Every generation is going to get smarter on the "computer grounding". When I was in my teens, my father thought that he could ground me by taking away the power cord to my Apple II. Little did he realize that the power cord for the dot matrix printer was identical:-)
It's worth considering that maybe you learned the lesson you were supposed to be learning after all...
iPhone is neat but for the TRUE mobile warrior/wackadoo like me it's cute and flashy but fairly useless.
Hmm, meets my needs pretty completely and combined 3 devices into 1 (Treo, ipod, and camera) with just the stock features.
VZW does allow me to tether a laptop for my needs, pretty much unfettered.
Tethering was one of the first things people got working with the iPhone actually. Google for "Nate True" for the details, I think he's the guy who did it first and has written it up the most completely.
On my handsets I can sync to what I want, ssh into stuff, get any kind of email, many useful things a mobile sysadmin needs.
ssh client and sshd have been out for months for the iPhone (and iPod touch of course). Email app native on the iPhone supports yahoo, gmail,.mac, AOL, IMAP, POP, and Exchange. My Outlook calendar at work synchs to it without problem. The system even renders.xls and.doc attachments properly unless they're doing something _very_ strange and exotic.
It ain't sexy and is kludgy (and the windoze phones always suck) but it can always be made to work reliably (your fiddling milage may very from handset to handset) without fear of a pushed firmware upgrade
Apple _never_ pushes updates. When you go into iTunes to sync (if you choose to use iTunes for syncing), it will let you know there's a new version available and asks if you want it - or if you want to stop being reminded.
No one with said needs can honestly claim that sort of thing from the iPhone. Laptop tethering isn't even an option. I'd buy one as-is if it were. Seriously, google Nate True's website, he had it working shortly after the iPhone came out. I used it for a presentation a few weeks ago when I found the place I was going to be presenting had no WIFI or network drops. iPhone using edge connection, running a proxy server. iPhone pulled a DHCP wifi address (ad-hoc) from my laptop, then I pointed the laptop to the iPhone's wifi IP address as the web proxy server.
I do like the iPhone (except for that damned virtual KYB) but for my needs, and surprisingly I've found many more like me than I ever expected to, it simply doesn't fit my needs. The keyboard took me about a week to get used to but, again coming from a Treo, I like this one much better. The buttons are larger, and you only have to be somewhat close-ish. The autocorrect and autocomplete features work very well. "OK, that' s not a word but here's something with the same number of letters that is most likely to be what you meant...or if it's a word, click it to add it to the dictionary" type thing. They even had the foresight to automatically add names in your contacts list to the dictionary so it doesn't autocorrect names of people you've entered there. That sort of workflow intelligence isn't something they can highlight in a 30 second commercial, obviously.
I understand what Apple is trying to sell but man, they needed to release it with the SDK from the get-go and allow for a tethering option, even if it were at $ATT's gawd-awful prices. A third party SDK has been out for months, and the official Apple one will be out in a couple months. And tethering, we've covered.
The issue is not about the device. The issue is about the restictive service. I would go out and buy an iPhone tomorrow if Verizon carried it, as Verizon is the ONLY carrier in NYC that I get reception from in my apartment. All coverage/service is not created equal, and in my case there is literally only one provider I can use.
(This is strange, the thread seems to be back from 10 days ago? So if I've made this point already feel free to disregard).
If Verizon was the only carrier for the iPhone, I probably wouldn't be able to use it. My Treo was locked to Verizon and was mostly unusable at my house. Which really sucks when you're on call and drop calls constantly during Sev-1 issues. So in my case AT&T worked out well, where Verizon wouldn't have. Unless the problem was with the Treo rather than Verizon, that's possible too, not sure.
I can't help but think that there would be about the same number of people bitching about this, regardless of if the contracted partner with Apple was AT&T, Cingular, T-mobile, Sprint, EIEIO, ROFL, or any other provider. For any product, it comes with (list) of (limitations), take it or leave it. All I can say, is that my $AT&T contract is $20 less per month than my Verizon contract for my Palm 600, so the iPhone pays for itself. If people want to be pissed off by this, (shrug) OK, go ahead, but, workflow and usability matter for something for me. Saving 20 bucks a month matters too. Between both, the iPhone makes sense for me regardless of who I have to contract with.
People who complain about this, I'm guessing, just like to bitch about things without any particular reason for same other than having something to complain about. Eventually you grow out of that whole "indignation based on look dammit" thing and get on with life.
Get on with life. Or not. Your choice. But fact remains, the device is well thought out, the workflow works, and only people who choose to not like it will not like it. It is waht it is, and what is is, is pretty damn well thought out. Get over it.
Go to your room, and I'm revoking your DHCP lease for the next 3 hours!
If the kids smart enough he can just assign himself a static IP, DNS, and subnet manually. Exactly! That's why it's such a good way to do it. "I am disabling your use of the following mechanism. If you can learn what it does and how you can do without it, then you will learn something useful".
Am I to understand that Cookie Monster is no longer a character on Sesame Street? He was the best one! If that's true, I'm moving to Cuba -- at least they're more upfront about their mind control. Where the heck did you get _that_? No, it's just that now he eats stuff other than just cookies. Which is silly given decades of character development, but not as silly as half-understanding something and making statements and decisions based on mostly-ignorance.
Video games, every kid having their own computer, dvd, etc. Being "sent to your room" is no longer punishment - the real task is to get them to come out except for meals.
Go to your room, and I'm revoking your DHCP lease for the next 3 hours!
I wonder why you would be hoping to see his response unless he had some sort of pattern to his posts... What do you call someone who, without fail, defends a particular company? Informative/insightful, in this case. He knows what he's talking about, and has the communication skills to present it in such a way that anyone who isn't blind to reality will understand. And it's not so much "defend(ing) a particular company", it's more about sharing his subject matter expertise with the group. Just because someone is correct and consistent doesn't somehow undermine their credibility - quite the opposite, in fact.
OK, how do you drag files from one volume to another, triggering this bug, without holding down a meta-key?
(and how is pointing out that it's a minor problem FUD?) Apparently, you're actually ignorant rather than lying. First for everything I guess. News to you apparently but, plug in an n-button USB mouse and for the last decade or so, It Just Works.
Luckily another design flaw in OS X makes it hard to trigger this bug. Because of the single-button mouse the only way to move files from one volume to another (rather than copying them) requires you to hold down some meta-key while dragging. If you just drag the files you get a copy. 1998 called, it wants its FUD back.
There ya go, Dave, being all informative, complete, accurate, and factual. You realize the haters are about to label you, let's see, what is it this time? Fanboi, apologist, and employee of Apple I think is due this time, right?
For the record, I saw the writeup and was hoping you'd have written a response, and am glad to see you did. Those of us who are capable of understanding facts and logic, rather than knee-jerk pretending that "w000, this is just as bad as Vista on a good day" and all that, appreciate your time and efforts.
David Hasselhoff is huge anywhere where you can't understand a word he is saying. So, everywhere then, is what you're saying? Gotta say though, his appearance in the Spongebob movie shows that he doesn't take himself too seriously so, I see that as a plus.
No, not govt jobs. Those pay crap. "Contractor" is gov-speak for "consultant". Usually, like consultants, former employees of the org they do work for. Like consultants, well-paid for expertise. Heh...funny you should mention that. Seems to describe my career path quite well. Now leading the team as a consultant, that I was part of when I got laid off as a direct hire. Took 3 or 4 years, got some outside experience, figured out that $VERYVERYVERYBIGCORPWHOSENAMEISTWOLETTERS isn't so bad after all, and went back. At a nice bump let's just say. It's not a game but, if it was, _I win_.
Already some poor government contractor is being asked to implement just that very system.
If they're a government contractor, I'm sure they're anything but poor...
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. So are you saying that gummint jobs pay better than your average conslutancy gig?
What blows my mind about it is that they frequently end up killing themselves when they get caught, probably because they know the government will do that (or worse) if they hang around. I wouldn't think it'd be a huge leap to think "Gee, if I don't use the lead-tainted paint on this product I won't have to kill myself later on..." Yup. The thing is, we can't rely on Chinese manufacturers or certainly their government to stop this. This stuff was brought into this country by an importer, and has someone's brand name on it. THAT company has a US presence. They need to be held fully responsible (not just some token fine and "Whoops, we got caught again"). If the fines shut 'em down, well, good. Test your products and this won't be a problem. It's time to start making this really hurt the companies who are bringing this crap into the country.
By all means, I'm in favor of the Chinese factory bosses offing themselves when they get caught but, lets make it hurt the people selling the stuff here too.
I will agree, however, that there's a pretty quick rush to throw "Chinese" into everything on this one, especially lacking some info that'd clear the whole thing up. OK, flogging my own site here but it's free and informative. Go to productrecallwatch.com and check out the items being recalled. 9 or 10 just yesterday. Note how many are from China. Note how many of those are for lead paint and now for _this_. I've only had the site up for a month or two, but the items being recalled are BY FAR from China, and BY FAR mostly about lead paint. It's not like this is something rare. They're putting toxic crap in products made for export to the US. I mean, who the hell would use lead paint in a _cake decoration_? How could they possibly not know that that would be (a) illegal here, and (b) a bad idea? If it's not ignorance, then it's either apathy our outright hostility causing them to do it.
If it was a couple items a month, yeah, OK, don't be so quick to judge. But when it's dozens a WEEK? I think we're past the "Whoa now, let's not be too hasty..." point.
You seem to have confused "wow, are you completely wrong for the following reasons" with "I disagree with you". Nothing incompetent about not releasing an SDK right away. They have a duty to protect shareholder value. Wish I was one. Should buy some. Haven't yet. But, cracking your iPhone or iPod Touch is trivial (seriously. Visit one website, done) so you can do whatever you want to it. It's a Unix box. Once you install sshd on it, a one-step install, it's Just Another Unix Box. How exactly can any reasonable interpretation of "We put a token barrier in the way of lazy/stupid people" be considered to be "incompetent"? They have to keep AT&T happy. So they make it not easy by default, but anyone who can google can find ipodtouchmods.com or whatever and just fix their iphone or iPod Touch. You seem to have fallen into the "lazy people will find it's hard" trap when, anyone with any reasonable amount of google-fu, will find that fixing the alleged problem is just a click away.
You see, it benefits Apple to pretend that it's hard to crack their stuff, while keeping their users happy. This isn't a surprise if you think about it.
>>FUD much? "pretty much risk bricking your phone" implies that this happens frequently, and it just plain doesn't.
Perhaps we just have to agree to disagree on that one. I don't believe for a second that the iphone was temporarily bricked for lack of compatibility testing - it was a deliberate act by apple to make people think twice about unlocking it. I have no doubt it'll happen again. It's not about agree or not, it's about you're flat-out-wrong. "pretty much risk bricking your phone" is completely and utterly false. Third party apps & unlockers are out there, easy to use, and as long as you're not that guy who just has to try everything shiny and new before understanding it, your risk of bricking is _zero_. If you jump into things you don't understand and don't bother to research, yeah, bad things might happen to you. (shrug). Which is a long way from your "pretty much risk bricking (it)".
>> You don't get it. Here's how it works.
Believe me, I get it just fine, we just don't agree over what consitutes a native SDK. Your point is irrelevant after February, by any definition. But I'm sure you'll find some reason to dismiss it...
All his points stand. There is no native SDK, Um, yeah, there is. And there's even one coming out from Apple in a few months. Maybe you missed the memo.
a pale imitation of GPS and no ability to be unlocked without voiding the warranty and bricking your phone every update. I think perhaps you are having terminology problems. What exactly does "bricking" mean in your mind? Because it's not happening, in droves. A few people, yeah, if you're an early adopter of a new process and then an early adopter of new firmware, you can be the guy to bleed on the edge I suppose, but, most people have the sense not to experiment with a prod box unless they are qualified to recover it.
Until Apple supports at least an SDK (which they have promised, so there's hope on the horizon) it is more than fair to call Apple incompetent. If only Apple had a release date for the mythical iPhone SDK. Oh wait, they do. (Feb '08). And in the meantime the SDK that folks are using to create many dozens of third-party apps is working just fine. But (shrug) whatever. Enjoy your RAZR or whatever, doesn't matter to me. Functionality and workflow matter more to me than whose SDK a third-party app was written on, or if my location is given to me using this flavor of technology instead of that.
>> There has been a third party SDK out for months, and ditto for unlocking them.
Do you really count those as features when you pretty much risk bricking your phone applying them? FUD much? "pretty much risk bricking your phone" implies that this happens frequently, and it just plain doesn't. After 1.1.1 came out, yeah, some people were annoye at Apple that their hack wasn't tested for compatibility with the new firmware, but, _come on_. So they had to wait for others to work out the process for them, but we're back to a 1-step "Your phone is now unjailed" process to install the installer for rather a lot of third-party apps. Which as you should know, you can revert out by just restoring the original OS image using iTunes.
I'd love to have a third party sdk to write my own stuff for it, much like I did for my symbian based p910 before it, but I don't want to eliminate my chances of getting future security updates for my phone, so I won't. You don't get it. Here's how it works. Today we can do what we want,at firmware rev 1.1.1. Eventually Apple will release 1.1.2 or something. And something will change. And your 1.1.1 phone will continue to work, modified as you have it today. At some point, the same really smart people who figured out how to get the third-party stuff onto 1.1.1 will figure out 1.1.2, release an easy process, and then you can upgrade. Or, if the fix is a security fix, you go back to an unhacked iPhone with the push of one button in iTunes, and upgrade from that state. It's just an OS image, there's nothing magic about it.
I should have been more specific. I'm talking about officially-supported unlocking, and an officially-supported SDK. So you can keep your phone under warranty and not have to wait for hacks to use your own SIM or applications. The contractual reasons for not having officially-supported unlocking are well known. And I have to mention that my Treo 600 was locked to Verizon, I couldn't use it with any other service provider. Oh, and there was no SIM card that I could access, and the battery also wasn't user-replacable, just for the record. The officially supported SDK comes out in January or so, if you don't want to use the third party one that's been out for months already.
You're not hallucinating, you simply don't make the distinction between official and unofficial. You're right, it doesn't matter to me whose sdk is used to write third-party apps for my iPhone. Why should it?
As for GPS, cell triangulation is NOT GPS. Considering there are phones out there with actual bona fide GPS in them, having to use a rough technology like cell triangulation seems a bit cheap. Fair enough - works more than well enough for me where I live, maybe I'm supposed to be bothered that it's coming from cellphone tower locations instead of time shifts measured from geosynchronous orbit but, functions the same from my perspective. And even if it didn't exist, that lack of one minor feature is more than made up for by the usability of the rest of the iPhone.
I'm not disliking it out of ignorance. Not having an official SDK or an official unlocking method, which can leave your phone inoperable with the latest firmware, is a show-stopper. Ah, so you _are_ intentionally distorting facts. Because this latest is quite a backpedal from your initial points that it couldn't be unlocked and had no SDK.
I'm not trolling, I swear. It was (is?) lacking a native SDK, GPS, the ability to be unlocked. It most definitely is not lacking a price:) Maybe you're not trolling, but you're pretty much completely wrong. There has been a third party SDK out for months, and ditto for unlocking them. Go to eBay and enter "unlocked iPhone" if you need confirmation on that. I've got 4 screens of icons on mine, so I'm thinking the third party apps either exist, or I'm hallucinating. GPS, yeah, not the satellite type, but there's one which triangulates where you are from cellphone towers and WIFI hotspots around you (kind of how LORAN works) and is pretty much spot-on for urban areas at least. Google for "Navizon GPS" for details on that. But yeah, that's one of those third party apps that you have to unjail the phone (a one-step process that anyone can follow) and someone had to write using some sort of SDK.
Point is, if you don't like the thing, fine, but if you're doing so out of ignorance then it's a distorted view. And if you're intentionally distorting reality, well then, not real likely to work in a group where lots of us know the subject matter.
There's also 5 million people in cook county, compared to the county I'm in which has less than 40000. Large numbers of people = more crime. Also downstate with all the open and empty space there's more places to hide things, and fewer police per square mile to catch stuff. In other words, there's plenty of crime downstate it's just that it's easier to see in the city.
Population density enters into it, of course. But the _real_ evil with the gun ban, is that only the honest people abide by it. The criminals don't, so now they have a legally enforced tactical advantage over their intended victims.
I'm not sure how that makes anyone safer but the criminals. Can you explain?
maybe it's time to weave in copper mesh into the T-shirt
Or Maybe arming some of the guards - but then again Chicago has some very restrictive gun laws, including a complete ban on handguns, so this may not be possible without relocating. But, that's unpossible! Everyone knows that once you ban guns in an area, crime immediately ceases and the criminals turn to a life of petting puppies and painting rainbow butterflies. Sheesh. To hear you talk, one would think that the criminals would (gasp!) exploit a legally-imposed tactical advantage or something.
OSX is vulnerable to viruses. The oldschool ones that come attached to a program and spread to every program installed on the machine each time an infected program is run. That's because/Applications is modifiable without any user intervention required.
Couple problems with your post. First, can you provide any examples of this having happened, ever? Because the theory and reality are two different things. Second - in any Unix system, files and directories have permissions for owner, group, and world. Read, write, and execute for each of these. System stuff, you have to be root to write. That's the fundamental difference that Windows is finally now trying to implement properly and Unix has had all along. The user shouldn't be _allowed_ to muck around in system internals. Installing software into an area which is protected requires you to authenticate as root do to it. But just installing it in your user space, well, you own that directory, go for it. It's an important role distinction because, letting users write over system files is exactly the design flaw that has caused Windows to be the virus-laden mess that it is.
Your hypothetical vulnerabilities because/Applications is world writable (it is?) sounds reasonable except that it just doesn't happen. I suspect that a close look at how the apps _within_ that directory are permissioned would explain that.
Back to the original topic, the "virus" in this example is just a script that breaks things, that if you allow yourself to run as root, will break things that root is allowed to break. That's a meatware vulnerability; has nothing to do with the OS. And meatware is much harder to patch.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth considering that maybe you learned the lesson you were supposed to be learning after all...
iPhone is neat but for the TRUE mobile warrior/wackadoo like me it's cute and flashy but fairly useless.
Hmm, meets my needs pretty completely and combined 3 devices into 1 (Treo, ipod, and camera) with just the stock features. VZW does allow me to tether a laptop for my needs, pretty much unfettered.Tethering was one of the first things people got working with the iPhone actually. Google for "Nate True" for the details, I think he's the guy who did it first and has written it up the most completely. On my handsets I can sync to what I want, ssh into stuff, get any kind of email, many useful things a mobile sysadmin needs.
ssh client and sshd have been out for months for the iPhone (and iPod touch of course). Email app native on the iPhone supports yahoo, gmail,
It ain't sexy and is kludgy (and the windoze phones always suck) but it can always be made to work reliably (your fiddling milage may very from handset to handset) without fear of a pushed firmware upgrade
Apple _never_ pushes updates. When you go into iTunes to sync (if you choose to use iTunes for syncing), it will let you know there's a new version available and asks if you want it - or if you want to stop being reminded.
No one with said needs can honestly claim that sort of thing from the iPhone. Laptop tethering isn't even an option. I'd buy one as-is if it were. Seriously, google Nate True's website, he had it working shortly after the iPhone came out. I used it for a presentation a few weeks ago when I found the place I was going to be presenting had no WIFI or network drops. iPhone using edge connection, running a proxy server. iPhone pulled a DHCP wifi address (ad-hoc) from my laptop, then I pointed the laptop to the iPhone's wifi IP address as the web proxy server. I do like the iPhone (except for that damned virtual KYB) but for my needs, and surprisingly I've found many more like me than I ever expected to, it simply doesn't fit my needs. The keyboard took me about a week to get used to but, again coming from a Treo, I like this one much better. The buttons are larger, and you only have to be somewhat close-ish. The autocorrect and autocomplete features work very well. "OK, that' s not a word but here's something with the same number of letters that is most likely to be what you meant...or if it's a word, click it to add it to the dictionary" type thing. They even had the foresight to automatically add names in your contacts list to the dictionary so it doesn't autocorrect names of people you've entered there. That sort of workflow intelligence isn't something they can highlight in a 30 second commercial, obviously.
I understand what Apple is trying to sell but man, they needed to release it with the SDK from the get-go and allow for a tethering option, even if it were at $ATT's gawd-awful prices. A third party SDK has been out for months, and the official Apple one will be out in a couple months. And tethering, we've covered.
(This is strange, the thread seems to be back from 10 days ago? So if I've made this point already feel free to disregard). If Verizon was the only carrier for the iPhone, I probably wouldn't be able to use it. My Treo was locked to Verizon and was mostly unusable at my house. Which really sucks when you're on call and drop calls constantly during Sev-1 issues. So in my case AT&T worked out well, where Verizon wouldn't have. Unless the problem was with the Treo rather than Verizon, that's possible too, not sure.
I can't help but think that there would be about the same number of people bitching about this, regardless of if the contracted partner with Apple was AT&T, Cingular, T-mobile, Sprint, EIEIO, ROFL, or any other provider. For any product, it comes with (list) of (limitations), take it or leave it. All I can say, is that my $AT&T contract is $20 less per month than my Verizon contract for my Palm 600, so the iPhone pays for itself. If people want to be pissed off by this, (shrug) OK, go ahead, but, workflow and usability matter for something for me. Saving 20 bucks a month matters too. Between both, the iPhone makes sense for me regardless of who I have to contract with. People who complain about this, I'm guessing, just like to bitch about things without any particular reason for same other than having something to complain about. Eventually you grow out of that whole "indignation based on look dammit" thing and get on with life. Get on with life. Or not. Your choice. But fact remains, the device is well thought out, the workflow works, and only people who choose to not like it will not like it. It is waht it is, and what is is, is pretty damn well thought out. Get over it.
If the kids smart enough he can just assign himself a static IP, DNS, and subnet manually. Exactly! That's why it's such a good way to do it. "I am disabling your use of the following mechanism. If you can learn what it does and how you can do without it, then you will learn something useful".
Where the heck did you get _that_? No, it's just that now he eats stuff other than just cookies. Which is silly given decades of character development, but not as silly as half-understanding something and making statements and decisions based on mostly-ignorance.
Video games, every kid having their own computer, dvd, etc. Being "sent to your room" is no longer punishment - the real task is to get them to come out except for meals.
Go to your room, and I'm revoking your DHCP lease for the next 3 hours!(and how is pointing out that it's a minor problem FUD?)
Apparently, you're actually ignorant rather than lying. First for everything I guess. News to you apparently but, plug in an n-button USB mouse and for the last decade or so, It Just Works.
There ya go, Dave, being all informative, complete, accurate, and factual. You realize the haters are about to label you, let's see, what is it this time? Fanboi, apologist, and employee of Apple I think is due this time, right?
For the record, I saw the writeup and was hoping you'd have written a response, and am glad to see you did. Those of us who are capable of understanding facts and logic, rather than knee-jerk pretending that "w000, this is just as bad as Vista on a good day" and all that, appreciate your time and efforts.
If they're a government contractor, I'm sure they're anything but poor...
I find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. So are you saying that gummint jobs pay better than your average conslutancy gig?By all means, I'm in favor of the Chinese factory bosses offing themselves when they get caught but, lets make it hurt the people selling the stuff here too.
If it was a couple items a month, yeah, OK, don't be so quick to judge. But when it's dozens a WEEK? I think we're past the "Whoa now, let's not be too hasty..." point.
You seem to have confused "wow, are you completely wrong for the following reasons" with "I disagree with you". Nothing incompetent about not releasing an SDK right away. They have a duty to protect shareholder value. Wish I was one. Should buy some. Haven't yet. But, cracking your iPhone or iPod Touch is trivial (seriously. Visit one website, done) so you can do whatever you want to it. It's a Unix box. Once you install sshd on it, a one-step install, it's Just Another Unix Box. How exactly can any reasonable interpretation of "We put a token barrier in the way of lazy/stupid people" be considered to be "incompetent"? They have to keep AT&T happy. So they make it not easy by default, but anyone who can google can find ipodtouchmods.com or whatever and just fix their iphone or iPod Touch. You seem to have fallen into the "lazy people will find it's hard" trap when, anyone with any reasonable amount of google-fu, will find that fixing the alleged problem is just a click away.
You see, it benefits Apple to pretend that it's hard to crack their stuff, while keeping their users happy. This isn't a surprise if you think about it.
Perhaps we just have to agree to disagree on that one. I don't believe for a second that the iphone was temporarily bricked for lack of compatibility testing - it was a deliberate act by apple to make people think twice about unlocking it. I have no doubt it'll happen again.
It's not about agree or not, it's about you're flat-out-wrong. "pretty much risk bricking your phone" is completely and utterly false. Third party apps & unlockers are out there, easy to use, and as long as you're not that guy who just has to try everything shiny and new before understanding it, your risk of bricking is _zero_. If you jump into things you don't understand and don't bother to research, yeah, bad things might happen to you. (shrug). Which is a long way from your "pretty much risk bricking (it)".
>> You don't get it. Here's how it works.
Believe me, I get it just fine, we just don't agree over what consitutes a native SDK. Your point is irrelevant after February, by any definition. But I'm sure you'll find some reason to dismiss it...
Do you really count those as features when you pretty much risk bricking your phone applying them?
FUD much? "pretty much risk bricking your phone" implies that this happens frequently, and it just plain doesn't. After 1.1.1 came out, yeah, some people were annoye at Apple that their hack wasn't tested for compatibility with the new firmware, but, _come on_. So they had to wait for others to work out the process for them, but we're back to a 1-step "Your phone is now unjailed" process to install the installer for rather a lot of third-party apps. Which as you should know, you can revert out by just restoring the original OS image using iTunes.
I'd love to have a third party sdk to write my own stuff for it, much like I did for my symbian based p910 before it, but I don't want to eliminate my chances of getting future security updates for my phone, so I won't. You don't get it. Here's how it works. Today we can do what we want,at firmware rev 1.1.1. Eventually Apple will release 1.1.2 or something. And something will change. And your 1.1.1 phone will continue to work, modified as you have it today. At some point, the same really smart people who figured out how to get the third-party stuff onto 1.1.1 will figure out 1.1.2, release an easy process, and then you can upgrade. Or, if the fix is a security fix, you go back to an unhacked iPhone with the push of one button in iTunes, and upgrade from that state. It's just an OS image, there's nothing magic about it.
You're not hallucinating, you simply don't make the distinction between official and unofficial.
You're right, it doesn't matter to me whose sdk is used to write third-party apps for my iPhone. Why should it?
As for GPS, cell triangulation is NOT GPS. Considering there are phones out there with actual bona fide GPS in them, having to use a rough technology like cell triangulation seems a bit cheap.
Fair enough - works more than well enough for me where I live, maybe I'm supposed to be bothered that it's coming from cellphone tower locations instead of time shifts measured from geosynchronous orbit but, functions the same from my perspective. And even if it didn't exist, that lack of one minor feature is more than made up for by the usability of the rest of the iPhone.
I'm not disliking it out of ignorance. Not having an official SDK or an official unlocking method, which can leave your phone inoperable with the latest firmware, is a show-stopper. Ah, so you _are_ intentionally distorting facts. Because this latest is quite a backpedal from your initial points that it couldn't be unlocked and had no SDK.
Point is, if you don't like the thing, fine, but if you're doing so out of ignorance then it's a distorted view. And if you're intentionally distorting reality, well then, not real likely to work in a group where lots of us know the subject matter.
Population density enters into it, of course. But the _real_ evil with the gun ban, is that only the honest people abide by it. The criminals don't, so now they have a legally enforced tactical advantage over their intended victims.
I'm not sure how that makes anyone safer but the criminals. Can you explain?
Or Maybe arming some of the guards - but then again Chicago has some very restrictive gun laws, including a complete ban on handguns, so this may not be possible without relocating. But, that's unpossible! Everyone knows that once you ban guns in an area, crime immediately ceases and the criminals turn to a life of petting puppies and painting rainbow butterflies. Sheesh. To hear you talk, one would think that the criminals would (gasp!) exploit a legally-imposed tactical advantage or something.
Couple problems with your post. First, can you provide any examples of this having happened, ever? Because the theory and reality are two different things. Second - in any Unix system, files and directories have permissions for owner, group, and world. Read, write, and execute for each of these. System stuff, you have to be root to write. That's the fundamental difference that Windows is finally now trying to implement properly and Unix has had all along. The user shouldn't be _allowed_ to muck around in system internals. Installing software into an area which is protected requires you to authenticate as root do to it. But just installing it in your user space, well, you own that directory, go for it. It's an important role distinction because, letting users write over system files is exactly the design flaw that has caused Windows to be the virus-laden mess that it is.
Your hypothetical vulnerabilities because
Back to the original topic, the "virus" in this example is just a script that breaks things, that if you allow yourself to run as root, will break things that root is allowed to break. That's a meatware vulnerability; has nothing to do with the OS. And meatware is much harder to patch.