I believe that the reason they have not been enterprise-ready previously the enterprise has little to no interest in macs before now. It's a circle that's time has come to be broken. Just a couple adjustments to this system and they could create an in-house application management system for the enterprise. Version and license control are there as well as distribution. Apple already includes software update server on their server OS. Minor tweaking could bring it all together.
If these documents are available to Wikileaks, they have probably been available to the people we really don't want to have them for a while. Just because Wikileaks makes them public, doesn't mean they're in any way actually responsible for the failed security.
The US is scared though. What happens when Wikileaks gets their hands on information that will really be damaging to the government as a whole. Classified documents of pertaining to the great conspiracy theories of the 20th century, anyone?
It isn't JUST the mag-safe adapter though. It's the thought that Apple actually puts into their laptops that spawn such features.
I used to work in the PC and Mac repair business. A significant percentage of repairs are DC-in boards, both old Macs and PCs. These repairs generally cost $200 or so to the customer. Sure, you could repair it yourself for almost nothing but the non-technical majority are intimidated by simple RAM installs.
Even if you're making sure the cable is tucked away and secured perfectly, Murphy will come around and make sure it happens to you in the worst way possible. It's best to just not worry about it.
Sure, mag-safe itself isn't worth the price difference between a macbook and similar PC. But it's another $20 or so value IMO. There are many of these little things that eventually add up to justify the difference. Some actually good included software, a strong OS, the Mac shareware community (amazing). 5 years of commercial AV software is a nice hidden cost of a PC that contributes to leveling the playing field. All the little details added up, I usually consider the Mac actually cheaper. Go find me a PC laptop that rivals a MacBook in construction quality. Go REALLY inspect the MacBook and MacBook pro before you just find something that looks fancy and claim it's just as good.
Those were great keyboards. I probably have a few in storage somewhere around here. Are you using an ADB-USB adapter? Do you have any funky functionality issues?
The signal issue varies greatly based on your "base" signal at the location. Not being exact, but for explanation only let's just say you drop a flat 40% signal strength. Also know that apples signal meter is way off ~60% of the signal range is contained in the first, largest, bar. Somebody at 90% signal won't even see the first bar drop. But somebody at 40% (still great signal on this phone) will drop their call.
Some people don't see the issue but everyone has it. It's all relative to your signal strength to start.
"most people" should probably be replaced with "people in high signal strength areas where a defect in antenna design that causes a 50% loss in signal strength won't boot them off the network"
All iPhones are affected by this issue. Some people just don't have it affecting their daily usage.
Both phones my fiance and I have are affected by this, different models, different batches. Oh and we also have the proximity issue. QA at Apple needs to be replaced.
You're grasping at straws here. Other platforms offer this without getting sued, and it's not like Apple has shied away from infringing on other people's patents. You can even get it for a jailbroken iPhone. If Apple really were worried, they could simply let third party developers offer the function.
You're more than welcome to make up with a reason yourself, if you'd like. Though this seems the most likely to me.
Apple pays lip service to consistency; that's different from delivering it.
Apple's no magically perfect company, some inconsistencies are inherent to humans as programmers. Stupid humans. But exactly why would you say that it's just lip service? I'm very curious there.
Why should I constantly plug in my iPad? Where am I supposed to plug in my iPad when I'm traveling? You can lose weeks of data on iOS devices because they don't sync over the air like other devices do. It's a ridiculous restriction.
So you're wanting "cloud" syncing of all your music, apps, movies, photos, and settings? Or just wifi syncing, which is all that other app did that's now on Cydia. If you have MobileMe, you're already getting your calendar, bookmarks, address book, and such synced over 3g, pushed, even. Now for saved app data, I would have you listen for some changes that might be coming to MobileMe late summer. But in terms of others having it, Android just got it in froyo, along with the ability to backup program data at all.
If you're out there comparing this to other platforms, the barrier to entry is extreme low. $99 assuming you already have a Mac somewhere in the office. $1098+tax if you don't. Even if that looks like a big number with the Mac, it's really not. If you see how much your company is paying for the software on your machine and your user licenses for things you access on their servers, you might be a little shocked.
Ahh, I misunderstood. I agree that at least on the iPad it's horrible. There's no ' without hitting a modifier key. I don't have a lot of complaints with the iPhone one, because I compare it to what I've used before. Mainly an old blackberry or a T9-type auto-detection monstrosity.
The best bet for fixing that thing is http://www.apple.com/feedback It's the best way to attack the problem right now.
It would be the same if Walmart only let you build products out of magical pixie dust that if taken out of Walland turns into a grumpy lawyer fairy in a black turtleneck.
I really need some of whatever that is you're smoking.
Business = risk. Every business venture has a chance to fail horribly. The people who go out and say "there's a chance it might not get approved, so why try" are going to be kicking themselves when somebody else does it and succeeds.
Follow the rules and test the app well before submission. But, if your groundbreaking app needs to bend/break the rules, sure, avoid the iPhone.
Maybe his company plans on making an app that crashes while using private APIs to do things other than what the description says it should do.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that he needs to avoid all that hard work and development time he would put into that. Android offers you much more flexibility for these apps.
This would be very nice. If you Jailbreak your phone, you can buy an app that does this. There's no damned good reason for Apple to not develop this officially.
The only conclusion that I can come up with for this is that there may be some agreement or licensing issue with syncing over WiFi that is holding it up. For a company like Apple, implementing that in software would be trivial.
Apple is very big on consistency, for good reasons. If there was a patent, license, or agreement holding it back for something like, music or rented movie transfers, Apple probably wouldn't want to split syncing up and say "you can transfer A and B over wifi, but you have to plugin over USB for X and Y".
All convenience aside, I am very glad that they automatically back your device up each time you plug in. It's saved my butt a couple times. I never planned on leaving my phone outside during a hailstorm, but I plugged in my replacement and it restored to my backup from earlier that day. Short of missing a few texts in between, you'd never have known it was a new one.
Has anyone actually said you couldn't do this now? I know at least on the iPad you can use bluetooth keyboards. When the iPhone version of the OS gets brought to speed with the iPad version, I'd assume it would work using a standard bluetooth interface then, if it doesn't already.
That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?
It probably has something to do with their ease of support, much lower rates of malware, and availability of mainstream software. Looking at the platforms and ignoring the initial sticker shock, the Mac platform is a great fit for many organizations. It's not always great for us in the I.T. profession, because our departments can get downsized. If you're as familiar with the mac platform, from a support perspective, as you are with windows, you notice how much easier macs can be to maintain.
I do believe that making the students provide them themselves is the wrong way to go about it. If the machine is owned by the students, you have no ability to maintain it or assure they have the software you need for your curriculum. You also can't control who's using pirated software in your classes. You shouldn't be liable for that, but that doesn't mean you are in the clear.
I think them choosing the mac platform makes sense to them, but for the kids that have new and perfectly capable PCs it makes no sense at all.
Office for Mac 2008 has Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Entourage (a horrible Outlook copy). Office 2011 will replace Entourage with an actual port of Outlook (it better be better than Entourage or I'm going to have to stab somebody). You might want to look up information before posting.
And hasn't Apple said they don't like widget type apps also?
No... As I said, they give you the ability to turn any web page into an app.
Just to clarify, the reason Apple is against widget-apps is that their sole purpose is just to go out and grab a web page. This is basically just a waste of time for their app reviewers, a waste of money for people fooled into buying them, and is supported in the basic user interface. They're basically just a web browser app with 1 page to load.
This would be more advantageous for MS, of course. Apple could have better allies. I would predict this this would be more of a shot across the Google's bow than actually productive for Apple.
I will die a little inside if this happens. I do suspect Apple to do something like this, but I know I'll be changing it right away. Even though Google is staring to become the Evil it once denounced, it's still a great search engine.
I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to do some type of strategic alliance to scare Google a little bit. Now that both Apple and MS see Google as a threat to their interests, it's a very interesting turn of events, for sure.
Apple at one point patented an eSATA target disk mode, it would be nice to see that. That's where you boot a computer with a key command that makes it a very expensive external hard disk for a connected computer. Over FireWire it's insanely useful for troubleshooting, cloning, and data retrieval from borked macs. Unfortunately there's not a single mac with esata standard.
I've not had a problem that takes "days" but my worst was a 1tb drive failure when it was the largest drive in the array. Took about 7 hours, but none of that time was "downtime", as my data was still accessible and working just as though nothing was wrong.
The next day I replaced the drive with a new one from newegg. Luckily I was not nearly at max capacity, so I wasn't even close to max capacity with 3 drives total. I hear that when you get to 90%+ capacity it really starts to slow down due to data "protection". AKA fragmenting + redundancy (my guess, not fact).
I've had 2 drives fail in the device, neither of which caused me any downtime. Pretty awesome for a consumer-grade RAID.
Most RAIDs are "well you had a drive die, copy your data off then replace the drive, rebuild the raid, and copy it back!"
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I believe that the reason they have not been enterprise-ready previously the enterprise has little to no interest in macs before now. It's a circle that's time has come to be broken. Just a couple adjustments to this system and they could create an in-house application management system for the enterprise. Version and license control are there as well as distribution. Apple already includes software update server on their server OS. Minor tweaking could bring it all together.
If these documents are available to Wikileaks, they have probably been available to the people we really don't want to have them for a while. Just because Wikileaks makes them public, doesn't mean they're in any way actually responsible for the failed security.
The US is scared though. What happens when Wikileaks gets their hands on information that will really be damaging to the government as a whole. Classified documents of pertaining to the great conspiracy theories of the 20th century, anyone?
What's the point if the device you're needing to charge isn't sound or light free? Just curious.
I used to work in the PC and Mac repair business. A significant percentage of repairs are DC-in boards, both old Macs and PCs. These repairs generally cost $200 or so to the customer. Sure, you could repair it yourself for almost nothing but the non-technical majority are intimidated by simple RAM installs.
Even if you're making sure the cable is tucked away and secured perfectly, Murphy will come around and make sure it happens to you in the worst way possible. It's best to just not worry about it.
Sure, mag-safe itself isn't worth the price difference between a macbook and similar PC. But it's another $20 or so value IMO. There are many of these little things that eventually add up to justify the difference. Some actually good included software, a strong OS, the Mac shareware community (amazing). 5 years of commercial AV software is a nice hidden cost of a PC that contributes to leveling the playing field. All the little details added up, I usually consider the Mac actually cheaper. Go find me a PC laptop that rivals a MacBook in construction quality. Go REALLY inspect the MacBook and MacBook pro before you just find something that looks fancy and claim it's just as good.
Those were great keyboards. I probably have a few in storage somewhere around here. Are you using an ADB-USB adapter? Do you have any funky functionality issues?
The signal issue varies greatly based on your "base" signal at the location. Not being exact, but for explanation only let's just say you drop a flat 40% signal strength. Also know that apples signal meter is way off ~60% of the signal range is contained in the first, largest, bar. Somebody at 90% signal won't even see the first bar drop. But somebody at 40% (still great signal on this phone) will drop their call. Some people don't see the issue but everyone has it. It's all relative to your signal strength to start.
"most people" should probably be replaced with "people in high signal strength areas where a defect in antenna design that causes a 50% loss in signal strength won't boot them off the network" All iPhones are affected by this issue. Some people just don't have it affecting their daily usage. Both phones my fiance and I have are affected by this, different models, different batches. Oh and we also have the proximity issue. QA at Apple needs to be replaced.
You're grasping at straws here. Other platforms offer this without getting sued, and it's not like Apple has shied away from infringing on other people's patents. You can even get it for a jailbroken iPhone. If Apple really were worried, they could simply let third party developers offer the function.
You're more than welcome to make up with a reason yourself, if you'd like. Though this seems the most likely to me.
Apple pays lip service to consistency; that's different from delivering it.
Apple's no magically perfect company, some inconsistencies are inherent to humans as programmers. Stupid humans. But exactly why would you say that it's just lip service? I'm very curious there.
Why should I constantly plug in my iPad? Where am I supposed to plug in my iPad when I'm traveling? You can lose weeks of data on iOS devices because they don't sync over the air like other devices do. It's a ridiculous restriction.
So you're wanting "cloud" syncing of all your music, apps, movies, photos, and settings? Or just wifi syncing, which is all that other app did that's now on Cydia. If you have MobileMe, you're already getting your calendar, bookmarks, address book, and such synced over 3g, pushed, even. Now for saved app data, I would have you listen for some changes that might be coming to MobileMe late summer. But in terms of others having it, Android just got it in froyo, along with the ability to backup program data at all.
If you're out there comparing this to other platforms, the barrier to entry is extreme low. $99 assuming you already have a Mac somewhere in the office. $1098+tax if you don't. Even if that looks like a big number with the Mac, it's really not. If you see how much your company is paying for the software on your machine and your user licenses for things you access on their servers, you might be a little shocked.
Ahh, I misunderstood. I agree that at least on the iPad it's horrible. There's no ' without hitting a modifier key. I don't have a lot of complaints with the iPhone one, because I compare it to what I've used before. Mainly an old blackberry or a T9-type auto-detection monstrosity. The best bet for fixing that thing is http://www.apple.com/feedback It's the best way to attack the problem right now.
It would be the same if Walmart only let you build products out of magical pixie dust that if taken out of Walland turns into a grumpy lawyer fairy in a black turtleneck.
I really need some of whatever that is you're smoking.
Business = risk. Every business venture has a chance to fail horribly. The people who go out and say "there's a chance it might not get approved, so why try" are going to be kicking themselves when somebody else does it and succeeds.
Follow the rules and test the app well before submission. But, if your groundbreaking app needs to bend/break the rules, sure, avoid the iPhone.
Maybe his company plans on making an app that crashes while using private APIs to do things other than what the description says it should do.
I think it's a pretty safe bet that he needs to avoid all that hard work and development time he would put into that. Android offers you much more flexibility for these apps.
- WiFi music sync
This would be very nice. If you Jailbreak your phone, you can buy an app that does this. There's no damned good reason for Apple to not develop this officially.
The only conclusion that I can come up with for this is that there may be some agreement or licensing issue with syncing over WiFi that is holding it up. For a company like Apple, implementing that in software would be trivial.
Apple is very big on consistency, for good reasons. If there was a patent, license, or agreement holding it back for something like, music or rented movie transfers, Apple probably wouldn't want to split syncing up and say "you can transfer A and B over wifi, but you have to plugin over USB for X and Y".
All convenience aside, I am very glad that they automatically back your device up each time you plug in. It's saved my butt a couple times. I never planned on leaving my phone outside during a hailstorm, but I plugged in my replacement and it restored to my backup from earlier that day. Short of missing a few texts in between, you'd never have known it was a new one.
Has anyone actually said you couldn't do this now? I know at least on the iPad you can use bluetooth keyboards. When the iPhone version of the OS gets brought to speed with the iPad version, I'd assume it would work using a standard bluetooth interface then, if it doesn't already.
That said, using a unified platform is not a bad idea, but why make students buy heavily marked up hardware? Why not Netbooks with Linux?
It probably has something to do with their ease of support, much lower rates of malware, and availability of mainstream software. Looking at the platforms and ignoring the initial sticker shock, the Mac platform is a great fit for many organizations. It's not always great for us in the I.T. profession, because our departments can get downsized. If you're as familiar with the mac platform, from a support perspective, as you are with windows, you notice how much easier macs can be to maintain.
I do believe that making the students provide them themselves is the wrong way to go about it. If the machine is owned by the students, you have no ability to maintain it or assure they have the software you need for your curriculum. You also can't control who's using pirated software in your classes. You shouldn't be liable for that, but that doesn't mean you are in the clear.
I think them choosing the mac platform makes sense to them, but for the kids that have new and perfectly capable PCs it makes no sense at all.
Office for Mac 2008 has Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Entourage (a horrible Outlook copy). Office 2011 will replace Entourage with an actual port of Outlook (it better be better than Entourage or I'm going to have to stab somebody). You might want to look up information before posting.
Your humor detector is broken.
And hasn't Apple said they don't like widget type apps also?
No... As I said, they give you the ability to turn any web page into an app.
Just to clarify, the reason Apple is against widget-apps is that their sole purpose is just to go out and grab a web page. This is basically just a waste of time for their app reviewers, a waste of money for people fooled into buying them, and is supported in the basic user interface. They're basically just a web browser app with 1 page to load.
This would be more advantageous for MS, of course. Apple could have better allies. I would predict this this would be more of a shot across the Google's bow than actually productive for Apple.
"Now that Apple's market cap has surpassed us and we're tanking in just about every market we're in, maybe we will try to ride their wave!"
I will die a little inside if this happens. I do suspect Apple to do something like this, but I know I'll be changing it right away. Even though Google is staring to become the Evil it once denounced, it's still a great search engine.
I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to do some type of strategic alliance to scare Google a little bit. Now that both Apple and MS see Google as a threat to their interests, it's a very interesting turn of events, for sure.
Apple at one point patented an eSATA target disk mode, it would be nice to see that. That's where you boot a computer with a key command that makes it a very expensive external hard disk for a connected computer. Over FireWire it's insanely useful for troubleshooting, cloning, and data retrieval from borked macs. Unfortunately there's not a single mac with esata standard.
The next day I replaced the drive with a new one from newegg. Luckily I was not nearly at max capacity, so I wasn't even close to max capacity with 3 drives total. I hear that when you get to 90%+ capacity it really starts to slow down due to data "protection". AKA fragmenting + redundancy (my guess, not fact).
I've had 2 drives fail in the device, neither of which caused me any downtime. Pretty awesome for a consumer-grade RAID. Most RAIDs are "well you had a drive die, copy your data off then replace the drive, rebuild the raid, and copy it back!"