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This and Panmans comments were my first thought when I read that piece. I like the SIM card. When I went backpacking round the world I was able to pick up a pay as you go SIM card from a local store in any country, load it with credit and pop it in my phone and I'm all good to go. None of this sharing information from my phone business. You don't need to know my identity or payment information. I don't want the hassle of calling customer services in a country where they speak very little english because all of a sudden I have had £50 taken from my account due to some set up issue or whatever.

Anyway, as panman says, i think it will cause the opposite effect. Didn't the original GSM phones work in a similar way, with no SIM and some sort of mapping to a phone number at the carrier end? What is the likelihood that the carriers would remove the ability to change carriers, pretty high i'd say.
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cheapass website because they look for the cheapest deal...

Why is this wrong. I don't see anything wrong in this.

Don't deals work around the world. Haven't you heard of sites like groupon?
Depending on how you look at it, there can be many benefits, but as with most technologies, they're contextual.

CDMA uses 1.25MHz channels. That can be limiting in some ways, but advantageous in others. When deploying UMTS channels, AT&T or T-Mobile would need to clear out 10MHz of spectrum. Back when 3G wireless was first getting off the ground, it was decently common for a carrier to have below 30MHz in a market. To give two examples, Sprint and T-Mobile both had an average spectrum depth of around 25MHz. Sprint was able to get out of the gate fast on 3G requiring only 2.5MHz (around 10% of their spectrum) to deploy. T-Mobile had to wait until it purchased new AWS spectrum years later. The UMTS channels would have taken up 40% of their spectrum. So, it was difficult to clear out enough space to deploy UMTS. You were basically taking a third to half of your spectrum and making it unavailable for current customers. Then, as you launched the network and started selling 3G devices, customers would start moving their usage to the new technology. EV-DO (the CDMA data standard), on the other hand, only required a carrier to free up 2.5MHz of spectrum to deploy 3G. Even today, it can be an issue. As the number of GSM customers dwindle, AT&T and T-Mobile want to allocate more spectrum to UMTS. However, they can only do that in 10MHz chunks. They don't get to say, "ah, there's 3MHz that we should move to UMTS".

Likewise, because UMTS does voice and data, it meant that carriers had to install SS7 and mobile switching gear to handle the voice. EV-DO was an all-IP network that wasn't going to handle voice. While that could be a disadvantage in some ways, it provided the benefit of being easier to deploy in terms of equipment.

Taking that a step further, the lack of a voice requirement for EV-DO meant that they could launch a network in a much more piecemeal fashion. If one launched a UMTS network with lots of holes, call quality would be poor. Sure, calls could hand-off to GSM, but they might have a "1-bar" UMTS signal with crummy call quality while GSM users got excellent quality. Back then, if data didn't work or was delayed a bit, it didn't matter that much. People used data infrequently compared to calling and call reliability is what people paid for.

It should also be noted that when EV-DO was first deployed, it was faster than UMTS. UMTS R99 had a peak data rate of 384kbps, well below the 2.4Mbps of EV-DO Rel 0. Now, the wider band of UMTS made it more future-proof, but initially EV-DO looked very good.

To be fair to UMTS, I could talk about problems with CDMA as well. CDMA offered a bit more of a practical, easier transition to 3G for carriers. It's narrower channels made it easy to carve out spectrum, the fact that there wasn't a voice component meant that less equipment was needed and it didn't require the same initial reliability, etc.
Main difference is that the zlib license does not require you to ship the copyright from non-source distributions. It's essentially "I don't need credit, as long as you don't say you made it yourself".
marketing at its best, last time i checked apple wasn't the first company to "think different" and soon another company will be disruptive and force apple to move in a new direction or new markets, thats just how the world works.
> I guess it was just a poor choice of words, but that was my point to begin with.

This is all called being pedantic. The idea was sound, and, let's be honest, unless you are completely obtuse (and, just to be clear, I don't think you are), I can guess that you understood what he was trying to say. But, you still had to provide a correction.

It's not you. You aren't the only one to do it here. By our very nature, hackers can be very pedantic.

Next time you read an article, and you have the sudden urge to say "Actually..." to correct a single thing, spend a moment to make sure you understand the context. What's the real idea?

Not everyone is going to be an excellent writer. Let's focus on the message, not the poor choice of words. =)
Cool looking but it just slows the site down. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Ya man, fuck economics.
Americans don't know that because their phone companies forbid that practice. AT&T doesn't even bother to move your SIM card from your old iPhone to your new iPhone when you upgrade, they just give you a new card.
I was responding to the "virtues of craftsmanship in a world of mediocre, mass-produced ...", which is not Apple's.
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Wow, she has a pretty impressive catalog of executing on ideas (even the bizarre/wacky).
Especially give the sheer number of apps out there and reports of apps doing more than they should, as well as users blindly installing apps with higher permissions than they actually require. This would get exploited very quickly no doubt.
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> but probably more than one can output from a small backpack of batteries like in the vid ;)

Actually, Lithium-Polymer battery packs capable of a sustained output in excess of 2kW weigh only a few pounds.
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It was copied in a few hours - not made - the design itself surely took longer than that.
In the UK now (possibly the EU) at the end of your contract (normally 18-24 months) the carrier has to unlock your phone now, my brother just came to the end of his contract and had his iPhone unlocked for free.
Similarly, many businesses will delay providing contractual services (with no apparent explanation or excuse).
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Completely agree. I am supremely confident that given the size of the market and the pace at which it is changing it is a great place to start a company. Also somewhat curious as to why lot of people are being so skeptical about it.
For those of you, like me, who are curious about the difference between RISC and CISC, here's a gentle introduction:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/pr...
Ask HN: Are YC events open to every startup?
We are EU startup that will apply for (YC S12), but if we are not selected can we still participate in some YC event during the 3 months cycle? We would love too!
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This is great, but if you've ever seen any of the Apigee slide decks on API design you won't see anything new.

Also, remember that these are "Best Practices". Which means that sometimes, after a lot of thought, you might need to do something different.
Maybe he's referring to the last line: We hope this book helps carry that spirit forward.
My understanding from a friend in the telecom business is that, because the network operates at higher power, you need fewer towers for the same coverage area as GSM (GSM has a limit of something like 30km from a tower). And it tolerates multiple users in the same frequency space better than GSM and is less prone to interference from terrestrial radio signals.

edit: here's a great comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_mobile_phone_stan...
Sure US consumers are generally ignorant about the ins and outs of subsidized hardware, and they take 2-year contracts as a matter of course. But there's no reason a lot of people wouldn't pay full price if the economics were laid bare.

For instance, when I tell my US friends that I pay £15 / month for unlimited data, 300 mins, and 3000 texts on my iPhone with tethering in the UK, it blows their minds. The fact that I can hop over to another country, buy a sim card for 10 bucks and instantly have data without having to sit on hold and beg a customer service rep to unlock my phone and then wait weeks is another huge bonus that any internationally traveling American can appreciate.

The only problem right now is that major carriers have a good thing going with overpriced contract plans and see little reason to offer reasonably priced pay as you go, thus giving Americans the impression that mobile service is inherently more expensive than it is and believing that they are getting a great deal with subsidized phones. But with globalization this illusion is bound to come crumbling down sooner or later, and customers will demand more.
I'm wondering how is this very different from MS Office vs. LibreOffice...

Granted, latest incarnations of MS's products are a bit different with the (crappy) ribbon and all, but LO is quite similar to previous versions of Office.

And I'm talking both about UI, design and functionality. Think Excel/Calc functions, for example.
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Well I'm glad that they feel competent with web APIs, because their web UIs are a bit confusing. My brain flagged their download links as an ad and skipped it and went straight to the image saying "Download Now" beneath, which required putting in an email address (thanks, Mailinator!) which was originally flagged for spam -- and then the resulting page's PDF download was blocked by the Firefox pop-up blocker. Left me with a sour taste in my mouth for whatever the rest of these folks have to say about web APIs. Granted in some sense it's a communication error and it's thus "the fault of both of us" and I can't be excused for my own stupidity -- but it still felt like a pain.
This comment could easily end up generating 50% of the comments here, while adding nothing new that hasn't been said before, just the same old accusations and defences. Would that really be signal? Or noise?

And does this pompous letter from Jobs add anything new that hasn't been said before? This post is the same as any other Apple aggrandizing post here, of course the comments will fall into the same old tropes, but I hardly think icode is the one opening those floodgates.

Here's a thought: is that bad? I mean, isn't this exactly what HN does? If we actually wanted to hear something that hadn't been said time and time again, we sure wouldn't be looking for it on HN (unless we found HN in the last month or so).

Your remark on signal v noise really got me thinking. I think my time here has expired, there is no more new signal to be found, just the same old same old framed in whatever current event or blog post we're talking about. I came to HN this morning to kill time while my roommate is using the shower, but now I'm going for a bike ride instead and stop visiting this website anymore. Bye, Hacker News, it was fun while it lasted!
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Guys, if someone dangled something in front of you with the initial impression that you could have one, and you wanted it, only later to find out that you actually can't have it and that those who could have it are "intelligent and witty", implying that you are not, then I think it's pretty safe to say that you'd run home, cook something similar up and run back to show that you have one now too.

In fact, after reading the original article, I felt a bit slighted and thought to myself "fine, I'll just build it myself".
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I'm fascinated by the fact that this topic is so close to Copyright/RIAA/MPAA, but the discussion is wildly different.

It is hard to tell if all the people who jump to the defense of Curtis are also defenders of copyright for music and films, but judging from the comment distribution I think at some people here have to be hypocrites.
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The article refers to changing the world and is illustrated with a photo of Ghandi. I don't know about you, but I get a strange feeling when Ghandi is used to illustrate the values of a company that is exploiting poor people to make toys for rich people.
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Copy my idea, not my design (or what I learned from Obtvse/Svbtle)
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1. Clearly its Chrome.

2. Nothing is exciting me, not even Google+ or Android. I wish I could get excited about Google+. I wanted Google+ to work out so bad, I even went as far as trying to join the team (before the product was even announced to the world) when I had my stint at Google (by the way, everyone internally was running away from it, I think its funny. They had to be strong armed by the power on high's reallocation of resources).
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I couldn't agree more.

This is an utterly toxic set of circumstances. While YC is utterly brilliant, Hacker News is so full of haters that it's downright... uninspiring?

What happened to being a supportive community that encouraged people to develop interesting things, helped one another, and could congratulate one another for our successes?

Jealousy doesn't really look good on anyone and it's unfortunately become this community's defining trait.
Python is such a better language for teaching programming and CS fundamentals than Java or C++.

There is of course a case to make for teach C , ASM or LISP first.

Trying to teach something like OO best practices will be lost on students if they haven't done enough programming to understand code complexity and why OO might be a useful paradigm.

Java is especially bad because you need to use the static keyword as well and the System.out object just to get "hello world" working
Dymanic pages properly programmed could and should send this headers. Also some frameworks and/or proxies manage this for you.
(http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/pirated/)

Mentions this screenshot:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/)

See also the (now dead, unfortunately) pirated sites.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/piratedsites/)

(http://www.pirated-sites.com/)
OT: Ghostery picked up 19 scripts on that page. I think that is a personal record, at least for HN links. Holy Fuck!
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Dustin Curtis' outraged seems somewhat bizarre for someone whose blog/Twitter logo is an obvious rework of the Flash logo:
https://www.google.ca/search?q=flash+dc&hl=en&safe=o...

https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1902246181/logo10.png

Not that I fault either designer. I think they've both taken previous work, improved upon it (or at least altered it), in some way before releasing it as their own. I suppose I have trouble feeling sorry for Dustin after reading he planned to open it up to those he thought worthy of its use.
The problem basically is the belief that there is runaway success in web/iphone/android app start ups and anything else will require a lot of work.

This forces people to spoil their thinking that there is easy money in such places. Most people don't know they are getting into Schlep blindness(http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

I know a lot of guys who think they can become millionaires the moment their MVC site goes live. This is the problem.

In general cases. Building anything awesome is difficult, not just in India but any where in the world.

Building things which bring value is even more difficult. Building things which bring value both in physical existence and software requires lot of work and patience.

Unless people understand this, things won't change.
Can someone copy-paste what was originally here? This discussion thread makes no sense at all.
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What you just said improves upon the original criticism immensely by being much more specific and tying the ideas together.
Mr. Birman's argument is so idiotic that he looks like a shill for telcos.
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I could be wrong, but I suspect the legitimacy or illegitimacy of copying design is a red herring here.

Perhaps svbtle's invite-only status made people feel like outsiders, perhaps something you've done in the past rubbed someone the wrong way - either way, I suspect the personal dislike comes first and the justification for the action comes second. If the design of a much-beloved figure here was stolen, I suspect the reaction and the arguments in the thread would be very different.

Stanley Fish wrote an interesting opinion piece recently about this impulse, applied to politics:

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/two-cheers...
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Your metaphor is wholly flawed. This would be like if you wanted to get in to a restaurant because of the great food, decor, and excellent ties the waiters were wearing, but couldn't get in. So you went next door and created your own restaurant with the same recipes, decor, and ties on the waiters, but let anyone in.

Building something with similar functionality is one thing; building a stem-to-stern carbon copy is just low class.
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in a world where fox news is taken for face value by many people, credibility is losing its credibility. at least someone is looking for more information.
People with those kinds of janky priorities aren't going to make anything that's meaningful.
So, what's wrong with that? I'd eat at the second restaurant in a heartbeat if getting into the first is too much of a hassle. You would too.
How is Obtvse, in any way, an improvement upon or alteration of Svbtle? As far as I can tell, it's a 1:1 clone, but "open".
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I prefer the Realbasic model, where 90% of everything is easy, 10% is hard, and you can compile cross-platform.

The thing that floored me with VB was it is was easy to write apps but surprisingly painful to deploy them (DLL hell initially, and then increasingly horrible installation).
I hear Apple and patents have a good track-record of ending up as standardized, reusable technology. A very good track, record indeed.

If this has been already patented by the Cupertino-based patent-troll, it is by definition doomed as a standard.
One additional issue is certain countries (eg: India) require a photographic ID, etc before they issue a SIM. This is becoming a larger issue in Europe and elsewhere.
In 6 months, after Svbtle has grown a bit, I'm going to give you a list of the new features. I'd like to see you build a great UI around them in a few hours.
It's not a 1:1 clone. Put them side by side and you'll quickly see differences in font choice and size as well as positioning of several elements. I'm not saying it's not similar, but it's certainly not a clone.

And I'd like to think that being open-source is a huge feature of Ovbtuse, and something certainly worth noting when comparing the two.
This kerfuffle is amusing on a site that believes copyright violation is a moral imperative.
So you want the good thing to be freed, but the free version to be not-similar?

That strongly implies the free version will be not-good, because there are many more ways to be not-good than to be different-good.
If I paint Starry Night from scratch, entirely by myself, it's not my work. It's a rip-off.
I think most people feel the same way. This elitist circlejerk stuff is annoying.

Dustin has a way of stating what is supposed to be gleaned. If you meet someone who is very charismatic and cool and has a great circle of friends, you might say to yourself "wow, that guy is pretty cool." On the other hand, if you meet someone who's kind of cool but then they flat out tell you "yeah me and my friends are pretty cool, we're kind of a big deal" then you're gonna think they're douchebags. It's false social proof. It's fake.

In a similar light: If this "network" would have been put forth as some kind of synergistic combination of great content, cool ideas, new technologies, etc.. then the community would automatically judge them on those merits and give them the cool stamp. In this circumstance, however, this "elite" blogging network has, without any real honest credibility[1] just made the rest of the confident hackers in this world irritated.

I don't think Nate set out specifically to plagarize Dustin's work. Rather, I think his primary goal was to send the message that so many people on HN and in our community think. And that is the message put forth by the parent comment to mine.

[1] That being said, it's obvious that some of these guys are big parts of our current and modern web/startup ecosystem. I'm not faulting them specifically.
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You make an awful lot of assumptions about how others would act. I definitely wouldn't eat at the second restaurant, because they'd be scumbags for ripping off the first restaurant and I wouldn't want to support them.

Exclusivity is not a license to, nor a justification for, outright copying.
You now understand the current practice of intellectual property law.
This guy so doesn't get it. It's almost as if he is trolling.

SIM cards (as implemented everywhere in the world except the US) is made to allow exactly the portability which he seeks.

I fail to see why it is even linked here.

Edit: Also why is he illustrating this with an iPhone? Is it for lulz that he in the name of advocating openness links to the closest closed phone of all out there?

I'm voting troll here.
In Australia, you must provide ID to purchase a SIM card. Whether it is pre-paid or post-paid. It is illegal to sell a SIM anonymously. I guess this is for law enforcement reasons, and that they wouldn't like to lose the ability to match a SIM with a citizen quickly and easily.
In the US, indirectly. Verizon tends to have the best coverage in many parts of the country.
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I think that there's a distinction to be made between copying code and copying design.

Design is hard, and even though a design might be quick to implement in code, that doesn't mean the design was easy.

Just look at the Samwer brothers - they clone every good startup that comes out. Is what they do okay? Maybe they don't copy any of the code from the successful site, but they shamelessly copy the design, which is often the hardest part of the creation process and the main reason why the original site was so successful in the first place.