OS X has it's fair share? Really? They have, say, 10% of the computer market, and about 0.0001% of the actual, in-the-wild viruses. The main problem on OS X is trojans (to which ANY platform is vulnerable) and OS X has NEVER had a self-replicating virus the way Windows has. (Nimda, Code Red, Sasser, etc.)
So yeah, if everyone switched to OS X or Linux, we probably WOULD be better off. Maybe not perfect, but much, much better.
... is that people are a) paying for data plans for relatively dumb phones or b) surfing that much without a good data plan.
(I've had an iPhone since late 2007, but before that my (%$#@#$&%) kid ran up multi-hundred-dollar phone bills with a basic phone* and data costs of, I think, 20 cents per kilobyte. What does pay-as-you-go data run these days?)
I would love, love, love to have a regular cordless house phone that's as smart as an iPhone/Android/whatever. I still use my house landline some and I wish it were not so dumb. The best trick my home phone does is match incoming Caller ID to laboriously-entered contacts.
The base station could double as a wireless access point and it would include a digital voicemail recorder which could be accessed with the handset and operate like the iPhone's visual voicemail. The handset could transmit calls to the base station with 5.8 GHz like a regular cordless (remember that word?) phone or it could be done with WiFi. Since it wouldn't be for carrying out and about, it could be as big as the late Dell Streak 5. You could use it as a regular phone or run Skype or Google Voice or any other VOIP client. Maybe the base station could run Asterisk. The possibilities are endless.
There is no single answer. Many things work well for some people and not for others. And as with many things in education, it is NOT the tool (laptop/iPad/smart board/fancy new books) but the teachers and the structure that makes the difference. Bad teachers = no learning. Good teachers, hamstrung by a bad system = no learning. I know some people who have done horribly with nontraditional education and some people who have thrived.
"Certain degrees are immediate disqualifiers, including nursing, social sciences, aviation, exercise physiology, technology, and some psychology degrees, too."
Thanks for helping prove my point more. Overall, there is really nothing new under the sun. Yes, touch interfaces go back many years. (Do I need to point out that the Apple Newton predates the Palm PDA?) Yes, the Samsung you showed predates the iPhone... the question is, why wasn't it a success? They had a six year headstart! So why did Apple win? That's right, they're just blindingly lucky. It can't possibly have anything to do with Apple actually doing good work.
What made the iPhone great wasn't that everything it had, had never been done before. What made it a success was that no one else had made a smartphone that well before. The two main things it had that no other phone at the time had: a fast, responsive, smooth UI, and a really good web browser.
First of all, I'm against Apple's abuse of the patent system just as much as the average slashdotter, though I also think they're on similar footing with every other company. Not that this makes what they're doing good, but that's how the game is played these days.
However, I do feel the need to address this particular point:
> Everything they've "invented" is nothing but mashups of technologies that already > exist in software frameworks made by people other than Apple.
Yet, for some reason, no one else on the planet has been able to combine these existing technologies as well or as successfully as Apple.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but far and away the best selling for ten years. The iPhone was not the first smartphone but it has over half the industry's profits with just 1/20th of the market. And then Apple came along with the iPad and sold more tablets in one year than the whole rest of the PC industry had sold in the previous (almost) decade.
When you say "They are a decade late to the smart phone race, but they claim to be the most prolific innovators in the market." -- can you look at this slide of what were the state-of-the-art smartphones at the time of the iPhone's release and really claim that Apple was not an innovator in the smartphone market? If not, can you explain why every single major manufacturer now makes phones that strongly resemble the iPhone?
If Apple is "just" stealing everyone else's ideas and adding no value to the mix, then their success ought to be easy to replicate, right? Or maybe you're wrong, and they are doing good work, and you're just unable to see just what it is they're doing.
And if you think all their success is "just" because of good marketing--well, that oughtta be easy enough to replicate too, right? Just go find a good marketing company and give them some money, right? Hell, if cigarette companies can sell things that will kill you, selling anything can't be that hard, right?
One other point: your claim that "they steal from the open source community" is flat out wrong. (At least in terms of what matters to the open source world--there, "stealing" means "using and not giving back." "Using" alone does not equal "stealing") Ever heard of WebKit? Apple started out with KHTML, drastically improved, it, and released it. A little company called Google also uses it.
> Remember that time in the '90s when a Taiwanese RAM > factory caught fire, and it turned out to be a big chunk of > world RAM output? Sent prices spiking for a while.
IIRC, that was more or less a cover for price fixing.
The movie was so-so and the effects were HORRIBLE--literally lower than SyFy monster-of-the-week movies. Watching the workprint was the best part. It's interesting to see the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Gene Siskel had a metric for movies: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" My variation is, "Is watching this movie more fun than watching the 'making-of' extras on the DVD?"
Wow, +5 for that? No offense but you're flat-out wrong. First of all, long-warranty drives do NOT cost 2x what short-warranty drives cost. Maybe 10% more on average, 20 or 30% over the really cheap models, but then again, I've been buying 5-year Seagates whenever there's a good sale and they've always been the cheapest thing in the store that week.
Secondly, I'd rather have a drive with a five year warranty, than a 1/2 price drive that fails in 1-2 years. Do the math... if a drive dies after 2 years, then you're going to buy one on Day zero, one at the end of month 24, and one at the end of month 48. That's THREE drives in 5 years.
Oh, and by the way, RAID is NOT backup.You should always have additional drives for backup and a non-real-time backup system. RAID can help lower your exposure in drive-failure situations, but that only works if you have backup drives on hand. As soon as one drive in a 2-disk setup dies, guess what? You're running on one drive until you get the second installed. Oops...
Furthermore, a LOT more data gets lost to mistakenly pressing the 'delete' key (RAID is no help there!) than to hardware failure. RAID offers a BIT of protection against one relatively small avenue of data loss. RAID only belongs in an organization that has taken many OTHER steps to prevent data loss.
Long drive warranties do nothing to protect your data, but they do protect your investment. I have several hard drives going--enough to keep everything I need safe--and I get some comfort in knowing that I won't have to pay money to replace any of them for a good long time.
"While the official corporate philosophy of Google does not contain the words "Don't be evil", they were included in the prospectus (aka "S-1") of Google's 2004 IPO (a letter from Google's founders, later called the "'Don't Be Evil' manifesto"): "Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served -- as shareholders and in all other ways -- by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains." The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says "You can make money without doing evil."
An image of their philosophy is here Their current page seems to have watered things down a bit--it only talks about not being deceptive with ads.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't be involved with protecting copyrights as they see fit, but giving a media company carte blanche to delete whatever content they want isn't the way to go.
I'd rather marketers be over-restricted than under-restricted. Talk about lying: just the other day I got an ad in the form of a fake rebate check. It looks just like a real check, of course, and it says "REBATE CHECK" in big letters and "This is not a check" in very small letters. WTF? Can I sell a pill that says "CURES CANCER!" in big letters and then "Does not cure cancer" in small letters just below it?
(I'm not kidding. I can post a pic later if anyone wants to see proof.)
Compared to the original Nexus, the new one has no physical keyboard, no hardware buttons along the bottom, no 4-directional controller, and no SD card slot--just like the iPhone. Now, can people quit whining about how Apple stole Android's notification system?
Are you serious? You lead off with "in 2013..."?!?!? - What should I do in the meantime? Say, the next (I'll be really generous here) 13 months? - What do you think Apple and Google will do in the meantime? Did they both announce that they're planning a two-year freeze on new features and no one told me? Even if MS does everything you say, their competitors will do plenty of OTHER equally-compelling things.
As for your points c) and d)... - I've used a PocketPC device to RDC into a Windows XP desktop. Desktop Windows is ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, ***NOT*** designed to be used with a four-inch, 200dpi-plus screen. (And overall, Windows 8 "Classic" desktop == Windows 7 desktop == comparable to XP.) - Do you really think a device that fits into your pocket will EVER perform at the same level as a full-size console? Moore's Law is great an all that, and phones are as fast as the LAST generation of consoles, but just as with Apple and Google above, MS isn't going to sit on their hands, either. You might have read recently (as in, earlier today) about the next generation of Xbox, which should also be out by 2013...
ALL design is compromise. There is no such thing as one device that does all things equally well, and certainly not in the form of something that fits in your pocket.
Random note: Dear Slashdot, please implement TinyMCE or CKEditor. Sometimes I just don't feel like typing a lot of tags, and laziness leads to capital letters and asterisks.
> Fines aren't high enough. Make them proportional > to income, like they do in Germany.
Any rich guy that can't convince you he's *actually* poor when the need arises isn't very good at being rich. Once you have money, you pay lawyers and accountants to make sure you keep it.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X has it's fair share? Really? They have, say, 10% of the computer market, and about 0.0001% of the actual, in-the-wild viruses. The main problem on OS X is trojans (to which ANY platform is vulnerable) and OS X has NEVER had a self-replicating virus the way Windows has. (Nimda, Code Red, Sasser, etc.)
So yeah, if everyone switched to OS X or Linux, we probably WOULD be better off. Maybe not perfect, but much, much better.
... is that people are a) paying for data plans for relatively dumb phones or b) surfing that much without a good data plan.
(I've had an iPhone since late 2007, but before that my (%$#@#$&%) kid ran up multi-hundred-dollar phone bills with a basic phone* and data costs of, I think, 20 cents per kilobyte. What does pay-as-you-go data run these days?)
* Nokia 6800, 128x128 color screen.
I would love, love, love to have a regular cordless house phone that's as smart as an iPhone/Android/whatever. I still use my house landline some and I wish it were not so dumb. The best trick my home phone does is match incoming Caller ID to laboriously-entered contacts.
The base station could double as a wireless access point and it would include a digital voicemail recorder which could be accessed with the handset and operate like the iPhone's visual voicemail. The handset could transmit calls to the base station with 5.8 GHz like a regular cordless (remember that word?) phone or it could be done with WiFi. Since it wouldn't be for carrying out and about, it could be as big as the late Dell Streak 5. You could use it as a regular phone or run Skype or Google Voice or any other VOIP client. Maybe the base station could run Asterisk. The possibilities are endless.
... it ain't got nothing on what you're gonna see once you put digital cameras into the hands of apes.
And with hookers and blackjack! In fact, forget the movies...
There is no single answer. Many things work well for some people and not for others. And as with many things in education, it is NOT the tool (laptop/iPad/smart board/fancy new books) but the teachers and the structure that makes the difference. Bad teachers = no learning. Good teachers, hamstrung by a bad system = no learning. I know some people who have done horribly with nontraditional education and some people who have thrived.
That said, this guy has had great successes with iPad deployments.
"Certain degrees are immediate disqualifiers, including nursing, social sciences, aviation, exercise physiology, technology, and some psychology degrees, too."
Anyone know (or have a good guess) why?
Thanks for helping prove my point more. Overall, there is really nothing new under the sun. Yes, touch interfaces go back many years. (Do I need to point out that the Apple Newton predates the Palm PDA?) Yes, the Samsung you showed predates the iPhone... the question is, why wasn't it a success? They had a six year headstart! So why did Apple win? That's right, they're just blindingly lucky. It can't possibly have anything to do with Apple actually doing good work.
What made the iPhone great wasn't that everything it had, had never been done before. What made it a success was that no one else had made a smartphone that well before. The two main things it had that no other phone at the time had: a fast, responsive, smooth UI, and a really good web browser.
First of all, I'm against Apple's abuse of the patent system just as much as the average slashdotter, though I also think they're on similar footing with every other company. Not that this makes what they're doing good, but that's how the game is played these days.
However, I do feel the need to address this particular point:
> Everything they've "invented" is nothing but mashups of technologies that already
> exist in software frameworks made by people other than Apple.
Yet, for some reason, no one else on the planet has been able to combine these existing technologies as well or as successfully as Apple.
The iPod was not the first MP3 player, but far and away the best selling for ten years. The iPhone was not the first smartphone but it has over half the industry's profits with just 1/20th of the market. And then Apple came along with the iPad and sold more tablets in one year than the whole rest of the PC industry had sold in the previous (almost) decade.
When you say "They are a decade late to the smart phone race, but they claim to be the most prolific innovators in the market." -- can you look at this slide of what were the state-of-the-art smartphones at the time of the iPhone's release and really claim that Apple was not an innovator in the smartphone market? If not, can you explain why every single major manufacturer now makes phones that strongly resemble the iPhone?
If Apple is "just" stealing everyone else's ideas and adding no value to the mix, then their success ought to be easy to replicate, right? Or maybe you're wrong, and they are doing good work, and you're just unable to see just what it is they're doing.
And if you think all their success is "just" because of good marketing--well, that oughtta be easy enough to replicate too, right? Just go find a good marketing company and give them some money, right? Hell, if cigarette companies can sell things that will kill you, selling anything can't be that hard, right?
One other point: your claim that "they steal from the open source community" is flat out wrong. (At least in terms of what matters to the open source world--there, "stealing" means "using and not giving back." "Using" alone does not equal "stealing") Ever heard of WebKit? Apple started out with KHTML, drastically improved, it, and released it. A little company called Google also uses it.
> Remember that time in the '90s when a Taiwanese RAM
> factory caught fire, and it turned out to be a big chunk of
> world RAM output? Sent prices spiking for a while.
IIRC, that was more or less a cover for price fixing.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/04/22/1850250/ram-manufacturers-fined-for-price-fixing
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/10/5429.ars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing
Many more links available if you search for 'ram price fixing'
I've got a copy, but evidently it wouldn't be a good idea for me to post it. ;-)
The movie was so-so and the effects were HORRIBLE--literally lower than SyFy monster-of-the-week movies. Watching the workprint was the best part. It's interesting to see the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Gene Siskel had a metric for movies: "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?" My variation is, "Is watching this movie more fun than watching the 'making-of' extras on the DVD?"
Wow, +5 for that? No offense but you're flat-out wrong. First of all, long-warranty drives do NOT cost 2x what short-warranty drives cost. Maybe 10% more on average, 20 or 30% over the really cheap models, but then again, I've been buying 5-year Seagates whenever there's a good sale and they've always been the cheapest thing in the store that week.
Secondly, I'd rather have a drive with a five year warranty, than a 1/2 price drive that fails in 1-2 years. Do the math... if a drive dies after 2 years, then you're going to buy one on Day zero, one at the end of month 24, and one at the end of month 48. That's THREE drives in 5 years.
Oh, and by the way, RAID is NOT backup.You should always have additional drives for backup and a non-real-time backup system. RAID can help lower your exposure in drive-failure situations, but that only works if you have backup drives on hand. As soon as one drive in a 2-disk setup dies, guess what? You're running on one drive until you get the second installed. Oops...
Furthermore, a LOT more data gets lost to mistakenly pressing the 'delete' key (RAID is no help there!) than to hardware failure. RAID offers a BIT of protection against one relatively small avenue of data loss. RAID only belongs in an organization that has taken many OTHER steps to prevent data loss.
Long drive warranties do nothing to protect your data, but they do protect your investment. I have several hard drives going--enough to keep everything I need safe--and I get some comfort in knowing that I won't have to pay money to replace any of them for a good long time.
> On a Mac keyboard I can't even figure out how
> to type a pipe symbol in bash.
Seriously? It's shift-\, just above the Return key, same as on every (US) PC keyboard I've seen in the last 15 years.
Yeah, for that you have to look to Microsoft, who originally promised to run NT on x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. :-)
> It would be foolish to expect Google to stand up for you
> any more than their bottom line dictates
From Wikipedia:
"While the official corporate philosophy of Google does not contain the words "Don't be evil", they were included in the prospectus (aka "S-1") of Google's 2004 IPO (a letter from Google's founders, later called the "'Don't Be Evil' manifesto"): "Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served -- as shareholders and in all other ways -- by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains." The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says "You can make money without doing evil."
An image of their philosophy is here Their current page seems to have watered things down a bit--it only talks about not being deceptive with ads.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't be involved with protecting copyrights as they see fit, but giving a media company carte blanche to delete whatever content they want isn't the way to go.
I'd rather marketers be over-restricted than under-restricted. Talk about lying: just the other day I got an ad in the form of a fake rebate check. It looks just like a real check, of course, and it says "REBATE CHECK" in big letters and "This is not a check" in very small letters. WTF? Can I sell a pill that says "CURES CANCER!" in big letters and then "Does not cure cancer" in small letters just below it?
(I'm not kidding. I can post a pic later if anyone wants to see proof.)
2/3 of Google's mobile search comes from iOS devices.
Yeah, I got it wrong. I was thinking of the first Android phone, not the first Nexus. Duh.
Compared to the original Nexus, the new one has no physical keyboard, no hardware buttons along the bottom, no 4-directional controller, and no SD card slot--just like the iPhone. Now, can people quit whining about how Apple stole Android's notification system?
Are you serious? You lead off with "in 2013..."?!?!?
- What should I do in the meantime? Say, the next (I'll be really generous here) 13 months?
- What do you think Apple and Google will do in the meantime? Did they both announce that they're planning a two-year freeze on new features and no one told me? Even if MS does everything you say, their competitors will do plenty of OTHER equally-compelling things.
As for your points c) and d) ...
- I've used a PocketPC device to RDC into a Windows XP desktop. Desktop Windows is ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, ***NOT*** designed to be used with a four-inch, 200dpi-plus screen. (And overall, Windows 8 "Classic" desktop == Windows 7 desktop == comparable to XP.)
- Do you really think a device that fits into your pocket will EVER perform at the same level as a full-size console? Moore's Law is great an all that, and phones are as fast as the LAST generation of consoles, but just as with Apple and Google above, MS isn't going to sit on their hands, either. You might have read recently (as in, earlier today) about the next generation of Xbox, which should also be out by 2013...
ALL design is compromise. There is no such thing as one device that does all things equally well, and certainly not in the form of something that fits in your pocket.
Random note: Dear Slashdot, please implement TinyMCE or CKEditor. Sometimes I just don't feel like typing a lot of tags, and laziness leads to capital letters and asterisks.
"When elephants dance, the grass gets trampled."
> Fines aren't high enough. Make them proportional
> to income, like they do in Germany.
Any rich guy that can't convince you he's *actually* poor when the need arises isn't very good at being rich. Once you have money, you pay lawyers and accountants to make sure you keep it.
See also this.
This post brought to you by Dell.
On the contrary, it's an essential skill. For example,
The team I am co-designing this Mars orbiter with is using
_ English
_ Metric
measurements.
:-)