"User experience" is important for geeks too, and I have to say the iphone seems to deliver a great one (at a price).
Such geeks ought to be excited to learn that the Nexus One delivers an equally great experience, especially since it costs less and is more open.
The Android user experience has always been limited by one thing: CPU power. With the release of the Droid, and now the Nexus One, that's no longer an issue.
Other devices don't have this, and just having the ability to drop a phone in your car's dash to jam out to whatever you listen to makes an iPhone a nicer deal than Android phones which don't seem to have BlueTooth support.
Sounds like you've been misled - Android supports Bluetooth just fine.
I use my G1 to jam out in the car all the time, without connecting the phone to anything or even taking it out of my pocket. Stereo sound comes through the car speakers, and the prev/next/pause buttons on my stereo control the Android media player.
The number of CDMA phones is more in Asia than NA, but the number of GSM phones is even great.
Agreed, GSM is still far more popular worldwide than CDMA. A GSM-only phone is better for international travel than a CDMA-only phone. But a GSM+CDMA phone is even better.
What happened to the concept of "saving before buying" and "living within your mean" ? Is that so old-fashioned ?
Those aren't the same concept. Living within your means is one thing, but saving before buying is overrated. (Know anyone who paid cash for a house? If so, did they die of old age a few years later, or were they just ridiculously wealthy?)
If know I'm going to have $530 ten months from now, why should I save $53 a month and buy the phone later, instead of buying it now and paying it off over time? Even if I have to pay $60 a month to cover interest, as long as I think it's worth $70 to enjoy the phone for those ten months, what's wrong with that?
Google Voice transcriptions absolutely are done on the server side. You don't even need a cell phone to use GV - you can forward your land line to it and get transcripts by email or read them on the web site.
It's a safe assumption that the Google Voice servers have more computing power than any smartphone, so it's unlikely that the phone is going to be any better at transcribing than GV. The phone's advantage, if any, would be that you know you're talking to a computer and you'll speak clearly, whereas the people leaving messages on GV don't bother.
"Unobtanium" is an engineer's humorous way of referring to a material with desirable properties that either simply doesn't exist, or is so expensive/difficult to obtain that it's infeasible to actually use for what you want.
My pet theory is that at some point in Avatar's past (our future), "unobtainium" entered the public lexicon as a potential solution to some kind of crisis: some prominent scientist said "sure, we could [desalinate the ocean/filter the atmosphere/whatever], but to build the reactors, we'd need a mineral with properties we've never seen... let me know when you find that unobtainium!", and headlines followed like "Desperate Senators Propose Searching Space For 'Unobtainium'". Then once a mineral with those properties was actually found, the name "unobtainium" stuck.
I wear glasses and saw it in Imax 3D as well. They fit just fine. I didn't look at the rack too closely, but it looked like they had two types of 3D glasses, a goggle-type to fit over eyeglasses and a smaller one for everyone else.
Apple's big contribution was demonstrating the right way to sell smart phone applications... make then cheap and easy to buy. Who would have guessed?
Even that was no innovation: Apple's app store doesn't do anything that Verizon's "Get It Now" store wasn't already doing for dumbphones (although the process is a little easier for developers).
It's been a while since I took economics, but I thought that to be a monopoly, there couldn't be any equivalent products - or close substitutes - on the market.
Depends on context. If you say "Apple has a monopoly on iPhones", that's true no matter how popular the iPhone is or whether there are any competing smartphones - Apple is the only one selling iPhones. Likewise, Toyota has a monopoly on the Corolla even though there are other small sedans, and Britney Spears (or her record label) has a monopoly on the song "Toxic" even though there are other pop songs.
Whether those monopolies are abusive, on the other hand, depends on the state of the market.
The simple fact of the matter is this: "Begging the question" has been used to mean "raising the question" for so long and by so many people that it is pointless to even suggest that they are not equal.
"It's" has been used to mean "its" for quite some time, too, and "there" has been used to mean both "their" and "they're". Are you going to say those are equally valid as well?
Quick, you go ahead and make something you call an "iPhone." The legal system will take you apart in seconds, leaving your bones for the sharks. That's not "monopoly," that's IP.
It's both. "IP" is a monopoly. It's a government-granted monopoly on making and distributing particular arrangements of parts (patents) and/or bits (copyright).
Try to keep up with the thread, please. We're not talking about poor immigrants hoping to give their kids a better life in the land of opportunity.
We're talking about people who already have a post-graduate education and are looking for a career in scientific research. They didn't spend all that time in school just so they could sneak into the US in the back of a truck, try to find some research position that pays cash and doesn't ask too many questions, and keep their heads down to avoid being discovered by the INS!
If they can't move here, they're going to stay in their home countries, where they can live like respectable citizens and maybe even become famous for their discoveries without the risk of deportation.
Considering that millions of illiterate and non-English speaking people get into the U.S. every year without valid papers, you would think that all these PhDs would be able to figure out how to do it too.
You might think that, if you thought people with PhDs would put up with getting paid under the table, having to carry fake IDs, going without access to even the US's meager social safety net, and living in fear of being deported.
It's one thing to put up with those conditions when you're coming from some poor, broken country. But why would an educated person from a developed country come here to live as a second-class citizen when he could stay home, do the same work above board, and enjoy his single-payer health care and 4 weeks of vacation?
I forget my C standards trivia, but are you saying that C doesn't require sign-extended right shift when operating on a signed operand, or that compilers are broken, or that you need to cast the "-1" constant to a signed type before shifting it?
The first one. The behavior of the right shift operator is unspecified (implementation defined) when operating on a signed negative value.
Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."
What this tells me is that the mental capacity for informed decision-making is overrated, and that claims about minors' inability to make informed decisions are likely to be post-hoc justifications for some predetermined end (e.g. "I'm uncomfortable with the idea of my kids having sex, so I'll grab onto whatever reason I can find to substitute my decisions for theirs").
Another example is voting: the voting age is commonly justified by claims that minors don't have the knowledge or long-term planning capacity to make an informed decision, but we all know adults often vote based on superficial, short-term considerations as well. For instance, proponents of the voting age might say "but kids will just vote for whoever promises less homework!" while ignoring the number of adults who just vote for whoever promises lower taxes. Again, I have to suspect that the real motivation has less to do with minors' mental capacity and more to do with a preexisting desire to prevent their interests from being represented.
It's a well known (scientific!) fact that children grow and learn. At some point, they stop growing, and, well, slow down in learning. At that point, they become adults. Children cannot consent. Adults can.
There are a couple serious problems with this approach.
1. Not everyone "stops growing" at the same age. How do you determine whether or not someone has reached that point yet, using nothing but pure logic?
If you have a good answer that can be practically implemented, then I'd honestly love to hear it. I personally oppose age-based laws as a matter of principle, because I believe discriminating against someone because of the specific number of times they've orbited the sun is every bit as unfair as discriminating based on the color of their skin. But the alternatives I've heard are far from perfect. I think they'd still be better than age-based laws, but I accept that they'd involve a lot more false positives, which is fine with me - that's a matter of priorities (I think giving young people freedom is more valuable than protecting them from the consequences of their own choices), not logic.
2. "Children cannot consent. Adults can" is an awfully simplistic and glib way to talk about it. Children can and do consent to things every day: for example, no one seriously argues that a 10 year old can't make an informed decision between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. What people claim is that children lack the capacity to make informed decisions about some things which have particularly dangerous or permanent consequences, or which require some (vaguely defined) sort of life experience or "emotional maturity" to be truly informed.
There is no "consent" section of the brain that suddenly comes online on a person's 16th or 18th birthday. There is no bright line between "child" and "adult" at a biological level. There is no scientific consensus, let alone logical proof, as to what physical capacity a person needs to make informed decisions, or how to measure that capacity, or even at what age that capacity tends to arise (see the variation in ages of consent across the US and around the world). Setting a policy here requires more than just logic.
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
Congress broke the biggest law.
While I agree with the sentiment behind your post, a retroactive copyright extension is not an ex post facto law.
An ex post facto law is one that retroactively outlaws a past act, punishing someone for doing something that was legal at the time. Retroactive copyright extension doesn't do that: if I legally copy a public domain work today, and then the copyright term is extended tomorrow (taking that work out of the public domain), I'm in the clear. Only future copying is illegal.
That's presumably "CDMA" as in "Qualcomm's cdmaOne and CDMA2000", not "CDMA" as in "Code Division Multiple Access".
Right. Specifically, "CDMA" as in "the main alternative to GSM".
That sounds as if it's referring to "CDMA" as in "Code Division Multiple Access", Does it apply to W-CDMA as used in UMTS 3G networks (such as AT&T in the US and just about everybody in Europe)?
I believe it does - it's a feature of the radio interface. Code Division Multiple Access requires you to know the codes in use before you have any hope of picking out a signal.
I don't know how easy UMTS makes it to discover or guess those codes, though. (Or, to be honest, how easy it is to do the same in cdmaOne/CDMA2000.)
The G1 and Droid both have QWERTY and directional controllers too: trackball on the G1, D-pad on the droid. But just like the Sidekick, they both have the directional controller on the wrong side!
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No, version 2.0 came out with the Droid.
"User experience" is important for geeks too, and I have to say the iphone seems to deliver a great one (at a price).
Such geeks ought to be excited to learn that the Nexus One delivers an equally great experience, especially since it costs less and is more open.
The Android user experience has always been limited by one thing: CPU power. With the release of the Droid, and now the Nexus One, that's no longer an issue.
Other devices don't have this, and just having the ability to drop a phone in your car's dash to jam out to whatever you listen to makes an iPhone a nicer deal than Android phones which don't seem to have BlueTooth support.
Sounds like you've been misled - Android supports Bluetooth just fine.
I use my G1 to jam out in the car all the time, without connecting the phone to anything or even taking it out of my pocket. Stereo sound comes through the car speakers, and the prev/next/pause buttons on my stereo control the Android media player.
The number of CDMA phones is more in Asia than NA, but the number of GSM phones is even great.
Agreed, GSM is still far more popular worldwide than CDMA. A GSM-only phone is better for international travel than a CDMA-only phone. But a GSM+CDMA phone is even better.
google has already announced the N1 on three of the four major US carriers. what other phone can claim that?
Blackberry? RAZR?
What happened to the concept of "saving before buying" and "living within your mean" ? Is that so old-fashioned ?
Those aren't the same concept. Living within your means is one thing, but saving before buying is overrated. (Know anyone who paid cash for a house? If so, did they die of old age a few years later, or were they just ridiculously wealthy?)
If know I'm going to have $530 ten months from now, why should I save $53 a month and buy the phone later, instead of buying it now and paying it off over time? Even if I have to pay $60 a month to cover interest, as long as I think it's worth $70 to enjoy the phone for those ten months, what's wrong with that?
To travel internationally you only need GSM. It is only the US that has the CDMA standard.
Not true. CDMA is available worldwide - pretty much everywhere except Central America, western Europe, and Australia.
In fact, there are more CDMA subscribers in Asia than North America. There's no GSM in Japan, but there is CDMA.
Google Voice transcriptions absolutely are done on the server side. You don't even need a cell phone to use GV - you can forward your land line to it and get transcripts by email or read them on the web site.
It's a safe assumption that the Google Voice servers have more computing power than any smartphone, so it's unlikely that the phone is going to be any better at transcribing than GV. The phone's advantage, if any, would be that you know you're talking to a computer and you'll speak clearly, whereas the people leaving messages on GV don't bother.
The Milestone doesn't work with AT&T's 3G network, so he'd be limited to EDGE. He might as well get an unlocked Nexus One.
"Unobtanium" is an engineer's humorous way of referring to a material with desirable properties that either simply doesn't exist, or is so expensive/difficult to obtain that it's infeasible to actually use for what you want.
My pet theory is that at some point in Avatar's past (our future), "unobtainium" entered the public lexicon as a potential solution to some kind of crisis: some prominent scientist said "sure, we could [desalinate the ocean/filter the atmosphere/whatever], but to build the reactors, we'd need a mineral with properties we've never seen... let me know when you find that unobtainium!", and headlines followed like "Desperate Senators Propose Searching Space For 'Unobtainium'". Then once a mineral with those properties was actually found, the name "unobtainium" stuck.
I wear glasses and saw it in Imax 3D as well. They fit just fine. I didn't look at the rack too closely, but it looked like they had two types of 3D glasses, a goggle-type to fit over eyeglasses and a smaller one for everyone else.
Apple's big contribution was demonstrating the right way to sell smart phone applications... make then cheap and easy to buy. Who would have guessed?
Even that was no innovation: Apple's app store doesn't do anything that Verizon's "Get It Now" store wasn't already doing for dumbphones (although the process is a little easier for developers).
It's been a while since I took economics, but I thought that to be a monopoly, there couldn't be any equivalent products - or close substitutes - on the market.
Depends on context. If you say "Apple has a monopoly on iPhones", that's true no matter how popular the iPhone is or whether there are any competing smartphones - Apple is the only one selling iPhones. Likewise, Toyota has a monopoly on the Corolla even though there are other small sedans, and Britney Spears (or her record label) has a monopoly on the song "Toxic" even though there are other pop songs.
Whether those monopolies are abusive, on the other hand, depends on the state of the market.
The simple fact of the matter is this: "Begging the question" has been used to mean "raising the question" for so long and by so many people that it is pointless to even suggest that they are not equal.
"It's" has been used to mean "its" for quite some time, too, and "there" has been used to mean both "their" and "they're". Are you going to say those are equally valid as well?
By the way, how many suits has Apple launched against jailbreakers?
They may not have filed any lawsuits yet, but they have petitioned the DMCA rulemaking committee to declare it illegal.
Quick, you go ahead and make something you call an "iPhone." The legal system will take you apart in seconds, leaving your bones for the sharks. That's not "monopoly," that's IP.
It's both. "IP" is a monopoly. It's a government-granted monopoly on making and distributing particular arrangements of parts (patents) and/or bits (copyright).
Try to keep up with the thread, please. We're not talking about poor immigrants hoping to give their kids a better life in the land of opportunity.
We're talking about people who already have a post-graduate education and are looking for a career in scientific research. They didn't spend all that time in school just so they could sneak into the US in the back of a truck, try to find some research position that pays cash and doesn't ask too many questions, and keep their heads down to avoid being discovered by the INS!
If they can't move here, they're going to stay in their home countries, where they can live like respectable citizens and maybe even become famous for their discoveries without the risk of deportation.
Considering that millions of illiterate and non-English speaking people get into the U.S. every year without valid papers, you would think that all these PhDs would be able to figure out how to do it too.
You might think that, if you thought people with PhDs would put up with getting paid under the table, having to carry fake IDs, going without access to even the US's meager social safety net, and living in fear of being deported.
It's one thing to put up with those conditions when you're coming from some poor, broken country. But why would an educated person from a developed country come here to live as a second-class citizen when he could stay home, do the same work above board, and enjoy his single-payer health care and 4 weeks of vacation?
I forget my C standards trivia, but are you saying that C doesn't require sign-extended right shift when operating on a signed operand, or that compilers are broken, or that you need to cast the "-1" constant to a signed type before shifting it?
The first one. The behavior of the right shift operator is unspecified (implementation defined) when operating on a signed negative value.
Very good post, but I must point out that there is in fact a great deal of psychological literature on decision-making, and I am alarmed at the number of decisions that adults "make" that are foregone conclusions of programming. This is not the abstract "there is no free will because free will implies uncaused causation" but a much more concrete "the conscious mind spends a lot of time justifying and making up explanations for decisions that the subconscious makes without recourse to reason."
What this tells me is that the mental capacity for informed decision-making is overrated, and that claims about minors' inability to make informed decisions are likely to be post-hoc justifications for some predetermined end (e.g. "I'm uncomfortable with the idea of my kids having sex, so I'll grab onto whatever reason I can find to substitute my decisions for theirs").
Another example is voting: the voting age is commonly justified by claims that minors don't have the knowledge or long-term planning capacity to make an informed decision, but we all know adults often vote based on superficial, short-term considerations as well. For instance, proponents of the voting age might say "but kids will just vote for whoever promises less homework!" while ignoring the number of adults who just vote for whoever promises lower taxes. Again, I have to suspect that the real motivation has less to do with minors' mental capacity and more to do with a preexisting desire to prevent their interests from being represented.
I take it as a good gesture, though, that Apple is not actively discouraging jailbreaking. Now, unlocking, on the other hand...
"Apple has filed comments to the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking committee complaining about jailbreaking and asking that it be deemed illegal."
Not active enough for you?
It's a well known (scientific!) fact that children grow and learn. At some point, they stop growing, and, well, slow down in learning. At that point, they become adults. Children cannot consent. Adults can.
There are a couple serious problems with this approach.
1. Not everyone "stops growing" at the same age. How do you determine whether or not someone has reached that point yet, using nothing but pure logic?
If you have a good answer that can be practically implemented, then I'd honestly love to hear it. I personally oppose age-based laws as a matter of principle, because I believe discriminating against someone because of the specific number of times they've orbited the sun is every bit as unfair as discriminating based on the color of their skin. But the alternatives I've heard are far from perfect. I think they'd still be better than age-based laws, but I accept that they'd involve a lot more false positives, which is fine with me - that's a matter of priorities (I think giving young people freedom is more valuable than protecting them from the consequences of their own choices), not logic.
2. "Children cannot consent. Adults can" is an awfully simplistic and glib way to talk about it. Children can and do consent to things every day: for example, no one seriously argues that a 10 year old can't make an informed decision between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. What people claim is that children lack the capacity to make informed decisions about some things which have particularly dangerous or permanent consequences, or which require some (vaguely defined) sort of life experience or "emotional maturity" to be truly informed.
There is no "consent" section of the brain that suddenly comes online on a person's 16th or 18th birthday. There is no bright line between "child" and "adult" at a biological level. There is no scientific consensus, let alone logical proof, as to what physical capacity a person needs to make informed decisions, or how to measure that capacity, or even at what age that capacity tends to arise (see the variation in ages of consent across the US and around the world). Setting a policy here requires more than just logic.
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
Congress broke the biggest law.
While I agree with the sentiment behind your post, a retroactive copyright extension is not an ex post facto law.
An ex post facto law is one that retroactively outlaws a past act, punishing someone for doing something that was legal at the time. Retroactive copyright extension doesn't do that: if I legally copy a public domain work today, and then the copyright term is extended tomorrow (taking that work out of the public domain), I'm in the clear. Only future copying is illegal.
That's presumably "CDMA" as in "Qualcomm's cdmaOne and CDMA2000", not "CDMA" as in "Code Division Multiple Access".
Right. Specifically, "CDMA" as in "the main alternative to GSM".
That sounds as if it's referring to "CDMA" as in "Code Division Multiple Access", Does it apply to W-CDMA as used in UMTS 3G networks (such as AT&T in the US and just about everybody in Europe)?
I believe it does - it's a feature of the radio interface. Code Division Multiple Access requires you to know the codes in use before you have any hope of picking out a signal.
I don't know how easy UMTS makes it to discover or guess those codes, though. (Or, to be honest, how easy it is to do the same in cdmaOne/CDMA2000.)
The G1 and Droid both have QWERTY and directional controllers too: trackball on the G1, D-pad on the droid. But just like the Sidekick, they both have the directional controller on the wrong side!