I use it because I have to to sync my iphone, but otherwise I wouldn't let iTunes near my computer with a 20 foot pole. It runs processes all the time in the background, has like 3-4 different ones going at once. It's ridiculously bloated -- 10 times the size of winamp with 1/4th of the features (and many people would consider Winamp bloated). Its got a clunky, non-intuitive UI, isn't extensible to work with new codecs (can't make it play DivX for instance).
It's an embarrassment to Apple and flies in the face of the image they market by being the opposite of everything they say they stand for. I could rant on all day long about reasons why I can't stand it, or how I absolutely hate being forced to install quicktime with it, and being forced to use it to sync any ipod because a hard-drive mode is apparently too convenient.
That may well be. I saw some very interesting maps of Iraq showing ethnic distributions now and 2 years ago, however, and they suggest to me that Sunni and Shia Muslims have completely segreated themselves from each other in Iraq. Before they were fairly evenly distributed, now each neighborhood is fairly solidly either one ethnicity or the other. Many people far smarter than myself have suggested that this is, in fact, the real reason behind the decline of violence.
I have no idea which it is, but most likely its probably some combination of the two. I'm sure the US efforts have had at least some results.
Now what someone is saying, when they make up a bullshit statistic like this one, is that there were fewer than 400 SOLDIERS killed. This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. This would be like comparing the number of police killed in Detroit to soldiers dead in Iraq, not civilians to soldiers. But moreover, there are about 8 times more people in Detroit than soldiers in ALL OF IRAQ -- and far fewer than that in just Baghdad. So of course, on a per capita basis, its just nonsense to say its "more dangerous" in detroit. Complete nonsense.
There have been over 29 civilians CONFIRMED as killed in the past WEEK (from last friday to this thursday) in baghdad. Just one week. At that rate, we're looking at about 1500 per year. Way higher than Detroit in a city with a much smaller population.
It turns out, that's a *GOOD* week. Check this out
From April 14th to 31st August, 2,846 violent deaths were recorded by the Baghdad city morgue. When corrected for pre-war death rates in the city a total of at least 1,519 excess violent deaths in Baghdad emerges from reports based on the morgue's records.
And last year? Try over 20 thousand confirmed civilian deaths. It's no wonder the fighting has died down since the surge -- there's hardly anyone left to kill. All the neighborhoods are now completely segregated because anyone who didn't flee is dead. That's one way to put an end to ethnic infighting -- not the one I would have chosen.
Nevertheless, suggesting the murder rate in Baghdad is less than Detriot for any period of time in the last 50 years is just a ridiculous joke. Like I said, the only way you could come even close to such a ridiculous number is if you ONLY COUNT American troop deaths in Baghdad. The most up to date information I could find suggests that we have roughly about 13,500 of our troops in Iraq in Baghdad. This falls WAY short of the 1 million people in Detroit. So saying that fewer of those 1 million people were shot than of the 13,500 troops is saying very, very, very little. It's per capita that matters here and that clearly has been ignored.
That's how easy it is to make a statistic lie -- thus explaining your Twain quote.
Good lord, you don't actually believe any of the crap you just spewed do you?
WMD did exist. Talk about old rhetoric.
Of course they existed -- past tense. That was never at question. That's why we had the UN inspectors there. But as the inspectors told us, and we later found to to be the case, most of those WMDS were either destroyed or not in any condition to where they could actually be used.
Two weeks before we went into Iraq, Bush held a speech saying that we'd go into Iraq in two weeks. Immediately after that, we watched caravans of vehicles leave Baghdad heading for Syria and Colin Powell immediately said that we'd likely never find the huge stockpiles now as they were leaving the country.
That never happened. The announcement that we were going into Iraq was 48 hours before we did, not 2 weeks.
Despite that we still found missiles filled with Sarin gas, documentation for WMD, storage facilities for WMD, training manuals for WMD, etc.
We found chopped up missiles with sarin gas residue in the warheads. That is not the same as what you are suggesting. We found defunct, destroyed, and useless old chemical weapons. We never found ANYTHING that could have been used against us. Ever. That's a fact -- look it up.
And in fact, those destroyed warheads we did find were, right where we were TOLD they would be. It's not like it took any great detective work to find them -- we demanded documentation of all of Iraq's WMD programs before we invaded and amazingly -- they complied. Remember the footage of a table full of thick files, books, and covered in cd-roms that Iraq said was all of the information on all of their WMD programs? Remember how, just hours later, without even taking the necessary time to be able to pretend they had actually read all of that information (even with a team of a hundred people they would have needed a few days to process all of that) the Bush Administration immediately announced to the press that it was incomplete and false?
Yeah, we found documentation on WMDS -- they gave it us when we asked for it. We barked. They rolled over. That was the whole idea behind the resolution giving Bush the authority to go to war. We wanted to show Iraq we were serious so that they could capitulate and we could *avoid* war. Guess what? It worked. And, despite that, we went in anyways because the Bush wanted the war. He said from day 1 he was going into Iraq and he found a way to make it acceptable to the public -- he just had to lie a lot.
Bush won the war without ever going into Iraq, then somehow snatched defeat from the Jaws of victory. Whether this was due to some sort of "democracy will flourish in the middle east" naivete or just "daddy issues" as others have suggested, I have no idea and won't guess -- but the facts are the facts: We won the war in Iraq before it was a war -- and we threw that victory away when we went in.
We never found any documentation on WMDs that suggested the programs were still active. We never found any sort of weapon of mass destruction that wasn't just some rusted old hunk of metal in a scrap yard. We killed far, far more civilians (accidentally, of course -- don't suggest I am suggesting otherwise) than Saddam could have killed if we let him live out the rest of his life (he was clearly already knocking on Deaths door anyways). We've spent nearly a trillion dollars on the war. I won't even tell you all the ridiculous things we could do with that much money. It's 25 times the ammount we spend on education per year, and we spend more than anyone else. Don't even get me started on the cost to our troops. There's simply no metric by which you can look at this war, or the Bush administration by extension, and not conclude that it has been an unmitigated disaster for this country. It disgusts me, as does your willful ignorance and gleeful repetition of republican talking points and right-wing radio misinformation.
Well, that and I think the average consumer honestly just doesn't care. Not everyone is a videophile and for most people the quality of DVD is more than enough and Blu-ray simply fails to offer anything compelling that DVD does not offer.
DVD's supplanted VHS not being a higher quality format, but by having other advantages like not needing to be rewound, multiple audio tracks, subtitles, extra features, director commentaries, deleted scenes, etc -- things that simply wouldn't work on VHS. But Blu-ray honestly doesn't have a damn thing except higher picture quality and people just really don't care. Most of us don't even have TV's good enough to be able to see the difference anyways. Heck, I still don't even have an HDTV and I'm what you'd call an early adopter for most consumer electronics.
I disagree. It doesn't matter if it was, in retrospect, obvious. He found a pretty blatant flaw in the system -- in that the password reset function was woefully inadequate for figures who live a very public life since all the questions pertain to the customers private life. This flaw isn't really any less simple to implement than a buffer overflow might be, it just requires far less technical knowledge to do so.
Regardless, he found a flaw in a computer system, recognized it, exploited it, and gained access. Sounds like hacking (or cracking depending on how malicious you regard his activities to have been). Just because that flaw, in retrospect, was utterly stupid and obvious, doesn't really change that. Douglas Adams once wrote something to the effect that it takes a true genius to invent something which everyone recognizes at once as having been completely obvious but no one had ever made before.
Does anyone know if this means that, eventually, the iPhone might benefit from this performance improvement? I was under the impression that Safari was webkit-based but I don't know if that includes Mobile Safari or not. Anyone know?
What amazes me the most when I hear stories like this is that the fact that I hear stories like this. That means, that somewhere, SOMEONE is actually coming through the patent website reading submissions and finding out stories like this. Given the ridiculous quantity of patent submissions and the utter denseness of them, I find this to be *amazing*.
You give the perpetrator entirely too much credit. I'm fairly certain he/she was only thinking about possible infamy and really nothing else -- yes, even posting anonymously it would still have been all about the fame.
Incidentally, Engadget recently reported that 95% of its mobile traffic was from the iPhone. Engadget is frequently critical of the iPhone and its readers and comments are not predominantly Apple-lovers by any means. That's market power, and Apple is using it "righteously."
I don't mean to be rude, but are you on crack? Engadget is *heavily* pro-iphone. I had my posting account banned for pointing out that a chinese player might not have had wifi support, but it did have DivX support so it was a bit unfair that they had compared it to the iphone and said "Why would anyone buy this when the Iphone is only 100 dollars more?" -- even though the product hadn't even been oficially released, didn't require a 75 dollar a month 2 year contract, hadn't been actually reviewed by anyone, and had clearly superior *media player* features when compared to the iphone.
What was wrong with it? It looked vaugely like an iphone, but it wasn't one. Ignoring its vastly cheaper price and superior features when viewed strictly from the perspective of a media player -- It wasn't an iphone, and thus was only deserving of scorn. They trashed it without ever even seeing the player anywhere but in a promotional video. And that was hardly an isolated incident -- many, many, many devices have run afoul of engadget simply for the cardinal sin of "not being an iphone". Apparently any device that isn't an iphone, is bad.
How on earth could you have come to the conclusion that Engadget has ever been "fair and balanced" when talking about the iphone?
P.S. I own an iphone, btw. I'm well aware of it's many good points, but that doesn't mean I'm not aware of its flaws too. The point I'm making here is that any website that bans users for pointing those flaws out probably isn't very neutral.
I looked at the URL in the e-mail and found the only requirement was a 16 digit hex number. [Update: A few readers pointed out that a 64-bit key results in a HUGE number of possibilities to guess 10^19. However, as I can obtain the keys via another security hole no guessing is required - I'm not going to release that information yet as I'd like O2 to fix this]. As these web pages were wide open to the internet, not requiring any authentication a very small handful were indexed by Google. I was able to craft a Google search that results in some matches to show an example of how this is an insecure method of hosting:
In other words, the stuff that's on google is merely the tip of the iceberg. He can start randomly plucking valid hex codes out of thin air and start viewing random people's random MMS's. The google search is just a "proof of concept" if you will, of the larger flaw.
This could be, of course, untrue -- as we really only have his word to take for it that there is some "pattern" in picking valid hex codes.
I think people are operating under the assumption that the newest iphone will be quickly hacked like the original in order to allow unlocking. Though I will say, AT&T's prepaid is currently about the cheapest way to get unlimited data (if data is your primary point of concern).
There is actually a way to hack the original iphone to use a proxy server with T-Mobile's "T-zone" which basically gives you unlimited data for only 6.99 -- but T-Mobile frowns on this and will eventually find you and cut off your data and then charge you, I belive, 30 bucks a month for the exact same thing (well, an un-portblocked version of the same thing).
Except that I'm getting the same thing out of my current iphone for $20 bucks a month (Gophone ftw). Sure a speed boost would be nice, but not 50 bucks a month worth of nice -- especially when the $20 bucks I'm paying per month now will work just fine an an iphone 3g for unlimited 3g data if I can get one without a contract.
Not only that, but with gophone once every 45 days I can buy $10 bucks worth of credit on my sim card for only 2-3 bucks (via ebay, using a new prepaid code) and that I get periodic bonuses when I do refill? My 20 bucks a month ends up being more like $15 bucks a month that I've actually deposited.
Now I do pay 25 cents a minute for the occasional phone call -- but I don't do nearly $55 dollars worth of talking at that price -- and if I did, there are voice plans available I could add to my service -- but I'm perfectly happy with $20 bucks a month data and no voice plan.
Anything you can do to weasel out of being locked into an unreasonable inflated contract monthly cost is worth it.
I suspect "return the phone" meant "return it for a refund". I bet still expect you to "surrender it" -- in other words, you don't pay the ETF, but you end up without a phone and without your $199.
Except you know perfectly well, if you're being honest with yourself, that the battery life excuse is just that -- an excuse. Apple has control over which apps make it to the app store and which don't. If they want to stop apps that use too many background resources (due to memory leaks, bad coding, whatever) from popping up -- that's fine with me.
The real problem here is that everytime apple needs an excuse as to why something is not implemented, they fall back on battery life. Battery life was the reasoning given for no 3g on the original iphone, if you'll recall. It's still the excuse for no flash in Safari despite an almost universal demand for this feature. The fact of the matter is, If I try an app, and it kills my battery life -- and I find that unacceptable, I simply won't use that app anymore.
I'm capable of making these decisions. Do you really think the average apple user is so stupid that he/she cannot make those decisions?
They ridiculed this idea for mobile computing. Backround apps are the death of your battery. Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources?
Yes, as a matter of fact I would like to be able to have true multi-tasking -- even if it does involve "dicking around with task managers". I have sense enough to disable programs that are using inordinate amounts of resources.
More to the point, I'd like apple to stop telling me what I want, and start listening to me when I tell them what I want.
Remember when no ipods supported video playback even though it was fast becoming a standard feature for every other brand? Steve Jobs had the nerve to say the reason video wasn't supported on Ipods was because people didn't want it as a feature because, if I recall, you "can't jog and watch a movie at the same time" -- because all of Apples customers do nothing but jog all day long (we're real fitness nuts).
Even more recently, the reason given for the original iphone not having 3g was, again, becuase we didn't "really" want it -- it ate up battery life too fast. In fact, that's the very same excuse they use for not having flash support in safari.
How about this, Apple -- why don't you let *me* worry about my battery life. If you want to make flash, 3g, multi-tasking or wahtever other "Battery draining" features we "don't want" disabled by default, go right ahead -- just add them FFS.
And while you're at it, how about some of this other stuff:
Cut and Paste
A Camera with a quality befitting the iphones price (I can seroiusly buy a 2 megapixel camera in the Walgreens checkout lane for 10 bucks -- and *it* will support video recording without 3rd party software).
A2DP bluetooth support (as I understand it, this won't require any hardware upgrade, just software)
MMS . . .
Let me view PDF's/office documents OFFLINE instead of forcing me to download them via Safari if I want to view them . . .
Look, I love my Iphone -- don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean I want to be talked down to by Apple. I'm tired of being told what I want when I know damn well what I want. If you want to make things "user friendly", that's fine -- "power user" features can be disabled by default just so long as they are there . . .
Apple products have always catered to a specific group of people who *generally speaking* tend to care more about aesthetics than functionality. Try to understand I'm not trying to troll you, or call apple fans "shallow" -- just calling it how it is.
While, for this reason, almost any apple product will ultimately be a success, that doesn't make criticisms of them any less valid nor does the products eventual success make it any more appealing to the people who originally criticized it -- they will almost certainly prefer other products.
Some quick examples of failures in the Iphone: No mp3 as ringtones, no divx/xvid codec support for video, no copy/paste, no flash support, no front-facing camera, no video recording (I mean, wtf?).
These are all *standard* things for most phones/video players, yet a device trying to be the best at both is missing so many basic things? What's worse, is that many of them could be EASILY implemented in software changes, but apple does not do it. Apple prefers to tell people what they want, rather than to listen to what people say they want.
Does anyone remember how late apple was to the party with an mp3 player in the first place? What about how late they were to come out with an ipod that could do video -- Steve Jobs famously announced that people didn't want video playback in a portable device. Really? Thank god Steve Jobs was there to tell me what I didn't want, only to backpedal a year later.
There's a lot of great stuff about the iphone. It's got a nice UI (nothing to write a sonnet about, but nice). Decent hardware (aside from the lack of front-facing camera) and some very nice apps (safari is hands down the best mobile browser). However, the glaring omissions are very off-putting to people who simply cannot imagine not having certain freedoms they have enjoyed no other phones for years.
That said, many of the iphones weaknesses have been compensated by jailbreaking. Custom apps have filled in quite a few of apple's gaps already. So who knows, if the 3g iphone can still be jailbroken, then it might end up being a great phone -- instead of just the phone for people for people who care more about form than function.
The bottom line is, the situation wherein someone has broken into your house with you in it with the intent to do you harm, for all the media sensationalization, is ridiculously rare. It is sort of like the opposite of winning the lottery.
On the other hand, the scenario wherein your son has been out all night partying, unbeknown to you, and he sneaks into the house and you mistake him for an intruder and shoot him is significantly *more common* (though thankfully still rare).
For my money, I feel safer without a gun. The odds aren't in your favor if you go the other direction. We live in a free society, and the benefit of that is you get to make your own choice -- and no one else is going to tell you which choice to make. But I think it's pretty clear where the *smart* money lies.
Moreover, think of the havoc you could wreak by simply finding one of these links, heading over to tinyurl.com to mask them, then posting them all over the internet claiming them to be something entirely different from what the original poster claimed them to be.
They could be the new rickroll/goatse/etc. You could get literally thousands of unsuspecting users to click on one of these links. It would be *easy*.
Better food does not = better nutrition or a better odds at survival. It just tastes better. Therefore, it's a *luxury*. Better healthcare does directly impact your odds of survival -- by quite a large margin. In fact, we don't even provide most people with "bread and butter" healthcare. Emergency rooms are required to treat you by law (given that is actually an emergency) and for many people that's the only healthcare they will receive.
By the time it's an emergency, whatever problem you have is already serious enough to kill you while most medical problems have orders of magnitudes higher survival rates with *early* detection. If we gave everyone health care "food stamps" then at least everyone would be able to see a doctor when they felt bad, but weren't in danger of dropping dead. That would be a *huge* improvement over our current system of "be dying, or find some cash".
IIRC, they have previously announced plans to sell added codec support (for instance, I have one of their earlier models and I can play almost any divx/xvid file I download off the internet -- provided they have mp3 audio -- those with AAC audio give me no sound) and that sort of thing. If people start implementing new codecs and making this thing compatabile with more types of media files than it already is, that's one less revenue stream for archos.
While I don't like this approach, it is understandable and I love my archos quite a bit so I'm willing to overlook it. Heck, if they'd give me the option of playing AAC on *my* model I'd shell out the extra cash for it.
They were in the shared folder. This does not necessarily equate to actual distribution -- it simply demonstrates that they would have been available for download to others. It's not as if his kazaa client would have kept logs of of if/when they were downloaded. Thus the distinction to be made is whether or not actual distribution occurred or if it even matters whether or not it did. It's possible that no one ever actually downloaded them -- so the question is does the act of "making available" constitute "distribution" entirely by itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I use it because I have to to sync my iphone, but otherwise I wouldn't let iTunes near my computer with a 20 foot pole. It runs processes all the time in the background, has like 3-4 different ones going at once. It's ridiculously bloated -- 10 times the size of winamp with 1/4th of the features (and many people would consider Winamp bloated). Its got a clunky, non-intuitive UI, isn't extensible to work with new codecs (can't make it play DivX for instance).
It's an embarrassment to Apple and flies in the face of the image they market by being the opposite of everything they say they stand for. I could rant on all day long about reasons why I can't stand it, or how I absolutely hate being forced to install quicktime with it, and being forced to use it to sync any ipod because a hard-drive mode is apparently too convenient.
That may well be. I saw some very interesting maps of Iraq showing ethnic distributions now and 2 years ago, however, and they suggest to me that Sunni and Shia Muslims have completely segreated themselves from each other in Iraq. Before they were fairly evenly distributed, now each neighborhood is fairly solidly either one ethnicity or the other. Many people far smarter than myself have suggested that this is, in fact, the real reason behind the decline of violence.
I have no idea which it is, but most likely its probably some combination of the two. I'm sure the US efforts have had at least some results.
Well, in this particular instance, its just complete and utter garbage.
There's about 1 million people living in detroit and about 400 murders per year. That's fairly bad.
Here's a link to 2006's muder rate: http://detroit.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm -- it was actually less than 400 in 2007. So we'll just say, about 400.
Now what someone is saying, when they make up a bullshit statistic like this one, is that there were fewer than 400 SOLDIERS killed. This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. This would be like comparing the number of police killed in Detroit to soldiers dead in Iraq, not civilians to soldiers. But moreover, there are about 8 times more people in Detroit than soldiers in ALL OF IRAQ -- and far fewer than that in just Baghdad. So of course, on a per capita basis, its just nonsense to say its "more dangerous" in detroit. Complete nonsense.
There have been over 29 civilians CONFIRMED as killed in the past WEEK (from last friday to this thursday) in baghdad. Just one week. At that rate, we're looking at about 1500 per year. Way higher than Detroit in a city with a much smaller population.
It turns out, that's a *GOOD* week. Check this out
From April 14th to 31st August, 2,846 violent deaths were recorded by the Baghdad city morgue. When corrected for pre-war death rates in the city a total of at least 1,519 excess violent deaths in Baghdad emerges from reports based on the morgue's records.
And last year? Try over 20 thousand confirmed civilian deaths. It's no wonder the fighting has died down since the surge -- there's hardly anyone left to kill. All the neighborhoods are now completely segregated because anyone who didn't flee is dead. That's one way to put an end to ethnic infighting -- not the one I would have chosen.
Nevertheless, suggesting the murder rate in Baghdad is less than Detriot for any period of time in the last 50 years is just a ridiculous joke. Like I said, the only way you could come even close to such a ridiculous number is if you ONLY COUNT American troop deaths in Baghdad. The most up to date information I could find suggests that we have roughly about 13,500 of our troops in Iraq in Baghdad. This falls WAY short of the 1 million people in Detroit. So saying that fewer of those 1 million people were shot than of the 13,500 troops is saying very, very, very little. It's per capita that matters here and that clearly has been ignored.
That's how easy it is to make a statistic lie -- thus explaining your Twain quote.
Good lord, you don't actually believe any of the crap you just spewed do you?
WMD did exist. Talk about old rhetoric.
Of course they existed -- past tense. That was never at question. That's why we had the UN inspectors there. But as the inspectors told us, and we later found to to be the case, most of those WMDS were either destroyed or not in any condition to where they could actually be used.
Two weeks before we went into Iraq, Bush held a speech saying that we'd go into Iraq in two weeks. Immediately after that, we watched caravans of vehicles leave Baghdad heading for Syria and Colin Powell immediately said that we'd likely never find the huge stockpiles now as they were leaving the country.
That never happened. The announcement that we were going into Iraq was 48 hours before we did, not 2 weeks.
Despite that we still found missiles filled with Sarin gas, documentation for WMD, storage facilities for WMD, training manuals for WMD, etc.
We found chopped up missiles with sarin gas residue in the warheads. That is not the same as what you are suggesting. We found defunct, destroyed, and useless old chemical weapons. We never found ANYTHING that could have been used against us. Ever. That's a fact -- look it up.
And in fact, those destroyed warheads we did find were, right where we were TOLD they would be. It's not like it took any great detective work to find them -- we demanded documentation of all of Iraq's WMD programs before we invaded and amazingly -- they complied. Remember the footage of a table full of thick files, books, and covered in cd-roms that Iraq said was all of the information on all of their WMD programs? Remember how, just hours later, without even taking the necessary time to be able to pretend they had actually read all of that information (even with a team of a hundred people they would have needed a few days to process all of that) the Bush Administration immediately announced to the press that it was incomplete and false?
Yeah, we found documentation on WMDS -- they gave it us when we asked for it. We barked. They rolled over. That was the whole idea behind the resolution giving Bush the authority to go to war. We wanted to show Iraq we were serious so that they could capitulate and we could *avoid* war. Guess what? It worked. And, despite that, we went in anyways because the Bush wanted the war. He said from day 1 he was going into Iraq and he found a way to make it acceptable to the public -- he just had to lie a lot.
Bush won the war without ever going into Iraq, then somehow snatched defeat from the Jaws of victory. Whether this was due to some sort of "democracy will flourish in the middle east" naivete or just "daddy issues" as others have suggested, I have no idea and won't guess -- but the facts are the facts: We won the war in Iraq before it was a war -- and we threw that victory away when we went in.
We never found any documentation on WMDs that suggested the programs were still active. We never found any sort of weapon of mass destruction that wasn't just some rusted old hunk of metal in a scrap yard. We killed far, far more civilians (accidentally, of course -- don't suggest I am suggesting otherwise) than Saddam could have killed if we let him live out the rest of his life (he was clearly already knocking on Deaths door anyways). We've spent nearly a trillion dollars on the war. I won't even tell you all the ridiculous things we could do with that much money. It's 25 times the ammount we spend on education per year, and we spend more than anyone else. Don't even get me started on the cost to our troops. There's simply no metric by which you can look at this war, or the Bush administration by extension, and not conclude that it has been an unmitigated disaster for this country. It disgusts me, as does your willful ignorance and gleeful repetition of republican talking points and right-wing radio misinformation.
Well, that and I think the average consumer honestly just doesn't care. Not everyone is a videophile and for most people the quality of DVD is more than enough and Blu-ray simply fails to offer anything compelling that DVD does not offer.
DVD's supplanted VHS not being a higher quality format, but by having other advantages like not needing to be rewound, multiple audio tracks, subtitles, extra features, director commentaries, deleted scenes, etc -- things that simply wouldn't work on VHS. But Blu-ray honestly doesn't have a damn thing except higher picture quality and people just really don't care. Most of us don't even have TV's good enough to be able to see the difference anyways. Heck, I still don't even have an HDTV and I'm what you'd call an early adopter for most consumer electronics.
I disagree. It doesn't matter if it was, in retrospect, obvious. He found a pretty blatant flaw in the system -- in that the password reset function was woefully inadequate for figures who live a very public life since all the questions pertain to the customers private life. This flaw isn't really any less simple to implement than a buffer overflow might be, it just requires far less technical knowledge to do so.
Regardless, he found a flaw in a computer system, recognized it, exploited it, and gained access. Sounds like hacking (or cracking depending on how malicious you regard his activities to have been). Just because that flaw, in retrospect, was utterly stupid and obvious, doesn't really change that. Douglas Adams once wrote something to the effect that it takes a true genius to invent something which everyone recognizes at once as having been completely obvious but no one had ever made before.
Does anyone know if this means that, eventually, the iPhone might benefit from this performance improvement? I was under the impression that Safari was webkit-based but I don't know if that includes Mobile Safari or not. Anyone know?
What amazes me the most when I hear stories like this is that the fact that I hear stories like this. That means, that somewhere, SOMEONE is actually coming through the patent website reading submissions and finding out stories like this. Given the ridiculous quantity of patent submissions and the utter denseness of them, I find this to be *amazing*.
You give the perpetrator entirely too much credit. I'm fairly certain he/she was only thinking about possible infamy and really nothing else -- yes, even posting anonymously it would still have been all about the fame.
Incidentally, Engadget recently reported that 95% of its mobile traffic was from the iPhone. Engadget is frequently critical of the iPhone and its readers and comments are not predominantly Apple-lovers by any means. That's market power, and Apple is using it "righteously."
I don't mean to be rude, but are you on crack? Engadget is *heavily* pro-iphone. I had my posting account banned for pointing out that a chinese player might not have had wifi support, but it did have DivX support so it was a bit unfair that they had compared it to the iphone and said "Why would anyone buy this when the Iphone is only 100 dollars more?" -- even though the product hadn't even been oficially released, didn't require a 75 dollar a month 2 year contract, hadn't been actually reviewed by anyone, and had clearly superior *media player* features when compared to the iphone.
What was wrong with it? It looked vaugely like an iphone, but it wasn't one. Ignoring its vastly cheaper price and superior features when viewed strictly from the perspective of a media player -- It wasn't an iphone, and thus was only deserving of scorn. They trashed it without ever even seeing the player anywhere but in a promotional video. And that was hardly an isolated incident -- many, many, many devices have run afoul of engadget simply for the cardinal sin of "not being an iphone". Apparently any device that isn't an iphone, is bad.
How on earth could you have come to the conclusion that Engadget has ever been "fair and balanced" when talking about the iphone?
P.S. I own an iphone, btw. I'm well aware of it's many good points, but that doesn't mean I'm not aware of its flaws too. The point I'm making here is that any website that bans users for pointing those flaws out probably isn't very neutral.
You missed a key point in the TFA:
I looked at the URL in the e-mail and found the only requirement was a 16 digit hex number. [Update: A few readers pointed out that a 64-bit key results in a HUGE number of possibilities to guess 10^19. However, as I can obtain the keys via another security hole no guessing is required - I'm not going to release that information yet as I'd like O2 to fix this]. As these web pages were wide open to the internet, not requiring any authentication a very small handful were indexed by Google. I was able to craft a Google search that results in some matches to show an example of how this is an insecure method of hosting:
In other words, the stuff that's on google is merely the tip of the iceberg. He can start randomly plucking valid hex codes out of thin air and start viewing random people's random MMS's. The google search is just a "proof of concept" if you will, of the larger flaw.
This could be, of course, untrue -- as we really only have his word to take for it that there is some "pattern" in picking valid hex codes.
If you don't pay the 20 bucks for unlimited data, then yes, it's very expensive -- 10 bucks a megabyte.
I think people are operating under the assumption that the newest iphone will be quickly hacked like the original in order to allow unlocking. Though I will say, AT&T's prepaid is currently about the cheapest way to get unlimited data (if data is your primary point of concern).
There is actually a way to hack the original iphone to use a proxy server with T-Mobile's "T-zone" which basically gives you unlimited data for only 6.99 -- but T-Mobile frowns on this and will eventually find you and cut off your data and then charge you, I belive, 30 bucks a month for the exact same thing (well, an un-portblocked version of the same thing).
Except that I'm getting the same thing out of my current iphone for $20 bucks a month (Gophone ftw). Sure a speed boost would be nice, but not 50 bucks a month worth of nice -- especially when the $20 bucks I'm paying per month now will work just fine an an iphone 3g for unlimited 3g data if I can get one without a contract.
Not only that, but with gophone once every 45 days I can buy $10 bucks worth of credit on my sim card for only 2-3 bucks (via ebay, using a new prepaid code) and that I get periodic bonuses when I do refill? My 20 bucks a month ends up being more like $15 bucks a month that I've actually deposited.
Now I do pay 25 cents a minute for the occasional phone call -- but I don't do nearly $55 dollars worth of talking at that price -- and if I did, there are voice plans available I could add to my service -- but I'm perfectly happy with $20 bucks a month data and no voice plan.
Anything you can do to weasel out of being locked into an unreasonable inflated contract monthly cost is worth it.
I suspect "return the phone" meant "return it for a refund". I bet still expect you to "surrender it" -- in other words, you don't pay the ETF, but you end up without a phone and without your $199.
If only they could have found a way to block packets from Slashdotters on their webserver . . .
Except you know perfectly well, if you're being honest with yourself, that the battery life excuse is just that -- an excuse. Apple has control over which apps make it to the app store and which don't. If they want to stop apps that use too many background resources (due to memory leaks, bad coding, whatever) from popping up -- that's fine with me.
The real problem here is that everytime apple needs an excuse as to why something is not implemented, they fall back on battery life. Battery life was the reasoning given for no 3g on the original iphone, if you'll recall. It's still the excuse for no flash in Safari despite an almost universal demand for this feature. The fact of the matter is, If I try an app, and it kills my battery life -- and I find that unacceptable, I simply won't use that app anymore.
I'm capable of making these decisions. Do you really think the average apple user is so stupid that he/she cannot make those decisions?
They ridiculed this idea for mobile computing. Backround apps are the death of your battery. Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources?
Yes, as a matter of fact I would like to be able to have true multi-tasking -- even if it does involve "dicking around with task managers". I have sense enough to disable programs that are using inordinate amounts of resources.
More to the point, I'd like apple to stop telling me what I want, and start listening to me when I tell them what I want.
Remember when no ipods supported video playback even though it was fast becoming a standard feature for every other brand? Steve Jobs had the nerve to say the reason video wasn't supported on Ipods was because people didn't want it as a feature because, if I recall, you "can't jog and watch a movie at the same time" -- because all of Apples customers do nothing but jog all day long (we're real fitness nuts).
Even more recently, the reason given for the original iphone not having 3g was, again, becuase we didn't "really" want it -- it ate up battery life too fast. In fact, that's the very same excuse they use for not having flash support in safari.
How about this, Apple -- why don't you let *me* worry about my battery life. If you want to make flash, 3g, multi-tasking or wahtever other "Battery draining" features we "don't want" disabled by default, go right ahead -- just add them FFS.
And while you're at it, how about some of this other stuff:
Cut and Paste
A Camera with a quality befitting the iphones price (I can seroiusly buy a 2 megapixel camera in the Walgreens checkout lane for 10 bucks -- and *it* will support video recording without 3rd party software).
A2DP bluetooth support (as I understand it, this won't require any hardware upgrade, just software)
MMS . . .
Let me view PDF's/office documents OFFLINE instead of forcing me to download them via Safari if I want to view them . . .
Look, I love my Iphone -- don't get me wrong. But that doesn't mean I want to be talked down to by Apple. I'm tired of being told what I want when I know damn well what I want. If you want to make things "user friendly", that's fine -- "power user" features can be disabled by default just so long as they are there . . .
Apple products have always catered to a specific group of people who *generally speaking* tend to care more about aesthetics than functionality. Try to understand I'm not trying to troll you, or call apple fans "shallow" -- just calling it how it is.
While, for this reason, almost any apple product will ultimately be a success, that doesn't make criticisms of them any less valid nor does the products eventual success make it any more appealing to the people who originally criticized it -- they will almost certainly prefer other products.
Some quick examples of failures in the Iphone: No mp3 as ringtones, no divx/xvid codec support for video, no copy/paste, no flash support, no front-facing camera, no video recording (I mean, wtf?).
These are all *standard* things for most phones/video players, yet a device trying to be the best at both is missing so many basic things? What's worse, is that many of them could be EASILY implemented in software changes, but apple does not do it. Apple prefers to tell people what they want, rather than to listen to what people say they want.
Does anyone remember how late apple was to the party with an mp3 player in the first place? What about how late they were to come out with an ipod that could do video -- Steve Jobs famously announced that people didn't want video playback in a portable device. Really? Thank god Steve Jobs was there to tell me what I didn't want, only to backpedal a year later.
There's a lot of great stuff about the iphone. It's got a nice UI (nothing to write a sonnet about, but nice). Decent hardware (aside from the lack of front-facing camera) and some very nice apps (safari is hands down the best mobile browser). However, the glaring omissions are very off-putting to people who simply cannot imagine not having certain freedoms they have enjoyed no other phones for years.
That said, many of the iphones weaknesses have been compensated by jailbreaking. Custom apps have filled in quite a few of apple's gaps already. So who knows, if the 3g iphone can still be jailbroken, then it might end up being a great phone -- instead of just the phone for people for people who care more about form than function.
Wonder how long that lasts . . .
The bottom line is, the situation wherein someone has broken into your house with you in it with the intent to do you harm, for all the media sensationalization, is ridiculously rare. It is sort of like the opposite of winning the lottery.
On the other hand, the scenario wherein your son has been out all night partying, unbeknown to you, and he sneaks into the house and you mistake him for an intruder and shoot him is significantly *more common* (though thankfully still rare).
For my money, I feel safer without a gun. The odds aren't in your favor if you go the other direction. We live in a free society, and the benefit of that is you get to make your own choice -- and no one else is going to tell you which choice to make. But I think it's pretty clear where the *smart* money lies.
Moreover, think of the havoc you could wreak by simply finding one of these links, heading over to tinyurl.com to mask them, then posting them all over the internet claiming them to be something entirely different from what the original poster claimed them to be.
They could be the new rickroll/goatse/etc. You could get literally thousands of unsuspecting users to click on one of these links. It would be *easy*.
Your analogy is bad and here is why:
Better food does not = better nutrition or a better odds at survival. It just tastes better. Therefore, it's a *luxury*. Better healthcare does directly impact your odds of survival -- by quite a large margin. In fact, we don't even provide most people with "bread and butter" healthcare. Emergency rooms are required to treat you by law (given that is actually an emergency) and for many people that's the only healthcare they will receive.
By the time it's an emergency, whatever problem you have is already serious enough to kill you while most medical problems have orders of magnitudes higher survival rates with *early* detection. If we gave everyone health care "food stamps" then at least everyone would be able to see a doctor when they felt bad, but weren't in danger of dropping dead. That would be a *huge* improvement over our current system of "be dying, or find some cash".
IIRC, they have previously announced plans to sell added codec support (for instance, I have one of their earlier models and I can play almost any divx/xvid file I download off the internet -- provided they have mp3 audio -- those with AAC audio give me no sound) and that sort of thing. If people start implementing new codecs and making this thing compatabile with more types of media files than it already is, that's one less revenue stream for archos.
While I don't like this approach, it is understandable and I love my archos quite a bit so I'm willing to overlook it. Heck, if they'd give me the option of playing AAC on *my* model I'd shell out the extra cash for it.
Proof based on circumstantial evidence!?
IANAL but I understand the argument to be this:
They were in the shared folder. This does not necessarily equate to actual distribution -- it simply demonstrates that they would have been available for download to others. It's not as if his kazaa client would have kept logs of of if/when they were downloaded. Thus the distinction to be made is whether or not actual distribution occurred or if it even matters whether or not it did. It's possible that no one ever actually downloaded them -- so the question is does the act of "making available" constitute "distribution" entirely by itself.