The app can only open files in specifically defined (and Apple approved) locations. Outside these locations, you need express permission (via a file open dialog) to access files. So all would be OK for ~/Movies or ~/Downloads.
But while you could open "/Volumes/My Big External Disk/Movies/movie.avi" via a file dialog to play it back, the software could not automatically also open "/Volumes/My Big External Disk/Movies/movie.srt" to show you subtitles.
Yes, they may make a loss on these unit, but not as much as they would make if they just scrapped the 100.000 parts and sub-assemblies they have lying in a warehouse.
If those parts are worth $200/piece, that would be a $20M loss.
Spending an extra $100 to turn them into units and selling them at $250 (nobody said these ones would be $99 also!) that would be a $5M loss.
(Shipping will only be a few dollars and reseller margins on these things are so thin at the best of times, they just want to get people into their store and sell them accessories)
The reason for drawing that conclusion is that when an aircraft departing controlled flight in this fashion without evidence of structural or control failure, there really is only one other option.
The conclusion did not come from knowing these things fail regularly; instead it came from working back what could cause the observed events - a purely scientific analysis.
The leading theory for a long time has been super cooled water droplets causing a blockage so rapidly that no amount of heating of the pitot probes could have prevented it.
I am working with a hardware company on this. The main issue we are having is that the whole program is tailored to high-volume manufacturers; little guys like us are below the Apple radar.
To apply for the program, you need to supply a lot of information, including company turn-over and a whole lot more that should be none of their business.
Then to make it work, you must integrate a chip supplied by Apple that does the authentication. That's great if you are starting from scratch and intend to send millions of products. It's a pain if you already have a working design with thousands of devices out in the field with bluetooth, but not Apple's chip.
That's what's stopped us from signing up and doing it. Luckily, in our business, people would be buying mostly tablet devices that are exclusively used for the purpose. Android here we come, which is a shame as iOS is a much nicer platform to create something that works well and looks good in very little time.
Yeah, but looking at the guy's name, I'd say he's Australian. While nobody here ends up with $100K student debt, the days of free are over too.
Australia has some of the lowest taxes in the western world, affordable quality education and healthcare and a very high standard of living. (Same big cars and McMansions Americans enjoy) All while having a $10K lower GNI per Capita than the US. So obviously, there seems to be a good balance between taxes and government spending here.
No NBN trial for me, but with the RIM hell we have here I have good hopes of being hooked up early in the rollout!
When the NBN was going to be FTTN I used to joke that's what we already had: it's called a RIM, look how great those are!
Yeah, if we had an ADSL2+ minimux, I'd be laughing at 24mbit, but 17 ain't so bad... (I used to live 75m from here on the other side of the suburb's ring road. That was direct exchange at 21mbit.)
But there are also a lot of RIMs with severe backhaul problems, where people sync at 8mbit and get a whole mbit or two at peak times.
Internode is the best ISP in the country, not Telstra!
Having experience with both Agile ports and TWS ports, I can say there is no discernible difference in being on either of them with Internode. The only difference is price; I have to pay the Telstra tax; being on a Agile port would be $30/month less.
My particular RIM actually has no minimux, instead it is fed by a 100-pair from the exchange for ADSL.
The larger the aircraft, the bigger the boom. A conventional 200 passenger airliner will create a very big boom.
I was surprised because the Mythbusters couldn't break any windows with an F-18 unless they were at tree-top level. But big booms from big airliners are real.
And it's not just the boom, it's also the engines. Hard to create a supersonic airliner using quiet high-bypass turbofans. Concorde used straight turbojet with after burners: very loud.
Right until the Paris crash, Concorde between London and NYC was full and making a lot of money for BA. (buying the aircraft for peanuts from the government helped) Ticket prices were barely more than 1st class going subsonic.
I would imagine a NYC-LAX service and between other hubs would be equally lucrative; there an aweful lot of very rich folks and companies!
That said: I agree the next SST will more than likely be a business jet.
Uhm, I hate to say this, but that is how Windows Phone 7 will work - no native code, Silverlight only. And only apps approved by MS, thought the MS app store.
Like Microsoft with Windows, Apple does not place any of these restrictions on OS X, just iPhone OS.
Wrong or right, each can have their own opinion, but you can not compare iPhone to Windows. Compare iPhone to WinMo7 and Windows to OS X. Looks like the two companies are not so different in their policies after all.
Booms aren't just loud, they also smash Windows and American law-makers care; the FAA specifically bans not sonic booms, but *all* supersonic flight. So even if you came up with a boomless SST, you'd still need the get permissions to go supersonic!
Your views on trips are also rather US-centric. There are a lot of aircraft flying from Europe to Asia, all over land.
If it had not been for this minor boom problem, Concorde would have been a much bigger success.
mrstrano: use Google App Engine. Either Java or Python, doesn't matter. FREE to start, great value when the website takes off and scales beyond what you'll likely need.
but one must be careful not to confuse popularity with ease of development. The iPhone may be easy to develop for (don't know personally), but that doesn't prove that popular == easy to develop for.
Absolutely, but in this case, from my experience it is true. I find it very easy and there are numerous stories of people new to programming making some very good and popular apps.
Apple has historically been more like Sony in this regard, limiting who can write for their platform AND what they can publish.
This is only try for the iPhone. ("historically" thus only going back 14 months!) There is not a single limation on the Mac platform; you can write anything you like and publish it any way you like. All without paying Apple anything, of course.
Also, something to remember about mobile platforms in general and iPhone in particular: they generally have a more limited and defined feature set because everyone has essentially the same hardware device (or with only minor variations).
You should try mobile development!:) To support the majority of Java ME phones that are technically capable of running your app you should really make hundreds of builds! Windows Mobile isn't much better, with wildly varying hardware inside.
Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft about treating developers right
This is a gripe you have with iPhone, not the Mac platform. MS charges hundreds for Visual Studio where XCode is free, for example. They do have a paid developer program which gives early access as well as good discounts on hardware. But you don't need to pay them anything to develop or get their approval for anything on the Mac.
How many people do you know who are interested in general purpose computing and choose to run MacOS?
An ever growing number around me, actually! People buy computers very much on price and "what I already know". Luckily more and more people are realising there is something better than Windows and switching is easy.
Just because a platform has a greater number of frameworks doesn't mean it is more powerful. You could even turn it around and say that the number of 3rd party frameworks being developed indicates the language is missing some important stuff and everybody is trying to solve it in their own way, with lots of redundant, very similar frameworks.
You are probably comparing your desktop/server experience wth those languages to a mobile platform. I program Java and.Net for server apps every day and iPhone by night. The two are a completely different world. In my dayjob I am using all the frameworks and libraries that make me more productive. For the iPhone I don't even go looking for them because everything I need is right there. (The only exception to that I could see is 2D/3D animtaion and games, for which there are several great frameworks for iPhone. But that is not something I Do.)
Fifty thousand apps in just over a year on a niche mobile platform can't be argued with. The Objective-C/Cocoa Touch platform is inmensly powerful.
Ask any mobile developer that has done Windows Mobile in.Net, Java ME or Android and see which platform they create their best looking, best function, most reliable apps on and which one is the fastest to develop for. Yes, that would be iPhone.
Maybe Mono Touch will bring that kind of quality and productivity using C# to the iPhone platform, but I am sceptical.
There is a reason why there is so much quality software for iPhone - and for the Mac platform for that matter - and that reason are the Apple SDKs and Objective-C.
Hmmm. Got my Mac pro with 10.4. Used retail disk to update to 10.5. Now I would like to use a new larger, faster disk as start-up disk.
Is there any way to convince 10.6 to install on that? Like having the old disk in there so the installer can see I am eligible but install on a new disk?
Or do I need to restore from th 10.4 disks, update to 10.5 and then "erase and install" 10.6!?
How did we go from "three unencrypted hard drives that disappeared" to it being a "data breach"?
Yes, they should have been encrypted and yes, they should not have disappeared. For all we know some idiot stole them reformatted them and now hold their pr0n collection at home. Or the wrong ones were picked up for destruction and they have actually been securely destroyed.
Really, the media and everyone here is getting their panties all in a twist and coming up with fantastical hypothetical situation when the most likely scenario is nothing bad will come from this as it rarely does.
I am and they do! Texts are a cash-cow, why wouldn't they upgrade? They wouldn't do that if it were free; you get what you pay for.
I don't think Telcos guarantee anything, anyway...
The upgrades work for all services at the same time, yes. But it is a shared piece of equipment, so in accounting you need to pay for your share. The cost of equipment and its maintenance is much higher than the cost of bandwidth required, so just using the amount of data used as a guide for how cheap SMS should be makes no sense.
Big gatherings are a different story. The reason your phone worked at all is because they wheeled in mobile towers, which is the norm for events. It doesn't make them much money directly, but indirectly, they don't want to be known as the one network that didn't work - it's the kind of thing that makes people churn when their contract is up.
they do put a lot of money for network enhancement, that is, voice and data. SMS is never an issue for enhancement, and always a surplus of the system itself.
They still have to pay for the equipment somehow. People place a value on SMS, so they pay for it. If they made SMS free, they would lose that revenue stream and you'd pay more for the calls.
That used to be the case when SMS first became available, already paid for in the basic equipment and hardly anyone used it. But with the volume it is being used in now, there most definitely is a cost that is involved in upgrading systems to deal with it.
Remember how at midnight, new year's eve your SMSs didn't used to arrive a few years ago and now they do? Why do you think that is? Exactly: investment in increased capacity.
The price they charge is too high for sure and it is a cash cow, but to say the cost is 0 is just dead wrong.
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The app can only open files in specifically defined (and Apple approved) locations. Outside these locations, you need express permission (via a file open dialog) to access files. So all would be OK for ~/Movies or ~/Downloads.
But while you could open "/Volumes/My Big External Disk/Movies/movie.avi" via a file dialog to play it back, the software could not automatically also open "/Volumes/My Big External Disk/Movies/movie.srt" to show you subtitles.
That's the problem.
Plus $30 line rental? For the $80 you'd get the 25/5, double the quota and node phone. Not to mention a more reliable connection with lower latency.
That is good value if you ask me!
Not to mention you are in the .1% of the population that actually gets those speeds on ADSL...
Yes, they may make a loss on these unit, but not as much as they would make if they just scrapped the 100.000 parts and sub-assemblies they have lying in a warehouse.
If those parts are worth $200/piece, that would be a $20M loss.
Spending an extra $100 to turn them into units and selling them at $250 (nobody said these ones would be $99 also!) that would be a $5M loss.
(Shipping will only be a few dollars and reseller margins on these things are so thin at the best of times, they just want to get people into their store and sell them accessories)
You are working on the assumption that the system will send location information to the government.
Sounds like the box has all the info it needs to calculate the cost, needing only to send that information to its base.
I'm not saying that is how it will work, but there is no reason to jump to conclusions.
The reason for drawing that conclusion is that when an aircraft departing controlled flight in this fashion without evidence of structural or control failure, there really is only one other option.
The conclusion did not come from knowing these things fail regularly; instead it came from working back what could cause the observed events - a purely scientific analysis.
The leading theory for a long time has been super cooled water droplets causing a blockage so rapidly that no amount of heating of the pitot probes could have prevented it.
When you look at the twisted mass of wreckage the flight recorder came from, finding the data unit is a miracle.
I miracle would have been some deity appearing in the cockpit on that fateful night and telling the guys how to not get into this mess.
Finding this flight recorder is simply a great achievement of science, technology and perseverance.
I really wish people would stop calling great examples of human ingenuity with no evidence of divine intervention "miracles".
"Miracle on the Hudson" my ass!
I am working with a hardware company on this. The main issue we are having is that the whole program is tailored to high-volume manufacturers; little guys like us are below the Apple radar.
To apply for the program, you need to supply a lot of information, including company turn-over and a whole lot more that should be none of their business.
Then to make it work, you must integrate a chip supplied by Apple that does the authentication. That's great if you are starting from scratch and intend to send millions of products. It's a pain if you already have a working design with thousands of devices out in the field with bluetooth, but not Apple's chip.
That's what's stopped us from signing up and doing it. Luckily, in our business, people would be buying mostly tablet devices that are exclusively used for the purpose. Android here we come, which is a shame as iOS is a much nicer platform to create something that works well and looks good in very little time.
Yeah, but looking at the guy's name, I'd say he's Australian. While nobody here ends up with $100K student debt, the days of free are over too.
Australia has some of the lowest taxes in the western world, affordable quality education and healthcare and a very high standard of living. (Same big cars and McMansions Americans enjoy) All while having a $10K lower GNI per Capita than the US. So obviously, there seems to be a good balance between taxes and government spending here.
It also has barely HALF the unemployment rate of the US. Europe and US are on par hovering around 10%; you might want to check your facts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_by_country
No NBN trial for me, but with the RIM hell we have here I have good hopes of being hooked up early in the rollout!
When the NBN was going to be FTTN I used to joke that's what we already had: it's called a RIM, look how great those are!
Yeah, if we had an ADSL2+ minimux, I'd be laughing at 24mbit, but 17 ain't so bad... (I used to live 75m from here on the other side of the suburb's ring road. That was direct exchange at 21mbit.)
But there are also a lot of RIMs with severe backhaul problems, where people sync at 8mbit and get a whole mbit or two at peak times.
Internode is the best ISP in the country, not Telstra!
Having experience with both Agile ports and TWS ports, I can say there is no discernible difference in being on either of them with Internode. The only difference is price; I have to pay the Telstra tax; being on a Agile port would be $30/month less.
My particular RIM actually has no minimux, instead it is fed by a 100-pair from the exchange for ADSL.
Yes they do: Internode offers Telstra wholesale ADSL2+ where available.
I do believe they are the only ISP to do so.
It's not cheap, but you do get the best ISP in the country. Linux mirrors included.
How do I know? I am on ADSL2+ (17mbit sync) on a RIM off a Telstra-only exchange using Internode as ISP.
The larger the aircraft, the bigger the boom. A conventional 200 passenger airliner will create a very big boom.
I was surprised because the Mythbusters couldn't break any windows with an F-18 unless they were at tree-top level. But big booms from big airliners are real.
And it's not just the boom, it's also the engines. Hard to create a supersonic airliner using quiet high-bypass turbofans. Concorde used straight turbojet with after burners: very loud.
Right until the Paris crash, Concorde between London and NYC was full and making a lot of money for BA. (buying the aircraft for peanuts from the government helped) Ticket prices were barely more than 1st class going subsonic.
I would imagine a NYC-LAX service and between other hubs would be equally lucrative; there an aweful lot of very rich folks and companies!
That said: I agree the next SST will more than likely be a business jet.
Uhm, I hate to say this, but that is how Windows Phone 7 will work - no native code, Silverlight only. And only apps approved by MS, thought the MS app store.
Like Microsoft with Windows, Apple does not place any of these restrictions on OS X, just iPhone OS.
Wrong or right, each can have their own opinion, but you can not compare iPhone to Windows. Compare iPhone to WinMo7 and Windows to OS X. Looks like the two companies are not so different in their policies after all.
Booms aren't just loud, they also smash Windows and American law-makers care; the FAA specifically bans not sonic booms, but *all* supersonic flight. So even if you came up with a boomless SST, you'd still need the get permissions to go supersonic!
Your views on trips are also rather US-centric. There are a lot of aircraft flying from Europe to Asia, all over land.
If it had not been for this minor boom problem, Concorde would have been a much bigger success.
mrstrano: use Google App Engine. Either Java or Python, doesn't matter. FREE to start, great value when the website takes off and scales beyond what you'll likely need.
So how many of these (usually slightly cheaper) Linux netbooks are wiped the moment they get home and an illegal copy of XP put on?
Or after trying for a while the owner (who had the best intentions) decides they don't like Linux and put an illegal copy of XP on?
Just sayin'...
but one must be careful not to confuse popularity with ease of development. The iPhone may be easy to develop for (don't know personally), but that doesn't prove that popular == easy to develop for.
Absolutely, but in this case, from my experience it is true. I find it very easy and there are numerous stories of people new to programming making some very good and popular apps.
Apple has historically been more like Sony in this regard, limiting who can write for their platform AND what they can publish.
This is only try for the iPhone. ("historically" thus only going back 14 months!) There is not a single limation on the Mac platform; you can write anything you like and publish it any way you like. All without paying Apple anything, of course.
Also, something to remember about mobile platforms in general and iPhone in particular: they generally have a more limited and defined feature set because everyone has essentially the same hardware device (or with only minor variations).
You should try mobile development! :) To support the majority of Java ME phones that are technically capable of running your app you should really make hundreds of builds! Windows Mobile isn't much better, with wildly varying hardware inside.
Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft about treating developers right
This is a gripe you have with iPhone, not the Mac platform. MS charges hundreds for Visual Studio where XCode is free, for example. They do have a paid developer program which gives early access as well as good discounts on hardware. But you don't need to pay them anything to develop or get their approval for anything on the Mac.
How many people do you know who are interested in general purpose computing and choose to run MacOS?
An ever growing number around me, actually! People buy computers very much on price and "what I already know". Luckily more and more people are realising there is something better than Windows and switching is easy.
Just because a platform has a greater number of frameworks doesn't mean it is more powerful. You could even turn it around and say that the number of 3rd party frameworks being developed indicates the language is missing some important stuff and everybody is trying to solve it in their own way, with lots of redundant, very similar frameworks.
You are probably comparing your desktop/server experience wth those languages to a mobile platform. I program Java and .Net for server apps every day and iPhone by night. The two are a completely different world. In my dayjob I am using all the frameworks and libraries that make me more productive. For the iPhone I don't even go looking for them because everything I need is right there. (The only exception to that I could see is 2D/3D animtaion and games, for which there are several great frameworks for iPhone. But that is not something I Do.)
Fifty thousand apps in just over a year on a niche mobile platform can't be argued with. The Objective-C/Cocoa Touch platform is inmensly powerful.
Ask any mobile developer that has done Windows Mobile in .Net, Java ME or Android and see which platform they create their best looking, best function, most reliable apps on and which one is the fastest to develop for. Yes, that would be iPhone.
Maybe Mono Touch will bring that kind of quality and productivity using C# to the iPhone platform, but I am sceptical.
There is a reason why there is so much quality software for iPhone - and for the Mac platform for that matter - and that reason are the Apple SDKs and Objective-C.
Great, thanks. I'll definitely make sure to have a fresh Time Machine backup in case it all goes pear-shaped!
Hmmm. Got my Mac pro with 10.4. Used retail disk to update to 10.5. Now I would like to use a new larger, faster disk as start-up disk.
Is there any way to convince 10.6 to install on that? Like having the old disk in there so the installer can see I am eligible but install on a new disk?
Or do I need to restore from th 10.4 disks, update to 10.5 and then "erase and install" 10.6!?
Why do so many folks expect the people we hire for our dirtiest jobs (like thermo-nuclear incineration of entire nations) to be do-no-harm nice guys?
At best you are going to get people who act like the majority of the society they represent.
How did we go from "three unencrypted hard drives that disappeared" to it being a "data breach"?
Yes, they should have been encrypted and yes, they should not have disappeared. For all we know some idiot stole them reformatted them and now hold their pr0n collection at home. Or the wrong ones were picked up for destruction and they have actually been securely destroyed.
Really, the media and everyone here is getting their panties all in a twist and coming up with fantastical hypothetical situation when the most likely scenario is nothing bad will come from this as it rarely does.
I am and they do! Texts are a cash-cow, why wouldn't they upgrade? They wouldn't do that if it were free; you get what you pay for.
I don't think Telcos guarantee anything, anyway...
The upgrades work for all services at the same time, yes. But it is a shared piece of equipment, so in accounting you need to pay for your share. The cost of equipment and its maintenance is much higher than the cost of bandwidth required, so just using the amount of data used as a guide for how cheap SMS should be makes no sense.
Big gatherings are a different story. The reason your phone worked at all is because they wheeled in mobile towers, which is the norm for events. It doesn't make them much money directly, but indirectly, they don't want to be known as the one network that didn't work - it's the kind of thing that makes people churn when their contract is up.
they do put a lot of money for network enhancement, that is, voice and data. SMS is never an issue for enhancement, and always a surplus of the system itself.
They still have to pay for the equipment somehow. People place a value on SMS, so they pay for it. If they made SMS free, they would lose that revenue stream and you'd pay more for the calls.
There's no such thing as a free lunch.
That used to be the case when SMS first became available, already paid for in the basic equipment and hardly anyone used it. But with the volume it is being used in now, there most definitely is a cost that is involved in upgrading systems to deal with it.
Remember how at midnight, new year's eve your SMSs didn't used to arrive a few years ago and now they do? Why do you think that is? Exactly: investment in increased capacity.
The price they charge is too high for sure and it is a cash cow, but to say the cost is 0 is just dead wrong.