Apple’s karma (romanian)

Aveam de gând să scriu despre drepturi de autor, licențe de softuri sau despre scandalul cu protv care crede ca va elimina concurenta facându-i reclamă. Nu mă pot abține, o să le fac și eu puțină reclamă, e vorba de vplay.

Poate altă dată o să abordez și subiectele astea. Am găsit ceva mult mai tare. Apple a dat în judecată o firmă micuță din Mexic încercând să-i oprească să mai folosească denumirea de iFone, pe care aceștia o înregistraseră de pe vremea când iPod era un display alb-negru cu o mare roată pe el. iFone e înregistrat în Mexic din 2003, pe când iPhone-ul a apărut în SUA în 2007. Apple i-a dat în judecată pe cei de la iFone din 2009, dar a pierdut abia acum. Puteți citi articolul original pe pagina ziarului El Universal. Glumeam! Îl puteți citi aici. Cât de prost poți să fii să-ți numești produsul iPhone și să te aștepți ca absolut nici unuia dintre ceilalți 7 miliarde de oameni să nu le fi tricut prin cap denumirea asta? Cât de îngâmfat poți să fii să vii cu denumirea de iPhone și să ai pretenția să fii numit revoluționar în denumitul de produse? Și ultima și cea mai importantă întrebare, cât de proști îi crede Apple pe mexicani dacă își imaginează că lumea de acolo n-o să facă distincția între iPhone 5 și iFone, care nici măcar nu e un telefon?

Abia aștept să-i dea în judecată pe cei de la Microsoft peste vreo câțiva ani. Pentru ce? Cum pentru ce!? Pentru utilizarea denumirii de PC, mult prea similara cu iPC, care va fi inventat cât de curând. Adevărul e că… doar un geniu care a lucrat pentru Apple ar fi putut veni cu revoluționara denumire Personal Computer pentru un… calculator personal.

Câteodata stau și mă gândesc cum de mai există Apple? Apoi îmi amintesc de legea antitrust, și total separat, de filmulețul de mai jos. Când mă gândesc câte persoane, ca cea din interviul de mai jos, sunt în lume, trebuie să recunosc că și eu aș fi procedat până în cel mai mic detaliu ca Steve Jobs.

Și dacă asta n-a fost suficient de amuzant, Apple a fost obligat să-și ceară scuze în Marea Britanie, față de Samsung, pentru ca a susținut, că aceștia le-ar fi copiat produsele, adică iPhone. Evident, nimeni altcineva nu s-a mai gândit și nici nu s-ar fi putut gândi la un dispozitiv touch-screen pe care poți atât să te joci, cât și să vorbești.

A personal impression on the new Trimble R10

the new Trimble R10

Read UPDATES

As some of you already know, Trimble launched the new Trimble R10 system two days ago(Oct. 9, 2012) in HANNOVER, Germany at INTERGEO 2012, the so called “world’s largest conference on geodesy, geoinformatics and land management“, so I’ll write my personal impressions on the new Trimble R10.

You can read the original news release by trimble here, but I’ll make a summary for you about what’s new about this new system.

Of course Trimble knows how to market their products, so they unveiled lots of “new excitement features”. As I see it there are 2 or maybe 3 things that are really new features and not just minor improvements of the now-old Trimble R8 system.

Let’s get started with the coolest(or hotter, whatever) new feature, Trimble xFill. It sounds like some sort of simple stakeout feature, but it’s not. It’s a system that allows you to get some extra signals by satellite or by cellular. During the last decade GNSS systems improved that much, that an extra-signal might not seem so impressive. We already have GLONASS, Galileo, Compass, SBAS and lots of other systems, so at first xFill didn’t impressed me too much either.

The really cool thing about xFill is that it wasn’t created to improve the overall accuracy, but to provide a reasonable accuracy in some harsh conditions. In my opinion, this is genius of Trimble that they didn’t push it  for an extra mm accuracy, just for the sake of it, maybe they learned from Apple’s failure with their extra 1cm iPhone5.

So, what does it do?

Let’s suppose you’re doing some RTK VRS surveying in some remote area(for most of the surveyors this is pretty standard) and the cellular coverage is poor and it drops every few minutes which also disconnects you from the VRS server. In this kind of conditions you must wait and hope you’ll get cellular signal again. Now with the xFill you don’t have to wait anymore, if you get disconnected from your main source of RTK corrections(VRS, single-base or whatever) you can continue to work for some extra-minutes(3 to 5 minutes) at a reasonable accuracy. Of course the accuracy will drop a little during these cellular signal(or radio) shortage, but it will still be surveying level. Here’s a graphic that shows how accuracy drops when using xFill during cellular signal shortage.

horizontal positioning error during xFill with Trimble R10

I haven’t actually did the test myself. This graph is taken from this white-paper from trimble.

How does it work?

Data from a permanent GNSS station network is sent to some servers, processed, then the corrections are sent to Trimble’s satellites which send the corrections back to your Trimble R10. You can also get these corrections by internet, instead of getting them through Trimble’s satellites, but if you don’t have enough bars on your cell to connect to your main RTK corrections source, then you won’t be able to use xFill either. Here’s a flowchart taken from the same white paper.

diagram of how the new Trimble R10 uses RTX and Trimble xFill

What’s the catch?

UPDATE2: There’s no catch anymore, here is the new Trimble xFill coverage.

xFill Coverage

If you live anywhere in the Americas, there’s no catch, it just works. If you don’t live in the Americas, then you should check the underneath map or the interactive map from trimble for the RTX satellite service, but take my word for it, you’re out of luck.

Trimble RTX satellite coverage
Trimble RTX satellite coverage

The only option left for those of you who, like me, don’t live in the Americas is to use some sort of internet connection to receive xFill corrections – the gray crossed option in the previous diagram – but as I stated before, if somehow you get an internet connection you’ll probably connect to your primary RTK corrections source.

The bottom line is that for European market, this system is only useful for those who rely on radio based RTK systems, who, for some reason, don’t control the GNSS base which sends the corrections through radio. I find this situation to be extremely rare, in Romania at least, so I’ll check this feature out again when Trimble will have satellite coverage over Europe too. Launching this pretty cool feature at INTERGEO in Europe(9-11 October), with Trimble Dimensions 2012 on its way to Las Vegas(5-7 November) seems odd and it feels frustrating and somehow annoying. It’s like they just wanted to brag on themselves about how great America and Americans are.

Going on to the next R10 cool feature – the eBubble

The eBubble is nothing else than a digital bubble displayed on the controller. So it’s basically what is already known as a G-Sensor in the smart-phone slang. It’s nothing new to the world, smartphones have it, total stations have it, the GNSS systems were the only one left out with a traditional bubble. The eBubble was bound to happen a long time ago. I don’t actually understand how nobody thought of using a G-Sensor in a GNSS system. Leica, Topcon, and others, WAKE UP!

Side note: If any of my teachers is reading this, hear me out. Anyone is calling it a bubble, because it’s a bubble. Of course there are a few who use fancy terms like spherical level and fine-level for bubbles, but I’ll continue to use the word bulă(exact translation of the word bubble in Romanian)

What’s so great about an eBubble?

1. You don’t have to look in two places before storing a point. You have the bubble right on your screen.

eBubble and xFill on Trimble Acces connected to Trimble R10

2. The actual tilt of the pole is recorded. Combine this with the height of the pole and you can use this to process your data even more. The new Trimble Business Center 2.8 supports Trimble R10, so I suppose it also support tilt data.

Other new features

Of course, the new Trimble R10 is smarter, faster, lighter and even better-looking than any  of its predecessors or any other existing similar product on Earth. It’s a new product, how else could it be?

I got most of the information to write this post from the following sources:

  1. Trimble News Release http://www.trimble.com/news/release.aspx?id=100912a
  2. White Paper – Trimble xFill RTK – English http://www.trimble.com/survey_wp.asp?Nav=Collection-92139
  3. Trimble Correction Services – Coverage Maps http://www.trimble.com/positioning-services/interactive-map/interactive-map.aspx
  4. Trimble R10 Datasheet http://www.trimble.com/globalTRLTAB.asp?nav=Collection-90566

When I’ll get a price for the new Trimble R10, I’ll update this post.

UPDATE1: My dealer told me that the new Trimble R10 is about 2000E more expansive than Trimble R8, which means about 20 000E. Compared to R8, R10 has a fair price. Compared to other brands, any Trimble product seems a little bit too expensive. I suppose they charge us with some kind of jewelry tax.

UPDATE3:Regarding Trimble R10’s price, the actual price is just a little bit higher than 20.000E. The difference between R8 and R10 is really the xFill features, if you have strong internet connection, or you always roll with a base receiver, than R10 or R8 will satisfy you just as well. If you really need to buy a new receiver go for R10, because R8 prices didn’t go down, and they won’t.

Have something to say? Write a comment!

Facebook Like Recommend and Send buttons

I usually write in Romanian, but I am gonna write this post in English as it may have a broader public than the Romanian people.

As cool as the Facebook Like button may be for a regullar user, it is just as much or even more suckier for developers. I spent the last few days almost entirely on  making Facebook like button work. Why did I have to spend that much time? Well, apparantely the multibillion company, just can’t hire someone to write a proper documentation for a, 21px by 80px, 500 lines of code, blue button and they also can’t afford a tester with its sole mission to click like buttons all day long.

Here are my discoveries:

1. The size of the Like button

If you try to change the height of the Like button, you will probably try to override some styling embeded in the iframe.

.fb_iframe_widget iframe{
height:20px !important;
}

or

.fb_ltr{
height: 20px !important;
}

These won’t work. The flyout which let users to comment when they like something won’t be visible if you modify the height of the button. This also applies to the Send button

1.1 The size of FConnect button can be changed adding this to your css file

#RES_ID_fb_login_image {
    height: 20px;
}

2. The locale

If you want facebook to display the Send button in your language, and the Send word in your language is longer than 4 letters, than you’re not enough important for facebook so that they would automatically change the width of the button for you. But you may add this to your styling:

.fb_ltr{
/*height: 20px !important;*/
min-width:60px !important;
}

To change the locale you have to change the en_us in http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js with your locale, in my case it would be http://connect.facebook.net/ro_RO/all.js

A list of locales supported by Facebook.

3. The position of the FB Buttons

If you want to display multiple social buttons on one line, you have to write something like this in your css styling:

#fb-root{
display:inline-block;
}

and also

.fb_iframe_widget iframe{
margin:1px !important;
top:-1px !important;
}

Now that you have some nice-looking-good-positioned like buttons you’d probably think you’ve done the job. Not yet!

4. Make Like buttons work

Warning: Whatever you do, DON’T like and unlike your pages. This would cause a Confirm link to appear whenever you try to “like”. I know this is not developer friendly at all, but this is the way facebook works…

After you add meta tags with all the info on every page you want to be liked, you have to lint the page before your page can actually be liked.

A good Open Graph reference can be found at The Open Graph Protocol Website

Here is The Facebook Linter. This tool doesn’t usually work, but keep trying, maybe you’ll get lucky.

The Google+ button has been so much easier to install. I think I’ll switch to this social platform. Ooh… wait, I already did that.

Add me to your Google Plus circles, this is my Google plus profile page https://plus.google.com/110014879955305002051/posts

PS: This post has been written months ago and I didn’t fully checked it again now.