I agree that Warner must have really flubbed it to get so far into the process without a clear copyright. I wouldn't be surprised if people were fired over this.
That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that Fox waited until the film was ready to release before pressing their claim, else Warner would simply have dumped the project and Fox would have a copyright on nothing.
I expect Warner to appeal, but if they run out of options, it would server Fox right if Warner dumped the completed film on The Pirate Bay rather than hand Fox profits they hadn't earned.
On the topic of the faithfulness of the adaptation, I own the original comic books (carefully preserved in archive-grade sleeves) and the first printing of the graphic novel, and participated in the original discussions in net.comics as the issues were coming out. That said, I don't care a rat's behind whether every single image and line of dialog are on the screen.
I think the people who are translating the novel's "every picture is worth 1000 words" to the equivalent number of novel pages and then back to screen time should go outside right now and breathe the fresh air. Get away from the computer screen for awhile and your acne may even clear up. Geeze, I'm reminded of all the angst over the Lord of the Rings films before they came out, how the elves should only be done in CGI because human actors could not be pretty enough, how the books couldn't possibly be filmed in less than a 22 hour miniseries, and raging that Gandalf bumped his head in Bilbo's home because THAT SCENE WASN'T IN THE BOOK!. Ohfercrissake.
That said, I *am* glad they kept Watchmen in 1985 rather than try to translate the plot to 2008. The issues are different and the plot doesn't work in our time. Which is the reason I rushed right out and didn't see the latest Keanu Reeves CGI extravaganza.
Personally, I'm glad Ozymandias lost the miniskirt and the owl's costume was updated. I'd be perfectly happy if they soft-pedaled certain canine-dismemberment scenes, but will grit my teeth and get through it if they don't. (I agree the scenes with Rorschach taking the rorschach test were key, albeit the least-enjoyable part of the novel.) I don't expect the left-right symmetry of issue #6 to be somehow faithfully reproduced on the screen. You just can't do that stuff in film. These minor points should be more than compensated by, you know, having real actors actually speaking and moving about.
The visuals look great, but visuals alone don't make a movie. (Example: The first Harry Potter film, which was no more than a moving illustration to a mediocre book, with no life of it's own. The subsequent films were better.) I am a little worried about the pressure to produce a "theater-length" edit, as this tends to leave in the expensive special effects and cut out the, you know, plot. (And I'm a little annoyed that they refer to the group in the film as "The Watchmen".) But what I've seen so far is interesting enough that I'll see it if it ever comes out. This doesn't mean I subscribe to "You can't complain about it until you see it". You certainly can. You can enumerate in fine detail what advance information has caused you to decide not to pay good money to see a piece of excrement. But for God's sake, let's keep some perspective.
> I dont see what that has to do with it, do a search for "american junkyard" or "african scrapyard", etc, etc.
This seems like it'll get some play in 3rd world countries, but I don't see it happen in the US. Anyone who tries it will get sued or legislated out of existence. For instance, there will be the inevitable dimwits who worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.
This will only work in areas that have access to sufficient car parts, and have a sufficiently low enough ratio of lawyers/humans to be allowed to use it.
> More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Well, maybe. To use your analogy, they never did sort out the problems with ME, but XP eventually turned out ok.
Right, I understand that analogy is a little broken because XP was an entirely different code base, and it sounds like Windows 7 will not be. So who the hell knows?
I was about to say that Microsoft has to hit a home run this time or they're in real trouble, but who are we kidding? There's only so long the majority of businesses can hold out before they make the jump. With Windows 7, Microsoft can bunt and still sell 20 million copies. Sure, a Windows 7 disappointment is additional motivation to seek alternatives, but who actually believes that'll amount to more than a percentage point? Two at most?
Are there "millions" of Windows apps? What subset of them work on a 320X480 screen without a keyboard?
From a geeky perspective, I'd be interested in seeing the citrix client running on an iphone. But I have to ask what problem we're trying to solve. Do users really need this, or would the majority be satisfied with a native VNC client or Windows Terminal Server client? (I know I would.) The iphone already supports the Cisco VPN client. (Yay.)
We're already getting what we pay for. Our local rag is no more than an unabashed mouthpiece for one of the major political parties. Their "news" isn't really, and their editorials are excrutiatingly predictable. Classifieds are overpriced, and you can get a better selection of comics in color online. If they actually had a thoughtful local angle on the news it might be interesting, but regurgitating the same AP release that everyone else gets is not. Besides cage liners and packaging for the more authentic fish and chips shops, what is the point of newspapers anymore?
One could say that when (if) they're owned by nonprofits, newspapers will become one-sided. This doesn't strike me as much different from now.
> The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular.
Not sure I buy that. The author might be confusing news reporting, which is usually a different profit center, from news printing.
But I dunno, it's possible that advertisers have found what they think is more bang for the buck advertising online than in print. But if this is the case, you'd think that the major newspapers could eck out a living online the same way everyone else does, and without changing their business model much -- and save printing costs to boot.
This is happening to a certain extent, but I think the main hitch is that online it's even more obvious that all these individual newspapers have the exact same articles.
When the flow of information was confined to the corporations who could afford wire service and (later) access to LexusNexus, newspapers made sense. Finding out stuff was expensive, and people had to accept the summaries that newspapers (and TV news, which is also sinking rapidly) provided.
Newspapers were shot through the heart when the Internet became common -- they just haven't stopped twitching yet. There's no point in paying for the local rag, (and then having to set it out in recycling every weekend) because I can find better content online. I might even get local content from the rag's online site, if it didn't annoy me so much.
Besides, printing fewer newspapers is green. Printing none at all is very green. So there.
> 2. The Earth heats up on a cycle. It just so happens that in this point in time were on the warming part. If we were going into an ice age, I'm sure Al Gore would be saying "Save the dingos from the ice" instead of "Save the polar bears from the heat".
In the seventies, that's pretty much what they were saying.
Palm will save Linux? Wow, is that twisted. First of all, Linux doesn't need saving. Secondly, Palm couldn't save their own butt with help from a thousand amorous spider-monkeys.
I have no idea where that came from. I may have accidentally doubled-up on my allergy medication...
> "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements.
> treo 750 sucks, but not all windows mobile devices do so. i've used a whole bunch of pda phones (htc wallaby, himalaya, blue angel, universal, touch pro). some of them are quite stable, some of them are not. different ringtones never were a problem, though.
Yeah, you know, like most companies, (and against all reason) our cellular department is enamored of Windows Mobile. The HTC slider with the full keyboard? Really popular. But oddly enough, same problems. Needs daily (or more frequent) reboots to recover performance, and occasionally just stops making sounds. Or maybe you meant a different model?
Windows breeds the expectation of periodic reboots. It's all about expectations.
For instance, you see a Windows Mobile device as primarily a PDA, and don't appear to care that the phone function sucks. I expect a phone to work as a phone, which is a whole 'nother set of expectations, which Windows Mobile devices can't generally meet.
> windows mobile isn't as locked as iphone. you actually can use lots of different interfaces with windows mobile.
Yes, I know, and I experimented with this that dreadful 3 months in which I owned a Treo 750. I came to the conclusion that the interface wasn't the real issue, it was the bloated code base beneath it. The "Start" button is the tail -- the code base is the horse. People are sold on the idea that every widget they have should have the same look and feel, and that locks them into an unmanageable piece of software. That you can braid the tail and put ribbons in it is true, but you still have to deal with the horse.
It's worse than that, because every look and feel change I made decreased it's reliability. The best results are had by not changing *anything* -- not even the default ringtone, because the audio driver tends to become stuck and then the damned thing won't ring on incoming calls.
> Sorry to be a prick but why doesn't your daughter just e-mail you instead? I'd rather e-mail than MMS, but I'm not much of an MMS'er so I'm mostly clueless.
I don't think you're being a prick. She uses MMS because that's what all her friends use. There doesn't need to be any other reason. That's the point, really. It's not up to Apple to change in what way we communicate with each other. They can provide a different, more positive experience, and have. But that doesn't give them the right to dictate in what fashion we share content.
> I really suspect that its an infrastructure problem in other countries.
It is not an infrastructure problem. It just isn't. The company for which I work is an AT&T customer, and we have access to many different types of phones on that network, including Palm, Nokia, RIM, Motorola, and most recently, the i-Phone. When it became available, it was very popular, but we rapidly found that it had a serious problem with dropping calls.
Side-by-side, with a phone from any of the other brands listed above, at the same geographical location, where the i-phone would drop calls, the other phone would work reliably. For instance, I have a Treo 680, my associate had an i-phone. Same network. Right in the middle of downtown, where he could not make or maintain a connection, I could. I know Apple has tried to blame this on AT&T, that they didn't build out enough transmitters or some such, but I can state from personal observation that this is at best wishful thinking.
Why haven't you seen any problems? I haven't a clue. Different batch of silicon? It's not up to me to tell you *why* it happens, but I can tell you that it does.
> You can complain about cut and paste or how the iphone is locked down or too expensive or doesn't run linux, but it's been a real donkey punch to the industry, and even rival companies acknowledge (and applaud) it for raising the bar (at least in the US).
Yes, I can, (except, who cares if it runs linux?) and also complain about 3G/Edge issues, dropped calls, and lack of MMS and flash and java. But despite all that it demonstrably kicks Windows Mobile's butt. (In fairness, from a technical standpoint, it was an easy butt to kick.)
The biggest lesson the industry needs to take from this is: People use Windows Mobile devices because they have to. People use i-Phones because they want to.
Microsoft promotes the "have to" mentality by selling interoperability and similar look-and-feel with Winders and Winders-related services. As more and more people (and corporations) realize that the Start button is not a good paradigm for a phone, and sufficient interoperability can be achieved without having to put up with the Windows Mobile code base, Windows Mobile will diminish to an also-ran and, like Disco, we'll all look back and wonder what madness made us think we liked it.
However, these other issues still need to be fixed. Here's hoping that Apple isn't so arrogant to believe that they can innovate *once* and retain the market. Nokia and RIM now have offerings that are similar in concept, without the drawbacks. Apple set the bar -- now they need to show us how to rise above it. Merely increasing the memory in the next model will not be good enough.
Personally, I'm still clinging to my old beat-up Palm-based phone whilst I see how Apple fixes the problems enumerated here in the next release. Or if someone catches up to them in the meantime.
For example, my daughter is a rabid user of MMS with her Blackberry Curve. On an i-phone, I'd not be able to receive her messages. That is not acceptable. Having a cool interface is not an acceptable substitute. Apple, give us the features we really want, instead of the features you think we should be using, and there will be no stopping you.
what we can learn from this
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Every once in awhile I review my outgoing box, mostly to make sure I haven't made some commitment and then forgotten about it... But after reading this, I'll be checking my outbox more often, and more carefully.
> I thought the Doctor's companion was an attractive black woman, but instead I see a redhead pictured in the article. Boy I've really fallen behind. What season is USA's Sci Fi Channel currently airing? 3?
Who the hell cares? Does anyone actually watch the hacked-up episodes on the sci-fi channel?
> Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system.
Yikes! $150 over and above Vista's already inflated price structure? For all that cost just to get an OS that works, it's worth considering... Ubuntu is free.
Why, you racist insensitive clod. How could you say such a thing! "Boiled cat" indeed. Cat is prepared in stir-fry with a garlic sauce made from garlic cloves, soy sauce and honey. After the meat is fully cooked, stir in snow peas and green onions, let simmer for a half minute and remove to platter. Serve with rat fried rice on the side.
>...discovers that through third-party forks and enhancements like Drizzle and OurDelta 'you can get a "better" MySQL than the one Sun/MySQL gives you today. For free.'
Is anyone at all surprised? Remember Sparcworks, the official, surprisingly expensive compiler for Solaris with really annoying license requirements that your management made you buy, that immediately became shelfware in favor of the free and far superior GCC if you hoped to do anything approaching ANSI C development? As soon as I had heard that Sun had purchased MySQL, I thought "Ah, the expense of Oracle without the innovation".
I consider the code base for "Enterprise" MySQL to be dead. It's not that community development is preventing Sun from doing core development. Community development is filling the void caused by the lack of core development.
Parenthetically, is anyone counting the number of/. articles lately that are whining about free development undercutting for-profit development? Maybe we need a new tag -- something like "mommyhesnotchargingenough".
> And modern 21st century clothing is less jarring and distracting than some of things they might have come up with instead. Imagine what you could get if you gave the wardrobe director the instruction, "just make sure it doesn't look like anything Earthlings wear."
Ok, I'm trying not to get hysterical here. What you SAY is "This is a highly evolved society from which we parted company before the dawn of human history. They look like us, and we may share some ancient legends, but they've had an hundred centuries to develop a completely different culture. Now, with some ancient Egyptian visual cues, come up with something imaginative and plausible in architecture, tools, clothing and weapons." THIS ISN'T HARD. There are bright, imaginative people in the industry who's JOB it is to do this. Just because it sounds hard to the geeks in slashdot doesn't mean it's hard to the people who do this for a LIVING. To a Hollywood costume designer, your ability to write a device driver would be so much incomprehensible magic. What gives you the audacity to believe it doesn't work the other way?
> enviromentalists love to propose things that would only be feasible if we killed half of the population off.
IE, Ted Turner's position that we should do the world a favor and kill ourselves. To which I reply: "Ok, you've convinced me. You first." But it never is them first. The mass human extinction necessary for the survivors to be able to live on pedal power always needs to be some other people. And you know damned good and well that in Turner's case, it'd be someone else doing the pedaling.
But I think we may be painting with too broad a brush. Some environmentalists understand the difference between "point" and "total" environmental impact, (electric cars have no point emissions, but they use electricity from coal fired plants) and that opposing all new energy sources only assures that we continue to use the current, elderly, inefficiently designed, high-impact sources.
Ok wait, before the technologists in this group get too upset, keep in mind that the above is not a technical position. "We need a fundamental change in how we use our energy" and so forth are statements of a philosophical position. IE, "it would be so much nicer if we all lived simply and loved one another". It's not something you can argue from a technical standpoint. Clues are fundamental misunderstanding of scale -- example (a) "the gross amount of concrete" needed for nuclear power plants, without any understanding of context -- what the requirements would be in relation to that used in the average high-density housing project, for instance. example (b), the closing statement, "That's a nice idea but honestly, I don't see fusion ever becoming a viable solution. It works fine and well for the sun but I don't see anything living anywhere near that." which has the same logical content as "I don't see wood stoves ever becoming a viable solution. Combustion works fine and well for forest fires but I don't see anything living anywhere near that." Trying to correct that kind of massive misunderstanding is an impossible undertaking. Like, where do you begin?
> Of course a big (so far) unresolved question is, if we came here in spaceships from some other planet, what happened to the spaceships and all our advanced technology?
Right. It would have to have been in our very distant past -- say, the time of the emergence of cro-magnon, 40,000 years ago. That would give it a plausible historical connection and perhaps be enough time to have lost a small, high tech colony, assuming some kind of event that destroyed the tech and scattered a few survivors. Some word-of-mouth could have been the basis of early Egyptian mythology, which was part of the original (1978) idea.
Were it, say, even 10,000 years ago, there would be too many clues for us not to know this. And for our society to match theirs right down to the cuff links and dry erase markers, it would have to have happened no earlier than... oh... 1985.
Where they screwed up -- and it's a jarring screwup that's in your face each and every episode -- is trying to save a few bucks in conceptual art by using modern human... no wait, modern American no that's not right, modern Hollywood...no that doesn't quite cover it... modern Rodeo Drive props and fashions. Yeah, I suppose that would look alien... to someone from Mumbai.
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I agree that Warner must have really flubbed it to get so far into the process without a clear copyright. I wouldn't be surprised if people were fired over this.
That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that Fox waited until the film was ready to release before pressing their claim, else Warner would simply have dumped the project and Fox would have a copyright on nothing.
I expect Warner to appeal, but if they run out of options, it would server Fox right if Warner dumped the completed film on The Pirate Bay rather than hand Fox profits they hadn't earned.
On the topic of the faithfulness of the adaptation, I own the original comic books (carefully preserved in archive-grade sleeves) and the first printing of the graphic novel, and participated in the original discussions in net.comics as the issues were coming out. That said, I don't care a rat's behind whether every single image and line of dialog are on the screen.
I think the people who are translating the novel's "every picture is worth 1000 words" to the equivalent number of novel pages and then back to screen time should go outside right now and breathe the fresh air. Get away from the computer screen for awhile and your acne may even clear up. Geeze, I'm reminded of all the angst over the Lord of the Rings films before they came out, how the elves should only be done in CGI because human actors could not be pretty enough, how the books couldn't possibly be filmed in less than a 22 hour miniseries, and raging that Gandalf bumped his head in Bilbo's home because THAT SCENE WASN'T IN THE BOOK!. Ohfercrissake.
That said, I *am* glad they kept Watchmen in 1985 rather than try to translate the plot to 2008. The issues are different and the plot doesn't work in our time. Which is the reason I rushed right out and didn't see the latest Keanu Reeves CGI extravaganza.
Personally, I'm glad Ozymandias lost the miniskirt and the owl's costume was updated. I'd be perfectly happy if they soft-pedaled certain canine-dismemberment scenes, but will grit my teeth and get through it if they don't. (I agree the scenes with Rorschach taking the rorschach test were key, albeit the least-enjoyable part of the novel.) I don't expect the left-right symmetry of issue #6 to be somehow faithfully reproduced on the screen. You just can't do that stuff in film. These minor points should be more than compensated by, you know, having real actors actually speaking and moving about.
The visuals look great, but visuals alone don't make a movie. (Example: The first Harry Potter film, which was no more than a moving illustration to a mediocre book, with no life of it's own. The subsequent films were better.) I am a little worried about the pressure to produce a "theater-length" edit, as this tends to leave in the expensive special effects and cut out the, you know, plot. (And I'm a little annoyed that they refer to the group in the film as "The Watchmen".) But what I've seen so far is interesting enough that I'll see it if it ever comes out. This doesn't mean I subscribe to "You can't complain about it until you see it". You certainly can. You can enumerate in fine detail what advance information has caused you to decide not to pay good money to see a piece of excrement. But for God's sake, let's keep some perspective.
> Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have ...
And since government produces nothing, everything has to come from somewhere else.
> I dont see what that has to do with it, do a search for "american junkyard" or "african scrapyard", etc, etc.
This seems like it'll get some play in 3rd world countries, but I don't see it happen in the US. Anyone who tries it will get sued or legislated out of existence. For instance, there will be the inevitable dimwits who worry about carbon monoxide poisoning.
This will only work in areas that have access to sufficient car parts, and have a sufficiently low enough ratio of lawyers/humans to be allowed to use it.
> More like Windows ME 2, do they really think people will buy it when they haven't sorted out the problems with vista.
Well, maybe. To use your analogy, they never did sort out the problems with ME, but XP eventually turned out ok.
Right, I understand that analogy is a little broken because XP was an entirely different code base, and it sounds like Windows 7 will not be. So who the hell knows?
I was about to say that Microsoft has to hit a home run this time or they're in real trouble, but who are we kidding? There's only so long the majority of businesses can hold out before they make the jump. With Windows 7, Microsoft can bunt and still sell 20 million copies. Sure, a Windows 7 disappointment is additional motivation to seek alternatives, but who actually believes that'll amount to more than a percentage point? Two at most?
Are there "millions" of Windows apps? What subset of them work on a 320X480 screen without a keyboard?
From a geeky perspective, I'd be interested in seeing the citrix client running on an iphone. But I have to ask what problem we're trying to solve. Do users really need this, or would the majority be satisfied with a native VNC client or Windows Terminal Server client? (I know I would.) The iphone already supports the Cisco VPN client. (Yay.)
We're already getting what we pay for. Our local rag is no more than an unabashed mouthpiece for one of the major political parties. Their "news" isn't really, and their editorials are excrutiatingly predictable. Classifieds are overpriced, and you can get a better selection of comics in color online. If they actually had a thoughtful local angle on the news it might be interesting, but regurgitating the same AP release that everyone else gets is not. Besides cage liners and packaging for the more authentic fish and chips shops, what is the point of newspapers anymore?
One could say that when (if) they're owned by nonprofits, newspapers will become one-sided. This doesn't strike me as much different from now.
> The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they've arguably become more popular.
Not sure I buy that. The author might be confusing news reporting, which is usually a different profit center, from news printing.
But I dunno, it's possible that advertisers have found what they think is more bang for the buck advertising online than in print. But if this is the case, you'd think that the major newspapers could eck out a living online the same way everyone else does, and without changing their business model much -- and save printing costs to boot.
This is happening to a certain extent, but I think the main hitch is that online it's even more obvious that all these individual newspapers have the exact same articles.
When the flow of information was confined to the corporations who could afford wire service and (later) access to LexusNexus, newspapers made sense. Finding out stuff was expensive, and people had to accept the summaries that newspapers (and TV news, which is also sinking rapidly) provided.
Newspapers were shot through the heart when the Internet became common -- they just haven't stopped twitching yet. There's no point in paying for the local rag, (and then having to set it out in recycling every weekend) because I can find better content online. I might even get local content from the rag's online site, if it didn't annoy me so much.
Besides, printing fewer newspapers is green. Printing none at all is very green. So there.
So, since he's patented this, any use of water vapor for large scale cooling would have to pay him?
> 2. The Earth heats up on a cycle. It just so happens that in this point in time were on the warming part. If we were going into an ice age, I'm sure Al Gore would be saying "Save the dingos from the ice" instead of "Save the polar bears from the heat".
In the seventies, that's pretty much what they were saying.
Palm will save Linux? Wow, is that twisted. First of all, Linux doesn't need saving. Secondly, Palm couldn't save their own butt with help from a thousand amorous spider-monkeys.
I have no idea where that came from. I may have accidentally doubled-up on my allergy medication...
> "trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers." While this may be true, the keynote addresses have been a critical venue for major new product announcements.
Maybe they don't have anything.
> treo 750 sucks, but not all windows mobile devices do so. i've used a whole bunch of pda phones (htc wallaby, himalaya, blue angel, universal, touch pro). some of them are quite stable, some of them are not. different ringtones never were a problem, though.
Yeah, you know, like most companies, (and against all reason) our cellular department is enamored of Windows Mobile. The HTC slider with the full keyboard? Really popular. But oddly enough, same problems. Needs daily (or more frequent) reboots to recover performance, and occasionally just stops making sounds. Or maybe you meant a different model?
Windows breeds the expectation of periodic reboots. It's all about expectations.
For instance, you see a Windows Mobile device as primarily a PDA, and don't appear to care that the phone function sucks. I expect a phone to work as a phone, which is a whole 'nother set of expectations, which Windows Mobile devices can't generally meet.
Yeah, but if you did it, it'd be illegal...
> windows mobile isn't as locked as iphone. you actually can use lots of different interfaces with windows mobile.
Yes, I know, and I experimented with this that dreadful 3 months in which I owned a Treo 750. I came to the conclusion that the interface wasn't the real issue, it was the bloated code base beneath it. The "Start" button is the tail -- the code base is the horse. People are sold on the idea that every widget they have should have the same look and feel, and that locks them into an unmanageable piece of software. That you can braid the tail and put ribbons in it is true, but you still have to deal with the horse.
It's worse than that, because every look and feel change I made decreased it's reliability. The best results are had by not changing *anything* -- not even the default ringtone, because the audio driver tends to become stuck and then the damned thing won't ring on incoming calls.
> Sorry to be a prick but why doesn't your daughter just e-mail you instead? I'd rather e-mail than MMS, but I'm not much of an MMS'er so I'm mostly clueless.
I don't think you're being a prick. She uses MMS because that's what all her friends use. There doesn't need to be any other reason. That's the point, really. It's not up to Apple to change in what way we communicate with each other. They can provide a different, more positive experience, and have. But that doesn't give them the right to dictate in what fashion we share content.
> I really suspect that its an infrastructure problem in other countries.
It is not an infrastructure problem. It just isn't. The company for which I work is an AT&T customer, and we have access to many different types of phones on that network, including Palm, Nokia, RIM, Motorola, and most recently, the i-Phone. When it became available, it was very popular, but we rapidly found that it had a serious problem with dropping calls.
Side-by-side, with a phone from any of the other brands listed above, at the same geographical location, where the i-phone would drop calls, the other phone would work reliably. For instance, I have a Treo 680, my associate had an i-phone. Same network. Right in the middle of downtown, where he could not make or maintain a connection, I could. I know Apple has tried to blame this on AT&T, that they didn't build out enough transmitters or some such, but I can state from personal observation that this is at best wishful thinking.
Why haven't you seen any problems? I haven't a clue. Different batch of silicon? It's not up to me to tell you *why* it happens, but I can tell you that it does.
> You can complain about cut and paste or how the iphone is locked down or too expensive or doesn't run linux, but it's been a real donkey punch to the industry, and even rival companies acknowledge (and applaud) it for raising the bar (at least in the US).
Yes, I can, (except, who cares if it runs linux?) and also complain about 3G/Edge issues, dropped calls, and lack of MMS and flash and java. But despite all that it demonstrably kicks Windows Mobile's butt. (In fairness, from a technical standpoint, it was an easy butt to kick.)
The biggest lesson the industry needs to take from this is: People use Windows Mobile devices because they have to. People use i-Phones because they want to.
Microsoft promotes the "have to" mentality by selling interoperability and similar look-and-feel with Winders and Winders-related services. As more and more people (and corporations) realize that the Start button is not a good paradigm for a phone, and sufficient interoperability can be achieved without having to put up with the Windows Mobile code base, Windows Mobile will diminish to an also-ran and, like Disco, we'll all look back and wonder what madness made us think we liked it.
However, these other issues still need to be fixed. Here's hoping that Apple isn't so arrogant to believe that they can innovate *once* and retain the market. Nokia and RIM now have offerings that are similar in concept, without the drawbacks. Apple set the bar -- now they need to show us how to rise above it. Merely increasing the memory in the next model will not be good enough.
Personally, I'm still clinging to my old beat-up Palm-based phone whilst I see how Apple fixes the problems enumerated here in the next release. Or if someone catches up to them in the meantime.
For example, my daughter is a rabid user of MMS with her Blackberry Curve. On an i-phone, I'd not be able to receive her messages. That is not acceptable. Having a cool interface is not an acceptable substitute. Apple, give us the features we really want, instead of the features you think we should be using, and there will be no stopping you.
Every once in awhile I review my outgoing box, mostly to make sure I haven't made some commitment and then forgotten about it... But after reading this, I'll be checking my outbox more often, and more carefully.
> I thought the Doctor's companion was an attractive black woman, but instead I see a redhead pictured in the article. Boy I've really fallen behind. What season is USA's Sci Fi Channel currently airing? 3?
Who the hell cares? Does anyone actually watch the hacked-up episodes on the sci-fi channel?
> Under current licensing 'downgrade' agreements, system builders can install XP Pro instead of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate; however, Dell has opted for a surcharge of $150 over the price of Vista for the older but more popular XP Professional operating system.
Yikes! $150 over and above Vista's already inflated price structure? For all that cost just to get an OS that works, it's worth considering... Ubuntu is free.
> The people eat boiled cat, for chrissakes.
Why, you racist insensitive clod. How could you say such a thing! "Boiled cat" indeed. Cat is prepared in stir-fry with a garlic sauce made from garlic cloves, soy sauce and honey. After the meat is fully cooked, stir in snow peas and green onions, let simmer for a half minute and remove to platter. Serve with rat fried rice on the side.
"Boiled" indeed. Philistine.
Is anyone at all surprised? Remember Sparcworks, the official, surprisingly expensive compiler for Solaris with really annoying license requirements that your management made you buy, that immediately became shelfware in favor of the free and far superior GCC if you hoped to do anything approaching ANSI C development? As soon as I had heard that Sun had purchased MySQL, I thought "Ah, the expense of Oracle without the innovation".
I consider the code base for "Enterprise" MySQL to be dead. It's not that community development is preventing Sun from doing core development. Community development is filling the void caused by the lack of core development.
Parenthetically, is anyone counting the number of /. articles lately that are whining about free development undercutting for-profit development? Maybe we need a new tag -- something like "mommyhesnotchargingenough".
> And modern 21st century clothing is less jarring and distracting than some of things they might have come up with instead. Imagine what you could get if you gave the wardrobe director the instruction, "just make sure it doesn't look like anything Earthlings wear."
Ok, I'm trying not to get hysterical here. What you SAY is "This is a highly evolved society from which we parted company before the dawn of human history. They look like us, and we may share some ancient legends, but they've had an hundred centuries to develop a completely different culture. Now, with some ancient Egyptian visual cues, come up with something imaginative and plausible in architecture, tools, clothing and weapons." THIS ISN'T HARD. There are bright, imaginative people in the industry who's JOB it is to do this. Just because it sounds hard to the geeks in slashdot doesn't mean it's hard to the people who do this for a LIVING. To a Hollywood costume designer, your ability to write a device driver would be so much incomprehensible magic. What gives you the audacity to believe it doesn't work the other way?
> enviromentalists love to propose things that would only be feasible if we killed half of the population off.
IE, Ted Turner's position that we should do the world a favor and kill ourselves. To which I reply: "Ok, you've convinced me. You first." But it never is them first. The mass human extinction necessary for the survivors to be able to live on pedal power always needs to be some other people. And you know damned good and well that in Turner's case, it'd be someone else doing the pedaling.
But I think we may be painting with too broad a brush. Some environmentalists understand the difference between "point" and "total" environmental impact, (electric cars have no point emissions, but they use electricity from coal fired plants) and that opposing all new energy sources only assures that we continue to use the current, elderly, inefficiently designed, high-impact sources.
Ok wait, before the technologists in this group get too upset, keep in mind that the above is not a technical position. "We need a fundamental change in how we use our energy" and so forth are statements of a philosophical position. IE, "it would be so much nicer if we all lived simply and loved one another". It's not something you can argue from a technical standpoint. Clues are fundamental misunderstanding of scale -- example (a) "the gross amount of concrete" needed for nuclear power plants, without any understanding of context -- what the requirements would be in relation to that used in the average high-density housing project, for instance. example (b), the closing statement, "That's a nice idea but honestly, I don't see fusion ever becoming a viable solution. It works fine and well for the sun but I don't see anything living anywhere near that." which has the same logical content as "I don't see wood stoves ever becoming a viable solution. Combustion works fine and well for forest fires but I don't see anything living anywhere near that." Trying to correct that kind of massive misunderstanding is an impossible undertaking. Like, where do you begin?
> Of course a big (so far) unresolved question is, if we came here in spaceships from some other planet, what happened to the spaceships and all our advanced technology?
Right. It would have to have been in our very distant past -- say, the time of the emergence of cro-magnon, 40,000 years ago. That would give it a plausible historical connection and perhaps be enough time to have lost a small, high tech colony, assuming some kind of event that destroyed the tech and scattered a few survivors. Some word-of-mouth could have been the basis of early Egyptian mythology, which was part of the original (1978) idea.
Were it, say, even 10,000 years ago, there would be too many clues for us not to know this. And for our society to match theirs right down to the cuff links and dry erase markers, it would have to have happened no earlier than... oh... 1985.
Where they screwed up -- and it's a jarring screwup that's in your face each and every episode -- is trying to save a few bucks in conceptual art by using modern human... no wait, modern American no that's not right, modern Hollywood ...no that doesn't quite cover it... modern Rodeo Drive props and fashions. Yeah, I suppose that would look alien... to someone from Mumbai.