Just as a side note. In my opinion design and interfacing are part of the functionality - which is an aspect that many feature ridden products neglect - and which is an area where apple is a leader.
What really concerns me with the iPhone is that there is no control for net access. While every application using GPS must be confirmed internet access is possible. I would like to see something like a an app-whitelist to manage that.
Turning the data-modes off in the preferences is imho very inconvenient, but of course is the most secure solution.
Maybe it ends up as a spy vs. spy game and the agencies use cunning plans working with that situation. I only hope that they are up to the new information realities - and I doubt that. (I live in germany - but I think we have a similar situation. And the the police is heavily underfunded for state-of-the-art work - imho, of course)
The thing is that I do not believe that "War" should be fought in the way it is and that there is a solution of any kind as long as it always ends in the extremes (no drugs vs. all drugs - I think there is some middle ground). But that is not the topic.
I cannot assess the legal situation here, but another aspect of the story is interesting: Is it that easy for a - maybe crazy - person to gather all that (confidential or not) information about the police/DEA officers than I think it is rather save to assume that the big time drug dealers/cartels already use the same methods (including honey-trap style personal information gathering etc.) and have most likely a pretty good picture of the law enforcement situation. That does not bode well for the War on Drugs (or whatever it is called...)
The only thing I think apple should change is to open up the dev-plattform to windows/linux users. They could tap into the already strong (often) windows/linux based "open" dev community. That would boost the number of apps far higher. They have 10k+ apps from mac developers alone, and that is only a small part of the active dev community (...are there any hard numbers on how developers split between the systems? I assume here that there are many more non mac-developers available).
What I do not understand is that they are not able to implement a safe recovery. It is obvious that you cannot test alle possible configurations, but with that in mind the upgrade procedure should be fail safe with an easy method to undo any possible damage. The problem with this bug is that safe modes do not work and the only help is a reboot with recovery from a system DVD (which implies that the running system *has* an optical drive, you have the DVD at hand etc.)
I agree that it is nice to have some suprises when presenting new hardware stuff, but as a consumer I was not that much amused when two month after the purchase of an 3G iPod I could get much better features with the newly released 4G version. If they had some sort of upgrade plan it would be different...
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Just as a side note.
In my opinion design and interfacing are part of the functionality - which is an aspect that
many feature ridden products neglect - and which is an area where apple is a leader.
What really concerns me with the iPhone is that there is no control for net access.
While every application using GPS must be confirmed internet access is possible.
I would like to see something like a an app-whitelist to manage that.
Turning the data-modes off in the preferences is imho very inconvenient, but of course is
the most secure solution.
Who knows :)
Maybe it ends up as a spy vs. spy game and the agencies use cunning plans working with that situation. I only hope that they are up to the new information realities - and I doubt that.
(I live in germany - but I think we have a similar situation. And the the police is heavily underfunded for state-of-the-art work - imho, of course)
The thing is that I do not believe that "War" should be fought in the way it is and that there is a solution of any kind as long as it always ends in the extremes (no drugs vs. all drugs - I think there is some middle ground). But that is not the topic.
I cannot assess the legal situation here, but another aspect of the story is interesting:
Is it that easy for a - maybe crazy - person to gather all that (confidential or not) information about the police/DEA officers than
I think it is rather save to assume that the big time drug dealers/cartels already use the same methods (including honey-trap style personal information gathering etc.) and have most likely a pretty good picture of the law enforcement situation. That does not bode well for the War on Drugs (or whatever it is called...)
The only thing I think apple should change is to open up the dev-plattform to windows/linux users.
They could tap into the already strong (often) windows/linux based "open" dev community.
That would boost the number of apps far higher.
They have 10k+ apps from mac developers alone, and that is only a small part of the active dev community (...are there any hard numbers on how developers split between the systems? I assume here that there are many more non mac-developers available).
What I do not understand is that they are not able to implement a safe recovery.
It is obvious that you cannot test alle possible configurations, but with that
in mind the upgrade procedure should be fail safe with an easy method to undo
any possible damage. The problem with this bug is that safe modes do not work and the only
help is a reboot with recovery from a system DVD (which implies that the running
system *has* an optical drive, you have the DVD at hand etc.)
I agree that it is nice to have some suprises when presenting new hardware stuff, but as a consumer I was not that much amused when two month after the purchase of an 3G iPod I could get much better features with the newly released 4G version.
If they had some sort of upgrade plan it would be different...
Claus Bitten