Any chance that
while you aren't
getting any raises
you are sending
emails with forced
carriage returns to
your boss? I'm
just saying...

That's typically not a level of openness found in the Apple playbook.

Apple has the IPad; The Playbook is Blackberry. Duh.

A link to an apk on a random file hosting site?!? Seriously? If you did the same thing with an exe you'd be flamed and hung from the Slashdot rafters. It should be the same with an apk, but everyone seems somehow fine with installing apks from random places with who knows what nasty code buried inside. One of these days everyone is going to get pwned by one of these hosted apk files.

I have a couple points that seem to be lost in this thread. First, this isn't the "Flash" that you know and hate. This is apps written in ActionScript 3 that are compiled into native iOS apps. They aren't necessarily going to be straddled with the same issues the community often complains about.

Second, there is one important aspect of this that no one seems to pay attention to. Adobe's Flash Packager for IPhone and MonoTouch are the only way for someone to develop IPhone software without buying a Apple Macintosh (at least without a Hackintosh, which is of questionable legality). It's always surprised me how few people point out that IPhone development requires a Mac, and that the barrier of entry is (or was) much, much greater than $99 / year for the majority of us.

Remember also that they did not force you to apply the update so if you wanted to you could have carried on playing all the single player games you already had and never upgrade. The only legitimate customers it affected were people who used the Other OS feature and also played games online.

First, this is not limited to Online games. I attempted to not apply the upgrade to keep my Other OS feature, and some of my non-online games required the update. Second, who cares online vs offline - I paid $50-70 for these online games, and I expect to be able to play them as well.

I was left with a choice of losing value for my original $600 purchase (the PS3, which I purchased partly due to the Other OS feature) or of losing hundreds more in games I can no longer play. It's pretty simple, Sony reduced the value of my purchased product. Sony sold me a feature, and then took it away. This is an illegal abuse, no matter how many or few people installed Linux.

Why do you think Oracle bought Sun?

For Solaris?

Ha. Hahahhahahah. I've got to read that a second time.

Why do you think Oracle bought Sun?

For Solaris?

Hahahahhhaaaa. Heeehee. Hah....hah. Oh man, tears.

Isn't this exactly what the GPL v3 is designed to prevent (Tivo-ization)? Seems like FSF's concerns are once again coming true. Too bad Linux won't ever adopt v3, it seems.

As has been pointed out, I am talking about open from an application-installation perspective, not open source. Windows and most OS are open from this perspective.

You're right. This is what I meant by "open platform". Something where apps don't require approval and/or can be installed from any source. Not an open source system as gp assumed.

You are right. Having a completely open platform has never worked before. *rolls eyes *

I honestly wonder about this though. I surf with my IPhone over Wifi exclusively, since I cancelled my AT&T service. The same pages on the same wifi router render considerably slower on the IPhone than on a laptop/desktop sitting right next to it. I really wonder how much of the slowness is AT&T, and how much is just that the IPhone doesn't render pages at the speed we are used to.

FWIW, I'm not an AT&T apologist. Friday I'm signing up with Verizon and getting a Droid, because I'm fed up with AT&T and (especially) Apple.

Your premise sounds good in theory, but that doesn't make it true. I'd like to see some solid evidence of this.

Today, more code is peer reviewed. WAY, way more code is reused due to the mass explosion of publicly shared libraries, the worldwide adoption of OO languages, and the popularity of open source. Very few software systems today are built from scratch. They usually use some framework that is used and reviewed by thousands of other projects. Much more code today is managed code. As a result, programmers aren't left to make the mistakes they would've previously made. Developers are often developing software that is optimized far better than their skill or time would normally allow. As a result, I'd argue that typical software today might be more efficient than it was 15 years ago.

As for tightening things up, I can't speak for Windows or OSX, but if you watch mailing lists for desktop Linux projects from the kernel to Gnome, code is frequently scrutinized, discussed, and patched to "go back and tighten it up".

The ironic thing is hearing people complain about the heavy weightedness of a modern OS. Whenever someone brings up switching to Linux, people frequently claim they can't make the switch because doesn't run on Linux. Photoshop, the latest DirectX games, etc.

People want their cake, and more cake, and then to eat the cake, and the more cake.

Oh bullocks. This old myth is tired and sad.

The reason modern software requires so much resources is because it's modern. It does things we couldn't dream about 10 years ago. In years past, we wouldn't bother to write software that ran like shit because we only had 128 MB of RAM. We write that software today because the hardware supports it, not because we are too lazy to optimize software like your myth concludes. Software developers develop software to the capability of their current machine, not the one they had 15 years ago.

15 years ago, running a single video in a tiny window was pushing the envelope. Before we ran games we shut down everything else, even killing processes we couldn't see. 15 years ago, a couple animated gifs on a web page could make a system crawl (oh, sweet Mosaic). Heaven forbid that you want to keep something running in the background while you did something else.

Today we concurrently run 3D desktop effects, a media player with software EQ, a couple dozen background processes, a browser with 10 tabs all running various flash animated applets and ajax processes, and a 3D game the likes of which we couldn't imagine 15 years ago. This is why it takes resources.

In other news, Ubuntu Karmic is pretty nice.

I am not a security expert, but does switching to Firefox really solve the issue? For browsing, sure. But everyone is saying this is part of the core crypto API in Windows. Certs are used in more things than just IE.

When the app you want to install says it is signed by Microsoft, Mozilla, or Nullsoft, can you still be sure that it really is? Can you be sure the Windows Update software is actually retrieving updates without a man-in-the-middle?

I really don't know the answers to these questions. But I would be surprised if switching to Firefox is a cure to a bug in the core Win32 apis. Helpful: yes. A solution: probably not.

That's the sexiest thing to come from the Linux community in forever.

In fairness, the previous competition wasn't exactly intense.