“One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen,” Jobs said during a 2010 earnings call. “Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The reason we [won't] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point, it’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software.”
I think that he managed to suggest that, even after starting a land war in Asia, those terrifying greenies with their incredible political power would still rank among his serious concerns... Impressive.
Why don't you publish all of your work emails, since you have nothing to hide. Assuming you aren't an unemployed basement-dweller, that is.
In the case of a great many civil servants, all their work emails are subject to public records laws. Unless their employer feels like stonewalling for them, or they work largely on classified stuff, the main thing keeping their email unpublished is lack of interest...
Unless the Android notification bar is patented, Apple has very legal right to copy it.
It's probably legal(and, in a great many of these cases, it is hard to feel warm and fuzzy about the quality of the patents that are being held as making certain duplication illegal...); but it's hard to argue that it is innovative. The two are largely orthogonal issues.
I wouldn't be inclined to say that cross-platform adoption of good UI elements is a bad thing for users; but I would say that there is only so much copying one can do while still having a right to a mystique of innovation...
As The Good Guys(tm), we have a right to an unsullied public image. Even holding the theory that our goodness state is some kind of empirical question, to be decided by looking at our actions, is downright anti-American.
There's a good chance it's going to turn out to be too much, too soon. There's a reason that "truth and reconciliation" type things are handled gently, and only after the gunplay has died down. See South Africa, East Germany, etc. Now is not the time, and this is not the method. A rash of revenge killings isn't going to help Syria move forward as a country.
The reason that "truth and reconciliation" is 'handled gently' is that it tends to occur in places where the necessary political will isn't available to manage actual justice. It's a feel-good way of letting your criminals off the hook because you are too weak, or too compromised by them, or too sympathetic toward them, to do anything else.
An actual justice system is, of course, preferable; but revenge killings are sometimes the only sort of judgement to which one's malefactors can ever be expected to be exposed and if there is anything uglier than vengeance, it is impunity...
Eh. We have been known to (temporarily) come in peace when we don't have the power to back up the alternative(Apropos of the 4th of July, see the English colonial activities in the new world).
The aliens can be 100% sure that we come in peace for as long as we lack access to any sort of weapon that will work across several light-years of more or less absolutely nothing.
Eh, this isn't the 1980s anymore. Are hard-partying homosexual intravenous drug users still a high risk demographic? Sure.
Has AIDS become something of a crossover hit, especially but not exclusively in the developing world, with substantial uptake among behaviorally prosaic demographics? Oh yes, yes it has...
At the risk of sounding blunt to the point of crassness, if the 'AIDS = Ass Cancer' theory of epidemiology were actually accurate, we wouldn't still be talking about it. It's hard for a virus that has no significant animal vectors and can't survive outside the body worth a damn to hang on if it can only burn its way through crazy-high-risk demographics. There just aren't that many of those, and they tend to die.
Unless the 1 in 12 figure includes some large number of "zOMG, I might have been infected, I'm going to get tested immediately, days before I could conceivably actually show what the tests look for!" morons(who really need to get to somebody qualified to tell them why that is stupid, now...), that is a dreadful false-negative rate...
The parallel is actually pretty apt: Kodak had a fuckload of R&D, and patents, in digital imaging and the managed to throw more or less all of it away through a myopic focus on their legacy business.
Similarly, this story isn't about how Microsoft has nothing but morons(they don't); but how they managed to take the good ideas generated by a decade plus of having all the smart people that gigantic bucketloads of money can buy, and suffocate them because they didn't look sufficiently like Windows, or interoperate in an obvious way with Office.
That's the real trick. Any moron can become irrelevant because their core product comes under some sort of unstoppable structural pressure. It takes talent to ensure that you squander your good ideas(and, in some cases, years-long leads on the competition) on the altar of your core product, and then become irrelevant because your core product suffers structural pressures...
Considering the low amount of people on 4.0, it's seems almost like there's no point in releasing 4.1 at this time.
How does that follow?
Among manufacturers who simply never upgrade, the state of the present is wholly disconnected from the state of the future. It doesn't matter whether the existing devices are on 1.6 or 4.0, they are water under the bridge, the only thing that matters is what version is available when future products are in development.
Among manufacturers who do upgrade, the willingness to upgrade only matters if Google has an upgrade available. The phone vendors, so far, show an ability to improve Android nearly as tepid as their desire to do so, so somebody has to take the lead.
The W Series is more of a man-portable-desktop/monitor combination than a laptop.
Of course, if the W Series is just too wimpy for you, there is always the Eurocom Panther 3.0, available with 6-core Xeon processor and SLI or Crossfire dual GPU configuration... Having to use two 300watt power bricks for maximum performance is heavy; but surely you want the best?
"Through the web interface I could set up a couple of VLANs, DHCP, DNS forwarding, firewall, a PPTP VPN connection, and a DMZ (if necessary) on them in a couple of hours, a set of tasks that would take a $250/hr CCNA most of a day on order-of-magnitude more expensive Cisco hardware."
I, er, think I can guess why Cisco may have "simplified" the interface of certain linksys products...
I can only assume that the people inside Cisco who believe that they have a natural right to be paid for a support contract on every item they ship finally could contain themselves no longer...
Since nobody buys support contracts on $40 plastic shitboxes, they had to 'monetize' them somehow.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't a case of mere stupidity, brought on by poor, poor, management's exposure to too many buzzwords. This is a straightforward control grab, an overt attempt to turn a low-margin hardware sale into an ongoing data harvesting and customer lock-in opportunity. The putrid buzzwords and condescending infographics are just the cover.
It looks like this would be a very good time for owners of cisco-branded routers to start hitting the OpenWRT, assuming that Cisco hasn't also locked-down or VXworks-ed all of the linksys routers by this time...
Maybe the people that I know are unrepresentative(and I'm not just talking about my nerd friends, I include the family members and various other non-techies who end up informing me of their usage habits in the course of extracting tech support); but inkjets seem to have suffered pretty massively in popularity in the last 5-ish years.
Photo printing seems to be nearly dead, with people either sending them to facebook and never printing them at all, or uploading them to some print service, which small-scale home inkjets can't touch on price or performance, and $100 laser printers have been a real kick in the teeth for inkjets when it comes to printing text/homework/online bank statements for paper filing/etc/etc.
Back when laser printers were quite expensive, and 'online' was not a ubiquitous concept, inkjets were certainly all over the place; but the 'razor/blades' model that the vendors all chased seems to have earned them substantial enmity. Even complete technophobes have frequently have a sense of grievance about how much ink cartridges cost, and how often printers break.
In the case of 3d printing, I definitely don't think that the future is a reprap in every household: DIY/Kit/OSS/etc 3d printers are geek toys, no question. However, the non-geek(and, in many cases, also useful to geeks) solution appears to be one of the 'upload 3d model, receive physical model by fedex' services that will sell you time on 20k+ printing gear a few bucks at a time, in the same way that the online photo printers do for 2d prints.
That is why I have such doubts about an offering like this. It isn't a terribly good fit for the nerds and hackers demographic that is likely to actually want a 3D printer on site; but it is also too expensive(up front and in consumables) to compare favorably for nontechnical users with the online print-to-order outfits that are similarly simple and friendly but have much more sophisticated equipment, and it's attempt to hit a consumer price point makes it a bit too limited(in materials, model size, and toolchain) for the rapid-prototyping needs of business users.
Oh, you can refill the cartridge; but does your filament have the correct cryptographically-signed-and-timestamped anti-tamper code printed along its entire length?
If the optical-verification scanner in the filament feed path encounters a missing section, or a section not signed with the private key corresponding to the public key QR-coded on the filament cartridge, it won't continue printing, now will it?
And don't even think about a replay atttack... Each cartridge's key is reported to the Consumable License Activation Server upon first installation, and each Enciphered Consumable Subsection String is reported as consumed when it first passes through the optical-verification path. If a printer attempts to validate a previously validated cartridge key, or reports the consumption of filament with the same Enciphered Consumable Subsection String more than once, your printer will fail Cubify Genuine Advantage...
(The above is sarcasm; but I suspect that it wouldn't exactly be rocket-surgery to implement such a system in the real world...)
The thing that makes me nervous about this 'Cubify' business, though the hardware certainly has a more polished look than some of the DIY models, is that it appears to derive its attitude toward software and consumables from the same cesspool that consumer inkjets use...
By the pictures, the 'cartridge' is a smallish reel of polymer filament('proprietary ABS' per the FAQ). ABS filament should set you back less than $20/lb, not $50/cartridge-of-unspecified-capacity-and-properties...
And software? Ha, ha, ha. Even if you already have an STL object ready to roll, it's their fisher-price-meets-flash-game mutant bastard child of kiddo's first 3d modelling application/device-driver for you. But at least you get 25 free 'creations' if you buy one! Have they been poaching software guys from HP's consumer printers division or something?
It's honestly somewhat baffling. Given economies of scale, mass production, experience, potentially useful patents, etc. it shouldn't be terribly difficult for commercial 3d-printer vendors to compete on hardware specs(along with fit-and-finish and easy availability of finished products rather than kits) with the various DIY contraptions, but these 'Cubify' fellows seem determined to undermine what might be promising hardware with usurious consumables pricing and cringe-worthy software...
Slashdot Mirror
With semiconductors expensive enough to actually have labels, you sometimes see 'diffused in' and 'packaged in' indicated individually.
“One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70 percent of the benefits of a 10-inch screen,” Jobs said during a 2010 earnings call. “Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The reason we [won't] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point, it’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software.”
I think that he managed to suggest that, even after starting a land war in Asia, those terrifying greenies with their incredible political power would still rank among his serious concerns... Impressive.
Are you seriously suggesting that Steve would approve of there being ways other than the One True Way to install things on an iPhone?
That sounds dangerously close to jailbreaker talk...
You're coding it wrong.
-Steve
Why don't you publish all of your work emails, since you have nothing to hide. Assuming you aren't an unemployed basement-dweller, that is.
In the case of a great many civil servants, all their work emails are subject to public records laws. Unless their employer feels like stonewalling for them, or they work largely on classified stuff, the main thing keeping their email unpublished is lack of interest...
Unless the Android notification bar is patented, Apple has very legal right to copy it.
It's probably legal(and, in a great many of these cases, it is hard to feel warm and fuzzy about the quality of the patents that are being held as making certain duplication illegal...); but it's hard to argue that it is innovative. The two are largely orthogonal issues.
I wouldn't be inclined to say that cross-platform adoption of good UI elements is a bad thing for users; but I would say that there is only so much copying one can do while still having a right to a mystique of innovation...
As The Good Guys(tm), we have a right to an unsullied public image. Even holding the theory that our goodness state is some kind of empirical question, to be decided by looking at our actions, is downright anti-American.
There's a good chance it's going to turn out to be too much, too soon. There's a reason that "truth and reconciliation" type things are handled gently, and only after the gunplay has died down. See South Africa, East Germany, etc. Now is not the time, and this is not the method. A rash of revenge killings isn't going to help Syria move forward as a country.
The reason that "truth and reconciliation" is 'handled gently' is that it tends to occur in places where the necessary political will isn't available to manage actual justice. It's a feel-good way of letting your criminals off the hook because you are too weak, or too compromised by them, or too sympathetic toward them, to do anything else.
An actual justice system is, of course, preferable; but revenge killings are sometimes the only sort of judgement to which one's malefactors can ever be expected to be exposed and if there is anything uglier than vengeance, it is impunity...
Hopefully, we can eject the RIAA into space to fight it out with a superior alien intelligence...
Eh. We have been known to (temporarily) come in peace when we don't have the power to back up the alternative(Apropos of the 4th of July, see the English colonial activities in the new world).
The aliens can be 100% sure that we come in peace for as long as we lack access to any sort of weapon that will work across several light-years of more or less absolutely nothing.
Eh, this isn't the 1980s anymore. Are hard-partying homosexual intravenous drug users still a high risk demographic? Sure.
Has AIDS become something of a crossover hit, especially but not exclusively in the developing world, with substantial uptake among behaviorally prosaic demographics? Oh yes, yes it has...
At the risk of sounding blunt to the point of crassness, if the 'AIDS = Ass Cancer' theory of epidemiology were actually accurate, we wouldn't still be talking about it. It's hard for a virus that has no significant animal vectors and can't survive outside the body worth a damn to hang on if it can only burn its way through crazy-high-risk demographics. There just aren't that many of those, and they tend to die.
Unless the 1 in 12 figure includes some large number of "zOMG, I might have been infected, I'm going to get tested immediately, days before I could conceivably actually show what the tests look for!" morons(who really need to get to somebody qualified to tell them why that is stupid, now...), that is a dreadful false-negative rate...
The parallel is actually pretty apt: Kodak had a fuckload of R&D, and patents, in digital imaging and the managed to throw more or less all of it away through a myopic focus on their legacy business.
Similarly, this story isn't about how Microsoft has nothing but morons(they don't); but how they managed to take the good ideas generated by a decade plus of having all the smart people that gigantic bucketloads of money can buy, and suffocate them because they didn't look sufficiently like Windows, or interoperate in an obvious way with Office.
That's the real trick. Any moron can become irrelevant because their core product comes under some sort of unstoppable structural pressure. It takes talent to ensure that you squander your good ideas(and, in some cases, years-long leads on the competition) on the altar of your core product, and then become irrelevant because your core product suffers structural pressures...
Considering the low amount of people on 4.0, it's seems almost like there's no point in releasing 4.1 at this time.
How does that follow?
Among manufacturers who simply never upgrade, the state of the present is wholly disconnected from the state of the future. It doesn't matter whether the existing devices are on 1.6 or 4.0, they are water under the bridge, the only thing that matters is what version is available when future products are in development.
Among manufacturers who do upgrade, the willingness to upgrade only matters if Google has an upgrade available. The phone vendors, so far, show an ability to improve Android nearly as tepid as their desire to do so, so somebody has to take the lead.
"Extremely Energy Efficient"*
*When compared with hardware requiring a four-post rack and premises wiring upgrades.
"Sell like the cattle they are", generally.
The W Series is more of a man-portable-desktop/monitor combination than a laptop.
Of course, if the W Series is just too wimpy for you, there is always the Eurocom Panther 3.0, available with 6-core Xeon processor and SLI or Crossfire dual GPU configuration... Having to use two 300watt power bricks for maximum performance is heavy; but surely you want the best?
"Through the web interface I could set up a couple of VLANs, DHCP, DNS forwarding, firewall, a PPTP VPN connection, and a DMZ (if necessary) on them in a couple of hours, a set of tasks that would take a $250/hr CCNA most of a day on order-of-magnitude more expensive Cisco hardware."
I, er, think I can guess why Cisco may have "simplified" the interface of certain linksys products...
I can only assume that the people inside Cisco who believe that they have a natural right to be paid for a support contract on every item they ship finally could contain themselves no longer...
Since nobody buys support contracts on $40 plastic shitboxes, they had to 'monetize' them somehow.
I'm pretty sure that this wasn't a case of mere stupidity, brought on by poor, poor, management's exposure to too many buzzwords. This is a straightforward control grab, an overt attempt to turn a low-margin hardware sale into an ongoing data harvesting and customer lock-in opportunity. The putrid buzzwords and condescending infographics are just the cover.
It looks like this would be a very good time for owners of cisco-branded routers to start hitting the OpenWRT, assuming that Cisco hasn't also locked-down or VXworks-ed all of the linksys routers by this time...
I suspect that the good folks at Pantone would be happy to collaborate with you on a line of co-branded and heavily licensed colors...
Just kick out the offerings here in filament rather than chip shape, add 75% for the service, and you are on your way.
Maybe the people that I know are unrepresentative(and I'm not just talking about my nerd friends, I include the family members and various other non-techies who end up informing me of their usage habits in the course of extracting tech support); but inkjets seem to have suffered pretty massively in popularity in the last 5-ish years.
Photo printing seems to be nearly dead, with people either sending them to facebook and never printing them at all, or uploading them to some print service, which small-scale home inkjets can't touch on price or performance, and $100 laser printers have been a real kick in the teeth for inkjets when it comes to printing text/homework/online bank statements for paper filing/etc/etc.
Back when laser printers were quite expensive, and 'online' was not a ubiquitous concept, inkjets were certainly all over the place; but the 'razor/blades' model that the vendors all chased seems to have earned them substantial enmity. Even complete technophobes have frequently have a sense of grievance about how much ink cartridges cost, and how often printers break.
In the case of 3d printing, I definitely don't think that the future is a reprap in every household: DIY/Kit/OSS/etc 3d printers are geek toys, no question. However, the non-geek(and, in many cases, also useful to geeks) solution appears to be one of the 'upload 3d model, receive physical model by fedex' services that will sell you time on 20k+ printing gear a few bucks at a time, in the same way that the online photo printers do for 2d prints.
That is why I have such doubts about an offering like this. It isn't a terribly good fit for the nerds and hackers demographic that is likely to actually want a 3D printer on site; but it is also too expensive(up front and in consumables) to compare favorably for nontechnical users with the online print-to-order outfits that are similarly simple and friendly but have much more sophisticated equipment, and it's attempt to hit a consumer price point makes it a bit too limited(in materials, model size, and toolchain) for the rapid-prototyping needs of business users.
Oh, you can refill the cartridge; but does your filament have the correct cryptographically-signed-and-timestamped anti-tamper code printed along its entire length?
If the optical-verification scanner in the filament feed path encounters a missing section, or a section not signed with the private key corresponding to the public key QR-coded on the filament cartridge, it won't continue printing, now will it?
And don't even think about a replay atttack... Each cartridge's key is reported to the Consumable License Activation Server upon first installation, and each Enciphered Consumable Subsection String is reported as consumed when it first passes through the optical-verification path. If a printer attempts to validate a previously validated cartridge key, or reports the consumption of filament with the same Enciphered Consumable Subsection String more than once, your printer will fail Cubify Genuine Advantage...
(The above is sarcasm; but I suspect that it wouldn't exactly be rocket-surgery to implement such a system in the real world...)
The thing that makes me nervous about this 'Cubify' business, though the hardware certainly has a more polished look than some of the DIY models, is that it appears to derive its attitude toward software and consumables from the same cesspool that consumer inkjets use...
By the pictures, the 'cartridge' is a smallish reel of polymer filament('proprietary ABS' per the FAQ). ABS filament should set you back less than $20/lb, not $50/cartridge-of-unspecified-capacity-and-properties...
And software? Ha, ha, ha. Even if you already have an STL object ready to roll, it's their fisher-price-meets-flash-game mutant bastard child of kiddo's first 3d modelling application/device-driver for you. But at least you get 25 free 'creations' if you buy one! Have they been poaching software guys from HP's consumer printers division or something?
It's honestly somewhat baffling. Given economies of scale, mass production, experience, potentially useful patents, etc. it shouldn't be terribly difficult for commercial 3d-printer vendors to compete on hardware specs(along with fit-and-finish and easy availability of finished products rather than kits) with the various DIY contraptions, but these 'Cubify' fellows seem determined to undermine what might be promising hardware with usurious consumables pricing and cringe-worthy software...