And they only work fine if you have no qualm with seriously degrading performance over time. Windows VSS provided snapshots, called "shadow copies" or whatever, more closely resemble ZFS snapshots than say, dumb SAN or LVM snapshots where the snapshots reside in a dedicated "snapshot area". NTFS, ZFS, have filesystem level snapshots and so the FS is able to put old and stale data relatively close together, and defrags can intelligently move stale data out of the way, making a contiguous area of disk a contiguous area of current data.
If you don't believe me, run Windows with hundreds of shadow copies on a disk, say, running PostgreSQL. Write a quick script to take a snapshot every minute and keep running PostgreSQL. Defrag after one hour, and then re-run the benchmark. Defrag, run benchmark.
Then run your favorite Linux distro with 100+ configured LVM snapshots, again, once a minute during a PostgreSQL benchmark of your choice. Defrag or do whatever you think will aid the benchmark except destroying the snapshots, and re-run the benchmark.
You will then sit patiently and wait for BTRFS or something else to save the day.
I submitted a security issue in how one of their management products generates a private key for signing internally distributed programs and other things. I gave them all the details, it took a while, but they patched it and included the fix in the release of the 2010 System Center Essentials (a mishmash of their pricier more specific products).
Full disclosure is of course, the only way to go when you don't get a response. If they don't treat security as a serious matter, then don't waste your breath. But complicated bugs can be difficult to fix, and fixing those bugs requires not insignificant regression testing.
Sounds like the "development environments other than Apple" excludes any cross-platform, non-Apple specific advertising platform. The first clause seems to say that any and all third party communications might require Apple's written consent.
Again, IANAL, so I'm really interested to see how this plays out in court. But I'd have a lot less problem with Apple doing this if this language was in the developer agreement on day 1. What about all the app developers who are using AdMob right now? What is their legal standing?
If we allow arbitrary definitions of what is or is not a market, we can call anything and nothing a monopoly.
So there's inherent risk there. Shelf space in Wal-Mart is monopolized by Wal-Mart is an example of over-specifying the market. However, computing software is monopolized by Microsoft is an example of under-specifying the market. Obviously Microsoft has monopoly status for "general purpose personal computer operating systems", but if we generalize it to simply "computing software" then they are an insignificant minority. Calculator software is probably the majority, or some chip with firmware that runs refrigerators or washing machines, for all I know.
Occasionally a whole new category of market is created by a company, there was, at some point, the first PC operating system. What we're seeing is the birth of a new market, and one company trying to attain a stranglehold on that market. In terms of market share by total value, Apple has *the* mobile application market. For both developers and users, there is no question whatsoever. But even if we ignore all of that:
Is it legal for Apple to retroactively prohibit an agreement developers had between themselves and an advertising service? I don't know the answer, does contract law prohibit that? I know it's illegal for Congress to retroactively enact law (ex post facto).
I think the issue is, Apple saw a market, decided they should be the only one allowed to get a cut, and modified their developer agreement to forbid any advertiser to operate through iOS apps.
No, all communications with third party advertisers (read: other than Apple and the developer themselves) are prohibited. Apple has decided they should be the only large company allowed to make a cut off anything on the iOS platform, and so they had to cut out all advertisers. But if they cut out all advertisers, they also kick advertising supported free app developers to the curb. So naturally, they create their own advertising service.
Apple is not running these ads and you're right, they are under no obligation to do so. This is app developers running ads. What Apple has done is make existing contracts between developers and advertising providers prohibited. Whether that's legal or not remains to be seen.
Are they? My non-legal reading is that any communication involving a third-party advertising provider not expressly permitted by Apple is prohibited. So opening up a simple URL, ok, opening up a URL with query parameters that show that it came from an iPhone running MyReallySweetApp, not.
I think it's yet to be settled if it's legal for Apple to essentially nullify all the agreements Google and other advertising companies had by locking them out retroactively. I imagine that'll be settled in court, but I think the DOJ has a pretty plain case.
I see nothing wrong with Apple providing their own service, the fact that it's from the same company that makes the device and all the other APIs and writes your check already is a strong sell. But creating their own service and then making certain there's zero competition in a hundred-million user marketplace, that smells of anti-trust to me.
This isn't Google throwing a hissy fit over Apple being a new competitor, this is Google complaining that Apple decided to retroactively change the developer agreement and prohibit developers from using third party analytics and advertising, making iAd the only advertising service a developer can use in iOS apps.
This goes much further than say, any Microsoft example ever has been. It'd be like if Microsoft not only included IE by default (just as Apple adds new APIs or apps with each release) but made it so that the hypothetical/fictional "Win32 developer agreement" did not allow you to use any HTML rendering engine other than mshtml.dll (Internet Explorer's HTML layout engine.) Or if they disallowed some other trivial thing that would be necessary for creating a third party browser, like disallowing developers from writing programs that would become the default program for web browsing, or email, or whatever. Or disallowing some weird strange little thing that would be all but necessary to sell a program that does word processing, then of course allowing an exception for their own Microsoft Word.
What they've done is clearly, plainly anticompetitive. I think Google should sue, they have existing contracts with a lot of developers for the iPhone, I imagine that Apple's change in developer agreement here breaks some contract law, but IANAL.
How are they supposed to know how much to charge or how much to pay out if they aren't legally permitted to know how many users are being exposed to ads, how long the exposure is, what click-through/tap-through rates are, etc?
What Apple has done is not explicitly ban third party advertisers, but instead achieve that goal through crafty wording in their developer agreement.
If autism is a spectrum, then it indicates that there are a number of factors that determine "how autistic" someone is, and we don't know how many of those factors correlate to the test above. What if the test above only correlates to one of the unknown factors of autism? It could do more harm than good to label some kids as autistic, even if they had only one of those genes or environmental causes, or another kid as not autistic because he has all of the factors that would put him firmly in the non-verbal camp, but the one that is tested for?
You have to be really, really careful with correlations like this.
This is very wrong. You can run XP as a normal user just fine and browse the internet, run regular programs that behave well, etc. In fact, due to the many programs being fixed to run without annoying prompts in Vista/7, XP is now easier than ever to run as a regular user.
I can't imagine the fallout that would occur if an ebola victim went to a major international airport. It'd be horrific, and even if, as in previous cases, the ebola virus "burned out" fast, it could be an international crisis.
NOOOOO! Implicit conversions are the bane of all evil! (They're essentially a premature optimization.) Also, your lack of parenthesis denote a language that isn't C/C++, so while(1) may not even work.
Firefox 4 will work on XP, but without either of those APIs. But if you take away the hardware acceleration of IE9, it's just IE8 with better html5 support. They've publicly said they just want to throw away most of the IE rendering and JS execution codebase and go for something new in IE9.
Also, XP is ten years old. What version of Firefox will installs on Debian Potato/Woody?
The iTunes updater installing a completely unrelated program is a little different than Windows Update updating a Windows program from one version to another.:P
I noticed your name wasn't Bad Analogy Guy, so I felt it needed to be pointed out.
For the majority of your post, my response is that copyrighted code does not consist of a particular algorithm or a mathematical formula, but a representation of one or more relative to a larger body of work. For example, if I were to pick out some individual pieces of a thesis, say, a particular formula, no one owns the rights to that formula. Likewise, no one owns the rights to a linked list in C#, or the IL that it compiles to, or the native code the JIT generates from the IL. And the law makes it difficult to discern where you go from "uncopyrightable snippet" to "copyrightable work". I do not think software or algorithms should be patentable, which covers the former case, but I do think copyright should apply to software.
That said, large pieces of software take a lot of time, effort and organization to pull off. If you look at major Linux distros, you see that the emphasis is on what the developers want to do. They think something is cool, so they do it. That's great, and I'm glad copyright exists so that the GPL allows them to enforce their own definition of freedom. More on that later, though.
But when you look at software like Windows, Mac OS X, or the database products you mention, you find that while bits and pieces may be open, the vast majority of the code was written by engineers paid to do a job. That R&D I spoke about? It wasn't what you thought it was, it wasn't trying to come up with truly novel algorithms, it was about designing, testing, and implementing software. It's about spending money on people whose job it is to try something and see if it's valuable. There's Bell Labs or Xerox PARC , which does pure research which is largely open source or academically available, and there's the internal R&D of most major corporations where they simply spend time designing things. That costs time and money.
A company might invest millions or billions of dollars in trying to create the software they are going to sell. And to what avail if there's no copyright? They'll sell a few dozen copies, sell some support, and then someone will undercut them on support prices and copy their software, with trademarks easily removed, and the investment goes down the drain. Should it be right for you to go to a book store, grab five books, scan them and put them online? The author likely spent months authoring and revising that book. All you did was remove the publisher's trademarks and put it online.
Frankly, I can't agree with you that copyright is something that should go away, but all of this pales in comparison to the misinformation that follows...
With no copyright, the GPL is unenforceable. The GPL is a license that gives recipients of a copyright work rights.
I'm always amused when someone points this out. Everyone needs to understand this point: Without copyright, we wouldn't need the GPL. The GPL was created specifically as a way of using copyright to fight copyright. I'm a very strong advocate of doing away with software patents completely and severely restricting copyright laws when it comes to software, and I will tell you that I dream of the day when we can once and for all do away with the GPL.
What? No. Without copyright, the GPL becomes unenforceable and the Linux kernel would effectively be BSD licensed, and people could use it in a way that RMS et al. do not like and would not condone. They consider GPL, with the share-alike clause and the other requirements to enforce a level of freedom that is not possible in a world without copyright. Without copyright, it would be perfectly legal for me to take the Linux kernel and fork it, remove all the names and attribution, and use it in a closed source product and resell it as my own.
The reason software and other forms of IP are copyrighted but fashion is not is because of availability or, as you said, scarcity.
When you buy a book, or music, or a piece of software, you are buying information. It often happens that you're buying information in a particular encoding on a particular medium, but you're buying a piece of information.
Without copyright law, what incentive would Microsoft have to continue to spend billions annually on software development and R&D? The moment they ship a single copy of Windows to someone they have not directly contracted with, the cat is out of the bag, they can make their own copies. They take their Windows disc and make copies for all their friends, and some company in a Southeast Asian country starts mass-producing it, depriving Microsoft of billions in revenue. Oh, and don't think open source saves you. With no copyright, the GPL is unenforceable. The GPL is a license that gives recipients of a copyright work rights. Without copyright, you can treat everything in the world as BSD licensed.
On the other hand, fashion is a literal thing, where knock-offs are typically identifiable as such and people often buy brands for their trademark logo. Like she says in TFS, customers who go to the fast fashion places or the seedy underbellies of major cities to buy handbags are not and never were Gucci's customers. Gucci may even end up selling the same design, sans trademark, to those people. They know they're going to copy it no matter what, and they know their customers are buying Gucci for the brand, the status, and of course, being on the bleeding edge of fashion.
Copyright is absolutely necessary for ideas, but I agree with the courts in that fashion is not something that can be copied with perfect fidelity. The trademarks alone prohibit perfect copies. On the other hand, if you buy a book from a penniless author, it is trivial, albeit time consuming, to make a perfect copy of the book's content. And it becomes even easier with all digital works.
The i* Dev Agreement says that any analytics service other than Apple's is prohibited and collection of user's data must occur through the iAd framework, even if you're displaying no ads.
But AdMob and other services don't work if there's no usage information. Google would be flying blind in trying to assign values to apps and determine "touch-through" rates.
What do you mean bar? The iPhone developer agreement will prohibit developers from using any advertising or analytics service other than Apple, and it's incredibly unlikely Apple will make their service available to Android, Windows Mobile/Phone, Symbian, BlackBerry, etc.
The i* platform is all about creating illusory markets. They aren't really markets in that Apple will always win on the i* platform, and if some particular service becomes popular, for example, a marketplace for in-app purchases, they will create their own or extend their own marketplace and disallow developers from using any alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
And they only work fine if you have no qualm with seriously degrading performance over time. Windows VSS provided snapshots, called "shadow copies" or whatever, more closely resemble ZFS snapshots than say, dumb SAN or LVM snapshots where the snapshots reside in a dedicated "snapshot area". NTFS, ZFS, have filesystem level snapshots and so the FS is able to put old and stale data relatively close together, and defrags can intelligently move stale data out of the way, making a contiguous area of disk a contiguous area of current data.
If you don't believe me, run Windows with hundreds of shadow copies on a disk, say, running PostgreSQL. Write a quick script to take a snapshot every minute and keep running PostgreSQL. Defrag after one hour, and then re-run the benchmark. Defrag, run benchmark.
Then run your favorite Linux distro with 100+ configured LVM snapshots, again, once a minute during a PostgreSQL benchmark of your choice. Defrag or do whatever you think will aid the benchmark except destroying the snapshots, and re-run the benchmark.
You will then sit patiently and wait for BTRFS or something else to save the day.
I submitted a security issue in how one of their management products generates a private key for signing internally distributed programs and other things. I gave them all the details, it took a while, but they patched it and included the fix in the release of the 2010 System Center Essentials (a mishmash of their pricier more specific products).
Full disclosure is of course, the only way to go when you don't get a response. If they don't treat security as a serious matter, then don't waste your breath. But complicated bugs can be difficult to fix, and fixing those bugs requires not insignificant regression testing.
Sounds like the "development environments other than Apple" excludes any cross-platform, non-Apple specific advertising platform. The first clause seems to say that any and all third party communications might require Apple's written consent.
Again, IANAL, so I'm really interested to see how this plays out in court. But I'd have a lot less problem with Apple doing this if this language was in the developer agreement on day 1. What about all the app developers who are using AdMob right now? What is their legal standing?
If we allow arbitrary definitions of what is or is not a market, we can call anything and nothing a monopoly.
So there's inherent risk there. Shelf space in Wal-Mart is monopolized by Wal-Mart is an example of over-specifying the market. However, computing software is monopolized by Microsoft is an example of under-specifying the market. Obviously Microsoft has monopoly status for "general purpose personal computer operating systems", but if we generalize it to simply "computing software" then they are an insignificant minority. Calculator software is probably the majority, or some chip with firmware that runs refrigerators or washing machines, for all I know.
Occasionally a whole new category of market is created by a company, there was, at some point, the first PC operating system. What we're seeing is the birth of a new market, and one company trying to attain a stranglehold on that market. In terms of market share by total value, Apple has *the* mobile application market. For both developers and users, there is no question whatsoever. But even if we ignore all of that:
Is it legal for Apple to retroactively prohibit an agreement developers had between themselves and an advertising service? I don't know the answer, does contract law prohibit that? I know it's illegal for Congress to retroactively enact law (ex post facto).
I think the issue is, Apple saw a market, decided they should be the only one allowed to get a cut, and modified their developer agreement to forbid any advertiser to operate through iOS apps.
No, all communications with third party advertisers (read: other than Apple and the developer themselves) are prohibited. Apple has decided they should be the only large company allowed to make a cut off anything on the iOS platform, and so they had to cut out all advertisers. But if they cut out all advertisers, they also kick advertising supported free app developers to the curb. So naturally, they create their own advertising service.
Apple is not running these ads and you're right, they are under no obligation to do so. This is app developers running ads. What Apple has done is make existing contracts between developers and advertising providers prohibited. Whether that's legal or not remains to be seen.
Are they? My non-legal reading is that any communication involving a third-party advertising provider not expressly permitted by Apple is prohibited. So opening up a simple URL, ok, opening up a URL with query parameters that show that it came from an iPhone running MyReallySweetApp, not.
I think it's yet to be settled if it's legal for Apple to essentially nullify all the agreements Google and other advertising companies had by locking them out retroactively. I imagine that'll be settled in court, but I think the DOJ has a pretty plain case.
I see nothing wrong with Apple providing their own service, the fact that it's from the same company that makes the device and all the other APIs and writes your check already is a strong sell. But creating their own service and then making certain there's zero competition in a hundred-million user marketplace, that smells of anti-trust to me.
This isn't Google throwing a hissy fit over Apple being a new competitor, this is Google complaining that Apple decided to retroactively change the developer agreement and prohibit developers from using third party analytics and advertising, making iAd the only advertising service a developer can use in iOS apps.
This goes much further than say, any Microsoft example ever has been. It'd be like if Microsoft not only included IE by default (just as Apple adds new APIs or apps with each release) but made it so that the hypothetical/fictional "Win32 developer agreement" did not allow you to use any HTML rendering engine other than mshtml.dll (Internet Explorer's HTML layout engine.) Or if they disallowed some other trivial thing that would be necessary for creating a third party browser, like disallowing developers from writing programs that would become the default program for web browsing, or email, or whatever. Or disallowing some weird strange little thing that would be all but necessary to sell a program that does word processing, then of course allowing an exception for their own Microsoft Word.
What they've done is clearly, plainly anticompetitive. I think Google should sue, they have existing contracts with a lot of developers for the iPhone, I imagine that Apple's change in developer agreement here breaks some contract law, but IANAL.
How are they supposed to know how much to charge or how much to pay out if they aren't legally permitted to know how many users are being exposed to ads, how long the exposure is, what click-through/tap-through rates are, etc?
What Apple has done is not explicitly ban third party advertisers, but instead achieve that goal through crafty wording in their developer agreement.
It only does them good if it's an accurate diagnosis.
If autism is a spectrum, then it indicates that there are a number of factors that determine "how autistic" someone is, and we don't know how many of those factors correlate to the test above. What if the test above only correlates to one of the unknown factors of autism? It could do more harm than good to label some kids as autistic, even if they had only one of those genes or environmental causes, or another kid as not autistic because he has all of the factors that would put him firmly in the non-verbal camp, but the one that is tested for?
You have to be really, really careful with correlations like this.
Asperger's? No problem.
Non-verbal autism? They aren't able to interact with the rest of the world.
Touche.
This is very wrong. You can run XP as a normal user just fine and browse the internet, run regular programs that behave well, etc. In fact, due to the many programs being fixed to run without annoying prompts in Vista/7, XP is now easier than ever to run as a regular user.
I can't imagine the fallout that would occur if an ebola victim went to a major international airport. It'd be horrific, and even if, as in previous cases, the ebola virus "burned out" fast, it could be an international crisis.
NOOOOO! Implicit conversions are the bane of all evil! (They're essentially a premature optimization.) Also, your lack of parenthesis denote a language that isn't C/C++, so while(1) may not even work.
while (true) {
print "FUCK";
}
Firefox 4 will work on XP, but without either of those APIs. But if you take away the hardware acceleration of IE9, it's just IE8 with better html5 support. They've publicly said they just want to throw away most of the IE rendering and JS execution codebase and go for something new in IE9.
Also, XP is ten years old. What version of Firefox will installs on Debian Potato/Woody?
The iTunes updater installing a completely unrelated program is a little different than Windows Update updating a Windows program from one version to another. :P
I noticed your name wasn't Bad Analogy Guy, so I felt it needed to be pointed out.
For the majority of your post, my response is that copyrighted code does not consist of a particular algorithm or a mathematical formula, but a representation of one or more relative to a larger body of work. For example, if I were to pick out some individual pieces of a thesis, say, a particular formula, no one owns the rights to that formula. Likewise, no one owns the rights to a linked list in C#, or the IL that it compiles to, or the native code the JIT generates from the IL. And the law makes it difficult to discern where you go from "uncopyrightable snippet" to "copyrightable work". I do not think software or algorithms should be patentable, which covers the former case, but I do think copyright should apply to software.
That said, large pieces of software take a lot of time, effort and organization to pull off. If you look at major Linux distros, you see that the emphasis is on what the developers want to do. They think something is cool, so they do it. That's great, and I'm glad copyright exists so that the GPL allows them to enforce their own definition of freedom. More on that later, though.
But when you look at software like Windows, Mac OS X, or the database products you mention, you find that while bits and pieces may be open, the vast majority of the code was written by engineers paid to do a job. That R&D I spoke about? It wasn't what you thought it was, it wasn't trying to come up with truly novel algorithms, it was about designing, testing, and implementing software. It's about spending money on people whose job it is to try something and see if it's valuable. There's Bell Labs or Xerox PARC , which does pure research which is largely open source or academically available, and there's the internal R&D of most major corporations where they simply spend time designing things. That costs time and money.
A company might invest millions or billions of dollars in trying to create the software they are going to sell. And to what avail if there's no copyright? They'll sell a few dozen copies, sell some support, and then someone will undercut them on support prices and copy their software, with trademarks easily removed, and the investment goes down the drain. Should it be right for you to go to a book store, grab five books, scan them and put them online? The author likely spent months authoring and revising that book. All you did was remove the publisher's trademarks and put it online.
Frankly, I can't agree with you that copyright is something that should go away, but all of this pales in comparison to the misinformation that follows...
What? No. Without copyright, the GPL becomes unenforceable and the Linux kernel would effectively be BSD licensed, and people could use it in a way that RMS et al. do not like and would not condone. They consider GPL, with the share-alike clause and the other requirements to enforce a level of freedom that is not possible in a world without copyright. Without copyright, it would be perfectly legal for me to take the Linux kernel and fork it, remove all the names and attribution, and use it in a closed source product and resell it as my own.
The reason software and other forms of IP are copyrighted but fashion is not is because of availability or, as you said, scarcity.
When you buy a book, or music, or a piece of software, you are buying information. It often happens that you're buying information in a particular encoding on a particular medium, but you're buying a piece of information.
Without copyright law, what incentive would Microsoft have to continue to spend billions annually on software development and R&D? The moment they ship a single copy of Windows to someone they have not directly contracted with, the cat is out of the bag, they can make their own copies. They take their Windows disc and make copies for all their friends, and some company in a Southeast Asian country starts mass-producing it, depriving Microsoft of billions in revenue. Oh, and don't think open source saves you. With no copyright, the GPL is unenforceable. The GPL is a license that gives recipients of a copyright work rights. Without copyright, you can treat everything in the world as BSD licensed.
On the other hand, fashion is a literal thing, where knock-offs are typically identifiable as such and people often buy brands for their trademark logo. Like she says in TFS, customers who go to the fast fashion places or the seedy underbellies of major cities to buy handbags are not and never were Gucci's customers. Gucci may even end up selling the same design, sans trademark, to those people. They know they're going to copy it no matter what, and they know their customers are buying Gucci for the brand, the status, and of course, being on the bleeding edge of fashion.
Copyright is absolutely necessary for ideas, but I agree with the courts in that fashion is not something that can be copied with perfect fidelity. The trademarks alone prohibit perfect copies. On the other hand, if you buy a book from a penniless author, it is trivial, albeit time consuming, to make a perfect copy of the book's content. And it becomes even easier with all digital works.
The i* Dev Agreement says that any analytics service other than Apple's is prohibited and collection of user's data must occur through the iAd framework, even if you're displaying no ads.
But AdMob and other services don't work if there's no usage information. Google would be flying blind in trying to assign values to apps and determine "touch-through" rates.
People didn't want high end work though, they wanted Good Enough(tm) and didn't want to spend a fortune to do it.
What do you mean bar? The iPhone developer agreement will prohibit developers from using any advertising or analytics service other than Apple, and it's incredibly unlikely Apple will make their service available to Android, Windows Mobile/Phone, Symbian, BlackBerry, etc.
The i* platform is all about creating illusory markets. They aren't really markets in that Apple will always win on the i* platform, and if some particular service becomes popular, for example, a marketplace for in-app purchases, they will create their own or extend their own marketplace and disallow developers from using any alternatives.
I wish I were getting paid, but I'm sure I'm way too vocal to be employable by Microsoft!
By Winforms I mean the Windows Forms API for Win32 & the MFC wrapper typically used for it. Sorry if I used the wrong term. My bad!