java can interact with via the SDK/Android APIs.
Interesting distinction, imo.
Additionally, if you can do it the other way around, then it's really not Java language programming.
Enter Dalvik, stage left.
.class or .jar files but runs .apk and .dex files which are a format compiled from code written in Java (or C, C++, etc). How big of a difference this makes legally is debatable, but there has been precedent and it's in Google's favor.
The VM in Android (Dalvik) is said to be a 'clean room' reverse engineering of a JVM and is not an actual JVM. In fact it does not run
See Case law under: Clean room design
So are you bound by Java licensing if you used it to cross compile into C? What about software that converted all your Java to Ruby? I'm not sure, but food for thought. Could they not just make the case that they are having developers code dex files, but are letting them write those dex files in Java and converting it for them? Sounds very semantic I know but this seems to be what the lawsuit comes down to. If I made a platform with custom apis and functions, could I not tell people that they can code in C# and I will convert their code to my format if they want? To me, neither side has a open and shut case here. The trademark question may only come into play if they wre claiming it as a Java Platform (and using the little coffee cup logo, etc). Simply metioning the name Java isn't infringing a trademark as far as I know.
The real question are the patents, which look, at a cursory glance, to be ridiculous:
* Protection Domains to Provide Security in a Computer System (2000)
* Controlling Access to a Resource (2000)
* Method and Apparatus for Preprocessing and Packaging Class Files (1999)
* System and Method for Dynamic Preloading of Classes through Memory Space Cloning of a Master Runtime System Process (2008)
* Method and Apparatus for Resolving Data References in Generate Code (2003)
* Interpreting Functions Utilizing a Hybrid of Virtual and Native Machine Instructions (2005)
* Method and System for Performing Static Initialization (2000)
I did find it funny though, that Google had criticized Sun in the past for letting Java fall apart amidst (paraphrasing here) a sea of lawsuits and trademark infringement claims.
Makes me skeptical of the coverage and reliability they will be able to provide for 4G but I dunno.
Well that was a better post but you finished it with the same stupid line. Still maybe now you will ponder who it does help. And the.real question, is it really utility that is being maximized, or is it just profitability? You also still missed the defacto collusion point.
IIRC this has to do with the API change from 1.5 and earlier to 1.6 and later. Because that permission never existed in 1.6, any app targeting that platform will show as requesting the permission on 2.0+
See the second comment here: stack overflow
The problem is that it comes up for any dev targeting 1.5 and earlier, so it comes up pretty often. Google probably could have handled the permissions differently but I cant think of any better ways off the top of my head at the moment.
No, the idea of free markets working effectively was sold with the idea of competition driving innovation. You seem to have completely missed that and instead reverted back to a knuckle dragger unicorn insult in order to mis-characterize what I said.
You may not really be a jerk or an idiot, but that was a really moronic reply. Sorry. Not sure if you will even see this but it bothers me when people are trying to have an intelligent conversation and it gets dragged down to unicorns and bullshit like your reply.
I'd be happy to discuss further but you need to show that you can formulate a thought besides "well the free market didnt promise unicorns" Give me a fscking break.
Bookmarked your blog to give it a test spin when it comes out
While I agree with you to some extent, maybe it helps to play Devil's Advocate: so what's the alternative? As far as publishers go, I can really only think of one or two who don't treat their customers like absolute garbage. Activision, THQ, EA, Blizzard, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Rockstar/Take Two -- all behave like money grubbing jerks who seem only to be interested in squeezing every dime out of you. Only Valve and Bioware seem to provide decent value to me; but even they are trying and take from the honey pot once too often. Bioware recently released updates for Dragon Age which put new locations on a map that you use in-game -- except these are just place holder locations whose intention is to drive people to buy DLC. It seems that in the consumer versus business scenario, the choice is to put up with maltreatment at the hands of a corporation, or to not game. Not ideal exactly. It's also hard to see a way out of this dynamic any time soon.
There's a limit where consumers will put up with some amounts of unfairness in order to get their media. The corporations know this and push that envelope ever higher. And like anything, consumers become desensitized to the previous level over time.
So I don't think this is the kind of Free Market envisioned by Milton Friedman et al, where consumer choice drives innovation and competition. If that were the case, consumers should be getting ever more for less, not the same products subdivided into "micro products" they end up paying more for. What we're seeing here is innovation in ways to screw over the consumer, not innovation in the games themselves. And when the entire industry does it, you have a sort of de-facto collusion.
Now this is all very speculative, fatalistic, one-sided opinion on my part. I recognize also there are quite a few exceptions. Still, it's hard for me to come to any other conclusion when every single game these days has a half dozen silly DLC add-ons half of which seem like they were carved out of the actual game. The only way to fight back does seem to be not to bother with add-ons, or only ever buy them if they are really worth paying extra for the game. It's just that fighting back hardly ever seems worth it.
Oh I agree 100% (was just joking above). I always think the best example though, for explaining net neutrality to people unfamiliar with it is to talk about video on demand services. When I'm trying to teach them why a neutral net is important, I point to the fact that, for example, both Netflix and Comcast offer video on demand. But only one company is an ISP and in a position to affect the quality of the other's business by capping or slowing bandwidth. This tends to help people grok net neutrality faster than aligning it with the interests of facebook and flickr.
I think you hit on a good point but it's bigger than that. In a sense all DRM is infringing on the public's right to Fair Use. This is no different.
What business model?
/sorry
Seems they have had some decently grand failures too as of late. WP7 looks almost dead out of the gate, Kin was dead out of the gate and they killed Courier before ever seeing the gate. Couple that with continual loss of browser share versus Firefox, and you have some pretty bad failures. While Windows 7 did well I think many havent forgotten how badly Vista sold. Now, being MS I'm sure they had quite a few spectacular failures over the years but it seems they are pretty inept at reading the marketplace as of late. Though they seem to be doing OK with Xbox.
Still, the thing that bums me is that Courier could have been so great.
/speculation
Indeed -- or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of Android community websites where this question has been answered 100 times already. I'm sorry, but Ask Slashdot has gone down the tubes (or series thereof). This is a question one could Google and find the answer to in less than a minute. This is supposed to be "news for nerds", not "common questions for laymen & kdawson."
Rooting and replacing the bootloader/ROM are completely different though. I thinks most people who know about the situation expected it would be rooted. The huge barrier that Motorola put up with the eFuse is still there however. And it's still going to be nearly impossible to circumvent. Key word being nearly.
As far as I can tell even now the Motorola Milestone (the european version of the original Droid) still hasn't gotten past the signed ROM requirement of it's boot loader even though it too has been rooted.
See the engadget article for details
int Main()
{
splif_f("Hellooooooo, World-dude!")
return 420;
}
Thanks :)