They'll feed you and make you fat in the good times, but they'll have no qualms about cutting your neck open, draining your blood, gutting you, cutting you up into bits and then cooking you.
This has always been the number one rule of dealing with Microsoft - as a business or individual. Make sure you have a back door on your pig sty.
The basic user interface interaction mechanism is simply well designed and works well? The entire user interface is designed for touch input? It's won numerous awards? Just using it is intuitive and pleasant compared to any other mobile interface? Despite having a small marketshare it makes up over 50% of mobile internet access, because it's not painful? What it does, it does in a very usable manner.
All irrelevant to me. I ain't paying that for a phone.
I think for mobile phones the hardware will eventually combine into an application processor (multi-core ARM + PowerVR graphics) and a communications processor (Wireless, Bluetooth, 4G/3G/2G, GPS) via integration. Phones will differ by some physical aspects - screen size, storage capacity, battery, design, etc. All the different operating systems will get to a similar level of capability, even Windows Mobile 7 might be okay. Will Apple's in-house application processor design with PA Semi give them a processing advantage?
What's your point? I don't own an iPhone, I've been using 3G smartphones for years. Sony Ericsson P800, Motorola A1000, etc. Indeed the raw specification and feature list of the iPhone has never been good.
Raw Specification penis wavers will NEVER understand that isn't the point.
That A1000 had GPS, but no software on-board to use it and no web browser that could do Google Maps. It had front and rear cameras, but nobody uses video calling. It had a dire user interface (UIQ on Symbian) and a fiddly stylus.
The lack of 3G on the first iPhone showed how much Apple didn't understand the market, especially outside the USA. The fact that they didn't increase the camera quality in the next revision, nor have enabled MMS or video recording, or cut and paste, shows some rough edges and features that people will miss. However in terms of software platform and usability you can't claim that they haven't succeeded, nor that they didn't have the best interface at the time of launch, and up until Android launched (at least) and arguably still the best.
And as time goes on, the only thing that is going to be different between the platforms is the software and the features in the software, and how good the platform development tools are.
There is also no need for J2ME today when you have 500MHz CPUs in phones, 128MB or more RAM and gigabytes of storage - you can run a full version of Java quite happily, no need to leave out parts of the platform. Indeed Android is all that but running on their own Dalvik VM instead of a JVM.
JavaFX may go some way to fix this, but Sun really needs to get off its arse and make a Java Mobile Specification for modern mobile devices.
Well considering the iPhone is a 2 year old hardware design (with a minor 3G upgrade since) it's not surprising that the hardware is nothing special now. The rest of the market has been catching up massively since the iPhone was pre-announced over two years ago. Microsoft are at sea with a UI that is stylus centric and outdated, putting a fancy launcher on the front won't help. Android can benefit from all the mistakes the iPhone made because it is more recent. The Palm Pre has the fancy interface but they're clearly behind, hence the HTML/JS web apps rather than native (for 3D games) which will surely come along later.
The iPhone has the central app store problem - a glut of rubbish that would never have been released in the past that bloats the listings, and a drive to cheap poor quality product in some form of lowest common denominator and the risks are too high for anyone to release anything significant that isn't a game. 15,000 apps, great statistic, but if 14,500 of them are tosh, and the other 500 are hard to find, or not even written...
The Apple II cost a lot more than that in the UK. Around £1000 (I'd have to look up the prices in the old computer mags I have), so it's no surprise that it never got popular in the home. Acorn should have made a home version of the BBC micro - I guess that was the Electron that sadly never did that well.
What was popular in small business was the Amstrad PCW series of CP/M systems (that came with a word processor out of the box) between 1985 and 1992.
Well if they have any sense, they'll realise that their products are more suited for nettops and netbook (lapbook?) type products, and a lot of these are using Linux because they're cheap devices that Windows adds too much cost to. So it's +$50 for XP, or $0 + desktop effects in Linux.
Of course a lot of this is dependent on their parent company VIA actually releasing Nano in meaningful quantities, and the current S3 graphics core getting into VIA chipsets (I think the chipsets are stuck at Chrome 3).
"These numbers are somewhat suspect for two reasons. First, Psion claims that peak netBook revenue occurred in 2006, three years after the netBook Pro went off the market"
But the NetBook Pro was launched in November 2003. This is a whole new definition of "went off the market". Therefore Ars is wrong or you're quoting an older article.
Psion's lawyers wouldn't be so stupid as to forge revenue statements to a court. And in addition, forge that 2006 contract to supply NetBook Pros... really? The court would only have to ask the other half of the supposed deal whether it happened or not!
The Psion NetBook launched at $1300 in 1999, then they released the NetBook Pro in November 2003, maybe that was $1300 then. Maybe Psion never dropped the price, but by 2006 it is highly likely the product was a lot cheaper. Regardless, the quantity sold is irrelevant.
Maybe Bones is set in an alternate universe where Commodore didn't sit on their arses, and they released the A1200 in 1987 (as per the clip) with full 3D capability and massive IBM PC add-on for the 5.25" disk drive. Sheesh, they could have just shown Gloom or Alien Breed 3D...
Apart from still selling netbook pros and actively selling tens of thousands in 2006.
They clearly stopped making them now, which is a great shame. The great Psion products faded away with the Symbian split, and Psion fading away. I would hope that they are working on a next generation ARM-based netbook product running Android, but fear that they're dead as a technological innovator.
When the entire article is about how they didn't abandon it, and indeed sold large numbers through 2006 and still sell remaining stock and supplies, how can you claim that they abandoned it?
And we're not talking about those specific instances of the trademark as they're not relevant. Still useful to know about their presence, of course, but they won't help or hinder either Intel or Psion.
Psion came up with the term. Psion got the trademark. Psion made good sales up until 2007 - note this is well within the five year trademark term before it's not in use. Psion indeed still sell remaining stock. Intel started using the term 'netbook' in 2008 to describe the systems they were pushing that were in the exact same format as the Psion Netbook and Netbook Pro. Psion only wanted the websites, bloggers and companies to stop using the term 'netbook' for non Psion products. Intel's now gone too far, and Psion have had to file suit. For other entities, they have respected the trademarks - Google has put the term on the banned list for advertisements, for example.
"Assuming around 15,000,000 netbooks were sold in 2008 at a conservative $200 per unit (and that our calculations are correct) Psion had a "netbook" market share of two thousandths of one percent in 2008 - rather low for a company claiming to hold a monopoly over the mark."
and absolutely irrelevant, especially as the sales in 2005 and 2006 show massive amounts of sales, and as they were the sole player in that market then, a 100% share. Within the past 5 years. And Intel's abuse of the trademark led to the Psion share of the netbook marking shrinking.
The only thing that would be useful is if the disc has the BluRay anti-scratch coating that was highly mooted a few years ago. I wouldn't pay more for it however, they're expensive enough as it is.
What I want is cheap SA-CD or DVD-Audio. Licensing fees from greedy companies killed these before they had a chance. I'd also like a "decompress audio" function for these high-bitrate, high bit-depth systems, that can take an over-produced, over-loud CD like Death Magnetic and make something altogether more pleasant to listen to on a decent system (you need the higher bit-depth to do that, 16-bit just isn't enough).
I don't see why a DVD Audio player has to cost more than a CD Audio player - 24-bit/192kHz DACs are cheap and used everywhere in computers, compressed audio can be handled by a $5 SoC, DVD drives are cheap (i.e., it's no more expensive to built a DVD drive than a CD drive, whether it's for a $100 budget system, or for a $1000 hifi-separate), etc, etc.
Now unless a BluCD has a section set aside for high-density BluRay formatting (e.g., 10% of the disc area = 2.5GB, reducing CD audio area by 10 minutes) for HD Audio playable on a BluRay player. But it doesn't. Fucking retards.
Male geeks work on something until they fail or succeed, never saying that they're potentially failing along the way for fear of rejection from fellow geeks.
However female geeks give a running commentary of their efforts, learning and discoveries via their Blog, Facebook, Twitter and numerous other places. It's exactly the opposite, except some male geeks will jump in to guide or give the solution straight away, to gain geek cred points (but nothing sexual, ha!).
Male geeks need sites like StackOverflow where they can anonymously ask questions, and also gain geek cred points for answering other people's questions.
Re:1996 nothing...
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That was at Cambridge University, in a room full of hackers and shelves full of empty champagne bottles. Oddly the camera didn't point at these, just the coffee pot which was mounted inside a ghetto metal rack.
Um, power over ethernet is when you route the power over the ethernet cable alongside the data. No power strip required.
My one mistake was that this probably doesn't work for GigE because I think that uses all 8 wires for data, whereas with slower ones there were 4 wires free for 12V, 5V and ground (I don't know the exact PoE configuration). DC, as you're asking.
However it would work worldwide as there is no PSU required, as the power is coming from the switch.
One switch on a decent power supply. 8 (or 24:D ) Linux Wallwarts (without the wallwart aspect, so, err, a box with an ethernet port, maybe enough room for a 1.8" SATA hard drive (the chipset supports 2 SATA ports))
A perfect sysadmin learner platform, 8 devices at the eventual end price of $49 would make for a cheap practice platform to learn and apply theory about service distribution, scaling, etc.
I don't think you know what being a monopoly means, what leveraging a monopoly means, etc. You've just gone on one of the most pointless snide attacks I've seen in a while making yourself look like a fool in the process.
The real issue is that this should have been done 8 years ago. Something must have happened 8 years ago to protect Microsoft as a single entity.
I believe the whole (of Microsoft) would have got stronger and have been more advantageous for consumers in general had the company been split up or had stricter sanctions applied at the time.
Higher than not. There's no incentive to the bottom line. Maybe if a tech has spare time he can set it up, but before you release you need to involve managers, legal, compliance, testing, product marketing,...
Everything's quite smooth here, and this naff Dell laptop uses naff Intel Integrated graphics. The CSS animations are neat, if rather esoteric right now until they are made part of the standard. It's nice that someone is driving the standards forward openly, just hope that the other vendors can get a word in edgewise before they're rubber stamped...
The window styling does pick up the windows native theme, even if Safari is rendering it itself to do the Chrome-style tabs (i.e., it picked up my Windows Embedded theme on Windows XP, rather than just mimicking XP). Good. Chrome looks nicer, but doesn't match the Windows styling.
The history works really well with the visual guides. The search works nicely. Correctly my secure website entries are not showing a picture.
Oh, darn it, I crashed it... no, no, it just hung for some seconds when I was deleting in the history search.
It's definitely less clunky on Windows than Safari 3. It's pulled together a lot of features from different browsers in a very cohesive manner, and added its own stuff on top. As a beta it's not perfect, but it is very promising.
Slashdot Mirror
Dealing with Microsoft is like being a pig.
They'll feed you and make you fat in the good times, but they'll have no qualms about cutting your neck open, draining your blood, gutting you, cutting you up into bits and then cooking you.
This has always been the number one rule of dealing with Microsoft - as a business or individual. Make sure you have a back door on your pig sty.
The basic user interface interaction mechanism is simply well designed and works well? The entire user interface is designed for touch input? It's won numerous awards? Just using it is intuitive and pleasant compared to any other mobile interface? Despite having a small marketshare it makes up over 50% of mobile internet access, because it's not painful? What it does, it does in a very usable manner.
All irrelevant to me. I ain't paying that for a phone.
I think for mobile phones the hardware will eventually combine into an application processor (multi-core ARM + PowerVR graphics) and a communications processor (Wireless, Bluetooth, 4G/3G/2G, GPS) via integration. Phones will differ by some physical aspects - screen size, storage capacity, battery, design, etc. All the different operating systems will get to a similar level of capability, even Windows Mobile 7 might be okay. Will Apple's in-house application processor design with PA Semi give them a processing advantage?
What's your point? I don't own an iPhone, I've been using 3G smartphones for years. Sony Ericsson P800, Motorola A1000, etc. Indeed the raw specification and feature list of the iPhone has never been good.
Raw Specification penis wavers will NEVER understand that isn't the point.
That A1000 had GPS, but no software on-board to use it and no web browser that could do Google Maps. It had front and rear cameras, but nobody uses video calling. It had a dire user interface (UIQ on Symbian) and a fiddly stylus.
The lack of 3G on the first iPhone showed how much Apple didn't understand the market, especially outside the USA. The fact that they didn't increase the camera quality in the next revision, nor have enabled MMS or video recording, or cut and paste, shows some rough edges and features that people will miss. However in terms of software platform and usability you can't claim that they haven't succeeded, nor that they didn't have the best interface at the time of launch, and up until Android launched (at least) and arguably still the best.
And as time goes on, the only thing that is going to be different between the platforms is the software and the features in the software, and how good the platform development tools are.
There is also no need for J2ME today when you have 500MHz CPUs in phones, 128MB or more RAM and gigabytes of storage - you can run a full version of Java quite happily, no need to leave out parts of the platform. Indeed Android is all that but running on their own Dalvik VM instead of a JVM.
JavaFX may go some way to fix this, but Sun really needs to get off its arse and make a Java Mobile Specification for modern mobile devices.
Well considering the iPhone is a 2 year old hardware design (with a minor 3G upgrade since) it's not surprising that the hardware is nothing special now. The rest of the market has been catching up massively since the iPhone was pre-announced over two years ago. Microsoft are at sea with a UI that is stylus centric and outdated, putting a fancy launcher on the front won't help. Android can benefit from all the mistakes the iPhone made because it is more recent. The Palm Pre has the fancy interface but they're clearly behind, hence the HTML/JS web apps rather than native (for 3D games) which will surely come along later.
The iPhone has the central app store problem - a glut of rubbish that would never have been released in the past that bloats the listings, and a drive to cheap poor quality product in some form of lowest common denominator and the risks are too high for anyone to release anything significant that isn't a game. 15,000 apps, great statistic, but if 14,500 of them are tosh, and the other 500 are hard to find, or not even written...
The Apple II cost a lot more than that in the UK. Around £1000 (I'd have to look up the prices in the old computer mags I have), so it's no surprise that it never got popular in the home. Acorn should have made a home version of the BBC micro - I guess that was the Electron that sadly never did that well.
What was popular in small business was the Amstrad PCW series of CP/M systems (that came with a word processor out of the box) between 1985 and 1992.
Well if they have any sense, they'll realise that their products are more suited for nettops and netbook (lapbook?) type products, and a lot of these are using Linux because they're cheap devices that Windows adds too much cost to. So it's +$50 for XP, or $0 + desktop effects in Linux.
Of course a lot of this is dependent on their parent company VIA actually releasing Nano in meaningful quantities, and the current S3 graphics core getting into VIA chipsets (I think the chipsets are stuck at Chrome 3).
"These numbers are somewhat suspect for two reasons. First, Psion claims that peak netBook revenue occurred in 2006, three years after the netBook Pro went off the market"
But the NetBook Pro was launched in November 2003. This is a whole new definition of "went off the market". Therefore Ars is wrong or you're quoting an older article.
Psion's lawyers wouldn't be so stupid as to forge revenue statements to a court. And in addition, forge that 2006 contract to supply NetBook Pros ... really? The court would only have to ask the other half of the supposed deal whether it happened or not!
The Psion NetBook launched at $1300 in 1999, then they released the NetBook Pro in November 2003, maybe that was $1300 then. Maybe Psion never dropped the price, but by 2006 it is highly likely the product was a lot cheaper. Regardless, the quantity sold is irrelevant.
Hahahaha but I like the custom case mod.
Maybe Bones is set in an alternate universe where Commodore didn't sit on their arses, and they released the A1200 in 1987 (as per the clip) with full 3D capability and massive IBM PC add-on for the 5.25" disk drive. Sheesh, they could have just shown Gloom or Alien Breed 3D...
Apart from still selling netbook pros and actively selling tens of thousands in 2006.
They clearly stopped making them now, which is a great shame. The great Psion products faded away with the Symbian split, and Psion fading away. I would hope that they are working on a next generation ARM-based netbook product running Android, but fear that they're dead as a technological innovator.
When the entire article is about how they didn't abandon it, and indeed sold large numbers through 2006 and still sell remaining stock and supplies, how can you claim that they abandoned it?
And we're not talking about those specific instances of the trademark as they're not relevant. Still useful to know about their presence, of course, but they won't help or hinder either Intel or Psion.
Psion came up with the term.
Psion got the trademark.
Psion made good sales up until 2007 - note this is well within the five year trademark term before it's not in use.
Psion indeed still sell remaining stock.
Intel started using the term 'netbook' in 2008 to describe the systems they were pushing that were in the exact same format as the Psion Netbook and Netbook Pro.
Psion only wanted the websites, bloggers and companies to stop using the term 'netbook' for non Psion products.
Intel's now gone too far, and Psion have had to file suit.
For other entities, they have respected the trademarks - Google has put the term on the banned list for advertisements, for example.
Yes, Psion (in their netbook trademark case overview on their website) even mention that Asus didn't use netbook in their EeePC marketing.
http://www.psionteklogix.com/documents/com/specSheets/Psion_Netbook%20_Trademark_%20Statement.pdf
"Assuming around 15,000,000 netbooks were sold in 2008 at a conservative $200 per unit (and that our calculations are correct) Psion had a "netbook" market share of two thousandths of one percent in 2008 - rather low for a company claiming to hold a monopoly over the mark."
and absolutely irrelevant, especially as the sales in 2005 and 2006 show massive amounts of sales, and as they were the sole player in that market then, a 100% share. Within the past 5 years. And Intel's abuse of the trademark led to the Psion share of the netbook marking shrinking.
Psion have this one all wrapped up.
The only thing that would be useful is if the disc has the BluRay anti-scratch coating that was highly mooted a few years ago. I wouldn't pay more for it however, they're expensive enough as it is.
What I want is cheap SA-CD or DVD-Audio. Licensing fees from greedy companies killed these before they had a chance. I'd also like a "decompress audio" function for these high-bitrate, high bit-depth systems, that can take an over-produced, over-loud CD like Death Magnetic and make something altogether more pleasant to listen to on a decent system (you need the higher bit-depth to do that, 16-bit just isn't enough).
I don't see why a DVD Audio player has to cost more than a CD Audio player - 24-bit/192kHz DACs are cheap and used everywhere in computers, compressed audio can be handled by a $5 SoC, DVD drives are cheap (i.e., it's no more expensive to built a DVD drive than a CD drive, whether it's for a $100 budget system, or for a $1000 hifi-separate), etc, etc.
Now unless a BluCD has a section set aside for high-density BluRay formatting (e.g., 10% of the disc area = 2.5GB, reducing CD audio area by 10 minutes) for HD Audio playable on a BluRay player. But it doesn't. Fucking retards.
Male geeks work on something until they fail or succeed, never saying that they're potentially failing along the way for fear of rejection from fellow geeks.
However female geeks give a running commentary of their efforts, learning and discoveries via their Blog, Facebook, Twitter and numerous other places. It's exactly the opposite, except some male geeks will jump in to guide or give the solution straight away, to gain geek cred points (but nothing sexual, ha!).
Male geeks need sites like StackOverflow where they can anonymously ask questions, and also gain geek cred points for answering other people's questions.
That was at Cambridge University, in a room full of hackers and shelves full of empty champagne bottles. Oddly the camera didn't point at these, just the coffee pot which was mounted inside a ghetto metal rack.
You mean Power over Ethernet, as I wrote! No power supply required, works worldwide because PoE is a standard, one cable for data and power, etc.
Um, power over ethernet is when you route the power over the ethernet cable alongside the data. No power strip required.
My one mistake was that this probably doesn't work for GigE because I think that uses all 8 wires for data, whereas with slower ones there were 4 wires free for 12V, 5V and ground (I don't know the exact PoE configuration). DC, as you're asking.
However it would work worldwide as there is no PSU required, as the power is coming from the switch.
To get rid of the wall socket aspect :)
One switch on a decent power supply. :D ) Linux Wallwarts (without the wallwart aspect, so, err, a box with an ethernet port, maybe enough room for a 1.8" SATA hard drive (the chipset supports 2 SATA ports))
8 (or 24
A perfect sysadmin learner platform, 8 devices at the eventual end price of $49 would make for a cheap practice platform to learn and apply theory about service distribution, scaling, etc.
I don't think you know what being a monopoly means, what leveraging a monopoly means, etc. You've just gone on one of the most pointless snide attacks I've seen in a while making yourself look like a fool in the process.
The real issue is that this should have been done 8 years ago. Something must have happened 8 years ago to protect Microsoft as a single entity.
I believe the whole (of Microsoft) would have got stronger and have been more advantageous for consumers in general had the company been split up or had stricter sanctions applied at the time.
The obvious real solution is Power over Ethernet.
1 PoE capable switch.
+ 8 Wallwart Linux Devices
= 1 (not quite enterprise level) Server Farm in a shoe-box
Higher than not. There's no incentive to the bottom line. Maybe if a tech has spare time he can set it up, but before you release you need to involve managers, legal, compliance, testing, product marketing, ...
Everything's quite smooth here, and this naff Dell laptop uses naff Intel Integrated graphics. The CSS animations are neat, if rather esoteric right now until they are made part of the standard. It's nice that someone is driving the standards forward openly, just hope that the other vendors can get a word in edgewise before they're rubber stamped...
The window styling does pick up the windows native theme, even if Safari is rendering it itself to do the Chrome-style tabs (i.e., it picked up my Windows Embedded theme on Windows XP, rather than just mimicking XP). Good. Chrome looks nicer, but doesn't match the Windows styling.
The history works really well with the visual guides. The search works nicely. Correctly my secure website entries are not showing a picture.
Oh, darn it, I crashed it ... no, no, it just hung for some seconds when I was deleting in the history search.
It's definitely less clunky on Windows than Safari 3. It's pulled together a lot of features from different browsers in a very cohesive manner, and added its own stuff on top. As a beta it's not perfect, but it is very promising.