That's a pretty stupid waste of bandwidth, if Pandora is sending out 128 kb/s streams. They could achieve near-lossless quality at around 32 kb/s with state-of-the-art codecs.
So that would keep the use case you mention down to around 2.5 G/month, just by itself.
Dropping back to 96 kb/s would allow Pandora to run indefinitely at the lowest rate I mentioned.
It is not sufficient for any of the media-rich apps for which Verizon advertised the device.
True enough. Continuous hi-def video streaming to mass-market mobile users? Forget it. It can't be done and it should be illegal for any carrier to imply that it can.
Most people understand that there's not enough licensed RF spectrum to let millions of users treat their cell phone as if it were a portable 20 Mb/sec cable connection running uTorrent and Netflix 24/7 at 100% saturation. So why don't the carriers advertise their service with a flat rate, but with terms like "3 Mb/s for the first 2 GB transferred per billing period, 500 kb/s for the next 2 GB, and 128 kb/s after that"?
Seems this would allow them to stick to the spirit of the law when it comes to "unlimited" service offers, while keeping the network from being either too congested or too expensive.
Um, the worst parts of communism and fascism are the parts where your neighbor rats you out for owning an iPhone, and the government drags you out in the street at 3 AM and shoots you, and sends your parents the bill for the bullet.
But this is bad for the same reason that simple passwords is bad. If you increase an attacker's chances of getting in by 0.01%, but you have 10,000,000 users, you've now put 1000 more people at risk.
Statistics does not work that way. As long as we're making up numbers, I'll guess that 0.0001% of those 1000 users will ever have a "guess the password" attack launched against their account.
This is an easy trap to fall into, admittedly. It usually comes up in pharmaceutical trials, where if you actually run the numbers on a new wonder drug, you discover it costs like $50,000,000 for every heart attack or stroke it prevents.
Then if you know a user John Smith was born in 1967, you can guess "smith67", and if he uses: smith, Smith, SMITH, smith67, Smith67, or SMITH67, your single guess of smith67 will work for ALL SIX cases. Increasing an attacker's chances SIX fold is terrible.
Weak password is weak. The actual odds of a successful attack are not affected significantly by a fuzzy match.
I could see it making life easier for crackers if the whole database escapes into the wild, of course... but that's another case where the real weakness has nothing to do with the matching algorithm.
Sure, it would make a dictionary attack easier, but it's not as if you can launch a dictionary attack against amazon.com without being shut down after the first n wrong guesses.
It strikes me as a clever way to save the inevitable calls/emails to tech support ("Uh, I haven't logged in for like, 3 years, and now I can't remember my password.")
Exactly. Is this Ballmer's secret new business plan? Sell PowerPoint slideshows to customers instead of competitive products?
Pathetic. As someone mentioned in the article's comments, this is just a rehash of the same PowerPoint presentation they would have circulated in 2007, when the iPhone first started attracting attention.
"Safe" meaning your company can afford to spend months or even years developing a title for publication, with confidence that it will not be arbitrarily rejected by Apple for reasons which are inconsistent with policies under which other applications and media have previously been approved.
It used to be necessary for the US Government to hire people who were known as "Kremlinologists," people who had spent years studying the history and culture of the Soviet Union and observing the politics and processes within the Politburo. Their role was to assist in formulating policy related to an utterly alien and intimidating foreign power, impermeable and mysterious to the rest of the world, yet strong enough to destroy civilization on a whim. Shrub's secretary of state, Condi Rice, was an example of someone who was trained in this line of work.
Now, Kremlinologists are no longer in demand, but it seems that it's necessary for major ISVs and publishers to recruit "Applepologists," people who are skilled at reading chicken entrails, tea leaves, tarot cards, and gossip sites to forecast the company's reaction to the submission of a given app. Will the same guidelines used for music and film be applied to Game X or Magazine Y? If not, which guidelines will apply, and which will not? Which camp is likely to be in favor with Jobs and Cook at the time the product is likely to be ready for submission -- the batshit-loony puritans who rejected a dictionary for "not being family friendly," or the anonymous contingent of progressives who would have given Playboy the green light to announce their iPad app? What are the odds that the rank-and-file employees will force change from the bottom, once they realize that they aren't really in a "worker's paradise" but a prison made of increasingly-lofty rhetoric and decreasingly-lucrative stock options?
Of course, we all know how successful Rice and the other Kremlinologists were at predicting the fall of the Soviet Union and understanding what would come next. Can anyone guess what will happen when Jobs finally leaves for good?
It's obvious there are two cultures within Apple, one dominated by intellectuals and geeks and the other dominated by Mormons or something. Which one will gain the upper hand?
Actually the opposite is true. The textual content was originally added to get around the Comstock-era laws against sending pornographic material through the US mail. It was to Hefner's credit that he realized that he could actually put together something with meaningful literary and sociological merit in the course of working around a fucked-up legal system.
Old-school Playboy really was awesome. I don't think anything like it exists now, or could. I'll definitely buy that app unless it turns out to be a real piece of junk.
Yeah, the free market. We should give that a try sometime, see how it goes. It couldn't be worse than what we have now, which is a market that lives and dies by regulatory capture.
Translation: "After racking up $60,000 in student loans, this piece of paper on my wall had better damned well mean something. And it does. Right? Right...?"
This is slashdot, they tell the same scary stories about he US, UK and recently even Sweden.
Ah, yes, Sweden, where shoplifting is referred to as "rape of inventory," wire fraud is defined as "rape of database," armed robbers are charged with "rape of wallet," and jaywalking is known as "rape of traffic."
Two, I can pick up the phone without looking at it and tell by feel if I'm holding it in the right orientation. Can't do either of those with a featureless expanse of glass and multi-touch gestures.
One of the things you notice that's different about the iPad is that it really doesn't matter how you orient it. If the iPhone's desktop could rearrange itself in landscape mode and/or invert itself, the way the iPad's desktop can, nobody would have a problem.
Also, one of the things they could do if they got rid of the home button would be to leave the task manager up all the time. That would give you access to multiple buttons with a quick swipe.
any software written to take advantage of the new IPhone hardware will not run on the older models. This is the same issue that android faces with it's different models. No different.
Every single app I have will at least run on the first iPhone ever shipped. I don't get features like unassisted GPS support where the hardware simply wasn't there, and the app might be slow as hell, but the compatibility issues are nothing even remotely like what Android users have to think about before they hit 'Buy'.
Apple deserves more credit than they get for making that possible. Backwards compatibility is very easy to add to the design document, and very tempting to blow off later.
Slashdot Mirror
So that would keep the use case you mention down to around 2.5 G/month, just by itself.
Dropping back to 96 kb/s would allow Pandora to run indefinitely at the lowest rate I mentioned.
True enough. Continuous hi-def video streaming to mass-market mobile users? Forget it. It can't be done and it should be illegal for any carrier to imply that it can.
Most people understand that there's not enough licensed RF spectrum to let millions of users treat their cell phone as if it were a portable 20 Mb/sec cable connection running uTorrent and Netflix 24/7 at 100% saturation. So why don't the carriers advertise their service with a flat rate, but with terms like "3 Mb/s for the first 2 GB transferred per billing period, 500 kb/s for the next 2 GB, and 128 kb/s after that"?
Seems this would allow them to stick to the spirit of the law when it comes to "unlimited" service offers, while keeping the network from being either too congested or too expensive.
Other than the fact that the iPad's desktop launcher supports landscape orientation, what are the differences? I can't think of any offhand.
Um, the worst parts of communism and fascism are the parts where your neighbor rats you out for owning an iPhone, and the government drags you out in the street at 3 AM and shoots you, and sends your parents the bill for the bullet.
Whether or not a supreme being exists is outside of the realm of science.
He exists outside of the realm of science, and He really, really wants you to vote Republican.
Disprove the existence of God. It's OK. I'll wait.
First you must define "God."
So, you can choose to believe or choose not to believe and I see both choices as equally valid.
You can "see" it any way you like, but logic, reason, and reality do not work that way.
Statistics does not work that way. As long as we're making up numbers, I'll guess that 0.0001% of those 1000 users will ever have a "guess the password" attack launched against their account.
This is an easy trap to fall into, admittedly. It usually comes up in pharmaceutical trials, where if you actually run the numbers on a new wonder drug, you discover it costs like $50,000,000 for every heart attack or stroke it prevents.
Weak password is weak. The actual odds of a successful attack are not affected significantly by a fuzzy match.
I could see it making life easier for crackers if the whole database escapes into the wild, of course... but that's another case where the real weakness has nothing to do with the matching algorithm.
Sure, it would make a dictionary attack easier, but it's not as if you can launch a dictionary attack against amazon.com without being shut down after the first n wrong guesses.
It strikes me as a clever way to save the inevitable calls/emails to tech support ("Uh, I haven't logged in for like, 3 years, and now I can't remember my password.")
What's the threat, exactly?
I award you ten points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Exactly. Is this Ballmer's secret new business plan? Sell PowerPoint slideshows to customers instead of competitive products?
Pathetic. As someone mentioned in the article's comments, this is just a rehash of the same PowerPoint presentation they would have circulated in 2007, when the iPhone first started attracting attention.
"Safe" meaning your company can afford to spend months or even years developing a title for publication, with confidence that it will not be arbitrarily rejected by Apple for reasons which are inconsistent with policies under which other applications and media have previously been approved.
Euhm, no, it doesn't.
There is no "side A" and "side B" in science. There is "proposition A", and there is "something other than proposition A."
Your attempt at imposing religious dualism on the scientific process is straight out of the Discovery Institute playbook.
What's "porn"? What makes Playboy pornographic but not Eyes Wide Shut?
Until Apple answers this question, no publisher of anything beyond nursery rhymes can safely do business with them.
It used to be necessary for the US Government to hire people who were known as "Kremlinologists," people who had spent years studying the history and culture of the Soviet Union and observing the politics and processes within the Politburo. Their role was to assist in formulating policy related to an utterly alien and intimidating foreign power, impermeable and mysterious to the rest of the world, yet strong enough to destroy civilization on a whim. Shrub's secretary of state, Condi Rice, was an example of someone who was trained in this line of work.
Now, Kremlinologists are no longer in demand, but it seems that it's necessary for major ISVs and publishers to recruit "Applepologists," people who are skilled at reading chicken entrails, tea leaves, tarot cards, and gossip sites to forecast the company's reaction to the submission of a given app. Will the same guidelines used for music and film be applied to Game X or Magazine Y? If not, which guidelines will apply, and which will not? Which camp is likely to be in favor with Jobs and Cook at the time the product is likely to be ready for submission -- the batshit-loony puritans who rejected a dictionary for "not being family friendly," or the anonymous contingent of progressives who would have given Playboy the green light to announce their iPad app? What are the odds that the rank-and-file employees will force change from the bottom, once they realize that they aren't really in a "worker's paradise" but a prison made of increasingly-lofty rhetoric and decreasingly-lucrative stock options?
Of course, we all know how successful Rice and the other Kremlinologists were at predicting the fall of the Soviet Union and understanding what would come next. Can anyone guess what will happen when Jobs finally leaves for good?
It's obvious there are two cultures within Apple, one dominated by intellectuals and geeks and the other dominated by Mormons or something. Which one will gain the upper hand?
He did not include both sides of the issue
Science does not work that way.
Actually the opposite is true. The textual content was originally added to get around the Comstock-era laws against sending pornographic material through the US mail. It was to Hefner's credit that he realized that he could actually put together something with meaningful literary and sociological merit in the course of working around a fucked-up legal system.
Old-school Playboy really was awesome. I don't think anything like it exists now, or could. I'll definitely buy that app unless it turns out to be a real piece of junk.
The worst case scenario is a company like APPL which is vastly overpriced, but yet finds a way of growing to fit the market cap
I think I see the problem
Yeah, the free market. We should give that a try sometime, see how it goes. It couldn't be worse than what we have now, which is a market that lives and dies by regulatory capture.
Translation: "After racking up $60,000 in student loans, this piece of paper on my wall had better damned well mean something. And it does. Right? Right...?"
As a software-hacker type, there are reasons why I don't even try to write articles for the Journal of Quantum Physics.
Not being stupid enough to think I could get away with it is one of those reasons, yes.
Wir müssen wissen.
Wir werden wissen.
It's going to be done, because we're human beings, and that's what we do. Deal with it, and get over it. And pass the steak sauce.
This is slashdot, they tell the same scary stories about he US, UK and recently even Sweden.
Ah, yes, Sweden, where shoplifting is referred to as "rape of inventory," wire fraud is defined as "rape of database," armed robbers are charged with "rape of wallet," and jaywalking is known as "rape of traffic."
Two, I can pick up the phone without looking at it and tell by feel if I'm holding it in the right orientation. Can't do either of those with a featureless expanse of glass and multi-touch gestures.
One of the things you notice that's different about the iPad is that it really doesn't matter how you orient it. If the iPhone's desktop could rearrange itself in landscape mode and/or invert itself, the way the iPad's desktop can, nobody would have a problem.
Also, one of the things they could do if they got rid of the home button would be to leave the task manager up all the time. That would give you access to multiple buttons with a quick swipe.
any software written to take advantage of the new IPhone hardware will not run on the older models. This is the same issue that android faces with it's different models. No different.
Every single app I have will at least run on the first iPhone ever shipped. I don't get features like unassisted GPS support where the hardware simply wasn't there, and the app might be slow as hell, but the compatibility issues are nothing even remotely like what Android users have to think about before they hit 'Buy'.
Apple deserves more credit than they get for making that possible. Backwards compatibility is very easy to add to the design document, and very tempting to blow off later.