The Apple patent was filed on December 19, 2007. The Nokia N95 had an accelerometer for automatic UI rotation and was released in September 2006. It wasn't touch-screen, while the Apple patent is applied to a touch-screen device. It is therefore a clear example of obviousness: what can be done on a non-touch-screen phone, can obviously be done on a touch-screen phone. Common reality-distortion field influence where something doesn't exist or is unuseful until it gets added to an Apple gadget.
Putting together two things together which already exist isn't an invention, and shouldn't be patentable.
Motors existed.
Bicycles existed.
By your logic, the first motorcycle shouldn't have been patentable.
Putting two things together than previously existed most certainly is patentable.
Putting a motor on a bicycle involves a large number of non-trivial technical challenges that I'm sure you don't ignore. The particular ways to overcome those problems can be patented, not the idea of a motorcycle itself. In fact, the first motorcycle hasn't been patented, and that's why we have had motorcycles from different manufacturers since the beginning of the history of motorcycles. And that has been good for motorcycle buyers and for the progress of motorcycling.
You shouldn't be running around with bluetooth on anyway.
Actually, I should be able to, because it's useful.
It's my OS that should drop any packet I'm not interested in. Machines are supposed to do the work for me, not the opposite.
In reality, not all Bluetooth adapters are Class 1 (I'd say that most aren't, but I have no numbers backing my claim), so they can only work within 10 meters or less. And we're not even talking about walls.
And you, Google, have become more evil than Microsoft. At least they were after my money, you're after every detail of my personal life.
If you like Ubuntu so much, then why haven't you put it in your chromebooks, instead of yet another extremely closed userspace with no "upstream" roots?
Buying second-hand games is the only (legal) sane way of getting PS3 games with the outrageous prices that Sony forces upon us here in Europe. I'll bet that even many first-hand buyers only buy original games because they can sell them after they're done with them.
This action by Sony shows an utter disrespect towards its customers, right when some of them might have been starting to forget the PSN fiasco. It's sad for me to say this, because I think that Sony's consoles are always above their competition. Unfortunately, I can't accept to pay a higher price to support a company which will treat me like a cash cow once they've locked me in.
Oh well, perhaps I'm too grown up for games anyway.
The first is a lack of good APIs (beyond the Posix level, which is fine).
We have excellent APIs well above the POSIX level. Try QT for example. Or the huge standard libraries made automatically available by high level languages such as Java.
If Linux had something like Quartz, porting Photoshop to Linux would be simple for Adobe.
Qt has nothing to envy from Quartz. Adobe ported Photoshop to UNIX, back when it had to be done using Motif and X11, which were a pain in the ass to code for. Nowadays even Adobe products for Windows use Qt (Photoshop Elements). If Adobe wanted to port Photoshop to Linux, they could do it in a couple of months. They don't, only because there's no demand for it.
It would make a lot of things easier. Instead you have to hack around with SDL (which is a great library that reaches it's goals, it just doesn't do all that much).
You can't in any way see SDL as the equivalent of Quartz for Linux. That would be XRender, Cairo, Arthur or Java2D. At least 3 of them are pretty powerful and easy to use.
Second is the difficulty of installing/distributing binary software. Linux was built for distributing applications by source, and has a lot of good tools for doing so, and as an open-source advocate I like that, but a lot of companies don't want to distribute source, and there isn't really a good way to distribute binaries.
Linux has all the mechanisms in place to install, distribute and maintain binary-only software. Even more so than Windows. It was modeled after the traditional UNIX OSes which weren't open source. The good way to distribute binaries is well defined by both common sense and written standards that all Linux distributions try to follow (Android doesn't, hence it is not a "Linux distro").
Packaging systems are nice to maintain an operating system, but IMHO they're highly overrated as a third party application distribution system. Try cracking open some RPM or DEB and manually run the software inside them - it will probably work fine with no modifications. Applications for Linux could be distributed in.tar format just like most applications for Windows are distributed in.zip format.
Why do they need to be wireless? They're coupled to an inherently wired technology, can't they use the power wires to transmit the signal? Isn't that how smart power meters work?
They already have a means, although a bit less comfortable to use than traditional wiretapping. They can install on the user's computer a trojan that samples the machine's microphone input. It can be used to eavesdrop Skype, but also for environmental interception. Italian police used this technique very recently against an alleged criminal who thought to be safe from wiretapping by virtue of using Skype.
And Italy and Switzerland, who are now joining Norway, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Australia and others.
but the public reaction was based on it's fears, rather than on the reports.
I don't know about TMI, but in the case of german nuclear power plants, there was the government-funded KiKK study which did find an increase in leukemia for children living near certain power plants under normal operation.
How much taxpayers' money is required to clean up lava lamps fires?
The cost of the meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could be between 5.7 trillion and 20 trillion yen ($70.1 billion-$246 billion), according to a report published Wednesday. The Nikkei business daily, citing data from the Japan Center for Economic Research, reported that the projections assume that only evacuees within a 20 kilometer radius of the plant receive income support, and that the government buys land within that area.
and your coffee machine has a digital clock based on a crystal, you could run it off a bicycle and it wouldn't care
A few weeks ago, lots of mains-connected clocks in Sicily started going faster because of unspecified maintenance work on the power grid, that involved cutting the island off the mainland network for some weeks. My modern, American-built microwave oven jumped 10 minutes in the future. I wouldn't believe it was possible with current appliances, but it happened. (Perhaps the reference provided by the crystal is multiplied by something coming from the power line? But wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having a crystal? I don't know.)
In this particular case the problem is that the WP7 announcement apparently didn't make b) happy either; the share price dropped heavily on 11 february and I think it hasn't recovered yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The novelty of Apple's patent relies on the fact that the device in question has a touchscreen. But:
The Apple patent was filed on December 19, 2007. The Nokia N95 had an accelerometer for automatic UI rotation and was released in September 2006. It wasn't touch-screen, while the Apple patent is applied to a touch-screen device. It is therefore a clear example of obviousness: what can be done on a non-touch-screen phone, can obviously be done on a touch-screen phone. Common reality-distortion field influence where something doesn't exist or is unuseful until it gets added to an Apple gadget.
Motors existed. Bicycles existed. By your logic, the first motorcycle shouldn't have been patentable.
Putting two things together than previously existed most certainly is patentable.
Putting a motor on a bicycle involves a large number of non-trivial technical challenges that I'm sure you don't ignore. The particular ways to overcome those problems can be patented, not the idea of a motorcycle itself. In fact, the first motorcycle hasn't been patented, and that's why we have had motorcycles from different manufacturers since the beginning of the history of motorcycles. And that has been good for motorcycle buyers and for the progress of motorcycling.
Step 1) Use a Google product without knowing that you're using it.
Step 2) Realize that you're using a Google product.
Step 3) Add to the list.
You shouldn't be running around with bluetooth on anyway.
Actually, I should be able to, because it's useful.
It's my OS that should drop any packet I'm not interested in. Machines are supposed to do the work for me, not the opposite.
In reality, not all Bluetooth adapters are Class 1 (I'd say that most aren't, but I have no numbers backing my claim), so they can only work within 10 meters or less. And we're not even talking about walls.
On the other hand, if you're interested in hearing about all the times I found myself using a Google product without knowing, I can tell you.
How could we make lava lamps work without inefficient incandescent light bulbs?
And you, Google, have become more evil than Microsoft. At least they were after my money, you're after every detail of my personal life.
If you like Ubuntu so much, then why haven't you put it in your chromebooks, instead of yet another extremely closed userspace with no "upstream" roots?
This action by Sony shows an utter disrespect towards its customers, right when some of them might have been starting to forget the PSN fiasco. It's sad for me to say this, because I think that Sony's consoles are always above their competition. Unfortunately, I can't accept to pay a higher price to support a company which will treat me like a cash cow once they've locked me in.
Oh well, perhaps I'm too grown up for games anyway.
But in the end it worked overall, both for the human race and for Linux. We did progress.
The first is a lack of good APIs (beyond the Posix level, which is fine).
We have excellent APIs well above the POSIX level. Try QT for example. Or the huge standard libraries made automatically available by high level languages such as Java.
If Linux had something like Quartz, porting Photoshop to Linux would be simple for Adobe.
Qt has nothing to envy from Quartz. Adobe ported Photoshop to UNIX, back when it had to be done using Motif and X11, which were a pain in the ass to code for. Nowadays even Adobe products for Windows use Qt (Photoshop Elements). If Adobe wanted to port Photoshop to Linux, they could do it in a couple of months. They don't, only because there's no demand for it.
It would make a lot of things easier. Instead you have to hack around with SDL (which is a great library that reaches it's goals, it just doesn't do all that much).
You can't in any way see SDL as the equivalent of Quartz for Linux. That would be XRender, Cairo, Arthur or Java2D. At least 3 of them are pretty powerful and easy to use.
Second is the difficulty of installing/distributing binary software. Linux was built for distributing applications by source, and has a lot of good tools for doing so, and as an open-source advocate I like that, but a lot of companies don't want to distribute source, and there isn't really a good way to distribute binaries.
Linux has all the mechanisms in place to install, distribute and maintain binary-only software. Even more so than Windows. It was modeled after the traditional UNIX OSes which weren't open source. The good way to distribute binaries is well defined by both common sense and written standards that all Linux distributions try to follow (Android doesn't, hence it is not a "Linux distro").
Packaging systems are nice to maintain an operating system, but IMHO they're highly overrated as a third party application distribution system. Try cracking open some RPM or DEB and manually run the software inside them - it will probably work fine with no modifications. Applications for Linux could be distributed in .tar format just like most applications for Windows are distributed in .zip format.
Android is a Linux distro.
Yeah. My Samsung TV set is a Linux distro, too, because it runs the Linux kernel.
Why do they need to be wireless? They're coupled to an inherently wired technology, can't they use the power wires to transmit the signal? Isn't that how smart power meters work?
They already have a means, although a bit less comfortable to use than traditional wiretapping. They can install on the user's computer a trojan that samples the machine's microphone input. It can be used to eavesdrop Skype, but also for environmental interception. Italian police used this technique very recently against an alleged criminal who thought to be safe from wiretapping by virtue of using Skype.
I think that "the projections assume that [...] the government buys land within that area" means something like that.
There's no need for them to be common. One is enough.
Only Germany doesn't stay the course.
And Italy and Switzerland, who are now joining Norway, Austria, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Australia and others.
but the public reaction was based on it's fears, rather than on the reports.
I don't know about TMI, but in the case of german nuclear power plants, there was the government-funded KiKK study which did find an increase in leukemia for children living near certain power plants under normal operation.
(link).
and your coffee machine has a digital clock based on a crystal, you could run it off a bicycle and it wouldn't care
A few weeks ago, lots of mains-connected clocks in Sicily started going faster because of unspecified maintenance work on the power grid, that involved cutting the island off the mainland network for some weeks. My modern, American-built microwave oven jumped 10 minutes in the future. I wouldn't believe it was possible with current appliances, but it happened. (Perhaps the reference provided by the crystal is multiplied by something coming from the power line? But wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having a crystal? I don't know.)
The point is that the article has no point at all.
I found some glimpses of the virtual keyboard in this long video. Disclaimer: I don't understand vietnamese.
In this particular case the problem is that the WP7 announcement apparently didn't make b) happy either; the share price dropped heavily on 11 february and I think it hasn't recovered yet.
I have an opposite impression. It looks slick and the transitions aren't annoying and distracting as the WP7 ones.
Antitrust? WP7 has an insignificant marketshare.