That depends very much on which kind of model you use. Some models have a tiny sensor and lens, others have good optics and sensors. Most of them beat the iPhone's camera hands down.
The point being people buy the iPhone by choice, and get Symbian because it is cheaper- but never actually use the device.
Sorry, but that's a ridiculous interpretation. If that were the case, people would only buy the most basic Nokia phones. But phones like the N95 and E71 have been big successes despite their high prices.
(You're seriously trapped in Apple's reality distortion field.)
Symbian signing is pain, but the criteria for it are technical; it's not a question of whether anybody "approves", it's a question of whether your app passes a bunch of compliance criteria.
Well, if you're trying to suggest that you can get an unlocked iPhone for less (i.e., an original US iPhone that has never been locked, as opposed to an iPhone that was bought locked and then unlocked), please let us know where.
The only original, Apple-supplied, unlocked iPhones I know of ship in Europe, and they are really expensive.
(Of course, even at $600, a price bandied around here, they are still much more expensive than an entry-level DSLR.)
I don't know where you checked, but the highest I've found it is 900$ for the 32GB
There are no unlocked iPhones officially sold in the US at all; what you're getting is either a gray market import or some kind of hacked phone or SIM workaround. Whether that's going to continue to work is anybody's guess.
New, Apple-supported unlocked iPhones are available only in Europe (because it's the law), and they cost about EU 950 for the 3GS.
I sure hope you're not citing a number that's not USD. In USD, the cost for an unlocked iPhone is $599.
AFAIK, there are officially no unlocked, no-contract iPhone 3GS being sold at all in the US. You can get them in Europe, and they cost about EU 950.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of Symbian users are of the variety, "Oh this thing? It's the crappy phone Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/Tmobile gave me for free.
I don't know of any US carrier that has "free" Symbian phones; the phones you're thinking of are Nokia's low-end dumb phones.
The phones we're talking about here are phones like the E71, E90, N95, N86, etc. People who shell out hundreds of dollars to buy them know why they're doing it: great cameras, user installable apps, tethering, etc. The user interface on those phones is not as sexy as the iPhone, but in terms of capabilities and quality, they run rings around the iPhone.
I would sure love to have a "real" camera from Apple.
Samsung, Nokia, and several other manufacturers already offer 5-8 Mpixel cameras with smart phone capabilities. They have automatic geo-tagging and automatic upload. You can get these phones with Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, and (soon) Linux/Maemo. You can program them in C, C++, Java, and, in some cases, Python and C#. Samsung even has HD video.
I don't see anything that Apple brings to the table. Apple's iPhone already costs more than twice than what those other phones cost, it's less capable, has worse battery life, can only be programmed in Apple-approved languages, and has severe restrictions on the kind of software you can write for it. And Apple's overall market share is small compared to Symbian.
Price it to compete with entry level DSLR
An unlocked iPhone 3GS without a two year contract already costs around $1400, about three times the price of an entry-level DSLR (if you buy it with a contract, you pay the same, it's just hidden in your monthly fees).
I suspect they may not actually give you the source code (but someone correct me if I'm wrong). Most likely, they are using BSD-licensed software somewhere in there. If that's the case, it's not very useful. Microsoft Windows uses plenty of BSD-licensed code as well.
"It's open source--you just can't get the source."
"It's open source (which means that if it doesn't work, we can point the finger at someone else)."
"All the buzzword compliance of open source without the many pesky braces and semicolons."
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
OS X is basically Mach, NeXTStep, and Objective-C, all technologies from the 1980's. Arguably, Windows is actually more modern, with a more object-oriented kernel, CLR, its presentation framework, and languages like C# and F#.
Of course, there is more than modernity to making a good OS. Actually, needless innovation and needless complexity is one of the most common problems with operating systems.
WiFi hotspots work for covering businesses, but they spend a lot of money for covering and maintaining a small area.
For something like a whole city, WiFi simply isn't the right technology: its range is too limited, the protocols aren't designed for it, and it requires too much maintenance.
Cities can (and probably should) try to offer access in public places: parks, public squares, public buildings.
Of course, with the screen down to 640x480 and with a modal dialog up it may be just a little bit hard to back out and search the internet for the mythical command key shortcut you need.
Well, so what? If you don't know about the shortcut, you're no worse off than you're on Windows or Macintosh in the same situation.
Furthermore, on Linux, these kinds of dialogs tend not be modal; modal dialogs locking up the UI are a common misfeature of Windows and Macintosh applications.
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux all have these kinds of problems. The difference is that Linux has a lot more ways in which you can get out of them if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're no worse off than on the other platforms.
No you don't. If I resize the screen to 640x480 on Windoze or Mac, even though the "okay" button is off the screen, I can still access it by using the Enter key, and thereby get back to the larger 1280x1024 size.
That works the same way on Linux. The Alt-Mouse-1 shortcut is an additional feature, and very useful for lots of things.
If this process can be regarded as being Turing complete then we have to regard a cell membrane, or even a simple mix of chemicals as being able to compute. And to be able to compute anything.
That's nothing new either; of course, you can compute with fairly simple systems of coupled chemical reactions.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
If only it were as simple as paying some $$$ and getting it to work. Unfortunately, it isn't. For me and many other FOSS users, not using Windows is not a question of money or even principle, it's simply that Windows is even worse at getting our work done than Linux.
Maybe Remote Desktop would have solved your problem, or maybe it would have failed miserably for some other reason. There are plenty of problems with Windows installations that simply do not have a solution at all. Or you can waste hours and days on buying one commercial app after another, and in the end figure out that none of them actually solve the problem you were trying to solve.
The sad truth is that Windows is just as bad, frustrating, and hard to use as Linux; the main differences are that Windows also empties your pockets in the process of trying to get your work done, and that on Linux, someone who knows what they are doing has a better chance of getting things working than on Windows.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
I have had not problems with vino at all, on many different Ubuntu machines. Nor have I ever even noticed IPv6 on my Ubuntu machines--it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. You might want to see whether you have done something odd with your setup or configuration.
For the best VNC performance, use xtightvncviewer.
Note that X11, VNC, and RDP make different tradeoffs; RDP is better for remote access but not as good for LAN usage. The RDP equivalent for Linux is NX; expect it to be packaged better in future Ubuntu distributions.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
So, what happens if you try to update and replace the system Python or system gcc on OS X? It completely breaks your system. You can't do it. People don't even try, they just suffer with buggy, outdated libraries and compilers, or they install multiple versions of the same software and then battle with incompatibilities and missing functionality.
I think your bad experiences result from using OS X: package management on OS X doesn't work. Fink is broken. MacPorts is broken. I had drunk the Apple Cool Aid and for a few years really, really gave OS X a try as the "better UNIX", but eventually just gave up.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
You can do that for desktop applications to a limited extent. You can't do it for something like gcc or Python. The dependencies are there, and you can't make them go away by pretending they don't exist.
And there's no need to either. Package management may not work on OS X, but it works like a charm on Linux distributions.
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
That's a problem with OS X: OS X lacks good dependency management. Lots of packages have this problem under OS X. Matlab probably has a full-time team working on trying to figure out just how to work around this problem on OS X. The right way of using pylab and SciPy is on a good Linux system; it's the other proprietary software (OS X) that's causing your problems.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source.
As I was saying: your problem is proprietary software, namely OS X.
If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
If your time is worth anything, dump both OS X and Matlab and use SciPy on Ubuntu or SuSE.
the problem with matlab's pricing
The problem with Matlab is that it isn't very good at any price. I don't use it even though I get it "free".
I gave Linux a fair shake, found it as frustrating as driving a Volkswagen Old Beetle that keeps breaking-down, and decided to go back to XP and MacOS. They cost money, but not that much, and that cost is offset
No, it isn't. XP and MacOS cost money, and they have just as many usability problems as Linux.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck.
It shouldn't happen on any OS, but the same thing happens with Windows and OS X. The difference? On Linux, there's a simple way out: you can grab any window and move it around with Alt-Mouse-1. It's documented and it's a useful shortcut anyway.
On Windows, you have to hack the registry in order to fix this kind of problem.
On the verge of dumping firefox after years of use. 3.5.2 was horrible. 3.5.3 crashed within the first 5 minutes of use.
Well, if 3.5.1 worked for you, why didn't you stick with it?
In any case, your problem is most likely not Firefox 3.5.x (which works fine for millions of people), but a bad extension or some other system problem. And that sort of crap happens frequently with IE as well.
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Just get a helmet cam; they're built for that.
That depends very much on which kind of model you use. Some models have a tiny sensor and lens, others have good optics and sensors. Most of them beat the iPhone's camera hands down.
The point being people buy the iPhone by choice, and get Symbian because it is cheaper- but never actually use the device.
Sorry, but that's a ridiculous interpretation. If that were the case, people would only buy the most basic Nokia phones. But phones like the N95 and E71 have been big successes despite their high prices.
(You're seriously trapped in Apple's reality distortion field.)
Symbian signing is pain, but the criteria for it are technical; it's not a question of whether anybody "approves", it's a question of whether your app passes a bunch of compliance criteria.
Well, if you're trying to suggest that you can get an unlocked iPhone for less (i.e., an original US iPhone that has never been locked, as opposed to an iPhone that was bought locked and then unlocked), please let us know where.
The only original, Apple-supplied, unlocked iPhones I know of ship in Europe, and they are really expensive.
(Of course, even at $600, a price bandied around here, they are still much more expensive than an entry-level DSLR.)
I don't know where you checked, but the highest I've found it is 900$ for the 32GB
There are no unlocked iPhones officially sold in the US at all; what you're getting is either a gray market import or some kind of hacked phone or SIM workaround. Whether that's going to continue to work is anybody's guess.
New, Apple-supported unlocked iPhones are available only in Europe (because it's the law), and they cost about EU 950 for the 3GS.
I sure hope you're not citing a number that's not USD. In USD, the cost for an unlocked iPhone is $599.
AFAIK, there are officially no unlocked, no-contract iPhone 3GS being sold at all in the US. You can get them in Europe, and they cost about EU 950.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of Symbian users are of the variety, "Oh this thing? It's the crappy phone Verizon/AT&T/Sprint/Tmobile gave me for free.
I don't know of any US carrier that has "free" Symbian phones; the phones you're thinking of are Nokia's low-end dumb phones.
The phones we're talking about here are phones like the E71, E90, N95, N86, etc. People who shell out hundreds of dollars to buy them know why they're doing it: great cameras, user installable apps, tethering, etc. The user interface on those phones is not as sexy as the iPhone, but in terms of capabilities and quality, they run rings around the iPhone.
I would sure love to have a "real" camera from Apple.
Samsung, Nokia, and several other manufacturers already offer 5-8 Mpixel cameras with smart phone capabilities. They have automatic geo-tagging and automatic upload. You can get these phones with Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, and (soon) Linux/Maemo. You can program them in C, C++, Java, and, in some cases, Python and C#. Samsung even has HD video.
I don't see anything that Apple brings to the table. Apple's iPhone already costs more than twice than what those other phones cost, it's less capable, has worse battery life, can only be programmed in Apple-approved languages, and has severe restrictions on the kind of software you can write for it. And Apple's overall market share is small compared to Symbian.
Price it to compete with entry level DSLR
An unlocked iPhone 3GS without a two year contract already costs around $1400, about three times the price of an entry-level DSLR (if you buy it with a contract, you pay the same, it's just hidden in your monthly fees).
Why not? Having a camera with you at all times is kind of nice, and building it into the MP3 player means you don't need to carry an extra gadget.
I suspect they may not actually give you the source code (but someone correct me if I'm wrong). Most likely, they are using BSD-licensed software somewhere in there. If that's the case, it's not very useful. Microsoft Windows uses plenty of BSD-licensed code as well.
"It's open source--you just can't get the source."
"It's open source (which means that if it doesn't work, we can point the finger at someone else)."
"All the buzzword compliance of open source without the many pesky braces and semicolons."
Yes, it did. A planet like Jupiter may actually have been essential for complex life to develop on Earth.
But they did, and have been catering to people who want a modern non-MS OS since then.
OS X is basically Mach, NeXTStep, and Objective-C, all technologies from the 1980's. Arguably, Windows is actually more modern, with a more object-oriented kernel, CLR, its presentation framework, and languages like C# and F#.
Of course, there is more than modernity to making a good OS. Actually, needless innovation and needless complexity is one of the most common problems with operating systems.
WiFi hotspots work for covering businesses, but they spend a lot of money for covering and maintaining a small area.
For something like a whole city, WiFi simply isn't the right technology: its range is too limited, the protocols aren't designed for it, and it requires too much maintenance.
Cities can (and probably should) try to offer access in public places: parks, public squares, public buildings.
Given how far behind technically IE is otherwise, I think this is called "grasping at straws".
Of course, with the screen down to 640x480 and with a modal dialog up it may be just a little bit hard to back out and search the internet for the mythical command key shortcut you need.
Well, so what? If you don't know about the shortcut, you're no worse off than you're on Windows or Macintosh in the same situation.
Furthermore, on Linux, these kinds of dialogs tend not be modal; modal dialogs locking up the UI are a common misfeature of Windows and Macintosh applications.
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux all have these kinds of problems. The difference is that Linux has a lot more ways in which you can get out of them if you know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're no worse off than on the other platforms.
No you don't. If I resize the screen to 640x480 on Windoze or Mac, even though the "okay" button is off the screen, I can still access it by using the Enter key, and thereby get back to the larger 1280x1024 size.
That works the same way on Linux. The Alt-Mouse-1 shortcut is an additional feature, and very useful for lots of things.
If this process can be regarded as being Turing complete then we have to regard a cell membrane, or even a simple mix of chemicals as being able to compute. And to be able to compute anything.
That's nothing new either; of course, you can compute with fairly simple systems of coupled chemical reactions.
You're getting more bang for the buck with a desktop PC and standard graphics cards.
And there you go, the problem in a nutshell. Expecting end users to do stuff like this is bullshit.
Nobody "expects" users to do this, it's just that when there is a problem, you have the option of fixing it.
Windows and OS X also have plenty of problems, but you have far fewer options for fixing them even if you know what you're doing.
After struggling with this for hours...finally getting it to work...and then enjoying the slow-as-molasses solution that VNC is, I started to think that paying $100 or $200 for Windows and just clicking a few checkboxes to enable Remote Desktop was looking pretty damn good. (And Remote Desktop performance is way better, too.)
If only it were as simple as paying some $$$ and getting it to work. Unfortunately, it isn't. For me and many other FOSS users, not using Windows is not a question of money or even principle, it's simply that Windows is even worse at getting our work done than Linux.
Maybe Remote Desktop would have solved your problem, or maybe it would have failed miserably for some other reason. There are plenty of problems with Windows installations that simply do not have a solution at all. Or you can waste hours and days on buying one commercial app after another, and in the end figure out that none of them actually solve the problem you were trying to solve.
The sad truth is that Windows is just as bad, frustrating, and hard to use as Linux; the main differences are that Windows also empties your pockets in the process of trying to get your work done, and that on Linux, someone who knows what they are doing has a better chance of getting things working than on Windows.
Now I look forward to someone telling me what a complete dummy I am for having such difficulty setting up remote access on Linux.
I have had not problems with vino at all, on many different Ubuntu machines. Nor have I ever even noticed IPv6 on my Ubuntu machines--it doesn't seem to be causing any problems. You might want to see whether you have done something odd with your setup or configuration.
For the best VNC performance, use xtightvncviewer.
Note that X11, VNC, and RDP make different tradeoffs; RDP is better for remote access but not as good for LAN usage. The RDP equivalent for Linux is NX; expect it to be packaged better in future Ubuntu distributions.
just to be honest, I briefly (briefly!) considered telling Corporate that we needed to just bite the bullet and go with an Exchange Server
And you think that is easier to install or maintain than a standard Linux mail server? Not in my experience.
We need to attract some equally-brilliant technical writers to donate time to explain how the stuff works in the real world.
We have: there are thousands of well-written books on FOSS. Just buy them.
Then sometime later you want to update python from 2.4 to 2.5. you do the update and it updates all these dependencies as well. And suddenly you find that Gimp or gnuplot or something else you need is busted because say they all depend on some Latex for symbolic fonts and there's an incompatibility.
So, what happens if you try to update and replace the system Python or system gcc on OS X? It completely breaks your system. You can't do it. People don't even try, they just suffer with buggy, outdated libraries and compilers, or they install multiple versions of the same software and then battle with incompatibilities and missing functionality.
I think your bad experiences result from using OS X: package management on OS X doesn't work. Fink is broken. MacPorts is broken. I had drunk the Apple Cool Aid and for a few years really, really gave OS X a try as the "better UNIX", but eventually just gave up.
One would prefer in many cases decoupling of applications or even standalone applications. When you update an app the worst that happens then is that just that app breaks. Plus it's trivial to roll back to the old self contained app.
You can do that for desktop applications to a limited extent. You can't do it for something like gcc or Python. The dependencies are there, and you can't make them go away by pretending they don't exist.
And there's no need to either. Package management may not work on OS X, but it works like a charm on Linux distributions.
I use pylab and scipy as a replacement for Matlab. But it's really frustrating because sometimes you do an update and everything can bust because this or that lib won't compile with your current compiler or this or that dependency is not available or it wont work with X or aqua term or whatever.
That's a problem with OS X: OS X lacks good dependency management. Lots of packages have this problem under OS X. Matlab probably has a full-time team working on trying to figure out just how to work around this problem on OS X. The right way of using pylab and SciPy is on a good Linux system; it's the other proprietary software (OS X) that's causing your problems.
Continuity is a huge headache with open source.
As I was saying: your problem is proprietary software, namely OS X.
If your time is worth anything then even something as overpriced as matlab starts to be attractive.
If your time is worth anything, dump both OS X and Matlab and use SciPy on Ubuntu or SuSE.
the problem with matlab's pricing
The problem with Matlab is that it isn't very good at any price. I don't use it even though I get it "free".
I gave Linux a fair shake, found it as frustrating as driving a Volkswagen Old Beetle that keeps breaking-down, and decided to go back to XP and MacOS. They cost money, but not that much, and that cost is offset
No, it isn't. XP and MacOS cost money, and they have just as many usability problems as Linux.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck.
It shouldn't happen on any OS, but the same thing happens with Windows and OS X. The difference? On Linux, there's a simple way out: you can grab any window and move it around with Alt-Mouse-1. It's documented and it's a useful shortcut anyway.
On Windows, you have to hack the registry in order to fix this kind of problem.
On the verge of dumping firefox after years of use. 3.5.2 was horrible. 3.5.3 crashed within the first 5 minutes of use.
Well, if 3.5.1 worked for you, why didn't you stick with it?
In any case, your problem is most likely not Firefox 3.5.x (which works fine for millions of people), but a bad extension or some other system problem. And that sort of crap happens frequently with IE as well.