This isn't hoarding...
... It's just a business continuity plan. In the event of the apocalypse!
664 publicly visible posts • joined 22 May 2008
They spent a year working on an upgrade, and all they could come up with was this? What the feck have Moto been doing? Counting their Google Dollars? This is basically last years Xoom, slightly over clocked, corners cut (literally and metaphorically), and a few ports bunged up.
Seriously, this is pathetic. 7.5% would be nearer the mark.
The calculation is a little more complex than that. You have to factor in the distance the screen is away from the eye. Certainly I hold my iPad at a greater distance than my iPhone.
So (without being arsed to do the actual calculation myself), that may well put 264dpi into the realm of 'retina' (the marketing term), whereby the pixels are indistinguishable from one another.
No.
Apple can patent a shape (trade dress or design patent), and Samsung can patent a 3G technology.
However, you do not need to have rounded corners etc. to make a mobile phone; while you do need to implement the 3G standard to make one (if you want to be competitive). As the latter is part of a defined standard, license to the patent needs to be under FRAND terms.
Although recent evidence would suggest otherwise, you don't need to make a phone look like an iPhone to be competitive. Ergo, no requirement for FRAND licensing terms.
That's rather assuming they had books in the first place.
I'm astonished at the closed-minded nature of posters on this topic. Leaving aside the whole Mugabe regime and whether Apple know/do not know anything about this, I think this idea is fantastic.
Think about all the information that can be stored on an iPad. Have a look at apps like Elements for the sorts of teaching aids you can have. Access to the internet would be possible too --mobile telephony coverage is actually pretty good in Zimbabwe. Hell, we could do with something like this in UK schools!
A good review, so far as it went. However, I think the important details missing are:
- How does Kobo's selection and range of books compare to Amazon
- Are Kobo's prices similar to Amazon
- How is the whole process of navigation, book discovery, and buying via Kobo compared to Amazon.
The hardware looks nice (a fair bit nicer than the Kindle), but as Apple have taught us, that's only half the story. It's the whole experience that counts, and this is where I would worry that Kobo are behind Amazon.
iTunes takes a lot less than 30% for music. IIRC it's substantially under 10%. The record companies take the lion's share (as per usual).
Really Pete, it's the record companies that are the vampires. They do very little of value in this day and age. You should be thanking iTunes for being a relatively level playing field. And, although you can't directly self-publish to iTunes, there are a multitude of aggregators out there who will publish your song for a few $ per year.
The important thing about Siri (and what raises it above the standard voice-to-text converters and voice command systems) is the understanding of context.
I got no impression from these reviews that any of the apps demonstrated that ability. It's one thing to convert a voice sentence to text then pass it to Wolfram Alpha; it's an entirely other thing to maintain the understanding of context across a number of spoken sentences.
I had a pretty much unbroken run of Ericsson (and then SE) phones from the T18 to T28 to T68 (Ericsson branded, as per the photo, before Sony Ericsson ruined the colour!) and finally T610. The T610 was awesome (well, the built in camera was a bit ropey, but then most phones didn't have cameras at all at this point). It was small, simple, and great looking. The phones after that were a little disappointing (can't even remember the model numbers).
Then I got a P910i (the one with the vestigial but surprisingly usable keypad on the flip down bit). At the time a great smartphone -- good battery life, reasonably fast browsing (despite only being GPRS), and plenty of apps (albeit rather expensive compared to the App Store -- amazing what a bit of competition and scale can have on downward pricing pressures). Specs were well below the WinMob phones of the day, but it worked so much better.
It died on me before the much delayed (and ultimately disappointing) P990 came out. I didn't get that and settled for some almost entirely unusable (and poorly made -- I got through 3 or 4) Walkman slider thingy. None of their promised smartphones really measured up, and I didn't like the look of anyone else's products either, so stuck it out until the iPhone came out. Got one of those, and have never looked back.
If only SE had been able to build on the success of the P800/9x0, rather than making them worse. They could have been dominating the smartphone market today.
The thing is, most people who listen to music (on the move, at least) have one of the first three devices you mention. Which don't support FLAC.
The huge numbers of FLAC supporting hardware are actually in the minority.
Not that I think ALAC being open source is a particularly big deal. The massive majority of people couldn't care less if their music was lossless of 128kbit MP3, and I doubt many of them could tell the difference.
If it's the MD player I'm thinking of (fecking ugly with a knurled silver wheel around the LCD screen), then wasn't it more of a jog-wheel -- i.e. it didn't continuously rotate like the iPod.
I may be wrong, my recollection of a friend's MD player from over 10 years ago is a little hazy.
Holsters? Fecking holsters? You rednecks are hilarious. If you'd bothered getting a passport and travelling outside of the deep south, you might notice that almost no-one outside of the good ole US of A wears their phone on a holster. They'd realise they look like a dick.
This, I suppose, explains why these ridiculous gigantaphones are largely (no pun intended) a US phenomenon.
Holsters. Christ almighty.
Lynch was meeting Hurd and Oracle's head of M&A. And we're expected to believe that they were just talking about database issues? Why would you talk database issues with the head of Mergers & /Acquisitions/? I don't buy it.
And having used Autonomy's enterprise search elsewhere, I'd say they are the last people you want helping you with your unstructured data.