The reason people are upset is because AT&T is the worst carrier. They lock the heck out of the phones they offer, no sideloading on android, charge for tethering and hotspot and still have the lowest data limits of them all.
If this was verizon and sprint merging it would still be bad, but not this bad.
I never have any problem with their voice services when I am roaming on them. Who cares about sideloading on android? A small fraction of those who even use Android? Tethering and hotspot data is something that you should be using as a backup when you have no free wifi or are away from your home wifi. Don't you have an ISP at home? What about the free wifi at coffee shops? Verizon is irrelevant to visitors like me because they use CDMA technology. For all of your bitching and complaining, this will probably lead to better service in more places, lower local and roaming rates eventually and force Verizon to step up their game with LTE to compete instead of resting on their laurels with CDMA. Verizon might even have to provide HSPA backwards compatibility to lure customers and roaming partners.
If you are trying to do most of your traffic through cellular networks then you are an idiot because you do not understand that the bottleneck for cellular data are the towers and they were never meant to be used on a sustained basis for things like streaming or tethering. Those features are there for an emergency when you need connectivity for business while in a non-wifi area.
The iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 (GSM Model) work fine in Japan. I used my 3GS (Fido - Canada) in Japan last year during golden week and I was roaming on NTT Docomo just fine.
As long as you have a quad band phone with one of the bands used in Japan then you should be fine. If you want to be sure, just get an iPhone on a GSM network. There is a new model coming out this summer. You can buy factory unlocked iPhone up in Canada from Apple stores or on eBay as some of the carriers there allow unlocks after 90 days of service.
All the more reason to fight for everything we possibly can.
If you wanted real competition, you should have fought for it earlier by pressuring Verizon and Sprint to both go with HSPA+ two years ago and then going to LTE in 2013 along with AT&T when LTE was mature enough.
We can hope, altho it's damning Verizon with faint praise. It becomes a GSM monopoly, further pushing Verizon out on an EDGE (pun intended) with LTE.
The duopoly that results (sorry, Sprint and Clearwire are dying) means that we'll have the fun of the Canadians, who deal with the Rogers- Bell Canada Conundrum. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
What we really need is a technology to become the successor to GSM, CDMA, and LTE. Call it, 5G. We could bribe the ITU to lower the speed floor, and use visible light modulation for phone-- with mirrors.
Uh, LTE is what you are looking for. AT&T is going to implement it and nothing is stopping from Verizon implementing HSPA fallback support for their LTE network.
In Canada, the CDMA network carriers decided to switch over to HSPA+ but skip supporting 2G GSM or lower.
As a Canadian, I would like to point out that the majority of your rant is off topic. We are talking about wireless carriers here and not television distribution.
We are in a much better position than the US as far as carrier competition is concerned. There are several HSPA+ carrier to choose from because the two main CDMA carriers decided to switch to HSPA+ ahead of the transition to LTE. I have already seen the positive impact of the increased head to head competition with lower prices on some plans, free upgrades to earlier unlimited evenings and weekends and several carriers offering genuine iPhone unlocks either 90 days into your contract (Bell) or at the end of you contract (Fido).
I plan on unlocking my iPhone 3S with Fido before I switch to Bell and get an iPhone 5 this summer. My officially unlocked 3GS should fetch more on the open market than a locked one.
Right, so you would want to break up AT&T but leave Verizon alone thereby creating an even greater imbalance than this deal creates? Breaking up AT&T would result in a bunch of smaller carriers which would be unable to compete with Verizon and unable to complete an upgrade to LTE in a timely manner.
Why don't you just come clean and admit to being a fanboy of Verizon and not someone genuinely interested in preserving competition.
This proprietary software is free, or do you pay for it?
Have you considered offering the same amount of money to the open source people to add these features?
Have you considered that open source coders are not mainly motivated by money but rather "scratching their itch"? If an issue does not occur to the developer then they are likely to not tackle it.
Open source software known for creating good backend software but not front end UIs as usability is a specialized skill that few developers possess be they open source or not.
"This developer reiterates that if Apple didn't specifically introduce these problems in iOS, it's aware of them now. And he says that the Mobile Safari team has indicated the issues will not be fixed."
It is still hearsay. Some guy claims that Apple will not fix it but there was no statement from Apple on the issue.
Why pick on the plaintiff? Aren't defendants often guilty?
The problem is not frivolous lawsuits, it's frivolous juries that come from a frivolous citizenry.
Why waste everyone's time on expensive frivolous lawsuits? There should be a preliminary hearing for a lawsuit where the case has to pass a sniff test before an actual trial can proceed. If the plaintiff cannot provide sufficient evidence in the hearing, no trial with fishing expeditions can commence.
GPL3 does. And GPL2 says "and everything you need to make the binary" which includes things like a signing key.
What utter nonsense. Everything that you need to make a binary is the source code. That is not necessarily mean everything you need to make a signed binary in the app store. You need paid developer account for that. You can create a binary targeting the simulator without the key.
The GPL V2 certainly does not require distribution of libraries or all build scripts for every platform imaginable. There are plenty of examples out there of source code that does not include a build script for OS X even though binaries are available from third parties.
It's not arbitrary. Apple have locked down their devices, and for (IMO) good reasons. The GPL forbids distribution of locked down derivatives, so it isn't Apple's doing, it's the GPL's. Same for Microsoft.
Citation needed. Give us the specific clause int he GPL Version 2 that states exactly that. Put up or shut up. The GPL Version 2 is a "source" license. Version 3 tries to go beyond that and specify what you can and cannot do with the binary. I'm not sure if those are enforceable but the author can always resort to copyright to block distribution.
But this is exactly the point I was making in my original post;
...the choice shouldn't have to be between incompetence and a walled garden.
Jailbreaking an iPhone is a hobby, so there's no professionally made software, add-on drivers, external hardware, etc. that works with a jailbroken iPhone.
Apple can still be a tyrant with the OS and allow for openness with regards to applications, drivers (to some extent) etc. without causing carriers any grief. Will it be harder to use for consumers? I don't see why it would, as long as those same consumers continue to live within the walls provided by Apple.
Do you expect everyone to live under the tyranny of openness where all people using "phones" which are supposed to be "appliances" have to worry about malware and viruses like people on Android? Were you asleep when Google had to crack down on openeness and purge people's phones of the malware? No normal person wants to have to worry about administrating their smartphone like a computer. They want a phone that "just works".
You can have an "open" hobby environment with the risk of malware and instability or you can have phones that work most of the time because they live in a walled garden. You cannot have it both ways.
The issue is not GPLv2 because its wording is silent on the issues that people are claiming incompatibility. GPLv3 is incompatible because it has explicit language which is unfriendly towards commercial use so it can prevent third parties from publishing in the Appstore. Neither GPLv2 or GPLv3 trump the copyright of the author or authors. When all authors agree to distribute on the app store, then there is no problem. The problem arrises when one of the contributors disagrees and exerts their copyright to block submission to the app store. It is a copyright issue only. The GPLV2 itself is not the stumbling block. Please stop spreading FUD whether it be in support of the FSF's own FUD or against the GPL. It is just a license and it does not trump copyright nor is it a living document which is why it is versioned.
Let me put this in as simply as possible. No license be it GPLv2, GPLv3 can prevent an application from being published on the appstore by the author or authors. The incompatibility in GPLV3 only applies to third parties publishing an application because the GPL has no power to remove the original copyrights of the author(s).
While I agree to some extent, the choice shouldn't have to be between incompetence and a walled garden.
It would drive the carriers insane, but Apple could open up iOS a bit more without causing compatibility problems between apps and OS versions.
You are not missing much dude. I have tried jailbraking on both my iPhone and iPad. You gain very little in exchange for the pain of having to wait for an updated jailbreak, faster battery drain and instability. With the constant updates that Apple have made, there is very little reason now to jailbreak especially in countries like Canada which now offer legal unlocking of iPhones.
Of course it auto-renews. What kind of idiot are you?
Wow. Talk about myopic. Not everyone lives in the US and therefore not everyone would have a carrier that offers auto-renewal on their iPad data packages.
So far, scientists have invented the following imaginary forms of matter/energy in an attempt to prop up their failed models and understanding in recent times: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and now Phantom Matter. They have also created concepts like cosmic strings, branes and a multiverse. We don't have the technology to test for or detect any of those things. Isn't anyone else bothered by this? We all laugh at the idea of "ether" now but why are so many ready to accept these new invented types of matter/energy?
It seems to me that if these scientist were interested in pursuing intellectual honesty, they would admit that the models are broken and go back to the drawing board rather that trying to create something out of thin air.
I find it ironic that people on the internet these days like to put down faith and god but seem to completely miss that these scientists making shit up and you are just accepting it as fact.
You are obviously not in the target market. Tell me, which card standard should they support? What if a new card standard comes out? Isn't it better to be able to buy a new reader that having an obsolete slot down the road?
Also, not having a card slot makes it much more attractive to business and government users. Think loss of data, think no encryption. Think wikileaks.
I would not be surprised if governments continue to buy the iPad 1 since it does not have a camera on it.
If don't like the locked down nature iOS devices then don't buy a mobile device. Android is generally just as locked down as iOS devices and the average end user does not give a rats ass about it. They serious don't care.
Your other choice is to take the risk of jailbreaking (iOS) or rooting (Android) a device and installing whatever crapware you want but you are basically taking your digital life into your own hands. With Android, the marketplace offers very little protection form malware but if you jailbreak and iOS device, you are effectively making even less secure than Android is out of the box. Jaibreaking strips iOS of code signing and removes BSD jail sandboxing which leaves the OS extremely vulnerable to attack by malware.
BTW. What do you do for a living? I get the feeling that you do not work in technology and you are just an "enthusiast".
Except for the fact its unrealistic and quite honestly kills the realism in a lot of films. For example, how often does it appear that everyone has unlimited money? Sure, the characters might complain about how expensive some stuff is then they sit down to their brand new $2,000 iMac, answer a call on their new $700 iPhone, etc. Sure, occasionally characters in movies are -supposed- to be filthy rich and can afford all the technology, but a lot of times they aren't.
I'm sorry to hear that you live in abject poverty. I don't have unlimited money but I do have a well paying job and so I do own a Core 2 Duo iMac, iPhone 3GS 32GB (unsubsidized) and 64GB iPad 3G. I don't waste money on things like drugs, getting drunk every friday night or smoking. I also don't own a car because I can either walk or bus to work.
You do not have to be rich to afford a new iMac especially if you don't upgrade every year. A lot of PC people like to talk about how expensive macs are but they spend a lot more money upgrading their hardware every year. I can sell my iMac if I choose to upgrade to recoup some money but "upgrading" a PC is basically just a money sink hole.
Maybe you don't live in poverty but maybe you just don't know how to manage your money or understand the difference between a bargain and "value for you money". If a mac lasts a person a number of years, they can end up spending less in the final analysis than someone who "upgrades" their PC hardware every 6-12 months.
I think you've missed a lot of the point of the Previous Versions feature. It isn't designed to give you "my power supply entered a murder-suicide pact with my hard drive" recovery, it's designed to give you "oh crap did I delete that?" recovery.
A while ago I was looking into what snapshot support various file systems have, and I was actually disappointed by the fact that Time Machine apparently requires an external drive, which was not at all what I wanted. Windows's VSS support was actually much closer. So to each his own. (Not that Time Machine would have been an option anyway. Apple won't sell me a copy of OS X that I can legally use and they don't sell a midrange desktop, so OS X is out of the question for me on the desktop anyway.)
Maybe you should go back and reread what I wrote. I know that it is not a an analogue for time machine but a lot of Apple detractors try to paint Shadow copy as the same thing as time machine which it obviously isn't.
True re Sun by the late '90s - concision led to imprecision, sorry.
As to Apple's stock price, I couldn't give two hoots. That's determined by the demand of shares on the secondary market, in turn determined by nothing much since they don't pay dividends. In particular, it's not determined by whether they're producing high quality products to help people produce. They are not.
Dividends are paid out to keep a stock from tanking. If you think MSFT is a good investment because it pays dividends then I have a bridge to sell you. Dividends cannot makeup for a stock like MSFT which has been either flat or in decline.
If you bought AAPL stock a year ago and sold it right now, you would earn $143.54 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with a $2.12 per share loss (before trading fees) for MSFT stock purchased a year ago and sold today. Offsetting that loss, you would have earned a measly 58 cents per share in dividends.
For a five year investment in AAPl, you would earn 276.70 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with an 8 cent loss per share of MSFT (before trading fees). Offsetting that loss, you would have earned $2.38 per share in dividend. That does not even keep up with inflation.
Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.
Doesn't add up to me. What did NeXT have, in the final analysis? What does it preside over?
Also, love it, hate it, or "meh", Java is still very big today.
Are you kidding me? You are serious? Let's see. NeXT brought us Open Step which was the first attempt a cross platform Object oriented spec for writing GUI applications but Sun and HP unfortunately abandoned it leaving NeXt Inc in the lurch. Open Step evolved into the Cocoa frameworks which is now used on OS X and iOS. NeXT Step evolved into OS X and iOS. Project Builder evolved into X-Code and Interface builder came over from NeXtStep/Open Steps developer tools.
I would argue that Webobjects has been influential on both.NET ASP and the various Java web development stacks that have come along since. I would also argue that Interface builder and many concepts from Cocoa have inspired VS.NET and.NET functionality.
If not for the Apple/NeXtStep merger, we would all be stuck on windows 2000 UIs running VB and C/C++ applications that crashed often with memory leaks all over the place.
Your point number one would have limited benefit for anyone other than a software developer working on code or a website because most of the data in those user cases would be text but then it would be redundant since any competent developer should be using a source repository like SVN in the first place. The average user's data probably has a lot of binary components to it like images, video and sound so recreating an SVN-like versioning would not work very well. Versioning systems like SVN do store incremental changes to text files but anytime you check in a binary file the next revision will be another full binary copy.
I've had experience with versioning systems as a software developer for close to a decade now and they work great for text but not for binary files since there is no sane way of storing the "changes".
Slashdot Mirror
The reason people are upset is because AT&T is the worst carrier. They lock the heck out of the phones they offer, no sideloading on android, charge for tethering and hotspot and still have the lowest data limits of them all.
If this was verizon and sprint merging it would still be bad, but not this bad.
I never have any problem with their voice services when I am roaming on them. Who cares about sideloading on android? A small fraction of those who even use Android? Tethering and hotspot data is something that you should be using as a backup when you have no free wifi or are away from your home wifi. Don't you have an ISP at home? What about the free wifi at coffee shops? Verizon is irrelevant to visitors like me because they use CDMA technology. For all of your bitching and complaining, this will probably lead to better service in more places, lower local and roaming rates eventually and force Verizon to step up their game with LTE to compete instead of resting on their laurels with CDMA. Verizon might even have to provide HSPA backwards compatibility to lure customers and roaming partners.
If you are trying to do most of your traffic through cellular networks then you are an idiot because you do not understand that the bottleneck for cellular data are the towers and they were never meant to be used on a sustained basis for things like streaming or tethering. Those features are there for an emergency when you need connectivity for business while in a non-wifi area.
The iPhone 3G, 3GS and iPhone 4 (GSM Model) work fine in Japan. I used my 3GS (Fido - Canada) in Japan last year during golden week and I was roaming on NTT Docomo just fine.
As long as you have a quad band phone with one of the bands used in Japan then you should be fine. If you want to be sure, just get an iPhone on a GSM network. There is a new model coming out this summer. You can buy factory unlocked iPhone up in Canada from Apple stores or on eBay as some of the carriers there allow unlocks after 90 days of service.
All the more reason to fight for everything we possibly can.
If you wanted real competition, you should have fought for it earlier by pressuring Verizon and Sprint to both go with HSPA+ two years ago and then going to LTE in 2013 along with AT&T when LTE was mature enough.
We can hope, altho it's damning Verizon with faint praise. It becomes a GSM monopoly, further pushing Verizon out on an EDGE (pun intended) with LTE.
The duopoly that results (sorry, Sprint and Clearwire are dying) means that we'll have the fun of the Canadians, who deal with the Rogers- Bell Canada Conundrum. Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.
What we really need is a technology to become the successor to GSM, CDMA, and LTE. Call it, 5G. We could bribe the ITU to lower the speed floor, and use visible light modulation for phone-- with mirrors.
Uh, LTE is what you are looking for. AT&T is going to implement it and nothing is stopping from Verizon implementing HSPA fallback support for their LTE network.
In Canada, the CDMA network carriers decided to switch over to HSPA+ but skip supporting 2G GSM or lower.
As a Canadian, I would like to point out that the majority of your rant is off topic. We are talking about wireless carriers here and not television distribution.
We are in a much better position than the US as far as carrier competition is concerned. There are several HSPA+ carrier to choose from because the two main CDMA carriers decided to switch to HSPA+ ahead of the transition to LTE. I have already seen the positive impact of the increased head to head competition with lower prices on some plans, free upgrades to earlier unlimited evenings and weekends and several carriers offering genuine iPhone unlocks either 90 days into your contract (Bell) or at the end of you contract (Fido).
I plan on unlocking my iPhone 3S with Fido before I switch to Bell and get an iPhone 5 this summer. My officially unlocked 3GS should fetch more on the open market than a locked one.
Right, so you would want to break up AT&T but leave Verizon alone thereby creating an even greater imbalance than this deal creates? Breaking up AT&T would result in a bunch of smaller carriers which would be unable to compete with Verizon and unable to complete an upgrade to LTE in a timely manner.
Why don't you just come clean and admit to being a fanboy of Verizon and not someone genuinely interested in preserving competition.
This proprietary software is free, or do you pay for it?
Have you considered offering the same amount of money to the open source people to add these features?
Have you considered that open source coders are not mainly motivated by money but rather "scratching their itch"? If an issue does not occur to the developer then they are likely to not tackle it.
Open source software known for creating good backend software but not front end UIs as usability is a specialized skill that few developers possess be they open source or not.
I hope you're right, but from the article:
"This developer reiterates that if Apple didn't specifically introduce these problems in iOS, it's aware of them now. And he says that the Mobile Safari team has indicated the issues will not be fixed."
It is still hearsay. Some guy claims that Apple will not fix it but there was no statement from Apple on the issue.
Why pick on the plaintiff? Aren't defendants often guilty?
The problem is not frivolous lawsuits, it's frivolous juries that come from a frivolous citizenry.
Why waste everyone's time on expensive frivolous lawsuits? There should be a preliminary hearing for a lawsuit where the case has to pass a sniff test before an actual trial can proceed. If the plaintiff cannot provide sufficient evidence in the hearing, no trial with fishing expeditions can commence.
GPL3 does. And GPL2 says "and everything you need to make the binary" which includes things like a signing key.
What utter nonsense. Everything that you need to make a binary is the source code. That is not necessarily mean everything you need to make a signed binary in the app store. You need paid developer account for that. You can create a binary targeting the simulator without the key.
The GPL V2 certainly does not require distribution of libraries or all build scripts for every platform imaginable. There are plenty of examples out there of source code that does not include a build script for OS X even though binaries are available from third parties.
It's not arbitrary. Apple have locked down their devices, and for (IMO) good reasons. The GPL forbids distribution of locked down derivatives, so it isn't Apple's doing, it's the GPL's. Same for Microsoft.
Citation needed. Give us the specific clause int he GPL Version 2 that states exactly that. Put up or shut up. The GPL Version 2 is a "source" license. Version 3 tries to go beyond that and specify what you can and cannot do with the binary. I'm not sure if those are enforceable but the author can always resort to copyright to block distribution.
But this is exactly the point I was making in my original post;
Jailbreaking an iPhone is a hobby, so there's no professionally made software, add-on drivers, external hardware, etc. that works with a jailbroken iPhone.
Apple can still be a tyrant with the OS and allow for openness with regards to applications, drivers (to some extent) etc. without causing carriers any grief. Will it be harder to use for consumers? I don't see why it would, as long as those same consumers continue to live within the walls provided by Apple.
Do you expect everyone to live under the tyranny of openness where all people using "phones" which are supposed to be "appliances" have to worry about malware and viruses like people on Android? Were you asleep when Google had to crack down on openeness and purge people's phones of the malware? No normal person wants to have to worry about administrating their smartphone like a computer. They want a phone that "just works".
You can have an "open" hobby environment with the risk of malware and instability or you can have phones that work most of the time because they live in a walled garden. You cannot have it both ways.
The issue is not GPLv2 because its wording is silent on the issues that people are claiming incompatibility. GPLv3 is incompatible because it has explicit language which is unfriendly towards commercial use so it can prevent third parties from publishing in the Appstore. Neither GPLv2 or GPLv3 trump the copyright of the author or authors. When all authors agree to distribute on the app store, then there is no problem. The problem arrises when one of the contributors disagrees and exerts their copyright to block submission to the app store. It is a copyright issue only. The GPLV2 itself is not the stumbling block. Please stop spreading FUD whether it be in support of the FSF's own FUD or against the GPL. It is just a license and it does not trump copyright nor is it a living document which is why it is versioned.
Let me put this in as simply as possible. No license be it GPLv2, GPLv3 can prevent an application from being published on the appstore by the author or authors. The incompatibility in GPLV3 only applies to third parties publishing an application because the GPL has no power to remove the original copyrights of the author(s).
While I agree to some extent, the choice shouldn't have to be between incompetence and a walled garden.
It would drive the carriers insane, but Apple could open up iOS a bit more without causing compatibility problems between apps and OS versions.
You are not missing much dude. I have tried jailbraking on both my iPhone and iPad. You gain very little in exchange for the pain of having to wait for an updated jailbreak, faster battery drain and instability. With the constant updates that Apple have made, there is very little reason now to jailbreak especially in countries like Canada which now offer legal unlocking of iPhones.
Of course it auto-renews. What kind of idiot are you?
Wow. Talk about myopic. Not everyone lives in the US and therefore not everyone would have a carrier that offers auto-renewal on their iPad data packages.
I think I didn't get it before, but WebOS is a hit/miss in Spanish speaking countries as it's an homonym with "Huevos", which is slang for "balls".
As in "Tienes WebOS?". Ah, yes... I don't see a good future launching WebOS either.
Fortunately English and not Spanish is the lingua franca of our modern times.
So far, scientists have invented the following imaginary forms of matter/energy in an attempt to prop up their failed models and understanding in recent times: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and now Phantom Matter. They have also created concepts like cosmic strings, branes and a multiverse. We don't have the technology to test for or detect any of those things. Isn't anyone else bothered by this? We all laugh at the idea of "ether" now but why are so many ready to accept these new invented types of matter/energy?
It seems to me that if these scientist were interested in pursuing intellectual honesty, they would admit that the models are broken and go back to the drawing board rather that trying to create something out of thin air.
I find it ironic that people on the internet these days like to put down faith and god but seem to completely miss that these scientists making shit up and you are just accepting it as fact.
Do we hv to wait for iPad 3 then? Or never ever?
You are obviously not in the target market. Tell me, which card standard should they support? What if a new card standard comes out? Isn't it better to be able to buy a new reader that having an obsolete slot down the road?
Also, not having a card slot makes it much more attractive to business and government users. Think loss of data, think no encryption. Think wikileaks.
I would not be surprised if governments continue to buy the iPad 1 since it does not have a camera on it.
If don't like the locked down nature iOS devices then don't buy a mobile device. Android is generally just as locked down as iOS devices and the average end user does not give a rats ass about it. They serious don't care.
Your other choice is to take the risk of jailbreaking (iOS) or rooting (Android) a device and installing whatever crapware you want but you are basically taking your digital life into your own hands. With Android, the marketplace offers very little protection form malware but if you jailbreak and iOS device, you are effectively making even less secure than Android is out of the box. Jaibreaking strips iOS of code signing and removes BSD jail sandboxing which leaves the OS extremely vulnerable to attack by malware.
BTW. What do you do for a living? I get the feeling that you do not work in technology and you are just an "enthusiast".
Except for the fact its unrealistic and quite honestly kills the realism in a lot of films. For example, how often does it appear that everyone has unlimited money? Sure, the characters might complain about how expensive some stuff is then they sit down to their brand new $2,000 iMac, answer a call on their new $700 iPhone, etc. Sure, occasionally characters in movies are -supposed- to be filthy rich and can afford all the technology, but a lot of times they aren't.
I'm sorry to hear that you live in abject poverty. I don't have unlimited money but I do have a well paying job and so I do own a Core 2 Duo iMac, iPhone 3GS 32GB (unsubsidized) and 64GB iPad 3G. I don't waste money on things like drugs, getting drunk every friday night or smoking. I also don't own a car because I can either walk or bus to work.
You do not have to be rich to afford a new iMac especially if you don't upgrade every year. A lot of PC people like to talk about how expensive macs are but they spend a lot more money upgrading their hardware every year. I can sell my iMac if I choose to upgrade to recoup some money but "upgrading" a PC is basically just a money sink hole.
Maybe you don't live in poverty but maybe you just don't know how to manage your money or understand the difference between a bargain and "value for you money". If a mac lasts a person a number of years, they can end up spending less in the final analysis than someone who "upgrades" their PC hardware every 6-12 months.
I think you've missed a lot of the point of the Previous Versions feature. It isn't designed to give you "my power supply entered a murder-suicide pact with my hard drive" recovery, it's designed to give you "oh crap did I delete that?" recovery.
A while ago I was looking into what snapshot support various file systems have, and I was actually disappointed by the fact that Time Machine apparently requires an external drive, which was not at all what I wanted. Windows's VSS support was actually much closer. So to each his own. (Not that Time Machine would have been an option anyway. Apple won't sell me a copy of OS X that I can legally use and they don't sell a midrange desktop, so OS X is out of the question for me on the desktop anyway.)
Maybe you should go back and reread what I wrote. I know that it is not a an analogue for time machine but a lot of Apple detractors try to paint Shadow copy as the same thing as time machine which it obviously isn't.
True re Sun by the late '90s - concision led to imprecision, sorry.
As to Apple's stock price, I couldn't give two hoots. That's determined by the demand of shares on the secondary market, in turn determined by nothing much since they don't pay dividends. In particular, it's not determined by whether they're producing high quality products to help people produce. They are not.
Dividends are paid out to keep a stock from tanking. If you think MSFT is a good investment because it pays dividends then I have a bridge to sell you. Dividends cannot makeup for a stock like MSFT which has been either flat or in decline.
If you bought AAPL stock a year ago and sold it right now, you would earn $143.54 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with a $2.12 per share loss (before trading fees) for MSFT stock purchased a year ago and sold today. Offsetting that loss, you would have earned a measly 58 cents per share in dividends.
For a five year investment in AAPl, you would earn 276.70 PER SHARE in profit (before trading fees) compare that with an 8 cent loss per share of MSFT (before trading fees). Offsetting that loss, you would have earned $2.38 per share in dividend. That does not even keep up with inflation.
Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.
Doesn't add up to me. What did NeXT have, in the final analysis? What does it preside over?
Also, love it, hate it, or "meh", Java is still very big today.
Are you kidding me? You are serious? Let's see. NeXT brought us Open Step which was the first attempt a cross platform Object oriented spec for writing GUI applications but Sun and HP unfortunately abandoned it leaving NeXt Inc in the lurch. Open Step evolved into the Cocoa frameworks which is now used on OS X and iOS. NeXT Step evolved into OS X and iOS. Project Builder evolved into X-Code and Interface builder came over from NeXtStep/Open Steps developer tools.
I would argue that Webobjects has been influential on both .NET ASP and the various Java web development stacks that have come along since. I would also argue that Interface builder and many concepts from Cocoa have inspired VS.NET and .NET functionality.
If not for the Apple/NeXtStep merger, we would all be stuck on windows 2000 UIs running VB and C/C++ applications that crashed often with memory leaks all over the place.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/gridpad/index.html
That was ready for use in 1989. Not "still in the development phase" the way the Newton was.
You might be technically correct but the Newton is more well known than that device despite being a failure in the marketplace.
Your point number one would have limited benefit for anyone other than a software developer working on code or a website because most of the data in those user cases would be text but then it would be redundant since any competent developer should be using a source repository like SVN in the first place. The average user's data probably has a lot of binary components to it like images, video and sound so recreating an SVN-like versioning would not work very well. Versioning systems like SVN do store incremental changes to text files but anytime you check in a binary file the next revision will be another full binary copy.
I've had experience with versioning systems as a software developer for close to a decade now and they work great for text but not for binary files since there is no sane way of storing the "changes".