Our service is to provide a peaceful and painless death to animals who no one wants.
They should not only not condemn, but wholeheartedly endorse kosher slaughterhouses since their service is to provide a peaceful and painless death to animals - not for liberal "think of the animals" guilt complexes, but because a peaceful, painless death provides better meat for other animals (homo sapiens) to eat - we are omnivorous animals - go look it up, PeTA wackos! The only difference here is that the carcasses of the dead animals are not going to waste, but are providing a critical link in the food chain.
PETA, once you bioengineer humans to live on grass, come talk to us. Otherwise, bug off!
Administering IIS has been a pain in the ass since day 1. Unlike NCSA, Netscape, and Apache servers, you had to point-and-click through a zillion tabs and dialog boxes in IIS to configure and tune the server - or for more advanced tuning, do something even worse: hark back to the day of C= BASIC 2.0 and do the equivalen of PEEK and POKE to the IIS Metabase. Microsoft has FINALLY seen the light and now offers the ability to edit configuration files. This makes things MUCH easier since you can see right in front of you which features are enabled or disabled, tweak things like buffers, and so forth, and don't have to click through eleventyteen places to find the bottleneck or what is breaking your server.
For a long time Apache has been kicking Microsoft's butt on the server side, and believe it or not, a large part of it is not just Apache's lesser system requirements, but the ability to easily administer it. If you're a serious sysadmin you'll appreciate the command line and the ease of administration it brings. Sure, you have to learn a little more, and put more up-front effort into the job, but once you have acquired the skills you will find you are repeating tasks only once or twice and then spend some time writing scripts to handle it automatically.
Aside from activation (I've spent thousands on Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) this is one of the big reasons we dumped Windows in favor of Linux. The only Windows server we have left is an MSDN installation, for testing, not production. All the other servers run Linux, and I have a ton of stuff automated.
Windows is really getting there - it really is. It just needs a really good CLI. Powershell is a good step, but I prefer bash. (Cygwin or AndLinux or SFU) + powershell are two ways you can get close to the flexibility of Unix administration, but even that doesn't get you 100% there.
Don't fear the CLI. Even Microsoft has seen the light and is well on its way to reinventing Unix, poorly (remember, "those who do not understand unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly").
Part of the problem was that users of the iPhone were actually using it to surf the web like they would at home and the proliferation of apps meant that iPhone users could be constant 3G usage when they were not surfing whether they were syncing data or apps.
. . . which is something AT&T has no right to complain about it because they have all along and continuing today advertising the iPhone for its web surfing, app downloading, and music and streaming capabilities. They wanted to offer the service and shouldn't be complaining about their explosive growth in market share overwhelming the networks; they ought to have planned upgrades accordingly since their whole goal was to expand their market share by leveraging the features of the iPhone being exclusive to AT&T.
I for one hope Android takes off in a big way; it will force AT&T and Apple to both open up their restrictions by a LOT. I think with Android's offering flash, allowing unrestricted tethering, making corporate deployments easier, and not blocking power users' installing what they want to install, Apple has to follow suit on at least some of those aspects. Bringing tethering back is just the first concession; Flash is sure to follow since everybody else is getting it, and Jobs knows HTML5 ain't quite here yet and Apple will have to allow people to use the features they expect now rather than 5-10 years from now.
Apple is currently a follower in the smartphone business. This is the beginning of their awakening. If Apple loses market share to Google's technology, you'll see Apple lighten up quite a bit, because as much as they like to "think different" and be quirky, ultimately their market share drives the bottom line - literally.
A Jailbreak and openssh is all you need to tether to the iPhone.:)
The issue is that people buy the iPhone based on advertised features, and it wasn't until Apple starting moving to disable tethering (quickly bypassed trivially) that they added the * and a footnote stating "in selective markets." The problem is if you pay full price for a fully (officially) unlocked iPhone, Apple still will not give you the ability to enable tethering; they refer you to the carrier. The carrier refers you to Apple. The situation has improved somewhat if you have an "official" Apple reseller as your provider, but if you own an Apple-unlocked phone and don't use their blessed providers, you are still SOL.
This problem began when AT&T and Apple in their joint press conferences announced each iPhone with all of its bells and whistles, and tethering being one of the key advanced features Apple was pushing (advanced? It is something other phone manufacturers have offered dating back to the late '90s by allowing the phones to be used as a modem, and later, many phone manufacturers allowed via a wired, wifi, or bluetooth network connection, passing the full bandwidth of the phone's data connection). Apple's yanking tethering pissed off a lot of customers who bought the iPhone with an advertised set of features, and then reneging after getting our money.
This is NO different than the Sony PS3/Other OS issue. Remember the outrage when Sony yanked the feature, and many had purchased the PS3 to be able to run PS3 games, play blu-ray, AND run a basic Linux box as part of their entertainment center? Sony removed a key feature that sold many units.
The difference here is Apple is FINALLY giving the functionality back after a lot of feedback over the last six months or so since they pulled it.
Stop being surprised when years-old features are suddenly "added" to products that should have had them (and technically *could* have had them for absolutely no price difference whatsoever) in the first place.
The iPhone 3G S had it originally, and Apple yanked it. They're just giving the feature back now.
I'm just interested in how much longer we can expect to see capacity gains like this.
Do you know how long that question has been asked, and how many times "theoretical limits" would be reached within a year at the current rate, and each time, new techniques have been developed which increase density many times more than anyone previously imagined? I think storage density will be increasing for that much longer.
15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte? The capacity we have nowadays is staggering, and when back when you had your 320MB to 512MB hard drive and were thinking "I'll never fill this up" only a few were bothering with MP3s and PVR technologies (I bought my first video capture/TV tuner card around that time) and I'll bet few ever fathomed that a user could fill terabytes' worth of hard drives. Now it's cheap to build home recording studios, or even engage in amateur independent movie production with only a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment, running free software.
It's amazing, and with storage capacity growth increasing (not decreasing) we'll find new ways to fill up the storage media, very likely doing things we haven't anticipated even today.
Bzzzt. Wrong. They are commodity goods, not work for hire under a contract. You do own that copy just as much as you own a book, and you can do whatever the fudge you please with it, except violate the copyright. That's why marketing says "own it today" not "license it today, unless our craptivation servers have been turned off."
At the rate that the Fed is printing more fiat currency (which is backed by debt, not by hard commodities like precious metals) money is already losing its meaning.
but using your computer requires some interaction and mental processing.
Judging from a lot of posts you see on here, I don't think too much mental processing is a problem for a lot of the anonymous cowards and first posters here!
I used to run Reiserfs after having a VERY bad experience with EXT3, but I've since switched back to EXT3 now that it's a lot more mature.
What did I like about Reiser? Exactly as you described; I never saw --rebuilt-tree fail. I've had NTFS and EXT2 and EXT3 partitions go bad but I have never had a ReiserFS partition become unrecoverable; if the drive spun up and could be enumerated by the OS, reiserfsck could retrieve everything even if it appeared lost. I also really liked the zero-slack feature (no wasted disk space!)
Why did I finally abandon ship?
Honestly, it was performance.
Writes are fast under reiser -- VERY fast. It is super reliable - I've never expected any filesystem to be so resilient.
What was wrong with it then?
Deletes. Deletions take for-freaking-ever. Right-click a file on a reiserfs partition in konqueror, and wait and wait and wait (watch the minute hand move on a clock or watch!) for the context menu. Delete a folder containing 70K files? Start the delete, come back an hour later, and see the deletion is still going. It is dreadfully slow deleting files. Do the same to an EXT3 (or now, EXT4) partition, an XFS partition, or even NTFS (via NTFS-3G) partition, and the deletion will take seconds - or maybe a minute for really immense directories. Reiser? s. . . . l. . . . o. . . ..w. . . that was honestly the only thing I could find wrong with Reiser (the FS, obviously, not the mama-killing douche of a meatbag who is hopefully being raped and beat up daily)
Riiight. Even hardcore sysadmins will choose Ubuntu or OpenSUSE to avoid having to spend eleventy-teen days configuring the system to get the REAL work done.
Debian is fine if you run a Pentium III still, Slackware is perfect for a masochist, oh, and Gentoo is good for people who like to LOOK busy but never actually get anything done!
Seriously though; distros like Ubuntu (and variants), OpenSUSE, and even Mandriva and Fedora get the drudgery of setting up a basic system out of the way for you. If you've set up slackware once, you've set it up a hundred times. Ditto for Debian, Gentoo, etc. - they are just too much work that is actually a distraction from real productivity. Need to deploy a desktop or a LAMP server? Just pick $DISTRO_OF_CHOICE and install it, and be getting actual work done within an hour.
Those distros certainly have their place(s) but honestly, those distros don't belong on the desktop and it's the kind of attitude you are displaying that has held F/OSS solutions back for so long; that, and the "RTFM, n00b!" type folks.
The C=128 could also do this; you could hook up a split composite (now called S-video) and RGBI monitor at the same time and have an app display different outputs on each screen.
. Prototypes like this phone might have thousands of dollars worth of parts
millions of dollars worth of parts - custom chips and all. It's not like the iPhone is a bunch of off-the-shelf parts, and don't forget the software development which all by itself costs Apple millions. The initial production iPhone will likely cost Apple several tens of millions, which will be earned back over the first two weeks it takes them to sell several million subsequent production units.
The case alone for that prototype probably cost Apple several thousand.
Are you telling me that Rockstar is using someone else's code in their product? Unless the work the "pirates"[sic'] produced was licensed under a BSD or similar permissive license, isn't Roskstar committing copyright infringement by redistributing said work (or derivatives) without prior written permission? I've always heard that "two wrongs don't make a right" and I try to live by it. Why is it okay for Rockstar and Steam to do it, when it is not OK for the "pirates?"[sic]
. I thought copy/paste would be a huge hindrance. I've had it for a while now and used it like... twice.
Ah, you must be Steve Jobs, or one of his buddies.
That you don't use something doesn't mean that millions of others don't. I use copy & paste very, very often. I understand the web sites you frequent are all HTML5 based, but the rest of us frequent web sites that utilize established technologies such as Flash and Silverlight, not alpha-test sites that use a standard that hasn't even left the draft stage yet.
Warning: Car analogy! Please get out of the "stop using oil RIGHT NOW" mindset. Right now wind farms, solar farms, nuclear power, Mr. Fusion, and so forth are nonexistent thanks to treehuggers blocking them at every turn with their NIMBY and BANANA mindset. Right now we use OIL and it is the only practical power source until other technologies are developed.
OK now that the obligatory car analogy is out of the way, you need to recognize that your needs are different from mine, and mine are different from John Doe's, whose needs are different from Mary Jane's. We might all use different feature sets very heavily, while not even using the features the others in that little circle might rely on daily.
Common open source argument as an analogy: Take Gimp vs. Photoshop for example: I love Gimp. It's a great app. However, at the office I also have Photoshop. Try as you might like to argue otherwise, Gimp CAN'T do everything Photoshop can - at least not without a LOT of extra work. Neither can Inkscape do everything Illustrator can do - not by a long shot. Where are the layer effects? Droplets? Macros? How can I edit text in place without losing every filter and other transformation I've applied to it? How can I emulate layer effects? Layer effects can be done in 2-3 clicks, whereas you can do as many as 30-60 steps in Gimp to achieve similar-but-not-identical effects, and if you decide to tweak that "effect" you have to go all the way undoing each step, and then re-do each step individually, whereas in the Adobe CS, it's two clicks to disable the effect, or 2-3 to completely change it. Now, you might use Gimp to resize an image and maybe draw a mustache on your ex girlfriend's photo before posting it to fark, but the reality is when you say it is a Photoshop replacement, you are ignoring the millions who rely on droplets, layer effects, nested layers, and the gadzillion features that only Photoshop delivers. Now, the Gimp folks may be promising those features Real Soon Now(tm) in the Next Major Version(tm) but the fact remains that they have been saying that for 5+ years now, so in the meantime, Gimp falls far short for millions of users, so the solution that might work for you 100% of the time works for me and others maybe 90% or 50% or whatever-percentage of the time.
Back to the functionality: that YOU do not use Copy & Paste regularly does not mean that I don't, and that others don't. In fact, I've installed a third-party menu to extend the context menu functionality, In fact, the lack of Copy & Paste is why I didn't buy the original iPhone, nor the 3G. I waited for the 3G S to come out, which is when Apple introduced the "groundbreaking" new Copy & paste feature.
I almost never use the calendar applet; should I say that it is a worthless feature because I don't bother with the calendar app? The problem with Calendar is it does not sync with google calendar, the GUI is dumbed down and limited, and is therefore cumbersome to use. So, because I don't use it, it's worthless for everyone, right? Right?
Flash? I need it and I want it. I've read there are cumbersome hacks to install the desktop plugin on a jailbroken iPhone, but that's a kludge and I really want to see an optimized-for-mobile-use flash plugin. It works WELL on mobile devices - I've seen the beta (or alpha?) of Flash on android devices and tried it, and it works very well. I want it on my iPhone, because HTML5 "just ain't there yet"
- I can tether through ssh tunneling - I can multitask on mine thanks to backgrounder, so I _CAN_ listen to Rhapsody while I read email - with 256MB of RAM*, I have NEVER run out of RAM, even while running TomTom, having Rhapsody or iPod running, AND having a call come in. No problems whatsoever - well, except the task switching is cumbersome compared even to WinCE/Windows Mobile - Battery life sucks on the 3G S, so I have a charger/sleeve plus eleventy-billion sync/charge cables - The AT&T network works fine for me, but then, I live in Boston, so YMMV, batteries not included, etc.
Keep in mind Microsoft achieved preemptive, realtime multitasking, a restriction-free app install feature, ability to mount as a mass storage device, ability to use Microdrive, SD, or compactflash storage in a system that typically shipped with 32MB or 64MB of RAM. Jobs' claim that it (smooth multitasking) can't be done in 256MB of RAM is a lie. Microsoft, the king of bloat, achieved it with much less RAM. On my first PocketPC, I often ran a media player in the background playing MP3s while navigating using teletype. That was Compaq's first-generation iPaq with only 32MB of RAM, and App footprints AND running programs had to share RAM, so realistically only 16MB was available. My second iPaq was an HP iPaq (basically a Journada in design with the iPaq name slapped on it) running Windows Mobile 5.0 with about 300MB of flash ROM, 64MB of RAM dedicated to running programs rather than app storage, and ran very, very well even with third-party desktops and themes (a KDE-style theme) installed.
Kinda small for a nuke? US, Great Britain and Soviet all had tests that fizzled had larger net outputs than this less-than-a-kiloton (one of the superpower "fizzle" tests was over 250 kilotons!) "success" claimed by North Korea. One kiloton is PUNY for a nuke, not "kinda small."
Slashdot Mirror
They should not only not condemn, but wholeheartedly endorse kosher slaughterhouses since their service is to provide a peaceful and painless death to animals - not for liberal "think of the animals" guilt complexes, but because a peaceful, painless death provides better meat for other animals (homo sapiens) to eat - we are omnivorous animals - go look it up, PeTA wackos! The only difference here is that the carcasses of the dead animals are not going to waste, but are providing a critical link in the food chain.
PETA, once you bioengineer humans to live on grass, come talk to us. Otherwise, bug off!
why has no one tagged the article "Beastie?"
Administering IIS has been a pain in the ass since day 1. Unlike NCSA, Netscape, and Apache servers, you had to point-and-click through a zillion tabs and dialog boxes in IIS to configure and tune the server - or for more advanced tuning, do something even worse: hark back to the day of C= BASIC 2.0 and do the equivalen of PEEK and POKE to the IIS Metabase. Microsoft has FINALLY seen the light and now offers the ability to edit configuration files. This makes things MUCH easier since you can see right in front of you which features are enabled or disabled, tweak things like buffers, and so forth, and don't have to click through eleventyteen places to find the bottleneck or what is breaking your server.
For a long time Apache has been kicking Microsoft's butt on the server side, and believe it or not, a large part of it is not just Apache's lesser system requirements, but the ability to easily administer it. If you're a serious sysadmin you'll appreciate the command line and the ease of administration it brings. Sure, you have to learn a little more, and put more up-front effort into the job, but once you have acquired the skills you will find you are repeating tasks only once or twice and then spend some time writing scripts to handle it automatically.
Aside from activation (I've spent thousands on Windows, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) this is one of the big reasons we dumped Windows in favor of Linux. The only Windows server we have left is an MSDN installation, for testing, not production. All the other servers run Linux, and I have a ton of stuff automated.
Windows is really getting there - it really is. It just needs a really good CLI. Powershell is a good step, but I prefer bash. (Cygwin or AndLinux or SFU) + powershell are two ways you can get close to the flexibility of Unix administration, but even that doesn't get you 100% there.
Don't fear the CLI. Even Microsoft has seen the light and is well on its way to reinventing Unix, poorly (remember, "those who do not understand unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly").
. . . which is something AT&T has no right to complain about it because they have all along and continuing today advertising the iPhone for its web surfing, app downloading, and music and streaming capabilities. They wanted to offer the service and shouldn't be complaining about their explosive growth in market share overwhelming the networks; they ought to have planned upgrades accordingly since their whole goal was to expand their market share by leveraging the features of the iPhone being exclusive to AT&T.
I for one hope Android takes off in a big way; it will force AT&T and Apple to both open up their restrictions by a LOT. I think with Android's offering flash, allowing unrestricted tethering, making corporate deployments easier, and not blocking power users' installing what they want to install, Apple has to follow suit on at least some of those aspects. Bringing tethering back is just the first concession; Flash is sure to follow since everybody else is getting it, and Jobs knows HTML5 ain't quite here yet and Apple will have to allow people to use the features they expect now rather than 5-10 years from now.
Apple is currently a follower in the smartphone business. This is the beginning of their awakening. If Apple loses market share to Google's technology, you'll see Apple lighten up quite a bit, because as much as they like to "think different" and be quirky, ultimately their market share drives the bottom line - literally.
A Jailbreak and openssh is all you need to tether to the iPhone. :)
The issue is that people buy the iPhone based on advertised features, and it wasn't until Apple starting moving to disable tethering (quickly bypassed trivially) that they added the * and a footnote stating "in selective markets." The problem is if you pay full price for a fully (officially) unlocked iPhone, Apple still will not give you the ability to enable tethering; they refer you to the carrier. The carrier refers you to Apple. The situation has improved somewhat if you have an "official" Apple reseller as your provider, but if you own an Apple-unlocked phone and don't use their blessed providers, you are still SOL.
This problem began when AT&T and Apple in their joint press conferences announced each iPhone with all of its bells and whistles, and tethering being one of the key advanced features Apple was pushing (advanced? It is something other phone manufacturers have offered dating back to the late '90s by allowing the phones to be used as a modem, and later, many phone manufacturers allowed via a wired, wifi, or bluetooth network connection, passing the full bandwidth of the phone's data connection). Apple's yanking tethering pissed off a lot of customers who bought the iPhone with an advertised set of features, and then reneging after getting our money.
This is NO different than the Sony PS3/Other OS issue. Remember the outrage when Sony yanked the feature, and many had purchased the PS3 to be able to run PS3 games, play blu-ray, AND run a basic Linux box as part of their entertainment center? Sony removed a key feature that sold many units.
The difference here is Apple is FINALLY giving the functionality back after a lot of feedback over the last six months or so since they pulled it.
The iPhone 3G S had it originally, and Apple yanked it. They're just giving the feature back now.
Best "press release" (of sorts) ever!
Classic.
Now, can I haz cheezburger?
I think you fucking mean "I fixed that fucking shit for you, you fucking fuck!" Come on, fucking stick to the fucking topic!
Then she had better get checked out for an infection.
Do you know how long that question has been asked, and how many times "theoretical limits" would be reached within a year at the current rate, and each time, new techniques have been developed which increase density many times more than anyone previously imagined? I think storage density will be increasing for that much longer.
15 years ago when you were paying $500 for a 320MB hard drive, did you ever anticipate your home PC would someday have a capacity of multiple terabytes? Could you imagine that a laptop would ever be able to hold over a terabyte? The capacity we have nowadays is staggering, and when back when you had your 320MB to 512MB hard drive and were thinking "I'll never fill this up" only a few were bothering with MP3s and PVR technologies (I bought my first video capture/TV tuner card around that time) and I'll bet few ever fathomed that a user could fill terabytes' worth of hard drives. Now it's cheap to build home recording studios, or even engage in amateur independent movie production with only a few hundred dollars' worth of equipment, running free software.
It's amazing, and with storage capacity growth increasing (not decreasing) we'll find new ways to fill up the storage media, very likely doing things we haven't anticipated even today.
Bzzzt. Wrong. They are commodity goods, not work for hire under a contract. You do own that copy just as much as you own a book, and you can do whatever the fudge you please with it, except violate the copyright. That's why marketing says "own it today" not "license it today, unless our craptivation servers have been turned off."
At the rate that the Fed is printing more fiat currency (which is backed by debt, not by hard commodities like precious metals) money is already losing its meaning.
That light confirms that it's off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2fsubA2-c&feature=related
Judging from a lot of posts you see on here, I don't think too much mental processing is a problem for a lot of the anonymous cowards and first posters here!
I used to run Reiserfs after having a VERY bad experience with EXT3, but I've since switched back to EXT3 now that it's a lot more mature.
What did I like about Reiser? Exactly as you described; I never saw --rebuilt-tree fail. I've had NTFS and EXT2 and EXT3 partitions go bad but I have never had a ReiserFS partition become unrecoverable; if the drive spun up and could be enumerated by the OS, reiserfsck could retrieve everything even if it appeared lost. I also really liked the zero-slack feature (no wasted disk space!)
Why did I finally abandon ship?
Honestly, it was performance.
Writes are fast under reiser -- VERY fast. It is super reliable - I've never expected any filesystem to be so resilient.
What was wrong with it then?
Deletes. Deletions take for-freaking-ever. Right-click a file on a reiserfs partition in konqueror, and wait and wait and wait (watch the minute hand move on a clock or watch!) for the context menu. Delete a folder containing 70K files? Start the delete, come back an hour later, and see the deletion is still going. It is dreadfully slow deleting files. Do the same to an EXT3 (or now, EXT4) partition, an XFS partition, or even NTFS (via NTFS-3G) partition, and the deletion will take seconds - or maybe a minute for really immense directories. Reiser? s. . . . l. . . . o. . . . .w. . . that was honestly the only thing I could find wrong with Reiser (the FS, obviously, not the mama-killing douche of a meatbag who is hopefully being raped and beat up daily)
Riiight. Even hardcore sysadmins will choose Ubuntu or OpenSUSE to avoid having to spend eleventy-teen days configuring the system to get the REAL work done.
Debian is fine if you run a Pentium III still, Slackware is perfect for a masochist, oh, and Gentoo is good for people who like to LOOK busy but never actually get anything done!
Seriously though; distros like Ubuntu (and variants), OpenSUSE, and even Mandriva and Fedora get the drudgery of setting up a basic system out of the way for you. If you've set up slackware once, you've set it up a hundred times. Ditto for Debian, Gentoo, etc. - they are just too much work that is actually a distraction from real productivity. Need to deploy a desktop or a LAMP server? Just pick $DISTRO_OF_CHOICE and install it, and be getting actual work done within an hour.
Those distros certainly have their place(s) but honestly, those distros don't belong on the desktop and it's the kind of attitude you are displaying that has held F/OSS solutions back for so long; that, and the "RTFM, n00b!" type folks.
How often do you read http response headers though?
That's where the dick and fart jokes come in.
Homer Simpson.
Now, granted, Homer doesn't drive a mighty Dodge Dart, but man is his car old and ratty!
The C=128 could also do this; you could hook up a split composite (now called S-video) and RGBI monitor at the same time and have an app display different outputs on each screen.
millions of dollars worth of parts - custom chips and all. It's not like the iPhone is a bunch of off-the-shelf parts, and don't forget the software development which all by itself costs Apple millions. The initial production iPhone will likely cost Apple several tens of millions, which will be earned back over the first two weeks it takes them to sell several million subsequent production units.
The case alone for that prototype probably cost Apple several thousand.
Wait a second, hold on here!
Are you telling me that Rockstar is using someone else's code in their product? Unless the work the "pirates"[sic'] produced was licensed under a BSD or similar permissive license, isn't Roskstar committing copyright infringement by redistributing said work (or derivatives) without prior written permission? I've always heard that "two wrongs don't make a right" and I try to live by it. Why is it okay for Rockstar and Steam to do it, when it is not OK for the "pirates?"[sic]
All the same, in the game of tit-for-tat North Korea would lose in the nuclear version of knifey-spoony. :D
Ah, you must be Steve Jobs, or one of his buddies.
That you don't use something doesn't mean that millions of others don't. I use copy & paste very, very often. I understand the web sites you frequent are all HTML5 based, but the rest of us frequent web sites that utilize established technologies such as Flash and Silverlight, not alpha-test sites that use a standard that hasn't even left the draft stage yet.
Warning: Car analogy!
Please get out of the "stop using oil RIGHT NOW" mindset. Right now wind farms, solar farms, nuclear power, Mr. Fusion, and so forth are nonexistent thanks to treehuggers blocking them at every turn with their NIMBY and BANANA mindset. Right now we use OIL and it is the only practical power source until other technologies are developed.
OK now that the obligatory car analogy is out of the way, you need to recognize that your needs are different from mine, and mine are different from John Doe's, whose needs are different from Mary Jane's. We might all use different feature sets very heavily, while not even using the features the others in that little circle might rely on daily.
Common open source argument as an analogy:
Take Gimp vs. Photoshop for example: I love Gimp. It's a great app. However, at the office I also have Photoshop. Try as you might like to argue otherwise, Gimp CAN'T do everything Photoshop can - at least not without a LOT of extra work. Neither can Inkscape do everything Illustrator can do - not by a long shot. Where are the layer effects? Droplets? Macros? How can I edit text in place without losing every filter and other transformation I've applied to it? How can I emulate layer effects? Layer effects can be done in 2-3 clicks, whereas you can do as many as 30-60 steps in Gimp to achieve similar-but-not-identical effects, and if you decide to tweak that "effect" you have to go all the way undoing each step, and then re-do each step individually, whereas in the Adobe CS, it's two clicks to disable the effect, or 2-3 to completely change it. Now, you might use Gimp to resize an image and maybe draw a mustache on your ex girlfriend's photo before posting it to fark, but the reality is when you say it is a Photoshop replacement, you are ignoring the millions who rely on droplets, layer effects, nested layers, and the gadzillion features that only Photoshop delivers. Now, the Gimp folks may be promising those features Real Soon Now(tm) in the Next Major Version(tm) but the fact remains that they have been saying that for 5+ years now, so in the meantime, Gimp falls far short for millions of users, so the solution that might work for you 100% of the time works for me and others maybe 90% or 50% or whatever-percentage of the time.
Back to the functionality: that YOU do not use Copy & Paste regularly does not mean that I don't, and that others don't. In fact, I've installed a third-party menu to extend the context menu functionality, In fact, the lack of Copy & Paste is why I didn't buy the original iPhone, nor the 3G. I waited for the 3G S to come out, which is when Apple introduced the "groundbreaking" new Copy & paste feature.
I almost never use the calendar applet; should I say that it is a worthless feature because I don't bother with the calendar app? The problem with Calendar is it does not sync with google calendar, the GUI is dumbed down and limited, and is therefore cumbersome to use. So, because I don't use it, it's worthless for everyone, right? Right?
Flash? I need it and I want it. I've read there are cumbersome hacks to install the desktop plugin on a jailbroken iPhone, but that's a kludge and I really want to see an optimized-for-mobile-use flash plugin. It works WELL on mobile devices - I've seen the beta (or alpha?) of Flash on android devices and tried it, and it works very well. I want it on my iPhone, because HTML5 "just ain't there yet"
I jailbroke mine, so:
- I can tether through ssh tunneling
- I can multitask on mine thanks to backgrounder, so I _CAN_ listen to Rhapsody while I read email
- with 256MB of RAM*, I have NEVER run out of RAM, even while running TomTom, having Rhapsody or iPod running, AND having a call come in. No problems whatsoever - well, except the task switching is cumbersome compared even to WinCE/Windows Mobile
- Battery life sucks on the 3G S, so I have a charger/sleeve plus eleventy-billion sync/charge cables
- The AT&T network works fine for me, but then, I live in Boston, so YMMV, batteries not included, etc.
Keep in mind Microsoft achieved preemptive, realtime multitasking, a restriction-free app install feature, ability to mount as a mass storage device, ability to use Microdrive, SD, or compactflash storage in a system that typically shipped with 32MB or 64MB of RAM. Jobs' claim that it (smooth multitasking) can't be done in 256MB of RAM is a lie. Microsoft, the king of bloat, achieved it with much less RAM. On my first PocketPC, I often ran a media player in the background playing MP3s while navigating using teletype. That was Compaq's first-generation iPaq with only 32MB of RAM, and App footprints AND running programs had to share RAM, so realistically only 16MB was available. My second iPaq was an HP iPaq (basically a Journada in design with the iPaq name slapped on it) running Windows Mobile 5.0 with about 300MB of flash ROM, 64MB of RAM dedicated to running programs rather than app storage, and ran very, very well even with third-party desktops and themes (a KDE-style theme) installed.
Kinda small for a nuke? US, Great Britain and Soviet all had tests that fizzled had larger net outputs than this less-than-a-kiloton (one of the superpower "fizzle" tests was over 250 kilotons!) "success" claimed by North Korea. One kiloton is PUNY for a nuke, not "kinda small."