Once I went without showering for 3 months. I think the skin has odor control built in. People who shower often, like just about every normal person, start smelling bad after a day or three without a shower, but just hang in there and don't cave for these "shower" modernities.
The list in the article isn't the same as in the submission... there is no trace of cold fusion, but there is Logo(!... !!!!) in spot 19. Is there something that would explain why the moving turtle of my childhood can be found on such a list?
But there's no great support for music, movie/tv, or podcast content that way.
Sure there is. iTunes + iTunes match is the best music in the cloud implementation out there. Movies and TV shows work fine as long as you bought them from iTunes (problem with non iTunes video of course is the studios).
So have two apps, iCloud control panel and iTunes as a library manager for Audio/Video media.
Good as it might be (no iTunes Match in Norway), you don't want to sync this many gigabytes over the air if you can avoid it. Both speed and traffic is a problem there.
Actually no...Android is here to stay and won't move away from Java and Oracle knows that very well. So they're trying to have their cake (Java made more popular by way of Android dev) and eat it too (grab lots of monies from Google for using Java in that manner).
This is one of the worst "have your cake and eat it too" uses I've seen - it's equivalent to "make a popular product, and earn money on it too!".
The story is ridiculous. What network would the phone run on in 1991? 0.1G? There was no wifi, no Bluetooth, no 3G or even 2G. In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number. No text messaging, no email, no Internet.
Indeed. At the time, smart phones were not adjacent possible. They were not until a couple of years before the iPhone. Then Microsoft tried, along with onder vendors. Microsoft had Windows Mobile, Nokia had Symbian which had many of the same possibilities iPhone had. They just didn't work nearly as well, which was why the iPhone was such a milestone and influenced everything after. E.g. my Nokia N95 did all the iPhone did (except touch) and more, but it was painful to use and the features felt more like "check!" than aiding you in what you wanted to do.
I can point to a bunch of examples, but it doesn't matter. You'll refuse any example that differs even in a trivial way from the iPad.
Apple didn't invent the tablet. They didn't even invent iPad-style tablets. Get over it.
Tablets before the iPad were completely different beasts... you have tablets before the iPad, you have tablets after the iPad. You can easily see the difference, and when operating them you'd also find a huge conceptual difference.
When you are able to say "before" and "after" about a product - like the iPhone and the iPad - you can't avoid saying that the company behind those products has been innovative. How much of this should be protected is a separate matter.
. But if I don't need your patent because I don't sell any products at all, then I can demand unreasonable royalties. The royalties don't make me a troll, it's not selling products that makes me a troll. Patent trolling is all about asymmetrical relationships between patent holders; those who need patents because they make things, and those who don't need patents because they don't make things.
If an inventor actually has invented something and licenses it rather than setting up a lot of factories himself, does that make him a patent troll?
Rather, it seems like Apple is claiming ownership the entire concept of a tablet.
Or rather, ownership of the concept of everything looking and behaving like an iPad. The tablets prior to the ipad were very, very different - and now a tablet suddenly have to look exactly like an iPad?
[...] I have owned the WP7 Phone (HTC Arrive) since last April [...] (disclaimer: I don't install a ton of apps on my phone).
No need to say the same thing twice;)
On a slightly more serious note: App selection is one of most important aspects on a smart phone today, and Windows Phone is nowhere near the quantity and quality of iPhone and Android in this area.
Let's see... when I was a kid in the days of Apple ][, these neighbors of ours (Stoltzfus family) came up with a graphical programming language.
They showed it to Apple, hoping that Apple would buy. Apple strongly considered it, and then returned it, saying that they weren't interested.
A year later, they came out with Apple Logo, which was immensely popular.
Logo was created in the 60s, turtles and all. It was popular on other systems as well in the early 80s, so it doesn't really seem to me that they did anything wrong here?
There was a time from 2005-2007 when everyone knew that a iPod touch shaped phone would come out.
iPod touch was released sometime after the iPhone - at the time, they were selling iPod classics and Nanos. Phones sucked ( like my N95, or anything else Symbian/windows mobile based), and touch screen phones used styluses.
Could they have just manufactured the iPhone in the USA?
Is that crazy?
No. The cost difference is much, much higher. 65 USD/phone has been mentioned - about 2.5 billion USD just last quarter.
More importantly, the skills needed don't exist and you have a manufacturing ecosystem in the area - almost all the things in the iPhone are made there too, making logistics[1] much easier. Also, using iSlaves adds tremendous flexibility
Apple transformed the mobile market with the iPhone - just look at phones before and after. Protecting as much as possible of this - while taking advantage of other transformations being available RAND - is what they want. The lawsuits is about stopping companies copying Apple, not about getting a share like Microsoft is happy doing.
[1] Logistics is where Apple really makes their money. Few products, little shelf time, no inventory. The actual product is a premium product at a premium price, true - but that costs in build quality and support as well. By keeping few product lines, reusing the same components and being the masters of supply chain management their profits go from "OK" to "incredible". Just witness how much trouble others have in matching the iPad price.
There is overwhelming evidence to show that piracy leads to an increase in sales. It doesn't make sense to dispute that anymore.
Given that taking copies doesn't cost anyone anything nor deprive anything from anyone, yet can lead to further contributions to society, it only makes sense.
Actually, if you look at the trends in music sales since mp3/napster arrived I'd say that on a macro level you have a very good case that piracy decreases sales. Also, if you look at the sales of top albums now vs. 10-20 years ago they have decreased significantly.
Sure, you could argue that this is because Britney and the gangsta rap-act of the week aren't as compelling as the high quality music made in earlier decades - but most of the content then was junk as well. We just happen to remember the good ones.
This doesn't mean that the music industry has acted sanely - their legal tactics are dubious, some of the suggested cures (like SOPA, and others before it) are much worse than disease and their "damages" are insane. And it has taken them a decade to go kicking and screaming into the future, with streaming music like spotify. But none of this means that piracy is good, and that a lot of people have downloaded music they would have paid for otherwise - alongside at lot of music they wouldn't have given second look, much less their cash.
It also doesn't mean that there aren't many artists who have used to their advantage - e.g. to get publicity - but overall it looks like a net loss. A big one.
With business practices like these I can only wonder how long it will take for the us government to bring on charges of monopolistic practices and force a breakup of Apple's business portfolio. One can only hope.
IPhone is pretty far away from being a monopoly... of the more than 1 billion cell phones sold in 2010, Apple sold less than 50 million.
Unions are obsolete. They have destroyed our automotive sector, they are destroying our healthcare sector, and they have no business in IT.
Like everything else, there is a balance. Too much power to unions is a very bad thing, too little power gives an extremely one sided relationship. As for destructive power, unions are strong in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.... both of which are doing pretty well.
Thing is, Apple could easily run this infrastructure in an open way - say, as a federated XMPP server - and just publish an open extension that lets you figure out if the sender (defined by his phone number) is signed up for that infrastructure or not. Then it'd all work just as transparently as iMessage does today, but for all phones that would implement this system.
If the big phone vendors did that, the phone companies would increase other prices. They need their ARPU to be roughly in the ballpark it is now to fund their operations. If SMS revenue disappears, most of it would be recouped elsewhere across the industry.
The SMS thing, in particular, kills me just on the grounds that we are just handing them over pure profit. Yet they still keep upping the prices on it.
It's only pure profit if you then think of running the infrastructure and the rest of the company as a separate business and pure loss. The services aren't priced at what they cost to produce - they are priced at a combination of what the value of a service is to a customer and the need to provide a certain average revenue per customer to cover operations/investment and profit. Adjusted for the competitive landscape, which all have the same need (cover costs and profit, most of the costs being fixed).
Of course, pointing out this doesn't mean that I think the US has working competition in telecom.... big mergers, separate technical standards, lack of "bring your own phone" plans (partially due to the former) and long customer lock-ins say otherwise.
SMS is technically free. The only cost is counting/bill.
Carriers don't charge SMS usage fees because of the big variable costs... they charge because they can, because it has a value to the customer.
A large part of the cost for a carrier is fixed cost - the various priced services is just how to they believe they can recoup most of it and make their profit. If noone pays for SMS anymore, they'll instead have higher costs for talk or data than they do now. They know how much money they need to earn per handset on average, and that's what they'll get one way or the other.
You learned on a Commodore 64? Lucky... way more convenient than having to save your programs on cassette tapes (the way some of us came up)
Disk drives were expensive back in -83... here in Norway, they cost about 800 USD or so. So tape drive was the most common data storage for the first years, until the price on the 1541 dropped.
Actually, a carbon tax might work, if it applies to imported goods as well. Of course, China would scream bloody murder.
When has a tax ever done anything? Name one!
Apart from funding well working societies and policies[1]: Taxes affect people's behaviour by affecting demand via price. Here in Norway, it has had a large effect on alcohol and tobacco consumption - and when car taxes changed to be partially based on CO2 emissions a couple of years ago, it had a large effect on mix of cars sold: More diesel, less gasoline, smaller and more modern engines.
[1]: Sure, one can discuss some policies and the exact tax level but the main conclusion is that society is a lot better off with infrastructure, general education, police, health care etc.
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Once I went without showering for 3 months. I think the skin has odor control built in. People who shower often, like just about every normal person, start smelling bad after a day or three without a shower, but just hang in there and don't cave for these "shower" modernities.
Young Steve Jobs, is that you?
The list in the article isn't the same as in the submission... there is no trace of cold fusion, but there is Logo(!... !!!!) in spot 19. Is there something that would explain why the moving turtle of my childhood can be found on such a list?
Sure there is. iTunes + iTunes match is the best music in the cloud implementation out there. Movies and TV shows work fine as long as you bought them from iTunes (problem with non iTunes video of course is the studios). So have two apps, iCloud control panel and iTunes as a library manager for Audio/Video media.
Good as it might be (no iTunes Match in Norway), you don't want to sync this many gigabytes over the air if you can avoid it. Both speed and traffic is a problem there.
Actually no...Android is here to stay and won't move away from Java and Oracle knows that very well. So they're trying to have their cake (Java made more popular by way of Android dev) and eat it too (grab lots of monies from Google for using Java in that manner).
This is one of the worst "have your cake and eat it too" uses I've seen - it's equivalent to "make a popular product, and earn money on it too!".
Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.
The story is ridiculous. What network would the phone run on in 1991? 0.1G? There was no wifi, no Bluetooth, no 3G or even 2G. In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number. No text messaging, no email, no Internet.
Indeed. At the time, smart phones were not adjacent possible. They were not until a couple of years before the iPhone. Then Microsoft tried, along with onder vendors. Microsoft had Windows Mobile, Nokia had Symbian which had many of the same possibilities iPhone had. They just didn't work nearly as well, which was why the iPhone was such a milestone and influenced everything after. E.g. my Nokia N95 did all the iPhone did (except touch) and more, but it was painful to use and the features felt more like "check!" than aiding you in what you wanted to do.
I can point to a bunch of examples, but it doesn't matter. You'll refuse any example that differs even in a trivial way from the iPad.
Apple didn't invent the tablet. They didn't even invent iPad-style tablets. Get over it.
Tablets before the iPad were completely different beasts... you have tablets before the iPad, you have tablets after the iPad. You can easily see the difference, and when operating them you'd also find a huge conceptual difference.
When you are able to say "before" and "after" about a product - like the iPhone and the iPad - you can't avoid saying that the company behind those products has been innovative. How much of this should be protected is a separate matter.
. But if I don't need your patent because I don't sell any products at all, then I can demand unreasonable royalties. The royalties don't make me a troll, it's not selling products that makes me a troll. Patent trolling is all about asymmetrical relationships between patent holders; those who need patents because they make things, and those who don't need patents because they don't make things.
If an inventor actually has invented something and licenses it rather than setting up a lot of factories himself, does that make him a patent troll?
Oh, and for your information, anyone can download Android SDKs and programming tools FREE OF CHARGE if they want to. Apple charges for its SDKs
Actually, Apple's SDKs are freely available - SDKs, iOS simulator, documentation, IDE and compilers.
Rather, it seems like Apple is claiming ownership the entire concept of a tablet.
Or rather, ownership of the concept of everything looking and behaving like an iPad. The tablets prior to the ipad were very, very different - and now a tablet suddenly have to look exactly like an iPad?
[...] I have owned the WP7 Phone (HTC Arrive) since last April [...] (disclaimer: I don't install a ton of apps on my phone).
No need to say the same thing twice ;)
On a slightly more serious note: App selection is one of most important aspects on a smart phone today, and Windows Phone is nowhere near the quantity and quality of iPhone and Android in this area.
Let's see... when I was a kid in the days of Apple ][, these neighbors of ours (Stoltzfus family) came up with a graphical programming language.
They showed it to Apple, hoping that Apple would buy. Apple strongly considered it, and then returned it, saying that they weren't interested.
A year later, they came out with Apple Logo, which was immensely popular.
Logo was created in the 60s, turtles and all. It was popular on other systems as well in the early 80s, so it doesn't really seem to me that they did anything wrong here?
There was a time from 2005-2007 when everyone knew that a iPod touch shaped phone would come out.
iPod touch was released sometime after the iPhone - at the time, they were selling iPod classics and Nanos. Phones sucked ( like my N95, or anything else Symbian/windows mobile based), and touch screen phones used styluses.
The tantrum was about someone doing to him exactly what he did to Xerox.
Apple licensed the technology, and paid in Apple stock. So not comparable
Could they have just manufactured the iPhone in the USA?
Is that crazy?
[1] Logistics is where Apple really makes their money. Few products, little shelf time, no inventory. The actual product is a premium product at a premium price, true - but that costs in build quality and support as well. By keeping few product lines, reusing the same components and being the masters of supply chain management their profits go from "OK" to "incredible". Just witness how much trouble others have in matching the iPad price.
Wow!
BASF still exists? To me BASF is this, and I haven't heard them since. :)
BASF is the largest chemical company in the world - more than twice the size of DuPont. 2010 revenues were almost 64 billion €.
There is overwhelming evidence to show that piracy leads to an increase in sales. It doesn't make sense to dispute that anymore.
Given that taking copies doesn't cost anyone anything nor deprive anything from anyone, yet can lead to further contributions to society, it only makes sense.
Actually, if you look at the trends in music sales since mp3/napster arrived I'd say that on a macro level you have a very good case that piracy decreases sales. Also, if you look at the sales of top albums now vs. 10-20 years ago they have decreased significantly.
Sure, you could argue that this is because Britney and the gangsta rap-act of the week aren't as compelling as the high quality music made in earlier decades - but most of the content then was junk as well. We just happen to remember the good ones.
This doesn't mean that the music industry has acted sanely - their legal tactics are dubious, some of the suggested cures (like SOPA, and others before it) are much worse than disease and their "damages" are insane. And it has taken them a decade to go kicking and screaming into the future, with streaming music like spotify. But none of this means that piracy is good, and that a lot of people have downloaded music they would have paid for otherwise - alongside at lot of music they wouldn't have given second look, much less their cash.
It also doesn't mean that there aren't many artists who have used to their advantage - e.g. to get publicity - but overall it looks like a net loss. A big one.
With business practices like these I can only wonder how long it will take for the us government to bring on charges of monopolistic practices and force a breakup of Apple's business portfolio. One can only hope.
IPhone is pretty far away from being a monopoly... of the more than 1 billion cell phones sold in 2010, Apple sold less than 50 million.
Unions are obsolete. They have destroyed our automotive sector, they are destroying our healthcare sector, and they have no business in IT.
Like everything else, there is a balance. Too much power to unions is a very bad thing, too little power gives an extremely one sided relationship. As for destructive power, unions are strong in Northern Europe and Scandinavia.... both of which are doing pretty well.
I can buy pretty fine cake for $1, but I live in Eastern Europe.
While here, in Norway, $4 is just 50% more than a small, cheap, shrink wrapped muffin bought at a cheap grocery store...
Thing is, Apple could easily run this infrastructure in an open way - say, as a federated XMPP server - and just publish an open extension that lets you figure out if the sender (defined by his phone number) is signed up for that infrastructure or not. Then it'd all work just as transparently as iMessage does today, but for all phones that would implement this system.
If the big phone vendors did that, the phone companies would increase other prices. They need their ARPU to be roughly in the ballpark it is now to fund their operations. If SMS revenue disappears, most of it would be recouped elsewhere across the industry.
The SMS thing, in particular, kills me just on the grounds that we are just handing them over pure profit. Yet they still keep upping the prices on it.
It's only pure profit if you then think of running the infrastructure and the rest of the company as a separate business and pure loss. The services aren't priced at what they cost to produce - they are priced at a combination of what the value of a service is to a customer and the need to provide a certain average revenue per customer to cover operations/investment and profit. Adjusted for the competitive landscape, which all have the same need (cover costs and profit, most of the costs being fixed).
Of course, pointing out this doesn't mean that I think the US has working competition in telecom.... big mergers, separate technical standards, lack of "bring your own phone" plans (partially due to the former) and long customer lock-ins say otherwise.
SMS is technically free. The only cost is counting/bill.
Carriers don't charge SMS usage fees because of the big variable costs... they charge because they can, because it has a value to the customer.
A large part of the cost for a carrier is fixed cost - the various priced services is just how to they believe they can recoup most of it and make their profit. If noone pays for SMS anymore, they'll instead have higher costs for talk or data than they do now. They know how much money they need to earn per handset on average, and that's what they'll get one way or the other.
Amazon App Store is terrible, both for consumers (try using apps offline), and developers (too much to even start mentioning.)
Are you saying that you can't use apps offline? That sounds too broken to be true... Planes, abroad with no roaming are just to examples.
You learned on a Commodore 64? Lucky... way more convenient than having to save your programs on cassette tapes (the way some of us came up)
Disk drives were expensive back in -83... here in Norway, they cost about 800 USD or so. So tape drive was the most common data storage for the first years, until the price on the 1541 dropped.
Actually, a carbon tax might work, if it applies to imported goods as well. Of course, China would scream bloody murder.
When has a tax ever done anything? Name one!
Apart from funding well working societies and policies[1]: Taxes affect people's behaviour by affecting demand via price. Here in Norway, it has had a large effect on alcohol and tobacco consumption - and when car taxes changed to be partially based on CO2 emissions a couple of years ago, it had a large effect on mix of cars sold: More diesel, less gasoline, smaller and more modern engines.
[1]: Sure, one can discuss some policies and the exact tax level but the main conclusion is that society is a lot better off with infrastructure, general education, police, health care etc.