You missed the joke. The Committee was going to announce the Internet as the winner, and then Al would walk up on stage uninvited to accept the award.
As he's giving the acceptance speech, Kanye West would show up and say something to the extent of "I'ma let you finish, but Alexander Graham Bell made one of the greatest inventions of all time! Just sayin'."
I had very similar thoughts...that, and the fact that the RIAA/MPAA would just *LOVE* a system that matches identities with IP addresses and could derivatively add "unlicensed data transmission", "allowing an unlicensed minor to go online", "unreasonable network congestion", and any number of other crimes to file sharing. Oh...and bucks to beans that they would add questions like "downloading music and movies is: A.) a good idea, but only if you pay for it B.) a guaranteed way to get viruses, C.)piracy (except in the case of A), D.) All of the above" to the test.
Apple seems to think that plenty of people are running them. The first gen iPhone was activated by the user at home. After the battle with people who didn't sign up for AT&T service once they got home, they started activating in the store (although admittedly they also started subsidizing them at that point). Every baseband update has also patched whatever the current-gen exploit was at the time; tools were modified to strip out the baseband updates before jailbreaking. Apple "silently" (as in made the front page of Slashdot, but wasn't the subject of an Apple press release) updated the hardware in the 3GS to prevent jailbreaking. If it was a few dozen computer geeks who wanted to tether, Apple wouldn't go to these lengths to actively prevent jailbreaking (which as we've determined, is simply desirable use of an exploit).
Most of the time would the tools would be sold, bragged about or just shown to be build on by others to make better tools?
My guess is that at least a part of the reason is that many of the exploits are used for jailbreaking and unlocking. With Apple trying feverishly to outwit the iPhone Dev Team, many of the vulnerabilities they use get patched (TIFF Exploit?). I'd imagine that this ultimately helps keep the iPhone a more secure platform.
Like it's been said before, if you didn't like the first one, you won't like the second. I haven't finished ME2 yet, but so far I think that ME1 had the better story.
Mass Effect really started to get me thinking about how one could exactly design a game where the user has freedom to make choices that impact gameplay, but the player doesn't miss anything as a part of the gameplay. The two seem to be polar opposite to each other. I'd hate to be among the group of people who has to sit there and plot out the decision tree in either game.
To directly address your statement about ME's story, I'll agree that it's not original. When I got Legion in ME2 and he was all "we are geth" I was like "uhm...cybernetic beings lacking individuality and subservient to the hive mind...Borg much?" I'll absolutely agree that lots of it seems to be a mix of things from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5, but there are two major differences: the characters and the feelings. I was so glad when Tali came back on board, and I felt an urgency to help her out in order to help clear her name on the Flotilla. I was so happy when Miranda was able to find her sister. I shared in Samara's rage when the outcome her daughter's actions was shown through Diana. I felt the gravity of my decision on Garrus' loyalty mission, literally deciding whether this man lived or died. Not a single Star Trek or Star Wars movie, episode, or video game made me feel that way.
Completely original plots are extremely rare these days, but an old theme brilliantly unfolded is still worth lauding.
"The boxed/retail PC version of Mass Effect 2 will use only a basic disk check and it will not require online authentication," wrote BioWare community director Chris Priestly in his announcement post on their official forum.
I can personally attest to my copy of ME2 only phoning home to check the Cerberus Network, and being nothing more than a disc check. There have been a couple complaints about intrusive DRM in ME2 here, but I haven't seen it. I'd even dare say that ME2 had a fairly reasonable compromise: The game only phones home for DLC and does not employ activation. The game can be resold or given away, and the buyer can either play as-is, or pay an extra $15 for the DLC. I'm no fan of DRM by any stretch of the imagination, but this method seems orders of magnitude better than some of the other games I've got on my shelf (including the first Mass Effect).
To play devil's advocate here, I'm guessing that a simple means to do it wouldn't necessarily be an invasion of privacy - check the address of the tracker it scrapes. I don't play WoW, but bucks to beans they don't scrape with Pirate Bay/ISOhunt/YourLegallyDubiousTrackerHere. Since the data has to have a destination IP, and the ISP has to know it, could that somehow narrow it down? Fedora, Canonical, and I'm guessing that Blizzard all have their own tracker. Granted this doesn't jive very well with the innocent-until-proven-guilty mindset (TPB had a few Linux ISOs, game patches/demos, indie films, etc.), but I guess that if the process goes something like Total Upload-->Protocol-->Destination IP-->Warrant-->Deep Packet Inspection-->C&D, it would at least follow some form of investigation instead of the wallpaper-everyone-and-see-what-sticks method they've been using.
Well for those movies that have stories. In some everything is a "crutch" to enable them to show off pretty CGI, and in others everything is a "crutch" to enable to show off various body parts of the cast.
And then you have Transformers 2, where it was unclear whether the CGI was the crutch for Megan Fox or vice versa.
Someone once posted this on cNet. can't find the link, but it was worth remembering:
"It’s predictable. If Apple got into medical devices, people would come out of Steve Jobs’ speech proclaiming “The iBag is the easiest, most user-friendly colostomy device I’ve ever encountered!"
My thought was somewhat similar: Charge full price for the current latest-and-greatest version, less for the prior version, still less for two versions ago, etc. I figure it this way: Adobe (for example) is currently selling CS4 of everything. Wonderful, more power to 'em. If my machine can't handle the CS4 suite, but will handle CS2, then the only legit way of getting a copy of software my machine supports is to head to eBay. If they sold a no-upgrade, 30-day-support copy of that suite for $349, they can monetize a sale they otherwise wouldn't have been able to with no R&D costs, new users can start with an older more affordable version instead of pirated ones, students can buy copies that match their textbooks, everyone wins. The only issues would be distribution (they'd either have to continue producing discs of older versions, or end users would be downloading tens of GB of data), but I'm pretty sure that even mailing everyone discs is a small price to pay for free money.
maybe I'm old school, but back in my day a STANDARDIZED SPECIFICATION essentially means that everyone got together, said what they wanted the new tech to accomplish, the engineers had many a heated debate on the exact methods as to how it was going to happen, the marketers figured out how it was going to be sold, the accountants begged the engineers and marketers to do it cheaper, and when all was said and done, there was a new technology that was a STANDARD. A piece of hardware/software that was certified to read and/or write content written to that spec was the end user's assurance that their content would play back on their hardware, period. Vinyl records started as mono, and they played back on every Victrola of the day. Whether I play a record back from the 1920's on a similar vintage Victrola, or my 2008 vintage Numark TTX turntables with brand new Shure Whitelabel cartridges, the record will play, end of story. The reverse is also true; all of my vinyl pressed in the last few years will play back on a record player that rolled off the assembly line during the Harding administration. A CD pressed to Redbook audio spec* today will play back on a CD player from 1985. This is how standards work. If the most recent disc labeled to conform to the Blu-Ray spec does not play on EVERY Blu-Ray player that has been certified to also conform to the Blu-Ray spec, then one of three things must be true: 1.) The disc isn't to spec and shouldn't have been certified, 2.) the player isn't to spec and shouldn't have been certified, 3.) the Blu-Ray spec is incomplete at best and broken at worst. Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassettes, VHS, CD-ROM*, 3 1/2" floppy, and for the most part DVD-ROM* have gotten along just fine without firmware updates, else we are talking about a moving target, which is the very situation that specifications are written to prevent.
*For these, I am referring to commercially stamped media, not CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, etc. designed for consumer use.
Why? What is McAfee considered now? Just curious, because lately I've seen a lot of infected machines coming into our shop with fully updated and running McAfee suites...
I consider McAfee to be just as ineffective as Norton, but marginally less cavalier with its use of system resources.
The flip side to that goes back to the difference between theory and practice. I'm sure that you've had those times when you've called tech support and you unknowingly mentioned a detail that gave the support tech an easy out to say "you have to call this other company". I remember going through that with HP and Microsoft for a friend, each side pointing fingers at the other and telling me to call the other company. Finally I did a conference call between me, an MS rep, and an HP rep, listened to the two of them duke it out for five minutes, and finally coming up with a solution. Another time I was trying to set up an Airport Extreme router, and when the Apple tech asked me what OS I was running, I said Windows 7 (this was just a few weeks ago; Win7 had RTM'd for some time), and she was like "oh we don't support that, you need to use another machine...do you have a Mac available?" when I called back later, I got a tech who walked me through it after I told him I was running Vista x64, and after it had all worked fine, I admitted to running Win7, and he negated what the other tech said and apologized on her behalf. Sometimes people are just stupid about calling the OEM when they should be calling someone else, but it's just as common for the phone techs to be just as stupid.
Entering contacts into a Razr wasn't the simplest task, but the Razr's interface wasn't special (the GSM version, anyway; IIRC Verizon slapped their standard UI on it when it reached their carrier). I owned a Razr for a few weeks and have used a few Motorola handsets throughout the decade. Entering contact info was never iPhone simple, but it was consistent across most Motorola phones of the period. Additionally, if one looked hard enough (and I'm referring to several hours), there was/is software available to sync a Razr with Outlook (and presumably other PIM titles). I'll agree that Motorola should have taken a lead from Nokia and made their sync software freely available, but their business models for PC/Phone sync were different: Nokia gave away software and charged for the DKU-5 cables, while Motorola used a standard mini-USB cable and charged for their first-party software.
what apparently needed to be expressed instead of implied is that BSODs were much more commonplace in Win9x, and people were familiar with the term by XP's launch. XP, though better, still experienced the occasional BSOD and thus perpetuated the term. I don't know where you live, but the vast majority of my friends and family had a computer by the release of Windows 98. *multiple* PCs in a household were much less common (i.e. a communal family PC was the norm), but having a household computer in 1999 was indeed commonplace.
The fact that the BSOD is known by just about everybody has more to do with Windows 95/98/ME than with XP. Pre-SP2 XP had other issues (i.e. boatloads of security vulnerabilities), but the BSOD wasn't nearly as prevalent in XP as it was in the 9x years.
The problem I see with the naysayers and "keep-it-the-way-it-is" argument is this: It only provides relevant information to an individual who is both interested and educated. NASA TV's holy grail would be to create a lineup of shows that address all four combinations: interested and educated (live, raw footage of noteworthy events), educated but not interested (I don't know what fits this audience that isn't some sort of rote entertainment), interested but not educated (something like a shuttle landing, cut down to its highlights with a voiceover {Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones?} declaring what's happening and why it's relevant to the launch in simplistic terms), and neither interested nor educated (again, don't know what fits here short of some rote entertainment such as a Hollywood bad-science-but-space-related movie). Slashdot is likely to draw a much bigger crowd in the first group than the last three, and I'm certain that a Facebook poll would reflect that. In my opinion, it doesn't take making a cheesed up reality show on a fake space shuttle set to make a show that is cut down to the details that are relevant to someone with a much lower amount of background information and interest.
Manhattan drivers are crazy. Turning signals are optional at best, there is no such thing as tailgating, and lane markers are just suggestions. In other boroughs of NYC, drivers are only marginally better, but that's offset by the crazed street layout. Google Map Brooklyn or the Bronx with satellite imagery. It still doesn't do it justice, but turns come up VERY quickly, are more likely than not some arbitrary angle of turn, and the street signs are impossible to read until you're right on top of them. In many cases you'll be driving under train trusses (and having to make a split-second evaluation as to which support pillars the street you need to turn on is between whilst not colliding with one), and lots of one-way streets, so missing a turn is quite a challenge (don't even try to U-turn if you're on a bidirectional street). Add snow and ice to this mixture, and it can get VERY dangerous. Long Island, Westchester, Hudson Valley, and other NYC suburbs are a bit more sane, and are more likely to slow down in the name of safety in adverse weather conditions.
There are a few other considerations that your statement fails to account for. In 2006, both iPods and cell phones had already saturated the market. Some were smart, some were dumb, some were clunky, some were the Razr. iTunes had sold its billionth song, and the majority had their libraries just how they wanted them. At the time, AT&T had the highest customer count, so statistically speaking customers were likely to have stayed within their service plan and have kept their phone number. For many first-gen iPhone owners, purchasing an iPhone was both an iPod refresh and consolidating it with their phone. No other smartphone on the market had the established ecosystem that the iPhone was released in.
Thanks for clearing that up. I'll admit that I'm not much of a programmer and only summarily understand web languages beyond HTML. My point was more that Farmville and Google Docs didn't exist, as both need more bandwidth than was typically readily available in 1999. Oh, and you quoted one of my typos; video was 320x240, not 320x24:-).
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the joke. The Committee was going to announce the Internet as the winner, and then Al would walk up on stage uninvited to accept the award.
As he's giving the acceptance speech, Kanye West would show up and say something to the extent of "I'ma let you finish, but Alexander Graham Bell made one of the greatest inventions of all time! Just sayin'."
I had very similar thoughts...that, and the fact that the RIAA/MPAA would just *LOVE* a system that matches identities with IP addresses and could derivatively add "unlicensed data transmission", "allowing an unlicensed minor to go online", "unreasonable network congestion", and any number of other crimes to file sharing. Oh...and bucks to beans that they would add questions like "downloading music and movies is: A.) a good idea, but only if you pay for it B.) a guaranteed way to get viruses, C.)piracy (except in the case of A), D.) All of the above" to the test.
Since you imply that you still have one, I'm assuming that it's not being hosted on Geocities.
But who is using them and why no chatter?
Apple seems to think that plenty of people are running them. The first gen iPhone was activated by the user at home. After the battle with people who didn't sign up for AT&T service once they got home, they started activating in the store (although admittedly they also started subsidizing them at that point). Every baseband update has also patched whatever the current-gen exploit was at the time; tools were modified to strip out the baseband updates before jailbreaking. Apple "silently" (as in made the front page of Slashdot, but wasn't the subject of an Apple press release) updated the hardware in the 3GS to prevent jailbreaking. If it was a few dozen computer geeks who wanted to tether, Apple wouldn't go to these lengths to actively prevent jailbreaking (which as we've determined, is simply desirable use of an exploit).
Most of the time would the tools would be sold, bragged about or just shown to be build on by others to make better tools?
Winpwn. Quickpwn. PwnageTool. Redsn0w. Yellowsn0w. Ultrasn0w. Purplera1n. Blackra1n. ZiPhone.
My guess is that at least a part of the reason is that many of the exploits are used for jailbreaking and unlocking. With Apple trying feverishly to outwit the iPhone Dev Team, many of the vulnerabilities they use get patched (TIFF Exploit?). I'd imagine that this ultimately helps keep the iPhone a more secure platform.
Like it's been said before, if you didn't like the first one, you won't like the second. I haven't finished ME2 yet, but so far I think that ME1 had the better story.
Mass Effect really started to get me thinking about how one could exactly design a game where the user has freedom to make choices that impact gameplay, but the player doesn't miss anything as a part of the gameplay. The two seem to be polar opposite to each other. I'd hate to be among the group of people who has to sit there and plot out the decision tree in either game.
To directly address your statement about ME's story, I'll agree that it's not original. When I got Legion in ME2 and he was all "we are geth" I was like "uhm...cybernetic beings lacking individuality and subservient to the hive mind...Borg much?" I'll absolutely agree that lots of it seems to be a mix of things from Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5, but there are two major differences: the characters and the feelings. I was so glad when Tali came back on board, and I felt an urgency to help her out in order to help clear her name on the Flotilla. I was so happy when Miranda was able to find her sister. I shared in Samara's rage when the outcome her daughter's actions was shown through Diana. I felt the gravity of my decision on Garrus' loyalty mission, literally deciding whether this man lived or died. Not a single Star Trek or Star Wars movie, episode, or video game made me feel that way.
Completely original plots are extremely rare these days, but an old theme brilliantly unfolded is still worth lauding.
"The boxed/retail PC version of Mass Effect 2 will use only a basic disk check and it will not require online authentication," wrote BioWare community director Chris Priestly in his announcement post on their official forum.
I can personally attest to my copy of ME2 only phoning home to check the Cerberus Network, and being nothing more than a disc check. There have been a couple complaints about intrusive DRM in ME2 here, but I haven't seen it. I'd even dare say that ME2 had a fairly reasonable compromise: The game only phones home for DLC and does not employ activation. The game can be resold or given away, and the buyer can either play as-is, or pay an extra $15 for the DLC. I'm no fan of DRM by any stretch of the imagination, but this method seems orders of magnitude better than some of the other games I've got on my shelf (including the first Mass Effect).
To play devil's advocate here, I'm guessing that a simple means to do it wouldn't necessarily be an invasion of privacy - check the address of the tracker it scrapes. I don't play WoW, but bucks to beans they don't scrape with Pirate Bay/ISOhunt/YourLegallyDubiousTrackerHere. Since the data has to have a destination IP, and the ISP has to know it, could that somehow narrow it down? Fedora, Canonical, and I'm guessing that Blizzard all have their own tracker. Granted this doesn't jive very well with the innocent-until-proven-guilty mindset (TPB had a few Linux ISOs, game patches/demos, indie films, etc.), but I guess that if the process goes something like Total Upload-->Protocol-->Destination IP-->Warrant-->Deep Packet Inspection-->C&D, it would at least follow some form of investigation instead of the wallpaper-everyone-and-see-what-sticks method they've been using.
Well for those movies that have stories. In some everything is a "crutch" to enable them to show off pretty CGI, and in others everything is a "crutch" to enable to show off various body parts of the cast.
And then you have Transformers 2, where it was unclear whether the CGI was the crutch for Megan Fox or vice versa.
Someone once posted this on cNet. can't find the link, but it was worth remembering:
"It’s predictable. If Apple got into medical devices, people would come out of Steve Jobs’ speech proclaiming “The iBag is the easiest, most user-friendly colostomy device I’ve ever encountered!"
Young whippersnapper! In my day, we wore an abacus!
and less about what computers want to buy
I don't think that any respectable marketing department is worried about what computers want to buy.
My thought was somewhat similar: Charge full price for the current latest-and-greatest version, less for the prior version, still less for two versions ago, etc. I figure it this way: Adobe (for example) is currently selling CS4 of everything. Wonderful, more power to 'em. If my machine can't handle the CS4 suite, but will handle CS2, then the only legit way of getting a copy of software my machine supports is to head to eBay. If they sold a no-upgrade, 30-day-support copy of that suite for $349, they can monetize a sale they otherwise wouldn't have been able to with no R&D costs, new users can start with an older more affordable version instead of pirated ones, students can buy copies that match their textbooks, everyone wins. The only issues would be distribution (they'd either have to continue producing discs of older versions, or end users would be downloading tens of GB of data), but I'm pretty sure that even mailing everyone discs is a small price to pay for free money.
maybe I'm old school, but back in my day a STANDARDIZED SPECIFICATION essentially means that everyone got together, said what they wanted the new tech to accomplish, the engineers had many a heated debate on the exact methods as to how it was going to happen, the marketers figured out how it was going to be sold, the accountants begged the engineers and marketers to do it cheaper, and when all was said and done, there was a new technology that was a STANDARD. A piece of hardware/software that was certified to read and/or write content written to that spec was the end user's assurance that their content would play back on their hardware, period. Vinyl records started as mono, and they played back on every Victrola of the day. Whether I play a record back from the 1920's on a similar vintage Victrola, or my 2008 vintage Numark TTX turntables with brand new Shure Whitelabel cartridges, the record will play, end of story. The reverse is also true; all of my vinyl pressed in the last few years will play back on a record player that rolled off the assembly line during the Harding administration. A CD pressed to Redbook audio spec* today will play back on a CD player from 1985. This is how standards work. If the most recent disc labeled to conform to the Blu-Ray spec does not play on EVERY Blu-Ray player that has been certified to also conform to the Blu-Ray spec, then one of three things must be true: 1.) The disc isn't to spec and shouldn't have been certified, 2.) the player isn't to spec and shouldn't have been certified, 3.) the Blu-Ray spec is incomplete at best and broken at worst. Vinyl, 8-Track, Cassettes, VHS, CD-ROM*, 3 1/2" floppy, and for the most part DVD-ROM* have gotten along just fine without firmware updates, else we are talking about a moving target, which is the very situation that specifications are written to prevent.
*For these, I am referring to commercially stamped media, not CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R, etc. designed for consumer use.
Why? What is McAfee considered now? Just curious, because lately I've seen a lot of infected machines coming into our shop with fully updated and running McAfee suites...
I consider McAfee to be just as ineffective as Norton, but marginally less cavalier with its use of system resources.
The flip side to that goes back to the difference between theory and practice. I'm sure that you've had those times when you've called tech support and you unknowingly mentioned a detail that gave the support tech an easy out to say "you have to call this other company". I remember going through that with HP and Microsoft for a friend, each side pointing fingers at the other and telling me to call the other company. Finally I did a conference call between me, an MS rep, and an HP rep, listened to the two of them duke it out for five minutes, and finally coming up with a solution. Another time I was trying to set up an Airport Extreme router, and when the Apple tech asked me what OS I was running, I said Windows 7 (this was just a few weeks ago; Win7 had RTM'd for some time), and she was like "oh we don't support that, you need to use another machine...do you have a Mac available?" when I called back later, I got a tech who walked me through it after I told him I was running Vista x64, and after it had all worked fine, I admitted to running Win7, and he negated what the other tech said and apologized on her behalf. Sometimes people are just stupid about calling the OEM when they should be calling someone else, but it's just as common for the phone techs to be just as stupid.
Entering contacts into a Razr wasn't the simplest task, but the Razr's interface wasn't special (the GSM version, anyway; IIRC Verizon slapped their standard UI on it when it reached their carrier). I owned a Razr for a few weeks and have used a few Motorola handsets throughout the decade. Entering contact info was never iPhone simple, but it was consistent across most Motorola phones of the period. Additionally, if one looked hard enough (and I'm referring to several hours), there was/is software available to sync a Razr with Outlook (and presumably other PIM titles). I'll agree that Motorola should have taken a lead from Nokia and made their sync software freely available, but their business models for PC/Phone sync were different: Nokia gave away software and charged for the DKU-5 cables, while Motorola used a standard mini-USB cable and charged for their first-party software.
what apparently needed to be expressed instead of implied is that BSODs were much more commonplace in Win9x, and people were familiar with the term by XP's launch. XP, though better, still experienced the occasional BSOD and thus perpetuated the term. I don't know where you live, but the vast majority of my friends and family had a computer by the release of Windows 98. *multiple* PCs in a household were much less common (i.e. a communal family PC was the norm), but having a household computer in 1999 was indeed commonplace.
The fact that the BSOD is known by just about everybody has more to do with Windows 95/98/ME than with XP. Pre-SP2 XP had other issues (i.e. boatloads of security vulnerabilities), but the BSOD wasn't nearly as prevalent in XP as it was in the 9x years.
(don't even try to U-turn if you're on a bidirectional street).
As opposed to the U-turn on the one-way streets?
I don't recommend trying those, either.
The problem I see with the naysayers and "keep-it-the-way-it-is" argument is this: It only provides relevant information to an individual who is both interested and educated. NASA TV's holy grail would be to create a lineup of shows that address all four combinations: interested and educated (live, raw footage of noteworthy events), educated but not interested (I don't know what fits this audience that isn't some sort of rote entertainment), interested but not educated (something like a shuttle landing, cut down to its highlights with a voiceover {Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones?} declaring what's happening and why it's relevant to the launch in simplistic terms), and neither interested nor educated (again, don't know what fits here short of some rote entertainment such as a Hollywood bad-science-but-space-related movie). Slashdot is likely to draw a much bigger crowd in the first group than the last three, and I'm certain that a Facebook poll would reflect that. In my opinion, it doesn't take making a cheesed up reality show on a fake space shuttle set to make a show that is cut down to the details that are relevant to someone with a much lower amount of background information and interest.
Manhattan drivers are crazy. Turning signals are optional at best, there is no such thing as tailgating, and lane markers are just suggestions. In other boroughs of NYC, drivers are only marginally better, but that's offset by the crazed street layout. Google Map Brooklyn or the Bronx with satellite imagery. It still doesn't do it justice, but turns come up VERY quickly, are more likely than not some arbitrary angle of turn, and the street signs are impossible to read until you're right on top of them. In many cases you'll be driving under train trusses (and having to make a split-second evaluation as to which support pillars the street you need to turn on is between whilst not colliding with one), and lots of one-way streets, so missing a turn is quite a challenge (don't even try to U-turn if you're on a bidirectional street). Add snow and ice to this mixture, and it can get VERY dangerous. Long Island, Westchester, Hudson Valley, and other NYC suburbs are a bit more sane, and are more likely to slow down in the name of safety in adverse weather conditions.
I second this - ESXi doesn't cost anything and virtualizing the build you've already got is pretty simple.
There are a few other considerations that your statement fails to account for. In 2006, both iPods and cell phones had already saturated the market. Some were smart, some were dumb, some were clunky, some were the Razr. iTunes had sold its billionth song, and the majority had their libraries just how they wanted them. At the time, AT&T had the highest customer count, so statistically speaking customers were likely to have stayed within their service plan and have kept their phone number. For many first-gen iPhone owners, purchasing an iPhone was both an iPod refresh and consolidating it with their phone. No other smartphone on the market had the established ecosystem that the iPhone was released in.
Thanks for clearing that up. I'll admit that I'm not much of a programmer and only summarily understand web languages beyond HTML. My point was more that Farmville and Google Docs didn't exist, as both need more bandwidth than was typically readily available in 1999. Oh, and you quoted one of my typos; video was 320x240, not 320x24 :-).