I don't know what you mean by "the PC approach" but locked down distribution of applications has been used by many organizations worried about security. It can be done in a way that is less restrictive than Apple's approach while still providing the same level of security, but so far no one has stepped up and implemented such a system on a mainstream consumer offering.
Yes, it's been done: by the organizations themselves. That's why no one has "stepped up" and implemented such a system on a consumer offering, it's not the manufacturer's role to do so and any system that attempts to generalize such a concept for the entirety of the marketplace will inevitably end up blocking apps that are useful to many organizations while still allowing apps that are either unnecessary or actively harmful to the productivity of others.
In what way is Apple trying to lockout competitors from HTML5?
By attempting to force a patented format they hold a large influence over onto the web, greatly raising the cost of entry to the web browser market.
If Steve cared about standards, he wouldn't have bitched and moaned to get Theora off the HTML5 standard, and in fact would've gladly supported it in both OSX and iOS. History, however, shows otherwise.
Because it had meant "take whatever I wrote, execute it and show me the results" for decades before Macs, and "take whatever I selected, and try to show it to me" is the closest analogue in the graphical world.
Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
Oh no, it really doesn't. The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
Sorry, but as much as it may pain some of the Apple crowd around here, Microsoft *did* actually go with the saner choice here.
Thing is, you don't need to use a CLI for anything on Debian either, and I don't think there's a significant difference in 'bleeding edge' between Fedora and Ubuntu either.
I don't have a problem with Ubuntu as a distro per se, but what I hate about its users is how they think every other distro is to the level of 2002-era Slackware in terms of usability, getting nothing but a blinking shell out-of-the-box and being forced to compile anything else by hand. Except not even 2002-era Slackware was *that* much of a pain, let alone modern Debian or Fedora.
These days, pretty much all you gain or lose going either way is a bunch of default themes, and varying levels of sanity in its default settings. Well, that and Debian's ability to build your own interface by mix-n-matching available apps rather than removing unwanted ones, but if you're the type that likes "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" style solutions you can also put the full GNOME/KDE suites during or after installation as well quite easily.
Well, considering even a guy with a Master's Degree in Computer Science had such a hard time with the inmigration process he postponed dealing with it again for *years*, I'd say it's hard to blame those who just "sneak" across.
If you'd blame the whole corporation even if it were Apple or Google, why did you justify yourself with Microsoft's alleged "history of being corrupt as a whole"? other than for karma whoring, of course.
I doubt you could find much on Microsoft that a simple Google search wouldn't turn on Apple as well. Other than being declared a monopoly of course, but that's only because Apple sucks at selling computers, not because they're not evil.
Still, even if you're correct that doesn't mean Microsoft did all of this themselves rather than having a bunch of their russian lawyers bribed by the government, and without evidence either way I'd say the latter is far more likely.
The Google case was different as there was enough evidence to determine it was a result of specific corporate policy put in place, so any blame should've rested on the company as a whole rather than a subset of it.
If you want a clearer parallel I'd direct you to the Foxconn suicides of a while back, where Slashdot as a whole fell on the side of "Apple is blameless for Foxconn's treatment of their employees" since there wasn't anything evidencing Apple's knowledge of the situation at Foxconn before the story broke out. Here we have the same thing with Microsoft and their russian branch's legal department, and the whole thing is suddenly Ballmer's fault?
Perhaps TFA offers some proof that Microsoft as a whole did this knowingly, can't read it until someone posts a source other than the NYT, but other than the entirely standard anti-piracy efforts all I get from TFS is that some of their lawyers are corrupt fucks, and that people are extending it to the entirety of Microsoft with nothing more than their personal bias to go for it.
To be fair to them, I still remember when the Apple loyalists said the same thing about Android, and yet here we are.
Yeah, Microsoft ain't the brightest bulb in the batch when it comes to portable platforms, but the iPhone isn't the unbeatable juggernaut that Slashdot tries to make it look as either.
To be against software patents is akin to saying that there's no innovation in the field of software, or that if there is innovation it doesn't need to be protected.
Wrong. It's akin to saying software is akin to mathematics: a field where innovations are far more valuable unrestricted than under a government-enforced monopoly.
Without software patents, there's nothing to stop a big company, or anyone for that matter, from stealing a small developer's idea.
So? here's what happens in the real world:
Without patents, Small Dev makes product A, Big Corp makes product iA, a blantant copy of A, getting most of A's potential user base as result of Big Corp's marketing strength. Small Dev gets a small niche in the market he helped create.
With patents however, Small Dev makes product A. Big Corp makes product iA, a blantant copy of A, getting most of A's potential user base as result of Big Corp's marketing strength. Small Devs sues Big Corp over patent infringement, so Big Corp has their lawyers find a dozen patents A owned by Big Corp and which infringes on and files a countersuit. Small Dev goes bankrupt trying to defend against it, and as result has to drop the original patent lawsuit. Big Corp gets the whole market for itself, and if Small Dev is very very lucky, Big Corp may believe his expertise is valuable enough to buy Small Dev on the cheap after the bankrupcy.
Fine, have more stringent standards for software patents instead of abolishing them.
Why? there's no evidence showing that the existence of patents itself is a positive force on the industry, regardless of the standards used.
What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators.
Citation needed. And I hope you won't use "numbers of patent held" to determine the degree of innovation but rather an objective, reasonable criteria that does not result in a circular argument.
Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set?
Strawman fallacy. The most usual argument against software patents are simply that software is of far greater value to society at large unpatented than otherwise, like math, not that it can't be inventive per se.
The flaw is with a lack of a rigorous model for determining what is and isn't obvious; the difficulty of truly understanding, without hindsight bias, what the level of ordinary skill in the art is.
That and differentiating what's an invention and what's simply math on a computer. But then again...
Stop trying to completely break what you don't understand, because despite the problems, there are a number of true innovators in software. And I won't say that they deserve patent protection, because that's not the point. But they should be given patent protection because we need to encourage that level of innovation, and you can tell where this innovation is most needed from those areas where huge gaps exist in FOSS offerings.
Your trollish closing aside, your argument does not necessarily follow: you still need to prove that said level of innovation is actually *encouraged* by such patents rather than obstructed by it. So yeah, Citation needed.
But what about people that just want to do the coding for themselves or fun?
They buy an Android or a Nokia smartphone.
I have a Mac, iPhone and XCode.
And that's your problem right there. If you had a Thinkpad, a Nexus One and Eclipse instead you'd be programming now rather than hoping Big Brother takes pity on you sometime before the next decade.
No, I'm saying that if you were reading Slashdot in recent months during the Flash/iPhone/iPad discussions or during the Flash HTML5/H264 discussions, Flash was pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. It solved all problems, and being critical of Flash got you modded down pretty regularly.
No, it didn't. Otherwise I would've seen posts stating that Flash sucked compared to Theora modded 'Troll' rather than 'Insightful'. What likely got you the downmod was defending Apple's attempted hijacking of the HTML5 standard to favor of their own patented mess instead of the truly open format that was to be in its place 'til then, not your treatment of Flash per se.
No, Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely explanation is that Apple survives and even thrives solely on its marketing department's expertise. Your "consumer experience" hypothesis fails to account for the distinct lack of success Apple has on that nebulous area we like to call "the rest of the world" relative to the US, where most of its marketing dollar is spent, and on markets other than home consumers, where most of its marketing dollar is aimed at.
you have to purchase a license to develop your own software for it (barring jailbreak) but then that's historically been the rule.
From what twisted, alternate universe do you come from? before Microsoft it was standard for any OS to come with a compiler or at least an interpreter for some given language (usually C or BASIC), and even Microsoft gave one away, just not on the same disk.
It IS a general purpose computer: get a license, code whatever the hell you want for it and it'll run it.
No, it's not. It has the potential to become one for as long as you keep paying Apple's fee, but the moment you stop is the moment it returns back to being nothing but a shiny toy.
Might as well start calling the upsizing of fast-food value meals a "joke" and a "gimmick" considering that they're available, they're more expensive, and you're under no obligation to purchase those - just like 3D TV.
If upsized fast-food meals sold poorly and were regularly found by normal consumers to taste worse than the regular-sized meals, damn right we'd call them a "gimmick" and a "joke".
I know, I know, you're emotionally invested in 3D TV and reeeeeally don't want to see it die, but if you want to convince us it'll still be around in a decade, you'll have to do better than just calling anyone who disagrees with you an "anti-3D troll".
OK then: Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
Not "who", "what". When I put your sorry ass in jail I'm acting as a law enforcement agent and, as such, you have the right to know why are you under arrest, and for how long. When I'm taking a leak however, I'm acting as a private individual and, as such, you'd better mind your own business and keep your goddamned hands out of my dick.
Though I guess in your ideal world the government would be free to just grab you off your bed, hit you with a tazer then dump you on a plane off to Guantanamo with nobody the wiser. After all, we wouldn't want to intrude on the life of the private citizen that acted as your judge, jury and executioner, do we?
But nice strawman, nonetheless. Seems to have grabbed you some modpoints at least.
In the case of Wikileaks, the short-term political goal of bringing the truth of the US' military actions out there is being pushed forward without consideration for the long-term effects on the state of the US military. I mean, come on. The US isn't going to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan (or avoid its next invasion, for that matter) just because of Wikileaks. Making the US invasion more difficult through leaks of classified information only increases the cost in blood of these invasions. It's the same preposterous logic that US warmongers have held, that continuing to blow people up will somehow make the Taliban leave sooner rather than later. Just accept that the US is doing these things, and it will be over a lot sooner and with a lot less pain.
Fixed that for you. Funny how your last statement takes on a whole new meaning when the rest is put into context, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what you mean by "the PC approach" but locked down distribution of applications has been used by many organizations worried about security. It can be done in a way that is less restrictive than Apple's approach while still providing the same level of security, but so far no one has stepped up and implemented such a system on a mainstream consumer offering.
Yes, it's been done: by the organizations themselves. That's why no one has "stepped up" and implemented such a system on a consumer offering, it's not the manufacturer's role to do so and any system that attempts to generalize such a concept for the entirety of the marketplace will inevitably end up blocking apps that are useful to many organizations while still allowing apps that are either unnecessary or actively harmful to the productivity of others.
So? what does that have to do with whether Apple cares about standards or not?
In what way is Apple trying to lockout competitors from HTML5?
By attempting to force a patented format they hold a large influence over onto the web, greatly raising the cost of entry to the web browser market.
If Steve cared about standards, he wouldn't have bitched and moaned to get Theora off the HTML5 standard, and in fact would've gladly supported it in both OSX and iOS. History, however, shows otherwise.
Why would anyone assume that return means open?
Because it had meant "take whatever I wrote, execute it and show me the results" for decades before Macs, and "take whatever I selected, and try to show it to me" is the closest analogue in the graphical world.
Under the Mac OS Finder return means "toggle editing the name", another defined action which at least makes a little sense since return ends the editing just like return on a typewriter ends the current line.
Oh no, it really doesn't. The logical jump from "end current line" to "edit selected item's name" is far too large to call it "[making] a little sense", larger still than the aforementioned "execute" -> "open" one which also has the benefit of being an analogy to another kind of computer rather than a whole different (and very much dead and forgotten) class of machines.
Sorry, but as much as it may pain some of the Apple crowd around here, Microsoft *did* actually go with the saner choice here.
Thing is, you don't need to use a CLI for anything on Debian either, and I don't think there's a significant difference in 'bleeding edge' between Fedora and Ubuntu either.
I don't have a problem with Ubuntu as a distro per se, but what I hate about its users is how they think every other distro is to the level of 2002-era Slackware in terms of usability, getting nothing but a blinking shell out-of-the-box and being forced to compile anything else by hand. Except not even 2002-era Slackware was *that* much of a pain, let alone modern Debian or Fedora.
These days, pretty much all you gain or lose going either way is a bunch of default themes, and varying levels of sanity in its default settings. Well, that and Debian's ability to build your own interface by mix-n-matching available apps rather than removing unwanted ones, but if you're the type that likes "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" style solutions you can also put the full GNOME/KDE suites during or after installation as well quite easily.
Well, considering even a guy with a Master's Degree in Computer Science had such a hard time with the inmigration process he postponed dealing with it again for *years*, I'd say it's hard to blame those who just "sneak" across.
Say what you will about Nintendo and Mario games, but by and large they are fun.
No, they really aren't, at least since Mario 64.
Isn't subjectivity wonderful?
If you'd blame the whole corporation even if it were Apple or Google, why did you justify yourself with Microsoft's alleged "history of being corrupt as a whole"? other than for karma whoring, of course.
I doubt you could find much on Microsoft that a simple Google search wouldn't turn on Apple as well. Other than being declared a monopoly of course, but that's only because Apple sucks at selling computers, not because they're not evil.
Still, even if you're correct that doesn't mean Microsoft did all of this themselves rather than having a bunch of their russian lawyers bribed by the government, and without evidence either way I'd say the latter is far more likely.
The Google case was different as there was enough evidence to determine it was a result of specific corporate policy put in place, so any blame should've rested on the company as a whole rather than a subset of it.
If you want a clearer parallel I'd direct you to the Foxconn suicides of a while back, where Slashdot as a whole fell on the side of "Apple is blameless for Foxconn's treatment of their employees" since there wasn't anything evidencing Apple's knowledge of the situation at Foxconn before the story broke out. Here we have the same thing with Microsoft and their russian branch's legal department, and the whole thing is suddenly Ballmer's fault?
Perhaps TFA offers some proof that Microsoft as a whole did this knowingly, can't read it until someone posts a source other than the NYT, but other than the entirely standard anti-piracy efforts all I get from TFS is that some of their lawyers are corrupt fucks, and that people are extending it to the entirety of Microsoft with nothing more than their personal bias to go for it.
The fact that you call Russia of all things a "third world" country shows you couldn't find your way out of your ass with a flashlight and a map.
Yeah, but if it had been Apple or Google only the corrupt lawyers would've been blamed and not the whole organization.
To be fair to them, I still remember when the Apple loyalists said the same thing about Android, and yet here we are.
Yeah, Microsoft ain't the brightest bulb in the batch when it comes to portable platforms, but the iPhone isn't the unbeatable juggernaut that Slashdot tries to make it look as either.
To be against software patents is akin to saying that there's no innovation in the field of software, or that if there is innovation it doesn't need to be protected.
Wrong. It's akin to saying software is akin to mathematics: a field where innovations are far more valuable unrestricted than under a government-enforced monopoly.
Without software patents, there's nothing to stop a big company, or anyone for that matter, from stealing a small developer's idea.
So? here's what happens in the real world:
Without patents, Small Dev makes product A, Big Corp makes product iA, a blantant copy of A, getting most of A's potential user base as result of Big Corp's marketing strength. Small Dev gets a small niche in the market he helped create.
With patents however, Small Dev makes product A. Big Corp makes product iA, a blantant copy of A, getting most of A's potential user base as result of Big Corp's marketing strength. Small Devs sues Big Corp over patent infringement, so Big Corp has their lawyers find a dozen patents A owned by Big Corp and which infringes on and files a countersuit. Small Dev goes bankrupt trying to defend against it, and as result has to drop the original patent lawsuit. Big Corp gets the whole market for itself, and if Small Dev is very very lucky, Big Corp may believe his expertise is valuable enough to buy Small Dev on the cheap after the bankrupcy.
Fine, have more stringent standards for software patents instead of abolishing them.
Why? there's no evidence showing that the existence of patents itself is a positive force on the industry, regardless of the standards used.
What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators.
Citation needed. And I hope you won't use "numbers of patent held" to determine the degree of innovation but rather an objective, reasonable criteria that does not result in a circular argument.
Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set?
Strawman fallacy. The most usual argument against software patents are simply that software is of far greater value to society at large unpatented than otherwise, like math, not that it can't be inventive per se.
The flaw is with a lack of a rigorous model for determining what is and isn't obvious; the difficulty of truly understanding, without hindsight bias, what the level of ordinary skill in the art is.
That and differentiating what's an invention and what's simply math on a computer. But then again...
Stop trying to completely break what you don't understand, because despite the problems, there are a number of true innovators in software. And I won't say that they deserve patent protection, because that's not the point. But they should be given patent protection because we need to encourage that level of innovation, and you can tell where this innovation is most needed from those areas where huge gaps exist in FOSS offerings.
Your trollish closing aside, your argument does not necessarily follow: you still need to prove that said level of innovation is actually *encouraged* by such patents rather than obstructed by it. So yeah, Citation needed.
But what about people that just want to do the coding for themselves or fun?
They buy an Android or a Nokia smartphone.
I have a Mac, iPhone and XCode.
And that's your problem right there. If you had a Thinkpad, a Nexus One and Eclipse instead you'd be programming now rather than hoping Big Brother takes pity on you sometime before the next decade.
No, I'm saying that if you were reading Slashdot in recent months during the Flash/iPhone/iPad discussions or during the Flash HTML5/H264 discussions, Flash was pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. It solved all problems, and being critical of Flash got you modded down pretty regularly.
No, it didn't. Otherwise I would've seen posts stating that Flash sucked compared to Theora modded 'Troll' rather than 'Insightful'. What likely got you the downmod was defending Apple's attempted hijacking of the HTML5 standard to favor of their own patented mess instead of the truly open format that was to be in its place 'til then, not your treatment of Flash per se.
No, Occam's Razor suggests that the most likely explanation is that Apple survives and even thrives solely on its marketing department's expertise. Your "consumer experience" hypothesis fails to account for the distinct lack of success Apple has on that nebulous area we like to call "the rest of the world" relative to the US, where most of its marketing dollar is spent, and on markets other than home consumers, where most of its marketing dollar is aimed at.
you have to purchase a license to develop your own software for it (barring jailbreak) but then that's historically been the rule.
From what twisted, alternate universe do you come from? before Microsoft it was standard for any OS to come with a compiler or at least an interpreter for some given language (usually C or BASIC), and even Microsoft gave one away, just not on the same disk.
It IS a general purpose computer: get a license, code whatever the hell you want for it and it'll run it.
No, it's not. It has the potential to become one for as long as you keep paying Apple's fee, but the moment you stop is the moment it returns back to being nothing but a shiny toy.
You're assuming that people over 18 wouldn't be prone to using words like "gay" and "fag" as insults.
Might as well start calling the upsizing of fast-food value meals a "joke" and a "gimmick" considering that they're available, they're more expensive, and you're under no obligation to purchase those - just like 3D TV.
If upsized fast-food meals sold poorly and were regularly found by normal consumers to taste worse than the regular-sized meals, damn right we'd call them a "gimmick" and a "joke".
I know, I know, you're emotionally invested in 3D TV and reeeeeally don't want to see it die, but if you want to convince us it'll still be around in a decade, you'll have to do better than just calling anyone who disagrees with you an "anti-3D troll".
OK then: Tell me exactly who should be treated as 'government' and who should be a private citizen. Give me a cast iron definition in a single sentence.
Not "who", "what". When I put your sorry ass in jail I'm acting as a law enforcement agent and, as such, you have the right to know why are you under arrest, and for how long. When I'm taking a leak however, I'm acting as a private individual and, as such, you'd better mind your own business and keep your goddamned hands out of my dick.
Though I guess in your ideal world the government would be free to just grab you off your bed, hit you with a tazer then dump you on a plane off to Guantanamo with nobody the wiser. After all, we wouldn't want to intrude on the life of the private citizen that acted as your judge, jury and executioner, do we?
But nice strawman, nonetheless. Seems to have grabbed you some modpoints at least.
In the case of Wikileaks, the short-term political goal of bringing the truth of the US' military actions out there is being pushed forward without consideration for the long-term effects on the state of the US military. I mean, come on. The US isn't going to pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan (or avoid its next invasion, for that matter) just because of Wikileaks. Making the US invasion more difficult through leaks of classified information only increases the cost in blood of these invasions. It's the same preposterous logic that US warmongers have held, that continuing to blow people up will somehow make the Taliban leave sooner rather than later. Just accept that the US is doing these things, and it will be over a lot sooner and with a lot less pain.
Fixed that for you. Funny how your last statement takes on a whole new meaning when the rest is put into context, huh?
Never trust a translation you didn't make yourself. And by "make" I don't mean "copy&pasted on Babelfish".
Much like there's a continent called Western Europe and another called Eastern Europe, which are collectively known as the Europes.
Oh, wait.