Why? It's normal. You aren't a lawyer, but you must obey and make choices about the law. You aren't a doctor, but you mush make choices about your health. You aren't a chef, but you must cook your food (or spend a fortune in restaurants, I guess). We are all required, as part of daily life, to make choices about things that we understand imperfectly or not at all. This is one of the reasons that corporations and governments seems more powerful than individuals. They can afford to higher one or more experts in many fields and make their decisions based on expert advice from those people. People who are not programmers or systems administrators are often forced to make decisions about their own personal IT, despite the fact that they understand it imperfectly. For that matter, even people who are "experts" in a field often make choices which are either arguably bad or demonstratively bad even in their own "expert" field (doctors who smoke, lawyers who get caught:-P, etc).
Some might argue that as a programmer/sys admin I made such a choice when I bought an iPhone myself. Personally I'm happy with the choice, the device does what I want in the way I want it to most of the time (it's hardly perfect, but it works for me much more often than not). Never the less, according to many people on this site and others I made a bad choice, and all the worse for being an "expert" in the field. Really though, when you think about it, even with non-experts making the choices absolute crap rarely prospers in the face of stiff competition unless the absolute crap has some sort of entrenched advantage (even then it fades eventually).
Even the most obvious example, Windows, shows this. Despite the huge advantages Windows has in the OS market, the really poor releases rarely proper. Bob, Me, and Vista all show this. Even XP failed to gain traction until the worst of its problems had been well and thoroughly resolved. I'd still rather have Linux or OSX on my boxes but XP isn't complete crap. I use it here at work and it does what I need it to the vast majority of the time without being to horribly slow or difficult. There are always exception of course, sometime crap beats out the better choice, but mostly the better choice gets adopted eventually.
OTOH I've never had any restriction put on how i can use the company's laptop as far as web browsing and network access go when I take the machine home. I've never been sitting at my house with a company laptop and had a "$Company Has DENIED you access to this website" message come up. They might prevent me from installing stuff or make me use the corporate VPN (and hence corporate filters) to access e-mail, but there's never been an actual filter installed on any company laptop I've had.
I kinda doubt it would be a good thing if IT got a hold of my laptop and found www.sheepporn.com cookies in my temporary internet files, but I could go there (assuming such a place existed) from home if I chose. It seems to me that while the school certainly has an obligation to limit access to the computers low level functions (to reduce maintenance headaches), and perhaps to filter access from the school's network; it's the parents responsibility to limit web browsing, social networking, etc from home.
I can tell you that I use many more of my iPhones features than I did my old Treo because it's easier to use them.
"Old" being the key word. Obviously I would expect phones to get dramatically better over the years. Web browsing and email are bog standard these days - I use Opera, and it just works.
Alright, how about my wife's recently replaced Treo which was much newer and had just as crappy an interface? Opera-Mini never worked on PalmOS.
I will say this though. Most of the people making positive comments about the iPhone in this thread? They use the iPhone, either their own or someone's close to them that they can play with regularly. Most of the people making negative comments? They've never used the phone or have seen one in a store and played with it a few minutes.
But you could say the same about any phone. Have you ever used a Motorola V980 phone? If not, you don't get to dispute my comments. You're making the classic fallacy of insisting that users must use the Iphone before dismissing it. Have you used every phone out there on the market? If not, you don't get to say the Iphone is better than all of them.
But that's kinda the point isn't it? I'm not dissing your Motorolla, I've never used one, maybe it is better than the iPhone. I never mentioned phones I haven't used, but you're quick to heap disdain on one you haven't. I said "It's better than any phone I've ever used", not "It's the best evar!1!!1eleventy-one!!". My statements were quite reasonable. It is the the best smartphone i've ever used and I've used a few. Not all by any stretch, a couple models of Treo, a Blackberry, some weird AT&T branded thing, I played with a G-1 for a few minutes and it seemed less polished, but since I didn't USE it, I won't count it. The iPhone is better than the smartphones I've used, that's all I ever claimed.
They're objecting to features that are missing on a checklist that they think they might want or need, and don't see listed on the feature list. If you tether your phone to your laptop as a daily occurrence, the iPhone is not for you.
Well the point is that if a phone costs lots of money, I expect to get something in return for that money. Surprising that. Yes, I guess if I expect something for my money, the Iphone is not for me.
That's fine, but other people who have spent the money seem to like the product. Implying that they are simply fanbois because they do is simply unnecessary. I respect your right to buy and use whatever product you want. Implying that I am some sort of poor consumer or moron that just doesn't know what is good is what I object to. I've written about half a dozen of these 'why I like my phone' posts in the last several months; and it's never because I feel the need to advertise for Apple. It's always because someone decides that not only do they not want an iPhone, but since they don't want one people who have one or want one are somehow stupid or uniformed.
If you copy blocks of text back and forth on a regular basis on your phone, the iPhone is not for you.
Crumbs, are you serious? I had to copy and paste this statement of yours in order to write this comment!
And indeed I used copy and paste to write this reply; but not on my phone. I cannot, in fact, ever recall doing large scale editing of any sort of document on my phone. I can recall exactly three occasions since I've owned my iPhone (nearly a year now) when I thought... 'Dammit, I wish I could copy/paste' and in all three I was able to compensate with a few moments effort. Certainly it would be nice to have, but it's hardly a key feature for me on this platform. If my computer couldn't do it, that would be crippling, but I don't use my phone for general purpose computing. Your experience may vary, that fine, as I keep saying I don't really care what you use, I'm just tired of being called an idiot because I own and like the iPhone. It does what i need it to do more of the time that other solutions.
WoW has found the start of the solution to persistent world problem with "phasing". It's apparently used several places in the expansion, though I've only played it in the Death Knight start area. Essentially you complete several quests in a "phase" and that keys you to move on the next phase, with the stuff you've done staying done. They use instance technology to make it work. Unfortunately it's still pretty limited, the quests in each phase are still static, and your social interactions are mostly limited to the people in the same phase as you are (you can talk in world chats like guild, but your options for partying or other social interaction are limited to the people you are currently phased with).
It doesn't solve the problem by any stretch, but it's a limited step forward.
It seems to me that part of the problem is that a lot of this stuff is simple to code (OK, not some much chess AIs, but crosswords, Sudokus, and such). If the market is niche, and it's simple to code, it's usually just a web app available for free or a three dollar box game. Not much margins in that.
A lot of the weaknesses you bring up are either the fault of or related to the limitations of the device, not the software. Copy/paste seems to be a mechanical issue (I'm not sure how you'd work highlights using multitouch). The OS can actually do multitasking: The phone, texting, and mail apps all run at least some background processes and the phone and text app can both foreground themselves. A decision was simply made to prevent other apps from multitasking in order to conserve the very small memory footprint.
Several of these complaints could be adjusted on a machine with more muscle, a bigger screen, and a keyboard/mouse based input system without significantly changing the underlying OS.
Not the earliest model MacBook Pros, and not any of the G-4/G-5 laptops. All of those do have card slots though (Well probably not all of the G-4/G-5 models do, but most do, and the early MBPs do).
Really, have you been reading the thread? First, some things are just not quantifiable. I can tell you that I use many more of my iPhones features than I did my old Treo because it's easier to use them. I can tell you that pages render more correctly and are easier to navigate in Safari than they ever were in Blazer. I can tell you that my e-mail app works with POP, IMAP, and MAPI and is a single app that came with the phone, whereas the Treo could only handle POP with it's default app and did that poorly. I can tell you that the user interface works better for me, and I like sliding my finger to see the next page of apps rather than tapping a scroll bar. I can tell you lots of things that I like better, but what it all boils down to is that the phone works better for me.
I never used Blazer if I could help it, the app was barely capable of displaying a page of straight text, but anything more complicated looked like trash and was unnavigable. The only decent mail and contacts app I ever had on the Treo was "Good" which cost the company I was working for at the time $150, and after I left that company eventually forced me to completely wipe the phone because it had taken over my contacts app and didn't work anymore once I was no longer connected to the old corporate exchange server. I found the screen hard to read and both the resolution and poor font design conspired to try to make me go blind. Real Player mobile sucked as a media platform and I never found anything better (granted I didn't try that hard, the mini-headphone jack and unreliability of most of the adapters I found made music listening on the thing uncomfortable anyway). I did like having copy/paste and that's the one thing I miss. Not nearly enough to go back though. It's not like it was a function I used daily or anything.
Those are my experiences with switching from one particular smart phone to the iPhone. There are several points in there you might argue with: "well I use copy and paste a lot and don't care to surf the web on my phone", "I LOVE Good and bought my own copy, so that's really an issue for me", "How can you think the fonts on the Treo sucked? I have 20/10 vision from the eye muscle exercise my Treo gives me!", "I already have an MP3 player, why do I want my phone to do it?". Fine, great. That's way this stuff is objective. It's different for different people with different wants and needs.
I will say this though. Most of the people making positive comments about the iPhone in this thread? They use the iPhone, either their own or someone's close to them that they can play with regularly. Most of the people making negative comments? They've never used the phone or have seen one in a store and played with it a few minutes. They're objecting to features that are missing on a checklist that they think they might want or need, and don't see listed on the feature list. If you tether your phone to your laptop as a daily occurrence, the iPhone is not for you. If you copy blocks of text back and forth on a regular basis on your phone, the iPhone is not for you. Otherwise there is not much that it won't or can't do, and, at least in my opinion, do better than any similar device I've ever used before.
This comment makes no sense. If your point is that you'd rather use your old phone or your Amiga because you feel that they are better integrated or work better for you, then good on ya. Use them away (though if they ever break you might feel the lack of qualified service or replacement parts), you've just made GPs point, sometimes, for some people, a better feature list does not make a better experience. If you're point if that ALL things with shorter feature lists are by definition better than things with longer feature lists (as if to disprove GPs point by "reductum ad absurdum"), that wasn't the GPs point at all. He was saying that sometimes the way a feature is implemented is as important or even more important than it's actual presence.
I used to have a Treo. It could surf the web. I never used it to surf the web because the rendering engine was awful, nothing worked right, I could hardly read the pages most of the times, and links were usually rendered so far out of place as to make them all but useless. I now have an iPhone (I've also play with G1's and my point stands there too). It can surf the web. I use it to surf the web all of the time, the interface is intuitive, the pages render as they were meant to the links are places where the designer intended, and I can zoom in to read smaller print. Both phones can "surf the web", check box checked, but one them actually get USED to "surf the web".
Actually the iPhone and the Treo can both multitask their "phone" apps and keep you talking while you look at contacts and notes and such. I'm sure any other modern smart phone can too. You need a headset of course, but the iPhone comes with a really nice one and I'm sure other smart phones have something decent. Bluetooth headsets are aquireable for $30-$40 these days too. The iPhone (and I'm sure any other wifi enabled smart phone) can even use the Internet through WiFi while you talk on it. It obviously can't use AT&T's network for Internet and still talk since the chip is in use already, but it works fine as long as you have WiFi. I've only ever made regular use of Treo and iPhone, so I can't speak with certainty of other models, but for these two at least, you're totally wrong.
As former Treo, now iPhone user all I can say is "Huh?". Blazer is all but useless as a browser, Opera never worked right on the PalmOS version of Java. Push e-mail never worked right unless you paid the fortune and a half for "Good" and had an Exchange back-end for it. The screen was fairly awful, and I was constantly replacing the little screen protectors. It was tremendously uncomfortable to use as an actual phone, it has no wifi or GPS support (without expensive add-on cards), it's 2G and doesn't even seem as fast as a first gen iPhone at that (I have a first gen and my wife has a 3G so I've experienced both). It constantly asked me if I wanted to make another call while I was talking on it, because my cheek would brush the button on the screen. It had really bad support for encryption, and my SSH app told me every time I used it that I was using dangerously poor encryption algorithms because the processor couldn't do any better.
I'd say it did perhaps half of what the iPhone does if we define "do" as "do well enough that I want to use it regularly". As to the things it can do that the iPhone "will never do", the only ones I can come up with are tethering (which was such a painfully slow way to access the Internet I never really used it any way, and it got expensive quickly with 5 GB data limits), Copy/paste (which I still hold out hope on), and multi-media text (which I also hold out hope on, but wouldn't mind so much if I could copy/paste).
Office documents are viewable with downloaded apps, and there are SSH and VNC clients on the app store as well. Most of the apps are a good bit cheaper than PalmOS apps were too. There are a few phones out there that really are more capable than the iPhone, but the Treo line is totally NOT among them. My wife rolled her Truck a couple of weeks back and lost her Treo, We considered it the only good part of the experience, and bought her a 3G.
Sprint is currently the only carrier that doesn't have a shiny new consumer smart phone too. AT&T has the iPhone, T-mobile has the G-1, Verizon has the Blackberry Storm, Sprint has some cute new commercial where a VP tells people to come into the store and learn how to use the crappy phones Sprint sells.:-)
Yes, it's completely outrageous that we've gone 30 years without a Paradigm Shift. I mean really. Just cause it took over a thousand year for the shift from Platonic/Aristotelian physics to Newtonian, and nearly five hundred year for the next shift to Eisensteinian, is no reason to expect that we can't have them yearly now. Because you know, those guys like Einstein and Newton, they didn't build on centuries of work leading up to their "Satori" moments, they just spontaneously came up with this stuff... and we're much smarter now so we should come up with new paradigms all the time. What was I saying yearly... We should be doing this monthly; that way in a few years all the major Physicists in the world can "$name-ian Physics" of their very own.
I'll agree that $200 an hour is still a bit steep, but he wasn't saying he paid the developer that. He specifically references developers and designers. We're talking about a three to four man team here I'm sure. Certainly overkill for "Bob's Recipe Storage App (it stores recipes!)", but not at all unreasonable for "Super Monkeyball". Pay each of those guys 25-30 an hour (not at all unreasonable and some might argue pretty low), give them health insurance, pay the employment taxes, unemployment insurance... You can get there pretty easily.
You misunderstand his problem. He was trying to install. I've seen this before, the BIOS boots to the CD, but the kernel image on the CD doesn't have drivers for the SCSI card or the CD-ROM drive or whatever. The installer will boot, but fail to see the CD it just booted from and refuse to install. It's been a long time since I saw this, almost all CD-ROMs these days are IDE/ATA, even on server class hardware, and all modern distros support IDE/ATA drives in their install kernel images. On older systems with strange SCSI cards or non-standard CD-ROM buses it happened though. The solution is fairly non-trivial and involves compiling a new kernel with the drivers you need, then building your own install CD (or less painfully a boot disk if you can fit the kernel image on it and have a disk drive on the target system).
Everyone's jailbreaking their phones in order to get semi-decent functionality
Are we defining "everyone" to mean "me and the guys I know who spend most of their time hacking computer software"? I'd be REALLY surprised if the number of "jail broken" iPhones is greater than 1% of the total number. Repeat after me "Slashdot readers are not a viable sample group for technology issues". As a general rule you will find that people who read Slashdot are exponentially more likely to: [care about DRM, care about open source, be able to figure out how perform technological tasks, want to hack a mostly functional piece of hardware or software they purchased, even know that it is possible to jail break an iPhone] than the average person. Not everyone here is a genius programmer, or a rabid Open Source or Free Software advocate, but the percentages of people who know about and care about these things on this site is MUCH greater than in the general population.
Obviously we'll never know what the total percentage of jail broken phones is, but anecdotally I know around 10 people who have iPhones and only one them is jail broken. That guy jail broke his first gen phone before the release of the 2.0 OS ( with the app store), and while I haven't talked to him in some months he had been thinking of restoring the base OS since most of the software he needed was now available without jail breaking. He figured it was safer to use the app store products than risk his phone bricking. Honestly the only things that are missing from the iPhone at this point from a usability standpoint are copy/paste, multimedia text messages, and a tether app. I don't need the third and the first and second only bother me once in a blue moon.
On the other hand, nothing in the reply to the teacher's letter (which, by the way I did think was pretty poor) indicated that the teacher SHOULD be teaching about Linux either. There is a difference between "not teaching about" and "confiscating disks (probably illegal, since they are not her property and almost certainly not prohibited by school rules), discouraging non-class time discussion, writing an angry letter to the developer, and hoping to find some way to encourage prosecution of the same."
Teaching about Non-windows OS's in computer courses is probably a good idea. A great many college CS programs use *nix development environments, and since computer classes in high school probably have a goal of prepping students for college computer classes, there is definitely an argument for this. Having said that, the thrust of this article is not that the teacher is not teaching about Linux in class, it's that's she's showing active hostility to a student's interest and trying to make his life more difficult because he chooses to use free software. She's honestly hoping to get this developer arrested because she feels that he's somehow corrupting the youth.
Dude... As an Anal-Retentive Grammar Nazi you should really grammar check your posts. You don't have a single capitalized letter in a post with no fewer than four sentences (I'm not sure if "like" qualifies), and several proper nouns. You've also comma spliced in at least two places. Get a new job.
Better pay for private schools in general is definitely a misconception, but I think what the GP was referring to are the elite private schools where pay is typically a bit better than public schools. I have friend who is a department head at such a school and he makes in the mid-60's I would guess. This is easily half again what a teacher in the public schools with his experience in the area would make, and probably twice what a "normal" private school teacher would make. He is semi-administration though so the other teachers may not make quite as much.
Getting gigs at that kind of school isn't easy though. He has a master's degree, and taught for a number of years at a lower tier private school before he got the job. Plus a lot of people get into teaching because they love kids and want to make a difference. It's a little harder to convince yourself that you're making a difference when you only teach kids who's parent can afford Yale level tuition costs for high school. He likes the job (and the free tuition for his soon to be high school aged son), but I don't know that it would be for everyone.
Many people who teach do so out a legitimate love for teaching. The love kids and want to make a difference in the next generation. They don't "do something better", not because they can't, but because they are willing to put up with the crappy pay to do something they love. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be adequately compensated for their efforts, but they are willing to put up with the fact that they are not for other reasons. Their one bargaining chip, their feet, are one they don't choose to use.
As for your point about unions, while certainly there are downsides to having unions, there are also significant upsides. Teaching is a VERY high liability risk profession, without unions teachers would be subject to considerably more of that risk themselves. Teachers are hard to fire specifically because their positions are naturally fairly risky. Anytime a parent thinks a teacher made an error in dealing with their precious child, every time an administrator thinks a teacher's methods are to innovative or not innovative enough or whatever, the teacher risks firing and even lawsuit. Unions protect good teachers from bad parents, administrators, or situations as often if not more often than they protect bad teachers from justified firing.
Blaming the union for the pay structure of teachers is just silly. All large institutions pay based on seniority and credentials. Get a job with any company or institution that has more than 500 or so employees. You'll find that you have a pay grade based on your title and that you can only move up in salary within that pay grade, and never make more than your pay grade's maximum salary. If you are promoted to higher pay grade you will likely get a raise, but also, possibly more importantly, have the "ceiling" on your pay raised. Most teachers are in same boat. They have a title: say "Teacher 1", and to get a raise past a certain ceiling they must get promoted. Often these pay grades are based on education level and years of service. Like most large companies. Better teachers, with a desire to do so, can get promoted into administration where they can make more money. Just as better workers in any field can get promoted into management where they can make more money. If anything union fight to raise teacher salaries overall. The collective force of the union is far more effective at this than one person screaming that they are worth more than they are paid.
it's really unfortunate too. if anything, public schools should promote the use of FOSS as it doesn't impose a financial burden on students/parents. the school themselves would save a lot of money too by not having to pay for software licenses, not having to subscribe to AV software, and generally having less malware-related maintenance to do.
I don't disagree with your post in principle, but Microsoft gets around a lot of this by charging next to nothing for educational licenses. It's their way of making certain that the next generation grows up using Microsoft software and helps to continue the market dominance.
At least Micro$oft has that "Ah ha, you changed the "S" to a dollar sign in order to indicate the company is greedy, you clever person you" sort of obvious, if trite, statement. I'm not even sure what "Abble" indicates other than: "I often confuse my "b" key with my "p" key."
Slashdot Mirror
1) Black turtleneck
2) "One more thing...."
3) ?
4) Profit!
Why? It's normal. You aren't a lawyer, but you must obey and make choices about the law. You aren't a doctor, but you mush make choices about your health. You aren't a chef, but you must cook your food (or spend a fortune in restaurants, I guess). We are all required, as part of daily life, to make choices about things that we understand imperfectly or not at all. This is one of the reasons that corporations and governments seems more powerful than individuals. They can afford to higher one or more experts in many fields and make their decisions based on expert advice from those people. People who are not programmers or systems administrators are often forced to make decisions about their own personal IT, despite the fact that they understand it imperfectly. For that matter, even people who are "experts" in a field often make choices which are either arguably bad or demonstratively bad even in their own "expert" field (doctors who smoke, lawyers who get caught :-P, etc).
Some might argue that as a programmer/sys admin I made such a choice when I bought an iPhone myself. Personally I'm happy with the choice, the device does what I want in the way I want it to most of the time (it's hardly perfect, but it works for me much more often than not). Never the less, according to many people on this site and others I made a bad choice, and all the worse for being an "expert" in the field. Really though, when you think about it, even with non-experts making the choices absolute crap rarely prospers in the face of stiff competition unless the absolute crap has some sort of entrenched advantage (even then it fades eventually).
Even the most obvious example, Windows, shows this. Despite the huge advantages Windows has in the OS market, the really poor releases rarely proper. Bob, Me, and Vista all show this. Even XP failed to gain traction until the worst of its problems had been well and thoroughly resolved. I'd still rather have Linux or OSX on my boxes but XP isn't complete crap. I use it here at work and it does what I need it to the vast majority of the time without being to horribly slow or difficult. There are always exception of course, sometime crap beats out the better choice, but mostly the better choice gets adopted eventually.
OTOH I've never had any restriction put on how i can use the company's laptop as far as web browsing and network access go when I take the machine home. I've never been sitting at my house with a company laptop and had a "$Company Has DENIED you access to this website" message come up. They might prevent me from installing stuff or make me use the corporate VPN (and hence corporate filters) to access e-mail, but there's never been an actual filter installed on any company laptop I've had.
I kinda doubt it would be a good thing if IT got a hold of my laptop and found www.sheepporn.com cookies in my temporary internet files, but I could go there (assuming such a place existed) from home if I chose. It seems to me that while the school certainly has an obligation to limit access to the computers low level functions (to reduce maintenance headaches), and perhaps to filter access from the school's network; it's the parents responsibility to limit web browsing, social networking, etc from home.
I can tell you that I use many more of my iPhones features than I did my old Treo because it's easier to use them.
"Old" being the key word. Obviously I would expect phones to get dramatically better over the years. Web browsing and email are bog standard these days - I use Opera, and it just works.
Alright, how about my wife's recently replaced Treo which was much newer and had just as crappy an interface? Opera-Mini never worked on PalmOS.
I will say this though. Most of the people making positive comments about the iPhone in this thread? They use the iPhone, either their own or someone's close to them that they can play with regularly. Most of the people making negative comments? They've never used the phone or have seen one in a store and played with it a few minutes.
But you could say the same about any phone. Have you ever used a Motorola V980 phone? If not, you don't get to dispute my comments. You're making the classic fallacy of insisting that users must use the Iphone before dismissing it. Have you used every phone out there on the market? If not, you don't get to say the Iphone is better than all of them.
But that's kinda the point isn't it? I'm not dissing your Motorolla, I've never used one, maybe it is better than the iPhone. I never mentioned phones I haven't used, but you're quick to heap disdain on one you haven't. I said "It's better than any phone I've ever used", not "It's the best evar!1!!1eleventy-one!!". My statements were quite reasonable. It is the the best smartphone i've ever used and I've used a few. Not all by any stretch, a couple models of Treo, a Blackberry, some weird AT&T branded thing, I played with a G-1 for a few minutes and it seemed less polished, but since I didn't USE it, I won't count it. The iPhone is better than the smartphones I've used, that's all I ever claimed.
They're objecting to features that are missing on a checklist that they think they might want or need, and don't see listed on the feature list. If you tether your phone to your laptop as a daily occurrence, the iPhone is not for you.
Well the point is that if a phone costs lots of money, I expect to get something in return for that money. Surprising that. Yes, I guess if I expect something for my money, the Iphone is not for me.
That's fine, but other people who have spent the money seem to like the product. Implying that they are simply fanbois because they do is simply unnecessary. I respect your right to buy and use whatever product you want. Implying that I am some sort of poor consumer or moron that just doesn't know what is good is what I object to. I've written about half a dozen of these 'why I like my phone' posts in the last several months; and it's never because I feel the need to advertise for Apple. It's always because someone decides that not only do they not want an iPhone, but since they don't want one people who have one or want one are somehow stupid or uniformed.
If you copy blocks of text back and forth on a regular basis on your phone, the iPhone is not for you.
Crumbs, are you serious? I had to copy and paste this statement of yours in order to write this comment!
And indeed I used copy and paste to write this reply; but not on my phone. I cannot, in fact, ever recall doing large scale editing of any sort of document on my phone. I can recall exactly three occasions since I've owned my iPhone (nearly a year now) when I thought... 'Dammit, I wish I could copy/paste' and in all three I was able to compensate with a few moments effort. Certainly it would be nice to have, but it's hardly a key feature for me on this platform. If my computer couldn't do it, that would be crippling, but I don't use my phone for general purpose computing. Your experience may vary, that fine, as I keep saying I don't really care what you use, I'm just tired of being called an idiot because I own and like the iPhone. It does what i need it to do more of the time that other solutions.
WoW has found the start of the solution to persistent world problem with "phasing". It's apparently used several places in the expansion, though I've only played it in the Death Knight start area. Essentially you complete several quests in a "phase" and that keys you to move on the next phase, with the stuff you've done staying done. They use instance technology to make it work. Unfortunately it's still pretty limited, the quests in each phase are still static, and your social interactions are mostly limited to the people in the same phase as you are (you can talk in world chats like guild, but your options for partying or other social interaction are limited to the people you are currently phased with).
It doesn't solve the problem by any stretch, but it's a limited step forward.
It seems to me that part of the problem is that a lot of this stuff is simple to code (OK, not some much chess AIs, but crosswords, Sudokus, and such). If the market is niche, and it's simple to code, it's usually just a web app available for free or a three dollar box game. Not much margins in that.
A lot of the weaknesses you bring up are either the fault of or related to the limitations of the device, not the software. Copy/paste seems to be a mechanical issue (I'm not sure how you'd work highlights using multitouch). The OS can actually do multitasking: The phone, texting, and mail apps all run at least some background processes and the phone and text app can both foreground themselves. A decision was simply made to prevent other apps from multitasking in order to conserve the very small memory footprint.
Several of these complaints could be adjusted on a machine with more muscle, a bigger screen, and a keyboard/mouse based input system without significantly changing the underlying OS.
Ehh... I'm sketchy on the pre-Intel models. I know for a fact that my early MBP had G-wireless and a micro port though :-)
Not the earliest model MacBook Pros, and not any of the G-4/G-5 laptops. All of those do have card slots though (Well probably not all of the G-4/G-5 models do, but most do, and the early MBPs do).
Really, have you been reading the thread? First, some things are just not quantifiable. I can tell you that I use many more of my iPhones features than I did my old Treo because it's easier to use them. I can tell you that pages render more correctly and are easier to navigate in Safari than they ever were in Blazer. I can tell you that my e-mail app works with POP, IMAP, and MAPI and is a single app that came with the phone, whereas the Treo could only handle POP with it's default app and did that poorly. I can tell you that the user interface works better for me, and I like sliding my finger to see the next page of apps rather than tapping a scroll bar. I can tell you lots of things that I like better, but what it all boils down to is that the phone works better for me.
I never used Blazer if I could help it, the app was barely capable of displaying a page of straight text, but anything more complicated looked like trash and was unnavigable. The only decent mail and contacts app I ever had on the Treo was "Good" which cost the company I was working for at the time $150, and after I left that company eventually forced me to completely wipe the phone because it had taken over my contacts app and didn't work anymore once I was no longer connected to the old corporate exchange server. I found the screen hard to read and both the resolution and poor font design conspired to try to make me go blind. Real Player mobile sucked as a media platform and I never found anything better (granted I didn't try that hard, the mini-headphone jack and unreliability of most of the adapters I found made music listening on the thing uncomfortable anyway). I did like having copy/paste and that's the one thing I miss. Not nearly enough to go back though. It's not like it was a function I used daily or anything.
Those are my experiences with switching from one particular smart phone to the iPhone. There are several points in there you might argue with: "well I use copy and paste a lot and don't care to surf the web on my phone", "I LOVE Good and bought my own copy, so that's really an issue for me", "How can you think the fonts on the Treo sucked? I have 20/10 vision from the eye muscle exercise my Treo gives me!", "I already have an MP3 player, why do I want my phone to do it?". Fine, great. That's way this stuff is objective. It's different for different people with different wants and needs.
I will say this though. Most of the people making positive comments about the iPhone in this thread? They use the iPhone, either their own or someone's close to them that they can play with regularly. Most of the people making negative comments? They've never used the phone or have seen one in a store and played with it a few minutes. They're objecting to features that are missing on a checklist that they think they might want or need, and don't see listed on the feature list. If you tether your phone to your laptop as a daily occurrence, the iPhone is not for you. If you copy blocks of text back and forth on a regular basis on your phone, the iPhone is not for you. Otherwise there is not much that it won't or can't do, and, at least in my opinion, do better than any similar device I've ever used before.
This comment makes no sense. If your point is that you'd rather use your old phone or your Amiga because you feel that they are better integrated or work better for you, then good on ya. Use them away (though if they ever break you might feel the lack of qualified service or replacement parts), you've just made GPs point, sometimes, for some people, a better feature list does not make a better experience. If you're point if that ALL things with shorter feature lists are by definition better than things with longer feature lists (as if to disprove GPs point by "reductum ad absurdum"), that wasn't the GPs point at all. He was saying that sometimes the way a feature is implemented is as important or even more important than it's actual presence.
I used to have a Treo. It could surf the web. I never used it to surf the web because the rendering engine was awful, nothing worked right, I could hardly read the pages most of the times, and links were usually rendered so far out of place as to make them all but useless. I now have an iPhone (I've also play with G1's and my point stands there too). It can surf the web. I use it to surf the web all of the time, the interface is intuitive, the pages render as they were meant to the links are places where the designer intended, and I can zoom in to read smaller print. Both phones can "surf the web", check box checked, but one them actually get USED to "surf the web".
Actually the iPhone and the Treo can both multitask their "phone" apps and keep you talking while you look at contacts and notes and such. I'm sure any other modern smart phone can too. You need a headset of course, but the iPhone comes with a really nice one and I'm sure other smart phones have something decent. Bluetooth headsets are aquireable for $30-$40 these days too. The iPhone (and I'm sure any other wifi enabled smart phone) can even use the Internet through WiFi while you talk on it. It obviously can't use AT&T's network for Internet and still talk since the chip is in use already, but it works fine as long as you have WiFi. I've only ever made regular use of Treo and iPhone, so I can't speak with certainty of other models, but for these two at least, you're totally wrong.
As former Treo, now iPhone user all I can say is "Huh?". Blazer is all but useless as a browser, Opera never worked right on the PalmOS version of Java. Push e-mail never worked right unless you paid the fortune and a half for "Good" and had an Exchange back-end for it. The screen was fairly awful, and I was constantly replacing the little screen protectors. It was tremendously uncomfortable to use as an actual phone, it has no wifi or GPS support (without expensive add-on cards), it's 2G and doesn't even seem as fast as a first gen iPhone at that (I have a first gen and my wife has a 3G so I've experienced both). It constantly asked me if I wanted to make another call while I was talking on it, because my cheek would brush the button on the screen. It had really bad support for encryption, and my SSH app told me every time I used it that I was using dangerously poor encryption algorithms because the processor couldn't do any better.
I'd say it did perhaps half of what the iPhone does if we define "do" as "do well enough that I want to use it regularly". As to the things it can do that the iPhone "will never do", the only ones I can come up with are tethering (which was such a painfully slow way to access the Internet I never really used it any way, and it got expensive quickly with 5 GB data limits), Copy/paste (which I still hold out hope on), and multi-media text (which I also hold out hope on, but wouldn't mind so much if I could copy/paste).
Office documents are viewable with downloaded apps, and there are SSH and VNC clients on the app store as well. Most of the apps are a good bit cheaper than PalmOS apps were too. There are a few phones out there that really are more capable than the iPhone, but the Treo line is totally NOT among them. My wife rolled her Truck a couple of weeks back and lost her Treo, We considered it the only good part of the experience, and bought her a 3G.
Which is essentially using the Windows driver.
Sprint is currently the only carrier that doesn't have a shiny new consumer smart phone too. AT&T has the iPhone, T-mobile has the G-1, Verizon has the Blackberry Storm, Sprint has some cute new commercial where a VP tells people to come into the store and learn how to use the crappy phones Sprint sells. :-)
Yes, it's completely outrageous that we've gone 30 years without a Paradigm Shift. I mean really. Just cause it took over a thousand year for the shift from Platonic/Aristotelian physics to Newtonian, and nearly five hundred year for the next shift to Eisensteinian, is no reason to expect that we can't have them yearly now. Because you know, those guys like Einstein and Newton, they didn't build on centuries of work leading up to their "Satori" moments, they just spontaneously came up with this stuff... and we're much smarter now so we should come up with new paradigms all the time. What was I saying yearly... We should be doing this monthly; that way in a few years all the major Physicists in the world can "$name-ian Physics" of their very own.
I'll agree that $200 an hour is still a bit steep, but he wasn't saying he paid the developer that. He specifically references developers and designers. We're talking about a three to four man team here I'm sure. Certainly overkill for "Bob's Recipe Storage App (it stores recipes!)", but not at all unreasonable for "Super Monkeyball". Pay each of those guys 25-30 an hour (not at all unreasonable and some might argue pretty low), give them health insurance, pay the employment taxes, unemployment insurance... You can get there pretty easily.
You misunderstand his problem. He was trying to install. I've seen this before, the BIOS boots to the CD, but the kernel image on the CD doesn't have drivers for the SCSI card or the CD-ROM drive or whatever. The installer will boot, but fail to see the CD it just booted from and refuse to install. It's been a long time since I saw this, almost all CD-ROMs these days are IDE/ATA, even on server class hardware, and all modern distros support IDE/ATA drives in their install kernel images. On older systems with strange SCSI cards or non-standard CD-ROM buses it happened though. The solution is fairly non-trivial and involves compiling a new kernel with the drivers you need, then building your own install CD (or less painfully a boot disk if you can fit the kernel image on it and have a disk drive on the target system).
Everyone's jailbreaking their phones in order to get semi-decent functionality
Are we defining "everyone" to mean "me and the guys I know who spend most of their time hacking computer software"? I'd be REALLY surprised if the number of "jail broken" iPhones is greater than 1% of the total number. Repeat after me "Slashdot readers are not a viable sample group for technology issues". As a general rule you will find that people who read Slashdot are exponentially more likely to: [care about DRM, care about open source, be able to figure out how perform technological tasks, want to hack a mostly functional piece of hardware or software they purchased, even know that it is possible to jail break an iPhone] than the average person. Not everyone here is a genius programmer, or a rabid Open Source or Free Software advocate, but the percentages of people who know about and care about these things on this site is MUCH greater than in the general population.
Obviously we'll never know what the total percentage of jail broken phones is, but anecdotally I know around 10 people who have iPhones and only one them is jail broken. That guy jail broke his first gen phone before the release of the 2.0 OS ( with the app store), and while I haven't talked to him in some months he had been thinking of restoring the base OS since most of the software he needed was now available without jail breaking. He figured it was safer to use the app store products than risk his phone bricking. Honestly the only things that are missing from the iPhone at this point from a usability standpoint are copy/paste, multimedia text messages, and a tether app. I don't need the third and the first and second only bother me once in a blue moon.
On the other hand, nothing in the reply to the teacher's letter (which, by the way I did think was pretty poor) indicated that the teacher SHOULD be teaching about Linux either. There is a difference between "not teaching about" and "confiscating disks (probably illegal, since they are not her property and almost certainly not prohibited by school rules), discouraging non-class time discussion, writing an angry letter to the developer, and hoping to find some way to encourage prosecution of the same."
Teaching about Non-windows OS's in computer courses is probably a good idea. A great many college CS programs use *nix development environments, and since computer classes in high school probably have a goal of prepping students for college computer classes, there is definitely an argument for this. Having said that, the thrust of this article is not that the teacher is not teaching about Linux in class, it's that's she's showing active hostility to a student's interest and trying to make his life more difficult because he chooses to use free software. She's honestly hoping to get this developer arrested because she feels that he's somehow corrupting the youth.
Dude... As an Anal-Retentive Grammar Nazi you should really grammar check your posts. You don't have a single capitalized letter in a post with no fewer than four sentences (I'm not sure if "like" qualifies), and several proper nouns. You've also comma spliced in at least two places. Get a new job.
Better pay for private schools in general is definitely a misconception, but I think what the GP was referring to are the elite private schools where pay is typically a bit better than public schools. I have friend who is a department head at such a school and he makes in the mid-60's I would guess. This is easily half again what a teacher in the public schools with his experience in the area would make, and probably twice what a "normal" private school teacher would make. He is semi-administration though so the other teachers may not make quite as much.
Getting gigs at that kind of school isn't easy though. He has a master's degree, and taught for a number of years at a lower tier private school before he got the job. Plus a lot of people get into teaching because they love kids and want to make a difference. It's a little harder to convince yourself that you're making a difference when you only teach kids who's parent can afford Yale level tuition costs for high school. He likes the job (and the free tuition for his soon to be high school aged son), but I don't know that it would be for everyone.
Many people who teach do so out a legitimate love for teaching. The love kids and want to make a difference in the next generation. They don't "do something better", not because they can't, but because they are willing to put up with the crappy pay to do something they love. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be adequately compensated for their efforts, but they are willing to put up with the fact that they are not for other reasons. Their one bargaining chip, their feet, are one they don't choose to use.
As for your point about unions, while certainly there are downsides to having unions, there are also significant upsides. Teaching is a VERY high liability risk profession, without unions teachers would be subject to considerably more of that risk themselves. Teachers are hard to fire specifically because their positions are naturally fairly risky. Anytime a parent thinks a teacher made an error in dealing with their precious child, every time an administrator thinks a teacher's methods are to innovative or not innovative enough or whatever, the teacher risks firing and even lawsuit. Unions protect good teachers from bad parents, administrators, or situations as often if not more often than they protect bad teachers from justified firing.
Blaming the union for the pay structure of teachers is just silly. All large institutions pay based on seniority and credentials. Get a job with any company or institution that has more than 500 or so employees. You'll find that you have a pay grade based on your title and that you can only move up in salary within that pay grade, and never make more than your pay grade's maximum salary. If you are promoted to higher pay grade you will likely get a raise, but also, possibly more importantly, have the "ceiling" on your pay raised. Most teachers are in same boat. They have a title: say "Teacher 1", and to get a raise past a certain ceiling they must get promoted. Often these pay grades are based on education level and years of service. Like most large companies. Better teachers, with a desire to do so, can get promoted into administration where they can make more money. Just as better workers in any field can get promoted into management where they can make more money. If anything union fight to raise teacher salaries overall. The collective force of the union is far more effective at this than one person screaming that they are worth more than they are paid.
it's really unfortunate too. if anything, public schools should promote the use of FOSS as it doesn't impose a financial burden on students/parents. the school themselves would save a lot of money too by not having to pay for software licenses, not having to subscribe to AV software, and generally having less malware-related maintenance to do.
I don't disagree with your post in principle, but Microsoft gets around a lot of this by charging next to nothing for educational licenses. It's their way of making certain that the next generation grows up using Microsoft software and helps to continue the market dominance.
At least Micro$oft has that "Ah ha, you changed the "S" to a dollar sign in order to indicate the company is greedy, you clever person you" sort of obvious, if trite, statement. I'm not even sure what "Abble" indicates other than: "I often confuse my "b" key with my "p" key."