The US military already has the largest collection of iPod touch in the world. They put them in rugged cases, and they don't really care if you break one, since by military standards, they are disposable devices.
There are about 10,000 various cases for each iPhone model, all built to fit that model exactly. If you want a rugged iPhone, you put it in a rugged case.
Macs don't get viruses. The misconception that they do is yours. There are zero OS X viruses. There are 3 Mac OS trojans, all of which the system will refuse to run. On iOS, there is no native malware at all.
iOS is much, much more secure than "Android" which is a meaningless term. Talk to us about a particular Android phone after it has been abused by a hardware manufacturer and a carrier, that is the real world. Unsigned apps don't even run on iOS. It is possible for an organization such as the US military to setup their iOS devices so they won't run any 3rd party apps other than those that are authored by the US military. There is no download-and-run for native apps, they have to be installed either from the App Store or from an organization's own I-T.
It would be great if you'd talk about things you know about and shut up otherwise.
If you need more than one battery on an iPhone, you add a second, external battery, typically built into a case, and that battery is of course, replaceable, you can carry 10 if you like. iPhone also has about double the battery life of any Android phone right out of the box, so if we're talking batteries, Android is at a distinct disadvantage.
The US military already owns the largest collection of iPod touch in the world. The fact that it requires almost no training and maintenance is a key feature. Powerful native C apps that are very easy to develop is another key feature.
Once you use open source, there will be whining from a peanut gallery of fucking losers. You see it with Apple all the time. They ship the only name-brand PC with open source software on it: Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, and more. They created WebKit and Bonjour. But there are some who will whine because Richard Stallman has not replaced Steve Jobs as CEO.
Netflix can't ship a DRM-free client due to the movie studios. Get a clue.
It is getting pretty tiresome to watch Google keep inventing all kinds of Apple technology a few years late. The fact that apps and users can't modify the system in iOS is something that fucking Andy Rubin (of Google) has criticized about it. What the fuck is up at Google?
The PC era ended in January of 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone. When we look back 20 years from now, we won't mark the point at which mobile smartphones and mobile tablets outsold PC's as the changing of the guard, we'll mark the original iPhone because it was the first mobile with a PC-class operating system, applications, and Web browser.
The HTML4/Flash era of the Web also ended in January of 2007, as well as the WML/WAP era, and the HTML5/MPEG-4 era of the Web began. That is also when the Web changed from being a PC/IT platform to being a consumer platform. Again, we won't look back 20 years from now to the point where there was more HTML5 on the Web than HTML4, or the point where there was more MPEG-4 on the Web than Flash, or even the point in 2010 when all the browsers turned on their HTML5 parsers by default. We'll look back to the original iPhone because it was the first HTML5/MPEG-4 -only system that Web developers had to support, and the first true consumer Web browser.
Every Web user is an equal to every other Web user. We all have the exact same rights. We are all "end users". Everything the browser vendor does should be for the user of that browser.
The Web is the HTML you see in a browser. There have always been apps other than the browser on the Internet: email apps, FTP apps, and now Twitter apps, and so on. Web and native are 2 separate things. That is how Apple sees them also.
Apple has done more than anyone to standardize the Web, to make it multiple vendor safe and consumer friendly. Apple offers by far the best Web experience in addition to the best native app experience. They don't need to trick anyone into anything.
Silverlight is fine if it runs native. If it runs in a browser and pretends to be the Web then it's as doomed as FlashPlayer. Consumers are not going to apply 52 security patches per year to every browser plug-in on every device they own. Plug-in developers are not going to be able to support the 50 different platforms the Web now runs on. So the Web will be HTML5 and universal, and in addition to that, each platform can offer a native app experience if they choose.
People aren't buying iPads to run a Twitter app. They buy them for the combination of a great browser and native apps that do things that the Web can't do yet, like 3D games, or music and audio apps. iOS v4.2 supports OS X MIDI-over-WiFi networks that is not the Web.
So it is in Microsoft's interest to make Silverlight a great native experience on their own platforms, side by side with IE9 which hopefully one day will be a great Web experience. That is what sells devices.
After IE illegally killed Netscape and crippled the HTML4 Web, and Windows XP invented the botnet, it's Apple and their standards-compliant, open source Web browser on certified UNIX systems that is a threat to net freedom?
Apple, who sells one device at a time to users who not only choose that device, but often have to go out of their way to get it, is a bigger threat than fleets of Dells with DOS and MSHTML shipping out even in 2010, decades after free UNIX and years after free HTML5? Dells with viruses and malware that exposes users to criminals and Slashdot readers and other unsavory types are not as big a danger to net freedom as Apple?
Apple, whose world leading ease of use is the only thing that enables many people to even access the Internet? Whose developer tools and GUI were used by Tim Berners Lee to fucking create the Web in the first place so that regular people could use the Internet, is a threat to net freedom?
Apple, who ported the Web to phones and tablets? Not Nokia who sells hundreds of times more phones but they have no fucking Web browser, even today?
Everything Apple has said about FlashPlayer has been totally practical and totally true. If you're not adult enough to see that FlashPlayer is impractical for about 100 reasons on a phone that has a consumer user, no I-T support, limited CPU and battery life, built-in hardware ISO video decoder, HTML5, and signed applications that can't run plug-ins, then that is your problem, not Apple's.
When Apple talks about the FlashPlayer user experience, they're not just talking about the fact that a lot of existing FlashPlayer content won't run in FlashPlayer for mobiles, or that when it does, it looks ugly and wears out the battery much, much faster than running that same video in hardware. They're also talking about expecting a consumer to monitor security bulletins and upgrade their FlashPlayer 5-10 times a year when a critical vulnerability is patched. Consumers do not know what any of that stuff is. You're forcing I-T work on them and they don't like it, and Apple is not going to be a party to that. They sell customers the exact opposite of that. For many iOS users, App Store is the very first time they installed a native app on a device because they couldn't jump the I-T hurdle that was put in front of them, even on a Mac.
Fundamentally, the Web has moved from being a PC/nerd Web to being a mobile/consumer Web. It's moved from being Mac/PC to being Mac/PC/iOS/BlackBerry/Palm/Android/Wii/Xbox/PlayStation/Roku and others. Web content absolutely has to run in a plain W3C HTML5 browser with ISO MPEG-4 audio video and no plug-ins because that is the only thing that is universal, because that is the only thing that is standardized. That is the only way the Web content can "just work" like CD/DVD because that is what consumers expect and demand. So if a Web publisher replaced the FlashPlayer content on their site with HTML5/MPEG-4 because of Apple, then Apple did them a favor. Adults publish in standardized technical formats like W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4, they don't expect the end user to customize their system with plug-ins and add-ons or switch to another system just to see the content they've wrapped up in a proprietary binary. FlashPlayer presentations are made out of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and MPEG-4. They are fundamentally made of standardized content that devices can already play. It is not at all unreasonable to expect publishers to untangle their content from Flash and publish it on the Web.
The HTML5/Flash debate is no longer raging, it's very much winding down. Java and Silverlight in the browser have also been supplanted by HTML5 already.
The Skyfire app is not embedded in Safari, it has its own WebKit view, same as Safari and many other OS X apps.
It may well be that the latest nightly WebKit beats IE9 on this test. It may be that the latest beta of Firefox 4 brats IE9 on this test. But they are all just betas. What matters is what you SHIP. There isn't a single Windows PC or Windows phone that has left the factory with an HTML5 browser. That is years and years behind.
Worse, most IE users are uses abysmal IE8, IE7, IE6 browsers, and since most Windows users are on XP, which can't run IE9, that will continue.
So no matter how you look at it, Microsoft has a long, long, way to go to get current in browsers.
Free software has a set of rules and it works. App Store has a different set of rules and it works. Participate in either as you see fit. Don't try and change one into the other. I am tired of this kind of totalitarianism coming from free software people, demanding other people embrace their ideology. Apple didn't trick you into submitting an app. In the same way that you should agree to comply with the GPL license if you want to use some GPL code, you should comply with App Store licensing if you want to use App Store. Or don't participate if you can't play by the rules. Don't show up to a baseball game in your hockey gear and demand to play.
Apple participates in free and open source software in many cases and they give a lot and they get a lot. They have also created a commercial market for "pop apps" where that make sense, and enabled many, many people who have never before installed and used native software to do so. We don't have to wonder if its success is based on the way it is structured, because we have Android Market to look at, where piracy has destroyed the ability of software developers to fund their projects.
> a netbook running Linux with 512MB > of RAM for $300. So Cheap open > source devices have already happened.
A netbook running Windows is also $300, so a $300 Linux netbook is not cheap. That is why all the netbooks are running Windows now, even though they started out with Linux. So a $300 Linux netbook is the equivalent of a $499 Linux tablet competing with a $499 iPad. You proved the parent's point.
What you have to understand is that in both Windows netbooks and Apple iPads, the software is being given away free. There is no advantage to the fact that Linux is free. There is nothing to undercut on the software. So to make a $150 netbook or $249 tablet you have to build them out of freeze-dried shit.
Further, where is the cheap Linux iPod touch after 3 years? Nowhere to be found because $229 is already the cheapest iPod touch that can be made. Same as $499 is the cheapest iPad that can be made.
A lot of people are waiting for the "mass market" to build cheaper than Apple. What you are failing to notice is that Apple is the absolute master of economies of scale. Their products are like (very tasty) Mexican cuisine, they are all made out of the same 5 ingredients. iPad, iPod touch, iPhone 4, and Apple TV all have the exact same SOC and memory and flash. They used the same screen on all iPhones and iPod touch for 3 full years. They order components in massive, massive, massive quantities like nobody else. The Apple product is the economies of scale product.
AND the Apple product is the open source product: LLVM, Clang, Mach, BSD, WebKit, Bonjour, and so on.
An iPad is half the size and weight of your subnotebook, has more than double the battery life, and it's too heavy to lug around? iPad is not a little toy reader, it's a mobile PC. 700 grams is not heavy for a PC.
The problem apps are Windows XP apps, they will have to be ported to the Web or another living platform before 2014 when Windows XP support ends. The fact that they depend on IE6 does not make them Web apps. There is no getting around it. Bite the bullet, hire an HTML5 developer and port your apps. The longer you wait and hope for some magic bullet, the less time you have to fix the problem.
I've been building HTML5 for some time and a significant amount of my work has been porting Windows XP and Adobe Flash apps to HTML5. In many cases, the clients originally asked for "Web apps" and were disappointed to find out later that is not what they got. So if you own such an app, you should look at your contracts and see whether there is grounds to sue your original developer for fraud. If your contract says "Web app" or "website" and you got an app that requires Windows XP or Adobe Flash, you should sue the developer for the cost of porting to the Web. In most cases, though, the contract will say the app requires XP or Adobe Flash and in that case you got screwed. So again, bite the bullet and port your app, and this time if you want a Web app that will last, put in the contract "platform-independent, hardware-independent, native W3C standard HTML5 Web application built to run without significant maintenance through 2020" and the developer will have to build a simple app on solid technical ground.
I built HTML4 apps in 1999 that still run perfectly today because they are just UTF-8, HTML4, CSS, JavaScript, PNG. And they can be upgraded to HTML5 very easily because they are just valid HTML4.
Slashdot Mirror
I love that you are on Slashdot and you're arguing against people using computers.
The US military already has the largest collection of iPod touch in the world. They put them in rugged cases, and they don't really care if you break one, since by military standards, they are disposable devices.
There are about 10,000 various cases for each iPhone model, all built to fit that model exactly. If you want a rugged iPhone, you put it in a rugged case.
Macs don't get viruses. The misconception that they do is yours. There are zero OS X viruses. There are 3 Mac OS trojans, all of which the system will refuse to run. On iOS, there is no native malware at all.
iOS is much, much more secure than "Android" which is a meaningless term. Talk to us about a particular Android phone after it has been abused by a hardware manufacturer and a carrier, that is the real world. Unsigned apps don't even run on iOS. It is possible for an organization such as the US military to setup their iOS devices so they won't run any 3rd party apps other than those that are authored by the US military. There is no download-and-run for native apps, they have to be installed either from the App Store or from an organization's own I-T.
It would be great if you'd talk about things you know about and shut up otherwise.
If you need more than one battery on an iPhone, you add a second, external battery, typically built into a case, and that battery is of course, replaceable, you can carry 10 if you like. iPhone also has about double the battery life of any Android phone right out of the box, so if we're talking batteries, Android is at a distinct disadvantage.
The US military already owns the largest collection of iPod touch in the world. The fact that it requires almost no training and maintenance is a key feature. Powerful native C apps that are very easy to develop is another key feature.
Once you use open source, there will be whining from a peanut gallery of fucking losers. You see it with Apple all the time. They ship the only name-brand PC with open source software on it: Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, and more. They created WebKit and Bonjour. But there are some who will whine because Richard Stallman has not replaced Steve Jobs as CEO.
Netflix can't ship a DRM-free client due to the movie studios. Get a clue.
It is getting pretty tiresome to watch Google keep inventing all kinds of Apple technology a few years late. The fact that apps and users can't modify the system in iOS is something that fucking Andy Rubin (of Google) has criticized about it. What the fuck is up at Google?
The PC era ended in January of 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone. When we look back 20 years from now, we won't mark the point at which mobile smartphones and mobile tablets outsold PC's as the changing of the guard, we'll mark the original iPhone because it was the first mobile with a PC-class operating system, applications, and Web browser.
The HTML4/Flash era of the Web also ended in January of 2007, as well as the WML/WAP era, and the HTML5/MPEG-4 era of the Web began. That is also when the Web changed from being a PC/IT platform to being a consumer platform. Again, we won't look back 20 years from now to the point where there was more HTML5 on the Web than HTML4, or the point where there was more MPEG-4 on the Web than Flash, or even the point in 2010 when all the browsers turned on their HTML5 parsers by default. We'll look back to the original iPhone because it was the first HTML5/MPEG-4 -only system that Web developers had to support, and the first true consumer Web browser.
Every Web user is an equal to every other Web user. We all have the exact same rights. We are all "end users". Everything the browser vendor does should be for the user of that browser.
The Android phones are huge, they barely fit in a typical male hand. To most women, they seem that much larger.
The Web is the HTML you see in a browser. There have always been apps other than the browser on the Internet: email apps, FTP apps, and now Twitter apps, and so on. Web and native are 2 separate things. That is how Apple sees them also.
Apple has done more than anyone to standardize the Web, to make it multiple vendor safe and consumer friendly. Apple offers by far the best Web experience in addition to the best native app experience. They don't need to trick anyone into anything.
Silverlight is fine if it runs native. If it runs in a browser and pretends to be the Web then it's as doomed as FlashPlayer. Consumers are not going to apply 52 security patches per year to every browser plug-in on every device they own. Plug-in developers are not going to be able to support the 50 different platforms the Web now runs on. So the Web will be HTML5 and universal, and in addition to that, each platform can offer a native app experience if they choose.
People aren't buying iPads to run a Twitter app. They buy them for the combination of a great browser and native apps that do things that the Web can't do yet, like 3D games, or music and audio apps. iOS v4.2 supports OS X MIDI-over-WiFi networks that is not the Web.
So it is in Microsoft's interest to make Silverlight a great native experience on their own platforms, side by side with IE9 which hopefully one day will be a great Web experience. That is what sells devices.
AT&T is on 3.5G with 2GB per month plans. You can download the whole 2GB in half an hour easy.
After IE illegally killed Netscape and crippled the HTML4 Web, and Windows XP invented the botnet, it's Apple and their standards-compliant, open source Web browser on certified UNIX systems that is a threat to net freedom?
Apple, who sells one device at a time to users who not only choose that device, but often have to go out of their way to get it, is a bigger threat than fleets of Dells with DOS and MSHTML shipping out even in 2010, decades after free UNIX and years after free HTML5? Dells with viruses and malware that exposes users to criminals and Slashdot readers and other unsavory types are not as big a danger to net freedom as Apple?
Apple, whose world leading ease of use is the only thing that enables many people to even access the Internet? Whose developer tools and GUI were used by Tim Berners Lee to fucking create the Web in the first place so that regular people could use the Internet, is a threat to net freedom?
Apple, who ported the Web to phones and tablets? Not Nokia who sells hundreds of times more phones but they have no fucking Web browser, even today?
Weak.
Everything Apple has said about FlashPlayer has been totally practical and totally true. If you're not adult enough to see that FlashPlayer is impractical for about 100 reasons on a phone that has a consumer user, no I-T support, limited CPU and battery life, built-in hardware ISO video decoder, HTML5, and signed applications that can't run plug-ins, then that is your problem, not Apple's.
When Apple talks about the FlashPlayer user experience, they're not just talking about the fact that a lot of existing FlashPlayer content won't run in FlashPlayer for mobiles, or that when it does, it looks ugly and wears out the battery much, much faster than running that same video in hardware. They're also talking about expecting a consumer to monitor security bulletins and upgrade their FlashPlayer 5-10 times a year when a critical vulnerability is patched. Consumers do not know what any of that stuff is. You're forcing I-T work on them and they don't like it, and Apple is not going to be a party to that. They sell customers the exact opposite of that. For many iOS users, App Store is the very first time they installed a native app on a device because they couldn't jump the I-T hurdle that was put in front of them, even on a Mac.
Fundamentally, the Web has moved from being a PC/nerd Web to being a mobile/consumer Web. It's moved from being Mac/PC to being Mac/PC/iOS/BlackBerry/Palm/Android/Wii/Xbox/PlayStation/Roku and others. Web content absolutely has to run in a plain W3C HTML5 browser with ISO MPEG-4 audio video and no plug-ins because that is the only thing that is universal, because that is the only thing that is standardized. That is the only way the Web content can "just work" like CD/DVD because that is what consumers expect and demand. So if a Web publisher replaced the FlashPlayer content on their site with HTML5/MPEG-4 because of Apple, then Apple did them a favor. Adults publish in standardized technical formats like W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4, they don't expect the end user to customize their system with plug-ins and add-ons or switch to another system just to see the content they've wrapped up in a proprietary binary. FlashPlayer presentations are made out of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and MPEG-4. They are fundamentally made of standardized content that devices can already play. It is not at all unreasonable to expect publishers to untangle their content from Flash and publish it on the Web.
The HTML5/Flash debate is no longer raging, it's very much winding down. Java and Silverlight in the browser have also been supplanted by HTML5 already.
The Skyfire app is not embedded in Safari, it has its own WebKit view, same as Safari and many other OS X apps.
It may well be that the latest nightly WebKit beats IE9 on this test. It may be that the latest beta of Firefox 4 brats IE9 on this test. But they are all just betas. What matters is what you SHIP. There isn't a single Windows PC or Windows phone that has left the factory with an HTML5 browser. That is years and years behind.
Worse, most IE users are uses abysmal IE8, IE7, IE6 browsers, and since most Windows users are on XP, which can't run IE9, that will continue.
So no matter how you look at it, Microsoft has a long, long, way to go to get current in browsers.
Free software has a set of rules and it works. App Store has a different set of rules and it works. Participate in either as you see fit. Don't try and change one into the other. I am tired of this kind of totalitarianism coming from free software people, demanding other people embrace their ideology. Apple didn't trick you into submitting an app. In the same way that you should agree to comply with the GPL license if you want to use some GPL code, you should comply with App Store licensing if you want to use App Store. Or don't participate if you can't play by the rules. Don't show up to a baseball game in your hockey gear and demand to play.
Apple participates in free and open source software in many cases and they give a lot and they get a lot. They have also created a commercial market for "pop apps" where that make sense, and enabled many, many people who have never before installed and used native software to do so. We don't have to wonder if its success is based on the way it is structured, because we have Android Market to look at, where piracy has destroyed the ability of software developers to fund their projects.
In short: STFU.
> a netbook running Linux with 512MB
> of RAM for $300. So Cheap open
> source devices have already happened.
A netbook running Windows is also $300, so a $300 Linux netbook is not cheap. That is why all the netbooks are running Windows now, even though they started out with Linux. So a $300 Linux netbook is the equivalent of a $499 Linux tablet competing with a $499 iPad. You proved the parent's point.
What you have to understand is that in both Windows netbooks and Apple iPads, the software is being given away free. There is no advantage to the fact that Linux is free. There is nothing to undercut on the software. So to make a $150 netbook or $249 tablet you have to build them out of freeze-dried shit.
Further, where is the cheap Linux iPod touch after 3 years? Nowhere to be found because $229 is already the cheapest iPod touch that can be made. Same as $499 is the cheapest iPad that can be made.
A lot of people are waiting for the "mass market" to build cheaper than Apple. What you are failing to notice is that Apple is the absolute master of economies of scale. Their products are like (very tasty) Mexican cuisine, they are all made out of the same 5 ingredients. iPad, iPod touch, iPhone 4, and Apple TV all have the exact same SOC and memory and flash. They used the same screen on all iPhones and iPod touch for 3 full years. They order components in massive, massive, massive quantities like nobody else. The Apple product is the economies of scale product.
AND the Apple product is the open source product: LLVM, Clang, Mach, BSD, WebKit, Bonjour, and so on.
> describe the form factor
> of the ipad. Tablet, slate,
> pad, and... what else?
"Mobile PC" as in "mobile phone."
Use Pogo Stylus for real touchscreens. Like $10. They are popular because there are world class art tools on iPad.
I guess you have never read a hard cover book due to your atrophied arm muscles.
An iPad is half the size and weight of your subnotebook, has more than double the battery life, and it's too heavy to lug around? iPad is not a little toy reader, it's a mobile PC. 700 grams is not heavy for a PC.
The problem apps are Windows XP apps, they will have to be ported to the Web or another living platform before 2014 when Windows XP support ends. The fact that they depend on IE6 does not make them Web apps. There is no getting around it. Bite the bullet, hire an HTML5 developer and port your apps. The longer you wait and hope for some magic bullet, the less time you have to fix the problem.
I've been building HTML5 for some time and a significant amount of my work has been porting Windows XP and Adobe Flash apps to HTML5. In many cases, the clients originally asked for "Web apps" and were disappointed to find out later that is not what they got. So if you own such an app, you should look at your contracts and see whether there is grounds to sue your original developer for fraud. If your contract says "Web app" or "website" and you got an app that requires Windows XP or Adobe Flash, you should sue the developer for the cost of porting to the Web. In most cases, though, the contract will say the app requires XP or Adobe Flash and in that case you got screwed. So again, bite the bullet and port your app, and this time if you want a Web app that will last, put in the contract "platform-independent, hardware-independent, native W3C standard HTML5 Web application built to run without significant maintenance through 2020" and the developer will have to build a simple app on solid technical ground.
I built HTML4 apps in 1999 that still run perfectly today because they are just UTF-8, HTML4, CSS, JavaScript, PNG. And they can be upgraded to HTML5 very easily because they are just valid HTML4.
You can pretend that the PC is an open platform all you like. It is not. Microsoft stole the PC from IBM and they're not giving it up.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard in the lap is amazing, because it's so flat. Your wrists rest on your legs, it's very comfortable.