Comment Re:The good old days... (Score 4, Insightful) 388
Bullshit. You can pay top prices for these flights, and you're still on those same planes. Fact is, unless you rent a private jet, you can't buy your way to a pleasant flight any more.
Bullshit. You can pay top prices for these flights, and you're still on those same planes. Fact is, unless you rent a private jet, you can't buy your way to a pleasant flight any more.
This article was surely published in 1965, right? I can't even get the attendants on AirHate to whip a bag of soggy pretzels in my direction these days. What's this nonsense about actual food on a modern aircraft?
Yep, Hitchhiker's it is. Figured somebody had to represent HG2G fans in this apparent sea of Trekkies.
...a nice, hot cup of tea?
Indeed, the look of the Prada does foreshadow that of the iPhone, but while it LOOKS like an iPhone, it was really just a feature phone with a touch screen (not multitouch) and a few built-in apps. It replaced buttons with on-screen icons, but that was about it: no app store, no full browser, nothing that would make one call it more computer than phone. Basically, a very car-looking buggy. (Meanwhile, Palm's Treo line was still the "smartphone" standard at the time -- all engine, no sleek automotive buggy, though).
Speaking NOT as a fanboy, but as a gadget fan:
In hindsight, it's easy to say the iPhone is just another smartphone, but at the time it was introduced, it was nothing like any phone that came before it. Yes, its individual features -- touch screen, icons, internal antenna, multitouch UI, etc., all existed -- but until the iPhone came along, they had not been put together quite like this before (To use the hackneyed "car" metaphor: wheels, internal combustion engines and axles predate the automobile, but this doesn't mean the car was nothing new when it came along).
Just look at marketing materials from the major carriers in 2006 -- flip phones and candy bars were the typical (practically only) form factors available before the iPhone was revealed in January 2007. It took very little time for all that to change, but when it comes right down to it -- there was nothing akin to the modern smartphone before the iPhone.
It's pretty silly to suggest today's wide array of multi-touch handheld computers have nothing to do with its design and success.
Deficits will never go away, and neither will the fact that the sun will eventually incinerate the earth.
Just because you can't balance a checkbook doesn't mean nobody can. Deficits CAN go away; It's not magic; it's restraint.
I certainly hope we haven't reached a point at which nobody believes problems can be solved without alien intervention.
Unlimited AT&T users still can't use tethering -- even if they'd agree to pay extra for it (They need the not-quite-unlimited-take-it-bitch-take-it plan for that). It will indeed be nice to see what competition does in this space. Both providers have their share of baggage, but at least now there's competition. But what will we do with http://www.thisiswhyiphonesucks.com/ now?
As a developer for both Android and iOS (and a few other mobile) platforms, I can say this is already an issue with Android (from a dev's perspective, at least). While "choice" always sounds good for consumers, the only real choices are usually pre-made by carriers and handset manufacturers, leaving the consumer with little more choice than they had with previous generations of phones (Motorola's RAZR had a pretty good Wheel of Fortune game "app," too).
Although the Android emulator is fine for quick checks, a viable Android product must be tested on a growing number of handsets and other products, making R&D for a new app MUCH more time consuming and costly than that of its iPhone counterpart (Even if you only wanted to support a single device, choosing to support only the latest iPhone 4, for instance, still gives one a much larger target audience than choosing only to support the latest Samsung Galaxy model on a particular carrier).
And supporting a commercial Android app is a larger undertaking too -- more like that of traditional PC development, in which one might expect to deal with a variety of hardware or setting possibilities, but nothing like traditional mobile or game console development -- in which one can expect some level of uniformity among systems.
In other words, iPhone developers can much more easily and affordably offer quality apps at lower prices than their Android counterparts. I'm not saying it's impossible to offer the same quality of user experience across the board, but it is without question a larger undertaking for Android development. And eventually, this WILL affect consumers, too -- either by limiting the size of their pool of quality apps, or by increasing the cost of these same apps.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken