That's not how the word "monopoly" works. If iTunes was the only place to buy music, it could be a monopoly. Just because some artists are exclusive to one store does not make that store a monopoly.
Actually you should have looked up the word monopoly in a dictionary before commenting on it. From Wikipedia
In economics, a monopoly [removed the phonetic stuff because/. wont render it] exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it
It does not say 100%, it says "sufficient control". Apple has this in the digital music distribution market as it can, much like MS in the OS market dictate how other people can sell their products.
Now being a monopoly is not illegal, abusing your monopoly is, Apple's been skirting this for a long time but staying 1 step ahead of an actual investigation until now.
Apple has enough sway that it gets to dictate what price other stores can sell at, that is a clear abuse, even if the publishers are in on it, it's still abuse.
Right. You undertake a multi-million project over the course of years and you can't sync logistics & legal? Come on, bullshit. The reason they release games on different dates now must be that they think they can make more money that way (money always is the reason).
Not disagreeing with your logic, it's sound but still pants on head retarded.
In Australia a game costs A$90, in USD thats $90.10, considering we have no restrictions on media exports delaying release in the US and Europe would theoretically net more money by making early adopters in the US and Europe import at higher prices... yet Australia is the last to get anything.
No one can touch Apple's price points because the factories don't yet exist. In 5 years they will be lower, but it takes time to retool factories.
maybe you should learn something about economics, before mouthing off what things "should cost" you have no clue.
I agree,
Further more, Apple artificially prices it's offerings, an iWhatever for $700 will be $700 until the iWhatever is released. This is highly unusual.
Most manufacturers release at a high price point, say $750 and drop the price once the initial costs have been paid off so at 3 months when the release costs have been adsorbed it's price drops to $650, in about six months after release the R&D costs have been adsorbed and the price drops to around $550. Also when the product comes close to being superseded by the next model prices will drop.
This is what MS, Sony and Nintendo did with their consoles, due to the shorter release cycle of phones the same thing happens in months rather then years. Same thing with TV's, computers, CPU's and so forth.
If you think that a tablet is something that just gets "lugged" from place to place, you're unclear on the concept.
If you think a laptop is that much heavier then a tablet then you're unclear on the concept of heavy.
but try reading it with one arm outstretched and I guarantee you'll be in pain before long.
You've never done anything on OH&S before.
Try doing that with anything and you'll get a sore arm, why? because it's not how you're meant to use it. In other words, you're arguing that I'm not doing it wrong.
Now lets put this into real measurements (something quantified, not books), a tablet weights about 700 grams, and EeePC weights about 1-1.4 KG and a 13" notebook weights around 1.5 to 3 KG max. I have a Lenovo R400 14" brick and that is under 3 KG.
If you've got problems carrying 3 KG for 8 to 10 hours a day, you're in for some serious health issues by the age of 40.
Further more, as you pointed out tablets dont have the functionality of netbooks or notebooks, so if you require that functionality and just about everyone who requires a computer for work does then you'll need to carry around both. This is why, if tablets are not a fad, convertible netbooks will become popular.
Hint: The reason why tablets are popular is not because of their features. It's because you can carry the damn things around with you without your arm falling off.
This...
is why American society is doomed. I've seen Chinese and Thai students lugging about ancient 5+ KG laptops because they were the only ones they can get and we're talking about 40-45 KG when soaking wet Asian girls.
Hold on, I'll be in my bunk
Now where was I, oh yes, not being able to carry around a 1.2 KG laptop. Are you kidding me? 1.2 KG for an EeePC or equivalent netbook, the heaviest one Asus has produced is 1460 grams (1.46 KG).
Seriously, is that your best excuse? How do you manage to open jars if 3 KG is too heavy for you. I though I needed to put in more time at the gym and I lugged an IBM X3650 server up 2 flights of stairs today (I'm by no means an Adonis, tiger blood maybe, no Adonis).
As a side note, the type of laptops the GP alluded to have always been around, it's just never been cheap to produce them before. They haven't disappeared because there is a successful niche market for tablets with built in keyboards. Question is, what happens when they do become cheap to produce, no reason why tablets and coverable netbooks cant co exist.
Do I assume NZ is recovered by its major earthquake/quake?
The earthquake only struck the South Island, near a city named Christchurch (CHCH for short). Most of UnZud (NZ in the native Kiwi tongue) is OK. The city has begun rebuilding, the big issue is that many of the buildings are still standing but are now unsafe and have to be torn down, CHCH didn't suffer anywhere near the level of destruction that Japan did.
The Kiwi film industry should be fine to shoot the hobbit.
Android itself is relativity open, however, the vendors (Motorola, HTC, SE, etc) can lock it down if they want.
Only 2 phones use Android in it's base form, everyone else use vendor modified versions.
If you can't get Angry Birds on the phone you're recommending, you're not going to win anyone over.
Jo Sixpack / Jane Peroxide don't care about your open platform. They don't care about homebrew, tracking, licensing, DRM, locked bootloaders ("Is that like a shoehorn?") or any other of that stuff which matters to you and me. They want to play Scrabble and update their bookface status with twatter. Don't kid yourself that it's any different.
Despite the part about Angry Brids not being true (very few phones are used for games, most are used for communication, nitendo DS's are used for games) you've stumbled blindly upon the truth and why unlocked bootloaders are important, if indirectly to the average person.
The best phone is not the fastest, the one with the best UI marketing, the one with the most fanboys or the one with the tightest controls. Like all other computing platforms the best phone is the one that does everything you need it to. A device does or does not and no-one wants a device that falls into the "does not" catagory.
This is why openness is important, Apple is losing marketshare to Android because Android does where Apple does not. Openness ensures that even if something "does not" by default, it can be made to "do". Windows ironically is proof of this, MS made DOS (and Windows) so anything will run on top of it when other manufacturers were still pushing locked down systems.
So the average person does care about locked bootloaders, they just don't know about it.
Either HTC are OK with it people hacking their devices or they are completely incompetent.
From hacking my HTC desire Z (took about 2 hours to get Cyanogen mod on there), HTC are making it just hard enough to make sure you know what you are doing. From HTC's perspective you would want two things, first not to piss off your smarter customers as these are the people who will be asked for opinions and second, not to piss off your dumber customers by making the phone easy to brick (which is only really possible during the rooting and bootloader replacing part).
I just bought a HTC Desire Z and I'm stoked with it. I was just as pleased with my older HTC Dream.
Comparing that with my Milestone that had a locked bootloader, the Milestone had a far better audio system to the newer Desire Z but their attitude towards updates and community ROM's sucked. The hardware was great, the support sucked.
If anyone were to buy an Android phone, I'd recommend a HTC over other brands (esp. Sony and Motorola) as HTC have the best history of updates, even if you don't like HTC Sense (like me) you can replace it with CyanogenMod. Plus HTC spec their phone's pretty well, generous RAM, decent proc's, nice screens. Rooting and going S-Off was a trivial affair.
Look, I severely dislike Apple, their products, their methods, and their policies.
The fact that you have to start your comment with that phrase here on Slashdot only shows that they are beyond rational discourse.
Actually, it shows the contrary, he's admitting his bias up front which shows he is capable of analysing his own bias and compensating for it.
Your comment on the other hand shows that you aren't capable of this, further more you feel compelled to attack anyone who does not share your point of view, which goes to show you are not capable of discussing the issue rationally.
BTW, I have read the article and disagree with the GP. To me this sounds like a serious overheating issue. I've had a few in the past, a bad fan on a northbridge caused my SATA drives to become unwritable and lock up the systems (windows and Linux don't like it when you cant write to disk), replaced the cooler and my data was accessible again. Had a video card that was overheating which was causing the system to blue screen during any game that was remotely taxing on the card, turns out the HSF assembly had detached from the card. To be fair, the card was 3 years old which I replaced.
Heat issues are almost always hardware based, not software based. When heat is causing problems in a laptop it is always down to bad design.
Do you want a list of Dell models that my employer has concluded have design flaws or do you just want to fling mud at Apple? (here's a hint: Every manufacturer has issues with their machines, including Apple).
As long as you provide a list of Dell models that did not have problems of this magnitude.
Then provide a list of Apple models that have had serious design flaws and compare it to the list of those that haven't.
Dell release 20 or so laptop models or more a year, Apple releases 3, the price of failure is higher for Apple because they have not diversified as much as Dell.
I hope Tunisia won't turn out to be the Archduke Ferdinand of our generation.
Very bad analogy.
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a minority opposition from a different ethnic group. Gaddafi's army is being fought by his own people.
But the most importantly, the "blank cheques" that were handed to minor powers by the major powers just aren't there. What empire has offered unconditional support to Libya? China doesn't care, neither does Russia, the ME is not a united force (last time enough ME nations allied with each other was 1967 and that started falling apart in six days).
Just to pick from your list two of the worst offenders:
Zimbabwe and Myanmar
Mugabe has a lot of support from the Zim people unfortunately. He may brutally suppress his opponents but his supporters dont seem to mind.
As for Myanmar, the important US ally Thailand would shit enough bricks to rebuild Bangkok 20 KM down the road. They think the amount of illegal Burmese workers are bad now, wait until bombs start dropping.
It's funny to read the same people decry Apples appstore censorship appeal to Steve Jobs to remove the app on the basis.
Yeah, hypocrisy is a bitch isn't it.
Those of us who are deriding Apple here are doing it for the same reasons. Apple are showing their hypocrisy here, first by censoring applications that they have a problem with but not censoring applications that others have a problem with. The problem is with double standards, Porn must be stopped but attacking Gay's is perfectly OK.
Apple chose to be the moral policemen and block porn, they made their bed and now have to lie in it when someone else wets it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how the word "monopoly" works. If iTunes was the only place to buy music, it could be a monopoly. Just because some artists are exclusive to one store does not make that store a monopoly.
Actually you should have looked up the word monopoly in a dictionary before commenting on it. From Wikipedia
In economics, a monopoly [removed the phonetic stuff because /. wont render it] exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it
It does not say 100%, it says "sufficient control". Apple has this in the digital music distribution market as it can, much like MS in the OS market dictate how other people can sell their products.
Now being a monopoly is not illegal, abusing your monopoly is, Apple's been skirting this for a long time but staying 1 step ahead of an actual investigation until now. Apple has enough sway that it gets to dictate what price other stores can sell at, that is a clear abuse, even if the publishers are in on it, it's still abuse.
Right. You undertake a multi-million project over the course of years and you can't sync logistics & legal? Come on, bullshit. The reason they release games on different dates now must be that they think they can make more money that way (money always is the reason).
Not disagreeing with your logic, it's sound but still pants on head retarded.
In Australia a game costs A$90, in USD thats $90.10, considering we have no restrictions on media exports delaying release in the US and Europe would theoretically net more money by making early adopters in the US and Europe import at higher prices... yet Australia is the last to get anything.
Maybe I shouldn't be giving them ideas.
I feel perfectly fine throwing in a meaningless comment about Kirk, Vader, Adama, Dr. Who, etc cause they're fictional characters..
Dr Who (Doctor Who) is not a fictional character, it's the title of a real TV show. The Doctor is the main (fictional) character in that show.
OK pedantry aside, but not everything we discuss needs to be grounded in science, networks and so forth.
No one can touch Apple's price points because the factories don't yet exist. In 5 years they will be lower, but it takes time to retool factories.
maybe you should learn something about economics, before mouthing off what things "should cost" you have no clue.
I agree,
Further more, Apple artificially prices it's offerings, an iWhatever for $700 will be $700 until the iWhatever is released. This is highly unusual.
Most manufacturers release at a high price point, say $750 and drop the price once the initial costs have been paid off so at 3 months when the release costs have been adsorbed it's price drops to $650, in about six months after release the R&D costs have been adsorbed and the price drops to around $550. Also when the product comes close to being superseded by the next model prices will drop.
This is what MS, Sony and Nintendo did with their consoles, due to the shorter release cycle of phones the same thing happens in months rather then years. Same thing with TV's, computers, CPU's and so forth.
If you think a laptop is that much heavier then a tablet then you're unclear on the concept of heavy.
You've never done anything on OH&S before.
Try doing that with anything and you'll get a sore arm, why? because it's not how you're meant to use it. In other words, you're arguing that I'm not doing it wrong.
Now lets put this into real measurements (something quantified, not books), a tablet weights about 700 grams, and EeePC weights about 1-1.4 KG and a 13" notebook weights around 1.5 to 3 KG max. I have a Lenovo R400 14" brick and that is under 3 KG.
If you've got problems carrying 3 KG for 8 to 10 hours a day, you're in for some serious health issues by the age of 40.
Further more, as you pointed out tablets dont have the functionality of netbooks or notebooks, so if you require that functionality and just about everyone who requires a computer for work does then you'll need to carry around both. This is why, if tablets are not a fad, convertible netbooks will become popular.
Hint: The reason why tablets are popular is not because of their features. It's because you can carry the damn things around with you without your arm falling off.
This...
is why American society is doomed. I've seen Chinese and Thai students lugging about ancient 5+ KG laptops because they were the only ones they can get and we're talking about 40-45 KG when soaking wet Asian girls.
Hold on, I'll be in my bunk
Now where was I, oh yes, not being able to carry around a 1.2 KG laptop. Are you kidding me? 1.2 KG for an EeePC or equivalent netbook, the heaviest one Asus has produced is 1460 grams (1.46 KG).
Seriously, is that your best excuse? How do you manage to open jars if 3 KG is too heavy for you. I though I needed to put in more time at the gym and I lugged an IBM X3650 server up 2 flights of stairs today (I'm by no means an Adonis, tiger blood maybe, no Adonis).
As a side note, the type of laptops the GP alluded to have always been around, it's just never been cheap to produce them before. They haven't disappeared because there is a successful niche market for tablets with built in keyboards. Question is, what happens when they do become cheap to produce, no reason why tablets and coverable netbooks cant co exist.
Wait, which MMORPG are you talking about again?
Do I assume NZ is recovered by its major earthquake/quake?
The earthquake only struck the South Island, near a city named Christchurch (CHCH for short). Most of UnZud (NZ in the native Kiwi tongue) is OK. The city has begun rebuilding, the big issue is that many of the buildings are still standing but are now unsafe and have to be torn down, CHCH didn't suffer anywhere near the level of destruction that Japan did.
The Kiwi film industry should be fine to shoot the hobbit.
Go to the T-Mobile forum if you want to know how well this is flying with T-Mobile customers.
The subject should give you an indication.
I explicitly chose NOT to have anything to do with AT&T and now I am forced into it. Does that sound like free capitalism to you??
Capitalism != freedom.
What you describe is capitalism but not freedom. Capitalism naturally tends towards monopolies. Monopolies are more often then not anti-freedom.
Hitting his house in 3... 2... 1...
Because the missiles are French, they'll probably obliterate some poor guy's house in the Ukraine.
Yes I know French munitions like exocets are quite effective, it's a joke, get over it.
You can admit it. Slashdot understands that you have a large *personal* media collection *AHEM*.
So it has to be organised in a /. friendly way. May I suggest the binary porn classification.
0 Solo (female) or lesbian.
1 Solo (male).
01 Straight.
11 Gay.
010 Threesome.
101 DP.
1010 multiple couples.
1001 goat.
Android itself is relativity open, however, the vendors (Motorola, HTC, SE, etc) can lock it down if they want.
Only 2 phones use Android in it's base form, everyone else use vendor modified versions.
1. Nexus One,
2. Nexus S,
3. Motorola Milestone/Droid. 4. Huawei X5
5. Huawei X6
Wait, what?
I guess if you're counting in binary, that's true.
If you can't get Angry Birds on the phone you're recommending, you're not going to win anyone over.
Jo Sixpack / Jane Peroxide don't care about your open platform. They don't care about homebrew, tracking, licensing, DRM, locked bootloaders ("Is that like a shoehorn?") or any other of that stuff which matters to you and me. They want to play Scrabble and update their bookface status with twatter. Don't kid yourself that it's any different.
Despite the part about Angry Brids not being true (very few phones are used for games, most are used for communication, nitendo DS's are used for games) you've stumbled blindly upon the truth and why unlocked bootloaders are important, if indirectly to the average person.
The best phone is not the fastest, the one with the best UI marketing, the one with the most fanboys or the one with the tightest controls. Like all other computing platforms the best phone is the one that does everything you need it to. A device does or does not and no-one wants a device that falls into the "does not" catagory.
This is why openness is important, Apple is losing marketshare to Android because Android does where Apple does not. Openness ensures that even if something "does not" by default, it can be made to "do". Windows ironically is proof of this, MS made DOS (and Windows) so anything will run on top of it when other manufacturers were still pushing locked down systems.
So the average person does care about locked bootloaders, they just don't know about it.
Either HTC are OK with it people hacking their devices or they are completely incompetent.
From hacking my HTC desire Z (took about 2 hours to get Cyanogen mod on there), HTC are making it just hard enough to make sure you know what you are doing. From HTC's perspective you would want two things, first not to piss off your smarter customers as these are the people who will be asked for opinions and second, not to piss off your dumber customers by making the phone easy to brick (which is only really possible during the rooting and bootloader replacing part).
Which companies are NOT on the list?
HTC.
I just bought a HTC Desire Z and I'm stoked with it. I was just as pleased with my older HTC Dream.
Comparing that with my Milestone that had a locked bootloader, the Milestone had a far better audio system to the newer Desire Z but their attitude towards updates and community ROM's sucked. The hardware was great, the support sucked.
If anyone were to buy an Android phone, I'd recommend a HTC over other brands (esp. Sony and Motorola) as HTC have the best history of updates, even if you don't like HTC Sense (like me) you can replace it with CyanogenMod. Plus HTC spec their phone's pretty well, generous RAM, decent proc's, nice screens. Rooting and going S-Off was a trivial affair.
He wasn't hung for bribery,
He was shot for getting caught.
Look, I severely dislike Apple, their products, their methods, and their policies.
The fact that you have to start your comment with that phrase here on Slashdot only shows that they are beyond rational discourse.
Actually, it shows the contrary, he's admitting his bias up front which shows he is capable of analysing his own bias and compensating for it.
Your comment on the other hand shows that you aren't capable of this, further more you feel compelled to attack anyone who does not share your point of view, which goes to show you are not capable of discussing the issue rationally.
BTW, I have read the article and disagree with the GP. To me this sounds like a serious overheating issue. I've had a few in the past, a bad fan on a northbridge caused my SATA drives to become unwritable and lock up the systems (windows and Linux don't like it when you cant write to disk), replaced the cooler and my data was accessible again. Had a video card that was overheating which was causing the system to blue screen during any game that was remotely taxing on the card, turns out the HSF assembly had detached from the card. To be fair, the card was 3 years old which I replaced.
Heat issues are almost always hardware based, not software based. When heat is causing problems in a laptop it is always down to bad design.
But they are already doing that, without passing on the savings to their customers.
A few days of load testing would have confirmed this issue before the consumer had even known the product existed.
You see, this isn't the first time Apple has had a serious issue. Macbooks have a history of overheating.
Why would they when hopeless fanboys such as yourself would keep buying no matter what was wrong with the product.
Do you want a list of Dell models that my employer has concluded have design flaws or do you just want to fling mud at Apple? (here's a hint: Every manufacturer has issues with their machines, including Apple).
As long as you provide a list of Dell models that did not have problems of this magnitude.
Then provide a list of Apple models that have had serious design flaws and compare it to the list of those that haven't.
Dell release 20 or so laptop models or more a year, Apple releases 3, the price of failure is higher for Apple because they have not diversified as much as Dell.
You get what you pay for. Oh wait. Defend this one, Apple fans.
This story is false and any evidence to the contrary merely coincidence.
Further more, we are at war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Very bad analogy.
Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a minority opposition from a different ethnic group. Gaddafi's army is being fought by his own people.
But the most importantly, the "blank cheques" that were handed to minor powers by the major powers just aren't there. What empire has offered unconditional support to Libya? China doesn't care, neither does Russia, the ME is not a united force (last time enough ME nations allied with each other was 1967 and that started falling apart in six days).
Just to pick from your list two of the worst offenders:
Zimbabwe and Myanmar
Mugabe has a lot of support from the Zim people unfortunately. He may brutally suppress his opponents but his supporters dont seem to mind.
As for Myanmar, the important US ally Thailand would shit enough bricks to rebuild Bangkok 20 KM down the road. They think the amount of illegal Burmese workers are bad now, wait until bombs start dropping.
Yeah, hypocrisy is a bitch isn't it.
Those of us who are deriding Apple here are doing it for the same reasons. Apple are showing their hypocrisy here, first by censoring applications that they have a problem with but not censoring applications that others have a problem with. The problem is with double standards, Porn must be stopped but attacking Gay's is perfectly OK.
Apple chose to be the moral policemen and block porn, they made their bed and now have to lie in it when someone else wets it.
Nothing of note actually happening.
IMEI.