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Anyway, you are being pedantic. Clearly there are risks and inconveniences associated with running a jailbroken phone. I'm guessing once you restore your device to the factory defaults you will no longer be able to run all those great jailbreak-only apps you bought, and you'll have to go reinstall them again later after you re-install the jailbreak patch. If Apple hasn't figured out a way to disable jailbreaking altogether, that is. Hardly a level playing field with apps from iTunes.

Thinking about it, part of the reason it annoys me is because Microsoft was declared a monopolist simply for including a browser with their operating system. This basically hurt no one except other browser makers. So if you're going to call that anti-competitive then you've got to call Apple's cornering the market on the sale of all types of apps to be anti-competitive too. But I honestly don't really think Microsoft deserved to be penalized for trying to give their users a better experience than they would have with a browser-less OS. Like the Apple apologists here are saying, if the market didn't like what Microsoft was doing, they could have bought Macs or used Linux instead.

Of course there is more than just spit-shine i.e. pretty designed box over someone else's tech.
There is the huge marketing army and the all powerful distortion field.
Microsoft might be the evil empire, but Apple is simply a crazy cult. Somewhere between Branch Davidian and Scientology.
Actually, Dave and Steve might be twins, separated at birth.
Or clones, maybe?

"Product exhibits better taste"? Seriously? Taste?
Well, a long time ago someone said "De gustibus non est disputandum".
Roughly translated it means "Tastes are like assholes. Everybody has one, and everybody finds the idea of tasting someone else's disgusting. Unless you are kinky."

Are Apple users THAT stupid? Maybe. Personally I find them to be more like mentally deranged. Also, frighteningly uninformed. As if they are living behind an iRon curtaiN.
I mean... waiting so long for cut&paste (and other iNventions like camera and MMS) on the iPhone can be compared to waiting for that right-click.

What 20 year old product are you talking about?
I guess you also consider MacOS a 26 year-old product too?
And it doesn't even work on all computers... truly a piece of shit software, I'm sure you would agree.
I'm using YOUR logic after all.

And hey... 10 years to get to Win7 is still better than 26. Or however long it will take Apple to move on from MacOS.
When exactly will Apple release an actual new piece of software? Like... they are just sitting there holding their one-button mice since 1984, polishing the same old crud.

Pure info-tainment.

Are you claiming the result was faked? Was the White Sands researcher in on the deception?

The idea that some cars stalling, coasting to a stop, and needing to be restarted

Except the video shows the car can't be restarted.

http://www.empcommission.org/

Which isn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper, it's a government committee report. Those aren't always 100% truthful, or they at least tend to massage the truth to come up with politically convenient answers (e.g. Warren Commission, 9/11 Commission, etc.) Yet sometimes they're right on, the trick is knowing which is which.

A company is developing an EMP weapon to disable vehicles for law enforcement. It's been shown that interruption vs. damage is a matter of power levels.

Interesting. So, I'm let wondering:

Did the Discovery special at White Sands purposely chose the only vulnerable car?
Did White Sands properly represent the situation and Discovery mis-represented it?
Is the White Sands HEMP simulator a higher power (or different in another signal characteristic) than this report used?
Was this report's methodology correct? (I tend to believe what I see on video over what I read on paper)
Could this report be misrepresenting?

There's also a video here of a device being developer for law enforcement to use a small EMP to disable a car. This would tend to suggest that most cars are vulnerable to shutdown. I think this means most cars have parts that will take an induced signal, so shutdown vs. disablement is probably just a matter of power levels.

Which then gets to the question of correct power levels. A White Sands reports highlights 50KV/m as typical for a HEMP blast, which the report you cite indicates they tested.

I haven't been able to find much information on the White Sands simulator, though.

"The 3D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer the light"

But what if there are more than one person around the display? How does it steer the light then?

Autostereoscopy has more promise I think. Philips has done it.

Just imagine trying to do this from an iPhone in a major market!

I know that it's fashionable to make fun of AT&T. I don't like carrier-exclusive agreements either - I think that they're anti-consumer and shouldn't be allowed. However, AT&T's network is actually the best in most markets as shown in independent tests by Gizmodo, PC World, and PC Magazine.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364263,00.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/article/189592/atandt_roars_back_in_pcworlds_second_3g_wireless_performance_test.html
http://gizmodo.com/5428343/our-2009-12+city-3g-data-mega-test-att-won

The most recent test (PC Magazine) shows AT&T nearly 80% faster than the other 3G networks (June 2010). PC World's tests show AT&T to be 67% faster than the competition (Feb 2010). Gizmodo's tests show AT&T on top, but by a smaller margin (Dec 2009). PC World's tests do show that AT&T has improved markedly since their Feb 2009 tests (improving speeds by over 200% in some places). By the end of 2009, AT&T's network was the fastest and it's kept improving to widen the gap. Even in so-called trouble markets like New York and San Francisco AT&T is doing well. In San Francisco, their speeds are double the competition's average and over 75% faster than the second fastest. In New York, T-Mobile's HSPA+ network (recently rolled out) is 10% faster, but AT&T is still 94% faster than Verizon and 130% faster than Sprint.

It's fashionable to make fun of AT&T. If you live in a rural area, AT&T might not have 3G service to you. If you were using AT&T in 2007 and 2008, their service was likely slower than the competition. That is not the case anymore. Real data (rather than anecdotal evidence) shows AT&T to be quite ahead of the competition when it comes to 3G capacity in major markets.

im *SICK* of the DRM restrictions on pc games

Consoles are DRMd, too. It's just that NORMALLY, they don't get in the way. However, on the PS3, there are some games which DRM their save files so that you can't backup/restore them with the normal process:

http://www.ps3news.com/PlayStation-3/locked-ps3-game-saves-compilation-list-is-now-available/#ixzz0TLGnOjgP

This is pretty bad, since if your PS3 dies, you lose this game data. You can technically move these to another PS3 if both systems are working, by doing some migration hoodoo using a network cable (as opposed to the relatively simple hard disk backups you can do with any other game.)

Of course, since this generation of consoles have a much higher failure rate than previous generations, this is a pretty big deal to me.

There are other issues that add to the annoyance factor. Some games require that you be signed into PSN ( http://psx-scene.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64147 ) and plenty of games require the latest firmware to play. Firmware updates can brick your console ( http://gizmodo.com/5021399/playstation-3-firmware-24-bricking-some-ps3s ). While you can easily fix a PC which has been hosed by an update, fixing a console is going to be much harder.

Consoles used to be great for gaming, but I'm too wary of all of these issues to buy one now. My last console was a Wii, though before that I had all of the major consoles of each generation.

This has been available on Lenovo IdeaPad laptops since they first launched maybe 2 years ago.

"the comments read "fascinating future" "imagination" "great stuff" etc. "

I guess I missed those comments, I saw spooky, porn and banned from theaters.

Seems more like a publicity stunt from a no name film maker... sorry there's no link, I couldn't find him on IMDB, unless he's this Robert Spence who's earned such illustrious titles as "additional assistant production office coordinator" in recent years (is that the assistant to the assistant to the coordinator?)

We all have cellphones, we've all see how teeny-tiny the camera chips can be (head of a pen) and pair that with wifi that fits in a SD card and your favor power source and you're done. Not really newest worthy, certainly not best invention of 2009.

Now if he could actually see with this device that'd be different, that's a bionic eye, but all he did was replace his false eye with a small streaming webcam. That's not a bionic eye anymore than a false arm with a webcam is a bionic arm.

What they are afraid of is people using non-Apple music and video stores and people creating applications that also work on Android.

Apple allow non-Apple music and video solutions - they allow e.g. spotify, wimp, netflix and many more. The latter is definitely one of their targets - not because they don't want things to work on Android, even though not being able to share the costs might be a fringe benefit now that the iPhone app market is so dominant. Their real goal is to avoid development environments that abstracts away their platform - and target the lowest common denominator, and won't give access to new iOS features when available.

As an iphone user, I really hate and love their approach. I dislike that I can't develop what I want. On the other side, the quality of the apps is higher - and I prefer a phone experience with no flash. Probably without iAd too, I don't want rich, intrusive ads.

What scares me more than their technical requirements, is their content censoring. I don't want a walled, Disney-like "think of the children!" world.

Or how about "No, I'm not going to buy my kid a POS Mac."? I'm sure at least one Windows or Linux adminstrator's child goes to high school there.

Or they did the research and have notice issues with Macs like how those new iMacs had broken screen issues, or how the MBP's had failing graphic cards, or the Snow Leopard bug deleting the home folder... You might be a bit worried. Sure, you could have mailed them back and waited weeks for the repairs, but when your talking school work you need something reliable. Not to mention, not everyone has a good experience with OSX (just check the Apple support forums) and why would anyone want to buy another laptop when their current one works perfectly anyways?

Or how about "No, I'm not going to buy my kid a POS Mac."? I'm sure at least one Windows or Linux adminstrator's child goes to high school there.

Or they did the research and have notice issues with Macs like how those new iMacs had broken screen issues, or how the MBP's had failing graphic cards, or the Snow Leopard bug deleting the home folder... You might be a bit worried. Sure, you could have mailed them back and waited weeks for the repairs, but when your talking school work you need something reliable. Not to mention, not everyone has a good experience with OSX (just check the Apple support forums) and why would anyone want to buy another laptop when their current one works perfectly anyways?

how about they concentrate their efforts a mile down instead?

Because the trouble didn't start until something got opened up down there!

No joy on a mouse, though. The touch interface doesn't support one.

Check this out if you want to see an iPad controlled by a mouse.

The mouse support code is there, it's just disabled by default. It is a little half-baked however, since drag scrolling is the opposite behavior of most mouse users (dragging up to scroll down). My guess is that Apple is working on it for a future release of iOS, but, just like copy and paste, doesn't want to release it until it works well.

HTC Evo that came out June 4th has a front facing camera with the same idea in mind it would seem. http://gizmodo.com/5554198/htc-evo-4g-review-a-war-machine

this

then you could warm your feet and charge your phone. Or fill a fanny pack with the mix, so it is contained.

http://gizmodo.com/5553765/are-cameras-the-new-guns

Indeed. Case in point:
http://gizmodo.com/comment/23991054

Original comment was obfuscated by the rat that bought the stolen iPhone (Jason Chen) to begin with, and he presumably unstarred me as well. So much for their free speech tact.

I only hang around Jalopnik now.

And here's the link to that story. Gizmodo isn't even clever enough to pull it off the web.

Video

"Gizmodo is reporting"

Pretty obvious - but here's one from the link-baiters in case you can't type gizmodo.com :

http://gizmodo.com/5554994/at-this-mondays-apple-keynote-help-us-liveblog

Whew - I'm spent - I need a Red Bull. That was tough.

This is the same outfit that thought it would be an amusing prank to show up at CES with a universal TV power-off remote, which they used to interrupt demonstrations, presentations and meetings.

I didn't believe this so I went looking. Childish stuff for an organization that's supposedly fighting to get blogs the same treatment as "real" journalists.

Gotta wonder how many poor IT shlubs came close to losing employment because of this. (Though, if you're going to a tradeshow and don't cover the IR, you're asking for some trouble I guess...)

Health effects of coffee

Health effects of tea

You can find more by searching at the obvious places, but needless to say, in recent years, coffee consumption (even high consumption) has been linked to health benefits. Of course, all things in moderation; I personally have one cup of coffee and one cup of tea a day, before noon (no caffeine after noon). It's more for taste and custom than anything else.

I used to only drink tea (and lots of it), which I had switched to because I used to drink so much coffee I started getting chest pains. I used to drink a *lot* of Dr. Pepper before that, but soda is probably the worst thing you can drink, besides bad moonshine or paint thinner. Seriously, the amount of sugar and other things that will leach the minerals right out of your bones in soda is criminal. Of course, getting a mocha-latte-frappe-choco-swirl from you-know-where probably isn't much better for you.

Just get yourself some whole beans, grind them right before you brew, and use a decent brewing system, and don't drink too much, and you will be better off. Or get some good tea, and make sure the water is boiling if it is black tea.

data only plans? can't believe that

Yeah, that would be too awesome. I'd love an iPhone with a iPad-like Data plan, but it won't happen.

I'd like to point out that when I said this, I did not intend for AT&T to take it as an excuse to do the complete bass-ackwards thing and nerf the iPad plan. Sorry everyone.

...And do you think Apple enjoys being with AT&T? They felt they needed a "deal" with a carrier, they went to Verizon first, which I believe in the US is pretty much "the best"? And you know what, Verizon apparently slammed the door in Jobs' face, "yea, that iPhone thingy? Good luck with that!".

AT&T was willing to have a "deal" with Apple...but they were locked into the exclusive contract...and you blame Apple for AT&T's service?

Do you remember how phones were before Apple entered the market? I do. And if they decided they needed some kickback scheme from the carrier, so be it. Do you remember how the tech pundits thought Apple could never make it? http://gizmodo.com/5416765/top-5-assclowns-laughing-at-the-iphone-back-in-2007

Would I prefer it if I could run my iPhone on any network? Yes, and hey, I can, in New Zealand....just like you can in Europe...none of that CDMA vs GSM BS...

Can you not unlock an iPhone and use it on another network? Are the other carriers in your area not compatible? Because I have a US iPhone, I run it on Vodafone NZ, I have to jailbreak it (or else it keeps searching for AT&T with every update!), but it works fine...

Its fine to hate AT&T, I suppose some people will always hate Apple, but dont hate APPLE for the faults of AT&T!

Its up to you to keep hating the iPhone "pissing on your customers"....enjoy your Storm or Android device, whatever.

The police seem perfectly able to hunt down the owner of a prepaid cellphone when it contains child porn on it. How can they manage that yet not hunt down terrorists the same way?

They were only able to do this because he used his credit card to purchase it. If he had used cash the trail would have been much harder to track (it's possible surveillance cameras would work, but much less likely).

The police seem perfectly able to hunt down the owner of a prepaid cellphone when it contains child porn on it. How can they manage that yet not hunt down terrorists the same way?

what catches my eye is the fact that this is basically blogspam taken from gizmodo. Interesting, no?

Gizmodo has a video. The 'dead' strips seem to change as it get's bent. It's cool.. but that doesn't seem like a problem easily solved.

I said...For the majority of the market, meaning the majority of the smart phone market, the iPhone is a great product. I even capitalized the smartphone part of that sentence. I didn't say it was the end-all be-all of phones. I merely don't understand slashdot's group-hate towards what is, in my opinion, a great product. I think the majority of "the haters" only hate it because they see others hating on it and think it would be nice to be a part of that group, for whatever reason. I really don't care that some developers "can't" develop for it (even though that's a flat out lie) or that everything has to run through the app store. I don't care about any of these things because I'm not a developer. When it comes to phones, I am a standard end-user, and for me, the iPhone (or Droid, it has some cool features too) does everything I want it to.

Anyway, based off your link, I went and looked up a few things myself. Does everyone who buys a cell phone buy a smart phone? No, obviously not. Of the smartphone market, Nokia has the largest marketshare, at 44%. Android is a distant fourth, behind RIM and Apple. Are they gaining ground? Sure. But between blackberries, Droid phones and iPhones, Nokia has decided to get out of the market completely.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/consumer/smartphones-to-overtake-feature-phones-in-u-s-by-2011/ --This link is for when smartphones are expected to over-take "regular" cell phones.

http://gizmodo.com/5418797/nokia-to-halve-smartphone-production-in-2010-official-suicide-watch-starts-now --Nokia getting out of the smartphone market?

I went to look for percentages in the US just to see what was what. I gotta say, I was rather intrigued by the results:

http://www.androidguys.com/2010/05/10/android-edges-apple-smart-phone-market-share/

Relevant quote: The Android train keeps gathering steam as evidenced by the latest report from The NPD Group. According to their estimates, Android has eclipsed Apple for second place in the United States in market share, behind Research in Motion. Android sits at a 28 percent share while RIM commands 36 percent. Apple trails in third with 21 percent.

Everything I was basing this off of is that of all the people I know, and the phones I've seen them with, exactly 1 guy uses an Android phone. Everyone else either uses a non-smart phone or a blackberry or iPhone.

Anyway, thanks for the links and whatnot.

P.S.: I expect, when Android gets a huge marketshare, for slashdot posters to start hating on those smartphones too, because that's the "cool kids" thing to do. Apple used to be "a great little company" that built quality computers and devices. Now, since they've had such huge successes, it's suddenly cool to hate on them. It gets old. I'm suspecting the majority of slashdot posters can't code Hello World properly and wouldn't know vi from emacs if emacs pimp-slapped them. (FTR, I am not referring to you in the above response, merely saying in general)
 

I know I'll get modded down for this, but here goes...

Almost everything that Jobs will announce has already been revealed. Like the OP states, Apple fanboi's will likely hoop and hollar over anything Job's announces; however, its going to be hard for the average techie to get excited about some of the new "features" of the iphone, such as pseudo-multitasking, when the competitors such as Android and WebOS have had almost all of these features since day one.

Now with the recent release of Froyo (Android 2.2) at Google I/O, and the significant improvements brought with the upgrade, even pro-Apple sites such as Gizmodo feel that Android has Leapfrogged iPhone.

I second the motion. I mean, take a look at this. Yeah, it's an MIT project, but could just as easily be done at home.

Also, considering the poster's mention of a sleep lab, maybe covert oral behavior processing would be a good project. Basically it's a phenomenon where speech signals from the brain are "leaked" to the vocal chords when words and sentences are merely thought, but not spoken. Maybe those signals are susceptible to analysis akin to speech recognition? In my undergrad years way back in the early 90's I did a research semester on this, but the CS technology wasn't there yet do to the analysis. (At least not for us lowly undergrads.) Now I'll bet it's there. And, just a guess, but it looks like the area is wide open...

Thats because the iPhone doesn't have a SD reader so no memory upgrades, no easy way to transfer files beyond that bloated software program iTunes, no uploading good quality pictures instantly to the internet from a digital camera.... how quaint.

Decriminalizing something like copyright law does not automagically make it ok to do no matter what.

One problem though: there's nothing to decriminalize about it, at least not in Sweden.

Just make sure the judge you get is not a board member of a copyright lobby group.

There's just not enough room in the flash rom. Sorry.

Being discrete:

"A reliable source sent us some pictures of what appears to be the gen next iPhone"


Not being discrete:

Using 6 pages of text and pictures to detail how they acquired the stolen property.

>>First of all, I haven't seen anything that says that Gizmodo or Hogan ever talked to Powell. Citation, please.

It's right in the main article gizmodo wrote on the subject!

http://gizmodo.com/5520438/how-apple-lost-the-next-iphone

>>Such people, finding a lost cellphone, would look through the contents of the phone to try and identify the owner or somebody who knows the owner, and then try to return within a couple of days

This is basically what happened.

Anyone know what Google is planning on stuffing in their new tablet?

WIN. Lots and lots of WIN.

If devices like iPad are the future of computing, then I guess we can kiss a lot of languages goodbye unless they come from Cupertino and are blessed by Jobs, since even developers don't like jailbreaking(it's illegal according to Apple).

Ah, a slippery slope argument. The fact is that Apple does NOT have a monopoly of the market, and people who want to develop in some other language has got plenty of choices to do so. And there's not even the merest hint of a suggestion that Apple is going to be the monopoly vendor of computing devices.

What about this scary scenario, Both Apple and MS hold ~50% of the market(mobile or otherwise), and hence are not a monopoly and can trample on developer's rights. Don't tell me that's unlikely, just look at Windows Phone 7 Series.

The iPhone is (one of?) the first general computing devices to ban other languages, and others are learning from their success.

Also, you don't need Apple to be a monopoly, just a big player is enough to affect software development.

What about articles such as:

http://gizmodo.com/5506692/ipad-is-the-future

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/ipad/

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9175600/The_iPad_is_the_future_for_home_computing

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/02/ipad-the-destroyer-19-things-it-will-kill/

Surely they are more than a merest hint of a suggestion?

You can write shitty apps in ObjC and people do it all the time. The App store is chock full of shitty apps like Fart apps.

There are a lot of shitty apps, and a lot of excellent apps. As I said, if Flash and their ilk were allowed there would be MORE shitty apps. It's a favour to consumers to keep the signal to noise ratio on the App Store as high as possible, and not allowing Flash apps helps that ratio.

So, lets kill a ton of good Flash Apps and content on the Web just because there will be some more shitty apps to sift and search through? And here I thought storage, bandwidth and power of servers on the internet was dirt cheap for a company wallowing in cash like Apple.

Anyone know what Google is planning on stuffing in their new tablet?

... Apple does not want its users having unsatisfactory experiences playing their Flash games, and then subsequently blaming Apple for the bad UI.

psssst

The last one happened right in time for the release of the HTC Incredible -- I wonder if this "leak" has anything to do with yesterday's story about Android sales overtaking the iPhone...

The key events of this month pretty well define the future for how the iPhone will unfold.

• Android Unit Sales Surpassed the iPhone in Q1
• Apple bans Flash and all other intermediate layers

True to form, Apple will not blindly chase market share with the iPhone, and instead will target the upper end of the market. In order to do this, they don't need a bunch of second-rate Flash applications. In fact, these low-quality applications would tarnish the value of the iPhone brand. What Apple does need is high-quality applications, for instance that can compete with Google's turn-by-turn navigator. Those type of applications aren't ever going to be built on Mobile Flash.

Tactically, it isn't in Apple's interest to let Android catch up in the numeric number of applications offered. Might as well hold on to a numerical lead in the number of applications as long as you can.

Even though we know virtual machines on handheld devices have historically resulted in pretty crummy applications (witness J2ME), we now have one counter-example, namely the Dalvik VM. Imagine, horror-of-horrors, if Dalvik were ported to the iPhone. Now instead of worrying about a third-party development environment, Apple would have the much larger worry of a the competitor's development environment. Better for them to quash all such attempts right now.

Even though Neil McAllister is a pretty bright guy, his peace offering doesn't do anything to reconcile the fundamentally different business goals that are shaping Apple and Adobe.

Well, you may have gone a little far.

I was afraid you might have felt that way. Among the greater challenges to reform or political change is when folk have a hard time agreeing on what destination to approach while changing, and when in-fighting undermines solidarity. As an abolitionist I end up in a fair number of arguments against the 7-14'ers, but it sure would be nice if we could somehow pool our efforts so as not to Life-Of-Brian each other.

Among 7-14'ers, you sound pretty open minded so I'm happy to let you know my position a little better.

While I think it's possible that circumstances could result in it being impossible for there to be any possible copyright law that is better than no copyright law at all, in terms of the benefit to the public, which is the only valid metric, I don't think that we're currently in that situation. I'm happy to listen to arguments otherwise, though.

I thank you for being able to comprehend such a possibility, and formally submit that we are there now.

There have been few times in history when the effects of Copyright law could really be compared empirically with the creative output of areas with zero copyright. One such time is the late 1700s, when Brittian had copyright and the rest of the world did not. Thomas Jefferson wrote his opinion on the subject, while the ink on the constitution was still dry, and clarified that he detected no less or greater creative output from countries lacking copyright law than from Great Brittian. It appears as though we chose to side with copyright from the beginning merely because it was a novel idea, and it might lead to greater creativity. I submit that whatever great creativity we have output cannot be reliably credited to the presence of Copyright.

Little data can be gathered beyond that point, as the Berne convention and others has forced the entire globe to honor our fragile IP system or risk rendering it meaningless. Since certain entities such as The Pirate Bay have had success flouting the Berne Convention, the balloon has effectively been punctured. Right now, today, any person on the internet can obtain high fidelity digital copies of every popular, copyright protected work for free, instantly, and conveniently. This may not be legal, but legal consequences are less likely to befall you than when you drive 5mph over the speed limit so that is of little consequence.

In spite of the fact that the availability and knowledge of Piracy has met a saturation point, the profits of multi-million dollar films remains secure. People will continue to pay for media they can get for free, so long as the price is fair to provide convenience and guaranteed quality with a little extra to express their patronage. So long as they are not forced into uncomfortable formats or hassling DRM.

Example. We discussed Avatar before, right? My wife wanted to watch it. I did not simply tell her it could be downloaded for free, she knows I'm a pirate and watches TV shows and many movies I download, even asks me to get things for her. I did not simply tell her I can download it, I told her I had already downloaded it. I pointed to the media center and told her she was two clicks away from watching it, and she still bought the DVD while she was out.

She's not a videophile, we've got a miserable video pipeline anyway (composite video through an analogue switch to a 27" 4:3 CRT) she even hates widescreen letterboxing because everything is made too small. No, she was just out and had to wonder if the copy I downloaded had hardsubs baked in it, so she conveniently grabbed the copy at Wal-Mart.

Then of course she got it home and it wouldn't play at all.

It is healthier for producers to accept that customers want media in whatever format is convenient, and after th

The problem with the netbook is that it does nothing well. It cannot playback even 720p video properly from the web and you can forget about games.

That's simply not true.

First, newer netbook chipsets built within the last year should handle 720p just fine. The only thing holding it back on the web is Flash being a bloated pig, and if you have to use Flash, those videos won't play on the iPad anyway, making this a moot point. With the new Flash 10 betas, even recent netbooks should be able to handle 720p Flash videos.

Second, most tasks (word processing, web browsing, sending/receiving email, etc.) don't require much CPU power at all. A netbook should be able to handle those tasks with ease. Thus, they do a lot of things reasonably well. They just don't happen to be the things you care about.

With an iPad, you can not only do what netbooks can do...

Stop right there. The iPad is a cool device, but as a long-time Apple zealot, even I can't argue that it can do everything a netbook can do. I currently use a real laptop, but if I did have a netbook, I could still run Finale or Sibelius (clumsily); I could still run Apache, PHP, and a web browser to prototype a web site; I could still compile and debug software; I could still run Photoshop (slowly); and so on.

Eventually, the iPad will have equivalents for many of these tools, but they don't exist yet. Thus, at least for now, the right tool depends on what you want to do with it.

If people want to use the Internet to download massive amounts of p2p content, do they really expect they should pay the same as Grandma who checks her email once a day? Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.

Yeah, totally. And because of this move, Bell will be cutting the price of grandma's connection by 90%!

Oh wait, it won't, because this really isn't "usage based billing", but both a money grab and an effort to cripple competition even further.
They're charging a dollar a gig, which is quite literally thousands of times the actual cost.

And they're allowed to cripple the speed of wholesale lines while they offer higher speeds to their direct customers.
Never mind that they have all this leverage (in terms of infrastructure and last mile copper) because they were a monopoly until '97.

And sadly, there are more than enough people like you out there to let the telecoms get away with pretty much anything.

This is why our cost for broadband is about twice as much (well, even more now) as it is for people in the USA.
http://gizmodo.com/5390014/internet-speeds-and-costs-around-the-world-shown-visually

No, the "Canada is less dense and they have to provide to these small villages" argument does not fly because our broadband coverage of rural areas is laughably pathetic and a significant portion of small communities can't get any decent internet access.

And it's just going to get worse, so thanks for being part of that.

Using your own device in whatever manner you wish is your right!

So jailbreak your iPhone and install Linux on it.

Apple aren't going to send round the goons and break down the door unless, maybe, you try and connect to their App store which isn't your personal property.

Alternatively, if you need a device on which to run your own code, don't buy a product which 0.5 milliseconds of research will show is unsuitable for that task.

I'm using it and, despite what you may have heard, it does have several new features. But, primarily, it's a major optimization (somewhat akin to Win7 vs Vista, although Win7 got bigger interface changes, at least as I understand their design team). That's particularly true in the Finder which was lagging way the hell behind the rest of the OS in performance -- for example, it's quite obvious they're now rendering all of the icons asynchronously rather than the f'd-up synchronous way they were before. They also included OpenCL with it so I don't need CUDA for NVIDIA carded systems and Stream for ATI carded systems, which makes dispatching MPI jobs far simpler. Plus lots of other stuff, but the other reply pretty much says that there's lots of developer goodness in it (like GCD - Grand Central Dispatch -- not sure I'm completely into it though).

You can peruse the Jobsified list of stuff here.

And they bent me over and charged me a whopping $29. Gosh. I'm still sore.

And earlier!

http://gizmodo.com/5063917/diy-egg-beater-centrifuge-can-save-lives

we will continue to pay the most and get the least.

Or maybe they realize that something like the Evo 4G is an iPhone/iPad killer.

If you want to kill the iPhone, it's no longer enough to just come out with better hardware. You have to come out with better hardware, an App Store with 100,000+ apps and a dizzying array of third-party peripherals, cases, etc all of which feature a neat little logo that states "made for iPhone." The iPhone/iPod Touch is no longer just a device--it's an entire supporting ecosystem that Apple has been cultivating for years now.

So unless Google et al can develop their own such ecosystems, nothing is going to take the iPhone down for a long time. Android has made strides on the app-store front, but I don't see a bazillion different cases/peripherals/et al with a common "made for Android" logo. Until that kind of stuff shows up, Android will never "kill" the iPhone.