Apple Adds Samsung Galaxy SIII To Its Ban List

After its big win against Samsung, Apple named 8 Samsung products it wanted an injunction to ban from sale in the U.S. Apple wasn't content with that, though; USA Today reports on the state of the expanded list: "The new list of 21 products includes Samsung's flagship smartphone Galaxy S III as well as the Galaxy Note, another popular Android phone. If the court finds those devices are infringing Apple's patents and irreparably harming the U.S. company, it could temporarily halt sales in the U.S. market even before the trial begins."

Comments

Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Add all Apple devices to you own ban list today !

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I'm sure having all of slashdot avoid apple products will be a totally effective boycott.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I did, but it is not working well. I got my daughter an HTC OneX (the day they came out, before their temporary ban caused them to be unavailable for awhile). She has just gone off to college, living in a brand new dorm. She's in a special program called Women In Science and Engineering (WISE) with 37 other girls. Apparently they ALL have an iPhone except for one kid that still has an old dumb phone. That's right: 36 iPhones, 1 dumb phone, 1 HTC android phone. Yes, that is a small group - but it is a group of smart (you had to apply and qualify and many were turned away) college freshmen. I sincerely hope that these stupid lawsuits over these ridiculous patents (such as the one currently going on that includes slide to unlock) will cause blowback on Apple in terms of lower sales. Not that I have much against Apple. I'd just like to see "the market" punish companies that are aggressively swinging around their ludicrous patents.

Re:Do it yourself

[TemperedAlchemist]

I'd be more interested in how you know that statistic, frankly.

Re:Do it yourself

[Nerdfest]

I keep saying this; it does have an effect. It's not just those of us that keep up to date about all of the bad corporate behaviour of Apple, Sony, etc, it's all the other people that come to us for opinions. It matters. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be as well.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I do agree. I don't think it's as powerful as Apple's marketing campaign, but it is meaningful.

Re:Do it yourself

[Ice Station Zebra]

Already done. Will NEVER buy an apple product and actively work to undermine their market share.

Re:Do it yourself

[betterunixthanunix]

Having all Slashdot tell everyone they know to avoid Apple products might have more of an impact than you expect. People often come to me (and I suspect most other Slashdot readers) asking for advice about computers. If I say, "Stay away from Apple," at least a large fraction of those people will do so.

The real question is, how many Slashdot readers actually will stay away from Apple? A pretty large number of IT, CS, and other technically-minded folks seem to like Apple's products (and they are generally apathetic when it comes to Apple's tactics, licenses, or how Apple is pushing for the destruction of PCs), and quite a few Slashdot readers are big supporters of Apple. If the world's technical communities were united on this issue, there would be no problem -- Apple would be facing mass resistance (see e.g. SOPA/PIPA). Unfortunately, we are not united; a lot of people in these communities like Apple's products and are going to deride people who boycott Apple.

Re:Do it yourself

[NatasRevol]

Social groups share things?

Seems odd that I'd have to say that, but this is slashdot.

Re:Do it yourself

[Man On Pink Corner]

That's fine, as log as you add Samsung into the list of bad corporate behavior.

Any organization with two or more people will be guilty of "bad corporate behavior" in someone's opinion. It's necessary to decide what you consider acceptable versus what you consider unacceptable.

I don't recall Samsung doing anything that I, personally, consider unacceptable. I can't say the same for Apple. Your own point is an empty one unless you elaborate.

Re:Do it yourself

[flappinbooger]

Yep - I'm no fan of Samsung, I was misfortunate enough to have owned the "Rogue" cell phone. It was a total piece of useless crap.

That said, the S3 is really interesting and I'm (was) planning to look into it, assuming it's even available. The iphones are simply not even an option any more, their screens are just too small. Plus the idea of having to drink the coolaid is just not appealing to me. Ipad? Nope. Sorry. Asus has you nailed there. Ipod? Sandisk makes some nice products. Plus, my android phone with google music is pretty sweet.

This legal action is absolutely ridiculous. What, being the biggest company in the world, ever, isn't enough? Besides, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery....

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what I`m doing, and I`m proud of it :
- Closed source
- Total control over apps

I always got against Microsoft, but Apple is x15 more aggressive and total control freaks...

I didn`t get an IPad, waited for an Android one instead, and I'm really happy with my Samsung Galaxy tab!

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Done, I'll never own a piece of crappy apple hardware again, how easy it is for 9 muppets to say a foreign company owes them over a billion dollars and all in the 21 hours to deliberate before the weekend.

Re:Do it yourself

[girlintraining]

Add all Apple devices to you own ban list today !

That solves nothing. Companies will continue to abuse intellectual property law and ideology to limit consumer choice. Every company has to -- that's how the game is played. Singling out Apple for being the most successful player doesn't change the fact that its the game that's fucking you, the consumer.

You can ban, cry, shout, scream, boycott -- but it's not the players that are the problem, it's the game. If you really want to make a difference, stop buying products designed or produced in the United States, and only buy from companies based in countries that do not buy into intellectual property (like China). It seems strange to advocate purchasing from a communist country with a long list of human rights issues and no labor rights to speak of -- but I'm of the opinion that supporting slave labor is superior to supporting intellectual property.

It's simple, really: We all learn by copying each other. This is neurological and hardwired. When you see someone performing an activity, you may be unaware of this but the same muscles they are using to do it will tense very slightly. These clusters of 'mirror' neurons, along with their connection to the limbic system, form the basis for learning. Intellectual property is a barrier interposed between ourselves and the environment which limits and manipulates that natural process so that industrialists can profit off of it.

It has to be stopped, or it'll stall out human progress for centuries to come -- our technological progress which up until now could be plotted exponentially upwards is rapidly flattening and we're going to have another Dark Ages on our hands if we don't stop this, and our children will live in some dystopic world where they are materially better off, but intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically enslaved. Our bodies will be comfortable, but our souls won't.

Re:Do it yourself

[erroneus]

Women in Science and Engineering is, apparently, not an effective course of training. They all seem to gravitate to iPhone. We should already know, by now, the general demographic who uses iPhone and it's not necessarily the geek/hack crowd.

Re:Do it yourself

[andrewa]

Wait, so you bought an consumer electronics device from them well over a decade ago, it had a feature on it that didn't work very well for your purposes, and you want to throw them in the same category as crApple? I thought that I had a grudge about Apple through their recent behaviour, ever increasingly closed O/S, and hardware that is becoming more and more difficult (read impossible) to upgrade - but your grudge is slightly alarming... and you got your money back from Best Buy!
As a former Apple employee and dedicated user of their products (I may have bordered on fanboy at one point), I've become so sick of Apple's despicable practices and direction that I've given my iPad to my wife and replaced it with a Google Nexus, replaced my iPhone (goodbye unlimited data!) with a Samsung S3, and my shiny late-2011 MBP has been relegated to a secondary laptop with a nice new Dell running Linux Mint 10... However, were Apple to change their business practices/policies I would again consider using their products as they are of exceptional quality.

Re:Do it yourself

[ColdWetDog]

People often come to me (and I suspect most other Slashdot readers) asking for advice about computers. If I say, "Stay away from Apple," at least a large fraction of those people will do so.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Uh huh...

Re:Do it yourself

[AvitarX]

Aren't DVD captions images, not text?

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you're a big PC supporter... you must of missed all of Microsoft's moves against Android and Google:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/19229/google_microsoft_sues_over_android_because_windows_phone_7_has_failed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-motorola-android-patent-lawsuit
A lot of "technically minded" folks like to vilify Apple in favor of Microsoft. I would say they are both guilty of a plethora of poor business practices throughout their histories.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter how book "smart" they might be, kids are always stupid owing to how little experience they have in general. That is the reason behind hipster attitudes; kids or people who haven't grown up who still put too much value into the opinions of others. So of course they have iPhones. It's the "cool" trend.

Re:Do it yourself

[EdIII]

Yes, it is very interesting. He should provide the location of his daughters dormitory for peer review. Don't worry sir, it's for science.

Re:Do it yourself

[shutdown -p now]

I do avoid Apple products. However, if someone comes to me and asks for advice, I cannot in good conscience tell them to say away from Apple without also explaining why I feel that way; and, let's face it, these kinds of ethical issues are far from universally agreed upon. It's something that everyone must decide for themselves. Sure, you can provide them with context, but making the choice for them would be immoral.

Re:Do it yourself

[shutdown -p now]

Just because the rules of the game allow you to play in a certain way, does not mean that everyone must actually do so. IRL we have laws, and then we have conventions. When people don't follow those conventions, we call them assholes and shun them, but we don't lock them up and don't rewrite the laws.

Similarly here. Not saying that patent reform isn't needed, but hey: of all the companies on the mobile device market today, Apple is the only one engaging in blanket bans on their competitor products and refusing to license some of their patents outright, forcing others to remove features from their phones (including even those already sold, as was the case with S3 and Nexus). So, as far as limiting my choice as a customer goes, they are the worst offender by a large margin. Of course I'm going to bash them more.

Re:Do it yourself

[danomac]

They can have subtitles as a bitmap overlay. However, the DVD player could be trying to OCR them or something to manipulate them before showing on the TV.

Re:Do it yourself

[andydread]

I too have recently started to advise against purchasing Apple products since their litigious behaviour and will continue to do so until they end this anti-competitive behaviour in the marketplace. I simply explain that Apple is Anti-Free market and anti-consumer-choice, Purchasing Apple IOS products is like purchasing a 5 bedroom house with only access to 3 rooms. The bulder of course has access to all 5 rooms. They get it then.

Re:Do it yourself

[hherb]

A pretty large number of IT, CS, and other technically-minded folks seem to like Apple's products (and they are generally apathetic when it comes to Apple's tactics, licenses, or how Apple is pushing for the destruction of PCs), and quite a few Slashdot readers are big supporters of Apple.

It is changing. In our clinic we were in the process of transitioning towards an "all Apple" environment (iphones, ipads, Macbooks, imacs and mac minis). However, witnessing with great concern Apple's customer hostile approach worsening rapidly over the last couple of years we decided to reverse the process. In phones it was easy - the Galaxy S3 is a vastly better device. In laptops it is not easy, we still find Macbooks unrivaled in build quality and features, and there is nothing on the market we could find that would come close to the desirable specs of a mac mini.

As a result, we are now transitioning to a mix of generic PC hardware and Mac hardware mostly running Linux (some desktops still running OSX), and Galaxy S3 phones and soon the new Galaxy note tablet too. While it is a slow transition, I can see many like minded people in my area making a similar transition - the walled garden walls have become far too high for many, the sun is not coming through any more.

Only two years ago I probably would have still praised the advantages of the OSX ecosystem. Nowadays, they have become as disgusting as Microsoft had 10 years ago - and that was the last time I used any Microsoft products. The writing is on the wall for Apple too - instead of keeping innovating they merely try to maximize their profit through litigating any competition and locking their existing customers completely in. When corporates become intolerably arrogant it is only a matter of time before people turn their back.

Re:Do it yourself

[shutdown -p now]

Are you sure they really understand the issue at hand fully?

Problem is, it takes a relatively involved discussion to explain the situation fully. And most people coming for an advice don't want such a discussion. They just want you to tell which phone is "better" without preaching to them. And there certainly are people for whom, purely from the use case perspective, iPhone makes more sense - so, when giving advice in good conscience, I have to tell them as much. And they don't really want to hear the lengthy "but" afterwards.

Re:Do it yourself

[makomk]

The font was small and had no background box, making it unreadable in many scenes and useless for my then fiance.

That's in large part the fault of your DVDs rather than the player. DVD subtitles are bitmap overlays which don't generally have any kind of background box. Whilst some DVDs do support old-fashioned closed captions, a lot of DVD players don't handle outputting them because they use a really old and quirky and US-specific data format in the vertical blanking interval that's really hard to support (and apparently can't be supported at all on high-definition outputs).

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Did MS seek injunctions against products from being sold? No.
Do they get some money from Android units sold? Yes.
MS is certainly bad. Apple is far worse.

Re:Do it yourself

[jedidiah]

Yes. Blatant copying is OK with me.

Otherwise nothing will ever get done because EVERYTHING builds on something else. If you think otherwise then you are just a pathological narcisist.

Although I don't accept your premise.

BOTH devices are blatant copies of any number of other devices that came before them. This is how progress occurs.

Ownership is not supposed to be assigned to "what" but to HOW. That HOW needs to be non-trivial. It needs to be something that can't be replicated by some student.

Patents need to be real inventions, not college homework assignments.

Re:Do it yourself

[jedidiah]

Yet the iPod went nowhere until those related criticisms were addressed.

Re:Do it yourself

[Pseudonym]

I don't know you, so I don't know if you're an arsehole or not. Assuming you're not, I'd be happy for you to get any promotion, raise or bonus that I do.

Why would I not want you to succeed? Sour grapes? The more the merrier, I say.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

I've been responsible for converting more than a dozen people from Apple to Android now, and Apple's bad acting is all the encouragement I need to redouble my efforts. Not that it takes much convincing. Basically, demonstrate the Google connectivity, show the hardware features (standard usb is a big deal for just about everybody) compare the free and open Android app scene to Apple and it's a done deal. Oh and the price of course, especially the Nexus 7.The bottom line is, a Google logo is just a lot more sought after these days than a half eaten apple.

Another way to seal the deal, bring along a couple of Nexus tablets and demo a video chat using Google Talk, which is based on free-and-open Jabber/XMPP. A pair of magic videochat devices for $200 each, how can you beat that?

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

Any organization with two or more people will be guilty of "bad corporate behavior" in someone's opinion.

Most try to steer clear of the "actively destructive" perception that Apple is building for itself.

Re:Do it yourself

[Sabriel]

If you really want to make a difference, stop buying products designed or produced in the United States, and only buy from companies based in countries that do not buy into intellectual property (like China). It seems strange to advocate purchasing from a communist country with a long list of human rights issues and no labor rights to speak of -- but I'm of the opinion that supporting slave labor is superior to supporting intellectual property.

Er, what? I'm all for patent reform/phaseout, but your suggested solution seems to me a case of destroying the village to save it.

Furthermore, it seems to me that developing countries will cheerfully ignore international IP laws as much as they can get away with - until they begin to dominate technologically, at which point they will begin cracking down. China is definitely in the "developing countries" camp and is trying to advance as rapidly as possible. A dominant superpower equipped with true 21st-century technology and a "long list of human rights issues and no labor rights to speak of" does not bode well for those in its shadow.

Re:Do it yourself

[Yahma]

Well said. Apple is under no obligation to act evil and behave the way they do. It only hurts us, the consumer. We shouldn't support their behavior. I hope the hipsters are getting the message.

Re:Do it yourself

[StripedCow]

Perhaps Slashdot can start by changing the Apple icon, just like we had the Borg icon for Microsoft.
For Apple, I'd say something with a snake will do.

Re:Do it yourself

[girlintraining]

Just because the rules of the game allow you to play in a certain way, does not mean that everyone must actually do so.

True, but most people play a game with the goal of winning it.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Android isnt copying it is different that is why apple want to put out of business its competitors they are like MS in the early 90's rotten to the core

Re:Do it yourself

[JDG1980]

The problem is, all corporations behave badly. If you boycott every corporation that does bad things, you'll essentially cut yourself off from modern society. There are a handful of companies I try to stay away from (Wal-Mart especially), but attempting to police corporate behavior on an individual, ad-hoc basis is a fool's game.

Don't blame the players, blame the game. Vote for politicians who will curb corporate power. Yes, they're hard to find and don't always do what they say they will – that's what primaries are for. "Voting with your wallet" seldom works, because the people with the biggest wallets aren't on your side. Only real democracy – one person, one vote – is the solution. History shows us that the only way to stop bad corporate behavior is for the government to crack down on it. (In this particular case, all that would be necessary would be for the government, through the courts, to stop specifically enabling it).

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I've been doing this as well. It has been working. I've convinced no less than 5 people in the last 3 months to seek anything that is non-apple.

Apple's prices on their notebooks does the rest.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

Are you sure they really understand the issue at hand fully?

Most don't fully get it or see the importance, but that doesn't matter either because they will easily get the fact that Android devices deliver a lot more value for the dollar and have a lot more good quality free stuff.

But let's face it, say "Google" and the average person is already basically sold.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Done and done since about 1983. As ever, fuck apple, Fuck Apple, FUCK FUCKING APPLE!!!!!!!

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You mentioned Apple's customer hostile approach, which I agree with you on. What really concerns me is how much they are trying to homogenize everything, and bring information technology under their strict iron curtain. I love how customizable my PC is, but with Apple products, they try to restrict this. Furthermore, I wanted to try my hand at creating apps for the iPhone/iPad, until I learned how restrictive it was, and also beyond my budget. I do not like how Apple wants everyone to abide by their draconian rules. If Apple takes over, it's going to be like Orwell's 1984, for information technology.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You have maintained a boycott of a company for well over a decade because they implemented a feature in a way you found unacceptable (with brushoff no doubt meaning that inarticulately demanded that they change it to your liking)?

Given your sensitivity, do you buy anything at all anymore or is every company on that list due to some real or imagined wrong?

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there is something we can do to take this battle to Apple. Go to the Apple store, find however many products you can that have a 100% return policy, with no restocking fee, and buy them. Use the items up as much as you can without rendering them unreturnible. Wait until near the end of the return eligibility period, and THEN return them. Get your money back, and leave Apple holding the bag, with them having a bunch of used products that will harm Apple more, forcing them to "eat" the unsellable returned, used merchandise, or forcing them to sell used items as new.

Do this until Apple stops its shenanigans. The way I see it, if Apple can harm Samsung in this way, restricting what we can buy just to pad their own bottom line using the benefits of other people's, better people's work, claiming it as their own after having stolen it, and pretending they're "innovating", we are justified doing whatever we can to return things to balance.

Samsung has NOT infringed on anything Apple has created, or that Apple deserved a patent for, because Apple hasn't created anything new, ever, or deserved just about a single patent they have. The patent system's brokenness is evident in just this one case. If it worked in every other case, it would still be able to be called completely broken just for the abuse of it Apple has shown time and again. No one buys Samsung Smart Phones thinking they're iPhones, they buy them because people think they're BETTER THAN iPhones. Because they are. Apple's claims would be like a bunch of cave-men who tied a rock around the end of a stick, suing Estwing for infringing their "Device and method for hitting things hard with a big rock".

Here's an idea: why not split up Apple? As the (allegedly) most valuable company ever, they should not sue everyone in their sight.

Apple is the new Microsoft. Fuck Apple.

I think I may even change my name, legally, to Fuck Apple. Middle name, you ask? FUCKING!!!

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

Then what about Google's FRAND patent abuses? They want $4 billion from Microsoft for 50 H.264 patents, whereas Microsoft is only paying $6.5million for the other 3,229 H.264 patents.

Talk about being abusive. Where is that "FR" in FRAND eh?

And didn't they promise to uphold FRAND patents when they bought Motorola? Going back on your words is apparently a good thing?

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

And just what/how are you restricted on your OSX system?

Re:Do it yourself

[rtb61]

Just an insane worms and a rotten core visible from the outside and your done. Everyone knows exactly what this is all about Apple use corruption of the court system and patents to squeeze out an inflated profit margins from a spoilt brat fashion product, for as long as psychopathically possible. Not that Google should be given free reign, those privacy invasive buggers also need to kept a very close watch on. Who would have thunk it, Apple worse than M$, even with Uncle Fester at the helm, makes you really want to take a much closer look at the Apple Board, they are worse than Uncle Fester and Co, crikey.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, I can only imagine what kind of beef you must have with Sony!

Re:Do it yourself

[Man On Pink Corner]

(Shrug) Sure. If life itself can be said to have a purpose, it's making copies. That's what we do.

Anyone who tries to interfere with that process will spend their lives in struggle against fundamental, inexorable forces that they don't even see, much less comprehend.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

What is my done?

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Asking for money is one thing. Seeking to ban products is quite another. Most patent cases between active tech companies get settled out of court, usually in a cross-licensing deal. Google's lawsuit will probably be settled that way, and both companies will continue on - no products banned.

Apple, on the other hand, just doesn't believe in real competition. They obviously aren't secure enough in their own products and capabilities, so they seek to ban other, arguably better, products from the market.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

Are you really defending Google abusing FRAND patents by using the justification that Google did not try to get the XBox 360 banned?

Because you know, they fucking did.

I'm impressed by the sheer hypocrisy from the Android fanbois.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+xbox+360+ban

Re:Do it yourself

[Sancho]

MS negotiated with the infringers and both parties came up with a deal to license the patents. Every. Single. Time.

Apple and Samsung couldn't come to an agreement. We can't know what Microsoft would have done at this point. Apple had three choices--ask for damages in the amount of the profits made by the infringing products, ask for an injunction, or drop the suit.

Re:Do it yourself

[LordKronos]

Aren't DVD captions images, not text?

Many DVDs have 2 types of captions. If you use handbrake, the image based captions are referred to as VOBSUB while the text based ones are referred to as CC.

https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Subtitles

Re:Do it yourself

[tsa]

And just what/how are you restricted on your OSX system?

I like OSX and feel in no way restricted by it. A month ago I bought an iPad however, and I am hugely disappointed about how primitive iOS is and at all the things it can't do. It feels like a 21st century device with the capabilities of a Commodore 64. On the iPhone I don't notice the constraints of iOS so much but I expected the iPad to be sort of a laptop without a keyboard. But it's completely unusable if you approach it like that.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

If you wanted a laptop...

I don't use the one I have (company provided) precisely because I need a laptop. But friends who have bought one loved it because that is all they need (not a laptop).

Re:Do it yourself

[Sancho]

Most don't fully get it or see the importance, but that doesn't matter either because they will easily get the fact that Android devices deliver a lot more value for the dollar and have a lot more good quality free stuff.

That's a matter of opinion.

I went from Palm to Windows Mobile to Apple to PalmOS to Android. Apple absolutely delivers the best experience, followed by PalmOS, then Android.

I hated Android. Seriously, with a passion. I loved the idea--a modern, open-source phone where I could install anything I wanted. In practice, I never found anything worth installing that wasn't in the market, the free apps were all ad-laden (taking up valuable screen real estate and slowing things down), the source was incomplete (drivers) and the phone vendor tried to lock the phone (and claimed that overriding it would void the warranty.) I couldn't even find paid versions of some classes of app that I wanted in order to avoid the ads because free apps are a race-to-the-bottom (on both platforms.) Paid apps seemingly have a hard time competing when there's any free version out there that isn't just a demo. The scrolling was horrible--I felt like I was using gestures to perform unrelated actions rather than directly controlling the on-screen elements. This probably sounds like a minor gripe, but UX is a rather important part of any design. I understand most of the UX is fixed in ICS. Maybe I'll give it a shot when my contract is up. Probably not, though--I'm practically locked into the ecosystem such that I the cost/benefit skews more in Apple's favor.

Regardless, due to the customizations, philosophical differences between vendors, and varying degrees of carrier influence, it's really not fair to compare Apples to Androids. You really need to compare specific phones (and specific OS versions). You might say Android is better, but I could show you phones being sold in stores today which offer a vastly worse experience and are as locked down as the phones being sold by Apple today. At the top end (best Android phone in all categories compared to best iPhone), things get tighter, but the price also get closer, if not exactly the same (16GB GS3 and the 16GB iPhone 4s cost the same.)

Re:Do it yourself

[sarysa]

As a slashdoter and iHater, I find this to be insightful. Slashdotters have the power to raise indie devices, but we can't take down behemoths that are perceived as cool.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the defensive lawsuits that were launched because Microsoft and Apple are actively trying to destroy Android?

It's self-defense, and there's NOTHING wrong with that. Apple and Microsoft are the aggressors, and anyone who tries to spin this otherwise likely either works for them or is a paid shill.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

What has Microsoft done to Android? (that they don't do to anyone/anything else...)

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I'm not defending Google, so stop harping on this. Chewbacca defenses work on South Park.

Apple can't compete, so they seek injunctions. Now they are choosing something that is very much NOT like an iPhone to try and ban. If they succeed, consumers lose.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tweezak]

If you are curious google "samsung plasma cracked" and enjoy reading the hundreds of instances of Sammy plasma sets spontaneously cracking due to thermal management issues. This usually happens in warranty and Samsung used to replace the sets. But as time went by it was happening too often so suddenly Samsung policy changed and since then every case I have heard of has ended with them saying "user damage" and denying the claim. The only people I have read about getting their set replaced are those that filed suit in small claims court. Samsung does not want this to go to court!

In my own case my $2100 58" plasma popped and went black while my wife and I were watching a DVD from across the room. In the almost 3 years we have had it the screen has never been touched to my knowledge. Not even to clean it. We have been ridiculously careful and protective of it...to no avail. Closer inspection after the set stopped working revealed a crack about 2 feet long in the lower right corner of the screen. As expected..."user damage."

I'll never buy another Samsung product as long as there's an alternative after seeing how they fraudulently avoid their responsibilities.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

Err, this is about Microsoft and Google. Specifically, Google abusing FRAND patents to get the Xbox 360 banned. I would have thought all the cries of "patent abuse" would be deafening. Unfortunately, I'm deafened by the silence from all the hypocrisy.

And anyway, what has the Google/Microsoft/XBox 360 ban got to do with the Apple/Samsung fight?

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

How about three different convictions or case settling of price fixing? Samsung has paid over a billion dollars in settlements or fines for price fixing in the DRAM, LCD display, and mobile phone markets.

But they've got a nice shiny halo over their heads around here for reasons passing understanding.

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

I brought MS up, as a counter point to how to negotiate to get compensated. They didn't try to have an injunction because they didn't like competition.

You brought up FRAND, which is another example of patent abuse, but adds nothing to this discussion.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Bwahahahaha.

You're not fooling anyone. You're crying inside.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

My last laptop purchase was a Windows based system, specifically because I am tired of paying for overpriced hardware. I prefer MacOS X, but I'm not going to pay a $700+ premium for it anymore.

Re:Do it yourself

[gmhowell]

I saw no reason to try their products for the past decade. Given that they are a mere copier of other manufacturers, I see no reason to try their current products.

Re:Do it yourself

[gmhowell]

No problem with the DVDs. I've since had about six other DVD players, running in price from $19 to $300. All of them let the text based CC pass through to my NTSC tv just fine.

Re:Do it yourself

[fredprado]

Google gets nothing by banning XBoxes, simply because it does not sell video game consoles. Obviously they are not trying to ban anything, they want just a slice of the pie.

Microsoft patents troll Google for money. Google patents troll Microsoft for money. They make agreements and continue to be. That is basically a zero sum game. Obviously it helps no one but the lawyers but it does not harm the consumer.

Apple is trying to patents troll Samsung into oblivion so they don't need to compete anymore and can have a legal monopoly over smartphones and tablets, and US courts apparently are fine with monopolies and Crony Capitalism so they get away with this.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

. In laptops it is not easy, we still find Macbooks unrivaled in build quality and features,

Lenovo. Better build quality than apple (as in less likely to break etc), but you pay for the privilege just like you would apple and don't get quite as much resale.

Re:Do it yourself

[fredprado]

Still the GS3 is the superior product by far, and that is what the GP said.

Sure, there is a lot of trash with Android installed, but they do not really compete with Apple products. Apple products compete for the high end market, and in this market, the Android devices that are competing have far more value for the money than the equivalent Apple's products.

Re:Do it yourself

[fredprado]

Winning on the short term may result in terrible loss at the long term. They are betting they can do it and get away with it indefinitely. Maybe they can, maybe they cannot, but if they come crashing and burning it will be because they chose to play by these rules.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "went nowhere" you mean that it sold like hotcakes out of the gate and then later (years later with respect to wireless) those criticisms were addressed, you're absolutely right.

Re:Do it yourself

[Compaqt]

Well, then you could just avoid the ethical issues.

Just talk about stuff like: app market (if applicable to where you live), choice of carrier, USB connection, ability to copy files, need/lack of need for iTunes to do basic stuff, battery change, screen size, memory/storage expansion, etc.

Re:Do it yourself

[fredprado]

No patent abuses are never OK, but fair and reasonable are subjective terms. To me there is no patent that would fit in the "fair and reasonable" class. Not even a single one. To you there may be a higher threshold.

It doesn't matter though. Even if Google's abuse of patents is bad it is no different from what other big companies, as MS, Oracle, Intel, etc do. I will certainly defend a World where none of them can do it, you may rest assured, but what Apple does goes several levels beyond that. Abusing the system to try and generate monopolies is way worse than abusing the system to get a bigger slice of the profits than you would judge fair.

Re:Do it yourself

[toddestan]

It went nowhere until they addressed the biggest shortcoming of the original iPod: That you needed a Mac to use it.

Re:Do it yourself

[tsa]

This is peculiar. I say something negative about an Apple product in a thread about how evil Apple is that rivals the threads about MS in the early 2000s and I am marked troll! I'm almost proud.

Re:Do it yourself

[CodeBuster]

A bad recommendation might be enough to convince someone not to buy a Sony product, particularly when adequate substitutes are readily available as they are for most of the products that Sony markets. However, in the case of Apple products, which are fast approaching a state of mania in the consumer market, even that my not be effective. Even people who can barely use them or don't need them seem to have no problem forking over thousands of dollars on a mobile contract that includes data and service charges that can easily top $100 per month just so that they too can have the newest iPhone and for what essentially amounts to pleasure, not business. Clearly the value of a dollar, what's left of it anyway, is lost on many younger Americans today.

Re:Do it yourself

[Forty Two Tenfold]

I'll never buy another Samsung product as long as there's an alternative after seeing how they fraudulently avoid their responsibilities.

OK. Buy SONY.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm no... the iPod sold at a much better-than-expected rate for the first year and a half before coming over the Windows platform. In fact, the release of the 2nd gen iPod on Windows only doubled the sales compared to the previous model, which is remarkably poor considering Macs were only ~5% of the market at the time. It wasn't until the 4th gen iPod that they became ubiquitous in the mp3 market.

In short, as far as Apple was concerned they were a success long before they were released on Windows or before the entire "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." criticisms were addressed.

Re:Do it yourself

[CodeBuster]

For Apple, I'd say something with a snake will do.

That's brilliant, but I wonder if even our fellow Slashdot users would fully appreciate the symbolism there.

Re:Do it yourself

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Trigger-happy immoderators don't read past the first sentence.

Re:Do it yourself

[psiclops]

Apple updates iOS for phones up to 3 years old

yep and the hardware of the older phones cant handle the new os updates. the phones are then rendered near unusable. YAY!!!

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Already have! I was considering buying an IPad 2 but after all this crap I went Nexus. Screw the overpriced hype, this was a purchase on principle. Its time everyone joins in. Boycott Apple! Hit them where it counts! Starting a boycott of Apple now will hit them around the time they release the IPhone 5, potentially making a mark on their sales and sending them a clear message. If we make enough noise around the Apple boycott this will happen early enough in the U.S. political campaign to make patent reform a political issue. I know, I know Apple isn't the only company doing crap with patents - but it is the most high profile right now, and the timing couldn't be more perfect to make a statement loud enough for all the other companies following Apples lead to hear.

Free development!!! Boycott Apple!!!

Re:Do it yourself

[boorack]

Winning short term (and getting fat bonus for it) is propably everything Tim Crook is looking for. Or maybe not ? Look at all those high-end engineers who left Apple in recent months. My suspicion is that Apple management team quite conciously got off the innovation path - they don't want do this anymore because they don't want to, not because they can't. Getting a monopoly and sitting on it forever seems to be the way they chose. Get consumers into a forced consumption treadmill (with iToys breaking just after warranty expires and being impossible to repair) is propably everything their Tim Crook and his cronies are able to grasp these days.

I'm happy to see people rushed to buy Samsung gadgets as soon out of fear that these might be banned anytime. This means that real market mechanism (not rigged by corporate commercials & propaganda) is still working.

Re:Do it yourself

[Plumpaquatsch]

Yawn, The US has had design patents a century before you were born - learn to live with it, or do something more useful against them then whining on the interwebs. Or at least don't limit your whining on one company, and if you can't manage that focus on the company with the most US design patents - which would be Samsung. By far.

Re:Do it yourself

[beelsebob]

Actually, that shortcoming was addressed exactly because it was a huge success, and they realised they were onto something.

Re:Do it yourself

[Drathos]

"Google's FRAND patent abuses?"

a) That was not Google, that was pre-buyout Motorola.
b) The terms are supposedly the same terms that many other companies have already agreed to.
c) It doesn't matter if the patent is FRAND or not. If it's being used without license, it's infringement. Yet it seems like every time FRAND patents get asserted, people go apeshit. Meanwhile, Apple and MS are asserting patents that should have never been issued and people are jumping on their bandwagon.

Just to point out, I'm against the idea of patents in standards. Instead of FRAND agreements, I think that they should be required to assign the patent to the public domain.

Re:Do it yourself

[Aryden]

That's interesting, I have been buying samsung monitors for years now. I have a house and office full of them. Anytime there is any issue at all, we send the monitor back and we get a replacement within weeks. I mean dead pixels, faulty speakers, scratches on the front panel, anything at all.

Re:Do it yourself

[rat_herder]

You are doing them a disservice. Apple makes great laptops. Quality build with a killer OS.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Converting my ass...what Apple did is important so that proper innovation will prosper, not that other companies will just copy or clone the look and feel by just providing cheaper alternative because they didn't came out with years of research and expenses with their own design. If Microsoft and RiM can differentiate themselves with their own unique design, why can't these other shameless copycats.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You still missed and failed to address the point GP was making: "...the fact that Android devices deliver a lot more value for the dollar."

The thing is... Apple can "deliver a better experience" (whatever that means) and still deliver less value FOR THE DOLLAR. The point here is that you'll be hard-pressed to find any Android phone that's more expensive than an iPhone and that doesn't deliver (better or worse) the same (if not more) relevant features.

Hence, the iPhone would have to tuck me into bed and slice potatoes for me, before I could justify to myself spending money on such a device (assuming, hypothetically speaking, that Apple weren't a bunch of litigious jerks and that I would ever give them money), when I could just as easily get something for half the price and that works just as well (makes phonecalls, takes pictures, fart apps, send messages.. what more do you need?).

Re:Do it yourself

[Teknikal69]

Might not be effective but count me in anyway.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

You certainly live in a very strange world.

A phone without a slide to unlock the way Apple implemented it would be a pain (and only the way they implemented it - they showed other slide to unlocks in court that are non-infringing I believe).

A phone that *CANNOT* communicate on established 3G standards would *NOT* be a (smart) phone.

Additionally, you seem to forget - even Google thought Samsung was copying Apple.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

a) That XBox ban was just requested *POST* buyout, if I remember correctly. Besides, Google can just stop it. They didn't.
b) $4B for 50 patents vs $6.5M for 3,229 patents is considered reasonable?
c) Have you actually read the patents?
d) I'm with your stance on standards.

Re:Do it yourself

[Ginger Unicorn]

Why on earth would a digital playback device invoke an archaic analogue overlay mechanism? Surely the player could just alter the frame digitally, rather than fudging around with the output signal?

Re:Do it yourself

[Ginger Unicorn]

Publicly objecting to something (or "whining" as you dismissively term it) contributes towards building mindshare against the problem in question, and is a necessary step in bringing about a solution.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. Google don't make a video games box, but they are trying hard to push googletv, while ms is quite clearly well ahead with turning the the xbox into a media delivery hub that threatens the whole strategy.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

If a dozen of patents in Samsung lawsuit was deemed worth $1B, surely four times as many patents can be worth $4B.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, wikipedia has a page for open source iphone apps as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_iOS_applications

Why bother going to wikipedia for one and to stackoverflow for the other?

People tend to believe you more if you appear unbiased.

Re:Do it yourself

[andrewa]

Says the Anonymous Coward....

Re:Do it yourself

[sl4shd0rk]

For Apple, I'd say something with a snake will do.

I was thinking more along the lines of a certain feminine hygiene product.

Re:Do it yourself

[poofmeisterp]

Although I don't accept your premise.

BOTH devices are blatant copies of any number of other devices that came before them. This is how progress occurs.

Amen.
 
I agree with you so much that I must add a backing snark comment:

In other news, tomorrow will have a news piece about the patent suit "Species of Homo Erectus -vs- Species of Homo Erectus" over the wheel. Without it, we would not have made progress as we did, and someone sure wants a large chuck of money from their corporate team (read: ancestors) coming up with that idea.

Re:Do it yourself

[fredprado]

You live in a strange World. A World where Apple "invented" anything. Apple just copies. It was always like this.

Re:Do it yourself

[aurispector]

Apple didn't even come close to "inventing the smart phone" as if it were a complete thing unto itself. They didn't invent the touchscreen, the computer processor, they didn't invent operating systems, they didn't invent wireless data transfer or cellular communications.

What they did was take existing tech and combine it in a new way. Not to denigrate apple's achievements; they're phenomenal. But the things they're claiming to "own" aren't really the things that allowed the smartphone revolution to occur.

They're suing samsung because they can, and it's not the consumer's best interest they're worrying about. I like google and android in part because they aren't microsoft and they aren't apple. Competition is good for ME.

This whole thing makes me want to go buy and SIII ASAP.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has been on my ban list for decades now.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

A pair of magic videochat devices for $200 each, how can you beat that?

The current iPod touch, for $200, supports this "magic videochat." Perhaps not over Google Talk, but definitely over FaceTime (exclusively) and Skype. And if you're looking for the same form factor, the rumored iPad mini's pricetag is said to be roughly $200 as well.

Re:Do it yourself

[atlasdropperofworlds]

No, I'm saving them from a bad purchasing decision.

I can't in good conscience recommend a laptop that costs so much, with such an insecure OS. A nice unibody doesn't mean that the overall quality of the laptop is any better than say, Dell. In fact, there have been just as many problems both hardware wise and software wise with our company MBPs as there have been with any other laptop.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Two thumbs up to what the OP...sub OP? said above. In line with that, part of the reason you haven't heard monsterous amounts of M$ hate lately is because, as they are still nominally being watched by the DOJ, they've played fairly nice over the last few years. Case in point: licensing their fat patents with every Android maker out there. Does anyone honestly believe that fat is the ONLY thing Microsoft has on everyone else? Remember, they're one of the few companies that DOES still pay for pure research. The Bell/PARC labs of our times, maybe not, but rows of icons they've long since moved past. That's why I'm still bewildered by the fact the the Motorola troll cases haven't been dropped yet. Google understands the value of innovation better than most, why allow the lawyer-roaches to continue?

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Add all Apple devices to you own ban list today !

I am with you. I won't buy Apple, evuh!
Thom

Re:Do it yourself

[soundguy4film]

Here's the problem I'm an audio engineer. Apps that I use regularly and make money from the abilities they give me are not available on android. Cl-wifi and v-control pro and the lectrosonics remote app are irreplaceable and pro audio is invested in OSX and iOS.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Worm inside an Apple will work fine for me...

Re:Do it yourself

[BasilBrush]

I've been responsible for converting more than a dozen people from Apple to Android now

I've converted a similar number from Android to iOS.

Basically, demonstrate the Google connectivity

Google's services are of course accessible from iPhone. Apple's services on the other hand don't tend to be available on Android.

show the hardware features (standard usb is a big deal for just about everybody)

iOS devices of course ship with a cable which plugs into any USB. So that's covered. However there are a huge variety of peripherals that use the Apple dock connector, and these Android users can't use them.

The bottom line is, a Google logo is just a lot more sought after these days than a half eaten apple.

Only for search. Market share of Google devices (Nexus) is miniscule next to iPhone. http://www.androidauthority.com/galaxy-nexus-minuscule-compared-iphone-sales-samsung-defense-against-apples-copy-claims-109137/

Another way to seal the deal, bring along a couple of Nexus tablets and demo a video chat using Google Talk, which is based on free-and-open Jabber/XMPP.

iOS ships with Facetime and has Skype and Jabber/XMPP clients available. You thus have more people you can do video chats with from an iPhone.

All the things you list, you're better off with an iPhone. You've given bad advice to your friends.

Re:Do it yourself

[Silas is back]

I simply explain that Apple is Anti-Free market and anti-consumer-choice.

While I do not want to defend Apple's latest tactics (I think we all agree on those), it's a little harsh to say that "Apple is anti-free market" when Apple gave us the type of phones that we have today. Yes, maybe some other company would have done it by now, but it was still Apple starting it, and it was them who fucked with the carriers to get a decent phone out.

Just saying this battle is fought overly emotional these days.

Re:Do it yourself

[tooyoung]

How has that worked for us with Microsoft? From comments that I read here, most people avoid Windows. I also suspect that we try to steer our friends away from purchasing Microsoft products. So, how successful have we been? If people truly made their tech purchases based on our advice, the world would be a very different place.

Re:Do it yourself

[lsatenstein]

Wait, so you bought an consumer electronics device from them well over a decade ago, it had a feature on it that didn't work very well for your purposes, and you want to throw them in the same category as crApple? I thought that I had a grudge about Apple through their recent behaviour, ever increasingly closed O/S, and hardware that is becoming more and more difficult (read impossible) to upgrade - but your grudge is slightly alarming... and you got your money back from Best Buy!
As a former Apple employee and dedicated user of their products (I may have bordered on fanboy at one point), I've become so sick of Apple's despicable practices and direction that I've given my iPad to my wife and replaced it with a Google Nexus, replaced my iPhone (goodbye unlimited data!) with a Samsung S3, and my shiny late-2011 MBP has been relegated to a secondary laptop with a nice new Dell running Linux Mint 10... However, were Apple to change their business practices/policies I would again consider using their products as they are of exceptional quality.

I have Samsung laptops, washing machine and dryers, vacuums, etc. All top top quality products. I had other samsung products (cell phones and TVs). All top quality. The one time some small electronics failed, I got an RMA after I quoted the date of purchase and the serial number on the device. They sent me a new one.

If it was for a TV or washer, they have certified repair organizations. Can't beat that.

Now for the major factor. Their products performs better than the average. Like all manufacturers, from car to home appliances, etc. they buy a few of the competing products, figure out how they can do it better and sell a better product. It also happens to them, as you can bet a thousand dollars that Apple did that same thing with Samsung and their other competitors.

Samsung Galaxy performs better than does Apples overly priced product. Price gouging, is price gouging, and using the courts in every possible way to harm competition (they learned from MS), is not what I consider acceptable.

Apple is temporarily on top. I think it will be a me too company within 5 years. And all the competitors with their patents will combine to make sure Apple dies a torturous death.

Re:Do it yourself

[Silas is back]

The logic of the internets, boom, in your face! xD

Re:Do it yourself

[BasilBrush]

That says more about you than Apple.

Re:Do it yourself

[lsatenstein]

Yes. Blatant copying is OK with me.

Otherwise nothing will ever get done because EVERYTHING builds on something else. If you think otherwise then you are just a pathological narcisist.

Although I don't accept your premise.

BOTH devices are blatant copies of any number of other devices that came before them. This is how progress occurs.

Ownership is not supposed to be assigned to "what" but to HOW. That HOW needs to be non-trivial. It needs to be something that can't be replicated by some student.

Patents need to be real inventions, not college homework assignments.

Yes, the local ceramics company is suing a mug manufacturer because the round tall mug violates the patent they have on the shape of the handle.
Reminds you of another company

Re:Do it yourself

[Nerdfest]

How's Microsoft doing in the server space? That ain't from Linux marketing campaigns.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

Changing the subject eh. Good debating technique.

Why don't you go get a Google tattoo while you're at it, fanboy.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

Again, how the fuck is that "Fair" and "Reasonable"? FRAND patents are *NOT* normal patents.

Patents gives the holder the right to *AND* not to license it to *ANYONE*

FRAND patent holders are *NOT* allowed to do that.

You get confused easily, don't you?

Re:Do it yourself

[Plumpaquatsch]

As I pointed out - why not go against those with the most design patents? Because they are not Apple? Fanboy alert.

Re:Do it yourself

[laffer1]

I'm not going to boycott Apple or Samsung. Both of them have copied IP to get where they are. For apple, it was entering the cell phone market without licensing various things from Motorola or other companies. They waited to get sued too. Samsung copied Apple and various other companies. They're now a huge conglomerate because of this behavior. They're not any better (or worse) than Apple.

Yesterday, I bought a Samsung monitor. Next year, I'll buy a new Mac. I'm fueling the mutual destruction campaign that Apple and Samsung are in because it's entertaining. I'm hoping it will prove the patent system needs reform. Things will get worse before they get better. We all need to realize that. For every person on slashdot that won't buy Apple products because of this, there will be a guy who won't buy Samsung too. Samsung makes a LOT more stuff.

As a side note, I was going to put the Samsung monitor on my Mac for humor's sake, but the bastards don't include DVI ports on their displays anymore. HDMI + VGA only. It's not Mac compatible without an adapter. :)

Re:Do it yourself

[lonecrow]

Wow our experiences vary greatly. I have a Samsung Note and love the hell out of it. Not only is it fast with a large battery, the software I use is amazing and written well. I can RDP, manage EC2 instances, FTP to and from my phone, access Trello, I have a crap load of nature field guides, watch Netflix, man the list goes on.

I looks and feels nothing like an iPhone, how they can include it in the ban is beyond me.

Re:Do it yourself

[Sancho]

I know that some of the devices on that list infringed based on design, but others were based on software patents. For example, the spring-back (the way a document or page behaves when you try to drag past the end of the data) is patented.

Re:Do it yourself

[andrewa]

Wish I had mod points. Well said.

Re:Do it yourself

[lonecrow]

Ok but the Samsung note doesn't do that bouncy thing whatever that is. I just loaded settings and scrolled to the bottom...no bounce.
Note to self, patent white letters on black background.

Re:Do it yourself

[B33RM17]

You need to try out stock Jellybean. Makes ios feel antiquated.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Lolwho's getting confused? How the hell did "asking for more money than other party's willing to pay" have become "not licensing the patents"? And how does it relate to the question of damages reasonability? Good job swerving off topic there.

Re:Do it yourself

[aurispector]

Corporations aren't even close to being the heart of the problem. Corporations behave in a rational and predictable manner in order to maximize profits. The operate under rules and regulations set by CONGRESS. We need the legal fiction of corporations in order to create the institutions that can accomplish things. Anyone who hates corporations doesn't understand their necessity in the real world.

Sure, there are abuses. That's another predictable element of corporate behavior. Free market competition is what keeps this sort of thing in check. Don't like how one corporation operates? Use the goods/services of another. If enough people agree with you and do the same the problems fix themselves. THAT is economic freedom, which is just as important as the freedom of speech.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Drunk driving and child abuse existed long before you were born, so don't whine about it and just learn to live with it.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't. You're just all too eager to attempt to turn the tables around because you're a hopelessly deluded apple fanboy.

Re:Do it yourself

[Glock27]

How about three different convictions or case settling of price fixing? Samsung has paid over a billion dollars in settlements or fines for price fixing in the DRAM, LCD display, and mobile phone markets.

But they've got a nice shiny halo over their heads around here for reasons passing understanding.

Agreed, except the reasons aren't "passing understanding". To wit, there is a large contingent here to which Linux and FOSS are holy, and Apple is evil for actually making money with its products. They can't seem to understand that the reason that Apple's products are so nice, is because the company has a lot of R&D dollars to throw at its products because it's profitable.

Evidently they also can't understand that Samsung (and the rest of the Android crowd) are profiting by blatantly copying iOS and Apple hardware - which also happens to be blatantly illegal.

Sorry Samsung - time to fork over big money in penalties and licensing arrangements. There are probably a few other companies (Google!) that'll get the same treatment.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's the player that we can boycott and do something about.
If apple will die because of its behavior everyone else will think many times before doing the same shit on consumers.
Personally I will buy both Galaxy note 2 and galaxy note 10 to support samsung and will buy these some of these t-shirts to show my protest:
http://www.cafepress.com/ibad
So we can cast our vote with our money.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what android device have you used, with what andoid version?
The only Android device that costed a fortune and a hand and had issues is Sony xperia.
My friend bought it for $1000 when it was brand new and still didn't upgrade its software. Still using android 1.6 with unbelievable lags.
But it's night and day if you compare it even with cheap Chinese copies that run gingerbread or ICS.

Re:Do it yourself

[Rakarra]

As I pointed out - why not go against those with the most design patents? Because they are not Apple? Fanboy alert.

I don't believe in them in general, but I push back against the most public offenders at the time. Right now, no one comes close to Apple in their abuse of 'design patents.' A year ago at this time, I rather liked Apple, despite my dislike for the walled garden approach. Tomorrow it may be someone else.

I appreciated Apple for role they played with the iPod, iPad, and iPhone. When they started using the legal system to try to shut out competitors with bullshit patents, I lost my interest.

Re:Do it yourself

[the_B0fh]

You may want to start off with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing

And understand what the fuck the F and R as well as ND means.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny - but my wife has a Samsung SIII and I have an iphone 4s - I still think the iphone is best for most people who don't want to spend many hours fiddling around setting it up to work right... even after a few days, every time she faces a problem it takes me an hour or so to try to figure out how, or even if it's possible, to fix it so that she can use it easily.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Great plan.

However, I also have several friends who joined the Apple camp. Not wishing to isolate themselves into using Google Talk they simply bought the phone, use Facetalk to do video chat - which works on ALL iOs devices (it doesn't need to be installed or set up).

The iPhone just works out of the box - find me an Android device that takes less than a month to get set up right! I meet people with the new SIII and they STILL have hardly any idea about the things they can do with it.

Sure it has potential which is walled out of the iOS device, but the iOS device does most of what people want it to do without all the pain.

You pay your money, you make your choice - and I am happy with mine, for now. I'm still waiting for Android to sort itself out, but as developmental pace is not slowing down, I can not see how it can keep up!

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh darn!!!! You were their biggest customer. Anyway I dont agree with what apple is doing, but then I don't have much sympathy for Samsung either. I'll keep buying Apple products. So will everyone else. Because this isn't about civil rights, it's about mobile phones.

Re:Do it yourself

[Stratus311]

I know very few in IT that "like" Apple products. We have about 50% Android and 50% Apple and I deal with the Apple users daily. Android users maybe a couple times a month. And that's typically to hand them a new battery. While Apple software quality speaks in logic, real world is a different story. For the record, I own 2 MacBook Pros, a MacPro, and 2 iMacs as their hardware is decent. All run Windows/Linux almost exclusively.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not surprising that Llarry Ellison of Oracle and Bill Gates of Microsoft were among the two close confidants of Mr. Steve Jobs.

OK

Re:Do it yourself

[Tweezak]

I've not personally seen issues with Samsung LCD displays. I was speaking of their plasmas which seem to be poorly engineered compared to their competition. I base this on the fact that no other manufacturer has this issue (spontaneous cracking) and also from the feedback I have received from people who service them.

This is a particularly expensive failure as it requires replacement of televisions costing $1500 or more retail. Like i said they used to pony up and honor their warranty but they did an about face around 2 years ago and have denied everything (so far as I can tell) since then claiming that the customer is essentially lying. I find this attitude particularly offensive so I will take my business and my money elsewhere.

Re:Do it yourself

[damonlab]

I am the "IT person" at my job. During the past year, I have told everybody asking advice for a new phone to purchase to get an Android based 4G device as all Apple products are still stuck on 3G. I have found that Apple's marketing department has done a good job as many people think that iPhone 4G is a 4G device, even though it is not. When Apple releases a true 4G device, Samsung is going to sue the shit out of them.

Re:Do it yourself

[Billlagr]

This whole thing makes me want to go buy and SIII

I did, yesterday, and it's freakin' awesome. I'll also be getting the other half one next week, and a Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. Apple has lost 3 sales right there.

Re:Do it yourself

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Well, I am a friend of a family of doctors, they are Mac users, and for the first time in 3 years, at least, they need help with one of they computers and I helped them. After giving back their computer yesterday we went to a party and the doctor's wife wanted to take a picture with their smartphone but it didn't work, she asked me to see if I could help her, and I said "yes, sure" thinking that her phone was a iPhone inside a black rubber case but no, it was a Samsung phone almost identical to an iPhone 4(s) and she already tried all the obvious things to do when a phone doesn't turn on. I was surprised that she didn't had an iPhone like her usband. The answer to that is that she had an iPhone 4s but it was stolen in their Christmas vacations in Paris, and she bought the Samsung phone thinking that it was so physically similar that it would work as good as her stolen iPhone. Of course it didn't.

I don't doubt that Samsung manufactures competing or better phones than Apple, but their cheap knock offs aren't good for consumers or for the company itself. Apple is stretching too much their court victory asking to ban so many products of Samsung, but Samsung should make itself a favor and stop doing such copycat products when they are able to do better. Copies of other companies products is what you expect from ZTE, Huawei or any no name brand from mainland China, but for a company with the technical prowes of Samsung is pathetic.

Re:Do it yourself

[Aryden]

I can't blame you for that, all I can say is that I have yet to experience this issue with samsung's service.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

And another apple-fanboy....

I have as many iPhone stories as i have Android stories about what's the simplest to use... It all boils down to what advertisement you choose to listen to...

Re:Do it yourself

[Fr33z0r]

Another way to seal the deal, bring along a couple of Nexus tablets and demo a video chat using Google Talk, which is based on free-and-open Jabber/XMPP. A pair of magic videochat devices for $200 each, how can you beat that?

Show iMovie running on iOS.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tweezak]

I suspect it has to do mostly with quantity. If they pulled that with hundreds of thousands of customers with defective computer monitors the effect on their reputation would be catastrophic. The plasma market is microscopic by comparison so they probably feel it's worth the gamble. Particularly when the replacement cost is so high.

Re:Do it yourself

[Kyusaku Natsume]

I can't comment about Android because the phone was bricked and the last time I used an Android phone was 3 years ago; my opinion about that phone is irrelevant now.

At least I post under my name and stand by my word. You can mod or you can post, but modding and then posting like an AC is childish. This history really happened. She took of from her phone the SIM, the memory card and the battery, cleaned the battery contacts in case they were dirty by humid clog. I did the same things again and the phone still didn't worked. Their house was attacked by burglars recently, I hope that the burglars didn't take away or destroyed the receipt of their phone because then they will end buying a new phone again instead of getting their current phone fixed under warranty.

I have a Samsung HD CRT tv that I swear by. I have also a Samsung laser printer, a CLP-510 that sadly was the last of their kind and was EOL too soon because Samsung developed a much better laser color printing technology and put it on the market at the same year I bought that printer. The printer feels cheap compared to the offers of Canon or HP at the time, but it have double side printing and supports a more wide range of printing media than every printer in their price range at the time, in this aspect is even better than most current offers. So I know first hand that Samsung can develop and build very nice equipment, but at least in that particular phone model, they choose to sell a cheap knock off.

I also have built 2 BOINC nodes using AMD processors and Gigabyte middle to top range motherboards, that up to a month ago were the fastest machines in all Mexico running BOINC. One of them is liquid cooled, with dual video cards. I know how to assemble my own PC's, not that it is particularly difficult now, and use AIX6 and 7, Solaris 9 and 10 and RHEL 5 at the datacenter were I work, but for my personal use I buy Apple gear because even for Windows they work better than other brands, ok?

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting,

As part of my work I have installed over 5,000 samsung professional displays for fids systems in airports - 24x7x365. Some in aircon, some in ambient (shade) temperatures of up to 90F.

Over 5 years I have always noted all failures of any type - roughly 12% failure rate, of which 95% is PSU, 4% fans, and 1% panel (counting those hit by ladders etc).
While a 12% failure rate is 90's tech for PCs, it is quite an acceptable rate for large screen devices. In all the cases within the 3 year warranty, Samsung has repaired at no cost, no arguement, even though over the last 3 years the warranty was modified to note number of "live" hours rather than period of absolute time from purchase.

Why do I keep using Samsung - the other professional vendors have a higher failure rate.

Re:Do it yourself

[NapoleonTheGreat]

I got a MB 13inch 3 years ago on the premise of great quality. When I got it, there was a dent on the optical slot. Within ONE year the track pad had to be changed twice. It was still under manufacturer warranty, so no problem fixing it. Within the following year the logic board failed, costing me few hundred dollars. After it came back from the shop, when you close the laptop shut, the lid was not flush with the base. A screw was not tightened properly. Another trip to the shop. For my first Apple product, I was quite disappointed.

Re:Do it yourself

[hazydave]

Yup... that's correct. It isn't that there are so many Slashdotters buying products themselves. But really, when you're a well known "computer nerd", people do ask you about computers and related technology. I'd be surprised if recommending Apple were a common thing for most folks here anyway, particularly when you can at least get some satisfaction that the leading smartphone platform is Linux-based, and consumers are actually happy to use it. Google has walked a fairly clean road between keeping the OS FOSS and still allowing developers to have the workable development and distribution model they largely can't get out of the mainstream Linux community.

Re:Do it yourself

[hazydave]

Actually, it's been obvious to Apple followers (not fanbois, but those actually watching closely) that they'd have been a whole lot more evil than Microsoft. Part of that's Apple's desire to really run everything... Microsoft had largely been happy just doing software. Apple was usually better at things than Microsoft, too -- MS tried very hard to be evil, and there did ok here and there, but they weren't always very good at it (though I think they'll redeem themselves with Windows 8, that's a work of profound evil). It's only now, that Apple's been really successful, rather than just on the fringe of things, that it's clear that they're capable of being so much worse than Microsoft.

Re:Do it yourself

[hazydave]

I don't know all the rules surrounding design patents (the patents Apple had on their rounded-square icons, and separate patents for the "black" and "white" iPhones), but yes, I agree, patents should be very specific. I have written many utility patents, analyzed probably hundreds over the years. Some are well written and really do describe an "oh, that's pretty cool" invention. Others get me angry, patenting things I had figured out, on my own, in High School (which, if nothing else, should automatically fail the "test of obviousness" on that patent).

On the other hand, Samsung's not entirely blameless, and some of their hacks to Android really did make it look more like iPhone OS. For example, the rows of icons has been around since the Palm and the Newton, but Android doesn't force icons into rounded squares. Though I think some early releases of SymbianOS did, so there's probably prior art enough to invalidate this as a patent. The also did the skeuomorphic "scroll bounce back" thing in their home screen shell, which is also not part of Android stock, but has been a very well known Apple patent. Samsung was at the least ignoring Apple's patents, maybe even baiting them. Even if the patents themselves all get struck down, Samsung might still be guilty of imitating the "trade dress" of the iPhone, which is really copying the gestalt of the whole thing, not any single individual element (eg, it stands as a thing aside from copyrights, trademarks, and patents).

Re:Do it yourself

[hazydave]

Taking other ideas, and adding to them, improving them, using them in different ways, etc. is progress. Making something as exactly like someone else's thing without any improvement (and in this case, basically uglifying Android to make it look more like iOS) is not advancing things.

Re:Do it yourself

[hazydave]

There were three software utility patents and three design patents judged to be infringed by some of the original Samsung devices in question. Apple's '381 "bounce-back" patent was one of these -- that's in Samsung's TouchWiz home shell, but not part of normal Android. So it's certainly not an issue on the Galaxy Nexus, not sure if the SIII's version of TouchWiz still does this. And like most of these, it's questionable anyway (http://www.talkandroid.com/127447-technology-expert-claims-apples-bounce-back-patent-is-invalid/).

There was also an issue of pinch-to-zoom as described in their '915 patent. This is definitely not the way pinch-to-zoom works in Android JellyBean, not sure if Google addressed this earlier or not. Apple's patent might well fail against the mountain of prior art on multitouch, but the '915 patent counts on multi-touch operations that use one anchor finger and one moving finger. So if it's done differently on the newer devices, there's not even an issue. '915 isn't specifically about pinch-to-zoom, either, and like the others, is being looked at heavily now (http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoom-patent-myth).

The last software utility patent is Apple's '163 tap-to-zoom patent. But that's not simply [double]tap-to-zoom, it deals with specifics about where the zoom is centered. This, maybe some of the others, may be too subtle in detail for the jury, or maybe they just weren't presented well.

Some of the older Samsung phones pretty much did look like iPhones. Two design patents covered the White ('D087) and Black ('D677) iPhones. It's true that some of the Samsung phones did mysteriously have the one big button on the front, rather than the four-or-five that the G1 and others ripped off from Palm :-)

The final design patent ('D305) is about the look of the rounded boxy icons on the iPhone home screen. Samsung went out of their way to change Android into this look -- Android from the early days had more "normal" icons, no bounding box displays, transparency, etc... going well back into the 80s if not earlier. Now, I think there have been others to use that look -- some of the early SymbianOS UIs did. And given this is a design patent, it's for the look, not any mechanism in the OS that enforces this or not, just what you get out of the box. So that ought to have been shown as prior art. Again, I'm not used to design patents, and they really don't say much about what's important in the design, just, "here's thing, give patent".

Clearly, the new devices don't look like iPhones. The Galaxy Nexus doesn't have any front-button, and it's got a curved screen, not the flat screen of the iPhone. Backside is contoured and pebbly, not flat and smooth (designed to slip out of your hands, but that's another Apple patent not asserted here, since GN's don't usually attempt to eject themselves from your grip, as do iOS devices). And the SIII is even more different... kind of the opposite. The iPhone is all 1960s Deiter Rams industrial looking, the SIII is kind of organic looking, smooth and pebbly, closer if anything to a gigantic Palm Pre than a slightly less gigantic iPhone 4. And one would hope Samsung's fixed their issues with TouchWiz, maybe just stayed with stock Android, to avoid trouble with Apple in these other areas.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

Thanks for the reality distortion. Nobody trusts Apple to keep providing Google services. Facetime is proprietary shit. Requiring a dongle for USB is bogus, and everybody understands that. If you don't then you are lying.

But hey you don't need to listen to me, just notice that way more people buy Android these days than Apple's dumbed down, expensive, proprietary, walled garden crap. Because they have a choice.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

Another way to seal the deal, bring along a couple of Nexus tablets and demo a video chat using Google Talk, which is based on free-and-open Jabber/XMPP. A pair of magic videochat devices for $200 each, how can you beat that?

Show iMovie running on iOS.

OK, show me the $200 ios device that runs imovie and I will retract the claim that you are an idiot.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

I never found anything worth installing that wasn't in the market...

You didn't look very hard, Apple troll.

Re:Do it yourself

[Sancho]

Not a troll, but thanks for contributing to the conversation. I know it must be impossible to believe that someone could have found Android to be unenjoyable, but it does happen.

Re:Do it yourself

[Fr33z0r]

The iPod Touch is sub-$200 and runs iMovie.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

I already have. For the last few years, I have gotten rid of everything, including a G4, and G3 Blue & White, an older Mac Book, both iPhones, and the airport wireless. For me it started when their update bricked my two 3G iPhones and Apple blew me off. The "Geniuses" told me to upgrade to an iPhone 4 or deal with it. At that point I went to Android and started offloading my Apple gear. After the first lawsuit against Android, I sent the rest of it to the county recycling plant.

Re:Do it yourself

[Tough Love]

You further need to show that the device doesn't suck compared to an Android phone before your idiot status is retracted.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody honestly trying to persuade people that one or other type of device 'sucks' is mentally deficient, trolling or both.

Re:Do it yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi everyone, it's the_B0fh again. Disregard all of my comments on this story, I suck cocks.

Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

They seek nothing less than a complete monopoly on the smart phone market.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave

[Anonymous Coward]

In excitement!

Re:Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave

[shentino]

That rolling might well be rotating on a spit in hell for all I know.

A more fitting punishment

[Ukab the Great]

I'd rather Samsung be allowed to sell its products in the US AND also be forced to donate a billion dollars to user interface research at universities which would then be put released open source patent free for any company to use.

Re:A more fitting punishment

[mickwd]

I'd rather Samsung be allowed to sell its products in the US.

No AND.

Re:A more fitting punishment

[betterunixthanunix]

Yeah but that would benefit society at the expense of corporations, so you will never see it happen. Maybe our grandchildren will live to see such a world, but I would not get my hopes up...

Re:A more fitting punishment

[Threni]

Yeah, if Apple cares about this sort of thing I have no problem with all the lawsuits if the result was just the loser having to put a little note on their webpage saying `a bunch of idiots who were too stupid to get out of jury duty thinks this phone looks a little like that phone`, but still letting everyone else - who, frankly, don't give a shit - buy one.

I also earnestly hope that Google (Motorola), Samsung, HTC etc all stick together and use their patents against Apple at every opportunity. It would be delicious if the new iPhone got pulled form the market, or had 4G removed, etc.

Re:A more fitting punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to make a finger gesture at your comment, but then I realized that might violate APPL's patents.

Re:A more fitting punishment

[shutdown -p now]

If only the "originals" were anywhere near as good.

Re:A more fitting punishment

[Rockoon]

Sounds like a shitty world. Why does society need to better itself at anyone elses expense?

It doesn't. Your "us" vs "them" philosophy is based on the ignorant idea that there must be a loser.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This summary doesn't make grammatical or syntactical sense.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

This summary doesn't make grammatical or syntactical sense.

So you're not contect?

Re:What?

[cervesaebraciator]

Allow me to summarize the above comment:

Sense these don't grammar summary or to make syntactically.

Thanks Apple

[zerodl]

For limiting my choices on (good or bad) products. I could rant endlessly about this but I'd be preaching to the choir. But wow, I don't like Apple at all now because of this.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you notice that verdict is mostly about utility patents like scroll bounce-back? I found it particularly funny how Apple fanboys' favorite see-they're-exactly-same-when-turned-off Galaxy Tabs weren't found to be infringing on trade dress.

So, "blatant copying not of rounded rectangles, but of many details together" in the end turns out to be "blatantly reacting to multitouch gestures (just like old touchscreen demos, but not the same, because it's loaded on a different processor. It changes everything right there.)".

Re:Thanks Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

stop using stupid analogies, it makes you look like an idiot

Re:Thanks Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes its important to step back and look at the big picture. Most patents on their own look obvious, especially in hindsight. The reality is that smartphones in 2006 sucked. Once the iphone came out, we had a wealth of amazing smartphones. So you can argue about whether a patent is obvious or significant till you are blue in the face, but its pretty clear that Samsung would not have been selling anything even close to the Galaxy phones if they had not studied the iPhone.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer, parent poster just bought Apple stock and needs it to go up a little more before offloading it.

Signed,

Anonymous Coward.

Re:Thanks Apple

[jacks0n]

What you just described - making a new product by slightly altering an existing one - happens in the food world all the time with no legal issues at all.
What you didn't describe but probably intended to - copying a bread recipe - also happens all the time with no legal issues at all. When either of these things happen, the baker is thrilled. Some of them actually publish books helping you infringe on their own products!
In short, your metaphor fails to map to the primary event in every way possible. Please stick to car metaphors in the future. It's traditional.

Re:Thanks Apple

[jaymz666]

. If I steal some brad from a baker

Isn't slavery involved here somewhere?

Re:Thanks Apple

[king neckbeard]

Most patents on their own look obvious, especially in hindsight.

Something being obvious in hindsight doesn't mean it wasn't also obvious beforehand.

The reality is that smartphones in 2006 sucked. Once the iphone came out, we had a wealth of amazing smartphones.

And if you aren't a complete and total moron, you'd realize that by far the most important innovation that the iPhone brought to the table was targeting general consumers instead of just nerds and businessmen.

Re:Thanks Apple

[andrewa]

Absolute bullshit. Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers? Apple are probably the richest company in the world and they are using their excessive funds to cripple any competition with frivolous patent trolling. It will become less important to Apple to innovate if there is no competition, is that what you really want?

Re:Thanks Apple

[epine]

its pretty clear that Samsung would not have been selling anything even close to the Galaxy phones if they had not studied the iPhone

Never heard of enabling technology (such as high-quality low power displays)? Never heard of convergent evolution? Never noticed that many technical product categories come into existence almost overnight due to economy of scale effects?

Apple clearly benefited from work at Xerox. Without Xerox, we'd still be using text consoles. I'm not so sure Samsung benefited from work done at Apple. What Apple established was credibility of consumer demand for a new class of expensive toy.

Do they own that? Or is it just the nature of business that everyone piles on to a hot new product category?

Re:Thanks Apple

[DMUTPeregrine]

A brad is a type of tack/nail. Stealing fastening hardware from bakers is probably less efficient than stealing it from building suppliers.

Re:Thanks Apple

[jedidiah]

Most patents look obvious because THEY ARE.

The patent office is not doing it's job. They are allowing things through that aren't at all inventive. It doesn't matter if the IDEA of using pinch to zoom is new. You don't get a 20 year monopoly on "new". You are supposed to get a 20 year monpoly on inventive.

That means HOW something is done. The "what" is pretty irrelevant. The fact that I can "re-invent" pinch to zoom just by hearing it described is what should make it unpatentable.

This is the problem laymen making judgements about the state of the art. The legal standard is not supposed to be "what impresses morons".

Re:Thanks Apple

[flimflammer]

Your analogy makes no sense. You can't copyright/trademark/patent the end result of a recipe, or a recipe for that matter. The baker could not do anything if "his" bread was used. Not only that, if the baker sold the bread to someone and they put flax seeds on the baker's very own bread and resold it, there would be no legal recourse for the baker in that circumstance either.

I've seen some terrible analogies before, but this was was probably one of the worst. Stick to car analogies.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Kjella]

Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers?

Actually Ford would be the one being sued to hell and back by Daimler-Benz. His mass production on an assembly line was revolutionary but he did not in any way invent the automobile.

Re:Thanks Apple

[phantomfive]

Absolute bullshit. Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers?

You can always tell the people who don't know what they are talking about because they come with examples like this one. Next time, do some basic research, and you'll find out that patent fights have been going on for a long time, much longer than computers. And they probably will for a long time into the future.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Silas is back]

What you just described - making a new product by slightly altering an existing one - happens in the food world all the time with no legal issues at all.

Exactly. Take Cocoa Cola and Pepsi for example. They also... oh wait. Nevermind.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Nemyst]

So just like Apple didn't invent the smartphone?

Re:Thanks Apple

[Compaqt]

I think one of the reasons it was able to target general consumers is because it gets free marketing from the press, who fawn over every new Apple release.

Re:Thanks Apple

[skine]

There are hundreds of companies making colas.

Do you have evidence that any of them has been sued by Coke or Pepsi?

Re:Thanks Apple

[andrewa]

That's fair enough, and thanks for the info. I know bugger all about the automotive industry, but just used it as an analogy. And as Nemyst mentions below, it probably is a good example after all :-)

Re:Thanks Apple

[andrewa]

@phantomfive: Didn't you just say that I'm wrong and right at the same time??

Re:Thanks Apple

[coraxo]

amen !

Re:Thanks Apple

[poofmeisterp]

For limiting my choices on (good or bad) products. I could rant endlessly about this but I'd be preaching to the choir. But wow, I don't like Apple at all now because of this.

You're intelligent. You're not a threat to their market dominance.

Now if you were a dumb teenager, in school, going through the struggle of fitting in with your peers and looking cool...... But that's a separate post. :)

Re:Thanks Apple

[poofmeisterp]

its pretty clear that Samsung would not have been selling anything even close to the Galaxy phones if they had not studied the iPhone

Never heard of enabling technology (such as high-quality low power displays)? Never heard of convergent evolution? Never noticed that many technical product categories come into existence almost overnight due to economy of scale effects?

Apple clearly benefited from work at Xerox. Without Xerox, we'd still be using text consoles. I'm not so sure Samsung benefited from work done at Apple. What Apple established was credibility of consumer demand for a new class of expensive toy.

Do they own that? Or is it just the nature of business that everyone piles on to a hot new product category?

Am I reading this wrong, or is it suggesting that I should ask large companies out there (side: in today's market with such secrecy and control), to see all of their ideas and products that didn't go anywhere for them?

Oh, then offer to buy one of those ideas for $500... Then develop a product that uses a component or two of that idea, patent it, and try to sell and make it the thing that is completely revolutionary?

Oh, while other companies are selling similar things, but mine eventually becomes so huge that my company has so much money for lawyers that there aren't enough on this continent to hire? Their purpose is to sue every other company out there that made a product that looked a little like mine because I SPENT 500 FUCKING DOLLARS ON THIS AND IT RUINED ME FOR THREE MONTHS, TEN YEARS AGO, DAMNIT!
 
...or is that completely different from what happened and not even on the same planet?

Apple is just the next company to play the "me, me, me" game until some completely new and unrelated technology destroys the value of tablets, phones, and standard GUI computers.

Re:Thanks Apple

[poofmeisterp]

Absolute bullshit. Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers? Apple are probably the richest company in the world and they are using their excessive funds to cripple any competition with frivolous patent trolling. It will become less important to Apple to innovate if there is no competition, is that what you really want?

Well, he didn't patent the idea before it hit assembly lines. Back in those days you could actually focus on developing a product that consumers would want to buy and, well, that's it.

I wonder what would have happened had Ford patented that nifty new device called the automobile? Hmm... I wonder what the Ford corporation would be doing today. Just curious.
 
;)

Re:Thanks Apple

[poofmeisterp]

Can you imagine the state of the automobile industry today if there had been a patent on the 'look and feel' of the original automobile, and Ford had aggressively sued other automobile manufacturers?

Actually Ford would be the one being sued to hell and back by Daimler-Benz. His mass production on an assembly line was revolutionary but he did not in any way invent the automobile.

Oooh, burn!

Re:Thanks Apple

[Compaqt]

Even granting the fairy tale that Apple invented smartphones, isn't it enough for Apple to be the largest company in the world, with a hundred billion in cash, far better than the position of the US government?

Or do they also need to ban all other players in whatever category they happen to sell products in?

Re:Thanks Apple

[Clueless Nick]

Apple was the first company to put a serious effort in the category 'full touch screen smartphone with a 500+ Mhz processor'. There were smartphones before the iPhone and there were full touchscreen phones before the iPhone. Many of these phones had copy+paste and (hold for) context menu functionalities. The world was going crazy after Blackberry phones then, and Apple changed the trend, but a large part of this had to do with the app ecosystem, because till then, you had to rely on either paltry offerings from the manufacturers' websites, or on dubious software (that worked well on one phone and horribly on another) from third parties.

So really, a larger and multitouch screen, a 3D GPU, an accelerometer, and a very good app store - these were the 'revolutionary new' things it introduced. Good, it set a trend and showed others how to create a really extensible smartphone.

Re:Thanks Apple

[bhiestand]

There are hundreds of companies making colas.

Do you have evidence that any of them has been sued by Coke or Pepsi?

There are some huge legal differences. Recipes aren't protected. They may be trade secrets, but patent and copyright do not apply. If Coke's recipe was leaked, anyone would be allowed to make it.

However, if a soda manufacturer produced a soda called "Coke", we can all be confident that Coke would sue. I'm sure they have numerous design patents and trademarks, and a similar-looking can would also be in danger. Hence, while competitors could use Coke's recipe if they could legally get their hands on it, they could not legally apply Coke's designs to confuse consumers into thinking they were selling Coke.

Re:Thanks Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

So you sincerely believe that samsungs first smart phones were the result of "convergent evolution"? We know that that isn't the case because of internal memos. Android is an apple alternative. Not a brilliant vision.

Re:Thanks Apple

[elistan]

It's very easy to imagine what they state of the automobile industry would be today if there were patent wars, because that's actually what happened from what I can tell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._SeldenGeorge Selden had a patent on four wheeled motorized vehicles, and sued Ford and an array of nascent automobile manufacturers. This went on for nearly a decade, Selden initially won, but eventually lost on appeal a case against Ford. Whatever argument you have against Apple is not bolstered by references to automobile history - what's happening now seems to have happened back then too.

A small thought

[jareth-0205]

In the long term, would the best outcome here be for Apple to *succeed*? I mean, if they manage to get their main competitor banned in the States, they look like a unbridled predator competing not with quality, but lawyers. (I know generally /. thinks that already, but general public perception is more important) If the reaction for those wanting a Galaxy III is going to be something along the lines of "why can't I have the shiney thing?" and turn their ire on Apple / lawmakers.

Apple might want to be careful what they wish for... the rest of the world will steam ahead unrestricted, and the case for software patents being harmful will get stronger.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if they manage to get their main competitor banned in the States, they look like a unbridled predator competing not with quality, but lawyers. (I know generally /. thinks that already, but general public perception is more important)

There are some here who don't believe this; I wonder how they'll react to the SIII's inclusion in the banlist...

Re:A small thought

[gl4ss]

well.. it would still only ban them for one generation. this is just following petty orders to cause misfortune for a competitor... classic tech a-holism.

but what would be a good law would be that if you start suing somebody over patents and blocking their products that you would have to at least tell them all the patents you intend to use for blocking their sales, so you can't just drag the shit on and on and on and try every stupid patent you have that everyones sw is bound to infringe upon one after another.. and the "infringer" would at least know just wtf he should do different to not infringe.

patent office should also have just thrown away every fucking patent that include "on a mobile device" -as if it matters for the patentability if it runs on fucking batteries, since batteries were invented as a concept ages ago, right with electricity..

Re:A small thought

[dotHectate]

I've a friend that's flip-flopped from telling me I needed an iPhone (when I got a Galaxy SII) to telling me how wonderful his wife's Galaxy SIII is. He's not even a tech-type guy and he's talked about the Apple vs. Samsung trial specifically because he wants to get a Galaxy SIII for himself soon.
Customers are fickle (outside of the the fanboy spectrum) and will jump on whatever is "hot" at the time. That's the whole purpose of the "walled garden" that Apple - and yes, Google "Play Store" also - encourages. It's an attempt to lock people into a specific set of devices (ones that you profit from) by discouraging change. Who wants to lose music, games, etc just because there's a new device out that is a little better? The better they can convince people to stay, the more money they can extract.

So yes, outside of the walling of the gardens, I suspect people want those choices. I would find it really interesting to see people genuinely upset that they're getting taken away from them.

Re:A small thought

[Misagon]

Precisely. In the past week, I have seen a lot of Apple hate on Internet forums, not just in those forums that have lots of tech-savvy geeks, and not just in such forums where the majority of users are US:ians. People are pissed off everywhere.

The lawsuit is biting Apple in the ass. The question is if this is going to be limited only to the short term, or if it will have long-term implications.

Re:A small thought

[Doctor_Jest]

If the Galaxy SIII is on everyone's list (looks like it's a popular phone right now), and somehow the ban goes into effect, there will be tons of pissed people who will remember that Apple told them they couldn't buy a phone they wanted. (Regardless of who implements the ban, the courts, etc... it's Apple's wish, so it's Apple's fault.)

Telling a customer "Apple banned the sales of that phone here in the US" will piss them off for a long time. It's not good to tell someone they can't buy something. :) Apple should realize this by now... but they're just trying to kill off competition (this isn't about patents... it's about market share...) The top dog (now Apple) is taking a page from every other top dog's playbook and litigating their competition now that they're #1 (or perceived as such....) It's not exclusive to Apple, of course... lots of companies do it. Steve Jobs thought Android copied his iPhone, so this is a natural extension of his nerd-rage. Trouble is, Steve's dead... the RDF is fading... people aren't going to be pleased... and Apple may reap the benefits sooner rather than later of the old phrase "don't shit where you eat."

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't really say if they're being bitten anywhere until their next financial report. Public is fickle and will go from "So low of them! I spit on Steve's grave!" to "Oooooh, shiny! Want! Want! Want!" the exact moment iPhone 5 is announced.

Re:A small thought

[VortexCortex]

That's the whole purpose of the "walled garden" that Apple - and yes, Google "Play Store" also - encourages. It's an attempt to lock people into a specific set of devices (ones that you profit from) by discouraging change. Who wants to lose music, games, etc just because there's a new device out that is a little better?

Uhm, no. There's nothing stopping Apple from installing Android on the iPhone 5. Hell, Apple could have a dual boot phone and offer some real choice. Google Play Store doesn't prevent you from buying or installing software from other sources. However, Apple will not let anyone install iOS on a Non Apple device, and actively works to prevent others from selling software to people who own iPhones.

I get what you're trying to say, but maybe you've never used Linux? I can add multiple "App Stores" (PPA's) to my OS, then get all the benefit of having trusted sources of software, and the choice of deciding who to trust for that software... There is a way to do "Walled Gardens" that allow you to unlock the gate, and visit other gardens, and even make your own garden. Android .APKs are cross platform bytecode, you can take the .APK from the repository, and install it on multiple devices... even a new one you just got. I do fault Google with not giving us easier file system access to the Android devices to make such software migration issues simple. One of the issues is that Davlik VM modifies the bytecode on installation to fix byte order, and static linking on a per machine basis, and you don't really want to keep an extra installation .APK on the system for every program you install. Side loaded apps don't have this problem, but it's not a failure of the "walled garden" / Software Repository System itself -- I frequently mirror my package cache to multiple machines on Linux so public facing bandwidth for updates is only consumed once.

DRM and 3rd party Streaming are what creates the planned obsolescence and vendor locking you're speaking of with songs and software no longer being available. However, My own DRM system is merely PKI that allows the User to accept or deny game mods made from others -- That type of DRM that puts the User in control is Good. I use a streaming system on my desktop machines that lets me stream all my media to any device -- That type of streaming where the user is in control is Good.

It's when the User is not in control of the systems they personally use and rely on that you have problems. I encourage you to read up about Free Software: RMS may be fucking weird but he's damn right.

TL;DR: You just need more control over your software -- Can you access the location where the files are and copy them to another device? If not then that's Treacherous Computing, not a "Walled Garden".

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Or telling a customer "The courts decided Samsung copied Apple too closely, and therefore the courts banned sales of that phone here in the US" might piss them off, towards Samsung.

Re:A small thought

[Cederic]

Uhm, no. There's nothing stopping Apple from installing Android on the iPhone 5.

Are you a fucking imbecile? dotHecates point is that the walled garden is Apple's way of trying to reduce churn by making it harder for customers to switch to another manufacturer.

So Apple installing Android on their next device would defeat that point entirely, including alienating all of the people that bought into the existing walled garden.

While ostensibly you're correct in that the technology exists for Apple to choose to install Android on the next telephone they produce, you're demonstrating a level of naivety that leaves me aghast. They don't want to. They perceive no advantage in doing so. They've adopted this closed and abusive model explicitly to fuck over their customers.

It's nice that you've taken a more reasonable approach and focussed on providing value rather than lock-in, but don't assume Apple (or Google) have any intention of being equally considerate.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, there's no profit in this for them. Unlike "Pssst, lend me your ear! Yeah, Apple wants them banned for stupid stuff like rubberband scrolling, but we just might have some left in stock. Are you interested? I can try and get it just for you". Banned item + being perceived underdog would sell great.

Oh, and btw, this article is about trying to get preliminary injunction - which you somehow already moved all the way through court, jury and appeals to a final decision.

Re:A small thought

[ohnocitizen]

They won't even see the shiny thing. When I get a new phone, I just log onto verizon's website and see what's available. If I looked on amazon.com, or headed to a local store (either a verizon outlet or a staples), I'd just see what's available. I wouldn't see what was banned.

Re:A small thought

[LordLucless]

Customers are fickle (outside of the the fanboy spectrum) and will jump on whatever is "hot" at the time. That's the whole purpose of the "walled garden" that Apple - and yes, Google "Play Store" also - encourages. It's an attempt to lock people into a specific set of devices (ones that you profit from) by discouraging change. Who wants to lose music, games, etc just because there's a new device out that is a little better?

That might be the function of Apple's app store, but Google's is a little different. Restricting yourself to Android's garden is entirely voluntary - it takes a single checkbox in an easy-to-find settings screen to allow loading any app you like. Android's garden doesn't have a wall. It also doesn't lock out other app stores from the device - the fact that Google's Play Store is the primary access point for Android apps is for two reasons - it's installed by default, and none of the other stores are sufficiently superior to warrant changing. In contrast, Apple's App Store is the primary access point because it's the only one available.

Also, I don't know where you get the losing music and games bit from - you can use two different marketplaces concurrently on Android. Using another marketplace doesn't stop the stuff you got from the old one from working.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

... but general public perception is more important ...

And the US courts is telling the public that Samsung is bad. We don't want that perception going overseas, where prior art is a valid argument.

Re:A small thought

[shutdown -p now]

The problem is that all those users who picked S3 over the "default choice" of an iPhone have likely already looked into both and understand how they're different - and that difference is precisely why they went for Samsung. So they won't have much empathy for the 'copied too close' argument.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

no, what i think needs to happen is for apple to receive a court issued ban, or have a bunch of features taken out (not that i agree with that in any way); because then all the little ifanatics will realize, when you play this stupid game everybody loses (lose popular support and apple will retreat pretty quick).

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

that's cause your just one of the sheeple.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the point it more that once you have built up and array of apps from a store on a specific platform you lose everything on transferring to the other platform

Re:A small thought

[jrumney]

Except the courts didn't decide that Samsung copied Apple too closely to make the Galaxy S3. Apple carefully kept that phone away from the jury so as not to harm their case, now they expect to suddenly extend the case to cover it, after the case is over? If they pull this one off, my faith in the US legal system will be completely gone.

Re:A small thought

[poofmeisterp]

I've a friend that's flip-flopped from telling me I needed an iPhone (when I got a Galaxy SII) to telling me how wonderful his wife's Galaxy SIII is. He's not even a tech-type guy and he's talked about the Apple vs. Samsung trial specifically because he wants to get a Galaxy SIII for himself soon.

Customers are fickle (outside of the the fanboy spectrum) and will jump on whatever is "hot" at the time. That's the whole purpose of the "walled garden" that Apple - and yes, Google "Play Store" also - encourages. It's an attempt to lock people into a specific set of devices (ones that you profit from) by discouraging change. Who wants to lose music, games, etc just because there's a new device out that is a little better? The better they can convince people to stay, the more money they can extract.

So yes, outside of the walling of the gardens, I suspect people want those choices. I would find it really interesting to see people genuinely upset that they're getting taken away from them.

Amen.

And it's sad that developing a new groundbreaking technology (or other product) today isn't stressful from only money and time in developing and marketing it...
 
Man, the fear of lawsuits is nearly enough to kill a developing company's heads. I'm not joking.

Re:A small thought

[poofmeisterp]

Uhm, no. There's nothing stopping Apple from installing Android on the iPhone 5.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when approached by Apple for the purchase of licenses, could Google not say, "Uhm, no."?

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

What licenses? The only thing you have to license from Google to build your Android device is Google's apps, most importantly Play store. If you don't need it, you can do without, using your own store or just .apk side loading.

And as they offer those to everyone, denying access for a single company would get them under fire for refusal to deal.

Re:A small thought

[Anonymous Coward]

Since no one has decided to reverse the perspective, I'll chime in a few cents.

I lived and worked at a Samsung plant in South Korea for two years 07-09. When the iphone was first released it was banned in S. Korea, and according to a co-worker , this was to avoid the fatal effects of competition of the phone vs samsung products.

I can't tell you how many times I meet "white collar" S. Koreans who were so proud of their Korean made phones and any chance they got they would try to show how inferior apple technology was. Samsung is a monster and they have more zealous consumer base than you can imagine.

So, please, cut this crap about apple being evil, clearly few of you want to learn about how Samsung does business in S.K.

Re:A small thought

[Doctor_Jest]

They're asking for a preliminary injunction BEFORE the trial starts to prevent sales of the S3 from continuing. What part of Preliminary injunction don't you get?

It means if it is granted, BEFORE the trial court and jury etc., there won't be a Galaxy S3 on American store shelves. Pretty simple logic, really.

Re:A small thought

[Doctor_Jest]

I never said Samsung WASN'T evil. But we can see PROOF that Apple is being an evil corporation trying to starve out competition that they consider to be a threat to their conquest of total marketshare dominance. (and since your evidence is anecdotal, it's simply anecdotal.... not proven... and since you're an AC, you could be an Apple employee filling the forums full of bullshit.)

So, I call bullshit on your post until you give proof, with citations and not just "I was in a Samsung plant." So cut the crap and stop defending Apple in this. Apple is JUST as evil as Samsung. I have no doubt of that. What concerns me is the ever-present "well Samsung kills babies to make LCDs!" crap that gets trotted out when this dust up is mentioned. Apple fucked the courts over (and the jury fucked Samsung) with their obvious patents based on common actions and prior art, which is funny, because a JAPANESE court said EXACTLY the opposite regarding this case. Funny how geography works. Do you think it's racist that Apple won, is American and white, and Samsung is Korean and well, not white? Go figure. I don't believe it is racist, but I do believe geography played a not-so subtle role in this verdict. Sorry, folks, Apple's just as Evil(tm) as Microsoft. They're showing how they really are in the courts and in their "walled garden." Pretty soon we'll have a Borg Steve Jobs for the Apple logo. I for one think it's past time for it.
 

Best advertising *ever*

[pla]

Just got mine - Thanks for giving me the push to beat your lawyers to market, Apple!

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre-ordered mine after sitting on the original Droid, got it 1 month after the wife got her 4S. The difference is astounding, Apple is so far behind OS wise. Her phone still has the same OS as the first ipod touch, it looks and feels ridiculously ancient.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

The OS nothing but an app launcher. Only people who have nothing better to do than endlessly tweak stupid shit focuses on the OS over the app.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[jareth-0205]

The OS nothing but an app launcher. Only people who have nothing better to do than endlessly tweak stupid shit focuses on the OS over the app.

In that measure, Android wins. iOS is much more restrictive than Android in what it will let apps do...

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[xaoslaad]

Amen, when my contract was up, I didn't even think twice to ditch Apple last month after their latest round of litigation. Nice new S3. I'm sorry I ever gave them money. I, along with everyone else, have created a monster, and I am immensely sorry for that.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

Ordered my S3 after reading this on /.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem being, let me reiterate yet again, is that the Iphone does what people need and want it to do. Stop the old keeping up with the joneses, and simply use what you have. People who dwell on specs are people who consume, simply consume to much, you should quite literally be shot.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

People who like non-Apple products should quite literally be shot.

I think this is what you really meant.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

The OS nothing but an app launcher. Only people who have nothing better to do than endlessly tweak stupid shit focuses on the OS over the app.

Which proves you have no idea what an OS actually is.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

It is good to know that by giving money to Samsung instead, you are investing in the future, as they only ever use their profits to build better orphanages. You created a monster in Apple, but that could never happen with any other company in this world full of altruists... rejoice!

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Volguus Zildrohar]

Better make a note to ditch Samsung when your current contract runs out too... wouldn't want to contribute to some monster that tries to block competing products

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

Touche!

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[shutdown -p now]

The OS also facilitates interaction between apps. Like, you know, being able to install a different/better browser, and having all other apps use it to open links.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[andydread]

Yeah you omitted one important point. It was Apple that decided launch to "thermonuclear war" on Android and started suing world+dog over trivial software-patents. No one would be suing Apple had they not started this "thermonuclear war" against Android. But don't let facts get in the way there...carry on.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

I attempted to track one down... my buddy at the AT&T store said they got wiped out of SIII's over the past couple days. I must get one before it's illegal to sell :(

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[jrumney]

Microsoft owns essential patents on exFAT, which is mandated by the SD card consortium for SDXC cards. Microsoft has also been quietly reducing the size of FAT filesystems that can be supported on USB thumb drives with Windows 8, in order to force exFAT on the industry. Samsung really don't have much of a choice here - unless they go the Apple route of unexpandable devices that interface to PCs through proprietary software.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

I will laugh my ass off at all the people "rushing to beat the injection" get their phones remotely disconnected by their carriers once an injunction is slapped on there - they CAN ban use of the devices in the US and likely could get the courts to force every single one to be locked out...

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

they CAN ban use of the devices in the US and likely could get the courts to force every single one to be locked out...

[Citation needed]. Preferably in form of a precedent. You're probably just another FUD spewing troll (that you? Because you're only second one to speak about banning use from 400 comments), but maybe, just maybe, you really got facts on your hand to prove? Come on, surprise me.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[pla]

The problem being, let me reiterate yet again, is that the Iphone does what people need and want it to do.

I want to see a map of drone strikes in Pakistan. I want to tether my netbook to my cellular data plan. I want to run an NES emulator. I want to run a torrent client. I want to get music and apps but hate iTunes. I want to play games with violent and/or pornographic content.

The iGarden most certainly does not do what I need and want it to do, simple as that.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly this may be the reason behind Nexus 7 not having SD slot. I wish android would just ditch fat for ext4 everywhere.

Re:Best advertising *ever*

[Anonymous Coward]

My mistake, I didn't realise behaving shittily is perfectly acceptable when it's in retaliation for someone else behaving shittily.

It confirms what I usually suspect about the 'righteous' attitudes on Slashdot though, which is that they're really just simple justifications for an emotional decision made beforehand.

Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

Get fucked. Seriously. You got what you wanted thanks to an incompetent judge and a jury with conflicts of interest. You can't go about trying to use that as a cudgel to ban things that weren't even in the original case.

It's funny how Jobs once said Apple has always been "shameless in stealing great ideas." Yet when you think someone else has done the same thing to you (regardless of evidence or prior art), you clowns get your panties in a bunch and start stamping your feet, crying to the courts, and whining about "going thermonuclear" on Android. Well, guess what, idiots. You can't shamelessly copy ideas then cry foul when you believe you're the one being copied. It doesn't work that way.

To close, Jobs was a great businessman. But he was also a COLOSSAL douchebag with no sense of perspective or grip on reality. I thought when he died that rational heads would prevail in Cupertino. Apparently I was wrong. This fucker's cult of personality is so strong that even now people worship him like he was some sort of deity.

So yes, Apple. You can go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw, because you're pissing away whatever good-will you may have had left. One day, the drooling iZealots will wake up and get off of the trend-whore treadmill.

--Pretentious signature about what device I'm posting from. In this case, my Galaxy S3

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

And I just thought of something else. Apple reminds me of a kid I knew back in my school days. When they showed up, everyone loved them, and thought they were hot shit. A couple years later, a new kid came along and started to steal their thunder. They got butthurt and went crying to the teacher with all sorts of made up stories to try and make the new kid look bad. In the end, they ended up crying in a corner alone at detention because everyone saw through their bullshit.

Re:Dear Apple:

[girlintraining]

You got what you wanted thanks to an incompetent judge and a jury with conflicts of interest.

That is not Apple's fault.

You can't go about trying to use that as a cudgel to ban things that weren't even in the original case.

They can, they should, and they must. They have a legal obligation to maximize profits. They were just handed a victory, however ill-earned it may be, and now they have to press that advantage. If they don't, they can be sued by the shareholders, and the entire board of directors could be thrown out. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

It's funny how Jobs once said Apple has always been "shameless in stealing great ideas."

First, he's dead. Second, that quote is a mutilation of the actual one from a 1996 PBS documentary titled "Triumph of the Nerds", in which Steve paraphrased Picasso's statement "Good artists copy, great artists steal." And in design, nothing is new. Anyone can tell you that -- we all steal from each other. It's respectable to give credit, but you still imitate, you still steal, and that's true in any line of work. In fact, theft is a word that probably should never be applied to ideas -- it just legitimizes intellectual property as an ideology. All human progress is built upon the advances of others -- not taking advantage of that is not only stupid, but goes against basic human nature. Most of how we learn is from watching others and copying their behavior.

Yet when you think someone else has done the same thing to you (regardless of evidence or prior art), you clowns get your panties in a bunch and start stamping your feet, crying to the courts, and whining about "going thermonuclear" on Android.

That's how the game is played. Intellectual property is now enshrined in the legal process; They can't decide to sit out on it, they'd be steamrollered. They have to play, whether they want to or not. So save your vitrol for Apple and put it where it belongs: A massively corrupt government.

To close, Jobs was a great businessman. But he was also a COLOSSAL douchebag with no sense of perspective or grip on reality. I thought when he died that rational heads would prevail in Cupertino. Apparently I was wrong. This fucker's cult of personality is so strong that even now people worship him like he was some sort of deity.

He had an absolute perspective and grip on reality -- you can't be crazy and bring a company from the brink of financial ruin and technological obscurity to the largest company (by market capitalization) on the planet. He was also a great designer. And most great designers, engineers, etc., are assholes. Actually, for any sufficiently large group, the majority are assholes. I'd love to get into it with you why the Dark Triad of social traits shows up so often in our leaders, but it's beyond the scope of this ever-lengthening reply.

So yes, Apple. You can go fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw, because you're pissing away whatever good-will you may have had left. One day, the drooling iZealots will wake up and get off of the trend-whore treadmill.

You are one of those "drooling iZealots", just as much as they are. Your Galaxy S3 has patented software and hardware in it, and Samsung and every parts manufacturer that contributed to its development, assembly, production, and distribution, also has them. And they all have a legal obligation to do so, and to get new ones, and to fight with each other. That's how the game is played.

You want to blame Apple for the failings of the judicial system, but that's pointless. If tomorrow Apple exploded in fire and doom and was no more, you'd cheer... and in a few years choose a new object of your hatred. You're part of the problem because you're attacking the players, not the game. The only winning move here is not to play.

Re:Dear Apple:

[TimFenn]

There is a fantastic TED talk by Kirby Ferguson that expands on this theme (loss aversion in behavioral economics) and discusses some of these exact quotes/points. In short: "great artists steal, but not from me."

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

> They have a legal obligation to maximize profits. They were just handed a victory, however ill-earned it may be, and now they have to press that advantage. If they don't, they can be sued by the shareholders, and the entire board of directors could be thrown out. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Where the fuck does this bullshit misconception come from? The only duty they have is not to not to act in bad faith detrimentally to beneficiaries.

You should just stop and think for one fucking moment - if you follow this line of reasoning, companies could and should be sued by shareholders for any expenses not related to increasing profits. Spent money on charities? You're breaking your fiduciary duties, you failure of a capitalist! Spent a million on recreational facilities for employees and guests? You're sooo getting sued! Your employess aren't glued to their cubicles from 8:00 to 17:00? You failed to supervise and will be held responsible! Don't tell me this three examples are not obstructions in the way to the high goal of maximizing profits.

Or just stop for another fucking minute and think why isn't every CEO sued by shareholders right now - after all, most big companies sit on huge chests of patents and those bastard CEOs don't utilize their profit maximization opportunities by suing everyone in alphabet order. They don't even need to sue, they just have to have lawyers go over the list and send lots and lots of scary letters to make people settle. For some reason, contrary to your view, noble people who employ this tactic of blanket patent bombardment to fulfill their fiduciary duty are frowned upon by everyone and called "patent trolls".

So yeah, seeing all the CEOs not suing everyone in sight despite having patent portfolio and not getting sued by shareholders for that really undermines your "but they must!" rhetoric.

This is a choice made by players. Game can be played in many ways. It is perfectly alright to hate the players with cheapshot methods of playing.

Re:Dear Apple:

[subreality]

They can, they should, and they must. They have a legal obligation to maximize profits. ... If they don't, they can be sued by the shareholders, and the entire board of directors could be thrown out.

Bullshit. They have an obligation to represent the interests of the shareholders. I am a shareholder in several companies, and I am interested in ethical behavior over profits.

That aside, I don't even think it's a good strategy to maximize profits: it may work short term, but turning the patent cold war into a shooting war is going to hurt everyone in the arena long term, Apple included.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how Jobs once said Apple has always been "shameless in stealing great ideas."

==

This misquote is completely inappropriately thrown around by fucknuggets like you. It means drawing inspiration for modern design ideas like telephones from old devices like Braun electronics from the 60s. It emphatically does NOT mean creating a carbon copy of a competitor's product and marketing it IN DIRECT COMPETITION WITH THEM.

Now this is the part where cretins like you insert your quote about Apple stealing the GUI from Xerox. That's where I respond that they didn't steal a fucking thing; they made a bargain and gave them pre-IPO stock for their GUI ideas.

Now crawl back under your rock, you ignorant troll.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how the game is played. Intellectual property is now enshrined in the legal process; They can't decide to sit out on it, they'd be steamrollered. They have to play, whether they want to or not. So save your vitrol for Apple and put it where it belongs: A massively corrupt government.

And who made that government corrupt? Mephistopheles? Or was it big businesses who wanted to dominate their market?

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

> They have a legal obligation to maximize profits.

Actually, they don't. There's even at least one court decision to back up the assertion that the company's fiduciary duty to its shareholders does NOT require that the company's management do everything legally possible to wring every last possible cent of profit. The court's rationale was that shareholders hired the management, and shareholders are free to sell their shares at any time if they disagree with the current direction management is taking a company. The court didn't abolish fiduciary duty, but it set the bar for establishing it so high that little short of outright fraudulent malice could actually breach it in real life.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

"He had an absolute perspective and grip on reality"

He thought he could cure his cancer with his mind. How did that work out for him?

Re:Dear Apple:

[girlintraining]

Bullshit. They have an obligation to represent the interests of the shareholders. I am a shareholder in several companies, and I am interested in ethical behavior over profits.

And you speak for all the shareholders?

That aside, I don't even think it's a good strategy to maximize profits: it may work short term, but turning the patent cold war into a shooting war is going to hurt everyone in the arena long term, Apple included.

That's nice. But you're one guy, with a few extra dollars, saying it's a bad idea. There are tens of thousands of lawyers who say it's a good idea. There's hundreds of thousands of pages from various court decisions, legislative works, and contracts, that support that notion. There's millions of workers that go to work every day to make sure that notion keeps right on ticking. And there's hundreds of billions of dollars backing that notion.

While I admire your devotion to ideals, few will respect the choices of a man who stands outside while the hurricane makes landfall and shout "I forbid this!" It's folly to think everyone is like you -- most people are not so idealistic. Most people like money first, and ideals, perhaps, as long as they're fashionable.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Pulzar]

They can, they should, and they must. They have a legal obligation to maximize profits.

That statement sounds like it came from somebody who learned about business laws from reading Cryptonomicon.

If only "maximizing profits" was such a simple formula, we wouldn't need all these expensive boards of directors and CEOs to run companies. Unfortunately, it's rarely clear what actions lead to increasing profits, and it's even less clear what "maximum" profits are. It's not even clear how far in the future are we need to look for our estimates!

A board can look at opinion polls, and determine that trying to ban a competing product will destroy enough of the consumer goodwill that it's not worth it in the long run, especially since the next-gen Samsung product would come out shortly after. That same board might decide that trying to ban a competing product will create short-term spike in that product's sales, hurting their at the time when they are about to launch a new product of their own. Considering that such an attempt might even fail to produce the ban, the overall result might be quite detrimental to their profits.

It's really not clear at all, in my opinion, that attempting to ban Galaxy SIII is in the best interest of Apple shareholders. So, to respond to your statement -- "they can" -- yes, "they should" -- matter of opinon, "they must" -- certainly untrue.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also how I see it. However I'm having trouble predicting what may happen... it seems unsustainable, in that eventually it may become too much even for those who are far less idealistic. The obvious questions are when might that happen, and what is the likely outcome?

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung didn't create a carbon copy of iOS you fucking retard.

Re:Dear Apple:

[subreality]

And you speak for all the shareholders?

Certainly not! I'm just illustrating that there's a disconnect there - maximizing profits by grabbing every possible dime is not what's mandated by law. If the shareholders don't like the course of things, they can either sell their shares or vote out the board. They don't have a case to sue just because a company doesn't take the maximally-profitable course.

Cite: "No, shareholders do not own the corporation. Rather, they own (or in some cases, temporarily hold) a type of security commonly called stock. Both corporate law and economic reasoning support the limited nature of this ownership, and also undermine the claim that directors should always strive to maximize shareholder value." -- http://www.directorship.com/stout-shareholders-as-owners/

That's nice. But you're one guy, with a few extra dollars, saying it's a bad idea. There are tens of thousands of lawyers who say it's a good idea. There's hundreds of thousands of pages from various court decisions, legislative works, and contracts, that support that notion. There's millions of workers that go to work every day to make sure that notion keeps right on ticking. And there's hundreds of billions of dollars backing that notion.

The entire rest of the arena settled on FRAND, generally cross-licensing everything, and focused on out-competing each other with ever better products for quite a while. There were some tiffs, but the complete mess of lawsuits didn't start until Steve decided that Android had to die. So no, it's not just me. It was the entire industry for a long time. Apple is the outlier, not the status quo.

Re:Dear Apple:

[girlintraining]

The entire rest of the arena settled on FRAND, generally cross-licensing everything, and focused on out-competing each other with ever better products for quite a while. There were some tiffs, but the complete mess of lawsuits didn't start until Steve decided that Android had to die. So no, it's not just me. It was the entire industry for a long time. Apple is the outlier, not the status quo.

Apple is the largest company on Earth by market capitalization, and they continue to gain market share. I think that's a compelling argument for Steve being right, and everyone else being wrong. Mind you, I despite intellectual property; But you're trying to minimize and marginalize what has obviously been a runaway success. Apple is not the problem here -- it's intellectual property as a whole, and whether the rest of the industry follows Apple or not doesn't matter. The market is rewarding Apple right now, not the people who are choosing not to litigate.

Re:Dear Apple:

[subreality]

I don't dispute that Apple has gotten many things right. They made quite a few brilliant moves that have put them in their current position, but that doesn't mean they get everything right.

The patent war is more recent than the things that made them successful. I think they're going to shoot themselves in the foot on this one, but that's just my opinion. We won't know for sure for some years.

Re:Dear Apple:

[RocketRabbit]

"They have a legal obligation to maximize profits. They were just handed a victory, however ill-earned it may be, and now they have to press that advantage. If they don't, they can be sued by the shareholders, and the entire board of directors could be thrown out."

This sounds good but can you think of any example of a huge, multi-billion dollar tech firm being sued by minority shareholders and then doing an about-face? I can't.

Yeah, I know it figured big into Cryptonomicon but it just doesn't seem to happen in real life.

Re:Dear Apple:

[skine]

Do they have a legal obligation to maximize profits in the short-term, or do they have a legal obligation to maximize profits in the long-term?

I mean, I could go out and rob a bank tomorrow. I would have a lot of money tomorrow.

However, that doesn't mean that I'll be rich the next day.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

So he doesn't speak for all the shareholders but you do?

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

And you speak for all the shareholders?

Just like you did. And even more, you outright lied by saying there's a legal obligation to maximize profits when not such a thing exists.

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

This fucker's cult of personality is so strong that even now people worship him like he was some sort of deity.

I hear Apple are turning their whole carpark into disabled spaces, as Tim has decreed that "for the future of the company, we all need to think more like Steve Jobs".

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

They can, they should, and they must. They have a legal obligation to maximize profits. ... If they don't, they can be sued by the shareholders, and the entire board of directors could be thrown out.

I'm with you on this. I hear this argument all the time, and it's bogus. If profits are the only factor, why don't they just sell crack? Would they be liable for not doing so?

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

err... i thought you said it was the shareholders. now it's the lawyers - sounds like a bait and switch to me.
a company is represented by it's shareholders just like a country by it's citizenry. which is why some countries seem to be exceptionally honest while others lead in every douchebag benchmark out there. same holds true for companies - if apple's shareholders want to maximize profit at any cost, the company is a perfect reflection of their ideals.
just as certain European countries were quicker than others to banish slavery or bonded labor as a repugnant practice despite the "fall in profits"

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

The cancer is dead though, right?

Re:Dear Apple:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just one man, maximising profits for short term is obviously a bad idea, you need some continuity. The amount of long versus short term investemt is debatable though.

Good?

[taxman_10m]

This is partly because of Samsung's stuff they stuck on top of vanilla android, right? I have an HTC phone and hate the Sense stuff. It would be great if this prompts phone manufacturer's to ditch their own UI "enhancements" for vanilla android, thus leaving any UI patent problems on Google's lap.

Re:Good?

[gl4ss]

This is partly because of Samsung's stuff they stuck on top of vanilla android, right? I have an HTC phone and hate the Sense stuff. It would be great if this prompts phone manufacturer's to ditch their own UI "enhancements" for vanilla android, thus leaving any UI patent problems on Google's lap.

partly.. but mostly it's because samsung has an actual well profitable business selling android phones, unlike most other people. that business being profitable also directly affects the pricing of components apple uses.

(the patent stuff has affected galaxy nexus too, though).

Samsung should argue that it's not a screenlock getting unlocked though, that it's actually already unlocked and running an application when the screen is awoken - because that's what it does, the screen is already awake after being awoken with a keypress of a hw key.

Re:Good?

[Frosty Piss]

Samsung should argue that it's not a screenlock getting unlocked though, that it's actually already unlocked and running an application when the screen is awoken - because that's what it does, the screen is already awake after being awoken with a keypress of a hw key.

Perhaps you have just described a component of Apple's patent?

Re:Good?

[stephanruby]

Actually except for Jellybeans (which doesn't have an HTC Sense equivalent yet), I'd choose HTC Sense over vanilla android in most cases (which is not to say that I like Samsungs' TouchWiz or Motorolas' MotoBlur, I think those tend to hurt vanilla android more they help). Even when I select a custom ROM, I tend to gravitate toward the ROMs based on Sense (which may not be entirely legal, but thus far they haven't pursued anybody).

With HTC, I've never had my gps google maps voice navigation get laggy, or force close on me. Plus HTC usually has the best looking clock widgets, a decent selection of attractive wallpapers, and the smoothest phone contacts scrolling interaction. Those little details make a huge difference in my opinion.

Really, the only Samsung/TouchWiz device I'd really salivate over would be the Samsung Galaxy Note (not its HTC Flyer equivalent), but even there, the low sound volume that Samsung phones usually have could be a showstopper for me (so I'd have to double-check that before I ever go that route).

Re:Good?

[Kalriath]

Google outright refuses to indemnify OEMs against patent lawsuits, so even stock Android could land the manufacturers in Apple lawsuits.

Re:Good?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably because they cake shit like TouchWiz, SVoice, etc on top of it.

What I want to know is

[Progman3K]

What happens when the level of ridiculous goes above 100% ?

Do smartphone lawsuits instantly get replaced by something even funnier?

Re:What I want to know is

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do smartphone lawsuits instantly get replaced by something even funnier?

I wish they'd be replaced by Thunderdome. Two CEOs enter, one CEO leaves!

At first I thought about doing it with teams of lawyers, but then considered that they'll still be lawyers but also combat hardened and ready to kill, and shuddered at the thought of United Earth State of Jurisprudentia.

Re:What I want to know is

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they'd be replaced by Thunderdome. Two CEOs enter, and then we implode the building.

Fixed for idealism.

Re:What I want to know is

[Progman3K]

I wish they'd be replaced by Thunderdome. Two CEOs enter, one CEO leaves!

I'd buy tickets to that

Re:What I want to know is

[Anonymous Coward]

ludicrous if i recall...then plaid.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[gl4ss]

They seek nothing less than a complete monopoly on the smart phone market.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

well... they want the parts cheaper, it's no good if they have to compete for cpu production capacity with samsung. but in the end apple by this way is going to end up the same way as many calculator assembly companies did.. when chip manufacturers like ti&others started making their own calculators - apple has been trying to avoid that a bit, but just a bit(don't quote bullshit how they have their own chip, pls). if they could really force everyone else with their "oh boy we've patented it(but don't ask exactly what!)" to stop producing phones.

the next iphone better do blowjobs and come with a 20g bag of coke for people to buy it - if they're now injunction happy because they don't have anything new than a new screen size then it doesn't really bode that well for apple(not that I care, they're closed garden snobby shithole platform with super short self life for their platforms).

I just wish nokia would have taken them to injunction city instead of ceding into the unholy 3 way circle jerk party-truce in exchange of some cash(from apple) with ms and apple(that's the plan - ms+apple duopoly in desktops, tablets and phones, because android started crashing their party like nothing before on computer-like consumer devices).

but complete monopoly is no good for either of them, they learnt that big way in the '90s.. fake competition whilst blocking everyone else from the market is much better.

Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[modmans2ndcoming]

Seriously.... The iPhone sucks....yes it is popular but it is a pain in the ass to use for people who are not super computer literate. I told my mother-in-law that she needs to get an android phone. She will have all her games but she will never need to connect it to her PC and worry about a bunch of weird pop-ups asking her to import her pictures or back up her apps, etc.

Fuck Apple.

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[jd2112]

Seriously.... The iPhone sucks....yes it is popular but it is a pain in the ass to use for people who are not super computer literate.

I see a marketing opportunity here: "Blackberry: So easy a CEO can use it!"

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[nurb432]

Odd, i find it the exact opposite. People who are confused with android and windows pick up how to use a idevice rather quickly, on their own.

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[Yahma]

Samsung should sue Apple when the iPhone 5 comes out with a 4" screen. Now who's copying who?

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[modmans2ndcoming]

you really think that the device management of an iPhone is easier than an android or windows phone?

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[nurb432]

For me, none are difficult, im talking about what i have seen with dealing with 'non techies'. The do much better with itunes. ( which now is pretty much irrelevant now that they do OTA updates and can back up to icloud.. )

Re:Fuck you Apple your phone sucks!

[modmans2ndcoming]

when iCloud works.

What if every country did this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just good old fashioned protectionism by the back door. When other countries start to block US companies products through their own "legal" patent laws then we will have a standoff that will be good for no one.

I don't know anything about how international patents work but I for one would not vote for anyone who would agree to abide by silly decisions like this in the UK, or the even more idiotic patents covering human DNA sequences.

 

this is bad

[aahpandasrun]

I'm not liking that Apple is using the courts to try and take out their #1 competitor in the smartphone market. It's VERY anti-competitive.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Howitzer86]

Correct. Microsoft will be let in on the game to give it the air of legitimacy. If Samsung wants to continue, they will have to make more Windows phones. Apple wins, Microsoft wins, and even Samsung comes out of this OK.

toddler tantrums

[houghi]

I have seen toddler behave more adults then these two.
Boo-fucking-hoo what you feel. Now kiss and make up already and let the grownups buy your products.

Re:toddler tantrums

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, how immature of Samsung to force Apple to sue them.

I really don't care

[Pop69]

I live in Europe and it's slightly more sane over here

This...

[LodCrappo]

This, quite literally if Apple succeeds, is why we can't have nice things.

Clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Could someone clarify for me if this was due to hardware or software infringements? If it's a software issue, why the hardware ban? Why not a firmware/OS update instead?

Re:Clarification

[SIR_Taco]

yes

Re:Clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed

US Patents lead to technological backwater

[SpankyDaMonkey]

I've been following this on Groklaw for a while, and it's obvious yet again how badly the US patent system is broken when Apple can patent a rectangle with rounded corners and succeed in banning devices of the same shape, and yet refuse to licence the basic technology that is needed for the phone to actually behave like a phone and make calls.

In real terms if this judgement stands then the US will end up with technology that lags the rest of the world by whole generations as why should companies like Samsung, HTC, etc etc actually bother releasing their products in the US when Apple will use the courts to ban them?

It's amazing how many of the self proclaimed 'freedoms' and 'ethics' have been quietly swept under the carpet in the name of capitalism and the next quarters profit margin.

Re:US Patents lead to technological backwater

[Anonymous Cowled]

why should companies like Samsung, HTC, etc etc actually bother releasing their products in the US when Apple will use the courts to ban them?

The US is one of the largest (the largest?) market in the world. Why would companies not try to cash in on that?

It's amazing how many of the self proclaimed 'freedoms' and 'ethics' have been quietly swept under the carpet in the name of capitalism and the next quarters profit margin.

"The land of the free" has been a joke to everyone outside of the US for decades.

Re:US Patents lead to technological backwater

[Yahma]

Correct. US Patent laws suck; however, Apple's behavior, while perhaps technically within the bounds of the law, will not win them any friends or goodwill. Their evil behavior is not only targeted at Samsung, but targeted any any US consumer who does not choose an Apple product. This is because Android, is really the only real competitor to iOS. Apple is trying to destroy the competition with patent abuse and lawsuits, rather than on the technical merits of their phone (which has already lost to the Galaxy SIII).

Re:US Patents lead to technological backwater

[flyingfsck]

"The land of the free" has been a joke to everyone outside of the US for decades. -- Hundreds of years actually. The underground railroad has always run from the USA to Canada, and not the other way around.

Re:US Patents lead to technological backwater

[Silas is back]

I've been following this on Groklaw for a while, and it's obvious yet again how badly the US patent system is broken when Apple can patent a rectangle with rounded corners and succeed in banning devices of the same shape, and yet refuse to licence the basic technology that is needed for the phone to actually behave like a phone and make calls.

You may be glad to hear that the "rounded rectangle" patent, design patent 504,889, was actually NOT found to be infringed, meaning Apple can NOT patent a rectangle with rounded corners.

Misattributed quote.

[AliasMarlowe]

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

This is a misattributed quote. It should more correctly be attributed to either Pablo Picasso (an overrated artist) or Igor Stravinsky (an excellent composer).

Re:Misattributed quote.

[speederaser]

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

This is a misattributed quote. It should more correctly be attributed to either Pablo Picasso (an overrated artist) or Igor Stravinsky (an excellent composer).

Both of you are correct, pretty much. Pablo Picasso said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" in 1934. And here is a link of Steve Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" in 1996.

Funny how the profit motive so strongly affects the moral belief system.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[Nerdfest]

Yes, he even stole that quote.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[king neckbeard]

He did say that, so it isn't exactly misattributed, although he mistakenly claimed it came from Pablo Picasso. However, Picasso didn't say that, at least not in those words. Those particular words did come from Jobs, and T.S. Eliot is the first conclusively known source I'm aware of for this sentiment. However, it almost certainly didn't originate with him, either.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[cynop]

Even if the original quote was not from him, he adopted it as if it was.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs always attributed the quote to Picasso. But leaving that out makes Jobs sound so much more sinister / hypocritical.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[flyingfsck]

Well, Picasso probaly said it in Spanish and it could be translated various ways...

Re:Misattributed quote.

[GerryGilmore]

What this really points to is that 90% - or more - of morality is ultimately based on convenience and/or expediency.

Re:Misattributed quote.

[poofmeisterp]

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

This is a misattributed quote. It should more correctly be attributed to either Pablo Picasso (an overrated artist) or Igor Stravinsky (an excellent composer).

Both of you are correct, pretty much. Pablo Picasso said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" in 1934. And here is a link of Steve Jobs saying "Good artists copy, great artists steal" in 1996.

Funny how the profit motive so strongly affects the moral belief system.

Every component in Apple products should have a "Mad props to [x] for the most basic, simple underlying product that enables your device to be the AWESOME APPLE IT IS!"

You know, I wonder who should sue them for making a handheld electronic computing device made from plastic.....
 
Oh, wait, their plastic is white. Never mind..
 
</snark>

Re:Misattributed quote.

[Anonymous Coward]

He did say that, so it isn't exactly misattributed, although he mistakenly claimed it came from Pablo Picasso. However, Picasso didn't say that, at least not in those words. Those particular words did come from Jobs, and T.S. Eliot is the first conclusively known source I'm aware of for this sentiment. However, it almost certainly didn't originate with him, either.

Let's sue to find out who really should get the credit!

Re:Misattributed quote.

[jrumney]

Well, Picasso probaly said it in Spanish

Or French, Catalan or Galician. Most likely French, as he spent most of his adult life in Paris.

It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[blind biker]

You got Apple dictating what is and what isn't acceptable to be sold in the US. Now you'll have to smuggle the goods from the rest of the world.

Fucking pathetic!

Re:It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[aliquis]

You have your courts do that.

But yeah, still suck living in the US on that occasion.

Not everything is bad with living in the US though.

Re:It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[Anonymous Coward]

It sets a bad precedent. A very dangerous one for USA.

If a company gets another company banned from the USA, then others will try the same. When that happens, do you honestly think, it won't happen to the US in the rest of the world? The USA had a lot of political capital, but squandered it in the past two decades.

Re:It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[Yahma]

Apple SUCKS! I don't care what the fanbois say. I hate that they are able to dictate what is acceptable to be sold in the US. This ridiculous decision (based upon patenting a square brick with rounded edges) only hurts consumer choice.

Re:It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well - I guess he would be happy to move...

Looking at it I cannot imagine why anyone wants to live in the USA.

Corporations are ruling the country, people are screwed by the products bans we are arguing about now, innovation is stifled and is going to grind to a halt by stupid overly general patents. The complete middle-class is screwed by banks, and are becoming increasingly poor. The few rich people having the biggest chunk of money, and sill becoming richer by paying less taxes (and earning money by screwing named middle-class). Even basic health care is out of range for a increasing number of people, and -believe it or not- there are actually people fighting to keep it that way, and are even proud they managed to accomplished that .. completely crazy. Even a lot of 3th world country's do better than the USA in that respect.. and seem to care more about their people. Record industries can start law suits to charge people millions of dollars for a few mp3's, and people don't even have the money to defend themselves. People are spied on without warrant. People can be thrown in a hell-hole called Guatemala-bay, without any chance to defend themselves.

And that are only a few things - there's a lot more.

Really - I am glad I am not living in the USA.

It used to be the land of the free, but it seems to be the land of suppression by now.

Re:It sucks monkey balls to live in the US!

[Anonymous Coward]

I sincerely hope that all these Samsung products are banned so that the US population can actually feel like how it is to be controlled by a large corporation in an actual practical aspect of their lives. Maybe then they will start ditching Apple and it's bullying behavior.

Irreparably harming Apple?

[amRadioHed]

It seems it would be a hard argument to make that anything was doing irreparable harm to Apple when they are currently the largest publicly traded company in the world.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Targon]

Market cap means NOTHING. You could have a 5 employee company with 10 trillion shares going for $1 each and end up as the largest publicly traded company in the world, but it doesn't mean the company is big or even matters in the grand scheme of things. How many employees, what is the gross and net profit and so on is what is really important, and Apple is NOT in the lead in that regard.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of that, Apple continually posts record quarterly profits. Samsung is not harming them.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[jareth-0205]

How many employees, what is the gross and net profit and so on is what is really important, and Apple is NOT in the lead in that regard.

Fine, but they're not exactly struggling, are they?

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

More than 100 billion in the bank will make them survive for a while, and allow them pay all the lawyer costs for next ten years or so.
But if courts don't get rid of a competition for them, nobody will and their market share will slowly sink.
Th threat for Apple is Android becoming a de facto monopoly platform, which these days assumes that best Apps are released for Android first and second for all other platforms (if at all) - e.g. app makers decide there is no point in going to the App store anymore and the iPhone looses appeal compared to Android.
What will prevent this from happening for now is that Apple still have plenty of high-class users which have money to buy apps. Additionally, Apple made sure that sideloading is not possible, which is a major piracy "problem" with Android. So the App store is more attractive to mobile app developers as they earn more if the iphone is a major platform. So the latter is not going to happen unless iOS market share _really_ drops to margins.

If that ever happens, the tidal forces will kick in and Apple will loose developers fast, at which point the platform and their mobile phones become much less attractive than competition. I don't see it happening anytime in next 10 years. Therefore Apple's lawsuits against Samsung & co are just a posthumiuous paranoia (and revenge) of Steve Jobs. They aren't going to become a monopoly, and they won't reach 200 billion in the bank, as they'd want. Especially as the phone is produced for $200 and sold for $700. They will not be able to afford this price for long.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

Market cap means NOTHING. You could have a 5 employee company with 10 trillion shares going for $1 each and end up as the largest publicly traded company in the world, but it doesn't mean the company is big or even matters in the grand scheme of things.

How does shit like this get modded up when some of the glorious gems I've posted go nowhere? Seriously...WTF???

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Tough Love]

You know who's irreparably harming Apple? Apple.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[Hognoxious]

You could have a 5 employee company with 10 trillion shares going for $1 each

No you couldn't.

Re:Irreparably harming Apple?

[poofmeisterp]

It seems it would be a hard argument to make that anything was doing irreparable harm to Apple when they are currently the largest publicly traded company in the world.

In a press release today (that didn't make it to paper, net, or air), Apple stated that they wanted to clarify "irreparable harm" as meaning "irreparable harm to our company's complete control of the mind market."
 
;)

all the scrubs buying foreign knock-offs...

[Anonymous Coward]

better not cry about american trade deficits and how shitty the economy is.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[symbolset]

Samsung gives Windows Phone token support. In return they get better license cost on Windows. But instead of being mass produced in a Chinese sweatshop these token Windows Phones are lovingly handcrafted in Whittier California by a wizened old former TV repairman named Hank. Hank is semi-retired and only works 15 hours a week, but he has no trouble keeping up with the global demand.

Banning them will make them more fashionable

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Flaunting something not available for sale in the US definitely has a lot of "bling" value. Just like banning songs from radio broadcast in the UK would increase the sales of records. Hollywood stars, rappers and such will flash them around.

So it might be illegal in the US to sell them. Will it also be illegal to posses one? Will the folks smuggling drugs in a tunnel under the kids on my front lawn, switch to smuggling banned phones?

If I was a South Korean diplomat in the US, I would smugly hand Samsung phones out as diplomatic gifts.

Ban the 'phone designed by lawyers'?

[knarf]

Remember what the press was saying when Samsung debuted the SIII?

The Samsung Galaxy S III: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers

And now Fruit wants to ban this lawyer-designed phone? Well smoke me a kipper, either the reality distortion field seems to cause lasting damage or they are communicating with St. Steve through an Ouija board. In any case it does not make sense. And they think they can gain what by doing this? Respect? Money? Time? What, exactly?

As far as I can see all they earn by going on a sueing spree is ridicule, contempt and hatred. For some reason many people seem to get almost religiously attached to their mobile gadgets, and Fruit now acts as if they are the Church of Scientology. Bad fruit. Soon anonymous will start staking out their sales churches.

Re:Ban the 'phone designed by lawyers'?

[Anonymous Coward]

This article has already been debunked. Just do a little bit of googling and you will find that there have been many precursors to the SGS3 design. E.g. just have a look at the white Samsung Galaxy Mini, imagine it being flattened and you will get the SGS3.

Re:Ban the 'phone designed by lawyers'?

[Anonymous Coward]

It amazes me how much Apple's behaviour reminds me of the Church of Scientology. Their overly secretive, and now litigious, and heavy handed culture is familiar.

Re:Ban the 'phone designed by lawyers'?

[StripedCow]

imagine it being flattened and you will get the SGS3

Similarly, if you stretch out a typical smartphone in two directions, you get an iPad.

Before the trial begin?

[symbolset]

The trial is almost over. The evidence was presented, the lawyers rested their case. The jury deliberated and returned a verdict. And they found that the Galaxy Tab did not infringe Apple's patents. The judge hasn't completed post-verdict processes and issued a final judgment, but it's late in the day for Apple to be adding devices to this case. Maybe we're talking about another case?

Re:Before the trial begin?

[symbolset]

Ah, there it is. This is a different case first filed in February this year.

Not about hate, not a choir

[fm6]

Why is Apple the bad guy?

Because they're basically out to force Android phones off the market.

And being critical of Apple doesn't make you an Apple hater, any more than pointing out all the problems with Android (version fragmentation, lousy development tools) makes you an Android hater. Some of us simply want to have a serious alternative to iOS devices that only run what Apple says they can run,

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[ThePeices]

Some of us simply want to have a serious alternative to iOS devices that only run what Apple says they can run,

I would rather the serious iOS alternative not have Apple dictate what apps it can run.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[fm6]

Oh come on, the subordinate clause was directly after "iOS devices".

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just the ones that closely copy the iPhone.

Most businesses would do the same to protect 50% of their revenue. Technology or not.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[fm6]

You can use a Blackberry, Windows Phone, even Samsung's own Bada OS.

Oh great, I can switch to an outdated platform that nobody's writing applications for, or I can try to forget my previous bad experiences and hope that MS has finally figured out how to do a mobile OS. Thanks a lot.

I'm not going to cheer for a for-profit company over another, no matter how less "evil" they look.

As I think I've already made clear, this isn't about hating Apple or loving Google. This is about Apple using bad IP laws to obtain market dominance. This is a bad thing.

Which is not to say that other companies (including Google) don't also do bad things. It's just that this bad thing is the one a lot of us really care about right now.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[shutdown -p now]

You can use a Blackberry, Windows Phone, even Samsung's own Bada OS. The only thing they lack is the apps

They also lack some important features like letting the user be fully in control of his phone.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[taharvey]

No, they are asking android not to copy. Android phones are free to come up with their own concept.

Look at Windows 8 phones. Late to the game, yes. Any good, I don't know. But it is a different and innovative approach, not just a iPhone copy-cat.

Personally I've never found anything good to say about Android. The first version were totally awful. The latest seem like a 2nd rate iPhone, that despite the word-play is no more "open" than the iPhone. And most phones run a custom OS version that boxes customers into a non-upgradable through-away device. People should stop waving Googles flag because they are geeks too. Googles business model put them in a very ethically sketchy position with customers, and I avoid it at all costs.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[Clsid]

Oh great, I can switch to an outdated platform that nobody's writing applications for

Well my friend, you do have a point there. I was just saying that just because Android fails you are not forced to use iOS, but in a way you are, so I guess you are right.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[fm6]

What, you're admitting you're wrong? Begone! There's no place for you on Slashdot!

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[kenorland]

Android is becoming a defacto monopoly by a company

Android isn't a "monopoly" because anybody can distribute and sell it.

If it isn't open source

Well, it is.

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[Clsid]

Haha, nice :)

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[Clsid]

Open source + non-profit :)

Re:Not about hate, not a choir

[kenorland]

Good! Because Apple's profits come out of the pockets of its customers. In an efficient market, companies should have small profit margins.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[Nerdfest]

The LG Prada, the Palm Treo, and The BlackBerry are all lined up outside and would like a word with you about copying others.

3 years down the line...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple?

Who were they?

This makes me glad that I don't live in the USA

[Gonoff]

Apple feels that some things will threaten their high profits. To compete by making products as good as the S3 would lower them.
The alternative is to practice legal scammery (a nice word). Lawyers cost less than having to improve your products and keep improving them. Lawyers can be dispensed with once they have convinced the courts that they invented everything.

I have a GS2 and will not consider an Apple product when the contract expires. This is not because they make rubbish. Their product is pretty average even if their current offering is inferior to what I have. Maybe the next one will be better than everything else. I will not pay money towards destroying the competitive market and nobody with knowledge of technology or economics should either.

Re:This makes me glad that I don't live in the USA

[xs650]

I have a GS2 and will not consider an Apple product when the contract expires. This is not because they make rubbish. .....

To paraphrase Pogo...

Apple has met the enemy and he is Apple

different case

[YesIAmAScript]

http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/31/apple-samsung-galaxy-s-iii-galaxy-note-patent-lawsuit/

'Just to help you keep things straight, remember this is a separate case from the one that ended exactly a week ago with a decision in Apple's favor to the tune of more than $1 billion in damages.'

The 'it could temporarily halt sales in the U.S. market even before the trial begin [sic]' in the summary should have been a tipoff.

And when you start getting angry over people's siglines, you really make yourself look petty and foolish. You also make yourself look like a person who doesn't have enough objectivity for your judgment of whether 'you're [Apple] pissing away whatever good-will you may have had left' to mean anything at all.

Re:different case

[gmhowell]

Two hours after posting, 100+ messages, and your post is the only sign of this fact. Sadly, it will get buried amidst the other posts whining about things that are not true.

Re:different case

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you start getting angry over people's siglines, you really make yourself look petty and foolish. You also make yourself look like a person who doesn't have enough objectivity for your judgment of whether 'you're [Apple] pissing away whatever good-will you may have had left' to mean anything at all.

When you're a pious little shit who gets butthurt about trivial details of the form of the message rather than the content, you really make yourself look petty and foolish.

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rather than innovate and develop its own technology and a unique Samsung style for its smartphone and tablet computer products, Samsung has chosen to copy Apple's technology, user interface, and innovative style," Apple said in one document.

I was unaware Samsung wrote Android.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[ThePeices]

Apple already has a 100% monopoly in the iOS market.

HUGE Security Resource+ - version 6000 - 08/31/12

[Anonymous Coward]

HUGE Security Resource+ - version 6000 - 08/31/2012
http://cryptome.org/2012/08/huge-sec-v6000.txt

The document Slashdot refuses to post!

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[ThePeices]

2/10 Troll.

Let me guess, you own an iPhone, and jerk off on your sense of superiority over others because of your phone?

Your mental capacity is as small as your screen size.

There was a study recently...

[taharvey]

That said the a huge part of the traffic at sites like slashdot are actually marketing firm paid posters. From the type of comentary at slashdot, it seems Google hires a lot more of them than Apple.

Re:There was a study recently...

[erroneus]

You're an idiot. Google doesn't hire people to astro-turf. That's the whole purpose of Google making all that cool free stuff. People use and and love Google for it. It's right in front of your nose and you can't see it?

Re:There was a study recently...

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell if you're humorous or delusional.

Re:There was a study recently...

[Anonymous Coward]

They should stop paying you, you are not doing a great job.

Universities and Apple Products

[betterunixthanunix]

The prevalence of Apple products at universities is no accident; Apple is pushing hard, and universities are basically bending over and promoting Apple products. Windows is sticking around because a few programs are training students to use Windows software (especially MS Office), but a typical college classroom looks like this:

http://potpiedeluxe.com/files/2011/02/apple-think-different.jpg

Suggesting that universities promote a free/libre OS is met with all sorts of derision and skepticism, usually of the form, "Yeah but nobody has any familiarity with that, and it is hard to use, and this is a university so students do not have the time to learn something unfamiliar!"

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[AmiMoJo]

Universities have unusually high concentrations of hipsters.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[aliquis]

A fat 404?

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[erroneus]

Note the absense of Apple in business and government. They aren't interested in meeting anyone's standards but their own.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[BancBoy]

Note the absense of Apple in (...) government. They aren't interested in meeting anyone's standards but their own.

You've not spent much time working in National Science Labs, I take it.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[StripedCow]

It is not considered hip to buy locked down and dumbed down products. Especially not at universities.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Tough Love]

Apple is pushing hard, and universities are basically bending over and promoting Apple products.

The best I can say about that is, at least it's Unix. And then it's only a matter of time before they discover that Android/Linux is "better Unix", and they already know something about it.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in K-12 education, I've noticed recently that iPads have been creeping into classrooms (in the form of "mobile computing labs").
There are field trials happening across many districts. Apple is providing discounts and already has some apps tailored to education.
Once the ball really gets rolling, apple will already be poised to offer familiar, tuned solutions to the technology hungry schools.
However, Microsoft has also offered discounted volume licensing on windows and office, and have sent out invitations to use it IT academy, where kids learn the finer points of office and can get some sort of MS certification.
They're both going after the kids.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[betterunixthanunix]

What difference does that make? Free operating systems are not Unix-like because Unix is some great OS design (it is good, but there are better things out there), they are Unix-like because that was the most expedient choice in 1984. If the FSF had been founded today, GNU would be Windows-like and we would be saying things like, "Well at least its Windows!"

Not only that, but using Mac OS X is nothing like GNU/Linux or even the BSD on which Mac OS X is based. When last I checked, X11 was not even installed by default these days, and the terminal is not immediately available from the base install (yes, I am sure it is not terribly hard to find; it is also not hard to find in Windows, but when I install something like RHEL, the out-of-the-box DE has a terminal icon right there, ready for me to explore or to use). It is absurd to think that any but a small minority of Mac OS X users will discover a "better Unix," because only a small minority of Mac OS X users will ever see anything even remotely Unix-like when they use their computer.

Universities are no exception to what I said. It is not as though they are encouraging students to use Mac OS X, then teaching them how to write shell scripts as part of some "basic computer usage" class. When a student is having a problem, they just bring their computer to the help desk and have someone else fix it for them. If a student cannot find the program they are looking for, they just go to the computer center to find out what shrink-wrapped off-the-shelf software they should buy, assuming their teacher did not tell them already. We are not raising a generation of Unix hackers when we encourage our college students to use Macs.

Yes, your CS department is different; there, the students are learning to program, so they will find their way to a terminal one way or another, and there are hackers in every CS department who will show people how to install a free OS. Even within CS departments, you see an awful lot of Apple customers these days...

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[betterunixthanunix]

Tell me where you are, so I can move there and see this fantastic place where it is not hip to use your iPad for everything. Around me, the hipsters are all loyal Apple customers, who love to use their iPads for everything and who eagerly await the next generation of Apple products.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[tsa]

Even at universities most people just want to get their job done and don't give a damn about 'open' or 'free' software.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

X11.app is no longer bundled as it was only intended as a shim until real applications appeared but Terminal.app is still there.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

This. Almost tragic that I had to scroll down all this way to get such a comment. I need to get my stuff done. I'm probably not going to do it with 700$ software, but if 30$ software gives me pleasure using it I give a damn about it being open or free. And the ecosystem of great apps is by far bigger on OS X and iOS than on other platforms, simple as that.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

If the FSF had been founded today, GNU would be Windows-like and we would be saying things like, "Well at least its Windows!"

I seriously doubt it. There were plenty of other operating system designs around at the time, including VMS, developed by the same people who brought you Windows NT. The FSF considered and rejected those other systems, and for good reason.

Not only that, but using Mac OS X is nothing like GNU/Linux or even the BSD on which Mac OS X is based.

And that's why OS X is going to be superseded by systems like Android, ChromeOS and iOS, because the current OS X user community just wants to launch some simple end-user apps and doesn't care about the technical details. OS X never managed to make serious inroads into actual UNIX or Linux usage.

Even within CS departments, you see an awful lot of Apple customers these days...

True, but they mostly use OS X like an iPad: to run consumer apps and as a thin client. Very few computer scientists or engineers actually develop for OS X.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[StripedCow]

You probably also put your money in a bank that invests in arms, saying: hey I don't care, this bank gives me the highest interest.

If you are a computing professional you should not buy Apple. Apple is the troll of our field.

You may disagree on the last point, but if you don't then please stop using that "but it's the only thing that works" argument, because it is simply flawed, there are plenty of alternatives.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

The terminal application icon is in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder. It is also in the "Other" folder on Launchpad. Hardly difficult to find (and anyway, everyone uses Spotlight or equivalents to launch things, don't they?)

You are correct about X11 though - it isn't even available from Apple these days on Mountain Lion. You have to install XQuartz (http://xquartz.macosforge.org/).

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

You probably also put your money in a bank that invests in arms, saying: hey I don't care, this bank gives me the highest interest.

I don't. But I like how you compare creating and distributing arms with a lawsuit over a frickin telephone.

If you are a computing professional you should not buy Apple. Apple is the troll of our field.

I am. I do.

You may disagree on the last point, but if you don't then please stop using that "but it's the only thing that works" argument, because it is simply flawed, there are plenty of alternatives.

I never said it's the only thing that works, I said I use it because it works very well for me. I don't agree with Apple's tactics as obviously nobody here does, but just because Apple is being mean to Samsung (that's about the scope of it) I'm not going to switch to more "open" software just for the sake of it.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

Note the absense of Apple in business and government. They aren't interested in meeting anyone's standards but their own.

You mean standards like DOC or PPT? And Exchange, almost forgot that standard. Is there some other standard people use when working for businesses and governments?

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

Even within CS departments, you see an awful lot of Apple customers these days...

True, but they mostly use OS X like an iPad: to run consumer apps and as a thin client. Very few computer scientists or engineers actually develop for OS X.

You are right in that few native OS X apps are being developed, but the amount of webapps and open-source scripts and high-performance tools being developed on OS X is huge - at least at the departments that I interact with and work (biomedical). Those tools compile just fine on Linux and OS X, and with Fink, MacPorts and Homebrew there are three *nix package managers available, with A LOT of Linux packages available.

The choice to use OS X is currently a choice that makes much sense, from a very pragmatic viewpoint. OS X may be replaced by other OS'es as you say, but it's not like this is going to happen overnight.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

Note the absense of Apple in (...) government. They aren't interested in meeting anyone's standards but their own.

You've not spent much time working in National Science Labs, I take it.

I have. They are mostly a PC and Linux environment. Very few people are using Apple, you can usually find them in the graphics dept of NASA branches, labs, etc.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[erroneus]

I hope you are not limited to an understanding of standards being limited to file formats. There are other standards such as "to be eligible for government procurement, there must be more than one supplier of any given component so that there may be competition and the government can be assured of getting the best possible price." That particular standard resulted in the creation of AMD as we know it and because of it, the public benefitted from increased technological development and a nearly steady increase in performance. (Until lately... I haven't heard much from either Intel or AMD in terms of earth shattering developments)

Also, there are other standards such as service and support such as next business day and six-hour response and the like. Apple's stance is "you bring it to us and we'll look at it when we get the chance. But if you want, you can buy something that gives you "first in line" privileges but that only goes for waiting at the counter... whatever goes on behind the closed door is a matter best left to descriptions like the one we saw recently with the confessions of two Apple store employees who did everything short of taking a huge dump in every computer and iphone they touched.

Apple is anything but what I would consider "consumer grade." Sometimes "pro-sumer" but in terms of service and support? Screw it. You can't depend on them even to honor their own warranties when they no longer wish to support it. (See the story of the guy who took Apple to court and won... this scenario had been happening over and over and over again where Apple simply refused and most people took it all up the butt and didn't defend themselves.)

Apple WILL sell to large institutions, government and businesses any time they are willing to buy. But do not expect to get special treatment. As IT manager at a small architectural firm, we experimented with Apple gear. It was extremely popular until something went wrong. Then it fell on me to drive to the nearest Apple store to resolve issues. That means the IT guy spent several hours away from the office (something I didn't mind actually) not there to handle emergencies should one occur. (A business of about 50 people doesn't need more than one IT guy in my opinion.) And there were no business warranties or plans available. None. No accidental damage. None. So when bad things happen (and they simply do) Apple's position is "buy a new one."

Apple makes brilliant and wonderful consumer devices. Consumer devices are limited use devices intended for specific tasks and purposes. General purpose does not describe Apple. And industrial grade or military spec definitely does not describe Apple.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Douglas Goodall]

"Not only that, but using Mac OS X is nothing like GNU/Linux or even the BSD on which Mac OS X is based" I have to disagree. Apart from issues of corporate ethics and marketing tactics, Mac OS X provides a GUI on top of Unix and what is underneath is definitely Unix. The terminal app is in the Applications folder and it can be dragged to the dock in seconds, after which it has an icon on the screen for obtaining a terminal session. Most of the GNU languages and utilities I use are shipped with, and if not can be ported in easily. I use the GUI for pushing files around, but when it is time to develop portable C and C++ applications, I am fine with the command line. In every respect the Mac OS X machine is the workstation I waited decades to buy. Until recently the OS was incredibly responsive, unlike Windows (which always makes you wait). I am revising my fanboi status regarding Apple, but for the last 8 years Mac OS X has done n admirable job for me. As long as my 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon Mac Pro keeps running I will be happy with it. (even if it was one version too early and has the 32-bit boot rom and cannot be upgraded). After that I will probably build the most powerful PC I can and run Linux after that.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

Nicely defended. There is the Apple Care program which I have seen work out for several people at my department, but ok, I can see how this could be improved. Still, the "[Apple isn't] interested in meeting anyone's standards but their own" is a generalization that's way over the top.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[betterunixthanunix]

Apart from issues of corporate ethics and marketing tactics, Mac OS X provides a GUI on top of Unix and what is underneath is definitely Unix

Yeah, and underneath TiVO, you have Busybox/Linux, but clearly TiVO presents an abstraction to the user that is not even remotely "Unix like." The same applies to Mac OS X, unless you take the time to get past the abstraction that comes out of the box. Yes, some of the abstraction that you see is derived from Unix (e.g. files are streams of bytes, programs are stored as files) but how you interact with the system is very different. The terminal is not integral to using Mac OS X; when you see answers to problems involving Mac OS X, you see instructions to click on things in configuration dialogs, not to enter a command in a terminal.

From what you said, I am going to guess that you are a highly technical user who really likes to work in a Unix environment; for you, Mac OS X is Unix that departs from X11. The person I replied to claimed that Mac OS X users will eventually discover a "better Unix," which I think both you and I disagree with you, just for different reasons. My point was that most Mac OS X users are seeing so little of the Unix abstraction that they would have trouble appreciating or judging any other Unix. Someone who uses Aqua 100% of the time -- and that is what most Mac OS X users are doing -- will just get confused if you sit them down in front of a TTY.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

quote "Free operating systems are not Unix-like because Unix is some great OS design (it is good, but there are better things out there), they are Unix-like because that was the most expedient choice in 1984." /quote

WRONG and big /facepalm.

    It's used and still used because it IS GOOD and still is good to this day. This is why the vast majority of network systems run a Unix/Bsd/Linux variant OS, especially those that serve content directly to the internet. Well, actually basically anything that needs to be highly reliable, adaptable, able to be highly secure (if properly used), expandable and just plain work....etc.

What exactly do you mean by "there are better things out there"? Better things at what? better file system? better graphics and or the ui? networking? all of these things can be added to the os anyways. new file systems comes out? you can pretty much be guaranteed it will work on a *nix based OS. There are like 2 main os variants out right now in general. Microsofts way and the *nix way (which Apples OsX is of course built upon (Bsd variant) There really is nothing other than those 2, maybe very minor differences, but those are essentially all there is.

Which thinking about it kind of makes me mad. I mean Apple basically just Stole a very good Bsd os and it's entire source code/kernel...etc and then put it's stuff into it while not contributing basically anything at all back to the community to which it owes pretty much everything to since without it they would never have had OS X. Yeah I realize that the BSD license allows this type of thing, which I suppose is fine... I just think Apple is a major hypocrite. Granted the license allows them to do so, but they basically just take all the hard work that was done by others, especially by the open source community and then give them the finger while acting all high and mighty like they did something amazing all the while suing everyone else who actually worked on things themselves and or at least contributed back. Like for instance Apple could contribute back their modified graphics stack/subsystem/sytem, whatever you want to call it, back to bsd and or *nix variants. It's not like they can legally copy the apple desktop design /icons and stuff anyways. but the technology should be able to be shared.

Too bad there isn't a way to just pull the rug out from under apple that basically says you are not allowed to sue other *nix/bsd os distro using companies or organizations on frivolous claims(which they basically are. most of the stuff has had prior art for years before they even made the device or filed for patents, but they somehow managed to get the courts to of course force the jury to throw out or ignore all prior art (which should be illegal in itself, prior art is a significant factor in patent issues) which would most likely have nullified the suite) or you forfeit the right to use that os base for commercial use and must either open source your ENTIRE OS (minus art work and stuff of course) or halt all production of all variants of OSX until they can build from scratch what they took from everyone else as well as paying a fine perhaps to a few open source organizations like the Electronic frontier foundation or some other non profit organization that furthers development of free os software and technology.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

Well having used Linux on my desktop for a fair few years, I would tend to agree... Apple provide something much better suited to university use, although I would say that it's a little expensive...

The thing that bugs me most about Linux, and the same would apply to Android, is that it just isn't optimised. Flash is the evil of internet - and it's a bit of a pig on linux, but when I use Windows or MacOS it seems blazingly fast, that's because Linux is just way behind and it is fragmented.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

"...this is a university so students do not have the time to learn something unfamiliar!"

Isn't that what students go to university for?

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Psyborgue]

It's no longer bundled but if you try to run an X11 app, the OS will point you in the right direction to download X11.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[StripedCow]

But I like how you compare creating and distributing arms with a lawsuit over a frickin telephone.

That was a little extreme perhaps, granted. But still nothing compared to "going thermonuclear", the phrasing of Steve Jobs :)

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but nobody has any familiarity with that, and it is hard to use, and this is a university so students do not have the time to learn something unfamiliar!"

Didn't they have to learn somethng new when they switched to Apple? OSX is not anything like Windows. Hard to use? I have several people over 80 using Linux and they had no problem learning it. What are you saying Collage student can't handle tech as well as a Grandmother? If so the student needs to get their money back from the collage and go back to Mc Donald's to work.

Do you want fries with that?

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

People in the biomedical field use Macs more than other scientific and engineering disciplines, which means OS X works a bit better there.

I don't think OS X makes "much sense" for any professional user: it's still overpriced and limiting, there is little hardware available that runs it, and even with MacPorts and Fink, it's a pain to maintain.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

That was a little extreme perhaps, granted. But still nothing compared to "going thermonuclear", the phrasing of Steve Jobs :)

Haha, indeed. So we complete the circle and we're back at weapons.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

I don't think OS X makes "much sense" for any professional user: it's still overpriced and limiting, there is little hardware available that runs it, and even with MacPorts and Fink, it's a pain to maintain.

This is a very subjective area, but "overpriced" depends very much. The price of the OS is negligible (20$) and yes, you can get a cheaper machine than an iMac with about the same specs, but ultrabooks comparable to the MacBook Air only now start to roll out at the same or even lower prices. The Retina MBP currently has no comparable counterpart and is expensive, but honestly, if all you do is stare at a machine as your job you better pick a machine that pleases you as much as possible (...). For me it's not just a bag of components, it's my daily companion, I give a damn how douchey this sounds. It's for the same reason that I haven't bought my desk at Ikea - I sit at the damn thing most of my day, I better feel good when touching the wood.

I don't understand what you mean by "limiting".

And "a pain to maintain", I don't feel this way at all, but again, this probably depends on which modules you need. In virtually all cases I can use the Ubuntu install instructions and substitute "brew" for "apt-get" and be done.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

This is a very subjective area, but "overpriced" depends very much. The price of the OS is negligible (20$) and yes, you can get a cheaper machine than an iMac with about the same specs, but ultrabooks comparable to the MacBook Air only now start to roll out at the same or even lower prices

But that's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is how much money you need to pay to get the job done. If Apple forces you to buy premium features you don't actually need, you are paying too much.

It's for the same reason that I haven't bought my desk at Ikea - I sit at the damn thing most of my day, I better feel good when touching the wood.

For professional users, it's return on investment that matters, not what makes you feel good. And Ikea desks are a good value and work very well. Many businesses and professionals use them. Many of them also look pretty good.

And "a pain to maintain", I don't feel this way at all, but again, this probably depends on which modules you need. In virtually all cases I can use the Ubuntu install instructions and substitute "brew" for "apt-get" and be done.

Brew doesn't seem to have much in the way of integration testing or dependency tracking. In addition, you are up to four package managers (native plus MacPorts, Homebrew, and Fink) all doing their thing on your system, installing multiple versions, and none of them actually doing things quite right. That's not easy, it's a bloody mess. That's the main reason I eventually gave up on OS X.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

But that's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is how much money you need to pay to get the job done. If Apple forces you to buy premium features you don't actually need, you are paying too much.

Which kinds of premium features I don't actually need do you mean?

For professional users, it's return on investment that matters, not what makes you feel good. And Ikea desks are a good value and work very well. Many businesses and professionals use them. Many of them also look pretty good.

Good thing I'm an independent researcher then, I care very much whether my job makes me feel good or I'm just working for ROI. I'm sure an Ikea desk works very well, all it needs to do is prevent your stuff from falling to the floor. I still prefer the feel of the walnut wood of my desk to the plastified surface of the average desk out there. Yes, it cost me a grand. I see the thing 12 hours a day, I want something that I like, not what has the best ROI.

Brew doesn't seem to have much in the way of integration testing or dependency tracking. In addition, you are up to four package managers (native plus MacPorts, Homebrew, and Fink) all doing their thing on your system, installing multiple versions, and none of them actually doing things quite right. That's not easy, it's a bloody mess. That's the main reason I eventually gave up on OS X.

That's the problem talking about stuff you don't actually use. I ditched Fink and MacPorts for Brew, so it's one manager. Brew installs into its own place but symlinks it all into /usr/local (by default, configurable) and respects all the "native" stuff. Brew does manage all dependencies of its packages, even different versions. It also executes the tests if the package manager added them. It's about as clean as it gets for the inherently messy *nix packages IMHO.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

Brew installs into its own place but symlinks it all into /usr/local (by default, configurable) and respects all the "native" stuff. Brew does manage all dependencies of its packages, even different versions. It also executes the tests if the package manager added them. It's about as clean as it gets for the inherently messy *nix packages IMHO.

HomeBrew doesn't even come close to solving OS X's package management mess; it's inherently impossible to do consistent package and dependency management on OS X as an add-on to the system. Your problem is that you don't even know what packages or dependency management are (otherwise you wouldn't talk about such nonsense as "*nix packages").

If HomeBrew works for you that's nice. It's not a solution or replacement for real package management.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

Your problem is that you don't even know what packages or dependency management are (otherwise you wouldn't talk about such nonsense as "*nix packages").

I think you know what I meant, but ok, since you don't bother explaining what exactly the problem seems to be we should leave it at that.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

BTW, here's the ridiculous gyrations you have to go through to get SciPy:

http://www.thisisthegreenroom.com/2011/installing-python-numpy-scipy-matplotlib-and-ipython-on-lion/

And when you're done, this is sure to break sooner or later as brew or OS X get updates. Many other scientific packages are missing entirely. Brew is the same kind of disaster as previous attempts at OS X package management.

On Ubuntu? You say "apt-get install python-scipy", and from then on it works, reliably, through upgrade after upgrade.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

No, I don't know what you meant. "*nix" doesn't have packages. You seem to think of tar files of sources as "packages" and of pulling them down and installing them as "package management".

In any case, the SciPy install instructions using brew I referred to in my other post show that package management on OS X is still a complete trainwreck.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[Silas is back]

No, I don't know what you meant. "*nix" doesn't have packages.

I meant cross-platform packages, just like SciPy or redland or maybe even Django, as opposed to OS X-native (or even Windows) stuff.

You seem to think of tar files of sources as "packages" and of pulling them down and installing them as "package management".

Not quite.

In any case, the SciPy install instructions using brew I referred to in my other post show that package management on OS X is still a complete trainwreck.

Just saw that, you posted it after my last comment. Granted, SciPy is not (yet?) available as a brew package. But the post you refer to installs quite a bunch of other things and sets up the environment, SciPy alone is two commands. Agreed, this is easier on Ubuntu.

Why you keep condemning HomeBrew without knowing how it works is beyond me though.

Re:Universities and Apple Products

[kenorland]

I meant cross-platform packages, just like SciPy or redland or maybe even Django, as opposed to OS X-native (or even Windows) stuff.

SciPy isn't a "package" in the sense of "package management", it's merely a "software package" in the colloquial sense.

Why you keep condemning HomeBrew without knowing how it works is beyond me though.

I do know what it does: I looked at the documentation and the scripts. It lacks anything close to Ubuntu's dependency management, integration testing, or upgrades. I'm "condemning it" because claiming that it is an alternative to Linux package management is a lie, and it's a lie that might cost people a lot of time and money, just like the false claims about Fink and MacPorts caused me to waste years and a lot of money on OS X.

question for a lawyer?

[arbiter1]

Being SIII wasn't part of the lawsuit (even though that verdict we know won't stand cause complete F up by the jury), so its not labeled as infringing on any those patents (if they are even valid patents) ?

Re:asians never innovate

[Anonymous Coward]

Just off the top of my head:
OLED screens?
Blue diodes?
White LEDs?

And just before you start replying, the US doesn't actually invent anything any more, that gets outsourced. Companies like IBM and Intel do most of their research in Israel. Most chip fab process development happens in the same countries where the fabs actually are. The best medical research is done in Europe. What does the US do still? Shiny consumer products that have absolutely no fucking value other than spaw lawsuits over their rough shape and size. While the Dutch are inventing new contact lens materials, the US is inventing rounded corners.

Puh fucking leez.

Not Contect

[Apocryphon]

"Apple named 8 Samsung products it wanted an injunction to ban from sale in the U.S. Apple wasn't contect."

WTF???

Is it just me or did this "summary" make anyone else actually angry?

Re:Not Contect

[Anonymous Coward]

It made me not so much angry as incontect.

Re:asians never innovate

[arbiter1]

no you are thinking of China, they are ones that steal everything and claim as their own.

So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 Insightful - for an AC post against Apple.

So, Apple is Evil now on Slashdot?!

Maybe the Mayans were right after all ....

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[erroneus]

Apple has been evil on Slashdot for a long time.

For some, it was what they did to Franklin. For others, it was how the screwed over Apple records where they allowed Apple to use their name with the agreement that they never go into the music business. (They are now big in the music business with iTunes.) There are lots of reasons Apple is evil. The Apple vs Samsung thing is only the most recent reason.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[dmesg0]

Apple is evil, period.
Not only on Slashdot, everywhere.
It's time to FSF to restart its Boycott Apple program from 199x. The things Apple does are far worse now than back then.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Yahma]

Agreed. Apple's heavy handed tactics and use of patents to stymie simple ideas that are no-brainers only hurts me (and other consumers). I've already been affected by Apple's behavior, in that my Google Nexus has had Local search feature removed (in the US), because Apple won an injunction against Samsung. C'mon, Local Search!? How different is that from "global" search? Google's been offering local search on its search engine for years now. Apple is EVIL period. I will never support them by purchasing their products, and will do everything I can to undermine their marketshare as well.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do your research on the Apple Corps vs Apple. Apple bought out the Apple Corps rights and name for $500M US and licensed back the record label back to them.
Don't think that Apple corps actually suffered any damage here. I;m sure they're all fine thanks.

And if you're old enough to remember the dispute against Franklin, you are delusional if you think Apple wasn't in the right here. The outright stole the ROMS. They admitted to it in court! They said it was too hard to copy Apple if they didn't. Well no shit!

Apple didn't get "evil" on slashdot until Android became a darling.. It's quite comical to me that the former evil empire (Microsoft ) hardly gets a nod from current slashdotters. One day many slashdotters will wake up and see they were on the wrong side of this battle.
Eric Schmidt is the reason all of this happened. He was on Apple's board for crying out loud. He knew absolutely what Google's plans were and he did not recuse himself. He was privy to a huge amount of Apple's plans. Pure 100% evil.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[santax]

Good to see the apple-spam team is at it again slashdot. Last story some of you paid apple-propagandist where actually using @mac.com accounts. What happened to that? To obvious?

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[kenorland]

Let's not forget the granddaddy of Apple's steal-and-sue approach, the look-and-feel lawsuits, where Apple tried the same sh*t:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation

Note that Xerox also had to sue Apple to get a declaratory judgment because Apple was threatening Xerox's licensees:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3538913398421433687&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[rat_herder]

Lame troll. Reads like you had no response to his well reasoned post.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[makomk]

Do your research on the Apple Corps vs Apple. Apple bought out the Apple Corps rights and name for $500M US and licensed back the record label back to them.

Apple only bought out the name after Apple Corps sued them for trademark infringement and breach of their settlement agreement in the previous trial, and this was well after Apple had gone into the music business having previously agreed not to.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to question conventional Slashdot wisdom, but what did they do that was so wrong here? I remember when Microsoft came and stole Apple's technology in the 80's and nearly put Apple out of business. This time around they patented things so that wouldn't happen. The patent system was designed to protect people from the very thing that happened here. Samsung isn't some little guy getting crushed, they're Apple's main component supplier and they're copying their largest customer's patented technology. Period. All this whining about patent bullying is a little unfounded in this case considering who the player are and their relationship to each other.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[erroneus]

It never nearly put Apple out of business. People wanted a GUI for their personal and business use. Apple was too expensive and didn't cater to business needs. Apple can never and should never be the single source vendor of anything simply because they will not back up what they sell with any worthwhile support.

What Apple is doing is defending something many of us feel they have no right to defend.

Apple didn't invent multitouch displays. They applied the technology in an obvious fashion... in the way it was designed to be used. And it IS obvious. One finger can point and tap and move. Two fingers do gestures. And there's lots more, but it all becomes software patents after that. The only patents which are worth considering are hardware patents which seem to get the least value from claims, interestingly enough.

And design? I'm sorry, but adding frills and then calling it "trade dress" is fine with me. But making something elementally simple and calling it trade dress falls under functionality and you can't patent that. Clothing has always had an exemption from being protected under trademark/trade dress or copyright. The reason for this was simple and obvious and back in the earliest of days it was recognized how dangerous it could be to allow intellectual property protection for clothing. In technology, I hold the same general truths should apply and often do.

"Rounded corners" might even be considered a safety and comfort function and a requirement if one wishes to avoid being sued when an accident occurs after a sharp corner hurts someone. Round corners also helps to make a thing like a table more durable which is also function and not fashion. And 'Flat"? Seriously? For the moment, all displays and tablets are flat. As soon as flexible displays are mature enough, I expect to see Apple capitalizing on that and even patenting the rounded display... or the concave display. And heaven help us all when recently discussed technology regarding display panels with electronically controlled raised textures get used by Apple.

The point is they didn't invent it. No question they made it popular. They did. But that doesn't warrant protection... celebration, perhaps, but not legal protection.

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Glock27]

I wish I had mod points. This is far from a simple case, Apple has many good points here.

If Android were based on Windows rather than Linux, I bet many /. folk would be singing a different tune. I remain bemused at their unquestioning love for Java in Android. ;-)

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree.
Apple Must Die!
http://www.cafepress.com/ibad

Re:So Apple is Evil now?!?

[FloydTheDroid]

Apple has been evil on Slashdot for a long time.

For some, it was what they did to Franklin.

What they did to Franklin... are you joking? The Apple II ROMS are not public domain so I don't see how you can say that Franklin should have been able to copy them. Franklin was free to create their own computer but they took the easy road of waiting for someone else to do it for them.

For others, it was how the screwed over Apple records where they allowed Apple to use their name with the agreement that they never go into the music business. (They are now big in the music business with iTunes.) There are lots of reasons Apple is evil. The Apple vs Samsung thing is only the most recent reason.

Make up your mind. If we're going to enforce trademarks then we should probably enforce patents while we're at it. Apple Inc. bought the Apple trademark and licenses it to Apple Corp. which isn't quite as sinister a story as you're implying.

Thermonuclear

[Clsid]

thermonuclear adj .\thr-m-nü-kl-r, -nyü-, ÷-n(y)ü-ky-lr\

: of, utilizing, or relating to a thermonuclear bomb

I guess they truly meant it, even if it causes harm to their company.

Re:Thermonuclear

[Miamicanes]

No, "thermonuclear" would be Google mustering all of its available resources to get Android ported to the iPhone 5 within a month of its release, complete with "Nexus A" boot animation featuring an Android eating an Apple and pooping out a phone whose display expands to fill the whole screen at the end of the animation.

Apple would still be selling hardware, of course... a lot of it, in fact... but Google would be skimming 100% of the "Market" revenue and "Maps ads" revenue from any iPhone 5 reflashed to Android. Apple is probably selling iPhones at a small loss, with the expectation of making back the difference from other fees. Imagine if they found themselves in the position of Sony -- selling devices at a small loss like hotcakes, knowing they'd never see another cent from those same devices once they left their hands.

The goal, of course, wouldn't be to just make iPhones a first-rate Android hardware platform -- it would be to goad Apple into locking down new iPhones against jailbreaking and reflashing really, REALLY HARD. As in, "Motorola hard". Instantly, Apple would alienate their most influential and enthusiastic group of hardcore users, and drive them away from the platform. Consumers would scramble to buy new old stock iPhones that weren't locked down, and angrily return the ones that ended up being locked down anyway. More consumer ire.

Keep in mind, Google would lose nothing from this. A phone running Android is a phone running Android, insofar as Google revenue is concerned. It would be a bit of a gamble, because it would obviously horrify Samsung and HTC (who might, or might not, buy into the logic of using the move to force Apple's hand and goad them into totally locking down IOS devices against reflashing unapproved firmware). Ultimately, though, this isn't about money for Apple -- it's about control. If it were just about money, Apple would shake down Samsung for royalties and move along to HTC & LG. I can't think of any single act of guerrilla terrorism Google could do to Apple that would more effectively undermine the control Apple is determined to exercise than porting Android to Apple's newest and best hardware.

Re:Thermonuclear

[RocketRabbit]

But people buy an Apple phone for the slick OS. Android doesn't have that. If Google made an Android distro for the iPhone it probably wouldn't even get installed on more than a few thousand devices, tops.

Re:Thermonuclear

[subreality]

locking down new iPhones against jailbreaking and reflashing really, REALLY HARD. ... Apple would alienate their most influential and enthusiastic group of hardcore users, and drive them away from the platform.

This has already happened. I was very happy with the original iPhone. Then I got a 3GS... Seriously locked down, boot signatures, the whole thing. I went from being able to trivially able to run whatever software I wanted to having to wait after each software release for someone to crack it (which didn't always happen), make sure that I wasn't going to end up in a dead-end upgrade path (can't downgrade it), and having to use ever increasingly flaky and slow tools. All just to keep my jailbreak.

With the 2G it was just hard enough to keep total noobs from tinkering with things they shouldn't. The 3GS was obnoxiously hard, and was a very clear message from Apple that they didn't want ANYONE tinkering with their toy under any circumstances.

I was QUITE alienated, and within a year I had sworn off Apple. I love the hardware, and iOS is much more polished than Android in many ways, but I insist on being able to open the hood. I now have a Galaxy Nexus and I'm not looking back. This whole patent war has just solidified my convictions.

Re:Thermonuclear

[Clsid]

Apple already does this with their computers and they don't seem to care to the point where they provide Boot camp and the tools to run the other OS effectively.

The main problem with your argument is that Apple doesn't sell hardware at a loss, they have made that very clear over and over. In fact, if anything Apple's hardware is way overpriced because they truly still make money from all the devices they design, as opposed to the small marging that PC hardware manufacturers or even Foxconn makes with each iPhone.

I said thermonuclear is because Apple is doing it, not that Google is doing anything. I think they unwillingly did more harm to Apple than they ever thought it could be possible, by rallying an unlikely alliance between a bunch of hardware manufactures and a company that was just starting on the operating system business.

The major thing Google can do to disrupt Apple is just keep what they are doing. Keeping Apple at bay while the rest of the manufacturers continue to erode their market share. I think the story is going to repeat itself on the iPad but with Windows 8 devices.

Re:Thermonuclear

[Clsid]

Why would you get mad with something that they clearly told you would void their warranty. The company is under no obligation to provide you with updates if you change the way that they expect the device to be. I mean, I might not like it but I get it. If you are a tinkerer, an iPhone or most Apple products for that matter are definitely not for you. They are for your regular consumers out there or power users that buy into their simplicity mantra. In my case, I have both an iPhone and a Samsung phone with Cyanogenmod from two different carriers since in that way I get complete coverage. As with the whole debate of Linux vs Windows or vs OSX, I decided that instead of choosing one over the other, it's easier to make up some use cases for each device and try to have it all if possible :). On the computing side I have a Macbook as a laptop with Windows and OSX, and a custom-built desktop with Linux and Windows. Windows is used for .NET and games, OSX for web browsing, mail, etc and Linux for web programming, development servers, etc. Adopt all platforms whenever possible or alternate between them, and I assure you, in the end, you will see them for what they really are. Just tools to get the work done :).

Re:Thermonuclear

[subreality]

There's a difference between them not supporting what I'm doing (which was how it worked on the 2G), and their taking active steps to make it as hard as possible. I expected the former, and was happy to take responsibility for my own support (as I now do on my Nexus); it was a change from their former policy when they changed to the latter with their completely obnoxious DRM on the 3GS and later.

Re:Thermonuclear

[tooyoung]

Apple is probably selling iPhones at a small loss, with the expectation of making back the difference from other fees. Imagine if they found themselves in the position of Sony -- selling devices at a small loss like hotcakes, knowing they'd never see another cent from those same devices once they left their hands.

How did this get modded insightful? It's well known that Apple makes obscene profits on their hardware sales. Do you seriously think that they became the most profitable company in the world by selling the iPhone at a loss and then scraping some money off of AppStore transactions?

Re:Thermonuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't buy the iPhone 4 because its hardware is better than Galaxy SIII (as it's not), they prefer the iOS. Because if they wanted Android, they'd have bought a cheaper phone with better hardware already. It follows that the potential app income for Google is marginal at best.

Furthermore "Google would lose nothing from this". Development costs are a loss of manpower and money. It's a huge effort to port Android to a device with device with proprietary hardware (some of it specifically made for Apple) that doesn't confirm to the hardware standards laid out by Google.

Making Android available to iPhone would waste Google's ressources, whilst having no benefits. This is a thermonocluear bomb exploding in Google's backyard.

Re:Thermonuclear

[Anonymous Coward]

it would be to goad Apple into locking down new iPhones against jailbreaking and reflashing really, REALLY HARD.

Well they have the ATV 3 they can leverage from. It's still not unlocked.

Re:contect ?

[bjwest]

If you can't read a sentence with a word or two misspelled, and figure out what it means, then you, along with all the other grammar nazis here on /., need to go back to fucking grade school.

FUCKING READ THE SENTENCE, FIGURE IT OUT AND SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Of course, there's punctuation errors in the above, so you won't be able to discern any meaning out of this either.

There. FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather Samsung be allowed to sell its products in the US AND AAPL is forced to donate a billion dollars to user interface research at universities which would then be put released open source patent free for any company to use.

Too late...

[Anonymous Coward]

... already got my SIII (Go Samsung Go !) :p

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Clsid]

The thing is, that Apple by the very definition of their business model, will never be able to reach a 100% monopoly. As a GNOME developer was pointing out, all the success that Apple is having only gave them about 7.5% market share on the desktop, they have been surpassed already by Android on smartphones and their only remaining bastion is the iPad which I think with Windows 8 devices, will truly have a run for its money.

Stop worrying so much, since at best, Apple can be like the Prada or Gucci of computers. Expensive, well designed items that fill a certain niche, but very unlikely to become mainstream but for the shortest periods of time.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see So Googles CEO sat on Apples board and had advanced and privileged information on Apples iPhone development. He used this knowledge to build his own competitive copy-cat Android OS and then

When did this supposedly happen?

Foundation
Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, United States in October 2003 by Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger),[18] Rich Miner (co-founder of Wildfire Communications, Inc.),[19] Nick Sears[20] (once VP at T-Mobile),[21] and Chris White (headed design and interface development at WebTV)[8] to develop, in Rubin's words "...smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner's location and preferences".[8] Despite the obvious past accomplishments of the founders and early employees, Android Inc. operated secretly, revealing only that it was working on software for mobile phones.[8] That same year, Rubin ran out of money. Steve Perlman, a close friend of Rubin, brought him $10,000 in cash in an envelope and refused a stake in the company.[22]
[edit]Google acquisition
Google acquired Android Inc. on August 17, 2005

Integration and polish, not innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

The two game changing innovations were the capacitive touch screen and getting the music industry behind the iTunes store: A business innovation and a choice of technology.

Before, phones had tap interfaces because reliable drag interfaces are practically impossible with resistive touch screens. Everything that people liked about the first iPhone was only possible with a capacitive touch screen: the light touch, swipe motions to scroll fluently, etc. Available hardware technology was the reason why most unlock schemes at the time used tap sequences or even physical switches. The "complexity" of coming up with the swipe to unlock scheme had nothing to with it. That *is* an obvious option if you can design with a capacitive touch screen in mind. A resistive touch screen was the sign of a cheap device that is so unusable that no price advantage could save it, modern UI or not. Apple is still a hardware company, but they're integrators, not innovators in that field. Apple chose the right technology at the right time - a feat that eluded them as often as not in the company's history.

Timothy Cook is a cocksucking piece of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Demand that Apple fire this motherfucker.

Re:Timothy Cook is a cocksucking piece of shit

[Yahma]

Demand that Apple fire this motherfucker.

You incorrectly assume that Apple actually cares that Timothy Cook is a cocksucking piece of shit. It actually works out better for them (financially) that he is.

Fuck you Tim Cook

[Anonymous Coward]

This asshole is going to destroy Apple.

Apple has gone from "insanely great" to just plain insane.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[gmhowell]

Let me guess, you own an iPhone, and jerk off on your sense of superiority over others because of your phone?

TBH, my sense of superiority is a pretty sexy and well endowed beast.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[siddesu]

Don't forget the"retina displays" of Sharp and Toshiba in 06, as well as the app markets of the Japanese carriers. There is a lot of copying in every "revolutionary" design out there.

Trial date is in 2014

[TrueSpeed]

The trial start date is March, 2014. Too bad all of these devices will be at end of life. Suck it Apple, you MoFo's.

EU 30% bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

And 4x the number of people in India alone, with a growing economy China has 6x the number of people in the USA. A much bigger market.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[nurb432]

That may or not be true, but the fact remains that someone may have violated another's patent. If you don't go after them, then you lose rights to said patent. Besides, if you are a company and feel someone is violating your IP, it would be silly not to do something about it.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[fustakrakich]

Why is Apple the bad guy?

Because people are prone to attack the symptoms and not the disease. Apple is not the bad guy. The system that rewards their behavior is the bad guy. The system gets its power from us, so actually, the public is the bad guy.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[dmesg0]

That may or not be true, but the fact remains that someone may have violated another's patent. If you don't go after them, then you lose rights to said patent. Besides, if you are a company and feel someone is violating your IP, it would be silly not to do something about it.

You are confusing patents and trademarks. Please get your facts straight before commenting.
And most of that IP is considered as such only because of the crappy US patent system.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't. You lose rights to trademarks if someone uses them. Stop confusing things.

Also, this has been a huge fuckfest of 'this looks to similar' to be even taken legitmately. The S3 and Note look notihng like the iPhone, although the Samsung overlay is a bit similar to it. On the other hand, there were things before the iPhone that had square icons in rows. You know, anything. However the phones, nothing like it.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[nurb432]

Regardless of why, its still IP that they must defend. Don't like it, change the laws, until then shut your pie hole.

True, you have to defend trademarks, but you must defend patents too.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[dmesg0]

Regardless of why, its still IP that they must defend. Don't like it, change the laws, until then shut your pie hole.

True, you have to defend trademarks, but you must defend patents too.

That's total BS, no law says you have to defend your patents, especially the bogus ones for obvious ideas. Well, unless you are a patent troll, in that case I agree, you absolutely have to do that.

IBM is an example of company that never sues for patents unless being sued by others.
And I believe it's you, sir, who definitely must stuff all your shiny itoys into all of your iholes, and stop insulting others' intelligence with childish replies.

SIII != iphone

[sl4shd0rk]

The SIII is like twice the size of an iphone. Nobody would ever confuse the two, no matter how rectangular or rounded or rows of icons. Microsoft never even took douchebaggery to this level.

Re:SIII != iphone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, according to Apple, their users are stupid enough not to be able to tell the difference.

Re:contect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

just for your info, the original didn't say
" Apple wasn't contect with that, though; "
it said :
" Apple wasn't contect; "

i still dont know what the semi colon is doing there
and i still think the original was shit

the site is a 'news' site , if they cant convey news
then what are they doing ?

i look forward to your all-caps reply

Apple abusing software patents

[Anonymous Coward]

The real problem here is that Apple has decided to abuse software patents. This is a very scary development. Patenting trivial software features drives up the cost for all developers to produce successful software. The days when you were free to code up a neat feature without having a legal department seems to be rapidly coming to an end.

Apple's continuing douche-baggery

[Yahma]

Back in April 2011, Apple's trade dress infringement claims against Samsung went like this:

• a rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded;
• the front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders;
• as to the iPhone and iPod touch products, substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width and narrower black borders on either side of the screen having roughly equal width;
• as to the iPad product, substantial black borders on all sides being roughly equal in width;
• a metallic surround framing the perimeter of the top surface;
• a display of a grid of colorful square icons with uniformly rounded corners; and
• a bottom row of square icons (the "Springboard") set off from the other icons and that do not change as the other pages of the user interface are viewed.

• That is basically a list of things you aren't allowed to do. Now, individually, those traits aren't worthy of a lawsuit. It's the combination of those things that will send Apple Legal over to kick down your door. The Galaxy SIII was designed from the start to not infringe on any of the above; yet Apple, in their continuing douche-baggery, has now brought up more ridiculous patents to use against the SIII.

  Fuck You Apple!

Re:Apple's continuing douche-baggery

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it you simultaneously acknowledge that infringement of that design patent requires simultaneous infringement of all the points, but also say "this is basically a list of things you can't do"? And then that patent has nothing to do with this case; what was the point of your post, anyway?

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[santax]

Eric didn't go to meetings about the Ipaid and Ihavebeenfucked-phones... A well known fact, you i-diot.

advice vs politics

[Anonymous Coward]

I have opinion about apple's actions of course, and there are not favorable ones... but if someone come asking for my opinion about what best suits them, they obviously thought I might be helpful and objective... so if we start getting political and have other motivations, we might quickly ruin our own reputation and their respect.

Maybe we take the line Ron Paul has taken with Fed, change the system!

Re:contect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

so how is life being a professional student, piss poor, buried in debt, living at your parents house at age 38? I ask cause you are the only type to get their panties in such a bunch over a semi-colon.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Kjella]

The thing is, that Apple by the very definition of their business model, will never be able to reach a 100% monopoly. As a GNOME developer was pointing out, all the success that Apple is having only gave them about 7.5% market share on the desktop, they have been surpassed already by Android on smartphones and their only remaining bastion is the iPad which I think with Windows 8 devices, will truly have a run for its money.

Because they price themselves out of most of the market. My Norwegian price checker lists 703 laptop models for sale. Apple's cheapest laptop is the MacBook Air for 999 USD / 8290 NOK and it's the 239th most expensive. Basically Apple has models for the top third, nothing for the bottom two thirds. What's keeping Apple from making a $499 laptop? Nothing as far as I can tell, they just have to decide to do it. Their market share would skyrocket at the expense of their margins, but they might make it up on volume. So far it doesn't seem like a battle Apple is willing to take, but if they are to sustain their growth it can't all be new business areas, they have to expand in the markets they're already in too.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll

Gee, who da thunk that to point out the source of a problem is a bad thing??

Not giving my SIII back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple can suck my drawers.

Bunch of has-beens.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[taharvey]

The fact that others like the Palm Treo in the past have copied Blackberry only supports the argument. Palm paid Blackberry for a license to do so.

Of course, the iPhone has very little in common with those phones, and only a passing commonality with the Prada - which is why when the first iPhone was unveiled it was completely revolutionary. The problem with average slashdot reader comparing the Prada to the iPhone is that the typical slashdoter, after stairing for hours at vim, has no grasp of the importance of design. Design can be seen as the three Fs: Function, Functionality and form. Your average slashdotter/programmer/engineer has a difficulting understanding anything other than pure Function. This is why you see arguements here that read like feature check list comparisons.

The Prada is a phone (check), the prada has a touch screen (check), the prada has no physical keyboard (check). But does that make it anything like the iPhone? No. it is worlds apart in functionality and form (and function in this case). The patent case that just occurred was about a series of patents that covered these unique bits of look and feel that come together as a well designed product. This is a story of innovative functionality and form being protected in patents just like basic function is, even if it can't be easily turned into a check list of features.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[taharvey]

Any links? Couldn't find any reference in a google search.

DVD captions are BITMAPS

[Anonymous Coward]

That's cute, but DVD captioning is done with bitmaps, not text. The DVD player simply overlays the bitmap at the location its told to in the captioning file.

Maybe it's

[Anonymous Coward]

Bigger screen envy?

Love my iPhone, but those bigger screens are looking better and better.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Plumpaquatsch]

They seek nothing less than a complete monopoly on the smart phone market.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

Yawn. He quoted Picasso, who "stole" from T.S.Eliot: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/

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.

Wish Steve Jobs was still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Its sad Steve Jobs had to die before this trial. If Apple falls from grace Steve Jobs death and now this trial will be known as the start of the downfall ( which WILL happen) Now people are going to see it as if Apple went evil after Steve Jobs death ,when in fact it was HIS idea to go after Samsung and Android in the first place. I just wish he had stayed around till the illusion faded.

Re:Wish Steve Jobs was still alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that it was Steve who wanted to go "thermonuclear" against Android.

as a former mac user

[issicus]

lets boycott apple

infringing features link:

[issicus]

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BW708C_SAMAP_G_20120823183614.jpg if you were wondering, i was.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at least considering buying a Samsung SIII. You just sealed the deal, Apple. F***ing idiots. Look at Micro$oft 20 years ago. Now look at them now. Learn.

-A consumer who doesn't want end-user device competition to end up like ISP market "competition".

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[Zorque]

Abusing a bad system to do bad things still makes you a bad guy.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Silas is back]

What's keeping Apple from making a $499 laptop?

I'm sure Porsche could also make a 20,000$ car. Would it still be worthy to carry a "Porsche" logo, though?

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[toddestan]

I'm sure Porsche could also make a 20,000$ car. Would it still be worthy to carry a "Porsche" logo, though?

Of course not. They use the Volkswagen logo for that.

Conflict Free products?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, we as customers should start a campaign

Any litigious companies that make products, we stop buying their products.. or severely curtail them?

I can only see the current market cap as rewarding litigious behavior, so it will probably escalate.. until products become so uniform, people revolt and go to illciit "Indie" manufacturers offshore and import banned products late at night in cigarette boats

We're building a new consumer market here.. Conflict Free products

Re:contect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems anger management class isn't working for you?

Re:contect ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, chill out. The original article read:

"Apple named 8 Samsung products it wanted an injunction to ban from sale in the U.S. Apple wasn't contect."

It *is* kinda hard to figure out what was meant by that, is it not?

Apple is dead piece of shit, but still stinks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is dead piece of shit, but still stinks.

Do you love iPhone? Buy Samsung!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/do-you-love-iphone-buy-samsung.jpg

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[Bongo]

Yes design is a discipline and has its own way of thinking about problems. There is a lot of intuitive intelligence and that's just not expresible in words and logical argument. Your brain grasps the whole picture, often despite the details. So can a design be patented? Who knows, fashion designers and architects put up with constant blatant copying, and it is "oh I just saw a picture of it and I want to make mine look just like it" copying. Ie. the person did NOT got through the weeks of design and redesign and problem solving and toying with the impossible to try to make it work, they just saw, "oh look, it is possible to do it THAT way, and it is selling really well, LET'S MAKE ONE JUST THE SAME". Or try anyway. From a consumer point of view, it is great because you can go to Zara and buy cheap knock-offs of every recent design.

High street clothes stores will go out, buy a bunch of clothes from high end designers, and literally take the garment apart, measure it, and duplicate the pattern, perhaps adding a button or a belt. It is blatant copying, as in, they did not have to bother doing the design work themselves or trying to hire the most creative designers. (And if the designs are just overpriced rubbish with a label, why bother copying it anyway? Your copy doesn't carry the label. People are buying the design because they like it.) Now to any designer, that copying is going to feel bad somewhere on a scale of "cheap" to "evil". But it is copying. And if some stories are to be believed, Google got the heads up on the iPhone via insider info, decided they liked it more than a Blackberry, and chose to copy much of it. But that's life. Maybe there should be no laws against it, and people can keep shopping at Zara. But let's not forget that new designs are RISKS and the iPhone could have flopped massively. It is easier to sit back and let other companies do your market research for you.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[thesupraman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors

At normal viewing distances, these are higher resolution, back in 2001..

Of course apple did 'invent' the marketing name retina.. MUCH harder than all the actual work
of making new technology..

sale

[Anonymous Coward]

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Apple = 1984

[DeltaQH]

I still remember that add. And today Apple has become closer to what it criticised in the Add.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

The real reason for Android over iPhone

[Alain Williams]

Coincidentally today's dilbert

Already have my SIII, suck it Apple!

[Anonymous Coward]

And use less teeth this time around.

Handout outside Apple Store

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to print off several hundred sheets of facts regarding what Apple is doing and stand outside an Apple Store.

For every person that comes out of an Apple Store, give them a sheet on why Apple is bad and why Apple is fucking the market place.

Why give them to people walking out and not in?

Because the handouts will all end up on tables inside of the store and forgotten while people play with the nice toys.

um..

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK APPLE

Beginning of the end!

[notb666]

I don't know why but i feel like this is the beginning of the end for Apple "in the long run".

The world doesn't stop on innovation, design is the most rapidly changing aspect of the tech industry, somehow someday people will come up with completely different, fresh, better and generally more favorable designs and also regarding the utility patents someone will come up with a more efficient, different and easier way to do those things. Who will Apple sue then?...their own fanbois for jailbreaking?

And mind you fanbois, this time Microsoft is not going to save Apple's Ass!

All it will do is this:

[MtViewGuy]

Drive cellphone manufacturers into building Windows Phone 8.0 devices, especially now that Windows Phone 8.0 supports all the latest cellphone hardware features (multicore SoC's like the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Samsung Exynos, 3GPP LTE, NFC mobile payments and high-resolution touchscreens up to 1280x768 resolution) and the fact cellphone manufacturers don't want to get in the crossfire in the Apple versus Google legal fight over Android itself.

Legally, Windows Phone 8.0 has two major advantages over Android:

1. The overall interface itself does not violate critical Apple patents on iOS.
2. MIcrosoft and Apple have cross-license agreements so a small number of iOS features can be run under Windows Phone 7.x and 8.0.

Indeed, why do you think Samsung surprised everyone by unveiling the Ativ S cellphone (essentially a Galaxy SIII modified to run Windows Phone 8.0)? And Nokia will unveil in a few days the Lumia 820 and Lumia 920 PureView? I expect both HTC and LG to unveil their Windows Phone 8.0 devices before the end of this year.

Yes, the Galaxy SIII is a great cellphone, but the legal cloud over this model is why I have yet to get one, because the last thing I want is a few months from now I can't legally use this model in the USA....

Re:All it will do is this:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a nice concern troll here, with a nick like that.

If Apple succeeds, it can only ban Samsung from importing and selling phones. They can't (though they tried) forbid retailers from selling it and they can't forbid using it. Please take your FUD and shove it somewhere else.

Re:All it will do is this:

[MtViewGuy]

I think you need to look up the history of Android itself.

Before the iPhone was unveiled, Google had developed Android to be essentially an "improved" version of what was accomplished with the Danger Hiptop (aka. T-Mobile Sidekick) platform, complete with real physical keyboard. But once the iPhone came out, Google completely redesigned the interface for Android, and incorporated touchscreen functionality that was not originally part of Android itself. And from Android 1.6 on, the similarities to iOS became more and more obvious.

Re:Snore. I really don't get the Apple Hater Choir

[fustakrakich]

Maybe so, but in a system where nice guys finish last, what do you expect? How can a guy see himself as 'bad' when that behavior is not just encouraged, but demanded of him? I don't think it makes him bad. It makes him crazy.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[poofmeisterp]

....but complete monopoly is no good for either of them, they learnt that big way in the '90s.. fake competition whilst blocking everyone else from the market is much better.

I agree with your post completely.

This is just a nudge in the "we have the power [of grey skull]" direction.

They won't do it right away because it will establish too much negative press. Wait until their stock drops or their sales decline by more than 10%.

When this happens, it will be SUIT TIME! Every single thing that any of their products has was suddenly 'stolen by another company for use in the manufacture' of products. "We didn't bring it up until now because we were just being nice and fair players, but, you know...."

Oh, and I can't wait for the suit against them for developing Intel x64, x86 systems in a case, because, you know, that was someone else's idea first. (gag)

Ok, end of snark.

so sad new

[Anonymous Coward]

this is very sad news. I live outside the United States and give thanks that even in my country I have the right to choose. Apple tries to fool consumed. I have a s3 and not at all like the iphone

Windows Phone 8 anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

This just makes my intended purchase of a Nokia Lumia 920 all the more sensible. :)

Dont mess with the Chinese!

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

Apple are idiots and they have just not thought about the ramifications.

The USA owes China over a Trillion in federal bonds which is $1,000,000,000,000 by USA standards or UK $1,000,000,000,000,000,000 to bail out the banking crisis and also fund the Iraq War. if you are stuck with getting your mind around the numbers this helps http://www.jimloy.com/math/billion.htm

If China calls in that debt and demands it in GOLD as they can do legally you will see a serious crisis and the currently economies around the world will seem like a Holiday (Vacation) and people will be fighting for food and you will not give a damn about your computer Apple/Mobile/Cellphone/Facebook/Twitter or /. (Tongue in cheek)

I think they should ask for maybe a quarter of it back just to get the ball rolling and see what happens as an experiment.

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[JayAEU]

brilliantly put!

I'm proud of you.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always been opposed to Apple because they are a bad corporate citizen. It's amazing to me that, when I bring this point up, so many people dismiss it as par for the course. If we, the computer guys of the present age, don't care about ethics in business, what will we leave behind?

iPhone 5

[tsa]

The iPhone 5 is a sort of benchmark by which we can estimate the level of inventiveness and radical thinking Apple still possesses. It must be super duper amazingly good and unique if Apple wants to have a chance of reaching the same success with it as they had with the 4S. It will be amazing if they pull that off.

Really, the Note?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? The Note? How? How can the Note possibly be seen as infringing on the iPhone? I would think that the 5" screen, stylus, and stylus-centric functions would make it pretty distinctive from the i-line of devices.

I really hope some judge sees this and throws out the whole decision. Just says "Oh, you want to amend the list? Ok, old decision is out, new trial."

Re:Universities and Extreme low standards

[Anonymous Coward]

I studied in Hebrew university in Jerusalem (huji). Extremly far from top us U's'

Debian is the only os availble in the computer room and all instructions assume you use it (compress in shell cmds etc')

Re:We are already messed up

[lpq]

They can't demand it in gold -- we went off a gold based currency during I think it was the Nixon era when France did exactly that -- came with a bunch of dollars and asked for the gold backing them.

After that the Fed went off the gold standard and was allowed to float.

Gold rose from $35 oz to well over 1000 and down into the 700-800's, now it's up over 1650. That's up from ~750 since 2008... So What --- about 140% inflation for the bank bailout?

And people wonder why hard disk prices are staying high....

Re:We are already messed up

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

Good reply and I see you are quite well informed. We have to eventually go back to a gold or silver standard. Maybe you could submit a news story on this including going back to a barter system?

I barter all the time with friends and family even though I could pay for some work to be done; but the value of work I give in exchange is fair and you get a little bit more satisfaction from that instead of currency changing hands. just an idea!

Can you think of a better marketing?

[wiedzmin]

Hear that sound? That is the sound of every single person, myself including, who were on the fence or waiting to buy the SIII rushing to buy one, before it is "banned". And even if they don't... wait for 6 months, Samsung can just release the same SIII with a different shell, avoiding the dreaded "rectangle with rounded corners" patent, and be back in the game again.

quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

buy your samsung before it gets banned

Re:Apple will not stop until they have 100% monopo

[Anonymous Coward]

the next iphone better do blowjobs and come with a 20g bag of coke for people to buy it

I'll buy that phone. Imagine the sales slogans: "Get blow and get blown away with iPhone".