I would say it's pretty much pointless, but won't do any harm.
Why do I think it's pointless? Well, I don't think that aliens visited. While I don't doubt very much there's life elsewhere, maybe even intelligent life, maybe even life with a civilisation that came up with technology, I doubt very much that faster-than-light travel is possible. Still, who knows?
IF there were aliens visiting our system, having them leave some sign on the Moon isn't that silly an idea. Things there will last a long time and if they wanted to make sure that we will find it some day, it's a good place. We would need fairly good science and technology to spot it in the first place and even better to reach it, which makes sure we won't just destroy or forget it immediately. Putting something in orbit where we could spot it even after a billion years is hard. Digging something like perfectly straight trenches forming a cross or a square on the Moon (and maybe dig in a time capsule in the center) is easy and it would last a very long time there.
Of course if you crowdsource such a search there will be no shortage of idiots seeing things in perfectly natural shadows and whatever. Better use software to look for straight lines and geometric shapes. I doubt it will find anything worthwhile, but it's surely fun and shouldn't be too hard to do anyway.
a smartphone has proven to save lots of time I would otherwise sit at an awful computer instead, chained to a keyboard and a desk and a mouse or a touchpad, sitting on a chair. It gives me freedom from computers (to a certain extent) and/or from finding a chair and a surface to set up my laptop. And this is a good thing.
Of course you also may say you don't need a computer or the Internet or hot water or anything than water to drink. Yes, no doubt. What you need is air, water, food and just enough clothing not to freeze to death. Everything else is luxury. But it's not bad just because it's luxury.
Nothing against minimalism, but these days I would rather give up my computer(s) than my smartphone (as long as I can also keep a bluetooth keyboard;-)
If you could be happy with a cobbled-together environment you still have to invest non-trivial amounts of time and effort in, why don't just install whatever ready-made environment comes along the way and be done with it? Chances are that it is better, smoother, prettier and more capable than what you can get together by yourself with reasonable effort.
Or start out with FVWM, Gkrellm and a bunch of terminal windows. Or go nostalgic and get a copy of OL(V)WM and all the old SunOS/OpenView desktop stuff to go along with it. There are long days and nights waiting to be wasted on that, believe me. I did all of that 10 or 15 years ago and today I miss nothing of it.
Don't waste your time on solving problems that were already solved in a thousand ways 10 years ago. If you're serious try to develop your own DE which is really *NEW* and not another bad copy of Windows95 or CDE or NeXTstep. Windows with a title and a frame and buttons in the title and a desktop with icons on it and a panel with a bar of window titles on the top or bottom of the desktop are so *boring*.
Re:Only part of the population can think abstractl
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book
Only part of the population can think abstractly. The exact percentage differs somewhat depending on what standard you use, but about 40 to 60% of the population is able to think using purely abstract models in well developed countries, without a good education far less. The rest may be very smart if they're dealing with physical objects or people, but the less it works like the "real world" the more lost they get.
And even those who *can* think using abstract models often just don't know that they can profit from things like an application having a unique design and style. Yes, things like fake pages and leather looks are just cosmetics, but they can make an app or a window look familiar and instantly recognizable among others.
Try it: use Expose in OS X and have only apps with "clean" UIs open -- they all look the same when zoomed out. The false-paginated address book still looks like an address book even at thumbnail size and you can find it without even trying.
Not everything that looks silly actually is silly.
These days I often just carry my iPhone with a BT keyboard instead of a laptop. Yes, it's a pain to use for some things and others are just impossible. But it's easy to carry, many things you can't do in a reasonable way with an app can be done via web apps or on a server via SSH and for the odd job now and then the pain is tolerable.
Replacing a laptop with an iPad? If you add a keyboard and don't do other things than to write, maybe. Even then, editing is a pain. You can't even adjust the key-repeat rate and scrolling is painfully slow. Selecting text is a pain. Positioning the cursor is a nightmare. There is a reason texts written with an iPad are often so bad. You have to avoid going back and editing your stuff as much as possible.
Everything else: There are apps to do the most basic things in a very cumbersome way, but WORK usually requires some flexibility and, well, speed. Everything you do with an iPad is slow and cumbersome, not only because the hardware is slow (compared to any "real" computer) but also because switching between apps is slow, getting things from one app to another is slow, there is no way to script or automate things... The iPad is just no platform for work. Not for work you usually use a computer for anyway.
The major reason the iPad is such a success is the fact that is it fun to use. If what you're after is getting things done as quickly and efficient as possible all the fun in the world drives you mad after eight hours worth of it. I'd rather use a 80x24 text console running nothing but a shell and Emacs to get things done and I would probably get ten times as many things done.
A car is a single-purpose transportation device with four wheels.
Yeah, TODAY it is exactly this, because people wanted it to be this and nothing else. Back in the times of a Ford Model T a car was designed to be everything from a transportation device to an engine for water-pumps. Things change.
The PC is the Model T of the digital world. It is good and useful but things will not stay that way forever. More and more people are happily giving up all the flexibility for more convenience and less trouble.
Yeah, but all your app's settings and data, and your photos and the music you sideloaded in and your ebooks you have loaded in all your reader apps -- did these also come back?
If you have any clue about how these things are handled in iOS and Android you should know that iTunes takes a 100% backup of your iPhone and will restore this backup to a new phone so that you will not even notice you've got a new phone because it will be 100% identically setup to your old one, down to the last detail. And all of this happens automatically with no need to install or configure anything. And that Android does only a very tiny subset of this, really.
In fact what you get with Android is the same as what you get with an iPhone you never connect to a PC and never make a backup from. Sign into your account(s) and "everything will come back". Everything that hangs off these accounts. Which really is not much.
"Syncing of contacts, apps, etc." is a very different thing than a full backup.
I mean, really. Android (and the Android market and Android apps) already has grown a reputation of being full of crap and scamware and spyware and Google is somehow very much "we spy on you but in turn everything we offer is free" anyway. With things like that Google and the carriers just nail down Android phones as something you have to sell your soul for getting some free candy. And yes, people love free candy and have not really a use for their souls, but then smartphones aren't free at all. Things like this are just poison for the smartphone business, believe me.
People aren't willing to pay less for less in this case. It is NOT UNIVERSALLY TRUE that people want the cheapest price. There is a minimum acceptable level of performance that is required in order for something to be comfortable and usable, when you fall below that level, price won't save you. You guys can sit around and discuss all these reasons why 'the reality distortion field' keeps people buying Apple products, but the fact of the matter is, its you that lives in a reality distortion field. No other rational reason for so many people hear to be so oblivious to the world around them.
No, I think the point is that even if the thing is perfectly usable, "usable" is not enough for these things. Tablets need to be a joy to use or they are just bad laptops with no real keyboards. What most people don't get is that Apple managed to make the tablet (and the smartphone) exactly that: Fun to use. You don't really *need* a smartphone or a tablet. The only reason to buy and use one a lot for most people is that it's something they like to do. Slickness and responsiveness are key here. Even if you can do the same things (or even more) with a more slow and cumbersome tablet or smartphone people don't really like to use them and they just start to gather dust.
Of course everybody saying "you don't need a tablet" is totally right.
But I would really like to see a comparison between both modes, especially speed and responsiveness. Something makes me think that the "normal" mode won't be exactly faster...
The app in question has already been pulled from the App Store. And I'm quite sure the flaw that allows executing code via some hole in Safari will be fixed very soon. iOS 5 supports delta updates now, so Apple can (and will) come with small updates much more often than in the past.
I'm still torn about security in such appliances. Ideally the user should fully own the device as well as all code running on it, but in practice, users being what they are, having a central control instance may very well be the lesser evil.
With digital devices filling every part of my life now the very thought of being personally responsible for every bit of code running on every one of them makes me shudder. Life is just too short for that.
Do I trust Apple? Not very much. Do I trust Apple more than myself when I haven't got the time to spend more than a few minutes a day to care for each device (and its software) that I own and use? Probably, yes. Sad but true.
This cancer is not "perfectly treatable". It grows slowly, yes, but it has a habit of invisibly metastizing, recurring and finally killing people.
And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink. He then had surgery, radiation treatment, liver transplantation and everything scientific medicine could do for him.
If you look at the surgery he had you will see that this is the most drastic rearrangement of your anatonomy that is routinely done during cancer treatment. Hesitating here is perfectly understandable.
But yes, maybe he would have lived longer if he hadn't waited. Maybe not.
In reality he was just successful. But then this is more than most slashdotters will ever be.
Come on guys, if you don't like fanbois don't turn into anti-fanbois. It's just the other side of the same coin. Quasi-religious hate and spite is in no way different than quasi-religious fanboidom. It's irrational, emotional and makes you look incredibly silly.
There would need to be a way to strongly restrict the ways that apps could hook in or else things could turn into a disaster quickly. Not to mention the fact that the larger you make the domain of Siri, the more poorly it'll perform. That's just how AI works.
I very much doubt that apps will be able to hook into Siri on the device itself at all. What will hook in are backend services that will support what Siri does on the servers. If you see Siri as a user interface it's very much like a webapp, with the user interface being presented on the client but all the code and all the data sitting out there in a data center. "Apps" for Siri will be things like Yelp or Wolfram Alpha with an intermediate layer parsing user input and correlating it with other data. This will have to be tightly and centrally controlled and very carefully integrated. Even thinking of an API that could allow to do this on the phone safely makes my head swim.
I think "apps" for Siri will be companies working with Apple to provide more data and services for Siri to understand and do for you. Maybe you will have to pay for such services (Apple and others will want to profit from it somehow), but I doubt very much that you will get an app to install for that.
Siri is based on a DARPA project named CALO, which aimed at much more than just a chatterbot. In how far this is "real AI" (whatever this may be) is arguable, but it definitely learns and adapts.
In theory Siri could read your emails, everything you write on your phone, whom you call and text (and what you text), could read the websites you visit... This would help greatly with learning about the contexts in your life, but I have no idea in how far Apple could do this without running into very nasty privacy-related problems. Which is a problem with any kind of consumer-facing AI anyway. You could easily end up with something that knows more about you than yourself -- and is running in Apple's data centers. But then Google already sits on a much larger treasure trove of data and nobody cares.
If people really like using Siri, then what's to keep Apple from using it as the front end for their own (or another party's) search engine?
What's to stop them from doing that with the built in search box on iOS, even without their own voice-control system?
The real threat to Google is when such systems (and Siri already does this for a few things) not bring up a page with search hits, but just answer your question or otherwise come up with their own kind of offering you a choice.
Today people use Google for everything, but you could probably cover 90% of what people do via a Google search with a selection of more specialized services sitting behind such a frontend. Then there's no room for ads anymore. You say something and get an answer or get something done.
Of course the question then is how these services will make money. Paid or bought by Apple? Hmm.
Anyway, Google lives and dies by the browser and adds in there. Or in apps.
Sure. Software-patent on swipe to unlock. They sued Samsung in the Netherlands over this., software patent on scroll bouncing and other effects. Effects that have been around for decades.
Have these really been around for decades? I mean, it looks totally obvious when you see it (which is the point of implementing it this way) but very often what looks totally obvious and the only right way to do it with hindsight is everything else than obvious before that. And if you work hard to come up with great and totally intuitive ways of doing something you're not happy if others just copy it without any effort spent on it. Without protecting it in some way everybody could just copy it and nobody would ever bother to put much effort into coming up with own solutions. You'd get mediocre half-assed solutions all over the place.
Well, maybe this is wrong. But evidence seems to support that view. If you look at copies and ripoffs from China and elsewhere how often do you see products where someone intelligently and carefully picked the best ideas from the products he has stolen from? He should be able to afford this, or not? He doesn't has to pay licenses and can freely chose whatever he wants to copy. But what you invariably see is just badly ripping off from the currently best selling products, nothing else. Small wonder: it's much cheaper, it takes much less effort and it's much faster -- and if there is no protection, being on the market a few weeks earlier than others is imperative.
No, I think we've taken a long time to get us into that mess and we will have to take a long time and careful measures to get out of it again.
The real story here is that Apple and Microsoft are on a coordinated campaign to own all your code.
The notion that you cannot sit down in front of your computer and write code without needing a massive legal department to go up against the likes of Apple and Microsoft as they come to either ban products based on your code or demand a license from vendors based on your code is chilling to say the least
These companies rose on the backs of others. These companies became successful using ideas of others and writing lots of code that was unchallenged by patents for decades. Now they want to use software-patents to raise the barrier of entry so high that even Samsung is having trouble in the marketplace
You're absolutely right with the first part but it is idiotic to assume that it's only MS or Apple or that anyone else in their position would do anything different. The patent system needs an overhaul, but just replacing one company with another wouldn't change a bit. They *can't* act different. It's not a point of "evil companies" at all. They are just doing what they must do in the position they're in.
Additionally it's very questionable to assume that without patents and copyright and trademarks and so on anyone would bother to put much development efforts into anything.
There are really no easy answers to these problems. Yes, this is sad and not very satisfying.
You shouldn't forget that this was just a bit court drama. Of course this is just the right silly bit to make good slashdot fodder. It wasn't the reason Apple won (if they did). There's much more to that. But all the people foaming about "rounded rectangles" will never get this.
You don't want to have to tell to the car "can you please apply the brakes now?" it is much easier, and yes, more natural to simply press a button or step on the brake pedal.
You don't believe me still? Armies all over the world establish a special communication protocol that purposely moves away from natural language communication with all its ambiguities to a command/control sparse language with just the right amount of redundancy to deal with noisy communications.
Captain: "Right full rudder, degree down angle." Pilot: "Right full rudder, degree down angle, sir"
Yeah, and there are still places where a command line is better than a mouse. No doubt. But still: There are a fucking many situations and applications were just speaking out what you want is much faster and easier than typing, clicking or tapping around on some kind of device to tell it what you want. "Wake me up in eight hours" is much easier and faster to say than setting up a timer with any kind of UI. And "Reschedule my meeting with John tomorrow to monday at 12" (real example from Siri) also is much easier and faster than tapping around on a phone or clicking around with a mouse.
There's no reason to assume that this will only start to be useful if it can replace every other kind of controlling computers. It will never do that. And it doesn't need to do that,to be revolutionary.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say it's pretty much pointless, but won't do any harm.
Why do I think it's pointless? Well, I don't think that aliens visited. While I don't doubt very much there's life elsewhere, maybe even intelligent life, maybe even life with a civilisation that came up with technology, I doubt very much that faster-than-light travel is possible. Still, who knows?
IF there were aliens visiting our system, having them leave some sign on the Moon isn't that silly an idea. Things there will last a long time and if they wanted to make sure that we will find it some day, it's a good place. We would need fairly good science and technology to spot it in the first place and even better to reach it, which makes sure we won't just destroy or forget it immediately. Putting something in orbit where we could spot it even after a billion years is hard. Digging something like perfectly straight trenches forming a cross or a square on the Moon (and maybe dig in a time capsule in the center) is easy and it would last a very long time there.
Of course if you crowdsource such a search there will be no shortage of idiots seeing things in perfectly natural shadows and whatever. Better use software to look for straight lines and geometric shapes. I doubt it will find anything worthwhile, but it's surely fun and shouldn't be too hard to do anyway.
a smartphone has proven to save lots of time I would otherwise sit at an awful computer instead, chained to a keyboard and a desk and a mouse or a touchpad, sitting on a chair. It gives me freedom from computers (to a certain extent) and/or from finding a chair and a surface to set up my laptop. And this is a good thing.
Of course you also may say you don't need a computer or the Internet or hot water or anything than water to drink. Yes, no doubt. What you need is air, water, food and just enough clothing not to freeze to death. Everything else is luxury. But it's not bad just because it's luxury.
Nothing against minimalism, but these days I would rather give up my computer(s) than my smartphone (as long as I can also keep a bluetooth keyboard ;-)
If you could be happy with a cobbled-together environment you still have to invest non-trivial amounts of time and effort in, why don't just install whatever ready-made environment comes along the way and be done with it? Chances are that it is better, smoother, prettier and more capable than what you can get together by yourself with reasonable effort.
Or start out with FVWM, Gkrellm and a bunch of terminal windows. Or go nostalgic and get a copy of OL(V)WM and all the old SunOS/OpenView desktop stuff to go along with it. There are long days and nights waiting to be wasted on that, believe me. I did all of that 10 or 15 years ago and today I miss nothing of it.
Don't waste your time on solving problems that were already solved in a thousand ways 10 years ago. If you're serious try to develop your own DE which is really *NEW* and not another bad copy of Windows95 or CDE or NeXTstep. Windows with a title and a frame and buttons in the title and a desktop with icons on it and a panel with a bar of window titles on the top or bottom of the desktop are so *boring*.
Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. The physical bookshelf, the leather desk calendar (complete with a torn page), the false-paginated address book
Only part of the population can think abstractly. The exact percentage differs somewhat depending on what standard you use, but about 40 to 60% of the population is able to think using purely abstract models in well developed countries, without a good education far less. The rest may be very smart if they're dealing with physical objects or people, but the less it works like the "real world" the more lost they get.
And even those who *can* think using abstract models often just don't know that they can profit from things like an application having a unique design and style. Yes, things like fake pages and leather looks are just cosmetics, but they can make an app or a window look familiar and instantly recognizable among others.
Try it: use Expose in OS X and have only apps with "clean" UIs open -- they all look the same when zoomed out. The false-paginated address book still looks like an address book even at thumbnail size and you can find it without even trying.
Not everything that looks silly actually is silly.
These days I often just carry my iPhone with a BT keyboard instead of a laptop. Yes, it's a pain to use for some things and others are just impossible. But it's easy to carry, many things you can't do in a reasonable way with an app can be done via web apps or on a server via SSH and for the odd job now and then the pain is tolerable.
Replacing a laptop with an iPad? If you add a keyboard and don't do other things than to write, maybe. Even then, editing is a pain. You can't even adjust the key-repeat rate and scrolling is painfully slow. Selecting text is a pain. Positioning the cursor is a nightmare. There is a reason texts written with an iPad are often so bad. You have to avoid going back and editing your stuff as much as possible.
Everything else: There are apps to do the most basic things in a very cumbersome way, but WORK usually requires some flexibility and, well, speed. Everything you do with an iPad is slow and cumbersome, not only because the hardware is slow (compared to any "real" computer) but also because switching between apps is slow, getting things from one app to another is slow, there is no way to script or automate things... The iPad is just no platform for work. Not for work you usually use a computer for anyway.
The major reason the iPad is such a success is the fact that is it fun to use. If what you're after is getting things done as quickly and efficient as possible all the fun in the world drives you mad after eight hours worth of it. I'd rather use a 80x24 text console running nothing but a shell and Emacs to get things done and I would probably get ten times as many things done.
Yeah, TODAY it is exactly this, because people wanted it to be this and nothing else. Back in the times of a Ford Model T a car was designed to be everything from a transportation device to an engine for water-pumps. Things change.
The PC is the Model T of the digital world. It is good and useful but things will not stay that way forever. More and more people are happily giving up all the flexibility for more convenience and less trouble.
Yeah, but all your app's settings and data, and your photos and the music you sideloaded in and your ebooks you have loaded in all your reader apps -- did these also come back?
If you have any clue about how these things are handled in iOS and Android you should know that iTunes takes a 100% backup of your iPhone and will restore this backup to a new phone so that you will not even notice you've got a new phone because it will be 100% identically setup to your old one, down to the last detail. And all of this happens automatically with no need to install or configure anything. And that Android does only a very tiny subset of this, really.
In fact what you get with Android is the same as what you get with an iPhone you never connect to a PC and never make a backup from. Sign into your account(s) and "everything will come back". Everything that hangs off these accounts. Which really is not much.
"Syncing of contacts, apps, etc." is a very different thing than a full backup.
I mean, really. Android (and the Android market and Android apps) already has grown a reputation of being full of crap and scamware and spyware and Google is somehow very much "we spy on you but in turn everything we offer is free" anyway. With things like that Google and the carriers just nail down Android phones as something you have to sell your soul for getting some free candy. And yes, people love free candy and have not really a use for their souls, but then smartphones aren't free at all. Things like this are just poison for the smartphone business, believe me.
People aren't willing to pay less for less in this case. It is NOT UNIVERSALLY TRUE that people want the cheapest price. There is a minimum acceptable level of performance that is required in order for something to be comfortable and usable, when you fall below that level, price won't save you. You guys can sit around and discuss all these reasons why 'the reality distortion field' keeps people buying Apple products, but the fact of the matter is, its you that lives in a reality distortion field. No other rational reason for so many people hear to be so oblivious to the world around them.
No, I think the point is that even if the thing is perfectly usable, "usable" is not enough for these things. Tablets need to be a joy to use or they are just bad laptops with no real keyboards. What most people don't get is that Apple managed to make the tablet (and the smartphone) exactly that: Fun to use. You don't really *need* a smartphone or a tablet. The only reason to buy and use one a lot for most people is that it's something they like to do. Slickness and responsiveness are key here. Even if you can do the same things (or even more) with a more slow and cumbersome tablet or smartphone people don't really like to use them and they just start to gather dust.
Of course everybody saying "you don't need a tablet" is totally right.
But I would really like to see a comparison between both modes, especially speed and responsiveness. Something makes me think that the "normal" mode won't be exactly faster...
The app in question has already been pulled from the App Store. And I'm quite sure the flaw that allows executing code via some hole in Safari will be fixed very soon. iOS 5 supports delta updates now, so Apple can (and will) come with small updates much more often than in the past.
I'm still torn about security in such appliances. Ideally the user should fully own the device as well as all code running on it, but in practice, users being what they are, having a central control instance may very well be the lesser evil.
With digital devices filling every part of my life now the very thought of being personally responsible for every bit of code running on every one of them makes me shudder. Life is just too short for that.
Do I trust Apple? Not very much. Do I trust Apple more than myself when I haven't got the time to spend more than a few minutes a day to care for each device (and its software) that I own and use? Probably, yes. Sad but true.
This cancer is not "perfectly treatable". It grows slowly, yes, but it has a habit of invisibly metastizing, recurring and finally killing people.
And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink. He then had surgery, radiation treatment, liver transplantation and everything scientific medicine could do for him.
If you look at the surgery he had you will see that this is the most drastic rearrangement of your anatonomy that is routinely done during cancer treatment. Hesitating here is perfectly understandable.
But yes, maybe he would have lived longer if he hadn't waited. Maybe not.
and to some he was like a devil.
In reality he was just successful. But then this is more than most slashdotters will ever be.
Come on guys, if you don't like fanbois don't turn into anti-fanbois. It's just the other side of the same coin. Quasi-religious hate and spite is in no way different than quasi-religious fanboidom. It's irrational, emotional and makes you look incredibly silly.
Siri, find me a bar with single straight women who like geeks who are 30-45 ...
There are other bars?
There would need to be a way to strongly restrict the ways that apps could hook in or else things could turn into a disaster quickly. Not to mention the fact that the larger you make the domain of Siri, the more poorly it'll perform. That's just how AI works.
I very much doubt that apps will be able to hook into Siri on the device itself at all. What will hook in are backend services that will support what Siri does on the servers. If you see Siri as a user interface it's very much like a webapp, with the user interface being presented on the client but all the code and all the data sitting out there in a data center. "Apps" for Siri will be things like Yelp or Wolfram Alpha with an intermediate layer parsing user input and correlating it with other data. This will have to be tightly and centrally controlled and very carefully integrated. Even thinking of an API that could allow to do this on the phone safely makes my head swim.
I think "apps" for Siri will be companies working with Apple to provide more data and services for Siri to understand and do for you. Maybe you will have to pay for such services (Apple and others will want to profit from it somehow), but I doubt very much that you will get an app to install for that.
Siri is based on a DARPA project named CALO, which aimed at much more than just a chatterbot. In how far this is "real AI" (whatever this may be) is arguable, but it definitely learns and adapts.
In theory Siri could read your emails, everything you write on your phone, whom you call and text (and what you text), could read the websites you visit... This would help greatly with learning about the contexts in your life, but I have no idea in how far Apple could do this without running into very nasty privacy-related problems. Which is a problem with any kind of consumer-facing AI anyway. You could easily end up with something that knows more about you than yourself -- and is running in Apple's data centers. But then Google already sits on a much larger treasure trove of data and nobody cares.
What's to stop them from doing that with the built in search box on iOS, even without their own voice-control system?
The real threat to Google is when such systems (and Siri already does this for a few things) not bring up a page with search hits, but just answer your question or otherwise come up with their own kind of offering you a choice.
Today people use Google for everything, but you could probably cover 90% of what people do via a Google search with a selection of more specialized services sitting behind such a frontend. Then there's no room for ads anymore. You say something and get an answer or get something done.
Of course the question then is how these services will make money. Paid or bought by Apple? Hmm.
Anyway, Google lives and dies by the browser and adds in there. Or in apps.
Sure. Software-patent on swipe to unlock. They sued Samsung in the Netherlands over this., software patent on scroll bouncing and other effects. Effects that have been around for decades.
Have these really been around for decades? I mean, it looks totally obvious when you see it (which is the point of implementing it this way) but very often what looks totally obvious and the only right way to do it with hindsight is everything else than obvious before that. And if you work hard to come up with great and totally intuitive ways of doing something you're not happy if others just copy it without any effort spent on it. Without protecting it in some way everybody could just copy it and nobody would ever bother to put much effort into coming up with own solutions. You'd get mediocre half-assed solutions all over the place.
Well, maybe this is wrong. But evidence seems to support that view. If you look at copies and ripoffs from China and elsewhere how often do you see products where someone intelligently and carefully picked the best ideas from the products he has stolen from? He should be able to afford this, or not? He doesn't has to pay licenses and can freely chose whatever he wants to copy. But what you invariably see is just badly ripping off from the currently best selling products, nothing else. Small wonder: it's much cheaper, it takes much less effort and it's much faster -- and if there is no protection, being on the market a few weeks earlier than others is imperative.
No, I think we've taken a long time to get us into that mess and we will have to take a long time and careful measures to get out of it again.
The real story here is that Apple and Microsoft are on a coordinated campaign to own all your code.
The notion that you cannot sit down in front of your computer and write code without needing a massive legal department to go up against the likes of Apple and Microsoft as they come to either ban products based on your code or demand a license from vendors based on your code is chilling to say the least
These companies rose on the backs of others. These companies became successful using ideas of others and writing lots of code that was unchallenged by patents for decades. Now they want to use software-patents to raise the barrier of entry so high that even Samsung is having trouble in the marketplace
You're absolutely right with the first part but it is idiotic to assume that it's only MS or Apple or that anyone else in their position would do anything different. The patent system needs an overhaul, but just replacing one company with another wouldn't change a bit. They *can't* act different. It's not a point of "evil companies" at all. They are just doing what they must do in the position they're in.
Additionally it's very questionable to assume that without patents and copyright and trademarks and so on anyone would bother to put much development efforts into anything.
There are really no easy answers to these problems. Yes, this is sad and not very satisfying.
You shouldn't forget that this was just a bit court drama. Of course this is just the right silly bit to make good slashdot fodder. It wasn't the reason Apple won (if they did). There's much more to that. But all the people foaming about "rounded rectangles" will never get this.
http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-1-Hardware-Design.html
http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-2-Interface-Icons.html
http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-3-Package-Design.html
Apple's "design patent" is not about any single property (like the famous "rounded rectangle") but about the combination of all of these.
While it is a wonderful feature, people will not use it that much. In my office, I am not going to be jabbering to my phone with people around me.
But I bet people will love to use it before and after work. In their cars.
By the way: You are not talking on the phone in your office? How quaint!
I wonder how you will tell the difference.
Try the commands on this list against the best and newest Android phone you can get your hands on and report how many worked:
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/
You don't want to have to tell to the car "can you please apply the brakes now?" it is much easier, and yes, more natural to simply press a button or step on the brake pedal.
You don't believe me still? Armies all over the world establish a special communication protocol that purposely moves away from natural language communication with all its ambiguities to a command/control sparse language with just the right amount of redundancy to deal with noisy communications.
Captain: "Right full rudder, degree down angle."
Pilot: "Right full rudder, degree down angle, sir"
Yeah, and there are still places where a command line is better than a mouse. No doubt. But still: There are a fucking many situations and applications were just speaking out what you want is much faster and easier than typing, clicking or tapping around on some kind of device to tell it what you want. "Wake me up in eight hours" is much easier and faster to say than setting up a timer with any kind of UI. And "Reschedule my meeting with John tomorrow to monday at 12" (real example from Siri) also is much easier and faster than tapping around on a phone or clicking around with a mouse.
There's no reason to assume that this will only start to be useful if it can replace every other kind of controlling computers. It will never do that. And it doesn't need to do that,to be revolutionary.