We have to complain about how Apple "Fanbois" are whiny and never satisfied.
Yeah, well, that's pretty much the truth. Just watch my karma disappear for making that remark. I wonder what would happen if someone were to publish a cartoon making fun of Apple owners? They'd probably issue a fatwa against the poor devil.
You'll have to excuse them, the people who are freaking out about this are all in the midst of the Five Stages of Acquisition [memory-alpha.org].
Actually, I think they're all still drooling on their bibs. Grow up people, the U.S. cell phone business is a crock, and it doesn't matter what carrier you deal with. Well, of course there's Sprint, but they're in a category all by themselves.
You know Apple releases a new phone every year, and you know AT&T makes you sign a 2-year contract. Either pay the higher price for the upgrade or live through the horror of not having the latest shiny product until your contract runs out.
Absolutely. Besides, early adopters always get the shaft. That's the price you pay for being an early adopter.
Me, I bought a G1 a few months ago, and the G2 is coming out this month, I understand. I'll have to wait to see if I do, in fact, end up feeling screwed. If so... I screwed myself and I did it willingly because I didn't want to wait.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
So you think they watch how things are going in windows and then when the shit hits the fan they run over to the QNX machine?
No, I just think they should use something reliable for the actual control loop, and if they really have to, use Windows for the front-end.
As quoted from the book, The Killing Star assumes the following about alien behavior:
1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.
If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing.
2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS.
No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
Use of relativistic missiles is idiotic unless you plan and are absolutely capable of killing off the entire universe at once without absolutely any survivors or information left over about your act.
mind you if a Ferengi minded species would show up, it would be interesting how certain human-looking entities on earth would be working out in relations to these new business partners
This is probably one of the few threads where this meme is on topic. To put this in perspective we are probably the native american indians greeting the european explorers. And we know how well that turned out for them.
Depends upon how valuable our real estate is to them, and how strong their collective stomach is (figuratively speaking.) Yes, you're right, historically the more technologically advanced culture usually subjugates the more primitive one... but that's assuming that our new alien friends are as fundamentally uncivilized as we still are, or think anything like we do. On the other hand, they really could be bloodthirsty BEMs Hell-bent on wiping us out (or enslaving and/or consuming us.) Personally, I'm hoping they're more like Vulcans, or even Andorians. Now, if we get hit by a Romulan or Klingon empire first (or, God help us, the Cardassians) we're well and truly screwed.
Is welcome them, if they have tech that gets them to our planet then we aren't going to have any weapons to use against them, and hiding won't end it either.
That's not necessarily true. If you're talking about a sub-light vessel that required enormous energy to be accelerated to a significant fraction of C, odds are good that they wouldn't have the power or the reaction mass to carry lots of weapons. Such a craft would likely be a major expenditure of resources for the civilization that launched it, and they'd have needed that power for more important things, such as personnel, life support, auxiliary craft. And if they have some kind of FTL drive... well, who knows. Either way, if they're just explorers or surveyors they would probably carry defensive weapons but not necessarily of the planet-wrecking variety. I'm really not too concerned that such visitors would have items like force fields and the like (movies like Independence Day aside) but they very well might have some seriously advanced AI on their side.
However you look at it though, we probably wouldn't want to fuck around with them too much, until we really knew the score.
Be respectful, and allow visitors to see a strictly controlled show. Given time, this can be relaxed. If they do seem interested in colonization, prepare for war.
Well, as it happens with tried that approach with Mexico. It turned out they were interested in colonization anyway.
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs. If they wished to annihilate us, I wager they'd be able to do it without even giving us a chance to react. If an alien race should contact Earth, I think our best bet would be to at least assume that they have peaceful intentions.
Well, if you see a bunch of them walking around, holding a large book which they page through occasionally while staring hungrily at people... time to start worrying.
Besides, we might get lucky and be able to bring down their force shields with a computer virus.
Not only that, the handset makers made it REALLY easy for apple to dominate with a well made product because they cripple the hardware far beyond what is necessary and offer NOTHING to address that lost functionality other then extremely overpriced ephemera.
I don't really disagree with you, but at least in the American market it is not the handset makers that are the problem. It's the service providers that wield so much power over the manufacturers that they can demand that firmware be crippled, in order to drive sales of trivialities like ringtones. Sprint is famous for that, and it's why I left that schlock outfit (I mean, I had a Sanyo Katana, and in order to get pictures that I took with the onboard camera, Sprint wanted me to pay for a data plan so that I could email them to myself.) Well, that stupid decision cost them a good customer. Well, that and insane billing practices that cross the line into fraudulent.
I currently have a G1, probably one of the most open cell phones on the market today (yeah, they took away root access in RC30 but you can get it back pretty easily, and that was a Google decision to protect app developers, not T-Mobile's.) The functionality is impressive, and the Web integration is excellent, particularly (as you would expect) with Google's services. I can take any MP3 and make a ringtone, I can do anything I want with my pictures (or, with the new Cupcake release of the OS, movies), mount the SD card as a drive on my PC via USB. Sure, not as polished or slick as an iPhone, but that's not what I was after.
Many of these folks are leaders because of the network effect of their services - something programmers and hardware can't change.
Well, you're basically correct... what you're talking about is something George Guilder discussed at some length in his book. Essentially, his premise is that highly-successful incumbent technologies are rarely displaced unless the disruptive replacement is substantially better, usually by about an order of magnitude. So yes, the displacement of a market leader is definitely something that engineers, programmers and other creative people bring about, but they have to make a serious improvement in order to do it. It can be done, and is. But it's not easy.
Take the internal combustion engine, for example. Are there better technologies out there? Ways of transducing chemical energy to mechanical that are cheaper, more efficient, easier to manufacture, etc? Certainly, but none of them have ever proven so much better that they were worth the cost of retooling manufacturing facilities and replacing existing national infrastructure. That's still the case to this very day.
On the other hand, take the venerable cathode-ray tube. Around for the better part of a century and yet... it's essentially gone. Displaced. Actually, it was superseded by a number of distinctly different technologies, and it took a lot of people a lot of time and money to pull that off. And more importantly, the new tech had to be substantially "better" to make the transition economically viable.
So don't expect Apple, Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook or any of the other current top-dogs to be around forever. They won't... sooner or later, they'll be marginalized by some up-and-coming competitor, sooner if they stumble and start making mistakes, or if society's needs change and they don't adapt.
Which competition is even close to this kind of market?
Well, the Google App Store is coming along pretty well, and Google has more infrastructure to support such efforts than Apple or just about anyone else. They also know how to run applications on a vast scale: an app store is pretty trivial in that context. As it happens, I picked a G1 over an iPhone. Frankly, I've been very happy with it, especially since the recent operating system update. Is it as slick as the iPhone... no, but then again, it does what I want extremely well, and integrates perfectly with the Google services I use. Lots of decent apps (nowhere near the variety of Apple's app store, but it's growing.) It's also a far more open development environment than the IPhone will ever be. That appeals to a lot of developers.
The G1's Linux-based Android OS is also far closer to a real desktop than any other phone I've used, and given that it's now being used on low-end netbooks instead of Windows, I expect that trend to continue.
Apple doesn't have that luxury in the smartphone market, so it must continually improve the product, service, and value to the customer.
Spoken like a true fanboy. Not to defend Microsoft to any significant degree, but every version of Windows since W2K is far superior to Windows 9x (any edition.) So Apple isn't the only company that invests R&D dollars in improving its product. For that matter, Apple wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as it did with the Macintosh if Microsoft hadn't supported it by developing and maintaining Microsoft Office for the Mac for so many years. Granted, Microsoft does have the advantage of being thoroughly unscrupulous, although Apple, oddly enough, is far more litigious. Which corporation is the more (ahem!) "evil" is not as clear as some would like. I know that to the average Mac owner Apple Computer, Inc. can do no evil, but the reality is that they're just another big corporation with the usual one-track mind.
The summary got it right, however:
To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals when it comes to the capabilities and the 'cool' factor of its devices.
And what you have to realize is that it is just that... an impression. Apple does make fine products, but they're not so far in the lead as they once were.
Did anyone else notice that they are running windows in the control room?
That frightens me.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
Kinda like how stewardesses are now called flight attendants, even though historically a steward was in no way a menial job. Stewards were probably one of the highest, if not the highest, ranking non-nobles in the household.
I have an aunt who was a stewardess for United Airlines for a long, long time (she retired some years ago.) Of course, if you called her a "stewardess" she would automatically correct you. "I'm a flight attendant."
Yes, VS costs money, but you can get cheap copies of VS all over the place. Cheaper than a mac anyway.
Of course, the entire Android SDK is free, supports a number of different IDEs (I've been playing around with Eclipse: kind of a steep learning curve but hey, it's free) and a developer sign-up only takes a couple minutes only and costs a whopping 25 bucks. At least on my G1, you are not required to download apps from the Android Market either: there's a checkbox in settings that allows installation of non-Market apps.
So, for the time being Google is being relatively benign. Yeah, they did pull tethering apps from the U.S. market (which pissed me off) but they don't insist that you go through their store to get hold of Android software.
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We have to complain about how Apple "Fanbois" are whiny and never satisfied.
Yeah, well, that's pretty much the truth. Just watch my karma disappear for making that remark. I wonder what would happen if someone were to publish a cartoon making fun of Apple owners? They'd probably issue a fatwa against the poor devil.
When did we as a society get our collective sense of entitlement?
It started sometime back in the mid-sixties, and it's been all downhill ever since.
You'll have to excuse them, the people who are freaking out about this are all in the midst of the Five Stages of Acquisition [memory-alpha.org].
Actually, I think they're all still drooling on their bibs. Grow up people, the U.S. cell phone business is a crock, and it doesn't matter what carrier you deal with. Well, of course there's Sprint, but they're in a category all by themselves.
This is totally out of left field. It's a good thing the US is chock-a-block with better wireless carriers and the iPhone is portable between them.
Very funny, and for some reason it makes me want to throw up.
You know Apple releases a new phone every year, and you know AT&T makes you sign a 2-year contract. Either pay the higher price for the upgrade or live through the horror of not having the latest shiny product until your contract runs out.
Absolutely. Besides, early adopters always get the shaft. That's the price you pay for being an early adopter.
... I screwed myself and I did it willingly because I didn't want to wait.
Me, I bought a G1 a few months ago, and the G2 is coming out this month, I understand. I'll have to wait to see if I do, in fact, end up feeling screwed. If so
Bunch of crybabies.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
So you think they watch how things are going in windows and then when the shit hits the fan they run over to the QNX machine?
No, I just think they should use something reliable for the actual control loop, and if they really have to, use Windows for the front-end.
As quoted from the book, The Killing Star assumes the following about alien behavior: 1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL. If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won't choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don't survive by being self-sacrificing. 2. WIMPS DON'T BECOME TOP DOGS. No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary. 3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
A very Kzin take on the Universe.
Use of relativistic missiles is idiotic unless you plan and are absolutely capable of killing off the entire universe at once without absolutely any survivors or information left over about your act.
Huh?
mind you if a Ferengi minded species would show up, it would be interesting how certain human-looking entities on earth would be working out in relations to these new business partners
They'd get along well with the RIAA, I'm sure.
This is probably one of the few threads where this meme is on topic. To put this in perspective we are probably the native american indians greeting the european explorers. And we know how well that turned out for them.
Depends upon how valuable our real estate is to them, and how strong their collective stomach is (figuratively speaking.) Yes, you're right, historically the more technologically advanced culture usually subjugates the more primitive one ... but that's assuming that our new alien friends are as fundamentally uncivilized as we still are, or think anything like we do. On the other hand, they really could be bloodthirsty BEMs Hell-bent on wiping us out (or enslaving and/or consuming us.) Personally, I'm hoping they're more like Vulcans, or even Andorians. Now, if we get hit by a Romulan or Klingon empire first (or, God help us, the Cardassians) we're well and truly screwed.
What makes you think they'll be pale-skinned?
Mainly because we're all hoping it won't be Klingons.
Is welcome them, if they have tech that gets them to our planet then we aren't going to have any weapons to use against them, and hiding won't end it either.
That's not necessarily true. If you're talking about a sub-light vessel that required enormous energy to be accelerated to a significant fraction of C, odds are good that they wouldn't have the power or the reaction mass to carry lots of weapons. Such a craft would likely be a major expenditure of resources for the civilization that launched it, and they'd have needed that power for more important things, such as personnel, life support, auxiliary craft. And if they have some kind of FTL drive ... well, who knows. Either way, if they're just explorers or surveyors they would probably carry defensive weapons but not necessarily of the planet-wrecking variety. I'm really not too concerned that such visitors would have items like force fields and the like (movies like Independence Day aside) but they very well might have some seriously advanced AI on their side.
However you look at it though, we probably wouldn't want to fuck around with them too much, until we really knew the score.
When the aliens arrive and say, "Live long and prosper," you say, "Thanks."
And when they arrive and say "K'oq h'U Ploq'!" (die, alien scum!), what do you say then? Think carefully, this is important.
Be respectful, and allow visitors to see a strictly controlled show. Given time, this can be relaxed. If they do seem interested in colonization, prepare for war.
Well, as it happens with tried that approach with Mexico. It turned out they were interested in colonization anyway.
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs. If they wished to annihilate us, I wager they'd be able to do it without even giving us a chance to react. If an alien race should contact Earth, I think our best bet would be to at least assume that they have peaceful intentions.
Well, if you see a bunch of them walking around, holding a large book which they page through occasionally while staring hungrily at people ... time to start worrying.
Besides, we might get lucky and be able to bring down their force shields with a computer virus.
Not only that, the handset makers made it REALLY easy for apple to dominate with a well made product because they cripple the hardware far beyond what is necessary and offer NOTHING to address that lost functionality other then extremely overpriced ephemera.
I don't really disagree with you, but at least in the American market it is not the handset makers that are the problem. It's the service providers that wield so much power over the manufacturers that they can demand that firmware be crippled, in order to drive sales of trivialities like ringtones. Sprint is famous for that, and it's why I left that schlock outfit (I mean, I had a Sanyo Katana, and in order to get pictures that I took with the onboard camera, Sprint wanted me to pay for a data plan so that I could email them to myself.) Well, that stupid decision cost them a good customer. Well, that and insane billing practices that cross the line into fraudulent.
I currently have a G1, probably one of the most open cell phones on the market today (yeah, they took away root access in RC30 but you can get it back pretty easily, and that was a Google decision to protect app developers, not T-Mobile's.) The functionality is impressive, and the Web integration is excellent, particularly (as you would expect) with Google's services. I can take any MP3 and make a ringtone, I can do anything I want with my pictures (or, with the new Cupcake release of the OS, movies), mount the SD card as a drive on my PC via USB. Sure, not as polished or slick as an iPhone, but that's not what I was after.
Many of these folks are leaders because of the network effect of their services - something programmers and hardware can't change.
Well, you're basically correct ... what you're talking about is something George Guilder discussed at some length in his book. Essentially, his premise is that highly-successful incumbent technologies are rarely displaced unless the disruptive replacement is substantially better, usually by about an order of magnitude. So yes, the displacement of a market leader is definitely something that engineers, programmers and other creative people bring about, but they have to make a serious improvement in order to do it. It can be done, and is. But it's not easy.
... it's essentially gone. Displaced. Actually, it was superseded by a number of distinctly different technologies, and it took a lot of people a lot of time and money to pull that off. And more importantly, the new tech had to be substantially "better" to make the transition economically viable.
... sooner or later, they'll be marginalized by some up-and-coming competitor, sooner if they stumble and start making mistakes, or if society's needs change and they don't adapt.
Take the internal combustion engine, for example. Are there better technologies out there? Ways of transducing chemical energy to mechanical that are cheaper, more efficient, easier to manufacture, etc? Certainly, but none of them have ever proven so much better that they were worth the cost of retooling manufacturing facilities and replacing existing national infrastructure. That's still the case to this very day.
On the other hand, take the venerable cathode-ray tube. Around for the better part of a century and yet
So don't expect Apple, Craigslist, Amazon, Facebook or any of the other current top-dogs to be around forever. They won't
Which competition is even close to this kind of market?
Well, the Google App Store is coming along pretty well, and Google has more infrastructure to support such efforts than Apple or just about anyone else. They also know how to run applications on a vast scale: an app store is pretty trivial in that context. As it happens, I picked a G1 over an iPhone. Frankly, I've been very happy with it, especially since the recent operating system update. Is it as slick as the iPhone ... no, but then again, it does what I want extremely well, and integrates perfectly with the Google services I use. Lots of decent apps (nowhere near the variety of Apple's app store, but it's growing.) It's also a far more open development environment than the IPhone will ever be. That appeals to a lot of developers.
The G1's Linux-based Android OS is also far closer to a real desktop than any other phone I've used, and given that it's now being used on low-end netbooks instead of Windows, I expect that trend to continue.
Apple doesn't have that luxury in the smartphone market, so it must continually improve the product, service, and value to the customer.
Spoken like a true fanboy. Not to defend Microsoft to any significant degree, but every version of Windows since W2K is far superior to Windows 9x (any edition.) So Apple isn't the only company that invests R&D dollars in improving its product. For that matter, Apple wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as it did with the Macintosh if Microsoft hadn't supported it by developing and maintaining Microsoft Office for the Mac for so many years. Granted, Microsoft does have the advantage of being thoroughly unscrupulous, although Apple, oddly enough, is far more litigious. Which corporation is the more (ahem!) "evil" is not as clear as some would like. I know that to the average Mac owner Apple Computer, Inc. can do no evil, but the reality is that they're just another big corporation with the usual one-track mind.
The summary got it right, however:
To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals when it comes to the capabilities and the 'cool' factor of its devices.
And what you have to realize is that it is just that ... an impression. Apple does make fine products, but they're not so far in the lead as they once were.
Did anyone else notice that they are running windows in the control room? That frightens me.
Windows does just fine as a display system: if that's all they're using it for I have no problem. Where I wouldn't want to see it is performing any kind of control function.
At least not without massive help from Europeans
Well, that does go both ways, bucko.
Kinda like how stewardesses are now called flight attendants, even though historically a steward was in no way a menial job. Stewards were probably one of the highest, if not the highest, ranking non-nobles in the household.
I have an aunt who was a stewardess for United Airlines for a long, long time (she retired some years ago.) Of course, if you called her a "stewardess" she would automatically correct you. "I'm a flight attendant."
The computer asks "Cancel or Allow?"
So, what you're saying is that a Mac isn't a computer?
No, actually it's a sandwich.
It's a lot better than pouring tons of carbon dioxide and various pollutants (including mercury) into the atmosphere.
Don't forget Thorium.
Yes, VS costs money, but you can get cheap copies of VS all over the place. Cheaper than a mac anyway.
Of course, the entire Android SDK is free, supports a number of different IDEs (I've been playing around with Eclipse: kind of a steep learning curve but hey, it's free) and a developer sign-up only takes a couple minutes only and costs a whopping 25 bucks. At least on my G1, you are not required to download apps from the Android Market either: there's a checkbox in settings that allows installation of non-Market apps.
So, for the time being Google is being relatively benign. Yeah, they did pull tethering apps from the U.S. market (which pissed me off) but they don't insist that you go through their store to get hold of Android software.