Re:Yes, but it's rails... ;)
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Rails Cookbook
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Ruby or Python are probably the best places to start; they're not going to be suitable for every type of programming you do, but they might teach you some good habits before you learn other languages with horrific syntax and dangerous pointers, and you can get going very quickly.
For Ruby, there's Chris Pine's Learn to Program or Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby which is whimsical, but does pretty much the same thing, or just go to Try Ruby and type help.
For Python there's Instant Hacking, or Useless Python and I'm sure many others. These two sites, like the Rails site, are written in PHP, but I wouldn't touch PHP with a barge-pole if you're learning just now, it's only useful for web apps and will teach you bad habits.
plainly stated genocide -check intolerant idealism -check racist -check sworn enemy of neighbor(s) -check willing to sacrifice entire nation for megalomaniac goals -check
Bush or Ahmadinejad?
The only one Bush is possibly not guilty of is plainly stated genocide, though the incompetence and resultant chaos on display in Iraq certainly doesn't support the claim that he cares either way about genocide.
Of course sexual organs are close to commodities by this definition. There's lots of them around, certainly no one has a corner on the market, and they are sold (well usually offered for very short term lease) by at least some posessors. In market theory, prostitution should show a lot of tenedencies towards commodity pricing. It categorically does - for example, the average base price for a sex act by the lowest grade of prostitute marches, and apparently always has marched, in near perfect lockstep with the price of a fix, whether it be a crack rock today, a pint of Gin in the 1890's in the Whitchapel district of London, or a pot of beer in Babylon 4,000 years ago.
In my opinion this meme of commodification, whilst it may be a useful economic tool, is best left to economists, as for the majority of posters I have seen on Slashdot it seems to have come to mean 'cheap stuff', being unaware of course of the Marxist origins of the term, and without the nuances attached in your post above. Wives (which the original poster specifically targetted in his post, probably just to troll better) are not commodities, and do not sell sex in any meaningful sense, except on Slashdot of course. You had to resort to prostitutes as an example (where it is more relevant obviously). So your entire post is I'm afraid irrelevant as an explanation for this troll.
The MAFIAA, come to think of it, reminds me of a gaggle of wives obfuscating their pudenda;Isn't it commodification, after all, that the industry-Yids fear?
Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??
That's exactly how Microsoft tried to solve it and why their distributed software is huge. It also has led to problems of competing dlls which are often incompatible. If you think you have dependency problems now, just wait until you implement your idea! Imagine installing 16 applications each having a dependency on 16 different versions of the same lib.
The idea of the post you're replying to was to package dependencies inside the application. That way, you can indeed install 16 applications each having a dependency on 16 different versions of the same library, with no problems whatsoever.
OS X does it this way just now, and it works very well; apps are sometimes a few MB bigger (not a huge amount for most apps), but it's a huge saving in convenience for the user, who shouldn't even have to know what a dll/shared library is, let alone worry about it. As the grandparent pointed out, packaging applications should be a job for developers, not the OS.
Perhaps people who read this article because they use OS X, i.e. not those who came to troll mac users with contemptuous comparisons.
Anyone who uses 'fanboys/bois' of any kind in an argument really isn't worth paying attention to. The only fanboys round here are in your head; they make a nice imaginary enemy to tilt against though don't they?
No, they are the closest thing to the ultimate in coolness as you can get. It doesn't mean what you think it does either.:-P
That's exactly what it doesn't mean. The article title misused it, and you're repeating the mistake. However since this is Slashdot, you've been modded +5 informative to his +3. It means 'Last but one in a series'. Penultimate implies an ultimate, ie, it's NOT the closest you can get, it's the one before the most extreme, it can't be used if you don't have an ultimate thing for it to come before, besides which it's not usually used in relation to ultimate as 'the best' and more for ultimate as 'the last'. So the penultimate step in a flight of stairs is not the last, but the one before. In short, it's the worst word to have chosen.
A more appropriate word for the meaning you state would have been apotheosis (eg apotheosis of cool), or simply the ultimate in cool.
If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Every developed country in the world did it at the expense of other countries, which were invaded, pillaged, plundered for slaves, or enslaved as vassal states. This is still going on and probably always will till we have a world government/dictatorship. The idea that history has ended and the world has seen the capitalist light belongs in the 1990s, and should have died by now.
The rise of India could perhaps be attributed to privatised business, though frankly I doubt it, it's not suddenly transformed into a free-market haven because of cancelling some external tarrifs, though Dr Singh may be trying to pass reforms and privatise some industries, that'll take a while. It's probably more to do with promotion of outsourcing in western countries and the move of a lot of manufacturing and now even services over to India/China in the 80s/90s. China could possibly conform better with your argument, though again their strong position has a lot to do with govt. intervention (the yuan being pegged for a start, and subsidies/tax breaks for development zones, plus the suppression of workers rights).
Africa doesn't receive much charity - I suspect the total annual figure is far less than the outlay on debt servicing - the external debt is around $300 billion for Africa in total. We definitely make more from them in arms sales (£1 billion in 2004 from the UK alone) than we've ever given in charity and I suspect the arms sales have a more dramatic deleterious effect. The colonial legacy and the wars which came after are the cause of their current problems, not charity.
Now of course charity doesn't necessarily solve all ills and can be downright damaging, especially given the cynical, pernicious way state aid is given nowadays, and enterprise can be useful, but to claim some sort of free trade enlightenment has swept the world is nonsense. Hell, the US is a very successful state, and many industries are heavily supported by import tarrifs and subsidies - steel, aerospace and agriculture among them. Their success has been in persuading others link India to lower their barriers for things like agriculture at the same time as remaining protectionist. However every successful society makes up their own myths to explain their success and the otherwise inexplicable failure of others.
Going back to the OLPC project, it's not strictly a charity anyway - they're talking about selling these things to governments to make money so they can make more laptops. Kids will make of these laptops what they wish, but without them it'd take a lot longer for IT to take off in developing countries. I think it's an enlightened idea, and will hasten the development of global thinking and a truly global market - in that sense you should welcome it. Perhaps when many more people in Brazil or elsewhere get laptops, we'll see an influx of people more informed about other countries on these boards - frankly it can do nothing but good as at the moment they're dominated by westerners and the western point of view.
The best way to deal with this is to design for non-borked browsers, then adjust for IE, with several style-sheets for different versions of IE to account for the bugs. That way Opera, Safari, Firefox and any others will just work, and IE will work as well as it can, till they release a version without all the CSS bugs.
The IE conditional includes are a nice idea - I wish other browsers did that as well, because it would make working around the bugs a lot easier. The majority of your code goes in a normal css file, and then you can isolate bug workarounds in specific files.
<![if lt IE 7]> Your stylesheet here
<![endif]>
You can use a bug in IE Mac to code for that browser too :
What gets me about CSS is that when in use it feels like it was designed by people who didn't really care about
1. The poor people who have to write browsers which deal with all its intricacies 2. Aesthetics
It's difficult to implement because of the complicated box model (I don't think any browser has a completely bug-free implementation of CSS), and it's actually difficult to design things that look nice. Lots of lovely typographical/graphics stuff that should be easy to do (drop caps, hanging punctuation, proper indented paras, multiple column layout) is instead really quite difficult.
It doesn't need to plug in - they could design a bluetooth keyboard. I'd be astounded if Apple doesn't already have a portable bluetooth keyboard in the works - all it needs is software on the iPhone to link up to it. Unfortunately you'd need to be able to load arbitrary software for that (or for your plug-in keyboard).
This is where Apple could step up to the plate with iTunes as a conduit for getting data onto a similar Apple ebook device. This could even be a perfect feature for more capable tablets - if it did the media reading parts right, and had a nice multi-touch interface (à la iPhone), it'd be a lot closer to a Knowledge Navigator than the readers we currently have. But I'd be happy with just the ebook.
An iTunes store partnered with a capable, very thin ebook, would be a great combination, and a guarantee that all the parts would work together, with polish, not just-about-work-if-the-stars-are-aligned. As for content - they could partner with Gutenberg and offer all the gutenberg stuff for download to kick-start their library. There's a lot of good stuff on there. Then later bring in Google and real publishers, most of whom have realised that time is running out on their current distribution model. It would be difficult for Google to do this on their own because none of the ebook manufacturers are producing something which will work seamlessly with whatever software they put out. The only way it can work for them is if they do it on the web, and then wait for ebook/tablets to have wifi.
What this sector needs is someone who's willing to take both hardware and software (on the device and the computer) seriously.
Yes I meant ~/Library by Library, not/Library : ~/Library is the one which has these very liberal permissions. Should have said 'User Library' instead to be clear.
The notion of just "hopping" on a free wifi spot isn't really in-line with the reality of so many providers wishing to charge you for that access. Which means the transparent switching is going to be a PITA for the end user, because it is not going to be transparent.
If it works as well as WiFi networks in OS X, it'll work transparently. First time you want to connect you enter the connection details and log in as necessary, after that it stores your details for you. In the prefs you can choose which networks you want to join and reorder their priority. Don't see why it shouldn't work the same way. Municipal WiFi will probably be a reality in most major cities sometime in the next 5 years - already there is almost universal WiFi access at airports.
EDGE is impossibly slow. So you'll find that you usually have a 384K pipe MAX to your phone. More realistically the phone will operate at dialup speeds. Which means that google maps will be much less cool. Another feature will not work well out of the box.
Absolutely. EDGE will work fine for email/chat (if Apple deigns to allow chat), but for web you'll be pretty much limited to wifi only, unless you're very very patient and limit yourself to the cut-down low bandwidth version of sites only. Good thing it has WiFi! For some people this will be a deal-breaker, till a year down the line when they get 3G...
Wifi draws an enormous amount of power for small batteries and so does a polling, always on data connection for IMAP/POP.
Presumably the WiFi circuitry could be turned off when you're not using it as it can on laptops. Re PUSH/PULL - Surely this depends on how often you receive emails - if you get 6 every hour, wouldn't PUSH require more connections than if you set your mail client to connect via PULL every 15 minutes? I'm curious as to the benefits of PUSH email - are their other benefits apart from receiving things immediately? As an aside, I believe it supports IMAP, which supports PUSH.
Finally, and this is really the kicker - I've been reading reports that it is going to be closed. Apple can kiss the adoption of this phone goodbye if this goes closed.
I'm really disappointed in this - there are several obvious features (chat,audio,video over IP) which are not there, and Apple needs outside help to add this kind of stuff - especially features which the networks won't want them to add. Long term I believe they'll have no choice but to open it, as the line fills out to smaller versions and tablets with the same gesture interface, they're going to want to develop the ecosystem so that the devices are worth buying and have value added by 3RD parties. They have the chance with future models, which really can run a meaningful subset of OS X, to dramatically expand their OS X marketshare, but not if it remains closed.
Short term I don't think it would harm adoption much, but long term, as people want those extra little apps that are available on other phones, and app development shifts over to mobile platforms, it's going to hurt Apple badly to not be in this from the start. If they don't have an SDK by the end of the year, it's a serious tactical error.
Jobs is crazy not to hint at this stage that things will open up later when they have time to consider it, instead of coming out with bullshit excuses about 'bad apps' and crashing networks. It would cost them nothing and earn a lot of goodwill - it's not just geeks who want extra apps, everyone will. Still, it's early days yet, so perhaps this will be fixed. Hopefully they'll feel the pressure from incredulous would-be users and change their attitude.
Also, you'll need the famous iPod sync cable instead of the ubiquitous 5 dollar USB cable now in use by almost every other smartphone major manufacturer.
I don't agree that synching is a thing of the past - for most people synci
I have a Razr - it looks pretty, and I quite like it, but the interface is crap, in too many ways to bother listing here. I'd switch in an instant if another phone was available with a better UI, and the iPhone looks to have a UI way ahead of any other phone, because they actually designed the UI for the users, not for the phone company.
The library folder has to be accessible to applications (and thus the current user) without authentication, because of the Application Support and Preferences directories, which they write to all the time.
Folders like Input Managers, Internet Plug-Ins, Widgets, and perhaps LaunchAgents need to have limited access though - that definitely needs to change, and I'd advise anyone who hasn't to change the permissions on those folders so that they require authentication for changes. Otherwise applications could silently install things in there without you knowing (some already do when they install things like 'Smart' Crash Reporter without asking for permission).
I expect they'll compromise and release a tablet but keep the option of having a machine with a keyboard. For now.
They could release a touchscreen tablet with an optional portable bluetooth keyboard - so for serious writing you could use the keyboard, otherwise just use the tablet for viewing things, surfing the web etc, and use the screen keyboard for short messages etc. Would make the perfect e-book reader and web browser.
Probably. But notice what wasn't said, always the thing to do at rah rah events like this. NOwhere did they even mention being able to install, run, use normal OS X applications on the thing. Considering what a coup it would be vs WinCE, if it could do it His Steveness would have crowed about it.
Well of course there's no way you'd run normal applications on it for GUI reasons. However a lot of the background toolkits have to be there to support something like webkit, mail and the SMS stuff (which looks suspiciously like ichat). So in theory at least you could probably transplant the guts of many applications unchanged, and give them a new iPhone-style GUI (a lot of the apps resemble little widgets, but perhaps they're done with IB nib files and standard cocoa instead).
Of the top of my head, it must have
Core Foundation (to support Cocoa)
Cocoa (inc. text fields etc for forms, and all standard widgets)
Webkit
Darwin (pruned version?)
AppKit (modified version of?)
Quicktime (assuming it plays videos etc)
Quartz
Dashboard lookie-likie
AddressBook (+framework)
OpenGL (for coverflow and other fancy effects)
Probably doesn't have :
Carbon (at least not a full version)
Loads of frameworks for IO/peripheral support
Other localisations
Loads of fonts
Loads of printer stuff
Scripting languages like Applescript, Ruby, Perl, Tcl
Lots of command line utilities like Apache etc
Java?
So will it be the typical mobile phone development deal, expensive development kit, massive legal hurdles in the NDA dept intended to make sure only select large development houses play and they play according to the mobile phone rules? Will the operating software in the thing be DRMed like the newest iPods so that only Apple signed binaries boot/run? Steve didn't say, and the silence is disturbing.
It'd be interesting to see some details on the 'OS X' which is included from Apple - if they don't provide them by the time it's launched, I'm sure someone will have a look around on the built in memory and find out. They'd really be shooting themselves in the foot here if they don't long term allow users to install software on the phones - eventually these phones will become more and more laptop replacements, and whoever makes a non user-hostile system will win. Of course it's still early days, so hopefully an SDK will turn up for free download sometime after they've launched and people can actually use/test on them.
I'm surprised at the omission of a to-do list or simple text application - TextEdit would surely be a no-brainer if they already have cocoa text views ported for safari and webkit?
I wonder if some of the little controls shown in the videos, like the search bar and buttons etc on the NYT webpage are in fact the new look controls for Jaguar?
Where the HELL is iChat integration? As in, IM'ing or calling your iChat contacts, maybe not from GSM / Edge network, but at least from any WiFi hotspot? I certainly hope they thought about it?!
This is an obvious progression, as is audio and video ichat. The thing is, if they put that in straight away, what telco in their right mind would partner with them? Apple would basically be saying 'We're going to make your entire business model obsolete, would you like to support our phone?'. The telcos would be extremely unhappy about people moving over to text messaging at data rates instead of SMS for example. Even now they must be treading a fine line with telcos knowing that in future their interests and Apple's diverge drastically.
At present Apple need the big telecos to get their phone supported and accepted in the market. Over the next few years that will change, particularly if they can tempt many ipod users to switch to this product and build up a large userbase which demands support for their phones. Once Apple are established in many markets worldwide and too big a presence to crush, expect them to use that weight to introduce text and audio chat, video conferencing etc over wifi (perhaps later WiMax) eventually bypassing the telecom networks completely for many customers most of the time (those who live in wifi saturated areas. They can do all this with a simple software update.
Personally I think opening up the software side will be more important, as it can allow third party vendors to do things that Apple wouldn't dare to do on their own. Aside from the functions you mentioned, soon these devices will be able to replace a laptop, if you can use them with a bluetooth keyboard and TV, but all that will depend on a healthy software ecosystem, so here's hoping Apple sees the light and releases an SDK for it.
If they do, I'd buy one, even at this price or higher. If they don't, I'll never buy one. Many people on this story seem to share this sentiment - I wonder why Apple felt the need to tie this phone to a carrier?
That is, although the Zune doesn't play PlaysForSure media, MS is still supporting PFS. In fact, files from the Zune store apparently even work in PFS players, although that isn't officially supported.
You are very naive if you think Microsoft are going to support Plays For Sure(TM) long term. They've shifted all their efforts over to Zune, and Plays for Sure (what a strange orwellian name) will be gone in a few years, leaving you stranded.
DRM'd music is always a risky proposition, but to buy it from Microsoft (who have a history of screwing their partners, customers, and anyone else they feel they can make a quick buck from), using a deprecated system, is the worst choice. Personally, I wouldn't buy it from anyone.
You are so utterly mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your drivel. NEVER in the history of the earth has anything happened that was even a tiny fraction of what we are seeing today. Not only were the ice ages NOT "more extreme", they were peanuts compared to what we see today. We have a pretty decent record of global temperatures for several hundred thousand years and there is no indication anywhere of global temperatures changing on the time-scales of decades or even centuries. Nothing like what we're seeing right now can be found anywhere in the earth's climate record.
While the speed of global climate change is staggering and not comparable to previous changes, the range of temperatures and habitats in the past is indeed far more extreme than those we have experienced over the last 10000 years. Much of the earth was probably covered in ice at several points in the distant past, and much of it was tropical at other times - far more extreme changes than we have yet experienced do occur over geological time periods, and there has been far more CO2 than there is now in the past. When the present interglacial ends things will change again. So we should be preparing for massive global climate changes regardless of whether we believe in global warming, as they're going to happen on the longer scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby or Python are probably the best places to start; they're not going to be suitable for every type of programming you do, but they might teach you some good habits before you learn other languages with horrific syntax and dangerous pointers, and you can get going very quickly.
For Ruby, there's Chris Pine's Learn to Program or Why the Lucky Stiff's Poignant Guide to Ruby which is whimsical, but does pretty much the same thing, or just go to Try Ruby and type help.
For Python there's Instant Hacking, or Useless Python and I'm sure many others. These two sites, like the Rails site, are written in PHP, but I wouldn't touch PHP with a barge-pole if you're learning just now, it's only useful for web apps and will teach you bad habits.
Bush or Ahmadinejad?
The only one Bush is possibly not guilty of is plainly stated genocide, though the incompetence and resultant chaos on display in Iraq certainly doesn't support the claim that he cares either way about genocide.
In my opinion this meme of commodification, whilst it may be a useful economic tool, is best left to economists, as for the majority of posters I have seen on Slashdot it seems to have come to mean 'cheap stuff', being unaware of course of the Marxist origins of the term, and without the nuances attached in your post above. Wives (which the original poster specifically targetted in his post, probably just to troll better) are not commodities, and do not sell sex in any meaningful sense, except on Slashdot of course. You had to resort to prostitutes as an example (where it is more relevant obviously). So your entire post is I'm afraid irrelevant as an explanation for this troll.
Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??
The idea of the post you're replying to was to package dependencies inside the application. That way, you can indeed install 16 applications each having a dependency on 16 different versions of the same library, with no problems whatsoever.
OS X does it this way just now, and it works very well; apps are sometimes a few MB bigger (not a huge amount for most apps), but it's a huge saving in convenience for the user, who shouldn't even have to know what a dll/shared library is, let alone worry about it. As the grandparent pointed out, packaging applications should be a job for developers, not the OS.
Perhaps people who read this article because they use OS X, i.e. not those who came to troll mac users with contemptuous comparisons.
Anyone who uses 'fanboys/bois' of any kind in an argument really isn't worth paying attention to. The only fanboys round here are in your head; they make a nice imaginary enemy to tilt against though don't they?
That's exactly what it doesn't mean. The article title misused it, and you're repeating the mistake. However since this is Slashdot, you've been modded +5 informative to his +3. It means 'Last but one in a series'. Penultimate implies an ultimate, ie, it's NOT the closest you can get, it's the one before the most extreme, it can't be used if you don't have an ultimate thing for it to come before, besides which it's not usually used in relation to ultimate as 'the best' and more for ultimate as 'the last'. So the penultimate step in a flight of stairs is not the last, but the one before. In short, it's the worst word to have chosen.
A more appropriate word for the meaning you state would have been apotheosis (eg apotheosis of cool), or simply the ultimate in cool.
. I think I can switch 90% of my operation to Mac and just keep one machine running Win 2000 for the softwares I can't live without.
Or use parallels on your mac.
If a country wants to get out of poverty, they have to do it the same way every developed country in the world did, lift themselves up by their bootstraps.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. Every developed country in the world did it at the expense of other countries, which were invaded, pillaged, plundered for slaves, or enslaved as vassal states. This is still going on and probably always will till we have a world government/dictatorship. The idea that history has ended and the world has seen the capitalist light belongs in the 1990s, and should have died by now.
The rise of India could perhaps be attributed to privatised business, though frankly I doubt it, it's not suddenly transformed into a free-market haven because of cancelling some external tarrifs, though Dr Singh may be trying to pass reforms and privatise some industries, that'll take a while. It's probably more to do with promotion of outsourcing in western countries and the move of a lot of manufacturing and now even services over to India/China in the 80s/90s. China could possibly conform better with your argument, though again their strong position has a lot to do with govt. intervention (the yuan being pegged for a start, and subsidies/tax breaks for development zones, plus the suppression of workers rights).
Africa doesn't receive much charity - I suspect the total annual figure is far less than the outlay on debt servicing - the external debt is around $300 billion for Africa in total. We definitely make more from them in arms sales (£1 billion in 2004 from the UK alone) than we've ever given in charity and I suspect the arms sales have a more dramatic deleterious effect. The colonial legacy and the wars which came after are the cause of their current problems, not charity.
Now of course charity doesn't necessarily solve all ills and can be downright damaging, especially given the cynical, pernicious way state aid is given nowadays, and enterprise can be useful, but to claim some sort of free trade enlightenment has swept the world is nonsense. Hell, the US is a very successful state, and many industries are heavily supported by import tarrifs and subsidies - steel, aerospace and agriculture among them. Their success has been in persuading others link India to lower their barriers for things like agriculture at the same time as remaining protectionist.
However every successful society makes up their own myths to explain their success and the otherwise inexplicable failure of others.
Going back to the OLPC project, it's not strictly a charity anyway - they're talking about selling these things to governments to make money so they can make more laptops. Kids will make of these laptops what they wish, but without them it'd take a lot longer for IT to take off in developing countries. I think it's an enlightened idea, and will hasten the development of global thinking and a truly global market - in that sense you should welcome it. Perhaps when many more people in Brazil or elsewhere get laptops, we'll see an influx of people more informed about other countries on these boards - frankly it can do nothing but good as at the moment they're dominated by westerners and the western point of view.
iTunes is the buggiest app by far on Vista for me, both systems.
Gates heard mumbling to the tune of that old MS saw about Lotus :
Vista isn't done, till iTunes won't run.
The best way to deal with this is to design for non-borked browsers, then adjust for IE, with several style-sheets for different versions of IE to account for the bugs. That way Opera, Safari, Firefox and any others will just work, and IE will work as well as it can, till they release a version without all the CSS bugs.
The IE conditional includes are a nice idea - I wish other browsers did that as well, because it would make working around the bugs a lot easier. The majority of your code goes in a normal css file, and then you can isolate bug workarounds in specific files.
<![if lt IE 7]>
Your stylesheet here
<![endif]>
You can use a bug in IE Mac to code for that browser too :
<style type="text/css">
@import(stylesheets/MYIEMACSTYLESHEET.CSS);
</style>
What gets me about CSS is that when in use it feels like it was designed by people who didn't really care about
1. The poor people who have to write browsers which deal with all its intricacies
2. Aesthetics
It's difficult to implement because of the complicated box model (I don't think any browser has a completely bug-free implementation of CSS), and it's actually difficult to design things that look nice. Lots of lovely typographical/graphics stuff that should be easy to do (drop caps, hanging punctuation, proper indented paras, multiple column layout) is instead really quite difficult.
It doesn't need to plug in - they could design a bluetooth keyboard. I'd be astounded if Apple doesn't already have a portable bluetooth keyboard in the works - all it needs is software on the iPhone to link up to it. Unfortunately you'd need to be able to load arbitrary software for that (or for your plug-in keyboard).
This is where Apple could step up to the plate with iTunes as a conduit for getting data onto a similar Apple ebook device. This could even be a perfect feature for more capable tablets - if it did the media reading parts right, and had a nice multi-touch interface (à la iPhone), it'd be a lot closer to a Knowledge Navigator than the readers we currently have. But I'd be happy with just the ebook.
An iTunes store partnered with a capable, very thin ebook, would be a great combination, and a guarantee that all the parts would work together, with polish, not just-about-work-if-the-stars-are-aligned. As for content - they could partner with Gutenberg and offer all the gutenberg stuff for download to kick-start their library. There's a lot of good stuff on there. Then later bring in Google and real publishers, most of whom have realised that time is running out on their current distribution model. It would be difficult for Google to do this on their own because none of the ebook manufacturers are producing something which will work seamlessly with whatever software they put out. The only way it can work for them is if they do it on the web, and then wait for ebook/tablets to have wifi.
What this sector needs is someone who's willing to take both hardware and software (on the device and the computer) seriously.
*The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.*
Have you ever used anything but Windows? Didn't think so. Try taking your sig seriously.
Yes I meant ~/Library by Library, not /Library : ~/Library is the one which has these very liberal permissions. Should have said 'User Library' instead to be clear.
If it works as well as WiFi networks in OS X, it'll work transparently. First time you want to connect you enter the connection details and log in as necessary, after that it stores your details for you. In the prefs you can choose which networks you want to join and reorder their priority. Don't see why it shouldn't work the same way. Municipal WiFi will probably be a reality in most major cities sometime in the next 5 years - already there is almost universal WiFi access at airports.
Absolutely. EDGE will work fine for email/chat (if Apple deigns to allow chat), but for web you'll be pretty much limited to wifi only, unless you're very very patient and limit yourself to the cut-down low bandwidth version of sites only. Good thing it has WiFi! For some people this will be a deal-breaker, till a year down the line when they get 3G...
Presumably the WiFi circuitry could be turned off when you're not using it as it can on laptops.
Re PUSH/PULL - Surely this depends on how often you receive emails - if you get 6 every hour, wouldn't PUSH require more connections than if you set your mail client to connect via PULL every 15 minutes? I'm curious as to the benefits of PUSH email - are their other benefits apart from receiving things immediately? As an aside, I believe it supports IMAP, which supports PUSH.
I'm really disappointed in this - there are several obvious features (chat,audio,video over IP) which are not there, and Apple needs outside help to add this kind of stuff - especially features which the networks won't want them to add. Long term I believe they'll have no choice but to open it, as the line fills out to smaller versions and tablets with the same gesture interface, they're going to want to develop the ecosystem so that the devices are worth buying and have value added by 3RD parties. They have the chance with future models, which really can run a meaningful subset of OS X, to dramatically expand their OS X marketshare, but not if it remains closed.
Short term I don't think it would harm adoption much, but long term, as people want those extra little apps that are available on other phones, and app development shifts over to mobile platforms, it's going to hurt Apple badly to not be in this from the start. If they don't have an SDK by the end of the year, it's a serious tactical error.
Jobs is crazy not to hint at this stage that things will open up later when they have time to consider it, instead of coming out with bullshit excuses about 'bad apps' and crashing networks. It would cost them nothing and earn a lot of goodwill - it's not just geeks who want extra apps, everyone will. Still, it's early days yet, so perhaps this will be fixed. Hopefully they'll feel the pressure from incredulous would-be users and change their attitude.
I don't agree that synching is a thing of the past - for most people synci
There was no mp3 "Razr"
I have a Razr - it looks pretty, and I quite like it, but the interface is crap, in too many ways to bother listing here. I'd switch in an instant if another phone was available with a better UI, and the iPhone looks to have a UI way ahead of any other phone, because they actually designed the UI for the users, not for the phone company.
The library folder has to be accessible to applications (and thus the current user) without authentication, because of the Application Support and Preferences directories, which they write to all the time.
Folders like Input Managers, Internet Plug-Ins, Widgets, and perhaps LaunchAgents need to have limited access though - that definitely needs to change, and I'd advise anyone who hasn't to change the permissions on those folders so that they require authentication for changes. Otherwise applications could silently install things in there without you knowing (some already do when they install things like 'Smart' Crash Reporter without asking for permission).
I expect they'll compromise and release a tablet but keep the option of having a machine with a keyboard. For now.
They could release a touchscreen tablet with an optional portable bluetooth keyboard - so for serious writing you could use the keyboard, otherwise just use the tablet for viewing things, surfing the web etc, and use the screen keyboard for short messages etc. Would make the perfect e-book reader and web browser.
Well of course there's no way you'd run normal applications on it for GUI reasons. However a lot of the background toolkits have to be there to support something like webkit, mail and the SMS stuff (which looks suspiciously like ichat). So in theory at least you could probably transplant the guts of many applications unchanged, and give them a new iPhone-style GUI (a lot of the apps resemble little widgets, but perhaps they're done with IB nib files and standard cocoa instead).
Of the top of my head, it must have
Probably doesn't have :
So will it be the typical mobile phone development deal, expensive development kit, massive legal hurdles in the NDA dept intended to make sure only select large development houses play and they play according to the mobile phone rules? Will the operating software in the thing be DRMed like the newest iPods so that only Apple signed binaries boot/run? Steve didn't say, and the silence is disturbing.
It'd be interesting to see some details on the 'OS X' which is included from Apple - if they don't provide them by the time it's launched, I'm sure someone will have a look around on the built in memory and find out. They'd really be shooting themselves in the foot here if they don't long term allow users to install software on the phones - eventually these phones will become more and more laptop replacements, and whoever makes a non user-hostile system will win. Of course it's still early days, so hopefully an SDK will turn up for free download sometime after they've launched and people can actually use/test on them.
I'm surprised at the omission of a to-do list or simple text application - TextEdit would surely be a no-brainer if they already have cocoa text views ported for safari and webkit?
I wonder if some of the little controls shown in the videos, like the search bar and buttons etc on the NYT webpage are in fact the new look controls for Jaguar?
Where the HELL is iChat integration? As in, IM'ing or calling your iChat contacts, maybe not from GSM / Edge network, but at least from any WiFi hotspot? I certainly hope they thought about it?!
This is an obvious progression, as is audio and video ichat. The thing is, if they put that in straight away, what telco in their right mind would partner with them? Apple would basically be saying 'We're going to make your entire business model obsolete, would you like to support our phone?'. The telcos would be extremely unhappy about people moving over to text messaging at data rates instead of SMS for example. Even now they must be treading a fine line with telcos knowing that in future their interests and Apple's diverge drastically.
At present Apple need the big telecos to get their phone supported and accepted in the market. Over the next few years that will change, particularly if they can tempt many ipod users to switch to this product and build up a large userbase which demands support for their phones. Once Apple are established in many markets worldwide and too big a presence to crush, expect them to use that weight to introduce text and audio chat, video conferencing etc over wifi (perhaps later WiMax) eventually bypassing the telecom networks completely for many customers most of the time (those who live in wifi saturated areas. They can do all this with a simple software update.
Personally I think opening up the software side will be more important, as it can allow third party vendors to do things that Apple wouldn't dare to do on their own. Aside from the functions you mentioned, soon these devices will be able to replace a laptop, if you can use them with a bluetooth keyboard and TV, but all that will depend on a healthy software ecosystem, so here's hoping Apple sees the light and releases an SDK for it.
Will they sell it separately?
If they do, I'd buy one, even at this price or higher. If they don't, I'll never buy one. Many people on this story seem to share this sentiment - I wonder why Apple felt the need to tie this phone to a carrier?
DRM'd music is always a risky proposition, but to buy it from Microsoft (who have a history of screwing their partners, customers, and anyone else they feel they can make a quick buck from), using a deprecated system, is the worst choice. Personally, I wouldn't buy it from anyone.
You are so utterly mentally retarded that it hurts my teeth to read your drivel. NEVER in the history of the earth has anything happened that was even a tiny fraction of what we are seeing today. Not only were the ice ages NOT "more extreme", they were peanuts compared to what we see today. We have a pretty decent record of global temperatures for several hundred thousand years and there is no indication anywhere of global temperatures changing on the time-scales of decades or even centuries. Nothing like what we're seeing right now can be found anywhere in the earth's climate record.
While the speed of global climate change is staggering and not comparable to previous changes, the range of temperatures and habitats in the past is indeed far more extreme than those we have experienced over the last 10000 years. Much of the earth was probably covered in ice at several points in the distant past, and much of it was tropical at other times - far more extreme changes than we have yet experienced do occur over geological time periods, and there has been far more CO2 than there is now in the past. When the present interglacial ends things will change again. So we should be preparing for massive global climate changes regardless of whether we believe in global warming, as they're going to happen on the longer scale.
But we can easily deal with text-only spam.
But why not deal with the real problem instead?