Apple is being singled out, because they are the only company with enough balls to actually show how their product works on a commercial, instead of relying on some pop-star to hold it in her hand.
In all the Apple ads, and in the stores, Apple's phones are never set up to browse using EDGE. It's always the Wifi connection and, using that, any service looks snappy. Using EDGE, I doubt Apple could actually *fit* more than two UI operations into a 30-second TV ad slot because it takes around that long for many basic web pages to finish loading.
Maybe Apple's new 3G phones will not suck so much at basic web tasks using the phone network, and Apple will actually have the balls to show this in operation. Sucks to be a user in a 2-year contract though.
The reason Mac OS is overwhelmingly adopted by the creative industry is that it does creative tasks well.
DA: Anything that happens, happens. Anything that in happening causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that in happening happens again, happens again. Though not necessarily in that order. Your favourite OS sucks.
Verizon 900 minutes + unlimited data = $105ish after taxes. I know, I had a Moto Q just before the iPhone price drop, when I bought mine. AT&T iPhone 900 minutes + unlimited data + rollover minutes = $85ish after taxes.
At those prices, it makes sense to get a Sprint phone, share out its connection using Wifi or BLuetooth, and slave an Apple Touch or phone off it for connectivity. You still come out ahead and you don't have to put up with sucky EDGE.
I think your assignation of "Web 1.0" to all of these things is not warranted. For Match and evite, aren't these classic early example of almost entirely user-driven content creation and social networking? I *think* that's what Web 2.0 is about. Unless it's really just about the rounded corners and candy colours.
As men age their germline DNA contains more mutation errors because of continued DNA replication to produce sperm. Therefore, the fertilisation by older men accelerates evolution!
Of course, this assumes that Google does not now have these kinds of meetings over the logo. Given how fond some people there are of meetings, interviewing, and "brainstorming", I suspect this is also the case...
If it doesn't have the scrolling feature of ReadThemAll [narod.ru] then it's not worth having
uBook does this as well and it's pretty good (and configurable for different reading speeds). When I got my Windows Phone I was trying out all the ebook readers. The Palm-derived eReader is okay, Amazon's Mobipocket was my regular until it started hinking on a few file formats it was supposed to be able to read. I gave uBook a try - it's initially off-putting because it's obviously done by a serious geek because it has around five billion config options, even down to be able to tweak the sub-pixel rendering to suit the individual characteristics of whatever screen you are using. But it also does auto scroll, which is nice.
This is a salve. Things like this should be opt in, not opt out. Aside from ethical considerations, it would make the data a lot more reliable in terms of a self-selecting group of people that welcomed Facebook spying on their consumption habits. Presumably, these opt-inners would welcome marketing spam.
Putin is doing wonders for the economy. Russia is one of the fastest developing countries on the planet, and will continue to grow that way for at least the next 5-10 years. The reason Russia is controlled by one party is because that one party is doing wonderful things for the average living standards of people across the country.
Yes, I've heard he really got the trains running on time.
I was using Mobipocket for a while but I found it often crapped out over specific PDB or even PRC formats created by other programs. Then I got uBook, which opens these files okay but has a less intuitive interface. However, I am liking its ability to tweak the sub-pixel font rendering and the autoscroll option. It's basically an evolved, advanced Mobipocket for people who don't mind 7 (!) pages of config options.
I highly suggest you upgrade [to an iphone] first. That thing has been amazing on many more levels, and it will load up your PDF books just fine
While the iPhone screen is nice and big, displaying only PDFs blows. For proper ebook reading you need something that can reflow and reformat (and even autoscroll) to suit your screen and your eyesight. Something like Mobipocket or uBook. Actually, because eBook enables you to fiddle with the sub-pixel font rendering, I have begun favouring this over other readers. Until Apple enables an open SDK you're unlikely to find support for many ebook formats (PDB/PRC etc) on the iphone so you're stuck with Windows Mobile or Palm. WM seems to have more readers available for it now. Get something like the Toshiba G900 and you've got an 800x400 screen that's got more pixels than Apple's phone. Bonus: you can also read PDFs on WM/Palm as well... but PDF reading is definitely the least attractive option compared to configurable ebook readers.
The sites these "testers" choose are hardly able to get any browser really worked up. They need to hit some of the uglier MySpace and Bebo pages loaded with all kinds of crap and see what happens. Preferably the stripper ones with lots of huge Adds banners and porno music videos. That's like natural selection for browsers, either they make it through the first few minutes of opening them or they just die, mercilessly.
My personal best with Firefox 2 on Windows was 780MB of RAM "Memory Used" and 785 "Peak Memory" on a 1 GB laptop before I killed that browser sessions like the mad dog it was.
How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
If it's a Mobipocket device then there's already convertors. PRC is the Mobi format and it's pretty widely used for non-DRM stuff. I have much of the Gutenberg ebooks in PRC for my phone. If ebooks ever take off then there's literally tens of thousands of ebooks on the torrents in every format from simple PDF/DJVu scans to various OCR captures. I'd say ebooks are about where mp3s were circa-1995 or so, hardware wise, before the HanGo and Rio came along and gave people a reason to put them on handhelds, and software distribution-wise about where mp3s were in 1999.
Apple had never competed in audio books against Audible, so it partnered with it to use its DRM in that field
That's exactly why now, today's much stronger Apple is unlikely to promote Amazon's DRM when it could use its own. Apple traditionally now doesn't enter a market until its quite mature and can promise a good ROI. I am not privy to whatever spreadsheets Apple's managers present to their VPs to get a go-ahead, but I think it comes down to whether the ebook market is now sufficiently large enough, and growing quickly enough, to satisfy an investment here. Given that this market has been moribund for years, until Amazon kicked off this latest round I'd have thought that a non-starter. However, following the Newsweek article Amazon seems to have got some traction. There is of course a huge bitorrent scene in scanned, DRM-stripped, and OCR'd ebooks. If Kindle did sell reasonably well. and had homebrew software, and could read these, and if some publishers decided to sue Amazon (or another ebook manufacturer) then maybe we'd see more action. It would be like the RIAA kicking off the MP3 market with a bang by going after the Diamond Rio. That kind of publicity might compel Apple to enter the market.
The rest of your article is something about dissing hardware standardisation, mistrusting Microsoft yet quoting the Gospel of Steve and other stuff which I am not going to get into here. I am not making value judgements about the worth of being under the yoke of either Apple or Microsoft DRM. I simply stated why I felt Apple made certain decisions in the past, and why I think it will make certain different decisions in the future regarding its DRM partners.
I also don't understand your decision to insert adverts for only very vaguely relevant articles that are not on this website after each of your responses.
Can you imagine having every O'Reilly book ever made on the thing, and the ability to do full text search/grep capability through your entire library of technical books?
I pretty much do that on my Windows phone right now (complete with annoyance of having four or five different ebook formats). It's okay. But you know what it has that beats the Kindle though? I can push a button and speak to people as well. Unless someone hacks the Kindle to do VOIP, it's a goner.
Audible was around before Apple, and had what passed then for a market-lock on DRM'd spoken audio... multiple platforms and huge back catalogue of content. It's simply too big a competitor to go against. Apple also partnered with Creative to use MusicMatch (now with Yahoo) when the Windows ipod launched. But then it dropped MusicMatch when it had its own solution. As regards DRM "NIH", it's not about where it was made, it's about control. You really think Apple wants anyone deploying DRM within "its" market? Apple wasn't content to just licence FairPlay for itunes, it bought it, brought it in-house, and prevented it from being licenced to any other companies. Apple even blocked Real from selling its own reverse-engineered FairPlay tracks that were higher quality than what was available from ITMS at that time. Or look at it another way - for years the ipod shipped with PortalPlayer chipsets which came with a Windows Media SDK. Implementing PlaysForSure would have been trivial, if Apple had not deleted those drivers from the firmware. There was simply no way Apple was going to allow a bunch of companies to deploy DRM files within its hardware channel without going through ITMS.
If I could download Kindle books to my iPhone from Amazon
Kindle books are just Mobipocket files. You can already read these on Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry phones. Plus a bunch of other hardware readers. Maybe *if* Apple finally gets around to releasing an SDK that doesn't suck and *if* Apple "blesses" a Mobipocket application for it to be signed then you will get your wish. However, Apple's never shown much enthusiasm for approving DRM content on its devices that isn't through iTunes or Apple directly. So I have my doubts that this will happen easily without some hardcore backroom dealing.
flat fee access to Wikipedia from anywhere where there's EVDO
Just get a $30/month Sprint SERO plan with smartphone and you have voice and unlimited data at EVDO rates + free roaming on Verizon's network without Verizon's insane overage charges. I have one and it works very well. I am actually thinking that eventually, if the iphone gets hacked enough to support bluetooth modem tethering easily, that I might get one without a plan and tether the Sprint phone to the iphone to use it as its data source.
Reading just PDFs off Google gets old fast unless you're really interested in 19th century Victorian travelogues. The best all purpose 3G-enabled multi-format ebook reader now with the best resolution is the Toshiba G900. It's a PocketPC phone with 800x400 colour screen. Because US carriers are loathe to offer any advanced phones besides Apple's, it doesn't seem to be subsidised. Google says it costs $600-$800 unlocked. There's a couple of HTC smartphones Athena, (640x480, $900!) or Universal (640x480, $200-$600 on eBay). The Universal has a lot of different OEM names. If you restrict yourself to non-3G carriers, and want to leech off WiFi, why not just get an EEE or a Nokia tablet? Cheaper, better screen than most phones, and more flexible. Hacking the ip[hone repeatedly is a bit like the entire PSP debacle. Too much time spent noodling with exploits, not enough time spent developing apps. Sure next year migth be different, but won't there still be signed apps? And you'll have missed out on real ebook reading for months and months.
Apple competes in the personal computer system market... OS X is not a competitor in this market because Apple does not sell it to OEMs to install on other systems. Apple just uses it to bypass MS's monopoly
Here's where our perspective differs. From my POV, Apple deploys OSX as a defensive strategy to lock in a customer base and create a barrier around its market. It is not really bypassing Microsoft's monopoly, it is replacing it with a smaller monopoly and a shallower software pool.
The advent of things like Boot Camp and Parallels is interesting regarding Apple's long-term approach to the Mac. For years the idea of supporting Windows/DOS emulation on a Mac was seen as a Very Bad Thing from a strategic point of view. The example of the Amiga was fresh in people's minds - part of its launch strategy was that it provided MS-DOS emulation from Day 1. Many people felt this was why it never really got a good ecosystem beyond games. Obviously thinking in Apple has changed as regards building out OSX's base long-term because, with the ability to run Windows easily on their machines, why should any software publishers begin any new large-scale OSX project or spend too much effort upgrading? It's a short-term win but a long-term questionable proposition. Apple's monopoly on Mac opeating systems has served it well, but maybe along with its transformation from Apple Computer to simply Apple, new thinking on the long-term development of its monopoly strategy has changed.
Only morons claim Nintendo has a monopoly on gaming. The same applies to Apple and computers.
Where did I claim that? You're obviously having trouble understanding the difference between the set of all exemplars versus a sub-set. You know, there should be a Godwin for the first person to resort to personal abuse in a conversation as defence for lack of clue. Oh wait, there is.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is being singled out, because they are the only company with enough balls to actually show how their product works on a commercial, instead of relying on some pop-star to hold it in her hand.
In all the Apple ads, and in the stores, Apple's phones are never set up to browse using EDGE. It's always the Wifi connection and, using that, any service looks snappy. Using EDGE, I doubt Apple could actually *fit* more than two UI operations into a 30-second TV ad slot because it takes around that long for many basic web pages to finish loading.
Maybe Apple's new 3G phones will not suck so much at basic web tasks using the phone network, and Apple will actually have the balls to show this in operation. Sucks to be a user in a 2-year contract though.
The reason Mac OS is overwhelmingly adopted by the creative industry is that it does creative tasks well.
DA: Anything that happens, happens. Anything that in happening causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that in happening happens again, happens again. Though not necessarily in that order. Your favourite OS sucks.
Sprint SERO:
500 mins, unlimited texts, unlimited EVDO data, free Verizon roaming, tethering. $30/month + tax.
1250 mins, unlimited texts, unlimited EVDO data, free Verizon roaming, tethering. $50/month + tax.
At those prices, it makes sense to get a Sprint phone, share out its connection using Wifi or BLuetooth, and slave an Apple Touch or phone off it for connectivity. You still come out ahead and you don't have to put up with sucky EDGE.
I think your assignation of "Web 1.0" to all of these things is not warranted. For Match and evite, aren't these classic early example of almost entirely user-driven content creation and social networking? I *think* that's what Web 2.0 is about. Unless it's really just about the rounded corners and candy colours.
Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution
As men age their germline DNA contains more mutation errors because of continued DNA replication to produce sperm. Therefore, the fertilisation by older men accelerates evolution!
If it doesn't have the scrolling feature of ReadThemAll [narod.ru] then it's not worth having
uBook does this as well and it's pretty good (and configurable for different reading speeds). When I got my Windows Phone I was trying out all the ebook readers. The Palm-derived eReader is okay, Amazon's Mobipocket was my regular until it started hinking on a few file formats it was supposed to be able to read. I gave uBook a try - it's initially off-putting because it's obviously done by a serious geek because it has around five billion config options, even down to be able to tweak the sub-pixel rendering to suit the individual characteristics of whatever screen you are using. But it also does auto scroll, which is nice.
This is a salve. Things like this should be opt in, not opt out. Aside from ethical considerations, it would make the data a lot more reliable in terms of a self-selecting group of people that welcomed Facebook spying on their consumption habits. Presumably, these opt-inners would welcome marketing spam.
Putin is doing wonders for the economy. Russia is one of the fastest developing countries on the planet, and will continue to grow that way for at least the next 5-10 years. The reason Russia is controlled by one party is because that one party is doing wonderful things for the average living standards of people across the country.
Yes, I've heard he really got the trains running on time.
I'm not a power user, and I really just use Quicktime for porn /. needs more candour like this.
use Amazons Mobi-Pocket reader
I was using Mobipocket for a while but I found it often crapped out over specific PDB or even PRC formats created by other programs. Then I got uBook, which opens these files okay but has a less intuitive interface. However, I am liking its ability to tweak the sub-pixel font rendering and the autoscroll option. It's basically an evolved, advanced Mobipocket for people who don't mind 7 (!) pages of config options.
I highly suggest you upgrade [to an iphone] first. That thing has been amazing on many more levels, and it will load up your PDF books just fine
While the iPhone screen is nice and big, displaying only PDFs blows. For proper ebook reading you need something that can reflow and reformat (and even autoscroll) to suit your screen and your eyesight. Something like Mobipocket or uBook. Actually, because eBook enables you to fiddle with the sub-pixel font rendering, I have begun favouring this over other readers. Until Apple enables an open SDK you're unlikely to find support for many ebook formats (PDB/PRC etc) on the iphone so you're stuck with Windows Mobile or Palm. WM seems to have more readers available for it now. Get something like the Toshiba G900 and you've got an 800x400 screen that's got more pixels than Apple's phone. Bonus: you can also read PDFs on WM/Palm as well... but PDF reading is definitely the least attractive option compared to configurable ebook readers.
Leopard Ain't Done 'til Tiger's Boot Camp Won't Run?
Your funny little post is not only wildly inaccurate and devoid of reality
And your post has sweet fuck all to do with news for nerds. GYOFB.
The sites these "testers" choose are hardly able to get any browser really worked up. They need to hit some of the uglier MySpace and Bebo pages loaded with all kinds of crap and see what happens. Preferably the stripper ones with lots of huge Adds banners and porno music videos. That's like natural selection for browsers, either they make it through the first few minutes of opening them or they just die, mercilessly.
My personal best with Firefox 2 on Windows was 780MB of RAM "Memory Used" and 785 "Peak Memory" on a 1 GB laptop before I killed that browser sessions like the mad dog it was.
How are you supposed to quickly and easily load your current books onto the Kindle?
If it's a Mobipocket device then there's already convertors. PRC is the Mobi format and it's pretty widely used for non-DRM stuff. I have much of the Gutenberg ebooks in PRC for my phone. If ebooks ever take off then there's literally tens of thousands of ebooks on the torrents in every format from simple PDF/DJVu scans to various OCR captures. I'd say ebooks are about where mp3s were circa-1995 or so, hardware wise, before the HanGo and Rio came along and gave people a reason to put them on handhelds, and software distribution-wise about where mp3s were in 1999.
Apple had never competed in audio books against Audible, so it partnered with it to use its DRM in that field
That's exactly why now, today's much stronger Apple is unlikely to promote Amazon's DRM when it could use its own. Apple traditionally now doesn't enter a market until its quite mature and can promise a good ROI. I am not privy to whatever spreadsheets Apple's managers present to their VPs to get a go-ahead, but I think it comes down to whether the ebook market is now sufficiently large enough, and growing quickly enough, to satisfy an investment here. Given that this market has been moribund for years, until Amazon kicked off this latest round I'd have thought that a non-starter. However, following the Newsweek article Amazon seems to have got some traction. There is of course a huge bitorrent scene in scanned, DRM-stripped, and OCR'd ebooks. If Kindle did sell reasonably well. and had homebrew software, and could read these, and if some publishers decided to sue Amazon (or another ebook manufacturer) then maybe we'd see more action. It would be like the RIAA kicking off the MP3 market with a bang by going after the Diamond Rio. That kind of publicity might compel Apple to enter the market.
The rest of your article is something about dissing hardware standardisation, mistrusting Microsoft yet quoting the Gospel of Steve and other stuff which I am not going to get into here. I am not making value judgements about the worth of being under the yoke of either Apple or Microsoft DRM. I simply stated why I felt Apple made certain decisions in the past, and why I think it will make certain different decisions in the future regarding its DRM partners.
I also don't understand your decision to insert adverts for only very vaguely relevant articles that are not on this website after each of your responses.
Can you imagine having every O'Reilly book ever made on the thing, and the ability to do full text search/grep capability through your entire library of technical books?
I pretty much do that on my Windows phone right now (complete with annoyance of having four or five different ebook formats). It's okay. But you know what it has that beats the Kindle though? I can push a button and speak to people as well. Unless someone hacks the Kindle to do VOIP, it's a goner.
Apple partnered with Audible
Audible was around before Apple, and had what passed then for a market-lock on DRM'd spoken audio... multiple platforms and huge back catalogue of content. It's simply too big a competitor to go against. Apple also partnered with Creative to use MusicMatch (now with Yahoo) when the Windows ipod launched. But then it dropped MusicMatch when it had its own solution. As regards DRM "NIH", it's not about where it was made, it's about control. You really think Apple wants anyone deploying DRM within "its" market? Apple wasn't content to just licence FairPlay for itunes, it bought it, brought it in-house, and prevented it from being licenced to any other companies. Apple even blocked Real from selling its own reverse-engineered FairPlay tracks that were higher quality than what was available from ITMS at that time. Or look at it another way - for years the ipod shipped with PortalPlayer chipsets which came with a Windows Media SDK. Implementing PlaysForSure would have been trivial, if Apple had not deleted those drivers from the firmware. There was simply no way Apple was going to allow a bunch of companies to deploy DRM files within its hardware channel without going through ITMS.
If I could download Kindle books to my iPhone from Amazon
Kindle books are just Mobipocket files. You can already read these on Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry phones. Plus a bunch of other hardware readers. Maybe *if* Apple finally gets around to releasing an SDK that doesn't suck and *if* Apple "blesses" a Mobipocket application for it to be signed then you will get your wish. However, Apple's never shown much enthusiasm for approving DRM content on its devices that isn't through iTunes or Apple directly. So I have my doubts that this will happen easily without some hardcore backroom dealing.
flat fee access to Wikipedia from anywhere where there's EVDO
Just get a $30/month Sprint SERO plan with smartphone and you have voice and unlimited data at EVDO rates + free roaming on Verizon's network without Verizon's insane overage charges. I have one and it works very well. I am actually thinking that eventually, if the iphone gets hacked enough to support bluetooth modem tethering easily, that I might get one without a plan and tether the Sprint phone to the iphone to use it as its data source.
Reading just PDFs off Google gets old fast unless you're really interested in 19th century Victorian travelogues. The best all purpose 3G-enabled multi-format ebook reader now with the best resolution is the Toshiba G900. It's a PocketPC phone with 800x400 colour screen. Because US carriers are loathe to offer any advanced phones besides Apple's, it doesn't seem to be subsidised. Google says it costs $600-$800 unlocked. There's a couple of HTC smartphones Athena, (640x480, $900!) or Universal (640x480, $200-$600 on eBay). The Universal has a lot of different OEM names. If you restrict yourself to non-3G carriers, and want to leech off WiFi, why not just get an EEE or a Nokia tablet? Cheaper, better screen than most phones, and more flexible. Hacking the ip[hone repeatedly is a bit like the entire PSP debacle. Too much time spent noodling with exploits, not enough time spent developing apps. Sure next year migth be different, but won't there still be signed apps? And you'll have missed out on real ebook reading for months and months.
It has come to this.
Apple competes in the personal computer system market ... OS X is not a competitor in this market because Apple does not sell it to OEMs to install on other systems. Apple just uses it to bypass MS's monopoly
Here's where our perspective differs. From my POV, Apple deploys OSX as a defensive strategy to lock in a customer base and create a barrier around its market. It is not really bypassing Microsoft's monopoly, it is replacing it with a smaller monopoly and a shallower software pool.
The advent of things like Boot Camp and Parallels is interesting regarding Apple's long-term approach to the Mac. For years the idea of supporting Windows/DOS emulation on a Mac was seen as a Very Bad Thing from a strategic point of view. The example of the Amiga was fresh in people's minds - part of its launch strategy was that it provided MS-DOS emulation from Day 1. Many people felt this was why it never really got a good ecosystem beyond games. Obviously thinking in Apple has changed as regards building out OSX's base long-term because, with the ability to run Windows easily on their machines, why should any software publishers begin any new large-scale OSX project or spend too much effort upgrading? It's a short-term win but a long-term questionable proposition. Apple's monopoly on Mac opeating systems has served it well, but maybe along with its transformation from Apple Computer to simply Apple, new thinking on the long-term development of its monopoly strategy has changed.
Only morons claim Nintendo has a monopoly on gaming. The same applies to Apple and computers.
Where did I claim that? You're obviously having trouble understanding the difference between the set of all exemplars versus a sub-set. You know, there should be a Godwin for the first person to resort to personal abuse in a conversation as defence for lack of clue. Oh wait, there is.