What's insane is that a company that did so well is considered to have "missed".
If one was really cynical, one might speculate that someone, somewhere is coining it in by releasing "analysts reports" predicting unfeasibly high profits and then shorting the stock.
Of course, that's pure conspiracy theory and the responsible, professional and law-abiding folk in our wonderful finance industries would never contemplate such illegal manipulation.
I have yet to see anything truly innovative come out of Apple,
Well, not if you define "innovation" as actually inventing a completely brand new idea from scratch, and don't give any credit to the hard part - selling it. "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is an aphorism only exceeded in utter wrongness by "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves".
The story of Apple's life has been "they may not have invented (x) but they were one of the first to turn it into a desirable product and successfully market it..." where X includes the GUI and mouse, local area networking, the laser printer, PostScript - and hence desktop publishing, full motion video on PC (Quicktime was at the cutting edge of this) - and hence nonlinear video editing... some of us were around when these things were taking off and people sure as hell weren't using IBM PCs for them (Amigas and Acorns maybe).
And the original Mac is something of a design classic...
Then you have the modern laptop - with the keyboard set back and a central pointing device in front, as debuted on the first Powerbooks. Maybe not the Manhattan project, but virtually every other laptop since has copied it. Pretty sure that the previous Mac "Portable", though deemed a flop, was the first portable to use an active-matrix (TFT) display.
Using a RISC processor? RISC vs. CISC is almost irrelevant now (since modern CISC processors have assimilated the good bits of RISC design) but it used to be the Next Big Thing and Apple were the second to market with a RISC-based personal computer (Acorn were first by a long margin, but not really significant outside of the UK, although the ARM processor they developed didn't do badly - Apple played a big role in the later development of that, too). Then there's Digital Cameras - again, not the first but one of the first viable consumer products.
Of course, the Newton wasn't innovative at all because some guy at Xerox had sketched one on a beer mat 20 years before (and anyway, Steve Jobs planted the whole Newton thing when he was using a time machine to set up the great iPhone conspiracy).
Then there's USB. Apple certainly didn't invent that, but before the iMac the only use for it was the slightly increased airflow from those two funny square sockets on the back of your PC that Windows 95 didn't really support. There was a reason why most of the first mass-market USB peripherals had translucent blue cases...
So, what have Apple done for us this century? Well, every year in the 80s and 90s was going to be The Year of Unix on the Desktop. Apple finally did it with OS X (yes, there's Linux - which succeeded on servers, embedded devices an Android but has yet to get large scale adoption on the desktop). They managed to fairly seamlessly switch from PPC to Intel using emulation/recompilation (quite an achievement) and popularised Small Form Factor computers. We've had vastly improved trackpads on laptops (seriously - I always had to carry a mouse around until Apple introduced the new multitouch trackpads). Now we have an external PCIe bus (thunderbolt) which may or may not take off, and they've just doubled the linear resolution of their laptop display at a time when everybody else had decided that 1080p was enough.
I won't mention the iPod/iPhone because everybody knows that they were invented by Samsung after being inspired by the "news pad" in the film 2001, and that Apple copied them and then used a time machine to go back and launch the iPhone at a time when Android phones looked like this.
So please suggest some other companies with anything like that track record. Microsoft/IBM? Well, turning the personal computer into a commodity was pretty damned significant (not so sure that it was progress), but apart from that...
Heck, Apple are now giving you a free magsafe-to-magsafe2 adapter if you buy a $1000 display and a $3000 laptop from them - if they're capable of that sort of eye-watering generosity then the sky's the limit...
...and before we start frothing at the mouth over all the iPad-enabled equipment destined for landfill, there are equally credible rumors that Apple will be making an adapter.
As for why - well, they've managed to stick to the same physical connector for 10 years, which is pretty good going. Maybe it wasn't possible to add USB3 in a way that didn't break compatibility with existing docks. They probably don't need composite/component analog video now, either.
I can't imagine they will, even with their recent EPEAT flip-flop.
Pretty sure that "flip-flop" was a political power play on both sides (Not sure I side with Apple on that one, but anybody else find it suspicious that City of San Francisco officials found it so urgent to issue a public pronouncement?)
and while they'll never use that for the iFamily of products (since so many people won't/can't buy machines with that connectivity), I can't imagine they'll cave to the USB standard now. I do hope I'm wrong though.
Actually, in terms of power, iDevices have been ahead of the game for a while in that the iPod/pad/phone adapters have a standard USB A socket rather than a captive cable. I've been using mine, plus mini- and micro- USB cables as a universal power supply for some time.
The sockets in the iDevices themselves need to be nonstandard because they carry analogue audio and video alongside USB. Apple are rumoured to be changing the connector with the next iPhone, so who knows what they're going to do?
As for the Macs, they've always had USB, and got USB2 as soon as they switched to the Intel chipset that included it. Apple are hardly alone in having proprietary power supplies & captive PSU cables on their laptops - but with this new standard it would be feasible (and consistent with the iPad approach) for them to have a high-power USB socket on the power brick. Since some people seem to go through magsafe cables like mad, it might save Apple money on replacements. (I've never seen a problem amongst multiple mac users, so either there's been a duff batch, some environment-based issue or some people think you are supposed to remove them by tripping over the cable...)
As for Thunderbolt, it isn't a replacement for USB2/3 - its a replacement for internal expansion and "fast" external expansion such as PCMCIA/ExpressCard slots. I doubt you'll see many Thunderbolt memory sticks, mice, keyboards, lava lamps, "domestic" backup drives even if it takes off. Its potentially a way of adding USB ports without the overheads of a hub (there's a Belkin 'dock' with USB3 and eSATA coming real soon now, and the Apple TB display has USB 2, Firewire and 1GB Ethernet controllers). I think the killer app will be docking stations for laptops - unfortunately the Belkin and Matrox ones announced so far are a day late and a dollar short.
Affordable Thunderbolt devices? Currently, just Apple's Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-Ethernet dongle:-)
If the government gives them out "free", it means that the taxpayers pay for them.
Why not force the 4G providers, who are causing the interference, to foot the bill . . . ?
Because the government hopes to make a metric shedload of money "for the taxpayer*" when it auctions off the old analog TV frequencies to the 4G providers later this year (it worked when they auctioned off the 3G spectrum in the 90s). This should be loose change in comparison.
* Don't hold your breath for your rebate cheque, though:-)
One problem is: How will it tell apart a serious accident in which people were hurt, and one in which the car was damaged but the people inside were unscathed.
If the airbags went off, its probably worth sending a paramedic on a motorbike - if only to check that people weren't injured by a small explosive device going off inches from their face.
Really? Every time they update OSX it becomes more like iOS.
They are pulling over individual features that (mostly) make sense on laptops with small-ish screens and large, multitouch trackpads, plus some cosmetic/layout changes that are not really tablet specific. Most of these features can either be ignored or turned off in Preferences.
What they're not doing - unlike Microsoft and some Linux distros - is forcing everybody to use the iOS "desktop" with the traditional desktop a second-class citizen. Yes, they've added "launchpad" and "Full Screen" mode (which would be better described as "tablet mode") but you can just ignore them if you have a huge monitor. On an 11" Air, they make sense.
Plus, Macs are uniquely set up for using gesture-based interfaces - all their laptops have, for some time, featured the biggest, nicest trackpads in the busines (the first time I've not felt the need to carry a mouse around) and, for the desktop, there is the Magic Trackpad (which, provided you turn on the three-fingers-to-drag option, I find excellent for everything short of gaming and graphics work).
The Nexus Q will never beat any of the competing device on price. That's because Google intentionally chose to manufacture it entirely in the United States, with its higher labor costs.
If it were 50% more expensive than an Apple TV - or maybe a bit more considering it includes an amplifier - I could believe that.
But three times the price? More than the Nexus Tablet? Seriously?
Well, that's a recipe for screwing things up on any modern Unix or Linux system (shadow password file? home directories? any config file that references the account by name rather than UID? Plus, you're supposed to use the 'vipw' command on Unix/Linux).
Anyway, OS X uses Open Directory for this sort of account information, so it plays nicely when you start using networks. The command-line utility for manipulating this is 'dscl' and, yes, adding/modifying users is more laborious that way - but it's still CLI-based and can be scripted. If you google a bit you'll find people who've written OS X equivalents of the adduser/moduser etc. scripts in most Linux distros.
The 'proper' CLI-shell and Unix-like architecture, ability to run all the usual FOSS suspects, plus native versions of those commercial applications that you just can't avoid, are still the main things that keep me on a Mac though. However, I don't think that's a major motivation for the hoards of supplicants at the stripped-pine and plate glass Jobsian temples.
Please don't ask me to defend the dog-XML 'property list' files that OS X uses, though.
reducing them to piles of... stuff... and somehow manages to rehydrate them [wikipedia.org] with everything perfectly back in place and functioning.
Holy Parody Batman! I think you may be taking that film a bit too seriously. People are talking as if it was a serious attempt to bring Batman to the screen rather than a deliberate comedy send-up of superhero comics.
The film also included a porpoise heroically throwing itself in front of a torpedo to save our heroes, a string of nuns, kittens and ducklings getting in the way when Bats was trying to throw away a bomb, and water faucets marked "regular" and "heavy".
Yeah, yeah the usual crap. You libs still haven't come-up with a better way to see if the Teachers are actually teaching the kids, or if they are (like one of my former teachers) screwing around in class teaching karate lessons. We didn't learn crap in that class, and that would have been clear if we'd been forced to take a test, thus revealing the teacher should be fired.
...or the Principal should have stuck their head around the door occasionally and noticed that the teacher was goofing off in lessons. No, you're right, its better to completely distort kids education and waste hours of valuable school time cramming for multi-choice tests with no relationship to real-world skills... just for the sake of catching the occasional karate-mad teacher.
Anyway, the problem is not having periodic tests as such, its the quality of the tests (which only reward recalling little fragments of knowledge and techniques) and the disproportionate importance based on them.
I mean, allthe modern tablets look so different from the front, especially when turned off.
I suggest that you get your eyes tested, especially if you think the Motorola Xoom looks anything like the white iPad 3. A Xoom versus a black iPad 1 would be close (but Apple and Motorola/Google aren't exactly BFFs at the moment, and I've lost track over whether the Xoom is an issue)
Go look at the Sony tablet, the Asus Transformer (even without the dock) or even the pictures of the Microsoft Surface (without the brightly coloured magnetic colour, which does look like a lawsuit in the making) and you'll see black rectangles with rounded corners that (a) don't look like an iPad and (b) don't have go-faster stripes or roses around the screen. In any case the "rectangle with rounded corners" is only one of the laundry list of similarities that Apple are upset over and wouldn't be an issue on its own.
Remember, Apple did not invent square icons & calendars
MacDonald's didn't invent the colours red and yellow, the letter "m", curvy writing, the prefix "Mac", clowns or, for that matter, the hamburger, and if they went after people "infringing" on just one or two of those features (not entirely unprecedented) they would be completely out of order.
However, if you open a burger restaurant called MacCartney's with red-and-yellow signs featuring curvy letter-Ms and a clown mascot then you pretty much deserve what you get.
Samsung don't just have a black rectangle with rounded corners. There's a whole list of other similarities between their tablets and phones and iDevices, from the design of the bezel and the glass front to the single dock connector, several icon similarities, (originally) the lock screen and some of the packaging (all q.v. ad nauseum elsewhere).
Its perfectly true that Steve Jobs didn't wake up one morning in 2006 and invent tablets, touch screens, multitouch, slide-to-unlock, glass, rectangles and rounded corners. However, Apple did pull together a distinctive mixture of old and new ideas and combine them into a product that put a rocket up the backside of the mobile phone industry and, later, the tablet computer industry. Unless you think that devices like the Galaxy Tab came about because someone at Samsung who had never heard of the iPad was watching 2001 on a LCD TV with a shiny bezel and thought "eureka!"...
Why are they only targeting Samsung? there are soooo many other tablets that look much MUCH more like the iPad
Examples? Other than ridiculously cheap no-brand lookalikes-but-not-workalikes, unless you're going to trot out the "black rectangle with rounded corners" strawman (just two of a long list of claimed features - not nearly enough to constitute an infringement). Unlike Samsung, other manufacturers (e.g. Sony and Asus) have managed to design tablets that don't look like iPad clones. Even Microsoft's Surface doesn't look much like an iPad (although I can see them having a spat over the cover) and has a very different-looking UI. Samsung even includes iPad features that get slated (e.g. having a proprietary dock connector and no USB, SD, HDMI connectors).
Incidentally - look at this review, particularly this picture and tell me this tablet wasn't separated from an iPad at birth. Obviously, at some stage, gTabs without "SAMSUNG" in large, friendly letters on the front were in circulation.
Seems to me Apple want to block Samsung because the gTab is a real contender for the iPad.
D'uh! Yes. The whole point of such lawsuits is to stop unfair competition. A $200 no-brand all plastic knockoff with a resistive screen is not actually a credible competitor - the only reason Apple would bother with those is if they infringed trademarks (which have to be defended).
You forgot the bit where the over-confident scorpion takes a nap allowing the frog to overtake it but the frog has promised the devil the soul of the first living thing to cross, so he tells the devil that his brother is much fatter and juicier than him except he first has to get 1/2 the way then 1/4 the way then 1/8 the way so he never actually gets there which doesn't matter because the frog actually liked it in the briar patch and just dropped stones into the water until he could reach it.
I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
Except for the small practical detail that English is already the de-facto lingua franca (God, that just pinned the needle on my irony meter!) in the EU and anywhere else that gets British/US music, TV and movies. The reason we Brits are so crap at languages is partly because its generally the most useful language to travel with. You can't "impose" a made-up language on the world - you have to build on what is already there.
One of the reasons that English is so illogical that it is the Borg of languages - your language's cultural distinctivness will be assimilated. It is defined by usage rather than committee. That also makes it easy to tailor to your culture: if you don't have an English phrase for your concept, just liberate one from any other language...
Oh, and yes, if you wanted to establish a universal computer OS in 1999 then your choices would have been (a) choose Win 95 and succeeed or (b) choose something better and fail.
We'll see if there is a significant difference when the source is shot with a higher framerate (like the hobbit).
ISTR that people who had seen the early previews of The Hobbit at 48fps were complaining about much the same effect.
I am not sure this effect is that irrational.
I think the irrational bit is that the high (or interpolated) frame-rate material is, technically, an improvement, but triggers a mental association with low production value shot-on-video productions.
Technically, those daytime soaps had smoother motion - 50-60 fields per second vs. 24 frames per second.
Microsoft wont throw the OEMs under the bus, it just wont happen.
No, but it might hop in a taxi and leave them standing in the rain. I can't see Microsoft taking over production of desktop PCs or full-size laptops - which can be bolted together by OEMs from commodity parts and run standard software - but tablets and tablet/laptop crossovers are a different matter. - the Android/OEM model seems to have taken root in the smartphone market (where there were already a lot of phone makers pre-iPhone), but not so much in tablets (which is a new market and is proving very different from the phone market).
The tablet market could still easily end up being dominated by Apple, Amazon and/or Google selling hardware tightly integrated with software and services. This is Microsoft insuring themselves against that situation.
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What's insane is that a company that did so well is considered to have "missed".
If one was really cynical, one might speculate that someone, somewhere is coining it in by releasing "analysts reports" predicting unfeasibly high profits and then shorting the stock.
Of course, that's pure conspiracy theory and the responsible, professional and law-abiding folk in our wonderful finance industries would never contemplate such illegal manipulation.
I have yet to see anything truly innovative come out of Apple,
Well, not if you define "innovation" as actually inventing a completely brand new idea from scratch, and don't give any credit to the hard part - selling it. "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" is an aphorism only exceeded in utter wrongness by "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves".
The story of Apple's life has been "they may not have invented (x) but they were one of the first to turn it into a desirable product and successfully market it..." where X includes the GUI and mouse, local area networking, the laser printer, PostScript - and hence desktop publishing, full motion video on PC (Quicktime was at the cutting edge of this) - and hence nonlinear video editing... some of us were around when these things were taking off and people sure as hell weren't using IBM PCs for them (Amigas and Acorns maybe).
And the original Mac is something of a design classic...
Then you have the modern laptop - with the keyboard set back and a central pointing device in front, as debuted on the first Powerbooks. Maybe not the Manhattan project, but virtually every other laptop since has copied it. Pretty sure that the previous Mac "Portable", though deemed a flop, was the first portable to use an active-matrix (TFT) display.
Using a RISC processor? RISC vs. CISC is almost irrelevant now (since modern CISC processors have assimilated the good bits of RISC design) but it used to be the Next Big Thing and Apple were the second to market with a RISC-based personal computer (Acorn were first by a long margin, but not really significant outside of the UK, although the ARM processor they developed didn't do badly - Apple played a big role in the later development of that, too). Then there's Digital Cameras - again, not the first but one of the first viable consumer products.
Of course, the Newton wasn't innovative at all because some guy at Xerox had sketched one on a beer mat 20 years before (and anyway, Steve Jobs planted the whole Newton thing when he was using a time machine to set up the great iPhone conspiracy).
Then there's USB. Apple certainly didn't invent that, but before the iMac the only use for it was the slightly increased airflow from those two funny square sockets on the back of your PC that Windows 95 didn't really support. There was a reason why most of the first mass-market USB peripherals had translucent blue cases...
So, what have Apple done for us this century? Well, every year in the 80s and 90s was going to be The Year of Unix on the Desktop. Apple finally did it with OS X (yes, there's Linux - which succeeded on servers, embedded devices an Android but has yet to get large scale adoption on the desktop). They managed to fairly seamlessly switch from PPC to Intel using emulation/recompilation (quite an achievement) and popularised Small Form Factor computers. We've had vastly improved trackpads on laptops (seriously - I always had to carry a mouse around until Apple introduced the new multitouch trackpads). Now we have an external PCIe bus (thunderbolt) which may or may not take off, and they've just doubled the linear resolution of their laptop display at a time when everybody else had decided that 1080p was enough.
I won't mention the iPod/iPhone because everybody knows that they were invented by Samsung after being inspired by the "news pad" in the film 2001, and that Apple copied them and then used a time machine to go back and launch the iPhone at a time when Android phones looked like this.
So please suggest some other companies with anything like that track record. Microsoft/IBM? Well, turning the personal computer into a commodity was pretty damned significant (not so sure that it was progress), but apart from that...
To be sold separately.
Quite possibly - but nobody knows yet.
Heck, Apple are now giving you a free magsafe-to-magsafe2 adapter if you buy a $1000 display and a $3000 laptop from them - if they're capable of that sort of eye-watering generosity then the sky's the limit...
(Flap, Oink!)
...and before we start frothing at the mouth over all the iPad-enabled equipment destined for landfill, there are equally credible rumors that Apple will be making an adapter.
As for why - well, they've managed to stick to the same physical connector for 10 years, which is pretty good going. Maybe it wasn't possible to add USB3 in a way that didn't break compatibility with existing docks. They probably don't need composite/component analog video now, either.
I can't imagine they will, even with their recent EPEAT flip-flop.
Pretty sure that "flip-flop" was a political power play on both sides (Not sure I side with Apple on that one, but anybody else find it suspicious that City of San Francisco officials found it so urgent to issue a public pronouncement?)
and while they'll never use that for the iFamily of products (since so many people won't/can't buy machines with that connectivity), I can't imagine they'll cave to the USB standard now. I do hope I'm wrong though.
Actually, in terms of power, iDevices have been ahead of the game for a while in that the iPod/pad/phone adapters have a standard USB A socket rather than a captive cable. I've been using mine, plus mini- and micro- USB cables as a universal power supply for some time.
The sockets in the iDevices themselves need to be nonstandard because they carry analogue audio and video alongside USB. Apple are rumoured to be changing the connector with the next iPhone, so who knows what they're going to do?
As for the Macs, they've always had USB, and got USB2 as soon as they switched to the Intel chipset that included it. Apple are hardly alone in having proprietary power supplies & captive PSU cables on their laptops - but with this new standard it would be feasible (and consistent with the iPad approach) for them to have a high-power USB socket on the power brick. Since some people seem to go through magsafe cables like mad, it might save Apple money on replacements. (I've never seen a problem amongst multiple mac users, so either there's been a duff batch, some environment-based issue or some people think you are supposed to remove them by tripping over the cable...)
As for Thunderbolt, it isn't a replacement for USB2/3 - its a replacement for internal expansion and "fast" external expansion such as PCMCIA/ExpressCard slots. I doubt you'll see many Thunderbolt memory sticks, mice, keyboards, lava lamps, "domestic" backup drives even if it takes off. Its potentially a way of adding USB ports without the overheads of a hub (there's a Belkin 'dock' with USB3 and eSATA coming real soon now, and the Apple TB display has USB 2, Firewire and 1GB Ethernet controllers). I think the killer app will be docking stations for laptops - unfortunately the Belkin and Matrox ones announced so far are a day late and a dollar short.
Affordable Thunderbolt devices? Currently, just Apple's Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-Ethernet dongle :-)
Yep, the film industry is going to keep milking the 3-d cow for a while. What is a 4-D movie?
At the end of the movie, if it sucked, you get to travel back in time and reclaim the two hours that you just wasted.
Now, THAT would sell movies - "We guarantee you will love this movie - or your time back*!!!"
* Ticket price and food sales not refundable**.
** Because we drugged the coke and popcorn to put you to sleep*** for just long enough to dump you out on the street. THERE IS NO MOVIE....
*** But not before the end of the commercials. We're greedy' not stupid!
(Sorry, that post went a bit Philip K Dick.)
You might want to look up the Pulfrich Effect. It might just work for your application if you show rotating models.
If the government gives them out "free", it means that the taxpayers pay for them.
Why not force the 4G providers, who are causing the interference, to foot the bill . . . ?
Because the government hopes to make a metric shedload of money "for the taxpayer*" when it auctions off the old analog TV frequencies to the 4G providers later this year (it worked when they auctioned off the 3G spectrum in the 90s). This should be loose change in comparison.
* Don't hold your breath for your rebate cheque, though :-)
One problem is: How will it tell apart a serious accident in which people were hurt, and one in which the car was damaged but the people inside were unscathed.
If the airbags went off, its probably worth sending a paramedic on a motorbike - if only to check that people weren't injured by a small explosive device going off inches from their face.
Really? Every time they update OSX it becomes more like iOS.
They are pulling over individual features that (mostly) make sense on laptops with small-ish screens and large, multitouch trackpads, plus some cosmetic/layout changes that are not really tablet specific. Most of these features can either be ignored or turned off in Preferences.
What they're not doing - unlike Microsoft and some Linux distros - is forcing everybody to use the iOS "desktop" with the traditional desktop a second-class citizen. Yes, they've added "launchpad" and "Full Screen" mode (which would be better described as "tablet mode") but you can just ignore them if you have a huge monitor. On an 11" Air, they make sense.
Plus, Macs are uniquely set up for using gesture-based interfaces - all their laptops have, for some time, featured the biggest, nicest trackpads in the busines (the first time I've not felt the need to carry a mouse around) and, for the desktop, there is the Magic Trackpad (which, provided you turn on the three-fingers-to-drag option, I find excellent for everything short of gaming and graphics work).
The Nexus Q will never beat any of the competing device on price. That's because Google intentionally chose to manufacture it entirely in the United States, with its higher labor costs.
If it were 50% more expensive than an Apple TV - or maybe a bit more considering it includes an amplifier - I could believe that.
But three times the price? More than the Nexus Tablet? Seriously?
# sed -i -e 's/admin/toor/g' /etc/passwd
Well, that's a recipe for screwing things up on any modern Unix or Linux system (shadow password file? home directories? any config file that references the account by name rather than UID? Plus, you're supposed to use the 'vipw' command on Unix/Linux).
Anyway, OS X uses Open Directory for this sort of account information, so it plays nicely when you start using networks. The command-line utility for manipulating this is 'dscl' and, yes, adding/modifying users is more laborious that way - but it's still CLI-based and can be scripted. If you google a bit you'll find people who've written OS X equivalents of the adduser/moduser etc. scripts in most Linux distros.
The 'proper' CLI-shell and Unix-like architecture, ability to run all the usual FOSS suspects, plus native versions of those commercial applications that you just can't avoid, are still the main things that keep me on a Mac though. However, I don't think that's a major motivation for the hoards of supplicants at the stripped-pine and plate glass Jobsian temples.
Please don't ask me to defend the dog-XML 'property list' files that OS X uses, though.
reducing them to piles of... stuff... and somehow manages to rehydrate them [wikipedia.org] with everything perfectly back in place and functioning.
Holy Parody Batman! I think you may be taking that film a bit too seriously. People are talking as if it was a serious attempt to bring Batman to the screen rather than a deliberate comedy send-up of superhero comics.
The film also included a porpoise heroically throwing itself in front of a torpedo to save our heroes, a string of nuns, kittens and ducklings getting in the way when Bats was trying to throw away a bomb, and water faucets marked "regular" and "heavy".
Abso-fucking-lutely. Look at how many people out there gladly pay the Apple Tax for devices that are really not that different,
Except in the case of the Nexus Q vs. the Apple TV (...or the WD TV Live) we seem to have a Google tax of 200%.
(TFA is talking about the 'Q' media streamer which is bizarrely more expensive than the new Google tablet).
Yeah, yeah the usual crap. You libs still haven't come-up with a better way to see if the Teachers are actually teaching the kids, or if they are (like one of my former teachers) screwing around in class teaching karate lessons. We didn't learn crap in that class, and that would have been clear if we'd been forced to take a test, thus revealing the teacher should be fired.
...or the Principal should have stuck their head around the door occasionally and noticed that the teacher was goofing off in lessons. No, you're right, its better to completely distort kids education and waste hours of valuable school time cramming for multi-choice tests with no relationship to real-world skills... just for the sake of catching the occasional karate-mad teacher.
Anyway, the problem is not having periodic tests as such, its the quality of the tests (which only reward recalling little fragments of knowledge and techniques) and the disproportionate importance based on them.
I mean, all the modern tablets look so different from the front, especially when turned off.
I suggest that you get your eyes tested, especially if you think the Motorola Xoom looks anything like the white iPad 3. A Xoom versus a black iPad 1 would be close (but Apple and Motorola/Google aren't exactly BFFs at the moment, and I've lost track over whether the Xoom is an issue)
Go look at the Sony tablet, the Asus Transformer (even without the dock) or even the pictures of the Microsoft Surface (without the brightly coloured magnetic colour, which does look like a lawsuit in the making) and you'll see black rectangles with rounded corners that (a) don't look like an iPad and (b) don't have go-faster stripes or roses around the screen. In any case the "rectangle with rounded corners" is only one of the laundry list of similarities that Apple are upset over and wouldn't be an issue on its own.
Remember, Apple did not invent square icons & calendars
MacDonald's didn't invent the colours red and yellow, the letter "m", curvy writing, the prefix "Mac", clowns or, for that matter, the hamburger, and if they went after people "infringing" on just one or two of those features (not entirely unprecedented) they would be completely out of order.
However, if you open a burger restaurant called MacCartney's with red-and-yellow signs featuring curvy letter-Ms and a clown mascot then you pretty much deserve what you get.
Samsung don't just have a black rectangle with rounded corners. There's a whole list of other similarities between their tablets and phones and iDevices, from the design of the bezel and the glass front to the single dock connector, several icon similarities, (originally) the lock screen and some of the packaging (all q.v. ad nauseum elsewhere).
Its perfectly true that Steve Jobs didn't wake up one morning in 2006 and invent tablets, touch screens, multitouch, slide-to-unlock, glass, rectangles and rounded corners. However, Apple did pull together a distinctive mixture of old and new ideas and combine them into a product that put a rocket up the backside of the mobile phone industry and, later, the tablet computer industry. Unless you think that devices like the Galaxy Tab came about because someone at Samsung who had never heard of the iPad was watching 2001 on a LCD TV with a shiny bezel and thought "eureka!"...
Why are they only targeting Samsung? there are soooo many other tablets that look much MUCH more like the iPad
Examples? Other than ridiculously cheap no-brand lookalikes-but-not-workalikes, unless you're going to trot out the "black rectangle with rounded corners" strawman (just two of a long list of claimed features - not nearly enough to constitute an infringement). Unlike Samsung, other manufacturers (e.g. Sony and Asus) have managed to design tablets that don't look like iPad clones. Even Microsoft's Surface doesn't look much like an iPad (although I can see them having a spat over the cover) and has a very different-looking UI. Samsung even includes iPad features that get slated (e.g. having a proprietary dock connector and no USB, SD, HDMI connectors).
Incidentally - look at this review, particularly this picture and tell me this tablet wasn't separated from an iPad at birth. Obviously, at some stage, gTabs without "SAMSUNG" in large, friendly letters on the front were in circulation.
Seems to me Apple want to block Samsung because the gTab is a real contender for the iPad.
D'uh! Yes. The whole point of such lawsuits is to stop unfair competition. A $200 no-brand all plastic knockoff with a resistive screen is not actually a credible competitor - the only reason Apple would bother with those is if they infringed trademarks (which have to be defended).
Complete rules for robohand v. human rock, paper, scissors:
Robohand crush rock.
Robohand bend scissors.
Robo-laser burn paper.
Puny humans no match for robohand.
You forgot the bit where the over-confident scorpion takes a nap allowing the frog to overtake it but the frog has promised the devil the soul of the first living thing to cross, so he tells the devil that his brother is much fatter and juicier than him except he first has to get 1/2 the way then 1/4 the way then 1/8 the way so he never actually gets there which doesn't matter because the frog actually liked it in the briar patch and just dropped stones into the water until he could reach it.
Windows CE/PocketPC was pretty great to have around the turn of the century. Nobody was selling anything else close to it.
Symbian/EPOC? Palm OS? Sharp Zaurus (Linux/Qtopia)?
Right. And from excessively short summary:
As this is about a program for a Turing Machine and not about a Turing Machine itself, I hope to be excused from the requirement of infinite tape.
His finite Turing machine ran out of tape before he got that far. Those things really are bloody useless for web browsing.
I was with you until that point. A single world language would certainly do more good than harm, but English is a horrible choice. It's like deciding to standardize on a single OS circa 1999, and then picking Win95 because it's the most common one.
Except for the small practical detail that English is already the de-facto lingua franca (God, that just pinned the needle on my irony meter!) in the EU and anywhere else that gets British/US music, TV and movies. The reason we Brits are so crap at languages is partly because its generally the most useful language to travel with. You can't "impose" a made-up language on the world - you have to build on what is already there.
One of the reasons that English is so illogical that it is the Borg of languages - your language's cultural distinctivness will be assimilated. It is defined by usage rather than committee. That also makes it easy to tailor to your culture: if you don't have an English phrase for your concept, just liberate one from any other language...
Oh, and yes, if you wanted to establish a universal computer OS in 1999 then your choices would have been (a) choose Win 95 and succeeed or (b) choose something better and fail.
We'll see if there is a significant difference when the source is shot with a higher framerate (like the hobbit).
ISTR that people who had seen the early previews of The Hobbit at 48fps were complaining about much the same effect.
I am not sure this effect is that irrational.
I think the irrational bit is that the high (or interpolated) frame-rate material is, technically, an improvement, but triggers a mental association with low production value shot-on-video productions.
Technically, those daytime soaps had smoother motion - 50-60 fields per second vs. 24 frames per second.
Microsoft wont throw the OEMs under the bus, it just wont happen.
No, but it might hop in a taxi and leave them standing in the rain. I can't see Microsoft taking over production of desktop PCs or full-size laptops - which can be bolted together by OEMs from commodity parts and run standard software - but tablets and tablet/laptop crossovers are a different matter. - the Android/OEM model seems to have taken root in the smartphone market (where there were already a lot of phone makers pre-iPhone), but not so much in tablets (which is a new market and is proving very different from the phone market).
The tablet market could still easily end up being dominated by Apple, Amazon and/or Google selling hardware tightly integrated with software and services. This is Microsoft insuring themselves against that situation.