The problem is no other company has a media-darling CEO like Apple. The media-hyped Apple announcements create their own reality. If Steve Jobs said that Apple was the first to come up with a touchscreen phone, then that's the absolute truth.
Who is Samsung going to put up there to compete? Some Korean guy that runs both the company and half the country, sure, but he's not going to have an RDF.
Even if true, it's the contention of most Slashdotters that it doesn't matter. We need another judge like the Oracle-Google judge to tell Apple any high-schooler could have rounded the corners of an icon (and they do, every day in design/art classes). Or another judge Posner.
Secondly, nothing Apple did is highly innovative whatsoever. The vaunted iPad design for which they claim a design patent is merely a knockoff of tablet designs that have been around for a long time, including the actual Knight-Ridder tablet.
There's nothing in the design patent that could not or does not apply to the Knight-Ridder tablet: it's simply a series of drawings of a rectangular slate object from different perspectives.
Apple could have come up with their own tablet design. Unfortunately, it appears Apple chose to copy Knight-Ridder's efforts instead.
It's quite frustrating talking about the patents when everyone in the discussion isn't in the same room with an oversize copy of the patents in front of us.
Click through and look at the "patent" folks: It's exactly as the parent describes. Nothing more than a few sketches. The only words, other than boilerplate are "We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described." The only problem being it's not described in any way whatsoever.
>I'm surprised that there seems to be this Slashdot groupthink against new desktop environments on the basis that they are different from Windows or Gnome2
I think the real backlash is environments being foisted on users in half-baked states. The pushback is in the refusal to be Gnome3 fanboys and uncritically praise whatever is put before them in a my way or the highway manner.
1. Hardware integration: Doesn't show you touchpad options if you're not on a touchpad.
2. Clicking on icon brings up an instance of an app, regardless of it was launched previously or not. You can launch a new instance by right-clicking.
3. Faster launch: They claim that typing the app name is faster than selecting it from a menu in Gnome2.
4. Notifications: They are interactive, unlike Unity's.
5. Window management: Drag to top to maximize, left or right to half-size.
My take: Unity has all that. Except you can still minimize your windows if you want. Also, multimonitor is pretty good (it was bad in Gnome3 last I heard).
The problem with all the "other" video sites is that they work horribly in comparison to Youtube.
If you have a just a slight Internet hiccup (say because you're on a congested wifi or cell network), alternative video players tend to go into permanent buffering mode. They tend to use more CPU, too.
Youtube "just works". It also has nice features, like the snapshot preview fast forward/rewind.
That said, it's evil that they're trying to force you to use your "real name".
2. It would be horrible to have a Google-only (or Apple-only) world. Here's hoping Google and Samsung prevail against Apple, and that Yahoo carves a niche for itself from Google.
While we're on the subject, has anyone noticed how the lazy developers of nypost.com offer "Download our app to view The Post optimized for your tablet" if you go there with "Linux" in your browser string.
(They're assuming Linux==Android tablet.)
The annoying thing is they ask each and every time.
I'll grant you that the websites have a lot (too much) stuff going on these days (cnn, huffpo).
But if someone's coming in on a phone, you'd just track that and send them to m.cnn.com (or whatever). On the mobile site, show them a search box, single-column list of the last headlines, plus one ad (not multiple).
Granted, people demanded the ability to create native apps.
But I would think they would be for, well, actual applications: I.e., compass, calorie counter, whatever.
Just loading a website and displaying links so you can view the articles? That's what a browser link to m.example.com and a suitable shortcut icon should be for.
I'm amazed at the indolent culture spawned by the iPhone: Nowadays, you can't just go to a website. You have to have a special executable for every single different website you visit!
It seems like there are people who don't go to certain websites, until they announce "Announcing the blah.com iPhone App!"
I was using NCSA Mosaic on Unix machines and loving it.
Later, I was using Netscape.
Then I was using IE when it was the only stable browser around.
At about that time, I started using the Firefox alphas (wasn't called Firefox then). It crashed early and often.
Later, when it became stable, it was really stable. It was the only browser I used on XP, other than testing in IE.
Of course, I'll always continue to love it. But these days, it's just too slow. It "greys" out all the time. Chrome never does that. And launching a new window is instantaneous in Chrome. Not so for FF. Not to mention always show "Well, this is a little embarrassing, we can't load all your tabs" when it restarts.
This is on the latest Ubuntu on a late-model laptop. YMMV esp. on Windows.
The point being Chrome is the most used browser (for me), and Firefox is the browser emeritus.
Now, I've responded to about 3 or 4 comments, but this guy is all over the page. I'm sure you remember the couple of stories on "reputation management" and paid bulletin board responders that was on Slashdot a while back. He (and a couple others) are either jobless fanboys or part of Apple's farm team.
Yeah, that's exactly what he's saying. It's the RDF at work.
Blindingly obvious that Apple opened the door.
How is Samsung supposed to know what Apple 's going to talk about before they talk about it? And also pre-introduce evidence to refute what Apple's going to say before they say it?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason they're suing Samsung is because the latter is beating Apple in sales.
The problem is no other company has a media-darling CEO like Apple. The media-hyped Apple announcements create their own reality. If Steve Jobs said that Apple was the first to come up with a touchscreen phone, then that's the absolute truth.
Who is Samsung going to put up there to compete? Some Korean guy that runs both the company and half the country, sure, but he's not going to have an RDF.
Even if true, it's the contention of most Slashdotters that it doesn't matter. We need another judge like the Oracle-Google judge to tell Apple any high-schooler could have rounded the corners of an icon (and they do, every day in design/art classes). Or another judge Posner.
Secondly, nothing Apple did is highly innovative whatsoever. The vaunted iPad design for which they claim a design patent is merely a knockoff of tablet designs that have been around for a long time, including the actual Knight-Ridder tablet.
There's nothing in the design patent that could not or does not apply to the Knight-Ridder tablet: it's simply a series of drawings of a rectangular slate object from different perspectives.
Apple could have come up with their own tablet design. Unfortunately, it appears Apple chose to copy Knight-Ridder's efforts instead.
It's quite frustrating talking about the patents when everyone in the discussion isn't in the same room with an oversize copy of the patents in front of us.
Click through and look at the "patent" folks: It's exactly as the parent describes. Nothing more than a few sketches. The only words, other than boilerplate are "We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described." The only problem being it's not described in any way whatsoever.
>I'm surprised that there seems to be this Slashdot groupthink against new desktop environments on the basis that they are different from Windows or Gnome2
I think the real backlash is environments being foisted on users in half-baked states. The pushback is in the refusal to be Gnome3 fanboys and uncritically praise whatever is put before them in a my way or the highway manner.
OK, I watched the videos.
1. Hardware integration: Doesn't show you touchpad options if you're not on a touchpad.
2. Clicking on icon brings up an instance of an app, regardless of it was launched previously or not. You can launch a new instance by right-clicking.
3. Faster launch: They claim that typing the app name is faster than selecting it from a menu in Gnome2.
4. Notifications: They are interactive, unlike Unity's.
5. Window management: Drag to top to maximize, left or right to half-size.
My take: Unity has all that. Except you can still minimize your windows if you want. Also, multimonitor is pretty good (it was bad in Gnome3 last I heard).
The problem with all the "other" video sites is that they work horribly in comparison to Youtube.
If you have a just a slight Internet hiccup (say because you're on a congested wifi or cell network), alternative video players tend to go into permanent buffering mode. They tend to use more CPU, too.
Youtube "just works". It also has nice features, like the snapshot preview fast forward/rewind.
That said, it's evil that they're trying to force you to use your "real name".
While it's good that Yahoos will be getting free food, the news of the name of Yahoo's cafe will now spark a pronunciation flame war:
URLs Cafe
The only way that makes sense is if you pronounce URL as "Earl".
Do people actually do that? The same number of people that call GUID "Goo Idd"?
The sane pronunciation is You Are Elle.
For some reason, a query I thought I used to be able to perform doesn't work.
First, a query that does work, and I use often:
blah site:example.com
Works better than example.com's own search in many/most cases.
But if I want to search on "blah" from all sites other than example.com, this doesn't seem to work:
blah -site:example.com
1. They support open source.
They have a slew of open source and free stuff:
YUI (Yahoo User Interface, a CSS and Javascript library), YSlow (page analyzer), YQL (query language for the web), APIs, and design pattern library.
http://developer.yahoo.com
2. It would be horrible to have a Google-only (or Apple-only) world. Here's hoping Google and Samsung prevail against Apple, and that Yahoo carves a niche for itself from Google.
Definitions-
Climate: When it's hot this year, that's climate, a manifestation of a long-term trend.
Weather: When it's cold this year, that's weather, a time-and-place limited phenomenon.
Yeah, I'll grant you that, for applications where you actually doing a lot of stuff. A Flickr app makes sense, too.
But for your average ho-hum content site? App for Time, app for Newsweak/DailyBeast, app for USNews, app for Politico, app for nytimes, that's nutty.
While we're on the subject, has anyone noticed how the lazy developers of nypost.com offer "Download our app to view The Post optimized for your tablet" if you go there with "Linux" in your browser string.
(They're assuming Linux==Android tablet.)
The annoying thing is they ask each and every time.
I'll grant you that the websites have a lot (too much) stuff going on these days (cnn, huffpo).
But if someone's coming in on a phone, you'd just track that and send them to m.cnn.com (or whatever). On the mobile site, show them a search box, single-column list of the last headlines, plus one ad (not multiple).
Thanks for bringing this up.
I actually had it mind.
Granted, people demanded the ability to create native apps.
But I would think they would be for, well, actual applications: I.e., compass, calorie counter, whatever.
Just loading a website and displaying links so you can view the articles? That's what a browser link to m.example.com and a suitable shortcut icon should be for.
I'm amazed at the indolent culture spawned by the iPhone: Nowadays, you can't just go to a website. You have to have a special executable for every single different website you visit!
It seems like there are people who don't go to certain websites, until they announce "Announcing the blah.com iPhone App!"
Speaking of which: has Elop implemented stack-ranking at Nokia?
I don't use it.
I was using NCSA Mosaic on Unix machines and loving it.
Later, I was using Netscape.
Then I was using IE when it was the only stable browser around.
At about that time, I started using the Firefox alphas (wasn't called Firefox then). It crashed early and often.
Later, when it became stable, it was really stable. It was the only browser I used on XP, other than testing in IE.
Of course, I'll always continue to love it. But these days, it's just too slow. It "greys" out all the time. Chrome never does that. And launching a new window is instantaneous in Chrome. Not so for FF. Not to mention always show "Well, this is a little embarrassing, we can't load all your tabs" when it restarts.
This is on the latest Ubuntu on a late-model laptop. YMMV esp. on Windows.
The point being Chrome is the most used browser (for me), and Firefox is the browser emeritus.
The UI formerly known as Metro
Now, I've responded to about 3 or 4 comments, but this guy is all over the page. I'm sure you remember the couple of stories on "reputation management" and paid bulletin board responders that was on Slashdot a while back. He (and a couple others) are either jobless fanboys or part of Apple's farm team.
re: the interface, are you trying to say Apple is claiming the rights to unsorted grid of icons?
Hmm, wonder where they could have gotten that idea. I wonder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager
True that. Remember all the rumors for the longest time about the "gphone"?
Do you get the feeling the guy you're responding to is a paid shill? He's on half the comments in this thread.
Yeah, that's exactly what he's saying. It's the RDF at work.
Blindingly obvious that Apple opened the door.
How is Samsung supposed to know what Apple 's going to talk about before they talk about it? And also pre-introduce evidence to refute what Apple's going to say before they say it?
It seems they filed the evidence, but it was disallowed by the judge.
Then Apple talked about Samsung's designs (such as F700).
Normally, that would mean Apple had "opened the door", and Samsung could present its own evidence in reply.
But then the judge disallowed that, too.