So what? I used to work on a mobile browser that literally sold hundreds of millions of units. The problem is that very very few of those browsers were ever used, so I personally still consider that a failure. Similarly, Windows Mobile in phones did not create an appreciable rise in mobile data usage, while the iPhone did to the point that AT&T's network was strained. That's just marketing? And Microsoft's response to Apple marketing is to start from scratch to build Windows Phone 7?
It's similar in some respects, but not in several that really matter. One, don't take 3G/WiFi for granted, because that feature (obviously nothing unique to iPad) is a game-changer compared to wired networking. Two, 1024x768 is another game-changer, compared to 640x480, as anybody who is old enough to witness that transition should remember. Three, the content that you can consume, starting from music and video to the Internet itself, has also changed dramatically since 1998. Not to mention that the PV-5000 is also more than twice as heavy, twice as thick, and twice (more if you consider inflation) as expensive.
Geeks have a tendency to look at specs and see quantitative differences, but often it is more important to see if the quantitative difference is big enough to become a qualitative difference. For example, a laptop is not just a lighter all-in-one desktop with a battery.
I challenge you to tell someone who was around on July 20, 1969 that manned spaceflight is pointless.
I wouldn't say it's pointless at all. I wasn't around, but as far as I know the whole world was attentive and moved. The question, however, is why would the American taxpayers have to fund manned spaceflight? If the Chinese landed on Mars first, wouldn't they be just as human, and a source of immense pride for us all? Or does it really have to be an American flag?
The fact is that the US needs to either raise taxes or cut programs. The empires of old built monuments that had no practical purpose except to vaguely inspire its people, but can the US afford the space age equivalent?
Robots can't do everything repairs to equipment for one are tough to do because of the delay and not seeing the full picture.
...and they won't need to, as long as humans are there to do it for them. Remove humans, and we will have to figure out how to build robots that can repair equipment. Wait, that sounds like a breakthrough of some sort, doesn't it?
No, it (assuming the fanboy math actually works out) proves that if your needs are met exactly by one of Apple's products, they may not be expensive. That can trivially be shown by not finding the same specs for less.
In other words, your beef seems to be that Apple doesn't offer enough models to suit your needs, rather than its price. But I can see how that doesn't lend itself as well to righteous indignation.
People keep citing this, but I bet the same people also criticize Apple for rejecting an app only after the author spent months on it, based on some vague or unpublished criteria. So now it's clear and published, and you're still not happy. I think what you folks actually want is for Apple to stop regulating what can get on an iPhone, so just come out and say it. You'd still complain if Apple did what you just suggested anyway.
Jobs wants to make appliances. Woz wants to make computers.
Right, which is why after Woz left Apple he co-founded Wheel of Zeus to "help everyday people find everyday things". Look, the guy bought iPhones and iPads, he's clearly not philosophically opposed to these devices, unlike many people here. Not everything has to be black and white.
If memory serves, President George W. Bush may have warned Iraq that he considers nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to all be "weapons of mass destruction", and will respond in kind if they are used against US troops. Since the US supposedly doesn't have biological or chemical weapons, he means he will retaliate with nukes.
Has this ever happened in appropriate scale? For it to work, they would need their own independent source of power, and more importantly the emergency personnel need to know they exist. Battery-powered satellite phones seem to have several significant advantages over your idea.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
grandma's arthritic hands aren't going to enjoy this thing.
Your mental image of "grandma" is not quite accurate. In the US, the average age at first marriage for a woman is 26, which means the average mother of the average woman can become grandmother at 53, and in many cases younger than that (remember that marriage is not a pre-requisite to having children).
Even if you have the algorithms, this part is hard enough, and there's a lot of difference to be done even if all the companies on the market have the same algorithms.
...and when a big company smells money and copies your invention? You might be first to market and have the better product, but the roads are littered with the corpses of such companies.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US patent system is horrendous, and that any patent system that doesn't allow a well-meaning engineer to be well-versed in most of the important patents in his field is broken. I'm just saying that a better-implemented one has a chance at protecting the little ones until they can grow up.
Whether or not such a patent stimulates innovation depends on whether it is truly novel, whether it represents real and expensive research, how long the patent lasts for, whether it is practical for engineers to actually read patents, and so on.
Put another way, if it will probably cost $10M to find the optimal algorithm to a problem, but your competitors can copy it for free, would you invest? If the answer is no, then a (good) patent system might change your mind and stimulate innovation.
China will never budge on these issues (at least not in my lifetime)
I don't know how old you are, but 100 years ago today China was a monarchy - the real kind that people had to revolt to overthrow. In 1949 it split into two pieces, and today in Taiwan (which calls itself the Republic of China) you can observe a loud, obnoxious, but vibrant democracy, even though martial law was not lifted until 1987. China, on the other hand, lost decades to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and in many ways is 20 years behind Taiwan, going through their rapid economic rise just like Taiwan did in the 80s. In the 90s, the Taiwanese were rich enough and began paying more attention to government, and in 2000 threw out the long-ruling KMT party in elections.
So if you have another 30 years to live, I'd be cautiously optimistic.
The counter-intuitive thing is that social problems are rarely solved by logic. Yes, illegal immigrants should all be rounded up and deported, but a quick search says there are perhaps 10-20 million of them. Problems of that scale don't just get solved by "shoulds". First, how will you find them all, and what kind of freedoms are you willing to sacrifice to get them? Where will you house them (the US has 2.4M inmates right now, less than 10,000 for the ICE) for processing? What will you do with their US citizen children, many of whom rely on their parents' incomes? What will the loss of their remittances do to Mexico, and how will that chaos affect the US?
I'm not usually a defender of the "let the market sort everything out" mentality; but by the time the court ruled, Linux already had some pretty useable desktops, and OS X was not far behind.
Microsoft was enough of a power to be able to dictate to OEMs that they may not pre-install Netscape, simply by threatening to charge different prices for Windows licenses. If that's not a monopoly, it's pretty damn close, because these OEMs did not tell Microsoft to fuck off. The fact is, they played ball and squished Netscape as instructed.
MacOS X is irrelevant to the discussion, because it ran on PowerPC chips, because Apple wasn't willing to license it anyway, and also because the antitrust trial started in 1998 - some two years before the MacOS X Public Beta. As for Linux, GNOME's first major release was March 1999, entirely irrelevant to this discussion. KDE was first released in July of 1998, also irrelevant. So exactly which "pretty usable desktops" were you referring to?
I remember joking at the time, "so an iMac's not a Personal Computer, eh?".
The trial started in May 1998, while the iMac G3 that did not ship until August 1998. The iMac is also irrelevant to the Microsoft antitrust case.
Spotty, to be honest, but I wasn't actually expecting the Second Coming. The World is more willing to work with the US now. The war spendings are now in the budget, and I don't think we're torturing people anymore. We're not being scared like children every other day by orange alert levels. The health care reform - warts and all - seems to have a chance. The rich are no longer getting tax cuts that insult our intelligence. The economy is bad, but not as bad as it could easily have been. Compared to early 2009, it's certainly looking more like we can look up at the sky instead of down into the abyss.
Could he have done more? Sure, but I knew I was voting for a center-left pragmatist.
My impression of the real tragedy of the time was the widespread belief that the Internet changed or will change the rules. Instead of actually selling things to real customers, "page views" meant something worth investing in. Every product became a loss leader to increase page views, and it was never clear how page views would turn back into money, much less more money than invested. In the end, only a few companies like Yahoo and Google managed to turn page views into money.
The other problem was that even if you were an established company at the time, you had to start acting like a dotcom, or you couldn't find or retain employees. You had to match the salaries, options, bonuses, and perks, so unless you were highly profitable, you end up having to do the same thing - appeal to VC - and later suffer the same fate.
Because the higher-level and powerful your module is, the less likely it'll be exactly what the next job needs, hence the dilemma between reinvention and reuse. I don't think anybody is advocating writing literally everyone from scratch. Low level libraries are easily reused.
Funny? No, this is quite insightful. A lot of programmers think the solution is easily reimplemented because they didn't really understand it, and by the time they realize how hard things are, the code has bloated to the same complexity and size as the library he was trying to avoid. Every other programmer has written an XML parser - some using regexps - only to find that the spec isn't really so simple.
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So what? I used to work on a mobile browser that literally sold hundreds of millions of units. The problem is that very very few of those browsers were ever used, so I personally still consider that a failure. Similarly, Windows Mobile in phones did not create an appreciable rise in mobile data usage, while the iPhone did to the point that AT&T's network was strained. That's just marketing? And Microsoft's response to Apple marketing is to start from scratch to build Windows Phone 7?
It's similar in some respects, but not in several that really matter. One, don't take 3G/WiFi for granted, because that feature (obviously nothing unique to iPad) is a game-changer compared to wired networking. Two, 1024x768 is another game-changer, compared to 640x480, as anybody who is old enough to witness that transition should remember. Three, the content that you can consume, starting from music and video to the Internet itself, has also changed dramatically since 1998. Not to mention that the PV-5000 is also more than twice as heavy, twice as thick, and twice (more if you consider inflation) as expensive.
Geeks have a tendency to look at specs and see quantitative differences, but often it is more important to see if the quantitative difference is big enough to become a qualitative difference. For example, a laptop is not just a lighter all-in-one desktop with a battery.
No, I'm proposing that relying more on unmanned missions creates a demand for more autonomous robots.
I wouldn't say it's pointless at all. I wasn't around, but as far as I know the whole world was attentive and moved. The question, however, is why would the American taxpayers have to fund manned spaceflight? If the Chinese landed on Mars first, wouldn't they be just as human, and a source of immense pride for us all? Or does it really have to be an American flag?
The fact is that the US needs to either raise taxes or cut programs. The empires of old built monuments that had no practical purpose except to vaguely inspire its people, but can the US afford the space age equivalent?
...and they won't need to, as long as humans are there to do it for them. Remove humans, and we will have to figure out how to build robots that can repair equipment. Wait, that sounds like a breakthrough of some sort, doesn't it?
Wouldn't an unmanned program require even more computing power than manned programs, and thus spur on more development in computers?
No, it (assuming the fanboy math actually works out) proves that if your needs are met exactly by one of Apple's products, they may not be expensive. That can trivially be shown by not finding the same specs for less.
In other words, your beef seems to be that Apple doesn't offer enough models to suit your needs, rather than its price. But I can see how that doesn't lend itself as well to righteous indignation.
People keep citing this, but I bet the same people also criticize Apple for rejecting an app only after the author spent months on it, based on some vague or unpublished criteria. So now it's clear and published, and you're still not happy. I think what you folks actually want is for Apple to stop regulating what can get on an iPhone, so just come out and say it. You'd still complain if Apple did what you just suggested anyway.
Right, which is why after Woz left Apple he co-founded Wheel of Zeus to "help everyday people find everyday things". Look, the guy bought iPhones and iPads, he's clearly not philosophically opposed to these devices, unlike many people here. Not everything has to be black and white.
If memory serves, President George W. Bush may have warned Iraq that he considers nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to all be "weapons of mass destruction", and will respond in kind if they are used against US troops. Since the US supposedly doesn't have biological or chemical weapons, he means he will retaliate with nukes.
It sure ought to be one of the considerations while making the law, because it easily leads to selective or uneven enforcement.
Has this ever happened in appropriate scale? For it to work, they would need their own independent source of power, and more importantly the emergency personnel need to know they exist. Battery-powered satellite phones seem to have several significant advantages over your idea.
Your mental image of "grandma" is not quite accurate. In the US, the average age at first marriage for a woman is 26, which means the average mother of the average woman can become grandmother at 53, and in many cases younger than that (remember that marriage is not a pre-requisite to having children).
Since when was Wiki allowed to run for public office?
...and when a big company smells money and copies your invention? You might be first to market and have the better product, but the roads are littered with the corpses of such companies.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US patent system is horrendous, and that any patent system that doesn't allow a well-meaning engineer to be well-versed in most of the important patents in his field is broken. I'm just saying that a better-implemented one has a chance at protecting the little ones until they can grow up.
Whether or not such a patent stimulates innovation depends on whether it is truly novel, whether it represents real and expensive research, how long the patent lasts for, whether it is practical for engineers to actually read patents, and so on.
Put another way, if it will probably cost $10M to find the optimal algorithm to a problem, but your competitors can copy it for free, would you invest? If the answer is no, then a (good) patent system might change your mind and stimulate innovation.
I don't know how old you are, but 100 years ago today China was a monarchy - the real kind that people had to revolt to overthrow. In 1949 it split into two pieces, and today in Taiwan (which calls itself the Republic of China) you can observe a loud, obnoxious, but vibrant democracy, even though martial law was not lifted until 1987. China, on the other hand, lost decades to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and in many ways is 20 years behind Taiwan, going through their rapid economic rise just like Taiwan did in the 80s. In the 90s, the Taiwanese were rich enough and began paying more attention to government, and in 2000 threw out the long-ruling KMT party in elections.
So if you have another 30 years to live, I'd be cautiously optimistic.
The counter-intuitive thing is that social problems are rarely solved by logic. Yes, illegal immigrants should all be rounded up and deported, but a quick search says there are perhaps 10-20 million of them. Problems of that scale don't just get solved by "shoulds". First, how will you find them all, and what kind of freedoms are you willing to sacrifice to get them? Where will you house them (the US has 2.4M inmates right now, less than 10,000 for the ICE) for processing? What will you do with their US citizen children, many of whom rely on their parents' incomes? What will the loss of their remittances do to Mexico, and how will that chaos affect the US?
...and how exactly is that not "competition"?
Microsoft was enough of a power to be able to dictate to OEMs that they may not pre-install Netscape, simply by threatening to charge different prices for Windows licenses. If that's not a monopoly, it's pretty damn close, because these OEMs did not tell Microsoft to fuck off. The fact is, they played ball and squished Netscape as instructed.
MacOS X is irrelevant to the discussion, because it ran on PowerPC chips, because Apple wasn't willing to license it anyway, and also because the antitrust trial started in 1998 - some two years before the MacOS X Public Beta. As for Linux, GNOME's first major release was March 1999, entirely irrelevant to this discussion. KDE was first released in July of 1998, also irrelevant. So exactly which "pretty usable desktops" were you referring to?
The trial started in May 1998, while the iMac G3 that did not ship until August 1998. The iMac is also irrelevant to the Microsoft antitrust case.
...but not by Apple.
...again, not by Apple. Allow me to direct you at the point in dispute: "Apple has had absolute control of their standards."
I have no real interest in the rest of the arguments, please carry on.
Spotty, to be honest, but I wasn't actually expecting the Second Coming. The World is more willing to work with the US now. The war spendings are now in the budget, and I don't think we're torturing people anymore. We're not being scared like children every other day by orange alert levels. The health care reform - warts and all - seems to have a chance. The rich are no longer getting tax cuts that insult our intelligence. The economy is bad, but not as bad as it could easily have been. Compared to early 2009, it's certainly looking more like we can look up at the sky instead of down into the abyss.
Could he have done more? Sure, but I knew I was voting for a center-left pragmatist.
My impression of the real tragedy of the time was the widespread belief that the Internet changed or will change the rules. Instead of actually selling things to real customers, "page views" meant something worth investing in. Every product became a loss leader to increase page views, and it was never clear how page views would turn back into money, much less more money than invested. In the end, only a few companies like Yahoo and Google managed to turn page views into money.
The other problem was that even if you were an established company at the time, you had to start acting like a dotcom, or you couldn't find or retain employees. You had to match the salaries, options, bonuses, and perks, so unless you were highly profitable, you end up having to do the same thing - appeal to VC - and later suffer the same fate.
Because the higher-level and powerful your module is, the less likely it'll be exactly what the next job needs, hence the dilemma between reinvention and reuse. I don't think anybody is advocating writing literally everyone from scratch. Low level libraries are easily reused.
Funny? No, this is quite insightful. A lot of programmers think the solution is easily reimplemented because they didn't really understand it, and by the time they realize how hard things are, the code has bloated to the same complexity and size as the library he was trying to avoid. Every other programmer has written an XML parser - some using regexps - only to find that the spec isn't really so simple.