This is definitely fodder for the "walled garden" proponents to justify closed and heavily vetted architectures. It feels like the old WWW-Wild west days but this time with bigger brothers smugly looking down with the "tut, tut, tut" expression on their faces.
I disagree; I think that perspective is shortsighted because it only looks at the direct benefits.
Think of how much users have been benefiting from new and innovative webapps, which are a result of the competition between browsers. Now imagine where we would be if Windows was a walled garden and didn't allow competing applications, like Apple does with iOS.
Openness breeds competition. Competition is always good for the user.
The browser is an extremely important part of the web. For now, Safari for iOS is up-to-date with the rest of the browsers, but what if it starts lagging behind? Either the users are stuck not being able to use fully certain websites, or the web gets stuck like it still is with IE.
I'm not saying walled gardens don't have advantages to the users - a garden with a good landscaper is probably better for the common user, no doubt. But to say that openness only benefits devs and a small number of users is shortsighted. It's a balancing act.
The average user doesn't care if their phone is "open" or not.
This is like saying that the average user doesn't care about free markets or not. Sure, they might not directly state a preference, but they do most certainly care about the platform benefits of it.
This is definitely fodder for the "walled garden" proponents to justify closed and heavily vetted architectures.
This is justification for some control, not total control. It is not all or nothing, and Google has shown startling negligence in even the most rudimentary of protections.
Seriously, name collisions and similarity should automatically yield a human review.
This is definitely happening (the Temple Run clones on the Market come to mind here), but in this case, the malware's not on the Market, I don't believe - it's being distributed on other sites. So I'm not sure the walled garden stuff matches here - you can download cracked iOS ipas all over the 'net, too.
The unfortunate thing here is that users are going to try to install this stuff by hook or by crook not caring from whence they get it. It's tough for developers or for Google to police this (although, with control of a search engine, you've got that - but policing search results this way is also a slippery slope. You could lock down side-loading, but that's draconian and easily subvertible anyway. You'd be surprised at the number of non-computer savvy folks who are rooted/jailbroken).
I'm not sure what the solution is - education helps (and wide proliferation of this particular malware campaign helps get the issue in front of the public a bit), community self-policing helps (see Cydia, Cyanogenmod communities), but when someone wants something and can't find it for whatever reason, they'll do anything they can to get it, no matter how dangerous.
Seriously, I once had a woman email me very upset--someone emailed her an apk off a pirate site and she was having a heck of a time getting it to download and install on her Blackberry Torch! Please help!
Anyone know why some of the courses offered by the likes of Standford that are available as open (free courses) on iTunesU and across the web aren't available on Coursera? One thing I dislike about the courses on iTunesU is the lack of being able to connect with others who are also studying along with you. There's no community per se
Because the Coursera courses are made to be online, not only classes that were put online.
The difference between Courser, Udacity and MITx, from iTunesU , earth academic and the others is that they prime for being a 'real' class. You have deadlines, exercises, projects and so on. And you can interact with your peers.
I hope that Steve Jobs, who happily credited himself as an openly adherent member and ambassador of the counterculture that fought for ideas like this to be acceptable in a then over-conservative society, is rightfully turning in his grave.
Let's not act like he would have cared about this while he was alive. Apple's products and services always place family-friendlyness over any kind of free expression.
Yeah as I say, "I hope"... maybe even retrospectively from atop of his own 'iCloud'. Please read my comment as slightly tongue in cheek, I'm well aware of his later-life stance on adult material.
Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, the man responsible for acquiring the popular photo sharing app for $1 billion, Systrom received no formal engineering training.
From Systrom's bio on Instagram:
Kevin graduated from Stanford University in 2006 with a BS in Management Science & Engineering—he got his first taste of the startup world when he was an intern at Odeo that later became Twitter. He spent two years at Google—the first of which was working on Gmail, Google Reader, and other products...
Spin aside. His story would be really inspiring for folks i have met who think that for one to learn how to program, they need to go to Uni and apply for a cs degree which is bullshit.
>>>The problem is that a lot of HR departments won't consider people without degrees.
Aren't people who are motivated to teach themselves coding the very kind of people who would want to avoid dealing with Suit HR departments? Wouldn't they be more interested in working at a smaller firm, especially a startup, if they had to work for someone else at all?
Sure, but the fewer alternatives you have available to you the less control you have over your market rate. Ideally you'd like to be eminently qualified and command a bigco salary at a strong small firm.
It is bullshit, I'm currently learning to program by following the excellent CS106A paper at Stanford, free on iTunesU. In the current online climate you can learn to code without trying to figure out how to pay a massive student loan back when you're done.
What bugged me about the spin was the comment about Systrom receiving no formal training, unlike Zuck. Zuck built Facebook with next none of the "formal training" he was supposedly getting during his short stint at Harvard. Systrom actually graduated and then went on to be exposed to some pretty big name companies in the tech world.
I'm curious about this. Can you basically get a Stanford education via iTunes now? And how would you convince people that you actually had one? [typo edit]
