The high end iHelmet will plug into a proprietary nasal Thunderbolt port.

Need a lower end version? The iPod Zip will have open interfaces, but you don't want to know where it plugs in.

It only takes one claim on one patent to become a significant and expensive problem.

Oracle may have had some of it's ability to negotiate for an out of court settlement shot down, but I don't see why this is a win for Google. Fewer claims remain but still the same number of patents in dispute.

Beyond "it's not a loss", can a nice slashdotter enlighten me what this really means?

Well, I thought I understood it.

Norman & Nielsen say gestures lack intuition because they lack consistency, discoverability, visibility, and feedback. They say they suck for other reasons too (scalability, et al). Compared to the successes of the traditional menu interface, OS vendors should: disallow inconsistent gestures. Develop gestures that can be reliable and not prone to error. Only release gestures in the wild before perfecting them in the lab. Add a button to universally pop up applicable menus in all situations. And like the old GUI standards, impose gesture standards from OS vendor down to developer and not the other way around.

I think they've nailed it that the discoverability is poor, but I don't find inconsistency a problem (except as a duplicate of the discoverability argument). I prefer that the app developers are taking the lead in making new gestures to fit their interfaces, once discovered (and yes, that is a problem) they "stick" much better in my fingers than the menu interface. The ability to experiment and fit the gesture to the interface is a good thing. Some gestures stink, and those developments & products will disappear. Remember the gesture (shown at WWDC) to rotate a photo on the iPad originally? It practically took two hands to do. That's something that was worked on in the lab and imposed from on high, and it stunk. The current gesture Apple adopted was (I think) copied from third party software. Since there isn't a fully vetted and evolved interface like GUI menus to impose on developers, falling back on menus or imposing consistency at this point is counter-productive.

Though I may not have expressed it well, I agree discovery is a problem, yet I find there are major wins for gestures in my usage despite the inconsistent, unreliable, poorly visible, and questionable feedback attributed to gestures. Telling OS vendors and developers to follow menu interface traditions and virtues may not be the best thing in the evolving gestural "wild west rules" right now.

I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. But there's a big advantage to pioneering a new physical interface: you don't need the language part of your brain. My 1 year old twin nephews can interact with their iPads with only the most basic of demonstrations of how a new app works. They can't read or write but they can follow demos of fingers creating action pretty well.

Is bringing along the old interface of mice & menus helping or hurting? I particularly like the new "swipe up" gesture to scroll down of a touchscreen rather than the traditional "elevator window" model of scroll bars where clicking up scrolls up.

They are absolutely to be commended for chastising developers that there is no easy way to discover actions if they are not intuitive; I'd rather they come up with ways to address this than just fall back on menus though. For example, Apple included an interactive tutorial for using the custom gestures built-in to Pages, Numbers and Keynote because they aren't discoverable at all. Some I've forgotten because I don't use them (and I'd have to re-watch the tutorials again to re-program my brain). But the ones I have picked up on are absolutely ingrained and effortless now. Unfortunately, built-in tutorials are the exception rather than the rule, and even when they are included they more trouble to refer to than a drop down menu. But there are ways to improve without eliminating gestures.

I wouldn't want to use the gesture interface when I'm programming during the day, but when I'm swiping through my early morning junk mail, RSS feeds, and to-do items, my brain feels far more engaged on my iPad than my desktop. It's almost like the touch gestures are autonomic and leave my (limited) higher brain functions alone to read though the fog (at least until my caffeine kicks in.)

I agree that people need to improve gesture interfaces which are in their infancy, but I don't think it's justified to throw the baby out with the bath water just because of long traditions.

This is a text book example on how the GPL is not a "trap" for big companies. The terms changed. A company disagreed with the changes. And they opted out of future usage.

Is it the right thing to do with lawyers? Yes. No fighting or disguised usage; they quit SAMBA "cold turkey" and all lawyers are happy.

Is it right thing to do with SAMBA developers? Yep. They didn't fork the codebase and create a competitive SAMBA GPLv2 effort.

Is it the right thing with Apple developers? Probably. Some older features are missing, so relying on pre-Active directory features will be troubling. For those who really need SAMBA itself (rather than just the features), Apple's GPLv2 forks are public and the GPLv3 work could be taken up by interested companies, researchers, or hobbyists.

Is this the right thing with users? That's what we don't know. Will the new system be secure enough? Will it be integrated well enough? Will end users be oblivious to its replacement? If yes, that's the final word on whether this was the right move at this time for this company. If no, then that shows SAMBA is non-trivial code, that can't be easily replaced.

IMHO, that's exactly how disagreements with GPL licensed code should be resolved.

While completely justified, the developer sounds like a very angry bird.

It takes time and effort to slingshot those pigs out of the store.

I really, really wanted a Windows tablet five years ago, but the prices were way too high. Whatever your feelings about Apple, their ability to crank tablet prices down to a reasonable range has been a big boon for everyone wanting to buy the form factor. They may lead right now, but when suppliers catch up and can get parts to all manufacturers (in a year or two), we'll all be better off that this is no longer considered a luxurious exclusive of the high end like the Windows slates used to be.

But how do they do it? Jobs may be the PR showman, but Tim Cook is the Compaq-alumnus who is the real price magician.

Remember back in 2005 when Apple made a huge exclusive deal for 5 years of Flash RAM with Samsung? That was more than a year before they even introduced the iPhone, but Tim Cook locked up supplier deals people thought were insane at the time. Apple only makes Macs and iPods, what the heck are they going to use all that flash RAM for?

Apple now has a lot of cash on hand to get the best prices and to make exclusive deals like that, which they said they just did for three more critical parts in their last earnings report (and people are speculating over what those three parts are).

But finally, when suppliers aren't able to deliver on time, in quantity, and at a good price, they haven't been shy about pitting suppliers against each other.

Even with the cheapest supplies, might Apple be selling the iPad at a loss? At least for the 1st generation iPad, it's unlikely. Though Apple doesn't break out many numbers they show that iPad revenue over Christmas was almost equal to Mac revenue. Considering the larger sales of the iPad, more sold at a loss would be more loss, and that doesn't seem to have happened with their record profits over Christmas. Second, Phil Schiller last year said after the introduction but before it went on sale that Apple still had some pricing flexibility (meaning they could cut deals with big companies or bring the price down to the public, if no one bought it). Those two things together really suggest that this isn't a loss leader for Apple like the XBox was for Microsoft back in 2005. This may all change with iPad 2, but it doesn't really look like they added any expensive features to the (minor?) upgrade this time around.

With as many of the iPad parts coming from Samsung (including the A4 & A5 system-on-a-chip) you'd expect Samsung would be in the best position to make a real competitor. Apple's price advantage (though painful to competitors, right now) is short term. It's good that the market is getting competitive with low power, touch input, tablet supplies. And it will be even better for users when tablets in 2012 will be significantly better and maybe even cheaper from a variety of sources.

Just be patient, Samsung and the iPad competitors will be back soon with better products.

Two days earlier and it would have been June 6, or 6/6. Rolling out IPv6 on 6/6 would have been biblically ordained to take over the heavens and the earth. Now it's just... another day, another test.

Jobs left Apple in May 1985. System 7 was released on May 13, 1991. Unless someone wrote down his ideas and preserved them on the infamous "colored note cards" he had zero influence over System 7.

System 7 was 32-bit clean and multitasking on full-time. But it wasn't popular because formerly "high end" 2MB Macs with 20MB hard drives were now the minimum requirements and seemed slow compared to System 6.

Steve Job's only influence so soon after his return on Mac OS 7.7 was to rename to Mac OS 8 and kill clone support. It was a nice evolution of classic Mac OS 7 so people liked it, but rename it Mac OS 8 and viola, no more contractual obligation to the clone makers. A dick move indeed, but irrelevant to the quality of the software itself.

Perhaps you mean the buggy, unstable, defunct System 8 code named Copland which Apple started in March 1994? It was the failed overhaul of System 7 software with a nanokernel, preemptive multitasking, new Finder, and so on. Apple bought NeXT (and brought Steve Jobs back) precisely because they couldn't get it perfected and stable. If anything that sort of supports Steve's philosophy "Real artists ship".

Whether Jobs has evolved into vision-driven designer or whether he's still a bullying brat is irrelevant. These three software releases aren't really examples of anything he had significant influence over.

Linux has been a great win for what people use it for. Developing it to fit the needs of non-developers is a crap shoot; developers aren't casual users. Here are some things I've thought were missing.

Quicken isn't proper double entry book keeping, but it's ease of use wins non-accountants over. It's hard to get that balance right though; even Intuit had to buy Mint when it's attempt to jump start it's Mac version failed to deliver. Other Linux tools have felt like a thin veneer over double entry hell to me. Trust such tools with my financial life? No.

An automated software updater? Cute names probably works against keeping ignorant users up to date. "I know it's been years, but I won't trade in my Karmic Koala for a Natty Narwhal!" Software updates are critical for stability and security, but the Linux update tools I've seen either don't cover enough or they are way too difficult for a casual user to operate. Demanding re-installation basically means sending them back to Windows.

How about training software instead of documentation? Despite the web's illusion otherwise, Mac and Windows users are not very advanced. It's one thing to offer a simple unified interface, but software to train the ignorant bosses of the world how to send email, backup, and print? Of the few such Linux attempts I've seen, some fail by mixing interfaces. But all have failed by going to the command line at some point. Even though they say "just type this, you don't have to understand it", the user's whole experience rides on them NOT making a typo. Way too fragile.

Linux is unparalleled in meeting the needs of it's developers, but without people making apps for their ignorant bosses, middle school kids, and reluctant grandparents, it's audience with (perhaps rightfully) stay self-serving.

I see it similar to the Etude music player on the iPhone. It's a MIDI player that highlights the notes on the sheet music and on a simulation of a piano keyboard as the music is being played.

The Cat in the Hat eBook has several modes, one of which highlights the text as a voice reads the words. Another of which lets the kid touch something in the drawing, says the word and highlights it in the text (if it's in the passage on that page).

Neither replaces an audio performance (like an iTunes song or an audio book), and neither of which replace the physical static medium (like a piece of sheet music or a book), but both make a nice interactive presentation to help the viewer's brain make the connection of these very different sensations.

The iPhone OS is pretty new so it's hard to know what will be found, if investigated. But if based on recent legal precedents, change won't come from US legal action.

At the end of 2008, Apple's Macintosh "walled garden" practices were brought before Judge William Alsup in the Apple vs Psystar case. Psystar filed counterclaims insisting that Apple's EULA was invalid because it was "tying" Mac OS X to Apple hardware. They were basically laughed out of court.

You can read Groklaw's analysis of that ruling, but my armchair lawyering just can't see too much difference between the OS X "walled garden" and the iPhone OS "walled garden" legally.

sopssa wrote: "Open Source: Nobody restricts where you can install the application, and you get the source code too -- the best situation."

No, open source is about "source" code, not the applications or products you build with it. It doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the compiled products on a platform, since that would also promise open source programmers will fix all the bugs that stop you from running their code on a platform. You've got the source, but that's only half the battle.

sopssa continued: "Proprierary software: You dont get the source code, but nobody is restricting where or if you can install it, as long as its freeware or you have paid for it."

First, proprietary software is not code. Licensing proprietary code or software often demands where you can deploy it in the license, but without that license the law says "nowhere". Heck, even some open source code such as GCC places demands on how the licensed code is deployed; you don't agree with the terms of the license and you again have no freedom to deploy it.

sopossa concludes: "Apple: Not only will you not get the source code and in most cases you have to pay for it, Apple is in total control what applications the user is allowed to install. They dont even give you the option to decide yourself."

Again, this conflates source and product, but I get the sense that sopssa's real complaint is about the locked down practices of saying what you can run on your Apple products. Even then you do have options; if it's a personal itch you need to scratch you can jailbreak or become a developer and deploy to a small handful of iProducts. But if you want to make "the next big thing" available to all platform users Apple does demand to play by our rules or go to a different playground.

When viewed as a fledgling platform that's still struggling with performance and security, that's not an unreasonable demand. When viewed as a multi-billion dollar, uber-popular computing platform, it is downright offensive. I vacillate between these perspectives regularly, but fortunately Apple's products are the only computing product around.

If Adobe becomes wildly successful on Android, Apple might change their mind about adoption. But Apple has made it clear they aren't going to be the pioneer with Flash on a mobile platform.

Not saying this is good or bad, unlike the iPad, It looks like two separate computers. The touch screen looks like the weakest part of the implementation, but I like this idea for a smart tablet dock. Your dock has the facility to backup your tablet's data; that seems much simpler than syncing through iTunes.

But in the video the netbook / keyboard base still maintains power when the screen is undocked; I'd think it'd quickly go to sleep instead.

How the base will react if someone else docks their tablet into the wrong base. Will it die? Will it enter a locked security state? Will it switch over to host the new tablet's data without problem?

The quick reloading of the web page is neat, but it is not the same page with local mods. The Flash banner ad at the top of the page doesn't load. And if you were on Slashdot entering your comment when you undocked, you'd lose all the words in your well-constr

The larger bookstore chains in the US all have floor space dedicated to eBook readers. Barnes & Noble (and subsidiaries like WaldenBooks) are all pushing the B&N branded "Nook". Competitors like Borders show off the Sony eReaders and their kin. They typically have a functional unit tethered to a display stand that's loaded with eBooks. Some smaller stores have non-functional display units. And some just have paper flyers.

Though eBook readers are more common to see in airports rather than coffee shops, the segment of the American public that visits bookstores is aware of what they are and what the current versions have to offer. Certainly over Christmas 2009 these things were promoted well beyond stores' capability to deliver them, but whether that was due to low supplies or high demand isn't clear. They did appear to outstrip sales expectations over Christmas.