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Welcome to Hell... iHell that is...
Darwin:
Wow! As Apple threads go - on DC or elsewhere - this one seems very tame to me. I'm surprised that justice and wraith are having such an adverse reaction to the discourse. If we're taking into account other Apple-related threads on DC, then I suppose the attitude could be defined as antagonisitc. However, I don't see the problem m'self... Personally, I like Apple products but loathe the company and the zealotry. I'm not a big Steven Jobs fan, either (yes, I think he is a genius - particularly at picking the "next big thing", producing it, and marketing his products - but that doesn't mean I have to like him ;D).
Anyway, I'm not sure what's being objected to here. If voicing any dissenting view about Apple is "attitudinal" then label me as attitudinal! Overall, I"m a bit concerned about the undertone of censorship that I detect. I mean, c'mon - I'll recycle an analogy already used in this thread and put it to a different purpose: if we were slagging off Microsoft, would anyone raise a voice of dissent about it?
FWIW I own both Windows and OSX PCs along with an iPod Classic and an iPod Touch 4th Gen. Doesn't mean I have to drink the Kool-Aid, though.
app103:
But as soon as there's big financial interest involved, and considering censorship and the license terms Apple enforces on the iPhone App store - ugh. And there's rumors that apple might be removing Flash and Java support for OS X...
-f0dder (October 22, 2010, 02:48 PM)
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Nah, they're simply not bundling them with Lion, so if you want any of those two, you're on your own. It's not the brightest idea Apple ever had as, unlike the iPhone, you need Flash on desktop computers, and Oracle does not yet have a Java runtime for OS X, which it's in their best interest to get resolved soon, considering the number of Java developers working with Macs. In the end, it's just another step towards Apple absolute control over their own products.
-Lashiec (October 22, 2010, 03:16 PM)
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I don't see a problem with this. Windows doesn't come with Flash and Java pre-installed either. Some OEMs do install it, but Windows itself doesn't come with it. What Apple would be doing is not something that represents having any more control than they did before. If anything, they are giving their users a little more control, protecting them (and themselves).
I can only speak here from the perspective of the Windows world when it comes to the effect that OEMs preinstalling Flash and Java has had.
By the time a user gets a new PC, often the pre-installed Flash and Java stuff is already outdated. And typical user behavior is not to upgrade stuff if whatever they want to do still works. So as long as the flash games on Facebook work and they can watch Youtube videos, they will keep the older version of Flash. The problem is that older versions of Flash and Java contain security vulnerabilities that are being exploited in the wild. There is a whole lot of malware getting on to users PC's because of this.
And really old versions of Java have an additional issue: upgrading it doesn't remove the older exploitable versions. Sure, they have improved this slightly and the latest installers do remove some of the older versions, but there is a point at which it stops and doesn't remove really ancient versions...the highly vulnerable and widely exploited 1.4 that so many OEMs still pre-install gets left on the machine to continue to be a security threat.
If OEMs didn't pre-install this stuff, then the user wouldn't likely have java or Flash on their machines unless they needed it and installed it themselves, and if/when they do, it will be the latest version and not something already outdated. Even if they are the typical user that doesn't update stuff unless they have a problem with it, they would still be better off starting with an up to date version rather than something pre-installed by the OEM.
If Apple's Macs become more popular, then it will be very important to their users experience not to have this old stuff on their systems. The more popular their OS becomes, the bigger target their users become, and the more malware we will see targeting them and the software they run. It would be a wise move for Apple not to repeat the mistakes made by OEMs in the PC world. And it would also be wise not to repeat the mistakes of Microsoft. (Does anyone remember what happened to MSJVM?)
Darwin:
Hmm... interesting points, app. My understanding of the brouhaha over Apple and Flash was that Apple devices like the iPad and iPhone not only do not ship with Flash but their OS's don't support Flash, rendering the choice over whether to install it or not, moot?
app103:
Hmm... interesting points, app. My understanding of the brouhaha over Apple and Flash was that Apple devices like the iPad and iPhone not only do not ship with Flash but their OS's don't support Flash, rendering the choice over whether to install it or not, moot?
-Darwin (October 23, 2010, 04:23 PM)
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This doesn't refer to iPhone/iPad...it's about OSX, their desktop OS.
Lashiec:
From an user's perspective, it may not change much, but for developers it's another thing. Apple did not bundle Sun's JVM with OS X, they developed its own version, just like Microsoft did, and would continue to do if they didn't ruin the whole thing. What's more, at one point Apple officially supported Java as a language suitable for developing OS X applications. Not anymore. Developers using Java now have to wait for Oracle to come up with a version of its own, which may or not suck more than Apple's own.
With Apple's security track record, non-bundling Flash and Java doesn't automatically make them invulnerable, they only have potentially fewer holes, but not many. And I say "potentially", because Flash had been autoupdating itself for a while and the JVM is updated via Apple Software Update, so in one case the infection window lasts at most a whole week, and in the second case, it's a matter of Apple to change its policies.
And finally, did you know the review guidelines for Apple's new App Store reject (among others) Java apps?
Who knows, in the end, it may not mean much, after all Microsoft used to bundle both Flash and their own JVM, and Windows hasn't become a less open platform that it was before, but Apple's control tendencies cannot be understated in things like this. In principle it's a good thing for Mac users that developers make good use of OS X features when developing applications, but in the long term you may be precluding them from using 3rd party tools which would make things easier for them, and we already saw a glimpse of such future with the abandoned iPhone app guidelines.
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