A big difference to Open Source software is in the cost of the manufacturing equipment.
True, but if you read TFA this is about big-iron firms on the Facebook/Google scale who are engaged in building humungous scale-able data centers and are already being forced to design their own custom solutions and pay to have them manufactured in quantity.
The problem with (say) the Open Graphics Project is that it duplicates the functionality of already available products, produced in vast numbers and developing at a rapid pace, with its only advantage being truly and usefully GPL'd drivers - an admirable aim but not one associated with large volumes of extra sales! Sorry, RMS, but most punters are going to buy something from AMD or Nvidia and live with the stigma of a binary driver. Plus, its ultimately dependent on custom silicon which is only remotely economical in large quantities (I don't think the data center people go below the motherboard level, and a lot of it is about PSUs, racking, cabling and cooling systems).
The OS is a kernel plus core system libraries. It has ZERO relationship to how the output is displayed. Which is why I not only should be able to run KDE and AfterStep under Windows, I can.
In that case, feel free to suggest a suitable name, other than "Operating System", for products such as Windows, OS X or Ubuntu which comprise an awful lot more than a kernel plus core system libraries, and cover everything from email to basic photo editing. Back in the 90s you might be able to argue that a web browser wasn't part of the OS, but these days every credible platform needs, not only a web browser, but libraries for HTTP, HTML/XML DOM, CSS etc. Apple does it, Android does it, and most Linux distributions (as opposed to Linux itself) anoint particular browsers and HTML/XML libraries.
Yes, Microsoft need "restraining" and, to a certain extent, their near-monopoly status is justification for forcing them to play by different rules - but saying that they can't have an HTML subsystem in their OS may have sounded credible in the 1990s but is ridiculous in the current environment. A better approach is to press for standards compliance, to ensure that IE only websites are unacceptable.
The problem is that Microsoft have a dominant market position in OS and Office software, so any product they "bundle" will tend to prevail. I'd say the situation with Office is now far worse than with Windows - I can live without Windows quite happily, but I have to be able to reliably open Office docs with far greater re4liability and fidelity than OO can manage.
Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it.
So what? If I have a FOSS application that uses Webkit there's no guarantee that an end-user can easily convert it to use Gecko (unless the authors have made the commercially unjustifiable effort to support both), or any particular reason that I should want to.
The competition is hurting something chronic. IE has rising usage figures. Firefox is starting to slide. Opera is sliding badly.
I don't recall Opera ever being a force to be reckoned with on the desktop, but they did have a nice niche on mobile devices: I'm guessing that its Safari and the Android browser that are eating their lunch.
Ironically, though, part of the issue is that Chrome and Firefox were successful and forced Microsoft, get their act together and improve both the UI and standards compliance of their browser. Later IEs are much nicer to use and (though not perfect) miles better on standards compliance. The major headache for web designers today is not getting their sites to work on IE8/9 and Firefox/Webkit but the fact that the accursed IE6 still isn't dead.
The positive news, however, is that its now much harder for MS to get away with ignoring standards, because people want to be able to access the web from their iDevices, Androids and Macs - all of which use variants on Webkit which (though surely not perfect) is a rather better implementation of the web standards than IE ever was. Neither Microsoft or current web designers can afford to ignore web standards. Unless Windows Mobile 7 succeeds beyond expectation, Webkit-based browsers will account for a large slice of web usage. There's still a problem in "corporate" systems but, even there, the upside of "consumerization" will be PHBs demanding access from their iPads.
Which kind of defeats the point of using a laptop to begin with.
Yeah, because mice are so bulky and heavy, and they don't make compact travel mice, and the trackpads and/or rubber tit thingies on PCs and older Macs are so much nicer to use... Nosir, nobody ever carries around a mouse to use with their laptop.
My laptops spend most of their time on a desk, or migrating between a desk at home and a desk at work. The mice stay on the desks. When I DO take one on a trip, the small size and weight become very important. I used to carry a mouse, but with the luverly extra-large trackpads on current MacBooks that's much less important (unless you want to do detailed graphics or play a FPS)
This is why you should turn the key to the accessory-only position.
I'm sure that will occur to drivers, with (slightly morphine-blurred) hindsight as the nice fire-persons are cutting them out of the wreckage. When you're driving along and the cruise control suddenly jams on, most mere mortal's thought processes will be along the lines of "What the fu...?!"
More to the point, though, what is this "ignition key" of which you speak? Even in my DasMini you plug the key fob into a wireless socket (which powers everything up and releases the steering lock) and then press a button to start/stop the engine. I thought this was pretty much standard in any non-economy-class car these days?
I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.
Its perfect if you want to run a conservative distro such as Debian or the LTE release of Ubuntu, but if you want to play with the latest and greatest Linux distros, its not such a good solution, especially with distros now defaulting to Compiz-based desktops (Unity, Gnome Shell etc.) - I've never been able to get those working satisfactorily on VirtualBox.
The latest Parallels seems to do rather better, but in the past its been slow to add support new distros, sometimes forcing you to take a paid update to get a compatible version of the guest tools.
Because you want more than one mouse button, for instance?
You've been able to plug a standard USB 3 button/wheel mouse into a Mac and use all the buttons since last century - which is good, because mice are the one thing that Apple don't seem to be able to get right (although they've had multiple virtual buttons using touch sensors for years) . Their trackpads, however, are the best in town and support multiple buttons/scrolling via multitouch gestures. You can even enable 3-finger dragging, which finaly makes click-drag usable on a trackpad and is almost (but not quite) enough to wean me off a mouse.
Perhaps he does not want the comparatively walled (though curated?) garden of a mac. I agree, though, almost all of the "just works" aspects that he want sounds like it would fit a macbook.
A Mac isn't an iPad - Apple would like you to you use the App Store, but you can still run what you like. The compilers and dev tools are free. If you install MacPorts you get access to a huge range of FOSS projects. Others (E.g. LibreOffice, Eclipse) have native ports that don't rely on X Windows.
I think I might have killed a man, what should I do? After 20 seconds of deliberation, Here's a list your scheduled meetings.
What were you expecting? "If they were called John Connor, Frank Poole or Kevin Flynn, that's OK by me, otherwise I'm calling 911!"
Ok, so next time I'm in an Apple store I'll ask it:
Siri: listen very carefully - the statement I am currently making is a lie.
Which should, of course, cause every computer in the store to start chanting "Error. Error. Does Not Compute!" and explode into a shower of sparks while the building starts to fall down for no adequately explored reason. If it doesn't, then Siri is obviously crap.
Or, I could ask it questions that might feasibly be answered by a good, 21st Century search engine hooked up to a PDA, instead of going on an Easter egg hunt.
Android has had voice recognition nearly since the beginning
You do understand the difference between voice recognition and natural language recognition, don't you?
Its the difference between "Call. Steve." and "Remind me to buy coffee when I get to work." The former has, as you say, been around for years. Siri is claiming the latter - we'll see how well it does after the masses have been using it for a few months.
But like so many features, Apple copies it, comes out with it years later, and then gets the credit for it.
More like: Apple takes a bunch of ideas that have been kicking around going nowhere for years, integrates them nicely into a desirable product and markets the hell out of it.
So Siri was, apparently, an existing product? Buggered if I'd heard about it. Now its front-page news - so if, in a year's time, everybody is walking around chatting in natural language to their phones then yes, absolutely, Apple will deserve a big slice of the credit.
Yes, it takes longer to recharge the Tesla than it does to "recharge" a Veyron or an Elise etc, but it's not the 13 hours they like to suggest for the low-power trickle charge - there are fast charge systems available that bring that time right down.
...so what if it only takes an hour to recharge? That's still much longer than the few minutes it takes to refuel a petrol car. (if you believe Wikipedia the "power" of a petrol pump is 5,000kW c.f. ~20kW tops for a direct-wired domestic mains connection or 3kW for a domestic socket. If you can afford a Veyron you can probably afford to hire a F1 pit team to refuel it in seconds - but no amount of money is going to make a big battery charge that fast.
This is the general problem with electric cars: when the battery runs out they're out of commission and take time to recharge - even if you can find a dedicated high-speed charging station, it will still take many times longer than filling up with petrol. That's fine for commuting - where they can be topped up overnight - but its a major inconvenience for longer trips and sports use.
What seems to be needed is a standardised replaceable battery system where you drive into the filling station, some sort of mechanised system undocks the spent battery and plugs in a fully-charged one from stock, and you drive off. You don't own the battery - you rent it from the energy supplier.
Oh yes, the right to anonymously slander and libel people is such an important right, taking that away would be chilling.
Actually, the real chilling effect is the inability of the legal system to quickly settle false, frivolous and trivial claims without costing both parties a fortune. The problem is not the law itself, but the ability of people with money and full-time legal teams to bludgeon people into submission with dubious claims and the threat of expensive court proceedings. Yes, trolls clearly accusing someone of criminality - especially something sensitive - deserve what they get, but if A. Celeb tries to sue you because someone anonymously posted a petty insult on your blog they shouldn't be allowed to get as far as having their lawyers send you a nastygram.
Interesting that they chose to omit the Galaxy Tab 10 from the "after iPad - reality" images. Of course, if they did it might spoil the message by reinforcing how many post-iPad tablet makers have come up with designs that don't shamelessly ape the iPad.
Note, I agree that the only beneficiaries of this silly patent war will be the lawyers - but trying to deny that the iPhone and iPad have hugely influenced the design of phones and tablets - and that the Samsung Galaxy products haven't been influenced more than most - requires a reality distortion field of at least 10000 miliJobs.
If this size-based naming goes much further we're going to end up with telescopes with names like The Bigger Than The Very Large Array But Not As Big As The Extremely Large Array Array...
Or they could just admit to their resolution envy and call it the Particularly Enormous Network of Interferometric Sensors.
That's bullshit. There's many open source software, especially security and crypto stuff, that only has open source client but they've never given away the server software. And it's fully within GPL license.
All true, but one would hope that the people behind LibreOffice would release the server-side code under some form of OS license.
A good open-source online/collaborative office suite that let people run their own servers could be really, really useful - and addresses one of the main worries (Google Can Haz Ur Data) about cloud computing.
When that's your opinion on the name LibreOffice then you suffer a serious lack of culture and language skills.
Sadly, when choosing a name for a product, if you want success you have to win the hearts and minds of people with small hearts and even smaller minds. Intellectually, Software Libre is a much better term than "Free Software" but out in the real world, "FreeOffice" would probably shift more copies than "LibreOffice".
...and its important to remember that, whether software is Free-as-in-speech or Free-as-in-beer, if you want impact you still have to market it as if it cost money.
I've used both MS Office and Open/Neo Office - and my impression is that OO was about as annoying as Microsoft Office (pre-ribbon).
I think the introduction of the abomination that is the Office Ribbon has left it ahead of the game (OK, some people like the ribbon, but then I know one person who liked Windows Vista, and another who liked the Apple hockey-puck mouse...)
One possible criticism of OO/LO is that the style system, though flexible, can be a bit hard to get your head around. OTOH, there again MS have been happily screwing up the style system in Word to the point where it is now pretty unusable.
So, what's the easy-to-use but flexible opposition that LibreOffice should be competing with?
I'll concede the point that LaTeX/LyX is probably still king for technical writing, and that there are other products aimed at people writing "pure text" - but what is a good role-model in the realm of general purpose WP/DTP-crossover?
- Siri itself has been around for nearly two years.
...and totally failed to make a big impression.
Now Apple have bought it, they've made a big hullabaloo, made it the headline feature of their new phone, got it mentioned in the popular press and given it a potential user base of <however many million iPhone 4S's they've pre-sold to date%gt;.
Now, the technology will get talked about, used and other OSs will have to up their game on speech recognition.
Apple has a track record of finding ideas that are "bubbling under", turning them into attractive products and marketing the living shit out of them while being prepared to run the risk that they will fail. That is what separates an invention from an innovation.
Anecdotal evidence aside, and since IANAE(ngineer), serious question: Wouldn't unintended uses and knock-on effects due to design innovations be something you would study and build around?
Well, yes, that's probably why Apple replaced the original design (small, slippery rectangular body with thin "in line" cable which invited people to yank it out by the cord against the full force of the magnet) with the current "right angle" design, which has a longer, cylindrical body that is easier to grip and gives you some leverage to "twist" the magnets apart.
...and I've seen people get into a right knot with DropBox when its used as anything more than an alternative to emailing files. Its a great fallback when trying to exchange files that are too big to email, but its not much good for collaborative work.
Creating a sharing/syncing/collaboration service for editable files that won't confuse the hell out of Apple's target non-techie customers is a non-trivial exercise. (Hint: syncing and sharing music/video/books - even emails and, to some extent, photos - is rather easier, because for 90% of users those files are immutable).
The interface to the iPhone is via iTunes. I tried to put a pdf on my wife's iPhone for her because she couldn't figure out how and I couldn't figure out how to do it via iTunes either.
Yes - its one of the weak spots of iOS.
Doesn't Apple think that people use their phones for anything but listening to music and looking at photos?
Possibly they think that the one method of exchanging files between devices that almost everybody can cope with is by sending an email. Which works well.
Alternative solution 1: install DropBox on the iPhone - the only limitation is that the iOS iWork apps can't save modified files *back* to DropBox, so you have to email them back once they're edited. OTOH I've seen people get really confused once they start *updating* files on DropBox, so maybe that's no bad thing.
Alternative solution 2 (for the more techie inclined): Run a WebDAV server on your Mac, or even on a NAS box or at a web hosting sewrvice. Many Apps (including iWork) can connect to WebDAV. In fact, all the "iOS file sharing" feature in Lion Server does is to enable a WebDAV share (...and then gives you frack all guidance on what to do next, so don't waste your money - there are plenty of HowTos on how to enable WebDAV on regular OS X).
Apple did not invent: the personal computer, the gui, the online music store, the portable mp3 player, the smart phone, or tablet computing.
No, but they turned those ideas into systems that ordinary people could use and then marketed them (add to that list: local area networking, laser printers and, indirectly, DTP). They've even managed to turn Unix into a widely used desktop operating system (something that others had been failing to do since the 1980s).
The Apple II wasn't the first microcomputer, by a long chalk, but it was certainly one of the first that you could just buy, plug in like an electrical appliance and use without owning a soldering iron and a second-hand Teletype.
The GUI was sitting in prototype limbo at Xerox PARC before Apple actually had the cojones to market the idea - and then to try again when the first attempt failed.
MP3 players were happening without Apple, but the record companies were too busy suing Napster into the stone age to think of setting up a legal music store, especially one with prices that threatened CD sales.
Did you ever try using a pre-iPhone smartphone? They were horrible! I had a Windows Mobile phone and although it was theoretically pretty capable, it was as much use as a chocolate teapot because the UI sucked.
Without Apple, the industry would have probably spent several more years trying to push desktop OSs shoehorned into expensive stylus-driven "tablets" because nobody else would risk producing a tablet that couldn't run MS Office.
Invention is only one part of innovation - contrary to popular belief, if you build a better mousetrap then the world won't beat a path to your door: you need someone to invest in it and market it. Typically, you also need someone to stop the inventor from building in a can opener, digital watch, kitchen sink, email client and implementation of Eliza, and to get the bloody thing to market...
If such a direct inspiration doesn't count as prior art I don't know what else would be.
I'm sure they have patents covering the distinctive features of their particular connector - that doesn't mean that they have a patent on the idea of a multi-pin accessory connector.
I think latter-day electronic gizmos such as the Sharp Zaurus 5500 - I have one and it uses a wide, thin edge-connector type thingy for docking - are rather more obvious prior art than some superficial similarity to the flash connector on a camera.
Of course, the Zaurus, along with most modern PDAs and phones, owes a little something to this - which in turn may have been somewhat inspired by this little muse from Xerox PARC.
What would have happened if Xerox had actually got round to commercializing the wonders that they dreamed up in their PARC labs (the GUI, Smalltalk, Laser Printers, Ethernet...)? Superficially, it looks like they could have owned personal computing.
I said this in an earlier post, but I think we need a better system. We need to protect people from getting ripped off, but we need to allow people to innovate and invent without needing a huge team of lawyers.
I haven't got any ideas.. does anyone?
Restrict the transferability of patents (so trolls couldn't buy patent portfolios at bankruptcy sales).
Require that any patent infringement claim must first be evaluated by an independent expert body at public expense (after all, its the state who grants these artificial monopolies) before going to court. That should ensure that the patent office gets flak for issuing duff patents.
Require litigants to identify the primary infringer (i.e. don't sue their customers) rather than going after Mom & Pop first.
If you send nastygrams to infringers and offer to let them settle for $x then the damages in any subsequent court case should be capped at $x...
Any claim for "willful infringement" must prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that literal copying of designs or concepts took place. If the civil courts are going to take it upon themselves to punish people they can take on criminal standards of proof.
Any settlements in patent litigation should be public documents, available alongside the patents.
Claiming patent infringements without identifying the specific patents and claims infringed and the specific infringing products should attract automatic civil, if not criminal, penalties.
And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.
As technology advances and becomes more specialized, patents become less and less workable. Patents ultimately depend on patent offices and courts being able to make judgements on whether the patented invention is novel or obvious, whether the patent describes it in sufficient detail, whether another product infringes or, even, whether the subject area should be patentable - what sort of incredible polymath is actually qualified to do that with modern technology? (if you want a laugh, go over to Groklaw and read some of the well-written, well meaning but naively Quixotic attempts to describe the theory of computing to lawyers... software may or may not be mathematics, but it certainly isn't the algebra and geometry their target audience failed to learn at high school).
I wonder whether Einstein was any good when he was a patent clerk?
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A big difference to Open Source software is in the cost of the manufacturing equipment.
True, but if you read TFA this is about big-iron firms on the Facebook/Google scale who are engaged in building humungous scale-able data centers and are already being forced to design their own custom solutions and pay to have them manufactured in quantity.
The problem with (say) the Open Graphics Project is that it duplicates the functionality of already available products, produced in vast numbers and developing at a rapid pace, with its only advantage being truly and usefully GPL'd drivers - an admirable aim but not one associated with large volumes of extra sales! Sorry, RMS, but most punters are going to buy something from AMD or Nvidia and live with the stigma of a binary driver. Plus, its ultimately dependent on custom silicon which is only remotely economical in large quantities (I don't think the data center people go below the motherboard level, and a lot of it is about PSUs, racking, cabling and cooling systems).
The OS is a kernel plus core system libraries. It has ZERO relationship to how the output is displayed. Which is why I not only should be able to run KDE and AfterStep under Windows, I can.
In that case, feel free to suggest a suitable name, other than "Operating System", for products such as Windows, OS X or Ubuntu which comprise an awful lot more than a kernel plus core system libraries, and cover everything from email to basic photo editing. Back in the 90s you might be able to argue that a web browser wasn't part of the OS, but these days every credible platform needs, not only a web browser, but libraries for HTTP, HTML/XML DOM, CSS etc. Apple does it, Android does it, and most Linux distributions (as opposed to Linux itself) anoint particular browsers and HTML/XML libraries.
Yes, Microsoft need "restraining" and, to a certain extent, their near-monopoly status is justification for forcing them to play by different rules - but saying that they can't have an HTML subsystem in their OS may have sounded credible in the 1990s but is ridiculous in the current environment. A better approach is to press for standards compliance, to ensure that IE only websites are unacceptable.
The problem is that Microsoft have a dominant market position in OS and Office software, so any product they "bundle" will tend to prevail. I'd say the situation with Office is now far worse than with Windows - I can live without Windows quite happily, but I have to be able to reliably open Office docs with far greater re4liability and fidelity than OO can manage.
Even if you install another browser, you CANNOT tell those components to use it.
So what? If I have a FOSS application that uses Webkit there's no guarantee that an end-user can easily convert it to use Gecko (unless the authors have made the commercially unjustifiable effort to support both), or any particular reason that I should want to.
The competition is hurting something chronic. IE has rising usage figures. Firefox is starting to slide. Opera is sliding badly.
I don't recall Opera ever being a force to be reckoned with on the desktop, but they did have a nice niche on mobile devices: I'm guessing that its Safari and the Android browser that are eating their lunch.
Ironically, though, part of the issue is that Chrome and Firefox were successful and forced Microsoft, get their act together and improve both the UI and standards compliance of their browser. Later IEs are much nicer to use and (though not perfect) miles better on standards compliance. The major headache for web designers today is not getting their sites to work on IE8/9 and Firefox/Webkit but the fact that the accursed IE6 still isn't dead.
The positive news, however, is that its now much harder for MS to get away with ignoring standards, because people want to be able to access the web from their iDevices, Androids and Macs - all of which use variants on Webkit which (though surely not perfect) is a rather better implementation of the web standards than IE ever was. Neither Microsoft or current web designers can afford to ignore web standards. Unless Windows Mobile 7 succeeds beyond expectation, Webkit-based browsers will account for a large slice of web usage. There's still a problem in "corporate" systems but, even there, the upside of "consumerization" will be PHBs demanding access from their iPads.
Which kind of defeats the point of using a laptop to begin with.
Yeah, because mice are so bulky and heavy, and they don't make compact travel mice, and the trackpads and/or rubber tit thingies on PCs and older Macs are so much nicer to use... Nosir, nobody ever carries around a mouse to use with their laptop.
My laptops spend most of their time on a desk, or migrating between a desk at home and a desk at work. The mice stay on the desks. When I DO take one on a trip, the small size and weight become very important. I used to carry a mouse, but with the luverly extra-large trackpads on current MacBooks that's much less important (unless you want to do detailed graphics or play a FPS)
This is why you should turn the key to the accessory-only position.
I'm sure that will occur to drivers, with (slightly morphine-blurred) hindsight as the nice fire-persons are cutting them out of the wreckage. When you're driving along and the cruise control suddenly jams on, most mere mortal's thought processes will be along the lines of "What the fu...?!"
More to the point, though, what is this "ignition key" of which you speak? Even in my DasMini you plug the key fob into a wireless socket (which powers everything up and releases the steering lock) and then press a button to start/stop the engine. I thought this was pretty much standard in any non-economy-class car these days?
I use VirtualBox on my 2010 MBPro and it works like a charm.
Its perfect if you want to run a conservative distro such as Debian or the LTE release of Ubuntu, but if you want to play with the latest and greatest Linux distros, its not such a good solution, especially with distros now defaulting to Compiz-based desktops (Unity, Gnome Shell etc.) - I've never been able to get those working satisfactorily on VirtualBox.
The latest Parallels seems to do rather better, but in the past its been slow to add support new distros, sometimes forcing you to take a paid update to get a compatible version of the guest tools.
Because you want more than one mouse button, for instance?
You've been able to plug a standard USB 3 button/wheel mouse into a Mac and use all the buttons since last century - which is good, because mice are the one thing that Apple don't seem to be able to get right (although they've had multiple virtual buttons using touch sensors for years) . Their trackpads, however, are the best in town and support multiple buttons/scrolling via multitouch gestures. You can even enable 3-finger dragging, which finaly makes click-drag usable on a trackpad and is almost (but not quite) enough to wean me off a mouse.
Perhaps he does not want the comparatively walled (though curated?) garden of a mac. I agree, though, almost all of the "just works" aspects that he want sounds like it would fit a macbook.
A Mac isn't an iPad - Apple would like you to you use the App Store, but you can still run what you like. The compilers and dev tools are free. If you install MacPorts you get access to a huge range of FOSS projects. Others (E.g. LibreOffice, Eclipse) have native ports that don't rely on X Windows.
I think I might have killed a man, what should I do? After 20 seconds of deliberation, Here's a list your scheduled meetings.
What were you expecting? "If they were called John Connor, Frank Poole or Kevin Flynn, that's OK by me, otherwise I'm calling 911!"
Ok, so next time I'm in an Apple store I'll ask it:
Siri: listen very carefully - the statement I am currently making is a lie.
Which should, of course, cause every computer in the store to start chanting "Error. Error. Does Not Compute!" and explode into a shower of sparks while the building starts to fall down for no adequately explored reason. If it doesn't, then Siri is obviously crap.
Or, I could ask it questions that might feasibly be answered by a good, 21st Century search engine hooked up to a PDA, instead of going on an Easter egg hunt.
Android has had voice recognition nearly since the beginning
You do understand the difference between voice recognition and natural language recognition, don't you?
Its the difference between "Call. Steve." and "Remind me to buy coffee when I get to work." The former has, as you say, been around for years. Siri is claiming the latter - we'll see how well it does after the masses have been using it for a few months.
But like so many features, Apple copies it, comes out with it years later, and then gets the credit for it.
More like: Apple takes a bunch of ideas that have been kicking around going nowhere for years, integrates them nicely into a desirable product and markets the hell out of it.
So Siri was, apparently, an existing product? Buggered if I'd heard about it. Now its front-page news - so if, in a year's time, everybody is walking around chatting in natural language to their phones then yes, absolutely, Apple will deserve a big slice of the credit.
Yes, it takes longer to recharge the Tesla than it does to "recharge" a Veyron or an Elise etc, but it's not the 13 hours they like to suggest for the low-power trickle charge - there are fast charge systems available that bring that time right down.
...so what if it only takes an hour to recharge? That's still much longer than the few minutes it takes to refuel a petrol car. (if you believe Wikipedia the "power" of a petrol pump is 5,000kW c.f. ~20kW tops for a direct-wired domestic mains connection or 3kW for a domestic socket. If you can afford a Veyron you can probably afford to hire a F1 pit team to refuel it in seconds - but no amount of money is going to make a big battery charge that fast.
This is the general problem with electric cars: when the battery runs out they're out of commission and take time to recharge - even if you can find a dedicated high-speed charging station, it will still take many times longer than filling up with petrol. That's fine for commuting - where they can be topped up overnight - but its a major inconvenience for longer trips and sports use.
What seems to be needed is a standardised replaceable battery system where you drive into the filling station, some sort of mechanised system undocks the spent battery and plugs in a fully-charged one from stock, and you drive off. You don't own the battery - you rent it from the energy supplier.
Oh yes, the right to anonymously slander and libel people is such an important right, taking that away would be chilling.
Actually, the real chilling effect is the inability of the legal system to quickly settle false, frivolous and trivial claims without costing both parties a fortune. The problem is not the law itself, but the ability of people with money and full-time legal teams to bludgeon people into submission with dubious claims and the threat of expensive court proceedings. Yes, trolls clearly accusing someone of criminality - especially something sensitive - deserve what they get, but if A. Celeb tries to sue you because someone anonymously posted a petty insult on your blog they shouldn't be allowed to get as far as having their lawyers send you a nastygram.
Don't hold your breath.
Someone already did make an antitroll image
Interesting that they chose to omit the Galaxy Tab 10 from the "after iPad - reality" images. Of course, if they did it might spoil the message by reinforcing how many post-iPad tablet makers have come up with designs that don't shamelessly ape the iPad.
Note, I agree that the only beneficiaries of this silly patent war will be the lawyers - but trying to deny that the iPhone and iPad have hugely influenced the design of phones and tablets - and that the Samsung Galaxy products haven't been influenced more than most - requires a reality distortion field of at least 10000 miliJobs.
...and the iPhone from the PDAs that came before it, like this [typepad.com].
Or maybe, this. Oh, wait, that was made by Apple, so I guess they're allowed to copy it.
If this size-based naming goes much further we're going to end up with telescopes with names like The Bigger Than The Very Large Array But Not As Big As The Extremely Large Array Array...
Or they could just admit to their resolution envy and call it the Particularly Enormous Network of Interferometric Sensors.
That's bullshit. There's many open source software, especially security and crypto stuff, that only has open source client but they've never given away the server software. And it's fully within GPL license.
All true, but one would hope that the people behind LibreOffice would release the server-side code under some form of OS license.
A good open-source online/collaborative office suite that let people run their own servers could be really, really useful - and addresses one of the main worries (Google Can Haz Ur Data) about cloud computing.
When that's your opinion on the name LibreOffice then you suffer a serious lack of culture and language skills.
Sadly, when choosing a name for a product, if you want success you have to win the hearts and minds of people with small hearts and even smaller minds. Intellectually, Software Libre is a much better term than "Free Software" but out in the real world, "FreeOffice" would probably shift more copies than "LibreOffice".
...and its important to remember that, whether software is Free-as-in-speech or Free-as-in-beer, if you want impact you still have to market it as if it cost money.
I've used both MS Office and Open/Neo Office - and my impression is that OO was about as annoying as Microsoft Office (pre-ribbon).
I think the introduction of the abomination that is the Office Ribbon has left it ahead of the game (OK, some people like the ribbon, but then I know one person who liked Windows Vista, and another who liked the Apple hockey-puck mouse...)
One possible criticism of OO/LO is that the style system, though flexible, can be a bit hard to get your head around. OTOH, there again MS have been happily screwing up the style system in Word to the point where it is now pretty unusable.
So, what's the easy-to-use but flexible opposition that LibreOffice should be competing with?
I'll concede the point that LaTeX/LyX is probably still king for technical writing, and that there are other products aimed at people writing "pure text" - but what is a good role-model in the realm of general purpose WP/DTP-crossover?
- Siri itself has been around for nearly two years.
...and totally failed to make a big impression.
Now Apple have bought it, they've made a big hullabaloo, made it the headline feature of their new phone, got it mentioned in the popular press and given it a potential user base of <however many million iPhone 4S's they've pre-sold to date%gt;.
Now, the technology will get talked about, used and other OSs will have to up their game on speech recognition.
Apple has a track record of finding ideas that are "bubbling under", turning them into attractive products and marketing the living shit out of them while being prepared to run the risk that they will fail. That is what separates an invention from an innovation.
Anecdotal evidence aside, and since IANAE(ngineer), serious question: Wouldn't unintended uses and knock-on effects due to design innovations be something you would study and build around?
Well, yes, that's probably why Apple replaced the original design (small, slippery rectangular body with thin "in line" cable which invited people to yank it out by the cord against the full force of the magnet) with the current "right angle" design, which has a longer, cylindrical body that is easier to grip and gives you some leverage to "twist" the magnets apart.
But I also think you're right, it isn't DropBox
...and I've seen people get into a right knot with DropBox when its used as anything more than an alternative to emailing files. Its a great fallback when trying to exchange files that are too big to email, but its not much good for collaborative work.
Creating a sharing/syncing/collaboration service for editable files that won't confuse the hell out of Apple's target non-techie customers is a non-trivial exercise. (Hint: syncing and sharing music/video/books - even emails and, to some extent, photos - is rather easier, because for 90% of users those files are immutable).
The interface to the iPhone is via iTunes. I tried to put a pdf on my wife's iPhone for her because she couldn't figure out how and I couldn't figure out how to do it via iTunes either.
Yes - its one of the weak spots of iOS.
Doesn't Apple think that people use their phones for anything but listening to music and looking at photos?
Possibly they think that the one method of exchanging files between devices that almost everybody can cope with is by sending an email. Which works well.
Alternative solution 1: install DropBox on the iPhone - the only limitation is that the iOS iWork apps can't save modified files *back* to DropBox, so you have to email them back once they're edited. OTOH I've seen people get really confused once they start *updating* files on DropBox, so maybe that's no bad thing.
Alternative solution 2 (for the more techie inclined): Run a WebDAV server on your Mac, or even on a NAS box or at a web hosting sewrvice. Many Apps (including iWork) can connect to WebDAV. In fact, all the "iOS file sharing" feature in Lion Server does is to enable a WebDAV share (...and then gives you frack all guidance on what to do next, so don't waste your money - there are plenty of HowTos on how to enable WebDAV on regular OS X).
Apple did not invent: the personal computer, the gui, the online music store, the portable mp3 player, the smart phone, or tablet computing.
No, but they turned those ideas into systems that ordinary people could use and then marketed them (add to that list: local area networking, laser printers and, indirectly, DTP). They've even managed to turn Unix into a widely used desktop operating system (something that others had been failing to do since the 1980s).
The Apple II wasn't the first microcomputer, by a long chalk, but it was certainly one of the first that you could just buy, plug in like an electrical appliance and use without owning a soldering iron and a second-hand Teletype.
The GUI was sitting in prototype limbo at Xerox PARC before Apple actually had the cojones to market the idea - and then to try again when the first attempt failed.
MP3 players were happening without Apple, but the record companies were too busy suing Napster into the stone age to think of setting up a legal music store, especially one with prices that threatened CD sales.
Did you ever try using a pre-iPhone smartphone? They were horrible! I had a Windows Mobile phone and although it was theoretically pretty capable, it was as much use as a chocolate teapot because the UI sucked.
Without Apple, the industry would have probably spent several more years trying to push desktop OSs shoehorned into expensive stylus-driven "tablets" because nobody else would risk producing a tablet that couldn't run MS Office.
Invention is only one part of innovation - contrary to popular belief, if you build a better mousetrap then the world won't beat a path to your door: you need someone to invest in it and market it. Typically, you also need someone to stop the inventor from building in a can opener, digital watch, kitchen sink, email client and implementation of Eliza, and to get the bloody thing to market...
If such a direct inspiration doesn't count as prior art I don't know what else would be.
I'm sure they have patents covering the distinctive features of their particular connector - that doesn't mean that they have a patent on the idea of a multi-pin accessory connector.
I think latter-day electronic gizmos such as the Sharp Zaurus 5500 - I have one and it uses a wide, thin edge-connector type thingy for docking - are rather more obvious prior art than some superficial similarity to the flash connector on a camera.
Of course, the Zaurus, along with most modern PDAs and phones, owes a little something to this - which in turn may have been somewhat inspired by this little muse from Xerox PARC.
What would have happened if Xerox had actually got round to commercializing the wonders that they dreamed up in their PARC labs (the GUI, Smalltalk, Laser Printers, Ethernet...)? Superficially, it looks like they could have owned personal computing.
I said this in an earlier post, but I think we need a better system. We need to protect people from getting ripped off, but we need to allow people to innovate and invent without needing a huge team of lawyers.
I haven't got any ideas.. does anyone?
Restrict the transferability of patents (so trolls couldn't buy patent portfolios at bankruptcy sales).
Require that any patent infringement claim must first be evaluated by an independent expert body at public expense (after all, its the state who grants these artificial monopolies) before going to court. That should ensure that the patent office gets flak for issuing duff patents.
Require litigants to identify the primary infringer (i.e. don't sue their customers) rather than going after Mom & Pop first.
If you send nastygrams to infringers and offer to let them settle for $x then the damages in any subsequent court case should be capped at $x...
Any claim for "willful infringement" must prove "beyond reasonable doubt" that literal copying of designs or concepts took place. If the civil courts are going to take it upon themselves to punish people they can take on criminal standards of proof.
Any settlements in patent litigation should be public documents, available alongside the patents.
Claiming patent infringements without identifying the specific patents and claims infringed and the specific infringing products should attract automatic civil, if not criminal, penalties.
And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.
As technology advances and becomes more specialized, patents become less and less workable. Patents ultimately depend on patent offices and courts being able to make judgements on whether the patented invention is novel or obvious, whether the patent describes it in sufficient detail, whether another product infringes or, even, whether the subject area should be patentable - what sort of incredible polymath is actually qualified to do that with modern technology? (if you want a laugh, go over to Groklaw and read some of the well-written, well meaning but naively Quixotic attempts to describe the theory of computing to lawyers... software may or may not be mathematics, but it certainly isn't the algebra and geometry their target audience failed to learn at high school).
I wonder whether Einstein was any good when he was a patent clerk?