Didn't take reading the article to figure out that any version of Photoshop that was both online and ad-supported was more likely to be a very cut-down service and greatly different/simplified from the boxed versions.
I used to use an app from Adobe called "Photo Deluxe". It was based on the Photoshop engine, but with the interface totally changed and cut down (more so than Elements). I wouldn't have considered that Photoshop, and I suspect that this online service will be even more simplified. Calling it Photoshop is likely just a branding exercise.
Assuming the whole thing was coded in C Yes, assuming.
And if it were, can you briefly explain why you believe this flaw to be due to the limitations of C? That is, why it would not have occurred with another language?
Can we please stop using C now? "Assuming the whole thing was coded in C", are you implying that they should have written the operating system in Java or Ada 95, or Shoot-Em-Up-Construction-Kit instead?
C certainly is certainly far from perfect from a modern perspective, but they probably chose it (assuming they did) for valid performance reasons. Other languages may have better checking, type safety, blah blah, but they all come with performance trade-offs. They may be better suited for many applications, but I can understand why they might have chosen C here.
£80 network cards (that was apparently the cheapest) Much as I dislike some of PC World's ludicruously inflated prices (£10- approx USD $20- for a 2m Ethernet cable), I was able to pick up a no-name white-box network card there for £6 about a year ago.
OTOH, I didn't ask their staff for advice on which card I should buy (^_^)
Yeah, it's established, with really crappy software and interfaces. True; the point is that the market is established in a way that it wasn't with the iPod. If Apple can make a phone that is really damn good *in practice*, they might convince people to buy it, but it had better be good.
"Even if they need a mobile for whatever reason, most don't "need" a new phone that often."
Maybe they don't, but And that was my point, period. People replace their phones often, but they don't *need* to, contrary to what the person I was replying to implied.
Who says they're going to exclusively target high-end customers? That's a really, really, really bad assumption. *I* didn't.
If you'd actually bothered to read what I was saying, instead of just skimming and jumping on isolated snippets, it'd be obvious that I was paraphrasing the other guy's position in order to disagree with it.
They said that "Since Apples goes after high end electronic consumers it may not be an issue." (my emphasis).
I replied "Smacks of elitism to me. Wake up; the iPod (which many will have in mind when considering the iPhone) is definitely a mass-market phenomenon, and you don't get that by targeting exclusively high-end consumers." (Emphasis added).
Next time, try spending more than 3 seconds reading what you're supposedly replying to.
One of these days I want to do an "Ask Slashdot: What would you do with the Star Trek franchise?" Write a story announcing that the entire Star Trek universe was a fiction created by The Master within the Doctor Who TV series, created to distract nerds everywhere from his plans to take over the universe and turn Tom Baker into Peter Davison:-P
When the iPod was launched, the portable music player market was decades old, and there were high-end, hard-drive based MP3 players available that very few people were willing to pay for. I think his analogy works just fine. I don't believe it's an analogy, I believe it was intended as a direct comparison. And whilst the portable music market may have been "decades old" at that point, the large-capacity all-your-music-on-one-device wasn't; it was a major change in the market.
Note that I didn't claim Apple were first, either with HDD-based devices or with MP3 players in general. I said that they got in there early, before the mass-market had matured. (Yes, there were portable MP3 players around years before the iPod; 32MB devices that held the same amount of music as a C60 cassette, took ages to copy your music to- which you had to do repeatedly when it could only hold one album's worth- and cost a lot of money. They were expensive geek toys.)
Apple got in there before MP3 players went *mainstream*; and to some extent they were able to define the market, not just with their player, but with iTunes.
Put simply, I don't see that the mobile phone market is at the same stage unless the iPhone does something as fundamentally new (and as well) as the original iPods.
tell me again why Digg is worse than this place? Because Digg is like that all the time. And whilst Slashdot is far from perfect, Digg has all the same problems squared, and a whole load of others besides.
Can you explain or give some links about these differences between 2G and 3G phones? I'm not overly familiar with the US situation and facilities, so I can't really compare the two.
I do know that 3G in Europe supports (e.g.) much faster data rates (384 kbps when moving and 2Mbps when still under 3G.... compared with 10 to 15 kbps on 2G's GPRS data service), i.e. greater capacity/speed, and at lower cost. (If they charged the same exorbitant rates per megabyte as they did with 2G, no-one would be able to afford the much-hyped new data services anyway).
Of course, this doesn't necessarily tell you which is best in practice. There are also issues like 2G vs. 3G network coverage, services offered by different operators, how much they charge, etc etc.
Anyway, the new European 3G facilities include the likes of video messaging, TV on demand to your phone, blah blah.... I don't know how well-developed two-way videophones are yet, but the network should be able to handle that. Note that the public's uptake of some of these services (espec. TV on demand) hasn't been as high as the operators had hoped; they're having to recoup some of the money that they paid for the 3G frequencies during the dotcom boom:-/
But unless you're planning on living in Europe, you should buy what's best in the context of *your* market/networks, not ours.
also, nobody would ever pay 200+ dollars for an mp3 players, Said who, and when? It's a bogus argument anyway; the iPod was launched when the portable MP3 market was still young, and hadn't really taken off. Apple got in early enough and worked their magic.
By contrast, the mobile phone market is established, and Apple is getting in much later in the game. "High-end" phones have been around for years, and have never sold in massive numbers; and whether the iPhone is considered worthy of the price remains to be seen.
Sure, the lower middle clas does, but anybody who is smart with their money would not do this if they ahd a choice. The people you describe *do* have a choice. Even if they need a mobile for whatever reason, most don't "need" a new phone that often.
It's not necessarily stupid either, so long as you realise that the subsidised phone isn't really "free" and the plan you're buying it on is a good fit for what you'd be doing anyway.
Since Apples goes after high end electronic consumers it may not be an issue. Smacks of elitism to me. Wake up; the iPod (which many will have in mind when considering the iPhone) is definitely a mass-market phenomenon, and you don't get that by targeting exclusively high-end consumers.
The market will tell Much as I'd like to see if you're proved wrong, it's not going to happen since (as others have mentioned, and I've acknowledged) Apple *are* planning on launching a 3G iPhone. So in that context, it's more likely to be subsidised by the operators in Europe after all. It'll probably still be more expensive than the competition, just not incredibly so, and Joe Pleb may well decide it's worth the (little) extra for the Apple cred.
At the time I posted that comment, I didn't realise that Apple intended to launch a 3G version anyway, nor (supposedly) how easy the iPhone would be to adapt for 3G. I still don't know how significant that "smidge of different hardware" is in practice, but since they have it in mind, it's probably not an issue.
BTW, I never implied that limited specs were a problem per se, it was that the 2G iPhone wouldn't have supported the lucrative (and hyped) Euro-3G facilities.
You're assuming that Apple won't upgrade the phone for the market. No, I'm saying that the *current 2G version* of the iPhone won't fly here and that (as I already said)
"if Apple wants the iPhone to be a success in Europe, they're going to have to come up with a 3G version."
Two superior devices (the best camera phone + the best portable HD based video player) for less than an overhyped, overpriced product... hmm. I wonder what people are going to buy. It might have escaped your attention, but many people *will* pay a premium for a smaller, neater solution, simply because they don't want to go around with a pocketful of clunky gadgets. Particularly if it's attractive and has a well-designed easy-to-use interface.
Maybe this applies to the iPhone, maybe not, but your inability to even see this issue leads me to suspect that you don't actually know what most people in the real world will or will not pay for.
More specifically which market. We've all read about the Asian markets and their love for new gadgets. That's where I'd start off. Then the EU Apple may face marketing problems within the EU. Basically, the operators here have invested a lot of money in 3G networks and in promoting multimedia facilities that can be used over them.
The iPhone is 2G, thus any company endorsing it would effectively be discouraging the use of 3G and those lucrative MMS facilities. Even if it were possible to fit similar facilities onto a modified 2G iPhone (via GPRS, or whatever), it wouldn't be worth the hassle as a one-off, and it's still going against the pro-3G politics and general flow of the European marketplace.
It's probable that the operators would allow the sale of network-tied iPhones with their name on, but far less likely that they'd offer subsidised contract prices. Thus, the iPhone would appear very expensive next to the ("free" or cheap) competition. Contract mobile users here are used to getting shiny new phones at highly-subsidised prices, so I can't see this flying. One exception is pay-as-you-go (not usually subsidised anyway). However, since most PAYGers are light/occasional users (or possibly kids), I doubt that many of them would consider paying even half of the iPhone's price.
In short, if Apple wants the iPhone to be a success in Europe, they're going to have to come up with a 3G version.
What is the chance of this cell (a cell is very complex) forming in the first place? randomly mutating into this functional entity. That misrepresentation again. Complex features are unlikely to be the result of a single mutation, and I doubt any reputable scientist would claim otherwise.
So? its not now, so what is your argument? He already made his argument. "Now" is relatively recent, and evolution takes place over a relatively long timescale.
If you're implying that nowadays it isn't the impediment to reproduction it was, well, so what? It would have been until relatively recently.
Maybe brittle bone disease will be more likely to remain in the population in future because it becomes less of a survival hindrance in modern/future society than it used to be. But we're not discussing the future, we're discussing the past up until the present.
What nervous system? How is it relayed? What is done with the information? Where is your experiment?
The wiki article reads like a hopeful fairy tale. Is this a "science doesn't have all the answers right now, so it must be wrong" argument? I don't think that any reputable scientist would claim that they know *all* the details of how the eye evolved. If the WP article implies that (and I haven't read it all), perhaps it should be rewritten.
This is plain vanilla wrong, read his reply I already did (and replied to it). Basically, he makes at least one fundamental misrepresentation (intentional strawman or otherwise) of the widely-accepted scientific position, and the assertion in his other argument (that brittle bone disease is not a disease of reproduction and will thus survive and overwhelm the population) is theoretically and demonstrably flawed at a very basic level.
Most mutations will not cause death, and will not effect reproductivity, but will cause entropy in the gene pool. The 99% overwhelms the 1%.
For example, I have osteogenesisimperfecto. Inherited from my mother and a 50% chance of passing to my children. It does not effect re productivity and has negligible mortality. Assuming you meant "Osteogenesis imperfecta" (i.e. brittle bone disease), this is questionable. Sure, it doesn't directly affect reproductivity, but it's a very major hindrance to survival and thus to reproduction. Also, you may have noticed that the vast majority of people are not affected by brittle bone disease.
Maybe brittle bone disease is genetically tied with a beneficial mutation in the same way that sickle-cell anaemia is related to a genetic predisposition to increased resistance to malaria? In that case, we can assume that (in the populations where it originated) the advantages of the mutation outweighed the risks of a child developing the disease.
Or maybe brittle bone disease is simply a non-beneficial mutation that hasn't worked its way out of the population yet? I don't know about that specifically, but I do know that your argument seems to be flawed.
Most functions are highly complex interdependent systems. Thus how can can one random mutation produce blood clotting, eye sight, hearing which are very complex machines. I doubt *any* reputable scientist has claimed that "one random mutation" would produce all those features.
Someone else has discussed how such features may arise in a reply to your first post, BTW, but that's not what you asserted here anyway. Your comment is either an intentional strawman or an ill-informed assumption.
So what handheld device sold in the United States Since you mention it, can we assume that this article is U.S.-based, and how applicable is it to other countries?
I'm NOT talking about natural selection, which makes perfect sense, but evolution; ie beneficial mutation
The ratio of beneficial to non beneficial mutation is hugely in favour of increasing disorder. What exactly is that supposed to mean? That because most mutations are not beneficial, everything should fall apart in the long term?
This is the same flawed argument that people who say stuff akin to
"The chances of all these evolutionary steps are the same as picking out the queen of hearts from a shuffled pack seventy times in a row" (or whatever)
It's wrong because it (a) disregards natural selection, i.e. all the less beneficial mutations won't survive and (b) the mutated organism does not automatically replace all its non-mutated siblings, i.e. if the mutation is a failure, they get to try again.
IMHO part of the problem with CS degrees is that the computing field has become relatively glamourous in the last two decades, in large part because of the dot-com millionaire era and the large salaries that can be commanded in IT compared to other career tracks. IT stopped being "glamorous" shortly after the dot-com crash in 2000/2001. Why do you think the number of students taking CS/IT courses is way down compared to five or six years ago?
If I want my favorite Britney song from Itunes, it costs 99 cents. If I want a ringtone of the same thing, Verizon charges me up to a couple bucks for a much smaller clip of exactly the same song. Why would I pay twice for something I can rip from my (wifes') CD and create myself anyway? Well, *you* wouldn't obviously. But the record/ringtone companies likely figure (probably rightly) that enough people will buy the ringtone, either because they're stupid (don't know that it's possible to rip, or don't know how) or are simply lazy.
Whether it's good value or not is irrelevant. If people are willing to pay silly money for tiny snippets of music, of course they're going to sell it.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't take reading the article to figure out that any version of Photoshop that was both online and ad-supported was more likely to be a very cut-down service and greatly different/simplified from the boxed versions.
I used to use an app from Adobe called "Photo Deluxe". It was based on the Photoshop engine, but with the interface totally changed and cut down (more so than Elements). I wouldn't have considered that Photoshop, and I suspect that this online service will be even more simplified. Calling it Photoshop is likely just a branding exercise.
And if it were, can you briefly explain why you believe this flaw to be due to the limitations of C? That is, why it would not have occurred with another language? Can we please stop using C now? "Assuming the whole thing was coded in C", are you implying that they should have written the operating system in Java or Ada 95, or Shoot-Em-Up-Construction-Kit instead?
C certainly is certainly far from perfect from a modern perspective, but they probably chose it (assuming they did) for valid performance reasons. Other languages may have better checking, type safety, blah blah, but they all come with performance trade-offs. They may be better suited for many applications, but I can understand why they might have chosen C here.
OTOH, I didn't ask their staff for advice on which card I should buy (^_^)
If you'd actually bothered to read what I was saying, instead of just skimming and jumping on isolated snippets, it'd be obvious that I was paraphrasing the other guy's position in order to disagree with it.
They said that "Since Apples goes after high end electronic consumers it may not be an issue." (my emphasis).
I replied "Smacks of elitism to me. Wake up; the iPod (which many will have in mind when considering the iPhone) is definitely a mass-market phenomenon, and you don't get that by targeting exclusively high-end consumers." (Emphasis added).
Next time, try spending more than 3 seconds reading what you're supposedly replying to.
ha ha, thanks :)
Talking of Penny Arcade:-
"The Same As It Ever Was".
Note that I didn't claim Apple were first, either with HDD-based devices or with MP3 players in general. I said that they got in there early, before the mass-market had matured. (Yes, there were portable MP3 players around years before the iPod; 32MB devices that held the same amount of music as a C60 cassette, took ages to copy your music to- which you had to do repeatedly when it could only hold one album's worth- and cost a lot of money. They were expensive geek toys.)
Apple got in there before MP3 players went *mainstream*; and to some extent they were able to define the market, not just with their player, but with iTunes.
Put simply, I don't see that the mobile phone market is at the same stage unless the iPhone does something as fundamentally new (and as well) as the original iPods.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily tell you which is best in practice. There are also issues like 2G vs. 3G network coverage, services offered by different operators, how much they charge, etc etc.
Anyway, the new European 3G facilities include the likes of video messaging, TV on demand to your phone, blah blah.... I don't know how well-developed two-way videophones are yet, but the network should be able to handle that. Note that the public's uptake of some of these services (espec. TV on demand) hasn't been as high as the operators had hoped; they're having to recoup some of the money that they paid for the 3G frequencies during the dotcom boom
But unless you're planning on living in Europe, you should buy what's best in the context of *your* market/networks, not ours.
By contrast, the mobile phone market is established, and Apple is getting in much later in the game. "High-end" phones have been around for years, and have never sold in massive numbers; and whether the iPhone is considered worthy of the price remains to be seen. Sure, the lower middle clas does, but anybody who is smart with their money would not do this if they ahd a choice. The people you describe *do* have a choice. Even if they need a mobile for whatever reason, most don't "need" a new phone that often.
It's not necessarily stupid either, so long as you realise that the subsidised phone isn't really "free" and the plan you're buying it on is a good fit for what you'd be doing anyway. Since Apples goes after high end electronic consumers it may not be an issue. Smacks of elitism to me. Wake up; the iPod (which many will have in mind when considering the iPhone) is definitely a mass-market phenomenon, and you don't get that by targeting exclusively high-end consumers.
The market will tell Much as I'd like to see if you're proved wrong, it's not going to happen since (as others have mentioned, and I've acknowledged) Apple *are* planning on launching a 3G iPhone. So in that context, it's more likely to be subsidised by the operators in Europe after all. It'll probably still be more expensive than the competition, just not incredibly so, and Joe Pleb may well decide it's worth the (little) extra for the Apple cred.
At the time I posted that comment, I didn't realise that Apple intended to launch a 3G version anyway, nor (supposedly) how easy the iPhone would be to adapt for 3G. I still don't know how significant that "smidge of different hardware" is in practice, but since they have it in mind, it's probably not an issue.
BTW, I never implied that limited specs were a problem per se, it was that the 2G iPhone wouldn't have supported the lucrative (and hyped) Euro-3G facilities.
"if Apple wants the iPhone to be a success in Europe, they're going to have to come up with a 3G version."
Maybe this applies to the iPhone, maybe not, but your inability to even see this issue leads me to suspect that you don't actually know what most people in the real world will or will not pay for.
The iPhone is 2G, thus any company endorsing it would effectively be discouraging the use of 3G and those lucrative MMS facilities. Even if it were possible to fit similar facilities onto a modified 2G iPhone (via GPRS, or whatever), it wouldn't be worth the hassle as a one-off, and it's still going against the pro-3G politics and general flow of the European marketplace.
It's probable that the operators would allow the sale of network-tied iPhones with their name on, but far less likely that they'd offer subsidised contract prices. Thus, the iPhone would appear very expensive next to the ("free" or cheap) competition. Contract mobile users here are used to getting shiny new phones at highly-subsidised prices, so I can't see this flying. One exception is pay-as-you-go (not usually subsidised anyway). However, since most PAYGers are light/occasional users (or possibly kids), I doubt that many of them would consider paying even half of the iPhone's price.
In short, if Apple wants the iPhone to be a success in Europe, they're going to have to come up with a 3G version.
If you meant that it would be the "lucky" result of a one-off sequence of random mutations, then you're still misrepresenting things; I already addressed this issue in a response to another of your comments, as did many others when they replied to the same comment.
If you're implying that nowadays it isn't the impediment to reproduction it was, well, so what? It would have been until relatively recently.
Maybe brittle bone disease will be more likely to remain in the population in future because it becomes less of a survival hindrance in modern/future society than it used to be. But we're not discussing the future, we're discussing the past up until the present. What nervous system? How is it relayed? What is done with the information? Where is your experiment? The wiki article reads like a hopeful fairy tale. Is this a "science doesn't have all the answers right now, so it must be wrong" argument? I don't think that any reputable scientist would claim that they know *all* the details of how the eye evolved. If the WP article implies that (and I haven't read it all), perhaps it should be rewritten.
Maybe brittle bone disease is genetically tied with a beneficial mutation in the same way that sickle-cell anaemia is related to a genetic predisposition to increased resistance to malaria? In that case, we can assume that (in the populations where it originated) the advantages of the mutation outweighed the risks of a child developing the disease.
Or maybe brittle bone disease is simply a non-beneficial mutation that hasn't worked its way out of the population yet? I don't know about that specifically, but I do know that your argument seems to be flawed. Most functions are highly complex interdependent systems. Thus how can can one random mutation produce blood clotting, eye sight, hearing which are very complex machines. I doubt *any* reputable scientist has claimed that "one random mutation" would produce all those features.
Someone else has discussed how such features may arise in a reply to your first post, BTW, but that's not what you asserted here anyway. Your comment is either an intentional strawman or an ill-informed assumption.
This is the same flawed argument that people who say stuff akin to
"The chances of all these evolutionary steps are the same as picking out the queen of hearts from a shuffled pack seventy times in a row" (or whatever)
It's wrong because it (a) disregards natural selection, i.e. all the less beneficial mutations won't survive and (b) the mutated organism does not automatically replace all its non-mutated siblings, i.e. if the mutation is a failure, they get to try again.
First time was acceptable; posting an identical post for a third time is just spamming.
Whether it's good value or not is irrelevant. If people are willing to pay silly money for tiny snippets of music, of course they're going to sell it.