Please consider studying a bit on the importance of open standards in the technology world. Many of the things that people take for granted today exist due to open standards, and might well not exist without them, or might exist but not be affordable to you. The issue is not about snobbery, that's just a FUD smokescreen you're blowing. You may like Microsoft and their products, but they have a long and well documented history of trying to crush open standards in order to prevent competition in the marketplace of software and technology. You may like Internet Explorer, but it has a well documented history of broken support for open standards. These things are not "bugs" or they would get fixed. The fact that they don't get fixed, for years and years, is indication that to some degree Microsoft intends IE to depart from the open standards, so that the "MUCH MUCH LARGER GROUP OF PEOPLE", sheeple that they are, will follow the herd to Microsoft land, and help cement Microsoft dominance by building broken web sites. If you own significant amounts of MSFT, then perhaps buy building broken web sites you are contributing to your own success. However, if you owned that much MSFT, you wouldn't be building web sites, would you?
The iPhone would be very useful without a data plan, to anyone who spends most of their time in a WiFi hotspot. Why pay for pig-dog slow EDGE when you've got free WiFi all around you? (Notwithstanding the fact that this whole discussion is predicated on a rumor. Given the evil policies of wireless carriers, it will not surprise anyone if a data plan is required with the iPhone.)
The problem with this "wag the dog" conspiracy theory is that the technical issue is too subtle. Apple's objective with Safari for Windows is not to use some clever media wagging stunt to convince the few dozen remaining Slashdot geeks who don't already think that Apple takes security more seriously than Microsoft. Their objective instead is to capture a chunk, a big, big chunk, say twenty or thirty percent of the web browser market for standards-compliant browsers. If they can swing it, with Safari for Windows, then the world will see a decline in web sites that support IE only. This will benefit Apple, of course, but it will benefit everybody else, too. Alternative web browsers of all types will find it easier to grow their audience base when web sites become standards-compliant, rather than IE-bug-compliant. Apple, I assure you, would have preferred that they ship Safari with zero defects.
Your use of the term "fanboy" is an ad hominum attack, and serves only to undermine whatever rational arguments you might make. It has also become cliche here in Slashdot for anyone who seeks to rebuke (rather than rebut) any comment with which they disagree by tossing these dismissive accusations of fanboi about, no matter that the comment might be factually correct and logically consistent. Dismiss it all with "fanboy", you think you can, but you are about this also mistaken.
Apart from that, your argument is generally weak. All of the assertions in your argument could be true, without invalidating the documented truth of my proposition. It is a matter, now, of public record that Steve Jobs has been, for a long time, possibly since before you ever heard of the iPod, lobbying the recording industry in opposition to DRM. It is quite clear that Apple never would have been able to license the libraries of the recording companies if Apple hadn't developed solid DRM technology, and supported it diligently. It is rumored that the contracts Apple had to accept for the first round when the opened the iTunes music store even included out clauses for the record companies, giving them the right to revoke Apple's right to use their music libraries in the event that Apple's DRM failed to protect the music in question.
This isn't blind faith. It's not sentimentalism. It's just a rational analysis of the facts.
Anyone who thinks that Steve Jobs is not consciously trying to fix a broken cell phone industry simply isn't paying attention. It's quite clear that the cell phone handset makers think that their customer is the wireless carrier. The wireless carrier industry is an oligopoly. This combination of factors is directly responsible for the state of cell phone suckage, which is pretty severe, and has appeared to be intractable. Apple is very clearly trying to fix this broken industry by getting into a position where the handset maker and the wireless carrier realize that their ultimate customer is you -- the ultimate user of the cell phone handset and service.
If you want to blow my arguments out of the water, you're going to need to work a little harder at it. Whatever you think of Steve Jobs, it's pretty difficult to deny that he is one of the few true visionaries in the technology industry, with a proven track record of leading an often unwilling industry into their own brighter future, against their collective will. Sure perhaps that is a bit of a poetic way to express it, but it's hardly sentimentalism. The pace of evolution of the cell phone has been painfully slow. I'm not in a mood to be sentimental at all. I'm in a mood to see the problems fixed, and the only hope I see on the horizon is Apple. Nobody else was stepping up to the plate.
Well, to start with it's not clear if the WiFi will really be disabled without an EDGE service plan, or exactly what the AT&T service plan for the iPhone will be, so it seems a little premature to be issuing the big FU to the one guy on the planet who's trying to fix the cell phone industry. Recall, this is the same guy and the same company who tried to save the music industry from it's own stupidity. (Reference EMI's evolving position on DRM). You might want to give this a little time. Apple cannot fix the entire cell phone industry overnight, but they can fix some things up front, gain influence in the market, and use that influence to fix other problems later.
I agree that EDGE isn't exactly exciting, but it does have much better coverage than the newer 3G Networks in the U.S. It would be nice if the AT&T data plan for the iPhone bundled their AT&T WiFi Hotpot aka LaptopConnect service with EDGE.
The future of the AT&T wireless network shows signs of being much brighter. Their HSDPA is being improved and it appears that they are upgrading the existing sites to 14.4 Mbit/sec service. If they roll that technology out nationwide I for one would welcome our new high speed wireless overlords.
The posts that begin "Bzzzt! Wrong!" seem to follow a normal distribution, so I think it should be a separate filter, not tied to the "meh-hole" filter, but yes, perhaps a more generalized filtering mechanism is desired as suggested elsewhere in this thread.
Don't forget the iPhone has 802.11 networking built in. People spend so much time in hot spots these days that the lackluster performance of the EDGE network will be an occasional nuisance, not a crippling defect in the product. The future of 3G HSDPA networks looks pretty bright, too.
Not to quibble, but the price of Linux isn't really free as in beer, nor free as in speech. Starting with the latter, GPL is more restrictive, not less restrictive, than BSD/MIT style licenses. There may well be good reasons for that in terms of the viral ability of the GPL and the community building positive social value that it provides, but it is clearly more restrictive, not less restrictive, than these other licenses. BSD is the Rodney Dangerfield of operating systems. Linux fans should really give BSD distributions a little credit for being even more free, they deserve it. For example, Linux can borrow code from BSD distributions, but the converse is not necessarily true. Commercial companies can modify BSD for special, proprietary purposes, perhaps to the benefit of their customers, and keep their technology secret. That is not true for Linux. So Linux is not the be-all and end-all of free as in speech. BSD pretty much is the gold standard. Do whatever the heck you want with it, its free.
Regarding the beer, the cost of Linux and the cost of Windows are different, but perhaps equivalent, in terms of hours spent learning arcane and useless trivia. Mac OS X, at $129, and valuing one's time at about $100, or even $5 per hour, is clearly cheaper than either of those alternatives, due to the near complete and utter freedom from futzing that it provides.
I hope my karma can withstand the drubbing it's about to get.
You are so right! NeXT supported four different machine architectures at one time in the early 1990s: intel, m68k, sparc, and pa-risc. This recent Leopard development is not entirely without precedent in the industry. It was possible to produce one build of an application that ran just fine on all four architectures, too, although the install CD would only hold two architectures (m68k and intel on a single cd for example) so you had to get a separate install CD for sparc and pa-risc.
The Intel transition introduced 32-bit hardware into the mix again, for a while before the Core 2 Duo shipped, so Apple actually has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of both PowerPC and Intel Core hardware in the installed customer base. The really nifty thing is that for applications that work on large amounts of data, even the older 64-bit PowerPC hardware will get a serious performance boost with Leopard for a mere $129. The newest member of that hardware pool will be two years old by the time Leopard ships, but some of those machines are still pretty nice. Their owners will be happy that Leopard treats them as full 64-bit citizens.
What Apple is accomplishing with seamless support for those four machine architectures from one build of Mac OS X is quite impressive. It also preserves Apple's ability to adopt new CPU architectures as needed. Suppose Apple came up with an idea for an appliance for which the Cell processor would be an ideal choice? Apple could certainly ship such a device without breaking a sweat.
Furthermore, suppose Apple wanted to use OS X as the operating system on a new bit of hardware that required, say, a low power CPU like the ARM that happened to be 32-bit, say a cell pone or something. If the OS is designed to cleanly handle both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, then the same version of the OS could be used across all five architectures.
The five year history of Apple's share price indicates that Apple's strictly enforced policies regarding secrecy of their product plans is probably not hurting the company in any way. Considering the lackluster performance of other companies that blabber on and on and on about their half-baked plans that never mature, one might well conclude that this policy is helping Apple shareholders, even if it comes at the expense of occasional inconvenience.
That said, ZFS is probably not important enough for Apple to punish Sun over a set of flapping gums. If you want a better conspiracy theory, perhaps Apple was testing Sun to see if they could keep a secret. The answer is "No."
Really, though, everybody knows ZFS is interesting, and Apple is porting it to Mac OS X. It's quite likely that nobody at Apple knows when or if ZFS on Mac OS X will be mature enough to become a candidate for replacing the default filesystem. It probably won't happen before October, but that's not to say it will never happen.
The larger pattern of which this is one example seems to indicate that many people don't read, except Slashdot and other geek discussion forums, blogs, etc., In turn, this leads to a self-perpetuating defect. A meme, if you will, mutates, and replicates in this pool because the corrective mechanisms are weak. It then may rise to dominance in a limited domain of Slashdot, for example, if people don't spend enough time reading outside materials. (We already know the articles are often not read.) People see these things misspelled more often than not. If they don't read sources from literature or properly edited magazines or newspapers then they pick up the wrong spelling or usage, and add to the noise. The feedback loop builds as other people are then more likely to encounter the incorrect usages or spellings more frequently than they otherwise would.
Not to pick on you, (really) but I have noticed a pattern. For some reason, any post which starts with "meh" is pretty much useless. Brief investigation indicates that most posts by most people who start some posts with "meh" tend to be content free, and sometimes vaguely hostile. I wonder if Slashdot could implement a new rule in the lameness filter for this, or perhaps some type of filtering system, so that the rest of us don't even need to know these people exist. Like, if somebody starts a post with "meh" they get added to a list that I can subscribe to, and then I can set a preference to a "-5, meh-hole" mod. or something. The regular mod system should have "-1, meh-hole" added to it, too.
Your argument assumes that the widely publicised "intelligence failures" in the United States can be solved by supplying additional funds. Since some of the most important "failures", those with the greatest consequences, were actually the result of policy failures (or perhaps worse, manipulation of the evidence at a policy level), and were not failures in data collection or analysis, I suspect that doubling the funds might actually be dangerous. Perhaps we could spend half as much money, and the consequences of "failure" would be reduced. Impossible to build a solid case for this argument without at least some amount of detailed data about how the money is spent of course, but worth pondering.
Apple really hasn't done much hyping of the iPhone, if you think about it.
January 10, 2007: MacWorld 2007 keynote, introduces iPhone
Apple.com iPhone web site
A couple interviews showing the phone, letting reporters hold it for a couple minutes
A very few magazine articles with access to Steve Jobs and the iPhone
Super Bowl "Hello" iPhone commercial
June 3, 2007: Apple starts running four new commercials that demonstrate features of the phone
Really, this is far, far less promotion than you see for typical new products. Heck, hamburgers at Burger King get more hype than this, by far, in a six month period. Even though they probably eat a whole bunch of them, bloggers don't get excited and blog about it.
Apple's biggest contribution to the "hype" came from keeping the project secret until it was up to a point where it could be demonstrated, and then keeping their mouths shut after the MacWorld Keynote, and refusing to answer questions about anything that wasn't demonstrated by Steve Jobs on January 10.
What we're seeing in the media, blogs, and in meatspace is, I think, genuine excitement. People can look at the information that's available, which is I grant you incomplete, but they can also look at the phone in their hand. They can tell immediately that several things they don't like about their phone are fixed by the iPhone. Visual Voicemail is damned exciting. A phone that can access the internet simply and easily is exciting. The Google Maps commercial makes girls squeel and giggle with delight when they see the pins drop... (try it sometime.) I don't think it's hype. I think it's genuine interest.
I just got a RAZR V3M and Verizon deliberately disabled the OBEX function (Object Exchange) which was probably enabled by accidenton the V3C, since it's been diabled on most of the other Verizon phones since it was invented.
It's definitely not just about aesthetics of the device. The primary driver behind the iPhone form factor is efficient use of device front real-estate. Buttons have been proliferating like mad on "smart phones for years, and it's not helping them sell to the broader market. Why? Well, the devices intimidate some users. Other users find them to be cumbersome. 40% of the surface is keypad, leaving only a tiny screen you can't really use for much besides text messages. They buttons can't be changed after they are stamped out. You may want QUERTY, somebody else might want right-hand-Dvorak. Somebody else wants a two-thumb layout. You may want a numeric keypad layout when you're dialing, but no other time.
Yes, the touch screen could be seen as a design risk, and it's possible that it will be rejected by the market. There are undoubtedly other people like you who are adicted to buttons, and dialing in the dark. I suspect that even most of those people will find that they can adapt to the iPhone easily enough, particularly if it provides haptic feedback as a user preference. (Some people might want that turned off -- something you can't do with a button.)
It's not about ssh, X Windows, or iWork. The current "smart phone" industry is providing people with a big heavy feature they don't presently want -- MS Office on their phone. Yeah, it makes for dramatic commercials where spreadsheets are edited at the last second before a big meeting and a billion dollar merger is saved. In practice, people running billion dollar mergers don't really care what's in the spreadsheet. They don't read them, they have people who have people who read them for them. This feature was added to smart phones by Microsoft because Excel is what they had lying about to sell, and because it makes for dramatic advertisements.
The iPhone is about a balance of features that people really want. Business people would love an iPod in their phone, because they spend a fair bit of time on airplanes, in hotels, in airports, in taxi cabs. They also would love an easy to use map system that could help them find a decent restaurant nearby. The Apple iPhone commercials don't look like they target business users, but they nail squarely what a business user wants from a phone. They want to carry less shit with them. They want to be able to quickly look up something on the internet, or bookmark something they heard about for reference later. They're going to buy an iPhone and their older iPod and Palm Pilot will be in a drawer.
The biggest thing, however, will be ease of use. If the Address book doesn't have some asinine limit of 500 contact numbers (it wont') and if it syncs easily and reliably (it will) and if the web browser really works and if Google Maps are easy to use on the iPhone, these things are going to be the hottest new business gadget since the original Palm Pilot.
It's about efficiency. Carry one or two fewer devices everywhere I go. Carry one device that's easy to learn and easy to use, rather than so hard to learn that many users don't even know about the advanced features and so hard to use that the advanced features they know about rarely get touched. Sending text messages, checking email, and placing and receiving calls need to work well.
A few business people I know are going to get an iPhone for one feature: visual voicemail (random access to voicemail queue). They calculate that the time and annoyance they will save with that single feature more than justifies the cost of the device.
1. Retail channel
There were many big problems to solve simultaneously, perhaps including one that couldn't be solved any other way, than partnering with at least one carrier: consumers today buy cell phones from wireless providers. That meant that Apple had to get the iPhone into wireless stores to really break into the market with anything other than a hobbyist handset maker niche. AT&T has over 2000 stores in the U.S., apparently. Other large wireless providers are similar in scale of retail presence. Wireless providers have stores in airports, big malls, little malls, downtown areas, inside of other stores like Radio Shack, Costco, etc. Apple couldn't build that kind of retail network in time to sell the iPhone, it needed to get the device into places where people were already looking for phones.
2. Give and Take of Negotiations & Shaking the Industry
I suspect that Apple would have preferred to be able to secure deals with multiple vendors in the U.S. However, the cell phone industry is seriously distorted, globally, not merely in the U.S. The handset makers think that the wireless carrier is the customer, which is the ultimate cause of cell phone suckage. Cell phones are camels designed by committes of people who have never even imagined a desert oasis, let alone been to one. Apple probably had to grant a period of exclusivity to Cingular / AT&T in order to get the rest of the things Apple needed for the iPhone to be an industry shaker -- which it already has been, despite the fact that it won't even be in consumer hands for a few more weeks. And Apple got a whole lot of stuff, some of it unprecedented including changes to the provider's network to support "visual voicemail". Companies like Verizon, even though they may provide good service to their customers, also are wed to the distorted market. They perceive bluetooth as a competitive threat, and cripple it in their phones to lock their customers into their ringtone sales engine and into paying extra to transfer photos from the phone to their computer. Apple's insistance that the iPhone not be hobbled by the carrier led Verizon to say "Thanks, we'll try it our way." But the Djinni is out of the bottle, on June 29. As consumers learn what these devices can really do, they'll be demanding blue tooth sync, 802.11 connection to their PCs, and other iPhone features from Verizon. Verizon will see its subscriber base shrink if they don't provide similar, un-hobbled capability to their customers.
3. HSPDA vs. EVDO
There's another interesting tidbit regarding the 3G network market in the U.S. that might be a factor. AT&T/T-Mobile/MISC GSM Vendors appear to be seriously lagging behind Verizon/Sprint/Alltell, which blanketed the U.S. Market with 2.4 Mbit EVDO data service many months ago. In fact this seems to be "common wisdom" amongst Slashdot / Gizmodo / Engadget geeks.
As everyone knows, AT&T and the many other network providers around the globe are betting on the other major 3G network technology, HSPDA. What seems to have been overlooked, in the frustration with the slow pace of 3G rollout from the GSM vendors, is that HSPDA seems on the brink of crushing EVDO in terms of bandwidth. According to that wikipedia page "Current HSDPA deployments now support 1.8 Mbit/s, 3.6 Mbit/s, 7.2 Mbit/s and 14.4 Mbit/s in downlink." One of my gadget geek friends was able to confirm that HSPDA service is available in his
the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons.
This article nicely describes a mechanism for tricking the brain with smart vibrations of the cell phone, providing a sense of tactile response on touch screens which might solve the issue with lack of tactile response for many touch screen use cases:
How it works: Touch Screen Cell
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, mods, that is an abuse of the mod system. You will be punished by the meta-mods.
Please consider studying a bit on the importance of open standards in the technology world. Many of the things that people take for granted today exist due to open standards, and might well not exist without them, or might exist but not be affordable to you. The issue is not about snobbery, that's just a FUD smokescreen you're blowing. You may like Microsoft and their products, but they have a long and well documented history of trying to crush open standards in order to prevent competition in the marketplace of software and technology. You may like Internet Explorer, but it has a well documented history of broken support for open standards. These things are not "bugs" or they would get fixed. The fact that they don't get fixed, for years and years, is indication that to some degree Microsoft intends IE to depart from the open standards, so that the "MUCH MUCH LARGER GROUP OF PEOPLE", sheeple that they are, will follow the herd to Microsoft land, and help cement Microsoft dominance by building broken web sites. If you own significant amounts of MSFT, then perhaps buy building broken web sites you are contributing to your own success. However, if you owned that much MSFT, you wouldn't be building web sites, would you?
I suggest starting here:
Open Standards: Principles and Practice
Open Standard
It was alleged that the spammers performed a DDoS on their web site and drove them out of business. They made an application called Blue Frog.
The iPhone would be very useful without a data plan, to anyone who spends most of their time in a WiFi hotspot. Why pay for pig-dog slow EDGE when you've got free WiFi all around you? (Notwithstanding the fact that this whole discussion is predicated on a rumor. Given the evil policies of wireless carriers, it will not surprise anyone if a data plan is required with the iPhone.)
The problem with this "wag the dog" conspiracy theory is that the technical issue is too subtle. Apple's objective with Safari for Windows is not to use some clever media wagging stunt to convince the few dozen remaining Slashdot geeks who don't already think that Apple takes security more seriously than Microsoft. Their objective instead is to capture a chunk, a big, big chunk, say twenty or thirty percent of the web browser market for standards-compliant browsers. If they can swing it, with Safari for Windows, then the world will see a decline in web sites that support IE only. This will benefit Apple, of course, but it will benefit everybody else, too. Alternative web browsers of all types will find it easier to grow their audience base when web sites become standards-compliant, rather than IE-bug-compliant. Apple, I assure you, would have preferred that they ship Safari with zero defects.
Your use of the term "fanboy" is an ad hominum attack, and serves only to undermine whatever rational arguments you might make. It has also become cliche here in Slashdot for anyone who seeks to rebuke (rather than rebut) any comment with which they disagree by tossing these dismissive accusations of fanboi about, no matter that the comment might be factually correct and logically consistent. Dismiss it all with "fanboy", you think you can, but you are about this also mistaken.
Apart from that, your argument is generally weak. All of the assertions in your argument could be true, without invalidating the documented truth of my proposition. It is a matter, now, of public record that Steve Jobs has been, for a long time, possibly since before you ever heard of the iPod, lobbying the recording industry in opposition to DRM. It is quite clear that Apple never would have been able to license the libraries of the recording companies if Apple hadn't developed solid DRM technology, and supported it diligently. It is rumored that the contracts Apple had to accept for the first round when the opened the iTunes music store even included out clauses for the record companies, giving them the right to revoke Apple's right to use their music libraries in the event that Apple's DRM failed to protect the music in question.
This isn't blind faith. It's not sentimentalism. It's just a rational analysis of the facts.
Anyone who thinks that Steve Jobs is not consciously trying to fix a broken cell phone industry simply isn't paying attention. It's quite clear that the cell phone handset makers think that their customer is the wireless carrier. The wireless carrier industry is an oligopoly. This combination of factors is directly responsible for the state of cell phone suckage, which is pretty severe, and has appeared to be intractable. Apple is very clearly trying to fix this broken industry by getting into a position where the handset maker and the wireless carrier realize that their ultimate customer is you -- the ultimate user of the cell phone handset and service.
If you want to blow my arguments out of the water, you're going to need to work a little harder at it. Whatever you think of Steve Jobs, it's pretty difficult to deny that he is one of the few true visionaries in the technology industry, with a proven track record of leading an often unwilling industry into their own brighter future, against their collective will. Sure perhaps that is a bit of a poetic way to express it, but it's hardly sentimentalism. The pace of evolution of the cell phone has been painfully slow. I'm not in a mood to be sentimental at all. I'm in a mood to see the problems fixed, and the only hope I see on the horizon is Apple. Nobody else was stepping up to the plate.
Well, to start with it's not clear if the WiFi will really be disabled without an EDGE service plan, or exactly what the AT&T service plan for the iPhone will be, so it seems a little premature to be issuing the big FU to the one guy on the planet who's trying to fix the cell phone industry. Recall, this is the same guy and the same company who tried to save the music industry from it's own stupidity. (Reference EMI's evolving position on DRM). You might want to give this a little time. Apple cannot fix the entire cell phone industry overnight, but they can fix some things up front, gain influence in the market, and use that influence to fix other problems later.
I agree that EDGE isn't exactly exciting, but it does have much better coverage than the newer 3G Networks in the U.S. It would be nice if the AT&T data plan for the iPhone bundled their AT&T WiFi Hotpot aka LaptopConnect service with EDGE.
The future of the AT&T wireless network shows signs of being much brighter. Their HSDPA is being improved and it appears that they are upgrading the existing sites to 14.4 Mbit/sec service. If they roll that technology out nationwide I for one would welcome our new high speed wireless overlords.
The posts that begin "Bzzzt! Wrong!" seem to follow a normal distribution, so I think it should be a separate filter, not tied to the "meh-hole" filter, but yes, perhaps a more generalized filtering mechanism is desired as suggested elsewhere in this thread.
Don't forget the iPhone has 802.11 networking built in. People spend so much time in hot spots these days that the lackluster performance of the EDGE network will be an occasional nuisance, not a crippling defect in the product. The future of 3G HSDPA networks looks pretty bright, too.
Not to quibble, but the price of Linux isn't really free as in beer, nor free as in speech. Starting with the latter, GPL is more restrictive, not less restrictive, than BSD/MIT style licenses. There may well be good reasons for that in terms of the viral ability of the GPL and the community building positive social value that it provides, but it is clearly more restrictive, not less restrictive, than these other licenses. BSD is the Rodney Dangerfield of operating systems. Linux fans should really give BSD distributions a little credit for being even more free, they deserve it. For example, Linux can borrow code from BSD distributions, but the converse is not necessarily true. Commercial companies can modify BSD for special, proprietary purposes, perhaps to the benefit of their customers, and keep their technology secret. That is not true for Linux. So Linux is not the be-all and end-all of free as in speech. BSD pretty much is the gold standard. Do whatever the heck you want with it, its free.
Regarding the beer, the cost of Linux and the cost of Windows are different, but perhaps equivalent, in terms of hours spent learning arcane and useless trivia. Mac OS X, at $129, and valuing one's time at about $100, or even $5 per hour, is clearly cheaper than either of those alternatives, due to the near complete and utter freedom from futzing that it provides.
I hope my karma can withstand the drubbing it's about to get.
You are so right! NeXT supported four different machine architectures at one time in the early 1990s: intel, m68k, sparc, and pa-risc. This recent Leopard development is not entirely without precedent in the industry. It was possible to produce one build of an application that ran just fine on all four architectures, too, although the install CD would only hold two architectures (m68k and intel on a single cd for example) so you had to get a separate install CD for sparc and pa-risc.
The Intel transition introduced 32-bit hardware into the mix again, for a while before the Core 2 Duo shipped, so Apple actually has both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of both PowerPC and Intel Core hardware in the installed customer base. The really nifty thing is that for applications that work on large amounts of data, even the older 64-bit PowerPC hardware will get a serious performance boost with Leopard for a mere $129. The newest member of that hardware pool will be two years old by the time Leopard ships, but some of those machines are still pretty nice. Their owners will be happy that Leopard treats them as full 64-bit citizens.
What Apple is accomplishing with seamless support for those four machine architectures from one build of Mac OS X is quite impressive. It also preserves Apple's ability to adopt new CPU architectures as needed. Suppose Apple came up with an idea for an appliance for which the Cell processor would be an ideal choice? Apple could certainly ship such a device without breaking a sweat.
Furthermore, suppose Apple wanted to use OS X as the operating system on a new bit of hardware that required, say, a low power CPU like the ARM that happened to be 32-bit, say a cell pone or something. If the OS is designed to cleanly handle both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, then the same version of the OS could be used across all five architectures.
The five year history of Apple's share price indicates that Apple's strictly enforced policies regarding secrecy of their product plans is probably not hurting the company in any way. Considering the lackluster performance of other companies that blabber on and on and on about their half-baked plans that never mature, one might well conclude that this policy is helping Apple shareholders, even if it comes at the expense of occasional inconvenience.
That said, ZFS is probably not important enough for Apple to punish Sun over a set of flapping gums. If you want a better conspiracy theory, perhaps Apple was testing Sun to see if they could keep a secret. The answer is "No."
Really, though, everybody knows ZFS is interesting, and Apple is porting it to Mac OS X. It's quite likely that nobody at Apple knows when or if ZFS on Mac OS X will be mature enough to become a candidate for replacing the default filesystem. It probably won't happen before October, but that's not to say it will never happen.
The larger pattern of which this is one example seems to indicate that many people don't read, except Slashdot and other geek discussion forums, blogs, etc., In turn, this leads to a self-perpetuating defect. A meme, if you will, mutates, and replicates in this pool because the corrective mechanisms are weak. It then may rise to dominance in a limited domain of Slashdot, for example, if people don't spend enough time reading outside materials. (We already know the articles are often not read.) People see these things misspelled more often than not. If they don't read sources from literature or properly edited magazines or newspapers then they pick up the wrong spelling or usage, and add to the noise. The feedback loop builds as other people are then more likely to encounter the incorrect usages or spellings more frequently than they otherwise would.
Not to pick on you, (really) but I have noticed a pattern. For some reason, any post which starts with "meh" is pretty much useless. Brief investigation indicates that most posts by most people who start some posts with "meh" tend to be content free, and sometimes vaguely hostile. I wonder if Slashdot could implement a new rule in the lameness filter for this, or perhaps some type of filtering system, so that the rest of us don't even need to know these people exist. Like, if somebody starts a post with "meh" they get added to a list that I can subscribe to, and then I can set a preference to a "-5, meh-hole" mod. or something. The regular mod system should have "-1, meh-hole" added to it, too.
No, it only indicates that a single person is dangerous and irresponsible.
Your argument assumes that the widely publicised "intelligence failures" in the United States can be solved by supplying additional funds. Since some of the most important "failures", those with the greatest consequences, were actually the result of policy failures (or perhaps worse, manipulation of the evidence at a policy level), and were not failures in data collection or analysis, I suspect that doubling the funds might actually be dangerous. Perhaps we could spend half as much money, and the consequences of "failure" would be reduced. Impossible to build a solid case for this argument without at least some amount of detailed data about how the money is spent of course, but worth pondering.
egads. I need an editor. Thank you for the correction.
- January 10, 2007: MacWorld 2007 keynote, introduces iPhone
- Apple.com iPhone web site
- A couple interviews showing the phone, letting reporters hold it for a couple minutes
- A very few magazine articles with access to Steve Jobs and the iPhone
- Super Bowl "Hello" iPhone commercial
- June 3, 2007: Apple starts running four new commercials that demonstrate features of the phone
Really, this is far, far less promotion than you see for typical new products. Heck, hamburgers at Burger King get more hype than this, by far, in a six month period. Even though they probably eat a whole bunch of them, bloggers don't get excited and blog about it.Apple's biggest contribution to the "hype" came from keeping the project secret until it was up to a point where it could be demonstrated, and then keeping their mouths shut after the MacWorld Keynote, and refusing to answer questions about anything that wasn't demonstrated by Steve Jobs on January 10.
What we're seeing in the media, blogs, and in meatspace is, I think, genuine excitement. People can look at the information that's available, which is I grant you incomplete, but they can also look at the phone in their hand. They can tell immediately that several things they don't like about their phone are fixed by the iPhone. Visual Voicemail is damned exciting. A phone that can access the internet simply and easily is exciting. The Google Maps commercial makes girls squeel and giggle with delight when they see the pins drop... (try it sometime.) I don't think it's hype. I think it's genuine interest.
I just got a RAZR V3M and Verizon deliberately disabled the OBEX function (Object Exchange) which was probably enabled by accident on the V3C, since it's been diabled on most of the other Verizon phones since it was invented.
There. I fixed it for you.
It's definitely not just about aesthetics of the device. The primary driver behind the iPhone form factor is efficient use of device front real-estate. Buttons have been proliferating like mad on "smart phones for years, and it's not helping them sell to the broader market. Why? Well, the devices intimidate some users. Other users find them to be cumbersome. 40% of the surface is keypad, leaving only a tiny screen you can't really use for much besides text messages. They buttons can't be changed after they are stamped out. You may want QUERTY, somebody else might want right-hand-Dvorak. Somebody else wants a two-thumb layout. You may want a numeric keypad layout when you're dialing, but no other time.
Yes, the touch screen could be seen as a design risk, and it's possible that it will be rejected by the market. There are undoubtedly other people like you who are adicted to buttons, and dialing in the dark. I suspect that even most of those people will find that they can adapt to the iPhone easily enough, particularly if it provides haptic feedback as a user preference. (Some people might want that turned off -- something you can't do with a button.)
It's not about ssh, X Windows, or iWork. The current "smart phone" industry is providing people with a big heavy feature they don't presently want -- MS Office on their phone. Yeah, it makes for dramatic commercials where spreadsheets are edited at the last second before a big meeting and a billion dollar merger is saved. In practice, people running billion dollar mergers don't really care what's in the spreadsheet. They don't read them, they have people who have people who read them for them. This feature was added to smart phones by Microsoft because Excel is what they had lying about to sell, and because it makes for dramatic advertisements.
The iPhone is about a balance of features that people really want. Business people would love an iPod in their phone, because they spend a fair bit of time on airplanes, in hotels, in airports, in taxi cabs. They also would love an easy to use map system that could help them find a decent restaurant nearby. The Apple iPhone commercials don't look like they target business users, but they nail squarely what a business user wants from a phone. They want to carry less shit with them. They want to be able to quickly look up something on the internet, or bookmark something they heard about for reference later. They're going to buy an iPhone and their older iPod and Palm Pilot will be in a drawer.
The biggest thing, however, will be ease of use. If the Address book doesn't have some asinine limit of 500 contact numbers (it wont') and if it syncs easily and reliably (it will) and if the web browser really works and if Google Maps are easy to use on the iPhone, these things are going to be the hottest new business gadget since the original Palm Pilot.
It's about efficiency. Carry one or two fewer devices everywhere I go. Carry one device that's easy to learn and easy to use, rather than so hard to learn that many users don't even know about the advanced features and so hard to use that the advanced features they know about rarely get touched. Sending text messages, checking email, and placing and receiving calls need to work well.
A few business people I know are going to get an iPhone for one feature: visual voicemail (random access to voicemail queue). They calculate that the time and annoyance they will save with that single feature more than justifies the cost of the device.
This story seems to provide a pretty reasonable background on the deal: How Steve Jobs Played Hardball In iPhone Birth: In Deal With Cingular He Called The Shots; Flirting With Verizon . It provides some clues as to the complexity of the negotiations that Apple engaged in. It doesn't cover everything, though.
1. Retail channel
There were many big problems to solve simultaneously, perhaps including one that couldn't be solved any other way, than partnering with at least one carrier: consumers today buy cell phones from wireless providers. That meant that Apple had to get the iPhone into wireless stores to really break into the market with anything other than a hobbyist handset maker niche. AT&T has over 2000 stores in the U.S., apparently. Other large wireless providers are similar in scale of retail presence. Wireless providers have stores in airports, big malls, little malls, downtown areas, inside of other stores like Radio Shack, Costco, etc. Apple couldn't build that kind of retail network in time to sell the iPhone, it needed to get the device into places where people were already looking for phones.
2. Give and Take of Negotiations & Shaking the Industry
I suspect that Apple would have preferred to be able to secure deals with multiple vendors in the U.S. However, the cell phone industry is seriously distorted, globally, not merely in the U.S. The handset makers think that the wireless carrier is the customer, which is the ultimate cause of cell phone suckage. Cell phones are camels designed by committes of people who have never even imagined a desert oasis, let alone been to one. Apple probably had to grant a period of exclusivity to Cingular / AT&T in order to get the rest of the things Apple needed for the iPhone to be an industry shaker -- which it already has been, despite the fact that it won't even be in consumer hands for a few more weeks. And Apple got a whole lot of stuff, some of it unprecedented including changes to the provider's network to support "visual voicemail". Companies like Verizon, even though they may provide good service to their customers, also are wed to the distorted market. They perceive bluetooth as a competitive threat, and cripple it in their phones to lock their customers into their ringtone sales engine and into paying extra to transfer photos from the phone to their computer. Apple's insistance that the iPhone not be hobbled by the carrier led Verizon to say "Thanks, we'll try it our way." But the Djinni is out of the bottle, on June 29. As consumers learn what these devices can really do, they'll be demanding blue tooth sync, 802.11 connection to their PCs, and other iPhone features from Verizon. Verizon will see its subscriber base shrink if they don't provide similar, un-hobbled capability to their customers.
3. HSPDA vs. EVDO
There's another interesting tidbit regarding the 3G network market in the U.S. that might be a factor. AT&T/T-Mobile/MISC GSM Vendors appear to be seriously lagging behind Verizon/Sprint/Alltell, which blanketed the U.S. Market with 2.4 Mbit EVDO data service many months ago. In fact this seems to be "common wisdom" amongst Slashdot / Gizmodo / Engadget geeks. As everyone knows, AT&T and the many other network providers around the globe are betting on the other major 3G network technology, HSPDA. What seems to have been overlooked, in the frustration with the slow pace of 3G rollout from the GSM vendors, is that HSPDA seems on the brink of crushing EVDO in terms of bandwidth. According to that wikipedia page "Current HSDPA deployments now support 1.8 Mbit/s, 3.6 Mbit/s, 7.2 Mbit/s and 14.4 Mbit/s in downlink." One of my gadget geek friends was able to confirm that HSPDA service is available in his