I think it's important to note that blue-ray disks are still routinely priced 10 dollars more than their full-priced DVD counterparts. Do these movies provide 30% more benefit to the consumer? The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is more like the difference between VHS and Beta, rather than VHS to DVD. It can be noticeable, but A: only to consumers with theater sized TV's and good eyes and B: assuming there are no technological translations along the way (progressive scan video to interlaced TV, for example). With the exploitive cost difference, the visual difference needs to be large.
HDTV has been a cock-up from the beginning. Supporting both interlaced signals and progressive scan was a huge mistake, one which ensures that content looks awful 50% of the time. In modern televisions, interlaced is a marketing tool to say that your set displays at a higher resolution than it actually does, while degrading image quality. Consumers are now used to horribly jaggy and obviously compressed HDTV broadcast signals, frequently no better than a standard-resolution television. Add in the blur inherent in dealing with resolution / interlaced / phase of moon conflicts, and you get an ecosystem that is utterly baffling, underperforms, and is really only needed for video gaming and displaying computer output.
Oh, and when Eraser, is in your top 20, you need to get more titles. Seriously guys, Eraser? Was Jingle All The Way not available?
The XP boots and loads to desktop a bit slower than yours (this isn't a spring chicken laptop). But as large portions of what used to consistute boot time in NT4 now happen after the desktop appears, the destop isn't usabe for several minutes afterwards. It is bogged down while windows starts its services, the virus checker initializes, office (and any other app that I haven't caught) pre-load themselves, everything phones home to version check, etc.
Sleep usually works, but drains the battery. Hybernate is a neat trick, but XP has never been particularly good at recovering sucessfully on this laptop.
And I love OS's. I'm currently triple booting with Sky OS, Ubuntu, and XP. DOS, Minuette, Kolibri, BusyBox, and others are all great choices to try.
The ratio of solved crimes will go up, but never to 100%. In the end, what is up for debate is the question of whether or not whatever the increase in unsolved crimes is worth A: the cost of the system, relative to other uses of that money, and B: the risk of abuse.
This is one of the main reasons why we have three branches of government instead of an elected monarch... giving unlimited power to any one agency has proven problematic in the world's history. Imagine what would happen if, under the guise of "public information," the Democrats and Republicans tracked eachother's movements. Or realtors with connections tracked the movements of other realtors, only to make counter-offers on all of their good finds. Or your parents tracking you throughout your college years. A database of everywhere you've driven to in your life. Ever been to a friend's birthday party at a strip club? You can give up on your goal of becoming a teacher now: it's public.
What you're talking about is a National database of everyone's movements which A: only a few people have access to and B: can be used for ANY purpose, as it falls under public information.
How many crimes would it prevent? I remember seeing an "Amber Alert" equivalent for someone in London last year. The person had disappeared from a subway terminal in plain view of several cameras. Despite having cameras on every street corner in the city, no other camera picked her up. Even with people pouring over all the footage they could find, the performance of the system was simply far below expected.
Let's say that unsolved vehicle thefts drops a whopping 10%. With 1,300,000 vehicle thefts in the US last year, that's a recovery rate of 130,000.
Now, with well over 4 million miles of highway and easily twice that much again of regular road, let's say 4 million traffic light cameras at a ballpark cost of 1,000 dollars each (* 4 directions) + 100 per year maintenence / service. These are all guesses, mind you, assuming the government negotiates well. That adds up to an initial cost of 16 billion dollars and an annual cost of 4 hundred million dollars. Let's amortize that 16 billion purely on a 10% alternative ROI opportunity cost. That comes out to 2 billion dollars per year for the system.
That two billion dollars is helping to recover 120,000 vehicles. We're now paying approximately 20,000 dollars above and beyond normal police costs per returned vehicle, which is significantly higher than the used value of most of those cars.
And then, of course, you have to factor in abuse costs. What if Nixon had access to this tracking data while creating his enemies list? What would the cost be if a senator in the pocket of Boeing could smear Northrup out of a bidding war before it happened? Or your competitors could find your carefully-crafted suppliers list by simply following your movements? Or many highly qualified Americans lose the opportunity to become teachers or politicans because of places they visited as a teenager?
In the balance of things, it may very well be worth the overall cost. But putting protections in place would be an essential step that can only come from public oversight... the sort of public oversight that is sidestepped by private actions like this.
California Child deaths by cause. Cause Number of Deaths Mortality Rate
Natural 3,923
Perinatal Conditions 1,508
Congenital Anomalies 836
Neoplasms 322
Respiratory Disease 157
Circulatory Disease 146
Nervous System Disease 183
SIDS 153
Unintentional Injury 1,149
Motor Vehicle 746
Drowning 134
Fire/Burn 20
Poisoning 44
Suffocation/Strangulation 73
Firearm 25
Homicide 508
Firearm 395
Suicide 155
Firearm 54
Suffocation/Strangulation 75
Poisoning 8
Comparatively: Number of Amber Alerts in California 2003 - 24. Role of Amber Alerts in recovering those children - Questionable.
In terms of children-saved-per-dollar, we could be doing a lot more for children by educating and enforcing laws about swimming pool fences, or cleaning the air in our major cities. Or, for that matter, getting drivers to pay attention to the road and stop running over the kids.
I know it's popular to suggest that marijuana isn't that bad, and perhaps it is. But that's really not a judgment to make until the facts are in. It's been less than 20 years since the more potent varieties have shown up, and it would be surprising if there were any reasonable conclusion for at least a decade or two. In cases like this the onus is always on the person that's arguing that it's safe. Basically because the harm of not doing is far less than the possible harm of doing in most cases.
Very true, and I'm glad you're arguing for a standard that clearly the US government applies to all other aspects of suspicious chemicals which might be entering our food ecosystem.
True. In an industry where time-to-crack is frequently days before release, "successful" DRM is measured by impact on paying customers, rather than impact on sales. It's successful if sufficient to make the bad business bureaucrats go away without crippling sales. Also, it prevents casual copying and is sweetened with additional functionality. All in all, now that it isn't a buggy mess anymore, steam is a pretty good compromise.
Wow! One big cloud of spectrum. Damn those oligopolistic senators who are preventing us from reaching that utopia!
Oh, and damn the people who make radio transmitters that can only recieve small slices of signal for a reasonable cost. Don't you want the cloud?!
Oh, and damn the millions of legacy devices which all require fixed spectrum blocks without negotiation. Didn't they realize that the future was coming? Damn those applications where a DSP attached to your radio is impractical.
Damn lazy americans who don't want to price-shop every time they make a phone call by looking for the reciever in their area with the lowest prices (or get trapped in an area where every reciever is gouging). Don't they realize that by checking cell tower rates every few seconds as you drive down the highway you can optimize your cash path?
But yes, damn those Senators! Why don't they just back off from this entire thing and let natural market forces take over... by writing the millions of lines of new regulations this structured market would require, including the conversion of legacy devices (and their recycling), spectrum buyback, establishing interoperative billing communications standards, testing for aeronautical interference, etc. Clearly by not jumping on the "unlimited spectrum" utopia bandwagon based upon early technological progress and conjecture, they simply hate freedom.
Why, why don't they realize that in areas untouched by federal regulation, like Operating Systems, the free market has created such perfect efficiencies? Why can't they enjoy the benefits of a truly competitive market like California's Energy markets?
The message would not necessarily be "too sensitive to release" because it provided genuinely new information, but because it counteracted the administration's justification for going to war. The optimist would say that it reduces a figurehead which is used to pump up our troops and help insure victory, the pessimist would say that it would reduce the nation's vitrol and lower Haliburton profit margins.
Considering that over 50% of americans still believe that Iraq was connected to the attacks on 911, don't you think that we need these great figurehead enemies to power this war effort?
1. DRM will remain invisible to the end user unless they are attempting to pirate the game.
2. The DRM system will be obvious, uninstallable through normal means, and will not make an effort to hide itself.
3. DRM will *never* run when the game is not running. (Performance is bad enough without 40 versions of a poorly-written software running around.)
4. DRM will never fail to authenticate due to the existence of tools with legitimate uses, although the DRM may require said tools be closed before the game will run. The DRM will never alter functionality of your system when not running.
5. DRM will never require the user to call the manufacturer for any reason.
6. Manufacturers are responsible for maintaining their DRM system on the latest version of the operating system for a minimum of 8 years after release.
7. If the DRM does phone home, it will do so without any personal data unrelated to the basic mechanics of managing rights.
8. Phoning home should not exceed once per month, with a one-month window for the player to have an internet connection. "Requires Network Connection To Play" will be prominently featured on the box and all related marketing material.
9. If a network verification server is ever end-of-lifed, the software manufacturer must either universally unlock all software that is no longer being verified or refund the original purchase price for all users.
10. All purchasers of digital downloads will have the right to re-download for up to 8 years after the original purchase. This must include some format which can be archived in a format that can be directly installed (pending verification server, if applicable).
11. All DRM restrictions will be clearly listed on the box and related marketing material in plain english in no less than 9 point font.
Not really. As you said, the original intent of the patent system was to encourage inventions and the spreading of knowledge through granting limited time monopolies. In this case, the patent has really nothing to do with inventions, so much as protecting uncreative business implementations from competition and interaction.
It's still just a pedometer attached to a descently written application. There is no reason this would necessarily need to take place on an iPod or a Nike^TM brand shoe. This could just as easily be connecting a hip-mounted sensor to your Nokia.
Further than that, the GPS in the iPhone should make that pretty much obsolete. Heck, use the GPS to detect distance, the built in accelerometer to detect impact, and the built in network connection to upload your data in realtime to a web server tracking your workouts. Suddenly you know exactly how far you went in exactly how many steps, and can compare that to a history of everything you've done at the gym on other machines. Gratuitous shoe tie-in not required.
I think that's the rub, really. The patent is entirely gratuitous. The only reason that patents like this exists is to prevent other shoe makers from creating compatible shoes, and to prevent other exercise software makers from creating compatible systems. The patent exists only to stifle competition from interacting, as the systems have basically no merit on their own. Apple's own description is that the patent exists to stop legitimate competition. That just doesn't seem like the original intention of the patent system.
If we want to look at this in contrast to Windows, there's not really any comparison, since we barely even begin to have a grasp of their Byzantine updating system, and couldn't even speculate as to the effects of a similar problem on their side.
Considering that signed executeables on windows has been a no-go for years, I think you're seeing the effects.
Because it's impossible to design something which looks really good without having control. Wanting control doesn't make you a control freak, wanting control without reason does.
Right. By demanding pixel-perfect control, designers ignore the fact that there are many aspects that they don't have control over. For example, Your website might be displayed on a screen in vga, uxga, wxga, wsxga+, NTSC, or one of a dozen other standard sizes. The window might be resized off to the side somewhere, or there might be toolbars taking up large chunks of screen real estate. The user might need to use alternative CSS files to increase text size or contrast, or might have zoomed in on the page itself to see details of a photo. The user might not have the fonts the designer intended, and the replacement font might use different kerning. Lots of users turn images off, block ads, or other things which can change layout. Personally, I use a css override that forces all link text to be underlined.
I worked with a web designer who just couldn't wrap her mind around the idea that we just didn't know how many pixels down the bottom of the screen would be. That a screen could be 1,600 pixels wide, or someone could be viewing it on their iPhone. None of the background images she created wrapped, and trying to talk to her about the elements we needed was like trying to explain advanced color harmony to a blind person.
Grandparent's point stands: If you're stuck in a pixel-perfect mindset, you're not a web designer. You're a print designer trying to fake your way through web, and you're making life hell on the rest of us.
Re:It gives you something just as bad...
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
Also, consoles have exactly one DRM system, the one created and debugged by the console manufacturer.
If there was only one DRM on your PC, it might not be so bad. If however you play 30 games on your computer over it's lifetime, you now potentially have 30 different DRM's running in the background. Many of them will be made for a different Service Pack or even operating system than the one you will be running. None of them will be maintained or fixed in any way if conflicts arise. Think of it: 30 different pieces of software spread over 7 years, all using exploits to hide in the underbelly of your operating system, and all written by the lowest bidder.
So if it isn't acting maliciously like a virus, but there are other reasons that it may be a virus and it may not, it gets a local scan and an individual scan from McAfee's private online database?
That's actually quite cool. It introduces a new level of threat rating between safe and deadly, and ensures that emerging threats are protcted against before needing to do a full local virus database update.
Essentially, the paper itself could display individual pixels, in almost exactly the same way that sections of electroluminescent tape could individually light up, but they would need to be wired for it. The difference between running one magnetic inducing plane to the back of a specially-cut region of the paper and running hundreds of wires all crisscrossing them is significnat. And that, of course, is what separates 2 dollar a foot electroluminescent tape from hundred dollar per 3-inch electroluminescent displays. At the point where you've fabricated electromagnetic matrices to interact with the e-paper, you're far into the cost of a real ebook reader.
The writer there isn't thinking about the tools at hand in any realistic fashion. Realistic tech writers aren't interesting, hence only the fantastic (and ignorant) survive.
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone know if the rotation of the earth around the sun mean that we actually rotate 366.25 times per revolution, or 364.25?
A pixel is just a very small, very square segment. I believe what the grandparent poster is trying to say is that this particular e-ink display is heavily segment based, and proposition supported by how it is being used in the cover and how cheap it is to make.
The cheap calculator displays are mostly LCD, which power both high end pixel-driven displays and the videogames that come free with your Happy Meal. This particular implementation of the technology appears to fall to the latter.
Hence, it would be nearly impossible to display anything other than what is currently on the cover without rebuilding the e-ink sheet. In this particular case, we're all winners.
This sounds exactly like HP under Carly Fiorina, who took a legendary industry powerhouse and turned it into an empty shell brand that made (and continues to make) some of the worst junk this industry has seen. I still can't open a new contract's computer without finding some piece of HP driver software permanently updating, failing to shutdown, or just plain broken. Don't get me started on their wireless printing implementation.
I feel confident right now offering Dells to clients because the machines that I've seen from you guys are actually quite good... Basically, the only laptops I trust any more are Dell, Lenovo, and Apple. Have you seen the fail rates that Sony has been churning out? And HP?
You can't get services-after-the-sale if you don't get a sale, and you don't get a sale if you start churning out the same crap like the rest of the industry that has moved to this model. So either charge more for well-made hardware or eat the margin in the hopes of making it up on services. But don't expect to sell high-profit services on low-quality machines made by Compaq.
Are there any other parts of living where something that usually costs 60 dollars per month can suddenly balloon out to 20,000 dollars per month without explicit user intervention? Even credit cards call you when usage patterns start looking strange.
Of course, the real problem is that people are getting *horribly* overcharged for international data roaming. I'm sorry, AT&T charges twenty dollars per MB in Canada. Telus charges just 1.7 dollars, and that's considered ripping off. AT&T charges Thirty dollars per MB in the UK, whereas Vodafone charges between 1c and 2 dollars (depending on plan). I don't care if an AT&T representative is taking a personal flight to London for each customer, setting up their wireless network, getting a few too many pints outside the Tate Modern, and flying back, it shouldn't have a 10,000% markup.
Personally, I think that by law users should have to opt-in to these ridiculous international rates while being shown what competing costs in that territory are and how to contact those vendors. Rates like these are just abusing the system to make a buck (or 20 thousand).
Flash drives don't really slip under 10 dollars, though. If you're trying to sell a movie for 20 dollars, having half of that eaten up by the cost of the media would be a bit of a dissuasion.
The size of the chip that you put into a flash drive doesn't really change certain baseline manufacturing costs.
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I think it's important to note that blue-ray disks are still routinely priced 10 dollars more than their full-priced DVD counterparts. Do these movies provide 30% more benefit to the consumer? The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is more like the difference between VHS and Beta, rather than VHS to DVD. It can be noticeable, but A: only to consumers with theater sized TV's and good eyes and B: assuming there are no technological translations along the way (progressive scan video to interlaced TV, for example). With the exploitive cost difference, the visual difference needs to be large.
HDTV has been a cock-up from the beginning. Supporting both interlaced signals and progressive scan was a huge mistake, one which ensures that content looks awful 50% of the time. In modern televisions, interlaced is a marketing tool to say that your set displays at a higher resolution than it actually does, while degrading image quality. Consumers are now used to horribly jaggy and obviously compressed HDTV broadcast signals, frequently no better than a standard-resolution television. Add in the blur inherent in dealing with resolution / interlaced / phase of moon conflicts, and you get an ecosystem that is utterly baffling, underperforms, and is really only needed for video gaming and displaying computer output.
Oh, and when Eraser, is in your top 20, you need to get more titles. Seriously guys, Eraser? Was Jingle All The Way not available?
Without fanfare, this bastion of the internet is being removed from the mainstream.
This bastion of the internet was removed from the mainstream about 10 years ago.
The XP boots and loads to desktop a bit slower than yours (this isn't a spring chicken laptop). But as large portions of what used to consistute boot time in NT4 now happen after the desktop appears, the destop isn't usabe for several minutes afterwards. It is bogged down while windows starts its services, the virus checker initializes, office (and any other app that I haven't caught) pre-load themselves, everything phones home to version check, etc.
Sleep usually works, but drains the battery. Hybernate is a neat trick, but XP has never been particularly good at recovering sucessfully on this laptop.
And I love OS's. I'm currently triple booting with Sky OS, Ubuntu, and XP. DOS, Minuette, Kolibri, BusyBox, and others are all great choices to try.
False.
The ratio of solved crimes will go up, but never to 100%. In the end, what is up for debate is the question of whether or not whatever the increase in unsolved crimes is worth A: the cost of the system, relative to other uses of that money, and B: the risk of abuse.
This is one of the main reasons why we have three branches of government instead of an elected monarch... giving unlimited power to any one agency has proven problematic in the world's history. Imagine what would happen if, under the guise of "public information," the Democrats and Republicans tracked eachother's movements. Or realtors with connections tracked the movements of other realtors, only to make counter-offers on all of their good finds. Or your parents tracking you throughout your college years. A database of everywhere you've driven to in your life. Ever been to a friend's birthday party at a strip club? You can give up on your goal of becoming a teacher now: it's public.
What you're talking about is a National database of everyone's movements which A: only a few people have access to and B: can be used for ANY purpose, as it falls under public information.
How many crimes would it prevent? I remember seeing an "Amber Alert" equivalent for someone in London last year. The person had disappeared from a subway terminal in plain view of several cameras. Despite having cameras on every street corner in the city, no other camera picked her up. Even with people pouring over all the footage they could find, the performance of the system was simply far below expected.
Let's say that unsolved vehicle thefts drops a whopping 10%. With 1,300,000 vehicle thefts in the US last year, that's a recovery rate of 130,000.
Now, with well over 4 million miles of highway and easily twice that much again of regular road, let's say 4 million traffic light cameras at a ballpark cost of 1,000 dollars each (* 4 directions) + 100 per year maintenence / service. These are all guesses, mind you, assuming the government negotiates well. That adds up to an initial cost of 16 billion dollars and an annual cost of 4 hundred million dollars. Let's amortize that 16 billion purely on a 10% alternative ROI opportunity cost. That comes out to 2 billion dollars per year for the system.
That two billion dollars is helping to recover 120,000 vehicles. We're now paying approximately 20,000 dollars above and beyond normal police costs per returned vehicle, which is significantly higher than the used value of most of those cars.
And then, of course, you have to factor in abuse costs. What if Nixon had access to this tracking data while creating his enemies list? What would the cost be if a senator in the pocket of Boeing could smear Northrup out of a bidding war before it happened? Or your competitors could find your carefully-crafted suppliers list by simply following your movements? Or many highly qualified Americans lose the opportunity to become teachers or politicans because of places they visited as a teenager?
In the balance of things, it may very well be worth the overall cost. But putting protections in place would be an essential step that can only come from public oversight... the sort of public oversight that is sidestepped by private actions like this.
It's called the Free Market. We left our politicians free to market us, and they sold us out.
California Child deaths by cause.
Cause Number of Deaths Mortality Rate
Natural 3,923
Perinatal Conditions 1,508
Congenital Anomalies 836
Neoplasms 322
Respiratory Disease 157
Circulatory Disease 146
Nervous System Disease 183
SIDS 153
Unintentional Injury 1,149
Motor Vehicle 746
Drowning 134
Fire/Burn 20
Poisoning 44
Suffocation/Strangulation 73
Firearm 25
Homicide 508
Firearm 395
Suicide 155
Firearm 54
Suffocation/Strangulation 75
Poisoning 8
Comparatively: Number of Amber Alerts in California 2003 - 24. Role of Amber Alerts in recovering those children - Questionable.
In terms of children-saved-per-dollar, we could be doing a lot more for children by educating and enforcing laws about swimming pool fences, or cleaning the air in our major cities. Or, for that matter, getting drivers to pay attention to the road and stop running over the kids.
I know it's popular to suggest that marijuana isn't that bad, and perhaps it is. But that's really not a judgment to make until the facts are in. It's been less than 20 years since the more potent varieties have shown up, and it would be surprising if there were any reasonable conclusion for at least a decade or two. In cases like this the onus is always on the person that's arguing that it's safe. Basically because the harm of not doing is far less than the possible harm of doing in most cases.
Very true, and I'm glad you're arguing for a standard that clearly the US government applies to all other aspects of suspicious chemicals which might be entering our food ecosystem.
True. In an industry where time-to-crack is frequently days before release, "successful" DRM is measured by impact on paying customers, rather than impact on sales. It's successful if sufficient to make the bad business bureaucrats go away without crippling sales. Also, it prevents casual copying and is sweetened with additional functionality. All in all, now that it isn't a buggy mess anymore, steam is a pretty good compromise.
Wow! One big cloud of spectrum. Damn those oligopolistic senators who are preventing us from reaching that utopia!
Oh, and damn the people who make radio transmitters that can only recieve small slices of signal for a reasonable cost. Don't you want the cloud?!
Oh, and damn the millions of legacy devices which all require fixed spectrum blocks without negotiation. Didn't they realize that the future was coming? Damn those applications where a DSP attached to your radio is impractical.
Damn lazy americans who don't want to price-shop every time they make a phone call by looking for the reciever in their area with the lowest prices (or get trapped in an area where every reciever is gouging). Don't they realize that by checking cell tower rates every few seconds as you drive down the highway you can optimize your cash path?
But yes, damn those Senators! Why don't they just back off from this entire thing and let natural market forces take over... by writing the millions of lines of new regulations this structured market would require, including the conversion of legacy devices (and their recycling), spectrum buyback, establishing interoperative billing communications standards, testing for aeronautical interference, etc. Clearly by not jumping on the "unlimited spectrum" utopia bandwagon based upon early technological progress and conjecture, they simply hate freedom.
Why, why don't they realize that in areas untouched by federal regulation, like Operating Systems, the free market has created such perfect efficiencies? Why can't they enjoy the benefits of a truly competitive market like California's Energy markets?
I actually phrased it very carefully to allow for Steam, and that has been a very effective DRM.
The message would not necessarily be "too sensitive to release" because it provided genuinely new information, but because it counteracted the administration's justification for going to war. The optimist would say that it reduces a figurehead which is used to pump up our troops and help insure victory, the pessimist would say that it would reduce the nation's vitrol and lower Haliburton profit margins.
Considering that over 50% of americans still believe that Iraq was connected to the attacks on 911, don't you think that we need these great figurehead enemies to power this war effort?
To be fair, EA did have a download service for Spore, and will probably do so again for C&C.* At least we're that much closer to the year 2000.
*PC Only, with all slimeware.
Can we have a DRM bill of rights?
1. DRM will remain invisible to the end user unless they are attempting to pirate the game.
2. The DRM system will be obvious, uninstallable through normal means, and will not make an effort to hide itself.
3. DRM will *never* run when the game is not running. (Performance is bad enough without 40 versions of a poorly-written software running around.)
4. DRM will never fail to authenticate due to the existence of tools with legitimate uses, although the DRM may require said tools be closed before the game will run. The DRM will never alter functionality of your system when not running.
5. DRM will never require the user to call the manufacturer for any reason.
6. Manufacturers are responsible for maintaining their DRM system on the latest version of the operating system for a minimum of 8 years after release.
7. If the DRM does phone home, it will do so without any personal data unrelated to the basic mechanics of managing rights.
8. Phoning home should not exceed once per month, with a one-month window for the player to have an internet connection. "Requires Network Connection To Play" will be prominently featured on the box and all related marketing material.
9. If a network verification server is ever end-of-lifed, the software manufacturer must either universally unlock all software that is no longer being verified or refund the original purchase price for all users.
10. All purchasers of digital downloads will have the right to re-download for up to 8 years after the original purchase. This must include some format which can be archived in a format that can be directly installed (pending verification server, if applicable).
11. All DRM restrictions will be clearly listed on the box and related marketing material in plain english in no less than 9 point font.
Not really. As you said, the original intent of the patent system was to encourage inventions and the spreading of knowledge through granting limited time monopolies. In this case, the patent has really nothing to do with inventions, so much as protecting uncreative business implementations from competition and interaction.
It's still just a pedometer attached to a descently written application. There is no reason this would necessarily need to take place on an iPod or a Nike^TM brand shoe. This could just as easily be connecting a hip-mounted sensor to your Nokia.
Further than that, the GPS in the iPhone should make that pretty much obsolete. Heck, use the GPS to detect distance, the built in accelerometer to detect impact, and the built in network connection to upload your data in realtime to a web server tracking your workouts. Suddenly you know exactly how far you went in exactly how many steps, and can compare that to a history of everything you've done at the gym on other machines. Gratuitous shoe tie-in not required.
I think that's the rub, really. The patent is entirely gratuitous. The only reason that patents like this exists is to prevent other shoe makers from creating compatible shoes, and to prevent other exercise software makers from creating compatible systems. The patent exists only to stifle competition from interacting, as the systems have basically no merit on their own. Apple's own description is that the patent exists to stop legitimate competition. That just doesn't seem like the original intention of the patent system.
If we want to look at this in contrast to Windows, there's not really any comparison, since we barely even begin to have a grasp of their Byzantine updating system, and couldn't even speculate as to the effects of a similar problem on their side.
Considering that signed executeables on windows has been a no-go for years, I think you're seeing the effects.
Because it's impossible to design something which looks really good without having control. Wanting control doesn't make you a control freak, wanting control without reason does.
Right. By demanding pixel-perfect control, designers ignore the fact that there are many aspects that they don't have control over. For example, Your website might be displayed on a screen in vga, uxga, wxga, wsxga+, NTSC, or one of a dozen other standard sizes. The window might be resized off to the side somewhere, or there might be toolbars taking up large chunks of screen real estate. The user might need to use alternative CSS files to increase text size or contrast, or might have zoomed in on the page itself to see details of a photo. The user might not have the fonts the designer intended, and the replacement font might use different kerning. Lots of users turn images off, block ads, or other things which can change layout. Personally, I use a css override that forces all link text to be underlined.
I worked with a web designer who just couldn't wrap her mind around the idea that we just didn't know how many pixels down the bottom of the screen would be. That a screen could be 1,600 pixels wide, or someone could be viewing it on their iPhone. None of the background images she created wrapped, and trying to talk to her about the elements we needed was like trying to explain advanced color harmony to a blind person.
Grandparent's point stands: If you're stuck in a pixel-perfect mindset, you're not a web designer. You're a print designer trying to fake your way through web, and you're making life hell on the rest of us.
Also, consoles have exactly one DRM system, the one created and debugged by the console manufacturer.
If there was only one DRM on your PC, it might not be so bad. If however you play 30 games on your computer over it's lifetime, you now potentially have 30 different DRM's running in the background. Many of them will be made for a different Service Pack or even operating system than the one you will be running. None of them will be maintained or fixed in any way if conflicts arise. Think of it: 30 different pieces of software spread over 7 years, all using exploits to hide in the underbelly of your operating system, and all written by the lowest bidder.
So if it isn't acting maliciously like a virus, but there are other reasons that it may be a virus and it may not, it gets a local scan and an individual scan from McAfee's private online database?
That's actually quite cool. It introduces a new level of threat rating between safe and deadly, and ensures that emerging threats are protcted against before needing to do a full local virus database update.
Essentially, the paper itself could display individual pixels, in almost exactly the same way that sections of electroluminescent tape could individually light up, but they would need to be wired for it. The difference between running one magnetic inducing plane to the back of a specially-cut region of the paper and running hundreds of wires all crisscrossing them is significnat. And that, of course, is what separates 2 dollar a foot electroluminescent tape from hundred dollar per 3-inch electroluminescent displays. At the point where you've fabricated electromagnetic matrices to interact with the e-paper, you're far into the cost of a real ebook reader.
The writer there isn't thinking about the tools at hand in any realistic fashion. Realistic tech writers aren't interesting, hence only the fantastic (and ignorant) survive.
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone know if the rotation of the earth around the sun mean that we actually rotate 366.25 times per revolution, or 364.25?
A pixel is just a very small, very square segment. I believe what the grandparent poster is trying to say is that this particular e-ink display is heavily segment based, and proposition supported by how it is being used in the cover and how cheap it is to make.
The cheap calculator displays are mostly LCD, which power both high end pixel-driven displays and the videogames that come free with your Happy Meal. This particular implementation of the technology appears to fall to the latter.
Hence, it would be nearly impossible to display anything other than what is currently on the cover without rebuilding the e-ink sheet. In this particular case, we're all winners.
This sounds exactly like HP under Carly Fiorina, who took a legendary industry powerhouse and turned it into an empty shell brand that made (and continues to make) some of the worst junk this industry has seen. I still can't open a new contract's computer without finding some piece of HP driver software permanently updating, failing to shutdown, or just plain broken. Don't get me started on their wireless printing implementation.
I feel confident right now offering Dells to clients because the machines that I've seen from you guys are actually quite good... Basically, the only laptops I trust any more are Dell, Lenovo, and Apple. Have you seen the fail rates that Sony has been churning out? And HP?
You can't get services-after-the-sale if you don't get a sale, and you don't get a sale if you start churning out the same crap like the rest of the industry that has moved to this model. So either charge more for well-made hardware or eat the margin in the hopes of making it up on services. But don't expect to sell high-profit services on low-quality machines made by Compaq.
Are there any other parts of living where something that usually costs 60 dollars per month can suddenly balloon out to 20,000 dollars per month without explicit user intervention? Even credit cards call you when usage patterns start looking strange.
Of course, the real problem is that people are getting *horribly* overcharged for international data roaming. I'm sorry, AT&T charges twenty dollars per MB in Canada. Telus charges just 1.7 dollars, and that's considered ripping off. AT&T charges Thirty dollars per MB in the UK, whereas Vodafone charges between 1c and 2 dollars (depending on plan). I don't care if an AT&T representative is taking a personal flight to London for each customer, setting up their wireless network, getting a few too many pints outside the Tate Modern, and flying back, it shouldn't have a 10,000% markup.
Personally, I think that by law users should have to opt-in to these ridiculous international rates while being shown what competing costs in that territory are and how to contact those vendors. Rates like these are just abusing the system to make a buck (or 20 thousand).
Flash drives don't really slip under 10 dollars, though. If you're trying to sell a movie for 20 dollars, having half of that eaten up by the cost of the media would be a bit of a dissuasion.
The size of the chip that you put into a flash drive doesn't really change certain baseline manufacturing costs.