This author has promise. He doesn't go the Evangelist route. He starts by praising the system, explains his lengthy experience, and then goes on to explain that it might be good "but for" some plausible reasons that matter to the target audience - but pointing out that improvements are promised before warning that promises are often unfulfilled. The author is biased we know, but this is an awesome hatchet job. I'll give it 8 of 10. Poor placement by the vendor.
Or - which seems more likely - the product is not quite satisfactory, and a software rev would put it in the green.
You need to discriminate between suing to prevent progress and countersuing to enable progress. Each and every company that's suing Google or an Android OEM is a Microsoft proxy hoping to prevent progress, including Apple. If Google should countersue to prevent Microsoft from shipping products, that's just a counterstroke to enable us to get more of the new good stuff. What Google needs from this is that progress continues unabated and uncontrolled, so people can continue to choose to use their products if they want to. All of Google's opponents in this are looking for the way to prevent you from Googling, because they fear Google's ability to tell you the truth and can't win with raw competition.
Google's on a good path here. They need only continue on this course and the absurdity of the patent system will become obvious. Google bought (not licensed) over 1000 of IBMs best patents. With these and an investment in lawyers equal to the net cost of the Nortel patents they can tie up every court in the US suing everybody that makes everything in tech and shut down both the courts and innovation with a DDOS. $4B buys a lot of lawyer time, and lawyers are good with tying up courts. Google could now drive the US courts into bankruptcy. They need not invest another dollar in overkill.
Wordperfect was originally written for a DataGeneral minicomputer back in 1979. It was hugely popular on minicomputers and Unix long before there was an Amiga. It was popular in the legal profession even back then.
For many years WordPerfect 5.1 was the most portable word processing document in the world.
Wordperfect fell from popularity many believe mainly because Microsoft engineered Windows beginning with W95 to prevent it from functioning correctly, particularly with printing. Novell sued in 2004, and seven years later the case is still winding through the courts. It's suspected that Novell's new owner Attachmate will accept a quiet settlement and let the WordPerfect lawsuit die. Attachmate is a privately held corporation and no information about the composition of their ownership is available.
Though Novell/Attachmate still own the lawsuit, Novell sold the product on to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect is still available in WordPerfect Office X5 from Corel, who bought the app in 1996. Microsoft invested in Corel in October of 2000. The last native Linux version, 8.1 released in 2004, didn't sell well as Linux adoption at that time was still very low. The last Linux version, 9.0, was released in 2000. Relying on Wine, performance was unsat. Some diehards still use the application. Novell also retained rights and merged the product into their own productivity suite, GroupWise, which is widely regarded as best avoided.
Way back when WordPerfect was good for its day. Since 1995 it's been an application that is uniformly rejected by its main host OS. To this day printing in WordPerfect in Windows is unreliable and quirky. Despite this, it's no longer a cross-platform application. Current versions run only on Windows now. Some think that Microsoft's investment of $135M in 2000 in a nearly-bankrupt Corel in October of 2000 might have influenced this decision somewhat. At that time Corel's founder Michael Cowpland was accused of insider trading and theft in August of 2000, an issue that was later disproved and settled when his trades were proved to be extremely ill-advised. A suspicious person might even think the accusation were an application of extreme leverage, given a decade of hindsight.
Michael Cowpland deserves his own post - an alumni of precursors to Bell Labs, Nortel Networks and others he cofounded Mitel Networks, founded Corel (which originally stood for COwpland REsearch Labs) and bought control of ZIM Labs. He did a lot of cool stuff.
I don't know what this has to do with the fine article though. WordPerfect was always a commercial application and is still. Source code has never been available, or it would have been fixed long ago.
This is Google poking fun at the patent office. They probably have hundreds of these in the pipeline, all with the same purpose: find out "How stupid a patent can you get?"
Thanks for that link, and for writing the post behind it. I enjoyed it a lot, as I do much of what you write. I'll try and put some interesting words in return, though I won't do as well as you have.
Do you remember your first computer?
IBM 5100. Brought to the school by Alan Schultz (sp?), one of the "Boys from Boca." "The Boys from Boca" were young turks at IBM rebelling against the staid establishment. A development group was spun off to develop some hardware from IBM HQ in Armonk NY to Boca Raton, FL where they wouldn't be blocked by IBM's staid corporate culture. They invented the PC. Alan retired early to teach school in rural California and brought some legacy hardware with him. He made the school board a deal: he would teach math if they let him introduce a Computer Science curriculum also, and wouldn't complain about his business interests (he owned the local Apple store - yes, such things did exist back then). Programming in BASIC, Assembler, APL and Honest to God Machine Code. Your freshman year you worked in pencil. You weren't allowed to touch actual hardware, but you still had to reinvent sort and solve the travelling salesman problem: in pencil, in machine code for an imaginary machine (and sometimes write the code in binary. 01001000.) Freshmen wrote in SIMPLE: Simplified Imaginary Machine Programming Language for Everyone. He was using the school to see if he could incent young minds to solve classical math and programming problems by presenting the problem to young minds without the taint of knowing the problem is difficult. It's a twisted use of youth, but necessary and it pays dividends. Microsoft still uses this strategem. I love the guy, so I hope he didn't patent and exploit some of that stuff.
Later we learned LOGO, Pascal, COBOL, loglan, Fortran and others - to the point where we were ready for an understanding of lex and yacc. I was exceptionally fortunate for my day, but it appears I have to get off your lawn.
I was quite proud that one of the apps I wrote back then made it 20 years without significant modification. I doubt it went much further than that - the computer it ran on was already a museum piece 20 years later, and now it would be worth more as a collectible than its rather considerable original retail price. How long it ran past then I'll never know. Most of the things I learned about machines and programming back then are still true, though the underlying technologies have changed beyond belief. I've not done as well as some of my cohort - some of us have gone on to significant discoveries (cosmic microwave background), mathematics (redacted), software authorship fame and fortune (MathBlaster and others), and certainly many I don't know about.
My family imploded and I went on the the Army, where for a few years at the High Technology Test Bed I played the Army's side of development efforts opposite to the likes of RDA Logicon, helping to develop some of the technologies that are still serving us well at home and abroad, educating others how to use them and future military leaders about the competitive advantages. Being a turbo geek from my background got me in easy to that role but luck played a part. I fell in love with Unix and began collecting languages including C and (oddly) SNOBOL, ending at an epiphany: they're all the same. Programming languages are syntactic sugar. After they melt in your mouth they decompose to C and libraries. What C is to programming languages, Turing Machines are to hardware. That was when I got my first access to what would become the Internet, and FIDONet too. The first time I saw The List, it was under 64K, and I was already hacking hosts and connections. I got caught a few times hogging the satellite or probing the Gods of DARPA, but they deemed me an uninteresting plebe and let me be. It was the Wild West back then. Funny: we're still arguing about whether the term "hacker" is a certification or a perjorative. As is often the case in state court, the cr
Before the 1950's oil used to leak out of the ground all over the place. Now it takes pretty sophisticated computers and software, analysts and engineers to figure out where to drill for it. And then to get 'er done. It takes oil to get oil too, of course. All those drilling rigs and supertankers don't run on moonbeams and kitten tears.
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed, Then one day he was shootin at some food, And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire, Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there" Said "Californy is the place you ought to be" So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
Well now its time to say good by to Jed and all his kin. And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in. You're all invited back a gain to this locality To have a heapin helpin of their hospitality
Hillybilly that is. Set a spell, Take your shoes off.
In the Cathedral one group offers one thing, and tells you to like it. This works for some. Apple's making a good go of it.
In the Bazaar "anything in the explored universe can be had by a man with cash, from a starship to ten grains of stardust, from the ruin of a reputation to the robes of a senator with the senator inside" - Citizen of the Galaxy, RAH. Android's making a good go of this one.
Somehow these different paths keep leading to the same places, which speaks volumes about the nature of humans.
No, really, there are a number of ways to solve this problem.
There exists a musical instrument, a theremin, that alters tone based on 3-dimensional proximity. A pair or triplet of them should give a nice no-touch input in 3d space with appropriate digitization and calibration without the lag of the 3-d camera approach.
Amazon is showing 274 Android tablets in the $100-$200 range, 310 at $200 and up. You know what? Some of these are a whole lot of technology for about the price of a Kindle, or less. With hundreds of thousands of apps, that's a lot of value. Not everybody needs the $500 tablet.
They sell capacitive Styli (styluses?) for capacitive touchscreens. This isn't one, but you can find them. The capacitive styluses are for using the tablet with gloves on, or women with long fingernails, or people fussy about fingerprints. Capacitive touchscreens aren't good for pen input for the reasons you said - you want a resistive touchscreen for that. Resistive touchscreens aren't good for multi-touch though. It sounds like the iPad, TouchPad, Transformer, Xoom and Galaxy tabs are not for you. Fortunately resistive touchscreen tablets are much cheaper.
I haven't tried that one by the way - but search for "resistive touchscreen tablet" and you should find something that meets your needs.
The Asus Transformer has very similar specs to the Iconia. I bought the Transformer. I can confirm that the thickness is not a problem, the weight is very similar to the iPad, the all have very much the same feel. The Transformer's back has a nice texture to it, which helps prevent droppage. I can also confirm that the prices are legitimate in the US. UK pricing will vary.
The widescreen format is a huge deal. 1280 pixels lets you browse the web in a format that looks right. Movies display perfectly in 720p resolution without scaling issues.
The Transformer is reported to have sold 400,000 units in June. The Iconia came out later and at a higher price point, but was lowered to meet the Transformer and now also seems to be ramping volumes.
It seems only two of those three things are critical. These things won't "beat" the iPad yet, but it seems the Android makers have found the critical metrics to variate around to move some products. Apple's not standing still, but it's definitely their turn to go to the next level.
I've had my tablet for about a month and a half. At the current rate of use by the time I'm done with it, it will have cost me about $0.25 per hour of entertainment. I can live with that.
Some consumers want reliable consistent quality. Some are more willing to risk that to get choices, or simply must have the choices to meet their needs - price, keyboard, ports, storage, display resolution or size, availability, performance.
There are only two iPads, and intermittently they can't be had at all because they're sold out. When they can be had they don't meet the needs of all users, which creates demand for fairly similar products that do meet those needs. If it doesn't have a feature that you must have in a similar product the iPad may as well not exist at all for you, and you don't exist as an iPad customer for Apple either. This need, unmet, is a vacuum. It serves noone to leave this need unfilled. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Fragmentation is choice. It's that simple. Apple will continue to make a few products that are excellent with a strict set of features that serves a vast mass of people. Everybody else will serve the rest of the world's needs. Isn't that wonderful? Everybody gets what they want.
.55M units per day x 365 = 198 million units per year. For instance. The trend is up so the given number was discounted.
wah? the rest of your post has unresolveable issues. Try again when you sober up. I'll wait here. I want to help you but you have to not be drooling on yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
This author has promise. He doesn't go the Evangelist route. He starts by praising the system, explains his lengthy experience, and then goes on to explain that it might be good "but for" some plausible reasons that matter to the target audience - but pointing out that improvements are promised before warning that promises are often unfulfilled. The author is biased we know, but this is an awesome hatchet job. I'll give it 8 of 10. Poor placement by the vendor.
Or - which seems more likely - the product is not quite satisfactory, and a software rev would put it in the green.
You need to discriminate between suing to prevent progress and countersuing to enable progress. Each and every company that's suing Google or an Android OEM is a Microsoft proxy hoping to prevent progress, including Apple. If Google should countersue to prevent Microsoft from shipping products, that's just a counterstroke to enable us to get more of the new good stuff. What Google needs from this is that progress continues unabated and uncontrolled, so people can continue to choose to use their products if they want to. All of Google's opponents in this are looking for the way to prevent you from Googling, because they fear Google's ability to tell you the truth and can't win with raw competition.
Google's on a good path here. They need only continue on this course and the absurdity of the patent system will become obvious. Google bought (not licensed) over 1000 of IBMs best patents. With these and an investment in lawyers equal to the net cost of the Nortel patents they can tie up every court in the US suing everybody that makes everything in tech and shut down both the courts and innovation with a DDOS. $4B buys a lot of lawyer time, and lawyers are good with tying up courts. Google could now drive the US courts into bankruptcy. They need not invest another dollar in overkill.
Who was harmed? Was the harm avoidable, or the lesser evil? Is the harmed entity sympathetic, or itself evil? Is the harm actual, or potential?
It's not evil to cut a hole in the devil, nor to choose the path of least harm. Collecting cutlery is not an expression of intent to become a slasher.
If you're going to rebel, bring your own communications. If you want a handbook for this you could do worse than this.
And remember: the ultimate responsibility of a rebel is to provide a better system than he supplants, else history will judge him harshly.
Wordperfect was originally written for a DataGeneral minicomputer back in 1979. It was hugely popular on minicomputers and Unix long before there was an Amiga. It was popular in the legal profession even back then.
For many years WordPerfect 5.1 was the most portable word processing document in the world.
Wordperfect fell from popularity many believe mainly because Microsoft engineered Windows beginning with W95 to prevent it from functioning correctly, particularly with printing. Novell sued in 2004, and seven years later the case is still winding through the courts. It's suspected that Novell's new owner Attachmate will accept a quiet settlement and let the WordPerfect lawsuit die. Attachmate is a privately held corporation and no information about the composition of their ownership is available.
Though Novell/Attachmate still own the lawsuit, Novell sold the product on to Corel in 1996. WordPerfect is still available in WordPerfect Office X5 from Corel, who bought the app in 1996. Microsoft invested in Corel in October of 2000. The last native Linux version, 8.1 released in 2004, didn't sell well as Linux adoption at that time was still very low. The last Linux version, 9.0, was released in 2000. Relying on Wine, performance was unsat. Some diehards still use the application. Novell also retained rights and merged the product into their own productivity suite, GroupWise, which is widely regarded as best avoided.
Way back when WordPerfect was good for its day. Since 1995 it's been an application that is uniformly rejected by its main host OS. To this day printing in WordPerfect in Windows is unreliable and quirky. Despite this, it's no longer a cross-platform application. Current versions run only on Windows now. Some think that Microsoft's investment of $135M in 2000 in a nearly-bankrupt Corel in October of 2000 might have influenced this decision somewhat. At that time Corel's founder Michael Cowpland was accused of insider trading and theft in August of 2000, an issue that was later disproved and settled when his trades were proved to be extremely ill-advised. A suspicious person might even think the accusation were an application of extreme leverage, given a decade of hindsight.
Michael Cowpland deserves his own post - an alumni of precursors to Bell Labs, Nortel Networks and others he cofounded Mitel Networks, founded Corel (which originally stood for COwpland REsearch Labs) and bought control of ZIM Labs. He did a lot of cool stuff.
I don't know what this has to do with the fine article though. WordPerfect was always a commercial application and is still. Source code has never been available, or it would have been fixed long ago.
Somebody sympathetic has to be deliberately harmed. What have you got here? Nothing.
Onboard storage in tablets too.
This is Google poking fun at the patent office. They probably have hundreds of these in the pipeline, all with the same purpose: find out "How stupid a patent can you get?"
Thanks for that link, and for writing the post behind it. I enjoyed it a lot, as I do much of what you write. I'll try and put some interesting words in return, though I won't do as well as you have.
Do you remember your first computer?
IBM 5100. Brought to the school by Alan Schultz (sp?), one of the "Boys from Boca." "The Boys from Boca" were young turks at IBM rebelling against the staid establishment. A development group was spun off to develop some hardware from IBM HQ in Armonk NY to Boca Raton, FL where they wouldn't be blocked by IBM's staid corporate culture. They invented the PC. Alan retired early to teach school in rural California and brought some legacy hardware with him. He made the school board a deal: he would teach math if they let him introduce a Computer Science curriculum also, and wouldn't complain about his business interests (he owned the local Apple store - yes, such things did exist back then). Programming in BASIC, Assembler, APL and Honest to God Machine Code. Your freshman year you worked in pencil. You weren't allowed to touch actual hardware, but you still had to reinvent sort and solve the travelling salesman problem: in pencil, in machine code for an imaginary machine (and sometimes write the code in binary. 01001000.) Freshmen wrote in SIMPLE: Simplified Imaginary Machine Programming Language for Everyone. He was using the school to see if he could incent young minds to solve classical math and programming problems by presenting the problem to young minds without the taint of knowing the problem is difficult. It's a twisted use of youth, but necessary and it pays dividends. Microsoft still uses this strategem. I love the guy, so I hope he didn't patent and exploit some of that stuff.
Later we learned LOGO, Pascal, COBOL, loglan, Fortran and others - to the point where we were ready for an understanding of lex and yacc. I was exceptionally fortunate for my day, but it appears I have to get off your lawn.
I was quite proud that one of the apps I wrote back then made it 20 years without significant modification. I doubt it went much further than that - the computer it ran on was already a museum piece 20 years later, and now it would be worth more as a collectible than its rather considerable original retail price. How long it ran past then I'll never know. Most of the things I learned about machines and programming back then are still true, though the underlying technologies have changed beyond belief. I've not done as well as some of my cohort - some of us have gone on to significant discoveries (cosmic microwave background), mathematics (redacted), software authorship fame and fortune (MathBlaster and others), and certainly many I don't know about.
My family imploded and I went on the the Army, where for a few years at the High Technology Test Bed I played the Army's side of development efforts opposite to the likes of RDA Logicon, helping to develop some of the technologies that are still serving us well at home and abroad, educating others how to use them and future military leaders about the competitive advantages. Being a turbo geek from my background got me in easy to that role but luck played a part. I fell in love with Unix and began collecting languages including C and (oddly) SNOBOL, ending at an epiphany: they're all the same. Programming languages are syntactic sugar. After they melt in your mouth they decompose to C and libraries. What C is to programming languages, Turing Machines are to hardware. That was when I got my first access to what would become the Internet, and FIDONet too. The first time I saw The List, it was under 64K, and I was already hacking hosts and connections. I got caught a few times hogging the satellite or probing the Gods of DARPA, but they deemed me an uninteresting plebe and let me be. It was the Wild West back then. Funny: we're still arguing about whether the term "hacker" is a certification or a perjorative. As is often the case in state court, the cr
Before the 1950's oil used to leak out of the ground all over the place. Now it takes pretty sophisticated computers and software, analysts and engineers to figure out where to drill for it. And then to get 'er done. It takes oil to get oil too, of course. All those drilling rigs and supertankers don't run on moonbeams and kitten tears.
- The Ballad of Jed Clampett by Paul Henning
Apple sells the Apple Experience. Everything else is just a delivery mechanism.
Eric Raymond. Read it.
In the Cathedral one group offers one thing, and tells you to like it. This works for some. Apple's making a good go of it.
In the Bazaar "anything in the explored universe can be had by a man with cash, from a starship to ten grains of stardust, from the ruin of a reputation to the robes of a senator with the senator inside" - Citizen of the Galaxy, RAH. Android's making a good go of this one.
Somehow these different paths keep leading to the same places, which speaks volumes about the nature of humans.
Shuttle hits Warp 2 Graphics might come out of my butt Definitely not gay Team Name Team Name.
(NSFW) The weather penis is actually an entire category: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djItGln6IxY
Yeah, let's stick with professionals. For the lulz.
So how about "surface"?
No, really, there are a number of ways to solve this problem.
There exists a musical instrument, a theremin, that alters tone based on 3-dimensional proximity. A pair or triplet of them should give a nice no-touch input in 3d space with appropriate digitization and calibration without the lag of the 3-d camera approach.
The HP TouchPad can run Angry Birds HD.
Apparently a lot of people are buying them, or scores of manufacturers would not be making hundreds of different models.
Amazon is showing 274 Android tablets in the $100-$200 range, 310 at $200 and up. You know what? Some of these are a whole lot of technology for about the price of a Kindle, or less. With hundreds of thousands of apps, that's a lot of value. Not everybody needs the $500 tablet.
They sell capacitive Styli (styluses?) for capacitive touchscreens. This isn't one, but you can find them. The capacitive styluses are for using the tablet with gloves on, or women with long fingernails, or people fussy about fingerprints. Capacitive touchscreens aren't good for pen input for the reasons you said - you want a resistive touchscreen for that. Resistive touchscreens aren't good for multi-touch though. It sounds like the iPad, TouchPad, Transformer, Xoom and Galaxy tabs are not for you. Fortunately resistive touchscreen tablets are much cheaper.
I haven't tried that one by the way - but search for "resistive touchscreen tablet" and you should find something that meets your needs.
Quad core. 5x video performance. Extreme HD. Christmas this year.
The Asus Transformer has very similar specs to the Iconia. I bought the Transformer. I can confirm that the thickness is not a problem, the weight is very similar to the iPad, the all have very much the same feel. The Transformer's back has a nice texture to it, which helps prevent droppage. I can also confirm that the prices are legitimate in the US. UK pricing will vary.
The widescreen format is a huge deal. 1280 pixels lets you browse the web in a format that looks right. Movies display perfectly in 720p resolution without scaling issues.
The Transformer is reported to have sold 400,000 units in June. The Iconia came out later and at a higher price point, but was lowered to meet the Transformer and now also seems to be ramping volumes.
It seems only two of those three things are critical. These things won't "beat" the iPad yet, but it seems the Android makers have found the critical metrics to variate around to move some products. Apple's not standing still, but it's definitely their turn to go to the next level.
I've had my tablet for about a month and a half. At the current rate of use by the time I'm done with it, it will have cost me about $0.25 per hour of entertainment. I can live with that.
Some consumers want reliable consistent quality. Some are more willing to risk that to get choices, or simply must have the choices to meet their needs - price, keyboard, ports, storage, display resolution or size, availability, performance.
There are only two iPads, and intermittently they can't be had at all because they're sold out. When they can be had they don't meet the needs of all users, which creates demand for fairly similar products that do meet those needs. If it doesn't have a feature that you must have in a similar product the iPad may as well not exist at all for you, and you don't exist as an iPad customer for Apple either. This need, unmet, is a vacuum. It serves noone to leave this need unfilled. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Fragmentation is choice. It's that simple. Apple will continue to make a few products that are excellent with a strict set of features that serves a vast mass of people. Everybody else will serve the rest of the world's needs. Isn't that wonderful? Everybody gets what they want.
No stylus. Optional keyboard though. I have one. It's very nice. Quite a lot of tech for the money. Battery goes all day and then some.
.55M units per day x 365 = 198 million units per year. For instance. The trend is up so the given number was discounted.
wah? the rest of your post has unresolveable issues. Try again when you sober up. I'll wait here. I want to help you but you have to not be drooling on yourself.