Don't worry, that won't be the case for long, (and not in a good way) companies would love to make buying something outside your local authorized dealer illegal.
You talk about that one scandal as if it's unique, there are MANY examples of us paying more for Canadian made products than the Americans do. There was a news article a year or two ago about a specific model of car that was priced more than $10,000 higher at the Canadian dealership across the street from the factory than it was in Hawaii, and best of all, the excuse given was that the transportation costs in Canada were higher! Thing is, the Canadian government has "investigated" this sort of thing many times, including yet another report that came out just last week. Do you think anything will ever change? Canadians pay more because... well, because we pay more, that's why!
On some things we can buy online and get the same price as the rest of the world, but if you just can't do that (some products don't work well that way, and the government makes it illegal to do so with other ones, not to mention the companies that flat out refuse to sell to customers outside the US) then you're just screwed.
It would hold true for any poorly programmed upgrade utility, of any form. Other possible causes of issues are upgrade utilities built in to existing firmware that have various limits on what the new firmware can look like, so for example if version 1.2 thinks the next version must be of exactly size Y, the manufacturer may make 1.3 fit that parameter, but also update the upgrade utility to allow new firmwares of size Z instead. And then when the next firmware upgrade is made to 1.4 the firmware is using that extra space. in that situation an upgrade from 1.2 directly to 1.4 would fail. (I've also seen this done with changing encryption keys, or new compression methods being implemented, in all cases an intermediate firmware is used to upgrade the upgrader before the following firmware makes use of the new features)
Of course the real culprit in any of these cases is extremely poor programming. About the first thing taught in any programming course is to never make assumptions about the initial state of any system, or about the input being handed to you. So your upgrade utility should always check first to make sure things are going to fit it's per-conceived notions, and have a contingency plan to work around it (either refuse the update, or fix the issue before continuing)
Thing is, most people don't want to loose all settings when they upgrade, so most of these upgrades leave some form of settings file intact (or it's stored somewhere other than the area you are flashing) and then does whatever magic is needed to convert the stored settings to the format expected by the new version. So the problem isn't so much in the firmware/software versions, as it is in an updater that doesn't properly translate stored settings between version, AND fails to check version numbers before updating, AND has no fallback to wipe corrupted data If you've only tested your conversion software to work from 1.5->1.6, you should check that it's actually running on 1.5 first before updating, if you can't/won't do that, then you should check all the values, and if things don't look like they're going to work, set them to default values.
Except that I find the "polish" of apple products to be SEVERELY lacking. the user interface of the initial ipod was horrible by comparison to the other devices of the day, and they continue to have similar problems. As for your other points, As someone doing technical work at people's houses every day, I use all manner of devices, I HATE the apple keyboard with a passion. it's about the most difficult keyboard to use. no dedicated number row, no indication looking at the keys as to if you are using caps or small case, as for the actual speed of input, I hate apple for convincing manufacturers they could do away with hardware keyboards, that's one trend that badly needs reversing! and if you have to use an onscreen keyboard, they could at least implement something like swype. Luckily most Android phones have the dedicated number row, the keys change from upper to lower case depending on the shift status, and most of the new ones support swype for input (some are even nice enough to have slide out keyboards)
And although completely unrelated to this topic, I use an airline website over a travel agent because it is MUCH simpler, much more reliable, always cheaper, and always "just works"
It's not the patent office's fault if people think patents mean something is legit. And I would say that invalidating all those patents would put exactly zero dent in those fraud schemes. Fixing human stupidity is far outside the scope of the patent office.
Prior art is a problem, broad and vague patents are an even bigger problem. Honestly, I believe "patents" are the problem, but I know that this view is not widely held (despite much research to support it)
So you want to remove the ability to swipe between screens within an app (an often used feature) so as to be able to do so to multi-task (a seldom used feature on most phones) Additionally, when you have a bunch of things open, swiping is a pain, because you never know what order they are in anyway, a list is much easier.
I can't believe how many sites use silverlight. Even Microsoft backed away from Silverlight ages ago, but some sites are even just now starting to implement Silverlight. As a Linux user this is EXTREMELY frustrating, and as a user of mobile devices it isn't any better. Silverlight has never worked properly on linux, and nobody has ever made a plugin for it for Android, there was a Linux Firefox plugin ages ago called "moonlight" that seemed to work on about 10% of Silverlight sites, but that stopped development ages ago too, and isnt' compatible with any of the latest browsers.
As much as I would LOVE them to do this... I'm not sure how a judge is supposed to invalidate the patent of a company that wasn't even involved in the lawsuit?
While I agree with your point in general, perpetual motion machines are not an example of the patent office's failings. The patent office's job is to determine if something is new and novel, substantially different from anything previously invented, and not overly broad in scope. Their job is not to determine if something works as claimed. A patent on something that doesn't, and can't, work, doesn't harm any real inventors. A patent on something that someone else has already done, or on something obvious, or so broad as to net things completely unrelated to what is patented, THOSE hurt real inventors. But I don't want them evaluating every thing as to whether or not it actually works, because they would likely reject many truly novel inventions based solely on the grounds that they haven't seen it work before, so assume your implementation can't.
And for those that will reply saying that the patent office doesn't currently do any of what I said, I agree with you, that doesn't change the fact that it is their job, it only proves that they aren't currently doing their job.
I'm not sure how it's supposed to be hard on an android. Press and hold the home button, pick your app from the list of running ones. I can't imagine any easier way to switch between them... (I had this even back on my froyo phone, so I know it's been around for a while)
Except that I can have one cable hanging out of my wall charger that can charge my camera, GPS, cell phone, wife's cell phone, work cell phone, bluetooth headset, remote control helicopter, television universal remote, or any other device that happens to be nearby. All with the same cable. the only devices I can't charge that way are my friend's iphone and ipod. for that he has to bring his own cable.
I have a blackberry for work... I never could understand why anyone would ever want to use BBM for anything. It's exactly like SMS, only it doesn't work unless the other person has a blackberry, and even if they do, you can't just send it to their phone number (something you already have) you have to instead find out what their special BBM PIN is, and if they ever get a new phone, that will change (even while their cell phone number stays the same) I never found any reason to not simply use SMS.
They produced the first good MP3 player, the iPod. Then others developed good MP3 players too.
MP3 players existed before the iPod, many of them were cheaper, had more storage, and better user interfaces. When the iPod came out it had half the features, but better marketing. I had an MP3 player in the days of the original ipods, it had twice the storage, and played video (the ipod didn't yet) it also had a much more intuitive user interface, and a longer battery life.
They moved on to the first good smartphone, the iPhone. Then others developed good smartphones too.
Smartphones existed before the iPhone, many of them were cheaper, had more features, and better user interfaces, when the iPhone came out it had half the features, but better marketing. I had a smart phone before the first iPhone, it had lots of apps available, cut and paste functionality, and several other features that didn't exist on the iphone at the time.
See a trend here? Apple has NEVER created the "best" anything, or the "first" anything, They produce marketing. that's it.
Apple needs a new form factor
And I'm sure that once someone else starts to make inroads in to the mainstream market with something neat, Apple will find this new device, make an inferior version, and market the heck out of it. That's what they do. And I'll admit, they do it really well.
"much longer"? hardly. depending on your model of android phone the iphone might have a slightly longer battery life, or your android phoen could have a MUCH longer battery life than the iphone. iphone is about middle of the road for battery life among smart phones.
Please give an example of a time where iphone has ever been in the lead? Other devices were better than the iphone before it came out, and continued to be superior after it did. Once the Android became mainstream it was already lightyears ahead of the iphone, and has maintained it's lead ever since.
the only thing the iphone has ever been in the lead on is marketing and market share (and honestly, it's lost on both of those now)
I hope you're not trying to use that to suggest the iphone would be better...
Unfortunately, no matter how far ahead Android phones are, the manufacturers are always rushing to remove features not available on the iphones. My last android phone had a slide out keyboard, a dedicated HDMI output port, and a micro-SD slot... Unfortunately as iPhone doesn't have those, many Android manufacturers have removed all of those from their latest offerings. Everyone wants to copy the iPhone all right, they want all our phones to be just as useless.
I like the fact that out of the box, the iPhone can handle, calendar invites. Android doesn't, so you have to find the "right" app to handle it correctly, and then there's no guarantee it will work on future versions of Android.
Where on earth did you come up with that complete and utter nonsense? Google Calendar comes with every Android phone I've ever seen, and it has always handled calendar invites perfectly well. As for future versions, I highly doubt they would remove such a basic feature that has existed since the start.
I found the summary easy enough to understand, though that's perhaps due to my knowledge of the current stare of copyright in Canada. Basically when the last copyright bill was shovelled through parliament the government promised that it wouldn't lead to individuals being charged for private infringement. To try to guarantee that they put in place a cap of a maximum of $5,000 for ALL past infringements combined making the act of sending a lawyer after someone potentially more expensive then you could possibly recoup in court. (Also note that is a maximum, and the minimum is substantially less. The court is unlikely to award everyone the maximum penalty as that wouldn't differentiate between someone copying a few movies, and copying every movie ever made)
It gets worse, I've seen the "cost of living index" intentionally omit energy and food prices as "too volatile". What is the cost of living without energy or food?
That way the "cost of living" index, which is used to set wages and other benefits, shows little inflation, even while costs soar.
no, I realize that they are unlikely to do so (I even stated as such in my original comment) I just don't like the idea that they can, for no reason whatsoever, and with no oversight at all, do so.
People keep suggesting if you don't like something to vote with your wallet, and that's what I do. I use my vacation time and dollars in other countries instead.
Considering the evidence we've been seeing recently for liquid water on the martian surface at some time in the past, it does stand to reason that Mars did at one point fall in the habitable zone.
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Don't worry, that won't be the case for long, (and not in a good way) companies would love to make buying something outside your local authorized dealer illegal.
slightly different in that due to our public health care system the governments actually legislate the prices for certain drugs.
You talk about that one scandal as if it's unique, there are MANY examples of us paying more for Canadian made products than the Americans do. There was a news article a year or two ago about a specific model of car that was priced more than $10,000 higher at the Canadian dealership across the street from the factory than it was in Hawaii, and best of all, the excuse given was that the transportation costs in Canada were higher!
Thing is, the Canadian government has "investigated" this sort of thing many times, including yet another report that came out just last week. Do you think anything will ever change?
Canadians pay more because... well, because we pay more, that's why!
On some things we can buy online and get the same price as the rest of the world, but if you just can't do that (some products don't work well that way, and the government makes it illegal to do so with other ones, not to mention the companies that flat out refuse to sell to customers outside the US) then you're just screwed.
It would hold true for any poorly programmed upgrade utility, of any form. Other possible causes of issues are upgrade utilities built in to existing firmware that have various limits on what the new firmware can look like, so for example if version 1.2 thinks the next version must be of exactly size Y, the manufacturer may make 1.3 fit that parameter, but also update the upgrade utility to allow new firmwares of size Z instead. And then when the next firmware upgrade is made to 1.4 the firmware is using that extra space. in that situation an upgrade from 1.2 directly to 1.4 would fail. (I've also seen this done with changing encryption keys, or new compression methods being implemented, in all cases an intermediate firmware is used to upgrade the upgrader before the following firmware makes use of the new features)
Of course the real culprit in any of these cases is extremely poor programming. About the first thing taught in any programming course is to never make assumptions about the initial state of any system, or about the input being handed to you. So your upgrade utility should always check first to make sure things are going to fit it's per-conceived notions, and have a contingency plan to work around it (either refuse the update, or fix the issue before continuing)
Thing is, most people don't want to loose all settings when they upgrade, so most of these upgrades leave some form of settings file intact (or it's stored somewhere other than the area you are flashing) and then does whatever magic is needed to convert the stored settings to the format expected by the new version. So the problem isn't so much in the firmware/software versions, as it is in an updater that doesn't properly translate stored settings between version, AND fails to check version numbers before updating, AND has no fallback to wipe corrupted data
If you've only tested your conversion software to work from 1.5->1.6, you should check that it's actually running on 1.5 first before updating, if you can't/won't do that, then you should check all the values, and if things don't look like they're going to work, set them to default values.
Except that I find the "polish" of apple products to be SEVERELY lacking. the user interface of the initial ipod was horrible by comparison to the other devices of the day, and they continue to have similar problems.
As for your other points, As someone doing technical work at people's houses every day, I use all manner of devices, I HATE the apple keyboard with a passion. it's about the most difficult keyboard to use. no dedicated number row, no indication looking at the keys as to if you are using caps or small case, as for the actual speed of input, I hate apple for convincing manufacturers they could do away with hardware keyboards, that's one trend that badly needs reversing! and if you have to use an onscreen keyboard, they could at least implement something like swype. Luckily most Android phones have the dedicated number row, the keys change from upper to lower case depending on the shift status, and most of the new ones support swype for input (some are even nice enough to have slide out keyboards)
And although completely unrelated to this topic, I use an airline website over a travel agent because it is MUCH simpler, much more reliable, always cheaper, and always "just works"
It's not the patent office's fault if people think patents mean something is legit. And I would say that invalidating all those patents would put exactly zero dent in those fraud schemes.
Fixing human stupidity is far outside the scope of the patent office.
Prior art is a problem, broad and vague patents are an even bigger problem. Honestly, I believe "patents" are the problem, but I know that this view is not widely held (despite much research to support it)
So you want to remove the ability to swipe between screens within an app (an often used feature) so as to be able to do so to multi-task (a seldom used feature on most phones)
Additionally, when you have a bunch of things open, swiping is a pain, because you never know what order they are in anyway, a list is much easier.
I'll take the Android way any day.
Or you could install flash on your tablet... just saying...
That's the great part about Android, unlike the iOS devices that don't have flash, we can view the vast majority of the web on our devices.
I can't believe how many sites use silverlight. Even Microsoft backed away from Silverlight ages ago, but some sites are even just now starting to implement Silverlight. As a Linux user this is EXTREMELY frustrating, and as a user of mobile devices it isn't any better. Silverlight has never worked properly on linux, and nobody has ever made a plugin for it for Android, there was a Linux Firefox plugin ages ago called "moonlight" that seemed to work on about 10% of Silverlight sites, but that stopped development ages ago too, and isnt' compatible with any of the latest browsers.
As much as I would LOVE them to do this... I'm not sure how a judge is supposed to invalidate the patent of a company that wasn't even involved in the lawsuit?
While I agree with your point in general, perpetual motion machines are not an example of the patent office's failings.
The patent office's job is to determine if something is new and novel, substantially different from anything previously invented, and not overly broad in scope. Their job is not to determine if something works as claimed. A patent on something that doesn't, and can't, work, doesn't harm any real inventors. A patent on something that someone else has already done, or on something obvious, or so broad as to net things completely unrelated to what is patented, THOSE hurt real inventors. But I don't want them evaluating every thing as to whether or not it actually works, because they would likely reject many truly novel inventions based solely on the grounds that they haven't seen it work before, so assume your implementation can't.
And for those that will reply saying that the patent office doesn't currently do any of what I said, I agree with you, that doesn't change the fact that it is their job, it only proves that they aren't currently doing their job.
I'm not sure how it's supposed to be hard on an android. Press and hold the home button, pick your app from the list of running ones. I can't imagine any easier way to switch between them... (I had this even back on my froyo phone, so I know it's been around for a while)
Except that I can have one cable hanging out of my wall charger that can charge my camera, GPS, cell phone, wife's cell phone, work cell phone, bluetooth headset, remote control helicopter, television universal remote, or any other device that happens to be nearby. All with the same cable. the only devices I can't charge that way are my friend's iphone and ipod. for that he has to bring his own cable.
I have a blackberry for work... I never could understand why anyone would ever want to use BBM for anything.
It's exactly like SMS, only it doesn't work unless the other person has a blackberry, and even if they do, you can't just send it to their phone number (something you already have) you have to instead find out what their special BBM PIN is, and if they ever get a new phone, that will change (even while their cell phone number stays the same)
I never found any reason to not simply use SMS.
Actually the proper research is very conclusive. There are no health hazards from cell phone use.
People don't like that answer though, so they keep trying to come up with something that says otherwise.
They produced the first good MP3 player, the iPod. Then others developed good MP3 players too.
MP3 players existed before the iPod, many of them were cheaper, had more storage, and better user interfaces. When the iPod came out it had half the features, but better marketing. I had an MP3 player in the days of the original ipods, it had twice the storage, and played video (the ipod didn't yet) it also had a much more intuitive user interface, and a longer battery life.
They moved on to the first good smartphone, the iPhone. Then others developed good smartphones too.
Smartphones existed before the iPhone, many of them were cheaper, had more features, and better user interfaces, when the iPhone came out it had half the features, but better marketing. I had a smart phone before the first iPhone, it had lots of apps available, cut and paste functionality, and several other features that didn't exist on the iphone at the time.
See a trend here? Apple has NEVER created the "best" anything, or the "first" anything, They produce marketing. that's it.
Apple needs a new form factor
And I'm sure that once someone else starts to make inroads in to the mainstream market with something neat, Apple will find this new device, make an inferior version, and market the heck out of it. That's what they do. And I'll admit, they do it really well.
"much longer"? hardly. depending on your model of android phone the iphone might have a slightly longer battery life, or your android phoen could have a MUCH longer battery life than the iphone. iphone is about middle of the road for battery life among smart phones.
Please give an example of a time where iphone has ever been in the lead? Other devices were better than the iphone before it came out, and continued to be superior after it did. Once the Android became mainstream it was already lightyears ahead of the iphone, and has maintained it's lead ever since.
the only thing the iphone has ever been in the lead on is marketing and market share (and honestly, it's lost on both of those now)
I hope you're not trying to use that to suggest the iphone would be better...
Unfortunately, no matter how far ahead Android phones are, the manufacturers are always rushing to remove features not available on the iphones. My last android phone had a slide out keyboard, a dedicated HDMI output port, and a micro-SD slot... Unfortunately as iPhone doesn't have those, many Android manufacturers have removed all of those from their latest offerings. Everyone wants to copy the iPhone all right, they want all our phones to be just as useless.
I like the fact that out of the box, the iPhone can handle, calendar invites. Android doesn't, so you have to find the "right" app to handle it correctly, and then there's no guarantee it will work on future versions of Android.
Where on earth did you come up with that complete and utter nonsense? Google Calendar comes with every Android phone I've ever seen, and it has always handled calendar invites perfectly well. As for future versions, I highly doubt they would remove such a basic feature that has existed since the start.
I found the summary easy enough to understand, though that's perhaps due to my knowledge of the current stare of copyright in Canada.
Basically when the last copyright bill was shovelled through parliament the government promised that it wouldn't lead to individuals being charged for private infringement. To try to guarantee that they put in place a cap of a maximum of $5,000 for ALL past infringements combined making the act of sending a lawyer after someone potentially more expensive then you could possibly recoup in court. (Also note that is a maximum, and the minimum is substantially less. The court is unlikely to award everyone the maximum penalty as that wouldn't differentiate between someone copying a few movies, and copying every movie ever made)
It gets worse, I've seen the "cost of living index" intentionally omit energy and food prices as "too volatile". What is the cost of living without energy or food?
That way the "cost of living" index, which is used to set wages and other benefits, shows little inflation, even while costs soar.
no, I realize that they are unlikely to do so (I even stated as such in my original comment)
I just don't like the idea that they can, for no reason whatsoever, and with no oversight at all, do so.
People keep suggesting if you don't like something to vote with your wallet, and that's what I do. I use my vacation time and dollars in other countries instead.
Considering the evidence we've been seeing recently for liquid water on the martian surface at some time in the past, it does stand to reason that Mars did at one point fall in the habitable zone.