361–370 of 401 posts
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Right -- and providing dev tools and server platforms for free to students at the high school and college levels is why the MSDNAA and DreamSpark exist on the MSFT side of things. Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform,…
And how popular is DreamSpark? I signed our organization up for it, did all the hard work and provided easy download instructions & serial keys. I had exactly 0 (zero) takers. It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby. I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is…
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Is this supposed to be satire? Being a hobbyist and learning to program in the 80s meant my dad shelling out hundreds of dollars for THINK Lightspeed Pascal, and yet, somehow I and many others managed to learn to program and become hobbyists and finally professional programmers. They'll sell you a full-featured, modern IDE with all the pro features uncrippled for a measly $5 . That's not a death blow to hobbyists, th…
> with all the pro features uncrippled Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled? This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store. All three of them, most probably.
And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problems rather than asking us to be outraged at a scenario in your imagination.
It may be just JetBrains fault. Apple could get into trouble in EU for "dumping" their products for free to kill competitors. Making a marginal profit may cost them in terms of the number of developers, but saves the hassle of being hauled in front of an EU commission.
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> with all the pro features uncrippled Do you mean Eclipse, NetBeans or any other modern, professional IDE is crippled? This is a death blow to Apple hobbyists who live in parts of the world that don't have access to the Mac App Store. All three of them, most probably.
Had in mind Visual Studio Express (heavily crippled vs the purchased editions), the commercial Ada and Lisp IDEs whose free versions have onerous limitations, etc. There's a lot out there beyond the java IDEs. And before we hold a eulogy for the vast swaths of poor put upon hobbyist devs who can't raise $5 or access the App store, you might want to establish the existence of these people actually having these problem…
Of course, Emacs is my Lisp (Clojure) IDE of choice.
As for the idiotic pricing of Xcode 4, I am bothered not by the price tag and the restrictions it imposes on some, but by the fact Apple's accountants interpret SOX in unique and singularly stupid ways.
I'm surprised this made it to the number 1 spot on the front page. From the Hacker News Guidelines: You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it. Xcode 4 is available as a free download for Mac and iOS developers with a paid membership [1], just like the versions before it. Those who aren't paying members of ADC can get Xcode 4 via the Mac App Sto…
That is ridiculous. Netflix would be making a loss just on the bandwidth if you stream more than 10 movies/month on the $8.99 plan.
And it's not as if Apple's hurting for money, they're rolling around in tens of billions in cash, max this will make them is about $20 million bucks.
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Especially when a sense of entitlement is free! You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. If a teenager can't find the motivation to scrounge up 10 bucks, they're going to have a hell of a time learning how to program.
Are you sure that this: You can get Visa gift cards at the convenience store for $10. Applies everywhere in the world? Or is it only people in certain countries that matter?
Guys. This is going to be included on the Lion disc, and we're only paying for it separately this spring due to an accounting rule. I'll bet $4.99 of my own money on it.
What's the accounting rule? I'm curious.
Apple has sometimes been infamous for charging for updates typically expected for free. The most frequent example has been major iPod touch firmware upgrades, which cost a small fee up until iOS 4. In 2007, the company went so far as charging $2 to enable 802.11n Wi-Fi on some Macs.
Read more: http://www.macnn.com/articles/11/02/24/may.be.trying.to.avoi...
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No, cue the you're assuming you won't get Xcode 4 with Lion rabble. Seriously. Don't jump to conclusions yet. Can you clarify the $5-hurts-FOSS argument? I don't mean to sound crass, but there are people who pay more than $5 for coffee. If a one-time charge of $5 to build OS X versions of your FOSS project is a, as you say, "[sizable] obstacle" to entering FOSS development, that's a genuine surprise to me. Especially…
The reason that people are pissed is that it's one more annoying hoop to jump through, especially for people without iTunes accounts.What about people kids without credit cards or Paypal? All this for what? A paltry $10 million or so for Apple which is already rolling in tens of bilions of cash(partly thanks to developers, you always see Jobs touting the app count). Is it even worth it for Apple? The company is smack…
There's no real reason to rage about this, other than a self-created illusion that the only thing stopping some hypothetical FOSS developer somewhere in Romania from creating the next Apache is the inability to pay Apple 5 dollars.
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It's just better business to make the price $0. $5 doesn't seem expensive. It just seems... odd.
Bingo. It throws an obstacle (however small) in front of one of your most important assets, a huge developer community, for minimal gain. It would be one thing if Apple, rightly or wrongly, decided that developers had to be commit to a $XXX/yr developer program. It's another to just say that developers on the current version of tools have to throw in some trivial amount given that seems to affect tire kicking levels…