The article doesn't really give details on how it works. It sounds like these are just contacts you can project images onto. If that's true then you need a projector somewhere pointed at the eye. If that's true why bother with a projector rather than just using a pair of glasses? I'm not really seeing the advantage to this technology other than to say "hey we projected something directly onto someone's eye!"
Unless I'm mistaken and these have their own power source or something, which would be quite impressive.
I've said it before and I'll say it every time. A year from the first day of sale is more than enough. Damn near every medium you hear of (books, movies, games, etc.) makes it money in the first few weeks. A saying in the game and movie industries is that if you don't turn a profit by the end of the sixth week then it's a flop.
The problem is that if it were only a year the studio would just not pay the artist and after a year mass produce the book/song/whatever and keep all the money. You need a long enough duration so the people with the means of distribution and control over advertising would rather pay the artist than wait out the copyright.
Uh... look again. It's filtered by year and 2008 was the year linked. If you look at 2010 there was a big spike in payouts from the media companies, and for 2012 the media companies are still on top.
And there's always Coin Star. If you convert it to a gift certificate you don't have to pay the 9% or whatever the fee is. I just convert my change to an Amazon gift card, which I buy from often anyway. And since the nearest Coin Star is at the market I don't have to make a special trip for it.
I'm guessing this is more related to the fact that the militar is looking into using tablets and other such consumer devices in the field. (See previous/. articles for reference. I'm too lazy to find links to them myself.)
Oh that's a great idea. Just keep rolling the dice until we win! Who needs to pay attention to what their elected officials are doing and decide if the new candidate is really better? (hint: he isn't.) The fix is to get good representatives nominated and then elected. Replacing people won't do anything until you have a good replacement.
I look up every candidate on the ballot every time I vote. Unfortunately, usually the most reasonable candidates are in another party. I mean the ones who think for themselves and actually form their own opinions rather than regurgitating their party's talking points. It would be nice if some of these people were on the ballot for the major parties so we could get them into office.
This really isn't a "sweetheart deal". I'm sure Google gave them this level of access for practical reasons. Now that they've abused it UMG is in legal trouble. Any serious abuse of this access was bound to get noticed either by lawsuits or by a large number of people complaining about their video being removed.
For example, if an investment results in the creation of a factory that produces a new type of ice cream, that is a net benefit to the consumer because there is more ice cream available.
Except this happens less and less since the name of the game these days is growth. What if they instead sit on the money or use it to buy out a competitor, eliminating redundant jobs? The only time investment is guaranteed to create jobs is when the company would not be able to operate without it.
Some yahoo buying a car just means there is more traffic on the road, and one less car available for the consumer to purchase.
There isn't one less car available. Supply and demand. More people buying cars = more cars need to be produced = more jobs building them. This is much more certain than the "what if" scenario with the investment being used to build a new factory and create jobs.
I suspect it is not as much for the shareholders as they want to paint the picture to politicians that the FCC is totally out of control so the politicians will weaken the FCC. I'm sure several politicians and maybe Fox will see this opportunity to jump on the FCC.
Exactly, California all by itself is the 8th most productive economy in the world..
California suffers from 2 things, the money that goes out through taxes to help the other 49 states (shouldn't someone scream communism ? ^_^), and stupid voters that want to pay less taxes all the while keeping the level of public services intact.
The first one can't be fixed short of a new civil war, the second problem on the other hand can be fixed. There just is no political will to do it.
California citizens already pay some of the highest taxes in the country. Raising the tax rates too high just makes it even less desirable for business to hire people here because of the higher cost of living, driving jobs and people out and hurting the state's income. It's not about "political will", it's about the reality that the only thing that keeps many businesses in this state is inertia and when costs hit the breaking point they will overcome that inertia. Most Californians are completely ignorant of this though, so it will probably keep getting worse for the foreseeable future.
I'm still resisting buying digital music until they start selling in a lossless format like flac. For some reason no major stores are willing to do this. I want my high quality archive copy damn it!
Quite simple to buy the CD and convert to FLAC, innit?
Nah, you're not looking to buy anything. Methinks your just grasping at straws to try to justify your theft*
*you can insert whatever euphemism you prefer to try to soften it up, if it helps you get through the day. We all know what it really is.
Good job assuming that because I don't buy *digital* music I don't buy music at all. I buy physical CDs quite a bit but then I feel obligated to keep the disc which takes up space.
I'm still resisting buying digital music until they start selling in a lossless format like flac. For some reason no major stores are willing to do this. I want my high quality archive copy damn it!
Why should a concept, the product of significant investment and innovation, be excluded simply because it is executed within a digital framework?
This argument applies as much to math as it does to software. And the reasons not to allow it to be patentable also apply to both.
The real question is: what does society gain from allowing software patents? Would Microsoft have not written any software were it not patentable? Since patents are a monopoly granted by society for its own benefit ("to promote the progress of science and the useful arts") it should not grant such monopolies in cases where the greater whole does not benefit. That would in fact go against the explicitly defined purpose of patents in the Constitution.
I like how every one of your arguments starts by assuming someone else's idea leads to arresting innocent people.
The idea was to "due something about outsourcing". What do YOU think government can do to stop it? Ask people really really nice? Or enforce new laws, which is done by arresting as needed.
I suggested import taxes. He said that leads to "arresting ordinary people for engaging in ordinary commerce". Are you really defending this?
- Prices go up for people buying things. This lowers their standard of living.
In some areas. In others it leads to more people with money to buy things, more sales, and therefore lower costs.
USA is just not competitive, because on all work you do, big part is taken and redistributed how current masters of you agree. With minimum wage and high tax everything is expensive. Adding new taxes will only make things worse. Rest of world will enjoy cheap electronics,tshirts and everything, while you will be forced to buy from eachother, everyone of you giving more and more money to gov. To be wasted or corrupted. Or perhaps invested into next war "on terror".
That doesn't even make sense. The new taxes would be for imports (or more specifically, outsourced labor), which would not apply for things made domestically. So high wages + new taxes is not the proposed scenario. It's about making companies choose between the two and hopefully making them cost close to the same in the end. Some things would be more expensive due to the wage differences, but I would rather pay more for a product my neighbor made than pay for his unemployment checks. And the last part about giving more and more money to government is completely ridiculous since it would be no more than we do otherwise.
Yup. You don't even have to tie them to wages per se - just tie them to working conditions, environmental laws, political freedom, access to courts, and such. You could even use the proceeds to help drive improvements in these things overseas as part of foreign aid. I think that much of the cost difference overseas boils down to the fact that if a factory worker gets their arm chewed up by a machine you can hand their family $10 and pay somebody else 50 cents to clean the machine, and if in the process 5000 gallons of toxic waste leaks out you just hose it into the creek. Then if the family does get upset and sues chances are the local government will shut them up (perhaps brutally) since they're in the pocket of the company and they don't like to advertise their conditions.
So, outsource your work to Belgium and vice-versa if that makes sense economically - I'm sure that sort of thing will just balance out. The real problem is jurisdiction shopping to get around basic human rights.
I have thought about tying taxes to conditions but you have to be really careful going in that direction because it tends to be used as a bargaining chip and loopholes get added. And since such laws are currently written by the industries they're targeting you can guarantee it would have so many loopholes the law would be effectively useless from the beginning. In the end I think the simpler you can make it the better.
I like how every one of your arguments starts by assuming someone else's idea leads to arresting innocent people.
- Prices go up for people buying things. This lowers their standard of living.
In some areas. In others it leads to more people with money to buy things, more sales, and therefore lower costs.
- Domestic production costs remain comparatively high (they actually increase), so domestic companies can forget about exporting anything.
Well first, the idea of building things locally leading to an end to all exports is utter bullshit. GM, Ford, Boeing, Intel... all export their products and make much of it in the US.
- Other countries retaliate and impose their own import taxes on US goods. So domestic companies can really forget about exporting anything.
- Millions of people in jobs involving international trade lose those jobs.
So? I would expect them to set similar import taxes, meaning stuff is imported when it is genuinely better and bought locally when the products are similar enough. Not unreasonable. This still puts us at an advantage since tech companies are still largely based in the US.
- The shift from economically advantageous trade to politically protected commerce is a long and disruptive one, causing severe economic hardship.
- The shift from free decision-making to government decision-making empowers government. Bribery and crony capitalism and flourish. Insiders get rich, outsiders get to beg for scraps.
Luckily, this won't happen because all economists -- left, right, and center -- know it's destructive.
Haha. Slippery slope bullshit. I'm not even going to respond to that.
Or we could just use import taxes targeted at equalizing the cost of outsourcing with manufacturing in the US. Simple concept but companies will scream and China won't be too happy.
Health care is also a matter of congress but everyone still calls it "Obamacare" and he seems happy to put his name behind it.
The president has quite a bit of sway over his party and can get congress to address whichever issues he deems important. The response to the software patents petition was basically "we don't want to change this" but they did so by pretended they are powerless.
Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. [...]
Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google. [...]
-- Joel Spolsky, stackoverflow.com (several months prior to the site actually existing)
Does that scare you? Bother you? Leave you a depressed shell of a man, thinking seriously about that potato-farming slash fracking job you left behind back in Idaho?
Well, it probably should. But regardless, that's reality: and that's the audience Stack Overflow was created to serve. So that the apps we're using every day aren't being cobbled together by folks who think DynamicDrive.com and W3Schools are the last word in programming knowledge. If nothing else, this little chart indicates it's working...
Why is that scary? I don't think books are a particularly good way of learning to write software. Often times you don't know exactly what it is you need to learn until you get there. Obviously you need a good foundation so you don't end up gluing a bunch of stuff together and creating a mess of memory leaks, but you don't need a book for every little topic.
One way I often use StackOverflow is to find better solutions to something I already know how to solve. Python has a lot of neat features that, when used correctly, can create some very elegant solutions. I'll run into a problem and think "I know there's a much better way to do this, I just don't know what it is" so I'll search StackOverflow. Does it make me a worse programmer that I haven't run out to buy books on every type of problem I might want to solve for every version of the programming language I might want to solve them in and trusted that the writer has the best solution available?
I graduated with a bachelors of science from an engineering focused university. I like math and science and use both in my work daily. The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist. Something like half the people who took those chemistry classes switched to another major or dropped out, but I seriously doubt there was a strong correlation with those that would be good at science.
I don't think it's a waste of time learning the periodic table and ion charges. Sure, you may forget most of it. But when it comes up again later it will be somewhat familiar. Not everything has to be fun. And getting to the fun stuff sometimes requires making sure everyone is on the same page with the basics.
I have a computer science degree. Some of the first classes they made us take to try to weed people out were documentation (requirements, design, etc) and a very low level class that primarily required programming in assembly. You could argue that you don't need to know how to write a requirements document to write good code or that you don't need to know assembly to write a web app, but universities aren't about cranking out codemonkeys. I'm glad the university is trying to give the students a reality check on what this stuff is really about. I've seen far too many people at work who had no idea what they were doing and now we have to clean up their messes.
The introductory math classes were little better with huge classes where you were supposed to memorize formulas and methodologies and then apply them, with lots of minor mistakes, on paper.
Oh my god! Applying formulas in a math class?! When you get to much more complicated math with huge formulas it is reasonable to expect the professor to allow you a cheat sheet during a test, but for introductory stuff what you describe sounds perfectly reasonable. Sometimes a little busywork is necessary to make the concept sink in.
I don't understand what people think is so absurd about the term "software engineer". The approaches to solving problems is very similar between programmers and other engineering professions. Not for all types of software, but certainly for any complicated system. Unless you're one of those programmers that copies and pastes code everywhere and generally leaves a mess for the next guy, but there are equivalents to this in other engineering practices as well.
I went through all of them and here is a list of some of the no brainers. Obviously it's not an exhaustive list. Just convenience for anyone that wants to hit a few buttons.
Can Samsung's UX team point out exactly how they designed all of Samsung's hardware and software? Why do their icons look that way? Why have the sheen/gloss instead of a flat look?
I don't know about the icons, but most laptops these days are glossy because that's what people tend to buy. This isn't something that started with tablets.
Why not make the icons circular vignettes instead of rounded squares?
Because a square shape is much more practical. It gives you more space to work with to come up with a descriptive picture. It's kind of like these things called "icons" some of us have had for decades on our computers. I've seen plenty of rounded icons on non-Apple devices long before the iPad.
Why taper the back of your device just so?
Ok, may have been copied. But it's a stupid thing to block a product over.
Have you ever heard the name of their head UI person? You'd think that, given the success of the Samsung tablet, that the person would be giving interviews left and right. Anyone? Anyone?
I can't name the head UI person of really any company ever. Most companies don't have celebrity designers.
Here's an analogy that even a closed-minded geek can understand. You have a Wii, XBox 360, and a PS3. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have an optical drive and a bunch of A/V output ports. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for another?
Those devices aren't trying to pack relatively standardized parts into the lightest and smallest packages they can. They don't have to support a flat display on the front or fit nicely in your hands. I have some ear buds that look a lot like some old ear buds I had from a previous brand. Should those companies sue each other because there's a limited number of practical ways to make a device fit in the ear?
I don't know why I'm even responding to an obvious Apple fanboy but that post being modded insightful is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
The article doesn't really give details on how it works. It sounds like these are just contacts you can project images onto. If that's true then you need a projector somewhere pointed at the eye. If that's true why bother with a projector rather than just using a pair of glasses? I'm not really seeing the advantage to this technology other than to say "hey we projected something directly onto someone's eye!"
Unless I'm mistaken and these have their own power source or something, which would be quite impressive.
I've said it before and I'll say it every time. A year from the first day of sale is more than enough. Damn near every medium you hear of (books, movies, games, etc.) makes it money in the first few weeks. A saying in the game and movie industries is that if you don't turn a profit by the end of the sixth week then it's a flop.
The problem is that if it were only a year the studio would just not pay the artist and after a year mass produce the book/song/whatever and keep all the money. You need a long enough duration so the people with the means of distribution and control over advertising would rather pay the artist than wait out the copyright.
Uh... look again. It's filtered by year and 2008 was the year linked. If you look at 2010 there was a big spike in payouts from the media companies, and for 2012 the media companies are still on top.
And there's always Coin Star. If you convert it to a gift certificate you don't have to pay the 9% or whatever the fee is. I just convert my change to an Amazon gift card, which I buy from often anyway. And since the nearest Coin Star is at the market I don't have to make a special trip for it.
I'm guessing this is more related to the fact that the militar is looking into using tablets and other such consumer devices in the field. (See previous /. articles for reference. I'm too lazy to find links to them myself.)
Oh that's a great idea. Just keep rolling the dice until we win! Who needs to pay attention to what their elected officials are doing and decide if the new candidate is really better? (hint: he isn't.) The fix is to get good representatives nominated and then elected. Replacing people won't do anything until you have a good replacement.
I look up every candidate on the ballot every time I vote. Unfortunately, usually the most reasonable candidates are in another party. I mean the ones who think for themselves and actually form their own opinions rather than regurgitating their party's talking points. It would be nice if some of these people were on the ballot for the major parties so we could get them into office.
This really isn't a "sweetheart deal". I'm sure Google gave them this level of access for practical reasons. Now that they've abused it UMG is in legal trouble. Any serious abuse of this access was bound to get noticed either by lawsuits or by a large number of people complaining about their video being removed.
For example, if an investment results in the creation of a factory that produces a new type of ice cream, that is a net benefit to the consumer because there is more ice cream available.
Except this happens less and less since the name of the game these days is growth. What if they instead sit on the money or use it to buy out a competitor, eliminating redundant jobs? The only time investment is guaranteed to create jobs is when the company would not be able to operate without it.
Some yahoo buying a car just means there is more traffic on the road, and one less car available for the consumer to purchase.
There isn't one less car available. Supply and demand. More people buying cars = more cars need to be produced = more jobs building them. This is much more certain than the "what if" scenario with the investment being used to build a new factory and create jobs.
I suspect it is not as much for the shareholders as they want to paint the picture to politicians that the FCC is totally out of control so the politicians will weaken the FCC. I'm sure several politicians and maybe Fox will see this opportunity to jump on the FCC.
Exactly, California all by itself is the 8th most productive economy in the world.. California suffers from 2 things, the money that goes out through taxes to help the other 49 states (shouldn't someone scream communism ? ^_^), and stupid voters that want to pay less taxes all the while keeping the level of public services intact. The first one can't be fixed short of a new civil war, the second problem on the other hand can be fixed. There just is no political will to do it.
California citizens already pay some of the highest taxes in the country. Raising the tax rates too high just makes it even less desirable for business to hire people here because of the higher cost of living, driving jobs and people out and hurting the state's income. It's not about "political will", it's about the reality that the only thing that keeps many businesses in this state is inertia and when costs hit the breaking point they will overcome that inertia. Most Californians are completely ignorant of this though, so it will probably keep getting worse for the foreseeable future.
There was a whoosh, but it wasn't the post you replied to.
I'm still resisting buying digital music until they start selling in a lossless format like flac. For some reason no major stores are willing to do this. I want my high quality archive copy damn it!
Quite simple to buy the CD and convert to FLAC, innit?
Nah, you're not looking to buy anything. Methinks your just grasping at straws to try to justify your theft*
*you can insert whatever euphemism you prefer to try to soften it up, if it helps you get through the day. We all know what it really is.
Good job assuming that because I don't buy *digital* music I don't buy music at all. I buy physical CDs quite a bit but then I feel obligated to keep the disc which takes up space.
I'm still resisting buying digital music until they start selling in a lossless format like flac. For some reason no major stores are willing to do this. I want my high quality archive copy damn it!
Why should a concept, the product of significant investment and innovation, be excluded simply because it is executed within a digital framework?
This argument applies as much to math as it does to software. And the reasons not to allow it to be patentable also apply to both.
The real question is: what does society gain from allowing software patents? Would Microsoft have not written any software were it not patentable? Since patents are a monopoly granted by society for its own benefit ("to promote the progress of science and the useful arts") it should not grant such monopolies in cases where the greater whole does not benefit. That would in fact go against the explicitly defined purpose of patents in the Constitution.
I like how every one of your arguments starts by assuming someone else's idea leads to arresting innocent people.
The idea was to "due something about outsourcing". What do YOU think government can do to stop it? Ask people really really nice? Or enforce new laws, which is done by arresting as needed.
I suggested import taxes. He said that leads to "arresting ordinary people for engaging in ordinary commerce". Are you really defending this?
- Prices go up for people buying things. This lowers their standard of living.
In some areas. In others it leads to more people with money to buy things, more sales, and therefore lower costs.
USA is just not competitive, because on all work you do, big part is taken and redistributed how current masters of you agree. With minimum wage and high tax everything is expensive. Adding new taxes will only make things worse. Rest of world will enjoy cheap electronics,tshirts and everything, while you will be forced to buy from eachother, everyone of you giving more and more money to gov. To be wasted or corrupted. Or perhaps invested into next war "on terror".
That doesn't even make sense. The new taxes would be for imports (or more specifically, outsourced labor), which would not apply for things made domestically. So high wages + new taxes is not the proposed scenario. It's about making companies choose between the two and hopefully making them cost close to the same in the end. Some things would be more expensive due to the wage differences, but I would rather pay more for a product my neighbor made than pay for his unemployment checks. And the last part about giving more and more money to government is completely ridiculous since it would be no more than we do otherwise.
Yup. You don't even have to tie them to wages per se - just tie them to working conditions, environmental laws, political freedom, access to courts, and such. You could even use the proceeds to help drive improvements in these things overseas as part of foreign aid. I think that much of the cost difference overseas boils down to the fact that if a factory worker gets their arm chewed up by a machine you can hand their family $10 and pay somebody else 50 cents to clean the machine, and if in the process 5000 gallons of toxic waste leaks out you just hose it into the creek. Then if the family does get upset and sues chances are the local government will shut them up (perhaps brutally) since they're in the pocket of the company and they don't like to advertise their conditions.
So, outsource your work to Belgium and vice-versa if that makes sense economically - I'm sure that sort of thing will just balance out. The real problem is jurisdiction shopping to get around basic human rights.
I have thought about tying taxes to conditions but you have to be really careful going in that direction because it tends to be used as a bargaining chip and loopholes get added. And since such laws are currently written by the industries they're targeting you can guarantee it would have so many loopholes the law would be effectively useless from the beginning. In the end I think the simpler you can make it the better.
I like how every one of your arguments starts by assuming someone else's idea leads to arresting innocent people.
- Prices go up for people buying things. This lowers their standard of living.
In some areas. In others it leads to more people with money to buy things, more sales, and therefore lower costs.
- Domestic production costs remain comparatively high (they actually increase), so domestic companies can forget about exporting anything.
Well first, the idea of building things locally leading to an end to all exports is utter bullshit. GM, Ford, Boeing, Intel... all export their products and make much of it in the US.
- Other countries retaliate and impose their own import taxes on US goods. So domestic companies can really forget about exporting anything. - Millions of people in jobs involving international trade lose those jobs.
So? I would expect them to set similar import taxes, meaning stuff is imported when it is genuinely better and bought locally when the products are similar enough. Not unreasonable. This still puts us at an advantage since tech companies are still largely based in the US.
- The shift from economically advantageous trade to politically protected commerce is a long and disruptive one, causing severe economic hardship. - The shift from free decision-making to government decision-making empowers government. Bribery and crony capitalism and flourish. Insiders get rich, outsiders get to beg for scraps.
Luckily, this won't happen because all economists -- left, right, and center -- know it's destructive.
Haha. Slippery slope bullshit. I'm not even going to respond to that.
Or we could just use import taxes targeted at equalizing the cost of outsourcing with manufacturing in the US. Simple concept but companies will scream and China won't be too happy.
Health care is also a matter of congress but everyone still calls it "Obamacare" and he seems happy to put his name behind it.
The president has quite a bit of sway over his party and can get congress to address whichever issues he deems important. The response to the software patents petition was basically "we don't want to change this" but they did so by pretended they are powerless.
Yup...
Does that scare you? Bother you? Leave you a depressed shell of a man, thinking seriously about that potato-farming slash fracking job you left behind back in Idaho?
Well, it probably should. But regardless, that's reality: and that's the audience Stack Overflow was created to serve. So that the apps we're using every day aren't being cobbled together by folks who think DynamicDrive.com and W3Schools are the last word in programming knowledge. If nothing else, this little chart indicates it's working...
Why is that scary? I don't think books are a particularly good way of learning to write software. Often times you don't know exactly what it is you need to learn until you get there. Obviously you need a good foundation so you don't end up gluing a bunch of stuff together and creating a mess of memory leaks, but you don't need a book for every little topic.
One way I often use StackOverflow is to find better solutions to something I already know how to solve. Python has a lot of neat features that, when used correctly, can create some very elegant solutions. I'll run into a problem and think "I know there's a much better way to do this, I just don't know what it is" so I'll search StackOverflow. Does it make me a worse programmer that I haven't run out to buy books on every type of problem I might want to solve for every version of the programming language I might want to solve them in and trusted that the writer has the best solution available?
I graduated with a bachelors of science from an engineering focused university. I like math and science and use both in my work daily. The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist. Something like half the people who took those chemistry classes switched to another major or dropped out, but I seriously doubt there was a strong correlation with those that would be good at science.
I don't think it's a waste of time learning the periodic table and ion charges. Sure, you may forget most of it. But when it comes up again later it will be somewhat familiar. Not everything has to be fun. And getting to the fun stuff sometimes requires making sure everyone is on the same page with the basics.
I have a computer science degree. Some of the first classes they made us take to try to weed people out were documentation (requirements, design, etc) and a very low level class that primarily required programming in assembly. You could argue that you don't need to know how to write a requirements document to write good code or that you don't need to know assembly to write a web app, but universities aren't about cranking out codemonkeys. I'm glad the university is trying to give the students a reality check on what this stuff is really about. I've seen far too many people at work who had no idea what they were doing and now we have to clean up their messes.
The introductory math classes were little better with huge classes where you were supposed to memorize formulas and methodologies and then apply them, with lots of minor mistakes, on paper.
Oh my god! Applying formulas in a math class?! When you get to much more complicated math with huge formulas it is reasonable to expect the professor to allow you a cheat sheet during a test, but for introductory stuff what you describe sounds perfectly reasonable. Sometimes a little busywork is necessary to make the concept sink in.
I don't understand what people think is so absurd about the term "software engineer". The approaches to solving problems is very similar between programmers and other engineering professions. Not for all types of software, but certainly for any complicated system. Unless you're one of those programmers that copies and pastes code everywhere and generally leaves a mess for the next guy, but there are equivalents to this in other engineering practices as well.
I went through all of them and here is a list of some of the no brainers. Obviously it's not an exhaustive list. Just convenience for anyone that wants to hit a few buttons.
So expect Obama to tell us why he can't end software patents, abolish the TSA, and repeal the Patriot Act any day now...
Everyone apparently wants machine guns and weed.
Can Samsung's UX team point out exactly how they designed all of Samsung's hardware and software? Why do their icons look that way? Why have the sheen/gloss instead of a flat look?
I don't know about the icons, but most laptops these days are glossy because that's what people tend to buy. This isn't something that started with tablets.
Why not make the icons circular vignettes instead of rounded squares?
Because a square shape is much more practical. It gives you more space to work with to come up with a descriptive picture. It's kind of like these things called "icons" some of us have had for decades on our computers. I've seen plenty of rounded icons on non-Apple devices long before the iPad.
Why taper the back of your device just so?
Ok, may have been copied. But it's a stupid thing to block a product over.
Have you ever heard the name of their head UI person? You'd think that, given the success of the Samsung tablet, that the person would be giving interviews left and right. Anyone? Anyone?
I can't name the head UI person of really any company ever. Most companies don't have celebrity designers.
Here's an analogy that even a closed-minded geek can understand. You have a Wii, XBox 360, and a PS3. Which one of them looks like the other? They all have an optical drive and a bunch of A/V output ports. Could you, at a glance, mistake one for another?
Those devices aren't trying to pack relatively standardized parts into the lightest and smallest packages they can. They don't have to support a flat display on the front or fit nicely in your hands. I have some ear buds that look a lot like some old ear buds I had from a previous brand. Should those companies sue each other because there's a limited number of practical ways to make a device fit in the ear?
I don't know why I'm even responding to an obvious Apple fanboy but that post being modded insightful is absurd.