Tablets will be used a lot more than phones for Internet usage - for phones it's a nice extra, for tablets it's what they're meant for. Just look at that silly "you folks are ahead of the curve" comment: they look at web site usage vs. overall usage, and there are basically no Android tablets before v.3. So no wonder that a web site sees Android 3 and 4 a lot more than the overall devices in use.
Same for iPads vs. Android tablets, overall. The iPad not only was released earlier taking a lot of market before Android tablets started to compete, they're still selling really well.
Which only works if they happen to have a ROM for your specific phone.
Which in my case, the LG P-500 (so old it's discontinued by now), was not the case last time I checked. Which was well over half a year ago, and some 1 1/2 years after the model was released.
In the meantime I upgraded from the stock Android 2.2 to 2.3 using a ROM I found provided by a UK telecom operator, and it's a great improvement.
and if MS where to go down they may be forced to do that in EU.
And why would that be? It's not like Apple are using one monopoly to gain in another market. They're a company that provides integrated computer systems, hardware+software. Even if they would have a monopoly I don't see any reason they should be split up, and be forced to sell their software to run on third-party hardware.
Yet they famously lifted the BSD TCP/IP implementation and incorporated it in Windows NT some 15, 20 years ago... taking full advantage of the copyleft license and available source code themselves!
OK I was exaggerating a bit - it helps getting the point across. Surely in such a situation someone would pick up the scraps, though continuity tends to be a problem in the short term.
And indeed management is likely to be better... hard to be worse than it is, after all!
Searching images and videos is an unsolved problem.
Currently you can not search Google for images: you can only search image meta data. If you want an image of a cow, you can search for images that say they are an image of a cow, but whether that image actually contains a cow or not, Google doesn't know. Also many images with a cow in it will be missed because no-one added a description to it. You may have noticed how few image search results you get are from sites like Flickr, even though they have millions upon millions of photos. They just don't have the meta data, especially no descriptions. Good luck finding the source of an image that's simply called "image.jpg" and does not have any EXIF or other meta data attached to it.
You can also not give an image as search term, like "look for images that look like this". I actually tried this a while ago, and found a web site that claims they can do it, but the results looked more like a totally random selection of images than anything remotely resembling a search.
If you think it's simple to search images based on images and not meta data, you should set up a search engine that indexes images. I'm quite sure it can make you rich if you actually pull it off.
The patent office of course can not hire experts in every single field. Vetting patents is difficult, and with technology getting more and more advanced it's getting harder to know all the little details. Having them know everything there is to know about everything, that's impossible and not reasonable.
The way it should work (don't know actual practice) is that if there is a real issue of not being innovative, then third parties may notify the patent office of just that, including relevant references and explanation, and the patent office invalidates the patent if they think it's indeed so.
Are there any AC's with an IQ above 50? This is probably the stupidest comment that I have seen here. If you have no clue whatsoever on how patents work, refrain from making these comments. Not all claims have to be unique and innovative, they just describe the complete working and outline of a device.
The fact that there are wireless standards doesn't mean no-one can come up with a new way of doing this, and subsequently patenting it. Also they do not patent "wireless charging" which, in itself, would be hard to patent - they patent a method of wireless charging using some magnetic coupling trick. And they claim they have a new way of doing this, and as such it may very well be innovative and patentable.
But well, like the summary and your outright uninformed comment the rest of the discussion here will be "patent troll hurr hurr". The first few comments that I see here are already like that, predicably.
I skimmed through the patent text, can't tell what is new and what is old. That part would require quite some deeper study, and requires understanding of the whole field. Sensationalism like from El Reg and copied by Slashdot is simply stupid. If you have read and understand the patent, and there is nothing in it that was not invented yet at the application date, please come back and let me know exactly why the patent is faulty. Please also send the same comments to the patent office, so this application may be rejected.
And the solution would be so simple. Well, technically simple, not politically of course.
Copyrights: limit the time of protection to something reasonable, anywhere from 10 to 30 years would be reasonable to me. Not the 100+ years like now. And limit by counting from time of creation, not lifetime of creator plus some time as it is now. For the rest there is not much wrong with copyrights per se.
Those RIAA law suits against file sharers are not to be solved by changing copyright, that needs a different approach. Normalising the statutory damages on copyright infringement to something more reasonable (something like $100-$1000 per count would be reasonable considering a $0.99 retail price) would be a good start.
Patents: ban patents on algorithms: software and business model patents are bad, and should never have been allowed to be patented. That's all, for the rest patents are still serving their purpose quite well.
This alone is an interesting question. How much work does one have to put in locating a work's copyright holder? How much effort do we have to put into remembering that information?
The summary already presents an interesting case: Facebook stripping metadata, such as the author name, from copies of works they receive. A short while later no-one can remember who it was from; so it is orphaned now? This would open an avenue of legal infringement. Especially with smaller works like photos it may be hard to find the original maker if the metadata is gone. Or should we consider such orphans as "copyright protected" and prohibit any further distribution unless the distributor can show they have the rights?
It's not exactly easy. Especially in this digital age where information can be wiped or added without a trace. Metadata can be stripped, it can also be added or changed, and then it becomes hard to prove which version is the original.
This means it's time for some Linux distro maker to do just that. Tie it all together. That's actually exactly what distro's are: a collection of software that's designed to work together nicely. If it's not done yet, I really wonder why.
Virtually all of MS's offerings have open source alternatives. From web servers to LDAP to e-mail and calendaring, all have open source replacements. Some more capable, some less capable - whether good enough will depend on your needs.
That it's not well integrated, I totally agree with. Years ago with Mandriva (around 2007 or so) I could just set it up to use Kerberos and LDAP for logging in to the work station and it worked perfectly; later with Ubuntu 10.04 it required serious tinkering to get this going and it's still not as good as Mandriva was. Very irritating. LDAP works great, but lacks proper maintenance tools. Or maybe they're there, I haven't found them yet. Adding a user happens less than once a year for me, so every time I've to think hard on how to do this.
Red Hat and SuSe target enterprises - don't they have such integrated solutions yet?
Euhm well yes and no. As much as I'd like to see Dr Evil go, I'd even rather see Dr Evil lose their evilness, be cut down to size, and play nicely along with the rest.
MS is a big company, it's never a good thing to see a big company fail, and not just because of the collateral damage it causes. MS going bankrupt (unlikely to happen any time soon considering how much assets they have, but just imagining) would, in short, be a disaster for this world. It would mean no more updates for Windows, and virus/malware writers would have the time of there life. There are no easy alternatives - Linux while a great alternative is by no means an easy switch, when you consider the taking along of all the user's existing data files and applications, many of which don't have a Linux version. OS-X is even worse as it requires complete change of hardware.
Secondly, MS as a big company is one of the few that can actually form viable competition against Google and Apple. Competition that's badly needed to keep those two in check.
And finally as a big company with all the money and brainpower that they have, they do have the potential to come with many innovations. The Surface is a good example of this, from the looks of it, it's a very nice device. Too bad their management can't make it really shine: too expensive, unappealing software.
So maybe something changed(?). I've always been amazed by how CIOs behave in big organizations. The trend is "we change hardware on a regular basis" but regarding the OS (ie Windows) there's never been even a question about alternatives.
Hardware is a commodity; it's a nameless (at least from the employee pov) grey box that sits on or under the desk, humming away, not to be interacted with other than to switch it on. It serves as no more than the platform on which to run the software; the internal workings are not important as long as it works.
Software is NOT a commodity. Software is what it's all about: that's what the employee/user interacts with. This can not be just replaced, as OS and applications are usually linked to one another. And until everything is running in the browser - which is what MS is afraid of - this is why they killed Netscape and stalled development of IE when it reached version 6 - it will remain like that.
Replacing hardware is a no-brainer, switching suppliers is easy and mostly painless. Switching software however may mean rebuilding what you have from the ground up. And that's quite an operation involving a lot of work and serious risks that not many companies are willing to take. Besides, why change a winning team? It's hard to deny that current Windows and other MS offerings work very well for most companies.
1% in well over a month - and pretty much all new systems come with it (MS probably made that mandatory).
At that rate it's going to take well over three years to reach the 40% mark. Mmm... Hard to believe that over a three year period only 40% of the world's computers are being replaced. Oh well, time will tell.
Solution: get competent staff. You know, people that actually know what they're doing, other than the "point there, click there" types. Linux has more options, you could use that to your advantage. You could alternatively stick to the single choice Apple gives you, or the very few choices MS gives you. Apple makes it extra easy that way, of course, less brainpower needed.
All those babies surviving is something of the last five, maybe ten generations at most. And that's in the Western world. TFA is talking about 200 generations.
There is a simple reason everything comes in different sized cartons: all products are different size. Outer and inner cartons must be full and not leave any room for a product to move around in it, or it would be damaged in transport. So unless you standardise the size of all your products, that's not going to work.
Standardising carton sizes would result in having to add heaps of filler material (adds cost: material and labour) and wasting space in trucks and shipping containers (adds more cost: less payload per job). That filler material will also mess up your robotics seriously - you still don't know where your product really is, and have more stuff to dig through.
Really, your "laughably easy" solution is just not a solution. Otherwise it would have been done already, look at other parts of transport: the Euro pallet has a size that makes them fit perfectly in rail road cars. Trucks are now being built to fit Euro pallets perfectly. And as much as possible, cartons are made to fit those pallets perfectly. For overseas transport, a 40' shipping container fits twenty standard pallets (1x1.2m) with very little room to spare. And manufacturers will make sure that their cartons stay as close as possible within those measurements. Big bags have a 1x1m footprint, and while their height may vary, the regular heights allow them to be stacked two or three on top of each other for a perfect fit.
It's likely mostly the physical skill of opening a wrapper and taking a book out of it. Or worse, some odd shaped item. That's stuck in the tight wrapper.
The first (and only photo visible to me) on that that site showed a bunch of shipping pallets aligned haphazardly with cartons stacked on top of them. Assuming one item per pallet, you go find the pallet (easy), then find which carton is currently open already (harder), then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part), and place it in your shopping trolley or whatever they use there (easy again).
Finding and scanning bar codes may also be tricky, as they're likely not on fixed locations.
Current robots work where a blind man could work. They are as good as blind, after all. And need to know exactly where to find a product, and how to take one and only one. That's not easy with all those odd shaped, and constantly changing products.
Slashdot Mirror
That's mainly phones vs. tablets.
Tablets will be used a lot more than phones for Internet usage - for phones it's a nice extra, for tablets it's what they're meant for. Just look at that silly "you folks are ahead of the curve" comment: they look at web site usage vs. overall usage, and there are basically no Android tablets before v.3. So no wonder that a web site sees Android 3 and 4 a lot more than the overall devices in use.
Same for iPads vs. Android tablets, overall. The iPad not only was released earlier taking a lot of market before Android tablets started to compete, they're still selling really well.
Which only works if they happen to have a ROM for your specific phone.
Which in my case, the LG P-500 (so old it's discontinued by now), was not the case last time I checked. Which was well over half a year ago, and some 1 1/2 years after the model was released.
In the meantime I upgraded from the stock Android 2.2 to 2.3 using a ROM I found provided by a UK telecom operator, and it's a great improvement.
and if MS where to go down they may be forced to do that in EU.
And why would that be? It's not like Apple are using one monopoly to gain in another market. They're a company that provides integrated computer systems, hardware+software. Even if they would have a monopoly I don't see any reason they should be split up, and be forced to sell their software to run on third-party hardware.
Yet they famously lifted the BSD TCP/IP implementation and incorporated it in Windows NT some 15, 20 years ago... taking full advantage of the copyleft license and available source code themselves!
OK I was exaggerating a bit - it helps getting the point across. Surely in such a situation someone would pick up the scraps, though continuity tends to be a problem in the short term.
And indeed management is likely to be better... hard to be worse than it is, after all!
Searching images and videos is an unsolved problem.
Currently you can not search Google for images: you can only search image meta data. If you want an image of a cow, you can search for images that say they are an image of a cow, but whether that image actually contains a cow or not, Google doesn't know. Also many images with a cow in it will be missed because no-one added a description to it. You may have noticed how few image search results you get are from sites like Flickr, even though they have millions upon millions of photos. They just don't have the meta data, especially no descriptions. Good luck finding the source of an image that's simply called "image.jpg" and does not have any EXIF or other meta data attached to it.
You can also not give an image as search term, like "look for images that look like this". I actually tried this a while ago, and found a web site that claims they can do it, but the results looked more like a totally random selection of images than anything remotely resembling a search.
If you think it's simple to search images based on images and not meta data, you should set up a search engine that indexes images. I'm quite sure it can make you rich if you actually pull it off.
The patent office of course can not hire experts in every single field. Vetting patents is difficult, and with technology getting more and more advanced it's getting harder to know all the little details. Having them know everything there is to know about everything, that's impossible and not reasonable.
The way it should work (don't know actual practice) is that if there is a real issue of not being innovative, then third parties may notify the patent office of just that, including relevant references and explanation, and the patent office invalidates the patent if they think it's indeed so.
Are there any AC's with an IQ above 50? This is probably the stupidest comment that I have seen here. If you have no clue whatsoever on how patents work, refrain from making these comments. Not all claims have to be unique and innovative, they just describe the complete working and outline of a device.
Please explain exactly how Tesla's invention is covered by the claims in this patent. That would be enlightening.
The fact that there are wireless standards doesn't mean no-one can come up with a new way of doing this, and subsequently patenting it. Also they do not patent "wireless charging" which, in itself, would be hard to patent - they patent a method of wireless charging using some magnetic coupling trick. And they claim they have a new way of doing this, and as such it may very well be innovative and patentable.
But well, like the summary and your outright uninformed comment the rest of the discussion here will be "patent troll hurr hurr". The first few comments that I see here are already like that, predicably.
I skimmed through the patent text, can't tell what is new and what is old. That part would require quite some deeper study, and requires understanding of the whole field. Sensationalism like from El Reg and copied by Slashdot is simply stupid. If you have read and understand the patent, and there is nothing in it that was not invented yet at the application date, please come back and let me know exactly why the patent is faulty. Please also send the same comments to the patent office, so this application may be rejected.
And the solution would be so simple. Well, technically simple, not politically of course.
Copyrights: limit the time of protection to something reasonable, anywhere from 10 to 30 years would be reasonable to me. Not the 100+ years like now. And limit by counting from time of creation, not lifetime of creator plus some time as it is now. For the rest there is not much wrong with copyrights per se.
Those RIAA law suits against file sharers are not to be solved by changing copyright, that needs a different approach. Normalising the statutory damages on copyright infringement to something more reasonable (something like $100-$1000 per count would be reasonable considering a $0.99 retail price) would be a good start.
Patents: ban patents on algorithms: software and business model patents are bad, and should never have been allowed to be patented. That's all, for the rest patents are still serving their purpose quite well.
This alone is an interesting question. How much work does one have to put in locating a work's copyright holder? How much effort do we have to put into remembering that information?
The summary already presents an interesting case: Facebook stripping metadata, such as the author name, from copies of works they receive. A short while later no-one can remember who it was from; so it is orphaned now? This would open an avenue of legal infringement. Especially with smaller works like photos it may be hard to find the original maker if the metadata is gone. Or should we consider such orphans as "copyright protected" and prohibit any further distribution unless the distributor can show they have the rights?
It's not exactly easy. Especially in this digital age where information can be wiped or added without a trace. Metadata can be stripped, it can also be added or changed, and then it becomes hard to prove which version is the original.
This means it's time for some Linux distro maker to do just that. Tie it all together. That's actually exactly what distro's are: a collection of software that's designed to work together nicely. If it's not done yet, I really wonder why.
Virtually all of MS's offerings have open source alternatives. From web servers to LDAP to e-mail and calendaring, all have open source replacements. Some more capable, some less capable - whether good enough will depend on your needs.
That it's not well integrated, I totally agree with. Years ago with Mandriva (around 2007 or so) I could just set it up to use Kerberos and LDAP for logging in to the work station and it worked perfectly; later with Ubuntu 10.04 it required serious tinkering to get this going and it's still not as good as Mandriva was. Very irritating. LDAP works great, but lacks proper maintenance tools. Or maybe they're there, I haven't found them yet. Adding a user happens less than once a year for me, so every time I've to think hard on how to do this.
Red Hat and SuSe target enterprises - don't they have such integrated solutions yet?
That would not explain the difference in price rises (8-400%).
At the time of the release of WinNT (mid 1990s), Linux was not an alternative.
Euhm well yes and no. As much as I'd like to see Dr Evil go, I'd even rather see Dr Evil lose their evilness, be cut down to size, and play nicely along with the rest.
MS is a big company, it's never a good thing to see a big company fail, and not just because of the collateral damage it causes. MS going bankrupt (unlikely to happen any time soon considering how much assets they have, but just imagining) would, in short, be a disaster for this world. It would mean no more updates for Windows, and virus/malware writers would have the time of there life. There are no easy alternatives - Linux while a great alternative is by no means an easy switch, when you consider the taking along of all the user's existing data files and applications, many of which don't have a Linux version. OS-X is even worse as it requires complete change of hardware.
Secondly, MS as a big company is one of the few that can actually form viable competition against Google and Apple. Competition that's badly needed to keep those two in check.
And finally as a big company with all the money and brainpower that they have, they do have the potential to come with many innovations. The Surface is a good example of this, from the looks of it, it's a very nice device. Too bad their management can't make it really shine: too expensive, unappealing software.
So maybe something changed(?). I've always been amazed by how CIOs behave in big organizations. The trend is "we change hardware on a regular basis" but regarding the OS (ie Windows) there's never been even a question about alternatives.
Hardware is a commodity; it's a nameless (at least from the employee pov) grey box that sits on or under the desk, humming away, not to be interacted with other than to switch it on. It serves as no more than the platform on which to run the software; the internal workings are not important as long as it works.
Software is NOT a commodity. Software is what it's all about: that's what the employee/user interacts with. This can not be just replaced, as OS and applications are usually linked to one another. And until everything is running in the browser - which is what MS is afraid of - this is why they killed Netscape and stalled development of IE when it reached version 6 - it will remain like that.
Replacing hardware is a no-brainer, switching suppliers is easy and mostly painless. Switching software however may mean rebuilding what you have from the ground up. And that's quite an operation involving a lot of work and serious risks that not many companies are willing to take. Besides, why change a winning team? It's hard to deny that current Windows and other MS offerings work very well for most companies.
1% in well over a month - and pretty much all new systems come with it (MS probably made that mandatory).
At that rate it's going to take well over three years to reach the 40% mark. Mmm... Hard to believe that over a three year period only 40% of the world's computers are being replaced. Oh well, time will tell.
1) Nokia is not a subsidiary of Microsoft yet.
FTFY.
Current strategy seems to be to make Nokia as a company lose a lot of value so they're easier to buy out later.
Solution: get competent staff. You know, people that actually know what they're doing, other than the "point there, click there" types. Linux has more options, you could use that to your advantage. You could alternatively stick to the single choice Apple gives you, or the very few choices MS gives you. Apple makes it extra easy that way, of course, less brainpower needed.
All those babies surviving is something of the last five, maybe ten generations at most. And that's in the Western world. TFA is talking about 200 generations.
Just installed Ubuntu's latest updates including FF 17, but still no luck there.
There is a simple reason everything comes in different sized cartons: all products are different size. Outer and inner cartons must be full and not leave any room for a product to move around in it, or it would be damaged in transport. So unless you standardise the size of all your products, that's not going to work.
Standardising carton sizes would result in having to add heaps of filler material (adds cost: material and labour) and wasting space in trucks and shipping containers (adds more cost: less payload per job). That filler material will also mess up your robotics seriously - you still don't know where your product really is, and have more stuff to dig through.
Really, your "laughably easy" solution is just not a solution. Otherwise it would have been done already, look at other parts of transport: the Euro pallet has a size that makes them fit perfectly in rail road cars. Trucks are now being built to fit Euro pallets perfectly. And as much as possible, cartons are made to fit those pallets perfectly. For overseas transport, a 40' shipping container fits twenty standard pallets (1x1.2m) with very little room to spare. And manufacturers will make sure that their cartons stay as close as possible within those measurements. Big bags have a 1x1m footprint, and while their height may vary, the regular heights allow them to be stacked two or three on top of each other for a perfect fit.
It's likely mostly the physical skill of opening a wrapper and taking a book out of it. Or worse, some odd shaped item. That's stuck in the tight wrapper.
The first (and only photo visible to me) on that that site showed a bunch of shipping pallets aligned haphazardly with cartons stacked on top of them. Assuming one item per pallet, you go find the pallet (easy), then find which carton is currently open already (harder), then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part), and place it in your shopping trolley or whatever they use there (easy again).
Finding and scanning bar codes may also be tricky, as they're likely not on fixed locations.
Current robots work where a blind man could work. They are as good as blind, after all. And need to know exactly where to find a product, and how to take one and only one. That's not easy with all those odd shaped, and constantly changing products.
Indeed, all the more reason to remove the binaries from usenet.