Aircraft are toys of the rich, and many of them are quite old. General aviation isn't a young mans game.
FALSE Probably the worst stereotype that exists in general aviation today.
It's expensive, yes, but it's not TOO bad - a reasonable used plane can be had for the low 5 digits, and many, many pilots do split ownership. Or they rent.
All in all, you do want to have a decent income - most pilots are middle income families - not rich 1 percenters. Most pilots also don't fly too much - under 100 hours a year. So split ownership or rental is actually very beneficial - the more an airplane flies, the cheaper it is to run (they want to run - the maintenance and everything goes way down if the engine's constantly turning and burning and such). Top end prices for a fully loaded brand new Cessna is probably around a quarter million.
And that's ignoring the biggest growth segment - light sport aircraft. They're currently expensive new, but the costs are way lower.
Now, if you want to talk jets that cost $1-2M, sure, they're for the rich and famous, but the regular avgas sucking sky-hole puncher is well within reach of someone with a decent salary. In fact, most/. readers working in IT probably make much more than the existing pilot population.
Learning to fly isn't too bad - all in all, probably $10,000 or so. It's cheaper if you can save up and do it in a month, more expensive if you have to spread it out over a couple of years. Or do light sport (you can upgrade it to full private pilot's later).
The benefits are, however, immense. If you could cut down a 10 hour road trip to 3 hours, wouldn't that be fun? And instead of endless highways and dirt, you get to see sights that few ever get to see. Avoiding big commercial airports for the little ones can often put you closer to your destination than flying commercial and dealing with security, lineups, etc. Heck, if you're particularly avid, you can fly into the neighbouring state for breakfast, fly back and have lots of time before lunch (many people do - they're called fly-ins, though the crowds are usually so fun they stay a few hours and end up having lunch as well).
As a career, though, being a pilot generally stinks - learning to fly and getting all your ratings, and you're barely making any rent. Finally get right seat at a region carrier and it's in the low 20s it's a joke. The big airlines aren't any better - most/. people are looking at people with 15-20 years seniority just to get the same salary.
However, if you don't want a career, with its lousy hours and routes until you build up seniority, flying for fun is actually quite affordable. And when the weather's beautiful, there's nothing like popping in the plane, flying to a nearby city and getting takeout for dinner after work.
And if you're a city dweller, night flying is so... serene and even when you're just 2500' high (I was flying local area), you;re above the light pollution and can see the stars. (And by local, I meant flying to cities that would normally take 40 minutes by car take barely 10 by air - or just when you get up, it's time to descend).
Expensive? It's one of the more costlier hobbies, but you can find golfers and scuba divers who'll plunk down huge cash on their equipment and training as well. Ditto car enthusiasts. Maybe even stamp collectors. Or gun enthusiasts (yes, guns can be had for a few hundred dollars, or many thousands). The only "expensive" stereotype comes from the fact that there's no realy "cheap" option (though many have earned flights by working or volunteering at their local airports). It's I suppose like Apple products - they don't make low end cheap stuff.
Hell, there's always the Coast Guard, and many civilian organizations that can subsidize flight training too (usually for SAR, firefighting, etc). It is a very social thing though - you cannot just fly and leave, you'll need to interact with people.
The proverb among pilots is "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing".
Professional pilots obviously hold themselves to a higher standard than that, but for a first-time flyer that landing met the requirements completely.
The quote is extended among pilots to "and a great landing is where you can use the plane again".
That said, the aeronautical term for this is called a Pinch-Hitter (taken from baseball). Google brings up many courses (online and off), videos, articles etc of being a pinch-hitter pilot. You'll find most are for small GA aircraft where single pilot operations are common.
If you are a pilot, there are plenty of resources to which you can print out to help your passengers in the unlikely event they need to take over - these sheets include instructions on how to radio for help (basically, how to use the radio) and what to radio for help on. Your passenger briefing that you do before starting up should include instructions on how to work the radio as well.
Samsung might be smart doing things like this. Rather than try to take over the masses to gain market share, take over all the niche markets. Apple makes one phone for all. Samsung makes a bunch of phones for individuals. Not sure if it's a good business model, but marketing wise it should work.
Actually, Samsung needs to do this because they already have marketshare. They have something like 90% marketshare of Android phones. Android itself outsells iOS by at least 3:1 so Samsung moves at least three times as many phones as Apple.
Samsung also just beat Apple in the profits game (which was inevitable - Samsung moves just that many more phones).
The only thing left is to go after the other 10% or the featurephone market.
The name attached to the log entries belonged to someone who said he didn't make the changes.
Well, it also had the fact that CVS was just a read-only clone. If you wanted to make a change, you can't submit it to CVS - you had to submit it up the change and eventually it would hit the BitKeeper repo first, then propagate to CVS.
So oddball entries like that mean it not only is a change that doesn't end up back in the BK tree (because there's no pointer back to the BK changeset), so something strange is going on.
Of course, this only affected CVS users - it would not affect BK users (as the CVS was a one-way clone of the BK tree that was autogenerated), so the change not only was only in CVS, but there is no corresponding change in the BK tree to be linked with anyone.
Just make it fucking stop. As someone who works in a Fortune 100 company and deals with this bullshit - just stop. None of it is cool, and none of it helps the bottom line. It's just bullshit the higher ups think up to seem like they're doing something valuable.
Actually, the core problem was not the game - but communications. For whatever reason (corporate culture, most likely) people would make mistakes but not share what happened (and how they fixed it). The whole reason for the video sharing platform was to create and share videos of these mistakes so people don't keep repeating them over and over and over again. (While an individually probably won't, someone in the satellite office might).
DirecTV chose to gamify how they communicate within themselves. It's just one possible solution out of many ways to increase communications and to avoid doing the same mistake over and over again. Some companies can't reproduce the results because they don't "fit" like DirecTV did.
In the end, it's really just a way one company chose to fix a structural communications problem within the company.
The minute I saw 800 person IT Group I knew that would be a hell hole.
It depends on the company - there may be a real need for it - like I think this count at DirecTV would include real helpdesk personnel, who may make up a good 750 of those 800 people who answer customer calls about technical problems like receivers failing or other thing. Or it may be supporting the installers out in the field.
Or it could be that managing programming, uplinking and downlinking and local ground based systems is really hard (needing 1 or 2 IT people per major city to manage stuff like local chnanels and programming?).
A lot tougher to get right than software. In software you can implement anything you want, as badly as you want. It doesn't cost anything and it's easy to start over. So what if you have an open source GPU? How are you going to connect it to the computer? You need an above-hobbyist PCB designer (sorry, it's true), you need someone to build the boards, test them, solder on the parts (assuming you were able to make a schematic and a BOM and order the parts), test again, and then you can start debugging software as maybe hardware bugs come out at the same time.
Not really - PCI (not PCIe) is fairly easy these days (it's 33MHz, so it's not "hard"). And since it's an FPGA, you just need one with a PCI compatible interface. The other parts would be a video DAC to output to VGA or an FPGA with TMDS lines (yes, they make those) to hook to DVI directly.
Connect to a computer is easy - it's PCI, most modern PCs have one. If not, they make PCIe-to-PCI bridges that do the same thing (albeit with more work). Or I'm sure if you look around, there's a reference design card you can have that has PCIe, an FPGA and a variety of connectors and ports for plugging straight into a PC.
And hobby manufacturing is actually fairly easy these days - given how kickstarter seems to have spawned a small industry of contract manufacturers and such with pick and place machines and all that that are reasonably affordable to use to build a small (under 1000, above 20 or so) run with.
No, the biggest problem these guys will encounter is it's impossible to do an open-source GPU. Because everything they need to do is patented, some of it quite heavily (like S3TC - a core part of OpenGL and DirectX these days, of which there is a software and a hardware part, all owned by Via).
And that's just 3D graphics. 2D graphics is also a minefield (stuff like overlays are patented). Or if you want to do hardware assisted video decode (patent minefield! Even if you don't want to do h.264). Since the drivers are probably going to be open, that means pushing a lot of the patented material into hardware.
Hell, the hardware is to be honest the easiest part. Even doing the GPU is fairly straightforward.
Did vBulletin change or something. I thought vBulletin was forum software, this states CMS. Or is CMS the preferred buzzword du jour?
Either way, this will mean more spam on lots of forums and more identity theft for those that use the same password for forums and bank accounts. Yawn.
No, CMS is not the preferred term for forum software. However, a lot of forum software and CMS systems are becoming highly integrated because they do a lot of overlapping things.
E.g., the front page may consist of news articles, but an integrated CMS-forum would let it be that it's a forum post in a specific forum, or it becomes one when written outside the forum. So the front page of a lot of sites is really driven by a post in the backend forums, and when you click on the comment link, it either links you direct to the forums, or a simplfied forum view based on existing forum content.
Stuff like files and downloads can also be linked to internal forums (or generally more annoying), to forum posts themselves so they auto-update when the post gets updated.
Add in other features like a wiki and direct editing and updating based on forum posts and you end up with a a relatively comprehensive CMS system that started as a forum application.
There are many sites which would basically be a forum - they offer little to no content of their own, but have due to time or other factors became de-factor sites for discussing various topics. Upgrading the site to later versions of the forum software often add CMS features enabling one to "blog" based on existing forum activity.
One could see how a regular blog (like say,/.) could really be seen as a lamer version of forum software.
Too bad this solar cycle is such a dud and 10m hasn't been opening for long haul comms. I remember back in 2000 talking to South Africa on my 25w mobile. Oh well.
Ironically, this makes it the best at sending a message detectable by Juno's sensors. The band is "bad" because the solar cycle and ionosphere interact - during the peak, the signals hit the ionosphere and bounce back to earth, giving you long range communications with little power.
During "bad" times, the ionosphere doesn't bend the signal back, so it goes out... into space. And that's exactly where Juno is.
In fact, NASA had to ensure the band was sufficiently "leaky" that they had a signal to detect.
Hardware manufacturers I'm pointing my my finger at you. The most powerful features of 802.11n are largely unimplemented. Laptop/tablet/phone Support for 3 spatial streams is about as rare and rocking horse shit. Support for even 5 ghz is spotty at best and its hard to find out if whatever piece of hardware you want to consider buying even supports it. Heck even 2 spatial streams at 2 ghz is something your lucky to get unless you spend more than $699 on a laptop. The lowest common denominator for 802.11n and what the "wireless n" wifi support really means for half the devices on the market is a single spatial stream 802.11n at 2 ghz, which is 65 Mbps max. I can buy a mid range smartphone with 4g support and the wifi is still single spatial stream at 2 ghz. Hardware manufacturers have no incentive to put better implementations of 802.11n in their because most customers aren't savvy enough to tell the difference and demand better from device manufacturers. 802.11n is on old specification. There's no excuse why 2 spatial streams can't be the minimum. The silicon to do this is cheap and has been refined for many years
The hardware isn't as cheap as you make it out.
The chips support it, but they require external blocks (each stream requires a T/R switch, a PA, a LNA, and other ancillary RF components). These parts have to be put on RF-impedance checked PCBs and run to separate antennas. It's actually a lot of design work in the end, and it's complex enough that most use WiFi modules that have it all (SD/USB/SPI/etc interface one end, u.FL connector on the other). Of course, the ones that fit in the available space only have single stream support.
As for 5GHz support, the best way I've found is remarkably simple - look for 802.11a support. If the package says it supports "802.11b/g/n", then it does NOT support 5GHz. However, if it says "802.11a/b/g/n", then yes, it does support 5GHz. That's all you need to look for.
There are probably exceptions, like devices that support 802.11n on 5GHz but not 802.11a, and devices that support 802.11n on 2.4 only while supporting 802.11a, but they're rare and honestly, if you're going to the trouble of supporting 5GHz, it doesn't hurt to add the support necessary for the missing a or n.
So, if you see "802.11bgn" - no 5GHz. "802.11abgn" yes it supports 5GHz.
Every device I've seen lists it like that, so it's quick and easy.
Heh, i just throw my days change accumulation into a jar and take it the bank every couple months. TD and BMO and others have been rolling out free automated coin sorting machines -- and that works well for me.
And while I can see the argument that paper was more convenient -- the higher value coins are almost a necessity for modern vending machine prices / parking meters / etc although most are taking plastic now. And I agree with the financial argument that the coin is cheaper for the government to circulate so its an inconvenience I don't object to.
I never understood this - why do people carry their change home and dump them in jars? I mean, I spend my change - not always to make exact change, but to make convenient change (e.g., if it's $3.55, I might use a $5 and a nickel to get $1.50 in change), or a $5 and three quarters to get back two dimes and a twoonie. Do it enough times and the change goes down very quick.
It requires a bit of math, but it's not terribly hard math (it's basic arithmetic) and not terribly hard one at that. Keeps the brain healthy and keeps you from reverting to a calculator to do 2+2.
As for the penny - yeah we agree there - they did a good job on getting rid of the coin, while implementing sensible pricing and rounding policies. Its loss isn't hurting anyone except maybe charities. But I've got to believe there are better ways to collect money for charity than one penny at a time.
Assuming stores do it. I've seen many a ripoff stores that don't implement the policy (it's voluntary, after all), and many more that used the opportunity for a small price hike.
It's why I quit frequenting a popular Canadian hamburger chain because their franchisees kept dinging me 4 cents (the totals kept coming out like $8.61 or something, so most places would round down and charge $8.60, but they kept rounding up to $8.65). It's only 4 cents, but still, you don't have to rip off your customers that badly.
And I've noticed how prices almost inevitably end up at values that round UP than down - i.e., they end in 3, 4, 8 or 9 far more often (triggering a round up) than 1, 2, 6 or 7 (round down).
Or how some places have altered prices that always end in 0 or 5, which sucks if you're paying by electronic (debit/credit) which are "exact" (you're not supposed to round at all).
In fact, it's one the arguments that the US uses against eliminating the penny - because there are so many low-income people that would get screwed over...
Even though you have to buy from a dealer, this new GM website means you get exactly the car you want with the extras you want at a price that is set before you even set foot on the dealer lot. No negotiating and no up-sell.
Which is exactly why some dealers dont like it.
Some dealers might not like it, that is. Selling cars is not a big source of income for a dealer - the dealer markup is often quite low because people know what the dealer paid, so the profit can be just a couple of thousand dollars on a vehicle (which doesn't include overhead like warehousing and staff, etc). Sometimes they'll upsell you to a higher end model because they have it there and are willing to take a cut on margins to move it out the door rather than sitting on the lot.
Dealers may like this model because it's fixed price - the dealer makes a known amount of profit and you won't haggle it down because the order says what you're going to pay. Plus it's closer to MSRP, and not "dealers may sell for less".
Most of the revenue from a dealership comes from service. Of course, an electric car like a Tesla needs far less service than a regular vehicle (Tesla recommends a yearly service in general, though it can go far longer).
Heck, when choosing a car these days, the service schedule is an important factor for me - some cars have you coming in almost monthly or every 3 months, others every year. Add in the general inconvenience (dealer or not)...
Customers who aren't price sensitive, aren't, well, price sensitive. If they cared enough, they'd gather the information. But the extra ding just doesn't make the extra information gathering worth it to them.
Or simply, the cost to do all the added research outweighs the cost of amenities like Wi-Fi. Or other factors intervene.
E.g., a hotel next to the convention center costs more, has paid Wi-Fi, etc., but being able to walk between the two in 5 minutes may be well worth the added cost than spending 30-45 minutes each way from a cheaper hotel (and the added cost of a car rental or taxi or whatever), etc. Or the ability to be right there and entertain guests until late in the morning at a nearby restaurant rather than hotel bar.
There are many factors in play - it's never as simple as "Let's just go to the holiday inn where it's free".
And if you have to drive a half hour out of the way to get to the hotels with free Wi-Fi, versus being right there in the middle of it all, well, perhaps spending the $5/night isn't such a bad idea.
The government would *love* to be able to discontinue those bills, and replace them with coins. But to date, there have been *two* attempts to replace the $1 bill with a $1 coin, and both have failed miserably because people refused to use them.
It's a cultural thing I think - Americans in general hate using change. For some reason or other, they'll just collect coins and toss them in a jar and leave it at that rather than try to spend it.
For me, I always spend my change - I don't have jars and jars of coins that I'll "sell" back at coin counters for 90 cents on the dollar.
Could be a math-related thing - perhaps Americans think the only way to make change is exact, rather than try to make convenient change (e.g., if it comes out to $3.55, giving $3.60 gets rid of two quarters and a dime and gets back a nickle, which means you get rid of two coins), Or if it's $4.55, I can put down a $5 bill and a nickel and get back 50 cents.
But I guess for the majority of Americans, such math is so hard that coins are hard. I generally don't have many coins in my pocket because I keep using them...
Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Most countries already use different colored bills to help distinguish one denomination from another (and to aid in quickly determining how much cash on hand you have by a quick glance). Only in the US do I have to manually count out every bill to make sure a $5 didn't sneak in with the $1s and so on.
Of course, perhaps it's time to go beyond linen/cotton/paper based bills and move to plastic (polymer) based ones...
Samsung's case hinged on a standards-essential patent they had agreed to license on fair and nondiscriminatory terms and was decided by the ITC. Apple's patent was not part of a standard and was decided by a US court of law. The cases aren't even remotely similar, no there's nothing "blatant" here.
Not only that, but Samsung's newer devices worked around Apple's patents, showing that not only could Samsung avoid using the patented item, they did.
Samsung's assertion of standards-essential patents is seen as a bully tactic that has gotten Samsung, Motorola/Google and others in serious hot water in the EU, because there is no way to implement a cellphone without those patents. Apple can't work around it and have it work.
Hence why Obama had to overturn the Apple ban, but not the Samsung one. Samsung avoided Apple's patents on their later devices (SGS3 onwards), so it's obvious they could fix the problem themselves (software update!).
In addition, Samsung's patents would've affected all Apple's products. Which has a huge effect on the economy. The ban on Samsung's products? Well, they're older phones - tell me you don't seriously expect not selling the SGS2 and older phones to put a huge dent in phone sales. The newer phones on Samsung's roster like the S3, S4 and others, not affected at all.
Forget about specific computer science trivia. You can look that all up, and it's all available in libraries with various licenses. When you're starting a new job, refresh yourself on how that problem is already being solved. If you need a refresher on a specific computer science concept, take some time and do so.
Well, it's helpful to have the basic understanding of Big-O and what common algorithms have. It's also worthwhile to know when it really doesn't matter - using bubblesort is bad, but if you know you're only sorting 10 items ever, it'll work in a pinch.
Knowing this can have an effect on what algorithms you choose and even how you architect the system - perhaps what you're dealing with may end up causing quicksort to see its worst-case behavior far more often than necessary.
And you laugh, but I've seen commercial software falter because of poor choices of algorithms - where doing a 1 second capture is perfectly fine, but a 10 second capture causes it to bog down and be 100 times slower.
Or the time where adding a line to a text box causes it to get exponentially slower because adding a line causes a memory allocation and a memory copy.
Next, understand OS fundamentals and how the computer really works. Things like how virtual memory and page files operate, how the heap works and synchronization and even lock-free algorithms and memory barriers. It's difficult to learn on your own - it takes a lot of time to sit down and really understand how it works and why it works, and even then it can take 3-4 different methods of explanation until it clicks.
Concurrent programming isn't hard especially if concurrency was taken into account when the system was designed. Adding concurrency to a non-concurrent system though is a huge, difficult and trouble-prone process. Especially once bit-rot has set in and you find 10 different ways of getting at the variable.
since a backup system kicked in to prevent any critical consequences.
Question is, how long do you want to rely on backups to save your ass when the primary problem is accidentally hitting a button? The backup's there as a just-in-case, but it's not something you really want to rely on happening just in case it happens to fail the one time.
Remember, there were a few emergency gensets set to supply power to the reactor cooling systems as well, but it seems a tsunami wiped out them out, and the ones it didn't kill, it killed the switchboards that selected the power source.
They are still bitter that they had the idea for a tablet long before Apple, but when they announced it, it was to a big yawn. When Apple did it, everyone pissed themselves like excited dogs, and then when Microsoft tried again... everyone said they stole the idea from Apple. Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives. For some reason though, they rarely manage to get on the train. Execution and follow-through has always been a problem for the organization; Especially now that the CEO is a dancing monkey-man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Except there was a collective yawn at Apple's announcement as well. It was so bad, the tech press was wondering who would buy one, and even Jobs muttered that if they didn't sell, he'd lower the price more.
It would be more akin to the iPod launch - a big collective yawn at "another MP3 player?".
Of course, the two things it did do was run all iOS apps, and Apple did a lot of developer seeding so day 1 there would've been plenty of iPad (or iPhone/iPad) apps.
Also didn't hurt that Apple didn't go the Microsoft route and try to adapt OS X for touchscreens (like Microsoft did for Windows - Pen Windows/Windows for Pens and other adaptations intended to get full blown Windows on tablets) because UI interactions between keyboard an mouse and touch are different (see Microsoft going the wrong way again with tablet UIs for desktops).
Of course, it's "low" cost ($500 killed many competitors attempts at releasing a tablet - everyone anticipated $1000 and the likes of Acer and Asus were going to release PC tablets for $800 or so), and long battery life (10 hours) helped, as well as trying to avoid being a complete PC replacement.
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 05, 2013 @02:17PM (#45046985)
Sony haven't put their foot up their bum-hole yet, whereas Microsoft have tried inserting the entire MLS roster up their poopy. Many Xbox fans are jumping ship with pre-orders. Nintendo massively underestimated gamers with the dreadful Wii U. Unless the steam-boxen are dirt cheap, Sony have going to wipe the floor this time simply because everyone has lost the plot.
That's the scary part of Sony. Like a politician that lets the opposition kill themselves while remaining silent, what Sony has NOT said is very important. More important than what they do say, because humans have a tendency to believe that if the "other guy" doesn't say something, they much be opposed, when really it's a non-statement.
Who knows what Sony has for DRM policies? We don't know - all we know is we can pass discs around. But that's it. (None of which is mutually incompatible with always online or 24-hour checkins).
Likewise, who knows what Sony's policies are for advertising? Sure, the PS3 had a bit (though I oddly find the always-on ad ticker way more annoying than the Xbox ones...).
The only thing we know is Microsoft has a crappy marketing and communications team that can't spit out a well-formed sentence.
Sony? They're probably doing what smart governments do - muzzle anyone who talks to the public unless it's something really important and only then on-message.
Steamboxes will be cheaper than the other consoles. The hardware will be more expensive. But if you count things like paying for online, mods, backwards compatibility and steam sales, they will be cheaper in the long run.
Valves problem is that most people rather buy stuff cheap and pay monthly payments.
Unfortunately, though, they're being matched.
Online gaming? Well I'll give you that. Maybe - it's only a matter of time before publishers see potential in it. Mods just the same.
Games on PC are starting to cost the same as their console cousins ($60), and DLC and other stuff are also costing money. Steam sales? Well, Sony and Microsoft run some fairly big sales as well.
Games on SteamOS won't be much cheaper - everyone will find a way to milk the users just the same
Unfortunately, this will get harder to do as subsequent generations are raised with thinner and thinner skin. The current legal landscape in the USA, completely byzantine and out of control, needs to be fixed, for sure, but the other part of the solution requires us to quit raising generations of pantywaists. Politics that encourage victimhood groupthink mentalities are a large part of the blame here.
It probably also requires raising people to be more mindful of their own limitations. You see it in the/. crowd - they see themselves as "superior" to everyone else - and want everyone else to conform.
And yet the world expects them to conform to societal norms that have been around for a long time - yet are seen as encumbrances. Think of such things as proper dress (are you opposed to wearing a suit and tie as appropriate?), proper etiquette, and proper behavior.
Aaron unfortunately was pretty much a non-conformist, and when you're prosecuted, that's the last thing you want - to be painted by the prosecution as someone that's "bad to society" alongside gangsters and such that roam the streets at night.
Because the general public doesn't care and they do judge books by the cover - you act disrespectful towards them (even if they are to you) and they'll take note of such behavior even if it's unwarranted.
The "sweet old lady" stereotype is basically the goal to avoid character assassination.
And wasn't there someone else who acted all superior as well that ended up being found guilty? I heard he made a real killer of a filesystem.
Wearable personal computing devices make complete sense. The current implementations are just not very good.
Smartwatches suffer from the fact they were pretty much invented needs.
The need for a smartwatch came from the fact that smartphones have gotten ever bigger and bigger (or as Gizmodo put it, "dick-a-geddon" came a month early - when screen sizes exceeded average penis size), they became clumsier and clumsier to use.
Sure, a big screen is nice for videos and games - that's why people love consoles attached to their 70" HDTVs. And likewise, having a 5+" display is nice for mobile gaming and videos as well. However, it also impedes the ability to well, use it for anything other than a big-screen gameboy. Heck, the Note 3 implements a "Small Screen" mode where it reduces the screen size so youc an use it single-handedly.
So they invent smart watches because it's a huge (literally) PITA to keep digging out this tablet just to see a text or to see if you want to answer the call. In effect, because screen sizes are so big, they need more gadgets to deal with it.
So now you have this PITA "smartwatch" with a sub-day battery life (great, so you forget to charge it and you're hooped).
(Important note - these flagship Androids? They make up less than 10% of the Android market - Google claims 900M Android devices, and Samsung sold 60M SGS3s, the best selling Android handset ever (all models)).
Apple's probably working on one, and rumors have it that the 3-4 day battery life they're getting is inadequate. Hell, Qualcomm announced their smartwatch the same day as the Galaxy Gear and it not only has an always-on display, but lasts a few days.
Right now, Apple and everyone else has to answer the question - what is it good for, that isn't a result of a self-created problem?
So the question becomes: did Jobs give up on pushing making a miniaturized OSX on the phone, or did you just misunderstand what he meant by miniaturized OSX (after all, he could have meant OS in the same way as you interpreted it, despite our quibbling about the technical definition of OS)?
And...I don't know the answer to that at all. Both are intuitively defensible positions, and with enough research one is likely correct.
Well, iOS is miniaturized OS X. In fact, I think when RIM first took apart an iPhone to see how it ticked, they were shocked when the OS took up 700MB of available storage. The typical phone OS of the days usually consumed under 30MB.
The UI model though is completely different between iOS and OS X, and for good reason. You don't want UI conventions from OS X making it into iOS because OS X is designed for a keyboard and mouse, while iOS is touchscreen based. Any UX designer knows interaction models are completely different for those interfaces.
Forcing app devs to use the different API gives them an opportunity to properly re-architect their UI for the touchscreen, rather than take the lazy route and recompile, leading to a potentially crappy experience.
See what happened when Microsoft tries to impose the same UI as desktop to tablet, or tablet to desktop. One interaction ends up being awkward.
Its also a testament about demonstrating something way before it was ready. A specific sequence of events that had to occur in a given order to prevent it crashing? Really? Send your most visible exec out with total crap in his hands?
Couldn't they just wait till it actually worked? Its not like anyone was racing them to market in those days.
Well, the original iPhone prototypes were known to be crap - Jobs having seen the early prototypes and nearly smashed them against the wall in annoyance at all the crashing and instability it had.
Jobs already knew it - he saw the crap it was during meetings, and decided to just go for it and announce a release date and all that. The FCC tied Apple's hands on when they could announce it - basically they were going to release the compliance information to the public soon, so Apple had to announce it sooner.
And these announcements take time to set up, so I guess he was hoping the software would be in a more stable state between the time of making all the arrangements and announcement day.
I don't think that's the long-term goal, though. The whole project seems to have kicked into gear because the Windows App Store means they can't rely on Windows indefinitely, and they seem to be trying to get devs to port to Linux natively. That entails a beefier GPU than you'd need for a pure streaming solution.
Exactly, that's the goal. You have to realize that Steam is the original curated App Store - sorry Apple, you are NOT the first.
With both the Windows App Store and Mac App Store, Steam has competition. And we know the MAS is starting to get some AAA titles as well as indie games. So Steam will have to compete - though it does have advantages like cross platform.
Enter Linux. There is no real App Store on Linux, at least one that that's universal across all distributions and such. Hence Valve's niche for Steam - if you can standardize Linux for developers, offer a universal DRM solution and basically layer over the difficulties of developing on Linux, it's possible to have a good chance to succeed.
And Steam has made moves to offer more than games - so general applications can be purchased and obtained via Steam
Steam offers a way to have stable binary APIs and library version management for Linux so binary closed-source applications and games can be sold for the platform. Add in auto-update capabilities and payment handling, and that should encourage success on Linux.
Linux folks have always wanted a way to get the big commercial apps on their platform - Steam offers a perfect distribution mechanism. Plus with name recognition means it'll probably be a successful app store.
They could just put it in another market or sideload it, oh wait.
You can do that actually - there are two ways to get an app onto an iPhone without going through Apple.
1) A developer certificate - lets you sign apps and install it on 100 devices.
2) An enterprise certificate - lets you sign apps and push it to unlimited numbers of devices that have been previously registered.
Both involve using a mobile provisioning file - the former is created by Apple, the latter by the enterprise as an Apple-derived certificate.
The latter is often used by many sites that help distribute iOS betas - the site holds an enterprise certificate they use to create mobileprovisioning certificates you load on your iOS device. the developer uploads their beta app, and the site distributes it (automatically or not) to the attached devices.
May I assume than it can be downloaded from somewhere and installed on a jail broken phone? Or is Apple's DRM that good?
You can always post it on say, the US App Store as a US-only app for free. Then just have users sign up for a free US iTunes account (there are ways to get one that require no credit card or other payment vehicle). Then just download it there and install it on your iPhone. (The iPhone doesn't care which account the app came from as long as it's been authorized).
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FALSE Probably the worst stereotype that exists in general aviation today.
It's expensive, yes, but it's not TOO bad - a reasonable used plane can be had for the low 5 digits, and many, many pilots do split ownership. Or they rent.
All in all, you do want to have a decent income - most pilots are middle income families - not rich 1 percenters. Most pilots also don't fly too much - under 100 hours a year. So split ownership or rental is actually very beneficial - the more an airplane flies, the cheaper it is to run (they want to run - the maintenance and everything goes way down if the engine's constantly turning and burning and such). Top end prices for a fully loaded brand new Cessna is probably around a quarter million.
And that's ignoring the biggest growth segment - light sport aircraft. They're currently expensive new, but the costs are way lower.
Now, if you want to talk jets that cost $1-2M, sure, they're for the rich and famous, but the regular avgas sucking sky-hole puncher is well within reach of someone with a decent salary. In fact, most /. readers working in IT probably make much more than the existing pilot population.
Learning to fly isn't too bad - all in all, probably $10,000 or so. It's cheaper if you can save up and do it in a month, more expensive if you have to spread it out over a couple of years. Or do light sport (you can upgrade it to full private pilot's later).
The benefits are, however, immense. If you could cut down a 10 hour road trip to 3 hours, wouldn't that be fun? And instead of endless highways and dirt, you get to see sights that few ever get to see. Avoiding big commercial airports for the little ones can often put you closer to your destination than flying commercial and dealing with security, lineups, etc. Heck, if you're particularly avid, you can fly into the neighbouring state for breakfast, fly back and have lots of time before lunch (many people do - they're called fly-ins, though the crowds are usually so fun they stay a few hours and end up having lunch as well).
As a career, though, being a pilot generally stinks - learning to fly and getting all your ratings, and you're barely making any rent. Finally get right seat at a region carrier and it's in the low 20s it's a joke. The big airlines aren't any better - most /. people are looking at people with 15-20 years seniority just to get the same salary.
However, if you don't want a career, with its lousy hours and routes until you build up seniority, flying for fun is actually quite affordable. And when the weather's beautiful, there's nothing like popping in the plane, flying to a nearby city and getting takeout for dinner after work.
And if you're a city dweller, night flying is so ... serene and even when you're just 2500' high (I was flying local area), you;re above the light pollution and can see the stars. (And by local, I meant flying to cities that would normally take 40 minutes by car take barely 10 by air - or just when you get up, it's time to descend).
Expensive? It's one of the more costlier hobbies, but you can find golfers and scuba divers who'll plunk down huge cash on their equipment and training as well. Ditto car enthusiasts. Maybe even stamp collectors. Or gun enthusiasts (yes, guns can be had for a few hundred dollars, or many thousands). The only "expensive" stereotype comes from the fact that there's no realy "cheap" option (though many have earned flights by working or volunteering at their local airports). It's I suppose like Apple products - they don't make low end cheap stuff.
Hell, there's always the Coast Guard, and many civilian organizations that can subsidize flight training too (usually for SAR, firefighting, etc). It is a very social thing though - you cannot just fly and leave, you'll need to interact with people.
The quote is extended among pilots to "and a great landing is where you can use the plane again".
That said, the aeronautical term for this is called a Pinch-Hitter (taken from baseball). Google brings up many courses (online and off), videos, articles etc of being a pinch-hitter pilot. You'll find most are for small GA aircraft where single pilot operations are common.
If you are a pilot, there are plenty of resources to which you can print out to help your passengers in the unlikely event they need to take over - these sheets include instructions on how to radio for help (basically, how to use the radio) and what to radio for help on. Your passenger briefing that you do before starting up should include instructions on how to work the radio as well.
Actually, Samsung needs to do this because they already have marketshare. They have something like 90% marketshare of Android phones. Android itself outsells iOS by at least 3:1 so Samsung moves at least three times as many phones as Apple.
Samsung also just beat Apple in the profits game (which was inevitable - Samsung moves just that many more phones).
The only thing left is to go after the other 10% or the featurephone market.
Well, it also had the fact that CVS was just a read-only clone. If you wanted to make a change, you can't submit it to CVS - you had to submit it up the change and eventually it would hit the BitKeeper repo first, then propagate to CVS.
So oddball entries like that mean it not only is a change that doesn't end up back in the BK tree (because there's no pointer back to the BK changeset), so something strange is going on.
Of course, this only affected CVS users - it would not affect BK users (as the CVS was a one-way clone of the BK tree that was autogenerated), so the change not only was only in CVS, but there is no corresponding change in the BK tree to be linked with anyone.
Actually, the core problem was not the game - but communications. For whatever reason (corporate culture, most likely) people would make mistakes but not share what happened (and how they fixed it). The whole reason for the video sharing platform was to create and share videos of these mistakes so people don't keep repeating them over and over and over again. (While an individually probably won't, someone in the satellite office might).
DirecTV chose to gamify how they communicate within themselves. It's just one possible solution out of many ways to increase communications and to avoid doing the same mistake over and over again. Some companies can't reproduce the results because they don't "fit" like DirecTV did.
In the end, it's really just a way one company chose to fix a structural communications problem within the company.
It depends on the company - there may be a real need for it - like I think this count at DirecTV would include real helpdesk personnel, who may make up a good 750 of those 800 people who answer customer calls about technical problems like receivers failing or other thing. Or it may be supporting the installers out in the field.
Or it could be that managing programming, uplinking and downlinking and local ground based systems is really hard (needing 1 or 2 IT people per major city to manage stuff like local chnanels and programming?).
Not really - PCI (not PCIe) is fairly easy these days (it's 33MHz, so it's not "hard"). And since it's an FPGA, you just need one with a PCI compatible interface. The other parts would be a video DAC to output to VGA or an FPGA with TMDS lines (yes, they make those) to hook to DVI directly.
Connect to a computer is easy - it's PCI, most modern PCs have one. If not, they make PCIe-to-PCI bridges that do the same thing (albeit with more work). Or I'm sure if you look around, there's a reference design card you can have that has PCIe, an FPGA and a variety of connectors and ports for plugging straight into a PC.
And hobby manufacturing is actually fairly easy these days - given how kickstarter seems to have spawned a small industry of contract manufacturers and such with pick and place machines and all that that are reasonably affordable to use to build a small (under 1000, above 20 or so) run with.
No, the biggest problem these guys will encounter is it's impossible to do an open-source GPU. Because everything they need to do is patented, some of it quite heavily (like S3TC - a core part of OpenGL and DirectX these days, of which there is a software and a hardware part, all owned by Via).
And that's just 3D graphics. 2D graphics is also a minefield (stuff like overlays are patented). Or if you want to do hardware assisted video decode (patent minefield! Even if you don't want to do h.264). Since the drivers are probably going to be open, that means pushing a lot of the patented material into hardware.
Hell, the hardware is to be honest the easiest part. Even doing the GPU is fairly straightforward.
No, CMS is not the preferred term for forum software. However, a lot of forum software and CMS systems are becoming highly integrated because they do a lot of overlapping things.
E.g., the front page may consist of news articles, but an integrated CMS-forum would let it be that it's a forum post in a specific forum, or it becomes one when written outside the forum. So the front page of a lot of sites is really driven by a post in the backend forums, and when you click on the comment link, it either links you direct to the forums, or a simplfied forum view based on existing forum content.
Stuff like files and downloads can also be linked to internal forums (or generally more annoying), to forum posts themselves so they auto-update when the post gets updated.
Add in other features like a wiki and direct editing and updating based on forum posts and you end up with a a relatively comprehensive CMS system that started as a forum application.
There are many sites which would basically be a forum - they offer little to no content of their own, but have due to time or other factors became de-factor sites for discussing various topics. Upgrading the site to later versions of the forum software often add CMS features enabling one to "blog" based on existing forum activity.
One could see how a regular blog (like say, /.) could really be seen as a lamer version of forum software.
Ironically, this makes it the best at sending a message detectable by Juno's sensors. The band is "bad" because the solar cycle and ionosphere interact - during the peak, the signals hit the ionosphere and bounce back to earth, giving you long range communications with little power.
During "bad" times, the ionosphere doesn't bend the signal back, so it goes out ... into space. And that's exactly where Juno is.
In fact, NASA had to ensure the band was sufficiently "leaky" that they had a signal to detect.
The hardware isn't as cheap as you make it out.
The chips support it, but they require external blocks (each stream requires a T/R switch, a PA, a LNA, and other ancillary RF components). These parts have to be put on RF-impedance checked PCBs and run to separate antennas. It's actually a lot of design work in the end, and it's complex enough that most use WiFi modules that have it all (SD/USB/SPI/etc interface one end, u.FL connector on the other). Of course, the ones that fit in the available space only have single stream support.
As for 5GHz support, the best way I've found is remarkably simple - look for 802.11a support. If the package says it supports "802.11b/g/n", then it does NOT support 5GHz. However, if it says "802.11a/b/g/n", then yes, it does support 5GHz. That's all you need to look for.
There are probably exceptions, like devices that support 802.11n on 5GHz but not 802.11a, and devices that support 802.11n on 2.4 only while supporting 802.11a, but they're rare and honestly, if you're going to the trouble of supporting 5GHz, it doesn't hurt to add the support necessary for the missing a or n.
So, if you see "802.11bgn" - no 5GHz. "802.11abgn" yes it supports 5GHz.
Every device I've seen lists it like that, so it's quick and easy.
I never understood this - why do people carry their change home and dump them in jars? I mean, I spend my change - not always to make exact change, but to make convenient change (e.g., if it's $3.55, I might use a $5 and a nickel to get $1.50 in change), or a $5 and three quarters to get back two dimes and a twoonie. Do it enough times and the change goes down very quick.
It requires a bit of math, but it's not terribly hard math (it's basic arithmetic) and not terribly hard one at that. Keeps the brain healthy and keeps you from reverting to a calculator to do 2+2.
Assuming stores do it. I've seen many a ripoff stores that don't implement the policy (it's voluntary, after all), and many more that used the opportunity for a small price hike.
It's why I quit frequenting a popular Canadian hamburger chain because their franchisees kept dinging me 4 cents (the totals kept coming out like $8.61 or something, so most places would round down and charge $8.60, but they kept rounding up to $8.65). It's only 4 cents, but still, you don't have to rip off your customers that badly.
And I've noticed how prices almost inevitably end up at values that round UP than down - i.e., they end in 3, 4, 8 or 9 far more often (triggering a round up) than 1, 2, 6 or 7 (round down).
Or how some places have altered prices that always end in 0 or 5, which sucks if you're paying by electronic (debit/credit) which are "exact" (you're not supposed to round at all).
In fact, it's one the arguments that the US uses against eliminating the penny - because there are so many low-income people that would get screwed over ...
Some dealers might not like it, that is. Selling cars is not a big source of income for a dealer - the dealer markup is often quite low because people know what the dealer paid, so the profit can be just a couple of thousand dollars on a vehicle (which doesn't include overhead like warehousing and staff, etc). Sometimes they'll upsell you to a higher end model because they have it there and are willing to take a cut on margins to move it out the door rather than sitting on the lot.
Dealers may like this model because it's fixed price - the dealer makes a known amount of profit and you won't haggle it down because the order says what you're going to pay. Plus it's closer to MSRP, and not "dealers may sell for less".
Most of the revenue from a dealership comes from service. Of course, an electric car like a Tesla needs far less service than a regular vehicle (Tesla recommends a yearly service in general, though it can go far longer).
Heck, when choosing a car these days, the service schedule is an important factor for me - some cars have you coming in almost monthly or every 3 months, others every year. Add in the general inconvenience (dealer or not)...
Or simply, the cost to do all the added research outweighs the cost of amenities like Wi-Fi. Or other factors intervene.
E.g., a hotel next to the convention center costs more, has paid Wi-Fi, etc., but being able to walk between the two in 5 minutes may be well worth the added cost than spending 30-45 minutes each way from a cheaper hotel (and the added cost of a car rental or taxi or whatever), etc. Or the ability to be right there and entertain guests until late in the morning at a nearby restaurant rather than hotel bar.
There are many factors in play - it's never as simple as "Let's just go to the holiday inn where it's free".
And if you have to drive a half hour out of the way to get to the hotels with free Wi-Fi, versus being right there in the middle of it all, well, perhaps spending the $5/night isn't such a bad idea.
It's a cultural thing I think - Americans in general hate using change. For some reason or other, they'll just collect coins and toss them in a jar and leave it at that rather than try to spend it.
For me, I always spend my change - I don't have jars and jars of coins that I'll "sell" back at coin counters for 90 cents on the dollar.
Could be a math-related thing - perhaps Americans think the only way to make change is exact, rather than try to make convenient change (e.g., if it comes out to $3.55, giving $3.60 gets rid of two quarters and a dime and gets back a nickle, which means you get rid of two coins), Or if it's $4.55, I can put down a $5 bill and a nickel and get back 50 cents.
But I guess for the majority of Americans, such math is so hard that coins are hard. I generally don't have many coins in my pocket because I keep using them...
Is it me, or does it have a bluish tinge now that makes it easier to tell that it's a different denomination?
Most countries already use different colored bills to help distinguish one denomination from another (and to aid in quickly determining how much cash on hand you have by a quick glance). Only in the US do I have to manually count out every bill to make sure a $5 didn't sneak in with the $1s and so on.
Of course, perhaps it's time to go beyond linen/cotton/paper based bills and move to plastic (polymer) based ones...
Not only that, but Samsung's newer devices worked around Apple's patents, showing that not only could Samsung avoid using the patented item, they did.
Samsung's assertion of standards-essential patents is seen as a bully tactic that has gotten Samsung, Motorola/Google and others in serious hot water in the EU, because there is no way to implement a cellphone without those patents. Apple can't work around it and have it work.
Hence why Obama had to overturn the Apple ban, but not the Samsung one. Samsung avoided Apple's patents on their later devices (SGS3 onwards), so it's obvious they could fix the problem themselves (software update!).
In addition, Samsung's patents would've affected all Apple's products. Which has a huge effect on the economy. The ban on Samsung's products? Well, they're older phones - tell me you don't seriously expect not selling the SGS2 and older phones to put a huge dent in phone sales. The newer phones on Samsung's roster like the S3, S4 and others, not affected at all.
Well, it's helpful to have the basic understanding of Big-O and what common algorithms have. It's also worthwhile to know when it really doesn't matter - using bubblesort is bad, but if you know you're only sorting 10 items ever, it'll work in a pinch.
Knowing this can have an effect on what algorithms you choose and even how you architect the system - perhaps what you're dealing with may end up causing quicksort to see its worst-case behavior far more often than necessary.
And you laugh, but I've seen commercial software falter because of poor choices of algorithms - where doing a 1 second capture is perfectly fine, but a 10 second capture causes it to bog down and be 100 times slower.
Or the time where adding a line to a text box causes it to get exponentially slower because adding a line causes a memory allocation and a memory copy.
Next, understand OS fundamentals and how the computer really works. Things like how virtual memory and page files operate, how the heap works and synchronization and even lock-free algorithms and memory barriers. It's difficult to learn on your own - it takes a lot of time to sit down and really understand how it works and why it works, and even then it can take 3-4 different methods of explanation until it clicks.
Concurrent programming isn't hard especially if concurrency was taken into account when the system was designed. Adding concurrency to a non-concurrent system though is a huge, difficult and trouble-prone process. Especially once bit-rot has set in and you find 10 different ways of getting at the variable.
Question is, how long do you want to rely on backups to save your ass when the primary problem is accidentally hitting a button? The backup's there as a just-in-case, but it's not something you really want to rely on happening just in case it happens to fail the one time.
Remember, there were a few emergency gensets set to supply power to the reactor cooling systems as well, but it seems a tsunami wiped out them out, and the ones it didn't kill, it killed the switchboards that selected the power source.
Except there was a collective yawn at Apple's announcement as well. It was so bad, the tech press was wondering who would buy one, and even Jobs muttered that if they didn't sell, he'd lower the price more.
It would be more akin to the iPod launch - a big collective yawn at "another MP3 player?".
Of course, the two things it did do was run all iOS apps, and Apple did a lot of developer seeding so day 1 there would've been plenty of iPad (or iPhone/iPad) apps.
Also didn't hurt that Apple didn't go the Microsoft route and try to adapt OS X for touchscreens (like Microsoft did for Windows - Pen Windows/Windows for Pens and other adaptations intended to get full blown Windows on tablets) because UI interactions between keyboard an mouse and touch are different (see Microsoft going the wrong way again with tablet UIs for desktops).
Of course, it's "low" cost ($500 killed many competitors attempts at releasing a tablet - everyone anticipated $1000 and the likes of Acer and Asus were going to release PC tablets for $800 or so), and long battery life (10 hours) helped, as well as trying to avoid being a complete PC replacement.
That's the scary part of Sony. Like a politician that lets the opposition kill themselves while remaining silent, what Sony has NOT said is very important. More important than what they do say, because humans have a tendency to believe that if the "other guy" doesn't say something, they much be opposed, when really it's a non-statement.
Who knows what Sony has for DRM policies? We don't know - all we know is we can pass discs around. But that's it. (None of which is mutually incompatible with always online or 24-hour checkins).
Likewise, who knows what Sony's policies are for advertising? Sure, the PS3 had a bit (though I oddly find the always-on ad ticker way more annoying than the Xbox ones...).
The only thing we know is Microsoft has a crappy marketing and communications team that can't spit out a well-formed sentence.
Sony? They're probably doing what smart governments do - muzzle anyone who talks to the public unless it's something really important and only then on-message.
Unfortunately, though, they're being matched.
Online gaming? Well I'll give you that. Maybe - it's only a matter of time before publishers see potential in it. Mods just the same.
Games on PC are starting to cost the same as their console cousins ($60), and DLC and other stuff are also costing money. Steam sales? Well, Sony and Microsoft run some fairly big sales as well.
Games on SteamOS won't be much cheaper - everyone will find a way to milk the users just the same
It probably also requires raising people to be more mindful of their own limitations. You see it in the /. crowd - they see themselves as "superior" to everyone else - and want everyone else to conform.
And yet the world expects them to conform to societal norms that have been around for a long time - yet are seen as encumbrances. Think of such things as proper dress (are you opposed to wearing a suit and tie as appropriate?), proper etiquette, and proper behavior.
Aaron unfortunately was pretty much a non-conformist, and when you're prosecuted, that's the last thing you want - to be painted by the prosecution as someone that's "bad to society" alongside gangsters and such that roam the streets at night.
Because the general public doesn't care and they do judge books by the cover - you act disrespectful towards them (even if they are to you) and they'll take note of such behavior even if it's unwarranted.
The "sweet old lady" stereotype is basically the goal to avoid character assassination.
And wasn't there someone else who acted all superior as well that ended up being found guilty? I heard he made a real killer of a filesystem.
Smartwatches suffer from the fact they were pretty much invented needs.
The need for a smartwatch came from the fact that smartphones have gotten ever bigger and bigger (or as Gizmodo put it, "dick-a-geddon" came a month early - when screen sizes exceeded average penis size), they became clumsier and clumsier to use.
Sure, a big screen is nice for videos and games - that's why people love consoles attached to their 70" HDTVs. And likewise, having a 5+" display is nice for mobile gaming and videos as well. However, it also impedes the ability to well, use it for anything other than a big-screen gameboy. Heck, the Note 3 implements a "Small Screen" mode where it reduces the screen size so youc an use it single-handedly.
So they invent smart watches because it's a huge (literally) PITA to keep digging out this tablet just to see a text or to see if you want to answer the call. In effect, because screen sizes are so big, they need more gadgets to deal with it.
So now you have this PITA "smartwatch" with a sub-day battery life (great, so you forget to charge it and you're hooped).
(Important note - these flagship Androids? They make up less than 10% of the Android market - Google claims 900M Android devices, and Samsung sold 60M SGS3s, the best selling Android handset ever (all models)).
Apple's probably working on one, and rumors have it that the 3-4 day battery life they're getting is inadequate. Hell, Qualcomm announced their smartwatch the same day as the Galaxy Gear and it not only has an always-on display, but lasts a few days.
Right now, Apple and everyone else has to answer the question - what is it good for, that isn't a result of a self-created problem?
Well, iOS is miniaturized OS X. In fact, I think when RIM first took apart an iPhone to see how it ticked, they were shocked when the OS took up 700MB of available storage. The typical phone OS of the days usually consumed under 30MB.
The UI model though is completely different between iOS and OS X, and for good reason. You don't want UI conventions from OS X making it into iOS because OS X is designed for a keyboard and mouse, while iOS is touchscreen based. Any UX designer knows interaction models are completely different for those interfaces.
Forcing app devs to use the different API gives them an opportunity to properly re-architect their UI for the touchscreen, rather than take the lazy route and recompile, leading to a potentially crappy experience.
See what happened when Microsoft tries to impose the same UI as desktop to tablet, or tablet to desktop. One interaction ends up being awkward.
Well, the original iPhone prototypes were known to be crap - Jobs having seen the early prototypes and nearly smashed them against the wall in annoyance at all the crashing and instability it had.
Jobs already knew it - he saw the crap it was during meetings, and decided to just go for it and announce a release date and all that. The FCC tied Apple's hands on when they could announce it - basically they were going to release the compliance information to the public soon, so Apple had to announce it sooner.
And these announcements take time to set up, so I guess he was hoping the software would be in a more stable state between the time of making all the arrangements and announcement day.
Exactly, that's the goal. You have to realize that Steam is the original curated App Store - sorry Apple, you are NOT the first.
With both the Windows App Store and Mac App Store, Steam has competition. And we know the MAS is starting to get some AAA titles as well as indie games. So Steam will have to compete - though it does have advantages like cross platform.
Enter Linux. There is no real App Store on Linux, at least one that that's universal across all distributions and such. Hence Valve's niche for Steam - if you can standardize Linux for developers, offer a universal DRM solution and basically layer over the difficulties of developing on Linux, it's possible to have a good chance to succeed.
And Steam has made moves to offer more than games - so general applications can be purchased and obtained via Steam
Steam offers a way to have stable binary APIs and library version management for Linux so binary closed-source applications and games can be sold for the platform. Add in auto-update capabilities and payment handling, and that should encourage success on Linux.
Linux folks have always wanted a way to get the big commercial apps on their platform - Steam offers a perfect distribution mechanism. Plus with name recognition means it'll probably be a successful app store.
You can do that actually - there are two ways to get an app onto an iPhone without going through Apple.
1) A developer certificate - lets you sign apps and install it on 100 devices.
2) An enterprise certificate - lets you sign apps and push it to unlimited numbers of devices that have been previously registered.
Both involve using a mobile provisioning file - the former is created by Apple, the latter by the enterprise as an Apple-derived certificate.
The latter is often used by many sites that help distribute iOS betas - the site holds an enterprise certificate they use to create mobileprovisioning certificates you load on your iOS device. the developer uploads their beta app, and the site distributes it (automatically or not) to the attached devices.
You can always post it on say, the US App Store as a US-only app for free. Then just have users sign up for a free US iTunes account (there are ways to get one that require no credit card or other payment vehicle). Then just download it there and install it on your iPhone. (The iPhone doesn't care which account the app came from as long as it's been authorized).