Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
To be pedantic, Hiragana and Katakana glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables. Kana generally represent consonant-vowel pairs, with a few exceptions, such as 'n'. For example, this is what causes the additional ending "oh" vowel on many loan-words in Japanese. Even though the consonant sound exists, it's completely unnatural for a native Japanese speaker to "stop" mid-syllable.
The syllables represented by these two syllabaries (akin to 'alphabets') are the same, with hiragana used for phonetic spelling of native words, names, etc.; katakana is used both for foreign words/phrases as well as for emphasis, similar to italics in English and other Latin-based writing systems.
If people have the money to pay for [XXXX] -- even if some of us think they're bad ideas -- why do we have the right to tell them what they can do with their money?
Because most societies have determined that fraud is a crime; people also have a right to make informed decisions about where they spend their money. Fraudsters deliberately misinform people in order to separate them from their money. Besides, "buyer beware" really isn't a very strong mantra for freedom.
*yawn* Guy takes standard QR codes, markets them against his specific web properties and/or mobile apps. Even the most steadfast of print publishers have cottoned on to the web by now. I have trouble imagining (and the ubimark site doesn't help) why a publisher would use this "platform" instead of just dropping in QR codes with URLs for the usual publisher-presented online offerings?
I completely agree, but there is no pro-Apple sentiment expressed in the article I linked whatsoever. It SLAMS Apple for continuing to use Foxconn's services.
This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the "sweatshop" that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly. Compared to others, the facilities here are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day just to find a place of their own, to find a dream that they'll probably never realize.
This isn't a factory's inside story, but the fate of a generation of workers.
In case you haven't been paying any attention to what's going on in China, these issues are FAR larger than Foxconn or any of its customers. China is undergoing a massive population shift from poor rural areas into urban centers. Vast numbers of people repeating the old dream of "makin' it in the big city" -- but the economics and opportunities available to them conflict with those starry eyed dreams.
ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
Yes, developers are "users" of APIs. But any "developer" worthy of that moniker has an assumed baseline of specialized domain knowledge *far* greater than any 5 or 7 year old.
Yes, there can and should be will be high-level framework APIs that mask inner complexity for straightforward use cases. The open source web world is littered with such things. See "idiomatic" Ruby and Python libraries that wrap native (OS/REST/etc.) counterparts. See what MS did with C#-based APIs that wrap many of the hellish old direct Win32 calls. Sometimes an early design is refined by experience into a simpler one (cf. Plan9's dial() API versus bind/accept/listen).
But sometimes you've just got to give access right down to the metal -- the problem domain is truly complex, and oversimplification of that simply makes users' lives much, much worse.
This has certainly been the case in some disciplines, at some institutions. But it's much less common in disciplines where graduate students already have significant hiring potential (e.g. Computer Science), and doesn't happen at all where they've unionized.
Unionization of graduate students actually happened while I was in grad school myself. It stopped some appalling abuses dead in their tracks. My department was an excellent one to work for, but many were pretty slimy. Not only were grads in some departments terribly overworked, but some shady practices were going on where hiring lines were split between several grads who were each doing overtime level work.
Since the consequences of ignoring the problem would most probably be disastrous, as there's simply no way we can provide a 1st-world standard of living for 100 billion people (at least not without some major technological advances which aren't here yet and may take centuries to achieve), #2 sounds like suicide; it could result in severe environmental damage which would then lead to the world being unlivable for mos
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story, IIRC back in the '80s, which illustrated quite clearly why we have no choice but to limit population growth. His telling was masterful, so I'll commit a bit of a crime by summarizing it: imagine that tomorrow we have technology capable, at perfect efficiency, of doing two things: 1) transporting arbitrary amounts of matter to arbitrary points in the universe instantaneously and 2) freely transmuting between matter and energy, in any desired configuration. In short, technologies that completely remove all limits on human population growth.
Here's the kicker: with all limits removed it would only take about 4,000 years before all matter in the known universe was converted to human beings. No planets, stars, nebulae -- literally nothing but human bodies. Ain't exponential growth a bitch?
Asimov used this to highlight that population growth simply cannot go on unchecked. There are two ways to control it: the birth rate and the death rate. We control the former, while "Mother Nature" controls the latter -- via disease, famine, warfare, etc. He also posed that should we let slip the reins on this one, that the resulting catastrophe might well deal a blow to human civilization from which we'd never recover.
Be honest now, would you really want to read a cogently argued article that garnered nothing but "Yup" and "Seems right" responses?
That's what the comments section is for, after all. Wouldn't want to take all the fun out of slamming down that trump-card Pulitzer-winning counterpoint in under a hundred characters of URL, now would we? We've even consolidated the "Yup" and "Seems right" bit into a simple integer count at the top of the post.;-)
Re:You know you're doing something wrong when
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 1
That's in no small part because Visual Studio tries its level best to avoid any sort of sane portability of user customization settings. It's nominally possible to export and import some settings these days, but it's such a PITA that even experienced VS users I know of mostly don't bother.
Re:You know you're doing something wrong when
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How on earth is this insightful? I don't know of a single software dev who doesn't end up adding significant hacks/customizations to their editor to make the tool fit their working style better. There's even a nice spectrum in most popular dev editors between "customize" and "hack" -- which goes right up through the occasional feature addition or bug fix in the app itself.
Heh, it's tempting to view this as an accidental homage to the blue box.:
An early phreaking tool, the blue box is an electronic device that simulates a telephone operator's dialing console. It functions by replicating the tones used to switch long-distance calls and using them to route the user's own call, bypassing the normal switching mechanism. The most typical use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls - inversely, the Black Box enabled one to receive calls which were free to the caller.
For those new to the party, on early telephony networks the telco's control signals were sent on the same channel as the content (voice) signals. Some bright folks figured out how to exploit this weakness. Oops.;-)
Re:Sounds like a Case of the Spostas
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's not as if Apple's hidden the fact that Flash isn't supported. It's not like you USED to be able to use it and now you can't -- they've been VERY open about their dick-waving with Adobe.
This also falls on Adobe -- it's not as if they've been able to run full-fledged Flash content at production quality on any mobile device yet either. I have to admit to a sense of teapot-tempest over "Apple sez you can't have what doesn't even exist yet!"
And w.r.t. the closed/open meme-wars going on: I decidedly don't hear the sounds of these same developers chucking their {PS3,Wii,XBox}'es into the dumpster over their "ev1l closed platformedness." Console platforms have traditionally had heavy restrictions at both the business and development levels. Nor do I hear the feds knocking down Sony's or Nintendo's or Microsoft's doors over the antitrust ramifications of their respective consoles.
Nonsense; "user visible" changes are very different for different people when it's a distro consisting of thousands of packages. Ubuntu's system is also far better than "release never", which was the seeming mantra of Debian stable for many years, and apparently RHEL's entire business model.
For my part, I like having reasonably vetted releases which bring incremental improvements. It's a happy medium between (e.g.) surfing Debian unstable just to get some new feature in one oft-used package and "stable" versions which are so stale that paleontology grad students write their dissertations on them.
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.
Forget old episodes, the "killer" feature they need to offer is the ability to handle prime-time streaming volume. Netflix streaming seems to have this down cold, but Hulu is almost unwatchable at times.
Have you been able to find any signs of other users having similar problems? If not, then my experience strongly suggests that it's a problem specific to your system, either the software configuration or the hardware. Problems with a vendor tend to show up with enough users to create a good deal of Internet traffic on the matter.
For example, one system I used would crash hard intermittently -- sometimes multiple times in a day, sometimes only after several days of use. Red herring #1: For ages I thought this was an OS/software problem as the onset seemed to coincide with an upgrade. Red herring #2: standard h/w diagnostics didn't show any problems, nor did logs. Then I finally clued into the fact that I was having trouble identifying the issue not only because of no diagnostics, but because no one else on the Internet seemed to have similar problems. I forget the particulars, but I had reason to suspect the RAM, so I replaced it. Bingo, no more crashes.
The Ubuntu Wiki has details on this issue at the GEMLeak entry. It provides instructions on how to upgrade to (and remove) the candidate packages in the PPA. This comment is worthy of note for those already on Lucid:
This does not affect cards using proprietary drivers or not using DRI2. Intel will always be affected since DRI2 is used with and without KMS, ATI uses DRI1 without KMS.
But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards
NO, NO, NO. No stupid, pointless warnings. Make the financial institutions solely liable for all identity theft. They're the only ones with the ability to stop it, and they should be the ones that bear the full economic incentive for managing fraud.
The actual problem to be solved is that of fraudulent transactions. Financial institutions make it too easy for a criminal to commit fraudulent transactions, and too difficult for the victims to clear their names. [...] It's not that financial institutions suffer no losses. Because of something called Regulation E, they already pay most of the direct costs of identity theft. But the costs in time, stress and hassle are entirely borne by the victims.
The whole article is +5 Insightful, well worth reading.
[...] demonstrating the use of cameras and laser pico-projectors to "extend" a laptop's user interface to adjacent surfaces.
Excellent! Now when I'm laptopping away on the couch, I can turn the cat into my UI. This would be great with context-sensitive help. "Double-tap left cat ear to confirm." Also, turnabout for all those times the cat decides to use her two-pawpad scrolling powers on me.
Apple made a hard decision to cut support for a legacy framework, with broad impact to many of its developers. This very trait is often lauded in comparisons to Microsoft, where many people would dearly love for terrible legacy frameworks and APIs to be deprecated (or even just 'nuked from orbit'). Moreover, Apple isn't obligated to do any work to make Adobe's life easier.
If you want to continue silly tit-for-tat analyses of such things, Adobe screwed Apple over a decade earlier by refusing to port anything to Cocoa -- sticking with Carbon in the first place. This Roughly Drafted article provides more of the historical color.
There, fixed that for ya. Unless Apple stupidly locks out small providers, a straightforward way of monetizing content is potentially a boon to all content providers regardless of size. With print media, there's fairly large overhead to print, market, and circulate a publication (magazine, newspaper, etc.). With digital media, these barriers to entry are equalized which provides for a LOT more competition to Big Content, and allows for niches to grow that were simply too small to be considered by Big Content. I'm frankly amazed that Rupert doesn't notice the laser sights of thousands (millions?) of authors and journalists targeting his head right now...
So you think publishers should be price regulated? Really? I'm no fan of seemingly high prices for some ebooks (esp. back-catalog items) either, but I can solve that problem by leaving my money in my wallet or buying the $2 used paperback...
My problem (at least at this point) isn't really with the iPad, but with people who are insisting the iPad is some kind of revolutionary device. It may do what it does very well, but it is hardly original.
Neither was the iPod "original" if you want to take the narrow view. There were plenty of other competing MP3 players when the 1st gen iPod hit the market... and not too long afterward they were all rendered irrelevant. The iPod was the first to have a really stellar interface given the UI limitations on devices that small, and it ended up owning the market because of that.
Just because there have been touch screen devices before and just because there have been tablet devices before is irrelevant. The history of technology is littered with failed originality. Heck, this even has a name: Second-mover advantage. This market (a new generation of ubiquitous computing devices) is wide-open for a winning combination of design elements, whether or not the iPad is "it". Apple has won the day before from those who don't grok design synergy as being original and immensely valuable in its own right. They may yet do it again.
The best guess is that Apple bought Fingerworks solely for it's patents and technology.
There's actually almost zero guessing on this point, although it takes some digging to find all of the facts. Much of the details were posted on the Fingerfans forum back when the purchase happened. Other useful info may exist primarily in the Internet Archive at this point.
Synopsis: Fingerworks as a company was a young venture founded based on Wayne Westerman's Ph.D. work relating to capacitive multi-touch interfaces. Fingerworks was one of the first companies to have useful (awesome, actually) multitouch based products on the open market. These included the GesturePad, a multi-touch pointing device not dissimilar to the recent Wacom Bamboo Touch; and the TouchStream multi-touch keyboard. The TouchStream was pretty cool: max typing speeds were slower than a conventional keyboard, but the whole surface was usable for multitouch pointer input and gestures.
Apple apparently liked what they saw and bought the company up -- its patent portfolio as well as Westerman and their core R&D team. This was not even remotely public knowledge at the time. To outsiders' view, Fingerworks practically vanished. The release of the first iPhone was the coming-out party for this technology at Apple. Westerman and his team have continued to do multi-touch research at Apple, issuing a variety of patents under the auspices of their new company. I recall a few of those being mentioned on Slashdot in the past, specifically one about ongoing work to improve haptics (touch feedback) for multi-touch keyboards.
Slashdot Mirror
They do not literally mean "this screen has the same 'resolution' as your retina".
Precisely. Quoting Steve Jobs' keynote from the WWDC via this transcript:
There's a magic number around 300DPI where, about a foot away, you can no longer see pixels; limit of the human retina.
Note that in practice, this limit is going to vary (generally, get worse) by individual due to the overall condition of their visual system.
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
To be pedantic, Hiragana and Katakana glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables. Kana generally represent consonant-vowel pairs, with a few exceptions, such as 'n'. For example, this is what causes the additional ending "oh" vowel on many loan-words in Japanese. Even though the consonant sound exists, it's completely unnatural for a native Japanese speaker to "stop" mid-syllable.
The syllables represented by these two syllabaries (akin to 'alphabets') are the same, with hiragana used for phonetic spelling of native words, names, etc.; katakana is used both for foreign words/phrases as well as for emphasis, similar to italics in English and other Latin-based writing systems.
If people have the money to pay for [XXXX] -- even if some of us think they're bad ideas -- why do we have the right to tell them what they can do with their money?
Because most societies have determined that fraud is a crime; people also have a right to make informed decisions about where they spend their money. Fraudsters deliberately misinform people in order to separate them from their money. Besides, "buyer beware" really isn't a very strong mantra for freedom.
*yawn* Guy takes standard QR codes, markets them against his specific web properties and/or mobile apps. Even the most steadfast of print publishers have cottoned on to the web by now. I have trouble imagining (and the ubimark site doesn't help) why a publisher would use this "platform" instead of just dropping in QR codes with URLs for the usual publisher-presented online offerings?
I completely agree, but there is no pro-Apple sentiment expressed in the article I linked whatsoever. It SLAMS Apple for continuing to use Foxconn's services.
Huh? From the closing of translated article on engadget (emphasis added):
This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn't the "sweatshop" that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a medium-sized town, all smooth and orderly. Compared to others, the facilities here are well-equipped and superior, with employee treatment meeting standard specifications. Thousands of people flock here each day just to find a place of their own, to find a dream that they'll probably never realize.
This isn't a factory's inside story, but the fate of a generation of workers.
In case you haven't been paying any attention to what's going on in China, these issues are FAR larger than Foxconn or any of its customers. China is undergoing a massive population shift from poor rural areas into urban centers. Vast numbers of people repeating the old dream of "makin' it in the big city" -- but the economics and opportunities available to them conflict with those starry eyed dreams.
ALL of it is user facing. That's the very point of an API. The user is the developer.
Yes, developers are "users" of APIs. But any "developer" worthy of that moniker has an assumed baseline of specialized domain knowledge *far* greater than any 5 or 7 year old.
Yes, there can and should be will be high-level framework APIs that mask inner complexity for straightforward use cases. The open source web world is littered with such things. See "idiomatic" Ruby and Python libraries that wrap native (OS/REST/etc.) counterparts. See what MS did with C#-based APIs that wrap many of the hellish old direct Win32 calls. Sometimes an early design is refined by experience into a simpler one (cf. Plan9's dial() API versus bind/accept/listen).
But sometimes you've just got to give access right down to the metal -- the problem domain is truly complex, and oversimplification of that simply makes users' lives much, much worse.
This has certainly been the case in some disciplines, at some institutions. But it's much less common in disciplines where graduate students already have significant hiring potential (e.g. Computer Science), and doesn't happen at all where they've unionized.
Unionization of graduate students actually happened while I was in grad school myself. It stopped some appalling abuses dead in their tracks. My department was an excellent one to work for, but many were pretty slimy. Not only were grads in some departments terribly overworked, but some shady practices were going on where hiring lines were split between several grads who were each doing overtime level work.
Since the consequences of ignoring the problem would most probably be disastrous, as there's simply no way we can provide a 1st-world standard of living for 100 billion people (at least not without some major technological advances which aren't here yet and may take centuries to achieve), #2 sounds like suicide; it could result in severe environmental damage which would then lead to the world being unlivable for mos
Isaac Asimov wrote a short story, IIRC back in the '80s, which illustrated quite clearly why we have no choice but to limit population growth. His telling was masterful, so I'll commit a bit of a crime by summarizing it: imagine that tomorrow we have technology capable, at perfect efficiency, of doing two things: 1) transporting arbitrary amounts of matter to arbitrary points in the universe instantaneously and 2) freely transmuting between matter and energy, in any desired configuration. In short, technologies that completely remove all limits on human population growth.
Here's the kicker: with all limits removed it would only take about 4,000 years before all matter in the known universe was converted to human beings. No planets, stars, nebulae -- literally nothing but human bodies. Ain't exponential growth a bitch?
Asimov used this to highlight that population growth simply cannot go on unchecked. There are two ways to control it: the birth rate and the death rate. We control the former, while "Mother Nature" controls the latter -- via disease, famine, warfare, etc. He also posed that should we let slip the reins on this one, that the resulting catastrophe might well deal a blow to human civilization from which we'd never recover.
Be honest now, would you really want to read a cogently argued article that garnered nothing but "Yup" and "Seems right" responses?
That's what the comments section is for, after all. Wouldn't want to take all the fun out of slamming down that trump-card Pulitzer-winning counterpoint in under a hundred characters of URL, now would we? We've even consolidated the "Yup" and "Seems right" bit into a simple integer count at the top of the post. ;-)
That's in no small part because Visual Studio tries its level best to avoid any sort of sane portability of user customization settings. It's nominally possible to export and import some settings these days, but it's such a PITA that even experienced VS users I know of mostly don't bother.
How on earth is this insightful? I don't know of a single software dev who doesn't end up adding significant hacks/customizations to their editor to make the tool fit their working style better. There's even a nice spectrum in most popular dev editors between "customize" and "hack" -- which goes right up through the occasional feature addition or bug fix in the app itself.
Heh, it's tempting to view this as an accidental homage to the blue box.:
An early phreaking tool, the blue box is an electronic device that simulates a telephone operator's dialing console. It functions by replicating the tones used to switch long-distance calls and using them to route the user's own call, bypassing the normal switching mechanism. The most typical use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls - inversely, the Black Box enabled one to receive calls which were free to the caller.
For those new to the party, on early telephony networks the telco's control signals were sent on the same channel as the content (voice) signals. Some bright folks figured out how to exploit this weakness. Oops. ;-)
It's not as if Apple's hidden the fact that Flash isn't supported. It's not like you USED to be able to use it and now you can't -- they've been VERY open about their dick-waving with Adobe.
This also falls on Adobe -- it's not as if they've been able to run full-fledged Flash content at production quality on any mobile device yet either. I have to admit to a sense of teapot-tempest over "Apple sez you can't have what doesn't even exist yet!"
And w.r.t. the closed/open meme-wars going on: I decidedly don't hear the sounds of these same developers chucking their {PS3,Wii,XBox}'es into the dumpster over their "ev1l closed platformedness." Console platforms have traditionally had heavy restrictions at both the business and development levels. Nor do I hear the feds knocking down Sony's or Nintendo's or Microsoft's doors over the antitrust ramifications of their respective consoles.
Nonsense; "user visible" changes are very different for different people when it's a distro consisting of thousands of packages. Ubuntu's system is also far better than "release never", which was the seeming mantra of Debian stable for many years, and apparently RHEL's entire business model.
For my part, I like having reasonably vetted releases which bring incremental improvements. It's a happy medium between (e.g.) surfing Debian unstable just to get some new feature in one oft-used package and "stable" versions which are so stale that paleontology grad students write their dissertations on them.
Specifically, this appears to be California Penal Code, section 485:
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.
Forget old episodes, the "killer" feature they need to offer is the ability to handle prime-time streaming volume. Netflix streaming seems to have this down cold, but Hulu is almost unwatchable at times.
Have you been able to find any signs of other users having similar problems? If not, then my experience strongly suggests that it's a problem specific to your system, either the software configuration or the hardware. Problems with a vendor tend to show up with enough users to create a good deal of Internet traffic on the matter.
For example, one system I used would crash hard intermittently -- sometimes multiple times in a day, sometimes only after several days of use. Red herring #1: For ages I thought this was an OS/software problem as the onset seemed to coincide with an upgrade. Red herring #2: standard h/w diagnostics didn't show any problems, nor did logs. Then I finally clued into the fact that I was having trouble identifying the issue not only because of no diagnostics, but because no one else on the Internet seemed to have similar problems. I forget the particulars, but I had reason to suspect the RAM, so I replaced it. Bingo, no more crashes.
The Ubuntu Wiki has details on this issue at the GEMLeak entry. It provides instructions on how to upgrade to (and remove) the candidate packages in the PPA. This comment is worthy of note for those already on Lucid:
This does not affect cards using proprietary drivers or not using DRI2. Intel will always be affected since DRI2 is used with and without KMS, ATI uses DRI1 without KMS.
But I also think that those producing these check cards should be required to advertise the hazards of having one of these cards
NO, NO, NO. No stupid, pointless warnings. Make the financial institutions solely liable for all identity theft. They're the only ones with the ability to stop it, and they should be the ones that bear the full economic incentive for managing fraud.
But I didn't say it first, Bruce Schneier did:
The actual problem to be solved is that of fraudulent transactions. Financial institutions make it too easy for a criminal to commit fraudulent transactions, and too difficult for the victims to clear their names.
[...]
It's not that financial institutions suffer no losses. Because of something called Regulation E, they already pay most of the direct costs of identity theft. But the costs in time, stress and hassle are entirely borne by the victims.
The whole article is +5 Insightful, well worth reading.
[...] demonstrating the use of cameras and laser pico-projectors to "extend" a laptop's user interface to adjacent surfaces.
Excellent! Now when I'm laptopping away on the couch, I can turn the cat into my UI. This would be great with context-sensitive help. "Double-tap left cat ear to confirm." Also, turnabout for all those times the cat decides to use her two-pawpad scrolling powers on me.
Apple made a hard decision to cut support for a legacy framework, with broad impact to many of its developers. This very trait is often lauded in comparisons to Microsoft, where many people would dearly love for terrible legacy frameworks and APIs to be deprecated (or even just 'nuked from orbit'). Moreover, Apple isn't obligated to do any work to make Adobe's life easier.
If you want to continue silly tit-for-tat analyses of such things, Adobe screwed Apple over a decade earlier by refusing to port anything to Cocoa -- sticking with Carbon in the first place. This Roughly Drafted article provides more of the historical color.
that's a wet dream for Big^H^H^H Content.
There, fixed that for ya. Unless Apple stupidly locks out small providers, a straightforward way of monetizing content is potentially a boon to all content providers regardless of size. With print media, there's fairly large overhead to print, market, and circulate a publication (magazine, newspaper, etc.). With digital media, these barriers to entry are equalized which provides for a LOT more competition to Big Content, and allows for niches to grow that were simply too small to be considered by Big Content. I'm frankly amazed that Rupert doesn't notice the laser sights of thousands (millions?) of authors and journalists targeting his head right now...
e-Book sellers now get to raise prices
So you think publishers should be price regulated? Really? I'm no fan of seemingly high prices for some ebooks (esp. back-catalog items) either, but I can solve that problem by leaving my money in my wallet or buying the $2 used paperback...
My problem (at least at this point) isn't really with the iPad, but with people who are insisting the iPad is some kind of revolutionary device. It may do what it does very well, but it is hardly original.
Neither was the iPod "original" if you want to take the narrow view. There were plenty of other competing MP3 players when the 1st gen iPod hit the market... and not too long afterward they were all rendered irrelevant. The iPod was the first to have a really stellar interface given the UI limitations on devices that small, and it ended up owning the market because of that.
Just because there have been touch screen devices before and just because there have been tablet devices before is irrelevant. The history of technology is littered with failed originality. Heck, this even has a name: Second-mover advantage. This market (a new generation of ubiquitous computing devices) is wide-open for a winning combination of design elements, whether or not the iPad is "it". Apple has won the day before from those who don't grok design synergy as being original and immensely valuable in its own right. They may yet do it again.
The best guess is that Apple bought Fingerworks solely for it's patents and technology.
There's actually almost zero guessing on this point, although it takes some digging to find all of the facts. Much of the details were posted on the Fingerfans forum back when the purchase happened. Other useful info may exist primarily in the Internet Archive at this point.
Synopsis: Fingerworks as a company was a young venture founded based on Wayne Westerman's Ph.D. work relating to capacitive multi-touch interfaces. Fingerworks was one of the first companies to have useful (awesome, actually) multitouch based products on the open market. These included the GesturePad, a multi-touch pointing device not dissimilar to the recent Wacom Bamboo Touch; and the TouchStream multi-touch keyboard. The TouchStream was pretty cool: max typing speeds were slower than a conventional keyboard, but the whole surface was usable for multitouch pointer input and gestures.
Apple apparently liked what they saw and bought the company up -- its patent portfolio as well as Westerman and their core R&D team. This was not even remotely public knowledge at the time. To outsiders' view, Fingerworks practically vanished. The release of the first iPhone was the coming-out party for this technology at Apple. Westerman and his team have continued to do multi-touch research at Apple, issuing a variety of patents under the auspices of their new company. I recall a few of those being mentioned on Slashdot in the past, specifically one about ongoing work to improve haptics (touch feedback) for multi-touch keyboards.