It stuns me that a rag-tag group of enthusiasts can so thoroughly spank a billion dollar corporation's highly funded professional developer group.
It shouldn't be that stunning. I have an engineer friend who worked in Korea with one of the ex-managers of Samsung's Galaxy S project. Some amusing insights into Samsung's business strategy:
The Galaxy S was actually a beta-prototype. They knew of problems with the hardware and software. When management saw the prototype unit, they decided to ship it. That's right, they went ahead with a worldwide release of a prototype design. The Samsung manager told my friend "Wait for the next hardware - that's the real Galaxy!"
As soon as a phone is released, the dev team is disbanded and moved onto other projects. The phone is considered done when it ships. Due to this policy, phones will likely never receive a future software update.
It might sound like I'm criticising Samsung, but I'm not. Here's the thing - from an engineering perspective, software is never "done". There is always room for improvement, and there are always bugs. At some point, you have to pull the trigger and ship it. Samsung made the call earlier than I would have done (there were apparently problems with the file system causing the UI to freeze, and GPS problems) but maybe they did the right thing; the mobile world is very competitive, and they sold 10 million units and won the "European smartphone of the year" 2010 award. Maybe if they had waited, that wouldn't have happened.
It shouldn't stun you that a group of enthusiasts could release a better Android than a phone company that has no commitment to future software updates. The current philosophy amongst all mobile manufacturers is that customers will buy a new phone every 12-24 months, so why bother wasting development time on updates for old phones? And for most consumers, that policy is actually correct! The average user does upgrade their phone that regularly. Top of the market smart phone users upgrade even more regularly. Geeks who buy phone hardware and treat it like a computer, updating software over a lifetime of many years, are in the minority.
Setting up a ESXi server is a one time task that tasks 15 minutes. The alternative to a VM is to run the system on real hardware. This also needs to be procured, maintained, backed up etc. There are also driver compatibility issues with running old operating systems on new hardware. I doubt there are many businesses running legacy systems who don't already have a number of VM servers available for this task. The potential performance issues are greatly outweighed by the fact that you are running the system on a VM server many times more powerful than the hardware of a decade ago. The advantages - backups, easy imaging and cloning, hardware compatibility - more than outweigh the hypothetical disadvantages.
VMs arn't a magic bullet, in fact for a lot of things they're barely a bullet at all.
For the specific use case of running old software stacks, VMs are the best solution. Nothing else will give you the whole stack, running as intended, on modern hardware, with so little effort.
No , its not "tough" , its moronic. Backwards compatability is not a nice-to-have , its a pretty damn fundamental to businesses and normal users.
Not really. If, as a business, we have a need to run some old proprietary software that requires RedHat 4, then we will run in in a VM, so we get the complete software stack that the software was originally written and tested on. We certainly don't expect software that was released a decade ago to run on systems that it was never designed or tested for, and we wouldn't waste time trying to make it work when the VM option is available. This isn't specific to Linux either - if we have an app that requires Windows 2000, we aren't going to waste time trying to get it running on Windows 7, we will just run it in a VM.
It's hard to image that they're really all that happy, though.
One of the biggest threats to the Android bunch (HTC, Samsung etc.) is patents. Samsung just had a release of their new tablet halted by Apple everywhere in the E.U. (apart from the Netherlands) because of a patent attack. HTC is paying a license fee to Microsoft for every Android phone sold. If these threats are removed, then these companies can go back to competing in the marketplace instead of the courts, they get to keep a greater percentage of their profits, and their CEOs and shareholders will be happier.
Will all be partners be treated equally when Google owns one of them? Won't Moogle get privileged access to Android architects and programmers? Won't Moogle be preferred for future Lead Devices?
This is a potential threat, but in scale it is a much smaller threat than the patent problem. The core of Android being open source means that there isn't that much advantage to be gained from "closing up" development. The first day that a new device goes on sale, rival manufacturers get access to the complete source code - not just to read, but also to freely modify and redistribute. Contrast that with any other market, or any other device. If you were HTC CEO you really don't have a choice - writing your own platform is now out of the question, which leaves you with Windows vs Android. What would you see as a greater threat - the Microsoft+Nokia partnership, or Google+Motorola? The situation is pretty similar, but one partnership has already given you a perpetual never-ending license to redistribute the bulk of their platform code, for free, and that platform has 50% market share, versus Windows Phone, where you have no right to redistribute any of the platform, and it has only 1% market share. It's not a difficult choice.
I'd be surprised if there were many bicycle owners who didn't do 400 miles in one year,
If the carbon neutral break-even point is 400 miles, then whether it's done in the first year is irrelevant. The important point is that almost every bike in the world is eventually going to be carbon neutral, because almost every bike will eventually hit 400 miles... even if a rider just does one mile a week, the bicycle will be carbon neutral in less than a decade. Most commuters will do at least a mile each working day, so their bikes will certainly be carbon neutral within 2 years. In contrast, the vast majority of cars will never be carbon neutral.
Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.
Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.
The 1918 flu pandemic infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.
Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.
But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.
If I remember correctly, the most remote place in the UK (defined as "furthest distance from a road") is the "Great Wilderness"... the most "remote" point is about 7 miles from the nearest road. It's a very scenic region.
That's where my trivia finishes, I have no idea about England...
Yes, unsurprisingly 2G coverage is better than 3G coverage. All UK networks will fall back to 2G when 3G is unavailable, with the exception of 3, who don't have a 2G network. Their customers used to be able to roam onto Orange 2G, but that's slowly being turned off.
This entire proposal rests on the assumption that Google has a monopoly in search. Does it? The latest figures show Google Search has 63.6% of the market. What percentage of the desktop market did Microsoft have in the nineties when it decided to tie Windows and IE together (in violation of its 1994 settlement with the DOJ)? I'm sure it was at least 90%.. Apparently it was news in Dec 1998 when Windows marketshare dropped below 90% "for the first time"...
There's a big difference between Google's 63% and Microsoft's >90%.
You're right. My phrasing was ambiguous. By "expert in the field" I meant "someone who is a specialist in that particular field". Expert is relative; to someone who has no knowledge of a field, pretty much anyone in the field is an expert - to someone who is an actual expert in the field, then most of the people in the field are not experts. One of the problems that I see in the reporting of patent news - we have journalists and bloggers who state that "company X" patents are valid because an ordinary member of the public wouldn't have thought of that idea. Well, that is not the way it's supposed to work, go and ask a specialist/professional if they think the claimed invention is obvious...
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed.
Why do you think software is fundamentally different to, say, electronics? Or design patents? Should someone really be able to patent a phone with a "flat glass screen and rounded edges", or any one of the other patents that the cell phone industry is currently tearing itself apart with?
Maybe software patents only seem ridiculous because we are all familiar with how software is written? Maybe a patent on wood bonding techniques seems equally ridiculous to a carpenter. Perhaps patents on circuit designs are ridiculous to electrical engineers. And perhaps patents on rounded edges for phones are ridiculous to the people who actually design these devices for a living.
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to an expert in the field. If that were actually enforced, I suspect 99% of patents would cease to exist.
Amazon is being predatory here, and asking developers (who are often desperate for exposure) to give away their app, in order to promote Amazon. A heated debate broke out in our office about whether we should or not.
It was clear that they understood that they were being asked to "give away their app".
The summary implies that the developers didn't know that they would get no money. The article makes it clear that they not only were told they would get nothing, but they confirmed in subsequent emails with Amazon that they would get nothing. Knowing this, they still decided to go ahead with the deal.
The Amazon emails have a good point:
The Free App of the Day promotion is the most valuable and visible spot in the store. It hosted the launch of the likes of Angry Birds Rio, Plants v. Zombies and more. Amazon will not receive any sales rev share from the Free App of the Day; and in fact, with as the Free of the Day for one day, you will receive a subsequent Appstore main page placement for the following 14 days.
All these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you. We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0% rev share for one day only.
Being "Free app of the day" is a huge advert for your app - and adverts have a cost. Being app of the day is optional - not mandatory - the developers in question could have said no. And the cost is not 101,491 copies of your app - that's RIAA accounting. The majority of downloaders will try your app once and then never use it again. Some may continue to use it, and when they do, if you're smart you'll figure out a way to monetise their usage (e.g. charge for version 2, offer premium feature updates etc.).
thanks to Amazon's secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day.
Amazon also made $0 that day (from your app). You agreed to the deal. It gave your app enormous exposure. You didn't lose 101,491 sales, because the vast majority of those people would never have bought your app anyway.
All of the phone manufacturers have experimented with different case designs and UIs. It is disingenuous for Apple to pretend that they have innovated more than, say, Nokia. If Nokia had filed for patents in the 1970s and 1980s that were as broad as Apple's are now then they'd have patented the dialler, the idea of having a graphical display, the idea of attaching it to a battery for mobile comms etc, and the result would've been only one single cellphone manufacturer, instead of the competitive market that's benefited us all over the last two decades.
Patents are a government granted right to be the only producer of a single item. Patents were designed to destroy the competitiveness of the free market. The only other system where governments gave individual companies the right to be the sole manufacturer of an item was under communism, where factories would be allocated as an "item X supplier" regardless of whether they were the best or most productive. When the government grants a sole supplier the right to sell an item to the nation, whether via mandate or patent, then the effect is the same - the people lose their right to freely choose which companies they do business with.
Patents erode your freedom. They remove your freedom to create and sell items, and they remove your freedom to choose who you do business with.
Saying that "Oracle are the good guys here" is kind of like saying that "Japan were the good guys" for hitting the U.S. at Pearl Harbor and pulling them into WWII, because it forced the U.S. to join the Allies and their fight. In the end, that may have turned out to have been for the best, but you still wouldn't describe the Japanese as the "good guys" for starting it.
I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license.
If that is the case, and the employment contract does not have some absurd "we own everything you do, including in your spare time" clause, then the employer will need to obtain a license for redistribution - just like with any other copyrighted code.
One of the prime target demographics for the Nintendo handheld consoles is children. Nintendo themselves have warned that children under 6 should not play 3D games, and adults should play for no more than 30 minutes at a time. Parents know that policing how long their kids play a portable video game system is not only undesirable, but nigh on impossible. The kind of parents who would spend hundreds of dollars on a toy for their kids are the same kind of parents who are going to be concerned when they hear reports that the toy may strain and damage the eyesight of their kids. It's a marketing nightmare for Nintendo.
The GP is correct: You are confusing two different problems with radio transmissions. Problem 1 - hand over antenna - all phones can suffer this to some degree if you put your hand over the antenna, or swallow your phone or whatever then the signal will be degraded due to physical blocking. That's why it's in the manual. Problem 2 - shorting of antenna - iPhone 4 only problem because in the iPhone 4 the external stainless steel frame is the antenna. Other phones use internal antennas.
Hardly a fair comparison - you are comparing global sales figures for a phone that hasn't been released globally yet. The Galaxy S2 is outselling the iPhone in Asia and Europe. It hasn't been released in the U.S. yet, and only got released in China a few days ago, so expect global sales to pick up rapidly over the next months.
It's a biased comparison for another obvious reason - to compare sales of one specific smartphone model from a company that sells several models to a company that sells only one. If you compare total global sales of all Samsung smartphones versus all Apple smartphones then it's about equal now. And if you include Samsung's non-smart phones, then Samsung outsells Apple.
It's perfectly possible to be "willing to negotiate" and "ready for war" at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.
why let facts get in the way of sensationalism
The BBC article has the headline "HTC is braced for Apple smartphone patent war: Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has said it is prepared to wage a patent war against Apple." The summary says "HTC Ready for Apple Patent War". Are the two really so different?
The SmarTech servers were hired as fail-over protection. Vote counts were only supposed to be transmitted to SmarTech if there was a fail-over condition. Though there is no record of a fail-over occuring, vote records WERE transmitted to SmarTech servers sometime after 9 p.m. on election night.
In the network topology, SmarTech's servers were placed in between the vote reporting computers and the vote counting computers instead of parallel to the vote reporting computers as specified for the failover backup.
Suspiciously, the state IT specialist for the Ohio Secretary of State's office was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night, and was told that contractors would be handling the rest of the evening's IT work.
The unpredicted shift in Ohio's voting patterns occured after the state IT specialist was sent home.
(Those points are taken from some other sites, not just TFA. I'm not saying that is what happened, just explaining what the article is going on about.)
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It stuns me that a rag-tag group of enthusiasts can so thoroughly spank a billion dollar corporation's highly funded professional developer group.
It shouldn't be that stunning. I have an engineer friend who worked in Korea with one of the ex-managers of Samsung's Galaxy S project. Some amusing insights into Samsung's business strategy:
It might sound like I'm criticising Samsung, but I'm not. Here's the thing - from an engineering perspective, software is never "done". There is always room for improvement, and there are always bugs. At some point, you have to pull the trigger and ship it. Samsung made the call earlier than I would have done (there were apparently problems with the file system causing the UI to freeze, and GPS problems) but maybe they did the right thing; the mobile world is very competitive, and they sold 10 million units and won the "European smartphone of the year" 2010 award. Maybe if they had waited, that wouldn't have happened.
It shouldn't stun you that a group of enthusiasts could release a better Android than a phone company that has no commitment to future software updates. The current philosophy amongst all mobile manufacturers is that customers will buy a new phone every 12-24 months, so why bother wasting development time on updates for old phones? And for most consumers, that policy is actually correct! The average user does upgrade their phone that regularly. Top of the market smart phone users upgrade even more regularly. Geeks who buy phone hardware and treat it like a computer, updating software over a lifetime of many years, are in the minority.
VMs arn't a magic bullet, in fact for a lot of things they're barely a bullet at all.
For the specific use case of running old software stacks, VMs are the best solution. Nothing else will give you the whole stack, running as intended, on modern hardware, with so little effort.
No , its not "tough" , its moronic. Backwards compatability is not a nice-to-have , its a pretty damn fundamental to businesses and normal users.
Not really. If, as a business, we have a need to run some old proprietary software that requires RedHat 4, then we will run in in a VM, so we get the complete software stack that the software was originally written and tested on. We certainly don't expect software that was released a decade ago to run on systems that it was never designed or tested for, and we wouldn't waste time trying to make it work when the VM option is available. This isn't specific to Linux either - if we have an app that requires Windows 2000, we aren't going to waste time trying to get it running on Windows 7, we will just run it in a VM.
It's hard to image that they're really all that happy, though.
One of the biggest threats to the Android bunch (HTC, Samsung etc.) is patents. Samsung just had a release of their new tablet halted by Apple everywhere in the E.U. (apart from the Netherlands) because of a patent attack. HTC is paying a license fee to Microsoft for every Android phone sold. If these threats are removed, then these companies can go back to competing in the marketplace instead of the courts, they get to keep a greater percentage of their profits, and their CEOs and shareholders will be happier.
Will all be partners be treated equally when Google owns one of them? Won't Moogle get privileged access to Android architects and programmers? Won't Moogle be preferred for future Lead Devices?
This is a potential threat, but in scale it is a much smaller threat than the patent problem. The core of Android being open source means that there isn't that much advantage to be gained from "closing up" development. The first day that a new device goes on sale, rival manufacturers get access to the complete source code - not just to read, but also to freely modify and redistribute. Contrast that with any other market, or any other device. If you were HTC CEO you really don't have a choice - writing your own platform is now out of the question, which leaves you with Windows vs Android. What would you see as a greater threat - the Microsoft+Nokia partnership, or Google+Motorola? The situation is pretty similar, but one partnership has already given you a perpetual never-ending license to redistribute the bulk of their platform code, for free, and that platform has 50% market share, versus Windows Phone, where you have no right to redistribute any of the platform, and it has only 1% market share. It's not a difficult choice.
I'd be surprised if there were many bicycle owners who didn't do 400 miles in one year,
If the carbon neutral break-even point is 400 miles, then whether it's done in the first year is irrelevant. The important point is that almost every bike in the world is eventually going to be carbon neutral, because almost every bike will eventually hit 400 miles... even if a rider just does one mile a week, the bicycle will be carbon neutral in less than a decade. Most commuters will do at least a mile each working day, so their bikes will certainly be carbon neutral within 2 years. In contrast, the vast majority of cars will never be carbon neutral.
Just look at all the hyped up illnesses in the past decade, if all those "predictions" were right all of us would be dead with bird flu/swine flu/MERSA/SARs.
Can you point to a single reputable scientist who claimed that everyone in the world was going to die from a flu pandemic? I'm not a flu expert, but my personal opinion is that the scientists actually understated the threat of a flu pandemic, whilst the media overstated it. The problem with the media is that they deal in the now, and have very little grasp of reporting long-term threats. Scientists tend to be more cautious and won't make predictions that aren't backed up with numbers.
The 1918 flu pandemic infected 32% of the world's population, and killed 3% of the world's population. As far as I can see, there is absolutely no reason why such a pandemic couldn't be repeated today. And whether it will be more or less deadly is impossible to predict - H5N1 killed 60% of infected humans - a mortality rate far higher than the 1918 flu. If H5N1 was as transmissable as the 1918 flu then over 3 billion people would've been killed. This is a number and a risk far in excess of the danger of terrorism, and yet we will spend literally trillions of dollars "fighting terrorism", whilst we spend only millions seeking flu vaccines.
Given the potential danger from flu, and the fact that the victims would be everyone on the planet, it seems like the per capita risk is several orders of magnitudes higher than terrorism. And yet, all of the funding, and all of the political debate, focuses on terrorism. It's crazy, and people who brush it under the carpet by saying "well, we haven't had another pandemic yet", have entirely missed the point. The fact that the 2009 swine flu outbreak didn't kill millions isn't a reason to believe that the threat does not exist - rather, the fact that the 2009 pandemic turned out to be caused by an entirely unseen new variant of the flu that incorporated genes from 5 different viruses should prove beyond any doubt that flu evolution and mutation does pose a continued threat to humanity.
But instead of heeding this warning, people like you will say "Ahh stupid scientists got it wrong! Everyone didn't die". But in fact 18000 did die, and it is only down to chance that this particular flu variant wasn't more lethal and more widely spread. How many dollars have been spent for each victim of 9/11 fighting the terrorism threat? How many dollars have been spent for each victim of H5N1 fighting the flu threat? For whatever reasons, our society is very bad at assessing risk when it comes to long term threats. We judge everything through the lens of the media, which reports current events news, and anything longer than a decade can be kicked into the long grass in the political world.
Rant over...
If I remember correctly, the most remote place in the UK (defined as "furthest distance from a road") is the "Great Wilderness"... the most "remote" point is about 7 miles from the nearest road. It's a very scenic region.
That's where my trivia finishes, I have no idea about England...
Yes, unsurprisingly 2G coverage is better than 3G coverage. All UK networks will fall back to 2G when 3G is unavailable, with the exception of 3, who don't have a 2G network. Their customers used to be able to roam onto Orange 2G, but that's slowly being turned off.
LG and Samsung had phones that "looked like the iPhone" before the iPhone existed. http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/29/apple-iphone-vs-lg-prada-separated-at-birth-part-2/ http://phandroid.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Samsungvs.Apple_-550x391.jpg
Actually newspapers and blogs are also mentioning the odd Blackberry usage. Allegedly some of the rioters were bragging about how the police don't monitor Blackberrys unlike Facebook etc. London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger played a key role, London riots: how BlackBerry Messenger has been used to plan two nights of looting.
Dec 1998
Correction: it was Dec 2008 when Windows market share dropped below 90% for the first time...
This entire proposal rests on the assumption that Google has a monopoly in search. Does it? The latest figures show Google Search has 63.6% of the market. What percentage of the desktop market did Microsoft have in the nineties when it decided to tie Windows and IE together (in violation of its 1994 settlement with the DOJ)? I'm sure it was at least 90%.. Apparently it was news in Dec 1998 when Windows marketshare dropped below 90% "for the first time"...
There's a big difference between Google's 63% and Microsoft's >90%.
You're right. My phrasing was ambiguous. By "expert in the field" I meant "someone who is a specialist in that particular field". Expert is relative; to someone who has no knowledge of a field, pretty much anyone in the field is an expert - to someone who is an actual expert in the field, then most of the people in the field are not experts. One of the problems that I see in the reporting of patent news - we have journalists and bloggers who state that "company X" patents are valid because an ordinary member of the public wouldn't have thought of that idea. Well, that is not the way it's supposed to work, go and ask a specialist/professional if they think the claimed invention is obvious...
Other than the software patent ruling, the system per se isn't flawed.
Why do you think software is fundamentally different to, say, electronics? Or design patents? Should someone really be able to patent a phone with a "flat glass screen and rounded edges", or any one of the other patents that the cell phone industry is currently tearing itself apart with?
Maybe software patents only seem ridiculous because we are all familiar with how software is written? Maybe a patent on wood bonding techniques seems equally ridiculous to a carpenter. Perhaps patents on circuit designs are ridiculous to electrical engineers. And perhaps patents on rounded edges for phones are ridiculous to the people who actually design these devices for a living.
Patents are supposed to be non-obvious to an expert in the field. If that were actually enforced, I suspect 99% of patents would cease to exist.
There wasn't any confusion. From TFA:
Amazon is being predatory here, and asking developers (who are often desperate for exposure) to give away their app, in order to promote Amazon. A heated debate broke out in our office about whether we should or not.
It was clear that they understood that they were being asked to "give away their app".
The summary implies that the developers didn't know that they would get no money. The article makes it clear that they not only were told they would get nothing, but they confirmed in subsequent emails with Amazon that they would get nothing. Knowing this, they still decided to go ahead with the deal.
The Amazon emails have a good point:
The Free App of the Day promotion is the most valuable and visible spot in the store. It hosted the launch of the likes of Angry Birds Rio, Plants v. Zombies and more. Amazon will not receive any sales rev share from the Free App of the Day; and in fact, with as the Free of the Day for one day, you will receive a subsequent Appstore main page placement for the following 14 days. All these highly valuable placements are at no cost to you. We want to promote your app and in exchange of the placements, at the 0% rev share for one day only.
Being "Free app of the day" is a huge advert for your app - and adverts have a cost. Being app of the day is optional - not mandatory - the developers in question could have said no. And the cost is not 101,491 copies of your app - that's RIAA accounting. The majority of downloaders will try your app once and then never use it again. Some may continue to use it, and when they do, if you're smart you'll figure out a way to monetise their usage (e.g. charge for version 2, offer premium feature updates etc.).
thanks to Amazon's secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day.
Amazon also made $0 that day (from your app). You agreed to the deal. It gave your app enormous exposure. You didn't lose 101,491 sales, because the vast majority of those people would never have bought your app anyway.
Samsung F700 (2006) vs iPhone (2007). LG Prada (2006) vs iPhone (2007) Engadget titled that article "Apple iPhone vs LG Prada: separated at birth?" because the phones are so similar.
All of the phone manufacturers have experimented with different case designs and UIs. It is disingenuous for Apple to pretend that they have innovated more than, say, Nokia. If Nokia had filed for patents in the 1970s and 1980s that were as broad as Apple's are now then they'd have patented the dialler, the idea of having a graphical display, the idea of attaching it to a battery for mobile comms etc, and the result would've been only one single cellphone manufacturer, instead of the competitive market that's benefited us all over the last two decades.
Patents are a government granted right to be the only producer of a single item. Patents were designed to destroy the competitiveness of the free market. The only other system where governments gave individual companies the right to be the sole manufacturer of an item was under communism, where factories would be allocated as an "item X supplier" regardless of whether they were the best or most productive. When the government grants a sole supplier the right to sell an item to the nation, whether via mandate or patent, then the effect is the same - the people lose their right to freely choose which companies they do business with.
Patents erode your freedom. They remove your freedom to create and sell items, and they remove your freedom to choose who you do business with.
Saying that "Oracle are the good guys here" is kind of like saying that "Japan were the good guys" for hitting the U.S. at Pearl Harbor and pulling them into WWII, because it forced the U.S. to join the Allies and their fight. In the end, that may have turned out to have been for the best, but you still wouldn't describe the Japanese as the "good guys" for starting it.
I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the company’s full support. They knew it was open source. I think now that I’m not at the company, they want to “control” it. As far as I understand it, they need to abide by the license.
If that is the case, and the employment contract does not have some absurd "we own everything you do, including in your spare time" clause, then the employer will need to obtain a license for redistribution - just like with any other copyrighted code.
One of the prime target demographics for the Nintendo handheld consoles is children. Nintendo themselves have warned that children under 6 should not play 3D games, and adults should play for no more than 30 minutes at a time. Parents know that policing how long their kids play a portable video game system is not only undesirable, but nigh on impossible. The kind of parents who would spend hundreds of dollars on a toy for their kids are the same kind of parents who are going to be concerned when they hear reports that the toy may strain and damage the eyesight of their kids. It's a marketing nightmare for Nintendo.
The GP is correct: You are confusing two different problems with radio transmissions. Problem 1 - hand over antenna - all phones can suffer this to some degree if you put your hand over the antenna, or swallow your phone or whatever then the signal will be degraded due to physical blocking. That's why it's in the manual. Problem 2 - shorting of antenna - iPhone 4 only problem because in the iPhone 4 the external stainless steel frame is the antenna. Other phones use internal antennas.
It's a biased comparison for another obvious reason - to compare sales of one specific smartphone model from a company that sells several models to a company that sells only one. If you compare total global sales of all Samsung smartphones versus all Apple smartphones then it's about equal now. And if you include Samsung's non-smart phones, then Samsung outsells Apple.
why let facts get in the way of sensationalism
The BBC article has the headline "HTC is braced for Apple smartphone patent war: Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has said it is prepared to wage a patent war against Apple." The summary says "HTC Ready for Apple Patent War". Are the two really so different?
in the same interview Mr. Chou goes to great lengths to express how they want to settle with Apple
Oh really? Where exactly in the interview does Mr. Chou say that?
(Those points are taken from some other sites, not just TFA. I'm not saying that is what happened, just explaining what the article is going on about.)