But that was not my question, I understand how the rendering through proxy and OBML work.
But Opera Mini has a much faster interface altogether, even the same keyboard widget that Safari uses is much more responsive in Opera Mini.
When Safari is running it is also running the entire Webkit engine and processing data for the pages. When Opera is running it is running a stripped down engine for processing the data display from Opera's servers. Less processing occuring on the device means more responsive UI elements, at least for devices with CPU bottlenecks, like smartphones.
The problem is that in the last 2 decades businesses have come up with a crazy new model where making it harder to make blades actually helps them sell razors. It sounds crazy, but it is the basis of why a vendor would want to lock people in instead of being open.
Once a vendor achieves dominance in a market, then artificial incompatibility becomes an asset. Before then, it is a detriment and there needs to be a justification in making the product better or you still lose money. Apple does not dominate the smartphone market.
What if you could put a restriction on the blades... an arbitrary one, and manufacturers would still make blades because your razor is so good and so popular?
An arbitrary restriction does not help you in this case. All it does is lead a few blade makers to move to some other market for investment. You can't implement an arbitrary inhibition without inhibiting someone.
Then you add another restriction... shouldn't consumers and manufacturers move to another razor? No - yours is still the best.
Except a few people will move as a result and you lose sales while gaining what?
And they have devoted effort to it, and they profit from it. So the blade manufacturers jump through hoops and they even tell the user it is for their own good. The users still buy it.
No they don't because that doesn't benefit them at all. They tell users it's dumb but they're coping... unless there really is a benefit.
You see the reason your application of this idea fails is twofold. First, Apple does not have dominance, so anything that makes things harder for developers does hurt Apple's bottom line. Second, Apple is pushing HTML5 as an open alternative to Flash, and HTML5 has less ability to lock in users than Flash does. Flash run poorly on many devices, especially Linux based ones and device makers and developers have no control over that. Only Adobe does. But Apple is not proposing a lock-in strategy or they'd be using something proprietary, like MS has done with Silverlight and their new phone OS. Apple is proposing the use of an open standard alternative that works not only on the iPhone, but can be made to work on any device and any platform. Now you may wonder why they are bothering, but you have to remember, Apple likes control (as in not having Adobe with a knife t their throat) and Apple makes more than phones. Pushing away from Flash and to HTML5 removes a problem for them with regard to OS X and Macs in that it improves stability, performance, and security there as well.
This is what IBM tried to do in the mainframe days, and they lost. The IBM PC clones killed it.
IBM did have market dominance and clones survived because IBM was restricted by antitrust law. Should Apple achieve dominance I'd like to think the same laws would apply, but the US hasn't been much for actually enforcing them of late.
Between Apple's developer license, the stigma of not making your app work on the iPhone, the lost sales from that, and the fact that Apple really is ahead of the curve (despite this rant, the iPhone really is a good product) - they are keeping the lock-in successful.
Apple is locking in developers by forcing them to use an open standard instead of a proprietary technology? Why can't developers develop HTML5 apps that run everywhere?
>>>freshman business student could tell you the Apps are blades and Apple's model is clearly to make money on the razor
First off you have that backwards. Typically the razor (or printer) is given away for free or near-free, and then the money is made on the backend from blades (ink).
Actually, razors and blades are the prototypical example used to teach loss leaders to economics and business students. The question for many business models is if they want to make money on razors or on blades, meaning whether their particular business model does better putting their margins on lower priced consumables or higher priced initial products. Both are common business strategies in different markets.
Second I don't think Apple is following that model. They appear to be trying to make money on Both the razor and the blades - both the hardware and the software.
Not really, no. When they entered the market for online music downloads, Apple undercut the prices of everyone else and ran the store at break even levels, making their money on iPods. This has been clearly stated by Steve Jobs to the shareholders and numerous business analysts have shown the same thing. Every now and again some blogger or incompetent news writer creates an article claiming it's all a lie and because Apple sells so many songs, they must be raking in the cash, but usually those people fail to take into account important things like operating costs or credit card transaction fees or they simply don't understand the difference between sales and profit. Anyone with any clue has known for a long time that Apple runs the iTunes store simply to sell iPods.
So then they enter the smartphone market. They offer a software developer package that costs all of $100 (basically nothing) and offer any freeware apps people put up for free. This costs Apple money for hosting and administration. Then they take 30% of the sales for pay apps, similar to what they take for song sales and for low priced apps, probably barely enough to cover bandwidth and credit card fees. It makes them a bit for more expensive apps, but all that has to cover the whole submission and evaluation process as well as cover the costs incurred for free apps. Just take a look at revenue numbers. From Q3 2008 to 2009, Apple's iPhone sales quadrupled (+300%). Their combined sales of music and applications went up +17%. If they're trying to significantly profit from app sales, they are failing miserably.
Apple's view is that if you control both, then you can profit off both.
Not really. Apple's philosophy for some time has been that if you can bring in consumables as cheaply, easily, and plentifully as possible, it will drive sales of expensive hardware devices.
It's similar to how the videogame console makers operate, earning profit on both the hardware and the software.
Historically both the XBox360 and PS3 have been subsidized and sold at a loss as a way to generate game licensing fees. Only the Wii (of the current generation) was initially sold at a profit. This late in the sales cycle costs have come down and it is debatable if either Sony or Microsoft is making money on each console sale, but it is clear that has not been the case in general.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations ended in similar figures but saying this is somehow readable in Apples revenue figures is news to me.
You make a valid point. They report out how much is from the iTunes store including apps and music and they announce periodically how many songs are sold and there have been plenty of analysts going over the numbers for many years. If you assume Apple has completely stopped selling music and somehow hidden this fact and that the administrative and hosting costs are negligible and that Jobs lied to shareholders and you look at the revenue numbers, you could make the numbers work out to Apple taking in a tenth of their profit from Apps, which is still a whole lot less than they make on iPhones or iPod touch hardware.
However the confusing part is that they allow the browser to use CSS, Javascript and even some HTML 5 components, thus making web based applications...
If they could find a way to prevent this without utterly breaking the entire web or ending up looking like the Devil himself, I’m sure they would.
Umm, their original plan was to only support Web apps as the official API. They added native APIs because so many people wanted them and because Web apps did not perform as well as Apple liked. Saying they would ban Web apps, when that was the foundation of their business plan, reeks of ignorance.
They run the HTML and Javascript interpreter in the cloud instead of using Webkit. Basically it offloads a lot of the processing from the iPhone to Opera servers. As a side note, it also means even for encrypted pages (like your online banking) the people at Opera have full access to what you're doing, so you need to decide if you trust them with your security.
Was it ever rejected? I can find references to Opera saying Apple might not let it in, but nothing definitive.
No, it was never rejected. Opera decided not to submit Opera Mobile, because they assumed it would be rejected since it does not comply with the requirements. A lot of people speculated that Opera Mini would not be accepted either, but it has never been rejected in the past.
Common belief is that it is really because it will allow third parties to develop apps in Flash and deploy them on the web (potentially even downloading them to the iPhone), thus bypassing the App Store and Apple's cut of the money.
What?!?
Commoners appear to be idiots. Apple not only supports Web apps developed in HTML5, but their support for them surpasses most browser vendors. Then Apple allows free application through their store, and Apple pays for all the bandwidth fees on them. Apple's revenue numbers show the App store makes what 1-2% of Apple's revenue compared to the 40% of their revenue from hardware sales of iPods and iPhones. So the common belief is that Apple is willing to make fewer sales in the part of their company that makes all the money by making those products worse, in order to make more money on the part that makes basically nothing and which the CEO has stated is run at near zero profit in order to promote other products. So your "common belief" requires Apple business people to be complete morons who are also lying to shareholders and risking investigation from the SEC.
Seriously, even a freshman business student could tell you the Apps are blades and Apple's model is clearly to make money on the razor. It makes no sense to make it harder for people to provide blades, because Apple runs their blade business just to promote their very, very profitable razor (hardware) business.
I don't get it, are you are you saying the Acer doesn't have support for multiple displays??
The Acer supports display mirroring, but according to their data sheet, not using the built in display and a second display as independent screens. This might be because of the way they route the video or they may just have driver issues getting it to work reliably (unplugging and sleep from different states to different states is a trial to QA).
The MBP does not have DVI anymore than the Acer has DVI. Displayport => DVI or HDMI => DVI. Same thing.
Well there are some differences but if you don't know about them, they probably do not matter to you so lets skip that.
What video card driver issues are you speaking of?
People doing emulation VirtualBox or VMWare rant about how impossible it is to get these working reliably with the graphics on these machines due to driver issues, especially with Windows 7.
I own MBP produced in 2008. The battery has been replaced twice
The plural of anecdote?
Quality and reliability? It's a fucking urban legend.
Hmm, "dremon" performed a study with a sample size of one. How does that compare to Consumer Reports and to my former IT department's studies? Ahh yes, not statistically significant. Sorry to be harsh and all but your crappy luck isn't any reason for someone to ignore actual data.
Read Mac forums; I am far from being alone with these issues.
Or read Dell forums, or Acer forums or forums from every company. Everyone has hardware failures and the people who get burned always gripe about it. That's just the reality of things. People actually interested in making good decisions, however, actually look up studies of short term and long term reliability when making a purchasing decision.
It also weighs more and has lower battery life. I think being substantially more powerful in every dimension more than makes up for that, though.
So why are you telling me? Seriously, are you just insecure about your purchasing decisions and feel the need to defend them even when no one asked? By all means buy the machine that suits your needs best. You don't have to come here, describe the tradeoffs as you see them, tell us which tradeoffs you prefer, then ask permission before you make a purchase. If you like what Dell offers better, from now on feel free to buy it without defending your choice on Slashdot.
But still, WHY would I pay $1,450 more for the MacBook Pro?
Screen resolution, quality and reliability of parts, decent touch pad, decent speakers, mag connect power, Firewire for video work, no driver issues with the video card and OS, faster hard drive, multiple non-mirrored video displays, 2 pounds lighter to carry around, DVI, backlit keyboard, more than twice the battery length, automatic graphic card switching, slightly better bluetooth... that's most of it. Well and it can run and comes with OS X, which means more to most of us than the rest of it.
You can make the same comparison though with a higher end Dell laptop. It has a lot more features than the Acer and it costs more. If you don't need a high end laptop, don't buy one. If you live you life in front of laptop, well you might want to spring for one that is higher quality, more reliable, and more featureful. A grand is what, a week or two of consulting for a professional. Hell adding the new Adobe CS Suite will bump up the price $2600 but if it's the best tool for the job, it pays for itself in short order.
But this president was going to usher in a new age of transparency, and produce "change we can believe in". Obama has the power to order the US negotiators to push for more transparency, but he has done nothing (or worse than nothing) to open up the process.
Absolutely. Assuming he is aware of what is going on with this, he seems to be breaking a campaign promise. My real question is, where are the opposition politicians on this? I mean, when the president breaks campaign promises, shouldn't Republican, at least a few of them, be calling him out on it publicly? I've heard not a peep, even from folks like Ron Paul. Are they all so badly in the pockets of lobbyists they won't even bring this up to attack their opponents?
This new restriction applies to iPhone OS 4.0, where they introduce multitasking for third party apps which takes advantage of halting portions of apps... unless they are cross compiled in which case the performance tricks fail.
You have been repeatedly told (in other stories about these new restriction, by me as well as others) that it's not how iPhone OS 4 multitasking works at all. There's no "suspending of portions of apps" there. They are just suspended entirely - if they want to do any background work, they have to offload that to OS-provided daemons (which are separate processes).
From my reading of the feature, it seems to offload specific types of threads based upon the profile for the app. For example, it can hand off a general processing thread to continue a calculation (for example) while halting all the UI and other components until the user switches back to that app. In short, I disagree with your characterization of how multitasking works. If you asserted otherwise before, I must have ignored your statement under the assumption you were simply ignorant. Maybe you still are, but my descriptions are similar to what Mr. Gruber theorized as well, so you'll have to do a bit better than simply asserting that it is not so if you want me to buy into your assertions.
Keep in mind that actual Flash apps written by CS5 beta testers have been approved in Apple's app store in the past as well as many games written with Unity3D, so it's not like performance is a problem.
It's not a performance problem because those apps completely suspend when not in use. This new restriction applies to iPhone OS 4.0, where they introduce multitasking for third party apps which takes advantage of halting portions of apps... unless they are cross compiled in which case the performance tricks fail.
Since every app is checked against objective (and subjective) criterias, it would have been OK to just reject poorly written applications.
Except in that case, you have developers making apps, submitting them, then complaining when they aren't accepted because the guidelines for creating them aren't clear. Thus, they made them very clear.
Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio.
MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, so that would be a legal issue. What if MS required Visual Studio to Write apps for the Zune, because Visual Studio was the only dev kit that took advantage of the battery saving features of the Zune when compiling?
Also, the timing was devious - on Friday, just before the Monday's official release of Adobe's CS5, effectively giving them no time to react.
It could be a coincidence or it could be a "screw you" to Adobe. There is certainly plenty of fighting between the two companies, with both being dicks. Adobe lost all my sympathy when they dropped the Mac version of Framemaker completely despite that group making up more than half of their install base.
Finally, I know that many/.-ers are against Flash. Keep in mind however that this move goes well beyond Flash, affecting other tools and frameworks. If successful, this move will lead to more and more closed ecosystems (from other vendors as well).
Flash is fighting open standards, that's why we are opposed to it. It makes no sense to oversimplify the issues because then your comparisons fall apart.
Today's Apple makes Microsoft look like saints.
I don't know about you, but my objection to MS has been their illegal antitrust actions that break the free market and stifle innovation and progress. What Apple is doing is not undermining the free market in any way and may in fact be promoting innovation. Will Android adopt a more granular multitasking framework in response, to provide battery hardware performance? Will they keep a more open policy for development instead? Will their actions result in more sales of Android phones because fewer apps come to the iPhone? That's competition, not anti-competitive behavior. I think you fundamentally fail to understand why what MS does is a problem or why people object to it.
It seems to me that this is anti-competitive. They're using the iPhone's market dominance to increase the costs of producing applications on other platforms.
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
It depends upon if they generate code that is interpreted the same way as human written code (as written by people using Apple's developer tools) for input into the tools. I've seen plenty of cross compiled code that looks like gibberish and which going through the same tools, ends up with vastly inferior results. Heck, you could probably generate code that made a whole app into one big thread just to hamper multitasking, but if you were coding it by hand, you wouldn't. If you are compiling it through a cross compiler... who knows?
As for the rest of your post, I think you're inferring way too much and extending Apple's policy beyond sensible reason. It's fun to ridicule in that way, but not really productive or pertinent to a real discussion.
wait - wouldn't the flash stuff actually be running in C/Obj C, using the same code that I might write.
No, it would run using code generated by a machine that does not use the same cues as the build tools from Apple and likely will not be profiled the same way with regard to the multitasking categories Apple has added. Did you actually read the article about their multitasking setup?
It doesn't make a difference in multitasking, except none of the third party apps have support for the multitasking services (like bg audio).
So if they don't use the services, that means all their threads run or don't run when the app is in the background, right? That sounds like it will waste a lot of battery and processor when an app runs in the background without any halting of unnecessary threads.
When you run a Flash app on iPhone OS4 and switch away, it's suspended in exactly the same fashion that native apps are by default, so that's not the reason at all. AT ALL.
Except native apps are profiled by the build tools and/or developer so they don't suspend the same way as one another. Either you know a lot more about how it works than I do, or your assumption is premature.
Of course not, but it is our duty as humans to make it as fair as we can and certainly if you don't care about fairness why should we care what you think is fair with regard to your taxes? You can't bitch and moan about how you don't think said taxation is fair and expect anyone to listen if you ignore the unfair things said taxation is addressing.
"proper multitasking" and what Apple is doing don't belong in the same sentence.
I disagree. What Apple is doing is more complex than is normal, but it also yields better results for platforms where battery and processing power are important limitations.
If it *was* proper multi-tasking (and the cross-compile didn't do stupid things, of course), there wouldn't be a problem.
If the apps thread strangely and don't have clean enough code separations, then it will not be finely grained enough to pause parts of it usefully and those apps will not perform well. It's not entirely unreasonable for Apple to require decent performance with their provided APIs to keep from tarnishing the brand by having their entire device perform poorly as a result of these third party apps.
If it is so easy to compete with Photoshop, why isn't anyone doing it and doing it good?
Actually, I'd say Pixelmator is pretty good competition, and one should not ignore Corel's offerings. I don't know anyone with quite as pricey and high-end of an offering, but I bet Apple could buy Pixelmator inexpensively and put some real hurt on Adobe with it in a few years of highly paid development.
Why would Apple succeed where several other have failed?
Apple has the money and the development expertise, especially if Adobe were to step out of the competition by abandoning all those on the Mac platform. Of course Adobe would never do that since it would be pissing off half of their customer base and losing them a pile of money (and probably get the CEO fired).
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way and individual threads can't be halted to save battery and processing power the same way that native apps can.
Whether or not that is true is a bit above my head. The claim has been made that all of Apple's fancy tricks with threat pausing, fail completely with cross-compiled apps and as a result those apps perform very badly with regard to battery drain. This is somewhat supported by the fact that Apple has applied this only to the version of iPhone OS that includes multitasking and not to older versions including current development for 3.x.
Others have also faulted Gruber for misquoting them in his rant by claiming Unity3D will no longer be allowed, despite the fact that the person he was quoting said maybe it will or maybe it won't as it is actually a pre-compiler and it does create objective C source files. The rant should be taken with a grain of salt as it is from a fairly biased Adobe employee.
...do you understand how much money can be made stealing, or the more lucrative drug dealing?
Yes, do you? Read the chapter of Freakonomics entitled "Why Do Drug Dealers Live With their Parents". It has some good numbers to show making more than minimum wage working as a crack dealer is sort of like playing basketball for a living... that is to say, you can make a lot of money, but any individual almost certainly won't.
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But that was not my question, I understand how the rendering through proxy and OBML work. But Opera Mini has a much faster interface altogether, even the same keyboard widget that Safari uses is much more responsive in Opera Mini.
When Safari is running it is also running the entire Webkit engine and processing data for the pages. When Opera is running it is running a stripped down engine for processing the data display from Opera's servers. Less processing occuring on the device means more responsive UI elements, at least for devices with CPU bottlenecks, like smartphones.
The problem is that in the last 2 decades businesses have come up with a crazy new model where making it harder to make blades actually helps them sell razors. It sounds crazy, but it is the basis of why a vendor would want to lock people in instead of being open.
Once a vendor achieves dominance in a market, then artificial incompatibility becomes an asset. Before then, it is a detriment and there needs to be a justification in making the product better or you still lose money. Apple does not dominate the smartphone market.
What if you could put a restriction on the blades... an arbitrary one, and manufacturers would still make blades because your razor is so good and so popular?
An arbitrary restriction does not help you in this case. All it does is lead a few blade makers to move to some other market for investment. You can't implement an arbitrary inhibition without inhibiting someone.
Then you add another restriction... shouldn't consumers and manufacturers move to another razor? No - yours is still the best.
Except a few people will move as a result and you lose sales while gaining what?
And they have devoted effort to it, and they profit from it. So the blade manufacturers jump through hoops and they even tell the user it is for their own good. The users still buy it.
No they don't because that doesn't benefit them at all. They tell users it's dumb but they're coping... unless there really is a benefit.
You see the reason your application of this idea fails is twofold. First, Apple does not have dominance, so anything that makes things harder for developers does hurt Apple's bottom line. Second, Apple is pushing HTML5 as an open alternative to Flash, and HTML5 has less ability to lock in users than Flash does. Flash run poorly on many devices, especially Linux based ones and device makers and developers have no control over that. Only Adobe does. But Apple is not proposing a lock-in strategy or they'd be using something proprietary, like MS has done with Silverlight and their new phone OS. Apple is proposing the use of an open standard alternative that works not only on the iPhone, but can be made to work on any device and any platform. Now you may wonder why they are bothering, but you have to remember, Apple likes control (as in not having Adobe with a knife t their throat) and Apple makes more than phones. Pushing away from Flash and to HTML5 removes a problem for them with regard to OS X and Macs in that it improves stability, performance, and security there as well.
This is what IBM tried to do in the mainframe days, and they lost. The IBM PC clones killed it.
IBM did have market dominance and clones survived because IBM was restricted by antitrust law. Should Apple achieve dominance I'd like to think the same laws would apply, but the US hasn't been much for actually enforcing them of late.
Between Apple's developer license, the stigma of not making your app work on the iPhone, the lost sales from that, and the fact that Apple really is ahead of the curve (despite this rant, the iPhone really is a good product) - they are keeping the lock-in successful.
Apple is locking in developers by forcing them to use an open standard instead of a proprietary technology? Why can't developers develop HTML5 apps that run everywhere?
>>>freshman business student could tell you the Apps are blades and Apple's model is clearly to make money on the razor
First off you have that backwards. Typically the razor (or printer) is given away for free or near-free, and then the money is made on the backend from blades (ink).
Actually, razors and blades are the prototypical example used to teach loss leaders to economics and business students. The question for many business models is if they want to make money on razors or on blades, meaning whether their particular business model does better putting their margins on lower priced consumables or higher priced initial products. Both are common business strategies in different markets.
Second I don't think Apple is following that model. They appear to be trying to make money on Both the razor and the blades - both the hardware and the software.
Not really, no. When they entered the market for online music downloads, Apple undercut the prices of everyone else and ran the store at break even levels, making their money on iPods. This has been clearly stated by Steve Jobs to the shareholders and numerous business analysts have shown the same thing. Every now and again some blogger or incompetent news writer creates an article claiming it's all a lie and because Apple sells so many songs, they must be raking in the cash, but usually those people fail to take into account important things like operating costs or credit card transaction fees or they simply don't understand the difference between sales and profit. Anyone with any clue has known for a long time that Apple runs the iTunes store simply to sell iPods.
So then they enter the smartphone market. They offer a software developer package that costs all of $100 (basically nothing) and offer any freeware apps people put up for free. This costs Apple money for hosting and administration. Then they take 30% of the sales for pay apps, similar to what they take for song sales and for low priced apps, probably barely enough to cover bandwidth and credit card fees. It makes them a bit for more expensive apps, but all that has to cover the whole submission and evaluation process as well as cover the costs incurred for free apps. Just take a look at revenue numbers. From Q3 2008 to 2009, Apple's iPhone sales quadrupled (+300%). Their combined sales of music and applications went up +17%. If they're trying to significantly profit from app sales, they are failing miserably.
Apple's view is that if you control both, then you can profit off both.
Not really. Apple's philosophy for some time has been that if you can bring in consumables as cheaply, easily, and plentifully as possible, it will drive sales of expensive hardware devices.
It's similar to how the videogame console makers operate, earning profit on both the hardware and the software.
Historically both the XBox360 and PS3 have been subsidized and sold at a loss as a way to generate game licensing fees. Only the Wii (of the current generation) was initially sold at a profit. This late in the sales cycle costs have come down and it is debatable if either Sony or Microsoft is making money on each console sale, but it is clear that has not been the case in general.
My back-of-the-envelope calculations ended in similar figures but saying this is somehow readable in Apples revenue figures is news to me.
You make a valid point. They report out how much is from the iTunes store including apps and music and they announce periodically how many songs are sold and there have been plenty of analysts going over the numbers for many years. If you assume Apple has completely stopped selling music and somehow hidden this fact and that the administrative and hosting costs are negligible and that Jobs lied to shareholders and you look at the revenue numbers, you could make the numbers work out to Apple taking in a tenth of their profit from Apps, which is still a whole lot less than they make on iPhones or iPod touch hardware.
It depends on who you ask: fanboy or detractor.
The fact that you apply this false dichotomy of extremism says a lot about how much we should value your opinions.
However the confusing part is that they allow the browser to use CSS, Javascript and even some HTML 5 components, thus making web based applications...
If they could find a way to prevent this without utterly breaking the entire web or ending up looking like the Devil himself, I’m sure they would.
Umm, their original plan was to only support Web apps as the official API. They added native APIs because so many people wanted them and because Web apps did not perform as well as Apple liked. Saying they would ban Web apps, when that was the foundation of their business plan, reeks of ignorance.
How do they do it?
They run the HTML and Javascript interpreter in the cloud instead of using Webkit. Basically it offloads a lot of the processing from the iPhone to Opera servers. As a side note, it also means even for encrypted pages (like your online banking) the people at Opera have full access to what you're doing, so you need to decide if you trust them with your security.
Was it ever rejected? I can find references to Opera saying Apple might not let it in, but nothing definitive.
No, it was never rejected. Opera decided not to submit Opera Mobile, because they assumed it would be rejected since it does not comply with the requirements. A lot of people speculated that Opera Mini would not be accepted either, but it has never been rejected in the past.
Common belief is that it is really because it will allow third parties to develop apps in Flash and deploy them on the web (potentially even downloading them to the iPhone), thus bypassing the App Store and Apple's cut of the money.
What?!?
Commoners appear to be idiots. Apple not only supports Web apps developed in HTML5, but their support for them surpasses most browser vendors. Then Apple allows free application through their store, and Apple pays for all the bandwidth fees on them. Apple's revenue numbers show the App store makes what 1-2% of Apple's revenue compared to the 40% of their revenue from hardware sales of iPods and iPhones. So the common belief is that Apple is willing to make fewer sales in the part of their company that makes all the money by making those products worse, in order to make more money on the part that makes basically nothing and which the CEO has stated is run at near zero profit in order to promote other products. So your "common belief" requires Apple business people to be complete morons who are also lying to shareholders and risking investigation from the SEC.
Seriously, even a freshman business student could tell you the Apps are blades and Apple's model is clearly to make money on the razor. It makes no sense to make it harder for people to provide blades, because Apple runs their blade business just to promote their very, very profitable razor (hardware) business.
I don't get it, are you are you saying the Acer doesn't have support for multiple displays??
The Acer supports display mirroring, but according to their data sheet, not using the built in display and a second display as independent screens. This might be because of the way they route the video or they may just have driver issues getting it to work reliably (unplugging and sleep from different states to different states is a trial to QA).
The MBP does not have DVI anymore than the Acer has DVI. Displayport => DVI or HDMI => DVI. Same thing.
Well there are some differences but if you don't know about them, they probably do not matter to you so lets skip that.
What video card driver issues are you speaking of?
People doing emulation VirtualBox or VMWare rant about how impossible it is to get these working reliably with the graphics on these machines due to driver issues, especially with Windows 7.
That's not to say I accept your other reasons...
Why do I bother responding to ACs?
I own MBP produced in 2008. The battery has been replaced twice
The plural of anecdote?
Quality and reliability? It's a fucking urban legend.
Hmm, "dremon" performed a study with a sample size of one. How does that compare to Consumer Reports and to my former IT department's studies? Ahh yes, not statistically significant. Sorry to be harsh and all but your crappy luck isn't any reason for someone to ignore actual data.
Read Mac forums; I am far from being alone with these issues.
Or read Dell forums, or Acer forums or forums from every company. Everyone has hardware failures and the people who get burned always gripe about it. That's just the reality of things. People actually interested in making good decisions, however, actually look up studies of short term and long term reliability when making a purchasing decision.
It also weighs more and has lower battery life. I think being substantially more powerful in every dimension more than makes up for that, though.
So why are you telling me? Seriously, are you just insecure about your purchasing decisions and feel the need to defend them even when no one asked? By all means buy the machine that suits your needs best. You don't have to come here, describe the tradeoffs as you see them, tell us which tradeoffs you prefer, then ask permission before you make a purchase. If you like what Dell offers better, from now on feel free to buy it without defending your choice on Slashdot.
But still, WHY would I pay $1,450 more for the MacBook Pro?
Screen resolution, quality and reliability of parts, decent touch pad, decent speakers, mag connect power, Firewire for video work, no driver issues with the video card and OS, faster hard drive, multiple non-mirrored video displays, 2 pounds lighter to carry around, DVI, backlit keyboard, more than twice the battery length, automatic graphic card switching, slightly better bluetooth... that's most of it. Well and it can run and comes with OS X, which means more to most of us than the rest of it.
You can make the same comparison though with a higher end Dell laptop. It has a lot more features than the Acer and it costs more. If you don't need a high end laptop, don't buy one. If you live you life in front of laptop, well you might want to spring for one that is higher quality, more reliable, and more featureful. A grand is what, a week or two of consulting for a professional. Hell adding the new Adobe CS Suite will bump up the price $2600 but if it's the best tool for the job, it pays for itself in short order.
But this president was going to usher in a new age of transparency, and produce "change we can believe in". Obama has the power to order the US negotiators to push for more transparency, but he has done nothing (or worse than nothing) to open up the process.
Absolutely. Assuming he is aware of what is going on with this, he seems to be breaking a campaign promise. My real question is, where are the opposition politicians on this? I mean, when the president breaks campaign promises, shouldn't Republican, at least a few of them, be calling him out on it publicly? I've heard not a peep, even from folks like Ron Paul. Are they all so badly in the pockets of lobbyists they won't even bring this up to attack their opponents?
This new restriction applies to iPhone OS 4.0, where they introduce multitasking for third party apps which takes advantage of halting portions of apps... unless they are cross compiled in which case the performance tricks fail.
You have been repeatedly told (in other stories about these new restriction, by me as well as others) that it's not how iPhone OS 4 multitasking works at all. There's no "suspending of portions of apps" there. They are just suspended entirely - if they want to do any background work, they have to offload that to OS-provided daemons (which are separate processes).
From my reading of the feature, it seems to offload specific types of threads based upon the profile for the app. For example, it can hand off a general processing thread to continue a calculation (for example) while halting all the UI and other components until the user switches back to that app. In short, I disagree with your characterization of how multitasking works. If you asserted otherwise before, I must have ignored your statement under the assumption you were simply ignorant. Maybe you still are, but my descriptions are similar to what Mr. Gruber theorized as well, so you'll have to do a bit better than simply asserting that it is not so if you want me to buy into your assertions.
Keep in mind that actual Flash apps written by CS5 beta testers have been approved in Apple's app store in the past as well as many games written with Unity3D, so it's not like performance is a problem.
It's not a performance problem because those apps completely suspend when not in use. This new restriction applies to iPhone OS 4.0, where they introduce multitasking for third party apps which takes advantage of halting portions of apps... unless they are cross compiled in which case the performance tricks fail.
Since every app is checked against objective (and subjective) criterias, it would have been OK to just reject poorly written applications.
Except in that case, you have developers making apps, submitting them, then complaining when they aren't accepted because the guidelines for creating them aren't clear. Thus, they made them very clear.
Imagine Microsoft demanding all windows apps to be written only in C# and compiled only with Visual Studio.
MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's, so that would be a legal issue. What if MS required Visual Studio to Write apps for the Zune, because Visual Studio was the only dev kit that took advantage of the battery saving features of the Zune when compiling?
Also, the timing was devious - on Friday, just before the Monday's official release of Adobe's CS5, effectively giving them no time to react.
It could be a coincidence or it could be a "screw you" to Adobe. There is certainly plenty of fighting between the two companies, with both being dicks. Adobe lost all my sympathy when they dropped the Mac version of Framemaker completely despite that group making up more than half of their install base.
Finally, I know that many /.-ers are against Flash. Keep in mind however that this move goes well beyond Flash, affecting other tools and frameworks. If successful, this move will lead to more and more closed ecosystems (from other vendors as well).
Flash is fighting open standards, that's why we are opposed to it. It makes no sense to oversimplify the issues because then your comparisons fall apart.
Today's Apple makes Microsoft look like saints.
I don't know about you, but my objection to MS has been their illegal antitrust actions that break the free market and stifle innovation and progress. What Apple is doing is not undermining the free market in any way and may in fact be promoting innovation. Will Android adopt a more granular multitasking framework in response, to provide battery hardware performance? Will they keep a more open policy for development instead? Will their actions result in more sales of Android phones because fewer apps come to the iPhone? That's competition, not anti-competitive behavior. I think you fundamentally fail to understand why what MS does is a problem or why people object to it.
It seems to me that this is anti-competitive. They're using the iPhone's market dominance to increase the costs of producing applications on other platforms.
Market dominance?
But section 3.3.1 also bans upstream tools that generate code consumed by Apple's toolchain. You can't write code in another language to write C/C++/ObjC code for you. Which means you're telling developers that they can't write tools that make their lives easier. What's the justification for that?
It depends upon if they generate code that is interpreted the same way as human written code (as written by people using Apple's developer tools) for input into the tools. I've seen plenty of cross compiled code that looks like gibberish and which going through the same tools, ends up with vastly inferior results. Heck, you could probably generate code that made a whole app into one big thread just to hamper multitasking, but if you were coding it by hand, you wouldn't. If you are compiling it through a cross compiler... who knows?
As for the rest of your post, I think you're inferring way too much and extending Apple's policy beyond sensible reason. It's fun to ridicule in that way, but not really productive or pertinent to a real discussion.
wait - wouldn't the flash stuff actually be running in C/Obj C, using the same code that I might write.
No, it would run using code generated by a machine that does not use the same cues as the build tools from Apple and likely will not be profiled the same way with regard to the multitasking categories Apple has added. Did you actually read the article about their multitasking setup?
It doesn't make a difference in multitasking, except none of the third party apps have support for the multitasking services (like bg audio).
So if they don't use the services, that means all their threads run or don't run when the app is in the background, right? That sounds like it will waste a lot of battery and processor when an app runs in the background without any halting of unnecessary threads.
When you run a Flash app on iPhone OS4 and switch away, it's suspended in exactly the same fashion that native apps are by default, so that's not the reason at all. AT ALL.
Except native apps are profiled by the build tools and/or developer so they don't suspend the same way as one another. Either you know a lot more about how it works than I do, or your assumption is premature.
...so you think the world is fair?
Of course not, but it is our duty as humans to make it as fair as we can and certainly if you don't care about fairness why should we care what you think is fair with regard to your taxes? You can't bitch and moan about how you don't think said taxation is fair and expect anyone to listen if you ignore the unfair things said taxation is addressing.
"proper multitasking" and what Apple is doing don't belong in the same sentence.
I disagree. What Apple is doing is more complex than is normal, but it also yields better results for platforms where battery and processing power are important limitations.
If it *was* proper multi-tasking (and the cross-compile didn't do stupid things, of course), there wouldn't be a problem.
If the apps thread strangely and don't have clean enough code separations, then it will not be finely grained enough to pause parts of it usefully and those apps will not perform well. It's not entirely unreasonable for Apple to require decent performance with their provided APIs to keep from tarnishing the brand by having their entire device perform poorly as a result of these third party apps.
If it is so easy to compete with Photoshop, why isn't anyone doing it and doing it good?
Actually, I'd say Pixelmator is pretty good competition, and one should not ignore Corel's offerings. I don't know anyone with quite as pricey and high-end of an offering, but I bet Apple could buy Pixelmator inexpensively and put some real hurt on Adobe with it in a few years of highly paid development.
Why would Apple succeed where several other have failed?
Apple has the money and the development expertise, especially if Adobe were to step out of the competition by abandoning all those on the Mac platform. Of course Adobe would never do that since it would be pissing off half of their customer base and losing them a pile of money (and probably get the CEO fired).
Actually, I read about this the other day. Rumor has it, the language requirements actually do have a purpose, that is making sure the apps work with the new profiled multitasking setups. Supposedly cross compiled apps don't behave in the same way and individual threads can't be halted to save battery and processing power the same way that native apps can.
Whether or not that is true is a bit above my head. The claim has been made that all of Apple's fancy tricks with threat pausing, fail completely with cross-compiled apps and as a result those apps perform very badly with regard to battery drain. This is somewhat supported by the fact that Apple has applied this only to the version of iPhone OS that includes multitasking and not to older versions including current development for 3.x.
Others have also faulted Gruber for misquoting them in his rant by claiming Unity3D will no longer be allowed, despite the fact that the person he was quoting said maybe it will or maybe it won't as it is actually a pre-compiler and it does create objective C source files. The rant should be taken with a grain of salt as it is from a fairly biased Adobe employee.
...do you understand how much money can be made stealing, or the more lucrative drug dealing?
Yes, do you? Read the chapter of Freakonomics entitled "Why Do Drug Dealers Live With their Parents". It has some good numbers to show making more than minimum wage working as a crack dealer is sort of like playing basketball for a living... that is to say, you can make a lot of money, but any individual almost certainly won't.