[...] an ad will always show the highlights only, brushed up, in a best case scenario. Like how the orignal iPhone ads show it to load web pages in a fraction of a second. Which was technically impossible as mobile data wasn't that fast.
I reviewed the original iPhone pre-release ads (I never saw them on TV since I'm not in the US), and they weren't loading pages off the net in the ads, even over wifi. They'd been preloaded during an earlier Safari session, so it was still in memory and instantly available when Safari was launched again for the ad. And they weren't advertising the data connection or wifi ability, just the fact you could view web pages like a regular browser (funny how that's changed...), so they're in the clear there, too.
But they do put a "sequences shortened" disclaimer on their ads now to cover stuff that's sped-up.
Oh, not this "Nazis were socialists--it's even in their name!" myth again. You didn't outright say it, but implying they hated the Jews because they were capitalist leaves no doubt. Undoing mods to reply to this nonsense.
The official name of North Korea is Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Pretty damn sure they aren't democratic, but by your logic they call themselves that, so they must be, right?
The Nazis used a socialist platform (and yes, scapegoated the Jews for Germany's socio-economic problems) to get into power. But their first attacks after attaining power were against communists and socialists in 1933, blaming them for a massive fire that gutted the Reichstag (parliament) building. Their supporters were arrested and harassed. Left-wing parties were banned. Unions were dissolved. The Nazi party purged its own social-revolutionary wing by massacring its leadership in June 1934 in the "night of the long knives."
So please, tell me again exactly how the Nazis were actually socialists who hated the Jews because they were capitalist.
If this practice spreads beyond this one company, what might happen is:
1) workers less likely to buy personal items on company time. Company wins.
2) if it's work-related purchase, company gets dinged a little extra for forcing continued use of an obsolete browser (some are still on IE6!). This might accelerate any planned browser upgrade or updating legacy intranet web apps. Winners: the internet community as a whole, and the websites imposing the Obsolete Browser tax.
Speaking as a (balanced) Apple defender, it's not like Apple's any better.
Examples: Facetime, iMessage, Siri blocked to other platforms after acquisition, some acquired desktop programs dropping Windows support, etc. Hell some of their flagship features and apps don't inter-operate with other Apple hardware--the Facetime/iChat video chat schism is a glaring example.
The AARP breakdown linked to by the GP said material cost was $360. About 1.7 million hearing aids are sold each year, suggesting that across all companies developing and producing hearing aids, there was $1.8 billion spent on research, salaries $918 million, and $490 million related to testing/diagnostic machines. Half a billion dollars on marketing.
Each year.
My point wasn't that those aren't legitimate expenses, it's that they seem out of whack, even if we assume this $3600 were the high-end, and averaged sale price including low-end ones is half of that.
And while the other poster was right in pointing out fitting and customization is exactly the opposite of economy of scale, I notice that personalization is not built in to the $3600 cost breakdown of the hearing aid itself.
We know there's markup, they're just not telling us how much.
While it's nice that Comcast is standing up to them, if you read through you'll find that it's four porn companies. In other words, they're not standing up (in this case, at least) to any of the MAFIAA members.
So what you're saying is, they're impotent and flaccid when facing the MAFIAA?
I'll give them parts and manufacturing, but research? Rent? Licenses? Salaries? Etc?
This costs $500 more than an entry-level Mac Pro, which have much the same cost categories, and I'm sure hearing aids sell in much greater numbers for better economies of scale.
The one cost category they obviously missed was "insurance markup" (not to be confused with licenses/insurance).
And because of wear leveling, drives marketed at X gigabytes actually have (X + Y%) GB, so secure erasures on SSDs apparently aren't very secure at all since writing random 1s and 0s won't necessarily overwrite the areas of memory where the original documents actually are, like they would traditional HDDs.
So yes you need to remove (rip out) the SSD and sledgehammer it anyway to be sure.
I dare say that religion is much more important than race in an election. A faithful follower will use his religion as a moral guideline. It is an integral part of his/her personality. If this is good or bad depends on your own views and how close they match.
A faithful follower will, as the term suggests, follow and do whatever his pastor/preacher/iman/[religious leader] tells them. This is bad if you're a voter and especially if you're the candidate for leadership.
In Canada we've had several Catholic prime ministers who have gone against the dictates and demands of their religion. Some were even threatened with excommunication over their political support for (or at least not strongly opposing) abortion or gay rights. They deserve much kudos for properly observing separation of church and state.
The current prime minister and a number of MPs, on the other hand, are fundamentalists and have let their religion influence several policies contrary to ample evidence and common sense.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
"Roughly 10"...is more like 14-15. Almost 20? What is that actually? 18? That 10 year spread between 10 and 20 is more like 3-4 years tops.
I don't know exactly when Ethernet became standard on PC laptops, hence the "roughly." I do know that when I started a job back in '03 they'd just bought a couple laptops that flat out didn't have RJ-45 ports and needed Ethernet PCMCIA cards. I don't remember brand or model (wasn't my responsibility), and they might not have been business-grade, but it's not like small businesses never buy consumer-level machines.
On further research, as late as mid-2001 not all IBM Thinkpads came with Ethernet built-in, but had them as options (A20M, T21, T22). So the spread is at least 7 years on business-level laptops, and 9 years on all PC laptops if you accept my anecdote; I'm not going to look up every brand and model.
You are right that there was a few years 95/96/97 where a lot of laptops didn't have it -- but the low end consumers really didn't need it - most were still on dialup and that was it. And the busienss oriented stuff had it in the docking station.
In your earlier comment you wrote "It is about the availability of functionality when I need it. They won't have a dongle. If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked." So a docking station back then doesn't count. You're even less likely to lug that around than a network dongle/card.
I'm not saying this isn't a minor shortcoming of the MB Air and MBP-Retina. I'm just amused at the irony of seasoned PC people criticizing Apple for requiring dongles.
And by doing so you waste space on the motherboard on a single-function port, instead of a multi-function port (Thunderbolt). And then people criticize Apple for introducing a "proprietary" port (unless you're referring to some multi-function, 8-pin standard that doesn't seem to have been very common).
In fact if you look at the ports on the MBP-Retina, other than SD and HDMI all ports are multi-function, even the audio in/out jack, allowing more space savings.
Requiring a dongle for an ubiqitous need like USB is just stupid beyond belief. That alone is a reason I will never own an ipad, even if it was not a walled garden and a DRM trap, which it is, so there are two more reasons I will never own one. Just saying.
A $2200 laptop where I have to carry around a separate bag of "parts" to restore the functionality that every other laptop has built in is a joke. The display adapters situation was bad enough.
Roughly 10 years ago it was PC laptop users lugging around Ethernet adapters, either as a PCMIA card with bulging port housing that you couldn't safely leave in when in a carry bag, or a card that could remain in the laptop but came with a flimsy adapter cable. And many of these PCMIA cards cost more than $30 back then.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
So while I agree carrying dongles is a pain, I find it ironic and hilarious that people criticize Apple for requiring them (and specifically for Ethernet), since this is traditionally a hallmark of the PC laptop world.
And unlike Apple, which today has functional reasons for excluding ports (thinness/compactness of the Air and MBP Retina), PC laptop makers back then had no excuse for excluding Ethernet ports so late in the game, other than saving a few dollars per unit.
The credit terminal was displaying what looked to be at least 400px wide, full motion digital video with sound. Are these adverts cached locally inside the pump, or do they get streamed on the fly from a hosting service?
If the former, it would be amusing as hell to hack the pumps to display silly fake PSAs, and other LULz.
If the latter, wouldn't that cause the pump operators to have an outstandingly large data throughput with their ISP?
You missed the middle option--the adverts are stored on a local server inside the gas station's store, similar to most airplane seat-back entertainment systems.
In addition to the money belt (though mine doesn't hook onto my belt; I'll look into that, thanks), when abroad I use a wallet with attached metal chain. I loop the chain around my belt a couple times and through one of the pants belt loops before clipping it to itself.
Unless I take the wallet out, the chain isn't usually visible the way I dress when travelling (shirt out over pants), and it's less goofy than taking cash out of a money belt for normal transactions.
It obviously won't help if I'm physically robbed, or if they're industrious enough. But, they'd have to remove a high-friction item from my pocket *and* either a) cut the chain or separate it from the metal zipper the chain is attached to on the wallet end, or b) cut through my belt and belt loop (which I would instantly notice--I wear a belt for the normal reasons). If they can do that in less than a second, frankly they can have it because they've truly earned it. I'm only out the equivalent of $50 and a low-limit credit card that I'd cancel right away.
I'm sure some can pull it off, but I'm even more sure it's far less effort for them to target the 95% of tourists who haven't taken similar precautions.
Before I begin, I'll repeat this for context: "Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter."
Notes: 1) "large parts of", not "all of" the modern mobile UI; and 2) "LG Prada [...] was obviously in no way an inspiration for [iPhone]."
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9)
The Nokia 770, introduced in 2006 did, however.
Some Windows PDAs seem to have had virtual keyboards before the Nokia 770. And as you note later on, its input was via stylus, not finger-touch. I shouldn't have to say that by "touchscreen", in this context I mean direct-finger, and excludes anything requiring stylus input. Otherwise, we'll go at least as far back as the Apple Newton in the early 90s.
Anyway I'm not saying a v-keyboard was an iPhone first (a claim that'd be as ridiculous as the "rows of colourful icons"), just that the lack of one is one reason the Prada can't be claimed as an iPhone-level smartphone that came before the iPhone was announced.
There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom
These are all cool, but they were first demoed in a TED talk around 2001. Small, cheap, capacitive touchscreens made them possible.
That was presented Feb 2006, though, not 2001. And although 11 months after this demo might have been enough for Apple to copy Hans' work, this patent application for a multi-point touchscreen, filed in May 2004 by Apple, shows that they were working on it for years before Hans' demo. And in 2005 Apple also bought Fingerworks, acquiring all of its multi-touch patents too.
Can you source the TED talk you're referring to? Video preferable; if they weren't recorded back then, then at least a write-up that shows the speaker *actually demo'ed* those features.
The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all.
That's probably a valid criticism, and the current Android phone and contact programs certainly don't make me disagree that there's some very poor UI going on there. I'm not sure what iOS does in this regard, but if Android is copying it then it's nothing to be proud of, and if Android isn't copying it then Android isn't copying it.
This, as well as my comments on the Prada's internet setup and browser comments which I've snipped for brevity, were to debunk the baseless claim that Prada was in any way an iPhone-level smartphone that preceded the iPhone (other than having a full-front capacitive touchscreen). It was not a comment on Android PIM apps.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
The availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens is a big UI dividing lines, just as the availability of cheap small TFTs was in replacing the older text-driven interfaces with more pictorial ones in earlier phones. The original iPhone ca
It annoys me when Apple defenders use poor examples to back up their position. "Distinctive rows of colorful icons" made me cringe.
Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter.
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9). There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom. The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all. Setting up mobile internet on it looked like instructions for setting a dial-up connection in Windows 3 Trumpet Winsock. And the browser was so bad anyway, I couldn't find any review that ever touched on it except to say it was a disaster.
The iPhone also used subtle effects to make the interface polished. For all the protestations that this is useless fluff, didn't add anything, and form over function, all the major Android competitors did the same thing and then some, some including animated "wallpapers" that truly didn't add any functionality.
Obviously, not every feature seen in 2012 smartphones were inspired from iPhone. The pull-down notifications page in iOS5 came from either Android or the iPhone jailbreaking community, for example. And there's parts of iOS that seem dated next to some Android UI features.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
I can just as easily say you eat their marketing/advertising and lobbying costs, which some (dubiously) claim is higher than their R&D budgets, but certainly among the highest of any industry.
You're doing it wrong ("you" meaning your government). I don't know why the US Medicare and Medicaid systems are so bloated (23% of the federal budget, but the US government spends more per capita on government health care than Canada does, even with private insurance taking up a lot of the burden.
Canada's Medicare covers all legal residents, and most of the common services are funded by the federal and provincial governments.
Advantages: - as a patient you don't have to pay up front, or fight with an insurance company if/when they deny you coverage for trivial reasons - as a primary healthcare provider you deal with *one* entity to get paid for services to a patient: the provincial government. No sending forms to different insurance companies on top of the government.
Disadvantages: - availability of primary and specialist care. Wait times are longer. In theory, you can't jump the queue even if you have the money. So those who can afford it sometimes go to the US. They paid their taxes and then paid more, and they're no longer in line for treatment with those who can't afford US treatment? Works for me. Our rich go to you, some of you turn to Canada for cheap(er) prescription drugs. Win-win.
The point is that in other industries, we do not see the petty suits over similarities. Perhaps we don't see them because we aren't looking.
Poor analogy. And yes, you're not looking.
Premium cars (Porsche, Ferrari, etc) sometimes aren't available in even top-tier racing games, and regular cars never look similar to premium cars, because they're protected by IP laws too (registration wall on second viewing, clear site's cookies to view again). Ferrari didn't win the copyright aspect, but did win the trademark violation claims, and the toy cars had to be destroyed even though there's no way they'd be mistaken for a full-sized Ferrari.
They won the trademark claims because "the court found that the total impression, supported by the packaging, gave the impression that Rema's toy car was a Ferrari."
And Ford and Ferrari even got into a legal dispute over the *name* F150, even though their vehicles don't look anything alike.
I'm not quite sure the distinction between tradmarks and "trade dress" which fall under US patents. I don't even think I agree with them. But IP lawsuits definitely aren't limited to the electronics industry.
I read the article, saw the video. It doesn't prove that Google had a real touchscreen strategy until after the iPhone was announced.
Video and engadget article post date: 11 November 2007 (Android beta released 5 Nov) iPhone announced, live demo: 9 January 2007 LG Prada announced (so we've covered the bases): December 2006
10 months is enough time for a large company with Google's resources to come up with a beta touchscreen OS and SDK, and prototype hardware for a video-only demo, shot in a controlled environment and edited, especially since they weren't starting from scratch. Arguments against parallel development so similar to iOS are still perfectly valid, or at least very plausible.
On the other hand, I've written previously that although the Prada was announced before the iPhone, Apple could not have come up with polished pre-release hardware and OS, ready for live public demo, in a single month; and that the Prada's UI was so primitive (virtual T9 keyboard input!?) it couldn't possibly have inspired the iPhone OS.
If Google had live-demo'ed a working Android touchscreen phone similar to the iPhone OS no more than a couple months after Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, I'd have no doubt there was parallel development. 10 months after? Video only? No reference hardware available to developers at first? Sorry, this is not proof at all.
If you have anything that provide more plausible proof of parallel development, I'll consider them.
"Mod Up/Funny/whatever" = "+1" = "This". I rarely use it here, but that's the reality, better get used to it.
Second, *my* reason for doing this is to highlight the parent for what I felt was a very good point, in case my comment is later modded up but theirs isn't and so it's hidden due to viewing threshold (as is the case here). You might not like it, but if it makes people expand the parent comment then it's served its purpose.
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[...] an ad will always show the highlights only, brushed up, in a best case scenario. Like how the orignal iPhone ads show it to load web pages in a fraction of a second. Which was technically impossible as mobile data wasn't that fast.
I reviewed the original iPhone pre-release ads (I never saw them on TV since I'm not in the US), and they weren't loading pages off the net in the ads, even over wifi. They'd been preloaded during an earlier Safari session, so it was still in memory and instantly available when Safari was launched again for the ad. And they weren't advertising the data connection or wifi ability, just the fact you could view web pages like a regular browser (funny how that's changed...), so they're in the clear there, too.
But they do put a "sequences shortened" disclaimer on their ads now to cover stuff that's sped-up.
Oh, not this "Nazis were socialists--it's even in their name!" myth again. You didn't outright say it, but implying they hated the Jews because they were capitalist leaves no doubt. Undoing mods to reply to this nonsense.
The official name of North Korea is Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Pretty damn sure they aren't democratic, but by your logic they call themselves that, so they must be, right?
The Nazis used a socialist platform (and yes, scapegoated the Jews for Germany's socio-economic problems) to get into power. But their first attacks after attaining power were against communists and socialists in 1933, blaming them for a massive fire that gutted the Reichstag (parliament) building. Their supporters were arrested and harassed. Left-wing parties were banned. Unions were dissolved. The Nazi party purged its own social-revolutionary wing by massacring its leadership in June 1934 in the "night of the long knives."
So please, tell me again exactly how the Nazis were actually socialists who hated the Jews because they were capitalist.
If this practice spreads beyond this one company, what might happen is:
1) workers less likely to buy personal items on company time. Company wins.
2) if it's work-related purchase, company gets dinged a little extra for forcing continued use of an obsolete browser (some are still on IE6!). This might accelerate any planned browser upgrade or updating legacy intranet web apps. Winners: the internet community as a whole, and the websites imposing the Obsolete Browser tax.
Speaking as a (balanced) Apple defender, it's not like Apple's any better.
Examples: Facetime, iMessage, Siri blocked to other platforms after acquisition, some acquired desktop programs dropping Windows support, etc. Hell some of their flagship features and apps don't inter-operate with other Apple hardware--the Facetime/iChat video chat schism is a glaring example.
The AARP breakdown linked to by the GP said material cost was $360. About 1.7 million hearing aids are sold each year, suggesting that across all companies developing and producing hearing aids, there was $1.8 billion spent on research, salaries $918 million, and $490 million related to testing/diagnostic machines. Half a billion dollars on marketing.
Each year.
My point wasn't that those aren't legitimate expenses, it's that they seem out of whack, even if we assume this $3600 were the high-end, and averaged sale price including low-end ones is half of that.
And while the other poster was right in pointing out fitting and customization is exactly the opposite of economy of scale, I notice that personalization is not built in to the $3600 cost breakdown of the hearing aid itself.
We know there's markup, they're just not telling us how much.
While it's nice that Comcast is standing up to them, if you read through you'll find that it's four porn companies. In other words, they're not standing up (in this case, at least) to any of the MAFIAA members.
So what you're saying is, they're impotent and flaccid when facing the MAFIAA?
I know you're joking, but people seriously needs to get away from such black-and-white thinking.
You can like or love specific things about something you hate, and hate specific things about something you like.
Or be completely neutral. And get flamed by ideologues on both side for "not taking a stand."
I'll give them parts and manufacturing, but research? Rent? Licenses? Salaries? Etc?
This costs $500 more than an entry-level Mac Pro, which have much the same cost categories, and I'm sure hearing aids sell in much greater numbers for better economies of scale.
The one cost category they obviously missed was "insurance markup" (not to be confused with licenses/insurance).
It doesn't have a hard drive, it has SSDs.
And because of wear leveling, drives marketed at X gigabytes actually have (X + Y%) GB, so secure erasures on SSDs apparently aren't very secure at all since writing random 1s and 0s won't necessarily overwrite the areas of memory where the original documents actually are, like they would traditional HDDs.
So yes you need to remove (rip out) the SSD and sledgehammer it anyway to be sure.
I dare say that religion is much more important than race in an election. A faithful follower will use his religion as a moral guideline. It is an integral part of his/her personality. If this is good or bad depends on your own views and how close they match.
A faithful follower will, as the term suggests, follow and do whatever his pastor/preacher/iman/[religious leader] tells them. This is bad if you're a voter and especially if you're the candidate for leadership.
In Canada we've had several Catholic prime ministers who have gone against the dictates and demands of their religion. Some were even threatened with excommunication over their political support for (or at least not strongly opposing) abortion or gay rights. They deserve much kudos for properly observing separation of church and state.
The current prime minister and a number of MPs, on the other hand, are fundamentalists and have let their religion influence several policies contrary to ample evidence and common sense.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
"Roughly 10"...is more like 14-15. Almost 20? What is that actually? 18? That 10 year spread between 10 and 20 is more like 3-4 years tops.
I don't know exactly when Ethernet became standard on PC laptops, hence the "roughly." I do know that when I started a job back in '03 they'd just bought a couple laptops that flat out didn't have RJ-45 ports and needed Ethernet PCMCIA cards. I don't remember brand or model (wasn't my responsibility), and they might not have been business-grade, but it's not like small businesses never buy consumer-level machines.
On further research, as late as mid-2001 not all IBM Thinkpads came with Ethernet built-in, but had them as options (A20M, T21, T22). So the spread is at least 7 years on business-level laptops, and 9 years on all PC laptops if you accept my anecdote; I'm not going to look up every brand and model.
You are right that there was a few years 95/96/97 where a lot of laptops didn't have it -- but the low end consumers really didn't need it - most were still on dialup and that was it. And the busienss oriented stuff had it in the docking station.
In your earlier comment you wrote "It is about the availability of functionality when I need it. They won't have a dongle. If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked." So a docking station back then doesn't count. You're even less likely to lug that around than a network dongle/card.
I'm not saying this isn't a minor shortcoming of the MB Air and MBP-Retina. I'm just amused at the irony of seasoned PC people criticizing Apple for requiring dongles.
I doubt Samsung will make the mistake of leaving out the USB port again.
They did. The second-generation Tab 2 series doesn't have an integrated USB port either.
A quick check on the Best Buy's tablet selection:
Samsung: no
Lenovo: no
Sony: no
Toshiba: yes
Acer: yes
So while it's great you have choices for tablets with USB, it's not like USB ports are a big deal even on most major-brand Android tablets.
And by doing so you waste space on the motherboard on a single-function port, instead of a multi-function port (Thunderbolt). And then people criticize Apple for introducing a "proprietary" port (unless you're referring to some multi-function, 8-pin standard that doesn't seem to have been very common).
In fact if you look at the ports on the MBP-Retina, other than SD and HDMI all ports are multi-function, even the audio in/out jack, allowing more space savings.
Requiring a dongle for an ubiqitous need like USB is just stupid beyond belief. That alone is a reason I will never own an ipad, even if it was not a walled garden and a DRM trap, which it is, so there are two more reasons I will never own one. Just saying.
You mean like how the Samsung Galaxy Tab series needs one of these for USB? Or one of these for regular SD cards?
A $2200 laptop where I have to carry around a separate bag of "parts" to restore the functionality that every other laptop has built in is a joke. The display adapters situation was bad enough.
Roughly 10 years ago it was PC laptop users lugging around Ethernet adapters, either as a PCMIA card with bulging port housing that you couldn't safely leave in when in a carry bag, or a card that could remain in the laptop but came with a flimsy adapter cable. And many of these PCMIA cards cost more than $30 back then.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
So while I agree carrying dongles is a pain, I find it ironic and hilarious that people criticize Apple for requiring them (and specifically for Ethernet), since this is traditionally a hallmark of the PC laptop world.
And unlike Apple, which today has functional reasons for excluding ports (thinness/compactness of the Air and MBP Retina), PC laptop makers back then had no excuse for excluding Ethernet ports so late in the game, other than saving a few dollars per unit.
It did make mw wonder though.
The credit terminal was displaying what looked to be at least 400px wide, full motion digital video with sound. Are these adverts cached locally inside the pump, or do they get streamed on the fly from a hosting service?
If the former, it would be amusing as hell to hack the pumps to display silly fake PSAs, and other LULz.
If the latter, wouldn't that cause the pump operators to have an outstandingly large data throughput with their ISP?
You missed the middle option--the adverts are stored on a local server inside the gas station's store, similar to most airplane seat-back entertainment systems.
In addition to the money belt (though mine doesn't hook onto my belt; I'll look into that, thanks), when abroad I use a wallet with attached metal chain. I loop the chain around my belt a couple times and through one of the pants belt loops before clipping it to itself.
Unless I take the wallet out, the chain isn't usually visible the way I dress when travelling (shirt out over pants), and it's less goofy than taking cash out of a money belt for normal transactions.
It obviously won't help if I'm physically robbed, or if they're industrious enough. But, they'd have to remove a high-friction item from my pocket *and* either a) cut the chain or separate it from the metal zipper the chain is attached to on the wallet end, or b) cut through my belt and belt loop (which I would instantly notice--I wear a belt for the normal reasons). If they can do that in less than a second, frankly they can have it because they've truly earned it. I'm only out the equivalent of $50 and a low-limit credit card that I'd cancel right away.
I'm sure some can pull it off, but I'm even more sure it's far less effort for them to target the 95% of tourists who haven't taken similar precautions.
Before I begin, I'll repeat this for context: "Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter."
Notes: 1) "large parts of", not "all of" the modern mobile UI; and 2) "LG Prada [...] was obviously in no way an inspiration for [iPhone]."
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9)
The Nokia 770, introduced in 2006 did, however.
Some Windows PDAs seem to have had virtual keyboards before the Nokia 770. And as you note later on, its input was via stylus, not finger-touch. I shouldn't have to say that by "touchscreen", in this context I mean direct-finger, and excludes anything requiring stylus input. Otherwise, we'll go at least as far back as the Apple Newton in the early 90s.
Anyway I'm not saying a v-keyboard was an iPhone first (a claim that'd be as ridiculous as the "rows of colourful icons"), just that the lack of one is one reason the Prada can't be claimed as an iPhone-level smartphone that came before the iPhone was announced.
There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom
These are all cool, but they were first demoed in a TED talk around 2001. Small, cheap, capacitive touchscreens made them possible.
After a quick search on TED the closest demo I could find was this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html
That was presented Feb 2006, though, not 2001. And although 11 months after this demo might have been enough for Apple to copy Hans' work, this patent application for a multi-point touchscreen, filed in May 2004 by Apple, shows that they were working on it for years before Hans' demo. And in 2005 Apple also bought Fingerworks, acquiring all of its multi-touch patents too.
Can you source the TED talk you're referring to? Video preferable; if they weren't recorded back then, then at least a write-up that shows the speaker *actually demo'ed* those features.
The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all.
That's probably a valid criticism, and the current Android phone and contact programs certainly don't make me disagree that there's some very poor UI going on there. I'm not sure what iOS does in this regard, but if Android is copying it then it's nothing to be proud of, and if Android isn't copying it then Android isn't copying it.
This, as well as my comments on the Prada's internet setup and browser comments which I've snipped for brevity, were to debunk the baseless claim that Prada was in any way an iPhone-level smartphone that preceded the iPhone (other than having a full-front capacitive touchscreen). It was not a comment on Android PIM apps.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
The availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens is a big UI dividing lines, just as the availability of cheap small TFTs was in replacing the older text-driven interfaces with more pictorial ones in earlier phones. The original iPhone ca
It annoys me when Apple defenders use poor examples to back up their position. "Distinctive rows of colorful icons" made me cringe.
Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter.
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9). There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom. The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all. Setting up mobile internet on it looked like instructions for setting a dial-up connection in Windows 3 Trumpet Winsock. And the browser was so bad anyway, I couldn't find any review that ever touched on it except to say it was a disaster.
The iPhone also used subtle effects to make the interface polished. For all the protestations that this is useless fluff, didn't add anything, and form over function, all the major Android competitors did the same thing and then some, some including animated "wallpapers" that truly didn't add any functionality.
Obviously, not every feature seen in 2012 smartphones were inspired from iPhone. The pull-down notifications page in iOS5 came from either Android or the iPhone jailbreaking community, for example. And there's parts of iOS that seem dated next to some Android UI features.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
I can just as easily say you eat their marketing/advertising and lobbying costs, which some (dubiously) claim is higher than their R&D budgets, but certainly among the highest of any industry.
You're doing it wrong ("you" meaning your government). I don't know why the US Medicare and Medicaid systems are so bloated (23% of the federal budget, but the US government spends more per capita on government health care than Canada does, even with private insurance taking up a lot of the burden.
Canada's Medicare covers all legal residents, and most of the common services are funded by the federal and provincial governments.
Advantages:
- as a patient you don't have to pay up front, or fight with an insurance company if/when they deny you coverage for trivial reasons
- as a primary healthcare provider you deal with *one* entity to get paid for services to a patient: the provincial government. No sending forms to different insurance companies on top of the government.
Disadvantages:
- availability of primary and specialist care. Wait times are longer. In theory, you can't jump the queue even if you have the money. So those who can afford it sometimes go to the US. They paid their taxes and then paid more, and they're no longer in line for treatment with those who can't afford US treatment? Works for me. Our rich go to you, some of you turn to Canada for cheap(er) prescription drugs. Win-win.
And the tax drops were an attempt to combat cigarette smuggling.
Who made and supplied those contraband cigarettes? Canadian tobacco companies, engaged in a massive fraud to avoid paying taxes.
Thankfully they got caught, charged, and had to pay over half a billion dollars to the government.
They would have patented the use of four wheels.
The point is that in other industries, we do not see the petty suits over similarities. Perhaps we don't see them because we aren't looking.
Poor analogy. And yes, you're not looking.
Premium cars (Porsche, Ferrari, etc) sometimes aren't available in even top-tier racing games, and regular cars never look similar to premium cars, because they're protected by IP laws too (registration wall on second viewing, clear site's cookies to view again). Ferrari didn't win the copyright aspect, but did win the trademark violation claims, and the toy cars had to be destroyed even though there's no way they'd be mistaken for a full-sized Ferrari.
They won the trademark claims because "the court found that the total impression, supported by the packaging, gave the impression that Rema's toy car was a Ferrari."
And Ford and Ferrari even got into a legal dispute over the *name* F150, even though their vehicles don't look anything alike.
I'm not quite sure the distinction between tradmarks and "trade dress" which fall under US patents. I don't even think I agree with them. But IP lawsuits definitely aren't limited to the electronics industry.
I read the article, saw the video. It doesn't prove that Google had a real touchscreen strategy until after the iPhone was announced.
Video and engadget article post date: 11 November 2007 (Android beta released 5 Nov)
iPhone announced, live demo: 9 January 2007
LG Prada announced (so we've covered the bases): December 2006
10 months is enough time for a large company with Google's resources to come up with a beta touchscreen OS and SDK, and prototype hardware for a video-only demo, shot in a controlled environment and edited, especially since they weren't starting from scratch. Arguments against parallel development so similar to iOS are still perfectly valid, or at least very plausible.
On the other hand, I've written previously that although the Prada was announced before the iPhone, Apple could not have come up with polished pre-release hardware and OS, ready for live public demo, in a single month; and that the Prada's UI was so primitive (virtual T9 keyboard input!?) it couldn't possibly have inspired the iPhone OS.
If Google had live-demo'ed a working Android touchscreen phone similar to the iPhone OS no more than a couple months after Steve Jobs did with the iPhone, I'd have no doubt there was parallel development. 10 months after? Video only? No reference hardware available to developers at first? Sorry, this is not proof at all.
If you have anything that provide more plausible proof of parallel development, I'll consider them.
"Mod Up/Funny/whatever" = "+1" = "This". I rarely use it here, but that's the reality, better get used to it.
Second, *my* reason for doing this is to highlight the parent for what I felt was a very good point, in case my comment is later modded up but theirs isn't and so it's hidden due to viewing threshold (as is the case here). You might not like it, but if it makes people expand the parent comment then it's served its purpose.
To the rest of your post, I agree, and I pointed out the conversion they obviously did, long before the comment you linked to. Mine was just attached to a later top-level post.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2899899&cid=40240621