So.. who actually bought the stolen records if T-mobile employees sold them to other operators but no other operators were involved?
Ans: Third party phone retailers (or, at least, their employees). Not the sort that sell SIM-free phones, the sort that act as agents for the networks and mostly sell phones on contract.
At least, that's who I was getting cold-called by when my T-Mobile contract ran out. Of course, they did their best to use weasel words to imply that they were calling from T-Mobile without actually saying so.
I assume that the game was to try and get you to sign a new T-Mobile contract with them as agent, so they would get the commission.
Publishing the names "in news accounts" is different from publishing the names in history articles or other.
I can see the front page now:
Vicious Murderers Released!
Convicted killers now living within 10km of an Infant School!
Are they living in YOUR town? See our disturbing Historical Report on page 27...
That's the problem - there's a difference between having the facts on record and available to anyone who wants to know, and having the popular press whip up a lynch mob. But its hard enough to make a watertight legal distinction even with out teh interwebs coming along and messing up all the old authority structures...
Proper response: If you can't learn, I can't help. Sorry.
...but first, make sure that you are in good financial shape, own your own house, have your own car insurance and aren't planning to begat any offspring who might require Granny's Discount Daycare Services. Also check that your parents haven't been seen reading any articles about the total cost of raising a child.
Remind me again what Muad'Dib has to do with a family's computer problems?
Er... that even if all the computers are destroyed in a holy war and people have to use mind-enhancing drugs instead, it won't solve all your niggling little family problems, and grandpa will still be an embarrasment?
Mafia Wars is free. You never have to install anything, spend any money, or visit any other sites.
Execpt that the USP of these games is that they are competetive.
If I take advantage of one of these offers, does it post a note to my Friends (tm) saying:
itsdapead is movin' on up the greasy pole, and has reached the rank of "Backstabbing Yuppie Oik" - rather than beating you the hard-but-honest way he's whipped out the Gold Card and bought a wad of Dollars.
To get a bonus from itsdapead, wait until hell freezes over.
Click here to remove itsdapead from your friends list.
These games are not just "free" games which let you play in response for viewing a few ads: are very artfully designed to actively provoke "peer pressure" to pay for extras or to sign up others - even in adults.
Personally, that's what puts me off Facebook: I didn't enjoy peer pressure when I was 12 and I certainly don't enjoy re-living it - however, (cough) years later I'm more capable of resisting it. However, I do remember what it was like, as a kid, to desperately want some must-have bit of tat - and this world is full of kids of all ages. There have to be some limits - some sensible compromise between the Nanny State and the Wild West.
All of this is completely in the users' hands.
...but that is not a free pass to distribute borderline malware - which is what TFA seems to be alleging.
In fact, it's a requirement that the implementation claimed by the patent could be done by any programmer of ordinary skill, with the guidance of just the specification and drawings.
That's the standard for the level of detail required by the specification. But what if it can be shown that your "programmer of ordinary skill" could have taken a non-technical description of the "business method" and implemented it, using well-established techniques without the full specification?
Now, as long as there was FUD as to whether or not the method was patentable in itself, that wouldn't necessarily have helped. If that's clarified, it should be much easier to sift out the unpatentable "method" elements of the patent from the technobabble and show that they are sufficient to allow any programmer to implement that method.
Any narrowing of the patentability of "methods" should help the fight against software patents, and make it harder to get vague software patents granted. It might not win the war, but it would win a battle.
My read is that the justices seem to be ok with software patents in principle but are leery of business method patents that are not tied to a device or that do not incorporate some form of technology.
Its too much to hope that this will kill software patents in one swoop.
Hopefully, even a ruling against "business method" patents will mean that a lot of software patents can be characterized as "implementing a buisness method on a standard computing device" and defeated on the grounds that the implementation could be done by any competent programmer.
This sort of thing has been done before, and in the past hasn't exactly set off a golden age of 3d television.
This happens every 10-15 years (just like it does in the cinema). I remember Channel 4 (I think) doing more or less exactly the same thing they are doing now some back in the 80s using red/cyan (which, unlike red/green gave some, limited, colour).
Its easy to pooh-pooh ideas as "never gonna catch on" - but this one has failed to catch on so many times that its about time they got the message. Even if the systems improve, that the fundamental question of how you reconcile a moving, 3D scene with a 20" window without giving the viewer a migraine every time an object gets clipped.
You'd pretty much have to rewind to the early "point a couple of cameras at a stage-play" era of movie making and start re-inventing the "language of film" from scratch.
The only thing that might have changed this time round is that more people have large/wide screen TVs which might make it marginally more impressive.
I guess the reason that 3D has flared up in the cinema again now is the popularity of computer-animated movies, which must be relatively easy make in 3D. Probably quite cool, too, if you're in Pixar HQ, sitting 2' away from a high def monitor wearing your LCD shutter specs.
Given that the monitor-less, keyboard-less and mouse-less Mac mini costs twice as much as a Netbook, I would bet on the "jumbo iPod touch" scenario.
Yet my EEE PC netbook is gathering dust on a shelf, while my Mac Mini currently has an uptime of 271 days (and that was after an intentional reboot)...
The other thing that was odd in the limited time I got to play, is that as you use the mouse it has a habit of twisting around on your mouse pad.
Oh dear. They really didn't learn from that hockey puck mouse...
Thing is, though, the pros and cons of Apple mice are a bit irrelevant: as long as Apple only offers one or two options, they'll inevitably veer towards "one size fits nobody" - which usually dictates that they have to be relatively small, light and and ambisinister (opposite of Ambidextrous - equally useless whichever hand you use*).
The main purpose of a mouse is basic pointing and clicking - for that I want to choose a mouse which feels comfortable in my hand - and only then do I start worrying about what other bells and whistles it has.
I prefer larger, heavier, "deeper" mice which are shaped for right-handed use - but can you imagine the outrage if Apple started shipping Macs with a right-hand-only mouse? Also, I know at least one person who liked the hockey-puck mouse (or, at least, used one for several years without defenestrating it). Then again, I also know someone who likes Windows Vista...
I'd be more alarmed to find someone who wasn't afraid to pass a checkpoint like this.
Especially if it was done properly - lots of coloured lights, eerie electronic humming noises, CO2 smoke and one of those plasma eye thingies (required by law in any ISO98641-compliant Mad Scientst's lab, doomsday machine or Borg recharging station).
Oh, and a carefully concealed foot-pedal to set it all off when someone who looked nervous, shifty or foreign walked through. In fact, don't bother with the actual fear detector (which is probably quite a boring looking black box).
Usually for these loss of freedom stories, we get the bleated "If you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to be afraid of" response. Where is it? Wait, what's that I smell? Scared sheeple?
Wow. Could we have finally found a proposal which is so self-evidently bloody stupid that even the "innocent people have nothing to fear from the law" brigade can see the potential problems?
I think all those Hackintoshers are also a reminder to Steve that there is a market for netbooks and non-AIO upgradable computers under 1000$.
Of course there is a market.
The $64,000 question is, however, what would supporting that market do to Apple's current sales of mid/high-end laptops, all-in-ones and workstations? Such systems probably yield much higher profit margins than netbooks and entry-level towers.
Its a dead cert that many loyal Apple customers would go for a cheaper alternative if it were offered: Apple need to be damned sure that they were going to attract enough genuinely new custom to more than compensate for that.
Thing is, Apple's current business model of selling premium-priced "boutique" systems seems to be working quite nicely - why risk it by competing with yourself?
I'm sure that they'll come out with a "response" to the netbook market soon - but I'd bet on a jumbo iPod Touch rather than a mini Mac.
In the UK fuses are built into the plugs - so you can have a 13A fuse on your kettle and a 3A fuse on your phone charger.
I've always found it ironic that USAian domestic appliances tend towards big, brutal things 50% bigger than their UK equivalent, that look like they should connect to industrial 3-phase - but have these tinny little toytown plugs that spark like buggery when you plug them in.
Next: which country has the better system of flush toilets?:-)
And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
No, its the closed-source model - and for pragmatic reasons rather than simple FOSS ideology.
The (L|U)i?n(i|u)x OS kernels and X window system are in perpetual development and lack stable binary APIs. The best way of supporting that is to release the source so that the FOSS community and distro producers can share the responsibility for maintaining it and building binaries. Trying to support numerous distros and multiple kernel and X versions via a binary release is a hugely inefficient way of supporting what is currently a minority market, c.f. a massive Windows market with only a couple of "active" major OS versions - with 5-year shelf-lives - to support. Frankly, I'm surprised that they bother.
Personally, I think its time that the (L|U)i?n(i|u)x ecosystem pulled itself out of perpetual alpha and settled down to a much longer release cycle. However, even if you like the "realase soon, release often" model, it doesn't mix well with closed source binaries.
If X isn't crap for you that's nice.
If you want true network-transparent graphics (not just a remote desktop), X is in a class of its own - although if you do just want a remote desktop then VNC-type solutions seem to cope just-as-well, if not better, with eye-candy laden desktops.
For a personal desktop, X just seems massivley over-engineered and also fails in one vital respect that hasn't been mentioned yet:
Windows and Mac each provide a standardised GUI that strongly encourages consistency between applications. Forget psychobabble about the desktop metaphor or visual cognition: I think that a major reason why the destop GUI initially succeeded was that suddenly all the applications did the basics - like saving and opening files, copying, pasting, setting preferences - in the same way at a time when competing application software houses were trying to copyright the "look and feel" of their ideosyncratic text-based menus. X doesn't do this (to be fair, that was never supposed to be part of X) and although Gnome/KDE have taken on this job, the earlier attempts at window managers and desktops seemed to have a design philosophy of "I can't conceive of any UI finer than the un*x shell and vi/emacs, but I do want to run 8 instances of XTerm on something that looks as cool as NeXTStep".
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop.
Has rendering speed ever been an issue with X11? If I had to criticize X11, I'd point at "responsiveness" to clicks and drags (making the desktop feel a bit "clunky" c.f. Windows/Mac), rather than any problem with how fast it could render a window - it only takes a small lag or a badly chosen movement threshold to destroy the illusion of dragging tangible things around a destop.
Also, issues like easily switching resolution and handling multiple screens sensibly - I'd say that distros like Ubuntu are just about caught up with where Mac and Windows were 15 years ago, although partly that's down to waiting for Gnome, KDE etc. to provide friendly interfaces to what could be achieved with a bit of xorg.conf hacking.
The other thing I find slightly disaapointing is that many modern apps and Gnome/KDE desktops don't work very well in conjunction with X11's USP: network transparancy - I've only really had adequate results using xnest - but then again, that's a fault of window managers and desktop suites, not X11.
Why can MS make profits that dwarf Apple's without profiting from hardware?
Because the CP/M guy was off flying his plane and they got the gig to supply the OS for the (proprietary) IBM PC. IBM then used the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme to sell PCs to all the suits who refused to buy computers from hippies, and (as predicted by all the pundits the moment the IBM PC was announced) soon completely dominated the corporate market.
Then, when virtually all serious business software was only available for the PC, Compaq et. al. released cheap, unauthorised "clones" - which IBM tried, and failed, to block in the courts, eventually lost control of the PC market, and no longer makes computers. MS, however, still had a guaranteed sale with virtually every computer sold.
MS's position is the result of a unique series of events that leads back to IBMs dominance of the pre-PC mainframe market - Apple can't hope for something similar.
...along with every other commercial software house who's EULAs claims that you can't install and run the software you think you have just bought without agreeing to a whole laundry-list of one-sided conditions, obligations and liabilities. (E.g. a Certain Well Known OSs ruling that you can't use it on a virtual machine unless you buy the "ultimate" version, or that you can't transfer the version included in the price of your PC to another PC, even if you delete the first copy).
If this were overturned, then the world would be a nicer place. However, selectively telling Apple that they alone can't do it would be somewhat unfair.
For example, if I want to stick with the current LTS version of Ubuntu, 8.04, the only version of OpenOffice on offer in the repository is 2.4. AFAIK, all the "LTS" release means is that any critical patches released for OoO 2.4 should appear. If I'd just grabbed the latest release from ubuntu.com (you have to dig a bit for the LTS).
Now, possibly the latest.deb from the OpenOffice site will work, maybe some kind soul has set up a repository with a newer version, or perhaps I have the time, patience and knowledge to build it from a tarball. However, the only way I'll get a more recent version of an application configured, compiled and properly integrated with my distro is to upgrade the whole operating system.
This isn't "the way Linux works" it is the chosen policy of the distro maintainers to continually tinker with the core OS infrastructure... and I can fully understand that when the distro maintainers are systems programmers working for free.
Then switch to a distro more to your liking.
This isn't about me. I'd be quite happy to use Debian or CentOS and build my packages from Tarballs. I don't personally mind upgrading the OS every 6 months - but that's the pathological Linux "works for me" attitude. This is about "selling" the idea of Linux to users of other OSs who really aren't going to accept that, in order to install the equivalent of Office 2007, they are going to have to upgrade to Windows 7 or Snow Leopard. Yes, Linux is different because the software is free, but upgrading a whole OS still "costs" time, expertise and risk.
Anyway - this thread isn't about "expert" distros designed for serious production use (CentOS, Debian) or bleeding-edge showcases (Fedora, Gentoo) - it is about Ubuntu, the highest profile distro, apparently aimed squarely at mainstream use, but apparently stuck in perpetual beta.
You want your freedom to get what you want but you would deny others their freedom.
Want to install the latest version of an application? Not confident to - quite unnecessarily - completely re-build your system and face questions about disc partitioning, bootloaders and video drivers? Tough. - yeah, that's really increasing freedom.
So you claim to have had an iPhone - but you're still perpetuating the myth that iPhone/iPod/iTunes somehow forces you to use DRM music? Did you ever take the iPhone out of its box?
Lets get this straight: iTunes/iPod/iPhone work perfectly well with DRM-free music. You can import any unprotected MP3 or AAC file into iTunes; iTunes can rip CDs to unprotected AAC or MP3 and these files sync and play seamlessly on iPod/iPhone.
In other news, although you can't easily copy tracks back off an iPod/phone, the desktop iTunes software stores your music library as regular files, clearly named, numbered and arranged in folders, with an easily interpreted XML file containing the metadata.
The only DRM or "lock in" comes if you choose to purchase your music from the iTunes store (and I believe that even that offers a DRM-free option now - can't say for sure because despite using iTunes and iPod, the only thing I ever bought from ITMS was an iPod Touch firmware upgrade).
Oh - and the same goes for video, too: of course, using "unofficial" software to rip DVDs means that some poor movie exec will go without his daily line and you'll go straight to hell - but iTunes/iPod won't stop you playing the result.
iPhone is ridiculously popular. I don't care to go into why it is popular, but I will say I don't fully understand it because I tend to measure things by a different set of metrics than non-nerds.
When the iPhone was first announced, the standard of UI design and usability on phones was completely abysmal. I'd just got a Windows Mobile phone, and while it out-featured the iPhone, half of those features were just plain unusable. It had a slide-out keyboard, a scroll wheel, a joypad, a touchscreen, on-screen keypad etc. In fact, it had so many buttons on every available surface that it was virtually impossible to pick it up without accidentally pressing something. To use it efficiently, you had to learn endless permutations of the various input modes and button functions. Since the iPhone, the other manufacturers have been playing catch-up (e.g. HTC have produced replacement UIs for WM, while the iPhone influence on Android and Palm is obvious).
Apple's main strengths are attention to detail, a flair for minimalist design and a resistance to creeping featurism. They are quite prepared to risk leaving out features and focus on making sure the features they do have are usable and consistent. One non-obvious advantage is that by having a touch screen and only a touch screen, they ensure that all applications have to be designed to work well with a touch screen.
To be clear, the primary weakness of the iPhone is its exclusivity to AT&T. It limits its growth potential and its flexibility.
...except that it doesn't seem to be stopping Apple from shifting iPhones, they were able to offer carrier-dependent features like visual voicemail and they've got a sweet deal with AT&T with who-knows-what clauses to ensure that AT&T promote iPhone. The exclusivity won't last forever - and if they time it right they'll do it just as the AT&T customer base is getting saturated.
Another difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple seem to be happy (or resigned) to a healthy slice of the market rather than total domination. Hence they're pretty much focusing on the consumer market, rather than making a determined assault on MS and Blackberry in the corporate market.
However, Google might concievably kill the market for GPS software for smartphones - which is something TomTom and others have invested in recently.
I'm not a heavy GPS user - if I was (and/or if I planned to use GPS overseas), I'd go for a standalone unit, for all the reasons discussed here by other posters. However, I got a HTC Hero phone, and it seemed a bit of a waste to have a GPS-capable phone with no turn-by-turn software so I bought Copilot - not perfect, but (IMHO) great value for money (probably better value than TomTom for Android/iPhone, but that's another issue).
I can see that Google's move could make a huge hole in such sales - but only if they add a cache facility to pre-load the maps for your journey while you have a good internet connection.
Slashdot Mirror
ROTFL!
However, they were about the first UK operator to offer a flat-rate Internet deal which only cost a hand and a foot.
So.. who actually bought the stolen records if T-mobile employees sold them to other operators but no other operators were involved?
Ans: Third party phone retailers (or, at least, their employees). Not the sort that sell SIM-free phones, the sort that act as agents for the networks and mostly sell phones on contract.
At least, that's who I was getting cold-called by when my T-Mobile contract ran out. Of course, they did their best to use weasel words to imply that they were calling from T-Mobile without actually saying so.
I assume that the game was to try and get you to sign a new T-Mobile contract with them as agent, so they would get the commission.
Publishing the names "in news accounts" is different from publishing the names in history articles or other.
I can see the front page now:
Vicious Murderers Released!
Convicted killers now living within 10km of an Infant School!
Are they living in YOUR town? See our disturbing Historical Report on page 27...
That's the problem - there's a difference between having the facts on record and available to anyone who wants to know, and having the popular press whip up a lynch mob. But its hard enough to make a watertight legal distinction even with out teh interwebs coming along and messing up all the old authority structures...
Proper response: If you can't learn, I can't help. Sorry.
...but first, make sure that you are in good financial shape, own your own house, have your own car insurance and aren't planning to begat any offspring who might require Granny's Discount Daycare Services. Also check that your parents haven't been seen reading any articles about the total cost of raising a child.
Remind me again what Muad'Dib has to do with a family's computer problems?
Er... that even if all the computers are destroyed in a holy war and people have to use mind-enhancing drugs instead, it won't solve all your niggling little family problems, and grandpa will still be an embarrasment?
Mafia Wars is free. You never have to install anything, spend any money, or visit any other sites.
Execpt that the USP of these games is that they are competetive.
If I take advantage of one of these offers, does it post a note to my Friends (tm) saying:
itsdapead is movin' on up the greasy pole, and has reached the rank of "Backstabbing Yuppie Oik" - rather than beating you the hard-but-honest way he's whipped out the Gold Card and bought a wad of Dollars.
To get a bonus from itsdapead, wait until hell freezes over.
Click here to remove itsdapead from your friends list.
These games are not just "free" games which let you play in response for viewing a few ads: are very artfully designed to actively provoke "peer pressure" to pay for extras or to sign up others - even in adults.
Personally, that's what puts me off Facebook: I didn't enjoy peer pressure when I was 12 and I certainly don't enjoy re-living it - however, (cough) years later I'm more capable of resisting it. However, I do remember what it was like, as a kid, to desperately want some must-have bit of tat - and this world is full of kids of all ages. There have to be some limits - some sensible compromise between the Nanny State and the Wild West.
All of this is completely in the users' hands.
...but that is not a free pass to distribute borderline malware - which is what TFA seems to be alleging.
In fact, it's a requirement that the implementation claimed by the patent could be done by any programmer of ordinary skill, with the guidance of just the specification and drawings.
That's the standard for the level of detail required by the specification. But what if it can be shown that your "programmer of ordinary skill" could have taken a non-technical description of the "business method" and implemented it, using well-established techniques without the full specification?
Now, as long as there was FUD as to whether or not the method was patentable in itself, that wouldn't necessarily have helped. If that's clarified, it should be much easier to sift out the unpatentable "method" elements of the patent from the technobabble and show that they are sufficient to allow any programmer to implement that method.
Any narrowing of the patentability of "methods" should help the fight against software patents, and make it harder to get vague software patents granted. It might not win the war, but it would win a battle.
My read is that the justices seem to be ok with software patents in principle but are leery of business method patents that are not tied to a device or that do not incorporate some form of technology.
Its too much to hope that this will kill software patents in one swoop.
Hopefully, even a ruling against "business method" patents will mean that a lot of software patents can be characterized as "implementing a buisness method on a standard computing device" and defeated on the grounds that the implementation could be done by any competent programmer.
This sort of thing has been done before, and in the past hasn't exactly set off a golden age of 3d television.
This happens every 10-15 years (just like it does in the cinema). I remember Channel 4 (I think) doing more or less exactly the same thing they are doing now some back in the 80s using red/cyan (which, unlike red/green gave some, limited, colour).
Its easy to pooh-pooh ideas as "never gonna catch on" - but this one has failed to catch on so many times that its about time they got the message. Even if the systems improve, that the fundamental question of how you reconcile a moving, 3D scene with a 20" window without giving the viewer a migraine every time an object gets clipped.
You'd pretty much have to rewind to the early "point a couple of cameras at a stage-play" era of movie making and start re-inventing the "language of film" from scratch.
The only thing that might have changed this time round is that more people have large/wide screen TVs which might make it marginally more impressive.
I guess the reason that 3D has flared up in the cinema again now is the popularity of computer-animated movies, which must be relatively easy make in 3D. Probably quite cool, too, if you're in Pixar HQ, sitting 2' away from a high def monitor wearing your LCD shutter specs.
...or they'll put comic books on the school curriculum, and no kid will ever want to read one again.
Given that the monitor-less, keyboard-less and mouse-less Mac mini costs twice as much as a Netbook, I would bet on the "jumbo iPod touch" scenario.
Yet my EEE PC netbook is gathering dust on a shelf, while my Mac Mini currently has an uptime of 271 days (and that was after an intentional reboot)...
The other thing that was odd in the limited time I got to play, is that as you use the mouse it has a habit of twisting around on your mouse pad.
Oh dear. They really didn't learn from that hockey puck mouse...
Thing is, though, the pros and cons of Apple mice are a bit irrelevant: as long as Apple only offers one or two options, they'll inevitably veer towards "one size fits nobody" - which usually dictates that they have to be relatively small, light and and ambisinister (opposite of Ambidextrous - equally useless whichever hand you use*).
The main purpose of a mouse is basic pointing and clicking - for that I want to choose a mouse which feels comfortable in my hand - and only then do I start worrying about what other bells and whistles it has.
I prefer larger, heavier, "deeper" mice which are shaped for right-handed use - but can you imagine the outrage if Apple started shipping Macs with a right-hand-only mouse? Also, I know at least one person who liked the hockey-puck mouse (or, at least, used one for several years without defenestrating it). Then again, I also know someone who likes Windows Vista...
(* That one's from Pratchett, I think)
I'd be more alarmed to find someone who wasn't afraid to pass a checkpoint like this.
Especially if it was done properly - lots of coloured lights, eerie electronic humming noises, CO2 smoke and one of those plasma eye thingies (required by law in any ISO98641-compliant Mad Scientst's lab, doomsday machine or Borg recharging station).
Oh, and a carefully concealed foot-pedal to set it all off when someone who looked nervous, shifty or foreign walked through. In fact, don't bother with the actual fear detector (which is probably quite a boring looking black box).
Usually for these loss of freedom stories, we get the bleated "If you aren't doing anything wrong you have nothing to be afraid of" response. Where is it? Wait, what's that I smell? Scared sheeple?
Wow. Could we have finally found a proposal which is so self-evidently bloody stupid that even the "innocent people have nothing to fear from the law" brigade can see the potential problems?
I'm impressed.
I think all those Hackintoshers are also a reminder to Steve that there is a market for netbooks and non-AIO upgradable computers under 1000$.
Of course there is a market.
The $64,000 question is, however, what would supporting that market do to Apple's current sales of mid/high-end laptops, all-in-ones and workstations? Such systems probably yield much higher profit margins than netbooks and entry-level towers.
Its a dead cert that many loyal Apple customers would go for a cheaper alternative if it were offered: Apple need to be damned sure that they were going to attract enough genuinely new custom to more than compensate for that.
Thing is, Apple's current business model of selling premium-priced "boutique" systems seems to be working quite nicely - why risk it by competing with yourself?
I'm sure that they'll come out with a "response" to the netbook market soon - but I'd bet on a jumbo iPod Touch rather than a mini Mac.
When was the last time you heard a rumor that Microsoft was disabling support for some line of processors on Windows?
Back when they dropped support for NT on MIPS and Alpha? :-)
Features like shuttering and built in fuses.
In the UK fuses are built into the plugs - so you can have a 13A fuse on your kettle and a 3A fuse on your phone charger.
I've always found it ironic that USAian domestic appliances tend towards big, brutal things 50% bigger than their UK equivalent, that look like they should connect to industrial 3-phase - but have these tinny little toytown plugs that spark like buggery when you plug them in.
Next: which country has the better system of flush toilets? :-)
And don't see "developer resources", that's just a cop-out and you all know it.
No, its the closed-source model - and for pragmatic reasons rather than simple FOSS ideology.
The (L|U)i?n(i|u)x OS kernels and X window system are in perpetual development and lack stable binary APIs. The best way of supporting that is to release the source so that the FOSS community and distro producers can share the responsibility for maintaining it and building binaries. Trying to support numerous distros and multiple kernel and X versions via a binary release is a hugely inefficient way of supporting what is currently a minority market, c.f. a massive Windows market with only a couple of "active" major OS versions - with 5-year shelf-lives - to support. Frankly, I'm surprised that they bother.
Personally, I think its time that the (L|U)i?n(i|u)x ecosystem pulled itself out of perpetual alpha and settled down to a much longer release cycle. However, even if you like the "realase soon, release often" model, it doesn't mix well with closed source binaries.
If X isn't crap for you that's nice.
If you want true network-transparent graphics (not just a remote desktop), X is in a class of its own - although if you do just want a remote desktop then VNC-type solutions seem to cope just-as-well, if not better, with eye-candy laden desktops.
For a personal desktop, X just seems massivley over-engineered and also fails in one vital respect that hasn't been mentioned yet:
Windows and Mac each provide a standardised GUI that strongly encourages consistency between applications. Forget psychobabble about the desktop metaphor or visual cognition: I think that a major reason why the destop GUI initially succeeded was that suddenly all the applications did the basics - like saving and opening files, copying, pasting, setting preferences - in the same way at a time when competing application software houses were trying to copyright the "look and feel" of their ideosyncratic text-based menus. X doesn't do this (to be fair, that was never supposed to be part of X) and although Gnome/KDE have taken on this job, the earlier attempts at window managers and desktops seemed to have a design philosophy of "I can't conceive of any UI finer than the un*x shell and vi/emacs, but I do want to run 8 instances of XTerm on something that looks as cool as NeXTStep".
X11 has never been a bottleneck in performance on the desktop.
Has rendering speed ever been an issue with X11? If I had to criticize X11, I'd point at "responsiveness" to clicks and drags (making the desktop feel a bit "clunky" c.f. Windows/Mac), rather than any problem with how fast it could render a window - it only takes a small lag or a badly chosen movement threshold to destroy the illusion of dragging tangible things around a destop.
Also, issues like easily switching resolution and handling multiple screens sensibly - I'd say that distros like Ubuntu are just about caught up with where Mac and Windows were 15 years ago, although partly that's down to waiting for Gnome, KDE etc. to provide friendly interfaces to what could be achieved with a bit of xorg.conf hacking.
The other thing I find slightly disaapointing is that many modern apps and Gnome/KDE desktops don't work very well in conjunction with X11's USP: network transparancy - I've only really had adequate results using xnest - but then again, that's a fault of window managers and desktop suites, not X11.
Why can MS make profits that dwarf Apple's without profiting from hardware?
Because the CP/M guy was off flying his plane and they got the gig to supply the OS for the (proprietary) IBM PC. IBM then used the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme to sell PCs to all the suits who refused to buy computers from hippies, and (as predicted by all the pundits the moment the IBM PC was announced) soon completely dominated the corporate market.
Then, when virtually all serious business software was only available for the PC, Compaq et. al. released cheap, unauthorised "clones" - which IBM tried, and failed, to block in the courts, eventually lost control of the PC market, and no longer makes computers. MS, however, still had a guaranteed sale with virtually every computer sold.
MS's position is the result of a unique series of events that leads back to IBMs dominance of the pre-PC mainframe market - Apple can't hope for something similar.
No, their attorneys are.
...along with every other commercial software house who's EULAs claims that you can't install and run the software you think you have just bought without agreeing to a whole laundry-list of one-sided conditions, obligations and liabilities. (E.g. a Certain Well Known OSs ruling that you can't use it on a virtual machine unless you buy the "ultimate" version, or that you can't transfer the version included in the price of your PC to another PC, even if you delete the first copy).
If this were overturned, then the world would be a nicer place. However, selectively telling Apple that they alone can't do it would be somewhat unfair.
It's your choice to upgrade or not,
You really don't get it, do you?
For example, if I want to stick with the current LTS version of Ubuntu, 8.04, the only version of OpenOffice on offer in the repository is 2.4. AFAIK, all the "LTS" release means is that any critical patches released for OoO 2.4 should appear. If I'd just grabbed the latest release from ubuntu.com (you have to dig a bit for the LTS).
Now, possibly the latest .deb from the OpenOffice site will work, maybe some kind soul has set up a repository with a newer version, or perhaps I have the time, patience and knowledge to build it from a tarball. However, the only way I'll get a more recent version of an application configured, compiled and properly integrated with my distro is to upgrade the whole operating system.
This isn't "the way Linux works" it is the chosen policy of the distro maintainers to continually tinker with the core OS infrastructure... and I can fully understand that when the distro maintainers are systems programmers working for free.
Then switch to a distro more to your liking.
This isn't about me. I'd be quite happy to use Debian or CentOS and build my packages from Tarballs. I don't personally mind upgrading the OS every 6 months - but that's the pathological Linux "works for me" attitude. This is about "selling" the idea of Linux to users of other OSs who really aren't going to accept that, in order to install the equivalent of Office 2007, they are going to have to upgrade to Windows 7 or Snow Leopard. Yes, Linux is different because the software is free, but upgrading a whole OS still "costs" time, expertise and risk.
Anyway - this thread isn't about "expert" distros designed for serious production use (CentOS, Debian) or bleeding-edge showcases (Fedora, Gentoo) - it is about Ubuntu, the highest profile distro, apparently aimed squarely at mainstream use, but apparently stuck in perpetual beta.
You want your freedom to get what you want but you would deny others their freedom.
Want to install the latest version of an application? Not confident to - quite unnecessarily - completely re-build your system and face questions about disc partitioning, bootloaders and video drivers? Tough. - yeah, that's really increasing freedom.
NON DRM (thats enough by itself to switch) music
So you claim to have had an iPhone - but you're still perpetuating the myth that iPhone/iPod/iTunes somehow forces you to use DRM music? Did you ever take the iPhone out of its box?
Lets get this straight: iTunes/iPod/iPhone work perfectly well with DRM-free music. You can import any unprotected MP3 or AAC file into iTunes; iTunes can rip CDs to unprotected AAC or MP3 and these files sync and play seamlessly on iPod/iPhone.
In other news, although you can't easily copy tracks back off an iPod/phone, the desktop iTunes software stores your music library as regular files, clearly named, numbered and arranged in folders, with an easily interpreted XML file containing the metadata.
The only DRM or "lock in" comes if you choose to purchase your music from the iTunes store (and I believe that even that offers a DRM-free option now - can't say for sure because despite using iTunes and iPod, the only thing I ever bought from ITMS was an iPod Touch firmware upgrade).
Oh - and the same goes for video, too: of course, using "unofficial" software to rip DVDs means that some poor movie exec will go without his daily line and you'll go straight to hell - but iTunes/iPod won't stop you playing the result.
iPhone is ridiculously popular. I don't care to go into why it is popular, but I will say I don't fully understand it because I tend to measure things by a different set of metrics than non-nerds.
When the iPhone was first announced, the standard of UI design and usability on phones was completely abysmal. I'd just got a Windows Mobile phone, and while it out-featured the iPhone, half of those features were just plain unusable. It had a slide-out keyboard, a scroll wheel, a joypad, a touchscreen, on-screen keypad etc. In fact, it had so many buttons on every available surface that it was virtually impossible to pick it up without accidentally pressing something. To use it efficiently, you had to learn endless permutations of the various input modes and button functions. Since the iPhone, the other manufacturers have been playing catch-up (e.g. HTC have produced replacement UIs for WM, while the iPhone influence on Android and Palm is obvious).
Apple's main strengths are attention to detail, a flair for minimalist design and a resistance to creeping featurism. They are quite prepared to risk leaving out features and focus on making sure the features they do have are usable and consistent. One non-obvious advantage is that by having a touch screen and only a touch screen, they ensure that all applications have to be designed to work well with a touch screen.
To be clear, the primary weakness of the iPhone is its exclusivity to AT&T. It limits its growth potential and its flexibility.
...except that it doesn't seem to be stopping Apple from shifting iPhones, they were able to offer carrier-dependent features like visual voicemail and they've got a sweet deal with AT&T with who-knows-what clauses to ensure that AT&T promote iPhone. The exclusivity won't last forever - and if they time it right they'll do it just as the AT&T customer base is getting saturated.
Another difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple seem to be happy (or resigned) to a healthy slice of the market rather than total domination. Hence they're pretty much focusing on the consumer market, rather than making a determined assault on MS and Blackberry in the corporate market.
Probably not.
However, Google might concievably kill the market for GPS software for smartphones - which is something TomTom and others have invested in recently.
I'm not a heavy GPS user - if I was (and/or if I planned to use GPS overseas), I'd go for a standalone unit, for all the reasons discussed here by other posters. However, I got a HTC Hero phone, and it seemed a bit of a waste to have a GPS-capable phone with no turn-by-turn software so I bought Copilot - not perfect, but (IMHO) great value for money (probably better value than TomTom for Android/iPhone, but that's another issue).
I can see that Google's move could make a huge hole in such sales - but only if they add a cache facility to pre-load the maps for your journey while you have a good internet connection.