Made a big mistake in my post: IP addresses, like anything else over the wire, are represented as 32-bit binary strings. The dotted quad format is just to make them more usable for us humans. I think the point is pretty clear; they don't have to just be integers.
Take that a step farther: anyone that does any sort of TCP/IP or sockets programming knows this, since IP addresses are naturally represented as hexadecimal to fit the four-byte long IP address field in the packet header. (Remember, int datatypes are four bytes long by themselves, whereas char datatypes are a byte (eight bits) each.) Getting dotted quad is as simple as inet_ntoa(struct in_addr *in).
This is just not as well known because IP addresses have been used for so long now, most people forget what they really are...
A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure)
Cygwin...have ya heard of it? Pretty good stuff
a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2),
a) Right, because every web developer develops for SAFARI. What's Internet Explorer?
b) Let's not forget how many people are switching to Firefox on the Mac...
c) Let's also not forget that MOST people don't care about ACID compliance...
Exposé,
But ALT+TAB's worked fine for years! Flip 3D works pretty good too
a journaled filesystem,
Great improvement; totally worth $129.
built-in support for reading and saving PDFs,
Because the free Adobe Reader sucks oh so much
and lower system requirements
at the cost of not-so-old Mac's that are rendered unable to run certain versions of OS X just because Apple says so
are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.
Does it really matter if an OS includes those things, when they are freely available and the more important problems (like usability, stability and security, all of which have been improved significantly since Windows 2000) have been fixed anyway?
Let's not forget the rosy parts of upgrading on the Mac, such as having to shell out whatever Apple's asking price is because of programs forcing these upgrades, all while rendering older, but perfectly capable, Macs from installing some of these upgrades without XPostFacto or similar hacks (if they work at all). Most programs on the Windows side support Windows XP, a ten-year old operating system at this point. Many popular OS X programs support 10.4 or newer, which is way younger than that.
Some lecturers/professors go the extra mile to make attendance mandatory for all students. For instance, one of my recitation teachers this semester mandates attendance by distributing an in-class quiz that cannot be made up. I don't really mind as I think these quizzes help improve grades, but it wouldn't be so bad if her lecture style wasn't completely mind-numbing (which is mostly one-way. disengaging and can be downright condescending at times, though I don't blame her reasons for being like that).
Remember, these are the same professors who don't understand that boredom is incredibly more powerful than it appears, and that uninspired students will find other ways to zone out of boring lectures.
Bullshit. Installing the OS and drivers will take at least that long. Also, you need to consider amount of time to research what chip you want, and which motherboard it fits into, with which graphics card, etc.
If you have all of that lined up, it's really not that much work. Of course, if you don't have the time or can't be bothered to do that, then getting a preconfigured computer is probably a better option.
Or I guess I could pirate it..sure, but what if we want to be legal.
Don't really need FatWallet...even Microsoft has information on where students can find discounted pricing (information here). If that doesn't work, a Google search reveals TONS of information.
Yeah, Macs are 'dumbed down' as far as the OS goes and they're not the cheapest machines available but for some people they are perfect. A flat out recommendation to ignore them is not good advice.
As poster said above; they aren't 'dumbed down' as much as they are 'easier to use.' Just because something is easier to use does not automatically mean it's been dumbed down.
I haven't built a PC in 10 years. I probably won't ever again. Too much effort
It only takes about an hour once you've done it at least, what, twice? I built a PC a few months ago for a friend, and it only took me an hour once I had everything together...and that was without having built a PC for years before that.
too expensive due to getting sucked in to going for higher-end components
Nope; that's all you, my man. HTPCs cost about $300 to put together...all with good hardware.
too much effort with unreliability
What?
too expensive to buy an OS (no, I don't want to us Linux any more either)
Find a student and have him get you Win7 for $50 shipped. Find a student with MSDNAA (a little tougher; HINT: There are quite a few on here, guaranteed) and get it for nothing.
I'm quite happy to buy a mid-range Dell if I'm worrying about price... at least everything has been tested, and it's one place to go if something fails. If price isn't an option, or I want something that just works really well, then it's a Mac all the way thanks
That's perfectly fine and respectable, since warranty is much better with both of those companies. However, you might want to consider the possibility that maybe you were just doin' it wrong at first and never got the help to fix that.
I would not recommend buying a Mac - I bought one because that is the only way to develop for the iPhone/iPod Touch (still haven't gotten around too it). It is true Mac offers little options. Some Mac junkies like to argue that you get the best technology, and you get what you paid for - however, since you are on slashdot, chances are you will not like the 'dumbed-down' approach Mac OS X takes. As with desktops, the only upgrade path is buy a new Mac (unless you have a Mac Pro), limiting your opportunities to add a new video card, or maybe an additional hard drive, etc.
Not sure if you looked into this, but if your computer is compatible enough, you could have just installed OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard straight on it. Some computers need slight modifications to make it work great; others aren't worth the effort. I did this with my Dell Latitude E-series a few months ago and enjoyed the experience! (I've also heard that iPhone development on an OSx86 box is possible.)
Good orators can present regardless of the medium. Folks that are bad with PPT are more than likely bad at other forms of presenting too, so don't think crippling Powerpoint and forcing a throwback will change anything.
On your last point, keep in mind that Microsoft has all the potential to export MOST of their key (and, thus, show-stopping) Office functionality right to the web...while making it work with IE6 somehow. (I hope they don't, though; IE6 really needs to die.) That and its absolutely competitive price of NOTHING will probably sink GDocs like a lead weight when they release it.
Changing the port might be troublesome if you're trying to SSH from public locations like airports and such. They usually leave port 22, 443 and 8080 open for their own services and block all others, so you will have to either set up VPN to get into your servers or wait until you're elsewhere. Additionally, an evenly-slightly determined hacker can still find where your sshd process is listening on by running a basic nmap scan.
Key exchange and disabling root login is probably the best way to go. Fail2ban worked really well when my server had a Linux distro on it.
Where in the article does it say that the government official was taking the girl to a bathroom? The person who dubbed the video assumed that he was doing this, though the staff at the restaurant thought different. Section reprinted below:
THE PLUM GARDEN Seafood Restaurant stands on a six-lane road that cuts through Shenzhen, a fishing village turned factory boomtown. It has a subterranean dining room with hundreds of orange-covered seats, an open kitchen to one side and a warren of small private rooms to the other. Late on a Friday night in October 2008, a security camera captured a scene that was soon replayed all over the Chinese Internet and sparked a human-flesh search against a government official.
In the video clip, an older man crosses the background with a little girl. Later the girl runs back through the frame and returns with her father, mother and brother. The subtitles tell us that the old man had tried to force the girl into the men’s room, presumably to molest her, and that her father is trying to find the man who did that. Then the girl’s father appears in front of the camera, arguing with that man.
There is no sound on the video, so you have to rely on the Chinese subtitles, which seem to have been posted with the video. According to those subtitles, the older man tells the father of the girl: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want? Name your price.” He gestures violently and continues: “Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I have the same level as the mayor of your city. So what if I grabbed the neck of a small child? If you dare challenge me, just wait and see how I will deal with you.” He moves to leave but is blocked by restaurant employees and the girl’s father. The group exits frame left.
...
While Netizens saw this as a struggle between an arrogant official and a victimized family of common people, the staff members at Plum Garden, when I spoke to them, had a different take. First, they weren’t sure that Lin had been trying to molest the girl. Perhaps, they thought, he was just drunk. The floor director, Zhang Cai Yao, told me, “Maybe the government official just patted the girl on the head and tried to say, ‘Thank you, you’re a nice girl.’ ” Zhang saw the struggle between Lin and the family as a kind of conflict she witnessed all too often. “It was a fight between rich people and officials,” she says. “The official said something irritating to her parents, who are very rich.”
How is this any different from collaborative e-stalking?
This has been done before, at least here in the US. The most recent example I can recall was one woman being accused of "threatening" to murder her ex-boyfriend using mortuary lab equipment (article here), when the sole evidence for this accusation was from a Facebook status update. Additionally, while China has their "BBS"es, we have Facebook, which is essentially human flesh-search made (sort of) easy. This would have catalyzed the manhunt against the husband in the article, since him and his ex-wife would have most likely been Facebook friends, and people could have collected information from using whatever was on his profile (unless he kept quiet on it, something not many people do).
But if you read the article, you would see that he goes in depth about actually developing for both platforms. Windows Mobile was actually pretty good on that front, but wouldn't be better than Android because:
Most of the core WinMo libraries are on Windows,
It's not open, and
It's pretty unreliable as an OS in comparison to the others on similar hardware.
Pandora for the iPhone is so well-written, it's practically a secondary music application for many folks. Many of the popular games on there work pretty well (and are lots of fun too!) and several of the applications I've downloaded have been pretty high-quality (read: few crashes, all of which are related to Safari hogging up memory and the memory being way too limited in the first place). I would be skeptical of thinking iPhone apps are pretty crappy when many, many people have at least four pages worth of apps on their phones.
I don't know enough about Android to really comment on other aspects of usability, but this article mainly compares development between both platforms. To be frank, though, I don't think the Android Alliance had to do a lot to be better than a system that only allows developers to code on OS X with a language that's almost entirely bound to that platform and under the control of an authoritarian and seemingly draconian submission control system.
However, under the Android platform gains critical mass (which the Droid and the Nexus One, to a lesser extent, are trying to do), the best bet to gaining lots of visibility and/or profit is by developing for the iPhone. The article is pretty comprehensive; I recommend it. (Probably means nothing here on/. though.:p)
I second this wholeheartedly. I switched to virtual desktops just a few days ago, and it has not only cleaned up my desktops significantly, but has also provided much needed organization while I'm working. (General stuff on one desktop, programming stuff on another, other work on another, etc.)
VirtuaWin is good; highly recommend! Microsoft's PowerToy...not so much (uses the same Start Menu across all desktops)
Not a particularly interesting article, but I'm eating dinner and my brain is sizzled, so why not?
Then it all came crashing down. iPhone 3.1 came out. I had to choose between visual voicemail and tethering or consider jailbreaking my iPhone.
A search on Google points one to the website which holds mobileconfigs for most global cellular providers. Downloading and installing the appropriate profile enables whatever support is needed. (It's also how one enables T-Mobile's MMS and Internet support rapidly.)
I’m gearing up for some travel so revisited the topic of tethering. I was stunned when I spoke to AT&T tech support two days ago and they told me they support tethering. How did I miss this?! Then the guy said I had to jailbreak my iPhone. It seems weird to have tech support recommend jailbreaking. I guess that’s a result of the AT&T/Apple love/hate relationship.
They shouldn't be telling people that because (a) that doesn't require a jailbreak and (b) jailbreaking is technically a contractual violation. That could get that CSR in trouble. NOTE: I'm all for jailbreaking; my iPhone certainly is. I'm just being pedantic.
I tested it last night at home, but the real test was this morning. I stopped for coffee at Peets, booted up Windows, tethered my Nexus One, opened a ssh session, and drove to work. At every stoplight I verified my ssh session session was still active. I was reading email, surfing the Web.
Reading mail and surfing the web WHILE DRIVING? That almost sounds responsible. ALMOST.
I really don't see what all the fuzz is about in regards to jailbreaking iPhones. Doing so doesn't seem to cause substantial harm to daily operation. In fact, it enhances usability even more since it allows applications that would never make the App Store, but are incredibly useful, to get installed (ex. SBSettings, which makes toggling all sorts of stuff dummy-proof and FAST, MobileTerminal, Veency for remote control, OpenSSH for obvious reasons, etc. et al). It's not hard at all to do (though it does make upgrading more cumbersome; hardly a disadvantage, though --- wait, isn't jailbreaking an iPhone easier than rooting Android?).
For every feature X, obviously there will be one phone company that does it best. Apple have only managed this with one feature. Most phone companies have managed this with large numbers of features. What's special about Apple here? Does every feature deserve a patent, because someone does it first?
Well, let's see:
A phone with a more-than-decent media player (look at the alternatives on Blackberry, Windows Mobile, even Android, and tell me they're smoother or as well integrated)
First platform with a centralized location to download applications easily (i.e. NOT Mobiledia, AvantGo, et al)
Renders the web probably better than any device which preceded it (most other browsers on comparable phones were good until they crashed, and boy did they crash often).
There are things that the iPhone doesn't do as well (like email and mobile document/spreadsheet editing), but considering that it was a device that was squarely targeted at the consumer base that doesn't really care about those things, it was a SIGNIFICANT win for the smartphone industry. The fact that practically every touchscreen smartphone out there is benchmarked against it shows just how influential it was.
Are you seriously arguing that because a company did it first, it must be non-obvious and hence patentable? (Hint, there will always be a first device to have any feature.)
Didn't read through all of the patents, but if I had to speculate, I wouldn't be at all surprised that the iPhone contains some truly unique patents, many of which would probably be crossed-over from OS X.
I just love the way that Apple fans grasp at multitouch, just because it's the sole thing it did first. Even though that's old news now (what did the later Iphone models do first?) It would be like trying to argue the benefits of the N97, based on what Nokia did first 5 years ago.
Incorrect. We actually like how our iPhones are super smooth to use, easy to download apps to, fun to use (because there are way too many games for it) and make pretty good phone calls. They even crash elegantly! (i.e. no error screens or harsh restarts like experienced on Windows Mobile and Blackberry)
Yet meanwhile, all the basic features that the original Iphone lacked were handwaved away as unnecessary.
They weren't. Tons of people were complaining about the lack of copy-pasta goodness and Exchange email.
Slashdot Mirror
Made a big mistake in my post: IP addresses, like anything else over the wire, are represented as 32-bit binary strings. The dotted quad format is just to make them more usable for us humans. I think the point is pretty clear; they don't have to just be integers.
Take that a step farther: anyone that does any sort of TCP/IP or sockets programming knows this, since IP addresses are naturally represented as hexadecimal to fit the four-byte long IP address field in the packet header. (Remember, int datatypes are four bytes long by themselves, whereas char datatypes are a byte (eight bits) each.) Getting dotted quad is as simple as inet_ntoa(struct in_addr *in).
This is just not as well known because IP addresses have been used for so long now, most people forget what they really are...
[citation needed]
Incorrect
A bash command line (and Unixlike filesystem structure)
Cygwin...have ya heard of it? Pretty good stuff
a web browser that's actually standards-compliant (and was the first to pass Acid2),
a) Right, because every web developer develops for SAFARI. What's Internet Explorer?
b) Let's not forget how many people are switching to Firefox on the Mac...
c) Let's also not forget that MOST people don't care about ACID compliance...
Exposé,
But ALT+TAB's worked fine for years! Flip 3D works pretty good too
a journaled filesystem,
Great improvement; totally worth $129.
built-in support for reading and saving PDFs,
Because the free Adobe Reader sucks oh so much
and lower system requirements
at the cost of not-so-old Mac's that are rendered unable to run certain versions of OS X just because Apple says so
are all things OS X has had since before 10.4, and Windows 7 still doesn't have.
Does it really matter if an OS includes those things, when they are freely available and the more important problems (like usability, stability and security, all of which have been improved significantly since Windows 2000) have been fixed anyway?
Let's not forget the rosy parts of upgrading on the Mac, such as having to shell out whatever Apple's asking price is because of programs forcing these upgrades, all while rendering older, but perfectly capable, Macs from installing some of these upgrades without XPostFacto or similar hacks (if they work at all). Most programs on the Windows side support Windows XP, a ten-year old operating system at this point. Many popular OS X programs support 10.4 or newer, which is way younger than that.
Some lecturers/professors go the extra mile to make attendance mandatory for all students. For instance, one of my recitation teachers this semester mandates attendance by distributing an in-class quiz that cannot be made up. I don't really mind as I think these quizzes help improve grades, but it wouldn't be so bad if her lecture style wasn't completely mind-numbing (which is mostly one-way. disengaging and can be downright condescending at times, though I don't blame her reasons for being like that).
Remember, these are the same professors who don't understand that boredom is incredibly more powerful than it appears, and that uninspired students will find other ways to zone out of boring lectures.
Bullshit. Installing the OS and drivers will take at least that long. Also, you need to consider amount of time to research what chip you want, and which motherboard it fits into, with which graphics card, etc.
If you have all of that lined up, it's really not that much work. Of course, if you don't have the time or can't be bothered to do that, then getting a preconfigured computer is probably a better option.
Or I guess I could pirate it..sure, but what if we want to be legal.
Uhh...that's the point behind what I said
Don't really need FatWallet...even Microsoft has information on where students can find discounted pricing (information here). If that doesn't work, a Google search reveals TONS of information.
Yeah, Macs are 'dumbed down' as far as the OS goes and they're not the cheapest machines available but for some people they are perfect. A flat out recommendation to ignore them is not good advice.
As poster said above; they aren't 'dumbed down' as much as they are 'easier to use.' Just because something is easier to use does not automatically mean it's been dumbed down.
I haven't built a PC in 10 years. I probably won't ever again. Too much effort
It only takes about an hour once you've done it at least, what, twice? I built a PC a few months ago for a friend, and it only took me an hour once I had everything together...and that was without having built a PC for years before that.
too expensive due to getting sucked in to going for higher-end components
Nope; that's all you, my man. HTPCs cost about $300 to put together...all with good hardware.
too much effort with unreliability
What?
too expensive to buy an OS (no, I don't want to us Linux any more either)
Find a student and have him get you Win7 for $50 shipped. Find a student with MSDNAA (a little tougher; HINT: There are quite a few on here, guaranteed) and get it for nothing.
I'm quite happy to buy a mid-range Dell if I'm worrying about price... at least everything has been tested, and it's one place to go if something fails. If price isn't an option, or I want something that just works really well, then it's a Mac all the way thanks
That's perfectly fine and respectable, since warranty is much better with both of those companies. However, you might want to consider the possibility that maybe you were just doin' it wrong at first and never got the help to fix that.
I would not recommend buying a Mac - I bought one because that is the only way to develop for the iPhone/iPod Touch (still haven't gotten around too it). It is true Mac offers little options. Some Mac junkies like to argue that you get the best technology, and you get what you paid for - however, since you are on slashdot, chances are you will not like the 'dumbed-down' approach Mac OS X takes. As with desktops, the only upgrade path is buy a new Mac (unless you have a Mac Pro), limiting your opportunities to add a new video card, or maybe an additional hard drive, etc.
Not sure if you looked into this, but if your computer is compatible enough, you could have just installed OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard straight on it. Some computers need slight modifications to make it work great; others aren't worth the effort. I did this with my Dell Latitude E-series a few months ago and enjoyed the experience! (I've also heard that iPhone development on an OSx86 box is possible.)
...because it will most likely get hacked just like the Kindle and iPhone were. Unless by some miracle the iPad becomes un-'jailbreakable.'
What are you talking about? I can finally run Vista with that! If I'm lucky, I might even get Aero!
Good orators can present regardless of the medium. Folks that are bad with PPT are more than likely bad at other forms of presenting too, so don't think crippling Powerpoint and forcing a throwback will change anything.
On your last point, keep in mind that Microsoft has all the potential to export MOST of their key (and, thus, show-stopping) Office functionality right to the web...while making it work with IE6 somehow. (I hope they don't, though; IE6 really needs to die.) That and its absolutely competitive price of NOTHING will probably sink GDocs like a lead weight when they release it.
Changing the port might be troublesome if you're trying to SSH from public locations like airports and such. They usually leave port 22, 443 and 8080 open for their own services and block all others, so you will have to either set up VPN to get into your servers or wait until you're elsewhere. Additionally, an evenly-slightly determined hacker can still find where your sshd process is listening on by running a basic nmap scan.
Key exchange and disabling root login is probably the best way to go. Fail2ban worked really well when my server had a Linux distro on it.
Where in the article does it say that the government official was taking the girl to a bathroom? The person who dubbed the video assumed that he was doing this, though the staff at the restaurant thought different. Section reprinted below:
THE PLUM GARDEN Seafood Restaurant stands on a six-lane road that cuts through Shenzhen, a fishing village turned factory boomtown. It has a subterranean dining room with hundreds of orange-covered seats, an open kitchen to one side and a warren of small private rooms to the other. Late on a Friday night in October 2008, a security camera captured a scene that was soon replayed all over the Chinese Internet and sparked a human-flesh search against a government official.
In the video clip, an older man crosses the background with a little girl. Later the girl runs back through the frame and returns with her father, mother and brother. The subtitles tell us that the old man had tried to force the girl into the men’s room, presumably to molest her, and that her father is trying to find the man who did that. Then the girl’s father appears in front of the camera, arguing with that man.
There is no sound on the video, so you have to rely on the Chinese subtitles, which seem to have been posted with the video. According to those subtitles, the older man tells the father of the girl: “I did it, so what? How much money do you want? Name your price.” He gestures violently and continues: “Do you know who I am? I am from the Ministry of Transportation in Beijing. I have the same level as the mayor of your city. So what if I grabbed the neck of a small child? If you dare challenge me, just wait and see how I will deal with you.” He moves to leave but is blocked by restaurant employees and the girl’s father. The group exits frame left.
...
While Netizens saw this as a struggle between an arrogant official and a victimized family of common people, the staff members at Plum Garden, when I spoke to them, had a different take. First, they weren’t sure that Lin had been trying to molest the girl. Perhaps, they thought, he was just drunk. The floor director, Zhang Cai Yao, told me, “Maybe the government official just patted the girl on the head and tried to say, ‘Thank you, you’re a nice girl.’ ” Zhang saw the struggle between Lin and the family as a kind of conflict she witnessed all too often. “It was a fight between rich people and officials,” she says. “The official said something irritating to her parents, who are very rich.”
How is this any different from collaborative e-stalking?
This has been done before, at least here in the US. The most recent example I can recall was one woman being accused of "threatening" to murder her ex-boyfriend using mortuary lab equipment (article here), when the sole evidence for this accusation was from a Facebook status update. Additionally, while China has their "BBS"es, we have Facebook, which is essentially human flesh-search made (sort of) easy. This would have catalyzed the manhunt against the husband in the article, since him and his ex-wife would have most likely been Facebook friends, and people could have collected information from using whatever was on his profile (unless he kept quiet on it, something not many people do).
But if you read the article, you would see that he goes in depth about actually developing for both platforms. Windows Mobile was actually pretty good on that front, but wouldn't be better than Android because:
And 150% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Pandora for the iPhone is so well-written, it's practically a secondary music application for many folks. Many of the popular games on there work pretty well (and are lots of fun too!) and several of the applications I've downloaded have been pretty high-quality (read: few crashes, all of which are related to Safari hogging up memory and the memory being way too limited in the first place). I would be skeptical of thinking iPhone apps are pretty crappy when many, many people have at least four pages worth of apps on their phones.
Mod parent up. This is not troll material; in fact, it has a really good point.
I don't know enough about Android to really comment on other aspects of usability, but this article mainly compares development between both platforms. To be frank, though, I don't think the Android Alliance had to do a lot to be better than a system that only allows developers to code on OS X with a language that's almost entirely bound to that platform and under the control of an authoritarian and seemingly draconian submission control system.
However, under the Android platform gains critical mass (which the Droid and the Nexus One, to a lesser extent, are trying to do), the best bet to gaining lots of visibility and/or profit is by developing for the iPhone. /. though. :p)
The article is pretty comprehensive; I recommend it. (Probably means nothing here on
I second this wholeheartedly. I switched to virtual desktops just a few days ago, and it has not only cleaned up my desktops significantly, but has also provided much needed organization while I'm working. (General stuff on one desktop, programming stuff on another, other work on another, etc.)
VirtuaWin is good; highly recommend! Microsoft's PowerToy...not so much (uses the same Start Menu across all desktops)
Not a particularly interesting article, but I'm eating dinner and my brain is sizzled, so why not?
Then it all came crashing down. iPhone 3.1 came out. I had to choose between visual voicemail and tethering or consider jailbreaking my iPhone.
A search on Google points one to the website which holds mobileconfigs for most global cellular providers. Downloading and installing the appropriate profile enables whatever support is needed. (It's also how one enables T-Mobile's MMS and Internet support rapidly.)
I’m gearing up for some travel so revisited the topic of tethering. I was stunned when I spoke to AT&T tech support two days ago and they told me they support tethering. How did I miss this?! Then the guy said I had to jailbreak my iPhone. It seems weird to have tech support recommend jailbreaking. I guess that’s a result of the AT&T/Apple love/hate relationship.
They shouldn't be telling people that because (a) that doesn't require a jailbreak and (b) jailbreaking is technically a contractual violation. That could get that CSR in trouble. NOTE: I'm all for jailbreaking; my iPhone certainly is. I'm just being pedantic.
I tested it last night at home, but the real test was this morning. I stopped for coffee at Peets, booted up Windows, tethered my Nexus One, opened a ssh session, and drove to work. At every stoplight I verified my ssh session session was still active. I was reading email, surfing the Web.
Reading mail and surfing the web WHILE DRIVING? That almost sounds responsible. ALMOST.
I really don't see what all the fuzz is about in regards to jailbreaking iPhones. Doing so doesn't seem to cause substantial harm to daily operation. In fact, it enhances usability even more since it allows applications that would never make the App Store, but are incredibly useful, to get installed (ex. SBSettings, which makes toggling all sorts of stuff dummy-proof and FAST, MobileTerminal, Veency for remote control, OpenSSH for obvious reasons, etc. et al). It's not hard at all to do (though it does make upgrading more cumbersome; hardly a disadvantage, though --- wait, isn't jailbreaking an iPhone easier than rooting Android?).
Here's some troll food.
What has that got to do with anything?
Lots; explained below.
For every feature X, obviously there will be one phone company that does it best. Apple have only managed this with one feature. Most phone companies have managed this with large numbers of features. What's special about Apple here? Does every feature deserve a patent, because someone does it first?
Well, let's see:
There are things that the iPhone doesn't do as well (like email and mobile document/spreadsheet editing), but considering that it was a device that was squarely targeted at the consumer base that doesn't really care about those things, it was a SIGNIFICANT win for the smartphone industry. The fact that practically every touchscreen smartphone out there is benchmarked against it shows just how influential it was.
Are you seriously arguing that because a company did it first, it must be non-obvious and hence patentable? (Hint, there will always be a first device to have any feature.)
Didn't read through all of the patents, but if I had to speculate, I wouldn't be at all surprised that the iPhone contains some truly unique patents, many of which would probably be crossed-over from OS X.
I just love the way that Apple fans grasp at multitouch, just because it's the sole thing it did first. Even though that's old news now (what did the later Iphone models do first?) It would be like trying to argue the benefits of the N97, based on what Nokia did first 5 years ago.
Incorrect. We actually like how our iPhones are super smooth to use, easy to download apps to, fun to use (because there are way too many games for it) and make pretty good phone calls. They even crash elegantly! (i.e. no error screens or harsh restarts like experienced on Windows Mobile and Blackberry)
Yet meanwhile, all the basic features that the original Iphone lacked were handwaved away as unnecessary.
They weren't. Tons of people were complaining about the lack of copy-pasta goodness and Exchange email.