How would you like if it I just randomly decided you had a slashdot addiction, and next time you went to make a post on Slashdot, I just came and punched you in the face -- as a friend. You know, on account of how much I care about you?
My 2 cents: Game "Addiction" isn't typically the cause of people's problems in life, but rather a symptom of deeper problems elsewhere. People simply aren't checking out from life and opting for a game world instead when they're happy with their real life. Video games offer a way out for people who are otherwise *already* deeply unhappy. There are certainly studies linking video game "addiction" to depression and unhappiness, I just happen to think that the causal relationship runs the other way around -- depression leads to video game addiction and not vice versa. If you think about it, really, far better they choose escapism than, say, suicide as a manifestation of their unhappiness.
But, ultimately, that's just my 2 cents. My opinion from observation and past experience -- and nothing more. I don't think video games are ever really to blame for people's problems. That doesn't simply mean that I think that *everyone* who becomes addicted to video games has a horrible life -- just that I think, if not video games, we'd see some other sign that that the person in question had deeper problems. Many clinically depressed people, from the outsiders perspective, seem to have great and happy lives and people often have trouble understanding why they might be depressed. When you see someone like that spending all their time playing video games and suffering social/economic consequences as a result, it's very easy to blame the games as they appear to have destroyed an otherwise idealic life -- but this isn't necessarily the case, at least not in my opinion.
So, at any rate, my completely non-medical advice is to treat video game addiction as a symptom of some deeper problem rather than as a cause. Since I don't really know your friend or anything about his situations, that's about the extent of what I can suggest.
You can point your non-iphone browser there to get a sense of how its done.
They've done a splendid job of letting people stream video directly from their site to the iphone simply by having every video on their site converted to Iphone-compatible quicktime (mp4) format. The video quality is even quite a step up from what youtube offers on the iphone.
Not actually true, they did this to the very first app that came out (it was just a simple app for fetching character info off the armory) and it was free -- that was some time ago. I remember the app's author posted that he was asked by Blizzard to remove the app (not sure if they actually used a C&D letter) and he complied.
I don't want to get into some sort of long rant, but everything about Fringe is bad and it insults my intelligence constantly when I try to watch it. The ideas make no sense. There isn't even a hint of realism to draw you into the story. The dialog was all written by aliens from some planet where they are completely unfamiliar with how actual human interaction occurs. The plot twists are entirely predictable *or* completely confusing because they weren't foreshadowed in any manner and actually make no sense.
There's just not a single redeeming quality to Fringe. It makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit just to think about it. The worst part about Fringe is that you can just tell it thinks its good. It's a show that doesn't know how bad it is . . .
Dollhouse and Terminator are a bit silly, but I can still watch them and be entertained -- and that's all that really matters.
How exactly do you pay $100 for this support? Do you actually give out your credit card number on a system you *know* with certainty is infected with all manner of malware?
That just seems highly irresponsible -- encouraging/allowing customers to do so seems even worse.
You're right. The Anti-DRM camp is indeed not offering a solution, per se, to the companies that employ it.
However, they are making an hell of a good case the the problems posed by DRM are far worse than the problems they are trying to solve -- and that they are ineffective at solving those problems anyways.
The majority of piracy goes on with or without DRM, every DRM system ever has been beaten almost immediately -- even the ones that go to slimy legnths (like installing rootkits) to avoid this.
So we have a technology that pisses consumers off, costs lots of money to implement, and *does not do what it's intended to do*.
And let's be realistic about the profit loss from piracy -- it's probably less than what companies spend on DRM. That's not to say there's not a lot of piracy -- just that very few pirates would actually be bothered to *pay* for your game even if they had no other way of getting it. Many are poor college students, many are just downloading random crap to try it out, many just have the "I'm not paying 50 bucks for a game no matter what" mentality.
Sure I can see how it would bother someone in the industry to see those types of people flout the rules -- but if you put an actual dollar number on it (not $50 multiplied by every copy pirated -- but an ACTUAL dollar number), is it really that high? Probably not. In fact, there's a strong argument to be made that *many* types of piracy actually increase sales by way of a sort of "try before you buy" and "word of mouth" means.
Where, honestly, is the motivation, other than sheer blind ignorance, for them to continue to use it? Saying they hate piracy more than they hate DRM is like saying it's perfectly logical to shoot yourself in the foot with a shotgun to cure your athletes foot. I'm not going to tell you piracy doesn't suck, but the cure is most definitely worse than the disease when it comes to DRM.
The prosecutor in this instance absolutely should have used some discretion in deciding how or whether to apply the law to these kids. But that being said, children should in no way be exempted from the law as a matter of statute.
If the law were changed to give underage offenders a specific exemption from prosecution, what would be to stop children from exploiting themselves? Little Suzy wants an X-box, so she takes some pictures of her own x-box and starts up a website charging for access. You think children wouldn't exploit themselves -- especially with encouragement from greedy parents -- if the law would allow it? They absolutely would. Not to mention the fact that it would allow abusive parents to hide behind the "but my child took all the pictures by him/herself" defense.
The law is not wrong, the prosecutor simply needed to exercise some discretion in this particular instance.
People have been asking this for decades though, the reason no one's done it isn't because no one's though of it -- just technical limitations.
It's one thing to motivate a team of people -- to challenge them -- to do something no ones done before by pushing current technology to the limit, but make no mistake the limitation is in the technology not in people's lack of vision.
If you could come up with a type of memory as fast as ram that maintained state with no power to it, then overnight we'd have instantly booting computers. Until then, we're stuck with the limitation of "how fast can your hard drive spin and how much data can it load?"
A new, faster File System is a great way to speed things up, but it's still working within the same limitations.
So in order to be a "visionary", I merely have to decide what consumers might want (not that hard being one yourself), and then ask people smarter than yourself to make it happen with no actual technical insight on how to make it happen yourself?
Well if you'll recall someone created a driver to let Creative products work properly on Vista and creative threw a fit about it. It was pretty clear they expected their end of product life to coincide with your upgrade to vista. By not letting your old products work with your new operating system, you'd go out and buy *new* stuff made by Creative.
And apparently Nvdias poor drivers were the reason for *most* Vista crashes. Letting Nvidia put out subpar drivers destroyed Vista's reputation for stability (it's not bad at all, I'm running it right now).
I'm sure Microsoft can strong arm the hardware companies into playing nice now that they recognize that its in their financial best interest to do so -- and I'm sure after Vista they've figured that out.
Find out what ISP's each lawmaker responsible for this bill is using (by gathering email addresses or whatnot) and then contact those ISPs and inform them of the gross copyright violations said lawmakers are guilty of. Let's see how long a law like this lasts when *they* suddenly find themselves disconnected without any means of appeal.
. . . someone could find a way to get rid of its horrible "zomg hackers are after you, give us some monies" pop-up that comes up at 10:30 every tonight and alt-tabs me out of anything else I might be doing. I realize the free version is free, and apparently that pop-up ad justifies, but *must* it also alt-tab me out of games? That's pretty obnoxious.
I can stream music just fine over EDGE on my iphone, who cares if the 3g in a particular area is good or not? 3g is overkill for all but the highest quality streams.
Also, my battery life while streaming is more along the lines of 5-6 hours. Now this is a big hit to my normal musical battery life, I'll admit. The iphone can play mp3's continuously for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours (though I think they advertise it as 12, all the battery life tests confirm that it goes 20-24).
The iphone simply has a bigger battery than most music players so it can take the hit and still offer *almost* enough battery life while streaming to get through the work day. If you mix it up, and go half and half, it works just fine.
Apple has more power in the media marketplace than Microsoft by way of iTunes and they have consistently weilded that power in favor of DRM. Itunes success is the only thing that stands between DRM and Death. Period. If you don't believe that, you're crazy. Apple is, in a nutshell, the reason DRM won't die. They've shown that consumers, at least certain consumers, will accept it.
Apple has, and continues to be, the largest supporter of DRM out there. While everyone else has abandoned it in droves, they have embraced it and continue to do so. DRM would already be dead if not for Apple. Steve Jobs may claim not to like it, but anyone who's paid any attention recognized that claim immediately as mere lip service. Go ahead and mod me down for speaking the truth, you know you want to. My Karma can take it . . .
I made fairly reasonable assumptions that apparently quite a few other people have made, thus the need to have a diagram like that and publicize it. Let me break it down for you:
There's a speaker on one end. To most people, that's a clear indicator that you hold that part to your ear. That means your mouth is next to the slit at the opposite end of the phone. Meaning that another perfectly reasonable assumption is that that slit would be the microphone. Having the microphone and the speaker right next to each other is completely non-intuitive but apparently is the product having, according to you, two different speakers, both mono, one for phone calls only.
Fine. Whatever. You can act like those were stupid assumptions but they seem to be on VERY solid logical footing to me.
What is not rational, however, is your ability to take *personal* offense that I would dare suggest anything which might *potentially* contradict your notion that Apple is perfect in every conceivable way and that the original article, as partial proof of that, must be defended against all "attacks".
And just FYI, a significant portion of iPhone owners are not under contract. The contract is ridiculously over-priced and many people bought their phones second-hand off ebay by people who were under contract but transferred their contract over to their new phone OR simply paid the ETF in order to use the cheaper 20 dollar a month data-only prepaid option.
A quick Google search shows that Squaretrade does not service unlocked phones, unless they are "officially" unlocked -- this may well be because they, for the first year, expect to hand the problem off to Applecare. Many warranty companies will do that: Take your phone, immediately give you a replacement, send your phone to the manufacturer, then use your phone, once serviced or replaced, as a replacement phone for the next guy to have a problem. I don't know if this is what Squaretrade does or not, but it seems probable to me.
So while they will cover accidental damage to your phone out of their pocket, I expect they want your phone to be covered by Apple's warranty for any non-accidental damage they cover. Whether or not they would have serviced my phone still seems questionable to me. In my experience, warranty companies will use any excuse to avoid it.
At any rate, the point of my post was simply that we shouldn't be so quick to accept one study which is actually an EXPECTED PROJECTION of the future to be gospel. It's entirely possible that the iPhone isn't any more reliable, hardware wise, than any other phone. It may well be the case that it is, time will tell.
Well, I'm fine with it. Your gripes don't seem to be performance related, at least the specific ones, and those are all things you can change if you don't like them. I'm not gonna shill for Vista here, but it's tolerable. I have no major gripes. It runs stable (for me anyways) and performance seems fine. I rarely find myself having to accept/deny actions, and that entire safety feature can be turned off if it bugs you.
As for the new office UI, I could do without that myself -- but that's not *exactly* a vista issue.
Has anyone noticed that if you look at the sun logo like one of those "magic eye" things it turns into a swastika? I've always felt that was a poor marketing decision. It's also very similar to the Columbia logo
I mean, most of the complaints about Vista focused on stability, and we later found out those were due to bad Nvidia drivers. I've never had much to complain about regarding Vista -- though I didn't start using it until long after the bad device driver debacle had ended.
Does it? I thought there was something wrong with my phone from a functional perspective -- and it merely turns out the problem is from a design perspective (why on earth would the speaker and the microphone be on the same end and right next to each other?)
Regardless, I had a problem and I did NOT seek service. I did not take it to the Apple Store. I knew it would have been a waste of time. How many others have problems but do not seek service because they don't pay $70 a month for the iphone plan and can't get it?
I didn't say it was the opposite of everything they stand for, I said it's the opposite of everything they "claim" to stand for. They obviously don't go around advertising the fact that they want to stick their hand down your pocket and keep it there and use any excuse possible to come back up with wad of your cash.
But I think we can agree that iTunes is really bad? If for no other reason that it simply refuses to playback files in formats that are industry standard on the OFF CHANCE by thusly inconveniencing you in that manner you might just say "screw it" and download whatever it is off itunes and fork over some extra cash in the process. "Oh, you paid money for that FLAC no DRM download? That's nice. We have our own lossless codec, why don't you buy it a second time from us?"
Well clearly, based on the fact that I was modded down, People don't want to have an honest an open discussion on this subject. A few fanboys would moderator privileges would rather play the role of the censor -- but I honestly know very few people who would disagree with my position on iTunes being a downright awful, abomination of a piece of software. It's really one of the most embarrassing software products that anyone, anywhere is still actively developing.
But of course, you want me to write a 10 page thesis on the subject or my claims are invalid? You want a point by point feature analysis and cpu/ram/disk space usage charts and graphs? Honestly? You think that's a necessary burden of proof? Becuase frankly, if you're the one defending iTunes I think you're the one making the "extraordinary claim" in need of extraordinary proof. Nevertheless, I'll take the bait. I already listed many of the features iTunes was lacking in my original post, I'll give you a few more:
1) Comprehensive Codec Conversion. Every other mp3 player sync software out there can convert between all the standard formats. I bought a creative Zen that came with a junky little piece of software that was maybe half a megabyte with almost no UI (just drag and drop and conversion began automatically). Even that piece of software, which someone spent all of 5 minutes on, could convert DivX to a WMV file that the player was capable of playing. Itunes can basically convert one resolution of quicktime to another -- slowly. It has limited support for a few other codecs, like mpeg -- but basically support for NONE of the major codecs or containers that media is actually distributed on in the internet.
When it comes to watching videos on your iphone/ipod -- you have two options: Buy it from itunes, or buy a third party piece of software to do the conversion for you. Ridiculous? I think so.
2) Codec Support. Hi, I'm FLAC, why won't you play nice with me?
Instead of the very basic features that every other competing piece of software supports and people DEPEND on, iTunes gives you crap you'll never use like Genius playlists and some funky visualizer. Thanks Apple, that's great bloat.
Now lets talk about size. My itunes install takes up 82 megabytes. It runs 4 separate background processes. Winamp has one background process, which is easy to disable. Itunes, not so much. I haven't even updated to the latest version Itunes which adds the genius playlists and all that other bloat, and yet my winamp install is a mere 25 megabytes. Winamp will play any video file I throw at it, Itunes will play any quicktime file I throw at it. Winamp will play any audio file I throw at it, itunes will play any mp3 I throw at it. I don't even use Winamp as a video player, its not good enough -- but its head and shoulders above iTunes.
Itune's UI is sluggish, thanks to my large library of files. There's a noticeable delay on every action. Winamp does not do this. I could go on and on and pointing out iTunes many flaws, but its pointless. It's not a fair fight. Itunes is awful.
No, you were right. Which speaker is left and which is right depends on how you're holding the phone. But thanks for the info, I always assumed the microphone was the slit at the top -- which the diagram says is the "receiver". Though I find that explanation confusing, I'm satisfied that you're correct.
While that's interesting information (and I appreciate it), it doesn't really change my original point that many iPhone owners with minor issues can't really do anything about them so they would be under-reported.
If you don't have an AT&T contract, you cannot get your iphone serviced. With that in mind, I'm sure many minor issues aren't sent in for repair and people simply learn to live with them.
For instance, my iPhone has, ever since I got it, had one dead speaker (the left one). But because I've been using prepaid sim card (AT&T) and I used a jail breaking program to activate my phone, Apple won't do anything for me about it. So, as far as they are concerned, my phone is working great. It's not a huge deal so I don't worry about it.
They don't specifically say you must have an AT&T contract to get warranty service, but it's more or less required via the other terms. They wont' service your phone unless its activated ("How can we see if it's working or not?). They won't service phones that aren't activated legitimately (at least not if they know about it). You MUST sign up for a contract to activate your phone (not actually true with the 3g, it'll apparently activate on a prepaid sim).
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like horrible advice.
How would you like if it I just randomly decided you had a slashdot addiction, and next time you went to make a post on Slashdot, I just came and punched you in the face -- as a friend. You know, on account of how much I care about you?
My 2 cents: Game "Addiction" isn't typically the cause of people's problems in life, but rather a symptom of deeper problems elsewhere. People simply aren't checking out from life and opting for a game world instead when they're happy with their real life. Video games offer a way out for people who are otherwise *already* deeply unhappy. There are certainly studies linking video game "addiction" to depression and unhappiness, I just happen to think that the causal relationship runs the other way around -- depression leads to video game addiction and not vice versa. If you think about it, really, far better they choose escapism than, say, suicide as a manifestation of their unhappiness.
But, ultimately, that's just my 2 cents. My opinion from observation and past experience -- and nothing more. I don't think video games are ever really to blame for people's problems. That doesn't simply mean that I think that *everyone* who becomes addicted to video games has a horrible life -- just that I think, if not video games, we'd see some other sign that that the person in question had deeper problems. Many clinically depressed people, from the outsiders perspective, seem to have great and happy lives and people often have trouble understanding why they might be depressed. When you see someone like that spending all their time playing video games and suffering social/economic consequences as a result, it's very easy to blame the games as they appear to have destroyed an otherwise idealic life -- but this isn't necessarily the case, at least not in my opinion.
So, at any rate, my completely non-medical advice is to treat video game addiction as a symptom of some deeper problem rather than as a cause. Since I don't really know your friend or anything about his situations, that's about the extent of what I can suggest.
You can point your non-iphone browser there to get a sense of how its done.
They've done a splendid job of letting people stream video directly from their site to the iphone simply by having every video on their site converted to Iphone-compatible quicktime (mp4) format. The video quality is even quite a step up from what youtube offers on the iphone.
Not actually true, they did this to the very first app that came out (it was just a simple app for fetching character info off the armory) and it was free -- that was some time ago. I remember the app's author posted that he was asked by Blizzard to remove the app (not sure if they actually used a C&D letter) and he complied.
I don't want to get into some sort of long rant, but everything about Fringe is bad and it insults my intelligence constantly when I try to watch it. The ideas make no sense. There isn't even a hint of realism to draw you into the story. The dialog was all written by aliens from some planet where they are completely unfamiliar with how actual human interaction occurs. The plot twists are entirely predictable *or* completely confusing because they weren't foreshadowed in any manner and actually make no sense.
There's just not a single redeeming quality to Fringe. It makes me vomit in my mouth a little bit just to think about it. The worst part about Fringe is that you can just tell it thinks its good. It's a show that doesn't know how bad it is . . .
Dollhouse and Terminator are a bit silly, but I can still watch them and be entertained -- and that's all that really matters.
How exactly do you pay $100 for this support? Do you actually give out your credit card number on a system you *know* with certainty is infected with all manner of malware?
That just seems highly irresponsible -- encouraging/allowing customers to do so seems even worse.
You're right. The Anti-DRM camp is indeed not offering a solution, per se, to the companies that employ it.
However, they are making an hell of a good case the the problems posed by DRM are far worse than the problems they are trying to solve -- and that they are ineffective at solving those problems anyways.
The majority of piracy goes on with or without DRM, every DRM system ever has been beaten almost immediately -- even the ones that go to slimy legnths (like installing rootkits) to avoid this.
So we have a technology that pisses consumers off, costs lots of money to implement, and *does not do what it's intended to do*.
And let's be realistic about the profit loss from piracy -- it's probably less than what companies spend on DRM. That's not to say there's not a lot of piracy -- just that very few pirates would actually be bothered to *pay* for your game even if they had no other way of getting it. Many are poor college students, many are just downloading random crap to try it out, many just have the "I'm not paying 50 bucks for a game no matter what" mentality.
Sure I can see how it would bother someone in the industry to see those types of people flout the rules -- but if you put an actual dollar number on it (not $50 multiplied by every copy pirated -- but an ACTUAL dollar number), is it really that high? Probably not. In fact, there's a strong argument to be made that *many* types of piracy actually increase sales by way of a sort of "try before you buy" and "word of mouth" means.
Where, honestly, is the motivation, other than sheer blind ignorance, for them to continue to use it? Saying they hate piracy more than they hate DRM is like saying it's perfectly logical to shoot yourself in the foot with a shotgun to cure your athletes foot. I'm not going to tell you piracy doesn't suck, but the cure is most definitely worse than the disease when it comes to DRM.
The prosecutor in this instance absolutely should have used some discretion in deciding how or whether to apply the law to these kids. But that being said, children should in no way be exempted from the law as a matter of statute.
If the law were changed to give underage offenders a specific exemption from prosecution, what would be to stop children from exploiting themselves? Little Suzy wants an X-box, so she takes some pictures of her own x-box and starts up a website charging for access. You think children wouldn't exploit themselves -- especially with encouragement from greedy parents -- if the law would allow it? They absolutely would. Not to mention the fact that it would allow abusive parents to hide behind the "but my child took all the pictures by him/herself" defense.
The law is not wrong, the prosecutor simply needed to exercise some discretion in this particular instance.
People have been asking this for decades though, the reason no one's done it isn't because no one's though of it -- just technical limitations.
It's one thing to motivate a team of people -- to challenge them -- to do something no ones done before by pushing current technology to the limit, but make no mistake the limitation is in the technology not in people's lack of vision.
If you could come up with a type of memory as fast as ram that maintained state with no power to it, then overnight we'd have instantly booting computers. Until then, we're stuck with the limitation of "how fast can your hard drive spin and how much data can it load?"
A new, faster File System is a great way to speed things up, but it's still working within the same limitations.
So in order to be a "visionary", I merely have to decide what consumers might want (not that hard being one yourself), and then ask people smarter than yourself to make it happen with no actual technical insight on how to make it happen yourself?
Well if you'll recall someone created a driver to let Creative products work properly on Vista and creative threw a fit about it. It was pretty clear they expected their end of product life to coincide with your upgrade to vista. By not letting your old products work with your new operating system, you'd go out and buy *new* stuff made by Creative.
And apparently Nvdias poor drivers were the reason for *most* Vista crashes. Letting Nvidia put out subpar drivers destroyed Vista's reputation for stability (it's not bad at all, I'm running it right now).
I'm sure Microsoft can strong arm the hardware companies into playing nice now that they recognize that its in their financial best interest to do so -- and I'm sure after Vista they've figured that out.
Find out what ISP's each lawmaker responsible for this bill is using (by gathering email addresses or whatnot) and then contact those ISPs and inform them of the gross copyright violations said lawmakers are guilty of. Let's see how long a law like this lasts when *they* suddenly find themselves disconnected without any means of appeal.
. . . someone could find a way to get rid of its horrible "zomg hackers are after you, give us some monies" pop-up that comes up at 10:30 every tonight and alt-tabs me out of anything else I might be doing. I realize the free version is free, and apparently that pop-up ad justifies, but *must* it also alt-tab me out of games? That's pretty obnoxious.
I can stream music just fine over EDGE on my iphone, who cares if the 3g in a particular area is good or not? 3g is overkill for all but the highest quality streams.
Also, my battery life while streaming is more along the lines of 5-6 hours. Now this is a big hit to my normal musical battery life, I'll admit. The iphone can play mp3's continuously for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours (though I think they advertise it as 12, all the battery life tests confirm that it goes 20-24).
The iphone simply has a bigger battery than most music players so it can take the hit and still offer *almost* enough battery life while streaming to get through the work day. If you mix it up, and go half and half, it works just fine.
Apple has more power in the media marketplace than Microsoft by way of iTunes and they have consistently weilded that power in favor of DRM. Itunes success is the only thing that stands between DRM and Death. Period. If you don't believe that, you're crazy. Apple is, in a nutshell, the reason DRM won't die. They've shown that consumers, at least certain consumers, will accept it.
Apple has, and continues to be, the largest supporter of DRM out there. While everyone else has abandoned it in droves, they have embraced it and continue to do so. DRM would already be dead if not for Apple. Steve Jobs may claim not to like it, but anyone who's paid any attention recognized that claim immediately as mere lip service. Go ahead and mod me down for speaking the truth, you know you want to. My Karma can take it . . .
I made fairly reasonable assumptions that apparently quite a few other people have made, thus the need to have a diagram like that and publicize it. Let me break it down for you:
There's a speaker on one end. To most people, that's a clear indicator that you hold that part to your ear. That means your mouth is next to the slit at the opposite end of the phone. Meaning that another perfectly reasonable assumption is that that slit would be the microphone. Having the microphone and the speaker right next to each other is completely non-intuitive but apparently is the product having, according to you, two different speakers, both mono, one for phone calls only.
Fine. Whatever. You can act like those were stupid assumptions but they seem to be on VERY solid logical footing to me.
What is not rational, however, is your ability to take *personal* offense that I would dare suggest anything which might *potentially* contradict your notion that Apple is perfect in every conceivable way and that the original article, as partial proof of that, must be defended against all "attacks".
And just FYI, a significant portion of iPhone owners are not under contract. The contract is ridiculously over-priced and many people bought their phones second-hand off ebay by people who were under contract but transferred their contract over to their new phone OR simply paid the ETF in order to use the cheaper 20 dollar a month data-only prepaid option.
A quick Google search shows that Squaretrade does not service unlocked phones, unless they are "officially" unlocked -- this may well be because they, for the first year, expect to hand the problem off to Applecare. Many warranty companies will do that: Take your phone, immediately give you a replacement, send your phone to the manufacturer, then use your phone, once serviced or replaced, as a replacement phone for the next guy to have a problem. I don't know if this is what Squaretrade does or not, but it seems probable to me.
So while they will cover accidental damage to your phone out of their pocket, I expect they want your phone to be covered by Apple's warranty for any non-accidental damage they cover. Whether or not they would have serviced my phone still seems questionable to me. In my experience, warranty companies will use any excuse to avoid it.
At any rate, the point of my post was simply that we shouldn't be so quick to accept one study which is actually an EXPECTED PROJECTION of the future to be gospel. It's entirely possible that the iPhone isn't any more reliable, hardware wise, than any other phone. It may well be the case that it is, time will tell.
Well, I'm fine with it. Your gripes don't seem to be performance related, at least the specific ones, and those are all things you can change if you don't like them. I'm not gonna shill for Vista here, but it's tolerable. I have no major gripes. It runs stable (for me anyways) and performance seems fine. I rarely find myself having to accept/deny actions, and that entire safety feature can be turned off if it bugs you.
As for the new office UI, I could do without that myself -- but that's not *exactly* a vista issue.
Has anyone noticed that if you look at the sun logo like one of those "magic eye" things it turns into a swastika? I've always felt that was a poor marketing decision. It's also very similar to the Columbia logo
I mean, most of the complaints about Vista focused on stability, and we later found out those were due to bad Nvidia drivers. I've never had much to complain about regarding Vista -- though I didn't start using it until long after the bad device driver debacle had ended.
Does it? I thought there was something wrong with my phone from a functional perspective -- and it merely turns out the problem is from a design perspective (why on earth would the speaker and the microphone be on the same end and right next to each other?)
Regardless, I had a problem and I did NOT seek service. I did not take it to the Apple Store. I knew it would have been a waste of time. How many others have problems but do not seek service because they don't pay $70 a month for the iphone plan and can't get it?
I didn't say it was the opposite of everything they stand for, I said it's the opposite of everything they "claim" to stand for. They obviously don't go around advertising the fact that they want to stick their hand down your pocket and keep it there and use any excuse possible to come back up with wad of your cash.
But I think we can agree that iTunes is really bad? If for no other reason that it simply refuses to playback files in formats that are industry standard on the OFF CHANCE by thusly inconveniencing you in that manner you might just say "screw it" and download whatever it is off itunes and fork over some extra cash in the process. "Oh, you paid money for that FLAC no DRM download? That's nice. We have our own lossless codec, why don't you buy it a second time from us?"
Well clearly, based on the fact that I was modded down, People don't want to have an honest an open discussion on this subject. A few fanboys would moderator privileges would rather play the role of the censor -- but I honestly know very few people who would disagree with my position on iTunes being a downright awful, abomination of a piece of software. It's really one of the most embarrassing software products that anyone, anywhere is still actively developing.
But of course, you want me to write a 10 page thesis on the subject or my claims are invalid? You want a point by point feature analysis and cpu/ram/disk space usage charts and graphs? Honestly? You think that's a necessary burden of proof? Becuase frankly, if you're the one defending iTunes I think you're the one making the "extraordinary claim" in need of extraordinary proof. Nevertheless, I'll take the bait. I already listed many of the features iTunes was lacking in my original post, I'll give you a few more:
1) Comprehensive Codec Conversion. Every other mp3 player sync software out there can convert between all the standard formats. I bought a creative Zen that came with a junky little piece of software that was maybe half a megabyte with almost no UI (just drag and drop and conversion began automatically). Even that piece of software, which someone spent all of 5 minutes on, could convert DivX to a WMV file that the player was capable of playing. Itunes can basically convert one resolution of quicktime to another -- slowly. It has limited support for a few other codecs, like mpeg -- but basically support for NONE of the major codecs or containers that media is actually distributed on in the internet.
When it comes to watching videos on your iphone/ipod -- you have two options: Buy it from itunes, or buy a third party piece of software to do the conversion for you. Ridiculous? I think so.
2) Codec Support. Hi, I'm FLAC, why won't you play nice with me?
Instead of the very basic features that every other competing piece of software supports and people DEPEND on, iTunes gives you crap you'll never use like Genius playlists and some funky visualizer. Thanks Apple, that's great bloat.
Now lets talk about size. My itunes install takes up 82 megabytes. It runs 4 separate background processes. Winamp has one background process, which is easy to disable. Itunes, not so much. I haven't even updated to the latest version Itunes which adds the genius playlists and all that other bloat, and yet my winamp install is a mere 25 megabytes. Winamp will play any video file I throw at it, Itunes will play any quicktime file I throw at it. Winamp will play any audio file I throw at it, itunes will play any mp3 I throw at it. I don't even use Winamp as a video player, its not good enough -- but its head and shoulders above iTunes.
Itune's UI is sluggish, thanks to my large library of files. There's a noticeable delay on every action. Winamp does not do this. I could go on and on and pointing out iTunes many flaws, but its pointless. It's not a fair fight. Itunes is awful.
No, you were right. Which speaker is left and which is right depends on how you're holding the phone. But thanks for the info, I always assumed the microphone was the slit at the top -- which the diagram says is the "receiver". Though I find that explanation confusing, I'm satisfied that you're correct.
While that's interesting information (and I appreciate it), it doesn't really change my original point that many iPhone owners with minor issues can't really do anything about them so they would be under-reported.
If you don't have an AT&T contract, you cannot get your iphone serviced. With that in mind, I'm sure many minor issues aren't sent in for repair and people simply learn to live with them.
For instance, my iPhone has, ever since I got it, had one dead speaker (the left one). But because I've been using prepaid sim card (AT&T) and I used a jail breaking program to activate my phone, Apple won't do anything for me about it. So, as far as they are concerned, my phone is working great. It's not a huge deal so I don't worry about it.
They don't specifically say you must have an AT&T contract to get warranty service, but it's more or less required via the other terms. They wont' service your phone unless its activated ("How can we see if it's working or not?). They won't service phones that aren't activated legitimately (at least not if they know about it). You MUST sign up for a contract to activate your phone (not actually true with the 3g, it'll apparently activate on a prepaid sim).