Wireless syncing and simultaneous apps on the iPhone. Apple’s phone is chock full of ways to communicate wirelessly—the iPhone has Wi-Fi, a cellular chip, and Bluetooth. Yet to sync my phone with my computer, I’ve got to physically tie the two together with a cord, which I’m pretty sure is how people connected things back in the days of ENIAC. You might call me a whiner—after all, it’s not that hard to plug one thing into the other. But it’s something you have to do, whereas if the iPhone synced with my PC wirelessly, all of my music and contacts would stay synchronized automatically. Say I rip a new CD to my computer—why can’t it just send the music over to my phone, wherever it is? It’s 2010: I shouldn’t have to connect things with wires. (And what about charging the battery? That should be wireless, too—like on the Palm Pre.) Quantcast Another thing the iPhone needs: a way to run multiple third-party apps at once. Unlike on your PC, where you’ve got lots of programs running in the “background”— your IM program is just sitting there waiting for someone to send you a message, for instance—the iPhone can now run only one program at a time. Apple has long insisted that its single-task design is a feature, not a bug; your phone would slow to a crawl if you could run lots of programs at once. There’s some merit to this argument: Multitasking does seem to slow down the iPhone’s rivals. But there’s also no doubt that multitasking would improve a lot of apps. Music programs like Pandora are pretty useless on the iPhone right now, because you can’t listen to something while also, say, typing an e-mail. Apple can surely find a way to add multitasking while keeping your phone running swiftly—for instance by limiting the number of programs you can run in the background or automatically closing down programs that are hogging too many resources. The iPhone is a mobile computer, and it’s time it began acting like one.

rIl suffit donc d’un seul hypocondriaque pour priver des centaines d’étudiants d’un service aujourd’hui essentiel. Mais, surtout, on s’aperçoit, en relevant les profession des plaignants comme des militants, bibliothécaires, documentalistes, sociologue, artiste-peintre, architecte, que l’éventail des humanités figure presque au complet. L’intérêt ne réside pas tant dans le fait qu’aucun d’entre eux ne dispose de la moindre qualification technique pour appuyer ce qui ne relève que de la conviction. L’intérêt, c’est que cette opération vaniteuse et symbolique, dans laquelle une catégorie sociale pourvue d’un fort capital culturel de nature traditionnelle, qui lui permet donc de récuser une technologie dont elle se passe d’autant plus volontiers qu’elle remet en cause sa position sociale, justifie, comme toujours, son action par le précédent de l’amiante, et n’éprouve donc aucun scrupule à abriter grâce à la souffrance des autres son égoïste confort bourgeois.