I thought they were able to examine the drive by court order because they'd already gathered enough evidence of wrongdoing (through the ISP's logs) that she'd committed a crime.
What crime? Copyright infringement isn't a criminal offense. That's why the RIAA is suing her instead of a state prosecutor.
's like saying that the police shouldn't be able to search your house because you're innocent until proven guilty: that's correct, until they've got enough evidence that the judge thinks the search is reasonable.
Its a good analogy, but the police aren't involved. Search warrants and general special evidence gathering powers are not granted to random individuals suing you.
Except that you have good transit systems and are counting around 30M fewer votes.
1) The counting and reporting is done right from the polling stations. Checks and rechecks, and additional audits might benefit from being able to move the ballots around efficiently, but the initial counting and reporting is very efficient.
2) The number of ballots being counted is completely irrelevant, and would make no difference in how long it takes. We allocate polling stations and staff them on a per capita basis. So if our population doubled it wouldn't take twice as long, we'd just have twice as many polling stations and staff.
(And it would cost twice as much, but there would be twice the population paying for it, so it all works out the same whether its 30M or 300M people.)
The only effort that goes up, is summarizing results, but: a) that is largely done using computers b) the amount of effort grows logarithmically so 300M ballots would only require a handful more staff than 30M ballots.
Really, people who think you can't run an efficient paper ballot system with a large population aren't really thinking.
So home owners fight the city when they try to pave their roads.
That's common in lots of areas actually. Paving the road tends to make it a preferred commuter route and therefor increases traffic considerably. Lots of places will fight to keep gravel to prevent that from happening to their street. Nobody wants to be on a 'main street', and being the paved road in an area that's mostly gravel pretty much ensures its going to be a main street unless it doesn't go anywhere. e.g. "not a through road".
And I'm sure we've all seen places where the home owners petitioned to block off one end of their street to turn it into a non-through-road to prevent other people from using it.
I guess maybe you might be worried about false positives (e.g. toy guns or whatever), but false positives tend to be resolved easily.
If by easily you mean they are arrested and searched and spend 3 - 4 months or more fighting with a legal system that doesn't want to let go because that would mean admitting they made a dumb mistake?
Because a lot of customers do some maintenance work like administration of extensions, and for that they need the password.
Which is why you give it to them, and keep a record of it. If they never change it and manage it themselves and then they need it, they can call you for it.
I mean, how are they doing admin work now? The only change I'm proposing is giving them a unique password instead of giving all your customers the same password and/or leaving it as the default. Then if they never change it, at least its not remotely exploitable, and/or compromising it doesn't compromise ALL your customers.
Hell, stick it on a sticker right on the device. Even that will be more secure than leaving it as the default.
You could buy a Motorola V180 or a C139 for example.
no memory card slot no edge (high speed internet) no wifi no bluetooth no camera
Granted both sport a color display, but seriously, who cares? Its not using much juice or adding to the cost. These are both available for under US$50.00 with no contract.
I want something that can take a drop into a puddle with good call quality.
So buy a $20 rubber waterproof case for whatever unit you settle on.
It has nothing to do with the type of PBX, but with the admins using it. And yes, the company I work for mostly keeps the original passwords on the PBX they deploy, because most customers have a lousy policy when it comes to keep passwords.
So why doesn't your company set the password to a random string, *keep a record for yourself in the customer file*, and then tell the customer what it is?
1) If they change it and keep records for themselves properly. GREAT 2) If they don't change it, and leave it the way you set it up... well not great, but still pretty good. Nobody is ever going to get in remotely. And its a vast improvement over leaving it on the default. And if they call you for support 5 years from now, and they never changed it, that's exactly what your records are for. 3) If they change it and forget it, well, there's nothing you can do about those people no matter what you do.
The obvious argument is that we've had phones that do that, they've just gone out of favor as cell phone companies have largely stopped releasing basic phones.
Those aren't affected because they don't violate the patent. The patent covers shutting down extraneous features, not 'not having them to begin with'.
With the added bonus of not having to pay patent ransom or waste battery with bullshit functions you didn't really want in the first place.
So buy one of those phones then, if you want one. They are still out there.
I have heard/read casually that a lot of HTML 5 will do what Flash does. That rather puts Flash and anything Flash-like (including Silverlight) out of business soon doesn't it?
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000/XP is still a significant percentage of the internet browser use. It supports flash.
In fact nothing out there today except beta's and previews really support html5. But nearly all of it supports flash. Its going to be a LONG LONG time before the current crop of browsers have been sufficiently phased out in favor of versions with support for html5 to let html5 come into its own.
Not if phone manufacturers are dissuaded from adding this feature because they would either have to pay Apple royalties or risk being sued by them. In that case the fact that it has been patented may actually cost lives.
The obvious counter argument is that it wouldn't have been worked on in the first place because it would have given them no competitive advantage without the patent, so the 'life saving feature' would never have been developed, and those "lives would not have saved".
Maybe you should have spent more time learning how to do math.
What do you think I was doing with Maple? I was spending more time learning how to do math. Idiot.
Those "silly mistakes" are exactly the kind of thing you're supposed to be able to find on your own.
You learn from your mistakes. But only if you know you made them.
Doing a set of exercises doesn't teach you anything if you made mistakes and don't know about them. Discovering you are making a mistake, and fixing it, and understanding and doing the next problem correctly right while your practicing sure beats doing 20 problems wrong, and finding out a week later from your TA that they were wrong, and then having to schedule a meeting after that to find out why...
IIRC, in regular college level calculus I wasn't allowed to use a graphing calculator. This was at a large public research university. I also don't think it would have helped...
I helped me. It would have caught the silly mistakes I made. Like confirming a function had no zeroes, rather than me wasting time thinking I'd screwed up. or catching that the function was discontinuous in the region I was supposed to take a derivative in, etc.
"Seeing the curve" in general will reveal things about it, like how its roots work, or help you estimate what an integral should work out to, explain why newtons method is flaking out and give you a better starting point, etc.
It makes checking that the limit you worked out is right trivial.
I got hooked on Maple, not for its ability to do my homework, which it could have done, but for its ability to graph and illustrate and help me understand the problems better. Unfortunately, a lot of my classmates used it to just do the homework. Their loss in the long term for the lack of the deeper understanding... but they still got an A in the class. And sadly, that's actually worth more on a cynical level.
Avast! only nagged me once in the last 12 months, when it wanted me to re-register it tried selling me on the pay versions... but other than that, it just quietly works away.
Sorry I meant Avira Antivir, with it's daily nag screen, not Avast.
If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse. Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.
We've already had touchpads for decades. Other than a small following, they haven't caught on as a mouse replacement, except on laptops where a mouse surface isn't reliably available.
Recent touch pads support multi-touch and gestures. And they still haven't upset the mouse.
What does 'natal' bring to the touch pad idea that's new? (Except less precision than the existing touch pads already have.)
Around here Shaw gives all subscribers "Shaw Secure" for free which uses the F-Secure engine. I highly recommend it to people around here on Shaw -- its decent software, with decent support, no ads or nagware component, and its already bundled with your internet service.
Telus also offers an antivirus package with their high speed ADSL. I have less experience with it, and don't know what engine it uses, but you can use it for free with up to 5 PCs, and again tech support is relatively good.
I used to recommend Avast and AVG, but the nagware direction the free versions have taken have put me off.
Roadrunner seems has a deal with Computer Associates for their EZ Armor antivirus stuff, free to all high speed subscribers.
Verizon for example doesn't have anything free... but $61/year will get you a suite from them for 3 PCs, which isn't that bad. ($1.70/month/pc) assuming you have 3.
So even if you/. users out there don't want this stuff yourself, you might want to consider it as an option to recommend to your less technical friends. I'd rather my Uncle run Shaw Secure than AVG Free because its just simpler for both of us. He has a number he can call -other than mine- when he has a question about it.
I certainly am going to buy the PS3 motion controllers, and I think a lot of the other PS3 owners will buy it too.
Uh huh, of course -you- will and a lot of other ps3 owners will too. Probably around 10% of them, like the GP said. Publishers will consider it as an afterthought, few games will REALLY be designed around it.
What made the Wii work is that EVERYONE has motion controls. 100%. Not only that but 100% have the nunchuk too. Publishers don't even have to consider whether the Wii 'motion control peripheral' has sufficient penetration.
but now it seems we can make decent motion control systems that are cheap enough for the average consumer, and the world has clearly fallen in love with it.
Consider how ridiculously well the Wii Fit has sold. 20,000,000 of them so far. But even its at less than 50% Wii market penetration. You REALLY think a PS3 motion capture accessory is going to sell to a significant enough percentage of the market to become something publishers can virtually assume the user will have.
I suspect you are utterly wrong about that. If you're so sure you should short AAPL.
1) I don't think either facebook or iphone apps are going anywhere in the immediate future.
2) I said iphone apps are a passing fad. Not apple.
3) Before iphone apps go they will be superceded with something else. As an example of a closed development platform, consider the NES. When was the last time someone wrote something for the NES? Just because the NES is long dead, and nobody writes nes apps anymore, Nintendo is doing just fine, with its business model of releasing successive closed platforms. But each one dies when they move on.
Contrast that to something like the PPC Macs, which will have a thriving community for years to come, thanks to the fact that anyone can write and release software for it long after apple has moved on.
But I'll frame the underlying question in another way--do these new classes of apps add to the experience of the iPhone, or do they merely tick checkboxes on some geek's wishlist?
Yes. They do.
The part of the reason built in iphone apps are so 'good' is that they are not restricted in terms of multitasking the same way 3rd party apps are.
Its not a 'checkbox on a meaningless feature list'.
Building a device that has multi-tasking and an open development platform doesn't make it 'better' than the iphone, but they ARE features that would genuinely improve on the iphone in a very real way. They aren't abstract BS like, to reuse my previous example - more digital zoom on a camera.
Ask that question from the standpoint of Apple, who needs to sell a lot of iPhones. Here's a hint--my old Palm didn't multi-task either, and it still crashed a lot.
And my first digital camera was crap compared to my second, but that didn't make the second camera the pinnacle of digital cameras. My 3rd digital camera was even nicer. Similiarly, the fact that the iphone is worlds better than the previous devices doesn't make it the pinnacle of technology.
As I pointed out earlier, Linux has an open development model.
And as I pointed out earlier, Windows has an open development model too. Hell, even OSX has an open development model. Its part of why these were as successful. And as for linux, it wouldn't even be a niche market if it was a closed model.
The iphone is like facebook apps... wildly popular now, but they'll be a forgotten memory sooner than later.
That explains why there's nobody developing for the iPhone, I guess. Oh, wait.
"Oh wait" for what? The iphone is the best device of its kind on the market right now, so its doing well. Nobody denies that. The closed devlopment model still sucks.
What you're describing isn't multi-tasking.
Uh. I didn't describe anything. If you want an example of app that doesn't work on the iphone... how about oh something really complex... like an alarm clock. Sure I can use the alarm clock app that the iphone comes with. But if I were to obtain a 3rd party alarm clock app, unless it was the current app, its not running, and the alarm doesn't go off.
Or maybe I don't like waiting seconds for my stock tracking app to update AFTER I launch it. Maybe I want it running in the background keeping itself up to date so when I flip to it, I don't have to wait for it to startup and connect to the server to download the current data. To me, that few seconds of pointless wait time is a few seconds too many.
I NEVER EVER used the media player in my previous cell phone because it took 5 seconds to start.
The reason I like the iphone is that i push itunes and its there, ready to go. Apple =gets= the importance of multitasking and responsiveness; it just hasn't figured out how to preserve a level of responsiveness while letting 3rd parties do what they want -- why can't it run 3rd party apps with a cpu quota at a lower priority level to ensure the core platform is "always on top and responsive"? for example?
"Open development" and "multi-tasking" will not solely serve as silver bullets to compete with the iPhone.
For sure. I never said they were. I merely said they were more than 'brochure bullet points'. Like 16 scene modes and 14x digital zoom on a camera... features that fillout the spec sheet but add zero real capability.
Open development appeals directly to me as a programmer. That's a real feature.
Multitasking is a real feature too that enables an entire class of apps that 3rd parties simply can't do on the iphone.
Open development model? Linux has that, but it didn't help it take the world by storm.
Microsoft Windows has an open development model too (open in the sense that anyone can develop and deliver apps for it without having to obtain microsoft's permission first.
Further, the LACK of an open development model on the iphone is one of the developer communities BIGGEST gripes with it. Apps that people WANT to own, want to write, and in some cases even have already written, are not readily available because apple said "No".
Multi-tasking? Sure, I suppose it would be better in some theoretical sense, but you're making a judgement based on brochure bullet-points.
Uh no. Its better in the sense that when I'm using the iphone and switch from one app to another, and back again, the original app has to to start from scratch. Multitasking is not a theoretical benefit.
The lack of multitasking has constrained iphone applications in very real ways.
So once a decade someone passes an omnibus bill containing all the existing legislation. They'll justify it based on just one out the 50,000 laws set to expire, and say "This one is important, we can't let this go... and there are many more like it. Lets renew all of them just to be safe... thinkofthechildren! terrorists. 9-11. 9-11.
It was designed to try and help immerse people in games better but within the limitation that you still had to use a controller.
Ditto for 3D graphics. Help immerse people in games better within the limitation that you still have to look at a screen.
Similiar force feedback is trying to compensate for the fact that that you can't feel anything from the game world... when a rocket explodes, when your car crashes, when your jet is starting to stall, when you take a punch, when you foul a ball... force feedback can't (and in some cases [car crash] shouldn't be entirely realistic, but it helps. I like the way Need For Speed gives you different feedback for different driving surfaces... and how you can actually feel your tires start to skip as you make a tight turn. This is genuinely useful feedback on top of the audio and visual feedback.
The whole idea of Natal is moving beyond the controller, immersing people in the game by allowing them to interact directly.
You can't really interact directly without a sense of touch.
Its too bad the article doesn't talk about things like Execute Disable, Virtualization support, etc. For a power user audience like/. these are important considerations.
For me not being able to install Xen, or Windows 7 XP mode, etc are complete deal killers. I want CPUs with those features, especially when shopping "value CPUs".
Getting something like an E8190 is a mistake that will bite a/. power user in the ass eventually even if it is a few bucks cheaper than an E8200 and delivers the same performance, at the same wattage, etc...
Printouts are good for worksheets (which you throw away anyway), and books that you won't actually use, [... ] but not Math and Science
1) Does anyone refer to their 8th grade math textbook all that often?
2) Did anyone ever read their entire 8th grade math book even in the 8th grade? I recall consistently covering less than half the material in any given text book, when I went to school.
And unlike the US, there aren't any other GSM carriers that Apple could threaten to switch to.
Yet.
Bell and Telus are building a GSM network. They rightly think the writing's on the wall for CDMA; so they are ramping up GSM. They are planning to have GSM coverage in time for the 2010 winter olympics. How much coverage they'll have exactly is anyone's guess; but if Bell and Telus are serious they could probably pretty well have urban Canada well covered by then.
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I thought they were able to examine the drive by court order because they'd already gathered enough evidence of wrongdoing (through the ISP's logs) that she'd committed a crime.
What crime? Copyright infringement isn't a criminal offense. That's why the RIAA is suing her instead of a state prosecutor.
's like saying that the police shouldn't be able to search your house because you're innocent until proven guilty: that's correct, until they've got enough evidence that the judge thinks the search is reasonable.
Its a good analogy, but the police aren't involved. Search warrants and general special evidence gathering powers are not granted to random individuals suing you.
Except that you have good transit systems and are counting around 30M fewer votes.
1) The counting and reporting is done right from the polling stations. Checks and rechecks, and additional audits might benefit from being able to move the ballots around efficiently, but the initial counting and reporting is very efficient.
2) The number of ballots being counted is completely irrelevant, and would make no difference in how long it takes. We allocate polling stations and staff them on a per capita basis. So if our population doubled it wouldn't take twice as long, we'd just have twice as many polling stations and staff.
(And it would cost twice as much, but there would be twice the population paying for it, so it all works out the same whether its 30M or 300M people.)
The only effort that goes up, is summarizing results, but:
a) that is largely done using computers
b) the amount of effort grows logarithmically so 300M ballots would only require a handful more staff than 30M ballots.
Really, people who think you can't run an efficient paper ballot system with a large population aren't really thinking.
So home owners fight the city when they try to pave their roads.
That's common in lots of areas actually. Paving the road tends to make it a preferred commuter route and therefor increases traffic considerably. Lots of places will fight to keep gravel to prevent that from happening to their street. Nobody wants to be on a 'main street', and being the paved road in an area that's mostly gravel pretty much ensures its going to be a main street unless it doesn't go anywhere. e.g. "not a through road".
And I'm sure we've all seen places where the home owners petitioned to block off one end of their street to turn it into a non-through-road to prevent other people from using it.
I guess maybe you might be worried about false positives (e.g. toy guns or whatever), but false positives tend to be resolved easily.
If by easily you mean they are arrested and searched and spend 3 - 4 months or more fighting with a legal system that doesn't want to let go because that would mean admitting they made a dumb mistake?
Because a lot of customers do some maintenance work like administration of extensions, and for that they need the password.
Which is why you give it to them, and keep a record of it. If they never change it and manage it themselves and then they need it, they can call you for it.
I mean, how are they doing admin work now? The only change I'm proposing is giving them a unique password instead of giving all your customers the same password and/or leaving it as the default. Then if they never change it, at least its not remotely exploitable, and/or compromising it doesn't compromise ALL your customers.
Hell, stick it on a sticker right on the device. Even that will be more secure than leaving it as the default.
Can I get one?
Of course you can. Try shopping for one.
You could buy a Motorola V180 or a C139 for example.
no memory card slot
no edge (high speed internet)
no wifi
no bluetooth
no camera
Granted both sport a color display, but seriously, who cares? Its not using much juice or adding to the cost. These are both available for under US$50.00 with no contract.
I want something that can take a drop into a puddle with good call quality.
So buy a $20 rubber waterproof case for whatever unit you settle on.
It has nothing to do with the type of PBX, but with the admins using it. And yes, the company I work for mostly keeps the original passwords on the PBX they deploy, because most customers have a lousy policy when it comes to keep passwords.
So why doesn't your company set the password to a random string, *keep a record for yourself in the customer file*, and then tell the customer what it is?
1) If they change it and keep records for themselves properly. GREAT
2) If they don't change it, and leave it the way you set it up... well not great, but still pretty good. Nobody is ever going to get in remotely. And its a vast improvement over leaving it on the default. And if they call you for support 5 years from now, and they never changed it, that's exactly what your records are for.
3) If they change it and forget it, well, there's nothing you can do about those people no matter what you do.
The obvious argument is that we've had phones that do that, they've just gone out of favor as cell phone companies have largely stopped releasing basic phones.
Those aren't affected because they don't violate the patent. The patent covers shutting down extraneous features, not 'not having them to begin with'.
With the added bonus of not having to pay patent ransom or waste battery with bullshit functions you didn't really want in the first place.
So buy one of those phones then, if you want one. They are still out there.
I have heard/read casually that a lot of HTML 5 will do what Flash does. That rather puts Flash and anything Flash-like (including Silverlight) out of business soon doesn't it?
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000/XP is still a significant percentage of the internet browser use. It supports flash.
In fact nothing out there today except beta's and previews really support html5. But nearly all of it supports flash. Its going to be a LONG LONG time before the current crop of browsers have been sufficiently phased out in favor of versions with support for html5 to let html5 come into its own.
Not if phone manufacturers are dissuaded from adding this feature because they would either have to pay Apple royalties or risk being sued by them. In that case the fact that it has been patented may actually cost lives.
The obvious counter argument is that it wouldn't have been worked on in the first place because it would have given them no competitive advantage without the patent, so the 'life saving feature' would never have been developed, and those "lives would not have saved".
Maybe you should have spent more time learning how to do math.
What do you think I was doing with Maple? I was spending more time learning how to do math. Idiot.
Those "silly mistakes" are exactly the kind of thing you're supposed to be able to find on your own.
You learn from your mistakes. But only if you know you made them.
Doing a set of exercises doesn't teach you anything if you made mistakes and don't know about them. Discovering you are making a mistake, and fixing it, and understanding and doing the next problem correctly right while your practicing sure beats doing 20 problems wrong, and finding out a week later from your TA that they were wrong, and then having to schedule a meeting after that to find out why...
IIRC, in regular college level calculus I wasn't allowed to use a graphing calculator. This was at a large public research university. I also don't think it would have helped...
I helped me. It would have caught the silly mistakes I made. Like confirming a function had no zeroes, rather than me wasting time thinking I'd screwed up. or catching that the function was discontinuous in the region I was supposed to take a derivative in, etc.
"Seeing the curve" in general will reveal things about it, like how its roots work, or help you estimate what an integral should work out to, explain why newtons method is flaking out and give you a better starting point, etc.
It makes checking that the limit you worked out is right trivial.
I got hooked on Maple, not for its ability to do my homework, which it could have done, but for its ability to graph and illustrate and help me understand the problems better. Unfortunately, a lot of my classmates used it to just do the homework. Their loss in the long term for the lack of the deeper understanding ... but they still got an A in the class. And sadly, that's actually worth more on a cynical level.
Avast! only nagged me once in the last 12 months, when it wanted me to re-register it tried selling me on the pay versions... but other than that, it just quietly works away.
Sorry I meant Avira Antivir, with it's daily nag screen, not Avast.
If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse.
Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.
We've already had touchpads for decades. Other than a small following, they haven't caught on as a mouse replacement, except on laptops where a mouse surface isn't reliably available.
Recent touch pads support multi-touch and gestures. And they still haven't upset the mouse.
What does 'natal' bring to the touch pad idea that's new? (Except less precision than the existing touch pads already have.)
Have you looked into what your ISP might offer?
Around here Shaw gives all subscribers "Shaw Secure" for free which uses the F-Secure engine. I highly recommend it to people around here on Shaw -- its decent software, with decent support, no ads or nagware component, and its already bundled with your internet service.
Telus also offers an antivirus package with their high speed ADSL. I have less experience with it, and don't know what engine it uses, but you can use it for free with up to 5 PCs, and again tech support is relatively good.
I used to recommend Avast and AVG, but the nagware direction the free versions have taken have put me off.
Roadrunner seems has a deal with Computer Associates for their EZ Armor antivirus stuff, free to all high speed subscribers.
Verizon for example doesn't have anything free... but $61/year will get you a suite from them for 3 PCs, which isn't that bad. ($1.70/month/pc) assuming you have 3.
So even if you /. users out there don't want this stuff yourself, you might want to consider it as an option to recommend to your less technical friends. I'd rather my Uncle run Shaw Secure than AVG Free because its just simpler for both of us. He has a number he can call -other than mine- when he has a question about it.
I certainly am going to buy the PS3 motion controllers, and I think a lot of the other PS3 owners will buy it too.
Uh huh, of course -you- will and a lot of other ps3 owners will too. Probably around 10% of them, like the GP said. Publishers will consider it as an afterthought, few games will REALLY be designed around it.
What made the Wii work is that EVERYONE has motion controls. 100%. Not only that but 100% have the nunchuk too. Publishers don't even have to consider whether the Wii 'motion control peripheral' has sufficient penetration.
but now it seems we can make decent motion control systems that are cheap enough for the average consumer, and the world has clearly fallen in love with it.
Consider how ridiculously well the Wii Fit has sold. 20,000,000 of them so far. But even its at less than 50% Wii market penetration. You REALLY think a PS3 motion capture accessory is going to sell to a significant enough percentage of the market to become something publishers can virtually assume the user will have.
I suspect you are utterly wrong about that. If you're so sure you should short AAPL.
1) I don't think either facebook or iphone apps are going anywhere in the immediate future.
2) I said iphone apps are a passing fad. Not apple.
3) Before iphone apps go they will be superceded with something else. As an example of a closed development platform, consider the NES. When was the last time someone wrote something for the NES? Just because the NES is long dead, and nobody writes nes apps anymore, Nintendo is doing just fine, with its business model of releasing successive closed platforms. But each one dies when they move on.
Contrast that to something like the PPC Macs, which will have a thriving community for years to come, thanks to the fact that anyone can write and release software for it long after apple has moved on.
But I'll frame the underlying question in another way--do these new classes of apps add to the experience of the iPhone, or do they merely tick checkboxes on some geek's wishlist?
Yes. They do.
The part of the reason built in iphone apps are so 'good' is that they are not restricted in terms of multitasking the same way 3rd party apps are.
Its not a 'checkbox on a meaningless feature list'.
Building a device that has multi-tasking and an open development platform doesn't make it 'better' than the iphone, but they ARE features that would genuinely improve on the iphone in a very real way. They aren't abstract BS like, to reuse my previous example - more digital zoom on a camera.
Ask that question from the standpoint of Apple, who needs to sell a lot of iPhones. Here's a hint--my old Palm didn't multi-task either, and it still crashed a lot.
And my first digital camera was crap compared to my second, but that didn't make the second camera the pinnacle of digital cameras. My 3rd digital camera was even nicer. Similiarly, the fact that the iphone is worlds better than the previous devices doesn't make it the pinnacle of technology.
As I pointed out earlier, Linux has an open development model.
And as I pointed out earlier, Windows has an open development model too. Hell, even OSX has an open development model. Its part of why these were as successful. And as for linux, it wouldn't even be a niche market if it was a closed model.
The iphone is like facebook apps... wildly popular now, but they'll be a forgotten memory sooner than later.
That explains why there's nobody developing for the iPhone, I guess. Oh, wait.
"Oh wait" for what? The iphone is the best device of its kind on the market right now, so its doing well. Nobody denies that. The closed devlopment model still sucks.
What you're describing isn't multi-tasking.
Uh. I didn't describe anything. If you want an example of app that doesn't work on the iphone... how about oh something really complex... like an alarm clock. Sure I can use the alarm clock app that the iphone comes with. But if I were to obtain a 3rd party alarm clock app, unless it was the current app, its not running, and the alarm doesn't go off.
Or maybe I don't like waiting seconds for my stock tracking app to update AFTER I launch it. Maybe I want it running in the background keeping itself up to date so when I flip to it, I don't have to wait for it to startup and connect to the server to download the current data. To me, that few seconds of pointless wait time is a few seconds too many.
I NEVER EVER used the media player in my previous cell phone because it took 5 seconds to start.
The reason I like the iphone is that i push itunes and its there, ready to go. Apple =gets= the importance of multitasking and responsiveness; it just hasn't figured out how to preserve a level of responsiveness while letting 3rd parties do what they want -- why can't it run 3rd party apps with a cpu quota at a lower priority level to ensure the core platform is "always on top and responsive"? for example?
"Open development" and "multi-tasking" will not solely serve as silver bullets to compete with the iPhone.
For sure. I never said they were. I merely said they were more than 'brochure bullet points'. Like 16 scene modes and 14x digital zoom on a camera... features that fillout the spec sheet but add zero real capability.
Open development appeals directly to me as a programmer. That's a real feature.
Multitasking is a real feature too that enables an entire class of apps that 3rd parties simply can't do on the iphone.
As for the others, they're potential benefits.
No they are real benefits.
Open development model? Linux has that, but it didn't help it take the world by storm.
Microsoft Windows has an open development model too (open in the sense that anyone can develop and deliver apps for it without having to obtain microsoft's permission first.
Further, the LACK of an open development model on the iphone is one of the developer communities BIGGEST gripes with it. Apps that people WANT to own, want to write, and in some cases even have already written, are not readily available because apple said "No".
Multi-tasking? Sure, I suppose it would be better in some theoretical sense, but you're making a judgement based on brochure bullet-points.
Uh no. Its better in the sense that when I'm using the iphone and switch from one app to another, and back again, the original app has to to start from scratch. Multitasking is not a theoretical benefit.
The lack of multitasking has constrained iphone applications in very real ways.
unless specifically re-approved
So once a decade someone passes an omnibus bill containing all the existing legislation. They'll justify it based on just one out the 50,000 laws set to expire, and say "This one is important, we can't let this go... and there are many more like it. Lets renew all of them just to be safe... thinkofthechildren! terrorists. 9-11. 9-11.
Force feedback is a hack.
Not really more than 3D graphics are a hack.
It was designed to try and help immerse people in games better but within the limitation that you still had to use a controller.
Ditto for 3D graphics. Help immerse people in games better within the limitation that you still have to look at a screen.
Similiar force feedback is trying to compensate for the fact that that you can't feel anything from the game world... when a rocket explodes, when your car crashes, when your jet is starting to stall, when you take a punch, when you foul a ball... force feedback can't (and in some cases [car crash] shouldn't be entirely realistic, but it helps. I like the way Need For Speed gives you different feedback for different driving surfaces... and how you can actually feel your tires start to skip as you make a tight turn. This is genuinely useful feedback on top of the audio and visual feedback.
The whole idea of Natal is moving beyond the controller, immersing people in the game by allowing them to interact directly.
You can't really interact directly without a sense of touch.
Its too bad the article doesn't talk about things like Execute Disable, Virtualization support, etc. For a power user audience like /. these are important considerations.
For me not being able to install Xen, or Windows 7 XP mode, etc are complete deal killers. I want CPUs with those features, especially when shopping "value CPUs".
Getting something like an E8190 is a mistake that will bite a /. power user in the ass eventually even if it is a few bucks cheaper than an E8200 and delivers the same performance, at the same wattage, etc...
Printouts are good for worksheets (which you throw away anyway), and books that you won't actually use, [ ... ] but not Math and Science
1) Does anyone refer to their 8th grade math textbook all that often?
2) Did anyone ever read their entire 8th grade math book even in the 8th grade? I recall consistently covering less than half the material in any given text book, when I went to school.
And unlike the US, there aren't any other GSM carriers that Apple could threaten to switch to.
Yet.
Bell and Telus are building a GSM network. They rightly think the writing's on the wall for CDMA; so they are ramping up GSM. They are planning to have GSM coverage in time for the 2010 winter olympics. How much coverage they'll have exactly is anyone's guess; but if Bell and Telus are serious they could probably pretty well have urban Canada well covered by then.