Apple however isn't content with this, because it's their opinion that Flash for Mac/iPhone takes up too much resources, which will harm the "browsing experience" and drain the battery.
True. Flash on mobile browsers might be too much (hardware wise) for the current generation of smartphones. But we're getting there fast.
Also, a proper flash plug-in would mean arbitrary code (which in Apple speak is code word for communism), and we can't have that sort of thing, no sir. Users must be protected from it at all cost.
Of course I'd prefer not to see an ad at all, but that's irrelevant.
We would prefer [...] our media without any ads but since that's not possible
Great outlook! I love how some people treat ads as if they where a inevitable fact of life.
Eating food is inevitable, rain is inevitable, dying is inevitable. Ads are just a byproduct of our economic system, we can easily get rid of them. This is a choice we make. It's up to us to decide in which kind of economic system we want to live in.
That's a bullshit excuse.
Street Fighter 4 has been released on both xbox 360 and PC. It's the same *exact* game. On PC, online play is enabled through "live - games for windows" (or whatever the hell it is called), bottom line: microsoft provides online gaming for both platforms.
Not only that, but they are explicitly trying to market their pc and xbox online services as a single, unified product... Yet, they still won't allow cross-platform play.
So, as an ignorant American I am baffled by the rest of the list. The Sharp SH-06A is the no. 2 phone? It seems to be a fairly boring clamshell phone with a nice camera. Am I missing something?
You are indeed missing something. The Japanese cell phone market is completely different from the European or US market. The whole things is well explained in this New York Times article
Basically it's a software vs hardware thing, and it boils down to this: Unlike the rest of the world market, which is software oriented right now (and this one of the reason apple is doing so well), the Japanese cell phone market is actually much more technologically oriented.
All it takes for a phone to be "cool" in the west now is a big touchscreen and facebook/twitter apps (and let's face it, it also probably needs to be an apple product). But seriously, what sells phone is software: email, IM, internet apps, etc. What sells in Japan is hardware features, because internet-enabled cell phones aren't a novelty there anymore, internet at 3G speeds is old news (2001), it's just part of what a phone is supposed to do, not the selling point anymore.
Then the form factor, this is a completely subjective thing, you only find the Sharp SH-06A boring because it's a clamshell phone... and this is exactly why it is cool in Japan. The candybar (a la iphone) phones are seen as business-like/boring there. The vast majority of japanese phones are clamshells but that form factor is basically dead in the west, it had its time, but it's gone out of fashion.
The Sharp SH-06A is a great phone, I'd buy in a heartbeat if I could. Why?
- 848×480 resolution: There are very few non-japanese phone with those kind of resolutions. Yet this is a major feature as far as browsing goes, plus videos can be watched in their full native resolution glory. Resolution is one of those area where the iphone dominant position is actually holding the market back (by setting low norm/expectations).
- High quality Sharp AQUOS screen (also a touchscreen by the way)
- 10MP camera
- High-res video recording
- It looks a lot cooler than any iphone/blackberry/palm!
So, buy or don't buy, jailbreak or don't jailbreak, but don't claim Apple --
translated version: buy or don't buy apple, but whatever you do, never criticize them.
I can understand some people liking apple, but for them to be so rabidly defended on slashdot, when their phone platform is totally locked down and prevents people from freely distributing the software they wrote (isn't that the *exact opposite* of what open source and free software stands for?) that's just something I don't get.
Sure it would be better if that database were open instead of proprietary. But quite bluntly, until someone defines an open standard
Apple doesn't give a shit about open or standard, that's why they keep the ipod firmware and database encrypted and closed. They don't want the users (or the competition) to "mess" with their hardware.
Good for them, in the meantime I'll just buy my mp3 players (and phones) from companies that don't act like paranoid control freaks.
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.
In what world is drag and dropping a bunch of mp3 files on a removable device "practically insane"? Do you also need itunes to manage every file on your hard drive?
There are a lot of players (Cowon etc.) out there that *do* use a database and offer modern features (playlists, metadata info etc.) without forcing users to use a piece of shit bloated software to move files around.
Sorry, some of us still cling to that "useless obsession" called doing things our way.
I can go to Chicago (six hours by car, probably 10 by rail) then to St. Louis (nine hours by rail).
Rail slower than car? What is it that Amtrak does wrong? City to City travel is almost always faster by rail than by car in most developed part of the world (at least in Europe, Japan etc.)
Some independent online stores (like Junodownloads) also say they watermark tracks, but I haven't been able to verify it so far. I don't know what kind of watermarking these stores use (if any) but embedding customers email in the files is clearly a bully move from Apple.
"Wanna leak our files on p2p? How about we leak your personal info? It would be too bad if some spammer found a way to harvest all those valid email addresses from itunes files.... too bad really..."
Guess what? If I buy music, I also want to be able to share it with my friends (friends!=p2p) without being traced on ending up sued.
Buying cds/vinyls and ripping them might still be the way to go in the end... Or are we going to have to pay an ever bigger premium for non-watermarked digital files?
Last time I checked Germany and Europe were part of the west.
Europe and the US of A just have a very different conception of what constitute freedom of speech and hate speech. Europe has gone through the holocaust, after which they said "never again" and decided to ban some ideas from public discourse.
You may disagree with hate speech laws, but the important thing is to understand why these laws were voted in the fist place.
Also, good luck with calling George W. Bush a fucking moron on network television...
"We don't believe that society can allow the free consumption of content to persist"
That quote made me think and I realized that my whole life is based on free consumption of content: radio (streaming/podcast), music, documentaries, tv shows, movies, porn, games.
The web and p2p are by far my main source of entertainment and information, this stuff is what I spend most of my free time on, this is who I am.
Trying to put an end to that is no less than a direct attack on my way of life.
And in the unlikely event that Twitter does become more that than, thanks to the internet archive, we will be able to remind you of your previous commitments.
Politics is dominated by the extreme left Extreme left ? Do words have lost all their original meaning in the world you live in?
Being extreme left wing means being in favor of a state controlled economy, wealth redistribution and a revolution with the working class taking over. Remember that 20th century thing called communism ? That's what far left is. Google is a corporation, and some of its employees are getting very wealthy thanks to the stock market system. This can hardly be qualified as left wing politics, let alone extreme left.
American conservatives labeling American liberals as extreme left wing... I think we're going to see a lot of that over the next the next six months.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple however isn't content with this, because it's their opinion that Flash for Mac/iPhone takes up too much resources, which will harm the "browsing experience" and drain the battery.
True. Flash on mobile browsers might be too much (hardware wise) for the current generation of smartphones. But we're getting there fast.
Also, a proper flash plug-in would mean arbitrary code (which in Apple speak is code word for communism), and we can't have that sort of thing, no sir. Users must be protected from it at all cost.
Apple: Making trusted computing cool since 2008.
Of course I'd prefer not to see an ad at all, but that's irrelevant.
We would prefer [...] our media without any ads but since that's not possible
Great outlook! I love how some people treat ads as if they where a inevitable fact of life.
Eating food is inevitable, rain is inevitable, dying is inevitable. Ads are just a byproduct of our economic system, we can easily get rid of them. This is a choice we make. It's up to us to decide in which kind of economic system we want to live in.
That's a bullshit excuse.
Street Fighter 4 has been released on both xbox 360 and PC. It's the same *exact* game. On PC, online play is enabled through "live - games for windows" (or whatever the hell it is called), bottom line: microsoft provides online gaming for both platforms.
Not only that, but they are explicitly trying to market their pc and xbox online services as a single, unified product... Yet, they still won't allow cross-platform play.
So, as an ignorant American I am baffled by the rest of the list. The Sharp SH-06A is the no. 2 phone? It seems to be a fairly boring clamshell phone with a nice camera. Am I missing something?
You are indeed missing something. The Japanese cell phone market is completely different from the European or US market. The whole things is well explained in this New York Times article
Basically it's a software vs hardware thing, and it boils down to this: Unlike the rest of the world market, which is software oriented right now (and this one of the reason apple is doing so well), the Japanese cell phone market is actually much more technologically oriented.
All it takes for a phone to be "cool" in the west now is a big touchscreen and facebook/twitter apps (and let's face it, it also probably needs to be an apple product). But seriously, what sells phone is software: email, IM, internet apps, etc. What sells in Japan is hardware features, because internet-enabled cell phones aren't a novelty there anymore, internet at 3G speeds is old news (2001), it's just part of what a phone is supposed to do, not the selling point anymore.
Then the form factor, this is a completely subjective thing, you only find the Sharp SH-06A boring because it's a clamshell phone... and this is exactly why it is cool in Japan. The candybar (a la iphone) phones are seen as business-like/boring there. The vast majority of japanese phones are clamshells but that form factor is basically dead in the west, it had its time, but it's gone out of fashion.
The Sharp SH-06A is a great phone, I'd buy in a heartbeat if I could. Why?
- 848×480 resolution: There are very few non-japanese phone with those kind of resolutions. Yet this is a major feature as far as browsing goes, plus videos can be watched in their full native resolution glory. Resolution is one of those area where the iphone dominant position is actually holding the market back (by setting low norm/expectations).
- High quality Sharp AQUOS screen (also a touchscreen by the way)
- 10MP camera
- High-res video recording
- It looks a lot cooler than any iphone/blackberry/palm!
So, buy or don't buy, jailbreak or don't jailbreak, but don't claim Apple --
translated version: buy or don't buy apple, but whatever you do, never criticize them.
I can understand some people liking apple, but for them to be so rabidly defended on slashdot, when their phone platform is totally locked down and prevents people from freely distributing the software they wrote (isn't that the *exact opposite* of what open source and free software stands for?) that's just something I don't get.
Sure it would be better if that database were open instead of proprietary. But quite bluntly, until someone defines an open standard
Apple doesn't give a shit about open or standard, that's why they keep the ipod firmware and database encrypted and closed. They don't want the users (or the competition) to "mess" with their hardware.
Good for them, in the meantime I'll just buy my mp3 players (and phones) from companies that don't act like paranoid control freaks.
This place is always against proprietary, unless its apple proprietary and then BEND OVER BABY!
You don't understand, when apple are restricting their users, they are doing it for their own good!
Good luck with that, with today's portable media players being 1~160GB+ capacity it would be practically insane to manage files by hand. Let go of this useless obsession and learn to use metadata on your files. You'll probably even like smart playlists once you start using them.
In what world is drag and dropping a bunch of mp3 files on a removable device "practically insane"? Do you also need itunes to manage every file on your hard drive?
There are a lot of players (Cowon etc.) out there that *do* use a database and offer modern features (playlists, metadata info etc.) without forcing users to use a piece of shit bloated software to move files around.
Sorry, some of us still cling to that "useless obsession" called doing things our way.
I can go to Chicago (six hours by car, probably 10 by rail) then to St. Louis (nine hours by rail).
Rail slower than car? What is it that Amtrak does wrong? City to City travel is almost always faster by rail than by car in most developed part of the world (at least in Europe, Japan etc.)
Because Apple doesn't advertise iPods as being open devices with open firmware?
Hurray for DRM, vendors lock in and no interoperability. They are all ok as long as marketing doesn't say otherwise.
By that same logic we should expect everything to be proprietary, locked down and DRM'd by default...
*They also encrypt firmware on all new ipods, specifically to prevent people from installing alternate firmware such as Rockbox.
Seriously, encrypting firmware? How evil is that? How can apple apologists even try to justify that?
Note to keygen creators: I do not want to hear your brother's crappy techno remixes when using your app.
It's called chiptune
Kids these days...
Some independent online stores (like Junodownloads) also say they watermark tracks, but I haven't been able to verify it so far. I don't know what kind of watermarking these stores use (if any) but embedding customers email in the files is clearly a bully move from Apple.
"Wanna leak our files on p2p? How about we leak your personal info? It would be too bad if some spammer found a way to harvest all those valid email addresses from itunes files.... too bad really..."
Guess what? If I buy music, I also want to be able to share it with my friends (friends!=p2p) without being traced on ending up sued.
Buying cds/vinyls and ripping them might still be the way to go in the end... Or are we going to have to pay an ever bigger premium for non-watermarked digital files?
Users using the social networking site called Twitter have reported that the site was "blockade[ed] today by the mainland" of China
Users using the electronic messaging technology called "email" also reported that the site was blocked.
Last time I checked Germany and Europe were part of the west.
Europe and the US of A just have a very different conception of what constitute freedom of speech and hate speech.
Europe has gone through the holocaust, after which they said "never again" and decided to ban some ideas from public discourse. You may disagree with hate speech laws, but the important thing is to understand why these laws were voted in the fist place.
Also, good luck with calling George W. Bush a fucking moron on network television...
If you want an idea of how direct democracy would work
Come to Switzerland. We're doing ok, I promise.
Despite all the uninformed taxi drivers.
Mod Parent UP
True. However, if Dick Cheney wasn't involved, he must go to bed every night saying thanks to those who did do it.
The first rule of the Dark Lord Nightly Ritural is - you do not talk about the Dark Lord Nightly Ritural.
What cartoon was it? A guy dies and goes to heaven expecting his virgins and low and behold, there they are: a bunch of geeks at their computers.
It's far worst than that in the cartoon. They are playing Magic: The Gathering.
I am Jonathan Zdziarski, and so's my wife!
I love that fact that this has been modded informative.
So that's what the Members of the European Parliament have been doing while being paid 14'000 euro (22'200$) per month.
The system works!
"We don't believe that society can allow the free consumption of content to persist"
That quote made me think and I realized that my whole life is based on free consumption of content: radio (streaming/podcast), music, documentaries, tv shows, movies, porn, games.
The web and p2p are by far my main source of entertainment and information, this stuff is what I spend most of my free time on, this is who I am.
Trying to put an end to that is no less than a direct attack on my way of life.
And in the unlikely event that Twitter does become more that than, thanks to the internet archive, we will be able to remind you of your previous commitments.
Being extreme left wing means being in favor of a state controlled economy, wealth redistribution and a revolution with the working class taking over. Remember that 20th century thing called communism ? That's what far left is.
Google is a corporation, and some of its employees are getting very wealthy thanks to the stock market system. This can hardly be qualified as left wing politics, let alone extreme left.
American conservatives labeling American liberals as extreme left wing... I think we're going to see a lot of that over the next the next six months.