Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple?

The Chinese... by j35ter · 2012-08-20 03:43 · Score: 5, Funny

couldn't care less!

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Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango

Re:The Chinese... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 03:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

You kid, but this is actually important.
Supposedly we live in a "Global Economy" now.
China manufactures a lot of goods for the US. Now ask yourself, what does the US have to offer China, and the rest of our world? Intellectual Property, which is only reinforced by our nations laws? Our Lawyers, which mostly are specialized in US law? Our MBAs?
If we hardly manufacture anything now and IP is our primary "resource", and foreign countries do not need to respect our IP, then what exactly do we have to trade for? What do we offer the world?
Re:The Chinese... by polar+red · 2012-08-20 04:16 · Score: 4, Insightful

You're kidding right ? The war in Afghanistan has taken 11+ years, and costing trillions, and you're saying China should be Afraid ? HAHAHAHAHAH !

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Re:The Chinese... by hawguy · 2012-08-20 04:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

We (The United States) offer them the ability to keep their land and people under peace and not the premise of war. We (The United States) have the military strength to undermine another sovereign state's ability to maintain control of factories and production of said goods. This is what we offer to them and will do so until we cannot do so.
I wonder if that's true in modern times - if we declared war on China because we wanted control of their factories and suddenly lost access to Asian electronic component imports (even if other Asian countries remained friendly to the USA, China's military may prevent them from manufacturing or exporting any goods), would we be able to keep our war machine running? Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
Re:The Chinese... by ColdWetDog · 2012-08-20 04:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

No, he's not kidding and what2123 shouldn't be downmodded as a troll. Just because we aren't terribly successful at winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people doesn't mean we do not have a formidable military presence in the rest of the world.
The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were totally stupid and failed to meet the vast majority of political and military objectives that were publicly stated. They do manage to show the world that we will spend untold trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (both ours and everyone elses) on fairly stupid, limited goals. China well knows that if it really tried to piss us off it could be turned into a vast repository of active nuclides so they won't.
It's going to be much like the "Cold War" which really was a warm warm using proxies (like Afghanistan). Look at China's attempts at getting at Africa's mineral resources. If they get terribly successful at it, plan on various guerrilla groups and proxy governments to join the fray.
I personally don't think this strategy is economically viable nor particularly sane, but then again, nobody votes for me....

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Re:The Chinese... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:32 · Score: 2, Interesting

In any serious war, you'd be fighting with what you had. A WWII fighter could be built and flying in a few days (few weeks if you had to start from nothing and build engines, etc, from scratch), but replacing an F-22 would take months or longer, even if you had no supply problems... the war would be over before the first replacements reached the front lines.
Years ago I worked for a company whose chips were used to a small extent in military aircraft. If I remember correctly, we had to build those chips in America rather than Taiwan, but they were so obsolete by the time the hardware flew that we had to pay the fab to do a special production run for us every time they wanted some.
Re:The Chinese... by paulsnx2 · 2012-08-20 04:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

It is totally naive to think that just because someone can look at your product, they can execute the production, distribution, and support for your product.
IP is not our primary resource. And if it is, we deserve to fail utterly.
Companies should be successful for building, selling, distributing, and supporting products. There isn't any reason to Tax the world for their willingness to compete just because we pass a law that says they have to.
Today there are nearly 200,000 patents on various aspects of smart phones. Maybe even more! If we gave every patent holder a penny, a cell phone would cost 2,000 dollars for IP alone.
Get over it. IP is important to some extent. But Apple's abuse of the system is unethical and shouldn't be tolerated.
Re:The Chinese... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

I write this knowing full well that it will probably get modded down to -1 but this is exactly the sort of attitude that we (foreigners) see from US citizens which makes us look down on your country.
You (vocal, arrogant and naive representatives of the USA) post inflammatory things (like the above) acting like you are the worlds police (Team America... F*ck YEAH!) without even realising that Chinas intellectual property laws are quite different from the USA's and they are not beholden to your laws.
In reality it is only the AMERICAN company (in this case Samsung USA) who imports the product who is responsible for making sure the product complies with the local laws of the USA.
Regardless it would be quite interesting to see what happens if the USA ever did declare war on China... a little flash video from Albinoblacksheep springs to mind:- http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end
Re:The Chinese... by CAIMLAS · 2012-08-20 04:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

China manufactures a lot of goods for the US. Now ask yourself, what does the US have to offer China, and the rest of our world? Intellectual Property, which is only reinforced by our nations laws?
Competence?
It's a running joke that Americans are fat, stupid, lazy bastards. Many of us are. It's true for Northern Europe, too. What is also true is that when you're looking for field experts and one-of-a-kind capabilities, this is still where you look.
You fail to realize that when another country needs precise engineering (regardless of the field), they'll usually look to the US. Yes, even today. With few exceptions, the rest of the world still looks to the White Man Culture to implement the new, important, interesting, useful things - and then "steals" them, implementing lesser versions of them.
* skilled machinists
* structural engineers
* any precision instruments
* specialty, non-consumer electronics
* competent sysadmins
* software that actually does its job well (what, did you think you'd find something in India?)
This isn't race pride or anything like that. You can find eg. good software engineering in India, but it's rare due to the culture.
Don't be fooled by the news and these patent sharks. There is still a lot of capability left in the US and the West as a whole, despite the powers that be trying to pillage it away.

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Re:The Chinese... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:44 · Score: 4, Insightful

Even though we still have a dominant 1st-world military, and we're trying to act like self-justifying warpigs in some areas, when an "ally" of one of our former enemies (who still has enough nukes to glaze the world over a couple of times, at least), we're suddenly reluctant.
China seems to want to take the long view on things more often than not. They're in a spot where they can invest in infrastructure in Africa with a currently far less obligatory reciprocity required from its target countries. In return, those countries are far more welcome to the Chinese investments. The US and Europe these days are edging to the worst excesses of the first colonial days, focused only on short-term, maximized resource extraction rate (aka "profits"), regardless of what is left behind. Sure, China will approach that, but at least the countries have 20-50 years to realize this. China is also new, different, not a lot of history. European & American countries have 100-200 or more years of colonial exploitation history...
China is happy to let us ADD ourselves into the spider web or quicksand. Hopefully, again in the future, we here in the West can come together, to a point, and pull our collective heads out of our asses (WWII), but hopefully not because of an epic world condition.
Re:The Chinese... by rtfa-troll · 2012-08-20 04:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

The Chinese don't give a shit about copying anything.
No; The Chinese care very much. China began writing long after the Mesopotanians, however, because ancient Chinese texts were carefully and repeatedly copied, they have survived much longer than texts almost anywhere else in the world. This gives them a real claim to be the oldest culture in existence. The current Chinese trend to "respect intellectual property" is a sign of their current governments disregard for the good of their culture and pandering to corporate interests over those of the Chinese people.

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Re:The Chinese... by polar+red · 2012-08-20 04:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

The US and Europe
Do not try to drag us(Europe minus the UK) into the mess the US(and its puppet, the UK) is getting itself into !

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Re:The Chinese... by Yo_mama · 2012-08-20 04:52 · Score: 3, Informative

Much as I like WWII fighters... that's bunk. You first need to build the tools and dies to form the parts. You need skilled workers who know how to use them. Let's also not forget the main strength that gets overlooked - logistics. Your fuel comes from a refinery that probably uses a few microprocessors here and there. What are you going to do when you start having production problems with your fuels, hydraulic fluids, etc.?

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Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Re:The Chinese... by fustakrakich · 2012-08-20 05:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

The war in Afghanistan has taken 11+ years...
Winning is not the objective. Perpetuating war is. Making this war one of America's most successful ever. And we have secured the poppy fields from the Taliban who damn near shut down the opium trade back in 2001. Just in case you're wondering why we are really there. The numbers speak for themselves.
...and costing trillions...
No, it's making trillions for the financiers of this little adventure.
But neither of these should or will frighten China.

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“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Re:The Chinese... by gman003 · 2012-08-20 05:23 · Score: 5, Insightful

That's because in Afghanistan, we're not fighting a war, we're fighting an insurgency. Big difference there (for a /.-friendly analogy, the difference between CP/M and RHEL).
A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be. Remember Iraq? The proper war with Iraq's rather significant military, many of them veterans of a very long, bloody war with Iran, and armed with reasonably modern weapons? I'm sure you *don't* remember, because we cut through them like butter. We blasted them with not even the full might of our military (we held the nukes back, at least), and they literally could not surrender fast enough.
An insurgency is different. You don't win by killing all the enemy combatants, destroying all their materiel and wrecking their supply chain. After all, they can recruit more insurgents from the population, can arm themselves with locally-made or stolen small arms, and have no supply chain worth speaking of. No, you win this sort of war by "winning over" the people, by trying to minimize civilian casualties (instead of maximize enemy casualties), by building up civilian infrastructure (instead of destroying militarily-useful infrastructure). It's a war of politics and propaganda, not of armies and fleets.
And it is, unfortunately, something very difficult to win. In fact, I think it is essentially impossible for a democracy with any semblance of a free press to win, because all but one of the examples I can think of of "successfully ending an insurgency" were done by brutal massacres and the sort of things the Geneva Conventions were designed to stop. The sole counter-example I can think of is Ireland, and that was not a "victory" as much as it was "stalemate".
Re:The Chinese... by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-08-20 05:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

China began writing long after the Mesopotanians, however, because ancient Chinese texts were carefully and repeatedly copied, they have survived much longer than texts almost anywhere else in the world. This gives them a real claim to be the oldest culture in existence.

Who cares about being "the oldest culture in existence"? What matters is where you're now, and it'd be pretty silly to excuse poor performance by saying, "well, but we did all those awesome things like 2000 years ago".
(naturally, this is not specific to Chinese at all)
Re:The Chinese... by macraig · 2012-08-20 05:29 · Score: 3, Interesting

Which is, of course, exactly why the Obama Administration has been "going nuclear" on domestic and especially non-domestic threats to that precious IP. It's what prompted the extreme and illegal actions against MegaUpload and Kim Dotcom, not to mention that fellow from the UK whose name and site escapes me who also faces a sort of extreme rendition. There's also WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, because our government also perceives the diplomatic cables, war documents and videos and all the rest that WikiLeaks has shared to be "intellectual property" of the government itself.
This is why "infringement" is no longer simply a civil matter. It's now a crime against the state.
Re:The Chinese... by maroberts · 2012-08-20 05:40 · Score: 2

Its a bit difficult to say what the attrition rate would be. Is Chinese military technology good enough to cause harm to significant numbers of F22s?
It has to be pointed out that whilst Chinese technology has advanced, it's nowhere close to that of the US in terms of what is in the front line in significant amounts.
The Chinese army significantly outnumbers that of the US, but again most of their troops are conscript level and less well equipped.
All this is a bit pointless really though, the Chinese simply believe that if they wait long enough, then their culture is superior enough and patient enough to win in the long run, without firing a shot (or at least not many)

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Re:The Chinese... by MightyMartian · 2012-08-20 05:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

And what kinds of messes do certain Continental European countries create? Germany, France and Switzerland are major arms exporters. Believe me, Europe causes its fair share of misery and woe, and on the scales of history, has caused more misery than war than any other bit of geography I can think of. No one needs to be lectured by Continental Europe on how to behave.

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Re:The Chinese... by rtfa-troll · 2012-08-20 05:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

Who cares about being "the oldest culture in existence"? What matters is where you're now
Where you are at now is a product of where you came from. It's not an accident that Sun Tzu is still studied in West Point. Time is an excellent filter of value in ideas. It's much easier to accept his teaching if you believe that he's an important part of your culture and if you have direct access to the original texts. Still; there's one perfectly valid point in what you are saying. Many of these texts are translated and everyone can learn from Chinese culture.

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Re:The Chinese... by shutdown+-p+now · 2012-08-20 06:07 · Score: 2

Time is an excellent filter of value in ideas.

Only when they're critically approached in the first place, rather than mindlessly duplicating them on the grounds that it's what you've always done before for centuries.
I'm not saying that keeping knowledge around is worthless, far from it. But you keep it around to build other things on top of it, not merely to preserve it as is for posterity.
Re:The Chinese... by icebike · 2012-08-20 06:15 · Score: 2

No; The Chinese care very much. China began writing long after the Mesopotanians, however, because ancient Chinese texts were carefully and repeatedly copied, they have survived much longer than texts almost anywhere else in the world.
Not germane.
In those days, where originally there may have been exactly one copy of a text, the act of copying was critical to its preservation, not to mention dissemination. One copy does no one any good. The Chinese copied texts no more frequently, and no more widely than any other civilization. Its just that more of them survived.
That texts have survived in China longer is due to a lack of nut-job dictators and religious zealots seeking out and destroying every copy they can find, and even burning entire libraries to do so.

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Re:The Chinese... by QuantumRiff · 2012-08-20 06:46 · Score: 2

A company I work with often has its primary product made in China. They ship the manuals from here locally, to the dealers all around the world, but the product is made in China. Recently, we have been getting angry customers, calling and saying that their russian model does not have a manual at all, and there are no russian language ones on the website. Funny, they don't sell in Russia, and none of their distributors are authorized to sell in (or located anywhere near) Russia.
Apparently, we let it go, because its more expensive to change the manufacturing to another provider, or move it back stateside, than put up with the manufacturer selling grey market product.

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Re:The Chinese... by polar+red · 2012-08-20 07:19 · Score: 3, Insightful

A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be.

area of iraq : 438,317 km2
area of china : 9,640,821 km2 (about 20 times as much)
populations : 31 million and 1300 million. (about 40 times)
and china also has nukes.
I hope you're not really contemplating attacking China ?

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Re:The Chinese... by CAIMLAS · 2012-08-20 08:04 · Score: 2

Yep, that's me - a jingoistic sysadmin. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.
You apparently don't understand the value of a sysadmin. A country with a locomotive which doesn't run, or runs inefficiently, doesn't mean half a shit because the fireman (as locomotive engineers used to be called) isn't doing his job.
Producing them? No. But keeping them running is the sysadmin's job (whether they're network, storage, etc. sysadmins, it doesn't matter). Without your switches, servers, and yes, often overly kludged temporary fixes, the engines of the modern world would screech to a halt. It happens to individual businesses all the time. The traits necessary to be a good sysadmin are not endemic or even culturally common within the US, but they're a hell of a lot more predominant here (and in Europe) than anywhere else.
In the US, a sodbusting peon is a farmer or a rancher with a multi-million dollar operation. That's a family farm, in many cases. But in other countries and throughout the world, they're just sodbusting peons. The mindset (not necessarily the experience) necessary for such feats is what, I have found, is commonly required for a sysadmin: you can do it all, top to bottom, and what you can't do, you can figure out quickly enough - because your livelihood depends on it.
A competent sysadmin is a lot more than someone who just clicks around in Windows. I'm talking about the rare individual who is able to do a full network rollout - switching through racked equipment, desktops, etc. - without much, if any planning (if needbe) because they know their stuff. A competent sysadmin is a maintenance engineer, in essence. The field or specific skillset doesn't matter: it's the ability and drive to quickly assess a problem - and have the ability to find a solution. (I should note that part of the reason why we're better at it is due to immigration: hundreds of years of immigration from poor countries has, if nothing else, given us a preponderance of problem solving ability, I think.)

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Re:The Chinese... by Aryden · 2012-08-20 08:36 · Score: 2

As a soldier having been on the field, the only difference between a "war" and an "insurgency" is the name you give it. A weapon in the hands of a man doesn't care whether he is wearing a uniform or a night gown.
Re:The Chinese... by cerberusss · 2012-08-20 08:43 · Score: 3, Funny

And what kinds of messes do certain Continental European countries create? Germany, France and Switzerland are major arms exporters.
Hey, don't forget the rest of Europe! I'm from the Netherlands and we're at least as big as, as, I dunno, Idaho! And we make really nasty stuff too, like, errrr, ummm, like target sights! Or at least, we used to make them, let me look that up *returns to computer terminal*

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Re:The Chinese... by MightyMartian · 2012-08-20 10:23 · Score: 2

Try a nice Dutch company, Trafigura, which got caught dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, poisoning thousands.

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Re:The Chinese... by hairyfish · 2012-08-21 00:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

doesn't mean we do not have a formidable military presence in the rest of the world.
China well knows that if it really tried to piss us off it could be turned into a vast repository of active nuclides so they won't.
Wow.... just wow. Are Americans really this naive? You know America! Fuck Yeah! isn't really a usable military strategy? Sure you have some impressive hardware, but you have no brain. Let me tell you how it will work. China will destroy the US without a single shot being fired. They'll steal you're IP, hack your secrets, buy your officials, supply drugs to your children, financially back all the conflicting fringe groups and rot you from the inside out. They won't kowtow to the religious crazies, the gun nuts or anti-abortionists, they'll do whatever needs to be done to win, and you won't know it has happened until it's all over. China has a hundred year plan, The US can't plan past next week. You've already lost, it will simply take a few years for all the pieces to fall into place.

What Innovfation? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 03:45 · Score: 3, Informative

Xerox created the interface which apple purchased in stock swap, it was not apple's original innovation.

Re:What Innovfation? by 91degrees · 2012-08-20 03:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

The UI that Apple purchased was nowhere near a complete system. Apple added a lot of improvements of their own. Microsoft clearly copied from Apple, not Xerox.
Re:What Innovfation? by jellomizer · 2012-08-20 03:57 · Score: 4, Informative

Apple did a lot of work to make their UI as a GUI for consumer level users. Xerox interface was for a limited use. Trying to get it in a system that is under 5k.
For Example Supercomputers can perform Ray Tracing Animations in real time. For our normal PC we cannot (at least at the same quality). In order to attempt this we take a lot of the ideas and find what to reduce and shortcuts that have the smallest visual effects. So we took an idea and make a new product off of it... Innovation.
But this is a difference case of Samsung and Apple They are both on the same market, selling a product at around the same price with similar specs. So it more of a case of copying then innovating.

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Re:What Innovfation? by Kenja · 2012-08-20 04:05 · Score: 4, Informative

If you want to get nit-picky about it, Microsoft stole nothing either despite things like the mouse cursor being pixel by pixel the same as Mac OS. Apple inadvertently licensed everything to Microsoft under the pretext of developer tools and office applications. I guess the point is, cant we just agree that they're all jerks?

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Re:What Innovfation? by UnknowingFool · 2012-08-20 05:14 · Score: 2

By never licensed, I suppose the million dollars Apple paid Xerox was for nothing.

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Re:What Innovfation? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 05:32 · Score: 2, Informative

I see you're living up to your user name.
Apple paid NOTHING. It allowed Xerox the opportunity to buy $1Mil worth of Apple pre-IPO stock. There's a difference, and it's important.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Xerox_PARC_and_the_Lisa
Re:What Innovfation? by Dog-Cow · 2012-08-20 05:50 · Score: 3, Informative

Stop posting from the future.
There isn't a PC in existence that can ray-trace a full scene (1920x1080 or better) in anything approaching "realtime" (24fps or better).
Re:What Innovfation? by vakuona · 2012-08-20 06:30 · Score: 2

Payment can take many forms. Allowing someone priority access to your stock pre-IPOD is worth something. Therefore it is payment.
Re:What Innovfation? by squiggleslash · 2012-08-20 06:38 · Score: 3, Interesting

Until Windows 95, I'd say that there was very little the two UIs had in common. Even 95 owed more to the Windows 1/2/3.x lineage than Macintosh. And anyone who saw Windows 1.0 (an environment I played around with a lot when I was a teenager) would have wondered if Microsoft ever saw a single Mac.
What are, seriously, the UI elements that Microsoft took? My answer to that is the same as the Android-iOS thing: nothing of significance was copied: what Apple did was to prove that users were comfortable with a different type of UI, and do so well enough that other manufacturers came in with their own take on things.
Apple's enthusiasts usually prove this by their enthusiasm: ask them to take an Android phone, and they'll protest, and after finally using it will come to the conclusion (if they're iPhone fans) that the iPhone is superior, and Google doesn't know what it's doing, and that Android is hard to use - or, of course, the complete opposite. What they'll never tell you is that the two devices are equivalent. They'll never say "Meh, just give me the cheapest phone with following specs {...}, they're all pretty much the same."
This was true in the Macintosh's first era too. Mac users didn't look over at their PC owning friends and remark "Gosh, that Windows thing is exactly like the Mac, just give me the cheapest PC or Mac you can get that runs... {...}", they made a point to note the way they felt the Mac was "superior" which, generally, involved the entire UI being completely different. That the Mac was different ended up being a point of pride as the two platforms went their seperate ways.
Executive summary? Xerox invented. Apple was bold enough to be inspired by Xerox. Microsoft, Commodore, Digital Research et al were comfortable enough to embrace the idea thanks to Apple making the first step. Copying? Meh, well, DR copied from Apple, there's little doubt about that, but I'd have been surprised if Windows was significantly different from what eventually was released if Microsoft, not Apple, had been the company made the bold step of marketing a completely new idea. Ironically, I suspect one difference is that Windows 1.x probably would have had overlapping windows.

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Patent System Broken by Concern · 2012-08-20 03:46 · Score: 4, Insightful

Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.

It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents

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Re:Patent System Broken by kelemvor4 · 2012-08-20 03:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think many companies have become like Apple. In my opinion the function of the high tech industry is attributable to the lack of ubiquitous software patent practices in the past. Now days, you have to watch out for patent landmines for even obvious features in a piece of software. I don't have any specific articles to link on the subject because I am lazy, but how can the patents serve to do anything but hinder progress? I just don't understand at all how companies could even try to argue the opposite.
Re:Patent System Broken by jekewa · 2012-08-20 05:04 · Score: 3, Interesting

Agreed. Here's the obligatory TED link, with an interesting view on how the lack of patents, and an obvious and accepted pattern (pun intended) of copying has made the industry huge.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

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End the FUD
Re:Patent System Broken by Chillburger · 2012-08-20 07:04 · Score: 2

Developing software, like any product, is a very time consuming and expensive effort. What incentive does a company have in developing a product if it will be copied out of the gate?
Re:Patent System Broken by Concern · 2012-08-20 08:42 · Score: 2

Of course offensive patent use has been the norm for centuries. The sky is also blue. Why the non-sequitir? Patent use in general has no relevance to this conversation. We're also not discussing patents on mathematical equations - which SCOTUS have held are actually unpatentable. By the way, all software is a subtype of mathematical equation - proving that they don't teach Turing-Church well enough in school, or at least in law school. :)
You seem to imply there is some sane way to apply patents to software, when there obviously is not. The link I already provided catalogues the various reasons for this. It's quite extensive. You should have a look and start your counter-argument from there, if you like.
Or you can save yourself the trouble. You cannot even show that a majority of software businesses, or even a majority of software patent holders, make offensive use of software patents. Not only because it is not true (only a small minority do), but because no one could produce software otherwise. Paradox.

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It isn't very easy to tell an original from a copy by G3ckoG33k · 2012-08-20 03:47 · Score: 2

It isn't very easy to tell an original from a copy, as this poor reporter found out (too late):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=789he-8T_-E

The object in that video looks like it was copied from something with rounded corners. Could it be an Apple copy of something? Don't know. Still. As always. I prefer the original.

Apple Did stop Innovating. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 03:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

This isn't true. Apple DID stop innovating. You missed the section of time where Apple was minutes from bankrupt before Jobs came back with a load of money.

Re:Apple Did stop Innovating. by phantomfive · 2012-08-20 04:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

They were in the same situation RIMM has now. Plenty of money in the bank, but an open question of whether it's worth it to keep trying, or better to break up the company and sell off the pieces.

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Samsung Must Be Made an Example by macs4all · 2012-08-20 03:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

Apple pretty much HAS to sue Samsung.

Even though in doing so, they actually may increase the sales of Samsung tablets. Some percentage of people who wouldn't have given a non-Apple-tablet a second glance may now decide "Hey, if Apple is 'worried' enough to sue over this, it must be pretty good."

However, Apple really has no choice. If they don't sue, then that would be the "green light" for the "Allwinners" of the world to come in and just crank out $40 blister-pack 'ePads', absolutely indistinguishable-from-iPad (until you actually tried to use them!) tablets.

Not only would that eat into Apple's sales/profits, but it would eventually (and wrongly) leak into the consumer mindset that ALL tablets are shit. And that could make the iPad market dry up as quickly as it was created.

Re:Samsung Must Be Made an Example by StikyPad · 2012-08-20 04:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
Spare us the confused consumer nonsense Fanboi Wan.

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Re:Samsung Must Be Made an Example by kenorland · 2012-08-20 04:08 · Score: 3, Interesting

However, Apple really has no choice. If they don't sue, then that would be the "green light" for the "Allwinners" of the world to come in and just crank out $40 blister-pack 'ePads',
And the harm in that would be what?

absolutely indistinguishable-from-iPad (until you actually tried to use them!) tablets. Not only would that eat into Apple's sales/profits, but it would eventually (and wrongly) leak into the consumer mindset that ALL tablets are shit. And that could make the iPad market dry up as quickly as it was created.
The iPad is doing a good job at planting the idea in people's minds that tablets are overpriced toys for kids.
Re:Samsung Must Be Made an Example by rjstanford · 2012-08-20 07:14 · Score: 2

Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
If those early Yugos had looked almost exactly like Fords, to the point that Yugo's own counsel mistook a Ford for one of their own products, then Ford would have indeed been concerned that their brand value had been diluted...

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Re:It's a blood feud by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 03:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

So, apple "steals" from open source...

How can you steal from open source? Especially when they give back an enormous amount of development to the open source movement (such as http://www.apple.com/opensource/ ).

But, hey, why let facts and logic get in the way of a good ol' Apple bashing, right?...

Turn the argument around. by wvmarle · 2012-08-20 03:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.

Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.

Re:Turn the argument around. by Rogerborg · 2012-08-20 04:20 · Score: 4, Funny

I do like the irony that you took the content of an article that says copying is good for innovation, and just copied it.

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Re:Turn the argument around. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

I do like the irony that you took the content of an article that says copying is good for innovation, and just copied it.
He improved on it. It was much easier for me to read his post than it was to read the article.
If only Apple could do half a good job as he did then I might actually consider getting an iPhone.
Re:Turn the argument around. by Richy_T · 2012-08-20 05:05 · Score: 2

I do like the irony that you took the content of an article that says copying is good for innovation, and just copied it.

Fair point by JestersGrind · 2012-08-20 03:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

The article makes a fair point. If everyone is allowed to copy everyone else (and they already are anyway including Apple), the only way for a company to distinguish itself is to innovate faster than the competition can copy. This actually promotes innovation, not stifle it.

Re:Fair point by SpeedBump0619 · 2012-08-20 04:22 · Score: 2

In the business world innovation is only ever justified by some cost-benefit analysis. Yes, competition will drive new features, iff the return on those features is great enough. Patent and copyright laws are specifically intended to widen this profit making window with the intent of fostering innovation.

Decreasing the time you can monetize any new idea serves to decrease the monetary value of that innovation. Decreasing the value of innovations doesn't sound like a winning formula for fostering innovation.
Re:Fair point by Zalbik · 2012-08-20 04:38 · Score: 4, Insightful

the only way for a company to distinguish itself is to innovate faster than the competition can copy
And more importantly, if an "innovation" can be copied by a competitor in nearly no time, then it's probably not an innovation at all (e.g. rounded corners)

Steve Jobs (RIP) was fond of this axiom by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 03:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

"Good artists copy. Great artists steal. And at Apple, we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

[Source: Isaac's authorized biography]

Apparently he never liked it if someone else followed this axiom, though.

Re:It isn't very easy to tell an original from a c by wvmarle · 2012-08-20 03:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

Not all copies are inferior. Japan got huge in the 80s/90s by "copying and improving". And they were not the first that did this; it's how UK lost out to mainland Europe in the later stages of the industrial revolution: they were the first to industrialise, but the continent copied there methods and products, and improved on them.

China is currently very much in the copy phase, sooner or later they will also start to innovate themselves (some Chinese companies already do that), followed by a time in which the establised companies will be out-innovated. It may take a while, the Chinese don't seem to be very fast in picking up the innovation part, but if the world's history is anything to go by, sooner or later they will.

Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by PuckSR · 2012-08-20 03:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate. Apple doesn't have some magical innovation juice. They are just a company. If they want to get lazy, then talent will move elsewhere. You mentioned "multi-tasking", but that would have been something that required talented and competent engineers, not innovators. Innovation is something you come up with while half-drunk. Everyone understood how multi-tasking was supposed to work, it was just a matter of "making it work". Apple innovated in the same way that George Selden innovated(the patent holder to the automobile). He didn't exactly create the greatest car in the world, he just had the idea for a car. Henry Ford developed some of the greatest ideas in automotive history, but he did it all while violating Selden's patent.

Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by jeffmeden · 2012-08-20 03:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.

There are two premises in play here; one is that if Apple's IP is not protected that they would choose not to innovate (perhaps so that they can take their ball and go home) and the other is that if their IP is not protected that they are at a competitive financial disadvantage and can no longer innovate since there is no revenue coming in. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over. However at this point Apple has more than enough money to innovate to any degree imaginable, so any "missing innovation" would be due solely to their will to restrain themselves.

Apple and the GUI by Murdoch5 · 2012-08-20 03:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

Well actually Apple never developed the GUI or User Interface. The "GUI" was actually developed decades before Apple even built a computer. I was trying to find the video from youtube but it might of got taken down. There was a video of a researcher in the 60's playing with a mouse and keyboard and moving a mouse pointer. Unless Steve Jobs was about 80 when he died then I fail to see how Apple invented the user interface.

However extracting this out, does apple really invent anything? Siri is just voice analysis which isn't new or clever or even that hard, as I did music genre detection for my final project in University, so I can tell you it's pretty simple. Apple didn't invent the smart phone, they didn't create the tablet, they didn't create Unix which is what OS X is based on and they didn't invent the intel CPU they run. So what does Apple invent? Having a little bit of software for messages or screen locking or even a GUI layout is hardly inventing anything, I consider more a look and feel which personally I don't think should be protected I mean anyone could do the same thing, you don't have to be a leader in the computer field.

So I rest with what does Apple invent? Seems to me they take and sue but thats about it.

Re:Apple and the GUI by PPH · 2012-08-20 04:01 · Score: 4, Informative

Mother of all demos.

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Re:Apple and the GUI by CanHasDIY · 2012-08-20 06:26 · Score: 2

"Invent" means a lot more than making a YouTube video. You need to bring a product to market at a reasonable cost.
Invention != Marketing.

[Marketing] is where Apple excels and Samsung excels in copying.
Welcome to Capitalism, comrade.

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Re:Does Apple Truly Innovate? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:00 · Score: 5, Informative

You mean the ones that Apple copied - after Jobs and Xerox negotiated a deal to allow Xerox to but 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock.

In other words, Apple was happy to give value for value received. Why is this story constantly repeated as an example of Apple being underhanded?

Parallels by chebucto · 2012-08-20 04:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

The parallels of current Apple to early 90s Apple are numerous.

- They were first widely used in multitouch and gui
- Their OS is more user-friendly
- Development and modification of their OS is more tightly controlled
- Crucially, they don't license their OS
- Steve Jobs isn't there to save them with brand-new product lines

So now, they're stuck with a market-leading position that is being slowly eroded by the open ARM + Android platform (Armdroid as the new Wintel?), and are being forced to fight on several fronts at once: hardware design, OS design, and developer loyalty.

The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.

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Re:This case is different! by Captain+Hook · 2012-08-20 04:02 · Score: 4, Informative

Samsung's copying is blatent counterfeiting.

how can it be counterfeiting? it has samsung written on the front and no apple logo's or other trademarks in sight.

Counterfeiting is about trying to pass 1 product off as another. They certainly look alike but without trying to pass it off as an apple product it can't be counterfeiting.

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Apple infringed first by stiggle · 2012-08-20 04:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

Apple should start playing by they own rules.
If a company infringes someone elses patents then they should lose the right to defend their own.

Apple doesn't license other peoples patented technologies - they just infringe. Ask Nokia how they magically got around $650 million from Apple last year along with an ongoing royalty payment for every iPhone. Because Apple refused to license key Nokia technology and just blatently infringed when they refused the terms Nokia offered. They then went to the courts claiming that Nokia were unfair to them in the terms and so shouldn't be allowed to hold the patent.

And it wasn't a "key technology" like rounded corners - it was GSM to make it work like a phone!

Re:Apple infringed first by alen · 2012-08-20 04:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

those were FRAND
if you develop new tech for wireless, wifi and other open technologies and the patents get accepted into an open standard you have to agree to license them to everyone who asks at a similar rate. usually a penny or two per device

This is the core patent issue imo. by gatesstillborg · 2012-08-20 04:07 · Score: 2

One should never be able to patent the what (eg. gui appearance/behavior), only the how (eg. specific implementation). Thus, it was right that Apple lost its MS suit, though they were the superior company (at that time).

Re:This is the core patent issue imo. by Endo13 · 2012-08-20 04:38 · Score: 2

It's called a design patent, which I can kind of understand the purpose of. But the ones being sued over appear to be far too basic and obvious. Things like rounded corners should never even be a possible component of a design patent. Sure there's more to it than that, but at the end of the day it's still like having a design patent on a car with four round wheels, four doors with windows, and a window front and rear. Rounded corners on hand-held devices have been around as long as hand-held devices, and using black as a possible color has been as well. Any design patent that mentions things like that should be thrown out by default as being too obvious.

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Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by macs4all · 2012-08-20 04:11 · Score: 2, Insightful

After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.

The GUI look-and-feel that has more-or-less been unchanged since MacOS System 1.0, even through OS X, is not a sign of lack-of-innovation. Rather it is part of the consistency that makes users happy.

The LAST thing users want is change in the look-and-feel of their computer's OS.

This is what Apple has always understood, and what Microsoft is about to (doubtfully) learn with Metro.

The instabilities of MacOS are greatly over reported. I have been using Macs since they were Lisas, and crashes of my Macs were always much less often than the Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 systems I administered and used as well.

And all the time you complain about "no innovation" as far as "stability" goes under MacOS (Classic), remember that a BSOD on a Windows system was every bit as catastrophic (entire system was taken down) as on Macs of the day, and it took MS until XP SP2 before they got their BSOD problem under control. By that time (what was that, like 2003 for XP SP2?), Apple was already shipping OS X 10.3 (Panther), which was 100% stable. In fact, I have used OS X since 10.0.0, and I have only had TWO Kernel Panics. One was in 2001, caused by a sketchy third-party scanner driver that was obviously playing around too deep in the Kernel; and the second was in 2005, when I purchased some incorrectly-spec'ed RAM.

I say it's pretty good when Kernel Panics are so infrequent that you can remember each of the system-wide OS failures in over a decade of use.

Apple doesn't innovate..... by GabriellaKat · 2012-08-20 04:13 · Score: 3, Informative

they copy, refine and cultivate. Really, just think about it. Im pretty sure I just burnt some Karma, but worth it.

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Seeing both sides by maroberts · 2012-08-20 04:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

Whilst I am hoping that Samsung largely wins its case, I can see that there should be limits to what can be copied and how much a rival product can simply imitate the originator. Apple should be able to protect the unique aspects of its design, and both Samsung and Apple should be able to patent technological innovation where it is appropriate to do so.

Having said that, I feel Apple is trying to grab too much in this case. It is obvious that Apple didn't come up with the general idea for the layout of a tablet, even if they were the first to market with a genuine product that consumers wanted. It is similarly obvious that everyone wanted to go to a touch screen phone layout at around the same time, and the ergonomics and layout for that are obvious.

Whilst the gap is narrowing, Apple should realise that they really make their money from producing a product that, whilst on the leading edge of techology, is a polished design where all the parts have been carefully put together. I have a Samsung phone at the moment, and whilst there are aspects of it that are probably better than an iPhone, the whole product lacks the design harmony of its rival. The UK judge who, in dismissing Apples case, said that the Samsung product was 'not as cool' probably expressed it best.

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If the headline... by closer2it · 2012-08-20 04:15 · Score: 2

If the headline is a question, then the answer is no... oh... nevermind.

Poor understanding of IP categories by Theaetetus · 2012-08-20 04:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.

... I've used Apple as the example here because it's illustrative in showing how innovation hasn't been stifled over time even when the patent system hasn't ruled in their favor as a patent owner.

The Apple v. Microsoft case was on copyright, not patents. Specifically, the court ruled that:

Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...

and look-and-feel simply isn't covered there.

With that distinction and proper categorization in mind, the article misses a crucial difference between the 1990s and today: Apple made a significant push to protecting its designs with patents. The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and its with that protection now that Apple is well on its way to being the largest company ever.

Re:Poor understanding of IP categories by Nerdfest · 2012-08-20 04:32 · Score: 2

The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s
I disagree. I think an operating system that was cheaper, more open, and had a better variety of hardware killed them. People rememberd what it was like when IBM was in Apple's position and they didn't like it. Most people these days don't remember that, but I'm guessing some of them are finding out why it's a bad thing.

Welcome to the Pirate Party, James by a_n_d_e_r_s · 2012-08-20 04:19 · Score: 5, Insightful

The Pirate Party here in Sweden been arguing just these points for a long time now. Innovation is not happening in a vacuum. Great ideas inspire others to come up with even greater ideas. By sharing the information and sharing the data others can look at it and improve it and the speed of research will increase.

The patent system is not something that foster innovation. Its is something that hinder innovation. Remove it

Also the billions of money going to patents trolls and feeding lawyers to hand patents could be instead used to invest in research to further the science of mankind.

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Just saying it like it are.

Sure... Here you go. by logicassasin · 2012-08-20 04:20 · Score: 4, Informative

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-comeback-story-2010-10?op=1
http://macdailynews.com/2009/04/14/steve_jobs_engineered_apples_resurrection/
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-return-19972011-10062011.html
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

I could go on forever on this one. It's very well documented that in 1997 Apple was extremely close to bankruptcy (some speculate days away) when Steve Jobs, then brought back to Apple as an "interim CEO", negotiated with Bill Gates to have Microsoft invest in Apple to the tune of $150M.

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Re:Sure... Here you go. by symbolset · 2012-08-20 04:44 · Score: 4, Informative

BTW, that Microsoft investment in Apple is what makes the fine summary untrue. Apple actually won that case on the style of the trashcan and folder icons. Instead of pursuing it further in 1994 there was a settlement deal made with a cross-license of all patents, that investment, Office for Mac, IE the default Mac browser, and some other things. It was not some open-handed Gates charity gesture at all.

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Re:Sure... Here you go. by symbolset · 2012-08-21 18:14 · Score: 2

They dragged it through the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court. They gave it all they could. But when it's over, it's over.

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Re:It's a blood feud by UnknowingFool · 2012-08-20 04:21 · Score: 4, Informative

Jobs was hell bent on stopping Android because he believed Google copied from them. At the time Schmidt sat on the board of Apple and was given advance early looks at the iPhone. As Android started to look more like iOS, Jobs was starting to believe that it wasn't a coincidence.

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Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by __aaqvdr516 · 2012-08-20 04:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

How can something be 100% stable and have 2 kernel panics?

If you exclude "sketchy third-party" drivers, you could knock every BSOD that I've experienced with Windows off the table.

With Gnome taking a bit of a dive, Unity a bit on the rise, and Metro just starting out, these are certainly interesting times. Just grab some popcorn and see what happens.

Re:It isn't very easy to tell an original from a c by acroyear · 2012-08-20 04:26 · Score: 4, Interesting

The UK lost out because at a certain point, the innovations necessary to continue to progress required more and more specialized technical education. The British University system was simply not set up to handle that. It was designed to turn the sons of Lords into Lords, and the upper middle-class into educated Lordly-like young men, optimized for leading business, but NOT in leading technical innovation (or military strategy, for that matter). Such a hands-on education was beneath them.

In addition, they always felt they didn't need such innovation in re-inventing that which they already had because of their extensive colonial might. Why invent a blue dye and undercut the price tag you were already commanding by being able to bring in the dye from the east-asian source?

Germany, on the other hand, spent most of the last decades of the 19th century realizing that trade schools, which the British wouldn't invest in, were precisely the means by which Germany could catch up to the rest of the world. German innovation happened most in the field of chemistry, where they were more and more able to invent (from coal and coal tar) products that could make up for places they lacked both colonies or military power. The process for sodium-nitrates alone (originally to be a fertilizer) produced enough explosives to preserve the German army for years through WW1.

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TED Talk on innovating without copyright by quietwalker · 2012-08-20 04:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

... in this case for the fashion industry, but hey, it's interesting and relevant:

http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Execution, not innovation by Andrio · 2012-08-20 04:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

"Innovation" is rarely little more than just a buzzword. The truth is that Apple rarely "innovates" (That's not an insult) At least not in the big picture. What Apple is good at is the *execution*.

Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent high-end laptops, they just made them better than most others, and marketed the hell out of them.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent the tablet, they just made it better than the others, and marketed the hell out of it.

That's why they're so threatened by Samsung. Because Samsung is doing the same thing. Samsung didn't invent the "iPhone," they just made it better. Just like they didn't invent the "iPad," they just made it better too.

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Re:Execution, not innovation by ahankinson · 2012-08-20 05:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

Except they didn't. In what way did Samsung make a better tablet than the iPad?

Samsung was not interested in making a better iPad or iPhone. They were interested in riding the wave of Apple's success, and hoping to score some cheap marketing by making their products nearly identical to Apple's.
Re:Execution, not innovation by Nemyst · 2012-08-20 07:58 · Score: 2

Samsung was not interested in making a better iPad or iPhone.
Indeed, they just made a good phone instead. That minimalistic designs look similar to one another is a flaw of that kind of design.
Only in tech does this kind of behavior warrant lawsuits all over the damn place.
Re:Execution, not innovation by Kartu · 2012-08-20 08:08 · Score: 2

Apple matched Galaxy Tab 10.1's color gamut only with iPad 3.
Galaxy Tabs are also much more comfortable to hold in hand than iPad 2 or 3.
If you don't care about draconian restricitons on accessing your own device, one could argue that iPad's "smoothness" is still unmatched by Android and hence they are inferior to iPads despite being lighter etc. However Galaxy SIII phone is superior to iPhone in every way.

And last time I've checked, Samsung sold twice as many smartphones as Apple, so not sure if they're still riding wave of Apple's success or their own.

Manufacturing strawman by sjbe · 2012-08-20 04:33 · Score: 5, Informative

If we hardly manufacture anything now and IP is our primary "resource"...

Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.

The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.

Re:Manufacturing strawman by rabtech · 2012-08-20 07:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.
The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.
This might be slightly OT but you make a good point and this is something that we, as a society, will have to deal with eventually.
At some point in the future there won't be a need for as much manual labor as we have now. Robots/machines will eventually take over most tasks - look at Foxconn buying a million (!) robots to start converting some assembly of electronics to robotic assembly. Look at what Musk is doing at Tesla and how the cars are made almost entirely by robots.
Either:
Work weeks will get shorter and some form of guaranteed income (or massive increases in minimum wage) will take place, thus having the average person work many fewer hours per week for the same or much higher pay than people get now for 40 hours of work. I don't see this as a bad thing - I suspect many (if not most) first-world people would be glad to continue their current lifestyle while working fewer hours - they'd get to spend more time with their family, pursuing hobbies (including spending money on them), etc.
Or:
Most people are going to end up poor and unemployed (leading to a vicious downward spiral where less consumer $$$ means less economic activity, further depressing the need for output, leading to people willing to work for scraps, further putting downward pressure on economies around the world, repeat until riot/revolution). We already have a massive glut of capital, running around shoving money at anything that smells like yield (the primary driver of the financial crisis - too much cheap money desperately looking for a place to invest, though certainly not the only driver). If all the resources continue to accumulate at the top then we may end up with a brutal police state that crushes most people while a few lords live in mansions, consuming luxury goods produced by robots solely for the rich. Prices for everything would skyrocket (despite the minimal cost of production) because the money is just changing hands between the various rich factory/resource owners.

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Just like the USA. Ask Charles Dickens. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-20 04:34 · Score: 3, Insightful

Or, rather, check up the history of the USA and copyright/patents and especially Hollywood.

Competative markets: they're pretty neat. by metrometro · 2012-08-20 04:35 · Score: 2

> Apple ended up losing the case. But it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all.'"

Yeah, competition is a bitch. You have to keep working. Much nicer not to have any competition - no innovation required at all. Ask Comcast about that.

Re:Competative markets: they're pretty neat. by freeze128 · 2012-08-20 05:36 · Score: 3, Funny

Yeah, competition is a bitch. You have to keep working. Much nicer not to have any competition - no innovation required at all. Ask Comcast about that.
I tried, but I have been on hold since last Tuesday.

Re:Well... by tlhIngan · 2012-08-20 04:37 · Score: 2

It's arguable that Apple has ever innovated in the first place. Steve Jobs used to brag about how he was the best thief in the industry. And to his credit, he was. He even went so far as to fly the Jolly Rodger above Apple headquarters.

Technically, that is correct from a technology sense. Apple never innovated too much in technology - they usually purchase technology.

What Apple does do is innovate in making technology usable. If you want a really technically advanced phone, Japan sells 'em with hundreds of features that we've not thought of, heard of, or could find a use for. Of course, it would have a crap UI filled with pages and pages of tiny icons representing said features, and each feature would have dozens more cryptic icons to configure it.

It's where Apple tends to be - they aren't at the forefront of technology (and never have been), however they are the ones who are putting emphasis on stuff that others aren't. UI, systems integration, etc.

Take the iPod - it wasn't the best player out there, but it incorporated stuff to make it usable. Putting music on it was a simple and quick process, and iTunes helped automate the whole process of taking your existing CDs and dumping it on. Add to that a scroll wheel and you have a compelling package. Scroll wheels, firewire, CD rippers, they all existed before the iPod, it's just the combination of them and the one-click nature of the use case made it really popular. No more "OK, put CD in drive and start ripper, then modify the file names to conform with blah, plug in your device (over serial/parallel or USB 1.1), then run this other program, import the files you ripped, then click sync".

Of course, it's this part of the innovation that gets lost in the mix, and it's actually very difficult to get this sort of protection as most people consider the UI, man-machine interfaces, human-factors, etc., to be completely orthogonal to innovation and an afterthought.

I mean, how many people think designing a website is easy? Once you add how users will try to see it, it gets nasty, quick. Or UIs - it's easy for a programmer to come up with a UI, but a useful one is much harder, especially ones aimed at people who are not programmers and don't get how programmers think.

Re:It's a blood feud by Baloroth · 2012-08-20 04:40 · Score: 4, Insightful

Who was it again who said "Good artists copy, great artists steal"? Steve Jobs? Oh right, he stole that quote from Picasso. No it isn't ironic, he did so deliberately, but the point is: "stealing" is what artists (and tech companies, and nearly everyone ever) do. It isn't a bad thing: in fact, it's very very good. You take good ideas, and you make them better. You add competition, with some (minor) improvement, then the original creator steals back your improvement (which Apple has done plenty of), improves on that, then you steal that, and so on and so forth. You know who wins in that arrangement? Literally everyone, but especially the customers. You know who wins when you protect the original with lawyers so that no-one else can make something similar? The lawyers. Not even the original creator, in the end: just lawyers. Which is not surprising, considering lawyers also wrote the law in the first place.

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"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton

Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by ColdWetDog · 2012-08-20 04:43 · Score: 2

I say it's pretty good when Kernel Panics are so infrequent that you can remember each of the system-wide OS failures in over a decade of use.

An issue with selective memory perhaps?

705,000 hits for "Kernel Panic OS X"

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!

This... by logicassasin · 2012-08-20 04:45 · Score: 3, Informative

Counterfeiting is about trying to pass 1 product off as another. They certainly look alike but without trying to pass it off as an apple product it can't be counterfeiting.

There are some amazing counterfeits out there. A trip to any swap meet/flea market across the US will turn up some good (and terrible) counterfeit goods from Coach bags, Louboutin shoes, to Rolex watches.

The Chinese have mastered the art of counterfeiting goods (and, apparently, entire companies).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/technology/27iht-nec.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/11/us-apple-china-fake-idUSTRE77A3U820110811

While the Samsung products may have elements of the look of some Apple products, they're not counterfeit.

--
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.

In the words of Steve Jobs by Jahta · 2012-08-20 04:46 · Score: 5, Insightful

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Jobs, interviewed in Triumph of the Nerds on PBS (1996)

"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." - Jobs, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography (2011)

So it's OK if Apple do it, but not otherwise?

Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by CAIMLAS · 2012-08-20 04:48 · Score: 3, Informative

. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over.

Then why was Microsoft's revenue not stunted by copying their crappy innovation? Even in the 3.1 days, Windows was preferable over a Mac by most.

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~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers

And the next step was even more fascinating... by pubwvj · 2012-08-20 05:03 · Score: 3, Funny

"it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all.'"

What followed was even more dramatic. Microsoft, since they could get away with copying, settled for that and stopped innovating. Eventually they imploded and lost their market dominance while Apple has far surpassed them.

I would never bother buying a Samsung as a replacement for the iPhone, iPad, iPod. Samsung has only a tiny part of the puzzle even if they totally copy Apple's hardware and software. They still lack all of the smooth integration with my laptop / desktop, the iTunes store and the enormous depth of software and other media available on the Macintosh which I use daily to get my work done.

The point they miss is all of these pieces of hardware are just tools. Tools to let us get our work done or what ever else we're doing. All alone the simple hardware is next to nothing.

There's another issue too. I don't trust Samsung to continue producing or supporting products. They're too wishy-washy. It is a waste of my time to change every year.

Re:Yeah they did stop innovating by guttentag · 2012-08-20 05:04 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate.

OK, you're going to need to qualify that statement. The Microsoft/Apple user interface case in question was decided in September 1994, and Steve Jobs returned in December 1996 and started pushing innovation in the UI again. So which companies exactly are you claiming "stepped up to innovate" between those dates as a result of Apple's stagnation in the UI?

In theory, there should be others to step in and innovate, but in practice that's simply not what happened. The most innovative UI feature introduced in that timeframe was the Windows Start Button. The only other thing I could think of would be BeOS, which had been in development since 1991, but they didn't suddenly "step up" because there was a void in '94.

Apple did stop innovating in the 1990's by Jerslan · 2012-08-20 05:06 · Score: 4, Informative

"But it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all"

That's a pretty asinine statement. Apple *did* stop innovating for a while (or at least nearly did as all attempts to innovate were dismal failures). They started copying the IBM-clone business model and started looking to outside OS's for the next-gen Mac OS. IIRC BeOS was a strong contender until Apple decided to buy NeXT and turn NeXTStep into Mac OS X. The innovation began again after they brought Steve Jobs back and he killed everything that had been done in the 1990's (after he was ousted). Apple very nearly died not long after that original trial and most analysts thought that even the second coming of Jobs wasn't going to save the company.

All "evidence" of innovation in this article happened *after* Jobs came back when the company was at death's doorstep. Even more damning for the author is that all of that "evidence" was patented trade dress, design, and technology that Apple has successfully defended (e.g. eMachines tried to make a rip-off of the iMac and got sued by Apple, I owned one because it's what my parents bought me in High School).

-OS X - Not really Apple's big innovation. It was their acquisition of NeXTStep that lead to OS X and the return of Steve Jobs and innovation at Apple.
-iMac (original CRT version) - Design championed by Steve Jobs after his return, successfully sued eMachines over copying nearly exactly (even came in several bright colors, I had blue)
-iPod - Several years *after* the company had regained some footing, IIRC several patents involved with the iPod were also successfully defended
-iPhone - MANY years *after* the company had become a powerhouse even bigger than before

Lets be honest here. by Shivetya · 2012-08-20 05:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

You can only win a war when you don't pretend your not at war. By that I mean, we no longer fight wars to finish them, we fight wars with the hopes of exhausting the resources of the other side before we exhaust the support of our own people.

If we had fought Afghanistan like we fought the Germans in WW2 it would be a lot closer to over if not. When you do not break the population supporting the other side the other side itself will never break. As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them

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* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.

Re:Lets be honest here. by dkleinsc · 2012-08-20 05:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them
The other approach (which has somewhat worked in Iraq) is to convince the population that the life provided under US occupation or a US-allied government is better than life under the other guys. For instance, the main reason that the VietCong had the slightest chance of winning in Vietnam is because their government had convinced people that they were the better choice - if they hadn't, the Vietnamese peasant population would have promptly turned in any VC in the area to the French, US, or South Vietnam.
If it works, it kills far fewer people than, say, the Dresden bombing.

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I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/

What has Google ever invented? by Brannon · 2012-08-20 05:13 · Score: 2

Using that type of analysis, then no company has ever invented anything. Everything is just some tweak or combination of existing technologies.

Seriously, name a single invention.

Re:It's a blood feud by UnknowingFool · 2012-08-20 05:23 · Score: 3, Insightful

The whole point about Google was that Jobs believed Schmidt used his position to give Google an advantage to compete against Apple and not that Google did it organically. You know why Apple hasn't sued MS for Metro or RIM of BBOS 7? Because Apple does not believe these were copied from them.

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Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Re:Labor mobility by j35ter · 2012-08-20 05:25 · Score: 3, Insightful

No, it means those people will do something else other than manufacturing.

Like what, being artists and/or bankers? Most service jobs today are being replaced by software or outsourced.
Profits and wages for a small group of people have risen astronomically, while the rest is in decline!

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Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango

The bullshit myth that won't die by Udo+Schmitz · 2012-08-20 05:34 · Score: 2

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html

“Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said.”

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/592FE887-5CA1-4F30-BD62-407362B533B9.html

http://lightbox.time.com/2011/10/06/in-a-private-light-diana-walkers-photos-of-steve-jobs/#10

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/05/apples-stock-rise-could-have-meant-5-billion-for-microsoft/

“Less than 12 hours before his big announcement, nobody here knows yet about the bombshell to come. In fact, Jobs is still negotiating it here at the Castle--on a cell phone. "Hi, Bill," you hear him say in the echo chamber of the old hall. Then his voice drops, and for nearly an hour he paces the stage, running through last-minute details with Gates. All the while, he leans over his computer, paces, lies down on the stage, paces, lurks in dark corners, paces and talks, paces and talks.

This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, "There are a lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up things." Then, to his crew, he yells, "Have we got satellite contact with the other side?" Assured this has been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates about what to wear on the morrow ("I'm just going to wear a white shirt," he assures him), and he finally ends the conversation with a heartfelt "Thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it." And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call.

The deal is vintage Jobs. Amelio began the process of repairing relations between the two longtime rivals. But once he was out the door at Apple, Jobs contacted Gates to try to get talks started again. Gates dispatched his CFO, Gregory Maffei, who met Jobs at his home. Jobs suggested they go for a walk. Grabbing a couple of bottles of mineral water from the fridge, the two took off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. "It was an interesting scene," Maffei recalls. "It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies." The two walked for nearly an hour, through Palo Alto's green university area, as they pounded out the details of a potential deal. Jobs, Maffei says, was "expansive and charming. He said, 'These are things that we care about and that matter.' And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn't ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured about what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal."”

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3239977/apple-and-microsoft-cross-license-agreement-includes-anti-cloning

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1292505/584.pdf

Follow the chain down by ThatsNotPudding · 2012-08-20 05:39 · Score: 4, Insightful

The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.

If you follow the supply chain down, you start to hit China pretty quickly: seamless steel tubing, castings, bushings, bearings, more and more seals... Problem is, they are relentlessly climbing up that supply chain to such an extent, that our 'manufacturers' become more 'assemblers' (such as the Google a/v widget). Caltrans is saving millions on a new bridge... by buying most of the subassembly weldments from China.

Just has already happened in the food industry, more and more weasel words and definitions are being applied to US 'manufacturing' to put more money in the pockets of corporations all the while waving their American flags (probably also made in China).

You missed the point of the Picasso quote by alispguru · 2012-08-20 05:40 · Score: 2

What Picasso (and Jobs) meant by "Great artists steal" was that:

* mediocre people copy designs without understanding them or improving them
* great artists take designs and add enough to them that everybody forgets about the original

Apple is clearly in the second category - 0.1% of the public remembers the Xerox Star, almost no one bought Windows tablets, etc.

I would have to put Samsung in the first category. Look at their 2010 iPhone analysis where most of its recommendations boil down to "iPhone does this better - we should copy it".

Android's category is debatable.

--

To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.

Gah by ThatsNotPudding · 2012-08-20 05:41 · Score: 4, Insightful

Needing fewer people in those sectors means we can use the labor force productively elsewhere.

Such as selling each other mobile phone contracts, or asking paper or plastic, or would we like to super-size those fries.

China and the US Debt by Ameryll · 2012-08-20 06:23 · Score: 2

China also knows they hold a large chunk of US debt and therefore we would think twice before causing them too much trouble.

Re:China and the US Debt by nedlohs · 2012-08-20 09:03 · Score: 2

We would think twice? Why? We wouldn't use military might against China because we owe them money? That's usually a reason for the other side of the argument - why pay them back when we can just declare the debt void since sending money to a wartime enemy would be rather dumb.
What China does know is that they have nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them (unless you relocate to South America...)

I hope this gets corrected soon! by synapse7 · 2012-08-20 06:53 · Score: 2

I mistakenly bought an iphone when I intended to buy a galaxy and now I have to use itunes!

Do you like bananas? by Quiet_Desperation · 2012-08-20 07:29 · Score: 2

Well, Apple seems to care. *shrug*

As for MS, I was learning to code both OSes back in those days, and there were so many data structures in Windows that were identical to those in Mac OS, and I mean down to the individual variable spellings. It was pretty sad.

Re:Labor mobility by pspahn · 2012-08-20 07:44 · Score: 3, Informative

Where do you live that the only things the population does is manufacture, paint, and manage money?

A nice list provided for your reading pleasure.

Note the lack of manufacturing, painting, and money managing on that list.

--
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.

Global trade by sjbe · 2012-08-20 08:02 · Score: 2

If you follow the supply chain down, you start to hit China pretty quickly...

If you follow the supply chain you'll hit any country you care to name, including the US. That's what global trade is all about. The product we make on our assembly like has parts from China, Mexico, Japan and the US. Furthermore there are lots of manufacturing needs that are not easily serviced by China, no matter how good their manufacturing prowess. Any production in the US that is done on a Just In Time basis pretty much rules out manufacturing in China. Shipping is expensive and makes lead times very long. You also have exchange rate fluctuations which have a strong impact on the cost of exporting/importing. China imports a lot of items like every big country.

Yes, China is going to be a player - they have 1/5 of the worlds population for crying out loud. They should be a major part of the economy. But the US isn't going to be a third world country just because China finally got their act together. It's just going to be different. Whining about it accomplishes nothing useful.

not quite by Chirs · 2012-08-20 09:10 · Score: 2

Motorola's standard fee for FRAND patents is 2.25% of the finished device price. (This is not unusually high, Qualcomm is 3.5% for example.) What usually happens is that everyone just enters into cross-licensing agreements instead.

Apple doesn't want to cross-license, but claims that the stated fee is too high even though it's what was quoted to everyone else.

It's a form factor not the device. by NoOneSpecific · 2012-08-20 09:12 · Score: 2

Did IBM, Compact, Packard Bell and HP go all crazy over the beige desktop case? Did Motorola sue anyone else who developed a flip phone? Is Microsoft going after APPLE for copying their Courier? NO! Why? Because it's not the product but the form factor of the product. Get over it. Move on.

Good Artists... by whisper_jeff · 2012-08-20 09:32 · Score: 2

About a year ago, I wrote an article about Steve Jobs' famous quote and, given that I've seen it raised several times in this thread, I feel it's worth reposting because it's just as valid now as it was then. So, here you go.

-----

Of late, with all the Apple vs Google geek drama boiling over, a quote by Steve Jobs is often thrown about in an effort to make Apple/Steve look bad.

"Good artists copy; great artists steal."

Now, obviously, this quote is thrown about in an effort to make Apple and/or Steve look bad and imply that they ripped off ideas from others. Well, the problem is the quote is actually a misquote which thus clouds the point, which is rare for someone of Steve's speaking elegance. Most people who know it's a misquote believe he's misquoting Picasso but the truth is he's misquoted TS Elliot. The actual quote is:

"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."

Now, when you compare Steve's misquote and TS Elliot's actual quote, you see they actually say basically the same thing but TS Elliot's full quote obviously puts the whole thing into context so the point is understood.

And I agree with it.

I have long believed that there are no more original ideas, just interesting takes on old ideas.

Now, as with Steve's misquote, when expressed that simply, my point can get lost and often has led to people disagreeing with me, strongly. But my point is this - as we grow up, we are exposed to extensive amounts of information that becomes the background noise of our creative processes. As we write, paint, sculpt, compose, and otherwise create, we are influenced, in one way or another, by everything we've seen and heard up until that point. Sometimes the inspiration is heavy and obvious and other times it's subtle and we aren't even aware of it. But we're always influenced by what we've seen up until that point of creation. And good creators put an interesting spin or twist on their inspirations and come up with something that seems and feels new and original. But, at the end of the day, there are no more original ideas, only interesting takes on old ideas.

While many toss around Steve's misquote in the hopes of painting him and Apple in a bad light, they fail to realize that, though he over-simplified a complex issue, he's right. As was TS Elliot before him. Great creators are inspired by what has come before them; they transform and mold and adapt their creation until its something new and wonderful while other creators simply copy without any of the finesse, simply regurgitating what came before.

And, when viewed in the context of Apple, it is clearly relevant. Apple is often touted as being innovative and original by some while others quickly point out that they're just doing what others have done before them. And you know what, both sides are right, which shows that Apple is a "good poet" - they take something and make it into something better, or at least different. They weld the theft into a whole of feeling which is unique. Apple wasn't the first to market with a graphic UI, but they transformed the computer market with Mac OS; Apple wasn't the first to market with an MP3 music player, but they transformed the market with the iPod; Apple wasn't the first to market with a smartphone, but they transformed the market with the iPhone; Apple wasn't the first to market with an ultralight laptop, but they've transformed the market with the Macbook Air; Apple wasn't the first to market with a tablet PC, but they've transformed the market with the iPad. The

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