Someone on the project page asked the guy who did this if the data connection worked.
His reply was rather cryptic: "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT".
If the person who managed it is recommending against it, the very same hoopy frood with the smarts who managed to go to all the trouble to hack Ubuntu onto the Kindle, then I gotta go with "it either doesn't work well enough to bother, or there's a really good reason why you shouldn't use it if it does".
A Netbook is cheaper, faster, and designed to run it. Why pay Amazon for an overpriced specialty item then make it do something it was never intended to do? I can't imagine the thing can still access the 3G network for free (the author replied "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" to someone who asked)...
And, yes, I know... "because we can". And I congratulate the person who managed this. It's an impressive technical achievement.
Still doesn't make it something I see a lot of people wanting to do. Why would anyone really want to take a one-trick pony and change the trick...?
PS: I think a lot of it has to do with target market, as well. My wife wanted a "smartphone" when she got a phone, and chose a Blackberry. This is partly because she doesn't want a data plan, she wants a phone that can run offline applications and also be a really good phone. If AT&T had a "super limited" data plan for less than $30 a month, she'd maybe get that.
If she had wanted to surf the web on it, she would have purchased an iPhone and gotten the $30 a month data plan, and she'd have probably used it. A lot.
But we have an iPod Touch for that. It's everything an iPhone is, except the data bits only work when she's in WiFi range, and it doesn't have an actual phone.:)
It's a shame it's not all that great a media player. But it is a great little portable web browser.
Several have posted that (a) the iPhone grants direct Internet access and (b) the iPhone will support compressed data if only more webmasters would turn it on.
But I agree, it's more than compression alone.
Graphics don't tend to compress well, but if you accept loss they do, and my Blackberry has an option to set the acceptable quality of the images that load versus how much data I want to use up. And most of the images don't load to start with.
I could easily see a tenfold difference between the two. First, because compression does save a considerable amount (especially text - a 10K text-only web page could easily drop to 2-3K when compressed), and second because the Blackberry simply doesn't load as much.
For better or worse, an iPhone loads up an entire page. Every element it can handle, every image, all the text, everything. Just like a desktop machine. And once loaded it allows you to scroll around and zoom in and twirl around and look at whatever part if it you want. For the user experience, this is generally "for better" (unless you count speed as really important or have a slow data connection). For speed and network usage, this is definitely "for worse."
Compare that with Blackberry browser, which loads the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. Images are sometimes there, scaled down appropriately for the screen, and if you want to view them full size you have to ask for them.
If you load, say, Slashdot on an iPhone, you're going to burn through about 35K or so per page (or more, I'm only using a page including your post and my reply on it as my example).
That includes 25K for the background image (which won't load on Blackberry Browser), and a few K for other images that will load compressed or not load at all on a BB. So I'd expect a BB to use maybe 5-10K, tops, to load this same page.
Note that I'm not saying the page will look as nice, etc, this is purely a bandwidth calculation. But it does lead to another possible reason for increased bandwidth. I'm not going to visit/. on my Blackberry unless they have a Mobile version. It's too frustrating.
I might use Opera Mini, but that's going to be even more efficient than the Blackberry Browser because everything is compressed and it's unlikely I'll look at the whole page at any time.
But if I had an iPhone, I might use it for a lot of stuff on/. - because the user experience is getting closer to a desktop. I still can't type on the consarned thing, but that's my big meaty paws, and I'm not really the iPhone's target customer anyway. My point is that someone might use it more, as opposed to going out of their way to find a desktop machine.
Agreed. In a setting like this, the students are guilty of a horrible breach of etiquette, no more and no less. Since the speaker has gone to the trouble of reserving a podium to express his views, he should be allowed to complete his point, whether the audience agrees or not. But that's a matter of manners, not law.
If someone becomes disruptive enough that the presenter is unable to continue, that person should be removed from the setting, and encouraged to go and reserve their own podium where they can freely express their own views. In return, if the former disruptive person goes to that effort, any audience that attends their presentation should offer the same courtesy - listen to the presentation, ask respectful questions when appropriate (if possible), and if you disagree vehemently with the speaker and don't feel their point of view is useful or productive in any way, just get up and walk out.
When exercising free speech, it's important to understand the reason for it. Democracy requires weighing viewpoints, which means you need to expose yourself to viewpoints to weigh. It should really be called "free discourse", since it requires a speaker and a listener, and a genuine interest in exchanging information and ideas.
But since I'd be dead set against some sort of standards body that determines whether and when someone can speak, the rules of etiquette will have to do for public settings.
If we find speech that causes physical pain to some people, we need to find those people and issue them free painkillers. If it's empirically proven, I'll gladly use some of my tax dollars to pay for those painkillers, because it would be an important government function in support of free speech.
Because the alternative is to have someone in control of what everyone says, and that would cause fatal blows to free discourse.
A democracy requires citizens who are able to freely discuss whatever they want. Ideally that discussion is civil, but as soon as you have a body deciding what is "civil discourse" versus "harmful speech", you give that body control of all discourse and you don't have a democracy any more.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't be offended by it, sure, but to go back the RobotRunAmok's original quote - "you cannot give offense, you can only take it."
They are doing something they know other people won't like to make a point. You find their actions deeply unpleasant and disrespectful. Fine. I actually agree with you, but that's beside the point. They know a lot of people will become angered by what they do, and that is their goal - to get people talking about them and help spread their message.
You are taking offense. They can't force you to be offended, offense is your reaction to their action. You control your reactions, not them. If you decide that they control that, then you have decided that they own a little teeny piece of you.
If you decide that their actions are worth anger and resentment on your part, then (a) you are taking offense, and (b) you are allowing their asshattedness to control you. You choose to take them seriously. They can't make you do so. You choose to mention their name in a discussion board. Guess what? That's what they want you to do. They want you to repeat their name as often as possible, and mention their actions. They are marketing, and you are giving them free ads. Don't take it personally, we all get manipulated this way.
If you decide that they are jsut a bunch of effing asshats and ignore them, then you are not taking offense, and they are not controlling you. You can still consider what they do offensive, but you can also choose to consider it irrelevant because they are asshats. You can stop mentioning them, and you can forget about them. If they do actual harm to someone, that merits a reaction, but reacting in their intended manner to their actions means they own you, at least a little. They win.
Your offense, ironically, justifies their actions in their minds. Ignoring them denies them the control over you they crave.
I agree, the exercise would be cool to watch, and by that I mean both exercises - the actual robots doing their thing, and watching people in a conference room try to brainstorm "not quite stupid enough to laugh" phrases that fit a word-based acronym.
But, after all, NASA is the one who now has a treadmill called the "Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill", proving they have a sense of humor and a streak of brilliance at acronyms. They managed to appease the members of Colbert Nation and get a good laugh at the same time.:)
While I don't entirely disagree, I would point to Opera Mini as an example of doing this well for both a small screen and reducing network load.
When you surf to a page in Opera on (only example I have) a Blackberry, the entire page loads, but only as preview image. This happens very quickly (note: I have an older 83xx Blackberry, so I can't play in the 3G playground, EDGE is the fastest my radio can manage, so "very quickly" to be is probably going to be "freaking fast" to a 3G-enabled user).
On top of this image is a box that I can scroll around. When I get the box placed where I want, Opera loads whatever element(s) I have highlighted. On a forum like this, that would generally be a message. Opera reformats the element to fit on the screen you have and displays it (so if I select a single message posting, it pulls up the text and re-wordwraps it so I'm looking at just the text).
No, it's not NEARLY as nice as pinching in and out to zoom in and out, having fully-variable fonts, seeing a desktop web page as the designers intended at the zoom level that makes sense to be at that exact moment, etc. I do love the iPod web browsing experience when compared to the Opera Mini or especially the native Blackberry browser. But I've only browsed on an iPod Touch over WiFi, so I've never waited for a page to load.:)
I agree that the best solution is for AT&T to upgrade their network. But, of course, if their network costs them more eventually the costs will be passed along. It may behoove them and Apple to come up with some way of saving network load by at least loading images at a lower resolution and replacing them as you zoom, etc. I have to imagine most (maybe not all, and I could easily be wrong) iPhone users would be happier with a very fast initial page load, even if it meant they saw a grainy version of an image for a couple of seconds after zooming.
Personally, I like the Opera approach best overall. Page zooms "feel" very fast, since it's not loading the whole page, only the portion I'm zooming in on, and the initial load of a page is really, really fast. So I get a quick picture of the page really fast, then I may have to wait a couple of seconds if I want to zoom in on a particular section, but I surf with a series of smaller delays instead of one really big one. But I rarely read every scrap of a web page, so having a quick index I can zoom in on to get the bits I want is pretty ideal.
Blackberry's native browser loads the whole page, but scales the images down and reformats the page to fit better on the screen. This makes the pages load pretty quickly since most of the data hogs are stripped out, but it's not a "true browsing" experience. Which is OK, you couldn't cram a "true browsing" experience on the tiny Blackberry screen anyway, and I can usually get to the bits of information I need from a given page relatively quickly. So the Blackberry browser fits the Blackberry well, but it's designed for a different phone and a different user experience than iPhone's Safari. When I've got a mobile-optimized web site, I go for the native browser because it does that particularly well.
My only experience with browsing on an iPhone-like interface is my wife's iPod Touch,and I love the fact that the whole page loads first in Safari. But that's on WiFi and I don't have any load time compromises there. I think if I was on GPRS or even EDGE, I'd be frustrated with the load times and prefer a faster "preview version" load with more detail coming in as I ask for it. And if Apple or AT&T offered that as an option, it would have the nice side effect of reducing their network load considerably, at least for web browsing.
I'm an AT&T customer in the US, and I don't get it either. I live in a rural area, so I do get the occasional dropped call if I'm driving on a rural road and get out of range of a tower. But that has nothing to do with network load, it means I'd like to see AT&T put in more towers.
I've had a couple of calls fail to complete (I dial the number, the phone pauses trying to get a free line, and I get a "your call cannot be completed" or "call failed" message). I'd say that's happened to me twice in the 9 months I've had my phone. That's probably an indication that my local tower is overwhelmed. But I've never lost a call in progress except drops that can easily be explained by lack of signal coverage.
I'm happy to hear that AT&T is looking at upgrades. Personally, I have run into almost no issues, but my area is a pretty recent recipient of 3G. Internet browsing got pretty slow midsummer, but AT&T managed through the bulk of tourist season with decent service. Now that most of our state's guests are headed home as the weather starts to cool and school gets back in session, I'm sure the load on the network will decrease.
I'm curious, though. I know very little about Apple's infrastructure on the iPhone, but I know that most of my Internet access on the Blackberry goes through a central server (BES for companies or BIS for individuals) and that data gets compressed en route. The primary reason, of course, is so pages can load more quickly, but it also has a side effect of requiring less data be transferred, therefore less load on the network.
Opera's mobile browser operates on the same basic idea - the "preview" you get of each web page is loaded as a very small and low-res image, then when you click on a section for details you zoom in on that area and it loads more detail. But the entire web page is not loaded to your phone up front - Opera's server serves up the parts you are looking at right now.
Does Safari do this, or does it load the entire page in full detail up front so you can zoom in on the little bit you want to see? If it loads the whole page, Apple and AT&T might want to discuss some form of "preview load" and only load more detail as it is asked for. It'd probably cut data usage considerably and if the preview loads quickly it would even improve the user experience.
There is no problem. I prefer standards-based equipment, you obviously prefer Apple's standard and want the extra features. Your decision is different from mine, not wrong or right.
No, but I also don't feel the need to watch content over my TV. If I want to watch full-screen video on a screen, I'll use a computer.
Last I checked, most TVs don't have Apple-specific cabling on them, either, though I'm sure Apple would love to change that.
Look, it's a free country, buy all the Apple-specific cabling you want. Get white plasticky logos on your clothing for all I care. I'm just saying that Apple doesn't have an exclusive lock on doing things with media, and even if your device happens to depend on that magic connector there's a whole world that depends on other established standards that works just fine without it. Thankfully, you can buy all the plastic flambe you want. Have at it.
Oddly enough, I was watching the X-Files the other day and marveling at how far the technologies they used in the show have come (and how many technologies they didn't have in the show have come to pass in the meantime). And even at that, the implementations of technology were fictional (out on a completely deserted forested highway in the middle of supposedly Iowa, and your cell phone rings, riiiiiiight...). Some of the things they were trying to show off on the show are now jarringly dated, but were cutting edge when the show was filmed and were used as showpieces to demonstrate that the show was fresh, high-tech, etc.
Then: Photocopiers, monochrome green/white CRT monitors, cordless phones you couldn't actually get your hand around with an antenna 8 inches long, FAX machines, manually comparing fingerprints, and "K" Cars. We've come a LONG way in 15 years.
Sure, some of the changes are incremental improvements, but you could argue that the Internet is the result of a series of improvements over telegraph (and in some areas pretty much uses the same wires - grin).
Don't forget, His Noodly Appendages must be served slightly al dente (unless you're an infidel who likes squishy appendages), and the proper attire is, of course, pirate.
"Quality"? Why does quality have to do any lifting at all? This is Internet access we're talking about.
I have one, count them, one service provider available to me unless I want to stick to dialup (slow), go wireless (slow and limited), or satellite (slow, limited, and hideously expensive).
Comcast could give me half my rated download speed and half my rated upload speed, and there'd be absolutely nothing I could do about it, because "they are the Internet" as far as my area is concerned. Actually, that's almost what IS happening. I'm paying for 3MB down / 256KB up, and running full-tilt-boogie against a known good download server I can maybe maintain 2.2MB down, and about 120-140K up on a good day, all this excellence for $50 a month and a 250GB cap.
Why should they maintain quality, when they can have profit?
The problem is that you see the words "unlimited broadband" as a sequential progression of syllables. Remember that the Internet is based on TCP/IP, where packets may arrive in a different sequence than they were sent, and the stack reassembles them. Verbiage that comes from ISPs is, logically enough, similarly delivered.
But you are receiving them as a user, and therefore using UDP, not TCP. What is not clear to you, then, is the order in which the syllables were sent, so it's understandably difficult to reassemble them into their correct sequence.
I sent a resend request and re-received the syllables using TCP. The original transmission only had one syllable out of place, surprisingly. Anyway, I reassembled the syllables back into their intended sequence for you, which is as follows: "limited unbroadband".
I'm not sure what other features the dock connector supports, actually. Charging, music playback via the connected device, remote control via the connected device, data transfer. What am I missing?
For music-out, both my devices are equipped with a standard 3.5mm headset jack. I can plug it into my home stereo without the slightest problem. Which, to be fair, the iPod also has, so I can use an industry-standard audio jack for all of my devices. I don't need a specific solution for my iPod.
For remote start/stop/pause, at home I just use the onboard device controls and the car has a USB interface and the stereo does the actual playing, the MP3 player or BlackBerry only serves as a flash drive for those circumstances. Though, to be honest, I just have a cheapo flash drive in the car for my music and it just stays plugged into the USB port. If it gets broken or stolen, I'm out a few bucks, so there's no sense risking plugging in expensive hardware every time.
Most of the other nifty things the iPod can do work just fine over WiFi.
The Apple connector is a nice, one-unit solution to talk to an iPod/iPhone. But since they've made the plug proprietary, it does all those nifty things only for Apple hardware. And, oddly enough, other people out there make hardware, and I don't want to get locked in.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering about their patent on "One Click Kidnapping".
That's about what I figured. :)
Smart dude, significant accomplishment, and not to denigrate his success but I'd love to see him using all that brainpower on something else.
But I can't criticize - we all have our hobbies. I can't say the time I spend kayaking really helps humanity out all that much either (grin).
Someone on the project page asked the guy who did this if the data connection worked.
His reply was rather cryptic: "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT".
If the person who managed it is recommending against it, the very same hoopy frood with the smarts who managed to go to all the trouble to hack Ubuntu onto the Kindle, then I gotta go with "it either doesn't work well enough to bother, or there's a really good reason why you shouldn't use it if it does".
No, the REAL question is... why?
A Netbook is cheaper, faster, and designed to run it. Why pay Amazon for an overpriced specialty item then make it do something it was never intended to do? I can't imagine the thing can still access the 3G network for free (the author replied "YES BUT DON'T DO THAT" to someone who asked)...
And, yes, I know... "because we can". And I congratulate the person who managed this. It's an impressive technical achievement.
Still doesn't make it something I see a lot of people wanting to do. Why would anyone really want to take a one-trick pony and change the trick...?
PS: I think a lot of it has to do with target market, as well. My wife wanted a "smartphone" when she got a phone, and chose a Blackberry. This is partly because she doesn't want a data plan, she wants a phone that can run offline applications and also be a really good phone. If AT&T had a "super limited" data plan for less than $30 a month, she'd maybe get that.
If she had wanted to surf the web on it, she would have purchased an iPhone and gotten the $30 a month data plan, and she'd have probably used it. A lot.
But we have an iPod Touch for that. It's everything an iPhone is, except the data bits only work when she's in WiFi range, and it doesn't have an actual phone. :)
It's a shame it's not all that great a media player. But it is a great little portable web browser.
Several have posted that (a) the iPhone grants direct Internet access and (b) the iPhone will support compressed data if only more webmasters would turn it on.
But I agree, it's more than compression alone.
Graphics don't tend to compress well, but if you accept loss they do, and my Blackberry has an option to set the acceptable quality of the images that load versus how much data I want to use up. And most of the images don't load to start with.
I could easily see a tenfold difference between the two. First, because compression does save a considerable amount (especially text - a 10K text-only web page could easily drop to 2-3K when compressed), and second because the Blackberry simply doesn't load as much.
For better or worse, an iPhone loads up an entire page. Every element it can handle, every image, all the text, everything. Just like a desktop machine. And once loaded it allows you to scroll around and zoom in and twirl around and look at whatever part if it you want. For the user experience, this is generally "for better" (unless you count speed as really important or have a slow data connection). For speed and network usage, this is definitely "for worse."
Compare that with Blackberry browser, which loads the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. Images are sometimes there, scaled down appropriately for the screen, and if you want to view them full size you have to ask for them.
If you load, say, Slashdot on an iPhone, you're going to burn through about 35K or so per page (or more, I'm only using a page including your post and my reply on it as my example).
That includes 25K for the background image (which won't load on Blackberry Browser), and a few K for other images that will load compressed or not load at all on a BB. So I'd expect a BB to use maybe 5-10K, tops, to load this same page.
Note that I'm not saying the page will look as nice, etc, this is purely a bandwidth calculation. But it does lead to another possible reason for increased bandwidth. I'm not going to visit /. on my Blackberry unless they have a Mobile version. It's too frustrating.
I might use Opera Mini, but that's going to be even more efficient than the Blackberry Browser because everything is compressed and it's unlikely I'll look at the whole page at any time.
But if I had an iPhone, I might use it for a lot of stuff on /. - because the user experience is getting closer to a desktop. I still can't type on the consarned thing, but that's my big meaty paws, and I'm not really the iPhone's target customer anyway. My point is that someone might use it more, as opposed to going out of their way to find a desktop machine.
Agreed. In a setting like this, the students are guilty of a horrible breach of etiquette, no more and no less. Since the speaker has gone to the trouble of reserving a podium to express his views, he should be allowed to complete his point, whether the audience agrees or not. But that's a matter of manners, not law.
If someone becomes disruptive enough that the presenter is unable to continue, that person should be removed from the setting, and encouraged to go and reserve their own podium where they can freely express their own views. In return, if the former disruptive person goes to that effort, any audience that attends their presentation should offer the same courtesy - listen to the presentation, ask respectful questions when appropriate (if possible), and if you disagree vehemently with the speaker and don't feel their point of view is useful or productive in any way, just get up and walk out.
When exercising free speech, it's important to understand the reason for it. Democracy requires weighing viewpoints, which means you need to expose yourself to viewpoints to weigh. It should really be called "free discourse", since it requires a speaker and a listener, and a genuine interest in exchanging information and ideas.
But since I'd be dead set against some sort of standards body that determines whether and when someone can speak, the rules of etiquette will have to do for public settings.
If we find speech that causes physical pain to some people, we need to find those people and issue them free painkillers. If it's empirically proven, I'll gladly use some of my tax dollars to pay for those painkillers, because it would be an important government function in support of free speech.
Because the alternative is to have someone in control of what everyone says, and that would cause fatal blows to free discourse.
A democracy requires citizens who are able to freely discuss whatever they want. Ideally that discussion is civil, but as soon as you have a body deciding what is "civil discourse" versus "harmful speech", you give that body control of all discourse and you don't have a democracy any more.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't be offended by it, sure, but to go back the RobotRunAmok's original quote - "you cannot give offense, you can only take it."
They are doing something they know other people won't like to make a point. You find their actions deeply unpleasant and disrespectful. Fine. I actually agree with you, but that's beside the point. They know a lot of people will become angered by what they do, and that is their goal - to get people talking about them and help spread their message.
You are taking offense. They can't force you to be offended, offense is your reaction to their action. You control your reactions, not them. If you decide that they control that, then you have decided that they own a little teeny piece of you.
If you decide that their actions are worth anger and resentment on your part, then (a) you are taking offense, and (b) you are allowing their asshattedness to control you. You choose to take them seriously. They can't make you do so. You choose to mention their name in a discussion board. Guess what? That's what they want you to do. They want you to repeat their name as often as possible, and mention their actions. They are marketing, and you are giving them free ads. Don't take it personally, we all get manipulated this way.
If you decide that they are jsut a bunch of effing asshats and ignore them, then you are not taking offense, and they are not controlling you. You can still consider what they do offensive, but you can also choose to consider it irrelevant because they are asshats. You can stop mentioning them, and you can forget about them. If they do actual harm to someone, that merits a reaction, but reacting in their intended manner to their actions means they own you, at least a little. They win.
Your offense, ironically, justifies their actions in their minds. Ignoring them denies them the control over you they crave.
I agree, the exercise would be cool to watch, and by that I mean both exercises - the actual robots doing their thing, and watching people in a conference room try to brainstorm "not quite stupid enough to laugh" phrases that fit a word-based acronym.
But, after all, NASA is the one who now has a treadmill called the "Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill", proving they have a sense of humor and a streak of brilliance at acronyms. They managed to appease the members of Colbert Nation and get a good laugh at the same time. :)
Now why would they want to fix the streaming issues? That just means you'll use more network capacity. (grin)
While I don't entirely disagree, I would point to Opera Mini as an example of doing this well for both a small screen and reducing network load.
When you surf to a page in Opera on (only example I have) a Blackberry, the entire page loads, but only as preview image. This happens very quickly (note: I have an older 83xx Blackberry, so I can't play in the 3G playground, EDGE is the fastest my radio can manage, so "very quickly" to be is probably going to be "freaking fast" to a 3G-enabled user).
On top of this image is a box that I can scroll around. When I get the box placed where I want, Opera loads whatever element(s) I have highlighted. On a forum like this, that would generally be a message. Opera reformats the element to fit on the screen you have and displays it (so if I select a single message posting, it pulls up the text and re-wordwraps it so I'm looking at just the text).
No, it's not NEARLY as nice as pinching in and out to zoom in and out, having fully-variable fonts, seeing a desktop web page as the designers intended at the zoom level that makes sense to be at that exact moment, etc. I do love the iPod web browsing experience when compared to the Opera Mini or especially the native Blackberry browser. But I've only browsed on an iPod Touch over WiFi, so I've never waited for a page to load. :)
I agree that the best solution is for AT&T to upgrade their network. But, of course, if their network costs them more eventually the costs will be passed along. It may behoove them and Apple to come up with some way of saving network load by at least loading images at a lower resolution and replacing them as you zoom, etc. I have to imagine most (maybe not all, and I could easily be wrong) iPhone users would be happier with a very fast initial page load, even if it meant they saw a grainy version of an image for a couple of seconds after zooming.
"...how do you like your pain administered?"
LOL. Too true.
Personally, I like the Opera approach best overall. Page zooms "feel" very fast, since it's not loading the whole page, only the portion I'm zooming in on, and the initial load of a page is really, really fast. So I get a quick picture of the page really fast, then I may have to wait a couple of seconds if I want to zoom in on a particular section, but I surf with a series of smaller delays instead of one really big one. But I rarely read every scrap of a web page, so having a quick index I can zoom in on to get the bits I want is pretty ideal.
Blackberry's native browser loads the whole page, but scales the images down and reformats the page to fit better on the screen. This makes the pages load pretty quickly since most of the data hogs are stripped out, but it's not a "true browsing" experience. Which is OK, you couldn't cram a "true browsing" experience on the tiny Blackberry screen anyway, and I can usually get to the bits of information I need from a given page relatively quickly. So the Blackberry browser fits the Blackberry well, but it's designed for a different phone and a different user experience than iPhone's Safari. When I've got a mobile-optimized web site, I go for the native browser because it does that particularly well.
My only experience with browsing on an iPhone-like interface is my wife's iPod Touch,and I love the fact that the whole page loads first in Safari. But that's on WiFi and I don't have any load time compromises there. I think if I was on GPRS or even EDGE, I'd be frustrated with the load times and prefer a faster "preview version" load with more detail coming in as I ask for it. And if Apple or AT&T offered that as an option, it would have the nice side effect of reducing their network load considerably, at least for web browsing.
I'm an AT&T customer in the US, and I don't get it either. I live in a rural area, so I do get the occasional dropped call if I'm driving on a rural road and get out of range of a tower. But that has nothing to do with network load, it means I'd like to see AT&T put in more towers.
I've had a couple of calls fail to complete (I dial the number, the phone pauses trying to get a free line, and I get a "your call cannot be completed" or "call failed" message). I'd say that's happened to me twice in the 9 months I've had my phone. That's probably an indication that my local tower is overwhelmed. But I've never lost a call in progress except drops that can easily be explained by lack of signal coverage.
I'm happy to hear that AT&T is looking at upgrades. Personally, I have run into almost no issues, but my area is a pretty recent recipient of 3G. Internet browsing got pretty slow midsummer, but AT&T managed through the bulk of tourist season with decent service. Now that most of our state's guests are headed home as the weather starts to cool and school gets back in session, I'm sure the load on the network will decrease.
I'm curious, though. I know very little about Apple's infrastructure on the iPhone, but I know that most of my Internet access on the Blackberry goes through a central server (BES for companies or BIS for individuals) and that data gets compressed en route. The primary reason, of course, is so pages can load more quickly, but it also has a side effect of requiring less data be transferred, therefore less load on the network.
Opera's mobile browser operates on the same basic idea - the "preview" you get of each web page is loaded as a very small and low-res image, then when you click on a section for details you zoom in on that area and it loads more detail. But the entire web page is not loaded to your phone up front - Opera's server serves up the parts you are looking at right now.
Does Safari do this, or does it load the entire page in full detail up front so you can zoom in on the little bit you want to see? If it loads the whole page, Apple and AT&T might want to discuss some form of "preview load" and only load more detail as it is asked for. It'd probably cut data usage considerably and if the preview loads quickly it would even improve the user experience.
There is no problem. I prefer standards-based equipment, you obviously prefer Apple's standard and want the extra features. Your decision is different from mine, not wrong or right.
No, but I also don't feel the need to watch content over my TV. If I want to watch full-screen video on a screen, I'll use a computer.
Last I checked, most TVs don't have Apple-specific cabling on them, either, though I'm sure Apple would love to change that.
Look, it's a free country, buy all the Apple-specific cabling you want. Get white plasticky logos on your clothing for all I care. I'm just saying that Apple doesn't have an exclusive lock on doing things with media, and even if your device happens to depend on that magic connector there's a whole world that depends on other established standards that works just fine without it. Thankfully, you can buy all the plastic flambe you want. Have at it.
Oddly enough, I was watching the X-Files the other day and marveling at how far the technologies they used in the show have come (and how many technologies they didn't have in the show have come to pass in the meantime). And even at that, the implementations of technology were fictional (out on a completely deserted forested highway in the middle of supposedly Iowa, and your cell phone rings, riiiiiiight...). Some of the things they were trying to show off on the show are now jarringly dated, but were cutting edge when the show was filmed and were used as showpieces to demonstrate that the show was fresh, high-tech, etc.
Then: Photocopiers, monochrome green/white CRT monitors, cordless phones you couldn't actually get your hand around with an antenna 8 inches long, FAX machines, manually comparing fingerprints, and "K" Cars. We've come a LONG way in 15 years.
Sure, some of the changes are incremental improvements, but you could argue that the Internet is the result of a series of improvements over telegraph (and in some areas pretty much uses the same wires - grin).
Don't forget, His Noodly Appendages must be served slightly al dente (unless you're an infidel who likes squishy appendages), and the proper attire is, of course, pirate.
RPG? Now you're talking my language! :)
And, yes, I've programmed in RPG using a couple of Agile development methodologies, including Scrum. .. oh, wait, different RPG.. ;)
D'OH! Guess I killed my television a decade too soon.
I'll continue to buy it on CD and rip it to MP3, thanks. :)
"Quality"? Why does quality have to do any lifting at all? This is Internet access we're talking about.
I have one, count them, one service provider available to me unless I want to stick to dialup (slow), go wireless (slow and limited), or satellite (slow, limited, and hideously expensive).
Comcast could give me half my rated download speed and half my rated upload speed, and there'd be absolutely nothing I could do about it, because "they are the Internet" as far as my area is concerned. Actually, that's almost what IS happening. I'm paying for 3MB down / 256KB up, and running full-tilt-boogie against a known good download server I can maybe maintain 2.2MB down, and about 120-140K up on a good day, all this excellence for $50 a month and a 250GB cap.
Why should they maintain quality, when they can have profit?
The problem is that you see the words "unlimited broadband" as a sequential progression of syllables. Remember that the Internet is based on TCP/IP, where packets may arrive in a different sequence than they were sent, and the stack reassembles them. Verbiage that comes from ISPs is, logically enough, similarly delivered.
But you are receiving them as a user, and therefore using UDP, not TCP. What is not clear to you, then, is the order in which the syllables were sent, so it's understandably difficult to reassemble them into their correct sequence.
I sent a resend request and re-received the syllables using TCP. The original transmission only had one syllable out of place, surprisingly. Anyway, I reassembled the syllables back into their intended sequence for you, which is as follows: "limited unbroadband".
I hope this helps...
I'm not sure what other features the dock connector supports, actually. Charging, music playback via the connected device, remote control via the connected device, data transfer. What am I missing?
For music-out, both my devices are equipped with a standard 3.5mm headset jack. I can plug it into my home stereo without the slightest problem. Which, to be fair, the iPod also has, so I can use an industry-standard audio jack for all of my devices. I don't need a specific solution for my iPod.
For remote start/stop/pause, at home I just use the onboard device controls and the car has a USB interface and the stereo does the actual playing, the MP3 player or BlackBerry only serves as a flash drive for those circumstances. Though, to be honest, I just have a cheapo flash drive in the car for my music and it just stays plugged into the USB port. If it gets broken or stolen, I'm out a few bucks, so there's no sense risking plugging in expensive hardware every time.
Most of the other nifty things the iPod can do work just fine over WiFi.
The Apple connector is a nice, one-unit solution to talk to an iPod/iPhone. But since they've made the plug proprietary, it does all those nifty things only for Apple hardware. And, oddly enough, other people out there make hardware, and I don't want to get locked in.