Or maybe you were suggesting that multitouch is necessary to make a touch-interface that doesn't screw up all the time. It isn't.
By that same token, why have a tough interface at all, we could navigate with a IBM style nubbin at the bottom of the the phone. The truth of the matter is that multi-tough is a HUGE enhancement when reading web pages on such a tiny screen. Being able to fluidly zoom in and out and automatically zoom to content edges makes browsing on the iPhone much more usable than I ever thought possible. The usage statistics for traffic from mobile phones backs this up. the iPhone does way more browsing than the other smart phones. I suspect that there is some correlation between browsing and the demographic that likes the iPhone, but the truth is that actually using the iPhone is enjoyable and so it's used - A LOT. I had a palm smart phone years ago (kyocera) and it was brutal to surf on. I only ever did it when I absolutely had to.
The third option is that there is nothing to be gained from an unlocked phone in the US (which is where most of the monkeys posting are from). Our cell phone landscape is dismal to say the least:
Verizon - best coverage in most but not all cases. CDMA, bastards, horrible customer service, no rollover minutes, EVDO is like fast edge, no voice while using data, so stream pandora and miss calls.
AT&T - Best GSM coverage, actually very good in the midwest, rollover minutes, call fidelity not quite as good as Verizon, overloaded service in big cities, between 3G and edge, data available everywhere I've traveled all over the lower 48. Cursomer service abotu as good as verizon (IE sucks), but they do offer subsidized new iPhone purchase even at mid contract (Verizon will not do that I'd bet).
T-Mobile - building 3G out like crazy, but still less coverage than AT&T. Seem to have good customer service, I've never been a customer, but when I took a look at the G1 I was impressed with the conversations I overheard from the customer severice people in the store.
It's unclear to me that I can take an unlocked phone or a phone that is already amortized and get a reduced monthly bill by using it. AT&T has no plan that is chaper if I bring my own phone to the party. Back when I was a verizon guy, there wasn't a cheaper plan that you could by if you didn't get a phone. So unless you can get a burner (pre-paid) sim card that does data as well, there just doesn't seem to be any reason to not get the subsidized phone, there is no discount to be had.
The real power of the unlocked phone happens when traveling abroad, where you can buy a local sim and go. But I suspect a staggeringly small percentage of buyers fit that category.
Yes, my desire to steal the occasional shitty movie after all the crap the MPAA has pulled, is driven entirely by the fact that I like to share my code with others to use as well.
If I need to do pure research, you are right, there's matlab, and every language known to man available on the Mac. In fact in the dark pre-OSX days I used absoft fortran on a mac to do my PhD research. Man that was painful. One bad indexing and you were going for coffee while the whole machine rebooted. The OS's lack of memory protection was a very clever means to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome (particularly when you are doing CFD and a lot of FFTs and crazy array indexing).
But if you are using specialized packages for engineering (I work on satellite designs), then it's a windows world. There is no ProE, Thermal Desktop, NASTRAN, Doors, Windchill, etc for the Mac. These are all closed source programs as well and always will be. Hard engineering is not an area that Macs have broken into and Apple doesn't really court that market at all. Which is odd given the powerhouse MacPro machines.
I use autodesk Inventor at home for a sideline business, and Autodesk's solution for Mac users is "run bootcamp or parallels". Now that's true mac support.
UT2004 does come in a Mac version, but the windows version runs smoother and better. And that's on the same mid2009 MacbookPro.
I always saw bootcamp as a gimmick to encourage MS Windows users to switch to Apple Hardware. If one buys a mac, and really can't stand OS X, one can always go back to MS Windows. Or if MS Windows must be run occasionally, then Bootcamp is an effective way to do so.
I use BootCamp for playing games (I still play a lot of UT2004) and for doing CAD (Autodesk Inventor and PCB design). All those really benefit from direct booting into windows. Plus the fascist copy protection in the CAD programs makes it difficult to run in parallels. I do use parallels for light CAD work and such, and I just boot from the BootCamp partition using parallels. IT's the best of both worlds.
I need windows around to do things like PCB design, because there are no viable Mac alternatives. There is a lot of scientific packages are just plain don't exist on the Mac. With the Mac I have OS X for my daily stuff and much of my engineering design work, and occasionally use Windows for the few things I can't do on the mac. All on one quiet machine.
Windows 7 works fine on my mid 2009 17" MBP using the vista drivers. I run XP though, as I don't need or want the extra features of "7" and the smaller footprint of XP makes it nicer for my needs.
The other rover needs a winch like any respectable Range Rover would have. Sounds like a cheap fly-by-night sort of budget operation...Oh wait, it was.
"They are launching a whole new branch of products and phasing out the "i' product all together in the next 3 years."
I hope so, the "i"everything was annoying when it came out on crummy ugly gumdrop computers, and it hasn't gotten better over time. I had hoped that the two word naming was the "new hotness" IE frontRow, finalCut, etc. but no... Thankfully, the colored translucent plastic era seems to be behind us.
I'm still scratching my head over the tablet, it was obvious that a phone with a non-sucko UI was needed when the iPhone came out, and even before seeing the product, I could imagine how it would make my life better. With the tablet, I don't have such a clear image of how it will make my life worth living.
I refuse to watch it. I am not going to vote with my pocketbook that plot, craft, and character development don't matter, and that all that matters is effects. This sort of thought has made the bulk of Hollywood movies complete crap. I'm lucky if there is one or two movies a year that aren't nauseatingly bad.
You want as much screen real estate as you can get. These tiny "LCD watch" resolution screens suck for any real-world work. Sure a netbook can be handy for travel, but for serious tasks like PCB design, you want pixels, and more than a thimble-full. I do PCB design with protel (altium or whatever protel turned into), and I do it at 1920x1200 and I would love twice that. You don't want to stare at the world through a toilet paper tube.
To build your planes and cars and ships, to layout your next computer motherboard or video card, etc. The heavy lifting from an engineering and design standpoint is closed-source. There is no equivalent open source for programs like ProEngineer, Solidworks, IDEAS, NASTRAN, Thermal Desktop, Altium etc.
Sure, you can host a website and do a lot of slick IT things with all open source, but the real heavy duty computer tools are closed source.
As someone who has spent 25 years driving in the US and several thousand miles driving in England and Scotland, what has been said above has a lot of truth to it. Our roads are hugely wide, each line is like two lanes in northern rural england or rural scotland. We push the land around to smooth and flatten our roadways rather than let the road follow the land. We have dismal public transportation (mostly) so the only people who take it are the people who for one reason or another cannot drive. That means that taking public transport isn't very nice, and doesn't really serve the societies needs very well. So it's cars or don't go.
twenty or thirty years ago we decided to turn all of our cars into golf carts by removing manual transmissions. The flat wide basically endlessly straight roads have driven us to have soft vague suspensions and steering.
God help the american driver if they had to deal with a round-a-bout or a road with passing places.
I love the design of the 900, sure it's a bit fugly, but man did it handle well and had an ergonomics that no other car had. I was ready to buy one and GM bought SAAB, so that was a deal breaker for me. Shortly after the GM acquisition, they started looking like weird beretta's rather than the amazingly quirky and great cars they used to be. The substitution of a Delco radio said it all, the saab had turned to crap. And I say that as an american engineer, lest you think I'm some sort of butthurt swedish person.
In what other medium are the ads actually useful and value added to your experience? Now that I have a DVR that can easily remove the ads actually watching commercial TV is brutally painful. The ads in magazines don't augment the stories at all, they are just the filler that makes the magazine 100 pages instead of 12.
Ads may be a necessary evil for a medium's survival, but that doesn't mean we as consumers like them or appreciate them as Google is asserting. In this day of internet product researching, ads mean less and less to me every year.
The music industry has failed because they missed the "Why" there was disaggregation. When they pump out huge masses of auto-tuned crap albums where there is only one song that is actually barely listenable, then there is no incentive to buy the whole album when you don't have to. There are precious few artists out there that make an entire album a cohesive unit that resists breaking apart without lessening the individual pieces.
The music industries death spiral is really obvious these days. I used to go to Borders to check new music in genre's other than top 40. The music was more expensive than the other options I had available to me (the ma and pop music stores had been crushed by that point). But now, the music selection is so small that in the blues and folk sections I've got significantly more selection at home than they have. Now there are no brick and mortar stores to browse so I don't buy from brick and mortar stores.
I bought a copy of windows 7 for $30 due to my wife's employer being a college. I haven't installed it on anything yet, and I don't have plans to, but for $30 it will be nice to have a legitimate copy if the need arises. For my old Dell laptop and my Parallels needs XP works just fine.
In my limited decades of experience, the diploma gets you in the door for an interview. The perspective employer has an idea of what sort of person he wants and what qualifications are needed for that job at hand. He also has limited time and money to hunt for applicants, and thus leverages the secondary education process to act as a filter for him.
There are still a lot of old-school companies that require degrees because they always have, not because it's smart. There's also a lot of degreed folks who aren't qualified to pet my dog. But in general using the established education system to act as a filter works pretty well. Blindly using it also filters out lots of qualified individuals that got their qualifications in a less traditional way. But those folks may not be best served by working for an "old-school" company in the first place. So this blind school based filtering actually does them a favor as well in some cases.
I am a PhD research scientist not a coder, but I do a LOT of coding in my research (that's why I love this place). I see the same phenomenon when hiring new scientists and engineers. It's not just the IT world.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me see if I have this right...
A company that strives to make high quality well-thought out expensive hardware has made high quality hardware.
Think what you will about apple, but the GUI and user experience has always been their strong suit and it shows in the subtleties of the iPhone.
Sheldon
yup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature_conversion
not to be a pedantic fuck, but the conversion from C to K is 273.15 which changes your answer to 25.372
sorry, I just couldn't resist
Or maybe you were suggesting that multitouch is necessary to make a touch-interface that doesn't screw up all the time. It isn't.
By that same token, why have a tough interface at all, we could navigate with a IBM style nubbin at the bottom of the the phone. The truth of the matter is that multi-tough is a HUGE enhancement when reading web pages on such a tiny screen. Being able to fluidly zoom in and out and automatically zoom to content edges makes browsing on the iPhone much more usable than I ever thought possible. The usage statistics for traffic from mobile phones backs this up. the iPhone does way more browsing than the other smart phones. I suspect that there is some correlation between browsing and the demographic that likes the iPhone, but the truth is that actually using the iPhone is enjoyable and so it's used - A LOT. I had a palm smart phone years ago (kyocera) and it was brutal to surf on. I only ever did it when I absolutely had to.
Sheldon
The third option is that there is nothing to be gained from an unlocked phone in the US (which is where most of the monkeys posting are from). Our cell phone landscape is dismal to say the least:
Verizon - best coverage in most but not all cases. CDMA, bastards, horrible customer service, no rollover minutes, EVDO is like fast edge, no voice while using data, so stream pandora and miss calls.
AT&T - Best GSM coverage, actually very good in the midwest, rollover minutes, call fidelity not quite as good as Verizon, overloaded service in big cities, between 3G and edge, data available everywhere I've traveled all over the lower 48. Cursomer service abotu as good as verizon (IE sucks), but they do offer subsidized new iPhone purchase even at mid contract (Verizon will not do that I'd bet).
T-Mobile - building 3G out like crazy, but still less coverage than AT&T. Seem to have good customer service, I've never been a customer, but when I took a look at the G1 I was impressed with the conversations I overheard from the customer severice people in the store.
It's unclear to me that I can take an unlocked phone or a phone that is already amortized and get a reduced monthly bill by using it. AT&T has no plan that is chaper if I bring my own phone to the party. Back when I was a verizon guy, there wasn't a cheaper plan that you could by if you didn't get a phone. So unless you can get a burner (pre-paid) sim card that does data as well, there just doesn't seem to be any reason to not get the subsidized phone, there is no discount to be had.
The real power of the unlocked phone happens when traveling abroad, where you can buy a local sim and go. But I suspect a staggeringly small percentage of buyers fit that category.
Sheldon
Yes, my desire to steal the occasional shitty movie after all the crap the MPAA has pulled, is driven entirely by the fact that I like to share my code with others to use as well.
Sheldon
If I need to do pure research, you are right, there's matlab, and every language known to man available on the Mac. In fact in the dark pre-OSX days I used absoft fortran on a mac to do my PhD research. Man that was painful. One bad indexing and you were going for coffee while the whole machine rebooted. The OS's lack of memory protection was a very clever means to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome (particularly when you are doing CFD and a lot of FFTs and crazy array indexing).
But if you are using specialized packages for engineering (I work on satellite designs), then it's a windows world. There is no ProE, Thermal Desktop, NASTRAN, Doors, Windchill, etc for the Mac. These are all closed source programs as well and always will be. Hard engineering is not an area that Macs have broken into and Apple doesn't really court that market at all. Which is odd given the powerhouse MacPro machines.
I use autodesk Inventor at home for a sideline business, and Autodesk's solution for Mac users is "run bootcamp or parallels". Now that's true mac support.
UT2004 does come in a Mac version, but the windows version runs smoother and better. And that's on the same mid2009 MacbookPro.
I always saw bootcamp as a gimmick to encourage MS Windows users to switch to Apple Hardware. If one buys a mac, and really can't stand OS X, one can always go back to MS Windows. Or if MS Windows must be run occasionally, then Bootcamp is an effective way to do so.
I use BootCamp for playing games (I still play a lot of UT2004) and for doing CAD (Autodesk Inventor and PCB design). All those really benefit from direct booting into windows. Plus the fascist copy protection in the CAD programs makes it difficult to run in parallels. I do use parallels for light CAD work and such, and I just boot from the BootCamp partition using parallels. IT's the best of both worlds.
I need windows around to do things like PCB design, because there are no viable Mac alternatives. There is a lot of scientific packages are just plain don't exist on the Mac. With the Mac I have OS X for my daily stuff and much of my engineering design work, and occasionally use Windows for the few things I can't do on the mac. All on one quiet machine.
Windows 7 works fine on my mid 2009 17" MBP using the vista drivers. I run XP though, as I don't need or want the extra features of "7" and the smaller footprint of XP makes it nicer for my needs.
Sheldon
Time to smoke some tires.
The other rover needs a winch like any respectable Range Rover would have. Sounds like a cheap fly-by-night sort of budget operation...Oh wait, it was.
Sheldon
...there are rumors that they have purchased another vowel?
The uTouch sounds a bit creepy and ... mmmmmm that feels good...but this is wrong... don't stop...
"They are launching a whole new branch of products and phasing out the "i' product all together in the next 3 years."
I hope so, the "i"everything was annoying when it came out on crummy ugly gumdrop computers, and it hasn't gotten better over time. I had hoped that the two word naming was the "new hotness" IE frontRow, finalCut, etc. but no... Thankfully, the colored translucent plastic era seems to be behind us.
I'm still scratching my head over the tablet, it was obvious that a phone with a non-sucko UI was needed when the iPhone came out, and even before seeing the product, I could imagine how it would make my life better. With the tablet, I don't have such a clear image of how it will make my life worth living.
Sheldon
I refuse to watch it. I am not going to vote with my pocketbook that plot, craft, and character development don't matter, and that all that matters is effects. This sort of thought has made the bulk of Hollywood movies complete crap. I'm lucky if there is one or two movies a year that aren't nauseatingly bad.
Now get off my lawn.
Sheldon
I've had some very explosive sausage-related experiences.. Do not take the threat lightly!
You want as much screen real estate as you can get. These tiny "LCD watch" resolution screens suck for any real-world work. Sure a netbook can be handy for travel, but for serious tasks like PCB design, you want pixels, and more than a thimble-full. I do PCB design with protel (altium or whatever protel turned into), and I do it at 1920x1200 and I would love twice that. You don't want to stare at the world through a toilet paper tube.
Sheldon
What do we need proprietary software for?
To build your planes and cars and ships, to layout your next computer motherboard or video card, etc. The heavy lifting from an engineering and design standpoint is closed-source. There is no equivalent open source for programs like ProEngineer, Solidworks, IDEAS, NASTRAN, Thermal Desktop, Altium etc.
Sure, you can host a website and do a lot of slick IT things with all open source, but the real heavy duty computer tools are closed source.
Sheldon
As someone who has spent 25 years driving in the US and several thousand miles driving in England and Scotland, what has been said above has a lot of truth to it. Our roads are hugely wide, each line is like two lanes in northern rural england or rural scotland. We push the land around to smooth and flatten our roadways rather than let the road follow the land. We have dismal public transportation (mostly) so the only people who take it are the people who for one reason or another cannot drive. That means that taking public transport isn't very nice, and doesn't really serve the societies needs very well. So it's cars or don't go.
twenty or thirty years ago we decided to turn all of our cars into golf carts by removing manual transmissions. The flat wide basically endlessly straight roads have driven us to have soft vague suspensions and steering.
God help the american driver if they had to deal with a round-a-bout or a road with passing places.
I love the design of the 900, sure it's a bit fugly, but man did it handle well and had an ergonomics that no other car had. I was ready to buy one and GM bought SAAB, so that was a deal breaker for me. Shortly after the GM acquisition, they started looking like weird beretta's rather than the amazingly quirky and great cars they used to be. The substitution of a Delco radio said it all, the saab had turned to crap. And I say that as an american engineer, lest you think I'm some sort of butthurt swedish person.
Sheldon
I hope his mother let's him park it in the garage at least.
Sheldon
It's winter so there isn't much sun or exposed flesh to worry about. My record for SPF is 50 when I'm bicycling in the noonday sun in the summer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunscreen
Somebody what actually awarded a PhD for that tripe?! It better have come from a school that also offers a degree in small engine repair.
As a PhD in a hard science, that is offensive.
Sheldon
In what other medium are the ads actually useful and value added to your experience? Now that I have a DVR that can easily remove the ads actually watching commercial TV is brutally painful. The ads in magazines don't augment the stories at all, they are just the filler that makes the magazine 100 pages instead of 12.
Ads may be a necessary evil for a medium's survival, but that doesn't mean we as consumers like them or appreciate them as Google is asserting. In this day of internet product researching, ads mean less and less to me every year.
Sheldon
The music industry has failed because they missed the "Why" there was disaggregation. When they pump out huge masses of auto-tuned crap albums where there is only one song that is actually barely listenable, then there is no incentive to buy the whole album when you don't have to. There are precious few artists out there that make an entire album a cohesive unit that resists breaking apart without lessening the individual pieces.
The music industries death spiral is really obvious these days. I used to go to Borders to check new music in genre's other than top 40. The music was more expensive than the other options I had available to me (the ma and pop music stores had been crushed by that point). But now, the music selection is so small that in the blues and folk sections I've got significantly more selection at home than they have. Now there are no brick and mortar stores to browse so I don't buy from brick and mortar stores.
Sheldon
I bought a copy of windows 7 for $30 due to my wife's employer being a college. I haven't installed it on anything yet, and I don't have plans to, but for $30 it will be nice to have a legitimate copy if the need arises. For my old Dell laptop and my Parallels needs XP works just fine.
Sheldon
The user submitted photos are great as well.
Sheldon
In my limited decades of experience, the diploma gets you in the door for an interview. The perspective employer has an idea of what sort of person he wants and what qualifications are needed for that job at hand. He also has limited time and money to hunt for applicants, and thus leverages the secondary education process to act as a filter for him.
There are still a lot of old-school companies that require degrees because they always have, not because it's smart. There's also a lot of degreed folks who aren't qualified to pet my dog. But in general using the established education system to act as a filter works pretty well. Blindly using it also filters out lots of qualified individuals that got their qualifications in a less traditional way. But those folks may not be best served by working for an "old-school" company in the first place. So this blind school based filtering actually does them a favor as well in some cases.
I am a PhD research scientist not a coder, but I do a LOT of coding in my research (that's why I love this place). I see the same phenomenon when hiring new scientists and engineers. It's not just the IT world.
Sheldon