Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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Geez
[Read the article: Another iPhone feature -- it crashes!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why take things so personally? Apple had to ship the iPhone - the downside of having the greatest evangelist since John the Baptist as your CEO is that the hype spins out of control so fast no one can stop it and you simply can't miss dates. And maybe it wasn't quite ready to ship. Microsoft pushes dates all the time because they can. Apple can't.
Again, Apple is not perfect. They are far more mercenary than people give them credit for. They could have shipped the iPhone with EDGE capability, the EDGE network was there, but they didn't, and the reason they didn't was because they want to have 4X faster internet in their pocket for the next version so people who bought one now will have a compelling reason to buy one then.
Should we expect more from an iPhone than a Treo or a Blackjack? Yes, because Apple controls their entire environment - that's part of what you are paying $500 for, and if you don't get it then you got cheated, at least a little. AT&T isn't writing patches for the iPhone like all carriers do for every other smart phone in existence. Apple writes all the code, with a single hardware platform and a single carrier to consider. Much simpler than anything running Windows or PalmOS, so you should be able to reasonably expect better, more reliable performance.
Is this Apple bashing? Not at all. Just reality. In fact, I don't know anyone who simply doesn't like Apple or their products. But there really isn't anything special about Apple or its products.
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Physicists want to be famous, too
[Read the article: We are meant to be here]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And the quest for fame instead of knowledge usually leads to circular, self justifying stuff like this.
This is about religion, and only about religion, but the religions involved are physics and mathematics. Wolfram has theorized that the universe is completely non-random, that anything can be predicted, including the stock market and raindrops hitting a parking lot. A lot of what he has published parallels what Davies says, the difference being that Wolfram actually offers proof - he has successfully predicted hundreds of complex and seemingly random events which occured in the past using his algorithms. Davies offers "the universe exists because the universe exists, and relying on outside factors is too inelegant to consider seriously". No reason is given for why outside factors are enathema, any more than Judeo-Christians give a reason why God created the universe. He thinks its sloppy, so its sloppy. Not an anthropic universe, but an anthropic theory. He attempts to offer an explanation of Wolfram that moves everything back to his baliwick - the predictions were successful because of Wolfram's observations -without ever mentioning Wolfram, which shows that there is a likely a large political/religious element here.
He says, at the same time, that cause and effect is a purely human construct which has no real bearing on physical reality, that cause and effect works both ways in time and is critical to the formation of the physical universe we live in, and that cause and effect are irrelevant when it comes to the actual formation of the universe. Talking out of 3 sides of his mouth - a neat trick sure to get him millions in federal grant money.
The least egregious logical blunder in this whole thing may be his assumption that all life must be carbon based. Again, completely anthropic and unscientific. We don't even know if all life in this universe is carbon based, let alone infinite alternate universes (universii?).
In this particular religious war, I have to side with the mathematicians. At least they offer proofs instead of justifications for speculative rants.
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Ahem
[Read the article: Another iPhone feature -- it crashes!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is a reason why Microsoft gets a break from knowledgeable reviewers on any 1.0 product they release - anyone who has been paying attention for the last 5 years knows that a 1.0 from Microsoft is exactly that, and that 2.0 or 3.0 is going to be the industry killer. MS doesn't expect to sell very much of any first release, they expect feedback, which they then act on in order to drive Sony or Lotus or Netscape or whoever their target is that day out of the industry. Is this fair? Not to people who buy 1.0, but then neither is Apple's habit of making 1.0 obsolete before you get to pull that transparent blue shit off your shiny new gadget. But the MS approach ultimately gives us the best products, and early adopters are financing and enabling that process. Apple does a lot of things well, but nobody listens better than Microsoft.
Having used EDGE as well as other networks, including Verizon and the not very good Cingular network that all iPhone users are stuck with until they buy the next version, I can tell you that EDGE is by far the best of the bunch. Crazy fast and highly available. Some of us don't live in Seattle and don't have WiFi available everywhere (anywhere, really, in this area - Miami has maybe 200 free WiFi hotspots serving 3 million people). Some of us want to access the internet and email from moving vehicles. Some of us haven't drunk the Kool Aid, and refuse to let Steve tell us what to do and what's best for us. Refusing to include EDGE was bullshit, and trying to excuse it is ridiculous. "In my opinion EDGE sucks, so we just won't offer it". What will you be saying when they do offer it in 6 months?