According to Proview's creditors. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
No there isn't - there are only Apple's claims on one side, versus Proview's claims and this settlement on the other. Apple have never disclosed the text of the contract between their front "IP Application Devlopment" and Proview Electronics. The U.S. case was dismissed because the U.S. court decided it had no jurisdiction to rule on the contract. From all we know right now, Apple may have signed a contract that didn't include China rights, or that failed to specify exactly where the parent company did own the rights, and whether or not that included China. International multi-jurisdictional law is complicated, perhaps Apple's lawyers made a mistake. Or maybe they didn't. But either way, unless you know of someone who has actually seen the contract, then there is no real evidence here. Infer what you will from the fact that Apple settled.
The US government has already shown they really don't give a shit about him. He is not worth the bother.
Except that the CIA set up its Information Review Task Force (aka Wikileaks Task Force, WTF) solely to deal with Wikileaks: 80 defence analysts working 24 hours a day (later increased to 120 analysts) in their self-styled "Wikileaks War Room". Why would the CIA assign 120 full-time defence analysts to deal with someone who "they don't give a shit about"?
For a start, it is an operating system. For it to work on your phone you'll need a Boot to Gecko phone, or some app to emulate the run time environment.
Yes, but that runtime environment app already exists - it is Firefox Mobile. The B2G apps are just HTML5 and Javascript being run on Mozilla - they will run on an existing phone under Firefox Mobile as the operating environment. Firefox on the desktop runs exactly the same apps, unmodified. You can actually browse to the URL of the B2G web browser or dialler or app launcher on a desktop Firefox and it works fine (apart from the dialler not being able to actually make calls, that will happen once Firefox has a VOIP backend).
A well-written fat client will behave well even when the network is down or slow. Most web apps become useless, if not outright unusable.
That depends on what the app is doing. A fat client that access a database across the network will perform very badly when the network goes down. Boot to Gecko apps are Javascript and cross platform - you can run the same app on Linux, Windows and your phone. Installed apps are JIT pre-compiled and cached locally so startup time is quick, and there's no need for an app store - running an app is basically the same as visiting a web site.
The current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.
In the future there won't be app stores, just like MSN Classic and AOL died as mechanisms of content delivery when the internet took off - there will just be URLs, and everyone will have a standard software stack that runs cached apps published at URLs. It's inevitable, the only question is how we get there.
The iPad does however look a lot like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 [anandtech.com], which was the product in question.
That photo does show some similarities, but also differences - the shape is different, the Tab has a circular feature at the top (camera?), the logos are different, one has "Samsung" text whilst the other has "iPad", and the iPad has a distinctive black strip along the top edge. But that is just my personal opinion.
An honest, good faith poster would acknowledge that point and concede that they had inadvertently compared the iPad to a product that wasn't in the lawsuit and is not subject to an injunction
It is true that this particular lawsuit was about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, however, Apple has previously sued and made the same claims regarding the original Galaxy Tab. If the debate were limited only to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and this lawsuit, then I would concede that the comparison to the original Galaxy Tab was not relevant - however, Apple did include the original Galaxy Tab in the debate, and as far as I know they still consider the original Galaxy Tab to be infringing, which makes the comparison still relevant.
So it is agreed that the design of the iPad from a frontal perspective is basically identical to Samsung's digital photo frame. And since the side by side comparison posted above only shows frontal views, then it is also agreed that the frontal perspective is the most important one.
If a differing rear design is supposed to be a valid differentiator, then see: iPad vs Galaxy Tab from another angle The iPad and Galaxy Tab appear very different when viewed from the rear; obviously not the same device.
And Samsung shareholders will go ballistic, literally that they're turning down sales from their #1 customer (Apple beat Sony in parts purchased from Samsung).
Samsung's #1 manufacturing customer is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. They utilise more of their parts in their own products than they sell to their competitors.
But how long will it be before any carriculum you'd want will be freely available?
Freely available books will also lower the cost of printed books - once the content itself is free, then low cost book printshops (probably in China) will be able to churn out quality copies of coursebooks for very low cost - a mass market paperback costs only $0.75 to print, a tablet costs hundreds of dollars to buy. For the cost of one tablet, you could have hundreds of paper books printed. The average student probably uses about 10 books a year? Let's say the printing cost is $10, or even $20, that still means you could have all the books re-printed every single year and it would still cost a tenth of the price of a single tablet. The economics vastly favors printed books over electronic book readers - ebook readers are not only more expensive initially, but also have a much higher replacement rate (breakage, battery wear, obsolescence). E-books are great for mobility, great for having content that can be updated etc. but paper wins for cheap text books that have to survive the student life and be reused year after year.
Think the Government and the British state don't have a large measure of control? Think again
Officially they don't. There have been numerous governments that have criticised the reporting of the BBC but been unable to prevent it - the BBC dutifully reported NATO airstrike civilian victims during the Balkans wars, leading to government criticism that BBC in fact stood for "Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation":
"During the Nato bombing campaign the British government was sharply critical of BBC coverage. At one stage some government officials referred to us as the Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation."- The Guardian
Now, contrast this situation with an actual state controlled media - do you think such a media would even be allowed to report on civilians killed by the state military (a fact that goes against the military line that these are "no-collateral-damage precision airstrikes"?) And to continue to report on such victims of your military, even when it angers and displeases the government? And it was not just the Kosovo War, during the Falklands War government ministers accused the BBC of unpatriotic and neutral reporting - one minister angrily naming it the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation", another the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation".
The notion that the TV license isn't a tax and the BBC isn't state-controlled is a delusion.
Compare the BBC and its successive spats with various governments to an actual state-controlled media and you will see a big difference. Do you think that real state-controlled media broadcasts any criticisms of the government? Would a real state-controlled media be allowed to report repeatedly on allegations that the government mis-represented the evidence for going to war? If so, why do we not see this kind of criticism coming out of, say, the Chinese state media?
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large.
What I would like to see is X-Prize style competitions for open drug research. If $10 million can get us a modern, reusable spaceship, then imagine what that could do to the drug research industry. A lousy $1 million prize got us several years of competitive research into statistical prediction algorithms for something as frivolous as choosing what movies to watch. Imagine what humanity could gain from a $50 million prize for a malaria vaccination or similar.
What I find interesting is that "business people" (by which I mean those who are concerned with money rather than engineering) are mostly obsessed with patents. Often the first question asked after an investment pitch is "do you have a patent for this?" And if the answer is negative - then no investment. It is as if they can't understand the potential of the technology itself, they can't see how it could change people's lives, they need instead to have a simple, concrete unit by which to evaluate and differentiate companies, even if that unit is bogus. It leads to startups and other small companies filing for patents to increase the perceived shareholder value, even when the engineers know that the work they are being told to patent is just an implementation of pre-existing ideas, and that every competing product does more or less the same thing in the same way.
it never claimed complete immunity to viruses, merely immunity to Windows viruses
The full quote: "It doesn't get PC viruses. A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That's thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part."
Technically you are right - a Mac won't be susceptible to a PC/Windows virus. However, if we are playing pedant, then we should also consider the claim that this immunity is due "to built-in defenses in Mac OS X". An immunity to PC/Windows viruses is not due to any special defenses of Mac OS X - it is due to the fact that the viruses are not cross-platform. The Mac is immune for the same reason that every other non-Windows computing platform is immune. With that in mind, it is hard to support the retroactive claim that Apple's marketing people meant the above quote to be taken literally as meaning that the Mac is protected against PC/Windows viruses, but *is not* protected from Apple-specific viruses. If that is what they meant, then why say that the immunity is due to "built-in defenses of OS X", rather than saying it's due to the lack of cross-platform viruses?
Apple disputed the amount required to be paid but was always willing to cut a check.
If you dispute the amount to be paid, then you aren't willing to pay that amount. It is disingenuous and contradictory to suggest that Apple were willing to pay but only at a lower rate. I'm willing to pay $1 for a Ferrari - does this mean that Ferrari have to sell me one at that price? No.
If there are 100 patents in a standards essential patent portfolio... and each one garners a 2.5% licensing fee, how much would the entire portfolio cost?
The license fee is for the whole portfolio, not per-patent. That's $18.75 per device for every iPhone. Compared to Microsoft's patent fee of $15 for every Samsung Android phone it looks like a reasonable deal - Samsung Android phones are generally lower priced than iPhones, and Motorola holds more phone-related patents.
Did you even read the article to which you, yourself, linked? It says nothing, at all, about Apple refusing to pay.
I didn't say that Apple refused to pay *anything at all* - I said that they refused to pay the standard license fees of Nokia:
And finally, Apple can just pay. We spoke to several experts in the field during the course of our research into this piece, and almost all of them were surprised that Apple hadn't already coughed up the green. Again, we don't know the royalty rates Nokia's demanding, but it's a little strange that Apple isn't using its enormous cash reserves to just make this disappear. The main issue we can see is that whatever rate gets set in this case will be the basis of all future license negotiations, and Apple's got to be careful with that -- unlike almost every other company in the space, it's become a major player in the phone market virtually overnight, and setting this precedent properly is an important step. That said, Nokia's got to feel pretty good about the rates they've offered Apple here -- filing a lawsuit means Nokia's license agreements with other companies will eventually be examined, so it'll be obvious right away if Espoo's not offering similar terms to Cupertino. Let's just say this: it's not going to happen anytime soon, but we wouldn't be surprised if Steve ends up writing a check somewhere down the line.
So we don't know exactly what the requested license rate was, but we can infer from the fact that Nokia were the ones filing the case and requesting a cash settlement that they were confident their fee offer to Apple was comparable to those of other licensees.
I am not sure what distro you're using, but when Firefox gets updated on my Ubuntu machines, it does pop up a dialog box saying that Firefox was updated and needs to restart -- and then it waits for my permission to do so.
I am also using Ubuntu, and I have seen this Firefox update problem happen several times. Firefox is still running, but the render window complains about some missing file. I have never seen any popups, I wonder if the notifications are sent to all users?
My system doesn't initialize USB properly on reboot; about every other boot,
I've also a similar issue initializing the internal USB hub in some Dell monitors, the BIOS fails to initialize it every other reboot as you describe. It never happened previously, but began after a certain kernel update, so the problem may be software. It looked like it would be a lengthy process to track down the cause, and possibly only relevant to my particular combination of hardware and BIOS, so I took the quick fix and bought a new USB hub.
It's absolutely possible, of course, but the sheer amount of hackery that is required to make it work is just mind boggling... at least to me. Can you link anything that explains your concept?
Writing the OS X bootloaders was probably a lot of work too, but someone did it. And Windows Activation was cracked months before it was even released. To defeat Secure Boot, all a cracker would need to do is to take a signed bootloader that allows booting unsigned code, use that to boot grub, and then chainload a cracked copy of Windows. Or just instruct the user to turn off Secure Boot, since apparently it will be possible to disable it.
But unless the bootloader is designed to require a signed kernel, the bootloader can be configured to load a Linux kernel that chain-loads a compromised Windows kernel. And at that point, Microsoft will add the bootloader to the blacklist in a Windows update.
True, but with TPM enabled Windows Update should be able to download code that checks the boot path status and then alerts the user that their Windows has been compromised. Chapter 8 – UEFI and the TPM: Building a foundation for platform trust. TPM is not a requirement for Secure Boot, but I don't really see how it can be that effective without it. I wouldn't be surprised if some pressure is brought to bear on vendors to enable TPM by default.
We managed to update running systems with package management for how long?
Yes, but we didn't actually manage to make it work with modern desktops. Firefox and Chromium both fail when the packages of libraries that they depend on are moved underneath the running process. It is fine to say that this is a package manager problem, but it has been a known problem for years and is still unfixed (telling the sysadmin that his users should all manually restart Firefox is not a seamless solution, even assuming that he notices the message and acts on it). You can hardly blame people for wanting a more robust desktop, with applications that don't start randomly crashing when the sysadmin (or an automated script) runs a background update.
On Windows, files are locked if any process is using them, which forces a design where updates install into a separate directory. But -- annoyingness of locking aside -- in fact I think that design is preferable. To start with, a given version of Chrome will know its files will remain unmolested by updates. Furthermore, when an update happens, the updater can write out a separate "update succeeded" sentinel after writing all the files out, making impossible for an aborted update to leave both the previous and next version in a half-working state. (On Mac, we take a similar approach; I don't know enough about Macs to know whether the versioned directories within bundles make this magically work.)
With all this in mind you might reasonably ask why Linux needs to be special: why we waste memory on this zygote process launcher and have extra buggy codepaths just to support an inferior update model. (Note that by using.deb files we also lose our tiny incremental updates.)
And to that I can only answer the thinking we had at the time: one, we wanted to be good citizens on Linux; one distinction between "lame port of a Windows app" and "real Linux software" is exactly whether you distribute as a tarball or as a package. Secondly, and more importantly, we knew that regardless of what we did for Google Chrome the Linux distros would attempt to stuff Chromium into their package manager even when they know it breaks the app, much like they've done to Firefox. Now that I've summarized it in these terms it sounds a little depressing, but there it is; with ChromeOS where we control the stack we have more intelligent updates.
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According to Proview's creditors. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary.
No there isn't - there are only Apple's claims on one side, versus Proview's claims and this settlement on the other. Apple have never disclosed the text of the contract between their front "IP Application Devlopment" and Proview Electronics. The U.S. case was dismissed because the U.S. court decided it had no jurisdiction to rule on the contract. From all we know right now, Apple may have signed a contract that didn't include China rights, or that failed to specify exactly where the parent company did own the rights, and whether or not that included China. International multi-jurisdictional law is complicated, perhaps Apple's lawyers made a mistake. Or maybe they didn't. But either way, unless you know of someone who has actually seen the contract, then there is no real evidence here. Infer what you will from the fact that Apple settled.
But, can anyone deny Jobs's statement was inaccurate now?
I do not think that means what you think it means.
Over 1 million Android phones are bought every day. RIM's problems are of RIM's making.
The US government has already shown they really don't give a shit about him. He is not worth the bother.
Except that the CIA set up its Information Review Task Force (aka Wikileaks Task Force, WTF) solely to deal with Wikileaks: 80 defence analysts working 24 hours a day (later increased to 120 analysts) in their self-styled "Wikileaks War Room". Why would the CIA assign 120 full-time defence analysts to deal with someone who "they don't give a shit about"?
For a start, it is an operating system. For it to work on your phone you'll need a Boot to Gecko phone, or some app to emulate the run time environment.
Yes, but that runtime environment app already exists - it is Firefox Mobile. The B2G apps are just HTML5 and Javascript being run on Mozilla - they will run on an existing phone under Firefox Mobile as the operating environment. Firefox on the desktop runs exactly the same apps, unmodified. You can actually browse to the URL of the B2G web browser or dialler or app launcher on a desktop Firefox and it works fine (apart from the dialler not being able to actually make calls, that will happen once Firefox has a VOIP backend).
A well-written fat client will behave well even when the network is down or slow. Most web apps become useless, if not outright unusable.
That depends on what the app is doing. A fat client that access a database across the network will perform very badly when the network goes down. Boot to Gecko apps are Javascript and cross platform - you can run the same app on Linux, Windows and your phone. Installed apps are JIT pre-compiled and cached locally so startup time is quick, and there's no need for an app store - running an app is basically the same as visiting a web site.
The current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.
In the future there won't be app stores, just like MSN Classic and AOL died as mechanisms of content delivery when the internet took off - there will just be URLs, and everyone will have a standard software stack that runs cached apps published at URLs. It's inevitable, the only question is how we get there.
The iPad does however look a lot like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 [anandtech.com], which was the product in question.
That photo does show some similarities, but also differences - the shape is different, the Tab has a circular feature at the top (camera?), the logos are different, one has "Samsung" text whilst the other has "iPad", and the iPad has a distinctive black strip along the top edge. But that is just my personal opinion.
An honest, good faith poster would acknowledge that point and concede that they had inadvertently compared the iPad to a product that wasn't in the lawsuit and is not subject to an injunction
It is true that this particular lawsuit was about the Galaxy Tab 10.1, however, Apple has previously sued and made the same claims regarding the original Galaxy Tab. If the debate were limited only to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and this lawsuit, then I would concede that the comparison to the original Galaxy Tab was not relevant - however, Apple did include the original Galaxy Tab in the debate, and as far as I know they still consider the original Galaxy Tab to be infringing, which makes the comparison still relevant.
Germany is the nation with the highest wages in Europe, maybe in the world.
Actually Switzerland probably has the highest wages in Europe. If you meant European Union, then Luxembourg is probably top.
You should not be surprised. I would gladly change my finnish pay for $100k a year.
Finnish average salary is only about 10% lower than Germany. Perhaps you are being underpaid? You could always relocate to Germany...
2006 Samsung digital photo frame viewed from other angles
So it is agreed that the design of the iPad from a frontal perspective is basically identical to Samsung's digital photo frame. And since the side by side comparison posted above only shows frontal views, then it is also agreed that the frontal perspective is the most important one.
If a differing rear design is supposed to be a valid differentiator, then see: iPad vs Galaxy Tab from another angle The iPad and Galaxy Tab appear very different when viewed from the rear; obviously not the same device.
And Samsung shareholders will go ballistic, literally that they're turning down sales from their #1 customer (Apple beat Sony in parts purchased from Samsung).
Samsung's #1 manufacturing customer is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. They utilise more of their parts in their own products than they sell to their competitors.
1993 Apple early tablet
2006 Samsung digital photo frame
2010 Apple iPad
But how long will it be before any carriculum you'd want will be freely available?
Freely available books will also lower the cost of printed books - once the content itself is free, then low cost book printshops (probably in China) will be able to churn out quality copies of coursebooks for very low cost - a mass market paperback costs only $0.75 to print, a tablet costs hundreds of dollars to buy. For the cost of one tablet, you could have hundreds of paper books printed. The average student probably uses about 10 books a year? Let's say the printing cost is $10, or even $20, that still means you could have all the books re-printed every single year and it would still cost a tenth of the price of a single tablet. The economics vastly favors printed books over electronic book readers - ebook readers are not only more expensive initially, but also have a much higher replacement rate (breakage, battery wear, obsolescence). E-books are great for mobility, great for having content that can be updated etc. but paper wins for cheap text books that have to survive the student life and be reused year after year.
Think the Government and the British state don't have a large measure of control? Think again
Officially they don't. There have been numerous governments that have criticised the reporting of the BBC but been unable to prevent it - the BBC dutifully reported NATO airstrike civilian victims during the Balkans wars, leading to government criticism that BBC in fact stood for "Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation":
"During the Nato bombing campaign the British government was sharply critical of BBC coverage. At one stage some government officials referred to us as the Belgrade Broadcasting Corporation."- The Guardian
Now, contrast this situation with an actual state controlled media - do you think such a media would even be allowed to report on civilians killed by the state military (a fact that goes against the military line that these are "no-collateral-damage precision airstrikes"?) And to continue to report on such victims of your military, even when it angers and displeases the government? And it was not just the Kosovo War, during the Falklands War government ministers accused the BBC of unpatriotic and neutral reporting - one minister angrily naming it the "Stateless Person's Broadcasting Corporation", another the "Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation".
The notion that the TV license isn't a tax and the BBC isn't state-controlled is a delusion.
Compare the BBC and its successive spats with various governments to an actual state-controlled media and you will see a big difference. Do you think that real state-controlled media broadcasts any criticisms of the government? Would a real state-controlled media be allowed to report repeatedly on allegations that the government mis-represented the evidence for going to war? If so, why do we not see this kind of criticism coming out of, say, the Chinese state media?
Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large.
What I would like to see is X-Prize style competitions for open drug research. If $10 million can get us a modern, reusable spaceship, then imagine what that could do to the drug research industry. A lousy $1 million prize got us several years of competitive research into statistical prediction algorithms for something as frivolous as choosing what movies to watch. Imagine what humanity could gain from a $50 million prize for a malaria vaccination or similar.
Patents are the first refuge of the unskilled.
What I find interesting is that "business people" (by which I mean those who are concerned with money rather than engineering) are mostly obsessed with patents. Often the first question asked after an investment pitch is "do you have a patent for this?" And if the answer is negative - then no investment. It is as if they can't understand the potential of the technology itself, they can't see how it could change people's lives, they need instead to have a simple, concrete unit by which to evaluate and differentiate companies, even if that unit is bogus. It leads to startups and other small companies filing for patents to increase the perceived shareholder value, even when the engineers know that the work they are being told to patent is just an implementation of pre-existing ideas, and that every competing product does more or less the same thing in the same way.
it never claimed complete immunity to viruses, merely immunity to Windows viruses
The full quote: "It doesn't get PC viruses. A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers. That's thanks to built-in defenses in Mac OS X that keep you safe, without any work on your part."
Technically you are right - a Mac won't be susceptible to a PC/Windows virus. However, if we are playing pedant, then we should also consider the claim that this immunity is due "to built-in defenses in Mac OS X". An immunity to PC/Windows viruses is not due to any special defenses of Mac OS X - it is due to the fact that the viruses are not cross-platform. The Mac is immune for the same reason that every other non-Windows computing platform is immune. With that in mind, it is hard to support the retroactive claim that Apple's marketing people meant the above quote to be taken literally as meaning that the Mac is protected against PC/Windows viruses, but *is not* protected from Apple-specific viruses. If that is what they meant, then why say that the immunity is due to "built-in defenses of OS X", rather than saying it's due to the lack of cross-platform viruses?
Two different (but similar) cases: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/11/morrisons-wine-ban-mother?CMP=AFCYAH http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4933325/Mother-refused-permission-to-buy-wine-by-Tesco-in-case-she-gave-them-to-her-daughter.html
Apple disputed the amount required to be paid but was always willing to cut a check.
If you dispute the amount to be paid, then you aren't willing to pay that amount. It is disingenuous and contradictory to suggest that Apple were willing to pay but only at a lower rate. I'm willing to pay $1 for a Ferrari - does this mean that Ferrari have to sell me one at that price? No.
If there are 100 patents in a standards essential patent portfolio ... and each one garners a 2.5% licensing fee, how much would the entire portfolio cost?
The license fee is for the whole portfolio, not per-patent. That's $18.75 per device for every iPhone. Compared to Microsoft's patent fee of $15 for every Samsung Android phone it looks like a reasonable deal - Samsung Android phones are generally lower priced than iPhones, and Motorola holds more phone-related patents.
Apple refused to accept the standard pricing
Did you even read the article to which you, yourself, linked? It says nothing, at all, about Apple refusing to pay.
I didn't say that Apple refused to pay *anything at all* - I said that they refused to pay the standard license fees of Nokia:
And finally, Apple can just pay. We spoke to several experts in the field during the course of our research into this piece, and almost all of them were surprised that Apple hadn't already coughed up the green. Again, we don't know the royalty rates Nokia's demanding, but it's a little strange that Apple isn't using its enormous cash reserves to just make this disappear. The main issue we can see is that whatever rate gets set in this case will be the basis of all future license negotiations, and Apple's got to be careful with that -- unlike almost every other company in the space, it's become a major player in the phone market virtually overnight, and setting this precedent properly is an important step. That said, Nokia's got to feel pretty good about the rates they've offered Apple here -- filing a lawsuit means Nokia's license agreements with other companies will eventually be examined, so it'll be obvious right away if Espoo's not offering similar terms to Cupertino. Let's just say this: it's not going to happen anytime soon, but we wouldn't be surprised if Steve ends up writing a check somewhere down the line.
So we don't know exactly what the requested license rate was, but we can infer from the fact that Nokia were the ones filing the case and requesting a cash settlement that they were confident their fee offer to Apple was comparable to those of other licensees.
Apple participates in many patent pools themselves, and they have no issue with paying the same license fees as anyone else.
Actually that isn't true. In the Nokia vs Apple case, Apple refused to accept the standard pricing and Nokia had to request that the court order them to pay: "all Nokia's asked the court to do is set a price, it's clearly willing to simply accept cash and move on"
I am not sure what distro you're using, but when Firefox gets updated on my Ubuntu machines, it does pop up a dialog box saying that Firefox was updated and needs to restart -- and then it waits for my permission to do so.
I am also using Ubuntu, and I have seen this Firefox update problem happen several times. Firefox is still running, but the render window complains about some missing file. I have never seen any popups, I wonder if the notifications are sent to all users?
My system doesn't initialize USB properly on reboot; about every other boot,
I've also a similar issue initializing the internal USB hub in some Dell monitors, the BIOS fails to initialize it every other reboot as you describe. It never happened previously, but began after a certain kernel update, so the problem may be software. It looked like it would be a lengthy process to track down the cause, and possibly only relevant to my particular combination of hardware and BIOS, so I took the quick fix and bought a new USB hub.
It's absolutely possible, of course, but the sheer amount of hackery that is required to make it work is just mind boggling... at least to me. Can you link anything that explains your concept?
Writing the OS X bootloaders was probably a lot of work too, but someone did it. And Windows Activation was cracked months before it was even released. To defeat Secure Boot, all a cracker would need to do is to take a signed bootloader that allows booting unsigned code, use that to boot grub, and then chainload a cracked copy of Windows. Or just instruct the user to turn off Secure Boot, since apparently it will be possible to disable it.
But unless the bootloader is designed to require a signed kernel, the bootloader can be configured to load a Linux kernel that chain-loads a compromised Windows kernel. And at that point, Microsoft will add the bootloader to the blacklist in a Windows update.
True, but with TPM enabled Windows Update should be able to download code that checks the boot path status and then alerts the user that their Windows has been compromised. Chapter 8 – UEFI and the TPM: Building a foundation for platform trust. TPM is not a requirement for Secure Boot, but I don't really see how it can be that effective without it. I wouldn't be surprised if some pressure is brought to bear on vendors to enable TPM by default.
We managed to update running systems with package management for how long?
Yes, but we didn't actually manage to make it work with modern desktops. Firefox and Chromium both fail when the packages of libraries that they depend on are moved underneath the running process. It is fine to say that this is a package manager problem, but it has been a known problem for years and is still unfixed (telling the sysadmin that his users should all manually restart Firefox is not a seamless solution, even assuming that he notices the message and acts on it). You can hardly blame people for wanting a more robust desktop, with applications that don't start randomly crashing when the sysadmin (or an automated script) runs a background update.
I don't understand how FF/TB updates can happen flawlessly on Windows but they screw up every single time on Linux.
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote.html
On Windows, files are locked if any process is using them, which forces a design where updates install into a separate directory. But -- annoyingness of locking aside -- in fact I think that design is preferable. To start with, a given version of Chrome will know its files will remain unmolested by updates. Furthermore, when an update happens, the updater can write out a separate "update succeeded" sentinel after writing all the files out, making impossible for an aborted update to leave both the previous and next version in a half-working state. (On Mac, we take a similar approach; I don't know enough about Macs to know whether the versioned directories within bundles make this magically work.)
With all this in mind you might reasonably ask why Linux needs to be special: why we waste memory on this zygote process launcher and have extra buggy codepaths just to support an inferior update model. (Note that by using .deb files we also lose our tiny incremental updates.)
And to that I can only answer the thinking we had at the time: one, we wanted to be good citizens on Linux; one distinction between "lame port of a Windows app" and "real Linux software" is exactly whether you distribute as a tarball or as a package. Secondly, and more importantly, we knew that regardless of what we did for Google Chrome the Linux distros would attempt to stuff Chromium into their package manager even when they know it breaks the app, much like they've done to Firefox. Now that I've summarized it in these terms it sounds a little depressing, but there it is; with ChromeOS where we control the stack we have more intelligent updates.