Your conclusion is wrong. An app that had the sole purpose of advertising the Android platform was banned. Apps like Zino could deliver Android focused magazines as part of their catalog of magazines.
If you want to read about android, use a web browser. Also, if are so damn interested in Android, why would you have an iPad in the first place? Who would have bought such a magazine on the iPad anyway? There are other magazine apps that offer subscriptions to other magazines like Zino and I'm sure some of those magazines have some Android coverage.
What was banned was an app that was specifically about Android, not magazine apps that could have magazines that cover Android news and reviews.
Stores are allowed to refuse service and allowed to pick and choose what they carry just like any other stores. Are console makers forced to carry content that promotes their competitors platforms? No.
If you want to read about android, use a web browser.
Do you really expect them to sell what basically amounts to "advertising" for the other platform in their store? Really?!?
AT&T? Sorry, but what does that have to do with all of those iPads/iPhone sold "OUTSIDE" of the US? The majority of iPhone sales are "OUTSIDE" of the US right now.
Most people on AT&T seems to be happy with their iPhone service. If you don't like your service, quit bitching about it and sell your iPhone or stop living in trendy places like San Francisco with bad AT&T service.
Normal users don't care. Normal users also don't seem to have any problems with Quicktime or iTunes on windows. Why is that? Because normal users have not screwed up their systems with registry hacks and other crapware that "leet" users do which is why their systems seem to still work fine even with Apple software running on it.
I used to be a windows user and I used to hack my resource files on windows to make it more like OS X but guess what? It ran like crap because of the size of the larger resources and the other hacks running in the background.
So, they want Quicktime to..... do what exactly? They downloaded Quicktime to be able to watch quicktime content and most of that is on the web which means that they probably wanted a plug-in for their browser. Being able to watch downloaded mov files is just gravy.
Most users (99.99%) "want" the plugins, otherwise they would not have installed quicktime in the first place. If you don't want the plugins, don't install the programs. The 0.01% who don't are either idiots or live in a mental institution with an aluminum foil hat on their head to keep out the alien and CIA transmissions from their brain.
This guy is just trying to get any publicity he can because Mozilla has not been in the news much lately.
As others have mentioned, on the mac, all plugins for all browsers live in/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ or ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ and they enhance the capabilities of the browsers to display other media formats.
If you think this stuff is evil, sell your computer and stay off the internet.
I don't know why we are having this conversation because on sane person would consider their phone a backup of their music collection because of how easy it can get lost.
I feel really bad for you but you should have had an "actual" backup in case your drive on your computer failed which it apparently did.
My personal experience with it has been somewhat mixed. The UI is superb, lightyears beyond Android, but it has its share of weaknesses - a big one I can think of is lack of socket support in the public API.
So you think that square boxes and text that is cut off is light years ahead of other UIs? Have you browsed the web much? MSFT basically took ideas from flash websites and created an inconsistent UI out of it. Should I really expect any more though from someone with the username "linux geek"? The UI is crap.
The lack of socket support is a minor issue compared to the lack of copy and paste and a lack of multitasking this late in the game. They rushed it out. There are gaping holes in the API which cause it to be much harder to develop on compared with even Android let alone iOS. iOS provides a rich set of frameworks whereas MSFT platforms usually offer only basic functionality and you have to either "roll your own" or buy an off the shelf third party library.
*SIGH* Virtually all USB mice are HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE compatible which means that they will work without a device specific. Most corporate desktops are NOT generic whitebox PCs but rather are usually standardized around a specific vendor be it Lenovo, HP or Dell and those vendors supply branded mice and keyboards.
I'm not going to directly bother to respond to the rest of your post because you completely missed the point.
*WOOOOSH*
The discussion was concerning peripherals as in printers, scanners and other "EXTERNAL" devices. Hence the word "peripheral". We were also talking about "AFTER MARKET" devices that are not OEM branded to the specific workstation brand.
The corporate world likes to keep things pretty standardized so you are not likely to get a lot of sales if your device was not chosen by the IT staff as "standard" equipment. The same thing applies even more for Point of sale units which can often have clauses in their maintenance contracts specifying no aftermarket upgrades of either software or hardware from other vendors.
If you are a third party vendor of either hardware peripherals or software and you are NOT MSFT then you are probably going to write off any chance of breaking into the corporate or POS OEM market in any big way.
I've worked the technology field for over 15 years.
General purpose peripheral devices are created mainly for the home and small business market. While corporations may have printers, most are present as "shared" network printers.
After market peripherals generally are not sold to a lot of corporate accounts nor are they present in Point of sale installations beyond the ones that make up the POS system itself.
The same barriers exist for third party software in both the corporate and POS/Kiosk segments. Most corporate desktops are standardized on a specific set of software and locked down to prevent installation of new software.
It seems a bit pointless to lump Apple sales in with segments where Apple is not actively involved in, if at all.
So say Light Peak comes to Macs first. The few peripherals that are made for this 10% of the market, how much are they going to cost?
Wow. Do you really believe that they are only 10% of the market in the US? They are currently over 12 % of the total market and that includes machines that are used as Point of sale devices and kiosks.
If you ignore the "total" market numbers and look at only the relevant market segments that actually buy after market addons then the number grows to double or triple of your estimate.
Anybody got a source for that? Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.
I suggest that you learn to use google. I'll shine a light for you in the right directly. Search Youtube for a video demonstrating Light Peak. The demo was done on a custom Mac Pro motherboard demoing light peak transporting video and other protocols.
You are currently interviewed to a greater or lesser degree when you enter a country.
I am "interviewed" when I enter the US and when I return to Canada. I would rather have a slightly more through interview than to have my junk felt up or photographed.
Phones are portable devices and are much more likely to be lost or stolen so you should not rely on them for backup purposes. You are supposed to keep a backup of your important data on a "backup" drive and it is prudent to make periodic archival backups onto removable storage like DVD-R/RW.
You claim to have all of this experience and yet you did not consider an actual backup strategy. Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone on slashdot or any technical forum and they will tell you that a phone is not a backup device. Rather, your computer that you are syncing to is the backup device to your phone data and you should have a backup of your computer onto an external drive.
I have been using computers since the early 1980s in school, since 1988 at home and since 1996 professionally. Even when I was a kid in school, I knew about the importance of "backups".
You did backups "on the phone"? Do you also do backups of your home folder onto the same physical drive? That would be basically the same concept. No redundancy incase of failure or physical loss.
Backing up a C drive to a D drive that is a separate partition on the same physical drive is practically no backup at all and marginally better than a compressed archive somewhere on C.
I have an incremental backup of my music onto an external drive via "time machine" and I also periodically backup my music collection to a series of DVD-RW discs as added protection.
I assume that I am more likely to lose my iPhone than have a hard drive failure so it would be silly of me to use my phone as a backup.
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines. These games are not more creative, just flashy and poorly coded.
Have you actually played any new games on a semi-decent machine? Apart from Crysis itself this phenomenon hasn't really been around for about 5 years. It used to be the case that a game would claim to run on (say) a 386 DX but in truth needed a 486, but those games are largely gone. My games rig is about 2 years old, and still plays anything new I throw at it very nicely. For $200 you can get a graphics card that will happily play any new game on the market.
Of course, some games offer 'ultra' graphics settings that might cause a mid-level machine to labour. But this is icing - these games look fantastic even at medium detail settings, and far surpass consoles at that level.
Yes I have. Why should a game like like Star Craft II require a Quad-core and 2 GB of ram to play on anything higher than 1024X768 with Medium graphics setting.
The there is Civilization V. Why should there be large hardware requirements on a "turn based" game? What the heck?
Please stop calling your gaming machine a "rig". It is a gaming PC, not a truck or a professional workstation.
I am sick and tired of nerds calling their PCs rigs and referring to their IT workplaces as a windows "shop" or linux "shop". You guys are not blue collar workers and you would be laughed out of any bar that had real blue collar workers in it.
Please. Visual Studio is not as great as you are making it out to be. If you took the vanilla VS.NET and tried using it without any third party addons like resharper, you would not be heaping praise on it.
IntelliJ IDEA has mainly of the features that you probably attribute to VS.NET without realizing that they are probably offered by the Resharper instead of built in functionality. The company that created resharper for VS.NET produces IntelliJ IDEA.
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines. These games are not more creative, just flashy and poorly coded.
Take the Rage game on iOS for instance, it rivals some console graphics but is not running on powerful hardware. It has to run on a machine with less than 512 Mb devoted to the game and no access to Virtual memory. PC games are written by people who could not code on embedded machines if their life depended on it. Sloppy code.
Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.
This is stupid.
There should absolutely, absolutely be a way to wipe a corporate account off a phone. That data is the property of the corporation.
But wiping everything is just inane. There is absolutely no reason to wipe pictures, personal contacts, emails, etc. This is software we're talking about. Just wipe the account(s) in question.
The only thinkable reason to wipe data outside of the corporate account is "you could have copied work content elsewhere," and that argument applies no more to phones than to personal computers. Hell, it applies to printed material too. Had any former employers snooping through your house lately?
No, the onus is on the corporation to restrict dissemination of corporate data if the risks are too high. Allowing a remote account wipe is a luxury afforded by software, not a corporate right over personal property.
This functionality is intended as a security feature in case the phone is lost regardless of whether it is a personal iPhone attached to corporate email or a company provided iPhone on exchange.
It can also be used when an employee is terminated or leaves the company. The employee agrees to a trade off when they request to have their personal phone on the corporate email. It is up to the employee to backup personal data in iTunes and that backup does not include corporate exchange information because the backup software does not back it up.
Sorry but while it might be easy to use, it is not idiot proof as you found out. Why the hell did you not have a backup of your data on your hard drive?
Why did you not right go into the preferences and uncheck "automatically sync all devices" before plugging the phone in? It did exactly what you told it to. You could have right clicked on the phone in the device list in iTunes and selected "transfer" purchases which would have at least restored any purchased music.
Seriously though, no backups? Have you ever heard of backups for your home folder? No?
That, and any nerd worth its card already knew those little facts.
You're neither a geek or a nerd if you use Apple products. Nerds and geeks do creative things with their computers and hardware. They write their own software, modify their hardware or create their own.
Guess what? Your "God", Steve Jobs, expressly forbids this kind of geek-ery. It's one of his commandments.
No, Apple users are spoon fed newbs that don't care about doing things their own way. They want to be lead to do it the Steve Jobs way. That's the exact opposite of being a geek or nerd.
I guess that is why they don't offer developer tools that ship with the OS oh wait...
It was supposed to be a mute button from the beginning but iOS 4 of the iPad was not ready for launch when the iPad came out so they had to release 3.2 has a temporary patch to 3.1 to get the device out on time. Had they had 4.x ready for the iPad, it would have remained as a mute switch as the rotate lock would have been on the multitasking bar.
Slashdot Mirror
Your conclusion is wrong. An app that had the sole purpose of advertising the Android platform was banned. Apps like Zino could deliver Android focused magazines as part of their catalog of magazines.
If you want to read about android, use a web browser. Also, if are so damn interested in Android, why would you have an iPad in the first place? Who would have bought such a magazine on the iPad anyway? There are other magazine apps that offer subscriptions to other magazines like Zino and I'm sure some of those magazines have some Android coverage.
What was banned was an app that was specifically about Android, not magazine apps that could have magazines that cover Android news and reviews.
Stores are allowed to refuse service and allowed to pick and choose what they carry just like any other stores. Are console makers forced to carry content that promotes their competitors platforms? No.
If you want to read about android, use a web browser.
Do you really expect them to sell what basically amounts to "advertising" for the other platform in their store? Really?!?
AT&T? Sorry, but what does that have to do with all of those iPads/iPhone sold "OUTSIDE" of the US? The majority of iPhone sales are "OUTSIDE" of the US right now.
Most people on AT&T seems to be happy with their iPhone service. If you don't like your service, quit bitching about it and sell your iPhone or stop living in trendy places like San Francisco with bad AT&T service.
Normal users don't care. Normal users also don't seem to have any problems with Quicktime or iTunes on windows. Why is that? Because normal users have not screwed up their systems with registry hacks and other crapware that "leet" users do which is why their systems seem to still work fine even with Apple software running on it.
I used to be a windows user and I used to hack my resource files on windows to make it more like OS X but guess what? It ran like crap because of the size of the larger resources and the other hacks running in the background.
So, they want Quicktime to..... do what exactly? They downloaded Quicktime to be able to watch quicktime content and most of that is on the web which means that they probably wanted a plug-in for their browser. Being able to watch downloaded mov files is just gravy.
Most users (99.99%) "want" the plugins, otherwise they would not have installed quicktime in the first place. If you don't want the plugins, don't install the programs. The 0.01% who don't are either idiots or live in a mental institution with an aluminum foil hat on their head to keep out the alien and CIA transmissions from their brain.
This guy is just trying to get any publicity he can because Mozilla has not been in the news much lately.
As others have mentioned, on the mac, all plugins for all browsers live in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ or ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ and they enhance the capabilities of the browsers to display other media formats.
If you think this stuff is evil, sell your computer and stay off the internet.
What happened to personal responsibility and the understanding that "accidents" happen. Accidents used by be "no fault" back when I was a kid.
The end of the world is nigh.
I don't know why we are having this conversation because on sane person would consider their phone a backup of their music collection because of how easy it can get lost.
I feel really bad for you but you should have had an "actual" backup in case your drive on your computer failed which it apparently did.
My personal experience with it has been somewhat mixed. The UI is superb, lightyears beyond Android, but it has its share of weaknesses - a big one I can think of is lack of socket support in the public API.
So you think that square boxes and text that is cut off is light years ahead of other UIs? Have you browsed the web much? MSFT basically took ideas from flash websites and created an inconsistent UI out of it. Should I really expect any more though from someone with the username "linux geek"? The UI is crap.
The lack of socket support is a minor issue compared to the lack of copy and paste and a lack of multitasking this late in the game. They rushed it out. There are gaping holes in the API which cause it to be much harder to develop on compared with even Android let alone iOS. iOS provides a rich set of frameworks whereas MSFT platforms usually offer only basic functionality and you have to either "roll your own" or buy an off the shelf third party library.
*SIGH* Virtually all USB mice are HUMAN INTERFACE DEVICE compatible which means that they will work without a device specific. Most corporate desktops are NOT generic whitebox PCs but rather are usually standardized around a specific vendor be it Lenovo, HP or Dell and those vendors supply branded mice and keyboards.
I'm not going to directly bother to respond to the rest of your post because you completely missed the point.
*WOOOOSH*
The discussion was concerning peripherals as in printers, scanners and other "EXTERNAL" devices. Hence the word "peripheral". We were also talking about "AFTER MARKET" devices that are not OEM branded to the specific workstation brand.
The corporate world likes to keep things pretty standardized so you are not likely to get a lot of sales if your device was not chosen by the IT staff as "standard" equipment. The same thing applies even more for Point of sale units which can often have clauses in their maintenance contracts specifying no aftermarket upgrades of either software or hardware from other vendors.
If you are a third party vendor of either hardware peripherals or software and you are NOT MSFT then you are probably going to write off any chance of breaking into the corporate or POS OEM market in any big way.
I've worked the technology field for over 15 years.
General purpose peripheral devices are created mainly for the home and small business market. While corporations may have printers, most are present as "shared" network printers.
After market peripherals generally are not sold to a lot of corporate accounts nor are they present in Point of sale installations beyond the ones that make up the POS system itself.
The same barriers exist for third party software in both the corporate and POS/Kiosk segments. Most corporate desktops are standardized on a specific set of software and locked down to prevent installation of new software.
It seems a bit pointless to lump Apple sales in with segments where Apple is not actively involved in, if at all.
So say Light Peak comes to Macs first. The few peripherals that are made for this 10% of the market, how much are they going to cost?
Wow. Do you really believe that they are only 10% of the market in the US? They are currently over 12 % of the total market and that includes machines that are used as Point of sale devices and kiosks.
If you ignore the "total" market numbers and look at only the relevant market segments that actually buy after market addons then the number grows to double or triple of your estimate.
Ok, but any source that isn't an Apple fanboy site?
Google it on Youtube. There is a video demo showing light peak on a Mac Pro running OS X Leopard.
They demoed 4X video displayed on a monitor and files being copied from SSDs at the same time over light peak.
Anybody got a source for that?
Other than an Apple-fanboy-page.
I suggest that you learn to use google. I'll shine a light for you in the right directly. Search Youtube for a video demonstrating Light Peak. The demo was done on a custom Mac Pro motherboard demoing light peak transporting video and other protocols.
You are currently interviewed to a greater or lesser degree when you enter a country.
I am "interviewed" when I enter the US and when I return to Canada. I would rather have a slightly more through interview than to have my junk felt up or photographed.
Phones are portable devices and are much more likely to be lost or stolen so you should not rely on them for backup purposes. You are supposed to keep a backup of your important data on a "backup" drive and it is prudent to make periodic archival backups onto removable storage like DVD-R/RW.
You claim to have all of this experience and yet you did not consider an actual backup strategy. Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone on slashdot or any technical forum and they will tell you that a phone is not a backup device. Rather, your computer that you are syncing to is the backup device to your phone data and you should have a backup of your computer onto an external drive.
I have been using computers since the early 1980s in school, since 1988 at home and since 1996 professionally. Even when I was a kid in school, I knew about the importance of "backups".
You did backups "on the phone"? Do you also do backups of your home folder onto the same physical drive? That would be basically the same concept. No redundancy incase of failure or physical loss.
Backing up a C drive to a D drive that is a separate partition on the same physical drive is practically no backup at all and marginally better than a compressed archive somewhere on C.
I have an incremental backup of my music onto an external drive via "time machine" and I also periodically backup my music collection to a series of DVD-RW discs as added protection.
I assume that I am more likely to lose my iPhone than have a hard drive failure so it would be silly of me to use my phone as a backup.
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines. These games are not more creative, just flashy and poorly coded.
Have you actually played any new games on a semi-decent machine? Apart from Crysis itself this phenomenon hasn't really been around for about 5 years. It used to be the case that a game would claim to run on (say) a 386 DX but in truth needed a 486, but those games are largely gone. My games rig is about 2 years old, and still plays anything new I throw at it very nicely. For $200 you can get a graphics card that will happily play any new game on the market.
Of course, some games offer 'ultra' graphics settings that might cause a mid-level machine to labour. But this is icing - these games look fantastic even at medium detail settings, and far surpass consoles at that level.
Yes I have. Why should a game like like Star Craft II require a Quad-core and 2 GB of ram to play on anything higher than 1024X768 with Medium graphics setting.
The there is Civilization V. Why should there be large hardware requirements on a "turn based" game? What the heck?
Please stop calling your gaming machine a "rig". It is a gaming PC, not a truck or a professional workstation.
I am sick and tired of nerds calling their PCs rigs and referring to their IT workplaces as a windows "shop" or linux "shop". You guys are not blue collar workers and you would be laughed out of any bar that had real blue collar workers in it.
Please. Visual Studio is not as great as you are making it out to be. If you took the vanilla VS.NET and tried using it without any third party addons like resharper, you would not be heaping praise on it.
IntelliJ IDEA has mainly of the features that you probably attribute to VS.NET without realizing that they are probably offered by the Resharper instead of built in functionality. The company that created resharper for VS.NET produces IntelliJ IDEA.
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines. These games are not more creative, just flashy and poorly coded.
Take the Rage game on iOS for instance, it rivals some console graphics but is not running on powerful hardware. It has to run on a machine with less than 512 Mb devoted to the game and no access to Virtual memory. PC games are written by people who could not code on embedded machines if their life depended on it. Sloppy code.
Employees should backup their own data. If they are uncomfortable with the possibility of Employer wiping their personal phone, then they should not connect their personal phone to work email.
This is stupid.
There should absolutely, absolutely be a way to wipe a corporate account off a phone. That data is the property of the corporation.
But wiping everything is just inane. There is absolutely no reason to wipe pictures, personal contacts, emails, etc. This is software we're talking about. Just wipe the account(s) in question.
The only thinkable reason to wipe data outside of the corporate account is "you could have copied work content elsewhere," and that argument applies no more to phones than to personal computers. Hell, it applies to printed material too. Had any former employers snooping through your house lately?
No, the onus is on the corporation to restrict dissemination of corporate data if the risks are too high. Allowing a remote account wipe is a luxury afforded by software, not a corporate right over personal property.
This functionality is intended as a security feature in case the phone is lost regardless of whether it is a personal iPhone attached to corporate email or a company provided iPhone on exchange.
It can also be used when an employee is terminated or leaves the company. The employee agrees to a trade off when they request to have their personal phone on the corporate email. It is up to the employee to backup personal data in iTunes and that backup does not include corporate exchange information because the backup software does not back it up.
Sorry but while it might be easy to use, it is not idiot proof as you found out. Why the hell did you not have a backup of your data on your hard drive?
Why did you not right go into the preferences and uncheck "automatically sync all devices" before plugging the phone in? It did exactly what you told it to. You could have right clicked on the phone in the device list in iTunes and selected "transfer" purchases which would have at least restored any purchased music.
Seriously though, no backups? Have you ever heard of backups for your home folder? No?
That, and any nerd worth its card already knew those little facts.
You're neither a geek or a nerd if you use Apple products. Nerds and geeks do creative things with their computers and hardware. They write their own software, modify their hardware or create their own.
Guess what? Your "God", Steve Jobs, expressly forbids this kind of geek-ery. It's one of his commandments.
No, Apple users are spoon fed newbs that don't care about doing things their own way. They want to be lead to do it the Steve Jobs way. That's the exact opposite of being a geek or nerd.
I guess that is why they don't offer developer tools that ship with the OS oh wait...
http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/
Information for developing hardware drivers for third party hardware either oh wait...
http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/
They also don't provide developer conferences like the WWDC, SDKs for OS X and iOS. Nope, they don't support any sort of development activity. /sarcasm
It was supposed to be a mute button from the beginning but iOS 4 of the iPad was not ready for launch when the iPad came out so they had to release 3.2 has a temporary patch to 3.1 to get the device out on time. Had they had 4.x ready for the iPad, it would have remained as a mute switch as the rotate lock would have been on the multitasking bar.