Because PCs, the last mass-produced general-purpose computers remaining, will turn from being always able to run whatever software their owners want, into closed machines that *could* perhaps run other software only if their manufacturers provide some optional, undocumented, model-specific, hard-to-reach switch enabling them to do so. This means that competition against MS in the PC market will be even harder, and has obvious benefits only to MS themselves.
And by the way, you can foresee how many manufacturers will do the right thing and provide the "freedom switch" by considering how many of them allow the installation of an unsigned OS on their Android smartphones today.
It *is* the trusted computing that started years ago, which is now starting to bear fruits. Corporations just took a few years to get the public opinion used to lockdown, for example by planting increasingly closed gadgets in people's everyday life. First they came for the smartphones...
What they want to achieve isn't to prevent you from running another OS (although making this operation painful or impossible is of course a nice side effect to them). They want to inject the end of a chain of trust inside your own machine, so they can control what software you run, what media files you play and so on. An OS installed inside a VM would be outside the chain of trust, and thus would be unable to run the software they want to protect (most likely "apps" from the forthcoming windows market) and to decode the media they want to protect.
In fact, firmware is not distributed under the GPL (except in rare cases).
You can distribute a GPL operating system containing non-free firmware. Linux is GPL and still it comes with firmware blobs inside its source code tarball. Debian are very strict GPL observers, yet they distribute an unsupported CD containing non-free firmware ( http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ ).
The problem is when the firmware, beyond being non-free, is not even redistributable. In that case your only option to obtain it legally is to download it from the hardware manufacturer's (or one of its licensee's) web site, or possibly to perform surgery on the Windows drivers that came with the product.
This is not the case for AMD's firmware, which is shipped officially by themselves with the Linux kernel.
I think that zealotry aside, a reason people don't like user-uploaded firmware is that some hardware vendors don't want you to redistribute the firmware for free, so end users have to download it from the manufacturer's website instead of having it installed alongside the rest of the operating system. Which can be an annoyance e.g. if the firmware is needed for your wifi card (that happened with the old Broadcom chips for example), as that requires you to connect your computer to the internet by wire just to download the firmware.
This is not the case for AMD's firmware which has been happily traveling with the Linux kernel since day zero.
Yes. Firmware is just an enabler that lets your hardware expose the features you read on the hardware's box before buying it. It's not related to the specific uses you want to make of your hardware, it's software-independent, so you as an end user have no interest in tinkering with firmware (although being able to do so can be an extra bonus, in some specific scenarios).
Drivers, on the other hand, bind your hardware to a specific operational environment, and limit your freedom to use the hardware in any way you want. They limit the CPU architectures you can run your hardware on. They limit the choice of operating systems you can run your hardware with. They limit the adaptability of your hardware to new operating system releases. An open source driver that, even by interfacing to closed-source firmware, sets me free from all of these limits, is perfectly free to me.
Sun wanted generified *and* non-generified code to coexist and interoperate on the same JVM, without requiring two different code bases. Apparently it was important to their customers of the time. That's why they chose type-erased generics, IIRC.
The ECMA specification dates back to version 2.0 (in 2006, 5 years ago) and even back then, it didn't cover the whole standard library for C#, which is more important than the language itself. C#'s de facto standard library,.NET, is not standardized and has plenty of links to Windows.
The current version of C# (4.0, from 2010), has no standard defining it, besides its Windows-only implementation.
Moorestown was supposed to bring high performance x86 cores to smartphones, allowing them e.g. to run the unmodified World of Warcraft and other wonders. The result: dual-core, 1.2 GHz Arm chips are everywhere, while Moorestown is dead with zero end-user smartphones having adopted it.
Now it's the time of Medfield, and while I haven't spotted any smartphone running on it yet, I already hear Intel talking about its successor.
Yeah, because people behave *so* nicely on Facebook (cf. the various groups such as "let's kill %s" or "happy birthday Mussolini").
And a lot of people are using fake names there, so it doesn't even count as evidence.
I liked that. Look at how the UI tended to be unsaturated, so the colours in the client area of the application appeared to be more relevant (I think this was true for the Macintosh, too).
Windows 3.1, in particular, introduced common dialogs so that typical workflows would appear uniform among different applications.
Also, applications had very comprehensive help systems, which allowed users to learn most of what they needed to learn by the applications themselves, instead of requiring them to take expensive courses from the applications' vendors.
They're trying to mimic the work of non-FOSS developers (for example Microsoft's ribbon, which has its roots in all the "innovations" that IMHO have been ruining the Windows UI since the "IE 4 desktop integration" for Windows '95).
I have the impression that people here have, on average, a strong opinion supporting nuclear energy, so I expect a large number of them to show up as volunteers to bring the convenience of nuclear power, in physical form, next to their own residences.
They are totally OK with modifications to their phone platform
Say what? WP7 is the most closed platform both from the handset makers' and the users' point of view. They won't even let you change your memory card without Windows locking it down, after which you'll need a Nokia phone (!) to exorcise Windows out of it.
where Apple and Android Handset makers are not.
Don't know about Apple, but the typical Android handset will let you do whatever you want to its platform once it's rooted. Oh, and Android is open source, so you can actually contribute to it.
They have reversed their stance on linux and are actively using it, contributing to it, and offering it as part of their cloud services.
No, they're actively suing and threatening any company that actually makes use of Linux, and their contribution to Linux is only limited to the stuff required to run Linux in their own proprietary virtualised environments, and they're only contributing the code because they're forced to do so by the GPL license, and they're doing it in the worst possible way, by releasing code drops and letting them bit-rot.
Name some from 2006 and 2007 and before which include all 3. Even the original iPhone had only accelerometers. The compass and gyro didn't come until later.
I didn't say that all of them were common in 2006... for example, the compass was in the Nokia N97 in November 2008, and only got into iPhone 3GS in June 2009. As of 2010, a (relatively) cheap phone such as the HTC Wildfire had the whole set.
I don't think you can't implement your own version of Java without being sued, as IBM and the ASF have been distributing their own implementation for years. I think, in poor words, that you can't have a commercial implementation and call it "Java" without giving money to Oracle.
If I remember correctly, Oracle opposed this "field of use" limitation when they weren't the owners of Java. Talk about consistency...
Among the other things, they're patent-trolling any phone manufacturer using Linux, they're planting patented standards at every occasion they get (e.g. exFAT), they poisoned the standardization of ODF, and they paid Nokia to kill MeeGo.
MS isn't transitioning anywhere, they just have less power than the past, thanks to Linux and the open source community in general (which they saw as "communism" and "cancer"), and thus they can do less evil than they could in the recent past. But they still do what they can.
Who could have thought that giving away our personal information over the Internet was a bad idea...
I wonder if further concentrating all those information into the hands of a single company will make things worse? Naah, they're "not evil", what could possibly go wrong.
As I wrote somewhere else, putting an engine on a moving vehicle involves overcoming hard technical challenges, that defined the state-of-the art of engineering at the time when cars were invented. Putting together a self-rotating UI and a touchscreen in a time when, individually, they were normally present on phones, requires a couple of screws.
The fact that cars were not patented, but e.g. their engines were, should make you reflect.
I have to wonder if anybody here actuall "read" the claims of the patent. Doesn't sound like it to me - sounds like Apple smashing.
Yes I did. What makes you believe otherwise?
You can receive a patent on an extension of another patent.
Indeed, we're full of granted patents that show that. The point is if it is actually fair and who benefits from this fact.
Recall that Apple has 3D accelerometers. That's not innovative - so what, right?
True. In fact, every non-low end phone sold in the last years has a triplet of sensors for each one of accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope, I think.
Their patent is on the heuristically algorithms that determine how to flip the image based on this information. [...] This isn't about putting two pieces of HW together - it's about the software parts that make it work right.
I 100% agree with you, but that's not the case of this particular patent we're discussing here, whose claims don't contain any reference to the way the software works, but only to the results. That's why it would catch all the touchscreen phones sold since 2007, regardless of the software tricks they're using to extract data from their sensors.
What's probably bothering most of the people here is that Apple now holds a patent on a feature used by 99.9% of Android phones and tablets.
Exactly. More in general, people here are afraid that the USPTO grants trivial, meaningless patents to companies that use them to hinder competition by exploiting cracks in the legal system instead of making better products, which would advantage the end user. Unfortunately, as long as the rules allow patent trolls to have power, Apple is forced to play this way, too. I don't blame them, they have done well, they have to defend themselves to survive.
That's what people can't stomach - acknowledging that Apple was smart enough to patent such an "obvious" patent when clearly nobody else in the industry thought of it or presented real prior art to stop it.
Prior art wouldn't work, because while there were phones rotating their display using accelerometers when the patent was filed, none of them had a touchscreen, which this patent is all about. So the patent system favours "smart" companies, as you call them, over companies trying to compete by actually making innovative products. Which is bad for everybody, even Apple users: the iPhone already costs $650 - the next iPhone might cost even more if some patent troll was "smart" enough to patent, say, "a mobile device with a touch screen and a 4G radio" and wanted a piece of Apple's profits for that.
The N95 reoriented its screen using its accelerometer well before December 19, 2007 which is the date the patent was filed.
The Apple patent is: portable device AND accelerometers AND screen orientation.
No, the Apple patent is: touchscreen portable device (already existing at the time) AND screen rotation by accelerometers (already existing at the time).
the reality is, however, that nobody else actually did it (so I guess it wasn't all that obvious, was it?).
The reality is that others actually did it, but on non-touchscreen devices. Doing the same thing on a touchscreen device is obvious, especially if you consider that all high-end phones were moving to touchscreen at the time, so the addition of a touchscreen was the next logic step for all high-end devices.
Slashdot Mirror
And by the way, you can foresee how many manufacturers will do the right thing and provide the "freedom switch" by considering how many of them allow the installation of an unsigned OS on their Android smartphones today.
It *is* the trusted computing that started years ago, which is now starting to bear fruits. Corporations just took a few years to get the public opinion used to lockdown, for example by planting increasingly closed gadgets in people's everyday life.
First they came for the smartphones...
What they want to achieve isn't to prevent you from running another OS (although making this operation painful or impossible is of course a nice side effect to them). They want to inject the end of a chain of trust inside your own machine, so they can control what software you run, what media files you play and so on. An OS installed inside a VM would be outside the chain of trust, and thus would be unable to run the software they want to protect (most likely "apps" from the forthcoming windows market) and to decode the media they want to protect.
Using a free OS would be.
You can distribute a GPL operating system containing non-free firmware. Linux is GPL and still it comes with firmware blobs inside its source code tarball. Debian are very strict GPL observers, yet they distribute an unsupported CD containing non-free firmware ( http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/ ).
The problem is when the firmware, beyond being non-free, is not even redistributable. In that case your only option to obtain it legally is to download it from the hardware manufacturer's (or one of its licensee's) web site, or possibly to perform surgery on the Windows drivers that came with the product.
This is not the case for AMD's firmware, which is shipped officially by themselves with the Linux kernel.
This is not the case for AMD's firmware which has been happily traveling with the Linux kernel since day zero.
Yes. Firmware is just an enabler that lets your hardware expose the features you read on the hardware's box before buying it. It's not related to the specific uses you want to make of your hardware, it's software-independent, so you as an end user have no interest in tinkering with firmware (although being able to do so can be an extra bonus, in some specific scenarios).
Drivers, on the other hand, bind your hardware to a specific operational environment, and limit your freedom to use the hardware in any way you want. They limit the CPU architectures you can run your hardware on. They limit the choice of operating systems you can run your hardware with. They limit the adaptability of your hardware to new operating system releases. An open source driver that, even by interfacing to closed-source firmware, sets me free from all of these limits, is perfectly free to me.
(an article by the same author as TFA on the subject.)
The current version of C# (4.0, from 2010), has no standard defining it, besides its Windows-only implementation.
Now it's the time of Medfield, and while I haven't spotted any smartphone running on it yet, I already hear Intel talking about its successor.
[DRM sucks]
Then use plain PDFs.
(12) Smells nice.
Nothing can beat the smell of fresh desiccant when you open the box of a shiny new gadget (such as an e-book reader).
Yeah, because people behave *so* nicely on Facebook (cf. the various groups such as "let's kill %s" or "happy birthday Mussolini").
And a lot of people are using fake names there, so it doesn't even count as evidence.
Windows 3.1, in particular, introduced common dialogs so that typical workflows would appear uniform among different applications.
Also, applications had very comprehensive help systems, which allowed users to learn most of what they needed to learn by the applications themselves, instead of requiring them to take expensive courses from the applications' vendors.
They're trying to mimic the work of non-FOSS developers (for example Microsoft's ribbon, which has its roots in all the "innovations" that IMHO have been ruining the Windows UI since the "IE 4 desktop integration" for Windows '95).
I have the impression that people here have, on average, a strong opinion supporting nuclear energy, so I expect a large number of them to show up as volunteers to bring the convenience of nuclear power, in physical form, next to their own residences.
sh,
At least bash breaks compatibility even at minor releases.
Perl 5,
Perl breaks binary compatibility even if you don't change Perl version but do change the flags used to compile the Perl interpreter.
Javascript,
JS breaks both at new releases and across different vendors.
everything IBM produces, ...
Are you refering to the IBM VM for Java?
They are totally OK with modifications to their phone platform
Say what? WP7 is the most closed platform both from the handset makers' and the users' point of view. They won't even let you change your memory card without Windows locking it down, after which you'll need a Nokia phone (!) to exorcise Windows out of it.
where Apple and Android Handset makers are not.
Don't know about Apple, but the typical Android handset will let you do whatever you want to its platform once it's rooted. Oh, and Android is open source, so you can actually contribute to it.
They have reversed their stance on linux and are actively using it, contributing to it, and offering it as part of their cloud services.
No, they're actively suing and threatening any company that actually makes use of Linux, and their contribution to Linux is only limited to the stuff required to run Linux in their own proprietary virtualised environments, and they're only contributing the code because they're forced to do so by the GPL license, and they're doing it in the worst possible way, by releasing code drops and letting them bit-rot.
Name some from 2006 and 2007 and before which include all 3. Even the original iPhone had only accelerometers. The compass and gyro didn't come until later.
I didn't say that all of them were common in 2006... for example, the compass was in the Nokia N97 in November 2008, and only got into iPhone 3GS in June 2009. As of 2010, a (relatively) cheap phone such as the HTC Wildfire had the whole set.
I don't think you can't implement your own version of Java without being sued, as IBM and the ASF have been distributing their own implementation for years. I think, in poor words, that you can't have a commercial implementation and call it "Java" without giving money to Oracle.
If I remember correctly, Oracle opposed this "field of use" limitation when they weren't the owners of Java. Talk about consistency...
MS isn't transitioning anywhere, they just have less power than the past, thanks to Linux and the open source community in general (which they saw as "communism" and "cancer"), and thus they can do less evil than they could in the recent past. But they still do what they can.
Who could have thought that giving away our personal information over the Internet was a bad idea...
I wonder if further concentrating all those information into the hands of a single company will make things worse? Naah, they're "not evil", what could possibly go wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000
The fact that cars were not patented, but e.g. their engines were, should make you reflect.
I have to wonder if anybody here actuall "read" the claims of the patent. Doesn't sound like it to me - sounds like Apple smashing.
Yes I did. What makes you believe otherwise?
You can receive a patent on an extension of another patent.
Indeed, we're full of granted patents that show that. The point is if it is actually fair and who benefits from this fact.
Recall that Apple has 3D accelerometers. That's not innovative - so what, right?
True. In fact, every non-low end phone sold in the last years has a triplet of sensors for each one of accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope, I think.
Their patent is on the heuristically algorithms that determine how to flip the image based on this information. [...] This isn't about putting two pieces of HW together - it's about the software parts that make it work right.
I 100% agree with you, but that's not the case of this particular patent we're discussing here, whose claims don't contain any reference to the way the software works, but only to the results. That's why it would catch all the touchscreen phones sold since 2007, regardless of the software tricks they're using to extract data from their sensors.
What's probably bothering most of the people here is that Apple now holds a patent on a feature used by 99.9% of Android phones and tablets.
Exactly. More in general, people here are afraid that the USPTO grants trivial, meaningless patents to companies that use them to hinder competition by exploiting cracks in the legal system instead of making better products, which would advantage the end user. Unfortunately, as long as the rules allow patent trolls to have power, Apple is forced to play this way, too. I don't blame them, they have done well, they have to defend themselves to survive.
That's what people can't stomach - acknowledging that Apple was smart enough to patent such an "obvious" patent when clearly nobody else in the industry thought of it or presented real prior art to stop it.
Prior art wouldn't work, because while there were phones rotating their display using accelerometers when the patent was filed, none of them had a touchscreen, which this patent is all about. So the patent system favours "smart" companies, as you call them, over companies trying to compete by actually making innovative products. Which is bad for everybody, even Apple users: the iPhone already costs $650 - the next iPhone might cost even more if some patent troll was "smart" enough to patent, say, "a mobile device with a touch screen and a 4G radio" and wanted a piece of Apple's profits for that.
No, the Apple patent is: touchscreen portable device (already existing at the time) AND screen rotation by accelerometers (already existing at the time).
The reality is that others actually did it, but on non-touchscreen devices. Doing the same thing on a touchscreen device is obvious, especially if you consider that all high-end phones were moving to touchscreen at the time, so the addition of a touchscreen was the next logic step for all high-end devices.