So, who wants the phone? I'm getting MLB videos of the playoffs just after the homer happened. I'm playing a game. I'm watching the latest episode of Mad Men while waiting for my friend to get out of emergency. I'm sending e-mail. I have NEVER spent an extra dime for the phone time. I have always kept a 3,000 minute bank of rollover minutes. I did throw in $5 for some texting. But I'm over 25. Nobody I know texts.
Farhad, once again, has courted "controversy" by writing something totally full of poo-poo.
Not only AT&T, but all networks, have got to realize that the iPhone may be first, but it's only the beginning. If they don't give us the bandwidth, somebody will.
Oh, I agtree with you there. We should have that kind of system in the U.S. But the fact is, we don't. And oddly enough, the fact that most new and innovative phones come out with exclusivity deals for a period of time in the U.S., at least, is not really Apple's doing. It COULD have insisted on that, but then its prices would have had to stay up in the hundreds of dollars. It wouldn't have been a year later that a $200 model would come out, nor another year later a $99 model wouldn't have come out. They'd still be selling a $399-$599 range of models, with sales many hundreds of thousands, or millions, less.
I'd love it if the US industry functioned like the Internet, with all the carriers required to hand over signals from other providers for free, and all of them cooperating on common standards. We have too many gauges on our wireless railroad. But that's the function of the FCC, not of one consumer handset company, no matter how popular it's becoming. In fact, the iPhone has spurred some congressional action about limiting these exclusivity deals.
Verizon is an interesting case. They have a very good wireless network, the vestiges of the most punkass wired phone network in the U.S., but they've adopted a deadend standard. Maybe the FCC can pressure the industry to become interoperable in a given time, but it's totally beyond one equipment manufacturer's capability.
I guess, then, that you hate what Intel is doing to stop, via hardware measures, any kind of code overflow attack. Should a hacker have the "right" to crash your media player so he can do a remote code execution attack?
Everything Apple does is Evil, obviously, because Martian hybrids are trying to have sex with you. Evil? This is about a company protecting itself when a phone is lost or stolen, and it's also about YOU being able to disable your iPhone for the f*cking thieves who stole your phone and could be phoning your girlfriend and finding out all your personal information. Screw 'em, let them have a brick with GPS. People obviously haven't been doing any critical thinking here. Can software that bricks an iPhone be used for evil? Of course. But the function has to exist. Nothing Evil here, folks.
Oh, let's see: "it may be necessary to remove functionality of an app?" Well, what about if a bit of spyware gets put into an app? I'd like Apple to disable it, reimburse me, and toss the programmer off the store. And sue him. And brick his iPhone, too.
Really, there are a number of people on these forums who are so sure that whatever Apple does is evil that they have to say any number of silly things.
So a Pre syncs to iTunes, right, and it copies the songs you have indicated in iTunes. It then goes to Mobile Me, but you don't have that. Do you spoof it, too, with Jungle Disk or other software? Then it goes to your contacts, your email, and your iCal events. Do they sync too? How the hell do they do that? Is there not some problem that could arise, quite easily, with a device that is spoofing itself as something with a completely different set of data needs? I think so.
The interface in iTunes is not public, and it is under no legal obligation to be. If there is no partnership, which would inevitably involve Palm paying a license fee that would cover the expense and hassle of the integration, then there's zero obligation to share the interface.
You can break a contract. It's done every day. You can break it for any number of reasons. The most you have to do is pay damages. "Illegal" is different from tortious.
On the other hand, if the contract was unduly onerous, or had any number of flaws in it, it may be an unconscionable contract that a court can say you were legally entitled to leave without compensation.
iTunes is the largest music retailer in the United States, which is pretty incredible in seven (?) years. But count up all the sources of music, and you realize that it's just a player in a much larger industry. It is totally dominant in the iPod sales business. It doesn't need to sell to other players, because it isn't going after music sales per se, just the sale of iPods to load up with songs. Of total music sales in the U.S., how much does iTunes represent? Nowhere near monopoly.
And setting prices? You'll notice when MS announced the more capable Zune HD with a low -- possibly money-losing (or "dumping"?) price -- Apple promptly lowered prices on their new nano and iPod Touch.
Fine. Let that nearly bankrupt company take Apple to court and fight away for a couple of years, spending all their money on lawyers instead of buying some music sync program and repurposing it to work with their player. And let Palm go down because only Slashdot idiots think they have a point.
At the moment, Apple does not support other players interfacing directly. If they did, it might have some point, but it would cost them a hell of a lot more to update each time they wanted to add a new feature. They'd have to check with their "partners." Okay, maybe there's something to that. But what would it involve from the "partners"? 1. Licensing fees to pay Apple for the use of their IP. 2. Cooperation with the partners, sharing costs and information. It becomes a LOT bigger job to interface with dozens of other players. What for? Apple makes its money selling hardware. The software they throw in for nothing.
They're under no legal obligation to open up their platform that way. You know, OS X can interface with Windows because of freeware interfaces. Windows never supplied them with their network and file codes. There's a ton of stuff that Windows does to only play with Windows.
Oh, my god. All iPhones use the Apple store. All iPods -- or 99% of them -- sync with iTunes and use the Apple Store. Together, they are the largest music seller in the US, because Apple sells by far the most devices. They actually went out and innovated, you know? The Windows world was saying, "I want to drag and drop my songs to the player," and dissing iTunes. Okay. Now, iTunes just syncs too. You can put your CDs, or the kids tell me, pirated copies of music, on your iPod or iPhone. You could rip a friend's music as an mp3, or Apple lossless, or AAC. They have managed to eliminate the DRM they were forced to put on their music from the beginning, though Universal/NBC and other labels were kind of nasty, in that they gave Amazon the rights to non-copy protected music for at least a year before they gave the same rights to Apple. Kind of "restraint of trade," no? But anyway, now it's done. ANYBODY can copy the tunes to their device.
Of course, I recall during the DRM controversies, a fair number of people were trying to preserve DRM by making Apple support other schemes. Not only FairPlay, but PlaysForSure (until it didn't) and the Zune too. That was completely unworkable, but a lot of people just hate Apple's success in this field, and they wanted to jump on it too. Hey. I've got a Mac. If I buy a Zune, where's the syncing software? You'd think MS could write compatible software for OS X, no?
Oh, by the open-handed, rational way you were discussing this subject, I'm so surprised by your attitude.
Advocate and discourage your life away, JohnFen. I really don't give a rip.
The best thing about Apple is the tight integration between their hardware. I think it's one of the big reasons why people like it. If you don't, that's fine. Use something else. There's lots of other things out there. The Zune has a store, I understand.
It will not transfer whatever DRM'ed files the user hasn't updated with non-DRM'ed files. That's the point. They're DRM'ed. You can easily replace them with superior (iTunes Plus) files, but if you choose not to, they won't transfer them to your Palm Poop. It wouldn't make a damn bit of difference if they did transfer the file, because you wouldn't be able to play it. It's copy protected, which is what the industry was demanding back at the beginning, and what the Movie and TV industries still are.
Are there Apple fanboys? Yes. There are also irrational Apple haters.
Microsoft had enough market share back in the '90s that they WERE a monopoly, and therefore their business practices came under close scrutiny. This is back before the Mac, and whatever penetration Linux has.
And what's wrong with Palm making an app that reads Apple iTunes library and loads its tunes from there, then adds the Google calendar and contacts -- or some other, proprietary database if they choose? Nothing. They're just so short on sales and money that they're desperate.
So there's some kind of "unfair business practice" in iTunes? There was a point when people had a point, when Apple had encrypted songs. Now they're not. They spent their money, risked their capital, to build iTunes. Now if they don't want to share iTunes with Palm, who didn't contribute to that effort and aren't contributing now, this is an injustice? I think you're absolutely wrong. If anyone's doing an unfair business practice, it's Palm. I guess they do so in desperation, because they just don't have money enough to develop their own iTunes, or enough imagination, I suppose. Why don't they use the Google tools to sync their calendars, contacts and so on, and just rely on their own tunes container to recognize the Palm. Do it over their cool charger.
I think there's some people out there who are wedded to the idea that there's something wrong about Apple tying their hardware with their software. Balderdash. It may or may not be a good business decision, but why in hell should they be obligated?
Why not? Look at it from the processor's point of view. If you could have a single I/0 from the motherboard, breaking out to a number of connectors on the case, with no rf problems and speed galore, why wouldn't you be interested? If Intel's going to maintain the dominance it has on the processor market, it's going to have to compete with itself. If you don't, you die.
Well, gosh, unfunk, maybe that's why Apple went to Intel with the idea this time. Maybe they saw what has happened to Firewire because they lack Intel's clout, which made them capable of selling an inferior connection, like USB 2.0. (Yes, a real-world Firewire 400 connection is faster than USB 2.0 at 480, because Firewire needs no processor arbitration, had power supply in it to start with, etc., but lost the fight to the omnipresent Intel. Bong-bong-bong-BONG!)
What's the point of inventing an interface if it doesn't get adopted?
But look at the specs: you wouldn't NEED an expensive docking station, just a single, standard Light Peak connector. Done and done.
As for the replacement of other interfaces, I'm sure it will be from the inside out. First, you could have only optical I/O to the motherboard. Then you could see what kind of ports you could eliminate or simplify. Would you connect a single connector to something like a hub, with multiple connectors hanging off that?
The thing that everybody's missing here is that this is a prototype, with a rumor attached about an appearance in 2010. Maybe yes, maybe no. I'd sure like designers allowed the freedom to work with optical inputs, especially if it's going to get to 100 Gbps in 10 years.
Hey: one thing is, what about the security implications. No RF leaks?
Actually, what's the matter with competition? If USB 3.0 is actually as good as they say, that's okay. If there's a real purpose to delivering multiple protocols through a single optical cable the thickness of a hair at 10 Gbps then up to 100 Gbps, it would be relatively easy to connect six or seven peripherals, run them at max, and add in the connection to the 36" monitor running at 2048 x 3840. The two things are not competitors. There might be uses for them both/neither. Let 'em compete.
I think Apple's move comes after the failure of Firewire to get market share in competition with Intel's relatively slow -- that's right -- USB standard, which won because of the ubiquity of Intel, and USB's need for processor arbitration. By the end, they could give away the standard, and it would still never get traction. So, no Firewire 3200.
But optical? Well, with one connector to the motherboard, you get a multitude of protocols, all running on the same fiber. Theoretically, it's great. And Intel will be able to profit no matter which wins; or maybe it's USB 3.0 first and then Light Peak? Who knows?
Slashdot Mirror
So, who wants the phone? I'm getting MLB videos of the playoffs just after the homer happened. I'm playing a game. I'm watching the latest episode of Mad Men while waiting for my friend to get out of emergency. I'm sending e-mail. I have NEVER spent an extra dime for the phone time. I have always kept a 3,000 minute bank of rollover minutes. I did throw in $5 for some texting. But I'm over 25. Nobody I know texts.
Farhad, once again, has courted "controversy" by writing something totally full of poo-poo.
Not only AT&T, but all networks, have got to realize that the iPhone may be first, but it's only the beginning. If they don't give us the bandwidth, somebody will.
Oh, I agtree with you there. We should have that kind of system in the U.S. But the fact is, we don't. And oddly enough, the fact that most new and innovative phones come out with exclusivity deals for a period of time in the U.S., at least, is not really Apple's doing. It COULD have insisted on that, but then its prices would have had to stay up in the hundreds of dollars. It wouldn't have been a year later that a $200 model would come out, nor another year later a $99 model wouldn't have come out. They'd still be selling a $399-$599 range of models, with sales many hundreds of thousands, or millions, less.
I'd love it if the US industry functioned like the Internet, with all the carriers required to hand over signals from other providers for free, and all of them cooperating on common standards. We have too many gauges on our wireless railroad. But that's the function of the FCC, not of one consumer handset company, no matter how popular it's becoming. In fact, the iPhone has spurred some congressional action about limiting these exclusivity deals.
Verizon is an interesting case. They have a very good wireless network, the vestiges of the most punkass wired phone network in the U.S., but they've adopted a deadend standard. Maybe the FCC can pressure the industry to become interoperable in a given time, but it's totally beyond one equipment manufacturer's capability.
I guess, then, that you hate what Intel is doing to stop, via hardware measures, any kind of code overflow attack. Should a hacker have the "right" to crash your media player so he can do a remote code execution attack?
Everything Apple does is Evil, obviously, because Martian hybrids are trying to have sex with you. Evil? This is about a company protecting itself when a phone is lost or stolen, and it's also about YOU being able to disable your iPhone for the f*cking thieves who stole your phone and could be phoning your girlfriend and finding out all your personal information. Screw 'em, let them have a brick with GPS. People obviously haven't been doing any critical thinking here. Can software that bricks an iPhone be used for evil? Of course. But the function has to exist. Nothing Evil here, folks.
Oh, let's see: "it may be necessary to remove functionality of an app?" Well, what about if a bit of spyware gets put into an app? I'd like Apple to disable it, reimburse me, and toss the programmer off the store. And sue him. And brick his iPhone, too.
Really, there are a number of people on these forums who are so sure that whatever Apple does is evil that they have to say any number of silly things.
When there are supereasy software calls in Cocoa and .NET that let you do all kinds of stuff with one call?
So a Pre syncs to iTunes, right, and it copies the songs you have indicated in iTunes. It then goes to Mobile Me, but you don't have that. Do you spoof it, too, with Jungle Disk or other software? Then it goes to your contacts, your email, and your iCal events. Do they sync too? How the hell do they do that? Is there not some problem that could arise, quite easily, with a device that is spoofing itself as something with a completely different set of data needs? I think so.
The interface in iTunes is not public, and it is under no legal obligation to be. If there is no partnership, which would inevitably involve Palm paying a license fee that would cover the expense and hassle of the integration, then there's zero obligation to share the interface.
You can break a contract. It's done every day. You can break it for any number of reasons. The most you have to do is pay damages. "Illegal" is different from tortious.
On the other hand, if the contract was unduly onerous, or had any number of flaws in it, it may be an unconscionable contract that a court can say you were legally entitled to leave without compensation.
All these shortcomings, and yet they're slaughtering the competition because people don't give a crap about anything that your rant is about.
iTunes is the largest music retailer in the United States, which is pretty incredible in seven (?) years. But count up all the sources of music, and you realize that it's just a player in a much larger industry. It is totally dominant in the iPod sales business. It doesn't need to sell to other players, because it isn't going after music sales per se, just the sale of iPods to load up with songs. Of total music sales in the U.S., how much does iTunes represent? Nowhere near monopoly.
And setting prices? You'll notice when MS announced the more capable Zune HD with a low -- possibly money-losing (or "dumping"?) price -- Apple promptly lowered prices on their new nano and iPod Touch.
Booth was a patriot of an evil country that allowed slavery and gloried in racism.
Fine. Let that nearly bankrupt company take Apple to court and fight away for a couple of years, spending all their money on lawyers instead of buying some music sync program and repurposing it to work with their player. And let Palm go down because only Slashdot idiots think they have a point.
At the moment, Apple does not support other players interfacing directly. If they did, it might have some point, but it would cost them a hell of a lot more to update each time they wanted to add a new feature. They'd have to check with their "partners." Okay, maybe there's something to that. But what would it involve from the "partners"? 1. Licensing fees to pay Apple for the use of their IP. 2. Cooperation with the partners, sharing costs and information. It becomes a LOT bigger job to interface with dozens of other players. What for? Apple makes its money selling hardware. The software they throw in for nothing.
They're under no legal obligation to open up their platform that way. You know, OS X can interface with Windows because of freeware interfaces. Windows never supplied them with their network and file codes. There's a ton of stuff that Windows does to only play with Windows.
Oh, my god. All iPhones use the Apple store. All iPods -- or 99% of them -- sync with iTunes and use the Apple Store. Together, they are the largest music seller in the US, because Apple sells by far the most devices. They actually went out and innovated, you know? The Windows world was saying, "I want to drag and drop my songs to the player," and dissing iTunes. Okay. Now, iTunes just syncs too. You can put your CDs, or the kids tell me, pirated copies of music, on your iPod or iPhone. You could rip a friend's music as an mp3, or Apple lossless, or AAC. They have managed to eliminate the DRM they were forced to put on their music from the beginning, though Universal/NBC and other labels were kind of nasty, in that they gave Amazon the rights to non-copy protected music for at least a year before they gave the same rights to Apple. Kind of "restraint of trade," no? But anyway, now it's done. ANYBODY can copy the tunes to their device.
Of course, I recall during the DRM controversies, a fair number of people were trying to preserve DRM by making Apple support other schemes. Not only FairPlay, but PlaysForSure (until it didn't) and the Zune too. That was completely unworkable, but a lot of people just hate Apple's success in this field, and they wanted to jump on it too. Hey. I've got a Mac. If I buy a Zune, where's the syncing software? You'd think MS could write compatible software for OS X, no?
Oh, by the open-handed, rational way you were discussing this subject, I'm so surprised by your attitude.
Advocate and discourage your life away, JohnFen. I really don't give a rip.
The best thing about Apple is the tight integration between their hardware. I think it's one of the big reasons why people like it. If you don't, that's fine. Use something else. There's lots of other things out there. The Zune has a store, I understand.
It will not transfer whatever DRM'ed files the user hasn't updated with non-DRM'ed files. That's the point. They're DRM'ed. You can easily replace them with superior (iTunes Plus) files, but if you choose not to, they won't transfer them to your Palm Poop. It wouldn't make a damn bit of difference if they did transfer the file, because you wouldn't be able to play it. It's copy protected, which is what the industry was demanding back at the beginning, and what the Movie and TV industries still are.
Are there Apple fanboys? Yes. There are also irrational Apple haters.
Microsoft had enough market share back in the '90s that they WERE a monopoly, and therefore their business practices came under close scrutiny. This is back before the Mac, and whatever penetration Linux has.
And what's wrong with Palm making an app that reads Apple iTunes library and loads its tunes from there, then adds the Google calendar and contacts -- or some other, proprietary database if they choose? Nothing. They're just so short on sales and money that they're desperate.
So there's some kind of "unfair business practice" in iTunes? There was a point when people had a point, when Apple had encrypted songs. Now they're not. They spent their money, risked their capital, to build iTunes. Now if they don't want to share iTunes with Palm, who didn't contribute to that effort and aren't contributing now, this is an injustice? I think you're absolutely wrong. If anyone's doing an unfair business practice, it's Palm. I guess they do so in desperation, because they just don't have money enough to develop their own iTunes, or enough imagination, I suppose. Why don't they use the Google tools to sync their calendars, contacts and so on, and just rely on their own tunes container to recognize the Palm. Do it over their cool charger.
I think there's some people out there who are wedded to the idea that there's something wrong about Apple tying their hardware with their software. Balderdash. It may or may not be a good business decision, but why in hell should they be obligated?
Why not? Look at it from the processor's point of view. If you could have a single I/0 from the motherboard, breaking out to a number of connectors on the case, with no rf problems and speed galore, why wouldn't you be interested? If Intel's going to maintain the dominance it has on the processor market, it's going to have to compete with itself. If you don't, you die.
Look at the firewire interconnects on digital video cameras. Sony's were "iLink".
And that's about the limit, isn't it. Not for optical.
Well, gosh, unfunk, maybe that's why Apple went to Intel with the idea this time. Maybe they saw what has happened to Firewire because they lack Intel's clout, which made them capable of selling an inferior connection, like USB 2.0. (Yes, a real-world Firewire 400 connection is faster than USB 2.0 at 480, because Firewire needs no processor arbitration, had power supply in it to start with, etc., but lost the fight to the omnipresent Intel. Bong-bong-bong-BONG!)
What's the point of inventing an interface if it doesn't get adopted?
But look at the specs: you wouldn't NEED an expensive docking station, just a single, standard Light Peak connector. Done and done.
As for the replacement of other interfaces, I'm sure it will be from the inside out. First, you could have only optical I/O to the motherboard. Then you could see what kind of ports you could eliminate or simplify. Would you connect a single connector to something like a hub, with multiple connectors hanging off that?
The thing that everybody's missing here is that this is a prototype, with a rumor attached about an appearance in 2010. Maybe yes, maybe no. I'd sure like designers allowed the freedom to work with optical inputs, especially if it's going to get to 100 Gbps in 10 years.
Hey: one thing is, what about the security implications. No RF leaks?
Yeah, only way faster. Come on, old timer. Computers get faster all the time.
Actually, what's the matter with competition? If USB 3.0 is actually as good as they say, that's okay. If there's a real purpose to delivering multiple protocols through a single optical cable the thickness of a hair at 10 Gbps then up to 100 Gbps, it would be relatively easy to connect six or seven peripherals, run them at max, and add in the connection to the 36" monitor running at 2048 x 3840. The two things are not competitors. There might be uses for them both/neither. Let 'em compete.
I think Apple's move comes after the failure of Firewire to get market share in competition with Intel's relatively slow -- that's right -- USB standard, which won because of the ubiquity of Intel, and USB's need for processor arbitration. By the end, they could give away the standard, and it would still never get traction. So, no Firewire 3200.
But optical? Well, with one connector to the motherboard, you get a multitude of protocols, all running on the same fiber. Theoretically, it's great. And Intel will be able to profit no matter which wins; or maybe it's USB 3.0 first and then Light Peak? Who knows?