Yeah, isn't this pretty much what the.Net brand was supposed to be about originally, something like 5-10 years ago? Not ".Net" is something else and they're calling it "cloud platform"? Color me unimpressed.
it seems that apple bought CUPS and changed the licence so that people could create proprietary derivatives on MacOS legally.
Yeah, at least my immediate thought as to why Apple would do this is, maybe they're planning some new feature in OSX, and they want to integrate some specific features of CUPS with some of their already proprietary portions of OSX in a way that would violate the GPL. Also, it might help with whatever they have in mind if they can tell the main CUPS developer what to work on. I doubt Apple really wants to alienate the existing FOSS community around this software.
SecurID and Push mail-- who gives a crap? Practically no one, that's who. Yeah, you can get push mail through Yahoo (no, I don't know why only Yahoo supports push mail on the iPhone), but give me good old-fashioned pull-mail through normal protocols, so I can check my normal e-mail accounts without having to use weird servers or crappy proprietary hacks. Good old fashion IMAP and SMTP is all I need. No Opera Mini, but it's not clear why I should prefer Opera Mini to Safari.
And I'll say it again, if you're going to claim that the iPhone doesn't support Google Maps or Gmail, you really need to do more research because you have no clue what you're talking about. For Christ's sake, look at a *picture* of an iPhone, and you'll see an icon right on the main screen that says "Maps". That's Google Maps. When you set up an e-mail account in the iPhone's mail app, it lets you select from Yahoo, Gmail,.Mac, AOL, or "Other" (which is a manual setup of IMAP/POP/Exchange).
What you suggest (that society might adjust) it possible, but I just don't believe that information is inherently useful or meaningful. You need context, and having facts, even absolutely true facts, without context can actually mislead you. If all of mankind knew all of the horrors that its members had inflicted on each other, it might well lead us to new and less accurate presumptions about what is and what should be acceptable. Confronting issues in the open may, in most cases, help to resolve them, but my issues are not yours to confront. You have no ability to understand my issues from recordings and bare facts, and no right to intrude into them. My issues are my own to confront, as privately or openly as I wish, and adding the judgement and presumptions of the general public won't necessarily help in a pursuit of a resolution.
I'm not sure if you think you're disagreeing with me, but that was included in my thinking. It's easy to get a skewed perspective when you imagine extreme crimes, but extreme crimes are rare. Also, if the crimes are extreme enough (murders, rapists, terrorists) then the crimes are probably going to get attention by law enforcement anyway, even without ubiquitous surveillance. If some kind of "all-seeing eye" run by the government would catch criminals and wrong-doers, it would mostly catch people doing things that are minor and perhaps even innocuous. People would be caught peeing on the sidewalk late at night, speeding, downloading copyrighted material and breaking the DMCA. They'd get caught for sodomy in the places where sodomy is still illegal. An 18 year old is having sex with a 17 year old in a jurisdiction where that's illegal. You'd catch some kids shoplifting.
Other that that, you'd probably get quite a lot of good blackmail material. This guy is cheating on this woman while she's the one who poops on the floor at work. Some other guy picks his nose and eats it, and some rich woman spends all her money on herself while her estranged husband and kids have very little. There might be lots of information to lord over people, and a lot of ammunition to use against political opponents. Someone might want to run for office or stage political protest to fight injustice, only to find their credibility ruined because once, 20 years ago, he told a racist joke or said something sympathetic to communists. It might not be so damaging except that his opponent is a powerful government official who was able to hunt down an actual recording and leak it to the press.
Maybe you think all this information is good to have stored somewhere, but I think it's better to just let these facts slide out of history and be forgotten.
Just because the government "can" spy on us doesn't mean that we have to give them permission to do it.
And this sentence is very important. We may have forgotten, but the government in the USA was founded on the idea that government must not be a foreign entity which controls the lives of people, but rather a body of the people which has been granted certain powers by the people for particular purposes. The government ought not have powers that the people have not granted to it.
Well I don't know what to tell you. This was my situation:
I already had an account, switched to an unlocked phone (moving my old SIM), and then tried to sign up for data services. I told them what kind of phone I had, and they said the data services would be activated remotely within... whatever amount of time, an hour I think. It never happened, so I called back. Tech support said my activation failed because I didn't have the T-Zones software (or whatever it's called) that should be on my phone. I informed them that it didn't have T-Mobile software because the phone was not purchased through T-Mobile, and I was told (twice by two different techs) that I was out of luck, because T-Mobile did not offer data services to phones not purchased through T-Mobile. No exceptions. As I said, one of my friends had a similar experience with Verizon.
That being said-- yes, I've heard people talk about getting data service from carriers on unlocked phones. Maybe the techs were misinformed or lying, or maybe there's some other easy way around the issue. Either way, it's clear to me that the issue isn't as simple as, "If you want an unlocked phone, you can just buy one without the carrier subsidy." The carriers won't necessarily support an unlocked phone.
Is that the data plan, or the phone and data together? The data plan on the iPhone is essentially $20 a month. It doesn't include tethering, though. But if your $40 plan is just for the data, then that's $20 a month more than the iPhone plan. $20 a month multiplied by 24 months (2 year contract) = $480. $480+225 = $705. The 8 GB iPhone is $699, so the cost is about the same. However, last I checked, Sprint actually charges $60 a month for unlimited data plans, which means you're actually talking about $50 a month, plus another $5 for 300 SMS messages (AT&T includes 200 with the iPhone plan). So that's $35 x 24 months + $225 = $1065. $1065 - $700 (cost of the iPhone) means that (with the most comparable combination I could come up with) your phone+plan is $365 more over 2 years than the iPhone+plan.
So your data is probably faster and you can tether a laptop, and you'd have 100 extra SMS messages, so you can certainly argue that your data plan is superior, but the GP post was still correct. The cost of the iPhone + 2 years of service is roughly similar to the cost of your Blackberry + 2 years of service.
Though it's true that there are good reasons for privacy even if you have nothing to hide, I also wonder if we might want privacy even for those who have something to hide.
I mean, often the whole thing gets framed around issues like terrorism or murder or child porn, and in those cases it's easy to let your emotions carry you away and think that perhaps the ends justify the means. Obviously, we want those crimes to be exposed and the perpetrator to be caught. On the other hand, we've all done something wrong at some point. We all have skeletons in our closets. Maybe there are some young people reading this who think, "I don't have any secrets!" Well wait. Sooner or later, something will happen in your life that you'll end up being ashamed of, you'll commit some act that saddens you to think about, or you'll do something that you just don't want people to know about.
These things might not be crimes. They might be that you have some dirty little fetish, that you cheated on your spouse, or that you screwed-over one of your friends when he/she really needed you. It might just be that you've been a bit greedy or harsh to people who didn't deserve it. Or it might even be that you were in a difficult situation, didn't do anything wrong, but the facts taken out of context could be twisted to make you look bad.
There are plenty of things that are legal that can ruin reputations, destroy relationships, embarrass people publicly, and generally ruin lives. Often, there's no positive purpose in bringing these things to light.
People sometimes fail to realize that civilization runs on forgiveness, forgetfulness, and ignorance. If everyone's skeletons were suddenly dragged into the light, it'd be very difficult to maintain work relationships and personal relationships. If everyone were suddenly punished for everything they'd done wrong, no one would escape a whipping. The way our system works is that a crime must be noticeable, someone must be hurt, and the police and prosecutors need to believe that punishing the offense is worthy of time, effort, money, and perhaps other risks. It's for the best. A perfect judicial system which punished all offenders fully would catch everyone at some point. We'd all be offenders, criminals, and subject to public ridicule at various points in our lives.
In the end, such a system would be harmful and oppressive to our society, while the whole point of the judicial system is to help our society maintain stability by reducing the need for vigilante justice/vengence. I'm afraid that, as strange as it may seem, it's better that some of the guilty are not found or prosecuted, and that some crimes go pretty well unnoticed. There's a reason why courts find people "not guilty" of a particular crime, rather than "innocent" in general. It's far better that many of our bad decisions, indiscretions, and unfortunate situations can be stowed away from prying eyes. We ought to maintain an attitude of faith in men, that all men should be treated as innocent until proven otherwise, in spite of the fact that no one is truly innocent.
The iPhone has no functionality for Google maps, web browsing, or accessing Gmail? Really? Maybe you should do some research on that before you make those claims.
Another option is to set up your POP or IMAP servers to forward copies of incoming mail directly to your BlackBerry's individual email address.
I've actually had to support many Blackberries, though not very recently (maybe things have changed in the past few years?). AFAIK, getting e-mail to your Blackberry requires some sort of hack no matter what. You need a Blackberry server, a desktop redirector, or else your carrier can provide a service that you set up through the web which actually checks your e-mail and forwards it through. In no case is it a real mail client on the device that can just go over the internet and fetch mail from IMAP (including being able to browse all your folders). Worse yet, using your carrier's forwarding service requires that you give them your e-mail address and password, and even worse than that, if you have Exchange, it's probably also your Windows domain password. Not exactly the height of security.
Either way, from supporting each of these methods, I'll tell you that I had significant and regular problems with each of these kinds of redirection. The Blackberry server would stop working properly, someone would log out of their computer and quit the desktop redirector, and the carrier's service would mysteriously lose the password. I'd get a call that the user's Blackberry wasn't receiving e-mail anymore, and sure enough, it was always the fault of the redirector.
Maybe I'm wrong... maybe they've changed. Either way, I'd rather just have a device that fetched e-mail the normal way over IMAP. I know it's not exclusive to the iPhone, but I'm very underwhelmed by RIM's "push" technology. Also, my larger point was that it's very likely the iPhone does support darkmeridian's firm's servers "off the shelf". Or can you tell me what major server software doesn't support either POP3 or IMAP?
If you want to prevent your customers from taking your subsidized handset to another carrier, don's subsidize them.
I might be paranoid, but it seems to me that locking phones to a given carrier should be grounds to investigate the major carriers for anti-trust violations. Maybe I just don't get it, but the major benefit I see to this lock-in is for the other carriers, so I've always assumed that the carriers got together and agreed to lock phones in order to all benefit each other to the detriment of all consumers.
What I mean is, there shouldn't really be any worry about customers taking the subsidized cell phones to other carriers. Think about it: if I run Verizon, why should it really bother me if one of my customers takes their subsidized phone to another carrier? If the customer has fulfilled his contract, then they've already paid off the subsidy. If he hasn't fulfilled his contract, then I've put terms in the contract saying that I can charge him a fee for breaking his contract, thereby recouping the money lost subsidizing the contract. Either way, I've lost nothing. Either way, the customer is free to leave and get phone service from another carrier. However, when the customer switches to the new carrier, that customer will need to pay the new carrier for their new phone, and also enter into a contract in order to subsidize the new phone. By signing on to a multi-year contract, that customer is now unable to switch back to Verizon if they become unhappy with the new carrier's service.
So as the guy running Verizon, I realize that the main result of locking my phones to only work on my network is that, should my customers choose to leave, they will give my competitors more money, and they'll be barred from returning to Verizon service for multiple years. In many ways, it would be a competitive advantage to be the carrier that is selling unlocked phones while your competitors only sell locked phones. The chief reason not to do this would be if there were an agreement among carriers, however tacit, that none of them would do this because then all of them would have to, and then consumers wouldn't need to purchase as many phones.
Oh well, it's probably just one of those situations where game theory could explain that it's in no ones best interest to actually compete. Still, it points out why you sometimes need government regulations specifically regarding monopolies and cartels. Capitalism only works when people compete, but often enough it's not in a company's best interest to actually try to be competitive.
I can buy and use an unlocked phone right now and use it with my current AT&T plan. I just won't have AT&T subsidizing the purchase.
I don't know what the exact policies on these things are, but I've run into trouble with this. T-Mobile wouldn't sell me data services because I had an unlocked phone, and a friend of mine had the same problem with Verizon.
Therefore, I don't believe it's as simple as you imply. The government might have to step in and require carriers to offer unlocked phones for an increased price and/or cease penalizing customers who buy unlocked phones. If carriers want to subsidize phones, it should be enough that the consumer is required to enter into a contract. Locking the phone shouldn't be necessary.
Never mind that there's no compelling reason to ditch NTSC broadcasts
There's a very good reason to ditch the NTSC broadcasts-- when all those broadcasts are being broadcast on another spectrum of frequencies, it's a waste of a very useful range of frequencies to continue the duplicate broadcasts. It may be that HD hasn't rolled out as quickly as many people hoped, and therefore it makes sense to delay "ditching" NTSC broadcasts, but that's been going on for years. They keep delaying it (for good reason), but eventually, when most people have upgraded their TVs and/or purchased new tuners, we ought to cease the old broadcasts.
Part of the reason for all this is that we chose to put NTSC broadcasts (IANA expert, but so I've heard) on the frequencies they occupy specifically because they travel well through solid materials and get good penetration into buildings. These are very useful/valuable frequencies, and we should free them up for wireless digital communications if we can. It only makes sense. As to the "auction", I'm not sure whether it's good or bad. I don't know the ins and outs of regulating this stuff. Do we need to give control of the spectrum to specific large companies in order to develop ubiquitous wireless internet? Would it make more sense to make it more of a free-for-all like the 2.4 Ghz range used by WiFi? If so, does the FCC need to do anything in particular to keep people from interfering with each other?
I ask these questions because I really don't know and I'm curious. I'd like to hear from someone who really knows what they're talking about. I really think that if there's one thing the FCC should be working on, it's pushing the agenda of getting high quality, high speed, open, wireless internet coverage throughout the entire country. And when I say "open" I don't necessarily mean "public" or "free" (as in beer), but it should at least be an open standard for wireless data.
He gets so upset about features like MMS that he feels compelled to use the word "friggin" in a serious review on a major tech site. Twice in one paragraph. I'm not sure that qualifies as "level headed".
Off-the-shelf interoperability with your firm's servers AND push mail? Hmmmm.... could that be because your firm has a Blackberry server?
I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed with "off-the-shelf" interoperability with expensive server software from the same company. Give me plain old IMAP and POP3 support, which will give you off-the-shelf support with pretty much every e-mail server on the planet.
I don't disagree. It took me a while to understand Apple's (or maybe Steve Jobs') design philosophy, but I think I do now and suddenly a lot of things make more sense (even the one button mouse!). I was mostly just saying that I didn't think making it hard to swap batteries was some kind of nefarious scheme.
I don't think iPhone really needs a "killer app". In fact, what's impressed me about the iPhone is how it sort of ends up being, in a specific sense, boring and unremarkable. Once you get past the "Oooooo... shiny!" factor, it just sort of does what it should do and what it's supposed to do. The operation of the device is roughly what people expect from e-mail, web browsers, media players, and phones. There isn't a lot of trickiness to it, and so far there aren't lots of amazing surprises. It operates pretty much how it's advertised to operate, doesn't really do any more or less than that. I know that it doesn't sound like praise, but I think it's a recipe for success.
If you don't believe me, look at the iPod. Same deal. It basically just plays audio (now pictures and movies, too). It sells itself as a portable audio player, and it performs that function rather simply and well. You generally don't have to jump through hoops, deal with weird quirkiness, learn strange interfaces, or hack through clumsy design to listen to audio on your iPod. The process is rather transparent-- it works roughly the way you would expect it to work, and doesn't do much more or less than that. There was no killer application beyond the primary use of the device: you could listen to audio.
Really, that was the success behind Blackberry, too. From the standpoint of being the IT guy who had to support them, I've always hated the damn things. They're a total nuisance in my eyes, particularly because of the requirement of a redirector or dedicated server or having the carrier fetch the e-mail. Every week or two some guy isn't getting his e-mail on his blackberry, and the problem is rarely with the e-mail server. Still, there's a very good reason why they got to be popular-- from the standpoint of the user, the e-mail was very easy to deal with. There was no killer application beyond the primary use of the device: you could check your e-mail.
I know, you'll probably claim that the "killer app" of blackberries was the Exchange connectivity, but I don't agree. I've worked for several different companies that gave their users blackberries, and most of those users didn't care about anything except getting their e-mail on their blackberry. Most didn't use any of the other features, or even use the blackberry as a phone (in spite of the fact that we were paying for a plan). They just wanted to check their e-mail while away from the office, and RIM offered the simplest solution.
So I think you're really underestimating the value of simplicity. The iPhone works pretty well as a phone, as an iPod, as an address book and a calendar, as a portable web browser and a portable e-mail client, and even all things considered (no flash) even the camera isn't too awful (for simple point-and-shoot). It does each of these things simply, easily, and without feeling tacked-on or crippled.
I'm not trying to convince you that you have to like it, but you seem to be interested to know why other people like it. That's my guess why.
Well, apparently part of the reason Verizon didn't want the iPhone is because Apple refused to cripple the phone [very much].
Anyway, the market is simple, and easy to figure out from your post. Take the people who would want good/easy web browsing and e-mail on a phone, don't care about depth of software (because even if they had Palm/WinCE device they still wouldn't install any additional software) or enterprise calendar/address hooks, will tolerate a 100-200kbps internet connection, and would otherwise be willing to pay for a nice cell phone and an iPod. That's the market, which incidentally is "a whole lot of people".
Personally, yes, I would love to see some 3rd party development, and SSH would be high on my list. But of all the people who own iPods and cell phones, what percentage do you think care about having SSH on their phone?
Well I think you might not like the iPhone, and it might not be the best phone for you, but certainly it has been demonstrated that there's a market for these things. Some people are estimating that Apple sold over 700,000 in the first weekends, and the rumor is that AT&T has already had over 1 million successful activations, less than a week into sales of the product. PS3s have been selling for 6 months and still only about 1.5 million have been sold in the US.
I'm really not trying to hype the iPhone here-- it's gotten plenty of hype already. I just find it hard to argue that Apple misjudged the market and I find it weird to imply that Apple is going to have trouble selling these things.
That was my reaction. Who bought the iPhone and, upon hearing that battery replacement would be expensive, thought, "... but I thought I was dealing with a budget brand!"
Greed could just as easily push them in the other direction, "We can sell swappable batteries, and then maybe we can sell multiple batteries to each customer. Then, we can re-engineer the iPhone for the next version to use different batteries, so that customers will need to buy new batteries if they get a new iPhone!" That's the sort of scheming most electronics manufacturers would pull.
My guess is that the choice really isn't nefarious at all, but rather a simple design choice. Apple wants people to perceive these things as an atom, an unbreakable unit, a single thing, and not a collection of parts. Therefore they aren't really interested in giving their customers easy access to the innards, and so making the battery easily swappable is just another unnecessary challenge. The iPhone is already packed into a mighty small case, and in order to design it so the battery is right in an accessible place, you might need to shuffle things around. Additionally, you'll need to add a layer of plastic between the battery and the innards so that taking the battery out doesn't expose all the innards. Then you have to figure out how to make it easy to swap batteries without having the batteries pop out on their own.
I'm not saying that it's a challenge that is insurmountable or even hugely difficult for Apple, but it puts more design restrictions on an already hard-to-design unit. If Apple can make the whole unit slightly smaller, slightly more durable, slightly prettier, or slightly more powerful by dropping this restriction for a swappable battery, I think it's a pretty decent trade-off.
And given that it usually takes a couple years or more to for batteries to really die, I doubt Apple is relying on dead batteries to sell more iPhones. Or are you really imagining that the iPhone won't be enough better in 3 years that the upgrade will sell itself?
No, really, the problem is that Microsoft can't find enough workers. Ballmer and Gates have had a fantastic vision for computing. They even had a plan to make versions of Vista and the Zune that didn't totally suck, but there weren't any workers in America that could build them!
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Yeah, isn't this pretty much what the .Net brand was supposed to be about originally, something like 5-10 years ago? Not ".Net" is something else and they're calling it "cloud platform"? Color me unimpressed.
it seems that apple bought CUPS and changed the licence so that people could create proprietary derivatives on MacOS legally.
Yeah, at least my immediate thought as to why Apple would do this is, maybe they're planning some new feature in OSX, and they want to integrate some specific features of CUPS with some of their already proprietary portions of OSX in a way that would violate the GPL. Also, it might help with whatever they have in mind if they can tell the main CUPS developer what to work on. I doubt Apple really wants to alienate the existing FOSS community around this software.
SecurID and Push mail-- who gives a crap? Practically no one, that's who. Yeah, you can get push mail through Yahoo (no, I don't know why only Yahoo supports push mail on the iPhone), but give me good old-fashioned pull-mail through normal protocols, so I can check my normal e-mail accounts without having to use weird servers or crappy proprietary hacks. Good old fashion IMAP and SMTP is all I need. No Opera Mini, but it's not clear why I should prefer Opera Mini to Safari.
And I'll say it again, if you're going to claim that the iPhone doesn't support Google Maps or Gmail, you really need to do more research because you have no clue what you're talking about. For Christ's sake, look at a *picture* of an iPhone, and you'll see an icon right on the main screen that says "Maps". That's Google Maps. When you set up an e-mail account in the iPhone's mail app, it lets you select from Yahoo, Gmail, .Mac, AOL, or "Other" (which is a manual setup of IMAP/POP/Exchange).
What you suggest (that society might adjust) it possible, but I just don't believe that information is inherently useful or meaningful. You need context, and having facts, even absolutely true facts, without context can actually mislead you. If all of mankind knew all of the horrors that its members had inflicted on each other, it might well lead us to new and less accurate presumptions about what is and what should be acceptable. Confronting issues in the open may, in most cases, help to resolve them, but my issues are not yours to confront. You have no ability to understand my issues from recordings and bare facts, and no right to intrude into them. My issues are my own to confront, as privately or openly as I wish, and adding the judgement and presumptions of the general public won't necessarily help in a pursuit of a resolution.
I'm not sure if you think you're disagreeing with me, but that was included in my thinking. It's easy to get a skewed perspective when you imagine extreme crimes, but extreme crimes are rare. Also, if the crimes are extreme enough (murders, rapists, terrorists) then the crimes are probably going to get attention by law enforcement anyway, even without ubiquitous surveillance. If some kind of "all-seeing eye" run by the government would catch criminals and wrong-doers, it would mostly catch people doing things that are minor and perhaps even innocuous. People would be caught peeing on the sidewalk late at night, speeding, downloading copyrighted material and breaking the DMCA. They'd get caught for sodomy in the places where sodomy is still illegal. An 18 year old is having sex with a 17 year old in a jurisdiction where that's illegal. You'd catch some kids shoplifting.
Other that that, you'd probably get quite a lot of good blackmail material. This guy is cheating on this woman while she's the one who poops on the floor at work. Some other guy picks his nose and eats it, and some rich woman spends all her money on herself while her estranged husband and kids have very little. There might be lots of information to lord over people, and a lot of ammunition to use against political opponents. Someone might want to run for office or stage political protest to fight injustice, only to find their credibility ruined because once, 20 years ago, he told a racist joke or said something sympathetic to communists. It might not be so damaging except that his opponent is a powerful government official who was able to hunt down an actual recording and leak it to the press.
Maybe you think all this information is good to have stored somewhere, but I think it's better to just let these facts slide out of history and be forgotten.
Just because the government "can" spy on us doesn't mean that we have to give them permission to do it.
And this sentence is very important. We may have forgotten, but the government in the USA was founded on the idea that government must not be a foreign entity which controls the lives of people, but rather a body of the people which has been granted certain powers by the people for particular purposes. The government ought not have powers that the people have not granted to it.
I already had an account, switched to an unlocked phone (moving my old SIM), and then tried to sign up for data services. I told them what kind of phone I had, and they said the data services would be activated remotely within... whatever amount of time, an hour I think. It never happened, so I called back. Tech support said my activation failed because I didn't have the T-Zones software (or whatever it's called) that should be on my phone. I informed them that it didn't have T-Mobile software because the phone was not purchased through T-Mobile, and I was told (twice by two different techs) that I was out of luck, because T-Mobile did not offer data services to phones not purchased through T-Mobile. No exceptions. As I said, one of my friends had a similar experience with Verizon.
That being said-- yes, I've heard people talk about getting data service from carriers on unlocked phones. Maybe the techs were misinformed or lying, or maybe there's some other easy way around the issue. Either way, it's clear to me that the issue isn't as simple as, "If you want an unlocked phone, you can just buy one without the carrier subsidy." The carriers won't necessarily support an unlocked phone.
Is that the data plan, or the phone and data together? The data plan on the iPhone is essentially $20 a month. It doesn't include tethering, though. But if your $40 plan is just for the data, then that's $20 a month more than the iPhone plan. $20 a month multiplied by 24 months (2 year contract) = $480. $480+225 = $705. The 8 GB iPhone is $699, so the cost is about the same. However, last I checked, Sprint actually charges $60 a month for unlimited data plans, which means you're actually talking about $50 a month, plus another $5 for 300 SMS messages (AT&T includes 200 with the iPhone plan). So that's $35 x 24 months + $225 = $1065. $1065 - $700 (cost of the iPhone) means that (with the most comparable combination I could come up with) your phone+plan is $365 more over 2 years than the iPhone+plan.
So your data is probably faster and you can tether a laptop, and you'd have 100 extra SMS messages, so you can certainly argue that your data plan is superior, but the GP post was still correct. The cost of the iPhone + 2 years of service is roughly similar to the cost of your Blackberry + 2 years of service.
Though it's true that there are good reasons for privacy even if you have nothing to hide, I also wonder if we might want privacy even for those who have something to hide.
I mean, often the whole thing gets framed around issues like terrorism or murder or child porn, and in those cases it's easy to let your emotions carry you away and think that perhaps the ends justify the means. Obviously, we want those crimes to be exposed and the perpetrator to be caught. On the other hand, we've all done something wrong at some point. We all have skeletons in our closets. Maybe there are some young people reading this who think, "I don't have any secrets!" Well wait. Sooner or later, something will happen in your life that you'll end up being ashamed of, you'll commit some act that saddens you to think about, or you'll do something that you just don't want people to know about.
These things might not be crimes. They might be that you have some dirty little fetish, that you cheated on your spouse, or that you screwed-over one of your friends when he/she really needed you. It might just be that you've been a bit greedy or harsh to people who didn't deserve it. Or it might even be that you were in a difficult situation, didn't do anything wrong, but the facts taken out of context could be twisted to make you look bad.
There are plenty of things that are legal that can ruin reputations, destroy relationships, embarrass people publicly, and generally ruin lives. Often, there's no positive purpose in bringing these things to light.
People sometimes fail to realize that civilization runs on forgiveness, forgetfulness, and ignorance. If everyone's skeletons were suddenly dragged into the light, it'd be very difficult to maintain work relationships and personal relationships. If everyone were suddenly punished for everything they'd done wrong, no one would escape a whipping. The way our system works is that a crime must be noticeable, someone must be hurt, and the police and prosecutors need to believe that punishing the offense is worthy of time, effort, money, and perhaps other risks. It's for the best. A perfect judicial system which punished all offenders fully would catch everyone at some point. We'd all be offenders, criminals, and subject to public ridicule at various points in our lives.
In the end, such a system would be harmful and oppressive to our society, while the whole point of the judicial system is to help our society maintain stability by reducing the need for vigilante justice/vengence. I'm afraid that, as strange as it may seem, it's better that some of the guilty are not found or prosecuted, and that some crimes go pretty well unnoticed. There's a reason why courts find people "not guilty" of a particular crime, rather than "innocent" in general. It's far better that many of our bad decisions, indiscretions, and unfortunate situations can be stowed away from prying eyes. We ought to maintain an attitude of faith in men, that all men should be treated as innocent until proven otherwise, in spite of the fact that no one is truly innocent.
The iPhone has no functionality for Google maps, web browsing, or accessing Gmail? Really? Maybe you should do some research on that before you make those claims.
Another option is to set up your POP or IMAP servers to forward copies of incoming mail directly to your BlackBerry's individual email address.
I've actually had to support many Blackberries, though not very recently (maybe things have changed in the past few years?). AFAIK, getting e-mail to your Blackberry requires some sort of hack no matter what. You need a Blackberry server, a desktop redirector, or else your carrier can provide a service that you set up through the web which actually checks your e-mail and forwards it through. In no case is it a real mail client on the device that can just go over the internet and fetch mail from IMAP (including being able to browse all your folders). Worse yet, using your carrier's forwarding service requires that you give them your e-mail address and password, and even worse than that, if you have Exchange, it's probably also your Windows domain password. Not exactly the height of security.
Either way, from supporting each of these methods, I'll tell you that I had significant and regular problems with each of these kinds of redirection. The Blackberry server would stop working properly, someone would log out of their computer and quit the desktop redirector, and the carrier's service would mysteriously lose the password. I'd get a call that the user's Blackberry wasn't receiving e-mail anymore, and sure enough, it was always the fault of the redirector.
Maybe I'm wrong... maybe they've changed. Either way, I'd rather just have a device that fetched e-mail the normal way over IMAP. I know it's not exclusive to the iPhone, but I'm very underwhelmed by RIM's "push" technology. Also, my larger point was that it's very likely the iPhone does support darkmeridian's firm's servers "off the shelf". Or can you tell me what major server software doesn't support either POP3 or IMAP?
Without Trademarks, there would be nothing stopping me from opening up the Disney Pornography store.
I guess trademarks do have some unfortunate consequences.
If you want to prevent your customers from taking your subsidized handset to another carrier, don's subsidize them.
I might be paranoid, but it seems to me that locking phones to a given carrier should be grounds to investigate the major carriers for anti-trust violations. Maybe I just don't get it, but the major benefit I see to this lock-in is for the other carriers, so I've always assumed that the carriers got together and agreed to lock phones in order to all benefit each other to the detriment of all consumers.
What I mean is, there shouldn't really be any worry about customers taking the subsidized cell phones to other carriers. Think about it: if I run Verizon, why should it really bother me if one of my customers takes their subsidized phone to another carrier? If the customer has fulfilled his contract, then they've already paid off the subsidy. If he hasn't fulfilled his contract, then I've put terms in the contract saying that I can charge him a fee for breaking his contract, thereby recouping the money lost subsidizing the contract. Either way, I've lost nothing. Either way, the customer is free to leave and get phone service from another carrier. However, when the customer switches to the new carrier, that customer will need to pay the new carrier for their new phone, and also enter into a contract in order to subsidize the new phone. By signing on to a multi-year contract, that customer is now unable to switch back to Verizon if they become unhappy with the new carrier's service.
So as the guy running Verizon, I realize that the main result of locking my phones to only work on my network is that, should my customers choose to leave, they will give my competitors more money, and they'll be barred from returning to Verizon service for multiple years. In many ways, it would be a competitive advantage to be the carrier that is selling unlocked phones while your competitors only sell locked phones. The chief reason not to do this would be if there were an agreement among carriers, however tacit, that none of them would do this because then all of them would have to, and then consumers wouldn't need to purchase as many phones.
Oh well, it's probably just one of those situations where game theory could explain that it's in no ones best interest to actually compete. Still, it points out why you sometimes need government regulations specifically regarding monopolies and cartels. Capitalism only works when people compete, but often enough it's not in a company's best interest to actually try to be competitive.
I can buy and use an unlocked phone right now and use it with my current AT&T plan. I just won't have AT&T subsidizing the purchase.
I don't know what the exact policies on these things are, but I've run into trouble with this. T-Mobile wouldn't sell me data services because I had an unlocked phone, and a friend of mine had the same problem with Verizon.
Therefore, I don't believe it's as simple as you imply. The government might have to step in and require carriers to offer unlocked phones for an increased price and/or cease penalizing customers who buy unlocked phones. If carriers want to subsidize phones, it should be enough that the consumer is required to enter into a contract. Locking the phone shouldn't be necessary.
Never mind that there's no compelling reason to ditch NTSC broadcasts
There's a very good reason to ditch the NTSC broadcasts-- when all those broadcasts are being broadcast on another spectrum of frequencies, it's a waste of a very useful range of frequencies to continue the duplicate broadcasts. It may be that HD hasn't rolled out as quickly as many people hoped, and therefore it makes sense to delay "ditching" NTSC broadcasts, but that's been going on for years. They keep delaying it (for good reason), but eventually, when most people have upgraded their TVs and/or purchased new tuners, we ought to cease the old broadcasts.
Part of the reason for all this is that we chose to put NTSC broadcasts (IANA expert, but so I've heard) on the frequencies they occupy specifically because they travel well through solid materials and get good penetration into buildings. These are very useful/valuable frequencies, and we should free them up for wireless digital communications if we can. It only makes sense. As to the "auction", I'm not sure whether it's good or bad. I don't know the ins and outs of regulating this stuff. Do we need to give control of the spectrum to specific large companies in order to develop ubiquitous wireless internet? Would it make more sense to make it more of a free-for-all like the 2.4 Ghz range used by WiFi? If so, does the FCC need to do anything in particular to keep people from interfering with each other?
I ask these questions because I really don't know and I'm curious. I'd like to hear from someone who really knows what they're talking about. I really think that if there's one thing the FCC should be working on, it's pushing the agenda of getting high quality, high speed, open, wireless internet coverage throughout the entire country. And when I say "open" I don't necessarily mean "public" or "free" (as in beer), but it should at least be an open standard for wireless data.
He gets so upset about features like MMS that he feels compelled to use the word "friggin" in a serious review on a major tech site. Twice in one paragraph. I'm not sure that qualifies as "level headed".
Off-the-shelf interoperability with your firm's servers AND push mail? Hmmmm.... could that be because your firm has a Blackberry server?
I'm sorry, but I'm not impressed with "off-the-shelf" interoperability with expensive server software from the same company. Give me plain old IMAP and POP3 support, which will give you off-the-shelf support with pretty much every e-mail server on the planet.
I don't disagree. It took me a while to understand Apple's (or maybe Steve Jobs') design philosophy, but I think I do now and suddenly a lot of things make more sense (even the one button mouse!). I was mostly just saying that I didn't think making it hard to swap batteries was some kind of nefarious scheme.
I don't think iPhone really needs a "killer app". In fact, what's impressed me about the iPhone is how it sort of ends up being, in a specific sense, boring and unremarkable. Once you get past the "Oooooo... shiny!" factor, it just sort of does what it should do and what it's supposed to do. The operation of the device is roughly what people expect from e-mail, web browsers, media players, and phones. There isn't a lot of trickiness to it, and so far there aren't lots of amazing surprises. It operates pretty much how it's advertised to operate, doesn't really do any more or less than that. I know that it doesn't sound like praise, but I think it's a recipe for success.
If you don't believe me, look at the iPod. Same deal. It basically just plays audio (now pictures and movies, too). It sells itself as a portable audio player, and it performs that function rather simply and well. You generally don't have to jump through hoops, deal with weird quirkiness, learn strange interfaces, or hack through clumsy design to listen to audio on your iPod. The process is rather transparent-- it works roughly the way you would expect it to work, and doesn't do much more or less than that. There was no killer application beyond the primary use of the device: you could listen to audio.
Really, that was the success behind Blackberry, too. From the standpoint of being the IT guy who had to support them, I've always hated the damn things. They're a total nuisance in my eyes, particularly because of the requirement of a redirector or dedicated server or having the carrier fetch the e-mail. Every week or two some guy isn't getting his e-mail on his blackberry, and the problem is rarely with the e-mail server. Still, there's a very good reason why they got to be popular-- from the standpoint of the user, the e-mail was very easy to deal with. There was no killer application beyond the primary use of the device: you could check your e-mail.
I know, you'll probably claim that the "killer app" of blackberries was the Exchange connectivity, but I don't agree. I've worked for several different companies that gave their users blackberries, and most of those users didn't care about anything except getting their e-mail on their blackberry. Most didn't use any of the other features, or even use the blackberry as a phone (in spite of the fact that we were paying for a plan). They just wanted to check their e-mail while away from the office, and RIM offered the simplest solution.
So I think you're really underestimating the value of simplicity. The iPhone works pretty well as a phone, as an iPod, as an address book and a calendar, as a portable web browser and a portable e-mail client, and even all things considered (no flash) even the camera isn't too awful (for simple point-and-shoot). It does each of these things simply, easily, and without feeling tacked-on or crippled.
I'm not trying to convince you that you have to like it, but you seem to be interested to know why other people like it. That's my guess why.
Well, apparently part of the reason Verizon didn't want the iPhone is because Apple refused to cripple the phone [very much].
Anyway, the market is simple, and easy to figure out from your post. Take the people who would want good/easy web browsing and e-mail on a phone, don't care about depth of software (because even if they had Palm/WinCE device they still wouldn't install any additional software) or enterprise calendar/address hooks, will tolerate a 100-200kbps internet connection, and would otherwise be willing to pay for a nice cell phone and an iPod. That's the market, which incidentally is "a whole lot of people".
Personally, yes, I would love to see some 3rd party development, and SSH would be high on my list. But of all the people who own iPods and cell phones, what percentage do you think care about having SSH on their phone?
Well I think you might not like the iPhone, and it might not be the best phone for you, but certainly it has been demonstrated that there's a market for these things. Some people are estimating that Apple sold over 700,000 in the first weekends, and the rumor is that AT&T has already had over 1 million successful activations, less than a week into sales of the product. PS3s have been selling for 6 months and still only about 1.5 million have been sold in the US.
I'm really not trying to hype the iPhone here-- it's gotten plenty of hype already. I just find it hard to argue that Apple misjudged the market and I find it weird to imply that Apple is going to have trouble selling these things.
Sorry Apple but you don't understand the cell phone market.
Obviously not. Nobody is buying these things, after all.
That was my reaction. Who bought the iPhone and, upon hearing that battery replacement would be expensive, thought, "... but I thought I was dealing with a budget brand!"
Greed could just as easily push them in the other direction, "We can sell swappable batteries, and then maybe we can sell multiple batteries to each customer. Then, we can re-engineer the iPhone for the next version to use different batteries, so that customers will need to buy new batteries if they get a new iPhone!" That's the sort of scheming most electronics manufacturers would pull.
My guess is that the choice really isn't nefarious at all, but rather a simple design choice. Apple wants people to perceive these things as an atom, an unbreakable unit, a single thing, and not a collection of parts. Therefore they aren't really interested in giving their customers easy access to the innards, and so making the battery easily swappable is just another unnecessary challenge. The iPhone is already packed into a mighty small case, and in order to design it so the battery is right in an accessible place, you might need to shuffle things around. Additionally, you'll need to add a layer of plastic between the battery and the innards so that taking the battery out doesn't expose all the innards. Then you have to figure out how to make it easy to swap batteries without having the batteries pop out on their own.
I'm not saying that it's a challenge that is insurmountable or even hugely difficult for Apple, but it puts more design restrictions on an already hard-to-design unit. If Apple can make the whole unit slightly smaller, slightly more durable, slightly prettier, or slightly more powerful by dropping this restriction for a swappable battery, I think it's a pretty decent trade-off.
And given that it usually takes a couple years or more to for batteries to really die, I doubt Apple is relying on dead batteries to sell more iPhones. Or are you really imagining that the iPhone won't be enough better in 3 years that the upgrade will sell itself?
No, really, the problem is that Microsoft can't find enough workers. Ballmer and Gates have had a fantastic vision for computing. They even had a plan to make versions of Vista and the Zune that didn't totally suck, but there weren't any workers in America that could build them!