There's no reason for Verizon to cater to your desire to keep speed Y fixed and have $X fluctuate.
Since there's virtually no competition in this market, you are absolutely correct. At this point, their only objective is to be slightly less shitty than the little competition they have and they are barely pulling that off.
At this point, I feel that internet speed is more than fast enough for most of my purposes. My FIOS subscription was just upgraded from 15 Mbps to 75 Mbps without any additional cost, but I would have preferred to stay at 15 Mbps at a reduced price. Unfortunately, the sales person claims that they only offer speed upgrades for the same price, but there is no option for paying less. For those that want the extra speed, I think it's great that options like this are available (at least in limited markets), but for those who don't need the speed it would be nice to have a more reasonably priced option. It's funny how telecommunications seems to be the one sector where improvements in technology never result in cheaper prices. I guess that's what happens when companies are granted local monopolies.
This is going to cause severe fragmentation in the body armor market. Now the developers are going to need to anticipate the needs of two different market segments rather than one. This is going to increase production cost as well as complicate inventory, not to mention the fact that third-party accessories will now have to conform to two different sets of specifications. Perhaps they could make it more flexible by doubling the number of horizontal and vertical plates, therefore contouring to the shape of both market segments while retaining backwards compatibility with previous models.
Things are paid for by whatever the parties agree to. This may be money, goods, services, or something more creative.
If Hitachi got access to those licenses by trading intellectual property worth $50M, then Apple needs to pay $50M.
Nobody is trading ownership of intellectual property in these agreements. They are simply promising not to sue each other if they happen their products happen to implement something that the other party has patented.
On no planet does FRAND now require Apple to hand over a $100B business, that's just retarded.
On what planet did I suggest anything even remotely close to Apple giving up a $100B business? I simply suggested that it is fair that Apple agrees to pay a small fee per device sold and promises not to sue over any functional patents that they own in exchange for using the technologies covered by Samsung's FRAND patents - just like all of the other licensees presumably have done.
You claim Apple's patents aren't worth that much money. It seems to me if they weren't then Samsung wouldn't be trying so hard to get access to them. But whatever, that's what the courts are going to decide.
Most of Apple's patents are related to software and cover broad, abstract, and trivial concepts, all of which should make them unpatentable. The only country absurd enough to grant these patents is the U.S. and if the USPTO ever gets its act together, these patents could go away overnight. Samsung is merely trying to use the FRAND patents to protect itself from Apple's onslaught of lawsuits over these frivolous patents.
Samsung believes they gave FRAND terms to Apple--Apple disagrees, they believe the terms were too onerous. Apple is asking the courts to set the price.
Here we go with another Apple fanboy trotting out the FRAND argument. While the terms of FRAND agreements aren't usually disclosed, it is widely thought that part of the price of a FRAND license is a cross-license patent agreement. Apple, however, doesn't want to cross-license their patents, instead they want to license the FRAND patents by paying slightly more than other companies who did cross-license have paid. They are using the court system to pressure the owners of FRAND patents into such an arrangement. They appear to be doing this because for some reason they feel entitled to be able to use the complex technologies that allow phones to discover proximity to towers, determine the closest tower, connect to the tower, seamlessly transition to other towers, and many other difficult tasks for very little compensation while they wish to retain the right to sue the companies that developed those technologies over Apple's patents for slide to unlock and parsing phone numbers. And somehow Apple fanboys have deluded themselves into thinking that this is Fair and Reasonable to the patent holders of wireless technologies as well as Non-Discriminatory despite the fact that all other FRAND license agreements for those same patents likely required cross-licensing a vast war chest of patents.
BTW: the "price" that Samsung is setting is "let us make clones of your tablets and phones"
There's your fanboyism showing itself. If by "clone" you mean make a device whose entire functionality depends on being a touchscreen and having such groundbreaking features as rounded corners, phone number parsing, and slide to unlock, then yes Samsung has cloned Apple's products. I'll tell you what: I will concede that Samsung is cloning Apple's products if you can go into an electronics store and identify every flat-panel television in that store by brand without looking at the logo. Until then, stop making this argument as it just makes you look stupid.
I must be missing something here. Can anyone explain to me how USB is not capable of sending audio or video data or how the Apple connector is somehow better at sending such data?
Agreed! How can they expect their country to become successful if they don't proliferate the idea of only rewarding the people at the top? If they keep up this shit, the money will never trickle down!
If you don't want a big screen on your phone, then don't buy a phone with a big screen! I could see if the market failed to offer decent phones with medium-sized screens, but that's just not the case. So what is this guy's problem? Here are some choice quotes from this article:
It’s certainly true that with a bigger phone you’ll often get a bigger screen, and with a bigger screen you’ll see much more of a web page without having to pinch and zoom. But do people really want that at the expense of carrying around such a huge, heavy lump of tech in their pocket?
Has he ever actually held one of these "huge, heavy lumps" in his hand. I have a Galaxy S2 and the screen is one inch larger than an a standard 3.5-inch phone, but the footprint isn't much bigger and the phone is actually lighter than most 3.5-inch phones. And based on the sales numbers of big-screen phones in a market with plenty of medium-sized phones, I would say that there are quite a few people willing to carry these "heavy lumps".
I realise this trend for huge phones isn’t welcomed by everyone, because when I recently asked on Twitter whether people liked the current trend for such monsters, I received lots of replies saying how much people hated them.
So he tweeted an emotionally charged question and found some people who agree with him. I couldn't think of a worse way to gather information about what people in the market truly want.
that bigger screen requires a bigger backlight and touch sensor; the higher screen resolution means more pixels to push around; and that in turn means the GPU will be sucking more life from the battery.
The bigger backlight will draw a bit more power. I don't think that the touch area will have any noticeable effect on the battery life. And while he is technically correct that phones with a higher resolution draw more power, the 3.5-inch iPhone has one of the highest resolutions of phones on the market yet few complain about its battery life, so that proves that its not impossible to deliver such a product.
the manufacturers believe they know what we want, and can probably produce carefully crafted research to support their marketing strategy;
So you're going to dismiss any research that supports a viewpoint different from your own without judging the quality of that data on a case-by-case basis. That seems very objective.
meanwhile, we who live in the real world dream of powerful yet easily pocketable phones that can go two or three days on a single charge
I live in the real world and my GS2 fits easily in the pocket of all of my pants and gets at least two days of moderate usage on a single charge. I think the question that's more important than the one proposed in this article is why this guy cares so much about the existence of phones that obviously aren't marketed toward him.
The WebApps can be platform-independent but something has to sit on linux to handle the api calls.
I understand that - my point is that you're tainting code that was platform-independent with code that only works on one platform.
THAT part (unless it is also written in something platform independent) must be platform-dependent.
Why does that part need to be written at all? Why does a WebApp need access to anything at the OS level? I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but I do not understand why you wouldn't write the entire program in a native language and provide better integration into the supported platform if you depend on such low-level access to the OS. This whole thing reeks of technologies that came out of Microsoft during the Nineties, such as Active-X, that provided unnecessary privileges to questionable applications. The technology was rarely necessary for legitimate applications but was exploited like crazy by developers of malicious code.
I thought the primary benefit of WebApps is that they are mostly platform-independent. So what benefit is there to introducing a platform-dependent API?
I know it's natural to think of Linux as a developer's operating system, but if I had to develop software using the Unity interface, I would promptly fall on a sword. It would have been nice if they went with Linux Mint, but then they wouldn't get official support from Canonical. Oh well, at least it should guarantee a laptop complete with Linux-friendly hardware (not that Linux has too much trouble with modern hardware anyway) and then the user can install their favorite distro.
While it is probably not ready for full-scale deployment, it is technically possible to upgrade our highways to charge cars as they drive. If we perfected this technology and upgraded our road systems to take advantage of it, electric car batteries wouldn't have to be as big as they are now. With smaller batteries, electric cars would immediately become much cheaper as well as lighter and even more efficient.
Even if charging roads don't become a reality, I think people will quickly warm up to electric cars as the prices come down. They are much cheaper to fuel and you can refuel at home. Their engines have fewer moving parts, are more reliable, and more efficient. Electric engines also have great torque and can provide considerable acceleration. Plus, they are not as dependent on a transmission which means they can provide a smoother ride.
I don't expect most families with two cars to have two electric cars in the timeline Musk is talking about, but I would be surprised if one of their two cars wasn't an electric by then. And that alone would bring the percentage of electric cars relatively close to Musk's 50%.
The only thing I use bookmarks for now is to make sure I don't fat-finger the URL to one of my financial sites and enter my credentials into an imposter's site. Whenever I get an e-mail that I have a new statement or that I need to reset my password, I use the bookmark rather than clicking the link in the body of the e-mail.
I was about to mod you up until I realized something: there is no guarantee that Apple's free recycling program will be around tomorrow. Given that people may hold on to their hardware for up to six years or more, there are decent odds that Apple's free recycling program could be gone by the time users are ready to recycle their hardware. Since EPEAT is an industry-wide standard, that is what most recycling programs depend on. Instead of continuing to support EPEAT, they're pulling a move from Microsoft's 1990's playbook: "we're better than the standard, therefore the standard should conform to us". That would be acceptable if they worked with the standards organizations to get the standard formally updated, but instead they've made a unilateral decision that divides the industry.
With all of their resources, you can never count out Microsoft. With that said, Microsoft was the last thing that came to mind as I read each of the five points in that quote.
Given all the stink Apple makes about its multi-touch patents, you'd have thought that they invented multi-touch. I guess they just patented USING multi-touch. I'm not sure if there is a term for this class of patents, but if not, then I suggest "constrictor patent". The patent covers integrating someone else's invention (wrapping it) and then suffocates anyone who attempts to also integrate that technology. For another example, look at Apple's patent on using inductive charging in computing and portable devices. This practice not only harms Apple's competitors, it also harms the inventor of the original technology since Apple is the only company that is able to legally use the technology without risk of being sued. The patent office really needs to stop offering these patents as well as revoke all of the constrictor patents that were already granted.
This sounds exactly like the color-changing LEDs that were used in flat panel televisions to project light onto the wall surrounding a wall-mounted television, except of course it's in a head-mounted display. Is that really worthy of a patent? Besides, I would rather have a head-mounted display with a single screen that wrapped all the way around the width of the user's peripheral vision. Stereoscopic images could be displayed by splitting the screen in the center and sending different images to each side, but the continuity of the screen itself would provide a more realistic field of view.
"That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever's easier for them.''
Whatever's easier for them is to use the e-mail address that they set up as their default before Facebook screwed with their settings. Changing users' settings without their consent is a great way to lose users. I should know, I dumped my Hotmail account for that very reason.
I don't think it's possible to support privacy more than I do. But if you step foot outside of your living space, you have entered a public area. You may be seen by other people, your conversation can be overheard, and people are free to record your image and conversation via photographs, video recordings, or audio recordings. If you do not like this, you are free to refrain from leaving your living space or wear a disguise when you go out.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there's virtually no competition in this market, you are absolutely correct. At this point, their only objective is to be slightly less shitty than the little competition they have and they are barely pulling that off.
At this point, I feel that internet speed is more than fast enough for most of my purposes. My FIOS subscription was just upgraded from 15 Mbps to 75 Mbps without any additional cost, but I would have preferred to stay at 15 Mbps at a reduced price. Unfortunately, the sales person claims that they only offer speed upgrades for the same price, but there is no option for paying less. For those that want the extra speed, I think it's great that options like this are available (at least in limited markets), but for those who don't need the speed it would be nice to have a more reasonably priced option. It's funny how telecommunications seems to be the one sector where improvements in technology never result in cheaper prices. I guess that's what happens when companies are granted local monopolies.
This is going to cause severe fragmentation in the body armor market. Now the developers are going to need to anticipate the needs of two different market segments rather than one. This is going to increase production cost as well as complicate inventory, not to mention the fact that third-party accessories will now have to conform to two different sets of specifications. Perhaps they could make it more flexible by doubling the number of horizontal and vertical plates, therefore contouring to the shape of both market segments while retaining backwards compatibility with previous models.
Things are paid for by whatever the parties agree to. This may be money, goods, services, or something more creative.
Nobody is trading ownership of intellectual property in these agreements. They are simply promising not to sue each other if they happen their products happen to implement something that the other party has patented.
On what planet did I suggest anything even remotely close to Apple giving up a $100B business? I simply suggested that it is fair that Apple agrees to pay a small fee per device sold and promises not to sue over any functional patents that they own in exchange for using the technologies covered by Samsung's FRAND patents - just like all of the other licensees presumably have done.
Most of Apple's patents are related to software and cover broad, abstract, and trivial concepts, all of which should make them unpatentable. The only country absurd enough to grant these patents is the U.S. and if the USPTO ever gets its act together, these patents could go away overnight. Samsung is merely trying to use the FRAND patents to protect itself from Apple's onslaught of lawsuits over these frivolous patents.
Here we go with another Apple fanboy trotting out the FRAND argument. While the terms of FRAND agreements aren't usually disclosed, it is widely thought that part of the price of a FRAND license is a cross-license patent agreement. Apple, however, doesn't want to cross-license their patents, instead they want to license the FRAND patents by paying slightly more than other companies who did cross-license have paid. They are using the court system to pressure the owners of FRAND patents into such an arrangement. They appear to be doing this because for some reason they feel entitled to be able to use the complex technologies that allow phones to discover proximity to towers, determine the closest tower, connect to the tower, seamlessly transition to other towers, and many other difficult tasks for very little compensation while they wish to retain the right to sue the companies that developed those technologies over Apple's patents for slide to unlock and parsing phone numbers. And somehow Apple fanboys have deluded themselves into thinking that this is Fair and Reasonable to the patent holders of wireless technologies as well as Non-Discriminatory despite the fact that all other FRAND license agreements for those same patents likely required cross-licensing a vast war chest of patents.
There's your fanboyism showing itself. If by "clone" you mean make a device whose entire functionality depends on being a touchscreen and having such groundbreaking features as rounded corners, phone number parsing, and slide to unlock, then yes Samsung has cloned Apple's products. I'll tell you what: I will concede that Samsung is cloning Apple's products if you can go into an electronics store and identify every flat-panel television in that store by brand without looking at the logo. Until then, stop making this argument as it just makes you look stupid.
My God! The world is covered in Siemen!
Doesn't that violate the Geneva Convention's policy against torture?
I must be missing something here. Can anyone explain to me how USB is not capable of sending audio or video data or how the Apple connector is somehow better at sending such data?
Agreed! How can they expect their country to become successful if they don't proliferate the idea of only rewarding the people at the top? If they keep up this shit, the money will never trickle down!
Has he ever actually held one of these "huge, heavy lumps" in his hand. I have a Galaxy S2 and the screen is one inch larger than an a standard 3.5-inch phone, but the footprint isn't much bigger and the phone is actually lighter than most 3.5-inch phones. And based on the sales numbers of big-screen phones in a market with plenty of medium-sized phones, I would say that there are quite a few people willing to carry these "heavy lumps".
So he tweeted an emotionally charged question and found some people who agree with him. I couldn't think of a worse way to gather information about what people in the market truly want.
The bigger backlight will draw a bit more power. I don't think that the touch area will have any noticeable effect on the battery life. And while he is technically correct that phones with a higher resolution draw more power, the 3.5-inch iPhone has one of the highest resolutions of phones on the market yet few complain about its battery life, so that proves that its not impossible to deliver such a product.
So you're going to dismiss any research that supports a viewpoint different from your own without judging the quality of that data on a case-by-case basis. That seems very objective.
I live in the real world and my GS2 fits easily in the pocket of all of my pants and gets at least two days of moderate usage on a single charge. I think the question that's more important than the one proposed in this article is why this guy cares so much about the existence of phones that obviously aren't marketed toward him.
I understand that - my point is that you're tainting code that was platform-independent with code that only works on one platform.
Why does that part need to be written at all? Why does a WebApp need access to anything at the OS level? I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but I do not understand why you wouldn't write the entire program in a native language and provide better integration into the supported platform if you depend on such low-level access to the OS. This whole thing reeks of technologies that came out of Microsoft during the Nineties, such as Active-X, that provided unnecessary privileges to questionable applications. The technology was rarely necessary for legitimate applications but was exploited like crazy by developers of malicious code.
I thought the primary benefit of WebApps is that they are mostly platform-independent. So what benefit is there to introducing a platform-dependent API?
I know it's natural to think of Linux as a developer's operating system, but if I had to develop software using the Unity interface, I would promptly fall on a sword. It would have been nice if they went with Linux Mint, but then they wouldn't get official support from Canonical. Oh well, at least it should guarantee a laptop complete with Linux-friendly hardware (not that Linux has too much trouble with modern hardware anyway) and then the user can install their favorite distro.
While it is probably not ready for full-scale deployment, it is technically possible to upgrade our highways to charge cars as they drive. If we perfected this technology and upgraded our road systems to take advantage of it, electric car batteries wouldn't have to be as big as they are now. With smaller batteries, electric cars would immediately become much cheaper as well as lighter and even more efficient.
Even if charging roads don't become a reality, I think people will quickly warm up to electric cars as the prices come down. They are much cheaper to fuel and you can refuel at home. Their engines have fewer moving parts, are more reliable, and more efficient. Electric engines also have great torque and can provide considerable acceleration. Plus, they are not as dependent on a transmission which means they can provide a smoother ride.
I don't expect most families with two cars to have two electric cars in the timeline Musk is talking about, but I would be surprised if one of their two cars wasn't an electric by then. And that alone would bring the percentage of electric cars relatively close to Musk's 50%.
A resolution of 576 pixels is better than nothing, but I'm going to wait for a Retina display.
The only thing I use bookmarks for now is to make sure I don't fat-finger the URL to one of my financial sites and enter my credentials into an imposter's site. Whenever I get an e-mail that I have a new statement or that I need to reset my password, I use the bookmark rather than clicking the link in the body of the e-mail.
I wonder if there is verbiage in consumer's contracts that allow them to end it early with no fee due to an adverse change
Yes. You can get out for $15.
Do you happen to work for a bank or credit agency?
I was about to mod you up until I realized something: there is no guarantee that Apple's free recycling program will be around tomorrow. Given that people may hold on to their hardware for up to six years or more, there are decent odds that Apple's free recycling program could be gone by the time users are ready to recycle their hardware. Since EPEAT is an industry-wide standard, that is what most recycling programs depend on. Instead of continuing to support EPEAT, they're pulling a move from Microsoft's 1990's playbook: "we're better than the standard, therefore the standard should conform to us". That would be acceptable if they worked with the standards organizations to get the standard formally updated, but instead they've made a unilateral decision that divides the industry.
With all of their resources, you can never count out Microsoft. With that said, Microsoft was the last thing that came to mind as I read each of the five points in that quote.
Given all the stink Apple makes about its multi-touch patents, you'd have thought that they invented multi-touch. I guess they just patented USING multi-touch. I'm not sure if there is a term for this class of patents, but if not, then I suggest "constrictor patent". The patent covers integrating someone else's invention (wrapping it) and then suffocates anyone who attempts to also integrate that technology. For another example, look at Apple's patent on using inductive charging in computing and portable devices. This practice not only harms Apple's competitors, it also harms the inventor of the original technology since Apple is the only company that is able to legally use the technology without risk of being sued. The patent office really needs to stop offering these patents as well as revoke all of the constrictor patents that were already granted.
This sounds exactly like the color-changing LEDs that were used in flat panel televisions to project light onto the wall surrounding a wall-mounted television, except of course it's in a head-mounted display. Is that really worthy of a patent? Besides, I would rather have a head-mounted display with a single screen that wrapped all the way around the width of the user's peripheral vision. Stereoscopic images could be displayed by splitting the screen in the center and sending different images to each side, but the continuity of the screen itself would provide a more realistic field of view.
There is no room for the will of the people in the Court of Justice.
Liver Change House Gift, LLC
"That was not our intention. We want people to use whatever's easier for them.''
Whatever's easier for them is to use the e-mail address that they set up as their default before Facebook screwed with their settings. Changing users' settings without their consent is a great way to lose users. I should know, I dumped my Hotmail account for that very reason.
I don't think it's possible to support privacy more than I do. But if you step foot outside of your living space, you have entered a public area. You may be seen by other people, your conversation can be overheard, and people are free to record your image and conversation via photographs, video recordings, or audio recordings. If you do not like this, you are free to refrain from leaving your living space or wear a disguise when you go out.