Do you see the correlation between the period Apple was knocked off their pedestal by the extensible alternative offered by IBM and when they began to make a come-back? Did you notice how Microsoft has lost market share to competition from Apple and open source in over the past decade? Although the latter of these is occurring much more slowly either as Microsoft have behaved somewhat favorably to third-party development for their platform (just so long as it does not compete with them) or open source alternatives are not compelling the market to move away so rapidly. Market forces may be lumbering at times, but they eventually serve ill effects to companies making poor decisions.
I fully expect (and, as an iPhone user, hope for) Apple to suffer in the long-run for their efforts to lock out third-party software development for the iPhone. Just wait and see—their competition will not sit idle as Apple weaken their own position with a killer product.
While this is to be applauded, it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head.
What makes altruism in this case “better”? Innovation is born from necessity and competition. Evolution is not sparked because it makes someone feel warm and cuddly with sunshine and rainbows, but because of the need to survive. History has proved that open platforms are essential in this market and those who decide otherwise inevitably get punished (e.g., Apple, Microsoft). Only those which choose openness make it in the end, and whether they did it because “they truly believed” or because they wanted to stay afloat makes no difference.
To the whiners about the price drop: I see no rational reason for you to be upset. You are early adopters and you evidently decided favorably to the value proposition of the iPhone. People who complain about a price-cut being a bad thing simply amaze me: they are pinning their own impatience, foolishness, or buyers remorse on someone else. If you feel cheated, take some personal responsibility and accept that if you did not like the price, you should not have made the purchase! When prices are lowered, it is almost always a good thing (there are exceptions for undercutting and subsidized goods, but I digress), and in this case, it is likely in response to market forces. That is how capitalism is meant to work. All of that is neglecting the fact that analyses of the manufacturing costs revealed huge margins for Apple almost immediately after the release (and reported on again, and again, and again). To the people who are complaining, you should make sure you understand caveat emptorbefore you plunk down over half a grand for a cell phone, especially since many—if not most—of you had all the facts available up-front. And in the interest of full disclosure, I do own an iPhone and made my purchase shortly after Apple subsidized my $200 early termination fee to Sprint. In closure, thank you for the price-cut, Steve!
People, when I learned about these restrictions on reincarnation, I nearly lost control of my incredible mystical might! However, after careful consideration, I have decided not to use my awesome supernatural powers against the Chinese state. I could unleash a magical fury and I could re-materialize as a thousand dragons that would crush this oppressive regime, but only if I wanted to. Luckily for them, I have decided to—ahem—exercise restraint and let the process work itself out through normal means.
Perhaps is this to prevent drivers from squeezing every last nickel out of us. Especially in such a large city, visitors may have no idea what the most direct and therefore cheapest route is to their destination. A system that shows the path will give the consumer the opportunity to be informed about the service they are buying and agree to or protest it as appropriate.
Why does claiming status intrinsically make the claim false? I hereby claim to post on Slashdot, an utterly false statement by your logic. I suppose you can, uh, “pretty much guarantee” I not a cyclist or a geek simply because I describe myself as a cyclist and a geek? If you want to get all metaphysical here, I think the argument could be made that because the universe is deterministic (although not predictable) none of us has any free will (thoughts are chemical reactions bounded by laws of physics which strictly follow causality) and it is therefore impossible for anyone to be a free-thinker. But then after our romp of intellectual masturbation, we have ultimately learned nothing because concepts of free will (and by extension, thought) are abstractions that eliminate the minutiae we cannot or do not care to quantify. The Stock Market operates on the atomic level, but nobody needs to study it at such detail in order to understand its workings and that likewise applies to human behavior. Or maybe we should just simply address the likely possibility that you have no idea what the term “freethought” actually means.
The iPhone is not an interesting or compelling product because of the icons, user interface widgets, or exterior design. Copying these purely aesthetic elements does not produce what people here are calling a “clone”. The iPhone is important because of the multi-touch input device, the resolution independent graphics system delivering the visuals, the hardware graphics acceleration, the frameworks underneath, and all other foundational elements that make whole classes of applications possible (e.g., the Google Maps client that nearly approaches Google Earth in presentation quality).
As far as I can tell, this knock-off does not copy anything substantive about the iPhone: the technology that makes it possible. It is just another phone that may appear similar on the surface and that is that. All these silly arguments about how they are “stealing innovation” and other nonsense are a waste of time. If it was so easy to create the raw materials behind the iPhone, or they could have been pulled off the shelf, this product would have existed before Apple introduced it.
On a side-note, this goes to show how wide-spread the ignorance is about what the iPhone (or OS X with Quartz and the Core frameworks for that matter) actually brings to the table. So many people I discuss the device (and the Mac) with think it is identical to any other phone (or computer) but with glossy-looking graphics. This is an entirely superficial assumption and ultimately wrong.
... tour buses and roadies and groupies and all that...
What female groupies provide has tremendous value and should be considered a sizable portion of the income a musician receives. Just think about how much that service would cost if purchased outright.
I can own many things, but not my partner. She stays as long as she wants me, and vice versa. And it is good.
With a wise attitude like that, your odds are good she'll stay a very long time.
And this is exactly why marriage may be a bad idea (not saying it is universally bad, but that it is not universally good). It can become a crutch that prompts the two partners to fall into complacency, believing their vows will hold the relationship together and they can get by with less effort. This is nonsense. Both parties have to remain focused on creating an incentive to maintain the relationship. If you have no interest or no ability to work on creating that mutual incentive, your marriage is a sham. If you do have the dedication, why get married? It will not help you at best and could promote false security at worse. Further damage is caused when the couple really does not have what it takes but then they unhappily remain shackled to each other simply to serve the interests of an abstract conception.
So, if Apple enters the sex business, there will be utilities for “iGirl” that will make her produce sounds upon contact? Not sure about others here, but I dislike fakers.
Apple is slowly phasing tactile response out of their input devices. Started with mice, then the iPhone, and now with keyboards. Soon, we will live in a polished world where nothing lets us know we touched it! I hope Apple never enters the sex industry.
Are they taking into account LCD monitors where the pixels block light rather than emit it? The back light is on no matter what color is displayed and pixels that are “off” appear as white. What am I missing?
It might just wake up the lemmings that flocked to a new, untried, untested in the real world device.
What a pity it would be if nobody ever tried new, untried, and untested devices. At one point computers fell into this category.
It annoys me the way the masses line up to get some new piece of tech thinking they'll be instantly cool and socially hip by owning one.
Or maybe they thought features not available on other mobile devices would be compelling and useful. To name a few: powerful conference calling, visual voice mail, and a full-featured web browser. There is also the possibility people who bought them wanted to consolidate their phones and music players. Perhaps I am going out on a limb here. By the way, I have noted some concrete reasons here why someone might purchase an iPhone. Would you care to substantiate your comment suggesting people bought in to be cool and socially hip?
It crashes and they just can't understand why. Then it crashes a lot.
Are we discussing cars, computers, airplanes, or the iPhone?
You don't think it's possibly because of contractual obligations to AT&T do you?
Not in the slightest. AT&T offer Blackberries and Treos, both having official third-party development tools and mature ecosystems of third-party software (much of it free and open source). Why is the iPhone an exception?
No matter any more, however. To restate my point, with the amount of effort being poured into iPhone hacking, it will only be a matter of time before people begin developing their own applications for the device, and I suspect the caliber of those applications will be substandard—a measure of the tools. Apple and AT&T have three choices: try to put the genie back in the bottle through litigation, do nothing and let hacked third-party tool chains dominate the market, or release official SDKs and at least have some influence over the market. It should be strikingly obvious, taking history into account, that option number one will fail. Of the latter two options, guess which has the best out-come for the providers involved.
This has reached the point of silliness. Efforts to “crack open” the iPhone have been met with large degrees of success. As has been reported elsewhere, a developer tool chain is in the early stages. The iPhone has been owned and the genie is out of the bottle. Apple, why not just open it up officially? Face up to the obvious fact that it is a hand-held computer with decent horsepower that many technology geeks will want to use creatively and constructively. Releasing official development tools will give a segment of the market what it clearly wants anyway (look at the rapid progress hackers have made) and give incentive for us hold-outs to buy-in. How much simpler does this have to get?
So many comments have been posted that enthusiastically denigrate people who have sex. In summary, stating that people who do not practice abstinence and have contracted HIV somehow deserve it. By this silly, childish reasoning, anyone who drives a car on a regular basis and gets into a fatal accident likewise “deserves it” because they know driving a car comes with inherent risk.
Sex is not bad and it is hardly immoral when safely practiced between two consenting partners. I hope all of you will take notice that every one of us are equipped with organs and instincts that have developed specifically for the purpose of engaging sexual practices. No one would disparage anyone else for using their eyes to see. Why do so towards people who use their genitals for their proper purpose? Perhaps it upsets certain groups that people who enjoy sex are just that much more likely to propagate their genes than those who consider sex an abomination.
What we need are more people who are properly informed about sex so that it can be had as a rational pleasure. This completely baseless and subjective assumption that we must abhor the practice needs to go away. Supporters of anti-sex messages need to prove it or keep their opinions to themselves if they only want to tear down others.
I suspect this approach is weak (relatively speaking) as any time you use something like a camera to capture entropy, you are inherently causing collisions due to the limited and discrete precision of the medium. To clarify with a concrete example, it is possible (although unlikely) for multiple states of the lamp to result in the same colors at the same pixels in the captured digital image due to inadequate dynamic range.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see the correlation between the period Apple was knocked off their pedestal by the extensible alternative offered by IBM and when they began to make a come-back? Did you notice how Microsoft has lost market share to competition from Apple and open source in over the past decade? Although the latter of these is occurring much more slowly either as Microsoft have behaved somewhat favorably to third-party development for their platform (just so long as it does not compete with them) or open source alternatives are not compelling the market to move away so rapidly. Market forces may be lumbering at times, but they eventually serve ill effects to companies making poor decisions.
I fully expect (and, as an iPhone user, hope for) Apple to suffer in the long-run for their efforts to lock out third-party software development for the iPhone. Just wait and see—their competition will not sit idle as Apple weaken their own position with a killer product.
What makes altruism in this case “better”? Innovation is born from necessity and competition. Evolution is not sparked because it makes someone feel warm and cuddly with sunshine and rainbows, but because of the need to survive. History has proved that open platforms are essential in this market and those who decide otherwise inevitably get punished (e.g., Apple, Microsoft). Only those which choose openness make it in the end, and whether they did it because “they truly believed” or because they wanted to stay afloat makes no difference.
And soon they will be, again.
To the whiners about the price drop: I see no rational reason for you to be upset. You are early adopters and you evidently decided favorably to the value proposition of the iPhone. People who complain about a price-cut being a bad thing simply amaze me: they are pinning their own impatience, foolishness, or buyers remorse on someone else. If you feel cheated, take some personal responsibility and accept that if you did not like the price, you should not have made the purchase! When prices are lowered, it is almost always a good thing (there are exceptions for undercutting and subsidized goods, but I digress), and in this case, it is likely in response to market forces. That is how capitalism is meant to work. All of that is neglecting the fact that analyses of the manufacturing costs revealed huge margins for Apple almost immediately after the release (and reported on again, and again, and again). To the people who are complaining, you should make sure you understand caveat emptor before you plunk down over half a grand for a cell phone, especially since many—if not most—of you had all the facts available up-front. And in the interest of full disclosure, I do own an iPhone and made my purchase shortly after Apple subsidized my $200 early termination fee to Sprint. In closure, thank you for the price-cut, Steve!
We should keep denying climate change!
You may want to do some reading before using the term. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism.
You could try putting your question online as an Ask Slashdot post. Use the Submit Story link on the left. Good luck finding your answer!
You might enjoy FindBugs. The project also offers an Eclipse plugin.
People, when I learned about these restrictions on reincarnation, I nearly lost control of my incredible mystical might! However, after careful consideration, I have decided not to use my awesome supernatural powers against the Chinese state. I could unleash a magical fury and I could re-materialize as a thousand dragons that would crush this oppressive regime, but only if I wanted to. Luckily for them, I have decided to—ahem—exercise restraint and let the process work itself out through normal means.
Perhaps is this to prevent drivers from squeezing every last nickel out of us. Especially in such a large city, visitors may have no idea what the most direct and therefore cheapest route is to their destination. A system that shows the path will give the consumer the opportunity to be informed about the service they are buying and agree to or protest it as appropriate.
Why does claiming status intrinsically make the claim false? I hereby claim to post on Slashdot, an utterly false statement by your logic. I suppose you can, uh, “pretty much guarantee” I not a cyclist or a geek simply because I describe myself as a cyclist and a geek? If you want to get all metaphysical here, I think the argument could be made that because the universe is deterministic (although not predictable) none of us has any free will (thoughts are chemical reactions bounded by laws of physics which strictly follow causality) and it is therefore impossible for anyone to be a free-thinker. But then after our romp of intellectual masturbation, we have ultimately learned nothing because concepts of free will (and by extension, thought) are abstractions that eliminate the minutiae we cannot or do not care to quantify. The Stock Market operates on the atomic level, but nobody needs to study it at such detail in order to understand its workings and that likewise applies to human behavior. Or maybe we should just simply address the likely possibility that you have no idea what the term “freethought” actually means.
Are they getting to expensive or are they just tired of nerds? Either way, I dislike the alternative.
The iPhone is not an interesting or compelling product because of the icons, user interface widgets, or exterior design. Copying these purely aesthetic elements does not produce what people here are calling a “clone”. The iPhone is important because of the multi-touch input device, the resolution independent graphics system delivering the visuals, the hardware graphics acceleration, the frameworks underneath, and all other foundational elements that make whole classes of applications possible (e.g., the Google Maps client that nearly approaches Google Earth in presentation quality).
As far as I can tell, this knock-off does not copy anything substantive about the iPhone: the technology that makes it possible. It is just another phone that may appear similar on the surface and that is that. All these silly arguments about how they are “stealing innovation” and other nonsense are a waste of time. If it was so easy to create the raw materials behind the iPhone, or they could have been pulled off the shelf, this product would have existed before Apple introduced it.
On a side-note, this goes to show how wide-spread the ignorance is about what the iPhone (or OS X with Quartz and the Core frameworks for that matter) actually brings to the table. So many people I discuss the device (and the Mac) with think it is identical to any other phone (or computer) but with glossy-looking graphics. This is an entirely superficial assumption and ultimately wrong.
What female groupies provide has tremendous value and should be considered a sizable portion of the income a musician receives. Just think about how much that service would cost if purchased outright.
And this is exactly why marriage may be a bad idea (not saying it is universally bad, but that it is not universally good). It can become a crutch that prompts the two partners to fall into complacency, believing their vows will hold the relationship together and they can get by with less effort. This is nonsense. Both parties have to remain focused on creating an incentive to maintain the relationship. If you have no interest or no ability to work on creating that mutual incentive, your marriage is a sham. If you do have the dedication, why get married? It will not help you at best and could promote false security at worse. Further damage is caused when the couple really does not have what it takes but then they unhappily remain shackled to each other simply to serve the interests of an abstract conception.
So, if Apple enters the sex business, there will be utilities for “iGirl” that will make her produce sounds upon contact? Not sure about others here, but I dislike fakers.
Apple is slowly phasing tactile response out of their input devices. Started with mice, then the iPhone, and now with keyboards. Soon, we will live in a polished world where nothing lets us know we touched it! I hope Apple never enters the sex industry.
“Fake Steve Jobs is fake!” Shocking!
And video is composed of a sequence of...?
Are they taking into account LCD monitors where the pixels block light rather than emit it? The back light is on no matter what color is displayed and pixels that are “off” appear as white. What am I missing?
What a pity it would be if nobody ever tried new, untried, and untested devices. At one point computers fell into this category.
Or maybe they thought features not available on other mobile devices would be compelling and useful. To name a few: powerful conference calling, visual voice mail, and a full-featured web browser. There is also the possibility people who bought them wanted to consolidate their phones and music players. Perhaps I am going out on a limb here. By the way, I have noted some concrete reasons here why someone might purchase an iPhone. Would you care to substantiate your comment suggesting people bought in to be cool and socially hip?
Are we discussing cars, computers, airplanes, or the iPhone?
Not in the slightest. AT&T offer Blackberries and Treos, both having official third-party development tools and mature ecosystems of third-party software (much of it free and open source). Why is the iPhone an exception?
No matter any more, however. To restate my point, with the amount of effort being poured into iPhone hacking, it will only be a matter of time before people begin developing their own applications for the device, and I suspect the caliber of those applications will be substandard—a measure of the tools. Apple and AT&T have three choices: try to put the genie back in the bottle through litigation, do nothing and let hacked third-party tool chains dominate the market, or release official SDKs and at least have some influence over the market. It should be strikingly obvious, taking history into account, that option number one will fail. Of the latter two options, guess which has the best out-come for the providers involved.
This has reached the point of silliness. Efforts to “crack open” the iPhone have been met with large degrees of success. As has been reported elsewhere, a developer tool chain is in the early stages. The iPhone has been owned and the genie is out of the bottle. Apple, why not just open it up officially? Face up to the obvious fact that it is a hand-held computer with decent horsepower that many technology geeks will want to use creatively and constructively. Releasing official development tools will give a segment of the market what it clearly wants anyway (look at the rapid progress hackers have made) and give incentive for us hold-outs to buy-in. How much simpler does this have to get?
So many comments have been posted that enthusiastically denigrate people who have sex. In summary, stating that people who do not practice abstinence and have contracted HIV somehow deserve it. By this silly, childish reasoning, anyone who drives a car on a regular basis and gets into a fatal accident likewise “deserves it” because they know driving a car comes with inherent risk.
Sex is not bad and it is hardly immoral when safely practiced between two consenting partners. I hope all of you will take notice that every one of us are equipped with organs and instincts that have developed specifically for the purpose of engaging sexual practices. No one would disparage anyone else for using their eyes to see. Why do so towards people who use their genitals for their proper purpose? Perhaps it upsets certain groups that people who enjoy sex are just that much more likely to propagate their genes than those who consider sex an abomination.
What we need are more people who are properly informed about sex so that it can be had as a rational pleasure. This completely baseless and subjective assumption that we must abhor the practice needs to go away. Supporters of anti-sex messages need to prove it or keep their opinions to themselves if they only want to tear down others.
At any rate, I would rather see more people fucking than fighting.
I suspect this approach is weak (relatively speaking) as any time you use something like a camera to capture entropy, you are inherently causing collisions due to the limited and discrete precision of the medium. To clarify with a concrete example, it is possible (although unlikely) for multiple states of the lamp to result in the same colors at the same pixels in the captured digital image due to inadequate dynamic range.