While Apple's terms are different from carrier to carrier, a major complaint from the European carriers is that Apple forces them to sell a certain amount of iPhones over a determined amount of time. If the carrier does not meet this quota, then they must pay Apple for the unsold devices.
The "compensate Apple" referred to in the summary appears to simply be that they need to pay for the devices they ordered even if they can't re-sell them to consumers. I know that the EU has strong protections for consumers being able to send goods back, so I would imagine they've got a case to be heard here.
However I have to wonder what the motivation is behind this. It's not like iPhones are sitting on shelves unsold and I don't see how a minimum order quantity is in any way unfair. The carrier knows that they don't have to push the iPhone on consumers and they'll sell their stock regardless. Is this a bargaining chip for other things, or do these factors have an effect on something in the pipeline?
scroll-bars that stay in place, and not having to fucking scroll in order to see the scroll bars in the first place. That is a serious fail, imho, and enough for me to tell my parents not to upgrade their 10.6 machines up.
Seriously? System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always. Problem solved, and it's a hell of a lot easier than answering questions like why Application X won't install, or remembering the UI for two revisions back when explaining how to do something over the phone.
Some of the phones released this summer are already being promised to work with 9.0 which comes out next summer.
This is not that much different from Android updates.
I remember I bought a Sony Xperia Pro because Sony committed to upgrading all of their 2011 phones to Android 4.0. I waited over a year for that to happen, then finally switched to the iPhone a few months after Android 4.1 was released and Sony were still refusing to give any information on upgrades.
Promises of upgrades are something easily discarded in the phone industry these days. You have to look at the company's track record. Microsoft's isn't too great.
EVERY Android phone has had better specs than the contemporary iPhone of the day. This goes all the way back to the original iPhone. The HTC G1 had more memory and a faster processor than the iPhone or iPhone 3G.
The G1 was released almost 18 months after the original iPhone - it wasn't a contemporary of the original iPhone, it was one generation later. And it may have had better specs than the iPhone 3G, but it was much slower - at the time, I had a G1 as my primary phone and my full-time job was developing for the iPhone, so I used both heavily every day. If the G1 had better specs, it certainly didn't show.
IETester can and will render things differently to Internet Explorer. If you are using that to test, you aren't testing if your websites are compatible with Internet Explorer, you are testing if they are compatible with IETester. There is no point testing in something other than Internet Explorer if you want to know if something is compatible with Internet Explorer. Use the virtual images.
"These images are specifically designed to run on Microsoft Virtual PC, and may or may not work in other hosting environments." I'd assume that Microsoft Virtual PC is available only for Windows. Users will need to buy a copy of Windows.
ievms has automatically handled setting these images up under the cross-platform VirtualBox for years. Nevertheless, you were pointed at outdated tools. You should be looking at modern.ie, where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
So in order to test on every browser without having to own multiple computers, one would have to replace one's current computer with a Mac (to be able to run Safari for Mac)
Doing a decent job of testing for web developers is expensive. Buying a Mac isn't a big deal. second-hand Mac Minis are cheap. It's the mobile devices you need to worry about - and no, something running on your computer is not an adequate substitute.
It was very useful for developers looking to support as many different users as possible
No, it was useful for developers looking to cut corners. Screenshots simply aren't a reliable way of testing something that the user will be interacting with. For instance, one particularly nasty Internet Explorer 6 bug made all the text on a page disappear - but only when the window was resized. There are some Android bugs where the tap target for links is different to where they appear on screen. Some Internet Explorer 8 bugs only manifest themselves while something is being animated.
Aside from the inherent limitations with a screenshot service, I've personally witnessed cases where this tool renders things differently to how a genuine browser renders it. It looks suspiciously like they were using a technique similar to IETester, because they got identical things wrong. A genuine copy of Internet Explorer 6 was rendering something one way, and this tool was showing Internet Explorer rendering something a completely different way.
The only reliable way of testing websites is with virtual machines. It's a little resource intensive, but it guarantees that you are testing with the actual browser and not with some Frankenstein reproduction, and it lets you replicate how a user actually uses the website - which is not by passively looking at it without any interaction.
He's not describing a paywall at all. Just because you can't think of any way to give money to content creators without a paywall, it doesn't mean the two things are synonymous. Look into micropatronage and the street performer protocol, for example.
Part of the benefit to working from home is the lack of interruptions and the ability to just get your head down and do your work. If you're complaining that they "aren't checking in enough" or "unavailable", you're basically complaining that they are using working from home as effectively as they can.
Now if you have a real productivity metric that shows they are less productive, then fair enough. But half of the reason working from home is a benefit is to get away from pointless unwork interruptions like that. Demanding that they check in with their managers is basically saying "we don't believe you are working, stop everything you are doing every so often to reassure us that you are working", and I'm not surprised that this renders these people less productive.
During the 2010 Christmas shopping season, Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7-inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung's Galaxy, as being 'tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7-inch diagonal] iPad,' adding that 'the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA â" dead on arrival.'
It was easier to make a decent small tablet later than it was earlier due to technology improvements. If the first iPad was 7.9" but otherwise used the same battery technology, you'd have seen a lot of people complaining about the battery life - the third generation iPad had a 70% greater capacity than its predecessor, and those improvements to the technology will have made a significant different to the utility of a smaller iPad.
Of course the Mini is cheaper, but not by much â" $329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage.
This isn't even a faddish story. It's an advert. This guy is a publicity whore, the only question is whether Slashdot were dumb enough to run his ad for free or not.
Identical twins isn't the interesting case. It's the conjoined twins that are the real puzzle. Suppose there are a pair of conjoined twins. One is an artist and hates computers, one is a programmer and hates art. Everybody knows this and will testify to the fact. When the artist goes to sleep, the programmer whips out a laptop and hacks into the Pentagon. He gets caught, gets arrested, and admits guilt... what are you going to do, imprison him?
I understand that it might not be immediately obvious, but I don't think this was a secret by any means. It uses Google Wallet for payments, which is essentially Google's answer to PayPal, and this gives your contact details to the person you are buying from. The first time I bought anything from Google Marketplace, I received a confirmation email from the developers themselves, it never occurred to me that people might not realise this.
I can see both sides of the argument. I've seen what happens when developers don't have this information, such as with Apple's App Store - it's very frustrating as you want to reach out to customers that have had problems and posted negative reviews to try to solve their problem and prevent it from happening to anybody else, but you've got no way of contacting them.
On the other hand, I've been spammed by people I've bought goods from through Amazon's Marketplace, so I'm not keen on that happening again. The ideal solution would be for Google to provide a forwarding, anonymised email address to the developers, like Facebook do with Facebook app developers.
Take a look at the context. We're talking about the earning potential of apps on the Mac App Store. It used to be the case that you couldn't make many sales because there weren't many people using the Mac App Store. Now you can make a lot more sales because a lot more people are using it.
The travesty is that people will be buying products labelled "iPhone" under the belief that they are buying the Apple product
Then they are stupid.
Yes, what idiots they are for confusing a phone called "iPhone", with a full-size touch screen, rounded corners, a camera, and the ability to run apps... with a phone called "iPhone", with a full-size touch screen, rounded corners, a camera, and the ability to run apps.
Just because they don't have in-depth knowledge of the smart phone market, it doesn't make them idiots.
Does the US company deserve to
As I have repeatedly pointed out again and again, my point is not about what either company deserves. It's about what consumers deserve. That's why trademarks exist - not to give companies benefits, but to protect consumers, to ensure that they can be confident enough to spend a lot of money on something and know that they will get the genuine article. Whether it's convenient or not, people purchasing something called an "iPhone" will be expecting the Apple product, and trademarks are there to make sure they get the product they are expecting.
Yes, it's a mess - I said as much in my first comment. And yes, simply giving Apple the trademark is a bad solution as well. But the current solution completely undermines the purpose of trademarks in the first place. If the trademarks don't protect consumers in this way, there's no point in having them, that's their whole purpose.
Most people aren't as knowledgable about technology as the average Slashdotter. They aren't stupid just because they confuse a phone called "iPhone" that has a full-size touchscreen, rounded corners, camera, and the ability to run apps with a phone called "iPhone" that has a full-size touchscreen, rounded corners, camera, and the ability to run apps. Your analogy with the fruit is ridiculous.
Which is why companies name products differently in markets where they were not able to secure the trademark.
That might have worked in the past, but now that the world is so connected, that's no longer a decent solution. Suppose Apple were to call their product "Apple Phone" in Brazil. If somebody buys a product labelled "iPhone" and gets it home to find that it's a cheap Android clone instead of an Apple Phone, do you think that's what they were expecting?
Sorry, the only travesty here is that Apple can continue to sell products in Brasil under the name iPhone.
The travesty is that people will be buying products labelled "iPhone" under the belief that they are buying the Apple product. This is exactly the scenario trademarks are intended to address, and the fact that they have not done so is an utter failure.
Now, by all means argue that Apple should not be able to just come in and usurp a pre-existing product - that's certainly a reasonable position to take - but you can't say that this isn't a failure of trademark law to protect consumers.
It's true that there's no good solution to the fact that somebody can register a trademark locally then get steamrollered by a massive multinational
On a side note, "wiki" is a type of software, the website is called "Wikipedia", and it serves quite well as an introduction for somebody unfamiliar with a field.
this ruling is just what the trademark is about. They were first to claim the name
What? No, that's not what trademarks are about. From Wikipedia:
The essential function of a trademark is to exclusively identify the commercial source or origin of products or services, so a trademark, properly called, indicates source or serves as a badge of origin. In other words, trademarks serve to identify a particular business as the source of goods or services.
Trademarks are for identification purposes. When people buy an iPhone, the trademark is there so that they know when it says "iPhone" on the box, it's the iPhone they are thinking of and not some other product.
Trademarks have never been land grabs where the first person to claim the name wins. Consider examples like "Escalator". That was originally a trademark, but became generic. Now anybody can make an escalator and call it such.
People are going to be buying these iPhones under the impression they are the product Apple produces. This is exactly what trademarks are intended to prevent - one product being passed off as another and the consumer unwittingly being fooled into buying something they don't want.
It's true that there's no good solution to the fact that somebody can register a trademark locally then get steamrollered by a massive multinational, but this is just a complete failure of trademark law - this ruling allows the very thing that trademarks are intended to prevent.
It seems relatively straightforward to solve. Just make the watch only transmit data if the device it is paired with is available. When you put your phone into airplane mode, it switches off the Bluetooth radio, your watch sees the signal drop off, and reverts to disconnected mode, which just shows the time. When you take your phone out of airplane mode, your watch sees the signal reappear and reconnects.
Slashdot Mirror
The "compensate Apple" referred to in the summary appears to simply be that they need to pay for the devices they ordered even if they can't re-sell them to consumers. I know that the EU has strong protections for consumers being able to send goods back, so I would imagine they've got a case to be heard here.
However I have to wonder what the motivation is behind this. It's not like iPhones are sitting on shelves unsold and I don't see how a minimum order quantity is in any way unfair. The carrier knows that they don't have to push the iPhone on consumers and they'll sell their stock regardless. Is this a bargaining chip for other things, or do these factors have an effect on something in the pipeline?
Seriously? System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars > Always. Problem solved, and it's a hell of a lot easier than answering questions like why Application X won't install, or remembering the UI for two revisions back when explaining how to do something over the phone.
I remember I bought a Sony Xperia Pro because Sony committed to upgrading all of their 2011 phones to Android 4.0. I waited over a year for that to happen, then finally switched to the iPhone a few months after Android 4.1 was released and Sony were still refusing to give any information on upgrades.
Promises of upgrades are something easily discarded in the phone industry these days. You have to look at the company's track record. Microsoft's isn't too great.
The G1 was released almost 18 months after the original iPhone - it wasn't a contemporary of the original iPhone, it was one generation later. And it may have had better specs than the iPhone 3G, but it was much slower - at the time, I had a G1 as my primary phone and my full-time job was developing for the iPhone, so I used both heavily every day. If the G1 had better specs, it certainly didn't show.
IETester can and will render things differently to Internet Explorer. If you are using that to test, you aren't testing if your websites are compatible with Internet Explorer, you are testing if they are compatible with IETester. There is no point testing in something other than Internet Explorer if you want to know if something is compatible with Internet Explorer. Use the virtual images.
ievms has automatically handled setting these images up under the cross-platform VirtualBox for years. Nevertheless, you were pointed at outdated tools. You should be looking at modern.ie, where Microsoft offer virtual images for multiple virtualisation systems running on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Doing a decent job of testing for web developers is expensive. Buying a Mac isn't a big deal. second-hand Mac Minis are cheap. It's the mobile devices you need to worry about - and no, something running on your computer is not an adequate substitute.
No, it was useful for developers looking to cut corners. Screenshots simply aren't a reliable way of testing something that the user will be interacting with. For instance, one particularly nasty Internet Explorer 6 bug made all the text on a page disappear - but only when the window was resized. There are some Android bugs where the tap target for links is different to where they appear on screen. Some Internet Explorer 8 bugs only manifest themselves while something is being animated.
Aside from the inherent limitations with a screenshot service, I've personally witnessed cases where this tool renders things differently to how a genuine browser renders it. It looks suspiciously like they were using a technique similar to IETester, because they got identical things wrong. A genuine copy of Internet Explorer 6 was rendering something one way, and this tool was showing Internet Explorer rendering something a completely different way.
The only reliable way of testing websites is with virtual machines. It's a little resource intensive, but it guarantees that you are testing with the actual browser and not with some Frankenstein reproduction, and it lets you replicate how a user actually uses the website - which is not by passively looking at it without any interaction.
He's not describing a paywall at all. Just because you can't think of any way to give money to content creators without a paywall, it doesn't mean the two things are synonymous. Look into micropatronage and the street performer protocol, for example.
Part of the benefit to working from home is the lack of interruptions and the ability to just get your head down and do your work. If you're complaining that they "aren't checking in enough" or "unavailable", you're basically complaining that they are using working from home as effectively as they can.
Now if you have a real productivity metric that shows they are less productive, then fair enough. But half of the reason working from home is a benefit is to get away from pointless unwork interruptions like that. Demanding that they check in with their managers is basically saying "we don't believe you are working, stop everything you are doing every so often to reassure us that you are working", and I'm not surprised that this renders these people less productive.
He was right - emphasis on "current crop". Despite announcing that they had shipped 2M Galaxy Tabs to stores in Jan 2011, they only managed to sell 1.4M by Q2 2012.
It was easier to make a decent small tablet later than it was earlier due to technology improvements. If the first iPad was 7.9" but otherwise used the same battery technology, you'd have seen a lot of people complaining about the battery life - the third generation iPad had a 70% greater capacity than its predecessor, and those improvements to the technology will have made a significant different to the utility of a smaller iPad.
That's 16GB storage, not 16KB.
This isn't even a faddish story. It's an advert. This guy is a publicity whore, the only question is whether Slashdot were dumb enough to run his ad for free or not.
Identical twins isn't the interesting case. It's the conjoined twins that are the real puzzle. Suppose there are a pair of conjoined twins. One is an artist and hates computers, one is a programmer and hates art. Everybody knows this and will testify to the fact. When the artist goes to sleep, the programmer whips out a laptop and hacks into the Pentagon. He gets caught, gets arrested, and admits guilt... what are you going to do, imprison him?
Betteridge's law of headlines: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no".
That's a fallacy. It's entirely possible that Broder or Musk are entirely full of shit.
I understand that it might not be immediately obvious, but I don't think this was a secret by any means. It uses Google Wallet for payments, which is essentially Google's answer to PayPal, and this gives your contact details to the person you are buying from. The first time I bought anything from Google Marketplace, I received a confirmation email from the developers themselves, it never occurred to me that people might not realise this.
I can see both sides of the argument. I've seen what happens when developers don't have this information, such as with Apple's App Store - it's very frustrating as you want to reach out to customers that have had problems and posted negative reviews to try to solve their problem and prevent it from happening to anybody else, but you've got no way of contacting them.
On the other hand, I've been spammed by people I've bought goods from through Amazon's Marketplace, so I'm not keen on that happening again. The ideal solution would be for Google to provide a forwarding, anonymised email address to the developers, like Facebook do with Facebook app developers.
Take a look at the context. We're talking about the earning potential of apps on the Mac App Store. It used to be the case that you couldn't make many sales because there weren't many people using the Mac App Store. Now you can make a lot more sales because a lot more people are using it.
Yes, what idiots they are for confusing a phone called "iPhone", with a full-size touch screen, rounded corners, a camera, and the ability to run apps... with a phone called "iPhone", with a full-size touch screen, rounded corners, a camera, and the ability to run apps.
Just because they don't have in-depth knowledge of the smart phone market, it doesn't make them idiots.
As I have repeatedly pointed out again and again, my point is not about what either company deserves. It's about what consumers deserve. That's why trademarks exist - not to give companies benefits, but to protect consumers, to ensure that they can be confident enough to spend a lot of money on something and know that they will get the genuine article. Whether it's convenient or not, people purchasing something called an "iPhone" will be expecting the Apple product, and trademarks are there to make sure they get the product they are expecting.
Yes, it's a mess - I said as much in my first comment. And yes, simply giving Apple the trademark is a bad solution as well. But the current solution completely undermines the purpose of trademarks in the first place. If the trademarks don't protect consumers in this way, there's no point in having them, that's their whole purpose.
As I have re-iterated several times in this thread: the consumer.
Most people aren't as knowledgable about technology as the average Slashdotter. They aren't stupid just because they confuse a phone called "iPhone" that has a full-size touchscreen, rounded corners, camera, and the ability to run apps with a phone called "iPhone" that has a full-size touchscreen, rounded corners, camera, and the ability to run apps. Your analogy with the fruit is ridiculous.
That might have worked in the past, but now that the world is so connected, that's no longer a decent solution. Suppose Apple were to call their product "Apple Phone" in Brazil. If somebody buys a product labelled "iPhone" and gets it home to find that it's a cheap Android clone instead of an Apple Phone, do you think that's what they were expecting?
The travesty is that people will be buying products labelled "iPhone" under the belief that they are buying the Apple product. This is exactly the scenario trademarks are intended to address, and the fact that they have not done so is an utter failure.
Now, by all means argue that Apple should not be able to just come in and usurp a pre-existing product - that's certainly a reasonable position to take - but you can't say that this isn't a failure of trademark law to protect consumers.
Please refer to my first comment:
On a side note, "wiki" is a type of software, the website is called "Wikipedia", and it serves quite well as an introduction for somebody unfamiliar with a field.
There are almost 200 countries in the world. Good luck coming up with a short, pronounceable product name that is original in all of them.
What? No, that's not what trademarks are about. From Wikipedia:
Trademarks are for identification purposes. When people buy an iPhone, the trademark is there so that they know when it says "iPhone" on the box, it's the iPhone they are thinking of and not some other product.
Trademarks have never been land grabs where the first person to claim the name wins. Consider examples like "Escalator". That was originally a trademark, but became generic. Now anybody can make an escalator and call it such.
People are going to be buying these iPhones under the impression they are the product Apple produces. This is exactly what trademarks are intended to prevent - one product being passed off as another and the consumer unwittingly being fooled into buying something they don't want.
It's true that there's no good solution to the fact that somebody can register a trademark locally then get steamrollered by a massive multinational, but this is just a complete failure of trademark law - this ruling allows the very thing that trademarks are intended to prevent.
It seems relatively straightforward to solve. Just make the watch only transmit data if the device it is paired with is available. When you put your phone into airplane mode, it switches off the Bluetooth radio, your watch sees the signal drop off, and reverts to disconnected mode, which just shows the time. When you take your phone out of airplane mode, your watch sees the signal reappear and reconnects.