Right, and the parent post is telling you that the technical aspects of that product are not in isolation - either Android has huge market share and awesomeness and openness etc etc, or it's your posited view - only an tiny number of handsets count when assessing its quality.
If "fragmentation is not an issue" as many here claim, then all the Android devices should be included, surely - this includes all the ones locked into old versions with no vendor support, and the ones that are hard to root (or that require rooting at all, in the supposedly "free of the walled garden" ecosystem).
It's one or the other - you can't flip between them at will to deemphasise the downsides, just as you can't crow on one hand that Android is outselling iOS, has bigger marketshare etc, then on the other hand simultaneously claim Apple is violating antitrust laws because it is abusing its "monopoly" in the smartphone market (not even bringing RIM or Nokia into it - the two positions are mutually exclusive, yet I see them presented as fact on slashdot all the time, at the same time).
There's a great deal to like about Android, and it has achieved remarkable things in a short space of time, but there are enough good points that you don;t need to attempt to twist things around to cover any tiny bit of perceived criticism. Responding to criticism is one of the ways you improve as a product. (although saying that, the article is a bit weak, but I am talking about this thread in the current context).
Poorly. The hardware is still struggling since it was designed with the 3GS in mind. They have updated since release though with performance tweaks for the 3G (I have one, and have been comparing) so they haven't just said "just buy an iPhone 4!" they are actually trying to make it better.
Battery life has been unaffected, it's still as good as it was - no complaints here.
You back up the data... same as any other mobile computing device that has a removable battery.
The fact that the battery is only replaceable by taking the unit apart has no relevancy whatsoever in this case. You either plug it in with a booster (and there are several iPad cases that have one built in, so that the iPad essentially "docks" with the case and provides power via the dock connector, or you swap devices and just hit up the server for a resync.
If any organisation was using iPads (or any mobile computing device: laptops/phones/memory sticks) as a sole point of data failure then they have bigger problems than a limited lifespan on lithium polymer cells.
Yes, the "form" being "remove all of the space taken up by door mechanisms and clips/bays/docking connectors" and use that space to increase the size of the battery so the majority of users (who never replace their battery) get longer battery life. Thus, function *and* form for the vast majority of users.
For those that need to replace the battery, it can be done at a service, or you can do it yourself with a third party replacement.
Well, this is slashdot - rapidly becoming the Fox News of the tech world. We're even capping it off by having a "healthy" complement of active climate change deniers to go with it.
Never let something like facts (say, enterprise iOS management with in-house apps) get in the way of a good bash of your enemy.
That already exists - A corporate developer licence is available that enables you to push in-house apps to the iPhones and iPads under your control. It has been like this for some time, since before the iPad launched.
California is not the centre of the world (although it depends on your frame of reference). The time is set so that as many people as possible *are* awake.
Yeah "desperate" enough to develop software in an ecosystem with 100 million users who all buy from the same store, with a lot of disposable income for small-value purchases.
mmmm. Desperate. That's what it is to develop for iOS.
Welcome to the mentality of the business owner who's early 2000 era website didn't support anything but IE because "those customers on other browsers are insignificant" (but they are still customers and are physically a large number....)
You (the collective you, not you specifically) can't trumpet Android's massive rise in install base and marketshare on one hand, with a "haha look now Apple, you will fall! muhahahah!" while simultaneously crying "wah! antitrust! Apple is a monopoly in the mobile space!" when it pulls a stunt like this.
Even without Android, Apple is nowhere near monopoly position in the mobile market - RIM, for one, Nokia for another...
It's not illegal to do this sort of thing if you're not a monopoly - if it is unpalatable to enough users they will migrate away to another competing platform (which they cannot easily do in a monopoly situation).
It depends, does the hotel room arrive at your location from Apple's servers? The fee is hosting, bandwidth and payment processing and is standard across all the services (music, apps, books), and it seems high for books given that their size relative to audio is small but their costs often reversed (99c for a song, $10 for a smaller filesize book, but 30% cut for both) - suggesting that the fee needs to be looked at.
What this is all about seems to be the end-run Amazon and others have done to avoid the in app purchase method to specifically skip the fees, and I can see why amazon would want to do that - they have no need of external hosting, payment processing or bandwidth, but they are also taking up residence in direct competition to Apple on their own device (for free, less $99 annual dev licence for hosting) in the ebook market.
I can see the business decision made here - not that I think it's necessarily smart, but it would offer a convenience option for iPad users to be able to buy books in app in addition to being sent off to a remote site to do the same.
Didn't you say that last time one of these topics came up?
Perhaps not, but join the line of slashdotters who have said "Thanks $LARGE-COMPANY, I was so close to buying $YOUR-PRODUCT, but now *this* is the straw that broke the camel's back!"
You know, the ones would weren't actually going to do anything of the sort, but didn't have anything to contribute to the discussion other than "$LARGE-COMPANY sucks!"
And for the record, I think this is a silly, if predictable business move, although it does offer the choice of convenience to the app user, although it will probably drive prices up.
The word is "leech" in this context, although your lack of basic grammar suggests you don't really care one way or the other.
I've never personally felt Apple looked cute, since that is an adjective I ascribe to a person rather than a corporation. In answer to your question, it looks as cute as it did before; neither more or less since it was never such a thing in the first place.
It's also good to see lots of citations to back up your amusing assertion. Note: the previous sentence might have contained sarcasm, YMMV, void where prohibited, never roller skate in a buffalo herd.
As for Apple's business decision, I think it is predictable given that the rules for apps state that they should already be doing this or they should never have been approved in the first place. All it does is force ebook sellers to offer the option of an in-app purchase through Apple if they also offer an external sale, which will either drive up prices overall, or cut into the margins of the publishers.
Sure, if MS are hosting the content and when you buy it it comes down of MS' servers.
This may be a bit of a silly move on Apple's part (although I can see why they made it, from a business perspective) but the requirement is to offer the choice of the two - in-app purchase or external purchase as is happening now. The only reason the Amazon app doesn't already do that is to avoid hosting stuff on Apple's servers (since they really have no need to pay for something they already do).
Note that it *additionally* must be sold in-app, not exclusively.
The difference is important. It essentially stops a free app from Amazon (which competes with its own ebook store) being a free rider on the store (in terms of hosting and bandwidth, although those are minimal) while using an end-run around the in-app purchase system. They are now saying "if you sell for use in the app, you must offer both choice".
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the decision, but it is subtly different to the statement "you must make the content available via in-app purchase" which lies by omission.
That is exactly what they want, in fact (less the increased cost - they want the prices to match). Go RTFA.
“We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app,” Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement.
So, yes, it sounds exactly like something would not only allow, but actively enforce (the rules already exist, but they have been lax in enforcement, either while the eBook market was in its infancy, or while it tried to make deals with the various people involved).
I loved MD. I still use it. I had one of the earliest portable recorders. I have a separate deck that is hooked up to my machine to this day.
However, the Serial Copy Management System was a brainless and heavy handed attempt by Sony to thwart CD copying or something, except it didn't - you could just make an analog copy at indistinguishable quality. You could make one digital copy from CD, and then that MD could not be further digitally copied (over SP/DIF) - you had to go analog. Even for music you created yourself.
It did *nothing* to stop piracy, and just pissed people off.
The pro MD decks didn't have this feature.
I also think they were poorly marketed in the US compared to other markets where they fared much better , like Japan and the EU.
You don't seem to know how to use iTunes, or you are attempting to make it more complicated than it is.
I have a huge library, and *none* of it has any DRM, not a single solitary song among many thousands (literally). A great deal of those tracks purchased from Apple's store directly. The rest all mp3 files from CDs and MiniDisc. All the metadata is accurate, extensive and not all of it was added by iTunes itself (or edited in by iTunes) and it all works fine.
All of my library plays on Linux-based machines as well as OS X.
I have migrated my library at least 4 times over its life, every time was seamless. In recent years it fell to a hard drive death, and yet was restored from backup seamlessly in the time it took to copy the files over to the new drive and start iTunes.
My apps have always migrated seamlessly to my iPhone, and the iPod Touch with the smashed screen that I use as a headless media server for my car's head unit also works just fine. I have had to restore my phone from backup on one occasion and it worked seamlessly. I even got back the draft text message that I was typing to a contact (and unlike Android, it was sent to the right person! [I kid, I kid]).
So, you're either massively trolling (as I suspect), or you are too stupid to own a computer (which I don't suspect is true, but run with the satire - I got into trouble for not declaring well ahead of time what was an obvious joke versus what I was alleged to believe was literal truth).
If you can't support that via app sales, you can always supplement it with in-app advertising. I have seen some with discreet text adverts (no need to use Apple's iAd system if you don;t want to, although that is also an option).
He's a celebrity; there are numerous ways to refer to him. Considering that the entire article is about a specific person, calling him by his first name is not outside the realm of "appropriate", especially in an informal discussion.
Although, I guess people only ever call the creator of Linux "Torvalds", right, never ever "Linus".
Also, good "hiding" of people other than Steve Jobs in recent Keynotes, bringing up more and more of the people working under him to do product demos. This has been a trend for some time now.
Random people on the street really don;t care one way or the other. Anyone who has seen the keynotes, however, will have a good feel for some of the major people in the company.
Good to know, I am looking at NAS options right now, and the Drobo stuff is piquing my interest but is clearly quite expensive, so my other choices are building something myself (not hugely au fait with setting up and managing the software side of this), or going with something cheaper and the Netgear stuff was on my radar. I need something that will sit on a network (gigE), support a 6 person household and be quiet and cheap to run. I suspect I am going to have to choose between "cheap, fast, good" pick any two.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, definitely a miasma of incandescent plasma....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA :)
I think you'll find it's a miasma of incandescent plasma.
Right, and the parent post is telling you that the technical aspects of that product are not in isolation - either Android has huge market share and awesomeness and openness etc etc, or it's your posited view - only an tiny number of handsets count when assessing its quality.
If "fragmentation is not an issue" as many here claim, then all the Android devices should be included, surely - this includes all the ones locked into old versions with no vendor support, and the ones that are hard to root (or that require rooting at all, in the supposedly "free of the walled garden" ecosystem).
It's one or the other - you can't flip between them at will to deemphasise the downsides, just as you can't crow on one hand that Android is outselling iOS, has bigger marketshare etc, then on the other hand simultaneously claim Apple is violating antitrust laws because it is abusing its "monopoly" in the smartphone market (not even bringing RIM or Nokia into it - the two positions are mutually exclusive, yet I see them presented as fact on slashdot all the time, at the same time).
There's a great deal to like about Android, and it has achieved remarkable things in a short space of time, but there are enough good points that you don;t need to attempt to twist things around to cover any tiny bit of perceived criticism. Responding to criticism is one of the ways you improve as a product. (although saying that, the article is a bit weak, but I am talking about this thread in the current context).
Poorly. The hardware is still struggling since it was designed with the 3GS in mind. They have updated since release though with performance tweaks for the 3G (I have one, and have been comparing) so they haven't just said "just buy an iPhone 4!" they are actually trying to make it better.
Battery life has been unaffected, it's still as good as it was - no complaints here.
You back up the data... same as any other mobile computing device that has a removable battery.
The fact that the battery is only replaceable by taking the unit apart has no relevancy whatsoever in this case. You either plug it in with a booster (and there are several iPad cases that have one built in, so that the iPad essentially "docks" with the case and provides power via the dock connector, or you swap devices and just hit up the server for a resync.
If any organisation was using iPads (or any mobile computing device: laptops/phones/memory sticks) as a sole point of data failure then they have bigger problems than a limited lifespan on lithium polymer cells.
Yes, the "form" being "remove all of the space taken up by door mechanisms and clips/bays/docking connectors" and use that space to increase the size of the battery so the majority of users (who never replace their battery) get longer battery life. Thus, function *and* form for the vast majority of users.
For those that need to replace the battery, it can be done at a service, or you can do it yourself with a third party replacement.
Well, this is slashdot - rapidly becoming the Fox News of the tech world. We're even capping it off by having a "healthy" complement of active climate change deniers to go with it.
Never let something like facts (say, enterprise iOS management with in-house apps) get in the way of a good bash of your enemy.
That already exists - A corporate developer licence is available that enables you to push in-house apps to the iPhones and iPads under your control. It has been like this for some time, since before the iPad launched.
Have a look at a globe some time ;)
California is not the centre of the world (although it depends on your frame of reference). The time is set so that as many people as possible *are* awake.
Yeah "desperate" enough to develop software in an ecosystem with 100 million users who all buy from the same store, with a lot of disposable income for small-value purchases.
mmmm. Desperate. That's what it is to develop for iOS.
Welcome to the mentality of the business owner who's early 2000 era website didn't support anything but IE because "those customers on other browsers are insignificant" (but they are still customers and are physically a large number....)
So wait, is Android outselling iOS or what?
You (the collective you, not you specifically) can't trumpet Android's massive rise in install base and marketshare on one hand, with a "haha look now Apple, you will fall! muhahahah!" while simultaneously crying "wah! antitrust! Apple is a monopoly in the mobile space!" when it pulls a stunt like this.
Even without Android, Apple is nowhere near monopoly position in the mobile market - RIM, for one, Nokia for another...
It's not illegal to do this sort of thing if you're not a monopoly - if it is unpalatable to enough users they will migrate away to another competing platform (which they cannot easily do in a monopoly situation).
It depends, does the hotel room arrive at your location from Apple's servers? The fee is hosting, bandwidth and payment processing and is standard across all the services (music, apps, books), and it seems high for books given that their size relative to audio is small but their costs often reversed (99c for a song, $10 for a smaller filesize book, but 30% cut for both) - suggesting that the fee needs to be looked at.
What this is all about seems to be the end-run Amazon and others have done to avoid the in app purchase method to specifically skip the fees, and I can see why amazon would want to do that - they have no need of external hosting, payment processing or bandwidth, but they are also taking up residence in direct competition to Apple on their own device (for free, less $99 annual dev licence for hosting) in the ebook market.
I can see the business decision made here - not that I think it's necessarily smart, but it would offer a convenience option for iPad users to be able to buy books in app in addition to being sent off to a remote site to do the same.
Didn't you say that last time one of these topics came up?
Perhaps not, but join the line of slashdotters who have said "Thanks $LARGE-COMPANY, I was so close to buying $YOUR-PRODUCT, but now *this* is the straw that broke the camel's back!"
You know, the ones would weren't actually going to do anything of the sort, but didn't have anything to contribute to the discussion other than "$LARGE-COMPANY sucks!"
And for the record, I think this is a silly, if predictable business move, although it does offer the choice of convenience to the app user, although it will probably drive prices up.
The word is "leech" in this context, although your lack of basic grammar suggests you don't really care one way or the other.
I've never personally felt Apple looked cute, since that is an adjective I ascribe to a person rather than a corporation. In answer to your question, it looks as cute as it did before; neither more or less since it was never such a thing in the first place.
It's also good to see lots of citations to back up your amusing assertion. Note: the previous sentence might have contained sarcasm, YMMV, void where prohibited, never roller skate in a buffalo herd.
As for Apple's business decision, I think it is predictable given that the rules for apps state that they should already be doing this or they should never have been approved in the first place. All it does is force ebook sellers to offer the option of an in-app purchase through Apple if they also offer an external sale, which will either drive up prices overall, or cut into the margins of the publishers.
Sure, if MS are hosting the content and when you buy it it comes down of MS' servers.
This may be a bit of a silly move on Apple's part (although I can see why they made it, from a business perspective) but the requirement is to offer the choice of the two - in-app purchase or external purchase as is happening now. The only reason the Amazon app doesn't already do that is to avoid hosting stuff on Apple's servers (since they really have no need to pay for something they already do).
Note that it *additionally* must be sold in-app, not exclusively.
The difference is important. It essentially stops a free app from Amazon (which competes with its own ebook store) being a free rider on the store (in terms of hosting and bandwidth, although those are minimal) while using an end-run around the in-app purchase system. They are now saying "if you sell for use in the app, you must offer both choice".
I'm not necessarily agreeing with the decision, but it is subtly different to the statement "you must make the content available via in-app purchase" which lies by omission.
That is exactly what they want, in fact (less the increased cost - they want the prices to match). Go RTFA.
“We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app,” Trudy Muller, an Apple spokeswoman, said in a statement.
So, yes, it sounds exactly like something would not only allow, but actively enforce (the rules already exist, but they have been lax in enforcement, either while the eBook market was in its infancy, or while it tried to make deals with the various people involved).
I loved MD. I still use it. I had one of the earliest portable recorders. I have a separate deck that is hooked up to my machine to this day.
However, the Serial Copy Management System was a brainless and heavy handed attempt by Sony to thwart CD copying or something, except it didn't - you could just make an analog copy at indistinguishable quality. You could make one digital copy from CD, and then that MD could not be further digitally copied (over SP/DIF) - you had to go analog. Even for music you created yourself.
It did *nothing* to stop piracy, and just pissed people off.
The pro MD decks didn't have this feature.
I also think they were poorly marketed in the US compared to other markets where they fared much better , like Japan and the EU.
You don't seem to know how to use iTunes, or you are attempting to make it more complicated than it is.
I have a huge library, and *none* of it has any DRM, not a single solitary song among many thousands (literally). A great deal of those tracks purchased from Apple's store directly. The rest all mp3 files from CDs and MiniDisc. All the metadata is accurate, extensive and not all of it was added by iTunes itself (or edited in by iTunes) and it all works fine.
All of my library plays on Linux-based machines as well as OS X.
I have migrated my library at least 4 times over its life, every time was seamless. In recent years it fell to a hard drive death, and yet was restored from backup seamlessly in the time it took to copy the files over to the new drive and start iTunes.
My apps have always migrated seamlessly to my iPhone, and the iPod Touch with the smashed screen that I use as a headless media server for my car's head unit also works just fine. I have had to restore my phone from backup on one occasion and it worked seamlessly. I even got back the draft text message that I was typing to a contact (and unlike Android, it was sent to the right person! [I kid, I kid]).
So, you're either massively trolling (as I suspect), or you are too stupid to own a computer (which I don't suspect is true, but run with the satire - I got into trouble for not declaring well ahead of time what was an obvious joke versus what I was alleged to believe was literal truth).
I would model it more accurately on a harmonic oscillator, with no anharmonic correction.
The "pay to play" is $99 per year.
If you can't support that via app sales, you can always supplement it with in-app advertising. I have seen some with discreet text adverts (no need to use Apple's iAd system if you don;t want to, although that is also an option).
He's a celebrity; there are numerous ways to refer to him. Considering that the entire article is about a specific person, calling him by his first name is not outside the realm of "appropriate", especially in an informal discussion.
Although, I guess people only ever call the creator of Linux "Torvalds", right, never ever "Linus".
How is this at all relevant?
Also, good "hiding" of people other than Steve Jobs in recent Keynotes, bringing up more and more of the people working under him to do product demos. This has been a trend for some time now.
Random people on the street really don;t care one way or the other. Anyone who has seen the keynotes, however, will have a good feel for some of the major people in the company.
No, it's his name.
Useful to use when referring to a specific person so you can identify then when talking about more than one person at a time.
Good to know, I am looking at NAS options right now, and the Drobo stuff is piquing my interest but is clearly quite expensive, so my other choices are building something myself (not hugely au fait with setting up and managing the software side of this), or going with something cheaper and the Netgear stuff was on my radar. I need something that will sit on a network (gigE), support a 6 person household and be quiet and cheap to run. I suspect I am going to have to choose between "cheap, fast, good" pick any two.