You sell a device based on your patented invention, then the buyer is free to do with it what they want: using it, reselling it, renting it out, giving it away, taking it apart to see how it works...
Copyrighted stuff works much the same except maybe for the renting part.
Yet I count on Nokia to not be stupid. By going for a certain piece of software (WP7) while you have a working alternative (Symbian) and a perfectly capable and very popular free alternative (Android) I would expect no less than that they can quickly release a phone with it.
Many many handset makers opt for Android - and are capable of bringing phones to the market one after another. New makers stand up all the time - no way they can spend a year or longer on development of a model. That has to be done much faster, and apparently it CAN be done faster with Android and many off-the-shelf components that make up a phone.
Is Nokia using some heavily customised, non-standard hardware platform, and are they opting for an OS that is not designed with that platform in mind? If so it's a wonder WP7 runs on it to begin with.
Or is WP7 such a pos that it takes ages to make it work?
If the answer on any of the above two questions is "yes" then Nokia is stupid. Yet I assume Nokia, which has always been one of the more trendy and technically advanced mobile phone makers, is not stupid. They must have a good reason to opt for WP7, and one of the reasons I can think of is that they want to distinguish themselves from the pack (very sensible) but then Android is also highly customisable and apparently far more mature than WP7 considering how seemingly easily it can be adapted to run on all those phones, tables, even dedicated GPS devices.
Is manufacturing a problem? (on a technical level, I mean)
Or is it simply the price, which almost certainly is much higher than a regular LCD screen?
As with many products it's often hard to get going. Price is high, so not many people buying it, so relatively low numbers for manufacturing, resulting in high per-unit costs, keeping the price high.
Well for a tablet that's not too bad: put it in e-book reader and turn the thing on it's short side. That'd be great for reading when you anyway want more vertical space instead of horizontal space (it's not just because that books are taller than that they're wide).
WP7 when it was released it was already behind iOS and even Android.
WP7 was released in November 2010, with a major update expected late 2011. When it was released it was considered by reviewers to be on par with older generations of iOS and Android, not even the then-current Android 2.2 and iOS 4.1. Since then I can find only minor updates, mostly bugfixes and security fixes.
A month later Android released 2.3, since then it has released 3.0 and expects another major version before the end of this year.
Apple has since released various updates with many new functions, and is at iOS 4.3.3 with iOS 5.0 due this month.
MS is falling more and more behind with WP7. Unless a miracle happens for WP8 (but then: where's the marketing hype?) they'll only fall behind more, and Nokia is falling with it.
On the upside there is increasing confidence they'll be able to ship at least one WP7 product before the end of the year.
Now that is promising... we're just in June. Not even halfway the year. And "before the end of the year" they hope to have a single model on WP7. That's a complete generation away in the mobile phone world! And then aiming for just a single model? I thought Nokia got large in part because they had so many different models to choose from, low-end to high-end. Now it seems in the lower end they're still strong, Nokia phones are all over the place, and WP7 is high-end work.
So they're going to be completely out of the high-end phone business for a full generation? That's not good for them.
Also the announcement by Nokia to switch exclusively to WP7 is at least a few months old. That seems to me quite a long time to release a phone that can run this OS - but apparently they have none yet. And I can't imagine WP7 is that hardware-specific that they have to start from scratch. Mobile phones go the way the PC has gone: standardised hardware, generic software. Point in case: Android OS can run on an iPhone.
This announcement of completely skipping a generation (and unless MS comes out with an upgrade to WP7 in the meantime having an outdated OS) sounds like either Nokia doesn't know how to properly put together a modern high-end phone (not likely - they're one of the biggest mobile phone makers in the world), or that WP7 is not ready for use (yet it's being installed on phones by other makers already).
I may be negative but it doesn't sound like an "upside". For neither Nokia nor Microsoft. By the time Nokia comes out with their first WP7 phone, WP7 is already a year old - and that's really old. Apple and Google are by then a generation or two ahead with their offerings, and it doesn't look like the WP7 app ecosystem is taking off anywhere near as strong as the Android and iOS competitors.
So this 14% drop in stock is what they deserve. Sorry Nokia, but this kind of announcements are very worrisome. You stand a chance if you manage to bring out a complete line of smartphones by the end of the year, AND if Microsoft in the meantime manages to catch up and release a new WP system that can compare to the then-current (not now-current) Android and iOS offerings. Good luck with that.
Which means there was a lot wrong with their overall security.
It's perfectly safe to connect a USB key full of malicious software to a computer - as long as you do not run any software from that key! And you can only have software running from the USB key if 1) the OS allows this to begin with, and 2) the user (or OS - autostart or so) runs the software.
It is only reasonable to assume that a properly secured OS does not allow autorun functionality, and maybe even does not allow software to be run directly from USB sticks. Linux comes with such security features by default; I expect no less from any high-security OS used to operate such facilities.
That Stuxnet managed to find its way all the way down to PLCs in a high-security environment means that there were multiple security issues. Not just one. Some may be software related, others human related: no matter what a single security issue should never have such a huge effect on their operations.
- the customers for copied goods are not the customers a designer would normally have anyway
While (mostly) true, there is a good reason for fashion designers to crack down on copied goods: brand dilution. In Hong Kong it appears almost all women are walking around with the typical LV-styled hand bags. Standard in brown with golden logo printed all over. But of course most of those are cheap mainland-made rip-offs bought across the border or on local street markets.
Those that spend a lot of money for the real thing do not stand out anymore. There is no reason to buy such a bag anymore, and the reason for a fashion-conscious person to buy some designer stuff is to have something unique. Why else pay the big bucks?
If you think that patenting has to do with keeping things secret, then you obviously have no clue about the reason we have patents. Patents are designed to fully disclose an invention; actually a patent is supposed to be written in a way that someone skilled in the art can build the machine described in the patent. This to promote the disclosure of inventions, and with that to increase common knowledge. The reward for this full disclosure is a time-limited monopoly on the use of that invention.
A design patent is different: it means that no-one is allowed to use the same design in their products. How same is same... that's what's now in court. Of course no secrets involved here, just protection of one's intellectual property (a design patent doesn't have an expiry data afaik - I'm not sure about that point), in a fashion similar to trademarks (a trademark is basically protected by using it, for unlimited time, protection ends when you stop using it - registration is optional though highly recommended).
Factual error in the summary: Norway is not a member of the EU.
Of course it's by now one of the very few countries in Europe that has chosen to stay out of the EU, still they're not a member and likely won't become a member anytime soon.
Gestures are broken because by and large software companies are too cheap and lazy to sensibly and rigorously test for what works and what doesn't
The problem of this testing is that the only way you can REALLY test it is in the real world, on consumers. A programmer or designer knows beforehand how to do something, for the very reason that they created the interface. They may think it's easy and logical - but how about someone who has never seen it? Preferably a whole lot of someones? And then you may tweak - and you will subsequently need a lot of new someones to test it as the previous someones already know exactly what's going on, so are not good test subjects any more. Just like the programmers/designers themselves.
Let the touch evolution run its course, and the good will remain and the bad will disappear naturally. Like what happened before, when the GUI came out of it's tiny niche and the average Joe who was not restricted by company policies could start creating interfaces.
He has several good points on where usability needs work, though unfortunately is light on suggesting improvements.
But you must agree with his main point: touch interfaces need work.
They're off to a great start, now it's time to discover the nuances of actual use (those that can not be discovered in the lab), and improve from there.
Point in case: the menu button in Android. It's not guaranteed to do anything: some apps use it, others not at all, and the ones that use it do not necessarily use it in every activity. I'm also "guilty" of the latter part, because some activities really have a need for extra functions (it's a great way to hide secondary and infrequently used functions such as the preferences from the main UI) and others not at all.
And the Back button in Android: he argues it should never just leave an app and drop you in the home. For the final activity, yes a confirmation may be in place. But often one app calls another (e.g. to show a location on a map) , and then it'd be irritating to have to confirm every time you go back as from a user pov it's the same app. So this is ambiguous.
The search button is even worse: most apps simply don't use it at all.
And so there are more things. Some items a long click does something, most items not. But you can't tell this beforehand - no guidelines for that, you just have to try.
Other than iOS and Android, are there any serious touch-optimised options around, then?
Symbian maybe? No experience, doesn't seem to be exactly popular. Development seems stalled.
Windows Phone 7? From reviews I understand it's not bad at all, but still no contender.
Blackberry's OS? No experience - but my image of blackberries includes a complete (albeit tiny) keyboard. And a stylus.
No others that I can think of, really. So it's just iOS and Android that really deserve attention. Would be good to see one or two more serious contenders.
A generation of developers maybe, but not all information is lost I'm sure. With accumulated knowledge, now there exist proper UI design guidelines for most platforms. 17 years ago not, as it really all had to be invented. Also I expect that schools/universities now teach user interface design based on this experience, something that this previous generation of developers never had. Those courses didn't exist back then.
What did happen though, is that a totally new way of interacting with a computer appeared. Touch interfaces were experimental only until not so long ago (iirc some 20 years ago I've seen the first demos of it - far too expensive for consumer electronics), now you see them everywhere. On top of that, those computers suddenly don't have a mouse or keyboard anymore, and their screens are often much smaller than what designers are used to.
The old UI design principles largely don't work here anymore. Buttons need to be much bigger relative to the total screen, for example. Scroll bars are for visual reasons only - not a method of control. We now touch, multi-touch, swipe or even move the device. Input methods that simply don't exist in a traditional desktop computer. Some elements can and should remain though, like radio and check buttons. And luckily mostly these elements are still there and work the same, even though we interact with them in a slightly different manner.
So while I agree with you that it's no surprise, I don't agree with the reason. I don't believe it's because of a new generation of developers, instead it's because we have a new generation of computer interaction methods. And indeed we have to learn how to really work with it, again.
They point that out in the article indeed, the face is added as an example of where it goes wrong. Their algorithm simply doesn't work well on anti-aliased images (scaled-down photos), it's primarily designed to handle typical hand-made sprites with much sharper edges and colour differences.
Flight plan... aircraft movement... whatever you call it. There is no need to keep this data for years. That's my point. I understand the idea behind filing flight plans, it helps general traffic planning. But when the flight is over, what's the use of such information?
I can understand days, maybe weeks. When an accident happens, you normally know it right away. Then you can immediately take the logs of flight movements around that area of the last hours - no more is needed for an accident investigation. Therefore also no need to keep this information for much longer.
Also planes log their own movement already in the black boxes.
How about some journalist uses this FOIA to get logs of commercial flights? And with that I mean passenger logs? When you fly within, to, or from the US, almost anything they know about you is given to the US government. Names, passport numbers, credit card details, hotel details, etc. etc. Everything. This is logged somewhere for sure - otherwise the exercise is quite useless. A single piece of information doesn't tell much; many pieces of information allow for data mining. Who traveled where? Travel companions? Who happened to be on the same plane all the time - but not booking together?
Apparently the FOIA can be used to reveal movements of private aircraft, and (maybe by linking elsewhere) to their owners. It's just a little step further to get the information on the passengers on board those planes as well. What're they waiting for? Publish it! Let the people know how much they're being spied upon! Let them feel the results of that spying, directly, immediately, personally. Maybe something good comes out of it... the end of this constant spying by the US government on their own citizens and a lot of the rest of the world.
The linked article also provides a screen shot with obscured personal information.
It appears the passwords are stored in plain text, not as hash: formatting makes it unclear but it seems the length varies, and the password fields are short (6-10 characters or so), while hashes are much longer than that.
Bad bad security! No wonder they also fall victim to the age-old SQL injection attack... which I thought most SQL interface libraries can automatically intercept by adding the appropriate escaping... many years ago I used Pythons MySQLdb and they were doing that for very very long already... so there should be no excuse for allowing this to happen still.
The first result is the "digital rights management" page of Wikipedia, where in the introduction the proper term "digital restrictions management" appears already, in bold.
The second hit is WP's disambiguation page.
And the third link points to the "digital restrictions management" page from defectivebydesign.org.
Of course, it's just that you may have to tailor the answer to the asker. Most apps you want to know the phone is rooted - that's the purpose of rooting the phone after all.
Still the workaround seems simple indeed: figure out the root detection method, and provide the correct answer to the app. Oh and simple does not necessarily mean easy:)
Slashdot Mirror
No: first sale doctrine.
You sell a device based on your patented invention, then the buyer is free to do with it what they want: using it, reselling it, renting it out, giving it away, taking it apart to see how it works...
Copyrighted stuff works much the same except maybe for the renting part.
Well no I haven't done development.
Yet I count on Nokia to not be stupid. By going for a certain piece of software (WP7) while you have a working alternative (Symbian) and a perfectly capable and very popular free alternative (Android) I would expect no less than that they can quickly release a phone with it.
Many many handset makers opt for Android - and are capable of bringing phones to the market one after another. New makers stand up all the time - no way they can spend a year or longer on development of a model. That has to be done much faster, and apparently it CAN be done faster with Android and many off-the-shelf components that make up a phone.
Is Nokia using some heavily customised, non-standard hardware platform, and are they opting for an OS that is not designed with that platform in mind? If so it's a wonder WP7 runs on it to begin with.
Or is WP7 such a pos that it takes ages to make it work?
If the answer on any of the above two questions is "yes" then Nokia is stupid. Yet I assume Nokia, which has always been one of the more trendy and technically advanced mobile phone makers, is not stupid. They must have a good reason to opt for WP7, and one of the reasons I can think of is that they want to distinguish themselves from the pack (very sensible) but then Android is also highly customisable and apparently far more mature than WP7 considering how seemingly easily it can be adapted to run on all those phones, tables, even dedicated GPS devices.
Makes you wonder where the problem lies.
Is it reliability of the screens?
Is manufacturing a problem? (on a technical level, I mean)
Or is it simply the price, which almost certainly is much higher than a regular LCD screen?
As with many products it's often hard to get going. Price is high, so not many people buying it, so relatively low numbers for manufacturing, resulting in high per-unit costs, keeping the price high.
Well for a tablet that's not too bad: put it in e-book reader and turn the thing on it's short side. That'd be great for reading when you anyway want more vertical space instead of horizontal space (it's not just because that books are taller than that they're wide).
WP7 when it was released it was already behind iOS and even Android.
WP7 was released in November 2010, with a major update expected late 2011. When it was released it was considered by reviewers to be on par with older generations of iOS and Android, not even the then-current Android 2.2 and iOS 4.1. Since then I can find only minor updates, mostly bugfixes and security fixes.
A month later Android released 2.3, since then it has released 3.0 and expects another major version before the end of this year.
Apple has since released various updates with many new functions, and is at iOS 4.3.3 with iOS 5.0 due this month.
MS is falling more and more behind with WP7. Unless a miracle happens for WP8 (but then: where's the marketing hype?) they'll only fall behind more, and Nokia is falling with it.
On the upside there is increasing confidence they'll be able to ship at least one WP7 product before the end of the year.
Now that is promising... we're just in June. Not even halfway the year. And "before the end of the year" they hope to have a single model on WP7. That's a complete generation away in the mobile phone world! And then aiming for just a single model? I thought Nokia got large in part because they had so many different models to choose from, low-end to high-end. Now it seems in the lower end they're still strong, Nokia phones are all over the place, and WP7 is high-end work.
So they're going to be completely out of the high-end phone business for a full generation? That's not good for them.
Also the announcement by Nokia to switch exclusively to WP7 is at least a few months old. That seems to me quite a long time to release a phone that can run this OS - but apparently they have none yet. And I can't imagine WP7 is that hardware-specific that they have to start from scratch. Mobile phones go the way the PC has gone: standardised hardware, generic software. Point in case: Android OS can run on an iPhone.
This announcement of completely skipping a generation (and unless MS comes out with an upgrade to WP7 in the meantime having an outdated OS) sounds like either Nokia doesn't know how to properly put together a modern high-end phone (not likely - they're one of the biggest mobile phone makers in the world), or that WP7 is not ready for use (yet it's being installed on phones by other makers already).
I may be negative but it doesn't sound like an "upside". For neither Nokia nor Microsoft. By the time Nokia comes out with their first WP7 phone, WP7 is already a year old - and that's really old. Apple and Google are by then a generation or two ahead with their offerings, and it doesn't look like the WP7 app ecosystem is taking off anywhere near as strong as the Android and iOS competitors.
So this 14% drop in stock is what they deserve. Sorry Nokia, but this kind of announcements are very worrisome. You stand a chance if you manage to bring out a complete line of smartphones by the end of the year, AND if Microsoft in the meantime manages to catch up and release a new WP system that can compare to the then-current (not now-current) Android and iOS offerings. Good luck with that.
Which means there was a lot wrong with their overall security.
It's perfectly safe to connect a USB key full of malicious software to a computer - as long as you do not run any software from that key! And you can only have software running from the USB key if 1) the OS allows this to begin with, and 2) the user (or OS - autostart or so) runs the software.
It is only reasonable to assume that a properly secured OS does not allow autorun functionality, and maybe even does not allow software to be run directly from USB sticks. Linux comes with such security features by default; I expect no less from any high-security OS used to operate such facilities.
That Stuxnet managed to find its way all the way down to PLCs in a high-security environment means that there were multiple security issues. Not just one. Some may be software related, others human related: no matter what a single security issue should never have such a huge effect on their operations.
- the customers for copied goods are not the customers a designer would normally have anyway
While (mostly) true, there is a good reason for fashion designers to crack down on copied goods: brand dilution. In Hong Kong it appears almost all women are walking around with the typical LV-styled hand bags. Standard in brown with golden logo printed all over. But of course most of those are cheap mainland-made rip-offs bought across the border or on local street markets.
Those that spend a lot of money for the real thing do not stand out anymore. There is no reason to buy such a bag anymore, and the reason for a fashion-conscious person to buy some designer stuff is to have something unique. Why else pay the big bucks?
If you think that patenting has to do with keeping things secret, then you obviously have no clue about the reason we have patents. Patents are designed to fully disclose an invention; actually a patent is supposed to be written in a way that someone skilled in the art can build the machine described in the patent. This to promote the disclosure of inventions, and with that to increase common knowledge. The reward for this full disclosure is a time-limited monopoly on the use of that invention.
A design patent is different: it means that no-one is allowed to use the same design in their products. How same is same... that's what's now in court. Of course no secrets involved here, just protection of one's intellectual property (a design patent doesn't have an expiry data afaik - I'm not sure about that point), in a fashion similar to trademarks (a trademark is basically protected by using it, for unlimited time, protection ends when you stop using it - registration is optional though highly recommended).
Factual error in the summary: Norway is not a member of the EU.
Of course it's by now one of the very few countries in Europe that has chosen to stay out of the EU, still they're not a member and likely won't become a member anytime soon.
Gestures are broken because by and large software companies are too cheap and lazy to sensibly and rigorously test for what works and what doesn't
The problem of this testing is that the only way you can REALLY test it is in the real world, on consumers. A programmer or designer knows beforehand how to do something, for the very reason that they created the interface. They may think it's easy and logical - but how about someone who has never seen it? Preferably a whole lot of someones? And then you may tweak - and you will subsequently need a lot of new someones to test it as the previous someones already know exactly what's going on, so are not good test subjects any more. Just like the programmers/designers themselves.
Let the touch evolution run its course, and the good will remain and the bad will disappear naturally. Like what happened before, when the GUI came out of it's tiny niche and the average Joe who was not restricted by company policies could start creating interfaces.
He has several good points on where usability needs work, though unfortunately is light on suggesting improvements.
But you must agree with his main point: touch interfaces need work.
They're off to a great start, now it's time to discover the nuances of actual use (those that can not be discovered in the lab), and improve from there.
UI guidelines should be clear too.
Point in case: the menu button in Android. It's not guaranteed to do anything: some apps use it, others not at all, and the ones that use it do not necessarily use it in every activity. I'm also "guilty" of the latter part, because some activities really have a need for extra functions (it's a great way to hide secondary and infrequently used functions such as the preferences from the main UI) and others not at all.
And the Back button in Android: he argues it should never just leave an app and drop you in the home. For the final activity, yes a confirmation may be in place. But often one app calls another (e.g. to show a location on a map) , and then it'd be irritating to have to confirm every time you go back as from a user pov it's the same app. So this is ambiguous.
The search button is even worse: most apps simply don't use it at all.
And so there are more things. Some items a long click does something, most items not. But you can't tell this beforehand - no guidelines for that, you just have to try.
Other than iOS and Android, are there any serious touch-optimised options around, then?
Symbian maybe? No experience, doesn't seem to be exactly popular. Development seems stalled.
Windows Phone 7? From reviews I understand it's not bad at all, but still no contender.
Blackberry's OS? No experience - but my image of blackberries includes a complete (albeit tiny) keyboard. And a stylus.
No others that I can think of, really. So it's just iOS and Android that really deserve attention. Would be good to see one or two more serious contenders.
A generation of developers maybe, but not all information is lost I'm sure. With accumulated knowledge, now there exist proper UI design guidelines for most platforms. 17 years ago not, as it really all had to be invented. Also I expect that schools/universities now teach user interface design based on this experience, something that this previous generation of developers never had. Those courses didn't exist back then.
What did happen though, is that a totally new way of interacting with a computer appeared. Touch interfaces were experimental only until not so long ago (iirc some 20 years ago I've seen the first demos of it - far too expensive for consumer electronics), now you see them everywhere. On top of that, those computers suddenly don't have a mouse or keyboard anymore, and their screens are often much smaller than what designers are used to.
The old UI design principles largely don't work here anymore. Buttons need to be much bigger relative to the total screen, for example. Scroll bars are for visual reasons only - not a method of control. We now touch, multi-touch, swipe or even move the device. Input methods that simply don't exist in a traditional desktop computer. Some elements can and should remain though, like radio and check buttons. And luckily mostly these elements are still there and work the same, even though we interact with them in a slightly different manner.
So while I agree with you that it's no surprise, I don't agree with the reason. I don't believe it's because of a new generation of developers, instead it's because we have a new generation of computer interaction methods. And indeed we have to learn how to really work with it, again.
They point that out in the article indeed, the face is added as an example of where it goes wrong. Their algorithm simply doesn't work well on anti-aliased images (scaled-down photos), it's primarily designed to handle typical hand-made sprites with much sharper edges and colour differences.
nyud.net gives a 504 gateway timeout for me... and besides that service is very slow at the best of times.
Flight plan... aircraft movement... whatever you call it. There is no need to keep this data for years. That's my point. I understand the idea behind filing flight plans, it helps general traffic planning. But when the flight is over, what's the use of such information?
And archiving it for years?
I can understand days, maybe weeks. When an accident happens, you normally know it right away. Then you can immediately take the logs of flight movements around that area of the last hours - no more is needed for an accident investigation. Therefore also no need to keep this information for much longer.
Also planes log their own movement already in the black boxes.
I wasn't talking about information on actual flights, but the information on the passengers on those flights.
Indeed... and why are they archiving those aircraft movements to begin with?
How about some journalist uses this FOIA to get logs of commercial flights? And with that I mean passenger logs? When you fly within, to, or from the US, almost anything they know about you is given to the US government. Names, passport numbers, credit card details, hotel details, etc. etc. Everything. This is logged somewhere for sure - otherwise the exercise is quite useless. A single piece of information doesn't tell much; many pieces of information allow for data mining. Who traveled where? Travel companions? Who happened to be on the same plane all the time - but not booking together?
Apparently the FOIA can be used to reveal movements of private aircraft, and (maybe by linking elsewhere) to their owners. It's just a little step further to get the information on the passengers on board those planes as well. What're they waiting for? Publish it! Let the people know how much they're being spied upon! Let them feel the results of that spying, directly, immediately, personally. Maybe something good comes out of it... the end of this constant spying by the US government on their own citizens and a lot of the rest of the world.
The linked article also provides a screen shot with obscured personal information.
It appears the passwords are stored in plain text, not as hash: formatting makes it unclear but it seems the length varies, and the password fields are short (6-10 characters or so), while hashes are much longer than that.
Bad bad security! No wonder they also fall victim to the age-old SQL injection attack... which I thought most SQL interface libraries can automatically intercept by adding the appropriate escaping... many years ago I used Pythons MySQLdb and they were doing that for very very long already... so there should be no excuse for allowing this to happen still.
A google search for DRM:
The first result is the "digital rights management" page of Wikipedia, where in the introduction the proper term "digital restrictions management" appears already, in bold.
The second hit is WP's disambiguation page.
And the third link points to the "digital restrictions management" page from defectivebydesign.org.
So not all is lost :)
Of course, it's just that you may have to tailor the answer to the asker. Most apps you want to know the phone is rooted - that's the purpose of rooting the phone after all.
Still the workaround seems simple indeed: figure out the root detection method, and provide the correct answer to the app. Oh and simple does not necessarily mean easy :)