And it still looks like you can't use it as a modem for your laptop.
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, it's most likely at the request of the networks. My current T-Mobile contract explicitly states that I'm not allowed to use my SIM with a computer. It's by no means something that's unique to the iPhone.
I'm with you on this. Maybe it's just because the camera on my current phone is appalling, but every time I went into an Apple Store and tried out the iPhone camera, I was astounded by how clear the picture was. No doubt the difference is less noticeable once it's on a computer screen...
No mention of geotagging though, as far as I'm aware, which is a bit of a disappointment.
Looks like the lower price comes from carrier subsidy. They're no longer available to buy direct from the online Apple Store. You have to do it in a brick and mortar store, or on the O2 or Carphone Warehouse websites (which haven't been updated yet, Boo-urns), which I suspect means signing up for a contract before you get your hands on one.
And Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, which is played without buttons.
The big question is, can these games be played without a stylus? An ordinary stylus won't work on an iPhone. Will a chubby finger/hand obscure too much of the screen, or be too wide to hit small targets?
Also worth pointing out if you want to avoid causing offence:
Great Britain is the island shared by Scotland, England and Wales. The British Isles is the term used in the UK to refer to the UK, Ireland and the Isle of Man, and has stuck for lack of a better term.
It's advisable to avoid the term in the Republic of Ireland, as they are neither part of Britain geographically, and are no longer part of the UK politically. And they rather like it that way.
Here in Europe, in some countries, cell phone companies offer a service that can reveal a phone's location (with the precision of a fraction of a kilometer/mile) at any given time from any place actually.
Down to a fraction of a kilometre sounds a bit optimistic. Such services track a person's location using the location of the cell tower they're currently connected to, they do not use triangulation so the radius can be quite wide. In some rural areas the radius could be up to 8km.
However, the owner of the phone must consent to this service.
And I'll just add that if a company phone is being tracked, the employee using the phone must be informed of this.
Is 2) something that the merchants have to contractually agree to in order to use the credit card system?
Otherwise, the retailer should be able to refuse any payment that isn't paid in legal tender, unless the law where you are has the concept of a reasonable offer of payment.
I use Safari for day-to-day browsing, but tend to use Firefox for web development because of Firebug (I know Safari has something similar, but I haven't quite got round to using it). So I'm more likely to be using Firefox when I visit w3schools.
The FoI act also allows a fee. I'm not sure what the limit is, but I think charges of around £70 are normal. The DPA might actually be more cost-effective.
As for push email, I guess if you need to know instantly when email messages have been sent to you, it might be useful. That probably describes less than 5% of the email using public though.
From the perspective of not having push messaging, having it may seem pointless. From the perspective of having push messaging, not having it is infuriating. Apple has the right idea about improving users' workflow (à la visual voicemail), but users will react badly to being told that an element of their workflow "isn't that important", as it is taken away from them.
I agree with you that MMS and SMS should die a death, but as long as my contract has inclusive SMS and MMS then I will use it. And stripping functionality from a phone is not the way to achieve said death if the alternatives aren't equivalent. Email and IM only work in place of MMS and SMS if the recipient has those things set up on their phone, which in the consumer market is still rare. On top of that, you'd be moving away from a situation where the sender pays (in Europe anyway) to a situation where both sides pay, and I think data prices need to drop further still in order to accommodate that.
Long term, I'd love to see a situation where mobile networks act as ISPs and all mobile services are IP-based, but I think that's still a long way off. The networks will cling to their expensive products until a competitor comes along and offers the better option (up until recently I would've cited 3 as an example of such a competitor, having released a Skype phone, but I had a very bad experience with them today and am loathe to recommend them).
For most in Europe it's not a case of 3G being faster than EDGE, it's a case of it being much, much faster than GPRS, which is the only alternative.
O2 allegedly began rolling out EDGE for the iPhone in the UK, at a time when they already had a 3G network, but they don't publish an EDGE coverage map. There's no way I'm buying an iPhone and risk being limited to GPRS speeds, it defeats the entire purpose.
You've said something that I don't think can be emphasised enough - 'multi-touch' (damn buzzwords) are a means to an end. You can't just add a touch interface to a device and declare it to be something new and innovative. You have to redesign the whole interface to take advantage of this new capability.
This is why I think tablet PCs have been a relative failure. Apart from replacing the mouse with a pen, they didn't really do anything interesting or new. Apple and Microsoft seem to have realised this.
I'm under no illusion I am a good person, but pedophiles take pleasure in harming - physically and emotionally - people in no position to defend themselves. Helpless children.
Except such a thing is already illegal. The purpose of this proposed law is not to prevent such a thing. The purpose is to make it illegal to even conceive of such a thing in an art form.
Some people take it upon themselves to grandstand about the environment, some people try to force others to quit smoking. Some people claim video games and rap are tearing down society. At least I have a firm stance on something that matters.
People die due to climate change in the film The Day After Tomorrow. This film is not illegal, because nobody was harmed in the making of it. Artistic representations of helpless children are not actually helpless children. No children were harmed in the making of this porn.
I found this announcement disappointing because I had hoped that MS would make that clean break with Windows, and deal with backward-compatibility using virtualisation. I was about to say so, and cite Apple's use of emulation in the move from OS 9 to OS X as an example.
It's not a like-for-like comparison, though, because Apple's market share was negligible, and any negative impact would have limited consequences.
If virtualised backward-compatibility was done badly in a hypothetical Windows clean break, the repercussions for Microsoft would have the potential to dwarf any of the current dissatisfaction with Vista. Losing market share after introducing the new product could be a critical blow to them.
On the other hand, losing market share before introducing their clean break product could put them in an advantageous position. So yes, your idea has some merit. Sadly, I think your final statement is the most insightful of everything you have said.
To be honest, if I was in this position then I'd be looking for another job anyway. It doesn't sound like the kind of place any right-minded techie would want to work.
It's always been a Muslim phenomena. Spreading Islam was and still is their religious duty. I don't understand how you can say that it won't have any implications in the future, because Muslim immigration has already changed Europe a great deal, and there's no reason to believe that this process will be suddenly stopped or reversed. On the contrary, it gains more and more momentum every year.
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. What I was trying to say is, just because this is a purely-Muslim phenomenon at the moment doesn't mean that it will be a purely-Muslim phenomenon in ten years' time.
And I'd put forward the point that spreading one's religion is as much a tenet of Christianity as it is of Islam. Personally, I'm not a big fan of having a religion shoved down my throat, but - treating others as I would like to be treated - I wouldn't want to shove my beliefs down anybody else's throat either, no matter where they lived or what their skin colour was.
Because for a comparison to be valid you have to compare like with like; ethics and knowledge have moved on somewhat in the last five centuries. In some places, at least.
They have, concerning the use of violence, certainly (again, I'm regretting the use of a word where it wasn't necessary). But if you'll allow me to re-print the comment that I was originally replying to:
We were not talking about terrorism. We were talking about a group that wishes to completely transform the country culturally, religiously and racially.
The ethics of this are much more ambiguous in this day and age, especially now that we have the ability to travel quickly and relatively cheaply.
And even if it hadn't, you're basically arguing that two wrongs make a right; one group did it, so it's OK for another to do so. What are you, a three year old?
(Assuming the use of violence is once again on-topic...)
I said it was hypocritical to say otherwise, just as a murderer later declaring thou shalt not kill. I didn't intend to imply that it was wrong to say otherwise.
Well, in this case it's immigration, but no interbreeding will occur. The immigrants will simply replace the native population, unless the natives take steps to prevent it. People call this multiculturalism.
The immigration debate isn't really one I want to get into. I live in Scotland, where our problem is depopulation rather than overcrowding, and our social tensions are homegrown rather than due to immigration. It gives me a fundamentally different perspective on things from those living south of the border.
...I was talking about groups that are currently attempting the same thing the Muslims are.
If you're trying to prove that the desire to change a country's demographic makeup is, has always been, and always will be a Muslim phenomenon, then I think I've already proven you wrong.
If you're trying to prove that such a desire is currently a Muslim phenomenon, then this has no implications for the state of play ten years ago or ten years into the future. So I fail to see the point of trying to prove such a thing.
So that justifies turning a first world Western democracy into a third world Islamic theocracy?
In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the term 'Islamification'. I am trying to speak in more general terms. I took issue with your earlier comment because it implied that "wishing to completely transform the country culturally, religiously and racially" was inherently bad. I have no such issue with it when it is explicitly applied to Islam.
Note that I've not touched on the racial side until now. I have no problem with racial demographic changes as long as it occurs due to immigration, emigration and interbreeding - as opposed to genocide and forced deportation.
Also, just because demographic changes occured in the past doesn't mean they must occur to infinity.
I am not trying to prove this, I am simply trying to disprove the opposite.
You were referring to the 16th century. I was talking about the 21st century.
What I'm trying to say is that we in the UK are hypocritical to say that Islamification should be opposed simply because it alters the country's demographics. The country as it stands is a product of such demographic change.
With regards to your genocide comment, I'm not trying to justify the means, only to say that the ends aren't necessarily something to be avoided. And if you read your earlier comment, you explicitly set the topic of conversation to be the ends:
We were not talking about terrorism. We were talking about a group that wishes to completely transform the country culturally, religiously and racially.
The circumstances of the precedent I referred to were quite different, true, but in the context of your statement it's not a leap of logic to describe the reformers as "a group that wished to completely transform the country culturally and religiously".
Finally, as a non-religious person living in a decreasingly Christian and increasingly non-religious country, I object to your implication that religious change in particular is something to be avoided.
There's already precedent for the transformation of culture and religion (taking the two as one and the same at the time) through the use of violence within the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, just be glad Wales is still there. Otherwise there'd be hell to pay!
This doesn't surprise me in the slightest, it's most likely at the request of the networks. My current T-Mobile contract explicitly states that I'm not allowed to use my SIM with a computer. It's by no means something that's unique to the iPhone.
I'm with you on this. Maybe it's just because the camera on my current phone is appalling, but every time I went into an Apple Store and tried out the iPhone camera, I was astounded by how clear the picture was. No doubt the difference is less noticeable once it's on a computer screen...
No mention of geotagging though, as far as I'm aware, which is a bit of a disappointment.
Looks like the lower price comes from carrier subsidy. They're no longer available to buy direct from the online Apple Store. You have to do it in a brick and mortar store, or on the O2 or Carphone Warehouse websites (which haven't been updated yet, Boo-urns), which I suspect means signing up for a contract before you get your hands on one.
Still no word on UK pricing either.
And Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, which is played without buttons.
The big question is, can these games be played without a stylus? An ordinary stylus won't work on an iPhone. Will a chubby finger/hand obscure too much of the screen, or be too wide to hit small targets?
Also worth pointing out if you want to avoid causing offence:
Great Britain is the island shared by Scotland, England and Wales. The British Isles is the term used in the UK to refer to the UK, Ireland and the Isle of Man, and has stuck for lack of a better term.
It's advisable to avoid the term in the Republic of Ireland, as they are neither part of Britain geographically, and are no longer part of the UK politically. And they rather like it that way.
Down to a fraction of a kilometre sounds a bit optimistic. Such services track a person's location using the location of the cell tower they're currently connected to, they do not use triangulation so the radius can be quite wide. In some rural areas the radius could be up to 8km.
And I'll just add that if a company phone is being tracked, the employee using the phone must be informed of this.
They're all right as long as they don't have to operate an anchor.
Is 2) something that the merchants have to contractually agree to in order to use the credit card system?
Otherwise, the retailer should be able to refuse any payment that isn't paid in legal tender, unless the law where you are has the concept of a reasonable offer of payment.
I use Safari for day-to-day browsing, but tend to use Firefox for web development because of Firebug (I know Safari has something similar, but I haven't quite got round to using it). So I'm more likely to be using Firefox when I visit w3schools.
The FoI act also allows a fee. I'm not sure what the limit is, but I think charges of around £70 are normal. The DPA might actually be more cost-effective.
From the perspective of not having push messaging, having it may seem pointless. From the perspective of having push messaging, not having it is infuriating. Apple has the right idea about improving users' workflow (à la visual voicemail), but users will react badly to being told that an element of their workflow "isn't that important", as it is taken away from them.
I agree with you that MMS and SMS should die a death, but as long as my contract has inclusive SMS and MMS then I will use it. And stripping functionality from a phone is not the way to achieve said death if the alternatives aren't equivalent. Email and IM only work in place of MMS and SMS if the recipient has those things set up on their phone, which in the consumer market is still rare. On top of that, you'd be moving away from a situation where the sender pays (in Europe anyway) to a situation where both sides pay, and I think data prices need to drop further still in order to accommodate that.
Long term, I'd love to see a situation where mobile networks act as ISPs and all mobile services are IP-based, but I think that's still a long way off. The networks will cling to their expensive products until a competitor comes along and offers the better option (up until recently I would've cited 3 as an example of such a competitor, having released a Skype phone, but I had a very bad experience with them today and am loathe to recommend them).
For most in Europe it's not a case of 3G being faster than EDGE, it's a case of it being much, much faster than GPRS, which is the only alternative.
O2 allegedly began rolling out EDGE for the iPhone in the UK, at a time when they already had a 3G network, but they don't publish an EDGE coverage map. There's no way I'm buying an iPhone and risk being limited to GPRS speeds, it defeats the entire purpose.
You've said something that I don't think can be emphasised enough - 'multi-touch' (damn buzzwords) are a means to an end. You can't just add a touch interface to a device and declare it to be something new and innovative. You have to redesign the whole interface to take advantage of this new capability.
This is why I think tablet PCs have been a relative failure. Apart from replacing the mouse with a pen, they didn't really do anything interesting or new. Apple and Microsoft seem to have realised this.
Except such a thing is already illegal. The purpose of this proposed law is not to prevent such a thing. The purpose is to make it illegal to even conceive of such a thing in an art form.
People die due to climate change in the film The Day After Tomorrow. This film is not illegal, because nobody was harmed in the making of it. Artistic representations of helpless children are not actually helpless children. No children were harmed in the making of this porn.
I found this announcement disappointing because I had hoped that MS would make that clean break with Windows, and deal with backward-compatibility using virtualisation. I was about to say so, and cite Apple's use of emulation in the move from OS 9 to OS X as an example.
It's not a like-for-like comparison, though, because Apple's market share was negligible, and any negative impact would have limited consequences.
If virtualised backward-compatibility was done badly in a hypothetical Windows clean break, the repercussions for Microsoft would have the potential to dwarf any of the current dissatisfaction with Vista. Losing market share after introducing the new product could be a critical blow to them.
On the other hand, losing market share before introducing their clean break product could put them in an advantageous position. So yes, your idea has some merit. Sadly, I think your final statement is the most insightful of everything you have said.
To be honest, if I was in this position then I'd be looking for another job anyway. It doesn't sound like the kind of place any right-minded techie would want to work.
Likewise the 2006 World Cup, where initially you could only buy tickets with a MasterCard.
I may be wrong, but I'm sure this has actually happened before. I've been Googling frantically and turned up nothing though.
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. What I was trying to say is, just because this is a purely-Muslim phenomenon at the moment doesn't mean that it will be a purely-Muslim phenomenon in ten years' time.
And I'd put forward the point that spreading one's religion is as much a tenet of Christianity as it is of Islam. Personally, I'm not a big fan of having a religion shoved down my throat, but - treating others as I would like to be treated - I wouldn't want to shove my beliefs down anybody else's throat either, no matter where they lived or what their skin colour was.
They have, concerning the use of violence, certainly (again, I'm regretting the use of a word where it wasn't necessary). But if you'll allow me to re-print the comment that I was originally replying to:
The ethics of this are much more ambiguous in this day and age, especially now that we have the ability to travel quickly and relatively cheaply.
(Assuming the use of violence is once again on-topic...)
I said it was hypocritical to say otherwise, just as a murderer later declaring thou shalt not kill. I didn't intend to imply that it was wrong to say otherwise.
The immigration debate isn't really one I want to get into. I live in Scotland, where our problem is depopulation rather than overcrowding, and our social tensions are homegrown rather than due to immigration. It gives me a fundamentally different perspective on things from those living south of the border.
If you're trying to prove that the desire to change a country's demographic makeup is, has always been, and always will be a Muslim phenomenon, then I think I've already proven you wrong.
If you're trying to prove that such a desire is currently a Muslim phenomenon, then this has no implications for the state of play ten years ago or ten years into the future. So I fail to see the point of trying to prove such a thing.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have used the term 'Islamification'. I am trying to speak in more general terms. I took issue with your earlier comment because it implied that "wishing to completely transform the country culturally, religiously and racially" was inherently bad. I have no such issue with it when it is explicitly applied to Islam.
Note that I've not touched on the racial side until now. I have no problem with racial demographic changes as long as it occurs due to immigration, emigration and interbreeding - as opposed to genocide and forced deportation.
I am not trying to prove this, I am simply trying to disprove the opposite.
Why is the date relevant?
What I'm trying to say is that we in the UK are hypocritical to say that Islamification should be opposed simply because it alters the country's demographics. The country as it stands is a product of such demographic change.
With regards to your genocide comment, I'm not trying to justify the means, only to say that the ends aren't necessarily something to be avoided. And if you read your earlier comment, you explicitly set the topic of conversation to be the ends:
The circumstances of the precedent I referred to were quite different, true, but in the context of your statement it's not a leap of logic to describe the reformers as "a group that wished to completely transform the country culturally and religiously".
Finally, as a non-religious person living in a decreasingly Christian and increasingly non-religious country, I object to your implication that religious change in particular is something to be avoided.
There's already precedent for the transformation of culture and religion (taking the two as one and the same at the time) through the use of violence within the UK.