The whole point of the computer voting is that humans can't reliable mark paper ballots. If you have to put an arrow pointing to the party you vote for, some people will put the arrow between parties.
[citation required]
You are right that we are going in circles. But I think this premise is wrong. People have been voting with lines and arrows for centuries, and it really hasn't been a problem. Florida had a problem with hanging chads and all of a sudden all people know is that "all paper ballots have flaws" and the rest goes out the window.
The system of drawing arrows is nearly foolproof. We are replacing with something more complex, more expensive, and inferior -- for all the wrong reasons.
Fair enough, but you make it sound like that is something specific to Flash or the iPhone. But this is the case with any language that is not the native operating-system language. It happens if you use Java,.NET, Python, etc. It also happens with individual frameworks like OpenGL, DirectX, QT, GTK,... Yet people still use these layers because they are a productivity boost. Insulating the developer from the native APIs is a trade-off with convenience/portability on one side, and speed/power on the other.
Nothing in this discussion gives reason to forbid 3rd-party languages. Let us not make a mistake here: Apple isn't doing this because they think that programming in objective-C + the OS X APIs is so much better than every other language and framework every made in the universe. They are doing it to create vendor lock-in.
The device is not 3-inches long. The consumable portion is 3-inches long. This is like saying that my HP color printer is only 3 inches long: The printer is actually 2 feet long, but the cartridge is only 3 inches. Also, the odds are that it requires additional processing before it even gets to the device.
I'm not knocking what they have done -- just knocking the oversimplified press releases.
So how was this better than if they had just given you the paper and had you draw the arrows yourself? Sounds to me like the best thing about this system was the sheet of paper. Remove the computer, and it would be even better.
In the example of music... And still, the torrents flow.
I don't think the majority of torrents are music any longer. Today, I think they are TV, anime, and video games. I remember being a file sharer because I couldn't get subtitled anime. It took years before it came out on Region 1 DVD, and it was badly subtitled, with poorer quality than the broadcasts. The fansubbers would convert it to DVD quality with good subtitles in about 48 hours. Some of those fansub sites closed down and stopped hosting torrents when the DVDs came out. Others closed down when Hulu started showing the anime with a delay of only a few days to a week.
There are similar anecdotes for TV. I have all sorts of old cartoons I got off of torrent sites because they didn't sell them. It was a labor of love for people to convert their old VHS tapes to DIVX and upload them. But now I can buy those old cartoons at Target and Best Buy. Same thing with TV series - I now watch TV through Netflix. Years ago they were 2-3 seasons behind, now they are 1 - 2 seasons behind. And Hulu often has them for free.
You are right that there are still people who are pirates for the sake of it. But we have seen plenty of evidence that legal access to downloads significantly reduces piracy. It seems as though the studios are looking at the pirates to measure demand and see what to put out there.
when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs.
Which is what we need to return to. During the dial-up era, we had a utility company providing the lines, and 3rd-parties providing the service. That model resulted in an explosion of services and massive competition lowering prices. We need that again.
This reminds me of the scene in the movie Aliens where Bishop (a synthetic human) performs a trick where a person places their hand on the table, and Bishop repeatedly stabs the table at superhuman speed without hitting the person's hand.
It would be cool to make a robot that does that trick, and dare people to stick their hand under it.
Sending more fonts down to the end-user doesn't increase the quality. More likely, it gives web site designers the ability to send crappy annoying fonts. The ones that come with the OS are usually optimized for readability on the kinds of devices that the OS ships with. Ex: Windows Vista/7 ship with fonts optimized for LCD displays. But I don't think I would want to use those fonts on an iPhone.
It is always interesting when people agree, but in a way that sounds like they disagreed.
My point is that the readers don't care about the font. You replied with "Yes, because web sites want" which is my point. The site designers care, but their readers don't.
We seem to agree on the part where it does matter: I said "title page" and you said "headline" I said "trademark-style fonts" and you said "trade dress fonts" - that's my point. In general, the body of a page can be in whatever font and it doesn't matter. It's the headlines, titles, etc. that matter.
(Disclaimer: I am not an Apple developer. Nor a troll)
As far as I know, you can't write a native C or C++ app on the iPhone. To do anything on it, you have to use Apple's APIs. Since those APIs are not available on other devices - you can't write something in xcode and compile it on Android. There's no common APIs between them. Apple is 100% proprietary.
Now, you could write a C++/GTK application in xcode and run that on an Apple OS X computer and on Windows/Linux/etc. But I don't think you can do that on an iPhone. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There is a misconception on the meaning of the term "right." A right is something that you have intrinsically, and no one must grant to you. For example, I have the right to jump up and down. I have the right to breathe. I have the right to type naughty words into my computer. No software is necessary for me to have that right, it is just automatic. Rights cannot be granted, but they can be taken away.
For example, if the computer gave me electrical shocks when I typed in naughty words, it would be taking away my right to type in naughty words. But in order to grant me the right to type naughty words, the computer had to do.... nothing at all. Now, suppose some of those naughty words happen to form ActionScript 3.0 code. And a certain combination of typing produces an executable that compiles that code to run on the Apple iPhone. Did the iPhone have to do anything to grant me that right? Nope. What if I typed in some words that produced C++ code that I compiled into an iPhone executable. What does the iPhone have to do to grant me the right to run that? Nothing. In fact -- the phone has no idea how I generated that executable. It could have been 1000 monkeys on 1000 keyboards.
But Apple does have the ability to take away a right. They can refuse to allow my application into the app store on the basis of having used an ActionScript 3.0 compiler. Now, they can only guess that I used one. Or ask me. There's nothing intrinsically different about code generated from that particular tool that makes it somehow less desirable or less compatible. Apple is denying me the right on principal.
[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity.
The author says "the right, not just the convenience or opportunity" but that is what a right is. It is the convenience of using Flash. The opportunity to use it. Adobe did all the work. Apple doesn't have to do anything to allow Flash on the iPhone. They just have to not stop it from happening. And that, is why Apple is so hated here. Because Apple can make everything better for end-users and developers, and all they have to do is get out of the way. What Apple is doing, is what we call a "wrong."
My iPhone 3GS (English, US) shows the URL in the native character set. However, it will not let me position the cursor in the middle of those characters. I can effectively only edit the Latin part of it. Also, it gives me an additional option to switch to RTL mode. That appears on the usual Select / Select All / Paste menu.
Maybe my visual cortex is different from everyone else on the web. But I just don't get the font thing. Maybe it is like color blindness - font blindness?
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at? The number of fonts I have to select from is already darned annoying. I'm on a fresh Windows 7, and the list goes off the bottom of the screen. I don't think I can even tell the difference between most of them without a side-by-side comparison.
I think I need 3 fonts to get along just fine: 1 serif proportional, 1 sans serif proportional, 1 fixed-width. I really don't want my computer to start downloading and caching a gigabyte fonts because this web site designer thought Garamond expressed their idea better when I already downloaded Bookman, Century, Baskerville, Bodini, Times Roman,...
The FUD must be working. The hover effect in games is not a reason to deny support for Flash. That's silly. The few things that actually require that won't work on an iPhone. Just like they don't work on other touch platforms. boo-hoo.
There's tons of games and apps out there for the iPhone, where the PC version uses hover-effects. But the Nintendo DS version, and the Android version, etc. forego the hover effects. The conversions work just fine.
If it was an official cabinet position, the appointment would be announced, debated publicly on the floor, aired on c-span, covered in newspapers, and eventually voted upon.
Question: Are the people who run the government healthier than the average person? How about the people enforcing the law? I just wonder who will be deciding what is and is not healthy. They might be right, but i just fear when they start telling me things that they really don't know much about.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of the computer voting is that humans can't reliable mark paper ballots. If you have to put an arrow pointing to the party you vote for, some people will put the arrow between parties.
[citation required]
You are right that we are going in circles. But I think this premise is wrong. People have been voting with lines and arrows for centuries, and it really hasn't been a problem. Florida had a problem with hanging chads and all of a sudden all people know is that "all paper ballots have flaws" and the rest goes out the window.
The system of drawing arrows is nearly foolproof. We are replacing with something more complex, more expensive, and inferior -- for all the wrong reasons.
The phone definitely matters. Just yesterday I noticed that an iPhone 3GS gets 3 bars in my house and an iPhone 3G gets 0 - 1.
I wish that affected my RSS feed.
Fair enough, but you make it sound like that is something specific to Flash or the iPhone. But this is the case with any language that is not the native operating-system language. It happens if you use Java, .NET, Python, etc. It also happens with individual frameworks like OpenGL, DirectX, QT, GTK, ... Yet people still use these layers because they are a productivity boost. Insulating the developer from the native APIs is a trade-off with convenience/portability on one side, and speed/power on the other.
Nothing in this discussion gives reason to forbid 3rd-party languages. Let us not make a mistake here: Apple isn't doing this because they think that programming in objective-C + the OS X APIs is so much better than every other language and framework every made in the universe. They are doing it to create vendor lock-in.
The device is not 3-inches long. The consumable portion is 3-inches long. This is like saying that my HP color printer is only 3 inches long: The printer is actually 2 feet long, but the cartridge is only 3 inches. Also, the odds are that it requires additional processing before it even gets to the device.
I'm not knocking what they have done -- just knocking the oversimplified press releases.
Here is the original press release from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
So how was this better than if they had just given you the paper and had you draw the arrows yourself? Sounds to me like the best thing about this system was the sheet of paper. Remove the computer, and it would be even better.
Duhh, nuke the debris with a second one. ;-)
Wow, in that case, it was sexual harassment and the supervisor should be fired.
Okay, fair enough.
In the example of music... And still, the torrents flow.
I don't think the majority of torrents are music any longer. Today, I think they are TV, anime, and video games. I remember being a file sharer because I couldn't get subtitled anime. It took years before it came out on Region 1 DVD, and it was badly subtitled, with poorer quality than the broadcasts. The fansubbers would convert it to DVD quality with good subtitles in about 48 hours. Some of those fansub sites closed down and stopped hosting torrents when the DVDs came out. Others closed down when Hulu started showing the anime with a delay of only a few days to a week.
There are similar anecdotes for TV. I have all sorts of old cartoons I got off of torrent sites because they didn't sell them. It was a labor of love for people to convert their old VHS tapes to DIVX and upload them. But now I can buy those old cartoons at Target and Best Buy. Same thing with TV series - I now watch TV through Netflix. Years ago they were 2-3 seasons behind, now they are 1 - 2 seasons behind. And Hulu often has them for free.
You are right that there are still people who are pirates for the sake of it. But we have seen plenty of evidence that legal access to downloads significantly reduces piracy. It seems as though the studios are looking at the pirates to measure demand and see what to put out there.
when a price war broke out because there were far too many ISPs.
Which is what we need to return to. During the dial-up era, we had a utility company providing the lines, and 3rd-parties providing the service. That model resulted in an explosion of services and massive competition lowering prices. We need that again.
This reminds me of the scene in the movie Aliens where Bishop (a synthetic human) performs a trick where a person places their hand on the table, and Bishop repeatedly stabs the table at superhuman speed without hitting the person's hand.
It would be cool to make a robot that does that trick, and dare people to stick their hand under it.
They don't, but they should: a good, quality
Sending more fonts down to the end-user doesn't increase the quality. More likely, it gives web site designers the ability to send crappy annoying fonts. The ones that come with the OS are usually optimized for readability on the kinds of devices that the OS ships with. Ex: Windows Vista/7 ship with fonts optimized for LCD displays. But I don't think I would want to use those fonts on an iPhone.
It is always interesting when people agree, but in a way that sounds like they disagreed.
My point is that the readers don't care about the font. You replied with "Yes, because web sites want" which is my point. The site designers care, but their readers don't.
We seem to agree on the part where it does matter: I said "title page" and you said "headline" I said "trademark-style fonts" and you said "trade dress fonts" - that's my point. In general, the body of a page can be in whatever font and it doesn't matter. It's the headlines, titles, etc. that matter.
(Disclaimer: I am not an Apple developer. Nor a troll)
As far as I know, you can't write a native C or C++ app on the iPhone. To do anything on it, you have to use Apple's APIs. Since those APIs are not available on other devices - you can't write something in xcode and compile it on Android. There's no common APIs between them. Apple is 100% proprietary.
Now, you could write a C++/GTK application in xcode and run that on an Apple OS X computer and on Windows/Linux/etc. But I don't think you can do that on an iPhone. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There is a misconception on the meaning of the term "right." A right is something that you have intrinsically, and no one must grant to you. For example, I have the right to jump up and down. I have the right to breathe. I have the right to type naughty words into my computer. No software is necessary for me to have that right, it is just automatic. Rights cannot be granted, but they can be taken away.
For example, if the computer gave me electrical shocks when I typed in naughty words, it would be taking away my right to type in naughty words. But in order to grant me the right to type naughty words, the computer had to do.... nothing at all. Now, suppose some of those naughty words happen to form ActionScript 3.0 code. And a certain combination of typing produces an executable that compiles that code to run on the Apple iPhone. Did the iPhone have to do anything to grant me that right? Nope. What if I typed in some words that produced C++ code that I compiled into an iPhone executable. What does the iPhone have to do to grant me the right to run that? Nothing. In fact -- the phone has no idea how I generated that executable. It could have been 1000 monkeys on 1000 keyboards.
But Apple does have the ability to take away a right. They can refuse to allow my application into the app store on the basis of having used an ActionScript 3.0 compiler. Now, they can only guess that I used one. Or ask me. There's nothing intrinsically different about code generated from that particular tool that makes it somehow less desirable or less compatible. Apple is denying me the right on principal.
[A] large number of developers seem to think that they have the right to make software for the iPhone (or for anything else) in Flash, or in another high-level environment of their choosing. Literally, the right, not just the convenience or the opportunity.
The author says "the right, not just the convenience or opportunity" but that is what a right is. It is the convenience of using Flash. The opportunity to use it. Adobe did all the work. Apple doesn't have to do anything to allow Flash on the iPhone. They just have to not stop it from happening. And that, is why Apple is so hated here. Because Apple can make everything better for end-users and developers, and all they have to do is get out of the way. What Apple is doing, is what we call a "wrong."
My iPhone 3GS (English, US) shows the URL in the native character set. However, it will not let me position the cursor in the middle of those characters. I can effectively only edit the Latin part of it. Also, it gives me an additional option to switch to RTL mode. That appears on the usual Select / Select All / Paste menu.
Yeah, 'cuz that doesn't happen with other computing devices.
It is hardly Metroid-like since there are no platforms and no jumps. It's is more like Ecco the Dolphin + Loom.
Maybe my visual cortex is different from everyone else on the web. But I just don't get the font thing. Maybe it is like color blindness - font blindness?
Apart from recognizable trademark-style fonts that people use for a title page or a logo (Coca-cola, Snickers, Pacman) - do most people even care what font they are looking at? The number of fonts I have to select from is already darned annoying. I'm on a fresh Windows 7, and the list goes off the bottom of the screen. I don't think I can even tell the difference between most of them without a side-by-side comparison.
I think I need 3 fonts to get along just fine: 1 serif proportional, 1 sans serif proportional, 1 fixed-width. I really don't want my computer to start downloading and caching a gigabyte fonts because this web site designer thought Garamond expressed their idea better when I already downloaded Bookman, Century, Baskerville, Bodini, Times Roman, ...
Because you can develop an app with XCode and have it run on multiple devices. It really isn't that difficult.
Fill me in on this. How do I write something in xcode and compile it to work on Android?
The FUD must be working. The hover effect in games is not a reason to deny support for Flash. That's silly. The few things that actually require that won't work on an iPhone. Just like they don't work on other touch platforms. boo-hoo.
There's tons of games and apps out there for the iPhone, where the PC version uses hover-effects. But the Nintendo DS version, and the Android version, etc. forego the hover effects. The conversions work just fine.
The U.S. likes those laws. The U.S. government does not.
That is not possible.
If it was an official cabinet position, the appointment would be announced, debated publicly on the floor, aired on c-span, covered in newspapers, and eventually voted upon.
Question: Are the people who run the government healthier than the average person? How about the people enforcing the law? I just wonder who will be deciding what is and is not healthy. They might be right, but i just fear when they start telling me things that they really don't know much about.