Maybe because the devices his company produces do what most people want, and do those things really well. Not everyone want to go digging under the hood. Most people really don't care about what is happening under the hood, they just want it to happen. For example I will be buying a 3G iPad when they come out with the express idea of playing with it for a month before giving it to my grandmother.
She needs something to replace the email-only station that she has, and I think that the simplicity of troubleshooting ("press the big button if you get in trouble"), and the single-midedness of doing one task at a time will mean that she might just venture out beyond the email-only realm she has been in. With a computer the first step to get to email is simply too much, and it does not matter Windows, MacOS, or linux for that statement. But with an iPad there is a chace that she will be tempted to view the photo sharing sites that my parrents and aunt have setup.
And my fiencée has already said that she might use it to replace her Windows notebook that has been nothing but a headache in the year she has had it (a couple of bad design choices by HP have caused real problems and it has already had two warentee issues). For the most part she just does email and web surfing. The only thing she was worried about was that she might not be able to save PDF reciepts from the bills she pays online (a legitimate worry).
As to myself, I am a professional geek and I specialize in MacOS. While I dig pretty deep in the desktop version of MacOS X, and do some lite programming (mostly on the heavy side of scripting), I have never been tempted to jailbreak my iPhone, or dig into the iPhone SDK. It is an appliance for me, and I am happy that it just does the job I want it to do.
I know this was supposed to be humorous, but you do know that only a very small minority of penguins actaully live where it snows, right? The empror penguins live in one of the most inhospitable locations on the planet (south pole... so nowhere near the polar bears at the north pole), but most species of penguins live quite a bit north of there on coasts that never freeze. So the only way globabl warming is likely to kill off the penguins is by raising sea lelels enough to wipe out their traditional hatching grounds. And that is probably going to happen slowly enough that they will move those up-hill.
How do you figure this? In the US the only entitiy that "creates" money is the US Govenment (through the US Mint). Banks are only in the business of moving money between people (and businesses) in the form of loans and deposits. They then "make" their money by taking a percentage off the flow of money, which is simply them diverting money from the stream (moving, not creating).
All this is a simplification of course. But if you take all of the complex things that banks do (like investments or morgages) and strip away the facade you are still left the same features. It always has to be a net-to-zero game within a bank.
Microsoft's last dividend was $0.17/share on November 17th, 2009 (they pay dividends quarterly). Apple's last dividend was November 21, 1995.
Stock splits are not dividends, they are accounting changes. People get excited about them, but they don't fundamentally change anything but the numbers.
The "double taxation" bit is just silly. Companies are taxed for their earnings, and people are charged for their earning, since companies are legally a form of individual this is right and good. There are taxes levied on the earnings my employer makes (gross), and I am then taxed for their paycheck to me. Is this "double taxation"? I am much more in favor of dividend (and capital gains) taxes because they are levied on "free" money, by that I mean money that people are getting without doing any productive work on it. I do trade on the stock market (an action different than investing), and I do get dividends on occasion. I consider that all free money and am happy to pay any taxes on it that they care to levy, because I am getting extra money without doing any real work for it.
As long as I can continue to make money on it (and there is no sign that that is about to stop) then I will continue to do so. People who claim that "double taxation" will prevent people from wanting to invest their money are just plain stupid, or are lying through their teeth in order to serve their own greed. Even Warren Buffet (the investor behind Berkshire Hathaway) has come out on the record with a similar argument to mine.
As the current developer of InstaDMG I want to point out that InstaDMG is not a compeditor to DeployStudio (or any of the other imaging products) but rather a great way of creating the image you are going to feed into your deployment solution (I really like DeployStudio, but my needs are rather outside its scope, so I have to go cusom).
The F-22/F35 combination is much like the F-15/F16 combination that the US Air Force now flys. The F-15 is meant to fly pure air superiority missions (shoot down other airplanes) while the F-16 is much cheaper and is meant to be a "fly bombs into dangerous places" plane (to keep it seperate from the pure bomb trucks like the B-52).
Both of the planes can be used for Air-to-Air or Air-to-Ground, but the emphasis is on their main role. The F-22 just picked up an additional role of Tacitcal Penetration Bomber (flying into heavily defended locations and dropping a few bombs), and in this round the cheaper version has Navy and Marine varients to offset costs onto more that one military branch (mostly a political move).
This was true for MacOS X Server 1.0 (came out 6 months or more before MacOS X client), but by the time MacOS X rolled out the Display PostScript had largely been architected out of the actual display model (in favor of things that were easier to hardware accelerate).
However, there is still of lot of the machinery there, which is what makes is so easy for an application to snap out PDF represntations of any non-custom NSView with a single call: dataWithPDFInsideRect.
I don't think you are right at all for most fo Apple's products.
In most of their products that have non-removable batteries it is because putting on a user-serviceable door would either make the battery smaller (and thus last less long) or the device bigger. Making the battery removable means you have to engineer a well for the battery to sit in (so the user doesn't have accidental access to the rest of the device while replacing the battery) in addition to meaning that you can't use the part of the case that is the door part of the structure of the device. This winds up to be rather costly in engineering terms.
And on MacOS X Apple goes out of their way to provide high-quality development tools and testing environments for free, included with every computer. I don't understand how that is "doing everything it possibly can to control the market for 3rd party software".
On the iPhone it is obvious that Apple was dealing with competing priorities: They needed to get a high-quality first product to market, and that does not leave a lot of time to also engineer a development environment. They also have to deal with keeping security on the device with AT&T and others demanding that the devices not mess with their networks (these people are paranoid).
And as someone who has an iPhone now, and had a Palm phone before I can really appriciate the trade-offs with allowing programs to do whatever they would like. I wound up having to wipe my Palm a few times because some bit of software was crashing in the background taking the radio (and thus the phone) with it. And anything that ran in the background cut my battery life to less than a working-day long. If I was not a tech-type person I would probably just blame Palm. Apple wants their products to "just work" and by isolating the software to only be running when it is front-most they are doing a good job of making sure that a common user knows who to blame when things go wrong.
Ya, I always hate that people get the phrase "The Ugly American" completely wrong. In the book the character refered to as "The Ugly American" is a wonderfull person who understands cross-cultural dealings and does a lot to help the people he is working with without making it out to be that he is better than them for being an American.
And then people just make the assumption that "The Ugly American" means US-Centric thinkers... *sigh*
I don't understand how GM is "betting the ranch" on a car that is going to cost somthing like $40,000 per unit, and GM expects to only produce in runs of 10,000. That means that they expect the Volt to sell something like 40,000 units.
They might be wagering that the second generation Volt will sell better, but the first is definatly just a prestige car.
The Silverlight client has a fully working MacOS X client. It may be Intel-only, but the old client was never going to be support on any platform but Microsoft (since it used Windows Media DRM, and Microsoft made public statements that it would never happen).
There is an outside chance that the Silverlight DRM used for Netflix could make it to platforms other than Windows and MacOS X. I am not say it is likely, but it is possible. This is more of a political thing than anything else.
My experience with the client is nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. To compare it to YouTube quality level is really overdoing it. The quality is usually very good, but not perfect. So I don't confuse it with a DVD, but it is just below broadcast TV most of the time.
Of course I don't have any problems with having previous clients, so I don't have that.
OmniWeb (my browser of choice) has been blocking adds very well for a long time (much longer than other browsers). It even allows you to set per-website preferences for that (and most other preferences). It started out just blocking certain image sizes, then expanded to off-site images, then got regular expressions. And it has held those for a while. The only issues I have are that you can't selectivly block flash images, and that it does not offer the ability to reflow the document as if there was never an image there.
And there are a number of features that OmniWeb has ad for a while that FireFox is just getting around ot copying now: saving the windows that were open when you quit, per-site prefereences, replicating bookmaks/history/etc to a WebDAV server, etc...
But do you think that the steam trains are still working with all-original parts? Or do you think that those steam trains have been disasembled and replacement parts swapped in repeatedly over the course of that 100 years? If you were (able) to treat hard drives the same way, then you could expect longer lives out of them.
And we don't expect computer components to last that long (at least not in production use) much for the same reason none of those steam trains are in regular production use (novelty use is not the same thing as production use): they are going to be superceded by something so much better that it does not make economic sense to continue to use the old. The speed of transition in computers is a bit faster, but the process is the same.
But in general non-moving parts beat out moving parts in tearms of wear almost uniformly. And if you then factor in the lack of phisical maintenance, the solid-state device is going to pull away.
And the vast majority of the people who have installed the update (such as me) are not having these problems. They are isolated to a relativly few people. The "blowing it out of proprotion" is that the areticles are implying that this is a generic problem when it is really a problems that relativly few people (who have access to the virtual microphone) are having.
The problem with that type of argement (that the rich support society disproprionatly) is that it totally ignores that the society is what allows the rich to be rich. The rich disproportionately benifit from society's ability to create the environment to allow for wealth creation.
The next bit that it ignores that the rich get disproprtionally more of the income in a far more scewed ratio than they pay taxes. So the top 5 percent of income eners have more collective wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. That distribution is just insane. Those same top 5 percent pay about 50% of taxes. In a "fair" system they would be paying 95%.
And finally there is the idea of "disposable income". For this purpose that means anything above the absolute minimum needed to live. That line (the absolute minimum) is hard to define, but no matter how you define it whne you take the numbers and start to look at how big a percentage of people's dispoable income they spend on taxes (remembering that the poor still pay sales and other taxes like FICA etc if they have an income) all of a sudden that already tiped ballence stands on its side.
I have never met a single iPhone user who has had extensive use of a smart phone. Most iPhone users probably couldn't even come up with a somewhat accurate definition of a smart phone. Most probably know nothing about PalmOS or WindowsCE. Your remark is FUD, at best.
I used a Palm Smartphone for a year before I got my iPhone (in january) and I can say that the iPhone is a far better product in every way that I have used the two devices (and I troubleshoot professionally so this is not a "I don't know how to use it" issue).
The Palm device crashed regularly (both with third party software, and cleaned of everything) and then when it rebooted would reboot with the radio off (so I would miss calls when it crashed while I wasn't watching). I have had a few iPhone crashes, and it reboots with the radio on, so I don't have that issue.
There were a long list of issues with the UI and basic problems with the way the OS used the radio, like every time it transitioned back onto the network it would freeze for 5-10 seconds... when you are in the subway and are going in-and-out of coverage this translated into a mostly-frozen device that is burning through its battery fast.
I have also spent some time with Winodws CE devices (I was responcible for supporting them at one point). I never had one myself for longer than a couple of days, and it did feel better than a Palm in some ways. But I always felt like the UI was a crampt uncomfortable attempt to shoe-horn a desktop UI onto a device that was not ready for it.
It is not just the dependance on the processor that makes the "slower" FireWire 400 beat out USB 2.0 (the fast one... whatever they are calling that today). A rough outline:
1) FireWire allows devices to allocate a specific slice of time to their needs for a period of time. This slice of time can then be used exclusivly by the device to transmit that round of data. This keeps devices from interupting the flow durring those periods. USB has a part-way analog to this, but it is not nearly as efficent.
2) FireWire allows any device to talk to any other without requiring a CPU's intervention. So if you are transfering from on HD to another connected via FireWire the data never has to flow thorugh the CPU (unlike on USB).
3) FireWire has explicit support for DMA (direct memory access), so when transfering data to and from an internal HD the CPU only has to grant access to the bits on disk and the FireWire support chips can handle streaming the data from one storage device to the other (like #2, but lightly different).
4) Latency can be gaurenteeded through a mechanism in the time-slice arbitration system. So audio devices can have the guaranteed chanels. On USB it is a constant fight... that does not work for music devices if you start loading up the USB system. This works well with the DMA thing, so even if your CPU is busy at the moment it does not have to make the context switch before accepting the data.
Most of these differences are inherint in the basic design of the two protocols. And they cause the FireWire bridge chips to be significaly more expensive (still we are talking a mater of a dollar or two). I have not heard any good analasis of USB 3 yet (since the spec just came out), but I suspect that USB 3.0 will still be saddled with the legacy of USB 1.0 (which was designed with mice an keyboards in mind... everything else seems to have been showhorned in).
This is done all across the US, and the main reason is that the taxes you are going to pay depend on where you buy the product. And not just depending on what state (but that is the biggest difference), but also depending on the particular city. So any advertising would have to take that into account making national campains would be unworkable.
So rather than that everything is adversised without taxes.
Most of the general cheeses are pretty bland stuff. However, you should go into a grocey store in Wisconsin and look in the "specialty cheeses" section, and you will find a wide selection of cheeses that routinely win international competitions.
That being said, they still tend to cede the whole area of "stinky cheeses" to the french.
And I have lived in Europe and Wisconsin and enjoy (and pay for) good cheese. I am living in California now, and miss the cheese.
The argument that oil is the reason that we went in to Iraq keeps comming up, but it is a bit rediculoius. Before the war the West was the one that prevented Iraq from selling oil (except the limited amount in the "oild for food" program). Before that Iraq was happy to sell it to us. And now Iraq is a net importer of oil, since all the infrastructure was hevily damaged in the fighting (both the old-style war, and the insugency). And that sort of damage was completely predictable (in fact the militaty commanders were told to limit the damage as much as possible).
So evreyone knew that the war would reduce the amount of oil comming out of Iraq severely, and that if the US started taking the oil that the rest of the world would protest heavily (including OPEC). Where exactly does the logic that we went in there for oil come in?
I recently took the train from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and the trip was really nice. It took 3 1/2 days, but was in the same price range as flight tickets (it really depends on when you buy them). The ride was pleasent, and people aboard the train were very willing to talk (unlike on a flight). And the views were absolutely gorgeous.
If you have the time, I would recomend the trip.
Oh.. and if you are willing to sit in a chair the whole way you can get the trip for something like $100. I am not going to recommend that, but it is possible.
The seller brings the house to the table. All of the money that is brought to the table is from the buyer's side (which includes the institution that makes the loan). So while the seller might be paying the realtor, they are paying with money gotten from the buyer. It might be presented as otherwise, but that is just a fiction.
The only problem with those NDAs is that more often than not the information you get about stuff further out than 6 months is completely wrong. It is not that the companies are deliberately lying to you, it is that there is no way they can predict the future. So the CIOs make all sorts of decisions about where they are going to go, and set aside future money to pay for things that never come to pass only to change directions completely when the actual product rolls out the door. In other words they get about as much real time to make decisions as they do with Apple, and wait 6 months to implement anyways. Only they have wasted a lot of their people's time (and wages) trying to prepare for something that was never going to be.
I have seen this over and over. The only reason that the CIOs come back to play this wasteful game over and over again is that it plays to their egos to be getting "inside information".
You are assuming that they did any real work in developing this setup. Instead they put together pieces of work that the OSx86 community had been working on, and put together some hardware that could run it and started selling the combination. They don't seem like the type of company that is going to be putting many development dollars into much of anything.
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Maybe because the devices his company produces do what most people want, and do those things really well. Not everyone want to go digging under the hood. Most people really don't care about what is happening under the hood, they just want it to happen. For example I will be buying a 3G iPad when they come out with the express idea of playing with it for a month before giving it to my grandmother.
She needs something to replace the email-only station that she has, and I think that the simplicity of troubleshooting ("press the big button if you get in trouble"), and the single-midedness of doing one task at a time will mean that she might just venture out beyond the email-only realm she has been in. With a computer the first step to get to email is simply too much, and it does not matter Windows, MacOS, or linux for that statement. But with an iPad there is a chace that she will be tempted to view the photo sharing sites that my parrents and aunt have setup.
And my fiencée has already said that she might use it to replace her Windows notebook that has been nothing but a headache in the year she has had it (a couple of bad design choices by HP have caused real problems and it has already had two warentee issues). For the most part she just does email and web surfing. The only thing she was worried about was that she might not be able to save PDF reciepts from the bills she pays online (a legitimate worry).
As to myself, I am a professional geek and I specialize in MacOS. While I dig pretty deep in the desktop version of MacOS X, and do some lite programming (mostly on the heavy side of scripting), I have never been tempted to jailbreak my iPhone, or dig into the iPhone SDK. It is an appliance for me, and I am happy that it just does the job I want it to do.
I know this was supposed to be humorous, but you do know that only a very small minority of penguins actaully live where it snows, right? The empror penguins live in one of the most inhospitable locations on the planet (south pole... so nowhere near the polar bears at the north pole), but most species of penguins live quite a bit north of there on coasts that never freeze. So the only way globabl warming is likely to kill off the penguins is by raising sea lelels enough to wipe out their traditional hatching grounds. And that is probably going to happen slowly enough that they will move those up-hill.
How do you figure this? In the US the only entitiy that "creates" money is the US Govenment (through the US Mint). Banks are only in the business of moving money between people (and businesses) in the form of loans and deposits. They then "make" their money by taking a percentage off the flow of money, which is simply them diverting money from the stream (moving, not creating).
All this is a simplification of course. But if you take all of the complex things that banks do (like investments or morgages) and strip away the facade you are still left the same features. It always has to be a net-to-zero game within a bank.
Wow, this was a really poorly researched quote.
Microsoft's last dividend was $0.17/share on November 17th, 2009 (they pay dividends quarterly). Apple's last dividend was November 21, 1995.
Stock splits are not dividends, they are accounting changes. People get excited about them, but they don't fundamentally change anything but the numbers.
The "double taxation" bit is just silly. Companies are taxed for their earnings, and people are charged for their earning, since companies are legally a form of individual this is right and good. There are taxes levied on the earnings my employer makes (gross), and I am then taxed for their paycheck to me. Is this "double taxation"? I am much more in favor of dividend (and capital gains) taxes because they are levied on "free" money, by that I mean money that people are getting without doing any productive work on it. I do trade on the stock market (an action different than investing), and I do get dividends on occasion. I consider that all free money and am happy to pay any taxes on it that they care to levy, because I am getting extra money without doing any real work for it.
As long as I can continue to make money on it (and there is no sign that that is about to stop) then I will continue to do so. People who claim that "double taxation" will prevent people from wanting to invest their money are just plain stupid, or are lying through their teeth in order to serve their own greed. Even Warren Buffet (the investor behind Berkshire Hathaway) has come out on the record with a similar argument to mine.
Never show a child or a fool a thing half-finished.
Then how exactly are we supposed to show management that we are actually getting something done?
As the current developer of InstaDMG I want to point out that InstaDMG is not a compeditor to DeployStudio (or any of the other imaging products) but rather a great way of creating the image you are going to feed into your deployment solution (I really like DeployStudio, but my needs are rather outside its scope, so I have to go cusom).
The F-22/F35 combination is much like the F-15/F16 combination that the US Air Force now flys. The F-15 is meant to fly pure air superiority missions (shoot down other airplanes) while the F-16 is much cheaper and is meant to be a "fly bombs into dangerous places" plane (to keep it seperate from the pure bomb trucks like the B-52).
Both of the planes can be used for Air-to-Air or Air-to-Ground, but the emphasis is on their main role. The F-22 just picked up an additional role of Tacitcal Penetration Bomber (flying into heavily defended locations and dropping a few bombs), and in this round the cheaper version has Navy and Marine varients to offset costs onto more that one military branch (mostly a political move).
This was true for MacOS X Server 1.0 (came out 6 months or more before MacOS X client), but by the time MacOS X rolled out the Display PostScript had largely been architected out of the actual display model (in favor of things that were easier to hardware accelerate).
However, there is still of lot of the machinery there, which is what makes is so easy for an application to snap out PDF represntations of any non-custom NSView with a single call: dataWithPDFInsideRect.
I don't think you are right at all for most fo Apple's products.
In most of their products that have non-removable batteries it is because putting on a user-serviceable door would either make the battery smaller (and thus last less long) or the device bigger. Making the battery removable means you have to engineer a well for the battery to sit in (so the user doesn't have accidental access to the rest of the device while replacing the battery) in addition to meaning that you can't use the part of the case that is the door part of the structure of the device. This winds up to be rather costly in engineering terms.
And on MacOS X Apple goes out of their way to provide high-quality development tools and testing environments for free, included with every computer. I don't understand how that is "doing everything it possibly can to control the market for 3rd party software".
On the iPhone it is obvious that Apple was dealing with competing priorities: They needed to get a high-quality first product to market, and that does not leave a lot of time to also engineer a development environment. They also have to deal with keeping security on the device with AT&T and others demanding that the devices not mess with their networks (these people are paranoid).
And as someone who has an iPhone now, and had a Palm phone before I can really appriciate the trade-offs with allowing programs to do whatever they would like. I wound up having to wipe my Palm a few times because some bit of software was crashing in the background taking the radio (and thus the phone) with it. And anything that ran in the background cut my battery life to less than a working-day long. If I was not a tech-type person I would probably just blame Palm. Apple wants their products to "just work" and by isolating the software to only be running when it is front-most they are doing a good job of making sure that a common user knows who to blame when things go wrong.
Ya, I always hate that people get the phrase "The Ugly American" completely wrong. In the book the character refered to as "The Ugly American" is a wonderfull person who understands cross-cultural dealings and does a lot to help the people he is working with without making it out to be that he is better than them for being an American.
And then people just make the assumption that "The Ugly American" means US-Centric thinkers... *sigh*
I don't understand how GM is "betting the ranch" on a car that is going to cost somthing like $40,000 per unit, and GM expects to only produce in runs of 10,000. That means that they expect the Volt to sell something like 40,000 units.
They might be wagering that the second generation Volt will sell better, but the first is definatly just a prestige car.
I think people are missing some important points:
The Silverlight client has a fully working MacOS X client. It may be Intel-only, but the old client was never going to be support on any platform but Microsoft (since it used Windows Media DRM, and Microsoft made public statements that it would never happen).
There is an outside chance that the Silverlight DRM used for Netflix could make it to platforms other than Windows and MacOS X. I am not say it is likely, but it is possible. This is more of a political thing than anything else.
My experience with the client is nowhere near as bad as people are making it out to be. To compare it to YouTube quality level is really overdoing it. The quality is usually very good, but not perfect. So I don't confuse it with a DVD, but it is just below broadcast TV most of the time.
Of course I don't have any problems with having previous clients, so I don't have that.
OmniWeb (my browser of choice) has been blocking adds very well for a long time (much longer than other browsers). It even allows you to set per-website preferences for that (and most other preferences). It started out just blocking certain image sizes, then expanded to off-site images, then got regular expressions. And it has held those for a while. The only issues I have are that you can't selectivly block flash images, and that it does not offer the ability to reflow the document as if there was never an image there.
And there are a number of features that OmniWeb has ad for a while that FireFox is just getting around ot copying now: saving the windows that were open when you quit, per-site prefereences, replicating bookmaks/history/etc to a WebDAV server, etc...
But do you think that the steam trains are still working with all-original parts? Or do you think that those steam trains have been disasembled and replacement parts swapped in repeatedly over the course of that 100 years? If you were (able) to treat hard drives the same way, then you could expect longer lives out of them.
And we don't expect computer components to last that long (at least not in production use) much for the same reason none of those steam trains are in regular production use (novelty use is not the same thing as production use): they are going to be superceded by something so much better that it does not make economic sense to continue to use the old. The speed of transition in computers is a bit faster, but the process is the same.
But in general non-moving parts beat out moving parts in tearms of wear almost uniformly. And if you then factor in the lack of phisical maintenance, the solid-state device is going to pull away.
And the vast majority of the people who have installed the update (such as me) are not having these problems. They are isolated to a relativly few people. The "blowing it out of proprotion" is that the areticles are implying that this is a generic problem when it is really a problems that relativly few people (who have access to the virtual microphone) are having.
The problem with that type of argement (that the rich support society disproprionatly) is that it totally ignores that the society is what allows the rich to be rich. The rich disproportionately benifit from society's ability to create the environment to allow for wealth creation.
The next bit that it ignores that the rich get disproprtionally more of the income in a far more scewed ratio than they pay taxes. So the top 5 percent of income eners have more collective wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined. That distribution is just insane. Those same top 5 percent pay about 50% of taxes. In a "fair" system they would be paying 95%.
And finally there is the idea of "disposable income". For this purpose that means anything above the absolute minimum needed to live. That line (the absolute minimum) is hard to define, but no matter how you define it whne you take the numbers and start to look at how big a percentage of people's dispoable income they spend on taxes (remembering that the poor still pay sales and other taxes like FICA etc if they have an income) all of a sudden that already tiped ballence stands on its side.
I have never met a single iPhone user who has had extensive use of a smart phone. Most iPhone users probably couldn't even come up with a somewhat accurate definition of a smart phone. Most probably know nothing about PalmOS or WindowsCE. Your remark is FUD, at best.
I used a Palm Smartphone for a year before I got my iPhone (in january) and I can say that the iPhone is a far better product in every way that I have used the two devices (and I troubleshoot professionally so this is not a "I don't know how to use it" issue).
The Palm device crashed regularly (both with third party software, and cleaned of everything) and then when it rebooted would reboot with the radio off (so I would miss calls when it crashed while I wasn't watching). I have had a few iPhone crashes, and it reboots with the radio on, so I don't have that issue.
There were a long list of issues with the UI and basic problems with the way the OS used the radio, like every time it transitioned back onto the network it would freeze for 5-10 seconds... when you are in the subway and are going in-and-out of coverage this translated into a mostly-frozen device that is burning through its battery fast.
I have also spent some time with Winodws CE devices (I was responcible for supporting them at one point). I never had one myself for longer than a couple of days, and it did feel better than a Palm in some ways. But I always felt like the UI was a crampt uncomfortable attempt to shoe-horn a desktop UI onto a device that was not ready for it.
It is not just the dependance on the processor that makes the "slower" FireWire 400 beat out USB 2.0 (the fast one... whatever they are calling that today). A rough outline:
1) FireWire allows devices to allocate a specific slice of time to their needs for a period of time. This slice of time can then be used exclusivly by the device to transmit that round of data. This keeps devices from interupting the flow durring those periods. USB has a part-way analog to this, but it is not nearly as efficent.
2) FireWire allows any device to talk to any other without requiring a CPU's intervention. So if you are transfering from on HD to another connected via FireWire the data never has to flow thorugh the CPU (unlike on USB).
3) FireWire has explicit support for DMA (direct memory access), so when transfering data to and from an internal HD the CPU only has to grant access to the bits on disk and the FireWire support chips can handle streaming the data from one storage device to the other (like #2, but lightly different).
4) Latency can be gaurenteeded through a mechanism in the time-slice arbitration system. So audio devices can have the guaranteed chanels. On USB it is a constant fight... that does not work for music devices if you start loading up the USB system. This works well with the DMA thing, so even if your CPU is busy at the moment it does not have to make the context switch before accepting the data.
Most of these differences are inherint in the basic design of the two protocols. And they cause the FireWire bridge chips to be significaly more expensive (still we are talking a mater of a dollar or two). I have not heard any good analasis of USB 3 yet (since the spec just came out), but I suspect that USB 3.0 will still be saddled with the legacy of USB 1.0 (which was designed with mice an keyboards in mind... everything else seems to have been showhorned in).
This is done all across the US, and the main reason is that the taxes you are going to pay depend on where you buy the product. And not just depending on what state (but that is the biggest difference), but also depending on the particular city. So any advertising would have to take that into account making national campains would be unworkable.
So rather than that everything is adversised without taxes.
Most of the general cheeses are pretty bland stuff. However, you should go into a grocey store in Wisconsin and look in the "specialty cheeses" section, and you will find a wide selection of cheeses that routinely win international competitions.
That being said, they still tend to cede the whole area of "stinky cheeses" to the french.
And I have lived in Europe and Wisconsin and enjoy (and pay for) good cheese. I am living in California now, and miss the cheese.
The argument that oil is the reason that we went in to Iraq keeps comming up, but it is a bit rediculoius. Before the war the West was the one that prevented Iraq from selling oil (except the limited amount in the "oild for food" program). Before that Iraq was happy to sell it to us. And now Iraq is a net importer of oil, since all the infrastructure was hevily damaged in the fighting (both the old-style war, and the insugency). And that sort of damage was completely predictable (in fact the militaty commanders were told to limit the damage as much as possible).
So evreyone knew that the war would reduce the amount of oil comming out of Iraq severely, and that if the US started taking the oil that the rest of the world would protest heavily (including OPEC). Where exactly does the logic that we went in there for oil come in?
I recently took the train from Philadelphia to San Francisco, and the trip was really nice. It took 3 1/2 days, but was in the same price range as flight tickets (it really depends on when you buy them). The ride was pleasent, and people aboard the train were very willing to talk (unlike on a flight). And the views were absolutely gorgeous.
If you have the time, I would recomend the trip.
Oh.. and if you are willing to sit in a chair the whole way you can get the trip for something like $100. I am not going to recommend that, but it is possible.
The seller brings the house to the table. All of the money that is brought to the table is from the buyer's side (which includes the institution that makes the loan). So while the seller might be paying the realtor, they are paying with money gotten from the buyer. It might be presented as otherwise, but that is just a fiction.
The only problem with those NDAs is that more often than not the information you get about stuff further out than 6 months is completely wrong. It is not that the companies are deliberately lying to you, it is that there is no way they can predict the future. So the CIOs make all sorts of decisions about where they are going to go, and set aside future money to pay for things that never come to pass only to change directions completely when the actual product rolls out the door. In other words they get about as much real time to make decisions as they do with Apple, and wait 6 months to implement anyways. Only they have wasted a lot of their people's time (and wages) trying to prepare for something that was never going to be.
I have seen this over and over. The only reason that the CIOs come back to play this wasteful game over and over again is that it plays to their egos to be getting "inside information".
You are assuming that they did any real work in developing this setup. Instead they put together pieces of work that the OSx86 community had been working on, and put together some hardware that could run it and started selling the combination. They don't seem like the type of company that is going to be putting many development dollars into much of anything.