Not to be pedantic, but CD audio quality is 44.1 kHz
44.1 kHz is the sampling frequency, 20 kHz is the audio signal frequency. According to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorm in order to accurately capture a signal you need to sample at least at twice the rate of the highest frequency you want to capture. That means you should sample at a minimum of 40 kHz to accurately capture 20 kHz signals.
Now, you want to overshoot a bit because of how the filters work so you should choose a sampling rate that's a bit higher than the minimum necessary. They chose 44.1 kHz partially for this reason, but also because of the reason found on this site:
From John Watkinson, The Art of Digital Audio, 2nd edition, pg. 104:
In the early days of digital audio research, the necessary bandwidth of about 1 Mbps per audio channel was difficult to store. Disk drives had the bandwidth but not the capacity for long recording time, so attention turned to video recorders. These were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field. Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at 50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.
The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field (blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or 625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.
In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :
60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz
In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by
some apparently save some money by using a sequence of green/red/red/green/blue/blue which reduces the resolution
I believe you are referring to something similar to the Bayer Filter where the pattern is more like green-blue-green-red. Since human eyes are generally more sensitive to green than blue or red you can get a better image by having twice as many green elements as you do blue or red.
I don't know of any pattern like green-red-red-green-blue-blue and I can't see how it would save any money since you'd still have the same number of elements but it would appear worse to most people.
At 15 miles x 3 miles x 600ft that's 21,314,566,152 cubic meters. At.5ppm (absolute minimum, from TFA), that's 10,657 cubic meters of pure oil.
Except what's the exact shape of the plume? Cubic? Spheroid? Most likely it's some sort of odd, elongated shape. Now what's the density of the oil at different points, is it mostly 0.5 ppm or does it vary greatly?
My point is that these sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations don't serve any useful purpose because they can be off by quite a bit. That's why we need a thorough scientific survey to come up with more detailed information than these simple numbers. Until we have that there's no use in throwing around useless statistics.
No matter what the size of the plume it's going to be a small blip in the overall world environment. The Gulf Stream itself is around 30 million cubic metres per second of flow past Florida. 10 thousand cubic meters of oil is paltry compared to that rate of flow. Yeah, in the short term there will be some animals affected and maybe we'll have a bloom of microorganisms feeding on the oil but it'll quickly clear once the source is capped.
Lets put it all in perspective. It's been approximately 49 days since the accident. That's about 4 million seconds. 30 million cubic meters times 4 million seconds equals 1.2x10^14 cubic meters of water. Your calculations estimate the plume at around 1.1x10^4 cubic meters of oil. This means that the Gulf Stream over the last 49 days is 10 billion times larger than the amount of oil in that plume. That amount of oil is literally a drop in the ocean.
The biggest effect will be in areas where the oil can gather and sit, such as wetlands and coves. The positive thing about those areas is they are easier to identify and target in cleanup efforts than a large, diffuse plume in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, I'm not saying that this isn't a serious accident or anything. It surely is serious, but it's just not as bad of a long-term disaster as some alarmists are making it out to be. We'll cap the well, do some cleanup, and then move on. The environment will be affected a bit, some animals will die, we'll have to test fish to make sure that they are still fit for consumption. In the future we'll have to come up with better ways of preventing and handling spills. Life will move on.
Yes, the base station would appear to have a higher signal strength because the signal would spread less and yes, the device's signal would be gathered and focused so it would have a better chance of working than no directional antenna system. However, there would still be considerable interference from the rest of the devices. Would a single directional antenna be enough? Possibly but it's not certain.
Some of those "unused" GSM bands are actually being used by other types of devices in the US, that's why they are unavailable for cellular use. You might be able to find something that's not currently in use, get a special dispensation from the FCC, and get the specialized equipment to use the bands but that's a lot of ifs and maybes. It's still easier, if you can, just to make people in the audience stop using their devices for an hour.
But the fact that there are USB host signals in the iPad's dock connector is a wild departure from every other iPhone-like device that Apple produces.
The iPhone also has a USB-dock connector and the same signaling mechanism is used across all of these devices. It's not a wild departure at all.
Had any of these folks created a spec and a drawing that included a place for an micro SD card and sent that down the chain to the folks who make specs work, I have every bit of confidence that Apple's engineering department would have had little difficulty implementing it.
Sure, it's not impossible to do and if it was a requirement then they would have done it and traded off other aspects such as cost, complexity, dimensions, and other features as necessary. Someone decided that they didn't want to make those tradeoffs and so there is no micro-SD slot.
What would the tradeoffs have been? We can only conjecture, however, it obviously hasn't been a huge roadblock to adoption so they probably made the right decision.
...or few sharpshooters aiming the antennas from the side of the scene.
That won't do much to help the phone itself which will still be deluged by wifi data from the audience. What you'd need to do is to have an external directional antenna on a mount and connected to the phone. Certainly doable but now you have to do the Keynote trailing a wire and the wire will be in the closeups. Maybe it's better than the demo failing but no matter what the situation isn't optimal.
Generally, yeah, poor planning; and wouldn't require any acrobatics to resolve, really - for example Apple/AT&T could perhaps get temporary license (like singular events often do) to operate separate, local, low power basestation on frequencies which aren't used in the US normally
That's assuming that the phone could easily be tuned to one of those odd frequencies. Most times the frequencies are fixed in silicon and other factors like the design of the antenna and can't easily be changed. Certainly Apple could have made some custom silicon but this is really the first time they've had problems of this sort. Perhaps next time they will know to take extra steps in case they run into this situation again.
Of course the easiest solution is to just require that the audience turn off their devices during the Keynote, assuming they listen!
So when you're out in public you got to ask everybody around you to turn off their wifi so you can use your phone?
Of course not. I know this is a troll but voice over cellular is not the same as data over wifi. There's also a huge difference between 1 or 2 base stations and a dozen or so clients and the situation at the Keynote where they had a couple of hundred base stations in a single room.
Occasionally, if you are connected to a wifi network and it stalls you might have to disconnect from the wifi and then your phone falls back to use the cellular data channels. I believe the iPhone will do this automatically but doing it manually might be faster, since the phone will take a little time to recognize that the wifi network is stalled.
The iPad is already very different, in that it is rather large and has a USB port.
The iPad does not have a USB port, it has the same dock connector that the iPhone uses.
Never attribute to technical limitations that which can be adequately explained by greed.
I don't know all of the reasons that Apple might have had for non-removable storage on the iPad, I'm just listing possibilities. I'm sure that reality includes some of these reasons and possibly more but you'd have to talk to the engineers over at Apple to get their actual reasoning. I'm sure some of it, but not all of it, is the money issue.
I don't know a whole lot about wireless bandwidth, but one thing I did notice about this display is that the 3GS apparently had no problem loading the NYT website, while the iPhone 4 wouldn't load it. In my eyes it appeared to be more of a glitch with the hardware, rather than a problem with the network. Also, how else could the people in the audience use that same network (probably pretty slowly I'd guess) if the network were that saturated.
When you have an overloaded wifi spectrum like that usually what happens is that some devices manage to get a clean connection and some don't. It's very sporadic and unpredictable. It's not like every device's connection will fail. You might even have what looks like a good connection and then it will stall for no apparent reason.
There are also several bands on which they could possibly be communicating and it could just be that the 4G and the 3GS happened to be on different bands at that point. The 4G's band might have gotten over-congested and there was still some room on the band that the 3GS was on.
And, yes, there were a ton of reporters and people using devices in that audience. Wireless is great but it relies on the assumption that there will only be a certain amount of connections communicating at one time. Once you surpass that limit you get into the "odd things happen" zone.
Yes, but why did apple not have the demo phones connected to a secure, and dedicated, wifi network? Not doing that just seemed silly.
It doesn't matter how secure your wifi network is, there's only so much bandwidth in the appropriate frequencies. Jam enough base stations into the same space and every network in that area, closed or open, will start behaving erratically because of the interference coming from the other devices. There's not many ways around it other than maybe defying FCC rules and amplifying your signal a ton to drown out all the other ones.
One thing they could have done if they really planned in advance was to use extremely directional antennas and basically make a point-to-point connection, only listening and transmitting on a narrow path. This would require additional equipment and planning and would have been very tough with a handheld device like a phone.
In the end their best play was to get most people to stop using their laptops and that took enough pressure off of their network to allow the demos to work decently.
Yeah, it's not as clear on the iPad. I'm guessing several reasons.
One is they wanted to keep everything as similar as possible between the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad. Since the iPad would be the only one that had the space for a SD slot they chose to go without one on all the devices.
A second reason would be that they wanted easily-definable configurations and allowing people to put in their own SD card would cause the device to have odd amounts of storage.
A third might be design issues. Supporting stuff like SD cards might mess with internal timing, bus design of the device, or software support and Apple just didn't feel it was worth pursuing.
Lastly, allowing people to buy a lower-end device and then add in more storage later would generate less money than having people go for the higher memory ones from the start.
Only the minds at Apple truly know how much each of these weighed on the final design.
It is just not worth it for most developers to keep 2 versions of every app, considering now you have to also keep an ipad version, and a higher resolution version for the new iphone.
It can all be done in a single version. The iPhone and iPad versions can easily be made to run as a single app which run on either device, no matter the resolution. Also, with in-app purchases you can have a free version which converts into a paid version upon making the in-app payment. This means a developer can easily have a single version in the app store which covers all the bases.
There are quite a few apps in the app store which have consolidated themselves in this fashion. It's really very little extra work for the developer and because they only have to maintain a single app it actually ends up saving work. It also makes it less confusing for consumers so your app is more likely to be purchased.
It was a pretty funny comment from the crowd, I laughed.
Of course it turned out that there were something like 570 wifi base stations operating in the audience and it totally hosed the whole wifi network for the event. Since the iPhones were set to load their data over wifi rather than over the cell network it killed the demos. Once the organizers made people turn off their devices the demos went very smoothly. Funny how that works!
Apple wants the iPhone to look like a magical device that just works - no obvious buttons, switches, speakers, seams, etc. Apple's reputation is built on this. If Steve could convince everyone that changing the speaker volume is a bad idea, and that he could pick the right volume level for everyone - he would do it, just to eliminate another physical complication from the device.
It's certainly not the actual reason. Apple has a micro-SIM card slot on the new iPhone 4G and that adds a seam. They didn't seem to have much problem with it being there.
The problem is that a soldered card takes up a lot less room in the device than a card + carrier. If you look at teardowns of the device it's pretty much packed solid and there's not a bit of spare space. In order to accommodate all of the slots and features everyone wants, such as physical keyboards, replaceable batteries, memory card slots and so on, Apple would have to either increase the device size or cut out some of the features planned for the device, maybe a lower capacity battery, lower quality camera, worse display, and so on.
Steve Jobs even said in the keynote that they had to move from a regular SIM to a micro-SIM because of space concerns.
I'm sure there are some esthetic concerns in addition to the engineering ramifications but I'm willing to bet that engineering is what really decided the matter. Overall the new iPhone is pretty damn compact and crammed with electronics, it's a wonder they could fit so much into such a spare package.
The format is just half the picture. Apple can and probably will slather the format with a proprietary DRM. So your book could be PDF under the DRM but it doesn't make it any more portable to other readers for being so.
Yeah, just like music in the iTunes store. Oh wait, that music is DRM-free and in an open format...
Anyways, this is more about 3rd-party content being usable in the book reader app. PDFs were perfectly readable from day one on the iPhone. All the new announcement means is that there's an easier way to get them on your device and they will be easier to organize and consolidate than before.
Yeah, I definitely agree that's a great way to reduce app clutter and confusion. The good thing is that Apple is offering these types of tools to developers so that we can be innovative and creative with how we finance the development. The more tools we have the better the apps can get.
10:54AM - "Megapixels are nice, but what cellphone cameras are really about is capturing photons and low-light photography. So we've gone from a 3 to a 5 megapixel sensor with a backside illuminated sensor."
10:55AM - "It's a way of getting more light to the sensor... also, when most people increase the megapixels, they make the pixel sensors smaller. We've kept them the same size so they capture more photons. We've got a 5x digital zome, tap to focus, and LED flash."
So yeah, if it's accurate it's kinda cool that he at least mentioned photons - at least to the nerds!
I've only seen a liveblog of the event that reported him as saying photons. We'll see the truth of it when the video of the event or a transcript of it is released. Being an Instrumental Chemist I definitely thought it was pretty cool.
Sounds reasonable enough to me. I'm a developer myself and I don't think I'll be doing it either. However, I could see people doing it as a way to put out a clearly-labeled free version to defray development costs and serve as a try-before-you-buy.
It depends on a lot of factors but at least it's an option and easy to add into an app if you want to give it a whirl.
I'm willing to bet that developers will allow users to choose between cheap apps with advertisements and apps that cost more but are advertisement free. This is happening right now in the app store even without Apple providing an easy way for developers to implement advertisements. The users win because more choice is almost always better, if you do download a free app and see that it has a ton of advertisements then no harm, remove it from your device and either get the paid version or move on to another app.
Adblock is a good add-on for your browser and it'd be nice to have for mobile Safari but I don't think it's a good thing if it also works on purchased apps. App developers do a lot of work on building these apps and they deserve to get paid for their efforts, if they want to be paid. Allowing people to get an inexpensive, advertisements-supported app and then block the advertisements would be cheating developers out of their work.
The market will balance all these things out. If an app goes overboard and charges too much or has too many advertisements then someone else will come by and eat their lunch with a better app. It happens all the time, competition is a good way to correct these sort of things.
As far as the bandwidth to Apple's advertisement servers, how do you know if it does count toward your carrier bandwidth? There hasn't been any announcement about it. There are several services on the iPhone that don't count toward your bandwidth, I believe that App Store purchases are one of them. We'll see how it pans out but I bet that the advertisement bandwidth will not count towards your total bandwidth.
Again, I believe he did say in the keynote that the lens is a better lens but we'll have to wait until there's official specs released or someone independent does some actual tests with it to be sure.
without a decent lens or good sensor, most of those pixels will be just noise anyway.
Apparently that's pretty close to what Jobs said in the keynote. He said the new camera not only shoots 720 but it does this with a larger sensor so the sensor elements still capture a decent amount of photons and don't lose quality. He also said they use better lenses. We'll see exactly how it pans out but the shots of pictures taken with the 3G model vs the new 4G model show that there's been a huge jump in quality.
It's an optional thing for a developer to include in his app. I can imagine that there will be free apps that use iAdd and pay versions that don't have ads. Just use the version without ads and you are good. If there's no version without ads then don't use the app!
That's basically how it works now except Apple is providing developers with an easy and good-looking way to include ads in their app without having to cut deals on the side. Pretty much win-win for Apple, app developers and iOS users.
If you look at the relevant California law part of "reasonable effort" is giving it to the police, something that neither the person who found the device nor Gizmodo did: California CIVIL CODE SECTION 2080-2080.10
2080.1. (a) If the owner is unknown or has not claimed the property, the person saving or finding the property shall, if the property is of the value of one hundred dollars ($100) or more, within a reasonable time turn the property over to the police department of the city or city and county, if found therein, or to the sheriff's department of the county if found outside of city limits, and shall make an affidavit, stating when and where he or she found or saved the property, particularly describing it. If the property was saved, the affidavit shall state:
(1) From what and how it was saved.
(2) Whether the owner of the property is known to the affiant.
(3) That the affiant has not secreted, withheld, or disposed of any part of the property.
(b) The police department or the sheriff's department shall notify the owner, if his or her identity is reasonably ascertainable, that it possesses the property and where it may be claimed. The police department or sheriff's department may require payment by the owner of a reasonable charge to defray costs of storage and care of the property.
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Not to be pedantic, but CD audio quality is 44.1 kHz
44.1 kHz is the sampling frequency, 20 kHz is the audio signal frequency. According to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorm in order to accurately capture a signal you need to sample at least at twice the rate of the highest frequency you want to capture. That means you should sample at a minimum of 40 kHz to accurately capture 20 kHz signals.
Now, you want to overshoot a bit because of how the filters work so you should choose a sampling rate that's a bit higher than the minimum necessary. They chose 44.1 kHz partially for this reason, but also because of the reason found on this site:
From John Watkinson, The Art of Digital Audio, 2nd edition, pg. 104:
In the early days of digital audio research, the necessary bandwidth of about 1 Mbps per audio channel was difficult to store. Disk drives had the bandwidth but not the capacity for long recording time, so attention turned to video recorders. These were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field. Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at 50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.
The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field (blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or 625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.
In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :
60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz
In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by
50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 Khz.
some apparently save some money by using a sequence of green/red/red/green/blue/blue which reduces the resolution
I believe you are referring to something similar to the Bayer Filter where the pattern is more like green-blue-green-red. Since human eyes are generally more sensitive to green than blue or red you can get a better image by having twice as many green elements as you do blue or red.
I don't know of any pattern like green-red-red-green-blue-blue and I can't see how it would save any money since you'd still have the same number of elements but it would appear worse to most people.
At 15 miles x 3 miles x 600ft that's 21,314,566,152 cubic meters. At .5ppm (absolute minimum, from TFA), that's 10,657 cubic meters of pure oil.
Except what's the exact shape of the plume? Cubic? Spheroid? Most likely it's some sort of odd, elongated shape. Now what's the density of the oil at different points, is it mostly 0.5 ppm or does it vary greatly?
My point is that these sort of back-of-the-napkin calculations don't serve any useful purpose because they can be off by quite a bit. That's why we need a thorough scientific survey to come up with more detailed information than these simple numbers. Until we have that there's no use in throwing around useless statistics.
No matter what the size of the plume it's going to be a small blip in the overall world environment. The Gulf Stream itself is around 30 million cubic metres per second of flow past Florida. 10 thousand cubic meters of oil is paltry compared to that rate of flow. Yeah, in the short term there will be some animals affected and maybe we'll have a bloom of microorganisms feeding on the oil but it'll quickly clear once the source is capped.
Lets put it all in perspective. It's been approximately 49 days since the accident. That's about 4 million seconds. 30 million cubic meters times 4 million seconds equals 1.2x10^14 cubic meters of water. Your calculations estimate the plume at around 1.1x10^4 cubic meters of oil. This means that the Gulf Stream over the last 49 days is 10 billion times larger than the amount of oil in that plume. That amount of oil is literally a drop in the ocean.
The biggest effect will be in areas where the oil can gather and sit, such as wetlands and coves. The positive thing about those areas is they are easier to identify and target in cleanup efforts than a large, diffuse plume in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, I'm not saying that this isn't a serious accident or anything. It surely is serious, but it's just not as bad of a long-term disaster as some alarmists are making it out to be. We'll cap the well, do some cleanup, and then move on. The environment will be affected a bit, some animals will die, we'll have to test fish to make sure that they are still fit for consumption. In the future we'll have to come up with better ways of preventing and handling spills. Life will move on.
Yes, the base station would appear to have a higher signal strength because the signal would spread less and yes, the device's signal would be gathered and focused so it would have a better chance of working than no directional antenna system. However, there would still be considerable interference from the rest of the devices. Would a single directional antenna be enough? Possibly but it's not certain.
Some of those "unused" GSM bands are actually being used by other types of devices in the US, that's why they are unavailable for cellular use. You might be able to find something that's not currently in use, get a special dispensation from the FCC, and get the specialized equipment to use the bands but that's a lot of ifs and maybes. It's still easier, if you can, just to make people in the audience stop using their devices for an hour.
But the fact that there are USB host signals in the iPad's dock connector is a wild departure from every other iPhone-like device that Apple produces.
The iPhone also has a USB-dock connector and the same signaling mechanism is used across all of these devices. It's not a wild departure at all.
Had any of these folks created a spec and a drawing that included a place for an micro SD card and sent that down the chain to the folks who make specs work, I have every bit of confidence that Apple's engineering department would have had little difficulty implementing it.
Sure, it's not impossible to do and if it was a requirement then they would have done it and traded off other aspects such as cost, complexity, dimensions, and other features as necessary. Someone decided that they didn't want to make those tradeoffs and so there is no micro-SD slot.
What would the tradeoffs have been? We can only conjecture, however, it obviously hasn't been a huge roadblock to adoption so they probably made the right decision.
...or few sharpshooters aiming the antennas from the side of the scene.
That won't do much to help the phone itself which will still be deluged by wifi data from the audience. What you'd need to do is to have an external directional antenna on a mount and connected to the phone. Certainly doable but now you have to do the Keynote trailing a wire and the wire will be in the closeups. Maybe it's better than the demo failing but no matter what the situation isn't optimal.
Generally, yeah, poor planning; and wouldn't require any acrobatics to resolve, really - for example Apple/AT&T could perhaps get temporary license (like singular events often do) to operate separate, local, low power basestation on frequencies which aren't used in the US normally
That's assuming that the phone could easily be tuned to one of those odd frequencies. Most times the frequencies are fixed in silicon and other factors like the design of the antenna and can't easily be changed. Certainly Apple could have made some custom silicon but this is really the first time they've had problems of this sort. Perhaps next time they will know to take extra steps in case they run into this situation again.
Of course the easiest solution is to just require that the audience turn off their devices during the Keynote, assuming they listen!
So when you're out in public you got to ask everybody around you to turn off their wifi so you can use your phone?
Of course not. I know this is a troll but voice over cellular is not the same as data over wifi. There's also a huge difference between 1 or 2 base stations and a dozen or so clients and the situation at the Keynote where they had a couple of hundred base stations in a single room.
Occasionally, if you are connected to a wifi network and it stalls you might have to disconnect from the wifi and then your phone falls back to use the cellular data channels. I believe the iPhone will do this automatically but doing it manually might be faster, since the phone will take a little time to recognize that the wifi network is stalled.
The iPad is already very different, in that it is rather large and has a USB port.
The iPad does not have a USB port, it has the same dock connector that the iPhone uses.
Never attribute to technical limitations that which can be adequately explained by greed.
I don't know all of the reasons that Apple might have had for non-removable storage on the iPad, I'm just listing possibilities. I'm sure that reality includes some of these reasons and possibly more but you'd have to talk to the engineers over at Apple to get their actual reasoning. I'm sure some of it, but not all of it, is the money issue.
I don't know a whole lot about wireless bandwidth, but one thing I did notice about this display is that the 3GS apparently had no problem loading the NYT website, while the iPhone 4 wouldn't load it. In my eyes it appeared to be more of a glitch with the hardware, rather than a problem with the network. Also, how else could the people in the audience use that same network (probably pretty slowly I'd guess) if the network were that saturated.
When you have an overloaded wifi spectrum like that usually what happens is that some devices manage to get a clean connection and some don't. It's very sporadic and unpredictable. It's not like every device's connection will fail. You might even have what looks like a good connection and then it will stall for no apparent reason.
There are also several bands on which they could possibly be communicating and it could just be that the 4G and the 3GS happened to be on different bands at that point. The 4G's band might have gotten over-congested and there was still some room on the band that the 3GS was on.
And, yes, there were a ton of reporters and people using devices in that audience. Wireless is great but it relies on the assumption that there will only be a certain amount of connections communicating at one time. Once you surpass that limit you get into the "odd things happen" zone.
Yes, but why did apple not have the demo phones connected to a secure, and dedicated, wifi network? Not doing that just seemed silly.
It doesn't matter how secure your wifi network is, there's only so much bandwidth in the appropriate frequencies. Jam enough base stations into the same space and every network in that area, closed or open, will start behaving erratically because of the interference coming from the other devices. There's not many ways around it other than maybe defying FCC rules and amplifying your signal a ton to drown out all the other ones.
One thing they could have done if they really planned in advance was to use extremely directional antennas and basically make a point-to-point connection, only listening and transmitting on a narrow path. This would require additional equipment and planning and would have been very tough with a handheld device like a phone.
In the end their best play was to get most people to stop using their laptops and that took enough pressure off of their network to allow the demos to work decently.
Yeah, it's not as clear on the iPad. I'm guessing several reasons.
One is they wanted to keep everything as similar as possible between the iTouch, iPhone, and iPad. Since the iPad would be the only one that had the space for a SD slot they chose to go without one on all the devices.
A second reason would be that they wanted easily-definable configurations and allowing people to put in their own SD card would cause the device to have odd amounts of storage.
A third might be design issues. Supporting stuff like SD cards might mess with internal timing, bus design of the device, or software support and Apple just didn't feel it was worth pursuing.
Lastly, allowing people to buy a lower-end device and then add in more storage later would generate less money than having people go for the higher memory ones from the start.
Only the minds at Apple truly know how much each of these weighed on the final design.
It is just not worth it for most developers to keep 2 versions of every app, considering now you have to also keep an ipad version, and a higher resolution version for the new iphone.
It can all be done in a single version. The iPhone and iPad versions can easily be made to run as a single app which run on either device, no matter the resolution. Also, with in-app purchases you can have a free version which converts into a paid version upon making the in-app payment. This means a developer can easily have a single version in the app store which covers all the bases.
There are quite a few apps in the app store which have consolidated themselves in this fashion. It's really very little extra work for the developer and because they only have to maintain a single app it actually ends up saving work. It also makes it less confusing for consumers so your app is more likely to be purchased.
It was a pretty funny comment from the crowd, I laughed.
Of course it turned out that there were something like 570 wifi base stations operating in the audience and it totally hosed the whole wifi network for the event. Since the iPhones were set to load their data over wifi rather than over the cell network it killed the demos. Once the organizers made people turn off their devices the demos went very smoothly. Funny how that works!
Apple wants the iPhone to look like a magical device that just works - no obvious buttons, switches, speakers, seams, etc. Apple's reputation is built on this. If Steve could convince everyone that changing the speaker volume is a bad idea, and that he could pick the right volume level for everyone - he would do it, just to eliminate another physical complication from the device.
It's certainly not the actual reason. Apple has a micro-SIM card slot on the new iPhone 4G and that adds a seam. They didn't seem to have much problem with it being there.
The problem is that a soldered card takes up a lot less room in the device than a card + carrier. If you look at teardowns of the device it's pretty much packed solid and there's not a bit of spare space. In order to accommodate all of the slots and features everyone wants, such as physical keyboards, replaceable batteries, memory card slots and so on, Apple would have to either increase the device size or cut out some of the features planned for the device, maybe a lower capacity battery, lower quality camera, worse display, and so on.
Steve Jobs even said in the keynote that they had to move from a regular SIM to a micro-SIM because of space concerns.
I'm sure there are some esthetic concerns in addition to the engineering ramifications but I'm willing to bet that engineering is what really decided the matter. Overall the new iPhone is pretty damn compact and crammed with electronics, it's a wonder they could fit so much into such a spare package.
The format is just half the picture. Apple can and probably will slather the format with a proprietary DRM. So your book could be PDF under the DRM but it doesn't make it any more portable to other readers for being so.
Yeah, just like music in the iTunes store. Oh wait, that music is DRM-free and in an open format...
Anyways, this is more about 3rd-party content being usable in the book reader app. PDFs were perfectly readable from day one on the iPhone. All the new announcement means is that there's an easier way to get them on your device and they will be easier to organize and consolidate than before.
Yeah, I definitely agree that's a great way to reduce app clutter and confusion. The good thing is that Apple is offering these types of tools to developers so that we can be innovative and creative with how we finance the development. The more tools we have the better the apps can get.
I'd like to have the sexy teen girlfriends in the first place but, alas, they are only in my head!
According to the liveblog at gdgt:
10:54AM - "Megapixels are nice, but what cellphone cameras are really about is capturing photons and low-light photography. So we've gone from a 3 to a 5 megapixel sensor with a backside illuminated sensor."
10:55AM - "It's a way of getting more light to the sensor... also, when most people increase the megapixels, they make the pixel sensors smaller. We've kept them the same size so they capture more photons. We've got a 5x digital zome, tap to focus, and LED flash."
So yeah, if it's accurate it's kinda cool that he at least mentioned photons - at least to the nerds!
I've only seen a liveblog of the event that reported him as saying photons. We'll see the truth of it when the video of the event or a transcript of it is released. Being an Instrumental Chemist I definitely thought it was pretty cool.
Sounds reasonable enough to me. I'm a developer myself and I don't think I'll be doing it either. However, I could see people doing it as a way to put out a clearly-labeled free version to defray development costs and serve as a try-before-you-buy.
It depends on a lot of factors but at least it's an option and easy to add into an app if you want to give it a whirl.
I'm willing to bet that developers will allow users to choose between cheap apps with advertisements and apps that cost more but are advertisement free. This is happening right now in the app store even without Apple providing an easy way for developers to implement advertisements. The users win because more choice is almost always better, if you do download a free app and see that it has a ton of advertisements then no harm, remove it from your device and either get the paid version or move on to another app.
Adblock is a good add-on for your browser and it'd be nice to have for mobile Safari but I don't think it's a good thing if it also works on purchased apps. App developers do a lot of work on building these apps and they deserve to get paid for their efforts, if they want to be paid. Allowing people to get an inexpensive, advertisements-supported app and then block the advertisements would be cheating developers out of their work.
The market will balance all these things out. If an app goes overboard and charges too much or has too many advertisements then someone else will come by and eat their lunch with a better app. It happens all the time, competition is a good way to correct these sort of things.
As far as the bandwidth to Apple's advertisement servers, how do you know if it does count toward your carrier bandwidth? There hasn't been any announcement about it. There are several services on the iPhone that don't count toward your bandwidth, I believe that App Store purchases are one of them. We'll see how it pans out but I bet that the advertisement bandwidth will not count towards your total bandwidth.
Again, I believe he did say in the keynote that the lens is a better lens but we'll have to wait until there's official specs released or someone independent does some actual tests with it to be sure.
without a decent lens or good sensor, most of those pixels will be just noise anyway.
Apparently that's pretty close to what Jobs said in the keynote. He said the new camera not only shoots 720 but it does this with a larger sensor so the sensor elements still capture a decent amount of photons and don't lose quality. He also said they use better lenses. We'll see exactly how it pans out but the shots of pictures taken with the 3G model vs the new 4G model show that there's been a huge jump in quality.
It's an optional thing for a developer to include in his app. I can imagine that there will be free apps that use iAdd and pay versions that don't have ads. Just use the version without ads and you are good. If there's no version without ads then don't use the app!
That's basically how it works now except Apple is providing developers with an easy and good-looking way to include ads in their app without having to cut deals on the side. Pretty much win-win for Apple, app developers and iOS users.
If you look at the relevant California law part of "reasonable effort" is giving it to the police, something that neither the person who found the device nor Gizmodo did:
California CIVIL CODE SECTION 2080-2080.10
2080.1. (a) If the owner is unknown or has not claimed the
property, the person saving or finding the property shall, if the
property is of the value of one hundred dollars ($100) or more,
within a reasonable time turn the property over to the police
department of the city or city and county, if found therein, or to
the sheriff's department of the county if found outside of city
limits, and shall make an affidavit, stating when and where he or she
found or saved the property, particularly describing it. If the
property was saved, the affidavit shall state:
(1) From what and how it was saved.
(2) Whether the owner of the property is known to the affiant.
(3) That the affiant has not secreted, withheld, or disposed of
any part of the property.
(b) The police department or the sheriff's department shall notify
the owner, if his or her identity is reasonably ascertainable, that
it possesses the property and where it may be claimed. The police
department or sheriff's department may require payment by the owner
of a reasonable charge to defray costs of storage and care of the
property.