I'm also an atheist Eagle Scout (as were several others in my troop), and frankly it never came up; I certainly never had to lie about it. It was maybe mentioned in passing once or twice, but the whole religious side of things was never a big thing in my troop. Be careful not to confuse "what Scouting stands for" with "what some Scout leaders" stand for. While the Scout Oath covers the whole God thing, it does not start "On my honor, I promise not to stick my dick up another man's ass". It's arguably a subset of the religion but that varies by religion and Scouting is (in theory) agnostic to which religion you practice provided that you do indeed practice.
Affiliate linking aside, Exchange is not the solution - doubly so when you're hosting it through a third party. How on earth are we going to get data portability when you've gone and locked yourself into TWO vendors? Being the DIY type, I'd just have a little web service sitting on my server that my devices can ping to update which would then notify the other devices. Open Exchange, if you will (I don't know the exact underpinnings of how Exchange's push functionality works, but I know it's anything but easily portable). A wrapper for a database (which is relatively portable) that provides a web interface for remote access and some sort of service (quite possibly along the lines of xml-rpc) that your device can hit to sync up or push stuff out to the other locations.
For a home user, $85ish/yr for a ton of features that probably aren't necessary is just stupid, and that's not just me being a cheapass. Quite frankly, what most people are going to want is something along the lines of Apple's recently-announced Mobile Me. Yeah, the price is the same or a bit higher, but there's (hypothetically) no need to fuck around with all of your software to get it working properly and reliably. And while not open, promises to be very much more cross-platform. Conceptually they'll function pretty similarly, but I think in practice the experience using Exchange is just going to be a lot worse for most people.
Or refusing to wear helmets. Or pretending that "skull caps" are helmets. I've been through a couple o' "Bike Weeks" in my time, and there are news reports *every freakin day* of bikers who die because they're not wearing helmets and bikers who manage to scrape through because they were wearing them.
Getting yourself killed in a crash doesn't really impact others in the same way that running over someone because you were straddling the yellow line while chatting with your bff Jill does. Sure, it's got the same social impacts (family stress, etc), but at the end of the day you caused your own death by being stupid rather than someone else's.
Of course you go on to say just this so I'm not really sure where you were going with that, unless you're merely pointing out that bikers are human and as such do stupid things too.
Users spending thirty five hundred dollars on a computer monitor will know what to use. Excepting the obnoxious rich guys, the target audience of this is primarily advertising businesses and high-end video/photography where color space and bit depth is actually important.
True. But stick most people watching American Idol in front of a 52" screen and they'll be too enthralled by the size and brightness to notice the image/video quality. If they're willing to put up with that kind of programming, you can't expect them to be overly picky about AV quality. It's not called the idiot box for nothing, even if it would be more aptly named the idiot panel these days.
Remember - "bigger is better" for most people. I can hardly watch typical HDTV due to how hard they stomp on the video for compression, as the macro blocking is too distracting to me (web content tends to be better, as most web producers actually CARE about that kind of thing). At least SDTV tends to be too soft of a picture to have bad macro blocking, and they don't need to compress it has hard in the first place to send it down the tubes.
It's different for each of the three primary additive colors (RGB). I think green tends to be the most sensitive, and red the least (the rough equivalent of 12-bit green, 8-bit red sensitivity, IIRC, with blue somewhere in the middle). However, for work where color accuracy is key such as photography and video work (especially with the 14-bit-per-channel sensors in many DSLRs today), you definitely want your eyes rather than your monitor to be the limiting factor. As a photographer I'd consider paying a premium for one of these displays over a standard 8-bit unit provided the rest of the system is able to support it, though not THIS much of a premium.
The point is that smartphones are bloody expensive, most people don't really need or even strongly want one, and it's only that this one's by Apple is making people forget that like all smartphones it's really a geek toy.
Which just goes to show that they did something right. Everyone will be fascinated by it for different reasons (for me, syncing was the big thing, and mobile email in a distant second, though it's now probably my primary use of the thing), but everyone IS fascinated.
I know several people here at the office who recently purchased personal blackberries. Probably so they can feel special since the company gives them to our trainers who are going offsite all the time. Half of them have asked me how I'd set up their email on the thing, as if I'm the only geek at a software company (and knowing full well that I'm the iPhone-toting Mac zealot in the MS shop). It's hard to not poke a bit of subtle fun at them for it when I just go to settings->mail->new account and tap the provider to set up my mail account while they have to ask half the company to do the same on the blackberry (I'm not trying to convert them - I'm not one of THOSE Mac guys - but if they ask for my advice...). I understand that it IS a fundamentally better email device thanks to the physical keyboard, but my experience with the interface on those things is always so painful and terrible that I'm willing to make the trade. I'd rather not be swearing at my new device just hours after having bought it.
Point is that while smartphones may just be expensive geek toys at heart if not being used for business (and what isn't, really?), but they do appeal to more than just the geeks. Why torture yourself to save a few bucks, or have all of the hardware for a great practical application wrapped in a useless interface that hardly allows you to work the thing?
Put another way, would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if they didn't see it as a major threat? Even with the relatively low market share as compared to RIM (or perhaps Samsung or Motorola on the more consumer-oriented side of things), you don't hear of manufacturers trying to make a blackberry-killer. Or I don't, anyways. Apple really blurred the line between business and personal devices, and could well erase it entirely when the 2.0 software hits.
They probably were a necessary evil to make the VV happen in the first place; I'm sure it's non-trivial to implement, but I doubt it's rocket science either. At this point, it's almost certainly just contractual obligations - remember, Apple+AT&T are in bed for, reportedly, five years from the initial iPhone launch. That means iPhone+AT&T only (within the US) until June 2012.
Of course by that point it won't matter, as all of the cell companies will have bought each other up, and then will proceed to purchase the FCC.
I damn well can. You don't set my ethical standards, I do. No matter how it happens I'll end up paying a premium to use it on another carrier (early contract termination fees, etc) that covers the subsidy so it's a financial non-issue; coupled with the fact that wireless providers have no standards whatsoever (ethical or otherwise), you'll have to excuse me for not going out of my way to please them.
Assuming that standard rates apply, which may not be the case. However, they're definitely doing the more traditional subsidized thing here so paying $375 (plus initial activation fees and probably a month's worth of service, so more like $475) to have an out of contract phone isn't far off the mark given the price point for the current iPhones.
Of course, you might just be able to buy it without contract at a huge "premium" like you can with any other phone and save yourself the trouble of doing that in the first place. Until someone pulls off another unlocking hack, it hardly matters.
If it were from Nokia or Microsoft, it wouldn't have all the features that make people want to own an iPhone. Believe it or not, some people care about more than the shiny logo.
(Yes, blah blah blah, missing features, no MMS, whine whine whine. I'm not claiming the iPhone has everything, but what it offers it does well; the same can't be said for many other devices)
I bought my iPhone on day three (hey, I'm not stupid enough to buy launch day only to find out there's a massive bug) for $600. I'm quite happy still. See, unlike the rest of the world, I haven't had to put up with a shitty cell phone for the past year.
Tech gets cheaper over time. I'm more pissed that I once spent $50 for a 30-pack of CD-R blanks and only had eight or so work after waiting half an hour to find out the burn failed, only to now be able to buy discs that burn in a minute for fifteen cents apiece with 99% reliability. At least my 1.0 iPhone worked properly at launch and continues to do so:)
You shouldn't. To most people, even people who "defended" him, it was more likely than not that he was guilty. But the legal criterion is "beyond a reasonable doubt". I think based on the publicly released evidence, there was still a reasonable doubt.
So what you're really saying is that we shouldn't feel bad for following the established process that is (was once) associated with the US Justice System. Especially given the general attitude of the open source community, I'd say that's pretty fair.
I'm glad you're not going to be developing games for the iPhone then.
I've played quite a broad array of current iPhone games (jailbroken phone). The ones that were designed for button-based input - the console emulators in particular - really suck. They're functional, but the input is awful, just as you would expect when the game wants buttons and all you have is a touchscreen. The games designed around the iPhone's input devices (accelerometer, multi-touch) are far better.
Of course, putting together some sort of RPG given those inputs would be a hell of a challenge. It's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination (I'm not so sure about accelerometer-based character movement, but multi-touch menus could still work quite well) but you'll really be looking at two completely different styles of gameplay that are centralized around the input device. I had an old GameBoy kirby game that had a primitive accelerometer built in that was used for character movement rather than the typical d-pad. It was kind of hack-ish and didn't lend itself especially well to the device, but perhaps if treated as an early proof of concept, it shows that there is potential.
The iPhone is NOT a traditional device, and no matter your opinion of Apple, you have to admit they changed the rules. If you try to develop for it while following the rules of traditional devices, you WILL fail. So porting over your DS/PSP games is right out unless you intend to give them away. If you want to develop games that need buttons, go right ahead - but keep them on the DS and PSP.
I don't think you'll see any real collision between the portable gaming and cell phone markets for quite a while, but rather see the two coexist with completely different styles and genres of games.
As an iPhone owner, I'll be the first to tell you not to buy it for the keyboard. It functions pretty well most of the time, but I'll often find myself hitting return rather than space (it shouldn't be that big of a button) and the auto-correct is really hit or miss. I'll take it over having a physical keyboard and losing half of the screen, but I'd love to be able to carry around a little fold-up keyboard and my iPhone and ditch the laptop when I'd be focusing almost entirely on heavy email and web browsing. I've typed out a few-paragraphs-long email on the virtual keyboard, but it's not to the point where it would replace my laptop entirely for more frequent work.
You'll get more teens buying it than blackberry-lovers, though, especially come tomorrow (?) when apps start becoming available. Money be damned, teens and early-twenties are the ideal market when it comes to spending disposable income, and it's an ideal device for that market (I'm not saying it's overpriced for what it is - I don't regret spending $600 a couple days after it came out - but the majority of cell phones are either provided by businesses to employees (blackberries) or cheap, crappy, free-with-contract types). It will end up as this little bizarre do-everything device at that point, though you can be sure that Apple makes sure that it's core features aren't neglected. The blackberry is too email-centric and if that's your #1 priority, you'll want the "real" keyboard. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it were to become available, and certainly wouldn't say no to a slide-out version like so many crap phones have today if it didn't compromise anything else on the device (that's probably the one thing that would get me to buy iPhone 2.0, seeing that I have enough trouble getting any signal out here, let alone 3G).
Having played a few games on it of varying quality, it's a pretty nice platform if developers adapt to the interface. Trism is a great example. The NES emulators not so much, since you're just forcing games made for physical controllers in to a touch/accelerometer device (they work well enough, but are awkward as hell). And teens + games = profit. Again, not so much on the blackberry market.
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Well are you looking at jobs for Windows software development? That could be why...
I'm also an atheist Eagle Scout (as were several others in my troop), and frankly it never came up; I certainly never had to lie about it. It was maybe mentioned in passing once or twice, but the whole religious side of things was never a big thing in my troop. Be careful not to confuse "what Scouting stands for" with "what some Scout leaders" stand for. While the Scout Oath covers the whole God thing, it does not start "On my honor, I promise not to stick my dick up another man's ass". It's arguably a subset of the religion but that varies by religion and Scouting is (in theory) agnostic to which religion you practice provided that you do indeed practice.
Welcome to the 21st century, where every single/homosexual person is a child molester. Enjoy your stay.
Likewise, but times have changed quite recently. It also varies tremendously by location.
Affiliate linking aside, Exchange is not the solution - doubly so when you're hosting it through a third party. How on earth are we going to get data portability when you've gone and locked yourself into TWO vendors? Being the DIY type, I'd just have a little web service sitting on my server that my devices can ping to update which would then notify the other devices. Open Exchange, if you will (I don't know the exact underpinnings of how Exchange's push functionality works, but I know it's anything but easily portable). A wrapper for a database (which is relatively portable) that provides a web interface for remote access and some sort of service (quite possibly along the lines of xml-rpc) that your device can hit to sync up or push stuff out to the other locations.
For a home user, $85ish/yr for a ton of features that probably aren't necessary is just stupid, and that's not just me being a cheapass. Quite frankly, what most people are going to want is something along the lines of Apple's recently-announced Mobile Me. Yeah, the price is the same or a bit higher, but there's (hypothetically) no need to fuck around with all of your software to get it working properly and reliably. And while not open, promises to be very much more cross-platform. Conceptually they'll function pretty similarly, but I think in practice the experience using Exchange is just going to be a lot worse for most people.
What Facebook lacks in private message spam is more than made up for by requests to install the Puff Puff Pass-type applications.
Getting yourself killed in a crash doesn't really impact others in the same way that running over someone because you were straddling the yellow line while chatting with your bff Jill does. Sure, it's got the same social impacts (family stress, etc), but at the end of the day you caused your own death by being stupid rather than someone else's.
Of course you go on to say just this so I'm not really sure where you were going with that, unless you're merely pointing out that bikers are human and as such do stupid things too.
Not to mention the increased maneuverability. It's a lot easier to avoid getting in a crash when you can swerve without a roll-over.
Users spending thirty five hundred dollars on a computer monitor will know what to use. Excepting the obnoxious rich guys, the target audience of this is primarily advertising businesses and high-end video/photography where color space and bit depth is actually important.
True. But stick most people watching American Idol in front of a 52" screen and they'll be too enthralled by the size and brightness to notice the image/video quality. If they're willing to put up with that kind of programming, you can't expect them to be overly picky about AV quality. It's not called the idiot box for nothing, even if it would be more aptly named the idiot panel these days.
Remember - "bigger is better" for most people. I can hardly watch typical HDTV due to how hard they stomp on the video for compression, as the macro blocking is too distracting to me (web content tends to be better, as most web producers actually CARE about that kind of thing). At least SDTV tends to be too soft of a picture to have bad macro blocking, and they don't need to compress it has hard in the first place to send it down the tubes.
It's different for each of the three primary additive colors (RGB). I think green tends to be the most sensitive, and red the least (the rough equivalent of 12-bit green, 8-bit red sensitivity, IIRC, with blue somewhere in the middle). However, for work where color accuracy is key such as photography and video work (especially with the 14-bit-per-channel sensors in many DSLRs today), you definitely want your eyes rather than your monitor to be the limiting factor. As a photographer I'd consider paying a premium for one of these displays over a standard 8-bit unit provided the rest of the system is able to support it, though not THIS much of a premium.
I had more meant along the lines of business practices.
Ok, they do have one (and it never involves lubrication). You can fill in the blank.
Which just goes to show that they did something right. Everyone will be fascinated by it for different reasons (for me, syncing was the big thing, and mobile email in a distant second, though it's now probably my primary use of the thing), but everyone IS fascinated.
I know several people here at the office who recently purchased personal blackberries. Probably so they can feel special since the company gives them to our trainers who are going offsite all the time. Half of them have asked me how I'd set up their email on the thing, as if I'm the only geek at a software company (and knowing full well that I'm the iPhone-toting Mac zealot in the MS shop). It's hard to not poke a bit of subtle fun at them for it when I just go to settings->mail->new account and tap the provider to set up my mail account while they have to ask half the company to do the same on the blackberry (I'm not trying to convert them - I'm not one of THOSE Mac guys - but if they ask for my advice...). I understand that it IS a fundamentally better email device thanks to the physical keyboard, but my experience with the interface on those things is always so painful and terrible that I'm willing to make the trade. I'd rather not be swearing at my new device just hours after having bought it.
Point is that while smartphones may just be expensive geek toys at heart if not being used for business (and what isn't, really?), but they do appeal to more than just the geeks. Why torture yourself to save a few bucks, or have all of the hardware for a great practical application wrapped in a useless interface that hardly allows you to work the thing?
Put another way, would every other manufacturer be trying to put out an iPhone killer if they didn't see it as a major threat? Even with the relatively low market share as compared to RIM (or perhaps Samsung or Motorola on the more consumer-oriented side of things), you don't hear of manufacturers trying to make a blackberry-killer. Or I don't, anyways. Apple really blurred the line between business and personal devices, and could well erase it entirely when the 2.0 software hits.
They probably were a necessary evil to make the VV happen in the first place; I'm sure it's non-trivial to implement, but I doubt it's rocket science either. At this point, it's almost certainly just contractual obligations - remember, Apple+AT&T are in bed for, reportedly, five years from the initial iPhone launch. That means iPhone+AT&T only (within the US) until June 2012.
Of course by that point it won't matter, as all of the cell companies will have bought each other up, and then will proceed to purchase the FCC.
I damn well can. You don't set my ethical standards, I do. No matter how it happens I'll end up paying a premium to use it on another carrier (early contract termination fees, etc) that covers the subsidy so it's a financial non-issue; coupled with the fact that wireless providers have no standards whatsoever (ethical or otherwise), you'll have to excuse me for not going out of my way to please them.
Assuming that standard rates apply, which may not be the case. However, they're definitely doing the more traditional subsidized thing here so paying $375 (plus initial activation fees and probably a month's worth of service, so more like $475) to have an out of contract phone isn't far off the mark given the price point for the current iPhones.
Of course, you might just be able to buy it without contract at a huge "premium" like you can with any other phone and save yourself the trouble of doing that in the first place. Until someone pulls off another unlocking hack, it hardly matters.
If it were from Nokia or Microsoft, it wouldn't have all the features that make people want to own an iPhone. Believe it or not, some people care about more than the shiny logo.
(Yes, blah blah blah, missing features, no MMS, whine whine whine. I'm not claiming the iPhone has everything, but what it offers it does well; the same can't be said for many other devices)
True for every phone. Most smartphones are even more expensive month-to-month. What's your point?
I blew $600, thank you very much. And I don't get 3g signal within fifty miles so big deal.
I bought my iPhone on day three (hey, I'm not stupid enough to buy launch day only to find out there's a massive bug) for $600. I'm quite happy still. See, unlike the rest of the world, I haven't had to put up with a shitty cell phone for the past year.
:)
Tech gets cheaper over time. I'm more pissed that I once spent $50 for a 30-pack of CD-R blanks and only had eight or so work after waiting half an hour to find out the burn failed, only to now be able to buy discs that burn in a minute for fifteen cents apiece with 99% reliability. At least my 1.0 iPhone worked properly at launch and continues to do so
Heh.
But the iPod Touch doesn't need to be activated, unlike the iPhone. Not that it will matter after a week, but still...
So what you're really saying is that we shouldn't feel bad for following the established process that is (was once) associated with the US Justice System. Especially given the general attitude of the open source community, I'd say that's pretty fair.
Perhaps not at the time; if it were to happen today, you could put money on it.
I'm glad you're not going to be developing games for the iPhone then.
I've played quite a broad array of current iPhone games (jailbroken phone). The ones that were designed for button-based input - the console emulators in particular - really suck. They're functional, but the input is awful, just as you would expect when the game wants buttons and all you have is a touchscreen. The games designed around the iPhone's input devices (accelerometer, multi-touch) are far better.
Of course, putting together some sort of RPG given those inputs would be a hell of a challenge. It's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination (I'm not so sure about accelerometer-based character movement, but multi-touch menus could still work quite well) but you'll really be looking at two completely different styles of gameplay that are centralized around the input device. I had an old GameBoy kirby game that had a primitive accelerometer built in that was used for character movement rather than the typical d-pad. It was kind of hack-ish and didn't lend itself especially well to the device, but perhaps if treated as an early proof of concept, it shows that there is potential.
The iPhone is NOT a traditional device, and no matter your opinion of Apple, you have to admit they changed the rules. If you try to develop for it while following the rules of traditional devices, you WILL fail. So porting over your DS/PSP games is right out unless you intend to give them away. If you want to develop games that need buttons, go right ahead - but keep them on the DS and PSP.
I don't think you'll see any real collision between the portable gaming and cell phone markets for quite a while, but rather see the two coexist with completely different styles and genres of games.
As an iPhone owner, I'll be the first to tell you not to buy it for the keyboard. It functions pretty well most of the time, but I'll often find myself hitting return rather than space (it shouldn't be that big of a button) and the auto-correct is really hit or miss. I'll take it over having a physical keyboard and losing half of the screen, but I'd love to be able to carry around a little fold-up keyboard and my iPhone and ditch the laptop when I'd be focusing almost entirely on heavy email and web browsing. I've typed out a few-paragraphs-long email on the virtual keyboard, but it's not to the point where it would replace my laptop entirely for more frequent work.
You'll get more teens buying it than blackberry-lovers, though, especially come tomorrow (?) when apps start becoming available. Money be damned, teens and early-twenties are the ideal market when it comes to spending disposable income, and it's an ideal device for that market (I'm not saying it's overpriced for what it is - I don't regret spending $600 a couple days after it came out - but the majority of cell phones are either provided by businesses to employees (blackberries) or cheap, crappy, free-with-contract types). It will end up as this little bizarre do-everything device at that point, though you can be sure that Apple makes sure that it's core features aren't neglected. The blackberry is too email-centric and if that's your #1 priority, you'll want the "real" keyboard. I'd buy one in a heartbeat if it were to become available, and certainly wouldn't say no to a slide-out version like so many crap phones have today if it didn't compromise anything else on the device (that's probably the one thing that would get me to buy iPhone 2.0, seeing that I have enough trouble getting any signal out here, let alone 3G).
Having played a few games on it of varying quality, it's a pretty nice platform if developers adapt to the interface. Trism is a great example. The NES emulators not so much, since you're just forcing games made for physical controllers in to a touch/accelerometer device (they work well enough, but are awkward as hell). And teens + games = profit. Again, not so much on the blackberry market.