Which is what made the Xbox competitive in the first place. MS knew that developer support and install base are mutually reliant. How did they solve it? By spending oodles of cash and buying enough exclusive first-party titles to jump-start the console. Halo is the most memorable, though not the only one.
This is what Sony failed to do this generation: they have thus far failed to provide must-have first party titles to the world. As soon as they do they will see sales rise, and developer support follow it. But at this point the PS3 is as good as two years behind the 360, having totally flopped for the first year of its existence.
Mmm, this is a good point. Tango, cool icons, very slick, definitely follows some good UI design fundamentals.
So where is it? Why is that when I pop in a Ubuntu install these great icons are nowhere to be found? Why is it that apps still largely do not follow the guidelines set out by the people of this project? I don't mean this as disparaging commentary towards open source in general - but seriously, why not? A private, proprietary software company can hire a team of designers and entrust the UI to them - all developers must follow suit (as in the case of Apple, particularly). Try doing that with open source! The lack of a central rallying body is FOSS's biggest strength, and biggest weakness.
Take Synaptic for example (mostly because I'm been futzing around with it all day). Sure, some distros may have renamed it to something a bit more intelligible, but they can't change the UI. So even if the Ubuntu guys suddenly decided to standardize everything to this Tango project's recommendations, Synaptic won't follow suit, being included in more distros than I can count. So the holy grail of streamlined, consistent UI is still a pipe dream.
Heck, even Killzone has been disappointing. According to all the press out there the game is extremely pretty, and showcases the PS3's processing power, but its gameplay is uninspired and bland. So really, Little Big Planet is going to be the first truly fun game (at least it looks to be fun) with great graphics to boot.
That's precisely the point I'm making. The Apollo landings, on the whole grand scheme of things, may be a "so what" affair? It's downright atrocious, if you think about how much money we spent just so that a few lucky guys get to go hopping along on the surface of the moon. It is not the Apollo projects that we are benefiting from directly today, but rather the basic research foundation that we had to lay down in order to get there.
This is precisely the point with funding basic research - private sector interests will only support research that will appear to have immediate applicable benefits - but it is the blue-sky kind of research that will revolutionize our world once in a while, and in the process establish a country as the dominant force on the planet.
By that rationale, they could equally argue, "Had we openned it up, we'd have to rely on carriers for testing as we couldn't test with every one of them. The moment Sprint or T-Mobile had a glitch where everyone's emails disappeared or a virus got in to the system that we couldn't lock out by forced updates
Keep in mind that the Blackberry does many of the same thing the iPhones do - and they don't seem to have a problem with 3rd party development nor other carriers. This is mostly because carriers who carry the Blackberry run RIM software on RIM equipment - all of which is patched and maintained by RIM. So in this case the company isn't opening themselves up to others' incompetence (to any significant degree), and you're unlikely to get problems that way.
Keep in mind also - when a game crashes on my machine, I don't blame Microsoft and shitty Windows (shitty as it may be), I'd blame the game developer for producing a buggy untested piece of crap.
I'll support Linux phones as soon as FOSS figures out how to design a good UI. I'm serious, instead of getting some halfway-decent Photoshoppers to make your icons, why don't you involve some real usability specialists? I really despise the attitude that some FOSS supporters have - the whole "well, the button's right there, n00b" mentality is what keeps Linux an arcade black box that no mainstream user will voluntarily touch.
Linux needs to stop being feature upgrades and start becoming more cohesive. Why is it called "Synaptic" when it can be called "Package Installer"? In every distro I've used the OS has always felt like components glued together. This doesn't help Linux marketing, especially when a mainstream new user is supposed to magically supposed to figure out that "GIMP" = "Image Editor", and every freaking app has a "K" attached to its name. While I appreciate the need to allow developer freedom for each component, Linux will not be usable until there is a unifying body that can dictate UI design guidelines, icon design guidelines, etc, etc, for all parts of the OS.
The level of funding provided is still significant, but it's nothing like the massive "spend anything to get the job done" mentality of the Apollo era. The research in life support, rocketry, guidance, and computers created numerous key technologies that the American economy still relies on today. At the risk of sounding like yet another left-wing wacko - imagine if we poured half of the Iraq War's budget into massive research endeavors in biology, physics, or engineering?
We got far more from the moon landings than just bragging rights. The government funded research created much of the tehnological economy we enjoy today. I would support a new space race for this very reason. It's been too long since the US invested heavily in basic research.
As a side note... Preview does an incredibly good job with PDFs that Adobe themselves can't even do. Back when I was a Windows user exclusively, I always complained that the "official" reader was dog slow even on the fastest machines, and could not ever scroll smoothly through any slightly complex document.
Now that I've switched to Mac and use Preview, I realize this isn't Windows, it's just Adobe's incompetence. Preview is fast as hell and NEVER lags in any way, while Adobe Reader for the Mac is as slow and bloated as its Windows brethren.
Not accusing of anything, but this is altogether too often used by FOSS advocates to justify the lack of features or polish.
use a lightweight minimalist PDF reader for 99% of your PDF needs, and then to only open up Adobe Acrobat when you absolutely need its extra features
The security issues still remain - all an attacker has to do is disguise his PDF as a PDF form and shabam, your employees fall hook, line, sinker, and your network is now compromised. A pinhole in a submarine will still let water in, even if 99% of the rest of the surface is perfectly sealed.
For myself and the people that responded to my original post, no problem at all. The problem is that I suspect the majority of Americans watch so damned much cable that it WOULD be hugely expensive - moreso than they're paying now in any case. Judging by the state of almost every market, people don't like things metered, they like all-you-can-eat subscriptions to things. This is why I don't think what is described here will ever happen, though I would certainly enjoy it if it does!
Not to mention families. If you have 4 people in your household, your cable costs don't increase a penny, whereas your metered cost would likely quadruple if not more. The whole cable deal may in fact break even if you "share" with multiple people.
Just wanted to add a bit more explanation of this. Lightmapping has traditionally been the most effective way to get radiosity in a scene while still remaining real-time. When effects like normal and parallax mapping came along, lightmaps were suddenly incompatible. It took Valve to sort this out (though their solution is far from ideal), and only now, with UE3 and Gears of War, does it actually look halfway decent (Half-Life 2's solution washed things out, it's as if the normal mapping simply isn't there).
To solve the problem of two fake effects being incompatible, Valve invented a new fake effect to bridge it. You can imagine what happens when you start trying to mix a large number of effects. This is why the holy grail is still real-time raytracing - it's also a bit like why we want to have the Theory of Everything, as opposed to a bunch of little physics theories that each apply to a special case.
While I know that Slashdot loves their anarchist sentiments so much, let's consider common sense here. If you wear something that looks like a bomb into a public place, airport or otherwise, it's not "clothes" or "fashion", it's just dangerously stupid. I suppose I can walk around carrying a gigantic bloody butcher knife and call it "fashion accessory" when I'm arrested also?
I'm all for free expression, but people like her give us freedom-loving people a bad name. The freedom to express ourselves comes with self-policing responsibilities.
If you wear decidedly unusual clothes you need to consider how others will perceive it, and be prepared to deal with the consequences. Dammit, if I start wearing a shirt with a big LED timer on it and a bunch of colourful wires I'd *totally* be expected to be handcuffed on the ground at some point.
The problem with faking everything is that it quickly breaks down as your needs get more complex. For example, I've been working with a colleague recently on doing some nice, fast, impressive fake effects - most notably a system that can simulate a light shining through stained glass (not just a straight texture projection). We came up with a novel and fast way to fake it, but it completely breaks down if, say, two stained glass windows are in-line and you try to shine a light through... It simply doesn't work.
The advantage of doing things "for real" are that compatibility between your different effects is almost guaranteed, and your coders don't have to spend immense amounts of time curing those problems.
I have trouble imagining how a non-ad-supported model would work, especially for the majority of Americans who watch a lot more TV than the average Slashdotter. Let's take Friends for example - that show reputedly would pull in $500K per min per new episode in commercial revenue. Considering there are some 8 minutes of commercials, that's $4M per night.
Now, that show was immensely popular, so let's say it had... 10M viewers that night (I'm pulling this number out of my bottom, but I imagine 10M is fairly high for a primetime show). Divide through and you realize that the advertisers are paying 40c per head to hit you with their advertisements.
Try selling that to the general public: "Hey guy, you need to pay 40c to watch each new episode of Friends!" Can you imagine the bill that most people will rack up over a month? Even if you quadruple my viewership estimate, that's still 10c per person, not to mention distribution costs, last-mile costs, etc... For people who only follow 2-3 shows (total of 15 episodes a month-ish) this is still affordable, for many others it becomes prohibitively expensive.
When it gets to housecat, you won't be able to win the games at all anymore.
Dear human meatbag: This is clearly preposterous, computers will never be smarter than humans. Your kind has nothing to worry about. Please return to opiating yourselves with video games and hollywood movies.
I haven't played some of the games on the list, but I can tell you that RE4's motion controls, while well done, was not superior to the traditional gamepad, IMHO at least. At no moment did I ever go "thank God they invented motion controls, or otherwise this game would be significantly inferior!", and in fact in a few moments i truly wished I had a control pad.
One thing I've always liked about AdWords is that it's always relevant (well, the vast majority of the time), and it's non-obtrusive. Now I get to stare a million punch-the-monkey ads, or if Google is halfway competent in knowing my patterns, a million flashing "you won X tech gadget!" ads.
LGPL, BSD, etc, licenses exist also. Almost all of the commercial software I've ever programmed for had open source components, but the companies were always diligent enough to pick libraries that did not require open sourcing of the entire app.
Mac OS X will do okay but it will still be fan boys who get that.
Really? Mac OS X has already achieved what Ubuntu can only hope for, and for the user there is really no difference. Both OSes involve migrating away from Windows-only software, both are (fairly) secure and immune to common viruses, and both are 'nix based. The difference is that OS X has achieved the "it just works" holy grail that Ubuntu reaches for (albeit by "cheating" - limiting hardware configs), but for the end-user that hardly matters. But seriously, will the average user care about being able to plug in any sound card he chooses? Heck no, he just wants his machine to work.
Yes, I know Ubuntu is free as in speech, but do you really think the average user cares? That's really the only "edge" Ubuntu has on Mac OS.
That is the center of the argument isn't it? The iPhone is not a revolutionary gadget by any stretch of the imagination, but it IS usable. I know Slashdot has this collective grudge against shiny, usable UIs (as opposed to obfuscated command lines), but IMHO the UI is worth the price of admission (including the arms race).
I can't attest to the conditions of foreign (i.e. non-NAFTA) H1B's, since I obviously don't work in the States, but keep in mind that Canada is one of the most immigrant-heavy countries in the world. Wet let a huge number of people into this country every year based on their skillsets, and yet the industry in Canada is not suffering from rampant undercutting by immigrants.
If America is indeed having a problem of immigrants severely screwing the industry by undercutting wages, then I propose that there is a problem with your system, not the concept of talent import.
Get a clue, and cut it out with the rampant unsubstantiated FUD.
As a Canadian I know many former colleagues who are now working in the US on H1B's, and know even more who have returned to Canada (for one reason or another) after working in the US for years in the same capacity. I also know a great number of work visa immigrants in my home country that I work closely with every single day.
All are highly educated individuals who are very capable in their work, and amongst the elite in their home countries. None come from sweatshop environments, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. All were very well paid in their home countries and enjoyed a quality of life similar to what we enjoy here.
All of the Canadian H1B's that went to the States that I know were brought in because of their unique skillsets, not because their salary demands were low. When they were hired their salaries were on par with their American colleagues, and none ever felt that they were there as cheap labour, as opposed to highly skilled additions to the company.
America is built upon these people, and thanks to you and your xenophobic brethren, it is being threatened. The hostility towards Muslims, minorities, and generally anyone out to "steal your job" is making the US plummet on the list of desirable places to move to. The vast majority of my colleagues who went to the USA have since returned, as economic conditions at home improve, and social conditions in your country worsen. Your great nation was built upon the importation of top-notch talent from around the world - Bohr, Einstein, all were immigrants. The openness and inclusiveness of America was what made it a shining beacon for the top people in the world to gather, and your little lighthouse has fallen into ill repair thanks to attitudes like yours.
Expect more inclusive countries to overtake yours soon - countries that embraces importing talent from overseas to strengthen themselves, instead being morbidly afraid of it.
Oh yeah, that's like, totally a secondary feature anyway, I'm certainly not missing it. Who uses the iPhone as a phone?
I'd like to own an iPhone. Honestly, I would. But, though I can pay for the phone, only AT&T can own it. Jobs, Apple, and AT&T want it that way, and if you've paid for an iPhone, you've essentially told them that they can have your cake and eat it too.
Funny, as a Canadian I've never paid a penny to AT&T, and my iPhone works fine. While I would like a factory unlocked phone as much as the next guy, there are plenty of ways for us technically adept people to have OUR cake and eat it too.
The task which it can be programmed to do are limited only by the ingenuity and creativity of the programmer/user.
You're right. In fact this morning the beta for a cell-tower-triangulation tool that integrates with Google Maps just came out. iPhone development is chugging right along, and many tools are already very mature and usable.
Consumer benefit beyond the original purpose of the device is explicitly and legally forbidden.
FUD. I have every legal right in both the US and Canada to unlock my phone and install whatever the hell I want on it. Apple may not like it, and may even do pitifully ineffectual things to stop me, but the law is on MY side.
I hope those who buy the iPhone are prepared to deal with a future in which everything they possess is owned and licensed by a corporation.
What part of ownership do you not understand? Neither AT&T nor Apple own my iPhone, I do, in EVERY sense of the law. Apple has chosen to cripple the device, I have chosen to un-cripple it. They don't own anything of mine.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is what made the Xbox competitive in the first place. MS knew that developer support and install base are mutually reliant. How did they solve it? By spending oodles of cash and buying enough exclusive first-party titles to jump-start the console. Halo is the most memorable, though not the only one.
This is what Sony failed to do this generation: they have thus far failed to provide must-have first party titles to the world. As soon as they do they will see sales rise, and developer support follow it. But at this point the PS3 is as good as two years behind the 360, having totally flopped for the first year of its existence.
Mmm, this is a good point. Tango, cool icons, very slick, definitely follows some good UI design fundamentals.
So where is it? Why is that when I pop in a Ubuntu install these great icons are nowhere to be found? Why is it that apps still largely do not follow the guidelines set out by the people of this project? I don't mean this as disparaging commentary towards open source in general - but seriously, why not? A private, proprietary software company can hire a team of designers and entrust the UI to them - all developers must follow suit (as in the case of Apple, particularly). Try doing that with open source! The lack of a central rallying body is FOSS's biggest strength, and biggest weakness.
Take Synaptic for example (mostly because I'm been futzing around with it all day). Sure, some distros may have renamed it to something a bit more intelligible, but they can't change the UI. So even if the Ubuntu guys suddenly decided to standardize everything to this Tango project's recommendations, Synaptic won't follow suit, being included in more distros than I can count. So the holy grail of streamlined, consistent UI is still a pipe dream.
Heck, even Killzone has been disappointing. According to all the press out there the game is extremely pretty, and showcases the PS3's processing power, but its gameplay is uninspired and bland. So really, Little Big Planet is going to be the first truly fun game (at least it looks to be fun) with great graphics to boot.
That's precisely the point I'm making. The Apollo landings, on the whole grand scheme of things, may be a "so what" affair? It's downright atrocious, if you think about how much money we spent just so that a few lucky guys get to go hopping along on the surface of the moon. It is not the Apollo projects that we are benefiting from directly today, but rather the basic research foundation that we had to lay down in order to get there.
This is precisely the point with funding basic research - private sector interests will only support research that will appear to have immediate applicable benefits - but it is the blue-sky kind of research that will revolutionize our world once in a while, and in the process establish a country as the dominant force on the planet.
Keep in mind that the Blackberry does many of the same thing the iPhones do - and they don't seem to have a problem with 3rd party development nor other carriers. This is mostly because carriers who carry the Blackberry run RIM software on RIM equipment - all of which is patched and maintained by RIM. So in this case the company isn't opening themselves up to others' incompetence (to any significant degree), and you're unlikely to get problems that way.
Keep in mind also - when a game crashes on my machine, I don't blame Microsoft and shitty Windows (shitty as it may be), I'd blame the game developer for producing a buggy untested piece of crap.
I'll support Linux phones as soon as FOSS figures out how to design a good UI. I'm serious, instead of getting some halfway-decent Photoshoppers to make your icons, why don't you involve some real usability specialists? I really despise the attitude that some FOSS supporters have - the whole "well, the button's right there, n00b" mentality is what keeps Linux an arcade black box that no mainstream user will voluntarily touch.
Linux needs to stop being feature upgrades and start becoming more cohesive. Why is it called "Synaptic" when it can be called "Package Installer"? In every distro I've used the OS has always felt like components glued together. This doesn't help Linux marketing, especially when a mainstream new user is supposed to magically supposed to figure out that "GIMP" = "Image Editor", and every freaking app has a "K" attached to its name. While I appreciate the need to allow developer freedom for each component, Linux will not be usable until there is a unifying body that can dictate UI design guidelines, icon design guidelines, etc, etc, for all parts of the OS.
The level of funding provided is still significant, but it's nothing like the massive "spend anything to get the job done" mentality of the Apollo era. The research in life support, rocketry, guidance, and computers created numerous key technologies that the American economy still relies on today. At the risk of sounding like yet another left-wing wacko - imagine if we poured half of the Iraq War's budget into massive research endeavors in biology, physics, or engineering?
We got far more from the moon landings than just bragging rights. The government funded research created much of the tehnological economy we enjoy today. I would support a new space race for this very reason. It's been too long since the US invested heavily in basic research.
As a side note... Preview does an incredibly good job with PDFs that Adobe themselves can't even do. Back when I was a Windows user exclusively, I always complained that the "official" reader was dog slow even on the fastest machines, and could not ever scroll smoothly through any slightly complex document.
Now that I've switched to Mac and use Preview, I realize this isn't Windows, it's just Adobe's incompetence. Preview is fast as hell and NEVER lags in any way, while Adobe Reader for the Mac is as slow and bloated as its Windows brethren.
Not accusing of anything, but this is altogether too often used by FOSS advocates to justify the lack of features or polish.
use a lightweight minimalist PDF reader for 99% of your PDF needs, and then to only open up Adobe Acrobat when you absolutely need its extra featuresThe security issues still remain - all an attacker has to do is disguise his PDF as a PDF form and shabam, your employees fall hook, line, sinker, and your network is now compromised. A pinhole in a submarine will still let water in, even if 99% of the rest of the surface is perfectly sealed.
For myself and the people that responded to my original post, no problem at all. The problem is that I suspect the majority of Americans watch so damned much cable that it WOULD be hugely expensive - moreso than they're paying now in any case. Judging by the state of almost every market, people don't like things metered, they like all-you-can-eat subscriptions to things. This is why I don't think what is described here will ever happen, though I would certainly enjoy it if it does!
Not to mention families. If you have 4 people in your household, your cable costs don't increase a penny, whereas your metered cost would likely quadruple if not more. The whole cable deal may in fact break even if you "share" with multiple people.
Just wanted to add a bit more explanation of this. Lightmapping has traditionally been the most effective way to get radiosity in a scene while still remaining real-time. When effects like normal and parallax mapping came along, lightmaps were suddenly incompatible. It took Valve to sort this out (though their solution is far from ideal), and only now, with UE3 and Gears of War, does it actually look halfway decent (Half-Life 2's solution washed things out, it's as if the normal mapping simply isn't there).
To solve the problem of two fake effects being incompatible, Valve invented a new fake effect to bridge it. You can imagine what happens when you start trying to mix a large number of effects. This is why the holy grail is still real-time raytracing - it's also a bit like why we want to have the Theory of Everything, as opposed to a bunch of little physics theories that each apply to a special case.
While I know that Slashdot loves their anarchist sentiments so much, let's consider common sense here. If you wear something that looks like a bomb into a public place, airport or otherwise, it's not "clothes" or "fashion", it's just dangerously stupid. I suppose I can walk around carrying a gigantic bloody butcher knife and call it "fashion accessory" when I'm arrested also?
I'm all for free expression, but people like her give us freedom-loving people a bad name. The freedom to express ourselves comes with self-policing responsibilities.
If you wear decidedly unusual clothes you need to consider how others will perceive it, and be prepared to deal with the consequences. Dammit, if I start wearing a shirt with a big LED timer on it and a bunch of colourful wires I'd *totally* be expected to be handcuffed on the ground at some point.
The problem with faking everything is that it quickly breaks down as your needs get more complex. For example, I've been working with a colleague recently on doing some nice, fast, impressive fake effects - most notably a system that can simulate a light shining through stained glass (not just a straight texture projection). We came up with a novel and fast way to fake it, but it completely breaks down if, say, two stained glass windows are in-line and you try to shine a light through... It simply doesn't work.
The advantage of doing things "for real" are that compatibility between your different effects is almost guaranteed, and your coders don't have to spend immense amounts of time curing those problems.
I have trouble imagining how a non-ad-supported model would work, especially for the majority of Americans who watch a lot more TV than the average Slashdotter. Let's take Friends for example - that show reputedly would pull in $500K per min per new episode in commercial revenue. Considering there are some 8 minutes of commercials, that's $4M per night.
Now, that show was immensely popular, so let's say it had... 10M viewers that night (I'm pulling this number out of my bottom, but I imagine 10M is fairly high for a primetime show). Divide through and you realize that the advertisers are paying 40c per head to hit you with their advertisements.
Try selling that to the general public: "Hey guy, you need to pay 40c to watch each new episode of Friends!" Can you imagine the bill that most people will rack up over a month? Even if you quadruple my viewership estimate, that's still 10c per person, not to mention distribution costs, last-mile costs, etc... For people who only follow 2-3 shows (total of 15 episodes a month-ish) this is still affordable, for many others it becomes prohibitively expensive.
Dear human meatbag: This is clearly preposterous, computers will never be smarter than humans. Your kind has nothing to worry about. Please return to opiating yourselves with video games and hollywood movies.
Sincerely, Skynet
I haven't played some of the games on the list, but I can tell you that RE4's motion controls, while well done, was not superior to the traditional gamepad, IMHO at least. At no moment did I ever go "thank God they invented motion controls, or otherwise this game would be significantly inferior!", and in fact in a few moments i truly wished I had a control pad.
... or in this case, annoying.
One thing I've always liked about AdWords is that it's always relevant (well, the vast majority of the time), and it's non-obtrusive. Now I get to stare a million punch-the-monkey ads, or if Google is halfway competent in knowing my patterns, a million flashing "you won X tech gadget!" ads.
Open Source != GPL
LGPL, BSD, etc, licenses exist also. Almost all of the commercial software I've ever programmed for had open source components, but the companies were always diligent enough to pick libraries that did not require open sourcing of the entire app.
Really? Mac OS X has already achieved what Ubuntu can only hope for, and for the user there is really no difference. Both OSes involve migrating away from Windows-only software, both are (fairly) secure and immune to common viruses, and both are 'nix based. The difference is that OS X has achieved the "it just works" holy grail that Ubuntu reaches for (albeit by "cheating" - limiting hardware configs), but for the end-user that hardly matters. But seriously, will the average user care about being able to plug in any sound card he chooses? Heck no, he just wants his machine to work.
Yes, I know Ubuntu is free as in speech, but do you really think the average user cares? That's really the only "edge" Ubuntu has on Mac OS.
That is the center of the argument isn't it? The iPhone is not a revolutionary gadget by any stretch of the imagination, but it IS usable. I know Slashdot has this collective grudge against shiny, usable UIs (as opposed to obfuscated command lines), but IMHO the UI is worth the price of admission (including the arms race).
I can't attest to the conditions of foreign (i.e. non-NAFTA) H1B's, since I obviously don't work in the States, but keep in mind that Canada is one of the most immigrant-heavy countries in the world. Wet let a huge number of people into this country every year based on their skillsets, and yet the industry in Canada is not suffering from rampant undercutting by immigrants.
If America is indeed having a problem of immigrants severely screwing the industry by undercutting wages, then I propose that there is a problem with your system, not the concept of talent import.
Get a clue, and cut it out with the rampant unsubstantiated FUD.
As a Canadian I know many former colleagues who are now working in the US on H1B's, and know even more who have returned to Canada (for one reason or another) after working in the US for years in the same capacity. I also know a great number of work visa immigrants in my home country that I work closely with every single day.
All are highly educated individuals who are very capable in their work, and amongst the elite in their home countries. None come from sweatshop environments, in both the literal and metaphorical senses. All were very well paid in their home countries and enjoyed a quality of life similar to what we enjoy here.
All of the Canadian H1B's that went to the States that I know were brought in because of their unique skillsets, not because their salary demands were low. When they were hired their salaries were on par with their American colleagues, and none ever felt that they were there as cheap labour, as opposed to highly skilled additions to the company.
America is built upon these people, and thanks to you and your xenophobic brethren, it is being threatened. The hostility towards Muslims, minorities, and generally anyone out to "steal your job" is making the US plummet on the list of desirable places to move to. The vast majority of my colleagues who went to the USA have since returned, as economic conditions at home improve, and social conditions in your country worsen. Your great nation was built upon the importation of top-notch talent from around the world - Bohr, Einstein, all were immigrants. The openness and inclusiveness of America was what made it a shining beacon for the top people in the world to gather, and your little lighthouse has fallen into ill repair thanks to attitudes like yours.
Expect more inclusive countries to overtake yours soon - countries that embraces importing talent from overseas to strengthen themselves, instead being morbidly afraid of it.
Oh yeah, that's like, totally a secondary feature anyway, I'm certainly not missing it. Who uses the iPhone as a phone?
I'd like to own an iPhone. Honestly, I would. But, though I can pay for the phone, only AT&T can own it. Jobs, Apple, and AT&T want it that way, and if you've paid for an iPhone, you've essentially told them that they can have your cake and eat it too.Funny, as a Canadian I've never paid a penny to AT&T, and my iPhone works fine. While I would like a factory unlocked phone as much as the next guy, there are plenty of ways for us technically adept people to have OUR cake and eat it too.
The task which it can be programmed to do are limited only by the ingenuity and creativity of the programmer/user.You're right. In fact this morning the beta for a cell-tower-triangulation tool that integrates with Google Maps just came out. iPhone development is chugging right along, and many tools are already very mature and usable.
Consumer benefit beyond the original purpose of the device is explicitly and legally forbidden.FUD. I have every legal right in both the US and Canada to unlock my phone and install whatever the hell I want on it. Apple may not like it, and may even do pitifully ineffectual things to stop me, but the law is on MY side.
I hope those who buy the iPhone are prepared to deal with a future in which everything they possess is owned and licensed by a corporation.What part of ownership do you not understand? Neither AT&T nor Apple own my iPhone, I do, in EVERY sense of the law. Apple has chosen to cripple the device, I have chosen to un-cripple it. They don't own anything of mine.