It would probably be unprotected AAC. They're pretty proud of their better codec and I think most third party music players are compatible with the unprotected version.
I'd prefer MP3 just because of the ease of interoperability with everything else.
Nobody's really being locked in. Burn your iTunes-purchased music to a CD and re-import it into iTunes and you have DRM-free music.
iTunes DRM was always pretty mild, and that's why it worked.
I think the real reason for Steve to speak against DRM at this time is that he doesn't want to be shoehorned into putting the same protections into MacOS X that Bill's guys had to put into Vista. Mild DRM's OK but non-optimal. Vista's DRM scheme is downright ugly and affects the whole widget, as Steve would say.
He's looking towards the time he will have to figure out a way to let us play Blu-Ray/HD DVD discs without selling out to the labels/studios.
If Steve can avoid draconian copy protection in the next version of MacOS, a lot of people are going to jump ship and switch over.
My reaction is that this seems like a lot of complexity for something that should be really, really simple.
Why do we need to have such a complex program as a web server, anyway, when most of us don't use 1% of its features?
I'm wondering if the weekend project might actually wind up being a better web server than Apache, for the average application where there is no private information in the web document tree and therefore no need to check internal security. (You would, of course, have to check the URL for../ and the like).
But all the buzz seems to be about Windows Mobile phones like the Motorola Q and the Samsung Blackjack.
The only comparable buzz I've seen has been for the Blackberry Pearl.
I'm actually surprised how little I've heard about the new crop of Symbian phones, although I understand they are very popular in Europe. I tried a Nokia N-series and thought the web browser was just as lousy as the competition's. (Web browsing is really the killer app for me for a smartphone).
How are the Q and Blackjack doing in the marketplace?
The 400mhz G4 actually handled all the graphics on its own. it was a pre-Quartz system due to its inferior graphics card (I think it only had 16MB of video RAM). The newer versions of MacOS made the system reasonably fast even without the hardware acceleration.
Of course the newer machines with hardware acceleration were loads faster, but after Tiger performance actually wasn't half bad on the old systems.
In the case of Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian, though, I think he has good points.
However, I would have liked to see a more detailed analysis of Windows Mobile since it looks like it has gained some traction.
I saw a Windows CE phone a couple of years back that was so abysmal that it's easy for me to think of Windows for Phones as an awful idea.
But right now Windows Mobile is gaining ground fast and an analysis that talks about relative cellphone market shares has to take that into account and acknowledge Windows Mobile as a serious competitor.
Aso, he's ignored RIM/Blackberry and its intensely loyal users. With more consumer-friendly phones and more modern design, I would expect RIM to gain market share against both Windows and Palm. I'm curious as to why that has not happened to the extent I would expect. Blackberry is a much loved brand by its main market, after all. A suvrey of IT professionals rated it second in overall quality and reliability among vendors, and the #1 vendor was not a competitor.
I did a similar analysis to RoughlyDrafted some time ago and came to to a simiilar conclusion. I looked at the iPhone, Treo (Palm and Windows versions), Sidekick IV and Blackberry Pearl.
I felt the Treo looked downright old-fashioned, the Sidekick had a low-resolution display they should have improved a generation ago, and Windows Mobile had a user interface both bland and hard to read. That left the Pearl, which I really liked except for its bizarre keyboard. My conclusion was that many of the companies making phones were highly complacent and deserved a big kick.
They also had web sites that had so many pictures of spinning phones that I found myself getting seasick, and my computer almost crashed from the ordeal. The super-elegant nad comprehensive presentation of the iPhone interface on Apple's site looked like a safe haven of perfection compared to how awful the competition's sites were.
Later on, I visited a Cingular store to ask about the iPhone, and a helpful fellow showed me the closest equivalent, the Cingular-branded large screen Windows Mobile touch screen phone. I pulled up my web site on Internet Explorer and you can imagine how pleased I was when it came up, looking pretty good. I was able to log in with the very nice keyboard and play around. But the process of scrolling was awkward. The idea of shrinking the web page to fit the screen and then letting you expand it is truly a work of genius on the part of the iPhone's inventors. The price of $419 makes me think the iPhone is competitively priced - you pay a bit more but you get a lot more in return.
So if I want a genuinely useful and usable web surfing device that will work whether I'm in WiFi hotspot or not, it seems like the iPhone reigns supreme.
RoughlyDrafted may be biased, but sometimes its conclusions hold up. I think this is one of those times.
A 200mhz ARM is bound to be more powerful than a 33mhz 68030.
Also, the tiny screen means a lot fewer pixels to fling around at any given time. A 480x320 screen has 1.5 million pixels. An PowerBook G4 has 1152x768, which is 884,736 pixels. It can run MacOS X just fine.
This means that a 400mhz PowerBook had about 5x (actually almost 6x) the pixels of an iPhone.
So if you think of it that way, it seems to me like there should be very little problem with running MacOS X on a 200mhz processor with a phone sized screen.
If you watch Steve Jobs' presentation, you will see that when they talk about using MacOS X, the slide behind him mentions several MacOS X technologies, including the very latest.
Besides, why wouldn't they use MacOS X? If RoughlyDrafted's sources are to be believed, programming under Symbian would be a huge pain, Windows Mobile would look like a defeat and PalmOS is years behind the times.
I know RoughlyDrafted's author is very pro-Apple, but I don't think he's a liar. After all, simply looking at screenshots confirms that PalmOS is way behind the times, Windows Mobile has inherited Microsoft's ugly gene, and Symbian phones don't look particularly modern, either. So really, if you look at things impartially, or try to, his analysis seems sound.
I would have liked to see him discuss RIM, since RIM's phone and OS look to me like the best on the American market today other than the iPhone. But I can sympathise somewhat because it seems pretty hard to find information about RIM's OS.
Just looking at the iPhone confirms that it uses something very similar to the Quartz transparency effects and built-in anti-aliasing in MacOS X. They could build something super complex themselves that emulated these effects, or they could just use MacOS X. Seem to me their decision would be pretty simple. They just waited until phone processors and technologies caught up to the extent that MacOS X could run.
Remember, MacOS X runs quite well a 400mhz PowerBook and an iPhone has a small fraction of its screen size. So is it likely that a 200mhz processor could give good performance on a phone? I would think it would be. And is it likely that a 10gb install of MacOS X could be cut down to phone size? Sure - alternate language fonts alone take gigabites of that, and drivers and built in applications take the bulk of the rest.
Remember, Windows Mobile isn't really Windows; it's a descendent of Windows CE, which was meant to be quite different from Windows itself. So the iPhone's adoption of MacOS X could be revolutionary, as the first phone with a no excuses, fully powered OS.
People who have used the iPhone praise its responsiveness, so that's impressive by any standard.
I grew up when the Incompatible Timesharing System was running at MIT and anyone could log on to it by just making up an account. There were no passwords or restrictions. Ordinary users could spy on other people's terminals, and all files were public. Anyone could delete anyone else's files.
But they didn't, because there was an atmosphere of mutual respect that is tragically gone from computing today.
In the late 1970s, about when I left that environment, the administration forced passwords on everyone. It was an ugly scene. RMS [Richard M Stallman, yes, the GNU guy] hated passwords and account control so much that he made his an empty string. And nobody cared about security holes. I pointed one out on a mailing list - you could send an email outside of the login process and escape into emacs and then do anything you want. I was gently flambeed for pointing it out. You don't want those evil administrators to win, do you?
Ever since then I have had an inherent bias against security and protection. Because there are now millions of bad guys out there who want to damage what people spend months putting together, I have had to change my tune and put together tight security.
After coming of age in an environment where you could get away with having no security at all, it's deeply depressing for me to face the modern word.
Face it I do.
But that doesn't mean I like it.
I hope that helps your understanding and makes my attitude seem a bit more understandable.
What a mean, ugly world computing has turned out to be today.
Isn't a script kiddie someone who launches other peoples' exploits that are discoverable against targets?
I don't like what this guy did, but it was clever and certainly not someone a script kiddie can do. Here's his explanation of his worm and how it worked. Clearly it took a lot of original effort and thought to do it.
What he did and how much time and effort he was willing to put into it shocked the heck out of me and caused me to put very strong anti-JavaScript code into my site. I didn't want to do it because I wish we could have given people the freedom to be creative in that arena. But after I saw what he did I felt I had no choice.
That being said, the reality is that he did an enormous amount of damage. He says things were back to normal at myspace within a few hours, but I remember at the time that the system was highly unstable for a few weeks after the incident was supposedly cleaned up.
From the point of view of the folks who ran myspace, what he did caused untold misery and pain for many people and i think he deserved a heavy punishment.
Not that I really think he will avoid using the Internet for social purposes no matter what the courts say. And I really don't think probation or community service seems like that heavy a punishment for someone who deliberately disrupted a service, however disliked in some quarters, that many people rely on.
Samy and people like him make it a difficult, miserable and thankless task to create services that hopefuly will do nice things for people. They make people like me waste our time trying to figure out how to restrict things, when we'd much rather produce fun features people will use and enjoy. Samy's account made me laugh, but it also made me furious that human nature is so pointlessly destructive.
I hope the sentence deters people from doing similar things.
I wonder how much he had to pay Myspace. Does anyone know?
Possibly but it looks like it might still be a slow process since Vista isn't exactly flying off the shelves right now, and component prices go down in sync with demand.
I wonder how Vista-based computers are selling.
It's interesting how little enthusiasm there is about it, even in the Windows world. I mean of course Mac users like me are not going to be terribly excited but even the reviews that acknowledge that it's nicer than what it replaces seem to think the DRM features and tighter license enforcement make it a questionable deal.
I wonder what kind of similar protections will be in Leopard. Will Steve Jobs cripple his computers in the same way Vista does? Do people want to play Blu-Ray/HD DVD discs so much that this is really necessary? I'd be tempted to sit this one out, if I were Steve.
The best copy protection system is to make the files too huge to copy. That protected DVDs pretty well until fairly recently. Nobody's going to use BitTorrent to download a 50gb file for a long time to come. I'd stick with that and not bother with any copy protection if I were a studio. But they seem to be just a shade paranoid...
That's actually a very good idea, though. It costs them next to nothing to print the ticker symbol, and if one in a million people checks it out and decides to invest, that's a big win.
Advertising on the scale of Vista, though, seems like a huge waste of money. I think everyone who's likely to buy Vista already knows what it is, and that it's available now.
Just the hardware requirements alone mean that 99% of customers will not and should not buy the upgrade. It's just not cost-effective to buy the $99-$270 upgrade, get new memory and a new video card and still be stuck with your old computer.
I notice that it still costs about $850 to buy a "Premium Ready" computer that will run Aero. One thing Vista will do is to increase average selling prices for PCs by quite a bit, since I can't see people getting excited by the features in Vista Basic.
I have never, at any point, enjoyed the "music" created by Britney Spears.
The fact that people ranging from kids to Slashdotters to more or less typical adults have enjoyed the books seems like an excellent tribute to their quality. It's very hard writing something a general audience enjoys. In particular, very few science fiction/fantasy authors have done it.
I think fans of SF/fantasy should be congratulating her on her success instead of trying to cut her down.
The general public sometimes shows surprisingly decent taste. This is one of these times.
The requirements for Vista are explained in a bunch of opaque documents on Microsoft's site. Typical consumers - not Slashdot readers - do not even realize they exist.. As a result they will not realize that the computer you're referring to is not even specced properly to run "Home Basic", let alone the Aero Glass effects they have been led to expect.
It's a bait and switch operation which I find disgusting and abhorrant. It's going to leave a dreadful taste in the mouths of consumers and will definitely decrease adoption of Vista and absolutely ruin word of mouth.
The official requirements for Home Basic might be met for that machine but even the basic run of Vista is 450mb (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread). So you can run the OS if you don't want to run any optional extras, like applications.
This might be a good time to consider MacOS X. Any machine Apple makes will run their operating system just fine, quickly and with all features enabled. And a Mac Mini or even a MacBook will be price-competitive with competing machines that can run Vista.
Call me crazy, but that's something I actually like about myspace. It gives people creative freedom to express who they are.
Most people nowadays are not writers. They are not professional photographers. They are not musicians. And yet they still want to express themselves online.
One problem with myspace, in my view, is that it doesn't offer its members help in designing profiles. People are told about third parties, but the third parties just want to make a buck, so their sites are confusing and much of the material produced is endless attempts at viral advertising. So people dump strange stuff in their profiles without understanding it, and I think that's a recipe for disaster.
But I sympthise with their desire to make their page look good, so I created a social networking site that tries to help them out. It lets you upload a photo as your background, suggests colors that might go with it, and automatically sets opacity to make the text on top of the photo readable. I put together a nice little photo library of backgrounds for people without their own photos to use. So far, for those who have tried it, it's been about 50/50 - about half the people have their own photos and about half use mine.
I think the approach of giving people freedom, but giving them some guidance as well seems like a promising idea. Time will tell how it works out when faced with the corrosive effects of the real world.
That's true. I have such a strong loathing of voice mail I didn't think of that, but even I might listen to my voice mails if they were presented as the iPhone does.
It is interesting that without Apple, Microsoft's extremely poor judgement in implementing PlaysForSure, and then worse judgement in implementing the Zune Marketplace, might have killed DRM on its own. So Apple probably did save DRM from its "friends".
I don't care that much about DRM; after all, I can always burn iTunes-purchased music to CD if I need to override the DRM for some reason. I haven't yet, so Apple's restrictions seem to work OK for me. I think artists should be paid and I'm not against paying for music.
As for the one-button mouse, I do hope that when Apple designs new PowerB... um... Macbook models, they'll add the second button. Control-click isn't a particularly natural gesture. At the same time, it's not a dealbreaker for me as it is for many people.
There's no question that Apple stands for innovation. They make mistakes, but nobody can take that away from them. So in the end I have to come down pretty hard on their side.
When I was at the Cingular store, I saw a Windows Mobile cellphone model with a large touch screen and minimal buttons. It also had a slip-out keyboard which I thought was really cool and very easy to use. If my memory serves the price was something like $419.
Pocket Internet Explorer rendered web sites very well, probably as well as the iPhone. But the screen didn't show the whole page; it only showed small segments of it at a time. I really fell in love with the iPhone feature that lets you see the whole page and then "pinch" in and out. The gestures might be harder to learn than Steve makes it look, but I susspect it will be really, really nice once learned.
I liked using the touchscreen, so I think Apple made the right decision to use it. Their product would have been even better with a keyboard, but I think Steve was obsessed with making the device as thin as possible.
Steve has mentioned that 3G is coming, relatively soon. I think it will be needed for the European version, which interestingly enough emerged on Amazon.DK yesterday. I think Steve's real problem is that Cingular's 3G coverage map is lousy. They either forgot to mention Los Angeles, or they don't have any 3G coverage there at all! (They have San Diego but not LA!) Where I live there is no 3G at all, and none likely for some time.
There may be problems coming with Cingular. The sales guy tried to discourage me from trying to pull up web sites on the phone. He said "I don't think this is going to work, we've had coverage problems here in the store." As it happens, web pages came up, just very slowly.
The cold truth is that after having very bad experiences with Windows in the past, I am disinclined to buy Windows phone products no matter how much better they are than the lamentably anemic competition. If I didn't buy the iPhone I would have probably bought the Blackberry Pearl. I don't think third party application support is a Blackberrry strength, although obviously perfect email is. The Palm UI and design don't look like they've been updated in years.
What sort of third party software are you looking for, or use frequently?
I encountered a cellphone virus while in the Philippines and that sort of turned me off of third party software, since the same mechanisms that make that possible make viruses possible too. The virus sent pornographic SMS messages that were a great embarassment to the phone's owner. Worse, it sent $300 worth of them, in a country where the average monthly income is $300! I don't know if my friend with the phone was ever able to pay the bill. She was well off by Philippine standards but that means $1,000 a month instead of $300. If I hadn't stepped in and eradicated the virus for her I don't know what her bill would have been, and in the Philippines, phone companies don't remove bogus charges like American ones would have.
I told myself then that I was very happy that my T-Mobile Sidekick ran no software that wasn't vetted by the phone's maker. So widgets, which let me do cool things without actually putting software on the phone, look like a pretty good compromise.
The author of the article points out that iPod games are $4.95 while treo games are typically $20. I don't know if this is true or not, since I have not bought any treo games. But there are probably economies of scale associated with knowing that you go to an Apple-based store instead of an individual web site. If the software is reasonably priced, it will sell much better under this model. Of course the problem is that non-Apple blessed software won't sell at all.
The iPhone is technically aimed at everyone. This means that sophisticated users like you and I are not the only users. For the iPhone to be popular, it has to be virus free. The ease with which a virus spread on Nokia phones in the Philippines was a huge cautionary story for me. I had one friend there who ran up a $300 phone bill because she had no clue how to get rid of it. Proportionate to typical incomes here, a $300 phone bill for her is like a $3,000 phone bill for you or me - a disaster. And no, unlike the telcos here in the US, the phone company there refused to write any of it off. Ouch.
The closed environment means that virus development is stopped on its tracks. Do I want a completely free development environment or a phone that's not going to spit out $300 phone bills on me?
I think for most people that's an easy choice. It's a little harder for me but if I can hook up custom widget like programs on a web page and run them through Safari, what more do I need, really? I can develop my own applications for that platform, no problem, and run them on the iPhone.
Seems to me that's a good compromise and doesn't endanger anyone's security or integrity. And we already know it can be done on the iPhone with no additional features beyond what's already demonstrated.
1 It's an exceptionally well designed phone. Many phones, even simple ones, are complex messes with cryptic or unlabelled buttons. Having a phone that's fairly simple to use but powerful is surprisingly rare.
2 It can browse the web more beautifully than any other device smaller than a laptop computer.
3 It has the best text messaging system
4 It supports Google Maps, so you can pull down driving directions
5 It has full-featured email
6 It has a camera that's fairly strong by smartphone standards (most of them have 1.3 megapixel phones, but the iPhone is 2 megapixels).
7 It supports widgets, which give us news aggregation, weather, etc. Even if installing widgets directly on the device is impossible, they are just HTML and JavaScript files, so you could link to them from a bookmark. Cookes would take care of persistent data storage problems.
7 In terms of third-party software, it should support any web-based games and diversions. I don't really like games, so I will admit having games that run on the device isn't a great priority. But I would not be surprised if there's a way to run the current iPod games on the device, or at least modify them to run on it.
If you think of the needs of most Slashdotters, the only thing missing from this list is SSH. I'm hoping Apple will support ssh; I'd be surprised if they don't, since all their competitors (T-Mobile Sidekick, RIM Blackberry, etc) have SSH applications.
If I can browse my own web site on it and make urgent corrections to it in a pinch, isn't that an invaluable feature that the competition makes a great deal more awkward? Put sideways, the iPhone display should work for at least a 80x24 screen, so assuming we have ssh, emacs on a remote computer should work just fine.
Other than a low price and open source for ideological reasons, I don't see anything this phone doesn't have that a Slashdot user would need.
Buy Photoshop Elements for $99, or (better yet) buy a digital camera and get it free with the camera.
A few years back, Photoshop Elements was redone to be identical to Photoshop except for a few helpful wizards and some missing features dealing mainly with print design.
If that's not enough, realize that Adobe has taken pity on you and will sell a version to students relatively inexpensively - you might want to look into that as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It would probably be unprotected AAC. They're pretty proud of their better codec and I think most third party music players are compatible with the unprotected version.
I'd prefer MP3 just because of the ease of interoperability with everything else.
D
Nobody's really being locked in. Burn your iTunes-purchased music to a CD and re-import it into iTunes and you have DRM-free music.
iTunes DRM was always pretty mild, and that's why it worked.
I think the real reason for Steve to speak against DRM at this time is that he doesn't want to be shoehorned into putting the same protections into MacOS X that Bill's guys had to put into Vista. Mild DRM's OK but non-optimal. Vista's DRM scheme is downright ugly and affects the whole widget, as Steve would say.
He's looking towards the time he will have to figure out a way to let us play Blu-Ray/HD DVD discs without selling out to the labels/studios.
If Steve can avoid draconian copy protection in the next version of MacOS, a lot of people are going to jump ship and switch over.
D
My reaction is that this seems like a lot of complexity for something that should be really, really simple.
../ and the like).
Why do we need to have such a complex program as a web server, anyway, when most of us don't use 1% of its features?
I'm wondering if the weekend project might actually wind up being a better web server than Apache, for the average application where there is no private information in the web document tree and therefore no need to check internal security. (You would, of course, have to check the URL for
D
But all the buzz seems to be about Windows Mobile phones like the Motorola Q and the Samsung Blackjack.
The only comparable buzz I've seen has been for the Blackberry Pearl.
I'm actually surprised how little I've heard about the new crop of Symbian phones, although I understand they are very popular in Europe. I tried a Nokia N-series and thought the web browser was just as lousy as the competition's. (Web browsing is really the killer app for me for a smartphone).
How are the Q and Blackjack doing in the marketplace?
D
The 400mhz G4 actually handled all the graphics on its own. it was a pre-Quartz system due to its inferior graphics card (I think it only had 16MB of video RAM). The newer versions of MacOS made the system reasonably fast even without the hardware acceleration.
Of course the newer machines with hardware acceleration were loads faster, but after Tiger performance actually wasn't half bad on the old systems.
D
In the case of Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian, though, I think he has good points.
However, I would have liked to see a more detailed analysis of Windows Mobile since it looks like it has gained some traction.
I saw a Windows CE phone a couple of years back that was so abysmal that it's easy for me to think of Windows for Phones as an awful idea.
But right now Windows Mobile is gaining ground fast and an analysis that talks about relative cellphone market shares has to take that into account and acknowledge Windows Mobile as a serious competitor.
Aso, he's ignored RIM/Blackberry and its intensely loyal users. With more consumer-friendly phones and more modern design, I would expect RIM to gain market share against both Windows and Palm. I'm curious as to why that has not happened to the extent I would expect. Blackberry is a much loved brand by its main market, after all. A suvrey of IT professionals rated it second in overall quality and reliability among vendors, and the #1 vendor was not a competitor.
I did a similar analysis to RoughlyDrafted some time ago and came to to a simiilar conclusion. I looked at the iPhone, Treo (Palm and Windows versions), Sidekick IV and Blackberry Pearl.
I felt the Treo looked downright old-fashioned, the Sidekick had a low-resolution display they should have improved a generation ago, and Windows Mobile had a user interface both bland and hard to read. That left the Pearl, which I really liked except for its bizarre keyboard. My conclusion was that many of the companies making phones were highly complacent and deserved a big kick.
They also had web sites that had so many pictures of spinning phones that I found myself getting seasick, and my computer almost crashed from the ordeal. The super-elegant nad comprehensive presentation of the iPhone interface on Apple's site looked like a safe haven of perfection compared to how awful the competition's sites were.
Later on, I visited a Cingular store to ask about the iPhone, and a helpful fellow showed me the closest equivalent, the Cingular-branded large screen Windows Mobile touch screen phone. I pulled up my web site on Internet Explorer and you can imagine how pleased I was when it came up, looking pretty good. I was able to log in with the very nice keyboard and play around. But the process of scrolling was awkward. The idea of shrinking the web page to fit the screen and then letting you expand it is truly a work of genius on the part of the iPhone's inventors. The price of $419 makes me think the iPhone is competitively priced - you pay a bit more but you get a lot more in return.
So if I want a genuinely useful and usable web surfing device that will work whether I'm in WiFi hotspot or not, it seems like the iPhone reigns supreme.
RoughlyDrafted may be biased, but sometimes its conclusions hold up. I think this is one of those times.
D
A fair question, so I tracked down the review I read that mentions it:
p honehands/index.php?lsrc=mwrss
http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2007/01/i
Hope that helps.
D
A 200mhz ARM is bound to be more powerful than a 33mhz 68030.
Also, the tiny screen means a lot fewer pixels to fling around at any given time. A 480x320 screen has 1.5 million pixels. An PowerBook G4 has 1152x768, which is 884,736 pixels. It can run MacOS X just fine.
This means that a 400mhz PowerBook had about 5x (actually almost 6x) the pixels of an iPhone.
So if you think of it that way, it seems to me like there should be very little problem with running MacOS X on a 200mhz processor with a phone sized screen.
D
If you watch Steve Jobs' presentation, you will see that when they talk about using MacOS X, the slide behind him mentions several MacOS X technologies, including the very latest.
Besides, why wouldn't they use MacOS X? If RoughlyDrafted's sources are to be believed, programming under Symbian would be a huge pain, Windows Mobile would look like a defeat and PalmOS is years behind the times.
I know RoughlyDrafted's author is very pro-Apple, but I don't think he's a liar. After all, simply looking at screenshots confirms that PalmOS is way behind the times, Windows Mobile has inherited Microsoft's ugly gene, and Symbian phones don't look particularly modern, either. So really, if you look at things impartially, or try to, his analysis seems sound.
I would have liked to see him discuss RIM, since RIM's phone and OS look to me like the best on the American market today other than the iPhone. But I can sympathise somewhat because it seems pretty hard to find information about RIM's OS.
Just looking at the iPhone confirms that it uses something very similar to the Quartz transparency effects and built-in anti-aliasing in MacOS X. They could build something super complex themselves that emulated these effects, or they could just use MacOS X. Seem to me their decision would be pretty simple. They just waited until phone processors and technologies caught up to the extent that MacOS X could run.
Remember, MacOS X runs quite well a 400mhz PowerBook and an iPhone has a small fraction of its screen size. So is it likely that a 200mhz processor could give good performance on a phone? I would think it would be. And is it likely that a 10gb install of MacOS X could be cut down to phone size? Sure - alternate language fonts alone take gigabites of that, and drivers and built in applications take the bulk of the rest.
Remember, Windows Mobile isn't really Windows; it's a descendent of Windows CE, which was meant to be quite different from Windows itself. So the iPhone's adoption of MacOS X could be revolutionary, as the first phone with a no excuses, fully powered OS.
People who have used the iPhone praise its responsiveness, so that's impressive by any standard.
D
A little context might be useful.
I grew up when the Incompatible Timesharing System was running at MIT and anyone could log on to it by just making up an account. There were no passwords or restrictions. Ordinary users could spy on other people's terminals, and all files were public. Anyone could delete anyone else's files.
But they didn't, because there was an atmosphere of mutual respect that is tragically gone from computing today.
In the late 1970s, about when I left that environment, the administration forced passwords on everyone. It was an ugly scene. RMS [Richard M Stallman, yes, the GNU guy] hated passwords and account control so much that he made his an empty string. And nobody cared about security holes. I pointed one out on a mailing list - you could send an email outside of the login process and escape into emacs and then do anything you want. I was gently flambeed for pointing it out. You don't want those evil administrators to win, do you?
Ever since then I have had an inherent bias against security and protection. Because there are now millions of bad guys out there who want to damage what people spend months putting together, I have had to change my tune and put together tight security.
After coming of age in an environment where you could get away with having no security at all, it's deeply depressing for me to face the modern word.
Face it I do.
But that doesn't mean I like it.
I hope that helps your understanding and makes my attitude seem a bit more understandable.
What a mean, ugly world computing has turned out to be today.
D
Constructive criticism would be appreciated, but your message makes me think you'd rather cut someone down than be helpful.
If you laughed at it, you found it entertaining, and I'm glad of that.
The people who use it like it and that's enough for me.
D
What are telling words?
That I don't want to restrict people, but I'm forced to thanks to folks like Samy and friends?
That I think someone who caused people to undergo a lot of pain and overtime deserves punishment is bad?
Have you ever been in a position where your own site is under attack?
I have been and it's not pretty. It's very painful.
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I have an idealistic streak where I wish I could give people freedom. It's a great pity people seem to love abusing it. That was what I meant.
I automatically resize all images and in the process they are re-encoded, so that part should work out fine.
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Isn't a script kiddie someone who launches other peoples' exploits that are discoverable against targets?
I don't like what this guy did, but it was clever and certainly not someone a script kiddie can do. Here's his explanation of his worm and how it worked. Clearly it took a lot of original effort and thought to do it.
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I can tell you that before I saw his account of the situation, I wanted to let anyone do anything they wanted on my fledgling social networking site. I agree, this account is required readng for anyone wanting to create a community site.
What he did and how much time and effort he was willing to put into it shocked the heck out of me and caused me to put very strong anti-JavaScript code into my site. I didn't want to do it because I wish we could have given people the freedom to be creative in that arena. But after I saw what he did I felt I had no choice.
That being said, the reality is that he did an enormous amount of damage. He says things were back to normal at myspace within a few hours, but I remember at the time that the system was highly unstable for a few weeks after the incident was supposedly cleaned up.
From the point of view of the folks who ran myspace, what he did caused untold misery and pain for many people and i think he deserved a heavy punishment.
Not that I really think he will avoid using the Internet for social purposes no matter what the courts say. And I really don't think probation or community service seems like that heavy a punishment for someone who deliberately disrupted a service, however disliked in some quarters, that many people rely on.
Samy and people like him make it a difficult, miserable and thankless task to create services that hopefuly will do nice things for people. They make people like me waste our time trying to figure out how to restrict things, when we'd much rather produce fun features people will use and enjoy. Samy's account made me laugh, but it also made me furious that human nature is so pointlessly destructive.
I hope the sentence deters people from doing similar things.
I wonder how much he had to pay Myspace. Does anyone know?
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Possibly but it looks like it might still be a slow process since Vista isn't exactly flying off the shelves right now, and component prices go down in sync with demand.
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I wonder how Vista-based computers are selling.
It's interesting how little enthusiasm there is about it, even in the Windows world. I mean of course Mac users like me are not going to be terribly excited but even the reviews that acknowledge that it's nicer than what it replaces seem to think the DRM features and tighter license enforcement make it a questionable deal.
I wonder what kind of similar protections will be in Leopard. Will Steve Jobs cripple his computers in the same way Vista does? Do people want to play Blu-Ray/HD DVD discs so much that this is really necessary? I'd be tempted to sit this one out, if I were Steve.
The best copy protection system is to make the files too huge to copy. That protected DVDs pretty well until fairly recently. Nobody's going to use BitTorrent to download a 50gb file for a long time to come. I'd stick with that and not bother with any copy protection if I were a studio. But they seem to be just a shade paranoid
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That's actually a very good idea, though. It costs them next to nothing to print the ticker symbol, and if one in a million people checks it out and decides to invest, that's a big win.
Advertising on the scale of Vista, though, seems like a huge waste of money. I think everyone who's likely to buy Vista already knows what it is, and that it's available now.
Just the hardware requirements alone mean that 99% of customers will not and should not buy the upgrade. It's just not cost-effective to buy the $99-$270 upgrade, get new memory and a new video card and still be stuck with your old computer.
I notice that it still costs about $850 to buy a "Premium Ready" computer that will run Aero. One thing Vista will do is to increase average selling prices for PCs by quite a bit, since I can't see people getting excited by the features in Vista Basic.
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i have enjoyed reading her books.
I have never, at any point, enjoyed the "music" created by Britney Spears.
The fact that people ranging from kids to Slashdotters to more or less typical adults have enjoyed the books seems like an excellent tribute to their quality. It's very hard writing something a general audience enjoys. In particular, very few science fiction/fantasy authors have done it.
I think fans of SF/fantasy should be congratulating her on her success instead of trying to cut her down.
The general public sometimes shows surprisingly decent taste. This is one of these times.
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This was something I was afraid would happen.
The requirements for Vista are explained in a bunch of opaque documents on Microsoft's site. Typical consumers - not Slashdot readers - do not even realize they exist.. As a result they will not realize that the computer you're referring to is not even specced properly to run "Home Basic", let alone the Aero Glass effects they have been led to expect.
It's a bait and switch operation which I find disgusting and abhorrant. It's going to leave a dreadful taste in the mouths of consumers and will definitely decrease adoption of Vista and absolutely ruin word of mouth.
The official requirements for Home Basic might be met for that machine but even the basic run of Vista is 450mb (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread). So you can run the OS if you don't want to run any optional extras, like applications.
This might be a good time to consider MacOS X. Any machine Apple makes will run their operating system just fine, quickly and with all features enabled. And a Mac Mini or even a MacBook will be price-competitive with competing machines that can run Vista.
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Call me crazy, but that's something I actually like about myspace. It gives people creative freedom to express who they are.
Most people nowadays are not writers. They are not professional photographers. They are not musicians. And yet they still want to express themselves online.
One problem with myspace, in my view, is that it doesn't offer its members help in designing profiles. People are told about third parties, but the third parties just want to make a buck, so their sites are confusing and much of the material produced is endless attempts at viral advertising. So people dump strange stuff in their profiles without understanding it, and I think that's a recipe for disaster.
But I sympthise with their desire to make their page look good, so I created a social networking site that tries to help them out. It lets you upload a photo as your background, suggests colors that might go with it, and automatically sets opacity to make the text on top of the photo readable. I put together a nice little photo library of backgrounds for people without their own photos to use. So far, for those who have tried it, it's been about 50/50 - about half the people have their own photos and about half use mine.
I think the approach of giving people freedom, but giving them some guidance as well seems like a promising idea. Time will tell how it works out when faced with the corrosive effects of the real world.
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That's true. I have such a strong loathing of voice mail I didn't think of that, but even I might listen to my voice mails if they were presented as the iPhone does.
... Macbook models, they'll add the second button. Control-click isn't a particularly natural gesture. At the same time, it's not a dealbreaker for me as it is for many people.
It is interesting that without Apple, Microsoft's extremely poor judgement in implementing PlaysForSure, and then worse judgement in implementing the Zune Marketplace, might have killed DRM on its own. So Apple probably did save DRM from its "friends".
I don't care that much about DRM; after all, I can always burn iTunes-purchased music to CD if I need to override the DRM for some reason. I haven't yet, so Apple's restrictions seem to work OK for me. I think artists should be paid and I'm not against paying for music.
As for the one-button mouse, I do hope that when Apple designs new PowerB... um
There's no question that Apple stands for innovation. They make mistakes, but nobody can take that away from them. So in the end I have to come down pretty hard on their side.
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When I was at the Cingular store, I saw a Windows Mobile cellphone model with a large touch screen and minimal buttons. It also had a slip-out keyboard which I thought was really cool and very easy to use. If my memory serves the price was something like $419.
Pocket Internet Explorer rendered web sites very well, probably as well as the iPhone. But the screen didn't show the whole page; it only showed small segments of it at a time. I really fell in love with the iPhone feature that lets you see the whole page and then "pinch" in and out. The gestures might be harder to learn than Steve makes it look, but I susspect it will be really, really nice once learned.
I liked using the touchscreen, so I think Apple made the right decision to use it. Their product would have been even better with a keyboard, but I think Steve was obsessed with making the device as thin as possible.
Steve has mentioned that 3G is coming, relatively soon. I think it will be needed for the European version, which interestingly enough emerged on Amazon.DK yesterday. I think Steve's real problem is that Cingular's 3G coverage map is lousy. They either forgot to mention Los Angeles, or they don't have any 3G coverage there at all! (They have San Diego but not LA!) Where I live there is no 3G at all, and none likely for some time.
There may be problems coming with Cingular. The sales guy tried to discourage me from trying to pull up web sites on the phone. He said "I don't think this is going to work, we've had coverage problems here in the store." As it happens, web pages came up, just very slowly.
The cold truth is that after having very bad experiences with Windows in the past, I am disinclined to buy Windows phone products no matter how much better they are than the lamentably anemic competition. If I didn't buy the iPhone I would have probably bought the Blackberry Pearl. I don't think third party application support is a Blackberrry strength, although obviously perfect email is. The Palm UI and design don't look like they've been updated in years.
What sort of third party software are you looking for, or use frequently?
I encountered a cellphone virus while in the Philippines and that sort of turned me off of third party software, since the same mechanisms that make that possible make viruses possible too. The virus sent pornographic SMS messages that were a great embarassment to the phone's owner. Worse, it sent $300 worth of them, in a country where the average monthly income is $300! I don't know if my friend with the phone was ever able to pay the bill. She was well off by Philippine standards but that means $1,000 a month instead of $300. If I hadn't stepped in and eradicated the virus for her I don't know what her bill would have been, and in the Philippines, phone companies don't remove bogus charges like American ones would have.
I told myself then that I was very happy that my T-Mobile Sidekick ran no software that wasn't vetted by the phone's maker. So widgets, which let me do cool things without actually putting software on the phone, look like a pretty good compromise.
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The author of the article points out that iPod games are $4.95 while treo games are typically $20. I don't know if this is true or not, since I have not bought any treo games. But there are probably economies of scale associated with knowing that you go to an Apple-based store instead of an individual web site. If the software is reasonably priced, it will sell much better under this model. Of course the problem is that non-Apple blessed software won't sell at all.
The iPhone is technically aimed at everyone. This means that sophisticated users like you and I are not the only users. For the iPhone to be popular, it has to be virus free. The ease with which a virus spread on Nokia phones in the Philippines was a huge cautionary story for me. I had one friend there who ran up a $300 phone bill because she had no clue how to get rid of it. Proportionate to typical incomes here, a $300 phone bill for her is like a $3,000 phone bill for you or me - a disaster. And no, unlike the telcos here in the US, the phone company there refused to write any of it off. Ouch.
The closed environment means that virus development is stopped on its tracks. Do I want a completely free development environment or a phone that's not going to spit out $300 phone bills on me?
I think for most people that's an easy choice. It's a little harder for me but if I can hook up custom widget like programs on a web page and run them through Safari, what more do I need, really? I can develop my own applications for that platform, no problem, and run them on the iPhone.
Seems to me that's a good compromise and doesn't endanger anyone's security or integrity. And we already know it can be done on the iPhone with no additional features beyond what's already demonstrated.
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How much of a feature set do you really need?
1 It's an exceptionally well designed phone. Many phones, even simple ones, are complex messes with cryptic or unlabelled buttons. Having a phone that's fairly simple to use but powerful is surprisingly rare.
2 It can browse the web more beautifully than any other device smaller than a laptop computer.
3 It has the best text messaging system
4 It supports Google Maps, so you can pull down driving directions
5 It has full-featured email
6 It has a camera that's fairly strong by smartphone standards (most of them have 1.3 megapixel phones, but the iPhone is 2 megapixels).
7 It supports widgets, which give us news aggregation, weather, etc. Even if installing widgets directly on the device is impossible, they are just HTML and JavaScript files, so you could link to them from a bookmark. Cookes would take care of persistent data storage problems.
7 In terms of third-party software, it should support any web-based games and diversions. I don't really like games, so I will admit having games that run on the device isn't a great priority. But I would not be surprised if there's a way to run the current iPod games on the device, or at least modify them to run on it.
If you think of the needs of most Slashdotters, the only thing missing from this list is SSH. I'm hoping Apple will support ssh; I'd be surprised if they don't, since all their competitors (T-Mobile Sidekick, RIM Blackberry, etc) have SSH applications.
If I can browse my own web site on it and make urgent corrections to it in a pinch, isn't that an invaluable feature that the competition makes a great deal more awkward? Put sideways, the iPhone display should work for at least a 80x24 screen, so assuming we have ssh, emacs on a remote computer should work just fine.
Other than a low price and open source for ideological reasons, I don't see anything this phone doesn't have that a Slashdot user would need.
Where am I wrong?
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Buy Photoshop Elements for $99, or (better yet) buy a digital camera and get it free with the camera.
A few years back, Photoshop Elements was redone to be identical to Photoshop except for a few helpful wizards and some missing features dealing mainly with print design.
If that's not enough, realize that Adobe has taken pity on you and will sell a version to students relatively inexpensively - you might want to look into that as well.
Hope that helps.
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