The thing is, the phone built on the foundation of the Apple Newton and what they learned from that.

I think a lot of that knowledge went fallow and they mostly started from scratch.

it isn't like Steve Jobs was seized by inspiration, locked himself in his office for a week and then walked out with a fully functional iPhone

Only die-hard Apple Haters (of which Slashdot holds many) ever come up with drivel like that, meant to belittle others who have the audacity to like something. People like you though seem to want to pretend the whole thing was just about that easy to produce, to make sure Apple gets no credit whatsoever for the work that went into it.

No more imperial shit.

Oh, just wait until the NeoCons hear about this rocket.

It'll decrease their backhaul capacity, but few people even care and fewer still will do something about it. Heck, it took me three months to bother renting a VPS to do it and I already had all the skills.

A CA is going to give Verizon a cert such that they can mint a cert for any domai. and remain trusted in device root stores? Don't be a fool - it's completely different than a corporate device. Google Diginotar.

Nope, you've proven you're a typical moronic American who thinks there's a difference between the "blue team" and the "red team".

The LG Prada was like the other smartphones of the day, but used touch (NOT multitouch) instead of a stylus. There was nothing about it like the iPhone save for superficial appearance (and some of that was obviously tweaked in response to the iPhone pre-launch demo).

Perhaps your problem is the definition of nothing, but to me that part is accurate since Apple did not sell any kind of phone or touchscreen device up until that point... and it really was a dramatically different device than any smartphone sold at the time.

From the standpoint of what Apple had done until then, it was from nothing. Resource wise, they had some money coming in from the iPod at that point, but they were tiny compared to all other companies making smartphones at the time. Lots of people dismissed the chances of Apple's making any kind of dent in the market based on that alone...

This is exactly it, in my opinion. Democrat voters are idiots who will back anything their Dear Leader Obama does, even when it was something they were bitching about during Bush's reign.

And Republican voters are just as stupid. They're now bitching about things that they were perfectly OK with when Bush was doing them, but now that Obama is doing them, they're up in arms.

This is because the crowd you hang out with is not representative of mainstream America. These polls are important because they show what the majority of Americans think about things, and those people are who vote for our leaders. Your little peer group does not have sole power to choose our governmental leaders.

What this shows can be argued different ways. Are young people these days generally more conservative than older people? (seems unlikely) Or is it because they're aligned with the Democratic Party, and since that party is currently in power in the Executive Branch, and their Dear Leader is all in favor of NSA spying, they too are in favor of it? Personally I think it's the latter. Americans are really stupid politically, and simply choose a "team" and then mindlessly back anything that team does. If Obama came out in favor of tax breaks for the rich and against abortion, Democrat voters would adopt those positions immediately, while if the Republican Party suddenly came out in favor of gay marriage and abortion rights and extremely progressive taxation (i.e. rich people would be taxed much more heavily), Republican voters would immediately adopt those positions too.

From an engineering perspective, it's not that big of a change

Well that certainly begs the question as to how Blackberry, Palm, Motorola, and Microsoft all missed such a small change...

If Apple did something that was a tiny change then you are inferring every single one of those companies is run by gibbering idiots.

Personally, I think better of people in those other companies - even Microsoft.

Boy, that DOJ was sure in the pocket of Apple!

The same DOJ that sued Apple for collision against Amazons over powerful monopoly...

Oh wait.

I wonder how much of this is a lack of decent alternatives which are well-marketed, versus simple cultlike behavior.

Think about it: if you want a PC-like computer, what are your choices? There's Apple which is well-marketed and attractive and shiny (but has downsides which aren't as obvious unless you're really familiar with the industry), there's Microsoft-driven PCs where you have to use shitty Windows and deal with all its annoyances, and there's Linux where there's pretty much no one actually pre-installing it and marketing it to consumers (plus there's a ton of different graphical environments, and the two most publicized ones are radical departures from Windows/Mac and have a lot of usability issues, and the one which is a great fit for Windows converts is simply ignored by the Linux community for some reason).

Maybe if there were another company making PCs with an attractive, stable OS which was very usable and could market it decently, we'd be seeing more people abandoning Apple.

This analysis of course is for PCs, not mobile devices. But over there the situation isn't much better; there's Android which has huge marketshare but still you have to deal with a complete lack of support after you buy the device, and then there's Windows Phone which is tainted by everyone's memory of Windows and MS problems. But still, Apple has lost a lot of marketshare in the phone market (though some of that is simply due to the market expanding, and Apple not aiming at the lower end).

If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

It kind of makes you wonder what the problems would be like if there was another 2-300 Mhz of bandwidth available -- ie, if all the issues are ultimately caused by limited RF space and the many kludges and speedups applied to overcome this.

Part of me thinks if the standards bodies would refuse extensions that attempt to go faster by using wider channels or channel bonding (thus maintaining a larger number of unused channels), it would be useful.

But the cynic in believes it would just be an arms race by vendors to bypass the standards bodies to come up with new ways to bond channels for "ZOMG! Megabitz!" advertised performance and do all kinds of stupid things in an attempt to hoard RF space for performance even if most devices wouldn't use it.

Pointers, please. That would be ideal and far better than having to use a virtualization layer.

There is no excuse for having congestion in your network on a daily or weekly. It can happen once in a blue moon when a line becomes unexpectedly busy, but it should never be the normal mode of operations.

At least not in a pretend-first-world-country where it is easy to lay backbone fiber.