This makes no sense to me. Lets run with your thought experiment for a moment. Google release a blinding implementation of VP8 support in Chrome next week, then FF and Opera pick it up and release browser updates the week after. Somehow, content providers decide this is a great idea and they all jump on the VP8 band wagon. How does this hurt Apple? What's to stop Apple from adding it to OS X and the iPhone OS along side H.264 and supporting both. How does this give google some kind of competitive edge over Apple that would make Apple "terrified"? They both have full access to H.264 and related tools today, so nothing would change with adoption of VP8: the status quo is maintained. You're just trying to blind people with FUD.
There's no way YouTube would drop H.264 and shock the majority of their users with "sorry but your browser doesn't support this format" type messages. There would be an outcry.
There will be a clear winner, and that will be driven by the content providers. It simply doesn't make good business sense to continue encoding many terabytes of content multiple times (chewing cpu cycles and disk space) when a single format can be viewed on all platforms by 100% of the users. Well, those that make the right browser choice.
YouTube are a business like any other with profit and losses to report. In the end pragmatism (and the demands of the shareholders) will force their hand.
They can if they buy a license. They earn tens of millions of dollars a year so they can afford it. If they don't give users the browsing experience they expect then their users will switch. IE9 will provide hardware accelerated H.264 on the desktop so they will be setting the user experience bar high.
The vast majority of users are non technical and Closed.vs. Open source means nothing to them. They value two things: functionality and cost. The cost of an H.264 license is absorbed by the browser maker so to the user the codec (cost) is free. That leaves functionality. What do you think these users are going to do when they get a substandard browsing experience on FF and Microsoft peppers them with Ads about how much better their browser gives the users what they want? After years of taking a browser beating Microsoft will go for the jugular. You can put money on it.
My point is that although we've achieved a lot, the nature of the questions we're able to ask today demonstrate that we still don't really understand huge areas of how our universe is constructed and the physics that support it.
If we try to see a way today to make interstellar space travel cheap and affordable in the context of the limitations we know of (as you are doing) then we can only assume that it's impossible. But the whole of history has demonstrated that as advanced as technology and knowledge is at any fixed point in time, hundreds and thousands of years later what is known and achievable is vastly different. Off the scale even. And so it will be for our successors, many generations from now.
The only scale this might tip is the Theora vs h.264 thing
Well not quite just yet, at least not in terms of browser support. It will be 50-50 when IE9 ships. Focusing on the major browsers (they're the only ones that really count) in the Ogg Theora camp we have: Firefox, Chrome and Opera. And in the H.264 camp we (will) have: IE9, Safari and Chrome.
I suspect though that in reality, 1-2 years from now, when you factor in all the mobile devices that will only do hardware accelerated H.264 and the combined market share that IE9 + Safari + Chrome have, it will be a landslide victory for H.264. Mozilla and Opera will be faced with a very tough choice to either support H.264 in some fashion or slide into obscurity.
My personal opinion is that they should adopt it now, continue to build on their market share and work behind the scenes to establish a viable alternative to H.264 that matches or exceeds its performance at a much lower price point (free - or as near as dam it). It's the old chicken and egg thing - content publishers will only push content in Theora (or perhaps VP8) format if there is an established user base out there who they can target. If Firefox and Opera whither on the vine before an alternative codec is ready then you've already lost the battle. You won't get people to switch from IE9 and Safari to a browser to that doesn't play existing content because users don't see the value of free codecs. It's hidden from them.
I read a very well researched shoot out several weeks back between H.264, Theora and Dirac, and Dirac came a distant 3rd place well behind Theora, which in turn was well behind H.264.
Besides, you lot are focusing on the wrong thing. Apple are trying to land as many punches as they can on flash but the real reason they don't want it on the iPhone OS is this (direct quote from the original letter):
Sixth, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.
Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
So it's really got nothing to do with whether something is open or not. It's all about having a 1-2-1 relationship with developers; being able to get future enhancements out into the hands of users as fast as possible (competitive edge) and finally, maintaining control.
Yep that's my suspicion too. Maybe at the quantum level objects can interact in more dimensions than we are currently able to understand. And maybe in one of those dimensions they can form relationships that are independent of the 3-dimensional space we're used to.
In 1829 George Stephenson build a steam engine called the Rocket. It had a top speed of 29mph: so fast that some people thought they would suffocate. I wonder if people in 2191 will laugh at us in the same way.
We indeed understand a lot today about physics and cosmology
Not really. Probably not anywhere near as much as you might think. If anything we probably have more questions now than answers.
We don't know what Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Dark Flow are: they are just place names for something we have no real clue about. We speculate they are there because we can observe their effects but they are a mystery.
We don't know what gives matter mass. We think it might be something we call a Higgs Boson but that's just a theory. It's one that fits, but why haven't we seen one yet when they are supposed to be "massive"?
Why are there 4 fundamental interactions in physics, and not (for example) 2, 10, 20 or 100?
How can two or more objects become linked to form a quantum entangled state and then retain that link over an infinite distance? There are some theories but we don't actually know why or how.
What is energy? We can see it manifest in different forms, we can measure how much of it is present and even transfer it from one place to another. But what is _it_ really?
Only a few hundred years ago we didn't even know enough about physics to be able to ask these questions never mind try to answer them. What do you think it will be like in a few hundred more? Physics 1000 years from now will probably look like black magic to us today as scientists manipulate matter and energy in ways we can barely dream about now.
There's a really interesting blog post I read recently that give more detail on the history of the relationship between Adobe and Apple. It walks the timeline from a decision Adobe made in 1996 (the birth of Mac OS X) to drop Apple as their primary development platform and move to Windows. Subsequently, every new application or major revision of an Adobe product was introduced for Windows first and followed months later, sometimes never at all, by a Mac version (I pinched some of that from the article).
Personally I have no sympathy for Adobe. As someone who now browses using Chrome with the FlashBlock extension installed, and having witnessed first hand the wonderful effect that has had on my laptop battery life, plus the reduced heat under my palms I sincerely hope I never cross paths with them again.
This is obviously a new meaning of 'simple' I was not previously aware of
There, fixed it for you.
No... Google Docs is "simple". MediaWiki is "simple". Plone (and Zope) is a forklift swinging a sledgehammer
From the point of view of an admin or a user? As a user, using Plone is no more difficult than using Google Docs, and it has the extra features on his tick list. You create folders and pages; edit the page content in a WYSIWYG editor; upload files for common use and (if required) embed links to them in pages for easy reference. It's a CMS so you can control who gets to see what content and when: plus pages can be published externally to be viewed without requiring a login, and it also includes version control (both are items on his tick list). It even has some really nice features like automatic link management, so if I create a link in one page to another page (or uploaded attachment) and then move the target to somewhere else, all linked references elsewhere move with it. Can you do that in MediaWiki?
In the past I've used Plone to do what you're asking. There are kits for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and *BSD and its open source.
Like anything there's a small learning curve but once you're past that creating new content is easy. Any uploaded files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, etc) are fully indexed for searching. It can integrate with Active Directory, LDAP, etc. It's extensible, skin-able and if the online documentation isn't enough there have been several books written about it (user guides and professional development).
Not to mention a VTOL car would be very noisy and incredibly messy, what with its air displacement chucking dirt, stones, grit and leaves all over the place. Maybe in a couple of thousand years technology will have solutions to these problems, but right now every day family flying cars are pure science fiction: and actually, that's kind of nice.
Mozilla and wider Open Source world has three options: (not mutually exclusive)
You missed a 4th option:
Drop Firefox and switch to Chrome
With support for H.264, Theora, (and hopefully soon VP8) all the bases are covered. This is the option that gets my vote, and now I can relax and enjoy the web as it's meant to be enjoyed, without having to worry or whinge about anything.
Oh, and one other thing I forgot to mention re: multitasking. Apple's iPhone philosophy here seems to be completely different to Android. In the Q&A wash-up at the end of the iPhone 4 launch SJ voiced his feelings about the competition and said:
"In multitasking, if you see a task manager... they blew it. Users shouldn't ever have to think about it."
That's probably the real driver behind their more controlled implementation of multitasking.
It lets me do something useful that I couldn't do with iPhone
Well, it's early days yet for us to be saying for certain exactly what the restrictions will/won't allow developers to get away with. They listed one multitasking API/feature as "task completion", what ever that actually means. An example they gave was an app that starts a download, continuing with that download while the user switches away to use another app. Maybe that can be used to continue receiving IRC updates. I'm not an iPhone developer so I can't tell just yet.
Which really sucks, to be honest. Back in the day, PC won over Mac because it was more open, and that, in turn, gave rise to a lot of advancements in desktop computing that we enjoy today. But now Apple tries to reverse that trend to the original lock-in model, and, what's worse, they are succeeding
Yeah I know. Several months back I decided to copy my iTunes library onto one of my desktop Linux PCs. I reluctantly took the cost option of upgrading the Library first to the higher bit rate but DRM free format, only to discover afterwards that there were still about 500 songs that had no DRM free equivalent. I was quite pissed off. The result: I sometimes use iTunes online store to help me find music I'm interested in, but I always buy from Amazon now. Apple have lost me as an iTunes customer (and my wife too).
So I'm fully aware that the iPhone ecosystem has 'lock-in' designed into the very heart of it, but I also want the best user experience I can get from a mobile platform, and right now the competition just doesn't exite me enough to switch. I try and mitigate the lock-in effect by using platform agnostic services as much as possible, e.g. Google for mail, calendar, etc. And by avoiding the use of apps like iWork (on the desktop) that while containing very nice tools use a proprietary file format I can't read elsewhere. Maybe I will switch one day, but not yet.
Oracle hasn't really truly found a way to live with Open Source yet
Umm.. Oracle Enterprise Linux, BerkeleyDB, OCFS2, BtrFS and now MySQL. There are a lot of good people doing important Open Source work at Oracle. And while they're not the top performers WRT additions to the Linux kernel, they still make a significant contribution (according to a graph I recently saw at a Red Hat presentation).
According to the video they're running Linux on this thing with a custom kernel. No specific details on the changes they had to make to get it running yet.
Well, not very eloquently put, but it's obviously not just me who can't get to his own Slashdot page. I first noticed it about 11 hours ago, so it's been broken for some time.
Now why did that post as AC? I did have a Chrome crash half way through typing it, and it did restore the session including what I'd typed. Will watch for that in future.
I'll stick to my Nexus One, which handles this scenario just fine and - surprise! - doesn't kill battery while doing so
Yeah right. If I google for "nexus one battery life" I get a page full of sorry stories about how bad the battery life is on a Nexus One. The very first link from TechCrunch says: "But I’ve found battery life to be woefully brief, even by iPhone standards".
And the second one says: "I am experiencing poor battery performance with this phone. Nothing close to what is advertised. Please don't humour me with battery saving tips, tried them all. Still no joy. I have to charge my phone twice a day". I've not bothered looking any further.
So I refuse to believe your flim flam as evidence points to the contrary.
Ok, I don't agree with the parent's view on this and have written as much elsewhere on this story so I don't care to repeat myself. But...
Unless your smartphone has more than one CPU core, your phone doesn't have TRUE multitasking either
... that is a load of bollocks. Computers have been multitasking on single cpus and single cpu cores for years before multi-core chips became the norm. Ok, with a single core only one task can be running at once, but that was why scheduling was invented: to enable a cpu to context switch between tasks at a speed that gives the user the illusion of multitasking. And that is the accepted definition/understanding of what multitasking means. Even with multiple cpus and multiples cpu cores, multitasking allows many more tasks to be run than there are CPUs . Last year I was responsible for maintaining one particular system with 4 single-core cpus running Oracle 10g that would peak at just over 1,000 simultaneous user connections each day. Now that is beautiful example of multitasking.
You're right. It's not everything inc the kitchen sink multitasking; it's smart multitasking. Multitasking that has the least impact on memory, on cpu, on battery and on the performance of the app running in the foreground (i.e. the one the user actually wants running the most). The app developer can choose what functionality he wants to keep going and let the OS take care of the rest. This is very smart, and if you disagree then you would do well to remember that this is a hand held device, not laptop or a PC, so it needs to be treated differently.
When the next iPhone is released the 3G will be 2 years old. I have a 3G and so does my wife. We could have upgraded to the 3GS in Jan, but have decided to wait for the next gen phone in Jun/July then we can renew our contract, get a steep discount and be up to date for the subsequent 18 months. Anyone else on a 3G iPhone will do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes no sense to me. Lets run with your thought experiment for a moment. Google release a blinding implementation of VP8 support in Chrome next week, then FF and Opera pick it up and release browser updates the week after. Somehow, content providers decide this is a great idea and they all jump on the VP8 band wagon. How does this hurt Apple? What's to stop Apple from adding it to OS X and the iPhone OS along side H.264 and supporting both. How does this give google some kind of competitive edge over Apple that would make Apple "terrified"? They both have full access to H.264 and related tools today, so nothing would change with adoption of VP8: the status quo is maintained. You're just trying to blind people with FUD.
There's no way YouTube would drop H.264 and shock the majority of their users with "sorry but your browser doesn't support this format" type messages. There would be an outcry.
There will be a clear winner, and that will be driven by the content providers. It simply doesn't make good business sense to continue encoding many terabytes of content multiple times (chewing cpu cycles and disk space) when a single format can be viewed on all platforms by 100% of the users. Well, those that make the right browser choice.
YouTube are a business like any other with profit and losses to report. In the end pragmatism (and the demands of the shareholders) will force their hand.
They can if they buy a license. They earn tens of millions of dollars a year so they can afford it. If they don't give users the browsing experience they expect then their users will switch. IE9 will provide hardware accelerated H.264 on the desktop so they will be setting the user experience bar high.
The vast majority of users are non technical and Closed .vs. Open source means nothing to them. They value two things: functionality and cost. The cost of an H.264 license is absorbed by the browser maker so to the user the codec (cost) is free. That leaves functionality. What do you think these users are going to do when they get a substandard browsing experience on FF and Microsoft peppers them with Ads about how much better their browser gives the users what they want? After years of taking a browser beating Microsoft will go for the jugular. You can put money on it.
My point is that although we've achieved a lot, the nature of the questions we're able to ask today demonstrate that we still don't really understand huge areas of how our universe is constructed and the physics that support it.
If we try to see a way today to make interstellar space travel cheap and affordable in the context of the limitations we know of (as you are doing) then we can only assume that it's impossible. But the whole of history has demonstrated that as advanced as technology and knowledge is at any fixed point in time, hundreds and thousands of years later what is known and achievable is vastly different. Off the scale even. And so it will be for our successors, many generations from now.
Well not quite just yet, at least not in terms of browser support. It will be 50-50 when IE9 ships. Focusing on the major browsers (they're the only ones that really count) in the Ogg Theora camp we have: Firefox, Chrome and Opera. And in the H.264 camp we (will) have: IE9, Safari and Chrome.
I suspect though that in reality, 1-2 years from now, when you factor in all the mobile devices that will only do hardware accelerated H.264 and the combined market share that IE9 + Safari + Chrome have, it will be a landslide victory for H.264. Mozilla and Opera will be faced with a very tough choice to either support H.264 in some fashion or slide into obscurity.
My personal opinion is that they should adopt it now, continue to build on their market share and work behind the scenes to establish a viable alternative to H.264 that matches or exceeds its performance at a much lower price point (free - or as near as dam it). It's the old chicken and egg thing - content publishers will only push content in Theora (or perhaps VP8) format if there is an established user base out there who they can target. If Firefox and Opera whither on the vine before an alternative codec is ready then you've already lost the battle. You won't get people to switch from IE9 and Safari to a browser to that doesn't play existing content because users don't see the value of free codecs. It's hidden from them.
I read a very well researched shoot out several weeks back between H.264, Theora and Dirac, and Dirac came a distant 3rd place well behind Theora, which in turn was well behind H.264.
Besides, you lot are focusing on the wrong thing. Apple are trying to land as many punches as they can on flash but the real reason they don't want it on the iPhone OS is this (direct quote from the original letter):
So it's really got nothing to do with whether something is open or not. It's all about having a 1-2-1 relationship with developers; being able to get future enhancements out into the hands of users as fast as possible (competitive edge) and finally, maintaining control.
Yep that's my suspicion too. Maybe at the quantum level objects can interact in more dimensions than we are currently able to understand. And maybe in one of those dimensions they can form relationships that are independent of the 3-dimensional space we're used to.
In 1829 George Stephenson build a steam engine called the Rocket. It had a top speed of 29mph: so fast that some people thought they would suffocate. I wonder if people in 2191 will laugh at us in the same way.
Not really. Probably not anywhere near as much as you might think. If anything we probably have more questions now than answers.
Only a few hundred years ago we didn't even know enough about physics to be able to ask these questions never mind try to answer them. What do you think it will be like in a few hundred more? Physics 1000 years from now will probably look like black magic to us today as scientists manipulate matter and energy in ways we can barely dream about now.
I can confirm that. I was told by a guy from Red Hat recently that it's based on FC12 with some things from FC13 included.
There's a really interesting blog post I read recently that give more detail on the history of the relationship between Adobe and Apple. It walks the timeline from a decision Adobe made in 1996 (the birth of Mac OS X) to drop Apple as their primary development platform and move to Windows. Subsequently, every new application or major revision of an Adobe product was introduced for Windows first and followed months later, sometimes never at all, by a Mac version (I pinched some of that from the article).
You can read the full story here
Personally I have no sympathy for Adobe. As someone who now browses using Chrome with the FlashBlock extension installed, and having witnessed first hand the wonderful effect that has had on my laptop battery life, plus the reduced heat under my palms I sincerely hope I never cross paths with them again.
There, fixed it for you.
From the point of view of an admin or a user? As a user, using Plone is no more difficult than using Google Docs, and it has the extra features on his tick list. You create folders and pages; edit the page content in a WYSIWYG editor; upload files for common use and (if required) embed links to them in pages for easy reference. It's a CMS so you can control who gets to see what content and when: plus pages can be published externally to be viewed without requiring a login, and it also includes version control (both are items on his tick list). It even has some really nice features like automatic link management, so if I create a link in one page to another page (or uploaded attachment) and then move the target to somewhere else, all linked references elsewhere move with it. Can you do that in MediaWiki?
In the past I've used Plone to do what you're asking. There are kits for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and *BSD and its open source.
Like anything there's a small learning curve but once you're past that creating new content is easy. Any uploaded files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, etc) are fully indexed for searching. It can integrate with Active Directory, LDAP, etc. It's extensible, skin-able and if the online documentation isn't enough there have been several books written about it (user guides and professional development).
I like it anyway.
And what part of Chrome is not open source? AFAIK Chromium on Linux uses ffmpeg's (open-source) h.264 implementation.
Not to mention a VTOL car would be very noisy and incredibly messy, what with its air displacement chucking dirt, stones, grit and leaves all over the place. Maybe in a couple of thousand years technology will have solutions to these problems, but right now every day family flying cars are pure science fiction: and actually, that's kind of nice.
You missed a 4th option:
With support for H.264, Theora, (and hopefully soon VP8) all the bases are covered. This is the option that gets my vote, and now I can relax and enjoy the web as it's meant to be enjoyed, without having to worry or whinge about anything.
Oh, and one other thing I forgot to mention re: multitasking. Apple's iPhone philosophy here seems to be completely different to Android. In the Q&A wash-up at the end of the iPhone 4 launch SJ voiced his feelings about the competition and said:
"In multitasking, if you see a task manager... they blew it. Users shouldn't ever have to think about it."
That's probably the real driver behind their more controlled implementation of multitasking.
Well, it's early days yet for us to be saying for certain exactly what the restrictions will/won't allow developers to get away with. They listed one multitasking API/feature as "task completion", what ever that actually means. An example they gave was an app that starts a download, continuing with that download while the user switches away to use another app. Maybe that can be used to continue receiving IRC updates. I'm not an iPhone developer so I can't tell just yet.
Yeah I know. Several months back I decided to copy my iTunes library onto one of my desktop Linux PCs. I reluctantly took the cost option of upgrading the Library first to the higher bit rate but DRM free format, only to discover afterwards that there were still about 500 songs that had no DRM free equivalent. I was quite pissed off. The result: I sometimes use iTunes online store to help me find music I'm interested in, but I always buy from Amazon now. Apple have lost me as an iTunes customer (and my wife too).
So I'm fully aware that the iPhone ecosystem has 'lock-in' designed into the very heart of it, but I also want the best user experience I can get from a mobile platform, and right now the competition just doesn't exite me enough to switch. I try and mitigate the lock-in effect by using platform agnostic services as much as possible, e.g. Google for mail, calendar, etc. And by avoiding the use of apps like iWork (on the desktop) that while containing very nice tools use a proprietary file format I can't read elsewhere. Maybe I will switch one day, but not yet.
Umm .. Oracle Enterprise Linux, BerkeleyDB, OCFS2, BtrFS and now MySQL. There are a lot of good people doing important Open Source work at Oracle. And while they're not the top performers WRT additions to the Linux kernel, they still make a significant contribution (according to a graph I recently saw at a Red Hat presentation).
According to the video they're running Linux on this thing with a custom kernel. No specific details on the changes they had to make to get it running yet.
Well, not very eloquently put, but it's obviously not just me who can't get to his own Slashdot page. I first noticed it about 11 hours ago, so it's been broken for some time.
Now why did that post as AC? I did have a Chrome crash half way through typing it, and it did restore the session including what I'd typed. Will watch for that in future.
Yeah right. If I google for "nexus one battery life" I get a page full of sorry stories about how bad the battery life is on a Nexus One. The very first link from TechCrunch says: "But I’ve found battery life to be woefully brief, even by iPhone standards".
And the second one says: "I am experiencing poor battery performance with this phone. Nothing close to what is advertised. Please don't humour me with battery saving tips, tried them all. Still no joy. I have to charge my phone twice a day". I've not bothered looking any further.
So I refuse to believe your flim flam as evidence points to the contrary.
Ok, I don't agree with the parent's view on this and have written as much elsewhere on this story so I don't care to repeat myself. But ...
... that is a load of bollocks. Computers have been multitasking on single cpus and single cpu cores for years before multi-core chips became the norm. Ok, with a single core only one task can be running at once, but that was why scheduling was invented: to enable a cpu to context switch between tasks at a speed that gives the user the illusion of multitasking. And that is the accepted definition/understanding of what multitasking means. Even with multiple cpus and multiples cpu cores, multitasking allows many more tasks to be run than there are CPUs . Last year I was responsible for maintaining one particular system with 4 single-core cpus running Oracle 10g that would peak at just over 1,000 simultaneous user connections each day. Now that is beautiful example of multitasking.
You're right. It's not everything inc the kitchen sink multitasking; it's smart multitasking. Multitasking that has the least impact on memory, on cpu, on battery and on the performance of the app running in the foreground (i.e. the one the user actually wants running the most). The app developer can choose what functionality he wants to keep going and let the OS take care of the rest. This is very smart, and if you disagree then you would do well to remember that this is a hand held device, not laptop or a PC, so it needs to be treated differently.
Pah, Storm Crow!
When the next iPhone is released the 3G will be 2 years old. I have a 3G and so does my wife. We could have upgraded to the 3GS in Jan, but have decided to wait for the next gen phone in Jun/July then we can renew our contract, get a steep discount and be up to date for the subsequent 18 months. Anyone else on a 3G iPhone will do the same.