I hate Apple

[Doctor X]

But you are not part of the ½% that has a toilet

--J.D.

[viscousmemories]

NextBigThing 60 Final - YouTube

[MonCapitan2002]

That commercial is pure win.

[Doctor X]

"I'm creative!"

"Dude, you're a barista!"

--J.D.

[Pyrrho]

Eh, eh, eh. They wrote it wrong. He should have said, "I'm a creative."

[Angakuk]

I ate apple. It were good.

[lisarea]

This isn't just about Apple, but he has a lot of good points:

Zittrain in Technology Review: The personal computer is dead

[seebs]

I have noticed that there are things where I really care more, or less, about openness. In some cases, I'm willing to put up with a walled garden for a more functional experience. In other cases, I'd rather have the open system. Sort of a trade-off depending on what I'm doing.

[Corona688]

"Functionality" may not be the driving characteristic in a captive-audience situation. You may get what you need, or you may not, and if they suddenly decide to stop being so helpful that's just too bad for you.

[lisarea]

I understand the appeal of walled gardens, and I think of it as more of a dichotomy of consumer electronics vs. computers. And most things with tightly integrated firmware I don't really consider personal computers. Technically, they are computers, of course, but so are microwaves probably.

The thing that makes those types of devices more hinky is that they're connected to someone else's servers. Your microwave is a self-contained device that you probably aren't going to be modifying, but the difference is that nobody else is either.

But there are a whole lot of people who don't care. There are a whole lot of people who aren't shocked by things like CarrierIQ and by content control measures because they already think that everything they do is being monitored somewhere. That's how that Windows Support scam works, where some guy calls you on the phone and says he's been monitoring your computer and offers to fix some kind of malfunction for you. There are enough people who think that's credible to make that scam profitable.

And those people probably wish they didn't even need computers. They're not as optional as they were 20 years ago, though. There's a lot of stuff you really need to be have access to the web and email for, and I can see how some people might just want some kind of a simple appliance that lets them do that without having to deal with a full-on personal computer. That's what iOS is for. It's still shitty for other reasons, but I don't think that is ultimately going to affect the future of PCs. It'll just peel off some segments of the PC market that don't really want a computer anyway.

Also, the funneh thing is you know what gets the walled garden thing right? Fucking desktop Linux. Most (I think) distributions have a simple GUI tool you can use to search secure repositories for software that's been tested and approved for your particular distribution, which you then install (along with dependencies) by clicking on a button or two. So if you stick with the stable repositories for your distrubution, it's totally a walled garden.

However, you can also choose to include other repositories if you want to, and you can, as always, install whatever you like from the command line. So you have a walled garden, but you can come and go as you please.

[Corona688]

A lot of what gets called "firmware" these days probably isn't. You could call a bootable USB stick firmware because it's flash media but it's not. You can modify it pretty much at will, and so can the manufacturers of these devices, and they often enough do, for updates and the like. It's the difference between what they let you access and what they don't, the same way Windows and OSX have collections of files they don't let you touch.

Originally Posted by lisarea

So if you stick with the stable repositories for your distrubution, it's totally a walled garden.

If you never open the door, your apartment's a prison, but not literal one.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by Corona688

A lot of what gets called "firmware" these days probably isn't. You could call a bootable USB stick firmware because it's flash media but it's not. You can modify it pretty much at will, and so can the manufacturers of these devices, and they often enough do, for updates and the like. It's the difference between what they let you access and what they don't, the same way Windows and OSX have collections of files they don't let you touch.

Yeah, I long ago gave up on understanding the firmware distinction. I don't know what it means.

I mean, I know. I've written firmware. I just don't think it is a useful or a well-defined distinction much of the time. It's a handy term for software that's very tightly integrated to its specific hardware, but some of it is easy to change, some is hard. Some needs to be jailbroken to modify it, some doesn't. Some has readily available third-party alternatives available, some doesn't. Some of the hardware is easier to write third party alternative firmware for, some is harder. Some is open source, some closed.

It's all just software, ultimately. I use the term firmware usually to describe software that is designed for a specific device, but I do know I use it sloppily because I understand the concept sloppily.

If you never open the door, your apartment's a prison, but not literal one.

But some people don't care, and that's OK. If you use your computer for specific, non computer related tasks, and those stable repositories allow you to perform those tasks the way you like, there might be no need to go elsewhere.

It's still a walled garden. It just has doors that you can open and close, so you don't have to stay there all the time.

Unless that's not what you meant. Oh god, I hate analogies sometimes. They're confusing.

[seebs]

I tend to view it as a logical extension of the same principle that made copyright useful; some people will only provide some things if they have enough control over them. Some of those things are worth putting up with control to get. Other things can only exist in uncontrolled environments.

In a way, the option of having a non-free environment is itself a useful freedom.

[ceptimus]

I wrote firmware back in the days when we burned it to PROM or EPROM. I suppose that was reasonably firm as there was nothing you could do on the machine to change it: you either had to throw it away and start with new chips, or at least bake the chips in U.V. oven and then reburn them in a programmer.

When EEPROMS and FLASH memory came along and were wired up in such a way that they could be reprogrammed on-the-fly without having to fit any links or throw switches first, then the software/firmware distinction pretty much evaporated.

[Doctor X]

Apple Sweat shop iPhone app - YouTube

The competition video is also worth a check.

--J. "We Asked for a John Edwards but They Gave Us a John Kerry!" D.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

I wrote firmware back in the days when we burned it to PROM or EPROM. I suppose that was reasonably firm as there was nothing you could do on the machine to change it: you either had to throw it away and start with new chips, or at least bake the chips in U.V. oven and then reburn them in a programmer.

Ah, very interesting. I've always been confused by the nomenclature myself because for as long as I've been in the industry "firmware" has been pretty flexible.

[JoeP]

Now that I think about it, when I started in IT you had to erase EPROMs in ultraviolet ovens or something like that. That was before EEPROMs - Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memories*. I'm not sure if we have progressed to EEEPROMs or EEEEPROMs yet.

* I suppose these are all levels of viscosity of memories.

[JoeP]

Well look at that ...

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Now that I think about it, when I started in IT you had to erase EPROMs in ultraviolet ovens or something like that. That was before EEPROMs - Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memories*. I'm not sure if we have progressed to EEEPROMs or EEEEPROMs yet.

flash is a kind of EEPROM, just organized a bit different.

EEPROM just acts like a really slow RAM chip. You can read and write whatever bytes you want, whenever you want.

Flash EEPROM, or just flash, is organized into big chunks which have to be written to or erased as a whole. This makes erasing tons faster, since you can erase entire sections at once instead of blanking 16,384 bytes individually -- which might be where 'flash' comes from.

[Stormlight]

It might be time to boycott Apple.

At least according to the good people of Techrights.org.

[Waluigi]

Originally Posted by Stormlight

It might be time to boycott Apple.

Apple is as ruthless as every other big company out there. The only difference is that Apple has a very carefully cultivated public image as an altruistic company for the anti-authority types who "think different".

But Apple as a company has always been ruthless. Ruthless is part of its ethos because one of its founders was ruthless (the other one wanted to give the Apple I away for free).

When I read articles like the above, I don't understand why anyone would be surprised. They're vigorously defending what they believe to be theirs. They're cutthroat, unforgiving, and evil... but so is every other game in town.

[Doctor X]

Because only PCs are EVIL!!1!!11!

--J.D.

[lisarea]

I don't see how it's possible that they actually believe these things to be theirs, though. They've sued other companies for things they knew damned well they didn't come up with (the one that comes to mind is them suing Amazon for using the term 'app store').

I can see kind of technically ignorant people believing that (I encountered someone in the wild who seemed to believe that 'app store' meant 'apple store,' and there are plenty of oblivious people who think Apple invented the tablet computer or the portable media player, for examples), but Apple knows better than that. They're just patent trolling, using lawsuits as intimidation and maybe in hopes of hitting the dumb judge jackpot.

[Corona688]

Which, again, is hardly an attitude or tactic unique to apple.

[lisarea]

That goes without saying.