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Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

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Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#11

Post by protomyth »

mclin wrote: post #3

iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!

I have often gone directly to the video file and played it directly. It seems to work better than iTunes on OS X. I really wish they would just hire a team to do the look and feel on Windows separately. It would improve both platforms.

I do wonder if the trend to use WebKit for a lot more things will continue.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#12

Post by archgrove »

The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument.

Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.

He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#14

Post by nkassis »

archgrove wrote: post #12

The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument. Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's mak…

I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#15

Post by andreyf »

pohl wrote: post #2

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That m…

I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it.

There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.

But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.

Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.

A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#16

Post by mclin »

mr_justin wrote: post #10
mclin wrote: post #3

iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!

Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system. That being said, the…

I don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is.

It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread.

I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing.

This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#17

Post by mattmiller »

I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention.

It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend.

The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#18

Post by acg »

pohl wrote: post #2

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That m…

Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#19

Post by _pius »

pohl wrote: post #2

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That m…

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.

Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

Re: Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

#20

Post by jws »

mr_justin wrote: post #10
mclin wrote: post #3

iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!

Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system. That being said, the…

I was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so)

  Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball.
  Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app.
  Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball.
If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever.

Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?

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