Yes, it's accounting rules. The iPhone is accounted for differently (subscription) vs. the iPod Touch (sale). Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules, Apple is able to provide updates to the iPhone as part of the subscription, but not the iPod touch.
Essentially, if Apple shipped an update to the iPod Touch, then it would have to record all the revenue from the sale of that iPod Touch in the quarter in which the update was applied. If you buy one in Q1 and then eight months later in Q3 update it to 3.0, then Apple has to record the sale in Q3... Until next time you update. And so on.
This is the same accounting practice that requires that Apple record the sales of the iPhone over a year, so of all the money they made by selling iPhones in July, they can only record 1/4 of it in that quarter, 1/4 in the next quarter, and so on. This is why in analyses of Apple's financials and revenue lately, there's been a lot of talk of the numbers Apple is providing vs. the actual amount of money they have.
I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.
This is definitely true. As someone who was around making websites (not especially professionally, mind you) on a 14.4 modem, I can vouch for this. This is the reasoning behind the LOWSRC attribute. <IMG SRC="image.jpeg" LOWSRC="image.gif"> would load the (presumably low-res) GIF, then load the high-res JPEG. People on 14.4 kbaud modems would get to load the 'whole' page sooner, then load the 'enhanced' bits extra. It was a compromise that allowed pages to use images, yet still be usable for modem users.
I suspect someone did something naughty, because now the entire site is down. I guess whoever designed it doesn't know that much about security after all.
I've always thought of evolution as the furtherance of a species through gradual genetic mutations over time. What is described here I've always thought of more as 'natural selection', whereby a specific trait produces an advantage in nature that leads to a higher rate of survival for those that possess the trait.
The difference being that natural selection is one aspect of how evolution occurs, but it's not required; a specific mutation may not directly provide a benefit in the environment; it may take several different mutations to interact before there's a tangible benefit to organisms possessing it, but each one is a part of the organism's evolution as a whole.
That said, maybe I've been thinking of them wrong, but that's how they make the most sense to me.
Interesting, I didn't know that VMWare was one of those companies that was afraid to have their product compared to those of others. Do they have something to hide?
I wasn't a VMWare user already, but hearing this kind of thing, if true, makes me even less inclined to try their product. If they're going to tell me I can't talk about a product I've paid for, well, I'm not going to pay for it.
You forgot DisplayPort, DVI, and VGA connectors, an ExpressCard slot, Firewire, and an integrated colour calibrator.
I'm surprised they don't have serial and parallel ports on this thing as well, but I guess they needed to make room for the four exhaust ports for the cooling fans. Something tells me that this 11 lbs behemoth moves a lot of air. I wonder what the battery life is, an hour maybe?
In Montreal at least, you can go with Colbanet's ADSL2+ service. They've got their own equipment, separate DSLAMs and pipes, and don't rely on Bell for anything.
A previous roommate worked for them on their ADSL2+ rollout. Turns out it was cheaper for them to move the customers they had on Bell's equipment (where they didn't pay for bandwidth) over to their own (where they did). Pretty crazy.
If you're in Montreal, give them a call and see if they cover your area. If they do, they might be worth the switch.
You seem to have used my post as a reason to talk about yourself. This I don't really understand. Regardless...
1. Part of the marketing around Apple products assumes exclusivity, that's why so much effort is made into making their devices look a certain way and why their stuff is more expensive than anything equivalent.
The 'Apple is more expensive' line has been debunked over and over. The reality is that Apple isn't trying to gain market share at any cost, and since there are no competitors producing macs (well, not legitimately anyway) they can keep their prices reasonable, make a profit, and put that back into R&D, whereas companies like Dell have to slash their margins in order to sell more units and compete on price.
2. As I've said several times before on Slashdot, I'm 47 years old and have been a techie in the telecoms and computer industry over here in the UK since I was 20. I've used (and still do) Linux, UNIX (Solaris & SCO) and Windows for years yet never once found any reason to buy any Apple product.
Well good for you. I've never found any reason to buy any Ford, BMW, Sun, or Prada product. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for them, or that people who buy their products don't enjoy using them. I have, however, purchased several Apple products, but only after products from Dell, HP, and so on proved themselves to be unreliable and Windows proved cumbersome and insecure.
3. I'm pretty interested in computers and notice what people are using around me, whether I'm at an airport, in the office or at a customer site. I see myriads of people using Windows, quite a large number of Linux (mainly Red Hat) servers and a few (SuSE and Ubuntu) desktops or occasional laptop. I've seen a total of five Apple machines - a notebook owned by an American instructor on a router course I did, a couple of students posing in Starbucks with a Macbook, and the one owned by a friend of mine that was given to him by his boss (who didn't know what to do with it) that now sits in a dusty box in the corner because he doesn't know what to do with it either.
Again, good for you. I'm very interested in computers, and going to conferences, meetups, and events, I find that Apple products are in good supply. Three years ago, half of the laptops at a given conference were Macs. A few weeks ago I went to another conference, and this one was nearly 100% Apple. And none of these conferences were the least bit Apple-related, incidentally. The only conference I went to at which that this wasn't the case was a Microsoft conference, but at that one, almost no one had a laptop out.
4. I work in converged telecoms and VoIP solutions and the reality is that Linux has basically trashed the commercial UNIX market when it comes to being the core OS of workhorse servers that drive tens of thousands of extensions, trunks, voicemail boxes, etc. Additionally, Windows gets used for the administration servers so that there's better integration into corporate intranets. No mention of Apple whatsoever, not even any administration clients.
Ok, so Linux is used on servers, which isn't news, and people write apps for Windows. None of this is a big surprise. It's a question of market penetration, and Windows nets you a bigger piece of the pie. That doesn't mean that Apple isn't making significant strides and rapidly gaining in mindshare.
What gets me is that you seem to have packaged this rant up for delivery whenever the least opportunity presents itself. Not a single measure of what you said has anything to do with what I said. You simply used a position that you disagree with, apparently passionately and vehemently, to spring off into your own personal diatribe. That's kind of sad.
Ballmer has also stated that the iPhone and RIM don't have 'momentum' (despite selling in colossal numbers), whereas the real market momentum is in 'windows mobile and android'. Which no one buys.
It's all marketing and PR BS. Apple's in a fantastic position, and will continue on that trend. Microsoft may have more money, people, and market share, but they've got nothing worth using it all for. The best they can come up with is a few stolen features, a few half-assed 'innovations', the occasional good idea, and a lot of competitors besieging them on all sides.
Probably by looking at the source code. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are all open-source. This is why they're used everywhere, including in recent GNOME browsers, QT 4, on Symbian, Android, and WebOS on the Palm Pre.
The reason NOT to do it with Adobe Air is the same as the reason not to use any cross-platform toolkit - all you end up with is the lowest common denominator experience and functionality.
It should be definitely doable to make Bespin Gears-aware, so that you don't need your internet connection for the duration - just when you're done editing, want to save to the server, etc.
The problem with that is that you end up with a graphical interface being shipped pixel by pixel over the network to your machine, and your keystrokes shipped back to the server.
With Bespin, for example, your editing work happens on the local end, and is sync'ed over the network to the server.
Yes, web apps are even more efficient than X11 for such things. Crazy, huh?
From my understanding of the DMCA, Apple is entirely correct that this is a DMCA violation - despite the fact that it shouldn't be illegal, the real problem is the law, not Apple's interpretation of it.
On my iPhone, I use an app called SBSettings. By doing a swipe gesture across the status bar at the top, I get a drop-down that allows me to quickly and easily enable/disable WiFi or 3G, or to adjust the brightness. This single feature alone is what I jailbreak for. I also like to be able to SSH into (or out of) my iPhone, and having a UNIX terminal that I can do basic administration from.
Theming is nice, there are some neat apps like MxTube, which lets you download YouTube videos to store and watch offline (but not re-share), but in the end, there are things for everyone. Unfortunately, quick and easy piracy is now one of those things.
It's the same familiar concept that encourages people to use a lot of products â"Âwhat Palm was offering was the least worst. If you hated WindowsCE/PocketPC, your only other choice was PalmOS. Despite how awful it was, it was the least-worst option.
The best PDA on the market these days, especially if you have a Mac on the desktop, is the iPod Touch; the best smartphone is the iPhone. Opinions may vary, of course, but 'PDAs' aren't dead, they've just been absorbed into other products, namely phones and MP3 players.
There's also netbooks, if you want something with a little more power but still portable (and Linux-able).
More like the courts are saying once and for all that the unfounded claims being made by people about vaccines causing autism have no basis in reality, which any good doctor could have told you.
Hey, we need to get our customers back, so let's add a useless 3D element to our movies that everybody has been able to do but nobody has cared about in the last fifty years!
Not just useless - in some cases, detrimental. Because of the visual impairment I have and the way my brain learned to deal with it, I don't have proper stereoscopic vision. My brain uses the picture from the dominant eye, and then fills in whatever's left with my other eye.
Aside from not having any depth perception, this also means that '3D' films are, at best, not 3D, and at worst, unwatchable and migraine-inducing. More 3D movies means less movies I can actually watch, and thus less money to the studios from myself and other people with visual impairments.
When I read the poster's question, I heard 'I'm an open-source geek, and I think everyone should use open-source software because it's inherently better. I just got a job at a university and I'm sure that if I tell them open-source is better enough times, they'll switch. I don't know anything about how universities or software licenses work, but that's probably not important. What do I do?'
There are a variety of reasons why this might not be a good idea. If everyone uses OpenOffice, switching to MS Office, with a different layout of features and a different interface, will confuse the hell out of them. After four years of OO, they'll be surprisingly sub-standard at mere document editing compared to their peers.
Not saying it's not a bad idea, but forcing a massive change in university could be detrimental to students down the road. There are far too many things to consider here for someone who isn't even in a position to know what's being paid, let alone influence what's being paid for.
Part of the issue I've always had with Mono is that, by its nature, it's playing catch-up.
Let's say Microsoft spends a year paying programmers full-time to develop and implement.Net 4.0. After they release it, the Mono developers then have to spend time figuring out what's new in 4.0 and how to implement it, then spend time implementing it, then test it against Microsoft's implementation.
They're always going to be at least (development time of new features) behind Microsoft, and that doesn't really appeal to me. It's interesting as a new platform, but they can only innovate too much without accomplishing the same cross-platform incompatibilities we criticize Microsoft for all the time.
Because, you know, no company ever files for a patent on something they come up with that they might want to use, but don't necessarily have plans to use.
With the number of patents Apple has and files for, I think it's more likely that this is a 'concept art' kind of patent, on an idea that they might pursue, or might not.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's accounting rules. The iPhone is accounted for differently (subscription) vs. the iPod Touch (sale). Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules, Apple is able to provide updates to the iPhone as part of the subscription, but not the iPod touch.
Essentially, if Apple shipped an update to the iPod Touch, then it would have to record all the revenue from the sale of that iPod Touch in the quarter in which the update was applied. If you buy one in Q1 and then eight months later in Q3 update it to 3.0, then Apple has to record the sale in Q3... Until next time you update. And so on.
This is the same accounting practice that requires that Apple record the sales of the iPhone over a year, so of all the money they made by selling iPhones in July, they can only record 1/4 of it in that quarter, 1/4 in the next quarter, and so on. This is why in analyses of Apple's financials and revenue lately, there's been a lot of talk of the numbers Apple is providing vs. the actual amount of money they have.
as if young males are completely devoid of taste, and just want some drunk slut in a bikini making an ass of herself in front of Brett Michaels
Is this a real TV show? Please link to torrent, thanks.
I even remember one early commentator saying that text-only web pages were actually *better* for people on 14.4k baud modems.
This is definitely true. As someone who was around making websites (not especially professionally, mind you) on a 14.4 modem, I can vouch for this. This is the reasoning behind the LOWSRC attribute. <IMG SRC="image.jpeg" LOWSRC="image.gif"> would load the (presumably low-res) GIF, then load the high-res JPEG. People on 14.4 kbaud modems would get to load the 'whole' page sooner, then load the 'enhanced' bits extra. It was a compromise that allowed pages to use images, yet still be usable for modem users.
I suspect someone did something naughty, because now the entire site is down. I guess whoever designed it doesn't know that much about security after all.
I've always thought of evolution as the furtherance of a species through gradual genetic mutations over time. What is described here I've always thought of more as 'natural selection', whereby a specific trait produces an advantage in nature that leads to a higher rate of survival for those that possess the trait.
The difference being that natural selection is one aspect of how evolution occurs, but it's not required; a specific mutation may not directly provide a benefit in the environment; it may take several different mutations to interact before there's a tangible benefit to organisms possessing it, but each one is a part of the organism's evolution as a whole.
That said, maybe I've been thinking of them wrong, but that's how they make the most sense to me.
And they don't get nearly as much use as all the other alternatives out there.
Interesting, I didn't know that VMWare was one of those companies that was afraid to have their product compared to those of others. Do they have something to hide?
I wasn't a VMWare user already, but hearing this kind of thing, if true, makes me even less inclined to try their product. If they're going to tell me I can't talk about a product I've paid for, well, I'm not going to pay for it.
You forgot DisplayPort, DVI, and VGA connectors, an ExpressCard slot, Firewire, and an integrated colour calibrator.
I'm surprised they don't have serial and parallel ports on this thing as well, but I guess they needed to make room for the four exhaust ports for the cooling fans. Something tells me that this 11 lbs behemoth moves a lot of air. I wonder what the battery life is, an hour maybe?
Not to nitpick, but the Thinkpad line was sold to Lenovo ages ago. IBM isn't shipping this notebook at all.
In Montreal at least, you can go with Colbanet's ADSL2+ service. They've got their own equipment, separate DSLAMs and pipes, and don't rely on Bell for anything.
A previous roommate worked for them on their ADSL2+ rollout. Turns out it was cheaper for them to move the customers they had on Bell's equipment (where they didn't pay for bandwidth) over to their own (where they did). Pretty crazy.
If you're in Montreal, give them a call and see if they cover your area. If they do, they might be worth the switch.
You seem to have used my post as a reason to talk about yourself. This I don't really understand. Regardless...
1. Part of the marketing around Apple products assumes exclusivity, that's why so much effort is made into making their devices look a certain way and why their stuff is more expensive than anything equivalent.
The 'Apple is more expensive' line has been debunked over and over. The reality is that Apple isn't trying to gain market share at any cost, and since there are no competitors producing macs (well, not legitimately anyway) they can keep their prices reasonable, make a profit, and put that back into R&D, whereas companies like Dell have to slash their margins in order to sell more units and compete on price.
2. As I've said several times before on Slashdot, I'm 47 years old and have been a techie in the telecoms and computer industry over here in the UK since I was 20. I've used (and still do) Linux, UNIX (Solaris & SCO) and Windows for years yet never once found any reason to buy any Apple product.
Well good for you. I've never found any reason to buy any Ford, BMW, Sun, or Prada product. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for them, or that people who buy their products don't enjoy using them. I have, however, purchased several Apple products, but only after products from Dell, HP, and so on proved themselves to be unreliable and Windows proved cumbersome and insecure.
3. I'm pretty interested in computers and notice what people are using around me, whether I'm at an airport, in the office or at a customer site. I see myriads of people using Windows, quite a large number of Linux (mainly Red Hat) servers and a few (SuSE and Ubuntu) desktops or occasional laptop. I've seen a total of five Apple machines - a notebook owned by an American instructor on a router course I did, a couple of students posing in Starbucks with a Macbook, and the one owned by a friend of mine that was given to him by his boss (who didn't know what to do with it) that now sits in a dusty box in the corner because he doesn't know what to do with it either.
Again, good for you. I'm very interested in computers, and going to conferences, meetups, and events, I find that Apple products are in good supply. Three years ago, half of the laptops at a given conference were Macs. A few weeks ago I went to another conference, and this one was nearly 100% Apple. And none of these conferences were the least bit Apple-related, incidentally. The only conference I went to at which that this wasn't the case was a Microsoft conference, but at that one, almost no one had a laptop out.
4. I work in converged telecoms and VoIP solutions and the reality is that Linux has basically trashed the commercial UNIX market when it comes to being the core OS of workhorse servers that drive tens of thousands of extensions, trunks, voicemail boxes, etc. Additionally, Windows gets used for the administration servers so that there's better integration into corporate intranets. No mention of Apple whatsoever, not even any administration clients.
Ok, so Linux is used on servers, which isn't news, and people write apps for Windows. None of this is a big surprise. It's a question of market penetration, and Windows nets you a bigger piece of the pie. That doesn't mean that Apple isn't making significant strides and rapidly gaining in mindshare.
What gets me is that you seem to have packaged this rant up for delivery whenever the least opportunity presents itself. Not a single measure of what you said has anything to do with what I said. You simply used a position that you disagree with, apparently passionately and vehemently, to spring off into your own personal diatribe. That's kind of sad.
Ballmer has also stated that the iPhone and RIM don't have 'momentum' (despite selling in colossal numbers), whereas the real market momentum is in 'windows mobile and android'. Which no one buys.
It's all marketing and PR BS. Apple's in a fantastic position, and will continue on that trend. Microsoft may have more money, people, and market share, but they've got nothing worth using it all for. The best they can come up with is a few stolen features, a few half-assed 'innovations', the occasional good idea, and a lot of competitors besieging them on all sides.
Probably by looking at the source code. WebKit, WebCore, and JavaScriptCore are all open-source. This is why they're used everywhere, including in recent GNOME browsers, QT 4, on Symbian, Android, and WebOS on the Palm Pre.
Google Gears does this.
The reason NOT to do it with Adobe Air is the same as the reason not to use any cross-platform toolkit - all you end up with is the lowest common denominator experience and functionality.
It should be definitely doable to make Bespin Gears-aware, so that you don't need your internet connection for the duration - just when you're done editing, want to save to the server, etc.
The problem with that is that you end up with a graphical interface being shipped pixel by pixel over the network to your machine, and your keystrokes shipped back to the server.
With Bespin, for example, your editing work happens on the local end, and is sync'ed over the network to the server.
Yes, web apps are even more efficient than X11 for such things. Crazy, huh?
There's been an abundance for the last eight years, the cost has dropped substantially.
From my understanding of the DMCA, Apple is entirely correct that this is a DMCA violation - despite the fact that it shouldn't be illegal, the real problem is the law, not Apple's interpretation of it.
On my iPhone, I use an app called SBSettings. By doing a swipe gesture across the status bar at the top, I get a drop-down that allows me to quickly and easily enable/disable WiFi or 3G, or to adjust the brightness. This single feature alone is what I jailbreak for. I also like to be able to SSH into (or out of) my iPhone, and having a UNIX terminal that I can do basic administration from.
Theming is nice, there are some neat apps like MxTube, which lets you download YouTube videos to store and watch offline (but not re-share), but in the end, there are things for everyone. Unfortunately, quick and easy piracy is now one of those things.
It's the same familiar concept that encourages people to use a lot of products â"Âwhat Palm was offering was the least worst. If you hated WindowsCE/PocketPC, your only other choice was PalmOS. Despite how awful it was, it was the least-worst option.
The best PDA on the market these days, especially if you have a Mac on the desktop, is the iPod Touch; the best smartphone is the iPhone. Opinions may vary, of course, but 'PDAs' aren't dead, they've just been absorbed into other products, namely phones and MP3 players.
There's also netbooks, if you want something with a little more power but still portable (and Linux-able).
More like the courts are saying once and for all that the unfounded claims being made by people about vaccines causing autism have no basis in reality, which any good doctor could have told you.
Hey, we need to get our customers back, so let's add a useless 3D element to our movies that everybody has been able to do but nobody has cared about in the last fifty years!
Not just useless - in some cases, detrimental. Because of the visual impairment I have and the way my brain learned to deal with it, I don't have proper stereoscopic vision. My brain uses the picture from the dominant eye, and then fills in whatever's left with my other eye.
Aside from not having any depth perception, this also means that '3D' films are, at best, not 3D, and at worst, unwatchable and migraine-inducing. More 3D movies means less movies I can actually watch, and thus less money to the studios from myself and other people with visual impairments.
You realize patents only last 20 years, right? Some of those "vital" x86 components must have expired or be pretty close.
Only if you want to make a 20-year-old processor.
When I read the poster's question, I heard 'I'm an open-source geek, and I think everyone should use open-source software because it's inherently better. I just got a job at a university and I'm sure that if I tell them open-source is better enough times, they'll switch. I don't know anything about how universities or software licenses work, but that's probably not important. What do I do?'
There are a variety of reasons why this might not be a good idea. If everyone uses OpenOffice, switching to MS Office, with a different layout of features and a different interface, will confuse the hell out of them. After four years of OO, they'll be surprisingly sub-standard at mere document editing compared to their peers.
Not saying it's not a bad idea, but forcing a massive change in university could be detrimental to students down the road. There are far too many things to consider here for someone who isn't even in a position to know what's being paid, let alone influence what's being paid for.
Part of the issue I've always had with Mono is that, by its nature, it's playing catch-up.
Let's say Microsoft spends a year paying programmers full-time to develop and implement .Net 4.0. After they release it, the Mono developers then have to spend time figuring out what's new in 4.0 and how to implement it, then spend time implementing it, then test it against Microsoft's implementation.
They're always going to be at least (development time of new features) behind Microsoft, and that doesn't really appeal to me. It's interesting as a new platform, but they can only innovate too much without accomplishing the same cross-platform incompatibilities we criticize Microsoft for all the time.
Because, you know, no company ever files for a patent on something they come up with that they might want to use, but don't necessarily have plans to use.
With the number of patents Apple has and files for, I think it's more likely that this is a 'concept art' kind of patent, on an idea that they might pursue, or might not.