It was totally sarcastic all the way, I'm kind of dismayed that this line of thinking is so ingrained here that it wasn't more obvious.

It's exhilarating to see such visceral confirmation of the superior efficiencies of free market capitalism. If the scientists working for this cancer research corporation didn't have the profit motive behind them, who knows how long it would have taken for them to reach this point in their research, that is, if the project had even gotten off the ground at all!

The phrase "better than nothing" is appropriate, I guess.

If you feel like trying to run your VSTs under WINE (audio plugins are tempermental enough in plenty of native hosts). And really, you think you'll be getting better results with LADSPA? Show me a non-trivial LADSPA effect (like, say, a guitar amp simulator) that doesn't sound like trash.

So your assumption is that audio production is becoming an increasingly *smaller* niche of computer use? With the number of DAWs, synths and sequencers continuing to rise on other platforms, what makes you think this is the case? If it's a "vanishingly small" market, it wouldn't have made much sense for Apple to release Garageband, now would it?

Really, there is just no form of criticism of Linux that you people can take. If the program in question is for a niche market, then it's irrelevant. If it doesn't exist at all on Linux, we can do just fine without it, and have been, thank you very much. If it's difficult to use, that's not because the software is badly designed, it's that the users are too stupid or accustomed to their existing tools to figure it out. If the documentation is undecipherable (see recent Slashdot article), the user probably shouldn't be reading documentation anyway, as they're probably the kind of user that should just stick to browsers and email. The list goes on and on and on and on and on.

The reason why people aren't using Linux en masse is that for your average user, Linux is simply a waste of time. All the stuff that your crowd dismisses as irrelevant is stuff that, in the aggregate, matters a quite a lot to people. What is a computing platform if not a collection of (sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes overlapping) niches? Who wants to recompile his kernel just to be able to get passable audio latency? On OS X I haven't had to think about that for...roughly the number of years since I migrated to it. Who wants to deal with woefully inadequate documentation or turn to community message boards where half of the advice is wrong or misleading? Who actually wants to spend more time fiddling with his OS than using it to produce content, or in the case of the non-musically-inclined such as yourself, "do something productive"? Who wants to learn a poorly designed user interface (or better yet, deal with no interface whatsoever) for substandard clone of an existing commercial product when the original product works just fine?

The answer is people like you, and the miniscule market share of like-minded ultra-left-brained mega-dweebs that your insipid post reflects.

Typical engineer's thinking. If manual dexterity is the ultimate benchmark of musicianship, then you must think that Joe Satriani is the pinnacle of guitar playing (who knows, maybe you do). There are countless musicians out there who may not be the most technically gifted performers in the world, but make incomparable music as a result of their musical sensitivity. And that sensitivity, beyond a sensitivity to the music itself, also manifests itself as a sensitivity to the capabilities, limitations, and the expressive range of the instrument (emotionally as well as physically).

Your fear of electronic musical instruments replacing traditional ones is unjustified. Not only will an electronic rendition of a traditional instrument (which is usually an insipid simulation) never fully capture the original, but the real interest in electronic instruments is in exploring the different possibilities afforded by them, both in terms of performativity and in terms of expressive depth.

I guess chant doesn't count as music to you, since that usually consists of people singing the same notes.

• Any sound can be decomposed into a series of overlapping sine waves
• The timbre produced by this ensemble is more harmonically complex than "we're all playing the same sine waves", since the drone varies spectrally (as well as in pitch) over time (coordinated, as well, it's not just a random collection of tones)
• What makes you think that playing tuning forks would require more skill, other than the fact that the activity itself is more obvious to the audience?

Stupid cat! You never bark! All you ever do is meow!

You are you, and unimaginative is unimaginative.

Totally! While we're at it, let's beef that up with a few other ethnic and racial stereotypes!

"As long as none of your references are named Dmitri, you should be fine" (eh? eh? RUSSIANS)
"As long as none of your references are named Deshawn, you should be fine" (black people are scary)
"As long as none of your references have Hussein for a middle name, you should be fine" (goes without saying)

I'm sure you can probably think of some others.

I don't know, TLDR, maybe you should RTFA and find out.

"Efficiency and practical utility are all that skills or technologies are for! Screw art!"

love,
Engineers

Maybe this analogy is failing. All I was trying to point out is that you're perfectly welcome to use their SDK and write iPhone apps, test them in the free simulator, etc, without paying a dime. The $99 fee lets you test on a real device and/or deploy to the store. I can see being annoyed at not being able to deploy to your own phone (that's one of the things I'd most like for them to change) without paying, but access to the store? That's fair game, as far as I'm concerned. They've gone to the trouble of creating this ecosystem, setting up all the infrastructure necessary for you to deploy your app to potentially hundreds of thousands of users, and handle all the financial transactions. All you have to do is write it, and of course, pay them $100.

Perhaps brick and mortar comparisons are just as useless, but if I make some gadget, I don't see why any store on the block would be obligated to accept it as merchandise and put it on their shelves. Apple charging me for access to their system simply means that all I have to do is invent and build the gadget. They even take care of the packaging. Seems like a pretty fair deal to me.

They charge a fee if you want to send builds to a device, or publish in their store, but the SDK itself, and its associated dev tools, are free as in beer.

Which is exactly why Apple gives away all their development tools for free, and why the built their current flagship software product on top of BSD, drawing significant interest and new users from the Linux crowd.

Apple doesn't hate geeks, it hates the way many geeks think that because they're so smart, they're automatically good at everything. The Unix that is OS X and the iPhone platform provide plenty of room for tinkering -- perhaps less so on the iPhone -- but it's not like everything Mac is a lifeless void. What Apple doesn't like you doing is trying to one-up them at their own game. For instance, if Apple made it easy for you install themes the way you might in any number of Linux window managers, chances are pretty good that you'll just make your computer hideously ugly and then have the audacity to show it to all your friends. This isn't a chance they'd like to take, being that their niche is in good design (how depressing is it that good design is a niche market?).

These beautifully designed packages you passingly deride are what make computers usable. In the case of the iPhone, seriously, the vast majority of apps in the store are awful, even adhering to Apple's design guidelines and making use of their standard UI toolkits. Imagine what we would end up with if programmers had total control over the system. In my eyes, it would result in a sharp decrease of users as the typical iPhone would be less stable, potentially less secure, and certainly more confusing as apps would depart more significantly from the accepted set of standards. Practically every rule in their SDK license has some similar reason behind it, even if a few of them are overkill. Background processes can drain battery life. Interpreted code environments (especially user-generated code, which is the biggest concern IMHO) can make it difficult for Apple to evaluate the spectrum of how an app might perform in real use (or fail to perform), which is a real concern for those who care about all the little details of packaging and interface design.

It used to bother me how much Apple locks things down, but I have to admit that they've been really successful in creating a pleasing, easy to use, and reasonably flexible system that also brings with it a thriving market ecosystem. Essentially none of the other smartphone manufacturers and platforms have come even close to this. It certainly makes you wonder if an open platform is really the solution to the "iPhone Killer" problem.