What are you going to foreclose on when little Johnny goes into default on his $100,000 loan debt because he can't find a job? You going to foreclose on and resell his worthless degree?
What happened in the UK is that there was a small movement that encouraged students to declare bankruptcy after graduating, at which point all of their debt would be cleared. It made sense, since bankruptcy isn't really the shame it once was, and personal credit ratings can be rebuilt. From a logical perspective, it's the same as "earning" the value of your debt ($15k+) by spending less than an hour filling in some forms. Obviously this would put the system into some jeopardy if everyone did it, so the government responded by changing the law so that student debt is exempt from the bankruptcy laws. There is no way to clear your student debt through default. Even if you default, it stays with you. And it will soon be mandatory for employers to take the student debt repayments from your salary before paying you. I expect the U.S. will probably enact similar laws to preserve the system.
Your post is entirely conjecture and personal opinion. What percentage of Android users are switching to iPhones? What percentage of Android users are unhappy with their phones? Every Android user I know is happy with their phone, and none has complained of lag or instability. Normal people just really do not care that much about software versions... they mostly want their phones to surf the net, send texts, and call people... That's all. An inexpensive Android phone is perfectly adequate for these functions, and costs a lot less than an iPhone.
Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It says "Net Market Share: Windows 7 30.6%, Windows XP 52.46%" And, since the OP comparison was to *every* Android device ever released, then the valid comparison here is to *every* Windows PC ever released, not just XP, so include Vista at 9.4% and the others.
Also, you are forgetting that market share includes all the PCs that have been sold with Windows 7 pre-installed. Those do not count as upgraded. So, the question is: what percentage of PCs running Windows (XP, Vista, 2003, etc.) have been upgraded to Windows 7? Microsoft says they have sold 400 million total. Current PC sales are 250 million PCs / year. Windows 7 has been shipping on retail PCs for 2 years. Do the math - the percentage of (XP,Vista,etc.) systems that got upgraded is not big.
And this thinking is why Apple is cleaning up. Ease of updates is not separate from usability.
Your comparison is invalid. You are comparing updates for a no-longer-supported platform to one that is still supported. The valid comparison is:
Upgrade a manufacturer supported Android phone or iPhone: Very easy
Upgrade a manufacturer unsupported Android phone: Not easy for an average person, but not that difficult for a technologically minded person
Upgrade a manufacturer unsupported iPhone: Near impossible for anyone except hardcore hackers
95% of the consumers out there just want a cool phone that does what they want.
The vast majority of consumers don't care about software updates. If this were a deal-breaker for them, then they wouldn't be buying phones without a contractual arrangement for software updates in place. This is simple capitalism - if people cared about software updates, then they would make sure that it was going to happen.
So your friend had relatively simple needs that would have been satisfied with an entry-level Android phone, and yet you told him to get a phone that costs four times more just so that he can upgrade the operating system in 12 months time? Did he even ask for that? Did he need this facility? Would his phone have suddenly stopped working without an update next year? There are plenty of people still using old unsupported iPhones - do you think that the lack of software updates stops them from browsing the internet?
Android phones are great for enthusiasts but for my friend & most other folks, the iPhone is a better choice.
iPhone 3G and every iPhone before it no longer has software updates. They don't even have the option of user supported updates like Cyanogenmod. The iPhone is not the answer to the "software updates for life" problem.
And Windows 7 has been available for 2 years and less than 20% of Windows PCs have been upgraded....
It's easy to do updates when you have a brand new OS with a limited number of hardware platforms to test - all of which are still being manufactured and sold. Just wait until those Windows Phones go EOL over the next 24 months as new models are brought to the market. How many manufacturers and networks are going to be willing to support updates of old phones, which they make no money from? It seems inevitable that, at some point, Microsoft will stop providing updates for old phones. Just look at the hardware platforms that have already shipped with Android. It is not feasible to test the functionality of upgrades on all of these devices. If Windows Phone turns out to be as popular (and that's a big *if*), then they are going to end up in the same boat.
It's a good point, but I've come to the conclusion that the majority of people just don't care. The average person buys a new phone every 20 months. They don't care if their old phone runs out-of-date software, because they aren't going to use it anymore. The networks don't care about software upgrades, because they are in the business of selling new phones with the latest software. The consumer doesn't care, because they buy new phones with the latest software. This situation will not change until the phone, the network provider, and the software are decoupled like in the PC market. PC operating systems run on old hardware because the software is available from alternative providers to the hardware. The likes of Sony, Acer etc. would love to lock software to their hardware, so that they could sell you a new PC every 2 years instead of you having the ability to upgrade your system without them making a profit.
Having said that, most PC owners run out-of-date operating systems, and they don't care, so long as they can go on the internet and play Farmville. So don't expect miracles from the cell phone industry; even if people had the ability to upgrade the software on their phones, most won't bother.
Shin said that the past six months of lawsuits in which Samsung and Apple have filed numerous suits and countersuits was "just the start" of a long patent war, from which he sees no end in sight.... Samsung added personnel to its legal team to ramp up the battle against Apple and plans to hire more lawyers, according to Shin. "(I realized that) having technological power and being business savvy aren't enough," he said.
How is this innovation? The patent system is encouraging companies to spend money on lawyers and lawsuits instead of engineers and technology. Instead of doing proper development, engineers have to waste their time making minor visual changes to a product line in the vague hope that someday a judge will find that these changes are significant enough to make a product "not infringing" of some random patent.
Using a global patent war to get a competitor's products banned outright is certainly an innovation in the competitive capitalist marketplace. And from a legal perspective, maybe corporate lawyers all over the world are now thinking, "yes, that's innovative! That's what we should be doing!".. But don't confuse this with technological innovation.
Having said that, it isn't even clear how the Galaxy Nexus design is supposed to avoid Apple's design patents - it is clearly still a phone with a glass screen and rounded corners, so I doubt Apple's legal team is going to back down.
The correct question is: intuitive for whom? Tens of thousands of web developers around the world seem to manage okay developing layouts in HTML/XHTML (you might argue that HTML isn't XML, but I would argue it's close enough that you won't find one intuitive and the other not). Is it intuitive for them? For many it is. Would it be intuitive for my grandmother? Certainly not. Remember that creating a layout in XML doesn't actually require writing XML - the Android plugin for Eclipse enables XML layouts to be created by drag-and-drop of GUI widgets, no XML editing necessary.
Gnome and other GUI frameworks have allowed layouts to be specified in XML for a long time, and there are other frameworks like QML that allow declarative descriptions of layouts in non-XML based languages. Is it the declarative nature of the task that makes it non-intuitive for you? Or is it the use of XML, rather than another declarative language like QML? There are many programmers who find declarative GUI layouts to be preferable to programatic ones, and there are many who are familiar with XML and prefer to use it rather than learn another custom layout language.
The math has been done and it is clear:
Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Okay, I'll bite... if the math has been done and is clear, where is it? Obviously there is a lot of free space outside the Earth, but there is more to providing a habitable environment than unused volume; in fact, as far as I am aware nobody has ever claimed that it is a lack of unused landmass that is the constraint holding back continued expansion of the human population. A lack of energy, a lack of clean water, a lack of arable land, a lack of food, a lack of raw resources, a lack of medical care, these are all factors. But how is moving into space going to solve these problems? If we can't effectively harness solar energy on Earth, and we can't geo-engineer our deserts to grow crops, and we can't provide enough raw materials, clean water and medicine to our growing populations, then how are we supposed to solve the exact same problems in space - where everything is orders of magnitude more difficult?
The problems that we have supporting growing populations here on Earth are only a subset of the problems of doing the same in outer space. I don't see how solving these problems in the domain of space could ever be easier than solving the same problems in the domain of Earth. Yes, if these problems were all solved, and free space were the prevailing constraint, then space might be the answer, but we already have 510 million square kilometers of surface here on Earth, all of which could hypothetically be covered in 20km high skyscrapers, so we are a long way away from lack of free space being the dominant constraint on growth.
If expansion of a species into deep space is so easy, and the Drake equation valid, then where is everyone? Where are all of the alien species that should be visiting our planet? Why hasn't the first deep-space faring species colonised the entire universe? I mean, as soon as humans built boats, we spread out across the world and colonised every habitable continent and scrap of land. Why hasn't the same thing happened on an intergalactic level? The possibilities I see are:
1. We are the first intelligent species to evolve. Highly unlikely but possible.
2. Expansion of a species into deep space is not feasible in terms of energy and other resources. Every intelligent species that has evolved to this point has hit this constraint.
3. The Prime Directive. Seems unlikely - we can't get global agreement on borders and border controls, and yet alien governments manage to stop every single one of their citizens from visiting Earth? There are no rebellious alien youths? No Mathias Rusts?
20% thought we had been farther than the Moon. Some were indignant on learning the truth: “What do we use the space shuttle for, if not to go to the Moon?!” I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost, certainly beyond the Moon, and likely strategically located next to a wormhole.
20% of physics students, at this university level, thought that humanity had traveled beyond the Moon? And some thought that we routinely use the shuttle to travel to the moon...
"Stuxnet source code is not out there. Only the original authors have it. So, this new backdoor was created by the same party that created Stuxnet." - F-Secure.
Thanks for the link. Yes, it says $1.5b revenue for desktop and $3.5b for laptop. Don't know exact profits but Deutsche Bank report says Apple is the most profitable personal computer manufacturer, they suggest other companies lose profit margin because they have to pay Microsoft for software.
Apple *is* in fact making huge profits from its Mac division - about $5B last *quarter*
That figure is for all divisions, not just personal computers. Anyway, it terms of PC manufacturers, then yes, Apple is highly profitable compared to the likes of Asus, Fujitsu etc. You may find this interesting.
Apple take more than 50% of the profit in the phone industry by owning only 4% of the market-share.
4.6% is the Garner figure for all Apple phones globally. Nielsen says Apple's market-share of smartphones is 28%. I suppose it depends on whether you count smartphones as a distinct market segment or not. Most figures these days do seem to be presented in terms of smartphone market share rather than overall phone market share.
For instance, Apple might have 5% of the computer market but they are making tons of profit while other makers sell much more volume but make less profit.
Exactly. At one time, Apple had a huge chunk of the home computer market. Then a standards-based competitor with multiple manufacturers appeared, and Apple market share was driven down into the single digits. Apple do not want a repeat of this situation. The second point to be made here is that Apple isn't actually making huge profits from the home computer business - the vast bulk of Apple's profits now come from the IOS devices where they have good market share (50%+ depending on device type).
If the wireless patents are essential then they should be covered by the FRAND terms of the 3G standardisation process. In contrast, Apple's patents are "design patents" - a special type of patent that covers the form and appearance of items. These are two very different types of patents, covered by different contractual terms, and so they will get treated differently by the courts. In terms of the design patent, the Samsung photo frame predates the iPad design patent and has a strikingly similar form, though obviously it is not a tablet.
Your quote doesn't say anything about a patent pool. There is no single patent pool that you can license that covers the 3G FRAND patents. You have to go to each patent holder individually and arrange a license agreement that covers their FRAND patents. From TFA it appears the judge has found that Samsung's patents should be covered by the FRAND agreement, and has sent them back to the negotiating table. This means that Apple still needs to get a license for those patents. This puts Apple in basically the same situation as they were with Nokia; expect to see a large cash settlement.
Except there is no such thing as "a license for the 3G RAND patent pool". Engadget had a patent lawyer write an understandable article on the situation in 2009. Because of patent cross-licensing, and the fact that there is no independent examination of potential FRAND patents during the standardisation process, the result is that a) nobody really knows which patents are (or should be) considered FRAND, and b) there is no "fixed price" for licensing FRAND patents. "In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a 'fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory' license actually is."
Samsung's patent that they're now saying apple doesn't have a license for is required to implement 3G, because of this, they were legally obliged to put it into the patent pool.
Once again, there is no single "3G patent pool" to license. When you deal with these FRAND patents, you have to license the patents of each patent holder individually.
That's where they failed at negotiating –they didn't disclose the existence of the patent
No, you are mixing up two things here. The "failure at negotiating" that the judge referred to is regarding the negotiations between Apple and Samsung in the last year. It is a completely unrelated issue to Samsung's dealings with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute who defined the 3G wireless standards a decade ago.
Yeah, all corporations stretch the truth about the success of their product deployments... remember Microsoft trumpeting their London Stock Exchange big success story? But it turned out that the LSE had so many problems they eventually dumped the entire platform and bought a provider of Linux-based systems instead. Microsoft don't talk about that so much anymore.
But then what did you expect, that a corporation would actually come out and tell the truth? "We deployed our software at customer site; it was problematic and buggy, and led to downtime and multiple redesigns, patches and redeployments." Too much honesty, marketing would never allow it.
Those two choices are not mutually exclusive, and they aren't even the right choices. You have mixed up two things: 1) building the network 2) building the devices that will use the network. The real choice is:
1. A large wireless network supplied by Huawei, and manufactured in China, which the government can monitor or shut down with relative ease.
2. A large wireless network supplied by companyX, and manufactured in China, which the government can monitor or shut down with relative ease.
The devices that will use the network being a "vast semi-regulated sea of Chinese-built devices of all kinds flowing into the US" is already a given, because every wireless manufacturer uses Chinese factories.
Right now, I'm just amazed how bad other tech companies are at design. They're REALLY, REALLY bad. Remember when computers were sold with 500 page instruction manuals, and everyone was arguing over who had the better instruction manual, and then Apple comes along, and throws the instruction manual away, and everyone's like WTF? And people liked it, because they manage to design computers to be intuitive.
People said the same about Microsoft when Windows was first released, and then again when Windows 95 was released... The first time a person sees an interface that they like, and that is significantly better than the one they previously used, they believe it is a revolution. Of course, it is nothing of the sort, merely incremental advances on previous achievements.
The only thing that ever came close to Apple over the last 30 years was the introduction of Google search bar, with no other crap around it.
There has been plenty of great technology with good HCI over the last 30 years. You are just unaware or unwilling to acknowledge it. Think: Nokia, Nintendo, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, IBM, etc. In software, Windows, OS/2, Borland, BeOS, Netscape, all had interfaces that were supposedly "revolutionary" in their day.
(remember the old search engines??
I remember Google search looking pretty much like Altavista, except with better results.
let the PC die
Huh? You do realise that the modern Mac is just a PC with some software pre-installed? If it weren't for the PC, there would be no Intel Macs.
The Lockheed Martin breakin is being used to suggest that the RSA hack must have been carried out by a nation state. However, it is clear from the past that there are individuals (e.g. Gary McKinnon) have both the motivation and capability to break into U.S. military sites. Security "experts" like those at RSA consistently (and conveniently) underestimate the capabilities of individual hackers and hacker groups, and yet the past 15 years have shown that military sites, government sites, security expert sites, credit card processors, etc. have all been routinely hacked.
The truth is that hacking is not actually that difficult. If you have a zero-day remote exploit, and you automate a scan of millions of domains, then it is highly likely that you will find some (or many) that are vulnerable, regardless of whether they are.gov,.mil,.com, or whatever. Once in, it is trivial to install a rootkit and scoop up all of the outgoing ssh passwords, and to exploit the existing trust relationships. Most sites don't keep up to date with security patches - I have worked with companies that are still running Red Hat based systems from 2004 with no security patches. Getting root on these systems is absolutely trivial. And I guess that is the big secret that RSA and the other security companies don't want you to know - that hacking is pretty easy, and that groups like lulzsec, that routinely penetrate respected corporations, are not gifted geniuses, just skilled computer engineers with a stash of exploits.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you going to foreclose on when little Johnny goes into default on his $100,000 loan debt because he can't find a job? You going to foreclose on and resell his worthless degree?
What happened in the UK is that there was a small movement that encouraged students to declare bankruptcy after graduating, at which point all of their debt would be cleared. It made sense, since bankruptcy isn't really the shame it once was, and personal credit ratings can be rebuilt. From a logical perspective, it's the same as "earning" the value of your debt ($15k+) by spending less than an hour filling in some forms. Obviously this would put the system into some jeopardy if everyone did it, so the government responded by changing the law so that student debt is exempt from the bankruptcy laws. There is no way to clear your student debt through default. Even if you default, it stays with you. And it will soon be mandatory for employers to take the student debt repayments from your salary before paying you. I expect the U.S. will probably enact similar laws to preserve the system.
Your post is entirely conjecture and personal opinion. What percentage of Android users are switching to iPhones? What percentage of Android users are unhappy with their phones? Every Android user I know is happy with their phone, and none has complained of lag or instability. Normal people just really do not care that much about software versions... they mostly want their phones to surf the net, send texts, and call people... That's all. An inexpensive Android phone is perfectly adequate for these functions, and costs a lot less than an iPhone.
Did you even read the Wikipedia article you linked to? It says "Net Market Share: Windows 7 30.6%, Windows XP 52.46%" And, since the OP comparison was to *every* Android device ever released, then the valid comparison here is to *every* Windows PC ever released, not just XP, so include Vista at 9.4% and the others.
Also, you are forgetting that market share includes all the PCs that have been sold with Windows 7 pre-installed. Those do not count as upgraded. So, the question is: what percentage of PCs running Windows (XP, Vista, 2003, etc.) have been upgraded to Windows 7? Microsoft says they have sold 400 million total. Current PC sales are 250 million PCs / year. Windows 7 has been shipping on retail PCs for 2 years. Do the math - the percentage of (XP,Vista,etc.) systems that got upgraded is not big.
The metrics are a bit useless since he hasn't even used the same RAID configuration - three use RAID10, and the others RAID2 and RAID5.
And this thinking is why Apple is cleaning up. Ease of updates is not separate from usability.
Your comparison is invalid. You are comparing updates for a no-longer-supported platform to one that is still supported. The valid comparison is:
95% of the consumers out there just want a cool phone that does what they want.
The vast majority of consumers don't care about software updates. If this were a deal-breaker for them, then they wouldn't be buying phones without a contractual arrangement for software updates in place. This is simple capitalism - if people cared about software updates, then they would make sure that it was going to happen.
Android phones are great for enthusiasts but for my friend & most other folks, the iPhone is a better choice.
iPhone 3G and every iPhone before it no longer has software updates. They don't even have the option of user supported updates like Cyanogenmod. The iPhone is not the answer to the "software updates for life" problem.
And Windows 7 has been available for 2 years and less than 20% of Windows PCs have been upgraded....
It's easy to do updates when you have a brand new OS with a limited number of hardware platforms to test - all of which are still being manufactured and sold. Just wait until those Windows Phones go EOL over the next 24 months as new models are brought to the market. How many manufacturers and networks are going to be willing to support updates of old phones, which they make no money from? It seems inevitable that, at some point, Microsoft will stop providing updates for old phones. Just look at the hardware platforms that have already shipped with Android. It is not feasible to test the functionality of upgrades on all of these devices. If Windows Phone turns out to be as popular (and that's a big *if*), then they are going to end up in the same boat.
It's a good point, but I've come to the conclusion that the majority of people just don't care. The average person buys a new phone every 20 months. They don't care if their old phone runs out-of-date software, because they aren't going to use it anymore. The networks don't care about software upgrades, because they are in the business of selling new phones with the latest software. The consumer doesn't care, because they buy new phones with the latest software. This situation will not change until the phone, the network provider, and the software are decoupled like in the PC market. PC operating systems run on old hardware because the software is available from alternative providers to the hardware. The likes of Sony, Acer etc. would love to lock software to their hardware, so that they could sell you a new PC every 2 years instead of you having the ability to upgrade your system without them making a profit.
Having said that, most PC owners run out-of-date operating systems, and they don't care, so long as they can go on the internet and play Farmville. So don't expect miracles from the cell phone industry; even if people had the ability to upgrade the software on their phones, most won't bother.
Shin said that the past six months of lawsuits in which Samsung and Apple have filed numerous suits and countersuits was "just the start" of a long patent war, from which he sees no end in sight. ... Samsung added personnel to its legal team to ramp up the battle against Apple and plans to hire more lawyers, according to Shin. "(I realized that) having technological power and being business savvy aren't enough," he said.
How is this innovation? The patent system is encouraging companies to spend money on lawyers and lawsuits instead of engineers and technology. Instead of doing proper development, engineers have to waste their time making minor visual changes to a product line in the vague hope that someday a judge will find that these changes are significant enough to make a product "not infringing" of some random patent.
Using a global patent war to get a competitor's products banned outright is certainly an innovation in the competitive capitalist marketplace. And from a legal perspective, maybe corporate lawyers all over the world are now thinking, "yes, that's innovative! That's what we should be doing!".. But don't confuse this with technological innovation.
Having said that, it isn't even clear how the Galaxy Nexus design is supposed to avoid Apple's design patents - it is clearly still a phone with a glass screen and rounded corners, so I doubt Apple's legal team is going to back down.
The correct question is: intuitive for whom? Tens of thousands of web developers around the world seem to manage okay developing layouts in HTML/XHTML (you might argue that HTML isn't XML, but I would argue it's close enough that you won't find one intuitive and the other not). Is it intuitive for them? For many it is. Would it be intuitive for my grandmother? Certainly not. Remember that creating a layout in XML doesn't actually require writing XML - the Android plugin for Eclipse enables XML layouts to be created by drag-and-drop of GUI widgets, no XML editing necessary.
Gnome and other GUI frameworks have allowed layouts to be specified in XML for a long time, and there are other frameworks like QML that allow declarative descriptions of layouts in non-XML based languages. Is it the declarative nature of the task that makes it non-intuitive for you? Or is it the use of XML, rather than another declarative language like QML? There are many programmers who find declarative GUI layouts to be preferable to programatic ones, and there are many who are familiar with XML and prefer to use it rather than learn another custom layout language.
The math has been done and it is clear: Habitats fabricated in free space can provide thousands of times more habitable surface area than Earth.
Okay, I'll bite... if the math has been done and is clear, where is it? Obviously there is a lot of free space outside the Earth, but there is more to providing a habitable environment than unused volume; in fact, as far as I am aware nobody has ever claimed that it is a lack of unused landmass that is the constraint holding back continued expansion of the human population. A lack of energy, a lack of clean water, a lack of arable land, a lack of food, a lack of raw resources, a lack of medical care, these are all factors. But how is moving into space going to solve these problems? If we can't effectively harness solar energy on Earth, and we can't geo-engineer our deserts to grow crops, and we can't provide enough raw materials, clean water and medicine to our growing populations, then how are we supposed to solve the exact same problems in space - where everything is orders of magnitude more difficult?
The problems that we have supporting growing populations here on Earth are only a subset of the problems of doing the same in outer space. I don't see how solving these problems in the domain of space could ever be easier than solving the same problems in the domain of Earth. Yes, if these problems were all solved, and free space were the prevailing constraint, then space might be the answer, but we already have 510 million square kilometers of surface here on Earth, all of which could hypothetically be covered in 20km high skyscrapers, so we are a long way away from lack of free space being the dominant constraint on growth.
If expansion of a species into deep space is so easy, and the Drake equation valid, then where is everyone? Where are all of the alien species that should be visiting our planet? Why hasn't the first deep-space faring species colonised the entire universe? I mean, as soon as humans built boats, we spread out across the world and colonised every habitable continent and scrap of land. Why hasn't the same thing happened on an intergalactic level? The possibilities I see are:
1. We are the first intelligent species to evolve. Highly unlikely but possible.
2. Expansion of a species into deep space is not feasible in terms of energy and other resources. Every intelligent species that has evolved to this point has hit this constraint.
3. The Prime Directive. Seems unlikely - we can't get global agreement on borders and border controls, and yet alien governments manage to stop every single one of their citizens from visiting Earth? There are no rebellious alien youths? No Mathias Rusts?
The rest of the quote was hilarious though
20% thought we had been farther than the Moon. Some were indignant on learning the truth: “What do we use the space shuttle for, if not to go to the Moon?!” I can only guess that some students imagined the International Space Station as a remote outpost, certainly beyond the Moon, and likely strategically located next to a wormhole.
20% of physics students, at this university level, thought that humanity had traveled beyond the Moon? And some thought that we routinely use the shuttle to travel to the moon...
"Stuxnet source code is not out there. Only the original authors have it. So, this new backdoor was created by the same party that created Stuxnet." - F-Secure.
Deutsche Bank report
Thanks for the link. Yes, it says $1.5b revenue for desktop and $3.5b for laptop. Don't know exact profits but Deutsche Bank report says Apple is the most profitable personal computer manufacturer, they suggest other companies lose profit margin because they have to pay Microsoft for software.
Apple *is* in fact making huge profits from its Mac division - about $5B last *quarter*
That figure is for all divisions, not just personal computers. Anyway, it terms of PC manufacturers, then yes, Apple is highly profitable compared to the likes of Asus, Fujitsu etc. You may find this interesting.
Apple take more than 50% of the profit in the phone industry by owning only 4% of the market-share.
4.6% is the Garner figure for all Apple phones globally. Nielsen says Apple's market-share of smartphones is 28%. I suppose it depends on whether you count smartphones as a distinct market segment or not. Most figures these days do seem to be presented in terms of smartphone market share rather than overall phone market share.
For instance, Apple might have 5% of the computer market but they are making tons of profit while other makers sell much more volume but make less profit.
Exactly. At one time, Apple had a huge chunk of the home computer market. Then a standards-based competitor with multiple manufacturers appeared, and Apple market share was driven down into the single digits. Apple do not want a repeat of this situation. The second point to be made here is that Apple isn't actually making huge profits from the home computer business - the vast bulk of Apple's profits now come from the IOS devices where they have good market share (50%+ depending on device type).
If the wireless patents are essential then they should be covered by the FRAND terms of the 3G standardisation process. In contrast, Apple's patents are "design patents" - a special type of patent that covers the form and appearance of items. These are two very different types of patents, covered by different contractual terms, and so they will get treated differently by the courts. In terms of the design patent, the Samsung photo frame predates the iPad design patent and has a strikingly similar form, though obviously it is not a tablet.
Your quote doesn't say anything about a patent pool. There is no single patent pool that you can license that covers the 3G FRAND patents. You have to go to each patent holder individually and arrange a license agreement that covers their FRAND patents. From TFA it appears the judge has found that Samsung's patents should be covered by the FRAND agreement, and has sent them back to the negotiating table. This means that Apple still needs to get a license for those patents. This puts Apple in basically the same situation as they were with Nokia; expect to see a large cash settlement.
Samsung's patent that they're now saying apple doesn't have a license for is required to implement 3G, because of this, they were legally obliged to put it into the patent pool.
Once again, there is no single "3G patent pool" to license. When you deal with these FRAND patents, you have to license the patents of each patent holder individually.
That's where they failed at negotiating –they didn't disclose the existence of the patent
No, you are mixing up two things here. The "failure at negotiating" that the judge referred to is regarding the negotiations between Apple and Samsung in the last year. It is a completely unrelated issue to Samsung's dealings with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute who defined the 3G wireless standards a decade ago.
Yeah, all corporations stretch the truth about the success of their product deployments... remember Microsoft trumpeting their London Stock Exchange big success story? But it turned out that the LSE had so many problems they eventually dumped the entire platform and bought a provider of Linux-based systems instead. Microsoft don't talk about that so much anymore.
But then what did you expect, that a corporation would actually come out and tell the truth? "We deployed our software at customer site; it was problematic and buggy, and led to downtime and multiple redesigns, patches and redeployments." Too much honesty, marketing would never allow it.
Those two choices are not mutually exclusive, and they aren't even the right choices. You have mixed up two things: 1) building the network 2) building the devices that will use the network. The real choice is:
1. A large wireless network supplied by Huawei, and manufactured in China, which the government can monitor or shut down with relative ease.
2. A large wireless network supplied by companyX, and manufactured in China, which the government can monitor or shut down with relative ease.
The devices that will use the network being a "vast semi-regulated sea of Chinese-built devices of all kinds flowing into the US" is already a given, because every wireless manufacturer uses Chinese factories.
Right now, I'm just amazed how bad other tech companies are at design. They're REALLY, REALLY bad. Remember when computers were sold with 500 page instruction manuals, and everyone was arguing over who had the better instruction manual, and then Apple comes along, and throws the instruction manual away, and everyone's like WTF? And people liked it, because they manage to design computers to be intuitive.
People said the same about Microsoft when Windows was first released, and then again when Windows 95 was released... The first time a person sees an interface that they like, and that is significantly better than the one they previously used, they believe it is a revolution. Of course, it is nothing of the sort, merely incremental advances on previous achievements.
The only thing that ever came close to Apple over the last 30 years was the introduction of Google search bar, with no other crap around it.
There has been plenty of great technology with good HCI over the last 30 years. You are just unaware or unwilling to acknowledge it. Think: Nokia, Nintendo, Sony, Bang & Olufsen, IBM, etc. In software, Windows, OS/2, Borland, BeOS, Netscape, all had interfaces that were supposedly "revolutionary" in their day.
(remember the old search engines??
I remember Google search looking pretty much like Altavista, except with better results.
let the PC die
Huh? You do realise that the modern Mac is just a PC with some software pre-installed? If it weren't for the PC, there would be no Intel Macs.
The Lockheed Martin breakin is being used to suggest that the RSA hack must have been carried out by a nation state. However, it is clear from the past that there are individuals (e.g. Gary McKinnon) have both the motivation and capability to break into U.S. military sites. Security "experts" like those at RSA consistently (and conveniently) underestimate the capabilities of individual hackers and hacker groups, and yet the past 15 years have shown that military sites, government sites, security expert sites, credit card processors, etc. have all been routinely hacked.
The truth is that hacking is not actually that difficult. If you have a zero-day remote exploit, and you automate a scan of millions of domains, then it is highly likely that you will find some (or many) that are vulnerable, regardless of whether they are .gov, .mil, .com, or whatever. Once in, it is trivial to install a rootkit and scoop up all of the outgoing ssh passwords, and to exploit the existing trust relationships. Most sites don't keep up to date with security patches - I have worked with companies that are still running Red Hat based systems from 2004 with no security patches. Getting root on these systems is absolutely trivial. And I guess that is the big secret that RSA and the other security companies don't want you to know - that hacking is pretty easy, and that groups like lulzsec, that routinely penetrate respected corporations, are not gifted geniuses, just skilled computer engineers with a stash of exploits.