"What Apple are doing is obfuscating file transactions by providing an extremely limited custom interface which hides file transactions from the user. In no way are they eliminating the concept of files, rather just treating the user like an idiot and hiding the actual transaction from them."
Exactly. Because, really, as a user, does it benefit you to have to name a file or document or whatever with an extension and all that? Especially when we've seen that it's possible to make an easy to use interface which involves simply a "+" button?
"I'd like to backup my entire device to filesystem or another device without the need for buggy third party software. Simple concept, no?"
Simple yes. And not a problem. Connect it to iTunes, let it backup your device. Then connect your new device, and restore. This will restore all the data attached to all your applications. Yes, those files that applications create and isolate from the idio..ahem... user are automatically backed up with a little control from the app so that it all just moves from old device to new device.
Now, if you were talking about piecemeal restores, yeah, that's not allowed. Why? Because apps could have private data, and doing this would allow you to easily backup and restore data in order to copy from a protected phone to a non-protected phone. Forcing you to restore the phone also forced you to retain the protection settings, while protecting you from the biggest problem (losing your phone).
"you need not restrict the entire user just to protect them, you need only to restrict application from accessing the parts of the OS (API) that it doesn't need. This can be accomplished by explicitly granting permissions during installation and explicitly denying access to all other functions. You know, how Linux security works today."
Allow or deny? Come on. Really? Might work for us two, but certainly not going to fly for most of my non-programmer friends.
Say the iPhone worked more like you wanted. "hey, look, check out this cool-looking new keyboard add-on app for my phone!... oh, there's a list of APIs. Sound? File sys access? Network? um... sounds like that social fart app. If it's fine for the fart, it's probably fine for a keyboard. let's hit allow."
"Hi, this is Chase bank. We're detecting some suspicious activity....."
Well, aside from the really lame marketing (stemcell? seriously, who thought of that one? lemme guess, it's supposed to sound like a handheld version of the IBM Cell?)
I mean, there's already several "Well, then build on Android" comments above that actually have substance. Some reasoning like: "If you don't like Apple's policies/actions/whatever/circlesomethinghere, then there's Android."
For me, I'm trying for a 2nd time to learn to build on Android just because I like to tinker. But damn, the Android SDK experience is feels kinda shitty after I've used the iPhone SDK.
If you read the article about the reporter who went in undercover, the people are working overtime because they want to. Cutting the hours actually hurts them because it decreases opportunity to earn money.
Ahem, Dell's cheapest Alienware unit starts at $999. That's still a consumer realm.
Even a Inspiron 580 + 24" LCD/Webcam + Speakers gets to be around $800. Going from the baseline CPU to the highest costs $350 more on top of that.
Apple's most expensive Xserve rack unit starts at $3,599.00. It's powered by a Xeon. So is a Mac Pro. By Intel's standards, that's a workstation/server.
whoops, college, not high school. I haven't done embedded systems stuff since college and somehow he expects me to keep up to date with specialized microcontrollers 8 years later? wtf?
Hmm, not a bad idea since it's a logical category.
Although, I'd be concerned about the average user knowing what "UI settings" or "visual settings" actually means.
For example, my guess is that that both my parents probably wouldn't know. (Dad even emailed me to ask about whether or not DSPs have interrupt controllers. I don't know. I haven't done embedded systems stuff since high school. He designed a FPU for AMD. For some reason, he won't google for info himself.):(
Something I've noticed is ever since 2nd semester CS undergrad courses 9 years ago, many of my friends in the industry consider "order of magnitude" to be the number of digits after rounding to the most significant digit.
Probably not going to happen. While that would fit in perfectly with American cars, Apple will make them turn in order to see the stock price jump after the Europe and Japan releases:P
"Why are full screen visualisers and system tray icons in there?"
As you mentioned, they're not basic. Where would you suggest they go?
Given that they're all tangential to the point of the app, it doesn't strike me as odd to be under a misc Advanced tab.
Given that almost every non-software-engineer using Windows I've met doesn't seem to understand what the systray icons are, that's certainly "Advanced" in the common user's eyes. (I used to do tech support at a university dorm, and also used to do IT work at a company whose main product line included high speed EEPROMs and wireless chipsets.)
Okay, so I looked at the article and then the first PDF link (20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf). First off, 7.2 isn't even talking about restrictions. It's about ad-hoc.
Oh, but check it out, they even have "FOSS" in the definitions list.
And what happens if I search for it? The first thing I see says "3.3.16 If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations."
Since I'm not lawyer, I'm just taking a guess here, but it sounds like: "If you're using FOSS in your code, don't forget to abide by that license too. And you're not allowed to relicense Apple's software to GPL."
Let's look at the situation in a little more detail instead of handwaving it away.
Apple distributes something (a zip file) which includes an App licensed under the GPL written by an Author who provides said zip file to Apple to distribute.
Walmart distributes something (a router) which includes an App (Linux kernel) licensed under the GPL produced by an company (Linksys) who provides said router to Apple to distribute.
To me: A store sells an object licensed under the GPL produced by another party.
So.... how's Walmart not an acceptable analogy? If you're going to tell me that Apple's going to need to provide me the GPL code from a third party, how do I request Newegg, Buy.com, Walmart, and Fry's Electronics to provide me the kernel source from a WRT54g?
Hold on there, you assume that all people care about the same things.
For example, a girl I knew loves her BMW M3, not because it's an M3, but because it has the BMW logo on the front. It could have been a 318 for all she cared. At the same time, I think it's cool because it's a M3 with all the nice engineering tweaking that went into it that makes it special to me.
Non-techie Mac-users will never care about what BSD is or what GPL is, or whether or not you can install an OpenSSH server on it. Advertise it and they'll go "huh? where's the lickable goodness?" Point is, they won't care. Heck, more mysterious acronyms might even scare them off. Marketing at Apple knows that.
All the techie Mac-users already know because, well, they're tech oriented and if you don't know BSD, you might as well give up your geek card right there any then.
As for the BSD-proponents, sometimes some people don't care about having their name in big lights. Sometimes it's all about standing back, grinning, and thinking to yourself, "I built that shit and the whole world works because of it."
What is the point of open source? It's to help others be more productive by advancing the field using what they know instead of reinventing the wheel every time. If Apple had to build an entire POSIX-compliant OS from scratch before making the GUI, would that really help the users? To be saying that it's unfair that Apple simply acknowledges FreeBSD as a userland foundation is a little strange to me when it's not even certain that the authors think the same. Apple met the license. And the authors can say, if they choose, "yup, we helped make that happen too." The alternative is, well, do we want to return to the time where every Unix-ish OS was built up from scratch by their individual vendors with almost compatible tools? My guess is no.
To all that worked on the BSD tcpip stack that the whole internet is based off: It is pretty darn obvious that your talent makes the world go round. Thanks once again.
I consider the GMA950 to be shitty enough that we shouldn't have it in a Mac in the first place.
But thing is, no matter how you look at benchmarks, there's almost always a way to skew it. So yeah, it's the truth that it's 5x faster when measured from this angle, but it's also the truth that when you compare budget (nvidia onboard) to scraping the barrel (Intel GMA) that pretty much anything is better.
This applies even to the G5. Remember the supercomputer cluster at Virginia Tech? Core 2 Quad might be pretty badass when compared to a Quad G5 for common tasks, but if you stick to anything that involves a lot of multiply/accumulate and anything that uses Altivec-supported vector math you're bound to find that SSE3 just doesn't cut it. Does it mean that the 2x to 5x isn't true. It just means it's true for that particular task.
Example? Distributed.net RC72 at 2Ghz: Intel Core 2 Duo normalized performance = 6,817,377.69 PowerPC 970 G5 normalized performance = 14,041,896.52 There's your 2x. What does it mean? It doesn't mean everything will be 2x faster on a G5, but if you just happen to be cracking keys or simply the right field, you might want to dig up a G5 on ebay and use your C2D to play some Supreme Commander. (and it seems the Cell then creams the G5 in this benchmark)
Whatever the case, use right tool for the right job, and a 5x performance difference isn't so hard to believe.
Say what? Everything that makes me think UNIX is totally moddable on a my Mac's OSX install if I so choose. I just click Terminal.app, run sudo -s, and off I go.
Um... Apple pushed for a removal of DRM for pretty much all of the music industry. If it wasn't for Apple scaring the shit out of the music execs, Amazon, Apple, and all the other stores wouldn't have been able to provide us with DRM-free musics.
I'm not sure even more than 1 core is necessary for software RAID.
I just (last week) built a OpenSolaris based ZFS NAS with 2 drives on a old Core Duo. Its never gone past 20% CPU utilization even when I'm copying from 3 disks over gigE to it with on-the-fly gzip compression enabled as part of ZFS. I think it sustained 48MB/sec.
CPU would have been a Core Solo instead had the ebay seller not mailed me the wrong chip.
I'd say anything P3 class or better would be fine with one core.
Also, I'd object to saying that OpenSolaris is a bad choice. We're taking file servers here. ZFS works well and OpenSolaris is open source. It's not like you want bleeding edge commits from a tree to run the thing that stores your precious data anyways.
Finally, if this is dedicated to being a file server, might as well boot off the USB flash drive or liveCD. Your distro ought to be small enough to fit and you have less chance of OS corruption from a read-only image.
Slashdot Mirror
"What Apple are doing is obfuscating file transactions by providing an extremely limited custom interface which hides file transactions from the user. In no way are they eliminating the concept of files, rather just treating the user like an idiot and hiding the actual transaction from them."
Exactly. Because, really, as a user, does it benefit you to have to name a file or document or whatever with an extension and all that? Especially when we've seen that it's possible to make an easy to use interface which involves simply a "+" button?
"I'd like to backup my entire device to filesystem or another device without the need for buggy third party software. Simple concept, no?"
Simple yes. And not a problem. Connect it to iTunes, let it backup your device. Then connect your new device, and restore. This will restore all the data attached to all your applications. Yes, those files that applications create and isolate from the idio..ahem... user are automatically backed up with a little control from the app so that it all just moves from old device to new device.
Now, if you were talking about piecemeal restores, yeah, that's not allowed. Why? Because apps could have private data, and doing this would allow you to easily backup and restore data in order to copy from a protected phone to a non-protected phone. Forcing you to restore the phone also forced you to retain the protection settings, while protecting you from the biggest problem (losing your phone).
"you need not restrict the entire user just to protect them, you need only to restrict application from accessing the parts of the OS (API) that it doesn't need. This can be accomplished by explicitly granting permissions during installation and explicitly denying access to all other functions. You know, how Linux security works today."
Allow or deny? Come on. Really?
Might work for us two, but certainly not going to fly for most of my non-programmer friends.
Say the iPhone worked more like you wanted. ... oh, there's a list of APIs. Sound? File sys access? Network? um... sounds like that social fart app. If it's fine for the fart, it's probably fine for a keyboard. let's hit allow."
"hey, look, check out this cool-looking new keyboard add-on app for my phone!
"Hi, this is Chase bank. We're detecting some suspicious activity....."
Well, aside from the really lame marketing (stemcell? seriously, who thought of that one? lemme guess, it's supposed to sound like a handheld version of the IBM Cell?)
http://www.zii.com/Developer/Landing.aspx
There you go. The device itself actually looks decent, and if they kick their current marketing team out and hire a new one, it might have a chance.
Cuz his comment doesn't really tell us anything?
I mean, there's already several "Well, then build on Android" comments above that actually have substance. Some reasoning like:
"If you don't like Apple's policies/actions/whatever/circlesomethinghere, then there's Android."
For me, I'm trying for a 2nd time to learn to build on Android just because I like to tinker. But damn, the Android SDK experience is feels kinda shitty after I've used the iPhone SDK.
And the Inspiron? And the Mac Mini?
Your selective blindness is too obvious.
If you read the article about the reporter who went in undercover, the people are working overtime because they want to.
Cutting the hours actually hurts them because it decreases opportunity to earn money.
Ahem, Dell's cheapest Alienware unit starts at $999. That's still a consumer realm.
Even a Inspiron 580 + 24" LCD/Webcam + Speakers gets to be around $800. Going from the baseline CPU to the highest costs $350 more on top of that.
Apple's most expensive Xserve rack unit starts at $3,599.00. It's powered by a Xeon. So is a Mac Pro.
By Intel's standards, that's a workstation/server.
whoops, college, not high school. I haven't done embedded systems stuff since college and somehow he expects me to keep up to date with specialized microcontrollers 8 years later? wtf?
Hmm, not a bad idea since it's a logical category.
Although, I'd be concerned about the average user knowing what "UI settings" or "visual settings" actually means.
For example, my guess is that that both my parents probably wouldn't know. (Dad even emailed me to ask about whether or not DSPs have interrupt controllers. I don't know. I haven't done embedded systems stuff since high school. He designed a FPU for AMD. For some reason, he won't google for info himself.) :(
As stupid as it sounds, unfortunately, yes.
Personally, I would have considered rounding 89999 to 100000 if it seemed like a reasonable error margin, but to answer your direct question, yes.
Something I've noticed is ever since 2nd semester CS undergrad courses 9 years ago, many of my friends in the industry consider "order of magnitude" to be the number of digits after rounding to the most significant digit.
So... 66000 = 70000. 5 zeros.
and 200000 = 200000. 6 zeros.
It seems wikipedia has shown some precedent for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
Probably not going to happen. While that would fit in perfectly with American cars, Apple will make them turn in order to see the stock price jump after the Europe and Japan releases :P
(signing off to get new brakes on my infiniti)
"Why are full screen visualisers and system tray icons in there?"
As you mentioned, they're not basic.
Where would you suggest they go?
Given that they're all tangential to the point of the app, it doesn't strike me as odd to be under a misc Advanced tab.
Given that almost every non-software-engineer using Windows I've met doesn't seem to understand what the systray icons are, that's certainly "Advanced" in the common user's eyes. (I used to do tech support at a university dorm, and also used to do IT work at a company whose main product line included high speed EEPROMs and wireless chipsets.)
Then explain the WRT54g and Android phones why the kernel source isn't in the box?
Okay, so I looked at the article and then the first PDF link (20100302_iphone_dev_agr.pdf). First off, 7.2 isn't even talking about restrictions. It's about ad-hoc.
Oh, but check it out, they even have "FOSS" in the definitions list.
And what happens if I search for it? The first thing I see says "3.3.16 If Your Application includes any FOSS, You agree to comply with all applicable FOSS licensing terms. You also agree not to use any FOSS in the development of Your Application in such a way that would cause the non-FOSS portions of the Apple Software to be subject to any FOSS licensing terms or obligations."
Since I'm not lawyer, I'm just taking a guess here, but it sounds like: "If you're using FOSS in your code, don't forget to abide by that license too. And you're not allowed to relicense Apple's software to GPL."
What?
Let's look at the situation in a little more detail instead of handwaving it away.
Apple distributes something (a zip file) which includes an App licensed under the GPL written by an Author who provides said zip file to Apple to distribute.
Walmart distributes something (a router) which includes an App (Linux kernel) licensed under the GPL produced by an company (Linksys) who provides said router to Apple to distribute.
To me: A store sells an object licensed under the GPL produced by another party.
So.... how's Walmart not an acceptable analogy?
If you're going to tell me that Apple's going to need to provide me the GPL code from a third party, how do I request Newegg, Buy.com, Walmart, and Fry's Electronics to provide me the kernel source from a WRT54g?
Hold on there, you assume that all people care about the same things.
For example, a girl I knew loves her BMW M3, not because it's an M3, but because it has the BMW logo on the front. It could have been a 318 for all she cared. At the same time, I think it's cool because it's a M3 with all the nice engineering tweaking that went into it that makes it special to me.
Non-techie Mac-users will never care about what BSD is or what GPL is, or whether or not you can install an OpenSSH server on it. Advertise it and they'll go "huh? where's the lickable goodness?" Point is, they won't care. Heck, more mysterious acronyms might even scare them off. Marketing at Apple knows that.
All the techie Mac-users already know because, well, they're tech oriented and if you don't know BSD, you might as well give up your geek card right there any then.
As for the BSD-proponents, sometimes some people don't care about having their name in big lights. Sometimes it's all about standing back, grinning, and thinking to yourself, "I built that shit and the whole world works because of it."
What is the point of open source? It's to help others be more productive by advancing the field using what they know instead of reinventing the wheel every time. If Apple had to build an entire POSIX-compliant OS from scratch before making the GUI, would that really help the users? To be saying that it's unfair that Apple simply acknowledges FreeBSD as a userland foundation is a little strange to me when it's not even certain that the authors think the same. Apple met the license. And the authors can say, if they choose, "yup, we helped make that happen too." The alternative is, well, do we want to return to the time where every Unix-ish OS was built up from scratch by their individual vendors with almost compatible tools? My guess is no.
To all that worked on the BSD tcpip stack that the whole internet is based off: It is pretty darn obvious that your talent makes the world go round. Thanks once again.
Kinda like the 4.4 BSD TCP/IP protocol stack is a perfect example to not chose GPL.
O RLY?
What's preventing the developers from posting source on their web site like the other GPL apps on the app store?
See http://github.com/RHoK/
I don't know what the other teams did, but the team I was on intended to release under this license: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php
I consider the GMA950 to be shitty enough that we shouldn't have it in a Mac in the first place.
But thing is, no matter how you look at benchmarks, there's almost always a way to skew it.
So yeah, it's the truth that it's 5x faster when measured from this angle, but it's also the truth that when you compare budget (nvidia onboard) to scraping the barrel (Intel GMA) that pretty much anything is better.
This applies even to the G5. Remember the supercomputer cluster at Virginia Tech? Core 2 Quad might be pretty badass when compared to a Quad G5 for common tasks, but if you stick to anything that involves a lot of multiply/accumulate and anything that uses Altivec-supported vector math you're bound to find that SSE3 just doesn't cut it. Does it mean that the 2x to 5x isn't true. It just means it's true for that particular task.
Example?
Distributed.net RC72 at 2Ghz:
Intel Core 2 Duo normalized performance = 6,817,377.69
PowerPC 970 G5 normalized performance = 14,041,896.52
There's your 2x. What does it mean? It doesn't mean everything will be 2x faster on a G5, but if you just happen to be cracking keys or simply the right field, you might want to dig up a G5 on ebay and use your C2D to play some Supreme Commander. (and it seems the Cell then creams the G5 in this benchmark)
Whatever the case, use right tool for the right job, and a 5x performance difference isn't so hard to believe.
Say what? Everything that makes me think UNIX is totally moddable on a my Mac's OSX install if I so choose.
I just click Terminal.app, run sudo -s, and off I go.
Here's some source code too : http://www.puredarwin.org/
As for the GUI, yeah, that's closed source. But then again GUIs aren't the Unix way so that doesn't matter.
Sprint probably won't get it since their 4G is WiMax not LTE like everybody else.
Meh, it's no different from software vendors trying to figure out the differences between each Linux distro.
Standards there would probably help even more people.
Um... Apple pushed for a removal of DRM for pretty much all of the music industry.
If it wasn't for Apple scaring the shit out of the music execs, Amazon, Apple, and all the other stores wouldn't have been able to provide us with DRM-free musics.
I'm not sure even more than 1 core is necessary for software RAID.
I just (last week) built a OpenSolaris based ZFS NAS with 2 drives on a old Core Duo. Its never gone past 20% CPU utilization even when I'm copying from 3 disks over gigE to it with on-the-fly gzip compression enabled as part of ZFS. I think it sustained 48MB/sec.
CPU would have been a Core Solo instead had the ebay seller not mailed me the wrong chip.
I'd say anything P3 class or better would be fine with one core.
Also, I'd object to saying that OpenSolaris is a bad choice. We're taking file servers here. ZFS works well and OpenSolaris is open source. It's not like you want bleeding edge commits from a tree to run the thing that stores your precious data anyways.
Finally, if this is dedicated to being a file server, might as well boot off the USB flash drive or liveCD. Your distro ought to be small enough to fit and you have less chance of OS corruption from a read-only image.