Well in general, if you want to make things easy, I'd recommend sticking with your distro's repository. For better or worse, it doesn't seem as though Linux is quite heading for stand-alone downloads of installers that work across distributions. I think the assumption has become that you'll stick with the default repositories unless you really know what you're doing.
It sounds bad, but I think in a lot of ways, it's easier to keep your system up-to-date and spyware free than how it's handled in OSX or Windows. I wish I had a package manager for Windows and OSX that would update *all* of my software with a single command.
But there's good reason it's never caught on in America or Australia or a number of other nations.
Because several decades ago the car companies did everything they could to dismantle existing public transportation systems and prevent future systems?
I was actually referring to the plans to put highspeed rail in the northeast, connecting Washington and Boston. It's part of the stimulus plan, but many teabaggers are trying to label it a waste of money.
Maybe *you* don't transport goods on high speed rail, but I'd bet good money that China will.
Even as it is the only Amtrak lines in the US that are profitable are a couple short connections on the east coast.
Well first, part of my point is that people are rallying against high speed rail even in the northeast corridor of the US, which is heavily congested already. There's a mentality in the US that the government can do *nothing* right, which has lead to heavy neglect of all forms of infrastructure. Our train system is outdated, our bridges are falling apart, and our communications infrastructure stinks. Even in heavily populated areas, where investment makes a lot of sense, there are people saying, "let the free market sort it out!" Generally speaking, you can't really have free-market infrastructure.
Now as far as Amtrak being generally unprofitable, there's a very good reason for that: we've built our country around cars. We continue to pour tons and tons of money into cars and highways, and we continue to build our cities so that you have to have a car to live. We've developed our cities and towns so you can't walk anywhere and it's too dangerous to ride your bike. We've built huge housing developments where the nearest store is a 10-15 minute drive. We've done everything with the expectation that every man, woman, and teenager would have their own car, and once everyone has their own car, it makes more sense to just drive that car places rather than buying a ticket on a train.
What's more, you have a chicken-and-the-egg problem with Amtrak. People don't take Amtrak trains because the trains stink. They're slow and dirty and they don't stick to the schedule. Amtrak trains are slow and dirty and poorly run because the whole business is unprofitable. The whole business is unprofitable because no one takes the train anywhere. No one takes the train anywhere because they're slow and dirty and they don't stick to the schedule. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
So China is building infrastructure that will let them transport goods throughout Asia and Europe very quickly and cheaply. Meanwhile, here in the US, people are fighting against the idea of building highspeed rail even between a handful of cities that are right next to each other.
If we don't turn it around, our economy is going down the tubes.
I don't, I'm merely exposing the failure of backing up h.264 because of its widespread support, when there are multiple formats with *much* wider support that you happen to ignore.
I'm not simply backing H264 because of "widespread support". I'm saying the various industries that distribute video are standardizing on H264 because of technical merit paired with widespread hardware support. You can whine about it all you want, but it's happening.
You mean, like HTTP or JPG? or perhaps POSIX? "old technology" is what standards are all about, they're not about giving us the shiniest and newest... You have completely and utterly missed the entire point of having standards in the first place.
Well no, standards are not about "old technology". Old standards stick around when they haven't been surpassed by newer standards, but having a standard doesn't mean you stop the march of progress. Having MPEG-1 files doesn't mean we shouldn't develop MPEG-4, nor does it mean we shouldn't use MPEG-4 once it's developed. The existence of MPEG-4 doesn't mean that MPEG-1 wasn't a standard, or that MPEG "missed the point of standards" in developing either standard. We just have a newer and better standard with many advantages, so we may as well use it.
So? it wasn't the lack of tags that drove us to the codec hell of old, it was the lack of an official standard required to be implemented on any and all platforms
Well it was lack of standardization of video formats and lack of standardization of presentation, lack of control of presentation, etc. The HTML video tag takes care of most of it; standardizing on MPEG4 w/H264 takes care of most of the rest. Flash shouldn't be necessary.
That's because you're a technophile
Au contraire, I think the fact that you're downloading pirated movies in DivX format and burning them to DVDs, playing them in your player is an indication that you're the technophile. A non-technophile wouldn't bother with something even that complicated.
Tell me, when h.265 comes around in a couple years, are *you* willing to stand up and say "no, we must stay with h.264 as it's what has the widest support in spite of its marked inferiority"?
Well first, you'd need an upgrade path one way or the other unless you want to stick with old technology forever. Once you acknowledge that, it's about having a sensible upgrade path and an appropriate timeline. I'm really not sure what your problem is. You've entered into a discussion about Flash and turned it into a soapbox to bemoan the fact that people are migrating from DivX to H264. I've got some news for you: even DivX is using H264 these days.
Now you can stick with whatever old technology you want. You can keep transcoding video to DivX for your little homebrew solution. You can output through RCA and record to VHS for all I care. Just don't expect that the rest of the world will keep using VHS tapes because you think your old solution is perfectly good.
Oh, and you didn't answer my question about whether your DVD player supports Flash.
Blantant patent infringement, as I said.
Meh. Sort of. In another sense, it's not patent infringement so long as the patent holder isn't going to ask you to stop.
Oh, I think there's a solution. It just requires that someone with a good sense of UI puts together something clear and simple.
For example, if you're running GNOME and you want a word processor, there are two obvious choices: Abiword and OpenOffice. The difference is Abiword is a little lighter and not quite as feature rich, whereas OpenOffice is a full office suite. Big difference, not too hard to understand.
The problem is in expecting a new Linux user to know that those are the two obvious choices. If my distro only comes with Abiword installed by default, and I want a full MS Office replacement, where do I go? Where do I look? If you give me a search box, what am I going to type in? When I get my search results, what's going to show up first?
Those are some questions people should be thinking about. I know some distros are already dealing with this stuff, and I think Ubuntu is actually doing a pretty good job of moving towards a friendly desktop experience.
Well it's not entirely clear that the disk mode restriction is Apple's alone. It may be that it was a restriction made for AT&T's sake to make it harder to jailbreak the phones. iPods allow disk mode. iPods even used to allow you to transfer MP3 files on and off through browsing the disk directly instead of going through iTunes. Apple started hiding the music's directory structure because the record companies through a hissy fit and claimed that iPods should be illegal because they enable piracy.
On the other hand, it is true that Jobs likes to keep control over the user experience.
Oh, I have no problem with there being a bunch of different packages in the package manager. It's entirely possible that a user wants some of the packages and not others, and a power user should have the choice. I just think normal users shouldn't have to look at all those choices in order to get OpenOffice installed.
And yes, there's a virtual package for it, but it's not even the first thing that comes up when you search for OpenOffice. So I'm just suggesting that distros aimed at the desktop market should provide an additional UI for their package manager that's more target toward basic users.
Well yes, tethering is definitely an AT&T imposed restriction. My question was more, if all the carriers in the world said, "We don't care, we're fine with people doing anything they like with the phone," then would Apple force you to go through their app store in order to install 3rd party apps? Would they allow you to access the iPhone storage in "disk mode", i.e. you plug your iPhone into a computer and it shows up as a USB disk?
The fact that most people are happy with committing blantant patent infringement is no reason to declare a patented format an official standard for the entirety of the web.
Also, you probably don't really care, but patent infringement is a bit fuzzier than you might think. Primarily, it's not my job to go around figuring out what patents my software might infringe on, seeking out all authors, and being sure to attain a license before running the software. As a private individual, such a thing would be absurdly impossible.
There are actually TONS of patents on the software that you're using where you're not paying a licensing fee and where the patent is simply not enforced. That is, if you're running Linux, it's possible your system does something patented by IBM, but IBM never really bothered to pursue it, and so it never became an issue. That kind of "patent infringement" happens all the time, even accidentally.
So you can make a lot of how horrible it is that "so many people are happy with committing blatant patent infringement," but it doesn't amount to much. Patent infringement is ultimately only an issue in cases where the patent holder decides to enforce the patent, and MPEG hasn't ever tried to enforce their patents against individual users anyway. In some countries, it can't even be considered "patent infringement" unless it's for commercial use. Also, companies like Apple and Microsoft are usually paying licensing fees, so users of Windows and OSX aren't even infringing.
The only companies who really get caught up are companies like Mozilla, i.e. big companies with money who someone might actually go after. In other cases, it's debatable how much anyone is really infringing.
Yes, because they should have gone with the good US cell carrier. Man, that carrier does a great job. They haven't ever tried to hobble the phones that they offer, haven't tried to impede VoIP use on their data network, and haven't tried to keep users from tethering their laptop to their phones. You know, the US carrier that provides great coverage, fast data speeds, and good service at cheap prices without any restrictions on how you use their service...?
It was a similar deal with VoIP, which was blocked over 3G until recently.
AT&T didn't block VoIP over 3G. They told Apple to disallow VoIP apps over the 3G network.
Isn't that in keeping with what I said? "AT&T requires them to disallow you from using it"?
There's nothing inherent about the phone that ever prevented VoIP over 3G, and Apple specifically built the capability to tether another device to your phone, but AT&T has to ok turning the feature on.
The iPod Touch runs the same software with no restrictions.
Well yes, but of course they'd be opening a messy can of worms if they allowed different things on the two different but nearly identical products. For one thing, it might be harder to keep the iPhone locked down if people have access to an identical unlocked version. Second, there'd be a marketing problem of trying to sell iPhones while iPod Touches had superior functionality. Third, you'd have a PR problem because people would get even *more* annoyed at the iPhone being locked down when there's a nearly identical unlocked product.
Of course, it might also be that Jobs is a control freak and won't just let people run their own devices. Hard to know until Apple can sell the iPhone on a truly open data network.
I have no problem with them offering the iTunes App store, and in fact think that the cut they take doesn't seem too high.
But what if I want a native app for Google Voice? What if I want Google Voice to essentially replace my Voicemail and SMS buttons with a Google version that lets me use SMS for free? What if I want to use Opera on my iPhone? They're developing an application, but it will most likely be rejected. What if I want to alter my home screen? (e.g. Winterboard) Apple won't let me run those applications, even though they've been developed.
And what of all the developers who won't bother to even write an application because they're dreading the possibility of being rejected and having all their work being useless?
I like the iPhone and I like the iTunes store. I just think we'd see even more apps and better apps if Apple didn't keep such an iron fist over distribution.
It's one thing for them to provide a store/repository of known-good software. It's another to prevent you from going outside of that store if you choose to.
However, there are frameworks where the OS itself provides codec support and programs can just harness what's available
Yes, this is more what I had in mind. Safari, for example, uses quicktime for decoding the HTML5 "video" tag. But even if there were a Firefox addon that provided *just* H264 decoding, it would solve this problem for the time being.
No, but if changing to HTML5 would mean that it became rather easier to scrape the URL, it does mean that there would be plenty of sites that wouldn't make the switch.
Maybe, but I'm sure it depends on exactly how hard it is to scrape and how many people stop installing Flash. After all, you can scrape most Flash stuff now with a Firefox addon.
If you're talking about something like Hulu, then yes, they'll probably want to make sure their content is protected somehow before they move away from Flash. So Flash may stick around for that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they found another solution in the near future.
Yes, Apple supports tethering in the iPhone, but AT&T requires them to disallow you from using it. It was a similar deal with VoIP, which was blocked over 3G until recently. It raises the question in my mind: how much of the iPhone lock-down (only allowed to install apps from the iTunes store) is caused by Apple wanting a cut of everything, and how much is caused by contractual obligations to AT&T for preventing certain kinds of apps.
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
Is it not possible to have the browser use an external codec while still controlling rendering of controls and such? Like can Firefox theoretically rely on the x264 library from VLC while still controlling how it looks?
As far as scraping... yeah... I'm not sure I care. If you put a copyrighted GIF on your site, it's not totally easy to keep people from downloading it and violating the copyright. That doesn't make it a good idea to render all GIF files in Flash.
I don't think you could do that sort of lock-in in Linux even if you wanted to. Apple can only do it because the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad are themselves locked down. Even that doesn't really stop people.
Anyway, if there were to be a Linux "App store", I would think it would just be a different front-end for the same package managers we already have. I'm on Ubuntu right now, and when I go to "Synaptic Package Manager" (which itself might not be completely obvious to novices as "the way to install software"), it immediately asks me for a password, which is scary. The first two options:
2vcard: perl script to convert an addressbook...
3270-common: Common files for IBM 3270 emulators...
Those aren't exactly the first things a novice user would be looking for. The first two catagories are "Amateur Radio" and "Base system"-- again, probably not what most novice users are looking for. Then, looking at the toolbar at the top, the buttons are "Reload", "Mark All Upgrades" and "Apply". I can easily imagine someone having no idea what any of these things do.
So I think what you'd need to do for a novice "app store" would be first to hide all of the libraries and junk. General users are only going to get confused by libraries and "common files". Basically you want to pare down the selection to things that most users will care about. No packages for debugging, for example, and don't show 50 different OpenOffice packages. 1 listing for OpenOffice-- either you want it or you don't.
Next, pull out some of the gems. Assume your a user who knows *nothing* and you want a chat application. Don't give me every option that's supported, but instead give me a selection of some of the better ones, or maybe just the two that I'm most likely to want. I'm not saying that access to the other options should be blocked, but if there's an obscure word processor that most users won't like, then don't give it equal billing with OpenOffice. Leave it out entirely and assume that if someone really wants it, they'll be able to find it in the package manager.
Finally, make the whole thing pretty and simple. Give people 2 buttons: "install" and "uninstall". Make it a 1-click install, and don't ask for a password until the user tries to install or uninstall something. Give it a front page with a list of new applications and the most popular applications.
</rant>Sorry.... I didn't mean to go on for so long there. But to get back on topic, I think this is the sort of thing that many developers could use, but that they don't like to get: basic user feedback. Often, when you work on a big project, you get too close to it and you stop seeing certain problems. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes to move forward. Unfortunately, it's hard to separate "useful user feedback" from "pointless bitching of know-nothing users." They're not necessarily even different things.
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Well in general, if you want to make things easy, I'd recommend sticking with your distro's repository. For better or worse, it doesn't seem as though Linux is quite heading for stand-alone downloads of installers that work across distributions. I think the assumption has become that you'll stick with the default repositories unless you really know what you're doing.
It sounds bad, but I think in a lot of ways, it's easier to keep your system up-to-date and spyware free than how it's handled in OSX or Windows. I wish I had a package manager for Windows and OSX that would update *all* of my software with a single command.
But there's good reason it's never caught on in America or Australia or a number of other nations.
Because several decades ago the car companies did everything they could to dismantle existing public transportation systems and prevent future systems?
I was actually referring to the plans to put highspeed rail in the northeast, connecting Washington and Boston. It's part of the stimulus plan, but many teabaggers are trying to label it a waste of money.
If you think this is bad, wait until we go another 20 years without investing any money in infrastructure.
You don't transport goods on high speed rail.
Maybe *you* don't transport goods on high speed rail, but I'd bet good money that China will.
Even as it is the only Amtrak lines in the US that are profitable are a couple short connections on the east coast.
Well first, part of my point is that people are rallying against high speed rail even in the northeast corridor of the US, which is heavily congested already. There's a mentality in the US that the government can do *nothing* right, which has lead to heavy neglect of all forms of infrastructure. Our train system is outdated, our bridges are falling apart, and our communications infrastructure stinks. Even in heavily populated areas, where investment makes a lot of sense, there are people saying, "let the free market sort it out!" Generally speaking, you can't really have free-market infrastructure.
Now as far as Amtrak being generally unprofitable, there's a very good reason for that: we've built our country around cars. We continue to pour tons and tons of money into cars and highways, and we continue to build our cities so that you have to have a car to live. We've developed our cities and towns so you can't walk anywhere and it's too dangerous to ride your bike. We've built huge housing developments where the nearest store is a 10-15 minute drive. We've done everything with the expectation that every man, woman, and teenager would have their own car, and once everyone has their own car, it makes more sense to just drive that car places rather than buying a ticket on a train.
What's more, you have a chicken-and-the-egg problem with Amtrak. People don't take Amtrak trains because the trains stink. They're slow and dirty and they don't stick to the schedule. Amtrak trains are slow and dirty and poorly run because the whole business is unprofitable. The whole business is unprofitable because no one takes the train anywhere. No one takes the train anywhere because they're slow and dirty and they don't stick to the schedule. It's a self-reinforcing loop.
Is there any reason that we couldn't use a high speed rail system for freight, too?
I don't believe so.
So China is building infrastructure that will let them transport goods throughout Asia and Europe very quickly and cheaply. Meanwhile, here in the US, people are fighting against the idea of building highspeed rail even between a handful of cities that are right next to each other.
If we don't turn it around, our economy is going down the tubes.
I don't, I'm merely exposing the failure of backing up h.264 because of its widespread support, when there are multiple formats with *much* wider support that you happen to ignore.
I'm not simply backing H264 because of "widespread support". I'm saying the various industries that distribute video are standardizing on H264 because of technical merit paired with widespread hardware support. You can whine about it all you want, but it's happening.
You mean, like HTTP or JPG? or perhaps POSIX? "old technology" is what standards are all about, they're not about giving us the shiniest and newest... You have completely and utterly missed the entire point of having standards in the first place.
Well no, standards are not about "old technology". Old standards stick around when they haven't been surpassed by newer standards, but having a standard doesn't mean you stop the march of progress. Having MPEG-1 files doesn't mean we shouldn't develop MPEG-4, nor does it mean we shouldn't use MPEG-4 once it's developed. The existence of MPEG-4 doesn't mean that MPEG-1 wasn't a standard, or that MPEG "missed the point of standards" in developing either standard. We just have a newer and better standard with many advantages, so we may as well use it.
So? it wasn't the lack of tags that drove us to the codec hell of old, it was the lack of an official standard required to be implemented on any and all platforms
Well it was lack of standardization of video formats and lack of standardization of presentation, lack of control of presentation, etc. The HTML video tag takes care of most of it; standardizing on MPEG4 w/H264 takes care of most of the rest. Flash shouldn't be necessary.
That's because you're a technophile
Au contraire, I think the fact that you're downloading pirated movies in DivX format and burning them to DVDs, playing them in your player is an indication that you're the technophile. A non-technophile wouldn't bother with something even that complicated.
Tell me, when h.265 comes around in a couple years, are *you* willing to stand up and say "no, we must stay with h.264 as it's what has the widest support in spite of its marked inferiority"?
Well first, you'd need an upgrade path one way or the other unless you want to stick with old technology forever. Once you acknowledge that, it's about having a sensible upgrade path and an appropriate timeline. I'm really not sure what your problem is. You've entered into a discussion about Flash and turned it into a soapbox to bemoan the fact that people are migrating from DivX to H264. I've got some news for you: even DivX is using H264 these days.
Now you can stick with whatever old technology you want. You can keep transcoding video to DivX for your little homebrew solution. You can output through RCA and record to VHS for all I care. Just don't expect that the rest of the world will keep using VHS tapes because you think your old solution is perfectly good.
Oh, and you didn't answer my question about whether your DVD player supports Flash.
Blantant patent infringement, as I said.
Meh. Sort of. In another sense, it's not patent infringement so long as the patent holder isn't going to ask you to stop.
Oh, I think there's a solution. It just requires that someone with a good sense of UI puts together something clear and simple.
For example, if you're running GNOME and you want a word processor, there are two obvious choices: Abiword and OpenOffice. The difference is Abiword is a little lighter and not quite as feature rich, whereas OpenOffice is a full office suite. Big difference, not too hard to understand.
The problem is in expecting a new Linux user to know that those are the two obvious choices. If my distro only comes with Abiword installed by default, and I want a full MS Office replacement, where do I go? Where do I look? If you give me a search box, what am I going to type in? When I get my search results, what's going to show up first?
Those are some questions people should be thinking about. I know some distros are already dealing with this stuff, and I think Ubuntu is actually doing a pretty good job of moving towards a friendly desktop experience.
Well it's not entirely clear that the disk mode restriction is Apple's alone. It may be that it was a restriction made for AT&T's sake to make it harder to jailbreak the phones. iPods allow disk mode. iPods even used to allow you to transfer MP3 files on and off through browsing the disk directly instead of going through iTunes. Apple started hiding the music's directory structure because the record companies through a hissy fit and claimed that iPods should be illegal because they enable piracy.
On the other hand, it is true that Jobs likes to keep control over the user experience.
Oh, I have no problem with there being a bunch of different packages in the package manager. It's entirely possible that a user wants some of the packages and not others, and a power user should have the choice. I just think normal users shouldn't have to look at all those choices in order to get OpenOffice installed.
And yes, there's a virtual package for it, but it's not even the first thing that comes up when you search for OpenOffice. So I'm just suggesting that distros aimed at the desktop market should provide an additional UI for their package manager that's more target toward basic users.
Well yes, tethering is definitely an AT&T imposed restriction. My question was more, if all the carriers in the world said, "We don't care, we're fine with people doing anything they like with the phone," then would Apple force you to go through their app store in order to install 3rd party apps? Would they allow you to access the iPhone storage in "disk mode", i.e. you plug your iPhone into a computer and it shows up as a USB disk?
The fact that most people are happy with committing blantant patent infringement is no reason to declare a patented format an official standard for the entirety of the web.
Also, you probably don't really care, but patent infringement is a bit fuzzier than you might think. Primarily, it's not my job to go around figuring out what patents my software might infringe on, seeking out all authors, and being sure to attain a license before running the software. As a private individual, such a thing would be absurdly impossible.
There are actually TONS of patents on the software that you're using where you're not paying a licensing fee and where the patent is simply not enforced. That is, if you're running Linux, it's possible your system does something patented by IBM, but IBM never really bothered to pursue it, and so it never became an issue. That kind of "patent infringement" happens all the time, even accidentally.
So you can make a lot of how horrible it is that "so many people are happy with committing blatant patent infringement," but it doesn't amount to much. Patent infringement is ultimately only an issue in cases where the patent holder decides to enforce the patent, and MPEG hasn't ever tried to enforce their patents against individual users anyway. In some countries, it can't even be considered "patent infringement" unless it's for commercial use. Also, companies like Apple and Microsoft are usually paying licensing fees, so users of Windows and OSX aren't even infringing.
The only companies who really get caught up are companies like Mozilla, i.e. big companies with money who someone might actually go after. In other cases, it's debatable how much anyone is really infringing.
Yes, because they should have gone with the good US cell carrier. Man, that carrier does a great job. They haven't ever tried to hobble the phones that they offer, haven't tried to impede VoIP use on their data network, and haven't tried to keep users from tethering their laptop to their phones. You know, the US carrier that provides great coverage, fast data speeds, and good service at cheap prices without any restrictions on how you use their service...?
Which carrier is that, again?
AT&T didn't block VoIP over 3G. They told Apple to disallow VoIP apps over the 3G network.
Isn't that in keeping with what I said? "AT&T requires them to disallow you from using it"?
There's nothing inherent about the phone that ever prevented VoIP over 3G, and Apple specifically built the capability to tether another device to your phone, but AT&T has to ok turning the feature on.
The iPod Touch runs the same software with no restrictions.
Well yes, but of course they'd be opening a messy can of worms if they allowed different things on the two different but nearly identical products. For one thing, it might be harder to keep the iPhone locked down if people have access to an identical unlocked version. Second, there'd be a marketing problem of trying to sell iPhones while iPod Touches had superior functionality. Third, you'd have a PR problem because people would get even *more* annoyed at the iPhone being locked down when there's a nearly identical unlocked product.
Of course, it might also be that Jobs is a control freak and won't just let people run their own devices. Hard to know until Apple can sell the iPhone on a truly open data network.
I have no problem with them offering the iTunes App store, and in fact think that the cut they take doesn't seem too high.
But what if I want a native app for Google Voice? What if I want Google Voice to essentially replace my Voicemail and SMS buttons with a Google version that lets me use SMS for free? What if I want to use Opera on my iPhone? They're developing an application, but it will most likely be rejected. What if I want to alter my home screen? (e.g. Winterboard) Apple won't let me run those applications, even though they've been developed.
And what of all the developers who won't bother to even write an application because they're dreading the possibility of being rejected and having all their work being useless?
I like the iPhone and I like the iTunes store. I just think we'd see even more apps and better apps if Apple didn't keep such an iron fist over distribution.
It's one thing for them to provide a store/repository of known-good software. It's another to prevent you from going outside of that store if you choose to.
However, there are frameworks where the OS itself provides codec support and programs can just harness what's available
Yes, this is more what I had in mind. Safari, for example, uses quicktime for decoding the HTML5 "video" tag. But even if there were a Firefox addon that provided *just* H264 decoding, it would solve this problem for the time being.
No, but if changing to HTML5 would mean that it became rather easier to scrape the URL, it does mean that there would be plenty of sites that wouldn't make the switch.
Maybe, but I'm sure it depends on exactly how hard it is to scrape and how many people stop installing Flash. After all, you can scrape most Flash stuff now with a Firefox addon.
If you're talking about something like Hulu, then yes, they'll probably want to make sure their content is protected somehow before they move away from Flash. So Flash may stick around for that, but I wouldn't be surprised if they found another solution in the near future.
Ooo... thanks. I don't really need this sort of thing (I often use command line instead of Synaptic anyway) but it still makes me happy.
Yes, Apple supports tethering in the iPhone, but AT&T requires them to disallow you from using it. It was a similar deal with VoIP, which was blocked over 3G until recently. It raises the question in my mind: how much of the iPhone lock-down (only allowed to install apps from the iTunes store) is caused by Apple wanting a cut of everything, and how much is caused by contractual obligations to AT&T for preventing certain kinds of apps.
Either way, obviously iPhones would be way better if Apple didn't restrict development and distribution of 3rd party apps.
I think the problem is not just finding UI designers to join you, but also getting the programmers to accept the UI designers that you find.
Is it not possible to have the browser use an external codec while still controlling rendering of controls and such? Like can Firefox theoretically rely on the x264 library from VLC while still controlling how it looks?
As far as scraping... yeah... I'm not sure I care. If you put a copyrighted GIF on your site, it's not totally easy to keep people from downloading it and violating the copyright. That doesn't make it a good idea to render all GIF files in Flash.
I don't think you could do that sort of lock-in in Linux even if you wanted to. Apple can only do it because the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad are themselves locked down. Even that doesn't really stop people.
Anyway, if there were to be a Linux "App store", I would think it would just be a different front-end for the same package managers we already have. I'm on Ubuntu right now, and when I go to "Synaptic Package Manager" (which itself might not be completely obvious to novices as "the way to install software"), it immediately asks me for a password, which is scary. The first two options:
Those aren't exactly the first things a novice user would be looking for. The first two catagories are "Amateur Radio" and "Base system"-- again, probably not what most novice users are looking for. Then, looking at the toolbar at the top, the buttons are "Reload", "Mark All Upgrades" and "Apply". I can easily imagine someone having no idea what any of these things do.
So I think what you'd need to do for a novice "app store" would be first to hide all of the libraries and junk. General users are only going to get confused by libraries and "common files". Basically you want to pare down the selection to things that most users will care about. No packages for debugging, for example, and don't show 50 different OpenOffice packages. 1 listing for OpenOffice-- either you want it or you don't.
Next, pull out some of the gems. Assume your a user who knows *nothing* and you want a chat application. Don't give me every option that's supported, but instead give me a selection of some of the better ones, or maybe just the two that I'm most likely to want. I'm not saying that access to the other options should be blocked, but if there's an obscure word processor that most users won't like, then don't give it equal billing with OpenOffice. Leave it out entirely and assume that if someone really wants it, they'll be able to find it in the package manager.
Finally, make the whole thing pretty and simple. Give people 2 buttons: "install" and "uninstall". Make it a 1-click install, and don't ask for a password until the user tries to install or uninstall something. Give it a front page with a list of new applications and the most popular applications.
</rant>Sorry.... I didn't mean to go on for so long there. But to get back on topic, I think this is the sort of thing that many developers could use, but that they don't like to get: basic user feedback. Often, when you work on a big project, you get too close to it and you stop seeing certain problems. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes to move forward. Unfortunately, it's hard to separate "useful user feedback" from "pointless bitching of know-nothing users." They're not necessarily even different things.