Bravo, Apple
gamehaxe.com
gamehaxe.com
Thoughtful analysis trumps cheap shots even when you're in the right.
There are plenty of smart people who disagree with you. Assuming the answer is obvious harms your argument. (I have a personal exception for tea baggers.)
1) I had dismissed sarcastically (or worse) many people as idiots who I discovered later were right
2) I have very little capacity to determine whether someone is thinking two or three steps ahead of me, at least from a couple of forum posts
The pain of remembering multiple situations where I was 'that guy' is enough to keep me in check, mostly :)
I have a personal exception for anyone who thinks it is a good idea to legally enforce programming language choice in a developer agreement.
I suggest that your "maturity" is still perhaps not to the point where you should be lecturing others quite yet.
Sorry, it turns out you are right, it's more like a quarter: http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainst... Still way too many people to be tarring with a brush while claiming to be rational about disagreement.
The politics of the tea party are not my concern here. My point is that you shouldn't claim to be open to disagreement, except for that thing over there that commands the "support" of tens of millions of people. That's simply called not being open to disagreement. Honestly, that's fine; I doubt there's anybody here who is actually open to every argument you can find 25% of a country or world to agree to. Just don't pretend otherwise. As that link shows, there's no obvious "well, that's just the stupid people" argument available, either.
(I do draw the line at the "supported by millions of people", though of course I can't draw a bright shining line, because there are practical limits; one need not spend a lot of time pondering one guy's theories about the Time Cube. But dismissing entire quarters of a country at a time isn't anywhere near the line.)
By analogy, should I also not be dismissive of creationism, which fails to postulate a single verifiable claim which has not already been disproved? If I am to be rational, then I must also be able to expect at least some baseline of rationality from those I converse with.
In summary, yes, I am open to disagreement, but I'm not open to be respectful of groups which have nothing with which I can even in principle disagree.
Apparently, it wasn't a favored group of people by HN standards, because if someone had come on and said the same thing about Democrats and I had been standing up for Democrats, I guarantee I would have been upmodded to the sky. But "not the favored group of people" is exactly who you need to be listening to if you're going to be "open minded". Smacking someone down for merely suggesting that if you are open minded you shouldn't be insulting the people who disagree with you is demonstrating the very sort of poser open mindedness that I'm speaking out against.
And I choose and emphasize the word "poser" quite deliberately. Everybody knows they're supposed to say they are "open minded". Few actually do it, but everybody sure does claim it!
The owner of a platform is making a very clear and calculated business decision in order to strengthen their position. This comes at the expense of the thousands of businesses that are attempting to profit from the platform.
Just because Mac vs PC, Android vs iPhone etc from a consumer perspective gets lost in endless, meaningless, irrational internet debate does not mean that you can't have rational, in depth discussion about issues related to developing software for these platforms.
I'm frustrated with Apple for their choices, but I expect that developers will work with it, and Apple does have some good points to their aid. Overall, Apple will happily bicker with their developers, but in the end they will always be trying to support them. On the sarcasm part, I think anyone coming across this and missing that won't think too much about it, and no harm done will be remembered.
I'm up for satire, but to qualify for my admiration, I'm looking for the satire to address both the action and the motivation of the party being skewered.
In this case, making fun of the "no other languages" clause is totally fair game, but by characterizing it as an attempt to weed out wimpy developers it is attacking a straw man instead of addressing Apple's desire to defend control of their own platform against encroachment by Adobe and others.
Not bad for a few lines of english added to an obscure document.
I saw news about plans for Creative Suite being able to export to HTML5 months ago. Adobe knows that that Flash is going to lose market share, they're smart enough to see the writing on the wall and prepare accordingly. Their designer tools don't have to be tied to Flash's fate. I think it's beautiful that the same tools can theoretically target Flash Player, HTML5, native iPhone, Android, etc. Everything is just an abstraction to ones and zeroes in the end.
The first effect of Apple's clause has been to brew up a shitstorm among developers who understand how computation works and how arbitrary business practices aren't aligned with technical reality.
I'm no Adobe fan, but give them some credit. They may be influenced by Apple's position, but whatever we're seeing from them now has surely been under development for a long time (i.e. months, not days).
... By raising the barrier of entry, and only permitting "real" programming languages (ie, "C" based ones)
Frankly I think, and I'm sure many here would agree, this is bullshit.
[edit] The rest of the post only gets worse. Very little facts and plenty of noise.
Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer ( usually the mistake is to employ sarcasm in first place ).
it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious
I completely disagree on both counts. First of all, just because some people get duped doesn't make sarcasm a bad idea. In fact, getting duped by sarcasm can be an educational experience.
Second of all, there is a lot of sarcasm and satire out there that is so obvious that it is a clear reading comprehension failure to miss it. If there is enough appropriate context, voice, and tone in a piece of writing and you fail to detect any of it, it may not be the fault of the writer. You can't just take a whole style or mood of expression and say it's not appropriate for written form. The most you can say is that it should be used with care. In this particular piece, the proposals and ideas put forth were very obviously constructed to be self-contradicting. If someone didn't mark this as satire when reading through it, they have a reading comprehension problem.
Then sarcasm in print must not be a good idea either, because if you can't convey tone and emotional nuance in text on the internet, certainly text in a dead-tree publication suffers from the same problem, right? What's fundamentally different between the two? The level of possible distribution? The ease at which one can be a publisher on the internet vs. in a print medium?
Or is there another reason why internet sarcasm is a bad idea that I'm not seeing?
> Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer
Preposterous. Some of the best sarcasm I've read isn't immediately obviously sarcastic. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Sometimes the writer sucks at being sarcastic, and sometimes the reader has a poorly-developed sense of humor. But that's ok! An ability to understand well-crafted sarcasm isn't a prerequisite for living in the world.
And I am extremely surprised there's a person out there that didn't get it.
Sarcasm on the internet is totally a good idea!