I have never read Google's Privacy Policy but am slightly concerned that they appear to be able to access emails after their deletion.
Maybe they'd backed them up using G-Archiver?
More seriously, you do understand that your e-mail is generally not secure, right? If you use Yahoo, Hotmail, or whatever else, there are employees of your e-mail provider who have the ability to read your e-mail and whatnot. It's also unlikely that your e-mail is encrypted the entire time from when it's sent to when it's received. Email just isn't a secure medium unless you encrypt it in some special way.
Do you have any actual experience writing embedded apps for cell phones?
No, but I have actual experience using embedded apps for cell phones, and they're generally pretty damned crappy. And ugly. And slow. And not the sort of software Apple would want to distribute.
You also didn't seem to read the article. Sun doesn't have a problem creating a JVM for the iPhone. There's no work for Apple to make "their SDK support [J2ME]"
Even if they don't have to "support" it in the technical sense, they'd still be supporting it in the sense of endorsing it, i.e. selling/distributing it on their store.
Yeah, isn't it crazy when the government allows companies to control what kind of product they release? Did you know that my Cisco router doesn't play XBox games?! How dare they decide which features shouldn't be available on the product they sold me! It's my router, and I should be allowed to play XBox games if I want to!
It's not a big deal unless Apple really wants all of that software ported over to iPhone very quickly without the developers putting in additional work. And why would they want that?
Apple wants people to use their SDK so everything is using power efficiently, interacting with the OS properly, and has an interface that fits with OSX and other iPhone apps. They're not going to take a shoddy port of a crappy program written for another cell phone and put that up on their store anyway, so why would they bother making their SDK support it?
Restricting use of the cellular network is also understandable. (Why would you want to run Skype over GSM/EDGE rather than WiFi anyway?
I agree, the "no VOIP over EDGE" is completely understandable. First and foremost, I would expect that insofar as they're the gatekeeper, they wouldn't allow apps that would cause technical problems for AT&T, and I'm sure all iPhone users trying to use VOIP over their EDGE network would cause a technical problem. Second, it wouldn't really be enough bandwidth even if it were allowed. The fact that Apple is allowing IM clients and VOIP over WiFi is a bit of a surprise to me, since that will most likely eat into AT&T's business.
But keeping users from running Java or an alternate browser by way of licensing? Sorry, that's not going to fly.
For me, I guess it depends on how intentional it is, and whether they have any kind of justification. For example, I'm not sure why they would explicitly forbid additional browsers, and that seems a little crappy to me. I think Safari is great (even Google is using Webkit for Android) but I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed.
However, I could understand them objecting to Java, which I'm sure would be less efficient than writing native apps. I think it's important to keep in mind that they're only allowing distribution through iTunes, and probably only licensing the SDK to be used to develop software that they'll consider putting up on their own store. If it's something that will damage their relationship with AT&T, make the iPhone look bad, drain battery life too quickly, or perform badly, then I wouldn't expect to see Apple put it up on iTunes.
The subject of our discussion is Bruce Schneier's article in Wired, which I read. The subject of the article is the "mutual disclosure argument" which Schneier explains in his article. The author also notes that the "mutual disclosure argument" is explained in David Brin's book, but that fact isn't central to the subject of the article.
In any case, quit changing the subject to irrelevant issues. The point of the article is that the government should not be allowed to keep citizens under permanent involuntary surveillance without just cause. If you have an argument that the government should be allowed to tap our phone lines and video tape our lives, completely unchecked, go ahead and present it.
You know this kind of bullshit thinking harks back to Aristotle right?
I'm very curious about this sentence. Which kind of bullshit thinking harkens back to Aristotle? There's a lot of bullshit thinking here on Slashdot, so I need you to be a little more specific. Can I get a citation maybe?
This is very clearly an example where the person with less power gained by the existence of the recording, which is opposite to the point Schneider was attempting to make, and in fact is a very good example of the point Brin was making.
If you think the example is the opposite of the point Schneider was trying to make, then I think you misunderstand what Schneider is saying. A relevant quote from the article:
Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad.
So what he's really saying is that people should be able to record the government, police, etc. but that police/government should not be allowed to record the people. I've never read Brin, but Schneider is interpreting Brin to say that we should all monitor each other, and that it's ok for the government to be watching us so long as we're watching them watch us. Schneider is saying (to paraphrase), "No, the government is too powerful already, relative to individual citizens. We should be able to watch them, and they should not be able to watch us. That would be way more likely to equal out the balance of power."
I still see one possible problem here. Let's say we have the ability to watch/record the police freely and they can watch/record us freely. You might expect that it would be fine, because the surveillance is mutual, but in reality a problem will present itself pretty quickly: The police are an organized group of people with a common agenda and additional powers over normal citizens, and meanwhile you're just one person trying to go about your normal life.
What tends to fall out of situations like that is that the police would develop the means and methods necessary to protect themselves, hide their actions from your surveillance, and sort through all of your misdeeds for prosecution.
When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition
The reason it's good to have many Linux distributions (IMO) is not really for the competition. It's for the customization. Most Linux distros can do the same things and interoperate with each other, but some are more optimized for some situations and some for others.
No in that vein, if Microsoft was releasing their own Flash development suite that serviced a different group of developers, I think fewer people would be complaining, and more people would see value in it.
One would assume that a flash implementation if written even semi-competently would leverage that built-in support and would perform about as well as the native implementation except for a slightly larger memory footprint from having to load the flash plug-in.
One would hope that to be the case, but I certainly wouldn't assume it.
Yes, the most recent version of Flash supports h264, but you can't count on people to actually have the most recent version of Flash Player, so I wouldn't recommend using it yet.
Additionally, wrapping your h264 in a Flash player doesn't really buy you anything on a mobile device. You're better off sending a normal h264 video to the device and letting that device decode the video in whichever method it's most optimized to do that.
Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.
I would quibble with this point. I can't think of any site in which Flash does anything *important*. I've seen situations where I understand why people use Flash, but in every case I can think of, Flash is expendable.
...but for streaming video, due to YouTube and the likes it's fast become a fairly standard way of displaying video...
Right, it's become a fairly standard way of *displaying* video embedded in webpages. Flash isn't chosen because it's a good/effective method of streaming video (FLV quality is pretty awful), but because it can be used to embed video in the page itself in an effective manner. However, when you go to a device as small as a cell phone, and you want to watch a video, there's a very good chance you'll want to watch that video full-screen. Once you're watching a video full-screen, the value of Flash for viewing videos complete evaporates.
So what would be a good standard for streaming, assuming you don't need to embed the video in a web page? In terms of quality at a given bitrate, and in terms of power consumption, h264 is a clear winner. h264 is supported by Quicktime and therefore the iPhone. And there you have it, what Apple is doing the sensible thing.
I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information.
I think it's likely that the information is not a myth, but outdated. There were a few reputable news sources who, years ago, analyzed Apple's business model for iTunes and determined that they weren't likely to be making much profit, if any at all, from the store. However, those calculations probably included some things like setting up the store and paying for bandwidth, bla bla bla.
Flash forward a few years, and the store is already set up, bandwidth prices have gone down a bit, and they're moving a lot more volume. Even though hardware/bandwidth demands will scale with the volume, more volume often means more profit (for a variety of reasons).
I would bet they're making decent money from iTunes, but still not an outrageous amount of money. That's part of the reason there's so much friction between the media companies and Apple, that the media companies view their industry as something that should be making outrageous amounts of money, and Apple tried to drive prices down to a modest level and use music/movies as a marketing tool to sell something else.
Maybe it's just that I'm not a programmer, but are you using "API" correctly? As far as I've heard, the iPhone has many of the APIs that OSX has, but they haven't released an SDK yet?
I mean, anyway, they're releasing an SDK, so if you're implying that Apple does want people to develop applications for the iPhone, it's pretty clear that you're wrong. Using Flash/Actionscript to code apps for the iPhone seems a bit silly to me anyway, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, so go ahead and correct me.
First, using that language implies that the iPhone is underpowered, when it'd be more true to say that Flash is a bloated resource-hog. Second, people who've researched the problem suggest that the iPhone *could* run flash, but it'd drain battery life and present other interface problems.
The major point here is that Flash just isn't an appropriate technology for mobile devices. If you want video, h264 will provide great quality/batter-consumption (relative to other video formats). I still question whether Flash is an appropriate technology for anything, but we can discuss that at another time.
I don't know if it's too late. AIM still has TONS of users. It's not clear to me how AOL intends to make money from AIM if people are using other clients without embedded ads, but I guess I don't really care either.
I also think it's funny because... what the hell is Woz doing these days? Maybe someone knows of something, but I doubt he's released anything recently that's enjoyed the sort of success that the iPod has. So even if he totally hates Apple's current lineup, so what? Let me know when someone relevant has an opinion.
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide.
I think it's more like the marketplace correctly ascertains that it's their best (and sometimes only) option. I hate my cable company, but there are no other cable companies that service my area. I don't know if satellite would be better, but it's not allowed by my building. My cable company is also my internet company. Again, I don't like them, but there's no other ISP in the area that offers better than 1.5Mbps/256kbps. I'm not such a big fan of my cell phone company, but I've tried a few different companies and no one is significantly better.
People will tolerate sub-standard service if it's a service they need and no one is offering better than sub-standard service. It's that simple. The whole telecommunications industry can sit on their collective butts and do nothing. So long as nobody can/will provide a better service, they don't have to worry about losing customers.
Users would of course find that many things from the Tiger "missing manual" would still apply. Obviously, though, anything that changed between Tiger and Leopard would be different. Why wouldn't O'Reilly want to stay up to date?
Yeah, I actually think that, in abstract, this sort of thing is very appropriate. Microsoft *should* be trying to appeal to the Unix/Linux crowd. They should be trying to make there stuff more interoperable, opening their protocols, giving headless servers, supporting GNU tools, etc. There's a case to be made for doing those sorts of things because of business interests, economic benefit, and technological need.
The only problem I see is that Microsoft has not earned people's trust that they'll do these things properly. They've earned a reputation for being willing to hobble their own products in order to maintain vendor lock-in and damage their competition.
I've been considering trying to hack my Wii just to get DVD playback. It's a nice little box already hooked to my TV with a DVD drive. I don't know why Nintendo won't do it in a legit way. I'd even be willing to shell out a couple dollars for it.
Well that's essentially what I'm saying. I didn't really read enough about this to know whether the patent holder was a patent troll or someone relatively legit, but it sounded like a pretty obvious patent that probably shouldn't have been granted.
However, the big problem is the bailout. If the government wants to make some law that says that patents can be rendered null and void if they're overly-obvious or if their enforcement will cause significant damage to the economy, an argument for such law can be made. However, if the patent is good and the government think it's fair to expect people to license that technology, than banks should be expected to license it. If banks want to buy the patent-holder out, let them do so with their own money. But there isn't any reasonable explanation that I can imagine as to why this patent ought to be purchased for the banks using tax-payer money.
I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license.
I wish software developers in general would make this concession on professional-level tools. Take Adobe, for example. Even their student/teacher versions are expensive, and don't take into account the occasional person who wants to learn to use CS3, but don't use it professionally and so don't have an economic justification to buy it.
I think that situation accounts for a large volume of casual piracy anyway, and some of these large companies might not lose much by granting that as a legitimate and licensed use. Of course, it could also confuse people by letting them believe that software is "free" just because it's free for non-commercial use. Also, it could cause of sort of slippery slope where people stretch their "non-commercial" use every now and then to include some minor commercial use, until they're a fully professional graphic artist using the "non-commercial" CS3.
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I have never read Google's Privacy Policy but am slightly concerned that they appear to be able to access emails after their deletion.
Maybe they'd backed them up using G-Archiver?
More seriously, you do understand that your e-mail is generally not secure, right? If you use Yahoo, Hotmail, or whatever else, there are employees of your e-mail provider who have the ability to read your e-mail and whatnot. It's also unlikely that your e-mail is encrypted the entire time from when it's sent to when it's received. Email just isn't a secure medium unless you encrypt it in some special way.
Do you have any actual experience writing embedded apps for cell phones?
No, but I have actual experience using embedded apps for cell phones, and they're generally pretty damned crappy. And ugly. And slow. And not the sort of software Apple would want to distribute.
You also didn't seem to read the article. Sun doesn't have a problem creating a JVM for the iPhone. There's no work for Apple to make "their SDK support [J2ME]"
Even if they don't have to "support" it in the technical sense, they'd still be supporting it in the sense of endorsing it, i.e. selling/distributing it on their store.
Yeah, isn't it crazy when the government allows companies to control what kind of product they release? Did you know that my Cisco router doesn't play XBox games?! How dare they decide which features shouldn't be available on the product they sold me! It's my router, and I should be allowed to play XBox games if I want to!
It's not a big deal unless Apple really wants all of that software ported over to iPhone very quickly without the developers putting in additional work. And why would they want that?
Apple wants people to use their SDK so everything is using power efficiently, interacting with the OS properly, and has an interface that fits with OSX and other iPhone apps. They're not going to take a shoddy port of a crappy program written for another cell phone and put that up on their store anyway, so why would they bother making their SDK support it?
Restricting use of the cellular network is also understandable. (Why would you want to run Skype over GSM/EDGE rather than WiFi anyway?
I agree, the "no VOIP over EDGE" is completely understandable. First and foremost, I would expect that insofar as they're the gatekeeper, they wouldn't allow apps that would cause technical problems for AT&T, and I'm sure all iPhone users trying to use VOIP over their EDGE network would cause a technical problem. Second, it wouldn't really be enough bandwidth even if it were allowed. The fact that Apple is allowing IM clients and VOIP over WiFi is a bit of a surprise to me, since that will most likely eat into AT&T's business.
But keeping users from running Java or an alternate browser by way of licensing? Sorry, that's not going to fly.
For me, I guess it depends on how intentional it is, and whether they have any kind of justification. For example, I'm not sure why they would explicitly forbid additional browsers, and that seems a little crappy to me. I think Safari is great (even Google is using Webkit for Android) but I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed.
However, I could understand them objecting to Java, which I'm sure would be less efficient than writing native apps. I think it's important to keep in mind that they're only allowing distribution through iTunes, and probably only licensing the SDK to be used to develop software that they'll consider putting up on their own store. If it's something that will damage their relationship with AT&T, make the iPhone look bad, drain battery life too quickly, or perform badly, then I wouldn't expect to see Apple put it up on iTunes.
The subject of our discussion is Bruce Schneier's article in Wired, which I read. The subject of the article is the "mutual disclosure argument" which Schneier explains in his article. The author also notes that the "mutual disclosure argument" is explained in David Brin's book, but that fact isn't central to the subject of the article.
In any case, quit changing the subject to irrelevant issues. The point of the article is that the government should not be allowed to keep citizens under permanent involuntary surveillance without just cause. If you have an argument that the government should be allowed to tap our phone lines and video tape our lives, completely unchecked, go ahead and present it.
I'm very curious about this sentence. Which kind of bullshit thinking harkens back to Aristotle? There's a lot of bullshit thinking here on Slashdot, so I need you to be a little more specific. Can I get a citation maybe?
If you think the example is the opposite of the point Schneider was trying to make, then I think you misunderstand what Schneider is saying. A relevant quote from the article:
So what he's really saying is that people should be able to record the government, police, etc. but that police/government should not be allowed to record the people. I've never read Brin, but Schneider is interpreting Brin to say that we should all monitor each other, and that it's ok for the government to be watching us so long as we're watching them watch us. Schneider is saying (to paraphrase), "No, the government is too powerful already, relative to individual citizens. We should be able to watch them, and they should not be able to watch us. That would be way more likely to equal out the balance of power."
I still see one possible problem here. Let's say we have the ability to watch/record the police freely and they can watch/record us freely. You might expect that it would be fine, because the surveillance is mutual, but in reality a problem will present itself pretty quickly: The police are an organized group of people with a common agenda and additional powers over normal citizens, and meanwhile you're just one person trying to go about your normal life.
What tends to fall out of situations like that is that the police would develop the means and methods necessary to protect themselves, hide their actions from your surveillance, and sort through all of your misdeeds for prosecution.
When the number of Linux distributions is critisized, it's good to have competition
The reason it's good to have many Linux distributions (IMO) is not really for the competition. It's for the customization. Most Linux distros can do the same things and interoperate with each other, but some are more optimized for some situations and some for others.
No in that vein, if Microsoft was releasing their own Flash development suite that serviced a different group of developers, I think fewer people would be complaining, and more people would see value in it.
One would assume that a flash implementation if written even semi-competently would leverage that built-in support and would perform about as well as the native implementation except for a slightly larger memory footprint from having to load the flash plug-in.
One would hope that to be the case, but I certainly wouldn't assume it.
Yes, the most recent version of Flash supports h264, but you can't count on people to actually have the most recent version of Flash Player, so I wouldn't recommend using it yet.
Additionally, wrapping your h264 in a Flash player doesn't really buy you anything on a mobile device. You're better off sending a normal h264 video to the device and letting that device decode the video in whichever method it's most optimized to do that.
Whilst I do realise Flash is quite a resource hog, it's also become a rather important part of the web and if the iPhone can't handle it then it can't handle a large portion of the web.
I would quibble with this point. I can't think of any site in which Flash does anything *important*. I've seen situations where I understand why people use Flash, but in every case I can think of, Flash is expendable.
Right, it's become a fairly standard way of *displaying* video embedded in webpages. Flash isn't chosen because it's a good/effective method of streaming video (FLV quality is pretty awful), but because it can be used to embed video in the page itself in an effective manner. However, when you go to a device as small as a cell phone, and you want to watch a video, there's a very good chance you'll want to watch that video full-screen. Once you're watching a video full-screen, the value of Flash for viewing videos complete evaporates.
So what would be a good standard for streaming, assuming you don't need to embed the video in a web page? In terms of quality at a given bitrate, and in terms of power consumption, h264 is a clear winner. h264 is supported by Quicktime and therefore the iPhone. And there you have it, what Apple is doing the sensible thing.
I'm convinced that the notion that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods is a myth or at best outdated information.
I think it's likely that the information is not a myth, but outdated. There were a few reputable news sources who, years ago, analyzed Apple's business model for iTunes and determined that they weren't likely to be making much profit, if any at all, from the store. However, those calculations probably included some things like setting up the store and paying for bandwidth, bla bla bla.
Flash forward a few years, and the store is already set up, bandwidth prices have gone down a bit, and they're moving a lot more volume. Even though hardware/bandwidth demands will scale with the volume, more volume often means more profit (for a variety of reasons).
I would bet they're making decent money from iTunes, but still not an outrageous amount of money. That's part of the reason there's so much friction between the media companies and Apple, that the media companies view their industry as something that should be making outrageous amounts of money, and Apple tried to drive prices down to a modest level and use music/movies as a marketing tool to sell something else.
Maybe it's just that I'm not a programmer, but are you using "API" correctly? As far as I've heard, the iPhone has many of the APIs that OSX has, but they haven't released an SDK yet?
I mean, anyway, they're releasing an SDK, so if you're implying that Apple does want people to develop applications for the iPhone, it's pretty clear that you're wrong. Using Flash/Actionscript to code apps for the iPhone seems a bit silly to me anyway, but like I said, I'm not a programmer, so go ahead and correct me.
It's not quite "exactly what the problem is."
First, using that language implies that the iPhone is underpowered, when it'd be more true to say that Flash is a bloated resource-hog. Second, people who've researched the problem suggest that the iPhone *could* run flash, but it'd drain battery life and present other interface problems.
The major point here is that Flash just isn't an appropriate technology for mobile devices. If you want video, h264 will provide great quality/batter-consumption (relative to other video formats). I still question whether Flash is an appropriate technology for anything, but we can discuss that at another time.
I don't know if it's too late. AIM still has TONS of users. It's not clear to me how AOL intends to make money from AIM if people are using other clients without embedded ads, but I guess I don't really care either.
I also think it's funny because... what the hell is Woz doing these days? Maybe someone knows of something, but I doubt he's released anything recently that's enjoyed the sort of success that the iPod has. So even if he totally hates Apple's current lineup, so what? Let me know when someone relevant has an opinion.
The marketplace has been duped into believing that this is the best technology can provide.
I think it's more like the marketplace correctly ascertains that it's their best (and sometimes only) option. I hate my cable company, but there are no other cable companies that service my area. I don't know if satellite would be better, but it's not allowed by my building. My cable company is also my internet company. Again, I don't like them, but there's no other ISP in the area that offers better than 1.5Mbps/256kbps. I'm not such a big fan of my cell phone company, but I've tried a few different companies and no one is significantly better.
People will tolerate sub-standard service if it's a service they need and no one is offering better than sub-standard service. It's that simple. The whole telecommunications industry can sit on their collective butts and do nothing. So long as nobody can/will provide a better service, they don't have to worry about losing customers.
Users would of course find that many things from the Tiger "missing manual" would still apply. Obviously, though, anything that changed between Tiger and Leopard would be different. Why wouldn't O'Reilly want to stay up to date?
This really isn't a tough logic problem.
Yeah, I actually think that, in abstract, this sort of thing is very appropriate. Microsoft *should* be trying to appeal to the Unix/Linux crowd. They should be trying to make there stuff more interoperable, opening their protocols, giving headless servers, supporting GNU tools, etc. There's a case to be made for doing those sorts of things because of business interests, economic benefit, and technological need.
The only problem I see is that Microsoft has not earned people's trust that they'll do these things properly. They've earned a reputation for being willing to hobble their own products in order to maintain vendor lock-in and damage their competition.
I've been considering trying to hack my Wii just to get DVD playback. It's a nice little box already hooked to my TV with a DVD drive. I don't know why Nintendo won't do it in a legit way. I'd even be willing to shell out a couple dollars for it.
Well that's essentially what I'm saying. I didn't really read enough about this to know whether the patent holder was a patent troll or someone relatively legit, but it sounded like a pretty obvious patent that probably shouldn't have been granted.
However, the big problem is the bailout. If the government wants to make some law that says that patents can be rendered null and void if they're overly-obvious or if their enforcement will cause significant damage to the economy, an argument for such law can be made. However, if the patent is good and the government think it's fair to expect people to license that technology, than banks should be expected to license it. If banks want to buy the patent-holder out, let them do so with their own money. But there isn't any reasonable explanation that I can imagine as to why this patent ought to be purchased for the banks using tax-payer money.
I think the next step is for Microsoft to make another license that says you can use it for personal use but once you use it to make money (commercial) you need a commercial license.
I wish software developers in general would make this concession on professional-level tools. Take Adobe, for example. Even their student/teacher versions are expensive, and don't take into account the occasional person who wants to learn to use CS3, but don't use it professionally and so don't have an economic justification to buy it.
I think that situation accounts for a large volume of casual piracy anyway, and some of these large companies might not lose much by granting that as a legitimate and licensed use. Of course, it could also confuse people by letting them believe that software is "free" just because it's free for non-commercial use. Also, it could cause of sort of slippery slope where people stretch their "non-commercial" use every now and then to include some minor commercial use, until they're a fully professional graphic artist using the "non-commercial" CS3.
Insofar as patents don't serve the common good by encouraging invention and innovation, they need reform.