Anyone else who considered buying a iPhone having second thoughts upon hearing there will be no 3rd party apps?
Yeah I have to agree that this seems a little silly to me. It works with the ipod because like you say it is a system that is intended to only do certain things while this phone looks as though it has the potential to do everything. There are also other limitations that I've heard about like not being able to use your music library as ring tones or being able to access the music store from the phone that are pretty disappointing.
The main reason I can see for not allowing 3rd party apps to run is that people would write VOIP software. While great for users I can't see any cellular carriers being happy with allowing that to happen. If people could easily make VOIP calls then they would lose most of their potential income. Actually this seems to be the reason for most of the restrictions. I, like I think a lot of people, was hoping that Apple would be able to convince the carriers to forget about this crap and just give us a device without these limitations that would do what we want.
Having said all that as there is nothing else out there with a remotely decent user interface I get the impression that even with all the limitations the phone will still be a great success. While it's not as great as some of us hoped it would be it still looks like a great device that is miles better then anything else out there.
... but this is no where near the sort of thing that compete with the NetFlix model of business.
Actually I see this as exactly the kind of model that will threaten Netflix. I know that with my net connection it would take only a few hours to download which is a lot faster than waiting for a DVD to show up in the mail. And with net connections getting faster all the time I only see the delivery time for most people getting faster while there is no way that your postal service is going to get any better. It's kind of funny that you say that you don't have the patience to wait several hours for a movie to download but that you're willing to wait for it to show up in the mail.
I agree that the proposal isn't dangerous. They would be accompanied by people who would help them find and shoot at proper targets. Of course you have to read the article to see that which and this being slashdot not a lot of people do that:)
I think a lot of the comments you are taking offense at are caused by the title of the submission. When I first saw it I got the impression that they wanted to allow blind people to run around with guns shooting at things which would clearly be a stupid idea and a good one to laugh at. Which is of course why the actual proposal is a lot more sensible.
Again, I can't speak for Japanese law, but in the USA it is clear that it is the owner of the performance venue, not the artist, who has to pay this fee.
Don't know how much it changes things but according to the article this guy was both the performer AND the manager of the bar. I guess as the manager he was responsible for the licensing fee?
I was just reading a relevant article on New Scientist about the "hockey stick" graph which says that it has since been duplicated by other scientists.
From : New Scientist
Another scientist to suffer the ire of the sceptics was Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He was attacked after the IPCC assessment in 2001, which highlighted his "hockey stick" graph showing that temperatures began a rapid rise in recent decades and are now higher than at any time over the past thousand years. The sceptics accused Mann of cherry-picking his data and criticised him for refusing to disclose his statistical methods which, they claimed, biased the study to show recent warming (New Scientist, 18 March, p 40). Last year, Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, ordered Mann to provide the committee with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. Barton's demands were widely condemned by fellow scientists and on Capitol Hill. "There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," said Santer at the time. Mann's findings, which will be endorsed in the new IPCC report, have since been replicated by other studies.
OK so the cameras may not act well as a deterrent but at least it increases the likelyhood of someone being caught and punished which is the next best thing. Not ideal but better than nothing.
China has a great opportunity to go electric across the board from the get-go, using nuclear power and solar power.
The problem is that China isn't going electric, they are going to coal. For example this BBC article says that 80% of there energy comes from coal and they have plans to build 544 more stations. Basically coal is the cheapest and fastest way for them to create power so that's what they will go for, not electricity.
'There's a lot more you could do with that capability.'
Like what?
The most obvious are being able to buy and download music without having to use a computer (ie from the device) and being able to wirelessly sync with a computer.
Both are features that were talked about when MS said the Zune would be wireless and a lot of people were disappointed when it didn't turn out to be the case. Of course with 802.11b/g syncing wirelessly would be rather slow so it's not surprising that they didn't support that.
According to wikipedia he is actually correct and the NASA budget has been increasing slightly during the Bush administration.
What he fails to mention is that Bush's plan to go to Mars has received no extra money and that going to Mars insn't cheap. The only way for the NASA to follow the direction that Bush has pointed them in is to cut the budgets of other projects. So while Bush hasn't directly instructed NASA to cut funding to other projects by telling them to go to Mars he effectively has.
If I buy 1 PC, 2 PCs or 10 PCs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
And how is that different to:
If I buy 1 TV, 2 TVs or 10 TVs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
They're saying that it was every bit as warm in 800 A.D. then? That kinda discounts their theory that modern man is causing global warming then doesn't it?
From TFA Reliable records from trees and other sources go back only about 1,200 years. So no, they're NOT saying that it was as warm in 800 AD. They are saying that this is the warmest year since 800 AD and that they don't have have any reliable records before that! This is a big difference.
I know that this is Slashdot but you really should try reading the article before making inflamatory statements like "Another crackpot theory bites the dust."
So because we don't have a full understanding about a subject there must be some mystical reason to explain it? From everything we understand about science (and admittedly there is a great deal that we still don't) the human mind is just a chemical process. A rather advanced and complicated one compared to other ones that we have encountered but simply that.
The fact that some of the greatest minds in our civilisation have held religious beliefs doesn't make them anymore true. It just shows how fallible we are as a species. It seems to me that most of us are to arrogant or scared to admit that we simply don't have all the answers. Personally I just can't understand how putting faith in these fantastical answers would help but that seems to be how a lot of people cope with it.
AJAX doesn't impress me either. Webapps, while nice for jobs and web-coders (everyone needs to make a living somehow), should die. There's a better and more secure way to do everything which any web-app does.
AJAX has it's place. For many websites it isn't of any use and it can confuse the interface if not used without providing the user with feedback. However there are applications where it is very useful. Gmail is probably the most well known. As far as web mail goes it provides a far better user experience than those that don't use it.
And there other applications such as drag and drop on a web page that it can be used for. Sure these things can be done without the use of XMLHttpRequests, and some of them without DHTML but this makes the entire user experience slower and more painful.
You may want to argue that these things should not be done using a browser and that custom application should be used for these tasks. This doesn't work however if you want access these programs at multiple locations. Often the program that you want to use is not installed or configured properly while you can usually guarantee that there will be a web browser installed.
Writing off a technology because it is used in places where it doesn't need to be seems rather shorted sighted to me. AJAX difinetly has its place and can be very useful.
The thing is that unlike the Sony-BMG debacle you can see what is happening. It isn't silently sending data in the background without giving you any feedback, you can see the ministore updating based on what song you have selected.
The other and more important difference is that you can easily disable this feedback by simple hiding the ministore. This is something that wasn't possible with the Sony-BMG mess.
However I do agree that apple should have asked permission before sending this data to their servers. I imagine that it would have been pretty simple to display a dialogue asking for permission and only enabling the ministore if it was granted. The way that it was done was a little invasive but hardly the major intrusion of privacy that others seem to be making it to be.
1. Let's not forget those rape victims, people with cheating spouses, medical professionals who get needle sticks while saving lives, children sold into sexual slavery.
2. In terms of evolution maybe the soceities where these things are allowed to happen should not be the ones to survive...
Ummm, you do realise that that kind of stuff does happen in every society in existense today. And even if it isn't allowed in most societies it still happens in every one. I think the original point was that there are a lot of innocent people who can get affected by this disease so a cure should be found.
The thing is that humans aren't the only things to have such a drastic effect on the environment. You can actually argue that the way that we are accelerating global warming is perfectly natural, at least as natural as a metorite crashing into the planet and wiping out most species.
And yes, drastic change like that has happened in the past (think about what happened to dinosaurs) and look at the diverse range of life that exists today.
The thing is that it would be millions and millions of years at least for such a diverse range to come about again. That is what we should worry about. The world will continue on as it always has even if we screw it up for ourselves. Unfortunately we probably won't.
What ethical concerns?
A live person is missing a face. A dead person doesn't need theirs any more. Where's the problem?
And how could the "psychological impact" be worse than not havin a face? The patient is going to "look different" no matter what is done.
Yeah and what happens if your life partner dies and their face gets transplanted onto someone else. That would be a pretty f'd up experience running into that person in the street.
You run linux and not buy any games..
Remember they are gambling on game sales to make a profit on these things.
Yeah but the number of people that would by an xbox to run linux rather than play games is so small I don't think it would be such an issue for them.
Re:Criminal charges against Microsoft too.
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 1
Except they're not removing the copy protection. They're removing the nasty code which hides the DRM code from casual observation. While this will make the DRM easier to remove it doesn't go so far to actually do so.
The MSNBC article says "we will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software to the Windows AntiSpyware beta". (my emphasis)
Very nice site. Only had a brief look but the look and feel is a lot like the NetNewsReader for Mac OSX. The difference is that I can access it on any computer and I don't have to set up the list of feeds that I like whenever I use a different box.
Also I found it a lot simpler to set up and use than googles version. It has a much more intuitive interface which is surprising as Google usually get that right! Good job.
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is. The fact that someone can be granted a patent for something as obvious as this just makes the system unusable. And it won't be until big corporations like apple start getting screwed over by these that they'll take notice.
I thought the intention of the patent system was to encourage innovation not stifle it, and that is what is happening with every company patenting anything they can in order to make money out of their rivals. Not necessarily inventing new and wonderful solutions but often just patenting existing ideas. Maybe if the patent office had more resources they would be able to reduce some of the obvious patents that are granted but then again maybe not.
And lets face it, the solution to browsing a music list by using multiple menus is a fairly obvious solution that shouldn't be protected by law. Computers are basically designed for ordering data and making it easier to access. This great "innovation" that they claim took so much hard work was really quite obvious.
The reason the movie industry is declining is not so much due to the fact that there really are no new stories. It's due to the fact that there are so many other equivilant forms of entertainment available, and many are cheaper and more convenient.
I can't say that I entirely agree with that. While the other forms of entertainment certainly contribute to their decline I think that the main reason is because they don't really tell stories. The movies they are churning out only focus on trying to make good looking movies and seem to have forgotten how to write decent dialogue that will make the story interesting and believable. They focus on predicatable one liners that introduce the next action sequence and don't contribute much to the story. It's kind of sad when you're watching a "tragic" scene in a movie and just feel like laughing because what the characters are saying is either too predictable or just impossible to believe.
So these people who were CADETS followed phishing instructions that came to them STRAIGHT FROM THEIR OWN COLONEL. I hardly think that's a reasonable test!
While they received the email from a teacher he was masquerading as someone else. The point is that the email could have been sent from any one pretending to be a colonel and the students would have have fallen for it
From TFA:
The mock phishing exercises demonstrate how effective such attacks can be. In June 2004, more than 500 cadets at West Point received an email from Col. Robert Melville notifying them of a problem with their grade report and ordering them to click on a link to verify that the grades were correct. More than 80% of the students dutifully followed the instructions.
But there is no Col. Robert Melville at West Point. The email was crafted by Aaron Ferguson, a computer-security expert with the National Security Agency who teaches at West Point. The gullible cadets received a "gotcha" email, alerting them they could easily have downloaded spyware, "Trojans" or other malicious programs and suggesting they be more careful in the future. Mr. Ferguson, who runs similar exercises each semester, said many cadets have been victimized by real online frauds.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I have to agree that this seems a little silly to me. It works with the ipod because like you say it is a system that is intended to only do certain things while this phone looks as though it has the potential to do everything. There are also other limitations that I've heard about like not being able to use your music library as ring tones or being able to access the music store from the phone that are pretty disappointing.
The main reason I can see for not allowing 3rd party apps to run is that people would write VOIP software. While great for users I can't see any cellular carriers being happy with allowing that to happen. If people could easily make VOIP calls then they would lose most of their potential income. Actually this seems to be the reason for most of the restrictions. I, like I think a lot of people, was hoping that Apple would be able to convince the carriers to forget about this crap and just give us a device without these limitations that would do what we want.
Having said all that as there is nothing else out there with a remotely decent user interface I get the impression that even with all the limitations the phone will still be a great success. While it's not as great as some of us hoped it would be it still looks like a great device that is miles better then anything else out there.
... but this is no where near the sort of thing that compete with the NetFlix model of business.
Actually I see this as exactly the kind of model that will threaten Netflix. I know that with my net connection it would take only a few hours to download which is a lot faster than waiting for a DVD to show up in the mail. And with net connections getting faster all the time I only see the delivery time for most people getting faster while there is no way that your postal service is going to get any better. It's kind of funny that you say that you don't have the patience to wait several hours for a movie to download but that you're willing to wait for it to show up in the mail.
I agree that the proposal isn't dangerous. They would be accompanied by people who would help them find and shoot at proper targets. Of course you have to read the article to see that which and this being slashdot not a lot of people do that :)
I think a lot of the comments you are taking offense at are caused by the title of the submission. When I first saw it I got the impression that they wanted to allow blind people to run around with guns shooting at things which would clearly be a stupid idea and a good one to laugh at. Which is of course why the actual proposal is a lot more sensible.
Again, I can't speak for Japanese law, but in the USA it is clear that it is the owner of the performance venue, not the artist, who has to pay this fee.
Don't know how much it changes things but according to the article this guy was both the performer AND the manager of the bar. I guess as the manager he was responsible for the licensing fee?
I was just reading a relevant article on New Scientist about the "hockey stick" graph which says that it has since been duplicated by other scientists.
From : New Scientist
Another scientist to suffer the ire of the sceptics was Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He was attacked after the IPCC assessment in 2001, which highlighted his "hockey stick" graph showing that temperatures began a rapid rise in recent decades and are now higher than at any time over the past thousand years. The sceptics accused Mann of cherry-picking his data and criticised him for refusing to disclose his statistical methods which, they claimed, biased the study to show recent warming (New Scientist, 18 March, p 40). Last year, Texas Republican Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, ordered Mann to provide the committee with voluminous details of his working procedures, computer programs and past funding. Barton's demands were widely condemned by fellow scientists and on Capitol Hill. "There are people who believe that if they bring down Mike Mann, they can bring down the IPCC," said Santer at the time. Mann's findings, which will be endorsed in the new IPCC report, have since been replicated by other studies.
Bold emphasis mine.
OK so the cameras may not act well as a deterrent but at least it increases the likelyhood of someone being caught and punished which is the next best thing. Not ideal but better than nothing.
China has a great opportunity to go electric across the board from the get-go, using nuclear power and solar power.
The problem is that China isn't going electric, they are going to coal. For example this BBC article says that 80% of there energy comes from coal and they have plans to build 544 more stations. Basically coal is the cheapest and fastest way for them to create power so that's what they will go for, not electricity.
'There's a lot more you could do with that capability.' Like what?
The most obvious are being able to buy and download music without having to use a computer (ie from the device) and being able to wirelessly sync with a computer.
Both are features that were talked about when MS said the Zune would be wireless and a lot of people were disappointed when it didn't turn out to be the case. Of course with 802.11b/g syncing wirelessly would be rather slow so it's not surprising that they didn't support that.
According to wikipedia he is actually correct and the NASA budget has been increasing slightly during the Bush administration.
What he fails to mention is that Bush's plan to go to Mars has received no extra money and that going to Mars insn't cheap. The only way for the NASA to follow the direction that Bush has pointed them in is to cut the budgets of other projects. So while Bush hasn't directly instructed NASA to cut funding to other projects by telling them to go to Mars he effectively has.
Not really. To be honest, I don't know how one could really raise children without Wikipedia.
Probably the same way that it was done before Wikipedia, you know with books and stuff. The same way that you were taught I imagine.
If I buy 1 PC, 2 PCs or 10 PCs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
And how is that different to:
If I buy 1 TV, 2 TVs or 10 TVs, I may never use them to watch BBC content and as such I'm paying for fresh air in effect.
They're saying that it was every bit as warm in 800 A.D. then? That kinda discounts their theory that modern man is causing global warming then doesn't it?
From TFA Reliable records from trees and other sources go back only about 1,200 years. So no, they're NOT saying that it was as warm in 800 AD. They are saying that this is the warmest year since 800 AD and that they don't have have any reliable records before that! This is a big difference.
I know that this is Slashdot but you really should try reading the article before making inflamatory statements like "Another crackpot theory bites the dust."
So because we don't have a full understanding about a subject there must be some mystical reason to explain it? From everything we understand about science (and admittedly there is a great deal that we still don't) the human mind is just a chemical process. A rather advanced and complicated one compared to other ones that we have encountered but simply that.
The fact that some of the greatest minds in our civilisation have held religious beliefs doesn't make them anymore true. It just shows how fallible we are as a species. It seems to me that most of us are to arrogant or scared to admit that we simply don't have all the answers. Personally I just can't understand how putting faith in these fantastical answers would help but that seems to be how a lot of people cope with it.
AJAX doesn't impress me either. Webapps, while nice for jobs and web-coders (everyone needs to make a living somehow), should die. There's a better and more secure way to do everything which any web-app does.
AJAX has it's place. For many websites it isn't of any use and it can confuse the interface if not used without providing the user with feedback. However there are applications where it is very useful. Gmail is probably the most well known. As far as web mail goes it provides a far better user experience than those that don't use it.
And there other applications such as drag and drop on a web page that it can be used for. Sure these things can be done without the use of XMLHttpRequests, and some of them without DHTML but this makes the entire user experience slower and more painful.
You may want to argue that these things should not be done using a browser and that custom application should be used for these tasks. This doesn't work however if you want access these programs at multiple locations. Often the program that you want to use is not installed or configured properly while you can usually guarantee that there will be a web browser installed.
Writing off a technology because it is used in places where it doesn't need to be seems rather shorted sighted to me. AJAX difinetly has its place and can be very useful.
The thing is that unlike the Sony-BMG debacle you can see what is happening. It isn't silently sending data in the background without giving you any feedback, you can see the ministore updating based on what song you have selected.
The other and more important difference is that you can easily disable this feedback by simple hiding the ministore. This is something that wasn't possible with the Sony-BMG mess.
However I do agree that apple should have asked permission before sending this data to their servers. I imagine that it would have been pretty simple to display a dialogue asking for permission and only enabling the ministore if it was granted. The way that it was done was a little invasive but hardly the major intrusion of privacy that others seem to be making it to be.
1. Let's not forget those rape victims, people with cheating spouses, medical professionals who get needle sticks while saving lives, children sold into sexual slavery.
2. In terms of evolution maybe the soceities where these things are allowed to happen should not be the ones to survive...
Ummm, you do realise that that kind of stuff does happen in every society in existense today. And even if it isn't allowed in most societies it still happens in every one. I think the original point was that there are a lot of innocent people who can get affected by this disease so a cure should be found.
The thing is that humans aren't the only things to have such a drastic effect on the environment. You can actually argue that the way that we are accelerating global warming is perfectly natural, at least as natural as a metorite crashing into the planet and wiping out most species.
And yes, drastic change like that has happened in the past (think about what happened to dinosaurs) and look at the diverse range of life that exists today.
The thing is that it would be millions and millions of years at least for such a diverse range to come about again. That is what we should worry about. The world will continue on as it always has even if we screw it up for ourselves. Unfortunately we probably won't.
What ethical concerns? A live person is missing a face. A dead person doesn't need theirs any more. Where's the problem? And how could the "psychological impact" be worse than not havin a face? The patient is going to "look different" no matter what is done.
Yeah and what happens if your life partner dies and their face gets transplanted onto someone else. That would be a pretty f'd up experience running into that person in the street.
You run linux and not buy any games.. Remember they are gambling on game sales to make a profit on these things.
Yeah but the number of people that would by an xbox to run linux rather than play games is so small I don't think it would be such an issue for them.
Except they're not removing the copy protection. They're removing the nasty code which hides the DRM code from casual observation. While this will make the DRM easier to remove it doesn't go so far to actually do so.
The MSNBC article says "we will add a detection and removal signature for the rootkit component of the XCP software to the Windows AntiSpyware beta". (my emphasis)
Very nice site. Only had a brief look but the look and feel is a lot like the NetNewsReader for Mac OSX. The difference is that I can access it on any computer and I don't have to set up the list of feeds that I like whenever I use a different box.
Also I found it a lot simpler to set up and use than googles version. It has a much more intuitive interface which is surprising as Google usually get that right! Good job.
Hopefully patents like this will start making the government realise just how flawed the system is. The fact that someone can be granted a patent for something as obvious as this just makes the system unusable. And it won't be until big corporations like apple start getting screwed over by these that they'll take notice.
I thought the intention of the patent system was to encourage innovation not stifle it, and that is what is happening with every company patenting anything they can in order to make money out of their rivals. Not necessarily inventing new and wonderful solutions but often just patenting existing ideas. Maybe if the patent office had more resources they would be able to reduce some of the obvious patents that are granted but then again maybe not.
And lets face it, the solution to browsing a music list by using multiple menus is a fairly obvious solution that shouldn't be protected by law. Computers are basically designed for ordering data and making it easier to access. This great "innovation" that they claim took so much hard work was really quite obvious.
The reason the movie industry is declining is not so much due to the fact that there really are no new stories. It's due to the fact that there are so many other equivilant forms of entertainment available, and many are cheaper and more convenient.
I can't say that I entirely agree with that. While the other forms of entertainment certainly contribute to their decline I think that the main reason is because they don't really tell stories. The movies they are churning out only focus on trying to make good looking movies and seem to have forgotten how to write decent dialogue that will make the story interesting and believable. They focus on predicatable one liners that introduce the next action sequence and don't contribute much to the story. It's kind of sad when you're watching a "tragic" scene in a movie and just feel like laughing because what the characters are saying is either too predictable or just impossible to believe.
Why waste time with a new medium, if it is the same people delivering the same message.
Because at least people now have the choice of listening to something less mainstream.
So these people who were CADETS followed phishing instructions that came to them STRAIGHT FROM THEIR OWN COLONEL. I hardly think that's a reasonable test!
While they received the email from a teacher he was masquerading as someone else. The point is that the email could have been sent from any one pretending to be a colonel and the students would have have fallen for it
From TFA: The mock phishing exercises demonstrate how effective such attacks can be. In June 2004, more than 500 cadets at West Point received an email from Col. Robert Melville notifying them of a problem with their grade report and ordering them to click on a link to verify that the grades were correct. More than 80% of the students dutifully followed the instructions. But there is no Col. Robert Melville at West Point. The email was crafted by Aaron Ferguson, a computer-security expert with the National Security Agency who teaches at West Point. The gullible cadets received a "gotcha" email, alerting them they could easily have downloaded spyware, "Trojans" or other malicious programs and suggesting they be more careful in the future. Mr. Ferguson, who runs similar exercises each semester, said many cadets have been victimized by real online frauds.