"isn't quite ready" ? "not cheap enough" ? You need to research that a little bit more.
No, you need to research Dunning-Kruger.
For at least a decade I've never worked at a place without those electric door "key card" locks. Every my kids daycare used them. Both my jobs, my wifes job, daycare, all use the same type of card.
And those cards can be updated over GSM networks? You can use a single card for all your key access needs, including ecash payments, subway, rail, and event tickets? I thought not.
Okay, I get that folks want to scream foul, but I still haven't seen anyone back up the OP's point
Well, since you put it like that. It's the first link, the one to Wikipedia. There have been smaller instances of this kind of thing before as well. But Apple's current litigiousness is even more outrageous than what they did in the 1980's.
I only have a memory of Apple going after HTC for patent infringement UNLESS they were sued first, a la Nokia.
Your sentence isn't grammatical so it's hard to tell what you are trying to say; are you trying to say that Apple is suing HTC because Nokia is suing Apple? How does that make sense?
And I don't mean the recent Nokia patent suit. Many of the iPhone patents were not obvious technologies because a boatload of them were created for this purpose.
If you look at the 20 patents Apple is suing HTC over, they generally have little to do with the iPhone or what supposedly makes the iPhone distinctive. Apple is suing over things like an object oriented file system API, an object oriented graphics notification API, the genie effect, turning off the screen when holding the phone up to your ear, and reducing chip power to conserve electricity.
Sure, they're obvious *now* since everyone and their brother is making a multitouch phone with an accelerometer, light sensor, compass, proximity sensor, and tilt sensor, but back in 2005 these things were rare or non-existent.
They were "rare and non-existent" not because people hadn't thought of them, but because they were expensive and power hungry. Apple could ship those things because their customers were willing to pay the higher prices and live with the limitations that that entails.
I think the jury is also still out which of these features are actually a good idea; many of them don't work particularly effectively even on the iPhone.
An entire industry gears up to create technologies for short range wireless communications in order to replace keys. Several companies already have solutions in the market, but they haven't caught on yet because the technology isn't quite ready yet and not quite cheap enough.
If things continue along Apple's usual path then: (1) Apple starts patenting the obvious applications of those technologies, something other people weren't even considering because that's what those technologies were designed for, (2) Apple starts adding immature implementations of the feature to their products at a premium price that only Apple customers would be willing to pay and gets accolades for how "innovative" they are, and (3) a few years later when other people are starting to offer mass market products at mass market prices, Apple starts suing them for patent violations.
It's easy to see what happened to programming: the industry was taken over by people who "wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20", "wrote multi-user dungeons in C", and "worked deep down in the guts of a text database system — still C".
You haven't provided any "evidence", you've simply been waving your hands and spewing the usual bullshit that we hear from publishers about editing, quality control etc.
The evidence, on the other hand, is clear: just go to the online sites for print-on-demand publishing, electronic distribution, editing and writing services, and marketing and advertising services. An author can get a book published and marketed for less than $1000 in both print and online form, and get a much higher cut than you or any other publisher is willing to give. And the author controls the terms and the where and how. That's the evidence.
In ten years, you're going to be out of business.
(As for "conspiracies", pulling one off requires that one knows what is going on; you don't.)
Those figures mean nothing either way, given that most people have no experience with electronic readers and given that electronic books are currently way overpriced.
Once people realize that a $99 book reader gives people access to millions of books for the price of three hardcovers, they'll become interested. And once electronic readers are widespread, many authors will choose to sell direct for a few dollars, instead of going through publishers.
Imagine Amazon were to say at checkout: "Your shopping card costs $357; get an electronic reader and the same books for $127." What do you think many people would choose?
No, you really need to get a clue. Publishing books about Greek humor to aging classics majors gives you a very warped perspective on publishing. In fact, your kind of publishing may well continue to exist--after all, you really sell decoration, not literature.
there's also quality control and editing
Editing? Quality control? Is that some kind of joke? In the technical world, publishers let the authors do their own editing, they publish whatever they can get, and then they charge upward of $100 for it. If people really need editing, they can contract it out for next to nothing over the Internet.
As for quality control, that should never have been in the hands of organizations whose primary purpose is to make money. In the past, that was a necessary evil, these days, it's just evil. I don't want you or any other publisher being a gatekeeper to the kind of information I can access. If I want quality control, I'd rather go to Oprah's book club than to you.
Second, besides marketing and distribution being pretty big things
Distribution is electronic and costs next to nothing. Marketing is the only legitimate function of publishers that's left; but why would I want someone like you to do my marketing for me and take away 85% of the net (!) revenue?
And finally, I suggest you do some research on wholesalers, distribution, and production costs.
I suggest you do the same, because if you think that those costs even matter anymore, you're stuck some time in the last century.
Global Warming Potential is bogus; you simply can't mix half-life and heating in a single number like that because the consequences of a long half life and high radiative forcing are entirely different.
and most of my experience has been that publishing companies are early adapters [sic]
They may well be, but their entire model is outdated. What value do they add other than marketing? And why should they get such obscenely large cuts for that?
And, there's nothing wrong with taking action there.
These companies aren't going to stop at prosecuting wholesale copying. They are going to see their revenues fall further and further (that's inevitable), and then they are going to go first after fair use and then they are going to try to copyright facts and news itself (they are already floating proposals for that).
Wholesale copying is wrong, but that's not the problem of publishers and news organizations. Their problem is that they are very inefficient. They could afford those inefficiencies when their product was a fairly expensive physical product, they can't afford them anymore today whether their product costs essentially nothing to replicate and distribute.
The problem of those companies is, in short, that they are dinosaurs and are becoming irrelevant. But they still have a lot of political clout and they are not going to go down easy.
And if you think that that's not a risk, think again. More and more businesses are hugely subsidized by the public: agriculture, music, broadcasting, steel, cars, airlines, oil, etc. In an efficient market, many of those industries would either not exist in the US or look radically different. Publishing will want its cut as well as it becomes obsolete.
They expect people to provide them with free information (they call it "interviews" and "fact gathering" and all that) and then turn around and try to sell it. Oh, but they do add something: overpaid upper-middle-class bias and political favoritism in return for being allowed to hobnob with the imporant people and getting invited to all the right parties.
We can only hope that the big players in this industry will go bankrupt.
Methane being 25 times more hazardous to the climate than CO2 then surely even burning it in-situ would be ecologically sound byproduct is CO2 + 2H20
That's not true. Methane's half-life in the atmosphere is so short that it is not a significant risk; in a year, all that methane is going to be CO2 anyway and only 1/25th as potent for global warming.
CO2 is risky because it has a half-life of over a century.
In part, this is a problem with the file sharing protocols the Mac uses. Good protocols cache the file locally (while still ensuring consistency) so that this kind of usage works efficiently.
It's generally not easy to program for a game console, yet that's where the AAA games are.
No, the AAA games are on the PC, in addition to a lot of crap.
Making a platform hard to program will mean that the average quality of a product is better (since it has a high cost of entry to develop for it), but it will also limit overall application availability. In the end, you get more of everything on the easier-to-program platform: you get more AAA products and you get a lot more crap too.
That's not true. ONE reason for the iPhone's dominance
I don't think Apple's tiny market share can be called "dominance".
is that there was no competition with a similar hardware class for quite some time. And when I say similar hardware class, I mean large screen, powerful processor and all the sensors.
There were plenty of large screen phones before the iPhone (and the form factor of the iPhone is almost identical to several Palm devices). However, they weren't popular because they were expensive and had poor battery life. Just like the iPhone. Apple's genius is in being able to sell a hugely expensive phone with a poor battery life to regular consumers, both by putting some fun content on it and by hiding the true cost in subscriptions.
Android it has. Not to mention the other hardware inconsistencies.
"Inconsistencies?" Has it occurred to you that there is actually a demand for these varieties of devices? The iPhone resolution and keyboard simply don't work for me (I tried). They don't work for many other people either. We want high resolution devices with a keyboard. I'm sorry that inconveniences you as a developer, but you'll just have deal with it (unless Apple succeeds into turning us into the United Socialist Apple Republic, where everybody is forced to use a single standard device by Apple Corporate).
As a result, the cost of us building an Android app is now double that of an iPhone app. And at the rate the new Android phones are coming out, that is likely to increase if customers want a full compatibility guarantee.
And the market share is likely going to be double that of the iPhone soon as well. Again, go deal with it. Or if you don't want to deal with it, fine, that's your choice; I'm sure other developers will be happy to take your market share.
We've spent over $2500 acquiring Android hardware just in the last six months of last year and have already spent another $1400 this year.
I hardly call $5000 in hardware per year a significant expense for a development shop. But you don't have to do it anyway since you can test on emulators.
Apple was evil even in the 1980's. In fact, what's happening with the iPhone closely parallels what they did with GUIs in the 1980's. Apple got a hold of Xerox's GUI technologies, rushed a machine to market, and then proceeded to sue Microsoft and threaten others over also shipping GUI-based machines.
And it's not like they don't admit it. Steve Jobs himself said: "We have always been shameless about stealing [sic] great ideas." Well, yes, they have. And then, they proceed to sue others over the ideas they "stole".
It's actually even worse than that. PARC's GUI was a lot more advanced than the crap Apple actually shipped as MacOS; Apple merely imitated its looks but cut corners on the implementation. That's why MacOS was on a death spiral within ten years: it didn't have a solid architecture or foundation.
OS X actually copied a bit more of PARC's technology, but even Objective-C and Cocoa are lousy compared to PARC's original technologies.
The iPhone was hugely innovative, and there was a lot there that was genuinely new.
Yeah? Like what? Except for Apple's usual slick packaging and the multitouch technology they bought elsewhere, I don't see anything innovative in the iPhone. Companies like Psion, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia were the commercial pioneers in this area, and university research labs and companies like IBM and Xerox created most of the hard technologies.
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
Those are big words coming from a man who has built his businesses by putting other people's inventions into pretty boxes and charging an arm and a leg for it.
as long as Microsoft pays the tax. After all, they are the cause of those virus infections. About half of the worldwide Windows revenues ought to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
"isn't quite ready" ? "not cheap enough" ? You need to research that a little bit more.
No, you need to research Dunning-Kruger.
For at least a decade I've never worked at a place without those electric door "key card" locks. Every my kids daycare used them. Both my jobs, my wifes job, daycare, all use the same type of card.
And those cards can be updated over GSM networks? You can use a single card for all your key access needs, including ecash payments, subway, rail, and event tickets? I thought not.
That's because near field communications is a significant extension of those simple electronic lock technologies. See the Wikipedia article for how they differ.
Okay, I get that folks want to scream foul, but I still haven't seen anyone back up the OP's point
Well, since you put it like that. It's the first link, the one to Wikipedia. There have been smaller instances of this kind of thing before as well. But Apple's current litigiousness is even more outrageous than what they did in the 1980's.
I only have a memory of Apple going after HTC for patent infringement UNLESS they were sued first, a la Nokia.
Your sentence isn't grammatical so it's hard to tell what you are trying to say; are you trying to say that Apple is suing HTC because Nokia is suing Apple? How does that make sense?
And I don't mean the recent Nokia patent suit. Many of the iPhone patents were not obvious technologies because a boatload of them were created for this purpose.
If you look at the 20 patents Apple is suing HTC over, they generally have little to do with the iPhone or what supposedly makes the iPhone distinctive. Apple is suing over things like an object oriented file system API, an object oriented graphics notification API, the genie effect, turning off the screen when holding the phone up to your ear, and reducing chip power to conserve electricity.
Sure, they're obvious *now* since everyone and their brother is making a multitouch phone with an accelerometer, light sensor, compass, proximity sensor, and tilt sensor, but back in 2005 these things were rare or non-existent.
They were "rare and non-existent" not because people hadn't thought of them, but because they were expensive and power hungry. Apple could ship those things because their customers were willing to pay the higher prices and live with the limitations that that entails.
I think the jury is also still out which of these features are actually a good idea; many of them don't work particularly effectively even on the iPhone.
An entire industry gears up to create technologies for short range wireless communications in order to replace keys. Several companies already have solutions in the market, but they haven't caught on yet because the technology isn't quite ready yet and not quite cheap enough.
If things continue along Apple's usual path then: (1) Apple starts patenting the obvious applications of those technologies, something other people weren't even considering because that's what those technologies were designed for, (2) Apple starts adding immature implementations of the feature to their products at a premium price that only Apple customers would be willing to pay and gets accolades for how "innovative" they are, and (3) a few years later when other people are starting to offer mass market products at mass market prices, Apple starts suing them for patent violations.
It's easy to see what happened to programming: the industry was taken over by people who "wrote space-invader games in BASIC on a VIC-20", "wrote multi-user dungeons in C", and "worked deep down in the guts of a text database system — still C".
You haven't provided any "evidence", you've simply been waving your hands and spewing the usual bullshit that we hear from publishers about editing, quality control etc.
The evidence, on the other hand, is clear: just go to the online sites for print-on-demand publishing, electronic distribution, editing and writing services, and marketing and advertising services. An author can get a book published and marketed for less than $1000 in both print and online form, and get a much higher cut than you or any other publisher is willing to give. And the author controls the terms and the where and how. That's the evidence.
In ten years, you're going to be out of business.
(As for "conspiracies", pulling one off requires that one knows what is going on; you don't.)
Those figures mean nothing either way, given that most people have no experience with electronic readers and given that electronic books are currently way overpriced.
Once people realize that a $99 book reader gives people access to millions of books for the price of three hardcovers, they'll become interested. And once electronic readers are widespread, many authors will choose to sell direct for a few dollars, instead of going through publishers.
Imagine Amazon were to say at checkout: "Your shopping card costs $357; get an electronic reader and the same books for $127." What do you think many people would choose?
You really need to get a clue.
No, you really need to get a clue. Publishing books about Greek humor to aging classics majors gives you a very warped perspective on publishing. In fact, your kind of publishing may well continue to exist--after all, you really sell decoration, not literature.
there's also quality control and editing
Editing? Quality control? Is that some kind of joke? In the technical world, publishers let the authors do their own editing, they publish whatever they can get, and then they charge upward of $100 for it. If people really need editing, they can contract it out for next to nothing over the Internet.
As for quality control, that should never have been in the hands of organizations whose primary purpose is to make money. In the past, that was a necessary evil, these days, it's just evil. I don't want you or any other publisher being a gatekeeper to the kind of information I can access. If I want quality control, I'd rather go to Oprah's book club than to you.
Second, besides marketing and distribution being pretty big things
Distribution is electronic and costs next to nothing. Marketing is the only legitimate function of publishers that's left; but why would I want someone like you to do my marketing for me and take away 85% of the net (!) revenue?
And finally, I suggest you do some research on wholesalers, distribution, and production costs.
I suggest you do the same, because if you think that those costs even matter anymore, you're stuck some time in the last century.
Global Warming Potential is bogus; you simply can't mix half-life and heating in a single number like that because the consequences of a long half life and high radiative forcing are entirely different.
Wow, with the Windows-experience wizard and the designers of Xbox and Zune on board, what could possibly go wrong?
and most of my experience has been that publishing companies are early adapters [sic]
They may well be, but their entire model is outdated. What value do they add other than marketing? And why should they get such obscenely large cuts for that?
And, there's nothing wrong with taking action there.
These companies aren't going to stop at prosecuting wholesale copying. They are going to see their revenues fall further and further (that's inevitable), and then they are going to go first after fair use and then they are going to try to copyright facts and news itself (they are already floating proposals for that).
Wholesale copying is wrong, but that's not the problem of publishers and news organizations. Their problem is that they are very inefficient. They could afford those inefficiencies when their product was a fairly expensive physical product, they can't afford them anymore today whether their product costs essentially nothing to replicate and distribute.
The problem of those companies is, in short, that they are dinosaurs and are becoming irrelevant. But they still have a lot of political clout and they are not going to go down easy.
And if you think that that's not a risk, think again. More and more businesses are hugely subsidized by the public: agriculture, music, broadcasting, steel, cars, airlines, oil, etc. In an efficient market, many of those industries would either not exist in the US or look radically different. Publishing will want its cut as well as it becomes obsolete.
They expect people to provide them with free information (they call it "interviews" and "fact gathering" and all that) and then turn around and try to sell it. Oh, but they do add something: overpaid upper-middle-class bias and political favoritism in return for being allowed to hobnob with the imporant people and getting invited to all the right parties.
We can only hope that the big players in this industry will go bankrupt.
Methane being 25 times more hazardous to the climate than CO2 then surely even burning it in-situ would be ecologically sound byproduct is CO2 + 2H20
That's not true. Methane's half-life in the atmosphere is so short that it is not a significant risk; in a year, all that methane is going to be CO2 anyway and only 1/25th as potent for global warming.
CO2 is risky because it has a half-life of over a century.
I'm happy that Toyota is taking data security and privacy seriously.
In part, this is a problem with the file sharing protocols the Mac uses. Good protocols cache the file locally (while still ensuring consistency) so that this kind of usage works efficiently.
but if smartphones are going to take over the world I would not want my grandmother to have to deal with fragmentation and software complexity.
You're suggesting that the iPhone is less complex? Don't make me laugh.
It's generally not easy to program for a game console, yet that's where the AAA games are.
No, the AAA games are on the PC, in addition to a lot of crap.
Making a platform hard to program will mean that the average quality of a product is better (since it has a high cost of entry to develop for it), but it will also limit overall application availability. In the end, you get more of everything on the easier-to-program platform: you get more AAA products and you get a lot more crap too.
That's not true. ONE reason for the iPhone's dominance
I don't think Apple's tiny market share can be called "dominance".
is that there was no competition with a similar hardware class for quite some time. And when I say similar hardware class, I mean large screen, powerful processor and all the sensors.
There were plenty of large screen phones before the iPhone (and the form factor of the iPhone is almost identical to several Palm devices). However, they weren't popular because they were expensive and had poor battery life. Just like the iPhone. Apple's genius is in being able to sell a hugely expensive phone with a poor battery life to regular consumers, both by putting some fun content on it and by hiding the true cost in subscriptions.
Android it has. Not to mention the other hardware inconsistencies.
"Inconsistencies?" Has it occurred to you that there is actually a demand for these varieties of devices? The iPhone resolution and keyboard simply don't work for me (I tried). They don't work for many other people either. We want high resolution devices with a keyboard. I'm sorry that inconveniences you as a developer, but you'll just have deal with it (unless Apple succeeds into turning us into the United Socialist Apple Republic, where everybody is forced to use a single standard device by Apple Corporate).
As a result, the cost of us building an Android app is now double that of an iPhone app. And at the rate the new Android phones are coming out, that is likely to increase if customers want a full compatibility guarantee.
And the market share is likely going to be double that of the iPhone soon as well. Again, go deal with it. Or if you don't want to deal with it, fine, that's your choice; I'm sure other developers will be happy to take your market share.
We've spent over $2500 acquiring Android hardware just in the last six months of last year and have already spent another $1400 this year.
I hardly call $5000 in hardware per year a significant expense for a development shop. But you don't have to do it anyway since you can test on emulators.
Apple was evil even in the 1980's. In fact, what's happening with the iPhone closely parallels what they did with GUIs in the 1980's. Apple got a hold of Xerox's GUI technologies, rushed a machine to market, and then proceeded to sue Microsoft and threaten others over also shipping GUI-based machines.
And it's not like they don't admit it. Steve Jobs himself said: "We have always been shameless about stealing [sic] great ideas." Well, yes, they have. And then, they proceed to sue others over the ideas they "stole".
It's actually even worse than that. PARC's GUI was a lot more advanced than the crap Apple actually shipped as MacOS; Apple merely imitated its looks but cut corners on the implementation. That's why MacOS was on a death spiral within ten years: it didn't have a solid architecture or foundation.
OS X actually copied a bit more of PARC's technology, but even Objective-C and Cocoa are lousy compared to PARC's original technologies.
The iPhone was hugely innovative, and there was a lot there that was genuinely new.
Yeah? Like what? Except for Apple's usual slick packaging and the multitouch technology they bought elsewhere, I don't see anything innovative in the iPhone. Companies like Psion, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia were the commercial pioneers in this area, and university research labs and companies like IBM and Xerox created most of the hard technologies.
Without diving into the specifics,
Geez, why don't you?
Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."
Those are big words coming from a man who has built his businesses by putting other people's inventions into pretty boxes and charging an arm and a leg for it.
as long as Microsoft pays the tax. After all, they are the cause of those virus infections. About half of the worldwide Windows revenues ought to do it.
The lunar regolith is basically made of solar cell materials, whereas here you have to dig them up
The lunar regolith is mainly silicon oxide with some iron oxide thrown in; you can find entire deserts filled with the stuff on earth.
not to mention that there's a little matter of ownership
Ownership of sand? You can get that in bulk for really cheap, you know.
, human labor, etc.
And the need for human labor magically disappears on the moon??