The tablets available previously were laptop computers running lightly modified desktop operating systems and applications. Consequently, that's what people tried to use them for. They were not very good at it.
The iPad doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement, it's for web browsing, casual gaming and media playing with maybe a little light note taking. It's using an OS which is designed specifically for the job. Also, love it or hate it, the iPhone did revolutionise the design of touch interfaces - if you can't see how everything since has copied it then you need stronger glasses.
People describe the iPad as "just a big iPod Touch" as if that were a criticism - I bought an iPad because that was exactly what I wanted. Most of the haters are evaluating it as if it were a small PC.
Its also closer to the original Netbook concept, while Netbooks themselves have morphed into entry-level laptops because they could run desktop software, and there wasn't a lot of alternative net book-friendly software. The iPad arrives with a good developer base, lots of available apps and no option to stick Windows or Ubuntu on it...
Anybody who is happy to work exclusively with web apps.
Makes a lot of sense with a mobile device if where you plan to use it has good Internet connections. Until that is universal it makes sense to have a dual track approach. Anyway, developing ChromeOS must be a relatively small job c.f. A full blown OS like android, and all the related web apps could (potentially) work across multiple platforms.
I'd see ChromeOS as more suitable for mobile use within an office/shop/warehouse than for road warriors (initially).
Not so much.. you are trying to say that by exercising whatever "policing" an ISP may do for objectionable content (even if its only malware/phishing sites) on its network
Apple doesn't "police" the App Store for abuse: they individually evaluate and approve each App on a whole raft of content and quality issues before they upload it. They enter into a licensing agreement with the author and, in many cases, collect money from custmers, keeping a wodge for themselves. That's very different from an ISP or public FTP server acting as a "common carrier" and deleting offending material as and when they discover it. Apple are actively distributing software, they're responsible, and its up to them to make sure they have the correct permissions and/or get the author to indemnify them.
and then goto the FSF website and read their take on the GPL
The general rule is, if you distribute binaries, you must distribute the complete corresponding source code too. The exception for the case where you received a written offer for source code is quite limited.
What exception? From the GPLv2
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
(snip)
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
So, if Apple distribute the binary, Apple are responsible for distributing the source - unless you think the Apple App Store is "noncommercial".
Claiming that distribution sites are responsible for content posted by third parties is a tactic used by the RIAA and MPAA and their ilk.
But the stuff on the App Store isn't "posted by third parties" - its posted by Apple, after being vetted and approved by Apple and the money is collected by Apple. Apple are running the stall - the problem with MAFIAA is when they go after the guy who just owns the table.
Its the difference between a newspaper accepting classified ads for cars, and a newspaper starting its own car dealership.
Now, that's a fine line with ISPs and (particularly) torrent-finder sites (some of which were plainly positiond as tools for illegal copying, others were not) but Apple sit very clearly on the "responsible" side of it.
This point seems to be lost on people who protest about the "freedom" of the App store: Apple are first in the firing line for any problems with the App, and they're a big fat litigation/negative publicity target.
Plus, it sounds like FSF has just informed Apple that they are infringing. They haven't made them a generous "settlement" offer under threat of legal action.
They are adding VP8 for HTML5 video support and are adding flash for the HTML4 Flash animation web.
Sadly, I see no mention of SVG support.
What with all the "Android Good - Apple Bad" fuss over Flash, which seems fixated on video, the fact that (unlike Apple) Android doesn't support the most obvious standards-based alternative to Flash doesn't get mentioned much.
OK, there is HTML5 canvas for fast, bitmapped "plot and forget" graphics, but sometimes scalable vectors graphics (as used in both SVG and Flash) are what you want.
Meanwhile, have they added proxy support for WiFi networks (or, more accurately, added a GUI for enabling it in the event that rooting your phone and executing a sqlite query doesn't "work for you")?
I'm stuck teaching JavaScript, which somehow always ends up being either "never hit enter" and all on one line, or else "hit enter and add whitespace completely at random"...
Which any modern, language-aware text editor will re-format into something half-decent for you at the touch of a button because the structure information is included in the code. Of course, if you'd rather spend time helping students find the stray hard tab in their Python code, or rescue it after they'd inadvertantly re-formatted it...
In other news, having a 12-inch spike in the middle of all steering wheels would encourage safer driving.
I use and like PHP - but that's because of its utility and choice of libraries, its still horribly inelegant (especially when all those useful libraries are pre-OOP/namespace, although at least it now has half-decent database abstraction). I wouldn't recommend it as a first language.
Also, writing PHP-style web apps is a bit of a specialised programming model.
I'd pick Java for high-level OOP stuff, supplemented by C and/or assembler for low-level understanding. Java may be on the way out, but only slowly and switching from Java to C# is hardly a huge paradigm shift...
Its possible that Python might be really good - I'll let you know as soon as I manage to get past the page in the manual where it describes significant whitespace without disolving into peals of disbelieving laughter...
Apple aren't going to send round the goons and break down the door unless, maybe, you try and connect to their App store which isn't your personal property.
Alternatively, if you need a device on which to run your own code, don't buy a product which 0.5 milliseconds of research will show is unsuitable for that task.
Can it be that there is nothing remotely adequate for getting from Flash to MPEG-4 or H.264 or whatever?
Flash isn't (just) a video format: its a programming language and graphics/animation engine that is actually quite good for developing casual games, educational apps and rich internet applications. It does also include a streaming video player, but that understands H.264 anyway.
Because if there are such, why is there such a fuss?
Because that is exactly what Apple have banned: App Store apps must now have been "originally written" in C/C++/Objective C or Javascript.
...which also rules out cross-compiling from Java (the preferred language for Android apps) or C# (preferred language for WinMobile apps) as well as desktop browsers.
What this does is throws a major spoke in any effort to support multiple platforms with a single codebase - except maybe by using Javascript/HTML5 (might not work on WinMobile - but every cloud has a silver lining!)
...but, honestly, who owns this problem? If Apple piss off their own developers or invoke the wrath of the DOJ or (more likely) the EU then Jobs gets to explain it to the shareholders. Nobody has to buy an iProduct unless they want to, nobody has to develop for them (unlike a certain large software house who's OS and office products are so dominant that its a major labour of love to avoid them).
Because every scripting language/virtual machine you add to the browser is a nest of potential security holes. iPhone already has ECMAScript/DOM for HTML and its part of Apple's job to keep that patched. Why add more weak spots (especially 3rd party ones)..?
There's also the issue of how many existing Flash apps (including some video GUIs - remember that if you use Flash on your site you also have to supply the UI) will actually run on a touch-only device?
Huh? How can you possibly fit those two sentences in your brain at the same time?
Bigger brain? (or at least, less narrow).
Seriously, what is the contradiction? Just because you have unmetered data doesn't mean that you have to use it inefficiently. Email is efficient for 1:1 sharing, uploading to a server is efficient for 1:many sharing. If you want to share an amusing video with your mates (as mentioned by the upstream post) upload it to YouTube or Facebook, once, and email the URL - don't send round multiple copues of the whole fscking file!
Here's another opinion. As someone who _had_ an iPhone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you the iPhone is junk.
I think you meant to say:
As someone who _had_ a smartphone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you that I don't actually want or need a smartphone.
...because if you strip out the usual Apple-hater memes many of your criticisms apply to many smartphones (Battery life, lots of dross in the App store, features knobbled to appease carriers, bugs & crashing, halfbaked Bluetooth). NB: I use a HTC Hero, not an iPhone and, yeah, it shares many of your issues (plus some all of its own, like a halfbaked WiFi implementation with no proxy support and unreliable and slow reconnection) and a basic $50 cellphone would be more practical if you just wanted calls and SMS/MMS.
Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS.
One helpful hint: a smartphone without an unmetered data plan is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. If you don't want to pay for unmetered data don't bother with a smartphone (of any flavour).
Oh and thank you for not forwarding silly videos and pictures to all and sundry over the already overloaded cellphone networks. Social networking sites are there for a reason.
Damn, now I have to use CD's as coasters. I find their reflective properties highly annoying.
Plus, the coffee runs through the hole in the middle.
Don't panic - the computer industry made it through the great "what, no surplus punched cards*? how can I take notes when I'm on the telephone!!!" crisis of the 1980s.
(*If a punched card hasn't been punched, is it a punched card?)
A good quality CD-R might cost about the same as a floppy disc today,
Quick unscientific search shows Sony floppies at £2.37 for 10 and Sony CD-R at £14.49 for 100. So CD-Rs are appreciably cheaper per disk, and vastly cheaper per MB.
Perhaps I should see a CD-R as a floppy reusable about 400 times
Knock a zero off that because there's a whopping great overhead of 13-20 MB per session. Still knocks the spots off most other media for price/MB though.
I've noticed that CD-RW doesn't really seem to have taken off - when they first came out I did the math and decided that I'd be unlikely to re-use CDs efficiently enough to make up for the extra cost.
0. Everyone I work with has an internal or USB floppy drive. What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
YMMV. I work with a bunch of Mac users and most of those have a USB floppy drive somewhere in their attic - I religiously made sure they were ordered with new Macs once Apple stopped building in floppies sometime last century, but as it turns out, they didn't get used much.
Even when I have retrieved old files from floppies, it frequently turns out that they are useless without the software that created them - we've lost a lot of stuff in Pagemaker (the new version won't load it and its not quite valuable enough to try and retrieve it).
The hard truth is that a digital archive will die unless it is actively maintained. Even then, some of it will become useless as technology changes.
I've created a lot of things in my life which are now either lost or rendered curiosities because technology has moved on (including 2 years spent working on a project using interactive Laservision discs*). I guess it is just an occupational hazard. However, if our race survives for another few centuries I think future historians are going to find a big black hole in the record circa 2000 AD.
(*No, not the BBC Domesday project - although that suffered the same fate, with added irony).
Yet, for most of the last decade, blank CD-ROMs have been cheaper than blank floppies ever were. I think that there is a psychology problem there: CD-ROMs "feel" more valuable than floppies because of the price of music CDs.
Although you dismiss email, I think that is the main reason for the lack of interest in a FD replacement. In my experience, people even use email for sneakernet - they send the email, print off a copy and walk down the corridor to discuss it.
There does seem to be a gap in the market for bulk packs of cheap <1GB flash drives, though.
2. Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable.
Only if you still have a floppy drive (I'd have to extract one from a defunct PC and install it in a less defunct one). OTOH DVD, DVDHD and BluRay drives should still read CD-Rs. I think the long-time readability of CD vs Floppy vs HD is a case of "your mileage may vary": neither is particularly secure.
3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
Dunno if you're still using "telnet 25" but in most modern email clients you just drag-n-drop. No fucking finding the zip code, writing an envelope, buying a stamp, walking to the mailbox...
However, I'd agree that writing a CD is still more of a faff than it should be - although all modern OS's let you drag, drop and burn. "Packet writing" didn't seem to go anywhere (and you had to finalize the disc to ensure readability, so you might as well have burnt a batch).
3. Everything boots from them.
Same correction: everything with a floppy drive boots from them. Virtually everything will boot from CD these days.
But you're right: there has been no direct replacement for the floppy - no single device that hits all the spots. My theory:
When the 3.5" disc came out there were several potential competitors (at least two 3" systems - including the one later used in the Amstrad PCW). However, once IBM (and Apple) went with the Sony system, it was all over. When the floppy was up for replacement in the late 90s there was no one flagship PC manufacturer with the sort of influence IBM had back in the day. Apple were at their lowest ebb (and when, after a brief dalliance with Zip, they bounced back with the iMac, it had no floppy equivalent) so no one system was anointed winner.
The huge amount of "legacy" 3.5" floppies led to lots of lame attempts to produce a backwards-compatible system, when a completely different mechanism was really needed. Plus, your point about booting was a big issue then.
At the time, I'd have put my money on a data version of the Sony Mini-disc - but Sony went with the backward-compatible superfloppy route instead.
The main contender, the Zip drive, suffered from horribly expensive, single-supplier media (and maybe reliability problems).
CD-R pwned the cost-per-megabyte contest as soon as you stopped needing SCSI and an ultrafast HD for mastering.
...and offer them some serious wonga to switch to IPv6 and/or make more use of DHCP/NAT etc.
A lot of Universities have class B blocks (and a lot of those addresses are assigned to Ethernet cards now sitting in dusty cupboards and landfills). Still a non-trivial job, but probably easier for universities than big business.
Universities are gagging for cash at the moment - and even if all the cash is spent on the switch
Or the gub'ment can make them do it. Here in the UK, back in the 80s, the powers that be were forcing universities to use the ISO networking protocols: forcing them to switch to IPv6 is far less silly than that (e.g. unlike the ISO stack the IPv6 protocol actually exists and has been implemented by people).
Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma.
Karma: Excellent
Forget Karma, its the "Comedian" Achievement points that I crave.
For the record, I have both an iPod Touch and an Android phone. Incredibly, both have their pros and cons - I'd rave enthusiastically about Android if I'd never used an iProduct.
In any case, why the fuck would apple want to buy ARM?
Er, because Apple have got a metric shitload of cash in their current account, Wells Fargo are only paying them 0.5% APR and ARM looks like a bloody good investment?
Plus they'd get a better deal on the ARM licenses for their iProduct chipsets.
Perhaps Steve takes an occasional day off from plotting to take over the world (mwahahahaha!!!) to put his finances in order.
Not that I'm in favour of it (and it would certainly attract the attention of the competition authorities - and if it was announced on a slow news day here in the UK they could have problems: the yanks just bought our favorite chocolate factory, now they want to buy one of our biggest tech success stories...?)
when it was founded out of the ashes of the Acorn computer company).
Ashes? Acorn remained a going concern for some time after spinning off ARM. The later versions of their RiscPC used StrongARM. In fact, AFAIK, Acorn didn't go titsup in the end - they just got to the point where their ARM holdings were worth more than the rest of the company put together and wound themselves up to cash in. Not saying the writing wasn't on the wall for them by then.
Apple's low-cost hardware with its wide range of options and standard interfaces teamed up with Android's consistent, carefully designed user interface experience, dazzling speed and frugal memory use.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
I don't see a problem with that, except for a few, small details:
The public will also have to pay for the extra effort involved in archiving data, dealing with disclosure requests etc. If you haven't worked at a University then bear in mind that most research projects are fixed term funding, and when that ends the account goes "poof" and even finding 10 quid to renew your domain name can be a major hassle.
For medicine and social sciences, that includes the cost of producing adequately anonymised versions of "raw" data to ensure compliance with scientific ethics and existing laws on data protection.
Recognise that not all research funding comes from the government - many commerciallt funded projects (and even some government projects not routed through the HE funding bodies) are, essentially, "work for hire" and/or subject to commercial confidentiality and NDAs.
Keep the enforcement and penalties proportionate and don't let this get surrounded by swathes of red tape desiged to cover management asses if someone walks on the cracks in the pavement. (Good luck with that!)
Have some protection against "nuicance" requests (one alleged factor in the recent climategate affair) - sadly the easiest way to do that is to charge a fee for access.
Make sure that our beloved leaders don't have a "public interest*" get-out to protect their policy-based evidence making, so this can take effect where it really matters and not just create extra paperwork for small projects.
* as in, "its in the public interest for the public not to take an interest in this:-)"
Because Apple runs, promotes and handles the money from the App store. If you were able to buy porn from the App Store you would be buying porn from Apple.
In a country where a glimpse of Janet Jackson's Bristols causes a massive scandal and phone-number fines for the messenger, and even moobs now seem to be unacceptable, you can see why they might want to keep the smut at arm's length.
If you buy a Mac (or, even, access porn from the iPhone) then your smut is being provided by a third party. You're not buying it from Apple.
When App writers protest about the T&Cs of the app store, its easy to forget that they're getting a shedload of indirect publicity from Apple. Try getting your better mousetrap on the shelves at Walmart...
(I'd concede that the "originally written in C/C++/ObjC" curb is bonkers, though).
OTOH, Apple may do a u-turn and release the iWank at the next press conference...
(1) Neither of your scenarios covers the case where both the quantum and the secondary channel are created by Eve, not just the secondary channel;
In other news, no encryption system, even some hypothetical mathematically perfect cypher, will guarantee that Bob is not actually Eve with a pair of socks stuffed down her jeans. No encryption system will tell Alice that Bob really is Bob. No encryption system will warn Alice that Bob is shagging Eve and talks in his sleep. No encryption system will warn you that Eve has tampered with your hardware. No encryption system will magically turn Alice and Bob into experienced cryptographers who will spot tampering.
Of course, you can use encryption to set up something like a trust network to validate identity, but at some point in the chain a human being has to positively identify Bob and Alice and hand them their "credentials". Likewise, no encryption system can be secure against arbitrarily sophisticated hardware/software tampering.
When you have a sexy cypher which the math says is uncrackable its easy to forget that the math depends on a whole raft of assumptions and assertions.
Slashdot Mirror
The tablets available previously were laptop computers running lightly modified desktop operating systems and applications. Consequently, that's what people tried to use them for. They were not very good at it.
The iPad doesn't pretend to be a laptop replacement, it's for web browsing, casual gaming and media playing with maybe a little light note taking. It's using an OS which is designed specifically for the job. Also, love it or hate it, the iPhone did revolutionise the design of touch interfaces - if you can't see how everything since has copied it then you need stronger glasses.
People describe the iPad as "just a big iPod Touch" as if that were a criticism - I bought an iPad because that was exactly what I wanted. Most of the haters are evaluating it as if it were a small PC.
Its also closer to the original Netbook concept, while Netbooks themselves have morphed into entry-level laptops because they could run desktop software, and there wasn't a lot of alternative net book-friendly software. The iPad arrives with a good developer base, lots of available apps and no option to stick Windows or Ubuntu on it...
Whats the Chome Tablet for?
Anybody who is happy to work exclusively with web apps.
Makes a lot of sense with a mobile device if where you plan to use it has good Internet connections. Until that is universal it makes sense to have a dual track approach. Anyway, developing ChromeOS must be a relatively small job c.f. A full blown OS like android, and all the related web apps could (potentially) work across multiple platforms.
I'd see ChromeOS as more suitable for mobile use within an office/shop/warehouse than for road warriors (initially).
Not so much.. you are trying to say that by exercising whatever "policing" an ISP may do for objectionable content (even if its only malware/phishing sites) on its network
Apple doesn't "police" the App Store for abuse: they individually evaluate and approve each App on a whole raft of content and quality issues before they upload it. They enter into a licensing agreement with the author and, in many cases, collect money from custmers, keeping a wodge for themselves. That's very different from an ISP or public FTP server acting as a "common carrier" and deleting offending material as and when they discover it. Apple are actively distributing software, they're responsible, and its up to them to make sure they have the correct permissions and/or get the author to indemnify them.
and then goto the FSF website and read their take on the GPL
OK.
From the GNU FAQ:
The general rule is, if you distribute binaries, you must distribute the complete corresponding source code too. The exception for the case where you received a written offer for source code is quite limited.
What exception? From the GPLv2
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
(snip)
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
So, if Apple distribute the binary, Apple are responsible for distributing the source - unless you think the Apple App Store is "noncommercial".
Claiming that distribution sites are responsible for content posted by third parties is a tactic used by the RIAA and MPAA and their ilk.
But the stuff on the App Store isn't "posted by third parties" - its posted by Apple, after being vetted and approved by Apple and the money is collected by Apple. Apple are running the stall - the problem with MAFIAA is when they go after the guy who just owns the table.
Its the difference between a newspaper accepting classified ads for cars, and a newspaper starting its own car dealership.
Now, that's a fine line with ISPs and (particularly) torrent-finder sites (some of which were plainly positiond as tools for illegal copying, others were not) but Apple sit very clearly on the "responsible" side of it.
This point seems to be lost on people who protest about the "freedom" of the App store: Apple are first in the firing line for any problems with the App, and they're a big fat litigation/negative publicity target.
Plus, it sounds like FSF has just informed Apple that they are infringing. They haven't made them a generous "settlement" offer under threat of legal action.
They are adding VP8 for HTML5 video support and are adding flash for the HTML4 Flash animation web.
Sadly, I see no mention of SVG support.
What with all the "Android Good - Apple Bad" fuss over Flash, which seems fixated on video, the fact that (unlike Apple) Android doesn't support the most obvious standards-based alternative to Flash doesn't get mentioned much.
OK, there is HTML5 canvas for fast, bitmapped "plot and forget" graphics, but sometimes scalable vectors graphics (as used in both SVG and Flash) are what you want.
Meanwhile, have they added proxy support for WiFi networks (or, more accurately, added a GUI for enabling it in the event that rooting your phone and executing a sqlite query doesn't "work for you")?
I'm stuck teaching JavaScript, which somehow always ends up being either "never hit enter" and all on one line, or else "hit enter and add whitespace completely at random"...
Which any modern, language-aware text editor will re-format into something half-decent for you at the touch of a button because the structure information is included in the code. Of course, if you'd rather spend time helping students find the stray hard tab in their Python code, or rescue it after they'd inadvertantly re-formatted it...
In other news, having a 12-inch spike in the middle of all steering wheels would encourage safer driving.
I use and like PHP - but that's because of its utility and choice of libraries, its still horribly inelegant (especially when all those useful libraries are pre-OOP/namespace, although at least it now has half-decent database abstraction). I wouldn't recommend it as a first language.
Also, writing PHP-style web apps is a bit of a specialised programming model.
I'd pick Java for high-level OOP stuff, supplemented by C and/or assembler for low-level understanding. Java may be on the way out, but only slowly and switching from Java to C# is hardly a huge paradigm shift...
Its possible that Python might be really good - I'll let you know as soon as I manage to get past the page in the manual where it describes significant whitespace without disolving into peals of disbelieving laughter...
Using your own device in whatever manner you wish is your right!
So jailbreak your iPhone and install Linux on it.
Apple aren't going to send round the goons and break down the door unless, maybe, you try and connect to their App store which isn't your personal property.
Alternatively, if you need a device on which to run your own code, don't buy a product which 0.5 milliseconds of research will show is unsuitable for that task.
Can it be that there is nothing remotely adequate for getting from Flash to MPEG-4 or H.264 or whatever?
Flash isn't (just) a video format: its a programming language and graphics/animation engine that is actually quite good for developing casual games, educational apps and rich internet applications. It does also include a streaming video player, but that understands H.264 anyway.
Because if there are such, why is there such a fuss?
Because that is exactly what Apple have banned: App Store apps must now have been "originally written" in C/C++/Objective C or Javascript.
...which also rules out cross-compiling from Java (the preferred language for Android apps) or C# (preferred language for WinMobile apps) as well as desktop browsers.
What this does is throws a major spoke in any effort to support multiple platforms with a single codebase - except maybe by using Javascript/HTML5 (might not work on WinMobile - but every cloud has a silver lining!)
...but, honestly, who owns this problem? If Apple piss off their own developers or invoke the wrath of the DOJ or (more likely) the EU then Jobs gets to explain it to the shareholders. Nobody has to buy an iProduct unless they want to, nobody has to develop for them (unlike a certain large software house who's OS and office products are so dominant that its a major labour of love to avoid them).
Why not support both HTML5 AND flash?
Because every scripting language/virtual machine you add to the browser is a nest of potential security holes. iPhone already has ECMAScript/DOM for HTML and its part of Apple's job to keep that patched. Why add more weak spots (especially 3rd party ones)..?
There's also the issue of how many existing Flash apps (including some video GUIs - remember that if you use Flash on your site you also have to supply the UI) will actually run on a touch-only device?
Huh? How can you possibly fit those two sentences in your brain at the same time?
Bigger brain? (or at least, less narrow).
Seriously, what is the contradiction? Just because you have unmetered data doesn't mean that you have to use it inefficiently. Email is efficient for 1:1 sharing, uploading to a server is efficient for 1:many sharing. If you want to share an amusing video with your mates (as mentioned by the upstream post) upload it to YouTube or Facebook, once, and email the URL - don't send round multiple copues of the whole fscking file!
Here's another opinion. As someone who _had_ an iPhone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you the iPhone is junk.
I think you meant to say:
As someone who _had_ a smartphone and went back to a $50 Nokia I'll tell you that I don't actually want or need a smartphone.
...because if you strip out the usual Apple-hater memes many of your criticisms apply to many smartphones (Battery life, lots of dross in the App store, features knobbled to appease carriers, bugs & crashing, halfbaked Bluetooth). NB: I use a HTC Hero, not an iPhone and, yeah, it shares many of your issues (plus some all of its own, like a halfbaked WiFi implementation with no proxy support and unreliable and slow reconnection) and a basic $50 cellphone would be more practical if you just wanted calls and SMS/MMS.
Apple's answer... use email or MMS. What if I'm sitting right next to the person and want to save some data charges? Nope. Use email or MMS.
One helpful hint: a smartphone without an unmetered data plan is as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. If you don't want to pay for unmetered data don't bother with a smartphone (of any flavour).
Oh and thank you for not forwarding silly videos and pictures to all and sundry over the already overloaded cellphone networks. Social networking sites are there for a reason.
Of course, you could go for a Verbatim pack of 10 floppies at £1.40.
I'm sure there are cheaper CD deals too - but the elephant in the room is that modern document sizes will eat up even a 2.8 MB floppy pretty rapidly.
Knock a zero off that because there's a whopping great overhead of 13-20 MB per session
With packet writing?
Depends if you have to finalize it to send to someone without packet writing support. Does anybody use this?
Damn, now I have to use CD's as coasters. I find their reflective properties highly annoying.
Plus, the coffee runs through the hole in the middle.
Don't panic - the computer industry made it through the great "what, no surplus punched cards*? how can I take notes when I'm on the telephone!!!" crisis of the 1980s.
(*If a punched card hasn't been punched, is it a punched card?)
A good quality CD-R might cost about the same as a floppy disc today,
Quick unscientific search shows Sony floppies at £2.37 for 10 and Sony CD-R at £14.49 for 100. So CD-Rs are appreciably cheaper per disk, and vastly cheaper per MB.
Perhaps I should see a CD-R as a floppy reusable about 400 times
Knock a zero off that because there's a whopping great overhead of 13-20 MB per session. Still knocks the spots off most other media for price/MB though.
I've noticed that CD-RW doesn't really seem to have taken off - when they first came out I did the math and decided that I'd be unlikely to re-use CDs efficiently enough to make up for the extra cost.
0. Everyone I work with has an internal or USB floppy drive. What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
YMMV. I work with a bunch of Mac users and most of those have a USB floppy drive somewhere in their attic - I religiously made sure they were ordered with new Macs once Apple stopped building in floppies sometime last century, but as it turns out, they didn't get used much.
Even when I have retrieved old files from floppies, it frequently turns out that they are useless without the software that created them - we've lost a lot of stuff in Pagemaker (the new version won't load it and its not quite valuable enough to try and retrieve it).
The hard truth is that a digital archive will die unless it is actively maintained. Even then, some of it will become useless as technology changes.
I've created a lot of things in my life which are now either lost or rendered curiosities because technology has moved on (including 2 years spent working on a project using interactive Laservision discs*). I guess it is just an occupational hazard. However, if our race survives for another few centuries I think future historians are going to find a big black hole in the record circa 2000 AD.
(*No, not the BBC Domesday project - although that suffered the same fate, with added irony).
1. Give-away-able
Yet, for most of the last decade, blank CD-ROMs have been cheaper than blank floppies ever were. I think that there is a psychology problem there: CD-ROMs "feel" more valuable than floppies because of the price of music CDs.
Although you dismiss email, I think that is the main reason for the lack of interest in a FD replacement. In my experience, people even use email for sneakernet - they send the email, print off a copy and walk down the corridor to discuss it.
There does seem to be a gap in the market for bulk packs of cheap <1GB flash drives, though.
2. Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable.
Only if you still have a floppy drive (I'd have to extract one from a defunct PC and install it in a less defunct one). OTOH DVD, DVDHD and BluRay drives should still read CD-Rs. I think the long-time readability of CD vs Floppy vs HD is a case of "your mileage may vary": neither is particularly secure.
Dunno if you're still using "telnet 25" but in most modern email clients you just drag-n-drop. No fucking finding the zip code, writing an envelope, buying a stamp, walking to the mailbox...
However, I'd agree that writing a CD is still more of a faff than it should be - although all modern OS's let you drag, drop and burn. "Packet writing" didn't seem to go anywhere (and you had to finalize the disc to ensure readability, so you might as well have burnt a batch).
3. Everything boots from them.
Same correction: everything with a floppy drive boots from them. Virtually everything will boot from CD these days.
But you're right: there has been no direct replacement for the floppy - no single device that hits all the spots. My theory:
...and offer them some serious wonga to switch to IPv6 and/or make more use of DHCP/NAT etc.
A lot of Universities have class B blocks (and a lot of those addresses are assigned to Ethernet cards now sitting in dusty cupboards and landfills). Still a non-trivial job, but probably easier for universities than big business.
Universities are gagging for cash at the moment - and even if all the cash is spent on the switch
Or the gub'ment can make them do it. Here in the UK, back in the 80s, the powers that be were forcing universities to use the ISO networking protocols: forcing them to switch to IPv6 is far less silly than that (e.g. unlike the ISO stack the IPv6 protocol actually exists and has been implemented by people).
Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma.
Karma: Excellent
Forget Karma, its the "Comedian" Achievement points that I crave.
For the record, I have both an iPod Touch and an Android phone. Incredibly, both have their pros and cons - I'd rave enthusiastically about Android if I'd never used an iProduct.
In any case, why the fuck would apple want to buy ARM?
Er, because Apple have got a metric shitload of cash in their current account, Wells Fargo are only paying them 0.5% APR and ARM looks like a bloody good investment?
Plus they'd get a better deal on the ARM licenses for their iProduct chipsets.
Perhaps Steve takes an occasional day off from plotting to take over the world (mwahahahaha!!!) to put his finances in order.
Not that I'm in favour of it (and it would certainly attract the attention of the competition authorities - and if it was announced on a slow news day here in the UK they could have problems: the yanks just bought our favorite chocolate factory, now they want to buy one of our biggest tech success stories...?)
when it was founded out of the ashes of the Acorn computer company).
Ashes? Acorn remained a going concern for some time after spinning off ARM. The later versions of their RiscPC used StrongARM. In fact, AFAIK, Acorn didn't go titsup in the end - they just got to the point where their ARM holdings were worth more than the rest of the company put together and wound themselves up to cash in. Not saying the writing wasn't on the wall for them by then.
Apple's low-cost hardware with its wide range of options and standard interfaces teamed up with Android's consistent, carefully designed user interface experience, dazzling speed and frugal memory use.
Truly a marriage made in heaven.
The public pays for gathering the data, the public should have access to that data. Kinda hard to find fault with that.
I don't see a problem with that, except for a few, small details:
* as in, "its in the public interest for the public not to take an interest in this :-)"
Why so different Steve?
Because Apple runs, promotes and handles the money from the App store. If you were able to buy porn from the App Store you would be buying porn from Apple.
In a country where a glimpse of Janet Jackson's Bristols causes a massive scandal and phone-number fines for the messenger, and even moobs now seem to be unacceptable, you can see why they might want to keep the smut at arm's length.
If you buy a Mac (or, even, access porn from the iPhone) then your smut is being provided by a third party. You're not buying it from Apple.
When App writers protest about the T&Cs of the app store, its easy to forget that they're getting a shedload of indirect publicity from Apple. Try getting your better mousetrap on the shelves at Walmart...
(I'd concede that the "originally written in C/C++/ObjC" curb is bonkers, though).
OTOH, Apple may do a u-turn and release the iWank at the next press conference...
(1) Neither of your scenarios covers the case where both the quantum and the secondary channel are created by Eve, not just the secondary channel;
In other news, no encryption system, even some hypothetical mathematically perfect cypher, will guarantee that Bob is not actually Eve with a pair of socks stuffed down her jeans. No encryption system will tell Alice that Bob really is Bob. No encryption system will warn Alice that Bob is shagging Eve and talks in his sleep. No encryption system will warn you that Eve has tampered with your hardware. No encryption system will magically turn Alice and Bob into experienced cryptographers who will spot tampering.
Of course, you can use encryption to set up something like a trust network to validate identity, but at some point in the chain a human being has to positively identify Bob and Alice and hand them their "credentials". Likewise, no encryption system can be secure against arbitrarily sophisticated hardware/software tampering.
When you have a sexy cypher which the math says is uncrackable its easy to forget that the math depends on a whole raft of assumptions and assertions.