Where exactly do you think Apple innovated? The iPhone seems little more than a Treo with a touch screen and an updated UI.
Well, I don't want to get into a complete feature list on the iPhone, but I think where they've created a revolutionary experience is in web browsing. Web browsing on the iPhone is almost as good as it is on the desktop. If you haven't tried it and compared it to a Treo, you don't know how revolutionary it is.
You've got a 2" screen with a relatively low resolution - even crappy video streaming will run over 2.5G (poorly, but who watches video on their phone anyway?).
As the owner of an iPhone I can tell you it DOES matter. The difference between crappy Youtube video running over EDGE (2.5G) and a full 1 megabit H.264 video stream coming over wifi is night and day. Anybody that tells you they can't tell the difference, even on the small 3.5" screen in the iPhone, is blind.
(sorry Apple, I wanted to like and want the iPhone, I really did, but you shot yourself in the foot by not offering 3G, offering iTunes but not stereo headphone compatibility, and by locking the phone down).
Ok, it doesn't have 3G, but it sure does take stereo headphones. The jack is recessed though so you might have to spend $10 on an adapter, but it's the same on all the Treos and other smartphones that have the mini-headphone jacks that you need an adapter for.
Apple store employee told my friend that the iphone would work with his cell network
I call BS. It has been well advertised for months now that AT&T was the only network that an iPhone would work on. Anyone that expected it to be any different was misinformed, and I find it hard to believe that an Apple store employee would spread this misinformation.
To my knowledge the only U.S. network that allows for unlocked phones is T-Mobile, and their coverage sucks.
T-Mobile is pretty much the "budget" GSM carrier here in the US, although their service is pretty good for the price, and if you get coverage where you're at, why not use them. AT&T/Cingular is higher priced, but they have a great GSM network with good coverage all over the US. If you want to use an unlocked GSM phone here in the US, you can, you just can't choose Sprint or Verizon. But who would want to be locked into their crappy CDMA networks anyway? It's just another form of vendor lockin. With a GSM phone that is unlocked, I can freely switch to any other GSM carrier. With CDMA, even if you wanted to switch from Verizon to Sprint, you can't.
It's a stupid design, a waste of time, money, energy. It's obvious that Apple rushed to market rather than finish a design with a longer-lived battery, or at least user-replaceable. For that matter, I've always bought an extra battery with every new mobile phone, because phone power management is highly unreliable, while I rely on the phone. Apple's design stops even that basic risk mitigation.
Actually, I don't think it's that stupid of a design. In order to make a battery fit in a phone that is only 11 mm thin, the battery needs to be extremely flat and have a large surface area. Now try to design a battery like that that is replaceable... That's where it becomes tricky. Those plastic latches (that break and feel really cheap) take space, making things thicker. So Apple seems to have made a design decision to keep the phone thin and sleek at the expense of an easily replaceable battery. I appreciate the fact that my iPhone is small and thin, easily able to slide in a pocket. I also appreciate the fact that my iPhone is made out of metal and airplane glass, and that there are no cheap plastic latches or battery compartments to break. My experience with my Treo is that the plastic battery case latch starts to wear out after changing the battery too many times and pretty soon you find the whole phone falling apart in your pocket after a year or so because the latch comes loose. Tons of mobile phones have this problem. Apple made a conscious design decision on both the iPod and iPhone to use thinner battery technology that is non-replaceable. I can guarantee you that if Apple had gone the traditional route, the Apple haters would just be complaining that the thing was too bulky or thick, or had plastic parts...
And hopefully by then, Microsoft has made an answering shot to the iPhone and I'll have the ability to choose the device suited best for me.
Hahaha... You actually expect Microsoft to design a phone that's as usable as Apple? Damn that must be some tasty kool-aid BillG has you drinking. Windows Mobile is up to what, 6.0? And still unusable as hell and has a freaking Start Menu... What mobile device needs a Start Menu? Apple did it right by taking the best ideas from Palm (have all applications accessible by simple icons and load instantly, or be running in the background). Windows Mobile still thinks it's a desktop computer so when I want to get someone's phone number I have to freaking wait for my Contacts application to load... "Just a minute there important business person while I load my Contacts application so that I can take your number down..."
If I see another moron carrying the iPhone and using it in a way just to show it off, I am going to smack them.
Sounds like you have a little case of iPhone envy... Just admit it, Apple blew Windows Mobile out of the market (what little share they had) and Microsoft will be forever playing catch-up to a 1.0 product that was barely released.
It's a tremendous economic sacrifice and risk for any lawyer to take on the defense of any of these cases. You have no understanding of the economics at all. If you did, you'd understand why "there ain't hardly any lawyers jumping on that train". The RIAA will pay its lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars on any given case. How many of the defendants have the means and ability to pay their lawyers that kind of money?
I think a lot of Slashdotters are unfamiliar with the way large cases like this play out. This is the same reason why there are not very many lawyers that would take on big tobacco. You have to have a law firm that is staffed and willing to go several millions into the red on billable hours just to compete with the RIAA's defense team, who will surely go farther into the red on billable hours to avoid a precedent setting outcome.
Big cases like these drag on for years and basically come down to "do your law firm's senior partners have the stomach to risk their entire personal fortunes on a potentially big payout?" In most cases it must be a sure win (like being able to prove that tobacco actually kills people, the companies were aware of it, and kept the information from the public) for the law firm to jump on that bandwagon.
Here are some number from the UK Vodafone GPRS (non-Edge) network collected on a typical Cambridge to London Commute:
Just because Vodafone oversold their GPRS network doesn't mean that AT&T has. I live in one of the most rail commuter heavy areas in the world (NYC area), and I see people on the train using all kinds of Blackberries, Treos, and other wireless devices. I get 160kbps downstream (tested using mobile speed test) consistently in this area, provided my train isn't going through a tunnel or underground. I use a Treo 650 GSM on Cingular/AT&T network.
The reason I switched from T-Mobile to Cingular was the data speed. T-Mobile clocked in around 40kbps average, where Cingular/AT&T was 160kbps.
unless these guys were real A-holes. What they were probably looking for is the point at which you say, I don't know that, but if I needed the information I would go about getting it in XYZ. I use this tactic in interviews all the time, the people that fail are the people that either try to guess when they don't know or simply say, I don't know without thinking how they would get the information. The questions are not about how much you know, but how good a problem solver and researcher you are.
I agree with you completely. I've been through many interviews where that was the case, and the way to "win" the interview was just to admit "I don't know, but I would google using these search terms, using boolean logic to discard irrelevant search results."
In this case it was different. Google is looking for people who "just know" or have memorized these concepts.
Look at the world around you and you'll realize what sort of experience you brag about. I'm sure you'd find someone like George Bush "experienced".
All you have to do is read my signature to know what I think about Bush. 5 years ago I probably would have agreed with you. Now that I've had a few more years in my career I'm starting to see the benefit of experience. Experience is the type of thing that tells you "maybe I should back things up before I patch," when your hacker mind is telling you "nah just go ahead and patch, what could possibly go wrong?" I'm not saying experience means you're smarter. It just gives you a little more wisdom, to know how to make the right choice when you're in a stressful situation.
Maybe by pressing for ridiculous detail they were expecting you to admit that you don't know something (evidently you did, though), but explain that details like that can be looked up easily?
I'll be the first to admit that there is a lot I don't know. Actually, the "just google it" answer doesn't fly too well with the interviewers. They are looking for a level of expertise that goes to the "subject matter expert" level so they expect you to have this stuff memorized. Also, when they had me writing code, I commented on how much easier it would be to have an actual computer I could code on, but they didn't seem into that, because it would give me the advantage of not having to have memorization of all concepts. I guess they assume (and possibly rightly so) that a real expert will just "know how to code" from memory and be able to do it in his sleep.
There are two deal-breakers for me with the iPhone: It has to sync with Exchange directly (no, not just IMAP, but calendaring as well), and it must work with my car's Bluetooth module. The former is because that's the only way I'll get my boss to let me get one instead of a Blackberry; the latter is because no $600 phone, no matter how insanely great, will get me to get rid of a $45K car.
Wow talk about vendor lockin... Anyway, I think they have you covered on both accounts. iPhone WILL sync with Outlook (just not wirelessly), so you can get your calendar/contacts/tasks synced every time you put it in the dock. It also should work with your Bluetooth hands free kit in your car, but check the Apple site to make sure it's compatible. I don't think you'll have any problems.
It's almost painful to watch this unfold; I so wish Apple had gone with Sprint or Verizon or almost anybody except Cingular (well, okay, T-Mobile would have been worse).
It's not as bad as you think. I have a Treo 650 GSM, which used to be on T-Mobile, where I only got about 40kbps downstream according to mobile speed tests. I went to the Cingular store, popped in a SIM card to see how fast it was, and ran the same speed test and got 160kbps downstream. Since then I switched to Cingular, and in my area (Connecticut), I can consistently get good download speeds; better than ISDN quality. In fact, it's good enough to stream 128kbps MP3 from Internet radio stations. Isn't this fast enough for when you're out of Wifi coverage? Oh, and I don't know why so many people are knocking Cingular's network. Here in the northeast, Cingular seems to get better coverage than Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. I'm sure there are parts of the country where their coverage does suck, but I think the combined Orange (Cingular) and Blue (AT&T) towers offers the widest coverage of any cell carrier in this country.
Their style of questions was grilling you more and more and going deeper and deeper into the questions and technicalities until you failed. Started as what is TCP and UDP to going down and down and down the stack, syncookies, handshakes, how it works, to how sequence numbers are generated and more to more obscure points... At one point I couldn't answer anymore.
That was exactly how my third and fourth Google interviews went. I did extremely well because I tend to be the type of person that remembers those obscure details about TCP/IP packets that nobody needs to know in the "real world." But I couldn't help feeling that the entire interview was just about a pissing contest between 2 techies to see who knew more. Google has a lot of brilliant people working there, but it did seem extremely elitist and not a very good way to determine how smart a potential candidate is. If they push you long and far enough they will get to a point where you don't know any more.
The thing that really, really bothered me about the interview process was that if they are hiring for a "senior level" position (in my case they were), basing their hiring decision on whether you know which bit is flipped on or off in a TCP header is more likely to favor the recent college graduate who happened to memorize his textbook and has no real world experience, than the experienced career veteran that has probably forgotten more than the college grad ever knew. That's most likely why the workforce is "just like college" and "work experience doesn't matter." Like I said, Google has a lot of bright people, but they lack a lot of real world experience. Maybe that's a good thing (look at problems from a new perspective), but there's something to be said for experience.
How much heat are these things putting out these days? I'm considering something between 7600 to a 7900, probably with only a passive heatpipe. Are you saying the 8800 actually has less heat dissipation?
No, I'm not saying these things are putting out any less heat than the previous model. In fact, based on the power draw requirements (it takes 2 PCI-Express power connectors instead of 1 like most cards), I would guess this thing generates a lot more heat.
What is better about the 8800GTX compared to my previous 7800GTX is the cooling solution. The fan is much improved and is so quiet now that it's not as loud as my case fans. With the 7800GTX whenever I was playing a game the fan on the graphics card would start whining like a banshee. I'm pretty sensitive to fan noise (drives me nuts) so this was a nice improvement.
If you're looking for something with a truly passive cooling solution, I don't think any of the "GTX" cards are what you're looking for. These are high performance and require a lot of cooling. I heard the 7300GT is a completely passively cooled solution which is suitable to home media center type applications (not gaming).
You see, I live in Minnesota, so I wear gloves 10 months out of the year!
Somehow I don't think Steve Jobs had the average Minnesota resident in mind when he designed this phone. If you have to wear winter gloves all year round and live in a fucking meat locker then why don't you get out of the cold and go inside before trying to use your phone?
As an early 8800GTX adopter, I'd like to tell NVIDIA where they can shove this $700 paperweight..
I too have an 8800GTX and it's been nothing but a great card for me. All of my games play very fast in it, and it's much quieter than my previous 7800GTX. I'm not using Vista yet (sticking with XP SP2) so maybe that's why you don't like it. I have to say it is the best graphics card I've ever had.
Every week MORE Windows games work in Linux. Continue that trend long enough and Linux is going to have better Windows compatibility than Windows does.
I like your enthusiasm, but think about it for a second: How could Linux ever support more Windows games than Windows?
I have a Windows box sitting in the corner to do those things for which Linux software does not exist. I fire it up after Patch Tuesday and then once in a while to run whatever it is I need.
How sad is that? Is the killer app for a Windows box now Windows Update? Oh don't forget about my new favorite software package, Windows Genuine Advantage... har har...
Someone clue me in. Did we activate Skynet while I was at the office or has someone been indulging in too many sci-fi books and movies?
This whole book sounds like completely uniformed luddite crap. Did you read this part of the review? This guy's argument about how children are "forced" to use computers if they want to do well in the world needs to be thrown out. The same thing could have been said about books hundreds of years ago... Children are "forced" to read books if they want to learn knowledge. Well boo fucking hoo, so if you want to learn something you have to expose yourself to some media, whether it be books, audio, television, or interactive media on the computer. Why doesn't whoever wrote this book go back to their cave and live like cavemen did, or was that too cruel because we forced young cavemen to bang 2 rocks together to make fire?
And I can't see how any product with DRM could possibly run faster/better than a system without DRM, so I imagine it's also a technologically sound decision as well.
You know, I can't imagine a modern computer operating system that doesn't implement some form of DRM, or digital rights (restrictions) management. Think about it... Protected memory is simply DRM that doesn't allow one process to see the memory space of another process. This is a good thing. It's what makes modern operating systems stable and (relatively) crash free.
I understand and sympathize with the point you are trying to make. DRM used by media companies is particularly nasty, but I just wanted to point out that there are certain types of DRM that are very useful and even essential to modern computing. Protecting processes from stepping on each other is a good thing. Processes are often indistinguishable from users...
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Big cases like these drag on for years and basically come down to "do your law firm's senior partners have the stomach to risk their entire personal fortunes on a potentially big payout?" In most cases it must be a sure win (like being able to prove that tobacco actually kills people, the companies were aware of it, and kept the information from the public) for the law firm to jump on that bandwagon.
The reason I switched from T-Mobile to Cingular was the data speed. T-Mobile clocked in around 40kbps average, where Cingular/AT&T was 160kbps.
In this case it was different. Google is looking for people who "just know" or have memorized these concepts.
The thing that really, really bothered me about the interview process was that if they are hiring for a "senior level" position (in my case they were), basing their hiring decision on whether you know which bit is flipped on or off in a TCP header is more likely to favor the recent college graduate who happened to memorize his textbook and has no real world experience, than the experienced career veteran that has probably forgotten more than the college grad ever knew. That's most likely why the workforce is "just like college" and "work experience doesn't matter." Like I said, Google has a lot of bright people, but they lack a lot of real world experience. Maybe that's a good thing (look at problems from a new perspective), but there's something to be said for experience.
What is better about the 8800GTX compared to my previous 7800GTX is the cooling solution. The fan is much improved and is so quiet now that it's not as loud as my case fans. With the 7800GTX whenever I was playing a game the fan on the graphics card would start whining like a banshee. I'm pretty sensitive to fan noise (drives me nuts) so this was a nice improvement.
If you're looking for something with a truly passive cooling solution, I don't think any of the "GTX" cards are what you're looking for. These are high performance and require a lot of cooling. I heard the 7300GT is a completely passively cooled solution which is suitable to home media center type applications (not gaming).
I understand and sympathize with the point you are trying to make. DRM used by media companies is particularly nasty, but I just wanted to point out that there are certain types of DRM that are very useful and even essential to modern computing. Protecting processes from stepping on each other is a good thing. Processes are often indistinguishable from users...