What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.
How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?
I drew a completely different conclusion than you did from the available fact. You conclude that they prioritized function, but they clearly a) performed inadequate testing, that is, in an environment in which it is too easy to get a signal, and b) put the emphasis on the machine on design.
Fine, draw your own conclusions, then. You're free to disagree with me, but don't try to justify your position by opening with "What you're telling us is [exactly the opposite of what you just told us]."
Perhaps the confusion lies in our definitions. You seem to be implying that if Apple had ignored aesthetics altogether and assembled a hideous monstrosity of a phone with the sole goal of making it work well, but then failed to adequately test it to make sure it really did work as well as it was supposed to, you'd call it "prioritizing form over function." I would call it "inadequate testing."
If, on the other hand, Apple were to design a beautiful, sleek and elegant phone, deliberately sacrificing functionality, usability, or reliability in order to preserve the aesthetic beauty of their creation, whether it actually worked or not I would call that "prioritizing form over function." I'm not sure what you would call it. My assertion is that this is NOT what Apple did with the iPhone 4; the reason they switched to using external antennas was an attempt to improve reception, not because it would look better. Your disagreement is baffling to me, but you're entitled to be wrong.:-)
I'm not sure how I could explain more clearly, but you've obviously misunderstood. You've suggested all sorts of things Apple could have done to fix the antenna problem at the expense of looking nice, and are insisting that the reason Apple didn't do those things is because it was more important for the phone to look nice. That is incorrect. The reason Apple didn't do those things is because Apple believed there wasn't a problem. They didn't drop calls during their testing. They didn't notice the signal strength dropping. The antenna seemed to function just fine.
What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.
How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?
If Apple cared about function more than form then they'd care enough to do real-world testing without the cover.
This has nothing to do with caring about function more than form. They did test it. They didn't see this problem in testing.
Apple didn't prioritize form over function in the design of the iPhone 4. Of course they tried to keep the whole thing a secret - competitors who prioritize form over function will try to copy their look, and sell to consumers who prioritize form over function, which will cost Apple bazillions of dollars in lost sales. Apple could make a phone that looks like a turd, and somebody else would come along and make a cheaper phone that looks like a turd, market it by saying "it looks just like Apple's expensive turd phone but it costs less!" and people would buy it because they're idiots.
They prioritized the appearance of the prototype over its function even in testing! This is just another typical Apple-esque failure at Apple.
There have been plenty of times when Apple prioritized form over function in the past. The 20th Anniversary Mac and the G4 Cube were overpriced flops. More successful examples include the iMac (from its original incarnation built from laptop parts bolted to a CRT, to the iMac G4 "desk lamp", to the modern all-in-one LCD design) and the Mac mini (successor to the G4 Cube, but sold at a reasonable price). Don't forget the proprietary Apple Display Connector and the USB speakers that shipped with the G4 Cube (which deliberately draw more power than the USB spec allows, so they could potentially fry other computers if plugged into a standard USB port), the buttonless Mighty Mouse that doesn't register right-clicks unless you lift your left finger, and probably a whole host of other terrible ideas. The iPhone 4 is not one of these.
How about having good food in school. Not low cost high fat stuff? also give the kids time to eat so they use the full 30 min lunch standing in line to just have 10 min or less to eat it. NO MORE recess time shared with launch. Make it it's own time.
Yes, this. Also, have a class that teaches kids how to cook. A lot of kids move into adult life not knowing how to prepare any food more complicated than macaroni & cheese, so it's no wonder they go to McDonald's when they're tired of their diet of mac&cheese, ramen noodles and ordering pizza.
30 minutes is enough time to eat if you brought your lunch from home. Otherwise, it's insane.
Lying? He's claiming that all the phones behave the same way, but doesn't show any data.
He showed videos of precisely the same kind of signal loss that people have been complaining about, happening with three other phones, caused just by holding them in a particular way. He provided the best statistics AT&T would allow him to provide publicly, and acknowledged that the data does show the iPhone 4 drops calls more often than the iPhone 3GS. He also provided data about their return rate so far, and how many people have called Apple's tech support about this issue. What data are you looking for?
He's using the press conference to put down his competitors,
He went out of his way to say the competing phones demonstrated are great phones. He had absolutely nothing negative to say about any of them, other than that (as shown in the videos) holding a competing phone in a particular way, in certain areas, can cause a drop in signal strength.
Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.
Let's be careful here: this problem was NOT caused by Apple's prioritization of form over function. On the contrary, the reason why the iPhone 4 has external antennas is entirely due to function, and they sacrificed form in order to do it (the black lines that separate the three different antennas are an aesthetic blemish, which Jobs acknowledged when the iPhone 4 was introduced).
Essentially what happened was this: Apple came up with the idea of using external antennas in an effort to boost signal strength and improve reception. The engineers warned that with an external antenna, you'll lose some signal strength when you hold it in certain ways. Management said "OK, we'll test it and see what happens." They tested it, and found that it wasn't a problem, so they shipped it.
So why did Apple's testing conclude that it wasn't a problem, when it clearly is a problem? First, because they probably didn't do a lot of testing in the lab with sweaty left-handed people. Second, Apple's campus gets great reception, and the problem is only noticeable in areas of poor reception. Third, whenever they took the phone out into the "real world" for field testing, they kept the phone disguised inside a case so nobody would notice they were using a prototype iPhone 4 - and the case eliminates this problem by preventing direct contact. Finally, a software bug made it look like the signal was fine when it really wasn't, so they didn't notice the effects of holding it in different ways.
Apple should have noticed the problem in their lab testing, and they didn't. That's the root of the issue here; it has nothing to do with looks. The fact that you assume the problem has anything to do with looks simply means that Apple's product designers are GENIUSES - they were prioritizing function, but designed it so well that you thought they were prioritizing looks. Never mind that the function doesn't work as well as they thought it did - function is still what drove this design.
By the way, I have a couple of coworkers with iPhone 4s who say they've never had a problem.
NAT has only been the standard for about the last 10 years or so. Prior to that, a LOT of desktop PCs were connected directly to the Internet with publicly routable IPs and no firewall.
This annoyed and confused me too, until I saw the option to turn it off.
As the other poster said, this page was being updated in real time during the announcement. I don't know why they didn't shut off the auto-reload feature after it was done, though...
When the Apple stores first opened, I don't believe they required appointments, but that policy was adopted pretty quickly. I agree that it's annoying, especially if you just have a quick question, but it does mean you don't have to wait there in the store in a long line behind other people who need their problems fixed.
In the future, I highly recommend getting the AppleCare extended warranty for any Mac. Out-of-warranty repairs are very expensive, and a lot of them aren't as easy as the screen replacement you found. Make sure you actually activate your AppleCare coverage once you've bought it; I seem to remember hearing they were going to be automating this but I'm not sure what the process is currently.
What should DNS server administrators do to sign our own domains, and configure our servers to pay attention to DNSSEC when performing lookups?
I learned how to configure BIND a decade ago, and it's mostly just been smooth sailing since then. I have no idea what's involved in setting up DNSSEC, whether it's something I can figure out how to enable in 20 minutes or a huge project that really won't be feasible for me to undertake at all. Can somebody point me in the right direction?
Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Quick, somebody update Wikipedia! You can cite this Slashdot article as your source.
...was that Mac is rarely the primary platform for game developers? Most mac games are ported from the PC or co-developed.
Halo is a notable exception to this. Actually the first ever public demo of Halo was at a Macworld Expo, and it ran on a PowerMac G4 running Mac OS 9. Bungie, the company that developed it (before they were acquired by Microsoft), was well known as a Mac game developer; most of their previous games were never ported to Windows.
Commercials are the domain for companies to get their message out.
How about: paid advertising is the domain for companies to get their message out. This includes not just television commercials, but also radio commercials, magazine ads, newspaper ads, billboards......and paid ads on web sites.
If the ad is clearly marked as such, I don't see a problem with this. Newspapers run ads that resemble news stories all the time, and to avoid confusion they mark them as "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" at the top. ScienceBlogs.com can do the same. As long as everything is clear and out in the open, what's the problem? If you don't want to read it because you aren't interested in whatever Pepsi's marketing team is trying to sell you, then just skip over the paid content and be thankful someone is helping to financially support the web site you enjoy.
I personally haven't seen a good implementation of this, with all the features described. It's quite possible there isn't one. However, the concept of what they're doing is completely obvious. People have been making page-turning animations for virtual books for decades; most of them are less fancy than what Microsoft is doing because the graphics technology didn't exist. Somebody mentioned HyperCard, for example, which did have page-turning animation but not with multitouch gestures, not in 3-D, not with transparency, and not in color, because it was created in the 1980s. Given today's technology, what Microsoft has described should be plainly obvious to anyone "skilled in the art."
Of course, the actual implementation is a different matter. I don't know nearly enough math to actually make this work. I'm sure it's very complicated, and optimizing it to the extent necessary to make it run perfectly smoothly on a mobile device is nothing to sneeze at. If Microsoft were patenting an implementation, I would be fine with that. The whole point of patents is to get people to reveal to the public how their invention works (instead of keeping it a secret that will die with them), in exchange for the right to prevent anyone from making it (or, the ability to license the patent to others for profit).
But of course, this isn't a patent on Microsoft's implementation - it's a patent on the concept, versions of which have been around for a quarter of a century. This patent hurts society.:-(
By the time Steve returned to the company in 1998, the command-semicolon shortcut was already a de-facto standard, which Apple was already ignoring. (Some Apple apps had no shortcut for Preferences, some had a random shortcut that wasn't consistent with anything.) However, it was under Steve's leadership that they came up with their own standard (that nobody else had ever used before).
I am posting this from Safari 4.1, which has two boxes at the top: an address bar, and a search bar. If I want to search Google, I use the search bar. If I want to revisit a page I've been to before, I use the address bar (Apple recently improved this feature in versions 4.1/5.0). Obviously if I want to enter a new URL, I also use the address bar.
Since I know what I'm trying to do (search my bookmarks and browser history, or search Google) I have no trouble choosing which field to use (and, for an additional hint, the former currently contains a URL while the latter says "Google" on it). When I type into the address bar, it auto-populates with a list of matches from my bookmarks and history, and is not cluttered by anything from Google. When I type into the search bar, it auto-populates with popular search terms from Google, which is a great feature that I really appreciate; these suggestions are not cluttered with search results from my bookmarks and history.
Safari's implementation is, therefore, more convenient than Firefox's.
I believe this was originally a Mac OS standard, which made its way to the UNIX world when UNIX had no standard of its own. As for why, though, I have no idea.
On the Mac, the keyboard shortcut command-semicolon became a de-facto standard, adopted by a huge percentage of Mac applications, but never accepted by Apple. With the transition to Mac OS X, Apple took the opportunity to create a new application menu, move Preferences to there, and define a new official keyboard shortcut, command-comma. I have no idea why they changed the keyboard shortcut that everyone except them had standardized on.
I could be mistaken, but I believe iTunes gift cards are activated at time of purchase, which should prevent that from happening. Also, unlike other gift cards which are often used for multiple purchases, iTunes gift cards are used to apply a one-time credit to your existing iTunes account, so if it works the first time, you know nobody can steal it because the card is already worthless. Finally, I would expect that Apple should have the ability to track the activation and use of a given iTunes gift card a lot better than some other companies, so if you did have a problem, their customer service people ought to be able to see when and where the card was activated and when it was used, on whose account.
If you're really concerned about it, you could even walk into an Apple Store, buy a gift card, then use one of the demo Macs to sign into your iTunes account and enter the card number before leaving the store. If it doesn't work, notify the salesperson you bought the card from. If you're extra paranoid, ask them to watch you do it. Don't forget to log out before leaving, obviously.
(So much for the misnomer "Apple designs good hardware." Say what? Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?)
Often because the hardware that was available before Apple's announcement was larger and uglier, and the hardware available afterwards was inspired by Apple's design (Apple demonstrates how it could be done, so other companies build something similar, but it wouldn't have occurred to them without seeing it first). The competition is often more robust and has more features, but is less elegant and may be more difficult to use.
Sorry, but you know nothing about reading sheet music. If I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that a computer should be able to randomly generate every possible combination of notes (like an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters), and one of these iterations would be close enough to an actual piece of music that it would make for a public-domain substitute. The trouble is, there's a LOT more to sheet music than the notes themselves.
Good sheet music doesn't simply contain the information required to reproduce the piece, it's written in such a way as to be clear and easy to read. This involves decisions such as: - Which repeated sections should be marked as repeats, and which should simply be written twice? - Of the repeated sections to be marked as such, should that be with repeat signs, D.C., D.S., first/second/third endings, segno/coda/fine marks, or just a measure repeat sign? - When beaming small notes together (8th and shorter), what's the clearest way to group them? - When should the stems go up, and when should they go down? Basic rule of thumb is the stems go inward toward the middle of the staff, unless you have some reason to do otherwise (such as using stems down to indicate a left hand part and stems up for right hand, for piano music, or stems down for alto/bass and stems up for soprano/tenor in choral music, but only when there are notes of different durations so they can't be combined on the same stem)? - When should an accidental be written in parentheses as a reminder that, for example, the F in the last half of this measure is sharp because there's an F-sharp in the key signature, even though the F in the first half of this measure was natural because it's tied with the F-natural (marked with an accidental) in the previous measure? Accidentals don't cross bar lines except for ties, so it really isn't required to mark the F-sharp at all, but it's a good idea if there could be confusion (but you don't want too many of such marks, or they'll get in the way). - Is it better to write a pair of eighth notes in 4/4 time and mark it "swing", or write a quarter note followed by an eighth note in 12/8 time? - How many measures should there be on each line? - Which measures should have a measure number in a box, signifying the beginning of a phrase? - When should you draw a straight line between notes to show where the melody crosses between staves or voices or whatever? - All notes have multiple names; which enharmonic equivalent is the most appropriate? When should you use e.g. an F-flat, or a C-double-sharp? This is based on which chord or scale the note is being used in, in context, so a D-flat minor scale should have an F-flat and not an E, and an F-sharp augmented chord should have a C-double-sharp and not a D. But should it really be D-flat minor, or should you be using C-sharp minor, which does have an E-natural? - When is it appropriate to include cue notes, so you can follow along with what other instruments are playing while you're not playing yourself? This lets you double-check your count to make sure you come in at the right place, but if it's not necessary, it just adds clutter. - Tons of other details I'm not currently awake enough to think of.
Reading badly written sheet music sucks. On several occasions I have rewritten a piece of music, without changing a note, to make it easier to read.
The last time I reported a bug to Microsoft, they told me I was the only customer they knew who actually understood how the stuff worked. I have mixed feelings about that.
The dell workstation at the office came with one of those abominations. Every now and then my thumb would hit that conveniently placed button, causing whatever webpage I was looking at to disappear for whatever webpage was in the list previously or next.
Yeah, this has happened to me at work too, at least two or three times. Very annoying, but it hasn't happened often enough for me to take the time to figure out how to disable them.
It just gets in the way like the windows keys do.
Weird, I never have trouble with that. Maybe you have a non-standard keyboard layout that puts the Windows keys in an easier-to-hit-by-accident place?
There are ATMs EVERYWHERE! Banks, convenience stores, gas stations.
Yes, ATMs are available, but the ones in convenience stores and gas stations all charge a fee, the ones in banks charge a fee to anyone who isn't their customer, and many banks will charge a fee to their customers when using a non-bank ATM. For example, if I have a Bank of America account, and I use a Chase ATM, both Chase and BofA will charge me fees for that transaction, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $4-$5.
Plus, you can withdraw from those ATMs even if you're not a Chase Bank customer. And many banks will refund any fees charged by the ATM network.
As far as I'm aware, most banks don't do this. Maybe they do?
When I moved to Phoenix, I opened a BofA checking account, because at the time, there were far more BofA ATMs available in Phoenix than any other financial institution. When I moved back to Portland, I closed out that account, because the same wasn't true in Portland.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.
How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?
I drew a completely different conclusion than you did from the available fact. You conclude that they prioritized function, but they clearly a) performed inadequate testing, that is, in an environment in which it is too easy to get a signal, and b) put the emphasis on the machine on design.
Fine, draw your own conclusions, then. You're free to disagree with me, but don't try to justify your position by opening with "What you're telling us is [exactly the opposite of what you just told us]."
Perhaps the confusion lies in our definitions. You seem to be implying that if Apple had ignored aesthetics altogether and assembled a hideous monstrosity of a phone with the sole goal of making it work well, but then failed to adequately test it to make sure it really did work as well as it was supposed to, you'd call it "prioritizing form over function." I would call it "inadequate testing."
If, on the other hand, Apple were to design a beautiful, sleek and elegant phone, deliberately sacrificing functionality, usability, or reliability in order to preserve the aesthetic beauty of their creation, whether it actually worked or not I would call that "prioritizing form over function." I'm not sure what you would call it. My assertion is that this is NOT what Apple did with the iPhone 4; the reason they switched to using external antennas was an attempt to improve reception, not because it would look better. Your disagreement is baffling to me, but you're entitled to be wrong. :-)
I'm not sure how I could explain more clearly, but you've obviously misunderstood. You've suggested all sorts of things Apple could have done to fix the antenna problem at the expense of looking nice, and are insisting that the reason Apple didn't do those things is because it was more important for the phone to look nice. That is incorrect. The reason Apple didn't do those things is because Apple believed there wasn't a problem. They didn't drop calls during their testing. They didn't notice the signal strength dropping. The antenna seemed to function just fine.
What you're telling us is that Apple's very testing methodology prioritizes form over function.
How on earth did you conclude exactly the opposite of what I just said?
If Apple cared about function more than form then they'd care enough to do real-world testing without the cover.
This has nothing to do with caring about function more than form. They did test it. They didn't see this problem in testing.
Apple didn't prioritize form over function in the design of the iPhone 4. Of course they tried to keep the whole thing a secret - competitors who prioritize form over function will try to copy their look, and sell to consumers who prioritize form over function, which will cost Apple bazillions of dollars in lost sales. Apple could make a phone that looks like a turd, and somebody else would come along and make a cheaper phone that looks like a turd, market it by saying "it looks just like Apple's expensive turd phone but it costs less!" and people would buy it because they're idiots.
They prioritized the appearance of the prototype over its function even in testing! This is just another typical Apple-esque failure at Apple.
There have been plenty of times when Apple prioritized form over function in the past. The 20th Anniversary Mac and the G4 Cube were overpriced flops. More successful examples include the iMac (from its original incarnation built from laptop parts bolted to a CRT, to the iMac G4 "desk lamp", to the modern all-in-one LCD design) and the Mac mini (successor to the G4 Cube, but sold at a reasonable price). Don't forget the proprietary Apple Display Connector and the USB speakers that shipped with the G4 Cube (which deliberately draw more power than the USB spec allows, so they could potentially fry other computers if plugged into a standard USB port), the buttonless Mighty Mouse that doesn't register right-clicks unless you lift your left finger, and probably a whole host of other terrible ideas. The iPhone 4 is not one of these.
How about having good food in school. Not low cost high fat stuff? also give the kids time to eat so they use the full 30 min lunch standing in line to just have 10 min or less to eat it. NO MORE recess time shared with launch. Make it it's own time.
Yes, this. Also, have a class that teaches kids how to cook. A lot of kids move into adult life not knowing how to prepare any food more complicated than macaroni & cheese, so it's no wonder they go to McDonald's when they're tired of their diet of mac&cheese, ramen noodles and ordering pizza.
30 minutes is enough time to eat if you brought your lunch from home. Otherwise, it's insane.
Lying? He's claiming that all the phones behave the same way, but doesn't show any data.
He showed videos of precisely the same kind of signal loss that people have been complaining about, happening with three other phones, caused just by holding them in a particular way. He provided the best statistics AT&T would allow him to provide publicly, and acknowledged that the data does show the iPhone 4 drops calls more often than the iPhone 3GS. He also provided data about their return rate so far, and how many people have called Apple's tech support about this issue. What data are you looking for?
He's using the press conference to put down his competitors,
He went out of his way to say the competing phones demonstrated are great phones. He had absolutely nothing negative to say about any of them, other than that (as shown in the videos) holding a competing phone in a particular way, in certain areas, can cause a drop in signal strength.
Apple has and always will be a company that prioritizes looks and simplicity over function. It's the same reason their products have almost no user options. They are too complicated. They force you to use the product the way they want you to.
Let's be careful here: this problem was NOT caused by Apple's prioritization of form over function. On the contrary, the reason why the iPhone 4 has external antennas is entirely due to function, and they sacrificed form in order to do it (the black lines that separate the three different antennas are an aesthetic blemish, which Jobs acknowledged when the iPhone 4 was introduced).
Essentially what happened was this: Apple came up with the idea of using external antennas in an effort to boost signal strength and improve reception. The engineers warned that with an external antenna, you'll lose some signal strength when you hold it in certain ways. Management said "OK, we'll test it and see what happens." They tested it, and found that it wasn't a problem, so they shipped it.
So why did Apple's testing conclude that it wasn't a problem, when it clearly is a problem? First, because they probably didn't do a lot of testing in the lab with sweaty left-handed people. Second, Apple's campus gets great reception, and the problem is only noticeable in areas of poor reception. Third, whenever they took the phone out into the "real world" for field testing, they kept the phone disguised inside a case so nobody would notice they were using a prototype iPhone 4 - and the case eliminates this problem by preventing direct contact. Finally, a software bug made it look like the signal was fine when it really wasn't, so they didn't notice the effects of holding it in different ways.
Apple should have noticed the problem in their lab testing, and they didn't. That's the root of the issue here; it has nothing to do with looks. The fact that you assume the problem has anything to do with looks simply means that Apple's product designers are GENIUSES - they were prioritizing function, but designed it so well that you thought they were prioritizing looks. Never mind that the function doesn't work as well as they thought it did - function is still what drove this design.
By the way, I have a couple of coworkers with iPhone 4s who say they've never had a problem.
NAT has only been the standard for about the last 10 years or so. Prior to that, a LOT of desktop PCs were connected directly to the Internet with publicly routable IPs and no firewall.
This annoyed and confused me too, until I saw the option to turn it off.
As the other poster said, this page was being updated in real time during the announcement. I don't know why they didn't shut off the auto-reload feature after it was done, though...
When the Apple stores first opened, I don't believe they required appointments, but that policy was adopted pretty quickly. I agree that it's annoying, especially if you just have a quick question, but it does mean you don't have to wait there in the store in a long line behind other people who need their problems fixed.
Another option is to take your Mac to an Apple-authorized service center. Here in the Northwest, The Mac Store is great.
In the future, I highly recommend getting the AppleCare extended warranty for any Mac. Out-of-warranty repairs are very expensive, and a lot of them aren't as easy as the screen replacement you found. Make sure you actually activate your AppleCare coverage once you've bought it; I seem to remember hearing they were going to be automating this but I'm not sure what the process is currently.
I wish I had mod points.
What should DNS server administrators do to sign our own domains, and configure our servers to pay attention to DNSSEC when performing lookups?
I learned how to configure BIND a decade ago, and it's mostly just been smooth sailing since then. I have no idea what's involved in setting up DNSSEC, whether it's something I can figure out how to enable in 20 minutes or a huge project that really won't be feasible for me to undertake at all. Can somebody point me in the right direction?
8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
Are you sure? I just searched and the first result is this Slashdot article which clearly says that he was an 18th century composer, right in the summary.
Quick, somebody update Wikipedia! You can cite this Slashdot article as your source.
...was that Mac is rarely the primary platform for game developers? Most mac games are ported from the PC or co-developed.
Halo is a notable exception to this. Actually the first ever public demo of Halo was at a Macworld Expo, and it ran on a PowerMac G4 running Mac OS 9. Bungie, the company that developed it (before they were acquired by Microsoft), was well known as a Mac game developer; most of their previous games were never ported to Windows.
Commercials are the domain for companies to get their message out.
How about: paid advertising is the domain for companies to get their message out. This includes not just television commercials, but also radio commercials, magazine ads, newspaper ads, billboards... ...and paid ads on web sites.
If the ad is clearly marked as such, I don't see a problem with this. Newspapers run ads that resemble news stories all the time, and to avoid confusion they mark them as "PAID ADVERTISEMENT" at the top. ScienceBlogs.com can do the same. As long as everything is clear and out in the open, what's the problem? If you don't want to read it because you aren't interested in whatever Pepsi's marketing team is trying to sell you, then just skip over the paid content and be thankful someone is helping to financially support the web site you enjoy.
I personally haven't seen a good implementation of this, with all the features described. It's quite possible there isn't one. However, the concept of what they're doing is completely obvious. People have been making page-turning animations for virtual books for decades; most of them are less fancy than what Microsoft is doing because the graphics technology didn't exist. Somebody mentioned HyperCard, for example, which did have page-turning animation but not with multitouch gestures, not in 3-D, not with transparency, and not in color, because it was created in the 1980s. Given today's technology, what Microsoft has described should be plainly obvious to anyone "skilled in the art."
Of course, the actual implementation is a different matter. I don't know nearly enough math to actually make this work. I'm sure it's very complicated, and optimizing it to the extent necessary to make it run perfectly smoothly on a mobile device is nothing to sneeze at. If Microsoft were patenting an implementation, I would be fine with that. The whole point of patents is to get people to reveal to the public how their invention works (instead of keeping it a secret that will die with them), in exchange for the right to prevent anyone from making it (or, the ability to license the patent to others for profit).
But of course, this isn't a patent on Microsoft's implementation - it's a patent on the concept, versions of which have been around for a quarter of a century. This patent hurts society. :-(
By the time Steve returned to the company in 1998, the command-semicolon shortcut was already a de-facto standard, which Apple was already ignoring. (Some Apple apps had no shortcut for Preferences, some had a random shortcut that wasn't consistent with anything.) However, it was under Steve's leadership that they came up with their own standard (that nobody else had ever used before).
You can't deny its convenience
Watch me.
I am posting this from Safari 4.1, which has two boxes at the top: an address bar, and a search bar. If I want to search Google, I use the search bar. If I want to revisit a page I've been to before, I use the address bar (Apple recently improved this feature in versions 4.1/5.0). Obviously if I want to enter a new URL, I also use the address bar.
Since I know what I'm trying to do (search my bookmarks and browser history, or search Google) I have no trouble choosing which field to use (and, for an additional hint, the former currently contains a URL while the latter says "Google" on it). When I type into the address bar, it auto-populates with a list of matches from my bookmarks and history, and is not cluttered by anything from Google. When I type into the search bar, it auto-populates with popular search terms from Google, which is a great feature that I really appreciate; these suggestions are not cluttered with search results from my bookmarks and history.
Safari's implementation is, therefore, more convenient than Firefox's.
I believe this was originally a Mac OS standard, which made its way to the UNIX world when UNIX had no standard of its own. As for why, though, I have no idea.
On the Mac, the keyboard shortcut command-semicolon became a de-facto standard, adopted by a huge percentage of Mac applications, but never accepted by Apple. With the transition to Mac OS X, Apple took the opportunity to create a new application menu, move Preferences to there, and define a new official keyboard shortcut, command-comma. I have no idea why they changed the keyboard shortcut that everyone except them had standardized on.
But I digress. :-)
Quite so. All Apple Stores have free public wifi.
I could be mistaken, but I believe iTunes gift cards are activated at time of purchase, which should prevent that from happening. Also, unlike other gift cards which are often used for multiple purchases, iTunes gift cards are used to apply a one-time credit to your existing iTunes account, so if it works the first time, you know nobody can steal it because the card is already worthless. Finally, I would expect that Apple should have the ability to track the activation and use of a given iTunes gift card a lot better than some other companies, so if you did have a problem, their customer service people ought to be able to see when and where the card was activated and when it was used, on whose account.
If you're really concerned about it, you could even walk into an Apple Store, buy a gift card, then use one of the demo Macs to sign into your iTunes account and enter the card number before leaving the store. If it doesn't work, notify the salesperson you bought the card from. If you're extra paranoid, ask them to watch you do it. Don't forget to log out before leaving, obviously.
(So much for the misnomer "Apple designs good hardware." Say what? Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?)
Often because the hardware that was available before Apple's announcement was larger and uglier, and the hardware available afterwards was inspired by Apple's design (Apple demonstrates how it could be done, so other companies build something similar, but it wouldn't have occurred to them without seeing it first). The competition is often more robust and has more features, but is less elegant and may be more difficult to use.
Sorry, but you know nothing about reading sheet music. If I understand you correctly, you're suggesting that a computer should be able to randomly generate every possible combination of notes (like an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters), and one of these iterations would be close enough to an actual piece of music that it would make for a public-domain substitute. The trouble is, there's a LOT more to sheet music than the notes themselves.
Good sheet music doesn't simply contain the information required to reproduce the piece, it's written in such a way as to be clear and easy to read. This involves decisions such as:
- Which repeated sections should be marked as repeats, and which should simply be written twice?
- Of the repeated sections to be marked as such, should that be with repeat signs, D.C., D.S., first/second/third endings, segno/coda/fine marks, or just a measure repeat sign?
- When beaming small notes together (8th and shorter), what's the clearest way to group them?
- When should the stems go up, and when should they go down? Basic rule of thumb is the stems go inward toward the middle of the staff, unless you have some reason to do otherwise (such as using stems down to indicate a left hand part and stems up for right hand, for piano music, or stems down for alto/bass and stems up for soprano/tenor in choral music, but only when there are notes of different durations so they can't be combined on the same stem)?
- When should an accidental be written in parentheses as a reminder that, for example, the F in the last half of this measure is sharp because there's an F-sharp in the key signature, even though the F in the first half of this measure was natural because it's tied with the F-natural (marked with an accidental) in the previous measure? Accidentals don't cross bar lines except for ties, so it really isn't required to mark the F-sharp at all, but it's a good idea if there could be confusion (but you don't want too many of such marks, or they'll get in the way).
- Is it better to write a pair of eighth notes in 4/4 time and mark it "swing", or write a quarter note followed by an eighth note in 12/8 time?
- How many measures should there be on each line?
- Which measures should have a measure number in a box, signifying the beginning of a phrase?
- When should you draw a straight line between notes to show where the melody crosses between staves or voices or whatever?
- All notes have multiple names; which enharmonic equivalent is the most appropriate? When should you use e.g. an F-flat, or a C-double-sharp? This is based on which chord or scale the note is being used in, in context, so a D-flat minor scale should have an F-flat and not an E, and an F-sharp augmented chord should have a C-double-sharp and not a D. But should it really be D-flat minor, or should you be using C-sharp minor, which does have an E-natural?
- When is it appropriate to include cue notes, so you can follow along with what other instruments are playing while you're not playing yourself? This lets you double-check your count to make sure you come in at the right place, but if it's not necessary, it just adds clutter.
- Tons of other details I'm not currently awake enough to think of.
Reading badly written sheet music sucks. On several occasions I have rewritten a piece of music, without changing a note, to make it easier to read.
The last time I reported a bug to Microsoft, they told me I was the only customer they knew who actually understood how the stuff worked. I have mixed feelings about that.
The dell workstation at the office came with one of those abominations. Every now and then my thumb would hit that conveniently placed button, causing whatever webpage I was looking at to disappear for whatever webpage was in the list previously or next.
Yeah, this has happened to me at work too, at least two or three times. Very annoying, but it hasn't happened often enough for me to take the time to figure out how to disable them.
It just gets in the way like the windows keys do.
Weird, I never have trouble with that. Maybe you have a non-standard keyboard layout that puts the Windows keys in an easier-to-hit-by-accident place?
There are ATMs EVERYWHERE! Banks, convenience stores, gas stations.
Yes, ATMs are available, but the ones in convenience stores and gas stations all charge a fee, the ones in banks charge a fee to anyone who isn't their customer, and many banks will charge a fee to their customers when using a non-bank ATM. For example, if I have a Bank of America account, and I use a Chase ATM, both Chase and BofA will charge me fees for that transaction, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $4-$5.
Plus, you can withdraw from those ATMs even if you're not a Chase Bank customer. And many banks will refund any fees charged by the ATM network.
As far as I'm aware, most banks don't do this. Maybe they do?
When I moved to Phoenix, I opened a BofA checking account, because at the time, there were far more BofA ATMs available in Phoenix than any other financial institution. When I moved back to Portland, I closed out that account, because the same wasn't true in Portland.