Yes, he suspended it, ie he recognized the right existed, and removed it during a time of crisis. The USAG is saying the right doesn't exist to begin with.
Normally the lunatic Right go off against Lincoln because he suspended Habeas Corpus. This time, Gonzales is proposing something much worse, and you're trying to say it's the same league?
And in Open Source news, suspending Habeas Corpus could be really bad news for Hans Reiser...
This bad taste comment was brought to you by Tuesday. It's the second day of the week(tm), unless you're of the opinion the week starts on Sunday, in which case it's the third day of the week.
Well, of course, warfare isn't all fun. Right. Stop that! It's all very well to laugh at the Military, but, when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself, and without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear. That is why we'll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
I would imagine that you're simply not using much of the disk, hence the total of your loaded applications + memory used by those applications + caching of disk blocks is less than your total RAM. Do not believe that because of that, the default behaviour of the Linux kernel is not to make use of swap to cache the disk at the cost of application memory. Honestly, that's what it does, and from time to time the subject comes up and it's somewhat controvertial for the reasons you state in the latter paragraphs. (Remember also that what's reported as swap doesn't encompass everything that's on disk rather than in RAM - your libraries and application code never count towards "swap", but they are frequently taken out of RAM and reloaded as necessary. Linux doesn't have to copy them into swap because they're already on disk.)
If you've ever had the experience of Firefox or OpenOffice suddenly acting slow as hell after you've been doing something that involves large files, especially on slightly lower memory systems, you'll get some idea of how this can be an issue. Something as simple as building a CD image and burning it is made more reliable by this scheme, but will also have quite an effect on the desktop afterwards, especially on machines with slower disks.
So do most modern operating systems. GNU/Linux and Mac OS X will also make full use of swap if available, even if there's "enough" RAM.
Here's the thing: Most computers are using the file system almost as much as regular "malloced" memory, with the same files being processed over and over again, or so goes the theory. So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.
In theory this is faster, over all, even if it means applications do not always seem as responsive. In server space, where files are being opened and closed all the time (think web services), this is an optimization that yields massive rewards. I'm not so convinced on the desktop, though it's certainly true that your file manager type app would seem a hell of a lot slower without this type of optimization running.
However, is Network Neutrality simply the inverse set of the scheme you refer to, or is it an over-the-top reaction that actually bans many quite legitimate activities an ISP might do (such as providing bandwidth over and above what an end user has paid for, to paying parties. ie you pay for a 256k connection, but it becomes a 1Mbps + 256k connection whenever Apple is sending data to it, because they paid.)
My reading of network neutrality is it makes all forms of improved service in exchange for money illegal, even when the end user doesn't lose out because of it. I'd rather see lobbying for minimum guaranteed service levels than "neutrality", the Internet equivalent of banning 1-800 numbers.
I think the FCC argument is dubious, to be honest.
Apple needed to have their device approved by the FCC, who'd have made some details of the device public. However, Apple could have had a third party (for example, their manufacturer - Apple doesn't generally make their own products) enter the product, and from the point of view of people watching the FCC lists, all they'd have seen would have been a stylish touchscreen camera phone with EDGE and 802.11, coming from Hon Hai, a company not immediately associated with Apple. Even if people put the pieces together and assumed Apple was involved, the FCC would have published no details of the software, which arguably is the most important aspect of the iPhone concept, and the part Apple needed to keep secret.
Here's what I think. I think Steve Jobs got very excited about a product, far more so than he normally does, and felt MacWorld was the opportunity to reveal it. It's that simple. I think Jobs, in common with much of the media, has overblown the importance of the Apple communicator. It's an original machine, but then original phones come out every year. It's not innovative, in that it will not introduce a technology to a mass audience (the definition of innovative, which is not a synonym for inventive), it's too expensive for that, but it may end up influencing many devices to come. But ultimately, it's a very large phone that, nonetheless, has many nice features but none that the majority of people will see as worth the price tag and Cingular handcuffs, and it'll be relegated to the designer product niche.
Meanwhile someone will popularize the genuine advantages. They'll not produce a product that's as desirable, but it'll be "good enough" and much cheaper and more accessable, just as Microsoft/Commodore/Atari and Palm did to Macintosh and Newton respectively.
But I'm getting off the subject. The point is that Jobs became convinced that this was an important product. That's why it was presented at MacWorld. Not because of the FCC, not because of a lack of other products, but Jobs being overwhelmed with excitement.
I guess he means fair use, not fair dealing. I'm not sure why he thinks Google is paying for music. This is news to me...
No, he means fair dealing. Fair use is an American concept. It is foreign to Britain. As far as Google paying for music and movies, I'm not really sure what that's a reference to.
The ability to quote or use small parts of a work as fair use has always been there as far as I know. This is a new way to use it, that's all. Is this post a looming intellectual property issue now?
Again, no, not in British copyright law. In British copyright law a very small amount of a text can be copied for certain limited purposes. There is no blanket right, "fair use" or otherwise, to quote or use small parts of a work. In the US, there similarly is no blanket right, though the conditions under which you can use an extract from a work are certainly wider, if less well defined.
Given that the author points out elsewhere that the American libraries are the first to allow digitization of copyrighted books, I'm not sure why he is surprised by this.
Perhaps he isn't. Perhaps he's making an unrelated point about the consequences of this.
I don't even know what to make of this paragraph. The net doesn't educate? Teachers will dictate how we read books in the future? If students only read books for information, we're doomed? It seems like a random collection of ideas that aren't backed up with logical argument, but exists only to give a punchy ending paragraph.
So your final piece of evidence that this British publication doesn't know about the American legal system that it is not writing about is a difference in opinion about the rhetorical ending.
Ever notice when you read a comment about an article from a culture and jurisdiction you know something about, the comment is always riddled with false assumptions and erroneous nitpicking? This comment made me think of that. In my not so humble opinion, this is just really, really, bad, parochial, writing.
when was the last time _anybody_ called Microsoft for support with MS Office? Can anybody even name a single instance of this?
Well, that just goes to show the inherent superiority of Microsoft products! Why they're so good, nobody has ever had to call Microsoft to support them!
I'll give you the multitouch screen, but all the rest are a nonsense. The last one is particularly sad, thin phones are rather popular at the moment, and this is a relatively large phone too, actually bigger and only 2/3 as thick as my second generation iPod.
This is an interesting phone, but the fact that is it's not unusually innovative. Motorola's four-letter series, Nokia's N series, their 9000 series, pretty much everything Blackberry has done, some of Samsung's new stuff, are equally or more innovative.
I'm beginning to think it'll sell anyway, based on a conversation I had with someone at lunch, but when it does it'll be a classic case of the inferior product beating the competition. And that's a real shame.
In practice, no, that's not going to work. The third party most likely to be interested in the source code is the original copyright holder. Regardless of contract, the copyright holder has an absolute right to enforce his or her license. If the source code is not provided, the code is no longer under license, and Cisco are now in breach of copyright. The author can (and, in my view, should) sue under such circumstances.
And since you decided to inject some random political propaganda about abortion, I'd like to know how many kids you've adopted. And how many fertility clinic "embryos" (blastocysts, really) you've had carried to term, or stopped from conception - of the 400,000 that will be destroyed this year as they expire. What have you done to stop state executions, which at least sometimes kill innocent people? Oh, and where do you get "thou shall not kill the innocent"? How many Iraqis would Jesus have killed while turning his other cheek?
What he's against is killing theoretical people - people who might exist in the future - not people who actually exist.
Real people are scary and stuff and pose a threat, but you can always redeem your support for the killing of them by imagining some great moral superiority in defending the non-existant.
I understand what you're saying, but it depends on how you're defining bias.
In context, an unbiased opinion is an opinion formed without any external factors influencing the decision beyond the facts. For example, if someone looks at two political candidates, determines that person A is more in tune with their views than person B, and so choses person A their opinion is unbiased, because even though there's a subjective element, their decision making has been made on the basis of the facts available pertinent to the question. If, on the other hand, they pick A because A gave them a bribe, then their choice has nothing to do with the question, and so is biased.
Bias does not exist without context. In the end, we come down on one side or the other on a variety of issues. Our bias, or ability to withstand it, is determined by how we reached that decision, whether we judged the issue on the basis of the criteria we stated, or whether we judged it on the basis of criteria not relevent to the discussion.
The only way in which they'd only need to give people who buy the phone the source code is if they get the source code with the phone, which clearly they haven't done. Otherwise the source code needs to be available upon request from any third party.
Its simple - if they REALLY believed that God knows, and that punishment is certain, they wouldn't be doing the crap they do.
But that's not what Christianity teaches. A fundamental difference between mainstream Christianity and, say, Islam or Judaism, is that you do get to act like an arsehole if you want. The key to getting into heaven is to accept Christ, and be accepting of Him when you die.
Sin is not, by itself, an eternal-burning-in-Heck offense. (In fact, in my view, it was a pretty good game, though I haven't played the episodic sequal thing, and I doubt I ever will given the concept strikes me as sucking somewhat.) You can be as big an ass as Charles Manson, and except eventual settlement in Heaven, or a profound atheist who spends your life doing good, and end up in Hell.
Which is one of the reasons I don't believe in God. I can't respect someone who's that big an asshole, according to the people who believe in Him.
Tell you what, when Yahoo starts vetting its ads, so the inane and actually quite physically repellant mortgage ads stop appearing at the top of the screen (you know the type I'm refering to) I'll stop blocking ads.
And if Yahoo wants me to cease using their services, rather than cleaning up their act, then fuck 'em, I'll go elsewhere.
No TV station would show ads that stoop to the same shock level that Yahoo routinely allows shown and has allowed shown, still less for dubious "financial services", for the last few years. Quite aside from being slapped by the FCC if they did, the fact is most know full well they'd lose viewers in an instant.
Adblock gives me the capability to continue using Yahoo. If Yahoo doesn't like it, I'll go elsewhere.
Apple doesn't just use the 'i' prefix, it also has used 'e', most famously in the eMac. Supposedly at one point, this stood for "everybody", as in "The Mac for everybody".
Perhaps if they also combined it with a short, simple, word that reflects the mobility of the device. That is, after all, the selling point of mobile phones. It is a device for the person on the Go, you can go anywhere with it.
But I'm failing really to come up with a simple combination of 'e', and a word like "Go" that reflects that mobility aspect, still less one that would, say, fit the personality of Steve Jobs. Perhaps some of the other Slashdotters can help me out.
This is why geeks don't predict successes like the iPod. Sorry to pick on you, but you're just the last person to mention this.
The reason people subscribe to cellphone service is they want a phone that "just works". The number one complaint of users of mobile phone services is not that it's too expensive, it's that there are blackspots, and/or dropped calls. In the US, most plans are effectively unlimited - you're given unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited in-network calls, and a huge bucket of minutes to use for everything else, that you're never likely to use up. People might complain it's $50 rather than $25, but that's the cost anyway, regardless of how you try to work around it.
Even if we graft Skype onto cellphones, you're losing the "just works" aspect of it. Calls are dropped if you go out of range, so no walking around any great distances while using your Skype phone. Not unless you plan to subscribe to an unlimited data plan, and then... what are you using Skype for? Where's the cost benefit?
Mobile operators, in any case, are fixing the issues so you wouldn't have any advantage from such a system anyway. In particular, GSM operators are adopting GAN/UMA, which seamlessly causes the upper level GSM protocols to route themselves over 802.11 if there's a WLAN in range. So no dropped calls. While some operators may charge the earth for this, most are likely to simply drop airtime charges for calls routed this way. That's what T-Mobile USA is proposing, for instance.
The phone that doesn't work when you go out of range of a microcell was tried in the early nineties anyway. The technology CT2 was designed for that purpose. It was a flop. People didn't want it, even if it was cheaper than cellular. What they wanted was a phone that works everywhere. That works the same way everywhere.
While EDGE is certified by the IMT-2000 initiative as "3G", it's seen as a transitional technology for 2G networks, networks that have EDGE are better than networks without them, but over-all, a 2G network enhanced with EDGE is still 2G. Or 2.5G if you want to get really into the marketing terms (2G with packet switching.)
The 3G version of GSM is called UMTS. HSDPA is an enhancement to two of UMTS's air interfaces (W-CDMA and TD-CDMA.) This offers better bandwidth and far lower latency than EDGE. Call quality, thanks to higher bit rates, is good too.
So... why wouldn't the iPhone sell in Europe? Because most GSM operators have UMTS networks as well as 2G GSM networks, and most people want a phone that isn't limited to 2G GSM. Tariffs encourage use of 3G services - as an example, the only unmetered mobile Internet access option in the UK is from T-Mobile, where the tariff requires use of T-Mobile's 3G network.
If you're selling a device one of whose primary advantages is Internet access, selling one that doesn't support UMTS in Europe is ridiculous.
Now, in the US, Cingular are trying to roll out a UMTS network but have been hampered by lack of spectrum. The only other major GSM network in the US is T-Mobile, and they've specifically waited for spectrum, planning to launch 3G in the next few months. That'll take time to deploy too. So releasing an EDGE phone is acceptable here, because a UMTS phone would be more expensive, would probably operate on the wrong frequencies initially, and offer few advantages given the lack of a viable network to use the UMTS side on.
That argument cannot be made for Europe, and it's going to bite Apple in the rear if they don't put UMTS in the European version.
Apple thinks it can make 10 million sales of this thing in a year. Unless they take the rest of the world seriously, recognizing that 3G is big outside of the US, that people outside the US are used to unlocked, carrier-neutral, phones, that the smartphone market is actually under active development outside of the "free cheap phone with two year contract" US market, they're going to have to make almost all those sales in the US. I don't think they can pull that off, especially given they've locked their fortunes to Cingular's.
So what type of event is Jobs going to use to show it off?
A one-off "event" with lots of invited journalists, none of whom have any idea of what it is Steve's showing them?
Or something that actual Mac users go to, like WWDC?
When's WWDC?
Or is he not going to demo it at all? Is it really that much of an incremental improvement that there will be nothing worth showing before release, and if so, has Apple just spent the last 6 months fixing bugs and tuning it?
Well, not really. The iPod was a success, and spawned a lot of successes. But it's essentially one thing the rest of the world thought wouldn't take off, that did anyway.
The iPhone is pretty much an entirely new product (despite some overlapping functionality) and the requirement for a contract and $500 down, for a machine the same size as - but lower capacity than - an iPod is basicly a completely new game.
Will it succeed? Only if there are a lot of unmarried people out there who are out of contract at the moment and have good Cingular coverage in their area, and are interested in a PDA, that also carries a lot of music, as well as getting cellphone coverage.
We must remember that no matter how ridiculous, every product that costs a huge amount of money and has Apple's name on it well sell really well because Slashdotters were wrong about the iPod.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the Society for Absurd Leaps of Logic. Now back to your scheduled messages.
They're not going to sell 10 million $500 + 2 year contract phones available only via one operator in 2008.
The iPhone undermines their music business. The iPod is going to go away in due time, as people move to integrated devices, it's going to be threatened the same way as the low and medium-end standalone digital camera is teetering on the brink right now.
But Apple has a wider media business, and has the opportunity to make money from sales of music playing devices in future, whether they be its own, or Nokia's, Motorola's, etc. All it has to do is continue to dominate the music player industry in some way, either by ensuring the majority of MP3 players run Apple's software, or by ensuring the majority of Phone-M3 Player sales are Apple iPhones. As long as it does that, it can make (almost) any demands it wishes of the music industry and they'll still provide content for Apple's proprietary store. And while Apple's store has all the music, the people will only want the MP3 players that run Apple's software.
Instead they've done what they can to piss off their would-be partners (no chance of licensing Apple's software to them) while simultaneously producing a minority interest product.
So the iPod will whither, as MP3 playing phones rise, and Apple will have a tiny share of the MP3 playing phone market, and be beholden to Microsoft and others to provide the DRM platform (because the music industry sure as hell isn't going to continue to support the iTS if Apple has 1% of the music player market.)
Apple loses control, even of the products it sells. Possibly good for the rest of us, I'm not sure, but not exactly good for Apple.
(Original post appears to have disappeared. I guess the "Apple can do no wrong" Mac zealots took a hating to it. Look forward to metamodding those who see any uncomfortable truths as trolls)
No, it most certainly isn't.
It's $500 and requires a commitment to a two year contract just for that price. It's locked to one operator, who may or may not be any good where you live. Its capabilities are nice, but not so significant that for the vast majority of people a compelling reason can be found to purchase one over a more conventional unit from an experienced manufacturer. There are things we already know about and nobody in their right mind can be happy about. Sealed, un-replaceable batteries in a cellphone? A non-programmable smartphone (not even Java, apparently)? (Just what was the point of putting OS X on it?) Integration with Yahoo and Google Mail, but nothing else, not even corporate email clients like Exchange? (Mail.app can do it, so don't tell me it isn't possible.)
There are many aspects we simply don't know about it yet. For example: does it do voice recognition? That's pretty critical, and wasn't mentioned at all during the keynote. I'm guessing it doesn't. What do you think?
While it's quite possible Apple will come up with a "Revision B" that's clearly compelling, the high price, carrier exclusivity, and questions still to be raised over the over-all package will mean that this version, at least, will remain one of the more questionable business decisions Apple has made. The entire thing to me looks like the victory of ego over common sense.
Well done Jobs. You've just undermined the one serious success Apple has had in a couple of decades (the iPod and mobile music market) by producing a toy for the wealthy person who lives alone (no spouse to ask "You're spending WHAT on WHAT?"), is not currently in a mobile phone contract, lives in an area where Cingular has good coverage and capacity, has a small enough music collection that 4gigs will store it, and doesn't mind spending $500 on something that'll cease to have acceptable battery life in 18-30 months. If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be getting out right now.
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Yes, he suspended it, ie he recognized the right existed, and removed it during a time of crisis. The USAG is saying the right doesn't exist to begin with.
Normally the lunatic Right go off against Lincoln because he suspended Habeas Corpus. This time, Gonzales is proposing something much worse, and you're trying to say it's the same league?
This bad taste comment was brought to you by Tuesday. It's the second day of the week(tm), unless you're of the opinion the week starts on Sunday, in which case it's the third day of the week.
Well, of course, warfare isn't all fun. Right. Stop that! It's all very well to laugh at the Military, but, when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself, and without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear. That is why we'll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
(Now for some marching up and down the square.)
I would imagine that you're simply not using much of the disk, hence the total of your loaded applications + memory used by those applications + caching of disk blocks is less than your total RAM. Do not believe that because of that, the default behaviour of the Linux kernel is not to make use of swap to cache the disk at the cost of application memory. Honestly, that's what it does, and from time to time the subject comes up and it's somewhat controvertial for the reasons you state in the latter paragraphs. (Remember also that what's reported as swap doesn't encompass everything that's on disk rather than in RAM - your libraries and application code never count towards "swap", but they are frequently taken out of RAM and reloaded as necessary. Linux doesn't have to copy them into swap because they're already on disk.)
A fairly eye opening discussion of this is here.
If you've ever had the experience of Firefox or OpenOffice suddenly acting slow as hell after you've been doing something that involves large files, especially on slightly lower memory systems, you'll get some idea of how this can be an issue. Something as simple as building a CD image and burning it is made more reliable by this scheme, but will also have quite an effect on the desktop afterwards, especially on machines with slower disks.
So do most modern operating systems. GNU/Linux and Mac OS X will also make full use of swap if available, even if there's "enough" RAM.
Here's the thing: Most computers are using the file system almost as much as regular "malloced" memory, with the same files being processed over and over again, or so goes the theory. So all modern operating system kernels use RAM to cache disk blocks even at the expense of having to swap memory used by processes to disk.
In theory this is faster, over all, even if it means applications do not always seem as responsive. In server space, where files are being opened and closed all the time (think web services), this is an optimization that yields massive rewards. I'm not so convinced on the desktop, though it's certainly true that your file manager type app would seem a hell of a lot slower without this type of optimization running.
No, it would not be a good idea.
However, is Network Neutrality simply the inverse set of the scheme you refer to, or is it an over-the-top reaction that actually bans many quite legitimate activities an ISP might do (such as providing bandwidth over and above what an end user has paid for, to paying parties. ie you pay for a 256k connection, but it becomes a 1Mbps + 256k connection whenever Apple is sending data to it, because they paid.)
My reading of network neutrality is it makes all forms of improved service in exchange for money illegal, even when the end user doesn't lose out because of it. I'd rather see lobbying for minimum guaranteed service levels than "neutrality", the Internet equivalent of banning 1-800 numbers.
I think the FCC argument is dubious, to be honest.
Apple needed to have their device approved by the FCC, who'd have made some details of the device public. However, Apple could have had a third party (for example, their manufacturer - Apple doesn't generally make their own products) enter the product, and from the point of view of people watching the FCC lists, all they'd have seen would have been a stylish touchscreen camera phone with EDGE and 802.11, coming from Hon Hai, a company not immediately associated with Apple. Even if people put the pieces together and assumed Apple was involved, the FCC would have published no details of the software, which arguably is the most important aspect of the iPhone concept, and the part Apple needed to keep secret.
Here's what I think. I think Steve Jobs got very excited about a product, far more so than he normally does, and felt MacWorld was the opportunity to reveal it. It's that simple. I think Jobs, in common with much of the media, has overblown the importance of the Apple communicator. It's an original machine, but then original phones come out every year. It's not innovative, in that it will not introduce a technology to a mass audience (the definition of innovative, which is not a synonym for inventive), it's too expensive for that, but it may end up influencing many devices to come. But ultimately, it's a very large phone that, nonetheless, has many nice features but none that the majority of people will see as worth the price tag and Cingular handcuffs, and it'll be relegated to the designer product niche.
Meanwhile someone will popularize the genuine advantages. They'll not produce a product that's as desirable, but it'll be "good enough" and much cheaper and more accessable, just as Microsoft/Commodore/Atari and Palm did to Macintosh and Newton respectively.
But I'm getting off the subject. The point is that Jobs became convinced that this was an important product. That's why it was presented at MacWorld. Not because of the FCC, not because of a lack of other products, but Jobs being overwhelmed with excitement.
Ever notice when you read a comment about an article from a culture and jurisdiction you know something about, the comment is always riddled with false assumptions and erroneous nitpicking? This comment made me think of that. In my not so humble opinion, this is just really, really, bad, parochial, writing.
Well, that just goes to show the inherent superiority of Microsoft products! Why they're so good, nobody has ever had to call Microsoft to support them!
I'll give you the multitouch screen, but all the rest are a nonsense. The last one is particularly sad, thin phones are rather popular at the moment, and this is a relatively large phone too, actually bigger and only 2/3 as thick as my second generation iPod.
This is an interesting phone, but the fact that is it's not unusually innovative. Motorola's four-letter series, Nokia's N series, their 9000 series, pretty much everything Blackberry has done, some of Samsung's new stuff, are equally or more innovative.
I'm beginning to think it'll sell anyway, based on a conversation I had with someone at lunch, but when it does it'll be a classic case of the inferior product beating the competition. And that's a real shame.
In practice, no, that's not going to work. The third party most likely to be interested in the source code is the original copyright holder. Regardless of contract, the copyright holder has an absolute right to enforce his or her license. If the source code is not provided, the code is no longer under license, and Cisco are now in breach of copyright. The author can (and, in my view, should) sue under such circumstances.
What he's against is killing theoretical people - people who might exist in the future - not people who actually exist.
Real people are scary and stuff and pose a threat, but you can always redeem your support for the killing of them by imagining some great moral superiority in defending the non-existant.
I understand what you're saying, but it depends on how you're defining bias.
In context, an unbiased opinion is an opinion formed without any external factors influencing the decision beyond the facts. For example, if someone looks at two political candidates, determines that person A is more in tune with their views than person B, and so choses person A their opinion is unbiased, because even though there's a subjective element, their decision making has been made on the basis of the facts available pertinent to the question. If, on the other hand, they pick A because A gave them a bribe, then their choice has nothing to do with the question, and so is biased.
Bias does not exist without context. In the end, we come down on one side or the other on a variety of issues. Our bias, or ability to withstand it, is determined by how we reached that decision, whether we judged the issue on the basis of the criteria we stated, or whether we judged it on the basis of criteria not relevent to the discussion.
The only way in which they'd only need to give people who buy the phone the source code is if they get the source code with the phone, which clearly they haven't done. Otherwise the source code needs to be available upon request from any third party.
Remember folks, what makes Apple so great is that they control the whole widget so of course they can't sell Mac OS X.
BTW, how dare you complain about the quality of Apple's products. That's nVidia's bug, not Apple's!
But that's not what Christianity teaches. A fundamental difference between mainstream Christianity and, say, Islam or Judaism, is that you do get to act like an arsehole if you want. The key to getting into heaven is to accept Christ, and be accepting of Him when you die.
Sin is not, by itself, an eternal-burning-in-Heck offense. (In fact, in my view, it was a pretty good game, though I haven't played the episodic sequal thing, and I doubt I ever will given the concept strikes me as sucking somewhat.) You can be as big an ass as Charles Manson, and except eventual settlement in Heaven, or a profound atheist who spends your life doing good, and end up in Hell.
Which is one of the reasons I don't believe in God. I can't respect someone who's that big an asshole, according to the people who believe in Him.
Tell you what, when Yahoo starts vetting its ads, so the inane and actually quite physically repellant mortgage ads stop appearing at the top of the screen (you know the type I'm refering to) I'll stop blocking ads.
And if Yahoo wants me to cease using their services, rather than cleaning up their act, then fuck 'em, I'll go elsewhere.
No TV station would show ads that stoop to the same shock level that Yahoo routinely allows shown and has allowed shown, still less for dubious "financial services", for the last few years. Quite aside from being slapped by the FCC if they did, the fact is most know full well they'd lose viewers in an instant.
Adblock gives me the capability to continue using Yahoo. If Yahoo doesn't like it, I'll go elsewhere.
Apple doesn't just use the 'i' prefix, it also has used 'e', most famously in the eMac. Supposedly at one point, this stood for "everybody", as in "The Mac for everybody".
Perhaps if they also combined it with a short, simple, word that reflects the mobility of the device. That is, after all, the selling point of mobile phones. It is a device for the person on the Go, you can go anywhere with it.
But I'm failing really to come up with a simple combination of 'e', and a word like "Go" that reflects that mobility aspect, still less one that would, say, fit the personality of Steve Jobs. Perhaps some of the other Slashdotters can help me out.
This is why geeks don't predict successes like the iPod. Sorry to pick on you, but you're just the last person to mention this.
The reason people subscribe to cellphone service is they want a phone that "just works". The number one complaint of users of mobile phone services is not that it's too expensive, it's that there are blackspots, and/or dropped calls. In the US, most plans are effectively unlimited - you're given unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited in-network calls, and a huge bucket of minutes to use for everything else, that you're never likely to use up. People might complain it's $50 rather than $25, but that's the cost anyway, regardless of how you try to work around it.
Even if we graft Skype onto cellphones, you're losing the "just works" aspect of it. Calls are dropped if you go out of range, so no walking around any great distances while using your Skype phone. Not unless you plan to subscribe to an unlimited data plan, and then... what are you using Skype for? Where's the cost benefit?
Mobile operators, in any case, are fixing the issues so you wouldn't have any advantage from such a system anyway. In particular, GSM operators are adopting GAN/UMA, which seamlessly causes the upper level GSM protocols to route themselves over 802.11 if there's a WLAN in range. So no dropped calls. While some operators may charge the earth for this, most are likely to simply drop airtime charges for calls routed this way. That's what T-Mobile USA is proposing, for instance.
The phone that doesn't work when you go out of range of a microcell was tried in the early nineties anyway. The technology CT2 was designed for that purpose. It was a flop. People didn't want it, even if it was cheaper than cellular. What they wanted was a phone that works everywhere. That works the same way everywhere.
While EDGE is certified by the IMT-2000 initiative as "3G", it's seen as a transitional technology for 2G networks, networks that have EDGE are better than networks without them, but over-all, a 2G network enhanced with EDGE is still 2G. Or 2.5G if you want to get really into the marketing terms (2G with packet switching.)
The 3G version of GSM is called UMTS. HSDPA is an enhancement to two of UMTS's air interfaces (W-CDMA and TD-CDMA.) This offers better bandwidth and far lower latency than EDGE. Call quality, thanks to higher bit rates, is good too.
So... why wouldn't the iPhone sell in Europe? Because most GSM operators have UMTS networks as well as 2G GSM networks, and most people want a phone that isn't limited to 2G GSM. Tariffs encourage use of 3G services - as an example, the only unmetered mobile Internet access option in the UK is from T-Mobile, where the tariff requires use of T-Mobile's 3G network.
If you're selling a device one of whose primary advantages is Internet access, selling one that doesn't support UMTS in Europe is ridiculous.
Now, in the US, Cingular are trying to roll out a UMTS network but have been hampered by lack of spectrum. The only other major GSM network in the US is T-Mobile, and they've specifically waited for spectrum, planning to launch 3G in the next few months. That'll take time to deploy too. So releasing an EDGE phone is acceptable here, because a UMTS phone would be more expensive, would probably operate on the wrong frequencies initially, and offer few advantages given the lack of a viable network to use the UMTS side on.
That argument cannot be made for Europe, and it's going to bite Apple in the rear if they don't put UMTS in the European version.
Apple thinks it can make 10 million sales of this thing in a year. Unless they take the rest of the world seriously, recognizing that 3G is big outside of the US, that people outside the US are used to unlocked, carrier-neutral, phones, that the smartphone market is actually under active development outside of the "free cheap phone with two year contract" US market, they're going to have to make almost all those sales in the US. I don't think they can pull that off, especially given they've locked their fortunes to Cingular's.
So what type of event is Jobs going to use to show it off?
A one-off "event" with lots of invited journalists, none of whom have any idea of what it is Steve's showing them?
Or something that actual Mac users go to, like WWDC?
When's WWDC?
Or is he not going to demo it at all? Is it really that much of an incremental improvement that there will be nothing worth showing before release, and if so, has Apple just spent the last 6 months fixing bugs and tuning it?
Well, not really. The iPod was a success, and spawned a lot of successes. But it's essentially one thing the rest of the world thought wouldn't take off, that did anyway.
The iPhone is pretty much an entirely new product (despite some overlapping functionality) and the requirement for a contract and $500 down, for a machine the same size as - but lower capacity than - an iPod is basicly a completely new game.
Will it succeed? Only if there are a lot of unmarried people out there who are out of contract at the moment and have good Cingular coverage in their area, and are interested in a PDA, that also carries a lot of music, as well as getting cellphone coverage.
We must remember that no matter how ridiculous, every product that costs a huge amount of money and has Apple's name on it well sell really well because Slashdotters were wrong about the iPod.
This has been a public service announcement on behalf of the Society for Absurd Leaps of Logic. Now back to your scheduled messages.
They're not going to sell 10 million $500 + 2 year contract phones available only via one operator in 2008.
The iPhone undermines their music business. The iPod is going to go away in due time, as people move to integrated devices, it's going to be threatened the same way as the low and medium-end standalone digital camera is teetering on the brink right now.
But Apple has a wider media business, and has the opportunity to make money from sales of music playing devices in future, whether they be its own, or Nokia's, Motorola's, etc. All it has to do is continue to dominate the music player industry in some way, either by ensuring the majority of MP3 players run Apple's software, or by ensuring the majority of Phone-M3 Player sales are Apple iPhones. As long as it does that, it can make (almost) any demands it wishes of the music industry and they'll still provide content for Apple's proprietary store. And while Apple's store has all the music, the people will only want the MP3 players that run Apple's software.
Instead they've done what they can to piss off their would-be partners (no chance of licensing Apple's software to them) while simultaneously producing a minority interest product.
So the iPod will whither, as MP3 playing phones rise, and Apple will have a tiny share of the MP3 playing phone market, and be beholden to Microsoft and others to provide the DRM platform (because the music industry sure as hell isn't going to continue to support the iTS if Apple has 1% of the music player market.)
Apple loses control, even of the products it sells. Possibly good for the rest of us, I'm not sure, but not exactly good for Apple.
No, it most certainly isn't.
It's $500 and requires a commitment to a two year contract just for that price. It's locked to one operator, who may or may not be any good where you live. Its capabilities are nice, but not so significant that for the vast majority of people a compelling reason can be found to purchase one over a more conventional unit from an experienced manufacturer. There are things we already know about and nobody in their right mind can be happy about. Sealed, un-replaceable batteries in a cellphone? A non-programmable smartphone (not even Java, apparently)? (Just what was the point of putting OS X on it?) Integration with Yahoo and Google Mail, but nothing else, not even corporate email clients like Exchange? (Mail.app can do it, so don't tell me it isn't possible.)
There are many aspects we simply don't know about it yet. For example: does it do voice recognition? That's pretty critical, and wasn't mentioned at all during the keynote. I'm guessing it doesn't. What do you think?
While it's quite possible Apple will come up with a "Revision B" that's clearly compelling, the high price, carrier exclusivity, and questions still to be raised over the over-all package will mean that this version, at least, will remain one of the more questionable business decisions Apple has made. The entire thing to me looks like the victory of ego over common sense.
Well done Jobs. You've just undermined the one serious success Apple has had in a couple of decades (the iPod and mobile music market) by producing a toy for the wealthy person who lives alone (no spouse to ask "You're spending WHAT on WHAT?"), is not currently in a mobile phone contract, lives in an area where Cingular has good coverage and capacity, has a small enough music collection that 4gigs will store it, and doesn't mind spending $500 on something that'll cease to have acceptable battery life in 18-30 months. If I were an Apple shareholder, I'd be getting out right now.