Of course the DAC is in the dock. The dock in this case is the computer, and the iThingy is the server. It's just downloading a file and playing it. How that's patentable in this day and age boggles the mind. Just because they take a traditional 'computer' app to play digital music files and package it in a single-purpose device doesn't mean they've invented anything.
How on earth does anybody justify a 2.5% (or any other percentage for that matter) royalty on an entire computer system based on a patent on some minor (or even major) feature of that system?
You could argue that GSM patents are inherent to the functionality of a mobile phone, and so justify royalties based on a significant portion of the device price. But even there, the 'making phone calls' part of today's smartphones is not their only (or even, for some people, their most important) feature. And besides, those patent royalties should apply to the cost of the chip that implements them - not the device that contains the chip.
The idea that Microsoft is collecting even $5 in royalties based on silly FAT32 patents or progress bar patents (even if they weren't silly) when they license the full WP7 OS for not much more than that is perverse beyond belief. And that Apple can prevent the sale of competing devices based on as minor a component as 'slide to unlock' is criminal. Go to court. Come up with a reasonable royalty. Charge it retrospectively if you must. But don't make it impossible to compete. The utter hypocrisy of the 'free market true believers' that write US law is mind boggling.
Could it be that the success of the iPad has uncovered a truth that, so far, only Microsoft in their inimically paranoid way, is able to see. In the age of mobile computing, operating systems have finally become commoditized.
The OEM model of selling (mostly) identical hardware with a pricey Microsoft tax on top won't cut it when competing with a successful Apple. Apple can cut the price to the bone and give away the software. Android OEM's can too. But for Windows OEM's to be price competitive, they need to stop paying big bucks to Microsoft for the OS. Microsoft can only solve this by emulating Apple and getting their baseline profit from the hardware, not the OS.
So far, this only really applies to the ARM tablets. Those won't run legacy Windows apps, so users have no need to pay for Windows on them. The X86 models still have that legacy tie-in, but they're a stopgap. Yeah, maybe some users would buy an ARM Windows tablet just so they can get Office, but not that many are gonna pay an extra hundred bucks for the tablet just for the privilege of paying another $150 to get Office for it. There's a market for that - just not an iPad-sized market. And that's the future. Microsoft is smart enough to see that. There's no profit to be made selling OS software for tablets. A new business model is required.
By the way, Google already has a viable business model. They don't need to make money selling Android for their business model to succeed. OEM's stand a better chance of building competitively powered and priced Android tablets than with the old hardware + MS software model. Whether Android tablet fragmentation prevents uptake or is a minor problem outweighed by real innovations in price and form factor is a question, but the potential is certainly there.
I've never used that key, because I refuse to give up my old, cheap, clicky keyboard that I like better than any keyboard I've tried that came with a new computer. What's with these mushy keyboard, carpal tunnel disasters?
That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
One of the problems with the DOJ's monopoly prosecution of Microsoft is that they didn't bother to establish that the monopoly that does the most harm is MSOffice. The idea that 'Exchange ActiveSync technology' should be able to be used to stop competitors in the smartphone industry is insane. Exchange has an effective monopoly achieved at first through bundling of Outlook with the OS, and perpetuated by bundling Outlook with Office. Presumably, Motorola 'infringes' on this technology because they have to in order to interoperate with the calendar system that most companies use. I suppose if you support software patents (I don't - especially for interoperability technologies), then you think MS should be paid whenever someone interacts with Exchange. But monopolies are treated differently, and for good reason. MS makes plenty of monopoly money on Exchange, and shouldn't be able to use it to block competitors in other fields.
Of course, the law doesn't seem to work this way. After all, the Windows monopoly has been well established, and that hasn't prevented Microsoft from charging royalties to use FAT32. But that just proves that the law sucks. A technology that is reverse-engineered and used for no other reason than to allow interoperability with a monopoly product shouldn't be subject to royalty payments. And if they are, the amount of those payments should be very little - say a fraction of the price of the competing product (WP7) proportional to the amount of code to implement the feature as a fraction of the size of the product.
Not to mention that, in Google's case, they came to prominence through some real innovation. Microsoft borrowed an OS, scammed IBM, copied WordPerfect, strong-armed OEMs into bundling their apps with the OS, lied to the DOJ, etc. Google came up with an innovative way to monetize the internet without ruining it, and so far they haven't strayed too far afield.
Now that Google's a public company, though, their 'Don't Be Evil' ethic is harder to square with Wall Street's poisonous demand for increasing stock prices at all costs. So sure, we ought to be wary, but I think Google's actually trying to compete as fairly as possible. And I don't think it's Dropbox they're cloning. They have this little competitor named Microsoft that would like nothing more than to neutralize their business model by giving away its own Dropbox clone - not to mention patent suits (and spending billions cloning Google's primary business), etc. Remember 'suck the air out' of your competitors business model? That was a Microsoft expression.
Would it be possible for owners of HTC, LG, etc phones to band together and file a class action suit against Microsoft for indirectly forcing them to pay bogus patent royalties? I doubt it, but it would be nice if somebody that can't be bought off were to challenge this shit.
Right. No skin off of Elop's ass to roll the dice. I'm sure he gets a huge payoff whether it succeeds or fails. Not so much for the rest of Nokia's workforce. And with 'just wait for WP8' as an excuse, he can string out the failure even longer....or succeed - y'never know...
There was nothing preventing them from putting out Android phones *and* this end-all atom based thing that you dream of.
The Android market is competitive, but whoever has the shiniest new device does well, and that could've been a Nokia device. Currently Samsung and HTC seem to be swapping places back and forth, but they're both selling lots of hardware. If Windows Phone ever takes off, all the Android OEM's are gonna be there too, so Nokia thinking that 'having the 3rd 0S to themselves' was worth waiting till October, 2012 to have a viable system was just nuts.
In 1991, it wouldn't have been Internet based at all. Back then, Microsoft was chasing Compuserv, attempting to build their own proprietary Microsoft Network. They were still at it in 1995 when Netscape hit.
That's my point. Vista was a big success, and everybody hated it. It still 'sold' with most new PC's. Nobody actually buys Windows upgrades any more - XP is 'good enough' for most Windows users, and newer OS's have needed beefier machines. So Microsoft's business model is no longer dependent on selling OS upgrades. They make all the Windows revenue they need from the OEM pre-load monopoly. Except for those pesky netbooks, for which they couldn't charge enough while still keeping Linux out of the market. So netbooks are 'no longer popular'. I wonder why...
All that said, Windows 8 might be a nice tablet system. But Win8 ARM tablets are just gonna be iPads + Office. If they're cheap enough, they may sell. Office may be the tie-breaker for some. The real killer tablet feature, though, will be true multi-user support. Apple and Google better get on the ball with that one, or Win8 really will take over.
Indeed they do. Too soon to know whether it works or not. But it's all upside for Microsoft. They don't need for people to like it on the desktop. As we've seen with Vista - people get (and pay for) it whether they like it or not. And if they put up a big enough stink, they can pay extra not to get it. In the meantime, Microsoft gets a fully funded project to develop a tablet OS that might possibly be able to leverage MSOffice compatibility into a winning formula. Nice what a monopoly or two can do...
Just because something's useful or was hard to come up with, doesn't mean it's an invention worthy of patent protection. I'm sure fashion designers work very hard and are quite brilliant at what they do. But they're not inventors.
Most of the cellphone UI patents that are gumming up the works are patents on metaphors used in a touch screen UI. 'Slide to unlock' is a metaphor for a slider switch implemented on a touch screen. It is not an invention - it's 'inventiveness' has nothing to do with how it's implemented. It's a simulation of a real-world device on a touch screen. The same could be said for scroll 'bounce'. It's a simulation of what happens when a display on a physical device is scrolled past it's physical end. It's clever to use this metaphor to enhance the UI experience, but it's not an invention.
And don't get me started on FAT32 long filenames. A bugfix masquerading as an invention, which is only even useful because a certain monopoly desktop OS requires it for plug-in devices to work. Inventive? Maybe. But mostly an 'inventive' way to extract monopoly tolls on every device designed to plug into a computer. Whether this is patentable or not, charging royalties for the ability to work with a Windows PC shouldn't be allowed under antitrust law.
Those HP printers can be made to work great, but you still need to do some serious Googling to find out that you first need to turn off the automatic USB-based Windows install disk that the printer appears to be when you plug it in. Then some more Googling to find out how to do it.
Pretty odd that HP goes out of its way to provide drivers for its printers and then doesn't bother to even warn you about this USB drive behavior.
Me too. I went in to wipe out my history, and even though I have gmail and youtube accounts, there's no web history. Somewhere along the line the people stirring up Google paranoia neglected to mention that almost nobody has this 'web history' thing enabled. If I as a regular Slashdot reading google user was never prompted to set this up, and didn't even know how to get to the page where you set it up, I imagine the affected population's pretty small.
Standards are chosen for the convenience of the producer of a patented service. I don't ask for H.264 video. I just want the content. If using a patent encumbered tech to deliver your goods makes business sense for you, then you should pay the royalty. But making the consumer pay a royalty again for the ability to consume is double charging, and doing so with monopoly restricted choices. If ATT wants to use GSM cell towers, fine. But why should the handset user pay a royalty to connect?
It's silly to claim that the harm to free software is negligible. The FOSS ecosystem can't work with royalty requirements. And most FOSS would go with patent free code if it were possible. But interoperability requires implementing standards. That's not a choice.
Other than 'goto-less purity', how about listing some of those horrors.
I'll admit the code's 'ugly', but it does have the advantage of letting you know exactly what it's doing. Sure, it would be 'better code' to split out the flush logic into a function, but that would involve defining a structure to pass it all the accumulated data (or worse, passing a whole bunch of parameters). This has the advantage of locating the accumulate and flush logic together where the relationships between the two are obvious.
How about removing the flag logic and using two gotos (better or worse?):
for (/* for loop */) {
if (/* section change */) {
goto flush_section;
} accumulate_data: /* add data into totals */ }
flush_section: /* flush logic here */ if (/*for condition - still in loop */
goto accumulate_data;
I sometimes like to use gotos (along with a flag) to handle final 'flush' logic in a loop during which intermediate flushing may take place. This could be done 'cleaner', I guess, by making the flush logic into a separate function (though that might require passing in a bunch of local variables). Sometimes, though, it's actually clearer to have the flush logic in the main loop, and when that logic is significant, the goto trick is certainly better (and clearer) than the copy/paste jobs you often see lazy programmers do.
final_flush=0; for (/* for loop */) {
if (/* section change */) { do_final_flush: /* flush current section data */
if (final_flush)
break;
} /* Accumulate data */ } /* Flush out final section data */ if (! final_flush) {
final_flush = 1;
goto do_final_flush; }
Further, who is to say how many lives were SAVED by the products that Union Carbide produces? That must be accounted for in the lawsuit that accompanies the prosecution of those responsible
No it doesn't. Just because a corporation does 'good' in the course of making money, that doesn't excuse negligence that kills people. Are you nuts?
>If you don't like the patent system, reform it by lobbying your government. The megacorporations are just playing by those rules
Unfortunately, before you can lobby your government to change the patent system, you've got to lobby your government to change the government lobbying system. Or pony up millions in campaign contributions...
> I might not want my competitors to know what technology I'm using in my product.
You're using Android. Your competitors already know what technology you're using in your product. I don't think any of the Microsoft patents are on Sense or TouchWiz - though I wouldn't put it past the patent office...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the DAC is in the dock. The dock in this case is the computer, and the iThingy is the server. It's just downloading a file and playing it. How that's patentable in this day and age boggles the mind. Just because they take a traditional 'computer' app to play digital music files and package it in a single-purpose device doesn't mean they've invented anything.
How on earth does anybody justify a 2.5% (or any other percentage for that matter) royalty on an entire computer system based on a patent on some minor (or even major) feature of that system?
You could argue that GSM patents are inherent to the functionality of a mobile phone, and so justify royalties based on a significant portion of the device price. But even there, the 'making phone calls' part of today's smartphones is not their only (or even, for some people, their most important) feature. And besides, those patent royalties should apply to the cost of the chip that implements them - not the device that contains the chip.
The idea that Microsoft is collecting even $5 in royalties based on silly FAT32 patents or progress bar patents (even if they weren't silly) when they license the full WP7 OS for not much more than that is perverse beyond belief. And that Apple can prevent the sale of competing devices based on as minor a component as 'slide to unlock' is criminal. Go to court. Come up with a reasonable royalty. Charge it retrospectively if you must. But don't make it impossible to compete. The utter hypocrisy of the 'free market true believers' that write US law is mind boggling.
Could it be that the success of the iPad has uncovered a truth that, so far, only Microsoft in their inimically paranoid way, is able to see. In the age of mobile computing, operating systems have finally become commoditized.
The OEM model of selling (mostly) identical hardware with a pricey Microsoft tax on top won't cut it when competing with a successful Apple. Apple can cut the price to the bone and give away the software. Android OEM's can too. But for Windows OEM's to be price competitive, they need to stop paying big bucks to Microsoft for the OS. Microsoft can only solve this by emulating Apple and getting their baseline profit from the hardware, not the OS.
So far, this only really applies to the ARM tablets. Those won't run legacy Windows apps, so users have no need to pay for Windows on them. The X86 models still have that legacy tie-in, but they're a stopgap. Yeah, maybe some users would buy an ARM Windows tablet just so they can get Office, but not that many are gonna pay an extra hundred bucks for the tablet just for the privilege of paying another $150 to get Office for it. There's a market for that - just not an iPad-sized market. And that's the future. Microsoft is smart enough to see that. There's no profit to be made selling OS software for tablets. A new business model is required.
By the way, Google already has a viable business model. They don't need to make money selling Android for their business model to succeed. OEM's stand a better chance of building competitively powered and priced Android tablets than with the old hardware + MS software model. Whether Android tablet fragmentation prevents uptake or is a minor problem outweighed by real innovations in price and form factor is a question, but the potential is certainly there.
I've never used that key, because I refuse to give up my old, cheap, clicky keyboard that I like better than any keyboard I've tried that came with a new computer. What's with these mushy keyboard, carpal tunnel disasters?
That's why the Nook Tablet came with a locked bootloader, whereas the original Nook Color spawned a large ROM'mer community. Netflix required it in order to let them use their app. I think I'd rather deal with DRM for paid downloads than have my whole device locked down.
...except on deciding that 'money == speech'. They were quick as bunnies deciding that. Faster than you can say "money also == bribery".
Did you expect Sergey Brin to develop the self-driving car?
One of the problems with the DOJ's monopoly prosecution of Microsoft is that they didn't bother to establish that the monopoly that does the most harm is MSOffice. The idea that 'Exchange ActiveSync technology' should be able to be used to stop competitors in the smartphone industry is insane. Exchange has an effective monopoly achieved at first through bundling of Outlook with the OS, and perpetuated by bundling Outlook with Office. Presumably, Motorola 'infringes' on this technology because they have to in order to interoperate with the calendar system that most companies use. I suppose if you support software patents (I don't - especially for interoperability technologies), then you think MS should be paid whenever someone interacts with Exchange. But monopolies are treated differently, and for good reason. MS makes plenty of monopoly money on Exchange, and shouldn't be able to use it to block competitors in other fields.
Of course, the law doesn't seem to work this way. After all, the Windows monopoly has been well established, and that hasn't prevented Microsoft from charging royalties to use FAT32. But that just proves that the law sucks. A technology that is reverse-engineered and used for no other reason than to allow interoperability with a monopoly product shouldn't be subject to royalty payments. And if they are, the amount of those payments should be very little - say a fraction of the price of the competing product (WP7) proportional to the amount of code to implement the feature as a fraction of the size of the product.
Not to mention that, in Google's case, they came to prominence through some real innovation. Microsoft borrowed an OS, scammed IBM, copied WordPerfect, strong-armed OEMs into bundling their apps with the OS, lied to the DOJ, etc. Google came up with an innovative way to monetize the internet without ruining it, and so far they haven't strayed too far afield.
Now that Google's a public company, though, their 'Don't Be Evil' ethic is harder to square with Wall Street's poisonous demand for increasing stock prices at all costs. So sure, we ought to be wary, but I think Google's actually trying to compete as fairly as possible. And I don't think it's Dropbox they're cloning. They have this little competitor named Microsoft that would like nothing more than to neutralize their business model by giving away its own Dropbox clone - not to mention patent suits (and spending billions cloning Google's primary business), etc. Remember 'suck the air out' of your competitors business model? That was a Microsoft expression.
Would it be possible for owners of HTC, LG, etc phones to band together and file a class action suit against Microsoft for indirectly forcing them to pay bogus patent royalties? I doubt it, but it would be nice if somebody that can't be bought off were to challenge this shit.
Right. No skin off of Elop's ass to roll the dice. I'm sure he gets a huge payoff whether it succeeds or fails. Not so much for the rest of Nokia's workforce. And with 'just wait for WP8' as an excuse, he can string out the failure even longer. ...or succeed - y'never know...
There was nothing preventing them from putting out Android phones *and* this end-all atom based thing that you dream of.
The Android market is competitive, but whoever has the shiniest new device does well, and that could've been a Nokia device. Currently Samsung and HTC seem to be swapping places back and forth, but they're both selling lots of hardware. If Windows Phone ever takes off, all the Android OEM's are gonna be there too, so Nokia thinking that 'having the 3rd 0S to themselves' was worth waiting till October, 2012 to have a viable system was just nuts.
In 1991, it wouldn't have been Internet based at all. Back then, Microsoft was chasing Compuserv, attempting to build their own proprietary Microsoft Network. They were still at it in 1995 when Netscape hit.
Netbooks.
But people didn't buy Vista
That's my point. Vista was a big success, and everybody hated it. It still 'sold' with most new PC's. Nobody actually buys Windows upgrades any more - XP is 'good enough' for most Windows users, and newer OS's have needed beefier machines. So Microsoft's business model is no longer dependent on selling OS upgrades. They make all the Windows revenue they need from the OEM pre-load monopoly. Except for those pesky netbooks, for which they couldn't charge enough while still keeping Linux out of the market. So netbooks are 'no longer popular'. I wonder why...
All that said, Windows 8 might be a nice tablet system. But Win8 ARM tablets are just gonna be iPads + Office. If they're cheap enough, they may sell. Office may be the tie-breaker for some. The real killer tablet feature, though, will be true multi-user support. Apple and Google better get on the ball with that one, or Win8 really will take over.
They certainly seem to be all in on this plan
Indeed they do. Too soon to know whether it works or not. But it's all upside for Microsoft. They don't need for people to like it on the desktop. As we've seen with Vista - people get (and pay for) it whether they like it or not. And if they put up a big enough stink, they can pay extra not to get it. In the meantime, Microsoft gets a fully funded project to develop a tablet OS that might possibly be able to leverage MSOffice compatibility into a winning formula. Nice what a monopoly or two can do...
Just because something's useful or was hard to come up with, doesn't mean it's an invention worthy of patent protection. I'm sure fashion designers work very hard and are quite brilliant at what they do. But they're not inventors.
Most of the cellphone UI patents that are gumming up the works are patents on metaphors used in a touch screen UI. 'Slide to unlock' is a metaphor for a slider switch implemented on a touch screen. It is not an invention - it's 'inventiveness' has nothing to do with how it's implemented. It's a simulation of a real-world device on a touch screen. The same could be said for scroll 'bounce'. It's a simulation of what happens when a display on a physical device is scrolled past it's physical end. It's clever to use this metaphor to enhance the UI experience, but it's not an invention.
And don't get me started on FAT32 long filenames. A bugfix masquerading as an invention, which is only even useful because a certain monopoly desktop OS requires it for plug-in devices to work. Inventive? Maybe. But mostly an 'inventive' way to extract monopoly tolls on every device designed to plug into a computer. Whether this is patentable or not, charging royalties for the ability to work with a Windows PC shouldn't be allowed under antitrust law.
Those HP printers can be made to work great, but you still need to do some serious Googling to find out that you first need to turn off the automatic USB-based Windows install disk that the printer appears to be when you plug it in. Then some more Googling to find out how to do it.
Pretty odd that HP goes out of its way to provide drivers for its printers and then doesn't bother to even warn you about this USB drive behavior.
Me too. I went in to wipe out my history, and even though I have gmail and youtube accounts, there's no web history. Somewhere along the line the people stirring up Google paranoia neglected to mention that almost nobody has this 'web history' thing enabled. If I as a regular Slashdot reading google user was never prompted to set this up, and didn't even know how to get to the page where you set it up, I imagine the affected population's pretty small.
Am I missing something?
Standards are chosen for the convenience of the producer of a patented service. I don't ask for H.264 video. I just want the content. If using a patent encumbered tech to deliver your goods makes business sense for you, then you should pay the royalty. But making the consumer pay a royalty again for the ability to consume is double charging, and doing so with monopoly restricted choices. If ATT wants to use GSM cell towers, fine. But why should the handset user pay a royalty to connect?
It's silly to claim that the harm to free software is negligible. The FOSS ecosystem can't work with royalty requirements. And most FOSS would go with patent free code if it were possible. But interoperability requires implementing standards. That's not a choice.
Other than 'goto-less purity', how about listing some of those horrors.
I'll admit the code's 'ugly', but it does have the advantage of letting you know exactly what it's doing. Sure, it would be 'better code' to split out the flush logic into a function, but that would involve defining a structure to pass it all the accumulated data (or worse, passing a whole bunch of parameters). This has the advantage of locating the accumulate and flush logic together where the relationships between the two are obvious.
How about removing the flag logic and using two gotos (better or worse?):
for (/* for loop */) {
/* add data into totals */
if (/* section change */) {
goto flush_section;
}
accumulate_data:
}
flush_section:
/* flush logic here */
if (/*for condition - still in loop */
goto accumulate_data;
I sometimes like to use gotos (along with a flag) to handle final 'flush' logic in a loop during which intermediate flushing may take place. This could be done 'cleaner', I guess, by making the flush logic into a separate function (though that might require passing in a bunch of local variables). Sometimes, though, it's actually clearer to have the flush logic in the main loop, and when that logic is significant, the goto trick is certainly better (and clearer) than the copy/paste jobs you often see lazy programmers do.
final_flush=0;
/* flush current section data */
/* Accumulate data */
/* Flush out final section data */
for (/* for loop */) {
if (/* section change */) {
do_final_flush:
if (final_flush)
break;
}
}
if (! final_flush) {
final_flush = 1;
goto do_final_flush;
}
Further, who is to say how many lives were SAVED by the products that Union Carbide produces? That must be accounted for in the lawsuit that accompanies the prosecution of those responsible
No it doesn't. Just because a corporation does 'good' in the course of making money, that doesn't excuse negligence that kills people. Are you nuts?
>If you don't like the patent system, reform it by lobbying your government. The megacorporations are just playing by those rules
Unfortunately, before you can lobby your government to change the patent system, you've got to lobby your government to change the government lobbying system. Or pony up millions in campaign contributions...
> I might not want my competitors to know what technology I'm using in my product.
You're using Android. Your competitors already know what technology you're using in your product. I don't think any of the Microsoft patents are on Sense or TouchWiz - though I wouldn't put it past the patent office...