That is an excellent graph of the problem... but contains no insight into a potential solution, other than the date range in which the inequality occoured. The data from that chart, needs to be aligned with various other sources of data, in order to find what exactly the problem is associated with.
1979 is the year that Margret Thatcher got into power, followed in 1981 by Ronald Regan. There's the problem: the set of principles those two established as the norm - laissez faire, market economy, anti-union, low tax (for the rich), monetarism. Basically, if you look at any issue and ask What would Thatcher do? That's the problem right there. Do the opposite of what Thatcher would do and you're probably in the right direction for solving the problem.
If wishes were ponies, every company would charge you for everything that they possibly could.
In the real world, every product is a balance of functionality, cost and ongoing cost. A company has to get that balance right to sell product and make money.
The other poster is right - Apple view content as little more than a way to sell hardware. It's open and/or free of charge when that makes the most sense; it's closed and/or priced when that is more sensible. It's not about control, and it's not about nickel and diming on content. If you think it is, you'll never be any good at predicting what Apple will do in the future.
How long before normal users who didn't pay $99/year to be a developer get the fix?
Just to follow up, v5.0.1 is out today. All users will get it today, if they chose to accept, via the iTunes app, or as an OTA download.
So the answer to your question is 1 week. Seems like a reasonable time period for beta testers to make sure it works and for developers to check it hasn't broken their apps.
I've seen no reason to contradict Apple's battery specs. The Apple products I've had all exceeded their stated battery life.
Don't project PC manufacturer lack of integrity onto others. As you've noticed you pay extra for Apple products, and you're getting quality in return. One of the things that means is decent battery life, as stated in the specs.
Apple hasn't sold those for some time. If you're seeing them for sale somewhere, they're old stock. All Macbooks are i5 or i7.
Your Acer isn't a substitute because it doesn't run OSX. Running the right OS is the prime requirement of a computer, way before worrying about what variant of CPU it has.
As for example of sites which don't fit a 1024 pixel screen well try reading nested comments on Slashdot.
I'm doing it right now on an iPad. It's too wide for potrait mode. But in Landscape it fits perfectly, by default, with a perfectly readable font. No zooming or scrolling required. As I said, you have no case.
AdBlock is an installable app. I don't really see what your point is.
It's perfectly simple. The objective is to block ads. You can do that on iOS. The method is different.
Can iOS apps even set up local proxies?
It's a phone. You've lost if you expect users to modify proxy settings for the sake of blocking ads. And you've got a security hole a mile wide if apps can alter that for themselves. Have you ever heard of sandboxes? This is the kind of shit we've endured for years on PCs. Apparently some people haven't learned any better.
The iOS solution - you want to block ads, you download a browser that has built in ad-blocking. Simple enough for everyone to understand. No security risk.
The Android Market is much cheaper and more importantly you can side-load apps from anywhere, including web site downloads direct from Sourceforge.
And yet the iOS App Store has 7 times the downloads of all Android, Blackberry, Microsoft and Symbian mobile App stores added together. People don't mind paying 99c for an app that's professionally done. You get shit for free.
Apple products tend to have a few "wow" features but are otherwise extremely average.
And yet Apple products are consistently higher rated by users than the rest of the industry.
Your problem is you're a geek who's impressed by feature lists. And you're blind to usability - you think it's something that comes with feature lists.
See i wish more companies were like Adobe, they can see a losing argument and innovate on the the next steps.
The time for seeing the losing argument and doing HTML5 dev tools was last year when Steve Jobs told them straight. Waiting 18 months to announce they're going to take Steve's advice is far from innovative.
Nor would Adobe still be using Carbon a decade after they were told it was a transitory technology and Cocoa was the future.
If Apple did what you suggested, then web-sites would continue to use flash, and tall people without the plugin to install the plugin. Just as happens to users on PCs. And so the crap-fest would have continued.
Instead, Apple assured a better experience for users by not having Flash, and at the same time broke Adobe's business model, so that, as of now, Flash technology is on death row.
Apple did the right thing. And that's been proven today. You're suggesting the pathetic loser move that the rest of the industry has been making for years.
I hate to break the news to ya but it ain't because everyone is using an iPad, it is because as we system builders that are still doing well in this economy can tell you for several years the PC has been "good enough" and there simply is no killer app that makes users need to switch!
It's not just people switching to iPad. It's also people switching to Macs. PCs are in decline, but Macs are growing 21.5% year on year.
I guarantee that the folks at Apple don't have the time or people to properly verify the apps either, nor do they seem to have the personal incentive to do it right.
I know better that your "guarantee". The app store review process found a crashing bug in one of my apps that neither I nor my partner had ever come across in our testing. It took me two days to reproduce it myself. I know from what had to happen to trigger that bug that either he gave it a very thorough evaluation, or they have fuzzer that randomly operates the UI of the app for an extended period.
Also interesting is that you earlier pointed out the hazards of trusting software, and here you're willing to trust open-source software. Sure, with open source you COULD look at the source, but when have you ever done that before using it - checking every line of code. I don't know if you've ever done code reviews, but do you know it takes a significant time to review even a single source file properly? Of course you're TRUSTING Stallman's theory that "with many eyes all bugs are shallow". And yet the reality is that open source developers are not outnumbered by people reviewing the code. On average, most open source code has only ever been read by it's author. - Now you might ask me how I know that. That's not the point. The point is that you don't know it's not true, and yet you're TRUSTING that it isn't.
I'd trust the Linux kernel as much as I'd trust iOS. I know that both have indeed had many eyes on them. I wouldn't trust that an open source app has been read by anyone but the often pseudonymous author. I'd know that an iOS app was more trustworthy, having at least been vetted - both app and developer.
Final point: go to the McAfee virus encyclopedia. Search for Android malware. 264 matches. Search for iOS malware. 0 matches.
The stock Google Android browser doesn't have text reflow either. It's based on exactly the same engine as iOS is. WebKit, developed by Apple from KHTML.
And presumably AdBlock is a separate download... hard to tell as every Android phone is different.
Now, despite the ever moving goalposts on your side, my goalpost remains the same. Give me a link for any website that is too wide to work well on my iPad. You keep ignoring that one. Because of course you've never seen such a website. Your supposed "problem" with 1024 wide browsers is just made up. You're a fraud.
Real science welcomes scientists. Intelligence, honesty, integrity, inquisitiveness, rigour, domain knowledge, logic are among the desirable aspects of scientists in addition to and more significant than scepticism. The so called global warming "sceptics" typically don't have any of those attributes.
Define yourself by your "scepticism", and you're not a scientist, you're a fuckwit.
So essentially, with Android you have unvetted applications, with Apple you have unvetted applications
Except that Apple do do vetting, and thus do have vetted apps.
You claim it doesn't work. The lesson of 4 years of the Apple App store is that it does work.
Despite the rumours to the contrary, there has been no great Android outbreak precisely because Android users are aware of their own security.
The average Android user is not like you. The average Android user is the average phone user. They're not geeks. They don't understand security. They are exactly the same people that load animated cursors, smily packages and screensavers on their Windows PCs.
There has been lots more malware on Android than iOS.
Except, it gives a false sense of security. With Android (or PC) apps, I know that there's a risk of malware, so I'm cautious.
And why do you imagine your caution is better than someone who's job is vetting apps? For example, what automated tools do you have for looking for suspicious API calls? Do you, like the app store reviewers, have test devices that don't contain your actual live data? Do you, like the app store, find out that the developer of the app is real enough to have a tax code?
Or is the reality of your "caution" that you're just going to guess.
Did or did you not notice that the whole point of what Charlie Miller did was that the sandbox was breached
I noticed from the examples that the sandbox was NOT breached. The things described - accessing photos, contacts etc are system services that any ordinary sandboxed app from the app store can already access. What was not claimed was anything that broke the sandbox, such as reading or writing from/to one of the other apps.
Android, by comparison, is acknowledged to have malware
Unlike the iOS App Store. And you're somehow trying to paint that as an advantage/more secure. Which is the dumbest argument I've read all day.
Kind of like trying to claim classic versions of Windows to be the most secure OSs, because at least they are acknowledged to have thousands of viruses.
Of course I read it. Why do you think I said "Zooming on a Thinkpad?"
I'll spell it out. Zooming on a conventional browser and zooming on iOS is not the same. On a laptop, a keyboard shortcut will zoom in a fixed amount each time from a fixed place. The result is only any good if you follow it with scrolling to place the view in the right place. On iOS, you double tap on a column of text say, and the zoom will make that column fill the screen width. Likewise with a photo, or whatever element.
If you ever used a browser on iOS, you'll appreciate the big difference.
I note you were unable to give me a response to my request for a single web-site that wouldn't display well on my 1024 width iPad screen. I'm not surprised. Your objection obviously wasn't a real one. It was just a thinly veiled attempt at a feature list bullet point battle.
Usability is what's important, not features. And that difference in zoom you stumbled up accidentally is a perfect example.
My old Thinkpad had a screen that resolution and despite loving it I upgraded because so many web pages require zooming or horizontal scrolling at that resolution.
Zooming on a Thinkpad? Funnily enough you mention the innovation that Apple made for the iPhone that made browsing practical on a phone screen at 320Ã--480 pixels. Double tap to zoom. You didn't have that on your thinkpad.
Still, browsing on a phone is more of an emergency thing than a norm. But the self same double tap to zoom means that if by any chance web-site is designed for a huge screen, it's still going to be a breeze on an iPad.
But what are these sites that are too wide for a 1024 width? I can't remember ever seeing one. Give me a link to one that's going to work badly on my iPad. I'll try it and see.
Slashdot Mirror
What a fine collection of strawmen.
That is an excellent graph of the problem ... but contains no insight into a potential solution, other than the date range in which the inequality occoured. The data from that chart, needs to be aligned with various other sources of data, in order to find what exactly the problem is associated with.
1979 is the year that Margret Thatcher got into power, followed in 1981 by Ronald Regan. There's the problem: the set of principles those two established as the norm - laissez faire, market economy, anti-union, low tax (for the rich), monetarism. Basically, if you look at any issue and ask What would Thatcher do? That's the problem right there. Do the opposite of what Thatcher would do and you're probably in the right direction for solving the problem.
If wishes were ponies, every company would charge you for everything that they possibly could.
In the real world, every product is a balance of functionality, cost and ongoing cost. A company has to get that balance right to sell product and make money.
The other poster is right - Apple view content as little more than a way to sell hardware. It's open and/or free of charge when that makes the most sense; it's closed and/or priced when that is more sensible. It's not about control, and it's not about nickel and diming on content. If you think it is, you'll never be any good at predicting what Apple will do in the future.
How long before normal users who didn't pay $99/year to be a developer get the fix?
Just to follow up, v5.0.1 is out today. All users will get it today, if they chose to accept, via the iTunes app, or as an OTA download.
So the answer to your question is 1 week. Seems like a reasonable time period for beta testers to make sure it works and for developers to check it hasn't broken their apps.
No indeed. And FYI, the few users that were affected are OK now. The fix (iOS 5.0.1) is already out.
I've seen no reason to contradict Apple's battery specs. The Apple products I've had all exceeded their stated battery life.
Don't project PC manufacturer lack of integrity onto others. As you've noticed you pay extra for Apple products, and you're getting quality in return. One of the things that means is decent battery life, as stated in the specs.
I can still buy new Macbooks with Core 2 Duo's
Apple hasn't sold those for some time. If you're seeing them for sale somewhere, they're old stock. All Macbooks are i5 or i7.
Your Acer isn't a substitute because it doesn't run OSX. Running the right OS is the prime requirement of a computer, way before worrying about what variant of CPU it has.
Are you saying there's something wrong with implementing Gmail in Flash?
Why are they supporting Flash then?
Yes it does. My first Android phone was a HTC Hero running 1.5 and that had it, as does the 2.3.3 I am running on my current Samsung phone.
No it doesn't. HTC and Samsung might have it but it isn't in the stock build of Android.
WebKit is open source and has actually had more contributions from Google than it has had from Apple.
Laughably false.
http://trac.webkit.org/
@google = 12 matches.
@apple = 92 matches.
As for example of sites which don't fit a 1024 pixel screen well try reading nested comments on Slashdot.
I'm doing it right now on an iPad. It's too wide for potrait mode. But in Landscape it fits perfectly, by default, with a perfectly readable font. No zooming or scrolling required. As I said, you have no case.
AdBlock is an installable app. I don't really see what your point is.
It's perfectly simple. The objective is to block ads. You can do that on iOS. The method is different.
Can iOS apps even set up local proxies?
It's a phone. You've lost if you expect users to modify proxy settings for the sake of blocking ads. And you've got a security hole a mile wide if apps can alter that for themselves. Have you ever heard of sandboxes? This is the kind of shit we've endured for years on PCs. Apparently some people haven't learned any better.
The iOS solution - you want to block ads, you download a browser that has built in ad-blocking. Simple enough for everyone to understand. No security risk.
The Android Market is much cheaper and more importantly you can side-load apps from anywhere, including web site downloads direct from Sourceforge.
And yet the iOS App Store has 7 times the downloads of all Android, Blackberry, Microsoft and Symbian mobile App stores added together. People don't mind paying 99c for an app that's professionally done. You get shit for free.
Apple products tend to have a few "wow" features but are otherwise extremely average.
And yet Apple products are consistently higher rated by users than the rest of the industry.
Your problem is you're a geek who's impressed by feature lists. And you're blind to usability - you think it's something that comes with feature lists.
See i wish more companies were like Adobe, they can see a losing argument and innovate on the the next steps.
The time for seeing the losing argument and doing HTML5 dev tools was last year when Steve Jobs told them straight. Waiting 18 months to announce they're going to take Steve's advice is far from innovative.
Nor would Adobe still be using Carbon a decade after they were told it was a transitory technology and Cocoa was the future.
Flash would have died either way. Apple just hastened it's death. Which is certainly a good thing.
If Apple did what you suggested, then web-sites would continue to use flash, and tall people without the plugin to install the plugin. Just as happens to users on PCs. And so the crap-fest would have continued.
Instead, Apple assured a better experience for users by not having Flash, and at the same time broke Adobe's business model, so that, as of now, Flash technology is on death row.
Apple did the right thing. And that's been proven today. You're suggesting the pathetic loser move that the rest of the industry has been making for years.
You might not know anyone. I get disgruntled PC users asking me for advice about buying their first Mac quite often.
That 21.5% Mac growth is coming from somewhere. And given the PC's decline, it's easy to see where.
I hate to break the news to ya but it ain't because everyone is using an iPad, it is because as we system builders that are still doing well in this economy can tell you for several years the PC has been "good enough" and there simply is no killer app that makes users need to switch!
It's not just people switching to iPad. It's also people switching to Macs. PCs are in decline, but Macs are growing 21.5% year on year.
Desktop and laptop sales are already in decline.
PC Desktop and laptop sales are in decline. Macs are growing 21.5% year on year.
I guarantee that the folks at Apple don't have the time or people to properly verify the apps either, nor do they seem to have the personal incentive to do it right.
I know better that your "guarantee". The app store review process found a crashing bug in one of my apps that neither I nor my partner had ever come across in our testing. It took me two days to reproduce it myself. I know from what had to happen to trigger that bug that either he gave it a very thorough evaluation, or they have fuzzer that randomly operates the UI of the app for an extended period.
Also interesting is that you earlier pointed out the hazards of trusting software, and here you're willing to trust open-source software. Sure, with open source you COULD look at the source, but when have you ever done that before using it - checking every line of code. I don't know if you've ever done code reviews, but do you know it takes a significant time to review even a single source file properly? Of course you're TRUSTING Stallman's theory that "with many eyes all bugs are shallow". And yet the reality is that open source developers are not outnumbered by people reviewing the code. On average, most open source code has only ever been read by it's author. - Now you might ask me how I know that. That's not the point. The point is that you don't know it's not true, and yet you're TRUSTING that it isn't.
I'd trust the Linux kernel as much as I'd trust iOS. I know that both have indeed had many eyes on them. I wouldn't trust that an open source app has been read by anyone but the often pseudonymous author. I'd know that an iOS app was more trustworthy, having at least been vetted - both app and developer.
Final point: go to the McAfee virus encyclopedia. Search for Android malware. 264 matches. Search for iOS malware. 0 matches.
The stock Google Android browser doesn't have text reflow either. It's based on exactly the same engine as iOS is. WebKit, developed by Apple from KHTML.
And presumably AdBlock is a separate download... hard to tell as every Android phone is different.
You want text reflow and ad block on iOS, no problem. Just as with Android you use an alternative browser. Here's one that supports both those things:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/onebrowser/id435089374?mt=8
Now, despite the ever moving goalposts on your side, my goalpost remains the same. Give me a link for any website that is too wide to work well on my iPad. You keep ignoring that one. Because of course you've never seen such a website. Your supposed "problem" with 1024 wide browsers is just made up. You're a fraud.
Real science welcomes skeptics
Real science welcomes scientists. Intelligence, honesty, integrity, inquisitiveness, rigour, domain knowledge, logic are among the desirable aspects of scientists in addition to and more significant than scepticism. The so called global warming "sceptics" typically don't have any of those attributes.
Define yourself by your "scepticism", and you're not a scientist, you're a fuckwit.
So essentially, with Android you have unvetted applications, with Apple you have unvetted applications
Except that Apple do do vetting, and thus do have vetted apps.
You claim it doesn't work. The lesson of 4 years of the Apple App store is that it does work.
Despite the rumours to the contrary, there has been no great Android outbreak precisely because Android users are aware of their own security.
The average Android user is not like you. The average Android user is the average phone user. They're not geeks. They don't understand security. They are exactly the same people that load animated cursors, smily packages and screensavers on their Windows PCs.
There has been lots more malware on Android than iOS.
Except, it gives a false sense of security. With Android (or PC) apps, I know that there's a risk of malware, so I'm cautious.
And why do you imagine your caution is better than someone who's job is vetting apps? For example, what automated tools do you have for looking for suspicious API calls? Do you, like the app store reviewers, have test devices that don't contain your actual live data? Do you, like the app store, find out that the developer of the app is real enough to have a tax code?
Or is the reality of your "caution" that you're just going to guess.
Did or did you not notice that the whole point of what Charlie Miller did was that the sandbox was breached
I noticed from the examples that the sandbox was NOT breached. The things described - accessing photos, contacts etc are system services that any ordinary sandboxed app from the app store can already access. What was not claimed was anything that broke the sandbox, such as reading or writing from/to one of the other apps.
Android, by comparison, is acknowledged to have malware
Unlike the iOS App Store. And you're somehow trying to paint that as an advantage/more secure. Which is the dumbest argument I've read all day.
Kind of like trying to claim classic versions of Windows to be the most secure OSs, because at least they are acknowledged to have thousands of viruses.
Absolutely. And also like the difference between Mac and PCs, you get a better experience when hardware and software are made by the same company.
Did you even read my comment? I did have zooming"
Of course I read it. Why do you think I said "Zooming on a Thinkpad?"
I'll spell it out. Zooming on a conventional browser and zooming on iOS is not the same. On a laptop, a keyboard shortcut will zoom in a fixed amount each time from a fixed place. The result is only any good if you follow it with scrolling to place the view in the right place. On iOS, you double tap on a column of text say, and the zoom will make that column fill the screen width. Likewise with a photo, or whatever element.
If you ever used a browser on iOS, you'll appreciate the big difference.
I note you were unable to give me a response to my request for a single web-site that wouldn't display well on my 1024 width iPad screen. I'm not surprised. Your objection obviously wasn't a real one. It was just a thinly veiled attempt at a feature list bullet point battle.
Usability is what's important, not features. And that difference in zoom you stumbled up accidentally is a perfect example.
My old Thinkpad had a screen that resolution and despite loving it I upgraded because so many web pages require zooming or horizontal scrolling at that resolution.
Zooming on a Thinkpad? Funnily enough you mention the innovation that Apple made for the iPhone that made browsing practical on a phone screen at 320Ã--480 pixels. Double tap to zoom. You didn't have that on your thinkpad.
Still, browsing on a phone is more of an emergency thing than a norm. But the self same double tap to zoom means that if by any chance web-site is designed for a huge screen, it's still going to be a breeze on an iPad.
But what are these sites that are too wide for a 1024 width? I can't remember ever seeing one. Give me a link to one that's going to work badly on my iPad. I'll try it and see.