I seriously can't wait until all cars have at least a USB port...
Long ago, decades even, I thought, "well now that portable music players like the walkman are common, at least all new cars will have Aux input ports for sound so we can play any source of music. I mean, it's only a few cents to add a line in to the stereo, they'd be morons not to add it. The problem is, it never happened. Not enough people think about these things when buying a car so manufacturers never did it. Right up though the peak of the iPod era most cars still shipped without an Aux port building a huge market for third party tape deck converters and radio transmitters to get music into your car stereo.
My point is, don't hold your breath. The auto industry is glacial and near fatally stupid much of the time. Just because a standard USB port makes sense doesn't mean it will ever happen. Quite likely by the time users can upload preferences into a car USB will be a legacy port and we'll be uploading via wireless transmissions and complaining about how we need an adaptor to get data off the quantum entanglement based network and into our autos.
And if you trust Consumer Reports' methodology, you have less than half a brain.
I don't think you understand the scientific method. A study with methodological flaws that might make it less accurate is still valid information. A scientist tentatively believes whatever the best scientific research has supported. Yes, Consumer Reports has always had significant self selection bias from their survey based studies, but that's still the best data we have.
There are plenty more articles out there explaining the problem.
Studies explaining the problem are no help. Show us valid, large scale studies without the same level of methodological problems. Otherwise your comments are pitting random unfounded beliefs influenced by marketing campaigns against a study with potential for bias in both directions. Guess which one is more likely to be accurate.
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens.
I actually don't remember anyone significant in the OSS community being up in arms. There were a lot of people on Slashdot, but I'm not really convinced that's the same thing.
Remember when KHTML folks were ranting about Apple's handling of WebKit?
No. I remember when one of the KHTML developers made a comment saying they wished Apple would make things easier to backport into KHTML. I further remember them politely e-mailing the Apple devs about it and then the KHTML team making numerous comments about how nice it was that Apple went out of their way to help even though a lot of the changes were in a direction the KHTML team was not really interested in emulating. I further remember people who weren't KHTML developers ranting loudly and at length in numerous forums and here on Slashdot about how "evil" Apple was and repeatedly making uninformed comments that bordered on libel. Apparently the impression that left still lingers.
Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
Not really. Until Google distributes the software they are not obligated to share any code and if they feel that the time to market advantage of keeping the code secret until they ship is important, well that's a perfectly reasonable strategy that has been quite common in OSS for a long time. It is a trade off because it discourages some players from contributing to the same project and can limit adoption by some vendors.
Huh? Google was supposed to release source code for Android? Pretty sure that counts as extra.
When you build off of GPL software you're legally obligated to release the modifications, so yeah, Google releasing a significant portion of Android is not "extra" it is the minimum required by law. That's not to say they did not also release some code they did not strictly have to, but since they had promised to do so, changing their mind at this stage would have been willfully misleading consumers and partners.
and in a world where almost everyone runs Windows and most of the rest run OSX (Which also supports only those three plus the apple-patented HPFS varients), that simply isn't an option.
As a side note, without plug-ins OS X also supports UDF and UFS for external storage. Both are workable solutions if you only use non-windows platforms.
Perhaps, but it is highly ranked especially in the engineering and science fields and several friends who went to other prestigious schools for similar programs have related similar experiences to me. Worse yet, I've met engineers who have undergraduate and graduate degrees in science and more than a handful have been unable to explain to me what the scientific method even is. I think the poorly thought out, institutionalized teaching methods coupled with teachers that aren't that interested in teaching is very, very common.
Funny thing... 6000 freshmen are admitted to my Alma mater's School of Engineering every year and fewer than 1000 graduate every year. The other 5000 simply can't do the work.
That sounds like a failure to teach.
It's not a matter of the faculty not teaching them well enough, the students simply decide that engineering is too much work and there are others ways to make a living.
Most people I have met are not primarily driven by financial concerns. It is a big concern, but more people seem to care about doing something interesting or cool or productive for society or just not boring. If the faculty can't teach them adequately and aren't motivating them by showing them how interesting and fun and downright awe inspiring work in the sciences can be on a good day, then I might have to disagree with you on the matter of the faculty's performance.
I don't think it's high school's fault. The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people.
I graduated with a bachelors of science from an engineering focused university. I like math and science and use both in my work daily. The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist. Something like half the people who took those chemistry classes switched to another major or dropped out, but I seriously doubt there was a strong correlation with those that would be good at science.
The introductory math classes were little better with huge classes where you were supposed to memorize formulas and methodologies and then apply them, with lots of minor mistakes, on paper. The only use they had was helping students learn a good balance of speed versus meticulousness. At least in introductory computer science you actually did some programming and did some of the nuts and bolts work of making a computer work for you. In general, however, it felt like teachers with no interest doing as little work as possible by forcing a lot of rote memorization for no real purpose other than to weed out students so there were more manageable class sizes going forward. It was as though all the advances in educational theory and methodology over the last 100 years were intentionally ignored.
The law defines legal responsibility. While some people seem to have forgotten the whole balance of rights and responsibility in our society, the ethical issue is that if a person does not have legal rights (such as the right to go where they want or not eat broccoli) that person likewise cannot be held accountable in a legal sense. If the law does not grant you rights, there is no ethical or moral responsibility to obey the law. That is why the whole "try a child as an adult" nonsense is so abhorrent to anyone who has taken a class in the evolution of law or civil ethics.
Legally and ethically a 16 year person in our society is a child.
Is anyone actually making money here or is it all just "revenue."
Apple has been making quite a bit of profit over the last decade, it's just that you have to understand their business model to see where the money comes from and be able to predict their actions. The iTunes store, App store,.Mac now iCloud, etc. are basically break even enterprises run solely as a way to give people incentive to buy Apple hardware. That's where Apple makes money.
So when you see people making claims like Apple wants more DRM so you have to buy songs multiple times or they want to restrict the App store for purposes of preventing competition and gouging people on App sales... think for a second if that actually helps Apple. Apple's actions like pushing to remove DRM on iTunes music were predictable and in line with their own most profitable business model.
US consumers like you that drive those practices with ignorance and laziness.
Except, I'm not a US consumer. But ok, continue to be proud of the fact that the US can't make anything at all anymore, thanks to the worship of profit and the bottom line above everything else.
It goes well beyond a strawman argument when you attack an argument I did not only not make, but which contradicts exactly what I said. What I attacked about your argument was that Apple was the ideal example of what is wrong, instead of the reality that they are one of the "least bad" in a field of internationally awful players. Can you admit that your comment was a little off base in this regard? Then you go on to attack many other ideas that I never stated and which have no bearing on the current topic. You come off as an angry zealot looking for any excuse to rant about your favorite pet peeve. Do enjoy using those quality German made computers.
Face it - Apple is a shining example of everything that is WRONG with modern American corporations. They COULD make their products in the US, but it would be slightly more expensive, so they outsourced manufacturing to Souzhou, China.
Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US. How many Next cubes did you buy? Oh yeah, they lost out because of price and because the US did not enforce its antitrust laws. After such an experience why would anyone do it again? Americans don't give a shit if it is US made and aren't willing to pay even a tiny bit more. There aren't any US made computers at all.
All the US gets to see is minimum wage retail mall jobs, while Apple gets extremely cheap manufacturing labor, relaxes environmental controls and of course tax breaks.
Apple is the poster child for making an effort with foreign manufacturing. They conduct regular audits of all suppliers, require suppliers to change practices, fire suppliers for violations and publish for all to see the audits and what is done in response to them. Apple is one of the few (possibly the only) computer company to push back against slave labor conditions in the third world. And yet you single them out as the example of what not to do. I can only assume this is because you don't actually pay attention and just want to attack Apple. Here's an idea, why not reward the best practices and only buy from Apple while telling other companies why. Maybe practices will start to change and someone will take a risk on US manufacturing again some day. You know what's wrong with US corporations? US consumers like you that drive those practices with ignorance and laziness.
Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X.
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
Wait what? Why would you limit yourself to apple software? You mean to say that if Apple stops offering some feature in a product then, for people to use only Apple software those people are limited? How does that make any sense? You might as well say that for people who use only HP products you can't do any real video editing because HP doesn't make any decent video editing software. Man that's just full of crazy!
On top of that, it's just plain factually incorrect. DVD Studio, iDVD, and Final Cut are all still available after a brief period where Apple stopped making them, then listened to users who said their needs weren't being filled and put them back up for sale until they can roll those features into the new product line. iWeb isn't gone it was updated 3 months ago and can be used to publish automatically to any site that supports FTP or publish to other sites by transferring the files in amore secure way. Dasshcode is still available although no one seems to use it. You're really trying to claim Apple is limiting users by not continuing the abysmal HTML export from their word processor? Seriously?
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
Or, you know, every other company on the planet. I don't even understand how wrongheaded you have to be to think that Apple not offering a few features in their own software packages limits the consumer, under the assumption that no other software vendors count. Bizarre.
Demonstrating the similarity of the units is just one part of a larger pattern of behavior Apple is trying to show. Their claim is that Samsung violated both regular old hardware patents and design patents on a large number of factors including: "rectangles with rounded corners", "black", "anything with a twelve inch diagonal", "tapering edges to make things seem thinner", "icons", "envelope shaped icons representing mail", "those envelopes being red"
That's just part of the trade dress claims, not even all of them. You missed packaging trade dress: "a rectangular box with minimal metallic silver lettering and a large front-viewpicture of the product prominently on the top surface of the box; a two-piece box wherein the bottom piece is completely nested in the top piece; and use of a tray that cradles products to make them immediately visible upon opening the box."
You also lack specificity as those are summaries you quote, not the actual patents which are much, much more specific. For example, the part about the icons doesn't apply to anything with icons. It applies specifically to a black mobile device with rounded corners with a grid of exactly sixteen icons in a four by four grid with a grey area below it for more icons, as per filings: U.S. Registration No. 3,470,983 , U.S. Registration No. 3,457,218, U.S. Registration No. 3,475,327.
you're also forgetting the long list of icons it looks like Samsung cloned from Apple's device: No. 3,886,196 is the iOS phone app icon:
No. 3,889,642 is the iOS messaging app icon.
No. 3,886,200 is the iOS photos app icon.
No. 3,889,685 is the iOS settings app icon.
No. 3,886,169 is the iOS notes app icon.
No. 3,886,197 is the iOS contacts icon.
Pending No. 85/041,463 the desktop iTunes logo.
Say what you will about the other claims but trying to deny the similarity of the icons to Apple's trademarked ones.
I took the liberty of filling in the details for you, lest anyone be misled into thinking Apple's suit is remotely reasonable.
There is a whole crapload more as well and it all adds up somewhat convincingly. Read here. I thought it would be important lest anyone be misled into thinking your post was remotely representative of the actual lawsuit and all the myriad claims of infringement.
I dunno. I live in Japan and over here, the Honda Inspire looks almost exactly like the Toyota Prius. Unless I can see the logo, it's hard to tell the difference. At a glance at least.
But did either company put together a unique combination of body style, interior, mechanics, and branding, then take out a design patent because it was unique... then gain dominance of the market with that very, very popular design before the competitor released one that looks just like it? Confusion between a Prius and a Inspire is really beneficial to anyone. Cloning the look of something famous though, where there is a huge brand presence and cloning specific trademarked parts of it while at the same time copying patented software and hardware bits.... that's a bit of something else.
Yes...because customers would go into a non-Apple store and see a Samsung product and think it was an iPad...
Why not? Apple sells products through many retail stores. Moreover, many consumers don't know the brand name of a product they've seen or seen ads for and go looking for it. That's why we have both trademark and design patents, because even if you aren't using a trademark you can still make a clone close enough to confuse users into thinking they're buying something else. The courts will decide but there is significant evidence to suggest this was an intentional strategy by Samsung, icons with the same design down to colors and gradients etc. And this is about more than just design, Samsung has also allegedly violated both software and plain old hardware patents and Apple is trying to show that this is a willful pattern of behavior across the board.
Yes, but have Apple actually patented a shape? I don't understand this story.
Demonstrating the similarity of the units is just one part of a larger pattern of behavior Apple is trying to show. Their claim is that Samsung violated both regular old hardware patents and design patents on a large number of factors including physical shape, color, size, contour, user interface elements, icon shapes and colors, packaging, etc. The idea is that Samsung tried to confuse consumers by making a device very similar to Apple thus violating the design patents, as well as regular hardware patents.
The summary and headline are more than a little sensationalist, but hopefully that makes things clearer?
pft I doubt I could tell them apart I've only ever really seen either in a store and they have plenty of signs around them that lets me know just what tablet they are.
And in at least one store Apple's patented logos around the Samsung because the employees didn't know the difference.
I also couldn't easily identify a Chevrolet Silverado from Ford F150 with out their freaking symbols plastered all over them. I don't see Ford suing Chevy though.
The difference is that Samsung has copied more than the basic shape. They copied the design, logo, and color scheme for icons. The copied packaging. They copied patented hardware components. While many people thing the big auto companies are derivative of one another's designs, no one thinks Chevy is trying to pass their cars off as being made by Ford, nor is there reason to thing they are intentionally confusing consumers about whether or not the product they are looking at is the one they saw a friend using or demonstrated in a commercial. There is significant reason to think Samsung tried to confuse consumers.
Arguably very few novels turn a profit. Writers write them when they get home from their real job, pouring their heart and soul, but more importantly their time into writing. Working a second job at McDs would generate a greater overall profit than writing. They do it because they enjoy it.
Most novels published by traditional publishers do make a profit, although that profit does not necessarily make its way to the author.
The barrier to entry for writing a novel is stunningly low. Anyone can do it. Look at NaNoWriMo next month to see what I mean.
The barrier to entry has traditionally been high in that most submissions were not accepted by mainstream publishers, never made it into mainstream stores, and were almost completely unavailable to the general public. The move to e-books has lowered that barrier so there are a lor more entrants into the market that the average buyer can choose from. This is still in transition though as the print book market still dominates.
Anyone who funds a writer through kickstarter is an idiot.
No logic or justification behind that? Okay.
That's equivalent to around three or four months paid work to most people, yet so many writers think they'll be able to write the next great American novel if only they took a year off work. Doesn't add up.
You're equivocating between the average published novel and the great american novel written by an amateur. It makes no sense.
J A Konrath defends the 99c price point, but long term it's unlikely we'll see more people reading novels because prices are low. You go from a $20 (or more) hardback/$10 paperback model to a 99c e-book model and 80% of the money leaves the industry. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but even if you cut out the publishers, writers will still be paying for editing and promotion.
This is sort of a broken window fallacy. Removing the cost of printing, binding, shipping, etc. is a real efficiency improvement. Expanding your potential market from those who can get to a bookstore you have a distribution deal with to those who can get to the internet changes the game entirely. Lower costs and greater potential market means lower prices can still turn a profit and are going to be needed in order to compete.
Overall writers will make even less money and the majority of rewards will still go to a select few making their real money from tie-ins, movie deals and assorted side projects.
You don't support this opinion with anything. Undoubtedly some will make more and some will make less but overall it could go either way. You have a lot of opinions but not much behind them.
Certainly more than one author has put Kickstarter.com into use to provide enough funding to pay for them to write and publish a work (books, graphic novels, movies, shorts, etc.). Many of these creators have also charged for the work either as an ebook or traditional print copies. One can also choose both. There is the custom group patronage route as well, where an author like Stephen King requires some amount of donations be contributed in advance and then releases the next chapter as a free work online. It seems to work in some cases and fail in others, just like any writing venture. It just moves who has control into the hands of the public.
Of course there is nothing wrong with publishing an e-book for 99 cents and making money on a large volume of sales if it is good enough and promoted well enough. It just means there are more unrealistically optimistic writers who enter the market with works that never turn a profit and are usually just not very good. It still beats hoping some publisher will be willing to take the chance on your behalf.
A mechanism would be interesting where a certain process (say firefox.exe) would have a physical memory cap (say 256MB)
That sort of reminds me of how Mac OS worked in the dinosaur age.
Well, early MacOS and Windows. I had MacOS 6 and Windows 3.1 running on the same system (two motherboards shared disk and peripherals). When I tried to run an app with preallocated memory footprint in MacOS that would bring my total over the cap, the OS stopped me from launching it until I quit something. Windows 3.1 just crashed; which also stopped me:) Then Windows leapt ahead with Win 95 which crashed some of the time, but usually actually handled the memory for me.
Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version. It made a huge difference when they let the OS decide more intelligently where to put resources not in use to.
I can't really speak to that, but there is a difference between management and footprint. I can speak to footprint. I usually run Windows in a VM for testing purposes or just to run the occasional Windows app. At some point the amount of RAM Windows can access becomes a limitation on usability and more needs to be allocated to make using it anything but an exercise in frustration. For all practical purposes, this is a minimum memory footprint for Windows and a few basic apps.
For each iteration of Windows: Win2K, WinXP, and Win Vista this minimum memory footprint has increased significantly, requiring more memory to have a usable system and leaving less for running applications. Windows 7 was a mixed bag, usable with some apps at about the same footprint as Vista or even less, but requiring much more for others.
Most people who don't really understand memory management will just look at the processes and start bitching how much memory each program uses, or how Windows shows there isn't any memory available (while in fact it's just used for caching things).
This is largely true, but any public forum will be primarily noise. The problem is you don't offer an alternative for measuring memory footprint, rather you just seem to be paraphrasing text from press releases about Windows' new memory awesomeness.
Ok... why is this on Slashdot? This is business news.
The technology offerings of a major US telecom, especially a huge shift is not of interest to geeks? If the headline was that Comcast bet big and invested in buying huge quantities of Juniper routing gear including cable modems would that be of interest? Love, hate, or indifference to Apple; a major switch by Sprint to offering Apple phones is news that many geeks care about. Deal with your insecurities.
Its FAIR, not FREE. As in a FAIR price, offered to anyone who wants to license it. If you don't pay, you can still be sued.
The difference is Apple and all the other players license their RAND patents, those the submitted as standards in a non-discriminatory way. Everyone pays about the same fee for use. Nokia is saying Apple can't pay that same fee because Nokia refuses to grant the license under non-discriminatory terms. Instead Nokia told Apple they had to give up their own patents in order to get the same license as everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously can't wait until all cars have at least a USB port...
Long ago, decades even, I thought, "well now that portable music players like the walkman are common, at least all new cars will have Aux input ports for sound so we can play any source of music. I mean, it's only a few cents to add a line in to the stereo, they'd be morons not to add it. The problem is, it never happened. Not enough people think about these things when buying a car so manufacturers never did it. Right up though the peak of the iPod era most cars still shipped without an Aux port building a huge market for third party tape deck converters and radio transmitters to get music into your car stereo.
My point is, don't hold your breath. The auto industry is glacial and near fatally stupid much of the time. Just because a standard USB port makes sense doesn't mean it will ever happen. Quite likely by the time users can upload preferences into a car USB will be a legacy port and we'll be uploading via wireless transmissions and complaining about how we need an adaptor to get data off the quantum entanglement based network and into our autos.
And if you trust Consumer Reports' methodology, you have less than half a brain.
I don't think you understand the scientific method. A study with methodological flaws that might make it less accurate is still valid information. A scientist tentatively believes whatever the best scientific research has supported. Yes, Consumer Reports has always had significant self selection bias from their survey based studies, but that's still the best data we have.
There are plenty more articles out there explaining the problem.
Studies explaining the problem are no help. Show us valid, large scale studies without the same level of methodological problems. Otherwise your comments are pitting random unfounded beliefs influenced by marketing campaigns against a study with potential for bias in both directions. Guess which one is more likely to be accurate.
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens.
I actually don't remember anyone significant in the OSS community being up in arms. There were a lot of people on Slashdot, but I'm not really convinced that's the same thing.
Remember when KHTML folks were ranting about Apple's handling of WebKit?
No. I remember when one of the KHTML developers made a comment saying they wished Apple would make things easier to backport into KHTML. I further remember them politely e-mailing the Apple devs about it and then the KHTML team making numerous comments about how nice it was that Apple went out of their way to help even though a lot of the changes were in a direction the KHTML team was not really interested in emulating. I further remember people who weren't KHTML developers ranting loudly and at length in numerous forums and here on Slashdot about how "evil" Apple was and repeatedly making uninformed comments that bordered on libel. Apparently the impression that left still lingers.
Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
Not really. Until Google distributes the software they are not obligated to share any code and if they feel that the time to market advantage of keeping the code secret until they ship is important, well that's a perfectly reasonable strategy that has been quite common in OSS for a long time. It is a trade off because it discourages some players from contributing to the same project and can limit adoption by some vendors.
Huh? Google was supposed to release source code for Android? Pretty sure that counts as extra.
When you build off of GPL software you're legally obligated to release the modifications, so yeah, Google releasing a significant portion of Android is not "extra" it is the minimum required by law. That's not to say they did not also release some code they did not strictly have to, but since they had promised to do so, changing their mind at this stage would have been willfully misleading consumers and partners.
and in a world where almost everyone runs Windows and most of the rest run OSX (Which also supports only those three plus the apple-patented HPFS varients), that simply isn't an option.
As a side note, without plug-ins OS X also supports UDF and UFS for external storage. Both are workable solutions if you only use non-windows platforms.
You seem to have gone to a bad university.
Perhaps, but it is highly ranked especially in the engineering and science fields and several friends who went to other prestigious schools for similar programs have related similar experiences to me. Worse yet, I've met engineers who have undergraduate and graduate degrees in science and more than a handful have been unable to explain to me what the scientific method even is. I think the poorly thought out, institutionalized teaching methods coupled with teachers that aren't that interested in teaching is very, very common.
Funny thing... 6000 freshmen are admitted to my Alma mater's School of Engineering every year and fewer than 1000 graduate every year. The other 5000 simply can't do the work.
That sounds like a failure to teach.
It's not a matter of the faculty not teaching them well enough, the students simply decide that engineering is too much work and there are others ways to make a living.
Most people I have met are not primarily driven by financial concerns. It is a big concern, but more people seem to care about doing something interesting or cool or productive for society or just not boring. If the faculty can't teach them adequately and aren't motivating them by showing them how interesting and fun and downright awe inspiring work in the sciences can be on a good day, then I might have to disagree with you on the matter of the faculty's performance.
I don't think it's high school's fault. The problem lies in the fact that doing well in those types of courses requires a certain type of analytic thinking that is simply not that intuitive for most people.
I graduated with a bachelors of science from an engineering focused university. I like math and science and use both in my work daily. The problem I saw was that the introductory classes were treated specifically as a way to weed out some of the students with mindless busywork. First year chemistry was an entire year of several hundred students in a giant lecture hall memorizing the periodic table, memorizing ion charges, and (in short) doing nothing at all relating to science or the type of problem solving or analytical thought actually needed to be a competent scientist. Something like half the people who took those chemistry classes switched to another major or dropped out, but I seriously doubt there was a strong correlation with those that would be good at science.
The introductory math classes were little better with huge classes where you were supposed to memorize formulas and methodologies and then apply them, with lots of minor mistakes, on paper. The only use they had was helping students learn a good balance of speed versus meticulousness. At least in introductory computer science you actually did some programming and did some of the nuts and bolts work of making a computer work for you. In general, however, it felt like teachers with no interest doing as little work as possible by forcing a lot of rote memorization for no real purpose other than to weed out students so there were more manageable class sizes going forward. It was as though all the advances in educational theory and methodology over the last 100 years were intentionally ignored.
law does not define truth.
The law defines legal responsibility. While some people seem to have forgotten the whole balance of rights and responsibility in our society, the ethical issue is that if a person does not have legal rights (such as the right to go where they want or not eat broccoli) that person likewise cannot be held accountable in a legal sense. If the law does not grant you rights, there is no ethical or moral responsibility to obey the law. That is why the whole "try a child as an adult" nonsense is so abhorrent to anyone who has taken a class in the evolution of law or civil ethics.
Legally and ethically a 16 year person in our society is a child.
Is anyone actually making money here or is it all just "revenue."
Apple has been making quite a bit of profit over the last decade, it's just that you have to understand their business model to see where the money comes from and be able to predict their actions. The iTunes store, App store, .Mac now iCloud, etc. are basically break even enterprises run solely as a way to give people incentive to buy Apple hardware. That's where Apple makes money.
So when you see people making claims like Apple wants more DRM so you have to buy songs multiple times or they want to restrict the App store for purposes of preventing competition and gouging people on App sales... think for a second if that actually helps Apple. Apple's actions like pushing to remove DRM on iTunes music were predictable and in line with their own most profitable business model.
US consumers like you that drive those practices with ignorance and laziness.
Except, I'm not a US consumer. But ok, continue to be proud of the fact that the US can't make anything at all anymore, thanks to the worship of profit and the bottom line above everything else.
It goes well beyond a strawman argument when you attack an argument I did not only not make, but which contradicts exactly what I said. What I attacked about your argument was that Apple was the ideal example of what is wrong, instead of the reality that they are one of the "least bad" in a field of internationally awful players. Can you admit that your comment was a little off base in this regard? Then you go on to attack many other ideas that I never stated and which have no bearing on the current topic. You come off as an angry zealot looking for any excuse to rant about your favorite pet peeve. Do enjoy using those quality German made computers.
Face it - Apple is a shining example of everything that is WRONG with modern American corporations. They COULD make their products in the US, but it would be slightly more expensive, so they outsourced manufacturing to Souzhou, China.
Learn your geeky history. Apple didn't but Steve Jobs did build all Next manufacturing to high tech facilities in the US. How many Next cubes did you buy? Oh yeah, they lost out because of price and because the US did not enforce its antitrust laws. After such an experience why would anyone do it again? Americans don't give a shit if it is US made and aren't willing to pay even a tiny bit more. There aren't any US made computers at all.
All the US gets to see is minimum wage retail mall jobs, while Apple gets extremely cheap manufacturing labor, relaxes environmental controls and of course tax breaks.
Apple is the poster child for making an effort with foreign manufacturing. They conduct regular audits of all suppliers, require suppliers to change practices, fire suppliers for violations and publish for all to see the audits and what is done in response to them. Apple is one of the few (possibly the only) computer company to push back against slave labor conditions in the third world. And yet you single them out as the example of what not to do. I can only assume this is because you don't actually pay attention and just want to attack Apple. Here's an idea, why not reward the best practices and only buy from Apple while telling other companies why. Maybe practices will start to change and someone will take a risk on US manufacturing again some day. You know what's wrong with US corporations? US consumers like you that drive those practices with ignorance and laziness.
Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X.
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
Wait what? Why would you limit yourself to apple software? You mean to say that if Apple stops offering some feature in a product then, for people to use only Apple software those people are limited? How does that make any sense? You might as well say that for people who use only HP products you can't do any real video editing because HP doesn't make any decent video editing software. Man that's just full of crazy!
On top of that, it's just plain factually incorrect. DVD Studio, iDVD, and Final Cut are all still available after a brief period where Apple stopped making them, then listened to users who said their needs weren't being filled and put them back up for sale until they can roll those features into the new product line. iWeb isn't gone it was updated 3 months ago and can be used to publish automatically to any site that supports FTP or publish to other sites by transferring the files in amore secure way. Dasshcode is still available although no one seems to use it. You're really trying to claim Apple is limiting users by not continuing the abysmal HTML export from their word processor? Seriously?
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
Or, you know, every other company on the planet. I don't even understand how wrongheaded you have to be to think that Apple not offering a few features in their own software packages limits the consumer, under the assumption that no other software vendors count. Bizarre.
They copied the design, logo, and color scheme for icons.
The logo??? How, exactly, does the word "SAMSUNG" look like an apple with a chunk taken out of it?
The logo on the icon, the design of the icon, and the color scheme of the icon. Please read more carefully.
Demonstrating the similarity of the units is just one part of a larger pattern of behavior Apple is trying to show. Their claim is that Samsung violated both regular old hardware patents and design patents on a large number of factors including: "rectangles with rounded corners", "black", "anything with a twelve inch diagonal", "tapering edges to make things seem thinner", "icons", "envelope shaped icons representing mail", "those envelopes being red"
That's just part of the trade dress claims, not even all of them. You missed packaging trade dress: "a rectangular box with minimal metallic silver lettering and a large front-viewpicture of the product prominently on the top surface of the box; a two-piece box wherein the bottom piece is completely nested in the top piece; and use of a tray that cradles products to make them immediately visible upon opening the box."
You also lack specificity as those are summaries you quote, not the actual patents which are much, much more specific. For example, the part about the icons doesn't apply to anything with icons. It applies specifically to a black mobile device with rounded corners with a grid of exactly sixteen icons in a four by four grid with a grey area below it for more icons, as per filings: U.S. Registration No. 3,470,983 , U.S. Registration No. 3,457,218, U.S. Registration No. 3,475,327.
you're also forgetting the long list of icons it looks like Samsung cloned from Apple's device: No. 3,886,196 is the iOS phone app icon:
Say what you will about the other claims but trying to deny the similarity of the icons to Apple's trademarked ones.
I took the liberty of filling in the details for you, lest anyone be misled into thinking Apple's suit is remotely reasonable.
There is a whole crapload more as well and it all adds up somewhat convincingly. Read here. I thought it would be important lest anyone be misled into thinking your post was remotely representative of the actual lawsuit and all the myriad claims of infringement.
I dunno. I live in Japan and over here, the Honda Inspire looks almost exactly like the Toyota Prius. Unless I can see the logo, it's hard to tell the difference. At a glance at least.
But did either company put together a unique combination of body style, interior, mechanics, and branding, then take out a design patent because it was unique... then gain dominance of the market with that very, very popular design before the competitor released one that looks just like it? Confusion between a Prius and a Inspire is really beneficial to anyone. Cloning the look of something famous though, where there is a huge brand presence and cloning specific trademarked parts of it while at the same time copying patented software and hardware bits.... that's a bit of something else.
Yes...because customers would go into a non-Apple store and see a Samsung product and think it was an iPad...
Why not? Apple sells products through many retail stores. Moreover, many consumers don't know the brand name of a product they've seen or seen ads for and go looking for it. That's why we have both trademark and design patents, because even if you aren't using a trademark you can still make a clone close enough to confuse users into thinking they're buying something else. The courts will decide but there is significant evidence to suggest this was an intentional strategy by Samsung, icons with the same design down to colors and gradients etc. And this is about more than just design, Samsung has also allegedly violated both software and plain old hardware patents and Apple is trying to show that this is a willful pattern of behavior across the board.
...there's just something about Apple being able to keep samsung from selling tablets because their tablet is, *gasp* a rectangular touch screen.
If that is your understanding of the issue then maybe you should read a few articles and gain a basic understanding before commenting.
Yes, but have Apple actually patented a shape? I don't understand this story.
Demonstrating the similarity of the units is just one part of a larger pattern of behavior Apple is trying to show. Their claim is that Samsung violated both regular old hardware patents and design patents on a large number of factors including physical shape, color, size, contour, user interface elements, icon shapes and colors, packaging, etc. The idea is that Samsung tried to confuse consumers by making a device very similar to Apple thus violating the design patents, as well as regular hardware patents.
The summary and headline are more than a little sensationalist, but hopefully that makes things clearer?
pft I doubt I could tell them apart I've only ever really seen either in a store and they have plenty of signs around them that lets me know just what tablet they are.
And in at least one store Apple's patented logos around the Samsung because the employees didn't know the difference.
I also couldn't easily identify a Chevrolet Silverado from Ford F150 with out their freaking symbols plastered all over them. I don't see Ford suing Chevy though.
The difference is that Samsung has copied more than the basic shape. They copied the design, logo, and color scheme for icons. The copied packaging. They copied patented hardware components. While many people thing the big auto companies are derivative of one another's designs, no one thinks Chevy is trying to pass their cars off as being made by Ford, nor is there reason to thing they are intentionally confusing consumers about whether or not the product they are looking at is the one they saw a friend using or demonstrated in a commercial. There is significant reason to think Samsung tried to confuse consumers.
Arguably very few novels turn a profit. Writers write them when they get home from their real job, pouring their heart and soul, but more importantly their time into writing. Working a second job at McDs would generate a greater overall profit than writing. They do it because they enjoy it.
Most novels published by traditional publishers do make a profit, although that profit does not necessarily make its way to the author.
The barrier to entry for writing a novel is stunningly low. Anyone can do it. Look at NaNoWriMo next month to see what I mean.
The barrier to entry has traditionally been high in that most submissions were not accepted by mainstream publishers, never made it into mainstream stores, and were almost completely unavailable to the general public. The move to e-books has lowered that barrier so there are a lor more entrants into the market that the average buyer can choose from. This is still in transition though as the print book market still dominates.
Anyone who funds a writer through kickstarter is an idiot.
No logic or justification behind that? Okay.
That's equivalent to around three or four months paid work to most people, yet so many writers think they'll be able to write the next great American novel if only they took a year off work. Doesn't add up.
You're equivocating between the average published novel and the great american novel written by an amateur. It makes no sense.
J A Konrath defends the 99c price point, but long term it's unlikely we'll see more people reading novels because prices are low. You go from a $20 (or more) hardback/$10 paperback model to a 99c e-book model and 80% of the money leaves the industry. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but even if you cut out the publishers, writers will still be paying for editing and promotion.
This is sort of a broken window fallacy. Removing the cost of printing, binding, shipping, etc. is a real efficiency improvement. Expanding your potential market from those who can get to a bookstore you have a distribution deal with to those who can get to the internet changes the game entirely. Lower costs and greater potential market means lower prices can still turn a profit and are going to be needed in order to compete.
Overall writers will make even less money and the majority of rewards will still go to a select few making their real money from tie-ins, movie deals and assorted side projects.
You don't support this opinion with anything. Undoubtedly some will make more and some will make less but overall it could go either way. You have a lot of opinions but not much behind them.
Certainly more than one author has put Kickstarter.com into use to provide enough funding to pay for them to write and publish a work (books, graphic novels, movies, shorts, etc.). Many of these creators have also charged for the work either as an ebook or traditional print copies. One can also choose both. There is the custom group patronage route as well, where an author like Stephen King requires some amount of donations be contributed in advance and then releases the next chapter as a free work online. It seems to work in some cases and fail in others, just like any writing venture. It just moves who has control into the hands of the public.
Of course there is nothing wrong with publishing an e-book for 99 cents and making money on a large volume of sales if it is good enough and promoted well enough. It just means there are more unrealistically optimistic writers who enter the market with works that never turn a profit and are usually just not very good. It still beats hoping some publisher will be willing to take the chance on your behalf.
A mechanism would be interesting where a certain process (say firefox.exe) would have a physical memory cap (say 256MB)
That sort of reminds me of how Mac OS worked in the dinosaur age.
Well, early MacOS and Windows. I had MacOS 6 and Windows 3.1 running on the same system (two motherboards shared disk and peripherals). When I tried to run an app with preallocated memory footprint in MacOS that would bring my total over the cap, the OS stopped me from launching it until I quit something. Windows 3.1 just crashed; which also stopped me :) Then Windows leapt ahead with Win 95 which crashed some of the time, but usually actually handled the memory for me.
Except for the services part, Windows memory management has been improving a lot with each version. It made a huge difference when they let the OS decide more intelligently where to put resources not in use to.
I can't really speak to that, but there is a difference between management and footprint. I can speak to footprint. I usually run Windows in a VM for testing purposes or just to run the occasional Windows app. At some point the amount of RAM Windows can access becomes a limitation on usability and more needs to be allocated to make using it anything but an exercise in frustration. For all practical purposes, this is a minimum memory footprint for Windows and a few basic apps.
For each iteration of Windows: Win2K, WinXP, and Win Vista this minimum memory footprint has increased significantly, requiring more memory to have a usable system and leaving less for running applications. Windows 7 was a mixed bag, usable with some apps at about the same footprint as Vista or even less, but requiring much more for others.
Most people who don't really understand memory management will just look at the processes and start bitching how much memory each program uses, or how Windows shows there isn't any memory available (while in fact it's just used for caching things).
This is largely true, but any public forum will be primarily noise. The problem is you don't offer an alternative for measuring memory footprint, rather you just seem to be paraphrasing text from press releases about Windows' new memory awesomeness.
Ok... why is this on Slashdot? This is business news.
The technology offerings of a major US telecom, especially a huge shift is not of interest to geeks? If the headline was that Comcast bet big and invested in buying huge quantities of Juniper routing gear including cable modems would that be of interest? Love, hate, or indifference to Apple; a major switch by Sprint to offering Apple phones is news that many geeks care about. Deal with your insecurities.
Its FAIR, not FREE. As in a FAIR price, offered to anyone who wants to license it. If you don't pay, you can still be sued.
The difference is Apple and all the other players license their RAND patents, those the submitted as standards in a non-discriminatory way. Everyone pays about the same fee for use. Nokia is saying Apple can't pay that same fee because Nokia refuses to grant the license under non-discriminatory terms. Instead Nokia told Apple they had to give up their own patents in order to get the same license as everyone else.