"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. "
They may have started to sue in 2010, but we are only starting to see the results of those lawsuits now. Apple made the mistake of choosing a victim who is both obviously in the right and rich enough to prove it.
Thats just silly. Android is neither a cell phone nor a company... it is just a VM running on linux therefore it has zero market share.
Let's put this really simply. If you have an app and you want people to run it, you have a choice of binary formats to put it in. If you put it out in Android's binary format, it will run on "75%" of the new phones sold this year (I'd guess 65% actually). If you put it out in iOS format it will run on, say, 20%. If you put it out in RIM's format it's likely to run on about 5%. If you put it out on Bada it will run on about 3% of phones. If you put it out in Windows Phone's format and we assume even a generous 50% growth caused by Windows phone 8, which would exceed every recent new version of Windows for Mobile phones, then it will run on about 3% of phones.
From the point of view of an App developer what you have to know is that, if you already have the facilities in place to support a Bada port of your app in parallel with you iOS, Android, and RIM ports, and if you really get serious ROI from the Bada version, then you should maybe consider producing a Windows Phone port. Otherwise forget it, come back in 2015 and have a look at the market again.
Producing ports for different operating systems isn't, as we have always been told for Linux, free. You are more likely to get widespread attention and grass roots marketing for your Windows version of you app if the iOS app is successful than if the Windows version is successful. Now is the chance to take advantage of your competitors who are distracted by Microsoft's Windows marketing and try to overtake them by concentrating all your efforts on the successful platforms.
Are Apple users really worse off not having Lattitude track them as they use the map app?
I'd imagine that the ones that choose to use Latitude are worse off since the features of Latitude they use won't work. I've seen Latitude used for finding when friends are nearby; it looks like a useful feature that I miss because I want to reduce the amount I'm tracked. The other users could choose to have it switched off as I do on my Android phone. What's the problem with extra choice? Overall, Google's tracking is the reason their map app gives the best times for routing. I guess that overall the users are better off.
What you are hinting at is a real privacy problem. Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon, AT&T and Google all get user's location data and then use that for commercial reasons other than the user's direct benefit. With Google, at least we can have the belief that they know how to do data filtering and anonymization. That's not enough though; there should definitely be laws, as there are in Europe for mobile operators, which protect the subscriber's privacy. That's an independent issue however.
Google's withholding turn-by-turn voice navigation from the iOS version in order to give their Android platform a competitive advantage.
Since you are obviously intimately familiar with the negotiations, perhaps you could correct my misapprehension. I had heard that Apple didn't want iOS users to have Latitude access or Google branding . Sort of like they do on all other versions of Google map I have ever seen. That would kind of suggest it was more about locking in Apple customers to Apple's own map app and friend finder service than about Google refusing to provide features.
There are about three linux based distros for the openmoko, all with custom UI front ends.
Most "distros" that you see are exactly that; ways of experimenting with different UI, usability and system administration concepts. The guys that do them don't want to do much of the low level plumbing. Think of Linaro as being similar to Mer which is the underlying developer whilst Plasma Active and Nemo the consumer distros built on top of it.
In the case of Linaro, though, they are trying to support completely embedded customers. These users often don't end using a proper distro at all. For this reason Linaro is less building a distro that people build on top and more building examples of working systems people can copy from. Let's say you are an SOC or sensor vendor that wants to sell to Android vendors in future. Your first place to start would be cooperating (paying) Linaro to get it working. Once that's done, everybody can can see how it works and is confident that they can also get it working in their own build of Android. At the same time you get access to the massive embedded Linux market.
This is one of the ways in which modern community oriented FOSS software works a bit differently from proprietary software. You see all of these experiments and development versions out in the open where each of them would be hidden somewhere deep inside Microsoft's R&D. For the hardware company this is a great way to address all the different Linux distros via one place. For the Linaro guys this is great because they continue to get the latest hardware to develop on all the time and they don't need to stop working and integrate to other distros. For the developer this is a great opportunity to understand which hardware will be best supported in future. For the normal user the message is "don't worry be happy".
If you used your Microsoft vendor to do your Linux support that's probably where you went wrong. Even companies like Red Hat may have a few Microsoft partnerships (e.g. in virtualisation) but anything more than that and it's a sign of lack of commitment. Remember these companies hope to take you for much more over the Windows systems long term since they know you are locked in.
Some of the really big IT vendors do have good support for Linux as well (IBM e.g.) but then you should expect an entire department dedicated to it. Also, you tend to find that you have to negotiate really carefully since they are used to Linux machines being used for big/serious work which pays big/serious money.
Simply put; if your support company wasn't Red Hat, either directly or indirectly that was probably a mistake.
Our samba box would have random drop outs where it would deny access unless you restarted the file server.
You probably had a minor misconfiguration. Would have happened whichever box you had it on. What did your support company say? [....] Oh; you set up a system without a support company? You thought that "Open Source" was a magic word which meant "fixes its self without any support company" ; you thought that Red Hat stood for "nice company that fixes everything for free even if we install a clone distro" and forgot that it actually means "fixes stuff their paying customers care about".
Okay, I might be wrong in this case, but 98% of the time when asked it turns out that the people have spent thousands on Microsoft, Cisco and so on certificates. They have support contracts coming out of their ears for Oracle. Then they install an open source load balancer or database or something and suddenly the fact they saved money on the software license means they want to save even more money on the support. This is a bad mistake; everyone should look for competent support and if they can't find it then they should find a way to set it up themselves. If there's nothing, then you can probably employ some of the people who wrote the project really cheap and get a bunch of good developers in the price.
It's important to realise that Active Directory has a bunch of overlapping different features. Samba4 is a great for part of it. Puppet is great for a different part of it (the ability to configure systems - like a superset of Active Directory Group Policies) LDAP covers some other parts etc. etc. You need to be really careful with this question because it is already loaded. Essentially, if the answer is "Active Directory" you are asking the wrong question. Your overall system administration story with Linux will be much better than Windows but you need to start thinking more from the beginning since it isn't always as obvious which tool is the right tool.
Microsoft is pushing Skype on all Windows platforms; this is specifically designed to take over AT&T and other operator's billing relationships. Means no sane mobile operator will go with WP8
HTC is the main launch partner for Windows 8 - Nokia is going to be pushed down below even a Minor Chinese competitor, smaller than Sony or LG in smartphones.
Windows Phone does not support pureview
Windows phone 8 is deeply late for Christmas deliveries
Microsoft has completely failed on app quality control - most apps are simply the cheapest thing to get a Microsoft bonus and inflate the app numbers
Microsoft took the tablet space - Nokia had previously planned to do WP8 tablets themselves
Microsoft promised Nokia sub $100 BOM on Windows phones - not, apparently, delivered yet.
Windows phone 7 won't be upgraded (as you said - Nokia for a long time claimed to believe it would be)
Microsoft is publicising their own phones just before Nokia's big launch
The camera one is really instructive. Nokia's big new feature as 40MP ultra-big, ultra-high resolution sensors with digital stabilisation. They create a special "pure-view" brand just for these. Instead they will be delivering 8MP sensors with standard optical stabilization and are desperate (this is the sensor where they cheated on the publicity video). Nokia has been forced to brand these "pure-view" also so they could get that feature check on their Windows phones.
Think about the loss that causes when imaging was the last feature Nokia stood out on:
Pure View - originally associated with 40MP custom sensors is now associated with commodity 8MP sensors
they have no single feature on their phones which is outstanding; almost everything is worse than an iPhone 5 and much worse than a new Samsung.
Imagine a "widget producing machine" with an MSDOS based control system. A new machine costs a million USD. You can still buy a new one, but the old one works. The producer has gone bust or, more likely, would love to force you to upgrade and refuses to produce a backwards compatible control system. Would you buy a new machine? If you know that the same story is likely to repeat in a few years anyway?
What you do is simple. You work out how long an outage you will have if the machine breaks completely, what you have to do to mitigate that (spare stock? another partner you can buy from?) and how much it will cost. Most likely you end up running the old machine and repairing it until it becomes so unreliable it ceases to be worth it. In that, the control system is normally the least of your problems.
I spoke to a salesperson today aswell, see I wanted a tablet for my wife so she could plug it in to her (i think olympus) camera and then upload her photos to DropBox. The guy told me come back in a few weeks when the Windows tablets are in. He also said that it was something the iPad isn't capable of, which really I'd consider is a pretty damn remedial task.
If you go talk to the Salesman in a Microsoft store in the office where you work you will hear some pretty weird shit. The iPad can obviously do that using the camera connection kit and if you bought a Nexus tablet you could just do it with a converter cable. I'd recommend going ahead with that now whilst you can still claim you bought it before the Surface was available. Later on you might get into trouble with your team leader for not being sufficiently loyal.
I think that Microsoft has been able to get away with spreading silly rumours about like this about Linux in the past because most people didn't have access to systems where they could check them. On the other hand, anyone who uploads a photo from their camera to an iPad or a Nexus is immediately going to see the benefits that a quality screen with a high PPI rating is going to give them. This is going to be one of the first things any iPad owner is going to ask a surface owner to show him.
any lost data and you throw away the entire packet.
There are plenty of techniques which mean that you can recover from bit errors even in digital signals. Look up e.g. "forward error correction". Fortunately these techniques work on both encrypted and unencrypted systems.
I believe the German generals were quite specific about it being a bad idea too. In fact they wanted to concentrate on taking Moscow as soon as possible in order to have somewhere to hide and rest during the winter. Luckily Hitler overruled them.
Actually you are the second to comment on that (the first was a long time ago). I kind of liked it that way; decided that it must be a special feature of the perl like pseudocode which uses some kind of wierd "all possible match" rule for the regex match... Also I figured it fitted with the Slashcode at the time; however, if the customers demand then I guess we need to fix.
There are a number of misconceptions here. However they are very common so it's interesting to break them down:
Firstly, please don't confuse standards essential RAND patents with other RAND patents. The two issues do not have to be in any way linked. For example IETF standards typically do not involve RAND at all. They try to avoid patents, but if they can't they leave the licensing up to the people who need them. At the same time there are often RAND licenses for multi-media encoding patents that can be worked around but help greatly with efficiency.
Secondly, RAND doesn't actually have a clear definition. Instead, each standards body defines their own set of RAND licensing processes or just leaves RAND to be worked out between the different standards implementers.
Thirdly this actually has no effect whatsoever on the patent its self. It is still completely possible and reasonable to license a RAND patent entirely outside the RAND process. This is very typical with e.g. Qualcomm CDMA patents where Qualcomm has not been involved in various CDMA based standards but still, later, allowed licensing.
Fourthly, there's no "low" about it. Reasonable is extremely difficult to pin down, however there's a presentation from the Jevons Institute for Competition law and Economics which should help. Wikipedia also has some articles which don't seem obviously wrong.
Basically there is no clear legal definition of "reasonable" and there have been few lawsuits about it but, it more or less comes down to "the price should not be more than it would be if the patent wasn't part of a standard". Various precedents talk about having the same result as a fair auction against other equivalent patent holders. Others talk about charging no more than the incremental value of the patent over the next best alternative.
What this means is that a patent that was the only way to achieve a particular thing in a standard could be seen as providing the entire value of the system which is being delivered according to the standard. In this case "reasonable" could mean 95% of the value of the item or a fixed fee of a hundred thousand dollars per item, or whatever the patent holder wished as long as it still allowed those products to be produced by someone for profit.
In the end, what you have to understand, is that the patent system as a whole is incredibly dangerous and should be vastly cut down. Certainly all patents on software or all other abstract inventions should be clearly disallowed. Definitely patents on technology should have more limited terms. Certainly anti-monopoly laws should be applied more strictly to them. RAND patent agreements which disallow free software implementations should certainly be treated as illegal cartels.
Unfortunately we have the patent law we currently have, and in this situation Motorola and Samsung are in the right and Apple and Microsoft are clearly setting out to abuse their good will and cooperation to get benefits they should never be allowed.
Look FOSS patents is wrong at the best of times ("SCO is da WINNA!!" ; Oracle will defeat Google ; Apple will win it's trade dress suits etc. etc.) but in this case he really really doesn't have a clue. You would be much better linking to one of the appropriate articles on Groklaw where there is much better analysis.
You have a current preliminary analysis that this is a matter that needs to be looked into by a judge who has clearly already overreached his powers (and has already pretty much admitted that himself). He probably will end up ruling against Motorola since he's a political appointee in Microsoft's home town. He will be slapped down so hard on appeal that he won't remember his own name. His legal theory would undermine the entire patent system by allowing enforced licensing through implied contracts. The appeals court judges are a bunch of patent lovers and will never let that happen.
The text you need is in this Groklaw article. The original order is clear that it specifies the entire notice, however the Appeals court is even more clear:
87. Finally I should say something about the notice itself. We heard no discussion about that. Plainly Judge Birss's Schedule has been overtaken by events. Subject to anything that may be submitted by either side I would propose the following:
If Apple wanted to put out a different text then they were to first clear it with the court. This becomes even more clear if you read the justification for the judgement in which they say:
51. In my judgment, Apple are carefully trying to say something which contains an innuendo that Samsung infringe without actually saying it. The reference to copying is exactly that. It is clear that copying plays no part in this case for Registered Community Design infringement, but to many people outside the circles of intellectual property law to say something infringes a Registered Community Design and to say someone copied your design or your product is to say the same thing.
By repeating texts about copying Apple is clearly and directly repeating the exact wrong deed for which they are being punished.
If that is what everyone else paid, then yes, distilled into a cash figure (Apple is not obligated to cross licence - it can pay the cash equivalent).
So, given that Apple believes that it can block all reasonable future mobile products from Motorola and basically cost them their entire business, the cash equivalent would be the entire potential future revenue of Motorola? Sounds kind of Fair and Reasonable.
You only need to look at one; the LG Prada to look at the difference between that and phones before it, and the iPhone and that. The amount the iPhone copied from LG is huge. Their differences are basically just taking LG's ideas even further by reducing the number of buttons and amount of decoration even more than LG did. If you add in the comparison between the Nokia N95 unboxing experience and the original iPhone unboxing experience and you will be able to see that Apple has nothing to stand on.
If Apple and Microsoft can reach a cross-licensing agreement that includes iPhones and iPads...
That just makes it worse; They are acting as a Cartel, having already had long term cross-licensing deals in place with Microsoft. This form of collaboration between companies that are supposed to be independent and competing is exactly what anti-trust laws were formed to stop. Deciding to carve up a market between two different public companies is a much worse crime than using your own monopoly to try to get commercial benefit.
There's nothing wrong with using the cost and length of litigation as a club against an opponent at the negotiating table.
Actually there are several things wrong.
much of the cost doesn't get covered by either party no matter what (e.g. security costs for the court) and goes, in the end, to the people.
you are supposed, in all commercial legal matters, to act to minimise costs of enforcement where possible.
statements like that would be likely to be used against you at the end of your case if you lost; possibly justifying a full award of costs to your opponent.
The idea that companies like Apple think that they can run around starting a patent war with no real consequences is outrageous. The fact that they are likely to get away with it by negotiating a settlement at the end just makes it worse.
Personally, I'm holding out for all the super principled slashdotters who hate patents in any way shape and form to chime in and argue that Motorola should just put their patents in the public domain and stop hindering progress.
There are actually some people who are arguing this. It's incredibly dangerous and stupid and shows a total lack of understanding of the difference between patents and copyright. When you put a copyright into the public domain, anybody can use that copyright freely together with their own work without further risk. When you freely allow anyone to use a patent, those people can still be stopped from using that patent by holders of other patents, whilst the licensees of those other patents can go ahead and compete.
The equivalent of putting a copyright into the public domain is committing to sue anyone who produces a product using patent licenses which have have not been freely licensed for everybody. This then means that either everybody or nobody using your patent gets a license for the other patents that might be used together with it and returns us to a more or less free situation. Something equivalent to the AGPLv3.
The equivalent of the BSD license would be simply to publish your invention without ever patenting it or to allow your patent to lapse. The risks, however, are much higher than the BSD license since any patent holder can stop anyone else in the market from doing anything. The BSD license just lets the proprietary companies get control of a particular software project.
The crucial thing to remember is that the other companies that are getting cheaper deals are entering into full reciprocal patent sharing deals with Motorola. Often even one sided (Motorola gets all their patents; they get cheap access to the RAND patents). This is worth plenty and so Apple is completely outrageous to even think they should get a similar price without making a similar offer.
Both evil does not actually mean equally evil. Most of the evil that Apple has done is kind of out in the open and known. They are, for example, suing Samsung, which is wrong, but it's something where, if you are really opposed to it there are clear political solutions. Microsoft, on the other hand, is entirely structured as a criminal organisation with, for example, special protocols for contract negotiations which mean that almost anything which could be used in a court against them is always written by with an external lawyer and so legally privileged.
Slashdot Mirror
"The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine. "
They may have started to sue in 2010, but we are only starting to see the results of those lawsuits now. Apple made the mistake of choosing a victim who is both obviously in the right and rich enough to prove it.
Thats just silly. Android is neither a cell phone nor a company... it is just a VM running on linux therefore it has zero market share.
Let's put this really simply. If you have an app and you want people to run it, you have a choice of binary formats to put it in. If you put it out in Android's binary format, it will run on "75%" of the new phones sold this year (I'd guess 65% actually). If you put it out in iOS format it will run on, say, 20%. If you put it out in RIM's format it's likely to run on about 5%. If you put it out on Bada it will run on about 3% of phones. If you put it out in Windows Phone's format and we assume even a generous 50% growth caused by Windows phone 8, which would exceed every recent new version of Windows for Mobile phones, then it will run on about 3% of phones.
From the point of view of an App developer what you have to know is that, if you already have the facilities in place to support a Bada port of your app in parallel with you iOS, Android, and RIM ports, and if you really get serious ROI from the Bada version, then you should maybe consider producing a Windows Phone port. Otherwise forget it, come back in 2015 and have a look at the market again.
Producing ports for different operating systems isn't, as we have always been told for Linux, free. You are more likely to get widespread attention and grass roots marketing for your Windows version of you app if the iOS app is successful than if the Windows version is successful. Now is the chance to take advantage of your competitors who are distracted by Microsoft's Windows marketing and try to overtake them by concentrating all your efforts on the successful platforms.
Are Apple users really worse off not having Lattitude track them as they use the map app?
I'd imagine that the ones that choose to use Latitude are worse off since the features of Latitude they use won't work. I've seen Latitude used for finding when friends are nearby; it looks like a useful feature that I miss because I want to reduce the amount I'm tracked. The other users could choose to have it switched off as I do on my Android phone. What's the problem with extra choice? Overall, Google's tracking is the reason their map app gives the best times for routing. I guess that overall the users are better off.
What you are hinting at is a real privacy problem. Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, Verizon, AT&T and Google all get user's location data and then use that for commercial reasons other than the user's direct benefit. With Google, at least we can have the belief that they know how to do data filtering and anonymization. That's not enough though; there should definitely be laws, as there are in Europe for mobile operators, which protect the subscriber's privacy. That's an independent issue however.
Google's withholding turn-by-turn voice navigation from the iOS version in order to give their Android platform a competitive advantage.
Since you are obviously intimately familiar with the negotiations, perhaps you could correct my misapprehension. I had heard that Apple didn't want iOS users to have Latitude access or Google branding . Sort of like they do on all other versions of Google map I have ever seen. That would kind of suggest it was more about locking in Apple customers to Apple's own map app and friend finder service than about Google refusing to provide features.
There are about three linux based distros for the openmoko, all with custom UI front ends.
Most "distros" that you see are exactly that; ways of experimenting with different UI, usability and system administration concepts. The guys that do them don't want to do much of the low level plumbing. Think of Linaro as being similar to Mer which is the underlying developer whilst Plasma Active and Nemo the consumer distros built on top of it.
In the case of Linaro, though, they are trying to support completely embedded customers. These users often don't end using a proper distro at all. For this reason Linaro is less building a distro that people build on top and more building examples of working systems people can copy from. Let's say you are an SOC or sensor vendor that wants to sell to Android vendors in future. Your first place to start would be cooperating (paying) Linaro to get it working. Once that's done, everybody can can see how it works and is confident that they can also get it working in their own build of Android. At the same time you get access to the massive embedded Linux market.
This is one of the ways in which modern community oriented FOSS software works a bit differently from proprietary software. You see all of these experiments and development versions out in the open where each of them would be hidden somewhere deep inside Microsoft's R&D. For the hardware company this is a great way to address all the different Linux distros via one place. For the Linaro guys this is great because they continue to get the latest hardware to develop on all the time and they don't need to stop working and integrate to other distros. For the developer this is a great opportunity to understand which hardware will be best supported in future. For the normal user the message is "don't worry be happy".
If you used your Microsoft vendor to do your Linux support that's probably where you went wrong. Even companies like Red Hat may have a few Microsoft partnerships (e.g. in virtualisation) but anything more than that and it's a sign of lack of commitment. Remember these companies hope to take you for much more over the Windows systems long term since they know you are locked in.
Some of the really big IT vendors do have good support for Linux as well (IBM e.g.) but then you should expect an entire department dedicated to it. Also, you tend to find that you have to negotiate really carefully since they are used to Linux machines being used for big/serious work which pays big/serious money.
Simply put; if your support company wasn't Red Hat, either directly or indirectly that was probably a mistake.
Our samba box would have random drop outs where it would deny access unless you restarted the file server.
You probably had a minor misconfiguration. Would have happened whichever box you had it on. What did your support company say? [....] Oh; you set up a system without a support company? You thought that "Open Source" was a magic word which meant "fixes its self without any support company" ; you thought that Red Hat stood for "nice company that fixes everything for free even if we install a clone distro" and forgot that it actually means "fixes stuff their paying customers care about".
Okay, I might be wrong in this case, but 98% of the time when asked it turns out that the people have spent thousands on Microsoft, Cisco and so on certificates. They have support contracts coming out of their ears for Oracle. Then they install an open source load balancer or database or something and suddenly the fact they saved money on the software license means they want to save even more money on the support. This is a bad mistake; everyone should look for competent support and if they can't find it then they should find a way to set it up themselves. If there's nothing, then you can probably employ some of the people who wrote the project really cheap and get a bunch of good developers in the price.
It's important to realise that Active Directory has a bunch of overlapping different features. Samba4 is a great for part of it. Puppet is great for a different part of it (the ability to configure systems - like a superset of Active Directory Group Policies) LDAP covers some other parts etc. etc. You need to be really careful with this question because it is already loaded. Essentially, if the answer is "Active Directory" you are asking the wrong question. Your overall system administration story with Linux will be much better than Windows but you need to start thinking more from the beginning since it isn't always as obvious which tool is the right tool.
How did Nokia get screwed by Microsoft?
so so many ways.
The camera one is really instructive. Nokia's big new feature as 40MP ultra-big, ultra-high resolution sensors with digital stabilisation. They create a special "pure-view" brand just for these. Instead they will be delivering 8MP sensors with standard optical stabilization and are desperate (this is the sensor where they cheated on the publicity video). Nokia has been forced to brand these "pure-view" also so they could get that feature check on their Windows phones.
Think about the loss that causes when imaging was the last feature Nokia stood out on:
Imagine a "widget producing machine" with an MSDOS based control system. A new machine costs a million USD. You can still buy a new one, but the old one works. The producer has gone bust or, more likely, would love to force you to upgrade and refuses to produce a backwards compatible control system. Would you buy a new machine? If you know that the same story is likely to repeat in a few years anyway?
What you do is simple. You work out how long an outage you will have if the machine breaks completely, what you have to do to mitigate that (spare stock? another partner you can buy from?) and how much it will cost. Most likely you end up running the old machine and repairing it until it becomes so unreliable it ceases to be worth it. In that, the control system is normally the least of your problems.
I spoke to a salesperson today aswell, see I wanted a tablet for my wife so she could plug it in to her (i think olympus) camera and then upload her photos to DropBox. The guy told me come back in a few weeks when the Windows tablets are in. He also said that it was something the iPad isn't capable of, which really I'd consider is a pretty damn remedial task.
If you go talk to the Salesman in a Microsoft store in the office where you work you will hear some pretty weird shit. The iPad can obviously do that using the camera connection kit and if you bought a Nexus tablet you could just do it with a converter cable. I'd recommend going ahead with that now whilst you can still claim you bought it before the Surface was available. Later on you might get into trouble with your team leader for not being sufficiently loyal.
I think that Microsoft has been able to get away with spreading silly rumours about like this about Linux in the past because most people didn't have access to systems where they could check them. On the other hand, anyone who uploads a photo from their camera to an iPad or a Nexus is immediately going to see the benefits that a quality screen with a high PPI rating is going to give them. This is going to be one of the first things any iPad owner is going to ask a surface owner to show him.
any lost data and you throw away the entire packet.
There are plenty of techniques which mean that you can recover from bit errors even in digital signals. Look up e.g. "forward error correction". Fortunately these techniques work on both encrypted and unencrypted systems.
I believe the German generals were quite specific about it being a bad idea too. In fact they wanted to concentrate on taking Moscow as soon as possible in order to have somewhere to hide and rest during the winter. Luckily Hitler overruled them.
Actually you are the second to comment on that (the first was a long time ago). I kind of liked it that way; decided that it must be a special feature of the perl like pseudocode which uses some kind of wierd "all possible match" rule for the regex match... Also I figured it fitted with the Slashcode at the time; however, if the customers demand then I guess we need to fix.
Just so that you know in future, Florian has been fully discredited and some time later it turned out that he was taking money for a long time from the people he seems to support. He's also known to (have?) consult(ed?) for Microsoft.
There is plenty more where that came from.
Firstly, please don't confuse standards essential RAND patents with other RAND patents. The two issues do not have to be in any way linked. For example IETF standards typically do not involve RAND at all. They try to avoid patents, but if they can't they leave the licensing up to the people who need them. At the same time there are often RAND licenses for multi-media encoding patents that can be worked around but help greatly with efficiency.
Secondly, RAND doesn't actually have a clear definition. Instead, each standards body defines their own set of RAND licensing processes or just leaves RAND to be worked out between the different standards implementers.
Thirdly this actually has no effect whatsoever on the patent its self. It is still completely possible and reasonable to license a RAND patent entirely outside the RAND process. This is very typical with e.g. Qualcomm CDMA patents where Qualcomm has not been involved in various CDMA based standards but still, later, allowed licensing.
Fourthly, there's no "low" about it. Reasonable is extremely difficult to pin down, however there's a presentation from the Jevons Institute for Competition law and Economics which should help. Wikipedia also has some articles which don't seem obviously wrong.
Basically there is no clear legal definition of "reasonable" and there have been few lawsuits about it but, it more or less comes down to "the price should not be more than it would be if the patent wasn't part of a standard". Various precedents talk about having the same result as a fair auction against other equivalent patent holders. Others talk about charging no more than the incremental value of the patent over the next best alternative.
What this means is that a patent that was the only way to achieve a particular thing in a standard could be seen as providing the entire value of the system which is being delivered according to the standard. In this case "reasonable" could mean 95% of the value of the item or a fixed fee of a hundred thousand dollars per item, or whatever the patent holder wished as long as it still allowed those products to be produced by someone for profit.
In the end, what you have to understand, is that the patent system as a whole is incredibly dangerous and should be vastly cut down. Certainly all patents on software or all other abstract inventions should be clearly disallowed. Definitely patents on technology should have more limited terms. Certainly anti-monopoly laws should be applied more strictly to them. RAND patent agreements which disallow free software implementations should certainly be treated as illegal cartels.
Unfortunately we have the patent law we currently have, and in this situation Motorola and Samsung are in the right and Apple and Microsoft are clearly setting out to abuse their good will and cooperation to get benefits they should never be allowed.
Look FOSS patents is wrong at the best of times ("SCO is da WINNA!!" ; Oracle will defeat Google ; Apple will win it's trade dress suits etc. etc.) but in this case he really really doesn't have a clue. You would be much better linking to one of the appropriate articles on Groklaw where there is much better analysis.
You have a current preliminary analysis that this is a matter that needs to be looked into by a judge who has clearly already overreached his powers (and has already pretty much admitted that himself). He probably will end up ruling against Motorola since he's a political appointee in Microsoft's home town. He will be slapped down so hard on appeal that he won't remember his own name. His legal theory would undermine the entire patent system by allowing enforced licensing through implied contracts. The appeals court judges are a bunch of patent lovers and will never let that happen.
87. Finally I should say something about the notice itself. We heard no discussion about that. Plainly Judge Birss's Schedule has been overtaken by events. Subject to anything that may be submitted by either side I would propose the following:
If Apple wanted to put out a different text then they were to first clear it with the court. This becomes even more clear if you read the justification for the judgement in which they say:
51. In my judgment, Apple are carefully trying to say something which contains an innuendo that Samsung infringe without actually saying it. The reference to copying is exactly that. It is clear that copying plays no part in this case for Registered Community Design infringement, but to many people outside the circles of intellectual property law to say something infringes a Registered Community Design and to say someone copied your design or your product is to say the same thing.
By repeating texts about copying Apple is clearly and directly repeating the exact wrong deed for which they are being punished.
If that is what everyone else paid, then yes, distilled into a cash figure (Apple is not obligated to cross licence - it can pay the cash equivalent).
So, given that Apple believes that it can block all reasonable future mobile products from Motorola and basically cost them their entire business, the cash equivalent would be the entire potential future revenue of Motorola? Sounds kind of Fair and Reasonable.
You only need to look at one; the LG Prada to look at the difference between that and phones before it, and the iPhone and that. The amount the iPhone copied from LG is huge. Their differences are basically just taking LG's ideas even further by reducing the number of buttons and amount of decoration even more than LG did. If you add in the comparison between the Nokia N95 unboxing experience and the original iPhone unboxing experience and you will be able to see that Apple has nothing to stand on.
If Apple and Microsoft can reach a cross-licensing agreement that includes iPhones and iPads...
That just makes it worse; They are acting as a Cartel, having already had long term cross-licensing deals in place with Microsoft. This form of collaboration between companies that are supposed to be independent and competing is exactly what anti-trust laws were formed to stop. Deciding to carve up a market between two different public companies is a much worse crime than using your own monopoly to try to get commercial benefit.
There's nothing wrong with using the cost and length of litigation as a club against an opponent at the negotiating table.
Actually there are several things wrong.
The idea that companies like Apple think that they can run around starting a patent war with no real consequences is outrageous. The fact that they are likely to get away with it by negotiating a settlement at the end just makes it worse.
Personally, I'm holding out for all the super principled slashdotters who hate patents in any way shape and form to chime in and argue that Motorola should just put their patents in the public domain and stop hindering progress.
There are actually some people who are arguing this. It's incredibly dangerous and stupid and shows a total lack of understanding of the difference between patents and copyright. When you put a copyright into the public domain, anybody can use that copyright freely together with their own work without further risk. When you freely allow anyone to use a patent, those people can still be stopped from using that patent by holders of other patents, whilst the licensees of those other patents can go ahead and compete.
The equivalent of putting a copyright into the public domain is committing to sue anyone who produces a product using patent licenses which have have not been freely licensed for everybody. This then means that either everybody or nobody using your patent gets a license for the other patents that might be used together with it and returns us to a more or less free situation. Something equivalent to the AGPLv3.
The equivalent of the BSD license would be simply to publish your invention without ever patenting it or to allow your patent to lapse. The risks, however, are much higher than the BSD license since any patent holder can stop anyone else in the market from doing anything. The BSD license just lets the proprietary companies get control of a particular software project.
The crucial thing to remember is that the other companies that are getting cheaper deals are entering into full reciprocal patent sharing deals with Motorola. Often even one sided (Motorola gets all their patents; they get cheap access to the RAND patents). This is worth plenty and so Apple is completely outrageous to even think they should get a similar price without making a similar offer.
They are about equally evil...
Both evil does not actually mean equally evil. Most of the evil that Apple has done is kind of out in the open and known. They are, for example, suing Samsung, which is wrong, but it's something where, if you are really opposed to it there are clear political solutions. Microsoft, on the other hand, is entirely structured as a criminal organisation with, for example, special protocols for contract negotiations which mean that almost anything which could be used in a court against them is always written by with an external lawyer and so legally privileged.