Neither Apple nor HTC are British companies. The only British-designed component they share is the ARM processor. We don't have any economic fallout if Apple loses (or HTC, for that matter).
Yo mama is so fat, she give all the particles in the Universe their mass.
Look, this is almost as sensible as what the newspapers have been printing about this. So far, the most coherent bit of journalism I've seen outside New Scientist is possibly The Daily Mash, which is at least mildly amusing.
Once a dysfunctional group gets any power at all, it leverages it. Mildly sociopathic Libertarians manage to get mod points, mod up less mild sociopaths, and before long the monkeys have the key of the banana plantation as they all mod one another up in a circular hell (the reference is to Huis Clos by Sartre). Apply this to your own specific interest group. (Note to Libertarians: if you mod me down you are betraying your own principles. Cognitive dissonance is your friend here.)
Modern wiring harnesses are designed to be (a) fast to assemble and disassemble) (b) reliable (c) as foolproof as possible, hence the different connectors. Those of us with long memories can recall when cars had hardly any wiring at all, yet it was always going wrong (cables frayed, bullet connectors pulled, contacts corroded, mechanics connected the wrong wire during a service and nobody noticed till the brakes started the indicators flashing).
The leader of the Saloon-bar Soundoff Party? Someone who complains because he finds economic arguments in the EU parliament "dull" ? Someone who regarded Berlusconi as a credible Italian leader?
For US readers, Nigel Farage is the leader of the UK version of the Tea Party. His party has been described as the "British National Party for people who shop at Marks and Spencer". Avoiding libel, I hope, I will merely observe that he is not, as far as I know, regulated by the FSA to offer financial advice, and that before you short the Euro you should be aware that the value of investments can go down as well as up.
"but nature took them out slowly and found a replacement"
Please don't anthropomorphise "Nature". "Nature" doesn't replace anything. (And note my sig: Tennyson in 1844 knew more about evolution than a lot of educated people do today. And yes, evolution as an idea was well established before Origin was published; Charles Darwin got some of his ideas from his grandfather Erasmus.)
Plumbing in the Roman world made their cities inhabitable by bringing in adequate drinking water and draining away sewage. The problems of the plague in London were solved by Bazalgette's sewage system, water purification plants and piped water.
Another thing: there are plenty of plumbers but not that many intelligent plumbers. The same goes for electricians. A plumber with IT qualifications will normally have the business and topological skills to do the job better and for less than a plumber without, and before long will be contracting those plumbers to work under his direction.
By the time I was 40 I had grown up, and I hope you do too. Knowing what I now know, I wouldn't hire you, because your driven lifestyle makes you likely to miss the big picture ("obsess over every little mistake" - no, you need to get a sense of proportion to fix large code bases), and you want a team of people like you (overly narrow focus). Fine, no doubt, if you want to design HFT systems, but not so good when a variety of real world problems with different priorities are flooding in all the time and a balanced, rational approach is needed to manage the workload and stay sane.
Several studies have shown that the peak years for sexual enjoyment in women is the range 36-44. I won't bore you with the details except to note that experience bears this out.
I know it's a dead platform, fallen off its perch, gone to join the choir immortal, insert Monty Python references ad nauseam - but webOS is being open sourced right now. And I'm trying to evaluate Enyo as a candidate for a cross platform front end for one of our applications. It isn't dead, it's resting.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but wasn't that the whole point of webOS? Which HP bought and then Leo the Druggist backed out of because he couldn't see the point of a company whose entire history was in hardware continuing to do hardware...
As a terminology Nazi, Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub, I am delighted that you quoted "monetize". It drives me slightly mad when people misuse it: literally, monetizing a router would mean that you could take a case of them into a bank and exchange them for dollars at some rate (since it is an economics term meaning "to use a particular thing as currency"). Given that the outcome of this is that it will be extremely hard to get people to exchange affected routers for cash, it's doubly inappropriate.
I am relieved to learn that no such state of affairs as I suggest could possibly occur in the USA.
Incidentally:
"she was concerned about how she would seem" - "she was concerned about how a ruling in their favor might be viewed."
"had went in favor" - "had ruled in favor" or "had found in favor". "Had went" is not English.
"run out of town on rails" - the expression is "on a rail". It's perhaps inadvisable to try and use colloquialisms you don't understand.
We have got used to thinking that anything that doesn't sell in tens of millions is a failure. But this is far from the truth. A niche product that is profitable is better than a volume product that sells at a loss (ask Nokia or RIM). This thing has a world power supply built in. There are probably over half a billion households around the world that could afford, and use one. If only 1% were to buy one, that's still a pretty successful product in audio terms.
When it comes to end-user products (I hate the word "consumer" which is just borrowed economics jargon trying to sound as if it means something) there is usually no clearly defined reason to buy A rather than B for most people. 16Gbytes on a Nexus tablet? I've used up barely a third of my 16Gbyte Playbook, and a fifth of the 16Gbytes on my phone. Not everybody wants to store movies on a tablet. 12.5W per channel? "Audiophiles" are a small minority. Many people have TV sets with far less audio output, and for them 25W total is a very significant improvement. So they have to buy a couple of speakers...the truth is most people do not want to pay $9000 for an amplifier every copper atom of which has been individually hand assembled by a time-served audio technician.
It looks as if the object here is to test drive a new class of appliance. It can't be compared to a $75 Android box. New services can be built on its architecture; NAS boxes can be made to work with it. HDMI monitors will plug into it. The design language is a world away from a well known fruit-centric product range. For a number of families in the world who don't happen to have six-figure incomes in dollars or euros, this plus a monitor plus a phone will plug into the ADSL router and away they go.
One of the besetting sins of many Slashdot posters is that they aren't US-centric: they are "My social class, age and income group in my profession in the US"-centric. That's because we don't work in marketing. Talk to anyone who has worked seriously in consumer product marketing and it's another world.
There is a complication in the case which makes me wonder if this is why Apple has chosen this court. Lucy Koh is of Korean descent. I guess that, had she ruled the other way, Apple would have demanded a new hearing because of judicial bias in favor of a Korean company. Therefore she has to give Apple the benefit of the doubt and, basically, kick it upstairs.
She may perhaps privately think that Apple will lose, but again the more publicly it loses, and the more expensively, the better.
The message of the case is actually that Apple is being outgunned technically by Samsung and is worried. If they thought the next iPhone would be a huge winner, why bother over these really rather trivial patents? The simple fact that they are trying to use litigation to keep a competitor product which is not a knock-off out of the US tells us that, just like the people who litigated to try and stop Henry Ford making cars, they are aware that the writing is on the wall for their business model.
"Troll" is nothing to do with fantasy monsters and everything to do with fishing. A troll is someone who floats a line with yummy bait across a discussion board and waits to see who bites, having failed to notice that the grub or worm is on a hook.
These people who didn't discover the Internet till this century...kindly remove yourself from my area of cultivated graminoids.
I'm just commenting on three or four German companies I worked with. I can't speak for all Germans.
Incidentally, the latest bottom-end Kia, the Picanto, very cheekily borrows a lot of design cues from BMW: even the grille looks more than a little BMW-like. But I don't like recent BMWs because they seem to be ripping off some 50s and 60s Citroen design elements. Once upon a time passing off was about Chinese handbags with linked CC emblems, or visual copies of Seamasters that lost an hour a day. Now it is about the shape of corners or a telephone icon. Effectively, the old legal principle of "de minimus non curat lex" perhaps seems to have less weight in Koh's court than it does in Posner's.
In fact patents belong in a world with a far smaller population. When there were lots of small nations with small educated populations, patents made some kind of sense. A patent holder affected at most a few million individuals in one country. But in a world in which the lucky first person to register an invention gets everything - that is ludicrous. It raises the bar of competitiveness to a degree that only the very well funded in countries with global reach are able to obtain any IP.
Patents on the crank and the negative to positive process held up engine development and photography, respectively, for years in the UK. In both cases it was merely a case of who was first to file. It is an excessive first mover advantage.
Do you remember Florian Mueller who persuaded a number of news outlets that he was an expert on patents (though I do not believe he is a qualified patent attorney in any jurisdiction)?
He has been very quiet lately, hasn't he? I wonder why?
I used to work with German companies to develop both components and machinery for my company, and I do not agree. The Germans I worked with had a high regard for Japanese and Korean machinery. Their view was that German manufacturing and skills were a few years ahead, and that much of their superiority was in the education and training of the workforce. A German machine tool was better because it might use the latest material, drive or control technology, but mainly because it had been put together by people who were that much better than their Far Eastern competitors.
In fact, one of our suppliers used to sell their machines to the Far East after 18 months to 2 years because by then they had worn to the extent that they were about as good as new Far Eastern machines. By doing this, they helped German companies keep their machine tool sales up.
I doubt this story. First, it costs tens of millions to design a washing machine up front. Second, with anything like this you do not design all the parts up front. You buy standard catalogue parts wherever possible to save money and, ideally, allow multiple supply sources. Third, what you describe is not "clean room". Clean room is when you take a functional specification (spins at 1200 rpm say) and engineer that without ever seeing how the original product does it. It gives protection against certain design copyrights such as source code and engineering drawings. And fourth, a sufficiently close copy would not "walk" during the spin cycle because this is a matter of drum balancing.
The object seems to be to suggest that Koreans just copy. They don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither Apple nor HTC are British companies. The only British-designed component they share is the ARM processor. We don't have any economic fallout if Apple loses (or HTC, for that matter).
Look, this is almost as sensible as what the newspapers have been printing about this. So far, the most coherent bit of journalism I've seen outside New Scientist is possibly The Daily Mash, which is at least mildly amusing.
Once a dysfunctional group gets any power at all, it leverages it. Mildly sociopathic Libertarians manage to get mod points, mod up less mild sociopaths, and before long the monkeys have the key of the banana plantation as they all mod one another up in a circular hell (the reference is to Huis Clos by Sartre). Apply this to your own specific interest group. (Note to Libertarians: if you mod me down you are betraying your own principles. Cognitive dissonance is your friend here.)
Modern wiring harnesses are designed to be (a) fast to assemble and disassemble) (b) reliable (c) as foolproof as possible, hence the different connectors. Those of us with long memories can recall when cars had hardly any wiring at all, yet it was always going wrong (cables frayed, bullet connectors pulled, contacts corroded, mechanics connected the wrong wire during a service and nobody noticed till the brakes started the indicators flashing).
For US readers, Nigel Farage is the leader of the UK version of the Tea Party. His party has been described as the "British National Party for people who shop at Marks and Spencer". Avoiding libel, I hope, I will merely observe that he is not, as far as I know, regulated by the FSA to offer financial advice, and that before you short the Euro you should be aware that the value of investments can go down as well as up.
Please don't anthropomorphise "Nature". "Nature" doesn't replace anything. (And note my sig: Tennyson in 1844 knew more about evolution than a lot of educated people do today. And yes, evolution as an idea was well established before Origin was published; Charles Darwin got some of his ideas from his grandfather Erasmus.)
Another thing: there are plenty of plumbers but not that many intelligent plumbers. The same goes for electricians. A plumber with IT qualifications will normally have the business and topological skills to do the job better and for less than a plumber without, and before long will be contracting those plumbers to work under his direction.
By the time I was 40 I had grown up, and I hope you do too. Knowing what I now know, I wouldn't hire you, because your driven lifestyle makes you likely to miss the big picture ("obsess over every little mistake" - no, you need to get a sense of proportion to fix large code bases), and you want a team of people like you (overly narrow focus). Fine, no doubt, if you want to design HFT systems, but not so good when a variety of real world problems with different priorities are flooding in all the time and a balanced, rational approach is needed to manage the workload and stay sane.
Several studies have shown that the peak years for sexual enjoyment in women is the range 36-44. I won't bore you with the details except to note that experience bears this out.
Profit from.
I know it's a dead platform, fallen off its perch, gone to join the choir immortal, insert Monty Python references ad nauseam - but webOS is being open sourced right now. And I'm trying to evaluate Enyo as a candidate for a cross platform front end for one of our applications. It isn't dead, it's resting.
Correct me if I'm wrong...but wasn't that the whole point of webOS? Which HP bought and then Leo the Druggist backed out of because he couldn't see the point of a company whose entire history was in hardware continuing to do hardware...
I'm curious. The worst thing they do is phone me up and ask when I would like to book my car in for servicing.
Anyway, thanks again.
Incidentally:
"she was concerned about how she would seem" - "she was concerned about how a ruling in their favor might be viewed."
"had went in favor" - "had ruled in favor" or "had found in favor". "Had went" is not English.
"run out of town on rails" - the expression is "on a rail". It's perhaps inadvisable to try and use colloquialisms you don't understand.
When it comes to end-user products (I hate the word "consumer" which is just borrowed economics jargon trying to sound as if it means something) there is usually no clearly defined reason to buy A rather than B for most people. 16Gbytes on a Nexus tablet? I've used up barely a third of my 16Gbyte Playbook, and a fifth of the 16Gbytes on my phone. Not everybody wants to store movies on a tablet. 12.5W per channel? "Audiophiles" are a small minority. Many people have TV sets with far less audio output, and for them 25W total is a very significant improvement. So they have to buy a couple of speakers...the truth is most people do not want to pay $9000 for an amplifier every copper atom of which has been individually hand assembled by a time-served audio technician.
It looks as if the object here is to test drive a new class of appliance. It can't be compared to a $75 Android box. New services can be built on its architecture; NAS boxes can be made to work with it. HDMI monitors will plug into it. The design language is a world away from a well known fruit-centric product range. For a number of families in the world who don't happen to have six-figure incomes in dollars or euros, this plus a monitor plus a phone will plug into the ADSL router and away they go.
One of the besetting sins of many Slashdot posters is that they aren't US-centric: they are "My social class, age and income group in my profession in the US"-centric. That's because we don't work in marketing. Talk to anyone who has worked seriously in consumer product marketing and it's another world.
The Apple attack is directed at Google, as well as Samsung, as a big hit here is more devastating.
She stimulates their cash flow every time she makes a ruling, and for lawyers that is an exceedingly attractive trait in a woman.
She may perhaps privately think that Apple will lose, but again the more publicly it loses, and the more expensively, the better.
The message of the case is actually that Apple is being outgunned technically by Samsung and is worried. If they thought the next iPhone would be a huge winner, why bother over these really rather trivial patents? The simple fact that they are trying to use litigation to keep a competitor product which is not a knock-off out of the US tells us that, just like the people who litigated to try and stop Henry Ford making cars, they are aware that the writing is on the wall for their business model.
These people who didn't discover the Internet till this century...kindly remove yourself from my area of cultivated graminoids.
Incidentally, the latest bottom-end Kia, the Picanto, very cheekily borrows a lot of design cues from BMW: even the grille looks more than a little BMW-like. But I don't like recent BMWs because they seem to be ripping off some 50s and 60s Citroen design elements. Once upon a time passing off was about Chinese handbags with linked CC emblems, or visual copies of Seamasters that lost an hour a day. Now it is about the shape of corners or a telephone icon. Effectively, the old legal principle of "de minimus non curat lex" perhaps seems to have less weight in Koh's court than it does in Posner's.
Patents on the crank and the negative to positive process held up engine development and photography, respectively, for years in the UK. In both cases it was merely a case of who was first to file. It is an excessive first mover advantage.
He has been very quiet lately, hasn't he? I wonder why?
In fact, one of our suppliers used to sell their machines to the Far East after 18 months to 2 years because by then they had worn to the extent that they were about as good as new Far Eastern machines. By doing this, they helped German companies keep their machine tool sales up.
The object seems to be to suggest that Koreans just copy. They don't.