It's obvious to anyone with common sense viewing Samsung's designs that Samsung is deliberately aping Apple's designs. The dimensions are the same, the look is the same, the chargers and cables are the same, the packaging is the same. Defenders argue that there's no other way to design a tablet, but that's an example of success bias, where things that weren't obvious are only argued to be such after something successful adopts those attributes. They certainly didn't appear to be obvious before the iPad, because there was a much greater variety of tablet designs back then.
Thickness, bezel size, screen size, etc. are determined by available technology, but within that range, Samsung has made different choices (7" tablets, 4.5" and 5" phones, wide screen, horizontal setup, front cameras, etc.). Low-waste packaging was an upcoming trend. The appearance of innovation in those areas results from Apple being able to beat other companies to market by a few months, mainly because of better supply chain management, because of excellent execution, and because they charge a premium.
You are right that Apple's success with touch-only phones made those kinds of devices much more popular than they would otherwise have been, and other manufacturers have responded. But no company should be able to own a fad. In fact, I find it annoying that there aren't more hardware designs. And most of the design aspect that were not driven by technology or environment are aspects that Apple ripped off from others. There is almost nothing original in either the iPhone or the iPad.
This community has just become so incredibly bitter.
And we have reason to be as far as Apple is concerned: the company has ripped off the tech community for 30 years, claiming ideas and technologies as their own that they didn't invest a cent in developing. They have ripped off their partners and their software developers, they have made DRM widespread not just for music but for apps, and they outsource almost everything to low-cost labor in Asia. And now they are trying to monopolize the market further by using sleazy patent tactics in order to prevent others from doing what they have been doing for decades.
Yes, we're bitter as far as Apple is concerned: the company needs to be stopped, or the US computer industry and US computer nerds are in big trouble. And anybody who takes them on in court and fights them gets my cheers and my support.
Note that he said he is in the hardware business; the software is just something extra.
I suspect that if they aren't competitive on the hardware, a few extra bits of binary-only software won't help. If other people manage to make better hardware at the same or lower price, they'll figure out how to make better software as well.
For many of your customers, closed source (i.e., binary or restrictive source license) may simply not work, for example because they are at a university (and can't guarantee that the source code won't leak out), or because they need to run the software on specialized hardware that you can't provide binaries for. Your advantage may also not be as big as you think, so open sourcing the software may not matter much, and other people may provide you with useful input and improvements. So, I think you should seriously consider open sourcing the software. You could make it a dual license (GPL + proprietary).
The best choice would be if you could incorporate those algorithms into your hardware. Can you add a small DSP do the hardware? That doesn't just protect your code, it actually may also make your hardware easier to use (fewer software dependencies). On the other hand, that way, you won't get any improvement from the community.
Believe me I tried. Fink is a buggy piece of crap. And it doesn't even try to fix the problems with the existing OS X packaging system. After using Fink on OS X, you then end up with the original broken OS X version of some software, plus an additional Fink version that doesn't integrate with the native version either and has a completely different set of problems and confuses the hell out of programs that get it by accident over the native version.
So, he's saying that once you're rich, you shouldn't take any risks anymore, but for poor people, it's OK to die in risky pursuits because, heck, they don't have anything to lose anyway? That is even worse than what I thought he said. Glad you cleared it up!
In principle, it would be good if the market could decide. On Windows and Macintosh, people are stuck with the crap that Microsoft and Apple are shipping, no choice, no alternative.
"s shares to be worth $50 million and is planning to book a trip to space with Virgin Galactic that would cost $200,000 or more" It is crazy to become wealthy then chance it all on being shot into space.
$200k out of $5M is hardly "all", it's like 4%. Many people spend a larger fraction of their savings on a new iPhone.
4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/
You should look up some time what "in poverty" actually means.
Installing Linux on a MacBook Air seems like it's a fairly involved multi-step process. Apple's habit of releasing different hardware versions under the same name also makes this tricky.
I don't see much advantage of a MBA over an Asus Transformer, in particular given that you can install full Debian inside a chrooted environment and have both a full Linux environment and a full touchscreen environment.
And having type apt-get in to install an app totally defeats the point of the touchscreen input mechanism
You don't have to use any kind of command line on a modern Linux distribution; they have easy-to-use graphical tools for everything.
what you want is a MacBook air or other thin laptop.
No, you do not want a MacBook air; it runs a bastardized and restricted derivative of Unix, you'll be paying tons of money for all those little utilities you need to plug the gaps in its OS, and its "AppStore" and package management is far inferior to that of a modern Linux distribution.
In addition to installing Linux natively, on many devices you can install a full distribution in a chrooted environment inside the stock Android environment. There are some Android market apps that make that easy.
A quick look at their service suggests that they might have been a nice addition to the existing wireless services. We really do need more providers and new technologies. But even a small chance of interfering with GPS is too much.
Maybe one could swap some rarely used military spectrum further from GPS against military spectrum close to GPS. Given that the military complains the loudest and sits on a lot of spectrum, I think it's reasonable to ask them to contribute to a solution.
Complaining does not help - making it transparent and understand could maybe do something.
I think it obfuscates rather than make things transparent. Yes, we should raise taxes on people making, say, more than $200k/year simply because we need to. We should stop giving large government handouts to banks and creating moral hazard. But that does not mean that the people who are part of the Occupy movement should get their wishes either. If you made a bad mortgage choice, spent too much, or took on too large a student loan, the rest of us who made more prudent choices shouldn't be left paying for you.
We need to increase taxes on the highest earners and decrease entitlements and government services. Unfortunately, right now, Republicans refuse to do the former and Democrats refuse to do the latter, and the people in the middle (like me) are getting fleeced by both sides.
It's viable for a married couple both working relatively high-ranking tech jobs (say, team leads), but just barely.
I think in Silicon Valley that's fairly common; and the cost of living matches it.
However, the definition of 1% is usually about total accumulated wealth, not current income
Except that much of the discussion revolves around income taxes. What sense does it make to talk about accumulated wealth (much of it is in homes, retirement funds, etc.) and then talk about income tax? Others have that kind of money by foregoing a steady job and finally getting valuable stock options.
So, you're saying that it's legitimate for Apple to buy itself a collection of patents and monopolize the market, but if other companies try to get together and fight back, that's somehow an antitrust violation? I don't think so.
As long as you remember that if you work in high tech, there's a good chance that you are in the 1%, or pretty close to begin with.
And as long as you remember that Americans represent roughly the top 5% worldwide, so that when you complain about being taken advantage of by the American rich, the rest of the world has a good case about complaining about being taken advantage of by the Americans. (The Europeans are just below that.)
The patents look iffy to begin with. But they aren't even Apple's iffy patents; Apple bought these patents (from Mitsubishi) and then transferred them to the shell companies.
seriously, you do not want to use a programming language without object orientation for GUI programming.
Oh, I completely agree. Hence, you shouldn't use Qt, because it is based on C++. And as Alan Kay has said:
Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
I think KDE apps feel so bad because many of them are written in C++. Qt/KDE really was just an imitation of Microsoft's approach to writing GUI software, and even Microsoft eventually figured out that this was a dead end.
Gtk and Gnome are not too bad; GObject is actually a tolerable runtime for an object system, it just needs to be bound to a decent language, and there are plenty to choose from. Personally, I prefer Python:
Of course, Qt can be bound to Python as well, but the fact that there is C++ underneath it with its broken object system just can't be hidden completely.
Gnome gives me a decent object system and a choice of decent object-oriented languages. I'm open to other alternatives, but if it involves C++, it's a non-starter.
I have less problems with the creationists and theocrats: I don't want them running the country, but at least they don't even pretend to have science on their side. Much worse are people who try to use tidbits of science to push political agendas without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about.
People can legitimately criticize multiple choice tests and a "test based culture": it doesn't make sense to determine people's futures based on minute differences in answering long lists of questions. But this test is so trivial that people who don't pass it really have no business in a white collar job or going to college. Every adult should be able to answer these questions in their head; they are necessary for basic participation in a modern economy.
I think a side remark at the beginning tells us why he is successful: he has "influential friends". It's the incompetent hiring the incompetent based on their social skills and connections. And now these people want to establish an idiocracy by eliminating even basic math from our curriculum. This kind of thing really doesn't bode well. We need more math in school, not less. Every college-bound high school student should know geometry, statistics, and basic calculus; without that, their decisions and reasoning about topics from microeconomics to climate change will just be based on hearsay, sympathies, and superstition.
You could install Linux on tablets 15 years ago. But you don't really want to because most Linux apps aren't designed for use with a tablet.
The problem with Android is not that they developed a new tablet UI for it or that it isn't Debian; the problem is that they completely broke with existing languages and toolkits.
It wasn't FSF FUD: Qt really had serious licensing problems. Those have been resolved. But Qt is still a C++ toolkit, with the usual bloat and design compromises that that implies. And it isn't even standard C++, they had to invent their own build system and non-standard language extensions.
I don't like either Gnome 3 or Unity. So, I gave KDE a serious try again and absolutely hated it: it is full of NIH apps, not-quite-right-graphics, and unnecessary complexity and gimmicks.
I ended up using XFCE4. It's a little rough around the edges, but on the whole, it's a simple, unobtrusive desktop interface that I can live with. I hope Gnome 4 will go that direction again.
I think Haskell and OCaml are inefficient, messy, and poorly designed. The fact that they incorporate some nice FP concepts doesn't change that. They are prime examples for why we need new languages...
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Thickness, bezel size, screen size, etc. are determined by available technology, but within that range, Samsung has made different choices (7" tablets, 4.5" and 5" phones, wide screen, horizontal setup, front cameras, etc.). Low-waste packaging was an upcoming trend. The appearance of innovation in those areas results from Apple being able to beat other companies to market by a few months, mainly because of better supply chain management, because of excellent execution, and because they charge a premium.
You are right that Apple's success with touch-only phones made those kinds of devices much more popular than they would otherwise have been, and other manufacturers have responded. But no company should be able to own a fad. In fact, I find it annoying that there aren't more hardware designs. And most of the design aspect that were not driven by technology or environment are aspects that Apple ripped off from others. There is almost nothing original in either the iPhone or the iPad.
And we have reason to be as far as Apple is concerned: the company has ripped off the tech community for 30 years, claiming ideas and technologies as their own that they didn't invest a cent in developing. They have ripped off their partners and their software developers, they have made DRM widespread not just for music but for apps, and they outsource almost everything to low-cost labor in Asia. And now they are trying to monopolize the market further by using sleazy patent tactics in order to prevent others from doing what they have been doing for decades.
Yes, we're bitter as far as Apple is concerned: the company needs to be stopped, or the US computer industry and US computer nerds are in big trouble. And anybody who takes them on in court and fights them gets my cheers and my support.
Note that he said he is in the hardware business; the software is just something extra.
I suspect that if they aren't competitive on the hardware, a few extra bits of binary-only software won't help. If other people manage to make better hardware at the same or lower price, they'll figure out how to make better software as well.
For many of your customers, closed source (i.e., binary or restrictive source license) may simply not work, for example because they are at a university (and can't guarantee that the source code won't leak out), or because they need to run the software on specialized hardware that you can't provide binaries for. Your advantage may also not be as big as you think, so open sourcing the software may not matter much, and other people may provide you with useful input and improvements. So, I think you should seriously consider open sourcing the software. You could make it a dual license (GPL + proprietary).
The best choice would be if you could incorporate those algorithms into your hardware. Can you add a small DSP do the hardware? That doesn't just protect your code, it actually may also make your hardware easier to use (fewer software dependencies). On the other hand, that way, you won't get any improvement from the community.
It's easy to understand, but it remains a stupid and arrogant thing to say.
Believe me I tried. Fink is a buggy piece of crap. And it doesn't even try to fix the problems with the existing OS X packaging system. After using Fink on OS X, you then end up with the original broken OS X version of some software, plus an additional Fink version that doesn't integrate with the native version either and has a completely different set of problems and confuses the hell out of programs that get it by accident over the native version.
So, he's saying that once you're rich, you shouldn't take any risks anymore, but for poor people, it's OK to die in risky pursuits because, heck, they don't have anything to lose anyway? That is even worse than what I thought he said. Glad you cleared it up!
In principle, it would be good if the market could decide. On Windows and Macintosh, people are stuck with the crap that Microsoft and Apple are shipping, no choice, no alternative.
$200k out of $5M is hardly "all", it's like 4%. Many people spend a larger fraction of their savings on a new iPhone.
You should look up some time what "in poverty" actually means.
Installing Linux on a MacBook Air seems like it's a fairly involved multi-step process. Apple's habit of releasing different hardware versions under the same name also makes this tricky.
I don't see much advantage of a MBA over an Asus Transformer, in particular given that you can install full Debian inside a chrooted environment and have both a full Linux environment and a full touchscreen environment.
You don't have to use any kind of command line on a modern Linux distribution; they have easy-to-use graphical tools for everything.
No, you do not want a MacBook air; it runs a bastardized and restricted derivative of Unix, you'll be paying tons of money for all those little utilities you need to plug the gaps in its OS, and its "AppStore" and package management is far inferior to that of a modern Linux distribution.
In addition to installing Linux natively, on many devices you can install a full distribution in a chrooted environment inside the stock Android environment. There are some Android market apps that make that easy.
A quick look at their service suggests that they might have been a nice addition to the existing wireless services. We really do need more providers and new technologies. But even a small chance of interfering with GPS is too much.
Maybe one could swap some rarely used military spectrum further from GPS against military spectrum close to GPS. Given that the military complains the loudest and sits on a lot of spectrum, I think it's reasonable to ask them to contribute to a solution.
I think it obfuscates rather than make things transparent. Yes, we should raise taxes on people making, say, more than $200k/year simply because we need to. We should stop giving large government handouts to banks and creating moral hazard. But that does not mean that the people who are part of the Occupy movement should get their wishes either. If you made a bad mortgage choice, spent too much, or took on too large a student loan, the rest of us who made more prudent choices shouldn't be left paying for you.
We need to increase taxes on the highest earners and decrease entitlements and government services. Unfortunately, right now, Republicans refuse to do the former and Democrats refuse to do the latter, and the people in the middle (like me) are getting fleeced by both sides.
I think in Silicon Valley that's fairly common; and the cost of living matches it.
Except that much of the discussion revolves around income taxes. What sense does it make to talk about accumulated wealth (much of it is in homes, retirement funds, etc.) and then talk about income tax? Others have that kind of money by foregoing a steady job and finally getting valuable stock options.
So, you're saying that it's legitimate for Apple to buy itself a collection of patents and monopolize the market, but if other companies try to get together and fight back, that's somehow an antitrust violation? I don't think so.
As long as you remember that if you work in high tech, there's a good chance that you are in the 1%, or pretty close to begin with.
And as long as you remember that Americans represent roughly the top 5% worldwide, so that when you complain about being taken advantage of by the American rich, the rest of the world has a good case about complaining about being taken advantage of by the Americans. (The Europeans are just below that.)
The patents look iffy to begin with. But they aren't even Apple's iffy patents; Apple bought these patents (from Mitsubishi) and then transferred them to the shell companies.
That's Apple innovation in action!
Ah, criticism of KDE still gets you modded down. Here's some more food for thought for you guys:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde+desktop%2Cgnome+desktop&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde+3%2Ckde+4%2Cgnome+2%2Cgnome+3&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0
Not much risk anymore of Qt and KDE taking over the world, fortunately. Let's hope that C++ based GUIs will be a thing of the past soon.
Creationism is a religious belief. You're thinking of intelligent design. The GGP specifically talked about creationism.
Oh, I completely agree. Hence, you shouldn't use Qt, because it is based on C++. And as Alan Kay has said:
I think KDE apps feel so bad because many of them are written in C++. Qt/KDE really was just an imitation of Microsoft's approach to writing GUI software, and even Microsoft eventually figured out that this was a dead end.
Gtk and Gnome are not too bad; GObject is actually a tolerable runtime for an object system, it just needs to be bound to a decent language, and there are plenty to choose from. Personally, I prefer Python:
Of course, Qt can be bound to Python as well, but the fact that there is C++ underneath it with its broken object system just can't be hidden completely.
Gnome gives me a decent object system and a choice of decent object-oriented languages. I'm open to other alternatives, but if it involves C++, it's a non-starter.
I have less problems with the creationists and theocrats: I don't want them running the country, but at least they don't even pretend to have science on their side. Much worse are people who try to use tidbits of science to push political agendas without having the slightest idea of what they are talking about.
People can legitimately criticize multiple choice tests and a "test based culture": it doesn't make sense to determine people's futures based on minute differences in answering long lists of questions. But this test is so trivial that people who don't pass it really have no business in a white collar job or going to college. Every adult should be able to answer these questions in their head; they are necessary for basic participation in a modern economy.
I think a side remark at the beginning tells us why he is successful: he has "influential friends". It's the incompetent hiring the incompetent based on their social skills and connections. And now these people want to establish an idiocracy by eliminating even basic math from our curriculum. This kind of thing really doesn't bode well. We need more math in school, not less. Every college-bound high school student should know geometry, statistics, and basic calculus; without that, their decisions and reasoning about topics from microeconomics to climate change will just be based on hearsay, sympathies, and superstition.
You could install Linux on tablets 15 years ago. But you don't really want to because most Linux apps aren't designed for use with a tablet.
The problem with Android is not that they developed a new tablet UI for it or that it isn't Debian; the problem is that they completely broke with existing languages and toolkits.
It wasn't FSF FUD: Qt really had serious licensing problems. Those have been resolved. But Qt is still a C++ toolkit, with the usual bloat and design compromises that that implies. And it isn't even standard C++, they had to invent their own build system and non-standard language extensions.
I don't like either Gnome 3 or Unity. So, I gave KDE a serious try again and absolutely hated it: it is full of NIH apps, not-quite-right-graphics, and unnecessary complexity and gimmicks.
I ended up using XFCE4. It's a little rough around the edges, but on the whole, it's a simple, unobtrusive desktop interface that I can live with. I hope Gnome 4 will go that direction again.
I think Haskell and OCaml are inefficient, messy, and poorly designed. The fact that they incorporate some nice FP concepts doesn't change that. They are prime examples for why we need new languages...