It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days.
Provided your machine is new enough and physically large enough to accept such modules. My two-year-old 10" laptop, for example, won't take more than 2 GB according to crucial.com.
Yeah, assuming your machine can be upgraded (many laptops, for instance, are not so flexible in this respect..) it's not so much the price as it is the annoyance of actually doing it.
For simple documents, it's good. But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. It has excellent integration between other MS stuff like excel, project etc. I have seriously tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't quite cut it yet.
Er, but for "serious stuff", MS office is also slow, flaky, and unreliable...
[Idiots at my work write their tech manuals in word...argh..!]
Ok, so as scrollbars often progress through a document in exactly the same way Apple's widget (that is to say, their "method" of displaying progress information is the same), and you say that a scrollbar's "extra" functionality (as a control) does not matter, that means from the patent point of view, Apple's widget is an exact duplicate of a common existing method for displaying progress, and Apple's caveat "but it's not a scrollbar" is irrelevant...
... and that sounds like it is exactly as it should be.
The problem with facebook is not really facebook per-se—some people like it, it serves their needs, good for them.
The problem is when facebook becomes so overwhelmingly dominant that they are essentially the only viable choice for most people, meaning that people who don't like it (and they are legion) are basically goaded into using it anyway.
Ideally, there would be a range of services that are all popular, maybe even with content-transfer between them (I know, FB would royally freak, but... from a user's point of view, this is ideal... and the user's content does belong to the user, doesn't it...?), allowing people to use the one they like best, and avoiding any one service from becoming too powerful.
Screen area was in short supply on the 1980’s machines used with Smalltalk-80. To preserve it, scroll bars were not shown all the time, but only when a scrollable view had the focus.
Not the same.
This isn't how the system I used worked. The scrollbar was only shown when the mouse was strategically positioned near the edge where it would pop up.
By definition, a scroll bar is a widget that can be used to scroll through a list or document. Apple's patent is for something which is purely an indicator. You can't move it around like you can with a scroll bar slider, although it will change vertical position based upon your finger scrolling thru your list.
Scrollbars serve as both indicators and controls, and good scrollbars indicate both size and position.
Surely Apple's widget isn't patentable simply because it offers only a subset of this functionality?!
By the way, when the article author compares Wikipedia and Geocities visual style and finds similarities, I'm prompted to wonder where the author actually was when Geocities was in its heydey.
Indeed... if anything, Wikipedia is the anti-Geocities: whereas Geocities was famous for its inconsistency, garish colors, and in many cases, almost complete unreadability, Wikipedia is very consistent and readable (well the form of the articles anyway, if not always the words). This is no easy feat, either, given the many editors and authors, but WIkipedia seems to have evolved reasonably good processes and conventions for moving articles towards consistency. [Geocities, of course, had pretty much zero overall structure or convention.]
You don't have to guess about the maglev part, because Japan is building an actual long-distance maglev line. Costs seem to be about $200 million / km, but that includes everything, stations, etc (compare the various route choices and note that the construction costs don't vary nearly as much as the distances [that's affected by the amount of tunneling, etc, too, of course]).
Google Reader's a fine app for [what seems to be] its intended purpose—but it's nothing like iGoogle, and doesn't do a great job of replacing it in my opinion. I use both regularly, and will be sad when either goes away.
This does seem a pretty weird decision. The reasoning they give (basically "lol, phones and device-/browser-specific apps are the future!") is kind of dubious, and seems strangely at odds with Google's general push for device-/browser-independent apps.
I wonder if this is the result of some internal political/turf/funding war at Google...?
[My guess: The Google+ team is politically very powerful, and they want to push everybody to use that instead. Never mind that Google+ (which I like) is extremely different, and not a particularly good replacement for iGoogle...]
"We will not make the decision in Prague... no, this decision will require at least 15-20 more all-expenses-paid meetings in luxury resorts around the world."
Yeah, although I'm obviously a fan of Uncharted, I totally agree about the "hanging train car." One really isn't doing anything there (there's only one path to follow, and almost no skill is required to follow it), so although it's sort of neat the first time, it gets boring quickly with repetition; it's more like a cut-scene where one has a tiny bit of control.
The fun parts are those where you actually do something, mostly the shootouts. [Though the jaw-dropping scenery really adds something to it...]
If 1313 is slavishly copying Uncharted, hopefully they copied the fun parts as well as the flashy "cut-scenes"!
Sure, but it's irrelevant. "Copying" is not illegal. Certain narrowly defined types of copying are, under the regimes of copyright, patents, and trademarks, but the cues Android took from the iphone are still general enough, and simple enough, that they do not fall under any of these regimes—anything you can describe in one sentence (and reimplement!) after a one-second external examination, and which follows pretty much entirely from a straight-forward mapping of previously well-known techniques to a new domain, is way too simple to be patented.
Granted that sucks a bit for Apple, because part of their genius lies in having good (but unpatentably simple) ideas, but there are very good reasons why such things do not deserve legal protection. Still, Apple is more than capable of competing without such protection (their eye for detail and polish, skill in marketing, etc, are as important or more to their success), so it's hard to feel too sorry for them.
In the end, this is good for the public, and the law is intended to benefit the public, not Apple.
Nor are these the defining characteristics of the iPhone anyway. Inertial scrolling with elasticity is more so. But even there, it was invented for the iPod, which had a wheel rather than a touch screen.
... and note that it's hardly something Apple came up with first. For instance, high-end stereos in the '70s had tuning knobs that did this (and it was clearly a "design" rather than an artifact of the mechanism).
Using a well-proven mechanical UI technique in an electronic device was a good idea, and Apple certainly deserves kudos for doing so—but "good ideas" are not patentable.
Er, yeah, sure, I like open games too, but Uncharted was really fun. Really really really fun. Uncharted is one of the few games I've played through many times (and similarly for Uncharted 2, which was arguably even better).
So while I'm generally kind of down on overly linear games, when done well, they can be wonderful. So don't write off "1313" just yet...
Google is doing the clever thing by using very carefully worded language which makes it abundantly clear what's going on to anybody with any clue at all (and Chinese net users certainly have a clue about this sort of thing), without stating so explicitly.
If they did as you suggest, and explicitly mentioned censorship, they'd immediately get stomped on by the Chinese government.
No it will be "reading low" pretty much all of the time — which is what people expect. People are in general malinformed about radiation, but the concept of non-zero background radiation is not so unknown, especially in Japan after 3/11.
Normal background radiation in the Tokyo area is about 0.15 uSv/h, so just at the bottom of this phone's range, but enough that people can see it's working.
My experience is that it will disconnect [if the recipient hangs up], but there's a fairly long delay. I think the intent is to give the call recipient some time to move to another extension without having to leave the original extension off the hook.
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It's also not very demanding. 16GB of RAM is all of $90 these days.
Provided your machine is new enough and physically large enough to accept such modules. My two-year-old 10" laptop, for example, won't take more than 2 GB according to crucial.com.
Yeah, assuming your machine can be upgraded (many laptops, for instance, are not so flexible in this respect..) it's not so much the price as it is the annoyance of actually doing it.
For simple documents, it's good. But for serious stuff it is slow, flaky and unreliable. It has excellent integration between other MS stuff like excel, project etc. I have seriously tried to use OpenOffice as a replacement and I'm sorry to say that it just doesn't quite cut it yet.
Er, but for "serious stuff", MS office is also slow, flaky, and unreliable...
[Idiots at my work write their tech manuals in word ...argh..!]
Ok, so as scrollbars often progress through a document in exactly the same way Apple's widget (that is to say, their "method" of displaying progress information is the same), and you say that a scrollbar's "extra" functionality (as a control) does not matter, that means from the patent point of view, Apple's widget is an exact duplicate of a common existing method for displaying progress, and Apple's caveat "but it's not a scrollbar" is irrelevant...
Er, right?
... and that sounds like it is exactly as it should be.
The problem with facebook is not really facebook per-se—some people like it, it serves their needs, good for them.
The problem is when facebook becomes so overwhelmingly dominant that they are essentially the only viable choice for most people, meaning that people who don't like it (and they are legion) are basically goaded into using it anyway.
Ideally, there would be a range of services that are all popular, maybe even with content-transfer between them (I know, FB would royally freak, but ... from a user's point of view, this is ideal ... and the user's content does belong to the user, doesn't it ...?), allowing people to use the one they like best, and avoiding any one service from becoming too powerful.
Diversity is a good thing!
Might not be the same. Did the scroll bar push content to the side when it popped up? It appears that this implementation is designed to prevent that.
No, it was an "overlay" (it actually popped up outside the window to be scrolled; I'm not sure what would happen if the window was full-screen sized).
Screen area was in short supply on the 1980’s machines used with Smalltalk-80. To preserve it, scroll bars were not shown all the time, but only when a scrollable view had the focus.
Not the same.
This isn't how the system I used worked. The scrollbar was only shown when the mouse was strategically positioned near the edge where it would pop up.
By definition, a scroll bar is a widget that can be used to scroll through a list or document. Apple's patent is for something which is purely an indicator. You can't move it around like you can with a scroll bar slider, although it will change vertical position based upon your finger scrolling thru your list.
Scrollbars serve as both indicators and controls, and good scrollbars indicate both size and position.
Surely Apple's widget isn't patentable simply because it offers only a subset of this functionality?!
But scroll bars are fixed user interface features that take up valuable display screen area on an already small display screen.
This is not correct.
Some of the earliest GUI scrollbars, on smalltalk systems, popped up only when used, in order to conserve screen real-estate.
(the system I observed this on was a late-80s tektronix smalltalk machine, but I believe the GUI was taken pretty verbatim from earlier xerox systems)
Oh come on ... Apple's completely exhausted from inventing the rectangle! The rectangle!
What more do you want from them?!
By the way, when the article author compares Wikipedia and Geocities visual style and finds similarities, I'm prompted to wonder where the author actually was when Geocities was in its heydey.
Indeed ... if anything, Wikipedia is the anti-Geocities: whereas Geocities was famous for its inconsistency, garish colors, and in many cases, almost complete unreadability, Wikipedia is very consistent and readable (well the form of the articles anyway, if not always the words). This is no easy feat, either, given the many editors and authors, but WIkipedia seems to have evolved reasonably good processes and conventions for moving articles towards consistency. [Geocities, of course, had pretty much zero overall structure or convention.]
You don't have to guess about the maglev part, because Japan is building an actual long-distance maglev line. Costs seem to be about $200 million / km, but that includes everything, stations, etc (compare the various route choices and note that the construction costs don't vary nearly as much as the distances [that's affected by the amount of tunneling, etc, too, of course]).
Er, well I guess the point is that although they may both be jerks, they're different jerks... :]
I think Google Reader's goal is very different than iGoogle's, so it's not a good replacement for it.
Judged on its own merits, though, Reader's actually pretty nice (and has lots of fans, judging from the outcry the last time they changed its UI...).
Google Reader's a fine app for [what seems to be] its intended purpose—but it's nothing like iGoogle, and doesn't do a great job of replacing it in my opinion. I use both regularly, and will be sad when either goes away.
This does seem a pretty weird decision. The reasoning they give (basically "lol, phones and device-/browser-specific apps are the future!") is kind of dubious, and seems strangely at odds with Google's general push for device-/browser-independent apps.
I wonder if this is the result of some internal political/turf/funding war at Google...?
[My guess: The Google+ team is politically very powerful, and they want to push everybody to use that instead. Never mind that Google+ (which I like) is extremely different, and not a particularly good replacement for iGoogle...]
"We will not make the decision in Prague ... no, this decision will require at least 15-20 more all-expenses-paid meetings in luxury resorts around the world."
What does ICANN actually do, anyway?
I mean, besides supporting various tourist economies with their biweekly meetings in exotic locations...?
(1) tie them up
(2) lots of beer
(3) eyelid clips
Yeah, although I'm obviously a fan of Uncharted, I totally agree about the "hanging train car." One really isn't doing anything there (there's only one path to follow, and almost no skill is required to follow it), so although it's sort of neat the first time, it gets boring quickly with repetition; it's more like a cut-scene where one has a tiny bit of control.
The fun parts are those where you actually do something, mostly the shootouts. [Though the jaw-dropping scenery really adds something to it...]
If 1313 is slavishly copying Uncharted, hopefully they copied the fun parts as well as the flashy "cut-scenes"!
Sure, but it's irrelevant. "Copying" is not illegal. Certain narrowly defined types of copying are, under the regimes of copyright, patents, and trademarks, but the cues Android took from the iphone are still general enough, and simple enough, that they do not fall under any of these regimes—anything you can describe in one sentence (and reimplement!) after a one-second external examination, and which follows pretty much entirely from a straight-forward mapping of previously well-known techniques to a new domain, is way too simple to be patented.
Granted that sucks a bit for Apple, because part of their genius lies in having good (but unpatentably simple) ideas, but there are very good reasons why such things do not deserve legal protection. Still, Apple is more than capable of competing without such protection (their eye for detail and polish, skill in marketing, etc, are as important or more to their success), so it's hard to feel too sorry for them.
In the end, this is good for the public, and the law is intended to benefit the public, not Apple.
Nor are these the defining characteristics of the iPhone anyway. Inertial scrolling with elasticity is more so. But even there, it was invented for the iPod, which had a wheel rather than a touch screen.
... and note that it's hardly something Apple came up with first. For instance, high-end stereos in the '70s had tuning knobs that did this (and it was clearly a "design" rather than an artifact of the mechanism).
Using a well-proven mechanical UI technique in an electronic device was a good idea, and Apple certainly deserves kudos for doing so—but "good ideas" are not patentable.
Er, yeah, sure, I like open games too, but Uncharted was really fun. Really really really fun. Uncharted is one of the few games I've played through many times (and similarly for Uncharted 2, which was arguably even better).
So while I'm generally kind of down on overly linear games, when done well, they can be wonderful. So don't write off "1313" just yet...
You're being way too literal.
Google is doing the clever thing by using very carefully worded language which makes it abundantly clear what's going on to anybody with any clue at all (and Chinese net users certainly have a clue about this sort of thing), without stating so explicitly.
If they did as you suggest, and explicitly mentioned censorship, they'd immediately get stomped on by the Chinese government.
No it will be "reading low" pretty much all of the time — which is what people expect. People are in general malinformed about radiation, but the concept of non-zero background radiation is not so unknown, especially in Japan after 3/11.
Normal background radiation in the Tokyo area is about 0.15 uSv/h, so just at the bottom of this phone's range, but enough that people can see it's working.
Japanese cell phones have had "retina" level display resolution years before the iphone did. Apple's definitely better at marketing it though ...
My experience is that it will disconnect [if the recipient hangs up], but there's a fairly long delay. I think the intent is to give the call recipient some time to move to another extension without having to leave the original extension off the hook.