There is a threshold to which any device will operate, including switching power supplies and power control units.
Perhaps he has a faulty laptop, but after *two* motherboard upgrades... maybe it's a faulty power supply? Still, the issue isn't only "What is wrong with the laptop," but "What is killing the laptop"?
Screen: Check Motherboard: Check check! Battery: Check Top shell: Check Power supply: Check
The only thing on that machine that may still be original is the bottom shell cover! Well, maybe the modem, optical drive, ram and airport card are still original too.
The video card is on the motherboard, as is sound, CPU, and all the ports. The only thing separating this machine from a new one is this one has known issues and a new one has unknown issues.
I would wonder if perhaps the owner has bad power at his house? Maybe that is causing all the issues? It seems curious to go through batteries, power supply, and motherboard and not suspect dirty power.
It weighs 6 times as much as an iPod and has half the battery life... I suppose this is just first gen tech so it shouldn't be a problem that it underperforms the market right now.
In a year, let's hope it can reach 20 hours and weigh as much as an iPod ^^
Or... maybe we can see it in a PowerBook! Still, it does seem rather counterintuitive to bundle it with a PDA, rather than a notebook... And that's one big PDA, it looks more like a small football!
If nothing else, the discovery mechanism is Rendezvous, so if you've got an open source AIM client that's willing to implement Rendezvous discovery, I bet it would be simple enough to 'sniff' the LAN and figure out how to chat with the iChat clients.
No harder than figuring out any other chat protocol.
Actually, technically, NeXT had it first, but since Apple bought NeXT, and then Apple designed/released the iPod, it really still is an Apple invention.
Throughout all three products, at least, Steve Jobs was at the helm.
Haha, I should have tried that in Windows... figures that if it would work on the Mac, it would work in Windows too ^^
Anyway, I don't know if they deserve to have the patent, but I do think it was non obvious and revolutionary, for an MP3 player, an half a million other people evidently do too...
Someone else asked the same question, this was the answer I gave them.
Except instead of drives, folders, shares, and files, they have albums, genres, playlists, songs, etc. Oh, and each 'column' takes up the whole of the iPod screen.
Perhaps the description is too general (I doubt it, having read it, it's fairly detailed), but the iPod UI and the Start menu are not alike. The Start menu is a tree you navigate 'down', while the iPod UI is five trees, and specifically Apple is patenting that.
If there's anything out there I've seen that resembles the iPod UI, it's Apple's Finder's column view; or NeXT's browser's column view.
Otherwise all the other MP3 players I had seen, when the iPod had been released (such as the Creative Nomad) and an Explorer tree based browser, or a playlist browser, very, very, unlike Apple's column view based browser on the iPod.
But the prior art doesn't exist on another media player. That's why I used the VCR->Steering wheel example. You can't find another MP3 player that uses this interface.
That Apple wants a patent on it is because it is non obvious. You don't think that's enough, so we'll have to disagree on that.
The difference between the Start menu and the Column View is that you can navigate bidirectionally in it, up and down, while the Start menu is a downward flowing tree, you can only navigate one direction.
If you haven't seen it in action, it's hard to explain the subtleties. Like the treeview explorer, you can navigate different branches and drag stuff between them. Nothing stops that. The difference is that the column view navigates faster than treeview because the target for the mouse is much, much, bigger than a single folder in treeview... really, the only example I can think of that is analogous is mouselook in Quake! When I'm using drag and drop in the Finder in column view, it's like moving the mouse in quake to control your direction of movement, whereas in the Explorer you have to fully expand your destination before you can drag and drop your items.
That's it I guess; in the Explorer you have to fully expand both your source and destination before you can drag and drop. In Column view you only need to fully navigate to your source, and the act of navigating to your destination is the process of drag and drop...
If you successfully melded a steering wheel with a VCR, sure, I say, feel free to patent it!
The only other interface before the iPod that displayed this hierarchical navigation method was Apple's OS X Finder's column view, or NeXTStep's Workspace column view.
If I avoided it, it's because the game of funding *is* dicksize, in this case.
No funds, no research. How much simpler can it get? It's not like the researchers *enjoy* doing that.
As an aside, you legitimately think VATech made a mistake going with a G5 cluster? Seriously, from all accounts, they can (and probably will) do some cool stuff that they couldn't afford otherwise on other platforms. They get 128bit vector processors, they get 64 bit computing, they get fast floating point, they get high performance, they get low cost (more or less my points which you claim are avoiding the subject of dicksize) but that are immediately applicable to REAL SCIENCE.
It's not obvious, at all. A post I wrote earlier. Apple/NeXT's column view is very different than anything I've seen, or heard about, in OS browsing. Not in Linux, not in Windows, not in DOS, not in OS/2.
And with the iPod, it didn't exist in the (predecessor) Nomads and Lyras, and I'm fairly sure it was in the Archos!
Those devices were playlist centric, in which you either selected playlists, or songs in playlists, an an explorer style folder view, which is *very* different than Apple's disclosure view, and very different from Apple's column view.
The iPod has implemented in hardware Apple's Finder's column view. Take a look at it, and tell me it isn't genius, if you ever handle an iPod.
It was so non obvious, that no one else did it until Apple's iPod!
Have you used an iPod? Have you used Apple's Finder? Specifically it's 'column view'? They're the same. You drill down a hierarchical list via columns of objects, until you get to the object you want. The only prior art I can think of is... NeXTStep's Workspace explorer (whatever they called it)... and Apple's Finder in OS X.
It is totally non obvious, Apple's implementation, and it's genius in it's simplicity.
Wow, your Siemens implements the Finder's Column View? Neat!
My Nokia doesn't. It would be *awesome* if it did! It's 80% there, but the navigation is *just* shy of being what the iPod is (I own an iPod, as well as Macs).
I haven't seen anything else implement the Finder's column view as faithfully as Apple's iPod; reading the claims, it almost read as if Apple were patenting column view!
It's structured like "column view" on Mac OS X's Finder.
Given that Windows doesn't implement that, the Nomad Zen didn't (does it now?) implement that, and many other music players don't implement that, no, it *isn't* obvious.
Nautilus has no plans on implementing column view in v2.6.
A critical look at column view. In the reviewer's words:
Column view at its finest: Mac OS X provides a refreshingly convenient way to burrow deep into one's machine or network and find important information. This isn't just another way to view a folder's contents. Instead, it's a new method to jump between and browse among many folders at a time... Column View is a navigation context, showing multiple folders at once. Icon and List Views are more like document contexts, showing exactly one folder's contents.
It's an old idea from NeXT, but new to OS X, and new to much of the world. I don't know if it's worth patenting, but really, until the iPod, no one else had *tried* to copy this browsing mechanism. In that it *is* new, useful, and non obvious, I think it passes the threshold of being patentable.
When the G5s were announced and the ads ran, there weren't any OEMs (competitors) shipping any Opteron systems for Apple to compare against. Yes, Boxx had an Opteron system, but there were no desktop PCs from IBM, Gateway, Fujitsu, Sony, HP, or Dell with Opterons. As far as I can tell, when Apple published their test results on June 30th 2003, no OEM was shipping a 3.2GHz P4 system for Apple to test.
They don't have to test every other PC; only the representative of the most common, it's a scientific process called 'sampling', and it reduces the need to keep track of *everything*, since it is physically labor intensive and nearly impossible to keep track of everything. It's how humans process tremendous amounts of data, our brains happen to throw away things we think aren't important.
As per the testing itself, you are satisfied then that it was all documented and regular, even if you are unhappy with the way the tests themselves were executed?
Apple has no choice but to use a different OS; they don't have Windows, and they sell OS X. Rather, using any other OS (like Linux or BSD) is stupid. Apple furthermore has no choice about gcc; since that's the compiler on their platform, OS X. In that way, it was kept 'fair' between platforms.
Anyway, the point remains; that it wasn't *OBVIOUS* that Apple's claims were false, any more than it was OBVIOUS that Apple's claims were true, and we can argue either way. That is exactly why they did the benchmarking, but there's no point talking about the benchmarks because no one is satisfied with the methodology. Or, to phrase it scientifically, "All irrelevant data was discarded during the experiment," which is exactly how science works... and benchmarking, and anything else to do with statistics.
The original grandparent post is all I questioned: It isn't OBVIOUS that Apple's claims were false. My own beliefs may not be true (that Apple's claims were true), but I'll say it again, it isn't OBVIOUS that Apple was wrong, either.
Astroturfer? It's not like I work for Apple or something.
They should actually be called on that, as a solution that might have taken a few weeks or months longer to arrive might have been cheaper.
They had three criteria, not sorted into any particular order: Time Cost Performance
They had to meet the timeline imposed by the supercomputer ranking; miss it, and they miss a whole year's worth of funding and name recognition. Only Apple could deliver on time, at cost and at performance. Cost had to be kept to some threshold. Only Apple could deliver on cost, at the expected performance, by the given deadline. Performance was critical, they wanted to be in the top 10, and were aiming for the top 3, and only Apple could deliver the performance at the lowest cost by the deadline.
Dell was too expensive or low performance. IBM would take too long. Opterons were were too expensive or low performance Etc etc. It's been pretty well documented.
IF they had waited, they wouldn't have made the list, which would have made the exercise moot. If they had gone for cheaper solutions... wait, they did. They went with Apple!
The whole VA Tech thing *was* a marketing stunt. They were advertising VA Tech's computing resources and research facility, and it worked. For the dollar they spent, they got tremendous credibility and recognition, and as a halo effect, so did Apple.
As per replacing it immediately after benchmarking, why do you think any other solution wouldn't have the same effect?
Built a system in November out of P4 2.8GHz, and then in February upgrade to P4 3.2GHz; more performance per space, right?
Except, unlike PCs, the G5s used in the cluster retained over 82% of it's resale value, selling at $2,799, which means out of this transaction they've only lost $200 per Mac over waiting for the XServe G5s; or at 1,100 heads, $220,000, which I think given all the recognition they've received, is well worth the cost.
That, and they've reduced their space use by 3/4, and power by some amount too, which also reflects in cooling requirements.
From what I can tell, VT has won on all counts: They got their ranking, they've saved money, they've got their recognition, *and* in the transition from PowerMac to XServe, they've made it quite possible to increase their performance 4x times, if they so chose to fill up the empty space with more XServes.
Well, since performance isn't linear, maybe 3x, or 2.5x, or even 2x; but the point being, they're ahead of the game, according to their own calculations and schedule.
Slashdot Mirror
Check Apple.com
Of course, I don't know *when*, but you never asked *when*.
There is a threshold to which any device will operate, including switching power supplies and power control units.
Perhaps he has a faulty laptop, but after *two* motherboard upgrades... maybe it's a faulty power supply? Still, the issue isn't only "What is wrong with the laptop," but "What is killing the laptop"?
You've never had a brownout? Power surge? Power spike? Fluctuations that shut down your computer if it's on, and start your computer when it's off?
I mean, maybe I'm using the wrong term, but if the signal isn't fairly clean and stable, I call it 'dirty'.
Screen: Check
Motherboard: Check check!
Battery: Check
Top shell: Check
Power supply: Check
The only thing on that machine that may still be original is the bottom shell cover! Well, maybe the modem, optical drive, ram and airport card are still original too.
The video card is on the motherboard, as is sound, CPU, and all the ports. The only thing separating this machine from a new one is this one has known issues and a new one has unknown issues.
I would wonder if perhaps the owner has bad power at his house? Maybe that is causing all the issues? It seems curious to go through batteries, power supply, and motherboard and not suspect dirty power.
It weighs 6 times as much as an iPod and has half the battery life... I suppose this is just first gen tech so it shouldn't be a problem that it underperforms the market right now.
In a year, let's hope it can reach 20 hours and weigh as much as an iPod ^^
Or... maybe we can see it in a PowerBook! Still, it does seem rather counterintuitive to bundle it with a PDA, rather than a notebook... And that's one big PDA, it looks more like a small football!
If nothing else, the discovery mechanism is Rendezvous, so if you've got an open source AIM client that's willing to implement Rendezvous discovery, I bet it would be simple enough to 'sniff' the LAN and figure out how to chat with the iChat clients.
No harder than figuring out any other chat protocol.
Is that why people use Windows?
Or even Linux?
And what, Macs are like getting laid? What does that make Microsoft?
I'll have to take your word on it, since I've never seen a Neo25 and all the screenshots of the UI don't make me think it's doing what an iPod does.
They invented it all right.
Actually, technically, NeXT had it first, but since Apple bought NeXT, and then Apple designed/released the iPod, it really still is an Apple invention.
Throughout all three products, at least, Steve Jobs was at the helm.
Haha, I should have tried that in Windows... figures that if it would work on the Mac, it would work in Windows too ^^
Anyway, I don't know if they deserve to have the patent, but I do think it was non obvious and revolutionary, for an MP3 player, an half a million other people evidently do too...
Someone else asked the same question, this was the answer I gave them.
Except instead of drives, folders, shares, and files, they have albums, genres, playlists, songs, etc. Oh, and each 'column' takes up the whole of the iPod screen.
More or less, they're trying to patent this interface on a portable mp3 player, specifically implemented in their iPod.
Except instead of shares, drives, and folders, you have albums, playlists, genres, songs, CDs, etc.
Perhaps the description is too general (I doubt it, having read it, it's fairly detailed), but the iPod UI and the Start menu are not alike. The Start menu is a tree you navigate 'down', while the iPod UI is five trees, and specifically Apple is patenting that.
If there's anything out there I've seen that resembles the iPod UI, it's Apple's Finder's column view; or NeXT's browser's column view.
Otherwise all the other MP3 players I had seen, when the iPod had been released (such as the Creative Nomad) and an Explorer tree based browser, or a playlist browser, very, very, unlike Apple's column view based browser on the iPod.
I had to do a google for empeg, having never heard of them. A car mp3 player? Is that right?
So the empeg had a column view style hierarchy browser in 1999?
From the empeg website, it looks like they're defunct? Or what?
But the prior art doesn't exist on another media player. That's why I used the VCR->Steering wheel example. You can't find another MP3 player that uses this interface.
That Apple wants a patent on it is because it is non obvious. You don't think that's enough, so we'll have to disagree on that.
The difference between the Start menu and the Column View is that you can navigate bidirectionally in it, up and down, while the Start menu is a downward flowing tree, you can only navigate one direction.
If you haven't seen it in action, it's hard to explain the subtleties. Like the treeview explorer, you can navigate different branches and drag stuff between them. Nothing stops that. The difference is that the column view navigates faster than treeview because the target for the mouse is much, much, bigger than a single folder in treeview... really, the only example I can think of that is analogous is mouselook in Quake! When I'm using drag and drop in the Finder in column view, it's like moving the mouse in quake to control your direction of movement, whereas in the Explorer you have to fully expand your destination before you can drag and drop your items.
That's it I guess; in the Explorer you have to fully expand both your source and destination before you can drag and drop. In Column view you only need to fully navigate to your source, and the act of navigating to your destination is the process of drag and drop...
Your analogy is a bit off, there.
If you successfully melded a steering wheel with a VCR, sure, I say, feel free to patent it!
The only other interface before the iPod that displayed this hierarchical navigation method was Apple's OS X Finder's column view, or NeXTStep's Workspace column view.
How is that for prior art?
If I avoided it, it's because the game of funding *is* dicksize, in this case.
No funds, no research. How much simpler can it get? It's not like the researchers *enjoy* doing that.
As an aside, you legitimately think VATech made a mistake going with a G5 cluster? Seriously, from all accounts, they can (and probably will) do some cool stuff that they couldn't afford otherwise on other platforms. They get 128bit vector processors, they get 64 bit computing, they get fast floating point, they get high performance, they get low cost (more or less my points which you claim are avoiding the subject of dicksize) but that are immediately applicable to REAL SCIENCE.
It's not obvious, at all. A post I wrote earlier. Apple/NeXT's column view is very different than anything I've seen, or heard about, in OS browsing. Not in Linux, not in Windows, not in DOS, not in OS/2.
And with the iPod, it didn't exist in the (predecessor) Nomads and Lyras, and I'm fairly sure it was in the Archos!
Those devices were playlist centric, in which you either selected playlists, or songs in playlists, an an explorer style folder view, which is *very* different than Apple's disclosure view, and very different from Apple's column view.
The iPod has implemented in hardware Apple's Finder's column view. Take a look at it, and tell me it isn't genius, if you ever handle an iPod.
No one's ever implemented it in a music player!
It was so non obvious, that no one else did it until Apple's iPod!
Have you used an iPod? Have you used Apple's Finder? Specifically it's 'column view'? They're the same. You drill down a hierarchical list via columns of objects, until you get to the object you want. The only prior art I can think of is... NeXTStep's Workspace explorer (whatever they called it)... and Apple's Finder in OS X.
It is totally non obvious, Apple's implementation, and it's genius in it's simplicity.
Wow, your Siemens implements the Finder's Column View? Neat!
My Nokia doesn't. It would be *awesome* if it did! It's 80% there, but the navigation is *just* shy of being what the iPod is (I own an iPod, as well as Macs).
I haven't seen anything else implement the Finder's column view as faithfully as Apple's iPod; reading the claims, it almost read as if Apple were patenting column view!
Given that Windows doesn't implement that, the Nomad Zen didn't (does it now?) implement that, and many other music players don't implement that, no, it *isn't* obvious.
Column view:
Proposed implementation in a news reader and a mockup.
Nautilus has no plans on implementing column view in v2.6.
A critical look at column view. In the reviewer's words:
It's an old idea from NeXT, but new to OS X, and new to much of the world. I don't know if it's worth patenting, but really, until the iPod, no one else had *tried* to copy this browsing mechanism. In that it *is* new, useful, and non obvious, I think it passes the threshold of being patentable.
When the G5s were announced and the ads ran, there weren't any OEMs (competitors) shipping any Opteron systems for Apple to compare against. Yes, Boxx had an Opteron system, but there were no desktop PCs from IBM, Gateway, Fujitsu, Sony, HP, or Dell with Opterons. As far as I can tell, when Apple published their test results on June 30th 2003, no OEM was shipping a 3.2GHz P4 system for Apple to test.
They don't have to test every other PC; only the representative of the most common, it's a scientific process called 'sampling', and it reduces the need to keep track of *everything*, since it is physically labor intensive and nearly impossible to keep track of everything. It's how humans process tremendous amounts of data, our brains happen to throw away things we think aren't important.
As per the testing itself, you are satisfied then that it was all documented and regular, even if you are unhappy with the way the tests themselves were executed?
Apple has no choice but to use a different OS; they don't have Windows, and they sell OS X. Rather, using any other OS (like Linux or BSD) is stupid. Apple furthermore has no choice about gcc; since that's the compiler on their platform, OS X. In that way, it was kept 'fair' between platforms.
Anyway, the point remains; that it wasn't *OBVIOUS* that Apple's claims were false, any more than it was OBVIOUS that Apple's claims were true, and we can argue either way. That is exactly why they did the benchmarking, but there's no point talking about the benchmarks because no one is satisfied with the methodology. Or, to phrase it scientifically, "All irrelevant data was discarded during the experiment," which is exactly how science works... and benchmarking, and anything else to do with statistics.
The original grandparent post is all I questioned: It isn't OBVIOUS that Apple's claims were false. My own beliefs may not be true (that Apple's claims were true), but I'll say it again, it isn't OBVIOUS that Apple was wrong, either.
They had three criteria, not sorted into any particular order:
Time
Cost
Performance
They had to meet the timeline imposed by the supercomputer ranking; miss it, and they miss a whole year's worth of funding and name recognition. Only Apple could deliver on time, at cost and at performance.
Cost had to be kept to some threshold. Only Apple could deliver on cost, at the expected performance, by the given deadline.
Performance was critical, they wanted to be in the top 10, and were aiming for the top 3, and only Apple could deliver the performance at the lowest cost by the deadline.
Dell was too expensive or low performance.
IBM would take too long.
Opterons were were too expensive or low performance
Etc etc. It's been pretty well documented.
IF they had waited, they wouldn't have made the list, which would have made the exercise moot.
If they had gone for cheaper solutions... wait, they did. They went with Apple!
The whole VA Tech thing *was* a marketing stunt. They were advertising VA Tech's computing resources and research facility, and it worked. For the dollar they spent, they got tremendous credibility and recognition, and as a halo effect, so did Apple.
As per replacing it immediately after benchmarking, why do you think any other solution wouldn't have the same effect?
Built a system in November out of P4 2.8GHz, and then in February upgrade to P4 3.2GHz; more performance per space, right?
Except, unlike PCs, the G5s used in the cluster retained over 82% of it's resale value, selling at $2,799, which means out of this transaction they've only lost $200 per Mac over waiting for the XServe G5s; or at 1,100 heads, $220,000, which I think given all the recognition they've received, is well worth the cost.
That, and they've reduced their space use by 3/4, and power by some amount too, which also reflects in cooling requirements.
From what I can tell, VT has won on all counts: They got their ranking, they've saved money, they've got their recognition, *and* in the transition from PowerMac to XServe, they've made it quite possible to increase their performance 4x times, if they so chose to fill up the empty space with more XServes.
Well, since performance isn't linear, maybe 3x, or 2.5x, or even 2x; but the point being, they're ahead of the game, according to their own calculations and schedule.