Apple already mentionned leaving samsung to go to other suppliers...
Then, they went on with samsung for their LCD screens on some devices because no other suppliers could give them the same level of quality...
There are other suppliers, but matching Samsung is difficult... Samsung is everywhere... From refrigerators to microwaves, from hard drive to whole computers, from Blue-Ray and DVD players to television sets, from electronic parts to smartphones and tablets... this gives them an huge advantage in scaling costs... which very few competitors may match.
By the way, one of the TFT screen suppliers for Apple, LG, could go down (and stop activities) anytime soon... Who will be able to supply the huge LCD demands from Apple ??? Samsung ?;-)
I think that Apple's best move is shut up and keep a low...
Samsung was waiting for the presentation to have an official confirmation that iPhone 5 will have LTE... Now, they'll ask for a ban of the device and people who will preorder will take the risk of waiting for ages before having their brand new phone...
So the lines may be quite short after all... Because people want their breand new toy NOW and not in a uncertain future...
---quote--- That's ironic, because I actually like the walled garden. On the consumer side I don't have to worry about viruses or spyware or other garbage android has been known for, and on the developer side I rest easy knowing most people are not stealing my apps. It's a win-win. ---end quote---
Well, this would be great if it were true... But you have repeatedly application that manage to escape the Apple Filter. And I don't talk about the system bugs like the one that resulted in a "jailbreakme.com" web page to jailbreak the iPhone.
Have a look at the underhanded code contest and you'll see that it may be quie easy to sneak some malware in the Apple Walled Garden...
So, relying on a walled garder for system security is clearly insane and stupid... It's nothing but snake oil...
They didn't replace non-free by free... They did replace GPL by non-GPL (ASL) component.
To provide a mechanical analogy, they didn't replace tri-wing, pentalobe or such screw by flat screw but standard cruciform screws by slot screws...
Before the donation to Apache, Oracle managed to have OpenOffice fork (LibreOffice) because of political issues from Oracle... that's never good for an opensource project...
During SUN's era, the motto for Java was : "if there is a vulnerability, stop everything until it's fixed"... Sun was quite responsive in order to keep java's secure reputation...
But now, it's Oracle... Oracle screwed on OpenOffice... Oracle is screwing up over MySQL... And it looks like Oracle is screwing up over Java... I wonder what treatement gets VirtualBox...
What about Samsung suing Apple for stealing it's design of a tablet with a size smaller than 10" but bigger than a phone ? After all, we DO KNOW (it was publicly said) that Apple came to that idea after using a Samsung 7" tablet !!! Blatant copy...
I'd say that samsung should ask for... 1B$ damages;-)
High value is an easy guess... The reason is the same than why people are buying bonds from Germany with NEGATIVE interests.
With the crisis, many investors don't know where to invest, Apple has lots of cash and, as such, is far from going bankrupt. It don't give much interrest but, unless the bubble crashs, it's there to stay, what can't be say for many companies.
But should there more rewarding (and still solid) shares, investors would switch because of the bubble-like behaviour of Apple...
The A4 (like some samsung's processors) is comprised mostly of "IP-Cores" from various companies.
IP Cores are electronic designs sold like the ARM processor (which is present in all the iPhone/iPad/... processors), the grephic accelerator (PowerVR, nVidia,...), the RAM block, the FLASH rom, the USB interface, the wifi system (Broadcom and other),...
So, no, Apple did not design the A4... they designed a VERY SMALL part of it. Some people did "decap" (cur the plastic box around the processor) both an A4 and a Samsung processor and, using microscopes, were able to identify these common parts which covered more than 90% of the chip (well, Samsung chip had some extra IPcores which were useless for a phone and are not present in the A4)
When Apple boast about their "brand new magic A(n+1) processor", it makes me laugh... because there is nothing magic, nothing new... they just updated the CPU cores to a newer version from Acorn (which designs ARM) and the graphic cores... Some glue electronics to bind all these parts and it's done...
And ARM cores were used in later Palm devices (first were using a 68000 variant), on iPaq (from CompaQ) and other windows mobiles PDA as well as in Embedded systems.
Given that most false claims are from companies with big pockets, I'd say that a false claim (with is a felony, let's remind about it) should result in an automatic fine of 50,000.00$ (paid to state or federal) plus automatic damages of 10,000.00$ to both the ISP and the person who posted the video.
Right now, Linux is still an "outsider", without much weight in the industry... It's mostly present in a few niches : - web hosting (and sometimes, web development, when Flash and Photoshop are not needed) - Academic (mostly universities) - Fanatics - some places where a centra IT has decided to use it (Munich, French police,...)...
The concerns about the UEFI and microsoft key are present because Linux is NOT mainstream enough to make computer vendor worry about Linux becoming unusable on their computers.
By embracing Linux, Steam may open linux to more people. Don't forget that older (DOS) games on steam run through a modified version of Dosbox (which is available on both Linux and Windows), that some game are already OpenGL/X11 ready because a MAC version does exist,...
If Steam move make more people use Linux, it also mean that more people will be using LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) instead of Microsoft Office. It also mean that more people will have a try at The Gimp, Blender, Audacity, Ardour, Pidgin, gcc,...
And don't get it wrong, the people the more likely to make the switch to Linux remain the more computer litterate... People who make be willing to have a look at the "official" web-site of these linux programs that they are using... and discover that the source are available, that contributions are (mostly) welcome,...
You can't force freedom through the troat of someone... the only thing that you may do is show that freedom exists and wait until they long for it enough to go further.
And I don't think that all software has to be free. I think that core software has to. This include OS, wordprocessing (spreadsheet,...), image edition/creation, music creation/listening/... These are the keys to computer world. Games are only content.
If you want to have people switch to linux, first make them use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice), Gimp, Blender, Audacity, VLC, Pidgin, Firefox,... under windows. Try to replace every single app by an application that exists in both linux and windows world.
When they got used to use these application, you may change the OS. Try to get a distribution that is simple to use. I like Mandriva but I've heard that Ubuntu is as easy to use.
Try to configure their window manager/desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) so that the "start" button is in the same lower-left place than on Windows and to have it similar (but with a good looking graphic theme and some nice applets that will be a "plus" over Windows.
Don't forget to install Midnight Commander (specially if the person switching has been using DOS in the past) and a decent text editor (nano, joe,...) set as default editor (vi is way too disturbing).
It may sound stupid, but don't forget to install PySol as a replacement for windows solitaire/freecell.
And, very important, be available when they'll have questions...Keep in mind that they'll come with questions for month even years... In the beginning, very trivial questions... you'll need to be very patient.
There are aleady hearing restoration though a devinde put in the head with the receptor and an electrode sending the "sound signal", and a device looking like a standard earing helper with the microphone and the emitter, put around the ear.
And years ago (15-20 years ago), I read in a book about electronics and what it allows about an artificial hand controlled by the brain (it could open/close the fingers), with heat and pressure captors which would send some basic feeling to the brain... It required lots of training to learn to control it but was working afaik.
There are two issues at hand : did Apple get the iPad trademark in China and is the buying through a shell company valid.
It seem that Apple has no rights for the iPad brand in China (well, they got screwed over this one). If courts in china decide that Apple has no right to the iPad name in China, this could mean that production could be blocked in China... And producing the iPad somewhere else would mean (much) higher costs.
There is also another problem : when Apple bought the name, it made up a name for a company which was the same than the product name (iPad) but where saying it wasn't about electronic display devices (well, it was about software programming) so there were no trademark issue (else, IP Application Development could have been sued for Trademark infrigment by Proview). It's improbable that Proview would have sold the iPad trademark to some company planning to make display devices.
The big point about having the Nuclear Bomb is to NOT use it...
Steve Jobs broke the truce and went nuclear against Android... Except that most of his nuclear missiles are rotten (patents on obvious things... didn't we have "swipe" in "Minority Report" for example... and rounded rectangle... no comment)
Now, it's beginning to backfire... Samsung, Motorola and other would probably not have sued Apple out of existence... But now, Apple has put them in a situation where it's probably the best move...
My guess is that they will sue Apple again and again until iPhone and iPad go to oblivion... And Apple is in a dangerous situation. It's share is bubbling up... which means that it's perceived value is probably much higher than it's real value... It also mean that the Apple share can drop suddently to levels well below it's real value (panic effect) when the bubble will explode... And market bubble always explode one time or another...
Except that with the other manufacturers, it probably has been a patent cross licensing, something that Apple has refused to do from the start.
And Apple built his iUniverse around infringing products, as it refused to license the technologies (waiting for some court to come to help)... IANAL but there is clearly a damage to the other players as Apple may not have been able to enter the market like he did should he have paid for the licences from the start... At that time, it was far from "some little money out of a big warchest"...
World of Warcraft uses Bittorrent to distribute it's client and it's updates NCSoft uses Bittorrent or a similar P2P protocol to distribute Lineage 2 files Mandriva distribute it's Linux CD and DVD using Bittorrent, including the "powerpack" edition (which is commercial) BitTorrent is increasingly used to transfer big LEGAL files by big companies...
Maybe we should have some big names like Blizzard and NCSoft (which are by no mean affiliated to that bunch of "OpenSource freaks") weight in in favor of the technology they are using themself...
Because, should RIAA/MPAA/... have their way, BitTorrent traffic would be banned at ISP level (using Layer7 firewalling) and it would affect them very badly.
You keep the same form factor (and thus, the same (or nearly the same) battery) but you change a few chips - more powerful 3D accelerator... which means more electricity hungry - dual core processor instead of single core And some other hardware increase which are electricity hungry. Even when you're on standby, the battery (which didn't change as it would have required a bigger case) will empty faster... and when you're actually USING these new performances, the battery will drain very fast.
In software, Apple can make the phone spend more time in "sleep" mode, with processor speed lowered and some subsystems turned off, but you can't bring it down to what iPhone 4 was. And when you're using the phone for 3D games and such, you'll probably be back to 1/2 day of battery expectancy.
Somehow, UNESCO did something he didn't have to do : it's clealy NOT the role of UNESCO to decide that a country exists or don't exists. It's up to the UN to take that decision. Until then, Palestine has no legal existence.
Most computer work 'out of the box' with current Linux distributions. Hardware problems are less and less frequent.
For the graphic card, you only have to boot in correct VESA mode and use VesaFB X11.
For the wifi, you've a way to use windows driver (Mandriva has it as an options as soon as at install time)
I've sometimes had less trouble installing Linux on a laptop than installing XP... All hardware being detected at install time with Linux when windows needed that I downloaded drivers (from Linux) in order to have both NIC and Wifi running, nvidia driver, SP2 (for the sound card),... not speaking of the trouble of having XP install on a SATA system without floppy disk...
Microsoft can give the soft for free, but here, they'd have to also donate some hardware which is way less probable...
By the way, that same hardware design was already present in a 1969 film called 2001 A Space Odyssey...
The icon-grid can be tracked back to Xerox' work (which was stolen by both Apple and Microsoft... Which is why Apple got denied when he tried to block Windows). We can find it on Palm Pilot devices (I already had an icon grid for the application launcher on my old Palm IIIxe monochrome)
Capacitive sensors were already used more than 20 years ago (I remind seing some of them on some microwave) and you can find some tools "out of the box" from microchip to make capacitive control panels (including sliders, buttons, switches and x-y zones)... Oh... and I should check but I think that it's the same technology which is used on touchpads on PC and Mac for years.
Tablet computers were already done by Microsoft (which was a big failure... well, Windows is not really made for tablets)
Gestures ? Well, ask to a 8year old boy who never saw an iPhone/Android, tablet,... what gestures he may do with one finger, with two fingers and you'll probably get the same list that Apple is trying to protect... It's trivial and as such can't (oops.. shouldn't) be patented.
On the other hand, Apple refused to pay for the 3G/GSM/... licences, saying that these should be covered because they are buying chips made by other who should have paid these... They have a lot of litigation about these technical patents (that can only be understood by people who are electronics engineers with telecom specialisation).
So, well, I'd like to see iPhone 4S Banned from Whole Europe and Korea... It could teach to Apple one basic law : "A bad peace is always better than a good war".
It's perfect timing to take a revenge against Apple and it's actions towars Galaxy Tab... And maybe kill the whole iPhone market in the long term. Apple lost it's Guru, Steve Jobs. Markets are waiting to see how things will go... If Apple get one big backlash it's stock value will probably fall down and Apple could be pushed back in a corner like it was before in the Macintosh vs PC. Unlike a few years ago, there are now viable alternatives to the iPhone. Android Market is catching up (faster growth, quality of application increasing,...), several android phones have a better hardware than the iPhone 4 (maybe even a better hardware than the 4S), Android is now known and has earned recognition,...
Dual core processor... what you can find on other (slimmer) phones for months 8MPixels camera... You also find it on other phone... And the size of the camera is barely different... The biggest part is the lens which didn't have to change. Voice recognition, available on Android for long There is nothing big about the new iPhone 4S... it's only trying to play catch-up with the other smartphones... And, yes, it's the best iPhone as each iPhone is better than the previous one (otherwise, nobody would purchase it).
Oh... and about their A5 chip... more than 95% of it is "common IP cores" that can be found in many other chips... ARM core, 3D core, RAM,... But it's more sexy to say "our brand new ultra-secret processor called A5" than to say "Our brand new ARMv7 two cores, 1GbRAM,XXX 3D core,...chip".
And iOS5 will probably be available to other Apple devices... Those with older devices being left in the cold.
If I'm correct, it's about some 3G patents... They didn't attack Apple before (for the previous phones) because patent war was not declared at that time. Since that time, Apple had the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned from Germany and tried to have it banned in whole europe. Samsung could go after all the iPhone but it would not make any sense. first, they'll have some trouble preventing them being sold as Apple is likely to stop selling them and only selling the 4S and they can't get these called back from consumers. It's also much easier to get a ban (and a trial saying Apple is infringing) on ONE product then ask for damage&interests for the previous products in a separate trial.
If it's to teach to young children, I think that good choices could be - scratch (scratch.mit.edu) a graphical langage that may help to understand basic algorithmic on a visual interface - futurepinball (futurepinball.com) a pinball emulator which uses event-driven basic to manage the controls Both have a ludic aspect that may appeal to children
If they are a little older, HTML then HTML+PHP could be a good choice. Javascript is a pain in the a** when it comes to complex programming (and I don't even talk about the cross browser nightmares). As a bonus, PHP may be used as command-line.
I'd avoid Python (a missing space may trigger a logic error with no syntax error which could become a pain for debugging), Java, C++ and C# (and other object oriented) as OOP is far from intuitive and C or Pascal (and similar) for the memory allocation problems. PERL seems a little un-intuitive (even if it's a great langage) and Reverse polish (Scheme/Lisp/...) is also a big problem.
If they are a little hardware oriented, Arduino or plain AVR/PIC microcontroller could be great (and there are good cheap devkits including lots of leds, buttons, an LCD screen,...)
Slashdot Mirror
Apple already mentionned leaving samsung to go to other suppliers...
Then, they went on with samsung for their LCD screens on some devices because no other suppliers could give them the same level of quality...
There are other suppliers, but matching Samsung is difficult... Samsung is everywhere... From refrigerators to microwaves, from hard drive to whole computers, from Blue-Ray and DVD players to television sets, from electronic parts to smartphones and tablets... this gives them an huge advantage in scaling costs... which very few competitors may match.
By the way, one of the TFT screen suppliers for Apple, LG, could go down (and stop activities) anytime soon... Who will be able to supply the huge LCD demands from Apple ??? Samsung ? ;-)
I think that Apple's best move is shut up and keep a low...
Samsung was waiting for the presentation to have an official confirmation that iPhone 5 will have LTE...
Now, they'll ask for a ban of the device and people who will preorder will take the risk of waiting for ages before having their brand new phone...
So the lines may be quite short after all... Because people want their breand new toy NOW and not in a uncertain future...
---quote---
That's ironic, because I actually like the walled garden. On the consumer side I don't have to worry about viruses or spyware or other garbage android has been known for, and on the developer side I rest easy knowing most people are not stealing my apps. It's a win-win.
---end quote---
Well, this would be great if it were true... But you have repeatedly application that manage to escape the Apple Filter. And I don't talk about the system bugs like the one that resulted in a "jailbreakme.com" web page to jailbreak the iPhone.
Have a look at the underhanded code contest and you'll see that it may be quie easy to sneak some malware in the Apple Walled Garden...
So, relying on a walled garder for system security is clearly insane and stupid... It's nothing but snake oil...
They didn't replace non-free by free... They did replace GPL by non-GPL (ASL) component.
To provide a mechanical analogy, they didn't replace tri-wing, pentalobe or such screw by flat screw but standard cruciform screws by slot screws...
Before the donation to Apache, Oracle managed to have OpenOffice fork (LibreOffice) because of political issues from Oracle... that's never good for an opensource project...
During SUN's era, the motto for Java was : "if there is a vulnerability, stop everything until it's fixed"... Sun was quite responsive in order to keep java's secure reputation...
But now, it's Oracle... Oracle screwed on OpenOffice... Oracle is screwing up over MySQL... And it looks like Oracle is screwing up over Java... I wonder what treatement gets VirtualBox...
What about Samsung suing Apple for stealing it's design of a tablet with a size smaller than 10" but bigger than a phone ? After all, we DO KNOW (it was publicly said) that Apple came to that idea after using a Samsung 7" tablet !!! Blatant copy...
I'd say that samsung should ask for... 1B$ damages ;-)
High value is an easy guess... The reason is the same than why people are buying bonds from Germany with NEGATIVE interests.
With the crisis, many investors don't know where to invest, Apple has lots of cash and, as such, is far from going bankrupt. It don't give much interrest but, unless the bubble crashs, it's there to stay, what can't be say for many companies.
But should there more rewarding (and still solid) shares, investors would switch because of the bubble-like behaviour of Apple...
The A4 (like some samsung's processors) is comprised mostly of "IP-Cores" from various companies.
IP Cores are electronic designs sold like the ARM processor (which is present in all the iPhone/iPad/... processors), the grephic accelerator (PowerVR, nVidia,...), the RAM block, the FLASH rom, the USB interface, the wifi system (Broadcom and other), ...
So, no, Apple did not design the A4... they designed a VERY SMALL part of it. Some people did "decap" (cur the plastic box around the processor) both an A4 and a Samsung processor and, using microscopes, were able to identify these common parts which covered more than 90% of the chip (well, Samsung chip had some extra IPcores which were useless for a phone and are not present in the A4)
When Apple boast about their "brand new magic A(n+1) processor", it makes me laugh... because there is nothing magic, nothing new... they just updated the CPU cores to a newer version from Acorn (which designs ARM) and the graphic cores... Some glue electronics to bind all these parts and it's done...
And ARM cores were used in later Palm devices (first were using a 68000 variant), on iPaq (from CompaQ) and other windows mobiles PDA as well as in Embedded systems.
Given that most false claims are from companies with big pockets, I'd say that a false claim (with is a felony, let's remind about it) should result in an automatic fine of 50,000.00$ (paid to state or federal) plus automatic damages of 10,000.00$ to both the ISP and the person who posted the video.
Right now, Linux is still an "outsider", without much weight in the industry... It's mostly present in a few niches : ...
- web hosting (and sometimes, web development, when Flash and Photoshop are not needed)
- Academic (mostly universities)
- Fanatics
- some places where a centra IT has decided to use it (Munich, French police,...)
The concerns about the UEFI and microsoft key are present because Linux is NOT mainstream enough to make computer vendor worry about Linux becoming unusable on their computers.
By embracing Linux, Steam may open linux to more people. Don't forget that older (DOS) games on steam run through a modified version of Dosbox (which is available on both Linux and Windows), that some game are already OpenGL/X11 ready because a MAC version does exist,...
If Steam move make more people use Linux, it also mean that more people will be using LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) instead of Microsoft Office. It also mean that more people will have a try at The Gimp, Blender, Audacity, Ardour, Pidgin, gcc,...
And don't get it wrong, the people the more likely to make the switch to Linux remain the more computer litterate... People who make be willing to have a look at the "official" web-site of these linux programs that they are using... and discover that the source are available, that contributions are (mostly) welcome,...
You can't force freedom through the troat of someone... the only thing that you may do is show that freedom exists and wait until they long for it enough to go further.
And I don't think that all software has to be free. I think that core software has to. This include OS, wordprocessing (spreadsheet,...), image edition/creation, music creation/listening/... These are the keys to computer world. Games are only content.
If you want to have people switch to linux, first make them use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice), Gimp, Blender, Audacity, VLC, Pidgin, Firefox,... under windows. Try to replace every single app by an application that exists in both linux and windows world.
When they got used to use these application, you may change the OS. Try to get a distribution that is simple to use. I like Mandriva but I've heard that Ubuntu is as easy to use.
Try to configure their window manager/desktop environment (Gnome or KDE) so that the "start" button is in the same lower-left place than on Windows and to have it similar (but with a good looking graphic theme and some nice applets that will be a "plus" over Windows.
Don't forget to install Midnight Commander (specially if the person switching has been using DOS in the past) and a decent text editor (nano, joe, ...) set as default editor (vi is way too disturbing).
It may sound stupid, but don't forget to install PySol as a replacement for windows solitaire/freecell.
And, very important, be available when they'll have questions...Keep in mind that they'll come with questions for month even years... In the beginning, very trivial questions... you'll need to be very patient.
There are aleady hearing restoration though a devinde put in the head with the receptor and an electrode sending the "sound signal", and a device looking like a standard earing helper with the microphone and the emitter, put around the ear.
And years ago (15-20 years ago), I read in a book about electronics and what it allows about an artificial hand controlled by the brain (it could open/close the fingers), with heat and pressure captors which would send some basic feeling to the brain... It required lots of training to learn to control it but was working afaik.
There are two issues at hand : did Apple get the iPad trademark in China and is the buying through a shell company valid.
It seem that Apple has no rights for the iPad brand in China (well, they got screwed over this one). If courts in china decide that Apple has no right to the iPad name in China, this could mean that production could be blocked in China... And producing the iPad somewhere else would mean (much) higher costs.
There is also another problem : when Apple bought the name, it made up a name for a company which was the same than the product name (iPad) but where saying it wasn't about electronic display devices (well, it was about software programming) so there were no trademark issue (else, IP Application Development could have been sued for Trademark infrigment by Proview). It's improbable that Proview would have sold the iPad trademark to some company planning to make display devices.
The big point about having the Nuclear Bomb is to NOT use it...
Steve Jobs broke the truce and went nuclear against Android... Except that most of his nuclear missiles are rotten (patents on obvious things... didn't we have "swipe" in "Minority Report" for example... and rounded rectangle... no comment)
Now, it's beginning to backfire... Samsung, Motorola and other would probably not have sued Apple out of existence... But now, Apple has put them in a situation where it's probably the best move...
My guess is that they will sue Apple again and again until iPhone and iPad go to oblivion... And Apple is in a dangerous situation. It's share is bubbling up... which means that it's perceived value is probably much higher than it's real value... It also mean that the Apple share can drop suddently to levels well below it's real value (panic effect) when the bubble will explode... And market bubble always explode one time or another...
Except that with the other manufacturers, it probably has been a patent cross licensing, something that Apple has refused to do from the start.
And Apple built his iUniverse around infringing products, as it refused to license the technologies (waiting for some court to come to help)... IANAL but there is clearly a damage to the other players as Apple may not have been able to enter the market like he did should he have paid for the licences from the start... At that time, it was far from "some little money out of a big warchest"...
World of Warcraft uses Bittorrent to distribute it's client and it's updates
NCSoft uses Bittorrent or a similar P2P protocol to distribute Lineage 2 files
Mandriva distribute it's Linux CD and DVD using Bittorrent, including the "powerpack" edition (which is commercial)
BitTorrent is increasingly used to transfer big LEGAL files by big companies...
Maybe we should have some big names like Blizzard and NCSoft (which are by no mean affiliated to that bunch of "OpenSource freaks") weight in in favor of the technology they are using themself...
Because, should RIAA/MPAA/... have their way, BitTorrent traffic would be banned at ISP level (using Layer7 firewalling) and it would affect them very badly.
You keep the same form factor (and thus, the same (or nearly the same) battery) but you change a few chips
- more powerful 3D accelerator... which means more electricity hungry
- dual core processor instead of single core
And some other hardware increase which are electricity hungry. Even when you're on standby, the battery (which didn't change as it would have required a bigger case) will empty faster... and when you're actually USING these new performances, the battery will drain very fast.
In software, Apple can make the phone spend more time in "sleep" mode, with processor speed lowered and some subsystems turned off, but you can't bring it down to what iPhone 4 was. And when you're using the phone for 3D games and such, you'll probably be back to 1/2 day of battery expectancy.
Somehow, UNESCO did something he didn't have to do : it's clealy NOT the role of UNESCO to decide that a country exists or don't exists. It's up to the UN to take that decision. Until then, Palestine has no legal existence.
Most computer work 'out of the box' with current Linux distributions. Hardware problems are less and less frequent.
For the graphic card, you only have to boot in correct VESA mode and use VesaFB X11.
For the wifi, you've a way to use windows driver (Mandriva has it as an options as soon as at install time)
I've sometimes had less trouble installing Linux on a laptop than installing XP... All hardware being detected at install time with Linux when windows needed that I downloaded drivers (from Linux) in order to have both NIC and Wifi running, nvidia driver, SP2 (for the sound card), ... not speaking of the trouble of having XP install on a SATA system without floppy disk...
Microsoft can give the soft for free, but here, they'd have to also donate some hardware which is way less probable...
By the way, that same hardware design was already present in a 1969 film called 2001 A Space Odyssey...
The icon-grid can be tracked back to Xerox' work (which was stolen by both Apple and Microsoft... Which is why Apple got denied when he tried to block Windows). We can find it on Palm Pilot devices (I already had an icon grid for the application launcher on my old Palm IIIxe monochrome)
Capacitive sensors were already used more than 20 years ago (I remind seing some of them on some microwave) and you can find some tools "out of the box" from microchip to make capacitive control panels (including sliders, buttons, switches and x-y zones)... Oh... and I should check but I think that it's the same technology which is used on touchpads on PC and Mac for years.
Tablet computers were already done by Microsoft (which was a big failure... well, Windows is not really made for tablets)
Gestures ? Well, ask to a 8year old boy who never saw an iPhone/Android, tablet,... what gestures he may do with one finger, with two fingers and you'll probably get the same list that Apple is trying to protect... It's trivial and as such can't (oops.. shouldn't) be patented.
On the other hand, Apple refused to pay for the 3G/GSM/... licences, saying that these should be covered because they are buying chips made by other who should have paid these... They have a lot of litigation about these technical patents (that can only be understood by people who are electronics engineers with telecom specialisation).
So, well, I'd like to see iPhone 4S Banned from Whole Europe and Korea... It could teach to Apple one basic law : "A bad peace is always better than a good war".
It's perfect timing to take a revenge against Apple and it's actions towars Galaxy Tab... And maybe kill the whole iPhone market in the long term. ...), several android phones have a better hardware than the iPhone 4 (maybe even a better hardware than the 4S), Android is now known and has earned recognition,...
Apple lost it's Guru, Steve Jobs. Markets are waiting to see how things will go... If Apple get one big backlash it's stock value will probably fall down and Apple could be pushed back in a corner like it was before in the Macintosh vs PC.
Unlike a few years ago, there are now viable alternatives to the iPhone. Android Market is catching up (faster growth, quality of application increasing,
Dual core processor... what you can find on other (slimmer) phones for months
8MPixels camera... You also find it on other phone... And the size of the camera is barely different... The biggest part is the lens which didn't have to change.
Voice recognition, available on Android for long
There is nothing big about the new iPhone 4S... it's only trying to play catch-up with the other smartphones... And, yes, it's the best iPhone as each iPhone is better than the previous one (otherwise, nobody would purchase it).
Oh... and about their A5 chip... more than 95% of it is "common IP cores" that can be found in many other chips... ARM core, 3D core, RAM, ... But it's more sexy to say "our brand new ultra-secret processor called A5" than to say "Our brand new ARMv7 two cores, 1GbRAM,XXX 3D core,...chip".
And iOS5 will probably be available to other Apple devices... Those with older devices being left in the cold.
If I'm correct, it's about some 3G patents... They didn't attack Apple before (for the previous phones) because patent war was not declared at that time.
Since that time, Apple had the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned from Germany and tried to have it banned in whole europe.
Samsung could go after all the iPhone but it would not make any sense. first, they'll have some trouble preventing them being sold as Apple is likely to stop selling them and only selling the 4S and they can't get these called back from consumers. It's also much easier to get a ban (and a trial saying Apple is infringing) on ONE product then ask for damage&interests for the previous products in a separate trial.
Big-trak anyone ? ;-)
If it's to teach to young children, I think that good choices could be
- scratch (scratch.mit.edu) a graphical langage that may help to understand basic algorithmic on a visual interface
- futurepinball (futurepinball.com) a pinball emulator which uses event-driven basic to manage the controls
Both have a ludic aspect that may appeal to children
If they are a little older, HTML then HTML+PHP could be a good choice. Javascript is a pain in the a** when it comes to complex programming (and I don't even talk about the cross browser nightmares). As a bonus, PHP may be used as command-line.
I'd avoid Python (a missing space may trigger a logic error with no syntax error which could become a pain for debugging), Java, C++ and C# (and other object oriented) as OOP is far from intuitive and C or Pascal (and similar) for the memory allocation problems. PERL seems a little un-intuitive (even if it's a great langage) and Reverse polish (Scheme/Lisp/...) is also a big problem.
If they are a little hardware oriented, Arduino or plain AVR/PIC microcontroller could be great (and there are good cheap devkits including lots of leds, buttons, an LCD screen, ...)