Please fix the title change. 'Trivial' and 'elementary' have specific meaning in mathematics and are not interchangeable. Roughly speaking, 'trivial' means easy or obvious, while 'elementary' means a proof that does not use complex analysis or higher techniques. This proof is elementary but definitely not trivial.
It might be that the Siri functionality is tied to the A5 chip. The A5 design is a lot larger than other dual core ARM A9 designs (even after accounting for the larger GPU) and thus has lots of spare silicon to use for specialized circuits. It is possible that Apple added a custom DSP to aid speech recognition.
Except that Windows vs Mac was something like 95% to 5% in favor of Windows, while the smartphone market is likely to end up more like 60% to 30% in favor of Android. The situation is different qualitatively.
The data consistently shows that iPhone share is growing, just not as fast as Android.
iPhones get a much bigger subsidy from the carriers. This can be deduced from the ASP that Apple, HTC, RIM etc report. iPhone ASP has always been $600+, while HTC, RIM have ASPs around $300-400 (Samsung smartphone ASP is even lower). This can also be seen by looking at contract prices outside the US. For example, in the UK all phones can be had free on contract, but the monthly amount you pay for an iPhone is much larger than for a top of the line Android (see the O2 or Vodafone UK sites).
The reason this is not reflected in the contract-less prices is because US carriers have a very strong incentive to inflate them to force you to choose contracts.
Actually, in your link above, iPhone 4 prices start from $859. $719 is the price of the 3GS.
I don't know how it is in Australia, but the contract price discrepancy between Android phones and iPhones is well known in England. For example, O2 sells the Galaxy S2 for free with a 24 month £42 plan, while the 16GB iPhone 4 is free on a 24 month £67 plan.
The Galaxy S2 plan gives you a bit more data, and you do have more flexibility with Galaxy S2 plans - you can choose to pay more for the phone and less for the plan for example. (Of course, you also have a big choice of cheaper Android phones too).
I must disagree with the Organic Chemistry bit. I took advanced organic chem as an elective in college and I absolutely loved it. Yes there are a lot of different reactions, and there is some memorization involved, but there is a very beautiful theory unifying so many diverse reactions and the focus was always on understanding the reasoning why and how those particular reactions occur (reaction mechanisms). Once you knew the basic facts, then solving problems involved a lot of deductive reasoning (in positing new mechanisms) and creativity (in building new compounds using known reactions).
i agree. my organic chemistry course in college was great. i attribute it largely to the fact that we used morrison and boyd as a textbook - they take great pains to present organic chemistry as a cohesive whole, with a solid structure built up step by step, rather than a hodgepodge of memorised reactions.
The FAQ has nothing to do with it. Nobody is contesting that cell tower location information is being used. The differing claim is this: the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are those of the device itself and these co-ordinates are possibly calculated using cell tower triangulation, while this blog post claims that the co-ordinates logged are those of the cell towers themselves rather than the device.
Because for a given timestamp, the iphone logs dozens of cell towers. So while you might be able to tell I was in Pittsburgh on Monday, you won't be able to figure out what address I was at.
but isn't the important thing whether or not these are public or private, and whether you have control over them? the precision of the location may affect some use cases, may not affect others, but doesn't strongly affect why this is important or not (on the other hand, it;s the kind of thing people can have a nerd fight over, which seems to be a big attraction...)
I just used the original headline from the blog. You're correct that it makes sense in context, but that is why the "recording your moves" part is in quotes. It's a direct quote from the O'Reilly headline.
Anyway the larger issue is that it is not clear exactly what information is being logged. We know some location info is vulnerable, but exactly what and how much? The O'Reilly researchers really should have done a better job. The least they should have done was to run some controlled experiments with a freshly wiped phone.
I'm not the author. But I believe the O'Reilly researchers claim that the co-ordinates logged are of the device itself. It is not clear at all that this is true and the author of this post presents some evidence that would suggest otherwise.
Sure, the article is a reasonable refutation to that part of the O'Reilly claim, and that is an important fact to clarify.
The article goes further though, and claims it's "not 'recording your moves'" and is just a "general place at a general time". I don't you can say that point-blank. As stated, I think that it's going to be entirely location-dependent as to whether the database can be treated as a "record of your moves" or not.
The author says he was using his phone and the GPS often.
If they wanted to track your moves and you have turned on the GPS, why doesn't it just, y'know, use the GPS data? Instead Apple tries to track your moves using cell towers?
Seems like the only way this would be a record of your moves would be by coincidence.
To quote from my original comment:
Apple probably didn't set out to track users ... That doesn't mean the data won't be enough to track movements in urbanised areas.
Whether this is really a scandal, I don't know. But it certainly seems surprising to me.
My understanding is hte iPhone doens't actually have a GPS receiver in it at all. It only uses a fuzzily defined "assisted GPS" which is basically based completely on 3g towers.
The original iPhone had no GPS and always used cell tower triangulation. This varied a lot - I remember in Manhattan, NY it could track me almost to the street number; on the other hand I once turned it on in a moving car in rural NSW, Australia and it drew a circle approximately 500km in diameter.
The device location is not logged in this database at all.
What it does is log the locations of all cell towers that it can communicate with at a point in time. So for a given timestamp, there will be dozens of points logged. So while the data will be able to say "You were somewhere in downtown Pittsburgh at 1:59PM on Monday", it won't be able to say "You were at 517 Liberty Ave at 1:59 on Monday." Also, timestamps for existing towers are updated whenever they are mapped an additional time. So if I was downtown again on Thursday, no one would be able to tell from my data that I had been there on Monday.
See my previous comment in another thread for more detail:
[Microsoft is] dictating rigid specs for 7 Series devices (a specific CPU and speed, screen aspect ratio and resolution, memory, and even button configuration), and doing away with carrier or partner UI customizations such as Sense or TouchWiz. That's right -- there will be a single Windows Phone identity regardless of carrier or device brand.
So all Windows phones will look the same and work the same. I'm skeptical that hardware manufacturers will be enthusiastic about Microsoft turning their products into commodities again. Unlike the situation with PCs, this time they have a viable alternative in Android.
The partners are probably just happy that they didn't get fucked over by a 1st party Zune Phone.
Microsoft has had several such projects in their recent stable of inept Mobile OS + hardware dev teams (along with several non-phone Zunes, WM6, WM6.5, several reboots of WM7, the Sidekick, etc.).
Google's doing a ton of meddling with their hardware partners, as they can withhold their apps (Maps, Gmail, Voice, etc.) to get their way, but even then they keep getting fucked on basic stuff like putting the hardware buttons in the same order, much less the insane issues with backporting software updates! It looks like MS is trying to dodge all of that up front.
