Of course if someone wanted 4mm fonts they would need to type in 11.3394pt in the current system, but of course we all know that fonts are especially right when they are at even numbers of points rather than millimeters. What the hell is a point anyway? Millimeters are used in carpentry, particle physics and trade, points are just another unit made up for one purpose that doesn't really need its own system of measurement.
No, if you want 4mm fonts in any modern and competent page layout program, you simply type "4mm", and the magic of computers works it all out for you.
If you think points are "just another unit made up for one purpose that doesn't really need its own system of measurement", then you have just proven that you know absolutely nothing about typography. Typography and graphic design are really rather elegant subjects that incorporate an incredible amount of mathematics. I suggest you read Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style" for a thorough introduction.
I am so sick and tired of these articles that pop up every now and then about how superior the metric system is and how we should force all public transactions into using SI units. This is probably the main reason why we in the United States still get annoyed by the French even thought they have long since ceased to be relevant to our lives.
First of all, the only people that care about SI units are people that believe they would die without a perfectly base 10 set of units. Unfortunately for them, the SI system will never be perfectly base 10, because it includes time measurements, which will always be based upon cosmological phenomena (at least until such time as Sol 3 ceases to be the center of the universe for most sentient beings, from our perspective, anyway).
The "Imperial" or "US Customary" units, what ever you like to call the traditional measurement system of your choice (personally, I like the Japanese Tatami system), was generally conceived to have measurements that are in some way related to the scale of the human body. The so-called "metric" system is based on a completely arbitrary division (1/10 000 000) of the distance from the equator to the north pole, as measured through Paris, France. This works out to a unit of measurement that is in no way related to human experience. Yes, I know the SI units are now based upon another arbitrary standard, but the point remains.
And in any case, all American Standard units are defined in terms of SI units, and have been for a long time. The United States is officially a metric country, much to the dismay of anyone who actually bothers to think about why a foot is a foot and a pound is a pound without having a kneejerk reaction about the arithmetic.
Because it would seem from the whois information that the record for the domain "iphone.org" was created on 16 Dec 1999, and since that time, has pointed directly to the Apple WWW site. Doesn't that qualify as a "continuous usage"? Wouldn't that make Apple, Inc. (nee Computer) next in line for the registration rather than Ocean Telecom? The existance of "iphone.org" was widely reported in the press back when.
The other question I have is whether or not an invalidity of the trademark registration necessarily invalidates a trademark. After all, isn't it a well-known principle of IP law that a trademark need not necessarily be registered to be valid, as long as the trademark holder can show prior and continous usage of the same? Also, remember that trademarks are generally only held to be valid within a certain sphere. The same word can function as a trademark for completely different concerns in dissimilar market spaces.
Whatever the outcome of this dispute, Steve Jobs pulled a brilliant marketing stunt by introducing the product as the iPhone. Even if Cisco eventually retains the trademark registration, the word iPhone is now indelibly imprinted on the public's mind as the name of Apple's new cell phone (not that it wasn't already, but this cemented it). As for myself, I never even heard of Cisco's so-called product until they apparently rushed it to market because of all the hype surrounding what was believed to be the impending release of the Apple product.
Let's face it, Cisco is a pretty lame company, and they always have been. Those of us who were installing wide-area networking routers in the early-mid 1990's will know what I mean.
Because DRM is like legislating against thought, at least in the case where DRM schemes effectively become government legislation through illegitimate laws like the DMCA.
Put simply, the most essential freedom we possess is the freedom to break the law. When this freedom is lost, we cease to be a free people.
Other than that, such a DRM scheme as you are attempting to describe is something that I believe to be impossible to produce. There is no feasible way of protecting digital content that cannot be broken with commonly available resources (within reason). All forms of encryption known to man are nothing more than stop gaps that buy time to give the appearance of security.
If DRM were simply a choice in the marketplace, it would fail miserably, as it can be argued that it demonstrably *has* failed, despite Apple selling 2 gigasongs. Unfortunately, we are left in a quandary, because it only takes one "free" copy of a digital work to be released to the Network, and left to their own devices, *someone* will see that it is done. You may argue whether or not this is a good thing, but there are many who disagree. Perhaps it is that now that we have progressed so far with technology that an original idea can become known to nearly everyone on Earth in a short period of time and at practically no cost, that original ideas will cease to have economic value.
How many of you are running OSX or OS9 or even 7.5 in a virtual machine on your linux boxes? And furthermore, how come Apple gets to keep their BIOS under IP lockdown when IBM had to give theirs up?
I'd say me, but my Linux boxes are currently a Core 2 Duo MacBook and a Core 2 Duo iMac, both running Fedora Core 6. And I haven't really bothered with trying to get Mac OS X to run in a virtualized environment, but I probably could if I gave a shit.
And, IBM didn't give up their BIOS. It was clean-room reverse engineered by Compaq. On the other hand, Apple eventually put the Mac OS Toolbox ROM in software, as evidenced by the fact that several IBM Power series PC's and even some RS/6000 machines that were based on the Common Hardware Reference Platform design were able to successfully boot and run Mac OS 8.
Oh, really now. Why is it that everyone always seems to start dropping their panties the minute somebody mentions the name Steve Jobs? I mean, I'm as much (or more) of an Apple (and Steve Jobs) fanboy as anybody you care to name, but the fact of the matter is that it's quite well documented that Steve Jobs can be a complete and utter dickhead and/or spiteful jackass when it suits him. Not that he has anything even remotely approaching a monopoly on that sort of behavior.
Is he a genius? In some ways, yes, in others, no. But very often, Steve has proven that concepts which really ought to be, and sometimes *are*, obvious to most people are very often concepts which they will either willfully ignore, or are too terrified to embrace. What makes Steve special is the fact that he doesn't accept the current state of technology (ever), and he brooks very little in the way of compromise when it comes to product design. As the saying goes, Steve wants everything he has a hand in making to come out "insanely great". Sometimes he misses the mark, but he's right more often than not because it's clear that he gives a shit about the product (and in his own small way, the people) rather than just wanting to make a load of greenbacks. Not that Steve doesn't want to make money, because obviously he has, but he does it by making some really cool shit happen.
Aside from the considerable mystique that Steve has built up over the years, it really wouldn't be all that hard to replace him. In fact, I will only semi-jokingly propose that Apple replace Steve Jobs with *me*. Seriously. I'd love to have the job, and I'd even do it for a modest salary because I think it would be one of the coolest jobs on the face of the Earth and I don't really *need* all that much money, in the end.
Here's what you need to be the next Steve Jobs:
1. The ability to see beyond what technology has become to what it ought to be. This is the most essential aspect. Steve Jobs ranks up there with the greatest figures in the history of computing when it comes to a vision about what the role of technology should be in our lives. 2. A black mock turtleneck. Simple, understated, not quite elegant, highlights your face on camera, and makes you look slimmer, to boot. 3. Friends and associates like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, Andy Hertzfeld, Avi Tevanian, etc (not to mention a whole bunch of people over at Pixar). Go take a look at the list of people who have worked for Apple and/or Pixar and what they've done. It's freaking shocking. Apple alone has, over the years, made both Microsoft and Google combined look like a bunch of kindergarteners. And Pixar? Do I even need to go into it? 4. The willpower not to accept a compromised design. Don't settle for less than "insanely great". Money isn't everything, you know, and it's not even the only thing. 5. And, of course, target the high end of the market, and make no apologies for it. Quality over quantity.
That's it, really. It's not all *that* difficult. Unfortunately, even most people involved with technology tend to forget that it's not all about the actual techie bits. It's also about design and philosophy, and a whole lot of other fuzzy ideas about Life, the Universe, and Everything that most brainiac gearheads have a difficult time wrapping their eggheads around. Those of us who can *do* exist, though we may be a extremely small subset of the population.
Because, I can tell you this, there's no way on Earth I'm shelling out the dough to upgrade my iPod now. I've got a couple fo 4th gen 40GB iPods, plus a 1st gen 1GB iPod shuffle, and a 1st gen 2GB iPod nano. Now that the iPhone is announced, there's no way I'm paying $249+ to buy a 5th gen iPod.
Then again, I'd have no problem paying for a 6th gen iPod if it was basically an iPhone minus the cell phone bits, with something like Samsung's new 32GB flash drive (I say "like" because while the capacity is right, the pricing of the 32GB flash drive is currently quite a bit more than could be reasonably expected to go into an iPod). After all, I probably only use about 10GB of my iPod, anyway, and at that much data, there's *way* too much stuff in it for it to be convenient. That 10GB might even include the installation of Mac OS X that resides on the drive.
In fact, I'd actually want to have both a 6th gen iPod like I describe here, *and* an iPhone. While I think it's pretty cool that I could store at least some stuff on the iPhone, my cell phone is primarily a business tool, and I can't afford to waste too much battery life on media, especially without a swappable battery. With my Samsung SPH-i500 Palm phone (and the Kyocera one before that), I've always kept one battery on the charger/cradle and one in the phone. With my new Samsung SPH-m610, I'm actually considering buying a second unit, just so I can keep a spare battery charged at all times, since it has no cradle that can charge a second battery. I don't like having to keep my phone tethered just so it stays charged; I like to just swap batteries and go.
I also find it quite interesting that no one seems to be talking about the possibility of Inkwell running on the iPhone platform. Granted, I'm not entirely surprised at this, since Apple (and particularly Steve) would probably not want too many comparisons to the Newton.
As an aside, I also found it a bit amusing that when Steve got up there to talk about "products that changed the world", there was no mention of either the Apple I/II series of computers (which essentially created the personal computer market) or the Newton (which essentially created the PDA market), both of which arguably fall into the same category as the Mac (and Lisa, if you really want to be a stickler about it), the iPod, and the iPhone. Of course, Steve Jobs had very little to do with the Apple II, as I recall, and nothing at all to do with the Newton (other than killing it).
I'm going to take a Wild Ass Guess here and claim that Apple will have Inkwell running on the iPhone before very long, but it almost certainly won't be part of the initial roll-out because of the Newton associations. Oh, and Palm may as well close up shop right now...stick a fork in it, it's done. The only thing worth saving from Palm is Graffiti, which came before Palm OS as a Newton application, anyway.
The title of this article is nothing more than FUD. RTFA.
On the other hand, even if no third-party development capabilities ever surface, it's not as if that would make the iPhone (and its future derivatives) any less better than what's come out of Symbian, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and the rest.
The funny thing about the iPhone is that it's the first handheld I've seen that has caused me not to attempt to justify buying it, but to cause me to try to justify *not* buying it. Right now, I'm in the process of switching from a Samsung SPH-i500 Palm phone to a Samsung SPH-m610 coupled with a Nokia 770 tablet (Music I leave to a collection of iPods). It's certainly not what I would call a seamless transition (or a seamless experience), and one of my main motivations for doing this is to get a handheld that isn't crippled by proprietary software, but even as the iPhone was demonstrated, it appears to contains every essential feature that I need in a handheld computing experience. Sure, there's a few more features I would like to see, but I doubt that Apple is going to be quite that short-sighted about it. After all, no one really worries about third-party Windows Mobile and Palm OS apps "taking down the network", do they?
My guess is that Apple hasn't finalized the developer interfaces, yet. Most third-party apps would really just need to interact primarily with the network protocol stack, anyway. It's quite clear from the fact that the iPhone is touted as running "OS X", "Safari", and "Widgets", that the intended development environment for the iPhone line is Dashcode. Even Steve isn't Steve enough not to see the possibilities of third-party development. Need I mention that Steve is a master of misdirection?
It's a shame this got modded down to Troll, because the vast majority of people in this world fail to understand Fundamentalism in all its guises.
To paraphrase and conflate Ayn Rand and 1 Timothy, the refusal to reason is the root of all evil.
It's nothing more than a simple statement of fact--the war promulgated by Fundamentalist Islamist Extremists against what they consider the Godless Infidel will not end until one side or the other is completely annihilated.
Not that I advocate annihilation of one faction or the other, it's just that it's the nature of Fundamentalism to frame things in these terms.
I used to use only fluorescent bulbs, both traditional and compact in my house, until I started recording my music again. I don't remember if the early CFL's were any better (the $20 ones made by the bigs, like Philips, rather than the cheap-ass ones made by the off-brands they sell at Lowe's and HD), but I got so much interference in my systems because of them, that I had to turn off all the lights in the house just to get anything done. This did not well please She Who Must Be Obeyed. So, I replaced all the CFL's with regular incandescents, and I'm back in business. The regular big fluo's I can live without, but they're noisy, too.
As an aside, as an Amateur Radio operator, I can tell you that many, many, household appliances are guilty of severe RFI these days. I really don't think that I should have to run around putting chokes and such on devices I paid several hundred dollars to own.
This being a site where an incredible amount of engineering and technology talent hangs out, how about some more constructive comments? At least Ford has the balls to talk about this issue, so how about we come up with some positive thoughts about how computing and transportation can be effectively and safely integrated? Let's face it, PCs in cars are coming, whether interaction experts are involved or not.
There are already many, many aftermarket ways to integrate computers with cars, and I'm currently working on a project to install a Mac mini in my Jeep to complement my Amateur Radio gear (Yaesu FT-100 HF/VHF/UHF system & Kenwood TM-D700A VHF/UHF system), GPS/APRS system (the Kenwood, plus a Garmin GPS 76map, soon to be upgraded), and my car stereo (Kenwood EZ-500 + iPod + satellite capable). Using a Mac mini with the addition of a ruggedized Mil-Spec HDD, and a DIN space touchscreen, I can have a shitload of wireless computing capability at my disposal wherever I go. It can run Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in a triple boot configuration. I can run OBDII (and better) automotive diagnostic software, manage my music library, connect to the Internet, run APRS packet radio software, get satellite radio weather, watch TV (obviously not while driving, but great for news on the go), and run a whole lot of other applications. Why I want to do all this is a bit beyond the scope of this comment, but I have a want and a need to do so.
Of course, all of this is cobbled together out of many, many parts that were never really designed to integrate as a whole. Imagine the possibilities if some company were to start pulling all of these things together into a coherent system? I guarantee you that all of these things will be common place in automobiles within ten years, if not by the end of *this decade* (minus, of course, the Amateur Radio stuff, although the big three *do* provide white papers on RF equipment installation in their vehicles.
By the time I'm done with my system, I'll have more communications and computing power in my car than most police cruisers, and I'm certain that pre-manufactured systems won't be far behind. It only remains to be seen how well such systems perform. In the spirit of the hacking community, I will say that I would prefer it if the auto manufacturers would make it a bit easier to install aftermarket electronics and put easily accessible (and securable) mounting positions in their cars, better wiring harnesses and grounding systems, and heavier duty alternators in vehicles. It's almost certain that, left to their own devices, they will put in black-box systems that will be practically impossible to hack.
As I mentioned in another comment, my primary mail system is Apple's Mail.app fortified with C-Command's SpamSieve, which uses Bayesian Filtering. Image spam simply doesn't get through. I haven't even trained it all that well. I've also been using Thunderbird, with its built-in Bayesian Filters, and SpanBayes on Outlook 2003. I have a bit less success filtering out the image spam, but then, those systems have little to no training at all. At least with SpamSieve, I made something of an effort. My corpus now has about 48K words, and I've only been using it for about six weeks.
I'm not so sure what everyone is complaining about. I'm using SpamSieve as a plug in to Mail.app, and it catches just about everything without much in the way of training. Currently, my statistics as of 2006-11-01 say it's 97.1% accurate (with 71% of my total mail volume being spam, but that includes some legitimate marketing mail that I no longer really want, and I'm too lazy to track down the list maintainers), and that number gets higher every day.
On Windows, I'm using either Mozilla Thunderbird (usually), or SpamBayes as a plug-in to Outlook 2003 (when I have to), and I get similar results.
Of course, what we really need to do is rethink the way that the whole email system is designed, just in terms of MTAs that work separately from MDAs, etc. This kind of filtering really needs to take place at what we currently call the MTA level, with a configurable corpus for each user. The filtering should be done before the mail is permanently accepted, so that the impact on storage resources is as minimal as possible. Granted, it still takes a lot of processing power.
Another thing I need to spend some time thinking about is how RFC822 messages are structured in general. I'm just pulling this out of my ass right now, but the fact is that message envelopes are much to easy to spoof. Why have a separate message envelope to route the mail when the addressing information is already supposed to be contained in the headers? With the way spam is going, the message needs to be processed in its entirety in any case, so perhaps the envelope has outlived its usefulness?
As for the Real Media encoding from what I remember it was the only useable and widely accepted option around when NPR first started offing audio content online.
Bullshit.
QuickTime has *always* been better than anything Real has come up with, not to mention the fact that it's vastly cheaper, even if you use the Apple-branded version. To top it off, you can even use the open source Darwin Streaming Server if you are so inclined.
NPR used to offer all their content in QuickTime format, up until a couple of/few years ago.
...was the scene in Shelob's Lair from the LOTR movies. Seriously.
I wonder, could we make something akin to "Silly String" that could fire huge globs of a gooey, rubbery, net-like substance that could be used to immobilize people?
I figure, if anybody out there knows, or has tried this, they're probably on Slashdot...
Funny, it only cost Scaled Composites about $25 million of Paul Allen's money to get SpaceShipOne into space. Of course, if you count the $10 million dollar Ansari X-Prize, it only cost $15 million. And now Richard Branson is putting up $21 million more to fund SpaceShipTwo. It seems this particular argument is just a lot of hot air...which, unfortunately, will not get you to space.
I find it rather amusing that most proponents of the "free market", like yourself, are much more concerned with ignoring what the "free market" actually wants, and are much happier shoving their ideology down other peoples throats before actually grokking the consequences.
You'll have to pardon me if I don't think so much of Milton Friedman's views or the influence he has wielded over US monetary policy for the past few decades. Personally, I believe that the ideas he propagated are so harmful to society that they may very well be the root cause of the downfall of western civilization as we know it within a very short time frame. Of course, you seem to have bought so deeply into the "free market" that you are likely incapable of understanding this point.
Sorry if you took that as being rude. Will you think it's rude when the entire "free market"/"growing money supply"/"let them eat cake" way of life comes crashing down upon us all, and millions, if not billions, die in the ensuing chaos?
You missing one very, very important point. There has been exactly NOTHING preventing any private company from developing a space vehicle outside of the government funding system. Had space travel development been left to the private sector, we would likely still not have left the atmosphere.
I guess you're probably just a little ticked off that Milton "Free Market" Friedman died, so I'll cut you some slack and not poke gaping holes through all the rest of your arguements.
Slashdot Mirror
For a minute there, I thought the title read, "Giant Rabbits to Eat North Korea".
Of course if someone wanted 4mm fonts they would need to type in 11.3394pt in the current system, but of course we all know that fonts are especially right when they are at even numbers of points rather than millimeters. What the hell is a point anyway? Millimeters are used in carpentry, particle physics and trade, points are just another unit made up for one purpose that doesn't really need its own system of measurement.
No, if you want 4mm fonts in any modern and competent page layout program, you simply type "4mm", and the magic of computers works it all out for you.
If you think points are "just another unit made up for one purpose that doesn't really need its own system of measurement", then you have just proven that you know absolutely nothing about typography. Typography and graphic design are really rather elegant subjects that incorporate an incredible amount of mathematics. I suggest you read Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style" for a thorough introduction.
I propose we redefine the standard unit of measurement as the distance travelled by light in 1/1 000 000 000 th of an SI second.
That would make the new standard approximately 11.80 US customary inches long.
Maybe then we can all get on with our lives.
I am so sick and tired of these articles that pop up every now and then about how superior the metric system is and how we should force all public transactions into using SI units. This is probably the main reason why we in the United States still get annoyed by the French even thought they have long since ceased to be relevant to our lives.
First of all, the only people that care about SI units are people that believe they would die without a perfectly base 10 set of units. Unfortunately for them, the SI system will never be perfectly base 10, because it includes time measurements, which will always be based upon cosmological phenomena (at least until such time as Sol 3 ceases to be the center of the universe for most sentient beings, from our perspective, anyway).
The "Imperial" or "US Customary" units, what ever you like to call the traditional measurement system of your choice (personally, I like the Japanese Tatami system), was generally conceived to have measurements that are in some way related to the scale of the human body. The so-called "metric" system is based on a completely arbitrary division (1/10 000 000) of the distance from the equator to the north pole, as measured through Paris, France. This works out to a unit of measurement that is in no way related to human experience. Yes, I know the SI units are now based upon another arbitrary standard, but the point remains.
And in any case, all American Standard units are defined in terms of SI units, and have been for a long time. The United States is officially a metric country, much to the dismay of anyone who actually bothers to think about why a foot is a foot and a pound is a pound without having a kneejerk reaction about the arithmetic.
Because it would seem from the whois information that the record for the domain "iphone.org" was created on 16 Dec 1999, and since that time, has pointed directly to the Apple WWW site. Doesn't that qualify as a "continuous usage"? Wouldn't that make Apple, Inc. (nee Computer) next in line for the registration rather than Ocean Telecom? The existance of "iphone.org" was widely reported in the press back when.
The other question I have is whether or not an invalidity of the trademark registration necessarily invalidates a trademark. After all, isn't it a well-known principle of IP law that a trademark need not necessarily be registered to be valid, as long as the trademark holder can show prior and continous usage of the same? Also, remember that trademarks are generally only held to be valid within a certain sphere. The same word can function as a trademark for completely different concerns in dissimilar market spaces.
Whatever the outcome of this dispute, Steve Jobs pulled a brilliant marketing stunt by introducing the product as the iPhone. Even if Cisco eventually retains the trademark registration, the word iPhone is now indelibly imprinted on the public's mind as the name of Apple's new cell phone (not that it wasn't already, but this cemented it). As for myself, I never even heard of Cisco's so-called product until they apparently rushed it to market because of all the hype surrounding what was believed to be the impending release of the Apple product.
Let's face it, Cisco is a pretty lame company, and they always have been. Those of us who were installing wide-area networking routers in the early-mid 1990's will know what I mean.
Because DRM is like legislating against thought, at least in the case where DRM schemes effectively become government legislation through illegitimate laws like the DMCA.
Put simply, the most essential freedom we possess is the freedom to break the law. When this freedom is lost, we cease to be a free people.
Other than that, such a DRM scheme as you are attempting to describe is something that I believe to be impossible to produce. There is no feasible way of protecting digital content that cannot be broken with commonly available resources (within reason). All forms of encryption known to man are nothing more than stop gaps that buy time to give the appearance of security.
If DRM were simply a choice in the marketplace, it would fail miserably, as it can be argued that it demonstrably *has* failed, despite Apple selling 2 gigasongs. Unfortunately, we are left in a quandary, because it only takes one "free" copy of a digital work to be released to the Network, and left to their own devices, *someone* will see that it is done. You may argue whether or not this is a good thing, but there are many who disagree. Perhaps it is that now that we have progressed so far with technology that an original idea can become known to nearly everyone on Earth in a short period of time and at practically no cost, that original ideas will cease to have economic value.
How many of you are running OSX or OS9 or even 7.5 in a virtual machine on your linux boxes? And furthermore, how come Apple gets to keep their BIOS under IP lockdown when IBM had to give theirs up?
I'd say me, but my Linux boxes are currently a Core 2 Duo MacBook and a Core 2 Duo iMac, both running Fedora Core 6. And I haven't really bothered with trying to get Mac OS X to run in a virtualized environment, but I probably could if I gave a shit.
And, IBM didn't give up their BIOS. It was clean-room reverse engineered by Compaq. On the other hand, Apple eventually put the Mac OS Toolbox ROM in software, as evidenced by the fact that several IBM Power series PC's and even some RS/6000 machines that were based on the Common Hardware Reference Platform design were able to successfully boot and run Mac OS 8.
Oh, really now. Why is it that everyone always seems to start dropping their panties the minute somebody mentions the name Steve Jobs? I mean, I'm as much (or more) of an Apple (and Steve Jobs) fanboy as anybody you care to name, but the fact of the matter is that it's quite well documented that Steve Jobs can be a complete and utter dickhead and/or spiteful jackass when it suits him. Not that he has anything even remotely approaching a monopoly on that sort of behavior.
Is he a genius? In some ways, yes, in others, no. But very often, Steve has proven that concepts which really ought to be, and sometimes *are*, obvious to most people are very often concepts which they will either willfully ignore, or are too terrified to embrace. What makes Steve special is the fact that he doesn't accept the current state of technology (ever), and he brooks very little in the way of compromise when it comes to product design. As the saying goes, Steve wants everything he has a hand in making to come out "insanely great". Sometimes he misses the mark, but he's right more often than not because it's clear that he gives a shit about the product (and in his own small way, the people) rather than just wanting to make a load of greenbacks. Not that Steve doesn't want to make money, because obviously he has, but he does it by making some really cool shit happen.
Aside from the considerable mystique that Steve has built up over the years, it really wouldn't be all that hard to replace him. In fact, I will only semi-jokingly propose that Apple replace Steve Jobs with *me*. Seriously. I'd love to have the job, and I'd even do it for a modest salary because I think it would be one of the coolest jobs on the face of the Earth and I don't really *need* all that much money, in the end.
Here's what you need to be the next Steve Jobs:
1. The ability to see beyond what technology has become to what it ought to be. This is the most essential aspect. Steve Jobs ranks up there with the greatest figures in the history of computing when it comes to a vision about what the role of technology should be in our lives.
2. A black mock turtleneck. Simple, understated, not quite elegant, highlights your face on camera, and makes you look slimmer, to boot.
3. Friends and associates like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive, Andy Hertzfeld, Avi Tevanian, etc (not to mention a whole bunch of people over at Pixar). Go take a look at the list of people who have worked for Apple and/or Pixar and what they've done. It's freaking shocking. Apple alone has, over the years, made both Microsoft and Google combined look like a bunch of kindergarteners. And Pixar? Do I even need to go into it?
4. The willpower not to accept a compromised design. Don't settle for less than "insanely great". Money isn't everything, you know, and it's not even the only thing.
5. And, of course, target the high end of the market, and make no apologies for it. Quality over quantity.
That's it, really. It's not all *that* difficult. Unfortunately, even most people involved with technology tend to forget that it's not all about the actual techie bits. It's also about design and philosophy, and a whole lot of other fuzzy ideas about Life, the Universe, and Everything that most brainiac gearheads have a difficult time wrapping their eggheads around. Those of us who can *do* exist, though we may be a extremely small subset of the population.
Because, I can tell you this, there's no way on Earth I'm shelling out the dough to upgrade my iPod now. I've got a couple fo 4th gen 40GB iPods, plus a 1st gen 1GB iPod shuffle, and a 1st gen 2GB iPod nano. Now that the iPhone is announced, there's no way I'm paying $249+ to buy a 5th gen iPod.
Then again, I'd have no problem paying for a 6th gen iPod if it was basically an iPhone minus the cell phone bits, with something like Samsung's new 32GB flash drive (I say "like" because while the capacity is right, the pricing of the 32GB flash drive is currently quite a bit more than could be reasonably expected to go into an iPod). After all, I probably only use about 10GB of my iPod, anyway, and at that much data, there's *way* too much stuff in it for it to be convenient. That 10GB might even include the installation of Mac OS X that resides on the drive.
In fact, I'd actually want to have both a 6th gen iPod like I describe here, *and* an iPhone. While I think it's pretty cool that I could store at least some stuff on the iPhone, my cell phone is primarily a business tool, and I can't afford to waste too much battery life on media, especially without a swappable battery. With my Samsung SPH-i500 Palm phone (and the Kyocera one before that), I've always kept one battery on the charger/cradle and one in the phone. With my new Samsung SPH-m610, I'm actually considering buying a second unit, just so I can keep a spare battery charged at all times, since it has no cradle that can charge a second battery. I don't like having to keep my phone tethered just so it stays charged; I like to just swap batteries and go.
I also find it quite interesting that no one seems to be talking about the possibility of Inkwell running on the iPhone platform. Granted, I'm not entirely surprised at this, since Apple (and particularly Steve) would probably not want too many comparisons to the Newton.
As an aside, I also found it a bit amusing that when Steve got up there to talk about "products that changed the world", there was no mention of either the Apple I/II series of computers (which essentially created the personal computer market) or the Newton (which essentially created the PDA market), both of which arguably fall into the same category as the Mac (and Lisa, if you really want to be a stickler about it), the iPod, and the iPhone. Of course, Steve Jobs had very little to do with the Apple II, as I recall, and nothing at all to do with the Newton (other than killing it).
I'm going to take a Wild Ass Guess here and claim that Apple will have Inkwell running on the iPhone before very long, but it almost certainly won't be part of the initial roll-out because of the Newton associations. Oh, and Palm may as well close up shop right now...stick a fork in it, it's done. The only thing worth saving from Palm is Graffiti, which came before Palm OS as a Newton application, anyway.
The title of this article is nothing more than FUD. RTFA.
On the other hand, even if no third-party development capabilities ever surface, it's not as if that would make the iPhone (and its future derivatives) any less better than what's come out of Symbian, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and the rest.
The funny thing about the iPhone is that it's the first handheld I've seen that has caused me not to attempt to justify buying it, but to cause me to try to justify *not* buying it. Right now, I'm in the process of switching from a Samsung SPH-i500 Palm phone to a Samsung SPH-m610 coupled with a Nokia 770 tablet (Music I leave to a collection of iPods). It's certainly not what I would call a seamless transition (or a seamless experience), and one of my main motivations for doing this is to get a handheld that isn't crippled by proprietary software, but even as the iPhone was demonstrated, it appears to contains every essential feature that I need in a handheld computing experience. Sure, there's a few more features I would like to see, but I doubt that Apple is going to be quite that short-sighted about it. After all, no one really worries about third-party Windows Mobile and Palm OS apps "taking down the network", do they?
My guess is that Apple hasn't finalized the developer interfaces, yet. Most third-party apps would really just need to interact primarily with the network protocol stack, anyway. It's quite clear from the fact that the iPhone is touted as running "OS X", "Safari", and "Widgets", that the intended development environment for the iPhone line is Dashcode. Even Steve isn't Steve enough not to see the possibilities of third-party development. Need I mention that Steve is a master of misdirection?
It's a shame this got modded down to Troll, because the vast majority of people in this world fail to understand Fundamentalism in all its guises.
To paraphrase and conflate Ayn Rand and 1 Timothy, the refusal to reason is the root of all evil.
It's nothing more than a simple statement of fact--the war promulgated by Fundamentalist Islamist Extremists against what they consider the Godless Infidel will not end until one side or the other is completely annihilated.
Not that I advocate annihilation of one faction or the other, it's just that it's the nature of Fundamentalism to frame things in these terms.
I used to use only fluorescent bulbs, both traditional and compact in my house, until I started recording my music again. I don't remember if the early CFL's were any better (the $20 ones made by the bigs, like Philips, rather than the cheap-ass ones made by the off-brands they sell at Lowe's and HD), but I got so much interference in my systems because of them, that I had to turn off all the lights in the house just to get anything done. This did not well please She Who Must Be Obeyed. So, I replaced all the CFL's with regular incandescents, and I'm back in business. The regular big fluo's I can live without, but they're noisy, too.
As an aside, as an Amateur Radio operator, I can tell you that many, many, household appliances are guilty of severe RFI these days. I really don't think that I should have to run around putting chokes and such on devices I paid several hundred dollars to own.
Now, where's that FCC when you need them?
This being a site where an incredible amount of engineering and technology talent hangs out, how about some more constructive comments? At least Ford has the balls to talk about this issue, so how about we come up with some positive thoughts about how computing and transportation can be effectively and safely integrated? Let's face it, PCs in cars are coming, whether interaction experts are involved or not.
There are already many, many aftermarket ways to integrate computers with cars, and I'm currently working on a project to install a Mac mini in my Jeep to complement my Amateur Radio gear (Yaesu FT-100 HF/VHF/UHF system & Kenwood TM-D700A VHF/UHF system), GPS/APRS system (the Kenwood, plus a Garmin GPS 76map, soon to be upgraded), and my car stereo (Kenwood EZ-500 + iPod + satellite capable). Using a Mac mini with the addition of a ruggedized Mil-Spec HDD, and a DIN space touchscreen, I can have a shitload of wireless computing capability at my disposal wherever I go. It can run Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in a triple boot configuration. I can run OBDII (and better) automotive diagnostic software, manage my music library, connect to the Internet, run APRS packet radio software, get satellite radio weather, watch TV (obviously not while driving, but great for news on the go), and run a whole lot of other applications. Why I want to do all this is a bit beyond the scope of this comment, but I have a want and a need to do so.
Of course, all of this is cobbled together out of many, many parts that were never really designed to integrate as a whole. Imagine the possibilities if some company were to start pulling all of these things together into a coherent system? I guarantee you that all of these things will be common place in automobiles within ten years, if not by the end of *this decade* (minus, of course, the Amateur Radio stuff, although the big three *do* provide white papers on RF equipment installation in their vehicles.
By the time I'm done with my system, I'll have more communications and computing power in my car than most police cruisers, and I'm certain that pre-manufactured systems won't be far behind. It only remains to be seen how well such systems perform. In the spirit of the hacking community, I will say that I would prefer it if the auto manufacturers would make it a bit easier to install aftermarket electronics and put easily accessible (and securable) mounting positions in their cars, better wiring harnesses and grounding systems, and heavier duty alternators in vehicles. It's almost certain that, left to their own devices, they will put in black-box systems that will be practically impossible to hack.
And here I am, trying to figure out how one could possibly get killed by whacking a D&D set with a hammer...
OK, maybe if you gave a d8 a hard enough glancing blow, it might shoot off at a bizarre angle, blast right through your eye, and lodge in your brain?
As I mentioned in another comment, my primary mail system is Apple's Mail.app fortified with C-Command's SpamSieve, which uses Bayesian Filtering. Image spam simply doesn't get through. I haven't even trained it all that well. I've also been using Thunderbird, with its built-in Bayesian Filters, and SpanBayes on Outlook 2003. I have a bit less success filtering out the image spam, but then, those systems have little to no training at all. At least with SpamSieve, I made something of an effort. My corpus now has about 48K words, and I've only been using it for about six weeks.
I'm not so sure what everyone is complaining about. I'm using SpamSieve as a plug in to Mail.app, and it catches just about everything without much in the way of training. Currently, my statistics as of 2006-11-01 say it's 97.1% accurate (with 71% of my total mail volume being spam, but that includes some legitimate marketing mail that I no longer really want, and I'm too lazy to track down the list maintainers), and that number gets higher every day.
On Windows, I'm using either Mozilla Thunderbird (usually), or SpamBayes as a plug-in to Outlook 2003 (when I have to), and I get similar results.
Of course, what we really need to do is rethink the way that the whole email system is designed, just in terms of MTAs that work separately from MDAs, etc. This kind of filtering really needs to take place at what we currently call the MTA level, with a configurable corpus for each user. The filtering should be done before the mail is permanently accepted, so that the impact on storage resources is as minimal as possible. Granted, it still takes a lot of processing power.
Another thing I need to spend some time thinking about is how RFC822 messages are structured in general. I'm just pulling this out of my ass right now, but the fact is that message envelopes are much to easy to spoof. Why have a separate message envelope to route the mail when the addressing information is already supposed to be contained in the headers? With the way spam is going, the message needs to be processed in its entirety in any case, so perhaps the envelope has outlived its usefulness?
Bullshit.
QuickTime has *always* been better than anything Real has come up with, not to mention the fact that it's vastly cheaper, even if you use the Apple-branded version. To top it off, you can even use the open source Darwin Streaming Server if you are so inclined.
NPR used to offer all their content in QuickTime format, up until a couple of/few years ago.
...was the scene in Shelob's Lair from the LOTR movies. Seriously.
I wonder, could we make something akin to "Silly String" that could fire huge globs of a gooey, rubbery, net-like substance that could be used to immobilize people?
I figure, if anybody out there knows, or has tried this, they're probably on Slashdot...
Funny, it only cost Scaled Composites about $25 million of Paul Allen's money to get SpaceShipOne into space. Of course, if you count the $10 million dollar Ansari X-Prize, it only cost $15 million. And now Richard Branson is putting up $21 million more to fund SpaceShipTwo. It seems this particular argument is just a lot of hot air...which, unfortunately, will not get you to space.
I find it rather amusing that most proponents of the "free market", like yourself, are much more concerned with ignoring what the "free market" actually wants, and are much happier shoving their ideology down other peoples throats before actually grokking the consequences.
You'll have to pardon me if I don't think so much of Milton Friedman's views or the influence he has wielded over US monetary policy for the past few decades. Personally, I believe that the ideas he propagated are so harmful to society that they may very well be the root cause of the downfall of western civilization as we know it within a very short time frame. Of course, you seem to have bought so deeply into the "free market" that you are likely incapable of understanding this point.
Sorry if you took that as being rude. Will you think it's rude when the entire "free market"/"growing money supply"/"let them eat cake" way of life comes crashing down upon us all, and millions, if not billions, die in the ensuing chaos?
You missing one very, very important point. There has been exactly NOTHING preventing any private company from developing a space vehicle outside of the government funding system. Had space travel development been left to the private sector, we would likely still not have left the atmosphere.
I guess you're probably just a little ticked off that Milton "Free Market" Friedman died, so I'll cut you some slack and not poke gaping holes through all the rest of your arguements.
Why bother spending all that money visiting asteroids, when if we just sit back and wait, the asteroids will come to us?
Can we at least *try* to avoid posting false news items that are really nothing more than thinly-disguised press releases?
Man, you really need either another drink, or a refill of your anti-psychotic prescription--or maybe a tinfoil hat.
Have a cup of tea. Tea's a good drink. It'll get you through.