Failure doesn't stem only from bad design. What happens if there's a slight clog in the 3D printer's extruder that creates a bubble or weak spot hidden within a part? A larger company engineers the manufacturing, not only the part, to be reliable, and does quality-control checks along the way as well. The equipment for such checks isn't practical for a consumer doing a one-off.
this has nothing to do with backward compatibility, this is a solid case of "I don't want to pay you for features that my customers need, and I can't provide decent replacement, but my users will buy my stuff anyway, so why bother"
No, it has to do with Google putting restrictions on the use of map data, including not allowing turn-by-turn navigation. Apple knew that it couldn't have a core feature of its product permanently beholden to a competitor and the restrictions it might impose down the line. So, realizing that bringing maps in-house would not get any easier down the line, it decided to rip off the band-aid now. Every other smartphone platform has done the same. Microsoft uses its own maps. Nokia owns Navteq and Google we all know about.
iPhone didn't support 3rd party apps for its entire first year. In fact, Apple's argument was that web apps using exisiting HTML5 technology made more sense. But users kept complaining about the lack of support, spawning jailbreaking and the Cydia store. So, Apple introduced the App Store with the iPhone 3G. Sometimes the market speaks and it wanted native performance.
There are plenty of things that demonstrate that Steve Jobs was human and didn't have perfect taste. Approving the fake wooden iBooks bookcase. Bringing in swatches of Corinthian leather to meeting and insisting that the "Find My Friends" UI replicate the look. And this:
http://www.cultofmac.com/163265/steve-jobs-wanted-to-dress-up-as-willy-wonka-provide-tour-of-apple-campus-for-millionth-imac-purchase/
In one article, Jolie O'Dell opined that Apple's use of a multicolored logo was an aesthetic gaffe marking the post-Jobs decline of Apple. Sounds good, except that Apple also used a flashy, multicolored logo at the original iPad unveiling. Misguided predictions like this are easy but usually short on research.
But they're not. There's no transfer of ownership. You get to choose if you want to take advantage of the huge exposure of the iBooks Store. If so, you use Apple's free tool to create an interactive book format that works there. If not, don't. In either case, you can take that same content and use another tool to format it for a different store without restriction. The only thing you can't do is have your cake and eat it, too: take Apple's free tool and use it to create content for a competing store. It's a restriction on the tool use, not on the fate of your content.
There are many, many software packages that restrict the use of their output. Look at the license of the Home & Student edition of Office 2010: you can't use the output for commercial purposes. Same with many packages that come in a free and for-pay version: the free version is non-commercial. The only difference here is that Apple hasn't (at least yet) offered a for-pay version without the restriction.
Also consider that business tools are commonly used to restrict distribution as well. Amazon won't allow your book to be part of the Kindle Lending Library if you sell it elsewhere, and that's for the *content*. iBooks Author only restricts the the formatting of the content into a particular output format.
There's nothing wrong with a company investing in producing a tool that didn't exist before and which creates interactive eBook output that can't be created easily elsewhere and which can't even be display with full fidelity elsewhere and deciding that it doesn't want to put this tool out there to the advantage of competing stores. Why would a for-profit company do such a thing?
First, Apple is only a case study in this story. The facts apply to just about all electronics products. Further, Apple doesn't boast about this. They audit the suppliers and factories that do work for them and publish their results, with goals for how to improve. They are now a member of the Fair Labor Association. Finally, the article doesn't say that US jobs are lost due to standard of living. Paying Chinese workers American wages would raise the cost of goods only about 25%, according to the article. The situation is far more grim than this. Rather, the U.S. no longer has the dense congregation of many places of manufacture that all tie together into a big supply chain web. The construction of manufacturing capacity sometimes begins even before a contract is actually awarded, just in case, and is subsidized by the government. Further, the U.S. lacks the numbers of workers with the engineering skill that these factories tend to employ: somewhat higher than high school but not a full four-year B.S. degree. We therefore can't easily mobilize and structure a sufficient (in both numbers and skillsets) labor force on short notice. The article states that China could amass the required talent for a job in 15 days that would take 9 *months* in the U.S.
Tesla is following its plan nicely. Knowing that developing the initial platform technology would be expensive, they started with a car that people are typically willing to pay a lot for: a high-performance roadster. Next, they are approximately halving that price while increasing the versatility to expand the potential market. There are many cars in the price range of the Model S that sell well to upper-middle-class customers, especially those that can serve as a primary vehicle such as this 5-door. The work on the Model S will ultimately allow Tesla to bring down the cost of the next model still further with a more mass-market vehicle. Each step furthers the technology and brings in revenue to fund the next step.
No more so than making assault illegal is a violation of your personal right to punch someone. Personal liberties stop where they infringe on the rights of others. Plus, noone is being held down at needle point, just being denied privileges that they can be replaced with private sources. When an individual forgoes a vaccine, they're increasing the chance that you and I will encounter and be infected with the disease (since vaccines aren't 100% effective and since prevention is a combination of reducing exposure and boosting immunity).
It makes far more sense for private industry to focus on where they can make money - transporting cargo such as satellites into orbit. That is, they become orbital trucks. This frees up NASA to work on visionary projects that aren't currently commercially viable: we the people funding, though tax dollars, the learning necessary for our long-term futures.
How you do pay "a lot more" for an iPad? A 10.1" Galaxy Tab is the same price as the iPad as of this moment on a reasonable site such as Amazon.com. And that's without Apple's excellent customer support (phone and retail store), without the ability to extend the warranty an extra year and without the high resale value which reduces total cost of ownership considerably.
An individual site doing its own investigation and coming up with a conclusion that they don't know exactly what's going on (and even stating that their speculations don't fully make sense) is hardly a reason for people to get all upset. Withhold judgment until there's an actual story to judge.
Those food scraps in the landfill become permanent volume. Ever higher mounds. At one point, the Fresh Kills Landfill near where my folks live was the largest manmade object in the world. The small amount of attrition that occurs is into methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.
In contrast, composting breaks down the food into constituent organic components, some of which become soil enrichers and come of which are turned into CO2 (which is released back into the air from which it recently came and so isn't a net climate change contributor).
What would you rather have? A big, permanent pile of stuff taking over your land and releasing undesirable gases or a much smaller static pile that gives off helpful-to-benign byproducts?
Put another way in terms of purely animal matter, would you rather that all the dead creatures of the earth pile up until we're hip deep in them or that they break down naturally for their materials to be reused?
Pretty true for most cases such as typical bus mass transit, but large cities with subways can be an exception. The average New York MTA average consumption per passenger mile is 2000 BTU, which is less than 5500 BTU for a single-passenger car, 3,500 BTU for a car with average passenger load and even less than the 2,300 for typically-loaded car under a 35MPG CAFE standard.
The original iPad racked up 100,000 preorders per day upon announcement, without any real preexisting tablet market to have stoked demand. The fact that it sold 1 million during the first month indicates that fulfilling these levels of orders for a complex product is tricky. Hopefully, since the Fire is based on the Playbook, they've been practicing production for a while.
Yes, but the first Intel Macs weren't released until January 2006. There was barely any time between the hardware being Windows compatible and Apple not only supporting it but actually supplying the enabling drivers. So, the "finally" sentiment is very misplaced, as it implies a long period of unfulfilled demand as someone dragged their feet.
This makes perfect sense to me. With Android, Amazon doesn't have top-to-bottom vertical integration and control, since they still rely on Google to do the core Android development and thus need to either be beholden to Google's timing or continue to work with forks of older versions. If they buy WebOS, they now employ all the programmers and can coordinate all the pieces that go into their tablet. Then could also further develop their EC2-assistance technologies and extend them beyond Silk to further enhance tablet performance.
Buy making their forward-facing UI software completely custom, it's independent of Android from the customer point of view, especially customers buying the device for media and not for Android app compatibiility. This should make it easier to transplant the UI onto a different core OS without confusing customers who've already learned the UI. They could eventually exposure more of WebOS over time and offer a fully-controlled app store for it.
I even wonder if they'd create a special build for $99 TouchPad firesale customers, allowing them to transform their tablets into large-screen Kindle Fires. In effect, HP would have subsidized putting Kindle software into many more Amazon-media-consuming hands.
Although I'm only one datapoint, my Optimum Boost (Cablevision) service north of NYC almost always hits the 50d/8u Mbps that I'm paying for ($15 over base service for the higher speeds). When I've had issues, they've always been catastrophic ones (no signal due to bad connector on the utility pole, etc.) rather than just slowdowns.
Not really. The equivalent would be if your power company charged a flat rate for unlimited electrical use, based on the tacit assumption that there were only so many gadgets and appliances that a regular house would ever run. Then, you go and install a huge cable from your house to your huge office park across the street in order for that park to take advantage of your house's unlimited power plan.
The problem is all the assumptions either implied or in fine print. Companies shouldn't be allowed to offer unlimited service at a flat rate. Such things are untenable, business-wise, since networks can't handle infinite traffic. If a company means that you can use as much data as a given device can consume, that's what the plan should say. The restrictions against another device tapping into that plan's data allotment should be spelled out clearly in advance of a customer signing the contract. Better yet, offer a metered plan that is device agnostic and perhaps which has an escalating cost for the highest monthly data caps as needed to keep network congestion reasonable.
Even when you enforce official APIs for apps, the OS itself must of course use undocumented APIs. That's merely separation of user functions from central system functions. Apple isn't using private APIs in its apps sold through the app store but rather in the implementation of a new OS capability. iOS already has USB sync. Apple just implemented the means to cut the cord. This isn't something an app can do because a central principle of iOS apps is that they are sandboxed and see only their own data. This is what allows users to feel free to try any app without worry of ever corrupting the phone or data from another app. A sync app must obviously see beyond its own sandbox and is thus impossible. That's why Apple made it a central system service.
Note that there is no concept of a system tweak in iOS. You can only buy apps, never any software to customize or modify the OS function itself. Perhaps Apple will one day create APIs to allow this, but the sandboxed app model is the only one right now.
By the way, another reason many private APIs is because the developer, whether Microsoft or Apple, isn't prepared to lock them down or support them. They are subject to change as the functions they implement are refined and co-optimized with the rest of the OS.
If you ran the company, would you throw away the brand value of "i" just for the sake of being imaginative? When you here "i" anything, you know the product is Apple. Most companies would kill for that level of brand recognition.
As many have stated for days now to no avail, the iPhone consolidated.db log does not store and user location data. Even the patent indicates this.
To understand this better, consider how both iOS and Android devices estimate user location when GPS is not available. They triangulate based on position relative to cell towers and wi-fi APs, which, in turn, requires the phone to know the location of these reference points. Since towers and APs don't transmit their own coordinates, phones need access to a position database.
There are two ways this access can happen. The phone can either access the info over the internet, with all attendant delays, or it can maintain a local database and go off-phone only when there is no hit in this cache. But how can one keep this local database from becoming too large? Limit it to those cell towers that the user has connected with in the past, since those are the ones the user is more likely to be near in the future.
This leads to a file on the phone containing location coordinates of towers and APs to which the phone has connected. Not user location data... reference point data. And not in linear time, but only the most recent encounter with each reference point.
In other words, the consolidated.db file. The Apple patent claims exactly this.
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Failure doesn't stem only from bad design. What happens if there's a slight clog in the 3D printer's extruder that creates a bubble or weak spot hidden within a part? A larger company engineers the manufacturing, not only the part, to be reliable, and does quality-control checks along the way as well. The equipment for such checks isn't practical for a consumer doing a one-off.
this has nothing to do with backward compatibility, this is a solid case of "I don't want to pay you for features that my customers need, and I can't provide decent replacement, but my users will buy my stuff anyway, so why bother"
No, it has to do with Google putting restrictions on the use of map data, including not allowing turn-by-turn navigation. Apple knew that it couldn't have a core feature of its product permanently beholden to a competitor and the restrictions it might impose down the line. So, realizing that bringing maps in-house would not get any easier down the line, it decided to rip off the band-aid now. Every other smartphone platform has done the same. Microsoft uses its own maps. Nokia owns Navteq and Google we all know about.
iPhone didn't support 3rd party apps for its entire first year. In fact, Apple's argument was that web apps using exisiting HTML5 technology made more sense. But users kept complaining about the lack of support, spawning jailbreaking and the Cydia store. So, Apple introduced the App Store with the iPhone 3G. Sometimes the market speaks and it wanted native performance.
There are plenty of things that demonstrate that Steve Jobs was human and didn't have perfect taste. Approving the fake wooden iBooks bookcase. Bringing in swatches of Corinthian leather to meeting and insisting that the "Find My Friends" UI replicate the look. And this: http://www.cultofmac.com/163265/steve-jobs-wanted-to-dress-up-as-willy-wonka-provide-tour-of-apple-campus-for-millionth-imac-purchase/ In one article, Jolie O'Dell opined that Apple's use of a multicolored logo was an aesthetic gaffe marking the post-Jobs decline of Apple. Sounds good, except that Apple also used a flashy, multicolored logo at the original iPad unveiling. Misguided predictions like this are easy but usually short on research.
Newtons would also have been fine.
But they're not. There's no transfer of ownership. You get to choose if you want to take advantage of the huge exposure of the iBooks Store. If so, you use Apple's free tool to create an interactive book format that works there. If not, don't. In either case, you can take that same content and use another tool to format it for a different store without restriction. The only thing you can't do is have your cake and eat it, too: take Apple's free tool and use it to create content for a competing store. It's a restriction on the tool use, not on the fate of your content.
There are many, many software packages that restrict the use of their output. Look at the license of the Home & Student edition of Office 2010: you can't use the output for commercial purposes. Same with many packages that come in a free and for-pay version: the free version is non-commercial. The only difference here is that Apple hasn't (at least yet) offered a for-pay version without the restriction. Also consider that business tools are commonly used to restrict distribution as well. Amazon won't allow your book to be part of the Kindle Lending Library if you sell it elsewhere, and that's for the *content*. iBooks Author only restricts the the formatting of the content into a particular output format. There's nothing wrong with a company investing in producing a tool that didn't exist before and which creates interactive eBook output that can't be created easily elsewhere and which can't even be display with full fidelity elsewhere and deciding that it doesn't want to put this tool out there to the advantage of competing stores. Why would a for-profit company do such a thing?
First, Apple is only a case study in this story. The facts apply to just about all electronics products. Further, Apple doesn't boast about this. They audit the suppliers and factories that do work for them and publish their results, with goals for how to improve. They are now a member of the Fair Labor Association. Finally, the article doesn't say that US jobs are lost due to standard of living. Paying Chinese workers American wages would raise the cost of goods only about 25%, according to the article. The situation is far more grim than this. Rather, the U.S. no longer has the dense congregation of many places of manufacture that all tie together into a big supply chain web. The construction of manufacturing capacity sometimes begins even before a contract is actually awarded, just in case, and is subsidized by the government. Further, the U.S. lacks the numbers of workers with the engineering skill that these factories tend to employ: somewhat higher than high school but not a full four-year B.S. degree. We therefore can't easily mobilize and structure a sufficient (in both numbers and skillsets) labor force on short notice. The article states that China could amass the required talent for a job in 15 days that would take 9 *months* in the U.S.
Tesla is following its plan nicely. Knowing that developing the initial platform technology would be expensive, they started with a car that people are typically willing to pay a lot for: a high-performance roadster. Next, they are approximately halving that price while increasing the versatility to expand the potential market. There are many cars in the price range of the Model S that sell well to upper-middle-class customers, especially those that can serve as a primary vehicle such as this 5-door. The work on the Model S will ultimately allow Tesla to bring down the cost of the next model still further with a more mass-market vehicle. Each step furthers the technology and brings in revenue to fund the next step.
No more so than making assault illegal is a violation of your personal right to punch someone. Personal liberties stop where they infringe on the rights of others. Plus, noone is being held down at needle point, just being denied privileges that they can be replaced with private sources. When an individual forgoes a vaccine, they're increasing the chance that you and I will encounter and be infected with the disease (since vaccines aren't 100% effective and since prevention is a combination of reducing exposure and boosting immunity).
It makes far more sense for private industry to focus on where they can make money - transporting cargo such as satellites into orbit. That is, they become orbital trucks. This frees up NASA to work on visionary projects that aren't currently commercially viable: we the people funding, though tax dollars, the learning necessary for our long-term futures.
Stratolaunch: Launch from the stratosphere. Seems apropos to me!
How you do pay "a lot more" for an iPad? A 10.1" Galaxy Tab is the same price as the iPad as of this moment on a reasonable site such as Amazon.com. And that's without Apple's excellent customer support (phone and retail store), without the ability to extend the warranty an extra year and without the high resale value which reduces total cost of ownership considerably.
An individual site doing its own investigation and coming up with a conclusion that they don't know exactly what's going on (and even stating that their speculations don't fully make sense) is hardly a reason for people to get all upset. Withhold judgment until there's an actual story to judge.
Those food scraps in the landfill become permanent volume. Ever higher mounds. At one point, the Fresh Kills Landfill near where my folks live was the largest manmade object in the world. The small amount of attrition that occurs is into methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. In contrast, composting breaks down the food into constituent organic components, some of which become soil enrichers and come of which are turned into CO2 (which is released back into the air from which it recently came and so isn't a net climate change contributor). What would you rather have? A big, permanent pile of stuff taking over your land and releasing undesirable gases or a much smaller static pile that gives off helpful-to-benign byproducts? Put another way in terms of purely animal matter, would you rather that all the dead creatures of the earth pile up until we're hip deep in them or that they break down naturally for their materials to be reused?
Pretty true for most cases such as typical bus mass transit, but large cities with subways can be an exception. The average New York MTA average consumption per passenger mile is 2000 BTU, which is less than 5500 BTU for a single-passenger car, 3,500 BTU for a car with average passenger load and even less than the 2,300 for typically-loaded car under a 35MPG CAFE standard.
iTunes Match does, yes. And tracks with under 256kbps that exist in the iTunes store are replaced with 256kbps AAC versions.
The original iPad racked up 100,000 preorders per day upon announcement, without any real preexisting tablet market to have stoked demand. The fact that it sold 1 million during the first month indicates that fulfilling these levels of orders for a complex product is tricky. Hopefully, since the Fire is based on the Playbook, they've been practicing production for a while.
Yes, but the first Intel Macs weren't released until January 2006. There was barely any time between the hardware being Windows compatible and Apple not only supporting it but actually supplying the enabling drivers. So, the "finally" sentiment is very misplaced, as it implies a long period of unfulfilled demand as someone dragged their feet.
This makes perfect sense to me. With Android, Amazon doesn't have top-to-bottom vertical integration and control, since they still rely on Google to do the core Android development and thus need to either be beholden to Google's timing or continue to work with forks of older versions. If they buy WebOS, they now employ all the programmers and can coordinate all the pieces that go into their tablet. Then could also further develop their EC2-assistance technologies and extend them beyond Silk to further enhance tablet performance. Buy making their forward-facing UI software completely custom, it's independent of Android from the customer point of view, especially customers buying the device for media and not for Android app compatibiility. This should make it easier to transplant the UI onto a different core OS without confusing customers who've already learned the UI. They could eventually exposure more of WebOS over time and offer a fully-controlled app store for it. I even wonder if they'd create a special build for $99 TouchPad firesale customers, allowing them to transform their tablets into large-screen Kindle Fires. In effect, HP would have subsidized putting Kindle software into many more Amazon-media-consuming hands.
Although I'm only one datapoint, my Optimum Boost (Cablevision) service north of NYC almost always hits the 50d/8u Mbps that I'm paying for ($15 over base service for the higher speeds). When I've had issues, they've always been catastrophic ones (no signal due to bad connector on the utility pole, etc.) rather than just slowdowns.
Not really. The equivalent would be if your power company charged a flat rate for unlimited electrical use, based on the tacit assumption that there were only so many gadgets and appliances that a regular house would ever run. Then, you go and install a huge cable from your house to your huge office park across the street in order for that park to take advantage of your house's unlimited power plan. The problem is all the assumptions either implied or in fine print. Companies shouldn't be allowed to offer unlimited service at a flat rate. Such things are untenable, business-wise, since networks can't handle infinite traffic. If a company means that you can use as much data as a given device can consume, that's what the plan should say. The restrictions against another device tapping into that plan's data allotment should be spelled out clearly in advance of a customer signing the contract. Better yet, offer a metered plan that is device agnostic and perhaps which has an escalating cost for the highest monthly data caps as needed to keep network congestion reasonable.
Even when you enforce official APIs for apps, the OS itself must of course use undocumented APIs. That's merely separation of user functions from central system functions. Apple isn't using private APIs in its apps sold through the app store but rather in the implementation of a new OS capability. iOS already has USB sync. Apple just implemented the means to cut the cord. This isn't something an app can do because a central principle of iOS apps is that they are sandboxed and see only their own data. This is what allows users to feel free to try any app without worry of ever corrupting the phone or data from another app. A sync app must obviously see beyond its own sandbox and is thus impossible. That's why Apple made it a central system service. Note that there is no concept of a system tweak in iOS. You can only buy apps, never any software to customize or modify the OS function itself. Perhaps Apple will one day create APIs to allow this, but the sandboxed app model is the only one right now. By the way, another reason many private APIs is because the developer, whether Microsoft or Apple, isn't prepared to lock them down or support them. They are subject to change as the functions they implement are refined and co-optimized with the rest of the OS.
If you ran the company, would you throw away the brand value of "i" just for the sake of being imaginative? When you here "i" anything, you know the product is Apple. Most companies would kill for that level of brand recognition.
As many have stated for days now to no avail, the iPhone consolidated.db log does not store and user location data. Even the patent indicates this. To understand this better, consider how both iOS and Android devices estimate user location when GPS is not available. They triangulate based on position relative to cell towers and wi-fi APs, which, in turn, requires the phone to know the location of these reference points. Since towers and APs don't transmit their own coordinates, phones need access to a position database. There are two ways this access can happen. The phone can either access the info over the internet, with all attendant delays, or it can maintain a local database and go off-phone only when there is no hit in this cache. But how can one keep this local database from becoming too large? Limit it to those cell towers that the user has connected with in the past, since those are the ones the user is more likely to be near in the future. This leads to a file on the phone containing location coordinates of towers and APs to which the phone has connected. Not user location data ... reference point data. And not in linear time, but only the most recent encounter with each reference point.
In other words, the consolidated.db file. The Apple patent claims exactly this.