Yup, none for cm as far as I'm aware, but mm = "mills", milligram = "miggs", micrograms = "mikes", kg = "kilos". Most places that do lots of small measurement will use mm rather than cm anyway, as it's easier to talk in hundreds than to do decimals. So, in my experience, the vast majority of SI units are expressed in single-syllable words.
Pretty much my only criticisms of the iPhone relate to carrier interference. I bought the phone outright, but when I put in a Vodafone SIM I now can't download podcasts above a certain size (10Mb I think) over 3G, I have to use Wi-fi, regardless of whether I've used 1% or 99% of my contracted data that month. It also discriminates between data used on the handset and data tethered to my laptop, even though I'm paying for an 'unlimited' data plan, and the options to change the settings for data are locked, so I can't force the phone to use the same settings for tethering and handset data so have to pay twice for the same service. On my wife's iPhone, where I bought a non-iPhone-contract SIM and just put it in, it never downloaded the 'carrier specific' settings, and she can pretty much do whatever she likes.
Their 'approach' is broken, and will almost certainly lead to a high rate of returns and general unpopularity of their product if they don't get an update out quickly. Even if it works smoothly, bringing a product to market with that 'feature' shows a total lack of understanding of the market. I could tether my Palm to my phone 8 years ago and use it as a larger display for my email and contacts, it was a hassle then and it will be a hassle now, people expect to be able to pick up their tablet at any time and for it to work without messing around.
You're right, but you're also right about the computer in my car, my Blu-ray player, my central heating system... the world was full of Turing-complete computers locked down by the manufacturer well before the iPhone came along, including plenty of consumer devices, and pretty much all mobile/cell phones. The difference is that Apple have made it easy for anyone to write apps using a laptop or desktop computer and get those apps onto their own phone, or sell them to the general public.
It think a grip of app icons was Apple's innovation, at least in this specific arrangement. Look for a similar phone UI prior to the iPhone, and look at phone UIs after the iPhone. Look at tablets prior to the iPad, and look at them afterwards (hint: this is the kind of "tablet" we've had for the past 5 years at work). We can argue over whether look/feel/arrangement should be protected for some period of time, but it's ridiculous to claim Apple did nothing innovative.
To counter your anecdote with anecdote, my wife's iPhone 3G (second-hand from me when I got an iPhone 4) is on the latest firmware, and works just fine. It's definitely slower than it was with its original firmware, but it's also more stable and more feature-rich. The 1-2 second delay on switching apps would drive me mad, but she's totally OK with it and has so far not been bothered when I've offered to upgrade it. I'm sure she'll get my iPhone 4 when I get a 5. If it's taking minutes to open an app on your friend's iPhone then it's broken, or the app is broken. If he has Applecare he should take it in for repair.
I have to say, I use my MacBook with its own 13" screen, and with my massive Cinema Display, and I never find it an issue using Mac-style menus. Actually, I find it more difficult using other systems with a large monitor because it's slower to park the mouse over a tiny (high-res) menu bar halfway down the screen than it is to just shove the pointer all the way to the top, where it automatically stops. It does come down to a matter of taste, really, but it's certainly not a given that large monitors don't work with fixed menus. For me, the muscle menu of the menu bar always being in the same place regardless of window position(s) is a big win, and another reason why MS-syle menus that hide half your options are a fail. Of course, for frequently used applications you'll memorise the keyboard shortcuts in any case.
The 'Windows for Teletubbies' (you've seen Teletubbies, right?) look has to be the most embarrassing GUI misfire in the history of computing. How a company with the size and capital of Microsoft ever let something like that out of the door is beyond me. But, then, Vista was/is a performance nightmare, seriously slow on all but the highest-end hardware. I actually find it amazing that MS have held on (mostly) to their place in the IT world, I guess there's just never been a non-niche competitor that could offer a serious alternative.
Yes, you might have a right to "take" a Porsche if you could do so in a way that would leave its owner with their own original, unchanged Porsche and therefore not actually depriving them of anything.
Ahhh, you're moving the goalposts. I never said it wasn't wrong, or that it wasn't "as bad" as stealing food, I said that it is different. Clearly, it is different. Piracy is wrong, I agree with you on that, but it is not theft. As I've said before, it's no more theft than it is arson ("you've burnt up their profits"), or assault ("you've hit them where it hurts"), or indeed rape (I'm not going to make a phrase up for that one). Piracy is wrong, but it isn't theft/stealing.
I don't know why you think the creator needs to sell an infinite number of copies in order for piracy to be different from theft. And, as a matter of simple fact, the creator will have spent that time whether they sell 1000 copies or none, and whether 1000 copies are pirated or none. No-one can take another person's time away after the fact; time can only be taken prospectively (e.g. false imprisonment).
What piracy does do is deprive them of a (potential) opportunity to exploit their creation for profit, something which is a contrived (i.e. artificial) right, not a principle of natural justice, which is reasonable to confer in limited circumstances for a limited duration for the good of the creator and the benefit of society. Deliberately conflating terms like theft and piracy supports the agenda of industries built around making maximum profit out of content (many of whom exploit the actual artists / programmers to a greater or lesser extent) to extend copyright terms indefinitely. Interestingly, this will actually be counter productive to the intentions of most decent people, that is - we end up with markets saturated with reworked content 'owned' by studios and software houses, which actually makes it harder for genuine innovators to make a sale.
But piracy clearly is "different than eating someone's food and then skipping on the bill". I'm not saying piracy is morally right, but there is a clear difference between taking someone's food (once you've eaten it, they're permanently deprived of it) and taking a digital copy of their software (once you copy it, they have as many copies of their software as they did before your action). Claiming that copying software is the same as stealing food is akin to a Native American belief that being photographed steals part of your soul. We do need a framework for ensuring that people and companies can make and sell software and be able to (within certain limitations) benefit financially from that, but dressing it up as stealing is nonsense.
I don't think they are removable at the moment. Apart from anything, the battery packs cost $36,000 so I doubt many cars would be kept with several spares. Interestingly Wikipedia lists the recharge time as about 4 hours, but that still makes the car pretty much useless on the track.
A normal super car can be refuelled in under 10 minutes. Once it's done its 55 miles, the Tesla needs recharging overnight. That's the issue - as a track car, it's basically useless after the first 20 minutes of driving.
Yes, but they didn't steal/copy it, did they? I overstated it by saying license, but clearly there was an arrangement between the two companies, later Xerox saw Apple suing Microsoft and wanted in, but their case got thrown out. Clearly the common belief that Apple copied/stole the GUI concept from Xerox is at best an overstatement, and at worst an absolute myth, both because of this agreement or understanding, and also because there were plenty of things in the Mac/Lisa GUI that were new inventions (like pull-down menus).
Since you're posting Wikipedia articles, I'll follow up with this article. To quote: "The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple... Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later... Xerox also sued Apple... the dismissal of Xerox's legal complaint was not based simply on late filings, but rather a lack of legal merit to Xerox's case as it was presented." So if Wikipedia is to be trusted (debatable) I think my point stands, although it looks like the agreement between Apple and Xerox was more complicated/tenuous than straight licensing.
I can already access all the songs I own from anywhere, using my smartphone and laptop. Are there really that many people desperate to access their music remotely who don't carry a device that already has the capacity to store all the music they could ever want?
Apple produced the first consumer computer with a proper GUI. Apple invented the pull-down menu, ubiquitous across almost all GUIs until the smart phone era. I'm not sure who you think Apple copied OS X from - they bought up NeXT and therefore didn't copy that part of it. If you're repeating the ancient myth that they copied the GUI from Xerox PARC, well for starters as I said there were plenty of new innovations in the Lisa/Mac GUI that built on the PARC GUI (the Alto had a modal button-based GUI more akin to a DOS-style fullscreen interface), secondly they licensed designs and employed ex-PARC people to continue development, which isn't copying.
This isn't an ad, it's billed as "The Samsung Galaxy Tab Interview Project", and the video opens with someone receiving an invitation. They are clearly implying that they are interviewing real people, which is false advertisement. It's one thing to have a video of an actor who appears to be in an office environment saying how amazing the product is; it's another thing entirely to falsely claim they are a real person being interviewed.
You've had bad luck. I've dropped my iPhone 4 at least half a dozen times without any case onto a lino over concrete floor (hospital ITU). It has a couple of tiny scratches and one sub-millimeter chip on the glass back, and a tiny dent in the metal rim around the screen that you can't really see and have to feel for. It's fared much better than my 3GS which had a number of cracks and a chip in the plastic back within 6 months.
Thanks for injecting some rationality here. This is the thing I can't understand: if someone wants to change their gender, that's something that's seen as acceptable, even if a bit unusual. If someone wants to change their sexual orientation, it's presumed that someone with an agenda must have brainwashed that person and the community that shares their (original) orientation takes offence. No-one should be pushing this sort of thing on anybody, but I can't understand why it's an issue for such software to exist.
Most clocks don't use the AC frequency as a timing source. Plenty of older mains powered clocks do, you can often come across them in lecture theatres in older institutions. You can usually tell because the second hand will move continuously rather than ticking.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, none for cm as far as I'm aware, but mm = "mills", milligram = "miggs", micrograms = "mikes", kg = "kilos". Most places that do lots of small measurement will use mm rather than cm anyway, as it's easier to talk in hundreds than to do decimals. So, in my experience, the vast majority of SI units are expressed in single-syllable words.
When you say instant messaging works -- can you sent an SMS/Text message from your iPad, or are you talking about an Internet IM?
Pretty much my only criticisms of the iPhone relate to carrier interference. I bought the phone outright, but when I put in a Vodafone SIM I now can't download podcasts above a certain size (10Mb I think) over 3G, I have to use Wi-fi, regardless of whether I've used 1% or 99% of my contracted data that month. It also discriminates between data used on the handset and data tethered to my laptop, even though I'm paying for an 'unlimited' data plan, and the options to change the settings for data are locked, so I can't force the phone to use the same settings for tethering and handset data so have to pay twice for the same service. On my wife's iPhone, where I bought a non-iPhone-contract SIM and just put it in, it never downloaded the 'carrier specific' settings, and she can pretty much do whatever she likes.
Their 'approach' is broken, and will almost certainly lead to a high rate of returns and general unpopularity of their product if they don't get an update out quickly. Even if it works smoothly, bringing a product to market with that 'feature' shows a total lack of understanding of the market. I could tether my Palm to my phone 8 years ago and use it as a larger display for my email and contacts, it was a hassle then and it will be a hassle now, people expect to be able to pick up their tablet at any time and for it to work without messing around.
You're right, but you're also right about the computer in my car, my Blu-ray player, my central heating system... the world was full of Turing-complete computers locked down by the manufacturer well before the iPhone came along, including plenty of consumer devices, and pretty much all mobile/cell phones. The difference is that Apple have made it easy for anyone to write apps using a laptop or desktop computer and get those apps onto their own phone, or sell them to the general public.
grid, darn it
It think a grip of app icons was Apple's innovation, at least in this specific arrangement. Look for a similar phone UI prior to the iPhone, and look at phone UIs after the iPhone. Look at tablets prior to the iPad, and look at them afterwards (hint: this is the kind of "tablet" we've had for the past 5 years at work). We can argue over whether look/feel/arrangement should be protected for some period of time, but it's ridiculous to claim Apple did nothing innovative.
To counter your anecdote with anecdote, my wife's iPhone 3G (second-hand from me when I got an iPhone 4) is on the latest firmware, and works just fine. It's definitely slower than it was with its original firmware, but it's also more stable and more feature-rich. The 1-2 second delay on switching apps would drive me mad, but she's totally OK with it and has so far not been bothered when I've offered to upgrade it. I'm sure she'll get my iPhone 4 when I get a 5. If it's taking minutes to open an app on your friend's iPhone then it's broken, or the app is broken. If he has Applecare he should take it in for repair.
I have to say, I use my MacBook with its own 13" screen, and with my massive Cinema Display, and I never find it an issue using Mac-style menus. Actually, I find it more difficult using other systems with a large monitor because it's slower to park the mouse over a tiny (high-res) menu bar halfway down the screen than it is to just shove the pointer all the way to the top, where it automatically stops. It does come down to a matter of taste, really, but it's certainly not a given that large monitors don't work with fixed menus. For me, the muscle menu of the menu bar always being in the same place regardless of window position(s) is a big win, and another reason why MS-syle menus that hide half your options are a fail. Of course, for frequently used applications you'll memorise the keyboard shortcuts in any case.
The 'Windows for Teletubbies' (you've seen Teletubbies, right?) look has to be the most embarrassing GUI misfire in the history of computing. How a company with the size and capital of Microsoft ever let something like that out of the door is beyond me. But, then, Vista was/is a performance nightmare, seriously slow on all but the highest-end hardware. I actually find it amazing that MS have held on (mostly) to their place in the IT world, I guess there's just never been a non-niche competitor that could offer a serious alternative.
Naturalism is a branch / philosophy of science. You're thinking of naturism.
Yes, you might have a right to "take" a Porsche if you could do so in a way that would leave its owner with their own original, unchanged Porsche and therefore not actually depriving them of anything.
Ahhh, you're moving the goalposts. I never said it wasn't wrong, or that it wasn't "as bad" as stealing food, I said that it is different. Clearly, it is different. Piracy is wrong, I agree with you on that, but it is not theft. As I've said before, it's no more theft than it is arson ("you've burnt up their profits"), or assault ("you've hit them where it hurts"), or indeed rape (I'm not going to make a phrase up for that one). Piracy is wrong, but it isn't theft/stealing.
I don't know why you think the creator needs to sell an infinite number of copies in order for piracy to be different from theft. And, as a matter of simple fact, the creator will have spent that time whether they sell 1000 copies or none, and whether 1000 copies are pirated or none. No-one can take another person's time away after the fact; time can only be taken prospectively (e.g. false imprisonment).
What piracy does do is deprive them of a (potential) opportunity to exploit their creation for profit, something which is a contrived (i.e. artificial) right, not a principle of natural justice, which is reasonable to confer in limited circumstances for a limited duration for the good of the creator and the benefit of society. Deliberately conflating terms like theft and piracy supports the agenda of industries built around making maximum profit out of content (many of whom exploit the actual artists / programmers to a greater or lesser extent) to extend copyright terms indefinitely. Interestingly, this will actually be counter productive to the intentions of most decent people, that is - we end up with markets saturated with reworked content 'owned' by studios and software houses, which actually makes it harder for genuine innovators to make a sale.
But piracy clearly is "different than eating someone's food and then skipping on the bill". I'm not saying piracy is morally right, but there is a clear difference between taking someone's food (once you've eaten it, they're permanently deprived of it) and taking a digital copy of their software (once you copy it, they have as many copies of their software as they did before your action). Claiming that copying software is the same as stealing food is akin to a Native American belief that being photographed steals part of your soul. We do need a framework for ensuring that people and companies can make and sell software and be able to (within certain limitations) benefit financially from that, but dressing it up as stealing is nonsense.
I don't think they are removable at the moment. Apart from anything, the battery packs cost $36,000 so I doubt many cars would be kept with several spares. Interestingly Wikipedia lists the recharge time as about 4 hours, but that still makes the car pretty much useless on the track.
A normal super car can be refuelled in under 10 minutes. Once it's done its 55 miles, the Tesla needs recharging overnight. That's the issue - as a track car, it's basically useless after the first 20 minutes of driving.
Yes, but they didn't steal/copy it, did they? I overstated it by saying license, but clearly there was an arrangement between the two companies, later Xerox saw Apple suing Microsoft and wanted in, but their case got thrown out. Clearly the common belief that Apple copied/stole the GUI concept from Xerox is at best an overstatement, and at worst an absolute myth, both because of this agreement or understanding, and also because there were plenty of things in the Mac/Lisa GUI that were new inventions (like pull-down menus).
Since you're posting Wikipedia articles, I'll follow up with this article. To quote: "The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple... Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later... Xerox also sued Apple... the dismissal of Xerox's legal complaint was not based simply on late filings, but rather a lack of legal merit to Xerox's case as it was presented." So if Wikipedia is to be trusted (debatable) I think my point stands, although it looks like the agreement between Apple and Xerox was more complicated/tenuous than straight licensing.
I can already access all the songs I own from anywhere, using my smartphone and laptop. Are there really that many people desperate to access their music remotely who don't carry a device that already has the capacity to store all the music they could ever want?
Apple produced the first consumer computer with a proper GUI. Apple invented the pull-down menu, ubiquitous across almost all GUIs until the smart phone era. I'm not sure who you think Apple copied OS X from - they bought up NeXT and therefore didn't copy that part of it. If you're repeating the ancient myth that they copied the GUI from Xerox PARC, well for starters as I said there were plenty of new innovations in the Lisa/Mac GUI that built on the PARC GUI (the Alto had a modal button-based GUI more akin to a DOS-style fullscreen interface), secondly they licensed designs and employed ex-PARC people to continue development, which isn't copying.
This isn't an ad, it's billed as "The Samsung Galaxy Tab Interview Project", and the video opens with someone receiving an invitation. They are clearly implying that they are interviewing real people, which is false advertisement. It's one thing to have a video of an actor who appears to be in an office environment saying how amazing the product is; it's another thing entirely to falsely claim they are a real person being interviewed.
You've had bad luck. I've dropped my iPhone 4 at least half a dozen times without any case onto a lino over concrete floor (hospital ITU). It has a couple of tiny scratches and one sub-millimeter chip on the glass back, and a tiny dent in the metal rim around the screen that you can't really see and have to feel for. It's fared much better than my 3GS which had a number of cracks and a chip in the plastic back within 6 months.
Wow that's the best bit of anti-logic I've heard for weeks.
Thanks for injecting some rationality here. This is the thing I can't understand: if someone wants to change their gender, that's something that's seen as acceptable, even if a bit unusual. If someone wants to change their sexual orientation, it's presumed that someone with an agenda must have brainwashed that person and the community that shares their (original) orientation takes offence. No-one should be pushing this sort of thing on anybody, but I can't understand why it's an issue for such software to exist.
Most clocks don't use the AC frequency as a timing source. Plenty of older mains powered clocks do, you can often come across them in lecture theatres in older institutions. You can usually tell because the second hand will move continuously rather than ticking.