> This reeks of desperation. Something tells me the recent rulings against them around the world from Germany to the US to Australia are a major blow to their ego and they're lashing out like the cool kid who is suddenly being abandoned by all his friends...
Don't read too much into it. Jobs decided to "go nuclear on Android" for ambition alone, nothing else. Apple is doing this because they can. If they were desperate they wouldn't be targeting everyone this time around. When the whole thing started, Jobs said it wasn't money that he was interested in because he already had plenty, the whole thing was just his personal agenda to rid the world of iPhone competitors, and I agree with him, as I don't recall many capacitive multi-touch touchscreen phones sporting an interface completely designed to be used with fingers before the iPhone came out and showed everyone how to properly use technology that had been around for ages, and 4 years later everyone is blatantly copying the iPhone.
Steve Jobs said explicitly that he'd go nuclear on Android, and that money was not his motivation because he already had plenty, it was just one man's ambition to control the market.
The masses don't give a crap, we just want our iPhones. People would potentially care if the Apple was thwarting innovation, but in this case they are the innovators, I'm pretty happy with my iPhone 4S, so I have no motivation to care.
The limitation is not arbitrary and much less imposed by me. There is no documented way to escape the sandbox on iOS. I'm a registered and licensed iOS and publisher and have absolutely no way to escape the sandbox, let alone implement my own drivers, without actually cracking the system.
If you think differently, then feel free to point out where Windows is limiting my ability to implement software as a developer. Claims regarding jailbroken iPhones are invalid in this argument because, as mentioned above, they require cracking the system, a process that is not required on Windows platforms.
> Proves that it isn't? How so? What does it prove I can't do that I can do on a Windows machine?
Leave the sandbox without cracking the system. There are plenty of things that the sandbox is designed to prevent you from doing and can be done just fine on Windows. Even if you disregard the fact that you need a license in order to sign code that runs on the platform, the sandbox prevents you from doing things as trivial and common as running another executable file, even if that file is part of your app. Attempting to call execve(2) on iOS results in the application being wiped in such a way that even gdb can't tell the process died.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually an Apple fag, but if there's something that they don't stand for is your freedom. Even if you are in the paid developer program (which gives you the freedom to implement stuff that runs on your iDevices but would never be accepted in the App Store), without jailbreaking your iDevices you can only run software that fits inside the restrictions of their sandbox. The result of this is that in certain cases you can't even take full advantage of all the hardware inside your iDevices. For instance, all iDevices have scanline-based multitouch touchscreens, which basically sense contact areas (and thus can be used to sense a virtually unlimited number of touch points), but since resolving a touch point from raw contact area provided by the hardware in real time is quite processor intensive, Apple caps the number of touch points that iOS feels on the iPad to 11 and on the iPhone and iPod Touch to 5 and does not relay contact area information to applications because they want people to use their gesture recognition APIs rather than waste CPU calculating touch points in inefficient ways.
On Windows you are perfectly free to hook whatever you wish to the kernel and write your own drivers and filters.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but only Windows' provides you with true freedom as a developer by not getting in the way.
I am beginning to find it hard to justify having a desktop at all. Right now I have a mid-2011 iMac for desktop which I am considering selling and replacing with a Thunderbolt Display at home, using a Macbook Pro as a transportable home computer (with the Thunderbolt Display serving as its dock), and the iPad as a netbook, because most of the use that I have for a laptop these days is to access remote servers, browse the web, and read E-mail, all things that can be done perfectly well using an iPad with a clam shell case while benefiting from its ability to run iOS apps (thus saving my iPhone's battery for calls), huge battery life even with very intensive use, and its very own Internet connection (thus, again, saving my iPhone's battery for calls). Having a Macbook Pro as my home computer, however, allows me to take my transportable home computer anywhere with me whenever I need to use Xcode or run virtual machines.
For regular text, I find the virtual keyboard to be fine (not perfect, since I'm a touch typist), but good enough. For programming, however, I find it to be terrible simply because I'm too used to the US layout and code requires quick access to lots of non-alphanumeric characters.
I don't think he needs to justify anything to anybody. My iPad 2 hasn't even paid the power that it has consumed since I've had it, let alone itself. I bought it because I have a thing for capacitive multitouch touchscreens, especially if they have a GPS too, and once the iPad 3 is out, this one will be sold at half the price, which is what I do to all my previous-generation Apple hardware as there's always someone around willing t buy my stuff when I upgrade. I have an iPhone 4S as well, but the iPad is bigger, lasts much longer on a single charge even with intensive use, and is the appliance that I take everywhere I predict to be spending a lot of time waiting.
Lately, however, I have been considering purchasing one of those clam shell cases for the iPad, again not because I need to justify purchasing any of these things but simply because, just like the author, I have realized that I don't really need a laptop most of the time because I only require that the device be portable, have a browser, an E-mail client, an ssh client, a huge battery life, and an Internet connection of its own so that I can avoid tethering to the iPhone. The iPad has all the features that I need without any of the burden caused by those that I don't.
Programming is perfectly doable on the iPad, I've been writing C and C++ in vim on remote servers for over a decade; the environment provided by the iPad is no different from what I am already used to. Of course I can't do anything that requires a graphical IDE, but operating system and server code is perfectly vim friendly and thus perfectly iPad friendly.
Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.
This is not to mention that should Apple decide to cross those GUIDs with people's Apple IDs (which they do register when they register the phones), then the chances of the trial process succeeding would be reduced even further, because in such a context my iPhone's GUID would not work without my Apple ID.
You know, once upon a time I too committed personal sacrifices in the name of freedom, and that lasted until one day I was actually kinda forced to use a Macbook Pro at work and it had all the traits that I had been looking for on a computer / operating system combination. That was when I realized why compliance is not necessarily a bad thing. While I do enjoy and respect freedom, as a software engineer I also try to comply to standards and established norms as much as humanly possible, even if I don't agree with them, because they may have a purpose that I do not understand while I'm writing my code, and I don't want to jeopardize that purpose by breaking conventions, which many free software developers, even some that should know better, unfortunately do.
Apple has, in many respects, successfully put itself in a position where they can actually enforce compliance in a way that makes everything work well, and I find myself at ease with that. Sometimes I have my face-palm moments such as when I realized that I could not develop an iOS app that could run in the background indefinitely unless it plays music or when I realized that my iPhone was completely incapable of exchanging contacts via Bluetooth because most Bluetooth profiles are either missing or intentionally disabled on the iPhone, but then I understood the purpose. In the first case it is a power concern whereas in the second it has been possible to write third-party apps for that since iOS 3 (my N900, for example, can't send MMSes or tune into FM radio without third party software either, and that was never a problem for me).
Regarding Flash I can count by my fingers the number of times when I have actually felt the need to have it on my phone, or even on my tablet, and I really do have to wonder what kind of Flash-powered website people would be interested in visiting through their mobile phones. Furthermore, iOS is so popular as a platform that people interested in developing web applications for mobile can simply not ignore it, so in my opinion they are doing the world a service by not allowing flash. I actually wish other companies actually had the balls to do the same. As far as my experience with Flash on a non-Apple phone is concerned, I only have bad things to say about it, since pretty much everything was slow, even Youtube was slow!
I must confess though that I have never touched an Android device, not because I am any less of a nerd than I was before (as I keep buying the Linux phones from Nokia, which unlike most Android vendors sells Linux phones that are as free and open as they can possibly be) but rather because in my mind Android will always be that platform powering non-Apple devices for either Apple haters who secretly wish they had the Real Thing or people who have this notion that Apple targets rich homosexuals. The name, Android, doesn't do them any favors either; having been a geek my entire life that's the last trait that I want people to perceive about me. I also don't understand the choice of Java as the main development language for embedded devices, it really makes no sense to me, and I must admit that as a self-respecting software engineer I keep myself as far away from Java as I can, because I can not accept a virtual machine on my embedded devices and because Java in particular doesn't bring anything interesting to the table as a development language. Another thing that keeps me away from Android devices is the fact that there are so many implementations of them that the experience of purchasing one is a chore, just like the experience or purchasing a PC, and totally unlike the experience of purchasing anything from Apple, where the only available choices are things that matter and you know they aren't hiding anything that will come back to bite you later.
So basically I think the article is right about Android having issues with public perception but I think it overestimates the value of freedom, because even as a power user I seldom feel restrained by my non-jailbroken iPhone.
It is obvious that your case is not problematic. My iPhone 4S wastes battery at a 1%/hour rate if left on standby, which I find quite good. The complaints, however, are coming from people whose iPhones are sometimes wasting as much as 15%/hour on standby. I would complain about that myself if that was the case here, but it isn't.
I can, however, imagine that figuring out the conditions in which this happens is no easy task, which to me justifies the delay.
It is, however, strange that people who do not wish to expose themselves are present on social networks. Even if they don't disclose their own identity it is generally easy to trace them back through their friends who do as well sa their own traits.
You can implement smart pointers and containers in C++, if manual memory management is such a pain for you. That is, in fact, the beauty of the language; you have a lot of paradigms at your disposal but the language doesn't get in the way if you choose not to use them.
>: Granted: You can retrofit a garbage-collecting memory manager onto C++...but that code will rob your C++ code of some of that enhanced execution performance which is probably the reason why you chose to develop in C++ in the first place.
If you do understand the concepts and implementations of smart pointers and containers in C++ then why the hell are you still talking about C++ as if it did not support automatic memory management?
This is the only thing that makes me envy the me generation. I was born in 82 and am loving to read about the EUNICE project on VMS from a year before I was born. The 80s sure were epic!
Is to be allowed to work with the technologies that I want and implement all the features that I deem necessary. In essence, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY, allow me to ENJOY DOING MY JOB and I'll make it epic! There's only so much money can buy!
(and let's be honest, it's your employers computer and bandwidth so they are perfectly entitled to monitor and control what goes on with it - that's not "fascist" at all
In the EU, my privacy rights override your property rights, and I'm almost certain that it's no different in the US. Just try, for example, to hide a camera in your employees' bathroom and see what happens once it's discovered.
Technically speaking, TransGaming could very well not be "in the right" since the copyright holders also have the right to revoke previously granted licenses. This is a common misconception that I believe needs to be addressed as it's too widespread among developers (another example where this mistake manifests itself is in OpenSSH).
Replying to myself as I made a mistake when I mentioned that only IPv4 packet should be sent to::/96 as there's an exception to this rule, which is when an IPv6 address is involved either in the sending or the receiving end, in which case IPv6 packets should be used.
Provide full backward compatibility with IPv4 by reserving::/96 as a special range from which only IPv4 packets would be expected and to which only IPv4 packets would be sent even by IPv6-enabled hosts. Once the inevitable crunch happened (10 years later), everyone would be able to talk IPv6 and no network management would be required beyond the regular software and hardware upgrades, so IANA would have no problem assigning new IPs outside of the reserved backward-compatibility network.
With the current migration plan, success is not defined by people connecting to IPv6, because as I said on my previous post many already are connected to it without even knowing thanks to Teredo; success is defined by people disconnecting from IPv4, and we are way too far from that moment. Until then IPv6 will continue to be the nerd virtual public network that it is today and has been since the 6bone days.
I've had a dual stack for a while thanks to Teredo, and quite frankly it's pretty useless. Don't get me wrong, I like the Teredo concept, I just don't believe in the migration plan. I foresee a world of NATs, just like eastern civilizations have had it for a while now, where IPv6 is regarded as a non-production protocol used mostly for P2P. Nothing is really going to change, we'll just lose our public addresses at home and get used to it; hell I'm already finding it odd that with this crunch, Vodafone is still giving me a public IPv4 address when I connect to the Internet from my cell phone.
The migration was terribly planned, they had over a decade to come up with a better solution (which exists), but instead of doing it they insisted in going on with the same plan ignoring the fact that nobody's gonna change their networks unless they're broken, and these people are the so called experts. Having two networks that can barely talk to each other and hoping that people simply migrate when one of them is considered highly optional is ridiculous. Does the IETF have any real engineers or is it just the name?
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> This reeks of desperation. Something tells me the recent rulings against them around the world from Germany to the US to Australia are a major blow to their ego and they're lashing out like the cool kid who is suddenly being abandoned by all his friends...
Don't read too much into it. Jobs decided to "go nuclear on Android" for ambition alone, nothing else. Apple is doing this because they can. If they were desperate they wouldn't be targeting everyone this time around. When the whole thing started, Jobs said it wasn't money that he was interested in because he already had plenty, the whole thing was just his personal agenda to rid the world of iPhone competitors, and I agree with him, as I don't recall many capacitive multi-touch touchscreen phones sporting an interface completely designed to be used with fingers before the iPhone came out and showed everyone how to properly use technology that had been around for ages, and 4 years later everyone is blatantly copying the iPhone.
Steve Jobs said explicitly that he'd go nuclear on Android, and that money was not his motivation because he already had plenty, it was just one man's ambition to control the market.
The masses don't give a crap, we just want our iPhones. People would potentially care if the Apple was thwarting innovation, but in this case they are the innovators, I'm pretty happy with my iPhone 4S, so I have no motivation to care.
You are still required to type your thoughts, and at least I don't perform both tasks in parallel.
I don't think you understood what I said.
The limitation is not arbitrary and much less imposed by me. There is no documented way to escape the sandbox on iOS. I'm a registered and licensed iOS and publisher and have absolutely no way to escape the sandbox, let alone implement my own drivers, without actually cracking the system.
If you think differently, then feel free to point out where Windows is limiting my ability to implement software as a developer. Claims regarding jailbroken iPhones are invalid in this argument because, as mentioned above, they require cracking the system, a process that is not required on Windows platforms.
> Proves that it isn't? How so? What does it prove I can't do that I can do on a Windows machine?
Leave the sandbox without cracking the system. There are plenty of things that the sandbox is designed to prevent you from doing and can be done just fine on Windows. Even if you disregard the fact that you need a license in order to sign code that runs on the platform, the sandbox prevents you from doing things as trivial and common as running another executable file, even if that file is part of your app. Attempting to call execve(2) on iOS results in the application being wiped in such a way that even gdb can't tell the process died.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually an Apple fag, but if there's something that they don't stand for is your freedom. Even if you are in the paid developer program (which gives you the freedom to implement stuff that runs on your iDevices but would never be accepted in the App Store), without jailbreaking your iDevices you can only run software that fits inside the restrictions of their sandbox. The result of this is that in certain cases you can't even take full advantage of all the hardware inside your iDevices. For instance, all iDevices have scanline-based multitouch touchscreens, which basically sense contact areas (and thus can be used to sense a virtually unlimited number of touch points), but since resolving a touch point from raw contact area provided by the hardware in real time is quite processor intensive, Apple caps the number of touch points that iOS feels on the iPad to 11 and on the iPhone and iPod Touch to 5 and does not relay contact area information to applications because they want people to use their gesture recognition APIs rather than waste CPU calculating touch points in inefficient ways.
On Windows you are perfectly free to hook whatever you wish to the kernel and write your own drivers and filters.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, but only Windows' provides you with true freedom as a developer by not getting in the way.
I am beginning to find it hard to justify having a desktop at all. Right now I have a mid-2011 iMac for desktop which I am considering selling and replacing with a Thunderbolt Display at home, using a Macbook Pro as a transportable home computer (with the Thunderbolt Display serving as its dock), and the iPad as a netbook, because most of the use that I have for a laptop these days is to access remote servers, browse the web, and read E-mail, all things that can be done perfectly well using an iPad with a clam shell case while benefiting from its ability to run iOS apps (thus saving my iPhone's battery for calls), huge battery life even with very intensive use, and its very own Internet connection (thus, again, saving my iPhone's battery for calls). Having a Macbook Pro as my home computer, however, allows me to take my transportable home computer anywhere with me whenever I need to use Xcode or run virtual machines.
For regular text, I find the virtual keyboard to be fine (not perfect, since I'm a touch typist), but good enough. For programming, however, I find it to be terrible simply because I'm too used to the US layout and code requires quick access to lots of non-alphanumeric characters.
I don't think he needs to justify anything to anybody. My iPad 2 hasn't even paid the power that it has consumed since I've had it, let alone itself. I bought it because I have a thing for capacitive multitouch touchscreens, especially if they have a GPS too, and once the iPad 3 is out, this one will be sold at half the price, which is what I do to all my previous-generation Apple hardware as there's always someone around willing t buy my stuff when I upgrade. I have an iPhone 4S as well, but the iPad is bigger, lasts much longer on a single charge even with intensive use, and is the appliance that I take everywhere I predict to be spending a lot of time waiting.
Lately, however, I have been considering purchasing one of those clam shell cases for the iPad, again not because I need to justify purchasing any of these things but simply because, just like the author, I have realized that I don't really need a laptop most of the time because I only require that the device be portable, have a browser, an E-mail client, an ssh client, a huge battery life, and an Internet connection of its own so that I can avoid tethering to the iPhone. The iPad has all the features that I need without any of the burden caused by those that I don't.
Programming is perfectly doable on the iPad, I've been writing C and C++ in vim on remote servers for over a decade; the environment provided by the iPad is no different from what I am already used to. Of course I can't do anything that requires a graphical IDE, but operating system and server code is perfectly vim friendly and thus perfectly iPad friendly.
The iPhone 4S' identification string reads "iPhone4,1".
Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.
This is not to mention that should Apple decide to cross those GUIDs with people's Apple IDs (which they do register when they register the phones), then the chances of the trial process succeeding would be reduced even further, because in such a context my iPhone's GUID would not work without my Apple ID.
As a consumer I feel much better served by native apps, and the rest are not my problems.
You know, once upon a time I too committed personal sacrifices in the name of freedom, and that lasted until one day I was actually kinda forced to use a Macbook Pro at work and it had all the traits that I had been looking for on a computer / operating system combination. That was when I realized why compliance is not necessarily a bad thing. While I do enjoy and respect freedom, as a software engineer I also try to comply to standards and established norms as much as humanly possible, even if I don't agree with them, because they may have a purpose that I do not understand while I'm writing my code, and I don't want to jeopardize that purpose by breaking conventions, which many free software developers, even some that should know better, unfortunately do.
Apple has, in many respects, successfully put itself in a position where they can actually enforce compliance in a way that makes everything work well, and I find myself at ease with that. Sometimes I have my face-palm moments such as when I realized that I could not develop an iOS app that could run in the background indefinitely unless it plays music or when I realized that my iPhone was completely incapable of exchanging contacts via Bluetooth because most Bluetooth profiles are either missing or intentionally disabled on the iPhone, but then I understood the purpose. In the first case it is a power concern whereas in the second it has been possible to write third-party apps for that since iOS 3 (my N900, for example, can't send MMSes or tune into FM radio without third party software either, and that was never a problem for me).
Regarding Flash I can count by my fingers the number of times when I have actually felt the need to have it on my phone, or even on my tablet, and I really do have to wonder what kind of Flash-powered website people would be interested in visiting through their mobile phones. Furthermore, iOS is so popular as a platform that people interested in developing web applications for mobile can simply not ignore it, so in my opinion they are doing the world a service by not allowing flash. I actually wish other companies actually had the balls to do the same. As far as my experience with Flash on a non-Apple phone is concerned, I only have bad things to say about it, since pretty much everything was slow, even Youtube was slow!
I must confess though that I have never touched an Android device, not because I am any less of a nerd than I was before (as I keep buying the Linux phones from Nokia, which unlike most Android vendors sells Linux phones that are as free and open as they can possibly be) but rather because in my mind Android will always be that platform powering non-Apple devices for either Apple haters who secretly wish they had the Real Thing or people who have this notion that Apple targets rich homosexuals. The name, Android, doesn't do them any favors either; having been a geek my entire life that's the last trait that I want people to perceive about me. I also don't understand the choice of Java as the main development language for embedded devices, it really makes no sense to me, and I must admit that as a self-respecting software engineer I keep myself as far away from Java as I can, because I can not accept a virtual machine on my embedded devices and because Java in particular doesn't bring anything interesting to the table as a development language. Another thing that keeps me away from Android devices is the fact that there are so many implementations of them that the experience of purchasing one is a chore, just like the experience or purchasing a PC, and totally unlike the experience of purchasing anything from Apple, where the only available choices are things that matter and you know they aren't hiding anything that will come back to bite you later.
So basically I think the article is right about Android having issues with public perception but I think it overestimates the value of freedom, because even as a power user I seldom feel restrained by my non-jailbroken iPhone.
It is obvious that your case is not problematic. My iPhone 4S wastes battery at a 1%/hour rate if left on standby, which I find quite good. The complaints, however, are coming from people whose iPhones are sometimes wasting as much as 15%/hour on standby. I would complain about that myself if that was the case here, but it isn't.
I can, however, imagine that figuring out the conditions in which this happens is no easy task, which to me justifies the delay.
It is, however, strange that people who do not wish to expose themselves are present on social networks. Even if they don't disclose their own identity it is generally easy to trace them back through their friends who do as well sa their own traits.
This is inaccurate. You can have a Google account without having a Google profile (as is the case of my own account).
You can implement smart pointers and containers in C++, if manual memory management is such a pain for you. That is, in fact, the beauty of the language; you have a lot of paradigms at your disposal but the language doesn't get in the way if you choose not to use them.
>: Granted: You can retrofit a garbage-collecting memory manager onto C++...but that code will rob your C++ code of some of that enhanced execution performance which is probably the reason why you chose to develop in C++ in the first place.
If you do understand the concepts and implementations of smart pointers and containers in C++ then why the hell are you still talking about C++ as if it did not support automatic memory management?
This is the only thing that makes me envy the me generation. I was born in 82 and am loving to read about the EUNICE project on VMS from a year before I was born. The 80s sure were epic!
Is to be allowed to work with the technologies that I want and implement all the features that I deem necessary. In essence, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY, allow me to ENJOY DOING MY JOB and I'll make it epic! There's only so much money can buy!
In the EU, my privacy rights override your property rights, and I'm almost certain that it's no different in the US. Just try, for example, to hide a camera in your employees' bathroom and see what happens once it's discovered.
Technically speaking, TransGaming could very well not be "in the right" since the copyright holders also have the right to revoke previously granted licenses. This is a common misconception that I believe needs to be addressed as it's too widespread among developers (another example where this mistake manifests itself is in OpenSSH).
Replying to myself as I made a mistake when I mentioned that only IPv4 packet should be sent to ::/96 as there's an exception to this rule, which is when an IPv6 address is involved either in the sending or the receiving end, in which case IPv6 packets should be used.
Provide full backward compatibility with IPv4 by reserving ::/96 as a special range from which only IPv4 packets would be expected and to which only IPv4 packets would be sent even by IPv6-enabled hosts. Once the inevitable crunch happened (10 years later), everyone would be able to talk IPv6 and no network management would be required beyond the regular software and hardware upgrades, so IANA would have no problem assigning new IPs outside of the reserved backward-compatibility network.
With the current migration plan, success is not defined by people connecting to IPv6, because as I said on my previous post many already are connected to it without even knowing thanks to Teredo; success is defined by people disconnecting from IPv4, and we are way too far from that moment. Until then IPv6 will continue to be the nerd virtual public network that it is today and has been since the 6bone days.
I've had a dual stack for a while thanks to Teredo, and quite frankly it's pretty useless. Don't get me wrong, I like the Teredo concept, I just don't believe in the migration plan. I foresee a world of NATs, just like eastern civilizations have had it for a while now, where IPv6 is regarded as a non-production protocol used mostly for P2P. Nothing is really going to change, we'll just lose our public addresses at home and get used to it; hell I'm already finding it odd that with this crunch, Vodafone is still giving me a public IPv4 address when I connect to the Internet from my cell phone.
The migration was terribly planned, they had over a decade to come up with a better solution (which exists), but instead of doing it they insisted in going on with the same plan ignoring the fact that nobody's gonna change their networks unless they're broken, and these people are the so called experts. Having two networks that can barely talk to each other and hoping that people simply migrate when one of them is considered highly optional is ridiculous. Does the IETF have any real engineers or is it just the name?