The science of all this is pretty settled by now. If you don't accept it, that's your problem.
If you believe that, shit if you believe any science is ever "settled", then you have completely failed to understand science. We are only now beginning to scratch the surface of understanding our climate, we have a long long journey ahead of us and this is a very new and immature science. We are attempting to understand one of the most complex systems we've ever attempted to understand before, and yet we don't really even know how a single atom works yet, so just slow down a bit. I'm not denying climate change, but its comments like this that lower the level of discourse. The philosophical rock behind the scientific process is that you never prove things, you only ever disprove previous theories. In this setting, the idea that science is ever "settled" just does not fit in.
We have a few theories that we can verify with computer simulations and correlate some field data to. That is the current state of climate science, that is the reality. Our predictive capacity is very limited right now, and our understanding is still changing at a very rapid pace. You don't have to give air to the nutjobs, but don't give them ammunition either, and for FSM's sake don't insult science like that!
1) climate is warming to a point of unnatural irreversible damage and 2) man made factors are contributing to it
But that is exactly the problem. On 1) we know the earth has warmed to far higher levels before, and has endured many times higher levels of CO2 before, and come bouncing right back teeming with life. So what exactly do you mean by "irreversible damage"? We could enter a period that is not amenable to human life, ok, thats bad, but "irreversible damage" is kind of hysterical. On 2) We are contributing but by how much? I mean if we expended some significant portion of the worlds economic output over the next ten years to become a zero emissions global society, and we save 2 degrees and 5cm of sea level, what the fuck is the point? On the other hand if we can stop it altogether then maybe its worth it, maybe? Again your point is bordering on the hysterical, yes I understand that you have researched and you are fighting a bunch of idiots with their fingers in their ears, but don't let that cloud your vision about reality, you become what you are fighting otherwise.
To my mind we are facing a threat with far more potential to damage our economy, and far sooner: Oil. Soon we will be facing the very real prospect of re-tooling our entire economy to use alternatives to fossil fuels, do we exhaust our economic capacity today to 'fight' climate change, only to find ourselves utterly spent when we need to completely change our energy strategy? This and many more examples, food, overpopulation, oceanic desertification, land desertification, water scarcity. Any one of these issues has the potential to require large amounts of the earths economic capacity to rectify when one of them inevitably blows up in our face. All of these issue we have more control over than the climate, so what do we choose?
This, for me, is THE issue, and the goddamn climate deniers are such a bunch of morons that have pissed off so many people with their stupid arguments that a thinking person cannot be openly skeptical about the popular theories anymore. The elephant in the room as I see it is that the theory of anthropogenic climate change skirts dangerously close to being completely unfalsifiable. We have no means, other than computer simulation, of teasing out whether the human contribution to CO2 emissions is tipping the system into instability, or simply being damped out and absorbed into the whole process. We won't even know in 200 years, you can't do a controlled experiment on this one. To top it off, the predictions made by the climate community are so random that its difficult to see whether you can falsify the main theory as well, the earth warms up: climate change, the earth cools down: climate change, more storms: climate change, drought: climate change. There are two truly falsifiable predictions as far as I can tell, firstly that the mean temperature is increasing (verified), and secondly that the sea levels are rising/will rise (not verified). With the former, how do you tease out the earth's natural cycle from the man-made part? The second, well we are going to have to wait a while yet, but the same question will remain when we know.
I'm not denying climate change, far from it, I am saying that there are aspects of it that smell of bad science, and the demonisation of skepticism is a very dangerous precedent. I'm sick of the whole debate honestly, but one thing I know for certain: climate scientists, a while ago and ever since, bought into the politics of the debate, and as far as I'm concerned they can go fuck themselves if they think this is a battle that should be fought in the 'hearts and minds' of the community, or one which should be fought with and against politicians. Politics and consensus are not aspects of good science, the fact that the majority of scientists believe the theories says absolutely nothing about the science. There was a time when the majority of scientists believed the earth to be flat, there was once a consensus that we won't find particles smaller than an atom. Science has nothing to do with consensus! This is a dangerous idea.
There is one more thing I am wholly certain of: There are far more pressing environmental issues than climate change, ones which we understand far more clearly, and have infinitely more capacity to reverse. That these issues have fallen to the wayside troubles me far more than the idea of living in a significantly more volatile climate.
I think some new fundamental elements may be needed in the language
And I think the community agrees with you: enter CUDA and OpenCL, these are both light extensions to C (well CUDA is) that deliver precisely what you are talking about. Its not mature, its in its infancy really, but I am willing to bet this is where we are heading.
I've just started looking at PyCUDA, and wow, just wow, they have really done some cool stuff there. They expose the low level elements of CUDA to the Python interpreter through a thing OO layer (pointers, and memory management), while providing high level tools so that you can safely ignore this stuff if you want. The approach they have taken though is not to simply embed CUDA calls into python, they use CUDA as a template metaprogramming language, and have built a just in time compiler so that GPU code can be generated on the fly. It is seriously cool stuff, and exposes lots of bare metal to Python if you want it, as well as the holy grail for Python: massively parallel computing (well, threading anyway).
By claiming that their competitors, with insulated antennas instead of exposed ones, have the same problem, yes they have pretty much denied that the exposed antenna is the issue.
But anecdotally at least, we know that iPhone 3gs has a poor track record for dropped calls, so if the average is 1.4%, its probably safe to say the 3gs is at ~2%.
Fact 3: 0.55% of users who call Apple care have complained about bad reception.
The lie: Omitting any mention of how many users have called Apple care for hardware problems vs other. If 1% of Apple care calls are for hardware complaints then over half of those calls are for reception issues. If its 50%, then not so much. But then my guess is if it was 50%, we would have heard about it.
Ok, my second jibe was pretty retarded I'll give you that, but honestly what is unreasonable about expecting them to admit to the actual problem here?
Everyone seems to have figured this out (barring the true believers of course), it makes perfect scientific sense that exposed conductive antennas might you know, conduct when touched. Why is it unreasonable to expect Apple to admit this is the case?
There's a snobbiness to the way they do everything, and it rubs me the wrong way too so don't worry. I dunno, I would be mad too at that price for a repair, and I'd be mad too if I couldn't just leave the laptop with them and leave with a job number. Don't apologise about it, Apple are a bunch of snobby asshole liars who shoehorn industry standard components into nice cases and lie to their fans telling them that they have purchased something superior. I swear the snobbiness is the appeal sometimes.
No, he said: "Theres a problem, we want to fix it, heres how...", followed by an announcement that there will be free cases. There was no announcement about a fix, in fact they ruled out doing anything about it. Yes, he said he wants to fix it, but what he actually announced was that they were not going to fix it. It was: You're holding it wrong, just wrapped up in a shiny press conference with their fucking iPowerPoint and black curtains and Steve's turtleneck.
"We admit that putting a conductive antenna surface on the exterior of a hand-held device was a dumb idea, and we are going to put a clear non conductive coating on it or shoehorn a better antenna somewhere inside the device."
And:
"We admit that for the last number of years, we have frequently lied outright to our customers and the general public about our products and engineering. We have repeatedly claimed to have invented many new technologies which we actually purchased off the shelf or just copied from a competitor without credit. We apologise for our frivolous and vague UI patents, and using them to attack other companies. For our endless lies we are sorry, we will stop claiming to be magical fairy engineers who can do the impossible and just shut up now and stop lying. And we are really, really sorry about Steve Jobs, seriously, that guy pisses us off too, we're taking care of it."
1: Offer an explanation of their perception of the issues which have come out of this, backed up by statistics.
No they did not. They just circled a spot on the phone and said: "magic no signal spot", they showed how if you death grip other smartphones they degrade, implying this is the same issue as they have (ie rf absorbtion by the body, which it is not), and they did not answer a question about why with the iPhone it can be done with just a touch of the finger, not a death grip. There was absolutely no technical explanation as to what the problem is, none whatsoever, and they stated outright they have no intention to do anything about it, barring the free cases (OTHER manufacturers cases, not bumpers).
Other companies have acted like this: Toyota notably with its recent problems, and they were criticised for their behaviour, so should Apple be criticised. Jesus dude get off the kool-aid.
I don't see how anyone could have an issue with Jobs's response.
What? He ducked any explanation whatsoever, claimed outright that it is the same issue that is faced by any smart phone, presented no solution to the problem and offered free cases to shut everyone up. They made every attempt to keep this thing under wraps, and do nothing about it! It is clearly NOT the same problem as other smartphones, no other smartphone has two antennas with exposed conductive surfaces on the outside of the device. No other smartphone loses as much signal as the iPhone 4 when held. No other smartphone will lose that much signal just by touching one exact spot.
It was more lies! How could you NOT be pissed off about that press conference?
I agree with you, but I have one bone to pick: Love it or hate it, Windows is highly customisable, with a high number of power tools for the advanced user. Very few linux afficionados ever use windows enough to figure this out, but it is true. You can tailor windows to about the same level as you can tailor a linux distro, barring outright kernel modding and changing of source code. I know the registry is a pile of shit, but it is a power tool, windows now has powershell which by all accounts is as powerful as bash, windows has a whole host of command line tools for alls sorts of functionality similar to linux. Windows is even POSIX compliant. Love it or hate it, windows belongs in your second category without a doubt, and really this is why it is so popular as a business platform.
Except that Google didn't make any phone, ever, the Nexus One is a branded HTC handset, granted its exclusively Google's phone, but in reality it is just pretty much the same spec you see on any HTC Android device right now. Now I have a HTC Desire, which is close to the exact same hardware as the N1, and 3G reception issues do not exist on this device. The N1 has exposed metal, so it could be that, but I doubt it, metal doesn't mean conductive, steel means conductive.
Me, I want them to stop telling flat out lies to the public, actually I want their "loyal fanbase" to stop swallowing their flat out lies but which is more likely to happen do you think? Look, all companies spin, all companies have powerful PR departments to make them looks good. But Apple, they don't spin shit, they just fucking lie to your face. Thats fine if nobody is listening, but they have a goddamn army of follower who then go forth and use these complete lies as a platform to sit on and take a dump on any competing technology. Fuck Apple.
I never used to be so bitter about Apple, but lately it has gotten so much worse, a stench has slowly built up and somehow I've just gradually grown to despise their every action. I don't even give a fuck about their products, hell I even commend them for the first iPhone! They literally breathed new life into a stale industry, and now I have a kickass Android handset and I have a lot to thank Apple for that. And good on them! But what is up with the lies? More lies in this press conference:
- iPhone doesn't have a specific issue, its just smart phones are like that.
Bullshit, you think you can stick an active, conductive surface on the outside of a hand held device and think that it is going to perform the same as a device who's active, conductive surfaces are insulated? Fucking bullshit, suggesting that this problem problem faced by a phone which does not expose its antenna to the world is a fucking lie, not spin, its a lie. True to form, instead of admitting error, Apple takes a shit on the entire smartphone industry. Can you even fathom a Nokia executive at a press conference saying a problem with his phone is not really a design flaw because the iPhone has the same problem? No other company would try this shit on.
To just sum up, with this iPhone release they have claimed the following (all complete lies):
- Invented video calling - Invented new type of stainless steel - Invented new glass-polymer laminate - Moved antenna to outside for better reception (rather than form over function)
And they have a recent history of more of this shit, expect more to come. And what was with Jobs pretending to have Google love all of a sudden? While taking a swipe at HTC in the same fucking breath: "when you're doing well, people want to tear you down. I see it happening with Google, people trying to tear them down. And I don't understand it..." - like, for example... Apple?, then: "what would you prefer? That we were a korean company" - So HTC is unamerican now... Jesus this man galls me.
Except we are talking about stainless steel here, not alluminium. Stainless steel is a lot harder to coat, and could add significantly to the overall cost of manufacturing the device, they have opted for a ridiculously over the top, and no doubt highly expensive screen on this thing, so the margins are likely thin on the rest of it. I believe to coat the stainless you would need to powder-coat it, you can't just slap on some laquer and hope for the best, and I don't know of any clear powder coat. I'm not saying its impossible, but I am saying its probably too expensive to be feasible. They could go back to regular steel and coat that, it wouldn't be stainless anymore but you could get some really nice colours going.
I know you were making a light hearted snipe at the Apple hate club, but seriously I think Apple hate is justifiable at this stage, until they change one or two aspects of their marketing practices. The problem, for me, is they are monumental liars, and they are fucking smug about it. So far with iPhone 4 they have released their own version of Skype and called it a revolution in phone tech with obvious overtones that they have now invented video calling. They have also made the utterly ridiculous claim that they invented a new grade of stainless steel, and a new type of glass-polymer laminate. Seriously, invented is the word they are using. They are then beating the drum about these 'inventions' by reeling off irrelevant figures, the stainless is 20x stronger than pig iron, their glass is 80x harder than plastic (seriously I'd say its about 5000x harder than bread but what the fuck information is being conveyed here?). They are just fucking liars, and I mean regular marketing teams lie, but this is fucked up. During the iPhone 4 keynote, Jobs talks about how he always dreamed of a technology like facetime, and that now, thanks to Apple, its real. Like fuck man you never used Skype, ICQ, MSN, Gmail chat, or a regular fucking mobile phone before? WHY would you make this claim? That just takes a fucking dump on the work of hundreds and thousands of software engineers in the past, fuck those guys their work is meaningless now that Apple have copied it. Then the fanbois run with this shit.
Fuck them, they are liars, and the smugness is fucking unbearable. Its fine if you look at this and most regular people see through the crap, but this disease is spreading, people who know no better buy into it and start repeating these lies. Its fucking offensive what they get away with, and they deserve to be hated on right now, until they tone it down a notch or two. Forget the growing 'trendiness' of Apple hate, these guys are literally reaping what they sow, seriously let them eat the shit sandwich they have made for themselves.
Google also demo'd a OS-wide push feature in Froyo, so you go to a website (logged in to your gmail account) and click a button -> the app (or event or whatever) is pushed to the phone and installs/displays/whatever. Its the fucking beez knees and streets ahead of the offerings of the competition.
I'm sorry to say this, but RTFA! They compare it to the iPhone 3gs and Palm Pre, neither of which have the problem.
Re:The iPhone and finally walk and chew gum!
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iOS 4 Releases Today
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The main problem I see is that you con't install a 3rd party app which is persistently running on your phone. That means no custom keyboard (I just installed swype for example), no resource monitoring, no custom file manager (like Astro), no custom calendar app (Android calendar is lacking to say the least, but don't get me started on iPhone), etc. Less important is the fact that I can basically have tabbed web browsing on my phone, while listening to music in the background. I can open 6 apps and copy/paste data and text between them willy nilly. Problem with the wireless in the web browser? Easy, quickly hit home and adjust wireless settings then pop straight back to where you were browsing. Its easy to dismiss multitasking when you don't have it, but I use it at least once a day on my Android phone, its a truly killer feature.
Sure, if you don't care about these things then by all means you can probably get by without it, but its silly to claim there isn't much benefit to it, there is sufficient benefits that Apple at least have gone the extra mile to introduce it. Really its a must-have feature if you ask me.
While I agree with your criticisms of Microsoft it seems you are a bit misguided about Apples amazingness. When iPhone got copy/paste, it was not worth waiting for, I can assure you it did not take that long to come up with an elegant implementation of copy/paste, it took them that long to figure out users wanted it. That said copy/paste is a crippled feature without multitasking or at least task pausing. On my Android phone I can open up half a dozen apps and freely copy/paste between all of them, as yet this is still far more clumsy on the iPhone, yes 4 will change this but still. I don't even know what 'full featured desktop copy/paste' means without multitasking. Seriously think about that.
Now finally I disagree that Apple are currently leading the industry, the latest generation of Android handsets have leapfrogged iPhone, Froyo is at least a release cycle ahead of iOS4, the iPhone 4 catches up to where HTC and Samsung are at currently, with no doubt a half dozen new Android handsets due out by the end of the year. Apple has lost the lead, and the momentum is now with Android. Given the very slow release cycle Apple works on, I can't see them catching up again any time soon. They had their time in the sun, but its over now. the iPhone 4 has literally 2 features over my HTC Desire: it has slightly more pixels (960x640 @ 3.5" vs 800*480 @ 3.7"), and a front facing camera. Watch this video if you don't believe me that froyo has marched ahead of iOS by strides.
I like iPhones, they look nice, and I am very grateful that Apple pushed phone technology such that we are where we are today, we should all be thankful for their innovation and I honestly mean that. I do prefer the open, customisable environment that android offers, but more importantly I am very pleased to see this environment take the technological lead.
I would guess that this is heading towards some future update for android, although if they want to license it, that could be difficult. Why why why won't I be able to buy it!!
Sorry I meant 'represent an electorate', but yeah ok, you could say the whole state is his electorate, but thats sorta my point: Its very hard to campaign against individual senators because they are party picks, and most people vote above the line.
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If you believe that, shit if you believe any science is ever "settled", then you have completely failed to understand science. We are only now beginning to scratch the surface of understanding our climate, we have a long long journey ahead of us and this is a very new and immature science. We are attempting to understand one of the most complex systems we've ever attempted to understand before, and yet we don't really even know how a single atom works yet, so just slow down a bit. I'm not denying climate change, but its comments like this that lower the level of discourse. The philosophical rock behind the scientific process is that you never prove things, you only ever disprove previous theories. In this setting, the idea that science is ever "settled" just does not fit in.
We have a few theories that we can verify with computer simulations and correlate some field data to. That is the current state of climate science, that is the reality. Our predictive capacity is very limited right now, and our understanding is still changing at a very rapid pace. You don't have to give air to the nutjobs, but don't give them ammunition either, and for FSM's sake don't insult science like that!
But that is exactly the problem. On 1) we know the earth has warmed to far higher levels before, and has endured many times higher levels of CO2 before, and come bouncing right back teeming with life. So what exactly do you mean by "irreversible damage"? We could enter a period that is not amenable to human life, ok, thats bad, but "irreversible damage" is kind of hysterical. On 2) We are contributing but by how much? I mean if we expended some significant portion of the worlds economic output over the next ten years to become a zero emissions global society, and we save 2 degrees and 5cm of sea level, what the fuck is the point? On the other hand if we can stop it altogether then maybe its worth it, maybe? Again your point is bordering on the hysterical, yes I understand that you have researched and you are fighting a bunch of idiots with their fingers in their ears, but don't let that cloud your vision about reality, you become what you are fighting otherwise.
To my mind we are facing a threat with far more potential to damage our economy, and far sooner: Oil. Soon we will be facing the very real prospect of re-tooling our entire economy to use alternatives to fossil fuels, do we exhaust our economic capacity today to 'fight' climate change, only to find ourselves utterly spent when we need to completely change our energy strategy? This and many more examples, food, overpopulation, oceanic desertification, land desertification, water scarcity. Any one of these issues has the potential to require large amounts of the earths economic capacity to rectify when one of them inevitably blows up in our face. All of these issue we have more control over than the climate, so what do we choose?
This, for me, is THE issue, and the goddamn climate deniers are such a bunch of morons that have pissed off so many people with their stupid arguments that a thinking person cannot be openly skeptical about the popular theories anymore. The elephant in the room as I see it is that the theory of anthropogenic climate change skirts dangerously close to being completely unfalsifiable. We have no means, other than computer simulation, of teasing out whether the human contribution to CO2 emissions is tipping the system into instability, or simply being damped out and absorbed into the whole process. We won't even know in 200 years, you can't do a controlled experiment on this one. To top it off, the predictions made by the climate community are so random that its difficult to see whether you can falsify the main theory as well, the earth warms up: climate change, the earth cools down: climate change, more storms: climate change, drought: climate change. There are two truly falsifiable predictions as far as I can tell, firstly that the mean temperature is increasing (verified), and secondly that the sea levels are rising/will rise (not verified). With the former, how do you tease out the earth's natural cycle from the man-made part? The second, well we are going to have to wait a while yet, but the same question will remain when we know.
I'm not denying climate change, far from it, I am saying that there are aspects of it that smell of bad science, and the demonisation of skepticism is a very dangerous precedent. I'm sick of the whole debate honestly, but one thing I know for certain: climate scientists, a while ago and ever since, bought into the politics of the debate, and as far as I'm concerned they can go fuck themselves if they think this is a battle that should be fought in the 'hearts and minds' of the community, or one which should be fought with and against politicians. Politics and consensus are not aspects of good science, the fact that the majority of scientists believe the theories says absolutely nothing about the science. There was a time when the majority of scientists believed the earth to be flat, there was once a consensus that we won't find particles smaller than an atom. Science has nothing to do with consensus! This is a dangerous idea.
There is one more thing I am wholly certain of: There are far more pressing environmental issues than climate change, ones which we understand far more clearly, and have infinitely more capacity to reverse. That these issues have fallen to the wayside troubles me far more than the idea of living in a significantly more volatile climate.
And I think the community agrees with you: enter CUDA and OpenCL, these are both light extensions to C (well CUDA is) that deliver precisely what you are talking about. Its not mature, its in its infancy really, but I am willing to bet this is where we are heading.
I've just started looking at PyCUDA, and wow, just wow, they have really done some cool stuff there. They expose the low level elements of CUDA to the Python interpreter through a thing OO layer (pointers, and memory management), while providing high level tools so that you can safely ignore this stuff if you want. The approach they have taken though is not to simply embed CUDA calls into python, they use CUDA as a template metaprogramming language, and have built a just in time compiler so that GPU code can be generated on the fly. It is seriously cool stuff, and exposes lots of bare metal to Python if you want it, as well as the holy grail for Python: massively parallel computing (well, threading anyway).
By claiming that their competitors, with insulated antennas instead of exposed ones, have the same problem, yes they have pretty much denied that the exposed antenna is the issue.
But anecdotally at least, we know that iPhone 3gs has a poor track record for dropped calls, so if the average is 1.4%, its probably safe to say the 3gs is at ~2%.
Fact 3: 0.55% of users who call Apple care have complained about bad reception.
The lie: Omitting any mention of how many users have called Apple care for hardware problems vs other. If 1% of Apple care calls are for hardware complaints then over half of those calls are for reception issues. If its 50%, then not so much. But then my guess is if it was 50%, we would have heard about it.
Ok, my second jibe was pretty retarded I'll give you that, but honestly what is unreasonable about expecting them to admit to the actual problem here?
Everyone seems to have figured this out (barring the true believers of course), it makes perfect scientific sense that exposed conductive antennas might you know, conduct when touched. Why is it unreasonable to expect Apple to admit this is the case?
There's a snobbiness to the way they do everything, and it rubs me the wrong way too so don't worry. I dunno, I would be mad too at that price for a repair, and I'd be mad too if I couldn't just leave the laptop with them and leave with a job number. Don't apologise about it, Apple are a bunch of snobby asshole liars who shoehorn industry standard components into nice cases and lie to their fans telling them that they have purchased something superior. I swear the snobbiness is the appeal sometimes.
No, he said: "Theres a problem, we want to fix it, heres how...", followed by an announcement that there will be free cases. There was no announcement about a fix, in fact they ruled out doing anything about it. Yes, he said he wants to fix it, but what he actually announced was that they were not going to fix it. It was: You're holding it wrong, just wrapped up in a shiny press conference with their fucking iPowerPoint and black curtains and Steve's turtleneck.
I want them to say the following:
"We admit that putting a conductive antenna surface on the exterior of a hand-held device was a dumb idea, and we are going to put a clear non conductive coating on it or shoehorn a better antenna somewhere inside the device."
And:
"We admit that for the last number of years, we have frequently lied outright to our customers and the general public about our products and engineering. We have repeatedly claimed to have invented many new technologies which we actually purchased off the shelf or just copied from a competitor without credit. We apologise for our frivolous and vague UI patents, and using them to attack other companies. For our endless lies we are sorry, we will stop claiming to be magical fairy engineers who can do the impossible and just shut up now and stop lying. And we are really, really sorry about Steve Jobs, seriously, that guy pisses us off too, we're taking care of it."
Yep, then I'd be happy.
No they did not. They just circled a spot on the phone and said: "magic no signal spot", they showed how if you death grip other smartphones they degrade, implying this is the same issue as they have (ie rf absorbtion by the body, which it is not), and they did not answer a question about why with the iPhone it can be done with just a touch of the finger, not a death grip. There was absolutely no technical explanation as to what the problem is, none whatsoever, and they stated outright they have no intention to do anything about it, barring the free cases (OTHER manufacturers cases, not bumpers).
Other companies have acted like this: Toyota notably with its recent problems, and they were criticised for their behaviour, so should Apple be criticised. Jesus dude get off the kool-aid.
What? He ducked any explanation whatsoever, claimed outright that it is the same issue that is faced by any smart phone, presented no solution to the problem and offered free cases to shut everyone up. They made every attempt to keep this thing under wraps, and do nothing about it! It is clearly NOT the same problem as other smartphones, no other smartphone has two antennas with exposed conductive surfaces on the outside of the device. No other smartphone loses as much signal as the iPhone 4 when held. No other smartphone will lose that much signal just by touching one exact spot.
It was more lies! How could you NOT be pissed off about that press conference?
I agree with you, but I have one bone to pick: Love it or hate it, Windows is highly customisable, with a high number of power tools for the advanced user. Very few linux afficionados ever use windows enough to figure this out, but it is true. You can tailor windows to about the same level as you can tailor a linux distro, barring outright kernel modding and changing of source code. I know the registry is a pile of shit, but it is a power tool, windows now has powershell which by all accounts is as powerful as bash, windows has a whole host of command line tools for alls sorts of functionality similar to linux. Windows is even POSIX compliant. Love it or hate it, windows belongs in your second category without a doubt, and really this is why it is so popular as a business platform.
Except that Google didn't make any phone, ever, the Nexus One is a branded HTC handset, granted its exclusively Google's phone, but in reality it is just pretty much the same spec you see on any HTC Android device right now. Now I have a HTC Desire, which is close to the exact same hardware as the N1, and 3G reception issues do not exist on this device. The N1 has exposed metal, so it could be that, but I doubt it, metal doesn't mean conductive, steel means conductive.
Me, I want them to stop telling flat out lies to the public, actually I want their "loyal fanbase" to stop swallowing their flat out lies but which is more likely to happen do you think? Look, all companies spin, all companies have powerful PR departments to make them looks good. But Apple, they don't spin shit, they just fucking lie to your face. Thats fine if nobody is listening, but they have a goddamn army of follower who then go forth and use these complete lies as a platform to sit on and take a dump on any competing technology. Fuck Apple.
I never used to be so bitter about Apple, but lately it has gotten so much worse, a stench has slowly built up and somehow I've just gradually grown to despise their every action. I don't even give a fuck about their products, hell I even commend them for the first iPhone! They literally breathed new life into a stale industry, and now I have a kickass Android handset and I have a lot to thank Apple for that. And good on them! But what is up with the lies? More lies in this press conference:
- iPhone doesn't have a specific issue, its just smart phones are like that.
Bullshit, you think you can stick an active, conductive surface on the outside of a hand held device and think that it is going to perform the same as a device who's active, conductive surfaces are insulated? Fucking bullshit, suggesting that this problem problem faced by a phone which does not expose its antenna to the world is a fucking lie, not spin, its a lie. True to form, instead of admitting error, Apple takes a shit on the entire smartphone industry. Can you even fathom a Nokia executive at a press conference saying a problem with his phone is not really a design flaw because the iPhone has the same problem? No other company would try this shit on.
To just sum up, with this iPhone release they have claimed the following (all complete lies):
- Invented video calling
- Invented new type of stainless steel
- Invented new glass-polymer laminate
- Moved antenna to outside for better reception (rather than form over function)
And they have a recent history of more of this shit, expect more to come. And what was with Jobs pretending to have Google love all of a sudden? While taking a swipe at HTC in the same fucking breath: "when you're doing well, people want to tear you down. I see it happening with Google, people trying to tear them down. And I don't understand it..." - like, for example... Apple?, then: "what would you prefer? That we were a korean company" - So HTC is unamerican now... Jesus this man galls me.
Except we are talking about stainless steel here, not alluminium. Stainless steel is a lot harder to coat, and could add significantly to the overall cost of manufacturing the device, they have opted for a ridiculously over the top, and no doubt highly expensive screen on this thing, so the margins are likely thin on the rest of it. I believe to coat the stainless you would need to powder-coat it, you can't just slap on some laquer and hope for the best, and I don't know of any clear powder coat. I'm not saying its impossible, but I am saying its probably too expensive to be feasible. They could go back to regular steel and coat that, it wouldn't be stainless anymore but you could get some really nice colours going.
I know you were making a light hearted snipe at the Apple hate club, but seriously I think Apple hate is justifiable at this stage, until they change one or two aspects of their marketing practices. The problem, for me, is they are monumental liars, and they are fucking smug about it. So far with iPhone 4 they have released their own version of Skype and called it a revolution in phone tech with obvious overtones that they have now invented video calling. They have also made the utterly ridiculous claim that they invented a new grade of stainless steel, and a new type of glass-polymer laminate. Seriously, invented is the word they are using. They are then beating the drum about these 'inventions' by reeling off irrelevant figures, the stainless is 20x stronger than pig iron, their glass is 80x harder than plastic (seriously I'd say its about 5000x harder than bread but what the fuck information is being conveyed here?). They are just fucking liars, and I mean regular marketing teams lie, but this is fucked up. During the iPhone 4 keynote, Jobs talks about how he always dreamed of a technology like facetime, and that now, thanks to Apple, its real. Like fuck man you never used Skype, ICQ, MSN, Gmail chat, or a regular fucking mobile phone before? WHY would you make this claim? That just takes a fucking dump on the work of hundreds and thousands of software engineers in the past, fuck those guys their work is meaningless now that Apple have copied it. Then the fanbois run with this shit.
Fuck them, they are liars, and the smugness is fucking unbearable. Its fine if you look at this and most regular people see through the crap, but this disease is spreading, people who know no better buy into it and start repeating these lies. Its fucking offensive what they get away with, and they deserve to be hated on right now, until they tone it down a notch or two. Forget the growing 'trendiness' of Apple hate, these guys are literally reaping what they sow, seriously let them eat the shit sandwich they have made for themselves.
Google also demo'd a OS-wide push feature in Froyo, so you go to a website (logged in to your gmail account) and click a button -> the app (or event or whatever) is pushed to the phone and installs/displays/whatever. Its the fucking beez knees and streets ahead of the offerings of the competition.
Except for the time when Apple is copying all of its competitors... Amazing how the world works!
I'm sorry to say this, but RTFA! They compare it to the iPhone 3gs and Palm Pre, neither of which have the problem.
The main problem I see is that you con't install a 3rd party app which is persistently running on your phone. That means no custom keyboard (I just installed swype for example), no resource monitoring, no custom file manager (like Astro), no custom calendar app (Android calendar is lacking to say the least, but don't get me started on iPhone), etc. Less important is the fact that I can basically have tabbed web browsing on my phone, while listening to music in the background. I can open 6 apps and copy/paste data and text between them willy nilly. Problem with the wireless in the web browser? Easy, quickly hit home and adjust wireless settings then pop straight back to where you were browsing. Its easy to dismiss multitasking when you don't have it, but I use it at least once a day on my Android phone, its a truly killer feature.
Sure, if you don't care about these things then by all means you can probably get by without it, but its silly to claim there isn't much benefit to it, there is sufficient benefits that Apple at least have gone the extra mile to introduce it. Really its a must-have feature if you ask me.
While I agree with your criticisms of Microsoft it seems you are a bit misguided about Apples amazingness. When iPhone got copy/paste, it was not worth waiting for, I can assure you it did not take that long to come up with an elegant implementation of copy/paste, it took them that long to figure out users wanted it. That said copy/paste is a crippled feature without multitasking or at least task pausing. On my Android phone I can open up half a dozen apps and freely copy/paste between all of them, as yet this is still far more clumsy on the iPhone, yes 4 will change this but still. I don't even know what 'full featured desktop copy/paste' means without multitasking. Seriously think about that.
Now finally I disagree that Apple are currently leading the industry, the latest generation of Android handsets have leapfrogged iPhone, Froyo is at least a release cycle ahead of iOS4, the iPhone 4 catches up to where HTC and Samsung are at currently, with no doubt a half dozen new Android handsets due out by the end of the year. Apple has lost the lead, and the momentum is now with Android. Given the very slow release cycle Apple works on, I can't see them catching up again any time soon. They had their time in the sun, but its over now. the iPhone 4 has literally 2 features over my HTC Desire: it has slightly more pixels (960x640 @ 3.5" vs 800*480 @ 3.7"), and a front facing camera. Watch this video if you don't believe me that froyo has marched ahead of iOS by strides.
I like iPhones, they look nice, and I am very grateful that Apple pushed phone technology such that we are where we are today, we should all be thankful for their innovation and I honestly mean that. I do prefer the open, customisable environment that android offers, but more importantly I am very pleased to see this environment take the technological lead.
I would guess that this is heading towards some future update for android, although if they want to license it, that could be difficult. Why why why won't I be able to buy it!!
Sorry I meant 'represent an electorate', but yeah ok, you could say the whole state is his electorate, but thats sorta my point: Its very hard to campaign against individual senators because they are party picks, and most people vote above the line.
Apologies for poor wording.