On Mar 30, 1:33 pm, Casper Bang <[email protected]> wrote:
> Are you telling me you don't
> think the bezel looks clunky by Apple's normal aesthetic standards?

One, call me a sucker for Apple, but I find the iPad beautiful.  Two,
I trust Apple of all companies to design a useful product (they have
been accused of many things, but "clunky" and "hard to use" seldom
pops up).  Three, from what I can see on the specs page, the bezel to
the left and right side of the iPad is about 2.1 cm each (or about 0.8
inches for our non-metric friends), which is actually about 0.1 cm
more than the bezel at the top and bottom of the iPhone.  So you as a
proud iPhone owner can hold the iPhone in landscape mode and get a
feel for holding the iPad.  ;-)  That may not be enough bezel for my
clunky hands, but they probably account for this in the software
somehow (ignore certain, permanent touches at the edges of the screen
where your hands could lay).

> When you buy a new computer and plan to hook it to the Interwebs, do
> you also sign a contract with the Internet carrier that says you may
> only use this computer and these applications with it?

I did - my DSL contract from late 2005 stated that using more than one
computer was forbidden.  I think they dropped this about two years
ago.  I'm pretty sure that most ISPs have these "reasonable use"
clause in there that allows them to kick out the about 10% of their
users that occupy 90% of the bandwidth with file sharing (a person I
know is a heavy downloader and got offered a couple of hundred bucks
for not extending the ISP contract and never using any services of the
company again), so using too much peer-to-peer downloading is
effectively banned.  Sometimes they ban or hinder VoIP (see
http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/08/skypes-ceo-talks-about-accelerating-innovation-and-who-stands-in-its-way/),
sometimes they block other stuff (I can't do SNMP, but that's actually
my router blocking it).

It's Economy 101 - with an "all you can eat" data plan, an ISP assumes
a certain volume per customer and loses money if you use more.  So
apart from kicking of the customers that cost them hundreds of bucks
each month, they try to limit the devices - not unlike the "all you
can eat" restaurants that put up signs of "In order to keep our
prices, please don't take food for customers that didn't pay, and
don't take food home".

> Where would we be today, if things were like that?

Things _are_ like that with "all you can eat" plans, it's just the
limits on cable/DSL/fiber are much more relaxed compared against
cellular networks because transmitting data in cellular networks is
much more expensive.  When you violate the conditions of any of these
fine products (download too much, use too many devices, use VoIP), the
carrier / ISP loses money and will make you pay one way or another.
Now I wish I would pay 30 Euro a month and get unlimited data on my
PC, laptop, PS3 and iPhone without any restrictions, but providing
high-speed Internet access is very expensive, so I don't see this
happening anytime soon.

And before you say it - no, this does not answer the "Apple controls
which apps I can get, and we don't censor movies or games, and I can't
find any porn with iPhone/iPad web browser" complaint that's all the
rage these days (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/
Joining-Google).

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