Posts by Steen Hive 842 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Nov 2007
Not only have 3rd party developers in the mobile space have to "adapt to changes Apples software and hardware environment", but they have to track a multitude of frequent changes in the SDK T&C - any one of which could mean their entire product has to be thrown out and written from scratch.
And on the Desktop, the source tree for the likes of CS5 is likely bigger than the entire Mac OS one, kernel and Cocoa included.
Nearly every web "standard" since time immemorial has suffered from exactly the same sort of bollox.
Now, flash is crap - everyone knows it's crap - but you know what? if I can use it to deliver a reasonably consistent experience without browser-sniffing, css hiding and positioning hacks, JS abstraction layers, per-browser codec detection and all the associated maintainability nightmares, I'm going to do just that. Sorry, my life is too short to wait for these cocks to get their act together.
I'm pretending nothing - the point is the absolute or relative volume of infringement is entirely irrelevant - the costs, if any, to the industry are. Now proto-Stalinists like you who undoubtedly have scant regard for individuals' hard-won rights to privacy, due process and freedom from arbitrary punishment should make a case for abrogating those rights in favour of your right to unlimited profit. Proving that one instance of infringement has led to one lost sale would be a start - over to you, Spock.
The "pirate" parties and friends can call themselves what they like - YOU calling it "piracy" gives you as much credence as calling it "murder".
"Copying stuff onto disks and sharing it with your chums is pre-internet style piracy and would massively reduce the offences carried out"
I thought "Home taping killed music" 3 decades ago? Nice to see the music came back to life miraculously after being dead all these years.
"Piracy" happens to ships in the Gulf Of Aden, not to computer files.
"He broke the law. He admits he broke the law. There is an agreement (no matter what you think about it) that the Americans can extradite him for trial in the US. What's there to decide?"
Well there's the decision whether the UK's obligations to bend over for uncle sam abrogate their responsibilities to protect UK citizens from the actions of a state where torture is legal for starters.
Secondly there's the decision whether the "crime" really should be extraditable in any just sense under a treaty that didn't come into effect till years after the "crime" was committed.
Finally, I think "broke the law" is being a bit fanciful - in that he did nothing in principle more onerous than pointing a web browser at a government computer that was wide-open on the internet.
"On the one hand, he pretty obviously committed a crime."
Really? If some buffoon leaves port 80 open with blank auth on a webserver or a proxy that the public is not supposed to access, and someone goes poking around in it looking at stuff, has a crime been committed?
Or is it just a crime because it's a shell on a different port? Seriously?
I suppose if that is a crime, people "stepping on the cracks in the pavement" should have the book thrown at them.
No not the one that says "no interpreted code" ( although that is stupid enough) But the one in the iPhone 4 SDK that says "no compiled code" unless *originally* written in C, C++ or Objective C, which was specifically designed to target the CS5 native-code implementation developed by Adobe to avoid falling foul of the original stupid "no interpereted code" clause.
Beyond the pale by a long way.
Please illustrate your argument for "Adobe hijacking Apples IP".
I'm the last person who would ever defend Adobe in general and flash in particular, so it isn't Adobe that directly concerns me. Apple are playing fast and loose with every developer who invests money and resources in making the platform viable. It seems like nearly every week on this site there is some story about Jobs pulling the rug out under someone's feet, if not by changing T & C at frequent intervals, then by the completely arbitrary way the existing T & C are interpreted. This is market manipulation by dictat, and Apple have a 100% monopoly on supply of iPhone apps. Anyone that finds this sort of behaviour acceptable is definitely a few cards short of a deck. El Reg is to be commended for keeping this sort of shenanigans in the spotlight - and it's quite clear what Apple think of them, for not being the fawning, obsequious inadequates that form the rest of the IT press.
Luckily I have not developed for the iPhone in Flash or otherwise (precisely because of this rubbish), or I would actually be pissed on my own behalf. Some of my stuff does target MacOS, though and if I get a whiff of anything similar approaching in that area, I'll drop the platform like a hot potato - except maybe bringing up the odd hackintosh hardware driver just for fun.
Anyone wanna help with an actionscript->Embedded C++/IOKit translator for a laugh? ;-)
Get off your high-horse, "Silly idealogue" isn't "name-calling"? - Apple started this spat by including a blanket clause in their T&C to *specifically* target Adobe NOT Flash! ( and not to mention making the future very uncertain for small, innovative companies like Unity, etc. ) and YOU started the name calling.
The point being that such a clause is just as much a ridiculous abuse as the GPL specifically including a clause to exclude Apple. Sorry if that was beyond you.
As for ideas, in the video arena you are probably correct in that html5 and friends can do everything that flash video can do, and Adobe have been idiotic in their response to the web community in general - with a bit of foresight they could have opened flash up completely years ago. ( Although I suspect that the codebase they inherited from Macromedia was a complete dog's dinner.) That however is very far from the point H264 is a patent-incumbered published standard, not an open one, and theora has major performance issues. So essentially very little, if anything is gained by replacing flash with either in the long run. Google may very well open VP8 in which case it would be a good candidate, but no-one will implement it for years until they are sure patent-trolls won't crawl out of the woodwork á là WMV9/VC-1.
Again very far from the point in this little Adobe-Apple spat, because it has nothing to do with "openness" or the future of internet video at all, just odious business practices.
"Think about it. Apple are a big OSS contributer. They already have inplace a good enough (OSS) replacement for gcc. What good would banning them do, other than satisfy your own over inflated sence of entitlement and petty, and frankly pointless predjudice of something that you don't fully understand?"
It would simply be a reflection of Apple's own over-inflated, supercilious sense of entitlement and pointless predjudices. - Banning *binaries* because they have been written in a different source language - WTF? Mind you, I'll put the "Joke Alert" icon up next time for the hard-of-thinking and similarly disadvantaged.
In these days of data breaches, personal data flying round on USB sticks and in Excel spreadsheets, compromising the security and safety of your users by handing the keys to the kingdom by telephone to a retarded moron in a suit who thinks "The Internet" is a big blue "E" is bordering on criminal negligence .
Being an asocial fuckup is much less deserving of soap-bar treatment than overreaching and under-qualified bureaucracy. In my opinion he did the right thing the wrong way, that is all.
"We're not suggesting the private sector's data handling will be any worse than the public sector's (au contraire…),"
Au contraire or not, the fact is if a public sector entity outsources data-handling to a private sector entitiy, then the attack vector/leak vector/fuckup vector surface immediately more than doubles - now you have two entities that "need" access to the data instead of one and also a communications channel to lock down. That together with any possible mismatch in protocols between the players leads to a "when" rather than "if" scenario for leaked data.
I've long been of the opinion that personal data should be considered private property and licenced on an individual basis for organizations to use with an expiry date mandated by law, renewable by explicit consent. Kinda like copyright, but rather acting in the interests of individuals rather than against them. Further, any and all organizations - private or public - that require to use this kind of information would themselves need to be licenced on a term basis subject to complying with certain data-protection criteria. No licence, no data - tough luck.
If it seems convoluted and difficult to implement, compare it to the problem of trying to keep a reign on ever-expanding and more-or-less inconsistent datasets bouncing back and forth between an ever-growing number of keepers.
No,no and NO!
"Your claims of monopoly abuse are wrong for the very simple reason that there are competitors; the market *isn't* iPhone software. If that were true, it could be argued that Apple have a case against Corel, Autodesk and to lesser extent Microsoft, to name three obvious companies, for *not*, or stopping, writing software for the Mac platform--which is just silly."
These companies ( Adobe, Unity, Opera etc etc ) don't make phones, don't make phone platforms, but you are mistakenly or disingenuously trying to conflate *their* market with Apple's market.
You also seem to have difficulty conceptualising the market in desktop software - in fact you have it arse-backwards - if Adobe refuse to code for MacOS because they think Jobs is a prick, it is *not* monopoly abuse, but if Jobs decides to block Creative Suite because he has a bad haemorrhoid day, it certainly IS. Jobs is engaging in anti-competitive behaviour in that case, Adobe is not.
The mono runtime too. Oops.
Of course the market is iPhone software, you know like there is a market for windows software, mac software, android software? That's what these people are jumping through hoops to try and compete in, and quite often having their hard work and great products nullified by dictat.
"You are free to develop and/or buy (insert other platform of choice here)" has bugger-all to do with this. Apple exerts 100% monopoly control on this market, no matter how significant or not you think that market is.
I hear yah. Unity - a great little, innovative company with an outstanding product - they've just unveiled iPad support too, and that jackbooted thug Jobs is pulling the rug from under their feet as we speak.
This is why monopolies and monopolistic control of any market hurt, all you apologists. And for the last fucking time - the market isn't phones, the market is software for the iPhone.
hmm never thought I'd say that. :-)
But Visual Studio wins over Eclipse in surprisingly few areas - the native debugger being one that comes immediately to mind. The MS Compiler is usually pretty tight with good compile times too.
Eclipse is such a mammoth project that it is a whole platform unto itself and a direct comparison with VS is kinda lame anyway. Eclipse gets a lot of somewhat justified stick for being a resource-hog and a bit slow, but if the betas of VS2010 were anything to go by, it's got some competition in that department.
Just for spite - VS loses out 100% to Eclipse in coding any language targeting anything but windows, from embedded systems up to big-iron. It even loses out ON windows for the likes of Adobe Flex, PHP, enterprise Java, etc.
Were never much to write home about. "Prosumer" gear usually isn't - you won't get much better results out of any of this sort of stuff than you will from an onboard soundcard.
And as for the tonka-toy interface and overpriced hardware that is the "industry standard" protools - don't get me started. Avid make Apple look like amateurs in the lock-in market. Definitely for mouth-breathers only.
What? People who for any reason have data in their possession that may be covered by the DPA should be personally responsible for it!
If some spiv can't be bothered to learn how to operate their tools beyond clicking on the blue "e", then they are not qualified to have access to such data, full stop. If they can't learn, fire them and get someone suitable for the job.
"Lose that laptop, and it'll cost you £500k" will stop their farting in church.
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