That is simply not true. If you commercially distribute a GPL or GPL-derived product, you must inform all users that it is GPL, and inform them how to get the source code, and all tools needed to work with/build said code.
How could they not have known? You don't spend a hundred million dollars promoting a product without hiring competent lawyers to cross your t's and dot your i's.
Any IP laywer would check the origin and license of the software.
Telstra should get a serious ass kicking over this. The amount of money they've spent on advertising alone for this product line wipes out any possible "we didn't know" excuse.
They had to have been told, by multiple lawyers, that this is happening.
If an ordinary person can get fined millions of dollars for minor IP violations, then a corporation the size of Telstra should be fined tens of billions for knowingly violating the GPL in a flagship product. But of course, the law is never fair.
Because a "netbook" is a small cheap laptop which is only just barely good enough for browsing the web.
The MBA's flash memory alone is half the price of a typical netbook, it has a desktop-calliper CPU (low clock speed, but still much better than any netbook CPU). It has an impressively high res screen, and a full size keyboard — exactly the same as the one they ship with $10,000 workstations (minus the number pad), and they didn't cut costs by dropping the size of the trackpad or using small components when tiny ones are available.
The MacBook Air is a no-expenses-spared ultraportable laptop. It's far from a netbook.
The previous model macbook air came with a DVD recovery disk. If you didn't have an optical drive, you had to put the DVD in a mac or pc (Win XP+), and the macbook air booted off the DVD drive over wifi.
I never tried it as I did buy the DVD drive, but I can only imagine how painfully slow that must be!
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
Agreed, but there are still *tons* of PPC macs out there.
It cost me $1,500 to upgrade to snow leopard, just so I could run the software I need to get work done. I'm still using my old G5 PowerMac when I work from home, and it's plenty fast enough. I'm still annoyed about having to buy an intel mac to replace perfectly good hardware, just so i could run a few apps I need at work.
Comparing iphone to android is like comparing toyota prius to fossil fuelled cars. The real comparison is iPhone OS vs Android. And in that comparison... iPhone OS market share is more than double the iPhone market share, and significantly bigger than android's marketshare.
It's the operating system marketshare that matters, not whether or not there's an app to make phone calls.
Also, androids marketshare is piss-poor in the country where I live, and I've heard it's like that in most countries. The study you linked is US-only.
Dunno what happened to your friend, but i lost my iPhone and three weeks later plugged a new one, two hardware revisions newer, into my computer. "Do you want to setup a new phone, or restore your most recent backup?" Clicked restore, waited for ~14GB of data to be transferred across, phone rebooted, and it was as if i had my old phone back.
Didn't have to touch a single setting or do any configuration to get it working how i had it before.
Blame your book publisher. Only specific categories of content are deleted when you switch to a different computer.
Apps, which is the only content where apple controls the drm, are not deleted. As long as you don't change to a different app store account, you're good to transfer it —and use the same apps on multiple devices with a single purchase.
My dad just bought an android phone on a two year contract, and after 3 weeks has complained because he can't get tethering to work —even after posting to various forums and even emailing a company who sells android tethering software. I personally spent 4 hours on phone and following tutorials on the net trying to get it to work, and failed even though my colleague has it working fine on his android phone.
Dad's phone company has cancelled his 2 year contract given him an iPhone 4 instead —where tethering is easy to setup and doesn't require any third party software.
Anyone who says android "works out of the box" compared to an iPhone is smoking crack. I'm not saying the iPhone is simple... it's not. But at least it works as advertised.
You have the right to not provide your passwords, which will result in them getting a crypto team in to crack the password and adding THAT to your legal fee's WHEN you lose your case.
In the UK, as of a few years ago, you do not have the right to refuse giving them the password. And cracking a good password is effectively impossible, even with a trillion dollar budget attached to a *single* hack attempt — the defendant's great great grandchildren will be bead of old age by the time the crack is completed.
But most driving is a chore. Why do you think rich people hire drivers? The freedom you get from having a car is totally independent of the responsibility of driving it.
There are a whole lot of other reasons not to drive than "I don't like doing it". It's ton more practical to let someone else drive, you can work while in the car, you don't have to park around the block from your destination, don't have to full up fuel yourself... Plenty of reasons.
Do your pleasure driving on courses designed for the purpose,and you'll have the fun of driving without any of the danger to others.
If I have to choose between only doing stuff I enjoy on the weekend, and regular fender benders/occasional injuries/extremely rare deaths, then I definitely choose the later.
Someone earlier quoted death rates/insurance bills. But compare those figures to a baseline, such as death from sicknesses and amount of money spent on, say, fuel and car maintenance. Suddenly it doesn't look so bad.
Imagine if your city's council allowed 30 gas stations to open in a space of two or three city blocks. Drivers would be spread among them, and most would go out of business.
The only gas station(s) who'd survive, would be the ones who sell the cheapest gas, and with such tough competition their gas would be too cheap for them to do a good job, they wouldn't be able to hire staff for cleaning etc.
But luckily, any good council will tell gas stations to get lost if they try to open too many in a small area. There is no law or government official protecting such things from happening in software, so Apple is doing it.
2.12 Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
I would say the vast majority of apps in the store fall under these points.
The keyword there is "may". There are categories where you have to choose through 10 different free applications with not a single feature do differentiate between them. That's annoying for users, and completely pointless for everyone else.
If you can't do something better or cheaper than anyone else in the store, then you shouldn't bother in the first place. 2.12 simply enforces that.
If they didn't enforce it, no developer would make any money at all in those categories (because the revenue would be spread too thinly, so individual apps would have low sales), and users would struggle to find the gems among the garbage.
Just because Apple doesn't carry out the wishes of every individual developer doesn't mean they don't listen. The ENTIRE POINT of the app store is to allow developers to create and distribute great software.
Do you seriously think apple doesn't give a shit about developers? If that was true, there would be no app store at all.
Have you ever headed a soccer ball? They're extremely light. And while there's contact all the time, soccer players are too fast/agile to do much damage.
I'm not so familiar with american football (looks like they wear a lot of padding), but there's no comparing soccer injuries to what see regularly in australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFy_kBEn5UY (fast forward to 50 seconds in).
I don't know about various android phones, but my iPhone 3G is able to track my position with near-perfect accuracy. I use it to fix bugs in openstreetmap.org, and also keep myself from getting lost. The GPS tracking software I use usually gives "within 30 feet", but in my experience that's being very generous, and the accuracy is closer to ~3 feet. If you zoom in on the map, you can literally see which side of the road I was riding down on my motorbike.
Sometimes it gets inaccurate or even looses signal for a few minutes, such as when there's dense tree cover / mountain ranges and I'm weaving through twisty roads at high speed. But 99.9% of the time it's extremely good.
Since I usually map roads which aren't on openstreetmap.org, or are likely to have mistakes, there's usually no GSM signal at all. So it's using pure GPS.
As for battery life... with the GSM card turned off it's pretty good. But I have to leave the screen on.
As someone who owns a motorbike with similar performance to that M5 (though it's almost 10 times cheaper!), I have to say there really are times when 100KPH over the speed limit is still safe.
I don't know if these particular circumstances were safe... but he may have been able to accelerate to that speed and drop back down to safe speeds over a very short stretch of road... one where you may have perfect visibility of potential dangers.
Laws based on fixed speed/rules suck. There should be only one offense: driving dangerously under the conditions. Traffic police should be required to prove that it was dangerous every time.
Disclaimer: I was recently fined $300 for something that would have, at the very worst, given me a few bruises if I'd fallen off my bike.
The fact that either drive may fail means you have to be able to recover from it perfectly.
So the only factor is cost: if 10% of disk drives fail, then you should add 10% to your budget plus whatever time you predict spending installing the new drives.
SymbianS60v3 and S60v5 (also known as Symbian^1) still powers pretty much all nokia's touch screen phones, which alone sell more then android and iphone combined.
I call bullshit. Where is your source to back up that claim? It's well known that nokia is the highest volume selling phone in the world... But as far as I understood, the vast majority of their sales are low-margin non-touch screen phones. I would expect Nokia to be selling only a handful of touch screen phones, certainly not more than iPhone/Android combined.
But whichever way you slice it, Nokia is a small company compared to Apple and Google. From wolfram alpha:
Like it or not, those $$$ reflect the actual amount of work being done on a given project. iOS and Android have already leapt ahead of Symbian and the gap is only going to get wider. In the tech industry Apple and google are both well known for spending an absolute fortune on research. Look at WebKit — only a few years ago it was a shitty little open source alternative to mozilla — barely able to render even popular websites properly. Then apple put some cash into it, followed by google a few years later, and suddenly WebKit is leading the rendering engine industry in terms of technological superiority and looks like it's going to become the defacto standard rendering engine in the next few years — Apple, KDE, Nokia, Google, RIM, Palm... they're all using WebKit now, and more to come.
The individual videos are irrelevant. There are thousands of videos with just about any phone out there, some are more dramatic than others because they're tested under vastly different curcumstances.
As someone who's been researching this in depth to decide whether or not I'm going to buy this phone — rather than just someone who hates apple, my conclusions are:
1. This is a well known problem to people in the industry, and effects all phones. It varies dramatically depending on the carrier's network. 2. It's more noticeable on the iPhone 4 because it's possible to short circuit the antenna if your skin is abnormally conductive. 3. The iPhone OS is showing strong signal strength when really it's only "just strong enough" to make reliable calls, and drops no low signal rapidly. 4. The iPhone 4 clearly gets far better signal strength than any previous Apple phone – which people have used for years without complaints. So it's clearly "good enough".
If you think apple should have made the phone bigger/heavier/more expensive by insulating the antennae from your hand, then you can simply make *your* phone bigger/heavier/more expensive by purchasing any one of the thousands of cases available. It will have the added benefit of keeping your phone pretty, if that floats your boat.
Personally, if I'd rather hold it in a different way than use a case—especially since I'll only need to if my hands are sweaty and if there's a poor signal where I'm standing.
Your WiFi and ham radio systems always run their transmitter at full power.
On a mobile phone, full power delivers terrible battery life. Especially because the transmitter needs to be powered on even while the device is in standby mode and everything else (display, cpu, wifi, 3g, etc) is shut down.
Most radios go for max possible signal strength, but a phone only wants "good enough for a reliable phone call". This is controlled using an extremely complicated algorithm, which is implemented in software so it can be improved on later.
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That is simply not true. If you commercially distribute a GPL or GPL-derived product, you must inform all users that it is GPL, and inform them how to get the source code, and all tools needed to work with/build said code.
How could they not have known? You don't spend a hundred million dollars promoting a product without hiring competent lawyers to cross your t's and dot your i's.
Any IP laywer would check the origin and license of the software.
Telstra should get a serious ass kicking over this. The amount of money they've spent on advertising alone for this product line wipes out any possible "we didn't know" excuse.
They had to have been told, by multiple lawyers, that this is happening.
If an ordinary person can get fined millions of dollars for minor IP violations, then a corporation the size of Telstra should be fined tens of billions for knowingly violating the GPL in a flagship product. But of course, the law is never fair.
Because a "netbook" is a small cheap laptop which is only just barely good enough for browsing the web.
The MBA's flash memory alone is half the price of a typical netbook, it has a desktop-calliper CPU (low clock speed, but still much better than any netbook CPU). It has an impressively high res screen, and a full size keyboard — exactly the same as the one they ship with $10,000 workstations (minus the number pad), and they didn't cut costs by dropping the size of the trackpad or using small components when tiny ones are available.
The MacBook Air is a no-expenses-spared ultraportable laptop. It's far from a netbook.
The previous model macbook air came with a DVD recovery disk. If you didn't have an optical drive, you had to put the DVD in a mac or pc (Win XP+), and the macbook air booted off the DVD drive over wifi.
I never tried it as I did buy the DVD drive, but I can only imagine how painfully slow that must be!
If you have an Intel Mac you should be on 10.6. Period.
Agreed, but there are still *tons* of PPC macs out there.
It cost me $1,500 to upgrade to snow leopard, just so I could run the software I need to get work done. I'm still using my old G5 PowerMac when I work from home, and it's plenty fast enough. I'm still annoyed about having to buy an intel mac to replace perfectly good hardware, just so i could run a few apps I need at work.
Comparing iphone to android is like comparing toyota prius to fossil fuelled cars. The real comparison is iPhone OS vs Android. And in that comparison... iPhone OS market share is more than double the iPhone market share, and significantly bigger than android's marketshare.
It's the operating system marketshare that matters, not whether or not there's an app to make phone calls.
Also, androids marketshare is piss-poor in the country where I live, and I've heard it's like that in most countries. The study you linked is US-only.
Dunno what happened to your friend, but i lost my iPhone and three weeks later plugged a new one, two hardware revisions newer, into my computer. "Do you want to setup a new phone, or restore your most recent backup?" Clicked restore, waited for ~14GB of data to be transferred across, phone rebooted, and it was as if i had my old phone back.
Didn't have to touch a single setting or do any configuration to get it working how i had it before.
Blame your book publisher. Only specific categories of content are deleted when you switch to a different computer.
Apps, which is the only content where apple controls the drm, are not deleted. As long as you don't change to a different app store account, you're good to transfer it —and use the same apps on multiple devices with a single purchase.
My dad just bought an android phone on a two year contract, and after 3 weeks has complained because he can't get tethering to work —even after posting to various forums and even emailing a company who sells android tethering software. I personally spent 4 hours on phone and following tutorials on the net trying to get it to work, and failed even though my colleague has it working fine on his android phone.
Dad's phone company has cancelled his 2 year contract given him an iPhone 4 instead —where tethering is easy to setup and doesn't require any third party software.
Anyone who says android "works out of the box" compared to an iPhone is smoking crack. I'm not saying the iPhone is simple... it's not. But at least it works as advertised.
Android is fragmented *because* it's open.
And the way they've chosen to implement "open" has made it even more fragmented than an open platform needs to be.
You have the right to not provide your passwords, which will result in them getting a crypto team in to crack the password and adding THAT to your legal fee's WHEN you lose your case.
In the UK, as of a few years ago, you do not have the right to refuse giving them the password. And cracking a good password is effectively impossible, even with a trillion dollar budget attached to a *single* hack attempt — the defendant's great great grandchildren will be bead of old age by the time the crack is completed.
But most driving is a chore. Why do you think rich people hire drivers? The freedom you get from having a car is totally independent of the responsibility of driving it.
There are a whole lot of other reasons not to drive than "I don't like doing it". It's ton more practical to let someone else drive, you can work while in the car, you don't have to park around the block from your destination, don't have to full up fuel yourself... Plenty of reasons.
Do your pleasure driving on courses designed for the purpose,and you'll have the fun of driving without any of the danger to others.
If I have to choose between only doing stuff I enjoy on the weekend, and regular fender benders/occasional injuries/extremely rare deaths, then I definitely choose the later.
Someone earlier quoted death rates/insurance bills. But compare those figures to a baseline, such as death from sicknesses and amount of money spent on, say, fuel and car maintenance. Suddenly it doesn't look so bad.
Imagine if your city's council allowed 30 gas stations to open in a space of two or three city blocks. Drivers would be spread among them, and most would go out of business.
The only gas station(s) who'd survive, would be the ones who sell the cheapest gas, and with such tough competition their gas would be too cheap for them to do a good job, they wouldn't be able to hire staff for cleaning etc.
But luckily, any good council will tell gas stations to get lost if they try to open too many in a small area. There is no law or government official protecting such things from happening in software, so Apple is doing it.
2.12 Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected
I would say the vast majority of apps in the store fall under these points.
The keyword there is "may". There are categories where you have to choose through 10 different free applications with not a single feature do differentiate between them. That's annoying for users, and completely pointless for everyone else.
If you can't do something better or cheaper than anyone else in the store, then you shouldn't bother in the first place. 2.12 simply enforces that.
If they didn't enforce it, no developer would make any money at all in those categories (because the revenue would be spread too thinly, so individual apps would have low sales), and users would struggle to find the gems among the garbage.
Get off your high horse.
Just because Apple doesn't carry out the wishes of every individual developer doesn't mean they don't listen. The ENTIRE POINT of the app store is to allow developers to create and distribute great software.
Do you seriously think apple doesn't give a shit about developers? If that was true, there would be no app store at all.
Have you ever headed a soccer ball? They're extremely light. And while there's contact all the time, soccer players are too fast/agile to do much damage.
I'm not so familiar with american football (looks like they wear a lot of padding), but there's no comparing soccer injuries to what see regularly in australia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFy_kBEn5UY (fast forward to 50 seconds in).
I don't know about various android phones, but my iPhone 3G is able to track my position with near-perfect accuracy. I use it to fix bugs in openstreetmap.org, and also keep myself from getting lost. The GPS tracking software I use usually gives "within 30 feet", but in my experience that's being very generous, and the accuracy is closer to ~3 feet. If you zoom in on the map, you can literally see which side of the road I was riding down on my motorbike.
Sometimes it gets inaccurate or even looses signal for a few minutes, such as when there's dense tree cover / mountain ranges and I'm weaving through twisty roads at high speed. But 99.9% of the time it's extremely good.
Since I usually map roads which aren't on openstreetmap.org, or are likely to have mistakes, there's usually no GSM signal at all. So it's using pure GPS.
As for battery life... with the GSM card turned off it's pretty good. But I have to leave the screen on.
As someone who owns a motorbike with similar performance to that M5 (though it's almost 10 times cheaper!), I have to say there really are times when 100KPH over the speed limit is still safe.
I don't know if these particular circumstances were safe... but he may have been able to accelerate to that speed and drop back down to safe speeds over a very short stretch of road... one where you may have perfect visibility of potential dangers.
Laws based on fixed speed/rules suck. There should be only one offense: driving dangerously under the conditions. Traffic police should be required to prove that it was dangerous every time.
Disclaimer: I was recently fined $300 for something that would have, at the very worst, given me a few bruises if I'd fallen off my bike.
Most high end phones created in the last few years have had a proper autofocus.
The fact that either drive may fail means you have to be able to recover from it perfectly.
So the only factor is cost: if 10% of disk drives fail, then you should add 10% to your budget plus whatever time you predict spending installing the new drives.
I call bullshit. Where is your source to back up that claim? It's well known that nokia is the highest volume selling phone in the world... But as far as I understood, the vast majority of their sales are low-margin non-touch screen phones. I would expect Nokia to be selling only a handful of touch screen phones, certainly not more than iPhone/Android combined.
But whichever way you slice it, Nokia is a small company compared to Apple and Google. From wolfram alpha:
Nokia: $32 billion
Apple: $225 billion
Google: $139 billion
Like it or not, those $$$ reflect the actual amount of work being done on a given project. iOS and Android have already leapt ahead of Symbian and the gap is only going to get wider. In the tech industry Apple and google are both well known for spending an absolute fortune on research. Look at WebKit — only a few years ago it was a shitty little open source alternative to mozilla — barely able to render even popular websites properly. Then apple put some cash into it, followed by google a few years later, and suddenly WebKit is leading the rendering engine industry in terms of technological superiority and looks like it's going to become the defacto standard rendering engine in the next few years — Apple, KDE, Nokia, Google, RIM, Palm... they're all using WebKit now, and more to come.
The individual videos are irrelevant. There are thousands of videos with just about any phone out there, some are more dramatic than others because they're tested under vastly different curcumstances.
As someone who's been researching this in depth to decide whether or not I'm going to buy this phone — rather than just someone who hates apple, my conclusions are:
1. This is a well known problem to people in the industry, and effects all phones. It varies dramatically depending on the carrier's network.
2. It's more noticeable on the iPhone 4 because it's possible to short circuit the antenna if your skin is abnormally conductive.
3. The iPhone OS is showing strong signal strength when really it's only "just strong enough" to make reliable calls, and drops no low signal rapidly.
4. The iPhone 4 clearly gets far better signal strength than any previous Apple phone – which people have used for years without complaints. So it's clearly "good enough".
If you think apple should have made the phone bigger/heavier/more expensive by insulating the antennae from your hand, then you can simply make *your* phone bigger/heavier/more expensive by purchasing any one of the thousands of cases available. It will have the added benefit of keeping your phone pretty, if that floats your boat.
Personally, if I'd rather hold it in a different way than use a case—especially since I'll only need to if my hands are sweaty and if there's a poor signal where I'm standing.
Maybe it's different in the USA, but here in Australia those phones were also running on a more reliable but primitive protocol and frequency.
Modern phone networks don't have as much range, but they can handle more simultaneous calls, better voice quality, and high speed data.
Your WiFi and ham radio systems always run their transmitter at full power.
On a mobile phone, full power delivers terrible battery life. Especially because the transmitter needs to be powered on even while the device is in standby mode and everything else (display, cpu, wifi, 3g, etc) is shut down.
Most radios go for max possible signal strength, but a phone only wants "good enough for a reliable phone call". This is controlled using an extremely complicated algorithm, which is implemented in software so it can be improved on later.