You've seen a piece of metal (without a hand) cause the iPhone 4's reception to drop?
That's exactly the Youtube video I've been waiting to see, and Apple's effectively claiming (by omission) that it doesn't happen. If you know someone who can reproduce it, you should film it and share it. Apple's dug pretty deep into "This is just like all other attentuation problems" now.
A simple, low-cost solution would have been to apply a thin, transparent layer of some kind of insulating material
From the liveblog, it sounds like they think problem is NOT simple conduction; it's capacitive coupling, and using a case works not because it's insulating but because it's thick. It's not "the black line isn't insulated" (or at least it doesn't sound that way, though I wish they'd addressed it directly). Jobs does say "Every phone has a weak spot, but like a dummy, we put a big black stripe across ours". If it weren't for that stripe, do you think iPhone owners would have narrowed down the spot in less than a month?
I'm just guessing, though, and it would have been nice to see the conduction vs capacitance issue addressed in the Q&A.
Nope, it's called "inducing infringement." Look under 35 U.S.C. 271(b).
[mod parent up]
OK, so: At one end of the spectrum, you might republish the original patent verbatim. Presumably, that isn't induced infringement, else any patent-search sites would be in trouble. At the other end of the spectrum, you might write a program that implements the machine described by the patent, print out the source, and hand it to someone, saying "Here! Run this, and you can do that patented thing!" Presumably, that IS induced infringement.
There's a lot in between. Where's the bright line? If I write a blog post saying "This is a brilliant patent! Here's how they probably implement it:" and go on to explain the patent in plainer English, might I be inducing infringement? What if I post the same explanation, but preceded by "This is patented, but here's how you could implement it:"
Funny, but incorrect. The grocer's apostrophe can also be used in the middle of a word if that word was originally a compound; for instance, I once saw a convenience store advertising "NEW'SPAPERS".
Look, I really respect old Steve, I really do. He took a company on life support and brought them not only back from the dead, but back to the top of the heap. And I understand to a point why he wants to make everything only work the way he wants it to and that is because he wants to control the experience, so that everything "just works" the way he designed it. I get that. But what we have to be careful of is his "vision" polluting web standards so that the ONLY way to get the full web is HIS way. We have already been down that road with MSFT and IE6, just because old Steve is good at making iShiny doesn't mean we should head down that road again, okay?
It's good to hear that you're working on a way out of the Kafka box. My personal-use-only mail server got caught up in both GMail *and* Postini's spam filters a few years ago, and it took multiple pleading e-mails via Google contacts to get anything but "Read the abuse auto-responder, which says it's not our fault and go away". Postini in particular has a bad reputation among mail sysadmins for not playing well with others.
Maybe you can explain what I've always wondered about. The stock market serves two purposes: Funding companies and betting on their future perceived success. (Perceived, because you're betting on the value of the stock, not the value of the company.)
What links those two together, other than happenstance? If I think a certain horse is going to win races, I can gamble, and so can others who disagree. But that money doesn't fund the horse's trainer. What does betting on "people will like Apple" have to do with "Apple needs a cash infusion"?
When Microsoft started the trend of removing menu bars with Vista and Office 2007 I believe their aim was not to improve the user experience but to lock users into their applications
No, their aim was to solve the problem that menu bar discoverability doesn't scale, to the point where the top 10 feature requests for Office were features that were already in Office.
If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans underfoot at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will critically wound small companies.
Luckily, protecting inventions is not at the heart of competitiveness. Patents are, by nature, a short-term monopoly on a technology. They are anti-competitive. Their intent was to spur risky innovation, and we can argue about whether or not that works in a low-barrier-to-entry market like software, but reducing patents can only increase competition.
my grammar nazi side has been pleased by all the idiots unintentionally and hilariously confusing losing and loosing
But are they illiterate, or are they merely literary? When the Apple engineer "lost" his phone, he also "loosed" it upon the blogosphere. For the first time in recorded history[1], those two words refer to the same act.
The 2000's? I used to do AJAX without AJAX in the early 1990s! The way you do it is you build a thin client with your own rendering engine, compression and protocols, you mail it to everybody every day so it's ubiquitous, then you put a few hundred thousand modems in colos and serve the content through those.
The CGI-haters are right, though. Even we knew enough not to fork a process per request. AOLserver FTW.
Just the fact that you can't disprove a percentage with a one-time event. Apple does it? He predicted it. Apple doesn't? He predicted they might not.
It's like David Cross's character in Waiting for Guffman: The amazing thing about this field is that the weather never changes. There is always - ALWAYS - a 72% chance of rain.
If Yelp's salespeople were, indeed, claiming that they could remove negative reviews - but weren't actually doing so - would that be illegal?
Because here's what we know:
1. We have multiple reports of businesses claiming that if they advertised, their negative reviews would be buried or hidden. 2. Yelp themselves says their algorithm might sometimes bury or hide negative reviews (and might sometimes boost them to the top). 3. Confirmation bias predicts we'll see business owners who bought advertising and saw fewer negative reviews, or who didn't buy advertising and saw more. 4. And we do.
Sure, but with network-based backups, your media aren't all in the same place; they're in data centers or friends' houses or floating platforms around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You've seen a piece of metal (without a hand) cause the iPhone 4's reception to drop?
That's exactly the Youtube video I've been waiting to see, and Apple's effectively claiming (by omission) that it doesn't happen. If you know someone who can reproduce it, you should film it and share it. Apple's dug pretty deep into "This is just like all other attentuation problems" now.
From the liveblog, it sounds like they think problem is NOT simple conduction; it's capacitive coupling, and using a case works not because it's insulating but because it's thick. It's not "the black line isn't insulated" (or at least it doesn't sound that way, though I wish they'd addressed it directly). Jobs does say "Every phone has a weak spot, but like a dummy, we put a big black stripe across ours". If it weren't for that stripe, do you think iPhone owners would have narrowed down the spot in less than a month?
I'm just guessing, though, and it would have been nice to see the conduction vs capacitance issue addressed in the Q&A.
I left the field in 2001 and they were already doing it then. It's just cheaper now (cheaper with real money, and cheaper to buy stolen credit cards).
[mod parent up]
OK, so: At one end of the spectrum, you might republish the original patent verbatim. Presumably, that isn't induced infringement, else any patent-search sites would be in trouble. At the other end of the spectrum, you might write a program that implements the machine described by the patent, print out the source, and hand it to someone, saying "Here! Run this, and you can do that patented thing!" Presumably, that IS induced infringement.
There's a lot in between. Where's the bright line? If I write a blog post saying "This is a brilliant patent! Here's how they probably implement it:" and go on to explain the patent in plainer English, might I be inducing infringement? What if I post the same explanation, but preceded by "This is patented, but here's how you could implement it:"
Kupfernigk wins the subthread.
Funny, but incorrect. The grocer's apostrophe can also be used in the middle of a word if that word was originally a compound; for instance, I once saw a convenience store advertising "NEW'SPAPERS".
They're songwriters. They want to something something night, something something light, something something else something feel so right.
Tell me you've heard FedEx's "Hello, and welcome to the Post Office" ads.
The fix is obvious, of course: mount an 18" spike on the front of the iPhone. Now you really can't hold it any closer than 18".
You should see how well it works on cougars.
This - Kim Jong-Il, atomic fusion, and death-defying soft drinks - this is what Steve Jobs would look like if he couldn't quite pull it off.
That just bears repeating:
The "news" outfit that's willing to pay for an iPhone prototype of murky origins is whining because they don't want to pay for a WWDC ticket?
It's good to hear that you're working on a way out of the Kafka box. My personal-use-only mail server got caught up in both GMail *and* Postini's spam filters a few years ago, and it took multiple pleading e-mails via Google contacts to get anything but "Read the abuse auto-responder, which says it's not our fault and go away". Postini in particular has a bad reputation among mail sysadmins for not playing well with others.
Maybe you can explain what I've always wondered about. The stock market serves two purposes: Funding companies and betting on their future perceived success. (Perceived, because you're betting on the value of the stock, not the value of the company.)
What links those two together, other than happenstance? If I think a certain horse is going to win races, I can gamble, and so can others who disagree. But that money doesn't fund the horse's trainer. What does betting on "people will like Apple" have to do with "Apple needs a cash infusion"?
No, he said the other thing about you winning.
No, their aim was to solve the problem that menu bar discoverability doesn't scale, to the point where the top 10 feature requests for Office were features that were already in Office.
See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx
Luckily, protecting inventions is not at the heart of competitiveness. Patents are, by nature, a short-term monopoly on a technology. They are anti-competitive. Their intent was to spur risky innovation, and we can argue about whether or not that works in a low-barrier-to-entry market like software, but reducing patents can only increase competition.
The hard part, though, will be keeping up with all the patches for 0-day missing-vulnerabilities.
But are they illiterate, or are they merely literary? When the Apple engineer "lost" his phone, he also "loosed" it upon the blogosphere. For the first time in recorded history[1], those two words refer to the same act.
[1] I'm talking about my browser history here.
The 2000's? I used to do AJAX without AJAX in the early 1990s! The way you do it is you build a thin client with your own rendering engine, compression and protocols, you mail it to everybody every day so it's ubiquitous, then you put a few hundred thousand modems in colos and serve the content through those.
The CGI-haters are right, though. Even we knew enough not to fork a process per request. AOLserver FTW.
I will, of course, as I'm sure you all assumed.
Just the fact that you can't disprove a percentage with a one-time event. Apple does it? He predicted it. Apple doesn't? He predicted they might not.
It's like David Cross's character in Waiting for Guffman: The amazing thing about this field is that the weather never changes. There is always - ALWAYS - a 72% chance of rain.
If Yelp's salespeople were, indeed, claiming that they could remove negative reviews - but weren't actually doing so - would that be illegal?
Because here's what we know:
1. We have multiple reports of businesses claiming that if they advertised, their negative reviews would be buried or hidden.
2. Yelp themselves says their algorithm might sometimes bury or hide negative reviews (and might sometimes boost them to the top).
3. Confirmation bias predicts we'll see business owners who bought advertising and saw fewer negative reviews, or who didn't buy advertising and saw more.
4. And we do.
Sure, but with network-based backups, your media aren't all in the same place; they're in data centers or friends' houses or floating platforms around the world.