Given the fact that nearly every time I mention this problem I'm slapped with a troll mod, as well as some of the other issues mentioned here (most of which I've also seen) I suspect that somebody (or more than one somebody) with unlimited or nearly unlimited mod points has a stick up their sphincter about this issue. There's a theoretical foundation for understanding why somebody slaps Trolls down on stuff they don't agree with, but why on Earth would they slap them down so reliably on "fix the damn moderation system" posts? Only if they're an Slashdot Editor, I suspect.
You're also lazy, and ill informed. You could have spent a fraction of a second (0.15 seconds) with Google to find about 3,860,000 results for the search term "Rasmussen bias" to discover that, yes, in fact, there is some discussion of this point.
Nate Silver on Possible Biasin Rasmussen Reports
"What Rasmussen has had is a "house effect". So far in the 2010 cycle, their polling has consistently and predictably shown better results for Republican candidates than other polling firms have. But such house effects can emerge from legitimate differences of opinion about how to model the electorate. And ultimately, these differences of opinion will be tested -- based on what happens next November. If Rasmussen's opinion turns out to be wildly inaccurate, that will impeach their credibility, and believe me, we will point that out. Likewise, if they turn out to be right when most other pollsters are wrong, we will point that out too."
There is also a glut of self serving, biased, and unqualified people with mod points at Slashdot. The troll mods around these parts are out of fucking control There really needs to be a more effective check on that, or Slashdot will continue its long slow slide toward a Usenet / Digg / YouTubeComments quality of discussion.
Moderators, if you're trawling for non-negative comments concerning Apple products, so you can slap a Troll mod down, you need to get out of your parents' basement once in a while and get some fresh air. My comment ("the least annoying mouse I've ever used") to people who understand the English language better than most Slashdot native speakers should be considered, "Damning with feint praise" and rated "Funny".
I was initially skeptical that this might be software related, but recent rumors have a plausible software theory. The new iOS 4 has a new algorithm for picking the tower and channel that the phone uses, when it can see more than one. It appears that this mechanism may have a defect which is triggered by attenuating the signal (such as by bridging the two antennae with salty skin). This appears to cause the phone to decide to attempt switching channels. The speculation is that the timing is off, and the phone sometimes reports "no signal" rather than deciding to switch or stay put.
The issue described is plausible, and fits some of the observations.
Some folk can reproduce this problem, basically at will (one of the magazine review sites).
Other folk are unable to reproduce this problem, at all (another reviewer at the NYT).
At least some folk who can reproduce this issue are doing so in areas where reception was previously known to be marginal (including one of my developers at his house).
The problem may have been harder to diagnose during Apple's testing, due to pre-release testing taking place inside insulated cases, thus the problem would be triggered less often, and not in associate with anything special that the user would notice (holding the phone in a certain way). The frequency of dropped calls might have been within the "normal" range for the AT&T network, given the small sample size of a few hundred test users. (Apple's off site testing includes hundreds of people, but that's actually a pretty small sample size, compared to the 600,000 people using the phone today.)
It will be interesting to see if a software patch emerges within a few days or even weeks, and cures this issue. If it does, I'll think back to several cell phones I had previously, which had problems that I could and did reproduce, and reported clearly to the vendors (both network and cell maker) and for which no patches were forthcoming, ever, during the life of the phone. Regular software updates for iPhone are a damn sight better than the old way, where the answer to any problem was "buy the new version of the phone you just bought a month ago".
Oh, you have no idea. Clearly you never had a Motorola StarTac. Dropped calls like you drop the soap in the prison of your raging fanboi mind. (Others may wish to know that it dropped calls as often as several times during a ten minute call.)
Contrast that with a full year of using the first generation iPhone (including much time in Washington DC, one of the most problematic areas, due to population density, and in remote areas of Nebraska, Iowa, Montana, and Wyoming, as well as other more populous areas including Houston Texas and Stamford Connecticut.) I had only a handful of dropped calls.
Nearly all of those were at a particular location in Washington DC where AT&T couldn't get the towers adjusted properly (they actually came to the site more than once to make measurements) because too many towers were visible to the phone from that location, and the tower with the strongest signal had the most traffic. I reported this issue, first to AT&T, then through Apple's developer program, describing the problem clearly and giving them the contact information for the AT&T engineer that I worked with. It took a couple years, but guess what? iPhone 4 and iOS 4 have design changes to improve performance in that exact situation, by being smarter about which tower to join. This issue turned out to be fairly common in dense population areas, and I had friends who had what appeared to be similar problems with Verizon. (Getting to this point with AT&T took an amazing amount of persistence by the way, but I was able to speak with the engineer.)
The only other pattern that I observed was dropping calls at a particular place on a freeway, where the phone failed to switch between cell towers, which it normally did fine, except in this particular location (every single time).
So, half your iPhone user sample owns a case, yet you can think of none who use their iPhone without a case. Do the non-case-owning half borrow a case from the case-owning half whenever they want to take their phone out for a walk, or what? Nearly every iPhone user that I know goes commando. Oh, wait. They don't use an iPhone case, either.
Oh, I guess that's funny in a Slashdot sorta way, but I'm not the first person to notice that conventions of programmers, like Java One, or BSDCon or various hacker and security geek conferences are seas of glowing Apple logos, the past few years. I know that among the programmers I know, it's actually the best programmers (the ones that I would recruit for any project on any platform with any language) who are nearly all on Mac OS X. Maintenance programmers tend to stick with the platform they work on during the day (usually Windows), but even some of those have switched to the Mac at home.
I haven't seen a full teardown of a finished unit, but the iPhone 4 keynote appeared to show that there are two antennae, and the steel band is made from two parts, not three. One of the black stripes appears to be to preserve visual symmetry on the bottom of the phone.
You raise an issue worthy of further consideration. It was first posed succinctly by the fictional character from Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery. Dr. Evil: "Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?" (Similarly, Scott Adams states this as the Dilbert Principle, we are all stupid, about most things, most of the time.) With the rise of civilization and technology has come increased complexity. Unfortunately, we seem, on average, to be ill equipped to cope with it. It's amazing we can get things done at all, really, when you think about the difficulty we have making what ought to be simple decisions.
Consider this week the news is full of European countries enacting substantial budget cuts. We know that's the wrong thing to do. It times of economic prosperity, we should run balanced budgets or pay down national debt. When faced with a recession so enormous that people invoke the Great Depression as an analog, though we have only about 20% unemployment, rather than 30% or more, this situation is dire. We know that we must run deficits, large ones, in order to create a demand stimulus large enough to moderate this trough of the economic cycle. Nonetheless, we have politicians trying to score political points by railing against deficit spending -- which didn't bother them for the past 8 years when they were in charge.
The problem is profound, widespread ignorance, but not merely ignorance as in the mere unawareness of relevant facts. It's ignorance that makes one blind to the limits of one's own ability to asses one's own capability. Smearing lemon juice on your face doesn't make you invisible to security cameras. If you think it does, then you're not qualified to be a bank robber, but you're also not qualified to assess many, many other issues -- foremost among them, you're not qualified to assess your sills as a bank robber, and are likely to be utterly ignorant as to the possibility that you might not be able to assess those skills without outside assistance. Presented with relevant facts, these people remain impervious to rational assessment of a situation. They are so poorly equipped that they can't evaluate their own ignorance.
After the first disaster which destroyed a Space Shuttle and killed all the astronauts aboard, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate, by President Reagan. Its members included the nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. Feynman wrote his own appendix to the official report of the committee. It's one of the most fascinating documents, and should be required reading for any engineer, politician, manager, or judge. It ranks up there with The Selfish Gene, Goedel Escher, Bach, and The Mythical Man Month.
The lesson of the Challenger disaster directly applies to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout disaster. Simply because we haven't had a disaster yet does not in any way imply that we are not doing things, lots of things, which are likely to lead to a disaster.
This problem applies to big problems, like managing national budgets, building and flying reusable spacecraft, drilling a mile under the ocean surface for oil -- and to small problems, like using mod points on Slashdot.
One well known contributor to what people call "eye strain" is a bright room environment (a sunlit room) contrasted with a dimmer display. The contrast ratio of the device itself contributes to reduced eyestrain, if black and white are more distinct from one another.
This isn't a mystery. iOS 4 will be available for the iPad this fall. The iPad development track was a secret project with a tiny staff, which started from a fork of iPhone OS 3. Their work needs to be ported over to iOS 4, and the iOS 4 needs to be ported to the iPad. Good food takes time.
It's unfortunate that you haven't considered the major difference between Apple and Microsoft in your analysis. Apple is a major backer of another platform, not just Cocoa Touch. The open standards based internet is supported by Apple and Google, and undermined by Microsoft at nearly every turn. Sure, there are valid criticisms of Apple's curated platform, Cocoa Touch, but there is a vast difference between them and Microsoft.
Nah. The handful of folk searching for IOS will start typing "Cisco IOS" in the search field. Who knows, Cisco might even be on the verge of renaming IOS, given their efforts to expand into the enterprise server market.
If I'd been running iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS for a while now, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you that you are repeating claims which are inconsistent with my experience.
I expect most app developers will move quickly to iOS4, given the small and declining incentive to develop and test for continuing compatibility with previous iPhone OS releases.
People who are not on iOS4 within the next 30 days, even if they represent a fraction of the market, say 1/5 or even 1/3, will be dramatically underrepresented amongst the pool of people buying apps. People who won't download a free OS upgrade are unlikely to be buying apps.
First generation devices are only a few percent of the total user base, already, and shrinking every month. Mostly, it will be the crackers and pirates on 2nd generation devices who will be stuck on iPhone OS 3.x for awhile. Since that entire pool only every buys one app to share amongst them, there's not much profit being left on the table if you don't serve them.
The statistics you present appear to be for an app which isn't typical, and which has such a small sample size as to be probably irrelevant (7.2% simulator?!) For the last few months, consumer apps with large distributions typically see something around 2% of their users (+/1 one or two percent) on first generation devices (total). This doesn't really change your conclusion, but you might want to be careful about what other conclusions you draw from that sample.
Well, assuming your claim is true, you wrote malware which included trojan and virus features. There are tens of thousands of those on Windows. They can replicate through a variety of mechanisms which don't require users to provide special authorization, or even take any action (viruses), propagate to other systems via network accessible security holes (worms) or trick the user into clicking something (trojans). Perhaps you have an english-as-a-second-language issue, but trojans are still not viruses, even when you link them into the same binary. You might want to rethink that last statement you just made.
Well, a billion dollar a year company really isn't all that big, and there are several examples of software companies in that range, unlike "bicycle pump manufacturers". The question is realistic. What it really amounts to is, "Why hasn't RedHat been more successful?" The nature of the fragmentation in the Linux market is an obvious issue, but is fragmentation and project forking the only limiting factor in the growth of these companies?
Mostly agreed. A related point is that people seem to be assuming that an "open source company" is something like RedHat, which charges money for support for an open source software product, typically under a GPL license, apparently because the people behind the project and/or the company fear being crushed by a fork that doesn't share back.
There are no examples of raging success of that model, but some modest successes.
A slightly different model is pursued by Apple. It supports a number of interesting open source projects. Sure, Darwin doesn't really seem to be used by anybody other than Apple and it's customers, but WebKit and LLVM, for example are widely used by others. The licenses for these projects tend to be BSD-style licenses, and the projects receive substantial support not only from Apple but other profit seeking enterprises as well.
Perhaps it's time to re-think the business approach to open source software, and the open source project's approach to business. There's an alternative model which seems to be worth pondering.
"In that sense its a proprietary apple project for which they've opened up the parts that they think won't give anyone else a competitive advantage against them. "
Free. Not encumbered in any way. No bullshit pseudo libertarian crap about distinctions between free beer and speech. The entire LLVM project is completely bloody f'ing free. It's a damn sight more free than the almost but not quite really free gcc.
LLVM is an entirely free and open source code to a complete compiler, several front ends, several back ends, optimization code. Better than that, it's all implemented as libraries you can easily compile in and link with your code. And a standardized Intermediate Representation. And today they added a free debugger under the same entirely free and entirely open terms. For free.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the fact that nearly every time I mention this problem I'm slapped with a troll mod, as well as some of the other issues mentioned here (most of which I've also seen) I suspect that somebody (or more than one somebody) with unlimited or nearly unlimited mod points has a stick up their sphincter about this issue. There's a theoretical foundation for understanding why somebody slaps Trolls down on stuff they don't agree with, but why on Earth would they slap them down so reliably on "fix the damn moderation system" posts? Only if they're an Slashdot Editor, I suspect.
There is also a glut of self serving, biased, and unqualified people with mod points at Slashdot. The troll mods around these parts are out of fucking control There really needs to be a more effective check on that, or Slashdot will continue its long slow slide toward a Usenet / Digg / YouTubeComments quality of discussion.
Moderators, if you're trawling for non-negative comments concerning Apple products, so you can slap a Troll mod down, you need to get out of your parents' basement once in a while and get some fresh air. My comment ("the least annoying mouse I've ever used") to people who understand the English language better than most Slashdot native speakers should be considered, "Damning with feint praise" and rated "Funny".
Death Grip hysteria may end Monday with iOS 4.01
The issue described is plausible, and fits some of the observations.
It will be interesting to see if a software patch emerges within a few days or even weeks, and cures this issue. If it does, I'll think back to several cell phones I had previously, which had problems that I could and did reproduce, and reported clearly to the vendors (both network and cell maker) and for which no patches were forthcoming, ever, during the life of the phone. Regular software updates for iPhone are a damn sight better than the old way, where the answer to any problem was "buy the new version of the phone you just bought a month ago".
Agreed. The Apple Magic Mouse is the least annoying mouse I've ever used. I still prefer the trackpad on a MacBook Pro, however.
Oh, you have no idea. Clearly you never had a Motorola StarTac. Dropped calls like you drop the soap in the prison of your raging fanboi mind. (Others may wish to know that it dropped calls as often as several times during a ten minute call.)
Contrast that with a full year of using the first generation iPhone (including much time in Washington DC, one of the most problematic areas, due to population density, and in remote areas of Nebraska, Iowa, Montana, and Wyoming, as well as other more populous areas including Houston Texas and Stamford Connecticut.) I had only a handful of dropped calls.
Nearly all of those were at a particular location in Washington DC where AT&T couldn't get the towers adjusted properly (they actually came to the site more than once to make measurements) because too many towers were visible to the phone from that location, and the tower with the strongest signal had the most traffic. I reported this issue, first to AT&T, then through Apple's developer program, describing the problem clearly and giving them the contact information for the AT&T engineer that I worked with. It took a couple years, but guess what? iPhone 4 and iOS 4 have design changes to improve performance in that exact situation, by being smarter about which tower to join. This issue turned out to be fairly common in dense population areas, and I had friends who had what appeared to be similar problems with Verizon. (Getting to this point with AT&T took an amazing amount of persistence by the way, but I was able to speak with the engineer.)
The only other pattern that I observed was dropping calls at a particular place on a freeway, where the phone failed to switch between cell towers, which it normally did fine, except in this particular location (every single time).
So, half your iPhone user sample owns a case, yet you can think of none who use their iPhone without a case. Do the non-case-owning half borrow a case from the case-owning half whenever they want to take their phone out for a walk, or what? Nearly every iPhone user that I know goes commando. Oh, wait. They don't use an iPhone case, either.
Oh, I guess that's funny in a Slashdot sorta way, but I'm not the first person to notice that conventions of programmers, like Java One, or BSDCon or various hacker and security geek conferences are seas of glowing Apple logos, the past few years. I know that among the programmers I know, it's actually the best programmers (the ones that I would recruit for any project on any platform with any language) who are nearly all on Mac OS X. Maintenance programmers tend to stick with the platform they work on during the day (usually Windows), but even some of those have switched to the Mac at home.
I haven't seen a full teardown of a finished unit, but the iPhone 4 keynote appeared to show that there are two antennae, and the steel band is made from two parts, not three. One of the black stripes appears to be to preserve visual symmetry on the bottom of the phone.
You raise an issue worthy of further consideration. It was first posed succinctly by the fictional character from Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery. Dr. Evil: "Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?" (Similarly, Scott Adams states this as the Dilbert Principle, we are all stupid, about most things, most of the time.) With the rise of civilization and technology has come increased complexity. Unfortunately, we seem, on average, to be ill equipped to cope with it. It's amazing we can get things done at all, really, when you think about the difficulty we have making what ought to be simple decisions.
Consider this week the news is full of European countries enacting substantial budget cuts. We know that's the wrong thing to do. It times of economic prosperity, we should run balanced budgets or pay down national debt. When faced with a recession so enormous that people invoke the Great Depression as an analog, though we have only about 20% unemployment, rather than 30% or more, this situation is dire. We know that we must run deficits, large ones, in order to create a demand stimulus large enough to moderate this trough of the economic cycle. Nonetheless, we have politicians trying to score political points by railing against deficit spending -- which didn't bother them for the past 8 years when they were in charge.
The problem is profound, widespread ignorance, but not merely ignorance as in the mere unawareness of relevant facts. It's ignorance that makes one blind to the limits of one's own ability to asses one's own capability. Smearing lemon juice on your face doesn't make you invisible to security cameras. If you think it does, then you're not qualified to be a bank robber, but you're also not qualified to assess many, many other issues -- foremost among them, you're not qualified to assess your sills as a bank robber, and are likely to be utterly ignorant as to the possibility that you might not be able to assess those skills without outside assistance. Presented with relevant facts, these people remain impervious to rational assessment of a situation. They are so poorly equipped that they can't evaluate their own ignorance.
The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)
After the first disaster which destroyed a Space Shuttle and killed all the astronauts aboard, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate, by President Reagan. Its members included the nobel prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. Feynman wrote his own appendix to the official report of the committee. It's one of the most fascinating documents, and should be required reading for any engineer, politician, manager, or judge . It ranks up there with The Selfish Gene, Goedel Escher, Bach, and The Mythical Man Month.
Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
Feynman's Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident
The lesson of the Challenger disaster directly applies to the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout disaster. Simply because we haven't had a disaster yet does not in any way imply that we are not doing things, lots of things, which are likely to lead to a disaster.
This problem applies to big problems, like managing national budgets, building and flying reusable spacecraft, drilling a mile under the ocean surface for oil -- and to small problems, like using mod points on Slashdot.
One well known contributor to what people call "eye strain" is a bright room environment (a sunlit room) contrasted with a dimmer display. The contrast ratio of the device itself contributes to reduced eyestrain, if black and white are more distinct from one another.
Anyone that up-modded you should read this: The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) because they are too stupid to wield mod points.
This isn't a mystery. iOS 4 will be available for the iPad this fall. The iPad development track was a secret project with a tiny staff, which started from a fork of iPhone OS 3. Their work needs to be ported over to iOS 4, and the iOS 4 needs to be ported to the iPad. Good food takes time.
It's unfortunate that you haven't considered the major difference between Apple and Microsoft in your analysis. Apple is a major backer of another platform, not just Cocoa Touch. The open standards based internet is supported by Apple and Google, and undermined by Microsoft at nearly every turn. Sure, there are valid criticisms of Apple's curated platform, Cocoa Touch, but there is a vast difference between them and Microsoft.
Nah. The handful of folk searching for IOS will start typing "Cisco IOS" in the search field. Who knows, Cisco might even be on the verge of renaming IOS, given their efforts to expand into the enterprise server market.
If I'd been running iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS for a while now, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you that you are repeating claims which are inconsistent with my experience.
Not to worry. You can spank your monkey all you want, with your new iOS update. HTML is the preferred platform for pr0n, or didn't you get the memo?
I expect most app developers will move quickly to iOS4, given the small and declining incentive to develop and test for continuing compatibility with previous iPhone OS releases.
People who are not on iOS4 within the next 30 days, even if they represent a fraction of the market, say 1/5 or even 1/3, will be dramatically underrepresented amongst the pool of people buying apps. People who won't download a free OS upgrade are unlikely to be buying apps.
First generation devices are only a few percent of the total user base, already, and shrinking every month. Mostly, it will be the crackers and pirates on 2nd generation devices who will be stuck on iPhone OS 3.x for awhile. Since that entire pool only every buys one app to share amongst them, there's not much profit being left on the table if you don't serve them.
The statistics you present appear to be for an app which isn't typical, and which has such a small sample size as to be probably irrelevant (7.2% simulator?!) For the last few months, consumer apps with large distributions typically see something around 2% of their users (+/1 one or two percent) on first generation devices (total). This doesn't really change your conclusion, but you might want to be careful about what other conclusions you draw from that sample.
Well, assuming your claim is true, you wrote malware which included trojan and virus features. There are tens of thousands of those on Windows. They can replicate through a variety of mechanisms which don't require users to provide special authorization, or even take any action (viruses), propagate to other systems via network accessible security holes (worms) or trick the user into clicking something (trojans). Perhaps you have an english-as-a-second-language issue, but trojans are still not viruses, even when you link them into the same binary. You might want to rethink that last statement you just made.
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." --Benjamin Franklin
Updated: Like dude, ever heard of Google?
You assumed incorrectly.
Well, a billion dollar a year company really isn't all that big, and there are several examples of software companies in that range, unlike "bicycle pump manufacturers". The question is realistic. What it really amounts to is, "Why hasn't RedHat been more successful?" The nature of the fragmentation in the Linux market is an obvious issue, but is fragmentation and project forking the only limiting factor in the growth of these companies?
Mostly agreed. A related point is that people seem to be assuming that an "open source company" is something like RedHat, which charges money for support for an open source software product, typically under a GPL license, apparently because the people behind the project and/or the company fear being crushed by a fork that doesn't share back.
There are no examples of raging success of that model, but some modest successes.
A slightly different model is pursued by Apple. It supports a number of interesting open source projects. Sure, Darwin doesn't really seem to be used by anybody other than Apple and it's customers, but WebKit and LLVM, for example are widely used by others. The licenses for these projects tend to be BSD-style licenses, and the projects receive substantial support not only from Apple but other profit seeking enterprises as well.
Perhaps it's time to re-think the business approach to open source software, and the open source project's approach to business. There's an alternative model which seems to be worth pondering.
Free. Not encumbered in any way. No bullshit pseudo libertarian crap about distinctions between free beer and speech. The entire LLVM project is completely bloody f'ing free . It's a damn sight more free than the almost but not quite really free gcc.
LLVM is an entirely free and open source code to a complete compiler, several front ends, several back ends, optimization code. Better than that, it's all implemented as libraries you can easily compile in and link with your code. And a standardized Intermediate Representation. And today they added a free debugger under the same entirely free and entirely open terms. For free.
Go troll elsewhere, GPL freak.