>If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up.
I think the only way that will happen is if hardware-DRM becomes mandatory in such a way that the playing of 'unprotected' content is disallowed. 'How can we be sure that the video you are playing is really a home movie and not a pirate recording'. In the long term this might even be technically feasible (lets say that you introduce some kind of HDMI like control into A/V recording devices such that even your home videos are uniquely encrypted).
If that doesn't happen, then there will always be an important part of culture that will reject the 'closed' world, just as many acts today deal with companies selling DRM-free music. What will become more obvious is when people cross over from one world to the other - it is going to be a far bigger deal than switching from an indie to a major.
>you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them I'm not sure it's wholly a waste of time, if it's also your hobby - and of course, once you get a Mac, you spend half your time evangelising them on the Internet, making up for the time saved in not tweaking hardware / Windows.
>Of course, this is where I take exception. If the game can pay for the database, the database will be created, regardless of whether or not they can charge someone *again* for the use
>of the database. If you can make $40,000,000 on a game, with a $10M investment, who wouldn't fund the DB - regardless of the DB's legal/copyright/protection status afterwards?
All investment is risk - if you could show someone they stood to make $30 million, they'd certainly go ahead, but then you come round to the question of 'why spend all this money mapping New York' - what are you actually trying to achieve by doing so.
Let's consider a very specific game - The Getaway. It's USP was that it was a GTA style game based on a completely realistic map of London. The technical demos looked great, and the initial hype was high, but protracted development raised people's suspicions. When it came out, it didn't really do so well, but reviewers were still impressed with the way it had captured London. It still sold fairly well too. The USP was good enough to over-ride the gameplay.
>And the original thesis was pitting GTA against Flight Simulator - two games unlikely to be in a consumer's "Either/or" zone, so the competetive advantage is moot
If the data is open, then that distinction is also moot. There is nothing to stop someone, like the Flight Sim firm, making a better GTA with that data. That might actually be a good thing for games players, but it makes it LESS likely for investors to bother in the first place.
To return to the Getaway - they managed to get a sequel out, obviously re-using the same map, and from doing a quick search on Google there is a 3rd 'chapter' due on the PS3, which is again set in London (so presumably re-using same data).
Change the law, and you change the outcome. To create a USP, companies would seek to develop imaginary locations they could protect under copyright as IP. If they can't do that, then the focus would be on something else (maybe on gameplay, as it was in the 80s when almost every arcade game was a sideways scrolling shooter).
I wasn't aware that the try/catch/finally was newer syntax, having only player around with Obj-C and Cocoa in the last 18 months, but I think syntax is exactly the area that I'm thinking could be improved. I have found Ruby to be far more approachable / readable - and perhaps most importantly 'elegant' - this may be because it has done away with the C legacy that (to my mind) had dogged the whole C++/Java/C-sharp lineage.
Of course I haven't used either 'in anger' to really evaluate how they stack up - working in the server side world, what little I've done has been playing around at home, to keep my oar in, and just to see what's out there. I've been pretty impressed with how far-sighted the decisions made in creating Obj-C were, and to a large degree these have probably been a reason why the language hasn't needed constant tweaking.
What I'm wondering is if it would be possible to create a new and appealing language that used the same conceptual model as Obj-C. Bruce Tate is quite right in 'Beyond Java' when he says that Java developers will never consider moving to Smalltalk, even if there are really interesting projects going on in the Smalltalk community, yet the features that are exciting them in Ruby (easy introspection) are exactly the things Smalltalk and Obj-C have offered for a long time. On the whole, developers only seem to like to move onto 'new' languages.
As a tangent - look at the way that Java web developers are now starting to back Tapestry - an open-source project inspired by WebObjects - over Struts/JSF. Again, you'll see a lot of talk about how WebObjects is dead (because it's old and didn't dominate), while hyping the features of WebObjects as the future. You'd never think we were quite so fashion led.
The thing that I like about Obj-C is the way that it's a strict superset of C, unlike C++.There are only something like 12 extra bits of syntax, largely derived from Smalltalk.
Reading your post what's interesting is that the languages you found easy to move around in were all procedural, so I wonder if the problem is actually to do with making the procedural / OO transition? I'll confess that having been programming since the early 80s, I still don't 'think OO' in the way I see younger developers do (sometimes to their detriment), but I did have a nice bridge to it from Pascal through Modula-n and ADA.
C++ 'won' pretty much for the reason that it was an easier transition for C-developers - even if it wasn't wholly C-compatible, and had some compromises in it's OO implementation, I think there was less of a mental leap to make for the procedural developer.
Quick checks to try : Do your text boxes support auto-spell, search in Spotlight / Google, etc? Can you drag/drop between it and a native app? How closely does it match the Apple HCI guidelines compared to something created using IB?
Unfortunately the only Java app I have handy doesn't even do the top menu bar properly, and looks as ugly as it does on Windows. If not actually uglier by the company it keeps. Double row of tiny icons at the top, because that's how MS Office does it? Check.
Actually I was alarmed by the 'All this and you don't have to change the source from Windows' statement more than anything. The 'subtle' differences are generally that Mac UI design tries to minimise the displayed options and use larger / easier to hit icons. My experience is that most Java UI follows Windows as 'best practice', but there is nothing inherent in Java to stop people creating a nice clear user interface.
JoelOnSoftware has some nice essays on design and the problems of Mac developers making Windows apps that do things the Mac way / vice versa - he suggests the most important thing is fidelity to how your users work - meaning that even if a button is in the wrong place in v2.0 of your app, your existing users have got used to it being in the wrong place by now. There's some classic stuff in there about error messages too.
The important thing about subtle details is not that a fan might notice them, but that they help create that inexplicable 'this system is easier to use' feeling. That means having a really good knowledge of how it should work. How many Windows developers even look at the Microsoft HCI guidelines? (It's evident that a good few people in Apple haven't looked at their own either!).
Q. Why do people make clothes worn by What is the point of wasting development resources on a shrinking niche segment of the market?
I pity your timing on that one. But again, see above. What's the point in localising to Swahili or Welsh when people know English?
Whatever language they use, developers are going to need to learn the OS X APIs (Cocoa and Quicktime at the very least) to make any real significant use of OS X - unless you're proposing that Apple also switch over to using the.NET2 / WinFX APIs rather than Cocoa, in which case OS X would cease to have much real point. You're more likely to see the rumoured 'Cocoa running on a Windows kernel' than Apple ditching their prime asset.
A large reason that the Java bridge 'failed' is that there was very little interest from cross-platform developers (i.e. Java programmers) in using any of the bridged Cocoa classes, when they could use a 'Java Native' equivalent. There's not a lot of interest from Mac developers in using Java over Obj-C to write Cocoa apps - there isn't any productivity gain. On the other hand, there is interest from Mac developers in scripting languages, but my understanding is that most of those bridges are being maintained outside of Apple, whereas the Java-Cocoa bridge was an Apple-funded project. There are a couple of Java-side initiatives to provide better cross-platform bridges to O/S, but they're not JCP supported - there's SWT on the widget side, and there's another project to provide a standard Java library that would use JNI calls to support native features common to Windows, OS X and Linux that the JCP won't allow in the standard Java runtime.
I'm not convinced that Apple are 'getting by' with bridges to scripting languages as I think most 'real' development on the Mac is still Obj-C based.
If you're serious enough about Mac development to actually want to use Cocoa features, I don't think learning Obj-C is a massive overhead for a competent OO developer. That said, it is showing it's age, and could learn a few tricks from more recent Smalltalk derived languages like Ruby, but the last attempt to revise Obj-C syntax failed and I expect any new one would also.
There is certainly more fit between a dynamic, Smalltalk derived language like Ruby and Obj-C, than the C++ -> Java -> C# lineage.
>rapidly increasing cross-platform interest in the language over Java.
I think the problem here is the 'cross-platform' developers and Mac developers have completely different motives. I work as a team leader in a cross-platform firm - even though our clients all run Windows and we never actually test on Linux or Solaris, and we don't have a Mac in the building, we've always stuck with cross-platform tools. Part of that is our legacy (we were cross-platform when that meant using 4GL's to generate platform specific binaries - hell, we were cross-platform when it meant having to put conditional compilation into your C code so it would compile on different compilers / O/S). What we've never been interested in is making great client-side software - we'd rather be happy it will run on anything.
There are a smaller group, who actually work for companies that do release cross-platform software, who see cross-platform languages as a solution to a real problem, rather than a political one. They want to 'write-once, run-anywhere'. The problem is in this phrase - it purely deals with the technical level, rather than the design one. It typically means 'design for Windows, Mac and Linux users should be grateful we've even done a version'.
Mac developers, on the other hand, are largely motivated towards exploiting the platform specific side, and that is currently serving Apple well. If 90% of Mac apps were as ugly as 90% of Windows apps, a lot of the apparent slickness of the platform would be lost. There are definitely Windows apps every bit as good as anything on the Mac, but you see them as so exceptional you gi
I still use vi as my primary editor (not even client-side vim - I still spend most of my day stuck in emulated VT terminals) - however, I've been getting to grips with Textmate, which seems to offer the customisability / flexibility of vi or emacs, but 'feels' Mac. Given that it's written by a Unix-to-OS-X developer that makes sense. It's the one everyone sees in the RubyOnRails demo and goes 'What's that editor'?
(Actually there is one other editor I loved, back on the Atari ST, which I think was called Tempus. When most GUI editors were slow, it was fast as any command-line editor).
Yes - I am in favour of using public money to build a public commons. Consider the creation of free public lending libraries and art galleries during the late C19th/early C20th century, or the BBC - paid for by all, owned by all. Given that tax is coercive then yes, I am in favour of coercion. Personally I regard it more as part of a social contract - we are free to leave if we really dislike the society it has produced.
>Perhaps I drew an incorrect implication, but you do (still!) seem to be arguing that databases should be copyrightable. Copyright is a private grant of monopoly.
Up to a point. I believe that anything that is created under the framework of copyright should be copyrightable. If such a framework did not exist, it would be very unlikely a group of investors would give Company A $10 million to map NYC to produce the hypothetical game, hence said game / database would not exist, or at least not until the GPL had reached the required state to make such a game possible.
There may be some benefit in removing copyright, but it is a fallacy to expect that it could be removed and the same works / type of work would exist - especially where they are not 'necessary'. The world may indeed be a better place without a hyper-realistic urban crime sim and with more live music.
Where I do draw the line is the notion that information can be patentable - i.e. you can own an instance of a database but you cannot own the facts within it (i.e. a gene).\
>But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies Correct. But you can go round in circles on this one - the only reason said data exists is because there is a legal framework to encourage it.
>If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow Which is pretty much where patent law entered the picture, I believe (not to stop competitors doing things but to encourage companies to 'open' their inventions to secondary manufacture).
>Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also. I think the Victorians got that one quite right. Of course with housing there is still a distinction between copying someone's style (a non-patentable idea), and re-using their blueprint (copyright).
>Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use >copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please. Well seeing as the hypothetical in this case is a GTA style game and a flight simulator, I think the benefit is pretty small, compared to the human genome. Of course the problem there was the ridiculous notion that you could patent information, rather than just have copyright over an instance of that information.
>One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost. Not quite - once the cost of collection had been paid off, it's a sunk cost. If you're MS or Oracle of course you can afford to write it off, but for many smaller firms the first few months will be spent paying back their investors. I'd agree with the overall idea that once something has recovered it's cost, and a certain time period has elapsed, it should move into the public domain at a faster rate than it does now - but it would be very hard to measure, especially without putting even more money into the pockets of accountants and lawyers.
I think you're last point actually explains a lot about the rise of free software - given that the incumbent players can lower their costs to zero (as MS and Oracle have with their entry edition D/B) the only possible value for rival software is zero.
I didn't quite mean it in the sense of suffocation! More in the sense of making sure your competitors have to work to keep up, rather than benefit without making an effort.
But the main point - in context - was that I won't give your flight sim company my data just because I've already made $20 million and won't lose anything by giving it to you. Even if there was 0% chance of competition (and both being games companies that's unlikely) I'm still not likely to do it unless there is something in it for me. (Maybe there is - publicity at the simplest level).
I think you're simply mistaking my original statement of the way business works for my own opinion.
I'm not in favour of coercive anything - I am suggesting that the answer lies in the same direction as it has with software - the development of a public commons. As with free software, the way that could occur is manifold - from individual voluntary contribution through to corporate backing through to public funding (taxation, licence fees, etc).
I don't see where I said anything about granting private monopolies on databases in my original post; I'm just suggesting that if company A has paid $10 million to map NYC they are not going to hand that information over to company B. Company B are free to go out and spend their own $10 million doing the same, or to licence the data from Company A at whatever value they agree at. What you can't do is say that Company A can have no 'ownership' of the database. While it would be absolutely lovely if they did put it straight into the public domain, that would also substantially reduce their ability to make the $10 million in costs back.
Scenario : Company B don't make a flight sim, but actually make a way better GTA styled game, at a development cost of $50,000. I've laid down $10 million to develop my game, and sure, I should have done a better job on the game side rather the ultra-realistic map bit, but I'd be bankrupt - if it wasn't for the fact no one would have invested the money upfront anyway.
Alternatively I could wait for Company B,C,D, and E to join me in joint-funding the public mapping of NYC, using as much voluntary labour as possible along the way.
I didn't say it was nice behaviour, but unfortunately it's exactly the one our society does facilitate, given that presented with a democratic choice the majority have voted time and again against supporting the public domain through higher taxation.
As said, I suspect that the answer lies in building the alternative, as has happened with software
I suspect the answer actually lies in the same thing happening as with software, and you can already see it emerging - freemapping projects for cities, Wikipedia, are all examples of open databases. Eventually you'll get a tipping point, where it will become uneconomic for developers to use anything else, regardless of the merits (we can see this now with database technology).
However :
>I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York? If I paid for all the intensive labour (photography, 3D modelling) and that cost me $10 million and the game sells for $30 million, then I'd be a bit irritated at someone else making $50 million off 'my' data. To a degree it's not money that I've lost (you could argue I should have made my own Flight Simulator) but I have handed a competitive advantage to another firm (they didn't need to risk $10 million on doing the initial mapping against something that could have been a flop). You're painting an overly simplistic picture of business if you think that it's just about how much money you can make - it's also always about denying your competitors air.
>But why is the anti-copyright argument always the one touted here?
Yes, I do find it odd, as I would wager that a very large number of/. regulars work in proprietary 'content' development of some sort, but seem to be desperately in denial of this fact.
I think the problem is that copyright gets in the way of what we want to do with technology, therefore it must die. I will not be told what to do with my computer by law, and god forbid me if someone tried to impose a technological restriction on me. I think that is an entirely fair attitude within your own home. I feel entitled to copy my VHS to DVD and vinyl to MP3, regardless of the actual legality.
The problem is that we have all been handed a personal printing press and CD pressing plant. We can act like publishers. Many of us do - we screw over artists for our own reasons.
Can you imagine the typical reaction here if Warners or Sony announced that it was not going to pay artists because 'they make millions from concerts anyway'?
(If you do believe in 'free culture' like you believe in Free software then support it. Pirating 'non-free' culture is like running a pirate copy of Microsoft Office. You aren't contributing to the solution, just depriving 'the man' of some money).
It is pretty much the first one. It's a bit like cars - most people go out and get a petrol one, because they're easier to get hold of, and more common. LPG and hybrids are niche, even though everyone knows the argument that the extra expense on the car is more than saved on fuel.
And when it comes to cars, my wife and I have a Ford Ka (one of the most common UK cars). It's not an area of my life where I'm that bothered about spending that much money as it's just a device to get to work and back. I wouldn't pay extra for safety and comfort on a short daily commute. I can entirely understand why for some people computers are like that.
Need a computer. Look for something cheap and well-known. Buy.
I work in a software house, where we develop Java based apps for Unix servers, where most of the staff are comfortable with vi; yet at home most of them have PCs. We did have two Linux users but one of them switched back. That leaves one Linux user and me as the sole Mac user.
(Although there are now several people who will take a look next time they get a machine; I've made a niche tidying up camcorder footage and burning to DVD. However, one of them who had been very impressed with iMovie told her husband, and he came back with an all-in-one Sony Media Centre PC. He was an IT consultant. I think it goes to show that most people still think it's the outside that's different).
While I'd dispute some of Pilgrim's reasons, I think a few OS X defectors to Linux is going to be a good thing. Their expectations will help improve Linux, and competition from Linux will help drive Apple forward.
What's evident to me is that over the years a lot of people have used Macs, not because they preferred MacOS, but simply because it was the politically correct choice - it was Not Microsoft, it was 'the alternative', it was the cooler option. I am reminded of a lot of friends of mine who were into old Sixties garage music for years, but as soon as it became widely popular, got into other things. It is just part of who they are. As well as being the canary in the mineshaft, you can also see these people as weathervanes - they get out just as things start to get too popular for their liking - and of course fairly often turn against the things they loved (Nirvana after Sub-Pop - you've got to be kidding).
On a personal level I stayed off Mac's through the 80s and 90s precisely because they were the sort of closed restrictive platform these guys have suddenly identified them to be. It wasn't until OS X that I started to change my mind.
Re:That was actually surprisingly good article
on
The Cost of the iPod
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· Score: 3, Informative
Apparently not. It is just something that many companies choose to do, in the spirit of best practice. The only people who could force Apple to disclose those figures would be a large group of unhappy investors, or if they felt they had to to gain further investors. At the moment, neither of those things are likely, although inevitably at some point hubris will enter the picture.
I think it's right for analysts to draw attention to this, as a warning to investors that they are taking a gamble on opaque accounting; on the other hand, there is an implication to the analysis that the iPod is carrying an ailing computer business which I think is misleading - he is particular wrong in one major respect :
'Apple clearly has its feet in two separate and distinct business models, namely computer manufacturing and software creation, and the consumer electronics industry'
Besides lumping two things together that most companies keep separate (computer manufacturing and software creation), it also utterly fails to comprehend that it has been Apple's ability to develop it's own software than has resulted in it's success in the consumer electronics business. Most CE firms don't have that level of software engineering in-house (many don't have hardware engineering either, but that has traditionally been where companies like Toshiba or Sony have invested their R&D)
As an example - I've just bought a new Fuji camera (on grounds of it being able to do reasonable ISO 3200 shots). Nice bit of hardware - you can even go to manual mode and set your own exposure or aperture settings, which isn't bad for a consumer level camera. The interface on the camera is good - a really nice touch I noticed was that in just doesn't display any of the advanced options if you have the camera set in 'Auto' mode, set my a manual dial on top. Nice solution to balancing functionality and simplicity. Guess what happened when I tried to install the supplied software - not only did it fail to install, the installer completely crashed the system (XP), resulting in a hard-reset (causing a boot-up disk scan).I can't even comment on the quality of the software because I couldn't install it. That is my 'out of the box' experience.
The main and obvious one is Cocoa. While NextStep was available on many platforms and GnuStep continues to be, Cocoa has advanced a long way since. For all practical purposes, Objective-C is pretty much a 'Mac-only' language.
Others that spring to mind : WebObjects - was cross-platform for a while, and in a weird way still is (the run-time was C++, now Java, but the only way to get a licence is with OS X server, and the development tools are now Mac specific). Front-ends can be Java or Browser clients.
OSA - this is 'Open Scripting Architecture' - it is the framework for adding scripting languages to OS X. The main example is AppleScript, but Python and JavaScript (Late Night Software) are also available on top of OSA. Any application that is said to be 'AppleScriptable' is in fact exposed via the OSA, so this does make it a high-level development platform, useful for sticking applications together (obvious one is glueing together a BitTorrent client, video conversion software and iTunes to auto-convert files for a video ipod).
Quartz Composer - if you have Tiger development tools, fire this up. It's an interesting way to develop graphics components, which can then be used as plug-ins in apps that support them. Having looked at Motion, you can see how much Motion is simply a friendly UI over Quartz, while Composer is a much more raw version.
Widgets - Apple's Dashboard widgets allow a mix of technologies, but mostly Javascript. (You can have a Quartz based widget, and you can fire off OS commands from a widget too). Even has it's own IDE, separate to XCode - DashCode. Not officially out but easy to find online.
Unix shell scripting - obviously not Mac specific, but Darwin and OS X do have unique commands - i.e. you CAN use them for Mac-specific development.
Odd proprietary languages : FutureBASIC is still hanging in there, as a Mac only version of BASIC. (RealBASIC is cross-platform and now-OO). I've certainly seen reviews of other similar tools, like a 3D-games writing language, but they are not things I tend to keep in mind. Took me a bit of Googling to even find the name of FutureBASIC.
If you want a direction to go in, I would suggest Obj-C and Cocoa. If you want to get better closer to the native layer than you can with Java it's definitely the way to go. One observation : There appear to be a growing number of apps that just use WebKit to throw up a browser window and then use HTML/JavaScript for the actual application code. Each to their own - I guess it makes sense if you mostly have web development skills.
Yes - due to lack of interest they have ceased development of the Java-Cocoa bridge. Of course I am sure that if there was a lot of interest, that decision would be reversed.
Where people have interest in particular technologies you'll certainly see JNI libraries appearing, but most Java development on the Mac is cross-platform so didn't use the Cocoa bridge. I would imagine that building on top of the Eclipse RCP will be a popular means for many Java developers to get a closer native feel.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate representation of the GPL or Stallman's view.
The equivalent of what you are saying, would be to insist that all software is shipped along with it's source code, and that I should have the right to alter or modify the program. Using non-standard 'parts' would invalidate my 'guarantee' (not that software is covered as well as cars against defects). I should be allowed to sell on my modified program, under my own conditions and at my own cost . . . but I should only be able to sell as many copies as I purchased. This exact model exists in the motor trade, with firms running modification production lines (the original Mini Cooper is a good example). A product can be both proprietary and 'open'.
Stallman's view is slightly different - firstly, unlike a BSD licence, I cannot sell on under my own conditions, only those of the GPL. Secondly, I don't NEED to pay the person whose code I have built on top of. Thirdly, anyone else can take a copy of what I have done and sell it for less or give it away.
In interview's he does express the idea that people (i.e. users) should contribute to the development of free software by funding the projects that they would like to see - I would agree that this is very different from Communism - if anything it is closest to the idea of a gift economy. Game theory shows that this actually results in the best outcome for society - if we all give more than we receive then 'wealth' grows more rapidly than under any competitive system. It is one of those systems, like Communism, Fascism or monetarism, that I think has a lot of appeal to people with logical minds.
And going back to the parent post - I'd agree that the debate over 'free' vs proprietary software has somehow become louder than the far more important debate, which is open vs proprietary standards. I am quite happy to use proprietary software so long as I can move my data to another platform or program.
Jherek - Firstly, congratulations on picking a pseudonym from my all time favourite book, and an author who is quite pertinent to the debate, given his anarchist inclinations, and his experiments (in the 70s) with 'open source' literature (thinking specifically of the Cornelius stories written by other authors in NW).
I've meant to ask him his views on this for ages, so today I did - new thread under the Q&A at Multiverse if you wish to join in.
>>The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist >> that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with >>strangers, you must be allowed to. >First off, your entire phrasing is biased - when you say "allowed to" >it completely avoids the fact that sharing information is the natural order >of things - you make it sound like we, as humans, naturally >have some higher authority dictating what is and what is not allowed.
Dare I say that citing natural law and that sharing information is the natural order, also implies there is a higher authority dictating what is permitted.
I guess the debate here is whether recordings, books, etc, are 'information' or 'property'. My view is that they are actually closer to the latter than the former. If you want to go with what's natural - yes, you can't stop an idea, you can't stop me hearing a song and then going away and playing my own version, or writing my own version of Don Quixote. An idea, a story, a song all exist independently of a particular instance. A recording, on the other hand, is quite 'unnatural'.
>While the State is constantly trying to assume that role, that does not > make such authority natural law. I didn't say that it did. What I do believe is that many books, records, films, etc, only exist due to the existence of a legal framework based around copyright and royalties - and their relationship with technology. We have long accepted the argument that the owner of a printing press is not permitted to just print copies of an authors work, despite that being a technological feasability.
>What educated people (vs the warez d00ds) are arguing regarding > distribution is that the inherent scalability problems of physical distribution > mean that, as a society, giving up the natural right to copy in exchange for >increased incentives to artists was a good bargain for society. >But the inherent ease of electronic distribution make that contract much less >of a bargain for society today. The social contract must be renegotiated and >that negotiation must take into account the costs to society as well as the >benefits to society. I would agree wholly. It just happens that I still think there is still some value for society in giving up our right to do as we please in order to encourage artists. The fact that we can all act as duplicators doesn't substantially change the bargain. What are the actual benefits for society?
>Many people argue that the costs of any sort of distribution restrictions are >far too high -- in particular that enforcement is close to impossible, making it >extremely expensive and that it leads to inefficient utilization of resources, or >more plainly, it causes lots of wasted effort and lost opportunities which hurt >society as a whole and serve only to enrich a few.
I certainly think technological restrictions are pointless, and must be resisted, for most of the above reasons. I just think the best approach remains civil, rather than criminal law, and a royalty based system.
In my mind, it is something like speeding; almost all cars can exceed legal limits, yet we do not want artificial restrictions on our cars. We all speed, but only to an extent - very few people do 100 in a 30 area. It is less a law than a formalisation of the social contract.
>>There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the >>cost of your free time) - and for most artist
See, I agree with about half of that, because pretty much the same arguments have been going on for centuries; I was going to say back to the birth of the printing press, until I remembered the Gnostic gospels, and even earlier Bible fragments. That tradition of the underground press has carried on through the centuries, but there have always been many reasons - sometimes things are uncommercial, sometimes things are actually bad but vanity rules, and sometimes they are suppressed by society.
Where I depart with you, however, is in your statement that the free software and free media have obliterated the need for the non-free. In the most basic sense this is true. There is no 'need' seeing as functionally equivalent software is available. However, many proprietary packages are still years ahead of the FOSS equivalents (compare OpenOffice presentation features with Keynote) - our society is not really built on 'need' but on desire and whim, waste and surplus. There is a lot wrong with that, and it is certainly a trap (work harder to buy things you don't need), but it is hardly news. I don't have a problem paying for Keynote or Delicious Library because I like them.
When you move onto art, you are into more dangerous territory. I buy a lot of small label music, and I've been involved with the underground music scene back to the 80s. I don't mean Underground as in 'MTV's alternative show' but as in bands distributing home-recorded cassettes and self-run record labels. A lot of these people are politically anti-major label. Most of them don't actually make any money out of what they are doing, but very few of them are into the idea of 'free culture', which is kind of odd. Even the cassette label people would charge about 4 times the value of a blank cassette for their music (quarter of the price of a CD or record). There was still an unspoken buy in to the capitalist idea that recorded music was something you traded. (This may be because a lot of them are involved in home recording - if you are one-person and a home-studio there is no live performance to advertise. And T-Shirt sales were the sort of thing corporate bands do to get even more money out of their fans).
There is a lot of space between the major labels and free media. It's the space occupied by independent labels, download sites like emusic, small publishing houses, independent art galleries - the people who believe that the existing system of copyright that saw us through the C20th is actually OK - that MP3 is simply another way to sell music, not an opportunity to enforce anarchism on artists, or an opportunity to use that threat as a reason to introduce control.
The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with strangers, you must be allowed to. This has always struck me as a fallacy. There are many areas where we are fighting the exact same battle against technological abuse - where governments insist that because they CAN do something with technology, they must be allowed to (snooping, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, data mining). There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the cost of your free time) - and for most artists, musicians and authors, those costs are eventually too high.
Finally - the idea that well-written books will be supplanted by Wikipedia is my idea of hell. I use Wikipedia regularly, and the web is my first port of call for searching for information on coding problems, but I have absolutely zero problem whatsoever with paying for a well written reference or teaching book. When I had no money, I used to use the library (cheaper than a PC and broadband). Let's not even start on literature - Shakespeare and Dickens were hacks who wrote for pay, but I shudder to think about some of the voluntary contributions I read while doing DTP for a creative writing magazine.
Sometimes I think people get so caught up in the political and technological arguments they become far more important than the art. I can imagine some people reading this will be going - 'yes, exactly, the politics are more important than the art. Humanity must be truly free, even if all non-free art must be destroyed in the process'.
Slashdot Mirror
>If too many people embrace these services, we could end up in a situation where everything is locked up.
I think the only way that will happen is if hardware-DRM becomes mandatory in such a way that the playing of 'unprotected' content is disallowed. 'How can we be sure that the video you are playing is really a home movie and not a pirate recording'. In the long term this might even be technically feasible (lets say that you introduce some kind of HDMI like control into A/V recording devices such that even your home videos are uniquely encrypted).
If that doesn't happen, then there will always be an important part of culture that will reject the 'closed' world, just as many acts today deal with companies selling DRM-free music. What will become more obvious is when people cross over from one world to the other - it is going to be a far bigger deal than switching from an indie to a major.
>you're probably wasting your time on your tools instead of what you do with them
I'm not sure it's wholly a waste of time, if it's also your hobby - and of course, once you get a Mac, you spend half your time evangelising them on the Internet, making up for the time saved in not tweaking hardware / Windows.
>Of course, this is where I take exception. If the game can pay for the database, the database will be created, regardless of whether or not they can charge someone *again* for the use
>of the database. If you can make $40,000,000 on a game, with a $10M investment, who wouldn't fund the DB - regardless of the DB's legal/copyright/protection status afterwards?
All investment is risk - if you could show someone they stood to make $30 million, they'd certainly go ahead, but then you come round to the question of 'why spend all this money mapping New York' - what are you actually trying to achieve by doing so.
Let's consider a very specific game - The Getaway. It's USP was that it was a GTA style game based on a completely realistic map of London. The technical demos looked great, and the initial hype was high, but protracted development raised people's suspicions. When it came out, it didn't really do so well, but reviewers were still impressed with the way it had captured London. It still sold fairly well too. The USP was good enough to over-ride the gameplay.
>And the original thesis was pitting GTA against Flight Simulator - two games unlikely to be in a consumer's "Either/or" zone, so the competetive advantage is moot
If the data is open, then that distinction is also moot. There is nothing to stop someone, like the Flight Sim firm, making a better GTA with that data. That might actually be a good thing for games players, but it makes it LESS likely for investors to bother in the first place.
To return to the Getaway - they managed to get a sequel out, obviously re-using the same map, and from doing a quick search on Google there is a 3rd 'chapter' due on the PS3, which is again set in London (so presumably re-using same data).
Change the law, and you change the outcome. To create a USP, companies would seek to develop imaginary locations they could protect under copyright as IP. If they can't do that, then the focus would be on something else (maybe on gameplay, as it was in the 80s when almost every arcade game was a sideways scrolling shooter).
I wasn't aware that the try/catch/finally was newer syntax, having only player around with Obj-C and Cocoa in the last 18 months, but I think syntax is exactly the area that I'm thinking could be improved.
I have found Ruby to be far more approachable / readable - and perhaps most importantly 'elegant' - this may be because it has done away with the C legacy that (to my mind) had dogged the whole C++/Java/C-sharp lineage.
Of course I haven't used either 'in anger' to really evaluate how they stack up - working in the server side world, what little I've done has been playing around at home, to keep my oar in, and just to see what's out there. I've been pretty impressed with how far-sighted the decisions made in creating Obj-C were, and to a large degree these have probably been a reason why the language hasn't needed constant tweaking.
What I'm wondering is if it would be possible to create a new and appealing language that used the same conceptual model as Obj-C. Bruce Tate is quite right in 'Beyond Java' when he says that Java developers will never consider moving to Smalltalk, even if there are really interesting projects going on in the Smalltalk community, yet the features that are exciting them in Ruby (easy introspection) are exactly the things Smalltalk and Obj-C have offered for a long time. On the whole, developers only seem to like to move onto 'new' languages.
As a tangent - look at the way that Java web developers are now starting to back Tapestry - an open-source project inspired by WebObjects - over Struts/JSF. Again, you'll see a lot of talk about how WebObjects is dead (because it's old and didn't dominate), while hyping the features of WebObjects as the future. You'd never think we were quite so fashion led.
The thing that I like about Obj-C is the way that it's a strict superset of C, unlike C++.There are only something like 12 extra bits of syntax, largely derived from Smalltalk.
Reading your post what's interesting is that the languages you found easy to move around in were all procedural, so I wonder if the problem is actually to do with making the procedural / OO transition? I'll confess that having been programming since the early 80s, I still don't 'think OO' in the way I see younger developers do (sometimes to their detriment), but I did have a nice bridge to it from Pascal through Modula-n and ADA.
C++ 'won' pretty much for the reason that it was an easier transition for C-developers - even if it wasn't wholly C-compatible, and had some compromises in it's OO implementation, I think there was less of a mental leap to make for the procedural developer.
Quick checks to try :
Do your text boxes support auto-spell, search in Spotlight / Google, etc?
Can you drag/drop between it and a native app?
How closely does it match the Apple HCI guidelines compared to something created using IB?
Unfortunately the only Java app I have handy doesn't even do the top menu bar properly, and looks as ugly as it does on Windows. If not actually uglier by the company it keeps. Double row of tiny icons at the top, because that's how MS Office does it? Check.
Actually I was alarmed by the 'All this and you don't have to change the source from Windows' statement more than anything. The 'subtle' differences are generally that Mac UI design tries to minimise the displayed options and use larger / easier to hit icons. My experience is that most Java UI follows Windows as 'best practice', but there is nothing inherent in Java to stop people creating a nice clear user interface.
JoelOnSoftware has some nice essays on design and the problems of Mac developers making Windows apps that do things the Mac way / vice versa - he suggests the most important thing is fidelity to how your users work - meaning that even if a button is in the wrong place in v2.0 of your app, your existing users have got used to it being in the wrong place by now. There's some classic stuff in there about error messages too.
The important thing about subtle details is not that a fan might notice them, but that they help create that inexplicable 'this system is easier to use' feeling. That means having a really good knowledge of how it should work. How many Windows developers even look at the Microsoft HCI guidelines? (It's evident that a good few people in Apple haven't looked at their own either!).
Q. Why do people make clothes worn by What is the point of wasting development resources on a shrinking niche segment of the market? I pity your timing on that one. But again, see above. What's the point in localising to Swahili or Welsh when people know English?
Whatever language they use, developers are going to need to learn the OS X APIs (Cocoa and Quicktime at the very least) to make any real significant use of OS X - unless you're proposing that Apple also switch over to using the .NET2 / WinFX APIs rather than Cocoa, in which case OS X would cease to have much real point. You're more likely to see the rumoured 'Cocoa running on a Windows kernel' than Apple ditching their prime asset.
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A large reason that the Java bridge 'failed' is that there was very little interest from cross-platform developers (i.e. Java programmers) in using any of the bridged Cocoa classes, when they could use a 'Java Native' equivalent. There's not a lot of interest from Mac developers in using Java over Obj-C to write Cocoa apps - there isn't any productivity gain.
On the other hand, there is interest from Mac developers in scripting languages, but my understanding is that most of those bridges are being maintained outside of Apple, whereas the Java-Cocoa bridge was an Apple-funded project. There are a couple of Java-side initiatives to provide better cross-platform bridges to O/S, but they're not JCP supported - there's SWT on the widget side, and there's another project to provide a standard Java library that would use JNI calls to support native features common to Windows, OS X and Linux that the JCP won't allow in the standard Java runtime.
I'm not convinced that Apple are 'getting by' with bridges to scripting languages as I think most 'real' development on the Mac is still Obj-C based.
If you're serious enough about Mac development to actually want to use Cocoa features, I don't think learning Obj-C is a massive overhead for a competent OO developer. That said, it is showing it's age, and could learn a few tricks from more recent Smalltalk derived languages like Ruby, but the last attempt to revise Obj-C syntax failed and I expect any new one would also.
There is certainly more fit between a dynamic, Smalltalk derived language like Ruby and Obj-C, than the C++ -> Java -> C# lineage.
>rapidly increasing cross-platform interest in the language over Java.
I think the problem here is the 'cross-platform' developers and Mac developers have completely different motives. I work as a team leader in a cross-platform firm - even though our clients all run Windows and we never actually test on Linux or Solaris, and we don't have a Mac in the building, we've always stuck with cross-platform tools.
Part of that is our legacy (we were cross-platform when that meant using 4GL's to generate platform specific binaries - hell, we were cross-platform when it meant having to put conditional compilation into your C code so it would compile on different compilers / O/S). What we've never been interested in is making great client-side software - we'd rather be happy it will run on anything.
There are a smaller group, who actually work for companies that do release cross-platform software, who see cross-platform languages as a solution to a real problem, rather than a political one. They want to 'write-once, run-anywhere'. The problem is in this phrase - it purely deals with the technical level, rather than the design one. It typically means 'design for Windows, Mac and Linux users should be grateful we've even done a version'.
Microsoft actually understand this quite well, and did not develop a 'cross-platform' version of Office - having learnt their lesson from the one time they did
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/ 26/80193.aspx
Mac developers, on the other hand, are largely motivated towards exploiting the platform specific side, and that is currently serving Apple well. If 90% of Mac apps were as ugly as 90% of Windows apps, a lot of the apparent slickness of the platform would be lost. There are definitely Windows apps every bit as good as anything on the Mac, but you see them as so exceptional you gi
I still use vi as my primary editor (not even client-side vim - I still spend most of my day stuck in emulated VT terminals) - however, I've been getting to grips with Textmate, which seems to offer the customisability / flexibility of vi or emacs, but 'feels' Mac. Given that it's written by a Unix-to-OS-X developer that makes sense. It's the one everyone sees in the RubyOnRails demo and goes 'What's that editor'?
(Actually there is one other editor I loved, back on the Atari ST, which I think was called Tempus. When most GUI editors were slow, it was fast as any command-line editor).
Yes - I am in favour of using public money to build a public commons. Consider the creation of free public lending libraries and art galleries during the late C19th/early C20th century, or the BBC - paid for by all, owned by all. Given that tax is coercive then yes, I am in favour of coercion. Personally I regard it more as part of a social contract - we are free to leave if we really dislike the society it has produced.
>Perhaps I drew an incorrect implication, but you do (still!) seem to be arguing that databases should be copyrightable. Copyright is a private grant of monopoly.
Up to a point. I believe that anything that is created under the framework of copyright should be copyrightable. If such a framework did not exist, it would be very unlikely a group of investors would give Company A $10 million to map NYC to produce the hypothetical game, hence said game / database would not exist, or at least not until the GPL had reached the required state to make such a game possible.
There may be some benefit in removing copyright, but it is a fallacy to expect that it could be removed and the same works / type of work would exist - especially where they are not 'necessary'. The world may indeed be a better place without a hyper-realistic urban crime sim and with more live music.
Where I do draw the line is the notion that information can be patentable - i.e. you can own an instance of a database but you cannot own the facts within it (i.e. a gene).\
>But it's only "your" data because the government has implemented copyright law that allows you to control copies
Correct. But you can go round in circles on this one - the only reason said data exists is because there is a legal framework to encourage it.
>If it is of net benefit to society to allow your competitor to copy your data (e.g. perhaps to avoid duplication and wasted effort in the long term) then the law should allow
Which is pretty much where patent law entered the picture, I believe (not to stop competitors doing things but to encourage companies to 'open' their inventions to secondary manufacture).
>Business ideas are legally copied all the time to everybody's benefit. Housing and decoration ideas also.
I think the Victorians got that one quite right. Of course with housing there is still a distinction between copying someone's style (a non-patentable idea), and re-using their blueprint (copyright).
>Whether it is of "net benefit" is a tricky question of course, including whether to classify particular competitive behaviour as positive or negative. e.g. Whether to allow you to use >copyright law to stop your competitor from using "their" copy of "your" data as they please.
Well seeing as the hypothetical in this case is a GTA style game and a flight simulator, I think the benefit is pretty small, compared to the human genome. Of course the problem there was the ridiculous notion that you could patent information, rather than just have copyright over an instance of that information.
>One problem I see with the sort of data compilations we're talking about is that once the data is collected it is a sunk cost.
Not quite - once the cost of collection had been paid off, it's a sunk cost. If you're MS or Oracle of course you can afford to write it off, but for many smaller firms the first few months will be spent paying back their investors. I'd agree with the overall idea that once something has recovered it's cost, and a certain time period has elapsed, it should move into the public domain at a faster rate than it does now - but it would be very hard to measure, especially without putting even more money into the pockets of accountants and lawyers.
I think you're last point actually explains a lot about the rise of free software - given that the incumbent players can lower their costs to zero (as MS and Oracle have with their entry edition D/B) the only possible value for rival software is zero.
I didn't quite mean it in the sense of suffocation! More in the sense of making sure your competitors have to work to keep up, rather than benefit without making an effort.
But the main point - in context - was that I won't give your flight sim company my data just because I've already made $20 million and won't lose anything by giving it to you. Even if there was 0% chance of competition (and both being games companies that's unlikely) I'm still not likely to do it unless there is something in it for me. (Maybe there is - publicity at the simplest level).
I think you're simply mistaking my original statement of the way business works for my own opinion.
I'm not in favour of coercive anything - I am suggesting that the answer lies in the same direction as it has with software - the development of a public commons. As with free software, the way that could occur is manifold - from individual voluntary contribution through to corporate backing through to public funding (taxation, licence fees, etc).
I don't see where I said anything about granting private monopolies on databases in my original post; I'm just suggesting that if company A has paid $10 million to map NYC they are not going to hand that information over to company B. Company B are free to go out and spend their own $10 million doing the same, or to licence the data from Company A at whatever value they agree at. What you can't do is say that Company A can have no 'ownership' of the database. While it would be absolutely lovely if they did put it straight into the public domain, that would also substantially reduce their ability to make the $10 million in costs back.
Scenario : Company B don't make a flight sim, but actually make a way better GTA styled game, at a development cost of $50,000. I've laid down $10 million to develop my game, and sure, I should have done a better job on the game side rather the ultra-realistic map bit, but I'd be bankrupt - if it wasn't for the fact no one would have invested the money upfront anyway.
Alternatively I could wait for Company B,C,D, and E to join me in joint-funding the public mapping of NYC, using as much voluntary labour as possible along the way.
I didn't say it was nice behaviour, but unfortunately it's exactly the one our society does facilitate, given that presented with a democratic choice the majority have voted time and again against supporting the public domain through higher taxation.
As said, I suspect that the answer lies in building the alternative, as has happened with software
I suspect the answer actually lies in the same thing happening as with software, and you can already see it emerging - freemapping projects for cities, Wikipedia, are all examples of open databases. Eventually you'll get a tipping point, where it will become uneconomic for developers to use anything else, regardless of the merits (we can see this now with database technology).
However :
>I said, does your game make less money if another game uses the same database describing New York?
If I paid for all the intensive labour (photography, 3D modelling) and that cost me $10 million and the game sells for $30 million, then I'd be a bit irritated at someone else making $50 million off 'my' data. To a degree it's not money that I've lost (you could argue I should have made my own Flight Simulator) but I have handed a competitive advantage to another firm (they didn't need to risk $10 million on doing the initial mapping against something that could have been a flop).
You're painting an overly simplistic picture of business if you think that it's just about how much money you can make - it's also always about denying your competitors air.
>But why is the anti-copyright argument always the one touted here?
/. regulars work in proprietary 'content' development of some sort, but seem to be desperately in denial of this fact.
Yes, I do find it odd, as I would wager that a very large number of
I think the problem is that copyright gets in the way of what we want to do with technology, therefore it must die. I will not be told what to do with my computer by law, and god forbid me if someone tried to impose a technological restriction on me. I think that is an entirely fair attitude within your own home. I feel entitled to copy my VHS to DVD and vinyl to MP3, regardless of the actual legality.
The problem is that we have all been handed a personal printing press and CD pressing plant. We can act like publishers. Many of us do - we screw over artists for our own reasons.
Can you imagine the typical reaction here if Warners or Sony announced that it was not going to pay artists because 'they make millions from concerts anyway'?
(If you do believe in 'free culture' like you believe in Free software then support it. Pirating 'non-free' culture is like running a pirate copy of Microsoft Office. You aren't contributing to the solution, just depriving 'the man' of some money).
It is pretty much the first one. It's a bit like cars - most people go out and get a petrol one, because they're easier to get hold of, and more common. LPG and hybrids are niche, even though everyone knows the argument that the extra expense on the car is more than saved on fuel.
And when it comes to cars, my wife and I have a Ford Ka (one of the most common UK cars). It's not an area of my life where I'm that bothered about spending that much money as it's just a device to get to work and back. I wouldn't pay extra for safety and comfort on a short daily commute. I can entirely understand why for some people computers are like that.
Need a computer. Look for something cheap and well-known. Buy.
I work in a software house, where we develop Java based apps for Unix servers, where most of the staff are comfortable with vi; yet at home most of them have PCs. We did have two Linux users but one of them switched back. That leaves one Linux user and me as the sole Mac user.
(Although there are now several people who will take a look next time they get a machine; I've made a niche tidying up camcorder footage and burning to DVD. However, one of them who had been very impressed with iMovie told her husband, and he came back with an all-in-one Sony Media Centre PC. He was an IT consultant. I think it goes to show that most people still think it's the outside that's different).
While I'd dispute some of Pilgrim's reasons, I think a few OS X defectors to Linux is going to be a good thing. Their expectations will help improve Linux, and competition from Linux will help drive Apple forward.
What's evident to me is that over the years a lot of people have used Macs, not because they preferred MacOS, but simply because it was the politically correct choice - it was Not Microsoft, it was 'the alternative', it was the cooler option. I am reminded of a lot of friends of mine who were into old Sixties garage music for years, but as soon as it became widely popular, got into other things. It is just part of who they are.
As well as being the canary in the mineshaft, you can also see these people as weathervanes - they get out just as things start to get too popular for their liking - and of course fairly often turn against the things they loved (Nirvana after Sub-Pop - you've got to be kidding).
On a personal level I stayed off Mac's through the 80s and 90s precisely because they were the sort of closed restrictive platform these guys have suddenly identified them to be. It wasn't until OS X that I started to change my mind.
Apparently not. It is just something that many companies choose to do, in the spirit of best practice. The only people who could force Apple to disclose those figures would be a large group of unhappy investors, or if they felt they had to to gain further investors. At the moment, neither of those things are likely, although inevitably at some point hubris will enter the picture.
I think it's right for analysts to draw attention to this, as a warning to investors that they are taking a gamble on opaque accounting; on the other hand, there is an implication to the analysis that the iPod is carrying an ailing computer business which I think is misleading - he is particular wrong in one major respect :
'Apple clearly has its feet in two separate and distinct business models, namely computer manufacturing and software creation, and the consumer electronics industry'
Besides lumping two things together that most companies keep separate (computer manufacturing and software creation), it also utterly fails to comprehend that it has been Apple's ability to develop it's own software than has resulted in it's success in the consumer electronics business. Most CE firms don't have that level of software engineering in-house (many don't have hardware engineering either, but that has traditionally been where companies like Toshiba or Sony have invested their R&D)
As an example - I've just bought a new Fuji camera (on grounds of it being able to do reasonable ISO 3200 shots). Nice bit of hardware - you can even go to manual mode and set your own exposure or aperture settings, which isn't bad for a consumer level camera. The interface on the camera is good - a really nice touch I noticed was that in just doesn't display any of the advanced options if you have the camera set in 'Auto' mode, set my a manual dial on top. Nice solution to balancing functionality and simplicity.
Guess what happened when I tried to install the supplied software - not only did it fail to install, the installer completely crashed the system (XP), resulting in a hard-reset (causing a boot-up disk scan).I can't even comment on the quality of the software because I couldn't install it. That is my 'out of the box' experience.
The main and obvious one is Cocoa. While NextStep was available on many platforms and GnuStep continues to be, Cocoa has advanced a long way since. For all practical purposes, Objective-C is pretty much a 'Mac-only' language.
Others that spring to mind :
WebObjects - was cross-platform for a while, and in a weird way still is (the run-time was C++, now Java, but the only way to get a licence is with OS X server, and the development tools are now Mac specific). Front-ends can be Java or Browser clients.
OSA - this is 'Open Scripting Architecture' - it is the framework for adding scripting languages to OS X. The main example is AppleScript, but Python and JavaScript (Late Night Software) are also available on top of OSA. Any application that is said to be 'AppleScriptable' is in fact exposed via the OSA, so this does make it a high-level development platform, useful for sticking applications together (obvious one is glueing together a BitTorrent client, video conversion software and iTunes to auto-convert files for a video ipod).
Quartz Composer - if you have Tiger development tools, fire this up. It's an interesting way to develop graphics components, which can then be used as plug-ins in apps that support them. Having looked at Motion, you can see how much Motion is simply a friendly UI over Quartz, while Composer is a much more raw version.
Widgets - Apple's Dashboard widgets allow a mix of technologies, but mostly Javascript. (You can have a Quartz based widget, and you can fire off OS commands from a widget too). Even has it's own IDE, separate to XCode - DashCode. Not officially out but easy to find online.
Unix shell scripting - obviously not Mac specific, but Darwin and OS X do have unique commands - i.e. you CAN use them for Mac-specific development.
Odd proprietary languages : FutureBASIC is still hanging in there, as a Mac only version of BASIC. (RealBASIC is cross-platform and now-OO). I've certainly seen reviews of other similar tools, like a 3D-games writing language, but they are not things I tend to keep in mind. Took me a bit of Googling to even find the name of FutureBASIC.
If you want a direction to go in, I would suggest Obj-C and Cocoa. If you want to get better closer to the native layer than you can with Java it's definitely the way to go.
One observation : There appear to be a growing number of apps that just use WebKit to throw up a browser window and then use HTML/JavaScript for the actual application code. Each to their own - I guess it makes sense if you mostly have web development skills.
Yes - due to lack of interest they have ceased development of the Java-Cocoa bridge. Of course I am sure that if there was a lot of interest, that decision would be reversed.
Where people have interest in particular technologies you'll certainly see JNI libraries appearing, but most Java development on the Mac is cross-platform so didn't use the Cocoa bridge. I would imagine that building on top of the Eclipse RCP will be a popular means for many Java developers to get a closer native feel.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate representation of the GPL or Stallman's view.
The equivalent of what you are saying, would be to insist that all software is shipped along with it's source code, and that I should have the right to alter or modify the program. Using non-standard 'parts' would invalidate my 'guarantee' (not that software is covered as well as cars against defects). I should be allowed to sell on my modified program, under my own conditions and at my own cost . . . but I should only be able to sell as many copies as I purchased. This exact model exists in the motor trade, with firms running modification production lines (the original Mini Cooper is a good example). A product can be both proprietary and 'open'.
Stallman's view is slightly different - firstly, unlike a BSD licence, I cannot sell on under my own conditions, only those of the GPL. Secondly, I don't NEED to pay the person whose code I have built on top of. Thirdly, anyone else can take a copy of what I have done and sell it for less or give it away.
In interview's he does express the idea that people (i.e. users) should contribute to the development of free software by funding the projects that they would like to see - I would agree that this is very different from Communism - if anything it is closest to the idea of a gift economy. Game theory shows that this actually results in the best outcome for society - if we all give more than we receive then 'wealth' grows more rapidly than under any competitive system. It is one of those systems, like Communism, Fascism or monetarism, that I think has a lot of appeal to people with logical minds.
And going back to the parent post - I'd agree that the debate over 'free' vs proprietary software has somehow become louder than the far more important debate, which is open vs proprietary standards. I am quite happy to use proprietary software so long as I can move my data to another platform or program.
Jherek - Michael Moorcock's reply is up on the Multiverse forum - http://www.multiverse.org/fora/showthread.php?t=35 28
Jherek - Firstly, congratulations on picking a pseudonym from my all time favourite book, and an author who is quite pertinent to the debate, given his anarchist inclinations, and his experiments (in the 70s) with 'open source' literature (thinking specifically of the Cornelius stories written by other authors in NW).
I've meant to ask him his views on this for ages, so today I did - new thread under the Q&A at Multiverse if you wish to join in.
>>The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist
>> that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with >>strangers, you must be allowed to.
>First off, your entire phrasing is biased - when you say "allowed to"
>it completely avoids the fact that sharing information is the natural order
>of things - you make it sound like we, as humans, naturally
>have some higher authority dictating what is and what is not allowed.
Dare I say that citing natural law and that sharing information is the natural order, also implies there is a higher authority dictating what is permitted.
I guess the debate here is whether recordings, books, etc, are 'information' or 'property'. My view is that they are actually closer to the latter than the former. If you want to go with what's natural - yes, you can't stop an idea, you can't stop me hearing a song and then going away and playing my own version, or writing my own version of Don Quixote.
An idea, a story, a song all exist independently of a particular instance.
A recording, on the other hand, is quite 'unnatural'.
>While the State is constantly trying to assume that role, that does not
> make such authority natural law.
I didn't say that it did. What I do believe is that many books, records, films, etc, only exist due to the existence of a legal framework based around copyright and royalties - and their relationship with technology.
We have long accepted the argument that the owner of a printing press is not permitted to just print copies of an authors work, despite that being a technological feasability.
>What educated people (vs the warez d00ds) are arguing regarding
> distribution is that the inherent scalability problems of physical distribution
> mean that, as a society, giving up the natural right to copy in exchange for >increased incentives to artists was a good bargain for society.
>But the inherent ease of electronic distribution make that contract much less >of a bargain for society today. The social contract must be renegotiated and >that negotiation must take into account the costs to society as well as the >benefits to society.
I would agree wholly. It just happens that I still think there is still some value for society in giving up our right to do as we please in order to encourage artists. The fact that we can all act as duplicators doesn't substantially change the bargain. What are the actual benefits for society?
>Many people argue that the costs of any sort of distribution restrictions are >far too high -- in particular that enforcement is close to impossible, making it >extremely expensive and that it leads to inefficient utilization of resources, or >more plainly, it causes lots of wasted effort and lost opportunities which hurt >society as a whole and serve only to enrich a few.
I certainly think technological restrictions are pointless, and must be resisted, for most of the above reasons. I just think the best approach remains civil, rather than criminal law, and a royalty based system.
In my mind, it is something like speeding; almost all cars can exceed legal limits, yet we do not want artificial restrictions on our cars. We all speed, but only to an extent - very few people do 100 in a 30 area. It is less a law than a formalisation of the social contract.
>>There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the >>cost of your free time) - and for most artist
See, I agree with about half of that, because pretty much the same arguments have been going on for centuries; I was going to say back to the birth of the printing press, until I remembered the Gnostic gospels, and even earlier Bible fragments. That tradition of the underground press has carried on through the centuries, but there have always been many reasons - sometimes things are uncommercial, sometimes things are actually bad but vanity rules, and sometimes they are suppressed by society.
Where I depart with you, however, is in your statement that the free software and free media have obliterated the need for the non-free. In the most basic sense this is true. There is no 'need' seeing as functionally equivalent software is available. However, many proprietary packages are still years ahead of the FOSS equivalents (compare OpenOffice presentation features with Keynote) - our society is not really built on 'need' but on desire and whim, waste and surplus. There is a lot wrong with that, and it is certainly a trap (work harder to buy things you don't need), but it is hardly news. I don't have a problem paying for Keynote or Delicious Library because I like them.
When you move onto art, you are into more dangerous territory. I buy a lot of small label music, and I've been involved with the underground music scene back to the 80s. I don't mean Underground as in 'MTV's alternative show' but as in bands distributing home-recorded cassettes and self-run record labels. A lot of these people are politically anti-major label. Most of them don't actually make any money out of what they are doing, but very few of them are into the idea of 'free culture', which is kind of odd. Even the cassette label people would charge about 4 times the value of a blank cassette for their music (quarter of the price of a CD or record). There was still an unspoken buy in to the capitalist idea that recorded music was something you traded.
(This may be because a lot of them are involved in home recording - if you are one-person and a home-studio there is no live performance to advertise. And T-Shirt sales were the sort of thing corporate bands do to get even more money out of their fans).
There is a lot of space between the major labels and free media. It's the space occupied by independent labels, download sites like emusic, small publishing houses, independent art galleries - the people who believe that the existing system of copyright that saw us through the C20th is actually OK - that MP3 is simply another way to sell music, not an opportunity to enforce anarchism on artists, or an opportunity to use that threat as a reason to introduce control.
The 'Economics of Electronic Data Exchange' only apply if you insist that because you CAN distribute something at zero cost, and share it with strangers, you must be allowed to. This has always struck me as a fallacy. There are many areas where we are fighting the exact same battle against technological abuse - where governments insist that because they CAN do something with technology, they must be allowed to (snooping, cluster bombs, chemical weapons, data mining). There is also the economics of production - even free culture has costs (the cost of your free time) - and for most artists, musicians and authors, those costs are eventually too high.
Finally - the idea that well-written books will be supplanted by Wikipedia is my idea of hell. I use Wikipedia regularly, and the web is my first port of call for searching for information on coding problems, but I have absolutely zero problem whatsoever with paying for a well written reference or teaching book. When I had no money, I used to use the library (cheaper than a PC and broadband).
Let's not even start on literature - Shakespeare and Dickens were hacks who wrote for pay, but I shudder to think about some of the voluntary contributions I read while doing DTP for a creative writing magazine.
Sometimes I think people get so caught up in the political and technological arguments they become far more important than the art. I can imagine some people reading this will be going - 'yes, exactly, the politics are more important than the art. Humanity must be truly free, even if all non-free art must be destroyed in the process'.