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Comment Again? (Score 1) 398

http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/03/19/2128249/the-air-car-nears-completion

"According to an article on Gizmag, Tata, India's largest automotive manufacturer, has developed a car that runs on compressed air. It costs less than $3 USD to fill a tank on which it can run for 200 to 300km. The car will cost about USD $7,300 and has a top speed of 68mph. About once every 50,000 km you have to change the oil (1 liter of vegetable oil). Initial plans are to produce 3,000 cars per year."

Comment Re:Linux on Mac?! (Score 0) 780

You think he'll get modded down on slashdot for being critical of something Apple does?!

It'll take a few days to mobilize the Fanboi Trike Force, but yes, he will get downmods, and most likely will have comments he made from other articles downmodded as well.

Yeah, and you know because that's the way you moderate, isn't it, shithead?

Comment Re:Advertising numbers (Score 0) 221

That's pretty rediculous, $1.1 billion advertising two new products?! I always knew Apple was a marketing company but damn.

This could simply be because I haven't seen regular ad numbers before though. Does anyone know what competing products have spent on advertising? That kind of information would help make more sense of their numbers.

Samsung Launches Biggest U.S. Campaign to Date for Galaxy S III - remember this is US only.

If any Americans haven't yet heard about the new Galaxy S III phone, chances are that will change this week.

That's because Samsung is unleashing the biggest-ever marketing campaign in Samsung Mobile USA's history for the phone's launch, beginning this week. Although Samsung declined to provide specifics on spending on the phone, it's believed that the marketing budget for the next few months will more than double what the company spent on all Galaxy-branded products in the U.S. in 2011.

Samsung spent $142 million in measured media on Galaxy products in 2011, according to Kantar Media, up from $79 million in 2010.

So that would be about $300 million just for the Galaxy S III in the US for half of 2012 alone. That probably adds up worldwide to more advertising for the S III alone than for all iPhones and iPads together in 5 years.

Comment Re:Usual posturing (Score 0) 221

Apple's competitors already know what drives IPhone/IPad sales. Yes, Apple's numbers are more authoritative, but 3rd party survey firms provide decent results. Why would consumer opinion be a secret? Especially to firms with billions to gain or lose on their attitudes.

So why does Samsung want access to them if they already have their own?

Comment Re:The Article is Wrong (Score 0) 221

They also designed the iPhone based on what a Sony engineer described during an interview. That 2006 design by Apple looks remakably close to the iPhone, and bears the Sony logo (the drawing was done by and Apple designed following what he interpreted from the Sony guy).

Nope. Because what the Sony engineer described was a media player inspired by the design of the iPad. Which you can see there: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/01/the-sony-device-samsung-claims-inspired-apples-iphone/ And what the Apple designer made was a "how would the iPhone (we have already designed) look like if Sony designed it".

Somebody claiming that should have "Silly" as their middle name. Or "Samsung". What? Eric S. Raymond? Figures.

Math

The Chaos Within Sudoku - a Richter Scale of Difficulty 74

mikejuk writes "A pair of computer scientists from the Babes-Bolyai University (Romania) and the University of Notre Dame (USA) have made some remarkable connections between Sudoku, the classic k-SAT problem, and the even more classic non-linear continuous dynamics. But before we go into the detail let's look at what this means for Sudoku enthusiasts. Maria Ercsey-Ravasz and Zoltan Toroczkai have devised a scale that provides an accurate determination of a Sudoku puzzle's hardness. So when you encounter a puzzle labelled hard and you find it easy, all you need to do is to compute a co-efficient that measures the hardness of the problem. An easy puzzle should fall in the range 0-1, medium ones in 1-2, hard ones in 2-3, and for ultra-hard puzzles, 3+, with the hardest puzzle, the notorious Platinum Blond, being top of the scale at 3.6. We will have to wait to see if newspapers and websites start to use this measure of difficulty. The difficulty is measured by the time it takes the classical dynamics corresponding to the problem to settle in the ground state and this depends on the degree of chaos in the search for a solution (PDF)."

Comment Re:The Article is Wrong (Score 0) 221

Steve had made similar comments in other forums. He seemed to be a big believer that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. If you did a market survey before the iPad came out, and asked people what they wanted in a tablet computer, very few would have articulated something that looked/operated similar to an iPad. Even after it was announced many people scoffed. But it's been a huge success.

While he sometimes said things that were not entirely clear, Steve's philosophy never seemed to be "don't ask the customer what they like or don't like about existing products". Especially knowing what they don't like is important. That's where the opportunities are. The trick is, in Steve's mind, that the customer is not the appropriate person to ask HOW to fix it. The great designers at Apple will come up with a fix. And if they do the job right, it will be something the customer would never have thought of, but will love.

Exactly. It's not like if they had asked people what computer they would buy, even 1% would have answered "a translucent blue, egg shaped all-in-one".

Comment Re:Those who don't buy your products ... (Score 0) 221

So what they learned only helps them attract that same customer again and again, which is precisely why most apple fanboys dump their perfectly good current model and rush out an replace it with the next model the instant it comes out, even if they have to pay an Early Termination Fee to do so.

Far from attracting the majority of new customers, Apple is mostly eating its young, singing to its own choir, reselling to the same crowd.

The research plan is fundamentally flawed, and has resulted in Apple's total domination of the smartphone market being cut in half over the years.

Yeah, and that's why every iPhone generation has sold only as much as all previous combined. An exponential growth is certainly not enough to raise market share.

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