Source please? Last figures I saw were about a mere 40 million.
Anyhow, you do realise that the market for mobile phones is about a billion every year? Of course, you probably don't, since you're an Apple fan. Yes, I'm sure Apple can make some money in their niche market, but it's nothing particularly notable.
Ah, look at the poor liddle mod who got mod points today!
Hey, here's an idea - how about you come back when you actually have some basic facts to argue with. The only troll here are the idiots who can only respond with their mod points, foaming at the mouth because someone dared to point out a fact that disagrees with their Apple world view.
Proof once against that the moderation system doesn't work when it comes to Apple stories.
The Ipad isn't going for anything right now, because it's not yet released - it's vaporware. If and when it is, we can compare prices to the available competition. Otherwise I might as well write how the new AmigaPad is going to be much better at only $399.
Though it would still be way more expensive than any netbook.
It's nothing new at all (and especially as the vaporware hasn't even been released yet). Tablets exist. Most people don't care about them, preferring to either go for smaller phones, or more functional and cheaper netbooks. No one cares about the Istale either, except for the fact that it's Apple means that the media bow down and give them tonnes of free hype.
If even a fraction of the people with iPhones will buy an iPad then it will be a success.
A fraction of a small fraction... well sure, I'm sure Apple will make money from it. They've always preferred to make money by selling expensive products to a niche, rather than better value products to a larger market. Good luck to them. But if the sales are only a fraction of the Iphones' total sales, it won't be anything worthy of special media attention, especially not the disproportionate hype that the vaporware is getting write now.
Apple is selling this as a new way to experience the internet.
Ah yes, it's the Ipod Fallacy, a classic logical fallacy of those enveloped by the RDF.
"The Ipod wasn't impressive to start with, yet it became very popular, therefore this new Apple device which is unimpressive will also be popular!"
If you say so. What's the current market share of Macs, or Iphones, btw? The Ipod is a one hit wonder - good enough for a company, sure, but it's a fallacy to assume that therefore every Apple product is now going to have the same success.
Nonsense. And on the contrary, it's only among geeks that Apple has any kind of significant following. On places like here on Slashdot, Apple are raved about all the time (indeed, this very story - a "story" that is just speculation, over a non-notable vaporware product, that hasn't even been released) is a perfect example of that. Most actually released tablets don't even get one single story.
In the real world, most people use Windows, they use phones other than the Iphone, and they don't give a shit about the Istale or whatever it is it's called this week.
Indeed. Here in the UK, the IWF's blocking system isn't even capable of blocking the images on the web, anyway! The Wikipedia fiasco showed us that. They blocked a page - containing perfectly legal text - that happened to inline the image, but the image was still available via the URL of the image, as well as via other HTML pages that inlined it.
Why is native so important? Supposing a high end phone came out that had all the bells and whistles of the high end smart phones today, but used a byte code system rather than native code. Are you saying it wouldn't be a smart phone? Indeed, this is how Android primarily works - are you saying if they dropped the ability for native code, it would stop being a smart phone?
That's a poor definition. And you know it - if the Iphone instead used a byte code language rather than native, but had all the other features, people here would still be hailing it as a wonderful smartphone, and claiming how revolutionary it was not to be using native code.
Still, even if we accept that definition, my point is still true. There is no evidence that the Iphone has drive sales of phones that run applications natively (hell, most users wouldn't see the difference between whether it's native code or whatever, as long as it's an application). That's a fact, supported by the market figures - but since the facts don't fit with the pro-Apple mod's worldview, they get modded down, as always.
The original Iphone sucked in many ways. All a matter of opinion.
The introduction of the iPhone has driven a great expansion of the smart phone market.
Nonsense. Firstly "smartphone" is ill-defined - the difference between "smart" and "feature" is just one for marketing convenience to distinguish the current high end from low end (can you give me a definition of smartphone that includes the original Iphone, but not many feature phones?) Since Apple even now only have a few per cent market share, and this was far lower with the original Iphone, it's clear that they can't have greatly expanded it.
Nokia are the company that should be praised for bringing phones (from the high end to the low) to the masses.
Remove things? So why are all the Iphone fans (and Ipad fans, when it stops being vaporware) raving about the wonders of multiple complex multitouch gestures? Single touch is far simpler.
And yes, they are a marketing company. They've convinced you that having no UI is somehow a good UI - even if you might need it (e.g., the Apple Ipod Shuffle).
If you've only got a couple of people, you don't need admins to monitor that either. I mean seriously - I have two computers here at home, do you think I need to employ an "admin" to handle them?
And regarding the topic, the answer to what Apple has only had minor success in business is the same reason they've only had minor success outside of business. There's nothing special about business, here.
Well, we could have a general rating system, but who would rate the websites, and who would pay for it? I would strongly oppose a mandatory rating system - but then a voluntary one probably wouldn't be used much.
And we've gone from ".xxx" to suddenly needing a whole load of classifications - do they all get their own domains? And how do you distinguish between countries, and companies vs orgs, etc?
Another problem is, how does any rating system work when the website changes (which may be continually)? Or for sites with user generated content?
I don't agree with censorship in general, but parents censor content all the time. Communities that do that are just taking the decisions away from the individuals to make up their own minds on what they want to watch. Which I'm against.
Yes, I entirely agree. I believe there are already filtering systems that parents can use, without needing it done by the domain name.
Then you too agree that the claim of one law per day is horse shit.
Not at all - I have no idea on what a reasonable estimate for the number of laws passed is. But you haven't presented any evidence to make me think the claim is horse shit.
100 years ago we were promised an age of new enlightenment while washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners and other then-cutting edge devices took over all the manual labor that dominated work at that time. Women were supposed to be able to ignore housework and concentrate on childrearing and other higher social activities.
Yes, this has happened - we no longer need someone spending all their time on housework.
Did that happen? No, the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed. Men and women now work side by side in gigantic cube farms while children rot in day care or roam the streets with little to no guidance from the more experienced members of society.
What country are you living in where women (or men, even - or do you think that women shouldn't be allowed to work?) are forced to work? This is ultimately a choice. People could still live on 1 income, whilst having a standard of living better than the past. But people choose to work, for better standards, because no one wants to live like it was 1900. It's still common for someone to take time off in order to look after their children. That some people choose not to is not a technological issue.
And please - you should go experience what conditions are like in most other countries. Yes, you're so oppressed working in an office, and then going home every evening.
Yes, when change happens, there will still be Daily Mail luddites whining about how it was better in the past when men had the money and women were stuck in the home. But personally I'd rather have the future.
I agree about sunset clauses, but even for dubious laws, don't underestimate the ability of Governments to rush through laws again without any debate.
In the UK, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was recently found to have never been enacted - it didn't exist. This is the law that allows requires all videos to be submitted for censorship (you have to pay for the privilege), even if intended only for adults, and allows videos to be cut or banned (even for adults).
One might hope that, since we no longer have the moral panic of video nasties from the 80s, and with a different Government in charge, perhaps we'd look again at the issue. Not a chance. Instead we got a new media moral panic of "But think of the children!" (the reality is that most cuts are made in films in the adult rating category, not those intended for child ratings), and the Government rushed through a replacement law with no debate, treating it as "emergency" legislation. Anyone would think that war was breaking out, or they'd just found at that murder was legal...
That's Acts, not laws. The problem is that each "one" of those Acts may bundle up large numbers of laws, often including entirely unrelated laws. E.g., the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 has stuff about coroners as you might expect, but hidden in there is a law that criminalises possession of all (non-realistic) pr0n depictions of under-18s (i.e., joke images of the Simpsons, as in the Austrialian case), along with all sorts of other laws.
Now sure, there is the question of how we count, and decide what's a different law, but going by the number of Acts is a particularly poor measure.
I'm talking about porn - where people are raped for the purpose of selling porn, or where these images turn up on porn sites. Obviously there may exist videos of crimes, including rape and murder, or indeed bank robberies, say. Are you suggesting that this image is "snuff", or that it should be censored?
The point is that people looking at these images doesn't create a demand for the crimes being committed (unlike child porn, where the argument is plausible), and there is no evidence that these kinds of images are turning up on porn sites.
Sometimes happy slapping videos turn up on youtube, so yes videos of real violence exist. But this isn't evidence for saying that violent films that people buy and watch sometimes have actual abusive violence. If someone started talking about banning "violent films", we'd know they meant the fictional depictions, and any reference to happy slapping videos would be a red herring.
If TPB is one of the most popular sites on the planet, I don't see how it's a "bullshit plea" - it's perfectly correct, and it's relevant to point out the wide scope that such action will take.
(If it isn't the one of the most popular planet, then sure - but then it's a case of simply being factually wrong, and the issue of legality is irrelevant to the point.)
I am not one for censorship but limiting child porn, rape, bestiality from being easily accessible is a good move.
Child porn, sure, bestiality, maybe[*], but you can bet that so-called "rape" includes fictional depictions. I.e., consenting adult actors doing anything from rape roleplay, to any rough sex, or sex with bondage, that the censors think looks like "rape". And I do oppose banning that. I don't believe that porn featuring actual rape has ever been found, let alone any kind of significant trade - much like snuff films, they seem to be a myth, nothing more than a moral panic invented to pass laws such as this (why would anyone risk making such a film, when it's much easier and legal to act?)
Even for "child" porn, it's not clear - remember, Australia is one of those (sadly increasing number of) places that thinks that a joke simpsons cartoon counts as "child" porn. Similarly, here in the UK our very own censorship system blocked that 30 year old legal album cover on Wikipedia.
[*] I think it's best handled as an animal cruelty issue, rather than a "But this looks disgusting! issue. And even images of actual animal cruelty are legal, and uncensored, so it's not clear to me why the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent -1, doesn't understand basic logic, but still gets pro-Apple mods to mod down anyone who dares point this out.
Mod parent down, -1 makes up facts out of nowhere.
Source please? Last figures I saw were about a mere 40 million.
Anyhow, you do realise that the market for mobile phones is about a billion every year? Of course, you probably don't, since you're an Apple fan. Yes, I'm sure Apple can make some money in their niche market, but it's nothing particularly notable.
Ah, look at the poor liddle mod who got mod points today!
Hey, here's an idea - how about you come back when you actually have some basic facts to argue with. The only troll here are the idiots who can only respond with their mod points, foaming at the mouth because someone dared to point out a fact that disagrees with their Apple world view.
Proof once against that the moderation system doesn't work when it comes to Apple stories.
The Ipad isn't going for anything right now, because it's not yet released - it's vaporware. If and when it is, we can compare prices to the available competition. Otherwise I might as well write how the new AmigaPad is going to be much better at only $399.
Though it would still be way more expensive than any netbook.
It's nothing new at all (and especially as the vaporware hasn't even been released yet). Tablets exist. Most people don't care about them, preferring to either go for smaller phones, or more functional and cheaper netbooks. No one cares about the Istale either, except for the fact that it's Apple means that the media bow down and give them tonnes of free hype.
How many of those friends have an iPhone?
If we go by market figures, less than 5%.
If even a fraction of the people with iPhones will buy an iPad then it will be a success.
A fraction of a small fraction ... well sure, I'm sure Apple will make money from it. They've always preferred to make money by selling expensive products to a niche, rather than better value products to a larger market. Good luck to them. But if the sales are only a fraction of the Iphones' total sales, it won't be anything worthy of special media attention, especially not the disproportionate hype that the vaporware is getting write now.
Apple is selling this as a new way to experience the internet.
New way? What new way is this?
Ah yes, it's the Ipod Fallacy, a classic logical fallacy of those enveloped by the RDF.
"The Ipod wasn't impressive to start with, yet it became very popular, therefore this new Apple device which is unimpressive will also be popular!"
If you say so. What's the current market share of Macs, or Iphones, btw? The Ipod is a one hit wonder - good enough for a company, sure, but it's a fallacy to assume that therefore every Apple product is now going to have the same success.
Nonsense. And on the contrary, it's only among geeks that Apple has any kind of significant following. On places like here on Slashdot, Apple are raved about all the time (indeed, this very story - a "story" that is just speculation, over a non-notable vaporware product, that hasn't even been released) is a perfect example of that. Most actually released tablets don't even get one single story.
In the real world, most people use Windows, they use phones other than the Iphone, and they don't give a shit about the Istale or whatever it is it's called this week.
Indeed. Here in the UK, the IWF's blocking system isn't even capable of blocking the images on the web, anyway! The Wikipedia fiasco showed us that. They blocked a page - containing perfectly legal text - that happened to inline the image, but the image was still available via the URL of the image, as well as via other HTML pages that inlined it.
Why is native so important? Supposing a high end phone came out that had all the bells and whistles of the high end smart phones today, but used a byte code system rather than native code. Are you saying it wouldn't be a smart phone? Indeed, this is how Android primarily works - are you saying if they dropped the ability for native code, it would stop being a smart phone?
That's a poor definition. And you know it - if the Iphone instead used a byte code language rather than native, but had all the other features, people here would still be hailing it as a wonderful smartphone, and claiming how revolutionary it was not to be using native code.
Still, even if we accept that definition, my point is still true. There is no evidence that the Iphone has drive sales of phones that run applications natively (hell, most users wouldn't see the difference between whether it's native code or whatever, as long as it's an application). That's a fact, supported by the market figures - but since the facts don't fit with the pro-Apple mod's worldview, they get modded down, as always.
Yeah, I'm too cheap to be an Apple user. I guess I'll just have to take my $100 that I've saved and spend it on something else. Poor me.
Smart phones before the iPhone sucked, big time.
The original Iphone sucked in many ways. All a matter of opinion.
The introduction of the iPhone has driven a great expansion of the smart phone market.
Nonsense. Firstly "smartphone" is ill-defined - the difference between "smart" and "feature" is just one for marketing convenience to distinguish the current high end from low end (can you give me a definition of smartphone that includes the original Iphone, but not many feature phones?) Since Apple even now only have a few per cent market share, and this was far lower with the original Iphone, it's clear that they can't have greatly expanded it.
Nokia are the company that should be praised for bringing phones (from the high end to the low) to the masses.
Remove things? So why are all the Iphone fans (and Ipad fans, when it stops being vaporware) raving about the wonders of multiple complex multitouch gestures? Single touch is far simpler.
And yes, they are a marketing company. They've convinced you that having no UI is somehow a good UI - even if you might need it (e.g., the Apple Ipod Shuffle).
But we need some way to distinguish them from the Apple PCs.
Save a small fortune versus what?
If you've only got a couple of people, you don't need admins to monitor that either. I mean seriously - I have two computers here at home, do you think I need to employ an "admin" to handle them?
And regarding the topic, the answer to what Apple has only had minor success in business is the same reason they've only had minor success outside of business. There's nothing special about business, here.
So all the porn sites are now registered at their current address, and .xxx. How does this improve matters?
Or alternatively they only use .xxx, and they can then easily be censored even for those who want to see them. I consider that to be a step backwards.
Well, we could have a general rating system, but who would rate the websites, and who would pay for it? I would strongly oppose a mandatory rating system - but then a voluntary one probably wouldn't be used much.
And we've gone from ".xxx" to suddenly needing a whole load of classifications - do they all get their own domains? And how do you distinguish between countries, and companies vs orgs, etc?
Another problem is, how does any rating system work when the website changes (which may be continually)? Or for sites with user generated content?
I don't agree with censorship in general, but parents censor content all the time. Communities that do that are just taking the decisions away from the individuals to make up their own minds on what they want to watch. Which I'm against.
Yes, I entirely agree. I believe there are already filtering systems that parents can use, without needing it done by the domain name.
Then you too agree that the claim of one law per day is horse shit.
Not at all - I have no idea on what a reasonable estimate for the number of laws passed is. But you haven't presented any evidence to make me think the claim is horse shit.
100 years ago we were promised an age of new enlightenment while washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners and other then-cutting edge devices took over all the manual labor that dominated work at that time. Women were supposed to be able to ignore housework and concentrate on childrearing and other higher social activities.
Yes, this has happened - we no longer need someone spending all their time on housework.
Did that happen? No, the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed. Men and women now work side by side in gigantic cube farms while children rot in day care or roam the streets with little to no guidance from the more experienced members of society.
What country are you living in where women (or men, even - or do you think that women shouldn't be allowed to work?) are forced to work? This is ultimately a choice. People could still live on 1 income, whilst having a standard of living better than the past. But people choose to work, for better standards, because no one wants to live like it was 1900. It's still common for someone to take time off in order to look after their children. That some people choose not to is not a technological issue.
And please - you should go experience what conditions are like in most other countries. Yes, you're so oppressed working in an office, and then going home every evening.
Yes, when change happens, there will still be Daily Mail luddites whining about how it was better in the past when men had the money and women were stuck in the home. But personally I'd rather have the future.
I agree about sunset clauses, but even for dubious laws, don't underestimate the ability of Governments to rush through laws again without any debate.
In the UK, the Video Recordings Act 1984 was recently found to have never been enacted - it didn't exist. This is the law that allows requires all videos to be submitted for censorship (you have to pay for the privilege), even if intended only for adults, and allows videos to be cut or banned (even for adults).
One might hope that, since we no longer have the moral panic of video nasties from the 80s, and with a different Government in charge, perhaps we'd look again at the issue. Not a chance. Instead we got a new media moral panic of "But think of the children!" (the reality is that most cuts are made in films in the adult rating category, not those intended for child ratings), and the Government rushed through a replacement law with no debate, treating it as "emergency" legislation. Anyone would think that war was breaking out, or they'd just found at that murder was legal...
That's Acts, not laws. The problem is that each "one" of those Acts may bundle up large numbers of laws, often including entirely unrelated laws. E.g., the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 has stuff about coroners as you might expect, but hidden in there is a law that criminalises possession of all (non-realistic) pr0n depictions of under-18s (i.e., joke images of the Simpsons, as in the Austrialian case), along with all sorts of other laws.
Now sure, there is the question of how we count, and decide what's a different law, but going by the number of Acts is a particularly poor measure.
I'm talking about porn - where people are raped for the purpose of selling porn, or where these images turn up on porn sites. Obviously there may exist videos of crimes, including rape and murder, or indeed bank robberies, say. Are you suggesting that this image is "snuff", or that it should be censored?
The point is that people looking at these images doesn't create a demand for the crimes being committed (unlike child porn, where the argument is plausible), and there is no evidence that these kinds of images are turning up on porn sites.
Sometimes happy slapping videos turn up on youtube, so yes videos of real violence exist. But this isn't evidence for saying that violent films that people buy and watch sometimes have actual abusive violence. If someone started talking about banning "violent films", we'd know they meant the fictional depictions, and any reference to happy slapping videos would be a red herring.
If TPB is one of the most popular sites on the planet, I don't see how it's a "bullshit plea" - it's perfectly correct, and it's relevant to point out the wide scope that such action will take.
(If it isn't the one of the most popular planet, then sure - but then it's a case of simply being factually wrong, and the issue of legality is irrelevant to the point.)
I am not one for censorship but limiting child porn, rape, bestiality from being easily accessible is a good move.
Child porn, sure, bestiality, maybe[*], but you can bet that so-called "rape" includes fictional depictions. I.e., consenting adult actors doing anything from rape roleplay, to any rough sex, or sex with bondage, that the censors think looks like "rape". And I do oppose banning that. I don't believe that porn featuring actual rape has ever been found, let alone any kind of significant trade - much like snuff films, they seem to be a myth, nothing more than a moral panic invented to pass laws such as this (why would anyone risk making such a film, when it's much easier and legal to act?)
Even for "child" porn, it's not clear - remember, Australia is one of those (sadly increasing number of) places that thinks that a joke simpsons cartoon counts as "child" porn. Similarly, here in the UK our very own censorship system blocked that 30 year old legal album cover on Wikipedia.
[*] I think it's best handled as an animal cruelty issue, rather than a "But this looks disgusting! issue. And even images of actual animal cruelty are legal, and uncensored, so it's not clear to me why the difference.