One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
That's a good question, and a problem for all copyrighted material, not just Creative Commons. It can be hard to know where to draw the line between a fair-use appropriation, a work that was inspired by another work, and a derivative work that is somehow violating copyright.
Is the virality of the CC-SA limited just to the part which you excerpt, or the whole webpage, or your whole website?
IANAL, but it probably depends on what constitutes the "work" that is being distributed, and the role of the excerpt. If you quote the article in your work as an excerpt, then you probably have a better argument that the viral aspect should not apply. If you incorporate the article into your article, then yes, the whole thing is a derivative work.
If you have a website where the entire website is one novel, each chapter being a webpage, then I suppose a licensing issue with one page could apply to the others, but websites themselves are a complicated copyright issue that is, to my mind, still unresolved. Copyrights claim that you can't copy the material, but by virtue of being a public website, the work is being copied and cached all over the place. I have seen a few websites try to put licenses that restrict the circumstances under which you can cache, load, and view the site, but there's a serious catch-22 issue with those licenses: even if it's somehow enforceable, you can't even view the license without violating the terms of the license.
I don't think "Samantha Wright" is claiming that they don't provide value, but also noting that there's a downside to their advocacy, and that more mainstream advocates need a good way to separate and differentiate themselves from hardcore zero-compromise activists.
overeager radicals who don't want (or know how) to balance their vision with public acceptance.
I don't think it's just balancing public acceptance, but accepting and accounting for reality.
For most of these good causes, there are usually counter-arguments with some level of validity. Environmentalism needs to recognize that people also need some level of industry and productivity. Multiculturalism needs to recognize that different cultures don't always gel so well together, and some cultures are fairly dysfunctional.
And even among those who completely agree with your ideals, there will be some who will say, "We need to take our time and transition." Sometimes it's a stall tactic, but large scale social changes aren't without their casualties, and sometimes it's worth having a plan for how you're going to get from point A to point B. So if you're an environmentalist who wants us to use 100% green-energy, you might want to give us some time to research different energy options, improve efficiency of power generation, and build our solar panels or wind turbines (or whatever) before we turn off the coal power plants.
He does not say they failed to consider prior art. He says the first one was bogging them down with the debate on prior art because they found it hard to believe there was not any. Then he says "they skipped that one", which, in context, probably means they put all questions regarding that patent aside to move on and see if the others were easier.
Yeah, I'm not sure what was intended by that quote about "they skipped that one", but the juror says, "because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple." So it may be that the reason it was bogging them down was simply that they had a hard time believing there was no prior art, but that implies that Samsung failed to offer sufficient evidence of prior art.
I'd guess that the reality is, most of the time, jury deliberations are not exactly what you'd hope they were. To some extent, the jurors don't care and they just want to go home. That possibility is at least relatively fair, since the main alternative is that the jurors *do* care, and then they probably want some particular side to win.
They're not experts in a particular field. They're not lawyers. They're not super-genuises who are unfailingly rational. They're just a bunch of people who have to wade through an absurd amount of information and try to decide what's legal and what's fair.
This is simply a matter of technical terminology. When a technology company says they have doubled the resolution of a screen, they're saying that each dimension has been doubled. They are not saying that the total pixel count has doubled.
"Resolution" is not inherently 1-dimensional.
In this context, yes it is. If you say that the resolution can be either pixel density or pixel count, then you would have to say that 8K is both 16 times the resolution and 4 times the resolution of 1080p at the same time, which means that a 4K display and an 8K display are both 4 times the resolution of 1080p in spite of having different specs. It makes no sense.
Most properly, "resolution" is discussing pixel density. As a function of this meaning, it's sometimes used to indicate the dimensions of a display, but that's because knowing that a display is a 21" 1080p display will tell you the pixel density. But the resolution is still a 1-dimensional measurement.
If you don't believe me, look it up. It's not a controversy. It's just an issue of correct usage of the terminology.
In this case even the upstream article introduced the concept as "TV with 16 times the resolution of HDTV."
Then the author of the article doesn't know the meaning of the word "resolution" either.
The wikipedia article you cite in your next post only reinforces my point: if you ask what the resolution is of a 1080p display, someone might say, "it's 72 dpi" or they might say, "it's 1920x1080". However, they don't say, "it's 2,073,600".
To quote what you quoted:
Note that the use of the word resolution here is a misnomer... The term “display resolution” is usually used to mean pixel dimensions, the number of pixels in each dimension (e.g., 1920 × 1080), which does not tell anything about the resolution of the display on which the image is actually formed: resolution properly refers to the pixel density...
So "resolution" is really about pixel density, but sometimes, in common usage, may refer to *both* of the dimensions of a 2D display. If you double each of those dimensions, then you have doubled the resolution. Saying that doubling the resolution of each of the dimensions quadruples the total resolution is terminologically incorrect.
But this is a silly conversation. We're arguing about a factual matter that you've already looked up and quoted a passage that says I'm factually correct.
Yes, it's an issue of correct use of technical terminology.
It would be sort of like if you said 8-bit color images have half the number of colors that 16-bit images have. It uses half the number of bits, yes, but that's actually not the same as having half the number of colors.
Sometimes people informally use "resolution" interchangeably with "pixel count", but it's technically incorrect. Resolution is a measure of linear density, such as dots per inch or pixels per inch. When you're talking about comparing the resolution of 1080p vs. 4k, you would say that 4k is twice the resolution because in order to have 4k on the same sized screen, you would need twice as many pixels per inch.
In computer graphics, people sometimes talk about an image resolution as being the total number of horizontal and vertical pixels (again not a pixel count) because there is no absolute resolution of the image. The implication of giving the horizontal and vertical measures is, again, that if you represent the image as a given physical size (e.g. when you print it out), a greater number of pixels would mean a higher resolution. That is, a 640x480 image is twice the resolution of a 320x240 image. That's how it works.
Now I might not have bothered to correct you in the first place, except that you seemed to be correcting someone else, and the person you were correcting was actually more correct.
Again, are you saying that 4k has 8 times the resolution, or 8 times as many pixels? There's a difference. If it's 8 times the resolution, then it has 8 times as many pixels per inch, which means the resolution would be 15,360 x 8,640.
I was under the impression (and the Wikipedia supports this) that 4k was roughly twice the resolution of 1080p, which would be around 3840x2160 which means it has 4 times the number of pixels. 8k is supposed to be twice the resolution of that, which is 4 times the resolution of 1080p, which is 7680 × 4320. That means it has 16 times the total number of pixels.
Microsoft knows damn well that people will never voluntarily never make the change which is why they removed the ability to boot directly into the desktop.
I think businessmen should always consider, "Whenever we're conspiring clever ways to *force* people to use our product (or a specific feature of our product) because we don't think they'll want to use it without coercion, we're probably doing something wrong somewhere."
Why doesn't Microsoft just try making good products? Just as an experiment, just to see, because maybe people will choose to use them voluntarily...?
You would be wrong. It was called "Application Memory". System 8 and 9 had a bare-bones VM system, but, other than turning it on or off, it was not "adjustable".
I'm not going to sort through this too much to argue over something from a decade ago, but what do you think this is referencing? By the way, the article you cite seems to indicate that it was adjustable when it says, "Increase the amount of memory allocated to the application in the Preferred Size box by 25 to 50 percent. (Example: change 1000 K to 1500 K)"
However, I don't think that what you're citing is the same as what I was remembering, because what I remember was definitely not controlled on an application-by-application basis. One of the frustrating things about it was that it was a system-wide setting that you had to change depending on which application you wanted to run.
There certainly were some (especially legacy) applications and drivers that hated that VM scheme, no doubt. But most devs. quickly updated their apps to be "System 8" compatible.
I don't remember which applications would work with VM and which would only work without, but I remember that it was common enough that my users had to switch back and forth constantly. It was silly along the lines of, "The latest version of Photoshop wouldn't run without virtual memory enabled, but the latest version of Illustrator won't run with virtual memory enabled, so any time you want to switch between the two, you have to close one application, change a system-setting, and then open the other."
I don't think it was literally Photoshop and Illustrator, but there were common big-name applications. It may have been Photoshop vs. Quark, or Quark vs. Appleworks, or something else.
Never heard of a single security problem with the Macs.
Actually, I think the Multi-User support began around System 8.5; but I can't remember exactly. But yes, just like the "Multi-User" support in competing OSes of the day, it was pretty much useless. So?
I could be wrong, but I believe in the multi-user support was pretty minimal before OSX. Like maybe it would let you have your own home folder to some degree, but it didn't have file-system level protections. Or maybe not that, but something equally silly.
Anyway, in answer to your question, "So?": It was a response to your claim that you never heard of a security problem, I was saying that would be unlikely unless you weren't concerned with security. Multi-user support is an important basic security measure. If your computer doesn't offer multi-user support with per-user filesystem-level permissions, then you can't have multiple users on the same computer without giving access to all of each others' settings and files.
Windows NT 4 had multi-user support, file permissions, and network authentication. It also didn't have the virtual memory quirkiness of Mac OS at the time, and didn't have the problem of preference files spontaneously corrupting on a regular basis.
And yet I'm pretty sure the system called it "virtual memory" in the control that you had to adjust. It's been about a decade since I supported these systems, but I'm pretty sure.
Andit wasn't just an issue of allocating *enough*. One of the silly things was that some applications would crash if you allocated too much, and some required that you turn it off. Admittedly, even at the time I didn't know enough to tell you why some specific applications would die if the virtual memory was turned on, but neither did any of the "Macintosh experts" that I dealt with, and sure enough fiddling with the virtual memory would cause programs to either crash or stop crashing, with there being no setting that would allow everything to run.
Never heard of a single security problem with the Macs.
Well maybe you were dealing with an environment that wasn't interested in security, then. Mac OS didn't even have multi-user support until OSX. OS9 started to provide some multi-user support, but it wasn't very extensive, and it generally wasn't worth the trouble.
This is a classic dilemma of anyone who has enjoyed success: Do I try to replicate my past successes and risk becoming stale, or do I try to break my mold and risk losing what made me successful in the first place?
What I mean is, yes, to some extent, the formula is stale. Nintendo has a few different series that, to some extent, are each remaking the same game over and over again with a few new gimmicks and tweaks, and otherwise it's just new levels. But then, lots of people *love* those games. They've played through each of those games multiple times, and they're essentially willing to keep buying remakes, new levels, etc. If the graphics are improved and their are a few new features/gimmicks sprinkled in, that's just a bonus.
And you could argue that, in all of this, Nintendo is just lazily milking their fans for more money, but I don't think that theory holds up very well. These games are very well designed and well balanced. They don't feel like the product of lazy developers, they feel like the product of very competent developers who love these games themselves.
> "Innovation" is rarely little more than just a buzzword. The truth is that Apple rarely "innovates" (That's not an insult) At least not in the big picture. What Apple is good at is the *execution*.
I take your point, but to some degree it raises the question in my mind, "What is innovation?" All ideas come from somewhere. For the most part, new technologies are a bunch of old technologies bundled together with a twist. Every now and there, there's something that's pretty original, but mostly not.
I could see an argument that Apple's process of "they just made it better than the others," is actually innovation. Generally, what Apple does in "making it better than the others" is not simply about quality. What makes the iPad "better" (or at least more successful) than past tablets is not build quality or OS stability, but that they reframed the concept of a tablet, and released something with a different design and feature-set. The iPad was a different sort of tablet than what came before, and it had a different market.
The same could be said of the iPod. In fact, what was noteworthy about the iPod on release was that it was clearly *less* feature-rich than many of its competitors, leading to the famous quote, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." However, they focused on pushing an efficient and simple UI, providing good syncing software, and keeping the physical design very small. It was not at all technologically innovative, but it was arguably an innovative design. It certainly wasn't the sort of design that other manufacturers were focused on.
Similarly with the iPhone, at the time it was released, it was not remotely like other smartphones at the time. Though I don't support Apple's lawsuit, they do have a point that they drastically changed the smartphone market, and that other companies copied them. When you look at the smartphones before the iPhone, it was drastically different. You had tiny crappy little screens and everything had a physical keyboard. Touch screens had tiny elements and relied on a stylus, and nobody was really using multi-touch. (Look at the Motorola Q or Palm Treo for reference) Smartphones were marketed to geeks and road warrior business-types, and not consumers. In fact, I know many people in the cell phone industry who believed that the iPhone would fail because they didn't believe there was a consumer market for a flashy simplified smartphone. Since the iPhone was released, the smartphone market has turned around and most smartphones look, to varying extents, like iPhone clones.
So are they innovative? I don't know. They're not necessarily developing entirely new technology, but then who is? However, they seem to the company that's developing a vision for where the computer/smartphone designs should go, and everyone else is trailing along behind, copying.
remember that a BSOD on a Windows system was every bit as catastrophic (entire system was taken down) as on Macs of the day, and it took MS until XP SP2 before they got their BSOD problem under control.
As someone who supported Windows and Mac computers for businesses in the late 90s and early 2000s, Windows NT4 and 2000 were generally superior to MacOS at the time. On a well managed system, BSOD happened, but not very often, and anyway that's not the only grounds to compare them.
Macs had lots of problems at the time. Security was virtually non-existent. You had to constantly futz with virtual memory, changing settings depending on which application you were running. Sometimes managing virtual memory was trial and error, just changing the settings and praying to the computer gods that things would work. Preference files would constantly get corrupted, mysteriously, causing applications to crash. Meanwhile Windows offered a relatively secure and stable multi-user system with real network authentication. The driver support wasn't always great, but if you got well-supported hardware, setup wasn't too bad and the system ran smoothly.
I don't know that if the reason is as simple as blaming a court case or a patent system, but Apple certainly did suck for a while. Looking at Apple's products before Jobs' return, they were stagnant. The security was terrible, their OS couldn't really handle virtual memory. In general, nothing had seen a substantial upgrade in several years.
A lot of people blame the past CEOs for Apple being stagnant and credit Jobs for the turn-around, and though I'm sure it's not quite that simple, there's probably some truth to it. However, they were definitely stagnant, and I don't know how someone who lived through those years and remembers them can claim otherwise.
A strong military, alone, does not make up a good foundation for an economy. The only way that the military can keep a society wealthy is by constantly invading and pillaging other countries, but even that doesn't constitute "building a productive economy."
StraightTalk is an MVNO, meaning it's just using one of the other networks, so the technical information still applies. I'm not sure if they're on T-Mobile or AT&T, but either way you'll want to know which 3G frequencies they're supporting and which 3G frequencies your phone supports. If the two don't match, you won't get 3G.
I don't know if there's a catch with StraightTalk, but it's not uncommon for there to be some kind of a catch with MVNOs. Like it's unlimited data, but maybe the unlimited data is limited to 2G. Or it's unlimited data(**), and the "(**)" explains that there are actually very severe limits. Maybe it's really a great deal, but generally speaking, my post just is true.
If you want to use your existing phone, you probably don't have a lot of choice. I assume it's a GSM phone which means you're either going to use AT&T or T-Mobile. If you want to use data and want 3G speeds, then you need to know what frequency bands your phone supports. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for 3G, and I don't believe the Nexus One supported both. So it's either a T-Mobile compatible phone or an AT&T compatible phone. Either way, you can probably use it for either carrier, but you can only get 3G speeds on one of them. And if you want a data plan, you're probably looking at something closer to $100 per month.
Welcome to America! Our infrastructure sucks, but at least we pay a lot for it!
I agree, their general strategy here isn't bad. I do somewhat wonder *why* they're forcing the issue. It seems like it'd be trivial to restore the start menu and allow users to boot straight into a "classic" desktop setup. Instead, they seem to be actively blocking people from bypassing the start screen.
The only theory I've heard that makes any sense is that they're trying to force people to use the new UI so that they'll become accustomed to it, and therefore be more likely to buy Windows based phones and tablets in the future. That might be Microsoft's strategy, but if so, I'm not too happy about it and I hope it backfires.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the worrying things about using CC material is: What is a derivative work?
That's a good question, and a problem for all copyrighted material, not just Creative Commons. It can be hard to know where to draw the line between a fair-use appropriation, a work that was inspired by another work, and a derivative work that is somehow violating copyright.
Is the virality of the CC-SA limited just to the part which you excerpt, or the whole webpage, or your whole website?
IANAL, but it probably depends on what constitutes the "work" that is being distributed, and the role of the excerpt. If you quote the article in your work as an excerpt, then you probably have a better argument that the viral aspect should not apply. If you incorporate the article into your article, then yes, the whole thing is a derivative work.
If you have a website where the entire website is one novel, each chapter being a webpage, then I suppose a licensing issue with one page could apply to the others, but websites themselves are a complicated copyright issue that is, to my mind, still unresolved. Copyrights claim that you can't copy the material, but by virtue of being a public website, the work is being copied and cached all over the place. I have seen a few websites try to put licenses that restrict the circumstances under which you can cache, load, and view the site, but there's a serious catch-22 issue with those licenses: even if it's somehow enforceable, you can't even view the license without violating the terms of the license.
I don't think "Samantha Wright" is claiming that they don't provide value, but also noting that there's a downside to their advocacy, and that more mainstream advocates need a good way to separate and differentiate themselves from hardcore zero-compromise activists.
overeager radicals who don't want (or know how) to balance their vision with public acceptance.
I don't think it's just balancing public acceptance, but accepting and accounting for reality.
For most of these good causes, there are usually counter-arguments with some level of validity. Environmentalism needs to recognize that people also need some level of industry and productivity. Multiculturalism needs to recognize that different cultures don't always gel so well together, and some cultures are fairly dysfunctional.
And even among those who completely agree with your ideals, there will be some who will say, "We need to take our time and transition." Sometimes it's a stall tactic, but large scale social changes aren't without their casualties, and sometimes it's worth having a plan for how you're going to get from point A to point B. So if you're an environmentalist who wants us to use 100% green-energy, you might want to give us some time to research different energy options, improve efficiency of power generation, and build our solar panels or wind turbines (or whatever) before we turn off the coal power plants.
He does not say they failed to consider prior art. He says the first one was bogging them down with the debate on prior art because they found it hard to believe there was not any. Then he says "they skipped that one", which, in context, probably means they put all questions regarding that patent aside to move on and see if the others were easier.
Yeah, I'm not sure what was intended by that quote about "they skipped that one", but the juror says, "because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple." So it may be that the reason it was bogging them down was simply that they had a hard time believing there was no prior art, but that implies that Samsung failed to offer sufficient evidence of prior art.
I'd guess that the reality is, most of the time, jury deliberations are not exactly what you'd hope they were. To some extent, the jurors don't care and they just want to go home. That possibility is at least relatively fair, since the main alternative is that the jurors *do* care, and then they probably want some particular side to win.
They're not experts in a particular field. They're not lawyers. They're not super-genuises who are unfailingly rational. They're just a bunch of people who have to wade through an absurd amount of information and try to decide what's legal and what's fair.
This is simply a matter of technical terminology. When a technology company says they have doubled the resolution of a screen, they're saying that each dimension has been doubled. They are not saying that the total pixel count has doubled.
"Resolution" is not inherently 1-dimensional.
In this context, yes it is. If you say that the resolution can be either pixel density or pixel count, then you would have to say that 8K is both 16 times the resolution and 4 times the resolution of 1080p at the same time, which means that a 4K display and an 8K display are both 4 times the resolution of 1080p in spite of having different specs. It makes no sense.
Most properly, "resolution" is discussing pixel density. As a function of this meaning, it's sometimes used to indicate the dimensions of a display, but that's because knowing that a display is a 21" 1080p display will tell you the pixel density. But the resolution is still a 1-dimensional measurement.
If you don't believe me, look it up. It's not a controversy. It's just an issue of correct usage of the terminology.
In this case even the upstream article introduced the concept as "TV with 16 times the resolution of HDTV."
Then the author of the article doesn't know the meaning of the word "resolution" either.
The wikipedia article you cite in your next post only reinforces my point: if you ask what the resolution is of a 1080p display, someone might say, "it's 72 dpi" or they might say, "it's 1920x1080". However, they don't say, "it's 2,073,600".
To quote what you quoted:
Note that the use of the word resolution here is a misnomer... The term “display resolution” is usually used to mean pixel dimensions, the number of pixels in each dimension (e.g., 1920 × 1080), which does not tell anything about the resolution of the display on which the image is actually formed: resolution properly refers to the pixel density...
So "resolution" is really about pixel density, but sometimes, in common usage, may refer to *both* of the dimensions of a 2D display. If you double each of those dimensions, then you have doubled the resolution. Saying that doubling the resolution of each of the dimensions quadruples the total resolution is terminologically incorrect.
But this is a silly conversation. We're arguing about a factual matter that you've already looked up and quoted a passage that says I'm factually correct.
Yes, it's an issue of correct use of technical terminology.
It would be sort of like if you said 8-bit color images have half the number of colors that 16-bit images have. It uses half the number of bits, yes, but that's actually not the same as having half the number of colors.
Sometimes people informally use "resolution" interchangeably with "pixel count", but it's technically incorrect. Resolution is a measure of linear density, such as dots per inch or pixels per inch. When you're talking about comparing the resolution of 1080p vs. 4k, you would say that 4k is twice the resolution because in order to have 4k on the same sized screen, you would need twice as many pixels per inch.
In computer graphics, people sometimes talk about an image resolution as being the total number of horizontal and vertical pixels (again not a pixel count) because there is no absolute resolution of the image. The implication of giving the horizontal and vertical measures is, again, that if you represent the image as a given physical size (e.g. when you print it out), a greater number of pixels would mean a higher resolution. That is, a 640x480 image is twice the resolution of a 320x240 image. That's how it works.
Now I might not have bothered to correct you in the first place, except that you seemed to be correcting someone else, and the person you were correcting was actually more correct.
So... what I understand by your statement is that it's 4 times the resolution, 16 times the pixel count, which is what I said.
Again, are you saying that 4k has 8 times the resolution, or 8 times as many pixels? There's a difference. If it's 8 times the resolution, then it has 8 times as many pixels per inch, which means the resolution would be 15,360 x 8,640.
I was under the impression (and the Wikipedia supports this) that 4k was roughly twice the resolution of 1080p, which would be around 3840x2160 which means it has 4 times the number of pixels. 8k is supposed to be twice the resolution of that, which is 4 times the resolution of 1080p, which is 7680 × 4320. That means it has 16 times the total number of pixels.
Unless I'm missing something, 8K is not 16x the resolution of 1080p. It's 4x the resolution, which results in it having 16x the number of pixels.
Microsoft knows damn well that people will never voluntarily never make the change which is why they removed the ability to boot directly into the desktop.
I think businessmen should always consider, "Whenever we're conspiring clever ways to *force* people to use our product (or a specific feature of our product) because we don't think they'll want to use it without coercion, we're probably doing something wrong somewhere."
Why doesn't Microsoft just try making good products? Just as an experiment, just to see, because maybe people will choose to use them voluntarily...?
You would be wrong. It was called "Application Memory". System 8 and 9 had a bare-bones VM system, but, other than turning it on or off, it was not "adjustable".
I'm not going to sort through this too much to argue over something from a decade ago, but what do you think this is referencing? By the way, the article you cite seems to indicate that it was adjustable when it says, "Increase the amount of memory allocated to the application in the Preferred Size box by 25 to 50 percent. (Example: change 1000 K to 1500 K)"
However, I don't think that what you're citing is the same as what I was remembering, because what I remember was definitely not controlled on an application-by-application basis. One of the frustrating things about it was that it was a system-wide setting that you had to change depending on which application you wanted to run.
There certainly were some (especially legacy) applications and drivers that hated that VM scheme, no doubt. But most devs. quickly updated their apps to be "System 8" compatible.
I don't remember which applications would work with VM and which would only work without, but I remember that it was common enough that my users had to switch back and forth constantly. It was silly along the lines of, "The latest version of Photoshop wouldn't run without virtual memory enabled, but the latest version of Illustrator won't run with virtual memory enabled, so any time you want to switch between the two, you have to close one application, change a system-setting, and then open the other."
I don't think it was literally Photoshop and Illustrator, but there were common big-name applications. It may have been Photoshop vs. Quark, or Quark vs. Appleworks, or something else.
Never heard of a single security problem with the Macs.
Actually, I think the Multi-User support began around System 8.5; but I can't remember exactly. But yes, just like the "Multi-User" support in competing OSes of the day, it was pretty much useless. So?
I could be wrong, but I believe in the multi-user support was pretty minimal before OSX. Like maybe it would let you have your own home folder to some degree, but it didn't have file-system level protections. Or maybe not that, but something equally silly.
Anyway, in answer to your question, "So?": It was a response to your claim that you never heard of a security problem, I was saying that would be unlikely unless you weren't concerned with security. Multi-user support is an important basic security measure. If your computer doesn't offer multi-user support with per-user filesystem-level permissions, then you can't have multiple users on the same computer without giving access to all of each others' settings and files.
Windows NT 4 had multi-user support, file permissions, and network authentication. It also didn't have the virtual memory quirkiness of Mac OS at the time, and didn't have the problem of preference files spontaneously corrupting on a regular basis.
MacOS had no Virtual Memory system, per se.
And yet I'm pretty sure the system called it "virtual memory" in the control that you had to adjust. It's been about a decade since I supported these systems, but I'm pretty sure.
Andit wasn't just an issue of allocating *enough*. One of the silly things was that some applications would crash if you allocated too much, and some required that you turn it off. Admittedly, even at the time I didn't know enough to tell you why some specific applications would die if the virtual memory was turned on, but neither did any of the "Macintosh experts" that I dealt with, and sure enough fiddling with the virtual memory would cause programs to either crash or stop crashing, with there being no setting that would allow everything to run.
Never heard of a single security problem with the Macs.
Well maybe you were dealing with an environment that wasn't interested in security, then. Mac OS didn't even have multi-user support until OSX. OS9 started to provide some multi-user support, but it wasn't very extensive, and it generally wasn't worth the trouble.
This is a classic dilemma of anyone who has enjoyed success: Do I try to replicate my past successes and risk becoming stale, or do I try to break my mold and risk losing what made me successful in the first place?
What I mean is, yes, to some extent, the formula is stale. Nintendo has a few different series that, to some extent, are each remaking the same game over and over again with a few new gimmicks and tweaks, and otherwise it's just new levels. But then, lots of people *love* those games. They've played through each of those games multiple times, and they're essentially willing to keep buying remakes, new levels, etc. If the graphics are improved and their are a few new features/gimmicks sprinkled in, that's just a bonus.
And you could argue that, in all of this, Nintendo is just lazily milking their fans for more money, but I don't think that theory holds up very well. These games are very well designed and well balanced. They don't feel like the product of lazy developers, they feel like the product of very competent developers who love these games themselves.
> "Innovation" is rarely little more than just a buzzword. The truth is that Apple rarely "innovates" (That's not an insult) At least not in the big picture. What Apple is good at is the *execution*.
I take your point, but to some degree it raises the question in my mind, "What is innovation?" All ideas come from somewhere. For the most part, new technologies are a bunch of old technologies bundled together with a twist. Every now and there, there's something that's pretty original, but mostly not.
I could see an argument that Apple's process of "they just made it better than the others," is actually innovation. Generally, what Apple does in "making it better than the others" is not simply about quality. What makes the iPad "better" (or at least more successful) than past tablets is not build quality or OS stability, but that they reframed the concept of a tablet, and released something with a different design and feature-set. The iPad was a different sort of tablet than what came before, and it had a different market.
The same could be said of the iPod. In fact, what was noteworthy about the iPod on release was that it was clearly *less* feature-rich than many of its competitors, leading to the famous quote, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." However, they focused on pushing an efficient and simple UI, providing good syncing software, and keeping the physical design very small. It was not at all technologically innovative, but it was arguably an innovative design. It certainly wasn't the sort of design that other manufacturers were focused on.
Similarly with the iPhone, at the time it was released, it was not remotely like other smartphones at the time. Though I don't support Apple's lawsuit, they do have a point that they drastically changed the smartphone market, and that other companies copied them. When you look at the smartphones before the iPhone, it was drastically different. You had tiny crappy little screens and everything had a physical keyboard. Touch screens had tiny elements and relied on a stylus, and nobody was really using multi-touch. (Look at the Motorola Q or Palm Treo for reference) Smartphones were marketed to geeks and road warrior business-types, and not consumers. In fact, I know many people in the cell phone industry who believed that the iPhone would fail because they didn't believe there was a consumer market for a flashy simplified smartphone. Since the iPhone was released, the smartphone market has turned around and most smartphones look, to varying extents, like iPhone clones.
So are they innovative? I don't know. They're not necessarily developing entirely new technology, but then who is? However, they seem to the company that's developing a vision for where the computer/smartphone designs should go, and everyone else is trailing along behind, copying.
remember that a BSOD on a Windows system was every bit as catastrophic (entire system was taken down) as on Macs of the day, and it took MS until XP SP2 before they got their BSOD problem under control.
As someone who supported Windows and Mac computers for businesses in the late 90s and early 2000s, Windows NT4 and 2000 were generally superior to MacOS at the time. On a well managed system, BSOD happened, but not very often, and anyway that's not the only grounds to compare them.
Macs had lots of problems at the time. Security was virtually non-existent. You had to constantly futz with virtual memory, changing settings depending on which application you were running. Sometimes managing virtual memory was trial and error, just changing the settings and praying to the computer gods that things would work. Preference files would constantly get corrupted, mysteriously, causing applications to crash. Meanwhile Windows offered a relatively secure and stable multi-user system with real network authentication. The driver support wasn't always great, but if you got well-supported hardware, setup wasn't too bad and the system ran smoothly.
I don't know that if the reason is as simple as blaming a court case or a patent system, but Apple certainly did suck for a while. Looking at Apple's products before Jobs' return, they were stagnant. The security was terrible, their OS couldn't really handle virtual memory. In general, nothing had seen a substantial upgrade in several years.
A lot of people blame the past CEOs for Apple being stagnant and credit Jobs for the turn-around, and though I'm sure it's not quite that simple, there's probably some truth to it. However, they were definitely stagnant, and I don't know how someone who lived through those years and remembers them can claim otherwise.
A strong military, alone, does not make up a good foundation for an economy. The only way that the military can keep a society wealthy is by constantly invading and pillaging other countries, but even that doesn't constitute "building a productive economy."
StraightTalk is an MVNO, meaning it's just using one of the other networks, so the technical information still applies. I'm not sure if they're on T-Mobile or AT&T, but either way you'll want to know which 3G frequencies they're supporting and which 3G frequencies your phone supports. If the two don't match, you won't get 3G.
I don't know if there's a catch with StraightTalk, but it's not uncommon for there to be some kind of a catch with MVNOs. Like it's unlimited data, but maybe the unlimited data is limited to 2G. Or it's unlimited data(**), and the "(**)" explains that there are actually very severe limits. Maybe it's really a great deal, but generally speaking, my post just is true.
If you want to use your existing phone, you probably don't have a lot of choice. I assume it's a GSM phone which means you're either going to use AT&T or T-Mobile. If you want to use data and want 3G speeds, then you need to know what frequency bands your phone supports. T-Mobile and AT&T use different frequencies for 3G, and I don't believe the Nexus One supported both. So it's either a T-Mobile compatible phone or an AT&T compatible phone. Either way, you can probably use it for either carrier, but you can only get 3G speeds on one of them. And if you want a data plan, you're probably looking at something closer to $100 per month.
Welcome to America! Our infrastructure sucks, but at least we pay a lot for it!
And the related, implied, "... and it will probably never make it into any products."
I agree, their general strategy here isn't bad. I do somewhat wonder *why* they're forcing the issue. It seems like it'd be trivial to restore the start menu and allow users to boot straight into a "classic" desktop setup. Instead, they seem to be actively blocking people from bypassing the start screen.
The only theory I've heard that makes any sense is that they're trying to force people to use the new UI so that they'll become accustomed to it, and therefore be more likely to buy Windows based phones and tablets in the future. That might be Microsoft's strategy, but if so, I'm not too happy about it and I hope it backfires.
Cool, thank you.