A 64-bit browser. Haven't gotten around to wrapping it. I don't use Flash enough to care, and one product page isn't enough to make me want to go to the trouble.
But seriously, since when did pure flash websites become acceptable?
You want an open platform, WM fits the bill for as far along as you are probably going to get in the cellphone world.
The remaining question is, do you have the skills to do this fast enough, and do you work cheap enough, for it to take less than $400 of your time?
Don't get me wrong, I'd do it regardless -- although VideoDownloader is absolutely NOT what you want to be doing from your couch; I'd look for whatever API they gave the iPhone and just stream h.264.
Yeah I agree. Stores make profit - Whatever happened to shoplifting. It must have no effect!
Except this isn't shoplifting so much as buying the cheap Chinese ripoff version.
You see, shoplifting actually removes the item from the store. No matter how bad piracy gets, if the original item has any value, there's still a chance to sell it.
Which, you would think, would tend to show not only that the MPAA's anti-piracy tactics are working, but that there isn't really a correlation (positive or negative) between piracy and MPAA profits.
It's not about which controller makes you better, it's about which controller provides the best control.
If by "best control" you mean "best controlling experience", which it looks like, from the rest of your comment, then that's a circular argument -- that's basically saying it's about which is a better controller.
Other than that, I honestly can't figure out what you mean. If a game is designed to be played with a joystick, and you play better with a mouse, then why is the mouse the natural choice for the game, but, say, an aimbot would be cheating? Or are you saying that games should come with auto-aiming enabled?
1) Loki, the only major Linux commercial game porting company failed
I don't think a game porting company is a viable business model. I don't actually do game development, but let me start with what I know...
Suppose we start with a website that works fine in IE 6. It's been developed over the years, features have been added, amazing things have been done, and now it's ready to deploy.
But now, someone wants it to work with Firefox.
This means we now have to dig into the CSS and find a way to make it display the way it always did on IE, but also now display properly on Firefox. We have to dig into the JavaScript, looking for old hacks, some working around IE quirks, some taking advantage of IE-specific, non-standard features. And we have to scrap any ActiveX stuff.
That's going to take awhile even with your own team, who knows your codebase (all its twists and turns), remembers the hacks (vaguely)... Would anyone in their right mind try to outsource that, too?
Now, compare this to a website which has been designed to the standards, and tested on multiple browsers from Day 1. Even if you leave out IE for awhile, you're probably still going to be OK on IE8 -- and for now, you've made sure no platform-specific hacks creep in, especially in critical, tempermental bits of code that you don't want to touch.
Sure, it's going to be much easier to do either of the above if your code is modular, but developing cross-platform in the first place is going to help encourage that modularity, too.
And the above is even more relevant to game development, as it also affects your choice of platform -- if you develop an OpenGL game in the first place, it's going to be much easier to port. But even if you need to have a DirectX version, you're still going to be much better off if you start out doing both than if you try to do it after the fact -- and a third party trying to do it after the fact is even worse.
So, I absolutely do think that a game company could produce Linux and Mac ports with little enough work for it to be worth it. Some very small studios, like Introversion, actually do, and they haven't failed (that I know of). Some larger ones, like id and Epic, also do their own ports.
2) DirectX is the API of choice on the platform with the most marketshare
Until you have to start thinking about consoles. Don't the PS3 and the Wii both have some sort of GL implementation available, even if it's not their best API?
3) many of the latest features are inconsistently supported in OpenGL
That does suck, and GL does tend to lag a bit behind DirectX. I suspect this is part of the whole "chicken and egg" problem, though.
on point 4 - the problem isn't so much with OpenGL - many game engine features are built to the Windows API. Want Havok Physics?
I'd say the opposite is true. I find it very strange that Havok would depend on Windows at all, given how completely isolated a problem physics is, but there are a couple of open alternatives -- some "open" as in "BSD license", so they can be included in commercial games.
But for the most part, I would expect a game to be more easily portable than many other things, if designed properly. Thunderbird might have to hook in to Spotlight manually, in order to make your email searchable. A spamfilter is going to have to deal with your email client directly -- or it's going to have to make arrangements with the host OS to sit between that client and your mailserver. An IM client probably has to talk to the local sound system, the network, the window manager, the system tray, even a webcam. And so on.
But games... Games have to talk to the network (which is mostly the same across platforms (BSD-based) and there are very light libraries on top of the major ones), the local filesystem (which can look like POSIX pretty much anywhere you go), to sound
Also, you don't have to pay $100 to run Firefox on your iPhone, some developer has to pay $100 to provide you with a free copy of Firefox to run on your iPhone.
So what happens when I'm the developer?
That's icing on top of my "hey, this is a neat phone" cake.
I think the point here is that for less than the price of the iPhone, I can get an EEE PC, which is a sub-notebook. If it was a $10 phone that I picked up as part of a wireless contract, it would be frustrating, but not nearly so much. But it's priced above some fully-functional portable general-purpose computers, which means I expect a lot more out of it.
"Just a neat phone" isn't worth $400. A neat phone that's also an all-in-one universal remote control, communication device, media player, and pretty much any gadget I want it to be is awesome, and well worth the money -- but the iPhone is not that, because Apple would rather the "neat phone" part be seamless than to make anything possible with it.
I realize this may still not apply to you, but understand, it doesn't have to affect you, either. I can probably put Linux on your "real computer", but that doesn't mean you have to. But it's nice to have the option.
The whole "locking to one cell provider" thing is just adding insult to injury.
Frankly, the biggest problem with the iPhone (IMNSHO) is the lack of Flash support, and that's got nothing to do with Apple, that's simply due to Adobe not having an ARM compiled version yet. C'mon, Adobe, get with it!
Not really. I suspect there's an ARM version already, probably somewhere in the wild -- Adobe's bigger problems are porting to 64-bit, apparently.
In this case, it's that Steve Jobs thinks the mobile version is too crippled, and the desktop version is too bloated, and is asking for an in-between version specifically for the iPhone.
There's a start. Not encouraging that it seems to be Windows Mobile, and the entire site appears to be Flash (so I can't see it)...
Why does Apple get a bad rap for this yet you don't cry out against the others?
I do, actually. But this isn't an article about the Remote Control SDK, or XNA, or any of the others. Or, in other words, it's offtopic.
Seriously, if I said I was anti-McCain, would your response be "But you don't cry foul against Ted Stevens!" I do cry foul against Ted Stevens, he just might not be relevant to that debate. Must I list absolutely everything I have a problem with to state that I have a problem with one thing?
I don't like that the iPhone's closed, and I also don't like overcooked vegetables, pollution, Microsoft, rabies, that little thing my video drivers do...
Their ethos is to simply have it work, one way, every time, all the time.
Is that why OS X on the desktop includes Terminal?
I understand that this is the preferred Apple Way, but they've never been quite this closed about it before.
Perhaps a Zune-phone could have 9-gillion switches and 10 layers deep drop down menus
I'm sorry, but how is one dialog which says "This is a third-party app and not approved by Apple. Continue?" adds up to some overwhelmingly huge number of options. If choice makes you so uncomfortable, you'd probably never see it, but if you did, one "cancel" and you can go back to the safe, warm, Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Zone.
Would you say the same thing if they didn't release an SDK at all?
Yes. And I did, before they announced the SDK.
Do I hear you crying foul about XNA, PS3 development, Verizon GIN?
No, but mostly because those are offtopic. Oh, and PS3 development is a bit more open -- PS3 Linux may be hypervisor'd, but it makes no restrictions about what software you actually run inside them.
Apple is not hindering things such as jailbreak.
Just looked it up, looks like I was wrong. I'd assumed that Jailbreak worked through exploits, similarly to how you might run third-party apps on a game console that disallows them.
The question in my mind, which I can't seem to find a clear answer to now, is whether this is akin to a game console (where an exploit and/or some soldering must be used), or whether it's akin to installing Linux on a Mac (Apple isn't going to help you, but if you can boot from the CD, they won't stop you.)
Also useful if you switch email accounts at a later date.
At which point, you still have the IMAP access. So that's really only useful if, again, you believe you have a reason to backup your email -- meaning you don't trust Google to do it.
Which is a good reason, but say it plainly.
I use Spotlight regularly, and I routinely find it useful that my email archive is included in its search, whether or not I'm online.
So what you mean is, it's useful to have that integration. I don't know if it's possible to write Spotlight plugins to this effect, but it seems like, when you're online, it still wouldn't be a bad idea to send that search over to Google.
Which also raises the question of how well Google Desktop Search might implement it.
I want my email archive to be a single collection, and if I switch email accounts I want to continue to archive to the same collection. That's not possible with IMAP.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "a collection", or why that's not possible with IMAP.
Not to mention that I've never met an IMAP client I didn't hate, and I do not trust an IMAP client to give me proper off-line access to my entire email archive.
Couple of commandline ones. Point is not that I think you should use IMAP instead of the web interface, just wondering why IMAP is worse than POP3 for backup here.
If he created a separate GMail account just for debugging purposes, then perhaps he would have checked it once or twice in the beginning and never checked back again, not realizing the stream of incoming messages.
That seems unlikely, given that this email address is jterry79@gmail.com (looks like a personal address to me). And I find it hard to imagine that someone who knows enough about GMail to archive it wouldn't know about labels and filters -- why would you need a separate address, when you can simply filter on your main one?
The framerate we are concerned with (this is a video card), is the framerate used to drive the output device. Therefore HD encoder is correct (we are not interested in decoding a stream here, we are encoding the frame buffer to the TV).
I suspect that the actual problems I've experienced are more on the side of decoding and/or scaling, and of trying to keep up with the framerate in the actual video. That is, it's still possible for h.264 to require more CPU than you have to decode realtime, no matter how fast your video card is. And that's why we want a hardware decoder.
the nVidia driver displayed some anomolies with it, using a 5200 FX, when I last tried it
To be fair, it was awhile for me, too, but it wasn't "some anomalies". It was more like crashing and/or making the rest of your desktop unusable, sometimes an inability to go fullscreen, etc.
If I am trying to display to a TV set, overscan should be accomodated. Most of the MythTV themes DO NOT.
Fair enough.
I still think that you should not be allowed to call it a "1080i" set if it's really more like 1000i, due to overscan. It's probably offtopic here, but I still consider it to be a defect.
Throw up as many "are you sure" messages as you like, but if I really want Firefox, I get Firefox, because it's my hardware. In fact, speaking of Firefox -- you can turn on the anti-phishing support if you really want to, but even that is still going to let you go to that site, if you really want.
Except it isn't my hardware, because I am not buying an iPhone as long as Apple continues to lock it down like this.
Fuck you, too. That wasn't entirely a rhetorical question. Find me something comparable -- even a fair bit worse -- and I'll buy it.
For instance, you buy a toaster from GE, and you want to run Linux on it. GE doesn't have to help you, and if you choose to make it happen, that's your prerogative. Same thing here, no different.
Bullshit. GE doesn't put a bunch of general-purpose computing hardware in there, and then use DRM to (try to) prevent me from putting my own software on it.
There is a difference between "not helping" and "actively hindering." Why is this such a hard concept?
But how are you going to get this app on the iPhone?
I'm sorry, it's a bit more than that, when Apple goes out of their way to ensure that apps are signed -- by Apple.
Compare this to Windows Mobile, which is actually more open -- the SDK might cost money (I haven't checked), but you can actually go out and download apps to your desktop, then sync them over to your phone, without Microsoft's blessing.
Go read up on "jailbreak".
All they are saying is that you cannot use their SDK to develop these apps.... Don't agree? Don't use their SDK and go it on your own, you have that right after all.
You seem to be implying that this is like Microsoft charging for Visual Studio. It's not.
You see, I can still run Cygwin or MinGW on Windows, and there are third-party compilers. Not so with the iPhone -- I'm not sure if it's even illegal, but it certainly requires more than simply writing the software.
So, "go it on your own" may not be a viable option -- not because Apple isn't helping, but because they are actively hindering.
That is not the same thing. Apple turning a blind eye is not the same as Sony actively opening the door.
Apple has never cared about hobbyists tinkering with their hardware.
Then why lock the hardware down in the first place?
No you don't. You have to pay $100 if you want to use Apple's distribution channel.
I'm not sure it's even legal to do it through
You think this is immoral? Really?
It's questionable, at least, to try to dictate to me what I may do with something I own.
This is a phone, not a general purpose PC. If it were a PC, it would not be alright.
Ok. What defines a PC?
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Microsoft just came out with a new kind of computer. Maybe it was the idea of putting the computer in the monitor (iMac-style), maybe it was a Tablet computer, something of that nature.
Except that this time, it won't run Linux -- it actually requires a digitally-signed copy of Windows.
Would that be alright? Really?
And keep in mind, that's not even as bad -- Windows still lets you install third-party apps without Microsoft's blessing.
But again, ethics or not, I am not buying it. As soon as I see an Android phone I like, maybe, but Apple's lost me as a customer. And that's about money, too.
Why do so many people assume that Apple is Microsoft or Sony? I've never gotten that impression. They are by and large very open.
And you are obviously an apple fanboi.
I can put Linux on a PS3. It will be crippled, but it will run.
I have to pay $100 to put my app on the iPhone, and Apple has to approve it in order for anyone else to see it.
Even if Apple opens this to all comers, in what way is this alright? Compare to any open platform, and it's obscene -- Windows, and Windows Mobile, is more open than the iPhone.
Seriously, this is like saying "Well, ok, he's carrying an AK47 and a live hand grenade, but why do you assume he's going to kill anything? He's by and large very non-violent."
Whether it's evil or not is one debate. Whether it's open to regulation is another debate. But it is not open, by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not buying an iPhone because of this.
Slashdot Mirror
A 64-bit browser. Haven't gotten around to wrapping it. I don't use Flash enough to care, and one product page isn't enough to make me want to go to the trouble.
But seriously, since when did pure flash websites become acceptable?
And so I'll wait.
Seriously, was there no other source for this news than one which has the headline:
The remaining question is, do you have the skills to do this fast enough, and do you work cheap enough, for it to take less than $400 of your time?
Don't get me wrong, I'd do it regardless -- although VideoDownloader is absolutely NOT what you want to be doing from your couch; I'd look for whatever API they gave the iPhone and just stream h.264.
Care to explain? Or link? Anything?
At a first glance, this would seem to be false -- a "collection" could simply be a label, or a label with a filter. What am I missing?
Or you can just insult me:
Except this isn't shoplifting so much as buying the cheap Chinese ripoff version.
You see, shoplifting actually removes the item from the store. No matter how bad piracy gets, if the original item has any value, there's still a chance to sell it.
It's a good point, but you need a better analogy.
To which I would point out that The Pirate Bay is also setting records.
Which, you would think, would tend to show not only that the MPAA's anti-piracy tactics are working, but that there isn't really a correlation (positive or negative) between piracy and MPAA profits.
Seems to me the world would be a better place if they got that backwards one year.
I wish I was in a position to organize just such a screw-up. Just swap the press releases...
No, wait, I don't condone such underhanded tactics. May as well be blunt and honest. Where's my cluebat?
I'm not entirely sure the bashing is new...
But I can't think of anyone more deserving of bashing than Scientologists.
Is there a particular reason that such a thing couldn't be built? Or why such a thing would be more difficult to build than what already exists?
Fine, then. Windows Mobile is more open than the iPhone. And that is a sad, sad thing.
If by "best control" you mean "best controlling experience", which it looks like, from the rest of your comment, then that's a circular argument -- that's basically saying it's about which is a better controller.
Other than that, I honestly can't figure out what you mean. If a game is designed to be played with a joystick, and you play better with a mouse, then why is the mouse the natural choice for the game, but, say, an aimbot would be cheating? Or are you saying that games should come with auto-aiming enabled?
I don't think a game porting company is a viable business model. I don't actually do game development, but let me start with what I know...
Suppose we start with a website that works fine in IE 6. It's been developed over the years, features have been added, amazing things have been done, and now it's ready to deploy.
But now, someone wants it to work with Firefox.
This means we now have to dig into the CSS and find a way to make it display the way it always did on IE, but also now display properly on Firefox. We have to dig into the JavaScript, looking for old hacks, some working around IE quirks, some taking advantage of IE-specific, non-standard features. And we have to scrap any ActiveX stuff.
That's going to take awhile even with your own team, who knows your codebase (all its twists and turns), remembers the hacks (vaguely)... Would anyone in their right mind try to outsource that, too?
Now, compare this to a website which has been designed to the standards, and tested on multiple browsers from Day 1. Even if you leave out IE for awhile, you're probably still going to be OK on IE8 -- and for now, you've made sure no platform-specific hacks creep in, especially in critical, tempermental bits of code that you don't want to touch.
Sure, it's going to be much easier to do either of the above if your code is modular, but developing cross-platform in the first place is going to help encourage that modularity, too.
And the above is even more relevant to game development, as it also affects your choice of platform -- if you develop an OpenGL game in the first place, it's going to be much easier to port. But even if you need to have a DirectX version, you're still going to be much better off if you start out doing both than if you try to do it after the fact -- and a third party trying to do it after the fact is even worse.
So, I absolutely do think that a game company could produce Linux and Mac ports with little enough work for it to be worth it. Some very small studios, like Introversion, actually do, and they haven't failed (that I know of). Some larger ones, like id and Epic, also do their own ports.
Until you have to start thinking about consoles. Don't the PS3 and the Wii both have some sort of GL implementation available, even if it's not their best API?
That does suck, and GL does tend to lag a bit behind DirectX. I suspect this is part of the whole "chicken and egg" problem, though.
I'd say the opposite is true. I find it very strange that Havok would depend on Windows at all, given how completely isolated a problem physics is, but there are a couple of open alternatives -- some "open" as in "BSD license", so they can be included in commercial games.
But for the most part, I would expect a game to be more easily portable than many other things, if designed properly. Thunderbird might have to hook in to Spotlight manually, in order to make your email searchable. A spamfilter is going to have to deal with your email client directly -- or it's going to have to make arrangements with the host OS to sit between that client and your mailserver. An IM client probably has to talk to the local sound system, the network, the window manager, the system tray, even a webcam. And so on.
But games... Games have to talk to the network (which is mostly the same across platforms (BSD-based) and there are very light libraries on top of the major ones), the local filesystem (which can look like POSIX pretty much anywhere you go), to sound
So what happens when I'm the developer?
I think the point here is that for less than the price of the iPhone, I can get an EEE PC, which is a sub-notebook. If it was a $10 phone that I picked up as part of a wireless contract, it would be frustrating, but not nearly so much. But it's priced above some fully-functional portable general-purpose computers, which means I expect a lot more out of it.
"Just a neat phone" isn't worth $400. A neat phone that's also an all-in-one universal remote control, communication device, media player, and pretty much any gadget I want it to be is awesome, and well worth the money -- but the iPhone is not that, because Apple would rather the "neat phone" part be seamless than to make anything possible with it.
I realize this may still not apply to you, but understand, it doesn't have to affect you, either. I can probably put Linux on your "real computer", but that doesn't mean you have to. But it's nice to have the option.
The whole "locking to one cell provider" thing is just adding insult to injury.
Not really. I suspect there's an ARM version already, probably somewhere in the wild -- Adobe's bigger problems are porting to 64-bit, apparently.
In this case, it's that Steve Jobs thinks the mobile version is too crippled, and the desktop version is too bloated, and is asking for an in-between version specifically for the iPhone.
There's a start. Not encouraging that it seems to be Windows Mobile, and the entire site appears to be Flash (so I can't see it)...
I do, actually. But this isn't an article about the Remote Control SDK, or XNA, or any of the others. Or, in other words, it's offtopic.
Seriously, if I said I was anti-McCain, would your response be "But you don't cry foul against Ted Stevens!" I do cry foul against Ted Stevens, he just might not be relevant to that debate. Must I list absolutely everything I have a problem with to state that I have a problem with one thing?
I don't like that the iPhone's closed, and I also don't like overcooked vegetables, pollution, Microsoft, rabies, that little thing my video drivers do...
Is that why OS X on the desktop includes Terminal?
I understand that this is the preferred Apple Way, but they've never been quite this closed about it before.
I'm sorry, but how is one dialog which says "This is a third-party app and not approved by Apple. Continue?" adds up to some overwhelmingly huge number of options. If choice makes you so uncomfortable, you'd probably never see it, but if you did, one "cancel" and you can go back to the safe, warm, Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Zone.
Yes. And I did, before they announced the SDK.
No, but mostly because those are offtopic. Oh, and PS3 development is a bit more open -- PS3 Linux may be hypervisor'd, but it makes no restrictions about what software you actually run inside them.
Just looked it up, looks like I was wrong. I'd assumed that Jailbreak worked through exploits, similarly to how you might run third-party apps on a game console that disallows them.
The question in my mind, which I can't seem to find a clear answer to now, is whether this is akin to a game console (where an exploit and/or some soldering must be used), or whether it's akin to installing Linux on a Mac (Apple isn't going to help you, but if you can boot from the CD, they won't stop you.)
At which point, you still have the IMAP access. So that's really only useful if, again, you believe you have a reason to backup your email -- meaning you don't trust Google to do it.
Which is a good reason, but say it plainly.
So what you mean is, it's useful to have that integration. I don't know if it's possible to write Spotlight plugins to this effect, but it seems like, when you're online, it still wouldn't be a bad idea to send that search over to Google.
Which also raises the question of how well Google Desktop Search might implement it.
I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "a collection", or why that's not possible with IMAP.
Couple of commandline ones. Point is not that I think you should use IMAP instead of the web interface, just wondering why IMAP is worse than POP3 for backup here.
Useful in the incredibly unlikely event that Google loses your data.
WTF?
This is Google you're talking about here. Your email is already indexed, and searchable better and faster than a desktop app will be able to.
Why not use IMAP?
It is useful to have it offline, but I don't really see the relevance of the other points you mention.
That seems unlikely, given that this email address is jterry79@gmail.com (looks like a personal address to me). And I find it hard to imagine that someone who knows enough about GMail to archive it wouldn't know about labels and filters -- why would you need a separate address, when you can simply filter on your main one?
I suspect that the actual problems I've experienced are more on the side of decoding and/or scaling, and of trying to keep up with the framerate in the actual video. That is, it's still possible for h.264 to require more CPU than you have to decode realtime, no matter how fast your video card is. And that's why we want a hardware decoder.
To be fair, it was awhile for me, too, but it wasn't "some anomalies". It was more like crashing and/or making the rest of your desktop unusable, sometimes an inability to go fullscreen, etc.
Fair enough.
I still think that you should not be allowed to call it a "1080i" set if it's really more like 1000i, due to overscan. It's probably offtopic here, but I still consider it to be a defect.
Which is moronic, but also not entirely true.
Throw up as many "are you sure" messages as you like, but if I really want Firefox, I get Firefox, because it's my hardware. In fact, speaking of Firefox -- you can turn on the anti-phishing support if you really want to, but even that is still going to let you go to that site, if you really want.
Except it isn't my hardware, because I am not buying an iPhone as long as Apple continues to lock it down like this.
Fuck you, too. That wasn't entirely a rhetorical question. Find me something comparable -- even a fair bit worse -- and I'll buy it.
Bullshit. GE doesn't put a bunch of general-purpose computing hardware in there, and then use DRM to (try to) prevent me from putting my own software on it.
There is a difference between "not helping" and "actively hindering." Why is this such a hard concept?
I'm sorry, it's a bit more than that, when Apple goes out of their way to ensure that apps are signed -- by Apple.
Compare this to Windows Mobile, which is actually more open -- the SDK might cost money (I haven't checked), but you can actually go out and download apps to your desktop, then sync them over to your phone, without Microsoft's blessing.
Go read up on "jailbreak".
You seem to be implying that this is like Microsoft charging for Visual Studio. It's not.
You see, I can still run Cygwin or MinGW on Windows, and there are third-party compilers. Not so with the iPhone -- I'm not sure if it's even illegal, but it certainly requires more than simply writing the software.
So, "go it on your own" may not be a viable option -- not because Apple isn't helping, but because they are actively hindering.
That is not the same thing. Apple turning a blind eye is not the same as Sony actively opening the door.
Then why lock the hardware down in the first place?
I'm not sure it's even legal to do it through
It's questionable, at least, to try to dictate to me what I may do with something I own.
Ok. What defines a PC?
Let's pretend, for a moment, that Microsoft just came out with a new kind of computer. Maybe it was the idea of putting the computer in the monitor (iMac-style), maybe it was a Tablet computer, something of that nature.
Except that this time, it won't run Linux -- it actually requires a digitally-signed copy of Windows.
Would that be alright? Really?
And keep in mind, that's not even as bad -- Windows still lets you install third-party apps without Microsoft's blessing.
But again, ethics or not, I am not buying it. As soon as I see an Android phone I like, maybe, but Apple's lost me as a customer. And that's about money, too.
And you are obviously an apple fanboi.
I can put Linux on a PS3. It will be crippled, but it will run.
I have to pay $100 to put my app on the iPhone, and Apple has to approve it in order for anyone else to see it.
Even if Apple opens this to all comers, in what way is this alright? Compare to any open platform, and it's obscene -- Windows, and Windows Mobile, is more open than the iPhone.
Seriously, this is like saying "Well, ok, he's carrying an AK47 and a live hand grenade, but why do you assume he's going to kill anything? He's by and large very non-violent."
Whether it's evil or not is one debate. Whether it's open to regulation is another debate. But it is not open, by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm not buying an iPhone because of this.
3... 2... Not buying.
What, you didn't see it coming?