I agree with all you've said. My point is that in a billion dollar industry (which the iPhone is [or is close to being] on hardware alone, excluding accessories and apps), every percentage point you lose to a competitor is a $10M+/year loss. While nobody is going to be making an identical copy of the device, it's amazing that before the iPhone nobody was making anything remotely like the iPhone. After the iPhone came out? Every major phone manufacturer had copied in some way a lot of the features, from the touch-screen to the "tiled apps" interface.
I don't know how much can be gleaned from this leak, but if a competitor can react fast enough and well enough perhaps they can shave off a few percentage points from the iPhone's marketshare. Whether or not their gain is well-deserved and due to a quality product is irrelevant at that point. The HTC Touch (a garbage product as you state) still sold half as many units as the iPhone. If HTC had this advanced knowledge with the original iPhone, things might be skewed more in their favor. Instead of selling 50% as many units, maybe they would have sold 55% or 60% as many units.
The last good one I saw was Hitler being informed that they are using one of his rants to parody him by putting funny subtitles on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSYk8ofhYFY
I agree. The government should impanel special juries comprised of Geek Squad technicians and entry-level LAMP developers just so that Slashdotters can be judged by their "peers".
Hahaha... mod this guy up. You gotta admit, that was good.
Reminds me of that Feynman story where he goes down in the middle of the night and removes one of the doors. The next day everyone is upset and they demand people swear that they did not do it. So it goes around the room:
Person 1: "I swear I did not remove the door." Person 2: "I swear I did not remove the door."... and so on. Then it gets to Feynman:
Feynman: "Yeah, *I* took the door." Upset Dude: "Oh, stop kidding around Feynman. Next!"
Person n: "I swear I did not remove the door."
Hit point was that afterward, even though he did admit to taking it, at the time they dismissed it as him not being serious and all they ultimately remembered was everybody denying taking the door.
I didn't say it did. And upon re-reading my post, I should have made my intent clearer by ending it instead with "No... no inconsistency there at all".
I'm sure it was halfway decent... "But Rahinder from Apple support in Bombay told me 'I am sorry sir, but I do not know anything about returning an iPhone. Now can you please tell me how I can help you with your iTunes purchase.' I contacted Apple, didn't I?"
All this talk about who owns the device is nothing more than mental masturbation. When you call up the general customer support line of a company that has 34,000 employees don't be surprised if the support rep working at a call center (likely nowhere near the head office) not only doesn't know what the R&D unit is up to but also hasn't been trained on how to properly deal with callers attempting to return lost items over the phone.
Yeah, the correct answer should have been something along the lines of: "If you believe you have something of Apple's, please return it to the security desk. Here is the address..." Would Gizmodo not have published anything in that case? Yeah, they'd still whore themselves out and they still would have paid $5000 for the item that was illegally removed from the private property where it was found.
So when Mohinder working out of a cubicle in a call center in Delhi claims to know nothing about a phone, you will maintain that Mohinder is a duly authorized agent of Apple Corporation and had the authority to recognize and receive lost property? Same thing for Sally working out of a cubicle in a call center in Cupertino.
I bet. They must be sooo angry about all this mysterious free hype and viral press coverage.
Press coverage does nothing for Apple when it's months away from anybody being able to buy it. Meanwhile, their competitors now have many months during which they can start cloning the design and/or features. Then, when Jobs launches the iPhone, everyone will say "Okay, but we knew that already. Nothing new here, folks." People won't be blown away by stuff they already knew.
What does that translate to? I'm guessing $50 million in lost opportunity cost. All the coverage is doing is potentially cannibalizing current iPhone sales if someone who was considering getting one now wants to wait. Additionally, their competitors now have an unfair advantage and will design their products not by guessing what Apple will be doing (as they normally do) but knowing what Apple will be doing. As a result, their competitors will save millions of dollars by not going down a course that they are now able to prevent. Further, all that wasted press coverage now means less when it actually launches. The hype and virality will be done by then. Oh, I'm sure it'll have some unexpected things... but the reduction will mean many more millions of dollars in free press that they won't get when it matters: when people can buy/preorder it.
The leg up that their competitors will receive from this information will have a ripple effect for years to come. That extra however many percent market share they are able to squeeze out by proactively countering (or sabotaging, even) Apple's strategy in a several billion dollar market is a huge cost to Apple.
Yeah, Jobs isn't going to be collecting food stamps and eating nothing but ramen noodles but this has a significant financial cost to Apple.
If you find something on private property and then remove that item from the private property, you have stolen the item. Yes, a bar is private property. The proper course of action is to turn the item over to the owner of the property. If the owner of the property is not the owner of the item, they can hold it for the rightful owner or turn it over to the police. If the rightful owner does not claim their item within a certain time period then it can legally go to the finder, but that's after quite a long time.
If you find an iPhone on a public sidewalk, you need to take it to the police. "Finder's keepers" is a nice schoolyard rhyme, but good luck using that as a legal defense. Yeah, nobody's going to fault you for picking up a quarter here and there, but if you take a clip of money with several hundred dollars in it you're a thief.
So yeah. I'm fully behind Apple for supporting the prosecution of thieves, if in fact they do support it. With all the publicity this story has received, the police would still investigate even if Apple said not to. After all, a crime was committed.
Jason Chen at Gizmodo did nothing wrong. He notified Apple and promptly returned the phone.
Gizmodo: "Hi, Apple customer service? I think I have a new model of your iPhone here."
Apple: "Sorry, we don't know anything about that."
Gizmodo: "No? Okay, well I thought I'd try."
Gizmodo: "Here are the Facebook pics of the guy who lost the phone. Did we mention we paid $5000 to some dude to purchase this?"
Gizmodo: "We tried contacting Apple, but they wouldn't say anything."
Gizmodo: "See this information about the phone owner in Facebook? Haha. It's a public profile. What a shame there's no means to contact him from his Facebook profile."
Gizmodo: "Hey, we did nothing wrong. Totally good faith attempt on our part to contact Apple in order to return this."
Gizmodo: "Check this out. We took the fucking thing apart and here are detailed photos of what's inside it."
Gizmodo: "We have the utmost respect for whoever lost this as it's their personal property and we hope to return it shortly."
Gizmodo: "Damn, look at the design on this baby. Let's see if we can put it back together again and not have broken it."
Gizmodo: "We finally stalled enough that we coerced Apple legal into sending us a letter asking for its return. Cha-ching baby! We're fucking awesome. Did I mention we paid some dude $5000 after he claimed he 'found' it in a bar? We so fucking rock!"
Their approval rules aren't 'wildly inconsistent'. They are consistent within context of the app, meaning if the app in question goes down one of the questionable paths like mature content, duplicates core functionality, or questionable content, then it is possible it will be banned.
Almost all apps showing sexy, non-nude pictures? Banned. Playboy app showing sexy playmates? Approved and featured on iTunes.
My ideas are not original. In fact, the idea sort of comes from various story lines from popular SciFi shows like Star Trek and SG-1. Not only should we be creating digital archives, we should be creating digital archives inside of orbital vehicles that are capable of sustaining their own orbits indefinitely.
And when another civilization comes across it, it takes control of their captain's mind, has him/her/it experience a lifetime as a member of the other culture, then permanently wipes itself and leaves them with nothing but a flute?
The best arrangement is to lay them out as a fractal a la Sierpinski carpet. Produces a decent tight packing and ensures that you are able to maximize your space. Other options that came to mind are if you have curved desks you could arrange them in a 69 fashion. Or get desks of different dimensions... some square, some straight, a few L-shaped ones. Then you could make the developers arrange their desks daily in a game of office Tetris.
No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made by closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality.
Odd... seems the opposite to what the esteemed "ChiefMonkeyGrinder" claims. Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.
Ah... The big deal there is...if there's nothing you want offered, was there anything really lost by sticking to your principles?
As with anything, it depends. In the simple case I'd say you're right -- if you want a portable radio that allows you to record and no devices feature recording, that's easy. However, the PS3 might do 97% of what you want but you're holding out because the last 3% (some downloadable content on PSN) has DRM you object to. Do you buy it and use the 97%, but vote with your wallet by not buying anything off PSN, or do you choose a different gaming console with an entirely different set of tradeoffs to make?
To be fair, it requires you to be logged in to buy it, so you'd already have the Other OS option disabled. If you don't update your firmware, any game that already works and doesn't require you to be online will continue to work.
That's the idea of boycotting in capitalism; not to punish companies, but to consciously refuse to compromise your principles, resulting in you getting only what you truly want.
Or, when what you truly want isn't offered in the marketplace, getting nothing.
Can I just commandeer a ride in a police car if I need it, after all, my taxes paid for it, so I own it right?
A police car is there to assist in the protection of everyone, not just a select few. So it's very analogous to the sharing of data. If you really want a ride, I'm sure one could be arranged as long as you don't mind sitting in the back seat and having no choice in the destination.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with all you've said. My point is that in a billion dollar industry (which the iPhone is [or is close to being] on hardware alone, excluding accessories and apps), every percentage point you lose to a competitor is a $10M+/year loss. While nobody is going to be making an identical copy of the device, it's amazing that before the iPhone nobody was making anything remotely like the iPhone. After the iPhone came out? Every major phone manufacturer had copied in some way a lot of the features, from the touch-screen to the "tiled apps" interface.
I don't know how much can be gleaned from this leak, but if a competitor can react fast enough and well enough perhaps they can shave off a few percentage points from the iPhone's marketshare. Whether or not their gain is well-deserved and due to a quality product is irrelevant at that point. The HTC Touch (a garbage product as you state) still sold half as many units as the iPhone. If HTC had this advanced knowledge with the original iPhone, things might be skewed more in their favor. Instead of selling 50% as many units, maybe they would have sold 55% or 60% as many units.
The last good one I saw was Hitler being informed that they are using one of his rants to parody him by putting funny subtitles on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSYk8ofhYFY
A great meta-joke.
I agree. The government should impanel special juries comprised of Geek Squad technicians and entry-level LAMP developers just so that Slashdotters can be judged by their "peers".
Hahaha... mod this guy up. You gotta admit, that was good.
Reminds me of that Feynman story where he goes down in the middle of the night and removes one of the doors. The next day everyone is upset and they demand people swear that they did not do it. So it goes around the room:
Person 1: "I swear I did not remove the door." ... and so on. Then it gets to Feynman:
Person 2: "I swear I did not remove the door."
Feynman: "Yeah, *I* took the door."
Upset Dude: "Oh, stop kidding around Feynman. Next!"
Person n: "I swear I did not remove the door."
Hit point was that afterward, even though he did admit to taking it, at the time they dismissed it as him not being serious and all they ultimately remembered was everybody denying taking the door.
I didn't say it did. And upon re-reading my post, I should have made my intent clearer by ending it instead with "No... no inconsistency there at all".
I'm sure it was halfway decent... "But Rahinder from Apple support in Bombay told me 'I am sorry sir, but I do not know anything about returning an iPhone. Now can you please tell me how I can help you with your iTunes purchase.' I contacted Apple, didn't I?"
All this talk about who owns the device is nothing more than mental masturbation. When you call up the general customer support line of a company that has 34,000 employees don't be surprised if the support rep working at a call center (likely nowhere near the head office) not only doesn't know what the R&D unit is up to but also hasn't been trained on how to properly deal with callers attempting to return lost items over the phone.
Yeah, the correct answer should have been something along the lines of: "If you believe you have something of Apple's, please return it to the security desk. Here is the address..." Would Gizmodo not have published anything in that case? Yeah, they'd still whore themselves out and they still would have paid $5000 for the item that was illegally removed from the private property where it was found.
So when Mohinder working out of a cubicle in a call center in Delhi claims to know nothing about a phone, you will maintain that Mohinder is a duly authorized agent of Apple Corporation and had the authority to recognize and receive lost property? Same thing for Sally working out of a cubicle in a call center in Cupertino.
I bet. They must be sooo angry about all this mysterious free hype and viral press coverage.
Press coverage does nothing for Apple when it's months away from anybody being able to buy it. Meanwhile, their competitors now have many months during which they can start cloning the design and/or features. Then, when Jobs launches the iPhone, everyone will say "Okay, but we knew that already. Nothing new here, folks." People won't be blown away by stuff they already knew.
What does that translate to? I'm guessing $50 million in lost opportunity cost. All the coverage is doing is potentially cannibalizing current iPhone sales if someone who was considering getting one now wants to wait. Additionally, their competitors now have an unfair advantage and will design their products not by guessing what Apple will be doing (as they normally do) but knowing what Apple will be doing. As a result, their competitors will save millions of dollars by not going down a course that they are now able to prevent. Further, all that wasted press coverage now means less when it actually launches. The hype and virality will be done by then. Oh, I'm sure it'll have some unexpected things... but the reduction will mean many more millions of dollars in free press that they won't get when it matters: when people can buy/preorder it.
The leg up that their competitors will receive from this information will have a ripple effect for years to come. That extra however many percent market share they are able to squeeze out by proactively countering (or sabotaging, even) Apple's strategy in a several billion dollar market is a huge cost to Apple.
Yeah, Jobs isn't going to be collecting food stamps and eating nothing but ramen noodles but this has a significant financial cost to Apple.
If you find something on private property and then remove that item from the private property, you have stolen the item. Yes, a bar is private property. The proper course of action is to turn the item over to the owner of the property. If the owner of the property is not the owner of the item, they can hold it for the rightful owner or turn it over to the police. If the rightful owner does not claim their item within a certain time period then it can legally go to the finder, but that's after quite a long time.
If you find an iPhone on a public sidewalk, you need to take it to the police. "Finder's keepers" is a nice schoolyard rhyme, but good luck using that as a legal defense. Yeah, nobody's going to fault you for picking up a quarter here and there, but if you take a clip of money with several hundred dollars in it you're a thief.
So yeah. I'm fully behind Apple for supporting the prosecution of thieves, if in fact they do support it. With all the publicity this story has received, the police would still investigate even if Apple said not to. After all, a crime was committed.
Jason Chen at Gizmodo did nothing wrong. He notified Apple and promptly returned the phone.
Gizmodo: "Hi, Apple customer service? I think I have a new model of your iPhone here."
Apple: "Sorry, we don't know anything about that."
Gizmodo: "No? Okay, well I thought I'd try."
Gizmodo: "Here are the Facebook pics of the guy who lost the phone. Did we mention we paid $5000 to some dude to purchase this?"
Gizmodo: "We tried contacting Apple, but they wouldn't say anything."
Gizmodo: "See this information about the phone owner in Facebook? Haha. It's a public profile. What a shame there's no means to contact him from his Facebook profile."
Gizmodo: "Hey, we did nothing wrong. Totally good faith attempt on our part to contact Apple in order to return this."
Gizmodo: "Check this out. We took the fucking thing apart and here are detailed photos of what's inside it."
Gizmodo: "We have the utmost respect for whoever lost this as it's their personal property and we hope to return it shortly."
Gizmodo: "Damn, look at the design on this baby. Let's see if we can put it back together again and not have broken it."
Gizmodo: "We finally stalled enough that we coerced Apple legal into sending us a letter asking for its return. Cha-ching baby! We're fucking awesome. Did I mention we paid some dude $5000 after he claimed he 'found' it in a bar? We so fucking rock!"
Their approval rules aren't 'wildly inconsistent'. They are consistent within context of the app, meaning if the app in question goes down one of the questionable paths like mature content, duplicates core functionality, or questionable content, then it is possible it will be banned.
Almost all apps showing sexy, non-nude pictures? Banned.
Playboy app showing sexy playmates? Approved and featured on iTunes.
No inconsistency there.
I don't understand the need to make all those straw men...
An imperfect analogy is now a straw man? Bit of a stretch, don't you think?
It wasn't easy (litterally), but worth it.
I was thinking about what it would have meant if you had said it wasn't easy figuratively.
Surely you mean figguratively?
Really? Google previously said one thing. Nevertheless, they backpedaled and said something different. Was it that hard?
That is why I use Linux.
The bitch is ugly, but she has big boobs and gets the job done.
Also, none of my friends want to "use" her.
Well no wonder.
My ideas are not original. In fact, the idea sort of comes from various story lines from popular SciFi shows like Star Trek and SG-1. Not only should we be creating digital archives, we should be creating digital archives inside of orbital vehicles that are capable of sustaining their own orbits indefinitely.
And when another civilization comes across it, it takes control of their captain's mind, has him/her/it experience a lifetime as a member of the other culture, then permanently wipes itself and leaves them with nothing but a flute?
The best arrangement is to lay them out as a fractal a la Sierpinski carpet. Produces a decent tight packing and ensures that you are able to maximize your space. Other options that came to mind are if you have curved desks you could arrange them in a 69 fashion. Or get desks of different dimensions... some square, some straight, a few L-shaped ones. Then you could make the developers arrange their desks daily in a game of office Tetris.
How do they force numbers to paint in those "Paint by Numbers" books?
About the UK and Open Source:
No, this side of the Atlantic would have involved a closed-tender process; a decision made by closed doors based on proprietary software and we'd be completely in the dark about costs, about delays, and about functionality.
http://www.google.com/search?q=uk+government+open+source
Odd... seems the opposite to what the esteemed "ChiefMonkeyGrinder" claims. Of course, one of the links there is "words, not deeds" so perhaps all the noise about open source is just that.
Ah... The big deal there is...if there's nothing you want offered, was there anything really lost by sticking to your principles?
As with anything, it depends. In the simple case I'd say you're right -- if you want a portable radio that allows you to record and no devices feature recording, that's easy. However, the PS3 might do 97% of what you want but you're holding out because the last 3% (some downloadable content on PSN) has DRM you object to. Do you buy it and use the 97%, but vote with your wallet by not buying anything off PSN, or do you choose a different gaming console with an entirely different set of tradeoffs to make?
To be fair, it requires you to be logged in to buy it, so you'd already have the Other OS option disabled. If you don't update your firmware, any game that already works and doesn't require you to be online will continue to work.
That's the idea of boycotting in capitalism; not to punish companies, but to consciously refuse to compromise your principles, resulting in you getting only what you truly want.
Or, when what you truly want isn't offered in the marketplace, getting nothing.
Nope. Plenty of classified research goes on in university research labs.
Then I stand corrected.
Can I just commandeer a ride in a police car if I need it, after all, my taxes paid for it, so I own it right?
A police car is there to assist in the protection of everyone, not just a select few. So it's very analogous to the sharing of data. If you really want a ride, I'm sure one could be arranged as long as you don't mind sitting in the back seat and having no choice in the destination.