No camera: why would you want a rear-facing camera on a device this size? The ergonomics are totally wrong. A front-facing camera for video chat might be more sensible - but then the iPhone doesn't have that either, so its no great surprise, and the ergonomics are still less than perfect. (Personally, I think video conferncing is evil anyway).
No USB ports/VGA/need camera adaptor - I'd modify that whinge and say no USB ports or SD on the dock accessory. While the device is undocked, it should be wireless - but the dock should include the full works. I'll give them a bit of slack on VGA because there are are so many other video connection standards punters might want.
No Ethernet: So what? This is the sort of device that wireless was made for (again, maybe on the dock).
No Adobe Flash: Why is Adobe Flash evil until Apple leave it off?
more expensive than a $399 netbook: You were expecting cheap from Apple? However: tattoo on your forehead this is not a netboook. Or rather, its closer to the original EEE PC concept, before that morphed into entry level laptops. Its a web/email/media player/casual gaming appliance. If you want a small, cheap laptop PC, don't buy this.
Also remember: one of the characteristics of Apple is that they don't pack their products with legacy compatability or features that "some people might want".
this thing requires OS X 10.5.8 to sync to a Mac, but WinXP is okay for a PC. [snip] can anyone explain why Apple would alienate all their own OS X 10.4 users?
Because a big enough proportion of Mac users have upgraded from your 2005 version of Apple's OS to make it economical for them to drop support.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has had a rather well-publicized spot of bother tearing the 2001 version of their OS from the cold, dead hands of their users - so dropping support for XP would potentially alienate more PC users than there are users of any Apple OS.
In other news, Steve doesn't love you anymore because he hasn't heard from your wallet in 3 years.
...and that's probably a good choice if all you ever want to do with it is read black and white ebooks page-by-page - because current e-ink screens may be beautifully clear but they have refresh times measured in seconds, making them unusable for most other purposes.
Yes, there are better technologies in the pipeline. I'm sure Apple is watching them carefully - but you can't use last month's new screen technology in a product that's going into production this month.
How come that, here on Slashdot, Flash is usually regarded as evil, spawn of the devil, violater of web pages, scourge of the internet and mortal enemy of standards-based web... until Apple don't support it.
Yet Apple are one of the few companies with a high enough profile to actually stand a ghost of a chance of persuading major websites to look at standards-based solutions (as distinct from Microsoft, who'd presumably prefer them to use Silverlight).
My prediction: that the massive amount of hype built up for this will mean a spectacular write-up of the device regardless of the quality
My counter-prediction: when Jobs stands up and announces a larger version of the iPod Touch and the availability of ebooks on iTunes, lots of people will start publicly whinging about the fact that its not powered by zero-point energy, doesn't come with free, unlimited mobile broadband, the books still cost as much as paper books, has less space than a Nomad and is generally lame. Meanwhile, all the media bods who hyped it up will start scouring the land for pundits who now want to knock it down.
My prediction: if people perceive this as a laptop/PC replacement it will fail. Pen/touch-based PCs are a niche market for people who need to use a full-blown PC while standing up. Otherwise, if you're doing substantial writing, you need a keyboard.
If, however, it is sucessfully pitched as an "appliance" for instant-on armchair web browsing, media playing, reading and casual gaming then, although it might not be what you want, I think it will find a market, because it does something that existing tablets* don't, and it will benefit from the existing iPhone/App Store ecology. If the price is right, I'd like something like that as a supplement to my "real" computer.
(*By "existing tablets" I mean "established" tablet/pen PCs, not the latest crop of Android etc. tablets which may be direct competitors with the iProduct).
'one player is denoted the Dungeon Master... [who] is tasked with giving directions to other players... [which] mimics the organization of a gang.'
Of course, the prison may just have banned D&D because it was causing trouble, much as a school might ban trading cards because they were causing fights and aruments, and the above nonsense could just be some post-hoc rationalization that their lawyers came up with to defend against the frivolous lawsuit.
I mean, ye gods, if the most heinous offense against human dignity in this place is that you're not allowed to play D&D, then US prisons have been receiving some very unfair press...
Which proprietary formats are those? The only annoying ones I can think of are the iTunes DRM (which is being phased out) and the (not unrelated) iPod interface protocol. Of course, without that they'd never have got permission for the iTunes store and woudn't have put a rocket under the legal online music business...
Sorry. Are we talking about the same Macs that run a POSIX-compliant OS of which large chunks (although certainly not all) are open source, talk standard internet protocols, come bundled with a full-featured SDK as standard with full documentation available online? The ones which, using Fink or MacPorts, can run most of the "big name" FOSS projects?
The iPhone, OTOH, is clearly far more "closed". So closed that the smallest developers can, for a paltry registration fee, develop apps and have them distributed via Apple's store. Yes - Apple have to approve things, but in return you get access to a high-profile sales channel. In other news, I can't just walk into WalMart or Amazon HQ and demand that they carry my product.
There is a massive failure here -- by the UN Panel when they relied on non-scientific sources for important predictions.
The problem is that the UN don't just have to collate the hard scientific evidence - they also have to communicate those findings in lay terms to the press, public and politicians. "Non-scientific" sources are usually more useful for this than formally written, peer-reviewed papers. The media don't want "important predictions" - they want good stories.
The date at which a particular set of glaciers are going to disappear is not an "important prediction" - and probably very hard to get right, because its a highly indirect, localised effect of global warming - but its a lot more likely to catch the public's eye than a discussion of the error margins on average ocean temperatures.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses.
So? If the automobile hadn't come along, and the Chicago city authorities had delayed tacking the manure problem because someone else had a model which only predicted 18 inches by 1935 and skeptics claimed that this debunked the "controversial" theory that horses make shit... Chicago probably would have been knee-deep by 1930.
Unless they had a hotline to the future and knew how the automobile would pan out, it sounds like they dodged a bullet there.
In other news, if someone harnesses zero point energy or cracks cold fusion in the next few years, then CO2 levels won't "follow current trends" and we'll be OK.
If.
Meanwhile, digging up and burning vast quantities of fossil fuel will continue to put more CO2 into the atmosphere, and that CO2 will continue to obey the laws of physics and trap the sun's heat. But don't worry, it won't cause dangerous warming because that would be bad for business and the morons at the IPCC can't even reliably predict to the nearest degree what the temperature will be in Chicago on Jan 24th 2050.
Even if the AGW predictions are wrong, it might be nice to leave the great-great grandchildren some oil to make drugs and plastics and stuff from. Oh, I forgot - because someone once wrongly predicted that the oil would run out by 1981 then it must be an infinite resource.
$54,000 is still a crazy amount all things considered, but hopefully this judgment can stand as a sort of benchmark for future ones, even if it's not setting a precedent.
It sounds as if that was the best the judge could reasonably do without forcing a retrial - which I'm guessing would have cost Thomas another 5-figure sum in legal fees, win or lose, plus whatever damages the new trial decided. So maybe its for the best.
Look on the bright side: $54k isn't going to pay RIAA's fees, either.
The implication is that ways of educating users has not improved in the past 20 years.
Its not a case of educating them - its a case of stopping asking them to do silly things: do use a complex password; don't write it down do change it every six weeks; do create a persistant account (with a unique password) for every web service you use, even if you only use it once; do grow fluffy purple wings and fly around the room...
One thing that bugs me is the people who think that requiring at least one capital and one non-alphanumeric makes the password a lot stronger.
I don't think the point is to increase the number of raw combinations so much as to prevent the use of "dictionary" words, which could be brute-forced.
ISTR this was an issue with older Unix-style systems where/etc/password was world readable, contained the hashed passwords for all users and used a crypt algorithm which had seemed awfully compute-intensive when the fastest thing around was a PDP-8...
Insisting on numbers helps, but could be subverted by using 1337-speak number/letter substitutions - which a cracker could still search for systematically, especially if they were using something a few orders of magnitude faster than a PDP-8.
there going to get, very, very little market share if they don't provide a reasonable install option.
I don't think Google gives a fig about ChromeOS gaining market share as an aftermarket OS. That market is a pretty barren cow anyway.
Google is going to work with manufacturers to produce ChromeOS-based netbooks, nettops, tablets etc. which will come with the OS pre-installed and optimized for the hardware.
ChromeOS only makes sense if its stripped-down and tailored for specific thin-client hardware - otherwise, you might as well just install the Chrome browser on your current OS. A "one size fits all" installer for PCs would defeat the object.
let's have specific examples and citations of where things were only done because of Apple?
Well, dang me if I couldn't find any blog entries from CEOs of phone manufacturers admitting that they took their lead from Apple. Must not be true then. Phone manufacturers just spontaneously decided to start making products that looked and operated somewhat like an iPhone.
Applications for phones existed long before Apple
...but Apple gathered them all together into a central App Store, with a single payment system, reviews, searches, ratings, a modicum of quality control, and made the store accessible to small developers. Its a pity that the red mist that comes down over your eyes because of the closed nature of the phone stops you seeing the advantages of that. It hasn't stopped Android, Nokia, Palm etc. going down a similar route.
I have no idea whether Google entered the market only because of Apple - that sounds rather like a Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Ooh, look: you know Latin. However, you can't see the difference between a rigorous logical argument and a plausibility argument (the only sort possible when hard factual evidence is unlikely to emerge).
Why hasn't Google also entered the mp3 market, if they do what Apple do?
Er, because its a totally different market, with different economies and considerations (e.g. the need to make deals with record companies)? Because they get a share of the MP3 action via. their search engine? Not that it would be particularly surprising if they did move into music...
Either way, Google and Apple together are still a minority of the market.
You still don't get the notion that minorities can still have a huge influence on other players who want them to stay minorities.
(a) what you give them is a nonexclusive license to redistribute your code and doesn't actually transfer the copyright to them, so you can continue to distribute the BSD version.
(b) they pay you enough money to cover the cost of having a lawyer give the contract the once-over vis. making sure you're not exposing yourself to any liabilities.
If they're not proposing to pay you enough money to cover the admin and make it worth your while, tell them to either use the BSD version which you've generously made available or go fish.
Apple has "redefined" less than 3% of current market (and with the uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, areas in which Apple is not interested in, that percentage might as well go down)
Absolutely. If Apple had "redefined" the market you'd expect the iPhone to have had an obvious influence on the design of every other smartphone released since the iPhone was announced.
Probably, large hardware manufacturers such as HTC would have written custom front ends to Windows Mobile to give it a more iPhone-like GUI. I expect some big concern like Google would have taken a leaf out of Apple's book and got into the smartphone market (maybe with a Linux-based platform). And everybody and their dog would have announced an "App Store" for their phone platform. Even cheap'n'cheerful phones and medial players would be styling their products along the lines of the iPhone.
But, as we know, none of that happened. The iPhone didn't have any significant effect on the mobile industry.
Why are you linking to a US decision about EULA when I'm talking about EU? You are aware that they are two entirely different beasts right?
Why are you talking about the EU when the Apple/Psystar case was in the US?
Anyway - AFAIK the situation is not significantly different in the EU (and the various EU member states differ anyway). The only arguments refer to whether specific terms in specific EULAs are unfair and whether EULA terms are visible before purchase (e.g. this old story) - not whether EULAs are valid at all.
Oh and you cannot forget Servelan. She played hot sexy strong in a way I haven't seen yet the only person come close was the visitor leader in V the new series.
Sorry... substitute sour milk for catfood and you have Alien Nation.
(Although, to be fair, although both were based on the idea of alien refugees and subtle-as-a-brick allegories about racism, District 9 was still pretty original)
Slashdot Mirror
No camera: why would you want a rear-facing camera on a device this size? The ergonomics are totally wrong. A front-facing camera for video chat might be more sensible - but then the iPhone doesn't have that either, so its no great surprise, and the ergonomics are still less than perfect. (Personally, I think video conferncing is evil anyway).
No USB ports/VGA/need camera adaptor - I'd modify that whinge and say no USB ports or SD on the dock accessory. While the device is undocked, it should be wireless - but the dock should include the full works. I'll give them a bit of slack on VGA because there are are so many other video connection standards punters might want.
No Ethernet: So what? This is the sort of device that wireless was made for (again, maybe on the dock).
No Adobe Flash: Why is Adobe Flash evil until Apple leave it off?
more expensive than a $399 netbook: You were expecting cheap from Apple? However: tattoo on your forehead this is not a netboook. Or rather, its closer to the original EEE PC concept, before that morphed into entry level laptops. Its a web/email/media player/casual gaming appliance. If you want a small, cheap laptop PC, don't buy this.
Also remember: one of the characteristics of Apple is that they don't pack their products with legacy compatability or features that "some people might want".
this thing requires OS X 10.5.8 to sync to a Mac, but WinXP is okay for a PC. [snip] can anyone explain why Apple would alienate all their own OS X 10.4 users?
Because a big enough proportion of Mac users have upgraded from your 2005 version of Apple's OS to make it economical for them to drop support.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has had a rather well-publicized spot of bother tearing the 2001 version of their OS from the cold, dead hands of their users - so dropping support for XP would potentially alienate more PC users than there are users of any Apple OS.
In other news, Steve doesn't love you anymore because he hasn't heard from your wallet in 3 years.
I may still get a Kindle because of this reason.
...and that's probably a good choice if all you ever want to do with it is read black and white ebooks page-by-page - because current e-ink screens may be beautifully clear but they have refresh times measured in seconds, making them unusable for most other purposes.
Yes, there are better technologies in the pipeline. I'm sure Apple is watching them carefully - but you can't use last month's new screen technology in a product that's going into production this month.
How come that, here on Slashdot, Flash is usually regarded as evil, spawn of the devil, violater of web pages, scourge of the internet and mortal enemy of standards-based web... until Apple don't support it.
Yet Apple are one of the few companies with a high enough profile to actually stand a ghost of a chance of persuading major websites to look at standards-based solutions (as distinct from Microsoft, who'd presumably prefer them to use Silverlight).
Just reading the comments on Macrumors.com... I'm feeling quietly confident :-)
Of course, Slashdot hates it, but Steve didn't get where he is today by designing products to appeal to the typical /.er...
My prediction: that the massive amount of hype built up for this will mean a spectacular write-up of the device regardless of the quality
My counter-prediction: when Jobs stands up and announces a larger version of the iPod Touch and the availability of ebooks on iTunes, lots of people will start publicly whinging about the fact that its not powered by zero-point energy, doesn't come with free, unlimited mobile broadband, the books still cost as much as paper books, has less space than a Nomad and is generally lame. Meanwhile, all the media bods who hyped it up will start scouring the land for pundits who now want to knock it down.
Its also available in suppository form!
My prediction: if people perceive this as a laptop/PC replacement it will fail. Pen/touch-based PCs are a niche market for people who need to use a full-blown PC while standing up. Otherwise, if you're doing substantial writing, you need a keyboard.
If, however, it is sucessfully pitched as an "appliance" for instant-on armchair web browsing, media playing, reading and casual gaming then, although it might not be what you want, I think it will find a market, because it does something that existing tablets* don't, and it will benefit from the existing iPhone/App Store ecology. If the price is right, I'd like something like that as a supplement to my "real" computer.
(*By "existing tablets" I mean "established" tablet/pen PCs, not the latest crop of Android etc. tablets which may be direct competitors with the iProduct).
...would eventually end up clogged with loaders, patchers, helpers, and monitors.
They'd have to join the queue, then. This has long been a headache with all software and device drivers, not just games.
'one player is denoted the Dungeon Master... [who] is tasked with giving directions to other players... [which] mimics the organization of a gang.'
Of course, the prison may just have banned D&D because it was causing trouble, much as a school might ban trading cards because they were causing fights and aruments, and the above nonsense could just be some post-hoc rationalization that their lawyers came up with to defend against the frivolous lawsuit.
I mean, ye gods, if the most heinous offense against human dignity in this place is that you're not allowed to play D&D, then US prisons have been receiving some very unfair press...
Proprietary formats anyone?
Which proprietary formats are those? The only annoying ones I can think of are the iTunes DRM (which is being phased out) and the (not unrelated) iPod interface protocol. Of course, without that they'd never have got permission for the iTunes store and woudn't have put a rocket under the legal online music business...
Sorry. Are we talking about the same Macs that run a POSIX-compliant OS of which large chunks (although certainly not all) are open source, talk standard internet protocols, come bundled with a full-featured SDK as standard with full documentation available online? The ones which, using Fink or MacPorts, can run most of the "big name" FOSS projects?
The iPhone, OTOH, is clearly far more "closed". So closed that the smallest developers can, for a paltry registration fee, develop apps and have them distributed via Apple's store. Yes - Apple have to approve things, but in return you get access to a high-profile sales channel. In other news, I can't just walk into WalMart or Amazon HQ and demand that they carry my product.
There is a massive failure here -- by the UN Panel when they relied on non-scientific sources for important predictions.
The problem is that the UN don't just have to collate the hard scientific evidence - they also have to communicate those findings in lay terms to the press, public and politicians. "Non-scientific" sources are usually more useful for this than formally written, peer-reviewed papers. The media don't want "important predictions" - they want good stories.
The date at which a particular set of glaciers are going to disappear is not an "important prediction" - and probably very hard to get right, because its a highly indirect, localised effect of global warming - but its a lot more likely to catch the public's eye than a discussion of the error margins on average ocean temperatures.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses.
So? If the automobile hadn't come along, and the Chicago city authorities had delayed tacking the manure problem because someone else had a model which only predicted 18 inches by 1935 and skeptics claimed that this debunked the "controversial" theory that horses make shit... Chicago probably would have been knee-deep by 1930.
Unless they had a hotline to the future and knew how the automobile would pan out, it sounds like they dodged a bullet there.
In other news, if someone harnesses zero point energy or cracks cold fusion in the next few years, then CO2 levels won't "follow current trends" and we'll be OK.
If.
Meanwhile, digging up and burning vast quantities of fossil fuel will continue to put more CO2 into the atmosphere, and that CO2 will continue to obey the laws of physics and trap the sun's heat. But don't worry, it won't cause dangerous warming because that would be bad for business and the morons at the IPCC can't even reliably predict to the nearest degree what the temperature will be in Chicago on Jan 24th 2050.
Even if the AGW predictions are wrong, it might be nice to leave the great-great grandchildren some oil to make drugs and plastics and stuff from. Oh, I forgot - because someone once wrongly predicted that the oil would run out by 1981 then it must be an infinite resource.
$54,000 is still a crazy amount all things considered, but hopefully this judgment can stand as a sort of benchmark for future ones, even if it's not setting a precedent.
It sounds as if that was the best the judge could reasonably do without forcing a retrial - which I'm guessing would have cost Thomas another 5-figure sum in legal fees, win or lose, plus whatever damages the new trial decided. So maybe its for the best.
Look on the bright side: $54k isn't going to pay RIAA's fees, either.
The implication is that ways of educating users has not improved in the past 20 years.
Its not a case of educating them - its a case of stopping asking them to do silly things: do use a complex password; don't write it down do change it every six weeks; do create a persistant account (with a unique password) for every web service you use, even if you only use it once; do grow fluffy purple wings and fly around the room...
One thing that bugs me is the people who think that requiring at least one capital and one non-alphanumeric makes the password a lot stronger.
I don't think the point is to increase the number of raw combinations so much as to prevent the use of "dictionary" words, which could be brute-forced.
ISTR this was an issue with older Unix-style systems where /etc/password was world readable, contained the hashed passwords for all users and used a crypt algorithm which had seemed awfully compute-intensive when the fastest thing around was a PDP-8...
Insisting on numbers helps, but could be subverted by using 1337-speak number/letter substitutions - which a cracker could still search for systematically, especially if they were using something a few orders of magnitude faster than a PDP-8.
there going to get, very, very little market share if they don't provide a reasonable install option.
I don't think Google gives a fig about ChromeOS gaining market share as an aftermarket OS. That market is a pretty barren cow anyway.
Google is going to work with manufacturers to produce ChromeOS-based netbooks, nettops, tablets etc. which will come with the OS pre-installed and optimized for the hardware.
ChromeOS only makes sense if its stripped-down and tailored for specific thin-client hardware - otherwise, you might as well just install the Chrome browser on your current OS. A "one size fits all" installer for PCs would defeat the object.
let's have specific examples and citations of where things were only done because of Apple?
Well, dang me if I couldn't find any blog entries from CEOs of phone manufacturers admitting that they took their lead from Apple. Must not be true then. Phone manufacturers just spontaneously decided to start making products that looked and operated somewhat like an iPhone.
Applications for phones existed long before Apple
...but Apple gathered them all together into a central App Store, with a single payment system, reviews, searches, ratings, a modicum of quality control, and made the store accessible to small developers. Its a pity that the red mist that comes down over your eyes because of the closed nature of the phone stops you seeing the advantages of that. It hasn't stopped Android, Nokia, Palm etc. going down a similar route.
I have no idea whether Google entered the market only because of Apple - that sounds rather like a Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Ooh, look: you know Latin. However, you can't see the difference between a rigorous logical argument and a plausibility argument (the only sort possible when hard factual evidence is unlikely to emerge).
Why hasn't Google also entered the mp3 market, if they do what Apple do?
Er, because its a totally different market, with different economies and considerations (e.g. the need to make deals with record companies)? Because they get a share of the MP3 action via. their search engine? Not that it would be particularly surprising if they did move into music...
Either way, Google and Apple together are still a minority of the market.
You still don't get the notion that minorities can still have a huge influence on other players who want them to stay minorities.
Just make sure that
(a) what you give them is a nonexclusive license to redistribute your code and doesn't actually transfer the copyright to them, so you can continue to distribute the BSD version.
(b) they pay you enough money to cover the cost of having a lawyer give the contract the once-over vis. making sure you're not exposing yourself to any liabilities.
If they're not proposing to pay you enough money to cover the admin and make it worth your while, tell them to either use the BSD version which you've generously made available or go fish.
Apple has "redefined" less than 3% of current market (and with the uptake of mobile phones in developing countries, areas in which Apple is not interested in, that percentage might as well go down)
Absolutely. If Apple had "redefined" the market you'd expect the iPhone to have had an obvious influence on the design of every other smartphone released since the iPhone was announced.
Probably, large hardware manufacturers such as HTC would have written custom front ends to Windows Mobile to give it a more iPhone-like GUI. I expect some big concern like Google would have taken a leaf out of Apple's book and got into the smartphone market (maybe with a Linux-based platform). And everybody and their dog would have announced an "App Store" for their phone platform. Even cheap'n'cheerful phones and medial players would be styling their products along the lines of the iPhone.
But, as we know, none of that happened. The iPhone didn't have any significant effect on the mobile industry.
In fact, to *urgently* tell the OS that the SysRq.
My first computer, an OSI Superboard 2 had a key for that: "Break". I think it was wired to the reset pin of the 6502.
That got its attention :-)
Why are you linking to a US decision about EULA when I'm talking about EU? You are aware that they are two entirely different beasts right?
Why are you talking about the EU when the Apple/Psystar case was in the US?
Anyway - AFAIK the situation is not significantly different in the EU (and the various EU member states differ anyway). The only arguments refer to whether specific terms in specific EULAs are unfair and whether EULA terms are visible before purchase (e.g. this old story) - not whether EULAs are valid at all.
Oh and you cannot forget Servelan. She played hot sexy strong in a way I haven't seen yet the only person come close was the visitor leader in V the new series.
Hot damn. Morena Baccarin as Servilan.
Yes.
I'll be in my bunk!
Like District 9?
Sorry... substitute sour milk for catfood and you have Alien Nation.
(Although, to be fair, although both were based on the idea of alien refugees and subtle-as-a-brick allegories about racism, District 9 was still pretty original)