But with Android it goes beyond the phone. Word is that the Google App Store is going to be completely free for developers. Google will host, ship, clear, etc. In essence, it will be subsidized by Google's existing server infrastructure. Apple would have a really hard time competing with that.
I feel the same way about Android, incidentally. Now you're going to have a cellphone that's completely subsidized by another business in which the company has a virtual monopoly. And they'll be able to link their web content to their cellphone by adopting standards that the competition chooses not to (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from). They're treading a pretty fine line here, and things like the Mobile Street View working on most phones except the iPhone aren't going the help the anti-trust argument any.
(So when Mr. Obama said that keeping your tires inflated would be as effective as offshore US drilling, he was pretty much right. Is it a long term energy solution? Of course not. But is it equivalent to the very little oil we'd get from offshore drilling? Sure.)
Maybe we should inflate everyone's tires with CO2 from the coal plants.
"seriously - we don't seem to make examples of bad businesses. in fact, we BAIL THEM OUT with taxpayer money!"
Are you talking about AIG? I thought that was a pretty good investment. I challenge you to find anywhere else where money can be loaned from the Feds at 12% interest! The taxpayers are going to get quite a windfall from this down the road a bit.
Not in the immediate election, no, but the more people do vote for a third party, the more other people will see that it IS a viable option. People that don't like the main parties but are stuck in your way of thinking will start to migrate. This is a slow process, but it's not a complete absense of effect."
Okay, I guess you missed my point. Third parties are mathematically NOT a viable option. The entire electoral system in the United States is geared toward two parties, and changing that requires congressional and state approval. The most you could hope for would be to replace one of the parties with a different one or to dramatically change an existing party. Each has happened several times in the past.
The more you vote for a third party and the more votes a third party gets, the more they take away from any candidate likely to agree with them. It's a self-"correcting" system, and you have to change it at the local and congressional level first.
"I don't agree that the right thing to do is vote for either."
I didn't say it was. I just implied that, practically speaking, voting for a third party is the same as not voting at all and not effecting any change whatsoever, while forcing yourself to analyze the two major party candidates for which one is however slightly closer to your position WOULD have an effect.
I think the suspicion was in the timing. The timing of events went something like: both had been observing the same object. Brown released an abstract saying he'd be announcing something. Moreno googled his logs to see what he'd been observing. Moreno then announces it the next day. I think there was speculation that upon realizing Brown would be announcing the discovery of the same object he was observing, Moreno announced it himself the next day since the first to announce it gets credit for discovery.
Regardless, finding a loophole in someone's data security and secretly viewing someone else's logs is impolite, if not downright unethical. It certainly doesn't speak well of Moreno's integrity.
Your reasoning assumes that one of the two majors is acceptable to everyone.
No it doesn't. It just posits that one of them are always going to win, and thus voting for anyone else is taking votes away from the one of them that most closely matches your views, however far they may be from them.
If you want to do away with the two-party system, the Presidential election is pointless anyway. The President of the United States has no power to change it whatsoever. If some bizarre aligning of planets happened and some third party did get elected, he wouldn't get anything at all done and be gone in four years (if not sooner).
If you want to "reject the current hegemony of two" and enable third party candidates, the way to do it is to get big names to run for Congress on that principle. If Nader had run for Congress, he probably would have won and actually gotten something useful done instead of just hurting his own cause with his presidential bids.
I can count five candidates without even looking them up, not to mention write-ins.
The US electoral system, with winner-takes-all contests and single votes, is designed as a two-party system. Any third party that does not drop out and endorse one of the existing candidates (generally in exchange for concessions on their favorite issues) takes votes away from the candidate that most closely represents their views. Thus, third party candidates generally end up hurting their causes in exchange for personal gratification.
So the parent poster was mostly right: you have 3 choices. 1. Obama, 2. McCain, 3. don't vote/vote for third party/otherwise throw vote away (all equivalent).
The Chinese are not as stupid as you seem to think. Of course they're not going to start from scratch when there is so much historical data, designs, and expertise available for sale right next door. It seems like the Chinese space technology took the best-of-breed (ie. mostly Russian) technology and modernized it using Chinese "indigenous spaceflight capability". I'm not sure why you jumped on this as somehow anti-Chinese, but it strikes me as by far the most intelligent thing to do. (After all, the US is licensing Russian technology to hold us over after the Shuttle retires, and we're not stupid either...)
When they, by using that ipod they sold you, tie you into becoming a subscriber (eventually) spending all your bucks for music, movies, tv shows and all your other media needs on *their* itunes infrastructure, making 30% on all your media, then that's way more worth for them than an ipod sale.
Are you saying that Apple is lying in their SEC filings? Because from everything they've reported to their shareholders, what you say is the opposite of true. Maybe someday the iTunes store will turn into a cash cow, but right now it's smaller and more or less break-even. As of the latest quarterly report, Apple was making at least twice as much revenue and better margins from hardware sales as store sales.
The big advantage Apple gets when you buy things from the iTunes store is that most of it only works with other iPods, so the next hardware purchase will likely also be an iPod (75%) instead of a SanDisk (15%) or one of the other bit players like Microsoft (2%).
Because we have the seat numbers of most of the terrorists reported by the people in the planes before they died, and we know who were sitting in those seats. And we know how they were paid for and how that money entered the country, along with how the people who were sitting in those seats entered the country. There is a lot of confusion about the exact chain of command in Al Quaeda and who knew exactly what when, but there's no viable conspiracy theory that explains the attacks as anything other than something perpetrated by a bunch of middle eastern men (mostly Saudis) funded by folks tied to Al Quaeda.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Apple sells hundreds of thousands of these things a week, and each one gets loaded with software as it's really easy and fun for the customer to do so. Unfortunately that leads to tons of shovelware (how many tip calculators and unit converters do we need, really?) but it's also a great opportunity for someone to do a simple app uncommonly well and make a few bucks. It also tends to be sufficiently different from day jobs that it both stays interesting and avoids a lot of the legal mess if the company decides to try to claim ownership.
It's free to sign up and download the SDK and try things out on the included simulator. The downside is if you don't have a Mac that'll be a large initial investment. Just think of it as a slightly more expensive UNIX laptop with unusually good driver support.
The key point to take home though is that there is no confirmed proof of string theory at the present time but it is still being taught much like evolution for that matter.
This might be a good point if it weren't completely wrong. String theory is at an entirely different level of acceptance than evolution and there is still significant debate within the scientific community over its veracity. Why? For exactly the reason you mention-- there's very little evidence to back it up, merely a nice solution to a set of abstract equations that implies that such a configuration of spacetime would be awfully convenient. Which, incidentally, is how a lot of the Standard Model was first postulated which has turned out to explain subsequent experiment extremely well.
Both of those things [featured list and top 100] are huge sales boosts, but simply like winning the lottery. That is to say, in the practical lives of day to day application developers they are irrelevant. What really matters again is all the infrastructure that Apple is taking care of, and a clear and direct channel to and from the user to your application.
Perhaps, but it does allow quality and originality to rise to the top to a certain extent. Therefore it tends to reward developers who don't just shovel on another tip calculator or unit converter. When my app got featured, sales were roughly 10x what they had been previously, and even as the app fell to the 2nd page of featured it was still 4x what it had been beforehand.
When you have thousands of apps, finding what you want becomes the hard part. That's very true with the App Store, so I can only imagine how hard it would be if the sites were spread over thousands of URLs.
Apple's cut (30%) is extremely low for what you get. Unlimited distribution, completely flexible pricing, international markets, hosting, updates, auto-pariticpation in their "top 100" lists and "feature apps", etc. And the $99 entry fee is also very comparatively low. If you can't make back $99/year on the App Store, you're doing it wrong.
And if the argument is ease of development, Apple definitely has Google beat so far regardless of ones ability to share. I'm no huge fan of XCode, but iPhone development is really easy. So easy that here we are less than two months after release and there's thousands of apps. My guess is that within a few months all the big names will have their stuff ported including Skype. So from a user's point of view.
So it's good for the users, and good for the developers. In return, you occasionally (4 apps so far out of 3000) get slapped down by Apple. I don't think it's going to affect the market much.
This is an awful decision. The source code is in no way going to help determine whether the defendants were or weren't drunk. If there is a standard for accuracy of a DUI measuring device and this mechanism meets the standards, then the source code is irrelevant. If it doesn't, the source code is still irrelevant. Either way, having a zillion government stooges and ambulance chasers second-guessing some engineer's code is not justice.
If you can't install arbitrary applications on your phone by now, I really don't think you have a right to call it a "smart" phone.
Oh please. All religious dogma aside, the 3000+ apps available through Apple's App Store more than qualify the iPhone as a "smart" phone. Sure, you have to pay $99, and Apple has rejected 3 apps so far so they must be evil, but all in all it's one of the cheapest, easiest-to-approach development systems for any mobile provider. And if you can't find some way to make $99/year on the App Store (or if you really want to keep everything free, open a lemonade stand on your street corner while developing on your laptop) then I don't have a lot of respect for your business acumen.
Adobe and Microsoft sell quite a lot of software for the Mac. There's a pretty vibrant community of Mac developers. So to answer your second question, yes.
As for the first question, I don't have a list. But success doesn't happen overnight, and I don't see the foundations being laid for innovative businesses to make profits on widespread Linux desktop adoption. Windows is "good enough" for a lot of folks, and anyone who really wants to try "something different" has MacOS. The only reason to pick Linux is a free software religion or having more time than money available.
It's possible that one of these years could be Linux On The Desktop Year. But no one really seems to be building the infrastructure to make that happen, and that's not the current trends. According to the latest browser market share numbers, the iPhone now has about 1/3 the browser market share as Linux and MacOS has about 8x Linux's browser market share. In order for HP to really make it happen, they'd have to re-invent themselves around the concept of Linux on the Desktop for support and infrastructure, and I don't see that happening.
Nothing you said contradicts the parent poster. GNU wrote a lot of utilities, but their attempt at an OS was Hurd and it failed. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds and heavily leverages GNU tools, but is not GNU's OS. The whole point of Free Software, by the way, is for people like Torvalds to be able to copy the source and do wonderful things with it. It's pretty disingenuous to then turn around and assert naming rights over someone else's creation.
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But with Android it goes beyond the phone. Word is that the Google App Store is going to be completely free for developers. Google will host, ship, clear, etc. In essence, it will be subsidized by Google's existing server infrastructure. Apple would have a really hard time competing with that.
I feel the same way about Android, incidentally. Now you're going to have a cellphone that's completely subsidized by another business in which the company has a virtual monopoly. And they'll be able to link their web content to their cellphone by adopting standards that the competition chooses not to (the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from). They're treading a pretty fine line here, and things like the Mobile Street View working on most phones except the iPhone aren't going the help the anti-trust argument any.
(So when Mr. Obama said that keeping your tires inflated would be as effective as offshore US drilling, he was pretty much right. Is it a long term energy solution? Of course not. But is it equivalent to the very little oil we'd get from offshore drilling? Sure.)
Maybe we should inflate everyone's tires with CO2 from the coal plants.
Do you think this best serves the interest of the people of Texas, almost all of whom want to vote for Obama or McCain?
Non-mortgage assets worth $1.2 trillion dollars. Their insurance business actually remains profitable.
"seriously - we don't seem to make examples of bad businesses. in fact, we BAIL THEM OUT with taxpayer money!"
Are you talking about AIG? I thought that was a pretty good investment. I challenge you to find anywhere else where money can be loaned from the Feds at 12% interest! The taxpayers are going to get quite a windfall from this down the road a bit.
""and not effecting any change whatsoever"
Not in the immediate election, no, but the more people do vote for a third party, the more other people will see that it IS a viable option. People that don't like the main parties but are stuck in your way of thinking will start to migrate. This is a slow process, but it's not a complete absense of effect."
Okay, I guess you missed my point. Third parties are mathematically NOT a viable option. The entire electoral system in the United States is geared toward two parties, and changing that requires congressional and state approval. The most you could hope for would be to replace one of the parties with a different one or to dramatically change an existing party. Each has happened several times in the past.
The more you vote for a third party and the more votes a third party gets, the more they take away from any candidate likely to agree with them. It's a self-"correcting" system, and you have to change it at the local and congressional level first.
"I don't agree that the right thing to do is vote for either."
I didn't say it was. I just implied that, practically speaking, voting for a third party is the same as not voting at all and not effecting any change whatsoever, while forcing yourself to analyze the two major party candidates for which one is however slightly closer to your position WOULD have an effect.
I think the suspicion was in the timing. The timing of events went something like: both had been observing the same object. Brown released an abstract saying he'd be announcing something. Moreno googled his logs to see what he'd been observing. Moreno then announces it the next day. I think there was speculation that upon realizing Brown would be announcing the discovery of the same object he was observing, Moreno announced it himself the next day since the first to announce it gets credit for discovery.
Regardless, finding a loophole in someone's data security and secretly viewing someone else's logs is impolite, if not downright unethical. It certainly doesn't speak well of Moreno's integrity.
Your reasoning assumes that one of the two majors is acceptable to everyone.
No it doesn't. It just posits that one of them are always going to win, and thus voting for anyone else is taking votes away from the one of them that most closely matches your views, however far they may be from them.
If you want to do away with the two-party system, the Presidential election is pointless anyway. The President of the United States has no power to change it whatsoever. If some bizarre aligning of planets happened and some third party did get elected, he wouldn't get anything at all done and be gone in four years (if not sooner).
If you want to "reject the current hegemony of two" and enable third party candidates, the way to do it is to get big names to run for Congress on that principle. If Nader had run for Congress, he probably would have won and actually gotten something useful done instead of just hurting his own cause with his presidential bids.
I can count five candidates without even looking them up, not to mention write-ins.
The US electoral system, with winner-takes-all contests and single votes, is designed as a two-party system. Any third party that does not drop out and endorse one of the existing candidates (generally in exchange for concessions on their favorite issues) takes votes away from the candidate that most closely represents their views. Thus, third party candidates generally end up hurting their causes in exchange for personal gratification.
So the parent poster was mostly right: you have 3 choices. 1. Obama, 2. McCain, 3. don't vote/vote for third party/otherwise throw vote away (all equivalent).
The Chinese are not as stupid as you seem to think. Of course they're not going to start from scratch when there is so much historical data, designs, and expertise available for sale right next door. It seems like the Chinese space technology took the best-of-breed (ie. mostly Russian) technology and modernized it using Chinese "indigenous spaceflight capability". I'm not sure why you jumped on this as somehow anti-Chinese, but it strikes me as by far the most intelligent thing to do. (After all, the US is licensing Russian technology to hold us over after the Shuttle retires, and we're not stupid either...)
You can go into your Slashdot preferences and change the value assigned to various tags.
I find Slashdot vastly more interesting with "Funny" set to -5.
When they, by using that ipod they sold you, tie you into becoming a subscriber (eventually) spending all your bucks for music, movies, tv shows and all your other media needs on *their* itunes infrastructure, making 30% on all your media, then that's way more worth for them than an ipod sale.
Are you saying that Apple is lying in their SEC filings? Because from everything they've reported to their shareholders, what you say is the opposite of true. Maybe someday the iTunes store will turn into a cash cow, but right now it's smaller and more or less break-even. As of the latest quarterly report, Apple was making at least twice as much revenue and better margins from hardware sales as store sales.
The big advantage Apple gets when you buy things from the iTunes store is that most of it only works with other iPods, so the next hardware purchase will likely also be an iPod (75%) instead of a SanDisk (15%) or one of the other bit players like Microsoft (2%).
Because we have the seat numbers of most of the terrorists reported by the people in the planes before they died, and we know who were sitting in those seats. And we know how they were paid for and how that money entered the country, along with how the people who were sitting in those seats entered the country. There is a lot of confusion about the exact chain of command in Al Quaeda and who knew exactly what when, but there's no viable conspiracy theory that explains the attacks as anything other than something perpetrated by a bunch of middle eastern men (mostly Saudis) funded by folks tied to Al Quaeda.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Apple sells hundreds of thousands of these things a week, and each one gets loaded with software as it's really easy and fun for the customer to do so. Unfortunately that leads to tons of shovelware (how many tip calculators and unit converters do we need, really?) but it's also a great opportunity for someone to do a simple app uncommonly well and make a few bucks. It also tends to be sufficiently different from day jobs that it both stays interesting and avoids a lot of the legal mess if the company decides to try to claim ownership.
It's free to sign up and download the SDK and try things out on the included simulator. The downside is if you don't have a Mac that'll be a large initial investment. Just think of it as a slightly more expensive UNIX laptop with unusually good driver support.
Both my iPhone 3G and my original series iPod Touch have been working flawlessly with WPA, so the problem is apparently not in the core 2.1 OS...
The key point to take home though is that there is no confirmed proof of string theory at the present time but it is still being taught much like evolution for that matter.
This might be a good point if it weren't completely wrong. String theory is at an entirely different level of acceptance than evolution and there is still significant debate within the scientific community over its veracity. Why? For exactly the reason you mention-- there's very little evidence to back it up, merely a nice solution to a set of abstract equations that implies that such a configuration of spacetime would be awfully convenient. Which, incidentally, is how a lot of the Standard Model was first postulated which has turned out to explain subsequent experiment extremely well.
Both of those things [featured list and top 100] are huge sales boosts, but simply like winning the lottery. That is to say, in the practical lives of day to day application developers they are irrelevant. What really matters again is all the infrastructure that Apple is taking care of, and a clear and direct channel to and from the user to your application.
Perhaps, but it does allow quality and originality to rise to the top to a certain extent. Therefore it tends to reward developers who don't just shovel on another tip calculator or unit converter. When my app got featured, sales were roughly 10x what they had been previously, and even as the app fell to the 2nd page of featured it was still 4x what it had been beforehand.
When you have thousands of apps, finding what you want becomes the hard part. That's very true with the App Store, so I can only imagine how hard it would be if the sites were spread over thousands of URLs.
Apple's cut (30%) is extremely low for what you get. Unlimited distribution, completely flexible pricing, international markets, hosting, updates, auto-pariticpation in their "top 100" lists and "feature apps", etc. And the $99 entry fee is also very comparatively low. If you can't make back $99/year on the App Store, you're doing it wrong.
And if the argument is ease of development, Apple definitely has Google beat so far regardless of ones ability to share. I'm no huge fan of XCode, but iPhone development is really easy. So easy that here we are less than two months after release and there's thousands of apps. My guess is that within a few months all the big names will have their stuff ported including Skype. So from a user's point of view.
So it's good for the users, and good for the developers. In return, you occasionally (4 apps so far out of 3000) get slapped down by Apple. I don't think it's going to affect the market much.
This is an awful decision. The source code is in no way going to help determine whether the defendants were or weren't drunk. If there is a standard for accuracy of a DUI measuring device and this mechanism meets the standards, then the source code is irrelevant. If it doesn't, the source code is still irrelevant. Either way, having a zillion government stooges and ambulance chasers second-guessing some engineer's code is not justice.
If you can't install arbitrary applications on your phone by now, I really don't think you have a right to call it a "smart" phone.
Oh please. All religious dogma aside, the 3000+ apps available through Apple's App Store more than qualify the iPhone as a "smart" phone. Sure, you have to pay $99, and Apple has rejected 3 apps so far so they must be evil, but all in all it's one of the cheapest, easiest-to-approach development systems for any mobile provider. And if you can't find some way to make $99/year on the App Store (or if you really want to keep everything free, open a lemonade stand on your street corner while developing on your laptop) then I don't have a lot of respect for your business acumen.
Adobe and Microsoft sell quite a lot of software for the Mac. There's a pretty vibrant community of Mac developers. So to answer your second question, yes.
As for the first question, I don't have a list. But success doesn't happen overnight, and I don't see the foundations being laid for innovative businesses to make profits on widespread Linux desktop adoption. Windows is "good enough" for a lot of folks, and anyone who really wants to try "something different" has MacOS. The only reason to pick Linux is a free software religion or having more time than money available.
It's possible that one of these years could be Linux On The Desktop Year. But no one really seems to be building the infrastructure to make that happen, and that's not the current trends. According to the latest browser market share numbers, the iPhone now has about 1/3 the browser market share as Linux and MacOS has about 8x Linux's browser market share. In order for HP to really make it happen, they'd have to re-invent themselves around the concept of Linux on the Desktop for support and infrastructure, and I don't see that happening.
Nothing you said contradicts the parent poster. GNU wrote a lot of utilities, but their attempt at an OS was Hurd and it failed. Linux was created by Linus Torvalds and heavily leverages GNU tools, but is not GNU's OS. The whole point of Free Software, by the way, is for people like Torvalds to be able to copy the source and do wonderful things with it. It's pretty disingenuous to then turn around and assert naming rights over someone else's creation.