I don't use iCal either, but I do use Address Book and so I did enable the Birthday feature mentioned above. I then synced the Birthday calendar so that BDs would show up on the iPhone.
"... the iphone is a half-assed phone, a half-assed media player and a half assed-pda. It gets NONE of those functions right."
Actually, I like the phone. It makes many things easy to access and obvious (like conference calling/joining, vm message handling) that were downright arcane on my previous RAZR.
As to being a media player, I find the "touch" interface to be far superior to that of the iPod, and especially to that of the new "split-screen" iPod interface. One could always wish for more storage space, but I expect that to improve as flash storage densities improve and prices drop. And the screen definitely beats out nearly any other phone for watching movies and TV shows.
And I might once have agreed about it being only a so-so PDA, but now we have the App Store. One can bemoan the many Tip Calculators and the like, but one has only to look at applications like Evernote or Salesforce Mobile to see the potential.
Finally, I for one don't miss carrying a phone and a pda and an ipod and a media player and a pocket camera and a gps and all of the associated cords and chargers needed for each one. Is it as good as a dedicated device in all of those categories? Of course not.
But it's great in some cases, adequate in others, and definitely better than the device I left at home because I didn't feel like being an electronic pack horse that day...
They weren't thinking about anything, as Apple is partnered with AT&T, not T-Mobile. And do you, perhaps, have anything to backup the notion that Apple and AT&T didn't conduct "a friggin' field test"? Work for AT&T or Apple, do you? Privy to all of their testing protocols, are you?
"By what I've read on the net... That means pretty much every new iPhone will be returned."
Or, since you've "read the net", wil simply download a firmware update the next time it's connected to iTunes.
Scary what passes for analysis here on/. these days...
"There's just *no way* a phone should contact another server without the user knowing it..."
Actually, when you stop to think about it, every cell phone in existence does just that, as all of 'em continually poll local cell towers to tell the servers that they're in that particular neighborhood. You might not have known it's doing that, but it does.
Then there's the fact that the iPhone checks iTunes servers for application updates, does push/pull on various and sundry mail servers, handles SMS messaging, will shortly begin checking for push notifications, checks who knows what stock and weather servers....
Depends on how it works, now doesn't it? From what I'm given to understand, and also based on what Steve has said, this is a "global" kill-switch, to be used in case some malicious application gets by the hall monitors and is installed on a bunch of phones.
So yeah, I could put the copy of Cro-Mag Rally you just bought on the list...
And delete EVERYONE'S copy.
But yes, since all of the apps are encrypted with FairPlay, you should be able to put a time-limit in there somewhere, and use a similar mechanism to zap it.
I have nothing against advances in technology, but what the industry fails to understand is that we're primarily buying the content, not the format, and not the disk. Blu-Ray may look better, true, but is looking better enough to compensate for 50 to 100% higher prices for the same movie?
The above isn't a troll, but simply an acknowledgement that you don't get something for nothing. It should be blindly obvious that if employees become too expensive any given employer will probably start looking for alternatives, be it automation, robots, or off-shoring.
The problem is price. Not of the Blu-Ray players (which are relatively reasonable), and not of HD televisions (which more people are buying anyway), but of the media.
Simply put, a Blu-Ray title typically costs 50% to 100% more than it's DVD predecessor. With high gas prices and reduced wages and many families struggling to make ends meet, does it make sense to spend $30 a pop for a movie?
High-definition disks, you see, were the industries the secret strategy behind rationalizing higher DVD prices. Consumers have historically resisted every attempt by the industry to raise prices, and competition has in fact lowered them. As such, we pay much less for a DVD today that we did a decade ago, despite that fact that inflation should have boosted the price of a disc along with most everything else.
A new format kills two birds with one stone: It provides a rationale for higher prices for a higher quality product and --not insignificantly-- lets us pay for our favorite movies yet again in yet another format.
Unfortunately for the industry, however, we're not taking the bait. Plus we now have other options, like HD cable VOD, or AppleTV/iTunes HD downloads. They're not quite as good as Blu-Ray, true... but they're also only five or six bucks apiece.
If the Blu-Ray folk want to sell players and discs, they need to drop media prices so that the HD version is only a slight premium over the SD DVD. Say two bucks, max.
As is, they're wanting to screw the consumer and, as always, make him pay for the privilege.
Other than fission reactions, uranium, pressure vessels, containment buildings, steam turbines, generators, primary and secondary coolant loops, fuel rods, moderators, waste treatment and storage, radioactive half-life's, breeder reactors, SCRAMs, and other various and sundry subjects? Not a clue.
Ram a plane moving fast enough into a containment building and you have an excellent chance of damaging the reactor and/or coolant and/or moderating systems, regardless of whether or not you manage to fully penetrate the structure.
And once you've done that, then one has only to look at Chernobyl to see what happens when you let a reactor overheat and blow off a little steam.
Worse is losing the blog itself. Unlike, say, a discontinued magazine or out-of-print book that a library will continue to maintain, a discontinued web site leaves a "hole" in the web where it used to be. All of the sites that linked to it now link to the proverbial black hole.
And yes, I know about the Internet Archive, but I suspect that many don't, and that still fails to help all of those broken links...
"... but when did the lives of people who travel by plane become so important that it is necessary to spend millions to protect a few..."
Which part about the planes themselves being used as weapons to kill thousands of people and take down a billon dollars worth of buildings did you miss?
Find the right nuclear plant, chemical plant, or, say, an LNG facility, situated near a major city, and you could potentially kill millions, not just "a few".
In which case you've still failed to eliminate it as a weapon. Going down means that it's still going to hit SOMETHING. And you've still lost a 747.
Movie scenario: Plane under terrorist control, seconds away from hitting one of the twin towers. Fighter jet swoops in and salvos missiles. Result? Pieces of burning 747 STILL hits tower, other buildings, and scatters among the streets of NYC.
And then you have a very large wing and the rest of the 747 moving through the air... and which is going to come to rest... somewhere. Blow it apart with multiple missiles, and you now have a lot of very large, heavy, falling parts. If its target is in a city (like the White House), shooting it down anywhere near its target could actually make things much worse.
If the site was so bad that you only visited it once, why did you give them your friggin' email address?
They didn't just grab it out of thin air, you know. You're the one that went through their registration process and agreed to their terms of service, in which case any email they sent to you WASN'T unsolicited and WASN'T spam.
In short, you're one of the idiots who're causing all of the problems. Just click the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email next time.
Slashdot Mirror
Never forget that "common sense" is an oxymoron.
"We had milk crates filled with albums..."
Yeah, but odds are they weren't stolen albums.
I don't use iCal either, but I do use Address Book and so I did enable the Birthday feature mentioned above. I then synced the Birthday calendar so that BDs would show up on the iPhone.
"... the iphone is a half-assed phone, a half-assed media player and a half assed-pda. It gets NONE of those functions right."
Actually, I like the phone. It makes many things easy to access and obvious (like conference calling/joining, vm message handling) that were downright arcane on my previous RAZR.
As to being a media player, I find the "touch" interface to be far superior to that of the iPod, and especially to that of the new "split-screen" iPod interface. One could always wish for more storage space, but I expect that to improve as flash storage densities improve and prices drop. And the screen definitely beats out nearly any other phone for watching movies and TV shows.
And I might once have agreed about it being only a so-so PDA, but now we have the App Store. One can bemoan the many Tip Calculators and the like, but one has only to look at applications like Evernote or Salesforce Mobile to see the potential.
Finally, I for one don't miss carrying a phone and a pda and an ipod and a media player and a pocket camera and a gps and all of the associated cords and chargers needed for each one. Is it as good as a dedicated device in all of those categories? Of course not.
But it's great in some cases, adequate in others, and definitely better than the device I left at home because I didn't feel like being an electronic pack horse that day...
"What were apple and t-mobile thinking..."
They weren't thinking about anything, as Apple is partnered with AT&T, not T-Mobile. And do you, perhaps, have anything to backup the notion that Apple and AT&T didn't conduct "a friggin' field test"? Work for AT&T or Apple, do you? Privy to all of their testing protocols, are you?
"By what I've read on the net ... That means pretty much every new iPhone will be returned."
Or, since you've "read the net", wil simply download a firmware update the next time it's connected to iTunes.
Scary what passes for analysis here on /. these days...
"I add a birthday to a contact in my address book. It doesn't automatically generate an appointment in my calendar? WTF? Stupid."
Go to iCal Preferences > General > Show Birthdays Calendar.
Now after syncing you'll automatically see any birthdays added to the address book, including those added from the iPhone.
"So I suspect that we haven't heard the last of this story yet."
Especially when it's been discussed elsewhere for weeks now.
Sigh. I remember when you read about breaking news on Slashdot FIRST. Now, it seems that it only exists to hash and rehash week-old news.
"There's just *no way* a phone should contact another server without the user knowing it..."
Actually, when you stop to think about it, every cell phone in existence does just that, as all of 'em continually poll local cell towers to tell the servers that they're in that particular neighborhood. You might not have known it's doing that, but it does.
Then there's the fact that the iPhone checks iTunes servers for application updates, does push/pull on various and sundry mail servers, handles SMS messaging, will shortly begin checking for push notifications, checks who knows what stock and weather servers....
Depends on how it works, now doesn't it? From what I'm given to understand, and also based on what Steve has said, this is a "global" kill-switch, to be used in case some malicious application gets by the hall monitors and is installed on a bunch of phones.
So yeah, I could put the copy of Cro-Mag Rally you just bought on the list...
And delete EVERYONE'S copy.
But yes, since all of the apps are encrypted with FairPlay, you should be able to put a time-limit in there somewhere, and use a similar mechanism to zap it.
"... media companies are all about taking advantage of ignorant boomers who don't know any better..."
Don't worry, they'll get around to the ignorant I'm-entitled-to-whatever-I-what-when-I-want-it younger generation soon enough...
"What about Apple users? "
In that case, the benefit is definitely large enough to qualify... (grin)
I have nothing against advances in technology, but what the industry fails to understand is that we're primarily buying the content, not the format, and not the disk. Blu-Ray may look better, true, but is looking better enough to compensate for 50 to 100% higher prices for the same movie?
According the sales numbers, apparently not.
At $30 a pop, that's $300 for just ten movies, or nearly a third of the cost of your $1,000 TV.
I'd say the cost of media is TOTALLY relevant.
The above isn't a troll, but simply an acknowledgement that you don't get something for nothing. It should be blindly obvious that if employees become too expensive any given employer will probably start looking for alternatives, be it automation, robots, or off-shoring.
The problem is price. Not of the Blu-Ray players (which are relatively reasonable), and not of HD televisions (which more people are buying anyway), but of the media.
Simply put, a Blu-Ray title typically costs 50% to 100% more than it's DVD predecessor. With high gas prices and reduced wages and many families struggling to make ends meet, does it make sense to spend $30 a pop for a movie?
High-definition disks, you see, were the industries the secret strategy behind rationalizing higher DVD prices. Consumers have historically resisted every attempt by the industry to raise prices, and competition has in fact lowered them. As such, we pay much less for a DVD today that we did a decade ago, despite that fact that inflation should have boosted the price of a disc along with most everything else.
A new format kills two birds with one stone: It provides a rationale for higher prices for a higher quality product and --not insignificantly-- lets us pay for our favorite movies yet again in yet another format.
Unfortunately for the industry, however, we're not taking the bait. Plus we now have other options, like HD cable VOD, or AppleTV/iTunes HD downloads. They're not quite as good as Blu-Ray, true... but they're also only five or six bucks apiece.
If the Blu-Ray folk want to sell players and discs, they need to drop media prices so that the HD version is only a slight premium over the SD DVD. Say two bucks, max.
As is, they're wanting to screw the consumer and, as always, make him pay for the privilege.
Yep, we need to unionize all of those jobs so that there's even more incentive to offshore that work as well.
I'm sure it will be comforting to know that you'd have a high paying job... if you had a job.
Or at least more sports like pro beach volleyball. Every notice that there are depressingly few sports involving women in bikinis?
Other than fission reactions, uranium, pressure vessels, containment buildings, steam turbines, generators, primary and secondary coolant loops, fuel rods, moderators, waste treatment and storage, radioactive half-life's, breeder reactors, SCRAMs, and other various and sundry subjects? Not a clue.
Ram a plane moving fast enough into a containment building and you have an excellent chance of damaging the reactor and/or coolant and/or moderating systems, regardless of whether or not you manage to fully penetrate the structure.
And once you've done that, then one has only to look at Chernobyl to see what happens when you let a reactor overheat and blow off a little steam.
Worse is losing the blog itself. Unlike, say, a discontinued magazine or out-of-print book that a library will continue to maintain, a discontinued web site leaves a "hole" in the web where it used to be. All of the sites that linked to it now link to the proverbial black hole.
And yes, I know about the Internet Archive, but I suspect that many don't, and that still fails to help all of those broken links...
"... but when did the lives of people who travel by plane become so important that it is necessary to spend millions to protect a few..."
Which part about the planes themselves being used as weapons to kill thousands of people and take down a billon dollars worth of buildings did you miss?
Find the right nuclear plant, chemical plant, or, say, an LNG facility, situated near a major city, and you could potentially kill millions, not just "a few".
"... then ran off the bus..."
Bit harder to run off an airplane in flight, wouldn't you say?
"... that big boy is going down..."
In which case you've still failed to eliminate it as a weapon. Going down means that it's still going to hit SOMETHING. And you've still lost a 747.
Movie scenario: Plane under terrorist control, seconds away from hitting one of the twin towers. Fighter jet swoops in and salvos missiles. Result? Pieces of burning 747 STILL hits tower, other buildings, and scatters among the streets of NYC.
"... stinger missile will take a wing off..."
And then you have a very large wing and the rest of the 747 moving through the air... and which is going to come to rest... somewhere. Blow it apart with multiple missiles, and you now have a lot of very large, heavy, falling parts. If its target is in a city (like the White House), shooting it down anywhere near its target could actually make things much worse.
More than that, have you noticed that the primary organizational concept used for all of these "advanced" systems is the pile?
If all I wanted to do was move things from one pile to another I'd ditch the computer and go back to the piles of paper on my desk.
If the site was so bad that you only visited it once, why did you give them your friggin' email address?
They didn't just grab it out of thin air, you know. You're the one that went through their registration process and agreed to their terms of service, in which case any email they sent to you WASN'T unsolicited and WASN'T spam.
In short, you're one of the idiots who're causing all of the problems. Just click the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of the email next time.