I use it once in a while to test compatibility with web applications I'm developing, but even then I find it frustrating to use. Perhaps it is just the windows version, but buttons never respond quickly, in general the browser just feels slow and heavy, and the fact that F5 doesn't refresh a page annoys the hell out of me (as I use it constantly in every other browser)...
It's not just the windows version, on OS X the Safari reload shortcut is [cmd]+R. The reason for this is that on many Apple computers the F keys are accessed via an [fn] modifier button on the keyboard since their default function os for Volume/Media player/Sreen-brightness control etc. You can change them to work as F keys by default in System Preferences. You aren't complaining about Safari being broken you are complaining about it not behaving like a windows App which is not a bug, it's just different. I suppose one could argue that on Windows, Safari should behave like other Windows browsers. But then again I see the fact that it doesn't as a feature rather than a shortcoming. For me the windows Safari version gives me a Mac browser on that OS which does not force me to suffer the same annoyances as you are complaining about (unfamiliar shortcuts) whenever I am forced to abandon OS X for Windows.
...On top of that Safari renders everything in tables, and if you save a rendered snapshot of the page you get this one line table vomit which makes it impossible to figure out what exactly is going wrong. Chrome of course gives the same output, but at least the default developer tools in Chromium are decent. My last WTF point about Safari is something that Apple is obviously handling differently for their own products: JavaScript mouse events, including drags - Safari will immediately reclaim the mouse and not let you implement a JavaScript drag easily unless you use their 800 line device detection library script and then set up a CSS3 framework of all sorts of bizzare obviously not standard garbage. This is what you see if you are able to view the HTML5+CSS3 demos on the Apple web page. Sure it looks good and perhaps even makes sense on an Apple device - but the whole thing could be done in JavaScript even without HTML5 (we're doing it!) and 3D stuff should be handled in Canvas; NOT Apple brand "it's a standard because we say it is" CSS3. Just look at the source to those demos, we achieved similar functionality in less than a quarter of the code using only actual standards and it even works on IE7+ (but the drag does not work on Apple devices, and we have no intention of adding hundreds of lines of code to allow it to).
One could sing a song like that about practically every browser out there. Take for example the entire Microsoft IE series... but never mind that, thanks for reminding me why I hate developing web-applications.
I see what you did there. You made an unlikely assumption about how this patent would be used and then you turned it into an advertisement for open source. Well done. I hate Apple and Steve Jobs (smug bastard) vehemently but even I recognized that to be a highly contrived scenario and illogical statement.
I don't see how you're able to say that it's "unlikely" and "highly contrived", considering there's a mockup of an osx-ish desktop in the article. The other portion you quoted about that it "could" be used for public kiosks, etc, doesn't say it *won't* be used for anything else. Especially when further in the article it specifically notes that it applies to anything with a UI, like set top boxes, smart phones, TV's, and others. Those aren't really public kiosk devices.
People with a major Apple bashing fetish can go on constructing wild conspiracy theories based on this patent all they want but I'm not particularly worried. Applying for a patent is one thing, using it is quite another. If Apple starts forcing people who paid anywhere from $699 (entry level MacMini) to $3.299 (top of the line 8-core Mac Pro) to watch iAds on their desktop OS, Apple will start losing business really quickly. They'd be shooting them selves in the foot much, much worse than Microsoft did with Windows Vista, Windows ME and Clippy combined. I know I'd switch my MacBook to Linux faster than you can say "Ubuntu".
What's next... having to sit through an advertisement on my smartphone to make a call? Or is that too unlikely and contrived, given that the article mentions this can be used on smartphones, with no further qualification?
A version of that idea was actually tried by a company in Denmark years and years ago. IIRC you got a free GSM service but you had to put up with ads when you made calls. It didn't work, I am willing to bet it also failed miserably wherever else it was tried and it will fail miserably if anybody ever tries that idiotic idea again.
Mean earth surface per inhabitant: 0,074 Km^2/habitant, or, to give it in "real international standards units", about 13,7 football fields.
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that a single man can alter 13,7 football fields within his lifetime through farming, mining, driving, building, etc.?
As opposed to the sun which has a surface area of 6088000000000 Km^2 ?
That's 887 Km^2/habitant, or 164,377 of your "real international standards units" (football fields).
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that the variations in radiation from a superheated ball of gas at 5505C (9941F) might, just possibly, have some bearing on the situation ?
The sun may very well may have a bearing on the situation but you are not going to convince anybody that digging and pumping up billions of years worth of sequestered carbon over the last 60-70 years and releasing it into the atmosphere with wild abandon had no effect at all. But let's put the climate debate aside for a moment. He was talking pretty generally about the way that humans are affecting their environment. Facts like a drop in the wold tiger population from 100.000 at the beginning of the century to a mere 3000 today can hardly be blamed on the sun, there are huge areas of dead ocean where nothing survives in any numbers you can make a profit from catching and selling, the list goes on... Changes like that are undeniably due to human excesses, mismanagement, corruption, greed and very little else.
Dude, If I had a buck for every time Microsoft _HAS_ pulled something like this I'd have a very tidy sum of money. Apply the same to the fortune 500 list and I'd be $tinking rich.
Which is why it won't happen. Here's how I predict things going down:
Steve strolls out, makes some remarks about huge sales of the iPhone 4.
"Bound to be a few issues reported when you have such a large share of the market", etc, etc.
Some tap dancing about real-world performance, estimated signal strength, "every cell phone does it", and an assortment of contemptuous remarks or outright lies, much like the explanation of why apps aren't approved at the iPhone 4 reveal event.
White model ship date announced, bumper cases quietly go on sale for $20 with no announcement, and Steve wraps up with some feel-good piece hoping to bury the issue(s).
Apple's board of directors make a few phone calls to Steve's health care providers to see if he's up to date on payments for that liver he bought, hoping not to have their front man degrade into the next Ken Kutaragi.
Don't buy the phone if this bothers you. That's the opt-out.
You can either go here: https://oo.apple.com/ on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and op out. The support page is typically vague and talked about disabling cookies "and other technologies in mobile advertising services" which can cover just about anything. Mind you the opt-out page showed an error (HAHA!) when I tried it with my iPhone 3GS so I'll stick with the old-fashioned solution which is to turn off location services completely. IMHO location services soak up battery life and they aren't so useful that I have to keep them switched on all the time. As far as I'm concerned the only thing location services are useful for is Google maps and that little compass app. When I need to use either I use the master switch to activate location services and de-activate them when I'm done. I could care less if my photos are geo-tagged or whether my "tweets" or FaceBook posts announce to the world where the #$#%$& I posted from. And that's assuming somebody ever manages to convince me to use Twitter or FaceBook which is highly unlikely. Even if you keep location services switched on, in iOS 4 you can now manage in detail which apps get to access them although there is presumably no way to cut off Apples tracking service.
I work entirely on a laptop, when I need more space well that's what virtual desktops are for. I find working without a mouse not hampering in the least.
Same here, ever since I got my aluminum MacBook I use the trackpad way more than the mouse. The trackpads on Macs and PCs used to be way to small to be useful except in a bind. Until the new MBs and MBPs came along the navigation knob on IBM laptop keyboards was about the only laptop pointing device other than a wireless mouse that beat the crap out of the stamp sized trackpads one still gets on many laptops today. With increased trackpad size on some newer machines and especially gesture suppor the trackpad IMHO beats the mouse for usability. The same goes for finger gesturing vs. styluses on touchscreen phones.
My desktop has a far bigger screen than any mobile device would be comfortable with carrying. Two screens some of the time. A full sized keyboard and mouse, which is infinitely more useful than anything other than perhaps touchscreen, and even then beats it in some applications. It's far more powerful per dollar spent than any mobile device from the same year could be, a trend that is still true. It runs cooler, as it can have a near unlimited amount of fans.
It all boils down to what you prefer. A mobile desktop replacement setup doesn't have to be a heavy and cumbersome 17" or 19" laptop. Mind you I'll still cede you your point about desktops having bigger screens, but two screens not being possible on a mobile setup?? I've got three of them... I bought a 13.3" macbook which I cram into the smallest laptop backpack I could find along with a USB driven touch screen monitor, a mouse and I still have enough space in my bag to cram a bluetooth numpad in there if I wanted to. I also have a 19" monitor that folds into a compact package. It fits nicely into an old laptop bag and I use it at semi-permanent work stations where I can't beg or borrow a decent monitor since I work in several different locations these days. I'm afraid I don't share your fetish for cooling fans, one of the nice points of the MacBook and many other small laptops is that they hardly ever fire up the fan. I can't claim that I don't miss the extra screen real estate I used to have with full blown desktops but on the other had this setup is infinitely more portable which is what I want. I can expand my MacBook into a tolerable desktop replacement practically anywhere but I can also dump one or both monitors and all of the rest of the paraphernalia if I don't feel like dragging it around and make do with virtual desktops.
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc 2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6. 3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
That list also gives one a glimpse of what is wrong with Windows Mobile in general. It is clunky, unintuitive and fragmented. It seems I can't pick up two phones purportedly running the same version of the same Windows Mobile OS and use the same procedure to configure half the things I want to. Some time ago I configured a HTC S620 smartphone to work over a a VPN connection. It took quite a while to figure out the clunky UI and the badly documented process needed to accomplish this (Mostly HTC's fault for writing a crappy manual) but it worked fine in the end. Recently the thing broke down and I was provided with another type of HTC smartphone of the same vintage running the same OS version but the configuration process was totally different. Although it usually ends up working OK if you have the patience to do battle with the UI and read the (often) crappy user manual, I passionately hate setting up and configuring Windows Mobile.
Given the relative wealth and GDP of East and West, I'd say it worked out pretty well for the population at large. But be assured: the US spent a lot of money making sure that the Nazis were defeated, and it was going to get its payback.
"Payback" ??? Ever heard of the Marshall Plan? The USA spent just as much rebuilding Europe as it did defeating the Nazis. US reward for the Marshall aid, or "payback" as you call it was very long term. It came in the form of profits from booming post war trade with a reconstructed Europe in the 50's and 60's, not from traditional extortion and pillaging of the defeated nation and the US continues benefitting from the Marshall Plan to this day. It was the British the French and the Soviets who went around carting off everything of value in Germany including entire factories and shipyards. Ironically, the West Germans least rebuilt them with cutting edge contemporary technology using Marshall aid money supplied by the US. The East Germans, however, spent the next 40 years paying war reparations to the Soviets in one form or another which to some extent explains the utter dilapidation of the East of Germany, a fact that has weighed down the German Economy ever since the reunification of Germany. The Marshall Plan was an important foundation for the peace in we have had in Europe since 1945. It just comes to show that when they don't make the mistake of electing complete nitwits to into the White House and Congress Americans can be pretty sensible people. It is a pity that the days of leaders such as F.D Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, who for all their flaws can still be considered to have been great statesmen, seem to be over. They displayed considerably more intelligence and good sense in handling the aftermath of WWII than the current crop of muppets has done today and by that I particularly mean GWB in Iraq. The aftermath of the Iraq war could have been considerably less painful if GWB had heeded the lessons taught by his predecessors in post WWII Europe.
Some of us Americans don't either... though we seemed to be in a minority.
I recently watched a German news report on Apple and it's business model entitled "Steve Jobs - the Digital Dictator?". See here (Sorry it's in German and without subtitles). They interviewed a number of people and most of them mentioned that developing/publishing for the Apple platforms (iPod/iPhone/iPad) is a strange experience for Europeans because you have to conform to the "puritanical attitudes" some Americans have to things like nudity and such. One of the people interviewed commented that there is a running joke among developers that if you want to develop or publish for the Apple "i" devices you better go for an "Iranian version" of your product. If it will pass muster with the Iranian Morality Police you stand a chance of making it through the AppStore approval process.
How is their a difference? if Mac did not properly support IPv6 then it is their problem.
I'm not sure quite what he meant by "properly supported in the wild" but it sounded like he was trying to point out that sometimes you do get bugs because you implement things correctly but somebody else screwed up their implementation. A while back I had a problem connecting Linux and OS X based VPN daemons to some Microsoft VPN servers. At first it seemed obvious that this was Apple screwing up. After some considerable wiresharking and digging in Apple's source code I found out that Microsoft's VPN server sends malformed protocol messages which the Linux/OS X based counterparts try to parse according to the letter of the specification and exit with an error when they run into problems. Not that I'm trying to absolve Apple of all blame they can fuck up like everybody else and do so regularly, however that doesn't change the fact that it's entirely possible to render your software unusable by implementing it according to specifications. In a situation like that you can either change your software to take the buggy implementation by <insert name of manufacturer> into account or stick to your guns and piss off your users.
What trully is inadequate is thinking that "intellectual" entities can be "property"... That's the source of all problems... Period.
Perhaps it is equally inadequate to think that "land" (or for that matter anything at all) can be "property". Early man certainly had little notion of the concept. Unfortunately "property" and the concept of "ownership" in general is one of the things that makes the modern civilization with it's "free market economy" work. If somebody is smart and talented enough to come up with some idea why shouldn't that idea/IP be a "tradable commodity", "property" like most everything else in a "free market economy" ?? Why should you get to enjoy that IP without compensating the inventor who probably poured a lot of his money into coming up with his idea and perfecting it? Claiming to own IP is no more or less stupid than claiming to own pretty much anything else.
See those rocks? Been standing there for 600 million years. Still be there when you and I are gone. So arguing over who owns them is like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they live on.
Great - does this mean we'll have to make all our calls using RPN? 1234 555 212 1+ DIAL I know it's supposed to be more logical, but it just seems so confusing...
I had a HP 48GX calculators with RPN for years when it broke down I bought a HP 50G and just assumed it had RPN. For a while after I fired it up for the first time I was a afraid I had wasted my money until I figured out that you can change the thing from the default infix mode to RPN. I've gotten so used to RPN that I can hardly use infix calculators any more.
* The battery life was woeful when you're actually using it as intended. I was lucky to get a day out of the thing and I used it as an ereader for about an hour during my daily commute and a phone casually.
That's true but then the same goes for many smart-phones out there (including HTC).
* It's not compatible (enough) with earlier iPod connectors/interfaces so my iPod capable car stereo won't work with it. A lot of other iPod capable stuff either failed or whinged at me. The phone quite often whinged too. Here's news Apple - if you use a "standard" connector on the thing then support it; don't change the damn internals and then tell the phone to whinge the thing on the other end is too old.
Get a firmware update for your car stereo. Failing that get a better quality stereo.
* It's locked down - you can only buy applications that Apple approve. If you jail break it you lose warranty, and on 3GS models the ability to reboot the fucking thing.
Tough luck. If you don't like what it says in the EULA don't use the product and for god's sake top whining.
* There is no pr0n (well there is, but Jobs is in denial that Safari can be used to access pr0n).
So? You can get your porn can't you?
* It crashed and froze up more often than not.
Had an iPhone's and iPod touch devices for years, same for many of my friends. That is not a common occurrence in my experience.
* I couldn't save anything in it that Apple doesn't want me to. That includes the videos/photos of my son that came attached to a series of MMS. They were forever trapped in the phone and I had to ask the sender to email me instead.
That pisses me off too.
* I can't send files via email/MMS that Apple doesn't want me to. I can't send that hillarious video that I just received to anyone else because it _might_ fuck over some record company somewhere.
Eh? Apple is censoring your email?
* I was stuck using iTunes to sync the address book and calendar. What kind of shit is that? Some people actually don't want to use iTunes. Apple won't expose those things in a standard way so I can't just use SyncML or something similar.
* The app store is full up with absolute garbage, low quality apps. There's an app for everything where "app" is defined as half-arsed P.O.S and "everything" is defined as {lim x->0 (1/x)}. Finding good quality software was difficult. A lot of the apps blatantly lie about their capability and you don't find out until you've paid for them.
That's true enough, the iTunes App-store interface sucks ass.
* Apple is reportedly known to stiff app developers.
That's true.
* Glass screen is uber-fragile; I know of several people who have managed to break them even when being mostly careful. It's such a common occurrence that a lot of insurance policies won't cover it anymore.
So get a leather or rubber cover, mine survived a trip down a flight of concrete stairs without breaking the glass.
* Bluetooth is a joke. Can't even transfer files with it. Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS.
Bluetooth has always been a joke. I don't think I've ever had a phone where that crap functioned completely the way it was supposed to.
* Apple seem to pander to the big telcos about ripping out features. For example it wouldn't let me download large (>5M) files over my data plan, even though I paid for a certain amount of data and wanted to use it as _I_ saw fit, not Apple. What if I need a 15M file right now this very instant and I'm now
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision
Right you are. I've had an iPod Touch, an iPhone and a whole string of other mobile phones none of whom supported Adobe Flash. As far as I am concerned the absence of Flash is a feature, not a shortcoming.
It's not a complaint that iPhone is devilishly difficult to program. It is not. The complaint is that it's devilishly difficult to write an iPhone/desktop cross-platform compatible app, which should have been easy if the device actually was cross-platform compatible.
Anybody expecting it to be easy to take an app which was written for a desktop system and porting it to a mobile system is going to unpleasantly surprised. Porting is always a bitch and if the platform you want to port to is less capable than the one you originally wrote the app for you'll have allot of work ahead of you. Even in CP languages like Java you'll have problems since the Java implementations for mobile platforms aren't as capable as their desktop counterpart and there are always issues with implementations for different mobile platforms. Mobile development is also subject to totally different laws than desktop GUI app development often is. There are limited resources which leads to more limited APIs which means either using the least common denominator or getting ready for an awful lot of #ifdeffy. If you really want to write an app for both desktop and mobile systems you have to write it with that in mind from the very beginning. This means manual memory management, using only the lowest common denominator in terms of APIs, programming languages, etc... and you better get your MVC separation straight from the very beginning as well since you are going to have to write separate UI's for each platform. Mobile UIs tend to be fundamentally different in concept from desktop UIs. You'll also want to write as much of your app as possible in platform independent modules that can be 'plugged into' your apps as required.
This eruption can go on for months, even years. To add insult to injury eruptions in Ejafjallajökull have historically been foreplay for eruptions in Mt. Katla which is a 100 square kilometer caldera that lies under nearby Mýrdalsjökull glacier. That eruption will be orders of magnitude bigger than this one. When Katla blows, and there is a good chance she will do so within the next two or three years or so if history is to be trusted, you can pretty much kiss air-traffic over much of Europe, or North America goodbye. Whose turn it is to not fly for a week or so at a time will depend on the wind direction and trust me, the economic damage of only being able to fly every other week for six months to a year is more than a mere "inconvenience".
The whole utopia of legalized drugs that people imagine, doesn't exist
Ever heard of Portugal? I assure you it exists and it has yet to fall into a nightmare of addiction and ruined lives yet. Just reduced addiction, reduced crime, and reduced drug related health problems.
Based on what I've read, Portugal has not made it legal to grow, manufacture, transport, sell, own or use any drugs. From Cato institute:
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
You are putting words in his mouth. He never explicitly stated that Portugal had become a junky heaven where it is legal to grow, manufacture, transport, sell, own or use any drugs. What is your point anyway? Perhaps you guys are you trying to tell us that the US American idea of filling your jails with small time users serving draconian sentences for minor drug offenses is some how better than what the Portuguese did? By the sound of that report the Portuguese simply concluded that having police officers chasing after small time drug users was a waste of time and that the Portuguese state was better off spending it's resources openly treating drug users and limiting addiction. That Cato report concluded that after the decriminalization of drug possession in favor of offering treatment, illegal drug use among teens declined, the rate of HIV infections declined and the number of people seeking treatment for addiction doubled since they didn't have to fear prosecution any more. The executive summary ends with the words:
The data shows that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.
He didn't say that there were moral wars, he suggested that sometimes there can be a moral dimension to the decision to go to war. I could give you the default example but I don't want to Godwin this thread.
So there will only be 11 selections on the browser choice menu.
I can still pick Opera.
And those are all written in C# and are therefore ready to deploy on Windows Phone 7 Series devices at a moment's notice are they?
Methinks Firefox is only the first casualty of this decision. Portability is a pretty important thing in Mobile App development. Fennec, for example, is being developed for several Mobile OS platforms simultaneously. Moving to C# forces a lot of software companies to re implement a C# version of their apps from scratch if they want to market them on Windows Mobile devices.
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I use it once in a while to test compatibility with web applications I'm developing, but even then I find it frustrating to use. Perhaps it is just the windows version, but buttons never respond quickly, in general the browser just feels slow and heavy, and the fact that F5 doesn't refresh a page annoys the hell out of me (as I use it constantly in every other browser)...
It's not just the windows version, on OS X the Safari reload shortcut is [cmd]+R. The reason for this is that on many Apple computers the F keys are accessed via an [fn] modifier button on the keyboard since their default function os for Volume/Media player/Sreen-brightness control etc. You can change them to work as F keys by default in System Preferences. You aren't complaining about Safari being broken you are complaining about it not behaving like a windows App which is not a bug, it's just different. I suppose one could argue that on Windows, Safari should behave like other Windows browsers. But then again I see the fact that it doesn't as a feature rather than a shortcoming. For me the windows Safari version gives me a Mac browser on that OS which does not force me to suffer the same annoyances as you are complaining about (unfamiliar shortcuts) whenever I am forced to abandon OS X for Windows.
...On top of that Safari renders everything in tables, and if you save a rendered snapshot of the page you get this one line table vomit which makes it impossible to figure out what exactly is going wrong. Chrome of course gives the same output, but at least the default developer tools in Chromium are decent. My last WTF point about Safari is something that Apple is obviously handling differently for their own products: JavaScript mouse events, including drags - Safari will immediately reclaim the mouse and not let you implement a JavaScript drag easily unless you use their 800 line device detection library script and then set up a CSS3 framework of all sorts of bizzare obviously not standard garbage. This is what you see if you are able to view the HTML5+CSS3 demos on the Apple web page. Sure it looks good and perhaps even makes sense on an Apple device - but the whole thing could be done in JavaScript even without HTML5 (we're doing it!) and 3D stuff should be handled in Canvas; NOT Apple brand "it's a standard because we say it is" CSS3. Just look at the source to those demos, we achieved similar functionality in less than a quarter of the code using only actual standards and it even works on IE7+ (but the drag does not work on Apple devices, and we have no intention of adding hundreds of lines of code to allow it to).
One could sing a song like that about practically every browser out there. Take for example the entire Microsoft IE series... but never mind that, thanks for reminding me why I hate developing web-applications.
I see what you did there. You made an unlikely assumption about how this patent would be used and then you turned it into an advertisement for open source. Well done. I hate Apple and Steve Jobs (smug bastard) vehemently but even I recognized that to be a highly contrived scenario and illogical statement.
I don't see how you're able to say that it's "unlikely" and "highly contrived", considering there's a mockup of an osx-ish desktop in the article. The other portion you quoted about that it "could" be used for public kiosks, etc, doesn't say it *won't* be used for anything else. Especially when further in the article it specifically notes that it applies to anything with a UI, like set top boxes, smart phones, TV's, and others. Those aren't really public kiosk devices.
People with a major Apple bashing fetish can go on constructing wild conspiracy theories based on this patent all they want but I'm not particularly worried. Applying for a patent is one thing, using it is quite another. If Apple starts forcing people who paid anywhere from $699 (entry level MacMini) to $3.299 (top of the line 8-core Mac Pro) to watch iAds on their desktop OS, Apple will start losing business really quickly. They'd be shooting them selves in the foot much, much worse than Microsoft did with Windows Vista, Windows ME and Clippy combined. I know I'd switch my MacBook to Linux faster than you can say "Ubuntu".
What's next... having to sit through an advertisement on my smartphone to make a call? Or is that too unlikely and contrived, given that the article mentions this can be used on smartphones, with no further qualification?
A version of that idea was actually tried by a company in Denmark years and years ago. IIRC you got a free GSM service but you had to put up with ads when you made calls. It didn't work, I am willing to bet it also failed miserably wherever else it was tried and it will fail miserably if anybody ever tries that idiotic idea again.
"It takes quite a bit of arrogance to believe that humanity can change the Earth's climate that much, that fast."
Earth's surface: 510,072,000 Km^2
Earth's population: 6,856,832,000
Mean earth surface per inhabitant: 0,074 Km^2/habitant, or, to give it in "real international standards units", about 13,7 football fields.
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that a single man can alter 13,7 football fields within his lifetime through farming, mining, driving, building, etc.?
As opposed to the sun which has a surface area of 6088000000000 Km^2 ?
That's 887 Km^2/habitant, or 164,377 of your "real international standards units" (football fields).
Do you really think it takes too much arrogance to imagine that the variations in radiation from a superheated ball of gas at 5505C (9941F) might, just possibly, have some bearing on the situation ?
The sun may very well may have a bearing on the situation but you are not going to convince anybody that digging and pumping up billions of years worth of sequestered carbon over the last 60-70 years and releasing it into the atmosphere with wild abandon had no effect at all. But let's put the climate debate aside for a moment. He was talking pretty generally about the way that humans are affecting their environment. Facts like a drop in the wold tiger population from 100.000 at the beginning of the century to a mere 3000 today can hardly be blamed on the sun, there are huge areas of dead ocean where nothing survives in any numbers you can make a profit from catching and selling, the list goes on... Changes like that are undeniably due to human excesses, mismanagement, corruption, greed and very little else.
What if Microsoft had pulled a stunt like this?
Dude, If I had a buck for every time Microsoft _HAS_ pulled something like this I'd have a very tidy sum of money. Apply the same to the fortune 500 list and I'd be $tinking rich.
Which is why it won't happen. Here's how I predict things going down:
I like the Microsoft process:
Simple and direct.
Don't buy the phone if this bothers you. That's the opt-out.
You can either go here: https://oo.apple.com/ on your iPhone, iPod or iPad and op out. The support page is typically vague and talked about disabling cookies "and other technologies in mobile advertising services" which can cover just about anything. Mind you the opt-out page showed an error (HAHA!) when I tried it with my iPhone 3GS so I'll stick with the old-fashioned solution which is to turn off location services completely. IMHO location services soak up battery life and they aren't so useful that I have to keep them switched on all the time. As far as I'm concerned the only thing location services are useful for is Google maps and that little compass app. When I need to use either I use the master switch to activate location services and de-activate them when I'm done. I could care less if my photos are geo-tagged or whether my "tweets" or FaceBook posts announce to the world where the #$#%$& I posted from. And that's assuming somebody ever manages to convince me to use Twitter or FaceBook which is highly unlikely. Even if you keep location services switched on, in iOS 4 you can now manage in detail which apps get to access them although there is presumably no way to cut off Apples tracking service.
I work entirely on a laptop, when I need more space well that's what virtual desktops are for. I find working without a mouse not hampering in the least.
Same here, ever since I got my aluminum MacBook I use the trackpad way more than the mouse. The trackpads on Macs and PCs used to be way to small to be useful except in a bind. Until the new MBs and MBPs came along the navigation knob on IBM laptop keyboards was about the only laptop pointing device other than a wireless mouse that beat the crap out of the stamp sized trackpads one still gets on many laptops today. With increased trackpad size on some newer machines and especially gesture suppor the trackpad IMHO beats the mouse for usability. The same goes for finger gesturing vs. styluses on touchscreen phones.
My desktop has a far bigger screen than any mobile device would be comfortable with carrying. Two screens some of the time. A full sized keyboard and mouse, which is infinitely more useful than anything other than perhaps touchscreen, and even then beats it in some applications. It's far more powerful per dollar spent than any mobile device from the same year could be, a trend that is still true. It runs cooler, as it can have a near unlimited amount of fans.
It all boils down to what you prefer. A mobile desktop replacement setup doesn't have to be a heavy and cumbersome 17" or 19" laptop. Mind you I'll still cede you your point about desktops having bigger screens, but two screens not being possible on a mobile setup?? I've got three of them... I bought a 13.3" macbook which I cram into the smallest laptop backpack I could find along with a USB driven touch screen monitor, a mouse and I still have enough space in my bag to cram a bluetooth numpad in there if I wanted to. I also have a 19" monitor that folds into a compact package. It fits nicely into an old laptop bag and I use it at semi-permanent work stations where I can't beg or borrow a decent monitor since I work in several different locations these days. I'm afraid I don't share your fetish for cooling fans, one of the nice points of the MacBook and many other small laptops is that they hardly ever fire up the fan. I can't claim that I don't miss the extra screen real estate I used to have with full blown desktops but on the other had this setup is infinitely more portable which is what I want. I can expand my MacBook into a tolerable desktop replacement practically anywhere but I can also dump one or both monitors and all of the rest of the paraphernalia if I don't feel like dragging it around and make do with virtual desktops.
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
That list also gives one a glimpse of what is wrong with Windows Mobile in general. It is clunky, unintuitive and fragmented. It seems I can't pick up two phones purportedly running the same version of the same Windows Mobile OS and use the same procedure to configure half the things I want to. Some time ago I configured a HTC S620 smartphone to work over a a VPN connection. It took quite a while to figure out the clunky UI and the badly documented process needed to accomplish this (Mostly HTC's fault for writing a crappy manual) but it worked fine in the end. Recently the thing broke down and I was provided with another type of HTC smartphone of the same vintage running the same OS version but the configuration process was totally different. Although it usually ends up working OK if you have the patience to do battle with the UI and read the (often) crappy user manual, I passionately hate setting up and configuring Windows Mobile.
Given the relative wealth and GDP of East and West, I'd say it worked out pretty well for the population at large. But be assured: the US spent a lot of money making sure that the Nazis were defeated, and it was going to get its payback.
"Payback" ??? Ever heard of the Marshall Plan? The USA spent just as much rebuilding Europe as it did defeating the Nazis. US reward for the Marshall aid, or "payback" as you call it was very long term. It came in the form of profits from booming post war trade with a reconstructed Europe in the 50's and 60's, not from traditional extortion and pillaging of the defeated nation and the US continues benefitting from the Marshall Plan to this day. It was the British the French and the Soviets who went around carting off everything of value in Germany including entire factories and shipyards. Ironically, the West Germans least rebuilt them with cutting edge contemporary technology using Marshall aid money supplied by the US. The East Germans, however, spent the next 40 years paying war reparations to the Soviets in one form or another which to some extent explains the utter dilapidation of the East of Germany, a fact that has weighed down the German Economy ever since the reunification of Germany. The Marshall Plan was an important foundation for the peace in we have had in Europe since 1945. It just comes to show that when they don't make the mistake of electing complete nitwits to into the White House and Congress Americans can be pretty sensible people. It is a pity that the days of leaders such as F.D Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, who for all their flaws can still be considered to have been great statesmen, seem to be over. They displayed considerably more intelligence and good sense in handling the aftermath of WWII than the current crop of muppets has done today and by that I particularly mean GWB in Iraq. The aftermath of the Iraq war could have been considerably less painful if GWB had heeded the lessons taught by his predecessors in post WWII Europe.
Some of us Americans don't either... though we seemed to be in a minority.
I recently watched a German news report on Apple and it's business model entitled "Steve Jobs - the Digital Dictator?". See here (Sorry it's in German and without subtitles). They interviewed a number of people and most of them mentioned that developing/publishing for the Apple platforms (iPod/iPhone/iPad) is a strange experience for Europeans because you have to conform to the "puritanical attitudes" some Americans have to things like nudity and such. One of the people interviewed commented that there is a running joke among developers that if you want to develop or publish for the Apple "i" devices you better go for an "Iranian version" of your product. If it will pass muster with the Iranian Morality Police you stand a chance of making it through the AppStore approval process.
At least now they won't have to worry about lubricating the wheel.
Yeah, and the tap-water has nice "money" flavor.
The location isn't spelled "Hafnarfjorour", it's "Hafnarfjörður".
Sheesh! How can you get a simple thing so wrong?
Yes it is! I live in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales. For some strange reason visitors keep spelling the name wrong.... wierd isn't it?
How is their a difference? if Mac did not properly support IPv6 then it is their problem.
I'm not sure quite what he meant by "properly supported in the wild" but it sounded like he was trying to point out that sometimes you do get bugs because you implement things correctly but somebody else screwed up their implementation. A while back I had a problem connecting Linux and OS X based VPN daemons to some Microsoft VPN servers. At first it seemed obvious that this was Apple screwing up. After some considerable wiresharking and digging in Apple's source code I found out that Microsoft's VPN server sends malformed protocol messages which the Linux/OS X based counterparts try to parse according to the letter of the specification and exit with an error when they run into problems. Not that I'm trying to absolve Apple of all blame they can fuck up like everybody else and do so regularly, however that doesn't change the fact that it's entirely possible to render your software unusable by implementing it according to specifications. In a situation like that you can either change your software to take the buggy implementation by <insert name of manufacturer> into account or stick to your guns and piss off your users.
I, for one, do not understand why Apple computers only understand numbers ending in .99...
It's a math fixation... row one, column two. Mind you I don't get it either ln(2*pi) is much more challenging.
inadequate intellectual property laws
What trully is inadequate is thinking that "intellectual" entities can be "property"... That's the source of all problems... Period.
Perhaps it is equally inadequate to think that "land" (or for that matter anything at all) can be "property". Early man certainly had little notion of the concept. Unfortunately "property" and the concept of "ownership" in general is one of the things that makes the modern civilization with it's "free market economy" work. If somebody is smart and talented enough to come up with some idea why shouldn't that idea/IP be a "tradable commodity", "property" like most everything else in a "free market economy" ?? Why should you get to enjoy that IP without compensating the inventor who probably poured a lot of his money into coming up with his idea and perfecting it? Claiming to own IP is no more or less stupid than claiming to own pretty much anything else.
See those rocks? Been standing there for 600 million years. Still be there when you and I are gone. So arguing over who owns them is like two fleas arguing over who owns the dog they live on.
-- Crocodile Dundee
Great - does this mean we'll have to make all our calls using RPN?
1234 555 212 1+ DIAL
I know it's supposed to be more logical, but it just seems so confusing...
I had a HP 48GX calculators with RPN for years when it broke down I bought a HP 50G and just assumed it had RPN. For a while after I fired it up for the first time I was a afraid I had wasted my money until I figured out that you can change the thing from the default infix mode to RPN. I've gotten so used to RPN that I can hardly use infix calculators any more.
* The battery life was woeful when you're actually using it as intended. I was lucky to get a day out of the thing and I used it as an ereader for about an hour during my daily commute and a phone casually.
That's true but then the same goes for many smart-phones out there (including HTC).
* It's not compatible (enough) with earlier iPod connectors/interfaces so my iPod capable car stereo won't work with it. A lot of other iPod capable stuff either failed or whinged at me. The phone quite often whinged too. Here's news Apple - if you use a "standard" connector on the thing then support it; don't change the damn internals and then tell the phone to whinge the thing on the other end is too old.
Get a firmware update for your car stereo. Failing that get a better quality stereo.
* It's locked down - you can only buy applications that Apple approve. If you jail break it you lose warranty, and on 3GS models the ability to reboot the fucking thing.
Tough luck. If you don't like what it says in the EULA don't use the product and for god's sake top whining.
* There is no pr0n (well there is, but Jobs is in denial that Safari can be used to access pr0n).
So? You can get your porn can't you?
* It crashed and froze up more often than not.
Had an iPhone's and iPod touch devices for years, same for many of my friends. That is not a common occurrence in my experience.
* I couldn't save anything in it that Apple doesn't want me to. That includes the videos/photos of my son that came attached to a series of MMS. They were forever trapped in the phone and I had to ask the sender to email me instead.
That pisses me off too.
* I can't send files via email/MMS that Apple doesn't want me to. I can't send that hillarious video that I just received to anyone else because it _might_ fuck over some record company somewhere.
Eh? Apple is censoring your email?
* I was stuck using iTunes to sync the address book and calendar. What kind of shit is that? Some people actually don't want to use iTunes. Apple won't expose those things in a standard way so I can't just use SyncML or something similar.
www.me.com
* The app store is full up with absolute garbage, low quality apps. There's an app for everything where "app" is defined as half-arsed P.O.S and "everything" is defined as {lim x->0 (1/x)}. Finding good quality software was difficult. A lot of the apps blatantly lie about their capability and you don't find out until you've paid for them.
That's true enough, the iTunes App-store interface sucks ass.
* Apple is reportedly known to stiff app developers.
That's true.
* Glass screen is uber-fragile; I know of several people who have managed to break them even when being mostly careful. It's such a common occurrence that a lot of insurance policies won't cover it anymore.
So get a leather or rubber cover, mine survived a trip down a flight of concrete stairs without breaking the glass.
* Bluetooth is a joke. Can't even transfer files with it. Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS.
Bluetooth has always been a joke. I don't think I've ever had a phone where that crap functioned completely the way it was supposed to.
* Apple seem to pander to the big telcos about ripping out features. For example it wouldn't let me download large (>5M) files over my data plan, even though I paid for a certain amount of data and wanted to use it as _I_ saw fit, not Apple. What if I need a 15M file right now this very instant and I'm now
Tip to moderators. This is a joke. Not sure why this is modded insightful.
From the /. FAQ: Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision
Right you are. I've had an iPod Touch, an iPhone and a whole string of other mobile phones none of whom supported Adobe Flash. As far as I am concerned the absence of Flash is a feature, not a shortcoming.
It's not a complaint that iPhone is devilishly difficult to program. It is not. The complaint is that it's devilishly difficult to write an iPhone/desktop cross-platform compatible app, which should have been easy if the device actually was cross-platform compatible.
Anybody expecting it to be easy to take an app which was written for a desktop system and porting it to a mobile system is going to unpleasantly surprised. Porting is always a bitch and if the platform you want to port to is less capable than the one you originally wrote the app for you'll have allot of work ahead of you. Even in CP languages like Java you'll have problems since the Java implementations for mobile platforms aren't as capable as their desktop counterpart and there are always issues with implementations for different mobile platforms. Mobile development is also subject to totally different laws than desktop GUI app development often is. There are limited resources which leads to more limited APIs which means either using the least common denominator or getting ready for an awful lot of #ifdeffy. If you really want to write an app for both desktop and mobile systems you have to write it with that in mind from the very beginning. This means manual memory management, using only the lowest common denominator in terms of APIs, programming languages, etc... and you better get your MVC separation straight from the very beginning as well since you are going to have to write separate UI's for each platform. Mobile UIs tend to be fundamentally different in concept from desktop UIs. You'll also want to write as much of your app as possible in platform independent modules that can be 'plugged into' your apps as required.
Terror? More like inconvenience.
This eruption can go on for months, even years. To add insult to injury eruptions in Ejafjallajökull have historically been foreplay for eruptions in Mt. Katla which is a 100 square kilometer caldera that lies under nearby Mýrdalsjökull glacier. That eruption will be orders of magnitude bigger than this one. When Katla blows, and there is a good chance she will do so within the next two or three years or so if history is to be trusted, you can pretty much kiss air-traffic over much of Europe, or North America goodbye. Whose turn it is to not fly for a week or so at a time will depend on the wind direction and trust me, the economic damage of only being able to fly every other week for six months to a year is more than a mere "inconvenience".
The whole utopia of legalized drugs that people imagine, doesn't exist
Ever heard of Portugal? I assure you it exists and it has yet to fall into a nightmare of addiction and ruined lives yet. Just reduced addiction, reduced crime, and reduced drug related health problems.
Based on what I've read, Portugal has not made it legal to grow, manufacture, transport, sell, own or use any drugs. From Cato institute:
On July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense. http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080
You are putting words in his mouth. He never explicitly stated that Portugal had become a junky heaven where it is legal to grow, manufacture, transport, sell, own or use any drugs. What is your point anyway? Perhaps you guys are you trying to tell us that the US American idea of filling your jails with small time users serving draconian sentences for minor drug offenses is some how better than what the Portuguese did? By the sound of that report the Portuguese simply concluded that having police officers chasing after small time drug users was a waste of time and that the Portuguese state was better off spending it's resources openly treating drug users and limiting addiction. That Cato report concluded that after the decriminalization of drug possession in favor of offering treatment, illegal drug use among teens declined, the rate of HIV infections declined and the number of people seeking treatment for addiction doubled since they didn't have to fear prosecution any more. The executive summary ends with the words:
The data shows that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.
Can you point one out? A moral war that is.
He didn't say that there were moral wars, he suggested that sometimes there can be a moral dimension to the decision to go to war. I could give you the default example but I don't want to Godwin this thread.
So there will only be 11 selections on the browser choice menu.
I can still pick Opera.
And those are all written in C# and are therefore ready to deploy on Windows Phone 7 Series devices at a moment's notice are they?
Methinks Firefox is only the first casualty of this decision. Portability is a pretty important thing in Mobile App development. Fennec, for example, is being developed for several Mobile OS platforms simultaneously. Moving to C# forces a lot of software companies to re implement a C# version of their apps from scratch if they want to market them on Windows Mobile devices.