Seriously, how did Apple not know about it? Doing a trademark search is simple - it's almost as easy as Googling it, once you find the search site. Half an hour's work could have thoroughly checked for anyone using that name - did nobody at Apple think to do so?
A search cannot find that which is not there, Grasshopper.
Yet another article makes Slashdot, well after it has been thoroughly torn to shreds as bullshit on Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites. Why can't Slashdot editors take a quick look at other, more timely sites to see if a submission is total BS before approving it?
Quick summary of the problems with this article. First, people have been asking for wireless sync as soon as iPhone launched. It is idiotic to think they got the idea from this guy's app.
Second, Apple in fact implemented wireless sync for AppleTV, long before this guy's app came along for iPhone, showing Apple in fact knows how to wirelessly sync things with iTunes. The lack of wireless sync in iPhone was by choice, not because they didn't know how to do it.
Third, the guy's app actually syncs using Apple's sync mechanism and code. All he's doing is using non-public APIs to invoke Apple's mechanism over wifi. That's the reason his app was rejected. Using APIs that aren't in the documented SDK is not allowed.
The icon is an obvious combination of symbols Apple is already using.
The name is also obvious, since Apple is dropping the use of "Airport" generally in favor of "Wifi".
The announcement said that it will be available from the online store, in addition to conventional distribution channels
At 35:21 in the keynote, they say explicitly that it will be ONLY available from the Mac App Store online. There will be no other distribution channel.
You'd think people would have learned by now to not trust any "reporting" on legislation that comes from a Slashdot story. As usual, the story grossly misrepresents what the bill actually does.
If you aren't streaming commercially, it does not apply to you. Putting a video on your Facebook page, for instance, would not be covered.
All this bill is really doing is closing a loophole in the existing provisions against commercial piracy, so that you can't get around those provisions by providing a commercial streaming service instead of a commercial copying service.
I'd be happy to appear on every radio and TV show discussing the out-of-control government which arrested me because I linked infringing "Sanctuary" episodes from youtube to my facebook page. It's time to Inform the public about what kind of tyranny they are living.
One of the most striking segments on "Human Planet" showed people who live on a volcanic island where very little crops can be grown hunting whales. They go out in small paddled boats, and someone with essentially a long sharp stick leaps and tries to hit the whale. Over the next several hours they poke at the whale with their sharp sticks until it dies, and they then haul it ashore where it feeds the village for months.
If the whales are so smart, why don't they learn to swim away when the boats launch? The whales are big enough to easily capsize the boats, but they don't. They could probably escape after the first attack by simply swimming away, but they don't.
It's even worse for whales in the open ocean. In the old days, whaling boats were sale boats and very limited in their ability to maneuver. Whales should have been able to learn to stay far away, and if they accidentally got too close, learned how to swim in a way that the boat could not follow. Modern whaling ships are powered and more maneuverable, but also make a ton of noise. Whales should be able to easily avoid coming in range of them.
Conclusion: whale intelligence is greatly overestimated.
When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report
So, basically, the thing that is by far the biggest use of bandwidth for most people uses between 16 and 26% of their cap? Based on this it appears AT&T was right--most people won't hit the cap.
Now we have a cable channel dedicated to sci-fi, and they changed their name to "Syfy". How's that's supposed to be pronounced, "siffie"? They used to produce remakes of Dune that were more faithful to the books, but "Syfy" now only makes end-of-the-world and big-animal movies
One night I was channel surfing. I found on Disney Channel a movie, specifically made for the Disney Channel, called "Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century". It was about a 13-year old girl living on a space station. It was clearly aimed at the pre-teen/early teen market. Her favorite band was going to come to the station and give the first rock concert in space, and they were going to pick a kid from the audience to dance on stage. She wanted to win the contest to be that kid. However, she got in trouble and as punishment her parents sent her back to live on Earth for a while with her Aunt. As part of how she got in trouble, she ended up with some information that proved that the industrialist who owned the station was going to sabotage it for the insurance money, but no one would believe her. In an adventurous way, she managed to get back on the station, save it from destruction, just in time for the concert to go on, and she got to dance on stage. Yippee. Happy ending.
A sequel to this movie was made, and I noticed that was on next week. So I watched that This time Zenon discovers an alien signal, nobody believes her, but she manages to make first contact (along the way also solving the mystery of what happened to the lead singer of her favorite band, who had disappeared). Oh, after the first movie, the military took over the station, and the new commander's daughter turned out to be a girl she had been enemies with when she had been banished to Earth in the first movie--she ended up getting the boy that girl liked. Of course she ended up being assigned to help the commander's daughter on the station, and things were tense, but by the end of the movie they were best friends. Another happy ending!
The next week, Disney Channel showed the third and final movie in the Zenon series. This time the big thing is a race to the moon, as part of the celebration of the opening of the new lunar colony. The colony is a commercial endeavor. Zenon meets a cute boy who shows up at the announcement of the race to protest. He's a space environmentalist and wants the Moon to be left undisturbed (I'm not making this up). Everyone else thinks he's a kook, but Zenon kind of likes him.
Zenon wins the race, but later weird things start to happen at the colony, including some that make it look like Zenon cheated. This causes tension among her and her friends because they were also in the race. Turns out the weird things are being caused by Selena, the Goddess of the Moon. She's pissed off that people have put a base on her territory and are leaving their junk there. (I told you, I'm not making this up). She starts fucking with the weather on Earth. Zenon and her friends manage to get the colony to close, and get all the stuff off the moon to calm Selena down and save Earth. Zenon and the space environmentalist kiss. Happy ending.
So, what do these three kind of science fiction movies aimed to 10-13 year old kids (probably mostly girls) have in common? Sadly, they are all better, both as science fiction and as entertainment in general, than anything "Syfy" is doing.
Most of the parts for iPad and iPhone are produced outside of China. Assembly happens in China. Only something like 5% of the money spent to make an iPad or iPhone actually ends up going to China. The parts come from a mix of the US, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
It's interesting how Mueller was widely praised in the free software world for his work in fighting software patents, and given financial support by major free software companies like Red Hat, right up until he started criticizing IBM for their use of software patents and their unbridled enthusiasm for them (IBM told the Supreme Court that software patents were necessary for free software!), and then suddenly a huge anti-Mueller FUD campaign started. Coincidence?
Major parts of it were rewritten (such as the javascript engine). Furthermore, KHTML was LGPL, not GPL. What that means is that Apple could have fairly easily structured the project to keep their code in separate libraries from the KHTML-based code, and kept their parts closed. They did not. They made all of their work open.
Because eating food and not paying for it is comparable to downloading software and not paying for it. Yeah.
Yes, they are comparable. In both cases, someone has offered to provide a service to you. One is providing food, the other providing software. In both cases the party offering the service has spend money in order to provide that service.
The restaurant paid rent on their building, they paid the kitchen staff. They paid the waiters. They paid for the ingredients that were used to make the meal.
The software company paid rent on their building, they paid their employees. They paid for equipment to develop the software.
In both cases you use the service without contributing to them making up those costs.
The dog accelerates to top speed very quickly. Using the speed you give for the dog (45 MPH) and assuming 1 second to reach top speed, the dog could do a straight quarter mile in under 21 seconds.
According to Mazda, an MX5 can do a straight quarter mile in just over 15 seconds.
Now change it from a straight course to an oval. The dog is likely to get much better traction in the turns, so won't have to slow down as much as the car does. The dog slows down quicker when it needs to, and gets back up to speed quicker. Net result is the car is going to lose significantly to the dog in and around each turn.
On the first straightaway the car may or may not be able to gain time on the dog. Since they start in the middle of the straightaway the car doesn't have a lot of time until the first turn. On the back straightaway it is room to gain time. Then coming out of the second turn it is another half-straightaway to the finish so may not be able to gain much.
The net result is that the car is going to be slowed down more by the turns and the track conditions than the dog is. If the dog loses 40% due to turns and track conditions and the car loses 60% (both compared to what they can do in a straight quarter mile), the dog will win on the track.
The GCC thing is not bizarre at all. For a long time, GCC purposefully sacrificed good engineering for politics, to try to prevent people from doing things like using non-GPL front ends to generate intermediate code for the GCC back end. The interface between the two was purposefully not well documented and made hard to use. This made it hard to integrate the compiler tightly with an IDE like XCode. Also, Apple is big on using on the fly code generation--for instance Core Image takes image processing pipelines and compiles them on the fly for the GPU or for the vector instructions of the CPU (whichever will be faster on a given system). Again, GCC is actively hostile to that kind of use in a non-free OS.
Finally, GCC has switched to GPLv3, so Apple is stuck with an old GCC.
Personally, I think Apple is trying to totally close their software and hardware ecosystems so only they can provide software, or are the gatekeeper of all software, that will run on any Apple device.
Yet when they replace GPL code, they usually release the replacement under a BSD license, the Apache 2 license, or the Apple Public Software License. All of these are free software licenses according to the FSF. Oops...there goes your conspiracy theory.
I suspect what Apple does not like is this part of GPLv3:
If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. “Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
Here's the nightmare scenario for Apple:
Apple distributes Samba.
Some third party comes along and alleges Samba infringes a patent of theirs, and sues Apple.
Apple either fights the third party in court and loses, or determines that Apple would not be able to win and wants to settle.
Under the GPLv3 section given above Apple basically has only two options. Either stop distributing Samba, or take out a patent license the effectively covers the whole world. In the first case, they then end up having to come up with their own Samba replacement. In the second case, it could get pretty damned expensive.
Better to get an alternative ready now, before someone shows up with a patent.
Could some of you idiots who keep voting this guy "insightful" explain your reasoning? For fuck's sake, he quoted the COPYING file, so all you had to do was glance up and read and you could see his claim about it is wrong. It says nothing about the kernel header files.
You generally do not need to use the kernel header files in order to write or compile programs that make system calls. For example, to write a program that uses fork, you include sys/types.h and unistd.h.
The Linux COPYING file does not say that. Why do you keep lying about this?
Also, it appears you overlooked part of what RMS said, even though you quoted it: "It would take a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros with substantial bodies) to do that.". Guess what? The Linux headers have such. Oops.
Finally, you mention the Supreme Court. Could you cite some specific cases? I can't point out how you botched your understanding of what the Supreme Court says without more information. (I am confident you did botch it, because you've botched pretty much every other thing you've ever written on Slashdot concerning copyright and licensing).
Linux has support for more architectures in the mainline kernel. That is the best reason why they should have gone with Linux, and lo and behold, they did.
When building the software for an embedded device, why would you care that Linux supports 20 architectures you aren't using, and NetBSD only supports 10 architectures you aren't using?
Who? Linux is used successfully on millions of commercially successful devices, released by manufacturers such as Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung with no problem whatsoever.
Maybe we have a different definition of "problem", but I consider the GPL lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center against Samsung, Westinghouse, Best Buy, JVC, Western Digital, Supermicro, Extreme Networks, Verizon, Cisco, and others to be problems for those companies.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, how did Apple not know about it? Doing a trademark search is simple - it's almost as easy as Googling it, once you find the search site. Half an hour's work could have thoroughly checked for anyone using that name - did nobody at Apple think to do so?
A search cannot find that which is not there, Grasshopper.
Yet another article makes Slashdot, well after it has been thoroughly torn to shreds as bullshit on Reddit, Hacker News, and other sites. Why can't Slashdot editors take a quick look at other, more timely sites to see if a submission is total BS before approving it?
Quick summary of the problems with this article. First, people have been asking for wireless sync as soon as iPhone launched. It is idiotic to think they got the idea from this guy's app.
Second, Apple in fact implemented wireless sync for AppleTV, long before this guy's app came along for iPhone, showing Apple in fact knows how to wirelessly sync things with iTunes. The lack of wireless sync in iPhone was by choice, not because they didn't know how to do it.
Third, the guy's app actually syncs using Apple's sync mechanism and code. All he's doing is using non-public APIs to invoke Apple's mechanism over wifi. That's the reason his app was rejected. Using APIs that aren't in the documented SDK is not allowed.
The icon is an obvious combination of symbols Apple is already using.
The name is also obvious, since Apple is dropping the use of "Airport" generally in favor of "Wifi".
The announcement said that it will be available from the online store, in addition to conventional distribution channels
At 35:21 in the keynote, they say explicitly that it will be ONLY available from the Mac App Store online. There will be no other distribution channel.
You'd think people would have learned by now to not trust any "reporting" on legislation that comes from a Slashdot story. As usual, the story grossly misrepresents what the bill actually does.
If you aren't streaming commercially, it does not apply to you. Putting a video on your Facebook page, for instance, would not be covered.
All this bill is really doing is closing a loophole in the existing provisions against commercial piracy, so that you can't get around those provisions by providing a commercial streaming service instead of a commercial copying service.
I'd be happy to appear on every radio and TV show discussing the out-of-control government which arrested me because I linked infringing "Sanctuary" episodes from youtube to my facebook page. It's time to Inform the public about what kind of tyranny they are living.
That would not be covered by the bill.
One of the most striking segments on "Human Planet" showed people who live on a volcanic island where very little crops can be grown hunting whales. They go out in small paddled boats, and someone with essentially a long sharp stick leaps and tries to hit the whale. Over the next several hours they poke at the whale with their sharp sticks until it dies, and they then haul it ashore where it feeds the village for months.
If the whales are so smart, why don't they learn to swim away when the boats launch? The whales are big enough to easily capsize the boats, but they don't. They could probably escape after the first attack by simply swimming away, but they don't.
It's even worse for whales in the open ocean. In the old days, whaling boats were sale boats and very limited in their ability to maneuver. Whales should have been able to learn to stay far away, and if they accidentally got too close, learned how to swim in a way that the boat could not follow. Modern whaling ships are powered and more maneuverable, but also make a ton of noise. Whales should be able to easily avoid coming in range of them.
Conclusion: whale intelligence is greatly overestimated.
When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media, according to a different Sandvine report
So, basically, the thing that is by far the biggest use of bandwidth for most people uses between 16 and 26% of their cap? Based on this it appears AT&T was right--most people won't hit the cap.
The other is the TI BA II Plus.
The Gil the Arm stories. China sells organs from executed prisoners, and the Niven stories would make a good launch point for a discussion of that.
Now we have a cable channel dedicated to sci-fi, and they changed their name to "Syfy". How's that's supposed to be pronounced, "siffie"? They used to produce remakes of Dune that were more faithful to the books, but "Syfy" now only makes end-of-the-world and big-animal movies
One night I was channel surfing. I found on Disney Channel a movie, specifically made for the Disney Channel, called "Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century". It was about a 13-year old girl living on a space station. It was clearly aimed at the pre-teen/early teen market. Her favorite band was going to come to the station and give the first rock concert in space, and they were going to pick a kid from the audience to dance on stage. She wanted to win the contest to be that kid. However, she got in trouble and as punishment her parents sent her back to live on Earth for a while with her Aunt. As part of how she got in trouble, she ended up with some information that proved that the industrialist who owned the station was going to sabotage it for the insurance money, but no one would believe her. In an adventurous way, she managed to get back on the station, save it from destruction, just in time for the concert to go on, and she got to dance on stage. Yippee. Happy ending.
A sequel to this movie was made, and I noticed that was on next week. So I watched that This time Zenon discovers an alien signal, nobody believes her, but she manages to make first contact (along the way also solving the mystery of what happened to the lead singer of her favorite band, who had disappeared). Oh, after the first movie, the military took over the station, and the new commander's daughter turned out to be a girl she had been enemies with when she had been banished to Earth in the first movie--she ended up getting the boy that girl liked. Of course she ended up being assigned to help the commander's daughter on the station, and things were tense, but by the end of the movie they were best friends. Another happy ending!
The next week, Disney Channel showed the third and final movie in the Zenon series. This time the big thing is a race to the moon, as part of the celebration of the opening of the new lunar colony. The colony is a commercial endeavor. Zenon meets a cute boy who shows up at the announcement of the race to protest. He's a space environmentalist and wants the Moon to be left undisturbed (I'm not making this up). Everyone else thinks he's a kook, but Zenon kind of likes him.
Zenon wins the race, but later weird things start to happen at the colony, including some that make it look like Zenon cheated. This causes tension among her and her friends because they were also in the race. Turns out the weird things are being caused by Selena, the Goddess of the Moon. She's pissed off that people have put a base on her territory and are leaving their junk there. (I told you, I'm not making this up). She starts fucking with the weather on Earth. Zenon and her friends manage to get the colony to close, and get all the stuff off the moon to calm Selena down and save Earth. Zenon and the space environmentalist kiss. Happy ending.
So, what do these three kind of science fiction movies aimed to 10-13 year old kids (probably mostly girls) have in common? Sadly, they are all better, both as science fiction and as entertainment in general, than anything "Syfy" is doing.
Have you read the trial transcript?
Most of the parts for iPad and iPhone are produced outside of China. Assembly happens in China. Only something like 5% of the money spent to make an iPad or iPhone actually ends up going to China. The parts come from a mix of the US, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.
It's interesting how Mueller was widely praised in the free software world for his work in fighting software patents, and given financial support by major free software companies like Red Hat, right up until he started criticizing IBM for their use of software patents and their unbridled enthusiasm for them (IBM told the Supreme Court that software patents were necessary for free software!), and then suddenly a huge anti-Mueller FUD campaign started. Coincidence?
WebKit was a derivative of KHTML, a GPL'd system.
Major parts of it were rewritten (such as the javascript engine). Furthermore, KHTML was LGPL, not GPL. What that means is that Apple could have fairly easily structured the project to keep their code in separate libraries from the KHTML-based code, and kept their parts closed. They did not. They made all of their work open.
At least the only naked butt that touches my keyboard is my own. The conference room chairs would have many different butts on them.
Because eating food and not paying for it is comparable to downloading software and not paying for it. Yeah.
Yes, they are comparable. In both cases, someone has offered to provide a service to you. One is providing food, the other providing software. In both cases the party offering the service has spend money in order to provide that service.
The restaurant paid rent on their building, they paid the kitchen staff. They paid the waiters. They paid for the ingredients that were used to make the meal.
The software company paid rent on their building, they paid their employees. They paid for equipment to develop the software.
In both cases you use the service without contributing to them making up those costs.
The dog accelerates to top speed very quickly. Using the speed you give for the dog (45 MPH) and assuming 1 second to reach top speed, the dog could do a straight quarter mile in under 21 seconds.
According to Mazda, an MX5 can do a straight quarter mile in just over 15 seconds.
Now change it from a straight course to an oval. The dog is likely to get much better traction in the turns, so won't have to slow down as much as the car does. The dog slows down quicker when it needs to, and gets back up to speed quicker. Net result is the car is going to lose significantly to the dog in and around each turn.
On the first straightaway the car may or may not be able to gain time on the dog. Since they start in the middle of the straightaway the car doesn't have a lot of time until the first turn. On the back straightaway it is room to gain time. Then coming out of the second turn it is another half-straightaway to the finish so may not be able to gain much.
The net result is that the car is going to be slowed down more by the turns and the track conditions than the dog is. If the dog loses 40% due to turns and track conditions and the car loses 60% (both compared to what they can do in a straight quarter mile), the dog will win on the track.
The GCC thing is not bizarre at all. For a long time, GCC purposefully sacrificed good engineering for politics, to try to prevent people from doing things like using non-GPL front ends to generate intermediate code for the GCC back end. The interface between the two was purposefully not well documented and made hard to use. This made it hard to integrate the compiler tightly with an IDE like XCode. Also, Apple is big on using on the fly code generation--for instance Core Image takes image processing pipelines and compiles them on the fly for the GPU or for the vector instructions of the CPU (whichever will be faster on a given system). Again, GCC is actively hostile to that kind of use in a non-free OS.
Finally, GCC has switched to GPLv3, so Apple is stuck with an old GCC.
Personally, I think Apple is trying to totally close their software and hardware ecosystems so only they can provide software, or are the gatekeeper of all software, that will run on any Apple device.
Yet when they replace GPL code, they usually release the replacement under a BSD license, the Apache 2 license, or the Apple Public Software License. All of these are free software licenses according to the FSF. Oops...there goes your conspiracy theory.
I suspect what Apple does not like is this part of GPLv3:
If you convey a covered work, knowingly relying on a patent license, and the Corresponding Source of the work is not available for anyone to copy, free of charge and under the terms of this License, through a publicly available network server or other readily accessible means, then you must either (1) cause the Corresponding Source to be so available, or (2) arrange to deprive yourself of the benefit of the patent license for this particular work, or (3) arrange, in a manner consistent with the requirements of this License, to extend the patent license to downstream recipients. “Knowingly relying” means you have actual knowledge that, but for the patent license, your conveying the covered work in a country, or your recipient's use of the covered work in a country, would infringe one or more identifiable patents in that country that you have reason to believe are valid.
Here's the nightmare scenario for Apple:
Better to get an alternative ready now, before someone shows up with a patent.
Could some of you idiots who keep voting this guy "insightful" explain your reasoning? For fuck's sake, he quoted the COPYING file, so all you had to do was glance up and read and you could see his claim about it is wrong. It says nothing about the kernel header files.
You generally do not need to use the kernel header files in order to write or compile programs that make system calls. For example, to write a program that uses fork, you include sys/types.h and unistd.h.
The Linux COPYING file does not say that. Why do you keep lying about this?
Also, it appears you overlooked part of what RMS said, even though you quoted it: "It would take a substantial amount of code (coming from inline functions or macros with substantial bodies) to do that.". Guess what? The Linux headers have such. Oops.
Finally, you mention the Supreme Court. Could you cite some specific cases? I can't point out how you botched your understanding of what the Supreme Court says without more information. (I am confident you did botch it, because you've botched pretty much every other thing you've ever written on Slashdot concerning copyright and licensing).
Linux has support for more architectures in the mainline kernel. That is the best reason why they should have gone with Linux, and lo and behold, they did.
When building the software for an embedded device, why would you care that Linux supports 20 architectures you aren't using, and NetBSD only supports 10 architectures you aren't using?
Who? Linux is used successfully on millions of commercially successful devices, released by manufacturers such as Sony, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung with no problem whatsoever.
Maybe we have a different definition of "problem", but I consider the GPL lawsuits filed by the Software Freedom Law Center against Samsung, Westinghouse, Best Buy, JVC, Western Digital, Supermicro, Extreme Networks, Verizon, Cisco, and others to be problems for those companies.
If your theory was correct then Google would not have needed to run the files through their de-GPLing process. They could have shipped them as is.