True, but when you consider the strength of your legal team, what matters most is the amount of money you have to afford a crack staff. Also, I'm no businessperson, but I'd imagine that if they're not making good margins on each unit sold, then as a company, they're really not growing.
In any case, I really wish that Google would choose them to produce the Nexus line again. Samsung makes a good phone no doubt, but there's something to be said about a company that publicly unlocks all of its phone's bootloaders. If I get into hacking phones myself, then maybe I will get an HTC next as well
To be honest, MS played the patent game a lot smarter than Apple did. MS just makes vendors pay to shut up, even though (true to form), they are utter sleezebags about it. Apple on the other hand was totally out of their minds when they developed their legal strategy (perhaps, once again, true to form). Did Steve Jobs really think he could sue other phone manufacturers out of existence? Did they actually think that they would be the only ones that should be allowed to make smartphones? His ego always was his downfall.
In any case, now I'd like to see someone do something about MS. Another Software Tax is a bad precedent for the industry...
At this point, the barrier to entry is so high that we'll probably never see another new phone company entering the market. You may see lots of competition among the companies that have lots of money to throw around (e.g. Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Amazon), but have you ever thought about the small companies that are getting crushed? I honestly don't have a clue how HTC survives, but if another of their ilk comes about amidst these stupid lawsuits, I'll eat my shoe.
Even moreso, it's Apple's goal of a means to enforce their ridiculously marked up prices and, on top of that, ensure that they're the only vendor allowing them to mark it up even higher. Even Apple knows that their pricing models are obviously unsustainable. Remember how the initial Iphone was $600? It would probably be even worse today if they had their way in the courts and crushed all of their competitors.
Yes, but at least Apple are shooting themselves in the foot. Once Apple's lawsuits are thrown out (okay, granted that's probably decades away a la SCO), it'll be the last we hear of that. But MS's tactics are far more permanent and sets a Very Bad Precedent for the future of the software industry.
It's ridiculous - there's far too much potential for abuse and is an obvious case of racketeering seeing as we already know that the patents are bogus. While it should be illegal for any patent licensing agreement to be covered by a NDA, I guess you couldn't expect such sensibility from any country that would allow software patents in the first place though.
Another victory for bribing politicians! And another step by America towards becoming an irrelevant country with an artificial, inflated Imaginary Property Economy.
You hold the people who made the car responsible? They better analyze the hell out of every single tiny problem that crops up and make details and fixes public. This is why all these driverless softwares must be open source. Any 'benefits' of making it proprietary would come at the cost everyone's safety.
And besides, it doesn't really matter how someone is punished for wrongdoing. You judge whether it's an improvement or not; you don't judge on how best to get retribution. Otherwise, you could hypothetically end up choosing a system that causes a lot of problems as long as it's easy to blame someone for causing them.
I suppose the only thing left to lament is all the money HTC had to waste to bring this common sense to light. Money that could have been spent on, well, something useful.
You make a lot of good points, but there's one important reason why it's bad: there's only one vendor providing the one sole implementation. I suppose one could argue that it's the very reason that it enables all those benefits that you mention. It's also the reason a lot of problems arise. For one, it's one of the most popular attack vectors on Windows (and possibly Macs as well soon). Then there's the fact that it will only be supported on platforms chosen by said vendor. This made even worse when you consider that in 99% of cases, their only reason for choosing a particular platform is whether it makes economical sense for them to do so. The product you get is limited by the mindshare that they're willing to invest in. Case in point: has Flash performance on Linux caught up to that of Windows yet?
Which brings me to the fact that it's bloated and slow. If I'm using an operating system (or any other piece of software) which is too resource intensive for my machine, I can switch it out and use something else. There's no replacement for Flash - you either get what it gives you or nothing at all. There's no alternative. And of course, we'll probably never see its source. As far as I know, it's the last piece of closed-source software that I have running on this machine.
So while I agree that it's nice that we have Flash to give us these things, I think a standards-compliant implementation would be far more ideal.
After the difficulties with the first wave of migrations, in 2007 the LiMux administrative team agreed on a new strategy. This involved implementing pilot projects in all departments to convert at least ten percent of existing PCs to the basic LiMux client in order to assess the degree of heterogeneity of the existing organic IT landscape.
Oh come on... A pilot program is standard practice before _any_ sort of migration. What kind of IT moron would just walk into the department and say 'we're ready!' before wiping every machine and expecting everything to just work? It doesn't happen that way.
The only way to make a smooth migration is to take it slowly. And the most important step is in the beginning when you gather a working knowledge of what you're dealing with and what it's going to take to migrate it. You plan ahead, and everything that goes after comes smoothly. If you just walk in expecting things to work, well you're just asking for a disaster to happen.
To be fair, the article doesn't state anywhere that it was due to the browser ballot. It could have just been a natural trend.
Nevertheless, good to see that there aren't any dominant browsers anymore. As long as there's a multitude of browsers, it means that there will be standards compliance...
Yeah, that'd be so great... it'd be proof that nothing's important unless it harms a major corporation. Cause just doing the common sense thing and blocking these worthless cases from the start requires too much intelligence for our neanderthals in power to handle.
Can't really comment on this since I don't monitor the memory usage very closely. All I can say is that my machine starts consuming hundreds of MB of swap space, so yes, it definitely reduces performance by a lot.
And yet some users (like myself) still prefer Firefox because that bloated garbage actually translates into useful features. Firefox is still the best browser in terms of customizability and (consequently) respecting users' privacy.
As far as I see, Firefox and Chrome occupy different niches - Chrome for more of a lean, one-size-fits-all approach, and Firefox for a more custom browsing experience (which, in my opinion is what makes it great). I know that Chrome has come a ways with some of the essentials like script- and ad-blockers, but Firefox still has the edge. While I'm sad to see that more users choose Chrome than FF, it doesn't mean that the most popular browser is the best. If that were the case, IE would still be king.
Though it still annoys me to no end that Firefox can take 700MB on memory. On this machine with only 1GB of RAM, that's pretty serious. But it's still worth it IMO. I'll be upgrading soon anyways
That's the beauty of a Free/Open Source software license like the GPL: it works within the system, and its strength grows right along with any bolstering of copyright law that might be done. It's like a sword that becomes bigger & stronger automatically when copyrights are strengthened.
Wow, that put a tear in my eye... what a beautiful double entendre!
Of course, if there were any such thing as antitrust regulation, then MS would get sued to hell if they changed their Windows pricing agreements because one of their vendors stood up to their anti-Android racket. There's no way in hell that MS should be allowed to attack vendors for defending themselves from this ridiculous shit.
Have you tried Dia? It's an open source alternative to Visio. I've never used Visio, and I've only played around with Dia for 5 minutes, but it's something you might want to check out.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but when you consider the strength of your legal team, what matters most is the amount of money you have to afford a crack staff. Also, I'm no businessperson, but I'd imagine that if they're not making good margins on each unit sold, then as a company, they're really not growing.
In any case, I really wish that Google would choose them to produce the Nexus line again. Samsung makes a good phone no doubt, but there's something to be said about a company that publicly unlocks all of its phone's bootloaders. If I get into hacking phones myself, then maybe I will get an HTC next as well
Slide to unlock
Showing pictures on a phone
Placement of status buttons and progress bars (on a phone)
These are all software implementations, not algorithms. They should all be thrown out as patents.
To be honest, MS played the patent game a lot smarter than Apple did. MS just makes vendors pay to shut up, even though (true to form), they are utter sleezebags about it. Apple on the other hand was totally out of their minds when they developed their legal strategy (perhaps, once again, true to form). Did Steve Jobs really think he could sue other phone manufacturers out of existence? Did they actually think that they would be the only ones that should be allowed to make smartphones? His ego always was his downfall.
In any case, now I'd like to see someone do something about MS. Another Software Tax is a bad precedent for the industry...
At this point, the barrier to entry is so high that we'll probably never see another new phone company entering the market. You may see lots of competition among the companies that have lots of money to throw around (e.g. Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, LG, Amazon), but have you ever thought about the small companies that are getting crushed? I honestly don't have a clue how HTC survives, but if another of their ilk comes about amidst these stupid lawsuits, I'll eat my shoe.
Even moreso, it's Apple's goal of a means to enforce their ridiculously marked up prices and, on top of that, ensure that they're the only vendor allowing them to mark it up even higher. Even Apple knows that their pricing models are obviously unsustainable. Remember how the initial Iphone was $600? It would probably be even worse today if they had their way in the courts and crushed all of their competitors.
Thankfully, their model is a failure.
Yes, but at least Apple are shooting themselves in the foot. Once Apple's lawsuits are thrown out (okay, granted that's probably decades away a la SCO), it'll be the last we hear of that. But MS's tactics are far more permanent and sets a Very Bad Precedent for the future of the software industry.
It's ridiculous - there's far too much potential for abuse and is an obvious case of racketeering seeing as we already know that the patents are bogus. While it should be illegal for any patent licensing agreement to be covered by a NDA, I guess you couldn't expect such sensibility from any country that would allow software patents in the first place though.
Another victory for bribing politicians! And another step by America towards becoming an irrelevant country with an artificial, inflated Imaginary Property Economy.
F11? Sorry, I think you mean Alt+F4
You hold the people who made the car responsible? They better analyze the hell out of every single tiny problem that crops up and make details and fixes public. This is why all these driverless softwares must be open source. Any 'benefits' of making it proprietary would come at the cost everyone's safety.
And besides, it doesn't really matter how someone is punished for wrongdoing. You judge whether it's an improvement or not; you don't judge on how best to get retribution. Otherwise, you could hypothetically end up choosing a system that causes a lot of problems as long as it's easy to blame someone for causing them.
I suppose the only thing left to lament is all the money HTC had to waste to bring this common sense to light. Money that could have been spent on, well, something useful.
You make a lot of good points, but there's one important reason why it's bad: there's only one vendor providing the one sole implementation. I suppose one could argue that it's the very reason that it enables all those benefits that you mention. It's also the reason a lot of problems arise. For one, it's one of the most popular attack vectors on Windows (and possibly Macs as well soon). Then there's the fact that it will only be supported on platforms chosen by said vendor. This made even worse when you consider that in 99% of cases, their only reason for choosing a particular platform is whether it makes economical sense for them to do so. The product you get is limited by the mindshare that they're willing to invest in. Case in point: has Flash performance on Linux caught up to that of Windows yet?
Which brings me to the fact that it's bloated and slow. If I'm using an operating system (or any other piece of software) which is too resource intensive for my machine, I can switch it out and use something else. There's no replacement for Flash - you either get what it gives you or nothing at all. There's no alternative. And of course, we'll probably never see its source. As far as I know, it's the last piece of closed-source software that I have running on this machine.
So while I agree that it's nice that we have Flash to give us these things, I think a standards-compliant implementation would be far more ideal.
FTA:
After the difficulties with the first wave of migrations, in 2007 the LiMux administrative team agreed on a new strategy. This involved implementing pilot projects in all departments to convert at least ten percent of existing PCs to the basic LiMux client in order to assess the degree of heterogeneity of the existing organic IT landscape.
Oh come on... A pilot program is standard practice before _any_ sort of migration. What kind of IT moron would just walk into the department and say 'we're ready!' before wiping every machine and expecting everything to just work? It doesn't happen that way.
The only way to make a smooth migration is to take it slowly. And the most important step is in the beginning when you gather a working knowledge of what you're dealing with and what it's going to take to migrate it. You plan ahead, and everything that goes after comes smoothly. If you just walk in expecting things to work, well you're just asking for a disaster to happen.
Naive indeed.
To be fair, the article doesn't state anywhere that it was due to the browser ballot. It could have just been a natural trend.
Nevertheless, good to see that there aren't any dominant browsers anymore. As long as there's a multitude of browsers, it means that there will be standards compliance...
or rather, Flash. ughh
This, my friends, is what happens when you have it.
Yeah, that'd be so great... it'd be proof that nothing's important unless it harms a major corporation. Cause just doing the common sense thing and blocking these worthless cases from the start requires too much intelligence for our neanderthals in power to handle.
Can't really comment on this since I don't monitor the memory usage very closely. All I can say is that my machine starts consuming hundreds of MB of swap space, so yes, it definitely reduces performance by a lot.
What mistakes does our community make that lead to that?
I blame this one
;-)
And don't drive in reverse!
And yet some users (like myself) still prefer Firefox because that bloated garbage actually translates into useful features. Firefox is still the best browser in terms of customizability and (consequently) respecting users' privacy.
As far as I see, Firefox and Chrome occupy different niches - Chrome for more of a lean, one-size-fits-all approach, and Firefox for a more custom browsing experience (which, in my opinion is what makes it great). I know that Chrome has come a ways with some of the essentials like script- and ad-blockers, but Firefox still has the edge. While I'm sad to see that more users choose Chrome than FF, it doesn't mean that the most popular browser is the best. If that were the case, IE would still be king.
Though it still annoys me to no end that Firefox can take 700MB on memory. On this machine with only 1GB of RAM, that's pretty serious. But it's still worth it IMO. I'll be upgrading soon anyways
Unfortunately, I don't just yank new computers out of my ass.
Actually, I think it's better this way, and for many reasons.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5058/amds-opteron-interlagos-6200/5
That's the beauty of a Free/Open Source software license like the GPL: it works within the system, and its strength grows right along with any bolstering of copyright law that might be done. It's like a sword that becomes bigger & stronger automatically when copyrights are strengthened.
Wow, that put a tear in my eye... what a beautiful double entendre!
Of course, if there were any such thing as antitrust regulation, then MS would get sued to hell if they changed their Windows pricing agreements because one of their vendors stood up to their anti-Android racket. There's no way in hell that MS should be allowed to attack vendors for defending themselves from this ridiculous shit.
I hear that! No one I know has bought a record since the 80s. Amazing how fast the new tech comes up!
Have you tried Dia? It's an open source alternative to Visio. I've never used Visio, and I've only played around with Dia for 5 minutes, but it's something you might want to check out.