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Fast forward to 2006... we have the Samsung Q1

And here we have a Samsung digital photo frame that looks very much like an iPad. The "sleek featureless design with rounded corners" idea predates the iPad and iPhone by a long way.

Take a look at this concept device from 1994, for example. Black, rounded corners, screen nearly to the edge, no front buttons...

Apple's entire design philosophy and many of its products were ripped off from Braun by your logic.

That's not comparable. Also, MS would by no means be guaranteed to succeed at monetizing it. Recall that Google makes less on Android than on iOS:

http://gizmodo.com/5897457/google-makes-four-times-more-money-from-ios-than-android

They were coasting on Windows XP for over a decade.

Windows XP was released in 2001 and Windows Vista 2006. Microsoft didn't coast, the users sure did though (with many home users and businesses still holding on to Windows XP) and no matter how you cut it five years is not a decade.

It wasn't until Apple starting to pose a threat with Mac OS X

OSX isn't (nor was it) a threat, it has less than 10% of the desktop market share here too, which until recently was less than Vista alone. If you want to compare particular versions of OSX it would be 10.5. Your threat argument might be better if it were referring to iOS on mobile devices. There also seems to be a lot of backlash over Lion.

Similar story with the Zune, Windows phones, and now tablets.

They've had success with the Xbox 360 and hardware. Microsoft had some dud launches and dysmal releases for certain but they're not alone in this. Apple has had its share of defects most recently with their iPhone4 antennas and blaming users for holding the phone wrong. Here is a nice list of some Apple failures.

Without realistic battery life estimates and a price this might have well be Vaporware.

Why? Fan-boys seem well prepared to forgive Apple for any battery problems. Why is it suddenly an issue for Microsoft?

No, it's a Lee Clow daemon. man clowd. Psft.... n00b!

Although I both loved the idea of the courier (details here: http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet) and understood the idea of cancelling the project, I'm not really sure I understand your reasoning. Why would a tablet, or the double-screened-courier for that matter, not fit in directly with the Windows and Office cullture?

Bill Gates did not like the concept. It was too different from his concept of what a tablet should be.

See:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-20128013-75/the-inside-story-of-how-microsoft-killed-its-courier-tablet/

Although I both loved the idea of the courier (details here: http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet) and understood the idea of cancelling the project, I'm not really sure I understand your reasoning. Why would a tablet, or the double-screened-courier for that matter, not fit in directly with the Windows and Office cullture?

You say: "I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP."

The apps which already have Android and/or iOS support, which you also want WP support for, may be obscure in terms of the ones you as a person are particularly looking for. However, there are a whole host of non-obscure apps supported on Android and iOS, which are not supported for Windows Phone yet.

Angry Birds Space. Temple Run. A banking app for Chase Manhattan bank. Instagram. Any Zynga app - Words with Friends, Draw Something etc. Pandora.

Dropbox is an app whose whole point is to be cross-platform. That they don't think WP is worthy of a port yet is a sign.

There's a Nook app for iOS and Android but not yet for Windows Phone, although I'm sure the $300 million deal Microsoft made with Barnes and Noble six weeks ago will change that. At the moment, Lumia owners are still out of luck due to the deal. It just goes to show that popular apps are not written overnight.

Is there a database app that can handle Microsoft Access files on Windows Phone? AFAIK, there is not. There is one for iPhone and Android. I should know, I wrote the one for Android. If you want to search through a Microsoft Access database file on a mobile phone - with Microsoft Access being included in most of the Microsoft Office suites I've found at large companies and universities - you have to buy an Android or iPhone.

All of these are all popular apps on iPhone and Android which are not on Windows Phone. Then there apps which have been ported to Windows Phone, but which reviewers say are much worse than their iPhone and Android versions. Rdio is one example, according to Techcrunch and Gizmodo reviewers - they love the Android and iPhone version, but think the WP port is sub-par.

Let me just take some of these out of order.

They are a platform that developers can't really avoid because they have most paying users.

[citation needed]

Just because they paid for a mac doesn't mean they will pay for your software. Every mac community I've been a part of has had rampant piracy. They are usually super-hypocritical about it at their UG meetings, though. Once I asked a guy I knew who worked at Adobe to hook me up with ATM, I couldn't afford it so I definitely wasn't a lost sale, he said no, he was stacked full of warez so he was just being a bitch. Pretty sure that guy ended up running off with my record collection from circus.com, he came back to get his old records and mine disappeared too. I'm looking at you, parade.

And the Mac gets closer to that vision with every release. http://gizmodo.com/5885837/this-is-how-apple-will-block-unapproved-apps-with-mountain-lions-gatekeeper

You really quoted a gawker article? You hopeless tool.

Firefox is banned from iOS App Store and every day a new story of abusing a developer is in the news.

Good thing there's an alternative that many find to be not just equal, but superior, which is available at a lesser cost.

Their biggest contribution of making lockdown DRM acceptable is going to have a lot of repercussions in the long term.

People are finding it less and less palatable. Apple is I think inadvertently doing us a favor because people get grumpy when Apple prevents them from doing things.

> If you want me to agree that Apple has done as much harm as Microsoft, you're going to be a long fucking time ranting.

Well, maybe they haven't done as much harm as Microsoft yet, but they're getting there and will cause immense harm in the next few years.

They essentially implemented Microsoft's Palladium letter by letter and made it socially acceptable and very very cool. They can't even keep the iDevices on the shelves, people are falling over each other to buy them. The same pundits who railed against Palladium now can't praise the iDevices enough.

And the Mac gets closer to that vision with every release. http://gizmodo.com/5885837/this-is-how-apple-will-block-unapproved-apps-with-mountain-lions-gatekeeper

Firefox is banned from iOS App Store and every day a new story of abusing a developer is in the news. http://rogueamoeba.com/utm/2012/06/08/in-response-to-mr-schiller/

Their biggest contribution of making lockdown DRM acceptable is going to have a lot of repercussions in the long term. And none of that "not a monopoly" BS please. They are a platform that developers can't really avoid because they have most paying users. Also, three companies having 30% marketshare and allowed to lock down everything doesn't help things rather that one company having a monopoly. Look at the US wireless carriers for proof.

If, however, you're writing this from a personal computer, smartphone, tablet, or anything with a GUI, then you must be a huge hypocrite, since you owe it to Steve Jobs for bringing those tools to the masses.

Mod parent Funny!

Oh shit, you were actually serious?!?

It is truly amazing the mythology you people have built up around this guy. He did not single-handedly invent the modern age, fanboys...

Forget Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs was the real electric Jesus!

Slightly more people pirate it than actually watch it legitimately. http://gizmodo.com/5916885/more-people-pirate-game-of-thrones-than-watch-game-of-thrones-on-hbo

I think the bigger news, not covered by TFA, is that more people are actually pirating it than are watching it "legally." That is a bit of a surprise to me.

I'm going to be generous and guess that that means about the same number of people would be interested in watching it, but don't want to pirate AND don't have HBO, so it's possible that HBO is only getting about a third of the eyeballs it could.

Well, this is a semantic argument.

The fact is that Oracle was trying to clobber competitors with the "Intellectual Property" card. This time it happened to be a company that has made something in the past. It's just a matter of degree from an outfit like Technicolor which made stuff in the past but is now a full fledged patent troll by any definition. If Oracle stops producing stuff and does the same thing then they'll be a patent troll too.

but isn't that 8 flavors? (2+2)*2? Or does processor architecture not count as a flavor?

And here we see one of the biggest examples of how "consumer" Linux likes to shoot itself in the foot: noting differences for the sake of noting differences (could also be interpreted as being too proud of how nerdy it is).

Linux Mint is arguably as mainstream and consumer oriented as Ubuntu (also with fewer polarizing design "features" than Unitybuntu). Yet if one compares the summary, or the quoted post to something like Windows 7, and what do you see?

The six flavours of Windows 7 in this article already seem annoying, and you notice that there is _zero_ mention of any technical details (32 vs 64 bit? processor architecture zomg hax?!) that are really inconsequential to an average consumer, only mention of what features they can or cannot access.

I think if the Linux community really wants to share the "joy" of Linux with the masses, they need to stop trying to force their own personal "joy" of being too nerdy on the masses as well.

Know your audience, and save your urges for a Gentoo summary or something, please.

One-half of one penny of every tax dollar. That's what the NASA budget is. We spend an assload more money on trying to kill people than we do planning for the future of the human race. On top of the measly NASA budget, we still have to outsource most of our space program.

Did you know the US spends more on the military's Air Conditioners than the entire NASA budget? http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget.

How much out of every tax dollar goes on keeping people in prison? From what I hear, the USA has about half the worlds prison population...

One-half of one penny of every tax dollar. That's what the NASA budget is. We spend an assload more money on trying to kill people than we do planning for the future of the human race. On top of the measly NASA budget, we still have to outsource most of our space program.

Ah, "future of the human race"? Sorry, but warp drive technology isn't exactly around the corner, and getting us to the moon isn't likely going to save a damn thing. We've got to learn to do more to save this little fragile planet we're destroying first.

Did you know the US spends more on the military's Air Conditioners than the entire NASA budget? http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget.

Gee, only a few billion people on Earth and thousands of computer systems that rely on A/C...go figure the priority. Would you go to work for a company with no A/C? Would you buy a house with no A/C? How about a car?

When YOU can't even prioritize things above A/C, don't expect others to, and don't be so shocked when they don't.

One-half of one penny of every tax dollar. That's what the NASA budget is. We spend an assload more money on trying to kill people than we do planning for the future of the human race. On top of the measly NASA budget, we still have to outsource most of our space program.

Did you know the US spends more on the military's Air Conditioners than the entire NASA budget? http://gizmodo.com/5813257/air-conditioning-our-military-costs-more-than-nasas-entire-budget.

Around 2008, my local ISP was formed. Sometime around 2009 they implemented data caps of 600 MB/day, as most users didn't exceed that amount. Today, the cap is exactly the same as was first implemented.

300 GB might seem like a lot right now. Give it a few years...

Comcast, Verizon, etc -- they're all banking their entire futures on this very idea. They're hoping to get in a reasonable -- for now -- cap, and then in 5 years when our bandwidth usage is way more commonplace, welp, their hope is to get us right around the $50 a month mark... and $50ish in over usage fees a month, every month, until some external market force economically forces them to stop.

Think about it. In 5-10 years, we won't have Cable, we'll have HD Video on Demand Networks, something like Hulu or Netflix instead.

Imagine when Hulu (or rather, a Hulu competitor, since Hulu has been compromised) gets the bright idea to make "channels" where you get X number of shows at differing points of the day, all streaming via a Roku box or something similar, with the option to switch back and forth in the channel's timeline if you want. All the benefits of a standard Cable Channel for Mom and Pop ("The news is on at 7, then it's Cops, and Letterman"), with all the benefits of Video on Demand ("We missed Cops, we'll watch it right now and Letterman later tonight").

Sounds great, right? Well, it won't be once you get the $50 a month ISP bill + $50 a month Overusage bill, every month, for the rest of your life. Which the Bandwidth Middlemen are literally banking their futures on.

Or one of these

Try it, and they'll arrest you anyway.

They do it because they can. When there's six unemployed people for every open position, they can afford to be choosy. When there are 5,000 janitors in the U.S. with PhD's, they feel quite comfortable in demanding a masters degree for a position that could really be filled with a high school diploma and a couple weeks of training.

What did smartphones look like before the iPhone?

They looked like the LG Prada, which sold a million phones incidentally, the iPhone, which was announced after the photos of the LG Prada had been circulating, looks like the LG Prada as well.

What did tablets look like before the iPad?

They looked like the Knight-Ridder Tablet, which was developed by one of the largest media companies of the time. Incidentally, the iPad, made 17 years later, looks like the LG Prada as well.

Aren't all of the ultra books attempted copies of the Macbook Air?

No. There were thin ultralight notebooks, long before apple. For example, the Sharp Actius which, as CNET noted, showed that the Macbook's claim of being the thinnest notebook was nonsense
This is nothing new. All my examples (and several more) have featured before in other places including /. comments. The point is, whatever you want to call it, Apple hasn't lead the industry and they probably steal the best ideas of trailblazers to build better targeted, better marketed, products, backed by an awesome supply chain, and a pretty decent industrial design team. But they have always been evolutionary (at least recently) rather than revolutionary.

Ya know, maybe they don't "invent" things. Whatever. One can say for sure that most of the industry tends to copy Apple's, er, um, 'not inventions'. What did smartphones look like before the iPhone?

Talking 'bout Android prototypes: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006 "The baseline specs required two soft menu keys, indicating that touchscreens weren't really in the plan at all"

Ya know, maybe they don't "invent" things. Whatever. One can say for sure that most of the industry tends to copy Apple's, er, um, 'not inventions'. What did smartphones look like before the iPhone? What did tablets look like before the iPad? Aren't all of the ultra books attempted copies of the Macbook Air? For sure, Intel uses the Air as the target .

The point is, whatever you want to call it, Apple does seem to lead the industry (at least recently) and they probably do get a bit tired of seeing everyone make stuff that looks and feels like theirs.

Twitter has filed the patent, but it's still not granted.
We'll see about this patent trolling in the near future, but my 2 cents are that Twitter will, sooner or later, start trolling around. Though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

TSA thieves are an evil twist of the knife.

http://gizmodo.com/5902383/a-tsa-agent-has-been-stealing-ipads-from-passenger-luggage

Indeed
http://gizmodo.com/5700063/apple-bans-android-magazine-from-the-app-store

The question is, should apps be allowed to upload your contact data? Both Android and ios apps allow this, and some of the most popular apps do it.

"some of App Store's shiniest celebrities are among those that beam away your contact list in order to make hooking up with other friends who use the app smoother. " http://m.gizmodo.com/5885321/how-iphone-apps-steal-your-contact-data-and-why-you-cant-stop-it

I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.

You're either blind or just ignorant. We pay our dues, we give the government VAST amounts of money, with which they squander on needless wars to keep the arms and military-industrial business going.
NASA's funding is a drop in the bucket comparatively, I can see NO REASON AT ALL not to 100% fund EVERY program that comes out of NASA, considering we spend more than their whole budget just to air-condition the troops.

Don't get me wrong, I support the troops and all that bullshit, but I'm not behind the reasoning of their CO, and our congress critters.

Priorites People! Let's throw out all those gas-bags, and keep doing it until they get them straight.

Mostly because people are idiots, and partly because OS manufacturers haven't figured out how to deal with high density displays.

1) It's easy to see that one CPU is faster than another, or one laptop has more RAM or a bigger HDD than another, or that one screen is larger (in inches) than another, but most people's eyes will glaze over when trying to compare two pairs of numbers in the thousands. (Fun fact: a 20" 4:3 LCD at 1600x1200 has about 10% more pixels than a 20" widescreen LCD at 1680x1050.)

2) Even thought it was obvious that high-res displays would (should) eventually be the norm, MS and Apple both really dragged their feet on resolution independence. We had these gorgeous things (22.2", 200dpi widescreen at 3840x2400) eight years ago but if all of (or most of, or even some of) your UI elements were half the size you needed them to be, life got pretty bad, pretty quick. Ars was hopeful that it would happen SEVEN FREAKING YEARS AGO with OS X 10.4 and then again in 10.5 but... sadly, no.

Even the iPad was launched in 2010 with the same 10", 1024x768 resolution we had on the 10" Compaq TC1100 in 2003. I was really hoping the first iPad would be at least 1400x1050 or, better yet, 1600x1200. The latter would have been 200dpi and would have been awesome. (Not that I'm unhappy we wound up at 2048x1536, but 16x12 would have been very good for quite a while.) I'm not a fan of the original iPad's screen at all.

1.Run the following command in Terminal:
defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
2. Take note of the value, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
3. Proceed to step 8 if you got the following error message:
"The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info, LSEnvironment) does not exist"

If you don't get that error message, well, time to head to F-Secure for your fix. If you're clean so far, you can move on to step eight:

8. Run the following command in Terminal:
defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES
9. Take note of the result. Your system is already clean of this variant if you got an error message similar to the following:
"The domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist"

In other words: "does not exist" means you've got a healthy rig. Anything else, just keep following F-Secure's instructions to vanquish the intruder.

Truths about Apple

Focus your Facebook account on your off-hours hobby of DJ'ing for gay Jewish inter-racial couples retreats.

Then let them explain themselves if they don't hire you. They'd have to demonstrate how your off-hours activity did NOT influence their hiring process.

After they kind of implied that your off-hours hobbies WOULD influence their hiring decision.

It's a lose-lose for them. I don't see why any company with any intelligent HR person would even broach the subject of "social media" with applicants.

There are third party services that'll google you and search for public social network information. These services are the ones who see your actual information and they black out anything that is illegal to be used - i.e., if you have a normal photo of yourself, your face and hands (but not, say your T-shirt) will be blacked out to prevent revealing race, age, and gender. Any other information that reveals it will also be blacked out.

Here's an example one someone ran.

So the company can claim ignorance by presenting this stuff.

Of course, things that invalid this check would be asking for you password directly (since they could access it). Which s why these companies don't do that - they just seek out blogs, profiles and other stuff publicly accessible.

It was pointed out on an aviation site (and visible in a Gizmodo photo that the engine nozzles are set asymmetrically (left side is closed down, right is opened up). So this could indicate a problem with one (the right?) engine.

By the end of the 1960s, rock amps had achieved enough power to reach the threshold of pain. From then on, much of the "wall of amps" thing was fake. You just didn't need that much speaker area to hit the threshold of pain.

A friend of mine was a roadie for metal groups years ago, and she discovered this when setting up for Metallica. Most of the "amps" were empty boxes. At least they were enclosed boxes. In the picture above, the low-budget metal band just used fake fronts.

Apple employees impersonating police

If you have a good lawyer, you can probably sue them already. In most facebook accounts, people provide a lot of information that it is illegal for the employer to ask about - age, gender, race, sexuality. Employers can't ask these questions, and similarly, they can't ask questions that they know will reveal that information. We don't really need a new law, just a smart lawyer

It's why there are services companies can use to scan social networks - they don't ask for passwords, but given a name and address they can look up what information is available via facebook, linked in, blogs, etc.

It seems creepy, but these companies actually obscure things that are illegal. So photos of you would have your hands and face blacked out as well as anything that would give away your sex and race.

It's about the only way to prove that googling or visiting your facebook page didn't have an influence. These companies even give confidence ratings as to how likely the proposed page could be the person in question.

Gizmodo did a check of what these companies provide

I do not believe the Oval Office has had a computer installed in it. Ever. If I'm not mistaken it is an even bigger deal than the Presidential Blackberry - it could be argued that every page POTUS surfed would be recorded and archived forever...

Do you really want your President to sit around wondering why his browser is frozen?

all Gawker media sites (I'd entertain a counterargument defending Jezebel) operate on one rule: feed the trolls

Not just feed them, but actively troll themselves. Some of them (Gizmodo, looking at you) are full of the writers trolling the readers, both in articles and in comments, with deliberately inflammatory bullshit. Hell, it got so bad that Gizmodo even had to ban one of its own writers from commenting: http://gizmodo.com/5879213/i-just-banned-jesus-diaz. Is it any surprise Denton thinks commenting is useless?

If there's an exception, it's Lifehacker, not Jezebel. The LH articles rarely encourage trolling in and of themselves, and most of the asshole stuff that passes on other Gawker sites gets tossed into a pit - not deleted, but moved with a reference link - instead of mucking up the conversation.

Of course they're nearly as good. They were caught stealing Google's search results.

The Iraq government spent 85 million dollars buying electronic bomb detector wands which are basically a dowsing rod with some useless un-powered electronics in it, yet the government swears by it! http://gizmodo.com/5455692/ade+651-magic-wand-bomb-detector-is-a-fraud-probably-killed-hundreds http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/middleeast/04sensors.html?_r=2

If a cell phone jammer can penetrate into your pacemaker and interfere with it then they need to design them better. Why would a pacemaker be responsive to cell phone frequencies anyway?

It was more of a what-if scenario, but given that they have some with internet monitoring, it's not outside the realm of conceivable that jamming could have consequences beyond just phones.

All I'm saying is one should know the ramifications of this before just deciding that restaurants and theaters should begin deploying these.

You may well be right, and it's no danger ... but I'm far from the first person to wonder if this could cause problems for other devices.

You can call out Fox's editorial shows for their bias, and I'd be on your side, but when you point out instances of typographical error as evidence of wrongdoing, you've reached FUD territory. Even WaPo makes mistakes. Hell, even the venerable BBC does it: http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2011/05/xlarge_mmrnb.jpg
That doesn't make them forever wrong.

Consider this for a moment. When you focus on critiquing others you may find yourself unable or unwilling to critique yourself. It is a conceit that afflicts those on the left as much as those on the right. From reading your postings in this thread, it seems to me you need to try less at convincing others that Fox News is bad/evil, and more at reflecting on your own penchant for overstatement and melodrama.

One company has already made genetically identical clones in china already. They even gave some rabbits human DNA at one of the government labs. That one kicked up quite a fuss, I'm not sure why you didn't hear about it.

Probably something to do with you sticking your fingers in your ears and yelling "nananana I can't hear you".

A lot of the problem is the cutting edge research IS NOT happening in your back yard so you know nothing about it nowadays.

As for mice, they've succesfully grown and transplanted whole livers into mice and they are working on monkeys now.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/rethinking-healthcare/can-reprogrammed-cells-nix-the-need-for-liver-transplants/4449

Not to mention the fact that an experimental stem cell treatment in the UK cured someone that was BLIND from a direct tissue injury that was previously completely incurable, and is still completely incurable by any other means.

http://gizmodo.com/5433391/stem-cells-cure-blind-man

They are not that small. The battery pack is about a foot long.

http://gizmodo.com/5658661/fbi-gets-caught-tracking-mans-car-wants-its-gps-device-back

That's true. Brain wave scanning to achieve a result or goal is here now, just not in the mainstream yet.
http://gizmodo.com/5887586/an-electric-skateboard-controlled-by-your-brainwaves

That's just a toy. And if that's a toy, the military types have significantly more than toys. Anybody ever read the Soul Rider series? In the end, life may again mimic art once we start controlling computers directly with the mind...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_L._Chalker#The_Soul_Rider_series
http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Rider-01-Spirits-Anchor/dp/0812533127

http://gizmodo.com/5426453/the-physics-of-space-battles
All your questions answered by an expert.

Root is no longer required: http://gizmodo.com/5883913/google-wallet-has-been-hacked-again-now-you-should-panic However, I did just get off the phone with Money Network (the company that manages the Google Prepaid card on Google Wallet. After speaking with them and doing a little reading, I discovered that the phone owner is not liable for fraudulent charges. You must notify them as soon as possible though (855-492-5538, toll free).

BTW, to address this Google has temporarily disabled re-provisioning of Prepaid cards. If you or someone else erases your Google Wallet configuration and then attempts to re-configure it, you will not be able to get your Prepaid card back. Currently-provisioned devices will work as they should, meaning you can add and spend value at will, and new devices that have never been provisioned can be provisioned and will work properly, but any device that once had a Google Prepaid card added to it and then was subsequently wiped will not be able to have the Prepaid card added again.

This is a temporary situation until the long-term fix can be deployed. This temporary fix is an improvement over the temporary fix deployed late last week, which completely disabled provisioning and balance increases for all Google Prepaid cards (though money already on a card already provisioned on a phone could still be spent).

The correct, long-term fix will be deployed soon. It will restore the ability to delete and re-provision, but with an authentication step to verify the ownership of the prepaid card before re-provisioning it.