Wow ... I had to switch from my iPhone to a BlackberryBold 9700 for corporate use today and so far I've been hating it. The SW on the BB feels cobbled up (eg. the various desktop manager 'modes' put the BB in different 'modes' vs a unified conduit in normal mode + special bootloader mode). Plus with this stupid BIS layer in the middle (+1 point of failure) vs all-IP mode of the iPhone ... well I'm not too happy. This "BB=Corporate" & "iPhone=fun" image needs to change .. the iPhone does all of that plus remote flash etc. Seriously, as an embedded programmer coding stuff in assembly and C (low levels) I dislike the BB from a technical perspective ... forget human interfaces!
Now .. waiting for BIS to come up ... :( ... unhappy switcher ...

BTW, when I say "disabling hardware" on the 360 ban I mean disabling the ability to use your hard drive on your (banned) console. Sure it still powers up etc ... but they just made a decision on your hardware!

I'd hate to think what would happen if Apple disabled all jailbroken iPhones! (powers up to a "Your modified iPhone has been disabled. Please buy a new unmodified iPhone (visit www.apple.com/iphone)" or something).

Stop the service, not the hardware.

NOT being able to access a service in the future seems about ok for a ToS violation.

BUT disabling or crippling YOUR hardware could very well be an area where the ToS may stretching itself. Also, the ToS is not a law, it's merely an agreement. An agreement although legally executed could very well have illegal/"extra legal"/unenforceable terms in it ... happens quite often. Then it's for the courts to decide what should/shouldn't be enforced given society's preference. The beauty of democracy - love it!

Before you get upset, imagine if Dell/Apple could disable your entire computer system because you didn't use a Dell/Apple branded hard drive/monitor etc. Sure they can stop their warranty (service) but disabling your hardware wouldn't be right, right?

Of course, the clause about timing of the ban sounds ridiculous !! I'm wondering if it's just a marketing plot ... you know, any publicity is good publicity.

You know, NOT being able to access a service in the future seems about ok for a ToS violation. But disabling or crippling your hardware could very well be an area where the ToS may stretching itself. Also, the ToS is not a law, it's merely an agreement. An agreement although legally executed could very well have illegal/"extra legal"/unenforceable terms in it ... happens quite often. Then it's for the courts to decide what should/shouldn't be enforced given society's preference. The beauty of democracy - love it!

Before you get upset, imagine if Dell/Apple could disable your entire computer system because you didn't use a Dell/Apple branded hard drive/monitor etc. Sure they can stop their warranty (service) but disabling your hardware wouldn't be right, right?

Of course, the clause about timing of the ban sounds ridiculous !! I'm wondering if it's just a marketing plot ... you know, any publicity is good publicity.

@Johnny K: You're a d!ck and a brainless one that too. India's GDP is growing and is currently larger than Britan's (but not the EUs). And considering that most of us in the US and UK still can't find enough qualified college graduates, the trend of outsourcing white collared jobs (tech, biotech, business) to India continues. And if you think it's cheap labor, you should look at the cost structures of some projects. Labor is cheap but there are plenty of labor markets cheaper than India at this point (yes, they won't work for cheap anymore). Over the last 30 years they've managed to generate a very large number of highly educated individuals. No business is going to pump $$$ into a foreign place if the returns on that $$$ are going to be weaker than local investments (since collaboration costs are non-zero)

FYI: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2001rank.html?countryName=India&countryCode=in®ionCode=sas&rank=5#in

Not to mention with a population of 1.2billion, evolutionary reproductive processes dictate sooner or later some of those 1.2billion (or their descendants) will be f***ing you (or your descendants).

I guess I see your frustration ...

Nopes ... I'm hoping they fix multitasking in OS 4.0. The Pre does it very well when you switch from calendar -> browser -> email when responding to an email and you need to check your calendar + some details on the web. My friend has pre and I played with it.

The Pre and my 3GS have the same processing power, so it can't be a h/w limitation to "do it". Apple is probably working out the software side of things out ... As a CS major I know multitasking isn't easy but I thought Apple had already solved that problem in Darwin/Mac OS X...

But yeah, valid point and so far we're still waiting!

For those who lost data today from AT&T (eg. using an iPhone with the more expensive corporate, non-iphone data plan), please read http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=799787 and then hit http://www.benm.at **from your iphone** (use wifi since your data service is down)

In short you need a new modified AT&T IPCC, which you can directly download to your iphone from http://www.benm.at ... I've not examined the difference between the old and new settings ...

It's stupid that AT&T want to tie down the plan with the phone ... Just give us a pipe and get paid for that. Comcast or Roadrunner don't tie their service plans to your desktop or laptop models.

Anyway, I'm still on 3GS, 3.0.1 + jailbreak + custom IPCC. I'll let others beta test the 3.1.x series and figure out getting the jailbreak and IPCC settled. If it aren't broke, don't fix it ... 3.0.1 = good so far!

Well, the weirdest thing is that the Swastika is a holy symbol for the Hindus for over 3000 years!! About 3000 years after that symbol was adopted, along came a German jackass (aka "Hitler") who thought he was an Aryan (Aryans are an ethnic race, from Iran to India) and adopted one of the Aryan symbols, the swastika. W-T-F?

To understand how weird this is, Imagine for a brief moment, that Hitler had chosen the holy christian cross for his symbol ... would we still be banning all artwork which bore the holy cross? I wish history were like "Inglorious Basterds" ... or if Truman had dropped the A-bomb on Hitlers ass. The monster ...

Well I drive a manual (Porsche Carrera) and an automatic too (BMW). There is no comparison between the driving experiences (apples to oranges in my opinion) but to intentionally drive a manual in city traffic jams is ... not a wise decision. It's pure masochistic! If you must prove yourself try autocross or track days ...

Folks driving manuals in insanely congested areas are (mental) wimps and those driving automatics otherwise are wimps too :P !!

@LaughingMan: Actually if you look in the context of the whole power budget. the duty cycle increase for the additional read time is negligible (concurrent DMA scheduling) when compared to the efficiency of the decoder implementation on the DSPs or ARM processors. MP3 has been around for a while and Apple's tuned the heck out of their AAC decoders ... I don't know if they've tuned their lossless to the same extent so I would expect more power "loss" in the decoding. I haven't seen the Apple implementation (how could I!?) nor have I measured the current consumption waveform in different situations - but I've implemented low level DSP decoders for mobile platforms - the largest source of power drain on new codecs has always been inefficient early implementations ...