Without single payer, there's no point
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 0
We have single payer defense, single payer firefighters, single payer cops, and for 65+ we have single payer medicine. Those under 65 have had their right to life revoked to create a false market so health insurance companies can siphon billions from hospitals and doctors.
With single payer, there is a financial incentive to cure people, so you don't have to treat them again. With private health insurance only, the financial incentive is to deny care, to boot people out of their insurance.
Almost 200,000 Americans will die before the prohibition on denying care based on existing conditions goes into effect in 4 years.
The worst part is, this bill makes it illegal not to have private health insurance if you are under 65, no matter the cost. So this false market will continue to drain us dry. It's a kind of taxation without representation.
I was as much an Obama supporter last year as anyone. He lost me with this. He was elected to provide Medicare for all, and didn't even try. We have the worst infant mortality in the developed world. We have gross obesity because it's not stopped before it gets too far. We have people with warts and other skin conditions, totally untreated. We have people dropping dead who haven't seen a doctor in the preceding 10 years. We have people getting healthier after they turn 65, soley because they finally get health care. We have tuberculosis going untreated, we have many epidemics. We would be the laughing stock of the world if they weren't so fucking horrified by it all.
In 2012, if trends continue, we will have the same access to health care as Dickensian England. Remember Tiny Tim? He was going to die until Scrooge got visited by 3 ghosts and paid for his health care out of charity. Well, health care is not charity any more than cops are charity. Your neighbor getting his tuberculosis cured benefits you as well as him.
The irony is, the US inspired universal health care in many countries after World War 2. It's a right in the UN Charter which we helped write. It's a right in the founding documents, which clearly defines a right to life.
Finally, the much less important business argument: we cannot compete globally if we waste half our health care money and our workers are sick. People in Europe do not worry they cannot see a doctor, they focus on their work. We change jobs every year now and we're supposed to play roulette with our health care such as it is? Completely unproductive.
So I am extremely disappointed in this bill. We have no representation. We are going to have to have sick ins, we are going to have to all cancel our private health insurance, we are going to have to build a nationwide network of free clinics on our own.
Shame on us all. Shame.
Respect for mothers? America kills its mothers, the only ones in the developed world who have to beg for care or go without care. Next time you hear that bullshit line about Mom and Apple Pie, feel ashamed of yourself.
This is no surprise at all. If there weren't a cost benefit to pushing the responsibility for malware onto the user, platform vendors wouldn't do it. Microsoft wouldn't do it.
That is why iPhone users see it as an advantage that Apple audits the native apps to keep the platform 100% malware-free. It's anti-virus that requires nothing from the user. This is what 90% of users EXPECT TO GET FOR FREE. They do not expect to have to be an I-T person at all and platform vendors should not expect it either. They expect their system to do only the things they ask it to do, they expect apps not to be doing sneaky stuff behind their back. When you think about it, that's what they ought to expect.
When somebody with an iPhone tells me they like the App Store, they are installing hundreds of apps, I always ask them, "are you concerned about malware?" and the most common answer by far is "what's malware?" and occasionally somebody says "no, I know Apple is auditing the apps." So competing vendors who want to sell to iPhone users are going to have to provide 100% malware-free platforms. The users are already spoiled for anything else. Android has a much smaller user base yet there has already been an incident of malware being downloaded from Android Market, and an incident where a consumer was sold a phone that had multiple malwares running on it. That has to be fixed. It's irresponsible to sell a malware-capable phone to an iPhone user. That responsibility has moved back onto the platform vendor and it's not going back to the users. There are 4 billion plus mobiles that are about to get smart and the users do not want to take computer science courses or play junior I-T man. But the benefit to vendors and developers is that once users can trust the apps, they buy and use many, many times more of them. If you ask people to tell you how many apps they installed on their iPhone and on their Mac/PC, the iPhone always wins. Mac/PC software developers should be so lucky as to sell apps like iPhone developers sell apps.
Consider if Windows XP had only been able to run audited apps from the start, we would have no botnets right now, we wouldn't have situations where consumers are having their bank accounts emptied by malware on their PC's. Don't you think that if iPhone can go 3 years with no malware, always-on, always-connected, that a full Windows PC should be able to do the same? A Windows PC can't go 3 months.
So the tech community is going to have to take more responsibility. The computer scientists and I-T people all already have PC's. If you want to sell more on top of that, you have to take more responsibility. If you want to put computers into 20 devices all around the typical human, you are going to have to make them much less fragile and exploitable than Windows and Android.
All you need to ask yourself is why did he even say the word "iPhone" at all? He just got hired by Google. WTF has iPhone got to do with anything? Seriously, ask yourself that. None of the answers are good for Google.
The misinformation was also very sad, since he is someone who has contributed mightily in the past. He should at least have the standards of a Gizmodo review. It was sad to see him say the Internet is locked down on iPhone when it is clearly not in any way locked down, nor is it proprietary like Microsoft or Adobe. It was also sad to see him say that iPhone has limited the conversation on the Internet when it's clearly drawn an even larger audience to the conversation, providing many people with the first Internet device that they could master, causing many people to discover text messaging or Twitter and so on for the first time. Not only that but these are the very first native app purchases and installs for many users. Also sad that he thinks the successful, popular, and malware-free iPhone App Store should change to be more like the fragmented, unpopular, malware-serving Android Market. And he clearly doesn't understand that App Store is not the only place to get iPhone apps, it is only 1 of 2 app platforms on iPhone... App Store is entirely optional. The other platform is totally open, totally unmanaged, totally unmediated, uses open API's, and apps are installed from any arbitrary HTTP server. The alternative is there already if App Store is not for you. Why does it bother the Nerd Police so much that users on iPhone have their own choice of either managed or unmanaged apps? With all that has happened with Windows malware and botnets, why is it so important that *phone users* should be exposed to a native malware risk?
But this is the guy who said he would never type on a virtual keyboard and how awful iPhone was for having that, how stupid the users were for not being able to type on the device (he imagined) until he got a G1 with a much worse virtual keyboard than iPhone and said it was OK, he could live with it. So it's actually not surprising to see him talking out of his ass rather than actually trying the gear, learning about it, finding out about it.
Imagine if Google had hired a hardware chief instead, and announced they were making a "true Google phone" like so many have asked for. I think that would have been a much more interesting move, and they could have done it without saying "iPhone." Well, maybe not. Too bad.
Nokia's case just continues to get more ridiculous. This is the kind of thing you say when you have nothing to say.
What Nokia is doing is like if Intel declared that NVIDIA can't use USB wihoit turning over a free license for all NVIDIA GPU's to Intel. There's no excuse for it. Whatever RIM pays Nokia for 3G is what Apple should pay, no more, no less.
Of course there will be Slashdot posters who feel that all Apple IP should be liberated for use by the whole industry rather than the industry having to design their own gear. Nokia is calling that tune and you will dance to it. After all, why should there be any competition in tech, right? If Apple spent the last 15 years building next-generation software and Nokia spent the same time making feature phones, why shouldn't Nokia be able to just take what they need from Apple in order to catch up in the smartphone era? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I don't even need a DNA sample from him to know that.
If 100% of society were scientists, maybe this would work. If 100% of laws were just, maybe this would even result in justice. Neither of these things is true, though.
If this database existed, cops would simply arrest whoever's DNA they could find at a crime scene. Job done. No messy investigation required. Criminals would frame people by leaving their DNA at crime scenes. Society at large would believe you were guilty because DNA is science. DNA is easier to fake than fingerprints. It's easier to break into your house and collect some hairs than lift your fingerprints. Easier to drop them at a scene.
The idea that iPad causes eye strain compared to e-ink is ridiculous. iPad dims or brightens its screen according to the ambient light, has an all-digital connection, advanced typography, and is probably the best screen most consumers have ever seen. If you can spend 8 hours at work looking at a shitty analog-connected display under flourescent lighting, iPad will be a joy to read on, just like iPod and iPhone have already been for some time now. The idea that a book light strapped to low-contrast e-ink with slow refresh, poor typography, and grayscale figures, charts, and illustrations that you have to visually decode is better than iPad is bizarre.
We need a replacement not just for the minority of books that can be rendered practicaly in gray, but also for the rest of the library: art books, children's books, recipe books, magazines, technical books, photo books. And we need it in 2009, when print died because the cost of paper, ink, and shipping soared to 75% of the publishing budget.
Beyond the technical, there is also the fact that by the end of the first quarter of iPad sales, Apple expects to sell 5 million iPads, all with a full HTML5 app environment, full native app environment, full eBook reader, full ISO audio video, and a digital distribution network, while to date Amazon has sold only 3 million Kindles. Which would you prepare a title for, if you're a publisher? Consider also that book masters are in color, we need only convert them to run on iPad. To run on Kindle we have to make gray figures, we have to make sure the book works in gray, it is ridiculous.
And to not have the full Web in your reader is just stupid. WebKit weighs the same as 1 book, and runs on all architectures with excellent performance and is free and open source. Books have had hyperlinks in them for 15 years.
E-ink had its chance. Even so, many reviewers ranked iPod touch as the second-best reader after Kindle for some time now, giving it second only because of screen size. iPad can do 10 hours of video, likely 12-15 of reading, and can hold a charge for a month when unused. People are not going to trade the 900 other things an iPad does for a gray Kindle-style reader to get the chance not to plug it in at night.
There's just no chance for e-ink once the iPad cat is out of the bag. Perception has changed among readers and publishers.
It's not a love/hate relationship, it's a love/love relationship. You love your iPhone, but you also love the Nerd Police propaganda that surrounds it.
The propaganda says Apple and AT&T have made some kind of pact with the devil to keep you enslaved to them. But reliance on AT&T comes out of the fact that AT&T runs the one (1) and only GSM 3G network in the United States of America. Don't blame Apple (or Nokia) for that. Blame Verizon and Sprint for building out proprietary networking and making themselves a tiny island in a global communications network. Verizon didn't want you to run a phone that they didn't sell you, and they succeeded. And remember tethering is working all over the world. Apple made it so you just flip a switch and it works, like everything else. In many, many countries you can choose which network to run your iPhone on because there is competition in GSM 3G in those countries.
The propaganda says you have no choice in what apps you run. But you can not only choose what apps to run, there are 2 independent app environments. You can choose from hundreds of thousands of completely open, completely unmediated, completely unmanaged Web apps on your iPhone because it has a desktop-class HTML5 open source Apple WebKit browser with touch controls, local storage, offline operation, accelerated 3D graphics, and home screen icons just like App Store apps. HTML5 is a totally open API, apps can be made with any tools, deployed on any HTTP server, and in many cases the apps are more sophisticated than what are available in the native app environments on other phones. As an added bonus, you can also choose from 150,000 managed apps, that even though they are native, are safe enough that you can install and use them as quickly and easily as music and movies. That is handy since it's a phone, you're on the go, you see an app on your friend's phone and you want it and you click INSTALL and you are using it. When Android Market has already served up malware and most phones have almost no native apps, criticism of the iPhone's app system is truly weak. Potential native iPhone malwares have been demoed at security conferences but there is no way to deploy them.
So my advice to you is to believe the evidence of your own senses, or else trade in your iPhone for a netbook running Linux and Skype.
There's no market for these like netbooks. The government should be paying, not a private individual. These are public sector items. If you were a government worker buying 20,000 of these you could get a reasonable price. Most of the price you're being asked to pay is going to fund the act of selling them to you, not the items themselves. It's expensive to procur funding on a case-by-case basis. The fact that you're comparing them to private sector purchases yet finding them curiously different shows this is a different kind of item. You don't want a hearing aid, you have been prescribed a hearing aid. It's not like shopping for rugs.
The government (everyone) should be paying for these. The cost per year to fund all medicine is less than the cost to fund all defense. There is no benefit to people going without hearing aids, but a large measurable benefit to people having them. It's the same as preventing houses from burning down. The fact that this is hurting your chances of getting a job makes this very immediately obvious in your case. Some will say you should get funds from a charity but health care, like cops and firefighters and defense, is not charity. These are non-market-driven human endeavors that create conditions in which market-driven private sector interests flourish.
So what to do? I don't know. If you are in the US there is very little hope. I have a friend who needs medicine also and we don't know what to do about him either. By 2012 we'll be in the same place as Dickensian England if current trends hold. You're just one of many Tiny Tims if you are in the US. Some ghosts have to visit a rich guy before you get cured.
It's interesting you say that, because that is one of the major reasons people buy iPhones, iPod touch, and now iPad. They can install whatever the hell they want on them, without having to learn computer science or information technology skills, without having to learn about malware, without having to learn how to kill tasks. They just tap "App Store," find the app they want, click INSTALL and in moments they are using the app. These include many people who have never installed a native Mac or PC app in their whole lives. Who literally do not understand what malware is or why it would be bad or how to watch out for it. For them, the fact that the 3 or 4 iPhone malwares that have been demoed at hacker conferences simply cannot be distributed to users via the Web is a HUGE feature.
So what seems like a downside to you as a tech-savvy user, is the upside for the non-technical user. The restrictions that you feel have taken your power over the computer away from you have enabled the majority of users to experience that power for the very first time.
> I see no reason to be stuck with the programs Apple deems "appropriate" for me.
You're not. There are 2 app platforms on iPhone/iPod/iPad. The other is the best HTML5 environment yet created. Even if you don't use App Store, there are still over 100,000 apps for you to run, built with open API's, downloaded from the developer's server, with an app on the home screen, local storage and offline operation, and completely unmediated by Apple. Even without App Store, iPad is still the leading device in terms of capabilities.
The point of the iPad is not ARM, or flash storage, or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, or 3G. Yes, you can get all of those parts from someone else. And you can replace OS X with Linux. But nobody but Apple has built the layer of software on top of that, which is completely lacking from Linux. And nobody but Apple has built a 3rd party software library like App Store. And nobody else has created something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which iPad clearly is.
Also, the blasé prediction that Linux versions will be cheaper is very optimistic. If you spend $50 less than an iPad 3G right now you get a Nexus One with hardly any storage. Even if you skimp on the software, it's very hard to get under the $500 price point.
Lots of people have a regular phone and an iPod touch. A typical desk has a phone and a PC. If you carry a cell phone and iPod touch it is very similar. You can easily talk over an email or Web page, or take notes as you talk. Skype on the iPod should save you some money. I have an iPhone myself, but a lot of friends have dumb phone plus iPod touch and love it.
Or an iPad may be more suitable. You can go month to month on the 3G, buy from Telus in Canada and then shut it off and buy from AT&T in US and swap the SIM when you change over. Maybe you can do that with an iPhone also, if you can shut the plans down when you're gone from each country. It seems like SIM's would work to your advantage.
I know JavaScript, PHP, and AppleScript, and I learned them so I could script the Web browser, the Web server, and the Mac desktop, respectively. With just a few simple lines of each you can make really practical and productive things happen that seem to me like they would reward the beginner. My background is publishing, though. Maybe I'm biased towards programming that makes documents.
Every 3 years, just before the warranty expires, I sell my current Mac, get half of what I paid for it (outrageous resale value!) and then I buy the updated version of that same Mac at the Apple Store. 3 years later I do that again. They're always smaller and faster and more rugged.
I know Macs have model numbers and I know they have CPU's which also have model numbers. I don't know any of those numbers.
The numbers I am concerned with all have to do with my work, which is music and art. I'm really happy to leave the I-T numbers to Apple.
The Linux version of Steam *is* the Windows version. PC's all come with Windows, and Linux users all play games in Windows. Windows is the Linux gaming layer. Until Linux can host the PC version of Steam without Windows, you'll need Windows to use Steam.
There's only one PC. It's not a chicken/egg problem, it's 2 Kirks.
Also they hired a ton of Mac coders to do this. That was actually the first indication this was coming, quite a while ago. They aren't repurposing their existing coders for this.
Any Valve users who complain should remember that this is better for the whole Valve ecosystem. Even if they don't think they will ever run a Mac, in a few years they may run a Linux version that uses OpenGL and is based on work done to support the Mac. Or they may run a future version on PlayStation thanks to work done for the Mac. Windows is not going to be around forever. I give it maybe 5 more years. Maybe.
> they will probably disappoint quite a few Mac users, who haven't upgraded for one reason or another.
If you're buying $80 games you already bought a new $600-$1200 Mac within the last 4 years and can handle the $29 for Snow Leopard if you don't have it already. There really isn't anyone to disappoint. What few PowerPC machines are still out there are valued for running legacy software that won't run under Mac OS X for Intel, such as software that uses PowerPC plug-ins, not for running current software.
Snow Leopard is the 3rd Mac OS to run on Intel. The PowerPC train has sailed.
Hardly any Macs have integrated Intel graphics. They used Intel graphics in the first Intel MacBook line, in the very lowest-end machine only, and by now that has already been retired.
The Mac OS itself uses 3D graphics throughout the interface. OpenGL is a part of everyday work on a Mac. Please use your head.
The quickest solution is to put another disk in your Mac Pro and get him working off that. Just put in another disk, move the files over there, and then only share that disk. Then you can work off the other disk(s). A Mac Pro has 4 hot-plug slots that take standard SATA drives and a pop-open door. We are talking about possibly 5 minutes work and even a small disk may do.
The best solution is to make a server, that is less than 1 hour of work, no I-T help is required.
Cheapest way is to use an old Mac. Aren't there any old Macs around? Every Mac in the 21st century except MacBook Air has Gigabit Ethernet, and all Mac Pro can take 4 disks, and all PowerMac could take 3. How hard is it to put Leopard on an old Mac and put the files on there? In many places I have worked, the Mac Pros get demoted down to file servers. If there aren't any around, you can get a used one for almost nothing, and all you have to do is install Leopard on it and it's ready to go. Again, no I-T hours are required.
Or, Apple's AirPort base station runs OS X and all you have to do to turn it into a file server is plug on a USB disk. The files are available over Gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi.
Tethering is always at least $30 per month, and usually has a 5GB cap. The iPad has unlimited 3G for $30 per month. If you could tether iPad to iPhone for $30 a month that would just wear out your iPhone battery unnecessarily. If you want 3G in your iPad, it has a SIM slot and $30 per month unlimited. Solved. It's wireless tethering without the incredible battery drain of Bluetooth.
Also, this question is backwards. From a 3G perspective, the iPad is another iPhone. In iPhone OS, there is a simple tethering switch, a big ON/OFF slider that shares the device's 3G connection with the Mac/PC it is attached to via USB or Bluetooth. So the question should be, "can I tether my Mac/PC to my iPad?" We haven't heard about that yet.
And the other question should be, "WTF is wrong with AT&T that they still don't offer iPhone tethering? It's available everywhere else!"
There is HTML5 on all Apple platforms also, whereas on Microsoft platforms you have various incompatible proprietary MSHTML implementations that create an environment that's so unfriendly to developers that it has become legendary.
People often forget you can get onto the iPhone home screen with HTML5 running off your own server, and your app gets GPU accelerated graphics and can run on all the other HTML5 devices as well. Many of which have HTML5 because of Apple WebKit. The fact that Apple provides a managed app platform in addition to an open one is seen as a feature by users and by many developers.
You can also write Unix and X-Windows apps for the Mac, as well as Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, AppleScript, and of course Mac apps.
Apple's developers tools are excellent also. They are the ones that were used to create the World Wide Web.
If you're a Java developer, of course Android's Java is great for you. But saying that is better than the C on the iPhone is ridiculous. The proof is in the pudding: the iPhone's apps are much deeper and sophisticated because in many cases they are 90% desktop code, dropped in and create an interface.
This article looks at the view from the player, but there are authoring issues also.
A key feature of ISO MPEG-4 is it is based on the QuickTime file format that authoring tools all speak. So adding ISO MPEG-4 support to an authoring tool was a minimal job, and it happened quickly and broadly. The fact that ISO MPEG-4 was a standardization of the QuickTime we were already using was very practical. Very much like how many HTML5 features are things the browsers or authors were already doing.
This all happened years ago, of course. The funny thing with the patent debate is the ISO MPEG-4 patents will expire before we could ever move everybody over to Ogg. And until then, it is a patent pool with cheap licensing that can't be denied to anyone, like GSM in phones, protection from liability, and with no content tax. Hardly the terrible evil it is made out to be.
But even so, the author is right: you have to bring the tech first. It has to be practical.
If you are still using XP at this point, who cares? Go for it. Press F1 while running FlashPlayer and Acrobat and IE6 simultaneously. If you gave a shit or had any data worth protecting you'd already be using a Mac or other Unix.
Yes, AT&T has fucked up iPhone tethering, but that is only applicable to the US. Elsewhere you just flip a switch and go. And if you are in the US, there is an easy hack you apply to turn it on, which millions of people are using. Many more than own a Nexus One.
So get over yourselves. iPhone was late to the tethering party. To come along 6 months later and act like Nexus One has invented it is just ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
We have single payer defense, single payer firefighters, single payer cops, and for 65+ we have single payer medicine. Those under 65 have had their right to life revoked to create a false market so health insurance companies can siphon billions from hospitals and doctors.
With single payer, there is a financial incentive to cure people, so you don't have to treat them again. With private health insurance only, the financial incentive is to deny care, to boot people out of their insurance.
Almost 200,000 Americans will die before the prohibition on denying care based on existing conditions goes into effect in 4 years.
The worst part is, this bill makes it illegal not to have private health insurance if you are under 65, no matter the cost. So this false market will continue to drain us dry. It's a kind of taxation without representation.
I was as much an Obama supporter last year as anyone. He lost me with this. He was elected to provide Medicare for all, and didn't even try. We have the worst infant mortality in the developed world. We have gross obesity because it's not stopped before it gets too far. We have people with warts and other skin conditions, totally untreated. We have people dropping dead who haven't seen a doctor in the preceding 10 years. We have people getting healthier after they turn 65, soley because they finally get health care. We have tuberculosis going untreated, we have many epidemics. We would be the laughing stock of the world if they weren't so fucking horrified by it all.
In 2012, if trends continue, we will have the same access to health care as Dickensian England. Remember Tiny Tim? He was going to die until Scrooge got visited by 3 ghosts and paid for his health care out of charity. Well, health care is not charity any more than cops are charity. Your neighbor getting his tuberculosis cured benefits you as well as him.
The irony is, the US inspired universal health care in many countries after World War 2. It's a right in the UN Charter which we helped write. It's a right in the founding documents, which clearly defines a right to life.
Finally, the much less important business argument: we cannot compete globally if we waste half our health care money and our workers are sick. People in Europe do not worry they cannot see a doctor, they focus on their work. We change jobs every year now and we're supposed to play roulette with our health care such as it is? Completely unproductive.
So I am extremely disappointed in this bill. We have no representation. We are going to have to have sick ins, we are going to have to all cancel our private health insurance, we are going to have to build a nationwide network of free clinics on our own.
Shame on us all. Shame.
Respect for mothers? America kills its mothers, the only ones in the developed world who have to beg for care or go without care. Next time you hear that bullshit line about Mom and Apple Pie, feel ashamed of yourself.
This is no surprise at all. If there weren't a cost benefit to pushing the responsibility for malware onto the user, platform vendors wouldn't do it. Microsoft wouldn't do it.
That is why iPhone users see it as an advantage that Apple audits the native apps to keep the platform 100% malware-free. It's anti-virus that requires nothing from the user. This is what 90% of users EXPECT TO GET FOR FREE. They do not expect to have to be an I-T person at all and platform vendors should not expect it either. They expect their system to do only the things they ask it to do, they expect apps not to be doing sneaky stuff behind their back. When you think about it, that's what they ought to expect.
When somebody with an iPhone tells me they like the App Store, they are installing hundreds of apps, I always ask them, "are you concerned about malware?" and the most common answer by far is "what's malware?" and occasionally somebody says "no, I know Apple is auditing the apps." So competing vendors who want to sell to iPhone users are going to have to provide 100% malware-free platforms. The users are already spoiled for anything else. Android has a much smaller user base yet there has already been an incident of malware being downloaded from Android Market, and an incident where a consumer was sold a phone that had multiple malwares running on it. That has to be fixed. It's irresponsible to sell a malware-capable phone to an iPhone user. That responsibility has moved back onto the platform vendor and it's not going back to the users. There are 4 billion plus mobiles that are about to get smart and the users do not want to take computer science courses or play junior I-T man. But the benefit to vendors and developers is that once users can trust the apps, they buy and use many, many times more of them. If you ask people to tell you how many apps they installed on their iPhone and on their Mac/PC, the iPhone always wins. Mac/PC software developers should be so lucky as to sell apps like iPhone developers sell apps.
Consider if Windows XP had only been able to run audited apps from the start, we would have no botnets right now, we wouldn't have situations where consumers are having their bank accounts emptied by malware on their PC's. Don't you think that if iPhone can go 3 years with no malware, always-on, always-connected, that a full Windows PC should be able to do the same? A Windows PC can't go 3 months.
So the tech community is going to have to take more responsibility. The computer scientists and I-T people all already have PC's. If you want to sell more on top of that, you have to take more responsibility. If you want to put computers into 20 devices all around the typical human, you are going to have to make them much less fragile and exploitable than Windows and Android.
say "hello world"
All you need to ask yourself is why did he even say the word "iPhone" at all? He just got hired by Google. WTF has iPhone got to do with anything? Seriously, ask yourself that. None of the answers are good for Google.
The misinformation was also very sad, since he is someone who has contributed mightily in the past. He should at least have the standards of a Gizmodo review. It was sad to see him say the Internet is locked down on iPhone when it is clearly not in any way locked down, nor is it proprietary like Microsoft or Adobe. It was also sad to see him say that iPhone has limited the conversation on the Internet when it's clearly drawn an even larger audience to the conversation, providing many people with the first Internet device that they could master, causing many people to discover text messaging or Twitter and so on for the first time. Not only that but these are the very first native app purchases and installs for many users. Also sad that he thinks the successful, popular, and malware-free iPhone App Store should change to be more like the fragmented, unpopular, malware-serving Android Market. And he clearly doesn't understand that App Store is not the only place to get iPhone apps, it is only 1 of 2 app platforms on iPhone ... App Store is entirely optional. The other platform is totally open, totally unmanaged, totally unmediated, uses open API's, and apps are installed from any arbitrary HTTP server. The alternative is there already if App Store is not for you. Why does it bother the Nerd Police so much that users on iPhone have their own choice of either managed or unmanaged apps? With all that has happened with Windows malware and botnets, why is it so important that *phone users* should be exposed to a native malware risk?
But this is the guy who said he would never type on a virtual keyboard and how awful iPhone was for having that, how stupid the users were for not being able to type on the device (he imagined) until he got a G1 with a much worse virtual keyboard than iPhone and said it was OK, he could live with it. So it's actually not surprising to see him talking out of his ass rather than actually trying the gear, learning about it, finding out about it.
Imagine if Google had hired a hardware chief instead, and announced they were making a "true Google phone" like so many have asked for. I think that would have been a much more interesting move, and they could have done it without saying "iPhone." Well, maybe not. Too bad.
Nokia's case just continues to get more ridiculous. This is the kind of thing you say when you have nothing to say.
What Nokia is doing is like if Intel declared that NVIDIA can't use USB wihoit turning over a free license for all NVIDIA GPU's to Intel. There's no excuse for it. Whatever RIM pays Nokia for 3G is what Apple should pay, no more, no less.
Of course there will be Slashdot posters who feel that all Apple IP should be liberated for use by the whole industry rather than the industry having to design their own gear. Nokia is calling that tune and you will dance to it. After all, why should there be any competition in tech, right? If Apple spent the last 15 years building next-generation software and Nokia spent the same time making feature phones, why shouldn't Nokia be able to just take what they need from Apple in order to catch up in the smartphone era? Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I don't even need a DNA sample from him to know that.
If 100% of society were scientists, maybe this would work. If 100% of laws were just, maybe this would even result in justice. Neither of these things is true, though.
If this database existed, cops would simply arrest whoever's DNA they could find at a crime scene. Job done. No messy investigation required. Criminals would frame people by leaving their DNA at crime scenes. Society at large would believe you were guilty because DNA is science. DNA is easier to fake than fingerprints. It's easier to break into your house and collect some hairs than lift your fingerprints. Easier to drop them at a scene.
Junk sociolgy.
The idea that iPad causes eye strain compared to e-ink is ridiculous. iPad dims or brightens its screen according to the ambient light, has an all-digital connection, advanced typography, and is probably the best screen most consumers have ever seen. If you can spend 8 hours at work looking at a shitty analog-connected display under flourescent lighting, iPad will be a joy to read on, just like iPod and iPhone have already been for some time now. The idea that a book light strapped to low-contrast e-ink with slow refresh, poor typography, and grayscale figures, charts, and illustrations that you have to visually decode is better than iPad is bizarre.
We need a replacement not just for the minority of books that can be rendered practicaly in gray, but also for the rest of the library: art books, children's books, recipe books, magazines, technical books, photo books. And we need it in 2009, when print died because the cost of paper, ink, and shipping soared to 75% of the publishing budget.
Beyond the technical, there is also the fact that by the end of the first quarter of iPad sales, Apple expects to sell 5 million iPads, all with a full HTML5 app environment, full native app environment, full eBook reader, full ISO audio video, and a digital distribution network, while to date Amazon has sold only 3 million Kindles. Which would you prepare a title for, if you're a publisher? Consider also that book masters are in color, we need only convert them to run on iPad. To run on Kindle we have to make gray figures, we have to make sure the book works in gray, it is ridiculous.
And to not have the full Web in your reader is just stupid. WebKit weighs the same as 1 book, and runs on all architectures with excellent performance and is free and open source. Books have had hyperlinks in them for 15 years.
E-ink had its chance. Even so, many reviewers ranked iPod touch as the second-best reader after Kindle for some time now, giving it second only because of screen size. iPad can do 10 hours of video, likely 12-15 of reading, and can hold a charge for a month when unused. People are not going to trade the 900 other things an iPad does for a gray Kindle-style reader to get the chance not to plug it in at night.
There's just no chance for e-ink once the iPad cat is out of the bag. Perception has changed among readers and publishers.
It's not a love/hate relationship, it's a love/love relationship. You love your iPhone, but you also love the Nerd Police propaganda that surrounds it.
The propaganda says Apple and AT&T have made some kind of pact with the devil to keep you enslaved to them. But reliance on AT&T comes out of the fact that AT&T runs the one (1) and only GSM 3G network in the United States of America. Don't blame Apple (or Nokia) for that. Blame Verizon and Sprint for building out proprietary networking and making themselves a tiny island in a global communications network. Verizon didn't want you to run a phone that they didn't sell you, and they succeeded. And remember tethering is working all over the world. Apple made it so you just flip a switch and it works, like everything else. In many, many countries you can choose which network to run your iPhone on because there is competition in GSM 3G in those countries.
The propaganda says you have no choice in what apps you run. But you can not only choose what apps to run, there are 2 independent app environments. You can choose from hundreds of thousands of completely open, completely unmediated, completely unmanaged Web apps on your iPhone because it has a desktop-class HTML5 open source Apple WebKit browser with touch controls, local storage, offline operation, accelerated 3D graphics, and home screen icons just like App Store apps. HTML5 is a totally open API, apps can be made with any tools, deployed on any HTTP server, and in many cases the apps are more sophisticated than what are available in the native app environments on other phones. As an added bonus, you can also choose from 150,000 managed apps, that even though they are native, are safe enough that you can install and use them as quickly and easily as music and movies. That is handy since it's a phone, you're on the go, you see an app on your friend's phone and you want it and you click INSTALL and you are using it. When Android Market has already served up malware and most phones have almost no native apps, criticism of the iPhone's app system is truly weak. Potential native iPhone malwares have been demoed at security conferences but there is no way to deploy them.
So my advice to you is to believe the evidence of your own senses, or else trade in your iPhone for a netbook running Linux and Skype.
There's no market for these like netbooks. The government should be paying, not a private individual. These are public sector items. If you were a government worker buying 20,000 of these you could get a reasonable price. Most of the price you're being asked to pay is going to fund the act of selling them to you, not the items themselves. It's expensive to procur funding on a case-by-case basis. The fact that you're comparing them to private sector purchases yet finding them curiously different shows this is a different kind of item. You don't want a hearing aid, you have been prescribed a hearing aid. It's not like shopping for rugs.
The government (everyone) should be paying for these. The cost per year to fund all medicine is less than the cost to fund all defense. There is no benefit to people going without hearing aids, but a large measurable benefit to people having them. It's the same as preventing houses from burning down. The fact that this is hurting your chances of getting a job makes this very immediately obvious in your case. Some will say you should get funds from a charity but health care, like cops and firefighters and defense, is not charity. These are non-market-driven human endeavors that create conditions in which market-driven private sector interests flourish.
So what to do? I don't know. If you are in the US there is very little hope. I have a friend who needs medicine also and we don't know what to do about him either. By 2012 we'll be in the same place as Dickensian England if current trends hold. You're just one of many Tiny Tims if you are in the US. Some ghosts have to visit a rich guy before you get cured.
> let me install whatever the hell I want on them
It's interesting you say that, because that is one of the major reasons people buy iPhones, iPod touch, and now iPad. They can install whatever the hell they want on them, without having to learn computer science or information technology skills, without having to learn about malware, without having to learn how to kill tasks. They just tap "App Store," find the app they want, click INSTALL and in moments they are using the app. These include many people who have never installed a native Mac or PC app in their whole lives. Who literally do not understand what malware is or why it would be bad or how to watch out for it. For them, the fact that the 3 or 4 iPhone malwares that have been demoed at hacker conferences simply cannot be distributed to users via the Web is a HUGE feature.
So what seems like a downside to you as a tech-savvy user, is the upside for the non-technical user. The restrictions that you feel have taken your power over the computer away from you have enabled the majority of users to experience that power for the very first time.
> I see no reason to be stuck with the programs Apple deems "appropriate" for me.
You're not. There are 2 app platforms on iPhone/iPod/iPad. The other is the best HTML5 environment yet created. Even if you don't use App Store, there are still over 100,000 apps for you to run, built with open API's, downloaded from the developer's server, with an app on the home screen, local storage and offline operation, and completely unmediated by Apple. Even without App Store, iPad is still the leading device in terms of capabilities.
The point of the iPad is not ARM, or flash storage, or Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, or 3G. Yes, you can get all of those parts from someone else. And you can replace OS X with Linux. But nobody but Apple has built the layer of software on top of that, which is completely lacking from Linux. And nobody but Apple has built a 3rd party software library like App Store. And nobody else has created something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which iPad clearly is.
Also, the blasé prediction that Linux versions will be cheaper is very optimistic. If you spend $50 less than an iPad 3G right now you get a Nexus One with hardly any storage. Even if you skimp on the software, it's very hard to get under the $500 price point.
Lots of people have a regular phone and an iPod touch. A typical desk has a phone and a PC. If you carry a cell phone and iPod touch it is very similar. You can easily talk over an email or Web page, or take notes as you talk. Skype on the iPod should save you some money. I have an iPhone myself, but a lot of friends have dumb phone plus iPod touch and love it.
Or an iPad may be more suitable. You can go month to month on the 3G, buy from Telus in Canada and then shut it off and buy from AT&T in US and swap the SIM when you change over. Maybe you can do that with an iPhone also, if you can shut the plans down when you're gone from each country. It seems like SIM's would work to your advantage.
Are people still teaching or learning BASIC?
I know JavaScript, PHP, and AppleScript, and I learned them so I could script the Web browser, the Web server, and the Mac desktop, respectively. With just a few simple lines of each you can make really practical and productive things happen that seem to me like they would reward the beginner. My background is publishing, though. Maybe I'm biased towards programming that makes documents.
What does BASIC actually do?
> how do you buy a computer these days?
Every 3 years, just before the warranty expires, I sell my current Mac, get half of what I paid for it (outrageous resale value!) and then I buy the updated version of that same Mac at the Apple Store. 3 years later I do that again. They're always smaller and faster and more rugged.
I know Macs have model numbers and I know they have CPU's which also have model numbers. I don't know any of those numbers.
The numbers I am concerned with all have to do with my work, which is music and art. I'm really happy to leave the I-T numbers to Apple.
The Linux version of Steam *is* the Windows version. PC's all come with Windows, and Linux users all play games in Windows. Windows is the Linux gaming layer. Until Linux can host the PC version of Steam without Windows, you'll need Windows to use Steam.
There's only one PC. It's not a chicken/egg problem, it's 2 Kirks.
Also they hired a ton of Mac coders to do this. That was actually the first indication this was coming, quite a while ago. They aren't repurposing their existing coders for this.
Any Valve users who complain should remember that this is better for the whole Valve ecosystem. Even if they don't think they will ever run a Mac, in a few years they may run a Linux version that uses OpenGL and is based on work done to support the Mac. Or they may run a future version on PlayStation thanks to work done for the Mac. Windows is not going to be around forever. I give it maybe 5 more years. Maybe.
> they will probably disappoint quite a few Mac users, who haven't upgraded for one reason or another.
If you're buying $80 games you already bought a new $600-$1200 Mac within the last 4 years and can handle the $29 for Snow Leopard if you don't have it already. There really isn't anyone to disappoint. What few PowerPC machines are still out there are valued for running legacy software that won't run under Mac OS X for Intel, such as software that uses PowerPC plug-ins, not for running current software.
Snow Leopard is the 3rd Mac OS to run on Intel. The PowerPC train has sailed.
Hardly any Macs have integrated Intel graphics. They used Intel graphics in the first Intel MacBook line, in the very lowest-end machine only, and by now that has already been retired.
The Mac OS itself uses 3D graphics throughout the interface. OpenGL is a part of everyday work on a Mac. Please use your head.
The quickest solution is to put another disk in your Mac Pro and get him working off that. Just put in another disk, move the files over there, and then only share that disk. Then you can work off the other disk(s). A Mac Pro has 4 hot-plug slots that take standard SATA drives and a pop-open door. We are talking about possibly 5 minutes work and even a small disk may do.
The best solution is to make a server, that is less than 1 hour of work, no I-T help is required.
Cheapest way is to use an old Mac. Aren't there any old Macs around? Every Mac in the 21st century except MacBook Air has Gigabit Ethernet, and all Mac Pro can take 4 disks, and all PowerMac could take 3. How hard is it to put Leopard on an old Mac and put the files on there? In many places I have worked, the Mac Pros get demoted down to file servers. If there aren't any around, you can get a used one for almost nothing, and all you have to do is install Leopard on it and it's ready to go. Again, no I-T hours are required.
Or, Apple's AirPort base station runs OS X and all you have to do to turn it into a file server is plug on a USB disk. The files are available over Gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi.
Tethering is always at least $30 per month, and usually has a 5GB cap. The iPad has unlimited 3G for $30 per month. If you could tether iPad to iPhone for $30 a month that would just wear out your iPhone battery unnecessarily. If you want 3G in your iPad, it has a SIM slot and $30 per month unlimited. Solved. It's wireless tethering without the incredible battery drain of Bluetooth.
Also, this question is backwards. From a 3G perspective, the iPad is another iPhone. In iPhone OS, there is a simple tethering switch, a big ON/OFF slider that shares the device's 3G connection with the Mac/PC it is attached to via USB or Bluetooth. So the question should be, "can I tether my Mac/PC to my iPad?" We haven't heard about that yet.
And the other question should be, "WTF is wrong with AT&T that they still don't offer iPhone tethering? It's available everywhere else!"
There is HTML5 on all Apple platforms also, whereas on Microsoft platforms you have various incompatible proprietary MSHTML implementations that create an environment that's so unfriendly to developers that it has become legendary.
People often forget you can get onto the iPhone home screen with HTML5 running off your own server, and your app gets GPU accelerated graphics and can run on all the other HTML5 devices as well. Many of which have HTML5 because of Apple WebKit. The fact that Apple provides a managed app platform in addition to an open one is seen as a feature by users and by many developers.
You can also write Unix and X-Windows apps for the Mac, as well as Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, AppleScript, and of course Mac apps.
Apple's developers tools are excellent also. They are the ones that were used to create the World Wide Web.
If you're a Java developer, of course Android's Java is great for you. But saying that is better than the C on the iPhone is ridiculous. The proof is in the pudding: the iPhone's apps are much deeper and sophisticated because in many cases they are 90% desktop code, dropped in and create an interface.
This article looks at the view from the player, but there are authoring issues also.
A key feature of ISO MPEG-4 is it is based on the QuickTime file format that authoring tools all speak. So adding ISO MPEG-4 support to an authoring tool was a minimal job, and it happened quickly and broadly. The fact that ISO MPEG-4 was a standardization of the QuickTime we were already using was very practical. Very much like how many HTML5 features are things the browsers or authors were already doing.
This all happened years ago, of course. The funny thing with the patent debate is the ISO MPEG-4 patents will expire before we could ever move everybody over to Ogg. And until then, it is a patent pool with cheap licensing that can't be denied to anyone, like GSM in phones, protection from liability, and with no content tax. Hardly the terrible evil it is made out to be.
But even so, the author is right: you have to bring the tech first. It has to be practical.
If you are still using XP at this point, who cares? Go for it. Press F1 while running FlashPlayer and Acrobat and IE6 simultaneously. If you gave a shit or had any data worth protecting you'd already be using a Mac or other Unix.
... and has been for the past 6 months.
Yes, AT&T has fucked up iPhone tethering, but that is only applicable to the US. Elsewhere you just flip a switch and go. And if you are in the US, there is an easy hack you apply to turn it on, which millions of people are using. Many more than own a Nexus One.
So get over yourselves. iPhone was late to the tethering party. To come along 6 months later and act like Nexus One has invented it is just ridiculous.