there's various degrees of this. first off, the tendency here to discount web services, either entirely server-side things like php, ruby and the like or client-side things like ajax is unfounded. the fact that it runs within a particular environment does not diminish the fact that those are cross-platform solutions. those are clearly the most common, and you're blind or ignorant if you're still going to say you've not seen many. beyond that, there's a decent handful of java apps out there that do a good job of being cross-platform. sure, they're less common (for a variety of reasons), but they certainly exist and are certainly options for programmers. finally, things like POSIX and other cross-platform portability standards and libraries have a very real impact as well. sure, they don't provide binary portability, but providing code portability is (in my mind, given the need to test on each supported platform anyway) very nearly as good for commercial or otherwise supported applications. and those have come a very long way since the world of the early/mid-80's.
"best company in the world"? based on what, exactly? stock price? market cap? "innovation"? i could certainly see arguments against the "microsoft is inherently evil" mindset, but putting them forward as "best" needs a bit more justification. and hey, who says we can't also go after Haliburton, ExxonMobile, and whoever else? revocation of corporate charter should require more grounds than "being jackasses", but repeated violation of judicial findings seems like a good basis. microsoft has that to spare; are the others you'd like to go after equally guilty?
while i think your example is crummy, you're right that a sentence must fit the crime. of course, the more Microsoft demonstrates the propensity for their applications group to illegally leverage the monopoly of their OS group, the more the original "break 'em up" sentence looks like a reasonable response.
(and i thought it was serious overkill at the time)
not disputing anything in your post, just pointing something out:
Well, Western Europe is a big place with many different nations.
depending on how one defines "nation", so is America. compare the number of indigenous languages found in Europe to the number found in North America; guess who's got more (hint: it's not Europe). most of the numbers for the indigenous NorAm languages are pretty low, but there's a few that are still significant populations in various regions (my company got asked to translate our app into Navajo, for example; just the second translation we were asked to do, and the first was for an international market). if you're in the american southwest, particularly, knowing spanish and navajo probably makes you twice as valuable, on average, as someone who just speaks english. people over-estimate the homogeneity of the Americas. it's true for Central and South America, too; i've got a few friends from Guatemala who've met plenty of people who only speak Mayan; their only Spanish is "no hablo castellano".
a few quotes from an editorialized article recounting an informal interview do not a definitive statement on the subject make. Jobs has said that the software distribution model won't look like it does today; can we give them at least a little time - since we're still 5-6 months before launch! - to describe what that model is before we announce the death of third party applications on the iPhone?
good for you. from my (significant) experience with the US, EU (especially GB), and IN markets, all of those were calling EDGE 3G in 2003 and 2004. the language has changed - some folks have started relabeling EDGE as 2.5G (or, in extreme cases, just 2G) - because it hasn't lived up to the hype, frequently because if operator deployment choices rather than fundamental technology issues.
i'm intrigued by your claims about video calling being widespread; do you have any numbers to site? with the exception of the 3 employees (that is, employees of 3, the GB 3G operator, not three employees that i know), i don't know anyone who makes even semi-regular use of video calling, and (again, outside the 3 employees) know very few people who've ever used it.
again, this argument over what's "3G" v. "2.5G" or whatever is just stupid; the terms are marketing nonsense with very degraded meaning. can we please just stick to things like UMTS, EVDO, HSDPA, and similarly content-laden terms?
EDGE is not 3G. EDGE is 5 times slower than VOL's 3G, and about the same amount slower they Cingular's own 3G service.
see, but there's the thing: go to Cingular's web site, ask them about 3G, and they talk about EDGE. they have a 3G coverage map which displays their EDGE coverage. your comparisons are all valid (and to the best of my knowledge, correct), but it's still useless to say that EDGE isn't 3G.
While EDGE is certified by the IMT-2000 initiative as "3G", it's seen as a transitional technology for 2G networks
seen by whom? certainly not Cingular, who explicitly touts their EDGE network as their 3G coverage. certainly not by the GSMA, who very much talks about EDGE as the entrance into 3G. not even by Verizon, who likes to point out that their first-wave 3G service (1xEVDO Rev. 0) is better than the GSM first-wave 3G service, EDGE. nor by the 3GPP folks, the people explicitly tasked with defining 3G for the GSM world. industry analysts seem divided today, but seemed much more united two years ago that EDGE was 3G; i suspect the sliding definition of 3G is a reaction to noticing that EDGE-class service still doesn't get them what it feels like it should.
the reality is that 2G, 3G, and friends are all crappy, meaningless terms, and we should just stop using them. your information on UMTS deployments is interesting; i knew Europe was ahead, but not that it was that common yet. UMTS, EDGE, EVDO, HSDPA; these are terms that mean things.
can we answer when the device fscking comes out? seriously, we have no information to make this decision with. if the reality ends up being as the majority of/. readers have understood it, then sure, that's a bad thing. but that's just speculation at this point. Jobs never says "no third party apps" anywhere.
did you miss the part where Jobs explicitly stated Exchange compatability? it's there if you want it. the point is you don't need it, whereas many of Blackberry's nicest corporate features require tie-in to an Exchange server (for no technical reason).
If you had to pick one single aspect that separates a "smart phone" from a "phone", the best indicator would probably be the ability to run arbitary software.
way to blow your credibility right up front. the vast majority of phones sold today, "smart" or "dumb", can run arbitrary software (in most cases, J2ME apps), including most of the free-with-contract phones from all the national US and EU operators.
So there are only three real potential outcomes here:
ah, proof by lack of imagination! let's see...
a.) Apple keeps it locked tight and is content to sell a very expensive but very elegant dumb phone.
we've already addressed your mis-characterization of the smart/dumb labels. beyond that, the first of your "only" alternatives already makes unfounded assumptions. "keeps it locked tight"? the device isn't available yet, and we don't have a formal statement from the company (you said you RTFA'd, but the A's are only interview clips). so another alternative beyond your "only three" is that the device isn't (ignoring your flexibility with verb tenses here) "locked tight" as it is.
b.) Lobbying by users, developers, and corporate purchases convince Apple that they need to offer a way to load third-party software...
again, you're assuming that such a thing doesn't already exist or isn't planned. you also don't say anything about what this "way to load" would look like. which i guess is fine, but it leaves an awful lot of options open in your "only three" choices.
c.) Some kind of middle ground is reached whereby developers pay Apple for the privilege of compatibility--like what they've managed to do with the iPod dock connector.
which isn't a middle ground, since your option B is so wide; this is a "way to load". in fact, it's the most common way in the mobile world today: write the app, submit it to the operator for signing, typically for a fee.
look, i want third party apps on this thing as much as anyone else here, and i almost certainly won't be buying one without that. but can we please not run off half-cocked spouting ignorance before any information is available?
As the information about the iPhone has started to come in...
i'm sorry, what information? a few random snippets of interviews in much larger articles, mostly editorializing? look, i agree: if the thing won't handle third party apps, it's a major turn-off, and probably enough (together with only working on Cingular) to remove the device from my personal consideration (and i'm a big Apple fan). but we don't actually know anything about it yet! all Jobs really says in the article is that the devices need to work, and that application distribution won't look like what we're familiar with, and that nobody wants buggy apps on here. now, that implies some form of restriction on third party apps, but we have no information yet on what this actually means.
i guess there's a sense in which it would "lock out" free content, sure. but that sense is not the same thing as not having an open development platform. have you ever done any mobile development, or gone through the certification process? with most carriers, it's neither terribly expensive nor terribly involved (although they certainly tend to move a lot slower than i'd like). if the VNC (just to pick an example of an app which might be useful on the phone and is normally free) folks want to distribute the app for the phone, they can put it up for a buck or two and make their money back after a hundred sales or so. yes, app signing is a pain in the butt, yes i'd like it to be a more free platform instead, yes, some people simply have a philosophical objection to paying for things.
what's common in the mobile world, and what i'd like to see here, is that unsigned apps can run just fine, but don't get access to certain features (the actual "phone" parts, for sure, and generally the PIM info, although i don't think that's appropriate here), whereas signed apps get a more free run of the system.
also, note that the quoted article isn't even close to definitive on the subject. it actually says (quoting from memory here) "there's no reason not to expect to see lots of apps on the phone, even if Apple has to vet them first". that's language leaves a lot of room for third party apps. and besides, we've got a few months yet before this is all clear. can't we just give them a bit of time?
Oh, and one more thing: it's not really about quality assurance. People are smart enough to realize that if they install a crappy app, it's their own fault, and they can uninstall it.
no, they're not. not by half. okay, most people here probably have that figured out. but go ask a major cell carrier what percentage of customer support problems with third party apps get directed at them, rather than the app's creator. heck, this is still a problem with computers for the grandma-types, and the idea of third party software's been common there since pretty much the introduction of home computing. granted, my information on this topic is US-centric, but it's most certainly true that this is something all the large national operators deal with. more interesting is the fact that only some of them seem to be working on it. For example, Nextel (before the buyout anyway) was actively trying to raise the profile of third party app developers as independent entities, whereas Verizon actively tries to preserve the illusion that it's all their stuff.
you're making crap up. granted, 3G has always been a pretty nebulous term, but EDGE, which the iPhone will have, is generally considered by the industry to be the GSM entry point into 3G; perhaps you mean HSDPA or the like, which it doesn't look like the iPhone will have, but there's certainly no market evidence that people won't buy non-HSDPA phones (all, what, two of them?). the camera's not stand out, but it's certainly not "crop" compared to the market. you can still find many, many phones with ~1MP cameras on there (or none at all, of course). putting a camera on the display side of the device might be nice for some people, but the vast majority of people don't care. for what, video calling? both the market numbers published to date and my friends at 3 say that's not exactly a driving force just now, nor do the uptake trends show it becoming one real soon. i'm not saying the things your asking for wouldn't be nice to see changed; personally, i don't really care about them, but sure, i bet some people do, and they don't seem like bad ideas. but your claim that there's no reason for people in Europe or Asia to want this phone because of the lack of these points is just dumb.
The real difference here is between a vocational/technical school for office workers or secretaries and a real liberal arts education. There's nothing inherently wrong with courses on how to use Office (or any other particular software application), but that's not what most education is supposed to be about, especially not before there's separate tracks kids can choose between vo/tec and "regular".
The same problem can be seen in higher education, at least in the US, particularly in realms like Computer Science. Rather than teaching people how to be real scientists who're focused on computers, they're producing programmers. Programming is clearly an important skill for many of these people, but it's not the same thing. Universities teach intro programming courses now in Java or C++ because those are the marketable things; never mind the fact that they're abysmal teaching languages. Folks who recommend teaching intro courses in C or Smalltalk or whatever are laughed at because those languages aren't "practical".
...but I despise people at work that make Comic Sans their default email font. How am I supposed to take anything they say seriously when every email from them looks like an excerpt from a Dilbert...
After reading this thread and the lined stories (yeah, i RTFAd), i called CompUSA who confirmed that the store closest to me had 7 in stock - despite it not yet being on their web site. i drove down to the store and the employee i talked to said it didn't exist - and as proof, pointed to their web site. i recounted the call to CompUSA, including that i'd clarified with the guy on the phone that it was an N800, not an N80 (a common mistake); the guy called his manager, who checked some other inventory system that only managers have access to (why? who knows.), which confirmed 7 in stock. the manager went into the back store room, found the 7, but informed me that they've got stickers on 'em saying they can't sell them before tuesday, or risk a fine. they took my name and will hold one for me to pick up on tuesday.
what's perhaps more ironic is that, given the link between obesity and certain forms of cancer, excess sugar donuts may cause the cancer in the first place.
so, is it like an even/odd thing? one too many donuts and you're screwed, one more and you're okay? is it by donut unit, or pounds, or dozens? bakers or regular? we simply must know!
this is more common than we'd all like. you'd figure Bell Labs could get this right, right? well, for about a year after the Lucent/AT&T split, going from the first floor of the Murray Hill headquarters building to the fifth floor of the same building required going through holmdel, about a hundred-mile round trip. we got around this by talking real nice to one of the building wiring techs to get us a drop that looked like it was on the fifth floor down on the first. my current company has offices in Maryland, London, and India. getting from the former two to India required taking the long route around the world. stupid Himalayas.
unless they explicitly define the terms, no. "derivative work" has a standing legal definition, the interpretation and application of which is up to the courts, not the copyright holder. if the license explicitly defines the term to mean some particular thing, that's another story, but (as far as i'm aware) the GPL does not do this clearly enough to answer the question here (thus my pending request for citations to the supposed legal precedent). commentary on a license on a web site has no legal standing, even from the copyright holder.
again, i wouldn't be shocked to find out the ancestor is correct here, but i remain skeptical until someone can point me at (a) a section of the license which resolves the issue unambiguously or (b) a court decision that has the same clarifying effect.
okay, apparently i wasn't clear. i understand the FSF's position. do you have cites on these court decisions? because, in my mind, dynamic (not static) linking doesn't create anything resembling what i've seen termed a "derivative work" relationship in other instances (including court cases). i don't particularly disbelieve that there's legal support out there, but i've just never seen it, and it doesn't match my expectations. references would be helpful. again: is there legal reference indicating dynamic linking can be considered a derivative work relationship?
good clarification. but still: does this really hold water? i mean, unless they're using a modified GPL or whatever (is the GPL open-source?), they don't really get to dictate the terms. "derivative work", for example, isn't something they get to define. if i'm shipping a closed-source app that simply requires MySQL be also installed, and not something that's statically linked to their binaries, where's the "derivative work" come in?
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there's various degrees of this. first off, the tendency here to discount web services, either entirely server-side things like php, ruby and the like or client-side things like ajax is unfounded. the fact that it runs within a particular environment does not diminish the fact that those are cross-platform solutions. those are clearly the most common, and you're blind or ignorant if you're still going to say you've not seen many. beyond that, there's a decent handful of java apps out there that do a good job of being cross-platform. sure, they're less common (for a variety of reasons), but they certainly exist and are certainly options for programmers. finally, things like POSIX and other cross-platform portability standards and libraries have a very real impact as well. sure, they don't provide binary portability, but providing code portability is (in my mind, given the need to test on each supported platform anyway) very nearly as good for commercial or otherwise supported applications. and those have come a very long way since the world of the early/mid-80's.
"best company in the world"? based on what, exactly? stock price? market cap? "innovation"? i could certainly see arguments against the "microsoft is inherently evil" mindset, but putting them forward as "best" needs a bit more justification.
and hey, who says we can't also go after Haliburton, ExxonMobile, and whoever else? revocation of corporate charter should require more grounds than "being jackasses", but repeated violation of judicial findings seems like a good basis. microsoft has that to spare; are the others you'd like to go after equally guilty?
while i think your example is crummy, you're right that a sentence must fit the crime. of course, the more Microsoft demonstrates the propensity for their applications group to illegally leverage the monopoly of their OS group, the more the original "break 'em up" sentence looks like a reasonable response.
(and i thought it was serious overkill at the time)
and you know this how?
a few quotes from an editorialized article recounting an informal interview do not a definitive statement on the subject make. Jobs has said that the software distribution model won't look like it does today; can we give them at least a little time - since we're still 5-6 months before launch! - to describe what that model is before we announce the death of third party applications on the iPhone?
good for you. from my (significant) experience with the US, EU (especially GB), and IN markets, all of those were calling EDGE 3G in 2003 and 2004. the language has changed - some folks have started relabeling EDGE as 2.5G (or, in extreme cases, just 2G) - because it hasn't lived up to the hype, frequently because if operator deployment choices rather than fundamental technology issues.
i'm intrigued by your claims about video calling being widespread; do you have any numbers to site? with the exception of the 3 employees (that is, employees of 3, the GB 3G operator, not three employees that i know), i don't know anyone who makes even semi-regular use of video calling, and (again, outside the 3 employees) know very few people who've ever used it.
again, this argument over what's "3G" v. "2.5G" or whatever is just stupid; the terms are marketing nonsense with very degraded meaning. can we please just stick to things like UMTS, EVDO, HSDPA, and similarly content-laden terms?
the reality is that 2G, 3G, and friends are all crappy, meaningless terms, and we should just stop using them. your information on UMTS deployments is interesting; i knew Europe was ahead, but not that it was that common yet. UMTS, EDGE, EVDO, HSDPA; these are terms that mean things.
can we answer when the device fscking comes out? /. readers have understood it, then sure, that's a bad thing. but that's just speculation at this point. Jobs never says "no third party apps" anywhere.
seriously, we have no information to make this decision with. if the reality ends up being as the majority of
did you miss the part where Jobs explicitly stated Exchange compatability? it's there if you want it. the point is you don't need it, whereas many of Blackberry's nicest corporate features require tie-in to an Exchange server (for no technical reason).
and "boi" is not a word.
look, i want third party apps on this thing as much as anyone else here, and i almost certainly won't be buying one without that. but can we please not run off half-cocked spouting ignorance before any information is available?
(i jest! i jest! although wtf is taking defcon so long?)
i guess there's a sense in which it would "lock out" free content, sure. but that sense is not the same thing as not having an open development platform. have you ever done any mobile development, or gone through the certification process? with most carriers, it's neither terribly expensive nor terribly involved (although they certainly tend to move a lot slower than i'd like). if the VNC (just to pick an example of an app which might be useful on the phone and is normally free) folks want to distribute the app for the phone, they can put it up for a buck or two and make their money back after a hundred sales or so. yes, app signing is a pain in the butt, yes i'd like it to be a more free platform instead, yes, some people simply have a philosophical objection to paying for things.
what's common in the mobile world, and what i'd like to see here, is that unsigned apps can run just fine, but don't get access to certain features (the actual "phone" parts, for sure, and generally the PIM info, although i don't think that's appropriate here), whereas signed apps get a more free run of the system.
also, note that the quoted article isn't even close to definitive on the subject. it actually says (quoting from memory here) "there's no reason not to expect to see lots of apps on the phone, even if Apple has to vet them first". that's language leaves a lot of room for third party apps.
and besides, we've got a few months yet before this is all clear. can't we just give them a bit of time?
okay, most people here probably have that figured out. but go ask a major cell carrier what percentage of customer support problems with third party apps get directed at them, rather than the app's creator. heck, this is still a problem with computers for the grandma-types, and the idea of third party software's been common there since pretty much the introduction of home computing. granted, my information on this topic is US-centric, but it's most certainly true that this is something all the large national operators deal with.
more interesting is the fact that only some of them seem to be working on it. For example, Nextel (before the buyout anyway) was actively trying to raise the profile of third party app developers as independent entities, whereas Verizon actively tries to preserve the illusion that it's all their stuff.
you're making crap up. granted, 3G has always been a pretty nebulous term, but EDGE, which the iPhone will have, is generally considered by the industry to be the GSM entry point into 3G; perhaps you mean HSDPA or the like, which it doesn't look like the iPhone will have, but there's certainly no market evidence that people won't buy non-HSDPA phones (all, what, two of them?). the camera's not stand out, but it's certainly not "crop" compared to the market. you can still find many, many phones with ~1MP cameras on there (or none at all, of course). putting a camera on the display side of the device might be nice for some people, but the vast majority of people don't care. for what, video calling? both the market numbers published to date and my friends at 3 say that's not exactly a driving force just now, nor do the uptake trends show it becoming one real soon.
i'm not saying the things your asking for wouldn't be nice to see changed; personally, i don't really care about them, but sure, i bet some people do, and they don't seem like bad ideas. but your claim that there's no reason for people in Europe or Asia to want this phone because of the lack of these points is just dumb.
Exactly.
The real difference here is between a vocational/technical school for office workers or secretaries and a real liberal arts education. There's nothing inherently wrong with courses on how to use Office (or any other particular software application), but that's not what most education is supposed to be about, especially not before there's separate tracks kids can choose between vo/tec and "regular".
The same problem can be seen in higher education, at least in the US, particularly in realms like Computer Science. Rather than teaching people how to be real scientists who're focused on computers, they're producing programmers. Programming is clearly an important skill for many of these people, but it's not the same thing. Universities teach intro programming courses now in Java or C++ because those are the marketable things; never mind the fact that they're abysmal teaching languages. Folks who recommend teaching intro courses in C or Smalltalk or whatever are laughed at because those languages aren't "practical".
After reading this thread and the lined stories (yeah, i RTFAd), i called CompUSA who confirmed that the store closest to me had 7 in stock - despite it not yet being on their web site. i drove down to the store and the employee i talked to said it didn't exist - and as proof, pointed to their web site. i recounted the call to CompUSA, including that i'd clarified with the guy on the phone that it was an N800, not an N80 (a common mistake); the guy called his manager, who checked some other inventory system that only managers have access to (why? who knows.), which confirmed 7 in stock. the manager went into the back store room, found the 7, but informed me that they've got stickers on 'em saying they can't sell them before tuesday, or risk a fine. they took my name and will hold one for me to pick up on tuesday.
what's perhaps more ironic is that, given the link between obesity and certain forms of cancer, excess sugar donuts may cause the cancer in the first place.
so, is it like an even/odd thing? one too many donuts and you're screwed, one more and you're okay? is it by donut unit, or pounds, or dozens? bakers or regular? we simply must know!
this is more common than we'd all like. you'd figure Bell Labs could get this right, right? well, for about a year after the Lucent/AT&T split, going from the first floor of the Murray Hill headquarters building to the fifth floor of the same building required going through holmdel, about a hundred-mile round trip. we got around this by talking real nice to one of the building wiring techs to get us a drop that looked like it was on the fifth floor down on the first.
my current company has offices in Maryland, London, and India. getting from the former two to India required taking the long route around the world. stupid Himalayas.
unless they explicitly define the terms, no. "derivative work" has a standing legal definition, the interpretation and application of which is up to the courts, not the copyright holder. if the license explicitly defines the term to mean some particular thing, that's another story, but (as far as i'm aware) the GPL does not do this clearly enough to answer the question here (thus my pending request for citations to the supposed legal precedent). commentary on a license on a web site has no legal standing, even from the copyright holder.
again, i wouldn't be shocked to find out the ancestor is correct here, but i remain skeptical until someone can point me at (a) a section of the license which resolves the issue unambiguously or (b) a court decision that has the same clarifying effect.
okay, apparently i wasn't clear. i understand the FSF's position. do you have cites on these court decisions? because, in my mind, dynamic (not static) linking doesn't create anything resembling what i've seen termed a "derivative work" relationship in other instances (including court cases). i don't particularly disbelieve that there's legal support out there, but i've just never seen it, and it doesn't match my expectations. references would be helpful.
again: is there legal reference indicating dynamic linking can be considered a derivative work relationship?
good clarification. but still: does this really hold water? i mean, unless they're using a modified GPL or whatever (is the GPL open-source?), they don't really get to dictate the terms. "derivative work", for example, isn't something they get to define. if i'm shipping a closed-source app that simply requires MySQL be also installed, and not something that's statically linked to their binaries, where's the "derivative work" come in?