You're making the assumption that it actually is "close enough for practical purposes". I don't think it is. Of course, I don't think the multitasking restrictions are technical in nature anyway; Apple is likely doing this to have yet another way of excluding apps they don't like. For example, with true multitasking, I could run things like a webdav server or metadata server in the background that would give users a better way of organizing and exchanging data between applications than Apple is providing. Apple would kill such an app simply because they don't want someone else providing such functionality.
And the hardware specs on the 4G are pretty clear from Apple's device. It's premium hardware, but likely at a premium price.
What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.
The reason iPhone OS is fast is because it is limited and old technology: C-based programming language, 20 year old kernel, little application integration, little componentization, limited multitasking. Android is a better, more powerful software architecture with many more features, and that naturally requires a more powerful CPU. Android is never going to be as efficient as iPhone OS because you need to make a tradeoff between features and efficiency. But the iPhone speed advantage is diminishing over time. Android today is about the same speed as a first and second generation iPhone. One more generation of hardware, and it's going to be so fast that it doesn't make a difference anymore even to picky users.
I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple
Apple needs to catch up with Google, not the other way around. Apple focused on efficiency and simplicity early on, but that matters less and less as hardware is getting more powerful. But software architecture and ease of development are going to matter more and more.
It's the same thing that happened with the original Mac: Apple squeezed every drop of efficiency out of the original hardware in their rush to bring an affordable GUI-based machine to market, they made it look good, but they botched the software architecture in the process. It's what Jobs does.
Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings
The leaked iPhone 4G looks like Apple is just trying to catch up with the Nexus One, and not even succeeding at that. People who already have iPhones will go for it, for others, it won't make a big difference.
The faulty assumption such a "peace plan" is that the "technical reasons" Apple states are the real reasons. The real reason Apple doesn't want Flash is because there are tons of excellent cross-platform games written in Flash that would kill both their lock-in and their cottage industry of iPhone games, many of which are just imitations of games already available in Flash.
Apple feels strong right now, and they want to leverage that strength as much as they can to kill competition and tie developers to their idiosyncratic platform.
Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?
objective-c is what c++ could have been had it not turned into an overly complex shitball
They're both shit, and for the same reason: they are based on C. Plain C was fine for what it was: a systems programming language, but you can't turn it into a modern application programming language. Objective-C stagnated and C++ turned into a "shitball" trying to compensate for C's deficiencies. On iPhone, I'm stuck with these losers. On other platforms, I have a choice.
Cocoa is a fantastic framework
Cocoa was a fantastic framework 20 years ago. Now it's obsolete.
That's my point though. How can a apx 515nm wavelength be a fully saturated green if the L cone is also being activated to some degree?
Because all light of a single wavelength is automatically "pure"; it doesn't matter what your cone responses are. The cone responses are just a code to transmit that information to your brain. Your cone responses are such that they overlap (for good reason), but that doesn't keep you from seeing pure colors.
And actually, you perceive color contrast anyway, not absolute RGB values or wavelengths. So, even if you get a group of cones to produce a pure "green" response somehow, that will simply be processed as being part of a strong red/green contrast and result just in a vivid green percept.
If they're Android based, the same knock offs and ports of iPhone apps and iPad apps that the Apple platform already has.
Unlike Gucci handbags, a software knock-off is often better than the original.
Apple apps will outnumber their apps 10:1
There are a few dozen apps on the iPad that are actually worth having, the rest is crap. How do I know? I have an iPad. Add to that the few dozen apps that Apple rejects on the iPad but that are really worth having and Android is already ahead.
Apple apps will be 2nd and 3rd gen
Easy to clone, in particular given that Android developers aren't hamstrung by Objective-C, Cocoa, and silly iPhone OS restrictions.
Until someone delivers a $99 consumer tablet, I put the iPad on top. And who's to say that Apple won't be the one who does?
Apple can barely deliver a VGA dongle for $99, let alone a whole computer.
That's misleading. A lack of a fully saturated green on a monitor is a limitation with the phosphors or dyes it uses. But monochromatic light of around 515 nm is pure, fully saturated green. Fully saturated green stimulates both your M and L cones ("G" and "R" cones); that's the way your eye works.
You can achieve non-physical responses from your photoreceptors via oversaturation, drugs, or electrical stimulation. That's interesting, but it isn't "green" and it isn't a "true qualia". Thinking of that as "green" is simply because you think of the M cone as a "green" cone and the L cone as a "red" cone, but those are just arbitrary names.
Maybe iPad sales are cutting into netbooks, maybe not. But what makes people think Apple can keep this up?
The MacBook Air looked like the granddaddy of netbooks, it was shiny and hot; and a year or two after its release, its just another expensive, light, and slow laptop for Mac users with too much cash.
The same is likely going to happen with iPads. Apple pushed the thing out the door quickly, but low-cost tablets have been in the pipeline for a couple of years, and you're likely going to see $200-$300 tablets with better specs than the iPad and no software restrictions this year.
If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover?
What makes you think the two are related? If netbook and iPad users are completely separate populations, you can still see the same behavior: one market gets saturated after a few years of sales, and a completely different market takes off.
Double LCDs don't really work all that well, and even if you sandwich them perfectly, there is still parallax.
The active LED backlight, on the other hand, actually works quite well; there are artifacts, but they happen to match the limitations of the human visual system pretty well.
If they really do the active LED backlight system on a per-pixel basis, then it's called an OLED display; you don't need the LCD at all anymore.
The gamut of the human eye is is not well approximated by mixtures of RGB pixels, even if they are perfect and ideal. You can do better with four or more pixel types. Furthermore, a yellow pixel likely also gives you more brightness and contrast. Similar things are done with printers (that's why many printers have 8 inks) and even some cameras. So, no, it's not hype. How well their particular monitor works depends on how good a job they did on the implementation. As for seeing the advantages, yes, they can also show you that. Obviously, they can't make the gamut of your TV bigger, but they can make it smaller by the same amount that their TV's gamut is larger than yours.
On the other hand, your brain compensates for, and becomes accustomed to, a limited gamut. That means that after working with a limited gamut device for a while, you won't notice much anymore. But side-by-side, the difference is obvious.
Anybody who has contributed to a piece of GPL software has standing to bring lawsuits against people who violate the GPL. Who has contributed the "majority" of the code is immaterial. I'm sorry this is inconvenient for Bruce Perens, but it can't reasonably work any different.
You can look that up yourself; the actual source of those technologies can be found mostly under those wikipedia entries.
I put the term "stolen" in quotes because that is the term Apple fanboys like to use when other companies adopt technologies that Apple has popularized; the actual term is "copying", and that's OK. It is particularly OK because most of what makes the iPhone what it is didn't even come from Apple.
Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. [...] In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces.
Nokia had smartphones and touch screen devices long before the iPhone even existed. Much of the iPhone is basically derived from the Palm Treo, the Danger Hiptop, Symbian, and the ideas of countless small developers and academics. Instead of acknowledging their enormous intellectual debt to all these other companies and developers, Apple is claiming to have done it all themselves.
The iPhone has been engineered with the usual Apple gimmicks and flair, but technically, it is not a ground-breaking device in any area. But, as is typical for Apple, first the rip everybody off, and then they claim that they are the aggrieved party. They tried the same thing with the GUI and window systems and lost badly. Apple is truly evil.
Are there any interesting patents Apple actually holds on phone technologies? Based on the list I saw earlier, there was nothing that was particularly interesting.
Maybe Nokia wants licenses for the multitouch patents. I think Nokia, Google, and Microsoft should just get together and have Apple's multi-touch patents invalidated since there is prior art.
A classic example of patents being used defensively by Apple to counter Nokia's offensive use.
You make it sound as if Apple is the aggrieved party here. But Apple has been pilfering other people's ideas and products liberally in order to create the iPhone. Apple's contributions have largely been in excellent packaging, but they have innovated fairly little. Nokia, on the other hand, has produce innovative phones with bad user interfaces. I think the "offender" here really is Apple, and Nokia deserves a cut of Apple's financial success, given the relative contributions of the two companies to the mobile phone market.
What's Apple supposed to do? Just eventually lose the patent case and pay up?
Most of what is responsible for the success of the iPhone--Mach, Objective-C, the GUI, MP3 players, multitouch, the app store, song recommendations, phone cameras--was invented elsewhere and simply copied ("stolen") by Apple. So, yes, maybe Apple should just lose the patent case and pay up; there's a good chance that they really do owe the money.
It could be a wonderful thing for both parties if presented properly. He recreated the entire game by himself thinking it wouldn't be plagiarism. However, just like a college essay, if you write down all the sentences yourself but the use of the words within these sentences are from other people's work, we consider it plagiarism.
Who cares whether it's "plagiarism"? Plagiarism isn't illegal, and in many contexts, it isn't even wrong. Plagiarism is an academic concept, not a legal or business concept. Ever major computer company has "plagiarized" in their products, i.e., taken ideas from others without acknowledging the source, and that's OK. In fact, this game case is probably not even plagiarism, since plagiarism means using material without acknowledging the source, and they may well have done so. On the other hand, a lot of legally infringing activity is not plagiarism at all, so not plagiarizing does not protect you from legal claims.
In business, what matters is copyrights, patents, trademarks, and contracts. The game could be taken down because Apple controls their app store and can do whatever they want. If Aquatica were sold outside the app store, the flOw developer would have had to go to court and claim copyright, patent, or trademark infringement.
Is that cloning or theft?
It's theft when there is a law against it. Did the game infringe copyrights, patents, trademarks, or did it break contracts? If so, it's "theft". If not, it's not "theft" in the usual legal sense, although it may still be plagiarism.
Given the similarity, I suspect that the Aquatica developer did commit copyright infringement, but that's really for a judge and jury to decide.
Sorry, but helping the clueless or unfortunate users from something that wasn't created, distributed, or sanctioned by Microsoft isn't a Microsoft Bailout even if the users are running MS Windows.
But it was created by Microsoft: Microsoft is selling software with inadequate security. And Microsoft is responsible even if the security problems are due to their users being "clueless": if they sell to clueless users, they have to create software that their users can use without getting into trouble. That's true for other products, and it should be true for Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
You're making the assumption that it actually is "close enough for practical purposes". I don't think it is. Of course, I don't think the multitasking restrictions are technical in nature anyway; Apple is likely doing this to have yet another way of excluding apps they don't like. For example, with true multitasking, I could run things like a webdav server or metadata server in the background that would give users a better way of organizing and exchanging data between applications than Apple is providing. Apple would kill such an app simply because they don't want someone else providing such functionality.
Wishful thinking? Or do you have a 4G now?
You don't have to guess at all; Apple has told us what the 4G has:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/
And the hardware specs on the 4G are pretty clear from Apple's device. It's premium hardware, but likely at a premium price.
What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.
The reason iPhone OS is fast is because it is limited and old technology: C-based programming language, 20 year old kernel, little application integration, little componentization, limited multitasking. Android is a better, more powerful software architecture with many more features, and that naturally requires a more powerful CPU. Android is never going to be as efficient as iPhone OS because you need to make a tradeoff between features and efficiency. But the iPhone speed advantage is diminishing over time. Android today is about the same speed as a first and second generation iPhone. One more generation of hardware, and it's going to be so fast that it doesn't make a difference anymore even to picky users.
I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple
Apple needs to catch up with Google, not the other way around. Apple focused on efficiency and simplicity early on, but that matters less and less as hardware is getting more powerful. But software architecture and ease of development are going to matter more and more.
It's the same thing that happened with the original Mac: Apple squeezed every drop of efficiency out of the original hardware in their rush to bring an affordable GUI-based machine to market, they made it look good, but they botched the software architecture in the process. It's what Jobs does.
Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings
Seems to me that's exactly what iPhone buyers do.
The leaked iPhone 4G looks like Apple is just trying to catch up with the Nexus One, and not even succeeding at that. People who already have iPhones will go for it, for others, it won't make a big difference.
Same here: Nokias get excellent reception in areas where iPhone doesn't. WiFi is also weird on the iPhone and iPad.
The faulty assumption such a "peace plan" is that the "technical reasons" Apple states are the real reasons. The real reason Apple doesn't want Flash is because there are tons of excellent cross-platform games written in Flash that would kill both their lock-in and their cottage industry of iPhone games, many of which are just imitations of games already available in Flash.
Apple feels strong right now, and they want to leverage that strength as much as they can to kill competition and tie developers to their idiosyncratic platform.
Everything you describe already exists. What possible reason would people have to throw it all out and move to Microsoft't proprietary (and probably patented) standard?
There are plenty of solutions, for example FOAF, FOAF+SSL, and OpenID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid
objective-c is what c++ could have been had it not turned into an overly complex shitball
They're both shit, and for the same reason: they are based on C. Plain C was fine for what it was: a systems programming language, but you can't turn it into a modern application programming language. Objective-C stagnated and C++ turned into a "shitball" trying to compensate for C's deficiencies. On iPhone, I'm stuck with these losers. On other platforms, I have a choice.
Cocoa is a fantastic framework
Cocoa was a fantastic framework 20 years ago. Now it's obsolete.
That's my point though. How can a apx 515nm wavelength be a fully saturated green if the L cone is also being activated to some degree?
Because all light of a single wavelength is automatically "pure"; it doesn't matter what your cone responses are. The cone responses are just a code to transmit that information to your brain. Your cone responses are such that they overlap (for good reason), but that doesn't keep you from seeing pure colors.
And actually, you perceive color contrast anyway, not absolute RGB values or wavelengths. So, even if you get a group of cones to produce a pure "green" response somehow, that will simply be processed as being part of a strong red/green contrast and result just in a vivid green percept.
If they're Android based, the same knock offs and ports of iPhone apps and iPad apps that the Apple platform already has.
Unlike Gucci handbags, a software knock-off is often better than the original.
Apple apps will outnumber their apps 10:1
There are a few dozen apps on the iPad that are actually worth having, the rest is crap. How do I know? I have an iPad. Add to that the few dozen apps that Apple rejects on the iPad but that are really worth having and Android is already ahead.
Apple apps will be 2nd and 3rd gen
Easy to clone, in particular given that Android developers aren't hamstrung by Objective-C, Cocoa, and silly iPhone OS restrictions.
Until someone delivers a $99 consumer tablet, I put the iPad on top. And who's to say that Apple won't be the one who does?
Apple can barely deliver a VGA dongle for $99, let alone a whole computer.
Why then is the Crunchpad (sorry, JooJoo) $500?
Because it's was designed around the same time as the iPad. There's a new generation of processors and screens in the works.
That's misleading. A lack of a fully saturated green on a monitor is a limitation with the phosphors or dyes it uses. But monochromatic light of around 515 nm is pure, fully saturated green. Fully saturated green stimulates both your M and L cones ("G" and "R" cones); that's the way your eye works.
You can achieve non-physical responses from your photoreceptors via oversaturation, drugs, or electrical stimulation. That's interesting, but it isn't "green" and it isn't a "true qualia". Thinking of that as "green" is simply because you think of the M cone as a "green" cone and the L cone as a "red" cone, but those are just arbitrary names.
Maybe iPad sales are cutting into netbooks, maybe not. But what makes people think Apple can keep this up?
The MacBook Air looked like the granddaddy of netbooks, it was shiny and hot; and a year or two after its release, its just another expensive, light, and slow laptop for Mac users with too much cash.
The same is likely going to happen with iPads. Apple pushed the thing out the door quickly, but low-cost tablets have been in the pipeline for a couple of years, and you're likely going to see $200-$300 tablets with better specs than the iPad and no software restrictions this year.
If the growth rate drops off and is replaced by growth in iPads, how in the world is that not a takeover?
What makes you think the two are related? If netbook and iPad users are completely separate populations, you can still see the same behavior: one market gets saturated after a few years of sales, and a completely different market takes off.
Double LCDs don't really work all that well, and even if you sandwich them perfectly, there is still parallax.
The active LED backlight, on the other hand, actually works quite well; there are artifacts, but they happen to match the limitations of the human visual system pretty well.
If they really do the active LED backlight system on a per-pixel basis, then it's called an OLED display; you don't need the LCD at all anymore.
The gamut of the human eye is is not well approximated by mixtures of RGB pixels, even if they are perfect and ideal. You can do better with four or more pixel types. Furthermore, a yellow pixel likely also gives you more brightness and contrast. Similar things are done with printers (that's why many printers have 8 inks) and even some cameras. So, no, it's not hype. How well their particular monitor works depends on how good a job they did on the implementation. As for seeing the advantages, yes, they can also show you that. Obviously, they can't make the gamut of your TV bigger, but they can make it smaller by the same amount that their TV's gamut is larger than yours.
On the other hand, your brain compensates for, and becomes accustomed to, a limited gamut. That means that after working with a limited gamut device for a while, you won't notice much anymore. But side-by-side, the difference is obvious.
It hasn't yet led to people being disappeared in the middle of the night for voicing an unpopular opinion
Well, but it has apparently led to people not voicing unpopular opinions and venting their feelings; you yourself have canceled posts.
Politics in many areas might be rather different if people weren't afraid to say what they really think and feel.
Anybody who has contributed to a piece of GPL software has standing to bring lawsuits against people who violate the GPL. Who has contributed the "majority" of the code is immaterial. I'm sorry this is inconvenient for Bruce Perens, but it can't reasonably work any different.
You can look that up yourself; the actual source of those technologies can be found mostly under those wikipedia entries.
I put the term "stolen" in quotes because that is the term Apple fanboys like to use when other companies adopt technologies that Apple has popularized; the actual term is "copying", and that's OK. It is particularly OK because most of what makes the iPhone what it is didn't even come from Apple.
Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. [...] In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces.
Nokia had smartphones and touch screen devices long before the iPhone even existed. Much of the iPhone is basically derived from the Palm Treo, the Danger Hiptop, Symbian, and the ideas of countless small developers and academics. Instead of acknowledging their enormous intellectual debt to all these other companies and developers, Apple is claiming to have done it all themselves.
The iPhone has been engineered with the usual Apple gimmicks and flair, but technically, it is not a ground-breaking device in any area. But, as is typical for Apple, first the rip everybody off, and then they claim that they are the aggrieved party. They tried the same thing with the GUI and window systems and lost badly. Apple is truly evil.
Are there any interesting patents Apple actually holds on phone technologies? Based on the list I saw earlier, there was nothing that was particularly interesting.
Maybe Nokia wants licenses for the multitouch patents. I think Nokia, Google, and Microsoft should just get together and have Apple's multi-touch patents invalidated since there is prior art.
A classic example of patents being used defensively by Apple to counter Nokia's offensive use.
You make it sound as if Apple is the aggrieved party here. But Apple has been pilfering other people's ideas and products liberally in order to create the iPhone. Apple's contributions have largely been in excellent packaging, but they have innovated fairly little. Nokia, on the other hand, has produce innovative phones with bad user interfaces. I think the "offender" here really is Apple, and Nokia deserves a cut of Apple's financial success, given the relative contributions of the two companies to the mobile phone market.
What's Apple supposed to do? Just eventually lose the patent case and pay up?
Most of what is responsible for the success of the iPhone--Mach, Objective-C, the GUI, MP3 players, multitouch, the app store, song recommendations, phone cameras--was invented elsewhere and simply copied ("stolen") by Apple. So, yes, maybe Apple should just lose the patent case and pay up; there's a good chance that they really do owe the money.
Who cares whether it's "plagiarism"? Plagiarism isn't illegal, and in many contexts, it isn't even wrong. Plagiarism is an academic concept, not a legal or business concept. Ever major computer company has "plagiarized" in their products, i.e., taken ideas from others without acknowledging the source, and that's OK. In fact, this game case is probably not even plagiarism, since plagiarism means using material without acknowledging the source, and they may well have done so. On the other hand, a lot of legally infringing activity is not plagiarism at all, so not plagiarizing does not protect you from legal claims.
In business, what matters is copyrights, patents, trademarks, and contracts. The game could be taken down because Apple controls their app store and can do whatever they want. If Aquatica were sold outside the app store, the flOw developer would have had to go to court and claim copyright, patent, or trademark infringement.
Is that cloning or theft?
It's theft when there is a law against it. Did the game infringe copyrights, patents, trademarks, or did it break contracts? If so, it's "theft". If not, it's not "theft" in the usual legal sense, although it may still be plagiarism.
Given the similarity, I suspect that the Aquatica developer did commit copyright infringement, but that's really for a judge and jury to decide.
Sorry, but helping the clueless or unfortunate users from something that wasn't created, distributed, or sanctioned by Microsoft isn't a Microsoft Bailout even if the users are running MS Windows.
But it was created by Microsoft: Microsoft is selling software with inadequate security. And Microsoft is responsible even if the security problems are due to their users being "clueless": if they sell to clueless users, they have to create software that their users can use without getting into trouble. That's true for other products, and it should be true for Microsoft.