The Dell XPS series is a good example of this. A 4:3 screen would have fitted perfectly, but instead I've got two one inch black strips glued on where my screen should be. Perhaps you should attribute those black bars to poor industrial design rather than a limitation of the screen itself.
Exactly. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case when advertised, and consumers almost never know what they get.
It's unfortunate - consumers shouldn't need to know the differences between TN, S-IPS, and S-PVA in order to get the best screens out there.
For those of you who are wondering, somewhere in the range of 100% of 22-inch flat panel monitors are TN 6-bit panels. This isn't a phenomenon limited to Apple, it's an industry-wide phenomenon. It doesn't help that TN panels get to advertise super-low refresh rates like 3-5 ms, attracting the numbers-only gamer crowd and bringing the consumer dollars to inferior panels.
Oh another thing - what kind of pornographic apps really need an SDK anyway? I imagine porno sites are better served using the mobile safari APIs. All legitimate ones would rather you do web authentication anyway, and video can be handled using quicktime.
I'm surprised so few people know what the application signing is in Leopard (well, this is slashdot, so not really surprised at all). You can use ANY certificate you want to sign it. ANY. Including the freemail one from thawte that doesn't cost anything.
Want an example in play? Look no further than the Xquartz binaries for Leopard (updated X11 components). Some guy signs that using a thawte freemail certificate.
Your post isn't even on topic - this isn't even talking about app signing.
And to date, all iPhone patches/upgrades have been free, much like your PSP example. That's because of an accounting trick they use. iPods are not recognized in the same way, and that's why they charge for the same upgrades. These charges apply to iPod touches only, not iPhones. iPhones are benefiting from this accounting trick for 2 years, so it will be interesting to see what happens at the end of that cycle. It's entirely likely that SCE employs the same accounting methods to deliver upgrades for PSPs and PS3s, and MSFT for xbox360 dashboard feature updates.
Seriously. LED backlighting? Wiki tells me it's been on some VAIOs since 2006 and on MacBook Pros since 2007. Widescreen displays? Pretty much every manufacturer in 2007 (including Lenovo, for that matter), and a large few in 2003-2006, and as far back as 2001 for Apple. Revolutionary time for Lenovo? More like playing catchup and/or letting high-end features stay in their high-end (the X300 is a $2500 machine after all).
Smells like astroturfing, or the dumbest kind of fanboyism, to me.
The only dangerous ground apple is in is with record companies if they don't aggressively pursue DRM faults/breaks/violations. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that apple has clauses in their contracts with these companies that force them to maintain their DRM updated, track offenders and litigate where necessary.
However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.
That explains the C&D letter pretty well.
This is not to say that apple is blameless. They aren't. Apple, at this point, has had the chance to shame record labels (at least them. It appears we are doomed to repeat this nonsense with video) into changing their contracts. They took the opportunity to sound like a white knight in copyleft circles for a few weeks and did nothing. Maybe this was because companies were intransigent in negotiation. Maybe it is because apple's commitment to DRM free media was less than sincere. Probably both.
Perhaps that letter may be of further use to you still.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
In any case, the industry is waiting to see whether -- and how quickly -- Amazon can grow into a credible alternative to iTunes, and whether Mr. Jobs will stand by as his service, which commands as much as 80 percent of digital download sales, is challenged.
"This is really a stare-down," said one major label executive who was briefed on the new Pepsi promotion and who requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak about it.
Industry executives say the rivalry could intensify if the two services jockey over who will be given exclusive rights to some songs or special promotions. A senior executive at another record company, who requested anonymity out of concern about irritating Mr. Jobs, said he was prepared to keep copy restrictions on his label's songs on iTunes for six months to a year while Amazon establishes itself. Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents, while Amazon sells them for 89 cents to over a dollar.
Looks like the real story here is that Apple would rather sell DRM-free music, and the labels would rather use consumers as pawns in their vendetta against Apple by making Amazon your only choice. Remember that: blame for iTunes DRM can be placed squarely on the labels' shoulders, because they want to interfere with your choice.
Well, it's more of a network effect than anything now. It used to be that iPod dock connector needed to supply both firewire and USB2, and the dock connector is a pretty good way of doing that. Nowadays it only needs to supply USB2 but the connector is far too popular to drop now. Not to mention it supplies nice things like line out and even controller functions separate of USB. Try shoehorning RCA-out connectors on something the size of an iPod:)
It would appear that no one on Slashdot has any sort of humor at all - at least the sort that read it on a Saturday night.
Many of you would do well to remember that FSJ is a parody blog, sometimes at its finest, sometimes not so much.
Those of you kneejerk types can also rest easy in the fact that because FSJ is a parody blog, it doesn't have any actual news content or any "rumors" worth suing over either.
This is the same guy who (figuratively) fell in love with David Maynor and their associated AirPort exploit back when everyone else was telling them to show the goods. The guy isn't much more than an Apple troll - go through his archives (but don't actually - that gives him advertising hits) and it basically reads as "Apple sucks at this, Apple sucks at that, wah wah wah."
See here for a brief recap of Ou's idiocy (not a word but still).
I got to play with the latest Sony Reader revision at a bookstore the other day. I have to say, it's actually a pretty attractive device now. If you can get past the fact that it's from Sony (a hard tidbit to overlook, I know), you might come away plesantly surprised. The screen is nice, as you might expect. They don't waste any space including a keyboard like on the Kindle, so about 85% of the entire device face is screen, and not much else. If you're not a fan of large bezels or are a fan of the full-screen iPhone experience, you'll like the Reader.
The hardware is actually surprisingly attractive. The body itself has a nice brushed metal feel to it now, not unlike a MacBook Pro. Buttons were a silver plastic I believe. The device is also really thin, which was a nice change over the first Reader I saw, as that one was a little on the chunky side.
This being a store demo unit, I did not get to try out the Sony Connect store. This being Sony though, I'm not surprised if the experience had a tendency to suck. The Sony Connect music store's already been shut down, if you were curious how that effort was going in general.
Read the Ars review if you want a more real-life experience though. Personally, I'd like the Sony Reader hardware and exterior combined with the Amazon software and EVDO connection as an ideal ebook reader.
Really? Because about a year and half ago it looks like the Konq devs weren't getting too much done, and Apple was doing all the heavy lifting. Two years ago I could've flipped that statement around and said "I'm glad that Mozilla is handling most of its work in-house and doesn't have to worry about a forked version overtaking it in quality and stature."
Besides, it's a bit of a ridiculous statement to assume that a significant portion of the OSS devs on Mozilla are involved or expending significant developer resources working on what amounts to a marketing deal, no? There can be other people at work on this you know.
I know I shouldn't be biting back at the trolls (a Konqueror troll, no less!) but this one was too hard to resist! You'd think someone really interested in OSS browsers would be more concerned for the rise of either WebKit, Firefox/Gecko, or both, when we're talking about the top 2 browsers in China being IE and an IE-derivative.
As of MY press time, Zune 80 is #9. iPods occupy spots 1,2, and 4-8. #3 is a Sansa of some variety, #9 is a Zune, and #10 is another Sansa. 11-14 are different nano varieties, and all the way at #15 is a Zune spot.
Feel free to come up with your own crackpot theory as to why this is. My favorite is the Zune isn't popular unless it's dirt cheap.
I can go out and buy an iPhone, Nokia, or whatever, or I can buy this. Why should I care whether it's a WM6 problem or a t-mob problem? It should be usable out of the box.
Not everyone knows about APE. I, for one, found APE on my system after wondering why my logins were so damned slow. Hint: update_prebinding was being run on every user logon because that was the only workaround that Unsanity decided to use for some retarded bug of theirs. Nevermind that this slows user logon down by about 5 minutes each time! However, I had never installed APE ever in my life, so how did it get there?
Logitech mouse/keyboard drivers install them for you, without asking or telling you! It's not entirely the user that's to blame - even a reasonably careful user won't notice surreptitious installs like this. Logitech's method of bundling it is vaguely like spyware, I'd say.
Who says that all the software produced for the iPhone under an SDK has to be hobbyist? Nothing stopping any other B2B software provider from putting out an iPhone client.
This quote is particularly telling I think:
Adding salt to Palm's wounds, Apple proclaimed last week it sold a million iPhones in its first 74 days in the smart phone market. Palm has yet to sell that many Treos in a quarter.
At the start of the day, Democrats were confident that the measure would gain approval in the House despite a veto threat from President Bush. But after an afternoon of partisan sniping, Democratic leaders put off that vote because of a competing measure from Republicans that on its face asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again.
The Republican measure declared that nothing in the broader bill should be construed as prohibiting intelligence officials from conducting the surveillance needed to prevent Mr. bin Laden or Al Qaeda "from attacking the United States." Had it passed, it threatened to derail the Democratic measure altogether.
Democrats denounced the Republicans' poison pill on Mr. bin Laden as a cynical political ploy and "a cheap shot." But Democratic leaders realized that they were at risk of losing the votes of a contingent of more moderate Democrats who did not want to be left vulnerable for voting against a resolution to stop Al Qaeda, officials said. So the leaders pulled the measure, promising to take it up again next week once they could solidify support.
The Republican maneuver "would have killed the bill, and we couldn't risk that," said a senior Democratic aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal leadership deliberations. "We thought we'd be able to defeat it, but it became clear that we couldn't."
The episode revealed, once again, fault lines within the Democratic Party over how to tackle national security questions without appearing "soft" on terrorism in the face of Republican criticism.
Blame the Republicans for being a bunch of 'tards and assholes, blame the Democrats for being spineless in the face of ads going "John S. loves al-Qaeda and hates our country!"
This would be a decent article, but unfortunately the first half of the summary has absolutely nothing to do with the second half. And that infoworld link? Woefully out of date. See http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/. What's that on the left there? Buildable sources for OS X 10.4.4-10.4.9 on both PPC and Intel? 10.4.10 isn't there but that's probably because they're running a little behind, not some whacko conspiracy theory that was disproven a month or so after that article. And let's not forget WebKit, which also happens to run on Nokia S60 phones (not the internet tablets though, those are Opera). If that's not open source I don't know what f'd up definition you're using.
After some of these iPhone articles, Apple misinformation is at some all-time high here at slashdot. There's lots of valid complaints to be had about the company - let's not muck that up with retarded ones, okay?
Sure you own it, But Apple owns the software. And the update that you, the owner of said device, can apply at your own choosing. Apple's putting out an update that breaks your hacked device. As a user of a hacked device, you should have known (especially since there were articles about it prior) before even attempting to apply the update.
The device is yours to do with it as you wish. Just because the 1.1 update closed those doors to you doesn't make the 1.0.x phones unusable.
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Exactly. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case when advertised, and consumers almost never know what they get.
It's unfortunate - consumers shouldn't need to know the differences between TN, S-IPS, and S-PVA in order to get the best screens out there.
For those of you who are wondering, somewhere in the range of 100% of 22-inch flat panel monitors are TN 6-bit panels. This isn't a phenomenon limited to Apple, it's an industry-wide phenomenon. It doesn't help that TN panels get to advertise super-low refresh rates like 3-5 ms, attracting the numbers-only gamer crowd and bringing the consumer dollars to inferior panels.
Oh another thing - what kind of pornographic apps really need an SDK anyway? I imagine porno sites are better served using the mobile safari APIs. All legitimate ones would rather you do web authentication anyway, and video can be handled using quicktime.
I'm surprised so few people know what the application signing is in Leopard (well, this is slashdot, so not really surprised at all). You can use ANY certificate you want to sign it. ANY. Including the freemail one from thawte that doesn't cost anything. Want an example in play? Look no further than the Xquartz binaries for Leopard (updated X11 components). Some guy signs that using a thawte freemail certificate. Your post isn't even on topic - this isn't even talking about app signing.
And to date, all iPhone patches/upgrades have been free, much like your PSP example. That's because of an accounting trick they use. iPods are not recognized in the same way, and that's why they charge for the same upgrades. These charges apply to iPod touches only, not iPhones. iPhones are benefiting from this accounting trick for 2 years, so it will be interesting to see what happens at the end of that cycle. It's entirely likely that SCE employs the same accounting methods to deliver upgrades for PSPs and PS3s, and MSFT for xbox360 dashboard feature updates.
That's not a material feature upgrade. I have a feeling firmware updates count as minor bug fixes or something like that.
Seriously. LED backlighting? Wiki tells me it's been on some VAIOs since 2006 and on MacBook Pros since 2007. Widescreen displays? Pretty much every manufacturer in 2007 (including Lenovo, for that matter), and a large few in 2003-2006, and as far back as 2001 for Apple. Revolutionary time for Lenovo? More like playing catchup and/or letting high-end features stay in their high-end (the X300 is a $2500 machine after all).
Smells like astroturfing, or the dumbest kind of fanboyism, to me.
Well, it's more of a network effect than anything now. It used to be that iPod dock connector needed to supply both firewire and USB2, and the dock connector is a pretty good way of doing that. Nowadays it only needs to supply USB2 but the connector is far too popular to drop now. Not to mention it supplies nice things like line out and even controller functions separate of USB. Try shoehorning RCA-out connectors on something the size of an iPod :)
My Dell Inspiron 600m did not come with a video adapter - that was a $19 accessory as well.
Besides, the MacBook Air comes with both DVI and VGA out. How often do you really use SVideo?
It would appear that no one on Slashdot has any sort of humor at all - at least the sort that read it on a Saturday night.
Many of you would do well to remember that FSJ is a parody blog, sometimes at its finest, sometimes not so much.
Those of you kneejerk types can also rest easy in the fact that because FSJ is a parody blog, it doesn't have any actual news content or any "rumors" worth suing over either.
See here for a brief recap of Ou's idiocy (not a word but still).
The hardware is actually surprisingly attractive. The body itself has a nice brushed metal feel to it now, not unlike a MacBook Pro. Buttons were a silver plastic I believe. The device is also really thin, which was a nice change over the first Reader I saw, as that one was a little on the chunky side.
This being a store demo unit, I did not get to try out the Sony Connect store. This being Sony though, I'm not surprised if the experience had a tendency to suck. The Sony Connect music store's already been shut down, if you were curious how that effort was going in general.
Read the Ars review if you want a more real-life experience though. Personally, I'd like the Sony Reader hardware and exterior combined with the Amazon software and EVDO connection as an ideal ebook reader.
Anyone else get the impression that Dvorak won't be giving any charitable contributions at all, rice or not?
Besides, it's a bit of a ridiculous statement to assume that a significant portion of the OSS devs on Mozilla are involved or expending significant developer resources working on what amounts to a marketing deal, no? There can be other people at work on this you know.
I know I shouldn't be biting back at the trolls (a Konqueror troll, no less!) but this one was too hard to resist! You'd think someone really interested in OSS browsers would be more concerned for the rise of either WebKit, Firefox/Gecko, or both, when we're talking about the top 2 browsers in China being IE and an IE-derivative.
As of MY press time, Zune 80 is #9. iPods occupy spots 1,2, and 4-8. #3 is a Sansa of some variety, #9 is a Zune, and #10 is another Sansa. 11-14 are different nano varieties, and all the way at #15 is a Zune spot.
Feel free to come up with your own crackpot theory as to why this is. My favorite is the Zune isn't popular unless it's dirt cheap.
I can go out and buy an iPhone, Nokia, or whatever, or I can buy this. Why should I care whether it's a WM6 problem or a t-mob problem? It should be usable out of the box.
'nuff said.
Logitech mouse/keyboard drivers install them for you, without asking or telling you! It's not entirely the user that's to blame - even a reasonably careful user won't notice surreptitious installs like this. Logitech's method of bundling it is vaguely like spyware, I'd say.
Same here. I signed up under the blogger.com referral days too.
It works, it really works!
This quote is particularly telling I think:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/gear/2007-09-21-palm-future_N.htmPerhaps you should bone up on the latest features in Leopard. The section on "app signing" may be directly related to your comment (and by "may be" I mean "is").
After some of these iPhone articles, Apple misinformation is at some all-time high here at slashdot. There's lots of valid complaints to be had about the company - let's not muck that up with retarded ones, okay?
Sure you own it, But Apple owns the software. And the update that you, the owner of said device, can apply at your own choosing. Apple's putting out an update that breaks your hacked device. As a user of a hacked device, you should have known (especially since there were articles about it prior) before even attempting to apply the update.
The device is yours to do with it as you wish. Just because the 1.1 update closed those doors to you doesn't make the 1.0.x phones unusable.