I see what you're saying there. You're saying that since two tin cans with a string existed since way back when, Alexander Graham Bell was evil for patenting the telephone.
The P900 was a touch screen device that pre-dated iPhone. It's unlock was via a physical buttons (specifically a combined jog dial/button on the edge). And of course your classic phone unlock is by pressing two physical button in sequence. So there's a third alternative, considering most (all? ) Android have physical buttons.
The palm-pilot just used to use the power button. Most all devices have one of those.
On a device with only a touchscreen, and I don't thing there are many (even the iPhone/iPad has multiple physical buttons), you have any two dimensional gesture and combination of them possible. And an infinite variety of ways that might be represented by graphics and animation on screen.
Sorry, but Apple does appear to have been first to use slide to unlock. There were touchscreen devices before and they didn't use it. And there are other alternatives for unlocking.
There's simply no argument that other companies must do it the same way because there's no alternative.
There must be a reason why Apple haters think "boy" is spelled with a i. Perhaps they are the same pretentious idiots that think that boxes is spelled "boxen".
There's your real sheep. The ones that follow on with spelling things wrong just because people they've read before misspelled it too. Idiots that don't even know why they are deliberately misspelling something, they are just following.
Does a rolex really tell time more accurately than a cheap watch?
When it made it's brand name, yes. In the days of quartz watches it may be difficult to remember, and many won't be old enough to remember, that watches used to only be an approximation. You'd get any bunch of people and the time on their wrist watches would vary. Up to about 5 minutes usually. Thus the classic scene before any commando or heist scene in a film: "Synchronize watches". That really used to happen.
And the guy that got to call his time the right time, by which other people would set their watch was obviously in a more powerful position. That's where the tradition of people who wanted to be leaders/managers paying serious money to get a more accurate watch came from.
For sure since cheap quartz watches came along that justification died. But the tradition that leaders buy expensive brands of watches continues as a status symbol. Now you can pretty much consider them to be jewellery with civilian implications of rank. But note, Rolex is still high quality. Its just that that is not expressed in terms of time keeping accuracy any more, because all watches are accurate. If Rolex ever let the quality drop - if they ever became known to be inaccurate; to use inferior materials; to easily break or tarnish - then Rolex would lose the quality of their brand, and people wouldn't buy them any more.
But where's the relevance to computers/phones and tablets? Whilst watches don't have a differentiating factor on their single function - telling the time - computers/phones and tablets still do. They perform many functions and they don't all perform equally well in them. This market is relevant to the pre-quartz era of watches, not the post-quartz era.
A brand is a promise of quality. Period. A worth of a brand is created by making yourself a reputation for selling quality products. The worth of a brand is lost when if you start shipping products that are not quality.
To say "it has very little to do with quality" means you don't have the first idea what a brand is.
Apple's customers are only people who don't know what they're buying.
I dare say I know better than you what I'm buying and why I'm buying it. Just because people make different decisions from you doesn't make them fools.
Being incapable of seeing why so many people find Apple to be the best solution for them probably does mark you out as a fool though.
Actually, the Innovator's Dilemma points out that beliefs such as yours are exactly the reason why so many successful companies go on to fail. For example there comes a time when it's suicidal to make your customers happy. Your customers are the people who are already buying your product. They want you to continue producing stepwise improvements of that product. If you continue doing that for too long, that's when another company comes along with a disruptive product and steals your lunch. You stop getting new customers, and your old customers start to dwindle.
It takes something quite different to stop focussing on a successful product at the height of it's success, and disappoint current customers by coming up with a disruptive product yourselves.
Apple's customers wanted a version of Mac OS 9 with multi-tasking. Instead Jobs gave them OS X 1.0, which was rather less functional than Mac OS 9 was, and had few native third party apps.
Apple's customers wanted Macs with better PowerPC CPUs. Apple pissed many of them off by switching to Intel.
Apple's customers wanted the conveyor belt of better Macs and better versions of OSX. That's what kept them happy. But Jobs took most of his engineers off that task and made a phone instead.
It's not about keeping the customers happy. Although you have to do that most of the time. But at times you have to ignore their wishes and think about what will get you lots of new customers in the longer term.
Fry/Davies is obviously in good humour. You can tell they like each other.
Deaton/Merton had not been in good humour for years before Deaton got the boot. Yes it was funny, but sometimes uncomfortable. And certainly very uncomfortable in the last show or two.
Talking of which, I really don't think the different presenter each week works. Sometimes they have a good or interesting one, but then that's balanced out by the uninteresting or just useless ones. Mostly it just ruins the illusion that the presenter is speaking for him/herself. And I don't find that to be a good thing. Yes, everyone knows that writers always did the presenter's patter and jokes. But there's such a thing as willing suspension of disbelief.
Because they are different. A computer doesn't work like a brain. And whilst in the future, computers that need to have AI might be created that are more brain like, designers would never progress by removing functionality that a computer has, or by adding negative aspects of brain functionality without also engineering something to compensate for that negative. For example overrides or fail-safes.
Unlike with human laws, the laws of robotics would be built in at design time.
You're not "calling my bluff." I specifically commented on the memory that was on the Apple store and Crucial's store TODAY. Since you didn't specify a particular model of Mac Pro it was only ever demonstrative of that the memory specs don't necessarily match.
Crucial not offering the same spec of memory for this computer.
Since Apple doesn't even sell that memory any more, what would be your suggestion?
I never, at any point, suggested not buying from third parties. When I myself upgraded my RAM I bought from a third party. My point was that when you do you have to beware, and be sure what you get is the right memory. And if things start to go wrong after you fitted it, then it's the first suspect.
Exactly the same would be true if you bought a cheap third party component for the engine of your car.
Since you (or those who participated on the fanboy side of this conversation) said to only buy first-party parts
a) No I didn't. Which leads me to doubt your diagnostic skills. and b) The use of the word "fanboy" to someone who did no more than offer advice is alerting me that there's a good chance you never really wanted to fix the Mac in the first place.
I don't call simply not allowing useful features a "solution".
Theres more to it than that. Apps can still have stuff happen when they are in the background. Realising that most of what applications on other platforms do themselves in the background could be provided by a limited number of built in system services was the innovation.
Android solved the problem by firstly giving coders the tools they need to minimise power consumption and secondly creating a handy graph of how much battery life each app is using so that the user can make an informed choice (and rate battery hogs with 1 star).
Thats not solving the problem, it's passing the buck. Passing it to third party developers, who don't even have to get their apps through any kind of vetting before being sold is futile. And passing it on to the user to play policeman with a task manager and graphs is unforgivable.
Ideas are ten a penny. It's execution that matters. A touchscreen smartphone in 2007. So what? The finished iPhone? An innovative product and instant success.
A successful product design isn't a case of an idea. It's a series of difficult questions, answered with good answers, right through the development process. Jobs asked many of those difficult questions, and had the taste to know what were good answers. That was a major part of his role.
Apple's design isn't about polish. It's about how things work. Sure they're polished too, but that's the tip of the iceberg. You don't get that, and Apple's successes will continue to be a surprise to you.
Note, Apple still sells more than half of all tablets, and with a much higher margin than Android sellers. A smaller, but more profitable, product share has worked out well for Apple, so no reason to consider 65% share a failure, as you assert.
I'm pretty sure Apple still sells more than 95% of tablets. That 65% figure didn't come from one of the regular market share studies, it was a one off from an analyst and considered Android tablet shipments, not sales. The HP Touchpad failure illustrated the difference between shipments and sales.
The iPhone is getting destroyed by Android 2.5 to 1 in sales
The iPhone is a single model of phone. Android is an OS that ships on many models of device from many manufacturers. Apples(!) and oranges.
The iPhone out-ships any model of Android device.
iOS devices as a whole outship Android OS devices as a whole. (iPhone only accounted for about 40% of iOS sales last time I looked.)
Compare like with like and Android isn't quite the winner you make out.
The iPad has dropped from some 95 percent of the tablet market down to 65 percent in just a few months
Those analyst stats refer to shipments, not sales. If you don't know the difference, you should look into what having large shipments without sales did to the HP Touchpad. Dead in 7 weeks. You should wait for the next set of proper market share figures to come out.
The rest of Jobs' products have been miserable failures like Apple TV and others.
Were you Rip-Van-Winkle during the decade of the iPod?
Yeah I know. Trolling. I don't usually bother looking down in the -1 slime.
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to take you to your new desk."
Now I understand why OSX has got so good at not losing unsaved user data when unexpected power loses happen.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Prada, Louis Vetton,etc ... i.e. all the fashion houses no Patents, No copyright, only trademarks .. and they seem to making plenty of money
They would apply for any IP registration that protected them. They are not choosing for their industry to be exempt from patents and copyright.
Actually they are making more profit than most tech companies
It's because the difference between cost of manufacture and selling price is bigger.
From now on, I know, when I do get a tablet it won't be Apple.
I'm sure Apple will be surprised and upset that a slashdotter declared he isn't going to buy one of their products.
I see what you're saying there. You're saying that since two tin cans with a string existed since way back when, Alexander Graham Bell was evil for patenting the telephone.
I'm trying to spot the true statement in your post and I can't find it.
Oh, and how many times has the iPhone played catch-up to Android features? I hope the the lawsuits are on the way.
I don't know. I can't think of any. Please provide a few examples if you believe that there are Android (Google) patents that iPhone has infringed.
The P900 was a touch screen device that pre-dated iPhone. It's unlock was via a physical buttons (specifically a combined jog dial/button on the edge). And of course your classic phone unlock is by pressing two physical button in sequence. So there's a third alternative, considering most (all? ) Android have physical buttons.
The palm-pilot just used to use the power button. Most all devices have one of those.
On a device with only a touchscreen, and I don't thing there are many (even the iPhone/iPad has multiple physical buttons), you have any two dimensional gesture and combination of them possible. And an infinite variety of ways that might be represented by graphics and animation on screen.
Sorry, but Apple does appear to have been first to use slide to unlock. There were touchscreen devices before and they didn't use it. And there are other alternatives for unlocking.
There's simply no argument that other companies must do it the same way because there's no alternative.
There must be a reason why Apple haters think "boy" is spelled with a i. Perhaps they are the same pretentious idiots that think that boxes is spelled "boxen".
There's your real sheep. The ones that follow on with spelling things wrong just because people they've read before misspelled it too. Idiots that don't even know why they are deliberately misspelling something, they are just following.
Does a rolex really tell time more accurately than a cheap watch?
When it made it's brand name, yes. In the days of quartz watches it may be difficult to remember, and many won't be old enough to remember, that watches used to only be an approximation. You'd get any bunch of people and the time on their wrist watches would vary. Up to about 5 minutes usually. Thus the classic scene before any commando or heist scene in a film: "Synchronize watches". That really used to happen.
And the guy that got to call his time the right time, by which other people would set their watch was obviously in a more powerful position. That's where the tradition of people who wanted to be leaders/managers paying serious money to get a more accurate watch came from.
For sure since cheap quartz watches came along that justification died. But the tradition that leaders buy expensive brands of watches continues as a status symbol. Now you can pretty much consider them to be jewellery with civilian implications of rank. But note, Rolex is still high quality. Its just that that is not expressed in terms of time keeping accuracy any more, because all watches are accurate. If Rolex ever let the quality drop - if they ever became known to be inaccurate; to use inferior materials; to easily break or tarnish - then Rolex would lose the quality of their brand, and people wouldn't buy them any more.
But where's the relevance to computers/phones and tablets? Whilst watches don't have a differentiating factor on their single function - telling the time - computers/phones and tablets still do. They perform many functions and they don't all perform equally well in them. This market is relevant to the pre-quartz era of watches, not the post-quartz era.
A brand is a promise of quality. Period. A worth of a brand is created by making yourself a reputation for selling quality products. The worth of a brand is lost when if you start shipping products that are not quality.
To say "it has very little to do with quality" means you don't have the first idea what a brand is.
Apple's customers are only people who don't know what they're buying.
I dare say I know better than you what I'm buying and why I'm buying it. Just because people make different decisions from you doesn't make them fools.
Being incapable of seeing why so many people find Apple to be the best solution for them probably does mark you out as a fool though.
after others developed it? do you know that this "magic technology" existed before apple? hint: they did.
If it did, then that's prior art, and the patent can be made invalid. So what are you worried about?
Of course you'd have to be specific, so what specifically are you claiming is prior art, and where was it to be seen?
Yeah, what happened to Apples "People are prepared to pay more for quality, and we're the best" philosophy.
You put that in quotes. Could you point me to where Apple said that was their philosophy. Thanks.
You know when a company has run out of ideas and has stopped innovating when they resort to law suits to protect their market...
Name me a big successful innovative company that doesn't patent what it can and defend those patents.
Actually, the Innovator's Dilemma points out that beliefs such as yours are exactly the reason why so many successful companies go on to fail. For example there comes a time when it's suicidal to make your customers happy. Your customers are the people who are already buying your product. They want you to continue producing stepwise improvements of that product. If you continue doing that for too long, that's when another company comes along with a disruptive product and steals your lunch. You stop getting new customers, and your old customers start to dwindle.
It takes something quite different to stop focussing on a successful product at the height of it's success, and disappoint current customers by coming up with a disruptive product yourselves.
Apple's customers wanted a version of Mac OS 9 with multi-tasking. Instead Jobs gave them OS X 1.0, which was rather less functional than Mac OS 9 was, and had few native third party apps.
Apple's customers wanted Macs with better PowerPC CPUs. Apple pissed many of them off by switching to Intel.
Apple's customers wanted the conveyor belt of better Macs and better versions of OSX. That's what kept them happy. But Jobs took most of his engineers off that task and made a phone instead.
It's not about keeping the customers happy. Although you have to do that most of the time. But at times you have to ignore their wishes and think about what will get you lots of new customers in the longer term.
Fry/Davies is obviously in good humour. You can tell they like each other.
Deaton/Merton had not been in good humour for years before Deaton got the boot. Yes it was funny, but sometimes uncomfortable. And certainly very uncomfortable in the last show or two.
Talking of which, I really don't think the different presenter each week works. Sometimes they have a good or interesting one, but then that's balanced out by the uninteresting or just useless ones. Mostly it just ruins the illusion that the presenter is speaking for him/herself. And I don't find that to be a good thing. Yes, everyone knows that writers always did the presenter's patter and jokes. But there's such a thing as willing suspension of disbelief.
Why would robots act any different ?
Because they are different. A computer doesn't work like a brain. And whilst in the future, computers that need to have AI might be created that are more brain like, designers would never progress by removing functionality that a computer has, or by adding negative aspects of brain functionality without also engineering something to compensate for that negative. For example overrides or fail-safes.
Unlike with human laws, the laws of robotics would be built in at design time.
You're right. But then, the first murder would bring a 100% increase in available resources if you kept it hidden.
Keeping it hidden wouldn't get you ANYTHING.
I call your bluff, sir.
You're not "calling my bluff." I specifically commented on the memory that was on the Apple store and Crucial's store TODAY. Since you didn't specify a particular model of Mac Pro it was only ever demonstrative of that the memory specs don't necessarily match.
http://store.apple.com/us/memorymodel/ME_MACPRO_S10_RAM
Crucial not offering the same spec of memory for this computer.
Since Apple doesn't even sell that memory any more, what would be your suggestion?
I never, at any point, suggested not buying from third parties. When I myself upgraded my RAM I bought from a third party. My point was that when you do you have to beware, and be sure what you get is the right memory. And if things start to go wrong after you fitted it, then it's the first suspect.
Exactly the same would be true if you bought a cheap third party component for the engine of your car.
Since you (or those who participated on the fanboy side of this conversation) said to only buy first-party parts
a) No I didn't. Which leads me to doubt your diagnostic skills. and
b) The use of the word "fanboy" to someone who did no more than offer advice is alerting me that there's a good chance you never really wanted to fix the Mac in the first place.
I don't call simply not allowing useful features a "solution".
Theres more to it than that. Apps can still have stuff happen when they are in the background. Realising that most of what applications on other platforms do themselves in the background could be provided by a limited number of built in system services was the innovation.
Android solved the problem by firstly giving coders the tools they need to minimise power consumption and secondly creating a handy graph of how much battery life each app is using so that the user can make an informed choice (and rate battery hogs with 1 star).
Thats not solving the problem, it's passing the buck. Passing it to third party developers, who don't even have to get their apps through any kind of vetting before being sold is futile. And passing it on to the user to play policeman with a task manager and graphs is unforgivable.
Apple got it right.
WoW players grind boars for 1XP a piece.
Not quite the same thing as murdering people in real life.
I'd bet a percentage of the population would resort to WMDs to remove competition for resources.
What makes me instantly think of the US military in the middle east?
Ideas are ten a penny. It's execution that matters. A touchscreen smartphone in 2007. So what? The finished iPhone? An innovative product and instant success.
A successful product design isn't a case of an idea. It's a series of difficult questions, answered with good answers, right through the development process. Jobs asked many of those difficult questions, and had the taste to know what were good answers. That was a major part of his role.
Apple's design isn't about polish. It's about how things work. Sure they're polished too, but that's the tip of the iceberg. You don't get that, and Apple's successes will continue to be a surprise to you.
Note, Apple still sells more than half of all tablets, and with a much higher margin than Android sellers. A smaller, but more profitable, product share has worked out well for Apple, so no reason to consider 65% share a failure, as you assert.
I'm pretty sure Apple still sells more than 95% of tablets. That 65% figure didn't come from one of the regular market share studies, it was a one off from an analyst and considered Android tablet shipments, not sales. The HP Touchpad failure illustrated the difference between shipments and sales.
The iPhone is getting destroyed by Android 2.5 to 1 in sales
The iPhone is a single model of phone. Android is an OS that ships on many models of device from many manufacturers. Apples(!) and oranges.
The iPhone out-ships any model of Android device.
iOS devices as a whole outship Android OS devices as a whole. (iPhone only accounted for about 40% of iOS sales last time I looked.)
Compare like with like and Android isn't quite the winner you make out.
The iPad has dropped from some 95 percent of the tablet market down to 65 percent in just a few months
Those analyst stats refer to shipments, not sales. If you don't know the difference, you should look into what having large shipments without sales did to the HP Touchpad. Dead in 7 weeks. You should wait for the next set of proper market share figures to come out.
The rest of Jobs' products have been miserable failures like Apple TV and others.
Were you Rip-Van-Winkle during the decade of the iPod?
Yeah I know. Trolling. I don't usually bother looking down in the -1 slime.
With that, he walked over to my desk, found the power cord to my Apple II, and gave it a sharp tug, pulling it out of the socket, causing my machine to lose power and the code I was working on to vanish. He unplugged my monitor and put it on top of the computer, and then picked both of them up and started walking away. "Come with me. I'm going to take you to your new desk."
Now I understand why OSX has got so good at not losing unsaved user data when unexpected power loses happen. ;-)