to be frank I think the iTMS is an abomination and I wish Apple had stood up to the record companies when they were screaming about the iPod and contributory infringement a few years ago, and remained a purely hardware company and stayed out of the music-retail business
You seem to forget that the iTMS + iPod combo has given scores of millions of happy users exactly the kind of music buying/listening experience they want. With an ease of use and range of choice they never had before. Not to mention that iTMS really broke the CD-only lock in, and brought (legal) per-song purchasing to the masses.
Abomination? No chance. Especially not for Apple. Their brand identity and mind share has not been higher in my adult life. Plus they're selling more computers now and their bank balance is healthier than at any time in the past decade. iTMS has been a very important part of achieving that.
Interesting that the health of our world is being decided by politicialns, rather than the scientists that study this kinda stuff
Many thousands of years from now, aliens from other worlds will tell their offspring about a sad little blue planet in a solar system far far away, who's denizens let their world rot underneath them because they elected or followed leaders who were unqualified to manage the health of their planet. And through ego blinkered eyes, refused to listen to the educated and wise who new the truth.
Our poisoned lump of lifeless rock will eventually go down in history as a model, a case study on how not to run a planet.
We will have no one else to blame but ourselves. We elect these people and then allow them to lead us by the nose in whatever direction they choose to take. We complain, but we don't actually do anything to change the system, because we're too addicted to comfort.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. KVM is not going to be championed by the likes of Redhat, SuSE or any other mainstream distro, so you won't really see or hear much about it in the real world. Their VM of choice is Xen and with good reason. Xen Paravirtualization narrows the gap between native and virtualized performance, and Xen's killer feature, Live Migration, turns the world of HA clustering on its head.
The anecdotal evidence that we receive from different groups, companies, and organizations makes it quite clear that group (2) is significantly larger than group (1). As such, we believe that the true numbers in the field are higher than the numbers on this page."
Huh? Anecdotal evidence doesn't make anything "quite clear". Nor does it give you anything to base "true numbers" on. If you want a believable view of how big group 2 is (because you can't count them) then you need to commission a survey that gathers enough statistical evidence to make your case. Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean a thing and doesn't cut it.
None of your objections to PICS are a major problem if you're talking about legislation
Yes they are. As I've already pointed out, PICs needs legislation of the complete internet to be effective or it's a disaster for the end user. But that's a white elephant, because only a portion of countries on the internet would ever go along with it. Plus the overhead and cost of implementing PICS is massive, because every internet content provider has to change the way they do business to accommodate it. Even the non-porn industry.
The real danger of PICS though is this. If the entire internet were fully legislated then PICS would work, but then we end up with an Orwellian Internet, where those who control the rating vocabulary control what we are allowed to see, read and hear. Kiss goodbye to your freedom.
And you apparently didn't read RFC 3675 either, since you have again missed the technical problems with.xxx
Yes I have read the RFC. I dismiss it because its arguments are weak and flawed. Like you, it critiques the use of TLD filtering because it only wants to view it as an absolute "fix everything" solution. TLD filtering will never fix this problem on its own, because no single black or white solution to this problem exists, or will ever exist. It's impossible. Legislated TLD filtering is a shades of grey solution that contributes significantly to aid a significant number of internet users. 10's of millions of them. It doesn't need legislation of the whole internet to add value, and should be applied because of that reason alone.
The PICS proposal first reared its ugly head in 1995. If it were as good as you say, why hasn't it been implemented in the past 12 years? The answer is because it's unworkable at worst, and draconian at best. So no one wants it.
Once Apple dries up the supply of people who will buy anything with an Apple logo, I don't think the iPhone is going to sell very well at all
Well the jury's still out on that one. But really I think it all balances on how well Apple have sized up the combined phone + iPod + internet appliance market.
They could be on to a hiding to nothing if they are relying on phone customers stumping up their cash. The iPhone is a top of the market device, so you'd expect that the top earners and by inference the top mobile phone spenders would be their target. But in reality, those people who spend the most on their mobile phones tend to have the more expensive (per month) contract plans with their providers. And people on those plans can get annual phone upgrades to the latest and greatest phones for FREE, just by signing up for another 12 month contract. Well, in the UK they do anyway. Case in point, my latest phone is an SE K800i which I got just before Christmas. It cost me nothing, and I've not paid for a new mobile for at least 4 years now. Would I pay in the future to upgrade to an iPhone just because it's a phone? Not likely, and I'm on my 3rd Apple laptop now (MBP Core Duo with 2GB RAM, etc) and 3rd (Video) iPod, so I'm definitely Apple's target market.
So would I buy it because it's an iPod? Well they might have me on that one. I've been largely disappointed with the use I've had out of my video iPod for the following reason. In addition to playing music, I wanted to use it to watch videos when I'm traveling by train, or plane, or my girlfriend is driving. There's virtually no content on iTunes in the UK, so I tried ripping DVD's to iPod's display format. But a widescreen film is unwatchable on a screen that small and is so unpleasant that I've just not bothered with it. So the iPhone's wide screen format is very appealing though I reserved judgement until I've seen one for myself.
Lastly it's Internet Appliance functionality. Well, I do actively use the browser on my K800i, especially as it works better in landscape mode than any previous phone I'd had. It's still not very good though as it switches to portrait every time I want to enter some text into a text field (like a URL or google search). So the iPhone's browser and text entry wins big brownie points for me there. I'm also waiting to see how well the iPhone's calendar integrates with iCal on the Mac. If it supports and syncs with the nested calendar groups on OSX, then for me at leas, that's a killer app. I would want it for that feature alone.
So in summary, it's not going to be the phone functionality of the iPhone that will make me put my hand in my pocket. I'm used to getting new phone hardware for free. But the other features could win me over big time. And if I don't have to buy a separate wide screen video iPod as well as update my phone, then I'm quids in. Providing (and this is a BIG one) the $ to £ translation price is not subject to the "Greedy-Corporate-UK-exchange-rate-tax" we always seems to get stung with over here. I'm sick to my back teeth of that. They only do it because historically they've got away with it. So if the UK iPhone ends up costing more than today's top end UK Video iPod then they can stick their shiny iPhone where the sun doesn't shine, and to hell with them.
What about the technical problems with using TLDs for filtering? What do you have against PICS?
The only real drawback of using TLD's for filtering are for those who want fine grained filtering by type. i.e. want to see interracial, but not gay, asian, etc. Not that porn sites will ever allow you to avoid their sites by excercising that kind of choice. They don't today. Even if a site only caters for one flavour of porn, they still litter the internet with as many porn related links to their page using as they can using any porn reference they can think of, related or not.
Where TLD based filtering would be strongest is at blanket filtering all legislated porn from your internet experience. There are more people who want to do this than not, even if only to protect their kids. So that's a big win for the majority of users.
Using PICS on its own is a waste of time. PICS isn't software, it isn't even a porn filtering system. It's a set of technical specs that could lend itself to fine grained, type based porn filtering. But unless the porn industry agreed to standardise on a specific set of labels or rating vocabulary, and evey one of them implemented it and stuck to it, it would be complete chaos. The other alternative is an indpendent rating agency, but do you really think there would be only one? There would be several, because people can never agree on these things. And anyway, PICS would offer no protection at all from sites that wanted to remain outside of PICS and not co-operate.
You could of cause set your browser to only accept any web page that passed your PICS tests, but your daily browsing experience would be severely limited unless the entire internet adopted PICS, which brings us right back to the rating vocabulary problem again.
The best solution really would be to use both at the same time. Use TLD filtering for binary access to porn. But if it's turned on, then use PICS to filter the porn experience you were specifically after, assuming the porn industry could co-operate enough to make it work. But you have to ask the question, why the hell would they? Is it really in their best interests? Would it increase their customer base? Would they make more money from it?
Unless the answer to that last question is yes, they're just going to laugh in your face.
I think you're talking rubbish. I can't find the data right now (signal to noise is too low on google) but I'm very sure that the vast majority of porn.com sites originate from companies operating out of the USA and other western world countries where English is the primary or first choice secondary language. i.e. those countries most likely to buy into mandatory.xxx tld legislation.
Legislate out those porn.com TLDs and you give the porn industry two choices:
Go get a.xxx tld and carry on doing business at home legitimately
Move your datacentre off shore. A huge and expensive undertaking for any serious porn site with significant compute, storage and bandwidth requirements. Plus any prosecutor following the money trail back to (for example) the USA would still be able to prosecute.
This makes.xxx very compelling. It wouldn't get rid of the porn TLDs from say Russia, Italy, Argentina, etc. But as most English speaking people don't speak those languages anyway, a technical tweak in your browser to ignore anything ending with.ru,.it, or.ar would solve that problem.
Bottom line, this could be very effective indeed for the majority of English speaking people. And if it proved to be effective then other countries (e.g. Italy, Germany, France, etc) could follow suit by protecting their own country specific TLDs in the same way.
My real suspicion is that those who strongly oppose this have a financial interest to protect.
So it's not inconceivable that the first traveler to Betelgeuse could arrive 12.2 years later only to find the place already settled and populated by 2nd generation people who discovered how to do interstellar travel by wormhole some 150 years earlier (their time). There has to be an idea for a film in that somewhere.. hehe:)
Ah, yet another stupid black.vs. white argument that claims we should throw out every solution that isn't perfect. How typical. All this rfc really says is that.xxx (or similar) isn't 100% effective, therefore don't bother. Well I've got news for you. There is no silver bullet or cure-all elixir for this problem. You will never ever find a one size fits all solution to controlling the dissemination of porn.
The only way to move forward on this is to hit it from a number of different sides and try combining a number of different approaches. Requiring mandatory.xxx tld's for porn and making it illegal to use anything else adds one useful layer of filtering that some (not all) countries could subscribe to. That's one more barrier the porn peddlers have got to negotiate and reduces the number of countries they can legally operate out of if they don't want to use.xxx. Sure it won't fix the problem completely, but it's a move in the right direction to control this, and control it we have to !!!!
Why? Well, I'm not a Christian, Muslim or anything else. And I don't mind having a bit of porn on tap if the mood should take me. But my parents are Evangelical Christians and should have the right and the protection to be able to travel the internet without the fear of running into Porn when they least expect it.
If it weren't my post you were replying to I'd have mod'd you up for that reply. You've certainly made me think about it some more. I love the way you worded the 2nd paragraph. I'd add to that by saying that the kids of today are born into a world where TV is served with their morning milk, so they don't really learn to how to make their own entertainment. Even worse, they think that's normal.
I thought that the closer you get to the speed of light, that time for the traveler slows down. So would that be 2.25 years experienced by the traveler, or time observed by someone back on earth (assuming some mechanism where by they could observe)?
Oh fuck off ! Until about a week ago that particular look and feel didn't exist anywhere on any smart from in the entire history of smart phones!
Apple come up with something new, of which the look and feel is an essential part, and someone takes less than a week to rip it off and transplant it onto a PocketPC. Apple have every right to be pissed off about this. Hell if you were in their shoes YOU would be pissed off about this.
The only person who's being an ass right now is you.. idiot !
Not that I, or anyone I know likes DRM, but this is a perfect example of what the rabid haters of DRM conveniently choose to ignore. That in many cases, without DRM we would not have access to the content that we do, or have the choices we enjoy today.
I also think that excuse from Channel4 is pathetic. Apple have a vehicle for delivering content is a secure way -- iTunes.
iPhone is not such a novelty to justify very high price. The competition in the cell phone market is very strong, Nokia and Sony will surely respond and they have very big advantage of having lots of experience, big market share (support from 3rd party companies) and wide range of products. You can have a Symbian phone very cheap now, if you want some high-end features, there are phones that have them. Apple has placed itself in a very uncomfortable position.
The price is not so high when you consider that the target customers are only paying for one device instead of two. As SJ said in the keynode, Apple know people are paying for two devices, because they will hit a 100 million iPod customers sales this year who do exactly that. Also as Apple demonstrated in the keynote, the Synbian phones are not competitive with the iPhone as they don't have the same default features, don't have wide screen video, don't have visual voicemail, don't have free "push" email (from Yahoo), etc etc. Apple have placed themselves in a very strong position, partnering so closely with Google, Yahoo and Cingular (the no:1 mobile vendor in the USA with 58 million customers). And as production ramps up and the customer base increases, the price will only come down. Don't forget either that the iPod took about 2 years before it really took off. I don't think the iPhone will take that long as Apple already have very strong brand mind share in the public now for this kind of device. Plus they now have years of experience developing consumer devices in this form factor. And they have previous experience producing the Newton to draw on.
Most of the current phones can run J2ME and Symbian apps, there are tons useful apps out there, like offline maps that don't require accessing Google Maps over EDGE. During the keynote and in the technical specs there is no mention of J2ME and this will be a problem. Apple aims to get 1% market share in 2008, this is way too small for most companies to even acknowledge the existence of iPhone.
So what. J2ME is for mobile devices that don't have an operating system like Mac OS X under the hood. The iPhone doesn't need the kind of OS services and widgets that J2ME provides. It already has it built in. Apple have leap-frogged the competition on this one.
It's called market forces dude. While initial production volumes are low and demand exceeds supply, then the price goes up. That's basic economics and will be driven by early adopters with deep pockets. As production moves into the millions and the competition responds, then prices will come down. In fact we want the competition to respond so that Apple are forced to re-asses their prices at the earliest opportunity. That's good for the consumer.
Apple has also a disadvantage of not using a common smartphone OS
But it's the same OS as their PCs and there are many thousands of developers on that platform already. I bet that when Leopard is released there is also an SDK for the iPhone that's integrated with Xcode (the Mac OS X IDE). Apple would be nuts not to do this and leverage their existing development talent for iPhone apps. One year from now you'll have iPhone apps coming out of your ears.
In all my years I've never seen anyone try to use a mobile phone with gloves on, tactile or no. How often do you even wear gloves -- about a dozen times in the last year for me.
The people on the CInet forms probably don't know about Pages, Keynote and the soon to be release spreadsheet app in iWork07. Pages does a respectable job of rendering MS Word files, Keynote nukes PowerPoint, and the spreadsheet app should be able to read Excel files. PDF's are supported natively in OS X, so are Quicktime mov's, and MS wmv files courtesy of Flip4Mac. Give it a year and any missing file types will quickly appear along with full support for iWork07.
I'm looking forward to the first games that make use of the acceleration and proximity sensors. It could be a mini-Wii in the making:-) And i wonder who'll be the first GPS Navigator vendor to port their mobile version onto it. Hope TomTom come out with a GPS dock and a port of their software. Now that would be sweet.
... but the small amount of music it does hold will only play for half a day
According to Apple's web site an 8GB iPod (and by inference, an iPhone too) will 2,000 four minute 128bit AAC songs. That's 5.5 days of music without repeating yourself once.
Nevertheless, short battery life, minuscule hard drive...
For songs? Again the technical specs say you can expect 16 hours of battery life for audio use which is more hours in a day than you would normally expect to be awake.
Over the next couple of years production and sales will ramp up, prices will drop and its memory capacity will increase. If in that time the iPhone becomes as successful, popular and iconic as the iPod; then Microsoft will be faced with 50+ million people who use a device with a Mac OS X style look and feel.
Making the jump from Vista to Mac OS X will be a lot easier, as the OS X apps will look/feel very similar to their iPhone experience. This could fuel a halo effect to dwarf that of the iPod and push OS X well into a double digit world market share.
At 4 or 8GB of memory it will be using the same memory as the Nano, so no it won't have a hard disk. The tech specs don't mention a hard disk either. I'd be surprised if it didn't have vibrate. It's such a common feature they've probably not bothered to mention it.
Using giga, mega and kilo in decimal makes sense because they are all (decimal) Greek units that existed several hundred years before electronic computers were invented. It's applying these terms to binary that was (is) a stupid idea in the first place. The scientists at the time should have exercised more imagination and created something unique and non contradictory. Thus the creation of Gibibytes (GiB), Mebibytes (MiB) and Kibibytes (KiB). They are the correct terms now and its only laziness that has stopped them from becoming ubiquitous. Schools, Colleges and Universities should make a point to only using the correct terms so that the next generation of scientists/programmers/admins get it right.
Guys... at this stage you've both lost the plot. This thread is no longer about OS X, Linux or Windows security, it's about nailing the other's argument to the floor. Your egos are out of control and are likely costing you both a lot of wasted time and emotional energy. Ask yourself if it's really worth it
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Abomination? No chance. Especially not for Apple. Their brand identity and mind share has not been higher in my adult life. Plus they're selling more computers now and their bank balance is healthier than at any time in the past decade. iTMS has been a very important part of achieving that.
Our poisoned lump of lifeless rock will eventually go down in history as a model, a case study on how not to run a planet.
We will have no one else to blame but ourselves. We elect these people and then allow them to lead us by the nose in whatever direction they choose to take. We complain, but we don't actually do anything to change the system, because we're too addicted to comfort.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. KVM is not going to be championed by the likes of Redhat, SuSE or any other mainstream distro, so you won't really see or hear much about it in the real world. Their VM of choice is Xen and with good reason. Xen Paravirtualization narrows the gap between native and virtualized performance, and Xen's killer feature, Live Migration, turns the world of HA clustering on its head.
The real danger of PICS though is this. If the entire internet were fully legislated then PICS would work, but then we end up with an Orwellian Internet, where those who control the rating vocabulary control what we are allowed to see, read and hear. Kiss goodbye to your freedom. Yes I have read the RFC. I dismiss it because its arguments are weak and flawed. Like you, it critiques the use of TLD filtering because it only wants to view it as an absolute "fix everything" solution. TLD filtering will never fix this problem on its own, because no single black or white solution to this problem exists, or will ever exist. It's impossible. Legislated TLD filtering is a shades of grey solution that contributes significantly to aid a significant number of internet users. 10's of millions of them. It doesn't need legislation of the whole internet to add value, and should be applied because of that reason alone.
The PICS proposal first reared its ugly head in 1995. If it were as good as you say, why hasn't it been implemented in the past 12 years? The answer is because it's unworkable at worst, and draconian at best. So no one wants it.
They could be on to a hiding to nothing if they are relying on phone customers stumping up their cash. The iPhone is a top of the market device, so you'd expect that the top earners and by inference the top mobile phone spenders would be their target. But in reality, those people who spend the most on their mobile phones tend to have the more expensive (per month) contract plans with their providers. And people on those plans can get annual phone upgrades to the latest and greatest phones for FREE, just by signing up for another 12 month contract. Well, in the UK they do anyway. Case in point, my latest phone is an SE K800i which I got just before Christmas. It cost me nothing, and I've not paid for a new mobile for at least 4 years now. Would I pay in the future to upgrade to an iPhone just because it's a phone? Not likely, and I'm on my 3rd Apple laptop now (MBP Core Duo with 2GB RAM, etc) and 3rd (Video) iPod, so I'm definitely Apple's target market.
So would I buy it because it's an iPod? Well they might have me on that one. I've been largely disappointed with the use I've had out of my video iPod for the following reason. In addition to playing music, I wanted to use it to watch videos when I'm traveling by train, or plane, or my girlfriend is driving. There's virtually no content on iTunes in the UK, so I tried ripping DVD's to iPod's display format. But a widescreen film is unwatchable on a screen that small and is so unpleasant that I've just not bothered with it. So the iPhone's wide screen format is very appealing though I reserved judgement until I've seen one for myself.
Lastly it's Internet Appliance functionality. Well, I do actively use the browser on my K800i, especially as it works better in landscape mode than any previous phone I'd had. It's still not very good though as it switches to portrait every time I want to enter some text into a text field (like a URL or google search). So the iPhone's browser and text entry wins big brownie points for me there. I'm also waiting to see how well the iPhone's calendar integrates with iCal on the Mac. If it supports and syncs with the nested calendar groups on OSX, then for me at leas, that's a killer app. I would want it for that feature alone.
So in summary, it's not going to be the phone functionality of the iPhone that will make me put my hand in my pocket. I'm used to getting new phone hardware for free. But the other features could win me over big time. And if I don't have to buy a separate wide screen video iPod as well as update my phone, then I'm quids in. Providing (and this is a BIG one) the $ to £ translation price is not subject to the "Greedy-Corporate-UK-exchange-rate-tax" we always seems to get stung with over here. I'm sick to my back teeth of that. They only do it because historically they've got away with it. So if the UK iPhone ends up costing more than today's top end UK Video iPod then they can stick their shiny iPhone where the sun doesn't shine, and to hell with them.
Where TLD based filtering would be strongest is at blanket filtering all legislated porn from your internet experience. There are more people who want to do this than not, even if only to protect their kids. So that's a big win for the majority of users.
Using PICS on its own is a waste of time. PICS isn't software, it isn't even a porn filtering system. It's a set of technical specs that could lend itself to fine grained, type based porn filtering. But unless the porn industry agreed to standardise on a specific set of labels or rating vocabulary, and evey one of them implemented it and stuck to it, it would be complete chaos. The other alternative is an indpendent rating agency, but do you really think there would be only one? There would be several, because people can never agree on these things. And anyway, PICS would offer no protection at all from sites that wanted to remain outside of PICS and not co-operate.
You could of cause set your browser to only accept any web page that passed your PICS tests, but your daily browsing experience would be severely limited unless the entire internet adopted PICS, which brings us right back to the rating vocabulary problem again.
The best solution really would be to use both at the same time. Use TLD filtering for binary access to porn. But if it's turned on, then use PICS to filter the porn experience you were specifically after, assuming the porn industry could co-operate enough to make it work. But you have to ask the question, why the hell would they? Is it really in their best interests? Would it increase their customer base? Would they make more money from it?
Unless the answer to that last question is yes, they're just going to laugh in your face.
I think you're talking rubbish. I can't find the data right now (signal to noise is too low on google) but I'm very sure that the vast majority of porn
Legislate out those porn
- Go get a
.xxx tld and carry on doing business at home legitimately - Move your datacentre off shore. A huge and expensive undertaking for any serious porn site with significant compute, storage and bandwidth requirements. Plus any prosecutor following the money trail back to (for example) the USA would still be able to prosecute.
This makesBottom line, this could be very effective indeed for the majority of English speaking people. And if it proved to be effective then other countries (e.g. Italy, Germany, France, etc) could follow suit by protecting their own country specific TLDs in the same way.
My real suspicion is that those who strongly oppose this have a financial interest to protect.
Thanks. That's fascinating.
So it's not inconceivable that the first traveler to Betelgeuse could arrive 12.2 years later only to find the place already settled and populated by 2nd generation people who discovered how to do interstellar travel by wormhole some 150 years earlier (their time). There has to be an idea for a film in that somewhere
Ah, yet another stupid black
The only way to move forward on this is to hit it from a number of different sides and try combining a number of different approaches. Requiring mandatory
Why? Well, I'm not a Christian, Muslim or anything else. And I don't mind having a bit of porn on tap if the mood should take me. But my parents are Evangelical Christians and should have the right and the protection to be able to travel the internet without the fear of running into Porn when they least expect it.
If it weren't my post you were replying to I'd have mod'd you up for that reply. You've certainly made me think about it some more. I love the way you worded the 2nd paragraph. I'd add to that by saying that the kids of today are born into a world where TV is served with their morning milk, so they don't really learn to how to make their own entertainment. Even worse, they think that's normal.
I thought that the closer you get to the speed of light, that time for the traveler slows down. So would that be 2.25 years experienced by the traveler, or time observed by someone back on earth (assuming some mechanism where by they could observe)?
Oh fuck off ! Until about a week ago that particular look and feel didn't exist anywhere on any smart from in the entire history of smart phones!
Apple come up with something new, of which the look and feel is an essential part, and someone takes less than a week to rip it off and transplant it onto a PocketPC. Apple have every right to be pissed off about this. Hell if you were in their shoes YOU would be pissed off about this.
The only person who's being an ass right now is you
Not that I, or anyone I know likes DRM, but this is a perfect example of what the rabid haters of DRM conveniently choose to ignore. That in many cases, without DRM we would not have access to the content that we do, or have the choices we enjoy today.
I also think that excuse from Channel4 is pathetic. Apple have a vehicle for delivering content is a secure way -- iTunes.
Actually this insensitive clod is from the UK, and it usually rains more than it sunshines over here
At least it used to when I was a kid
The price is not so high when you consider that the target customers are only paying for one device instead of two. As SJ said in the keynode, Apple know people are paying for two devices, because they will hit a 100 million iPod customers sales this year who do exactly that. Also as Apple demonstrated in the keynote, the Synbian phones are not competitive with the iPhone as they don't have the same default features, don't have wide screen video, don't have visual voicemail, don't have free "push" email (from Yahoo), etc etc. Apple have placed themselves in a very strong position, partnering so closely with Google, Yahoo and Cingular (the no:1 mobile vendor in the USA with 58 million customers). And as production ramps up and the customer base increases, the price will only come down. Don't forget either that the iPod took about 2 years before it really took off. I don't think the iPhone will take that long as Apple already have very strong brand mind share in the public now for this kind of device. Plus they now have years of experience developing consumer devices in this form factor. And they have previous experience producing the Newton to draw on.
So what. J2ME is for mobile devices that don't have an operating system like Mac OS X under the hood. The iPhone doesn't need the kind of OS services and widgets that J2ME provides. It already has it built in. Apple have leap-frogged the competition on this one.
It's called market forces dude. While initial production volumes are low and demand exceeds supply, then the price goes up. That's basic economics and will be driven by early adopters with deep pockets. As production moves into the millions and the competition responds, then prices will come down. In fact we want the competition to respond so that Apple are forced to re-asses their prices at the earliest opportunity. That's good for the consumer.
But it's the same OS as their PCs and there are many thousands of developers on that platform already. I bet that when Leopard is released there is also an SDK for the iPhone that's integrated with Xcode (the Mac OS X IDE). Apple would be nuts not to do this and leverage their existing development talent for iPhone apps. One year from now you'll have iPhone apps coming out of your ears.
Hopefully they've learned from their iPod mistakes and have already addressed the problem of scratches.
In all my years I've never seen anyone try to use a mobile phone with gloves on, tactile or no. How often do you even wear gloves -- about a dozen times in the last year for me.
This is a non-issue.
The people on the CInet forms probably don't know about Pages, Keynote and the soon to be release spreadsheet app in iWork07. Pages does a respectable job of rendering MS Word files, Keynote nukes PowerPoint, and the spreadsheet app should be able to read Excel files. PDF's are supported natively in OS X, so are Quicktime mov's, and MS wmv files courtesy of Flip4Mac. Give it a year and any missing file types will quickly appear along with full support for iWork07.
I'm looking forward to the first games that make use of the acceleration and proximity sensors. It could be a mini-Wii in the making
According to Apple's web site an 8GB iPod (and by inference, an iPhone too) will 2,000 four minute 128bit AAC songs. That's 5.5 days of music without repeating yourself once.
For songs? Again the technical specs say you can expect 16 hours of battery life for audio use which is more hours in a day than you would normally expect to be awake.
I think you're picking nits.
Over the next couple of years production and sales will ramp up, prices will drop and its memory capacity will increase. If in that time the iPhone becomes as successful, popular and iconic as the iPod; then Microsoft will be faced with 50+ million people who use a device with a Mac OS X style look and feel.
Making the jump from Vista to Mac OS X will be a lot easier, as the OS X apps will look/feel very similar to their iPhone experience. This could fuel a halo effect to dwarf that of the iPod and push OS X well into a double digit world market share.
At 4 or 8GB of memory it will be using the same memory as the Nano, so no it won't have a hard disk. The tech specs don't mention a hard disk either. I'd be surprised if it didn't have vibrate. It's such a common feature they've probably not bothered to mention it.
Using giga, mega and kilo in decimal makes sense because they are all (decimal) Greek units that existed several hundred years before electronic computers were invented. It's applying these terms to binary that was (is) a stupid idea in the first place. The scientists at the time should have exercised more imagination and created something unique and non contradictory. Thus the creation of Gibibytes (GiB), Mebibytes (MiB) and Kibibytes (KiB). They are the correct terms now and its only laziness that has stopped them from becoming ubiquitous. Schools, Colleges and Universities should make a point to only using the correct terms so that the next generation of scientists/programmers/admins get it right.
Guys