IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".
You can't really compare between categories in a meaningful way. Samsung may have twice Apple's score, but that doesn't mean they have twice as many innovations patented. Actually, I'd suggest that 90% of Apple's patents aren't innovative and shouldn't be patentable. I'm not sure what fraction of Samsung's are based on Apple-like (design, software, pretty colors) topics, but I suspect a lot of them are real innovations in fields like quantum mechanics. They certainly file a lot of innovative solid state physics patents.
If you compare the breadth of operation by Samsung and that of Apple, it's easy to see that Samsung has its fingers in a lot more pies, and it would be surprising if they didn't file more patents than Apple. It might be surprising if they filed more about tablets than Apple, though.
Samsung also has tons of patents on Real Things, not just software and device design. They do fundamental research into a lot of chemical and physical processes that feed into their display business, for instance. They patent methods and materials based on that research.
OWS, on the other hand, seems to grasp the issue (that we are fast-becoming a facist state)
No, OWS doesn't "grasp the issue" - they simply want a fascist state run to their liking, rather than the fascist state the Republicans (I refuse to call them conservatives, because they are not conservatives any longer) are aiming for. One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
Thanks, I was looking for a good example of the straw man fallacy.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be), but AFAIK there is no strong ecosystem for x86 software that is geared toward usage on a touch-screen phone. Granted, Win8 will run X86 and will probably garner some touch-oriented software for the small screen, but it doesn't exist yet. So if I get one of these phones which 'apps' will I run? I suppose there is the Android x86 port, but I would imagine that most of the existing Android apps would fail in that environment.
From Anand:
"By default all Android apps run in a VM and are thus processor architecture agnostic. As long as the apps are calling Android libraries that aren't native ARM there, once again, shouldn't be a problem. Where Intel will have a problem is with apps that do call native libraries or apps that are ARM native (e.g. virtually anything CPU intensive like a 3D game).
Intel believes that roughly 75% of all Android apps in the Market don't feature any native ARM code. The remaining 25% are the issue. The presumption is that eventually this will be a non-issue (described above), but what do users of the first x86 Android phones do? Two words: binary translation.
Intel isn't disclosing much about the solution, but by intercepting ARM binaries and translating ARM code to x86 code on the fly during execution Intel is hoping to achieve ~90% app compatibility at launch. Binary translation is typically noticeably slower than running native code, although Intel is unsurprisingly optimistic about the experience on Android. I'm still very skeptical about the overall experience but we'll have to wait and see for ourselves."
720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?
Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).
So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.
If 70% more power draw than an iPhone 4S playing back 720p was "comparable", I might be impressed.
And the same source giving you that number says that iPhone 4S uses 30% more power for web browsing, which is far more common on a phone. 4S also uses more than twice as much power (111% more) when in standby and 14% more power when talking over 3G. Now are you impressed?
You can have everything right in your product but if no one knows about it and if there's no one telling you what would your product improve on the persons work or life, then your product is almost useless. This same trend can be seen with Linux and to an extend with some Google (and other geeky companies) products
Chrome has issue 44106, which despite countless requests for an implementation, was labeled "Won't Fix".
One developer says:
"Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider."
Then goes further to say:
"We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time."
So thus "bug" sounds like a feature! Now, talk of listening to customers.
Maybe this is why everyone I know at Google uses Firefox (or Safari!), even at work.
Learning more about Ceasar Chavez then George Washington?
These ideas come from people like yourself saying, "Those kooks in California would probably ______________," but don't match reality. There are a few absurd exceptions that you can find in any state, but no statistically significant trend of crazy liberalism in Californian textbooks. Also, there's no way to be as far from the truth as evolution denial in textbooks but in the opposite direction. That scale runs from reality to Texas.
More outrageous details: they carefully worded the law so that there are two judges involved in the process of closing a web page. And all they do is checking the paperwork is correctly done, not if the page should be closed or not!! Go figure... any web page the commission says is against someone's intellectual property will be closed in a hat's drop, and only after a pair of years fighting in the courts it will be ruled if the web page should come back or not. A pair of years, literally!! That's way too much for someone's starting a new bussiness on the net. This law is just a workarround since the judges in Spain where issuing "not guilty" to every filesharing case, since in spanish law filesharing was legal as long as you wasn't making money in the process.
And worst of all, there are so many fires in Spain right now, there's literally not enough people to fight back, because they are fighting back too many problems at the same time! Did you know Spain's health care system was universal and free as in beer (read paid through taxes), and they are trying to turn it into USA style private health care system? And that's just the iceberg tip...
Science and engineering are quite mature fields and don't change very quickly. The stuff you learn serves you well for a long time. Our best engineer just retired this year. He was stationed at Rolls Royce, a couple of Universities and then here. Amazing guy. He's in his 60s now and says that he can feel that he's less able to remember things and keep everything organised in his head the same way that he used to, but he was still supremely capable when it comes to deconstructing problems and solving them using "the literature", or figuring out his own equations by graphics a bunch of data in a spreadsheet.
Obviously computing technology changes a bit quicker, but I still think that there are still concepts that serve you well and that don't really change in amongst all the other fads that come and goes. Interface and languages have been changing, and everything is getting more powerful, but we've not had any really new concepts since the internet. Virtual machines, parallel processing and thin client "cloud computing" style stuff have been around for decades, but people like to pretend that it's all shiny and new and that your experience becomes completely useless every couple of years..
As a young scientist in industry, in my company it looks like productivity is geometrically dependent on age. The 60 year old scientists are inventing left and right and solving problems across several disciplines on a regular basis while those of us in our 20s and early 30s are contributing much less broadly (and generally not a lot more deeply) because we don't have the experience to understand how the things we've learned in area A and what we read about area B should shape our strategy in solving a problem in area C.
Yep. The Great Google Hard Disk Study revealed that no brand was "more reliable" than any other.
Every single manufacturer had troublesome batches and/or models. No brand was immune to this.
FWIW the single biggest factor they found which correlated to failure was heat. If your drive runs hot then expect trouble.
Wait, where in the Rather Poorly Written Google Hard Disk Study, linked by EdZ a few replies away from this one, does it say that reliability didn't vary with brand? All I see related to that is "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact," specifically stating that reliability does indeed vary by manufacturer. Given the rather sloppy organization in the paper, however, I wouldn't be surprised if they contradict themselves elsewhere and make the claim that you've cited. Can you show us the quotation that gave you the impression that brand doesn't matter?
Re:next we'll hear that Dell is in trouble...
on
Dell Ditches Netbooks
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Compared to a netbook with an Atom, it's a steal.
An Atom-based netbook has its place. Real world 11 hours of battery life with a pretty good keyboard at 2 pounds and a full suite of text-oriented content creation software, for instance.
It's going to come back and smash into the earth in 2012.
Quite possible as, quoting TFA:
"There is still a possibility that Comet Lovejoy will start to fragment,"
No telling which directions those pieces might fly off.
Absolutely. When a single object slowly fragments due to thermal gradients, it ignores conservation of momentum and sometimes even conservation of mass. It's possible this ~100-500 m radius comet will launch a 50000 m chunk at us with a velocity of over half the speed of light!
Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this.
This is true, but I think it's interesting to look at it in context. Android phones usually have performance advantages over the current iPhone when it comes to things like loading web pages, but UI smoothness can be done on very little hardware if it's your OS design priority, and the iPhones have been designed with that in mind from the start. Looking even further in this direction, a single core first gen Windows Phone 7 has an even smoother UI than a much more powerful iPhone 4s - MS definitely focused on being iPhonelike this time around. That weaker hardware manifests itself in poorer computing performance, but the majority of what people do on their phones is swipe around different screens and run applications designed for the lowest common denominator hardware on its platform.
In my experience, OSX, Windows 7, and any flavor of Linux are somewhere between Android and iOS in their UI smoothness even when running on vastly more powerful hardware. Since we use those operating systems for content creation, though, we care about other types of responsiveness. I always disable smooth scrolling in a web browser, for instance, because it induces a slight delay. Scrolling is then jerky but instant. As mobile devices become more suited for content creation (and yes, I know that they're severely crippled for most non-consumption roles) I think we'll see users shift their priorities away from dropped UI frames and toward things like time to run a photo processing filter, which will largely favor the more powerful hardware.
OTH, people getting into $60K for a degree in History or Social Science is just absolutely retarded. I could understand that debt in those degrees if the student 1) goes to a private Ivy League school, and 2) go all the way for a Ph.D. But for a B.A in those fields?
Both of your points are misguided.
1) Ivy League schools are the best in the country for avoiding debt. The Ivies I know stopped including student loans as part of financial aid. They replaced them with grants. Furthermore, comparing the financial aid offered by an Ivy to the same package offered to the same student at a non-Ivy private school, the Ivies tend to be much more generous. I went to an Ivy before they eliminated student loans, but even then they had a max loan amount of about $20k for 4 years.
2) PhD programs, even in history and other social sciences, don't involve debt. The department pays the student, not the other way around.
A student who goes to an Ivy League school for a history degree and then gets a PhD in the field will have no education-related debt whatsoever.
Seriously, once books move into a more reasonable price range in general, I'd guess that it clearly doesn't make sense to use DRM. MP3's made this transition once the vendors realized that $20 for a CD wasn't going to fly for MP3's. Books are going to do it too, I suspect, and sooner rather than later.
Sadly, ebooks are moving away from reasonable prices, not toward them. Apple managed to raise ebook prices by roughly 50% when they negotiated deals with the publishers before the iPad's launch. Given another major vendor willing to charge much more for books, the publishers were unwilling to allow Amazon to continue selling at their sometimes below cost price point, and now they had the leverage to do something about it. I hope that Apple's influence wanes so that prices can come back down, or that cheaper prices align with Apple's interests at some point in the near future.
Just take a deep breath and try for one moment to appreciate just how many Motorola's Apple's $81 billion bux would buy, outright. How many legal hours do you think that represents? How many companies can afford to do battle at these scales? Do you really think Germany is that important when China sits there with a 1% Apple penetration?
Legal issues aside, sonny, you may want to reconsider calling this dominoes. It's clear you're not familiar with the game or business, in general.
And it's clear you're not familiar with a mixed metaphor.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets.
This quarter the iPad is hitting 65% market share. That's a lot, but remember it started the year in the high 90s. The only thing that might keep Android from being the top tablet platform in 2013 is Windows 8, and that's a long shot.
I disagree. I'm no lover of AT&T, I got screwed by them once on international calls and had to fight for a couple of months to get my money back. This was at a time when money was in really short supply, and the $500 or so that I had to get back would have made a big difference. If you actually read FCC's Analysis, and look at what AT&T disagrees with, you can't but agree with AT&T. Their rebuttal is backed by facts, and an hour of googling later you will see for yourself that they are certainly right in the issues they have enumerated. I would have personally really wanted AT&T's response to turn out to be made up shitty troll, but it turns out not to be so.
Sprint's "short and sweet" response turns out to be completely unfounded. It essentially translates to "yeah, yeah, we don't like AT&T either, kudos to FCC for sharing in our dislike". FCC did a pathetic job in their Analysis, that's all there's to it.
Calling AT&T's response "scathing" is uncalled for. We have a saying in Polish: the truth stings you in the eyes. As far as I'm concerned, the submitter takes "factual" for "scathing". It's silly. People often take a defensive stance when presented with facts that clearly contradict whatever they previously claimed, so I can at least understand the psychology in the mostly negative reaction to AT&T's rebuke to FCC. What I don't get is why people side with FCC without spending the time necessary to verify the sources. It only takes a couple of hours.
It sounds like you only read the rebuttal and didn't consider the context. In this case the context is reality. The assertions AT&T makes and the way they try to cherry pick their issues just don't jive with reality. Even if they can factually tell us that they'll create N jobs in the U.S., that doesn't mean it's a good thing when independent analysis done months ago (and common sense) concluded that in addition to creating those N jobs they'll be eliminating 3N jobs.
Uh-huh. And what effect does all this high performance have on the containing tablet's battery life?
If we're talking about the Transformer Prime, the first Tegra 3 tablet, it's equivalent in battery life to the iPad 2 and roughly double it when you add the keyboard dock. It's also thinner than the iPad2, lighter, and the screen is much higher resolution, a better form factor, and nearly twice as bright, with blacks good enough that contrast ratio is also better than the iPad 2. The iPad's advantages are in number of apps and GPU speed. I wouldn't get either because even in iOS there are hardly any non-terrible applications or games.
As always, this Slashdot story about new hardware links to a rather amateurish site instead of Anandtech. Go check out Anand's Transformer Prime review for a really nicely balanced article.
As much as I don't like Zynga at all, I'm going to have to ask you to explain how what they're doing is writing human Skinner boxes. Please do so in a way that does not include the output of the video game industry as a whole, or, in fact, the very concept of risk and reward, as an abstract Skinner box.
Note that no credit will be given for any answer that asserts microtransactions to be the primary differentiating factor. Demerits will be handed out if the answer asserts microtransactions to be inherently evil, as that is not the topic at hand.
A great game (that is not a Skinner box) should have the player constantly facing new problems and asking, "How can I solve this? What tools have I got? What have I learned from previous challenges that I can apply here?" Portal is a good example of that kind of game. Some games involve insane amounts of repetition but also involve reasonable levels of new problems to solve (WoW might fit this category). Zynga games just have the insane repetition.
Slashdot Mirror
IEEE Spectrum magazine annually puts out an international "Patent Power" scorecard for all the major industries to measure patent quality. In its most recent index published in November 2011, Apple was graded as having the powerful patent portfolio among the consumer electronics companies. Note that companies are listed in only one category, and Samsung is listed in the semiconductor industry, most likely because that is the domain where the majority of its patents are filed. IBM dwarfs all other companies; it is listed in the "Computer Systems" category. In the PDF file that has the actual metrics, the key value to look for is "adjusted pipeline power".
You can't really compare between categories in a meaningful way. Samsung may have twice Apple's score, but that doesn't mean they have twice as many innovations patented. Actually, I'd suggest that 90% of Apple's patents aren't innovative and shouldn't be patentable. I'm not sure what fraction of Samsung's are based on Apple-like (design, software, pretty colors) topics, but I suspect a lot of them are real innovations in fields like quantum mechanics. They certainly file a lot of innovative solid state physics patents.
If you compare the breadth of operation by Samsung and that of Apple, it's easy to see that Samsung has its fingers in a lot more pies, and it would be surprising if they didn't file more patents than Apple. It might be surprising if they filed more about tablets than Apple, though.
Samsung also has tons of patents on Real Things, not just software and device design. They do fundamental research into a lot of chemical and physical processes that feed into their display business, for instance. They patent methods and materials based on that research.
No, OWS doesn't "grasp the issue" - they simply want a fascist state run to their liking, rather than the fascist state the Republicans (I refuse to call them conservatives, because they are not conservatives any longer) are aiming for. One wants cradle-to-grave socialism where the government runs and administers every facet of your life. And the other wants to let their buddies running large corporations lobby for no-bid contracts to decide who gets to run and administer every facet of your life.
Thanks, I was looking for a good example of the straw man fallacy.
Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be), but AFAIK there is no strong ecosystem for x86 software that is geared toward usage on a touch-screen phone. Granted, Win8 will run X86 and will probably garner some touch-oriented software for the small screen, but it doesn't exist yet. So if I get one of these phones which 'apps' will I run? I suppose there is the Android x86 port, but I would imagine that most of the existing Android apps would fail in that environment.
From Anand:
"By default all Android apps run in a VM and are thus processor architecture agnostic. As long as the apps are calling Android libraries that aren't native ARM there, once again, shouldn't be a problem. Where Intel will have a problem is with apps that do call native libraries or apps that are ARM native (e.g. virtually anything CPU intensive like a 3D game).
Intel believes that roughly 75% of all Android apps in the Market don't feature any native ARM code. The remaining 25% are the issue. The presumption is that eventually this will be a non-issue (described above), but what do users of the first x86 Android phones do? Two words: binary translation.
Intel isn't disclosing much about the solution, but by intercepting ARM binaries and translating ARM code to x86 code on the fly during execution Intel is hoping to achieve ~90% app compatibility at launch. Binary translation is typically noticeably slower than running native code, although Intel is unsurprisingly optimistic about the experience on Android. I'm still very skeptical about the overall experience but we'll have to wait and see for ourselves."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
720p video encoding, 1080p video decoding and 1080p via HDMI are considered stunning features?
Heck, Apple's been conservative, and the iPhone 4s has got 1080p video encoding, 1080p video decode and 1080p via HDMI. Androids have had it in 2010-2011 (and were mocking Apple the whole time).
So... the bigger question is - what's the battery life? The performance looks spectacular, but x86 is a notable power hog. And more worringly, I see nothing in the articles about battery life, power consumption, or battery size.
Less power draw than ARM for most tasks, more performance: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
If 70% more power draw than an iPhone 4S playing back 720p was "comparable", I might be impressed.
And the same source giving you that number says that iPhone 4S uses 30% more power for web browsing, which is far more common on a phone. 4S also uses more than twice as much power (111% more) when in standby and 14% more power when talking over 3G. Now are you impressed?
The phones in the article are HTC Sensation, Motorola Droid 3, iPhone 4S, LG Optimus 2X and Samsung Galaxy S 2.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
x86 is offering more performance per watt than ARM, though by no more than a factor of 2.
You can have everything right in your product but if no one knows about it and if there's no one telling you what would your product improve on the persons work or life, then your product is almost useless. This same trend can be seen with Linux and to an extend with some Google (and other geeky companies) products
Chrome has issue 44106, which despite countless requests for an implementation, was labeled "Won't Fix".
One developer says:
"Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider."
Then goes further to say:
"We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time."
So thus "bug" sounds like a feature! Now, talk of listening to customers.
Maybe this is why everyone I know at Google uses Firefox (or Safari!), even at work.
I guess they need to find some way to get people to use Google+...
And yet I think that this move creates one of the better reasons not to have a Google+ account.
thats all fine and dandy but it went into full force in the mid 1980's, place blame where it belongs
I think it's pretty reasonable to say Nixon's administration presided over the beginning of all this.
'Sciences' like * studies?
Learning more about Ceasar Chavez then George Washington?
These ideas come from people like yourself saying, "Those kooks in California would probably ______________," but don't match reality. There are a few absurd exceptions that you can find in any state, but no statistically significant trend of crazy liberalism in Californian textbooks. Also, there's no way to be as far from the truth as evolution denial in textbooks but in the opposite direction. That scale runs from reality to Texas.
Also Professors don't make significant money on books they write.
Oh no, reality! Get back in your hole.
Spaniard here. Totally true history.
More outrageous details: they carefully worded the law so that there are two judges involved in the process of closing a web page. And all they do is checking the paperwork is correctly done, not if the page should be closed or not!! Go figure... any web page the commission says is against someone's intellectual property will be closed in a hat's drop, and only after a pair of years fighting in the courts it will be ruled if the web page should come back or not. A pair of years, literally!! That's way too much for someone's starting a new bussiness on the net. This law is just a workarround since the judges in Spain where issuing "not guilty" to every filesharing case, since in spanish law filesharing was legal as long as you wasn't making money in the process.
And worst of all, there are so many fires in Spain right now, there's literally not enough people to fight back, because they are fighting back too many problems at the same time! Did you know Spain's health care system was universal and free as in beer (read paid through taxes), and they are trying to turn it into USA style private health care system? And that's just the iceberg tip...
No good - I've known too many Spaniards.
Science and engineering are quite mature fields and don't change very quickly. The stuff you learn serves you well for a long time. Our best engineer just retired this year. He was stationed at Rolls Royce, a couple of Universities and then here. Amazing guy. He's in his 60s now and says that he can feel that he's less able to remember things and keep everything organised in his head the same way that he used to, but he was still supremely capable when it comes to deconstructing problems and solving them using "the literature", or figuring out his own equations by graphics a bunch of data in a spreadsheet.
Obviously computing technology changes a bit quicker, but I still think that there are still concepts that serve you well and that don't really change in amongst all the other fads that come and goes. Interface and languages have been changing, and everything is getting more powerful, but we've not had any really new concepts since the internet. Virtual machines, parallel processing and thin client "cloud computing" style stuff have been around for decades, but people like to pretend that it's all shiny and new and that your experience becomes completely useless every couple of years..
As a young scientist in industry, in my company it looks like productivity is geometrically dependent on age. The 60 year old scientists are inventing left and right and solving problems across several disciplines on a regular basis while those of us in our 20s and early 30s are contributing much less broadly (and generally not a lot more deeply) because we don't have the experience to understand how the things we've learned in area A and what we read about area B should shape our strategy in solving a problem in area C.
Yep. The Great Google Hard Disk Study revealed that no brand was "more reliable" than any other.
Every single manufacturer had troublesome batches and/or models. No brand was immune to this.
FWIW the single biggest factor they found which correlated to failure was heat. If your drive runs hot then expect trouble.
Wait, where in the Rather Poorly Written Google Hard Disk Study, linked by EdZ a few replies away from this one, does it say that reliability didn't vary with brand? All I see related to that is "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact," specifically stating that reliability does indeed vary by manufacturer. Given the rather sloppy organization in the paper, however, I wouldn't be surprised if they contradict themselves elsewhere and make the claim that you've cited. Can you show us the quotation that gave you the impression that brand doesn't matter?
http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
Compared to a netbook with an Atom, it's a steal.
An Atom-based netbook has its place. Real world 11 hours of battery life with a pretty good keyboard at 2 pounds and a full suite of text-oriented content creation software, for instance.
It's going to come back and smash into the earth in 2012.
Quite possible as, quoting TFA:
"There is still a possibility that Comet Lovejoy will start to fragment,"
No telling which directions those pieces might fly off.
Absolutely. When a single object slowly fragments due to thermal gradients, it ignores conservation of momentum and sometimes even conservation of mass. It's possible this ~100-500 m radius comet will launch a 50000 m chunk at us with a velocity of over half the speed of light!
Despite improvements, ICS isn't quite as smooth and responsive as iOS was four years ago on the first iPhone, and it's really becoming quite an annoyance that Google hasn't yet solved this.
This is true, but I think it's interesting to look at it in context. Android phones usually have performance advantages over the current iPhone when it comes to things like loading web pages, but UI smoothness can be done on very little hardware if it's your OS design priority, and the iPhones have been designed with that in mind from the start. Looking even further in this direction, a single core first gen Windows Phone 7 has an even smoother UI than a much more powerful iPhone 4s - MS definitely focused on being iPhonelike this time around. That weaker hardware manifests itself in poorer computing performance, but the majority of what people do on their phones is swipe around different screens and run applications designed for the lowest common denominator hardware on its platform.
In my experience, OSX, Windows 7, and any flavor of Linux are somewhere between Android and iOS in their UI smoothness even when running on vastly more powerful hardware. Since we use those operating systems for content creation, though, we care about other types of responsiveness. I always disable smooth scrolling in a web browser, for instance, because it induces a slight delay. Scrolling is then jerky but instant. As mobile devices become more suited for content creation (and yes, I know that they're severely crippled for most non-consumption roles) I think we'll see users shift their priorities away from dropped UI frames and toward things like time to run a photo processing filter, which will largely favor the more powerful hardware.
That said, ICS looks pretty smooth to me.
OTH, people getting into $60K for a degree in History or Social Science is just absolutely retarded. I could understand that debt in those degrees if the student 1) goes to a private Ivy League school, and 2) go all the way for a Ph.D. But for a B.A in those fields?
Both of your points are misguided.
1) Ivy League schools are the best in the country for avoiding debt. The Ivies I know stopped including student loans as part of financial aid. They replaced them with grants. Furthermore, comparing the financial aid offered by an Ivy to the same package offered to the same student at a non-Ivy private school, the Ivies tend to be much more generous. I went to an Ivy before they eliminated student loans, but even then they had a max loan amount of about $20k for 4 years.
2) PhD programs, even in history and other social sciences, don't involve debt. The department pays the student, not the other way around.
A student who goes to an Ivy League school for a history degree and then gets a PhD in the field will have no education-related debt whatsoever.
Seriously, once books move into a more reasonable price range in general, I'd guess that it clearly doesn't make sense to use DRM. MP3's made this transition once the vendors realized that $20 for a CD wasn't going to fly for MP3's. Books are going to do it too, I suspect, and sooner rather than later.
Sadly, ebooks are moving away from reasonable prices, not toward them. Apple managed to raise ebook prices by roughly 50% when they negotiated deals with the publishers before the iPad's launch. Given another major vendor willing to charge much more for books, the publishers were unwilling to allow Amazon to continue selling at their sometimes below cost price point, and now they had the leverage to do something about it. I hope that Apple's influence wanes so that prices can come back down, or that cheaper prices align with Apple's interests at some point in the near future.
Just take a deep breath and try for one moment to appreciate just how many Motorola's Apple's $81 billion bux would buy, outright. How many legal hours do you think that represents? How many companies can afford to do battle at these scales? Do you really think Germany is that important when China sits there with a 1% Apple penetration?
Legal issues aside, sonny, you may want to reconsider calling this dominoes. It's clear you're not familiar with the game or business, in general.
And it's clear you're not familiar with a mixed metaphor.
I'm sure it had nothing to do with the almost complete lack of consumer interest in Android tablets.
This quarter the iPad is hitting 65% market share. That's a lot, but remember it started the year in the high 90s. The only thing that might keep Android from being the top tablet platform in 2013 is Windows 8, and that's a long shot.
I disagree. I'm no lover of AT&T, I got screwed by them once on international calls and had to fight for a couple of months to get my money back. This was at a time when money was in really short supply, and the $500 or so that I had to get back would have made a big difference. If you actually read FCC's Analysis, and look at what AT&T disagrees with, you can't but agree with AT&T. Their rebuttal is backed by facts, and an hour of googling later you will see for yourself that they are certainly right in the issues they have enumerated. I would have personally really wanted AT&T's response to turn out to be made up shitty troll, but it turns out not to be so.
Sprint's "short and sweet" response turns out to be completely unfounded. It essentially translates to "yeah, yeah, we don't like AT&T either, kudos to FCC for sharing in our dislike". FCC did a pathetic job in their Analysis, that's all there's to it.
Calling AT&T's response "scathing" is uncalled for. We have a saying in Polish: the truth stings you in the eyes. As far as I'm concerned, the submitter takes "factual" for "scathing". It's silly. People often take a defensive stance when presented with facts that clearly contradict whatever they previously claimed, so I can at least understand the psychology in the mostly negative reaction to AT&T's rebuke to FCC. What I don't get is why people side with FCC without spending the time necessary to verify the sources. It only takes a couple of hours.
It sounds like you only read the rebuttal and didn't consider the context. In this case the context is reality. The assertions AT&T makes and the way they try to cherry pick their issues just don't jive with reality. Even if they can factually tell us that they'll create N jobs in the U.S., that doesn't mean it's a good thing when independent analysis done months ago (and common sense) concluded that in addition to creating those N jobs they'll be eliminating 3N jobs.
Uh-huh. And what effect does all this high performance have on the containing tablet's battery life?
If we're talking about the Transformer Prime, the first Tegra 3 tablet, it's equivalent in battery life to the iPad 2 and roughly double it when you add the keyboard dock. It's also thinner than the iPad2, lighter, and the screen is much higher resolution, a better form factor, and nearly twice as bright, with blacks good enough that contrast ratio is also better than the iPad 2. The iPad's advantages are in number of apps and GPU speed. I wouldn't get either because even in iOS there are hardly any non-terrible applications or games.
As always, this Slashdot story about new hardware links to a rather amateurish site instead of Anandtech. Go check out Anand's Transformer Prime review for a really nicely balanced article.
As much as I don't like Zynga at all, I'm going to have to ask you to explain how what they're doing is writing human Skinner boxes. Please do so in a way that does not include the output of the video game industry as a whole, or, in fact, the very concept of risk and reward, as an abstract Skinner box.
Note that no credit will be given for any answer that asserts microtransactions to be the primary differentiating factor. Demerits will be handed out if the answer asserts microtransactions to be inherently evil, as that is not the topic at hand.
A great game (that is not a Skinner box) should have the player constantly facing new problems and asking, "How can I solve this? What tools have I got? What have I learned from previous challenges that I can apply here?" Portal is a good example of that kind of game. Some games involve insane amounts of repetition but also involve reasonable levels of new problems to solve (WoW might fit this category). Zynga games just have the insane repetition.