larryjw

crowley said:

coolfactor said:

Berners-Lee conceived and wrote the code for the world wide web and the first browser between 1989 and 1991. He never patented the code, and instead released it into the public domain. That code built the foundation for the internet as we know it today.

AppleInsider, you have a responsibility to not spread misinformation, or use the wrong terminology.

it's not the "foundation for the internet" that we know today, but the "WWW (World-Wide Web)", which is only ONE part of the larger internet. It's based on the HTTP protocol, which is just one of several protocols used on the Internet.

Microsoft made this mistake when they called their browser "Internet", which sends the wrong message to users. Users begin to think that the web is the entiry of the internet, and that is factually false.

Is the foundation the entirety of the house?  Stop being so sensitive.

He's absolutely correct. I was using the Internet certainly 15 years before Berners-Lee invented the HTTP protocol and the browser, and many people I knew were then designing and coding the RFC's that define the many protocols that constitute the Internet -- many who were working under the aegis of DARPA. 

Back then, we were intimate with machine addresses, IPv4, more recently IPv6, utp, ftp, smtp, imap, ntp, ping, bridges, routers, tftp, arp, rarp, ports, listeners, telnet services, and the seven layers of the Reference Model, and reading the Internet packets that came through our servers. 

To refer to the WWW as the foundation is to ignore the real foundations which began in the mid-1920's. 

elijahg said:

crowley said:

Maybe I will, maybe I won't.  But some people definitely won't, they'll go somewhere else, or put off that upgrade another year; 

Which is exactly what I have done since Cook ballooned iPhone prices. I had a new iPhone every other year since the original, until the 6S. Since then I have only bought one: the X - and that was second hand. Cook's absurd pricing has caused them to lose a number of iPhone sales from a historically avid fan, and thus average revenue from me has nosedived in the latter 5 years compared to the 5 before. ASP is up, but that is meaningless. Many of my friends have switched away from iOS or are still rocking an ancient iPhone 6, and they all say it's down to the crazy prices.

When I started my law practice back in the early '80s, I bought two printers. The fast dot-matrix printer cost me $1200. I needed a computer so purchased the Osbourne luggable computer for $1800, Z80 CPU with 64KB of memory and two floppy disks and 5" screen, all running under the CPM OS. My first large brief was 100 pages of Constitutional Law, printed on the second of my printers. The printer could print 10 characters a second max. It took 2 days to print the brief. I typed the brief on the Osbourne using the CPM equivalent of nroff and troff. 

My first "smart" phone, circa 1995, was $1200 from Radio Shack, flip-phone from Verizon. I had no connection from my home. 

When I was working my first job, circa 1970, at a UW-Madison lab, we needed a hard disk to run a real-time OS I had written for a PDP-8, which controlled lab equipment. It cost us $8000 for a 32K hard disk. Before that I had to write my software on a Classic Linc computer in the basement of the UW Hospital. Then dump the compiled code onto a paper-tape, walk the paper-tape back over to the lab and feed the paper-tape into the ASR-33 teletype and debug it, walking back and forth between the hospital and lab fixing coding errors. Of course, I had to work at night from 10p.m. to 6 a.m in the morning, because we were running experiments during the day. 

You really have no idea how good you have it. 

GeorgeBMac said:

lkrupp said:

Rayz2016 said:

This happens every five years. 

They announce that they’re going to break with the past, release something that points to a legacy-free future. 

Then a chap from marketing reminds them that if they do that, then they’re going to have to build market share from scratch. 

And then the whole idea gets binned … for another five years. 

Microsoft is trapped in a legacy hellhole they cannot escape. As time marches on Windows gets ever more bloated because of this captivity. Apple has the luxury of just telling the legacy luddites to fuck off. Every Apple blog and every Apple discussion forum is loaded with outraged users livid because their legacy hardware and software no longer perform. The dropping of 32bit compatibility is just one example. Microsoft could never do that. Apple simply tells the legacy crowd too bad, so sad. The kicker is all those outraged legacy types stay with the platform anyway.

That may be one of the reasons why MacOS is an "also ran".

Support for older hardware is one of the strengths Windows has.   We saw that with WIndows 7 as well as with IE:  Microsoft wanted to move on but its users, particularly corporate users had too much invested in those so called "legacy systems".  Currently the 14 year old Thinkpad I use for financial work is running Windows 8.1.  But, when I get a break from yard work and tutoring my grandson, I plan to stick in an SSD and upgrade it Windows 10.   Why not?  It runs fine, the upgrade will cost almost nothing and will stop me from having to sink money into a new machine for a few more years.

Another example is COBOL, the business language the proliferated in 30-40 years ago.  Today many businesses still run on business critical systems developed with it.  

The truth is:  while hardware can continue to move forward, it is the software that businesses rely on and where the investment lies.  They aren't going to walk away from that investment quickly or easily.  And, in some cases, like COBOL, they can't.  The resources to replace it aren't available.

Cobol from 30 or 40 years ago? That only takes us back to 1990 or 1980. Cobol has been around since the 1960's, defined in 1959 as part of the CODASYL process. 

Cobol came into being at about the same time as Fortran, Lisp, and Algol. 

The truth about Cobol is not the language, but the legacy managers. The Cobol language has incorporated many newer features in addition to having DB2 relational database the backend. But the old Cobol programs were written against card readers and mag tapes, and they still today treat DB2 as a dumb sequential record system. And managers won't allow, much less require, the use of the newer more robust Cobol language features. 

It's legacy mindsets, not legacy programs, hardware, etc. Businesses don't have to walk away from Cobol -- they can take the relatively trivial step to refactor their Cobol programs to use the new Cobol features, and SQL against the DB2 database. The result would be more reliability and half the existing Cobol programs could be each be replaced by a single SQL query. 

• Systems and methods for generating damped electromagnetically actuated planar motion for audio-frequency vibrations

  Patent number: 10659885

  Abstract: A vibration module for applying vibrational tractions to a wearer's skin is presented. Use of the vibration module in headphones is illustrated for providing tactile sensations of low frequency for music, for massage, and for electrical recording and stimulation of the wearer. Damped, planar, electromagnetically-actuated vibration modules of the moving magnet type are presented in theory and reduced to practice, and shown to provide a substantially uniform frequency response over the range 40-200 Hz with a minimum of unwanted audio.

  Type: Grant

  Filed: October 3, 2019

  Date of Patent: May 19, 2020

  Assignee: Taction Technology, Inc.

  Inventor: Silmon James Biggs
  
  
• The above is a summary of the main patent in question. Filing date as you can see is Oct 3, 2019. Apple has been incorporating haptic feedback for many years before this. It does seem to appear Apple's inventions predates Biggs patent. 

dewme said:

emcnair said:

Apple has $193.82 billion in cash. If they are serious about building a car, then they should just buy an existing automobile manufacturer. For example, Mazda is currently worth 5.44 billion.

I think Mazda is already outsourcing a lot of its own manufacturing but I suppose it would give them some relationships already in place. 

I’d love to see Apple do the assembly in Wisconsin at the site that was set aside for the Foxconn fiasco. Something good could actually come from the political theater that took place there. The people of Wisconsin and the US deserve better than what they’ve been dealt. 

The Foxconn Wisconsin site was not designed for the manufacture of cars -- the promise was screens. 

Janesville Wisconsin was the site of a GM plant. Closed of course. Is there still a source of labor and skill from there?  But, there is no mass transit to bring the labor to the Foxconn site. True to form, Republican Governor Walker way back when, made sure to kill a train line, part of Obama's economic recovery proposals that might have been useful for this purpose.