You're putting words in my mouth. What I did say is that a lack of 3G is a great reason not to buy the iPhone. The bottom line is iPhone has no 3G, other phones have 3G, and that adds up to a good reason not to buy it, regardless of whose fault it is (phone, network technology, AT&T, aliens, doesn't matter!).
Furthermore, if you have HSDPA service in your home area, as a significant percentage of US citizens do, or if you anticipate getting HSDPA service within two years (which covers at least 50% of the US population, and a high percentage of predominantly urban prospective iPhone customers) then lack of HSDPA support in particular is a great reason not to buy an iPhone, not a stupid one as you continue to suggest.
Data from 2005 is outdated; the rollout of 3G in the US has been fast. Verizon has stated in the past that by the end of 2006, they would have "nationwide" 3G coverage, but I haven't been able to find numbers for population covered. They have been the fastest to deploy 3G. Sprint has stated that they have 208 million people covered now and 220 million by the end of 3nd quarter 2007, which admittedly is not 90% of the US population (more like 75%). Sprint has been behind Verizon so far, but they are set to be the first with 4G by aggressively rolling out WiMAX starting this year.
The info comes from most of the reviews, which detail the purchase process for the iPhone. You buy the iPhone at the Apple store, without a contract. You take it home, connect it to iTunes, and *then* enter your social security number for a credit check, then choose and buy your contract, using iTunes. So when you buy the hardware, you haven't yet bought the contract. I suppose it's possible that iTunes will force you to buy a contract before letting you sync the iPhone, but if so hackers will soon fix that. Furthermore, I believe (without evidence, yet) that Apple wants to let people use the iPhone without cell service if they so desire, as a WiFi video iPod with internal speaker, plus PDA and awesome web browser.
How did you get to +5 informative when you are completely factually wrong? Both Verizon and Sprint have 3G networks that cover more than 90% of the US population. I'm using Sprint as my only ISP. I routinely get 2Mbps real-world download speed (plenty for youtube and abc/nbc.com streaming TV), and latency is tolerable. T-Mobile and AT&T are lagging, it's true. But 3G is available, and once you've had the luxury of always-on broadband wherever you happen to be sitting at the moment, you'll never go back. I'm not buying an iPhone until it has 3G. (Also GPS, and third party apps, but I have faith that hackers will provide third-party apps, so I'm really only waiting on GPS and 3G).
The sim card can be changed; there is a hole in the top to stick a paper clip and the sim card pops out (the NYTimes review shows this feature). What Mossberg was saying is that the phone is locked to AT&T, so it refuses to accept other sim cards. However, rest assured that hackers will soon unlock the iPhone. Furthermore, Apple has ensured that you don't have to sign a contract to buy the iPhone, so there's no cancellation fee!
Apple has played this well; despite the much lamented exclusivity contract, the only real-world limitation will be that you're limited to GSM providers (which admittedly, in the US, limits you to AT&T or T-Mobile). The only real question is: how will the iPhone's software react to non-AT&T networks? Visual voice mail won't work for sure. iTunes seems pretty integrated with the phone service; how will iTunes react to a non-AT&T service? More hacking might be required.
I'd add that it's important *you* find your patch useful. If you're writing a patch for someone else's problem just to "join the project", I don't think that's going to work well. You should be a user of the project first, then write a patch to scratch an itch that *you* have. Join the mailing list and submit the patch. For example, if you're a user of Firefox, I'm sure there's something that bugs you about it. Find the bug on bugzilla, then make the patch.
You probably didn't watch the keynote. Steve Jobs stood up there and basically said "We expect people to switch from Firefox to Safari, because Safari is the best browser in the world". He had a slide where he explicitly depicted Firefox's market share switching to Safari (interestingly, IE's market share didn't change). He stated that iTunes is being downloaded twice as many times per day as Firefox, and they will use that leverage to grab a significant share of the Windows browser market.
So that's where this perception is coming from; it's directly from Steve Jobs. His presentation explicitly positioned Safari against Firefox. IMHO that was stupid since Firefox has a lot of goodwill in the community while Microsoft is still the market leader with perhaps their most-hated product.
I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn't it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they'd done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we're pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It's way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they'd put on phones before.
And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they're just blown away by how good it is. And you can't do that stuff in a browser.
Steve Jobs yesterday:
Web apps are just as good as rich client apps! Really! [sets RDF generator to maximum]
You're not going to be able to use the camera in a web app. You're not going to be able to use the microphone or accelerometer or proximity sensor (or GPS when it is added). You're not going to be able to go fullscreen, you're not going to be able to access the address book, you're not going to be able to do animated graphics nearly as well, you're going to be slow due to high latency and low bandwidth (especially upstream) on cellular Internet service, you're not going to be able to access the locally stored music and video, you're not going to be able to add support for new audio/video codecs, you're not going to be able to do innovative UI concepts with multitouch, you're not going to be able to add new icons to the UI or add features to any of the built-in applications.
Don't try and pretend that web apps are going to be just as good.
Not to mention that the PSP has been hacked like crazy, and the only reason nobody has ripped UMDs is that nobody cares.
You forget about modchips though. You basically describe the DRM used to protect console games, but consoles are hacked in hardware. Sure, your average Joe can't do it, but they don't have to: the market takes care of that. The average Joe creates demand for a modchip since he is willing to pay; then real experienced hardware hackers do the really hard cracking, create the supply of modchips and get paid. Average Joe just takes his console down to the corner hack shop and gets it cracked for a small fee. The only way to actually enforce DRM is the law, i.e. suing people.
Actually, there is one way that DRM actually can be made to work. Microsoft has a very, very impressive DRM system in place on Xbox 360 (including hardware fuses in the processor which can be blown to prevent downgrading the system software after an upgrade), but it has still been cracked. The crack is not becoming widespread, however, because of one thing: Xbox Live. Microsoft can strictly enforce DRM on any Xbox as long as it continues to connect to Xbox Live. Microsoft can actively counter hacks as they occur. This only works because Xbox Live provides a valuable service that people want; otherwise you could mod your Xbox and never again connect to Xbox Live.
That certainly does tilt the balance in favor of C++. It doesn't make sense to port the entire runtime and create appropriate tools and libraries for just one project. If Nintendo provided a Java environment, or if you could reuse the base for tens of projects, that would be a different story. I'm kinda surprised that nobody has ever tried to run Java on the DS. After all, a lot of games are being written in Java now for phones.
Yes, given a limited amount of time and equally skilled programmers, because they will be so much more productive not having to worry about tracking ownership and reference counting and wacky memory corruption crashes and writing custom allocators that they can use their limited time focusing on improving the algorithms being used, which is where the real wins are anyway.
Given an unlimited amount of time to fix all the bugs and wring out all the performance, C++ will win. But in the real world, use Java and be done faster.
This is an interesting question that I've often wondered about. It's possible that Google programmers simply went in and special-cased C++ and C#, but I personally think that Google has an automated process which notices that "C++" and "C#" are commonly occurring both in web pages and queries, and then automatically adds them to the list of "strange" tokens to index.
I will often watch ads if they are in HD and have high production values. I have my finger on the 30-second-skip button, but many ads are funny and interesting and I have no problem with that (some ads are better than the shows they sponsor). I'll even rewind to the beginning of an ad if it looks interesting, like the Apple ads. I also notice that I'm more likely to watch the first commercial of a break, since if the ad is good I get "hooked" before I have time to think about the skip button.
Broadcasters simply need to learn that the days where you could show the same ad 8 times during the same program are over. Good riddance to that ridiculous practice. Make the ads attractive, novel, funny, and not too numerous, and I'll gladly watch them in payment for good programming.
Oh and I'd just like to ditto Daychilde and say this stuff is awesome. Your job sounds pretty cool; I'd love to work on this stuff. I'd be especially interested in extracting 3D information from this kind of data. Like to produce textured building models for Google Earth automatically. Are you guys working on that?
It's good press. If Slashdot is the first news site to do it, they can post an article (maybe to fill out a slow news day) and other sites might even report on it (I could see a Digg article about it). Also, anyone with IPv6 would have an extra incentive to visit Slashdot. And it's a long shot, but maybe someone out there would like to do targeted advertising to IPv6 users.
Read my proposal aagain. You only have to click a button to reveal an edit box, where you can enter URLs to your heart's content. To correct your analogy, this is like putting a keypad lock feature on a cell phone so it doesn't dial numbers unintentionally. Only the unintentional dialing is being done by people who don't know the difference between an address bar and a search box instead of random objects in your pocket.
I'm hoping Sprint helps solve some of these problems when they start rolling out WiMAX as they are planning this Winter. I've heard that Sprint owns quite a bit of spectrum. At the very least, some consumer WiMAX hardware should start to become available.
It is a shame how the FCC seems focused on generating the most revenue through selling licenses instead of trying to consolidate useful blocks to simplify things and allow for high-bandwidth networks. If I was running the FCC, I'd take all the old analog crap that's hogging prime spectrum and can it. If there was a coast-to-coast wireless single-standard high-bandwidth IP network, you could just run *everything* through that. Replace AM/FM/XM/Sirius with Shoutcast, walkie-talkies/CB radio with Skype or similar, microwave towers with leased guaranteed bandwidth, TV with youtube and on-demand IPTV.
Every old analog application you replace with IP gives you bandwidth in spades thanks to the incredible advances made in radios since these things were invented. If you could kill everything else and devote the entire spectrum to an IP network, we would all have bandwidth coming out our ears. The last mile problem would be solved. Every inch of the country would have instant access to gigabit class broadband.
Well, that kinda went off on a tangent. Nice thought though, isn't it?
There is only one permanent solution: redesign the browser and eliminate the "address bar" which most users do not understand, and replace it with a search box. The domain name section of the URL should still be shown (with TLD and first subdomain in bold to combat phishing), but be non-editable. The rest of the URL (protocol, path, query, and anchor) should not be shown unless a drop-down button is clicked to reveal an edit box.
This would kill the traffic to all squatter sites, add resistance to phishing, and improve the user experience in one fell swoop. A checkbox option to add the address bar back would pacify the web developers who are resistant to change. Everyone else would welcome this.
So you're saying that if DX10 was designed "properly", every video card would perform identically? I'm sorry, but that's a stupid thing to say, and Slashdot's the only place you'd get modded up for saying so just because it sounds like you're bashing Microsoft.
The bigger picture is that these cards are completely compatible with each other, sporting exposed feature sets that are practically identical from a software point of view, making it much easier to program DX10 games that work on both. This is a big step forward for the entire industry. The only important difference between the cards is performance, and that's exactly as it should be. Furthermore, the performance differences are rarely bigger than a factor of 2 in the real world. It's not as if one card is useless compared to the other, fanboy whining aside.
If it's detailed benchmark information you want, you'll get far more details than you'll even understand at Beyond3D (G80 review (AKA GeForce 8800 GTX), R600 review (AKA Radeon HD 2900 XTX)). But I guarantee you don't really want benchmarks that detailed. Analysis is impossible becuase these architectures are simply too complex to predict real-world performance from low-level hardware details. Like it or not, the only way to quantify real-world performance is game benchmarks. Just don't get your benchmarks from involved parties like ATI/NVidia. Get them from hardware review sites; it's not like there's a shortage of those. Most sites now do image quality analysis to combat driver cheating.
But how could yet another WiFi network be the answer? Personally, I don't see how a municipal WiFi network could ever be considered a good idea, for one reason and one reason only: range. You need billions of hotspots and even so you will inevitably have terrible coverage. Not to mention the conflicts with existing networks. Unreliable wireless is hardly better than no wireless at all. OTOH, municipal *WiMAX* makes lots of sense. Let's use technologies for the purposes they were designed.
Actually, most Internet traffic (BitTorrent) is multicast mapped onto unicast in a terribly inefficient manner. We are forced to use BitTorrent because ISPs refuse to implement multicast (which makes it hardly surprising that there is no multicast traffic on the Internet).
Slashdot Mirror
You're putting words in my mouth. What I did say is that a lack of 3G is a great reason not to buy the iPhone. The bottom line is iPhone has no 3G, other phones have 3G, and that adds up to a good reason not to buy it, regardless of whose fault it is (phone, network technology, AT&T, aliens, doesn't matter!).
Furthermore, if you have HSDPA service in your home area, as a significant percentage of US citizens do, or if you anticipate getting HSDPA service within two years (which covers at least 50% of the US population, and a high percentage of predominantly urban prospective iPhone customers) then lack of HSDPA support in particular is a great reason not to buy an iPhone, not a stupid one as you continue to suggest.
Data from 2005 is outdated; the rollout of 3G in the US has been fast. Verizon has stated in the past that by the end of 2006, they would have "nationwide" 3G coverage, but I haven't been able to find numbers for population covered. They have been the fastest to deploy 3G. Sprint has stated that they have 208 million people covered now and 220 million by the end of 3nd quarter 2007, which admittedly is not 90% of the US population (more like 75%). Sprint has been behind Verizon so far, but they are set to be the first with 4G by aggressively rolling out WiMAX starting this year.
The info comes from most of the reviews, which detail the purchase process for the iPhone. You buy the iPhone at the Apple store, without a contract. You take it home, connect it to iTunes, and *then* enter your social security number for a credit check, then choose and buy your contract, using iTunes. So when you buy the hardware, you haven't yet bought the contract. I suppose it's possible that iTunes will force you to buy a contract before letting you sync the iPhone, but if so hackers will soon fix that. Furthermore, I believe (without evidence, yet) that Apple wants to let people use the iPhone without cell service if they so desire, as a WiFi video iPod with internal speaker, plus PDA and awesome web browser.
This is true, and yet it doesn't make you any less wrong. Lack of 3G is still a great reason to not buy the iPhone.
How did you get to +5 informative when you are completely factually wrong? Both Verizon and Sprint have 3G networks that cover more than 90% of the US population. I'm using Sprint as my only ISP. I routinely get 2Mbps real-world download speed (plenty for youtube and abc/nbc.com streaming TV), and latency is tolerable. T-Mobile and AT&T are lagging, it's true. But 3G is available, and once you've had the luxury of always-on broadband wherever you happen to be sitting at the moment, you'll never go back. I'm not buying an iPhone until it has 3G. (Also GPS, and third party apps, but I have faith that hackers will provide third-party apps, so I'm really only waiting on GPS and 3G).
The sim card can be changed; there is a hole in the top to stick a paper clip and the sim card pops out (the NYTimes review shows this feature). What Mossberg was saying is that the phone is locked to AT&T, so it refuses to accept other sim cards. However, rest assured that hackers will soon unlock the iPhone. Furthermore, Apple has ensured that you don't have to sign a contract to buy the iPhone, so there's no cancellation fee!
Apple has played this well; despite the much lamented exclusivity contract, the only real-world limitation will be that you're limited to GSM providers (which admittedly, in the US, limits you to AT&T or T-Mobile). The only real question is: how will the iPhone's software react to non-AT&T networks? Visual voice mail won't work for sure. iTunes seems pretty integrated with the phone service; how will iTunes react to a non-AT&T service? More hacking might be required.
I'd add that it's important *you* find your patch useful. If you're writing a patch for someone else's problem just to "join the project", I don't think that's going to work well. You should be a user of the project first, then write a patch to scratch an itch that *you* have. Join the mailing list and submit the patch. For example, if you're a user of Firefox, I'm sure there's something that bugs you about it. Find the bug on bugzilla, then make the patch.
Well considering that the human eye does much the same thing (rods vs cones), I'd say yes.
You probably didn't watch the keynote. Steve Jobs stood up there and basically said "We expect people to switch from Firefox to Safari, because Safari is the best browser in the world". He had a slide where he explicitly depicted Firefox's market share switching to Safari (interestingly, IE's market share didn't change). He stated that iTunes is being downloaded twice as many times per day as Firefox, and they will use that leverage to grab a significant share of the Windows browser market.
So that's where this perception is coming from; it's directly from Steve Jobs. His presentation explicitly positioned Safari against Firefox. IMHO that was stupid since Firefox has a lot of goodwill in the community while Microsoft is still the market leader with perhaps their most-hated product.
Don't try and pretend that web apps are going to be just as good.
Not to mention that the PSP has been hacked like crazy, and the only reason nobody has ripped UMDs is that nobody cares.
You forget about modchips though. You basically describe the DRM used to protect console games, but consoles are hacked in hardware. Sure, your average Joe can't do it, but they don't have to: the market takes care of that. The average Joe creates demand for a modchip since he is willing to pay; then real experienced hardware hackers do the really hard cracking, create the supply of modchips and get paid. Average Joe just takes his console down to the corner hack shop and gets it cracked for a small fee. The only way to actually enforce DRM is the law, i.e. suing people.
Actually, there is one way that DRM actually can be made to work. Microsoft has a very, very impressive DRM system in place on Xbox 360 (including hardware fuses in the processor which can be blown to prevent downgrading the system software after an upgrade), but it has still been cracked. The crack is not becoming widespread, however, because of one thing: Xbox Live. Microsoft can strictly enforce DRM on any Xbox as long as it continues to connect to Xbox Live. Microsoft can actively counter hacks as they occur. This only works because Xbox Live provides a valuable service that people want; otherwise you could mod your Xbox and never again connect to Xbox Live.
That certainly does tilt the balance in favor of C++. It doesn't make sense to port the entire runtime and create appropriate tools and libraries for just one project. If Nintendo provided a Java environment, or if you could reuse the base for tens of projects, that would be a different story. I'm kinda surprised that nobody has ever tried to run Java on the DS. After all, a lot of games are being written in Java now for phones.
Yes, given a limited amount of time and equally skilled programmers, because they will be so much more productive not having to worry about tracking ownership and reference counting and wacky memory corruption crashes and writing custom allocators that they can use their limited time focusing on improving the algorithms being used, which is where the real wins are anyway.
Given an unlimited amount of time to fix all the bugs and wring out all the performance, C++ will win. But in the real world, use Java and be done faster.
This is an interesting question that I've often wondered about. It's possible that Google programmers simply went in and special-cased C++ and C#, but I personally think that Google has an automated process which notices that "C++" and "C#" are commonly occurring both in web pages and queries, and then automatically adds them to the list of "strange" tokens to index.
I will often watch ads if they are in HD and have high production values. I have my finger on the 30-second-skip button, but many ads are funny and interesting and I have no problem with that (some ads are better than the shows they sponsor). I'll even rewind to the beginning of an ad if it looks interesting, like the Apple ads. I also notice that I'm more likely to watch the first commercial of a break, since if the ad is good I get "hooked" before I have time to think about the skip button.
Broadcasters simply need to learn that the days where you could show the same ad 8 times during the same program are over. Good riddance to that ridiculous practice. Make the ads attractive, novel, funny, and not too numerous, and I'll gladly watch them in payment for good programming.
Oh and I'd just like to ditto Daychilde and say this stuff is awesome. Your job sounds pretty cool; I'd love to work on this stuff. I'd be especially interested in extracting 3D information from this kind of data. Like to produce textured building models for Google Earth automatically. Are you guys working on that?
Who provided the San Francisco data? It's much higher-res. In the full-screen mode you can zoom in like you have binoculars.
It's good press. If Slashdot is the first news site to do it, they can post an article (maybe to fill out a slow news day) and other sites might even report on it (I could see a Digg article about it). Also, anyone with IPv6 would have an extra incentive to visit Slashdot. And it's a long shot, but maybe someone out there would like to do targeted advertising to IPv6 users.
No need to go that far. Just give users who post over IPv6 a badge next to their name and and an auto +1 IPv6 mod on their posts.
Read my proposal aagain. You only have to click a button to reveal an edit box, where you can enter URLs to your heart's content. To correct your analogy, this is like putting a keypad lock feature on a cell phone so it doesn't dial numbers unintentionally. Only the unintentional dialing is being done by people who don't know the difference between an address bar and a search box instead of random objects in your pocket.
I'm hoping Sprint helps solve some of these problems when they start rolling out WiMAX as they are planning this Winter. I've heard that Sprint owns quite a bit of spectrum. At the very least, some consumer WiMAX hardware should start to become available.
It is a shame how the FCC seems focused on generating the most revenue through selling licenses instead of trying to consolidate useful blocks to simplify things and allow for high-bandwidth networks. If I was running the FCC, I'd take all the old analog crap that's hogging prime spectrum and can it. If there was a coast-to-coast wireless single-standard high-bandwidth IP network, you could just run *everything* through that. Replace AM/FM/XM/Sirius with Shoutcast, walkie-talkies/CB radio with Skype or similar, microwave towers with leased guaranteed bandwidth, TV with youtube and on-demand IPTV.
Every old analog application you replace with IP gives you bandwidth in spades thanks to the incredible advances made in radios since these things were invented. If you could kill everything else and devote the entire spectrum to an IP network, we would all have bandwidth coming out our ears. The last mile problem would be solved. Every inch of the country would have instant access to gigabit class broadband.
Well, that kinda went off on a tangent. Nice thought though, isn't it?
There is only one permanent solution: redesign the browser and eliminate the "address bar" which most users do not understand, and replace it with a search box. The domain name section of the URL should still be shown (with TLD and first subdomain in bold to combat phishing), but be non-editable. The rest of the URL (protocol, path, query, and anchor) should not be shown unless a drop-down button is clicked to reveal an edit box.
This would kill the traffic to all squatter sites, add resistance to phishing, and improve the user experience in one fell swoop. A checkbox option to add the address bar back would pacify the web developers who are resistant to change. Everyone else would welcome this.
So you're saying that if DX10 was designed "properly", every video card would perform identically? I'm sorry, but that's a stupid thing to say, and Slashdot's the only place you'd get modded up for saying so just because it sounds like you're bashing Microsoft.
The bigger picture is that these cards are completely compatible with each other, sporting exposed feature sets that are practically identical from a software point of view, making it much easier to program DX10 games that work on both. This is a big step forward for the entire industry. The only important difference between the cards is performance, and that's exactly as it should be. Furthermore, the performance differences are rarely bigger than a factor of 2 in the real world. It's not as if one card is useless compared to the other, fanboy whining aside.
If it's detailed benchmark information you want, you'll get far more details than you'll even understand at Beyond3D (G80 review (AKA GeForce 8800 GTX), R600 review (AKA Radeon HD 2900 XTX)). But I guarantee you don't really want benchmarks that detailed. Analysis is impossible becuase these architectures are simply too complex to predict real-world performance from low-level hardware details. Like it or not, the only way to quantify real-world performance is game benchmarks. Just don't get your benchmarks from involved parties like ATI/NVidia. Get them from hardware review sites; it's not like there's a shortage of those. Most sites now do image quality analysis to combat driver cheating.
But how could yet another WiFi network be the answer? Personally, I don't see how a municipal WiFi network could ever be considered a good idea, for one reason and one reason only: range. You need billions of hotspots and even so you will inevitably have terrible coverage. Not to mention the conflicts with existing networks. Unreliable wireless is hardly better than no wireless at all. OTOH, municipal *WiMAX* makes lots of sense. Let's use technologies for the purposes they were designed.
Actually, most Internet traffic (BitTorrent) is multicast mapped onto unicast in a terribly inefficient manner. We are forced to use BitTorrent because ISPs refuse to implement multicast (which makes it hardly surprising that there is no multicast traffic on the Internet).