However, FWIW, I couldn't get either of his demos, the Java or the JavaScript, to work on Firefox 2.0.0.6 on Windows XP, despite the fact that the author says that both work on Firefox.
It worked on my XP system and covered everything but the Start Menu and Task Bar. Getting it to close was simply a matter of right clicking on Firefox in the Task Bar and closing it down. It's certainly an annoyance, but it's not as bad as the article makes it seem to be. Anybody with a brain (which admittedly excludes about 60% of the population) can figure out how to close Firefox and thus the Java App.
With all the noise the RIAA and MPAA are making about copyright violations (and the subsequent lawsuits) can you blame him? If Linux ever starts making serious dents into Microsoft's market share, how long until they begin employing similar tactics?
Citizens of the planet prepare to put on your best dancing shoes so you can take to the streets and rejoice. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their army of flying drones come to LIBERATE you!
We apologize in advance for all of the collateral damage, but remember, freedom comes at a cost and the more infrastructure that is destroyed and the more people that are killed, the more "progress" we make!
What's that fellow US citizens? Enough "liberation" you say? Nonsense! If we stop liberating people who live in countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 then the terrorists win.
It makes perfect sense to me. It's Economics 101. AT&T had to make changes to it's network in order to work with the iPhone and it had to give up control to the phone manufacturer over aspects of the phone that it had never done with other phone manufacturers in the past. All of that comes at a cost and AT&T would have been irresponsible to incur those costs without the chances of turning a profit. That profit comes by having users of the iPhone locked into a two year contract. You don't like it, then don't buy an iPhone. Problem solved.
None of the 10 are necessarily deal breakers in and of themselves, but when taken together I can't justify buying an iPhone just yet. I trust enough of these issues will be resolved in the second generation:
1) It's best to avoid the first generation of a product from any manufacturer. There are sure to be issues.
2) Lack of 3G support. I'm an AT&T wireless customer and I don't live in an area that has 3G coverage yet, but I'm very close to areas that do and coverage in my area will happen sooner or later so why waste the money when you know that a version of the iPhone that supports 3G will happen. Likely sooner rather than later if they plan on having any success when they launch in Europe.
3) Lacks the ability to record video. I don't record a lot of video on my phone but in this day and age with a phone that costs over $500... are you kidding me?
4) Lack of Flash and Java support on the browser. You can't claim to have a full fledged web browser on your phone unless you've got a browser that supports both Flash and Java. There's too many web sites out there that use them. I don't necessarily think they need to be turned on by default, but support for both should be there if you want to enable it.
5) The 2.0 megapixel camera. If I'm dropping several hundred bucks on a phone, it would be nice to have at least a 3.0 megapixel camera to take pictures with.
6) Lack of a built in GPS receiver. Google maps is great, but I can run it on my current phone (sans the sleek touchscreen interface). If I'm spending several hundred dollars on a phone I'd like one that can give me turn by turn directions as I'm en route (and can recalculate the route if I make a wrong turn) and I don't want to bother having to type in my starting address first, especially if I'm in an area I'm not familiar with.
7) Lack of a proper SDK so third parties can write apps for the phone. I'm sorry but Ajax as a third party development platform doesn't cut it for me. I want a smart phone that offers developers a way to write real third party applications that take advantage of the phones features. There is no way the manufacturer of a device can or will think of all of the ways in which a device can be used. A proper SDK extends the both the usability and the shelf life of any device.
8) Recessed head phone jack. I want a cell/phone MP3 player combination to have a standard headphone jack and that I can use with any pair of headphones that I either own now or will own in the future.
9) Inability to use the wide screen keyboard outside of Safari. I want to be able to use the wide screen on-screen keyboard in every application on the iPhone.
10) Inability to "search" in the contact list. I've got a ton of contacts and I don't want to have to scroll through them to find the contact I'm looking for.
All it takes is one malicious site to be open at the same time the Web interface is, and the attacker can gain access to your network, he says.
So don't manage any device on your network via it's web interface while browsing web sites you don't trust on the Internet. Problem solved. In this day and age you should be careful about opening links to non-trusted sites no matter what.
If you absolutely must do both at the same time, use one browser for the web and another to manage the device. If you're on Windows and you've got a brain then you've already installed a second browser to avoid the headache that is IE when possible anyway.
At some point you won't be able to buy an off the shelf PC without Vista. Then most consumers won't have much of a choice so it's really a moot point. In 4 or 5 years, most people will be running Vista.
I'm an AT&T customer and it costs an extra $9.99 a month for the basic media bundle which gives you access to Edge. So if you didn't have access to Edge before, you're going to have to pay an additional $9.99 a month for access to Edge and the ability to use WiFi. Now tell me, if you're dropping around $500 on a brand spanking new cellphone (and all of the joys and frustrations that come with a first generation product), do you think you'll blink at having to pay an extra $9.99 a month if you want WiFi? Further, if you have the ability to drop $500 on a cell phone, chances are pretty good you're probably already have access to Edge (or it's equivalent with another provider).
This is quite the non-issue for anybody who has the cash to drop on the iPhone. I can see why it would cause an uproar here, but the people bitching about it here aren't in Apple's target market to begin with. Apple isn't targeting the do-it-yourself for a cheap as possible gadget geek crowd. Apple is targeting the I want it to just work and be easy to use first adopter with cash to spare crowd. For people in that group an addition $9.99 a month, if they aren't already paying it, is a drop in the bucket.
I'm an AT&T customer and it costs me a grand total of $9.99 for the basic media bundle which gives me access to Edge and several hundred text messages a month. So if you didn't have access to Edge before, you're going to have to pay an additional $9.99 dollars a month. Now tell me, if you're dropping around $500 bucks on a cellphone, do you think you'll blink at having to pay an extra $9.99 dollars a month? Further, if you have the ability to drop $500 on a cell phone, chances are pretty good you're probably already have access to Edge (or it's equivilent with another provider) already.
How was the iPod a revolution? It wasn't, it was an evolution of existing digital audio players (from both a hardware and a software perpective). So it will be with the iPhone. It will do what existing phones do, but it will have a slick, easy to use UI and it will "just work" without a lot of complicated setup on the PC or the phone.
Plus, anyone who thinks that Apple won't eventually offer an SDK is crazy. There will be one eventually, this was just a stop gap solution that could be made available when the phone ships to allow at least some third party development.
Anyone have some insights on how this development will put money in the bank at Apple?
There are two areas where this will be advantageous for Apple. First, iPhone applications can be developed and tested on Windows boxes. This increases the potential pool of developers of 3rd party iPhone applications. The second advantage, and in the long run the most important of the two, is that Cocoa application can now run on Windows.
Safari for Windows users are beta testing both the Safari application and the Cocoa for Windows API's at the same time. In a year or two after the bugs have been worked out Apple will release a version of XCode that runs on both the Mac and Windows that can create applications that will also run on both platforms with the click of a mouse (much like how XCode can currently produce binaries for both PowerPC and Intel).
Paralles and Boot Camp are good stop gap solutions, but ultimately Apple wants more software that will run natively on OS X. By releasing a version of Xcode that can easily produce software that will run under both operating systems, developers interested in creating applications that can run on both platforms will move to XCode.
It's a win / win for Apple, designed to both move more iPhones and eventually to move more Mac's as the number of applications that can run natively on OS X increases.
Agreed - the browser marketshare thing is just a front for getting millions of people to beta test their application development framework - YellowBox for Windows is back. Next year you can have real applications on the iPhone (and Mac, and Windows).
There have been rumblings about this for some time. It's a great move on Apple's part. Between Parallels, Boot Camp, and now this Apple is making it easier and easier to consumers to switch.
Captcha's didn't evolve. There were put here 3,000 years ago by God when he made the Earth. Any evidence to the contrary was put there by God to fool you. Get with it.
How can you deal with people who actually believe that there is an invisible man who lives in the sky who watches over everything that you do and, although he is omnipotent and good, is so insecure that he demands that you devote your life to him but will not tell you any of this directly, instead relying a select group of others to spread the word.
That just makes no fucking sense and it is impossible to engage in a rational conversation with anyone who really believes that because if you can reconcile all of those inconsistencies then you can justify just about anything. No matter how fucking ridicules it is.
I'm not saying there is not a God. There very well may be, there's no way we can ever know, but I can garun-fucking-tee you that if God does exist, he/she/it is nothing like the crap that religious nut bags (of all faiths) are trying to sell you.
.. I would join up with an elite crew of climbers, cameramen and production personnel...
... we had both a production leader, Anthony Geffen, world renowned documentary producer, and elite climber,...
... I teamed up with gadget guru and professional climber, Kevin Thaw (http://www.kevinthaw.com), often heralded as Britain's best all-round climber...
... where we found our complimentary skills and synergy allowed us to produce top quality work...
... We endured torrential downpours and hacked with machetes for days through triple canopy rain forest...
... As for myself, I had a variety of skills that led to my recruitment for this project...
Apparently all he's missing a cape with a big fat S on his chest.
This is Slashdot. We do not say "they killed the project". We say "but BSD/OpenSolaris/ZFS/etc is dead".
You left off "Windows sucks", "There's no good reason to run Microsoft Office anymore", "Bush should be impeached", "the RIAA, MPAA, DRM and software patents are evil", "information wants to be free", "Diebold rigs their electronic voting machines to favor Republicans", and "Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field" / "Steve Jobs is god".
They exact same thing was said about the iPod. The iPhone won't have that kind of success because it's tied to a single wireless provider, but it will be successful. I've been waiting forever for a cellphone / mp3 player combination that works as well as my iPod for and I've yet to find one that comes close. I'd buy the iPhone for that alone, the other features are just icing on the cake. Oh and much like the iPod, if you think the first generation iPhone is all Apple will ever offer your crazy. More features will be introduced as new generations are released and there will be less expensive models in the future.
Then buy a Tivo. You'll get a great DVR with the ability to burn any show you want to save to a DVD. It takes a while to transfer and burn shows, but it works. Removing the Tivo "DRM" to get a plane jane MPEG isn't all that hard either. The only downside is the monthly subscription fee but IMHO 12 bucks a month is well worth the price of being freed from the networks schedules.
I've yet to find a PC based solution that is as simple and easy to use as Tivo and I've tried quite a few of them.
people who assume that copyright is an inherent right, when it is so obviously not;
people who think that without our current copyright structure, there could only be chaos
Stating its so doesn't make it so. Two things irritate me about this topic.
US Citizens who assume copyright isn't an inherent right, when it's right their in the United States Constitution.
People who think that our current copyright structure is so flawed that the entire concept of copyright should be thrown out the window and replaced with something like the GPL. Our copyright laws were sane until the recent past. I'd argue it began when Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and that act was signed into law by Bill Clinton in the 90's. It's been a downward spiral ever since, but pre-90's, IMHO our copyright laws were sane.
Slashdot Mirror
It worked on my XP system and covered everything but the Start Menu and Task Bar. Getting it to close was simply a matter of right clicking on Firefox in the Task Bar and closing it down. It's certainly an annoyance, but it's not as bad as the article makes it seem to be. Anybody with a brain (which admittedly excludes about 60% of the population) can figure out how to close Firefox and thus the Java App.
With all the noise the RIAA and MPAA are making about copyright violations (and the subsequent lawsuits) can you blame him? If Linux ever starts making serious dents into Microsoft's market share, how long until they begin employing similar tactics?
Yo, she-bitch! Let's go!
Citizens of the planet prepare to put on your best dancing shoes so you can take to the streets and rejoice. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their army of flying drones come to LIBERATE you!
We apologize in advance for all of the collateral damage, but remember, freedom comes at a cost and the more infrastructure that is destroyed and the more people that are killed, the more "progress" we make!
What's that fellow US citizens? Enough "liberation" you say? Nonsense! If we stop liberating people who live in countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 then the terrorists win.
Bush should act immediately. The man should be placed in Gitmo! This new found wireless "freedom" will only make the terrorists hate us more.
It makes perfect sense to me. It's Economics 101. AT&T had to make changes to it's network in order to work with the iPhone and it had to give up control to the phone manufacturer over aspects of the phone that it had never done with other phone manufacturers in the past. All of that comes at a cost and AT&T would have been irresponsible to incur those costs without the chances of turning a profit. That profit comes by having users of the iPhone locked into a two year contract. You don't like it, then don't buy an iPhone. Problem solved.
Overblown panic in a Slashdot story? Well color me surprised .....
None of the 10 are necessarily deal breakers in and of themselves, but when taken together I can't justify buying an iPhone just yet. I trust enough of these issues will be resolved in the second generation:
... are you kidding me?
1) It's best to avoid the first generation of a product from any manufacturer. There are sure to be issues.
2) Lack of 3G support. I'm an AT&T wireless customer and I don't live in an area that has 3G coverage yet, but I'm very close to areas that do and coverage in my area will happen sooner or later so why waste the money when you know that a version of the iPhone that supports 3G will happen. Likely sooner rather than later if they plan on having any success when they launch in Europe.
3) Lacks the ability to record video. I don't record a lot of video on my phone but in this day and age with a phone that costs over $500
4) Lack of Flash and Java support on the browser. You can't claim to have a full fledged web browser on your phone unless you've got a browser that supports both Flash and Java. There's too many web sites out there that use them. I don't necessarily think they need to be turned on by default, but support for both should be there if you want to enable it.
5) The 2.0 megapixel camera. If I'm dropping several hundred bucks on a phone, it would be nice to have at least a 3.0 megapixel camera to take pictures with.
6) Lack of a built in GPS receiver. Google maps is great, but I can run it on my current phone (sans the sleek touchscreen interface). If I'm spending several hundred dollars on a phone I'd like one that can give me turn by turn directions as I'm en route (and can recalculate the route if I make a wrong turn) and I don't want to bother having to type in my starting address first, especially if I'm in an area I'm not familiar with.
7) Lack of a proper SDK so third parties can write apps for the phone. I'm sorry but Ajax as a third party development platform doesn't cut it for me. I want a smart phone that offers developers a way to write real third party applications that take advantage of the phones features. There is no way the manufacturer of a device can or will think of all of the ways in which a device can be used. A proper SDK extends the both the usability and the shelf life of any device.
8) Recessed head phone jack. I want a cell/phone MP3 player combination to have a standard headphone jack and that I can use with any pair of headphones that I either own now or will own in the future.
9) Inability to use the wide screen keyboard outside of Safari. I want to be able to use the wide screen on-screen keyboard in every application on the iPhone.
10) Inability to "search" in the contact list. I've got a ton of contacts and I don't want to have to scroll through them to find the contact I'm looking for.
So don't manage any device on your network via it's web interface while browsing web sites you don't trust on the Internet. Problem solved. In this day and age you should be careful about opening links to non-trusted sites no matter what.
If you absolutely must do both at the same time, use one browser for the web and another to manage the device. If you're on Windows and you've got a brain then you've already installed a second browser to avoid the headache that is IE when possible anyway.
At some point you won't be able to buy an off the shelf PC without Vista. Then most consumers won't have much of a choice so it's really a moot point. In 4 or 5 years, most people will be running Vista.
The iPhone, like the iPod, isn't marketed toward corporate customers.
I'm an AT&T customer and it costs an extra $9.99 a month for the basic media bundle which gives you access to Edge. So if you didn't have access to Edge before, you're going to have to pay an additional $9.99 a month for access to Edge and the ability to use WiFi. Now tell me, if you're dropping around $500 on a brand spanking new cellphone (and all of the joys and frustrations that come with a first generation product), do you think you'll blink at having to pay an extra $9.99 a month if you want WiFi? Further, if you have the ability to drop $500 on a cell phone, chances are pretty good you're probably already have access to Edge (or it's equivalent with another provider). This is quite the non-issue for anybody who has the cash to drop on the iPhone. I can see why it would cause an uproar here, but the people bitching about it here aren't in Apple's target market to begin with. Apple isn't targeting the do-it-yourself for a cheap as possible gadget geek crowd. Apple is targeting the I want it to just work and be easy to use first adopter with cash to spare crowd. For people in that group an addition $9.99 a month, if they aren't already paying it, is a drop in the bucket.
I'm an AT&T customer and it costs me a grand total of $9.99 for the basic media bundle which gives me access to Edge and several hundred text messages a month. So if you didn't have access to Edge before, you're going to have to pay an additional $9.99 dollars a month. Now tell me, if you're dropping around $500 bucks on a cellphone, do you think you'll blink at having to pay an extra $9.99 dollars a month? Further, if you have the ability to drop $500 on a cell phone, chances are pretty good you're probably already have access to Edge (or it's equivilent with another provider) already.
This is quite the non-issue.
How was the iPod a revolution? It wasn't, it was an evolution of existing digital audio players (from both a hardware and a software perpective). So it will be with the iPhone. It will do what existing phones do, but it will have a slick, easy to use UI and it will "just work" without a lot of complicated setup on the PC or the phone.
Plus, anyone who thinks that Apple won't eventually offer an SDK is crazy. There will be one eventually, this was just a stop gap solution that could be made available when the phone ships to allow at least some third party development.
There are two areas where this will be advantageous for Apple. First, iPhone applications can be developed and tested on Windows boxes. This increases the potential pool of developers of 3rd party iPhone applications. The second advantage, and in the long run the most important of the two, is that Cocoa application can now run on Windows.
Safari for Windows users are beta testing both the Safari application and the Cocoa for Windows API's at the same time. In a year or two after the bugs have been worked out Apple will release a version of XCode that runs on both the Mac and Windows that can create applications that will also run on both platforms with the click of a mouse (much like how XCode can currently produce binaries for both PowerPC and Intel).
Paralles and Boot Camp are good stop gap solutions, but ultimately Apple wants more software that will run natively on OS X. By releasing a version of Xcode that can easily produce software that will run under both operating systems, developers interested in creating applications that can run on both platforms will move to XCode.
It's a win / win for Apple, designed to both move more iPhones and eventually to move more Mac's as the number of applications that can run natively on OS X increases.
There have been rumblings about this for some time. It's a great move on Apple's part. Between Parallels, Boot Camp, and now this Apple is making it easier and easier to consumers to switch.
Captcha's didn't evolve. There were put here 3,000 years ago by God when he made the Earth. Any evidence to the contrary was put there by God to fool you. Get with it.
Personal information, in the form of you Apple ID, have been in the DRM'd files since the beginning. It's burried as an ATOM in the AAC file.
How can you deal with people who actually believe that there is an invisible man who lives in the sky who watches over everything that you do and, although he is omnipotent and good, is so insecure that he demands that you devote your life to him but will not tell you any of this directly, instead relying a select group of others to spread the word.
That just makes no fucking sense and it is impossible to engage in a rational conversation with anyone who really believes that because if you can reconcile all of those inconsistencies then you can justify just about anything. No matter how fucking ridicules it is.
I'm not saying there is not a God. There very well may be, there's no way we can ever know, but I can garun-fucking-tee you that if God does exist, he/she/it is nothing like the crap that religious nut bags (of all faiths) are trying to sell you.
From the article:
Apparently all he's missing a cape with a big fat S on his chest.
You left off "Windows sucks", "There's no good reason to run Microsoft Office anymore", "Bush should be impeached", "the RIAA, MPAA, DRM and software patents are evil", "information wants to be free", "Diebold rigs their electronic voting machines to favor Republicans", and "Steve Jobs has a reality distortion field" / "Steve Jobs is god".
Am I missing any other notorious Slashdot cliche?
They exact same thing was said about the iPod. The iPhone won't have that kind of success because it's tied to a single wireless provider, but it will be successful. I've been waiting forever for a cellphone / mp3 player combination that works as well as my iPod for and I've yet to find one that comes close. I'd buy the iPhone for that alone, the other features are just icing on the cake. Oh and much like the iPod, if you think the first generation iPhone is all Apple will ever offer your crazy. More features will be introduced as new generations are released and there will be less expensive models in the future.
Then buy a Tivo. You'll get a great DVR with the ability to burn any show you want to save to a DVD. It takes a while to transfer and burn shows, but it works. Removing the Tivo "DRM" to get a plane jane MPEG isn't all that hard either. The only downside is the monthly subscription fee but IMHO 12 bucks a month is well worth the price of being freed from the networks schedules.
I've yet to find a PC based solution that is as simple and easy to use as Tivo and I've tried quite a few of them.
This Administration doesn't give a flying fuck what you or anybody else thinks. It will do what it wants to do.
Stating its so doesn't make it so. Two things irritate me about this topic.
US Citizens who assume copyright isn't an inherent right, when it's right their in the United States Constitution.
People who think that our current copyright structure is so flawed that the entire concept of copyright should be thrown out the window and replaced with something like the GPL. Our copyright laws were sane until the recent past. I'd argue it began when Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and that act was signed into law by Bill Clinton in the 90's. It's been a downward spiral ever since, but pre-90's, IMHO our copyright laws were sane.