Correct. Most usability improvements are not innovation, they are the application of known principles of usability engineering to the development of products.
So in the past 4 years Apple has added to it's 'usability' stable with:
Some of it is good engineering, very little of it is innovation.
Meta-data database in the OS as an information management feature
Has been around since the 1960's.
Dashboard, though I don't know how 'revolutionary' it will be
Ah, yes, Apple: continuing a proud tradition of stomping over other people's project names and trademarks, demonstrating both a disregard for the ideas of others, as well as their ignorance.
And, no, not innovative either: Windows, KDE, and Gnome have software like this already.
Automator, a pervasive scripting tool to access the pervasive scripting environment available for over 15 years
Nope, not innovative either. These kinds of end user scripting environments were first developed decades ago.
What has Microsoft done that is innovative in the past 10 years?
Microsoft has shipped very little that is innovative either. What does that have to do with Apple?
We are talking about research and innovation. Apple isn't investing in research or innovation, they are investing in engineering and marketing.
You seem to be expecting Apple to conduct pure science. That isn't where R&D money goes.
It is well understood what "computer science research" means for a company like Apple, and Apple isn't doing it. It doesn't mean "pure science", it means developing new ideas that change the face of computing. Ideas like the personal computer, the GUI, the mouse, desktop search, etc. None of those came from Apple, Apple just took those ideas that other companies invested billions in and built their own business around them--it's what they have done pretty much since they were founded.
There are some policy questions one might ask. Should game designs really be protected indefinitely? Should electronic versions of games infringe on their original versions?
But right now, Hasbro seems to be within its rights, and they could face problems if they don't stop this. So, I don't see why they are being criticized for this action.
How about leading the march on all of the important new technologies?
That simply is an expression of the fact that Apple is a smaller company with limited marketshare and an integrated product: they can bring technologies to market a little quicker than other, larger companies. That doesn't mean they invented the technologies. And usually, they aren't even the first to market, they are simply the first to market that is big enough to be noticed by your average consumer.
To ditch legacy ports and the floppy? To sell a computer with a GUI and mouse? To ship computers with integrated sound? To sell a laser printer for desktop use? Need I go on?
No, you need not go on, because if you think that Apple did any of those things, you have already demonstrated your ignorance. Apple wasn't first in any of those areas, but the fact that you seem to think they were is just another example of the myths surrounding them.
Apple spends a disproportionally huge amount of money on R&D. In turn, they have a disproportionate impact on the PC industry.
I challenge you to support that assertion with actual figures; I would like to see those figures, because I have been unable to track them down.
If they actually are spending a lot on R&D, they aren't getting much research out of it. Microsoft, IBM, and Google are visible in the research world, with publications, job postings, professional activities, and people; Apple is essentially non-existent in the research world.
As I've said before, Microsoft R&D is just a way to make sure there are a lot of smart people not producing things for other companies. It's basically a cushy prision for people Microsoft fears being in the wrong hands.
Why would Microsoft need to put these people into a "prison" if companies like Apple don't have jobs for them anyway? Where are the job postings for people with research-level qualifications from Apple? Apple employees neither publish much, nor does Apple even hire the kind of people that deliver innovation.
Apple used to have a research lab that looked promising and produced some great stuff, but that was short lived and closed about a decade ago. Nowadays, Apple just seems to have engineers who confuse product feature lists and usability engineering with "innovation".
That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.
With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.
In your rush to discredit Apple, you were a bit too hasty in dismissing the accomplishments of the programmer as well.
Using the accelerometer for parking the disk head may or may not be "innovative", since parking disk heads in emergencies is actually a standard feature in many drives. But using a built-in accelerometer as a user interface definitely is in no way innovative; those uses are old in human computer interaction.
So, why discredit the notion that some idea is innovative when it isn't? Because believable claims of innovation have important real-world consequences. For example, when people make a big deal out of a company doing something that was actually developed in academia, people get the wrong impression of where to put their money if they want innovation. The fact is that most of the nifty ideas in commercial software systems, ideas that the companies like to portray as "novel" and "innovative", were developed in academia with public funding.
Oh, I'm sorry, the ISP is delivering 30X the requirements for a single call and still has possibility that the call quality could be affected by node traffic fluctuations.
And then, for the nth time, RDP, gaming, security cameras, and lots of other services won't work correctly either, because they require more bandwidth and latency that is at least as low as VoIP.
Order of magnitude off - go back and read up on voip. G.711 - 80kbps for 20ms frames when you add UDP/IP packet overhead. So 80*20 = 1600kps.
With a decent codec, VoIP requires less than 8kbps, and it pretty much doesn't matter whether you use TCP, UDP, or some other network protocol. Using G.711 for VoIP is just plain stupid.
Agreed. At the base, maintaining a VPN connection does not require anywhere near the real-time capabilities of voice. We are both guilty of making blanket statements about VPN traffic patterns.
I pointed out the possibility that real-time traffic flows through a VPN, you point out the possibility that a VPN might not carry real-time traffic. My point is relevant to the discussion, yours is not: if ISPs support VPNs (and they have to), they have to support them well enough so that the real-time traffic that may flow through those VPNs arrives in time at the other end.
Windows and Mac flash-card programs are a bit inconvenient because they run on Windows and Mac machines--not exactly portable.
For about $100, you can get a Palm, and there are plenty of flash card and language learning programs for that.
However, I would also disagree with the statement that you shouldn't bother with CDs. In fact, in my experience, while you should do some reading, most of your time should be spent with tapes/CDs. If you don't focus on learning the spoken language before you attack the written language, you will likely end up with a horrendous accent.
Foreign language-only drill-tapes are the best ones, I find (like those from Barron's). If some company shipped them as MP3s, that would be even better, but converting them yourself isn't hard.
Surely your kidding - VPNs don't have more strict real-time requirements than voice.
VPNs have the real-time requirements of the traffic that runs through them.
Lets say the user is downloading at 3mbps (his promised speed)
You sound like a nerd living at home by himself. In fact, ISPs better offer reasonably good simultaneous connections, because otherwise, in a normal family, junior (playing games), dad (on RDP to the office), mom (listening to MP3s), and sister (downloading an ISO) are going to be pissed. Or, for that matter, are multiple small office users.
So the ISP is delivering 20X the requirements for a basic call and yet the end user can experience a call degredation.
Sorry, even your far fetched scenario isn't realistic. Besides, you are an order of magnitude off on the requirements of voice.
While I'm fully convinced that the Battery Life Activator is nonsense, the experiments trying to prove that it is are as poorly done as those trying to prove that it works. Grabbing a random battery out of a photo bag and cycling it a few times with and without the sticker isn't a good experimental test.
At some point, Adaptec was putting out several incompatible versions of their SCSI controllers (I believe the 2940). That wouldn't have been so bad if their own drivers didn't get confused about that: if you used the wrong driver/card combination on Windows, you wouldn't get an error, things would just mysteriously fail.
That was just one of many headaches I have had with Adaptec cards. I just ended up avoiding Adaptec altogether whenever I could. Adapters from other companies turned out to be cheaper and easier to use/install. Several other companies also had better FOSS support.
I think it is quite common for vendors to put out hardware that isn't quite engineered up to spec, where, if you looked at its design and interface, you'd see that it really can't work quite right, or get the performance they claim. Another reason is that the documentation may simply not exist, a clear indication of poor engineering practices at the hardware vendor. I suspect that's actually the main reason so many hardware vendors are so secretive about their interfaces: they don't want to air their dirty laundry in public.
As a rule of thumb, if you are buying a piece of hardware, buy one for which known, good, independently-developed open source drivers exist. The existence of such drivers is a good indication that the hardware is well-documented, probably decently designed, and that it probably does what it is advertised as doing. And that's a good rule of thumb even if you are buying the hardware that you only intend to use with closed-source operating systems.
Now if only they'd let me have a cigarette I could actually be productive too.
Yeah, and everybody else wouldn't be. People, be a bit more considerate on flights: it's hundreds of people in a little tin can.
If you have a cough or cold, get medicine beforehand so that you don't cough or sniffle, both to reduce noise and to reduce infectivity. Get a face mask if you can't control it in order to protect those around you. If you do need to make noise related to bodily functions, go to the toilet.
If you have children that might make noise, make sure they are tired before you get on the plane, get them toys, and get them pacifiers (or chewing gum or whatever). Everybody might agree that your children are really cute at the airport, but when people are tired and uncomfortable on an airplane, your children will seem like little monsters to them when they scream, run around, whine, or cry.
Conversations are a great way to pass the time, but please keep them hushed and subdued during "quiet time".
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.
Were you just not listening? ISP's can't afford to degrade non-voice traffic to that point, not by oversubscription and not by fiddling with the routers. That's because whole classes of essential applications other than VoIP demand better service than VoIP itself. Gaming is a major application (in fact, voice in gaming is a major application) that requires stricter real-time guarantees than VoIP and more bandwidth. In fact, any use of VPN is.
And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
What TFA is saying is that the network operators will prioritize their own voice so that it always gets delivered. Each line requires only 80kbps
And what I am saying is that any broadband ISP that doesn't achieve >80kbps and <100ms latency almost all the time for non-prioritized traffic might as well close shop, because lots of applications demand that, not just VoIP (of course, VoIP needs much less bandwidth than that anyway).
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to that is to create an XUL plugin for IE: then, people have an open choice and alternative.
What, usability isn't innovation?
Correct. Most usability improvements are not innovation, they are the application of known principles of usability engineering to the development of products.
So in the past 4 years Apple has added to it's 'usability' stable with:
Some of it is good engineering, very little of it is innovation.
Meta-data database in the OS as an information management feature
Has been around since the 1960's.
Dashboard, though I don't know how 'revolutionary' it will be
Ah, yes, Apple: continuing a proud tradition of stomping over other people's project names and trademarks, demonstrating both a disregard for the ideas of others, as well as their ignorance.
And, no, not innovative either: Windows, KDE, and Gnome have software like this already.
Automator, a pervasive scripting tool to access the pervasive scripting environment available for over 15 years
Nope, not innovative either. These kinds of end user scripting environments were first developed decades ago.
What has Microsoft done that is innovative in the past 10 years?
Microsoft has shipped very little that is innovative either. What does that have to do with Apple?
Yeah, that was before people started creating "hard drives" that one could put a system on.
Um, no. Hard drives were first, personal computers later.
There are huge security risks in this
Not with a properly designed system. Unfortunately, neither Apple nor Microsoft have designed their systems to make this sort of thing secure.
Implementing something well does require R&D
We are talking about research and innovation. Apple isn't investing in research or innovation, they are investing in engineering and marketing.
You seem to be expecting Apple to conduct pure science. That isn't where R&D money goes.
It is well understood what "computer science research" means for a company like Apple, and Apple isn't doing it. It doesn't mean "pure science", it means developing new ideas that change the face of computing. Ideas like the personal computer, the GUI, the mouse, desktop search, etc. None of those came from Apple, Apple just took those ideas that other companies invested billions in and built their own business around them--it's what they have done pretty much since they were founded.
There are some policy questions one might ask. Should game designs really be protected indefinitely? Should electronic versions of games infringe on their original versions?
But right now, Hasbro seems to be within its rights, and they could face problems if they don't stop this. So, I don't see why they are being criticized for this action.
So, you are saying that Apple often isn't first with an idea, they are however good at implementing things and marketing them. Well, we agree then.
That's why it won't make much of a difference if Apple gets more revenue: the company just isn't investing in research.
I bought a 15" powerbook. With after market addition of a 1GB DIMM raising the price to $2100,
I just bought a 15" x86-based laptop for under $1500 (80G, 1G, SuperDrive, 1280x800), and I was already paying a premium for a nice-looking design.
it does everything a $2500 windows machine does with much less worries regarding a virus,
I don't worry about viruses either--I run Linux on it.
How about leading the march on all of the important new technologies?
That simply is an expression of the fact that Apple is a smaller company with limited marketshare and an integrated product: they can bring technologies to market a little quicker than other, larger companies. That doesn't mean they invented the technologies. And usually, they aren't even the first to market, they are simply the first to market that is big enough to be noticed by your average consumer.
To ditch legacy ports and the floppy? To sell a computer with a GUI and mouse? To ship computers with integrated sound? To sell a laser printer for desktop use? Need I go on?
No, you need not go on, because if you think that Apple did any of those things, you have already demonstrated your ignorance. Apple wasn't first in any of those areas, but the fact that you seem to think they were is just another example of the myths surrounding them.
Apple spends a disproportionally huge amount of money on R&D. In turn, they have a disproportionate impact on the PC industry.
I challenge you to support that assertion with actual figures; I would like to see those figures, because I have been unable to track them down.
If they actually are spending a lot on R&D, they aren't getting much research out of it. Microsoft, IBM, and Google are visible in the research world, with publications, job postings, professional activities, and people; Apple is essentially non-existent in the research world.
As I've said before, Microsoft R&D is just a way to make sure there are a lot of smart people not producing things for other companies. It's basically a cushy prision for people Microsoft fears being in the wrong hands.
Why would Microsoft need to put these people into a "prison" if companies like Apple don't have jobs for them anyway? Where are the job postings for people with research-level qualifications from Apple? Apple employees neither publish much, nor does Apple even hire the kind of people that deliver innovation.
Apple used to have a research lab that looked promising and produced some great stuff, but that was short lived and closed about a decade ago. Nowadays, Apple just seems to have engineers who confuse product feature lists and usability engineering with "innovation".
What exactly are people afraid of, that they can't commit a crime anymore and get away with it?
No, what they are afraid of is that they will show up as a false positive and then face charges based on "incontrovertible" DNA evidence.
In fact, what has come out in many legal cases so far is that handling and processing DNA by forensic labs often leaves a lot to be desired.
That's one fingerprint. It helps you verify that a cooperative person actually the license holder. However, it is of little use for forensic purposes.
I believe the top market share the Apple II ever achieved was around 16%.
That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.
With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.
More marketshare means more income to spend on R&D. With what Apple puts out already
Can you point to any important research publications by Apple researchers in the last few years? I haven't seen any.
At some point, there's a threshold where growth begins to fuel itself through momentum (maybe ~10% or so).
Apple had more than 15% market share at some point; they dropped to the current 2-3% from that.
So what do camera sensors have to do with tilt/shift sensors?
They also sense motion by the user.
In any case, the PS/2 isn't the prior art for this. There have been dozens of papers on using orientation sensors and accelerometers for HCI.
since few consoles are in a position to be easily picked up and shifted around...
So are few laptops. These kinds of sensors are most useful in cell phones, GPS units, and PDAs.
In your rush to discredit Apple, you were a bit too hasty in dismissing the accomplishments of the programmer as well.
Using the accelerometer for parking the disk head may or may not be "innovative", since parking disk heads in emergencies is actually a standard feature in many drives. But using a built-in accelerometer as a user interface definitely is in no way innovative; those uses are old in human computer interaction.
So, why discredit the notion that some idea is innovative when it isn't? Because believable claims of innovation have important real-world consequences. For example, when people make a big deal out of a company doing something that was actually developed in academia, people get the wrong impression of where to put their money if they want innovation. The fact is that most of the nifty ideas in commercial software systems, ideas that the companies like to portray as "novel" and "innovative", were developed in academia with public funding.
Oh, I'm sorry, the ISP is delivering 30X the requirements for a single call and still has possibility that the call quality could be affected by node traffic fluctuations.
And then, for the nth time, RDP, gaming, security cameras, and lots of other services won't work correctly either, because they require more bandwidth and latency that is at least as low as VoIP.
Order of magnitude off - go back and read up on voip. G.711 - 80kbps for 20ms frames when you add UDP/IP packet overhead. So 80*20 = 1600kps.
With a decent codec, VoIP requires less than 8kbps, and it pretty much doesn't matter whether you use TCP, UDP, or some other network protocol. Using G.711 for VoIP is just plain stupid.
Agreed. At the base, maintaining a VPN connection does not require anywhere near the real-time capabilities of voice. We are both guilty of making blanket statements about VPN traffic patterns.
I pointed out the possibility that real-time traffic flows through a VPN, you point out the possibility that a VPN might not carry real-time traffic. My point is relevant to the discussion, yours is not: if ISPs support VPNs (and they have to), they have to support them well enough so that the real-time traffic that may flow through those VPNs arrives in time at the other end.
Windows and Mac flash-card programs are a bit inconvenient because they run on Windows and Mac machines--not exactly portable.
For about $100, you can get a Palm, and there are plenty of flash card and language learning programs for that.
However, I would also disagree with the statement that you shouldn't bother with CDs. In fact, in my experience, while you should do some reading, most of your time should be spent with tapes/CDs. If you don't focus on learning the spoken language before you attack the written language, you will likely end up with a horrendous accent.
Foreign language-only drill-tapes are the best ones, I find (like those from Barron's). If some company shipped them as MP3s, that would be even better, but converting them yourself isn't hard.
Surely your kidding - VPNs don't have more strict real-time requirements than voice.
VPNs have the real-time requirements of the traffic that runs through them.
Lets say the user is downloading at 3mbps (his promised speed)
You sound like a nerd living at home by himself. In fact, ISPs better offer reasonably good simultaneous connections, because otherwise, in a normal family, junior (playing games), dad (on RDP to the office), mom (listening to MP3s), and sister (downloading an ISO) are going to be pissed. Or, for that matter, are multiple small office users.
So the ISP is delivering 20X the requirements for a basic call and yet the end user can experience a call degredation.
Sorry, even your far fetched scenario isn't realistic. Besides, you are an order of magnitude off on the requirements of voice.
While I'm fully convinced that the Battery Life Activator is nonsense, the experiments trying to prove that it is are as poorly done as those trying to prove that it works. Grabbing a random battery out of a photo bag and cycling it a few times with and without the sticker isn't a good experimental test.
At some point, Adaptec was putting out several incompatible versions of their SCSI controllers (I believe the 2940). That wouldn't have been so bad if their own drivers didn't get confused about that: if you used the wrong driver/card combination on Windows, you wouldn't get an error, things would just mysteriously fail.
That was just one of many headaches I have had with Adaptec cards. I just ended up avoiding Adaptec altogether whenever I could. Adapters from other companies turned out to be cheaper and easier to use/install. Several other companies also had better FOSS support.
I think it is quite common for vendors to put out hardware that isn't quite engineered up to spec, where, if you looked at its design and interface, you'd see that it really can't work quite right, or get the performance they claim. Another reason is that the documentation may simply not exist, a clear indication of poor engineering practices at the hardware vendor. I suspect that's actually the main reason so many hardware vendors are so secretive about their interfaces: they don't want to air their dirty laundry in public.
As a rule of thumb, if you are buying a piece of hardware, buy one for which known, good, independently-developed open source drivers exist. The existence of such drivers is a good indication that the hardware is well-documented, probably decently designed, and that it probably does what it is advertised as doing. And that's a good rule of thumb even if you are buying the hardware that you only intend to use with closed-source operating systems.
Now if only they'd let me have a cigarette I could actually be productive too.
Yeah, and everybody else wouldn't be. People, be a bit more considerate on flights: it's hundreds of people in a little tin can.
If you have a cough or cold, get medicine beforehand so that you don't cough or sniffle, both to reduce noise and to reduce infectivity. Get a face mask if you can't control it in order to protect those around you. If you do need to make noise related to bodily functions, go to the toilet.
If you have children that might make noise, make sure they are tired before you get on the plane, get them toys, and get them pacifiers (or chewing gum or whatever). Everybody might agree that your children are really cute at the airport, but when people are tired and uncomfortable on an airplane, your children will seem like little monsters to them when they scream, run around, whine, or cry.
Conversations are a great way to pass the time, but please keep them hushed and subdued during "quiet time".
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.
Were you just not listening? ISP's can't afford to degrade non-voice traffic to that point, not by oversubscription and not by fiddling with the routers. That's because whole classes of essential applications other than VoIP demand better service than VoIP itself. Gaming is a major application (in fact, voice in gaming is a major application) that requires stricter real-time guarantees than VoIP and more bandwidth. In fact, any use of VPN is.
And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
What TFA is saying is that the network operators will prioritize their own voice so that it always gets delivered. Each line requires only 80kbps
And what I am saying is that any broadband ISP that doesn't achieve >80kbps and <100ms latency almost all the time for non-prioritized traffic might as well close shop, because lots of applications demand that, not just VoIP (of course, VoIP needs much less bandwidth than that anyway).
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.