Mini-DisplayPort is the same height as USB, and like USB is hot-pluggable, and backwards-compatible with both DVI and VGA connectors. It's a great plug.
> You aren't much of a geek if you don't plan on upgrading beyond DVD technology > once the next technology gets to the same price point and is an order of > magnitude better. I know I will be!
Yeah, I already did! I bought a MacBook Air and iPhone 3GS and now I buy and rent movies over Wi-Fi. Where the fuck do I put the stone DVD?
Vinyl is actually older than that, but it's analog, so it's a lot easier to figure out than anything that's digital. They made their own vinyl record player on Gilligan's Island, but it's unlikely they would have been able to make their own DVD player.
You have to completely disable all of your iPhone's security features using 3rd party software to get this to run. This reminds me of the "iPod malware" that only worked on iPods that were running Linux.
iTunes is not yet ready to sell your iTunes LP or your fucking eBook. That is all. They don't have the infrastructure yet.
If for some reason iTunes wanted to make any part of their content proprietary, why did they delay opening the store for a year to use ISO MPEG-4 instead of Apple QuickTime? Why is iTunes LP made out of HTML5 instead of Cocoa if they want to make it proprietary?
I know there is a strong urge among some people to bash Apple at every opportunity, but truly: use your fucking heads.
> It's an interesting move, but honestly I don't think many people will go back to buying whole albums again.
No need to be so suspicious. The iTunes LP format doesn't have to change music buying habits, it is needed just to digitize the back catalog. There are many albums which it is very desirable to have the whole album. Many of these albums are already in the iTunes Store. For example, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's was the first album with lyrics printed inside, before that lyrics were looked at as very throwaway. So when the Beatles release an iTunes version of that album, don't you think it would be nice if all the computer nerds who are now involved in music could come up with a way (40 years later) to maintain the full content of the album when it is digitized?
> So on a scale of usefulness from "necessary for human survival"
Art is necessary for human survival.
> WinAMP
So the digital age is for Windows and Slashdot, but not for the artwork from Electric Ladyland or The Wall or Bitches Brew? We can throw all that stuff out as long as we rip a copy of the audio for fucking WinAMP.
> If Apple and USB Interoperability Forum have worked to make the system deliberately incompatible, Palm has the legal right to circumvent that
You are factually wrong here. Palm are the only ones that broke the USB spec by sending Apple's vendor ID instead of their own. USB does not connect Pre to iTunes, it connects Pre to OTHER USB DEVICES such as Macs or PC's. Palm has a right to attach to a Mac or a PC, not to iTunes. iTunes itself is not now and has never been a USB device.
Pre can be plugged into Mac or PC and mount as USB mass storage, charge over USB power, and even attach as a USB audio interface or USB mouse if it wants to do that. Nobody is stopping that. However, there is no USB standard for media sync. There's no USB codes to say "I'm a media player with a syncable library." The iPod syncs with iTunes using proprietary commands because they are both part of the same system, not a breeding ground for 3rd parties like Microsoft makes.
Now, maybe there should be a USB standard for media sync. If you think so, you may want to promote that idea. Palm may even want to promote that idea. Apple may even allow USBIF to just standardize what the iPod is already doing, same as MPEG-4 is a standardization of the Apple QuickTime file format, same as the HTML5 canvas tag is a standardization of the Mac OS Dashboard. However, what you're demanding is that Apple create and maintain a 3rd party synchronization scheme without any standardization at all. That's like saying Microsoft should write all the Web standards because IE has 50%+ market share. That is not standardization.
I also have to point out that compatibility is not free. It's incompatibility that is free, and compatibility takes work. The iPod and Mac are both USB-compatible because Apple did the work to make them so, same as Pre required work from Palm to make it USB compatible. They implement the spec and so they can talk to each other using "USB language" and get things done for the user. There are no words for "media sync" in the USB language as yet. They have to be created. It takes fucking work. That work has not been done yet by anyone, least of all Palm. Demanding that we nationalize iTunes is a poor substitute for actual industry co-operation on a media sync standard.
Finally, I have to say that the fact that your little fact-free, law-free, anti-Apple bigotry got a score of 5 on Slashdot says bad things about the technical knowledge of today's Slashdot readers. Truly guys, if you want your Pre to have a particular feature, ASK PALM TO BUILD IT FOR YOU. Do not complain that Apple didn't build it for you. They are not your vendor. They are just a totally uninvolved vendor whose USB ID is being misused. The only action Apple has taken was to improve iTunes' ability to recognize iPods now that another device is pretending to be an iPod.
While Apple was politely knocking on this guy's door to offer him yet another free software download (by mistake it turns out) to go with the Apple software he is already using, malware and viruses were installing themselves through the windows and cracks in the walls and hiding all over his system. Windows is fucking wide open and this guy is complaining that Apple offered him something. This fucker should save his misplaced animosity for Microsoft and the shitty PC industry that can't even ship him a fucking Unix in 2010. He has to get his media layer, media manager, zero configuration networking, and HTML5 browser from fucking Apple even though he is using Windows. There is something already wrong there, and not at Apple. To be pissy about the updater politely offering you something you can refuse in 2 ways (refuse just for now, or refuse permanently) is just fucking completely unacceptable.
Truly, STOP USING APPLE SOFTWARE. You are a fucking bigot and you deserve what you get from Microsoft. Take it from them, bend over, and plead for some more.
I truly hope a black-hat finds this guy's wide-open fucking Windows PC and installs a fucking nuclear bomb on there and let's see his article about that. Probably goes something like this: "well, Microsoft tried their best, if only computers weren't so naturally virus-prone, I better upgrade to Windows 7!" and just insert about 20 more ass-licking Microsoft excusifying that Windows users have become so good at you fucking wretched masochists.
The anti-Apple bigotry is widespread right now because Apple is once again 10 plus years ahead of the rest of the industry. The correct response to this is not hatred towards Apple, it's righteous indignation directed towards YOUR OWN FUCKING SHITTY PC VENDOR WHO IS 10 FUCKING YEARS BEHIND. HP/Dell/Lenovo are still selling you warmed over Windows fucking 95! Unix is fucking FREE! You already own the fucking thing but you are PAYING FOR FUCKING WINDOWS ANYWAY.
With all the shit that self-installs and can't even be removed from Windows, it is just incredible to hear Windows users whine about this fucking iPhone provisioning app that was offered by fucking mistake. Microsoft fucking wishes that their mistakes were as small as offering people a download they don't want. That would be an awesome day at Microsoft.
Truly, get off the Apple gear. Uninstall all of it, sell your iPod, get the fuck away from it all. Never darken an Apple Store again. Nobody has a gun to your head you fucking loser. INCREDIBLE.
You hear people saying "Apple" and "anti-trust" in the same breath today, that is fucking ridiculous, they have 10% of the market. What that really amounts to is a plea to nationalize Apple, to stop them from competing, to break up the Yankees, to appropriate their technology for the user of the generic PC industry. That is how fucking hopeless the PC makers are. People can't imagine any of them actually advancing their technology to the same generation as Apple so they just say "well, Pre should be able to use iTunes if it wants, and PC makers should be able to use OS X if they want, and if not, then Apple is a criminal monopolist. FUCKING LAME. TOTALLY FUCKING LAME.
Yes, Chrome Frame improves the whole experience in IE. Everything is faster. It feels like running Chrome or Safari, not IE. You get the same hair-blown-back feeling that you get if you run IE for an hour and then switch to Safari or Chrome. But the feeling may be even more pronounced in Chrome Frame because you can view 100 pages in the IE renderer and then go to a page that asks for Chrome and immediately your hair is blown back. The page pops into view like nothing you've seen in IE.
The JavaScript benchmarks steal the headlines because they are always 8x or more faster than IE, but the slowest improvement is still over 2x. IE is really, really, really slow.
For 6 years now, WebKit has been constantly iterated on with speed in mind. If they added a feature and it slowed the browser down they took the feature out and added it again in some other way. From the beginning Apple knew they wanted to run WebKit on iPod so they were just crazy about making it fast. On the other hand, IE was not under development for 5 full years and speed has never been a requirement. Microsoft has always taken the position that you get more speed out of their products by getting a faster CPU. That's why IE8 doesn't run on their mobiles.
So it should not surprise you that IE runs faster with Chrome Frame than otherwise. It would be surprising if anything could render HTML as slowly as IE.
IE8 is terrible. It is 2x slower than every other browser and it has no HTML5 features. It's only good when compared to IE6 from 2001. Also, IE8 is over 25 megabytes and runs only on Wintel. For comparison, WebKit is 5 megabytes and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and on x32, x64, PowerPC, and ARM.
There is just no excuse for the low quality of Internet Explorer. Microsoft has been at this longer than any other browser maker. Safari is from early 2003, Firefox from late 2004, Chrome from 2008, but IE is from 1995. That is a dramatic head start and yet IE8 is way, way behind the other browsers.
The stupid thing here is there are many Add-ons for IE that do ridiculously unproductive things, and that's all fine with Microsoft. But then Google releases one that is actually useful, that doubles the speed of Web browsing in IE, and Microsoft is against that.
> This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
Weak! I wouldn't recommend you let your dog run IE.
The touch screen does not replace your existing display, it replaces your keyboard and mouse. The touch screen is going to go where your hands already are right now. Your hands are not going to go to it.
Examples of this can be seen in audio video production already. Many digital audio mixers are a computer with a hardware "mixing surface" attached via MIDI and you basically don't use the typical PC keyboard if things are done right. You map the real controls on the mixing surface to the virtual controls in your audio production system, and then you can slide the fader up or down on channel 1 on the mixing surface and the virtual fader on channel 1 on screen follows. Or slide 2 or 3 faders at once and they all follow. So the user can treat the computer as if it were a "real" audio mixer. There are transport controls and a jog wheel typically.
If you add a touchscreen to that kind of audio production setup, you don't remove the mixing surface and ask the user to touch the computer screen from then on, you put the touch screen in place of the mixing surface and it morphs into a mixing surface when you're doing audio, it morphs into a video editing surface for video, it becomes any kind of _real_ device you would use for the kind of work you're doing, only instead you have a _virtual_ version that can appear or go away depending on the context.
The display in front of you may also have touch, but you'll touch it rarely like a whiteboard, or the way you shuffle papers on a desk. The vast majority of your touching will be in the same context as now, only instead of a 1970's keyboard and 1980's mouse you'll have a 2010's touchscreen that can become a keyboard and mouse but most of the time it will become more interesting things.
Another example is graphics tablets. The ones with displays built-in are still used flat or on an easel just like the ones without displays that preceded them and the paper and art tools they're all replacing. Wacom didn't start building in displays and then put the graphics tablet vertical.
If you look at the iPhone, it has screen where the keyboard "should" be and no screen where the screen "should" be (a flip out part like a notebook or a separate device altogether) and it spends only a minority of its time emulating a keyboard and no time emulating the mouse. It's morphing into a compass or an HP calculator or a Sudoku game or a 4-track recorder and mixer. When we have that on the desktop we will simply be emulating bigger, more complex devices.
I sold my original iPhone after 2 years of everyday use, and compared to the new 3GS that replaced it, the screen and glass looked identical in wear and tear, which is to say there was none. Glass is a great thing to put between humans and technology, it keeps them separate. The grease-resistant coating on 3GS is also working very well, you have to work hard to get some grease to stick to it.
When people compare Mac OS to Windows Vista or 7 this is basically academic because Microsoft is responsible for an ongoing tire fire with Windows XP that accounts for 80% of their users. It doesn't matter how many new security gee-gaws Microsoft shipped in 2007 if most of their users are using pre-2006 Microsoft software.
The main reason Mac OS does not have a commercial malware market like Windows does is that each version of Mac OS only lasts for 2-3 months before it is replaced by a new one, and Apple can patch 75% of the Mac user base automatically within a week or two. So whatever malware you make, before you can sell it, the version of Mac OS it worked on is gone and so is the vulnerability you were depending upon. On Windows, you have years to find and exploit a problem and years to sell it and then years for your malware-deploying users to reap the reward. It's completely different.
Instead of talking about how Apple could make Mac OS _academically_ better in order to avoid a _theoretical_ malware problem that does not exist, we should talk about what Microsoft is doing about their XP users. You cannot even put a Windows 7 disc into an XP machine and get back a Windows 7 system with the XP part lifted up into the XP Mode virtualizer. A simple upgrade path like that could have been enough to kill the botnet. But the tire fire continues and Microsoft acts like the very first version of Windows ever was Vista.
In short, Microsoft Address Space Randomization is no substitute for Apple Software Update. The latter has been replacing the Mac OS kernel every 3 months for a decade now. Please tell me why Windows doesn't have that feature.
No Windows means no PC monopoly issues, no legacy technology, no malware, and the device you make an ship will not be yet another yawn-inducing generic PC.
Read the article you moron. The head of Zune development at Microsoft said so.
> There might well be plenty, if MS don't restrict it so that you can only > run apps from one store.
You cannot run any apps from any store.
> No one says that the Windows platform (or Linux, OS X, Amiga or whatever) > would be better if you could only download apps from one app store.
That is not true, plenty of people are saying just that. There are more malware titles for Windows than legitimate titles. If Windows 7 had a version that could only run signed apps that had already been certified by Microsoft to not be malware, there are users who would pay more for that version of Windows, especially businesses who have short lists of approved apps. It would run Photoshop and Office and AutoDesk and so on but not malware.
Honestly, I think you need working examples of somebody doing this better before you knock the App Store. It's a huge success. Lots of developers, lots of sophisticated apps, lots of satisfied users. I have a friend who in 10 years of Mac use never installed a 3rd party app at all, yet on his iPhone he has 10-20 apps he installed himself. I have another friend who has used a lot of Mac and PC software over the past 10 years, but never, ever paid for it. He also has 10-20 apps on his iPhone and he paid for them all, yet it only cost $75. So there are a lot of things working about the App Store that are going to be replicated on the desktop, not the other way around.
Ubuntu should have a mode "only run signed apps" and the Ubuntu people themselves should test and approve a list of 3rd party apps. Then a user could choose this safer, more secure native app mode if it's appropriate to what they're doing. Considering only about 10% of all computer users ever create any of their own software, this is going to be the default mode for computing going forward. Especially when we have a wide-open HTML5 app environment for running arbitrary stuff.
> And clearly, not having that doesn't mean you then have nowhere to obtain apps from!
Again, you have to read the article to make a contribution to this conversation. The whole point of this article is YOU CAN ONLY GET ZUNE HD APPS FROM MICROSOFT. NO 3RD PARTIES. Even if the apps come later, they are still all built-in apps. They are exactly like iPhone apps were the first year. Whatever you said or agreed with in 2007 about iPhone apps is what you should be saying right now about Zune HD if not a hypocrite. The Zune HD is like an iPod touch from 2007 with no 3rd party native apps, yet the Zune HD also does not have HTML5 like iPod touch, so it's even less 3rd party developer friendly.
Microsoft is the biggest control freak in the world. They cannot even tolerate competing in a market, they have to have it all to themselves.
The iPod touch has 2 full 3rd party developer environments: App Store and HTML5. The Zune HD has zero 3rd party developer environments. So who is the control freak?
Also PlayStation and Wii software requires much more strict approval process than App Store.
If this was an HTML5 target the app would not require Apple's approval to run on the iPhone, and it would also run on other platforms. This could be a target that makes an app to run on all smartphones, since they all have WebKit.
If these apps look generic they won't get approved for App Store. You have to design your way into app Store as well as engineer. With HTML5 you can do what you please.
If you consider the iPod touch to be Apple's netbook (it has all the same features and similar price points) then it's interesting that they are selling about 1 iPod touch for every Mac they sell. In a way that is netbooks making up half of their computer sales.
This is a really stupid crime. The take is way too low to get yourself on video for it. Even $46,000 is not very much to end up on video, but they are only going to get 10 cents on the dollar for display models with extremely well-known serial numbers. And it wouldn't be surprising at all if Apple could track some or all of the devices that were stolen.
It would be smarter to hijack a truck that is headed for the Apple Store and then you would at least get new-in-box product. And you wouldn't be on video like a schmuck.
Audio standardization is not only bigger than the Web, it's older, and it's MUCH more successful than any Web standardization to date, including HTML 5, which is still only 35% of desktops and 90% of mobiles.
I think until the Web development community actually creates and follows even just one of their own standards (maybe HTML 5 will be the one), browser makers and other principals should STFU about audio video standardization, which has been highly successful for 30 years.
During the 21st century thus far, you can't make one fucking Web page for all browsers. But the same ISO MPEG-4 audio video plays in both Adobe Flash and QuickTime Player; both iTunes and YouTube; both iPod and Blu-Ray; both iPhone and Blackberry. Camcorders from Sony and Kodak make the same MPEG-4 video format. Editors from Adobe and Apple edit and export the same MPEG-4 video format. Both NVIDIA and AMD GPU's have ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC decoders in them. There are MPEG-4 players from literally hundreds of manufacturers.
But consider that Linux and Windows can't play all of that audio video, and so we invoke Flash in a Web page, bring in a proprietary app with questionable security context and crashy history and also it changed owners twice already, just so we can make everyday standard audio video work in Linux and Windows!
And during the 21st century thus far, HTML has been static. The object tag bullshit from 2008 is the same object tag bullshit I used in 1998. The W3C and browser makers have contributed almost nothing to audio and video in the entire history of the Web. If not for the fact Tim Berners-Lee created the Web on a NeXT system that had 8-bit audio, maybe the Web would not have had audio at all from the beginning. The Web is turning 20 and still no consumer level audio, never mind pro audio. I produce music... how can I express a 5 minute 24-track 24-bit 192kHz song made up of hundreds of synchronized audio clips in HTML so I can store it for posterity? You guys are not even getting started with what needs to be done with audio and video on the Web. And while HTML did nothing over the past 10 years, we got RSS and then podcasts, which are filled with ISO MPEG-4 audio video. Even MSNBC.com is MPEG-4 since podcasts, no more Windows Media. Set-top boxes with MPEG-4 decoders in them are downloading podcasts. These podcasts are viewable already in browsers. The browser today is interacting with a metric shitload of MPEG-4, but it's leaving it all to Flash and then ironically, the browser vendors complain that Flash crashes their browser! Incredible.
Think about the fact that Microsoft could not break MPEG-4 standardization in spite of using Windows and Internet Explorer to push Windows Media. That was years ago when MPEG-2 was changing over to MPEG-4. How is Firefox going to do it now, when all the media is MPEG-4 already?
Understand that music and movie makers are creating content for MPEG-4 in the way they used to make CD and DVD. Authoring tools have had MPEG-4 export for many years, it's extremely old news. And music and movies are not tolerant of format wars. The margins are too low. Most music albums and movies don't make money. A format war kills all the smaller artists who can't double up their production costs to make 2 products. Broken audio video standardization breaks artists. The media that is on iPod and YouTube and Blu-Ray is what is going to be on the Web servers. If Mozilla can't play it then Flash will be invoked perpetually. That is all Flash is used for now it seems, is to wrap MPEG-4 up to make it Linux and Windows safe.
Further, this is all political because there is no technical substitute for MPEG-4 that pleases Mozilla. Ogg is offered, but Google has already said that an Ogg YouTube would require more bandwidth than currently exists in the world today. Are you telling me that YouTube is not part of the World Wide Web? Ogg on iPod would get you one quarter battery life because there are no Ogg decoder chips. Should the audio from the Web not play on iPods
This is the first time the iPhone has been #1 in Japan. That is the news story. Usually a Japanese phone is #1. So this is man bites dog. That makes it news.
Also, Apple is selling more than a million iPhones every week, in almost 100 countries. The iPhone is news.
> Of course I'll probably be modded down now for providing possible explanations > that don't fit in with the pro-Apple viewpoint here.
Slashdot has a pro-Apple viewpoint? You are out of your mind as well as exhibiting the emotional maturity of a small child. Slashdot is rabidly anti-Apple. What seems to you to be too much and too-positive Apple coverage is actually minimal Apple coverage and most of the time the articles are based on trolling.
Here in this article we see the poster commenting that this story contradicts an earlier story. Well, the earlier story was a complete troll, there was no truth to it. That is the typical Slashdot Apple coverage.
The iPhone earned its success honestly. At $99 it is the cheapest smartphone and almost 90% of users give it their highest satisfaction rating. People go out of their way to buy it, and they're glad they did. Get over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Mini-DisplayPort is the same height as USB, and like USB is hot-pluggable, and backwards-compatible with both DVI and VGA connectors. It's a great plug.
I think you are insane if you spend even one minute building on Microsoft's sand. Even if you could trust them, not even they know WTF they are doing.
> You aren't much of a geek if you don't plan on upgrading beyond DVD technology
> once the next technology gets to the same price point and is an order of
> magnitude better. I know I will be!
Yeah, I already did! I bought a MacBook Air and iPhone 3GS and now I buy and rent movies over Wi-Fi. Where the fuck do I put the stone DVD?
Vinyl is actually older than that, but it's analog, so it's a lot easier to figure out than anything that's digital. They made their own vinyl record player on Gilligan's Island, but it's unlikely they would have been able to make their own DVD player.
> When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces
Already happened. How many people have you heard say they want to make a DVD since YouTube?
> people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time.
That is why I have 2 Drobos and zero optical disc readers. Since a year ago.
So what is needed is a stone DVD player also. And a stone TV. And stone component video cables and remote control.
You have to completely disable all of your iPhone's security features using 3rd party software to get this to run. This reminds me of the "iPod malware" that only worked on iPods that were running Linux.
iTunes is not yet ready to sell your iTunes LP or your fucking eBook. That is all. They don't have the infrastructure yet.
If for some reason iTunes wanted to make any part of their content proprietary, why did they delay opening the store for a year to use ISO MPEG-4 instead of Apple QuickTime? Why is iTunes LP made out of HTML5 instead of Cocoa if they want to make it proprietary?
I know there is a strong urge among some people to bash Apple at every opportunity, but truly: use your fucking heads.
> It's an interesting move, but honestly I don't think many people will go back to buying whole albums again.
No need to be so suspicious. The iTunes LP format doesn't have to change music buying habits, it is needed just to digitize the back catalog. There are many albums which it is very desirable to have the whole album. Many of these albums are already in the iTunes Store. For example, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's was the first album with lyrics printed inside, before that lyrics were looked at as very throwaway. So when the Beatles release an iTunes version of that album, don't you think it would be nice if all the computer nerds who are now involved in music could come up with a way (40 years later) to maintain the full content of the album when it is digitized?
> So on a scale of usefulness from "necessary for human survival"
Art is necessary for human survival.
> WinAMP
So the digital age is for Windows and Slashdot, but not for the artwork from Electric Ladyland or The Wall or Bitches Brew? We can throw all that stuff out as long as we rip a copy of the audio for fucking WinAMP.
Lame.
> If Apple and USB Interoperability Forum have worked to make the system deliberately incompatible, Palm has the legal right to circumvent that
You are factually wrong here. Palm are the only ones that broke the USB spec by sending Apple's vendor ID instead of their own. USB does not connect Pre to iTunes, it connects Pre to OTHER USB DEVICES such as Macs or PC's. Palm has a right to attach to a Mac or a PC, not to iTunes. iTunes itself is not now and has never been a USB device.
Pre can be plugged into Mac or PC and mount as USB mass storage, charge over USB power, and even attach as a USB audio interface or USB mouse if it wants to do that. Nobody is stopping that. However, there is no USB standard for media sync. There's no USB codes to say "I'm a media player with a syncable library." The iPod syncs with iTunes using proprietary commands because they are both part of the same system, not a breeding ground for 3rd parties like Microsoft makes.
Now, maybe there should be a USB standard for media sync. If you think so, you may want to promote that idea. Palm may even want to promote that idea. Apple may even allow USBIF to just standardize what the iPod is already doing, same as MPEG-4 is a standardization of the Apple QuickTime file format, same as the HTML5 canvas tag is a standardization of the Mac OS Dashboard. However, what you're demanding is that Apple create and maintain a 3rd party synchronization scheme without any standardization at all. That's like saying Microsoft should write all the Web standards because IE has 50%+ market share. That is not standardization.
I also have to point out that compatibility is not free. It's incompatibility that is free, and compatibility takes work. The iPod and Mac are both USB-compatible because Apple did the work to make them so, same as Pre required work from Palm to make it USB compatible. They implement the spec and so they can talk to each other using "USB language" and get things done for the user. There are no words for "media sync" in the USB language as yet. They have to be created. It takes fucking work. That work has not been done yet by anyone, least of all Palm. Demanding that we nationalize iTunes is a poor substitute for actual industry co-operation on a media sync standard.
Finally, I have to say that the fact that your little fact-free, law-free, anti-Apple bigotry got a score of 5 on Slashdot says bad things about the technical knowledge of today's Slashdot readers. Truly guys, if you want your Pre to have a particular feature, ASK PALM TO BUILD IT FOR YOU. Do not complain that Apple didn't build it for you. They are not your vendor. They are just a totally uninvolved vendor whose USB ID is being misused. The only action Apple has taken was to improve iTunes' ability to recognize iPods now that another device is pretending to be an iPod.
While Apple was politely knocking on this guy's door to offer him yet another free software download (by mistake it turns out) to go with the Apple software he is already using, malware and viruses were installing themselves through the windows and cracks in the walls and hiding all over his system. Windows is fucking wide open and this guy is complaining that Apple offered him something. This fucker should save his misplaced animosity for Microsoft and the shitty PC industry that can't even ship him a fucking Unix in 2010. He has to get his media layer, media manager, zero configuration networking, and HTML5 browser from fucking Apple even though he is using Windows. There is something already wrong there, and not at Apple. To be pissy about the updater politely offering you something you can refuse in 2 ways (refuse just for now, or refuse permanently) is just fucking completely unacceptable.
Truly, STOP USING APPLE SOFTWARE. You are a fucking bigot and you deserve what you get from Microsoft. Take it from them, bend over, and plead for some more.
I truly hope a black-hat finds this guy's wide-open fucking Windows PC and installs a fucking nuclear bomb on there and let's see his article about that. Probably goes something like this: "well, Microsoft tried their best, if only computers weren't so naturally virus-prone, I better upgrade to Windows 7!" and just insert about 20 more ass-licking Microsoft excusifying that Windows users have become so good at you fucking wretched masochists.
The anti-Apple bigotry is widespread right now because Apple is once again 10 plus years ahead of the rest of the industry. The correct response to this is not hatred towards Apple, it's righteous indignation directed towards YOUR OWN FUCKING SHITTY PC VENDOR WHO IS 10 FUCKING YEARS BEHIND. HP/Dell/Lenovo are still selling you warmed over Windows fucking 95! Unix is fucking FREE! You already own the fucking thing but you are PAYING FOR FUCKING WINDOWS ANYWAY.
With all the shit that self-installs and can't even be removed from Windows, it is just incredible to hear Windows users whine about this fucking iPhone provisioning app that was offered by fucking mistake. Microsoft fucking wishes that their mistakes were as small as offering people a download they don't want. That would be an awesome day at Microsoft.
Truly, get off the Apple gear. Uninstall all of it, sell your iPod, get the fuck away from it all. Never darken an Apple Store again. Nobody has a gun to your head you fucking loser. INCREDIBLE.
You hear people saying "Apple" and "anti-trust" in the same breath today, that is fucking ridiculous, they have 10% of the market. What that really amounts to is a plea to nationalize Apple, to stop them from competing, to break up the Yankees, to appropriate their technology for the user of the generic PC industry. That is how fucking hopeless the PC makers are. People can't imagine any of them actually advancing their technology to the same generation as Apple so they just say "well, Pre should be able to use iTunes if it wants, and PC makers should be able to use OS X if they want, and if not, then Apple is a criminal monopolist. FUCKING LAME. TOTALLY FUCKING LAME.
Yes, Chrome Frame improves the whole experience in IE. Everything is faster. It feels like running Chrome or Safari, not IE. You get the same hair-blown-back feeling that you get if you run IE for an hour and then switch to Safari or Chrome. But the feeling may be even more pronounced in Chrome Frame because you can view 100 pages in the IE renderer and then go to a page that asks for Chrome and immediately your hair is blown back. The page pops into view like nothing you've seen in IE.
The JavaScript benchmarks steal the headlines because they are always 8x or more faster than IE, but the slowest improvement is still over 2x. IE is really, really, really slow.
For 6 years now, WebKit has been constantly iterated on with speed in mind. If they added a feature and it slowed the browser down they took the feature out and added it again in some other way. From the beginning Apple knew they wanted to run WebKit on iPod so they were just crazy about making it fast. On the other hand, IE was not under development for 5 full years and speed has never been a requirement. Microsoft has always taken the position that you get more speed out of their products by getting a faster CPU. That's why IE8 doesn't run on their mobiles.
So it should not surprise you that IE runs faster with Chrome Frame than otherwise. It would be surprising if anything could render HTML as slowly as IE.
IE8 is terrible. It is 2x slower than every other browser and it has no HTML5 features. It's only good when compared to IE6 from 2001. Also, IE8 is over 25 megabytes and runs only on Wintel. For comparison, WebKit is 5 megabytes and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and on x32, x64, PowerPC, and ARM.
There is just no excuse for the low quality of Internet Explorer. Microsoft has been at this longer than any other browser maker. Safari is from early 2003, Firefox from late 2004, Chrome from 2008, but IE is from 1995. That is a dramatic head start and yet IE8 is way, way behind the other browsers.
The stupid thing here is there are many Add-ons for IE that do ridiculously unproductive things, and that's all fine with Microsoft. But then Google releases one that is actually useful, that doubles the speed of Web browsing in IE, and Microsoft is against that.
> This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.
Weak! I wouldn't recommend you let your dog run IE.
Lame response from Microsoft as usual.
The touch screen does not replace your existing display, it replaces your keyboard and mouse. The touch screen is going to go where your hands already are right now. Your hands are not going to go to it.
Examples of this can be seen in audio video production already. Many digital audio mixers are a computer with a hardware "mixing surface" attached via MIDI and you basically don't use the typical PC keyboard if things are done right. You map the real controls on the mixing surface to the virtual controls in your audio production system, and then you can slide the fader up or down on channel 1 on the mixing surface and the virtual fader on channel 1 on screen follows. Or slide 2 or 3 faders at once and they all follow. So the user can treat the computer as if it were a "real" audio mixer. There are transport controls and a jog wheel typically.
If you add a touchscreen to that kind of audio production setup, you don't remove the mixing surface and ask the user to touch the computer screen from then on, you put the touch screen in place of the mixing surface and it morphs into a mixing surface when you're doing audio, it morphs into a video editing surface for video, it becomes any kind of _real_ device you would use for the kind of work you're doing, only instead you have a _virtual_ version that can appear or go away depending on the context.
The display in front of you may also have touch, but you'll touch it rarely like a whiteboard, or the way you shuffle papers on a desk. The vast majority of your touching will be in the same context as now, only instead of a 1970's keyboard and 1980's mouse you'll have a 2010's touchscreen that can become a keyboard and mouse but most of the time it will become more interesting things.
Another example is graphics tablets. The ones with displays built-in are still used flat or on an easel just like the ones without displays that preceded them and the paper and art tools they're all replacing. Wacom didn't start building in displays and then put the graphics tablet vertical.
If you look at the iPhone, it has screen where the keyboard "should" be and no screen where the screen "should" be (a flip out part like a notebook or a separate device altogether) and it spends only a minority of its time emulating a keyboard and no time emulating the mouse. It's morphing into a compass or an HP calculator or a Sudoku game or a 4-track recorder and mixer. When we have that on the desktop we will simply be emulating bigger, more complex devices.
I sold my original iPhone after 2 years of everyday use, and compared to the new 3GS that replaced it, the screen and glass looked identical in wear and tear, which is to say there was none. Glass is a great thing to put between humans and technology, it keeps them separate. The grease-resistant coating on 3GS is also working very well, you have to work hard to get some grease to stick to it.
When people compare Mac OS to Windows Vista or 7 this is basically academic because Microsoft is responsible for an ongoing tire fire with Windows XP that accounts for 80% of their users. It doesn't matter how many new security gee-gaws Microsoft shipped in 2007 if most of their users are using pre-2006 Microsoft software.
The main reason Mac OS does not have a commercial malware market like Windows does is that each version of Mac OS only lasts for 2-3 months before it is replaced by a new one, and Apple can patch 75% of the Mac user base automatically within a week or two. So whatever malware you make, before you can sell it, the version of Mac OS it worked on is gone and so is the vulnerability you were depending upon. On Windows, you have years to find and exploit a problem and years to sell it and then years for your malware-deploying users to reap the reward. It's completely different.
Instead of talking about how Apple could make Mac OS _academically_ better in order to avoid a _theoretical_ malware problem that does not exist, we should talk about what Microsoft is doing about their XP users. You cannot even put a Windows 7 disc into an XP machine and get back a Windows 7 system with the XP part lifted up into the XP Mode virtualizer. A simple upgrade path like that could have been enough to kill the botnet. But the tire fire continues and Microsoft acts like the very first version of Windows ever was Vista.
In short, Microsoft Address Space Randomization is no substitute for Apple Software Update. The latter has been replacing the Mac OS kernel every 3 months for a decade now. Please tell me why Windows doesn't have that feature.
No Windows means no PC monopoly issues, no legacy technology, no malware, and the device you make an ship will not be yet another yawn-inducing generic PC.
> Who says there'll be no app store?
Read the article you moron. The head of Zune development at Microsoft said so.
> There might well be plenty, if MS don't restrict it so that you can only
> run apps from one store.
You cannot run any apps from any store.
> No one says that the Windows platform (or Linux, OS X, Amiga or whatever)
> would be better if you could only download apps from one app store.
That is not true, plenty of people are saying just that. There are more malware titles for Windows than legitimate titles. If Windows 7 had a version that could only run signed apps that had already been certified by Microsoft to not be malware, there are users who would pay more for that version of Windows, especially businesses who have short lists of approved apps. It would run Photoshop and Office and AutoDesk and so on but not malware.
Honestly, I think you need working examples of somebody doing this better before you knock the App Store. It's a huge success. Lots of developers, lots of sophisticated apps, lots of satisfied users. I have a friend who in 10 years of Mac use never installed a 3rd party app at all, yet on his iPhone he has 10-20 apps he installed himself. I have another friend who has used a lot of Mac and PC software over the past 10 years, but never, ever paid for it. He also has 10-20 apps on his iPhone and he paid for them all, yet it only cost $75. So there are a lot of things working about the App Store that are going to be replicated on the desktop, not the other way around.
Ubuntu should have a mode "only run signed apps" and the Ubuntu people themselves should test and approve a list of 3rd party apps. Then a user could choose this safer, more secure native app mode if it's appropriate to what they're doing. Considering only about 10% of all computer users ever create any of their own software, this is going to be the default mode for computing going forward. Especially when we have a wide-open HTML5 app environment for running arbitrary stuff.
> And clearly, not having that doesn't mean you then have nowhere to obtain apps from!
Again, you have to read the article to make a contribution to this conversation. The whole point of this article is YOU CAN ONLY GET ZUNE HD APPS FROM MICROSOFT. NO 3RD PARTIES. Even if the apps come later, they are still all built-in apps. They are exactly like iPhone apps were the first year. Whatever you said or agreed with in 2007 about iPhone apps is what you should be saying right now about Zune HD if not a hypocrite. The Zune HD is like an iPod touch from 2007 with no 3rd party native apps, yet the Zune HD also does not have HTML5 like iPod touch, so it's even less 3rd party developer friendly.
Microsoft is the biggest control freak in the world. They cannot even tolerate competing in a market, they have to have it all to themselves.
The iPod touch has 2 full 3rd party developer environments: App Store and HTML5. The Zune HD has zero 3rd party developer environments. So who is the control freak?
Also PlayStation and Wii software requires much more strict approval process than App Store.
So you're full of shit basically.
If this was an HTML5 target the app would not require Apple's approval to run on the iPhone, and it would also run on other platforms. This could be a target that makes an app to run on all smartphones, since they all have WebKit.
If these apps look generic they won't get approved for App Store. You have to design your way into app Store as well as engineer. With HTML5 you can do what you please.
If you consider the iPod touch to be Apple's netbook (it has all the same features and similar price points) then it's interesting that they are selling about 1 iPod touch for every Mac they sell. In a way that is netbooks making up half of their computer sales.
This is a really stupid crime. The take is way too low to get yourself on video for it. Even $46,000 is not very much to end up on video, but they are only going to get 10 cents on the dollar for display models with extremely well-known serial numbers. And it wouldn't be surprising at all if Apple could track some or all of the devices that were stolen.
It would be smarter to hijack a truck that is headed for the Apple Store and then you would at least get new-in-box product. And you wouldn't be on video like a schmuck.
Audio standardization is not only bigger than the Web, it's older, and it's MUCH more successful than any Web standardization to date, including HTML 5, which is still only 35% of desktops and 90% of mobiles.
I think until the Web development community actually creates and follows even just one of their own standards (maybe HTML 5 will be the one), browser makers and other principals should STFU about audio video standardization, which has been highly successful for 30 years.
During the 21st century thus far, you can't make one fucking Web page for all browsers. But the same ISO MPEG-4 audio video plays in both Adobe Flash and QuickTime Player; both iTunes and YouTube; both iPod and Blu-Ray; both iPhone and Blackberry. Camcorders from Sony and Kodak make the same MPEG-4 video format. Editors from Adobe and Apple edit and export the same MPEG-4 video format. Both NVIDIA and AMD GPU's have ISO MPEG-4 H.264/AAC decoders in them. There are MPEG-4 players from literally hundreds of manufacturers.
But consider that Linux and Windows can't play all of that audio video, and so we invoke Flash in a Web page, bring in a proprietary app with questionable security context and crashy history and also it changed owners twice already, just so we can make everyday standard audio video work in Linux and Windows!
And during the 21st century thus far, HTML has been static. The object tag bullshit from 2008 is the same object tag bullshit I used in 1998. The W3C and browser makers have contributed almost nothing to audio and video in the entire history of the Web. If not for the fact Tim Berners-Lee created the Web on a NeXT system that had 8-bit audio, maybe the Web would not have had audio at all from the beginning. The Web is turning 20 and still no consumer level audio, never mind pro audio. I produce music ... how can I express a 5 minute 24-track 24-bit 192kHz song made up of hundreds of synchronized audio clips in HTML so I can store it for posterity? You guys are not even getting started with what needs to be done with audio and video on the Web. And while HTML did nothing over the past 10 years, we got RSS and then podcasts, which are filled with ISO MPEG-4 audio video. Even MSNBC.com is MPEG-4 since podcasts, no more Windows Media. Set-top boxes with MPEG-4 decoders in them are downloading podcasts. These podcasts are viewable already in browsers. The browser today is interacting with a metric shitload of MPEG-4, but it's leaving it all to Flash and then ironically, the browser vendors complain that Flash crashes their browser! Incredible.
Think about the fact that Microsoft could not break MPEG-4 standardization in spite of using Windows and Internet Explorer to push Windows Media. That was years ago when MPEG-2 was changing over to MPEG-4. How is Firefox going to do it now, when all the media is MPEG-4 already?
Understand that music and movie makers are creating content for MPEG-4 in the way they used to make CD and DVD. Authoring tools have had MPEG-4 export for many years, it's extremely old news. And music and movies are not tolerant of format wars. The margins are too low. Most music albums and movies don't make money. A format war kills all the smaller artists who can't double up their production costs to make 2 products. Broken audio video standardization breaks artists. The media that is on iPod and YouTube and Blu-Ray is what is going to be on the Web servers. If Mozilla can't play it then Flash will be invoked perpetually. That is all Flash is used for now it seems, is to wrap MPEG-4 up to make it Linux and Windows safe.
Further, this is all political because there is no technical substitute for MPEG-4 that pleases Mozilla. Ogg is offered, but Google has already said that an Ogg YouTube would require more bandwidth than currently exists in the world today. Are you telling me that YouTube is not part of the World Wide Web? Ogg on iPod would get you one quarter battery life because there are no Ogg decoder chips. Should the audio from the Web not play on iPods
This is the first time the iPhone has been #1 in Japan. That is the news story. Usually a Japanese phone is #1. So this is man bites dog. That makes it news.
Also, Apple is selling more than a million iPhones every week, in almost 100 countries. The iPhone is news.
> Of course I'll probably be modded down now for providing possible explanations
> that don't fit in with the pro-Apple viewpoint here.
Slashdot has a pro-Apple viewpoint? You are out of your mind as well as exhibiting the emotional maturity of a small child. Slashdot is rabidly anti-Apple. What seems to you to be too much and too-positive Apple coverage is actually minimal Apple coverage and most of the time the articles are based on trolling.
Here in this article we see the poster commenting that this story contradicts an earlier story. Well, the earlier story was a complete troll, there was no truth to it. That is the typical Slashdot Apple coverage.
The iPhone earned its success honestly. At $99 it is the cheapest smartphone and almost 90% of users give it their highest satisfaction rating. People go out of their way to buy it, and they're glad they did. Get over it.