I could have probably networked and asked someone for an invitation, but that is rather missing the point that I don't feel I should have to beg for an invitation to try out Google's new software.
Invites and waiting lists are Google's way of managing roll-out, so that experimental software that is initially released doesn't have to handle veryone on the web jumping on it on day 1.
Since the biggest complaints about Wave that I heard from people who found it generally useful were about performance, I can't imagine that just blindly throwing the doors open to everyone with no controls would have made it more successful.
Google bought Etherpad and Jotspotlive, two very advanced implementations of real time collaborative editing (albeit without some of the extra features of wave). Can we please have them back Google?
Weren't those acquisitions largely for the purposes of (and the technology applied for) improving the realtime collaboration features in Google Documents and Spreadsheets?
I have lost trust in Google, I think the Wave was too innovative for them, it allowed data to stay on separate servers, perhaps Google wanted more control over our data than that model allowed.
The Google Wave protocol is hardly the only server-to-server protocol created by Google and leveraged in Google products that allows data to stay on servers outside of Google, so I doubt very much that that is the problem.
I think the problem is that an insufficient number of people were using the Wave product to continue to actively maintain it as such, not that the product offered people too much freedom to use non-Google servers.
"This case demonstrates that the FTC is willing to challenge anticompetitive conduct by even the most powerful companies in the fastest-moving industries," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said in a statement today.
If that's really the case, why aren't you putting a stop to carrier lock-in for cellphones?
Carrier lock-in for cellphones mostly comes from: 1. Incompatible hardware used on different networks, so that a phone for certain carriers won't work for certain other carriers -- that's clearly FCC, not FTC, jurisdiction. 2. Contract "early termination" penalties (tied in part to phone subsidies) -- already been addressed through rules requiring pro-rated reduction of early termination penalties rather than the flat penalty any time before the scheduled end of the contract period. And there are no-contract plans available from many carriers, as well, so being tied to a contract is mostly a choice that is not required to get access to the network. 3. Not wanting to change numbers -- already addressed through number portability rules.
I don't think there is as much real "lock-in" as there are people preferring getting the latest and greatest phone subsidized by their current provider to changing providers, even when they aren't completely happy with service.
I agree that it *should* be that way, but the debate regarding text vs. intent is alive and well in judicial circles, including (and especially) in the USSC.
Yeah, but the issue here isn't whether the intent or the text controls the interpretation of the law, that's mostly a peripheral issue. Its an issue of passing the strict scrutiny test for restrictions on fundamental Constitutional rights (here, the First Amendment right to free speech/press, though strict scrutiny isn't limited to the First Amendment.)
It's also been noted by historians that simply BUYING the slaves outright, and making them the property of the US Government, would have been 1/10th as expensive as fighting the war.
The United States didn't choose to take the slaves, and then choose to fight the war as a method to do it. While abolitionism was a fairly popular cause in the States that did not elect to rebel, it was not popular enough nationally (the South being part of the nation, after all) as to make abolition a national policy.
It is the states that chose to rebel -- first by acts of secession and forming the Confederation, and then more substantively by initiating armed conflict -- that chose the war. And, by doing so, made abolition politically viable.
So whether it would have been cheaper for the US to "nationalize and emancipate" all the slaves rather than fight a war had it chosen a policy of nationwide abolition is irrelevant, because the US never chose such a policy until well into the war the rebels started.
I can not lay my hand on any part of the Constitution that forbids Member States from seceding from the Union. On the contrary, the tenth amendment reserves that right to the states.
Art. IV, Sec. 4 empowers and obligates the US federal government to guarantee a specific form of government for a State once Congress has it to the Union (note also, related to this, that the consent of a State is nowhere required in the Constitution for it to be joined to the Union in the first place; that power is reserved to the Congress alone in Art. IV, Sec. 3.) This guarantee clearly is not for the benefit of the State government (who it operates directly against) and so cannot reasonably be interpretted in any way except to include a prohibition on the state government opting out by any means, including secession (a power of secession would also render as a dead letter the exclusive grant of power to Congress to join States to the Union.) This guarantee, then, obviously prohibits states from opting out of federal oversight of their form of government. Consequently, such opting-out via secession is a power prohibited by the Constitution to the States, and is thus not within the "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states".
Therefore, it is not reserved either to the States, or to the people, by the 10th Amendment.
don't think so. The iOS ecosystem is far more desirable from a developer standpoint. On iOS, developers are competing for a customer base that's willing to spend lots of money for their well-integrated product and accessories. On Android, developers compete with a lot of pretty good free applications, but no other product integration.
The strength of Android for a consumer, that there's an Android device for whatever you need, is a weakness for the Android ecosystem. Android devices are all different sizes and shapes, there's no particular killer application associated with it (as opposed to iTunes), making it difficult for peripheral manufacturers to work with it from a brand/design perspective.
The same things you say have generally been argued as an issue that makes the Windows PC market less attractive than the Mac market to sell things to. What has overcome that in the Windows (and, before that, DOS) PC market is that the fact that that market is stronger for consumers because of the diversity of manufacturers, and the wider install base resulting from the fact that it is more attractive to consumers means more sales.
If at some point there is a decrease in the number of developers pursuing the iOS market, then you may have a point, but suggesting that will happen is purely speculative right now.
I'm not saying that it will happen. I am saying that if Android devices continue to outsell iOS devices, it will naturally make development choices (both Android-native apps and relatively platform-neutral mobile web apps) other than iOS-native apps more attractive to mobile developers than would be the case if iOS was the leading platform in sales. And there is a danger to Apple of a positive feedback loop there, that as those other development choices become more attractive, iOS will lose its edge in apps, which will make the platform less attractive to consumers, and so on.
According to my history professor from a year ago, the proclamation freed exactly zero slaves in the union. My government professor agreed.
Insofar as, in regard to the civil war, "the union" generally means "the state of the United States of America which were not, at that time, attempting to secede", this is largley true (though not entirely, IIRC, as some of the slaves which were, under the pre-Proclamation policy, held by the Union Army as "contraband of war" were in fact held in the Union, and all such slaves were freed with the Proclamation): the areas to which the proclamation applied were all in parts of the USA that were in states that were, at the time, in rebellion. Further, for the most part, it didn't appy to areas within those rebelling states that were controlled by the US military (though there were a few exceptions, which is why there were a few, out of the total, slaves immediately freed.)
It seems that they wouldn't relinquish control of their PROPERTY without recompense, hence the reason the south seceded in the first place.
Nobody (well, at least not the government of the USA) was asking the South to give up their human "property" without recompense until they rebelled in the first place.
As it is, the restrictions in the proclamation reflected the ongoing political efforts both to bring parts of the South out of the rebellion by negotiation and to resolve slavery through the political process within the Union, more than any desire to avoid deprivation of property without recompense (in fact, every slave in the USA not freed by the US military reestablishing control over rebel territory and enforcing the proclamation was, either by action within the individual states or by the passage of the 13th Amendment, freed without recompense to their former masters by the end of the 1865.)
How do you create a monopoly which screws its customers without government preventing competitors from entering your market?
Most industries have natural barriers to entry which make it expensive for competitors to enter the market, and its quite possible for a dominant player to use its profits to buy up the companies in the industries that make the things that you'd need to enter as their competitor in the primary industry, and to continue doing so until their monopoly extends to the entire supply chain from the mineral rights to raw materials to the retail sales to the customers, making it practically impossible for any competitor to enter anywhere in the field.
The only government support that is generally necessary is government enforcement of property rights and the absence of government anti-monopoly action (and the former is often optional, as a sufficiently powerful player can enforce its own -- self-perceived -- property rights if the local government is unwilling or unable to do so.)
I'm sure there are a couple examples, but I can't actually think of any standards which arose from unregulated markets.
There are standards that arise from private industry that aren't directly spurred by regulation or involvement of public entities. (There is no such thing in reality as an "unregulated market", so its probably not worth looking for standards that emerged in such a market.)
For instance, while the AMQP messaging standard effort largely came from a heavily regulated industry (the early movers were in the financial industry, though software companies and others have signed on), it wasn't regulation that drove it, it was the fact that a bunch of large users of enterprise messaging software were unsatisfied with the existing offerings (and, I suspect, particularly the vendor lock-in that came with the existing enterprise-class offerings) and all had an interest in a developing and adopting a standard that would meet their needs and that vendors who wanted to business with them would need to conform to.
In fact, many of the standards that get adopted in government regulations (at least, in the US) are existing products of industry workgroups before they get adopted by government and mandated for use, and the existing industry workgroups are often charged by the government with updating the standards (though the regulating body chooses whether and when to adopt a new version of the standard that has been developed by the industry organization.)
Private enterprise didn't "largely" build the Internet. After the "very early phase" when government actually built the thing, it was publicly-funded universities that did the heavy lifting.
But even that might be somewhat misleading, since it wasn't in many cases publicly funded universities just using their general budget in their own discretion, but publicly-funded universities doing work on specific federal government grants issued under programs that were implemented for the specific purpose of advancing computing and communication, especially via the Internet, like the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 which provided the funding used at NCSA to, among other things, develope the first graphical web browser.
So, really, after the "very early phase" where government built the internet, was the later phase were major government policy efforts directed much of the heavy lifting.
This jailbreak thing is indeed a real live exploit running in the wild, but it's a trojan (kind of) since you are asking it to do one thing (display a PDF) and it does another (jailbreak the phone).
In a way it should be labeled Malware, but that hardly seems an appropriate label since it's doing the user a favor...
Actually, it advertises itself to the user as a jailbreak, even if the OS feature it exploits to perform that function is the PDF reader, so its not malware at all (at least, based on any current information about what it does.) OTOH, it uses a massive security hole that could be used by malware.
It says that it's caused by a PDF vulnerability in iOS, but is it in Apple's PDF viewer or in PDF itself?
Its obviously in Apple's PDF viewer, whether or not its a result of that viewer being a direct implementation of the spec.
But I'll be surprised if anyone can point to anything in any version of the PDF spec which requires a conforming implementation to allow unrestricted access to the underlying OS. It may require that certain APIs be available, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't allow those APIs to return errors if code running in a PDF document attempted to use them in a way which would violate the basic integrity of the underlying OS.
Actually the Emancipation Proclamation didn't apply to any part of the United States.
It only applied to the CSA
There is no part of the so-called Confederate States of America that was not part of the United States of America. It is true that it didn't apply to many areas under the effective control of the United States government at the time it was issued, and that only ~20,000 slaves were actually freed immediately when it went into effect.
and once those states were reclaimed, it didn't apply there either.
That's just wrong. As the union military retook control of the portions of the country to which the Proclamation applied, slaves in those areas were freed in accordance with the proclamation.
In order to free the slaves it required a Constitutional amendment.
Most slaves in the USA were, in fact, freed through the Proclamation prior to the 13th Amendment.
Government did not make the internet what it is today; private industry did.
Government created ARPAnet.
TCP/IP was developed as a solution to scalability on the government-controled ARPAnet.
"The Internet" as a real entity rather than a concept was created when the the government switched ARPAnet to TCP/IP and then allowed connections to other networks.
A researcher at a (multi-)government-funded lab (CERN) developed the protocol (HTTP) and data format (HTML) that were key to the popularization of the Internet.
Another government-funded lab (NCSA) developed the graphical web browser, the key application of HTTP/HTML that drove the popularization of the Internet.
So, yeah, I think its fair to say that governments did a lot, directly, to both create the internet and make it what it is today.
Admittedly, once the internet was popular and commercial opportunity was recognized, private industry became more involved in shaping the further development, though even now government is very much involved in the development of the internet.
fact, looking at current government and military uses of networks and IP, and it's inability to keep up with not just commercial; but foreign government uses as well
That one government can't keep up with other governments isn't evidence of the lack of potence of "government" generally, its an indication that the poorly-performing government is either not devoting sufficient resources to the task, or not using those resources as effectively as other governments.
The internet would be born no matter who designed it. It just so happened that the US government was the only entity that owned enough computers to need a network like that in the early 60s.
Its worth noting that government involvement in shaping the internet didn't end with the creation of a single integrated TCP/IP based network; the key developments that made the internet popular were the development, by (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, of HTTP and HTML at the (multi-)government-funded European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the subsequent development of the graphical web browser leveraging HTTP and HTML by a team at the government- (US and State of Illinois, primarily) funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications with specific project funding from the federal High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991.
And who knows, had private enterprise designed the internet from the start, it could have more elegant solutions and such.
We don't have to speculate: we know what private industry did when it got access to the internet. It developed a variety of walled-garden services (like CompuServe, Prodigy, and the early incarnation of AOL) that made parasitic use of the public internet (e.g., interfacing with internet mail) without doing much to innovate in the actual use of the public internet. The innovations which made the public internet itself directly popular and eventually made the walled-gardens obsolete were HTTP, HTML, and the graphical web browser, all developed at government funded institutions.
Not hardly. Corporate networks would never, ever have evolved into the Internet.
I think when GP refers to the "networks of the 1970s" he's referring to the actual early Internet and its direct precursors like ARPAnet as precursors to the modern, popular Internet.
I don't think he was referring to corporate internal networks of the 1970s in general.
So compare the platform then, not the device. iOS runs on multiple different devices. Android does too.
For some developers, the platform combined with the type of device makes a difference -- while for some, a generic mobile device is fine, for some that a device is a phone makes a difference. And I already discussed the comparison of the platforms without restriction to a particular (e.g., phone) device class in GP.
There are lots of possible comparisons which are relevant for lots of different uses. Lots of people seem to be arguing as if there is only one right comparison to make (whichever comparison produces the results they are happier seeing, it seems) -- that's wrong. There are infinitely many valid comparisons, though there are invalid uses of any of the valid comparisons.
If a developer is targeting Apple's platform, they're targeting a version of iOS, and by all indications, developers are targeting iOS more than Android.
Yes, they are. OTOH, that's a backward looking view of what developers are doing, which doesn't help developers now decide what to do. Comparisons of the trends in consumer sales are a basis (though not the only one!) for developers deciding what the best approach is now and going forward.
true that the Android platform is becoming dominant. But it is interesting (admirable?) that the iPhones are still by far the most popular smartphone devices.
Great for Android/Google/HTC/Motorola/Samsung, but certainly nothing to worry about for Apple.
And Apple may be the biggest individual seller of desktop computers (it was for a while, ISTR, don't know if that's still true) but the fact that MacOS has far less penetration than Windows means that MacOS is far less attractive for many application developers.
If the same thing happens with the mobile space, it will make native iOS apps less attractive to developers than other choices. Which has a feedback effect, as the decrease in iPhone-specific apps will reduce the incentive to buy into the platform for the apps.
But this article is skewed...did anyone take into consideration what Apple would have done with iPhone sales if they offered a "Buy one get one free" deal like Verizon was? It's little wonder Android phones are flying off the shelf!
For lots of people making business decisions based on current market trends, it doesn't really matter that Apple could be doing better if they took a course of action that they have shown no inclination to take.
And for those that it does make a difference to (e.g., Apple stockholders evaluating the performance of Apple's current executive management), adding that into consideration might not make Apple (management) look any better.
Certainly, I don't think developers looking for where to target apps -- native iOS, native Android, or portable web -- it makes a big difference why Android is winning, what matters is that Android is ahead in sales and that it is particularly ahead in sales to new smartphone owners, so its going to be increasingly shaping expectations. That makes both native Android and portable web applications more attractive as compared to native iOS apps than would be the case if more iPhone handsets were ending up in customers hands than Android, no matter what the cause for Android's relative success is.
I'm a die hard Apple-Hater. The mere sight of Apple's logo gives me the creeps but I still think it's unfair to compare the sales of an entire Platform with the sales of one phone.
Its certainly relevant to anyone who cares about targeting a platform (such as, say, developers) to compare sales of one platform to another. The fact that one platform only has devices from one manufacturer, and a fairly small number of devices from that manufacturer, doesn't somehow make the comparison any less meaningful, it just explains one of the factors that contributes to the overall relative performance.
Coz if you're gonna do that then you should include ipod touch and ipad and it still wouldn't be fair.
Well, that would be relevant to the size of the platform if you were looking it at from a more general mobile perspective rather than a phone perspective (whether that is the comparison any given person is interested in probably depends on what they plan to do in the market.)
Of course, there's more manufacturers and models of non-phone Android devices on the market than there are of non-phone iOS devices, so expanding the comparison to include non-phone devices wouldn't necessarily help Apple.
The numbers for the iPhone are of course going to reflect that the apple crowd has been holding off and waited for the new generation iPhone 4.
Probably very much, especially considering that Apple seems to be doing a very good job of selling upgrades to the same people, while Android devices are doing better at selling to people who are new to the platform and even smartphones in general.
OTOH, this isn't exactly good for Apple's relevance in the market; if Apple becomes in the mobile space what it is in the desktop space (successful at selling upgrades to a fairly static minority slice of the market), the attraction of its OS as an application platform will recede compared both to native apps for other platforms and portable web apps that can be used across a variety of mobile platforms.
I would have figured prices at or greater than paperback + cost of a reader would keep their sales figures laughably low.
Not all books for which electronic versions are available -- particularly new releases -- even have a paperback version, so often the relevant cost comparison is to the cost of hardbacks, where the cost of ebooks is favorable, and the cost of the ereader device compares fairly favorably to the cost of bookshelves (especially if you consider the value of the space in the home, etc., in which the bookshelves would reside.)
Aren't e-books selling at levels competitive with physical books?
No a single vendor, Amazon.com -- who sells exclusively by internet -- is selling as many ebooks as they are selling hardbacks (not physical books in total.)
That is very far from ebooks selling as well as physical books overall in the market.
The marginal cost to produce an individual copy may be zero; the cost of the ebook is, however, not just the marginal cost to produce a copy, its the fixed costs of producing the title divided by the number of copies sold plus the marginal cost of the copy.
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Invites and waiting lists are Google's way of managing roll-out, so that experimental software that is initially released doesn't have to handle veryone on the web jumping on it on day 1.
Since the biggest complaints about Wave that I heard from people who found it generally useful were about performance, I can't imagine that just blindly throwing the doors open to everyone with no controls would have made it more successful.
Weren't those acquisitions largely for the purposes of (and the technology applied for) improving the realtime collaboration features in Google Documents and Spreadsheets?
The Google Wave protocol is hardly the only server-to-server protocol created by Google and leveraged in Google products that allows data to stay on servers outside of Google, so I doubt very much that that is the problem.
I think the problem is that an insufficient number of people were using the Wave product to continue to actively maintain it as such, not that the product offered people too much freedom to use non-Google servers.
Carrier lock-in for cellphones mostly comes from:
1. Incompatible hardware used on different networks, so that a phone for certain carriers won't work for certain other carriers -- that's clearly FCC, not FTC, jurisdiction.
2. Contract "early termination" penalties (tied in part to phone subsidies) -- already been addressed through rules requiring pro-rated reduction of early termination penalties rather than the flat penalty any time before the scheduled end of the contract period. And there are no-contract plans available from many carriers, as well, so being tied to a contract is mostly a choice that is not required to get access to the network.
3. Not wanting to change numbers -- already addressed through number portability rules.
I don't think there is as much real "lock-in" as there are people preferring getting the latest and greatest phone subsidized by their current provider to changing providers, even when they aren't completely happy with service.
Yeah, but the issue here isn't whether the intent or the text controls the interpretation of the law, that's mostly a peripheral issue. Its an issue of passing the strict scrutiny test for restrictions on fundamental Constitutional rights (here, the First Amendment right to free speech/press, though strict scrutiny isn't limited to the First Amendment.)
The United States didn't choose to take the slaves, and then choose to fight the war as a method to do it. While abolitionism was a fairly popular cause in the States that did not elect to rebel, it was not popular enough nationally (the South being part of the nation, after all) as to make abolition a national policy.
It is the states that chose to rebel -- first by acts of secession and forming the Confederation, and then more substantively by initiating armed conflict -- that chose the war. And, by doing so, made abolition politically viable.
So whether it would have been cheaper for the US to "nationalize and emancipate" all the slaves rather than fight a war had it chosen a policy of nationwide abolition is irrelevant, because the US never chose such a policy until well into the war the rebels started.
Art. IV, Sec. 4 empowers and obligates the US federal government to guarantee a specific form of government for a State once Congress has it to the Union (note also, related to this, that the consent of a State is nowhere required in the Constitution for it to be joined to the Union in the first place; that power is reserved to the Congress alone in Art. IV, Sec. 3.) This guarantee clearly is not for the benefit of the State government (who it operates directly against) and so cannot reasonably be interpretted in any way except to include a prohibition on the state government opting out by any means, including secession (a power of secession would also render as a dead letter the exclusive grant of power to Congress to join States to the Union.) This guarantee, then, obviously prohibits states from opting out of federal oversight of their form of government. Consequently, such opting-out via secession is a power prohibited by the Constitution to the States, and is thus not within the "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states".
Therefore, it is not reserved either to the States, or to the people, by the 10th Amendment.
The same things you say have generally been argued as an issue that makes the Windows PC market less attractive than the Mac market to sell things to. What has overcome that in the Windows (and, before that, DOS) PC market is that the fact that that market is stronger for consumers because of the diversity of manufacturers, and the wider install base resulting from the fact that it is more attractive to consumers means more sales.
I'm not saying that it will happen. I am saying that if Android devices continue to outsell iOS devices, it will naturally make development choices (both Android-native apps and relatively platform-neutral mobile web apps) other than iOS-native apps more attractive to mobile developers than would be the case if iOS was the leading platform in sales. And there is a danger to Apple of a positive feedback loop there, that as those other development choices become more attractive, iOS will lose its edge in apps, which will make the platform less attractive to consumers, and so on.
Insofar as, in regard to the civil war, "the union" generally means "the state of the United States of America which were not, at that time, attempting to secede", this is largley true (though not entirely, IIRC, as some of the slaves which were, under the pre-Proclamation policy, held by the Union Army as "contraband of war" were in fact held in the Union, and all such slaves were freed with the Proclamation): the areas to which the proclamation applied were all in parts of the USA that were in states that were, at the time, in rebellion. Further, for the most part, it didn't appy to areas within those rebelling states that were controlled by the US military (though there were a few exceptions, which is why there were a few, out of the total, slaves immediately freed.)
Nobody (well, at least not the government of the USA) was asking the South to give up their human "property" without recompense until they rebelled in the first place.
As it is, the restrictions in the proclamation reflected the ongoing political efforts both to bring parts of the South out of the rebellion by negotiation and to resolve slavery through the political process within the Union, more than any desire to avoid deprivation of property without recompense (in fact, every slave in the USA not freed by the US military reestablishing control over rebel territory and enforcing the proclamation was, either by action within the individual states or by the passage of the 13th Amendment, freed without recompense to their former masters by the end of the 1865.)
Most industries have natural barriers to entry which make it expensive for competitors to enter the market, and its quite possible for a dominant player to use its profits to buy up the companies in the industries that make the things that you'd need to enter as their competitor in the primary industry, and to continue doing so until their monopoly extends to the entire supply chain from the mineral rights to raw materials to the retail sales to the customers, making it practically impossible for any competitor to enter anywhere in the field.
The only government support that is generally necessary is government enforcement of property rights and the absence of government anti-monopoly action (and the former is often optional, as a sufficiently powerful player can enforce its own -- self-perceived -- property rights if the local government is unwilling or unable to do so.)
There are standards that arise from private industry that aren't directly spurred by regulation or involvement of public entities. (There is no such thing in reality as an "unregulated market", so its probably not worth looking for standards that emerged in such a market.)
For instance, while the AMQP messaging standard effort largely came from a heavily regulated industry (the early movers were in the financial industry, though software companies and others have signed on), it wasn't regulation that drove it, it was the fact that a bunch of large users of enterprise messaging software were unsatisfied with the existing offerings (and, I suspect, particularly the vendor lock-in that came with the existing enterprise-class offerings) and all had an interest in a developing and adopting a standard that would meet their needs and that vendors who wanted to business with them would need to conform to.
In fact, many of the standards that get adopted in government regulations (at least, in the US) are existing products of industry workgroups before they get adopted by government and mandated for use, and the existing industry workgroups are often charged by the government with updating the standards (though the regulating body chooses whether and when to adopt a new version of the standard that has been developed by the industry organization.)
But even that might be somewhat misleading, since it wasn't in many cases publicly funded universities just using their general budget in their own discretion, but publicly-funded universities doing work on specific federal government grants issued under programs that were implemented for the specific purpose of advancing computing and communication, especially via the Internet, like the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 which provided the funding used at NCSA to, among other things, develope the first graphical web browser.
So, really, after the "very early phase" where government built the internet, was the later phase were major government policy efforts directed much of the heavy lifting.
Actually, it advertises itself to the user as a jailbreak, even if the OS feature it exploits to perform that function is the PDF reader, so its not malware at all (at least, based on any current information about what it does.) OTOH, it uses a massive security hole that could be used by malware.
Its obviously in Apple's PDF viewer, whether or not its a result of that viewer being a direct implementation of the spec.
But I'll be surprised if anyone can point to anything in any version of the PDF spec which requires a conforming implementation to allow unrestricted access to the underlying OS. It may require that certain APIs be available, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't allow those APIs to return errors if code running in a PDF document attempted to use them in a way which would violate the basic integrity of the underlying OS.
There is no part of the so-called Confederate States of America that was not part of the United States of America. It is true that it didn't apply to many areas under the effective control of the United States government at the time it was issued, and that only ~20,000 slaves were actually freed immediately when it went into effect.
That's just wrong. As the union military retook control of the portions of the country to which the Proclamation applied, slaves in those areas were freed in accordance with the proclamation.
Most slaves in the USA were, in fact, freed through the Proclamation prior to the 13th Amendment.
Government created ARPAnet.
TCP/IP was developed as a solution to scalability on the government-controled ARPAnet.
"The Internet" as a real entity rather than a concept was created when the the government switched ARPAnet to TCP/IP and then allowed connections to other networks.
A researcher at a (multi-)government-funded lab (CERN) developed the protocol (HTTP) and data format (HTML) that were key to the popularization of the Internet.
Another government-funded lab (NCSA) developed the graphical web browser, the key application of HTTP/HTML that drove the popularization of the Internet.
So, yeah, I think its fair to say that governments did a lot, directly, to both create the internet and make it what it is today.
Admittedly, once the internet was popular and commercial opportunity was recognized, private industry became more involved in shaping the further development, though even now government is very much involved in the development of the internet.
That one government can't keep up with other governments isn't evidence of the lack of potence of "government" generally, its an indication that the poorly-performing government is either not devoting sufficient resources to the task, or not using those resources as effectively as other governments.
Its worth noting that government involvement in shaping the internet didn't end with the creation of a single integrated TCP/IP based network; the key developments that made the internet popular were the development, by (now Sir) Tim Berners-Lee, of HTTP and HTML at the (multi-)government-funded European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the subsequent development of the graphical web browser leveraging HTTP and HTML by a team at the government- (US and State of Illinois, primarily) funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications with specific project funding from the federal High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991.
We don't have to speculate: we know what private industry did when it got access to the internet. It developed a variety of walled-garden services (like CompuServe, Prodigy, and the early incarnation of AOL) that made parasitic use of the public internet (e.g., interfacing with internet mail) without doing much to innovate in the actual use of the public internet. The innovations which made the public internet itself directly popular and eventually made the walled-gardens obsolete were HTTP, HTML, and the graphical web browser, all developed at government funded institutions.
I think when GP refers to the "networks of the 1970s" he's referring to the actual early Internet and its direct precursors like ARPAnet as precursors to the modern, popular Internet.
I don't think he was referring to corporate internal networks of the 1970s in general.
For some developers, the platform combined with the type of device makes a difference -- while for some, a generic mobile device is fine, for some that a device is a phone makes a difference. And I already discussed the comparison of the platforms without restriction to a particular (e.g., phone) device class in GP.
There are lots of possible comparisons which are relevant for lots of different uses. Lots of people seem to be arguing as if there is only one right comparison to make (whichever comparison produces the results they are happier seeing, it seems) -- that's wrong. There are infinitely many valid comparisons, though there are invalid uses of any of the valid comparisons.
Yes, they are. OTOH, that's a backward looking view of what developers are doing, which doesn't help developers now decide what to do. Comparisons of the trends in consumer sales are a basis (though not the only one!) for developers deciding what the best approach is now and going forward.
And Apple may be the biggest individual seller of desktop computers (it was for a while, ISTR, don't know if that's still true) but the fact that MacOS has far less penetration than Windows means that MacOS is far less attractive for many application developers.
If the same thing happens with the mobile space, it will make native iOS apps less attractive to developers than other choices. Which has a feedback effect, as the decrease in iPhone-specific apps will reduce the incentive to buy into the platform for the apps.
For lots of people making business decisions based on current market trends, it doesn't really matter that Apple could be doing better if they took a course of action that they have shown no inclination to take.
And for those that it does make a difference to (e.g., Apple stockholders evaluating the performance of Apple's current executive management), adding that into consideration might not make Apple (management) look any better.
Certainly, I don't think developers looking for where to target apps -- native iOS, native Android, or portable web -- it makes a big difference why Android is winning, what matters is that Android is ahead in sales and that it is particularly ahead in sales to new smartphone owners, so its going to be increasingly shaping expectations. That makes both native Android and portable web applications more attractive as compared to native iOS apps than would be the case if more iPhone handsets were ending up in customers hands than Android, no matter what the cause for Android's relative success is.
Its certainly relevant to anyone who cares about targeting a platform (such as, say, developers) to compare sales of one platform to another. The fact that one platform only has devices from one manufacturer, and a fairly small number of devices from that manufacturer, doesn't somehow make the comparison any less meaningful, it just explains one of the factors that contributes to the overall relative performance.
Well, that would be relevant to the size of the platform if you were looking it at from a more general mobile perspective rather than a phone perspective (whether that is the comparison any given person is interested in probably depends on what they plan to do in the market.)
Of course, there's more manufacturers and models of non-phone Android devices on the market than there are of non-phone iOS devices, so expanding the comparison to include non-phone devices wouldn't necessarily help Apple.
Probably very much, especially considering that Apple seems to be doing a very good job of selling upgrades to the same people, while Android devices are doing better at selling to people who are new to the platform and even smartphones in general.
OTOH, this isn't exactly good for Apple's relevance in the market; if Apple becomes in the mobile space what it is in the desktop space (successful at selling upgrades to a fairly static minority slice of the market), the attraction of its OS as an application platform will recede compared both to native apps for other platforms and portable web apps that can be used across a variety of mobile platforms.
Not all books for which electronic versions are available -- particularly new releases -- even have a paperback version, so often the relevant cost comparison is to the cost of hardbacks, where the cost of ebooks is favorable, and the cost of the ereader device compares fairly favorably to the cost of bookshelves (especially if you consider the value of the space in the home, etc., in which the bookshelves would reside.)
No a single vendor, Amazon.com -- who sells exclusively by internet -- is selling as many ebooks as they are selling hardbacks (not physical books in total.)
That is very far from ebooks selling as well as physical books overall in the market.
The marginal cost to produce an individual copy may be zero; the cost of the ebook is, however, not just the marginal cost to produce a copy, its the fixed costs of producing the title divided by the number of copies sold plus the marginal cost of the copy.