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http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/09/05iphone.html
Apple sold nearly a million iPhones at the original price ($499-$599) in the first two months. (And the 8GB, $599 units outsold the 4B, $499 ones by a pretty wide margin--so much so that when the price drop happened, they also discontinued the 4GB model.) Then they lowered the price to $399 and it still sold very well--a total of six million in the first year, according to this. It wasn't $199 until mid-2008.

great QA

The article was created based on a Dell forum post, which suggests its a revision/replacement board, and that Dell found it, rather than someone outside. Getting parts that are compatible but not fully debugged happens, Apple,HP, and Asus have done it too.

Yes, they can

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft,-Adobe-squabble-over-PDF/2100-1012_3-6079320.html

Here's a link to PDF becoming an open standard:

http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1141

Yes, they can

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft,-Adobe-squabble-over-PDF/2100-1012_3-6079320.html

That was 2006. I think that might have changed since then.

Yes, they can

http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft,-Adobe-squabble-over-PDF/2100-1012_3-6079320.html

Source:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20010923-261.html

"In the FBI's letter, the agency included a clause that says Web hosts and Internet service providers may voluntarily elect to shut down the sites of customers involved in these kinds of situations. The Burst.net employee who handled the request erroneously believed that the FBI would want to seize the customer's server and thus the employee cut off service to Blogetery. Marr said the FBI, however, never asked for the server."

Historically, Blackberries have had no auto-lock timer, but required being put into the case or hitting a key combination in order to lock the device.

Maximum Security Timeout

(the above link is to the BES article, but the setting exists in standalone configuration too)

Or, there is the re-bindable convenience key

So you've been annoyed enough to rant on /. but not enough to spend 10 seconds on google?
Or are you just another iPhone fanboi?

Keep in mind that RIM's smartphone market share, though greater, isn't insanely greater than Apple's market share -- last we saw it was 35% versus 27 %, with RIM falling and Apple rising in Q1 2010 (who knows where it is now), and even given that disparity Apple still takes a greater share of the profits and has higher customer satisfaction. The iPhone solution is simply more profitable to the producer and more beneficial to more buyers than Blackberrys.

We all know Linus doesn't want to move into GPL v3. He never liked the GPL, or free software at all for that matter.

There's more than one problem with this. Firstly, Linus doesn't hate the GPL:

Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.

- Linus Torvalds, 1997

He just doesn't like version 3. Also, I see no reason to believe he hates free software either.

But it will happen eventually, he can't stay behind forever.

Secondly, he can indeed "stay behind forever": he owns the copyright to about 2% of the kernel source - the rest is owned by its many thousands of contributors, and there is no realistic way to contact them all about relicensing (though I should point out that not all of them have specified a GPL version).

Additionally, while Linus has been the most vocal about GPLv3, the majority of major kernel developers agree with him (not that the GPL and free software in general sucks, but that GPLv2 suits them better than GPLv3).

This means that even if Torvalds and the rest of the kernel team decide they like GPLv3, they still can't switch.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10409153-1.html

I'm kinda seconding the general thought everyone else is voicing. Disappointment over the lack of improvement. But I think with some more work, it could be made to do better.

Let's face the facts though - it's taped onto the phone.

Still, the so-called democratic countries don't do this: China shuts down dozens of blogs

see this article in cnet news. At the bottom a flash window has all the pages of the suit and the contract in the appendix. According to the contract the 50% ownership is unambiguous. it's the primary compensation and it is listed right up front. Also they show other documents indicating that the name changes were registered as ficticious (placeholder) names in NY. It's going to be interesting....

While it would be nice if they could keep companies like Fujitsu in the slate market (they recently discontinued their Stylistic ST6000 line and HP/Compaq has yet to replace the TC1000/1100/1200 line), there are a couple of slates running (or which can run) Windows 7 available:

http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_J35.asp

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/archos-9-pc-tablet/1805-3126_7-33800951.html

Unfortunately, the marketplace has mostly switched over to convertibles (pending the release of devices intended to compeat w/ the iPad). This has gotten so bad that some people purchase the Axiotron ModBook:

http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=home

and then install Windows on it, which indicates there is a market...

William

I hope Microsoft brings back their Courier project or some other device with two screens that you hold like a book.

There is hope for the future of the 'Courier'. On June 30, 2010, Network World posted that Microsoft received a patent on June 29th, which might be for the 'Courier', "[p]atent number D618683 for a 'dual display device'."

It's seriously the only tablet I would feel comfortable to hold and use. A hard single surface tablet is not nice to hold, especially since we have used to hold books in our hands for hundreds of years.

Personally I will be waiting and will not buy a tablet unless I can hold it like that. Otherwise I might just as well use a laptop.

Hm, that's dangerously close to this one. Better be careful.

Background material:

Vista class action lawsuit.

New York Times article: "Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less prone to crashing."

http://news.cnet.com/Patent-office-issues-final-rejection-of-NTP-patent/2100-1047_3-6042049.html

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a final rejection of one of the five patents at issue in NTP's long-running case against BlackBerry maker Research In Motion.

The final rejection was posted on the Patent Office's Web site for the NTP-held patent, which covers a system for sending e-mails over a wireless network to a mobile device. The Patent Office has already issued nonfinal actions rejecting the claims in four out of the five NTP patents in question, but a final rejection is required before the appeals process can begin.

All in 2006...

And your problem is that you make shit up.

http://www.riaa.com/aboutus.php?content_selector=about_us_exec_bios

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1027_3-5056299.html

> If we go by marketshare, best bet is Symbian.

Er, no! Symbian only has a 2% market share and falling. Personally, I don't even know anyone with a Symbian phone anymore - they've moved to Blackberrys or iPhones.

> should make an Android app instead. They're cheaper, open, and there are many more devices with it.

No, there are nothing like as many Android devices as there are iPhones. There are only a quarter or up to a third (depending on which website you read).

Android only has a 9% market share, compared with iPhone's 28% and RIM Blackberry at 35%. source

Now if you have to make more than one call, something is wrong. That one call should be a notification to Twitter who I am, where you can contact me and what I want to keep tabs on--be it a keyword or user.

That's not easy to do on a large scale. A persistent connection has to be in place between publisher and subscriber. Twitter would have to have a huge number of low-traffic connections open. (Hopefully only one per subscriber, not one per publisher/subscriber combination.) Then, on the server side, they'd have to have a routing system to track who's following what, invert that information, and blast out a message to all followers whenever there was an update. This is all quite feasible, but it's quite different from the classic HTTP model.

It's been done before, though. Remember Push technology? That's what this is. PointCast sent their final news/stock push message in February 2000. There's more support for "push" in HTML5, incidentally.

If you really wanted to scale this concept, the thing to do would be to rework a large server TCP implementation so that it used a buffer pool shared between connections, rather than allocating buffers for each open connection. The TCP implementation needs to be optimized for a very large number of mostly-idle connections. Then implement an RSS server with slow polling, so that the client makes an RSS query which either returns new data, waits for new data, or times out in a minute or two and returns a brief "no changes" reply. Clients can then just read the RSS feed, and be informed immediately when something changes. A single server should be able to serve a few million Twitter-type users in this mode.

The client side would encode what it was "following" in the URL parameters. The server side needs a fabric between data sources such that changes propagate from sources to front servers quickly, and then on each front server, all the RSS feeds for all the followers for the changed item get an update push.

There's a transient load problem. If you have 50,000,000 users, each following a few hundred random users, load is relatively uniform and it works fine. If you have 50,000,000 people following World Cup scores, each update will force 50,000,000 transactions, all at once. All the clients get a notification that something has changed. So they immediately make a request for details (the picture of someone scoring, for example). All at the same time. However, if you arrange things so that the request for details hits a server different from the one that's doing the notifications, ordinary load-balancing will work.

You're missing my point. I'm not saying that there are no Symbian apps in these categories. Of course there are. But I don't just want an app that does X, I want an app that does X the way I want it to be done.

Case in point: MP3 players. Every platform has them, but I keep trying them, and going back to my Cowan U2, because it was the only player I could find that let me dump a bunch of podcasts on to it and listen to them in chronological order, with automatic bookmarking.

The I got an Android phone. Tried a couple dozen different MP3 players before I found MortPlay. Which fortunately turned up just as my U2 died.

Tell me, are there even a dozen different MP3 players for Symbian? I'm guessing not. Which makes it unlikely that any of them have the feature set I'm looking for.

That was my point: that all those thousands of fartware apps may be useless, but they're signs of a platform that's popular with developers. And that popularity translates into the nice feature set I was looking for.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10274953-94.html

Looks like industry is moving in that direction. I thought Mini USB was going to win out but looks like Micro USB is the future.

in fact.... here....

http://reviews.cnet.com/usb-flash-drives/?filter=502909_14791771_

Filtered for Write protect switch enabled.

Someone is standing a bit to the left of Lenin. Oh, and as far as cyber wars go, the one between 4chan and Youtube seems to be heating up!

Shhhh! You don't want Barack to shut down the internet, do you?

What's convenient about electrical grid systems designed to fail? We've even had the East Coast power grid, which includes part of the midwest and Canada fall down, allegedly related to some idiot using Microsoft products in mission critical situations. We've also had extended air traffic shut downs for the world's 8th largest economy. But hey check out that spin. The headline says it's the fault of the flunky who needs to reboot the Microsoft "server" every few hours, rather than hanging up the criminals who replaced working systems with Microsoft products.

Secure systems are convenient: they work.

Will Monster make a special gold-plated, oxygenated cable for it?

How about a cable in the $500 price range?

I don't think that money for the site is a problem, given that you can get a decent webhosting package (cgi + 2 databases) with unlimited traffic for about 50 USD per year.

Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money? Well, looking at just storage and bandwidth I guess there are some that do like iPage but I wonder how reliable they are. Others CNet lists cost more or have limited bandwidht and storage. Aplus.net, the first on the CNet list, has personal websites for $65.45 for the year but storage is limited to 20 GB and data transfer 250GB. HostMySite.com is next with Linux hosting for $13 a month. It's basic plan has 20 GB of storage and 500 GB of monthly data transfer.

Falcon

I don't think that money for the site is a problem, given that you can get a decent webhosting package (cgi + 2 databases) with unlimited traffic for about 50 USD per year.

Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money? Well, looking at just storage and bandwidth I guess there are some that do like iPage but I wonder how reliable they are. Others CNet lists cost more or have limited bandwidht and storage. Aplus.net, the first on the CNet list, has personal websites for $65.45 for the year but storage is limited to 20 GB and data transfer 250GB. HostMySite.com is next with Linux hosting for $13 a month. It's basic plan has 20 GB of storage and 500 GB of monthly data transfer.

Falcon

I don't think that money for the site is a problem, given that you can get a decent webhosting package (cgi + 2 databases) with unlimited traffic for about 50 USD per year.

Can you provide a host that provides that for that much money? Well, looking at just storage and bandwidth I guess there are some that do like iPage but I wonder how reliable they are. Others CNet lists cost more or have limited bandwidht and storage. Aplus.net, the first on the CNet list, has personal websites for $65.45 for the year but storage is limited to 20 GB and data transfer 250GB. HostMySite.com is next with Linux hosting for $13 a month. It's basic plan has 20 GB of storage and 500 GB of monthly data transfer.

Falcon

IBM, as one example, has been on this hard since 2002 ( http://news.cnet.com/2100-1008-998264.html ) when the prize was first announced....stop going all lady gaga over stuf that is so old it can't even be recycled properly.

I'm not sure .NET was ever supposed to be what you seem to be saying

The original marketing for it (circa 2001-2002) was indeed very web-centric, and included the buzzwords of the day, such as "XML" and "web services". Hence the ".NET" name, actually. You might also remember Passport.NET from that age, also having to do with the web; and a bunch of other products that were slated to have .NET as part of their name, but which was dropped eventually - such as Windows Server .NET, shipped as Windows Server 2003.

Here is a typical example of article about .NET from that era.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10379870-38.html

It was a total of over 9,000 jobs. Only 3,000 were attributed to the delay - and in the final analysis, the EU agreed, the claims by Mueller etc., were bullshit.

Why are you citing a site (techrights) whose material largely consists of cites to their own prior articles, and when there is actually an external reference, the majority of times it does not back up what techrights is claiming?

Here's one for you: Florian Mueller/Muller is just a lobbyist

Another voice uneasy about the Oracle-Sun venture is Florian Mueller, an EU policy expert who is a former MySQL shareholder and adviser. Mueller had helped Widenius' new company, Monty Program, urge the EU to investigate the anticompetitive effects of a MySQL owned by Oracle.

That delay cost 3,000 people their jobs.

Major database players, including HP and IBM, have already reportedly taken advantage of the delay to win over customers from Sun.

In the meantime, Sun continues its downward spiral. Late Tuesday, the company confirmed that it would lay off another 3,000 employees, about 10 percent of its total workforce, over the next year. This latest round is in addition to 6,000 jobs cuts announced almost a year ago as part of the company's restructuring plan.

Muller/Mueller is another Darl McBride.

Also, Muller/Mueller continually cites his blog as "evidence". And remember - he IS a lobbyist.

Speaking of trolls 4 hire, why won't techrights disclose who is providing financial backing for the site? Yes, they claim there is no backing and its all done as a hobby. But they also claim to spend over an hour on average researching and writing each post. That works out to nearly 60 hours a week on average over the last 3 years. (That's average, The volume of posting there has gone up over the last few months, indicating its more like 80 hours a week now. Unpaid hobby my ass).

Don't underestimate what a group of volunteers can do. Next you'll be claiming that Pamela Jones is really a bunch of IBM lawyers.

Oh, speaking of that ... has already accused the people who called him out on his trolling and lies this last weekend of being IBM shills:

We're talking about a Groklaw crowd that uses its moderator rights etc. here on slashdot to suppress the truth that Groklaw claims to be digging for. Groklaw sent its crowd over by way of a link in its news pick column. And some of the postings look a lot like written by people who if they're not IBM employees are at least very close to IBM and very much informed.

Shades of Darl McBride - blame it on groklaw and IBM.

What did he expect? People on slashdot are going to be "very much informed" - we're not politicians who can be bought with some bafflegab and a few drinks over dinner.

And his "solution" is brain-dead. I'll be dealing with that in a future story.

Make no mistake about it folks - Muller/Mueller is a shill.

This is the same lobbyist who helped delay the Oracle rescue of Sun. The delay cost 3,000 additional jobs over and above the 6,000 that were originally slated.

This is the same lobbyist who is trying to pull a Darl McBride on IBM for Turbo Hercules - and who "complained to the establishment" when slashdotters down-modded his bullsh*t.

This is the same lobbyist who is now threatening to "expose" groklaw because astroturfers got the boot.

His latest lie? He's now saying that I've claimed he's a Microsoft shill. I've never said anything one way or another on that topic. His tin-foil hat is too tight - or he can't keep his lies straight.

He's no friend of the community.

This court ruling was a win. To say this:

It clearly favors an expansive patent system, assuming that new technologies must fall within the scope of patentable subject matter unless there's legislation that sets limits

flies against reality.

So why does Mueller continue to lie and spread fud? It's what he does - he's a lobbyist. Not a programmer.

Of course, the rules are a bit different when you're a spy :)

You forgot us normal programmers, free software guys or not. Who wants to come up with a neat design, get himself or his company into trouble for it, and be forced to go back and tear out that neat design again?

That's because Mueller doesn't give 2 shits about normal programmers, or free software, except when it's convenient for him. Remember, he tried to pull a McBride on Oracle to get them to cave into the crybaby former owner of MySql (the money lost in delaying the Oracle rescue of Sun is that much money that won't be available for supporting programmers)

Major database players, including HP and IBM, have already reportedly taken advantage of the delay to win over customers from Sun.

In the meantime, Sun continues its downward spiral. Late Tuesday, the company confirmed that it would lay off another 3,000 employees, about 10 percent of its total workforce, over the next year. This latest round is in addition to 6,000 jobs cuts announced almost a year ago as part of the company's restructuring plan.

That's 3,000 people who lost jobs in part because of assholes like Nueller/Muller.

and he's now trying to pull a McBride on IBM on behalf of his buddies at Turbo Hercules .

And also he wants to "expose" groklaw because they exposed the Turbo Hercules FUD for what it was.

3,000 jobs. This is not someone who cares about programmers. This is someone who cares about being a lobbyist - and you can be sure he's looking out for #1.

Apple wouldn't make near the $$$ following your plan. reportedly, Apple get $3 per month per phone, $11 if it was a new AT&T customer in addition to the phone cost. Apple also forced AT&T to invest millions on updating voicemail, for their phones. So that is likely $250 Million dollars per month that apple is taking from AT&T, that goes away without a exclusivity agreement. This is not the case with Verizon/Google matchup leaving Verizon with hundreds of millions of extra dollars to update their network, that serves them better than giving that to apple for their marketing. Apple had the power over AT&T to push for a network capable of the bandwidth, instead Apple pushed to make sure AT&T was capable of doing the visual voice-mail, etc not caring to push to take care of their customers overall experience when they have a chance. Not Apples fault, but apple has the power to influence AT&T, if they felt it was important to their sales.

Dell caught selling faulty PCs? News is that people are surprised.

Maybe Dell should shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders (Dell: Apple should close up shop, Oct 6 1997)

Mod me down as flamebait, I don't care. After 13 years keeping that bottled up, it felt sooo good.

Don't be a dumbshit.

AAC is not "Apple's Advanced Codec", it's a perfectly standard version of MPEG-2/MPEG-4 audio. The fact that Apple chose that as the default vs. MP3 doesn't make it any less industry-standard than MP3, especially since the iTMS started selling DRM-free versions. Just because you can't find a portable player that plays AAC, doesn't mean that there aren't those that do.

Now, if the iTMS has started selling lossless audio in ALAC (Apple Lossless), that would be different. And desirable, because you could convert that from a lossless format to another lossless format.

Are you seriously comparing the quintessential .com bubble site to a profitable and innovative car company? Just because their stock price is increasing on opening day doesn't mean that they're about to burst.

For instance, take - Google's stock. There were a multitude of pundits and "experts" claiming that their $100 IPO price levels were totally unsustainable. They looked pretty stupid when the price doubled in 6 months. Sure, Tesla is no Google, but don't imagine that their stock price is guaranteed plummet just because there is a lot of excitement surrounding their IPO.

The picture is a Seagate Goflex (and Seagate's website is now listing 3GB desktop GoFlex drives), which as far as I can find are just standard SATA drives in an enclosure that use Seagate's GoFlex interface for their connection. Relevant Link

So if people are just interested in the drive they can crack the case and get it. Also, according to the above link the GoFlex connection thingy will work for any SATA drive, so you can use it like a HDD hot swap docking station of sorts.

Overrated mods, really ? It's not at all relevant that the site that has faced police action and possible criminal charges after the stolen prototype sage are pushing this story to the point where they are getting interviewed about it in The NY Times ? (Best part of that article: the Gizmodo editor actually has better reception with his iPhone 4 than before.) Well excuse me for pointing out that when you say "consider the source" that works both ways.

Orrin Hatch proposed developing technology to remotely destroy computers that illegally download music. He has also proposed legislation that would eliminate any device that could copy media. Orrin Hatch is a menace.

If you weren't such a RINO, Pudge, you would recognize the threat he and his anti-freedom ilk represent to the Republic.

The networks were linked, and user names were made cross-compatible in 2002. If you login to AIM, and send a message to a "username" consisting of an ICQ number, it will be delivered.

Do people still use ICQ? I thought it was a dying technology in 2000

ICQ is based in Israel and has always had strong regional loyalties. Bids are in for AOL's sale of ICQ--it's down to 'UN' of 4 buyers [Feb 8]

We in the U.S. have the Fifth Amendment -- protection against self-incrimination, and luckily a federal judge ruled in favor of the fifth amendment in a similar case.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html

Unfortunately the direction that our country has been going (i.e. PATRIOT act, etc..) I don't know how long this protection will last.

You should be careful about spouting things like 'You don't know what your talking about AC'.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20008945-263.html

Considering it's been proven to affect a 3GS phone AFTER the upgrade to iOS4, but not before, it would seem to be a software issue.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20008945-263.html

The OS handles issues with signal strength and adapts the power required for poor cell reception. There is apparently some issue in iOS4 that is not adapting well to signal degradation that all cell phones experience when holding the phone at the botom.

See page 6 of the HTC Incredible manual:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20008945-263.html

Considering it's been proven to affect a 3GS phone AFTER the upgrade to iOS4, but not before, it would seem to be a software issue.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20008945-263.html

The OS handles issues with signal strength and adapts the power required for poor cell reception. There is apparently some issue in iOS4 that is not adapting well to signal degradation that all cell phones experience when holding the phone at the botom.

See page 6 of the HTC Incredible manual:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20008945-263.html