...that it does not support HSDPA--when phones costing a quarter as much under similar terms do--will refuse the purchase.... and those who realize their HSDPA performance is around 10% of spec, lingering around the EDGE spec, and similarly that their EDGE devices are lumbering along at about 10% of spec, might just give up completely.
When you snoop around the forums for the OPTION cards that support HSDPA, which should support 3Mbps+, people are THRILLED to get 300Kbps, which is fine for "bursty" traffic, but when you've got a 100MB download to chew through and your device is fully capable of pulling it down in 4, not 45, minutes...that difference gets a bit nerving, especially at $50/month. No, I don't expect it 24/7, but damn...
IIRC they have a blurb in the TOS of the $20 plan saying you may not use the handset as a modem and they certainly do their damnedest to try and prevent you from using that feature, though basic GPRS is pretty crap on their network. I just got a 3G data card and they want $50/month for "unlimited" data for that.
I wonder if the SIM card trick would work on it. I mean, they had to assign it a telephone number (quoi?), so methinks they might not be able to tell the difference.
"MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers."
None of these things equate. Sounds like someone has a queer axe to grind from being ostracized in high school and has an inferiority complex because her parents didn't go to college.
What the hell is this self-involved freshman comp dreck doing on the front page?
"My vote only exists in aggregate with 300 million other votes:"
Sort of like your dollars. But, no, in fact, it exists in the aggregate of roughly 645,000 (your district). Which given the rough number of participating voters really comes out to about a power of about 1:129,000. Now, sure, that's just one seat. So, to be fair, 129k*435, your power is about 1:56M. Now, Microsoft pulls in about $44.5 billion per year. You'd have to send Microsoft $800 per year, every year, to exert that kind of power. Some people certainly do, but put in perspective, you certainly don't have much of an edge on any private corporation over your influence in government. That is, in both cases, unless you do a much larger amount of, ahem, "business" with them than the average person... I mean, let's face it, they're mutually corrupt to precisely equal degrees (for reasons that should be obvious)....and on that note:
"Corporations can not send me to jail."
Baloney. DMCA, anyone? The charges that send you to jail will come from a corporation. Corporations lobbied HARD to make it possible for them to extend what should rightfully be mere torts into crimes--and if convicted, you'll likely end up a guest of the Corrections Corporation of America.
The government is merely the arbiter. Do not be fooled as to who is really locking you up.
"They can not censor my speech."
Strangely enough, the general thrust of this entire thread is precisely to the contrary. CERTAINLY they can censor your speech. That's precisely what the ESRB and MPAA are designed to do. Remember the Hays code? That wasn't a law, it was an industry standard -- and to say it wasn't censorship would be a stretch. Whether that's infringing on your right to freedom of speech, well, no. They can't taken away your right, but they can certainly censor you should your expression of speech require the use of their property.
The ABC News Law & Justice Unit has calculated that for $67 million Pearson could buy 84,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 value he placed on the missing trousers in court documents. If you stacked those pants up, they would be taller than eight Mount Everests. If you laid them side by side, they would stretch for 48 miles.
So, you're more comfortable with people you have no control over controlling your life than those over whom you exert direct control...and this makes you feel sublimely free from oppression. This, I hope, will soon be recognized as one of the greatest propaganda successes in history, wherein the populace has inexplicably been convinced that feudalism is preferable to democracy.
Roughly 50,000 square feet of spinach yields about 100 pounds per day, which would cost about $80k/month in rents, not including the necessary utilities. If people are willing to pay $20/lb for spinach, this will work. Until then, when you can BUY an acre of land for $1/sq.ft. and truck your produce in by the ton for pennies a pound...this ain't gonna work unless you're growing heroin.
General purposes, sure. However, I just did it this month as a new version of Kerrighed required it. Lots of things require it, especially if you get into SMP, clustering, tediously specific hardware or embedded systems, you know, the things you're more likely to run into in the business/enterprise market than in the low-end home user market.
Of course, I've never had many problems with purpose-built systems either. Duh.
The problem is when people expect to plug in existing hardware that wasn't necessarily purchased off a Linux compatibility list because they just have it sitting around and expect it to work. My Wacom tablet works great on my desktop off a fresh Ubuntu install, but a fresh install from the same disk on a Dell Laptop and everything works fine, but the Wacom driver is suddenly all wonky. Just taking the volume of calls to tell people "sorry, piss off, we don't support that" would wipe out most of their profits.
If you based your business model on assuming everyone is the perfect little engineer like you who checks every device driver of every piece of hardware before purchase and staffed your call center accordingly, you'd have quite a line of angry customers demanding refunds, which I imagine is precisely what Dell are trying to keep to a minimum until they're confident they can turn a profit, support included, and not broadly alienate their customer base.
If a private, advisory, non-binding, completely voluntary, self-regulating, loosely affiliated industry association gets your knickers that in a bunch, you've obviously never had your rights inflicted upon in the slightest by anyone.
The quality of support they provide in the business division assumes a level of competence on the customer end that is not safe to assume with Linux, which could cause them to lose their shirts as well-meaning newbies stumble through transitioning hand-held and paid for by Dell.
Ubuntu is pretty straight-forward and I've been using various flavors of Linux for a decade, but if I had a support line to call the first few days I was trying it out for the first time, I would have burned through the price of a cheap laptop in no time trying to get a few of my odder doo-dads to connect. I mean, honestly, when was the last time their support department had to tell a Windows customer "please apply these five patches to your kernel source v.xyz and recompile?"
On a daily basis, do you protect your valuables and confidential records because you're afraid of a public official confiscating them or some random private citizen busting in and stealing them? Strangely enough, the primary reason we have government in the first place is to guard against the latter (whether through policing, the courts or recognition of property rights in general). Yet, people are/far/ more careless with their information and property in the hands of other private interests over whom they have virtually no control than they are with their public counterparts over whom they have direct control.
The fact that your level 47 avatar can slaughter an entire plain of level 30's with the same single-finger-salute that had no effect on that level 3 landstrider a month ago has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with simple time-served. Frankly, after wasting countless hours slashing through endless droves of completely uninspired beasties on WoW just to endlessly level up an erg at a time through weeks of tediously dull quests and insipid wandering, I don't blame people for buying their way in, though I question the worth of it...I mean, just how much better does it get after you've dedicated 2700 hours to the !@%^ing thing?
"it's interesting to note that similar tactics have been in use by record companies for over a century."
A revelation no doubt common in people who think the media are biased cesspools of sensationalist crap designed entirely to manipulate the population out of quasi-fascist capitalist greed...until they pick up an 1890's edition of the San Francisco Examiner and realize contrary to their previous perception, things have actually markedly improved.
Brings the wonderful image of aliens sending nanomachines to take over the indigent population...
I suppose that explains Ayn Rand and the Republican party then...
I'm sort of deferring to "the experts" on this one who seem to think 50 per year is sustainable. Okay, it's all the fault of the Europeans and Japanese. True. Great. So, go kill a thousand of 'em a year and after seven years it won't matter who thinks this hunt is just a quaint little bit of antiquity and who thinks it is an enduring tribal tradition because it will be over for good no matter what you think.
If the well was down to a month's supply of water, it would be sort of stupid to rush out and fill the swimming pool out of spite just to make a point.
The "killer app" ideas for this thing already exist on other platforms. Would it be a _Good Idea_ for them to have a GPS moving-map application on the phone? Yes. Would such an application be enough to drive someone to buy the phone just to get the app (read: the definition of a 'Killer App')?
No.
Like I said, "multi-touch" is the only unique interface ability this thing has. Everything else is elsewhere already, even the accelerometers, and many of those devices as you've so keenly noted already have clear advantages, yet, nope, no "killer app" from them. What would make this device more likely to produce one that others couldn't and, more annoyingly, are the unique qualities of this phone actually a HINDRANCE (try touch-dialing on completely zero-tactile-feedback plexi)?
All the functional components the iPhone offers have been around for years with the sole exception of "Multi-Touch." My gut feeling is that Apple are essentially right about this. The sorts of things you can do with Widgets may be cooler-looking if done as widgets on that nice glossy interface, but their purpose is not "Killer." Most other purposes have already been tried and failed over and over and over for the simple problem of the interface being too god damned small to be of any real use.
People aren't doing that with this thing though. They already know exactly what the SDK would give them, but when you ask why it's basically nothing but "uhm, because I might think of something, well, not me, but like, someone else might, because I got nothin." Now, ask your average person on the street about, say, OLED polymer screens and with just the slightest explanation, they'll give you a hundred applications, invariably including "hey! that'd be so cool if they could roll out of my cellphone because I've always wanted an app where I could... " -- and usually most people can think of about a dozen things they'd kill to have. That's the rub. Yes, this is neat, but it's just not obviously useful enough yet to produce a "killer app" and opening the SDK isn't going to provide any inspiration if it isn't already there.
Slashdot Mirror
If he doesn't you shoot first, you'd best be his journeyman...
When you snoop around the forums for the OPTION cards that support HSDPA, which should support 3Mbps+, people are THRILLED to get 300Kbps, which is fine for "bursty" traffic, but when you've got a 100MB download to chew through and your device is fully capable of pulling it down in 4, not 45, minutes...that difference gets a bit nerving, especially at $50/month. No, I don't expect it 24/7, but damn...
IIRC they have a blurb in the TOS of the $20 plan saying you may not use the handset as a modem and they certainly do their damnedest to try and prevent you from using that feature, though basic GPRS is pretty crap on their network. I just got a 3G data card and they want $50/month for "unlimited" data for that.
I wonder if the SIM card trick would work on it. I mean, they had to assign it a telephone number (quoi?), so methinks they might not be able to tell the difference.
"MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers."
None of these things equate. Sounds like someone has a queer axe to grind from being ostracized in high school and has an inferiority complex because her parents didn't go to college.
What the hell is this self-involved freshman comp dreck doing on the front page?
While certain varieties of FLORA may be able to survive in a CO2 atmosphere at near vacuum, the FAUNA would find it a tad more difficult.
"My vote only exists in aggregate with 300 million other votes:"
...and on that note:
Sort of like your dollars. But, no, in fact, it exists in the aggregate of roughly 645,000 (your district). Which given the rough number of participating voters really comes out to about a power of about 1:129,000. Now, sure, that's just one seat. So, to be fair, 129k*435, your power is about 1:56M. Now, Microsoft pulls in about $44.5 billion per year. You'd have to send Microsoft $800 per year, every year, to exert that kind of power. Some people certainly do, but put in perspective, you certainly don't have much of an edge on any private corporation over your influence in government. That is, in both cases, unless you do a much larger amount of, ahem, "business" with them than the average person... I mean, let's face it, they're mutually corrupt to precisely equal degrees (for reasons that should be obvious).
"Corporations can not send me to jail."
Baloney. DMCA, anyone? The charges that send you to jail will come from a corporation. Corporations lobbied HARD to make it possible for them to extend what should rightfully be mere torts into crimes--and if convicted, you'll likely end up a guest of the Corrections Corporation of America.
The government is merely the arbiter. Do not be fooled as to who is really locking you up.
"They can not censor my speech."
Strangely enough, the general thrust of this entire thread is precisely to the contrary. CERTAINLY they can censor your speech. That's precisely what the ESRB and MPAA are designed to do. Remember the Hays code? That wasn't a law, it was an industry standard -- and to say it wasn't censorship would be a stretch. Whether that's infringing on your right to freedom of speech, well, no. They can't taken away your right, but they can certainly censor you should your expression of speech require the use of their property.
...in a town where the damages from losing a pair of pants are worth $67 million.
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3119381
The ABC News Law & Justice Unit has calculated that for $67 million Pearson could buy 84,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 value he placed on the missing trousers in court documents. If you stacked those pants up, they would be taller than eight Mount Everests. If you laid them side by side, they would stretch for 48 miles.
So, you're more comfortable with people you have no control over controlling your life than those over whom you exert direct control...and this makes you feel sublimely free from oppression. This, I hope, will soon be recognized as one of the greatest propaganda successes in history, wherein the populace has inexplicably been convinced that feudalism is preferable to democracy.
Seriously...
Roughly 50,000 square feet of spinach yields about 100 pounds per day, which would cost about $80k/month in rents, not including the necessary utilities. If people are willing to pay $20/lb for spinach, this will work. Until then, when you can BUY an acre of land for $1/sq.ft. and truck your produce in by the ton for pennies a pound...this ain't gonna work unless you're growing heroin.
General purposes, sure. However, I just did it this month as a new version of Kerrighed required it. Lots of things require it, especially if you get into SMP, clustering, tediously specific hardware or embedded systems, you know, the things you're more likely to run into in the business/enterprise market than in the low-end home user market.
Of course, I've never had many problems with purpose-built systems either. Duh.
The problem is when people expect to plug in existing hardware that wasn't necessarily purchased off a Linux compatibility list because they just have it sitting around and expect it to work. My Wacom tablet works great on my desktop off a fresh Ubuntu install, but a fresh install from the same disk on a Dell Laptop and everything works fine, but the Wacom driver is suddenly all wonky. Just taking the volume of calls to tell people "sorry, piss off, we don't support that" would wipe out most of their profits.
If you based your business model on assuming everyone is the perfect little engineer like you who checks every device driver of every piece of hardware before purchase and staffed your call center accordingly, you'd have quite a line of angry customers demanding refunds, which I imagine is precisely what Dell are trying to keep to a minimum until they're confident they can turn a profit, support included, and not broadly alienate their customer base.
If a private, advisory, non-binding, completely voluntary, self-regulating, loosely affiliated industry association gets your knickers that in a bunch, you've obviously never had your rights inflicted upon in the slightest by anyone.
The quality of support they provide in the business division assumes a level of competence on the customer end that is not safe to assume with Linux, which could cause them to lose their shirts as well-meaning newbies stumble through transitioning hand-held and paid for by Dell.
Ubuntu is pretty straight-forward and I've been using various flavors of Linux for a decade, but if I had a support line to call the first few days I was trying it out for the first time, I would have burned through the price of a cheap laptop in no time trying to get a few of my odder doo-dads to connect. I mean, honestly, when was the last time their support department had to tell a Windows customer "please apply these five patches to your kernel source v.xyz and recompile?"
On a daily basis, do you protect your valuables and confidential records because you're afraid of a public official confiscating them or some random private citizen busting in and stealing them? Strangely enough, the primary reason we have government in the first place is to guard against the latter (whether through policing, the courts or recognition of property rights in general). Yet, people are /far/ more careless with their information and property in the hands of other private interests over whom they have virtually no control than they are with their public counterparts over whom they have direct control.
This is puzzling.
Because in a hundred years "Manhunt 2" will be remembered as 2007's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" or "Of Mice and Men."
But, yeah, censorship is what it is, regardless of the relative worth of the item in question, which in this case is about zilch.
The fact that your level 47 avatar can slaughter an entire plain of level 30's with the same single-finger-salute that had no effect on that level 3 landstrider a month ago has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with simple time-served. Frankly, after wasting countless hours slashing through endless droves of completely uninspired beasties on WoW just to endlessly level up an erg at a time through weeks of tediously dull quests and insipid wandering, I don't blame people for buying their way in, though I question the worth of it...I mean, just how much better does it get after you've dedicated 2700 hours to the !@%^ing thing?
"it's interesting to note that similar tactics have been in use by record companies for over a century."
A revelation no doubt common in people who think the media are biased cesspools of sensationalist crap designed entirely to manipulate the population out of quasi-fascist capitalist greed...until they pick up an 1890's edition of the San Francisco Examiner and realize contrary to their previous perception, things have actually markedly improved.
Brings the wonderful image of aliens sending nanomachines to take over the indigent population...
I suppose that explains Ayn Rand and the Republican party then...
...because they're just as dangerous as talking to a passenger. Let's outlaw that too and force all vehicle occupants to sit inside cones of silence.
...because it was a response to an even more spurious argument (essentially "It's not my fault, I'll do what I want," which isn't the point here).
Actually, I didn't say anything about it.
I'm sort of deferring to "the experts" on this one who seem to think 50 per year is sustainable. Okay, it's all the fault of the Europeans and Japanese. True. Great. So, go kill a thousand of 'em a year and after seven years it won't matter who thinks this hunt is just a quaint little bit of antiquity and who thinks it is an enduring tribal tradition because it will be over for good no matter what you think.
If the well was down to a month's supply of water, it would be sort of stupid to rush out and fill the swimming pool out of spite just to make a point.
What the hell are "Penis painted" bars? /Useless without pics
The "killer app" ideas for this thing already exist on other platforms. Would it be a _Good Idea_ for them to have a GPS moving-map application on the phone? Yes. Would such an application be enough to drive someone to buy the phone just to get the app (read: the definition of a 'Killer App')?
No.
Like I said, "multi-touch" is the only unique interface ability this thing has. Everything else is elsewhere already, even the accelerometers, and many of those devices as you've so keenly noted already have clear advantages, yet, nope, no "killer app" from them. What would make this device more likely to produce one that others couldn't and, more annoyingly, are the unique qualities of this phone actually a HINDRANCE (try touch-dialing on completely zero-tactile-feedback plexi)?
All the functional components the iPhone offers have been around for years with the sole exception of "Multi-Touch." My gut feeling is that Apple are essentially right about this. The sorts of things you can do with Widgets may be cooler-looking if done as widgets on that nice glossy interface, but their purpose is not "Killer." Most other purposes have already been tried and failed over and over and over for the simple problem of the interface being too god damned small to be of any real use.
... " -- and usually most people can think of about a dozen things they'd kill to have. That's the rub. Yes, this is neat, but it's just not obviously useful enough yet to produce a "killer app" and opening the SDK isn't going to provide any inspiration if it isn't already there.
People aren't doing that with this thing though. They already know exactly what the SDK would give them, but when you ask why it's basically nothing but "uhm, because I might think of something, well, not me, but like, someone else might, because I got nothin." Now, ask your average person on the street about, say, OLED polymer screens and with just the slightest explanation, they'll give you a hundred applications, invariably including "hey! that'd be so cool if they could roll out of my cellphone because I've always wanted an app where I could