While some of this is undoubtedly the "cool" factor that Apple has grown with the iPod/iPhone, I think another piece of the puzzle is that except for gaming, the pace of hardware cycles is pretty much irrelevant these days. In the late 90's/early 2000's, you could buy a new computer every two years and really feel the speed difference, even if you only used it for basic stuff like email/web browsing/word processing. Close to a decade later, email/web browsing/word processing/etc. are still what 99% of computer use is, and the demand that those activities put on the hardware hasn't increased anywhere near as much as the power of the hardware has.
A computer that you bought in 2004 to surf the web can likely still surf the web very adequately in 2008. The experience wouldn't be much different on a brand new machine. The impetus to be constantly upgrading is gone. With that out of the equation, the priorities when choosing a new machine change. It probably didn't make as much sense to spend an extra $500 on a computer that should keep working for five or six years when you were already expecting to upgrade to a new one within two years. But If you're shopping for a machine that you fully expect to use as your primary computer for five years, then paying extra for something nicer makes more sense.
There was looting, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the media reports may have led you to believe. It's a concern, and some people will stay because of it. But even though the Katrina situation wasn't as bad as you may have heard, there will still lessons learned, and the police/national guard should be less busy rescuing people from flooding and have more time to safeguard property after the storm.
It's an expensive proposition, the sort of thing that you really need a federal government to handle. But more importantly, whether it was a good idea or not, decades ago the federal government agreed to be responsible for the flood protection (In exchange for Louisiana allowing massive destruction to its coast). Katrina showed that the federal government did not live up to their part of the agreement, and that should be reason enough for the federal government to fix it.
More than half of New Orleans is actually above sea level. It's not above possible storm surge levels, but neither are the majority of the coast line in the rest of louisiana, texas, mississippi, alabama, or a very large portion of florida. While Louisiana is certainly hurricane prone, it's no more so than anywhere else along the gulf.
There are many steps that could be taken to help protect New Orleans and other at risk places, and to help minimize the damage that storms are able to cause. The federal government had agreed to undertake some of those steps, and in exchange, Louisiana allowed the shipping industry and the oil industry to basically destroy its coastline. Not to mention how Louisiana has to deal with the overflow from every other city and town up the Mississippi river. The huge line of levees that all those northern states have built increase the speed of the river to the point where there's no more sediment build-up to replenish the Louisiana wetlands. Incredible amounts of fertilizer runoff from farms flows into the gulf, creating giant dead-zones that have had drastic effects on Louisiana's seafood industry. And to top it all off, New Orleans citizens have to drink water from that same river that dozens of other cities have already dumped their waste water into.
New Orleans and Louisiana has been getting crapped on by a huge swath of the country for decades. In return for those sacrifices, some decent flood walls isn't too much to ask. The wind and rain of Katrina destroyed very little of New Orleans. The inability of the Army Corps of Engineers to live up to their side of the deal is what caused the flooding. The citizens of New Orleans don't want to use tax payers' money to rebuild after every storm. They want the flood protection that they were promised. Give the city that, and it'll take care of itself.
It's not necessarily mechanical vs. drugs, it's more about the intention. There's nothing wrong with taking a drug to get someone back to what would be considered "normal health." It's not a total ban on drugs. They're not going to suspend a football player for taking aspirin or anything like that. It's definitely not a clear-cut line, which makes the whole debate that much more complicated.
At the end of the day, there's very strong evidence that steroids and the like have some really significant and unhealthy side-effects. And while I generally believe that people should be free to mistreat their bodies in whatever way they wish, there's a lot of good reasons that we as a society frown upon that sort of drug-use in sports. Beyond the appeal to "fairness", there's also the reality that star athletes are often role models for younger athletes, and as such their behavior can change the behavior of children.
But I do think your comment leads towards an interesting questions. What would be the NFL's response if a quarterback with perfectly normal vision decided to get LASIK surgery to enhance their vision well beyond a normal human's sight? As our technological ability to manipulate our bodies in more mechanical ways increases, then this sort of thing will become an issue. Especially if it starts to move into modifications that have some serious side-effects or health risks.
For any function that you can find on a swiss army knife, you can also find a number of stand-alone tools that are generally superior for accomplishing their specific tasks. But that doesn't mean that a swiss army knife isn't an incredibly useful thing to carry around. (Although, personally I prefer a Leatherman)
There are many people for whom the trade-off of lower quality in exchange for the convenience of carrying less tools around all day is an easy one. It's often a very pragmatic decision. The cellphone is turning out to be the swiss army knife of electronics.
As for the iPhone in particular, it does some things worse that the other options, but it does somethings better. Sure, there are apple fanbois who will make excuses for the flaws, but that's not any more ridiculous than you saying "the whole world is laughing at you." Neither of them are true or useful things to claim.
With a UID as low as yours, I'd think you'd have figured this out by now, but I'll say it anyways: Slashdot isn't really a news website, it's a discussion website. If all you're interested in is the latest headlines, then there are better places to look. If you're more interested in finding sometimes meaningful and informed discussion on a wide variety of topics, then the comment boards here are as good as anywhere on the internet.
Although it's not without its problems, the community is the only thing that makes/. worth reading. As a news/link aggregrator, it's been surpassed by other sites. The editors here don't do much editing, and even less real research/investigative reporting.
It doesn't have to be newsworthy to be posted, it just has to be something that the community would find interesting to talk about. This story fits that criteria.
Yeah, but you gotta take the good with the bad. Digital provides so many advantages over analog film that I wouldn't go back for a million dollars.
At the end of the day, a good photographer will take the time to compose a good photo, regardless of what technology is in their hands. For an hack like me who mostly takes pictures less for artistic purposes and more for straight up documentation, digital cameras have made my life about a zillion times easier.
Why would tying software to a particular brand of hardware be illegal? It happens in lots of industries outside of just computer operating systems. I'd imagine that video game console manufacturers would have a pretty strong opinion on it.
Apple has a pretty straight-forward option if this does happen. They just stop shipping stand-alone Mac OS. In Apple's world, you shouldn't ever have to buy a full version, because you can only run it on a mac, and macs all ship with the OS pre-installed. If they still want boxes in stores, just mark them all upgrade only. There's no reason for someone who wants a new version to not be able to upgrade, because their mac already has an older version on it.
If Psystar's argument is that they've bought the license to use OSX and so they can sell that license however the like, then taking away the ability to buy a stand-alone license is an easy counter. Make it so that the only way to get that license is to buy a full on Mac, hardware and all. I guess Psystar could still buy mac-mini's, then transfer that license to a high-powered workstation, and maybe find a way to turn a profit, but I think that'd be a real challenge for them.
Well I guess the question is, how did that "apple products are supposed to be good" thought get into their head? Apple certainly has slick marketing, no doubt, but it's not like they're beaming subliminal messages into people while they sleep.
Is it word of mouth? I don't see anything wrong with that. I've got a pretty decent grasp on technology and am more than capable of doing thorough research, but when one of my good friends said that he thought I'd really like an iPhone, that's a really significant endorsement to me. He's a guy a know really well, he knows me really well, we've generally had very similar opinions on various pieces of technology over the years, and so his judgment is solid as far as I'm concerned. I'm not just blindly following some stranger yelling on the side of the road, I'm letting a source that I trust do some of the research for me. On the flip side, I love my mom to death but her views and uses of technology are very different than mine, so her suggestions about cell phones are mostly useless to me.
Are a lot of iPhone buyers getting them because they love their iPods and figure that Apple can get the phone thing right as well? Maybe, and that seems like a pretty valid reason to me as well. It's not a completely seamless jump from music player to cell phone, but the devices do have many similar features and Apple's earned a decent reputation in terms of designing interfaces.
There's been lots of media hype about the iPhone, no doubt, but the majority of what I've read in the past year has said that the iPhone is a good product. Many professional tech critics as well as less technologically focused writers have said good things about it, and for a lot of people that's good enough. Like I said before, for some people it's better to let others do the research for you. If you have the time and desire to sit and read every last detail about a bunch of phones before you make your choice, then good for you. That's not a compelling option for many people, but that doesn't make them mindless drones.
Even the iPhone commercials don't strike me as particularly shallow or trendy. They mostly just show some of the basic functions of the phone, and how they're accomplished.
I've played plenty of games where I've lost but still had fun. The competition is part of the fun, winning is great, but it's not the only thing in sport that's enjoyable. Training yourself to overcome the nervousness and stress of a close game, watching your skills improve, watching the skills of your teammates improve, that's all really exciting stuff. Maybe at the top professional level, the final score is all that's important. But for the 99.99% of the population who doesn't get paid to play sports, there's still room for other motivation.
I play beach volleyball not just because I like to win, but also because it's a fun game, it's decent exercise, and it's a very social activity. I generally prefer winning over losing, but I have much more fun getting my ass kicked on a higher skill level net than I do going on a beginners net and just tearing it up.
So I guess my point is, playing the game in and of itself is a pretty good reason for sport. Competition is an important part of it, because without that, what would be the motivation to improve your skills?
What's your criteria that defines this objective scale? Graphics? Gameplay? Innovation? Ambition?
Bejewelled is a very well made game, it was just designed with a less ambitious scope in mind. It doesn't try to dazzle with graphics or storyline or anything like that. It's all about addictive gameplay, and it's certainly managed to hit that target. The Wii* games have been created around a somewhat similar philosophy.
Generally, I don't see the point in necessarily even grouping together something like WiiFit and, for example, Grand Theft Auto. The only thing they really have in common is that they're both "video games", which is such a broad term that it isn't really useful for drawing opinions. And I would say the same thing about Scary Movie 10 vs. the Cohen Brothers' work.
There are people who can take a pencil and a piece of paper and make an incredible work of art. Give me the same two items and you'll be lucky to get a legible grocery list. But even though those two creations have a common low-level similarity doesn't mean that you can draw any sort of meaningful comparison between them.
Basically, for a company in Nintendo's position, it's usually easier to create a genre than to try and out-do competitors in an already established genre. It helps when you've got a designer like Miyamoto who's got a proven sense of what others might enjoy, and it also helps that Nintendo works with the new idea and polishes it up and doesn't just shove something out the door really quick.
So when they ship a new type of game, a few good things happens for them. First, if it's a successful genre, then they've got that whole little market segment all to themselves, at least until someone else manages to spit out a clone. Second, as long as it's a halfway decent game, then they've got a pretty clear path towards developing a franchise. And Nintendo loves their franchises. And third, they get some credit as innovators, which is nice PR and helps them sell other games down the line.
You can't judge the relative worth of different products just by going down a feature checklist. A swiss army knife has many more features than an 8" chef knife, but which one would you rather use to cut up some onions?
And you weren't being critical of Apple, you were being critical of the millions of people who've bought an iPhone. You can't dismiss numbers like that with something as basic as "brand loyalty." All those people aren't going out and handing over hundreds of dollars because the iPhone was shiny enough that it shut their brain off (OK, some are, but not the majority). Their brains are just making decisions based on different priorities than yours.
I think you're overestimating the size of the Apple fanboy market. That crowd certainly exists, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that everyone who's got an iPhone got it just because it has an Apple logo on the back. That crowd was tapped out in the first couple weeks or so. The iPhone must be offering something to people that's making so many of them spend money on it.
But I'm sorry to interrupt. Please continue telling us all the details of your phone contract so we can fully comprehend how much smarter you are than everyone else.
Actually, I doubt it. The US is already in a position where it can start wars where it basically has unchallenged air-superiority. If all it wants to do is bomb the hell out of somewhere, it can do that basically risk-free with manned aircraft.
The reality is that although airpower is an essential part of modern warfare, it's not the only thing that matters. Eventually you need soldiers on the ground holding territory, and that pretty much always gets messy.
As far as I can tell, UAV's create a shift in tactics for both airpower and the ground support, but it doesn't radically change the overall equation of war, at least not for the US.
When I was in college I noticed the extreme speed with which just about any sort of electronics would disappear from the side of the road. One day we took an old computer case, emptied it out, and poured in about 8" of concrete. That sucker was heavy, but it disappeared the first night it spent out front.
Another entertaining event, I was visiting a friend, and we noticed that a car parked on the street a couple houses down had had all 4 wheels stolen, but rather than just the usual concrete blocks to prop the car up, they had used a couple of old and really heavy duty computer cases.
Nothing is truly useless if you use your imagination.
Then why would they have allowed free apps to begin with on their app store? They could've easily made up some BS excuse like having to cover bandwidth costs or something like that.
It's not conspiracy theory 'tinfoil hat' material, it's just plain lack of common sense.
First off, Apple knows that the ability to download lots of software will continue to drive iPhone sales. Why they'd want to stomp on that enthusiasm as you suggest, I can't imagine.
Second, as the App Store stands now, Apple makes 30% of each sale just for hosting the app. They're basically getting 1/3 of the revenue while doing 0% of the work. That's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Why would they want to keep developers out?
Third, regarding Apple's own software offerings, If Apple releases a pay-for App they are not going to have any trouble selling it. Plenty of people will check it out just because Apple is the one releasing it, Apple can give it top billing on their online store, and chances are it'll be a well designed and attractive application that would sell reasonably well on its own merits.
And fourth, just up and terminating applications just because they're releasing a competitor application of their own would cause so much bad publicity and ill will that it'd be foolish. It would kill their app store.
I fail to see what Apple would gain by acting as you suggest.
Then don't buy one, and go be happy. For every competent computer admin that reads/. today, there are thousands of other people out in the world who want to use a phone, and want to be able to download new programs, and who will willingly admit that they don't know that much about computers/software/etc. There are lots of people who are perfectly happy having someone take responsibility for helping them avoid malware. This kill-switch isn't an affront to them, it's a valuable feature.
And they are Apple's primary market. I know it's hard for some people to accept, but your competence with computers doesn't automatically make you the prime target, even for a computer manufacturer. People like you are creating things such as Linux and Android for themselves and other people like them. Go play in their sandbox, they'll be happy to have you.
Also, even if they do form and are stable, they'll likely be moving at a very high speed in relation to the earth, and will likely fly off into space, never to be heard from again.
You can't just park on an asteroid and fire the thrusters nonstop, because asteroids are generally tumbling as they move through space. Imagine a rocket attached to a sphere that's rotating along one axis. If you want to move in a given direction perpendicular to that axis, you can only fire the rocket at most half of the time, or else on the other half of the rotation you'll be pushing the sphere back in the wrong direction. And to make things even harder asteroids are usually rotating along multiple-axis, making the timing of rocket firings very complicated. Much more complicated than the tiny adjustments that would be needed to keep the craft at a given distance from the asteroid. The hard part would be getting the craft into the proper position to begin with, but that's certainly not any harder than getting the craft in position to make a soft landing.
The great thing about gravity is that it's basically free. You don't have to carry any fuel to power your gravity, you don't have to worry about it running out, and you don't have to worry about it malfunctioning and not working once it gets there.
The trade-off is that it takes a longer time to work, but if you've put your plan into effect early enough then that's not really a big deal. If time isn't an issue and the end result is the same either way, then why not go with the simplest solution? Putting a rocket on an asteroid and actively thrusting against it is very complicated for a number of reasons that other commenters on this article have already described.
This isn't the most useful analogy, but say I was moving out of my apartment and I had 100 lbs of stuff that needed to get loaded into my car. The fastest way might be to just throw all that crap into a big box and haul it down the stairs and into the driveway. But even though it'll take me longer, I'd probably prefer to pack it into a few smaller boxes and make five or six trips down to the car. It's not as quick, but it's easier, and there's much less of a chance of either a box or my back giving out.
Slashdot Mirror
While some of this is undoubtedly the "cool" factor that Apple has grown with the iPod/iPhone, I think another piece of the puzzle is that except for gaming, the pace of hardware cycles is pretty much irrelevant these days. In the late 90's/early 2000's, you could buy a new computer every two years and really feel the speed difference, even if you only used it for basic stuff like email/web browsing/word processing. Close to a decade later, email/web browsing/word processing/etc. are still what 99% of computer use is, and the demand that those activities put on the hardware hasn't increased anywhere near as much as the power of the hardware has.
A computer that you bought in 2004 to surf the web can likely still surf the web very adequately in 2008. The experience wouldn't be much different on a brand new machine. The impetus to be constantly upgrading is gone. With that out of the equation, the priorities when choosing a new machine change. It probably didn't make as much sense to spend an extra $500 on a computer that should keep working for five or six years when you were already expecting to upgrade to a new one within two years. But If you're shopping for a machine that you fully expect to use as your primary computer for five years, then paying extra for something nicer makes more sense.
There was looting, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the media reports may have led you to believe. It's a concern, and some people will stay because of it. But even though the Katrina situation wasn't as bad as you may have heard, there will still lessons learned, and the police/national guard should be less busy rescuing people from flooding and have more time to safeguard property after the storm.
It's an expensive proposition, the sort of thing that you really need a federal government to handle. But more importantly, whether it was a good idea or not, decades ago the federal government agreed to be responsible for the flood protection (In exchange for Louisiana allowing massive destruction to its coast). Katrina showed that the federal government did not live up to their part of the agreement, and that should be reason enough for the federal government to fix it.
More than half of New Orleans is actually above sea level. It's not above possible storm surge levels, but neither are the majority of the coast line in the rest of louisiana, texas, mississippi, alabama, or a very large portion of florida. While Louisiana is certainly hurricane prone, it's no more so than anywhere else along the gulf.
There are many steps that could be taken to help protect New Orleans and other at risk places, and to help minimize the damage that storms are able to cause. The federal government had agreed to undertake some of those steps, and in exchange, Louisiana allowed the shipping industry and the oil industry to basically destroy its coastline. Not to mention how Louisiana has to deal with the overflow from every other city and town up the Mississippi river. The huge line of levees that all those northern states have built increase the speed of the river to the point where there's no more sediment build-up to replenish the Louisiana wetlands. Incredible amounts of fertilizer runoff from farms flows into the gulf, creating giant dead-zones that have had drastic effects on Louisiana's seafood industry. And to top it all off, New Orleans citizens have to drink water from that same river that dozens of other cities have already dumped their waste water into.
New Orleans and Louisiana has been getting crapped on by a huge swath of the country for decades. In return for those sacrifices, some decent flood walls isn't too much to ask. The wind and rain of Katrina destroyed very little of New Orleans. The inability of the Army Corps of Engineers to live up to their side of the deal is what caused the flooding. The citizens of New Orleans don't want to use tax payers' money to rebuild after every storm. They want the flood protection that they were promised. Give the city that, and it'll take care of itself.
It's not necessarily mechanical vs. drugs, it's more about the intention. There's nothing wrong with taking a drug to get someone back to what would be considered "normal health." It's not a total ban on drugs. They're not going to suspend a football player for taking aspirin or anything like that. It's definitely not a clear-cut line, which makes the whole debate that much more complicated.
At the end of the day, there's very strong evidence that steroids and the like have some really significant and unhealthy side-effects. And while I generally believe that people should be free to mistreat their bodies in whatever way they wish, there's a lot of good reasons that we as a society frown upon that sort of drug-use in sports. Beyond the appeal to "fairness", there's also the reality that star athletes are often role models for younger athletes, and as such their behavior can change the behavior of children.
But I do think your comment leads towards an interesting questions. What would be the NFL's response if a quarterback with perfectly normal vision decided to get LASIK surgery to enhance their vision well beyond a normal human's sight? As our technological ability to manipulate our bodies in more mechanical ways increases, then this sort of thing will become an issue. Especially if it starts to move into modifications that have some serious side-effects or health risks.
For any function that you can find on a swiss army knife, you can also find a number of stand-alone tools that are generally superior for accomplishing their specific tasks. But that doesn't mean that a swiss army knife isn't an incredibly useful thing to carry around. (Although, personally I prefer a Leatherman)
There are many people for whom the trade-off of lower quality in exchange for the convenience of carrying less tools around all day is an easy one. It's often a very pragmatic decision. The cellphone is turning out to be the swiss army knife of electronics.
As for the iPhone in particular, it does some things worse that the other options, but it does somethings better. Sure, there are apple fanbois who will make excuses for the flaws, but that's not any more ridiculous than you saying "the whole world is laughing at you." Neither of them are true or useful things to claim.
With a UID as low as yours, I'd think you'd have figured this out by now, but I'll say it anyways: Slashdot isn't really a news website, it's a discussion website. If all you're interested in is the latest headlines, then there are better places to look. If you're more interested in finding sometimes meaningful and informed discussion on a wide variety of topics, then the comment boards here are as good as anywhere on the internet.
Although it's not without its problems, the community is the only thing that makes /. worth reading. As a news/link aggregrator, it's been surpassed by other sites. The editors here don't do much editing, and even less real research/investigative reporting.
It doesn't have to be newsworthy to be posted, it just has to be something that the community would find interesting to talk about. This story fits that criteria.
Maybe you should just get over it. It's just a little picture, what's the problem? Did an image kill your dog or something?
Yeah, but you gotta take the good with the bad. Digital provides so many advantages over analog film that I wouldn't go back for a million dollars.
At the end of the day, a good photographer will take the time to compose a good photo, regardless of what technology is in their hands. For an hack like me who mostly takes pictures less for artistic purposes and more for straight up documentation, digital cameras have made my life about a zillion times easier.
Why would tying software to a particular brand of hardware be illegal? It happens in lots of industries outside of just computer operating systems. I'd imagine that video game console manufacturers would have a pretty strong opinion on it.
Apple has a pretty straight-forward option if this does happen. They just stop shipping stand-alone Mac OS. In Apple's world, you shouldn't ever have to buy a full version, because you can only run it on a mac, and macs all ship with the OS pre-installed. If they still want boxes in stores, just mark them all upgrade only. There's no reason for someone who wants a new version to not be able to upgrade, because their mac already has an older version on it.
If Psystar's argument is that they've bought the license to use OSX and so they can sell that license however the like, then taking away the ability to buy a stand-alone license is an easy counter. Make it so that the only way to get that license is to buy a full on Mac, hardware and all. I guess Psystar could still buy mac-mini's, then transfer that license to a high-powered workstation, and maybe find a way to turn a profit, but I think that'd be a real challenge for them.
Well I guess the question is, how did that "apple products are supposed to be good" thought get into their head? Apple certainly has slick marketing, no doubt, but it's not like they're beaming subliminal messages into people while they sleep.
Is it word of mouth? I don't see anything wrong with that. I've got a pretty decent grasp on technology and am more than capable of doing thorough research, but when one of my good friends said that he thought I'd really like an iPhone, that's a really significant endorsement to me. He's a guy a know really well, he knows me really well, we've generally had very similar opinions on various pieces of technology over the years, and so his judgment is solid as far as I'm concerned. I'm not just blindly following some stranger yelling on the side of the road, I'm letting a source that I trust do some of the research for me. On the flip side, I love my mom to death but her views and uses of technology are very different than mine, so her suggestions about cell phones are mostly useless to me.
Are a lot of iPhone buyers getting them because they love their iPods and figure that Apple can get the phone thing right as well? Maybe, and that seems like a pretty valid reason to me as well. It's not a completely seamless jump from music player to cell phone, but the devices do have many similar features and Apple's earned a decent reputation in terms of designing interfaces.
There's been lots of media hype about the iPhone, no doubt, but the majority of what I've read in the past year has said that the iPhone is a good product. Many professional tech critics as well as less technologically focused writers have said good things about it, and for a lot of people that's good enough. Like I said before, for some people it's better to let others do the research for you. If you have the time and desire to sit and read every last detail about a bunch of phones before you make your choice, then good for you. That's not a compelling option for many people, but that doesn't make them mindless drones.
Even the iPhone commercials don't strike me as particularly shallow or trendy. They mostly just show some of the basic functions of the phone, and how they're accomplished.
I've played plenty of games where I've lost but still had fun. The competition is part of the fun, winning is great, but it's not the only thing in sport that's enjoyable. Training yourself to overcome the nervousness and stress of a close game, watching your skills improve, watching the skills of your teammates improve, that's all really exciting stuff. Maybe at the top professional level, the final score is all that's important. But for the 99.99% of the population who doesn't get paid to play sports, there's still room for other motivation.
I play beach volleyball not just because I like to win, but also because it's a fun game, it's decent exercise, and it's a very social activity. I generally prefer winning over losing, but I have much more fun getting my ass kicked on a higher skill level net than I do going on a beginners net and just tearing it up.
So I guess my point is, playing the game in and of itself is a pretty good reason for sport. Competition is an important part of it, because without that, what would be the motivation to improve your skills?
What's your criteria that defines this objective scale? Graphics? Gameplay? Innovation? Ambition?
Bejewelled is a very well made game, it was just designed with a less ambitious scope in mind. It doesn't try to dazzle with graphics or storyline or anything like that. It's all about addictive gameplay, and it's certainly managed to hit that target. The Wii* games have been created around a somewhat similar philosophy.
Generally, I don't see the point in necessarily even grouping together something like WiiFit and, for example, Grand Theft Auto. The only thing they really have in common is that they're both "video games", which is such a broad term that it isn't really useful for drawing opinions. And I would say the same thing about Scary Movie 10 vs. the Cohen Brothers' work.
There are people who can take a pencil and a piece of paper and make an incredible work of art. Give me the same two items and you'll be lucky to get a legible grocery list. But even though those two creations have a common low-level similarity doesn't mean that you can draw any sort of meaningful comparison between them.
Basically, for a company in Nintendo's position, it's usually easier to create a genre than to try and out-do competitors in an already established genre. It helps when you've got a designer like Miyamoto who's got a proven sense of what others might enjoy, and it also helps that Nintendo works with the new idea and polishes it up and doesn't just shove something out the door really quick.
So when they ship a new type of game, a few good things happens for them. First, if it's a successful genre, then they've got that whole little market segment all to themselves, at least until someone else manages to spit out a clone. Second, as long as it's a halfway decent game, then they've got a pretty clear path towards developing a franchise. And Nintendo loves their franchises. And third, they get some credit as innovators, which is nice PR and helps them sell other games down the line.
You can't judge the relative worth of different products just by going down a feature checklist. A swiss army knife has many more features than an 8" chef knife, but which one would you rather use to cut up some onions?
And you weren't being critical of Apple, you were being critical of the millions of people who've bought an iPhone. You can't dismiss numbers like that with something as basic as "brand loyalty." All those people aren't going out and handing over hundreds of dollars because the iPhone was shiny enough that it shut their brain off (OK, some are, but not the majority). Their brains are just making decisions based on different priorities than yours.
I think you're overestimating the size of the Apple fanboy market. That crowd certainly exists, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that everyone who's got an iPhone got it just because it has an Apple logo on the back. That crowd was tapped out in the first couple weeks or so. The iPhone must be offering something to people that's making so many of them spend money on it.
But I'm sorry to interrupt. Please continue telling us all the details of your phone contract so we can fully comprehend how much smarter you are than everyone else.
Actually, I doubt it. The US is already in a position where it can start wars where it basically has unchallenged air-superiority. If all it wants to do is bomb the hell out of somewhere, it can do that basically risk-free with manned aircraft.
The reality is that although airpower is an essential part of modern warfare, it's not the only thing that matters. Eventually you need soldiers on the ground holding territory, and that pretty much always gets messy.
As far as I can tell, UAV's create a shift in tactics for both airpower and the ground support, but it doesn't radically change the overall equation of war, at least not for the US.
When I was in college I noticed the extreme speed with which just about any sort of electronics would disappear from the side of the road. One day we took an old computer case, emptied it out, and poured in about 8" of concrete. That sucker was heavy, but it disappeared the first night it spent out front.
Another entertaining event, I was visiting a friend, and we noticed that a car parked on the street a couple houses down had had all 4 wheels stolen, but rather than just the usual concrete blocks to prop the car up, they had used a couple of old and really heavy duty computer cases.
Nothing is truly useless if you use your imagination.
Then why would they have allowed free apps to begin with on their app store? They could've easily made up some BS excuse like having to cover bandwidth costs or something like that.
It's not conspiracy theory 'tinfoil hat' material, it's just plain lack of common sense.
First off, Apple knows that the ability to download lots of software will continue to drive iPhone sales. Why they'd want to stomp on that enthusiasm as you suggest, I can't imagine.
Second, as the App Store stands now, Apple makes 30% of each sale just for hosting the app. They're basically getting 1/3 of the revenue while doing 0% of the work. That's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Why would they want to keep developers out?
Third, regarding Apple's own software offerings, If Apple releases a pay-for App they are not going to have any trouble selling it. Plenty of people will check it out just because Apple is the one releasing it, Apple can give it top billing on their online store, and chances are it'll be a well designed and attractive application that would sell reasonably well on its own merits.
And fourth, just up and terminating applications just because they're releasing a competitor application of their own would cause so much bad publicity and ill will that it'd be foolish. It would kill their app store.
I fail to see what Apple would gain by acting as you suggest.
Then don't buy one, and go be happy. For every competent computer admin that reads /. today, there are thousands of other people out in the world who want to use a phone, and want to be able to download new programs, and who will willingly admit that they don't know that much about computers/software/etc. There are lots of people who are perfectly happy having someone take responsibility for helping them avoid malware. This kill-switch isn't an affront to them, it's a valuable feature.
And they are Apple's primary market. I know it's hard for some people to accept, but your competence with computers doesn't automatically make you the prime target, even for a computer manufacturer. People like you are creating things such as Linux and Android for themselves and other people like them. Go play in their sandbox, they'll be happy to have you.
Also, even if they do form and are stable, they'll likely be moving at a very high speed in relation to the earth, and will likely fly off into space, never to be heard from again.
You can't just park on an asteroid and fire the thrusters nonstop, because asteroids are generally tumbling as they move through space. Imagine a rocket attached to a sphere that's rotating along one axis. If you want to move in a given direction perpendicular to that axis, you can only fire the rocket at most half of the time, or else on the other half of the rotation you'll be pushing the sphere back in the wrong direction. And to make things even harder asteroids are usually rotating along multiple-axis, making the timing of rocket firings very complicated. Much more complicated than the tiny adjustments that would be needed to keep the craft at a given distance from the asteroid. The hard part would be getting the craft into the proper position to begin with, but that's certainly not any harder than getting the craft in position to make a soft landing.
The great thing about gravity is that it's basically free. You don't have to carry any fuel to power your gravity, you don't have to worry about it running out, and you don't have to worry about it malfunctioning and not working once it gets there.
The trade-off is that it takes a longer time to work, but if you've put your plan into effect early enough then that's not really a big deal. If time isn't an issue and the end result is the same either way, then why not go with the simplest solution? Putting a rocket on an asteroid and actively thrusting against it is very complicated for a number of reasons that other commenters on this article have already described.
This isn't the most useful analogy, but say I was moving out of my apartment and I had 100 lbs of stuff that needed to get loaded into my car. The fastest way might be to just throw all that crap into a big box and haul it down the stairs and into the driveway. But even though it'll take me longer, I'd probably prefer to pack it into a few smaller boxes and make five or six trips down to the car. It's not as quick, but it's easier, and there's much less of a chance of either a box or my back giving out.