If iTunes had a face, I would stab it. I don't mind work lending me an iPhone to use, but fuck the whole iTunes GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS side of it.
iTunes does not require a credit card for registration. iTunes doesn't even require a credit card for you to buy something on the store. You can use gift cards or PayPal.
Roger Entner, senior vice president for telecommunications research at Nielsen, said the iPhone's "air interface," the electronics in the phone that connect it to the cell towers, had shortcomings that "affect both voice and data." He said that in the eyes of the consumer, "the iPhone has the nimbus of infallibility, ergo, it's AT&T's fault." AT&T does not publicly defend itself because it will not criticize Apple under any circumstances, he said. AT&T and Apple both declined to comment on Mr. Entner's assessments." and "The data seem incontrovertible: AT&T, while meeting 4,000 percent growth in data use, has acquitted itself quite nicely. But the company is saddled with an awful public image as the perennial laggard."
Don't you find it a little bit strange that of all the carriers worldwide, AT&T is the only one affected by this?
I was never arguing that most of these weren't possible with other software, but the fact that you have to have three or four different programs to do it instead of an integrated solution from your computer to your phone does speak volumes about the iTunes +iPhone/iPod integration, I was really questioning how is it an advantage of being able to copy everything to an sd card as a mass storage device over having a program that knows how to intelligently handle your media and interact with your device.
All I have to do is pop the Micro SD card into my adapter and plug it into my laptop and I can copy all the music onto it I want. I don't even need to plug my phone in to my computer to do so.
Scenario #1: Create multiple playlists with some of the same songs. How do you keep from duplicating files?
Scenario #2: How do you automatically download podcasts to your phone and have it delete the episodes you've watched/listened to?
Scenario #3: How do you quickly create a playlist of based on a combination of certain criteria -- rating, year, genre, last played, last skipped, number of times played, etc.?
Scenario #4: I have a 1GB shuffle (along with other iPods). I have a 3GB playlist of music I work out with (Workout Music) . I set up a smart playlist to create a 1GB list of songs based on least recently played that are in the "Workout Music" playlist that haven't been skipped in two weeks. I plug in my shuffle, music that I just played automatically gets removed from it and pushed to bottom of the list. Music that I skipped also gets removed and is eligible for resync in two weeks. How do I do that via drag and drop.
Scenerio #5: I'm working at my computer listening to a podcast/audiobook, watching a movie, etc. I'm about 20 minutes into it and I have to go. I sync my iPod (or iPhone) up and it starts playing right where I left off. How is that handled with your phone?
If by better you mean "more language features" then I guess you could use "better".
Java is easier to learn, easier to master, easier to maintain. C# is a kitchen sink language. The only design goal Anders apparently had was to add every conceivable feature from any arbitrary language into it.
Structs? Hi this language is object oriented - unless you don't want it to be. Preprocessor directives? Hi this language is readable- unless you don't want it to be. Operator overloading? Hi this language is maintainable - unless you don't want it to be. Partial classes? Hi this language is well organized- unless you don't want it to be. Functional programming? Hi this language is object oriented - unless you don't want it to be. Goto? Hi this language is object oriented - unless you don't want it to be. Pointer arithmetic? Hi this language is safe - unless you don't want it to be. Var and Dynamic keywords? Hi this language is compiled - unless you don't want it to be.
You really don't know c# do you? Structs -- in c# are objects with value semantics that don't carry the overhead of references
Operating overloading -- yeah it's really readable to have foo.add(5).subtract(5).add(7).multiply(7).(foo.add(6)+food(7))
partial classes -- useful to separate auto-generated code from user code.
Var - var is just syntactic sugar. A variable declared as var x = new foo is still strongly typed at compile time.
Pointer arithmetic -- it has to be done in an unsafe context. How is this any different than JNI?
Java always feel limiting to me, as if it were meant for people who couldn't handle a real language.
Anyway, as said before on slashdot, Android vs iPhone is just like Windows vs Mac all over again. With Verizon on board, Motorola building 20 new Android phones next year, and 50 Android sets in the works around the world, Android is set to finally deliver on it's promise of unifying the software across a broad spectrum of handsets. There wont be any single iPhone killer, just as no single PC was ever a Mac killer. However, I see nothing that can stop Android from becoming the world's dominant smart phone OS.
The Motorola Droid isn't quite as exciting of a device as the Sony Xperia X10. I suspect we'll keep seeing Android based "iPhone killers" plunk away until Adroid wins the race.
That's the same thing they said about Plays4Sure. Everyone predicted that Apple would be overwhelmed by the PFS infrastructure and that Microsoft would crush Apple. How did that work out?
On a more related note, Windows Mobile is already available for multiple phones and multiple carriers. Apple is outselling all WM phones worldwide. The Android platform is already running into the same problem as PFS devices and Windows Mobile phones. No integration between the hardware, software, and services. It's even worse since different carriers will cripple the phones in different ways. Apple can release a software update simultaneously across all of the carriers. The first Android phone can't even be updated with the 2.0 software.
I keep seeing this repeated, but nobody has presented any proof.
be The article presented says that the motorola Droid has 256MB. This does not mean that Android limits you to 256MB. It means that specific phone has 256MB.
If someone told you that a particular Dell laptop had 512MB of RAM, would you assume, and then emphatically state that was because Windows or Linux prevented you from installing more? If not, why do you assert that Android has such a limitation?
It's part of the Android's feeble attempt at piracy prevention. Apps are only allowed to be installed on the internal memory - not the SD card.
The iPhone won't let you download apps over 10 Megs over 3G and instead asks for you use WiFi, let me know of _any_ iPhone apps that over 256 Megs.
256MB is the total size of all apps that are allowed on the phone.
As far as apps that are larger than 256MB, besides the three or four GPS navigation apps that store all of the map data on the phone, Myst is 727MB. I'm sure there are a few others.
Selling games is strictly self-serving also. Apparently, you think its fantastic for companies to be driven by greed, but the customers should be selfless? Same old shit as the banks - capitalise the profit, socialise the loss.
One quarter doesn't tell you anything; Nokia was hit hard by the depression, and while it's profits are in the red, historically it has made more money, ships more units, and operates on a larger scale than Apple.
So was Apple operating in a parallel universe where there was no recession when it reported record revenues and profits on Tuesday?
Nokia may sell a lot more phones but the average price of a Nokia phone is $68. The average price of an iPhone is $669 (wholesale price).
Nokia's has made less than Apple every quarter for the last four quarters and as of close of business today is worth about a quarter of what Apple is worth (total market cap).
This is no different from Dell selling a lot more computers than Apple but being a lot less profitable doing it.
True, best comparator would be net revenue I think; Nokia makes a lot more than Apple. Honestly, neither company could buy the other (outside a heavily leveraged buyout).
Nokia's net income last reported quarter - 559 Million EUR loss ($838 Million US) Apple's net income last quarter - $1,229 Million (GAAP) $2,855 Million (Non GAAP)
Nokia's market cap - $49.38 Billion Apple's cash on hand - $35.171 Billion
You're being shortsighted though. While your numbers might currently be true, you're not seeing the big picture in all of this. Apple is 2 years old on the market, they are past their initial launch boost and they have exactly 1 product with different capacities.
Android is less than a year old on the market, many of the Android devices are announced and coming this fall/winter. They have many more carrier deals than the iPhone has, and already more devices. Expect the tables to turn in 1-2 years. Apple will become the niche and Android will be everywhere. That is if they manage to supplant Symbian which right now has 3 times more market share than the iPhone and Android put together.
1. Windows Mobile is on a lot of different devices but according to Canalysis, the iPhone outsold all WM devices combined worldwide last quarter.
2. Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks (circa 2003), ''It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.'' Plays4Sure devices were suppose to overtake Apple and leave Apple a niche player....
1. Firewire is an IEEE standard -- not an Apple standard 2. Isn't one of the tenants of user interface design that different things should look different? Isn't it a good thing that the nozzle for Diesel gas and the nozzle for regular gas are different so that you can't mistakenly put Diesel in a car that can't use it?
However, while I don't know about Macs, I know that Windows will warn you if you connect a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.0 port and tell you you could get better performance. So point two is kind of moot.
The songs and videos sold are the "other products" from the grandparent post which Apple hopes to sell people.
Are you confusing iTunes with the iTunes Music Store? The former is software that lets you manage media collections, as well as purchase media from the latter.
In that case you would have to refer to all software that comes bundled with hardware to let the user manage hardware a "loss leader". This would include the software that comes with printers, cameras, Blackberrys, etc.
A loss leader is a product that is sold to consumers for less than it costs the seller, with the expectation that consumers will buy other products as part of the deal. Unless there are a lot of people who pay for iTunes rather than use the free download (or get it bundled with other Apple products), it is a loss leader, and advertising revenues from the iTunes Store -- or any other B2B revenues that Apple sees from iTunes -- don't change that.
And when they change the format on newer versions, to break compatibility with your application?
(They've been doing these tricks since the BeOS days.)
Any documentation that they have changed their XML file format since 2003 in a way that it broke compatibility...besides [i][b]It's a XML file[/b][/i] how much less obscure of a file format can you get?
Apple is using capabilities of the USB spec to disable interoperation with other manufacturers' equipment for what is clearly purely anticompetitive reasons. Don't you think it's a little late to "keep business politics out of this"?
Did Apple ever ask to be able to sync with Windows Media Player? Apple wrote their own app. Why can't Palm do the same? Since day one the iTunes library database has been stored in both a binary file and an XML file. Couldn't half of the readers on Slashdot write a simple GUI to read the XML file, let the users choose which music to sync over and copy the files to a Palm Pre in less than 2 hours?
"Microsoft's Zune HD, set to go on sale Tuesday, will not feature a tightly controlled by control freaks with degrees in control freakery application store like its competitor the iPod Touch."
Let's see....
1. The upcoming WM app store will cost developers $99 per year plus $99 per app submission (even free ones) and updates as opposed to Apple's one time $99 fee. 2. It will have the ability to remotely delete apps (http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/09/16/win.mobile.marketplace.can.remote.delete/) 3. The WM app store will not allow apps that replace core functionality or mapping or navigation software (Ibid). 4. No runtime engines (i.e. Java) 5. Additional purchases within apps is forbidden such as additional levels (iPhone release 3.0 encourages and has an API for this).
(If Microsoft started requiring their approval for apps to run on Windows, then even if they never banned an app - let alone if they did start blocking widely used applications such as Flash and emulators - I bet you'd be first in line to criticise them.)
Yeah just imagine if Microsoft made a closed hardware platform -- not necessarily a phone but let's say a game system -- that required a license to run software on it or you could only download games from their own service. I'm sure their would be a major uproar......
Slashdot Mirror
iTunes does not require a credit card for registration. iTunes doesn't even require a credit card for you to buy something on the store. You can use gift cards or PayPal.
Don't you find it a little bit strange that of all the carriers worldwide, AT&T is the only one affected by this?
I was never arguing that most of these weren't possible with other software, but the fact that you have to have three or four different programs to do it instead of an integrated solution from your computer to your phone does speak volumes about the iTunes +iPhone/iPod integration, I was really questioning how is it an advantage of being able to copy everything to an sd card as a mass storage device over having a program that knows how to intelligently handle your media and interact with your device.
Scenario #1: Create multiple playlists with some of the same songs. How do you keep from duplicating files?
Scenario #2: How do you automatically download podcasts to your phone and have it delete the episodes you've watched/listened to?
Scenario #3: How do you quickly create a playlist of based on a combination of certain criteria -- rating, year, genre, last played, last skipped, number of times played, etc.?
Scenario #4: I have a 1GB shuffle (along with other iPods). I have a 3GB playlist of music I work out with (Workout Music) . I set up a smart playlist to create a 1GB list of songs based on least recently played that are in the "Workout Music" playlist that haven't been skipped in two weeks. I plug in my shuffle, music that I just played automatically gets removed from it and pushed to bottom of the list. Music that I skipped also gets removed and is eligible for resync in two weeks. How do I do that via drag and drop.
Scenerio #5: I'm working at my computer listening to a podcast/audiobook, watching a movie, etc. I'm about 20 minutes into it and I have to go. I sync my iPod (or iPhone) up and it starts playing right where I left off. How is that handled with your phone?
What features does C# leave out compared to C++? The only one I can think of is multiple inheritance.
You really don't know c# do you?
Structs -- in c# are objects with value semantics that don't carry the overhead of references
Operating overloading -- yeah it's really readable to have foo.add(5).subtract(5).add(7).multiply(7).(foo.add(6)+food(7))
partial classes -- useful to separate auto-generated code from user code.
Var - var is just syntactic sugar. A variable declared as var x = new foo is still strongly typed at compile time.
Pointer arithmetic -- it has to be done in an unsafe context. How is this any different than JNI?
Java always feel limiting to me, as if it were meant for people who couldn't handle a real language.
That's the same thing they said about Plays4Sure. Everyone predicted that Apple would be overwhelmed by the PFS infrastructure and that Microsoft would crush Apple. How did that work out?
On a more related note, Windows Mobile is already available for multiple phones and multiple carriers. Apple is outselling all WM phones worldwide. The Android platform is already running into the same problem as PFS devices and Windows Mobile phones. No integration between the hardware, software, and services. It's even worse since different carriers will cripple the phones in different ways. Apple can release a software update simultaneously across all of the carriers. The first Android phone can't even be updated with the 2.0 software.
It's part of the Android's feeble attempt at piracy prevention. Apps are only allowed to be installed on the internal memory - not the SD card.
256MB is the total size of all apps that are allowed on the phone.
As far as apps that are larger than 256MB, besides the three or four GPS navigation apps that store all of the map data on the phone, Myst is 727MB. I'm sure there are a few others.
Do you go to work every day for free?
So was Apple operating in a parallel universe where there was no recession when it reported record revenues and profits on Tuesday?
Nokia may sell a lot more phones but the average price of a Nokia phone is $68. The average price of an iPhone is $669 (wholesale price).
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090804/iphone-claims-32-percent-of-handset-industry-operating-profits/
Apple's share of smart phone profits is 32%
Nokia's has made less than Apple every quarter for the last four quarters and as of close of business today is worth about a quarter of what Apple is worth (total market cap).
This is no different from Dell selling a lot more computers than Apple but being a lot less profitable doing it.
Net Revenue is called profit.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:NOK&fstype=ii
Nokia's net income last reported quarter - 559 Million EUR loss ($838 Million US)
Apple's net income last quarter - $1,229 Million (GAAP) $2,855 Million (Non GAAP)
Nokia's market cap - $49.38 Billion
Apple's cash on hand - $35.171 Billion
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2009/r2009081.htm
Symbian 50.3%
RIM 20.9%
Apple 13.9%
Android 2.8%
1. Windows Mobile is on a lot of different devices but according to Canalysis, the iPhone outsold all WM devices combined worldwide last quarter.
2. Rob Glaser, founder and C.E.O. of RealNetworks (circa 2003), ''It's absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.'' Plays4Sure devices were suppose to overtake Apple and leave Apple a niche player....
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30IPOD.html?ei=5007&en=750c9021e58923d5&ex=1386133200&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=all&position=
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/
http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
1. Firewire is an IEEE standard -- not an Apple standard
2. Isn't one of the tenants of user interface design that different things should look different? Isn't it a good thing that the nozzle for Diesel gas and the nozzle for regular gas are different so that you can't mistakenly put Diesel in a car that can't use it?
However, while I don't know about Macs, I know that Windows will warn you if you connect a USB 2.0 device to a USB 1.0 port and tell you you could get better performance. So point two is kind of moot.
The songs and videos sold are the "other products" from the grandparent post which Apple hopes to sell people.
Are you confusing iTunes with the iTunes Music Store? The former is software that lets you manage media collections, as well as purchase media from the latter.
In that case you would have to refer to all software that comes bundled with hardware to let the user manage hardware a "loss leader". This would include the software that comes with printers, cameras, Blackberrys, etc.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/01/24/apple-cents-and-advertising
Apple makes money off of each song and video sold...therefore by definition it is not a loss leader.
Any documentation that they have changed their XML file format since 2003 in a way that it broke compatibility...besides [i][b]It's a XML file[/b][/i] how much less obscure of a file format can you get?
Apple has said that iTunes "breaks even".
Did Apple ever ask to be able to sync with Windows Media Player? Apple wrote their own app. Why can't Palm do the same? Since day one the iTunes library database has been stored in both a binary file and an XML file. Couldn't half of the readers on Slashdot write a simple GUI to read the XML file, let the users choose which music to sync over and copy the files to a Palm Pre in less than 2 hours?
Let's see....
1. The upcoming WM app store will cost developers $99 per year plus $99 per app submission (even free ones) and updates as opposed to Apple's one time $99 fee.
2. It will have the ability to remotely delete apps (http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/09/16/win.mobile.marketplace.can.remote.delete/)
3. The WM app store will not allow apps that replace core functionality or mapping or navigation software (Ibid).
4. No runtime engines (i.e. Java)
5. Additional purchases within apps is forbidden such as additional levels (iPhone release 3.0 encourages and has an API for this).
Maybe the iQuickTake?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake
Yeah now you can use your mini computer with all two of the GSM providers in the US one of which has barely started deploying 3G.
You do know that isn't even a phone don't you?
Yeah just imagine if Microsoft made a closed hardware platform -- not necessarily a phone but let's say a game system -- that required a license to run software on it or you could only download games from their own service. I'm sure their would be a major uproar......