Ahum. iPad and its coming imitators? Anyone who thinks so has been living under a rock. Days after the release of the iPad I already received advertising e-mails from Chinese manufacturers producing such lookalikes. And indeed mostly Android based, though I have also seen Windows based tablets. Same for the iPhone. That one took a little longer as the actual device outlook was a little less predictable.
The big difference starts of course with price (about half), choice (hundreds - in different sizes and colours) and functionality (Android vs. iOS).
But to say imitations are coming - well no, not really. The big manufacturers may have yet to launch imitations, but then they are always slow to react. The Chinese have their imitations on the market already for well almost as long as the real thing is there.
It is not unethical to "reformat" a page. Otherwise it would be unethical to use FF for a page designed for IE6 or the other way around.
HTML pages render different in different browsers, that is pretty much a fact of life until w3 comes with a complete reference implementation of their proposed standards. These incompatibilities already sometimes drop content. AdBlock and reader are just an extension on that behaviour.
It is easy enough to keep the other variables at bay, really.
How to set up the experiment: take four hives from a beekeeper, same hives, same colony size, etc. Ask the beekeeper to continue to take care of those four as normal. Position them say 10m apart: far enough for the phone signal to become sufficiently weak for non-exposed colonies; close enough to be in the same microclimate.
Install a phone in each of them: four phones, connected to the charger to keep them working, all connected to a remote control system to switch them on/off. Disable or remove any lights from the phone.
Leave them for a while with the phones off, just connected, look at the results (the beekeeper will know how long that has to be). Have the beekeeper keep daily records of colony health, including any fungus infection or other serious issues that he may spot. If you have a disease well that would kill part of your experiment.
Then without telling the beekeeper when and which start switching on two of the phones (double-blind).
See if there is any difference.
After a period of time, start switching on the other phones, keeping the original two off.
See if there is any difference.
This really should do the job. If there is colony collapse when the phones are on, but they restore when phones off and then the other two start to collapse, then the chance of other environmental variables is so slim. Remember we are taking hives that are fairly close together, so weather/food supply/etc is basically the same.
The main thing you have to be looking for here is reproducibility: do the colonies thrive with phones but no RF? Do they always collapse when it is switch on? Do they restore as soon as the signal is gone? If that is the case, and reproducible so, then you have a scientific result. And no need for hundreds or hives.
They had four of them, still a small sample size of course though that doesn't mean results are necessarily wrong. If the two sets behave almost identical (both controls thrive, both test hives perish, and not much difference within the pairs) and very different from the other set, then the results are very significant. That part they had correct. Putting the phones inside the hives is also not too bad an idea to increase the radiation level and get clearer results that way.
However there are several control experiments that I am missing here:
The hives with the phones but then in all four hives the phones off. Look over a few months, see what happens.
I would not use dummies in the control, but identical phones, just switched off all the time. Maybe the phones give off chemicals such as solvents or flame retardants used in the PCB production, or chemicals from the battery.
After the results come in, switch the pattern. Start switching on the phones in the hives instead, and see if the results reverse. If it is really the phones, the original hives should start to thrive, and the original hives should start to perish.
And how about the display light of the real phones? Most phones switch on their display when switched on, or when called. The light they give off is yet another difference between the two sets.
While the experiment is interesting I miss these controls. And the fact they used dummy phones means to me that it is highly possible that chemicals given off by the real phones are the culprit. There surely looks like an effect of the phones in the hive, but it needs more testing. There are too many flaws in their methods: using dummies instead of actual phones in the control, not reversing them, the display light... maybe more that I don't think of right now.
I may be old-fashioned but indeed I buy a paper almost every day. The real thing.
I also don't get the idea of reading news via Google. I now and then did a search about a news topic, but it's really hard to find the interesting/good stories, there are too many hits, and many get their stories off the same feed. It has been rare for me to hit something really.
And finally I read the news to learn what's new, and what's important. How can I search for news when I don't yet know what's going on? My newspaper's newsroom filters it nicely for me, and presents all the things that I did NOT know about yet. So that if I really want to know more at least I know what I could start searching for.
I do read papers on the Internet as well sometimes, but then I go to the web site of that paper to read what's going on. It's the same as the physical paper, just updated faster but in a less convenient format.
In the real world (at least in China) copycats are known to be able to bring copied designs of clothes, jewellery, even electronics on the market before the official brand releases them.
I doubt it. If your logo looks very much like the original Gucci logo then it may still infringe on the trademark. It is something like confusing the casual person or so, I don't know the exact definition, but I do know that if you design a logo that looks very much like the original, then you have a problem. No matter whether that is an intentional likeness or not.
Many cases have been fought out in front of a judge regarding to similar trademarks and brand names! Most familiar on/. may well be Apple Computer vs. Apple records.
Indeed. And I would almost call this story a dupe... there surely are more reasons to apply band-aid instead of starting all over than just budget. Continuity comes to mind.
I have the feeling that the ISP is doing this more using the following reasons:
1) preventing being sued by record companies for being accomplice in copyright infringement,
2) having a nice excuse to cut-off their heaviest users, saving a nice dime on their own uplink.
Remember they are a private company, and as such have the sole discretion to accept you as customer or not. They are not a public utility, not a government office, they are a private company. If the ISP doesn't like you for whatever reason (e.g. putting them at risk of copyright violation law suits) then they can simply stop doing business with you.
Like the GPL says, they need to supply everything necessary to compile, install, and run the software, except for perhaps the utility you'd use to burn the EPROM.
Mmm... that would include compilers? Third-party libaries that are linked against? Not all are available for free, some are mighty expensive, or have other restrictions. DRM comes to mind. Problems may arise when the target is custom hardware, that requires custom compilers. Now the manufacturer is required to release their changes to GCC as well, even though they are not redistributing GCC itself? Getting troublesome. I thought the GPL was not supposed to be a viral license.
The scripts is not necessarily the complete build environment. Apparently there is some code that is linked against or so that is missing - I am not programmer/lawyer enough to know whether those parts should be released as well. The problem is that you are hitting the "viral" part of the GPL: it is afaik not the idea that code that touches GPL code has to become GPL as well.
Here they are talking about "firmware tools" whatever that may be; it appears to me that this are pieces of proprietary software that are used one way or another in the compilation of the GPL'd software.
It is I think an interesting case, but I doubt it is as easy, clear, and black/white as you state it is. And, as other posters pointed out, probably one of the cases what GPLv3 was created for. It may very well be allowed under the GPLv2.
They are always after IP addresses... as if that is so clearly identifiable.
My previous ISPs gave me a de-facto static IP (in name dynamic but it didn't change much, less than once a year, and usually after network maintenance works).
My current ADSL connection at home has a dynamic IP and with dynamic they mean dynamic. I have a router which is connected all the time, but my IP address changes all the time, as in every day or even more frequently, I haven't tried to keep track of that but all the time I wrote down my IP address to allow me to connect back to home the next day it had changed. Quite irritating. Makes this kind of monitoring quite hard I'd guess.
A world where every little gadget can access the web as you approach, by using your phone.
It is easy to limit access like now with Bluetooth appliances. Just do not accept any new connection without user intervention. Actually I wonder what the advantage of WiFi over BT may be for handsets, considering BT was designed exactly for this purpose: short-range communication between devices.
Yes the iPhone is one of their major competitors. Other posts talk about the iPhone bumped to third place - is that on handset lists of on OS lists? I have the feeling when I look around me that the iPhone is the nr 1 choice for smart phones. I see that one everywhere it seems.
Google's phones are likely technologically ahead of the iPhone: tethering, being WiFi hotspot, probably faster processor, better screen, and whatnot.
The one-million-dollar (literally) question remains:
Is it going to be as user friendly and easy to use as the iPhone, and most other Apple gadgets?
After all THAT is where Apple makes the difference. Not in the hardware, even though they're primarily a hardware company. It's that the software they make, makes it easy to use. And that's what's winning them customers.
Well coming to think of it, they may get better results by showing two models each time, and then to ask you to choose which one is the more attractive of the two.
I think what the GP meant is the same what I experienced. For me (rating female models) there was none that had any significant attractiveness. There were a bunch that were clearly unattractive and got a negative rating depending on unattractiveness. All the rest got a 0 for averageness.
Wait a moment. MacOS and Win 3.1 in their time being able to run on the same hardware?
Win 3.1 has always been restricted to x86 processors.
MacOS in it's time on what was it the Motorola 68something or so. Definitely not Intels. Win 3.1 was from even before the PPC era. Especially if Amigas were still around other than as museum piece.
Now I don't know the hardware of the Amiga but I can not believe it would be able to happily emulate a totally different hardware layout, and still be speedy.
For a start there is such thing as "copyright" that covers software nicely.
Secondly there is something called a "design patent" which allows you to protect a specific design, e.g. of a machine, or of a UI. Some years ago here on/. (sorry too lazy to search) there was mentioned that Apple was granted a patent on the waste basket of OS-X. That was a design patent. Other vendors may still implement waste baskets, but they are not allowed to look just like Apple's.
And on top of that the patent system (used to) allow technical different implementations to the same result.
E.g. fans: the result is blowing air. Still there will be many different ways to (mechanically) blow air, each of which are patentable and rightfully so.
It is not the idea of blowing air that is patentable, how interesting it may be in itself, it is the implementation on how to do it that is patentable.
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Ahum. iPad and its coming imitators? Anyone who thinks so has been living under a rock. Days after the release of the iPad I already received advertising e-mails from Chinese manufacturers producing such lookalikes. And indeed mostly Android based, though I have also seen Windows based tablets. Same for the iPhone. That one took a little longer as the actual device outlook was a little less predictable.
The big difference starts of course with price (about half), choice (hundreds - in different sizes and colours) and functionality (Android vs. iOS).
But to say imitations are coming - well no, not really. The big manufacturers may have yet to launch imitations, but then they are always slow to react. The Chinese have their imitations on the market already for well almost as long as the real thing is there.
It is not unethical to "reformat" a page. Otherwise it would be unethical to use FF for a page designed for IE6 or the other way around.
HTML pages render different in different browsers, that is pretty much a fact of life until w3 comes with a complete reference implementation of their proposed standards. These incompatibilities already sometimes drop content. AdBlock and reader are just an extension on that behaviour.
It is easy enough to keep the other variables at bay, really.
How to set up the experiment: take four hives from a beekeeper, same hives, same colony size, etc. Ask the beekeeper to continue to take care of those four as normal. Position them say 10m apart: far enough for the phone signal to become sufficiently weak for non-exposed colonies; close enough to be in the same microclimate.
Install a phone in each of them: four phones, connected to the charger to keep them working, all connected to a remote control system to switch them on/off. Disable or remove any lights from the phone.
Leave them for a while with the phones off, just connected, look at the results (the beekeeper will know how long that has to be). Have the beekeeper keep daily records of colony health, including any fungus infection or other serious issues that he may spot. If you have a disease well that would kill part of your experiment.
Then without telling the beekeeper when and which start switching on two of the phones (double-blind).
See if there is any difference.
After a period of time, start switching on the other phones, keeping the original two off.
See if there is any difference.
This really should do the job. If there is colony collapse when the phones are on, but they restore when phones off and then the other two start to collapse, then the chance of other environmental variables is so slim. Remember we are taking hives that are fairly close together, so weather/food supply/etc is basically the same.
The main thing you have to be looking for here is reproducibility: do the colonies thrive with phones but no RF? Do they always collapse when it is switch on? Do they restore as soon as the signal is gone? If that is the case, and reproducible so, then you have a scientific result. And no need for hundreds or hives.
They had four of them, still a small sample size of course though that doesn't mean results are necessarily wrong. If the two sets behave almost identical (both controls thrive, both test hives perish, and not much difference within the pairs) and very different from the other set, then the results are very significant. That part they had correct. Putting the phones inside the hives is also not too bad an idea to increase the radiation level and get clearer results that way.
However there are several control experiments that I am missing here:
While the experiment is interesting I miss these controls. And the fact they used dummy phones means to me that it is highly possible that chemicals given off by the real phones are the culprit. There surely looks like an effect of the phones in the hive, but it needs more testing. There are too many flaws in their methods: using dummies instead of actual phones in the control, not reversing them, the display light... maybe more that I don't think of right now.
I may be old-fashioned but indeed I buy a paper almost every day. The real thing.
I also don't get the idea of reading news via Google. I now and then did a search about a news topic, but it's really hard to find the interesting/good stories, there are too many hits, and many get their stories off the same feed. It has been rare for me to hit something really.
And finally I read the news to learn what's new, and what's important. How can I search for news when I don't yet know what's going on? My newspaper's newsroom filters it nicely for me, and presents all the things that I did NOT know about yet. So that if I really want to know more at least I know what I could start searching for.
I do read papers on the Internet as well sometimes, but then I go to the web site of that paper to read what's going on. It's the same as the physical paper, just updated faster but in a less convenient format.
In your world the copycats are truly slow.
In the real world (at least in China) copycats are known to be able to bring copied designs of clothes, jewellery, even electronics on the market before the official brand releases them.
I doubt it. If your logo looks very much like the original Gucci logo then it may still infringe on the trademark. It is something like confusing the casual person or so, I don't know the exact definition, but I do know that if you design a logo that looks very much like the original, then you have a problem. No matter whether that is an intentional likeness or not.
Many cases have been fought out in front of a judge regarding to similar trademarks and brand names! Most familiar on /. may well be Apple Computer vs. Apple records.
We just had that discussion.
Indeed. And I would almost call this story a dupe... there surely are more reasons to apply band-aid instead of starting all over than just budget. Continuity comes to mind.
No: Windows respects DRM. The OSS world simply ignores those restrictions as soon as they can decode the stuff.
You got blocked twice?
Which means you didn't switch to another ISP already?
I have the feeling that the ISP is doing this more using the following reasons:
1) preventing being sued by record companies for being accomplice in copyright infringement,
2) having a nice excuse to cut-off their heaviest users, saving a nice dime on their own uplink.
Remember they are a private company, and as such have the sole discretion to accept you as customer or not. They are not a public utility, not a government office, they are a private company. If the ISP doesn't like you for whatever reason (e.g. putting them at risk of copyright violation law suits) then they can simply stop doing business with you.
Like the GPL says, they need to supply everything necessary to compile, install, and run the software, except for perhaps the utility you'd use to burn the EPROM.
Mmm... that would include compilers? Third-party libaries that are linked against? Not all are available for free, some are mighty expensive, or have other restrictions. DRM comes to mind. Problems may arise when the target is custom hardware, that requires custom compilers. Now the manufacturer is required to release their changes to GCC as well, even though they are not redistributing GCC itself? Getting troublesome. I thought the GPL was not supposed to be a viral license.
The scripts is not necessarily the complete build environment. Apparently there is some code that is linked against or so that is missing - I am not programmer/lawyer enough to know whether those parts should be released as well. The problem is that you are hitting the "viral" part of the GPL: it is afaik not the idea that code that touches GPL code has to become GPL as well.
Here they are talking about "firmware tools" whatever that may be; it appears to me that this are pieces of proprietary software that are used one way or another in the compilation of the GPL'd software.
It is I think an interesting case, but I doubt it is as easy, clear, and black/white as you state it is. And, as other posters pointed out, probably one of the cases what GPLv3 was created for. It may very well be allowed under the GPLv2.
They are always after IP addresses... as if that is so clearly identifiable.
My previous ISPs gave me a de-facto static IP (in name dynamic but it didn't change much, less than once a year, and usually after network maintenance works).
My current ADSL connection at home has a dynamic IP and with dynamic they mean dynamic. I have a router which is connected all the time, but my IP address changes all the time, as in every day or even more frequently, I haven't tried to keep track of that but all the time I wrote down my IP address to allow me to connect back to home the next day it had changed. Quite irritating. Makes this kind of monitoring quite hard I'd guess.
A world where every little gadget can access the web as you approach, by using your phone.
It is easy to limit access like now with Bluetooth appliances. Just do not accept any new connection without user intervention. Actually I wonder what the advantage of WiFi over BT may be for handsets, considering BT was designed exactly for this purpose: short-range communication between devices.
Yes the iPhone is one of their major competitors. Other posts talk about the iPhone bumped to third place - is that on handset lists of on OS lists? I have the feeling when I look around me that the iPhone is the nr 1 choice for smart phones. I see that one everywhere it seems.
Google's phones are likely technologically ahead of the iPhone: tethering, being WiFi hotspot, probably faster processor, better screen, and whatnot.
The one-million-dollar (literally) question remains:
Is it going to be as user friendly and easy to use as the iPhone, and most other Apple gadgets?
After all THAT is where Apple makes the difference. Not in the hardware, even though they're primarily a hardware company. It's that the software they make, makes it easy to use. And that's what's winning them customers.
Well battleships are supposed to bring a lot of death and destruction. Throwing a BSOD at the right moment may help.
Furthermore I would suggest for the period before you're dead to stick to the BSD license instead.
Well coming to think of it, they may get better results by showing two models each time, and then to ask you to choose which one is the more attractive of the two.
I think what the GP meant is the same what I experienced. For me (rating female models) there was none that had any significant attractiveness. There were a bunch that were clearly unattractive and got a negative rating depending on unattractiveness. All the rest got a 0 for averageness.
Wait a moment. MacOS and Win 3.1 in their time being able to run on the same hardware?
Win 3.1 has always been restricted to x86 processors.
MacOS in it's time on what was it the Motorola 68something or so. Definitely not Intels. Win 3.1 was from even before the PPC era. Especially if Amigas were still around other than as museum piece.
Now I don't know the hardware of the Amiga but I can not believe it would be able to happily emulate a totally different hardware layout, and still be speedy.
Or am I missing something here?
For a start there is such thing as "copyright" that covers software nicely.
Secondly there is something called a "design patent" which allows you to protect a specific design, e.g. of a machine, or of a UI. Some years ago here on /. (sorry too lazy to search) there was mentioned that Apple was granted a patent on the waste basket of OS-X. That was a design patent. Other vendors may still implement waste baskets, but they are not allowed to look just like Apple's.
And on top of that the patent system (used to) allow technical different implementations to the same result.
E.g. fans: the result is blowing air. Still there will be many different ways to (mechanically) blow air, each of which are patentable and rightfully so.
It is not the idea of blowing air that is patentable, how interesting it may be in itself, it is the implementation on how to do it that is patentable.
Maybe either you should try more, or ask her what's good and what not :)