... have they somewhat improved the miserable performance of these devices on iOS 4.x? I hate being continuously reminded that I'm not complying to the upgrade treadmill by using a not-yet-2-years-old-paid-500EUR-for-the-privilege phone...:/
You are unfortunately in the minority. Most 3G users should have already upgraded to the iPhone 4.
At least in the USA, the process is pretty ridiculous: 1) Upgrade to the iPhone 4 for $200 while keeping your grandfathered-in unlimited data plan 2) Wipe and then jailbreak your iPhone 3G 3) Sell your iPhone 3G on eBay or Craigslist for $250 4) Profit.
Everyone I know that had a 3G used this method for upgrading - at least in my area Verizon is no better than AT&T so there is no reason to wait for them to sell the iPhone.
While not covered well in the press, like IXI, Motorola is also demanding that Microsoft stop shipping "infringing" products, though in this case they speak of virtually the entire Microsoft product line. This can become very interesting. I think Microsoft picked on the wrong company to try and bully and run it's protection racket on this time. They seem to have inherited SCO's footgun...
It will be an interesting fight. Don't forget that RIM sued Motorola, Motorola sued back, and they settled the suits out of court confidentially but with a couple pieces of information released to the public:
So yes, it is possible that Microsoft picked the wrong company to bully. RIM certainly did. Motorola has been doing high-tech stuff for a very long time...
Isn't one requirement of a patent for it to be non-obvious?!!!
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it. This is pretty much the most perfect definition of
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
that you will ever find.
It was mentioned in another comment that the patent was applied for in 2004 and that as far as that poster knew nobody else was doing it. So... Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular. When was that?
My understanding is that it can't. I believe you need to have your content in an iTunes library on your computer. Furthermore, I have read that an Apple TV won't stream content on a NAS that can otherwise host an iTunes library; the library actually needs to be on a computer.
This is a myth that Apple themselves have been perpetuating. I don't know why they make it so hard to find this information on their website but it is there.
The Apple TV can subscribe to video podcast channels and happily stream your media library from anything that can run a basic Apache installation. Just dump your media library information into an XML file (as described in the above link) and point your Apple TV at it.
I find it absolutely amazing that the actual Apple TV section of their website makes no mention of this feature. You do not need to submit it to iTunes for review/approval. You just host it on your own home network.
Looking at the patent claims show that this is actually a pretty interesting patent in the sense that it reveals a lot of information about Google's television business model (and yes, I think it sucks).
Not only is Google building an individual profile on you, but they are building individual profiles on TV commercials. They will be tracking which commercials you skip and storing that information in both profiles. This will help them figure out what type of commercials you are least likely to skip based on the previous actions of you and people like you.
Google will be sharing information with TV companies and will allow TV companies to "get rid of" the "freeloaders" by making them jump through hoops or just outright paying cash to keep watching their TV shows. This seems to be what Slashdot is focusing on. Unfortunately, that is only a small part of the problem.
I also find it hard to believe, with 10% unemployment, they can't find engineers/software people who are desperate for jobs.
National unemployment for Americans with a bachelor degree or higher is currently 4.6%. Certainly there are plenty of unemployed engineers/software people out there, but not as many as you might expect.
The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program - it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.
The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little to make the task easier.
There is a research lab near me that does this sort of thing. I've talked with many people that walk out of this place. They are there for the small amounts of cash they receive in exchange for participating. If one of the computer programs made the puzzle easier, that allowed them to finish and collect their cash faster.
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. To accurately compare the two methods, you will need to find a group of people who are interested in learning how to solve a difficult puzzle and divide them into the groups. Good luck finding such a group, however.
Good luck getting a GPS receiver on the roof of an existing facility. Running conduit, grounding, waterproofing, etc. People say "hey, the Garmin GPS 18x costs only $100", but it will require ten months and $5K to install.
If you wanted to mount a GPS receiver on the roof of a building and wanted to use something off the shelf, perhaps you would be better off looking at the Garmin marine offerings. The GPS 17x has the same timing accuracy of the 18x, has the same MSRP, yet is packaged in a weatherproof housing designed to be mounted on a boat or a pole and survive the harsh conditions of the open ocean for many years.
My point is that by the time Google and their partners could get this into widespread use, H.264 is going to be in even more widespread use than it is now.
If Google wanted to really compete, the time to do it was a few years ago. It's too late now. The only way to stop H.264 is to come out with a codec that makes H.264 look like bloated garbage. This isn't such a codec.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I would love to be proven wrong - I don't really want to have to start paying royalties in 2015.
How long will it take to get popular? 1 year? How long will it take to design the hardware implementation? 6 months? How long will it take to get into production? 1 year? How long will it take to get into a product that is on store shelves? 6 months?
This is too long. Intel may as well have said they aren't interested. 3 years from now there are going to be how many tens of millions of devices with hardware H.264 support and no way of upgrading to VP8 support? People aren't going to toss these things in the trash just so the can buy brand new devices that give them the exact same experience.
States need to recognize that they have lost the battle with online retailers and instead do what they can to lower the cost of business for in-state retailers.
Namely, get rid of sales taxes and make it up via property tax and income tax.
As luck would have it, the Federal tax code encourages this. An individual is allowed to deduct their choice of two out of these three forms of taxation via Schedule A. Residents of the states which only have two of the three taxes get an unfair advantage as they are allowed to deduct their entire state taxes instead of a portion of them.
Any state that eliminates sales tax gets the advantage of lowering the overall tax burden of their residents AND providing an attractive location for online retailers to build warehouses and provide jobs that increase the tax base for the state.
In the 1600s French explorers wrote about finding a location in the center of the new world which would be the most strategic location for controlling shipping by water. Indeed, for many years in the 1800s Chicago was the busiest port in the United States. But the age of the railroad was approaching and Chicago decided it must be the center of that as well. To this day, more than 60% of rail traffic in the United States runs through Chicago. In the 1900s a fast expanding America purchased many of their goods from catalogs. The largest building in the United States was built in Chicago so that manufacturers of goods could display their products to the purchasing managers of the largest retailers in America. And thus Chicago was the center of American retail. In the last 30 - 40 years, trading of financial instruments has exploded in quantity. And Chicago is the center of this market. Every day, more money flows through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange than the NYSE and NASDAQ combined
And here we are today, with Chicago the center of data distribution. Should we be surprised?
I would seriously like a serious opinion from other people. Are apple's machines, in particluar their notebooks overpriced?
I have owned 3 Apple computers and my experience has been that the resale value more than makes up for any initial price differential. I have never had a problem finding people willing to pay hundreds (in one case $1500) for a 4 to 5 year old Apple computer. Sometimes I have trouble getting people to follow through when I put an old PC on craigslist for FREE.
My other experience has been that build quality is generally very good and that commands a bit of a premium, much like a good Thinkpad will generally cost a bit more than an equivalent Dell.
the wordpress app may be all well and good, but there can't plausibly be an app for every site that would otherwise work in a browser. I don't foresee Apple allowing a GoogleDocs app to allow mobile editing of documents, competing with iWork for iPad....
Why not?
There has been an Amazon Kindle app for the iPad since day one. It connects to the Amazon bookstore, not the Apple bookstore.
I can still remember the Computer Security professor telling the class on the very first day that computer security is a matter of economics. How much does it cost to implement? How much do you stand to lose if your security is broken and your "stuff" stolen? At some point, you reach a point of diminishing returns and it is wasteful to spend more on security.
And in this context, time, effort, and inconvenience all have a significant cost that must be counted.
The average idiot computer user is not always as dumb as you think they are.
Isn't BIOS + Browser just a modern interpretation of the thin client? Sure, there's always going to be a small market for them, but I don't see how it can grab a huge share of the market.
Of course a business can run the Web apps from an internal server so it's definitely viable, but it never took off before - I doubt it would now.
On the home front, such a business model turns your computer into a subscription service. It works as long as you pay your internet bill (and whatever other costs are needed to access the actual web applications). This wasn't very popular for music when the customer was presented with other options (iTunes).
And this doesn't even address network reliability.
The worst part of my iPhone is that it uses AT&T's network.
When I am connected via Wi-Fi, it works great. But here in my office in downtown Chicago, I frequently get "Could not activate cellular data network" errors and have problems with voice calls dropping as well.
Last year I was in rural Indiana, getting 3 bars of EDGE, and I was able to use the maps application to find my way through miles and miles of empty roads with rows of corn as far you could see. In fact, it was a lot more responsive than when I get 5 bars of 3G most times.
Perhaps the key is to be the only person connected to the cell tower.
Mercedes introduced a radar Cruise Control system on its S-Class [engadget.com] to automatically slow the car or stop it completely if the car in front is braking. (Adaptive CC is now on several German cars.)
Back in the late 1990s, I had an internship at Delphi Automotive in Indiana and I did some testing work on version 2 of a radar-based adaptive cruise control system for Jaguar. The test vehicle was an otherwise stock XK coupe. I can remember it being driven from Kokomo to West Lafayette without ever touching the gas or brake pedal. They just set the cruise and kept it pointed at the rear of the lead car.
My point is that all three of the technologies you've described have been around for more than a decade and have been in continuous development for more than a decade. And you would probably be very surprised to find out who actually did much of the development work.
As of this morning, Google thinks I have a spyware problem and every time I've tried to do a search I get the sorry page with a captcha to complete the search.
It sure scared me - how does a Linux box and a Macbook get infected while they're both asleep? I've done all the checking I can and I'm pretty sure my network is clean.
Yes, OSX supports SMB via Samba, which means it has solid support for Windows file sharing. You can run AFP on Linux or Windows, but frankly it's not really worth it. I'd be interested to know if anyone wants to make a case that AFP is necessary, but my personal opinion is that it's only worth using if you're running an OSX server.
I have an old Ubuntu box at home acting as a file server on my network. I have a Macbook and my wife has a Windows XP laptop. I set it up so I connect to the server via AFP and she connects via SMB. File transfers are definitely faster over AFP, with the added bonus of the shared device automatically showing up in the finder.
You can share the file system via SMB and AFP at the same time and both are very easy to set up on Linux (I used simple tutorials I found online).
If you've got Macs on your network it seems like a no-brainer to enable AFP.
What about some sort of compromise? I never turn off my Macbook; I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. By the time I finish opening the lid, it is ready for use (although wireless networking usually takes a good 4 to 5 seconds to reconnect). I know that it saves a lot of energy because I've left the computer unplugged and in sleep mode for 2 weeks and when I came back the battery was still more than half charged.
What about enforcing a strict monitor policy? Have all the monitors set to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity.
I'm pretty sure that with a bit more thought, you can get nearly the same savings without any of the additional cost or employee downtime.
Slashdot Mirror
... have they somewhat improved the miserable performance of these devices on iOS 4.x? I hate being continuously reminded that I'm not complying to the upgrade treadmill by using a not-yet-2-years-old-paid-500EUR-for-the-privilege phone... :/
You are unfortunately in the minority. Most 3G users should have already upgraded to the iPhone 4.
At least in the USA, the process is pretty ridiculous:
1) Upgrade to the iPhone 4 for $200 while keeping your grandfathered-in unlimited data plan
2) Wipe and then jailbreak your iPhone 3G
3) Sell your iPhone 3G on eBay or Craigslist for $250
4) Profit.
Everyone I know that had a 3G used this method for upgrading - at least in my area Verizon is no better than AT&T so there is no reason to wait for them to sell the iPhone.
While not covered well in the press, like IXI, Motorola is also demanding that Microsoft stop shipping "infringing" products, though in this case they speak of virtually the entire Microsoft product line. This can become very interesting. I think Microsoft picked on the wrong company to try and bully and run it's protection racket on this time. They seem to have inherited SCO's footgun...
It will be an interesting fight. Don't forget that RIM sued Motorola, Motorola sued back, and they settled the suits out of court confidentially but with a couple pieces of information released to the public:
The financial terms of the Agreement include an up-front payment and ongoing royalties to Motorola. Further terms and conditions of the Agreement are confidential.
So yes, it is possible that Microsoft picked the wrong company to bully. RIM certainly did. Motorola has been doing high-tech stuff for a very long time...
The fear is that Apple will start charging $99 per year to use XCode so that you can compile, install, and run your own copy of Eclipse.
XCode uses two compilers - gcc and llvm/clang. Both are open source compilers. You don't need to install XCode to get and use these compilers.
Isn't one requirement of a patent for it to be non-obvious?!!!
One of the strongest justifications for patent protection is when you create something that becomes ridiculously obvious once you create it. This is pretty much the most perfect definition of
promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
that you will ever find.
It was mentioned in another comment that the patent was applied for in 2004 and that as far as that poster knew nobody else was doing it. So... Were people contemplating this back in 2004? The idea of video cards being used for general purpose computing is not very old. Transcoding user-generated video from one format to another was not very common until YouTube got popular. When was that?
My understanding is that it can't. I believe you need to have your content in an iTunes library on your computer. Furthermore, I have read that an Apple TV won't stream content on a NAS that can otherwise host an iTunes library; the library actually needs to be on a computer.
This is a myth that Apple themselves have been perpetuating. I don't know why they make it so hard to find this information on their website but it is there.
The Apple TV can subscribe to video podcast channels and happily stream your media library from anything that can run a basic Apache installation. Just dump your media library information into an XML file (as described in the above link) and point your Apple TV at it.
I find it absolutely amazing that the actual Apple TV section of their website makes no mention of this feature. You do not need to submit it to iTunes for review/approval. You just host it on your own home network.
Looking at the patent claims show that this is actually a pretty interesting patent in the sense that it reveals a lot of information about Google's television business model (and yes, I think it sucks).
Not only is Google building an individual profile on you, but they are building individual profiles on TV commercials. They will be tracking which commercials you skip and storing that information in both profiles. This will help them figure out what type of commercials you are least likely to skip based on the previous actions of you and people like you.
Google will be sharing information with TV companies and will allow TV companies to "get rid of" the "freeloaders" by making them jump through hoops or just outright paying cash to keep watching their TV shows. This seems to be what Slashdot is focusing on. Unfortunately, that is only a small part of the problem.
I also find it hard to believe, with 10% unemployment, they can't find engineers/software people who are desperate for jobs.
National unemployment for Americans with a bachelor degree or higher is currently 4.6%. Certainly there are plenty of unemployed engineers/software people out there, but not as many as you might expect.
The article described a simple experiment where a puzzle needed to be solved using a computer program. One half of participants were given a 'good' program - it gave hints, was intuitive and generally helped the user to their goal.
The other half took on the same puzzle, but with software which offered little to make the task easier.
There is a research lab near me that does this sort of thing. I've talked with many people that walk out of this place. They are there for the small amounts of cash they receive in exchange for participating. If one of the computer programs made the puzzle easier, that allowed them to finish and collect their cash faster.
The motivation is not to complete the puzzle, the motivation is to collect the cash. To accurately compare the two methods, you will need to find a group of people who are interested in learning how to solve a difficult puzzle and divide them into the groups. Good luck finding such a group, however.
Can't someone (everyone) sue the lawyers who make this schoolboy error?
Yes. Well, you don't normally sue, you ask the court for sanctions against the lawyers.
This happens more frequently than you may expect, and is part of the reason why malpractice insurance is very expensive.
Good luck getting a GPS receiver on the roof of an existing facility. Running conduit, grounding, waterproofing, etc. People say "hey, the Garmin GPS 18x costs only $100", but it will require ten months and $5K to install.
If you wanted to mount a GPS receiver on the roof of a building and wanted to use something off the shelf, perhaps you would be better off looking at the Garmin marine offerings. The GPS 17x has the same timing accuracy of the 18x, has the same MSRP, yet is packaged in a weatherproof housing designed to be mounted on a boat or a pole and survive the harsh conditions of the open ocean for many years.
My point is that by the time Google and their partners could get this into widespread use, H.264 is going to be in even more widespread use than it is now.
If Google wanted to really compete, the time to do it was a few years ago. It's too late now. The only way to stop H.264 is to come out with a codec that makes H.264 look like bloated garbage. This isn't such a codec.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I would love to be proven wrong - I don't really want to have to start paying royalties in 2015.
How long will it take to get popular? 1 year?
How long will it take to design the hardware implementation? 6 months?
How long will it take to get into production? 1 year?
How long will it take to get into a product that is on store shelves? 6 months?
This is too long. Intel may as well have said they aren't interested. 3 years from now there are going to be how many tens of millions of devices with hardware H.264 support and no way of upgrading to VP8 support? People aren't going to toss these things in the trash just so the can buy brand new devices that give them the exact same experience.
States need to recognize that they have lost the battle with online retailers and instead do what they can to lower the cost of business for in-state retailers.
Namely, get rid of sales taxes and make it up via property tax and income tax.
As luck would have it, the Federal tax code encourages this. An individual is allowed to deduct their choice of two out of these three forms of taxation via Schedule A. Residents of the states which only have two of the three taxes get an unfair advantage as they are allowed to deduct their entire state taxes instead of a portion of them.
Any state that eliminates sales tax gets the advantage of lowering the overall tax burden of their residents AND providing an attractive location for online retailers to build warehouses and provide jobs that increase the tax base for the state.
#1, #5, and #8 in Chicago?
In the 1600s French explorers wrote about finding a location in the center of the new world which would be the most strategic location for controlling shipping by water. Indeed, for many years in the 1800s Chicago was the busiest port in the United States. But the age of the railroad was approaching and Chicago decided it must be the center of that as well. To this day, more than 60% of rail traffic in the United States runs through Chicago. In the 1900s a fast expanding America purchased many of their goods from catalogs. The largest building in the United States was built in Chicago so that manufacturers of goods could display their products to the purchasing managers of the largest retailers in America. And thus Chicago was the center of American retail. In the last 30 - 40 years, trading of financial instruments has exploded in quantity. And Chicago is the center of this market. Every day, more money flows through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange than the NYSE and NASDAQ combined
And here we are today, with Chicago the center of data distribution. Should we be surprised?
I would seriously like a serious opinion from other people. Are apple's machines, in particluar their notebooks overpriced?
I have owned 3 Apple computers and my experience has been that the resale value more than makes up for any initial price differential. I have never had a problem finding people willing to pay hundreds (in one case $1500) for a 4 to 5 year old Apple computer. Sometimes I have trouble getting people to follow through when I put an old PC on craigslist for FREE.
My other experience has been that build quality is generally very good and that commands a bit of a premium, much like a good Thinkpad will generally cost a bit more than an equivalent Dell.
the wordpress app may be all well and good, but there can't plausibly be an app for every site that would otherwise work in a browser. I don't foresee Apple allowing a GoogleDocs app to allow mobile editing of documents, competing with iWork for iPad....
Why not?
There has been an Amazon Kindle app for the iPad since day one. It connects to the Amazon bookstore, not the Apple bookstore.
I can still remember the Computer Security professor telling the class on the very first day that computer security is a matter of economics. How much does it cost to implement? How much do you stand to lose if your security is broken and your "stuff" stolen? At some point, you reach a point of diminishing returns and it is wasteful to spend more on security.
And in this context, time, effort, and inconvenience all have a significant cost that must be counted.
The average idiot computer user is not always as dumb as you think they are.
I rarely get 3G data service during the week. Usually it's EDGE and not very fast EDGE at that.
Weekends are much better.
Anyone thinking of getting an iPad should really think about the real value of the 3G option - will it be worth anything in your area?
Isn't BIOS + Browser just a modern interpretation of the thin client? Sure, there's always going to be a small market for them, but I don't see how it can grab a huge share of the market.
Of course a business can run the Web apps from an internal server so it's definitely viable, but it never took off before - I doubt it would now.
On the home front, such a business model turns your computer into a subscription service. It works as long as you pay your internet bill (and whatever other costs are needed to access the actual web applications). This wasn't very popular for music when the customer was presented with other options (iTunes).
And this doesn't even address network reliability.
If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice.
How well does OpenOffice.org do this?
The worst part of my iPhone is that it uses AT&T's network.
When I am connected via Wi-Fi, it works great. But here in my office in downtown Chicago, I frequently get "Could not activate cellular data network" errors and have problems with voice calls dropping as well.
Last year I was in rural Indiana, getting 3 bars of EDGE, and I was able to use the maps application to find my way through miles and miles of empty roads with rows of corn as far you could see. In fact, it was a lot more responsive than when I get 5 bars of 3G most times.
Perhaps the key is to be the only person connected to the cell tower.
Mercedes introduced a radar Cruise Control system on its S-Class [engadget.com] to automatically slow the car or stop it completely if the car in front is braking. (Adaptive CC is now on several German cars.)
Back in the late 1990s, I had an internship at Delphi Automotive in Indiana and I did some testing work on version 2 of a radar-based adaptive cruise control system for Jaguar. The test vehicle was an otherwise stock XK coupe. I can remember it being driven from Kokomo to West Lafayette without ever touching the gas or brake pedal. They just set the cruise and kept it pointed at the rear of the lead car.
My point is that all three of the technologies you've described have been around for more than a decade and have been in continuous development for more than a decade. And you would probably be very surprised to find out who actually did much of the development work.
As of this morning, Google thinks I have a spyware problem and every time I've tried to do a search I get the sorry page with a captcha to complete the search.
It sure scared me - how does a Linux box and a Macbook get infected while they're both asleep? I've done all the checking I can and I'm pretty sure my network is clean.
Yes, OSX supports SMB via Samba, which means it has solid support for Windows file sharing. You can run AFP on Linux or Windows, but frankly it's not really worth it. I'd be interested to know if anyone wants to make a case that AFP is necessary, but my personal opinion is that it's only worth using if you're running an OSX server.
I have an old Ubuntu box at home acting as a file server on my network. I have a Macbook and my wife has a Windows XP laptop. I set it up so I connect to the server via AFP and she connects via SMB. File transfers are definitely faster over AFP, with the added bonus of the shared device automatically showing up in the finder.
You can share the file system via SMB and AFP at the same time and both are very easy to set up on Linux (I used simple tutorials I found online).
If you've got Macs on your network it seems like a no-brainer to enable AFP.
What about some sort of compromise? I never turn off my Macbook; I just close the lid and it goes to sleep. By the time I finish opening the lid, it is ready for use (although wireless networking usually takes a good 4 to 5 seconds to reconnect). I know that it saves a lot of energy because I've left the computer unplugged and in sleep mode for 2 weeks and when I came back the battery was still more than half charged.
What about enforcing a strict monitor policy? Have all the monitors set to turn off after 20 minutes of inactivity.
I'm pretty sure that with a bit more thought, you can get nearly the same savings without any of the additional cost or employee downtime.