The beta of 5 was out for developers for a good bit of time and no one reported it. You might be suppressed what can go unnoticed in testing.
Moreover, I assume that the developer builds included debugging code which would be less efficient. Poorer battery life should have been expected, and probably was.
iPhones required entry every time, but gave a 15 minute grace period that wasn't configurable. Now it's configurable, but I don't know how many parents know about it.
Typing "web" into Spotlight doesn't autocomplete to Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera (the four browsers I have installed on my Mac.) In fact, typing "irefox" into Spotlight doesn't even turn up Firefox. However typing "cal" autocompletes to iCal. Typing "vim" autocompletes to MacVim.
I don't know how Unity does it, but I'm not that impressed with Spotlight. It works if you know the command, or a word in the command (vnc => Chicken of the VNC) but it doesn't seem to know anything about semantics, even for built-in applications.
And they don't provide the public benefit. Patents are supposed to show you exactly how to reproduce the subject of the patent. That way, when the patent expires, anyone can use the knoweldge.
The whole thing definitely sounds off. It's just usually a bad idea to give people money for no reason. (I consider "helping you stay afloat temporarily while you look for another job" to be a good reason.)
I agree. And I complain about the problem a lot. But then I remember that it's a fight just to get science taught in science class, and it usually obliterates my resolve.
Sure, but I never said NCLB was the cause of the bubble. Maybe I never really tied it back to the OP, though.
The OP complained about education requirements and degree inflation. I think s/he's right about that. Many jobs which ask for a degree could be done with simply adequate training. I've already seen plenty of college graduates who aren't worth a damn. And I've known fantastic admins and systems engineers who were college dropouts. During our last hiring round, we got a huge number of applicants who didn't meet our requirements--people who apparently just applied for every position available without consideration. I'm talking about teachers with no computer experience on their resume applying for sysadmin positions. We already had to filter out crap--I have to wonder if we'd have been better off nixing the degree requirement so that people without a degree but with a good skillset could have been considered.
The tie-in to NCLB is that NCLB means more high school students graduate. More high school graduates means more potential college candidates. This increased demand means that colleges can charge more. They hire a few more faculty. Class sizes increase. More people manage to get degrees who wouldn't have been able to (not due to cost) 10 years ago. The degree becomes less meaningful.
It's certainly not the only reason for higher tuition, but I'd bet it's a part of it. If we could let kids flunk out and just learn a trade, everyone would probably be better off.
It's true that there have been students getting into college unprepared for decades. In the last 10 years, though, there's been a huge surge. It's the surge that we think caused by NCLB.
This is coming from college professors who have been teaching for something like a combined 70 years.
I was pretty disappointed, too. I'd like to be able to easily try out different carriers, or get a prepaid US SIM for times when Sprint has poor service while I'm travelling. Unfortunately, I suspect that the reason for the lockdowns is totally to do with the carriers.
I come from a family of college teachers. High schools just aren't doing the job these days. Lots of students manage to graduate with no life skills and barely being able to read. They're not even remotely prepared for college, but there are colleges which will accept them.
When it comes time to pay, most get student loans. They abuse the loans. By federal law, they're allowed to take a given class up to three times (with federal money). My parents see the same students over and over again, sleeping through class, texting, etc. The school doesn't care--they get tons of money from it. The students don't care--they're getting paid to be there. The teachers don't care--they're still getting paid.
Our guess is that programs like NCLB are the cause. High schools are pressured to teach to the test (so they aren't teaching much useful) and pass students to the next grade/graduate. Their funding is directly tied to this. Some schools set a floor for grades. Some just hand out grades. They all focus on the weaker students in order to bring them up to a mediocre level rather than bringing up the ones who are inherently better able to cope with college.
It's all a mess, and I don't think legislation is going to fix it. The problem is that any legislation which would stand a chance at solving the problem would be extremely unpopular. No politician will put themselves in that position.
We have to worry about semantics when discussing this. It certainly had the most recent major iOS version for three years. However the last update it received was in February--4 months before iOS 4 came out. However that same Februray, an exploit for 3.1.3 (the last version the original iPhone got) was discovered. Which means:
- The original iPhone was not patched after the exploit was discovered. - An unpatchable iPhone could be considered to be out-of-support. - Though we didn't know it at the time, 3.1.3 was the end of Apple's involvement with the original iPhone.
I think a very reasonable argument could be made stating that support effectively ended in February--2 years and 8 months after the device was first released. Without a known exploit, the argument would be much weaker.
I might be inclined to stop the clock when the first exploit is found for the last OS. But regardless, that wasn't the parameter established by the chart, so you are of course correct.
That said, the best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. Apple has a history of supporting their phones for longer than 2 years. Every iPhone has had this support, or is less than 2 years old and so we don't know. Carriers selling Android phones don't--no Android phone that I know of has had more than 2 years of OS updates from the vendor (either they aren't two years old like the SGS, or they stopped receiving updates sometime before 2 years since their release.)
The Samsung Galaxy phones may well be the first ones to break this trend, and I hope that they do. But Android missed the boat for me. After getting stuck with a phone that stopped getting updates less than a year after I bought it, I'm moving to the Apple camp.
What they don't mention is that every "wonderful new software update" by Apple came (until after the new iOS 5 release) in the form of a 500+ megabyte software download that was only accessible through iTunes. Never mind that the Android updates are all on the order of 2-100MB and most are available over the air, that would distract from the reader's impression that Apple devices were superior in every way possible. It's clear that the author of this article set out to prove that Apple devices are "better", nothing more nothing less.
I don't know why the update mechanism matters if the phone doesn't use it. Who cares if your previous updates were OTA if you are no longer getting updates?
And read into it much? The article is focusing on one specific facet of the phones. Your own bias is showing, I think.
And most people know that iPhones have their own warts. The experience is better overall than Android in my opinion, and so I'm going with Apple. If Android were actually free (as in I could update the code myself without the hardware standing in my way) I might feel differently. But it's not free. It's not open. Not in most uses of the words. Even a good chunk of the code that makes Android useful is closed by Google via the fact that the Apache license doesn't require its redistribution.
If you read up the comment tree, the OP was talking about the original iPhone which didn't get even iOS 4. And the OP was the one who first erroneously called it the iPhone 2G.
They meant the original, and the point stands. The original iPhone got 2.5 years of updates. The 3G actually got updates for slightly less time.
I'm not saying they should stop--though I think that's in their medium-term plans. I'm saying that separating DVD from streaming into separate business units -- or separate businesses altogether -- would probably benefit customers in both segments. Overlapping customers suffer slightly in that they have to deal with two queues.
I think the DVD by mail is convenient, but not much more so than stopping by a Redbox on the way home (for me, at least). And the Redbox is cheaper, if you don't keep it out more than a day or two.
Um... Customers bitched about the Qwikster split and the price increase which went with it. If the total price for streaming+DVD had stayed about the same, then there would have been much less disgruntlement.
Well, they happened at different times. One conspiracy theory posits that the Qwikster split was an attempt to recover from the pricing increases, and that the recovery itself was also poorly received. They were definitely different events, though. The price change was announced in July and implemented September 1. Qwikster was announced September 18 and widely and immediately panned. Customers were primed to be annoyed long before Qwikster was announced, but people bitched about Qwikster separately from the price increase.
They were going to be different business units. That affords a bit of protection via antitrust (legally) and contracts would have been negotiated separately with separate contract teams. It would have made it harder to to tie one to the other, but certainly not impossible.
There are plenty of cloud-for-hire services that the studios could use.
More importantly, they're already starting to do this with Ultraviolet, which promises to bring the DVD compatibility to the digital-download/streaming world.
DVD rental started out as first-sale rights, but later became contractual agreements between Netflix and the studios. Hence the delay in getting some DVDs. Part of the reason to move to contractual agreements was almost certainly the ties to streaming--streaming became a hammer with which the studios could beat Netflix into compliance on the DVD side. Does Netflix want to stream Warner Bros movies? Then agree to delay Warner Bros. DVDs by a month. Note that I am just making assumptions here, but all the pieces fit.
Splitting off DVDs would have allowed a much better DVD rental experience. Contracts could no longer tie streaming access to DVD restrictions. It's hard to know what would have happened when the studios lost their hammer, though. Would they cave and give streaming without further restrictions, or would they just bump up the cost and tell Netflix to pay up if they want the movies? Who knows. And now, no one ever will.
Customers bitched about the Qwikster split, and now they're getting what they deserve. And Netflix is showing that they just can't handle PR at all. They should have ended DVD-by-mail altogether and let Qwikster come in to fill the void without making an explicit connection between the two companies.
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The beta of 5 was out for developers for a good bit of time and no one reported it. You might be suppressed what can go unnoticed in testing.
Moreover, I assume that the developer builds included debugging code which would be less efficient. Poorer battery life should have been expected, and probably was.
Good to know! Thanks for the pointer!
iPhones required entry every time, but gave a 15 minute grace period that wasn't configurable. Now it's configurable, but I don't know how many parents know about it.
Yeah, I was imprecise, or looking at it too narrowly.
RAID isn't a solution for the problem of data loss. Exactly for the reasons you state.
Sorry :)
Typing "web" into Spotlight doesn't autocomplete to Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera (the four browsers I have installed on my Mac.) In fact, typing "irefox" into Spotlight doesn't even turn up Firefox. However typing "cal" autocompletes to iCal. Typing "vim" autocompletes to MacVim.
I don't know how Unity does it, but I'm not that impressed with Spotlight. It works if you know the command, or a word in the command (vnc => Chicken of the VNC) but it doesn't seem to know anything about semantics, even for built-in applications.
I currently have 8TB of data (16TB raw storage) and am very paranoid about data loss.
Maybe s/he has backups in place, and maybe not. But clusters and RAID aren't about data loss--they're about continuity when disks go down.
And they don't provide the public benefit. Patents are supposed to show you exactly how to reproduce the subject of the patent. That way, when the patent expires, anyone can use the knoweldge.
I don't see source code in many software patents.
The whole thing definitely sounds off. It's just usually a bad idea to give people money for no reason. (I consider "helping you stay afloat temporarily while you look for another job" to be a good reason.)
Interesting points that I'll have to ponder.
Thanks for the discussion!
That works great until word gets out that you can get a paid vacation by punching your boss in the face.
I agree. And I complain about the problem a lot. But then I remember that it's a fight just to get science taught in science class, and it usually obliterates my resolve.
Sure, but I never said NCLB was the cause of the bubble. Maybe I never really tied it back to the OP, though.
The OP complained about education requirements and degree inflation. I think s/he's right about that. Many jobs which ask for a degree could be done with simply adequate training. I've already seen plenty of college graduates who aren't worth a damn. And I've known fantastic admins and systems engineers who were college dropouts. During our last hiring round, we got a huge number of applicants who didn't meet our requirements--people who apparently just applied for every position available without consideration. I'm talking about teachers with no computer experience on their resume applying for sysadmin positions. We already had to filter out crap--I have to wonder if we'd have been better off nixing the degree requirement so that people without a degree but with a good skillset could have been considered.
The tie-in to NCLB is that NCLB means more high school students graduate. More high school graduates means more potential college candidates. This increased demand means that colleges can charge more. They hire a few more faculty. Class sizes increase. More people manage to get degrees who wouldn't have been able to (not due to cost) 10 years ago. The degree becomes less meaningful.
It's certainly not the only reason for higher tuition, but I'd bet it's a part of it. If we could let kids flunk out and just learn a trade, everyone would probably be better off.
It's true that there have been students getting into college unprepared for decades. In the last 10 years, though, there's been a huge surge. It's the surge that we think caused by NCLB.
This is coming from college professors who have been teaching for something like a combined 70 years.
I was pretty disappointed, too. I'd like to be able to easily try out different carriers, or get a prepaid US SIM for times when Sprint has poor service while I'm travelling. Unfortunately, I suspect that the reason for the lockdowns is totally to do with the carriers.
I come from a family of college teachers. High schools just aren't doing the job these days. Lots of students manage to graduate with no life skills and barely being able to read. They're not even remotely prepared for college, but there are colleges which will accept them.
When it comes time to pay, most get student loans. They abuse the loans. By federal law, they're allowed to take a given class up to three times (with federal money). My parents see the same students over and over again, sleeping through class, texting, etc. The school doesn't care--they get tons of money from it. The students don't care--they're getting paid to be there. The teachers don't care--they're still getting paid.
Our guess is that programs like NCLB are the cause. High schools are pressured to teach to the test (so they aren't teaching much useful) and pass students to the next grade/graduate. Their funding is directly tied to this. Some schools set a floor for grades. Some just hand out grades. They all focus on the weaker students in order to bring them up to a mediocre level rather than bringing up the ones who are inherently better able to cope with college.
It's all a mess, and I don't think legislation is going to fix it. The problem is that any legislation which would stand a chance at solving the problem would be extremely unpopular. No politician will put themselves in that position.
FYI, the unlocked version is GSM-only. (Fine print at the bottom of http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone/iphone4s )
We have to worry about semantics when discussing this. It certainly had the most recent major iOS version for three years. However the last update it received was in February--4 months before iOS 4 came out. However that same Februray, an exploit for 3.1.3 (the last version the original iPhone got) was discovered. Which means:
- The original iPhone was not patched after the exploit was discovered.
- An unpatchable iPhone could be considered to be out-of-support.
- Though we didn't know it at the time, 3.1.3 was the end of Apple's involvement with the original iPhone.
I think a very reasonable argument could be made stating that support effectively ended in February--2 years and 8 months after the device was first released. Without a known exploit, the argument would be much weaker.
I might be inclined to stop the clock when the first exploit is found for the last OS. But regardless, that wasn't the parameter established by the chart, so you are of course correct.
He should have included those phones.
That said, the best predictor for future behavior is past behavior. Apple has a history of supporting their phones for longer than 2 years. Every iPhone has had this support, or is less than 2 years old and so we don't know. Carriers selling Android phones don't--no Android phone that I know of has had more than 2 years of OS updates from the vendor (either they aren't two years old like the SGS, or they stopped receiving updates sometime before 2 years since their release.)
The Samsung Galaxy phones may well be the first ones to break this trend, and I hope that they do. But Android missed the boat for me. After getting stuck with a phone that stopped getting updates less than a year after I bought it, I'm moving to the Apple camp.
What they don't mention is that every "wonderful new software update" by Apple came (until after the new iOS 5 release) in the form of a 500+ megabyte software download that was only accessible through iTunes. Never mind that the Android updates are all on the order of 2-100MB and most are available over the air, that would distract from the reader's impression that Apple devices were superior in every way possible. It's clear that the author of this article set out to prove that Apple devices are "better", nothing more nothing less.
I don't know why the update mechanism matters if the phone doesn't use it. Who cares if your previous updates were OTA if you are no longer getting updates?
And read into it much? The article is focusing on one specific facet of the phones. Your own bias is showing, I think.
And most people know that iPhones have their own warts. The experience is better overall than Android in my opinion, and so I'm going with Apple. If Android were actually free (as in I could update the code myself without the hardware standing in my way) I might feel differently. But it's not free. It's not open. Not in most uses of the words. Even a good chunk of the code that makes Android useful is closed by Google via the fact that the Apache license doesn't require its redistribution.
If you read up the comment tree, the OP was talking about the original iPhone which didn't get even iOS 4. And the OP was the one who first erroneously called it the iPhone 2G.
They meant the original, and the point stands. The original iPhone got 2.5 years of updates. The 3G actually got updates for slightly less time.
I'm not saying they should stop--though I think that's in their medium-term plans. I'm saying that separating DVD from streaming into separate business units -- or separate businesses altogether -- would probably benefit customers in both segments. Overlapping customers suffer slightly in that they have to deal with two queues.
I think the DVD by mail is convenient, but not much more so than stopping by a Redbox on the way home (for me, at least). And the Redbox is cheaper, if you don't keep it out more than a day or two.
Um... Customers bitched about the Qwikster split and the price increase which went with it. If the total price for streaming+DVD had stayed about the same, then there would have been much less disgruntlement.
Well, they happened at different times. One conspiracy theory posits that the Qwikster split was an attempt to recover from the pricing increases, and that the recovery itself was also poorly received. They were definitely different events, though. The price change was announced in July and implemented September 1. Qwikster was announced September 18 and widely and immediately panned. Customers were primed to be annoyed long before Qwikster was announced, but people bitched about Qwikster separately from the price increase.
They were going to be different business units. That affords a bit of protection via antitrust (legally) and contracts would have been negotiated separately with separate contract teams. It would have made it harder to to tie one to the other, but certainly not impossible.
There are plenty of cloud-for-hire services that the studios could use.
More importantly, they're already starting to do this with Ultraviolet, which promises to bring the DVD compatibility to the digital-download/streaming world.
DVD rental started out as first-sale rights, but later became contractual agreements between Netflix and the studios. Hence the delay in getting some DVDs. Part of the reason to move to contractual agreements was almost certainly the ties to streaming--streaming became a hammer with which the studios could beat Netflix into compliance on the DVD side. Does Netflix want to stream Warner Bros movies? Then agree to delay Warner Bros. DVDs by a month. Note that I am just making assumptions here, but all the pieces fit.
Splitting off DVDs would have allowed a much better DVD rental experience. Contracts could no longer tie streaming access to DVD restrictions. It's hard to know what would have happened when the studios lost their hammer, though. Would they cave and give streaming without further restrictions, or would they just bump up the cost and tell Netflix to pay up if they want the movies? Who knows. And now, no one ever will.
Customers bitched about the Qwikster split, and now they're getting what they deserve. And Netflix is showing that they just can't handle PR at all. They should have ended DVD-by-mail altogether and let Qwikster come in to fill the void without making an explicit connection between the two companies.