.Mac isn't iDisk..Mac is integrated into Mac OS X's Sync Services so that users can upload all their synced data (PIM phone and iPod data, Address Book contacts, calendar items, web bookmarks, app preferences, keychain passwords and certificates, Dock items, Dashboard widgets, email account settings, mail rules and signatures and smart mailboxes) to.Mac as a central repository, allowing multiple Macs to be kept in sync with the same data. Sync Services also allows developers to package their app preferences and other data for syncing with.Mac.
This isn't new, it was rolled into Mac OS X Tiger in 2005, and sharpened up in Leopard. It's one of the more useful things about.Mac.
Ironically, Apple introduced ".Mac" as a play on.NET (which it really has very little relation to apart from the idea of networked data sharing) at a time when Microsoft was touting the potential to be a gatekeeper for PC users with Passport.
MS never really delivered those promises (it did f-up data integrity with Passport's high profile data leaks), but Apple quietly delivered it as a system that just works. Now Microsoft is announcing that it's "introducing" something that is nothing new as a beta.
The numbers provided by Gartner/IDG aren't PCs as in Personal Computers, as one might reasonably think. They aren't representing a single market either. They reflect the kind of licenses Microsoft sells, and the range of business conducted by Dell and HP.
They are gerrymandered in the sense that they are carefully cut out to exaggerate the representation of specific companies Gartner and IDG want to promote.
Why else would PC figures include handheld PDA (and apparently some smartphones)? Why would the numbers include server shipments, but only x86 servers, not anything with a different processor?
No other industry hides sales behind such a worthless definition of a market. Imagine comparing car companies together based on all vehicles sold worldwide, when the definition of "vehicle" was expanded to include motorcycles and dump trucks. Those numbers wouldn't tell you much about the passenger car market.
How many people who read about "Apple's market share" know they're being intentionally mislead by figures that have nothing to do with the PC market a reasonable person would envision?
I cited retail sales numbers to illustrate Apple's position in the consumer segment. I did not suggest that Dell makes or ships fewer computers. It's common knowledge that NPD's retail numbers don't count direct sales.
I don't think any reasonable person would have trouble getting that Apple's rapidly increasing retail share is an interesting data point and a valid argument against the idea that Apple isn't relevant because it doesn't have a certain percentage of a gerrymandered market definition concocted by Microsoft-enraptured number companies.
There is nothing fabricated in the article you cited. You just didn't like what it said:
"Since Apple has released five times as many major updates and over fifteen times as many minor updates to Mac OS X since 2000, you might not have guessed that Windows actually costs users five times as much to keep up to date!"
Everybody knows Windows is expensive to maintain, especially for those who have to pay others to clean up their systems rather than spending their time to do it themselves.
Nice job skirting the facts to remain irrelevant to reality.
BTW, any Apple fan needn't be complaining of sour grapes, because the company is hotter today that it ever has been.
Also, the idiom of sour grapes relates to those who, like the fabled fox, complain that the out of reach grapes they wanted but can't have are sour, only because they can't have them.
Therefore, you can't really "eat sour grapes" in any sensible fashion.
The IDG/Gartner numbers (currently at 6.6% in the US, somewhere under 4% worldwide) include all PC, handheld and servers shipped (but only x86 servers). If you're waiting for Apple to take over those gerrymandered statistics, you'll be waiting for some time.
However, if you're looking at the markets Apple sells to, the company already has double digit market penetration in retail laptops (~20%), in home/SOHO (~16%) and education (very high across the US/EU, where Apple is #1 or close to being).
Market share isn't really that critical of a number, expecially when the market isn't defined to do anything but make Microsoft look good. Apple had ~5% OS market share in PCs throughout 2007, but made roughly half as much revenue as MS did with its 95% share of PC OS market. Those statistics also indicate that Linux has zero "market share," when we know some people are using Linux on the desktop.
Conversely, Apple had ~80% market share in music and MP3 players, but rivals, including MS, mostly only lost money. Market share doesn't tell you much about a products quality, suitability, desirability, or anything else. It's like a straight guy measuring his dick. It really doesn't matter.
Apple is not in any way restricting what developers can do with the code they write. The only restrictions are related to how developers can distribute their code for use on the iPhone.
Your argument that code written for the iPhone is somehow not going to be available for reuse elsewhere is non-sensical. The only reason that might happen is due to the impracticality of porting code tied to the Cocoa frameworks to another framework or platform, such as Java ME or BREW. Those limitations already exist in the phone world, and in fact even Java apps aren't always that portable in a practical sense.
TFA is worrying that Apple has secret code related to its SDK that is under NDA, and would not be compatible with the free release of code, but even that idea is bogus because Apple hasn't ever stopped developers from doing the same thing with regard to the Mac SDKs that already exist and use the same NDA legalese.
Which you certainly can do, particularly if you have no profit motive.
However, the majority of iPhone developers are going to be expending their efforts to get paid. Distributing jailbreak software will be as profitable as trying to sell Palm or WinCE software: 99% will be used without payment, and those who do pay will expect expensive support. Good luck with that kind of business plan.
Developers who join up with the AppStore will be able to sell their work to large, paying audiences with little piracy loss, just like iPod Games and other iTunes downloads.
Ever talk to indie musicians who sell their work via iTunes? They make real money. They could also sell MP3s from their own website and avoid paying the ~40% cut Apple takes, but they wouldn't sell anything that way. Same for you.
Who pays you to keep your PC humming and your lights on and your mouth full of pizza and beer and your health insurance premiums and your continuing eduation and your programming books from Amazon?
Don't believe Steve Ballmer; FOSS isn't communism. Sometimes you have to have a day job if you don't have a business plan supporting the software you develop.
Anyone who harps about a $99 certificate is either grossly ignorant of every other more expensive signing program or is simply a disingenuous asshat.
Because leaded gas would destroy the catalytic converter in newer cars.
Old cars used lead in fuel to lubricate engine parts. Lead is toxic. In addition to removing lead, newer cars added catalytic converters to burn off tailpipe toxins. If you run leaded gas through them, it contaminates the catalysts.
So to prevent people who didn't know better from thinking they could run "regular" gas through their newer cars without destroying a ~$300 part and dumping out more pollution, they make it difficult to do so with a smaller filler hose and port.
That shares little in common with the idea of using GPL software in the iPhone. First of all, there's no damage: anyone can adapt FOSS libraries or develop new code under a free license and use this to deliver iPhone programs. Their open source code can be distributed for others to adapt; the only difference is that in order for someone to actually deploy an adapted version of that code, that new developer would need to be in the iPhone dev program so they could sign and distribute it.
Apple uses both GPL and BSD licensed software on the iPhone, and makes their source available from its website. Why can't other software developers do the same?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but even the GPL doesn't force developers to guarantee that their code will never be used on a secured platform that requires code signing. iPhone development offers no barriers to open source ideologies. It's only the official AppStore distribution of completed software that requires some approval from Apple. It seems pretty clear that there will always be some software that requires modifying the iPhone's firmware to distribute non-signed, unofficial software, so even that is hardly relevant.
What's the controversy here? Seems to be much grasping at straws by the ignorant diggtard crowd that likes to bewail the "Apple monopoly." Of course, the problem is that Apple competes against lots of other products in the market. There are lots of MP3 players, media software, and smartphones; there are no commercial PC operating systems to choose from, and even the free volunteer options are hard to find available on a new PC that doesn't already include a Windows license. That's the difference between the Windows monopoly and the competition of iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.
Well clearly you must be puzzled at why Linux has gone nowhere in desktop PCs if it offers the same ease of use as OS X. Even counting the millions of EEE PC toys that will quickly find their way to various junk drawers, Linux remains insignificant on the desktop. That's not to say that nobody uses it productively or that people shouldn't have a choice, but realistically, Linux isn't doing anything for the desktop and there's a huge reason why: usability.
The "freedom" of having a handful of window managers and dozens of window styles isn't freedom, its a burden for anyone trying to develop desktop software that works consistently. Linux isn't growing out of the server arena where it is uniquely valuable, because it simply isn't very valuable on the desktop, even when its free. If it were, it would be selling Linux PCs and there wouldn't be Windows.
Now look at Vista: it's so unusable that Microsoft can't even sell it as the exclusive product to its monopolized partners. That's like McDonalds having such a shitty new burger that it can't manage to sell it to its obese shit eating clients.
Now explain to me why some shit for brains who can't even spell "neurosurgeon" with an inline spell checker... oh wait, maybe because you don't have OS X, you can't fucking spell check your insults.
That might also explain why your myopic world view, which holds that OS X has no particular significance, is so at odds with the reality that Apple is selling Macs and iPhones using that OS so fast it can hardly keep them in stock, and is making billions of dollars doing so. At a time when Linux can't fucking ship for free in any significant way on the desktop or on mobile phones (outside of locked Chinese Motorola phones that aren't open), and at a time when Microsoft can't retail its shitty new "6 year in the making" Vista and has similarly failed spectacularly after a decade of WinCE explosions.
Yes, it must all be explained by your incapacity to figure out the Mac after a few minutes of derisively poking at its keyboard. And yes, the only rational explanation is that Mac users are a bamboozled cult ready to commit mass suicide, rather than customers who like getting a product that actually works as they expect it to and doesn't need the constant configuration you love so much.
You're the asshat with the ignorantly religious fervor here, denying the fucking obvious reality in the market and blaming everything you don't want to be happening upon the people paying a premium not to deal with lame shit thrown together without any regard for usability.
Toyota hasn't done anything to consistently revolutionize the auto.
There are brands I like for various reasons, whether because I like their product, have fallen for their marketing, or just have some nostalgic attachment.
I happen to like New Balance shoes and Volkswagons, but I don't write about them because they are a personal interest and not all that exciting nor revolutionary, just like your Toyota.
Apple is revolutionary. It has a long history of developing and introducing new technologies in ways that can actually be used. At several points, the company became stale and released uninspired products, as I've chronicled. It's also made decisions recently that can be debated and criticized.
I defend or describe a number of things Apple does that I think are notable or misrepresented by the corporate media and by simpletons who repeat CNET/ZDNet chatter. I don't comment on a lot of Apple's flaws because they are already detailed in extreme detail elsewhere.
And it's not that I emotionally defend Apple, because I don't. I just criticize morons, and in the battle between morons and Apple, its easy to come across as right all the time when you side with Apple. How many morons have introduced something like the iPod, or the iPhone, or deeply eaten into Microsoft?
3D is a gimmick to get people into theaters. In life action films, 3D gets pretty old quick. It's great for adding a few cheesy yucks to slasher films, but after awhile, the novelty grows old.
I went to a triple feature of 3D films and got my fill for a year or two: Jaws 3D, Jason 3, and something else IIRC.
In puter animation, 3D is free. 2D CGI films frequently use shots that would be impossible using a real camera. 3D just makes that kind of thing more involving. Beowolf did a lot of that; I didn't see it in 2D, so I don't know how much would be lost without the glasses, but it made the movie something I'd try as opposed to passing (I went not knowing it was CGI, amazingly).
Other gimmick film techniques, such as Cinerama, used multiple cameras to make a crazy wide shot. The problem is that when you have multiple cameras, it changes how you can zoom and pan, greatly limiting the cinematography you can use.
There are lots of "ways things are done" that would be exposed in live 3D filming. Adding 3D effects to a CGI film are cheap and simple, but live action movies would add considerably expense and complexity to get back less effect and impose greater limitations on the art in the film.
You tumbled off the serious wagon and into emotionalism there.
Apple has every right to sue bloggers and "fan sites." I'm connected to sites that have been sued. The better question is: why were they sued? Apple sued for information on leaks. It did not sue them for damages. It was found by the courts to have a case without merit.
A corporation is just a group of people working together. Being a corporation doesn't make a partnership evil.
Microsoft is bad for holding back technology, overcharging users, cheating its partners, preventing competing products from reaching the market, and producing poor products... all things that it has been found guilty of in court.
Apple isn't more moral in your emotionally enraptured sense of the term, its just a company that strives to deliver great products more than control markets. Microsoft has no enthusiasm for great products, it's all about money.
Look at the difference of Ballmer and Jobs: night and day.
Maybe if you stopped parroting off easy to repeat talking points it would be easier to take your opinions seriously. Perhaps start by defining how I've ever repeated anything from Apple PR.
The software that expired hours before Beta 3 was released, and had a temporary, solvable solution for the issue that affected certain developers? I think you're overreaching.
And how many HD MP3 players have you seen or heard of that weren't iPods? I've seen one Zune in the wild, and a friend had an early Creative Nomad (I think) that used a huge 2.5" drive and was super ugly. Most iPod alternatives end up in a sock drawer long before their parts have the chance to fail.
But we're talking about a mobile hard drive unit, which is fated to live for two or three years. Saying iPods crash is ridiculous. In five years of ownership and supporting lots of users, I've seen models occasionally need a reset after a couple months of use. It's not like Windows Mobile devices that crash 3 times a day.
I'm not gonna feed your trolling anymore, so you can say whatever you like in the last word.
The entire point of theaters going to 3D is to entice people away from their HDTVs with something that is unique and compelling can can't be as easily experienced at home.
That's why Pixar is doing it, and why George Lucas, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez, Randal Kleiser, and Peter Jackson "implored the exhibition community to invest in digital projectors" to show their upcoming 3D movies.
Of course, at the same time Lucas also told Variety, "We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature-film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky."
If 3D doesn't help get viewers into the theater, there will be fewer blockbuster movies coming out, and entertainment will shift further toward TV.
Yes, and the reason you hear about Cube microcracks and palm rests on the white iBooks that discolored are because Apple slights are newsworthy.
I managed the rollout of several dozen MacBooks at a company where we also supported Dell, HP and Sony laptops. I didn't notice hardware problems with the MBs, but the Sony Vaios all fell apart, the Dells were flimsy plastic cases that didn't hold up well, and the HP machines not only discolored, but couldn't accommodate an HD upgrade to 80 GB (they shipped with 60!).
None of those problems are discussed. Who would care? Apple users have multiple web sites where they can moan and cry about things. I didn't say Apple's hardware was perfectly flawless, I said Mac user's expectations are unreasonable.
Same thing with the iPod: nobody complained that other MP3 players come with batteries that wear out, or hard drives that die due to being bounced around for a couple years.
I don't think they made fun of the concept of wanting developers, just the monkey boy jumping around the stage while profusely sweating and screaming it through clenched teeth like the raving insane moron only Momma Ballmer could love.
Actually BSD is what serious people use. And hubris? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Also, intelligent people disagree with your argument that things have to be messed up with complications in order to be "smart."
Leonardo da Vinci: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
Albert Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
Except that NeXT did have devices - it ran on more platforms than you could shake a stick at. It also had users. Not the Win95 crowd, but people doing real work, from Tim Berner-Lee to John Carmack, who accomplished things Windows wasn't well suited to do. And then there's Dell, the banks, the trading companies, the NSA/CIA spooks...
NeXT had serious devices and serious users. It's just that Microsoft decided to "piss on it" because it preferred to showcase Cairo as its own copy, years later, which then never actually arrived.
For its second act, NeXT is making NT+15 years of work look silly, while also making the last ten years of CE look absurd.
Just like "virus" has evolved to encompass anything that can self-propagate or no?
Just like "hacker" has evolved to encompass security cracking and theft rather than hacking together a smart, quick fix?
The point of words is to convey an idea. Language needs to able to change and adapt, but if the words we use are all used improperly by retards, their meanings will no longer have any clear definition and they stop representing an idea that conveys anything useful.
If five becomes an idiot shorthand for four, it makes it hard to do math with any precision.
The point of being "bricked" clearly means being permanently broken in the sense that it would be very difficult to use it for anything other than a brick, typically that the firmware is toast and so new software can't be loaded.
If you "evolve" that definition to mean that anything that just needs to be restored or rebooted has been "bricked," the idea of being as useless as a brick goes away. It is rather trivial to restore a phone with the flawed firmware. It's not a brick, its a fully functional $300 phone that requires a push button restore.
If a device locks up and needs a restart or a software restore, it is not bricked. That phrase has really never been used with any other device outside of the iPhone, so its a bit of a sensationalizing bullshit to pass it around. It's also simply ignorant.
Insisting that the world "recognize" that up is down is disingenuous.
Let's complain about BETA software that results in a temporary problem for developers, and which can be rolled back by pushing RESTORE and installing the original software. Then lets call it BRICKING, because that sounds so much better than a flawed dev build of a phone firmware.
No, Mac users expect their stuff to work flawlessly, never have any bugs, never wear out (plastic crack, batteries die, etc) and maintain its value.
It's other users who have zero expectations. Windows users expect things not to work, expect to spend hours futzing around, expect to replace parts frequently, and are blown away whenever anything works.
That's why they disdainfully look down upon Mac users as "needing to be cool." I have never talked to any Mac users who were enraptured with being cool (and I've worked with lots of Mac users as a IT consultant for lots of small Mac shops). They like design, functionality, simplicity, and other things, but being cool is only an old saw dragged out by Windows Enthusiasts to account for their embarrassment in dealing with crap.
Microsoft still has a monopoly position over desktop PC software. Google has already complained that MS is tying its failed search products into Windows in order to replace the currently competitive market into another annex of Windows.
So while neither MS nor Yahoo have a huge chunk of the web search/advertising business, a merger would not only inflame the competitive threat Google is already complaining about, but also destroy a number of competitive products, including Zimbra and other FOSS projects Yahoo contributes toward.
Slashdot Mirror
.Mac isn't iDisk. .Mac is integrated into Mac OS X's Sync Services so that users can upload all their synced data (PIM phone and iPod data, Address Book contacts, calendar items, web bookmarks, app preferences, keychain passwords and certificates, Dock items, Dashboard widgets, email account settings, mail rules and signatures and smart mailboxes) to .Mac as a central repository, allowing multiple Macs to be kept in sync with the same data. Sync Services also allows developers to package their app preferences and other data for syncing with .Mac.
.Mac.
.NET (which it really has very little relation to apart from the idea of networked data sharing) at a time when Microsoft was touting the potential to be a gatekeeper for PC users with Passport.
This isn't new, it was rolled into Mac OS X Tiger in 2005, and sharpened up in Leopard. It's one of the more useful things about
Ironically, Apple introduced ".Mac" as a play on
MS never really delivered those promises (it did f-up data integrity with Passport's high profile data leaks), but Apple quietly delivered it as a system that just works. Now Microsoft is announcing that it's "introducing" something that is nothing new as a beta.
Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, Taligent
The numbers provided by Gartner/IDG aren't PCs as in Personal Computers, as one might reasonably think. They aren't representing a single market either. They reflect the kind of licenses Microsoft sells, and the range of business conducted by Dell and HP.
They are gerrymandered in the sense that they are carefully cut out to exaggerate the representation of specific companies Gartner and IDG want to promote.
Why else would PC figures include handheld PDA (and apparently some smartphones)? Why would the numbers include server shipments, but only x86 servers, not anything with a different processor?
No other industry hides sales behind such a worthless definition of a market. Imagine comparing car companies together based on all vehicles sold worldwide, when the definition of "vehicle" was expanded to include motorcycles and dump trucks. Those numbers wouldn't tell you much about the passenger car market.
How many people who read about "Apple's market share" know they're being intentionally mislead by figures that have nothing to do with the PC market a reasonable person would envision?
I cited retail sales numbers to illustrate Apple's position in the consumer segment. I did not suggest that Dell makes or ships fewer computers. It's common knowledge that NPD's retail numbers don't count direct sales.
I don't think any reasonable person would have trouble getting that Apple's rapidly increasing retail share is an interesting data point and a valid argument against the idea that Apple isn't relevant because it doesn't have a certain percentage of a gerrymandered market definition concocted by Microsoft-enraptured number companies.
There is nothing fabricated in the article you cited. You just didn't like what it said:
"Since Apple has released five times as many major updates and over fifteen times as many minor updates to Mac OS X since 2000, you might not have guessed that Windows actually costs users five times as much to keep up to date!"
Everybody knows Windows is expensive to maintain, especially for those who have to pay others to clean up their systems rather than spending their time to do it themselves.
Nice job skirting the facts to remain irrelevant to reality.
BTW, any Apple fan needn't be complaining of sour grapes, because the company is hotter today that it ever has been.
Also, the idiom of sour grapes relates to those who, like the fabled fox, complain that the out of reach grapes they wanted but can't have are sour, only because they can't have them.
Therefore, you can't really "eat sour grapes" in any sensible fashion.
Double digit share of what market?
The IDG/Gartner numbers (currently at 6.6% in the US, somewhere under 4% worldwide) include all PC, handheld and servers shipped (but only x86 servers). If you're waiting for Apple to take over those gerrymandered statistics, you'll be waiting for some time.
However, if you're looking at the markets Apple sells to, the company already has double digit market penetration in retail laptops (~20%), in home/SOHO (~16%) and education (very high across the US/EU, where Apple is #1 or close to being).
Market share isn't really that critical of a number, expecially when the market isn't defined to do anything but make Microsoft look good. Apple had ~5% OS market share in PCs throughout 2007, but made roughly half as much revenue as MS did with its 95% share of PC OS market. Those statistics also indicate that Linux has zero "market share," when we know some people are using Linux on the desktop.
Conversely, Apple had ~80% market share in music and MP3 players, but rivals, including MS, mostly only lost money. Market share doesn't tell you much about a products quality, suitability, desirability, or anything else. It's like a straight guy measuring his dick. It really doesn't matter.
IBMâ(TM)s Strategic Interest in Macs Goes Beyond Pilot Program
Apple is not in any way restricting what developers can do with the code they write. The only restrictions are related to how developers can distribute their code for use on the iPhone.
Your argument that code written for the iPhone is somehow not going to be available for reuse elsewhere is non-sensical. The only reason that might happen is due to the impracticality of porting code tied to the Cocoa frameworks to another framework or platform, such as Java ME or BREW. Those limitations already exist in the phone world, and in fact even Java apps aren't always that portable in a practical sense.
TFA is worrying that Apple has secret code related to its SDK that is under NDA, and would not be compatible with the free release of code, but even that idea is bogus because Apple hasn't ever stopped developers from doing the same thing with regard to the Mac SDKs that already exist and use the same NDA legalese.
Which you certainly can do, particularly if you have no profit motive.
However, the majority of iPhone developers are going to be expending their efforts to get paid. Distributing jailbreak software will be as profitable as trying to sell Palm or WinCE software: 99% will be used without payment, and those who do pay will expect expensive support. Good luck with that kind of business plan.
Developers who join up with the AppStore will be able to sell their work to large, paying audiences with little piracy loss, just like iPod Games and other iTunes downloads.
Ever talk to indie musicians who sell their work via iTunes? They make real money. They could also sell MP3s from their own website and avoid paying the ~40% cut Apple takes, but they wouldn't sell anything that way. Same for you.
iPhone 2.0 SDK: How Signing Certificates Work
Who pays you to keep your PC humming and your lights on and your mouth full of pizza and beer and your health insurance premiums and your continuing eduation and your programming books from Amazon?
Don't believe Steve Ballmer; FOSS isn't communism. Sometimes you have to have a day job if you don't have a business plan supporting the software you develop.
Anyone who harps about a $99 certificate is either grossly ignorant of every other more expensive signing program or is simply a disingenuous asshat.
iPhone 2.0 SDK: How Signing Certificates Work
Because leaded gas would destroy the catalytic converter in newer cars.
Old cars used lead in fuel to lubricate engine parts. Lead is toxic. In addition to removing lead, newer cars added catalytic converters to burn off tailpipe toxins. If you run leaded gas through them, it contaminates the catalysts.
So to prevent people who didn't know better from thinking they could run "regular" gas through their newer cars without destroying a ~$300 part and dumping out more pollution, they make it difficult to do so with a smaller filler hose and port.
That shares little in common with the idea of using GPL software in the iPhone. First of all, there's no damage: anyone can adapt FOSS libraries or develop new code under a free license and use this to deliver iPhone programs. Their open source code can be distributed for others to adapt; the only difference is that in order for someone to actually deploy an adapted version of that code, that new developer would need to be in the iPhone dev program so they could sign and distribute it.
Apple uses both GPL and BSD licensed software on the iPhone, and makes their source available from its website. Why can't other software developers do the same?
Perhaps I'm missing something, but even the GPL doesn't force developers to guarantee that their code will never be used on a secured platform that requires code signing. iPhone development offers no barriers to open source ideologies. It's only the official AppStore distribution of completed software that requires some approval from Apple. It seems pretty clear that there will always be some software that requires modifying the iPhone's firmware to distribute non-signed, unofficial software, so even that is hardly relevant.
What's the controversy here? Seems to be much grasping at straws by the ignorant diggtard crowd that likes to bewail the "Apple monopoly." Of course, the problem is that Apple competes against lots of other products in the market. There are lots of MP3 players, media software, and smartphones; there are no commercial PC operating systems to choose from, and even the free volunteer options are hard to find available on a new PC that doesn't already include a Windows license. That's the difference between the Windows monopoly and the competition of iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone.
iPhone 2.0 SDK: How Signing Certificates Work
Well clearly you must be puzzled at why Linux has gone nowhere in desktop PCs if it offers the same ease of use as OS X. Even counting the millions of EEE PC toys that will quickly find their way to various junk drawers, Linux remains insignificant on the desktop. That's not to say that nobody uses it productively or that people shouldn't have a choice, but realistically, Linux isn't doing anything for the desktop and there's a huge reason why: usability.
The "freedom" of having a handful of window managers and dozens of window styles isn't freedom, its a burden for anyone trying to develop desktop software that works consistently. Linux isn't growing out of the server arena where it is uniquely valuable, because it simply isn't very valuable on the desktop, even when its free. If it were, it would be selling Linux PCs and there wouldn't be Windows.
Now look at Vista: it's so unusable that Microsoft can't even sell it as the exclusive product to its monopolized partners. That's like McDonalds having such a shitty new burger that it can't manage to sell it to its obese shit eating clients.
Now explain to me why some shit for brains who can't even spell "neurosurgeon" with an inline spell checker... oh wait, maybe because you don't have OS X, you can't fucking spell check your insults.
That might also explain why your myopic world view, which holds that OS X has no particular significance, is so at odds with the reality that Apple is selling Macs and iPhones using that OS so fast it can hardly keep them in stock, and is making billions of dollars doing so. At a time when Linux can't fucking ship for free in any significant way on the desktop or on mobile phones (outside of locked Chinese Motorola phones that aren't open), and at a time when Microsoft can't retail its shitty new "6 year in the making" Vista and has similarly failed spectacularly after a decade of WinCE explosions.
Yes, it must all be explained by your incapacity to figure out the Mac after a few minutes of derisively poking at its keyboard. And yes, the only rational explanation is that Mac users are a bamboozled cult ready to commit mass suicide, rather than customers who like getting a product that actually works as they expect it to and doesn't need the constant configuration you love so much.
You're the asshat with the ignorantly religious fervor here, denying the fucking obvious reality in the market and blaming everything you don't want to be happening upon the people paying a premium not to deal with lame shit thrown together without any regard for usability.
Toyota hasn't done anything to consistently revolutionize the auto.
There are brands I like for various reasons, whether because I like their product, have fallen for their marketing, or just have some nostalgic attachment.
I happen to like New Balance shoes and Volkswagons, but I don't write about them because they are a personal interest and not all that exciting nor revolutionary, just like your Toyota.
Apple is revolutionary. It has a long history of developing and introducing new technologies in ways that can actually be used. At several points, the company became stale and released uninspired products, as I've chronicled. It's also made decisions recently that can be debated and criticized.
I defend or describe a number of things Apple does that I think are notable or misrepresented by the corporate media and by simpletons who repeat CNET/ZDNet chatter. I don't comment on a lot of Apple's flaws because they are already detailed in extreme detail elsewhere.
And it's not that I emotionally defend Apple, because I don't. I just criticize morons, and in the battle between morons and Apple, its easy to come across as right all the time when you side with Apple. How many morons have introduced something like the iPod, or the iPhone, or deeply eaten into Microsoft?
OMG It's coming right at me!
3D is a gimmick to get people into theaters. In life action films, 3D gets pretty old quick. It's great for adding a few cheesy yucks to slasher films, but after awhile, the novelty grows old.
I went to a triple feature of 3D films and got my fill for a year or two: Jaws 3D, Jason 3, and something else IIRC.
In puter animation, 3D is free. 2D CGI films frequently use shots that would be impossible using a real camera. 3D just makes that kind of thing more involving. Beowolf did a lot of that; I didn't see it in 2D, so I don't know how much would be lost without the glasses, but it made the movie something I'd try as opposed to passing (I went not knowing it was CGI, amazingly).
Other gimmick film techniques, such as Cinerama, used multiple cameras to make a crazy wide shot. The problem is that when you have multiple cameras, it changes how you can zoom and pan, greatly limiting the cinematography you can use.
There are lots of "ways things are done" that would be exposed in live 3D filming. Adding 3D effects to a CGI film are cheap and simple, but live action movies would add considerably expense and complexity to get back less effect and impose greater limitations on the art in the film.
the Origin of Home Theater: TV and Movies Fight For Attention in the 50s and 60s
You tumbled off the serious wagon and into emotionalism there.
Apple has every right to sue bloggers and "fan sites." I'm connected to sites that have been sued. The better question is: why were they sued? Apple sued for information on leaks. It did not sue them for damages. It was found by the courts to have a case without merit.
A corporation is just a group of people working together. Being a corporation doesn't make a partnership evil.
Microsoft is bad for holding back technology, overcharging users, cheating its partners, preventing competing products from reaching the market, and producing poor products... all things that it has been found guilty of in court.
Apple isn't more moral in your emotionally enraptured sense of the term, its just a company that strives to deliver great products more than control markets. Microsoft has no enthusiasm for great products, it's all about money.
Look at the difference of Ballmer and Jobs: night and day.
Maybe if you stopped parroting off easy to repeat talking points it would be easier to take your opinions seriously. Perhaps start by defining how I've ever repeated anything from Apple PR.
The software that expired hours before Beta 3 was released, and had a temporary, solvable solution for the issue that affected certain developers? I think you're overreaching.
And how many HD MP3 players have you seen or heard of that weren't iPods? I've seen one Zune in the wild, and a friend had an early Creative Nomad (I think) that used a huge 2.5" drive and was super ugly. Most iPod alternatives end up in a sock drawer long before their parts have the chance to fail.
But we're talking about a mobile hard drive unit, which is fated to live for two or three years. Saying iPods crash is ridiculous. In five years of ownership and supporting lots of users, I've seen models occasionally need a reset after a couple months of use. It's not like Windows Mobile devices that crash 3 times a day.
I'm not gonna feed your trolling anymore, so you can say whatever you like in the last word.
The entire point of theaters going to 3D is to entice people away from their HDTVs with something that is unique and compelling can can't be as easily experienced at home.
That's why Pixar is doing it, and why George Lucas, James Cameron, Robert Zemeckis, Robert Rodriguez, Randal Kleiser, and Peter Jackson "implored the exhibition community to invest in digital projectors" to show their upcoming 3D movies.
Of course, at the same time Lucas also told Variety, "We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television. As far as Lucasfilm is concerned, we've moved away from the feature-film thing because it's too expensive and it's too risky."
If 3D doesn't help get viewers into the theater, there will be fewer blockbuster movies coming out, and entertainment will shift further toward TV.
Five Ways Apple Will Change TV: 5 - George Lucas Talks Movies
Yes, and the reason you hear about Cube microcracks and palm rests on the white iBooks that discolored are because Apple slights are newsworthy.
I managed the rollout of several dozen MacBooks at a company where we also supported Dell, HP and Sony laptops. I didn't notice hardware problems with the MBs, but the Sony Vaios all fell apart, the Dells were flimsy plastic cases that didn't hold up well, and the HP machines not only discolored, but couldn't accommodate an HD upgrade to 80 GB (they shipped with 60!).
None of those problems are discussed. Who would care? Apple users have multiple web sites where they can moan and cry about things. I didn't say Apple's hardware was perfectly flawless, I said Mac user's expectations are unreasonable.
Same thing with the iPod: nobody complained that other MP3 players come with batteries that wear out, or hard drives that die due to being bounced around for a couple years.
I don't think they made fun of the concept of wanting developers, just the monkey boy jumping around the stage while profusely sweating and screaming it through clenched teeth like the raving insane moron only Momma Ballmer could love.
Actually BSD is what serious people use. And hubris? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Also, intelligent people disagree with your argument that things have to be messed up with complications in order to be "smart."
Leonardo da Vinci: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
Albert Einstein: "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."
Oh Snap.
Your right, its correct. Their just worried about the affect error's will have on readers trying to under stand.
Except that NeXT did have devices - it ran on more platforms than you could shake a stick at. It also had users. Not the Win95 crowd, but people doing real work, from Tim Berner-Lee to John Carmack, who accomplished things Windows wasn't well suited to do. And then there's Dell, the banks, the trading companies, the NSA/CIA spooks...
NeXT had serious devices and serious users. It's just that Microsoft decided to "piss on it" because it preferred to showcase Cairo as its own copy, years later, which then never actually arrived.
For its second act, NeXT is making NT+15 years of work look silly, while also making the last ten years of CE look absurd.
1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
Just like "virus" has evolved to encompass anything that can self-propagate or no?
Just like "hacker" has evolved to encompass security cracking and theft rather than hacking together a smart, quick fix?
The point of words is to convey an idea. Language needs to able to change and adapt, but if the words we use are all used improperly by retards, their meanings will no longer have any clear definition and they stop representing an idea that conveys anything useful.
If five becomes an idiot shorthand for four, it makes it hard to do math with any precision.
The point of being "bricked" clearly means being permanently broken in the sense that it would be very difficult to use it for anything other than a brick, typically that the firmware is toast and so new software can't be loaded.
If you "evolve" that definition to mean that anything that just needs to be restored or rebooted has been "bricked," the idea of being as useless as a brick goes away. It is rather trivial to restore a phone with the flawed firmware. It's not a brick, its a fully functional $300 phone that requires a push button restore.
If a device locks up and needs a restart or a software restore, it is not bricked. That phrase has really never been used with any other device outside of the iPhone, so its a bit of a sensationalizing bullshit to pass it around. It's also simply ignorant.
Insisting that the world "recognize" that up is down is disingenuous.
You also spelled "fart raider" wrong.
Let's complain about BETA software that results in a temporary problem for developers, and which can be rolled back by pushing RESTORE and installing the original software. Then lets call it BRICKING, because that sounds so much better than a flawed dev build of a phone firmware.
No, Mac users expect their stuff to work flawlessly, never have any bugs, never wear out (plastic crack, batteries die, etc) and maintain its value.
It's other users who have zero expectations. Windows users expect things not to work, expect to spend hours futzing around, expect to replace parts frequently, and are blown away whenever anything works.
That's why they disdainfully look down upon Mac users as "needing to be cool." I have never talked to any Mac users who were enraptured with being cool (and I've worked with lots of Mac users as a IT consultant for lots of small Mac shops). They like design, functionality, simplicity, and other things, but being cool is only an old saw dragged out by Windows Enthusiasts to account for their embarrassment in dealing with crap.
Microsoft still has a monopoly position over desktop PC software. Google has already complained that MS is tying its failed search products into Windows in order to replace the currently competitive market into another annex of Windows.
So while neither MS nor Yahoo have a huge chunk of the web search/advertising business, a merger would not only inflame the competitive threat Google is already complaining about, but also destroy a number of competitive products, including Zimbra and other FOSS projects Yahoo contributes toward.
That's anticompetitive and an anti-trust issue.