Let me start by saying I've mostly agreed with posters in this thread, and though I use Apple systems, I'm by no means a fanboi.
That said, plase refrain from using statements like "Apple have never been able to establish themselves in an existing market" as that's just fanboi bait.
PCs were around long before macs, and now Apple is outprofiting Dell (in Apple's PC business arms alone, exclusing iPhone, iPod, iTunes). They have 12% marketshare, and on their trend since 2004, they'll move from the #4 vendor to the #3 vendor in 2009, and likely to #2 in 2010.
Personal music players were in every kids hands before there was an iPod, they have 80% of the market today.
Rapsody as well as several other music stores pre-dated iTunes. Multiple sites offered video and movie downloads pre-iTunes. iTunes is the worlds largest provider by leaps and bounds, even though they STILL use DRM on everything but music, and were one of the last to switch.
iPhone may be targeted at fans today, but it's gaining POWERFUL GPS features, will soon be providing better Exchange integration than Windows Mobile itself does, and is becoming a favorite of the government now too (DISA is looking at it as a great secure platform, as is the DOD, RIM no longer is acceptible under STIG rules, they made an exception for Obama's team).
Apple was not first on the scene with music editing, not the first with desktop publishing, certainly not the first in word processing, and way behind in the browser market. They're one of the leaders in all of these and have already passed Opera in browser share.
26% of freshmen this year have a Mac. Use amoung professors is nearly 60%.
I work for a LARGE health insurance provider. We have 2300 people in the IT department.... MORE THAN HALF use an iPhone to access exchange. We're hiring devs to write iPhone apps now...
Background GPS API is forthcoming. TomTom can apparently make use of it. Once 3.1 hits, I'm sure it will open up to other devs to, though Im wondering what the GPSs limitations are on how many apps could simultaneously collect from the logs.
Reverse lookup might be nice, but i do that today manually, and if it's not a number in my contact list, or a legitimate business (not a telemarketer/collector/scam) then 95% of the time revorse lookup is useless (unless you're subscribed to some kind of unlisted number service, but I;ve never seen one prices at less than $10 a lookup). Basically, I don;t care WHAT your number is, if I don't answer, and you don;t leave a voicemail, it;s a wrong number (which when lookup DOES work, that's what I find).
No argument on the mail/apple exclusive thing, but actually, that's just a push notification... sorry, can easily be crossed off the list.
VPN/cisco can't reasonably background if you're hopping wifi or GPS towers, breaks the encryption stream. Battery monitor? it's there. Hard core diagnostic tools? honestly, that's OS level stuff, I wouldn't even want it to be an app, just some native dev mode. Background featres are being added to safari. They just got caching in there, loading multiple concurrent pages is coming soon enough, then you'll be able to backgound it. What are you downloading anyway that needs backgrounding, since there's no user accessible file system?
Traffic stats? I want it to work. If I have a traffic issue, I can load an app, it does not need to run 24x7. You do get upl/dnl stats, just not in a graph.
Battery graph? I hate to even ask why you need such detailed battery info.
3rd party mail, again, can use push.
Not denying MT is important for the future, just saying except for devs, and maybe some hackers, I still don;t have an app that even 1% of people would see as a use case for making a radical change to the iPhone OS now to support it.
I'll admit, GPS needs to be able to run, but it does not need to log directly to your app, it can simply log, then when you load your app, it collects the log and displays the data. Simple.
You're not giving your crednetials to Apple. They're simply runnign Activsync to keep your IP open, and the iPhons OS simply knows whay app to send the request to.
I have not looked at the Nokia97. Hard to find Nokia in the USA nowadays...
RIM may be holdingh marketshare, but companies are yanking out BES servers by the dozen. They're holding marketshare only because PALM and WinMobile are falling even faster.
RIM is too proprietary, too expensive, and their app store sucks (that's an opinion, but I'm not in the minority).
Why RAID is not a backup: 1) not fireproof. 2) not mistake proof "oops, didn;t mean to delete that" 3) not immune to file system corruption. 4) not immune to power supply failure/surge/lightning/other destructive forces 5) more expensive than a good backup 6) not protable offsite 7) does not track versionb history or old files (something that should be of critical importance to a programmer... 8) Viruses, mailware, hackers oh my! 9) bad/corrupt install 10) OS failure
I could easily go on. I worked in DR for 4 years...
Nearly all of the above have a higher frequency of occurance over a 5 year typical HDD life. Even if you continually replace drives without a data failure, you're still eventually going to have an issue RAID can not deal with.
My Qnap was a $399 device. The 4 drives in it were $90 each (and the 5th spare too). The HDDs I run the PC off on the RAID 1/0 were $40 each. I only run the RAID 1/0 for performance during video editing. I chose 1/0 vs 1 since 1 halves the reliabiltiy of the drives. Even though I do have a good recovery solution, the downtime, nor the effort involved in recovery, would be welcome, and the extra $80 to mirror the performance stripe was easily spent.
The Qnap is also my iTunes media server, my FTP server, included the price of the DR software, and runs 2 IP cameras I set up at home too (which let me tell the insurance company I have real-time video monitoring, and they knowcked an extra 5% of my homewoners policy cost, which by itself is enough to fund replacement drives as I'll need them).... Oh, yea, and it's a NAS too... It has a lot of value beyond a backup system.
I'm guessing you've not got a child yet, or a large family. You probably don;t value to pictures you take, files you have, and other stuff on your PC. That's fine, someday you likely will.
There are cheaper ways than mine to do backups. I have over a TB, and 3 (currelty, soon to add 2 Macs to the list an decom 1 old laptop leaving me with 4) computers I'm backing up, so centrally makes sense. If you have 1-2 machines, a small amount of data, and don't value most of it, then 2 external USB drives and a safety deposit box (Dad's house) usually suffice... Or, just an online backup account for $5 a month...
RAID 1 might save you from a firmware failure, or a disk going bad, but that's about it... Also, RAID 1 may be cheap, but a backup is cheaper. Also, good luck rebuilding that RAID if your MOTHERBOARD fails... RAIDs are proprietary to a particular controller. Unless your new board usues the same chipset (and firmware too in most cases) you;re screwed without a backup.
Well, actually, my inital 900GB took a bit over 3 months to make the first pass (including stop start when I had to occasionally reboot). Second pass took about 3 days. Now, rarely is it more than a few hours behind my level of effort, especially once I tweaked it and eliminated my log directories, tmp folders, processing folders for video editing, and other large block delta folders that were completely unimportant for backing up....and it's not $60 for a 1TB external... and you need mroe than 1... What, do you plan to leave it plugged in 24x7 where your power supply, a virus, a fire, a mistake, or other far-more-common-than-component-failure-issue comes up?
I use on online backup service for my entire data set ($5 / month unlimited data). I also use 2 services for my highly critical personal files that provide 5GB each free. Then I have a Qnap 4 bay NAS device I run backups 2 (using 2 drives in RAID 5). The Qnap archives my data from the RAID to slot 4 where I have 2 drives I swap between my house and my fathers providing offsite data resiliency.
Maybe you don;t have a lot of real critical date, or stuff that's important to you. I however have dozens of movies and TV shows I have to pay to redownload (or waste time to re-rip), over 10,000 songs all legally acquires (mostly through streamripping) which would be virtually impossible to rebuld, over 8,000 photos all tagged and sorted which most are irreplaceable, about 20 hours of home movie footage from my childs first years, and nearly 20 years of writings, business files, tax records, and other critical data. This is aside from the more than 100 apps I have installed, most of which were downloaded, and many of which I have keys only sacved in electronic for for. If I lost my backup drive an my main drive, I'd loose uncountable irreplacebale amounts of information. I'd also loose about 500 hours of my life rebuilding what COULD be rebuilt.
I've been through 1 data disaster. I had been working for a DR company. They relocated me, and about 3 days later, did a round of layoffs and I got fired. The previous 15 months I'd been using a company provided backup server, which I had to return upon termination. Since I'd only been in town 3 days, my first thing I did after telling the wife the bad news was to set up the home-office, when i found out I lost 2 RAID drives in the move, and all my current data. Folks at the office had already formatted my backup server, so those backups were gone too. I had my last known good backup set from 15 months ago, plus some meticulously archived photo and video DVDs. It took me 4 of my 5 weeks unemployed at home to get 95% of what I had back running. I lost a few apps, had to roll back a version on some software, was short 4,000 songs, and lost ALL my song ratings, tags, and album art I spent my idle time over the 15 months I worked from home catalogging and updating. It's been over a year since, and I STILL have not finished cleaning up iTunes to the state I had it, and I spent a few hundred bucks re-buying apps I already owned.
This is why instead of a simple "name brand" PS, I have one that not only employs internal surge protection features, but they actually place an insurance guarantee against all the components connected to it internally, including data recovery(up to $10,000). It's conditional on you having a properly rated UPS attached (you even have to send a copy of the UPS receipt with the waranty registration card), and if it's a true electical failure, they expect the UPS company's insurance guarantee to kick in first, they just cover the gaps, but if it;s a hardware failure, and devices are damaged, they'll replace them with equal or better, up to and including replacing the entire machine. They'll also attempt first to have your data recoverd from backups, including professional services to do so, and if those fail they'll pay for data recovery (data recovery however is NOT covered if you can not produce backups. Your failure to make a best effort to protect your data is a waranty violation in their eyes, and mine too honestly)
Of course, I also planned the system well, so each of my 4 HDDs in my RAID 1/0 is actually on a seperate power lead.
If all else fails I added a rider policy on my homeowners insurance that covers up to 10,000 in computer electronics (which also covers them outside my home, and includes my camcorder, digital cameras, and even my iPhones) with only a $100 deductible. This is also a "full replacement cost" waranty, and includes up to $5000 extra for data recovery services. It cost $14 a year to add this to my policy. CHECK YOURS!!! if you're like me, and you ACTUALLY READ IT, you'll find out your homeowners policy likely only covers $10,000 in "electonics" likely NCLUDING your appliances, which may or may not also include your heat/AC system too... Others have a "personal belonging" or "house content" subsection, and electronics and computing devices (puters, tvs, stereos, and everything else) are sometimes limited to $5K per 100K of insurance. I didn't even have enough coverage for what was in my living room, let alone the rest of the house before I added the rider policy. Now the base policy only covers the appliances (and I had that raised to 20K considering the value of the 3 AC units the house has), and I have 10K in additional coverage (which we'll be raising to 15K later this year).
And this is why you don;t buy the cheapest drives NewEgg has on sale on any given day. There's a HUGE difference between their retail, enthusiast, professional, business, and server calss drives... There's a reason some come with 5 year warranties and others come with 1...
I did work for one. My current company also uses 2 seperate centers as hotsites though hosted providers nearly identical to the PC retail equivalent (it's actually how nearly all the online backup companies got started, they protect FAR more commercial data than user data).
I use mobile.me and mesh.live.com to sync highlky critical data I'd need back in a pinch after a crash (including my current system drivers, CD keys, and other non-data-related critical files.) I also use BackBlaze to sync about 900GB of data for their $5 a month.
This is completely secure. Even THEY can't access your data. I've seen first hand how these systems are architected. The storage is not only so virtualized that they really can't tell which disks in the SAN have who's data (not to mention the 256bit AES encryption), but the data is also block deduplicated, making it even more difficult.
Since the upload stram is not only encrypted (usually an SSH stream using a varian of rsync to move blocks), but since the only time whole files are sent is when they're new (after that it's only modified blocks), it's damned near impossible to rebuild a data stream from it even if they had your machine tapped at your local IP level.
When you request a hard disk recovery (backblaze offers to put your data on a disk and send it to you, as downloading 900GB might take a while...) even that is still encrypted with your key. Loose that key and you simply need to close your account and open a new one, and sync from scratch (first pass took me just over 3 months).
If you understood the technology, you;de see there's nothing to be paranoid about. It;s safer than it being on your own PC.
Yes, Mod parent up. RAID is for providing data resiliency, not data protection. In corporations where either very large data sets would simply take too LONG to restore, or where spindle count for acheiving IOPS is critical, RAID permits a reduction in failure rate. However, is it NOT a replacement for backups, and RAID should generally only be considdered when you;re already considering a multiple disk setup (either for capacity or performance reasons).
A RAID1 setup on your home computer may increase your uptime, and a RAID 0 can imrpove your performance, but generally, it's not that improtant, and on a home PC, typically the OS drive is more critical than the data drive (It's easy to resorte a backup, It'sdifficult to make your machine exactly as it was if you loose the drive and need to re-install).
That said, even a data backup is NOT enough. You also likely need an image/BareMetal backup of the OS and application drives. Rember, it's one thing to limit hardware failure by using a RAID, and another to have good backups of your data, but you also need to take the human factor into account: 1) your mistakes change both RAID 1 disks, there is not rollback; 2) hackers and viruses corrupt data just as easily on your external USB used for backup as it does on your primary drive, unless you're using top nothch backup software that hides the backup[ device from Windows and makes the backups unreadable to the OS (rare); and 3) software installs, bad code, and Windows itself can just as easily render all your data useless.
If your data is important: 1) Backup regularly, and please use a real backup application, not Robocopy or some cheap scripting system... Keep miltiuple incremental backups and use software that manages a proper rotation and can search offline data to find files you want to recover. 2) Make image/BareMetal backups of the OS. Vista Business and higher editions have something similar built in, but using a program like Ghost is often easier and quicker to restore from. Make a new image at least as often as you install make major changes to your system, or every few patch rotations. 3) DO NOT leave your primary backup device connected 24x7 unless it's a tape drive or worm device. Your backups are easy fodder for hackers on USB drives. Also, a lightning strike or surge that takes out your primary AND backup is bad, really bad......and NO, there is NO SUCH THING as a surge protector that can stop a lighting strike. The EMP alone is good enough to destroy data. (I've seen a montior and PC 4 feet from the nearest outlet get cooked when the lightnig's EMP backfed the CRT's stores static energy into the motherboard). 4) GET YOUR DATA OFFSITE. Fire or water damage should not be able to take out your "important enough to back up" data. This not only includes your backupos, but critical media, CD keys, and anything else you'd need to rebuild the computer far enough to reconnect to your backup disks... 5) Keep this rule in mind: "Nothing is backed up until it's been restored." Well enough that you're doing backups, but if you have never tried to restore your system, you have NO IDEA what that takes, and NO IDEA what you're missing to do it. Done a firmware patch? many of the original drivers may not work anymore, you might need new ones on CD to reload the OS... Maybe you'll find your backup software doesn't have an open file manager, and your e-mail isn't being backed up properly when it's running... Do you have the backup software stored offsite with your backups???
I have nearly 20 years of important files spread across my 3 main computers (including the wife's machine too) totaling about 1.1TB of actual data and files. My main machine runs a RAID 1/0 (mirrored stripes) with 4x 250GB 7200RPM drives on an AMCC/3ware controller (Soft raids SUCK, onboard RAID is not much better, NEVER opt for the lowest bidder if your data and your performance are important...) That's my OS, Application, gaming, and higly-used data drive. I also have a 750
Again, I'm not a fanboi, but I am open minded enough to realize the Mac has certain strenghts that since 1984 PC has simply never been able to come close to matching.... mostly in media capabilities. And since a performance box from Apple is point for point cheaper (in some cases drastically cheaper) than equivalent PCs now, you can't use price as an arguement. Certainly far from perfect, and I'm still waiting patiantly for an X-Mac (or OS X on a shelf for x64 generic hardware), but I'll bever buy a Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, Gateway, or Toshiba, at least for the forseeable future... I'm not even counting on Dell being in business in 3-4 years (especially with their multi-million dollar cock up last night).
For every gripe I have against Apple, I have a bushel of them against the other players. I simply don't have the time or energy to build my own systems anymore, and the custom built systems available are REDICULOUSLY over priced. I'd sooner buy a Mac and install Windows on it than buy a PC in today's market.
And again, in October, 1 of my 2 iPhones is off contract. We'll see what the competition offers then... The outlook is not good so far. Might just keep the off-contract phone until it dies... Android has a good year to advance in feature and device offerings. WebOS is too new, unproven, ugly, and limited. RIM is dying. WinMobile 7 might start being a contender, but that';s not slated until late 2010. Apple is still improving (just caught the 3.1 beta notes, half the latest round of gripes are also resolved).
"I'm willing to bet your biggest issues have to do with MMS and tethering, which you can conveniently blame on AT&T and not the almighty Apple."
Actually, I care about neither. in fact, I have no need for MMS since I have free e-mail... I have no need for tethering as I don't typically use my notebook where there's no WiFi for anything I couldn't simply surf on the phone for.
My beefs with the iPhone were over the lack of Voice Dial, lack of AVI format support, Safari stability issues, Edge download speeds (they really should have just started with the 3G), and lack of turn-by-turn GPS. Heck, until OS 3 the device even felt a little slow to me... Until the Storm, I didn't even think there was a competitor, and i looked at getting one (until I actually used one). now the pre looked good, but the UI is crap and many fatures only work if you;re connected to the cloud, which I'm often not (family in bumb fuck).
Windows and non-Apple systems (AIX, UNIX, Suse, OS390) are my livelyhood. It's not just "I use Windows because of work," it's my chioce of work is to support corporate networks. As such, I'm a PC guy. I game, I have custom rigs, I'm use the Win7 beta, I run Vista. I also am an old mac guy too. Been using them since 1984, I even had a Lisa. Why? Every network had a document team, a graphics department, and a finance department, and back then, they all used macs, so I've allways been around them. I'm also a linux nut, so running a UNIX OS that actually has a usable GUI feels right to me (OK, KDE and Gnome are starting to figure it out...). We're getting a new macbook because out aging iMac can't run 10.6, if 5 years old, and just needs to be replaced. I use it for pictures and video editing because even the latest PC software sucks at that...
I donl't think the iPhone makes me popular. But if you whip one out, people ask dumb questions, or assume you're a fan boi. If you met me, you'd understand I'm no elitist.
Each platform has it's strengths. If you refuse to accept that some tools are better than others at some jobs, and refuse to diversify your skill set and use alternate platforms, than you're an IT biggot, and a moron. If you refuse to abandon one tool for a better one simply because it;s from another vendor, then you're an even bigger idiot.
I got the 3Gs because my WIFE needed a new phone (battery lasting about 3 hours now...) and was outside her contract. We wanted to leave Verizon and consolodate our phone plan into one bill instead of 2. She looked at other AT&T offerings, and we also looked at waiting until October and swithing both of us over to Sprint or T mobile. We looked at all the devices, and she liked the iPhone. My 2G was recently replaced under waranty (screen issue that effected a very small run of phones) so it was practicaly brand new, so I gave her that and got myself a 3G S. I offerd her the S, but she doesn't want the GPS and doesn't use bluetooth, and i travel a lot in IT, so she let me have the new one.
In october, her plan on that 2G will expire. If something better is out there, I'll get it, and giver her the 3G S. I have NO ISSUE switching devices, but for my personal use habits, andf for the price (including apps) I can not only not find a better deal, but i can't find a better price either.
You seem to be the kind of a-hole who flames people simply because they have an Apple device. I bet you did the same years ago over the iPod, but i bet someone in your house has one, if not yourself.
If your post honently was in jest, i appologize for the targeted insults.
Your home state has other ways to tax people driving through it... It's called toll booths... and with ez-pass, many of them now let you drive past at 70MPH. They're even working on having "boothless" tolls in some places.
Tag you entering the state, tag you later leaving, and if you stop for gas in that state, it;s a bonus for them.... On average it all works out.
BUT for ordinary people, very few uof us drive many miles on out-of-state freeways enough that this realistically is even an argument.
I've put 52K miles on my car in 4.5 years. Less than 2000 have been out-of-state miles, spread across 7 states. What are they really missing? (since I stopped for gas in all but 2 or 3 of them). Commuters who cross state lines fill up on both sides regularly (most of them anyway).
This is a TINY amount of extra revenue they're clamoring about. Besides, most of the really big projects, like freeways and big bridges that they're talking about missing money on, are NOT STATE ROADS, but federally funded roads, so really, your state IS getting all your money for their roads if you live there... People traveling through barely use your roads at all, unless they're stopping to buy something (tax revenue), get gas (tax revenue), or visit people (and then usually need gas).
People who travel for business purposes, company cars, truckers, we get them at weigh stations already...
I understand their wants to move off fuel taxes, especially as we move to alternative fuels (unless you considder Doty Energy's WindFuels project, in which case we'll still be using gasoline for decades, just not from oil).
However, I WANT the gas taxes. I WANT them to go UP actually. Without fuel charges increasing, we have no incentive to invest in getting off oil... Governments are panicking thinking taking away the $0.19 fuel tax is somehow going to offset the $2 a gallon price increase from demand...
And using GPS? first, it's too easy to override, and thus can't be reliably used... Simply check the Odometer. If states and cities are concerned about paying from bridges and major projects, they can put up 55MPH toll booths... EZ Pay is in almost every state now...
Good luck forcing me by law to buy a government trackable GPS unit... And good luck getting this law past all the privacy paranoids...
Look at it this way. The device was nearly certain to be huge. However, prior to it's actual launch, who would finance a massive facility to make tens of millions of devices America had never seen?
Apple has "rolled out" their iPhone in the same way the did with the iPod.
They're STILL building new facilities to handle the market load of ther device. Same for their Macs. They COULD be a lot more popular, but Apple simply doesn't have a CAPACITY to build enough fast enough if the device was actually 100% perfect. They also don;t have the staff to support a user base growing on that scale. even with their slower adoption they're having major staff issues, even 2 years in...
Oh, and it does multitask, allways did. Wuit the "background" argument already. I'm sick of it. Short of them needing a "plug-in" system for the iPod interface, so things Like Pandora can use it's functions as a background app, i can't find a single reason why suspend (sleep and resume without using resources) and notify (same thing as backgrounding in my opinion, and easier to code for) functionality isn't equally as good. The only thing they're missing on top of an iPod plug-in is for multiple web pages to be loading, or downloading docs, concurrently. But Mail downloads in the background, SMS runs in the background, so does the phone, name any one app you background on another device that we can't do exactly the same thing with on the iPhone without "requiring" backgrounding... No one has yet given me ONE, not ONE.
Well, actually, so long as we pay maintenance (a contractual obligartion of government contracts btw, they don't like subcontractors running on unsupported out-of-warranty platforms), IBM not only supports their OS390 (and everythgin since OS 360 runs on it), but also AIX, HP/UX, and a few other OS on their system. We run ALL of them! We also run zVM and run both RedHat and Suse on the mainframe...
Keep in mind, apple makes and tests the device thourally. However, once mass production begins, and 3rd party battery manufacturers try to cut corners, the "samples" they send to Apple for testing may not reflect what they're putting in the devices.
Battery quality has LONG been an INDUSTRY issue, never a manufacturer issue.
The 3G S has the same thermal envelope of the 3G, and it was fine... 10 million of them were fine. The 3G S uses a newer battery, LiPo this time not LiIon. It'sd a far safer, stabler technology, and not subject to spontaneous combustion like LiIon.
And Sony, Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway have all been immune????
No quite the opposite.
Nokia, RIM, motorolla, have also all had MASSIVE recalls. Nearly every cell manufacturer has. This is their 3rd device, and the first "potential" (unconfirmed) issue.
Apple's heat issues have largely been limited events, and when they have been confirmed (which does take some time and a moderate sample size), they have been completely forthcoming, and have issues easy to deal with voluntary recall programs. In the case of my Mother's macBook Pro, they actually sent her a letter, and told her to come in as they were actually concerned it might be an issue. For my older MacBook, I brought it in for a CD drive issue, and they replaced the motherboard, and it was OUT OF WARANTY at the time. They even threw in the CD replacement free for my "trouble" which i fully expected to pay for even with the motherboard being replaced under a voluntary recall.
So far, i have not seen a report of an overheating phone that was not in my opinion abused. They are not designed to run under pillows and inside insulated bags, nor are they designed to run in 100 degree summer weather in direct sunlight on a hot wooden table. Heck, my Sprint phone actually WARPED in the heat just sitting on my dashboard. My iPhone runs quite nice for hours there, playing music and running GPS concurrently.
My new 3G S gets pleanty of sunshine, sitting in a dock on my black dashboard in full direct sinlight...
I have run it for 4+ hours straight, in SC sunlight, in a car with poorly performaing Air Conditioning, (about 80 in the car) running iPod in the background, full volume output, WiFi and BlueTooth on, and with Google Maps on, in hybrid mode, screen set to not sleep, with GPS real time tracking and the compass enabled, while and charging the battery.
It was 102 degrees on Saturday. After that much time under that heavy load, the device was warm, but placing it in my shirt pocket was not uncomfortable. I even made a phone call within a minute or two of getting out of the car and placed it on my ear and was not at all concerned about the temp of the device.
I also played an immersive 3D game the other night from full charge until the battery died (about 4.5 hours) with the iPod running in the background. My bluetooth headset was on in my pocket, and wifi was enabled. The device again got warm, but not even as warm as it did in the car. Far from uncomfortable. My (now my wife's) 2G gets hotter under those loads.
Reports I've heard from people with "pink" phones are people who left it running like this under a pillow, in a bag, outside in the hot summer sun for hours, and other extreme conditions.
Quite possibly there's a battery issue and some bad one's floating around. There's over a million of them out there already. An issue rate of a few dozen phones per milion is a SMALL issue. Also, being a LiPo, not a LiIon, though it may get hot, it;s not likely to explode or burn as cascade failure is fare more difficult to achive in LiPo.
I try not to talk about it unless other people drag me into it. (usually because a coworker got one of his own and is asking me questions about my favorite apps). I generally try to hide my use of the device as I don't like being pestered about it by people who want to buy one but have not. I don't flame iPhoine posts, I just flame FUD, and in many cases I've defended features of competing devices, and am always more than willing to discuss the iPhone's limitations and what I'd like to see changed as opposed to it's strengths. Since I nearly always post in iPone forums where another poster has spread disinformation, or their own unfounded flamings, I'm usually incapable of using my mod points to bury them. I also do not shamelessly promote the device simply because it's an apple product. Though my wife and I both own one (since I gave her my 2G when i got my 3G S last week), and we do plan to buy a MacBook Pro in August, we are both PC users on a daily basis and expect to stay that way for the forseeable future. When someone comes out with a device that I feel is genuinely as good or better than the iPhone, and I don;t have to break a contract to get it, then I might very well switch.
Has microsoft ever had a mainframe? No. Do they have a mainframe OS? no. Could they develop one? HPC could theoretically be considdered one if they added storage virtualization to it, and a few other mainframe class systems. Would we use a microsoft OS to replace out IBM mainframes? No. I'll elaborate:
- We have MILLIONS of lines of code ON the mainframe that would ALL have to be completely re-done from scratch to move off the OS390 platform. - We have 10 times that much code that would have to be modified to talk to a non-OS390 mainframe. - We have hundreds of servers that run support applications for the mainframe or mainframe apps that don't run on Windows. - Any competing platform uses far more space and many fold more power, and does not have the HA features of true mainframes. - A LARGE part of the security of our mainframe environment is that since you can't exactly get access to OS390 easily, hacing it is damned near impossible... Moving to a windows kernel based mainframe would NOT be adviseable even if we could afford it. - IBM is here, and has been for decades, and there's more legacy code running on OS390 that's 10 years old than code running on it that's less than 10 years old. they're NOT going to drop support for it. I can't say that about any competitor. - IBM has a FULL suite of tools to manage, monitor, and protect the mainframe. Most technologies entering the x64 space now have been in use on mainframes for 5-10 years... some longer. - Licensing prices on the mainframe are a FRACTION of the price of lecensing x86 and P6 systems. (we're saving about 10 million this year in licensing alone moving a few hundred machines to Suse Linux virtualised on z10 IFL processors.) - Component hardware costs of the mainframe are a bit higher (about $8K for a gig of RAM), but the system as a whole is actually not only cheaper than an equivalent VMWare or hypervisor supercluster, but it;s energy use is also a fraction of the equivalent. - the Z systems have 5-10 year lifespans, we have a few running 12 years without a critical outage, not 3-5 years like all other platforms...
We pay a never-ending maintenance plan on our mainframes. We add new ones every year or two to replace old ones, but we don't really "buy" new mainframes, we simply pay to have a base number of MIPS available and IBM keeps the hardware running. (and pay to increase those MIPS as necessary. The licensing and hardware costs are FAR lower than out other platforms.
I prefer not assuming it WILL be equivalent or better until we HAVE data, given the facts that SSD cells DO degrade and the existance technology admited to be in effect to circumvent that degredation.
We KNOW there are lifespan "concerns."
If you knew a boat was prone to leaking, but were told the pump "should" be faster than the boat can sink, but it's never been confirmed, you;re telling me you'd get on board? Especially when the ticket on that boat is 3X more expensive?
if you're paying 0.08, you;re getting a bargin... It went from 4 to 8 most likely because your small coop either couldn't compete and merged with a larger organization, or they simply raised prices to profit more seeing the competition charging more.
deregualtion of the grid in many places caused the little guys to charge more since wholesale prices are actually higher than 0.04.
1: I had a single floor 3bd with over 1800sqft under the roof, a flat roofline, and a southern exposure. Mostly considered an "ideal" roofline by BP's solar rep who came by to survey. unfurtunately, that's just not enough roof to support the number of panels I needed. 2: that's about cost, not space... Does the cost of a new panel offset the efficieny lost by the existing collection of panels... 3: Most are not, and planning ahead for efficiny losses using a scalable inverter, and scalable rooftop grid, is an extreme added expense. not to mention the labor fees associated with augmenting the install. 4: Most are NOT. Panels made 10 years ago do NOT output the same power characteristics of panels offered today. You can get replacement "additional" panels of your old type, but at replacement cost, which is out of scale with retail. New panels output more energy per sqft and may/may not integrate with your existing monitoring controlls. The longer you go in time, the less likely new planels can be simply added without swaping all of them out, or without changing multiple other compnents, making #2 harder to justify.
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Let me start by saying I've mostly agreed with posters in this thread, and though I use Apple systems, I'm by no means a fanboi.
That said, plase refrain from using statements like "Apple have never been able to establish themselves in an existing market" as that's just fanboi bait.
PCs were around long before macs, and now Apple is outprofiting Dell (in Apple's PC business arms alone, exclusing iPhone, iPod, iTunes). They have 12% marketshare, and on their trend since 2004, they'll move from the #4 vendor to the #3 vendor in 2009, and likely to #2 in 2010.
Personal music players were in every kids hands before there was an iPod, they have 80% of the market today.
Rapsody as well as several other music stores pre-dated iTunes. Multiple sites offered video and movie downloads pre-iTunes. iTunes is the worlds largest provider by leaps and bounds, even though they STILL use DRM on everything but music, and were one of the last to switch.
iPhone may be targeted at fans today, but it's gaining POWERFUL GPS features, will soon be providing better Exchange integration than Windows Mobile itself does, and is becoming a favorite of the government now too (DISA is looking at it as a great secure platform, as is the DOD, RIM no longer is acceptible under STIG rules, they made an exception for Obama's team).
Apple was not first on the scene with music editing, not the first with desktop publishing, certainly not the first in word processing, and way behind in the browser market. They're one of the leaders in all of these and have already passed Opera in browser share.
26% of freshmen this year have a Mac. Use amoung professors is nearly 60%.
I work for a LARGE health insurance provider. We have 2300 people in the IT department.... MORE THAN HALF use an iPhone to access exchange. We're hiring devs to write iPhone apps now...
Background GPS API is forthcoming. TomTom can apparently make use of it. Once 3.1 hits, I'm sure it will open up to other devs to, though Im wondering what the GPSs limitations are on how many apps could simultaneously collect from the logs.
Reverse lookup might be nice, but i do that today manually, and if it's not a number in my contact list, or a legitimate business (not a telemarketer/collector/scam) then 95% of the time revorse lookup is useless (unless you're subscribed to some kind of unlisted number service, but I;ve never seen one prices at less than $10 a lookup). Basically, I don;t care WHAT your number is, if I don't answer, and you don;t leave a voicemail, it;s a wrong number (which when lookup DOES work, that's what I find).
No argument on the mail/apple exclusive thing, but actually, that's just a push notification... sorry, can easily be crossed off the list.
VPN/cisco can't reasonably background if you're hopping wifi or GPS towers, breaks the encryption stream. Battery monitor? it's there. Hard core diagnostic tools? honestly, that's OS level stuff, I wouldn't even want it to be an app, just some native dev mode. Background featres are being added to safari. They just got caching in there, loading multiple concurrent pages is coming soon enough, then you'll be able to backgound it. What are you downloading anyway that needs backgrounding, since there's no user accessible file system?
Traffic stats? I want it to work. If I have a traffic issue, I can load an app, it does not need to run 24x7. You do get upl/dnl stats, just not in a graph.
Battery graph? I hate to even ask why you need such detailed battery info.
3rd party mail, again, can use push.
Not denying MT is important for the future, just saying except for devs, and maybe some hackers, I still don;t have an app that even 1% of people would see as a use case for making a radical change to the iPhone OS now to support it.
I'll admit, GPS needs to be able to run, but it does not need to log directly to your app, it can simply log, then when you load your app, it collects the log and displays the data. Simple.
You're not giving your crednetials to Apple. They're simply runnign Activsync to keep your IP open, and the iPhons OS simply knows whay app to send the request to.
I have not looked at the Nokia97. Hard to find Nokia in the USA nowadays...
RIM may be holdingh marketshare, but companies are yanking out BES servers by the dozen. They're holding marketshare only because PALM and WinMobile are falling even faster.
RIM is too proprietary, too expensive, and their app store sucks (that's an opinion, but I'm not in the minority).
Why RAID is not a backup:
1) not fireproof.
2) not mistake proof "oops, didn;t mean to delete that"
3) not immune to file system corruption.
4) not immune to power supply failure/surge/lightning/other destructive forces
5) more expensive than a good backup
6) not protable offsite
7) does not track versionb history or old files (something that should be of critical importance to a programmer...
8) Viruses, mailware, hackers oh my!
9) bad/corrupt install
10) OS failure
I could easily go on. I worked in DR for 4 years...
Nearly all of the above have a higher frequency of occurance over a 5 year typical HDD life. Even if you continually replace drives without a data failure, you're still eventually going to have an issue RAID can not deal with.
My Qnap was a $399 device. The 4 drives in it were $90 each (and the 5th spare too). The HDDs I run the PC off on the RAID 1/0 were $40 each. I only run the RAID 1/0 for performance during video editing. I chose 1/0 vs 1 since 1 halves the reliabiltiy of the drives. Even though I do have a good recovery solution, the downtime, nor the effort involved in recovery, would be welcome, and the extra $80 to mirror the performance stripe was easily spent.
The Qnap is also my iTunes media server, my FTP server, included the price of the DR software, and runs 2 IP cameras I set up at home too (which let me tell the insurance company I have real-time video monitoring, and they knowcked an extra 5% of my homewoners policy cost, which by itself is enough to fund replacement drives as I'll need them).... Oh, yea, and it's a NAS too... It has a lot of value beyond a backup system.
I'm guessing you've not got a child yet, or a large family. You probably don;t value to pictures you take, files you have, and other stuff on your PC. That's fine, someday you likely will.
There are cheaper ways than mine to do backups. I have over a TB, and 3 (currelty, soon to add 2 Macs to the list an decom 1 old laptop leaving me with 4) computers I'm backing up, so centrally makes sense. If you have 1-2 machines, a small amount of data, and don't value most of it, then 2 external USB drives and a safety deposit box (Dad's house) usually suffice... Or, just an online backup account for $5 a month...
RAID 1 might save you from a firmware failure, or a disk going bad, but that's about it... Also, RAID 1 may be cheap, but a backup is cheaper. Also, good luck rebuilding that RAID if your MOTHERBOARD fails... RAIDs are proprietary to a particular controller. Unless your new board usues the same chipset (and firmware too in most cases) you;re screwed without a backup.
Well, actually, my inital 900GB took a bit over 3 months to make the first pass (including stop start when I had to occasionally reboot). Second pass took about 3 days. Now, rarely is it more than a few hours behind my level of effort, especially once I tweaked it and eliminated my log directories, tmp folders, processing folders for video editing, and other large block delta folders that were completely unimportant for backing up. ...and it's not $60 for a 1TB external... and you need mroe than 1... What, do you plan to leave it plugged in 24x7 where your power supply, a virus, a fire, a mistake, or other far-more-common-than-component-failure-issue comes up?
I use on online backup service for my entire data set ($5 / month unlimited data). I also use 2 services for my highly critical personal files that provide 5GB each free. Then I have a Qnap 4 bay NAS device I run backups 2 (using 2 drives in RAID 5). The Qnap archives my data from the RAID to slot 4 where I have 2 drives I swap between my house and my fathers providing offsite data resiliency.
Maybe you don;t have a lot of real critical date, or stuff that's important to you. I however have dozens of movies and TV shows I have to pay to redownload (or waste time to re-rip), over 10,000 songs all legally acquires (mostly through streamripping) which would be virtually impossible to rebuld, over 8,000 photos all tagged and sorted which most are irreplaceable, about 20 hours of home movie footage from my childs first years, and nearly 20 years of writings, business files, tax records, and other critical data. This is aside from the more than 100 apps I have installed, most of which were downloaded, and many of which I have keys only sacved in electronic for for. If I lost my backup drive an my main drive, I'd loose uncountable irreplacebale amounts of information. I'd also loose about 500 hours of my life rebuilding what COULD be rebuilt.
I've been through 1 data disaster. I had been working for a DR company. They relocated me, and about 3 days later, did a round of layoffs and I got fired. The previous 15 months I'd been using a company provided backup server, which I had to return upon termination. Since I'd only been in town 3 days, my first thing I did after telling the wife the bad news was to set up the home-office, when i found out I lost 2 RAID drives in the move, and all my current data. Folks at the office had already formatted my backup server, so those backups were gone too. I had my last known good backup set from 15 months ago, plus some meticulously archived photo and video DVDs. It took me 4 of my 5 weeks unemployed at home to get 95% of what I had back running. I lost a few apps, had to roll back a version on some software, was short 4,000 songs, and lost ALL my song ratings, tags, and album art I spent my idle time over the 15 months I worked from home catalogging and updating. It's been over a year since, and I STILL have not finished cleaning up iTunes to the state I had it, and I spent a few hundred bucks re-buying apps I already owned.
NEVER again will I have a data failure.
This is why instead of a simple "name brand" PS, I have one that not only employs internal surge protection features, but they actually place an insurance guarantee against all the components connected to it internally, including data recovery(up to $10,000). It's conditional on you having a properly rated UPS attached (you even have to send a copy of the UPS receipt with the waranty registration card), and if it's a true electical failure, they expect the UPS company's insurance guarantee to kick in first, they just cover the gaps, but if it;s a hardware failure, and devices are damaged, they'll replace them with equal or better, up to and including replacing the entire machine. They'll also attempt first to have your data recoverd from backups, including professional services to do so, and if those fail they'll pay for data recovery (data recovery however is NOT covered if you can not produce backups. Your failure to make a best effort to protect your data is a waranty violation in their eyes, and mine too honestly)
Of course, I also planned the system well, so each of my 4 HDDs in my RAID 1/0 is actually on a seperate power lead.
If all else fails I added a rider policy on my homeowners insurance that covers up to 10,000 in computer electronics (which also covers them outside my home, and includes my camcorder, digital cameras, and even my iPhones) with only a $100 deductible. This is also a "full replacement cost" waranty, and includes up to $5000 extra for data recovery services. It cost $14 a year to add this to my policy. CHECK YOURS!!! if you're like me, and you ACTUALLY READ IT, you'll find out your homeowners policy likely only covers $10,000 in "electonics" likely NCLUDING your appliances, which may or may not also include your heat/AC system too... Others have a "personal belonging" or "house content" subsection, and electronics and computing devices (puters, tvs, stereos, and everything else) are sometimes limited to $5K per 100K of insurance. I didn't even have enough coverage for what was in my living room, let alone the rest of the house before I added the rider policy. Now the base policy only covers the appliances (and I had that raised to 20K considering the value of the 3 AC units the house has), and I have 10K in additional coverage (which we'll be raising to 15K later this year).
And this is why you don;t buy the cheapest drives NewEgg has on sale on any given day. There's a HUGE difference between their retail, enthusiast, professional, business, and server calss drives... There's a reason some come with 5 year warranties and others come with 1...
Buy cheap crap, get burned...
I did work for one. My current company also uses 2 seperate centers as hotsites though hosted providers nearly identical to the PC retail equivalent (it's actually how nearly all the online backup companies got started, they protect FAR more commercial data than user data).
I use mobile.me and mesh.live.com to sync highlky critical data I'd need back in a pinch after a crash (including my current system drivers, CD keys, and other non-data-related critical files.) I also use BackBlaze to sync about 900GB of data for their $5 a month.
This is completely secure. Even THEY can't access your data. I've seen first hand how these systems are architected. The storage is not only so virtualized that they really can't tell which disks in the SAN have who's data (not to mention the 256bit AES encryption), but the data is also block deduplicated, making it even more difficult.
Since the upload stram is not only encrypted (usually an SSH stream using a varian of rsync to move blocks), but since the only time whole files are sent is when they're new (after that it's only modified blocks), it's damned near impossible to rebuild a data stream from it even if they had your machine tapped at your local IP level.
When you request a hard disk recovery (backblaze offers to put your data on a disk and send it to you, as downloading 900GB might take a while...) even that is still encrypted with your key. Loose that key and you simply need to close your account and open a new one, and sync from scratch (first pass took me just over 3 months).
If you understood the technology, you;de see there's nothing to be paranoid about. It;s safer than it being on your own PC.
Yes, Mod parent up. RAID is for providing data resiliency, not data protection. In corporations where either very large data sets would simply take too LONG to restore, or where spindle count for acheiving IOPS is critical, RAID permits a reduction in failure rate. However, is it NOT a replacement for backups, and RAID should generally only be considdered when you;re already considering a multiple disk setup (either for capacity or performance reasons).
A RAID1 setup on your home computer may increase your uptime, and a RAID 0 can imrpove your performance, but generally, it's not that improtant, and on a home PC, typically the OS drive is more critical than the data drive (It's easy to resorte a backup, It'sdifficult to make your machine exactly as it was if you loose the drive and need to re-install).
That said, even a data backup is NOT enough. You also likely need an image/BareMetal backup of the OS and application drives. Rember, it's one thing to limit hardware failure by using a RAID, and another to have good backups of your data, but you also need to take the human factor into account: 1) your mistakes change both RAID 1 disks, there is not rollback; 2) hackers and viruses corrupt data just as easily on your external USB used for backup as it does on your primary drive, unless you're using top nothch backup software that hides the backup[ device from Windows and makes the backups unreadable to the OS (rare); and 3) software installs, bad code, and Windows itself can just as easily render all your data useless.
If your data is important: ...and NO, there is NO SUCH THING as a surge protector that can stop a lighting strike. The EMP alone is good enough to destroy data. (I've seen a montior and PC 4 feet from the nearest outlet get cooked when the lightnig's EMP backfed the CRT's stores static energy into the motherboard).
1) Backup regularly, and please use a real backup application, not Robocopy or some cheap scripting system... Keep miltiuple incremental backups and use software that manages a proper rotation and can search offline data to find files you want to recover.
2) Make image/BareMetal backups of the OS. Vista Business and higher editions have something similar built in, but using a program like Ghost is often easier and quicker to restore from. Make a new image at least as often as you install make major changes to your system, or every few patch rotations.
3) DO NOT leave your primary backup device connected 24x7 unless it's a tape drive or worm device. Your backups are easy fodder for hackers on USB drives. Also, a lightning strike or surge that takes out your primary AND backup is bad, really bad...
4) GET YOUR DATA OFFSITE. Fire or water damage should not be able to take out your "important enough to back up" data. This not only includes your backupos, but critical media, CD keys, and anything else you'd need to rebuild the computer far enough to reconnect to your backup disks...
5) Keep this rule in mind: "Nothing is backed up until it's been restored." Well enough that you're doing backups, but if you have never tried to restore your system, you have NO IDEA what that takes, and NO IDEA what you're missing to do it. Done a firmware patch? many of the original drivers may not work anymore, you might need new ones on CD to reload the OS... Maybe you'll find your backup software doesn't have an open file manager, and your e-mail isn't being backed up properly when it's running... Do you have the backup software stored offsite with your backups???
I have nearly 20 years of important files spread across my 3 main computers (including the wife's machine too) totaling about 1.1TB of actual data and files. My main machine runs a RAID 1/0 (mirrored stripes) with 4x 250GB 7200RPM drives on an AMCC/3ware controller (Soft raids SUCK, onboard RAID is not much better, NEVER opt for the lowest bidder if your data and your performance are important...) That's my OS, Application, gaming, and higly-used data drive. I also have a 750
OK. Nice to hear on #1, sad for you on #2.
Again, I'm not a fanboi, but I am open minded enough to realize the Mac has certain strenghts that since 1984 PC has simply never been able to come close to matching.... mostly in media capabilities. And since a performance box from Apple is point for point cheaper (in some cases drastically cheaper) than equivalent PCs now, you can't use price as an arguement. Certainly far from perfect, and I'm still waiting patiantly for an X-Mac (or OS X on a shelf for x64 generic hardware), but I'll bever buy a Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, Gateway, or Toshiba, at least for the forseeable future... I'm not even counting on Dell being in business in 3-4 years (especially with their multi-million dollar cock up last night).
For every gripe I have against Apple, I have a bushel of them against the other players. I simply don't have the time or energy to build my own systems anymore, and the custom built systems available are REDICULOUSLY over priced. I'd sooner buy a Mac and install Windows on it than buy a PC in today's market.
And again, in October, 1 of my 2 iPhones is off contract. We'll see what the competition offers then... The outlook is not good so far. Might just keep the off-contract phone until it dies... Android has a good year to advance in feature and device offerings. WebOS is too new, unproven, ugly, and limited. RIM is dying. WinMobile 7 might start being a contender, but that';s not slated until late 2010. Apple is still improving (just caught the 3.1 beta notes, half the latest round of gripes are also resolved).
"I'm willing to bet your biggest issues have to do with MMS and tethering, which you can conveniently blame on AT&T and not the almighty Apple."
Actually, I care about neither. in fact, I have no need for MMS since I have free e-mail... I have no need for tethering as I don't typically use my notebook where there's no WiFi for anything I couldn't simply surf on the phone for.
My beefs with the iPhone were over the lack of Voice Dial, lack of AVI format support, Safari stability issues, Edge download speeds (they really should have just started with the 3G), and lack of turn-by-turn GPS. Heck, until OS 3 the device even felt a little slow to me... Until the Storm, I didn't even think there was a competitor, and i looked at getting one (until I actually used one). now the pre looked good, but the UI is crap and many fatures only work if you;re connected to the cloud, which I'm often not (family in bumb fuck).
Windows and non-Apple systems (AIX, UNIX, Suse, OS390) are my livelyhood. It's not just "I use Windows because of work," it's my chioce of work is to support corporate networks. As such, I'm a PC guy. I game, I have custom rigs, I'm use the Win7 beta, I run Vista. I also am an old mac guy too. Been using them since 1984, I even had a Lisa. Why? Every network had a document team, a graphics department, and a finance department, and back then, they all used macs, so I've allways been around them. I'm also a linux nut, so running a UNIX OS that actually has a usable GUI feels right to me (OK, KDE and Gnome are starting to figure it out...). We're getting a new macbook because out aging iMac can't run 10.6, if 5 years old, and just needs to be replaced. I use it for pictures and video editing because even the latest PC software sucks at that...
I donl't think the iPhone makes me popular. But if you whip one out, people ask dumb questions, or assume you're a fan boi. If you met me, you'd understand I'm no elitist.
Each platform has it's strengths. If you refuse to accept that some tools are better than others at some jobs, and refuse to diversify your skill set and use alternate platforms, than you're an IT biggot, and a moron. If you refuse to abandon one tool for a better one simply because it;s from another vendor, then you're an even bigger idiot.
I got the 3Gs because my WIFE needed a new phone (battery lasting about 3 hours now...) and was outside her contract. We wanted to leave Verizon and consolodate our phone plan into one bill instead of 2. She looked at other AT&T offerings, and we also looked at waiting until October and swithing both of us over to Sprint or T mobile. We looked at all the devices, and she liked the iPhone. My 2G was recently replaced under waranty (screen issue that effected a very small run of phones) so it was practicaly brand new, so I gave her that and got myself a 3G S. I offerd her the S, but she doesn't want the GPS and doesn't use bluetooth, and i travel a lot in IT, so she let me have the new one.
In october, her plan on that 2G will expire. If something better is out there, I'll get it, and giver her the 3G S. I have NO ISSUE switching devices, but for my personal use habits, andf for the price (including apps) I can not only not find a better deal, but i can't find a better price either.
You seem to be the kind of a-hole who flames people simply because they have an Apple device. I bet you did the same years ago over the iPod, but i bet someone in your house has one, if not yourself.
If your post honently was in jest, i appologize for the targeted insults.
Your home state has other ways to tax people driving through it... It's called toll booths... and with ez-pass, many of them now let you drive past at 70MPH. They're even working on having "boothless" tolls in some places.
Tag you entering the state, tag you later leaving, and if you stop for gas in that state, it;s a bonus for them.... On average it all works out.
BUT for ordinary people, very few uof us drive many miles on out-of-state freeways enough that this realistically is even an argument.
I've put 52K miles on my car in 4.5 years. Less than 2000 have been out-of-state miles, spread across 7 states. What are they really missing? (since I stopped for gas in all but 2 or 3 of them). Commuters who cross state lines fill up on both sides regularly (most of them anyway).
This is a TINY amount of extra revenue they're clamoring about. Besides, most of the really big projects, like freeways and big bridges that they're talking about missing money on, are NOT STATE ROADS, but federally funded roads, so really, your state IS getting all your money for their roads if you live there... People traveling through barely use your roads at all, unless they're stopping to buy something (tax revenue), get gas (tax revenue), or visit people (and then usually need gas).
People who travel for business purposes, company cars, truckers, we get them at weigh stations already...
I understand their wants to move off fuel taxes, especially as we move to alternative fuels (unless you considder Doty Energy's WindFuels project, in which case we'll still be using gasoline for decades, just not from oil).
However, I WANT the gas taxes. I WANT them to go UP actually. Without fuel charges increasing, we have no incentive to invest in getting off oil... Governments are panicking thinking taking away the $0.19 fuel tax is somehow going to offset the $2 a gallon price increase from demand...
And using GPS? first, it's too easy to override, and thus can't be reliably used... Simply check the Odometer. If states and cities are concerned about paying from bridges and major projects, they can put up 55MPH toll booths... EZ Pay is in almost every state now...
Good luck forcing me by law to buy a government trackable GPS unit... And good luck getting this law past all the privacy paranoids...
Look at it this way. The device was nearly certain to be huge. However, prior to it's actual launch, who would finance a massive facility to make tens of millions of devices America had never seen?
Apple has "rolled out" their iPhone in the same way the did with the iPod.
They're STILL building new facilities to handle the market load of ther device. Same for their Macs. They COULD be a lot more popular, but Apple simply doesn't have a CAPACITY to build enough fast enough if the device was actually 100% perfect. They also don;t have the staff to support a user base growing on that scale. even with their slower adoption they're having major staff issues, even 2 years in...
Oh, and it does multitask, allways did. Wuit the "background" argument already. I'm sick of it. Short of them needing a "plug-in" system for the iPod interface, so things Like Pandora can use it's functions as a background app, i can't find a single reason why suspend (sleep and resume without using resources) and notify (same thing as backgrounding in my opinion, and easier to code for) functionality isn't equally as good. The only thing they're missing on top of an iPod plug-in is for multiple web pages to be loading, or downloading docs, concurrently. But Mail downloads in the background, SMS runs in the background, so does the phone, name any one app you background on another device that we can't do exactly the same thing with on the iPhone without "requiring" backgrounding... No one has yet given me ONE, not ONE.
Well, actually, so long as we pay maintenance (a contractual obligartion of government contracts btw, they don't like subcontractors running on unsupported out-of-warranty platforms), IBM not only supports their OS390 (and everythgin since OS 360 runs on it), but also AIX, HP/UX, and a few other OS on their system. We run ALL of them! We also run zVM and run both RedHat and Suse on the mainframe...
Keep in mind, apple makes and tests the device thourally. However, once mass production begins, and 3rd party battery manufacturers try to cut corners, the "samples" they send to Apple for testing may not reflect what they're putting in the devices.
Battery quality has LONG been an INDUSTRY issue, never a manufacturer issue.
The 3G S has the same thermal envelope of the 3G, and it was fine... 10 million of them were fine. The 3G S uses a newer battery, LiPo this time not LiIon. It'sd a far safer, stabler technology, and not subject to spontaneous combustion like LiIon.
And Sony, Dell, HP, Compaq, Gateway have all been immune????
No quite the opposite.
Nokia, RIM, motorolla, have also all had MASSIVE recalls. Nearly every cell manufacturer has. This is their 3rd device, and the first "potential" (unconfirmed) issue.
Apple's heat issues have largely been limited events, and when they have been confirmed (which does take some time and a moderate sample size), they have been completely forthcoming, and have issues easy to deal with voluntary recall programs. In the case of my Mother's macBook Pro, they actually sent her a letter, and told her to come in as they were actually concerned it might be an issue. For my older MacBook, I brought it in for a CD drive issue, and they replaced the motherboard, and it was OUT OF WARANTY at the time. They even threw in the CD replacement free for my "trouble" which i fully expected to pay for even with the motherboard being replaced under a voluntary recall.
So far, i have not seen a report of an overheating phone that was not in my opinion abused. They are not designed to run under pillows and inside insulated bags, nor are they designed to run in 100 degree summer weather in direct sunlight on a hot wooden table. Heck, my Sprint phone actually WARPED in the heat just sitting on my dashboard. My iPhone runs quite nice for hours there, playing music and running GPS concurrently.
If you have an issue, tell Apple.
My new 3G S gets pleanty of sunshine, sitting in a dock on my black dashboard in full direct sinlight...
I have run it for 4+ hours straight, in SC sunlight, in a car with poorly performaing Air Conditioning, (about 80 in the car) running iPod in the background, full volume output, WiFi and BlueTooth on, and with Google Maps on, in hybrid mode, screen set to not sleep, with GPS real time tracking and the compass enabled, while and charging the battery.
It was 102 degrees on Saturday. After that much time under that heavy load, the device was warm, but placing it in my shirt pocket was not uncomfortable. I even made a phone call within a minute or two of getting out of the car and placed it on my ear and was not at all concerned about the temp of the device.
I also played an immersive 3D game the other night from full charge until the battery died (about 4.5 hours) with the iPod running in the background. My bluetooth headset was on in my pocket, and wifi was enabled. The device again got warm, but not even as warm as it did in the car. Far from uncomfortable. My (now my wife's) 2G gets hotter under those loads.
Reports I've heard from people with "pink" phones are people who left it running like this under a pillow, in a bag, outside in the hot summer sun for hours, and other extreme conditions.
Quite possibly there's a battery issue and some bad one's floating around. There's over a million of them out there already. An issue rate of a few dozen phones per milion is a SMALL issue. Also, being a LiPo, not a LiIon, though it may get hot, it;s not likely to explode or burn as cascade failure is fare more difficult to achive in LiPo.
I guess I'm a bad owner...
I try not to talk about it unless other people drag me into it. (usually because a coworker got one of his own and is asking me questions about my favorite apps).
I generally try to hide my use of the device as I don't like being pestered about it by people who want to buy one but have not.
I don't flame iPhoine posts, I just flame FUD, and in many cases I've defended features of competing devices, and am always more than willing to discuss the iPhone's limitations and what I'd like to see changed as opposed to it's strengths.
Since I nearly always post in iPone forums where another poster has spread disinformation, or their own unfounded flamings, I'm usually incapable of using my mod points to bury them.
I also do not shamelessly promote the device simply because it's an apple product. Though my wife and I both own one (since I gave her my 2G when i got my 3G S last week), and we do plan to buy a MacBook Pro in August, we are both PC users on a daily basis and expect to stay that way for the forseeable future. When someone comes out with a device that I feel is genuinely as good or better than the iPhone, and I don;t have to break a contract to get it, then I might very well switch.
Has microsoft ever had a mainframe? No.
Do they have a mainframe OS? no.
Could they develop one? HPC could theoretically be considdered one if they added storage virtualization to it, and a few other mainframe class systems.
Would we use a microsoft OS to replace out IBM mainframes? No. I'll elaborate:
- We have MILLIONS of lines of code ON the mainframe that would ALL have to be completely re-done from scratch to move off the OS390 platform.
- We have 10 times that much code that would have to be modified to talk to a non-OS390 mainframe.
- We have hundreds of servers that run support applications for the mainframe or mainframe apps that don't run on Windows.
- Any competing platform uses far more space and many fold more power, and does not have the HA features of true mainframes.
- A LARGE part of the security of our mainframe environment is that since you can't exactly get access to OS390 easily, hacing it is damned near impossible... Moving to a windows kernel based mainframe would NOT be adviseable even if we could afford it.
- IBM is here, and has been for decades, and there's more legacy code running on OS390 that's 10 years old than code running on it that's less than 10 years old. they're NOT going to drop support for it. I can't say that about any competitor.
- IBM has a FULL suite of tools to manage, monitor, and protect the mainframe. Most technologies entering the x64 space now have been in use on mainframes for 5-10 years... some longer.
- Licensing prices on the mainframe are a FRACTION of the price of lecensing x86 and P6 systems. (we're saving about 10 million this year in licensing alone moving a few hundred machines to Suse Linux virtualised on z10 IFL processors.)
- Component hardware costs of the mainframe are a bit higher (about $8K for a gig of RAM), but the system as a whole is actually not only cheaper than an equivalent VMWare or hypervisor supercluster, but it;s energy use is also a fraction of the equivalent.
- the Z systems have 5-10 year lifespans, we have a few running 12 years without a critical outage, not 3-5 years like all other platforms...
We pay a never-ending maintenance plan on our mainframes. We add new ones every year or two to replace old ones, but we don't really "buy" new mainframes, we simply pay to have a base number of MIPS available and IBM keeps the hardware running. (and pay to increase those MIPS as necessary. The licensing and hardware costs are FAR lower than out other platforms.
I prefer not assuming it WILL be equivalent or better until we HAVE data, given the facts that SSD cells DO degrade and the existance technology admited to be in effect to circumvent that degredation.
We KNOW there are lifespan "concerns."
If you knew a boat was prone to leaking, but were told the pump "should" be faster than the boat can sink, but it's never been confirmed, you;re telling me you'd get on board? Especially when the ticket on that boat is 3X more expensive?
if you're paying 0.08, you;re getting a bargin... It went from 4 to 8 most likely because your small coop either couldn't compete and merged with a larger organization, or they simply raised prices to profit more seeing the competition charging more.
deregualtion of the grid in many places caused the little guys to charge more since wholesale prices are actually higher than 0.04.
1: I had a single floor 3bd with over 1800sqft under the roof, a flat roofline, and a southern exposure. Mostly considered an "ideal" roofline by BP's solar rep who came by to survey. unfurtunately, that's just not enough roof to support the number of panels I needed.
2: that's about cost, not space... Does the cost of a new panel offset the efficieny lost by the existing collection of panels...
3: Most are not, and planning ahead for efficiny losses using a scalable inverter, and scalable rooftop grid, is an extreme added expense. not to mention the labor fees associated with augmenting the install.
4: Most are NOT. Panels made 10 years ago do NOT output the same power characteristics of panels offered today. You can get replacement "additional" panels of your old type, but at replacement cost, which is out of scale with retail. New panels output more energy per sqft and may/may not integrate with your existing monitoring controlls. The longer you go in time, the less likely new planels can be simply added without swaping all of them out, or without changing multiple other compnents, making #2 harder to justify.