You mean you can't already do all that in windows now? Linux and Macs have long had right click contextual mouse buttons ("open hihlighed text in google", check spelling is default for all text windows across all apps, there's open-with contexts. Macs have the Expose and command-tab application switchers from the keyboard. Linux have virtual desktops from the mouse, etc...)
Are you saying that this sort of thing is not currently in widows or wont' be in vista. I'm having a hard time believing people work without this.
The idea is this. If the DVD contains executable then this can vary. Therefore the location in memory and the kind of obfuscation used to hide the title key can vary between movies and there could even be 10000 different ones for the same title. They could even determine which executable ran by the player key. This would mean that every title key recovery would have to be cracked by a different attack, and the result would not even be universal since it would only work on say 1/10000th of the dvd's of that movie.
Now as for it only running on a subset of processors this is not a big deal. If it only ran on intel 386 how much bussiness for PC players would they lose?
Moreover any other processor could run an emulator or the code itself might be compiled java or a script. it does not need to be blazingly fast.
Actually I'm wrong. here's how they can fix their problem fairly well.
Those old players that arebeingused to extract the title key can have their player keys revoked. That will bust some limited number of players too. Now without those player keys the old players cant decode the title keys. So they have to migrate to new players. If those players are stealthier then they may not be able to figure out how to extract the title keys.
Finally what if the new players were to get some of their executables right off of the DVD itself. Then they could make it very difficult to have a universal method for subvering the player to get the title key.
How do you know that Intel has not been putting a TPC module in every CPU for the last five years? They've had this ring architecture for a decade, could there not be one more ring they never told us about? in five more years they could turn it on and surprise! every computer less than a decade old is TPC complient. The remaineder still run but can't use the new OS or must run in a reduced privledge mode.
As I understand this it extracts the title or volume key from the PC memory. One could have gone after the upstream player keys since they are in memory too but then if they ever figured out what player you were using from the crack then all future titles and disks would remove that player key. That would of course break every player with that key, but it's not so bad with PC players as it would be with physical players, since the company with the broken player could offer a downloadable software upgrade. In any case that's moot for now since it's the title key that's being extracted from memory.
Now at some point the hddvd autorities will figure out which one of these PC players that is exposing the title key to attack. At that point the software will be upgraded to better obscure the title key. While in principle the title key will still be lurking in memory somewhere they can probably figure out a way of making is really hard to extract. e.g. self modifying code. Non determinsistic algorithms, and putting parts of it inside protected areas of Vista's kernel. This will make it so all future players will have a difficult time being exploited to grab the title key. I suspect they can pull this off even though it will be a moving target. Apple for example has managed to keep Hymm broken, and it uses the same attack.
But that does not solve the problem. Those old players will still exist and run. So they can still be used to extract the title keys. The only way they can beat this is if there is some way they can cause those old players to break on new movies. How might they do this?
Well here's an approach. just mangle the title key or move its location on disk. Now all the new players are told how to unmangle so they can play the disks, and of course they can still play the old unmangled disks. The people screwed by this are all the people who own exisisting DVD players. these are now broken.
But can they be upgraded? for example were they smart enough to allow the DVD players the ability to be reprogramed in firmware. Perhaps for example they could release some DVD that could be poped in the machine and it would reflash the firmware. That woul dmake this kind of breakage less painful to fix. Not painless however after millions of these are deployed. But at this stage pretty doable.
If they were smart they'd shut the whole thing down now when there's too few players in the wild to matter. change the system to make the title keys stealthier, then start over.
Google checkout has two things Paypal does not. 1) no ties to your bankaccount so they can't freeze your assets 2) a trustworthy company that actually has contact information.
Which of course is exactly what I said too. Only I used fewer words on an obvious point. I said the real issue was capitalization and making that affordable.
Well I think you are agreeing with me. you pay 1200 to 1400 for total energy costs for the home, plus probably an equal amount or slightly more for your car if you are typical. And you and your wife both pay a kilobuck or more in taxes to support our political oil policy consequences, and tax breaks to oil companines for exploration.
Moreover unlike those costs, the solar equipment costs are partly recoverable. When you go to sell the house, it will be worth more because of the infrastructure you built, especially because by then energy costs will have gone up.
Conversely if solar power is used more, oil prices may drop, making industrial production cheaper. I'm not sure why you think solar poer requires oil to produce the equipment. Certainly no the solar elements themselves. Perhaps the acnilliary stuff like wire insulation?
This is exactly why umbrellas should be banned from cities, to prevent rain. And it's exactly why hospitals and doctors should be rounded up, to prevent disease. And light should be stopped to prevent darkness.
It's crucial to realize that it's not important what the average homeowner pays per year for energy. What's important is how many homeowners pay more than $4000 per year for energy.
many people would balk at the $100,000/25 year price tag of this solar home. that's 4000 per year for yout energy needs. Right now people pay about 1000 to 1500 per year on gasoline for their cars and another 1000+ to heat their homes. THe article says that people pay $1500 fo their energy needs but I suspect that might be per person not per home, since the figure is too low.
Since it's certain that energy costs are going to rise faster than inflation it seems like locking in $4000 per year cost would be terrific. So the real issue is capitalizing this up front, and working to make it even more affordable.
Moreover, if everyone did this then my tax bill could remove some of the kilobucks I spend on military, homeland security, oil industry subsidy, and heath and environment costs for pollution.
this guy is using solar to generate hydrogen so he can store the energy for winter time and run his car. That storage and conversion to transportation fuels is perhaps more significant than the efficiency.
It seems very likely to me that nanotechnology break thoughs are the kind of thing likely to at least double or quadruple the efficiency of going from solar to hydrogen, and probably have a similar effect on the conversion of hydrogen back to locomotion or electricity. So I could see the cost of this dropping in a couple decades. Does that mean we should wait for that? Id' say no. just like the pharma industry, the huge profits have also bought lots of medical research.
If the world power consumption stays on its current growth rate, and if anything it's poised to accelerate, then by 2040 we will need to double the worlds energy production. To put this in perspective, if you were doing this via nuclear power alone it would mean building a gigawatt plant every day for the next 30 years. There is not enough water to do it with biofuels unless there is a breakthrough. One can do it with Shale oil, but the carbon load will create a crisis. So while shale oil may clamp the price of oil, carbon sequestration will up the cost. It's very easy to imagine that world wide competition for energy will either lead to enormous prices, environmental crisis or war, unless steps are taken to create a variable marketbasket of more environmental and cost effective renewable energy sources. Oil will always be part of the mix but it can't be the only source.
real costs are going to rise for conventional electricity sources while this will drop.
the cost of these solar appliances will not only drop but the cost of oil will surely rise. Not quite sure about the cost of nuclear, but it's also true we can't generate enough nuclear power to replace oil ( it would take opening 1 gigawatt plant every single day for the next 30 years just to stay even with energy usage growth). While shale oil will keep the price of oil clamped, it will create a crisis in carbon load, so it can't be the dominant energy source.
So it seems to me that prices for energy are going to rise dramtically over time, at least double, and that solar energy is one of the keys. The fact that he is also generating transportation fuels and has off-peak solar storage does more to make this viable than the overall efficiency.
Should we include the kilobuck the middleclass homeowner pays for military adventurism every year (even more during wars)? Should we count the deaths of soldiers and civilans caused by that adventurism? Should we count the carbon load on the environment from using non-renewables?
If someone comes over to your house and tries to open the windows and see if they can climb in are they not trespassing? It seems like rattling doorknobs is a bold act that does border on criminal intent. It's not the same as going up to a door and knocking. we all know that. Probing a site for flaes is wrong
Enron got in to trouble because they were booking sales on unshipped product. THe wayapple is looking at this put in enron accounting terms would look something like this. 1) holding company owned by enron agrees to buy 10 barrels of oil from enron. 2) enron books the sale even though they just paid themsleves 3) but they don't book the liability because they just deliver 9 barrels of oil and defer delivery of the tenth to a later date.
Here apple is scared that they will get flagged for booking the sale of an incomplete product. I don't really see how this applies but I can see why they are paranoid.
In the mac world, word 6 actually had fewer features and was harder to use than mac word 5. the difference was that it was identical to the PC product. that is, they advanced the PC product to have features that were already in the mac product, and then regressesed and reskinned the mac product ot make it identical.
I remember my extreme rage, shared by many, at this and vowen not to upgrade. Then after a month or so I got a critical contract application form in word 6. I could not read it in word 5 and had to buy word 6.
so yes to your question.
Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format. You will need to not only read them but edit them and send them back. So far no one has ever been able to create a document in MS WOrd that is 100% platform interchangable. Even MS word on mac is in 100% compatible with ms word on PC, though it's pretty close, the page layouts shift subtly with tables and figures changing positions and dimensions.
Thus the only way you can work with other people's word documents is to own word. anything else as the parent points out is a waste of valuable time. the cost of word is negligible compared to your time
hen don't shift units. Use kilo feet or centi-miles. The reason you are decimal shifting in the metric system is precisely because you are Not shifting units. kilometers, meters and centimeters are all the same units. Nothing prevents you from using decimal english units and decimal point shifting. that's how they do it in machine shops. In the metric system, a unit shift is like going from cgs to MKS where mu and epsilon change scales and all of maxwells equations require conversions.
What units does your metric watch use, mr science? 100 second to the metric minute?
As a scientist, I can attest to the massive superiority of the metric system
Back off man I'm a scientist too.
You must be daffy or have only book leanrt experience to have such a clouded understanding of the issue. Walk in to any machine shop some time. It's filled with decimal measures. Every dial is calibrated in decimal inches down to thousanths of an inch.
Nothing prevents decimalizing any unit of measure
Your argument only hangs on the idea that metric units tend to be more derived other units. For example, you indicate that length measures can be turned into weight measures by filling a measured volume with water and weighing it.
That's an irrational argument for such a renouned scientist to make since the SAME is true of the english system. In your example you selected water to do the conversion. But if you had selected dihydro pentoxy sulfate as the liquid you would find that 1 pound of this is equal to 1000 cubic inches. Laugh but it's only slightly more arbitrary than water.
Since we seldom actually use this fact, what matters more it how useful the ratio of unit measures is not how they were derived. English units have two properties that metric units lack. Namely most of them have rations that are commonly divisible by handy numbers. weight measures are mainly powers of 2: (2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon). Or by thirds and twos: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 second to the hour, 24 hours per day. How many hours are in your metric da, mr science? The second property is that they are created to be right sized for many daily human interactions. An inch is about the size of tip of a thump to it's knuckle. If your making something that uses hand work it's a pretty damn "handy" measure. A gallon of water is about what a soldier, field worker or seaman needs to drink every day, so if your provisioning it's a pretty useful measure. and so on.
there's no reason not to use decimal english measures and in most ways they are superior.
This the very first Apple iphone. Treo is many versions and generations old. Apple does not want to weather a virus on their very first outing. Even instability and debugging user problems would not be desirable. They want to back this phone 100% so for it's debut they are going to do that by keeping it 100% their problem if anything goes wrong. Can you imagine how screwed they'd be if the rumor was that the battery life was only 2 hours not 5 (and it turned out to be some power sucking craplet widget). The people who will buy these are not the geeks like you but corporate executives who want a seemless balckberry existence.
Additionally I would bet that it's API is still in flux. They probably will have lots of debugging code in the first edition. So they probably can't even publish a third party SDK even if they wanted too. I would also imagine that cingular insisted that they can keep skype and VoiP off the phone too.
Remember they probably see cingular as their customer more than they see you right now. After all they probably had some problems getting the company to agree to make all the changes they wanted. For now they want to keep them happy because it's those changes like viusal voice mail, and probably a whole lot more we have not seen yet, that are going to set apple apart and make it like the whole itunes/ipod/music store seemless integration that people love.
GIve it a year before they release an sdk, and another year for the cingular contract to expire before they open it up.
Bulky? it's thinnner than almost any phone on the market. it's shorter than most flip phones or ones that extend KB. it will slip nicely in my jean pockets. and good god who talks for 5 hours on a cell phone. that's 300 minutes a day.
They were a bit cagey on the battery life I admit. this one clearly has varying modes of use. PDA mode with screen and CPU churning. Idle PDA with screen dimmed, and cell-phone mode, wi-fi on. blue tooth on. etc... No mention of stand-by time.
I'm thinking they are being cagey because they are still developing the power management software and don't really know. They probably still have wads of debugging code in this and have not optimized a lot of it since it's obviously running on yet another cpu. THey did the same thing at the debut of OSX and then of intel, not beiing totally clear about the power management.
On the other hand, the track record on the ipod is that they tend to underspec the battery life. Or rather they spec it for normal usage not minimal settings like other brands do. So those are lower bounds I imagine.
Who said wii killer? it just is ripe for allowing wii like functionality. Not everyone has a wii or an apple. But if you had one of these iphones would you not want it to be a video game controller too?
If you desire a tactile input for games then one can imagine all sorts of stick-on rubber button arrays and other sorts of intefaces. These would adhere (removably) to the screen and the touches translated to actions. Sort of a universal adapter for any sort of input. So I don't see the virtual buttons as foreclosing tacile input fopr games
Well yes, those ring tones are a nice profit margin billion dollar industry (not exagerating!). But remember the folks that will buy these are going to have preimum voice+data contracts too. the ringtone market won't matter so much in that case. Moreover if verizons phones are the zune++ then we can be pretty sure that MS will accomodate the carriers wishes (just like how Vista is accomodating the MPAA): Windows-CE will lock them down tight with drm and maybe not let you buy ring tones outside the approved source.
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You mean you can't already do all that in windows now? Linux and Macs have long had right click contextual mouse buttons ("open hihlighed text in google", check spelling is default for all text windows across all apps, there's open-with contexts. Macs have the Expose and command-tab application switchers from the keyboard. Linux have virtual desktops from the mouse, etc...)
Are you saying that this sort of thing is not currently in widows or wont' be in vista. I'm having a hard time believing people work without this.
The idea is this. If the DVD contains executable then this can vary. Therefore the location in memory and the kind of obfuscation used to hide the title key can vary between movies and there could even be 10000 different ones for the same title. They could even determine which executable ran by the player key. This would mean that every title key recovery would have to be cracked by a different attack, and the result would not even be universal since it would only work on say 1/10000th of the dvd's of that movie.
Now as for it only running on a subset of processors this is not a big deal. If it only ran on intel 386 how much bussiness for PC players would they lose?
Moreover any other processor could run an emulator or the code itself might be compiled java or a script. it does not need to be blazingly fast.
Actually I'm wrong. here's how they can fix their problem fairly well.
Those old players that arebeingused to extract the title key can have their player keys revoked. That will bust some limited number of players too. Now without those player keys the old players cant decode the title keys. So they have to migrate to new players. If those players are stealthier then they may not be able to figure out how to extract the title keys.
Finally what if the new players were to get some of their executables right off of the DVD itself. Then they could make it very difficult to have a universal method for subvering the player to get the title key.
How do you know that Intel has not been putting a TPC module in every CPU for the last five years? They've had this ring architecture for a decade, could there not be one more ring they never told us about? in five more years they could turn it on and surprise! every computer less than a decade old is TPC complient. The remaineder still run but can't use the new OS or must run in a reduced privledge mode.
Is THAT you, there "that guy". You were pretty cagey about your proclivities up until you mentioned the dragon.
As I understand this it extracts the title or volume key from the PC memory. One could have gone after the upstream player keys since they are in memory too but then if they ever figured out what player you were using from the crack then all future titles and disks would remove that player key. That would of course break every player with that key, but it's not so bad with PC players as it would be with physical players, since the company with the broken player could offer a downloadable software upgrade. In any case that's moot for now since it's the title key that's being extracted from memory.
Now at some point the hddvd autorities will figure out which one of these PC players that is exposing the title key to attack. At that point the software will be upgraded to better obscure the title key. While in principle the title key will still be lurking in memory somewhere they can probably figure out a way of making is really hard to extract. e.g. self modifying code. Non determinsistic algorithms, and putting parts of it inside protected areas of Vista's kernel. This will make it so all future players will have a difficult time being exploited to grab the title key. I suspect they can pull this off even though it will be a moving target. Apple for example has managed to keep Hymm broken, and it uses the same attack.
But that does not solve the problem. Those old players will still exist and run. So they can still be used to extract the title keys. The only way they can beat this is if there is some way they can cause those old players to break on new movies. How might they do this?
Well here's an approach. just mangle the title key or move its location on disk. Now all the new players are told how to unmangle so they can play the disks, and of course they can still play the old unmangled disks. The people screwed by this are all the people who own exisisting DVD players. these are now broken.
But can they be upgraded? for example were they smart enough to allow the DVD players the ability to be reprogramed in firmware. Perhaps for example they could release some DVD that could be poped in the machine and it would reflash the firmware. That woul dmake this kind of breakage less painful to fix. Not painless however after millions of these are deployed. But at this stage pretty doable.
If they were smart they'd shut the whole thing down now when there's too few players in the wild to matter. change the system to make the title keys stealthier, then start over.
Google checkout has two things Paypal does not.
1) no ties to your bankaccount so they can't freeze your assets
2) a trustworthy company that actually has contact information.
Which of course is exactly what I said too. Only I used fewer words on an obvious point. I said the real issue was capitalization and making that affordable.
Well I think you are agreeing with me. you pay 1200 to 1400 for total energy costs for the home, plus probably an equal amount or slightly more for your car if you are typical. And you and your wife both pay a kilobuck or more in taxes to support our political oil policy consequences, and tax breaks to oil companines for exploration.
Moreover unlike those costs, the solar equipment costs are partly recoverable. When you go to sell the house, it will be worth more because of the infrastructure you built, especially because by then energy costs will have gone up.
Conversely if solar power is used more, oil prices may drop, making industrial production cheaper. I'm not sure why you think solar poer requires oil to produce the equipment. Certainly no the solar elements themselves. Perhaps the acnilliary stuff like wire insulation?
This is exactly why umbrellas should be banned from cities, to prevent rain. And it's exactly why hospitals and doctors should be rounded up, to prevent disease. And light should be stopped to prevent darkness.
It's crucial to realize that it's not important what the average homeowner pays per year for energy. What's important is how many homeowners pay more than $4000 per year for energy.
many people would balk at the $100,000/25 year price tag of this solar home. that's 4000 per year for yout energy needs. Right now people pay about 1000 to 1500 per year on gasoline for their cars and another 1000+ to heat their homes. THe article says that people pay $1500 fo their energy needs but I suspect that might be per person not per home, since the figure is too low.
Since it's certain that energy costs are going to rise faster than inflation it seems like locking in $4000 per year cost would be terrific. So the real issue is capitalizing this up front, and working to make it even more affordable.
Moreover, if everyone did this then my tax bill could remove some of the kilobucks I spend on military, homeland security, oil industry subsidy, and heath and environment costs for pollution.
this guy is using solar to generate hydrogen so he can store the energy for winter time and run his car. That storage and conversion to transportation fuels is perhaps more significant than the efficiency.
It seems very likely to me that nanotechnology break thoughs are the kind of thing likely to at least double or quadruple the efficiency of going from solar to hydrogen, and probably have a similar effect on the conversion of hydrogen back to locomotion or electricity. So I could see the cost of this dropping in a couple decades. Does that mean we should wait for that? Id' say no. just like the pharma industry, the huge profits have also bought lots of medical research.
If the world power consumption stays on its current growth rate, and if anything it's poised to accelerate, then by 2040 we will need to double the worlds energy production. To put this in perspective, if you were doing this via nuclear power alone it would mean building a gigawatt plant every day for the next 30 years. There is not enough water to do it with biofuels unless there is a breakthrough. One can do it with Shale oil, but the carbon load will create a crisis. So while shale oil may clamp the price of oil, carbon sequestration will up the cost. It's very easy to imagine that world wide competition for energy will either lead to enormous prices, environmental crisis or war, unless steps are taken to create a variable marketbasket of more environmental and cost effective renewable energy sources. Oil will always be part of the mix but it can't be the only source.
real costs are going to rise for conventional electricity sources while this will drop.
the cost of these solar appliances will not only drop but the cost of oil will surely rise. Not quite sure about the cost of nuclear, but it's also true we can't generate enough nuclear power to replace oil ( it would take opening 1 gigawatt plant every single day for the next 30 years just to stay even with energy usage growth). While shale oil will keep the price of oil clamped, it will create a crisis in carbon load, so it can't be the dominant energy source.
So it seems to me that prices for energy are going to rise dramtically over time, at least double, and that solar energy is one of the keys. The fact that he is also generating transportation fuels and has off-peak solar storage does more to make this viable than the overall efficiency.
Should we include the kilobuck the middleclass homeowner pays for military adventurism every year (even more during wars)? Should we count the deaths of soldiers and civilans caused by that adventurism? Should we count the carbon load on the environment from using non-renewables?
The coherent detection version of this was patented 11 years ago.
Apparatus and method for heterodyne-generated, two-dimensional detector array using a single detector
If someone comes over to your house and tries to open the windows and see if they can climb in are they not trespassing? It seems like rattling doorknobs is a bold act that does border on criminal intent. It's not the same as going up to a door and knocking. we all know that. Probing a site for flaes is wrong
Enron got in to trouble because they were booking sales on unshipped product. THe wayapple is looking at this put in enron accounting terms would look something like this. 1) holding company owned by enron agrees to buy 10 barrels of oil from enron. 2) enron books the sale even though they just paid themsleves 3) but they don't book the liability because they just deliver 9 barrels of oil and defer delivery of the tenth to a later date. Here apple is scared that they will get flagged for booking the sale of an incomplete product. I don't really see how this applies but I can see why they are paranoid.
In the mac world, word 6 actually had fewer features and was harder to use than mac word 5. the difference was that it was identical to the PC product. that is, they advanced the PC product to have features that were already in the mac product, and then regressesed and reskinned the mac product ot make it identical. I remember my extreme rage, shared by many, at this and vowen not to upgrade. Then after a month or so I got a critical contract application form in word 6. I could not read it in word 5 and had to buy word 6. so yes to your question.
Eventually more and more customers and clients will send you documents encoded in MS format. You will need to not only read them but edit them and send them back. So far no one has ever been able to create a document in MS WOrd that is 100% platform interchangable. Even MS word on mac is in 100% compatible with ms word on PC, though it's pretty close, the page layouts shift subtly with tables and figures changing positions and dimensions.
Thus the only way you can work with other people's word documents is to own word. anything else as the parent points out is a waste of valuable time. the cost of word is negligible compared to your time
hen don't shift units. Use kilo feet or centi-miles. The reason you are decimal shifting in the metric system is precisely because you are Not shifting units. kilometers, meters and centimeters are all the same units. Nothing prevents you from using decimal english units and decimal point shifting. that's how they do it in machine shops. In the metric system, a unit shift is like going from cgs to MKS where mu and epsilon change scales and all of maxwells equations require conversions.
As a scientist, I can attest to the massive superiority of the metric system
Back off man I'm a scientist too.
You must be daffy or have only book leanrt experience to have such a clouded understanding of the issue. Walk in to any machine shop some time. It's filled with decimal measures. Every dial is calibrated in decimal inches down to thousanths of an inch.
Nothing prevents decimalizing any unit of measure
Your argument only hangs on the idea that metric units tend to be more derived other units. For example, you indicate that length measures can be turned into weight measures by filling a measured volume with water and weighing it.
That's an irrational argument for such a renouned scientist to make since the SAME is true of the english system. In your example you selected water to do the conversion. But if you had selected dihydro pentoxy sulfate as the liquid you would find that 1 pound of this is equal to 1000 cubic inches. Laugh but it's only slightly more arbitrary than water. Since we seldom actually use this fact, what matters more it how useful the ratio of unit measures is not how they were derived. English units have two properties that metric units lack. Namely most of them have rations that are commonly divisible by handy numbers. weight measures are mainly powers of 2: (2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon). Or by thirds and twos: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 second to the hour, 24 hours per day. How many hours are in your metric da, mr science? The second property is that they are created to be right sized for many daily human interactions. An inch is about the size of tip of a thump to it's knuckle. If your making something that uses hand work it's a pretty damn "handy" measure. A gallon of water is about what a soldier, field worker or seaman needs to drink every day, so if your provisioning it's a pretty useful measure. and so on.
there's no reason not to use decimal english measures and in most ways they are superior.
This the very first Apple iphone. Treo is many versions and generations old. Apple does not want to weather a virus on their very first outing. Even instability and debugging user problems would not be desirable. They want to back this phone 100% so for it's debut they are going to do that by keeping it 100% their problem if anything goes wrong. Can you imagine how screwed they'd be if the rumor was that the battery life was only 2 hours not 5 (and it turned out to be some power sucking craplet widget). The people who will buy these are not the geeks like you but corporate executives who want a seemless balckberry existence.
Additionally I would bet that it's API is still in flux. They probably will have lots of debugging code in the first edition. So they probably can't even publish a third party SDK even if they wanted too. I would also imagine that cingular insisted that they can keep skype and VoiP off the phone too.
Remember they probably see cingular as their customer more than they see you right now. After all they probably had some problems getting the company to agree to make all the changes they wanted. For now they want to keep them happy because it's those changes like viusal voice mail, and probably a whole lot more we have not seen yet, that are going to set apple apart and make it like the whole itunes/ipod/music store seemless integration that people love.
GIve it a year before they release an sdk, and another year for the cingular contract to expire before they open it up.
Bulky? it's thinnner than almost any phone on the market. it's shorter than most flip phones or ones that extend KB. it will slip nicely in my jean pockets. and good god who talks for 5 hours on a cell phone. that's 300 minutes a day.
They were a bit cagey on the battery life I admit. this one clearly has varying modes of use. PDA mode with screen and CPU churning. Idle PDA with screen dimmed, and cell-phone mode, wi-fi on. blue tooth on. etc... No mention of stand-by time.
I'm thinking they are being cagey because they are still developing the power management software and don't really know. They probably still have wads of debugging code in this and have not optimized a lot of it since it's obviously running on yet another cpu. THey did the same thing at the debut of OSX and then of intel, not beiing totally clear about the power management.
On the other hand, the track record on the ipod is that they tend to underspec the battery life. Or rather they spec it for normal usage not minimal settings like other brands do. So those are lower bounds I imagine.
Who said wii killer? it just is ripe for allowing wii like functionality. Not everyone has a wii or an apple. But if you had one of these iphones would you not want it to be a video game controller too?
If you desire a tactile input for games then one can imagine all sorts of stick-on rubber button arrays and other sorts of intefaces. These would adhere (removably) to the screen and the touches translated to actions. Sort of a universal adapter for any sort of input. So I don't see the virtual buttons as foreclosing tacile input fopr games
Well yes, those ring tones are a nice profit margin billion dollar industry (not exagerating!). But remember the folks that will buy these are going to have preimum voice+data contracts too. the ringtone market won't matter so much in that case. Moreover if verizons phones are the zune++ then we can be pretty sure that MS will accomodate the carriers wishes (just like how Vista is accomodating the MPAA): Windows-CE will lock them down tight with drm and maybe not let you buy ring tones outside the approved source.