... components that Apple left out of the Touch so that it could cash in on the low end of the market...
This is so disengenuous as to be silly. Not everyone wants an iPhone. A lot of those people who don't want an iPhone might be in the market for a high end mp3 player. There are two different markets, ergo two different products. Yes, these products have a lot of synergy, but that's just good business.
... only Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without a phone'.
If Apple didn't already have the iPod before they had the iPhone, your rant might actually sound clever. However, in light of actual history it just sounds like a lame rant.
You don't understand. I've never dropped any of those Samsungs. In fact, I can't remember ever dropping any of my cell phones. My problem has been basic infant mortality issues. The damn things just stop responding to touches or the radio stops sending or the phone just randomly powers itself off with a full battery.
If anything, I think the opposite is true. Mac market share is at an all time high. Apple continues to innovate the Macintosh line. The iEcosystem seems to be giving the Mac line a boost as it becomes more "acceptable" to use Apple products and people start to intuitively understand Apple value.
Except for my Motorola RAZR I have yet to own a phone that continues to function correctly for more than two years (my Blackberry almost made it)... and I baby my phones.
I've had to send three Samsungs back for warranty in the last year alone. Nokias were crap. Sony Ericsson - crap. HTC - crap. LG - crap.
It almost seems like all mobile phones are designed to fail within a year or so. Of course, that doesn't make sense. I mean, why would these companies want you to purchase another device in such a short period of time???
I'm confused by this. I don't own an iPad, so perhaps this is an exclusively iPad issue. I do own an iPod Touch and copy/paste has been supported for as long as I've had it.
My Samsung Mythic (touch screen) does not support copy/paste. My Blackberry Pearl does, but it's almost painful. My point is that supporting copy/paste for small handheld devices is a challenge. Apple's implementation is pretty decent.
But as long as we're talking about copy/paste implementations let's talk Microsoft. Microsoft's implementation of copy/paste is brutal. When I copy something to the clipboard, I expect it to stay there until I replace it.
...iPad and other Apple products are great if you stay within its narrow Apple sanctioned usage.
I'm not a big fan of iPod, iPhone, or iPad for exactly the reasons you mention (I only have an iPod because it was a gift). However, you should be careful not to lump all Apple products into the same toilet. Macs are the most unfettered computing platform available... the opposite of what you claim.
If you think ANY amp simulator is good, your opinion is of little weight.
Dude, you're way off-topic, but I have to ask... what is your definition of good? If your point is that no simulator is ever going to make some kid in his bedroom playing an Epiphone LP Junior through a Fender Frontman sound like Steve Vai playing Evo through a Carvin Legacy... (or Tommy Emmanuel playing a Maton MS500 through an AER, if that's the way you sling)... well, you have a point. Otherwise, not so much...
BTW, lots of very discerning guitarists endorse many different modellers... why should we respect the weight of your opinion?
Line 6 released the first POD in 1997... at least 4 years before Apple released the iPod. Now that you can plug your guitar into your iPod to do modeling, maybe Apple should just keep their mouths shut...
I remember, back in the mid-1960's, we used to put a light bulb, with aluminum foil wrapped around it (to block the light) at the top of our doghouse in winter. This, along with and old carpet remnant for a door, kept the doghouse nice and toasty... just in case anyone was thinking about trying to patent the idea of incandescent light bulbs as heating devices...
High paid executives rarely fill out their own expense reports. They have peeps for doing that. The communication part of that process doesn't always happen seamlessly. Things that are supposed to go in one bucket end up in another. Personal expenses get confused as business expenses. Expenses end up being claimed in the wrong period, etc.. It's easy to do an expense report when you do it yourself and it's only a few thousand dollars... not so easy when it's a team effort and involves hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seriously, being off over multiple expense reports by $20K may seem a lot to you, but for an executive of Hurd's caliber it's a minor infraction. HPs issue was not so much about being off, but what they believe the expenses were for.
When you have a lot of money, you can be a target. We will probably never know if Hurd sexually harassed Fisher or if Fisher exploited Hurd's position to extort money and favors. It seems suspicious that Fisher sought financial compensation from Hurd rather than following the usual channels with HP's HR department...
However, all of that is irrelevant, because that is not what Hurd was ousted for (at least not officially). He was ousted for filing inaccurate expense reports. The problem with this is that it was never shown that the inaccuracies were intentional or accidental. The matter was not pursued, since Hurd voluntarily stepped down.
In our society, someone is assumed innocent until proven guilty. Hurd has not been proven guilty of either charge.
HP completely mishandled this situation and it has cost them dearly. If HP had not offered Hurd his golden parachute, it would have cost HP even more in the long run. They would never be able to recruit decent executives in the future.
You're putting words in my mouth. My point wasn't that it's OK because everyone is corrupt. My point is you shouldn't have unrealistic expectations of the police. You can try to hold them to a higher standard, but you'll be disappointed.
I would like to think that the police are just people and that what they do is just a job.
I would like to think this, but, I sometimes find myself asking what motivates someone to become a cop? I'm sure there are few well balanced cops, but I think the scales of justice may be tipped just a little towards the unbalanced. I also think that many who start out balanced can become jaded by what they experience on the job and the company they keep or even become corrupted by the power and authority granted them by the public.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in the semiconductor business for over 30 years and we've always been doing this. Manufacture one device with certain performance or features that can be disabled and sell 2 or more different versions. It happens with other kinds of technologies, as well.
You're confused about the cost part of the equation, though. Usually what happens is that the marketing gurus figure out how much market share you're going to get with each flavor and set the price accordingly. Often, if you only sold the low-end version you would not make enough profit. You count on some sales of the high-end version to offset the actual cost. It's a gamble and if your marketing team guesses wrong, and no one wants the high-end flavor, you lose money. If they guess wrong and everyone only wants the high-end flavor, then everyone gets a nice bonus...
I've seen it go both ways.
If the upgrade capability was zero cost, Intel would do exactly what you say. Just make that the standard; it's free marketshare. The fact that they had to get creative is a sure sign that it's not zero cost.
We all know people we work with who are less than ethical. Since most of us don't do anything about the ethics of those around us, then by your assessment, none of us are honest...
Sorry so late to reply. Server issues. Long story. I've looked and looked and the only Mac OS X virus I could find references to is not a virus at all, it's a trojan. And a security update has rendered it inoperable. So not a virus and not active.
I refute your premise thusly with some of the most prominent leaders in creationism and intelligent design:
Michael Behe - biochemist
Michael Denton - biochemist
Stephen Meyer - physicist
Dean Kenyon - biologist
William Dembski - statistics, mathematics, & philosophy
Jonathan Wells - geology, physics, and biology
In fact, in my albeit brief search, I couldn't find anyone prominent that was an engineer. Most of the other leaders are lawyers, journalists, and politicians. BTW, it's the Salem Hypothesis.
In actuality, though, I think engineers are less likely to be creationists. Engineers tend to be very data driven. In the absence of compelling data they tend to be agnostic. I don't think there is any compelling data to support creationism. One might argue (from an engineer's perspective) that there is not a lot of compelling evidence against a higher power... Therefore, I think a lot of engineers may be Christians, but that's not the same thing as being a creationist. This is the flaw in Bruce Salem's hypothesis - he doesn't appear to understand the difference.
Unlike Apple, other companies don't force you to stop using an OS after a couple years.
Huh? Ummm... I have a G3 Gossamer, purchased in 1997, running OS 9 since 1999, that is still going strong... still running Mac OS 9. Apparently I escaped under Apple's merciless radar because they have not forced me to stop using it. It's still a rock solid machine and I sometimes still use it to run some old PowerPC software and (get this) I can still run some 68000 software in emulation mode.
And for the record, I know you were really trying to make a statement about OS support, but I couldn't let you get away with rewriting history:
Windows 95 was supported for less than 3 years.
Windows NT was only supported for 4 years.
Windows 2000 was only supported for 5 years.
Windows XP has only been supported for this long because Microsoft screwed the pooch. If Vista would have come out sooner and if Vista wouldn't have been such a bomb and if Microsoft could make their new OSes support the tons of enterprise software that currently depends on XP, XP would be long dead.
Apple's security model goes far beyond not executing.exe files and it goes far beyond simply restricting code execution. It's actually one of the most advanced security models in the industry.
There are currently no known active viruses on Mac OS X, however the platform is certainly not immune from viruses... So yes... perhaps that's the customer's problem... eventually... but today... not a problem.
How exactly would a less computer savvy person be fooled? Might they purchase a Mac thinking that they are less likely to get a virus on an unprotected machine and somehow be let down by that assumption?
What IS implied is that the average Mac user has to be less concerned about viruses and malware than the average PC user. Being a computer engineer and a user of both PCs and Macs I have to say that I can't find anything wrong with this implication.
Technically, this is not reading, as in understanding, the speech centers. It's simply pattern matching. The speech center has a certain pattern of signals right before enunciating. A computer is trained to recognize that pattern and choose the appropriate word from a list.
Such a system would not be able to speak words that are not in it's training dictionary.
Moreover, the real flaw that I see is that this implementation requires that the subject actually be able to speak so that the system can be trained. There is no indication from this study or any other study that I know of to suggest that the patterns in one individual's brain would match the patterns in another individual's brain for the same situation. In fact, all current evidence is to the contrary. Everyone's brain is "wired" slightly differently and uses different synaptic patterns to accomplish the same actions.
I'm not tryhing to belittle the study, but as usual, there's a lot more hype and excitement than is justified...
Well, none of these are actual inventions, so I'm not sure why patents were issued, but even beyond that, if you were to allow the patenting of "ideas", Interval Research Corporation didn't originate these ideas...
Interval Research Corporation was founded in 1992. NCSA's Mosaic browser was invented in 1992 with the first public release in 1993. Most modern browsers owe their foundations to NCSA not Interval Research Corporation. NCSA also had the first web sites to host bodies of audiovisual information as well. So this claim seems to be unfounded.
The second and third claims are even more ludicrous. There have been "attention managers" that display alerts on video displays for as long as there have been video displays. I was programming them before Al Gore invented the internet and I was programming them on the internet before Interval Research Corporation was a gleam in Allen's eye...
there's good reason to believe that experts historically underestimate the rate of advancement
Except in the area of artificial intelligence. About every 5 years, starting back in the early 1950s, some group of experts have proclaimed that human level intelligence would be simulated on a computer "within the next 20 years". They all overestimated the growth rate in this field... and continue to do so, in all likelihood.
Don't confuse what Moore's Law does for technology with growth of knowledge about the human brain. We know a lot more than we did 60 years ago... but we still don't have a clue how the damn things work.
We're like aliens probing semiconductors at the nanoscale trying to figure out how computers work, with no concept yet of CPUs or software or algorithms...
The playbook only tells you the general plan. In reality, players have to react to hundreds or thousands of variables. Dumb people don't make it in real football... which is not to say that real football players don't do some really dumb stuff, but then you should see what goes on after hours at Strings.
As far as recording calls, it's actually much simpler than this. All that is required for recording in two party states is a regular interval beep. Why not make the capability available to all and just insert the beeps?
Now if you want to secretly record, that's different...
A guy once told me that he secretly recorded all of his calls so he could catch people in lies... I told him that he should just tell everyone he was recording and then people would be less likely to lie in the first place. Better to get the truth up front than to try and sort through lies. So to that end, I want an app that inserts regular interval beeps into my conversation so people think they are being recorded.
Slashdot Mirror
... components that Apple left out of the Touch so that it could cash in on the low end of the market...
This is so disengenuous as to be silly. Not everyone wants an iPhone. A lot of those people who don't want an iPhone might be in the market for a high end mp3 player. There are two different markets, ergo two different products. Yes, these products have a lot of synergy, but that's just good business.
... only Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without a phone'.
If Apple didn't already have the iPod before they had the iPhone, your rant might actually sound clever. However, in light of actual history it just sounds like a lame rant.
You don't understand. I've never dropped any of those Samsungs. In fact, I can't remember ever dropping any of my cell phones. My problem has been basic infant mortality issues. The damn things just stop responding to touches or the radio stops sending or the phone just randomly powers itself off with a full battery.
If anything, I think the opposite is true. Mac market share is at an all time high. Apple continues to innovate the Macintosh line. The iEcosystem seems to be giving the Mac line a boost as it becomes more "acceptable" to use Apple products and people start to intuitively understand Apple value.
Except for my Motorola RAZR I have yet to own a phone that continues to function correctly for more than two years (my Blackberry almost made it)... and I baby my phones.
I've had to send three Samsungs back for warranty in the last year alone. Nokias were crap. Sony Ericsson - crap. HTC - crap. LG - crap.
It almost seems like all mobile phones are designed to fail within a year or so. Of course, that doesn't make sense. I mean, why would these companies want you to purchase another device in such a short period of time???
Take copy/paste. Apple allegedly omitted it ...
I'm confused by this. I don't own an iPad, so perhaps this is an exclusively iPad issue. I do own an iPod Touch and copy/paste has been supported for as long as I've had it.
My Samsung Mythic (touch screen) does not support copy/paste. My Blackberry Pearl does, but it's almost painful. My point is that supporting copy/paste for small handheld devices is a challenge. Apple's implementation is pretty decent.
But as long as we're talking about copy/paste implementations let's talk Microsoft. Microsoft's implementation of copy/paste is brutal. When I copy something to the clipboard, I expect it to stay there until I replace it.
...iPad and other Apple products are great if you stay within its narrow Apple sanctioned usage.
I'm not a big fan of iPod, iPhone, or iPad for exactly the reasons you mention (I only have an iPod because it was a gift). However, you should be careful not to lump all Apple products into the same toilet. Macs are the most unfettered computing platform available... the opposite of what you claim.
If you think ANY amp simulator is good, your opinion is of little weight.
Dude, you're way off-topic, but I have to ask... what is your definition of good? If your point is that no simulator is ever going to make some kid in his bedroom playing an Epiphone LP Junior through a Fender Frontman sound like Steve Vai playing Evo through a Carvin Legacy... (or Tommy Emmanuel playing a Maton MS500 through an AER, if that's the way you sling)... well, you have a point. Otherwise, not so much...
BTW, lots of very discerning guitarists endorse many different modellers... why should we respect the weight of your opinion?
Line 6 released the first POD in 1997... at least 4 years before Apple released the iPod. Now that you can plug your guitar into your iPod to do modeling, maybe Apple should just keep their mouths shut...
iRig Guitar Modeling Interface
I remember, back in the mid-1960's, we used to put a light bulb, with aluminum foil wrapped around it (to block the light) at the top of our doghouse in winter. This, along with and old carpet remnant for a door, kept the doghouse nice and toasty... just in case anyone was thinking about trying to patent the idea of incandescent light bulbs as heating devices...
High paid executives rarely fill out their own expense reports. They have peeps for doing that. The communication part of that process doesn't always happen seamlessly. Things that are supposed to go in one bucket end up in another. Personal expenses get confused as business expenses. Expenses end up being claimed in the wrong period, etc.. It's easy to do an expense report when you do it yourself and it's only a few thousand dollars... not so easy when it's a team effort and involves hundreds of thousands of dollars. Seriously, being off over multiple expense reports by $20K may seem a lot to you, but for an executive of Hurd's caliber it's a minor infraction. HPs issue was not so much about being off, but what they believe the expenses were for.
When you have a lot of money, you can be a target. We will probably never know if Hurd sexually harassed Fisher or if Fisher exploited Hurd's position to extort money and favors. It seems suspicious that Fisher sought financial compensation from Hurd rather than following the usual channels with HP's HR department...
However, all of that is irrelevant, because that is not what Hurd was ousted for (at least not officially). He was ousted for filing inaccurate expense reports. The problem with this is that it was never shown that the inaccuracies were intentional or accidental. The matter was not pursued, since Hurd voluntarily stepped down.
In our society, someone is assumed innocent until proven guilty. Hurd has not been proven guilty of either charge.
HP completely mishandled this situation and it has cost them dearly. If HP had not offered Hurd his golden parachute, it would have cost HP even more in the long run. They would never be able to recruit decent executives in the future.
You're putting words in my mouth. My point wasn't that it's OK because everyone is corrupt. My point is you shouldn't have unrealistic expectations of the police. You can try to hold them to a higher standard, but you'll be disappointed.
I would like to think that the police are just people and that what they do is just a job.
I would like to think this, but, I sometimes find myself asking what motivates someone to become a cop? I'm sure there are few well balanced cops, but I think the scales of justice may be tipped just a little towards the unbalanced. I also think that many who start out balanced can become jaded by what they experience on the job and the company they keep or even become corrupted by the power and authority granted them by the public.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in the semiconductor business for over 30 years and we've always been doing this. Manufacture one device with certain performance or features that can be disabled and sell 2 or more different versions. It happens with other kinds of technologies, as well.
You're confused about the cost part of the equation, though. Usually what happens is that the marketing gurus figure out how much market share you're going to get with each flavor and set the price accordingly. Often, if you only sold the low-end version you would not make enough profit. You count on some sales of the high-end version to offset the actual cost. It's a gamble and if your marketing team guesses wrong, and no one wants the high-end flavor, you lose money. If they guess wrong and everyone only wants the high-end flavor, then everyone gets a nice bonus...
I've seen it go both ways.
If the upgrade capability was zero cost, Intel would do exactly what you say. Just make that the standard; it's free marketshare. The fact that they had to get creative is a sure sign that it's not zero cost.
We all know people we work with who are less than ethical. Since most of us don't do anything about the ethics of those around us, then by your assessment, none of us are honest...
Sorry so late to reply. Server issues. Long story. I've looked and looked and the only Mac OS X virus I could find references to is not a virus at all, it's a trojan. And a security update has rendered it inoperable. So not a virus and not active.
I refute your premise thusly with some of the most prominent leaders in creationism and intelligent design:
William Dembski - statistics, mathematics, & philosophy
In fact, in my albeit brief search, I couldn't find anyone prominent that was an engineer. Most of the other leaders are lawyers, journalists, and politicians. BTW, it's the Salem Hypothesis.
In actuality, though, I think engineers are less likely to be creationists. Engineers tend to be very data driven. In the absence of compelling data they tend to be agnostic. I don't think there is any compelling data to support creationism. One might argue (from an engineer's perspective) that there is not a lot of compelling evidence against a higher power... Therefore, I think a lot of engineers may be Christians, but that's not the same thing as being a creationist. This is the flaw in Bruce Salem's hypothesis - he doesn't appear to understand the difference.
Unlike Apple, other companies don't force you to stop using an OS after a couple years.
Huh? Ummm... I have a G3 Gossamer, purchased in 1997, running OS 9 since 1999, that is still going strong... still running Mac OS 9. Apparently I escaped under Apple's merciless radar because they have not forced me to stop using it. It's still a rock solid machine and I sometimes still use it to run some old PowerPC software and (get this) I can still run some 68000 software in emulation mode.
And for the record, I know you were really trying to make a statement about OS support, but I couldn't let you get away with rewriting history:
Apple's security model goes far beyond not executing .exe files and it goes far beyond simply restricting code execution. It's actually one of the most advanced security models in the industry.
There are currently no known active viruses on Mac OS X, however the platform is certainly not immune from viruses... So yes... perhaps that's the customer's problem... eventually... but today... not a problem.
Which claims are false?
How exactly would a less computer savvy person be fooled? Might they purchase a Mac thinking that they are less likely to get a virus on an unprotected machine and somehow be let down by that assumption?
What IS implied is that the average Mac user has to be less concerned about viruses and malware than the average PC user. Being a computer engineer and a user of both PCs and Macs I have to say that I can't find anything wrong with this implication.
Apple never said that their products are secure, non-exploitable and virus free.
What Apple actually says is that their products come with "built-in defenses against viruses and other malware".
Technically, this is not reading, as in understanding, the speech centers. It's simply pattern matching. The speech center has a certain pattern of signals right before enunciating. A computer is trained to recognize that pattern and choose the appropriate word from a list.
Such a system would not be able to speak words that are not in it's training dictionary.
Moreover, the real flaw that I see is that this implementation requires that the subject actually be able to speak so that the system can be trained. There is no indication from this study or any other study that I know of to suggest that the patterns in one individual's brain would match the patterns in another individual's brain for the same situation. In fact, all current evidence is to the contrary. Everyone's brain is "wired" slightly differently and uses different synaptic patterns to accomplish the same actions.
I'm not tryhing to belittle the study, but as usual, there's a lot more hype and excitement than is justified...
Well, none of these are actual inventions, so I'm not sure why patents were issued, but even beyond that, if you were to allow the patenting of "ideas", Interval Research Corporation didn't originate these ideas...
Interval Research Corporation was founded in 1992. NCSA's Mosaic browser was invented in 1992 with the first public release in 1993. Most modern browsers owe their foundations to NCSA not Interval Research Corporation. NCSA also had the first web sites to host bodies of audiovisual information as well. So this claim seems to be unfounded.
The second and third claims are even more ludicrous. There have been "attention managers" that display alerts on video displays for as long as there have been video displays. I was programming them before Al Gore invented the internet and I was programming them on the internet before Interval Research Corporation was a gleam in Allen's eye...
Nothing to say about the 4th patent...
there's good reason to believe that experts historically underestimate the rate of advancement
Except in the area of artificial intelligence. About every 5 years, starting back in the early 1950s, some group of experts have proclaimed that human level intelligence would be simulated on a computer "within the next 20 years". They all overestimated the growth rate in this field... and continue to do so, in all likelihood.
Don't confuse what Moore's Law does for technology with growth of knowledge about the human brain. We know a lot more than we did 60 years ago... but we still don't have a clue how the damn things work.
We're like aliens probing semiconductors at the nanoscale trying to figure out how computers work, with no concept yet of CPUs or software or algorithms...
The playbook only tells you the general plan. In reality, players have to react to hundreds or thousands of variables. Dumb people don't make it in real football... which is not to say that real football players don't do some really dumb stuff, but then you should see what goes on after hours at Strings.
As far as recording calls, it's actually much simpler than this. All that is required for recording in two party states is a regular interval beep. Why not make the capability available to all and just insert the beeps?
Now if you want to secretly record, that's different...
A guy once told me that he secretly recorded all of his calls so he could catch people in lies... I told him that he should just tell everyone he was recording and then people would be less likely to lie in the first place. Better to get the truth up front than to try and sort through lies. So to that end, I want an app that inserts regular interval beeps into my conversation so people think they are being recorded.