RE: Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win

I recommend that you read Greed kills: Why smartphone lock-in will fail and open source win yourself, but to summarize, esr predicts that iPhone OS vs. Android will play out the same way that the early PC wars played out back in the day.

There are two things I think are relevant to this argument. One is the recent Apple-HTC patent suits. The other is giving a definition of "win" and "fail". I won't comment on the patent suits because I have no expertise whatsoever there, and those I rely on to digest such things for me haven't had time to comb through the details of the patents yet. The fact that the suits exist though seems to be a significant departure from how things played out in the PC wars.

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124 / 365: I Ate This

124 / 365: I Ate This
Originally uploaded by Chris Hlady

I had a lot of work to due this evening, so it had to be a quick shot tonight (huh... starting to feel like that every night).

45 / 365: Necking

45 / 365: Necking
Originally uploaded by Chris Hlady

Is it so wrong that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this?

Re: Apple's Mistake

I've been reading a lot of blog posts during the last year about how bad it is that Apple acts as a gatekeeper to the App Store. I don't mean to suggest in this post that Apple's system is without its flaws, but I don't believe the situation is as bad as all these prominent developers make it out to be. I say this both as a user, and as an admittedly inexperienced developer. One thing that is a problem though is that it has taken this long for Apple to address the concerns of the developer community. While I think the individual problems are somewhat overblown, there clearly is a problem. I'm not so sure the solution is so easy as many developers make it out to be though. There are tens of thousands of developers, more than a hundred thousand applications, and tens of millions of users. Any changes have to satisfy lots of paying customers.

There are a number of common threads in all the discussion about how bad it is:

1. You can get rejected for no reason whatsoever.
2. It takes forever for an application to get approved.
3. It is evil of Apple to act as gatekeeper -- regardless of the implementation.

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iPhone 3G dead out of warranty

White Screen of Death

The other day I went to check my messages on my iPhone and was greeted with a white screen with vertical colored bars. The iPhone appeared to be functioning, as I could hear the sounds when swiping to unlock and receiving e-mails even though I couldn't see anything. Hard resetting and doing a factory restore failed to fix the problem, so off to AT&T I went. They informed me that if there are problems after 30 days I need to contact Apple directly. I called Apple from the AT&T store, and was informed that I activated the phone exactly one year earlier. This meant that the included one year warranty had expired :-(

Buying a new phone?

Fortunately, AT&T offered me an early upgrade, AND Apple offered to make an exception and repair / replace the iPhone. I chose the latter, shipped it off Tuesday, Apple diagnosed the problem Wednesday and FedEx estimates I'll have a replacement Friday. I'm glad that everything worked out, and thankful that both companies offered to help me out even though they were under no obligation to do so. Thanks AT&T! Thanks Apple!

Replacement iPhone 3G

This is the second time Apple has offered to repair a product out of warranty, which makes me a happy customer.

My MacBook Pro display is garbled :-(

Oh NO!

A few hours ago I was using Safari to do some reading and Finder to re-organize some files, and noticed some graphical glitches. I wasn't doing anything cpu or graphic intensive, and hadn't seen something like this happen before so I was a bit concerned. Further, I've now had my macbook for 14 months -- 2 months longer than the one year warranty it comes with. Not good.

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