darkandbrooding

The Zope community experienced similar (self inflicted) branding damage with Zope 3. The goal of Zope 3 was to build a next-generation rapid app development toolkit, incorporating lessons learned over the life of Zope 2. This is perfectly laudable goal, but developers heard "zope" and thought they could leverage existing knowledge, best practices, and tools. Then they learned that "zope 2" products wouldn't work under zope 3. Then they learned how much they would have to unlearn from one project to the other. Then they gnashed their terrible teeth, and roared their terrible roars, and finally the zope 3 developers got the message and renamed their framework "Bluebream." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBream )

As someone who worked at a shop that migrated from python/Zope to java/hibernate/GWT during the "zope 3 WTF?" days, I can attest that the confusion created by poor naming choices, and the lack of clarity in product roadmaps, was indeed a factor in deciding to migrate entirely away from Zope.

That was my first thought as well. My initial exposure to nix was a purchased copy of Red Hat Linux 4.2, running on an HP Vectra tower. and I remember paying extra for the CDE install CDs. An absolute noob when I started, by the time I'd learned enough to make my modem work I felt like I'd climbed a mountain. sigh* Good times.

You need a compiler to build iOS and OS X apps. Once you have a compiler on your machine, how can someone else prevent you from creating or running arbitrary executables?

In order to lock down the desktop so as to make a Mac App Store the only way to obtain executable content, Apple would have to fundamentally re-invent the way people build iOS and OS X apps. I just don't see developers sticking with the platform once Xcode is a hosted web app. Chasing away their developer community would effectively cede the market for mobile apps to Android.

Apple's strategic, long term focus is clearly and unambiguously "mobile computing for the common man." Providing a dirt-simple app distribution platform makes sense within the context of mobile computing. Making it substantially harder to create iOS apps, relative to other mobile platforms, is contrary to Apple's strategic goals.

Re: Uncertainty about what data is shared with Google, for OS X users Little Snitch ( http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html ) is an eye-opening (and quite possibly alarming) way to see just how much data an application is sending out from your computer. Chrome is very "chatty."

I do not know the names of equivalent software for *nix or Windows. Does anyone else?

Moglen stated, "but Mr. Jobs is investing heavily in LLVM solely so he can stop using GCC, lest the patents somehow leak across the GPLv3 barrier, and we become able to use his claims. Nobody has ever tried before, to build a multi-platform C compiler solely in order to undermine freedom."

According to wikipedia, the LLVM is licensed using the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois/NCSA_Ope...

As stated in that entry, "Source code under the NCSA license can be incorporated into proprietary products without the reciprocity requirements that copyleft free software licenses raise. The license is compatible with all versions of the GNU General Public License."

Can someone smarter than me explain how this license undermines freedom? Or how the LLVM undermines freedom despite this license? I'm having a hard time connecting the dots.

I won't attempt to defend iMac-based hardware upgrades apart from RAM, but memory is actually extremely easy to replace. Just FYI. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3918

Over the past decade I've used OS X's firewire migration option... (counts on fingers) five times for myself and friends. Four of those times the transfer was flawless and (surprisingly) painless. The one problematic time was because the new machine arrived with bad RAM; although it booted, the new box was for all practical purposes DOA. One warranted replacement later, the migration process worked every bit as well as I'd come to expect.

I think the "app-as-folder" convention and the lack of a central registry are the main contributors to the success of these migrations. "Move this list of folders and files from A to B" is a simple, if tedious, task.

FWIW, I have NOT performed that migration on any machine that had Parallels or VMWare installed; Adobe installs have been the most complicated thing that I've migrated using this utility. If any readers have used the migration on machines containing software (vmware, parallels, etc) that adds kernel extensions, I would be very interested to read the results.

I'm assuming, based on your handle here, that you wrote the original piece as well as submitted it to HN. Was the point of the article to provide some obligatory context for the (quite well executed) collage of Steve Jobs? I ask because yet another "apple users are idiots" article doesn't add to the conversation in any meaningful way. You have not covered any new ground, or provided any new insights.

If the body of the article was an excuse for the image, I would actually rather learn about how you created it. Let me again say, "Well done!" and encourage you to write about the process and technology involved in creating the image.

If you intend for the article to stand on its own, may I suggest citing sources other than yourself, or making firmer points that I can either agree with or push back against? Arguing that Apple treats its users like idiots is such an overly broad and subjective statement that a single counter-example negates its strength. Citing yourself does not strengthen your argument, it only emphasizes the force of your opinion.

You are, of course, free to state your opinions as loudly and forcefully as you care to, but if those opinions do not encourage conversation then you will only attract people who already share your opinion, and repel those who don't.

Your post contains the implicit assumption that "really hideous malware" will strike the Android platform before it does the iPhone, which is the necessary condition for Jobs to say "I told you so." (I make the assumption that Jobs would not be able to credibly deliver that line if iOS became a malware target before Android did.)

I don't own an Android phone, and am only superficially familiar with its OS or software stack. Do you think that the Android OS is architecturally more susceptible to malware than iOS? If not, do you think that Android's application distribution model is more likely to get malware onto people's phones that Apple's highly restrictive one?