Not only that: the truly gifted, good IT people go to managed services and then take the jobs away from the common IT person. It's good for managed services companies, because they make a lot of money by only employing the exceptional types, but in the long term it's bad because it sets the expectation that a few super bright people can do the job of a half dozen normal sysadmin types.
Experience has told me something about automated batching of config changes which your 'senior' admin should've known as well. This is crucial:
DEPLOY IN (SEQUENTIAL) PHASES. I don't care if you tested it in one situation or 5: if you've got 50 different situations, you need to 'test' it in each of those unless you know those different situations are in fact the same situation. This means a longer deployment, but you need to test ad verify everything, especially something infrastructural. It will take longer, but it's inerrantly necessary.
Not only does it reduce the outage potential, but it allows you to more quickly back out of it. Sure, it's not as lazy as deploying everywhere at once after a couple quick tests, but it's more foolproof than having half a dozen people look at your changes. Yes, having a second set of eyes is important, but its mostly pointless if they don't fully understand what they're looking - that's why they're the junior, after all.
There are certain things you can not learn - such as things which do not yet exist.
Case in point, from experience: complex mail migration tools. Take the use case of "Migrate mailboxes from x mail system to y mail system." Yes, there are dozens if not nearly a hundred different tools for doing so. Many vendors provide tools for their products which work with other mail systems to a limited degree, and there are a handful of 3rd party commercial and open source tools available for the job.
None of them work well except in the most simple of use cases: only a few users, simple mailbox utilization, not a lot of actual data, lengthy downtime is acceptable, shared mailboxes aren't important, etc.
Or sometimes it's not simply what needs to be done, but the timeframe in which it needs to be done. A tool might work perfectly, but at a 10th the performance you need to meet your deliverables. That's where sysadmin monkey coding comes into play - hack that tool up, throw it in a wrapper, and hope you put your bounds at the right place to not get into a race condition or fork bomb. It's not elegant but it's fast and gets the job done when nothing else seems to be able to.
Honestly, if you're not hitting situations where hacking together custom code, packaging your own tools, etc. aren't coming into play, you're not really trying that hard to find the best solutions. You're taking the 90% effectiveness solution and running with it, to the detriment and irritation of everyone who uses the systems you manage. Eventually, decisions like that will catch up with you: no, they may not require 'ongoing maintenance' like a custom internal process might, but they're going to be unmaintainable in the long run, anyway.
... as opposed to most programmers, who seem to think that a system is an open sandbox in which they can piss and shit to their hearts content, expecting it to magically clean itself.:)
At least the simpleton sysadmins understand the cause and effect of various behaviors.
(That said, balance is really best. You're much more versatile that way and look like a miracle worker to everyone.)
... until you compare a suitably designed Intel chip to the task, in which you measure operations per second per watt per dollar, in which the Intel chip would win again.
The low end Atom SoCs Intel is coming out with now very much compete with ARM on price per performance watt. (Unfortunately.)
For instance, I lived in a town years ago of about 10k people ('regional' population center). They had their own Coke and Pepsi bottling facilities. They were small facilities but presumably everything was done there for the region/area. Presumably, this is done in most places; I know I've got a "Pepsi Bottling Group" facility here (as well as a large Coca Cola facility of some sort as well); it's near an area where a great number of private wells are sunk, so presumably they're pulling their water off-grid, so to speak.
Between CocaCola and Pepsi, the number of drinks available in the supermarket are fairly negligible: they own most brands nowadays, it seems. So while some drinks need to be shipped in, the vast majority of the drinks are bottled using local water. It makes sense: you cut down on your distribution transportation costs markedly (50% as expensive? 80%?) by just having to ship the syrup and bottles/cans. Water is heavy and very common, why ship it? (That's probably why 'bottled water' never comes from where it's claimed to come from - it's too expensive to ship.)
That said, there are also people who run their drinking water through RO etc. filters, some who completely denurture their water and then add an off-the-shelf mineral additive, etc. - not common, but I'm sure that they would, with global distribution of foods, skew the scales a bit.
Also, Southern France has a lot of wine. Maybe that's what he was referring to?
They could do it for about 25% less in a corporation-friendly state (right to work) where there is no personal state income tax and very low corporate tax, too. You know, somewhere with low employment rates and a lot of people seeking jobs, and where $15/hour is a hell of a lot of money (similar to what about $90k/year would be in the SF Bay area wrt cost of living, I'm guestimating).
The plant would have a never ending supply of hard working people, and they could easily do 24/7 manufacturing/assembly in many locations. You'd also get a fair number of people with greater-than-GED levels of education in many locations by doing this, so you could easily stratify the skill levels for things like QC/QA. The overall product would be greatly superior to whatever would be gotten in China (assuming part supply issues were not a problem).
It would be inconsistent with the near-religious dogma of the typical Apple user in the US - where Apple resides and sells most of its products - to have a factory in the US. Factories in the US would provide jobs for the 'welfare' and 'low' class peoples of the disdained 'flyover' states. This is inconsistent with "hate and denigrate America at all costs".
Yes, the powerful of both sides of the political spectrum in the US do pretty much everything to sell out the American public for the purposes of company value and corporate political handouts. It's best to keep all manufacturing overseas, where the common American high-pay consumer can safely compartmentalize things out of mind.
That's debatable. Google needs QC/QA devs, they need people to run their backend operations and devops, and many other common 'routine' tasks. Not everyone at Google is a full-fledged implementation engineering developer - they probably make (a lot) more than the $130k or whatever it is.
For instance, know some competent developers not making much more than $40k. Yes, they're young and it's their first job, but it's not assembly line programming, either.
Ironically, 120k in the Bay area is probably pretty close to about 50k in many of the 'flyover' states, if you consider the cost of living. I can pay for a mortgage on a 2k sqft house for half what a studio in SF cost me, and I can do a lot more in general with that 50k here than I can in the Bay Area. About the only financial benefit I could see to living there is that you don't have to buy winter clothes and you can find some really sweet deals on used sports cars in great condition (though you'd probably rarely get to drive it fast). Aside from the career benefits for working for Google/Oracle/Yahoo or some other big name IT company, there really aren't that many financial lifestyle benefits. (Culturally, that's probably slightly different and debatable: it all depends on what you want, but the SF Bay lifestyle comes with a high financial premium.)
That said, you've got to consider the perks Google offers, too. I imagine they still offer stocks, which has quite a lot of value in and of itself, but it's well known that they offer their customers:
* Very generous healthcare plans * Very high quality free cafeteria food on campus * Flexible schedules * Game and recreation rooms * Exercise facilities
So it might be less than what Microsoft might pay their customers, once you adjust for the local cost of living and the suffering required to live in the SF Bay area, but I'm going to guess that the work environment is much more enjoyable than at Microsoft. For me, the full cafeterias alone would be worth an extra $15k a year or so - I'm a picky eater and hate cooking unless it's with someone beautiful.:P
That said, I make about $55-$65k normally, pay no state income tax, and work from home and much pay less for a mortgage on a 2000sqft house with a nice yard than a studio apartment in SF. I'm having chicken soup with my daughter right now at my kitchen table, because she was sick and I had to pick her up from school 2 blocks away. I am making way, way more than the average Googler is.:D
My experience in several different hospitals is that it largely depends on the size of the hospital.
Smaller hospitals have shit for IT skill or capabilities, usually. You'll 50-200 workstations with a dozen proprietary systems, many of which may not even run Windows (eg. legacy stuff that runs eg MUMPS). You'll have multi-million-dollar grant funded xray machines running Windows NT or Windows 95sp1 because that's all they'll run. These will probably all be on a topographically flat network with a half dozen 'infrastructure' servers. Many of these networks just use switches, not managed or locked down as should be the case in a healthcare network.
Healthcare vendors are a big, big part of the problem. They sell things they don't want to maintain. Often, products will be sold for millions of dollars to -small- hospitals, even when the product isn't done yet. Due to government meddling and regulations, hospitals (particularly the smaller ones) are forced to buy software which claims certain requirements; the vendors are then not really all that required to deliver in feature, just in name. It's dotcom software all over again, funded by tax money, really.
The rest of the problem is that the healthcare system isn't really structured to properly do IT. IT answers to the CFO or a CTO of a "nonprofit" organization. They don't understand asset depreciation or anything like that, and they just expect IT to make it work, all while complying with the myriad of regulations. Often, the decision making process for IT equipment doesn't even involve IT - I've seen a dozen servers arrive for a 30 bed hospital for record OCR without IT knowing about the delivery. IT is there just for the 'maintenance' and everything runs around them.
When the patent trials in question hinge on specious claims based on broadly obvious troll patents, it should - as is the case with this guy's and Apple's patents.
There are a number of 'night mode' apps available for Android.... though, for the life of me, I can't seem to find any of them. I know for fact I had some installed on at least one of my phones since ICS came out.
Do they have an internal team for making workable replacements for their own software and/or hardware, or do they forget the 'lessons learned' with each new iteration? Because their stuff tends to be the most frustrating to get to work with anything else (properly).
The best thing I can say about Apple is that they got VPN connectivity Right in both iOS and OSX. Beyond that, it's been a general bag of meh sprinkled with fail and incompatibility for the past 5 years.
That may be true for you, but I've seen quite a few popular applications simply not release anything for the older OSes. It may be different now due to the unified binary issue at around that time, but the last time I used a mac for any period of time (10.4/10.5 era), most of what I found wouldn't work on 10.4 without using an older version or jumping through hoops not required at the time anywhere else (eg. compiling it).
Hopefully mac users don't have to put up with that nonsense anymore to get up-to-date versions of their software.
R&D quality is meaningless when you're dealing with a consumer commodity, such as the iPhone (or any smartphone). It's a race to the bottom every. single. time. That is what Apple is fighting.
Look at DVD players, or cassette tape players, for that matter. Sony had cassette players and later CD and DVD players locked up tight for the better part of 20 years through one means or another. At the end of their reign it was due to image more than any actual quality. But then media consumption became commodity, and the bottom fell out. You can get a $15 DVD player now from Walmart or even some gas stations for a bit more.
That is what Apple does not want to see happen to the cell phone industry, because it's all they've got. If they can't maintain control of cell phones, they've got to compete with all the other media distribution markets out there - Google Play, Amazon Prime, etc. - on multiple platforms due to not having market dominance.
So they've put a shitton into marketing, first and foremost. That's where most of Apple's money has gone since they released OS X: marketing. Even when you're selling non-physical things like software and music, it's impossible to have that kind of ROI when your market is as big as these companies are and the competition is as stiff as it is.
Seriously: provide for me an honest comparision of how Apple has done discernibly better research and development than, say, HTC, resulting in better products. (I'd argue they haven't, simply based on consumer preference. Apple's products weren't even twice as good as HTCs at less than twice the price point, based on consumer preference and intiial investment amount. In fact, you could argue they were half as good, based on market numbers.)
In the northern hemisphere it'd be clockwise, and in the southern hemisphere counter-clockwise - because it's an intuitive motion which won't work depending on which side of the globe you're on.
Symbian and Windows Mobile were both extensively used on cell phones. You had many apps available, and could add more (through side-loading or direct download).
The only thing Apple has done in the phone market which is in the least bit revolutionary, from an implementation standpoint, was to be the first to implement
The general feature set now offered in smartphones was available in 1993 from a number of vendors, in 1993 context (most notably because small color touchscreens and ubiquitous cellular networks were not yet invented). From the wiki article on the Sharp Zaurus:
In September 1993, Sharp introduced the PI-3000, the first in the Zaurus line of PDAs, as a follow-on to Sharp's earlier Wizard line of PDAs (the Wizard also influenced Apple's Newton). Featuring a black and white LCD screen, handwriting recognition, and optical communication capabilities among its features, the Zaurus soon became one of Sharp's flagship products.
The PI-4000, released in 1994, expanded the Zaurus' features with a built-in modem and facsimile functions. This was succeeded in 1995 by the PI-5000, which had e-mail and mobile phone interfaces, as well as PC linking capability. The Zaurus K-PDA was the first Zaurus to have a built-in keyboard in addition to handwriting recognition; the PI-6000 and PI-7000 brought in additional improvements.
There's also the IBM Simon, from just recently - 1994. That couldn't possibly predate Apple's invention of the smartphone in 2007, nevermind that the first product to be called a smartphone in 1994 with Ericsson's GS88.
The fact that the IBM Simon has an almost identical corner radius as the iPhone is, I'm sure, purely coincidental. It has nothing to do with what a person might consider to be prior art, nothing at all.
Then there's the iPaq h6315, which was a decent enough device, in 2004. You may not know this, but iPaq devices were the shit for about 4-6 years there, from around 1999-2005. They were the desirable portable device and basically single-handedly ended the geekly quest for "wearable computers" due to its broad capabilities. It was a cellphone, a PDA, and had installable applications. Bluetooth, wireless, color touchscreen - and so on. Yes, it ran Windows Mobile 5.0, but that was not only the best but the only thing out there which could even approach its general cabailities..
This was all years before Apple even got on its feet again with PC sales, while the iPod was just Yet Another MP3 Player. Apple didn't step out until it basically adopted cable TV's content delivery scheme to mobile devices with the iStore.
It's exploits like this which make me pine for someone to re-implement VMS security mechanisms for modern operating systems. If I could get that kind of granular control at the IP level of a network, I'd be even happier. "Prohibit all traffic from to anywhere except sites x, y, z". It wouldn't be a fix, but it'd sure help.
I know I can do it with layer 7 filtering, but it's still a huge headache today.
I've used it. It always seems to make my sweat sting more when it gets in my eyes, to the point where I have to wash my face/eye area with soap/water to stop it from obscuring my vision.
iBUYPOWER and other similar, smaller companies have something in common that Dell, HP, et al do not have: they're small and nimble, and they specialize. They do one thing, and they do it well. Even if HP/Dell/etc. have departments or divisions which specialize, they can't compete because of the corporate overhead. See: Alienware's ultimate mediocre standing.
I'm sure a big part of the reason why they're not doing well is because people don't buy as many PCs anymore, but people do still have PCs (and laptops). They're more resilient and last longer now than they did a decade ago, and that's another part of it. I don't think the 'iPhone craze' has much to do with it, that's a misnomer.
The fact is that any successful product company (or industry) will become a commodity unless they are seen by the public at large as adding value to whatever they integrate. Don't kid yourself - everyone's an integrator to one degree or another, even Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. They're just integrating at a different level - and adding value.
With Intel, nvidia, and AMD all providing largely/fully integrated systems out the door (via integrated chipsets and GPUs), and most people 'just' wanting things like email, web browsing, and maybe some video playback and light gaming, there's nothing to distinguish the companies which put those devices in a box and label it with their brand when none of them bother to be anything but acceptable (or universally horrible - I don't know, I've not bought any of their stuff for home use for years), and few aesthetically distinguishing factors between them, why care?
Apple's products may not be that different than HPs and Dells, but they at least market their shit^Wproducts well. They have a frenzy of marketing every 3 or so years (or whatever it is now) when a new product is due, and they provide their customers with a very narrow set of products to pick from (something like two configuration options per line?). Then they provide good support (so I've heard is the perception), which is entirely unheard of pretty much anywhere, anymore, in an industry where "good support" hasn't been seen for a decade.
My personal experience is that HP and Dell are the preferred suppliers for this sort of thing. Who else are you going to buy? IBM/Lenovo, Acer, or Asus? None of them have the value that Dell or HP have these days for general purpose desktop computing.
Hell, Dell/HP are my preferred server vendors, as well. When it comes to servers, they tend to have less gongshow anachronism than IBM. UEFI actually boots quickly on their platform(s). While they use less Intel Ethernet, it's something I can work with, versus the craptastic RAID controllers shipping on IBMs (at least on Windows; with Linux, we have other options on IBMs, eg. LSI firmware and mdraid).
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?
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So in other words, conservative people (not necessarily political, but probably financial) tend to be better sysadmins.
(Yes, that's been my observation, too. On the flip side, 'rockstar developers' almost invariably seem to be of the red diaper variety.)
Not only that: the truly gifted, good IT people go to managed services and then take the jobs away from the common IT person. It's good for managed services companies, because they make a lot of money by only employing the exceptional types, but in the long term it's bad because it sets the expectation that a few super bright people can do the job of a half dozen normal sysadmin types.
Guess what, those bright people burn out too.
Experience has told me something about automated batching of config changes which your 'senior' admin should've known as well. This is crucial:
DEPLOY IN (SEQUENTIAL) PHASES. I don't care if you tested it in one situation or 5: if you've got 50 different situations, you need to 'test' it in each of those unless you know those different situations are in fact the same situation. This means a longer deployment, but you need to test ad verify everything, especially something infrastructural. It will take longer, but it's inerrantly necessary.
Not only does it reduce the outage potential, but it allows you to more quickly back out of it. Sure, it's not as lazy as deploying everywhere at once after a couple quick tests, but it's more foolproof than having half a dozen people look at your changes. Yes, having a second set of eyes is important, but its mostly pointless if they don't fully understand what they're looking - that's why they're the junior, after all.
There are certain things you can not learn - such as things which do not yet exist.
Case in point, from experience: complex mail migration tools. Take the use case of "Migrate mailboxes from x mail system to y mail system." Yes, there are dozens if not nearly a hundred different tools for doing so. Many vendors provide tools for their products which work with other mail systems to a limited degree, and there are a handful of 3rd party commercial and open source tools available for the job.
None of them work well except in the most simple of use cases: only a few users, simple mailbox utilization, not a lot of actual data, lengthy downtime is acceptable, shared mailboxes aren't important, etc.
Or sometimes it's not simply what needs to be done, but the timeframe in which it needs to be done. A tool might work perfectly, but at a 10th the performance you need to meet your deliverables. That's where sysadmin monkey coding comes into play - hack that tool up, throw it in a wrapper, and hope you put your bounds at the right place to not get into a race condition or fork bomb. It's not elegant but it's fast and gets the job done when nothing else seems to be able to.
Honestly, if you're not hitting situations where hacking together custom code, packaging your own tools, etc. aren't coming into play, you're not really trying that hard to find the best solutions. You're taking the 90% effectiveness solution and running with it, to the detriment and irritation of everyone who uses the systems you manage. Eventually, decisions like that will catch up with you: no, they may not require 'ongoing maintenance' like a custom internal process might, but they're going to be unmaintainable in the long run, anyway.
... as opposed to most programmers, who seem to think that a system is an open sandbox in which they can piss and shit to their hearts content, expecting it to magically clean itself. :)
At least the simpleton sysadmins understand the cause and effect of various behaviors.
(That said, balance is really best. You're much more versatile that way and look like a miracle worker to everyone.)
... until you compare a suitably designed Intel chip to the task, in which you measure operations per second per watt per dollar, in which the Intel chip would win again.
The low end Atom SoCs Intel is coming out with now very much compete with ARM on price per performance watt.
(Unfortunately.)
The fattest kids I know these days are vegetarians. All those veggie oils instead of healthy animal fat don't do you any good.
"Local" is relative.
For instance, I lived in a town years ago of about 10k people ('regional' population center). They had their own Coke and Pepsi bottling facilities. They were small facilities but presumably everything was done there for the region/area. Presumably, this is done in most places; I know I've got a "Pepsi Bottling Group" facility here (as well as a large Coca Cola facility of some sort as well); it's near an area where a great number of private wells are sunk, so presumably they're pulling their water off-grid, so to speak.
Between CocaCola and Pepsi, the number of drinks available in the supermarket are fairly negligible: they own most brands nowadays, it seems. So while some drinks need to be shipped in, the vast majority of the drinks are bottled using local water. It makes sense: you cut down on your distribution transportation costs markedly (50% as expensive? 80%?) by just having to ship the syrup and bottles/cans. Water is heavy and very common, why ship it? (That's probably why 'bottled water' never comes from where it's claimed to come from - it's too expensive to ship.)
That said, there are also people who run their drinking water through RO etc. filters, some who completely denurture their water and then add an off-the-shelf mineral additive, etc. - not common, but I'm sure that they would, with global distribution of foods, skew the scales a bit.
Also, Southern France has a lot of wine. Maybe that's what he was referring to?
They could do it for about 25% less in a corporation-friendly state (right to work) where there is no personal state income tax and very low corporate tax, too. You know, somewhere with low employment rates and a lot of people seeking jobs, and where $15/hour is a hell of a lot of money (similar to what about $90k/year would be in the SF Bay area wrt cost of living, I'm guestimating).
The plant would have a never ending supply of hard working people, and they could easily do 24/7 manufacturing/assembly in many locations. You'd also get a fair number of people with greater-than-GED levels of education in many locations by doing this, so you could easily stratify the skill levels for things like QC/QA. The overall product would be greatly superior to whatever would be gotten in China (assuming part supply issues were not a problem).
It would be inconsistent with the near-religious dogma of the typical Apple user in the US - where Apple resides and sells most of its products - to have a factory in the US. Factories in the US would provide jobs for the 'welfare' and 'low' class peoples of the disdained 'flyover' states. This is inconsistent with "hate and denigrate America at all costs".
Yes, the powerful of both sides of the political spectrum in the US do pretty much everything to sell out the American public for the purposes of company value and corporate political handouts. It's best to keep all manufacturing overseas, where the common American high-pay consumer can safely compartmentalize things out of mind.
It's more likely that Torvalds will apoligize for calling Nvidia fuckers, or fucking idiots, or whatever it was.
And that will never happen.
That's debatable. Google needs QC/QA devs, they need people to run their backend operations and devops, and many other common 'routine' tasks. Not everyone at Google is a full-fledged implementation engineering developer - they probably make (a lot) more than the $130k or whatever it is.
For instance, know some competent developers not making much more than $40k. Yes, they're young and it's their first job, but it's not assembly line programming, either.
Ironically, 120k in the Bay area is probably pretty close to about 50k in many of the 'flyover' states, if you consider the cost of living. I can pay for a mortgage on a 2k sqft house for half what a studio in SF cost me, and I can do a lot more in general with that 50k here than I can in the Bay Area. About the only financial benefit I could see to living there is that you don't have to buy winter clothes and you can find some really sweet deals on used sports cars in great condition (though you'd probably rarely get to drive it fast). Aside from the career benefits for working for Google/Oracle/Yahoo or some other big name IT company, there really aren't that many financial lifestyle benefits. (Culturally, that's probably slightly different and debatable: it all depends on what you want, but the SF Bay lifestyle comes with a high financial premium.)
Yeah, 128k/year does not
That said, you've got to consider the perks Google offers, too. I imagine they still offer stocks, which has quite a lot of value in and of itself, but it's well known that they offer their customers:
* Very generous healthcare plans
* Very high quality free cafeteria food on campus
* Flexible schedules
* Game and recreation rooms
* Exercise facilities
So it might be less than what Microsoft might pay their customers, once you adjust for the local cost of living and the suffering required to live in the SF Bay area, but I'm going to guess that the work environment is much more enjoyable than at Microsoft. For me, the full cafeterias alone would be worth an extra $15k a year or so - I'm a picky eater and hate cooking unless it's with someone beautiful. :P
That said, I make about $55-$65k normally, pay no state income tax, and work from home and much pay less for a mortgage on a 2000sqft house with a nice yard than a studio apartment in SF. I'm having chicken soup with my daughter right now at my kitchen table, because she was sick and I had to pick her up from school 2 blocks away. I am making way, way more than the average Googler is. :D
My experience in several different hospitals is that it largely depends on the size of the hospital.
Smaller hospitals have shit for IT skill or capabilities, usually. You'll 50-200 workstations with a dozen proprietary systems, many of which may not even run Windows (eg. legacy stuff that runs eg MUMPS). You'll have multi-million-dollar grant funded xray machines running Windows NT or Windows 95sp1 because that's all they'll run. These will probably all be on a topographically flat network with a half dozen 'infrastructure' servers. Many of these networks just use switches, not managed or locked down as should be the case in a healthcare network.
Healthcare vendors are a big, big part of the problem. They sell things they don't want to maintain. Often, products will be sold for millions of dollars to -small- hospitals, even when the product isn't done yet. Due to government meddling and regulations, hospitals (particularly the smaller ones) are forced to buy software which claims certain requirements; the vendors are then not really all that required to deliver in feature, just in name. It's dotcom software all over again, funded by tax money, really.
The rest of the problem is that the healthcare system isn't really structured to properly do IT. IT answers to the CFO or a CTO of a "nonprofit" organization. They don't understand asset depreciation or anything like that, and they just expect IT to make it work, all while complying with the myriad of regulations. Often, the decision making process for IT equipment doesn't even involve IT - I've seen a dozen servers arrive for a 30 bed hospital for record OCR without IT knowing about the delivery. IT is there just for the 'maintenance' and everything runs around them.
When the patent trials in question hinge on specious claims based on broadly obvious troll patents, it should - as is the case with this guy's and Apple's patents.
There are a number of 'night mode' apps available for Android. ... though, for the life of me, I can't seem to find any of them. I know for fact I had some installed on at least one of my phones since ICS came out.
Do they have an internal team for making workable replacements for their own software and/or hardware, or do they forget the 'lessons learned' with each new iteration? Because their stuff tends to be the most frustrating to get to work with anything else (properly).
The best thing I can say about Apple is that they got VPN connectivity Right in both iOS and OSX. Beyond that, it's been a general bag of meh sprinkled with fail and incompatibility for the past 5 years.
That may be true for you, but I've seen quite a few popular applications simply not release anything for the older OSes. It may be different now due to the unified binary issue at around that time, but the last time I used a mac for any period of time (10.4/10.5 era), most of what I found wouldn't work on 10.4 without using an older version or jumping through hoops not required at the time anywhere else (eg. compiling it).
Hopefully mac users don't have to put up with that nonsense anymore to get up-to-date versions of their software.
R&D quality is meaningless when you're dealing with a consumer commodity, such as the iPhone (or any smartphone). It's a race to the bottom every. single. time. That is what Apple is fighting.
Look at DVD players, or cassette tape players, for that matter. Sony had cassette players and later CD and DVD players locked up tight for the better part of 20 years through one means or another. At the end of their reign it was due to image more than any actual quality. But then media consumption became commodity, and the bottom fell out. You can get a $15 DVD player now from Walmart or even some gas stations for a bit more.
That is what Apple does not want to see happen to the cell phone industry, because it's all they've got. If they can't maintain control of cell phones, they've got to compete with all the other media distribution markets out there - Google Play, Amazon Prime, etc. - on multiple platforms due to not having market dominance.
So they've put a shitton into marketing, first and foremost. That's where most of Apple's money has gone since they released OS X: marketing. Even when you're selling non-physical things like software and music, it's impossible to have that kind of ROI when your market is as big as these companies are and the competition is as stiff as it is.
Seriously: provide for me an honest comparision of how Apple has done discernibly better research and development than, say, HTC, resulting in better products. (I'd argue they haven't, simply based on consumer preference. Apple's products weren't even twice as good as HTCs at less than twice the price point, based on consumer preference and intiial investment amount. In fact, you could argue they were half as good, based on market numbers.)
In the northern hemisphere it'd be clockwise, and in the southern hemisphere counter-clockwise - because it's an intuitive motion which won't work depending on which side of the globe you're on.
What, are you serious? Or 12?
Symbian and Windows Mobile were both extensively used on cell phones. You had many apps available, and could add more (through side-loading or direct download).
The only thing Apple has done in the phone market which is in the least bit revolutionary, from an implementation standpoint, was to be the first to implement
The general feature set now offered in smartphones was available in 1993 from a number of vendors, in 1993 context (most notably because small color touchscreens and ubiquitous cellular networks were not yet invented). From the wiki article on the Sharp Zaurus:
In September 1993, Sharp introduced the PI-3000, the first in the Zaurus line of PDAs, as a follow-on to Sharp's earlier Wizard line of PDAs (the Wizard also influenced Apple's Newton). Featuring a black and white LCD screen, handwriting recognition, and optical communication capabilities among its features, the Zaurus soon became one of Sharp's flagship products.
The PI-4000, released in 1994, expanded the Zaurus' features with a built-in modem and facsimile functions. This was succeeded in 1995 by the PI-5000, which had e-mail and mobile phone interfaces, as well as PC linking capability. The Zaurus K-PDA was the first Zaurus to have a built-in keyboard in addition to handwriting recognition; the PI-6000 and PI-7000 brought in additional improvements.
There's also the IBM Simon, from just recently - 1994. That couldn't possibly predate Apple's invention of the smartphone in 2007, nevermind that the first product to be called a smartphone in 1994 with Ericsson's GS88.
The fact that the IBM Simon has an almost identical corner radius as the iPhone is, I'm sure, purely coincidental. It has nothing to do with what a person might consider to be prior art, nothing at all.
Then there's the iPaq h6315, which was a decent enough device, in 2004. You may not know this, but iPaq devices were the shit for about 4-6 years there, from around 1999-2005. They were the desirable portable device and basically single-handedly ended the geekly quest for "wearable computers" due to its broad capabilities. It was a cellphone, a PDA, and had installable applications. Bluetooth, wireless, color touchscreen - and so on. Yes, it ran Windows Mobile 5.0, but that was not only the best but the only thing out there which could even approach its general cabailities..
This was all years before Apple even got on its feet again with PC sales, while the iPod was just Yet Another MP3 Player. Apple didn't step out until it basically adopted cable TV's content delivery scheme to mobile devices with the iStore.
It's exploits like this which make me pine for someone to re-implement VMS security mechanisms for modern operating systems. If I could get that kind of granular control at the IP level of a network, I'd be even happier. "Prohibit all traffic from to anywhere except sites x, y, z". It wouldn't be a fix, but it'd sure help.
I know I can do it with layer 7 filtering, but it's still a huge headache today.
I've used it. It always seems to make my sweat sting more when it gets in my eyes, to the point where I have to wash my face/eye area with soap/water to stop it from obscuring my vision.
iBUYPOWER and other similar, smaller companies have something in common that Dell, HP, et al do not have: they're small and nimble, and they specialize. They do one thing, and they do it well. Even if HP/Dell/etc. have departments or divisions which specialize, they can't compete because of the corporate overhead. See: Alienware's ultimate mediocre standing.
I'm sure a big part of the reason why they're not doing well is because people don't buy as many PCs anymore, but people do still have PCs (and laptops). They're more resilient and last longer now than they did a decade ago, and that's another part of it. I don't think the 'iPhone craze' has much to do with it, that's a misnomer.
The fact is that any successful product company (or industry) will become a commodity unless they are seen by the public at large as adding value to whatever they integrate. Don't kid yourself - everyone's an integrator to one degree or another, even Intel, Nvidia, and AMD. They're just integrating at a different level - and adding value.
With Intel, nvidia, and AMD all providing largely/fully integrated systems out the door (via integrated chipsets and GPUs), and most people 'just' wanting things like email, web browsing, and maybe some video playback and light gaming, there's nothing to distinguish the companies which put those devices in a box and label it with their brand when none of them bother to be anything but acceptable (or universally horrible - I don't know, I've not bought any of their stuff for home use for years), and few aesthetically distinguishing factors between them, why care?
Apple's products may not be that different than HPs and Dells, but they at least market their shit^Wproducts well. They have a frenzy of marketing every 3 or so years (or whatever it is now) when a new product is due, and they provide their customers with a very narrow set of products to pick from (something like two configuration options per line?). Then they provide good support (so I've heard is the perception), which is entirely unheard of pretty much anywhere, anymore, in an industry where "good support" hasn't been seen for a decade.
My personal experience is that HP and Dell are the preferred suppliers for this sort of thing. Who else are you going to buy? IBM/Lenovo, Acer, or Asus? None of them have the value that Dell or HP have these days for general purpose desktop computing.
Hell, Dell/HP are my preferred server vendors, as well. When it comes to servers, they tend to have less gongshow anachronism than IBM. UEFI actually boots quickly on their platform(s). While they use less Intel Ethernet, it's something I can work with, versus the craptastic RAID controllers shipping on IBMs (at least on Windows; with Linux, we have other options on IBMs, eg. LSI firmware and mdraid).
Do these vendors really have that much historically locked up financially in home user sales that the home PC market flatlining (or, at least, becoming commodity) is enough to sink their business? Servers and storage may not be 'interesting' but they're fairly high profit margin and low support (vs. home user desktops). Intuitively, their profits should be up. So why aren't they?