If you take a tower computer and stick a display on one side that is the iMac. Your complaints may have applied to iMac G3 and G4 which were more Mac mini -like, but since the G5 the iMac is the most sensible design possible. It's easier to get at the guts than on the Power Mac G3/G4 which had the drop down door with the mobo on it.
> easily swapped RAM and maybe other parts.
All you do to service an iMac is lay it on its face on a soft surface, then loosen three screws underneath the housing, and the whole back and foot comes off, and inside there is your tower computer laid out as if on a silver platter. Everything is only one layer deep, nothing is on top of anything else, so if you are putting in RAM, there are the RAM slots right in front of you, the HD is right there on top, you don't have to do any of the origami that most computers ask of you. You can't even lose the three screws, they are captive, they stay in the backplane. The backplane also just snaps back on in the right place, almost like a vacuum seal, you don't have to work with it, then tighten the three screws and you're done.
Also the integrated display means no expensive digital graphics cable, no need to configure the preferences, easier setup, smaller size, camera built-in, not to mention only one housing, one power supply, there are many advantages that bring the cost down overall.
> I'm also not rich enough
If Apple does a "low-end" tower it will still likely be quite a bit more expensive than an iMac. Things like not needing a graphics cable save money on the whole device.
> throw a monitor in the trash
The iMac doesn't go in the trash, you obviously haven't had an iMac. They have great resale value.
In fact, a friend of mine who does I-T has some clients who buy a new iMac for $1200, skip the AppleCare 3-year warranty, use the iMac for 12 months, sell it for $800, and buy a new iMac for $1200 with a new one-year warranty. They are paying $400 per year to always have this year's iMac and always be under warranty. It is very economical, actually.
> indicates that high-end graphics cards are a no-no.
No, it doesn't. The iMac typically uses lower-power CPU's because it's an all-in-one, but it also typically has high-end ATI or Nvidia graphics. There is a stripped-down education iMac with Intel graphics that you can only get at the Apple Store for Education.
> So in other words, this is a tablet PC without the movable touch screen.
It may have a touch screen, the touch screen in the iPhone is done through a framework called CoreSurface that could easily run on the Mac. The prototype for the iPhone was actually a Mac tablet, but apparently they felt the touch screen was even better for a situation where you have no keyboard, no mouse, no alternative. So they were running touch-screen Macs inside Apple for quite some time now.
I hope this is a real Mac and not just some guy at Apple saw one of those giant iPhones they put in the Apple Store windows. They're like an HDTV size screen with a scale model iPhone around it. When I first saw them I thought that is the source of the iPhone iMac rumor.
You are really, really, really, really, really wrong.
> There's a clear cut grey area with sheet music.
No there isn't. You are dead center in the black.
> You as a person can make a performing work, and copyright it (without registry!).
When you "fix" an original work into a sharable medium, it is copyright by default. You own the copyright on all of the original works you make in your life. There is no registry, and you don't even have to put "copyright me 2007" on there, that is optional. If you find a piece of sheet music on the street with no name or copyright info on it, you are to assume still that somebody did in fact write that song, it did not appear out of thin air. If you decide to make it the title cut of your new album you had better do some research and find the songwriter and copyright status first.
> If you were > to listen to a song, learn it by ear (knowledge is not copyrightable),
The reason knowledge is not "copyrightable" is that it is only in your head. There are no copies until you attempt to share that knowledge.
> and then pen that song (as completely your own work) you would be the > rights holder.
Here you have come entirely off the rails.
What you have described is not authoring, it's transcription. In both cases you "write" but when you transcribe you do not create an original work, you merely write an existing work down on a new piece of paper. You have demonstrated the originality of a court reporter, who writes all day but authors nothing. The words in the transcript are someone else's.
> Should it happen to sound fairly similar to another piece of work, that's their problem.
Yes, but it becomes your problem when you are accused of plagiarism and dragged into court right after you sell your first copy of your transcribed song that you declare you are the rights holder to. The whole point of copyright is to stop you from doing that.
> In all likelihood there will be differences > in the metre, key or vibrato.
None of those aspects of a song can be copyrighted. Only two parts can be: the melody, and the lyrics. Singing Happy Birthday at a faster tempo is not a new song. Singing it with vibrato is not a new song. In another key it is not a new song.
In order to write a new original work, you must do three things: 1) CREATE the work, 2) FIX the work into a sharable medium, 3) be prepared to defend the originality of the work if someone accuses you of plagiarism.
> He's not a Tolkien, but produces a book, on average, once a year.
Once you mention Tolkien in your anti-copyright rant you've blown it. The Lord Of The Rings is a significant case in copyright law.
Tolkien's work sold really well in America for many years and the American publishers kept 100% of the money because Tolkien was not American and so not covered by U.S. copyright law. You could buy a low-quality, typo-rich, art-free Lord Of The Rings from a variety of U.S. publishers, secure in the knowledge that not one cent of what you paid went to the original author.
> The song they they own the publishing rights to isn't just that individual recording you did of it. It's that specific combination > of chords and lyrics, that melody, that drumbeat.
No, it's just the melody and the lyrics that make the song. You write them together on one piece of paper, put a title at the top and sign your name to it and you are done. That is called a "lead sheet" and it's all that is "written" when you write a song. The melody part counts for half the money and the lyrics count for the other half. When you see a song has two writers, often one did the melody and one did the lyrics.
What chords to use, what rhythms, the tempo, how syncopated you play, what instruments you use... these are all part of the arrangement. You can give one lead sheet to 20 arrangers and get back 20 different sets of chords for the same song. An arrangement cannot be copyrighted. The guitar and voice acoustic version of a song or a 50-piece orchestra, it is the same underlying song, one melody and lyrics on one lead sheet.
IBM didn't open the IBM PC, Compaq did. That is well known. It's Compaq's one and only claim to fame, and the reason their name is a play on "compatible."
The IBM PC came out in 1982 and competed with the Apple II throughout the 80's. That was Apple's business machine. The Apple II had more slots than IBM PC and years of hardware hacking documentation behind it, as well as color display, and Woz' encouragement. If the battle was openness then Apple II would win. Instead what happened was the 98% of businesses that had IBM Selectric typewriters bought IBM PC's.
As for the Mac, it sold really well to an entirely different market because it was the only computer with graphics, typography, laser printer. In 1984 you did typesetting the same way it was done in 1884, but by 1988 you were using a Mac. The IBM PC and the Mac simply did not compete with each other.
> It's the classic tale that Apple seems to have not yet learnt, the only way to gain long term success in a market > is to allow 3rd parties to develop under your platform and support you.
You are making the mistake of thinking "3rd party development == C coders."
The iPod has millions of third-party developers. They make music and movies. For example, Disney/Pixar, Dixie Chicks, Eminem, 20th Century Fox.
The iPhone has millions of third-party developers. They make Web apps. For example, YouTube, Flickr, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter.
An hour into your iPhone ownership you probably have the work of hundreds if not thousands of third-parties on your iPhone. Throughout an iPhone's two year life span (both the hardware and service contract are $X/month for 24 months) a typical user will probably have 1000x the third-party data in their iPhone than if they were using another phone. The iPhone has so much more storage, syncs so much more easily with your music and movies, and has a real Web browser and Wi-Fi so you can chew up a lot of Web over two years.
So if your standard for greatness is third-parties then you have predicted iPhone's impending world domination.
> Last I checked, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian all have native APIs with SDKs you can download > along with thriving third-party software support.
You should check again, specifically for the "thriving" part. Phone apps look like 1992's ass.
> No cracking required!
Usually the phones are crippled in some way, so that is not true. In fact it takes master hacking skills just to work some of those phones.
> You can run real applications [on non-iPhone phones]
Can I run a real Web browser? No. Pathetic. The Web is almost 20 years old. When are they going to get around to it?
The phones you're talking about are pocket calculators with phones in them, they make some nerds happy and everyone else miserable. The iPhone is an iPod with a phone AND a Web 2.0 browser in it. People really like it.
The apps that regular people run are MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, and they want to run the whole app, not just see some snippets of text out of each page with no formatting. So for most users the iPhone is a better application platform than other phones.
I don't think he was suggesting that iPhone has outsold all other phones in total volume just in its first few days. However the amount of iPhones sold so far is more than Razr sold in is first month and it went on to become the best-selling phone of all time. So iPhone is very popular.
I guess what the original poster wants is for Steve Jobs to attach a URL with a disclaimer to everything he says, with a list of all the obscure technologies that have come and gone during his 30+ year career in the PC industry.
As for the Xerox post, c'mon people, it is well known that Apple BOUGHT RESEARCH from Xerox's RESEARCH CENTER. They paid with pre-IPO Apple stock which made Xerox a fucking fortune. Steve Jobs did not show up at Xerox' product division in a fake mustache one day taking photos with a tiny camera. He was there at the invitation of Xerox' CEO because Xerox did not know what to do with the tech that their research people had come up with, they could not take the project any further. Apple knew what to do and the engineers followed from Xerox because they wanted to make something real and ship it and have people use it.
Apple also bought the beta of Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, who had decided against competing with Adobe in that market. Should Apple credit Macromedia with the success of Final Cut Pro? Give me a break.
Making these things into products is not just semantics. Until they were real products, nobody could build on them, they are CS academic only. For example, the Xerox Alto and the Lisa did not replace 100 years of typesetting, the Mac did. Adobe was not founded to make Alto software, they were founded to make Mac software. It's all the post-sale stuff that matters, when the world takes the product and uses it in novel and interesting ways.
Also, when you look into how many of the GUI features that we use today were invented inside Apple between 1980-1984, it is astounding. Drag and drop, overlapping windows, pull down menus, it goes on and on.
> The problem with html in general is that too many websites use 20 to 100 tiny images to do their tricky visual effects.
That is Web 1.0 development which is still popular because 75% of the Web is using the definitive Web 1.0 browser: Internet Explorer.
The solution to this is to use CSS to create those effects. For example, in CSS 3 you can write:
border-radius: 4px; box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px;
And any box gains rounded corners and a drop shadow and the entire bandwidth cost was the above two lines of text. Making the same thing happen the Web 1.0 way is hundreds of kb of data, numerous images, one for each corner at least.
But the above CSS 3 only works in Safari and Firefox, not in Internet Explorer.
> If HTML had the power to render small objects it would cut out those 100 TCP connections with overhead of http headers and connects. > This could be solved if you could use ONE animated gif and say img src=image.gif#5 for the frame number.
What you're talking about wouldn't work, because each frame of an animated GIF is not the whole picture, but just what changed since the last frame. You can't just show a middle frame and see anything useful. Anyway, there is no excuse to use GIF at all today because of its index color and 1-bit masks. Photoshop is at version 10 now, when GIF was created, Photoshop did not exist yet. Get over the GIF.
The way to reduce TCP connections is to do rollover buttons as image wells. If you have a 100 px button with six states, then rather than 6 100 px images, you make one 600 px image, with the buttons arranged from left to right in 100 px squares. Then in your CSS you say:
And you get at the sixth state with JavaScript by setting backgroundPosition = "-500px 0" to for example show a "here" state, or "disabled" state.
This way instead of six 30 kb images you do one 50 kb image that comes over one TCP connection. Also using this method the hover and other states are already loaded before the user even sees the button, so you don't have to preload the other states and the button is always responsive.
You can see this kind of button here, two of them actually, one in the menu on the right and the round ones in the body content, just one image each:
> Or if you could embed images into the html, such as when IE saves webpages as whole in.MHT format.
You've always been able to do this with base64 encoding, however Internet Explorer does not support it. It is also really hard to manage and does not reduce file size.
> The fact that a whole.html file is sent via.gz compressed mode
That only works for uncompressed data such as plain text. A Web image such as PNG or JPEG is already compressed. Try zipping a 100 kb JPEG you will get a Zip file back that is 100 kb.
Here is the deal: Apple wanted Verizon to be the iPhone's U.S. carrier but Verizon turned them down. The only other choice for GSM in the U.S. is AT&T. AT&T's data network is EDGE and it's not the fastest. That is all.
There is no conspiracy to keep you surfing at a slow speed. There are probably 250 key features of iPhone and 4 of them are not perfect. One of those is EDGE. Get over it.
> Apple's stupid battery policy in iPods and the iPhone.
Apple's battery policy is brilliant.
Last time I bought a cell phone, it came with a tiny battery to make it appear slimmer, and if you wanted the "real" battery life you were supposed to buy an expensive add-on battery. That is a scam. And once you buy the bigger battery, the slim one goes into a drawer and later to landfill, that is a huge drag. There are like 2 billion phones, that is a lot of landfill.
A big problem in cell phones is that third parties make very low-quality batteries for popular phones, and they explode. A guy died yesterday in China from his cell phone exploding in his chest pocket.
Another problem with removable batteries is that you can create the condition where the device has no battery, which the phone has to be able to deal with without losing data, by having an internal battery anyway. Why not just make the internal battery large enough that it serves the needs of most users? With my iPod I never manage the battery, I just plug it in to sync and the battery is always full.
With Apple's system, if you need more battery power than the internal battery, you add a second battery to the iPod dock connector. There are many third-party batteries that connect this way. Some are styled just like the iPod dock, but instead of a cable coming off there is nothing, it just provides power to the iPod/iPhone as well as makes it a bit fatter. The nice thing here is that once the external battery dies, you take it off and the iPhone/iPod has a full charge in its internal battery, which you can use while the external battery charges.
Finally, lithium-polymer batteries can be any shape, you fill in the empty space in your device with battery. Making a removable battery means making it square inside another square spot, with a door on there, it takes up a huge amount of internal volume and limits the size of the battery. If iPod or iPhone had that kind of battery they would have to be much thicker and would also have worse battery life.
> MacBook doesn't hold a charge for more than a half hour anymore? No problem, just throw it out and buy a new one."
Nobody tells you to throw out your iPod because the battery is no good. Not only will Apple replace it for you, but so will various third-parties.
> So, Apple, where is the source code to the version of KHTML that runs on the iPhone, how do I compile it, and how do I install the modified version on the iPhone?
It's not KHTML, it's WebKit, and that is the rendering engine, not the browser, and the source is "hidden" here:
> If KHTML were under LGPLv3, then either Apple would have had to make the iPhone user programmable, > or they would have had to pay a lot of money to get some other high-quality HTML rendering library. And that's a good thing.
In the first place, WebKit is not KHTML. It has been an independent project for years now.
In the second place, WebKit replaced Internet Explorer on the Mac. If you think that is not a good thing, then something is wrong with you. If Apple had just bought IE from Microsoft the world would not be a better place, not for Apple, their users, non-Apple users, and not for Web developers certainly.
Finally, the iPhone is user programmable. Everyday people program it with their fingers. That is why it is popular.
If you are the head of the FSF and you get up publicly on the day the iPhone is released and say if there is GPL software in there, there will be hell to pay than that is an implicit accusation and definitive FUD.
It's like if you're a runner and right before the race starts you said I hope that other runner is not using performance-enhancing drugs.
Or if you were a monopolistic software company and you said everyone else is infringing on up to 235 of our patents.
Right here in this thread you have people saying Apple used GPL software those bastards! And these are the very people who should know better. All because the head of FSF shot his mouth off like a know-nothing suit.
> Why does Apple hate DRM on audio, but not on Software or Video?
Because it is not Apple who is pushing the DRM, it is the particular industry behind either music or video, they are separate, and have different expectations and requirements.
Video has always had DRM. iTunes Store video, HD DVD, Blu-Ray, DVD, even VHS has Macrovision. In the movie industry they don't even want to think about not having it yet.
Audio has never had DRM. The CD and compact cassette and vinyl LP have no DRM. The DAT did but there was no consumer audio market in DAT. Even iTunes Store music can be burned to CD to break the DRM so you can make mix discs for a friend. That has always been the case.
So DRM is entrenched deep into video, but it has only ever been at the most paper-thin on audio. EMI only had to take a 1 inch step to drop DRM. The movie companies have a lot further to go.
That is one of the stupidest fucking things I have ever heard. You're giving open source software a bad name.
Open source doesn't save Apple money, it saves their users money. I didn't have to buy a Web server for my Mac from Apple, compatible only with their Classic proprietary operating system and incompatible with the world. Instead I got Apache and PHP free with my Mac and if they weren't there I could have compiled them because the core OS in Mac OS X is deliberately Unix compatible for exactly that reason.
WebKit would have cost Apple the same money either open or closed. Because they did it open, it is 100x more compatible with the Web. Compare to Internet Explorer, which is constantly trying to crate a parallel de facto set of Web standards that cost Web developers billions of dollars per year to support.
Nokia's Web browser is based on WebKit, and that will be the main competition for the iPhone. If Nokia makes an iPhone killer somebody will write an article saying look open source was bad for Apple, they wrote Nokia's browser for them and got clobbered in the phone market. But the reality is that support for Web standards ought to be free to the browser maker, it is better for everyone if Nokia starts with WebKit and competes on usability and new UI features. It's better for Web developers, it's better for Nokia users, it's better for the whole Web because Web content ends up at the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator on today's Web was WebKit/Gecko instead of IE the Web would be so much better than it is. For example, GIF is from the 1980's and has 1-bit transparency, but that is the only transparency that IE supported until 2006, so it is all over the fucking Web. If IE had proper PNG support since 1998 the Web would be all true-color, 8-bit mask by now. Instead, that graphical richness stayed in Photoshop and all Web users got a lower-quality Web.
Slashdot Mirror
If you take a tower computer and stick a display on one side that is the iMac. Your complaints may have applied to iMac G3 and G4 which were more Mac mini -like, but since the G5 the iMac is the most sensible design possible. It's easier to get at the guts than on the Power Mac G3/G4 which had the drop down door with the mobo on it.
> easily swapped RAM and maybe other parts.
All you do to service an iMac is lay it on its face on a soft surface, then loosen three screws underneath the housing, and the whole back and foot comes off, and inside there is your tower computer laid out as if on a silver platter. Everything is only one layer deep, nothing is on top of anything else, so if you are putting in RAM, there are the RAM slots right in front of you, the HD is right there on top, you don't have to do any of the origami that most computers ask of you. You can't even lose the three screws, they are captive, they stay in the backplane. The backplane also just snaps back on in the right place, almost like a vacuum seal, you don't have to work with it, then tighten the three screws and you're done.
Also the integrated display means no expensive digital graphics cable, no need to configure the preferences, easier setup, smaller size, camera built-in, not to mention only one housing, one power supply, there are many advantages that bring the cost down overall.
> I'm also not rich enough
If Apple does a "low-end" tower it will still likely be quite a bit more expensive than an iMac. Things like not needing a graphics cable save money on the whole device.
> throw a monitor in the trash
The iMac doesn't go in the trash, you obviously haven't had an iMac. They have great resale value.
In fact, a friend of mine who does I-T has some clients who buy a new iMac for $1200, skip the AppleCare 3-year warranty, use the iMac for 12 months, sell it for $800, and buy a new iMac for $1200 with a new one-year warranty. They are paying $400 per year to always have this year's iMac and always be under warranty. It is very economical, actually.
> indicates that high-end graphics cards are a no-no.
No, it doesn't. The iMac typically uses lower-power CPU's because it's an all-in-one, but it also typically has high-end ATI or Nvidia graphics. There is a stripped-down education iMac with Intel graphics that you can only get at the Apple Store for Education.
> So in other words, this is a tablet PC without the movable touch screen.
It may have a touch screen, the touch screen in the iPhone is done through a framework called CoreSurface that could easily run on the Mac. The prototype for the iPhone was actually a Mac tablet, but apparently they felt the touch screen was even better for a situation where you have no keyboard, no mouse, no alternative. So they were running touch-screen Macs inside Apple for quite some time now.
I hope this is a real Mac and not just some guy at Apple saw one of those giant iPhones they put in the Apple Store windows. They're like an HDTV size screen with a scale model iPhone around it. When I first saw them I thought that is the source of the iPhone iMac rumor.
... oh, wait.
> Correct me if im wrong please.
You are really, really, really, really, really wrong.
> There's a clear cut grey area with sheet music.
No there isn't. You are dead center in the black.
> You as a person can make a performing work, and copyright it (without registry!).
When you "fix" an original work into a sharable medium, it is copyright by default. You own the copyright on all of the original works you make in your life. There is no registry, and you don't even have to put "copyright me 2007" on there, that is optional. If you find a piece of sheet music on the street with no name or copyright info on it, you are to assume still that somebody did in fact write that song, it did not appear out of thin air. If you decide to make it the title cut of your new album you had better do some research and find the songwriter and copyright status first.
> If you were
> to listen to a song, learn it by ear (knowledge is not copyrightable),
The reason knowledge is not "copyrightable" is that it is only in your head. There are no copies until you attempt to share that knowledge.
> and then pen that song (as completely your own work) you would be the
> rights holder.
Here you have come entirely off the rails.
What you have described is not authoring, it's transcription. In both cases you "write" but when you transcribe you do not create an original work, you merely write an existing work down on a new piece of paper. You have demonstrated the originality of a court reporter, who writes all day but authors nothing. The words in the transcript are someone else's.
> Should it happen to sound fairly similar to another piece of work, that's their problem.
Yes, but it becomes your problem when you are accused of plagiarism and dragged into court right after you sell your first copy of your transcribed song that you declare you are the rights holder to. The whole point of copyright is to stop you from doing that.
> In all likelihood there will be differences
> in the metre, key or vibrato.
None of those aspects of a song can be copyrighted. Only two parts can be: the melody, and the lyrics. Singing Happy Birthday at a faster tempo is not a new song. Singing it with vibrato is not a new song. In another key it is not a new song.
In order to write a new original work, you must do three things: 1) CREATE the work, 2) FIX the work into a sharable medium, 3) be prepared to defend the originality of the work if someone accuses you of plagiarism.
> He's not a Tolkien, but produces a book, on average, once a year.
Once you mention Tolkien in your anti-copyright rant you've blown it. The Lord Of The Rings is a significant case in copyright law.
Tolkien's work sold really well in America for many years and the American publishers kept 100% of the money because Tolkien was not American and so not covered by U.S. copyright law. You could buy a low-quality, typo-rich, art-free Lord Of The Rings from a variety of U.S. publishers, secure in the knowledge that not one cent of what you paid went to the original author.
> The song they they own the publishing rights to isn't just that individual recording you did of it. It's that specific combination
... these are all part of the arrangement. You can give one lead sheet to 20 arrangers and get back 20 different sets of chords for the same song. An arrangement cannot be copyrighted. The guitar and voice acoustic version of a song or a 50-piece orchestra, it is the same underlying song, one melody and lyrics on one lead sheet.
> of chords and lyrics, that melody, that drumbeat.
No, it's just the melody and the lyrics that make the song. You write them together on one piece of paper, put a title at the top and sign your name to it and you are done. That is called a "lead sheet" and it's all that is "written" when you write a song. The melody part counts for half the money and the lyrics count for the other half. When you see a song has two writers, often one did the melody and one did the lyrics.
What chords to use, what rhythms, the tempo, how syncopated you play, what instruments you use
IBM didn't open the IBM PC, Compaq did. That is well known. It's Compaq's one and only claim to fame, and the reason their name is a play on "compatible."
The IBM PC came out in 1982 and competed with the Apple II throughout the 80's. That was Apple's business machine. The Apple II had more slots than IBM PC and years of hardware hacking documentation behind it, as well as color display, and Woz' encouragement. If the battle was openness then Apple II would win. Instead what happened was the 98% of businesses that had IBM Selectric typewriters bought IBM PC's.
As for the Mac, it sold really well to an entirely different market because it was the only computer with graphics, typography, laser printer. In 1984 you did typesetting the same way it was done in 1884, but by 1988 you were using a Mac. The IBM PC and the Mac simply did not compete with each other.
> It's the classic tale that Apple seems to have not yet learnt, the only way to gain long term success in a market
> is to allow 3rd parties to develop under your platform and support you.
You are making the mistake of thinking "3rd party development == C coders."
The iPod has millions of third-party developers. They make music and movies. For example, Disney/Pixar, Dixie Chicks, Eminem, 20th Century Fox.
The iPhone has millions of third-party developers. They make Web apps. For example, YouTube, Flickr, eBay, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter.
An hour into your iPhone ownership you probably have the work of hundreds if not thousands of third-parties on your iPhone. Throughout an iPhone's two year life span (both the hardware and service contract are $X/month for 24 months) a typical user will probably have 1000x the third-party data in their iPhone than if they were using another phone. The iPhone has so much more storage, syncs so much more easily with your music and movies, and has a real Web browser and Wi-Fi so you can chew up a lot of Web over two years.
So if your standard for greatness is third-parties then you have predicted iPhone's impending world domination.
> Last I checked, Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian all have native APIs with SDKs you can download
> along with thriving third-party software support.
You should check again, specifically for the "thriving" part. Phone apps look like 1992's ass.
> No cracking required!
Usually the phones are crippled in some way, so that is not true. In fact it takes master hacking skills just to work some of those phones.
> You can run real applications [on non-iPhone phones]
Can I run a real Web browser? No. Pathetic. The Web is almost 20 years old. When are they going to get around to it?
The phones you're talking about are pocket calculators with phones in them, they make some nerds happy and everyone else miserable. The iPhone is an iPod with a phone AND a Web 2.0 browser in it. People really like it.
The apps that regular people run are MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, eBay, and they want to run the whole app, not just see some snippets of text out of each page with no formatting. So for most users the iPhone is a better application platform than other phones.
I don't think he was suggesting that iPhone has outsold all other phones in total volume just in its first few days. However the amount of iPhones sold so far is more than Razr sold in is first month and it went on to become the best-selling phone of all time. So iPhone is very popular.
I have no idea where the story is here. Other smart phone batteries are comparably priced but last half as long.
> (where's SP3 dammit?). Vista
You answered your own question.
I guess what the original poster wants is for Steve Jobs to attach a URL with a disclaimer to everything he says, with a list of all the obscure technologies that have come and gone during his 30+ year career in the PC industry.
As for the Xerox post, c'mon people, it is well known that Apple BOUGHT RESEARCH from Xerox's RESEARCH CENTER. They paid with pre-IPO Apple stock which made Xerox a fucking fortune. Steve Jobs did not show up at Xerox' product division in a fake mustache one day taking photos with a tiny camera. He was there at the invitation of Xerox' CEO because Xerox did not know what to do with the tech that their research people had come up with, they could not take the project any further. Apple knew what to do and the engineers followed from Xerox because they wanted to make something real and ship it and have people use it.
Apple also bought the beta of Final Cut Pro from Macromedia, who had decided against competing with Adobe in that market. Should Apple credit Macromedia with the success of Final Cut Pro? Give me a break.
Making these things into products is not just semantics. Until they were real products, nobody could build on them, they are CS academic only. For example, the Xerox Alto and the Lisa did not replace 100 years of typesetting, the Mac did. Adobe was not founded to make Alto software, they were founded to make Mac software. It's all the post-sale stuff that matters, when the world takes the product and uses it in novel and interesting ways.
Also, when you look into how many of the GUI features that we use today were invented inside Apple between 1980-1984, it is astounding. Drag and drop, overlapping windows, pull down menus, it goes on and on.
> The problem with html in general is that too many websites use 20 to 100 tiny images to do their tricky visual effects.
.MHT format.
.html file is sent via .gz compressed mode
That is Web 1.0 development which is still popular because 75% of the Web is using the definitive Web 1.0 browser: Internet Explorer.
The solution to this is to use CSS to create those effects. For example, in CSS 3 you can write:
border-radius: 4px;
box-shadow: 2px 2px 4px;
And any box gains rounded corners and a drop shadow and the entire bandwidth cost was the above two lines of text. Making the same thing happen the Web 1.0 way is hundreds of kb of data, numerous images, one for each corner at least.
But the above CSS 3 only works in Safari and Firefox, not in Internet Explorer.
> If HTML had the power to render small objects it would cut out those 100 TCP connections with overhead of http headers and connects.
> This could be solved if you could use ONE animated gif and say img src=image.gif#5 for the frame number.
What you're talking about wouldn't work, because each frame of an animated GIF is not the whole picture, but just what changed since the last frame. You can't just show a middle frame and see anything useful. Anyway, there is no excuse to use GIF at all today because of its index color and 1-bit masks. Photoshop is at version 10 now, when GIF was created, Photoshop did not exist yet. Get over the GIF.
The way to reduce TCP connections is to do rollover buttons as image wells. If you have a 100 px button with six states, then rather than 6 100 px images, you make one 600 px image, with the buttons arranged from left to right in 100 px squares. Then in your CSS you say:
a {
display: block;
background: url(button.png) 0 0 no-repeat;
}
a:visited {
background-position: -100px 0;
}
a:focus {
background-position: -200px 0;
}
a:hover {
background-position: -300px 0;
}
a:active {
background-position: -400px 0;
}
And you get at the sixth state with JavaScript by setting backgroundPosition = "-500px 0" to for example show a "here" state, or "disabled" state.
This way instead of six 30 kb images you do one 50 kb image that comes over one TCP connection. Also using this method the hover and other states are already loaded before the user even sees the button, so you don't have to preload the other states and the button is always responsive.
You can see this kind of button here, two of them actually, one in the menu on the right and the round ones in the body content, just one image each:
http://lsdna.com/fingrs.html?item=quicktime_suite
> Or if you could embed images into the html, such as when IE saves webpages as whole in
You've always been able to do this with base64 encoding, however Internet Explorer does not support it. It is also really hard to manage and does not reduce file size.
> The fact that a whole
That only works for uncompressed data such as plain text. A Web image such as PNG or JPEG is already compressed. Try zipping a 100 kb JPEG you will get a Zip file back that is 100 kb.
The iPhone already has 3 antennae in it and you want a 4th?
Here is the deal: Apple wanted Verizon to be the iPhone's U.S. carrier but Verizon turned them down. The only other choice for GSM in the U.S. is AT&T. AT&T's data network is EDGE and it's not the fastest. That is all.
There is no conspiracy to keep you surfing at a slow speed. There are probably 250 key features of iPhone and 4 of them are not perfect. One of those is EDGE. Get over it.
> Apple's stupid battery policy in iPods and the iPhone.
Apple's battery policy is brilliant.
Last time I bought a cell phone, it came with a tiny battery to make it appear slimmer, and if you wanted the "real" battery life you were supposed to buy an expensive add-on battery. That is a scam. And once you buy the bigger battery, the slim one goes into a drawer and later to landfill, that is a huge drag. There are like 2 billion phones, that is a lot of landfill.
A big problem in cell phones is that third parties make very low-quality batteries for popular phones, and they explode. A guy died yesterday in China from his cell phone exploding in his chest pocket.
Another problem with removable batteries is that you can create the condition where the device has no battery, which the phone has to be able to deal with without losing data, by having an internal battery anyway. Why not just make the internal battery large enough that it serves the needs of most users? With my iPod I never manage the battery, I just plug it in to sync and the battery is always full.
With Apple's system, if you need more battery power than the internal battery, you add a second battery to the iPod dock connector. There are many third-party batteries that connect this way. Some are styled just like the iPod dock, but instead of a cable coming off there is nothing, it just provides power to the iPod/iPhone as well as makes it a bit fatter. The nice thing here is that once the external battery dies, you take it off and the iPhone/iPod has a full charge in its internal battery, which you can use while the external battery charges.
Finally, lithium-polymer batteries can be any shape, you fill in the empty space in your device with battery. Making a removable battery means making it square inside another square spot, with a door on there, it takes up a huge amount of internal volume and limits the size of the battery. If iPod or iPhone had that kind of battery they would have to be much thicker and would also have worse battery life.
> MacBook doesn't hold a charge for more than a half hour anymore? No problem, just throw it out and buy a new one."
Nobody tells you to throw out your iPod because the battery is no good. Not only will Apple replace it for you, but so will various third-parties.
> there is (L)GPL code on the iPhone. Wouldn't we all be curious "how much"...
There are drugs in your house. Wouldn't we all be curious how much?
> So, Apple, where is the source code to the version of KHTML that runs on the iPhone, how do I compile it, and how do I install the modified version on the iPhone?
It's not KHTML, it's WebKit, and that is the rendering engine, not the browser, and the source is "hidden" here:
http://webkit.org/
Cheers.
> If KHTML were under LGPLv3, then either Apple would have had to make the iPhone user programmable,
> or they would have had to pay a lot of money to get some other high-quality HTML rendering library. And that's a good thing.
In the first place, WebKit is not KHTML. It has been an independent project for years now.
In the second place, WebKit replaced Internet Explorer on the Mac. If you think that is not a good thing, then something is wrong with you. If Apple had just bought IE from Microsoft the world would not be a better place, not for Apple, their users, non-Apple users, and not for Web developers certainly.
Finally, the iPhone is user programmable. Everyday people program it with their fingers. That is why it is popular.
> The FSF has not made any accusations.
If you are the head of the FSF and you get up publicly on the day the iPhone is released and say if there is GPL software in there, there will be hell to pay than that is an implicit accusation and definitive FUD.
It's like if you're a runner and right before the race starts you said I hope that other runner is not using performance-enhancing drugs.
Or if you were a monopolistic software company and you said everyone else is infringing on up to 235 of our patents.
Right here in this thread you have people saying Apple used GPL software those bastards! And these are the very people who should know better. All because the head of FSF shot his mouth off like a know-nothing suit.
> Why does Apple hate DRM on audio, but not on Software or Video?
Because it is not Apple who is pushing the DRM, it is the particular industry behind either music or video, they are separate, and have different expectations and requirements.
Video has always had DRM. iTunes Store video, HD DVD, Blu-Ray, DVD, even VHS has Macrovision. In the movie industry they don't even want to think about not having it yet.
Audio has never had DRM. The CD and compact cassette and vinyl LP have no DRM. The DAT did but there was no consumer audio market in DAT. Even iTunes Store music can be burned to CD to break the DRM so you can make mix discs for a friend. That has always been the case.
So DRM is entrenched deep into video, but it has only ever been at the most paper-thin on audio. EMI only had to take a 1 inch step to drop DRM. The movie companies have a lot further to go.
> Apple likes to save money on R&D by using FOSS
That is one of the stupidest fucking things I have ever heard. You're giving open source software a bad name.
Open source doesn't save Apple money, it saves their users money. I didn't have to buy a Web server for my Mac from Apple, compatible only with their Classic proprietary operating system and incompatible with the world. Instead I got Apache and PHP free with my Mac and if they weren't there I could have compiled them because the core OS in Mac OS X is deliberately Unix compatible for exactly that reason.
WebKit would have cost Apple the same money either open or closed. Because they did it open, it is 100x more compatible with the Web. Compare to Internet Explorer, which is constantly trying to crate a parallel de facto set of Web standards that cost Web developers billions of dollars per year to support.
Nokia's Web browser is based on WebKit, and that will be the main competition for the iPhone. If Nokia makes an iPhone killer somebody will write an article saying look open source was bad for Apple, they wrote Nokia's browser for them and got clobbered in the phone market. But the reality is that support for Web standards ought to be free to the browser maker, it is better for everyone if Nokia starts with WebKit and competes on usability and new UI features. It's better for Web developers, it's better for Nokia users, it's better for the whole Web because Web content ends up at the lowest common denominator. If the lowest common denominator on today's Web was WebKit/Gecko instead of IE the Web would be so much better than it is. For example, GIF is from the 1980's and has 1-bit transparency, but that is the only transparency that IE supported until 2006, so it is all over the fucking Web. If IE had proper PNG support since 1998 the Web would be all true-color, 8-bit mask by now. Instead, that graphical richness stayed in Photoshop and all Web users got a lower-quality Web.
It's the definition of FUD.
The only thing that would have made it clearer is if the guy had said "iPhone violates the GPL up to 235 times!"
FSF/GNU/Linux and Microsoft deserve each other, they are two sides of the same coin.