I keep hearing a lot of theories about security from the tech media like they know security. The problem is that security is a great way to scare up hits and freak people out so it's useful to write articles pandering in one direction or another, but there's rarely any true science to the articles, no figures, no statistics, no hard examples. This is because all that is boring and doesn't get hits, but it's what it takes to truly determine what is and what is not secure. Nothing is 100% secure, but then again we have this false sense of how architectures and security work. It's just BS.
This is the same kind of argument about how pundits spread the myth Macs are not any more secure than windows because hackers aren't targeting it. There's no evidence to back that statement up, and there's no evidence that Android less secure just because there are various flavors. In fact that can make it harder because one hack might not work on multiple flavors. That's even one of Androids problems now, that it's sometimes difficult to get a single app to work on multiple Android OS devices. You could then posit that the iPhone is easier to hack because the OS is so similar and the number of iOS devices in the wild is much higher than Android. But that's BS too because the iPhone is such a locked down system that in order to install anything you have to go thru the iTunes app store gatekeepers. The other way in is thru Safari, but that's really the only other way, and well now we know the security of Safari is BS because of that hole that they found in iOS 4 they used for jailbreaking. But compared to windows and compared to each other, which of these has had more critical vulnerabilities? The article gives me nothing.
Despite all this positing, it comes down to number of hacks, and what the hacks are. I could not truly begin to tell you which handhelds are more secure than others because no one, including this article, has any facts. The article eludes to "security circles" but who knows who those people are.
I think we should ban security articles from Slashdot unless they have a certain level of scientific statistics or hardcore evidence. Most articles about computer security on slashdot are not news for nerds, they are news for "platform fanboi weenies who want to start a flame war about which platform is more secure."
OMG everyone complained about Voice Control on the iPhone coming late and all this time Android didn't have it and iPhone has had it for over a year and you people still can't fix your battery issues? iPh0ne is l337, j00r Andr01d suxx0rs!
Now while all the iPhone fanbois are busy celebrating on your perceived killshot, the Nokia fanbois are sneaking up behind you ready to club you with almost two decades of history, but they will be given away as their phone beeps asking to install something called Cabir. The WebOS fanbois will try to call to an end to the violence, but no one can hear them, and the Blackberri fanbois will just ignore it all, acting all superior and pretending to do work when they are really just looking at pron.
Give a hacker physical access to any device and they will eventually find a way to crack it.
It amazes me that scientists and journalists phrase this as an "attack." It normally takes an act of thievery or an "attack" on the street to lose your phone. If you lose your phone, your fucked anyway, right? The lock on a phone is meant as a casual lock for someone who just happens to walk by and wants to sneak a peek. In fact wouldn't it be easier to plug the phone in via USB and hack it that way, perhaps by mounting it as a hard drive and messing with the contents?
We also need a populace which will support Obama if he leans left and shows jerks like Palin just how big his balls really are.
But that's the true problem. We have an uneducated, jaded populace that doesn't vote their heart (if they vote at all), we have two parties who don't want to lose any control on government they have to allow a major third party, and we have a bunch of fat lazy rich people who also control much of the media who want to maintain their control on government as well.
Obama was a good choice, IMHO, but he's basically been given crap to start with, and anything less than diamonds from that crap is spun as failure by the political machine. No he's not perfect, but the entire country has been positioned as center right, and our system of checks and balances, while good, has been pushed to the right hard over the past few decades and we don't have enough force to push it back. Even if we did it will take time as our system of government was built to create "stability", and major changes are sometimes harder for no other reason than it's hard to change the status quo.
Having someone walk around asking for orders takes more time away from making orders, cleaning the equipment, grinding the coffee, etc. The biggest expense of any US business is it's payroll. Plus in a coffee shop environment, some people might find it annoying because those people have come to expect that they won't be bothered every 15 minutes. In an upscale restaurant where I don't pull my laptop I expect someone to visit my table regularly. At a coffee shop I personally want to be left alone. It's one of the many coffee shop paradoxes.
Cringley is a columnist, like many others, and he makes predictions based on the facts he has and his extensive experience in IT. He also makes annual predictions for the coming year in technology and then follows them up the following year with an article about how many he got right and how many he got wrong. So the first person to say he's wrong is himself and he is humble about it. He even has rough statistics on his percentage year to year. Someone who's willing to dissect his own hits a misses deserves your attention simply as a columnist with very interesting ideas that more than a few times are right. Compare that to asses like Dvorak who are 95%+ of the time wrong.
At the same time there are a bunch of monday morning quarterbacks on Slashdot...
To me, The Truman show WAS a black comedy. Look at how everyone is trying to get their 2 minutes of fame on the latest vapid reality show. The video of thousands of models creating a stampede (in NYC I think?) trying to get on a model reality show and all thinking this was their only chance at decent job and stardom?
We ARE on The Truman Show, and we are all being filmed, if we let the asses do it. The only reason why The Truman show came out so nice is because Truman picked the best out come... and yet the public reached for the TV guide to see what was on immediately after Truman walked out./rant
(can anyone offer an explanation how Facebook for Android is such pure garbage, all jokes about content aside?)
Because the Facebook developers suck?
The iPhone Facebook app isn't much better. They finally got it stable, but that's after several versions and even then some people still have some crashing, and there are still plenty of missing features (I can filter the Newsfeed on the website to exclude those stupid facebook game posts people post every 5 seconds, but I can't seem to do the same on the phone? WTF??). If it wasn't for the narrow development approach apple takes, and that (I think) so many more iPhone users have Facebook installed than Android users** and were screaming at Facebook to get their act together, then it probably would have never gotten to the point it 's at now.
**PS: my hypothesis is that since Android users are more conscious about personal digital freedom, they are less likely to be Facebook users than iPhone users and there is less demand for the Android app than the iPhone app. It seems plausable but I have no proof to back this up. The point still stands that for a while the facebook app sucked very hard and I don't think it was primarily anything to do with any platform. Now it currently sucks a little.
Since the internet hit the mainstream, the trend has been to have less human-to-human interaction. It started with things like IRC, USENet, and email, and has expanded to Web-based forums, blogs, comments on the bottom of news websites, and Facebook. Human to Human interaction is messy. Humans are dumb, annoying, selfish, greedy, and lazy. But on Facebook, humans are reduced to some cute pictures and a periodic status. One can communicate light heartedly with your "friends" simply by replying to comments or posting your own and look for comments. It's not as real, but it filters out all the hassle of having to make plans, go outside, and deal with other people you don't want to deal with, like your friend's significant other or relatives.
"Better" is relative. Human to human contact is to Facebook as good restaurants are to McDonalds. You have to invest time looking into restaurants and risk bad or mediocre restaurants in order to find the good ones or even the best one. McD's is unhealthy and boring, but to the untrained pallete it still takes just fine, it feeds your hunger, and it's incredibly easy to get because it's the same at every single chain. When I was a kid, McDonalds was great. Now that I've grown up, I have figured out there are better foods out there, both better tasting and better for you.
Maybe more of your friends spend less time on facebook, but I know a ton of people who are still on there, and new people are being added daily, in the form of teens who want to be part of the trend.
Oh and before you point out that there's a trend in schools and families to wean kids off fast food and the like because it's bad for you in general, there's no such movement for facebook yet. Only parents yelling at their kids to get off the computer, and kids never listen until you pull the plug and force them to go outside and password protect the computer.
This is not a defense of Apple, but a statement about how large corporations work. I seriously doubt that the videos were completely faked. As with anything, the results can be spun or manipulated, but there has to be a least a shred of truth, or the lawyer attack dogs would be out by now.
Apple basically called out every single smartphone developer and said "you all suck too!" and posted videos to "prove" it. Those companies all responded so far with nothing but the same tired PR statements. If Apple was actually slandering these other phones and faked the results entirely, I'm sure these companies would love to have some extra cash plus a chance to smear one of their biggest competitors.
Now, Apple's video proof is mostly annecdotal since it's one phone and one hand. Yours is too, however. I know people who say they can't make the Apple Antenna issue happen on the iPhone 4, and I see videos on Youtube posted both before and after the iPhone 4 that point out signal loss issues with other smartphones. All of this evidence is, again, annecdotal.
From a scientific standpoint, you have to admit Apple's doing a good job of basically trying to throw a bunch of "proof" out there and making people pick thru it. It stirs in just enough doubt to make everyone stop and think. The hard core haters and fanboys won't change their mind, but this is like election politics, it's not about swaying everyone, just trying to tilt the balance in their favor.
Apple and AT&T have an exclusivity agreement until 2012 (insert end of the world jokes here). Steve has said more than once back in 2007 that this was so. Expect a Verizon phone announcement 2012, unless AT&T ponies up a huge amount of cash to redo the agreement. Apple won't end the agreement because I bet there is a huge money clause that says Apple will have to pay thru the nose if they break that agreement.
This is from a business website, and I believe the last prediction which was that it would be announced at WWDC, was also a business website. I'd bet every prediction since 2007 originated from some business website. And these same guys probably have Apple and Verizon stock. These predictions come out once every 6 months at least. Everyone of them is BS, and they know it.
By harping on and advertising on those very things that you just mentioned.
I'm still skeptical, but here's hoping that because VISA is a financial institution and subject to regulation, unlike Paypal, that they will be forced to do things in the best interests of their customers, or that additional companies getting into this market highlights to the government the need for more regulation.
In the long run, I'm cautiously optimistic on this one.
Junk mail, rules, and filtering absolutely should happen at the server level if you are using Exchange or IMAP, and any business still using POP for email is just shooting themselves in the foot for not understanding their tech better.
However, unzipping would be kind of nice. People send attachments to each other all the time, and email servers have attachment limits. New iPhone users will also have limited data bandwidth. It would be nice if someone could send me that file zipped to 20-50% so I could save time. It takes less time to download files than it does to unzip them and in advanced situations with larger files every little bit helps. Granted, you may be correct in that there are better solutions than trying to email me a 250 MB spreadsheet on a device that probably can't display it in a sophisticated manner.
Before IBM created the standard platform there were a plethora of competing chips, architectures, "operating systems" approaches, price-points and failures. The phone market is in the same situation now.
Correct.
Just as soon as some manufacturer starts to dominate and everything becomes standardised two things will happen: the software will become much more important and the hardware will start the spiral down to commodity status.
WRONG... for the following reasons.
1) Consolidation is always bad for the consumer, because it limits choice. Single manufacture=monopoly and monopoly=bad remember? 2) You actually have it backwards. In the early 80s everyone was trying to sell hardware and they decided to hop on the IBM PC bandwagon the moment Compaq reverse engineered their PC. Then everyone saw that hardware would sell and software wasn't important. IBM was dominant and the clone makers wanted to hitch their wagon to a sure thing. It wasn't until everyone was on PCs that we suddenly understood how important software was. 3) Android, iPhone, webos, etc are all tied to their hardware. No one is going to be able to reverse engineer both the software and hardware like that, at least not legally. Hopefully competition will drive down prices, but these companies will fight tooth and nail to keep from being commodities and "cloning" will not be allowed.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics.
Bad analogy, because software really has very little analogy in the physical world. The closest analogy here is that all cars run on the same gas. Gasoline has specific standards you must adhere to, but it's pretty much the same thing with little variation. And now, gas is controlled by a few powerful companies which make huge obscene profits at the detriment to us as consumers... (insert anti BP references here).
While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers.
Again wrong... WRONG WRONG WRONG. Consolidation=bad! Have you learned nothing from Windows?
So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
Wrong again. Again, the phone manufacturers will not allow it to happen, and we have indeed seen benefits. Regardless of whether you like iPhone or not, it has changed the landscape significantly in just 3 years. The state of the art 4 years ago was the motorola RAZR. That was a cute looking flip phone but it wasn't advanced. Now we have these super powerful smartphones which are computers in our pockets with REAL cameras, REAL screens, and REAL interfaces. This is what competition does, not consolidation.
Okay I'm not surprised or upset some nut job decided to post the usual whackjob theories. I'm surprised that multiple modded him. I'm upset that you modded him "interesting" and not "funny".
So what is it about some Muslim theologies that leads them to try to, for example, feel justified and/or compelled to try to kill Dutch cartoonists and Facebook executives?
It's the same thing that compels born again christians to travel to Utah and tell them how wrong they are for their beliefs. It's the same thing that compels radical christian groups to lobby the United States Congress to pass an amendment declaring marriage being between one man and one woman. It's the same thing that compels extremists to gun down Abortion doctors and harass those who work at Abortion clinics.
This is not something that Muslims have a monopoly on.
I worked for a non profit company with about 200 people, and there were like 5 divisions, Sales and service, Accounting, Publishing, Marketing, and Operations. IT fell under operations. Operations included things like janitorial services, the guys who managed the HVAC, etc. IT was considered a tool to maintain the business flow, and it actually was a very well thought out department; it seemed to fit just right. I was brought in to assist with the first attempt at a "rolling update" of all the machines in the building from old Win 3.1 boxes to Windows NT, and while I was there we started implementing the first help desk to manage the questions coming in from the new hardware. It was a well oiled machine, and we understood we were exactly that, people who knew our IT infrastructure was simply a machine that needed to be oiled and maintained regularly. You may turn your nose up to the idea that IT belongs under someone who manages the guys who make sure the Air Conditioning works, but in fact that's what we did, and what a lot of IT departments do, or should do.
IT had three teams, desktop, network, and development. Each was headed by a different manager. A previous post mentioned how IT often cannabalized development, but IT managed development can work fine as long as it's separate from the rest of the IT team and dedicated to it's task. Also the company has to be sufficiently large enough to warrant it. This was a nonprofit publishing company. For your medical device company it depends on what they use IT for. If you basically buy and sell, if you need a development team to manage your sales tools, then they can be in IT and be responsible for these types of programs, but make sure they also are accessible to the people who need them. IT can easily get Aloof and think they don't have to help people who don't do things exactly the way they want, and thus can't get work done.
If by ad-blocker you mean Safari Reader, it's not an ad-blocker, because you still have to get to the page that has the article and click on the reader button. A true ad blocker hides them from even being loaded. If by unblock advertisement system you mean iAds, then you don't understand iAds. iAds will be part of applications that you download. If you don't like ads don't download the app. And ads have existed in apps for a while, it's just that Apple is facilitating now, so it's nothing new. And what do you mean by "index of web pages?" You mean what Google has? Why re-invent the proverbial wheel when you can use other search engines and concentrate on your company's core competency? Okay that's it you must be a troll. It's clear you don't have a grasp on these concepts or simply have no ability to explain yourself.
Steve's banning of iPhone porn apps from the store is a front. Steve is playing both sides of the porn coin here to make as many people as he can happy.
You can find plenty of iPhone compatible mobile porn websites. These same sites work on any just about other smartphone as well. And the porn industry doesn't need any apps in the app store, because they don't make money on apps, they make money on monthly subscriptions. Sure they would love some kind of free app to drum up more subscriptions, but they aren't bothered too much, they are used to this kind of discrimination. They are also used to their customers hunting them down via Google or clicking thru 15 ads.
It's like Betamax creating a bunch of corner stores and saying "you can't buy porn in our stores" but then being able to go to Joe's porn emporium down the street and get all you want. If Steve really was that concerned he'd have permanently turned on the parental controls on all iPhones. That would be how he would have to shoot his foot clean off, because then he'd have created the VHS/Betamax situation.
Take a few hours to basically put together a report of how long all this is going to take and over estimate. Overestimating is important here. When you explain this to your boss, don't say I can't do blah, say this is what I can do. They may ask for more, say that's impossible. When they push, and they will, give them a little, just enough to cut into your overestimate then hope they take it. If they push and try to make you do 60-80 hours, you are fucked. Dust up your resume. But if they accept your logic and push the schedule or hire someone then logic wins.
Your company is fucked right now. They somehow got into a situation where they need to meet a goal without proper resources. So they are trying to squeeze you for all they can and you let them. The above is what you should have done originally. Now that they saddled you with this they are glig to blame failures on you. You always need to know what you can and can't do. They have no money to fulfill your requests but if you push back politely you might find something. However I doubt this. If they were good managers they wouldn't be in this situation.
I know you are just being overly sarcastic and trying to get karma or something, but it just doesn't apply here. Why are you getting modded up for an unfunny, non-insightful comment that is flat out wrong? The Hurt Locker won the academy award this past year. I personally feel it rightfully deserved it, it was a fantastic movie! Light years better than Avatar, which had huge sales, and probably huge downloads as well.
Perhaps more people downloaded The Hurt Locker because they heard about it from the academy awards but it wasn't in most mainstream movie theaters? Perhaps the RIAA distribution model favors huge Avatar style blockbusters that appeal to the masses rather than well crafted intelligent works of art? Perhaps Hurt Locker didn't have the huge media blitz and the money to promote it that Avatar did?
Slashdot Mirror
I keep hearing a lot of theories about security from the tech media like they know security. The problem is that security is a great way to scare up hits and freak people out so it's useful to write articles pandering in one direction or another, but there's rarely any true science to the articles, no figures, no statistics, no hard examples. This is because all that is boring and doesn't get hits, but it's what it takes to truly determine what is and what is not secure. Nothing is 100% secure, but then again we have this false sense of how architectures and security work. It's just BS.
This is the same kind of argument about how pundits spread the myth Macs are not any more secure than windows because hackers aren't targeting it. There's no evidence to back that statement up, and there's no evidence that Android less secure just because there are various flavors. In fact that can make it harder because one hack might not work on multiple flavors. That's even one of Androids problems now, that it's sometimes difficult to get a single app to work on multiple Android OS devices. You could then posit that the iPhone is easier to hack because the OS is so similar and the number of iOS devices in the wild is much higher than Android. But that's BS too because the iPhone is such a locked down system that in order to install anything you have to go thru the iTunes app store gatekeepers. The other way in is thru Safari, but that's really the only other way, and well now we know the security of Safari is BS because of that hole that they found in iOS 4 they used for jailbreaking. But compared to windows and compared to each other, which of these has had more critical vulnerabilities? The article gives me nothing.
Despite all this positing, it comes down to number of hacks, and what the hacks are. I could not truly begin to tell you which handhelds are more secure than others because no one, including this article, has any facts. The article eludes to "security circles" but who knows who those people are.
I think we should ban security articles from Slashdot unless they have a certain level of scientific statistics or hardcore evidence. Most articles about computer security on slashdot are not news for nerds, they are news for "platform fanboi weenies who want to start a flame war about which platform is more secure."
I know many of us are thinking it...
OMG everyone complained about Voice Control on the iPhone coming late and all this time Android didn't have it and iPhone has had it for over a year and you people still can't fix your battery issues? iPh0ne is l337, j00r Andr01d suxx0rs!
Now while all the iPhone fanbois are busy celebrating on your perceived killshot, the Nokia fanbois are sneaking up behind you ready to club you with almost two decades of history, but they will be given away as their phone beeps asking to install something called Cabir. The WebOS fanbois will try to call to an end to the violence, but no one can hear them, and the Blackberri fanbois will just ignore it all, acting all superior and pretending to do work when they are really just looking at pron.
Give a hacker physical access to any device and they will eventually find a way to crack it.
It amazes me that scientists and journalists phrase this as an "attack." It normally takes an act of thievery or an "attack" on the street to lose your phone. If you lose your phone, your fucked anyway, right? The lock on a phone is meant as a casual lock for someone who just happens to walk by and wants to sneak a peek. In fact wouldn't it be easier to plug the phone in via USB and hack it that way, perhaps by mounting it as a hard drive and messing with the contents?
Nice academic study, but not that big of a deal.
We also need a populace which will support Obama if he leans left and shows jerks like Palin just how big his balls really are.
But that's the true problem. We have an uneducated, jaded populace that doesn't vote their heart (if they vote at all), we have two parties who don't want to lose any control on government they have to allow a major third party, and we have a bunch of fat lazy rich people who also control much of the media who want to maintain their control on government as well.
Obama was a good choice, IMHO, but he's basically been given crap to start with, and anything less than diamonds from that crap is spun as failure by the political machine. No he's not perfect, but the entire country has been positioned as center right, and our system of checks and balances, while good, has been pushed to the right hard over the past few decades and we don't have enough force to push it back. Even if we did it will take time as our system of government was built to create "stability", and major changes are sometimes harder for no other reason than it's hard to change the status quo.
It costs even more money than free wifi.
Having someone walk around asking for orders takes more time away from making orders, cleaning the equipment, grinding the coffee, etc. The biggest expense of any US business is it's payroll. Plus in a coffee shop environment, some people might find it annoying because those people have come to expect that they won't be bothered every 15 minutes. In an upscale restaurant where I don't pull my laptop I expect someone to visit my table regularly. At a coffee shop I personally want to be left alone. It's one of the many coffee shop paradoxes.
Cringley is a columnist, like many others, and he makes predictions based on the facts he has and his extensive experience in IT. He also makes annual predictions for the coming year in technology and then follows them up the following year with an article about how many he got right and how many he got wrong. So the first person to say he's wrong is himself and he is humble about it. He even has rough statistics on his percentage year to year. Someone who's willing to dissect his own hits a misses deserves your attention simply as a columnist with very interesting ideas that more than a few times are right. Compare that to asses like Dvorak who are 95%+ of the time wrong.
At the same time there are a bunch of monday morning quarterbacks on Slashdot...
To me, The Truman show WAS a black comedy. Look at how everyone is trying to get their 2 minutes of fame on the latest vapid reality show. The video of thousands of models creating a stampede (in NYC I think?) trying to get on a model reality show and all thinking this was their only chance at decent job and stardom?
We ARE on The Truman Show, and we are all being filmed, if we let the asses do it. The only reason why The Truman show came out so nice is because Truman picked the best out come... and yet the public reached for the TV guide to see what was on immediately after Truman walked out. /rant
(can anyone offer an explanation how Facebook for Android is such pure garbage, all jokes about content aside?)
Because the Facebook developers suck?
The iPhone Facebook app isn't much better. They finally got it stable, but that's after several versions and even then some people still have some crashing, and there are still plenty of missing features (I can filter the Newsfeed on the website to exclude those stupid facebook game posts people post every 5 seconds, but I can't seem to do the same on the phone? WTF??). If it wasn't for the narrow development approach apple takes, and that (I think) so many more iPhone users have Facebook installed than Android users** and were screaming at Facebook to get their act together, then it probably would have never gotten to the point it 's at now.
**PS: my hypothesis is that since Android users are more conscious about personal digital freedom, they are less likely to be Facebook users than iPhone users and there is less demand for the Android app than the iPhone app. It seems plausable but I have no proof to back this up. The point still stands that for a while the facebook app sucked very hard and I don't think it was primarily anything to do with any platform. Now it currently sucks a little.
Since the internet hit the mainstream, the trend has been to have less human-to-human interaction. It started with things like IRC, USENet, and email, and has expanded to Web-based forums, blogs, comments on the bottom of news websites, and Facebook. Human to Human interaction is messy. Humans are dumb, annoying, selfish, greedy, and lazy. But on Facebook, humans are reduced to some cute pictures and a periodic status. One can communicate light heartedly with your "friends" simply by replying to comments or posting your own and look for comments. It's not as real, but it filters out all the hassle of having to make plans, go outside, and deal with other people you don't want to deal with, like your friend's significant other or relatives.
"Better" is relative. Human to human contact is to Facebook as good restaurants are to McDonalds. You have to invest time looking into restaurants and risk bad or mediocre restaurants in order to find the good ones or even the best one. McD's is unhealthy and boring, but to the untrained pallete it still takes just fine, it feeds your hunger, and it's incredibly easy to get because it's the same at every single chain. When I was a kid, McDonalds was great. Now that I've grown up, I have figured out there are better foods out there, both better tasting and better for you.
Maybe more of your friends spend less time on facebook, but I know a ton of people who are still on there, and new people are being added daily, in the form of teens who want to be part of the trend.
Oh and before you point out that there's a trend in schools and families to wean kids off fast food and the like because it's bad for you in general, there's no such movement for facebook yet. Only parents yelling at their kids to get off the computer, and kids never listen until you pull the plug and force them to go outside and password protect the computer.
So you are already an asshole.
Oh Shazbot!
This is not a defense of Apple, but a statement about how large corporations work. I seriously doubt that the videos were completely faked. As with anything, the results can be spun or manipulated, but there has to be a least a shred of truth, or the lawyer attack dogs would be out by now.
Apple basically called out every single smartphone developer and said "you all suck too!" and posted videos to "prove" it. Those companies all responded so far with nothing but the same tired PR statements. If Apple was actually slandering these other phones and faked the results entirely, I'm sure these companies would love to have some extra cash plus a chance to smear one of their biggest competitors.
Now, Apple's video proof is mostly annecdotal since it's one phone and one hand. Yours is too, however. I know people who say they can't make the Apple Antenna issue happen on the iPhone 4, and I see videos on Youtube posted both before and after the iPhone 4 that point out signal loss issues with other smartphones. All of this evidence is, again, annecdotal.
From a scientific standpoint, you have to admit Apple's doing a good job of basically trying to throw a bunch of "proof" out there and making people pick thru it. It stirs in just enough doubt to make everyone stop and think. The hard core haters and fanboys won't change their mind, but this is like election politics, it's not about swaying everyone, just trying to tilt the balance in their favor.
Apple and AT&T have an exclusivity agreement until 2012 (insert end of the world jokes here). Steve has said more than once back in 2007 that this was so. Expect a Verizon phone announcement 2012, unless AT&T ponies up a huge amount of cash to redo the agreement. Apple won't end the agreement because I bet there is a huge money clause that says Apple will have to pay thru the nose if they break that agreement.
This is from a business website, and I believe the last prediction which was that it would be announced at WWDC, was also a business website. I'd bet every prediction since 2007 originated from some business website. And these same guys probably have Apple and Verizon stock. These predictions come out once every 6 months at least. Everyone of them is BS, and they know it.
By harping on and advertising on those very things that you just mentioned.
I'm still skeptical, but here's hoping that because VISA is a financial institution and subject to regulation, unlike Paypal, that they will be forced to do things in the best interests of their customers, or that additional companies getting into this market highlights to the government the need for more regulation.
In the long run, I'm cautiously optimistic on this one.
Junk mail, rules, and filtering absolutely should happen at the server level if you are using Exchange or IMAP, and any business still using POP for email is just shooting themselves in the foot for not understanding their tech better.
However, unzipping would be kind of nice. People send attachments to each other all the time, and email servers have attachment limits. New iPhone users will also have limited data bandwidth. It would be nice if someone could send me that file zipped to 20-50% so I could save time. It takes less time to download files than it does to unzip them and in advanced situations with larger files every little bit helps. Granted, you may be correct in that there are better solutions than trying to email me a 250 MB spreadsheet on a device that probably can't display it in a sophisticated manner.
Before IBM created the standard platform there were a plethora of competing chips, architectures, "operating systems" approaches, price-points and failures. The phone market is in the same situation now.
Correct.
Just as soon as some manufacturer starts to dominate and everything becomes standardised two things will happen: the software will become much more important and the hardware will start the spiral down to commodity status.
WRONG... for the following reasons.
1) Consolidation is always bad for the consumer, because it limits choice. Single manufacture=monopoly and monopoly=bad remember?
2) You actually have it backwards. In the early 80s everyone was trying to sell hardware and they decided to hop on the IBM PC bandwagon the moment Compaq reverse engineered their PC. Then everyone saw that hardware would sell and software wasn't important. IBM was dominant and the clone makers wanted to hitch their wagon to a sure thing. It wasn't until everyone was on PCs that we suddenly understood how important software was.
3) Android, iPhone, webos, etc are all tied to their hardware. No one is going to be able to reverse engineer both the software and hardware like that, at least not legally. Hopefully competition will drive down prices, but these companies will fight tooth and nail to keep from being commodities and "cloning" will not be allowed.
The car market has gone the same way - they all look pretty much the same - dictated by the laws of aerodynamics. It means that other features have been developed to differentiate - things like economy, safety, electronics.
Bad analogy, because software really has very little analogy in the physical world. The closest analogy here is that all cars run on the same gas. Gasoline has specific standards you must adhere to, but it's pretty much the same thing with little variation. And now, gas is controlled by a few powerful companies which make huge obscene profits at the detriment to us as consumers... (insert anti BP references here).
While this is not necessarily good for the manufacturers - the number of players shrinks as the market consolidates, it is good for the consumers.
Again wrong... WRONG WRONG WRONG. Consolidation=bad! Have you learned nothing from Windows?
So it will be with phones (or whatever they evolve into, they're the equivalent of an Atari, today). We have yet to see the major benefits emerge, despite what Apple may tell us.
Wrong again. Again, the phone manufacturers will not allow it to happen, and we have indeed seen benefits. Regardless of whether you like iPhone or not, it has changed the landscape significantly in just 3 years. The state of the art 4 years ago was the motorola RAZR. That was a cute looking flip phone but it wasn't advanced. Now we have these super powerful smartphones which are computers in our pockets with REAL cameras, REAL screens, and REAL interfaces. This is what competition does, not consolidation.
Okay I'm not surprised or upset some nut job decided to post the usual whackjob theories. I'm surprised that multiple modded him. I'm upset that you modded him "interesting" and not "funny".
WTF is wrong with you people today?
So what is it about some Muslim theologies that leads them to try to, for example, feel justified and/or compelled to try to kill Dutch cartoonists and Facebook executives?
It's the same thing that compels born again christians to travel to Utah and tell them how wrong they are for their beliefs. It's the same thing that compels radical christian groups to lobby the United States Congress to pass an amendment declaring marriage being between one man and one woman. It's the same thing that compels extremists to gun down Abortion doctors and harass those who work at Abortion clinics.
This is not something that Muslims have a monopoly on.
I worked for a non profit company with about 200 people, and there were like 5 divisions, Sales and service, Accounting, Publishing, Marketing, and Operations. IT fell under operations. Operations included things like janitorial services, the guys who managed the HVAC, etc. IT was considered a tool to maintain the business flow, and it actually was a very well thought out department; it seemed to fit just right. I was brought in to assist with the first attempt at a "rolling update" of all the machines in the building from old Win 3.1 boxes to Windows NT, and while I was there we started implementing the first help desk to manage the questions coming in from the new hardware. It was a well oiled machine, and we understood we were exactly that, people who knew our IT infrastructure was simply a machine that needed to be oiled and maintained regularly. You may turn your nose up to the idea that IT belongs under someone who manages the guys who make sure the Air Conditioning works, but in fact that's what we did, and what a lot of IT departments do, or should do.
IT had three teams, desktop, network, and development. Each was headed by a different manager. A previous post mentioned how IT often cannabalized development, but IT managed development can work fine as long as it's separate from the rest of the IT team and dedicated to it's task. Also the company has to be sufficiently large enough to warrant it. This was a nonprofit publishing company. For your medical device company it depends on what they use IT for. If you basically buy and sell, if you need a development team to manage your sales tools, then they can be in IT and be responsible for these types of programs, but make sure they also are accessible to the people who need them. IT can easily get Aloof and think they don't have to help people who don't do things exactly the way they want, and thus can't get work done.
If by ad-blocker you mean Safari Reader, it's not an ad-blocker, because you still have to get to the page that has the article and click on the reader button. A true ad blocker hides them from even being loaded. If by unblock advertisement system you mean iAds, then you don't understand iAds. iAds will be part of applications that you download. If you don't like ads don't download the app. And ads have existed in apps for a while, it's just that Apple is facilitating now, so it's nothing new. And what do you mean by "index of web pages?" You mean what Google has? Why re-invent the proverbial wheel when you can use other search engines and concentrate on your company's core competency? Okay that's it you must be a troll. It's clear you don't have a grasp on these concepts or simply have no ability to explain yourself.
Steve's banning of iPhone porn apps from the store is a front. Steve is playing both sides of the porn coin here to make as many people as he can happy.
You can find plenty of iPhone compatible mobile porn websites. These same sites work on any just about other smartphone as well. And the porn industry doesn't need any apps in the app store, because they don't make money on apps, they make money on monthly subscriptions. Sure they would love some kind of free app to drum up more subscriptions, but they aren't bothered too much, they are used to this kind of discrimination. They are also used to their customers hunting them down via Google or clicking thru 15 ads.
It's like Betamax creating a bunch of corner stores and saying "you can't buy porn in our stores" but then being able to go to Joe's porn emporium down the street and get all you want. If Steve really was that concerned he'd have permanently turned on the parental controls on all iPhones. That would be how he would have to shoot his foot clean off, because then he'd have created the VHS/Betamax situation.
Take a few hours to basically put together a report of how long all this is going to take and over estimate. Overestimating is important here. When you explain this to your boss, don't say I can't do blah, say this is what I can do. They may ask for more, say that's impossible. When they push, and they will, give them a little, just enough to cut into your overestimate then hope they take it. If they push and try to make you do 60-80 hours, you are fucked. Dust up your resume. But if they accept your logic and push the schedule or hire someone then logic wins.
Your company is fucked right now. They somehow got into a situation where they need to meet a goal without proper resources. So they are trying to squeeze you for all they can and you let them. The above is what you should have done originally. Now that they saddled you with this they are glig to blame failures on you. You always need to know what you can and can't do. They have no money to fulfill your requests but if you push back politely you might find something. However I doubt this. If they were good managers they wouldn't be in this situation.
It's not that people don't understand MPG
It's simply that people don't understand percentages or ratios. This is a question of math.
Sounds like the school did what was best for the student, and is now being punished for it.
Oh well in that case it's business as usual isn't it?
I know you are just being overly sarcastic and trying to get karma or something, but it just doesn't apply here. Why are you getting modded up for an unfunny, non-insightful comment that is flat out wrong? The Hurt Locker won the academy award this past year. I personally feel it rightfully deserved it, it was a fantastic movie! Light years better than Avatar, which had huge sales, and probably huge downloads as well.
Perhaps more people downloaded The Hurt Locker because they heard about it from the academy awards but it wasn't in most mainstream movie theaters? Perhaps the RIAA distribution model favors huge Avatar style blockbusters that appeal to the masses rather than well crafted intelligent works of art? Perhaps Hurt Locker didn't have the huge media blitz and the money to promote it that Avatar did?