I definitely think Samsung ripped off a lot Apple's design.
However, none of those elements are relevant to the case at hand, Germany's ban of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is based on the Community Design I linked to, which depicts a rounded rectangle with a screen.
I realize you're trolling this story making a ton of posts (10 at the time of my post, all trolls) ridiculing anyone that has bad things to say about Apple, but your response is completely nonsensical to mine, making it not even an amusing troll.
The judge obviously did see this document, as it is purported to be the Community Design (what people are calling patents) in question around which this case revolves.
The judge has decided that, "Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer." This case establishes that it doesn't matter if the screen's aspect ratio is different, the OS is different, etc. minimalist all-screen tablet is Apple's property.
I don't think it's impossible (like all the smug other responders in this thread seem to think) that public opinion could hurt Apple in the long run.
Microsoft's bad behavior back in the 90's were arguably even more removed from the world of the average consumer than Apple's current behavior. However, given a few years, public opinion among even the average consumer on the street did sour against Microsoft.
Sure, it wasn't enough to break their monopoly on operating systems, but how much do you think it cost Microsoft to be a not-cool brand? How much do you think it hurt their attempts to break into the phone market, which is overwhemlingly likely to be the operating system market of the future? How much do you think it hurt their attempts to break into the video game market, where they basically had to give away an entire generation of consoles to compete?
Apple lives and dies on its cool brand factor. If they act like a dick for hard enough and long enough, eventually it might come back to bite them.
T-Mobile does have contract-free plans, and are the only major carrier to do so.
T-Mobile used to have contract-free plans, with their bring your own phone plans. They recently altered these so even if you bring your own phone, you're locked in for 2 years.
Now their only contract-free plans are the pre-paid plans, same as the rest.
I find most interesting from this episode the following:
Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source. When San Francisco police and Apple's investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said.
When you or I go to the police and tell them our phone/computer was stolen, but we can track it via GPS from any computer and can even use the built-in camera to take pictures of the perpetrator, they tell us to take a hike and go read up on vigilante justice.
When Apple goes to the police with a missing phone, the police go with them, stick around to search a person's house, and in the last case:
Last year's prototype iPhone went missing when Robert Gray Powell, an Apple computer engineer who was 28 years old at the time, left it in a German beer garden in Redwood City, Calif. In early August, San Mateo County prosecutors filed misdemeanor criminal charges against two men, Brian Hogan and Sage Wallower, for allegedly selling Powell's iPhone 4 prototype to Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog. An arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow. Prosecutors obtained a warrant to search the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, and indicated they might prosecute Gizmodo, but eventually decided not to file charges.
But is there a reason why we should be applying a looser standard online than we apply to in-person transactions?
I believe that if your friend tells you of his intent to engage in a crime, and you give him an address he can go to in order to commit his crime, you have just aided and abetted.
I'm not saying that is this case, but it certainly points to the fact that at least some cases of linking should probably be crimes.
I've separated out both my phone and my phone plans.
I now carry around a 7" tablet, the original Galaxy Tab, which is a dream of a mobile Internet device. It's big enough to pretty much completely defuse any desire I have to carry around a laptop, while still weighing less than a pound and being totally portable. I then buy a data-only connection on this for only $25 a month from AT&T ($15 a month is also available if you don't use much data), and I have a web and app experience that totally kills what I used to have with a smartphone.
I now also carry around a dirt-cheap tiny prepaid cellular phone. I'm not a huge talker, and when I do talk, I can use a device that has a form-factor designed for talking, and the prepaid plan is dirt cheap.
All in I'm paying about $30 a month for a superior web/app experience, and a superior phone experience.
How does the iPad get around the concept of the file system? (serious question, I really would like to know)
For example, if I download an image in my web browser, how do I select it in image editing software, and then take the result and email it to my friend in my email software?
(which, conveniently, is always 6 months from now.)
As someone who works in the open source world, I gotta say that's not only spot on, but applies to almost all open source software. You're trading ease of use for configurability and openness, at the cost of glitches and big, empty promises.
Yeah, that's why I'm still running Internet Explorer. Firefox and Webkit (among the most popular and widely distributed of open source software) may have configurability and openness, but they'll never match Internet Explorer for its ease of use, lack of glitches and fulfilled promises.
Can you even access the pull down the activate USB mass-storage mode when the phone is locked?
I would think it's sufficient just to disable development mode, so that ADB cannot be hooked into USB, which I think does work when the phone is locked.
Not necessarily I think, as these two things protect against different style attacks.
Complex passwords: +protects against brute force attacks Manual entry of passwords every time (as opposed to saving them in client): +protects against loss of control of your device
Depending on the situation, it's completely plausible that a complex saved password may be the right call.
Moreover, manual entry of passwords has a big negative: weak against shoulder surfing and entry loggers, which is enhanced by the fact that this is a mobile phone and you never know who might be watching.
This is a ridiculous idea...The idea that we would build the 2nd tallest structure in the world for 200 MW is ridiculous
If you're not talking about cost, I have no idea why we should care where it ranks in the tallest structures in the world vis a vis the amount of MW it generates.
You're right that "those numbers are supposed to be big and scary, but they add up to less than a tenth of a percent of the national landmass". That's because the limiting factor isn't really the land.
When we're back to talking about absolute numbers (612,355,359.6 sqr meters x 3 is the figure thrown out earlier in the discussion), that as an eye-poppingly large order to cover with solar power generators.
And you are letting your bias for the model that works get in the way of your understanding that it is not the only model in the universe that may work.
It isn't implausible that epyT-R could be right, that Apple may have been able to "release the exact products they do now minus the draconian lockdown", and have been just as successful.
Just because they succeeded as is doesn't mean that they couldn't have succeeded in some other way, and there's no need for you to go around getting in everyone's face here with the aggressive and insulting demeanor.
I'm a big fan, too, and was pretty saddened by the poor reviews of the TouchPad to see I'd been let down.
It's a little hard for me to understand what HP was thinking. From where I'm standing it doesn't look to me like they did a good job in a that fight over before it started. It looked to me like they under invested and screwed the platform.
You get to pick up to 2 of: fast, good, or cheap. They managed to be none of fast, good, or cheap.
Fast: They were late to market, with HP doing seemingly nothing for about a year. They're enormous, why didn't they hire more (or more likely, better) people if they couldn't iterate as fast as the competition. Good: They had more time than the competition, and are an enormous company, yet managed to still ship a half-baked product with major bugs like random slowdowns promised to be fixed in a future update. Cheap: Worst of all, they have decided to price the TouchPad as a premium tablet, about the same as the iPad2, or Samsung Galaxy Tab. They couldn't stand taking a few video-game-console-style quarters of losses to build market share for their nascent ecosystem?
If this was their plan, I don't know why they bothered to buy Palm at all. Palm under HP didn't seem any better funded or to execute any better than when Palm didn't have the backing of the world's #1 computer maker.
Actually, from the reviews of the TouchPad, it sounds like the problem is the software. Random slowdowns and gradual slowdown without reboots, even on their top-of-the-line TouchPad, all promised to be fixed with a future update.
What the problem is not is the user interface. Their conception of mobile multitasking is truly a thing of beauty, and I dearly wish Google and Apple would rip them off like RIM did.
Well, normally I think companies try and figure a ballpark figure that might be good for their bid. They then round it arbitrarily to "round" numbers that are near their ballpark figure. This is susceptible to the same overpaying problem in that a round number may be greater than the lowest bid the would have won.
In this case, they were just using universal constants as their round numbers.
I recently was looking into services that can be used for global roaming, and these are what I turned up in my research, in case anyone else was interested: abroadband (already recommended by someone else here) leverages Telecom Austria's existing roaming agreements to offer worldwide roaming at a flat.59 Euro / MB. Downside is you have to buy your sim card in Europe. Tru has a really interesting business model, and is becoming a MVNO in multiple different countries with the same SIM card database, such that one card lets you make calls and access data as a local in the 3 countries they service so far (USA, UK, and Australia) at.10-.35 / MB. There also are a bunch of MiFi based services like Droam and Xcom Global Mifi that are quite expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
According to Engadget, it has a 1GHz TI OMAP dual-core CPU. It's not underpowered by any measure.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/28/amazon-fire-tablet-unveiled-7-inch-display-199-price-tag/
It's not an e-book reader primarily, it'll play back any movies, music, and Android games/apps just fine.
I definitely think Samsung ripped off a lot Apple's design.
However, none of those elements are relevant to the case at hand, Germany's ban of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which is based on the Community Design I linked to, which depicts a rounded rectangle with a screen.
You mean, this particular one, the completely generic featureless screen on a tablet from the Community Design filing on which the decision was based?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61944044/Community-Design-000181607-0001
Uhh, this is from a completely different lawsuit, and covers US Registrations.
I realize you're trolling this story making a ton of posts (10 at the time of my post, all trolls) ridiculing anyone that has bad things to say about Apple, but your response is completely nonsensical to mine, making it not even an amusing troll.
The judge obviously did see this document, as it is purported to be the Community Design (what people are calling patents) in question around which this case revolves.
The judge has decided that, "Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer." This case establishes that it doesn't matter if the screen's aspect ratio is different, the OS is different, etc. minimalist all-screen tablet is Apple's property.
I read about this originally in this Techcrunch article:
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/09/apple-ftw-german-court-upholds-galaxy-tab-10-1-sales-ban/
In it, they link to the design in question, Community Design 000181607 for the iPad:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61944044/Community-Design-000181607-0001
Look at it! I mean look at it! It is literally a rounded rectangle with a screen on the front! I'm not even exaggerating. Look at it!
I don't think it's impossible (like all the smug other responders in this thread seem to think) that public opinion could hurt Apple in the long run.
Microsoft's bad behavior back in the 90's were arguably even more removed from the world of the average consumer than Apple's current behavior. However, given a few years, public opinion among even the average consumer on the street did sour against Microsoft.
Sure, it wasn't enough to break their monopoly on operating systems, but how much do you think it cost Microsoft to be a not-cool brand? How much do you think it hurt their attempts to break into the phone market, which is overwhemlingly likely to be the operating system market of the future? How much do you think it hurt their attempts to break into the video game market, where they basically had to give away an entire generation of consoles to compete?
Apple lives and dies on its cool brand factor. If they act like a dick for hard enough and long enough, eventually it might come back to bite them.
T-Mobile does have contract-free plans, and are the only major carrier to do so.
T-Mobile used to have contract-free plans, with their bring your own phone plans. They recently altered these so even if you bring your own phone, you're locked in for 2 years.
Now their only contract-free plans are the pre-paid plans, same as the rest.
I find most interesting from this episode the following:
Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source.
When San Francisco police and Apple's investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said.
When you or I go to the police and tell them our phone/computer was stolen, but we can track it via GPS from any computer and can even use the built-in camera to take pictures of the perpetrator, they tell us to take a hike and go read up on vigilante justice.
When Apple goes to the police with a missing phone, the police go with them, stick around to search a person's house, and in the last case:
Last year's prototype iPhone went missing when Robert Gray Powell, an Apple computer engineer who was 28 years old at the time, left it in a German beer garden in Redwood City, Calif.
In early August, San Mateo County prosecutors filed misdemeanor criminal charges against two men, Brian Hogan and Sage Wallower, for allegedly selling Powell's iPhone 4 prototype to Gawker Media's Gizmodo blog. An arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow.
Prosecutors obtained a warrant to search the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, and indicated they might prosecute Gizmodo, but eventually decided not to file charges.
But is there a reason why we should be applying a looser standard online than we apply to in-person transactions?
I believe that if your friend tells you of his intent to engage in a crime, and you give him an address he can go to in order to commit his crime, you have just aided and abetted.
I'm not saying that is this case, but it certainly points to the fact that at least some cases of linking should probably be crimes.
I've done something similar to that.
I've separated out both my phone and my phone plans.
I now carry around a 7" tablet, the original Galaxy Tab, which is a dream of a mobile Internet device. It's big enough to pretty much completely defuse any desire I have to carry around a laptop, while still weighing less than a pound and being totally portable. I then buy a data-only connection on this for only $25 a month from AT&T ($15 a month is also available if you don't use much data), and I have a web and app experience that totally kills what I used to have with a smartphone.
I now also carry around a dirt-cheap tiny prepaid cellular phone. I'm not a huge talker, and when I do talk, I can use a device that has a form-factor designed for talking, and the prepaid plan is dirt cheap.
All in I'm paying about $30 a month for a superior web/app experience, and a superior phone experience.
Heh, open in the sense that any door is open if you have a crowbar.
How does the iPad get around the concept of the file system? (serious question, I really would like to know)
For example, if I download an image in my web browser, how do I select it in image editing software, and then take the result and email it to my friend in my email software?
As someone who works in the open source world, I gotta say that's not only spot on, but applies to almost all open source software. You're trading ease of use for configurability and openness, at the cost of glitches and big, empty promises.
Yeah, that's why I'm still running Internet Explorer. Firefox and Webkit (among the most popular and widely distributed of open source software) may have configurability and openness, but they'll never match Internet Explorer for its ease of use, lack of glitches and fulfilled promises.
Can you even access the pull down the activate USB mass-storage mode when the phone is locked?
I would think it's sufficient just to disable development mode, so that ADB cannot be hooked into USB, which I think does work when the phone is locked.
Not necessarily I think, as these two things protect against different style attacks.
Complex passwords:
+protects against brute force attacks
Manual entry of passwords every time (as opposed to saving them in client):
+protects against loss of control of your device
Depending on the situation, it's completely plausible that a complex saved password may be the right call.
Moreover, manual entry of passwords has a big negative: weak against shoulder surfing and entry loggers, which is enhanced by the fact that this is a mobile phone and you never know who might be watching.
This is a ridiculous idea...The idea that we would build the 2nd tallest structure in the world for 200 MW is ridiculous
If you're not talking about cost, I have no idea why we should care where it ranks in the tallest structures in the world vis a vis the amount of MW it generates.
These exist and are found in some cars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_transmission
You're right that "those numbers are supposed to be big and scary, but they add up to less than a tenth of a percent of the national landmass". That's because the limiting factor isn't really the land.
When we're back to talking about absolute numbers (612,355,359.6 sqr meters x 3 is the figure thrown out earlier in the discussion), that as an eye-poppingly large order to cover with solar power generators.
And you are letting your bias for the model that works get in the way of your understanding that it is not the only model in the universe that may work.
It isn't implausible that epyT-R could be right, that Apple may have been able to "release the exact products they do now minus the draconian lockdown", and have been just as successful.
Just because they succeeded as is doesn't mean that they couldn't have succeeded in some other way, and there's no need for you to go around getting in everyone's face here with the aggressive and insulting demeanor.
I'm a big fan, too, and was pretty saddened by the poor reviews of the TouchPad to see I'd been let down.
It's a little hard for me to understand what HP was thinking. From where I'm standing it doesn't look to me like they did a good job in a that fight over before it started. It looked to me like they under invested and screwed the platform.
You get to pick up to 2 of: fast, good, or cheap. They managed to be none of fast, good, or cheap.
Fast: They were late to market, with HP doing seemingly nothing for about a year. They're enormous, why didn't they hire more (or more likely, better) people if they couldn't iterate as fast as the competition.
Good: They had more time than the competition, and are an enormous company, yet managed to still ship a half-baked product with major bugs like random slowdowns promised to be fixed in a future update.
Cheap: Worst of all, they have decided to price the TouchPad as a premium tablet, about the same as the iPad2, or Samsung Galaxy Tab. They couldn't stand taking a few video-game-console-style quarters of losses to build market share for their nascent ecosystem?
If this was their plan, I don't know why they bothered to buy Palm at all. Palm under HP didn't seem any better funded or to execute any better than when Palm didn't have the backing of the world's #1 computer maker.
Actually, from the reviews of the TouchPad, it sounds like the problem is the software. Random slowdowns and gradual slowdown without reboots, even on their top-of-the-line TouchPad, all promised to be fixed with a future update.
What the problem is not is the user interface. Their conception of mobile multitasking is truly a thing of beauty, and I dearly wish Google and Apple would rip them off like RIM did.
Well, normally I think companies try and figure a ballpark figure that might be good for their bid. They then round it arbitrarily to "round" numbers that are near their ballpark figure. This is susceptible to the same overpaying problem in that a round number may be greater than the lowest bid the would have won.
In this case, they were just using universal constants as their round numbers.
So what is their solution to one of these problems?
Let's go for the one where now the box of assorted similar-looking cables is a total pain-in-the-ass mishmash of speed capabilities.
There is no solution, that is the design.
I recently was looking into services that can be used for global roaming, and these are what I turned up in my research, in case anyone else was interested: .59 Euro / MB. Downside is you have to buy your sim card in Europe. .10-.35 / MB.
abroadband (already recommended by someone else here) leverages Telecom Austria's existing roaming agreements to offer worldwide roaming at a flat
Tru has a really interesting business model, and is becoming a MVNO in multiple different countries with the same SIM card database, such that one card lets you make calls and access data as a local in the 3 countries they service so far (USA, UK, and Australia) at
There also are a bunch of MiFi based services like Droam and Xcom Global Mifi that are quite expensive.