Considering Moore's law that's just about to be expected.
In 5 years we have 3 x 18 month period. The level of improvement in hardware is multiplies by 2^3. Then I'd expect level of parallelism to affect the process by the same magnitude bringing the total to 2^6 = 64.
Except Moore's Law only indirectly applies. All it states is that the number of transistors you can squeeze doubles every 18 months or so.
Number of transistors only really is a passing indication of CPU power. Especially these days where the thing limiting the density of transistors is wiring them up - the "random logic" of a CPU is dominated by the wires that interconnect them together.
Moore's Law does however apply to the most transistor dense logic aorund - memory. Memory arrays (volatile and non-volatile) are basically controlled by how close you can pack them together, so every generation you can pack twice as much for twice the storage or make 'em half the price.
If you are spending a ton of money on something you'll probably never use, and what's more, of no productive use at all, you might as well cut costs by stealing designs of that from the retards who developed it first and spend the savings on something useful. Seriously, when are we going to evolve from that stage where we are still inventing new ways to throw rocks at each other?
True. Most of the weapons in the arsenal probably aren't to be used in actual war, but in the projection of military supremacy. Enemies would think twice if they saw what "awesome firepower" you have (even if most if it is just cardboard cutouts or lame copies).
As for your second question - probably never. If you look throughout human history, it's been basically war after war after war, and most of the research involved in making wars lead to the comforts we enjoy today. Just human nature - someone has a big gun, someone else gets jealous and builds a bigger gun. Just be content in the fact that we've not yet waged any atomic war that wipes out most of humanity.
choice of the Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, HTC EVO 4G LTE, Nokia Lumia 920, or the upcoming iPhone 5
None of these phones have real keyboards. To those of us with large fingers, that's a deal-breaker when selecting a phone; on-screen keyboards are simply unusable with a screen that small. As much as it sucks in other ways, the BlackBerry at least did offer a hardware keyboard. Yahoo should offer at least one Android phone with an actual keyboard (maybe the Samsung Epic 4G?)
I believe those are the top-end flagship phones on each platform. Which until quite recently stopped coming with hardware keyboards and settled in on the slate formfactor for whatever reason.
Which is where I'm wondering where the innovation is - back when the Droid/Milestone was the kickass Android to get, it had a hardware keyboard. Can't they not come up with some innovative mechanicals and layout to produce a decent phone with a keyboard in the same formfactor? Hell, build in a battery like the iPhone!
Just like bigger screens - there's very few top end phones with screens smaller than 4". If you have smaller hands, it can be a pain to use these top end phones single-handedly (which can include the iPhone 5).
Right but, are we talking about units sold or units shipped. Apple consistently uses units sold to my knowledge, and then after that it's a crapshoot without additional information.
For Apple, units shipped == units sold. They manage their supply chain quite well and know when a new model is about to be released to cut back production. It's the sure sign a new model is coming when supplies of the old one start drying up.
Of course, I think preorders for the iphone5 dried up because the wait is so long now that most people are simply going to mob the retail stores. When I got my 4s (upgraded from an original iphone), my 4s preorder was supposed to ship a couple of weeks from release (ship, not arrive - when you preorder with Apple, Apple ships so it'll arrive on release day). I walked to the Apple store, and bought one on release days and cancelled the preorder.
Basically launch day units sold out within an hour of preordering - which could be easily 1.5M. The others are stragglers for people taking a chance that maybe they can get it by going on release day.
Though, an annoyance seems to be Apple never makes "enough" - they always sell out on the weekend and supplies are extremely tight. It's a marketing ploy, maybe (though each Apple store seems to get a few daily), but I guess when you're spending billions on making the things, you get cautious and don't blithely order tens of millions for release day and tie up money on inventory.
Is it me, or does this seem like how some HFT will go in and monetize BitCoin? I mean, 10 minutes is usually "good enough", but you can bet someone will see a way to make it instant.
Actually it's just you, because you haven't read the protocol spec and don't know what you're talking about.
Sure, it maybe against PROTOCOL, but who's to say it isn't possible? Remember the economic crisis we're in? It's caused by a lot of "funny money" floating around, based on things that don't really exist. Just because it takes 6 confirms to validate a transaction doesn't mean you can't have a bunch of money managers agreeing to another protocol to do "instant confirms" or trading without confirming.
Think "I'll sell you 1 bitcoin now for 1.1 bitcoins in the future" (note: fractional bitcoins are not in the spec, either). Then periodically they'll "settle up".
Just because "official" transactions require confirmations doesn't mean unofficial ones aren't. After all, we aren't supposed to be able to trade stocks and shares 24/7 - the market's only open a few hours on weekdays and non-bank holidays. We seem to have made after-hours trading possible though.
Where there's profit to be made, protocol be damned. Bitcoin's just too geeky for wall street at the moment, but you can bet the quants are looking into exploiting it and offering pension funds and other investments based on "the future of money".
Neither does Xbox Live (purely because Microsoft is a tempting target for every hacker/cracker/script kiddy that they have no choice).
The thing though is that Nintendo has nothing TO steal. Games are tied to the device (you don't have to make an account, and yes, you can transfer to another console). Payment requires entering your credit card information over and over again (or using a gift card, also tied to your console).
Breaking into Nintendo is hard because Nintendo sees itself as a family company and thus hamstrung by all the child-protection laws (hence not requiring an account, which means no personal data to keep a hold of). Of course, it also means it's inconvenient to go online and do stuff - friend codes (which eliminate the need for accounts) and other such things.
Navigate to any content heavy website. If your mobile browser allows you to, try to see the source of the page. Chances are you will see all whitespace trimmed, all CSS and JS inlined. All pictures are compressed in a lossy fashion to reduce their size.
There is also HTTP request coalescing. If you request "/", the whole page will be retrieved, then processed as above and delivered to the mobile browser in a single reply. How many GET requests do you save? A lot.
If there were no such techniques, one's mobile bill would be almost twice as high and the browsing experience would be 4 times as slow.
Depends heavily on the plan you choose.
If you're on a smartphone, yes, you'd encounter this. However, more "laptop" style plans don't do things like this (they don't have to be optimized for power as well - so blasting off a bunch of requests is perfectly fine - a laptop battery is way bigger than a cellphone). If you go for the premium rate VPN-capable plans, it's a raw network connection.
It depends on the carrier as well - some carriers like Sprint are Tier 1 ISPs so their traffic even on the smartphones is raw and unfiltered. Others, not so much. (It's one reason why Sprint can advertise unlimited plans).
Is it me, or does this seem like how some HFT will go in and monetize BitCoin? I mean, 10 minutes is usually "good enough", but you can bet someone will see a way to make it instant.
And once BitCoin becomes popular, you can bet the money traders will move in. Unregulated transactions? Check. With 10 minutes between confirmations, you can do millions of transactions in between that get resolved afterwards.
Knock it off with the trolling.. Piracy is an excuse, nothing more as console games are pirated all the time too. The publishers want control, something they cannot get on win32 but can on the shitty consoles.
Except piracy IS a problem. After all, people are routinely counting 90% piracy on PCs, while even on consoles, it's generally under 10%. Hell, before 2011, PS3 piracy was 0%.
Piracy on consoles and console-like smartphones (i.e., iOS) is generally very low. Piracy on PC and other open platforms (e.g., Android) is much higher - 90% has been quoted.
And publishers do get control on win32 - it's called Steam, which is a very popular game distribution mechanism.
The metric you are missing is that the Windows Marketplace destroys Valve's app store business model.
More like Microsoft has a chance of created a walled garden that beats Valve's walled garden. (Yes, Steam is walled garden - games aren't freely let in, and before Greenlight, they too had to be "approved.").
Valve probably had the first walled garden and was quite successful with it (Steam predates many other online walled gardens, and has been around the longest).
And Valve basically realized that they have a disadvantage because they're the only walled garden without a platform. Hell, I'd like to know how Steam on Mac compares to the Mac App Store - given Valve's fears, it must be doing absolutely terrible. Or Steam for PS3.
And yes, I like Steam. I just find it frustrating at times - a game developer I know has games for consoles (PS3 and Xbox360) - both released on disc and now as digital downloads, as well as iOS and Android. And they're in the Mac App Store. But they don't have a PC port because they can't get on Steam! (They do require the ability to have paid DLC, and are not willing to setup an entire payment processing system just for PC). They're right now only featured on Greenlight, but given how Greenlight is, probably will be crowded out by everyone else (it's not a huge community that can upvote it).
Of course, with Linux, Valve knows that no one else can crowd them with another walled garden. There will be other walled gardens, but they can compete.
How are they stifling innovation if they force companies to do things in a different way - that is, to innovate? "Copy someone's success" hasn't been new for ages.
Don't fandroids keep harping about all the new stuff in Android that iPhone doesn't? How were those innovations stifled?
Indeed. Google worked around several iPhone patents on Android. For example, the home screen and launcher are specifically designed to avoid the iPhone patents that Samsung lost (because of TouchWiz). You unlock the phone, and... no grid of icons. You get a flexible surface to put "widgets" like clocks (by default), and a row of icons common to the home screen. Switch to the launcher and the row of icons disappear. At no time using the (as the patent describes) rounded rectangular slate with a grid of icons and a bottom row common to all screens.
Android fans always point out the widgets as being far superior to the iPhone home screen, when it's an innovation meant to avoid the patent. If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.
Hell, the launcher changes through Android revisions also don't violate the patent. From a drawer you pull up, to a series of panels that rise and slide to the side, I see them as not only avoiding Apple's patents, but doing it skillfully, artfully, and tastefully.
The real problem is companies have discovered it's far easier to copy products than to innovate, and it's far cheaper to do so.
Then again, maybe all the Android fans and users really want iPhone clones, because really, that's all we'd have in the end - Samsung, HTC, Asus, Acer - they see the success of the iPhone and start copying it. Ditto the iPad - it seems Sony is one of the few that are doing interesting things with their tablets.
Re:Not to discourage people from contributing...
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Patent Troll Sues X-Plane
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Plus, I bet Google steps in. Its a Google API he is using that is the subject of the troll.
In fact, this is part of the lawsuit that Uniloc filed against Mojang (Minecraft) as well, plus EA and many other big names. And the one where the founder says he's not a "patent troll".
I'd be surprised if Google didn't step in - it's Google's technology they're all using in the end. Just like how Apple stepped in when a bunch of iOS developers (and later, Android devs) got sued over in-app purchases.
True, the patent system for software is completely hosed up. But to say, "Innovation is dead in this country," is just you talking out of your ass.
There are plenty of companies in many other facets of science and engineering that are doing just fine by staying in the states (not to mention having some of the best schools in the world plus lots of very good ones). As an example, why do international companies in the petroleum industry routinely do business in the states? Oh wait, is it because innovation is dead? No, it's because we have some of the very best technology and great minds to advise companies all over the world.
Or, it's just software's turn this century.
Patent trolls have been around practically forever. The 19th century had patent lawsuits flying around over motorized vehicles, probably just as much as we're seeing between Apple, Microsoft, Google/Motorola, Samsung, etc. And probably just as stupid.
I believe it's a sure sign of innovation when it happens - when a technology is booming, people start mining for gold. When the high-technology sector settles down, so will the lawsuits. And then some OTHER field will experience a rise in patent lawsuits, and they too will wonder about reforming the system, blah blah blah.
History repeating itself over and over again. I tihnk some of the greatest inventors (Edison?) were also some of the most prolific lawsuit-filers.
If the rioters are not religious zealots, what exactly are they rioting about?
Hm...what might people in those countries be angry about...
Wars in their countries. Wars next to their countries. Foreign governments exploiting their countries. The lack of democracy. The lack of democracy following a hard-fought revolution. The lack of democracy following a revolution against a government installed by foreign countries that wanted to exploit them. The general realities of living in those countries.
Really, do you need this list made for you? Do you think the rioters were sitting on their lounge chairs beneath some palm trees in their own personal gardens, and then suddenly saw this video and went nuts?
Riots are infectious. You can easily generate a whole mob to riot with some encouragement. After all, last year we had a huge riot in Vancouver, Canada over a hockey game. Or so they claim.
None of the list are true (when you have bunch of kids wearing $300+ clothes...) - it was just a riot fueled by alcohol and a bunch of drunken idiots who felt like having a good time destroying stuff. It was, as they say, remarkably easy. And once it started, others poured in to join in the fun.
All you need is someone to go apeshit and others will follow. Hell, who knows why the riot started - perhaps afterwards someone claimed they rioted because of the video - finding the reason after the fact to justify what they did.
I have an iPhone 3GS on AT&T. How do I check if Carrier IQ is on it? Did that program show up "randomly" or only on new phones after a certain date?
Carrier IQ exists on several levels. For Android, it went particularly deep, enough to be able to capture the key codes (whe you typed). For iOS, it couldn't go as deep, so it was used mostly for its ability to collect diagnostic data ("send diagnostic information to Apple").
I believe it came in around iOS 4 or so, but 5 I think eviscerated it as Apple implemented it themselves. If not, the sure way is to just disable sending diagnostic information to Apple.
Tease launches only work for industry-new products. Apple pulled it off with the original iPhone and iPad because there weren't any competitive products in the space, so the market didn't have an option to go out and buy something that filled that need *right now*. Microsoft and Nokia are trying to do a tease launch, when I can go to the store and buy something very similar for a probably similar price and have it in my hand before Microsoft and Nokia will get around to announcing prices, much less ship dates.
Apple actually announced rough availability dates for both the iPhone and iPad. It wasn't a precise day (that came a little bit later), but it was a month. Which was done because there were a pile of things tha thad to be done that could not be done in secret anymore (FCC approvales require the documentation be public, for example, but there is also field testing and such).
So the original iPhone's launch was mentioned to be in July, and the real date came down a little later. The ipad similarly. These weren't tease launches, but very real launches. Every subsequent iPhone and iPad launch had a real date associated with it.
The problem right now is no one can tell you when the new Nokia phones will ship - not even which month. Or "later this year" or "early next year". Hell, Apple had the iPhone and iPad pricing down in the keynotes, before the date (so people can save up money).
Video games do. Well, technically they were ugly to begin with, we just didn't notice because it was the best we had (and usually better than what came before). The graphics, mind you, not the gameplay.
Not to mention they aged because we aren't playing on 640x480 screens anymore - people are rocking laptops with 2880x1800 screen resolutions (or tablets with 2560x1536). Or even just 1080p or 1920x1200. What looked good at VGA tends to look just terrible at the higher resolutions everyone runs at.
It's effectively going from standard-def to high-def.
Half Life's just one of those games that people like well enough to do a proper conversion.
1. Go online a few hours after the show airs, download to USB stick, plug into television and watch.
Or wait a few months for GoT to be on DVD/Blu-Ray, or if you don't mind it, iTunes. At least for season 2, as season 1 is already out on DVD/Blu-Ray and on iTunes (in Canada).
Is a few months wait really that bothersome? Or is there some sort of "status" to be had by watching the show when it airs rather than waiting a few months for the box set?
Hell, I bet half the people who pirate it had no intention of even buying it on DVD/Blu-Ray "to support the show" or whatever. Pirate it when it airs, fine, if you're gonna buy it anyways. Don't buy it, if it's not for sale is also fine. But justifying pirating it without buying it when it's available?
Given how much GoT is pirated, I expect the box sets to hit #1 on Amazon's sales chart when they're released, but I think that's a fat chance.
There are many legitimate reasons to pirate, all enumerated in TFA, but really, considering you're saving $1200 by not having HBO, is spending $75 for the Blu-Ray set really putting you in the dog house?
Everyone has been copying from everyone else in this industry for decades, including Apple itself. Now that they're the king of the hill, they want to change the rules. Too bad for them, this kind of crap means that every other player will now proceed to nuke them with everything at their disposal - and rightly so./me is eagerly waiting for a lawsuit over LTE in iPhone 5 from Samsung...
Even before they were king of the hill people were copying Apple.
Though I'm not exactly sure I want everyone copying off each other. I mean, do you really want a bland world where every PC is the same because "it's the best" or phone or whatever? Sure there might be a few people to innovate, but really, the world would get pretty bland.
Some recent examples include well, laptops having 1366x768 screens when just a few years ago everyone had a variety of resolutions. These days, with all the ultrabook stuff (copying Apple), we're seeing laptops all over the place sporting screens of higher resolutions again. But only because Intel started paying companies to duplicate the Macbook Air (3 years after it's first release).
Or how today all the high-end smartphones are all slates with onscreen keyboards - what happened to sliders with built in keyboards?
Or how Android has a "home screen" where you can stick apps and widgets (which was probably written by Google to get around the iPhone patents)?
Sometimes avoiding patents leads to real innovation - see how Google deftly works around a bunch of Apple patents in Android.
The problem is companies are lazy - if someone will do the R&D for them, they will let them do it, then copy (see China). Then sell it on the market a few months later for half the price. (Copying is the best business strategy - less risk of a flop (you clone only products that show promise), very little R&D (only enough to be able to reverse the original), etc).
As for the LTE lawsuits from Samsung - don't be so confident. Apple has 443-odd LTE patents in their arsenal (purchase of Nortel), plus a freely licensable one on nano-SIM. It'll be a large battle of FRAND patents that basically ends up as a big lovefest in the end - and if Samsung's lawyers are as incompetent as they were during the first trial (sorry, missing deadlines is never an excuse, nor is not tracking time spent during time-allocation), it could end as a very nasty smackdown for Samsung. If they are halfway competent, they'd argue that Samsung's patents (which have to be licensed by Apple directly, or paid for indirectly, through Qualcomm) are more valuable per phone than Apple's patents are.
And Apple is NOT king of the hill. Android is, as is Samsung. Samsung has shipped more Android phones than Apple and has greater marketshare (they're the #1 phone seller). The only area where Apple is king is profits. iOS marketshare is 1/2 that of Android, too.
iOS fragmentation is far worse than Android fragmentation, because the Apple App Store has no problem selling you software that you can't use on your devices. Google Play won't let you buy an app that won't work on your device, which mitigates a lot of the problems that exist because of fragmentation.
It's annoying because decent software will get rated down on the App Store because it doesn't work on the iPad 1 and angry suckers leave low ratings to show their anger at Apple's incompetence.
Yeah, it's annoying. But so is Google Play's model.
However, Google Play lacks a "yes I know, get it anyways" feature. Sometimes I come across a good Android app on sale, and it's not available on my device. I wish to get it anyways because it's on sale (or free) right now, and maybe I'm upgrading when the newest Android comes out next month.
So just because it's not compatible now, I can't buy it on sale. When I get my new phone or tablet, it's no longer on sale. I'm not paying full price. So I'll just download it off my favorite torrent site while I wait for it to go on sale again.
Perhaps that's why piracy is so rampant?
The Apple model lets you buy apps while you don't have the device, so you can take advantage of sales, at the expense of not being able to run the app currently.
There's got to be a better way - Google Play only lets me install it if any of my current devices work with it, versus Apple letting anyone buy anything even though I have no hardware that can run it. If I want to take advantage of sales, Google Play prevents me from doing so, so I have to resort to piracy to get the app "on sale".
Reduced friction and reduced turbulence might enable higher seek times.
Slightly faster seek times as there's less, err, air resistance that the heads have to oppose. Unfortuantely, they added two platters which means the seek arm has nearly 40% more mass. More mass means more inertia, which means the heads are harder to start and stop quickly, which probably more than compensates for the reduction due to air resistance. It could seek *slower*, too.
Android is not free (that is, you actually do have to give something up to be an Android licensee, even if its not a cash payment -- the terms are not, AFAIK, publicly disclosed, though.)
I believe the terms to get access to Android (non-AOSP) is you have to be a member of the OHA (before Google will even talk to you), which is, I think a $5000/year annual membership. Joining isn't easy (you need two members to vouch for you), and agree to a bunch of NDA terms.
Which includes NOT giving away Android source code (commercially licensed). Members are free to move their source code over to the Apache-licensed AOSP when it's released (the code's identical) to free themselves of the commercial licensing.
To get access to Honeycomb required controls on who had access to the source code and which PCs that code may exist on as well as signing a bunch of NDAs personally with Google.
Google controls Android with a heavy fist. Most vendors use AOSP to allow for easier redistribution, but they use Android when the AOSP isn't available, then switch over. The code's practically identical so it's really little more than merging the kernel source code.
No comments from Google Tokyo or Acer Taiwan. Google (Mountain View) could make a statement about it soon enough. Given the timing of this, I'm guessing Google HQ has not had time to analyze what happened yet.
Though, Acer not commenting isn't unusual - Google could've told them to not mention anything about it publicly, or else they'll lose it as well. After all, what happens inside the OHA is probably covered by many NDAs (like Honeycomb source code).
Yeah, how exactly would google be cutting Acer off? Android is open source.
Incorrect. Android is NOT open source. Android is a commercially licensed mobile OS. Google does however provide the same source code under an open-source license called the Android Open Source Project, or AOSP.
The difference between the two are very minor code-wise, but commercial access wise, they're much bigger.
First, the commercially available Android is for partners only - while Google traditionally works with a partner to release a flagship phone with the latest OS, the other partners often have early access to the new code prior to Google releasing it on AOSP. (And as we saw with Honeycomb, Google can prevent partners from releasing the code to AOSP. Google has also applied source code distribution restrictions on who may access Honeycomb source under what conditions).
Second, and more importantly, being a partner also allows you to license the Google Apps. So if you wanted the Play store, the only way you can include it in your image would be to be a commercially licensed partner. Otherwise you would have to release it without the Google Apps, and your users will have to manually install the Play store marketplace themselves (like what you do with Cyanogen).
Doing this means that Acer's tablets and phones would be like the random Chinese tablets and phones running AOSP - sure they run Android, but that's about it - you'd have to find and install the marketplace yourself (not sure if it requires root?).
If it came out of the pockets of the credit card holders, it probably would've been fixed long ago. The problem is that the credit card companies have gamed it so that it comes out the pockets of the merchants. And no merchant can realistically refuse to accept credit cards if he's serious about running a business. The credit card companies have even managed to trick most card holders into thinking that they're doing the noble thing and paying for fraud, when in most cases it's the merchant who pays. After all, those high interest rates and annual fees have to be paying for something, not going straight into their pocket, right?
The analogy between labor and employers works here. Merchants need a union so they can negotiate on an even footing with the 3 credit card companies which control the vast majority of the electronic transaction market.
Well, first of all, handling cash is not free. The more cash you handle, the more expensive it becomes. If your business takes in $50k worth of cash - how do you deposit it? Rent an armored car ($1-2K per call, meaning 2-4% "transaction fee")? Carry it to the bank and hope you don't get robbed (100+% - if you require medical treatment or counselling, plus loss of the day's take), etc.
You can choose to take debit only (cheaper - 25 cents (paid by cardholder) plus well under 1% (paid by the merchant)), though many people are wary and banks love to charge lots of fees to account holders.
And in Canada, it was found that yes, credit card companies were effectively strongarming merchants and merchants were given rights to charge extra to credit card holders, the ability to refuse some credit cards, etc. (Which may be noble, but potentially impractical if it results in customers lining up with $100 worth of stuff, then not completing the transaction because they refuse to pay an extra $3-5 in credit card fees and leaving for someone else).
The only way to advertise it is to build it into prices and have the cashier say "your total is $100, but if you pay by cash, I'll give you a discount - you'll only pay $95". (Customers hate having things "tacked on" at the end - they want to know that the item they're buying is the price shown on the tag. Of course, giving a discount is a nicety where you pay less than tagged price, or even if you couch it as "If you pay by cash, I won't charge sales tax")
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Except Moore's Law only indirectly applies. All it states is that the number of transistors you can squeeze doubles every 18 months or so.
Number of transistors only really is a passing indication of CPU power. Especially these days where the thing limiting the density of transistors is wiring them up - the "random logic" of a CPU is dominated by the wires that interconnect them together.
Moore's Law does however apply to the most transistor dense logic aorund - memory. Memory arrays (volatile and non-volatile) are basically controlled by how close you can pack them together, so every generation you can pack twice as much for twice the storage or make 'em half the price.
True. Most of the weapons in the arsenal probably aren't to be used in actual war, but in the projection of military supremacy. Enemies would think twice if they saw what "awesome firepower" you have (even if most if it is just cardboard cutouts or lame copies).
As for your second question - probably never. If you look throughout human history, it's been basically war after war after war, and most of the research involved in making wars lead to the comforts we enjoy today. Just human nature - someone has a big gun, someone else gets jealous and builds a bigger gun. Just be content in the fact that we've not yet waged any atomic war that wipes out most of humanity.
I believe those are the top-end flagship phones on each platform. Which until quite recently stopped coming with hardware keyboards and settled in on the slate formfactor for whatever reason.
Which is where I'm wondering where the innovation is - back when the Droid/Milestone was the kickass Android to get, it had a hardware keyboard. Can't they not come up with some innovative mechanicals and layout to produce a decent phone with a keyboard in the same formfactor? Hell, build in a battery like the iPhone!
Just like bigger screens - there's very few top end phones with screens smaller than 4". If you have smaller hands, it can be a pain to use these top end phones single-handedly (which can include the iPhone 5).
For Apple, units shipped == units sold. They manage their supply chain quite well and know when a new model is about to be released to cut back production. It's the sure sign a new model is coming when supplies of the old one start drying up.
Of course, I think preorders for the iphone5 dried up because the wait is so long now that most people are simply going to mob the retail stores. When I got my 4s (upgraded from an original iphone), my 4s preorder was supposed to ship a couple of weeks from release (ship, not arrive - when you preorder with Apple, Apple ships so it'll arrive on release day). I walked to the Apple store, and bought one on release days and cancelled the preorder.
Basically launch day units sold out within an hour of preordering - which could be easily 1.5M. The others are stragglers for people taking a chance that maybe they can get it by going on release day.
Though, an annoyance seems to be Apple never makes "enough" - they always sell out on the weekend and supplies are extremely tight. It's a marketing ploy, maybe (though each Apple store seems to get a few daily), but I guess when you're spending billions on making the things, you get cautious and don't blithely order tens of millions for release day and tie up money on inventory.
Sure, it maybe against PROTOCOL, but who's to say it isn't possible? Remember the economic crisis we're in? It's caused by a lot of "funny money" floating around, based on things that don't really exist. Just because it takes 6 confirms to validate a transaction doesn't mean you can't have a bunch of money managers agreeing to another protocol to do "instant confirms" or trading without confirming.
Think "I'll sell you 1 bitcoin now for 1.1 bitcoins in the future" (note: fractional bitcoins are not in the spec, either). Then periodically they'll "settle up".
Just because "official" transactions require confirmations doesn't mean unofficial ones aren't. After all, we aren't supposed to be able to trade stocks and shares 24/7 - the market's only open a few hours on weekdays and non-bank holidays. We seem to have made after-hours trading possible though.
Where there's profit to be made, protocol be damned. Bitcoin's just too geeky for wall street at the moment, but you can bet the quants are looking into exploiting it and offering pension funds and other investments based on "the future of money".
Neither does Xbox Live (purely because Microsoft is a tempting target for every hacker/cracker/script kiddy that they have no choice).
The thing though is that Nintendo has nothing TO steal. Games are tied to the device (you don't have to make an account, and yes, you can transfer to another console). Payment requires entering your credit card information over and over again (or using a gift card, also tied to your console).
Breaking into Nintendo is hard because Nintendo sees itself as a family company and thus hamstrung by all the child-protection laws (hence not requiring an account, which means no personal data to keep a hold of). Of course, it also means it's inconvenient to go online and do stuff - friend codes (which eliminate the need for accounts) and other such things.
Depends heavily on the plan you choose.
If you're on a smartphone, yes, you'd encounter this. However, more "laptop" style plans don't do things like this (they don't have to be optimized for power as well - so blasting off a bunch of requests is perfectly fine - a laptop battery is way bigger than a cellphone). If you go for the premium rate VPN-capable plans, it's a raw network connection.
It depends on the carrier as well - some carriers like Sprint are Tier 1 ISPs so their traffic even on the smartphones is raw and unfiltered. Others, not so much. (It's one reason why Sprint can advertise unlimited plans).
Is it me, or does this seem like how some HFT will go in and monetize BitCoin? I mean, 10 minutes is usually "good enough", but you can bet someone will see a way to make it instant.
And once BitCoin becomes popular, you can bet the money traders will move in. Unregulated transactions? Check. With 10 minutes between confirmations, you can do millions of transactions in between that get resolved afterwards.
That's the future of BitCoin.
Except piracy IS a problem. After all, people are routinely counting 90% piracy on PCs, while even on consoles, it's generally under 10%. Hell, before 2011, PS3 piracy was 0%.
Piracy on consoles and console-like smartphones (i.e., iOS) is generally very low. Piracy on PC and other open platforms (e.g., Android) is much higher - 90% has been quoted.
And publishers do get control on win32 - it's called Steam, which is a very popular game distribution mechanism.
More like Microsoft has a chance of created a walled garden that beats Valve's walled garden. (Yes, Steam is walled garden - games aren't freely let in, and before Greenlight, they too had to be "approved.").
Valve probably had the first walled garden and was quite successful with it (Steam predates many other online walled gardens, and has been around the longest).
And Valve basically realized that they have a disadvantage because they're the only walled garden without a platform. Hell, I'd like to know how Steam on Mac compares to the Mac App Store - given Valve's fears, it must be doing absolutely terrible. Or Steam for PS3.
And yes, I like Steam. I just find it frustrating at times - a game developer I know has games for consoles (PS3 and Xbox360) - both released on disc and now as digital downloads, as well as iOS and Android. And they're in the Mac App Store. But they don't have a PC port because they can't get on Steam! (They do require the ability to have paid DLC, and are not willing to setup an entire payment processing system just for PC). They're right now only featured on Greenlight, but given how Greenlight is, probably will be crowded out by everyone else (it's not a huge community that can upvote it).
Of course, with Linux, Valve knows that no one else can crowd them with another walled garden. There will be other walled gardens, but they can compete.
Indeed. Google worked around several iPhone patents on Android. For example, the home screen and launcher are specifically designed to avoid the iPhone patents that Samsung lost (because of TouchWiz). You unlock the phone, and ... no grid of icons. You get a flexible surface to put "widgets" like clocks (by default), and a row of icons common to the home screen. Switch to the launcher and the row of icons disappear. At no time using the (as the patent describes) rounded rectangular slate with a grid of icons and a bottom row common to all screens.
Android fans always point out the widgets as being far superior to the iPhone home screen, when it's an innovation meant to avoid the patent. If that's not innovation, I don't know what is.
Hell, the launcher changes through Android revisions also don't violate the patent. From a drawer you pull up, to a series of panels that rise and slide to the side, I see them as not only avoiding Apple's patents, but doing it skillfully, artfully, and tastefully.
The real problem is companies have discovered it's far easier to copy products than to innovate, and it's far cheaper to do so.
Then again, maybe all the Android fans and users really want iPhone clones, because really, that's all we'd have in the end - Samsung, HTC, Asus, Acer - they see the success of the iPhone and start copying it. Ditto the iPad - it seems Sony is one of the few that are doing interesting things with their tablets.
Actually, I'm surprised it took so long for a response. Laminar Research was sued back in July 22, 2012.
In fact, this is part of the lawsuit that Uniloc filed against Mojang (Minecraft) as well, plus EA and many other big names. And the one where the founder says he's not a "patent troll".
I'd be surprised if Google didn't step in - it's Google's technology they're all using in the end. Just like how Apple stepped in when a bunch of iOS developers (and later, Android devs) got sued over in-app purchases.
Or, it's just software's turn this century.
Patent trolls have been around practically forever. The 19th century had patent lawsuits flying around over motorized vehicles, probably just as much as we're seeing between Apple, Microsoft, Google/Motorola, Samsung, etc. And probably just as stupid.
I believe it's a sure sign of innovation when it happens - when a technology is booming, people start mining for gold. When the high-technology sector settles down, so will the lawsuits. And then some OTHER field will experience a rise in patent lawsuits, and they too will wonder about reforming the system, blah blah blah.
History repeating itself over and over again. I tihnk some of the greatest inventors (Edison?) were also some of the most prolific lawsuit-filers.
Riots are infectious. You can easily generate a whole mob to riot with some encouragement. After all, last year we had a huge riot in Vancouver, Canada over a hockey game. Or so they claim.
None of the list are true (when you have bunch of kids wearing $300+ clothes...) - it was just a riot fueled by alcohol and a bunch of drunken idiots who felt like having a good time destroying stuff. It was, as they say, remarkably easy. And once it started, others poured in to join in the fun.
All you need is someone to go apeshit and others will follow. Hell, who knows why the riot started - perhaps afterwards someone claimed they rioted because of the video - finding the reason after the fact to justify what they did.
Carrier IQ exists on several levels. For Android, it went particularly deep, enough to be able to capture the key codes (whe you typed). For iOS, it couldn't go as deep, so it was used mostly for its ability to collect diagnostic data ("send diagnostic information to Apple").
I believe it came in around iOS 4 or so, but 5 I think eviscerated it as Apple implemented it themselves. If not, the sure way is to just disable sending diagnostic information to Apple.
Apple actually announced rough availability dates for both the iPhone and iPad. It wasn't a precise day (that came a little bit later), but it was a month. Which was done because there were a pile of things tha thad to be done that could not be done in secret anymore (FCC approvales require the documentation be public, for example, but there is also field testing and such).
So the original iPhone's launch was mentioned to be in July, and the real date came down a little later. The ipad similarly. These weren't tease launches, but very real launches. Every subsequent iPhone and iPad launch had a real date associated with it.
The problem right now is no one can tell you when the new Nokia phones will ship - not even which month. Or "later this year" or "early next year". Hell, Apple had the iPhone and iPad pricing down in the keynotes, before the date (so people can save up money).
Not to mention they aged because we aren't playing on 640x480 screens anymore - people are rocking laptops with 2880x1800 screen resolutions (or tablets with 2560x1536). Or even just 1080p or 1920x1200. What looked good at VGA tends to look just terrible at the higher resolutions everyone runs at.
It's effectively going from standard-def to high-def.
Half Life's just one of those games that people like well enough to do a proper conversion.
Or wait a few months for GoT to be on DVD/Blu-Ray, or if you don't mind it, iTunes. At least for season 2, as season 1 is already out on DVD/Blu-Ray and on iTunes (in Canada).
Is a few months wait really that bothersome? Or is there some sort of "status" to be had by watching the show when it airs rather than waiting a few months for the box set?
Hell, I bet half the people who pirate it had no intention of even buying it on DVD/Blu-Ray "to support the show" or whatever. Pirate it when it airs, fine, if you're gonna buy it anyways. Don't buy it, if it's not for sale is also fine. But justifying pirating it without buying it when it's available?
Given how much GoT is pirated, I expect the box sets to hit #1 on Amazon's sales chart when they're released, but I think that's a fat chance.
There are many legitimate reasons to pirate, all enumerated in TFA, but really, considering you're saving $1200 by not having HBO, is spending $75 for the Blu-Ray set really putting you in the dog house?
Even before they were king of the hill people were copying Apple.
Though I'm not exactly sure I want everyone copying off each other. I mean, do you really want a bland world where every PC is the same because "it's the best" or phone or whatever? Sure there might be a few people to innovate, but really, the world would get pretty bland.
Some recent examples include well, laptops having 1366x768 screens when just a few years ago everyone had a variety of resolutions. These days, with all the ultrabook stuff (copying Apple), we're seeing laptops all over the place sporting screens of higher resolutions again. But only because Intel started paying companies to duplicate the Macbook Air (3 years after it's first release).
Or how today all the high-end smartphones are all slates with onscreen keyboards - what happened to sliders with built in keyboards?
Or how Android has a "home screen" where you can stick apps and widgets (which was probably written by Google to get around the iPhone patents)?
Sometimes avoiding patents leads to real innovation - see how Google deftly works around a bunch of Apple patents in Android.
The problem is companies are lazy - if someone will do the R&D for them, they will let them do it, then copy (see China). Then sell it on the market a few months later for half the price. (Copying is the best business strategy - less risk of a flop (you clone only products that show promise), very little R&D (only enough to be able to reverse the original), etc).
As for the LTE lawsuits from Samsung - don't be so confident. Apple has 443-odd LTE patents in their arsenal (purchase of Nortel), plus a freely licensable one on nano-SIM. It'll be a large battle of FRAND patents that basically ends up as a big lovefest in the end - and if Samsung's lawyers are as incompetent as they were during the first trial (sorry, missing deadlines is never an excuse, nor is not tracking time spent during time-allocation), it could end as a very nasty smackdown for Samsung. If they are halfway competent, they'd argue that Samsung's patents (which have to be licensed by Apple directly, or paid for indirectly, through Qualcomm) are more valuable per phone than Apple's patents are.
And Apple is NOT king of the hill. Android is, as is Samsung. Samsung has shipped more Android phones than Apple and has greater marketshare (they're the #1 phone seller). The only area where Apple is king is profits. iOS marketshare is 1/2 that of Android, too.
Yeah, it's annoying. But so is Google Play's model.
However, Google Play lacks a "yes I know, get it anyways" feature. Sometimes I come across a good Android app on sale, and it's not available on my device. I wish to get it anyways because it's on sale (or free) right now, and maybe I'm upgrading when the newest Android comes out next month.
So just because it's not compatible now, I can't buy it on sale. When I get my new phone or tablet, it's no longer on sale. I'm not paying full price. So I'll just download it off my favorite torrent site while I wait for it to go on sale again.
Perhaps that's why piracy is so rampant?
The Apple model lets you buy apps while you don't have the device, so you can take advantage of sales, at the expense of not being able to run the app currently.
There's got to be a better way - Google Play only lets me install it if any of my current devices work with it, versus Apple letting anyone buy anything even though I have no hardware that can run it. If I want to take advantage of sales, Google Play prevents me from doing so, so I have to resort to piracy to get the app "on sale".
Slightly faster seek times as there's less, err, air resistance that the heads have to oppose. Unfortuantely, they added two platters which means the seek arm has nearly 40% more mass. More mass means more inertia, which means the heads are harder to start and stop quickly, which probably more than compensates for the reduction due to air resistance. It could seek *slower*, too.
I believe the terms to get access to Android (non-AOSP) is you have to be a member of the OHA (before Google will even talk to you), which is, I think a $5000/year annual membership. Joining isn't easy (you need two members to vouch for you), and agree to a bunch of NDA terms.
Which includes NOT giving away Android source code (commercially licensed). Members are free to move their source code over to the Apache-licensed AOSP when it's released (the code's identical) to free themselves of the commercial licensing.
To get access to Honeycomb required controls on who had access to the source code and which PCs that code may exist on as well as signing a bunch of NDAs personally with Google.
Google controls Android with a heavy fist. Most vendors use AOSP to allow for easier redistribution, but they use Android when the AOSP isn't available, then switch over. The code's practically identical so it's really little more than merging the kernel source code.
No comments from Google Tokyo or Acer Taiwan. Google (Mountain View) could make a statement about it soon enough. Given the timing of this, I'm guessing Google HQ has not had time to analyze what happened yet.
Though, Acer not commenting isn't unusual - Google could've told them to not mention anything about it publicly, or else they'll lose it as well. After all, what happens inside the OHA is probably covered by many NDAs (like Honeycomb source code).
Incorrect. Android is NOT open source. Android is a commercially licensed mobile OS. Google does however provide the same source code under an open-source license called the Android Open Source Project, or AOSP.
The difference between the two are very minor code-wise, but commercial access wise, they're much bigger.
First, the commercially available Android is for partners only - while Google traditionally works with a partner to release a flagship phone with the latest OS, the other partners often have early access to the new code prior to Google releasing it on AOSP. (And as we saw with Honeycomb, Google can prevent partners from releasing the code to AOSP. Google has also applied source code distribution restrictions on who may access Honeycomb source under what conditions).
Second, and more importantly, being a partner also allows you to license the Google Apps. So if you wanted the Play store, the only way you can include it in your image would be to be a commercially licensed partner. Otherwise you would have to release it without the Google Apps, and your users will have to manually install the Play store marketplace themselves (like what you do with Cyanogen).
Doing this means that Acer's tablets and phones would be like the random Chinese tablets and phones running AOSP - sure they run Android, but that's about it - you'd have to find and install the marketplace yourself (not sure if it requires root?).
Well, first of all, handling cash is not free. The more cash you handle, the more expensive it becomes. If your business takes in $50k worth of cash - how do you deposit it? Rent an armored car ($1-2K per call, meaning 2-4% "transaction fee")? Carry it to the bank and hope you don't get robbed (100+% - if you require medical treatment or counselling, plus loss of the day's take), etc.
You can choose to take debit only (cheaper - 25 cents (paid by cardholder) plus well under 1% (paid by the merchant)), though many people are wary and banks love to charge lots of fees to account holders.
And in Canada, it was found that yes, credit card companies were effectively strongarming merchants and merchants were given rights to charge extra to credit card holders, the ability to refuse some credit cards, etc. (Which may be noble, but potentially impractical if it results in customers lining up with $100 worth of stuff, then not completing the transaction because they refuse to pay an extra $3-5 in credit card fees and leaving for someone else).
The only way to advertise it is to build it into prices and have the cashier say "your total is $100, but if you pay by cash, I'll give you a discount - you'll only pay $95". (Customers hate having things "tacked on" at the end - they want to know that the item they're buying is the price shown on the tag. Of course, giving a discount is a nicety where you pay less than tagged price, or even if you couch it as "If you pay by cash, I won't charge sales tax")