Vinnie555

Apple is well known for spending less on R&D than any of it’s competitors, so I can only assume that a metric crapton is significantly less than it’s imperial equivalent.

They don’t use search to push chrome, simply their landing page. These are not the same thing.

Ok, several issues now,
1 ) Whilst GMail may be popular, and very good but it is hardly a monopoly

2) Gmail has a full suit of accessibility options, ( imaps, pop3 etc) and native clients on competing platforms.

3) Google make a point of having zero lock-in on their services, at any point you can download your full contact information and mail history.

The same is true of all of their services, so I hardly see how your point stands

I wholeheartedly dislike the way they use their services to promote Android

how do they do this exactly, outside of holding various Android related G+ developer profiles, or people link Andy Rubin using their personal account to blog about what’s happening I have never seen any evidence of this.

Oops, 3.5", though hopefully people would realise that.

Firstly source link

Google suggested a single executable, but in no way suggested that a single layout should be shared between all devices. They created the fragment api, and the layout system to allow people to read information about the device at runtime, and adjust the UI accordingly, they also have extensive documentation about how any why people should implement these features.

Yes, but you’re not wearing your magical iTrousers with perfect ergonomically designed iPhone pockets.

More seriously I find it amazing how much people go on about how uncomfortable it would be to have a phone with a screen larger than 5.5" in their pocket. Given that the average smartphone size is significantly larger than that nowadays do they simply believe we’re all walking around in permanent agony, and causing ourselves long term crippling damage just to spite Apple?

It thinks you’re writing html you have to use &lt; instead of <
and believe me that was a pain to write.

And Chrome syncs your search history, and your currently open tabs. Also in the beta you can sync back from phone to desktop to allow for uninterrupted web browsing.

This has been discussed numerous times, but let me try and explain it to you again.

1 ) The results are not part of the regular result, they represent an alternative search you can perform.

2) The social media web pages do not turn up at any discoverable depth of the original Google search

3) If you search for the people directly you get the most popular page related to them.

4) Google have been expressly forbidden from indexing Facebook and Twitter in a way which would allow them to directly associate the search term with the person.

5) Google can only ensure that G+ results are actually linked to the real person in question, using the method focus on the user use could lead to fake pages being associated with certain celebrities, simply because they are more popular.

So it would also be ok if you asked it where you could buy a computer and it only directed you to the nearest Apple store?

Whilst Siri was designed to provide a more personable response than Google Voice Actions it is still supposed to be an interaction layer for your phone, not a virtual person. If you ask the phone for the best type of something, you expect an objective answer, or a relevant web result. Should you phone also “emulate” a person by not bothering to set reminders for you, or lacking knowledge on things a simple web search could turn up?

G+ results have never been “injected” into regular search results, they appear in a sidebar, as an alternative search type. This is the same way Google have used shopping and places results for years. Also the result don’t pollute or otherwise bias a regular search, direct searches for people or generic terms like social network throw up Facebook result in favour of G+.

I want this to be true just to see the furious back pedalling from the most vehement Apple supporters, you know the ones who say that 3.5" is the perfect size, supported by lots of research, and that “retina display” is a scientific term, meaning exactly like an iPhone.

You would do it because it makes everything that little bit larger, so targets are easier to hit, also if you’re looking at media consumption or internet browsing you can hold the phone at a more comfortable distance and still view things easily. Bigger phone = bigger pictures/movies and people like that.

Income == revenue, and whilst profit is a good thing, it isn’t a good measure of the size of a company. Whilst I can see you’re support your company of choice liking them best doesn’t mean they have to win at everything.

The term is simple hyperbole, and is most commonly used in mainstream media. It’s simply used to mean that the product greatly outperforms the Apple equivalent, they feel to an extent where it will replace it in the public conciousness as the de-facto standard. There is never a suggestion that it completely eliminate a devices market, of cause Apple to go into bankruptcy, this simply comes from your perception that the market it only capable of supporting a single product in any niche.

Ok, 2 things

1) The programmers boss is almost always a programmer themselves, they just have to spend more time managing people and less time writing code.

2) It would not be possible for some to monitor the total continuous output of a team of programmers, and compare it to all existing patents whilst trying to determine whether there is any infringement or not. Furthermore patents are generally quite technically precise, and as such you would need a detailed technical understanding of the process to be able to accurately determine would may or may not constitute infringement, possibly then requiring the programmer to stop working to justify there case, or re-implement their work.

Yes, but you can only pay the patent holder for the rights to use something when you become aware an infringement has occurred, the point that everyone apart from you is trying to make is that, in the mobile area particularly, there are so many existing patents, and so many new ones filed on a daily basis that were someone to continuously monitor all new products against all the patents out there, then negotiate on any possible infringement you would spend so much time doing this that you’d never actually make anything.

I understand what you’re saying, but you’re still mistaking cost for value, the device may cost them $5 but it has a $20 value, you could easily extend your point to suggest that they should be giving them out at $10 pledges as they still make $5 per pledge. Ultimately it comes down to my original point, conceptual it is not a pre order, you are spending money to assist a product getting to market, they company addition choose to reward certain levels of funding with lower value items. The whole project is constructed with what they hope are realistic targets in mind, as they have to offset any expect reward handouts from the original target, so the higher the reward value to pledge ration the more money they have to request in order to launch.

Umm.. yeah that is how it works.

Umm.. yeah that is how it works.They didn’t just double up so they wouldn’t have to rework the UI, though that is a part of it, they doubled because the OS at the most basic level can’t effectively scale images, all iOS icons and other UI elements are design as pixel precise images, you get away with double because you can just make 4 nes pixels = 1 old one. This however has absolutely no bearing on screen size, all that happens then is as the screen gets bigger so do the pixels. So the same precise elements get drawn just as neatly, and are just as easy to use, except on a slightly larger screen.

Umm.. yeah that is how it works.They didn’t just double up so they wouldn’t have to rework the UI, though that is a part of it, they doubled because the OS at the most basic level can’t effectively scale images, all iOS icons and other UI elements are design as pixel precise images, you get away with double because you can just make 4 nes pixels = 1 old one. This however has absolutely no bearing on screen size, all that happens then is as the screen gets bigger so do the pixels. So the same precise elements get drawn just as neatly, and are just as easy to use, except on a slightly larger screen.And that’s what it comes down to, just a slight increase in screen size whilst maintaining the current resolution and aspect ration, it would simply make each screen element that tiny bit bigger, no redesign necessary. Yes if you doubled the size, or tried to stretch it out to a 20" monitor you might have problems, but as far a an extra .3" of screen space is concerned no-one is going to object.

This is pretty much it, iOS has zero effective scaling, it was just designed that way. Because of this the only way they had of changing screen resolutions was doubling up, as with the iPhone4. Given the amount of effort they’ve gone to in pushing the idea of a “retina display” since then you can see how difficult it would be to push out a new product with lower dpi, ( their only option to increase size without doubling again, which would be frankly ridiculous ). Basically Apple have missed the boat on this one. They could easily have put out the iPhone4 at 3.8inches, used the same resolution, and called that retina display, but they didn’t, and now they’re stuck.

The concept is nothing like a pre-order, it’s a crowd sourcing investment system. Their aim is to raise sufficient capital to launch the product commercially, the pledge promises are simply their way of rewarding ( incentivising ) larger investments. If the reward was fully worth the value of the investment, then they would gain nothing from it.

But isn’t it true that streaming subscription services basically screw the artists (and the labels)? They make essentially no money, regardless of how popular a song may be?

Not really, songs are technically licensed and broadcast in a similar way to how radio used to work, the label receives a small royalty fee every-time a song is played. As such the system much better supports producers where short media formats are prevalent, particularly where repeated use is likely. Books just don’t lend themselves to a system like this, as you tend to make contact with the server once, then read a book over an extended period of time, meaning that the royalty fees per contact would have to be much higher. A better model to use in this case would be closer to the sort of rental model offered by Netflix, and LoveFilm, where you would only ever be allowed access to a single book on the device, and copyright holders would be entitled to a share of your fees based on how much of the time it was their book. Of course you’d need some serious DRM to prevent abuse of this sort of system, as text is incredibly easy to copy.

Yes, because examining a broad spectrum of information sources, studying market trends and extrapolating out from there is much more narrow minded, and brainwashed than directly quoting a companies most vapid and nebulous of PR sound-bites. Contrary to your tin-foil belief there was no meeting of the secret cabal of tech journalist where they decided that RIM was on the down and out, there continuously declining market share, and lack of technical advancement did that for them, it remains to be seen whether BBX can turn things around for the company, however signs so far are less than promising. As for

this goes way beyond phones and tablets.

the judgement included the structure and organization of the work

Yes, but it was clearly stated that that inclusion was very specific to this case, and only allowed due to unusual nature of the interface, ( note this was related to apparent “creativity” and not scale or complexity ). The wording of the case and judgement certainly seems to work to avoid setting a general precedent. That is quite different to the current case, where Oracle have made no attempt to gain a specific exception, but have continued the entire case, on the basis that API’s in general are subject to copyright. Which Judge Alsup himself has stated has yet to be determined as a matter of law.

infringement would be trivially avoided by simply creating different functions, with different names, and different signatures.

This isn’t as trivial as you might think, firstly the signatures chosen by the first party are likely to be the most obvious and descriptive, at least forcing unusual trick of linguistics or logic on the part of the rte-implementing team to express themselves effectively, additionally given the ability to create, and copyright an API you could simply create vast blocks of copyrighted method names, forcing people to start having function calls like

lajksdgf( int _jfd234, char* _fajkl )

just the be on the safe side.

It’s only available in the US, so doesn’t exactly work for everyone.