Forgive me for saying so but your definition of a 'normal computer' is rather limited - maximizing windows, and having in-window menu's do not a computer make.
I have a couple of Windows machines, both for development and for gaming. However, OS X, as a *nix platform, can do far more - through the sheer availability of both commercial and open source software - then a Win PC, with the sole exception of gaming. It's also way more robust and much easier to maintain and requires minimal effort to keep running efficiently.
PS. hotkeys and a trackpad on full acceleration are far more efficient then a mouse, on any platform
Do you remember the 3 different window treatment styles in the age of Aqua or the 'corinthian leather' look of apps in iOS or Firewire + USB. Steve Jobs gave us those and we called him a genius.
Apple is down to two ports on all their hardware - USB C and Lightning - and we're still critical that it's not down to one and we say 'if Steve were here this would never happen' - seriously?
Ideas, as every VC and every entrepreneur knows instinctively, are a dime a dozen. It's the ability to execute on those ideas that matters. In the course of that execution compromises must be made to make the ideas reality.
'The pundits' make a point about Apple's success because it's self evident that consumers, in aggregate, consider Apple's compromises more then acceptable, hence driving Apple's growth.
I pay a small fortune for cable television I don't use. I recently went to just having local channels and I am still paying though the nose for the stupid 'FIOS triple pack'. When I call them and tell them I want just have internet they tell me I will have a 'cool down period' where I will have no internet if I do this.
It's a rip off.
I'll take: HBO - for GoT and Westworls, Startz - for American Gods, and now CBS All Access - for ST: Discovery and iTunes - for everything else any day. At least I know why I have these services and if I don't like them I just cancel them ( and I can even cancel them off season when the shows I watch are now available ).
It wasn't about the labor savings. The ROI was far out compared to payroll of forklift drivers.
The Seegrid solution provides much more favorable ROI - 1 to 2 years - specifically because the devices can be deployed without 'a team who helped implement fully autonomous warehousing'. In fact, the units that just "drop and return" don't require any sort of skilled person at all, a warehouse worker can just walk them around the facility and they 'learn' where they need to go and how to get there. That's a big deal because once your warehouse has a specific role for a unit like that you can just get one, teach it, and you get a solid return on investment quickly - it's not just for big companies with giant warehouses.
This is really the innovation here: robots that can be delivered and taught their job without expansive ( and expensive ) implementation efforts.
Actually this system avoids all sorts of problems that speech recognition has. Your thought patterns are implicitly language and accent agnostic.
The big question is whether there can be sufficient pre-training of this software so that it could draw enough inference from some thoughts to determine the meaning of all thoughts. I mean, when I think of a cat does that look similar, from a brain activity point of view, to the way you think of a cat. If so this should work well. If not, it would require a huge amount of training. That said, training this thing would be pretty natural. It just has to monitor your brain activity while you type and eventually it should have a good map of thought patterns to words so even if it takes a while it wouldn't be tedious ( and it could pretty accurately determine accuracy so as to tell you when you no longer have to type and can just think the words ).
Personally I am really excited by the idea that I can communicate my thoughts to a machine. Never mind the Facebook implications. This would be a huge change in the man > machine interface.
Your really missing what this is. It's not about a keyboard. It's about understanding what you are thinking about and emiting text in in response. Think of it like speech recognition which doesn't know you are saying the sounds for D,O, and G when you say 'dog', it just knows that the sound for the word dog means it should emit the word 'dog'. Similarly this technology would simply understand the words ( or perhaps even concepts ) you are thinking of and emit those as text; think of a dog and it emits the text 'dog'.
The cool thing is that it is implicitly multilingual and avoids issues like pronunciation and accents and so on.
The technology is unidirectional. It's all about 'reading' not 'writing'. That said, if it knows when your thinking of, say, shoes, that would be a great time to give you a shoe ad.
The idea of controlling a mouse with your brain is not a new one. The notion of converting thoughts to actual text or direct actions is more novel and then fact that Facebook thinks it can make that a reality in 2 years is a pretty big deal.
The technology in question will also do emoji. It identifies thoughts, not text. If you think of a dog that will be translated to the text 'dog'. Similarly, if you think of a smiling emoji and you train the software to emit a smiling emoji there is no reason to it couldn't enter that for you ( or likes, or emoticons, or whatever ).
You can only drive in a city like NYC if you are rather wealthy. Costs too much and is far too impractical for most people. You essentially are forced to take public transit and not everyone likes that.
I am wealthy and I don't drive in Manhattan, where driving is a PITA irrespective of your wealth level. I do dislike the subways though and so I use a car service, most often Uber. Although I personally take regular Uber the use of Uberpool is pervasive in the city and is reasonably priced. Indeed, for shorter trips it can cost the same as the subway.
I have hired a number of 6 weeks immersive course graduates for our development team. Although skills and aptitude is certainly variable several have shown themselves to be excellent engineers, in some cases outpacing their traditionally educated team members.
That said there are certainly gaps in their education and general understanding of the field but that does not preclude them from making a general contribution.
This is a terribly misguided and misinformed post.
DRM has nothing to do with the agency model. You can have DRM with or without an agency model. DRM existed on e-books long before the rise of the agency model.
The iPhone does not require DRM and many books from iBooks store don't have DRM on them. In fact, in most cases the ONLY reason why an iBook cannot be used on a Kindle is because of the Kindles non standard file format (without first converting it).
Jobs pushed for the agency model on books to eliminate Amazon's stranglehold on e-books. It was attractive to publishers. Nothing more, nothing less.
(It is true that by eliminating Amazon's stranglehold on books the price of e-books rose because publishers could set their own prices. Amazon has responded by by-passing publishers and trying to get authors to self publish books on Amazon. So it goes.)
Objective C is arguably as complex as Java and C++. It's not hurting Apple any and the general integrity and quality of applications on Mac OS X is quite high. In contrast, Microsoft has much simpler language in Visual Basic and the application written in VB are arguably the lowest quality applications on that platform.
You said they did not own up to a problem, that's false, they did.
You said they did not apologize, that's also false, because Steve Jobs did, personally, apologize several times.
Now your saying that because during this marketing event Apple also said good things about themselves the apology does not count and your throwing in a murder analogy - in the context of a problem with a cell phone - to somehow justify your inability to keep your facts straight.
Dude, honestly, Jobs - the CEO of the company - said he was 'truly sorry' that anyone experienced problems, he offered a solution by offering a free $29 product, and he said that anyone not happy with that solution can have all their money back (up to and including contract cancellation).
I have an iPhone 4 and I can't reduce the bars while holding it (without a case) no matter how I hold it. Neither can anyone I know. Possibly we're in the wrong area or something but it's not an issue for any of us.
Frankly, the proximity sensor thing is more of a problem. I've muted people accidentally a few times.
Also, for the record, the iPhone 4 drops way less calls then the 3GS did.
"We admit that screwed up, and bad. We'll make it right. Here's how."
Steve Jobs: 'We're not perfect. We want to make *all* of our users happy.'
Steve Jobs: 'We screwed up.'
Steve Jobs: 'To our customers who are affected by the issue, we are deeply sorry"
And obviously, they are trying to make it right by giving you a free case and, if your not cool with that, giving you a full refund, no questions asked. What more do you want exactly?
IPhone apps do not have access to email or text messages or the data in any other app except through a very well defined API that requires user confirmation in virtually all instances of data sharing.
In many cases there is no way to access the content of another app (email for example).
It it also not possible for an app to make a call without user confirmation and it is not possible to send a text message at all.
Now this is, in fact, sort of a pain because I'd really like to build an app that sends or receives text messages but it does make for improved data security.
In order to run afoul of anti-trust Apple would need to be deemed a monopoly. Apple is not even the market leader in smart phones so there is no way it could be considered a monopoly in that or any other space.
And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?
Your actually very astute by pointing this out. The application advertising is only the first skirmish in the battle. Apple will almost certainly permit these ads to be shown in Safari using some kind of proprietary extension. Because iAD adds earn significantly more than AdSense these will get extensive adoption and significantly improve support for iOS devices.
If you buy a device from vendor you are buying into whatever the vendor is selling. In this case your buying into the 'word of Steve' and the word of Steve today is 'the only ads you will see will be served by Apple'.
If you don't like it, don't buy it, that's the free market way.
(Honestly, despite Google crying foul this has 0 impact on consumers. Does anyone care who serves the advertising?)
The FTC just approved of the Google/AdMod deal on the strength of Apple competition so it's unlikely they will say anything other 'see, we were right!'
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Forgive me for saying so but your definition of a 'normal computer' is rather limited - maximizing windows, and having in-window menu's do not a computer make.
I have a couple of Windows machines, both for development and for gaming. However, OS X, as a *nix platform, can do far more - through the sheer availability of both commercial and open source software - then a Win PC, with the sole exception of gaming. It's also way more robust and much easier to maintain and requires minimal effort to keep running efficiently.
PS. hotkeys and a trackpad on full acceleration are far more efficient then a mouse, on any platform
Do you remember the 3 different window treatment styles in the age of Aqua or the 'corinthian leather' look of apps in iOS or Firewire + USB. Steve Jobs gave us those and we called him a genius.
Apple is down to two ports on all their hardware - USB C and Lightning - and we're still critical that it's not down to one and we say 'if Steve were here this would never happen' - seriously?
Ideas, as every VC and every entrepreneur knows instinctively, are a dime a dozen. It's the ability to execute on those ideas that matters. In the course of that execution compromises must be made to make the ideas reality.
'The pundits' make a point about Apple's success because it's self evident that consumers, in aggregate, consider Apple's compromises more then acceptable, hence driving Apple's growth.
I pay a small fortune for cable television I don't use. I recently went to just having local channels and I am still paying though the nose for the stupid 'FIOS triple pack'. When I call them and tell them I want just have internet they tell me I will have a 'cool down period' where I will have no internet if I do this.
It's a rip off.
I'll take: HBO - for GoT and Westworls, Startz - for American Gods, and now CBS All Access - for ST: Discovery and iTunes - for everything else any day. At least I know why I have these services and if I don't like them I just cancel them ( and I can even cancel them off season when the shows I watch are now available ).
It wasn't about the labor savings. The ROI was far out compared to payroll of forklift drivers.
The Seegrid solution provides much more favorable ROI - 1 to 2 years - specifically because the devices can be deployed without 'a team who helped implement fully autonomous warehousing'. In fact, the units that just "drop and return" don't require any sort of skilled person at all, a warehouse worker can just walk them around the facility and they 'learn' where they need to go and how to get there. That's a big deal because once your warehouse has a specific role for a unit like that you can just get one, teach it, and you get a solid return on investment quickly - it's not just for big companies with giant warehouses.
This is really the innovation here: robots that can be delivered and taught their job without expansive ( and expensive ) implementation efforts.
Actually this system avoids all sorts of problems that speech recognition has. Your thought patterns are implicitly language and accent agnostic.
The big question is whether there can be sufficient pre-training of this software so that it could draw enough inference from some thoughts to determine the meaning of all thoughts. I mean, when I think of a cat does that look similar, from a brain activity point of view, to the way you think of a cat. If so this should work well. If not, it would require a huge amount of training. That said, training this thing would be pretty natural. It just has to monitor your brain activity while you type and eventually it should have a good map of thought patterns to words so even if it takes a while it wouldn't be tedious ( and it could pretty accurately determine accuracy so as to tell you when you no longer have to type and can just think the words ).
Personally I am really excited by the idea that I can communicate my thoughts to a machine. Never mind the Facebook implications. This would be a huge change in the man > machine interface.
Your really missing what this is. It's not about a keyboard. It's about understanding what you are thinking about and emiting text in in response. Think of it like speech recognition which doesn't know you are saying the sounds for D,O, and G when you say 'dog', it just knows that the sound for the word dog means it should emit the word 'dog'. Similarly this technology would simply understand the words ( or perhaps even concepts ) you are thinking of and emit those as text; think of a dog and it emits the text 'dog'.
The cool thing is that it is implicitly multilingual and avoids issues like pronunciation and accents and so on.
The technology is unidirectional. It's all about 'reading' not 'writing'. That said, if it knows when your thinking of, say, shoes, that would be a great time to give you a shoe ad.
The idea of controlling a mouse with your brain is not a new one. The notion of converting thoughts to actual text or direct actions is more novel and then fact that Facebook thinks it can make that a reality in 2 years is a pretty big deal.
The technology in question will also do emoji. It identifies thoughts, not text. If you think of a dog that will be translated to the text 'dog'. Similarly, if you think of a smiling emoji and you train the software to emit a smiling emoji there is no reason to it couldn't enter that for you ( or likes, or emoticons, or whatever ).
You can only drive in a city like NYC if you are rather wealthy. Costs too much and is far too impractical for most people. You essentially are forced to take public transit and not everyone likes that.
I am wealthy and I don't drive in Manhattan, where driving is a PITA irrespective of your wealth level. I do dislike the subways though and so I use a car service, most often Uber. Although I personally take regular Uber the use of Uberpool is pervasive in the city and is reasonably priced. Indeed, for shorter trips it can cost the same as the subway.
I have hired a number of 6 weeks immersive course graduates for our development team. Although skills and aptitude is certainly variable several have shown themselves to be excellent engineers, in some cases outpacing their traditionally educated team members.
That said there are certainly gaps in their education and general understanding of the field but that does not preclude them from making a general contribution.
This is a terribly misguided and misinformed post.
DRM has nothing to do with the agency model. You can have DRM with or without an agency model. DRM existed on e-books long before the rise of the agency model.
The iPhone does not require DRM and many books from iBooks store don't have DRM on them. In fact, in most cases the ONLY reason why an iBook cannot be used on a Kindle is because of the Kindles non standard file format (without first converting it).
Jobs pushed for the agency model on books to eliminate Amazon's stranglehold on e-books. It was attractive to publishers. Nothing more, nothing less.
(It is true that by eliminating Amazon's stranglehold on books the price of e-books rose because publishers could set their own prices. Amazon has responded by by-passing publishers and trying to get authors to self publish books on Amazon. So it goes.)
]{
Objective C is arguably as complex as Java and C++. It's not hurting Apple any and the general integrity and quality of applications on Mac OS X is quite high. In contrast, Microsoft has much simpler language in Visual Basic and the application written in VB are arguably the lowest quality applications on that platform.
]{
You said they did not own up to a problem, that's false, they did.
You said they did not apologize, that's also false, because Steve Jobs did, personally, apologize several times.
Now your saying that because during this marketing event Apple also said good things about themselves the apology does not count and your throwing in a murder analogy - in the context of a problem with a cell phone - to somehow justify your inability to keep your facts straight.
What will you do for encore?
Dude, honestly, Jobs - the CEO of the company - said he was 'truly sorry' that anyone experienced problems, he offered a solution by offering a free $29 product, and he said that anyone not happy with that solution can have all their money back (up to and including contract cancellation).
What more do you want?
I have an iPhone 4 and I can't reduce the bars while holding it (without a case) no matter how I hold it. Neither can anyone I know. Possibly we're in the wrong area or something but it's not an issue for any of us.
Frankly, the proximity sensor thing is more of a problem. I've muted people accidentally a few times.
Also, for the record, the iPhone 4 drops way less calls then the 3GS did.
"We admit that screwed up, and bad. We'll make it right. Here's how."
Steve Jobs: 'We're not perfect. We want to make *all* of our users happy.'
Steve Jobs: 'We screwed up.'
Steve Jobs: 'To our customers who are affected by the issue, we are deeply sorry"
And obviously, they are trying to make it right by giving you a free case and, if your not cool with that, giving you a full refund, no questions asked. What more do you want exactly?
They did NOT own up to the problem. There was no apology.
Steve Jobs: "To our customers who are affected by the issue, we are deeply sorry,"
Why let facts get in the way of a good rant, eh?
IPhone apps do not have access to email or text messages or the data in any other app except through a very well defined API that requires user confirmation in virtually all instances of data sharing.
In many cases there is no way to access the content of another app (email for example).
It it also not possible for an app to make a call without user confirmation and it is not possible to send a text message at all.
Now this is, in fact, sort of a pain because I'd really like to build an app that sends or receives text messages but it does make for improved data security.
In order to run afoul of anti-trust Apple would need to be deemed a monopoly. Apple is not even the market leader in smart phones so there is no way it could be considered a monopoly in that or any other space.
Do you think Google will permit iAD advertising in their any of their web based products? Why should Apple not institute a reciprocal restriction?
And do you accept that the Safari browser on the iOS devices has the right to purge all web ads and replace them with Apple ads? Why not, right?
Your actually very astute by pointing this out. The application advertising is only the first skirmish in the battle. Apple will almost certainly permit these ads to be shown in Safari using some kind of proprietary extension. Because iAD adds earn significantly more than AdSense these will get extensive adoption and significantly improve support for iOS devices.
It's a real smart move by Apple.
If you buy a device from vendor you are buying into whatever the vendor is selling. In this case your buying into the 'word of Steve' and the word of Steve today is 'the only ads you will see will be served by Apple'.
If you don't like it, don't buy it, that's the free market way.
(Honestly, despite Google crying foul this has 0 impact on consumers. Does anyone care who serves the advertising?)
]{
The FTC just approved of the Google/AdMod deal on the strength of Apple competition so it's unlikely they will say anything other 'see, we were right!'