This has to be about the most clueless advice I've ever read about how to build a better tablet. First of all, just about everything the author mentions already exists and has existed for years with Windows tablet pcs. Speech and handwriting recognition, having a filesystem, and the nebulous "The filesystem is the CMS is the PIM is the email client" already existed or could have easily have been built into the existing tablet pc ecosystem. If those are the features you really care about, why not just buy a laptop or netbook?
At no point in this article does the author acknowledge the importance of the defining features of tablets, namely that they should be portable, have good battery life, have a good screen and have a responsive and well designed touch interface. I consider these to be pretty much the essential basics when it comes to any tablet that hopes to be widely successful. Yet, going on two years later, almost no other company has succeeded in integrating these features into a compelling product despite having a template to work from. iOS itself is not that ambitious an OS. It's actually not the flashiest or most eye-candy-laden OS out there -- not by a a long shot. It doesn't even have the most intuitive user interface all the time. But for core tablet functionality, it is extremely good and is perhaps still unmatched in the industry.
You have to understand how the features of a tablet all work together to support the overall use-cases that you designed the tablet for. So if it is a tablet whose defining features are: (1) not having a keyboard, (2) probably held and used while standing up or lying down, (3) may spend prolonged time outside of the home or away from an outlet, (4) will be used under varying lighting conditions, then why do we see so many tablets these days that are bulky, heavy, have poor screens, and poor keyboards? I don't get that. This is working against your own best interest. Now, there are a lots of tablets that do more than an ipad in a technical sense but since they are such poor tablets they don't differentiate themselves sufficiently from a netbook or laptop to justify the costs.
I think if Microsoft or any company wants to beat Apple at making a better tablet then they need to acknowledge the unique constraints and opportunities of the form factor they are working with. Add features that truly leverage the benefits of a portable device. Aim for a battery life of 15+ hours. This is more than a whole workday because it gives you leeway in case you forget to recharge the device overnight from the previous 'whole day' of work. Find a good balance for security that sits somewhere between the locked down iTunes Appstore and the Android Market. Apps need not be rejected on silly grounds like conformance to a style guide or ease of use but they damn well better not be obvious malware or trojans. With the resources that these companies have it their disposal, how hard can it be to run each app in a sandbox with a monkey-like testing environment and monitor for anomalous outgoing connections to China or some place?
Every one of the major competitors to Apple have lots of cash on hand, well into the billions. If one is serious about tablets, why not buy up or seriously invest in every company that is trying to build reflective screen technology? There are whole classes of use-cases related to the outdoors that are poorly served by any tablet today. Shit, at a minimum, whoever gets this right can crash the ebook market which is a pretty significant market in itself.
Perhaps, I am a fool and this is not as easy as I think, but I never said it was easy anyway. And yet, the problem can't be money since Apple did not have the billions upon billions of revenue that it has now when it was designing the ipad. They just had a very clear idea of the device they were working on and what its purposes were. To this point, Amazon with its
This is absolutely the case and doesn't get enough attention in these days of "IP" run amok. People talk about a company's "IP" as if it encompasses anything that is produced from the mind; it is not. In the US, there are only three types of "IP" that are protected by Federal law: copyrights, trademarks and patents. From a software perspective, you can think of these as sourcecode, logos (that have to be registered with the government), and technical design documents.
On the state level, things get a little more nebulous with the concept of a "trade secret". Now, trade secrets are much more broad than the federally enforced IP. A trade secret really can be almost any technique or process that is developed or learned by an employee on the company's dime. However, there are limits to what a company can claim as a trade secret since it is in the public interest for employees to be able to learn on the job and apply that experience to future jobs. IANAL, but I had to do research on this because I was in a similar predicament to the submitter. In general, a company can only claim a "trade secret" for information that is not generally known and from which it can derive some business benefit. It also has to be actively taking steps to protect the dissemination of such knowledge, e.g., nondisclosure agreements, access controls, etc. Again, this varies to some extent by state so one really might need to talk to a lawyer with respect to trade secrets. As a point of reference, there are important differences between the trade secret laws in California and Massachusetts.
I think you've just proven the geographic diversity of the US. If you live in a small town or do your shopping at Wallmart then of course it's going to seem like Americans don't like variety. There's only so much variety you can fit in a single superstore that's trying to meet everyone's basic needs. Wallmart stocks a modest selection of electronics, toys, foods, clothes, home appliances and that's about it.
However, you'll find all kinds of variety if you go to cities on the coasts or larger (perhaps, ironically) more international cities like Boston or New York. For example, I've seen little clothes stores and specialty shops from all over the world in these cities. I'm not even sure how some of these places stay in business because there's almost never anybody in them.
So, in short, Americans buy more cheap crap. And that could explain the absence of variety.
I would say that Apple's rising pc marketshare in the US says otherwise.
I forgot the reference but I read somewhere that Apple, incidentally enough, is one of the only American computer companies that could move their manufacturing back to the USA. This is because they own and have retained institutional knowledge of the core manufacturing process technologies for their products. This is a side-effect of their fanatical soup-to-nuts control of the design and manufacturing process itself.
The recipe for getting corporate influence out of government is to reduce governmental power in corporate behavior. I'm sorry you hate Rand, but that's the gist of it. If the business isn't controlled by government, then business has no interest in government and we can all go about our lives. If you don't like what company does, please found company and change the industry, or at least your small part of it. The problem with regulation and subsidy is that it obfuscates the costs of delivery, so nobody can tell what makes sense and what does not.
Not trying to flame but this is a silly argument. I have to assume that you don't really believe it. This is like saying, "if you want to prevent cops from dying on duty then get rid of cops". That's just a recipe for lawlessness and unchecked corporate abuse. Government isn't involved in business for its own sake (this is all hypothetical) but rather because bad behavior by business demands it. There's noting special about government as far as being a mediator or authority to set rules -- you just need some kind of body that (in theory) is looking out for the best interest of the people and not particular companies. With our institutions and law constructed the way it is there is simply no other entity that can do this or has a demonstrated capability and willingness to do it.
You obviously haven't heard about Google attempting to purchase Motorola Mobility. If HTC or Samsung don't want to play ball then all Google has to do is lean on Motorola.
Okay, I have to respond to this. Not trying to flame anyone (so you can keep your flame retardant suit in the closet) but in what ways are the iPhone keyboard better than the Android ones? As the owner of an iPod Touch (with retina display), iPad and HTC EVO 4G, I really want to know. I've heard this again and again and again but never with any accompanying details or specifics. Are you talking about the stock keyboard (and which version, since I've read that the Gingerbread stock keyboard was an improvement over previous stock keyboards)? Are you saying that none of the Android replacement keyboards are better than the iPhone keyboard?
I can give very specific reasons for why I prefer Android keyboards on the whole to the iOS keyboard. (1) Pretty much all the Android keyboards offer better visual hints when it comes to extended characters (e.g., punctuation, numbers and symbols) because they appear next to the primary character on the key, (2) Pretty much all Android keyboards are easier to use for entering complex passwords with upper and lower case letters because, again, you can see immediately when the letter you are typing is going to be uppercase or lowercase, (3) this could be a matter of taste, but in most situations I prefer the swiping type keyboards like Swype or FlexT9 to any tapping keyboard. I can usually type the fastest and most accurately with this input style, (4) I like the autocorrection of Android keyboards like Swiftkey better than what is available in iOS.
Having said all of this, I have noticed that when purely tap-typing, I seem to be slightly more accurate with the iOS keyboard. I'm not sure why this is, but it could simply be due to the spacing between the characters is better for the size of my fingers.
It also doesn't frighten easily from gunfire or explosions, can be mounted with guns, doesn't take years of training to handle (once the software is developed), can (eventually) be mass produced much faster, can be hauled and stored easier, won't arouse the heckles of PETA, can be remotely controlled without putting a human handler in danger, is a stepping stone toward more advanced robotics . .., etc
I don't see how the decision to not include 3G in the Kindle Fire has anything to do with polish. True, your ebook reading experience isn't as seamless as it was with the original Kindle but you were compromising on that the moment you moved away from an E-Ink screen and accepted a battery life measured in hours instead of days. Unless they're buying it on pure hype, I don't think anybody is expecting the same reading experience on this device as the E-Ink Kindles, which is why Amazon still offers them. Anybody that can handle wifi on the Ipad 1/2 can handle it on this device.
$25 seems like like a lot to me, especially in addition to an existing smartphone bill. If you're going to pay that much then you may as well pay the extra 25 - 30 dollars that most carriers charge for wifi hotspot tethering and be able to use your network for not just a single tablet but any other wifi enable device, like your laptop. In any case, the point is damn near moot if you're tethering through a rooted Android phone because then you don't have to pay anything. I've tethered an ipod, ipad and laptop to my HTC EVO with generally decent results, although, admittedly, I only do it when I have a decent 4G signal. In the age of wifi tethering, $25 a month plus a higher base cost is a rotten deal indeed.
I think it depends on the cost to manufacture the item. Wanting someone to sell you device for $5 when it costs $1000 to make and you can afford to pay $1000 is certainly greedy. But I don't think its greedy to prefer to pay $1000 instead of $5000 for an item that that only costs $800 to make. I also don't know if it is greedy to prefer to pay $800 for a device when you can only afford to pay $800 but it costs $1000 to make. Especially if you need said item for a medical reason.
Heavy use is heavy use. It doesn't matter whether you're streaming Pandora or Netflix all day through a phone app or through a laptop. What should be obvious is that the carriers want to charge something for nothing. The carriers don't do anything to earn the extra money for tethering but they want you to pay anyway. After all, it's not like they promise a more stable network connection for tetherers or lower latencies. If they're offering everybody the same 5GB per month then they should prepare for the worst case scenario where everybody is actually using 5GB per month. What are they going to do when the latest high bandwidth fad like video chat becomes the rage and everybody is using close to 5GB per month?
Yeah, you are obviously biased. I can't speak much to web browsing on Android tablets (which is another animal from web browsing on Android smart phones) but I can say that the iPad 2 keyboard is an absolute horror to use. Now, that is not to say that the default keyboard for Android tablets aren't also horrible to use but I find it hard to believe that they are much worse than the the iPad's. The problem GP was talking about with respect to alternative keyboard modes applies to iPad as much as it does to Android keyboards. However, my biggest gripe with the iPad keyboard (or any iOS keyboard for that matter) is that it doesn't change the onscreen key appearance when toggling between uppercase and lowercase letters. It also doesn't give visual hints of what the alternative key-binding will be when you long-press a key until after you've already pressed it. This is a huge annoyance when you're typing a lot or entering passwords with upper and lower case letters. At least with Android tablets, you can use alternative keyboards, like Swype, which can make typing more tolerable.
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Having said all this, I like the iOS keyboard on smartphone-sized devices and can hunt-and-peck type on them fairly accurately.
This puts the lie to any claim that the primary problem with people who tether is their bandwidth usage. If Verizon was so burdened by the top bandwidth hogs then why would they roll out this service, thus making more people hogs? It should be obvious to anyone that the real reason is greed. They want to charge for every possible use of their (ours if you consider the publicly owned airwaves that they were leased ) spectrum. Verizon has already eclipsed AT&T as the carrier I hate most. And to think that I was almost enticed to Verizon for their fast LTE network.
"If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards."
Umm, it is their choice. Didn't you read any of the previous articles? You know, the ones where they made and told us they made the choice. It's their game, so yes they can force anyone who wishes to play it, play it with an internet connection.
The ONLY (legal) choice you have, is to buy or not to buy.
I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.
You clearly misread what parent was saying, even though you quoted the exact part in question. He said it was his choice -- not Blizzard's -- how he does his singleplayer gaming, which is absolutely correct. If Blizzard insists that his singleplayer experience involve an always-on connection, then he has every right to refuse to buy their game; he'll just play a different singleplayer game. There was nothing in his post to suggest he would pirate it instead.
What could possibly change in the underlying value of a corporation made up of flesh and blood humans and capital with decades of depreciation in a fucking microsecond? Here's a hint: nothing.
Not exactly true. If companies were islands isolated from each other and other external factors then you might have a point. However, as we all know that is not true. The value of a company can indeed change within microseconds and less because some external factor outside of that company's control might affect its value. For example, suppose some disruptive event occurs in the world, such as a coup in Iran or a UFO landing on Washington. The value of a lot of companies will change instantly (well, really at the speed at which information can flow, which is on the order of nanoseconds). I imagine our HFT friends here would want to be amongst the first to act upon this information, either minimizing loss or maximizing gain from such an event. This doesn't strike me as voodoo or particularly nefarious/underhanded/unethical, especially since there would probably be obvious losers depending on the type of event.
Here in the States, we call that "World Class Customer Service. . . "
. ..with emphasis on World, as in: "Your customer service can come from anywhere in the world!" Of course, this doesn't mean that if you bought a gadget from Sony, your support calls will be routed to an engineer in Japan who helped designed the device and who can speak your language fluently. No, what it really means is that your call will go to wherever is cheapest to outsource the callcenters.
Blasphemy! Epic comment fail! Although it didn't do very well at the box office in its day, 2001 is pretty universally considered one of the best sci fi movies ever made. Even in its time, it won 4 Academy awards (ref). No other sci fi movie (Apollo 13 by Ron Howard doesn't count since I don't consider that sci fi) before or since has had a more realistic portrayal of space travel and life in space (sans the whole warp speed travel at the end). From a pure technology standpoint, the movie still isn't particularly dated, even after 40 years. Quoting Wikipedia to drill the point home:
2001 was #15 on AFI's 2007 100 Years... 100 Movies, was named #40 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, was included on its 100 Years, 100 Quotes ("Open the pod bay doors, Hal."), and HAL 9000 is the #13 villain in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.[154] 2001 is the only science fiction film to make the Sight & Sound poll for ten best movies, and tops the Online Film Critics Society list of "greatest science fiction films of all time."[155] In 1991, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry. Other lists that include the film are 50 Films to See Before You Die (#6), The Village Voice 100 Best Films of the 20th Century (#11), the Sight & Sound Top Ten poll (#6),[156] and Roger Ebert's Top Ten (1968) (#2). In 1995, the Vatican named it as one of the 45 best films ever made (and included it in a sub-list of the "Top Ten Art Movies" of all time.)
I haven't thought enough about patents to form an opinion on whether they should be abolished in general but I definitely lean against software patents. The problem that I see with these type of patents is how do you assign the value of them? Any device as complex as a smartphone will benefit from all kinds of innovation and patents many of which would not be practical to implement in the original form that the inventor(s) envisioned. Setting aside the question of whether the patent should have been granted in the first place, what are fair rules for violations of that patent? Should it be an injunction against importing devices with that idea? If licensing fees, why X number of dollars versus Y? In my opinion, the punishment for violating a patent should be a government imposed fine in proportion to the amount of worth that that patent contributes to the overall product in relation to the other innovation that went into it. So the Lodsys patents would be almost worthless because the innovation contained therein would be almost nothing compared to the other innovations that went into implementing an electronic payment system, a smartphone that people would want to buy and the apps themselves that were good enough for people to want to make in-app payments with them. On top of this, patent disclosures would have to be understandable by an average engineer or practitioner in the field. If not, then the patent is invalidated automatically. The purpose of patents are NOT to make inventors rich (that is simply a possible side-effect), it is for the public disclosure of innovative and useful ideas in exchange for a LIMITED monopoly over control of that particular idea.
I don't think this is as black and white as you think. In what legal sense are retail stores "public places"? A public place owned and operated by Apple (a private entity) falls under different laws than a public place owned and operated by a municipal, state, or Federal authority; not all public places are made the same. My point had to do with who gets to decide what the rules for acceptable behavior on the premises are. Photography could be deemed unacceptable behavior on a public place under private control even if similar photography would otherwise be okay on publicly owned and operated grounds. This is why museums and theaters can have no photography rules. My claim is that people in retail stores operated by Apple probably expect a higher standard for privacy with respect to covert surveillance by other customers than they would expect in most other public places.
Citation please for applicable laws that state that private property rights go out the window for retail stores. If that was the case then an Apple employee couldn't ask a customer to leave because obviously an Apple employee would have no authority in a public place. Clearly, this is not what you meant when you said that Apple's "retail stores are not afforded private property status. . .." Also, I wasn't making a point on whether anyone's privacy was legally violated. My point was about what their expectations about privacy are likely to be on a private property owned by Apple, regardless of whether it is open to the public or not. Because the premises were under the authority of Apple, it affects how you expect other members of the public that are in that retail store to behave, it affects who you complain to if another member of the public is harassing you with a camera, it affects where you expect surveillance cameras to be and it affects your expectations on how that surveillance footage will be used. My point was about how members of the public would expect other members of the public to behave on premises owned by a private company.
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This has to be about the most clueless advice I've ever read about how to build a better tablet. First of all, just about everything the author mentions already exists and has existed for years with Windows tablet pcs. Speech and handwriting recognition, having a filesystem, and the nebulous "The filesystem is the CMS is the PIM is the email client" already existed or could have easily have been built into the existing tablet pc ecosystem. If those are the features you really care about, why not just buy a laptop or netbook?
At no point in this article does the author acknowledge the importance of the defining features of tablets, namely that they should be portable, have good battery life, have a good screen and have a responsive and well designed touch interface. I consider these to be pretty much the essential basics when it comes to any tablet that hopes to be widely successful. Yet, going on two years later, almost no other company has succeeded in integrating these features into a compelling product despite having a template to work from. iOS itself is not that ambitious an OS. It's actually not the flashiest or most eye-candy-laden OS out there -- not by a a long shot. It doesn't even have the most intuitive user interface all the time. But for core tablet functionality, it is extremely good and is perhaps still unmatched in the industry.
You have to understand how the features of a tablet all work together to support the overall use-cases that you designed the tablet for. So if it is a tablet whose defining features are: (1) not having a keyboard, (2) probably held and used while standing up or lying down, (3) may spend prolonged time outside of the home or away from an outlet, (4) will be used under varying lighting conditions, then why do we see so many tablets these days that are bulky, heavy, have poor screens, and poor keyboards? I don't get that. This is working against your own best interest. Now, there are a lots of tablets that do more than an ipad in a technical sense but since they are such poor tablets they don't differentiate themselves sufficiently from a netbook or laptop to justify the costs.
I think if Microsoft or any company wants to beat Apple at making a better tablet then they need to acknowledge the unique constraints and opportunities of the form factor they are working with. Add features that truly leverage the benefits of a portable device. Aim for a battery life of 15+ hours. This is more than a whole workday because it gives you leeway in case you forget to recharge the device overnight from the previous 'whole day' of work. Find a good balance for security that sits somewhere between the locked down iTunes Appstore and the Android Market. Apps need not be rejected on silly grounds like conformance to a style guide or ease of use but they damn well better not be obvious malware or trojans. With the resources that these companies have it their disposal, how hard can it be to run each app in a sandbox with a monkey-like testing environment and monitor for anomalous outgoing connections to China or some place?
Every one of the major competitors to Apple have lots of cash on hand, well into the billions. If one is serious about tablets, why not buy up or seriously invest in every company that is trying to build reflective screen technology? There are whole classes of use-cases related to the outdoors that are poorly served by any tablet today. Shit, at a minimum, whoever gets this right can crash the ebook market which is a pretty significant market in itself.
Perhaps, I am a fool and this is not as easy as I think, but I never said it was easy anyway. And yet, the problem can't be money since Apple did not have the billions upon billions of revenue that it has now when it was designing the ipad. They just had a very clear idea of the device they were working on and what its purposes were. To this point, Amazon with its
This is absolutely the case and doesn't get enough attention in these days of "IP" run amok. People talk about a company's "IP" as if it encompasses anything that is produced from the mind; it is not. In the US, there are only three types of "IP" that are protected by Federal law: copyrights, trademarks and patents. From a software perspective, you can think of these as sourcecode, logos (that have to be registered with the government), and technical design documents.
On the state level, things get a little more nebulous with the concept of a "trade secret". Now, trade secrets are much more broad than the federally enforced IP. A trade secret really can be almost any technique or process that is developed or learned by an employee on the company's dime. However, there are limits to what a company can claim as a trade secret since it is in the public interest for employees to be able to learn on the job and apply that experience to future jobs. IANAL, but I had to do research on this because I was in a similar predicament to the submitter. In general, a company can only claim a "trade secret" for information that is not generally known and from which it can derive some business benefit. It also has to be actively taking steps to protect the dissemination of such knowledge, e.g., nondisclosure agreements, access controls, etc. Again, this varies to some extent by state so one really might need to talk to a lawyer with respect to trade secrets. As a point of reference, there are important differences between the trade secret laws in California and Massachusetts.
I prefer to have syntax beyond parenthesis.
What other syntax do you need? Some people are never satisfied.
I think you've just proven the geographic diversity of the US. If you live in a small town or do your shopping at Wallmart then of course it's going to seem like Americans don't like variety. There's only so much variety you can fit in a single superstore that's trying to meet everyone's basic needs. Wallmart stocks a modest selection of electronics, toys, foods, clothes, home appliances and that's about it.
However, you'll find all kinds of variety if you go to cities on the coasts or larger (perhaps, ironically) more international cities like Boston or New York. For example, I've seen little clothes stores and specialty shops from all over the world in these cities. I'm not even sure how some of these places stay in business because there's almost never anybody in them.
I would say that Apple's rising pc marketshare in the US says otherwise.
I forgot the reference but I read somewhere that Apple, incidentally enough, is one of the only American computer companies that could move their manufacturing back to the USA. This is because they own and have retained institutional knowledge of the core manufacturing process technologies for their products. This is a side-effect of their fanatical soup-to-nuts control of the design and manufacturing process itself.
The recipe for getting corporate influence out of government is to reduce governmental power in corporate behavior. I'm sorry you hate Rand, but that's the gist of it. If the business isn't controlled by government, then business has no interest in government and we can all go about our lives. If you don't like what company does, please found company and change the industry, or at least your small part of it. The problem with regulation and subsidy is that it obfuscates the costs of delivery, so nobody can tell what makes sense and what does not.
Not trying to flame but this is a silly argument. I have to assume that you don't really believe it. This is like saying, "if you want to prevent cops from dying on duty then get rid of cops". That's just a recipe for lawlessness and unchecked corporate abuse. Government isn't involved in business for its own sake (this is all hypothetical) but rather because bad behavior by business demands it. There's noting special about government as far as being a mediator or authority to set rules -- you just need some kind of body that (in theory) is looking out for the best interest of the people and not particular companies. With our institutions and law constructed the way it is there is simply no other entity that can do this or has a demonstrated capability and willingness to do it.
You obviously haven't heard about Google attempting to purchase Motorola Mobility. If HTC or Samsung don't want to play ball then all Google has to do is lean on Motorola.
Of course we would have. We'd just use them as excavators and aircraft.
Of course we would. We'd just be using them as excavators and aircraft.
Okay, I have to respond to this. Not trying to flame anyone (so you can keep your flame retardant suit in the closet) but in what ways are the iPhone keyboard better than the Android ones? As the owner of an iPod Touch (with retina display), iPad and HTC EVO 4G, I really want to know. I've heard this again and again and again but never with any accompanying details or specifics. Are you talking about the stock keyboard (and which version, since I've read that the Gingerbread stock keyboard was an improvement over previous stock keyboards)? Are you saying that none of the Android replacement keyboards are better than the iPhone keyboard?
I can give very specific reasons for why I prefer Android keyboards on the whole to the iOS keyboard. (1) Pretty much all the Android keyboards offer better visual hints when it comes to extended characters (e.g., punctuation, numbers and symbols) because they appear next to the primary character on the key, (2) Pretty much all Android keyboards are easier to use for entering complex passwords with upper and lower case letters because, again, you can see immediately when the letter you are typing is going to be uppercase or lowercase, (3) this could be a matter of taste, but in most situations I prefer the swiping type keyboards like Swype or FlexT9 to any tapping keyboard. I can usually type the fastest and most accurately with this input style, (4) I like the autocorrection of Android keyboards like Swiftkey better than what is available in iOS.
Having said all of this, I have noticed that when purely tap-typing, I seem to be slightly more accurate with the iOS keyboard. I'm not sure why this is, but it could simply be due to the spacing between the characters is better for the size of my fingers.
.. sometimes you just want to throw up a Mythbusters or TNG episode while you work on dinner or read a book...
You can watch TV while reading a book?
It also doesn't frighten easily from gunfire or explosions, can be mounted with guns, doesn't take years of training to handle (once the software is developed), can (eventually) be mass produced much faster, can be hauled and stored easier, won't arouse the heckles of PETA, can be remotely controlled without putting a human handler in danger, is a stepping stone toward more advanced robotics . . ., etc
I don't see how the decision to not include 3G in the Kindle Fire has anything to do with polish. True, your ebook reading experience isn't as seamless as it was with the original Kindle but you were compromising on that the moment you moved away from an E-Ink screen and accepted a battery life measured in hours instead of days. Unless they're buying it on pure hype, I don't think anybody is expecting the same reading experience on this device as the E-Ink Kindles, which is why Amazon still offers them. Anybody that can handle wifi on the Ipad 1/2 can handle it on this device.
$25 seems like like a lot to me, especially in addition to an existing smartphone bill. If you're going to pay that much then you may as well pay the extra 25 - 30 dollars that most carriers charge for wifi hotspot tethering and be able to use your network for not just a single tablet but any other wifi enable device, like your laptop. In any case, the point is damn near moot if you're tethering through a rooted Android phone because then you don't have to pay anything. I've tethered an ipod, ipad and laptop to my HTC EVO with generally decent results, although, admittedly, I only do it when I have a decent 4G signal. In the age of wifi tethering, $25 a month plus a higher base cost is a rotten deal indeed.
I think it depends on the cost to manufacture the item. Wanting someone to sell you device for $5 when it costs $1000 to make and you can afford to pay $1000 is certainly greedy. But I don't think its greedy to prefer to pay $1000 instead of $5000 for an item that that only costs $800 to make. I also don't know if it is greedy to prefer to pay $800 for a device when you can only afford to pay $800 but it costs $1000 to make. Especially if you need said item for a medical reason.
Heavy use is heavy use. It doesn't matter whether you're streaming Pandora or Netflix all day through a phone app or through a laptop. What should be obvious is that the carriers want to charge something for nothing. The carriers don't do anything to earn the extra money for tethering but they want you to pay anyway. After all, it's not like they promise a more stable network connection for tetherers or lower latencies. If they're offering everybody the same 5GB per month then they should prepare for the worst case scenario where everybody is actually using 5GB per month. What are they going to do when the latest high bandwidth fad like video chat becomes the rage and everybody is using close to 5GB per month?
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Having said all this, I like the iOS keyboard on smartphone-sized devices and can hunt-and-peck type on them fairly accurately.
This puts the lie to any claim that the primary problem with people who tether is their bandwidth usage. If Verizon was so burdened by the top bandwidth hogs then why would they roll out this service, thus making more people hogs? It should be obvious to anyone that the real reason is greed. They want to charge for every possible use of their (ours if you consider the publicly owned airwaves that they were leased ) spectrum. Verizon has already eclipsed AT&T as the carrier I hate most. And to think that I was almost enticed to Verizon for their fast LTE network.
"If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski' and do my singleplayer gaming from a remote cabin in Wisconsin, it's my choice, not Blizzards."
Umm, it is their choice. Didn't you read any of the previous articles? You know, the ones where they made and told us they made the choice. It's their game, so yes they can force anyone who wishes to play it, play it with an internet connection.
The ONLY (legal) choice you have, is to buy or not to buy.
I'm going to buy it. I'm going to play it with internet connection on. I'm going to be happy in the knowledge that those I'm playing with/against or buying/selling items with will be doing it without cheating.
You clearly misread what parent was saying, even though you quoted the exact part in question. He said it was his choice -- not Blizzard's -- how he does his singleplayer gaming, which is absolutely correct. If Blizzard insists that his singleplayer experience involve an always-on connection, then he has every right to refuse to buy their game; he'll just play a different singleplayer game. There was nothing in his post to suggest he would pirate it instead.
What could possibly change in the underlying value of a corporation made up of flesh and blood humans and capital with decades of depreciation in a fucking microsecond? Here's a hint: nothing.
Not exactly true. If companies were islands isolated from each other and other external factors then you might have a point. However, as we all know that is not true. The value of a company can indeed change within microseconds and less because some external factor outside of that company's control might affect its value. For example, suppose some disruptive event occurs in the world, such as a coup in Iran or a UFO landing on Washington. The value of a lot of companies will change instantly (well, really at the speed at which information can flow, which is on the order of nanoseconds). I imagine our HFT friends here would want to be amongst the first to act upon this information, either minimizing loss or maximizing gain from such an event. This doesn't strike me as voodoo or particularly nefarious/underhanded/unethical, especially since there would probably be obvious losers depending on the type of event.
Here in the States, we call that "World Class Customer Service. . . "
. . .with emphasis on World, as in: "Your customer service can come from anywhere in the world!" Of course, this doesn't mean that if you bought a gadget from Sony, your support calls will be routed to an engineer in Japan who helped designed the device and who can speak your language fluently. No, what it really means is that your call will go to wherever is cheapest to outsource the callcenters.
Blasphemy! Epic comment fail! Although it didn't do very well at the box office in its day, 2001 is pretty universally considered one of the best sci fi movies ever made. Even in its time, it won 4 Academy awards (ref). No other sci fi movie (Apollo 13 by Ron Howard doesn't count since I don't consider that sci fi) before or since has had a more realistic portrayal of space travel and life in space (sans the whole warp speed travel at the end). From a pure technology standpoint, the movie still isn't particularly dated, even after 40 years. Quoting Wikipedia to drill the point home:
2001 was #15 on AFI's 2007 100 Years... 100 Movies, was named #40 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, was included on its 100 Years, 100 Quotes ("Open the pod bay doors, Hal."), and HAL 9000 is the #13 villain in the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains.[154] 2001 is the only science fiction film to make the Sight & Sound poll for ten best movies, and tops the Online Film Critics Society list of "greatest science fiction films of all time."[155] In 1991, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry. Other lists that include the film are 50 Films to See Before You Die (#6), The Village Voice 100 Best Films of the 20th Century (#11), the Sight & Sound Top Ten poll (#6),[156] and Roger Ebert's Top Ten (1968) (#2). In 1995, the Vatican named it as one of the 45 best films ever made (and included it in a sub-list of the "Top Ten Art Movies" of all time.)
Jesus Christ! Do you even like sci fi?
I haven't thought enough about patents to form an opinion on whether they should be abolished in general but I definitely lean against software patents. The problem that I see with these type of patents is how do you assign the value of them? Any device as complex as a smartphone will benefit from all kinds of innovation and patents many of which would not be practical to implement in the original form that the inventor(s) envisioned. Setting aside the question of whether the patent should have been granted in the first place, what are fair rules for violations of that patent? Should it be an injunction against importing devices with that idea? If licensing fees, why X number of dollars versus Y? In my opinion, the punishment for violating a patent should be a government imposed fine in proportion to the amount of worth that that patent contributes to the overall product in relation to the other innovation that went into it. So the Lodsys patents would be almost worthless because the innovation contained therein would be almost nothing compared to the other innovations that went into implementing an electronic payment system, a smartphone that people would want to buy and the apps themselves that were good enough for people to want to make in-app payments with them. On top of this, patent disclosures would have to be understandable by an average engineer or practitioner in the field. If not, then the patent is invalidated automatically. The purpose of patents are NOT to make inventors rich (that is simply a possible side-effect), it is for the public disclosure of innovative and useful ideas in exchange for a LIMITED monopoly over control of that particular idea.
I don't think this is as black and white as you think. In what legal sense are retail stores "public places"? A public place owned and operated by Apple (a private entity) falls under different laws than a public place owned and operated by a municipal, state, or Federal authority; not all public places are made the same. My point had to do with who gets to decide what the rules for acceptable behavior on the premises are. Photography could be deemed unacceptable behavior on a public place under private control even if similar photography would otherwise be okay on publicly owned and operated grounds. This is why museums and theaters can have no photography rules. My claim is that people in retail stores operated by Apple probably expect a higher standard for privacy with respect to covert surveillance by other customers than they would expect in most other public places.
Citation please for applicable laws that state that private property rights go out the window for retail stores. If that was the case then an Apple employee couldn't ask a customer to leave because obviously an Apple employee would have no authority in a public place. Clearly, this is not what you meant when you said that Apple's "retail stores are not afforded private property status. . . ." Also, I wasn't making a point on whether anyone's privacy was legally violated. My point was about what their expectations about privacy are likely to be on a private property owned by Apple, regardless of whether it is open to the public or not. Because the premises were under the authority of Apple, it affects how you expect other members of the public that are in that retail store to behave, it affects who you complain to if another member of the public is harassing you with a camera, it affects where you expect surveillance cameras to be and it affects your expectations on how that surveillance footage will be used. My point was about how members of the public would expect other members of the public to behave on premises owned by a private company.