Well, you need to keep the pistons in phase, so you need to physically connect the two (or more) cranks to each other - at that point it's trivial to simply drive one output shaft.
You don't need a big, heavy cylinder head since the opposing piston acts as the head for the other. This way you can push up the pressure in the cylinder without having to beef up the block/head much and get much more power for limited size and weight.
An opposed piston engine has two (well, at least two) crankshafts at opposite ends of a cylinder, with a piston on each. The pistons then "meet" in the middle.
The advantage is that you don't need a cylinder head, so the engine can be lighter, and often smaller and go to higher pressures, which makes it ideal for aircraft and submarines and areas where you want to maximise power to weight.
A boxer engine is simply a V engine flattened all the way down, with two banks of cylinders facing away from each other with the crank in the middle.
One of the "classic" opposed piston engines is the Deltic, fitted to the locomotives that were named for it. A hugely complex beast with three crankshafts (one contrarotating), which was very powerful for its size, but very highly strung. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
In all aspects? Box art and design, physical design, UI etc?
It's all on margins - there's no shortage of black rectangles with rounded corners in the mobile market, but the Nook is clearly different enough to differentiate itself from the iPad, as is the Eee pad Transformer and so on.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
I'm not using "geek" in a negative context here - I self identify as a geek, but either way it misses the point of my post. I could have simply said "technical" and "non-technical" and my argument would still stand exactly the same.
You are just desperately looking for a way to paint any of Apple's decisions as Machiavellian. It's just not possible for you to see any of Apple's choices as pro-consumer, is it?
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 2
Yes, that's fine - geeks and "normal" people want different things. Where it gets iffy is when geeks say "What Apple is doing is evil! Burn them!" because they don't agree with how they're doing it, or they categorise people who use Apple products as clueless sheep with no intelligence or mind of their own because they don;t want the same things out of technology as the geeks do.
That viewpoint is rife around here, and it's extremely short sighted and arrogant. It also creates the incredulity that Apple can be doing so well making "inferior" products - such that they scramble about for an explanation and blame it entirely on marketing or "cult status".
Somehow they miss the Occam's Razor explanation that Apple are making products that many people want to buy, not because they've been brainwashed into it, but because their products actually offer an experience and features that they want!
To swing it away from computers and use the inevitable car analogy, it's the tale of two cars - one that comes as a kit (although you bought it ready assembled, it's designed to be easy to mess with and alter etc), and one that was factory assembled with limited emphasis put on home modification. Some people want the former, some people want the latter. What I don't see is people in the former group questioning the intelligence, sexuality and social standing of those in the latter group. Sometimes you just want a car, you know?
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
Cool story bro.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
·
· Score: 1
So we don't want to replicate an OS that is based on open source with a custom UI on top, that has ties into the open source community, looking for useful projects and adopting them and helping to make them outstanding, and contributing new open source projects to the community?
An OS with a totally free IDE, that uses open standards and protocols for data and communication.
No, we don't want to replicate that at all, because they made a phone with a walled garden.
NeXT, for one. Founded it, helped to shape it into what it became (including the first web server and web browser; cheers Tim Berners Lee), and took it with him when Apple bought it.
He was responsible for driving the early creation of the Apple II along with Woz - two essential sides of a coin - one could not have succeeded in quite the way they did without the other.
He was extremely good at what he did, and had an eye for helping to shape technology to take it beyond the realm of geeks and tech-minded people. You may not think that's a worthy skill, but it is a large part of why Apple is so successful.
"Built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation, OS X is engineered to take full advantage of the technologies in every new Mac. And to deliver the most intuitive and integrated computer experience."
They've made no secret of the fact that they have a BSD core - and in fact spend a great deal of time contributing back to it and the open source community. Not just through "legal obligation" by the licences involved, but with new projects and so on. They do far more than they are "obliged" to by licences like the GPL.
As far as the deal with the RIAA - that was nothing to do with the iPod. The iPod was a product in itself that existed long before iTunes was selling music on the net (that didn't happen until at least 2 years later). The RIAA deal is irrelevant. While the iPod wasn't the first portable mp3 player, it was the first one to really shake up the UI and physical design. I knew someone who had a Rio and it was poorly made with a cumbersome UI. The iPod came along and changed the game. It wasn't first, but it was what people wanted.
Apple don't claim to invent things like the iPod and iPad and so on, but they do claim that they've created something *right* (whether you believe them is entirely subjective), and in many cases that is exactly what they do.
I'm not going to give Jobs credit for "inventing the mp3 player", that misses the point entirely. I will give him (and the team around him who he managed) the credit for making the mp3 player great.
Samsung has aknowledged that Apple has paid for the 3G licences, so that's not in doubt as far as this goes; in fact, it's one of Samsung's arguments - that they have proof they are violating an essential 3G patent because Apple has paid for 3G licences, they are just claiming that this particular one is not covered (despite the seeming issue with it then being subject to RAND terms and surely covered by the licencing, but that's for a court to determine).
It certainly would be discriminatory to have a clause that allowed them to use those patents for suing you "if you sue us for any reason", since that would effectively create a situation where Samsung would be immune from lawsuits for infringement of any patents/IP/trademarks/copyright from anyone who made a 3G device. Hypothetically they could make a literal copy of the HTC Desire, say, and then be immune from HTC suing them because Samsung could say "ah ah! check your 3G licence, you'll be in violation!" They can't do this because HTC have no choice but to sign up to a 3G licence since it's part of the standard, thus Samsung would never be allowed to put terms like that into the licensing agreement in the first place by the standards body that set it all up in the first place.
Ah yes, they changed the policy in exchange for the increased upload speeds (was cap-free when it was 50/1 and changed to only monitor traffic between 3pm and 8pm when it went to 50/5 - but downstream is never capped at all).
I could certainly exceed that 6GB in the time slot if I was uploading at full speed for the whole 5 hours, but in practice I have not run up against any issue. The 50Mb plan has been well worth the money for me.
Don't blame Apple for the GPLv3 issue - blame the FSF and everyone else throwing their toys out of the pram over "tivo-isation".
"What?! Someone took the open source code that is free for anyone to use and actually used it for something we disagreed with?! Evil! I don;t care that they're complying with the licence by releasing the changes! This must be stopped!"
FWIW, GPLv2 is still compatible with the App Store - Apple specifically tweaked their licences to make sure it was fully covered after a GPLv2 challenge, but v3 is very specifically designed to be incompatible, but not from Apple's end.
We're in the UK - the top level plans here tend to be free of caps.
Virgin's top couple of fibre tiers are completely cap-free (50Mb, 100Mb [200 in places]). I'm on the 50Mb tier and am paying a very reasonable amount (similar to my friends in Columbus, OH), for more than 4 times the speed. Decent latency too with extremely rare outages (and never for very long if they do happen).
My internet has been hassle free and very fast for the nearly 2 years I've had it.
Why would they be kicked out of a consortium they are not involved with, other than using the standards set out by the group?
You can licence 3G patents without having anything to do with their design, implementation or features - if you want to make a cellular device that works on the standard you simply *must* pay to use them, but there's no requirement that you actively contribute to them, apart from paying the licence fees.
That "non discriminatory" bit pops up again - the patent holders who have 3G patents in the "essential" pool cannot simply kick Apple to the curb because it isn't doing what they want. That's the price of the FRAND system - in exchange for making your patents essential to a global standard, there are rules to follow.
But then there's that tricky "discriminatory" part of the licence - you cannot just use your FRAND patents selectively, or as a defence - you can't just say "hey, infringement!" and sue, if they've been paid for already after the fact just because you don;t like a particular company.
That's the point everyone else has made - if this is their evidence for infringement then they should be laughed out of court, because Apple has a licence for those "essential" 3G patents.
Samsung is effectively trying to Trojan the 3G standard - if Apple are in violation (after paying for 3G licences, which they demonstrably have done - Samsung themselves have acknowledged this), then every other manufacturer with a 3G device is also in violation.
Samsung can *ask* for cross licensing, but they are not entitled to it - it's up to Apple what they offer in trade for the FRAND patents, as long as they offer something of the same value that everyone else paid (whether that be cash, patents, old phone books, pint glasses full of brown M&Ms).
Samsung can't get pissy because Apple doesn't want to cross licence patents. If Apple wants to pay in cash, Samsung are required to take it - those are the breaks for having a patent in a global standard that everyone *must* use.
Apple already has a licence - it has paid for the use of the 3G patents. Samsung is trying to claim that one of the "essential" patents has not been covered.
So if they win, they have successfully Trojaned the 3G standard, and everyone who uses 3G in their product will owe them whatever Apple ends up paying, or they're just trying to cause trouble for Apple.
They really did. They practically photocopied the iPad and the iPhone and sold it.
Notice how Apple are not trying to block other Android phones and tablets from sale, since they aren't direct rip offs of the ipad right down to the box design.
And yes, rectangular tablets with rounded corners have existed for some time, even pre-iPad. If you think that's all there is to it, I have a bridge to sell you.
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Well, you need to keep the pistons in phase, so you need to physically connect the two (or more) cranks to each other - at that point it's trivial to simply drive one output shaft.
You don't need a big, heavy cylinder head since the opposing piston acts as the head for the other. This way you can push up the pressure in the cylinder without having to beef up the block/head much and get much more power for limited size and weight.
An opposed piston engine has two (well, at least two) crankshafts at opposite ends of a cylinder, with a piston on each. The pistons then "meet" in the middle.
The advantage is that you don't need a cylinder head, so the engine can be lighter, and often smaller and go to higher pressures, which makes it ideal for aircraft and submarines and areas where you want to maximise power to weight.
A boxer engine is simply a V engine flattened all the way down, with two banks of cylinders facing away from each other with the crank in the middle.
One of the "classic" opposed piston engines is the Deltic, fitted to the locomotives that were named for it. A hugely complex beast with three crankshafts (one contrarotating), which was very powerful for its size, but very highly strung. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic
In all aspects? Box art and design, physical design, UI etc?
It's all on margins - there's no shortage of black rectangles with rounded corners in the mobile market, but the Nook is clearly different enough to differentiate itself from the iPad, as is the Eee pad Transformer and so on.
Stay objective slashdot!
Classy.
I'm not using "geek" in a negative context here - I self identify as a geek, but either way it misses the point of my post. I could have simply said "technical" and "non-technical" and my argument would still stand exactly the same.
So your argument is.... capitalism is bad?
You are talking nonsense.
A licence fee for Flash?
You are just desperately looking for a way to paint any of Apple's decisions as Machiavellian. It's just not possible for you to see any of Apple's choices as pro-consumer, is it?
Yes, that's fine - geeks and "normal" people want different things. Where it gets iffy is when geeks say "What Apple is doing is evil! Burn them!" because they don't agree with how they're doing it, or they categorise people who use Apple products as clueless sheep with no intelligence or mind of their own because they don;t want the same things out of technology as the geeks do.
That viewpoint is rife around here, and it's extremely short sighted and arrogant. It also creates the incredulity that Apple can be doing so well making "inferior" products - such that they scramble about for an explanation and blame it entirely on marketing or "cult status".
Somehow they miss the Occam's Razor explanation that Apple are making products that many people want to buy, not because they've been brainwashed into it, but because their products actually offer an experience and features that they want!
To swing it away from computers and use the inevitable car analogy, it's the tale of two cars - one that comes as a kit (although you bought it ready assembled, it's designed to be easy to mess with and alter etc), and one that was factory assembled with limited emphasis put on home modification. Some people want the former, some people want the latter. What I don't see is people in the former group questioning the intelligence, sexuality and social standing of those in the latter group. Sometimes you just want a car, you know?
Cool story bro.
So we don't want to replicate an OS that is based on open source with a custom UI on top, that has ties into the open source community, looking for useful projects and adopting them and helping to make them outstanding, and contributing new open source projects to the community?
An OS with a totally free IDE, that uses open standards and protocols for data and communication.
No, we don't want to replicate that at all, because they made a phone with a walled garden.
NeXT, for one. Founded it, helped to shape it into what it became (including the first web server and web browser; cheers Tim Berners Lee), and took it with him when Apple bought it.
He was responsible for driving the early creation of the Apple II along with Woz - two essential sides of a coin - one could not have succeeded in quite the way they did without the other.
He was extremely good at what he did, and had an eye for helping to shape technology to take it beyond the realm of geeks and tech-minded people. You may not think that's a worthy skill, but it is a large part of why Apple is so successful.
By "very accurate" you mean "biased and deliberately flamebait" right?
The are certainly criticisms to be made of Jobs and Apple, but the GP'd post was nothing but trolling.
From the subtitle on this page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is/
"Built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation, OS X is engineered to take full advantage of the technologies in every new Mac. And to deliver the most intuitive and integrated computer experience."
They've made no secret of the fact that they have a BSD core - and in fact spend a great deal of time contributing back to it and the open source community. Not just through "legal obligation" by the licences involved, but with new projects and so on. They do far more than they are "obliged" to by licences like the GPL.
As far as the deal with the RIAA - that was nothing to do with the iPod. The iPod was a product in itself that existed long before iTunes was selling music on the net (that didn't happen until at least 2 years later). The RIAA deal is irrelevant. While the iPod wasn't the first portable mp3 player, it was the first one to really shake up the UI and physical design. I knew someone who had a Rio and it was poorly made with a cumbersome UI. The iPod came along and changed the game. It wasn't first, but it was what people wanted.
Apple don't claim to invent things like the iPod and iPad and so on, but they do claim that they've created something *right* (whether you believe them is entirely subjective), and in many cases that is exactly what they do.
I'm not going to give Jobs credit for "inventing the mp3 player", that misses the point entirely. I will give him (and the team around him who he managed) the credit for making the mp3 player great.
I bet the top execs at Samsung are all shitting themselves now.
I mean, one of them has to have a copycat death - preferably the one closest to 56 years old.
RIP Steve.
Samsung has aknowledged that Apple has paid for the 3G licences, so that's not in doubt as far as this goes; in fact, it's one of Samsung's arguments - that they have proof they are violating an essential 3G patent because Apple has paid for 3G licences, they are just claiming that this particular one is not covered (despite the seeming issue with it then being subject to RAND terms and surely covered by the licencing, but that's for a court to determine).
It certainly would be discriminatory to have a clause that allowed them to use those patents for suing you "if you sue us for any reason", since that would effectively create a situation where Samsung would be immune from lawsuits for infringement of any patents/IP/trademarks/copyright from anyone who made a 3G device. Hypothetically they could make a literal copy of the HTC Desire, say, and then be immune from HTC suing them because Samsung could say "ah ah! check your 3G licence, you'll be in violation!" They can't do this because HTC have no choice but to sign up to a 3G licence since it's part of the standard, thus Samsung would never be allowed to put terms like that into the licensing agreement in the first place by the standards body that set it all up in the first place.
Ah yes, they changed the policy in exchange for the increased upload speeds (was cap-free when it was 50/1 and changed to only monitor traffic between 3pm and 8pm when it went to 50/5 - but downstream is never capped at all).
I could certainly exceed that 6GB in the time slot if I was uploading at full speed for the whole 5 hours, but in practice I have not run up against any issue. The 50Mb plan has been well worth the money for me.
Don't blame Apple for the GPLv3 issue - blame the FSF and everyone else throwing their toys out of the pram over "tivo-isation".
"What?! Someone took the open source code that is free for anyone to use and actually used it for something we disagreed with?! Evil! I don;t care that they're complying with the licence by releasing the changes! This must be stopped!"
FWIW, GPLv2 is still compatible with the App Store - Apple specifically tweaked their licences to make sure it was fully covered after a GPLv2 challenge, but v3 is very specifically designed to be incompatible, but not from Apple's end.
We're in the UK - the top level plans here tend to be free of caps.
Virgin's top couple of fibre tiers are completely cap-free (50Mb, 100Mb [200 in places]). I'm on the 50Mb tier and am paying a very reasonable amount (similar to my friends in Columbus, OH), for more than 4 times the speed. Decent latency too with extremely rare outages (and never for very long if they do happen).
My internet has been hassle free and very fast for the nearly 2 years I've had it.
Why would they be kicked out of a consortium they are not involved with, other than using the standards set out by the group?
You can licence 3G patents without having anything to do with their design, implementation or features - if you want to make a cellular device that works on the standard you simply *must* pay to use them, but there's no requirement that you actively contribute to them, apart from paying the licence fees.
That "non discriminatory" bit pops up again - the patent holders who have 3G patents in the "essential" pool cannot simply kick Apple to the curb because it isn't doing what they want. That's the price of the FRAND system - in exchange for making your patents essential to a global standard, there are rules to follow.
But then there's that tricky "discriminatory" part of the licence - you cannot just use your FRAND patents selectively, or as a defence - you can't just say "hey, infringement!" and sue, if they've been paid for already after the fact just because you don;t like a particular company.
That's the point everyone else has made - if this is their evidence for infringement then they should be laughed out of court, because Apple has a licence for those "essential" 3G patents.
Samsung is effectively trying to Trojan the 3G standard - if Apple are in violation (after paying for 3G licences, which they demonstrably have done - Samsung themselves have acknowledged this), then every other manufacturer with a 3G device is also in violation.
Cool story bro.
Samsung can *ask* for cross licensing, but they are not entitled to it - it's up to Apple what they offer in trade for the FRAND patents, as long as they offer something of the same value that everyone else paid (whether that be cash, patents, old phone books, pint glasses full of brown M&Ms).
Samsung can't get pissy because Apple doesn't want to cross licence patents. If Apple wants to pay in cash, Samsung are required to take it - those are the breaks for having a patent in a global standard that everyone *must* use.
Apple already has a licence - it has paid for the use of the 3G patents. Samsung is trying to claim that one of the "essential" patents has not been covered.
So if they win, they have successfully Trojaned the 3G standard, and everyone who uses 3G in their product will owe them whatever Apple ends up paying, or they're just trying to cause trouble for Apple.
They really did. They practically photocopied the iPad and the iPhone and sold it.
Notice how Apple are not trying to block other Android phones and tablets from sale, since they aren't direct rip offs of the ipad right down to the box design.
And yes, rectangular tablets with rounded corners have existed for some time, even pre-iPad. If you think that's all there is to it, I have a bridge to sell you.