While they certainly enjoyed the conventions English law afforded them, it was always understood that these rights are natural rights born with their humanity. To lead a revolution and form a new government, they understood that this could not be justified if they had to appeal to the King's law. Instead they argued based on the natural rights of man and drew upon bodies of political philosophy and thinking such as John Locke which gave the legal basis.
These ideas are all over the Declaration of Independence:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth,"
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"
The bottom 2/3's of the Declaration of Independence are a list of specific grievances against the King and how "He" violated their rights. While most school children are only introduced the preamble to the Declaration, the drafters felt that the actual important part was the list at the bottom because this was considered both a moral and legal document, justifying revolution. Trying to argue in only technical legal terms within the King's law would give them neither which is why the political philosophy of natural rights is embraced.
It is worth reminding that the freedom of speech was understood at the time as one of our unalienable rights as individuals. Notice the phrasing of the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging _the_ freedom of speech
The article "the" before "freedom" was deliberate. "The" freedom of speech is an absolute given. And it is not that Congress authorizes or allows freedom of speech. It is "Congress shall make no law".
Part of the debate on writing the Bill of Rights was not that rights needed to be granted to the people and the states, but that it was not necessary because it was understood that these rights already exist and come from our humanity and cannot be denied. A document like the Bill of Rights could be misconstrued and abused to flip the tables and make people assume their rights are granted as a privilege of the ruling government, instead of a truth that it is inherently in every person and they delegate their powers to the government.
It is worth remembering that The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonym Publius. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay believed in the importance of anonymity as a tool for public discussion. A surveillance state can destroy this tool as well.
As somebody who has written to companies about bugs in their products (and almost always ignored), I would really appreciate a response even if it was some form letter thing to the effect of "I just make a small component that happens to be used in your car, kind of like the people who make the screws in your car. Please contact your car manufacturer directly."
I personally just like knowing somebody read my letter instead of going into a black hole. And I kind of expect these things to go into black holes, so it's actually kind of heart warming when I receive any kind of response.
And this response would at least tell me to try a different contact. (I know in this case who Daniel Stenberg is and know what curl is so I wouldn't make this specific mistake, but sometimes hunting for support contact information returns things that are vague.)
If the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine because it just means they don't understand, which means they are just getting angrier at the car company. The car company deserves that since they made it so hard to contact them.
Interesting. Now you got me thinking more about what things might change with self-driving cars.
Will cars offer an "orbiting" mode where they keep driving in a circle until you are ready to be picked up.
Will stores offer a driving ring where cars can drive around in circles off the main street in the case where no parking slots are available?
Will cars be able to drop you off, and park themselves when a space becomes available? Will the cars notify you where they parked, or will they always come to your location? (And what if you are standing in an area that is impossible to drive to...where does the car go?)
I can't wait for self-driving cars. This will be a lot of fun to see how the world changes in both the large and small.
I knew a guy in college who rented a house that didn't have any outlets with a ground plug.
This became such a problem, he made his own ground by using a big metal pipe outside the house that was already deep in the earth, and running a wire from it to where he kept all his equipment.
Then he used stuff like in that picture to make sure he could ground all his equipment.
I also suspect CUPS remains pretty active. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) started a long time ago and is used by pretty much all the Unix platforms. Apple bought the project in 2007. The license remains GPL2/LGPL2 and all the platforms still use it as far as I know.
I know from personal experience that at least LLVM, Clang, Swift, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore have daily activity and also include non-Apple commit reviewers.
I am now a victim of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it".
I hated Flash. I either avoided installing it or used a Flash blocker. So I always managed to avoid the auto-playing problem when the Internet primarily used Flash for everything annoying.
Now that Flash is about dead and everything is HTML5 now, neither of these techniques work any more to avoid auto-playing.
All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors.
The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.
The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to open source since the switch to OS X (NeXT acquisition).
Just off the top of my head, projects they have had a large hand in: WebKit & JavaScriptCore, Objective-C, CUPS, LLVM, Clang, Bonjour/Zeroconf, Darwin, launchd, libdispatch, CoreFoundation, dtrace.
And more recently Apple Lossless Encoder, LZFSE compression, and of course Swift.
And this is only a tiny fraction of what they are users of.
I personally think they go overboard in the name of security on iOS, for example the banning of JIT and (formerly) dynamic libraries combined with the App review process is overkill. You don't need both.
BUT...context of where this all stems from is important to remember. On the Mac side before the iPhone, the Windows world was getting hammered with security problems and the perception of this was having negative repercussions throughout the PC world. Average users were scared to touch their PCs and especially afraid to try installing new applications. Mac users were the complete opposite of this and their market was dominated by consumers who loved getting (buying) the latest OS updates and buying the latest, coolest apps. Money flowed in the Mac world. But as Mac started getting more attention, lots of different press coverage wondered if Mac could be vulnerable to the same kind of vulnerabilities Windows users were constantly dealing with now that it is a bigger target. So keeping Mac secure for the benefit of their users became a profit incentive for Apple.
On the iPhone side, remember, Apple was walking a tightrope with the phone carrier (AT&T) when they first got started. They didn't have the leverage they have now. Remember that mobile carriers have been obstinate about updates in the name of (their own) "security". They didn't want a bad update, that they couldn't test, somehow bring down the entire cellphone network. Nor did the carriers want nefarious apps that would secretly make expensive phone calls to pay-per-minute numbers. It's no surprise that when Jobs finally was convinced to open the platform to 3rd party native apps, there was some kind of vetting system introduced to appease the mobile carriers from saying 'no'. This is not to say that security was the only thing on their mind and there are other reasons they would like the model they have, but it was a factor. (Consistent user experience is another factor, which is something the App Review process could help enforce since the iPhone was new. Mac has less of this problem because there had been many years of conventions laid down which developers were very good about following in the eco-system already, which is another key difference between the iPhone and Mac ecosystems.)
As for why Apple doesn't lock down the Mac as they do now, the simple answer is that it doesn't help their bottom line in any way. Mac and iOS have very different use cases and heritages. And Apple has been successful with their current Mac carrot/stick trade-off. Most Mac developers I've talked with say that while dealing with the Mac App Store is annoying, they do get a lot more visibility and sales than by not being on the store. Users are no longer confused about how to "install" their apps which saves them customer support costs. (Yes, the open DMG, drag-and-drop to Applications thing is confusing for people.) For indie developers, building a store front and dealing with a payment processor doesn't save them a huge amount of money for what Apple provides for their 30% cut. And remember, sales seem to be better on MAS for most developers so this ends up paying for itself. (And if you are a game developer, you see basically the same arrangement with Steam/Value.)
For those who can't get on the Mac App Store, perhaps due to the technical restrictions, Developer ID for GateKeeper is one option. Apple still gets $99/year for this. And it is worth pointing out, if Apple was truly only obsessed about their 30% cut for MAS, they wouldn't have these technical restrictions and would let anybody do anything on MAS so they could get their cut.
So if Apple decided to lock down the Mac entirely, what does it get them? Most developers are already voluntarily using Mac App Store and Developer ID. Those developers who are not already participating in those systems and not giving Apple money, locking down the system isn't likely going to get any of these developers to hand over any more money.
A lot of these developers are probably making software for their own in-house purposes, developing web sites, or developing for Android. Apple locking down these use cases would only result in people moving back to the PC. And internally, this would probably break all of Apple engineering as they all work on operating system components which don't fit the lock down model either.
And most importantly, remember that Apple's gross margins on hardware is like 40%. If we're talking about chasing customers away, that's a lot of money to lose. Who cares about the cut on a freebie flashlight app, website, or command line tool, which isn't going to make any money, compared to the profit on selling all those $2000 Macs.
You are using a disingenuous interpretation of what he said.
His quote is:
"tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem"
Yes, he uses the word "lock", but not in the same context we are talking about here.
He is talking about leveraging the connection between their products so say that a person with an iPhone may not want to leave the Mac for a PC because the customer may miss the interoperability/integration features available.
For example, Apple provides their "Continuity" APIs for things like Handoff between iOS and Mac. This is something that Apple can do to make their ecosystem more attractive to customers and discourage them from leaving because it is less likely developers are going to write apps that go to this level of coordination between say your Windows desktop, your Android phone, Pebble watch, and Roku TV.
This strategy does not automatically imply that Mac must be locked down so nobody is allowed to distribute apps outside the Mac App Store.
Since all the posts here seem pretty negative about Slack's response, I'm genuinely curious...how do you think a smaller company should respond when a huge company decides to enter their competitive space?
I ask because I've been an employee at multiple start ups before and seen this kind of situation happen multiple times. I have not yet seen a response that gets received well. And silence gets perceived by existing customers as weakness or fear.
Wait. Aren't the numbers for SSDs, particularly the bus speeds for the SATA connection measured in Gigabits (not bytes)?
Looking at these numbers you linked to (which seem to be in megabytes, it seems to me that decompression speeds could keep up. And I know write speeds on SSDs are a lot slower than the spec'd numbers, so the compression write speeds look plausible to me too.
The general idea is that modern CPUs tend to be instruction starved and sit idle because they are waiting on the slow memory buses that connect everything.
These ideas are all over the Declaration of Independence:
"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth,"
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"
"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"
The bottom 2/3's of the Declaration of Independence are a list of specific grievances against the King and how "He" violated their rights. While most school children are only introduced the preamble to the Declaration, the drafters felt that the actual important part was the list at the bottom because this was considered both a moral and legal document, justifying revolution. Trying to argue in only technical legal terms within the King's law would give them neither which is why the political philosophy of natural rights is embraced.