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Apple Patent Claim Threatens To Block Or Delay W3C
Kelson writes "The W3C Widget specification is running into a problem: Apple claims a patent on automatic updates and is unwilling to license it royalty-free in the event that it impacts the spec. The W3C is investigating to determine whether the spec includes anything covered by the patent, and decide what to do."
it's a software patent.
start hating.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
It's all about money, Apple fans. Seriously. I have tried to tell you this before, but they do not care about you at all.
Worse, it's a patent on a ridiculously general software concept.
I can't stand these kinds of patents, especially when they block progress and innovation.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
From the article "It probably helped that in those days we avoided patents and other restrictions; without any financial incentive to control the protocols, it was much easier to reach agreement." Exactly why patents don't work in their current form.
Now it seems more appropriate for this story.
Wouldn't "transparent" mean, that the user can see what is actually going on (ie the opposite of a black box)? Though I don't know how far you would have to go in order to fulfil this with a computer.
What you are describing sounds more like "invisible".
Meh. Apple is basically just Microsoft with an inferiority complex.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"We are think for ourselves," eh?
My point, since you missed it, was that we often don't, based on the story posted. Nobody will remember this when the next iPhone comes out.
... and in a manner that is completely transparent to the user of the computer.
In my book that means: no need for a restart. Completely different from what i.E. FireFox / Thunderbird and the like do - needing to ask the user to stop with his / her work in order to perform the update.
Not trivial.
My work machine does this, much to my anguish.
Except that web pages are not programs.
The line's blurring. Ever use Google Documents?
There's nothing wrong with stockpiling patents. The alleged problem is that Apple refuses to grant them royalty free to the W3C, undermining the open standards that Apple professes to protect.
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this patent is total BS!
the patent description makes it sound like we're talking about a system for automatically updating any program while its running without any interruption (which would be quite a feat if accomplished, but still not worthy of a process patent because its an obvious goal).
However the operation the patent actually describes is as follows:
1) I click on an icon to launch an application,
2) a process starts that checks to see if I have the latest version of the application
2a) if I have the latest, it launches the application
2b) if I don't have the latest, it replaces my copy with the latest and the launches the application
this stuff about "transparently running" and "no need for restart" is a red herring. of course there's no need for restart, the program isn't running yet!
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I think Google Chrome is a better fit. GoogleUpdate.exe just sits in the background, the user doesn't know it's installed or running. When a new version of Chrome is detected, its automatically downloaded and installed without any user prompt. The only way they could find out they're running a new version is to manually check.
"Joy is contagious," he said, peering into the microscope.
I know. I have not seen a valid software patent. This one is almost impossible to implement. Apart from Web-2 applications. And this is probably why it popped up.
You don't see Steve Jobs with sweaty underarms, do you?
That's why he always wears black: there's not enough contrast to see it;-) Apple certainly has a far better marketing department, and they've gone to great lengths to not only play up their image, but to tie their products to that image; but once you're beyond that they are every bit as deceptive and secretive as Microsoft. They've essentially convinced an entire class of consumers to think that they are "different" from everyone else when they really just aren't. The inferiority comes from reacting vehemently over any thing that is said along those lines, which is why, like my initial post, this will be modded down to -1 TROLL in no time.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
That is not one of the claims of the patent. That is part of the abstract, which has no direct bearing on what the patent actually applies to.
If you read the claims, it amounts to "checking for an update at runtime, and updating without asking the users, then restarting the program".
Some months ago the W3C was pressured by Apple and Nokia to remove the inclusion of unencumbered audio and video codecs from video tag support in the HTML5 draft. The W3C recognized that only with the existence of a widely supported baseline could we escape the closing of the web which is currently happening through patented media formats.
Of course, give them an inch and they'll take a mile. Now that Apple has seen that the W3C is subject to their manipulation on licensing related matters we can hardly blame them for continuing to use their new found power over this standards group.
This is the nature of the problem.
You don't have inventions in software. You have ideas, and implementations. There is no in-between.
The idea of patenting a software algorithm is equivalent to patenting a mathematical expression.