See, Apple wants to ensure that the phone maintains a great user experience. You believe that? Then I guess you'll also believe Verizon just wants to ensure that their customers have a great user experience, which is why you have to buy high-quality, professionally selected ringtones, games, and utilities from their store instead of uploading files of questionable quality on your own. It's just a coincidence that selling ringtones is a billion dollar industry, right?
Imagine the customer support nightmare for Apple and Cingular if third-party applications have problems. They do not want that! It's the same as opening and releasing Mac OS X to the masses of beige-boxes. Er, no... it's the same as opening a cellular platform to the masses of developers, which every carrier has already done, because that's the whole point of a smartphone!
Perhaps you don't realize it, but you can go out today and buy a cellular device from any US carrier that does run third-party apps, without having to get them signed or tested by the carrier or manufacturer. The world hasn't ended, the networks haven't been crashed by rogue apps, and customer service desks aren't overwhelmed with calls from idiots who broke their own phones by installing something.
With a device that connects to WiFi networks so easily and VoIP, who needs a big bucket of Cingular minutes? People who use their phones somewhere other than their living room and Starbucks.
So Apple's just going to test, sign, and distribute those apps for free? Or are they going to write those "killer consumer apps" themselves, making them non-third-party apps?
The hacker geeks aren't going to like it, but, hey, it didn't stop Sony from owning the world with this very same model for the PSX and PS2. The PSX and PS2 didn't have to compete with open consoles that did everything the PlayStation did at the same or lower price. The iPhone, OTOH, costs as much as a smartphone ($100 more for the 8 GB model) but is less open than a cheap J2ME handset.
Fact is, before this announcement, there was only one major wireless carrier in the US that locked their phones down to the point where you could only install "blessed" third-party apps and you had to buy them from the carrier. Now there are two.
Seems like it might be a reasonable strategy that won't lock out 3rd party developers. Unless Apple/Cingular is going to test, sign, and distribute apps for free, this will lock out 3rd party developers--the ones who want to write freeware, or OSS, or any kind of app that only appeals to a small audience--because developing apps for the iPhone will be a significant investment. The iPhone market will look just like "Get It Now", Verizon's BREW store: a limited selection of mass-appeal games and apps that cost $8 each, or $4 a month.
What he was saying "no" to is having a plethora of buggy software out there that would endanger the user experience of the phone. I still expect to see non-Apple and non-Cingular developers having access to the tools to build applications for the iPhone. Sure, but that doesn't make it any more open.
For example, you can go right now and download the BREW SDK, which is used for writing apps that will run on Verizon phones. It's totally free.
But you know what? There aren't really all that many apps for Verizon phones--certainly not as many as for other carriers' phones that run unsigned Java apps--and none of those apps are free. If you want a game or utility, you have to buy it for $5-$10 or pay a monthly subscription. And if someone hasn't written the thing you have in mind, forget about writing it yourself, unless you think you can sell it to a big audience.
See, you can get the SDK and write apps for free, but if you want to run it on actual hardware, you have to get a new phone and send it away to be authorized for debugging. Ka-ching! If you want others to be able to run your app, you have to pay to get it tested and signed, then strike up a deal with Verizon to get them to put it in their store. You can't really release it for free, of course, because you've just invested hundreds of dollars in it.
End result: only mass-appeal apps get written at all, and there's no open source or even freeware.
Oh, and one more thing: it's not really about quality assurance. People are smart enough to realize that if they install a crappy app, it's their own fault, and they can uninstall it. This is really about the carrier (Verizon/Cingular) and manufacturer (Qualcomm/Apple) seeing a chance to make a buck by crippling their hardware.
The summary is fine. It's a closed platform, unlike every other smartphone and most other cell phones.
You see, real smartphones let you install whatever software you want onto your phone. Hell, even many (most?) non-smart phones can run Java apps. That's certainly the kind of functionality Cingular customers are used to.
What Apple's doing with the iPhone, OTOH, is what Verizon customers are used to: the carrier tells you what you can do with your phone. You buy it, but you don't really own it. They say it's about quality assurance, and to some degree it might even be, but what it's really about is making sure you pay for extra features, instead of downloading freeware or writing your own. They think that if you're getting extra value out of their service, you owe them for it. But even Verizon doesn't go that far with their smartphones!
There might be apps written by third parties on the iPhone, but who writes them is pretty much irrelevant, because you can't write or install them without going through Cingular and/or Apple. They'll charge for the SDK, for testing apps, and for making apps available to users, and those costs will be passed onto the end user in the form of (1) paying to download apps and (2) limited selection because amateurs can't afford to develop.
Why would Apple care about the coverage area more than, say, the number of customers?
If they'd gone with a CDMA chipset instead of GSM, they'd have twice as many potential US customers right off the bat - Verizon and Sprint each have nearly as many customers as Cingular, and people who are interested in data services certainly aren't flocking to Cingular. Their coverage areas are around the same size too, at least Verizon's, and they have EVDO coverage, which blows the pants off of EDGE.
Remember, we're in the broadband speed access age now. Er, "we" might be, but Cingular isn't, and the iPod is tied to Cingular. EDGE is fast enough to sync music in real-time--at least at the bitrates you'd get from the iTunes store--but certainly not video.
I DONT want a GSM + Edge phone... [...] But... maybe it will sell in a third-world-country like the US is when it comes to cellular phones Heh, think again. The iPhone is GSM-only, and GSM is less than half the market here in the US: Cingular (GSM) is the largest carrier, but still only slightly larger than Verizon (CDMA) and Sprint (CDMA); they all have 50-60 million customers. The other major GSM carrier is T-Mobile, which is a distant fourth with less than 30 million.
And it's not just GSM-only, but Cingular-only. Apple is limiting themselves to around a quarter of the market! The iPhone sure looks cool, but eh... wake me up when it costs less than a PS3 and actually uses the same technology as the majority of customers in this country.
My biggest reason for going with the cingular (other than seeing all the verizon people experiancing bad service in my area and having to deal with Verizon's locked down phones) was that they use GSM phones. Stick in a new SIM and I am good to go. Travel to europe? grab an international SIM and I have a phone I can use. You can get that with Sprint or Verizon by using a multi-system phone (like this one): it speaks CDMA on US frequencies while you're at home, and switches to GSM on international frequencies when you travel.
This is a different thing. In your case we have one company suing another because the violating company sells copyrighted material online. Whether you agree with this or not, what is important is that both the US and Russia have copyright laws and a treaty saying that they will both enforce those laws. You're oversimplifying here: both the US and Russia have copyright laws, but they aren't identical, which means some acts of copying are legal under Russian law even though they'd be illegal under American law (more specifically, the royalty payments are handled by different organizations in the different countries, using different rules). That's the whole point of the AllOfMP3 controversy, and the reason they're able to operate cheaply and openly.
Oh no, you can't do that, because then the kids' self-esteem would be hurt. After all, we want our children to be happy, right? Er, do these kids seem happy to you if they're frustrated or angry enough to throw bricks through windows? A million bucks says they'd be happier if they weren't in school, so why waste everyone's time making them go?
Some comments here have blamed teachers for acting like "wardens", but the real problem is that the school system is set up like a prison. Any individual student or teacher can change his attitude, but the system doesn't change: if you round up a huge group of people who have nothing in common but their age and geographic location, and then you force them to spend their days together running on a strict schedule, taking part in activities they don't care about, and presided over by a faculty that writes and enforces rules which the students have no say in, then they are prisoners. No one should be surprised that they act the part.
If you agree that Qatar is not part of the UAE, please tag this story 'notuae' NO! To cancel out the "uae" tag, you should tag it !uae. Please stop adding extra useless tags.
What do you mean, "current"? 18-25 year olds have always been relatively apathetic when it comes to politics, with the notable exception of those times when there was a military draft, a very obvious invasion of politics into their daily lives.
Why the apathy? Because they've been excluded from politics their whole lives. They couldn't vote until age 18, so no politicians paid attention to any of the issues that mattered to them, and in return these future voters didn't pay attention to the issues that mattered to anyone else - those issues were irrelevant to them. It takes a few years for them to realize their opinions are finally worth something.
This is hardly unique to youth. For example, how many adults do you see buying parenting books, practicing to be good parents and forming opinions on parenting issues, years before they actually have kids? In general, adults who don't have kids are as apathetic to parenting issues as minors who can't vote are to political issues. The main difference is that once you have kids, you're forced to face all those issues immediately; once you turn 18, you don't have to face any political issues immediately because voting is optional.
If you want young people to be involved in politics, you have to make it relevant to them. Let them vote.
So why would someone want to run OS X on something OTHER than an Apple made computer? Do Mac owners want to deal with cheap hardware, driver problems, things not working? And what is the cost benefit? Like $100? Er.. when's the last time you compared MacBook prices to competing laptops? Last time I checked, the low end MacBook Pro cost over $800 more than a similar notebook from HP - nearly twice as much.
(HP dv6000t vs Apple MacBook Pro 15.4". Same CPU, RAM, drives, screen size, remote/mic/camera, etc.; weight within 1/2 lb, dimensions within 1/2 inch; the HP has a lower screen resolution, but an extra USB port and better DVD burner.)
And what is wrong with iTunes? It has, by far, the fairest DRM. You can burn unlimited copies of the music (you are limited to a certain number per playlist, but you can make a new Playlist and do more). You can always burn a CD, and re-import it. That's true for music, but have you had a look at the DRM for videos from the iTunes store? Good luck getting those to play with anything other than QT Player and iPod, or giving them away as gifts without handing over your account password.
How many drive SUV while being the only person in the car? I think a lot of people! Are the USA a country where the average family is 7+? If you needed to carry 7 passengers every Sunday, would you buy a whole other car to drive Monday through Saturday? Or would you buy a car to fit your peak load and then drive it less-than-full the rest of the time?
You're talking about security, while the US have bad records regarding: - seat belt use (73% in the USA, while it is obligatory in Europe Seat belts are mandatory in the US too. It's just that in some states, you can't be pulled over specifically for not wearing your seat belt; you have to break some other law and then you'll get cited for both infractions (secondary enforcement). AFAIK, however, most of the population is in states with primary enforcement.
This has already been done. Remember "Cool Spot," which was basically a platformer for Virgin drinks Virgin was the company that made the game; the drink was 7-Up.
The great thing about Cool Spot was it was a really fun game, with solid gameplay and production values, even though it was centered around the 7-Up brand and mascot. I don't know how well it actually worked as an advertisement, but it's still among my favorite Genesis games. But meanwhile, who remembers Mick and Mack? If you take a crappy game and slap some brand logos on it, you'll just be forgotten, or ridiculed at best.
It is somewhat easy to implement XML security and provide approved businesses with what amounts to an access token. They could also allow developers a limited number of queries per day in the same manner. Such a system would allow Google to allow approved uses of their API (e.g. tools that display their ads or relationships with approved business deals behind them). Isn't that how the search API already worked? They were handing out tokens and limiting each one to a certain number of queries per day, although I don't think they were investigating the applications for which the tokens were used.
Again I ask, though, how much can Square charge for something that, without copyright protection, is freely available once the first copy is "in the wild?" They would have to do something like distribute the game on a medium which is only readable by a single device and add "DRM" like crazy. No, they wouldn't. You seem to be stuck on the idea of selling copies; what I'm proposing is not selling copies, but selling the act of writing the game in the first place.
It doesn't matter to Square whether the game can be copied for free once the first copy becomes available, because everyone who made it will have already been paid by then. Furthermore, it doesn't matter to the people paying either, because they're not paying for a copy of the game (which they can make on their own for free), they're paying to live in a world where that game exists. It's like paying a physicist to figure out the value of some natural constant - his effort is still worth paying for, even if you can't charge for access to the number he comes up with.
Everyone wants to tell me how people will make money somehow without specifying where that money is going to come from or why the money would be paid. The money can come from anyone who believes he'll benefit from the availability of a new game. Most obviously, the players benefit because they're the ones who'll directly use it, but funding might also come from other parties: for example, if Sony thinks the arrival of a new Final Fantasy game for PS3 would sell thousands of new consoles, they might be willing to fund its development too.
But, that doesn't help a company just starting out that might be capable of making the greatest game of all time - fans won't pay money in advance on pure speculation, investors won't pay money when there's no decent business model light at the end of the tunnel (well, going by the past, smart investors wouldn't), who's left with an interest in getting a game made? Again, let me remind you that this is exactly the situation faced by anyone who starts out in any other field of work. If you can't convince someone to pay your asking price because you have no track record of success, then you'll have to lower your price (at first), or prove that you can create something good by putting together a portfolio at your own expense.
Until I see a reasonable answer to the above, then I have to consider anti-copyright arguments foolish and short-sighted. Well then, do you have a "reasonable answer" for all the first-time barbers, mechanics, CEOs, accountants, etc. out there -- people who also must face the fact that potential customers/employers might be hesitant to pay them with no proof of their skill?
Or are you just demanding special treatment for artists, musicians, and programmers, while leaving everyone else out in the cold?
Oh yeah, and programmers have been making software on spec and getting paid later once they can start selling their programs (made possible by both copyright and patent laws, by the way) for a very long time - again, without those laws they'd have made diddly for those efforts. Yes, and it's been foolish all along; they're lucky to have made anything for their effort. Anyone could've seen from the beginning that any business founded on maintaining a monopoly over information--which anyone can duplicate for free without being detected or stopped--is fundamentally built on shaky ground, and yet they decided to join in, hoping they could get rich before the bubble burst.
Thus, your job, in particular, is a poor example to hold up on this issue. My job is a great example, actually, because I practice what I preach. I'm not in the business of selling copies. If every program I've ever worked on became freely available for download, my income wouldn't be affected at all.
I have a few provisional patents for stopping denial of service attacks; the reason I don't do anything with them is that there would be no way to keep it out of government hands, and by definition the concept can be used to really put the hurt on freedom of speech. If the government wants to use your invention to put the hurt on freedom of speech, do you really think a patent is going to stop them?
And I see a problem with your statement; what about someone like Robert Heinlein? when he died, his copyrighted works went to supporting his wife of a gazillion years, ginny, which I just can't see anyone having a problem with. You don't think anyone could object to restricting everyone's speech in order to subsidize Mrs. Heinlein?
Look, everyone else who wants to support their loved ones after they die has to either buy life insurance or invest their money while they're still alive. They can't just expect payments to keep rolling in for work they did decades earlier even after they're dead. I can't believe so many people, especially here on Slashdot, think it's fine for certain occupations to get special treatment like this.
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Perhaps you don't realize it, but you can go out today and buy a cellular device from any US carrier that does run third-party apps, without having to get them signed or tested by the carrier or manufacturer. The world hasn't ended, the networks haven't been crashed by rogue apps, and customer service desks aren't overwhelmed with calls from idiots who broke their own phones by installing something.
By "everything you put on it outside of your own [media]", all you're really referring to is games, right? The iPod doesn't do anything else.
The difference is the iPod doesn't have to compete with other players, at the same or lower price point, which can play freeware and homebrew games.
So Apple's just going to test, sign, and distribute those apps for free? Or are they going to write those "killer consumer apps" themselves, making them non-third-party apps?
Fact is, before this announcement, there was only one major wireless carrier in the US that locked their phones down to the point where you could only install "blessed" third-party apps and you had to buy them from the carrier. Now there are two.
For example, you can go right now and download the BREW SDK, which is used for writing apps that will run on Verizon phones. It's totally free.
But you know what? There aren't really all that many apps for Verizon phones--certainly not as many as for other carriers' phones that run unsigned Java apps--and none of those apps are free. If you want a game or utility, you have to buy it for $5-$10 or pay a monthly subscription. And if someone hasn't written the thing you have in mind, forget about writing it yourself, unless you think you can sell it to a big audience.
See, you can get the SDK and write apps for free, but if you want to run it on actual hardware, you have to get a new phone and send it away to be authorized for debugging. Ka-ching! If you want others to be able to run your app, you have to pay to get it tested and signed, then strike up a deal with Verizon to get them to put it in their store. You can't really release it for free, of course, because you've just invested hundreds of dollars in it.
End result: only mass-appeal apps get written at all, and there's no open source or even freeware.
Oh, and one more thing: it's not really about quality assurance. People are smart enough to realize that if they install a crappy app, it's their own fault, and they can uninstall it. This is really about the carrier (Verizon/Cingular) and manufacturer (Qualcomm/Apple) seeing a chance to make a buck by crippling their hardware.
The summary is fine. It's a closed platform, unlike every other smartphone and most other cell phones.
You see, real smartphones let you install whatever software you want onto your phone. Hell, even many (most?) non-smart phones can run Java apps. That's certainly the kind of functionality Cingular customers are used to.
What Apple's doing with the iPhone, OTOH, is what Verizon customers are used to: the carrier tells you what you can do with your phone. You buy it, but you don't really own it. They say it's about quality assurance, and to some degree it might even be, but what it's really about is making sure you pay for extra features, instead of downloading freeware or writing your own. They think that if you're getting extra value out of their service, you owe them for it. But even Verizon doesn't go that far with their smartphones!
There might be apps written by third parties on the iPhone, but who writes them is pretty much irrelevant, because you can't write or install them without going through Cingular and/or Apple. They'll charge for the SDK, for testing apps, and for making apps available to users, and those costs will be passed onto the end user in the form of (1) paying to download apps and (2) limited selection because amateurs can't afford to develop.
Why would Apple care about the coverage area more than, say, the number of customers?
If they'd gone with a CDMA chipset instead of GSM, they'd have twice as many potential US customers right off the bat - Verizon and Sprint each have nearly as many customers as Cingular, and people who are interested in data services certainly aren't flocking to Cingular. Their coverage areas are around the same size too, at least Verizon's, and they have EVDO coverage, which blows the pants off of EDGE.
And it's not just GSM-only, but Cingular-only. Apple is limiting themselves to around a quarter of the market! The iPhone sure looks cool, but eh... wake me up when it costs less than a PS3 and actually uses the same technology as the majority of customers in this country.
More like Donald Rumsfeld.
"Do stores have to have national laws enacted when they enforce their return policies? Heavens, no! Do they? Good gravy, yes!"
4.2.2.2 is a good, easy-to-remember DNS server.
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.youtube.com
Addresses: 208.65.153.245, 208.65.153.251, 208.65.153.253, 208.65.153.241
208.65.153.242
Some comments here have blamed teachers for acting like "wardens", but the real problem is that the school system is set up like a prison. Any individual student or teacher can change his attitude, but the system doesn't change: if you round up a huge group of people who have nothing in common but their age and geographic location, and then you force them to spend their days together running on a strict schedule, taking part in activities they don't care about, and presided over by a faculty that writes and enforces rules which the students have no say in, then they are prisoners. No one should be surprised that they act the part.
What do you mean, "current"? 18-25 year olds have always been relatively apathetic when it comes to politics, with the notable exception of those times when there was a military draft, a very obvious invasion of politics into their daily lives.
Why the apathy? Because they've been excluded from politics their whole lives. They couldn't vote until age 18, so no politicians paid attention to any of the issues that mattered to them, and in return these future voters didn't pay attention to the issues that mattered to anyone else - those issues were irrelevant to them. It takes a few years for them to realize their opinions are finally worth something.
This is hardly unique to youth. For example, how many adults do you see buying parenting books, practicing to be good parents and forming opinions on parenting issues, years before they actually have kids? In general, adults who don't have kids are as apathetic to parenting issues as minors who can't vote are to political issues. The main difference is that once you have kids, you're forced to face all those issues immediately; once you turn 18, you don't have to face any political issues immediately because voting is optional.
If you want young people to be involved in politics, you have to make it relevant to them. Let them vote.
(HP dv6000t vs Apple MacBook Pro 15.4". Same CPU, RAM, drives, screen size, remote/mic/camera, etc.; weight within 1/2 lb, dimensions within 1/2 inch; the HP has a lower screen resolution, but an extra USB port and better DVD burner.) And what is wrong with iTunes? It has, by far, the fairest DRM. You can burn unlimited copies of the music (you are limited to a certain number per playlist, but you can make a new Playlist and do more). You can always burn a CD, and re-import it. That's true for music, but have you had a look at the DRM for videos from the iTunes store? Good luck getting those to play with anything other than QT Player and iPod, or giving them away as gifts without handing over your account password.
Well, it didn't make me want to drink any more 7-Up. I'm a Pepsi man.
The great thing about Cool Spot was it was a really fun game, with solid gameplay and production values, even though it was centered around the 7-Up brand and mascot. I don't know how well it actually worked as an advertisement, but it's still among my favorite Genesis games. But meanwhile, who remembers Mick and Mack? If you take a crappy game and slap some brand logos on it, you'll just be forgotten, or ridiculed at best.
It doesn't matter to Square whether the game can be copied for free once the first copy becomes available, because everyone who made it will have already been paid by then. Furthermore, it doesn't matter to the people paying either, because they're not paying for a copy of the game (which they can make on their own for free), they're paying to live in a world where that game exists. It's like paying a physicist to figure out the value of some natural constant - his effort is still worth paying for, even if you can't charge for access to the number he comes up with. Everyone wants to tell me how people will make money somehow without specifying where that money is going to come from or why the money would be paid. The money can come from anyone who believes he'll benefit from the availability of a new game. Most obviously, the players benefit because they're the ones who'll directly use it, but funding might also come from other parties: for example, if Sony thinks the arrival of a new Final Fantasy game for PS3 would sell thousands of new consoles, they might be willing to fund its development too. But, that doesn't help a company just starting out that might be capable of making the greatest game of all time - fans won't pay money in advance on pure speculation, investors won't pay money when there's no decent business model light at the end of the tunnel (well, going by the past, smart investors wouldn't), who's left with an interest in getting a game made? Again, let me remind you that this is exactly the situation faced by anyone who starts out in any other field of work. If you can't convince someone to pay your asking price because you have no track record of success, then you'll have to lower your price (at first), or prove that you can create something good by putting together a portfolio at your own expense. Until I see a reasonable answer to the above, then I have to consider anti-copyright arguments foolish and short-sighted. Well then, do you have a "reasonable answer" for all the first-time barbers, mechanics, CEOs, accountants, etc. out there -- people who also must face the fact that potential customers/employers might be hesitant to pay them with no proof of their skill?
Or are you just demanding special treatment for artists, musicians, and programmers, while leaving everyone else out in the cold? Oh yeah, and programmers have been making software on spec and getting paid later once they can start selling their programs (made possible by both copyright and patent laws, by the way) for a very long time - again, without those laws they'd have made diddly for those efforts. Yes, and it's been foolish all along; they're lucky to have made anything for their effort. Anyone could've seen from the beginning that any business founded on maintaining a monopoly over information--which anyone can duplicate for free without being detected or stopped--is fundamentally built on shaky ground, and yet they decided to join in, hoping they could get rich before the bubble burst. Thus, your job, in particular, is a poor example to hold up on this issue. My job is a great example, actually, because I practice what I preach. I'm not in the business of selling copies. If every program I've ever worked on became freely available for download, my income wouldn't be affected at all.
Look, everyone else who wants to support their loved ones after they die has to either buy life insurance or invest their money while they're still alive. They can't just expect payments to keep rolling in for work they did decades earlier even after they're dead. I can't believe so many people, especially here on Slashdot, think it's fine for certain occupations to get special treatment like this.