not reliably. plenty of towns simply don't bother, especially in more rural areas.
Sidewalks are public.
but unmarked. when there's a sidewalk in front of a storefront, how am i to conclude the sidewalk is public if, in your system, all public lands must be marked?
Without personal property rights, you really can't have any of your other rights.
that's certainly a popular theory, but it's unclear that it's actually true. doing the experiment would be fun, if only i had a country and culture to play with. regardless, this paragraph is intended to cast your opponents position as communist, when in reality it's no such thing. your opponent never tried to deny property owners any rights, just to specify the default treatment (you agree that there is, of course, some default which owners are allowed to change, right?). don't be dumb.
no, the "sigh" is shorthand for "this argument is very tired, wrong every time its repeated, and based on a knee-jerk emotional reaction rather than logic. i probably shouldn't bother feeding the troll, but have a weakness for technical stupidity on what's supposed to be a geek site." you understand that "sigh" is shorter.
This would help Apple in MANY ways...
yes, it would. it's clearly at least partially a strategically motivated decision (in addition to the practical reality that flash current sucks, technically). but that's not what you said. you said it would help Apple "lock in content", which is very different. not all strategic business decisions are anti-competitive or anti-consumer.
Um, except for their DRM variations...
a fair point. DRM does (clearly) involve lock-in. of course, the DRMd content is not Apple's, they're just the retailer. Apple likes to get DRM-free content out (see the "plus" stuff on iTunes), but their first priority is getting any content out. it's a fair question as to whether or not this is good for the world generally in the long term.
...and the fact they also don't support the mainstream alternatives...
what, all of them? sure, true. but the support the most common (real) industry standards (MPEG derivatives). again, even if there were something nefarious to this decision (there isn't, as far as anyone can show), it wouldn't help "lock in" content at all; it locks content out, if you can call it that (which is a very good reason to believe there's nothing nefarious going on; surely Apple wants as much content on their devices as possible, all other things being equal). sticking the Windows Media codecs on your list is particularly telling. these are anything but open, far from market leading (especially on audio), and have the same strategic profile for support that Flash does, from Apple's point of view.
And since most of the online content providers that are NOT iTunes, use these other formats...
which, together, amount for a minority of online sales. also, i doubt your figures; cite? personally, i use or have used (only still on iTunes and eMusic) other, all of which are MP3 or similar.
Wow, really into hair spliting...
certainly not the first time i've been accused of that. i don't think the difference between "has" and "doesn't have" qualifies as hair splitting, though.
3G's meaning has changed from its original design specifications, when you talk 3G, you better mean 3G bandwidth. PERIOD
oh, PERIOD? thanks for clearing that up for me. very persuasive: "3G means 3G". sweet. now, please define "3G bandwidth". that's exactly the problem. i'd be perfectly happy if the industry adopted a meaning that simply said "100kbps or better" (or whatever), but there is simply no consensus on what "3G" means outside the technical standards i've referenced. now, that's fine in at&t's glossy sales literature, but this is a technical community. precision matters.
...sadly the DESKTOP Flash player is only a dog on non-Windows platforms.
the resource consumption of Flash is bad on Win32 on IA32, too, just less so. you also clipped the rest of my quote (it wasn't just about Flash) and seem to have misread whatever you took to be talking about subsets.
Really, so an iPhone......worked for you how again?
huh. cute assumption. don't have one. support for Verizon's network, having the best coverage in the US, is a pre-requisite for any phone i buy. thus, the iPhone doesn't fit my requirements, so i haven't bought one. i'd really like an iPod Touch, once they release one with enough storage to hold my library. this isn't about "my phone is better than your phone"; i can discuss products witho
Please name a single product that can do everything Flash can do...
Sorry, there just isn't...
you miss the point, and you're counterpoint is entirely irrelevant. it might (maybe) be true that no single technology can replace flash. so? a large part of the problem with flash is the monolithic nature of it. there's no reason all that functionality should be in one place. the only upside of that form of centralization is to change the shape of the learning curve for new developers so that the earlier parts are less steep. the costs of this tradeoff are substantial, and almost certainly outweigh those benefits now that better technologies are available.
exactly. Roughly Drafted wrote about this when the iPhone first came out. what Jobs is saying is certainly true - Flash is astoundingly bloated and would offer a bad experience on the iPhone - but the real reasons are strategic. that, and maybe a little bit of spite: Apple was burned by Adobe's cold reaction to OS X (prompting the acquisitions that lead to Final Cut Pro and friends).
the iPhone runs an ARM processor above 400Mhz. there are plenty of video codecs for which that's plenty. that even used to be okay for Flash, most of a decade ago. these days, Flash is so inefficiently coded that the equivalent mips on a PC wouldn't cut it using the Windows Flash player, which is the most efficient of the set. given that, it's totally fair to blame poorly coded software for the failure.
the market will decide. if Jobs is wrong, and Flash really is that important, people will not buy iPhones and will instead buy phones with Flash support. except, to date, that's not what's happening: the iPhone is selling even better than expected and there are no phones with full Flash support. assuming one comes out, it'll be interesting to see what the market reaction is.
"let the market decide" does not mean Apple should cram every possible feature into their products and let "the market" decide which ones to use. Apple produces a product, puts it in a competitive field, and the market decides whether that product covers a good set of things it wants. Jobs is in no way making decisions for you; there's loads of other choices for you.
i agree both lock-in and lock-out are bad, but the Flash decision is neither. the iTunes DRM is troubling, although it's difficult to see what the better answer is for Apple, who doesn't own any of the content. i'm pleased to see the DRM-free selection on iTunes growing. the SDK has taken longer than expected, but i don't think that qualifies as lock-out (legal actions against crackers certainly do, though).
So is this just Apple trying to lock in content...
sigh. how, exactly, would this help Apple lock-in content? the alternatives they support are published, open industry standards in wide use by loads of content producers before the iPhone even hit the market. there's a much richer field of competitors for MPEG decoders than flash decoders.
...or are there real reasons behind this?
the current flash player is very poor. it's highly inefficient, which is a coding issue, and presumes a certain application flow. the first would be addressable if Adobe rewrote the player, but they're not likely to do that any time soon; the second results in all sorts of kludges to wedge it in places it's not intended for. Apple tries hard to sell kludge-free products.
I know the non-3G connection would make Flash horrid.
"3G" doesn't mean what you think it does. the current iPhone has a "3G" connection. i've said this about a dozen times here on slashdot: by any technical definition of 3G, most relevantly those from the ITU and 3GPP, EDGE is one of a set of 3G technologies. what you mean is that flash over a not-fast-enough connection would be horrid. and there we have another instance of the efficiency issue above. modern MPEG encodings are more bandwidth efficient.
I also know that Flash can be a pig on non-optimized platforms, which is sad since Flash Lite can run on Phones with 100mhz processors.
Flash and Flash Lite are very, very different things. it's not simply a question of optimization; they present different feature sets (i believe, but am not certain, Flash Lite is a proper subset of Flash; can anyone knowledgeable confirm?).
The rest of the world is already using phones that have Flash and also out feature an iPhone.
show me. first, remember that Flash Lite is not Flash. so which phone are you referring to? you also focus solely on feature set, which is only a small part of the experience of using any device. Apple excels at crafting that experience, of which feature set is a part. the iPhone stands out because the vast majority of mobile phone (to a lesser extent, mobile devices generally) interfaces... well, suck. Nokia does a reasonable job on their high-end models; Palm OS is good but dying for other reasons. beyond that, it's mostly all crap. even the iPhone only nudges into the "pretty good" category, but that already puts them way ahead of most of their competition.
This is why non-fanbois pick up phones like this one:
the idea that only fanboys ("fanboi" makes you sound like even more of a tool, by the way) of a company can choose a product by that company is astoundingly juvenile (and much more prevalent than i understand). i pick products based on what works for me; sometimes that means i buy Apple products, sometimes Motorola, sometimes Linksys, or whoever. i pick the tool that fits the job. i have no particular devotion to any company beyond recognizing a trend of them producing tools that tend to fit the jobs i run across. the Tilt is a reasonably interesting phone, except for running Windows Mobile, which is a horrid interface for small devices. it's hard to see how it makes an iPhone look like a toy, though. the feature set is not "above" the iPhone, just off to the side. it depends what you want.
in the short term, sure. but what Jobs is trying to do is get folks to move their content over to better formats, where it'll be faster. a better experience in content consumption will lead to more demand for content, in turn leading to more content being made available. so, once you add a time dimension to the equation, the question really becomes whether slow content for a long, long time is better than no content for a little while and fast content soon.
apple has a history of pushing the migration from established, older, inferior technologies to newer, better ones. i'm happy to see that continuing here. i'd be quite happy to see flash simply go away on the web. a decade ago, when bandwidth, memory, and cycles were all more constrained, the hack that is flash was a reasonable solution. the situation has changed, and flash is no longer a reasonable answer, and should be discarded.
is true. also, swap reliable out for secure, scalable, or any other of a large set of attributes that mostly just engineers talk about and it remains true. pretty much the only things on the same rough level of importance for the bulk of the public are convenient and "new and shiny".
if you want a reliable IP connection, you can get it, but it'll cost you about 10x what you're paying now. same for mobile phone service: "just" go get a sat phone. the "good" (in those engineering terms) stuff tends to lag in features somewhat (be less new and shiny) too, but is available if you need it.
to be clear: normally when i hear people make this argument, the unspoken addendum to "most people prefer cheap to good" is "because they're dumb". i don't think that's fair in the least. most people really don't need particularly reliable service by engineering standards. and the fact that most people push the feature set instead of more conservative engineering values has obvious benefits, too. there are costs, of course; like everything in engineering, it's a trade-off. if you stop and actually think about it, rather than just wanting everything to magically work, i think you'll find this is true for yourself, as well.
only retroactively. TDMA (really D-AMPS) was a direct competitor to GSM (which was introduced only a year or so later). GSM (up through some of the 3G technologies) happens to be based on TDMA technology, so D-AMPS (also based on TDMA technology) -> GSM was an easier upgrade path in most ways than D-AMPS -> CDMA. it was certainly not envisioned as an upgrade path when created.
W-CDMA is based on GSM under the covers, too.
exactly backwards. GSM 4G (and some 3G) services will be based on Wideband CDMA, because the lower-level tech in CDMA has always been better than that in D-AMPS/TDMA. the GSM folks recognized this (after the fact, but still) and have incorporated those portions of the air interface.
CDMA is the undisputed ruler of bandwidth but call audio quality suffers in congested cells, though at least CDMA users are almost guaranteed the ability to complete a call even if you cannot hear the called party clearly.
what? this implies some form of scaling back of the audio bandwidth allocated to each mobile, which i've never heard of. i think you're just making it up. please cite.
GSM is always good quality at the expense of the bandwidth used per user.
again, cite. same for the next few. there are certainly differences (GSM, like D-AMPS/TDMA, sucks for call handoff), but i think you've made these up.
TDMA offers none of this
in terms of the air interface characteristics, GSM basically is TDMA (although with somewhat different propagation characteristics from operating in different frequency bands). GSM doesn't improve significantly on the TDMA air interface, it improves in pretty much everything above that layer.
(neither does AMPS for that matter).
AMPS is a very different set of tradeoffs. there you actually do see the sort of call completion vs. call quality tradeoff you claim above (with AMPS doing well on call completion at the expense of frequently crappy quality). AMPS also degrades gracefully, so your quality has a nice curve from clear to nil, whereas the digital technologies all have much steeper (and earlier) falloffs.
you've taken the troll's bait and are now playing his game, which is rigged so that he'll win the argument. this is a bad decision. the correct response to this sort of nonsense (other than to ignore it, which is probably best) is to point out that the poster doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. you're starting with "yeah, but..." when the correct response is "no, dummy."
"open" does not mean "does what i want". to get more specific: OS openness: one could actually make a reasonable point here, but the GP doesn't. the interfaces between the OS and the outside world are documented. third parties can develop for OS X in exactly the same way Apple can. it's even possible to create a "clean" implementation (see Gnustep; the fact that they don't have the manpower does nothing to impact the point) for going in the other direction. one could certainly take issue with the control-of-definition issue (Apple has only informal community input), but the documentation gets them a long way there. the open source nature of their core source code gets them a lot further.
iTunes songs on other hardware: any song you rip from a CD or other locally-imported source will work on any digital audio device supporting either mp3 or AAC (both independent, open standards). many songs you purchase from iTunes Music Store will work the same way (the iTunes Plus tracks; a growing percentage). as for the rest, it's not really Apple's product that he's complaining about, it's the record companies'; Apple just provides the marketplace. and they've provided an easy way to sell compatible, portable product for those who choose that path (and encouraged them to do so). it's worth noting that there's absolutely no issue with taking pretty much any third-party media and playing it on Apple hardware (unlike hardware from a great many other sources).
iTunes platform support: the weakest point in the bunch. the fact that iTunes doesn't run on your OS of choice has nothing at all to do with openness. i'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that your favorite media player doesn't run on my favorite OS, either, despite the fact that mine is OSI-approved "Open Source" and implements multiple open standards from ISO, ANSI, and so on, and yours may well be GPL'd or similar. "open" is not a magic word. iTunes doesn't run on Linux because Apple doesn't consider the cost worth it.
dummies like the GP see the word "open" and associate it with a very narrow definition of "open source" or, in the worst cases, as seen by the grandparent, linux and/or the GPL. the idea and practice of open standards predates the OSI, FSF, and linux. in OS X, apple has shown very good support for a wide variety of open standards. no OS will ever be absolute in that regard (let's say i've got this great OSF app i want to run on linux... and where's the linux equivalent of the SVID, by the way?).
The problem with thinking of these network technologies in simple marketing terms like "3G" is that so many different companies and consortiums are working on so many different technologies, and they don't arrive in lock-step.
that's why i'm referencing specific technical definitions. the ITU is an authority here, not some random group of folks. the 3GPP and 3GPP2, both recognized authorities in their own right in their respective technologies, both explicitly defer to the ITU definition.
good summary of the EDGE vs. EV-DO battle, although i don't really see the relevance. it's entirely possible to run EV-DO with insufficient network (mostly air-network) resources and get crappy speeds, too. a particular operator's deployment does not change the classification of the technology.
i actually just got word of Verizon's intent to go with LTE (the 3GPP (GSM-derived) 4G alternative) only today; it's pretty exciting! it's not quite right to describe it as moving to the camp at&t's in; moving from GSM to LTE is not dramatically easier than moving from CDMA to LTE. Verizon's certainly not migrating to the "UMTS camp", and it's exactly because it's incorrect to say the "other family of radio technologies leapfrogged em". LTE is based on CDMA technology! they've just done a better job of turning it into a product than the 3GPP2 folks have (and, really, with a name like that how could you expect them to be anything other than an also-ran?). many parts of LTE (radio propagation, for example; anything involving the low-level air interface) will be closer to today's CDMA than today's GSM.
but we are on a technology-oriented site, not a marketing-oriented site. you're correct that at&t, like most other carriers, has started (a few years ago now) calling EDGE 2G (or 2.xG). we're discussion what we want in an iPhone, not what we want the iPhone marketed as. i don't care what at&t or apple or whoever say in their commercials. i was simply hoping for a higher level of precision from this crowd. my mistake.
i work in the telecom industry, and wikipedia is the first place i've seen 2.75G used. EDGE is most certainly not "generally classified" that way.
While EDGE qualifies as 3G because it can reach a set minimum speed, AFAIK EDGE is based on 2G technology, not 3G.
my point is that you're exactly wrong. the ITU has explicitly defined what "3G technologies" are, and EDGE makes the list. both the 3GPP and 3GPP2 refer to this definition in their standards. it's true that EDGE is implemented as a "bolt-on" in some useful senses, but that's just a question of upgrade path.
if you need wikipedia to be the definitive reference here, check out the IMT-2000 page.
in large part that's because the term "3G" has been diluted in common use. the US has nearly-ubiquitous EVDO and EDGE coverage; both of these are 3G technologies as defined by the ITU in IMT-2000. both the 3GPP and 3GPP2 recognize IMT-2000 as the definition of 3G that they're working in. five years ago, nobody questioned that EDGE was 3G; now, the marketing focus on how ubiquitous 3G would change everything has just stuck around (since very little changed with 3G's arrival), pushing 3G perpetually into the future.
what people seem to mean when they talking about 3G's "pending" arrival is that data rates will increase. this has nothing to do with the underlying technology, really; with EDGE, for example, it's simply a matter of how many channels the operators would like to dedicate to data traffic.
this is totally non-sensical; it's like saying "Hybrids beat the crap out of a Prius". EDGE is 3G. IMT-2000 sets the definition for 3G overall, and the 3GPP and 3GPP2 (stupidest organization name ever) do it for GSM and CDMA technologies respectively. both of those organizations recognize that they're working within the IMT-2000 framework, as defined by the ITU (the telecom standards people).
the market use of these terms has changed over time. five years ago, nobody questioned that EDGE was 3G. the marketing hype was that once 3G (by which everyone meant EDGE) was ubiquitous, it would change everything. well, we got EDGE, and very little changed. so they kept the same marketing message - once we get 3G, everything will change - and just obliterated and precise meaning of what 3G was.
EDGE is explicitly a 3G technology. the speeds found in real-world applications are dependent on far more things than the underlying technology used. one can run EDGE slower than RTT (a clearly 2G technology) if you allocate few enough cells, or faster than EVDO if you allocate enough. if what you really mean is that we want HSDPA, please just say that. if what you really mean is that you want >300Kbps, say that.
How is it assured that nobody will maliciously spam the receiver?
the operators are all fairly aggressive using relatively well-known spam fighting techniques. in addition to the standard tools that work well for email, like RBLs, they can cap message size and messages/time very low without affecting almost any legitimate use. one gets through every once in a while, as in once every several months or more.
There are plans that don't differ between landline vs mobile, and ones that do - you have a wide range of choices.
what you describe is the same in every market i know anything about, regardless of charging model; that's beside the point. the point is the base charges are different. you can elect to have your operator hide that for you, but that's all it is.
i should point out that you can sometimes actually get your local ISP - the one that actually owns the loop and the CO - to give you access to the ATM-level link. this is exactly what, for example, Verizon will do to allow you to use a third-party DSL provider. i spent a month or two finding someone at Verizon who understood enough about how things worked to actually talk to me about this, then another two weeks finding someone who could say "yes" (never accept a "no" from someone who isn't empowered to say "yes"). we were going to set up a bunch of remote workers with home DSL lines on our internal corporate IP network via ATM circuits. it was a pretty sweet plan. then the company imploded.
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less gunfire, worse roads.
(having worked in Hoboken and now living in Cleveland)
no, the "sigh" is shorthand for "this argument is very tired, wrong every time its repeated, and based on a knee-jerk emotional reaction rather than logic. i probably shouldn't bother feeding the troll, but have a weakness for technical stupidity on what's supposed to be a geek site." you understand that "sigh" is shorter.
yes, it would. it's clearly at least partially a strategically motivated decision (in addition to the practical reality that flash current sucks, technically). but that's not what you said. you said it would help Apple "lock in content", which is very different. not all strategic business decisions are anti-competitive or anti-consumer.
a fair point. DRM does (clearly) involve lock-in. of course, the DRMd content is not Apple's, they're just the retailer. Apple likes to get DRM-free content out (see the "plus" stuff on iTunes), but their first priority is getting any content out. it's a fair question as to whether or not this is good for the world generally in the long term.
what, all of them? sure, true. but the support the most common (real) industry standards (MPEG derivatives). again, even if there were something nefarious to this decision (there isn't, as far as anyone can show), it wouldn't help "lock in" content at all; it locks content out, if you can call it that (which is a very good reason to believe there's nothing nefarious going on; surely Apple wants as much content on their devices as possible, all other things being equal).
sticking the Windows Media codecs on your list is particularly telling. these are anything but open, far from market leading (especially on audio), and have the same strategic profile for support that Flash does, from Apple's point of view.
which, together, amount for a minority of online sales. also, i doubt your figures; cite? personally, i use or have used (only still on iTunes and eMusic) other, all of which are MP3 or similar.
certainly not the first time i've been accused of that. i don't think the difference between "has" and "doesn't have" qualifies as hair splitting, though.
oh, PERIOD? thanks for clearing that up for me. very persuasive: "3G means 3G". sweet. now, please define "3G bandwidth". that's exactly the problem. i'd be perfectly happy if the industry adopted a meaning that simply said "100kbps or better" (or whatever), but there is simply no consensus on what "3G" means outside the technical standards i've referenced. now, that's fine in at&t's glossy sales literature, but this is a technical community. precision matters.
the resource consumption of Flash is bad on Win32 on IA32, too, just less so.
you also clipped the rest of my quote (it wasn't just about Flash) and seem to have misread whatever you took to be talking about subsets.
huh. cute assumption. don't have one. support for Verizon's network, having the best coverage in the US, is a pre-requisite for any phone i buy. thus, the iPhone doesn't fit my requirements, so i haven't bought one. i'd really like an iPod Touch, once they release one with enough storage to hold my library. this isn't about "my phone is better than your phone"; i can discuss products witho
exactly. Roughly Drafted wrote about this when the iPhone first came out. what Jobs is saying is certainly true - Flash is astoundingly bloated and would offer a bad experience on the iPhone - but the real reasons are strategic. that, and maybe a little bit of spite: Apple was burned by Adobe's cold reaction to OS X (prompting the acquisitions that lead to Final Cut Pro and friends).
the iPhone runs an ARM processor above 400Mhz. there are plenty of video codecs for which that's plenty. that even used to be okay for Flash, most of a decade ago. these days, Flash is so inefficiently coded that the equivalent mips on a PC wouldn't cut it using the Windows Flash player, which is the most efficient of the set. given that, it's totally fair to blame poorly coded software for the failure.
the market will decide. if Jobs is wrong, and Flash really is that important, people will not buy iPhones and will instead buy phones with Flash support. except, to date, that's not what's happening: the iPhone is selling even better than expected and there are no phones with full Flash support. assuming one comes out, it'll be interesting to see what the market reaction is.
"let the market decide" does not mean Apple should cram every possible feature into their products and let "the market" decide which ones to use. Apple produces a product, puts it in a competitive field, and the market decides whether that product covers a good set of things it wants. Jobs is in no way making decisions for you; there's loads of other choices for you.
i agree both lock-in and lock-out are bad, but the Flash decision is neither. the iTunes DRM is troubling, although it's difficult to see what the better answer is for Apple, who doesn't own any of the content. i'm pleased to see the DRM-free selection on iTunes growing. the SDK has taken longer than expected, but i don't think that qualifies as lock-out (legal actions against crackers certainly do, though).
the Tilt is a reasonably interesting phone, except for running Windows Mobile, which is a horrid interface for small devices. it's hard to see how it makes an iPhone look like a toy, though. the feature set is not "above" the iPhone, just off to the side. it depends what you want.
apple has a history of pushing the migration from established, older, inferior technologies to newer, better ones. i'm happy to see that continuing here. i'd be quite happy to see flash simply go away on the web. a decade ago, when bandwidth, memory, and cycles were all more constrained, the hack that is flash was a reasonable solution. the situation has changed, and flash is no longer a reasonable answer, and should be discarded.
tool.
if you want a reliable IP connection, you can get it, but it'll cost you about 10x what you're paying now. same for mobile phone service: "just" go get a sat phone. the "good" (in those engineering terms) stuff tends to lag in features somewhat (be less new and shiny) too, but is available if you need it.
to be clear: normally when i hear people make this argument, the unspoken addendum to "most people prefer cheap to good" is "because they're dumb". i don't think that's fair in the least. most people really don't need particularly reliable service by engineering standards. and the fact that most people push the feature set instead of more conservative engineering values has obvious benefits, too. there are costs, of course; like everything in engineering, it's a trade-off. if you stop and actually think about it, rather than just wanting everything to magically work, i think you'll find this is true for yourself, as well.
Wait, I thought the writer's strike was over. Why are they still recycling plot lines?
oh, that's good. we wouldn't want to stop the computer getting into the parents.
you've taken the troll's bait and are now playing his game, which is rigged so that he'll win the argument. this is a bad decision. the correct response to this sort of nonsense (other than to ignore it, which is probably best) is to point out that the poster doesn't have any idea what he's talking about. you're starting with "yeah, but..." when the correct response is "no, dummy."
"open" does not mean "does what i want". to get more specific:
OS openness: one could actually make a reasonable point here, but the GP doesn't. the interfaces between the OS and the outside world are documented. third parties can develop for OS X in exactly the same way Apple can. it's even possible to create a "clean" implementation (see Gnustep; the fact that they don't have the manpower does nothing to impact the point) for going in the other direction. one could certainly take issue with the control-of-definition issue (Apple has only informal community input), but the documentation gets them a long way there. the open source nature of their core source code gets them a lot further.
iTunes songs on other hardware: any song you rip from a CD or other locally-imported source will work on any digital audio device supporting either mp3 or AAC (both independent, open standards). many songs you purchase from iTunes Music Store will work the same way (the iTunes Plus tracks; a growing percentage). as for the rest, it's not really Apple's product that he's complaining about, it's the record companies'; Apple just provides the marketplace. and they've provided an easy way to sell compatible, portable product for those who choose that path (and encouraged them to do so). it's worth noting that there's absolutely no issue with taking pretty much any third-party media and playing it on Apple hardware (unlike hardware from a great many other sources).
iTunes platform support: the weakest point in the bunch. the fact that iTunes doesn't run on your OS of choice has nothing at all to do with openness. i'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that your favorite media player doesn't run on my favorite OS, either, despite the fact that mine is OSI-approved "Open Source" and implements multiple open standards from ISO, ANSI, and so on, and yours may well be GPL'd or similar. "open" is not a magic word. iTunes doesn't run on Linux because Apple doesn't consider the cost worth it.
dummies like the GP see the word "open" and associate it with a very narrow definition of "open source" or, in the worst cases, as seen by the grandparent, linux and/or the GPL. the idea and practice of open standards predates the OSI, FSF, and linux. in OS X, apple has shown very good support for a wide variety of open standards. no OS will ever be absolute in that regard (let's say i've got this great OSF app i want to run on linux... and where's the linux equivalent of the SVID, by the way?).
good summary of the EDGE vs. EV-DO battle, although i don't really see the relevance. it's entirely possible to run EV-DO with insufficient network (mostly air-network) resources and get crappy speeds, too. a particular operator's deployment does not change the classification of the technology.
i actually just got word of Verizon's intent to go with LTE (the 3GPP (GSM-derived) 4G alternative) only today; it's pretty exciting! it's not quite right to describe it as moving to the camp at&t's in; moving from GSM to LTE is not dramatically easier than moving from CDMA to LTE. Verizon's certainly not migrating to the "UMTS camp", and it's exactly because it's incorrect to say the "other family of radio technologies leapfrogged em". LTE is based on CDMA technology! they've just done a better job of turning it into a product than the 3GPP2 folks have (and, really, with a name like that how could you expect them to be anything other than an also-ran?). many parts of LTE (radio propagation, for example; anything involving the low-level air interface) will be closer to today's CDMA than today's GSM.
but we are on a technology-oriented site, not a marketing-oriented site. you're correct that at&t, like most other carriers, has started (a few years ago now) calling EDGE 2G (or 2.xG). we're discussion what we want in an iPhone, not what we want the iPhone marketed as. i don't care what at&t or apple or whoever say in their commercials. i was simply hoping for a higher level of precision from this crowd. my mistake.
if you need wikipedia to be the definitive reference here, check out the IMT-2000 page.
in large part that's because the term "3G" has been diluted in common use. the US has nearly-ubiquitous EVDO and EDGE coverage; both of these are 3G technologies as defined by the ITU in IMT-2000. both the 3GPP and 3GPP2 recognize IMT-2000 as the definition of 3G that they're working in. five years ago, nobody questioned that EDGE was 3G; now, the marketing focus on how ubiquitous 3G would change everything has just stuck around (since very little changed with 3G's arrival), pushing 3G perpetually into the future.
what people seem to mean when they talking about 3G's "pending" arrival is that data rates will increase. this has nothing to do with the underlying technology, really; with EDGE, for example, it's simply a matter of how many channels the operators would like to dedicate to data traffic.
the market use of these terms has changed over time. five years ago, nobody questioned that EDGE was 3G. the marketing hype was that once 3G (by which everyone meant EDGE) was ubiquitous, it would change everything. well, we got EDGE, and very little changed. so they kept the same marketing message - once we get 3G, everything will change - and just obliterated and precise meaning of what 3G was.
EDGE is explicitly a 3G technology. the speeds found in real-world applications are dependent on far more things than the underlying technology used. one can run EDGE slower than RTT (a clearly 2G technology) if you allocate few enough cells, or faster than EVDO if you allocate enough. if what you really mean is that we want HSDPA, please just say that. if what you really mean is that you want >300Kbps, say that.
on the upside, you get to set your own hours.
i should point out that you can sometimes actually get your local ISP - the one that actually owns the loop and the CO - to give you access to the ATM-level link. this is exactly what, for example, Verizon will do to allow you to use a third-party DSL provider. i spent a month or two finding someone at Verizon who understood enough about how things worked to actually talk to me about this, then another two weeks finding someone who could say "yes" (never accept a "no" from someone who isn't empowered to say "yes"). we were going to set up a bunch of remote workers with home DSL lines on our internal corporate IP network via ATM circuits. it was a pretty sweet plan. then the company imploded.