Mark LaCroix

What does that mean? That’s exactly how it looks on my desk.

LaCie isn’t a “major hard drive maker”… actually, they aren’t a hard drive maker at all. They make enclosures.

I’ll take this over LaCie’s cloned Apple designs any day. I’m excited to see if LaCie is able to reinvent themselves, actually. They really care about their products, but they’ve been stuck aping the outdated Mac Pro aesthetic for far too long.

Yeah, this isn’t a sign of the “shrinking” hard drive industry. LaCie doesn’t make hard drives, they make Apple accessories, and shove Hitachi drives (or worse) in them.

It’s a good move for both companies. LaCie isn’t just a design firm, they have good engineering, but they have a style over substance reputation when it comes to drive selection and quality.

As for Seagate, my father is an executive there and he was recently complaining to me about how Seagate doesn’t have a brand strategy, and has a bad history with design.

I’m biased, but I think Seagate has really stepped it up and made a few gorgeous external enclosures over the past few years, but he’s right, they are comparatively late to the consumer space and haven’t developed a consistency in style or design.

Clearly he was talking about the impending LaCie acquisition, so I’m going to have to scold him for keeping this info from me!

For nearly $200,000, this goes against the very spirit of the Internet. These TLDs may be a way for ICANN to make some quick cash (they should be able to raise some revenue for all the work they do), but the only thing that saves this from being a massive tragedy by creating a premium section of the web and a complete dismantling of the low-cost commodity nature of domain names is that this is a stupid thing to own and nobody really really wants it.

Imagine if they floated this plan in 1998, before most people knew what “.com” even was? Think of how quickly “mywebsite.com” would have been seen the way that “mywebsite.geocities.com” is seen today, an alternate history where only major corporations with hundreds of thousands of dollars could get “real” addresses?

Imagine if startups like Google or Facebook or Twitter had launched as a Tripod sub-domain?

Just because a scenario like that can’t possibly happen now doesn’t mean that this idea is any less an insult to the open web.

The Firefox blog commissioned a promotional video from a bunch of researchers in Antarctica who are all big Firefox supporters. They sent them T-shirts and a Firefox flag and everything.

And, “define voracious” works in Firefox just as is does in Chrome, you just need to leave out the colon (because that implies that you want to use a protocol, like “http:” or “gopher:” or “mailto:”.

No, it’s more like carrying around a screwdriver and a hammer. Two tools for two jobs.

Except Firefox’s Awesome Bar has the same features as the Omnibox, so really, you can still use one tool most of the time, and use the other when you need it (quick wiki or amazon search without needing a keyword search, etc)

In the end, both browsers do the same things, in slightly different (but mostly the same) ways. I just don’t see the point of wasting an extra 300 pixels on the address bar when you could put something useful there.

Hi guys, did I miss anything?

Classic deflection. Nice. Just admit that your outrage over this supposed “theft” is a little hollow already.

To each his own, I suppose, but in my opinion (and many others) HTC makes beautiful devices. The Nexus One, the One X, and the Evo LTE are all unique, gorgeous, bold designs with incredible build quality. compare that to Samsung’s plastic-y me-too aesthetic or Motorola’s “stuck in the 1990s” designs.

I absolutely adore the iPhone 4 design (I was shocked by how many people hated it when it came out), but that brushed aluminum/white/black aesthetic that Apple uses on all their other devices just feels so outdated in 2012. It was a hot style in 2005, but now it’s just a way to identify the brand. It’s boring.

Great artists evolve, too.

The headline should say “delivery expected May 24th” not “shipping May 24th.”

**Actually stole a patent or profited…

“And they want money for it.”

Nope.

Apple would rather block the sale of competing devices than license their largely bogus patents. Even if they would make more money by licensing, it’s more in their interest to prevent other companies from competing with them, even if it’s using these dumb tactics.

If a company actually stole an idea or profited directly from the work of another, then by all means, let the lawyers loose, but that isn’t what happened here. This patent is on an idea, not an actual mechanism or any literal code. HTC (or Google or Samsung) didn’t steal anything.

In fiction, you can’t copyright a happy ending, or a wacky sidekick, and yet I’m sure that as soon as first time someone put those things into a story, others couldn’t wait to try their hand at a the same idea.

Apple is exploiting a broken patent system, and they didn’t even come up with the idea they hold the patent on in the first place! It had existed long before they implemented it.

Actually, many mobile devices and other software did do the things covered in the 647 patent, long before the iPhone.

Let’s keep some perspective here. HTC isn’t trying to ship iPhone knockoffs into the country compiled using stolen iOS source code.

This is a minor patent, and it’s for a thing that Apple didn’t even invent, just filed the patent for. Get a grip.

“Not going to buy anything from a company with some thieves”
Jack Glenn

“Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
-Steve Jobs

(That quote “stolen” from Picasso, by the way)

People really need to stop quoting that “not a fan of lawsuits” line. It’s sounds like 1984 doublethink.

Until Apple actually does something to change their litigious ways, that quote has no relevance. And since it came from an executive at Apple, it’s not even worth using as evidence to predict future behavior.

You do realize that you’re talking about a patent that Apple holds for a thing that they didn’t even invent, right?

“Worked long and hard at…” give me a break. Everyone is owed some protection for their work, but seriously, this isn’t that.

Why do you care if Samsung is so blatantly and shamelessly copying Apple (and they are). I mean, if it’s so obvious, then just let their knockoff products die in the Marketplace.

It’s a strange, but natural, feeling that if you’re a fan of something, you develop hate for their enemies, and you want your favorite product to be the best selling most popular one.

Ax yourself: Why should that bother you, the consumer? What interest do you have in seeing Apple’s (or anyone’s) competitors punished?

I love that Chrome came along when it did, to kick off the 3rd great browser war. But… I don’t think I will ever give up on Firefox. As the only major browser from a non-profit, and not supported by an enormous corporation motivated to lock you into a branded ecosystem (I said “major,” Opera people), I feel it’s the only browser maker I can trust to be ethical and to naturally put the interests of the web and its users first (I know, they get all their money from Google, but still).

We’ve already seen Chrome user data tied into Google’s ad-supported business model. And sometimes I feel that the race to HTML5 compliance amongst corporations like Apple and Microsoft is more about what’s fashionable and popular with users (and in Apple’s case, part of its PR campaign against Flash), than about what’s actually right for the web.

I don’t get what’s so special about the Omnibox. Every other browser can execute searches in the address bar, too… except in, say, Firefox, you also have a separate search field which has simple drop down searches for Wikipedia, Amazon, Twitter, etc.

I mean, if there’s one thing we all have plenty of on desktop computers, it’s horizontal screen real estate. Giving it all up for a single enormous search bar seems silly. Sacrificing utility for simplicity, for it’s own sake.

I use Chrome for web development testing and am very familiar with its features, positives, and negatives compared to the other major browsers, so… am I just missing something unique about Chrome’s Omnibar that is better than Firefox’s Awesome Bar + Search Bar?

Is it just search term autocomplete?

HTC has complied with the order (see: the million stories about this), and other HTC phones, like the One S, have arrived in the US and are on sale with no problems.

In this case, someone with standing (guess who?) asked for the customs to step in and double-check for compliance. Odd that only the flagship devices (and not the mid-tier model with identical software sold through the 4th-place network) would be subject to a inspection, no?

HTC couldn’t have done anything differently. This is red tape, but somebody specifically unspooled it, and I don’t think it was US Customs or any other branch of the government.

Right, but they’ll, in one fell swoop, hand the title of highest ppi (along with highest resolution) to Android for another year.

What happens with iPhone 6, or 7? Are they going to keep it at 960×640 forever?

No, it’s that when people say “hey, the iPhone is a bit small, don’t you think?” iPhone owners start defending it like it’s a deliberate choice to keep it that way. Because if larger screens were better, Apple would have already done it, surely.

The iPhone screen is much more tied to Apple’s iOS developer API than a aesthetic or ergonomic choice. If the screen were physically any larger it would quickly be too wide because it’s a 4:3 device (my Android sceen is almost an inch larger but basically the same physical size as an iPhone), and they can’t change the aspect ratio because of their non-fluid app layouts.

Hell, the invention of the “Retina Display” was merely so that they didn’t have to support resolution independence. Nobody at Apple said, “what people really need is a higher ppi.” They said “holy hell, our screen resolution is tiny, let’s fix that, oh, but our apps will break unless we… uh, multiply it by 2, I guess… oh God… somebody call those engineers at Samsung or LG!”

You are free to prefer a small, 3.5" screen if you want, but that’s not usually how these discussions go, and I’m sure after two weeks with a larger iPhone, you’ll never want to go back.

Great. I hope you like it when they break app compatibility, or remain at 960×640 forever.

“You cannot optimize the UI for resolution independence.”

Yes you can, it’s just harder. The good news is that tons of people are already really good at it, they’re called web designers!

Yeah, because they totally planned to go bankrupt first, and only then become wildly successful.

Companies that are short-sighted that can still do well if they put out good products.

Like putting “X” in the name of their desktop OS so that every version has to be called “10.X.” OSX is the name of the product, not the version number (and they just did it again with Final Cut Pro X!)

Or calling the 5th iPhone the “4s,” so that 6th one will be called… what? No iPhone has used the same naming convention.

Or how they put a 4:3 screen on the iPhone in an era when all mobile devices had 4:3 screens, yet didn’t plan their developer guidelines for a future where 16:9 (or higher resolution) screens would be available, much less standardized (this is part of their current problem).

Or how Steve Jobs famously didn’t want native apps on the iPhone. “Were’ not going to release an native SDK. Create webapps for Safari instead!”, he said in that that keynote. He went on to say years later that “we know that all non-native experiences are bad” when trying to justify kicking AIR apps out of the App Store.

Or how you download movies, books, and mobile apps in something called “iTunes.”

Or how after canning the 64-bit version of Carbon (a good decision, probably), it took them years to update their own bundled software to thier own 64-bit Cocoa API. Adobe actually got there first, yet Steve Jobs then had the nerve to criticize them for taking so long at a time when both iTunes and final Cut Pro were will 32bit Carbon.

Seriously, the list goes on. I didn’t say that those things are fatal, just that Apple has a very short sighted view on innovation, and paints themselves into a corner time and time again. In once case, it produced the iPhone 4 screen, which was great, but in other cases, it limits not just their own creativity and innovation, but that of their developer community.

To use an analogy, they plan very well for next month, not don’t even consider the existence of a next year.

I’d say less sickened, because I’m not overreacting, nor am I an idiot like Santorum. Duh. Were you trying to make fun of me or something?

Like I said “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t reasons to justify doing it, but at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.”

It’s like when pot smokers talk about the benefits of hemp as an argument for legalizing pot.

Like you, they’re not wrong, just disingenuous. You make good points about the realty of the situation, but too many people use that as a justification for their personal behavior. I’m tired of people saying “I pirate software, but it’s okay because…”

It’s not okay. It’s not stealing, but it’s not legal. I’m not telling to to stop (go right ahead), or that it can’t have potentially positive effects if a company leverages it correctly, but don’t lie to yourself.

Yeah, it’s the only thing that makes sense anymore!