How old is the original iPhone? How long do you expect companies to support old tech?
No, really. It's well known in the tech industry that tech gets old and stops being supported at a certain point. Typically, it's when that tech is sufficiently old that the market of users has dwindled below a certain point. If you look into things you'll probably find that the original iPhone is both quite old by smartphone standards and it's use in the market has dropped below a threshold where it's logical to continue providing support for it.
So, feel free to hate on Apple for moving on from the original iPhone but it's a practice that has occurred in the tech industry from, well, the very beginning and every company does it. Every. Single. Company.
Virtually all phone have this issue. When you introduce an object that can affect radio transmission, it can alter and degrade reception. A human hand can affect radio transmission. This affects all iPhones, Android phones, and probably every cell phone on the market. It affects the iPhone 4 _more_ than a lot of other phones, but other phones _are_ affected similarly.
Yes, but if someone has one or two bars and does something that is likely to degrade the signal strength (such as holding the device, which applies to virtually all cell phones on the market, which has already been discussed elsewhere, ad nauseum), you won't be terribly surprised if you lose a call. It won't be perceived as a sudden and drastic drop - it will now _correctly_ be perceived as a weak signal being lost. It may not fix the problem but it fixes the perception of the problem.
You are a pathetic, disgusting human being. That you would support depriving people of equality because they do something you dislike is utterly repulsive. Even operating with your utterly flawed logic (and it is utterly flawed), you are supporting depriving people of the rights that others enjoy simply because they do something you do not like. They are doing it consensually, breaking no laws, and harming no person nor thing, yet you support depriving them the right to live a committed and loving life with someone else and enjoy the same benefits (and requirements) that we all enjoy.
I say again, you are a pathetic and disgusting human being.
How can they legally justify paying straight people less than gays, if all other factors are equal?
All other factors are NOT equal.
Take a moment to read that again.
Until any and all laws against gay marriage are abolished, all other factors are not equal. Once all factors are equal - once gay couples are treated no differently than straight couples - then your point is valid and gay couples will no longer deserve extra pay to compensate a tax that they, and only they, have to pay.
Ah, now I see why I've been modded flamebait so far - people like you are modding my post.
You don't see a similarity? You don't see the similarity between a movement who's goal was to ensure equal rights for all people regardless of sex/skin colour and a movement that is attempting to obtain equal rights for all people regardless of sexual orientation?
Perhaps you'd like to invest a bit more time thinking about the subject before posting. Equal rights are equal rights. They know no colour, religion, sex, age, nor anything else, including sexual preference. Otherwise, they are not _EQUAL_ rights.
...how can anyone that appreciates the freedoms offered by our constitution and the rationale backing it in the declaration of independence, willfully discriminate against another based solely on private, personal preference?
My favourite example of this was watching the news during (iirc) the Prop 8 debate and seeing an interview with a black woman who was speaking out against gay marriage rights.
A black woman.
This woman has had thousands and thousands and thousands of people fight for her to have rights as a person _on two fronts_ - first as a woman and then as an African American - and she has the audacity to oppose the rights of anyone else?? The utterly disgusting hypocrisy of it infuriated me (and still does). I will never, ever understand how this woman was so profoundly ignorant as to not see the similarities between the _TWO_ movements that provided her with the rights she now enjoys and the movement to provide gays with the rights that they deserve. Human rights are human rights.
Regardless of your background, heritage, sex, religion, or whatever, anyone who opposes gay rights is a disgusting human. Period.
The woman I saw being interviewed simply added hypocrite to the list.
I doubt that they did any real-world testing in a weak signal environment.
Have you been living in a cave for the past couple months? We know that Apple had testing units in the field - they were "lost and found" (stolen) in various locations around the world. The one thing they all had in common, however, is that they were wrapped in a case that was designed to make them look like iPhone 3GSs so that nobody would realize that they were the new iPhone 4s. In other words, their real world testing involved phones that had cases covering the antennas.
Obviously, that's a flawed testing method and someone's certainly getting shit for it at Apple but I have no doubt, whatsoever, that the phones were tested extensively and, in that testing, virtually no issues with the outer antenna were observed.
But, in the end, a flawed testing method will provide flawed results...
Translation: "We are at war with Apple and anything they support, we must now oppose. Thus, we are going to throw our support behind an buggy, laggy, piece of crap like Flash just so we can stick it to Apple a bit more in our ongoing effort to knock both them and Microsoft out of the picture. Thanks for your information, we will use it to make money."
Maybe I'm just getting jaded in my old age but I always seem to see nefarious reasons behind "business" decisions of late.
This company is fear-mongering about nothing to such a degreee that I wonder if they are on Apple's payroll.
Or maybe, just maybe, the security vendor is on their own payroll and is attempting to drum up some fear and uncertainty and doubt in order to sell their own products. Kinda like all the other security vendors out there have been doing for years and years and years.
As an Apple fanboy who's tired of seeing the anti-Apple sensationalism in other postings (ok, even the blatantly pro-Apple sensationalism is annoying too), allow me to say that the 1-in-5 comment in the summary was absolute FUD. It really would be nice if story submissions were more about the story and less about furthering marketing agendas for/against a given product. I realize we're all passionate about our particular sections of geekdom but this is just getting pathetic. I think it's interesting that Google exercised their orbital nuke option (for a variety of reasons that I'm sure will be discussed in other threads below) but the little addendum to the story was completely irrelevant and served only one purpose - to troll. Would be nice if slashdot editors removed those extra tidbits.
And, interestingly enough, that post was made before yours. Perhaps you'd like to read slashdot more thoroughly - while there may be the haters and fanbois and Steve-is-the-Dark-Side jokes, there's also informative and interesting posts to be found.
Some of us quite enjoy being able to promote openness and discuss products that threaten that when they become ubiquitous enough that their closed practices have a good chance of leading market trends.
Sorry, but there's the key problem I see with this entire discussion. The belief is that, if Apple is successful with their walled garden approach, it threatens open products everywhere. Which is wrong. There will always - ALWAYS - be open products for those who want them. There will always be people who champion the cause of open source and they will produce products for that market. The mass market may move towards closed options for a wide variety of reasons but there will always be open options for those who want them. Apple's success with a walled garden approach does not threaten that in any way.
The implication is that a walled garden is bad for consumers. It's been proven that it isn't. The majority of consumers want their dishwasher to wash dishes, their toaster to toast bread, their music player to play music, and their smart phone to be a smart phone. Power users may want to do more with their products (*) and they can but the majority of people just want their stuff to work. That's why a walled garden is so successful and isn't a bad thing. But it doesn't threaten the open options because there will always be power users that want to do more.
* And, sorry, I just don't buy any argument that suggests that power users can't do more with an iPhone (for example) - they have the _choice_ to jailbreak their phone and do more with it. They can be a power user and push the device beyond it's design specs and make it do things it wasn't intended to do. Which, last time I checked, is the very definition of a power users. The majority of consumers, however, don't give a fuck what CHMOD means and don't want to have to google things every time they want to change something on their phone. they just want the device to work without having to think about it. Power users like to think about things and be challenged.
I love my iPhone and iPad. I also love my MSI Wind which I've hacked to run OSX. Sometimes I just want to use my device and sometimes I want to push my device beyond what it was intended to do. And Apple's success hasn't hindered my ability to do either of those things.
Except Apple doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on anything.
Not true. Portable music players. Last number I heard had iPods at _about_ 80% of the market which is a dramatically dominant position. That said, most people who complain about Apple often accuse them of "abusing a monopoly" in markets in which they not only don't have a majority of the market share - they aren't even the #1 player NOR the #2 player so how they could be abusing a monopoly is beyond me. But, Apple does have a near-monopoly in one (and only one) market - portable music players.
Ironically, the one market in which they have a near-monopoly seems to be the one market that people don't accuse them of abusing a monopoly...
Actually, it's become cool and "in" on Slashdot to bitch and complain about everything from Apple. It's _also_ a problem that Slashdot seems to report every time Steve Jobs sneezes (or whatever) but that's not what the OP was complaining about. He was doing the typical "Apple is a big bad poo poo head" thing that is all the rage.
Remember, Apple is no longer the underdog struggling against their evil corporate counterparts. They're now an evil corporation and thus everything they do is to be reviled. That, of course, is despite the fact that they make excellent products that are popular which are also forcing other companies to adapt and evolve (seriously, look at the (smart)phone landscape before the iPhone and compare it to after the iPhone).
The problem some of us have is that there are times that Apple needs to be called out for stupid shit because, as with every single company out there, they aren't perfect and they fuck up from time to time but they really don't need to be called out Every. Gawddamn. Time. It's kinda tedious reading the same bullshit over and over again. Repetition doesn't make it more true...
Read on - I'm sure someone is, right this moment, comment on how we all used to hate on Microsoft but Apple is now worse than they ever were while someone else is bitching about Apple's walled garden approach.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Some of us quite enjoy the user experience it provides. I'm sure you think we're sheep but we don't care. Just like we bought the product we liked and are happy with that purchase, we're fine with you buying the product you enjoy. So, again, you don't like the iPhone or any other Apple product? Fine. Don't buy it. Go buy something else.
Other than these two, totally separate stories being about movies, how are they even related? Shouldn't they be two different front page submissions? One is about rental policies from a major studio while the second is about a decidedly independent movie-making effort. Or did we just piggyback one on the other so that it could get Slashdot front page face time?
How is this being modded "Informative"? First off, it's New Democratic Party. http://www.ndp.ca/
If you're going to talk politics, at least try to get the party names right.
Also, as others have pointed out, the NDP might be a minority party but so are the Conservatives who are currently in power - all the parties in Canada are currently minority parties.
I have no clue how anyone found your post remotely informative given how utterly uninformed it is.
I'm a Liberal and have been since I started voting. For the most part, I sympathized with the NDP (since they are a left party and I am similarly left in most of my views) but just didn't think most of their agendas were in line with my interests and goals. Of late, however, they have taken new "modern" issues very seriously and are coming out on the side I support, which is to say the side of the populace rather than corporate overlords. As the Liberals languish in a bygone era and the Conservatives drive further towards a system that I loathe (and all other options simply not worth considering unless I've already put a bullet in my head), I find myself becoming increasingly inclined to vote NDP in upcoming elections. Kudos to them and I hope they keep forcing the other parties to seriously consider consumer rights as various subjects are discussed and debated.
Yet, oddly, when I google "cydia" I actually find an app store for iDevices. Yes, they need to be jailbroken, but the consumer may make that choice. If they do make that choice, there are consequences - namely that they can probably kiss tech support bye bye but I have yet to hear of anyone having their door kicked in by the cops and being arrested for jailbreaking one's own device and installing apps via Cydia.
Or did I just miss the news of people being arrested for deciding to jailbreak their device and use it however they want?
There are other options. Apple does not support those options which I believe is entirely understandable - play in their walled garden and they'll do everything they can to give you the best user experience you can enjoy but, if you decide to trek out into the wild jungle, you're on your own. But, while they may not support it and make rumblings about it being illegal, I have yet to hear about them actually taking legal action against anyone.
And, given that people on Cydia are selling apps, there is incentive for Apple to take action, but they haven't. Odd that.
Apple is not a museum or a library for new content then, so much as they are a grocer.
While many may have troubles understanding this (which is why I'm going to quote it in the hopes of it being read again), it is nice to see that the person directly impacted by things least understands it well (which speaks greatly of his character).
Slashdot Mirror
How old is the original iPhone? How long do you expect companies to support old tech?
No, really. It's well known in the tech industry that tech gets old and stops being supported at a certain point. Typically, it's when that tech is sufficiently old that the market of users has dwindled below a certain point. If you look into things you'll probably find that the original iPhone is both quite old by smartphone standards and it's use in the market has dropped below a threshold where it's logical to continue providing support for it.
So, feel free to hate on Apple for moving on from the original iPhone but it's a practice that has occurred in the tech industry from, well, the very beginning and every company does it. Every. Single. Company.
Virtually all phone have this issue. When you introduce an object that can affect radio transmission, it can alter and degrade reception. A human hand can affect radio transmission. This affects all iPhones, Android phones, and probably every cell phone on the market. It affects the iPhone 4 _more_ than a lot of other phones, but other phones _are_ affected similarly.
Yes, but if someone has one or two bars and does something that is likely to degrade the signal strength (such as holding the device, which applies to virtually all cell phones on the market, which has already been discussed elsewhere, ad nauseum), you won't be terribly surprised if you lose a call. It won't be perceived as a sudden and drastic drop - it will now _correctly_ be perceived as a weak signal being lost. It may not fix the problem but it fixes the perception of the problem.
Clearly, you aren't paying attention. Or you're a troll. Either way, bye.
The right to be treated like everyone else in society. Have you not been paying attention?
You are a pathetic, disgusting human being. That you would support depriving people of equality because they do something you dislike is utterly repulsive. Even operating with your utterly flawed logic (and it is utterly flawed), you are supporting depriving people of the rights that others enjoy simply because they do something you do not like. They are doing it consensually, breaking no laws, and harming no person nor thing, yet you support depriving them the right to live a committed and loving life with someone else and enjoy the same benefits (and requirements) that we all enjoy.
I say again, you are a pathetic and disgusting human being.
How can they legally justify paying straight people less than gays, if all other factors are equal?
All other factors are NOT equal.
Take a moment to read that again.
Until any and all laws against gay marriage are abolished, all other factors are not equal. Once all factors are equal - once gay couples are treated no differently than straight couples - then your point is valid and gay couples will no longer deserve extra pay to compensate a tax that they, and only they, have to pay.
Ah, now I see why I've been modded flamebait so far - people like you are modding my post.
You don't see a similarity? You don't see the similarity between a movement who's goal was to ensure equal rights for all people regardless of sex/skin colour and a movement that is attempting to obtain equal rights for all people regardless of sexual orientation?
Perhaps you'd like to invest a bit more time thinking about the subject before posting. Equal rights are equal rights. They know no colour, religion, sex, age, nor anything else, including sexual preference. Otherwise, they are not _EQUAL_ rights.
...how can anyone that appreciates the freedoms offered by our constitution and the rationale backing it in the declaration of independence, willfully discriminate against another based solely on private, personal preference?
My favourite example of this was watching the news during (iirc) the Prop 8 debate and seeing an interview with a black woman who was speaking out against gay marriage rights.
A black woman.
This woman has had thousands and thousands and thousands of people fight for her to have rights as a person _on two fronts_ - first as a woman and then as an African American - and she has the audacity to oppose the rights of anyone else?? The utterly disgusting hypocrisy of it infuriated me (and still does). I will never, ever understand how this woman was so profoundly ignorant as to not see the similarities between the _TWO_ movements that provided her with the rights she now enjoys and the movement to provide gays with the rights that they deserve. Human rights are human rights.
Regardless of your background, heritage, sex, religion, or whatever, anyone who opposes gay rights is a disgusting human. Period.
The woman I saw being interviewed simply added hypocrite to the list.
I doubt that they did any real-world testing in a weak signal environment.
Have you been living in a cave for the past couple months? We know that Apple had testing units in the field - they were "lost and found" (stolen) in various locations around the world. The one thing they all had in common, however, is that they were wrapped in a case that was designed to make them look like iPhone 3GSs so that nobody would realize that they were the new iPhone 4s. In other words, their real world testing involved phones that had cases covering the antennas.
Obviously, that's a flawed testing method and someone's certainly getting shit for it at Apple but I have no doubt, whatsoever, that the phones were tested extensively and, in that testing, virtually no issues with the outer antenna were observed.
But, in the end, a flawed testing method will provide flawed results...
Translation: "We are at war with Apple and anything they support, we must now oppose. Thus, we are going to throw our support behind an buggy, laggy, piece of crap like Flash just so we can stick it to Apple a bit more in our ongoing effort to knock both them and Microsoft out of the picture. Thanks for your information, we will use it to make money."
Maybe I'm just getting jaded in my old age but I always seem to see nefarious reasons behind "business" decisions of late.
That or I just need my morning coffee now...
Ok, seriously, get your Hulu ass into Canada already please. I'm so tired of the _world wide_ web being regionally restricted...
Yes, I know there are ways to get around the regional restrictions but it'd be nice if these corporations could think globally...
Ok, maybe I'm a bit bitter that it's not available north of the border yet...
This company is fear-mongering about nothing to such a degreee that I wonder if they are on Apple's payroll.
Or maybe, just maybe, the security vendor is on their own payroll and is attempting to drum up some fear and uncertainty and doubt in order to sell their own products. Kinda like all the other security vendors out there have been doing for years and years and years.
As an Apple fanboy who's tired of seeing the anti-Apple sensationalism in other postings (ok, even the blatantly pro-Apple sensationalism is annoying too), allow me to say that the 1-in-5 comment in the summary was absolute FUD. It really would be nice if story submissions were more about the story and less about furthering marketing agendas for/against a given product. I realize we're all passionate about our particular sections of geekdom but this is just getting pathetic. I think it's interesting that Google exercised their orbital nuke option (for a variety of reasons that I'm sure will be discussed in other threads below) but the little addendum to the story was completely irrelevant and served only one purpose - to troll. Would be nice if slashdot editors removed those extra tidbits.
If you're uncertain what FUD stands for, please re-read the summary. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1693596&cid=32651210
And, interestingly enough, that post was made before yours. Perhaps you'd like to read slashdot more thoroughly - while there may be the haters and fanbois and Steve-is-the-Dark-Side jokes, there's also informative and interesting posts to be found.
Some of us quite enjoy being able to promote openness and discuss products that threaten that when they become ubiquitous enough that their closed practices have a good chance of leading market trends.
Sorry, but there's the key problem I see with this entire discussion. The belief is that, if Apple is successful with their walled garden approach, it threatens open products everywhere. Which is wrong. There will always - ALWAYS - be open products for those who want them. There will always be people who champion the cause of open source and they will produce products for that market. The mass market may move towards closed options for a wide variety of reasons but there will always be open options for those who want them. Apple's success with a walled garden approach does not threaten that in any way.
The implication is that a walled garden is bad for consumers. It's been proven that it isn't. The majority of consumers want their dishwasher to wash dishes, their toaster to toast bread, their music player to play music, and their smart phone to be a smart phone. Power users may want to do more with their products (*) and they can but the majority of people just want their stuff to work. That's why a walled garden is so successful and isn't a bad thing. But it doesn't threaten the open options because there will always be power users that want to do more.
* And, sorry, I just don't buy any argument that suggests that power users can't do more with an iPhone (for example) - they have the _choice_ to jailbreak their phone and do more with it. They can be a power user and push the device beyond it's design specs and make it do things it wasn't intended to do. Which, last time I checked, is the very definition of a power users. The majority of consumers, however, don't give a fuck what CHMOD means and don't want to have to google things every time they want to change something on their phone. they just want the device to work without having to think about it. Power users like to think about things and be challenged.
I love my iPhone and iPad. I also love my MSI Wind which I've hacked to run OSX. Sometimes I just want to use my device and sometimes I want to push my device beyond what it was intended to do. And Apple's success hasn't hindered my ability to do either of those things.
Except Apple doesn't have anything close to a monopoly on anything.
Not true. Portable music players. Last number I heard had iPods at _about_ 80% of the market which is a dramatically dominant position. That said, most people who complain about Apple often accuse them of "abusing a monopoly" in markets in which they not only don't have a majority of the market share - they aren't even the #1 player NOR the #2 player so how they could be abusing a monopoly is beyond me. But, Apple does have a near-monopoly in one (and only one) market - portable music players.
Ironically, the one market in which they have a near-monopoly seems to be the one market that people don't accuse them of abusing a monopoly...
Actually, it's become cool and "in" on Slashdot to bitch and complain about everything from Apple. It's _also_ a problem that Slashdot seems to report every time Steve Jobs sneezes (or whatever) but that's not what the OP was complaining about. He was doing the typical "Apple is a big bad poo poo head" thing that is all the rage.
Remember, Apple is no longer the underdog struggling against their evil corporate counterparts. They're now an evil corporation and thus everything they do is to be reviled. That, of course, is despite the fact that they make excellent products that are popular which are also forcing other companies to adapt and evolve (seriously, look at the (smart)phone landscape before the iPhone and compare it to after the iPhone).
The problem some of us have is that there are times that Apple needs to be called out for stupid shit because, as with every single company out there, they aren't perfect and they fuck up from time to time but they really don't need to be called out Every. Gawddamn. Time. It's kinda tedious reading the same bullshit over and over again. Repetition doesn't make it more true...
Read on - I'm sure someone is, right this moment, comment on how we all used to hate on Microsoft but Apple is now worse than they ever were while someone else is bitching about Apple's walled garden approach.
Don't like it? Don't buy it. Some of us quite enjoy the user experience it provides. I'm sure you think we're sheep but we don't care. Just like we bought the product we liked and are happy with that purchase, we're fine with you buying the product you enjoy. So, again, you don't like the iPhone or any other Apple product? Fine. Don't buy it. Go buy something else.
Other than these two, totally separate stories being about movies, how are they even related? Shouldn't they be two different front page submissions? One is about rental policies from a major studio while the second is about a decidedly independent movie-making effort. Or did we just piggyback one on the other so that it could get Slashdot front page face time?
How is this being modded "Informative"? First off, it's New Democratic Party. http://www.ndp.ca/
If you're going to talk politics, at least try to get the party names right.
Also, as others have pointed out, the NDP might be a minority party but so are the Conservatives who are currently in power - all the parties in Canada are currently minority parties.
I have no clue how anyone found your post remotely informative given how utterly uninformed it is.
I'm a Liberal and have been since I started voting. For the most part, I sympathized with the NDP (since they are a left party and I am similarly left in most of my views) but just didn't think most of their agendas were in line with my interests and goals. Of late, however, they have taken new "modern" issues very seriously and are coming out on the side I support, which is to say the side of the populace rather than corporate overlords. As the Liberals languish in a bygone era and the Conservatives drive further towards a system that I loathe (and all other options simply not worth considering unless I've already put a bullet in my head), I find myself becoming increasingly inclined to vote NDP in upcoming elections. Kudos to them and I hope they keep forcing the other parties to seriously consider consumer rights as various subjects are discussed and debated.
Yet, oddly, when I google "cydia" I actually find an app store for iDevices. Yes, they need to be jailbroken, but the consumer may make that choice. If they do make that choice, there are consequences - namely that they can probably kiss tech support bye bye but I have yet to hear of anyone having their door kicked in by the cops and being arrested for jailbreaking one's own device and installing apps via Cydia.
Or did I just miss the news of people being arrested for deciding to jailbreak their device and use it however they want?
There are other options. Apple does not support those options which I believe is entirely understandable - play in their walled garden and they'll do everything they can to give you the best user experience you can enjoy but, if you decide to trek out into the wild jungle, you're on your own. But, while they may not support it and make rumblings about it being illegal, I have yet to hear about them actually taking legal action against anyone.
And, given that people on Cydia are selling apps, there is incentive for Apple to take action, but they haven't. Odd that.
I'm just sayin'.
Apple is not a museum or a library for new content then, so much as they are a grocer.
While many may have troubles understanding this (which is why I'm going to quote it in the hopes of it being read again), it is nice to see that the person directly impacted by things least understands it well (which speaks greatly of his character).