Sorry, I just don't understand the complaints on this front. The local council here does rubbish collection every week and recycling collection every 2 weeks. I put out one *small* bin bag every 2 weeks. I produce maybe 4 or more times the volume of recycling than I produce landfill rubbish. Now, I admit that I am a single person, but a family of 4 should produce less than 4 times the amount of rubbish than a single person, and yet we have people with the *large* 240 or 360 litre wheelie bins in the news complaining that over 2 weeks they produce far more landfill rubbish than can be accommodated in their bin. What the hell are these people throwing away? I would wholly support the idea of reducing landfill rubbish collections to every 2 weeks; I just wish my council would introduce kerbside plastic and tetra collections so I don't have to take that stuff to the tip myself.
Used anti-terror laws to conduct surveillance on people the council suspects of having un-approved structures...like a garden shed in the backyard.
Citation please. You don't need planning permission for temporary structures, such as garden sheds, so this sounds completely bogus to me.
I don't have the reference to hand, but I've heard of at least one a case where a fatal crash ocurred because the pilot accidentally moved the controls and therefore unknowingly disengaged the autopilot.
Aeroflot flight 593. The auto pilot disconnected it's control of the ailerons (whilst still keeping on controlling everything else) and didn't provide any warning that it had done so. In fact, autopilots doesn't unexpected things seems to be behind a lot of accidents.
When was the last time you saw a symbian phone with more than 2 3rd party apps on it?
When I had a Symbian phone, I did have more than 2 3rd party apps on it, and they did get used. But most of the apps were infuriatingly shit, and that extends to the built in stuff as well as the third party stuff too. Conversely, my Android phone does have a lot of apps on it which are pretty good and do get used.
On the other hand, when was the last time you saw an iPhone (not brand new) that didn't have pages of apps installed?
I'm not sure that pages of apps necessarily means the apps are good or well used. It might mean that the owner has been trying lots of apps out to see which are the best and hasn't bothered to delete the ones they've given up on. My desktop computer doesn't have "pages and pages of apps", I'm not sure why I should expect to have more useful apps on my phone than my desktop. FWIW, my phone has just over 3 pages of apps on it (which I don't count as "pages and pages"), and this includes some of the stock apps that I don't use but can't delete, and a few apps I've given up on and not bothered to delete.
From a quick look through my apps, I use about 21 apps: Alarm Clock, AndNav2, Astrid, Barcode scanner, Browser, Calendar, ConnectBot, Contacts, Dialer, Email, Google Maps, Google Skymap, Market, Messaging, Mileage, Music, MyTracks, OI Safe, Sipdroid, Spare Parts and TideApp Its a reasonable list, but it certainly isn't "pages and pages". Of course, in addition to that list, I have Debian installed on the phone, which has a few bits and pieces I use on occasion. I'd venture that if someone has over 50 apps installed, they probably don't use most of them.
I'm fascinated that this is so often quoted as a downside of the iPhone... The entire reason that there's a virtual keyboard there is because that area that *was* hardware keyboard now gets to be screen, and actually useful when you're not typing.
My phone has a screen that is about the same size as the iPhone's, plus a physical keyboard. The space taken up by the keyboard is not useful as screen space since it is hidden behind the screen when not in use. Well, I guess you could use that space for a second screen in a Nintendo-DS style, but it doesn't sound especially useful to me and would cripple the battery life.
No one gives a shit except geeks who've never actually tried an iPhone keyboard for more than 4 seconds, and hence haven't discovered you can type faster on it than with a physical one.
2 reasons why a touchscreen keyboard is unsuitable for me:
1. no tactile feedback. I'm afraid I like to be able to feel the keys before I press them so I know my finger is in the right place. 2. I want to be able to see what's on the screen without a virtual keyboard covering it up.
I'll admit that (1) might be something that I would learn to do without if I used an iPhone all the time, but no amount of practice is going to prevent (2) from being a problem - I get an 80x25 terminal window on my phone, which I use for doing things like remotely administering servers; reducing the visible area of that terminal to 3 or 4 lines so that I can fit a keyboard on the screen would make it very unusable. Sure, most people aren't using their phones for administering servers, but this is a major reason for me buying a smartphone since it means I can avoid carrying a laptop around most of the time.
When will you iPhone fanboys get it into your head that a single design of device *never* suits everyone - just because you find a design choice to be ok doesn't mean that everyone else will. Choice is good.
100,000 apps. Seriously, it's *that* important.
I imagine that Symbian has well over 100,000 apps. Most of them are utter shit. Raw numbers are meaningless - if there were 100,000 _good_ apps then that would be something worth shouting about, but that's not the case.
Choice is good only so long as you aren't being screwed. Right now iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry are all off the table and the rest? Who knows. Show me a phone that supports and syncs with GNU/Linux. The Freerunner is the only phone that comes close to providing choice in the market and it doesn't even really exist since it isn't finished and on the general market.
I'm not sure what you mean by "syncs with Linux".
If you mean making a full backup of the phone then I don't think Android actually does that with anything, although there are some apps in Market that do full device backups - personally I have Debian installed on my phone and I just rsync the whole filesystem to my server over wifi, but this is a rather more complex solution than most people are going to want.
If you mean syncing individual application's data with their desktop equivalents, then is isn't really a "won't sync with Linux" problem, more a "won't sync with the specific apps I use" problem, and you'd have similar problems on Windows unless you were using a specific application suite. Email is an easy one - any phone that can't talk to an IMAP server isn't worth bothering with, but other applications like calendaring, contacts, etc., aren't so clear cut because these things tend to be handled by desktop apps with their own proprietary file formats, rather than being hosted by a server using standard protocols.
I'm currently using Google's contacts and calendaring, which I'm not that happy about, but I haven't come across any _good_ server software that lets me make the data available with standard protocols (I did look into using Horde, but ISTR it doesn't do stuff like ICAL to allow calendaring clients to connect, etc).
Diversity is a good thing, it gives choice and keeps competition driving things forward.
This is something that a lot of people in the industry seem to miss, and I just don't get it. When I was shopping around for my phone, I kept getting told things like "you don't want that, it's not like the iPhone" by the shops.
For example, I went into the Carphone Warehouse (who are independent, so shouldn't have any reason to sell me one device over another) and stated that I was after a phone, that a hardware QWERTY keyboard was an absolute requirement and that I was thinking about the HTC Dream. I was quickly met with the reply that the HTC Dream wasn't very good and that I'd be better off with an iPhone. After I pointed out that the iPhone didn't do what I wanted (no physical keyboard, completely closed platform with an abusive vendor preventing me from using my phone how I want) the salesman pointed me at the HTC Hero and told me that this was "better" than the HTC Dream because it didn't have a keyboard and was therefore more "iPhone-like".
I got a similar attitude from a number of shops, but the Carphone Warehouse certainly got the award for completely ignoring the customer's stated requirements. The vendors have a choice: either they can produce a wide range of different types of devices to target different types of customer, or they can produce a million and one iPhone clones. I sincerely hope they don't do the latter...
In Australia there is no signifiicant opportunity to road-test these devices before investing in them, often on a multi-year contract with significant cost penalty for early departure.
Wait 6 months and buy one from eBay with no contract for a fraction of the price. I got my HTC Dream for about £120 - 6 months old, as-new condition, no expensive contract lockin to care about.
What all the Android fanbois don't know, or tell you, is that Android has a 256 MB app storage limit. While Apple limits you to 2 GB for your maximum app size download. Google, just WTF where you thinking?
This doesn't seem to be an Android limitation - it is a limitation caused by the flash configuration that Motorola have used. On Android, the apps are just stored as individual files in the/data/app directory; other than the size of the filesystem that contains this directory, I can't see there being any limitation. Also, there are several methods of storing apps on the sdcard. For example, the CyanogenMod firmware does this as standard.
I don't think this is true. Note we're talking about phones containing a GPS receiver, not phones that do geolocation by triangulating masts.
For some reason, phones often don't seem to have SBAS functionality (my HTC Dream doesn't). I have no idea why this is, since SBAS uses the same frequencies and encoding as the GPS satellites, so shouldn't need any extra hardware, it's just a firmware thing AFAIK.
See above. Some devices need a phone signal to get their maps, but that's an implementation choice. Google's implementation caches the image data for the route.
ISTR that some of the older phones rely on remote servers run by the MNO to do assisted GPS, although I doubt any new phones do.
The UK and Euro ones are very slightly more expensive ($102 instead of $99), but nowhere near the usual "Euro tax" that you guys sometimes get shafted with.
I ordered a UK version on Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting it. But whilst the manufacturer doesn't charge a massive "euro tax", the shipping cost is downright ridiculous - £30 for the "economy" option - that's half the price of the device itself, which is £60.
The plug is external and there is a brick but the mini might not be able to adjust to a power supply with a different wattage. Plugging a 110W power brick into the 85W original mini might cause issues.
No... no it won't. Please go and learn about electronics.
Last I checked, you don't need QoS when there are no congestion issues on your network.
Network traffic tends to be bursty, this means that even with "no congestion issues", there will be queued traffic during the bursts, it just averages out over short periods of time. QoS can be important in these cases since it allows you to move traffic for applications that are adversely affected by latency to the front of the queue. On a network with adequate capacity, the result of this is that things like VoIP work better because the latency stays very low all the time, whilst things like bittorrent get variable latency (which doesn't affect the raw throughput, so no one will notice).
Of course, there are always times when even the most well provisioned network gets congested (e.g. if a good number of connections get chopped then the remaining parts of the network come under increased load. A good example of this is in the case of natural (or not so natural) disasters where not only have you lost a lot of the network, but the world and his dog is on the web trying to get news updates.
QoS isn't without issues though - one of which is trying to identify which traffic to prioritise. I personally favour paying attention to the ToS flags so that applications can signal what kind of service they need and automatically penalising users who are abusing this (e.g. by tagging bittorrent traffic as low-latency).
>Hey, ISP is in seconds, it's an industry standard.
Might be standard, but it's still crazy. Using weight instead of mass means you have to know how much gravity it was calculated for (a figure that isn't specified anywhere in the units), and means that the value given for ISP will change depending on the gravitational force you assume is in effect.
The SI version isn't any better - kgf-sec/kg.
That isn't the SI version - there is no such SI unit as "kgf". The SI unit for force is Newtons, giving you "Newton seconds per kilogram", which makes a lot more sense since there are no hidden coefficients.
The specific impulse of these is around 1800 seconds (lb-sec of impulse per lbm of fuel- hey I didn't invent the units, I just use them...)
That unit doesn't make sense - force and mass don't cancel each other out, even if you happen to be crazy and give the units the same name: lb-force is not the same thing as lb-mass.
To put it another way: N × s / Kg See - no identical units to cancel.
You don't have to patent it yourself if you want it to be available to everyone; it's sufficient to challenge his patent application and prove that you did it first.
Yes, because *everyone* can afford to do that when a huge multinational decides to sue them.
Look -- I don't want to be rude and I know I won't be able to hinder myself when you pull these kinds of things out of your ass.
Huh?
All I can say is that nobody I know is an inventor, and as far as I know of those I know know no inventor.
I guess you don't know many people in the technical field then. Whether you call them an "inventor" or not, whenever someone comes up with a new idea, that is an "invention" and is probably patentable. So you're basically saying you don't know anyone who's come up with a new electronic circuit design, microcontroller, bit of software, etc - you may be telling the truth and you really don't know anyone who's come up with an original independent idea, no matter how trivial; the majority of technical professionals are not in your position, and _do_ come up with new ideas and designs for stuff, as do most of their colleagues.
I know a number of electronic engineers who have got patents for stuff like microcontroller designs, which were developed as components for products. None of these people are "inventors" in the traditional sense of someone who does nothing but spend their time coming up with off-the-wall ideas and then trying to push them to market, but they have "invented" stuff all the same, as their patents prove.
And your word isn't good enough for anybody with half a brain and a handfull of source criticism.
I don't understand what you're talking about here. I've given a number of real-world examples to back up my points and you've done nothing but basically say "you're wrong" without any explanation as to why you think I'm wrong.
By kitchen appliance I of course also meant the parts of kitchen appliances, such as e.g. electric motors etc., as these are also a part of the patent. Look either you're trolling and desperate to win this nonsensical argument or you're not very clever.
You see, you're now changing your argument - you started off saying that you would only need to know about a very small subset of patents regarding kitchen appliances. Now you're saying that you need to know about an enormous number of patents regarding all the technologies used in kitchen appliances too. This is no longer a small collection of patents, so you claim that inventors can reasonably be expected to know about all these patents seems to be bunk.
First of all: people? So all of a sudden everybody is an inventor?
Not everyone, but a high proportion of the professional population are.
inventor is an occupation
Not really. Pretty much anyone working in a creative technical field will be "inventing" on pretty much a daily basis. Many (but not all) of these "inventions" are fairly trivial, but still patentable. We're talking about things like electronic circuits, microcontroller designs, etc. I.e. the stuff that "normal people" in the technical fields do *all the time*. Software developers are also coming up with new ideas pretty much all the time - if they aren't then they're a pretty crap software developer, and with the advent of software patents many of these "inventions" are patentable too.
So given this, to suggest that someone must perform a patent search (which will take weeks and almost certainly won't have 100% coverage) every time they come up with a new invention (every few days) is insane.
let's not forget that if you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you only need to research about existing kitchen appliances, you can skip anything else
Untrue. If you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you need to research other kitchen appliances, then you need to research all the technologies that go into your kitchen appliance. This could include patents on electronics, patents on various mechanical designs used within the appliance, etc. You may not consider the tiny low-level implementation details to be especially novel but that doesn't mean that someone else didn't, and if they did you open yourself up to getting sued.
Also patents expire, while laws don't unless changed.
This is one of the reasons why it isn't reasonable to expect people to know what patents may apply - laws are relatively unchanging whereas there are many thousands of patents being filed and expiring every year.
As an inventor you would generally only need to keep yourself updated about the still valid patents. I really don't see why this is so unreasonable to you.
So you are going to do a full check across the many thousands of patent records covering your subject area, every time you come up with an idea, no matter how trivial? Yeah, coz that's going to really help your development cycle...
By that logic I shouldn't be able to get sentenced for a crime I didn't know was unlawful. The bullet you're presenting can easily be dodged by saying that it's every inventors responsibility to look for existing inventions before setting sail, just like it is every citizens responsibility to check for laws before committing a crime.
Your argument is ridiculous - criminal law and patents are there for different purposes and can't be compared as you have attempted to do. Criminal law is there to protect society and giving people incentive to know the legalities of their actions is good for society. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a lot of social good to come out of forcing people to spend vast amounts of time and money checking to see if they are allowed to use what they have invented and throwing it in the bin if they aren't.
Also, criminal law changes very slowly compared to the huge database of patents, so it is much more reasonable to expect someone to know the laws than the patents.
I'm guessing this is a big part of why they don't honor independent simultaneous invention. It means that if you had a mole in a competitor's development space, they could secretly feed you enough data that you can reproduce the invention cycle on your own with only a slight delay.
It works both ways - the mole could provide enough information for the competitor to actually get ahead and file a patent before the company that did most of the work. There are plenty of cases where this has happened.
Disregarding the inability to authenticate independent invention; if two inventors did have a patent on the same invention, then licensing becomes a bidding war for which inventor will offer a lower licensing cost. One of the main purposes of a patent is to allow an inventor to recover the cost of research & development; now these inventors would instead be in a position where they were trying to minimize loss.
With the existing "single inventor" model, one of the inventors basically gets to charge whatever they like (even to the point of making it prohibitively expensive to licence, so that they can keep the invention for just their own products, keeping competition out of the end-user market as well), whilst the other inventor makes *nothing*, or worse - the other inventor gets sued.
I think the "multiple inventors" model would work better, whereby you take a risk and if it doesn't pay off everyone gets to minimise their losses, as opposed to the "single inventor" model whereby you take a risk and if it doesn't pay off you're utterly screwed.
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I've heard there's also a version of Android that removes the prohibition on installing apps on the SD card.
Yes, CyanogenMod does it out of the box - I have my phone set up to install apps on the Debian partition of my SDHC card.
Reduced bin collection to every *two weeks*
Sorry, I just don't understand the complaints on this front. The local council here does rubbish collection every week and recycling collection every 2 weeks. I put out one *small* bin bag every 2 weeks. I produce maybe 4 or more times the volume of recycling than I produce landfill rubbish. Now, I admit that I am a single person, but a family of 4 should produce less than 4 times the amount of rubbish than a single person, and yet we have people with the *large* 240 or 360 litre wheelie bins in the news complaining that over 2 weeks they produce far more landfill rubbish than can be accommodated in their bin. What the hell are these people throwing away? I would wholly support the idea of reducing landfill rubbish collections to every 2 weeks; I just wish my council would introduce kerbside plastic and tetra collections so I don't have to take that stuff to the tip myself.
Used anti-terror laws to conduct surveillance on people the council suspects of having un-approved structures...like a garden shed in the backyard.
Citation please. You don't need planning permission for temporary structures, such as garden sheds, so this sounds completely bogus to me.
Funny how they all had letters of resignation ready to submit.
Yes, because it takes *weeks* to draft a resignation letter...
That said, if you are a public figure, making decisions on behalf of the public, you should expect criticism.
I don't have the reference to hand, but I've heard of at least one a case where a fatal crash ocurred because the pilot accidentally moved the controls and therefore unknowingly disengaged the autopilot.
Aeroflot flight 593. The auto pilot disconnected it's control of the ailerons (whilst still keeping on controlling everything else) and didn't provide any warning that it had done so. In fact, autopilots doesn't unexpected things seems to be behind a lot of accidents.
When was the last time you saw a symbian phone with more than 2 3rd party apps on it?
When I had a Symbian phone, I did have more than 2 3rd party apps on it, and they did get used. But most of the apps were infuriatingly shit, and that extends to the built in stuff as well as the third party stuff too. Conversely, my Android phone does have a lot of apps on it which are pretty good and do get used.
On the other hand, when was the last time you saw an iPhone (not brand new) that didn't have pages of apps installed?
I'm not sure that pages of apps necessarily means the apps are good or well used. It might mean that the owner has been trying lots of apps out to see which are the best and hasn't bothered to delete the ones they've given up on. My desktop computer doesn't have "pages and pages of apps", I'm not sure why I should expect to have more useful apps on my phone than my desktop. FWIW, my phone has just over 3 pages of apps on it (which I don't count as "pages and pages"), and this includes some of the stock apps that I don't use but can't delete, and a few apps I've given up on and not bothered to delete.
From a quick look through my apps, I use about 21 apps:
Alarm Clock, AndNav2, Astrid, Barcode scanner, Browser, Calendar, ConnectBot, Contacts, Dialer, Email, Google Maps, Google Skymap, Market, Messaging, Mileage, Music, MyTracks, OI Safe, Sipdroid, Spare Parts and TideApp
Its a reasonable list, but it certainly isn't "pages and pages". Of course, in addition to that list, I have Debian installed on the phone, which has a few bits and pieces I use on occasion. I'd venture that if someone has over 50 apps installed, they probably don't use most of them.
I'm fascinated that this is so often quoted as a downside of the iPhone... The entire reason that there's a virtual keyboard there is because that area that *was* hardware keyboard now gets to be screen, and actually useful when you're not typing.
My phone has a screen that is about the same size as the iPhone's, plus a physical keyboard. The space taken up by the keyboard is not useful as screen space since it is hidden behind the screen when not in use. Well, I guess you could use that space for a second screen in a Nintendo-DS style, but it doesn't sound especially useful to me and would cripple the battery life.
No one gives a shit except geeks who've never actually tried an iPhone keyboard for more than 4 seconds, and hence haven't discovered you can type faster on it than with a physical one.
2 reasons why a touchscreen keyboard is unsuitable for me:
1. no tactile feedback. I'm afraid I like to be able to feel the keys before I press them so I know my finger is in the right place.
2. I want to be able to see what's on the screen without a virtual keyboard covering it up.
I'll admit that (1) might be something that I would learn to do without if I used an iPhone all the time, but no amount of practice is going to prevent (2) from being a problem - I get an 80x25 terminal window on my phone, which I use for doing things like remotely administering servers; reducing the visible area of that terminal to 3 or 4 lines so that I can fit a keyboard on the screen would make it very unusable. Sure, most people aren't using their phones for administering servers, but this is a major reason for me buying a smartphone since it means I can avoid carrying a laptop around most of the time.
When will you iPhone fanboys get it into your head that a single design of device *never* suits everyone - just because you find a design choice to be ok doesn't mean that everyone else will. Choice is good.
100,000 apps. Seriously, it's *that* important.
I imagine that Symbian has well over 100,000 apps. Most of them are utter shit. Raw numbers are meaningless - if there were 100,000 _good_ apps then that would be something worth shouting about, but that's not the case.
Choice is good only so long as you aren't being screwed. Right now iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry are all off the table and the rest? Who knows. Show me a phone that supports and syncs with GNU/Linux. The Freerunner is the only phone that comes close to providing choice in the market and it doesn't even really exist since it isn't finished and on the general market.
I'm not sure what you mean by "syncs with Linux".
If you mean making a full backup of the phone then I don't think Android actually does that with anything, although there are some apps in Market that do full device backups - personally I have Debian installed on my phone and I just rsync the whole filesystem to my server over wifi, but this is a rather more complex solution than most people are going to want.
If you mean syncing individual application's data with their desktop equivalents, then is isn't really a "won't sync with Linux" problem, more a "won't sync with the specific apps I use" problem, and you'd have similar problems on Windows unless you were using a specific application suite. Email is an easy one - any phone that can't talk to an IMAP server isn't worth bothering with, but other applications like calendaring, contacts, etc., aren't so clear cut because these things tend to be handled by desktop apps with their own proprietary file formats, rather than being hosted by a server using standard protocols.
I'm currently using Google's contacts and calendaring, which I'm not that happy about, but I haven't come across any _good_ server software that lets me make the data available with standard protocols (I did look into using Horde, but ISTR it doesn't do stuff like ICAL to allow calendaring clients to connect, etc).
Diversity is a good thing, it gives choice and keeps competition driving things forward.
This is something that a lot of people in the industry seem to miss, and I just don't get it. When I was shopping around for my phone, I kept getting told things like "you don't want that, it's not like the iPhone" by the shops.
For example, I went into the Carphone Warehouse (who are independent, so shouldn't have any reason to sell me one device over another) and stated that I was after a phone, that a hardware QWERTY keyboard was an absolute requirement and that I was thinking about the HTC Dream. I was quickly met with the reply that the HTC Dream wasn't very good and that I'd be better off with an iPhone. After I pointed out that the iPhone didn't do what I wanted (no physical keyboard, completely closed platform with an abusive vendor preventing me from using my phone how I want) the salesman pointed me at the HTC Hero and told me that this was "better" than the HTC Dream because it didn't have a keyboard and was therefore more "iPhone-like".
I got a similar attitude from a number of shops, but the Carphone Warehouse certainly got the award for completely ignoring the customer's stated requirements. The vendors have a choice: either they can produce a wide range of different types of devices to target different types of customer, or they can produce a million and one iPhone clones. I sincerely hope they don't do the latter...
In Australia there is no signifiicant opportunity to road-test these devices before investing in them, often on a multi-year contract with significant cost penalty for early departure.
Wait 6 months and buy one from eBay with no contract for a fraction of the price. I got my HTC Dream for about £120 - 6 months old, as-new condition, no expensive contract lockin to care about.
Android is open source. Just remove the limit in the code and reinstall, if you really need more than 256 megs. Problem solved.
There is no size limit in the code. The size limit is from the fact that Motorola only put that much flash in the phone.
What all the Android fanbois don't know, or tell you, is that Android has a 256 MB app storage limit. While Apple limits you to 2 GB for your maximum app size download. Google, just WTF where you thinking?
This doesn't seem to be an Android limitation - it is a limitation caused by the flash configuration that Motorola have used. On Android, the apps are just stored as individual files in the /data/app directory; other than the size of the filesystem that contains this directory, I can't see there being any limitation. Also, there are several methods of storing apps on the sdcard. For example, the CyanogenMod firmware does this as standard.
Yes, they are Far, far more accurate,
I don't think this is true. Note we're talking about phones containing a GPS receiver, not phones that do geolocation by triangulating masts.
For some reason, phones often don't seem to have SBAS functionality (my HTC Dream doesn't). I have no idea why this is, since SBAS uses the same frequencies and encoding as the GPS satellites, so shouldn't need any extra hardware, it's just a firmware thing AFAIK.
See above. Some devices need a phone signal to get their maps, but that's an implementation choice. Google's implementation caches the image data for the route.
ISTR that some of the older phones rely on remote servers run by the MNO to do assisted GPS, although I doubt any new phones do.
It may be easier to buy.
If by "easier" you mean "harder"... They don't actually appear to ship outside the Americas.
The UK and Euro ones are very slightly more expensive ($102 instead of $99), but nowhere near the usual "Euro tax" that you guys sometimes get shafted with.
I ordered a UK version on Saturday, so I'm looking forward to getting it. But whilst the manufacturer doesn't charge a massive "euro tax", the shipping cost is downright ridiculous - £30 for the "economy" option - that's half the price of the device itself, which is £60.
The plug is external and there is a brick but the mini might not be able to adjust to a power supply with a different wattage. Plugging a 110W power brick into the 85W original mini might cause issues.
No... no it won't. Please go and learn about electronics.
Last I checked, you don't need QoS when there are no congestion issues on your network.
Network traffic tends to be bursty, this means that even with "no congestion issues", there will be queued traffic during the bursts, it just averages out over short periods of time. QoS can be important in these cases since it allows you to move traffic for applications that are adversely affected by latency to the front of the queue. On a network with adequate capacity, the result of this is that things like VoIP work better because the latency stays very low all the time, whilst things like bittorrent get variable latency (which doesn't affect the raw throughput, so no one will notice).
Of course, there are always times when even the most well provisioned network gets congested (e.g. if a good number of connections get chopped then the remaining parts of the network come under increased load. A good example of this is in the case of natural (or not so natural) disasters where not only have you lost a lot of the network, but the world and his dog is on the web trying to get news updates.
QoS isn't without issues though - one of which is trying to identify which traffic to prioritise. I personally favour paying attention to the ToS flags so that applications can signal what kind of service they need and automatically penalising users who are abusing this (e.g. by tagging bittorrent traffic as low-latency).
>Hey, ISP is in seconds, it's an industry standard.
Might be standard, but it's still crazy. Using weight instead of mass means you have to know how much gravity it was calculated for (a figure that isn't specified anywhere in the units), and means that the value given for ISP will change depending on the gravitational force you assume is in effect.
The SI version isn't any better - kgf-sec/kg.
That isn't the SI version - there is no such SI unit as "kgf". The SI unit for force is Newtons, giving you "Newton seconds per kilogram", which makes a lot more sense since there are no hidden coefficients.
The specific impulse of these is around 1800 seconds (lb-sec of impulse per lbm of fuel- hey I didn't invent the units, I just use them...)
That unit doesn't make sense - force and mass don't cancel each other out, even if you happen to be crazy and give the units the same name: lb-force is not the same thing as lb-mass.
To put it another way:
N × s / Kg
See - no identical units to cancel.
You don't have to patent it yourself if you want it to be available to everyone; it's sufficient to challenge his patent application and prove that you did it first.
Yes, because *everyone* can afford to do that when a huge multinational decides to sue them.
Look -- I don't want to be rude and I know I won't be able to hinder myself when you pull these kinds of things out of your ass.
Huh?
All I can say is that nobody I know is an inventor, and as far as I know of those I know know no inventor.
I guess you don't know many people in the technical field then. Whether you call them an "inventor" or not, whenever someone comes up with a new idea, that is an "invention" and is probably patentable. So you're basically saying you don't know anyone who's come up with a new electronic circuit design, microcontroller, bit of software, etc - you may be telling the truth and you really don't know anyone who's come up with an original independent idea, no matter how trivial; the majority of technical professionals are not in your position, and _do_ come up with new ideas and designs for stuff, as do most of their colleagues.
I know a number of electronic engineers who have got patents for stuff like microcontroller designs, which were developed as components for products. None of these people are "inventors" in the traditional sense of someone who does nothing but spend their time coming up with off-the-wall ideas and then trying to push them to market, but they have "invented" stuff all the same, as their patents prove.
And your word isn't good enough for anybody with half a brain and a handfull of source criticism.
I don't understand what you're talking about here. I've given a number of real-world examples to back up my points and you've done nothing but basically say "you're wrong" without any explanation as to why you think I'm wrong.
By kitchen appliance I of course also meant the parts of kitchen appliances, such as e.g. electric motors etc., as these are also a part of the patent. Look either you're trolling and desperate to win this nonsensical argument or you're not very clever.
You see, you're now changing your argument - you started off saying that you would only need to know about a very small subset of patents regarding kitchen appliances. Now you're saying that you need to know about an enormous number of patents regarding all the technologies used in kitchen appliances too. This is no longer a small collection of patents, so you claim that inventors can reasonably be expected to know about all these patents seems to be bunk.
First of all: people? So all of a sudden everybody is an inventor?
Not everyone, but a high proportion of the professional population are.
inventor is an occupation
Not really. Pretty much anyone working in a creative technical field will be "inventing" on pretty much a daily basis. Many (but not all) of these "inventions" are fairly trivial, but still patentable. We're talking about things like electronic circuits, microcontroller designs, etc. I.e. the stuff that "normal people" in the technical fields do *all the time*. Software developers are also coming up with new ideas pretty much all the time - if they aren't then they're a pretty crap software developer, and with the advent of software patents many of these "inventions" are patentable too.
So given this, to suggest that someone must perform a patent search (which will take weeks and almost certainly won't have 100% coverage) every time they come up with a new invention (every few days) is insane.
let's not forget that if you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you only need to research about existing kitchen appliances, you can skip anything else
Untrue. If you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you need to research other kitchen appliances, then you need to research all the technologies that go into your kitchen appliance. This could include patents on electronics, patents on various mechanical designs used within the appliance, etc. You may not consider the tiny low-level implementation details to be especially novel but that doesn't mean that someone else didn't, and if they did you open yourself up to getting sued.
Also patents expire, while laws don't unless changed.
This is one of the reasons why it isn't reasonable to expect people to know what patents may apply - laws are relatively unchanging whereas there are many thousands of patents being filed and expiring every year.
As an inventor you would generally only need to keep yourself updated about the still valid patents. I really don't see why this is so unreasonable to you.
So you are going to do a full check across the many thousands of patent records covering your subject area, every time you come up with an idea, no matter how trivial? Yeah, coz that's going to really help your development cycle...
By that logic I shouldn't be able to get sentenced for a crime I didn't know was unlawful. The bullet you're presenting can easily be dodged by saying that it's every inventors responsibility to look for existing inventions before setting sail, just like it is every citizens responsibility to check for laws before committing a crime.
Your argument is ridiculous - criminal law and patents are there for different purposes and can't be compared as you have attempted to do. Criminal law is there to protect society and giving people incentive to know the legalities of their actions is good for society. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a lot of social good to come out of forcing people to spend vast amounts of time and money checking to see if they are allowed to use what they have invented and throwing it in the bin if they aren't.
Also, criminal law changes very slowly compared to the huge database of patents, so it is much more reasonable to expect someone to know the laws than the patents.
I'm guessing this is a big part of why they don't honor independent simultaneous invention. It means that if you had a mole in a competitor's development space, they could secretly feed you enough data that you can reproduce the invention cycle on your own with only a slight delay.
It works both ways - the mole could provide enough information for the competitor to actually get ahead and file a patent before the company that did most of the work. There are plenty of cases where this has happened.
Disregarding the inability to authenticate independent invention; if two inventors did have a patent on the same invention, then licensing becomes a bidding war for which inventor will offer a lower licensing cost. One of the main purposes of a patent is to allow an inventor to recover the cost of research & development; now these inventors would instead be in a position where they were trying to minimize loss.
With the existing "single inventor" model, one of the inventors basically gets to charge whatever they like (even to the point of making it prohibitively expensive to licence, so that they can keep the invention for just their own products, keeping competition out of the end-user market as well), whilst the other inventor makes *nothing*, or worse - the other inventor gets sued.
I think the "multiple inventors" model would work better, whereby you take a risk and if it doesn't pay off everyone gets to minimise their losses, as opposed to the "single inventor" model whereby you take a risk and if it doesn't pay off you're utterly screwed.