> Life arising only once could very well be the more plausible option
Indeed I feel like coming to this conclusion is something that the authors - and most of us rationalist types - do not _want_ to come to.
Because if you accept that hypothesis, then it follows as a consequence that an alternative view of the world makes a lot more sense: what if, rather than living in an emergent, random universe where life sprouts up everywhere, hundreds of billions of times, but somehow _always_ disappears before we can ever observe it outside Earth, we are instead living at the center of a universe where we are the sole intelligent species that ever existed? In that system of the world, the universe is being directed by beings existing outside its bounds - gods. A simulation created and managed by uncaring observers - as hypothesized by the likes of Elon Musk? Or a benevolent God in the Judeo/Christiano/Islamic tradition?
The truth is that this alternative is being rejected a priori, indeed not even acknowledged, by the authors of the article or most people in this thread, because it is an affront to their core beliefs, not through pure logical reasoning.
> The truth is that this alternative is being rejected a priori, indeed not even acknowledged, by the authors of the article or most people in this thread, because it is an affront to their core beliefs, not through pure logical reasoning.
I think it isn't acknowledged because it is inconsistent with literally everything we have learned about physics and the universe, and even if it were true, as you said, they are outside this reality and don't care. They set the simulation parameters, and then walked away, so they are irrelevant.
If however, you point to something like miracles occuring in our reality to back up the "gods" view, then you aren't really having the same discussion as the authors.
If there isn't a single person in the western political discourse who proudly adheres to a given characterization, it's a strawman.
That's all. Meanwhile, on Ron Paul / race, that newsletter is a bit of a problem. Maybe you're too young to remember the conflation between states' rights and segregation.
I'm really interested to see what happens if he wins Iowa and comes in 2nd in New Hampshire. I do think it would be good for the Republican party.
Perhaps, but he did have a company that earned a lot of money from publishing newsletters containing racist and anti-gay passages under his name (e.g. The Ron Paul Survival Report):
> The newsletters, attributed to Paul, made statements such as "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," "if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be", and referring to Martin Luther King as a "pro-communist philanderer" and to Martin Luther King Day as "hate Whitey day."[72][73] An issue from 1992 refers to carjacking as the "hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos."[74] In an article title "The Pink House" the newsletter wrote that " "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities."[73]
Of course, he distances himself from these newsletters now. Would somebody who is truly not racist and not anti-gay have such words published in their name by accident?
I'd argue that this discussion isn't at all branding - it's about something more fundamental — user expectations, privacy actual fact. We're not arguing that Facebook is bad because it's Facebook. If Apple and Facebook switched places tomorrow, we'd still be "arguing" (though I feel this is the wrong word) about the same basic points.
exactly. all those car-sharing services may become much, much more useful and prevalent when you can use your smartphone to whistle the car to come to you. that would also spell doom to taxis.
perhaps then only the very rich, those who live in remote areas, and true car enthusiasts will want or need to have their own car.
a bit like a 100 years ago, everybody from the middle-class up had a maid, but now only rich people do because machines now do most of the household work for us.
> everybody from the middle-class up had a maid, but now only rich people do because machines now do most of the household work for us.
You'd be surprised how many people hire household help. Pretty-much every dual-income couple I know over a certain age has someone come in every week or so. And no, it's not a generation thing, that "certain age" has remained stable for at least 15 years. (I didn't notice before because I was too young.)
Yes, there's an income threshold, but at $150/month, the starter cost is suprisingly low. (That's San Jose prices.)
You're missing his point. At any given time it has a lot to do with relative wealth. But the change over time is the result of things like vacuums and washing machines changing housekeeping from a full-time-plus job to something that can be done in the evenings/weekends.
He either has low standards of housework or a Japanese robot... Yes, vaccuming, laundry and dishes are a bit quicker, but they still take a lot of effort, and what about dusting and ironing? I'd hire a maid in a shot if they were a bit cheaper.
It's not just devices, modern cleaning solutions are a huge improvement over what people had even just 100 years ago. As to dusting a good air filter and regular vacuuming dramatically cuts down on dust accumulation. All together the modern household with about 5 hours a week of effort get's better results than you would have from a 20 hour per week maid using methods from 1911.
PS: People still use home cleaning services but the number of hours they work is a lot less than what you would expect from a maid a 100 years ago.
Ever tried hand washing your clothes with a bucket and a stick, then running them through a mangle yourself?
It ain't quick. It is orders of magnitude more effort than putting your clothes in the washing machine, which takes about a minute and no physical exertion whatsoever.
Yep. You also have to consider the time spent on boiling the water, ironing with irons that have to be reheated on a stove, hanging the clothes out to dry (and hoping that it doesn't rain), and so on.
Yes, yes, and yes. I wasn't born yesterday, and I am from a fairly isolated part of the world. They all took much longer, I agree. Perhaps this is a reason that both members of a couple can usually work nowadays - but I don't think it is the reasona that less people higher maids. All I am saying is that the maids issue is economic; no matter how little housework there is, I would still pay somebody else to do it if it were economical.
>I would still pay somebody else to do it if it were economical.
Of course you would, but, for most middle class people, maids have moved from necessity, to luxury.
The marginal utility of a maid has gone down, they used to save you 10 hours a day, now they may save you 1 or 2. Most modern middle class people can manage an hour or 2 a day, but not 10, so the demand has gone way down. Most people aren't willing to sacrifice in order to afford a maid b/c they don't need one.
It will be the same with cars. If you can rent a car with 90% of the connivence of owning one, owning one will become a luxury.
Many people sacrifice a large percentage of their income because the feel a car is necessary. When it's merely, nice to have, most middle class and lower will no longer do so.
Adding positive comments doesn't usually add as much information. The story itself was a positive comment. Critical discussion is best done not by saying "hey, cool story" - that's what upvoting is for. There are some cases where a non-negative comment is great, like pointing other readers to an interesting piece of related information, but if all it does is confirm what the original submission said, it's less informative.
the problem, i think, is that there is a core contradiction at the heart of the euro system:
1) you can't have a currency union, without a fiscal union;
2) you can't have a fiscal union, without a true political union;
3) the euro area is a currency union with neither a fiscal or a political union.
in other words, for a currency union to work well, you need to shuffle money around. but you can't do that without political legitimacy, or if people feel like the money is going to "them", as opposed to "us".
The leaders who created the euro were trying to go about it the other way around: currency union would lead to fiscal union, which would lead to political union. but now, in a recession, with things going bad, they are finding that, in fact, they would need all three for any part to work correctly.
why are the Germans refusing to let the ECB be the lender of last resort? the core reason is that they see, correctly, that this would put them on the hook for the past and likely future mismanagement of the Greeks and Italians. of course, they can't say this publicly, so instead you hear all sorts of nonsense, hyperinflation this and weimar that.
or, to put it another way, would the Germans let this kind of thing happen to other Germans? I don't think so! Greeks and Italians are "them", and in bad times people feel less generous and fall back to the "us".
but at the same time, of course, their refusing to let the ECB, as it were, bail out the Greeks and Italians will inevitably lead to their default, exit from the Euro, and who knows what after that. at the very least, expect nationalist parties everywhere to rise in the polls.
let's just hope that we're not rebooting to the early 20th century.
The point is that Germany IS going to pay for the crisis anyway, because if Greece, Spain and Italy defaulted, the German banks would lose hundreds of billions of euros of German money. The European economy would enter a crisis that would last years (decades?), and most of German exports are to other European countries - thinking that they could have a great economy amid a European depression is just stupid. And I'm not even thinking about the possibility of wars should become "everyone for himself" in Europe again.
So, it isn't a matter of self interest vs. generosity: it is a matter of understanding that it would be MUCH less costly to make the ECB lender of last resort now than to wait and just hope that things will fix themselves. Moreover, in Italy the only real risk is that of interest rates on its massive debt going too high: Italy already has a primary budget surplus, with "normal" rates the debt would already be shrinking.
1) you can't have a currency union, without a fiscal union; - correct.
2) you can't have a fiscal union, without a true political union; - unknown, but history is on your side.
3) the euro area is a currency union with neither a fiscal or a political union. - correct.
There may be a way to incentivise independent states to act in their collective interest and thus create a fiscal union without a true political union. However, if there is such a way, it has certainly never been applied to date for the Eurozone. This is the grand experiment ongoing in the EMU.
In a sense, the experiment not only already failed, but failed from the outset due to states choosing to ignore leverage rules in the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact, including even Germany.
The probability of this ending well, or without Germans paying in some shape or form and potentially severely against their long-term interests, is low.
If Germany had any sense, they will be making preparations to leave at any time, possibly taking the few remaining Germanic (+Switzerland) and Scandinavian creditor nations with them too.
Some people get used to a workflow. They have an environment set up just how they like.
All of a sudden Gnome release Gnome 3 - which breaks a lot of that workflow, and also means that people wanting to stay at Gnome 2.x are going to drift slowly into dependancy hell. And Shuttleworth plays his benign dictator card, saying he doesn't care what the community thinks, they're wrong, and Unity is the way forward. Unity also breaks the workflow.
Now those users are kind of stuck. KDE also has an example of dramatic change, so people might be reluctant to move there.
LXDE or XFCE aren't yet mature and there are some frustrating features with both. (But they've picked up some users.)
And then you're left with self-built desktop environments - one of the *boxes or some other WM + file manager + etc etc.
XFCE is great. I switched to xubuntu and loving it. It might be lacking. but I find it far more enjoyable to use than Unity or gnome3. I tried to use both gnome3 and unity. and both had me very frustrated.
After Gnome2 was discontinued, Canonical _could_ have listened to their current users and instead of Unity, developed something similar to Mint's MGSE. But Canonical suddendly decided to discard their current target group, desktop users, which made Ubuntu popular, and suddenly switch everything to tablet users.
People hate on Unity for two reasons:
1. Because they feel betrayed by Canonical for switching to another target group and letting desktop users Gnome2-less alone in the cold. It is like Apple completely giving up on Macs and OSX and fully going iOS.
2. Because Unity is, hands down, simply less usable for day-to-day desktop use than Gnome2. It may make sense on tablets, but it is a step backwards on PCs. If Canonical wouldnt aggressively push it by making it a default, probably nobody would voluntarily install and use it.
My personal reason is that it felt like beta-quality software at best. The UI would hang almost every time I tried to log out, for example, forcing me to go to a tty to kill the lightdm service. As lysol says, it seems like things that used to take a mouse click or two now required a lot more effort (but I'm willing to admit I probably didn't try hard enough to figure out the "new way" to do them).
Beyond the UI, stuff that "just worked" before (like my wireless network adapter) now didn't work at all without manual intervention.
All told, it was just too much hassle on a machine where I just want to get some work done. Yes, I should probably know better than to upgrade a Linux distribution on a machine that I use to actually get some work done, and it will probably be a while before I upgrade again--I'll just choose something usable and leave it alone until I have a week of vacation to spend fussing with updates.
Some people have legitimate complaints, there are a couple minor bugs and glitches in Unity still. But mostly what I see is knee-jerk resistance to change; even if Unity is a better UI, they hate it because it's different from what they're familiar with.
It's exactly the same kind of hang-wringing we saw from a lot of the GNOME 1 users when GNOME 2 came out.
Sure, some of it is resistance to change, but that's not all of it. It also has to do with users, particularly power users, having their workflow broken. That was essentially Linus Torvalds' complaint about GNOME 3 being a mess, and why he's now back on GNOME 2.
* Stability: I've had issues on multiple different hardware setups. Trying to configure compiz plugins -- hung. Reboot then failed to re-log in to "3d" Unity. Only "2d" unity, where all the key shortcuts were different. Sigh.
* Stupid UI design: Maximized windows get the top panel as their title-bar, but that panel displays a different name if a different window is active.
* UI glithces: Double-click of title usually [un]maximizes. That is, unless you're trying to unmaximize a non-active window.
* Winkey behavior: Type the full name of an application, hit <return>, and a different application is executed! That is because the search happened to find that different application, and not my application yet.
* Slowing me down: The time it takes to un-hide the bar is extremely long and slows me down.
* No fast way to minimize a window with the mouse (I used to be able to click a task bar item)
* No easy glance to see which windows I was working with
* Crappy workspace switcher: requires multiple clicks to switch workspaces, cannot drag&drop windows between desktops, etc.
I really cannot hope to remember the hundreds of annoyances I've had when trying to use Unity. I find it to be really incompetent design.
Apple may be competent enough to decide to throw everything away and design something nice. The Ubuntu guys are not. They should have stuck to incrementally improving the Linux desktop as it was. I think that now, they're going to become irrelevant.
For me its the menu bar on the top of the screen except for libreoffice. On a 1920 by 1080 its a bit of a trek to the top of the screen from a small Gedit window.
The rest I can deal with, I tend toward 'end user' tasks plus a couple of ssh sessions, and about 10 applications over four virtual desktops.
Hibernate works so I can keep the setup between sessions.
Have you used it? The principal thing is that it's different and offers less customization than gnome2 and even gnome3 with gnome-shell. Any action requires a hilarious number of clicks to get done. These sorts of things are self-evident when you've attempted to use Unity for any length of time.
The author is referring to the fact that the taskbar/dock in Unity doesn't offer the same affordances as the old Gnome2 taskbar. For example, in Ubuntu 11.04, there was no way to open a new terminal from the dock. You had to click on the terminal icon, then click File->New Terminal. As someone who routinely opens a number of terminals for various tasks, that one regression was a source of significant slowdowns.
In addition, Unity is slow on any system that doesn't have a separate graphics card or the latest generation of integrated graphics. There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off the graphical effects to speed it up. Combine that with the usability regressions, and Unity was a definite no-go for me.
That's not to say that I "hate" Unity or will never use it as my desktop environment. I think Unity has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, like all too much software out there, it was released before it had been fully finished. I look forward to trying Unity again when the next Ubuntu LTS (12.04, I believe) is released. Hopefully it'll be far more usable and "finished" by then.
Can't you just middle click the icon in the dock? Middle click launches a new instance of the app instead of bringing the current instance to the foreground.
for now i only use linux server-side, but i'm thinking of maybe swiching from osx to linux for my next laptop. i played a little with both mint and ubuntu in vmware, but i don't think i can make a fair assessment.
personally, i don't care for customization at all, so i was wondering if there were other issues besides that.
There are a bunch of slightly off-center use cases that Unity doesn't handle well at all (or at least not yet). For me it's multi-screen setups, which it didn't cope with well for me as of 11.04 ...
because nobody likes to be treated like a four year old, I personally hate ubuntu's approach on this: "THIS IS GOOD FOR YOU! USE IT! WE KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR YOU".
Unity might be the next big thing in the desktop environment phenomena but forcing it down through our throats is very obnoxious.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. You're free to use a different desktop or distribution. The source is even provided to you free of charge to modify as you see fit.
Complaining that someone else is not doing free work just to suit you personally sounds like acting like a four year old, honestly.
-Lack of bottom taskbar... I greatly dislike the combination launcher/taskbar style of Unity/Mac (Win 7 pulled it off better.) I could fix this except for item #1.
no. the problem is that scala allows almost any string of characters as identifiers, and this encourages programmers to use symbols instead of english words for their function names. So you end up with identifiers that convey no meaning whatsoever, like /:\ or >>:.
Sure, this can be in fact very nice if you are writing a DSL for a problem that already has its own well-known set of symbols, like a branch of mathematics.
However, what happens in reality is that most programming is "business" programming. But still programmers use it for everything (because we're lazy and typing :: seems faster than "append"). The scala api leads the way here. For example the list class:
The following are all subtle variations on append and prepend:
::, :::, ++, :+, ++:, +:
Can any non-scala programmer guess which one is which? When you move on to the Map or Set class, it's a little bit the same and a little bit different. Sure, at one point you will remember all of this by heart, but the same pattern repeats itself when you try to use another library: it defines its own little language, instead of using the one common to us all: english.
Note another huge drawback, for me at least: you can't google such symbols because of course search engines will treat them as noise. Even searching for them with regexes is tricky because you can't use word boundaries.
The argument I heard over and over is that you can make non-sense function words even if you're restricted to alpha-numeric. This is true, and it happens. However, if I call my function "append" or "xyz", and what it does is "prepend", it's obviously the wrong name and you can point it out.
Symbols, on the other hand, are arbitrary, and it becomes a question of taste.
edit: removed some list operators added in error, thanks Inufu
my point is that this style of writing is pervasive within the scala world, including the official api. and it's not just the list class. look at the base xml class, NodeSeq:
The xml stuff is more the exception than the rule. They've moved away from that approach. Whether to keep it at all has been discussed quite a bit. It would be more fair to look at the newer code in the collection framework to paint what is considered "best practice" by the creators of Scala.
These operators such as ++ (concatenation) etc are uniformly available in all collections. It has inherited these operators from base sequence classes/traits specifically TraversableLike.
It does not implement any of these operators.
It just inherits some features
extends immutable.Seq[Node] with SeqLike[Node, NodeSeq] with Equality
provides an equality operator and a builder and gets all the other collection operators for free. These operators have the same semantics and implementation across all collection classes unless you specifically override them.
???
These are the same methods. It is common in languages with inheritance that classes implementing the same types have pretty much the same methods available ...
> Can any non-scala programmer guess which one is which?
I have read the documentation and I still do not know which one is which.
Specifically the summary documentation is the same for both ++ and ++:
Can you explain the difference to a non-scala programmer? I can see that the answer must be in the type signatures, but I have no idea how to decipher those.
In scala the use of : changes the associativity of the operator, so a ++ b ++ c is equivalent to (a.++ b).++ c while a ++: b ++: c is equivalent to (c.++: b).++: a
However fear not :-) the arguments are always evaluated left to right i.e. a,b,c and never c,b,a. It might be useful to think of (c.++: b).++: a as a ++ (b ++ c) except that ++ has c as the "this" parameter in the inner expression and not b.
Avoid! Despite the degree to which Scala facilitates
this area of API design, the definition of methods with
symbolic names should not be undertaken lightly,
particularly when the symbols itself are non-standard
(for example, >>#>>). As a general rule, symbolic
method names have two valid use-cases:
Domain-specific languages (e.g. actor1 ! Msg)
Logically mathematical operations (e.g. a + b or c :: d)
The definition of methods with symbolic names should be
considered an advanced feature in Scala, to be used only
by those most well-versed in its pitfalls. Without care,
excessive use of symbolic method names can easily
transform even the simplest code into symbolic soup.
And searching ... well, every symbolic method name has a searchable string embedded in ScalaDoc.
Additionally, you can also click on the index and get every symbolic method with the place where it is defined.
I don't really understand what's so hard about that ...
i used scala for a few months. it sounded very promising, java without the verbosity. but in the end i decided to stop using it.
The biggest problem for me was readabilty. Scala is the first language that i've learned where at first i couldn't just read code and immediately guess what it does.
I think the prime reason for this is that scala permits operator overloading; more than that, in fact, almost every character can be an identifier. This results in often very cryptic code and libraries, because you can't guess what that function does without reading its definition. quick, what's the difference between +++ and ::: ? what's /: and /:\ ? You can't even google it!
The other big problem for me was the type system. At first it sounded really great, and in fact the amount of compile-time code verification that you can achieve is indeed impressive. But in practice, i found myself fighting with the type system a lot, for example when trying to reuse a function with generic type restrictions that I had't written: some time these can get very long and your only choice is to copy-paste them from the original definition.
Also, how do you test that your type constraints are correct? you can't, by definition, write compilable code that would invalidate them.
Finally, it turns out that a lot of the bad stuff that's in java ends up in scala also, because of runtime compatibility concerns. in particular, scala's generics are an extension of java's. so, for example, almost all generic type information is lost at runtime, except for some extra metadata that scala stores in the object. this results in pretty ugly code when you have a dynamic object and you need to use it with a generic method.
>I think the prime reason for this is that scala permits operator overloading; more than that, in fact, almost every character can be an identifier.
I've been toying with the idea of trying scala for a serious project for a few months, and this part scares me. It's so obviously a bad idea it makes me wonder what other dumb things are in there.
Those "random rules" make the code base much easier to read. This kind of thing is a big step backwards for people working on large projects, especially people who need to come up to speed on a large code base.
personnally i find it quite amazing, and incredibly short-sighted, how developpers are willing to give up the freedom of the web in favor of the golden chains of the apple platform. because, make no mistake, this is where its going: in a few years nobody will want to try your stuff unless its an app, and the web will be a ghetto for porn and 4chan.
haven't we seen this movie before when microsoft controlled basically all of personal computing? at least on windows the user could install anything he wanted. now, not only developpers are at the mercy of apple's policies, but apple has decided to prevent any theoritical disruption from within by forbidding apps that host code (other than its own browser).
1. What good is the "freedom of the web" when all an application needs is client-side processing of client-side data and client-side user action? It's not even "Client" at that point because there's no server worth mentioning. The decision has nothing to do with "golden chains," and everything to do with choosing the right tool for the job, where "right" is defined by maximizing customer value per unit development BS.
2. Despite the uptick in development BS caused by "unfair" reviews and the "accelerated timeframe" with which Apple moved to enact sandboxing requirements, OS X development and MAS distribution remain a remarkably low-hassle way to monetize the activity of "getting useful, graceful code onto users' machines."
OTOH, the other platform for which I regularly write commercial software is z/OS...so consider the source, etc.
Have you ever taken a job with a company as opposed to starting your own? You do so not because you trust the employer to watch out for your individual self-interest, but because they will pay you more than you think you can make for yourself.
The app store is pretty much the same thing. I think most developers go into it with their eyes open because they figure 30% is an order of magnitude less than the increased sales they expect to get. Is it short-sighted? Maybe, but what can one developer do given the choice of either making lots of money or not? If all the developers abstained sure they could put pressure on Apple, but that's statistically not going to happen, plus Apple has been at the mercy of developers before and now they are very careful to make sure their ecosystem is complete with or without you. They'll dangle a juicy carrot for you, but they do not need to care if you take it.
Web pages are still terrible for rich content. For the web to really work you need something that is A) stable B) ridiculousness cross platform C) Fast both to load AND run D) degrades gracefully on limited Hardware, interfaces, AND network connectivity. HTML has always been a compromise and Adobe was incapable of maintaining and expanding Flash.
An opensource solution might be able to bridge the gap, but until then App's have significant advantages for users and developers alike.
What universe are you living in? The web sites/apps I use do all the things you describe, on desktop and mobile, excepting perhaps that most do not function offline (though the capability exists, the adoption rate is still low).
What's wrong with HTML being a compromise? Most things are compromises. What started off as hyper-linked rich text is a now a pretty-good (and completely open) software platform that really does work on just about any computing device there is, which would have seemed like a crazy pipe dream 20 years ago. What's the problem?
Very few people will probably agree with you, probably even try and bury your comment, even though you're absolutely right.
No one wants to admit that their fav. ecosystem is basically mob-mentality dressed in a sleek, comfortable, suit - but it is.
I love Xcode, the Apple ecosystem - but I'm finding it hard not to look down the road and see the inevitable. Are people willfully blind?
It's a mixture of shortsightedness and comfort. We have this Apple/Google fanboy thing going on, where one is trying to be better than the other. While that happens, the open web, something both sides seem to agree is important, becomes an "old media" way of doing things.
No, most customers will win. Their experience is improved by the layer of curating to weed out broken and scammy stuff. Most customers don't have needs that can't be satisfied within the set of apps that Microsoft and Apple approve, plus the entire public browser-accessible web.
It's not black-and-white that "OPEN == GOOD" and "CLOSED == BAD". There are tradeoffs both ways.
I am open source agnostic but I will not allow someone else to control what apps I can install.
Scammy stuff will still exists and only difference will be that customer will never know about it[1] and is going to live under false security.Companies will try to ban every person trying to expose vulnerabilities.
Do you thing a small set of employees sitting in a company's approval department are experts of every single thing that can be ever conceived by a developer?
I am not against the idea of sand-boxing if it is built in the OS API. How approving a sand-boxed application is going to improve the security?
This. Attackers just point their attention to the greatest targets. When one target disappears, the attackers don't disappear - they just find a different approach. The recent iOS security breach proved this, in my opinion, pretty concretely.
I agree that both open and closed can co-exist, but if media drives media (ie, advertising agencies chasing the app-for-no-reason bandwagon) how can we be sure that we don't have a monoculture in software development in the future? I don't think there is any argument that that would be an entirely bad thing.
At my job, I am embroiled in signs that point in this very loathsome direction.
I have a hard time imagining, let alone fearing, such a future when we have an abundance of alternatives. How much can Apple limit developers or somehow degrade our consumer experience when Android, Chrome and Windows are readily available? If you can really imagine Apple kicking Avid, Pro Tools and Blizzard off of the Mac platform (the sure result if Apple forced them on the App Store and demanded %30 of the revenue) then you have a much more active imagination than me.
Apple's building a controlled app store, we get it - that doesn't mean that their only goal is control. To me, this is like imputing in 2003 that since Apple's highest profile products were music related, that Apple would soon be strictly dedicated to music-related software and hardware.
It's definitely interesting to me that some developers call people who purchase their app through the App Store "customers" when, in reality, they have NO way of knowing who these people are, contacting them outside the app, or really doing anything with them at all. That, to me, does not a customer make.
If you don't have a way of "doing anything with" your customers that functions independent of holding their email address and/or credit card number, you're not doing something "with" them so much as doing something "to" them.
Not every application needs to be a goddamned community experience wherein the original transaction spawns a lifetime of subtle sales attempts from the developer. Be happy that someone paid to use what you built. If you want more money from them, or you want their email address, build so much cool shit that they want to hear about what's next.
Any application that works with media, e.g. audio, video, needs really good access to the filesystem. I can't see Avid Media Composer for example ever conforming to the sandbox idea. What is Apple going to do about that in the long term? Give up on their platform for professional use?
Apps that need access to arbitrary files can ask for it when setting up their sandbox credentials. Apple has to approve that, of course, but that's the cost of "safety."
I'm with the majority here who fear this new feature...
I was of the understanding that the sandboxed app needed permission to access certain files that weren't created by them, I'll read the documentation more thoroughly. Perhaps a better example are apps that scan you drive to tell you what your file system is full off (to free up space for example). This type of thing is extremely useful, and would seem to violate the sandbox idea?
My understanding is that it's not permission from the user, but permission from Apple. If you need to do something outside of the sandbox, you need to go through their API calls. And when you submit your application, you need to justify each out-of-sandbox-API call you make.
Indeed I feel like coming to this conclusion is something that the authors - and most of us rationalist types - do not _want_ to come to.
Because if you accept that hypothesis, then it follows as a consequence that an alternative view of the world makes a lot more sense: what if, rather than living in an emergent, random universe where life sprouts up everywhere, hundreds of billions of times, but somehow _always_ disappears before we can ever observe it outside Earth, we are instead living at the center of a universe where we are the sole intelligent species that ever existed? In that system of the world, the universe is being directed by beings existing outside its bounds - gods. A simulation created and managed by uncaring observers - as hypothesized by the likes of Elon Musk? Or a benevolent God in the Judeo/Christiano/Islamic tradition?
The truth is that this alternative is being rejected a priori, indeed not even acknowledged, by the authors of the article or most people in this thread, because it is an affront to their core beliefs, not through pure logical reasoning.