The foo-phone would have to address something that's very sub-par in today's smartphones. The iPhone succeeded by addressing major shortcomings in user interface and internet browsing. This even overcame the first iPhone's lack of 3G network speeds.
There was also the initial novelty of an all-touchscreen device. The LG Prada may have been released a few months earlier, but I've commented a number of times how truly awful the Prada's first user interface was compared to the iPhone.
So what's severely lacking in today's phones? Not processor power, screensize, user interface, network speed, storage, battery life, etc, that's for sure.
Actually most of the products you can identify in movies have either had the rights paid for by the movie company or if the movie is a big name flick will often get money from the company in return for showing their product in a favorable light. Why do you think every person that uses a laptop in a movie is always using a MacBook when IRL that is less than 10% of the population? Product placement.
Apple has repeatedly said/claimed that they don't pay for product placement, so your implication that Apple pays for the placement is incorrect.
Even in shows that don't obviously show the logo or other markings (Big Bang Theory covers the logo and name with a circular patch), it's obvious they are Apple devices.
And North Korea is democratic. It's right in their official name (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)! They wouldn't lie in the very name they give themselves, would they?/extreme_sarcasm
Your actions define you, not your name. By actions, the Nazis were fascist, not socialist, and in the simple but flawed single-axis political spectrum, that falls more in line with right-wing thinking. So very sorry your feelings are hurt by the simple truth that fascists are ideologically closer to conservatives than they are to liberals, but trying to rewrite or deny history to ease your conscience is pathetic.
I think it's more that consumers for some reason demand 16:9 in their desktop and even laptop screens because when they do watch 16:9 video, they don't like seeing black bars on the screen.
Look at the flack Apple got for not making iPads 16:9, and that's a *ten* inch screen.
not allowed to hang up on abusive customers no matter what they do.
A friend used to work for a different government agency, Passport Canada. He would give verbally abusive customers one, maybe two warnings, and then yes he'd hang up on them if they persisted. One time, someone called back and demanded to speak to his manager, the call was transferred, after talking for a few moments the manager asked the caller if he had been verbally abusive before my friend hung up on him. When the caller answered yes and started trying to justify it, the manager told him "good" and hung up on him.
(Being professional doesn't mean you put up with abuse, of any kind).
On the surface, that sounds a lot like the Apple purchase of NeXT the year earlier, in that NeXT staff soon ended up in all the key positions. Unlike Apple/NeXT, though, Boeing/MD did the complete opposite on the critical points the requiem article touched on.
Admittedly I'm not the target market, but at this point I'd think it'd be best for BB to appeal to as broad a market as possible. If they could profit at $350/phone then they should saturate the market, rather than pricing high now, then dropping the price like the Playbook. Nothing makes your product look more unappealing than staging it as a premium product then dropping the price because it doesn't live up to the premium status.
They tried that already. Their entry-level devices broke down early (hardware and/or software issues, e.g. BB Storm), damaging their reputation for quality and reliability.
Unlike the big Android manufacturers, BB (the company) doesn't have many other products to fall back on. Their BB Curve line is about $300 without contract from Rogers, and their margins on it are probably very thin. Even at $0 on contract, it did a poor job saturating the market.
Carriers also started discounting the Galaxy SIII soon after launch, and they sold better than any other phone. BB's not in the same league right now, but neither are they in the same position as when they launched their Playbook to initially poor reviews. The buzz is fairly positive on BB10, so they can afford to risk starting at the premium level and work their way down.
As they (both sides) should. The Google Maps app's UI for example is a jarring change from many other iOS apps. Call it superfluous eye candy to have rounded ends on a text box instead of plain right angled corners, or smoothly shaded tabs for different functions, but visually the current GMaps, while perfectly functional and I use it a fair bit, just doesn't look right when run in iOS.
A different example: Apple was rightly criticized for basically porting the Mac's text rendering engine and some of the Mac's UI conventions when they first released Safari on Windows. Even if the rendering method was superior to how Windows does it (not saying it was or wasn't), it clashed badly with the underlying OS and all other programs on it, so it didn't look right. Apple got the hint and later versions of Windows Safari (and iTunes) render text the Windows way.
What Coulton did definitely deserved a follow-up, but as editor, timothy was negligent for not linking to the original story to make the association clear.
When copyright and IP issues in showbiz become headline and gossip fodder on TMZ or Variety, then you can complain that it's become something that "normal" people care about and can dismiss it as dreck. Until then, yes, any article pertaining to the sordid state of IP laws and how the industry (especially Hollywood showbiz) abuses it, can be considered a proper topic for Slashdot to cover.
Fox has some giant balls on this one. I don't know why they bothered to change the vocals at all, personally, if they're going to steal the entire song in the first place.
Fox doesn't have balls, giant or otherwise. They have a metric whackload of money. Granted that's often mistaken for balls, but take the money away and they're more cowardly than the average joe.
What the hell is wrong with you people. Whether or not you like the style of his song is completely fucking irrelevant.
What's completely fucking irrelevant is this story about a song on "Glee" being featured on Slashdot. Is this TMZ or Variety?
I don't watch or follow Glee in the slightest, so I must have completely missed the memo advising that the production of Glee is totally free of any intellectual property rights and associated issues.
I also outgrew Mickey Mouse when I was 9, so I'm sure I missed a similar memo about how Disney's effect on copyrights is irrelevant.
.. you assume that global warming simply means everywhere gets proportionally hotter, all year round. It doesn't.. Some places will get colder...
The term is Global Warming. A combination of "global" and "warming". Which obviously means warming on a global scale. That's what the '"global" means. Globally so to speak. And no cooling either, just warming. Otherwise it'd be be called "global warming and cooling". Or local warming.
That fallacy is why the scientific community was forced to start using "climate change" instead of global warming. Joe Public just can't (or refuse to) grasp the concept of averages.
Yes, it means warming on a global scale. But the global scale means the *average* goes up. There may be areas that get cooler, but they are outweighed by the number of areas that get warmer.
Put it in computer terms (only to illustrate the "global scale" fallacy, not how global warming happens): say your CPU has 8 logical cores. All 8 cores are being used moderately by a multithreaded process, but you suspend it when you start running a more demanding process that only uses 6 cores. A monitoring tool will note that 2 cores cool off but the other six get much warmer. The tool's ninth temperature reading, the average of all cores, will obviously report that the temperature of the whole CPU has gone up.
You don't have to differentiate with screen/case etc. JUST FUCKING UPDATE YOUR FUCKING DEVICE! That will make you fucking unique in Android land. The first company that manages to release a device that can ALWAYS run the latest Android version will leave ALL the other companies in the dust.
Remember that more Android phones are being sold per quarter than Apple phones. This despite the well-known issue of limited (if any) updates from Android manufacturers and carriers, and despite Apple still providing iOS updates (even if some features are missing) to models that came out almost 3.5 years ago.
The takeaway is that most Android users *don't care* what version they're running. By many accounts, they don't even use most of the features in the version that came with it. More than screen size or the latest features, they want it cheap, and that's exactly what they're getting.
And as you note, there's already a device that can always run the latest Android version: the Nexus 4 (unless I and many others have been mislead about its true upgradability). Google and LG botched the Nexus 4's launch and supplies are next to nil, but even if we're extremely generous and say it could've sold ten times the 370,000 estimated actual sales, and increase that by 50% to make it a quarter's worth of sales (it's only been out for 2 months), that's still only 9% of the estimated 60 million Galaxy SIIIs sold in just the last quarter. I'm sure Samsung isn't losing any sleep at all over the possibility the Nexus will leave them in the dust.
BTW AK Marc I'm not saying Google should take action on this, or that Hingston is right, or whatever. I'm just taking issue with "that would be perfectly fine" and contesting that you would be "perfectly fine" with the reality of the situation if you were in his shoes.
In marriage at least, an annulment means that the marriage was invalid, null and voice, and legally it retroactively did not in fact occur. "Legal" is of course different from "reality" or "what actually did happen".
If GP used the word in a similar context, it means the bankruptcy was invalid and should have been stricken from the legal, financial record.
Obviously Google isn't (nor should be) held to the same legal standards, but let's put it another way: say you're arrested for a widely-reported crime, but you're released and charges dropped a day or two later. Of course there's now tons of online news articles about this, and even though many write follow-up articles saying charges are dropped, would you be perfectly fine with "arrested/charged with X" to be the first autocomplete when typing "AK Marc"? Would you even be fine with "AK Marc released" or "AK Marc charges dropped" as the second/third autocomplete result in the list? They all did happen, after all, and the arrest itself did get more coverage.
The story about the retired technician sending the company which demanding an itemized invoice, "fixing issue: $10; knowing how to fix it: $19,990" needs to be updated with an additional "Jumping through multiple levels of management CYA red tape" line item costing three times more.
One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.
Sounds a lot like some organized religions or at least a few of their denominations...
One of the major Canadian federal parties that merged to form the current Conservative party was officially announced as the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance party.
Yes, Canadian CRAP or CCRAP ("see crap"). Even if "party" wasn't officially part of the name, it's amazing how that slipped past all the highly-paid PR spinsters they had at their disposal.
The name lasted a day before they switched some letters around.
You'd think that after the fall from grace of the US Olympic basketball "Dream Team" label in the early 2000s, Boeing would've learned the pitfalls of naming anything with "dream" in it.
The basketball team at least could claim that it was journalists, not themselves, who came up with that term.
Somehow I suspect most airlines consider not catching on fire more important than a slight improvement in fuel efficiency.
Agreed.
Someone's going to lose a shedload of money if these planes are out of service for long.
The alternative is losing a shedload of people if warnings aren't looked into, and develop into catastrophic failure. Too many preventable air accidents have happened because money was a factor (rushed takeoffs to stay under pilot flighttime limits; takeoff/landing in terrible weather; poor or improper maintenance/parts; ill-equipped airports and control towers; etc).
The 787 has been in active service only a bit over a year, they really have not yet found all the bugs. British Airways 038, a Boeing 777, was brought down by something as simple as a few extra millimetres of piping protruding from the fuel/oil heat exchangers.
They did it because on top of the smoke warning, they also got a battery fault warning in the same cargo compartment where a battery caught fire on a sister airplane just last week.
The slide chutes were perhaps a bit much if there was no smoke in the cabin after landing, but the emergency landing itself is easily justified.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I said, the original implication that Apple pays money to get product placement is wrong. That is all.
The foo-phone would have to address something that's very sub-par in today's smartphones. The iPhone succeeded by addressing major shortcomings in user interface and internet browsing. This even overcame the first iPhone's lack of 3G network speeds.
There was also the initial novelty of an all-touchscreen device. The LG Prada may have been released a few months earlier, but I've commented a number of times how truly awful the Prada's first user interface was compared to the iPhone.
So what's severely lacking in today's phones? Not processor power, screensize, user interface, network speed, storage, battery life, etc, that's for sure.
Actually most of the products you can identify in movies have either had the rights paid for by the movie company or if the movie is a big name flick will often get money from the company in return for showing their product in a favorable light. Why do you think every person that uses a laptop in a movie is always using a MacBook when IRL that is less than 10% of the population? Product placement.
Apple has repeatedly said/claimed that they don't pay for product placement, so your implication that Apple pays for the placement is incorrect.
Some marketing company calculated the screen time of Apple gear on the latest Mission Impossible was worth about $23 million. Whatever the secret, money-less deals are, they're obviously working great for Apple.
Even in shows that don't obviously show the logo or other markings (Big Bang Theory covers the logo and name with a circular patch), it's obvious they are Apple devices.
Stalinism was Communism. Nazism is Socialism.
Both are extreme. Both are left wing.
And North Korea is democratic. It's right in their official name (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)! They wouldn't lie in the very name they give themselves, would they? /extreme_sarcasm
Your actions define you, not your name. By actions, the Nazis were fascist, not socialist, and in the simple but flawed single-axis political spectrum, that falls more in line with right-wing thinking. So very sorry your feelings are hurt by the simple truth that fascists are ideologically closer to conservatives than they are to liberals, but trying to rewrite or deny history to ease your conscience is pathetic.
I think it's more that consumers for some reason demand 16:9 in their desktop and even laptop screens because when they do watch 16:9 video, they don't like seeing black bars on the screen.
Look at the flack Apple got for not making iPads 16:9, and that's a *ten* inch screen.
not allowed to hang up on abusive customers no matter what they do.
A friend used to work for a different government agency, Passport Canada. He would give verbally abusive customers one, maybe two warnings, and then yes he'd hang up on them if they persisted. One time, someone called back and demanded to speak to his manager, the call was transferred, after talking for a few moments the manager asked the caller if he had been verbally abusive before my friend hung up on him. When the caller answered yes and started trying to justify it, the manager told him "good" and hung up on him.
(Being professional doesn't mean you put up with abuse, of any kind).
On the surface, that sounds a lot like the Apple purchase of NeXT the year earlier, in that NeXT staff soon ended up in all the key positions. Unlike Apple/NeXT, though, Boeing/MD did the complete opposite on the critical points the requiem article touched on.
Admittedly I'm not the target market, but at this point I'd think it'd be best for BB to appeal to as broad a market as possible. If they could profit at $350/phone then they should saturate the market, rather than pricing high now, then dropping the price like the Playbook. Nothing makes your product look more unappealing than staging it as a premium product then dropping the price because it doesn't live up to the premium status.
They tried that already. Their entry-level devices broke down early (hardware and/or software issues, e.g. BB Storm), damaging their reputation for quality and reliability.
Unlike the big Android manufacturers, BB (the company) doesn't have many other products to fall back on. Their BB Curve line is about $300 without contract from Rogers, and their margins on it are probably very thin. Even at $0 on contract, it did a poor job saturating the market.
Carriers also started discounting the Galaxy SIII soon after launch, and they sold better than any other phone. BB's not in the same league right now, but neither are they in the same position as when they launched their Playbook to initially poor reviews. The buzz is fairly positive on BB10, so they can afford to risk starting at the premium level and work their way down.
As they (both sides) should. The Google Maps app's UI for example is a jarring change from many other iOS apps. Call it superfluous eye candy to have rounded ends on a text box instead of plain right angled corners, or smoothly shaded tabs for different functions, but visually the current GMaps, while perfectly functional and I use it a fair bit, just doesn't look right when run in iOS.
A different example: Apple was rightly criticized for basically porting the Mac's text rendering engine and some of the Mac's UI conventions when they first released Safari on Windows. Even if the rendering method was superior to how Windows does it (not saying it was or wasn't), it clashed badly with the underlying OS and all other programs on it, so it didn't look right. Apple got the hint and later versions of Windows Safari (and iTunes) render text the Windows way.
OK, I see where your confusion stems from. This was a direct follow-up to the Slashdot story just 3 days ago. In *that* linked article, the IP issues and ethics are pretty clearly spelled out.
What Coulton did definitely deserved a follow-up, but as editor, timothy was negligent for not linking to the original story to make the association clear.
When copyright and IP issues in showbiz become headline and gossip fodder on TMZ or Variety, then you can complain that it's become something that "normal" people care about and can dismiss it as dreck. Until then, yes, any article pertaining to the sordid state of IP laws and how the industry (especially Hollywood showbiz) abuses it, can be considered a proper topic for Slashdot to cover.
Fox has some giant balls on this one. I don't know why they bothered to change the vocals at all, personally, if they're going to steal the entire song in the first place.
Fox doesn't have balls, giant or otherwise. They have a metric whackload of money. Granted that's often mistaken for balls, but take the money away and they're more cowardly than the average joe.
Coulton is the one with balls in this story.
What the hell is wrong with you people. Whether or not you like the style of his song is completely fucking irrelevant.
What's completely fucking irrelevant is this story about a song on "Glee" being featured on Slashdot. Is this TMZ or Variety?
I don't watch or follow Glee in the slightest, so I must have completely missed the memo advising that the production of Glee is totally free of any intellectual property rights and associated issues.
I also outgrew Mickey Mouse when I was 9, so I'm sure I missed a similar memo about how Disney's effect on copyrights is irrelevant.
.. you assume that global warming simply means everywhere gets proportionally hotter, all year round. It doesn't.. Some places will get colder ...
The term is Global Warming. A combination of "global" and "warming". Which obviously means warming on a global scale. That's what the '"global" means. Globally so to speak. And no cooling either, just warming. Otherwise it'd be be called "global warming and cooling". Or local warming.
That fallacy is why the scientific community was forced to start using "climate change" instead of global warming. Joe Public just can't (or refuse to) grasp the concept of averages.
Yes, it means warming on a global scale. But the global scale means the *average* goes up. There may be areas that get cooler, but they are outweighed by the number of areas that get warmer.
Put it in computer terms (only to illustrate the "global scale" fallacy, not how global warming happens): say your CPU has 8 logical cores. All 8 cores are being used moderately by a multithreaded process, but you suspend it when you start running a more demanding process that only uses 6 cores. A monitoring tool will note that 2 cores cool off but the other six get much warmer. The tool's ninth temperature reading, the average of all cores, will obviously report that the temperature of the whole CPU has gone up.
Come on! A pound is a universal measurement in troubleshooting!
*Pound!* *Pound!*
There you go, two pounds of sledge.
You don't have to differentiate with screen/case etc. JUST FUCKING UPDATE YOUR FUCKING DEVICE! That will make you fucking unique in Android land. The first company that manages to release a device that can ALWAYS run the latest Android version will leave ALL the other companies in the dust.
Remember that more Android phones are being sold per quarter than Apple phones. This despite the well-known issue of limited (if any) updates from Android manufacturers and carriers, and despite Apple still providing iOS updates (even if some features are missing) to models that came out almost 3.5 years ago.
The takeaway is that most Android users *don't care* what version they're running. By many accounts, they don't even use most of the features in the version that came with it. More than screen size or the latest features, they want it cheap, and that's exactly what they're getting.
And as you note, there's already a device that can always run the latest Android version: the Nexus 4 (unless I and many others have been mislead about its true upgradability). Google and LG botched the Nexus 4's launch and supplies are next to nil, but even if we're extremely generous and say it could've sold ten times the 370,000 estimated actual sales, and increase that by 50% to make it a quarter's worth of sales (it's only been out for 2 months), that's still only 9% of the estimated 60 million Galaxy SIIIs sold in just the last quarter. I'm sure Samsung isn't losing any sleep at all over the possibility the Nexus will leave them in the dust.
BTW AK Marc I'm not saying Google should take action on this, or that Hingston is right, or whatever. I'm just taking issue with "that would be perfectly fine" and contesting that you would be "perfectly fine" with the reality of the situation if you were in his shoes.
In marriage at least, an annulment means that the marriage was invalid, null and voice, and legally it retroactively did not in fact occur. "Legal" is of course different from "reality" or "what actually did happen".
If GP used the word in a similar context, it means the bankruptcy was invalid and should have been stricken from the legal, financial record.
Obviously Google isn't (nor should be) held to the same legal standards, but let's put it another way: say you're arrested for a widely-reported crime, but you're released and charges dropped a day or two later. Of course there's now tons of online news articles about this, and even though many write follow-up articles saying charges are dropped, would you be perfectly fine with "arrested/charged with X" to be the first autocomplete when typing "AK Marc"? Would you even be fine with "AK Marc released" or "AK Marc charges dropped" as the second/third autocomplete result in the list? They all did happen, after all, and the arrest itself did get more coverage.
The story about the retired technician sending the company which demanding an itemized invoice, "fixing issue: $10; knowing how to fix it: $19,990" needs to be updated with an additional "Jumping through multiple levels of management CYA red tape" line item costing three times more.
One of the fundamental principles of communism is that it must spread and take over the entire world. Marx himself said that. Communism inherently cannot co-exist peacefully with non-communist countries, not if they are sticking to their ideology even moderately. That's why people are taught from birth that communism is evil. Because it is.
Sounds a lot like some organized religions or at least a few of their denominations...
One of the major Canadian federal parties that merged to form the current Conservative party was officially announced as the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance party.
Yes, Canadian CRAP or CCRAP ("see crap"). Even if "party" wasn't officially part of the name, it's amazing how that slipped past all the highly-paid PR spinsters they had at their disposal.
The name lasted a day before they switched some letters around.
You'd think that after the fall from grace of the US Olympic basketball "Dream Team" label in the early 2000s, Boeing would've learned the pitfalls of naming anything with "dream" in it.
The basketball team at least could claim that it was journalists, not themselves, who came up with that term.
"If it ain't Boeing, it's still going!"
Somehow I suspect most airlines consider not catching on fire more important than a slight improvement in fuel efficiency.
Agreed.
Someone's going to lose a shedload of money if these planes are out of service for long.
The alternative is losing a shedload of people if warnings aren't looked into, and develop into catastrophic failure. Too many preventable air accidents have happened because money was a factor (rushed takeoffs to stay under pilot flighttime limits; takeoff/landing in terrible weather; poor or improper maintenance/parts; ill-equipped airports and control towers; etc).
The 787 has been in active service only a bit over a year, they really have not yet found all the bugs. British Airways 038, a Boeing 777, was brought down by something as simple as a few extra millimetres of piping protruding from the fuel/oil heat exchangers.
They did it because on top of the smoke warning, they also got a battery fault warning in the same cargo compartment where a battery caught fire on a sister airplane just last week.
The slide chutes were perhaps a bit much if there was no smoke in the cabin after landing, but the emergency landing itself is easily justified.