Saturn 3 was brilliant.
Hector's gonna be wearing your head.
"They are not as cool." With these five words, Judge Colin Birss became Samsung's friend and tormentor in one. He had just found in the company's favour in its defence against Apple but ruined the moment for Samsung by hinting that the Galaxy Tab was, well, a bit crap compared to an iPad. Apple iPad Cool tablet Birss …
Yes, they reckoned he sounded a bit foreign or girly or something.
I wish someone would release a decent DVD of it - mine only have mono sound and apparently there were 20 minutes of the original cut that were thrown away.
I was going to write some software to try and combine the compressed-but-stereo sound track from the laserdisc with the faithful-but-mono sound from the DVD, but then decided that time is a precious commodity and not to be pissed away quite as pointlessly.
Oooh, cutting:
The guy from Jamiroquai /was/ called JayKay.
Made me lol.
I never liked the guy, all of his "we got to save mother earth" stuff would have been ok, if he didn't have some of the most conspicuous consumption you could imagine. However, as he backed it all up with generally behaving like a prize penis, that was the icing on the cake for me.
I've just replaced my iPad, with The New iPad... Having skipped the iPad 2, as it wasn't worth upgrading.
Presumably the next one will be the iPad 4, and then back to the New iPad again? I wonder how many people get confused when Apple's website are selling both the iPad and the iPad 2 simultaneously, but the iPad 2 (which should be newer) is the cheaper one?
Also the judge's statements pointed out that Apple cannot patent the obvious and that the function of a device significantly dictates its form.
1. Every tablet with a touch screen will be a thin rectangular object, just like all modern TV & Computer screens.
2. Those thin rectangles will have curved corners so they are not sharp and therefore not damaging to clothes, furniture or people.
3. Touching that screen in a way similar to turning pages in a book, or similar to using a mouse or cursor are all obvious and derived from previous works.
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Judges are rarely 'cool', therefore not likely to be acceptable arbitrators in that field. It's like having the BBC ban your song, immediate success follows, even if its pony & trap. If you parent's, no matter what age you are, think it's cool, it usually isn't often for no more reason than they think that. For example ;
Exhibit A: The Scorpions (although Lovedrive is a bit epic).
Exhibit B: Speedos.
Exhibit C: Wine made from random shrubbery.
I can't think of anything more devastating to Apple.
Ni Indeed! Perhaps our generation felt that way although I grew up in an environment where a tipple with a meal from a young age was encouraged to promote repsonsible drinking (it worked barring the the exception of a few notable incidents, one including an f150, gaffa tape and a teen wolf impression, "officer there is no open alcohol container inside the vehicle! I'm on the roof").
Drinks targetted at kids these days seem to have to be unlikely colours and taste nothing like alcohol. Nettle wine is not cool next to alcopops, but I guess if you can't get alcopops (and lets be honest, from about age 12 onwards we all knew which offlicence didn't ask for id's) then random fermented plant is better than nothing.
@Rampant spaniel: Oddly, kids don't drink many alcopops because they're so expensive compared to a litre of white lightning.
However I do remember seeing someone come up to the bar in my local (a Camra award winning pub) and ask for a Blue WKD being told by the fearsome landlady "Sorry, we don't sell childrens' drinks."
Good for your landlady!
My friends at that kind of age tended to sup junk like concorde (cheap pseudo wine), alcopops weren't around. My much younger brothers friends were all fans of alcopops, mostly because they didn't taste of booze and the bottles were tiny so they could act like they'd drunk lots. Personally I was a fan of scrumpy (farm boy sorry!), I even like the cider you used to get at glastonbury in jerry cans that came with an inch or two of sediment, for the life of me I couldn't drink white lightning. You are entirely correct that it's cheap and strong but it tastes worse than that boxed wine that they refuse to identify beyond 'red wine'. Theres probably wide variations across the country in what kids drink or just what they can afford in any area. White lightning must seriously hamper your ability to play pool!
Ahhh... Happy nostalgic memories...
A bottle of White Lighting in my hand (Diamond White if I was feeling 'rich'), maybe some Thurnderbird to follow, the stench smell of Malibu drifting from across the other side of the room. The Dirty Dancing soundtrack on the stereo...
Oh God! It's a hideous 80s nightmare! Help! Now I can afford proper wine, or single malt. My over-riding memory of parties when I were a lad is that my friends had appalling taste in music. It always seemed to be either the soundtracks of Grease and Dirty Dancing or Whitesnake. *shudder*
Whitesnake might be tolerated, malibu definately not. A friend used to drink malibu and coke until we had every bar in town refuse to serve him unless he shouted as loud as he could that he wanted a "girly and coke".
I do miss proper British pubs. They just aren't the same in the states, the booze and the atmosphere, nothing like a country pub. They can't even name ales correctly.
Ah, the days when 'lets go to the park' was synonymous with 'lets go get pissed'. Lambrini (or a cheaper knockoff) and 20/20 for the girls and some White Lightning or half a dozen cans of Carling for the lads. I guess I'll have to wait till I'm a pensioner unable to afford a roof over my head before I can get away with drinking in the park again.
Fibbles,
Mmmm. I'd forgotten about the 'delightful' taste of Lambrusco blush. Yum. Thanks for reminding me. I must have had weird tastebuds when I was a teenager. I drank Lambrusco for the ridiculous sweetness. And yet I often drank proper scrumpy. Which I now can't stand.
I notice Black Tower is now back on sale, so I can always satisfy nostalgia with a bottle of horrible white wine of some kind. But I think I'll give it a miss. The wine gums that say hoc are nice though...
I did feel a desire to get a Galaxy tab when Apple started kicking off about it, but it passed with a little help from "the spending committee". I'm currently waiting to compare the Series Seven with MS' Intel surface as I've decided to go for a "proper" OS on a tablet and use it as a desktop/laptop replacement as well...
I used to love playing Beyond Dark Castle on my System 7 Macintosh Classic.
Oh, I quite like the Galaxy Tab too, it's a great product that is being marred by Apple's refusal to compete fairly in the Market instead of using the courts to compete in the market. Before someone starts ranting about copying and intellectual property fights. Just think, "standing on the shoulders of Giants" and "Apple Copy too".
Yep i had a macally mouse at some point. While it was, and still is, true that if you need a second, physical mouse button to do something, then it isn't worth doing, that mouse did make it a bit easier to play Starcraft. (These days all Mac interfaces are multitouch, so it's no longer an issue).
AND i had one of those USB ports - and a printer in Bondi(ish) blue and white.
and what's not cool about Wierd Al?
Amish Paradise is a work of genius, especially the video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg
As is The Saga Begins - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU
>Amish Paradise and Dirty Deeds spring to mind
Dirty Deeds (Done With Sheep) is Bob Rivers, not Weird Al (and is far and away the best thing Bob Rivers has done - most times he doesn't even finish the song).
I know the words to Saga Begins, Amish Paradise and many more far better than the original songs. But then, I'm a somewhat excessive writer of parodies myself..
>A lot of Bob Rivers songs tend to be attributed to Weird Al.
I'd be a bit pissed off if I were Bob Rivers, because the ones attributed to Weird Al are the best of his songs.. he's done a humungous number of really rather poor to mediocre parodies, but a few that are outstanding tending towards genius. And it's a bit like some people have gone "that's way too good to be Bob Rivers, must be Weird Al instead" :-)
The notion of tablet devices has been around for decades and the fact they have rectangular screens and a bezel with more or fewer buttons and connectors has zero copycat association; mischievious for anyone lawyer or journo to suggest otherwise.
Stargate Atlantis (2004-2008) featured tablet devices heavily. There are also instances of hybrids I think, not so different to ASUS transformer and Surface. Chunkier than the iPad of 2010 or the Surface of 2012 but thats expected as technology shrinks. Cheeky of Apple to pretend they know nothing of SciFi.
Cool is in eye of the beholder. I suspect Judge Colin was teasing a little.
"In those five words, he saved the company from a lawsuit and utterly trashed its product in the public perception. Who’s going to want to get a ‘not cool’ tablet for Christmas?"
Anyone under the age of 18 is going to percieve anything a fuddy duddy old judge believes to be cool as exactly the opposite.
:-)
Bill board with a HUGE picture of an iPad and the legend
Only a Judge could think it cool
They aren't even going to need to put their own product on the ad.
There are a million and one variations and in everyone Apple get to look like a total tit and yet won't have a leg to stand on.
You'd be surprised how many people wear them. Rugged outdoor clothing is not just the domain of trainspotters and star trek addicts.
The judge's comment has pulled the rug out from under Apple or perhaps more accurately, the curtain from in front of the wizard. Apple may be "cool" but this is an entirely subjective judgement and no defence in court. It gave the judge his fifteen minutes of fame but it is the precedent set by his judgement that will be remembered years from now.
And your reasoning for this is?
I think it is exactly the opposite as hipsters like to be the outsiders so Samsung will now be on their shopping list
Young people (Apples primary market) don't really want to be seen with something that Grandad thinks is cool. If the olds are getting in on the act in won't take much for the fickle youth market to move to something different.
if Samsung had enough guts, they'd turn this story into a tongue in cheek advertising campaign: Our bestest uncoolest product, as per the "Samsung v. Apple", case No...
yes, a bit risky, but they had something similar already, was in Nissan, or Toyota? The car they don't want you to drive? (and they didn't ;)
Well, maybe they didn't, but then, how come I see that... horribly bland vehicle still on the roads?
Similar situation, I think, was when Anheauser-Busch sued over rights to the Budweiser name in the UK to try to get Budvar-Budweiser to drop the Budweiser name and Budvar counter claimed that they owned the name. From what I recall having read the Judge eventually ruled that both companies could continue to use the name as it was unlikely that no beer/larger drinker was likely mistake one type of Budweiser for the other!
iMac copies? I definitely remember the way everyone+dog started to produce thei peripherals in semi translucent blue packaging .... however, due to the lead time in doing this the new products seemed to arrive on the market at almost precisely the time that Apple started to produce iMacs in a number of different colours!
Also, at the same time adding "i" in front of a name seemed to take over from adding "v" or "e" which had in the previous couple of years been the way to make some boring name look "cutting edge"
Honestly I don't think the judges comments will make a difference one way or another on the market at large. True the kids won't want something that some old fuddy duddy of a judge thinks is cool, but how many of them are going to know about the judgement? For that matter how many adults are going to know about it? Patent warfare isn't exactly popular reading when you get outside of the tech sector.
Cool is just so uncool.
Daft kids trying to be cool don't know any better and think that happiness will only be evident if they are cool (popular).
If you are an adult trying to be cool (and the worst example buying apple product to make people think your cool), then it would seem your trying to be younger than you are, which is a totally uncool.
If cool is popular, then being uncool is cooler than cool.
As for a JUDGE even using the word cool makes those trying to attain such status so uncool.
Some adults don't have the inclination to learn about the technology, but they keep reading about these newfangled iPad things in the Telegraph, and they have the ready cash in their back pocket (unlike most youngsters)... They don't buy one because they are 'cool' but rather on the assumption that if lots of people have one, they must work without too much hassle.
My old man uses his Tab 10.1 for precisely three things:
-looking at photos from his camera, via SD Card adaptor.
-Google maps (but only on the continent)
-watching videos of Adolf Hitler being told things his doesn't like.
I think all the fuss about "not cool" being a liability for Samsung is just noise being generated to obscure what really happened: the court ruled that the Samsung tablets is no more a copy of the iPad than the iPad is of a bunch of other designs. What amused me most was the judge talking about how the Samsung tablets seemed somehow "too thin", which we all know is a bit of an unusual perspective on mobile electronics!
I actually stopped caring about the topic in question when I came across this line:
It's probable that Windows 2.0 and the Macintosh OS looked the same to a computer virgin, but to those who actually use computers - usually virgins in a more conventional sense..
Hahaha - those are the lines I love. Thumbs up.
"possibly the most unusable atrocity ever to claim the moniker of 'mobile phone'."
Never used a U800 but not sure it's even possible to get worse than the HTC Touch Pro 2 that work forced on me. We called it the anti-productivity device. Bar none, it was the worst consumer electronic device I have ever used... but does make a decent toy for the three year old now.