I didn't paint the entire market. I presented a second-hand anecdote. Feel free to down-mod. I'm posting just to get you to burn your mod points. And yes, I know who you are.
Makes me think of the joke about the carpenter. "This is the best hammer I've ever owned; I've had it my whole career," he says. "I've replaced the head three times and the handle five times. I love this hammer, and I'd never part with it."
Oh, come now. Are you saying there isn't a market for purple tablets? Are black and white the only options? And was black the only option until Apple made a white one?
What if Apple had made a design where the corners were not uniformly round, i.e. each rounding having a slightly different radius. And what if Samsung had copied that? Heck, why doesn't Samsung do that now? Or even make the device purple or green? Or have the home button in a corner? Or have a hardware keyboard lid over the screen?
I wouldn't know. I'm not trying to create a tablet. It's up to them to determine their own best designs.
It is my understanding, though, that "uniformly rounded corners" is only one of the factors. It's kind of like a finger print. If there were enough other differences, the corners thing would get them laughed out of court. The fact that it's not getting them laughed out of court indicates there's more to it than you seem to believe.
And regarding desktop PCs, My Commodore 64 didn't look like my IBM PC XT which didn't look like my Quadra 650 which didn't look like my G4 tower, which didn't look like my E-Machine. And that C64 was also recognizably different from similar machines available at the time. The Atari 400/800, TI99/4a, Apple ][e, Coleco Adam... All very unique.
Are you saying that there is no other way to design a tablet than how the iPad is built? Sony would suggest otherwise. If you're suggesting that Apple's design is the best and because of that, all other manufacturers should be able to make knock-offs, I'm not sure I agree on either account. I'd suggest that even Apple is looking for ways to improve their design.
I've lived in seven places, each with a refrigerator, and every single one of them looked recognizably different. And thinking of the fridges at each of my friends' houses, none of them look like mine, nor like each other. There is no way that, if a judge were to ask which is which, a lawyer for one manufacturer or another, would respond, "I can't tell at this distance".
A buddy of mine who develops for iOS and Android was at Best Buy a few weeks back to pick up a new tablet, and he saw and overheard a conversation between a mother and daughter, where they looked at the iPad, and decided based solely on price that they should go for the Galaxy Tab. The same thing, for cheaper.
For the great majority of people outside of SlashDot, they don't understand the difference between iOS and Android based devices. They see similar-looking gadgets and they hear that they can get Angry Birds on both, so they make a barely-informed decision based on purchase price.
This is why companies like Apple are concerned about trade dress and other patents. The Samsung products, in this case, appear to them to have been designed to look as close as possible to the iPad, and as demonstrated in this case, Apple lost a sale not based on technical merits or open technology, but rather because the buyer thought they were getting the same thing for a lower price. Regardless of your preference, the Tab and the iPad are not the same thing, and the fact that the similarities in design factor into poorly made purchase decisions does indeed affect sales.
I'm not saying that this uninformed girl shouldn't have bought the tab; merely that her decision was clearly based on an incorrect assumption that was influenced by stark similarities in design. She wasn't looking at the Sony wedge tab and thinking it was the same thing.
Should that stuff be protected? I don't know. But the current law says that it is protected, so all the involved parties are going to do what they can to take advantage of the law. If the roles were reversed, I'm sure Samsung would be doing the same thing.
It reminds me of the old tales about Burger King, which was an up-and-coming fast food joint riding the coat tails of MacDonald's. McD's, according to allegory, would spend tens of thousands of dollars doing research on economics, traffic patterns, etc., before putting down a restaurant. Burger King would wait and wait and wait and... get a space right across the street from McD's; this is why they're so often close together.
I'm sure that McD's lobbied--and probably in some cases with success--to limit the number of fast food restaurants in a given radius in order to prevent this, in a way trying to protect their investment in research. That's what Apple is doing. If you don't like it, don't bitch and moan in slashdot; get a law degree and fight the law. Or write your congresscritter. Or become an expert witness and hire yourself out to the EFF.
But comments here do nothing to change the status quo.
Devotion? I don't know, I guess I miss Microsoft Comic Chat, but they killed that a long time ago. I've got two Microsoft wheel mice; they're pretty good, but I wouldn't call that devotion. The only device I've got religious devotion to, I think is my long-gone Commodore 64. I miss that thing.
Meh. Microsoft ain't in too great of shape either. I mean, yes, they're making bazillions of dollars, but they're looking more and more like the legacy, not the future of technology.
OK, let me clarify. In the context of the article, the composer was contractually bound to receive payment for use of his work, and it was used without remuneration outside of the terms of that contract. That's theft.
In the more general sense, e.g. college kids doing file sharing, the money is theoretical, and while I don't think your window-shopping example is apt--after all, people don't get to take home and use a free copy of, for example, furniture that they see in while doing the window-shopping--I think we're in general agreement that it should not be considered theft.
In an ideal world, content creators (and their overlords, such as the labels) would allow free personal distribution of content. And in that same world, in the cases when artists chose to limit distribution, fans would respect it. And nobody would get sued.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about Google these days. I used to be a staunch defender, but the whole Google+ debacle turned me sour on them. I have no great love for FaceBook or anything, but after signing up for G+, hearing crickets and then finding I couldn't delete my profile without deleting my whole Google (e.g. GMail et al) account, the whole thing just stank to me.
I've even stopped using Chrome for the most part, where it used to be my main browser. Now I only use it on my Mac when I need Flash because I've recently un-installed Flash from the rest of my system. Basically, Chrome is my Kingdom Rush browser.
In the context of TFA, there is an effective theft in that there was a contractual agreement based on IP laws that the composer would get money for distribution of his work. The work was distributed and the composer was not given his due and was thus deprived of something of material value (money).
That's what it all comes down to when they're talking about copyright violations being theft, isn't it? Depriving someone of funds which they theoretically should have received.
In the case of poor college students, I'm actually totally with you. They wouldn't have bought the music anyway, and them having the music turns them into fans who might eventually buy the music or go to shows or introduce other people to the music who will in turn become paying customers.
But in the case of a corporation--especially one whose sole existence is based on profits from collecting payment for use of copyrighted material--not paying for their own use of copyrighted material, I'm quite happy to vilify that act with the oversimplified term, "theft".
Hate to say it, but Nokia was going to die anyway. They were in the lead in the race to the bottom for a long time before they realized the market wasn't even behind them anymore. Sure they have some nice devices--even some hacker-friendly ones--but none of them were ever going to be popular enough to save the company.
Once upon a time, Nokia pivoted from being world leader in wood product sales to being a technology and communications leader. It's a pity they didn't see the black swan and pivot again in time to make more of a showing against the iPhone.
Yeah, I used to love my professors who published their lecture notes. You could review before class, then just sit and listen in order to really grok it. Maybe a couple of little notes to reinforce something. I recall a guy named Ousterhout having some of the best-prepared notes and lectures of all my CS profs.
While the iPad does suck for real-time note-taking, there's no reason that they couldn't be used in this model with a great deal of success. Same goes, of course, for the tabs, the droid maxxxes and the surfaces of the world. Mix in handwriting recognition and you have searchable notes--not just the prof's but yours, too.
I remember the other thing people used was Black Lightning: professional note-takers who'd sit in on courses and take perfect notes and sell them for people to buy and review. A LOT of people used that instead of going to the lecture.
Now, so many lectures are going on-line. I was going to suggest that SIRI-style voice recognition would be great, but with all the other options available, that's not even the most useful solution to the note-taking problem.
Hardware acceleration? Check! Using WebKit's CSS transforms, you can use GPU acceleration. I know it's there in iOS, but since Android uses WebKit, too, I presume they have it also.
Access to GPS and accellerometer? Check! Both have Javascript APIs, again, at least in iOS.
Camera? I don't think there's a way to access that with JS yet, but I might be wrong.
SIMD NEON thingies? No, I guess not. If you're talking about maxing out the hardware with direct register access, well, that's grand if that's what you want, but I'd posit that the variety of applications that don't require such low level access far outnumber those that do.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't paint the entire market. I presented a second-hand anecdote. Feel free to down-mod. I'm posting just to get you to burn your mod points. And yes, I know who you are.
Makes me think of the joke about the carpenter. "This is the best hammer I've ever owned; I've had it my whole career," he says. "I've replaced the head three times and the handle five times. I love this hammer, and I'd never part with it."
Oh, come now. Are you saying there isn't a market for purple tablets? Are black and white the only options? And was black the only option until Apple made a white one?
What if Apple had made a design where the corners were not uniformly round, i.e. each rounding having a slightly different radius. And what if Samsung had copied that? Heck, why doesn't Samsung do that now? Or even make the device purple or green? Or have the home button in a corner? Or have a hardware keyboard lid over the screen?
I wouldn't know. I'm not trying to create a tablet. It's up to them to determine their own best designs.
It is my understanding, though, that "uniformly rounded corners" is only one of the factors. It's kind of like a finger print. If there were enough other differences, the corners thing would get them laughed out of court. The fact that it's not getting them laughed out of court indicates there's more to it than you seem to believe.
Thank you; I'll be here all week.
It was "looks the same, both have angry birds on them, and this one's cheaper". Not exactly the best set of data points to make a decision.
She knew one was $100 cheaper. That was all.
The Scribbler looks nothing like an iPad. If Samsung had gone with that design, it would be Electrovaya suing them, not Apple.
Gene's tablet wasn't a real product, you know.
And regarding desktop PCs, My Commodore 64 didn't look like my IBM PC XT which didn't look like my Quadra 650 which didn't look like my G4 tower, which didn't look like my E-Machine. And that C64 was also recognizably different from similar machines available at the time. The Atari 400/800, TI99/4a, Apple ][e, Coleco Adam... All very unique.
Are you saying that there is no other way to design a tablet than how the iPad is built? Sony would suggest otherwise. If you're suggesting that Apple's design is the best and because of that, all other manufacturers should be able to make knock-offs, I'm not sure I agree on either account. I'd suggest that even Apple is looking for ways to improve their design.
I've lived in seven places, each with a refrigerator, and every single one of them looked recognizably different. And thinking of the fridges at each of my friends' houses, none of them look like mine, nor like each other. There is no way that, if a judge were to ask which is which, a lawyer for one manufacturer or another, would respond, "I can't tell at this distance".
A buddy of mine who develops for iOS and Android was at Best Buy a few weeks back to pick up a new tablet, and he saw and overheard a conversation between a mother and daughter, where they looked at the iPad, and decided based solely on price that they should go for the Galaxy Tab. The same thing, for cheaper.
For the great majority of people outside of SlashDot, they don't understand the difference between iOS and Android based devices. They see similar-looking gadgets and they hear that they can get Angry Birds on both, so they make a barely-informed decision based on purchase price.
This is why companies like Apple are concerned about trade dress and other patents. The Samsung products, in this case, appear to them to have been designed to look as close as possible to the iPad, and as demonstrated in this case, Apple lost a sale not based on technical merits or open technology, but rather because the buyer thought they were getting the same thing for a lower price. Regardless of your preference, the Tab and the iPad are not the same thing, and the fact that the similarities in design factor into poorly made purchase decisions does indeed affect sales.
I'm not saying that this uninformed girl shouldn't have bought the tab; merely that her decision was clearly based on an incorrect assumption that was influenced by stark similarities in design. She wasn't looking at the Sony wedge tab and thinking it was the same thing.
Should that stuff be protected? I don't know. But the current law says that it is protected, so all the involved parties are going to do what they can to take advantage of the law. If the roles were reversed, I'm sure Samsung would be doing the same thing.
It reminds me of the old tales about Burger King, which was an up-and-coming fast food joint riding the coat tails of MacDonald's. McD's, according to allegory, would spend tens of thousands of dollars doing research on economics, traffic patterns, etc., before putting down a restaurant. Burger King would wait and wait and wait and... get a space right across the street from McD's; this is why they're so often close together.
I'm sure that McD's lobbied--and probably in some cases with success--to limit the number of fast food restaurants in a given radius in order to prevent this, in a way trying to protect their investment in research. That's what Apple is doing. If you don't like it, don't bitch and moan in slashdot; get a law degree and fight the law. Or write your congresscritter. Or become an expert witness and hire yourself out to the EFF.
But comments here do nothing to change the status quo.
Huh. I guess they aren't making bazillions of dollars.
Devotion? I don't know, I guess I miss Microsoft Comic Chat, but they killed that a long time ago. I've got two Microsoft wheel mice; they're pretty good, but I wouldn't call that devotion. The only device I've got religious devotion to, I think is my long-gone Commodore 64. I miss that thing.
Meh. Microsoft ain't in too great of shape either. I mean, yes, they're making bazillions of dollars, but they're looking more and more like the legacy, not the future of technology.
OK, let me clarify. In the context of the article, the composer was contractually bound to receive payment for use of his work, and it was used without remuneration outside of the terms of that contract. That's theft.
In the more general sense, e.g. college kids doing file sharing, the money is theoretical, and while I don't think your window-shopping example is apt--after all, people don't get to take home and use a free copy of, for example, furniture that they see in while doing the window-shopping--I think we're in general agreement that it should not be considered theft.
In an ideal world, content creators (and their overlords, such as the labels) would allow free personal distribution of content. And in that same world, in the cases when artists chose to limit distribution, fans would respect it. And nobody would get sued.
I think we're in agreement, although I think your "finding a winning lottery ticket" is not exactly an accurate parallel.
I think we're in agreement.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about Google these days. I used to be a staunch defender, but the whole Google+ debacle turned me sour on them. I have no great love for FaceBook or anything, but after signing up for G+, hearing crickets and then finding I couldn't delete my profile without deleting my whole Google (e.g. GMail et al) account, the whole thing just stank to me. I've even stopped using Chrome for the most part, where it used to be my main browser. Now I only use it on my Mac when I need Flash because I've recently un-installed Flash from the rest of my system. Basically, Chrome is my Kingdom Rush browser.
...says the Anonymous Coward.
In the context of TFA, there is an effective theft in that there was a contractual agreement based on IP laws that the composer would get money for distribution of his work. The work was distributed and the composer was not given his due and was thus deprived of something of material value (money).
That's what it all comes down to when they're talking about copyright violations being theft, isn't it? Depriving someone of funds which they theoretically should have received.
In the case of poor college students, I'm actually totally with you. They wouldn't have bought the music anyway, and them having the music turns them into fans who might eventually buy the music or go to shows or introduce other people to the music who will in turn become paying customers.
But in the case of a corporation--especially one whose sole existence is based on profits from collecting payment for use of copyrighted material--not paying for their own use of copyrighted material, I'm quite happy to vilify that act with the oversimplified term, "theft".
Hate to say it, but Nokia was going to die anyway. They were in the lead in the race to the bottom for a long time before they realized the market wasn't even behind them anymore. Sure they have some nice devices--even some hacker-friendly ones--but none of them were ever going to be popular enough to save the company.
Once upon a time, Nokia pivoted from being world leader in wood product sales to being a technology and communications leader. It's a pity they didn't see the black swan and pivot again in time to make more of a showing against the iPhone.
Yeah, I used to love my professors who published their lecture notes. You could review before class, then just sit and listen in order to really grok it. Maybe a couple of little notes to reinforce something. I recall a guy named Ousterhout having some of the best-prepared notes and lectures of all my CS profs.
While the iPad does suck for real-time note-taking, there's no reason that they couldn't be used in this model with a great deal of success. Same goes, of course, for the tabs, the droid maxxxes and the surfaces of the world. Mix in handwriting recognition and you have searchable notes--not just the prof's but yours, too.
I remember the other thing people used was Black Lightning: professional note-takers who'd sit in on courses and take perfect notes and sell them for people to buy and review. A LOT of people used that instead of going to the lecture.
Now, so many lectures are going on-line. I was going to suggest that SIRI-style voice recognition would be great, but with all the other options available, that's not even the most useful solution to the note-taking problem.
Hardware acceleration? Check! Using WebKit's CSS transforms, you can use GPU acceleration. I know it's there in iOS, but since Android uses WebKit, too, I presume they have it also.
Access to GPS and accellerometer? Check! Both have Javascript APIs, again, at least in iOS.
Camera? I don't think there's a way to access that with JS yet, but I might be wrong.
SIMD NEON thingies? No, I guess not. If you're talking about maxing out the hardware with direct register access, well, that's grand if that's what you want, but I'd posit that the variety of applications that don't require such low level access far outnumber those that do.