It supports standard Bluetooth keyboards but no mouse. The OS "is not designed with cursor support", although I seen it enabled via jailbreak.
In theory you can develop a case with a built in gamepad that connects via Bluetooth too. Think there is a company releasing such a device for the iPhone. Software would have to I develop support, though (unless it emulates keyboard keys)
I really would hate to install cabled USB peripherals, wish more devices were Bluetooth.
I find Dropbox gives me all the storage I need. Note I also love apps that allow me to stream my video and music over the web so I don't sync either locally. If you rather have everything locally, then lack of expandable or replaceable memory may be an issue.
The laptop has development tools licensed to my employer, between other things. Taking the laptop home is not much different from staying at the office after hours and use a desktop there. I have no legal right to use those tools outside for my personal use or for development in a side job as a startup company.
That aside, I have never personally work at a company that literally allows you to use their laptop for personal use at home. I have worked with managers or IT departments that tell me it's no big deal if I choose to browse the web on the thing while at home, but thats far from company policy and I still avoid it (I have seen people fired after finding questionable personal content in their laptop, in their browser cache.)
Not completely. What is common is for clauses that state your employer owns anything you do matching the following list:
Is related to company scope
Is done using company resources
Is done within work hours.
Example, my dayjob is in the healthcare industry. If I was to develop something in my work provided laptop at any time, with any scope, it would belong to them. If I develop something within work hours, even if I'm telecommuting, it belongs to them. Finally, if I develop any healthcare related software, no matter the time, it belongs to them. I can, though, develop a game on my free time with my own computer.
These are measures to avoid missuse of resources and work hours, plus make sure you don't apply an unfair advantage in competing with your own employer in their own field.
When applied to huge companies like Microsoft, that span so many fields, you are extremely locked up in the scope area. Microsoft is technically in the entire software development scope. You may be able to, as a Microsoft employe, design, patent and own your revolutionary nuclear powered blender, though.
There do are some companies that entirely block you out. Others that have classes were any invention must be offered to your employers and you can pursue it on your own if they dont care for it (happened with the original Apple PC and Steve Wozniak) but from my experience these are minority of the companies (albeit their size may make up for it in the amount of people locked by such rules.)
As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.
As a company, I think you stand in a very different platform than the writer of the article. As an individual, it does seem a bit hostile to go through such a process. It did cross my mind that his point may be mute as a company, but also, as a company, a lot of programmers would still develop for the platform because they were told to do so (for the exception of one man companies that the IRS considers illegal, you will have to hire a janitor or something to work around the 1 employee rule and not face any retaliation.) The single hobbyist programmer, though, is very important for these markets, and RIM is indeed making it hard for them.
As for "scammers", I'd say their app approval process should be the one handling that, just the way Apple does.
Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?
Wrong. The judge cant accept that type of evidence unless there is a certified technician that can vouch for the validity of the data and corroborate it was not tampered with. Truth is the gun not being calibrated regularly is enough reason for a ticket to be dismissed, and most cops never calibrate their radar guns. The calibration frequency depends on the gun model, what makes the third question relevant.
He also may had prayed the previous night, proving God is not only real, but that he can get you out of tickets.
Seriously, a judge going out of his way to clarify something is not part of the ruling is not just to avoid precedent. Officers failing to calibrate the radar gun alone can lead to bad readings and will get a ticket dismissed.
Sorry, no matter how attractive, I still wont let anyone near my cavities.
On the good side, though, this device may allow Airports to capitalize in alternative revenue forms. Now you will be able to opt in, for an additional fee, for a non intrusive colon cancer diagnostic!!!
Really? Well that sucks. You're saying Apple deliberately chose a sub-par method of scaling legacy apps solely to force developers to improve them? Even I didn't think they were that cruel to their developers, or to their users.
Thats a theory of mine (and I can be wrong,) and as a developer I don't find it cruel at all. It's not hard to rearrange the UI for larger screens at all, not even half a day work. Cruel would be to prevent the apps from running in the device at all.
As you say, it just results in legacy apps being dismissed by users, and who wants that (or the 5 inch buttons)?.
Users will of course prefer a better-optimised layout, so many developers will update their apps without being forced, in order to remain competitive.
And many developers would not, heck, Skype still is running only in iPhone mode. As much as I hate it (one of the most used apps) making it prettier would not make much difference to my hatred. I think they figure they can get away without bothering to spend half a day doing a nicer UI.
Otherwise, users will simply switch to a better app - there's plenty of competition.
Most of these apps are not crippled, they literally never got updated for either, iPad or iPhone Retina display, meaning the only way to get them working is indeed pixel doubling. I would not even come close to call them crippled. It would be crippled if apple forced them to run always at just 1x, or if they were only allowed to run for short amounts of times. They are just cosmetically handicapped. At the end of the day, only the ones that ever got Retina Display treatment can be even accounted under that banner.
There is another chance, there is also the possibility that Apple did this only to protect developers interests. Some may think a more complex UI may give them room for more complex functionality and a higher price tag. There is plenty of market for HD apps out there, that follow this pattern. If iPhone Retina apps worked full size, I can see many users refusing to pay the premium for the more complex HD version and stick to a resized iPhone version, specially in the gaming department. So there is a chance Apple is doing it mostly to give developers room to fork out separate more complex products and capitalize on this extra work, instead of "forcing them" to update the UI.
It may even be a bit of both worlds, too.
I'd like to know more about the iOS API too, to see what Apple's approach is like, but as I don't own the required Mac for development, it's just idle curiosity.
Disclaimer: I work mostly with OpenGL, this has it's own independent coordinate system and does not care what Apple is doing with it's OS resolution, some of the information following may not be entirely accurate but it's what I have gathered looking at some articles on the subject:
From a programmer's perspective, the iPhone is still 480 x 320 "pixels". Off course, we know thats not true, so technically they are not "pixels" but "units". If you want to support the iPhone 4's higher resolution, you just turn on a flag and add new image resource files (if you use any) that include @2x in their name. The flag tells the OS to look for this 2x image if it's running in a device that supports retina display (currenly only iPhone 4 and iPod Touch Gen 4 but not iPad at 2x.)
In theory, Apple can go for any crazy resolution it wanted and translate coordinates from it's 480x320 to the native full screen, but this would distort proportion of images in some displays and in others simply result in non-even resamplilng that would require either blurred scaling or horrible pixelation. There is also the risk of an application that uses as much CPU as possible suffering lag due to additional resources being invested in a smarter scaling algorithm. The lest intrusive way to do this ends up being plain pixel doubling. Unless Apple releases a larger iPhone with a new custom
Android devices all over the world have a 97.6% return rate.
It must be true since I'm posting it here, in the comment section. Everyone knows this is the best source of reliable information in the planet. Oh darnit, I didnt click the Post Anonymously box!!! That destroys my credibility... I'll learn from that guy in that blog's comment section next time and remember to post this Anonymously for maximum credibility!
Changes don't need to be "significant", at least not internally. But it's the other way around, if you don't need to do significant UI changes to your smartphone app to take advantage of the increased real state of a tablet, you are doing it apocalyptically wrong.
If at the end of the day you were right, Google would never had seen any need to roll out Honeycomb at all.
And unlike with iOS, most existing Android apps scale nicely to any resolution and aspect, rather than just being pixel-doubled, thanks to Android's resolution-independent UI API. You can release a tablet-optimised version of your app to take better advantage of the extra screen area, but at least it won't be ignored altogether.
That's a blessing and a curse. Lazy developers will say "my app scales fine, thats all I care" and never update it's app for the platform. With the iOS, the app "works" but its not looking good and most people will dismiss pure iPhone apps in their iPads because they know how bad they look. This forces developers to actually sit down and dedicate time in using the larger screen and deliver apps that use that space. At the end of the day, i don't want 5 inch buttons in my iPad, even if they look pretty. That defeats the purpose of the device and amplifies the "enlarged phone" perception.
When Apple intentionally forced iOS apps to just scale up (no smoothing, no use of Retina graphics in the large version) they knew what they were doing. They were forcing developers to work on improved layouts and UI design, while allowing users to migrate the unoptimized iOS monetary investment into this one device.
We can believe fantasy numbers and feel impressed, or we can look at the truth. Samsung shipped 2 million Galaxy Tabs to retailers. How many were bought by customers? Samsung isn't saying. Why not? But they have admitted that of those that did sell to customers, 16% were returned. That hardly sounds "impressively well."
They did not admit the return rate, they also claim less than 2% were returned, but gave no specifics on that number either. Was that "only 2% returns due to defects"? Was it "only 2% returns due to satisfaction"? Was it "only 2% because I thought i was getting my kid an iPad"?
It does not matter, though. Everyone seems to sing Doom about Windows Phone 7, despite Microsoft claiming also 2 million units shipped and never noting how many units got sold. How can it be success for one company to ship a whole 2 million while failure for another to only ship 2 million?
Not that it matters to Samsung, they make money of every sold iPad, they are the ones making the displays for Apple at the end of the day.
It is worth noting that the enterprise license is only 500 a year, thats nothing even for the smallest of companies.
Also worth noting is that developers can do similar things with the development license and that one is just 100 a year, you just don't get tools to easily push apps into large amounts of devices and must email them to all authorized users so they can sync them in through iTunes.
I always pondered who wants to install pornography apps in their devices... does this means people that install all these porn pop-up creating toolbars in their work computers are actually doing it intentionally and want that same level of "quality" in their phones?
The internet is for porn, keep your porn out of your apps!
The impossible thing is to get people to write open source for a living. Apple and Microsoft have a lot of developers writting software for the platform in closed form because they can make a living out of it. If you cant make a living out of it, the best anyone can expect is for you to make this development as a hobby, forcing Open Source users to actually hire developers to implement features they need and were not able to find in the market.
And, ironically, that is the original goal of Open Source, not to make software free but to make it so that I am not tied by the original vendor should I want to expand it's functionality or address bug fixes. As some one that buys a product, I should expect to be able to hire any coder to improve or fix it, just as I can hire any mechanic to improve or fix my Toyota car.
Open source, unfortunately, has been redefined into FOSS, to the point where anyone charging or keeping the rights of their commercially available open source programs gets heavily criticized for not being "true" open source. This slowly is making it harder and harder for developers to make any money in that field, and in turn forces consumers to hire another contractor for the improvements and bug fixes, due to the nature of the developer working for free, you cant expect him to address bugs or add features you need, after all. Problem is that coders tend to be very expensive to hire. It comes the point where it's cheaper to just stick to closed source platforms like Windows and OSX.
The difference this time is that there's no substantial price differential. even the cheapest android is only a couple hundred less than the apple model.
The cheapest 3G iPad is 600. The only Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom, is 800. Worse, although announced for the future, right now thats the only model available. If you care not for the data plan and want to go pure Wifi, you still have to pay one month of data plan to activate your wifi, making it 820 for pure wifi Xoom vz 500 for pure wifi iPad.
Likely in the future cheaper Honeycomb tablets will show up, but so far, there is no cheaper alternative for the iPad.
If you bothered to use your brain for a 2#$!% minute, you would realize a few things:
1) Soldiers are not out there because they wanted to, they decided to serve their country so you could stay home and play your video games. If they did not sign up in enough numbers, they would force you to serve as soon as they run out of volunteers. Remember every time that a soldier gets killed or looses his legs because of a bomb, that it could had been you out there had he and many others not volunteered.
2) It is good to know military budget goes into medical research that can also be used to save civilians in, say, burning buildings and not entirely to develop new guns and bombs.
Patents simply monopolize progress, and the worst part is very often is a monopoly only used to lock a door, not even to actually implement said progress.
What are you relying on when you say this?
What you yourself said (bolded)
Copyrights and patents function very differently. One difference is the so-called independent creation, where if two people write the same code, neither having seen the others, they both have rights to use that code and obtain copyright in it. This protection is very different from the monopoly granted by a patent, which prevents all second-comers, regardless whether they knew of the patent, from practicing the invention. So when comparing copyright and patent law, one does not supplant the other, and frequently they address different issues. Boiling that down, patents protect the idea/function achieved by the code (performed by a machine, of course), while copyright protects the expression of that idea/function (the individual lines of code).
If you refer to the "door lock" part, I refer to the flood of patent trolls that do just that.
That paragraph also happens to very clearly state some of the reasons I dislike patents (for one it is becoming more expensive to research if whatever you are doing is already patented than it is to develop anything in the software world.) I should not be able to redistribute some one else's code, I should not be able to clone some one else's software to the T, but I should have the freedom to come up with things on my own that happen to work the same way some other guy somewhere thought off first.
In the world of software, that is addressed by copyrights. Patents simply monopolize progress, and the worst part is very often is a monopoly only used to lock a door, not even to actually implement said progress.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Hungary, go to Settings > Mail > Signature and enter anything you want.
We highly recommend to avoid using threats to cut off your nations Internet connection. We have recently discovered it can be very counterproductive.
It supports standard Bluetooth keyboards but no mouse. The OS "is not designed with cursor support", although I seen it enabled via jailbreak.
In theory you can develop a case with a built in gamepad that connects via Bluetooth too. Think there is a company releasing such a device for the iPhone. Software would have to I develop support, though (unless it emulates keyboard keys)
I really would hate to install cabled USB peripherals, wish more devices were Bluetooth.
I find Dropbox gives me all the storage I need. Note I also love apps that allow me to stream my video and music over the web so I don't sync either locally. If you rather have everything locally, then lack of expandable or replaceable memory may be an issue.
The laptop has development tools licensed to my employer, between other things. Taking the laptop home is not much different from staying at the office after hours and use a desktop there. I have no legal right to use those tools outside for my personal use or for development in a side job as a startup company.
That aside, I have never personally work at a company that literally allows you to use their laptop for personal use at home. I have worked with managers or IT departments that tell me it's no big deal if I choose to browse the web on the thing while at home, but thats far from company policy and I still avoid it (I have seen people fired after finding questionable personal content in their laptop, in their browser cache.)
Not completely. What is common is for clauses that state your employer owns anything you do matching the following list:
Is related to company scope
Is done using company resources
Is done within work hours.
Example, my dayjob is in the healthcare industry. If I was to develop something in my work provided laptop at any time, with any scope, it would belong to them. If I develop something within work hours, even if I'm telecommuting, it belongs to them. Finally, if I develop any healthcare related software, no matter the time, it belongs to them. I can, though, develop a game on my free time with my own computer.
These are measures to avoid missuse of resources and work hours, plus make sure you don't apply an unfair advantage in competing with your own employer in their own field.
When applied to huge companies like Microsoft, that span so many fields, you are extremely locked up in the scope area. Microsoft is technically in the entire software development scope. You may be able to, as a Microsoft employe, design, patent and own your revolutionary nuclear powered blender, though.
There do are some companies that entirely block you out. Others that have classes were any invention must be offered to your employers and you can pursue it on your own if they dont care for it (happened with the original Apple PC and Steve Wozniak) but from my experience these are minority of the companies (albeit their size may make up for it in the amount of people locked by such rules.)
As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.
As a company, I think you stand in a very different platform than the writer of the article. As an individual, it does seem a bit hostile to go through such a process. It did cross my mind that his point may be mute as a company, but also, as a company, a lot of programmers would still develop for the platform because they were told to do so (for the exception of one man companies that the IRS considers illegal, you will have to hire a janitor or something to work around the 1 employee rule and not face any retaliation.) The single hobbyist programmer, though, is very important for these markets, and RIM is indeed making it hard for them.
As for "scammers", I'd say their app approval process should be the one handling that, just the way Apple does.
Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?
Wrong. The judge cant accept that type of evidence unless there is a certified technician that can vouch for the validity of the data and corroborate it was not tampered with. Truth is the gun not being calibrated regularly is enough reason for a ticket to be dismissed, and most cops never calibrate their radar guns. The calibration frequency depends on the gun model, what makes the third question relevant.
He also may had prayed the previous night, proving God is not only real, but that he can get you out of tickets.
Seriously, a judge going out of his way to clarify something is not part of the ruling is not just to avoid precedent. Officers failing to calibrate the radar gun alone can lead to bad readings and will get a ticket dismissed.
Are you crazy!? Have you seen the tools those guys carry?! Uh Uh, no way!!!
Sorry, no matter how attractive, I still wont let anyone near my cavities.
On the good side, though, this device may allow Airports to capitalize in alternative revenue forms. Now you will be able to opt in, for an additional fee, for a non intrusive colon cancer diagnostic!!!
Really? Well that sucks. You're saying Apple deliberately chose a sub-par method of scaling legacy apps solely to force developers to improve them? Even I didn't think they were that cruel to their developers, or to their users.
Thats a theory of mine (and I can be wrong,) and as a developer I don't find it cruel at all. It's not hard to rearrange the UI for larger screens at all, not even half a day work. Cruel would be to prevent the apps from running in the device at all.
As you say, it just results in legacy apps being dismissed by users, and who wants that (or the 5 inch buttons)?.
Users will of course prefer a better-optimised layout, so many developers will update their apps without being forced, in order to remain competitive.
And many developers would not, heck, Skype still is running only in iPhone mode. As much as I hate it (one of the most used apps) making it prettier would not make much difference to my hatred. I think they figure they can get away without bothering to spend half a day doing a nicer UI.
Otherwise, users will simply switch to a better app - there's plenty of competition.
Most of these apps are not crippled, they literally never got updated for either, iPad or iPhone Retina display, meaning the only way to get them working is indeed pixel doubling. I would not even come close to call them crippled. It would be crippled if apple forced them to run always at just 1x, or if they were only allowed to run for short amounts of times. They are just cosmetically handicapped. At the end of the day, only the ones that ever got Retina Display treatment can be even accounted under that banner.
There is another chance, there is also the possibility that Apple did this only to protect developers interests. Some may think a more complex UI may give them room for more complex functionality and a higher price tag. There is plenty of market for HD apps out there, that follow this pattern. If iPhone Retina apps worked full size, I can see many users refusing to pay the premium for the more complex HD version and stick to a resized iPhone version, specially in the gaming department. So there is a chance Apple is doing it mostly to give developers room to fork out separate more complex products and capitalize on this extra work, instead of "forcing them" to update the UI.
It may even be a bit of both worlds, too.
I'd like to know more about the iOS API too, to see what Apple's approach is like, but as I don't own the required Mac for development, it's just idle curiosity.
Disclaimer: I work mostly with OpenGL, this has it's own independent coordinate system and does not care what Apple is doing with it's OS resolution, some of the information following may not be entirely accurate but it's what I have gathered looking at some articles on the subject:
From a programmer's perspective, the iPhone is still 480 x 320 "pixels". Off course, we know thats not true, so technically they are not "pixels" but "units". If you want to support the iPhone 4's higher resolution, you just turn on a flag and add new image resource files (if you use any) that include @2x in their name. The flag tells the OS to look for this 2x image if it's running in a device that supports retina display (currenly only iPhone 4 and iPod Touch Gen 4 but not iPad at 2x.)
In theory, Apple can go for any crazy resolution it wanted and translate coordinates from it's 480x320 to the native full screen, but this would distort proportion of images in some displays and in others simply result in non-even resamplilng that would require either blurred scaling or horrible pixelation. There is also the risk of an application that uses as much CPU as possible suffering lag due to additional resources being invested in a smarter scaling algorithm. The lest intrusive way to do this ends up being plain pixel doubling. Unless Apple releases a larger iPhone with a new custom
Android devices all over the world have a 97.6% return rate.
It must be true since I'm posting it here, in the comment section. Everyone knows this is the best source of reliable information in the planet. Oh darnit, I didnt click the Post Anonymously box!!! That destroys my credibility... I'll learn from that guy in that blog's comment section next time and remember to post this Anonymously for maximum credibility!
Changes don't need to be "significant", at least not internally. But it's the other way around, if you don't need to do significant UI changes to your smartphone app to take advantage of the increased real state of a tablet, you are doing it apocalyptically wrong.
If at the end of the day you were right, Google would never had seen any need to roll out Honeycomb at all.
And unlike with iOS, most existing Android apps scale nicely to any resolution and aspect, rather than just being pixel-doubled, thanks to Android's resolution-independent UI API. You can release a tablet-optimised version of your app to take better advantage of the extra screen area, but at least it won't be ignored altogether.
That's a blessing and a curse. Lazy developers will say "my app scales fine, thats all I care" and never update it's app for the platform. With the iOS, the app "works" but its not looking good and most people will dismiss pure iPhone apps in their iPads because they know how bad they look. This forces developers to actually sit down and dedicate time in using the larger screen and deliver apps that use that space. At the end of the day, i don't want 5 inch buttons in my iPad, even if they look pretty. That defeats the purpose of the device and amplifies the "enlarged phone" perception.
When Apple intentionally forced iOS apps to just scale up (no smoothing, no use of Retina graphics in the large version) they knew what they were doing. They were forcing developers to work on improved layouts and UI design, while allowing users to migrate the unoptimized iOS monetary investment into this one device.
We can believe fantasy numbers and feel impressed, or we can look at the truth. Samsung shipped 2 million Galaxy Tabs to retailers. How many were bought by customers? Samsung isn't saying. Why not? But they have admitted that of those that did sell to customers, 16% were returned. That hardly sounds "impressively well."
They did not admit the return rate, they also claim less than 2% were returned, but gave no specifics on that number either. Was that "only 2% returns due to defects"? Was it "only 2% returns due to satisfaction"? Was it "only 2% because I thought i was getting my kid an iPad"?
It does not matter, though. Everyone seems to sing Doom about Windows Phone 7, despite Microsoft claiming also 2 million units shipped and never noting how many units got sold. How can it be success for one company to ship a whole 2 million while failure for another to only ship 2 million?
Not that it matters to Samsung, they make money of every sold iPad, they are the ones making the displays for Apple at the end of the day.
It is worth noting that the enterprise license is only 500 a year, thats nothing even for the smallest of companies.
Also worth noting is that developers can do similar things with the development license and that one is just 100 a year, you just don't get tools to easily push apps into large amounts of devices and must email them to all authorized users so they can sync them in through iTunes.
I always pondered who wants to install pornography apps in their devices... does this means people that install all these porn pop-up creating toolbars in their work computers are actually doing it intentionally and want that same level of "quality" in their phones?
The internet is for porn, keep your porn out of your apps!
The impossible thing is to get people to write open source for a living. Apple and Microsoft have a lot of developers writting software for the platform in closed form because they can make a living out of it. If you cant make a living out of it, the best anyone can expect is for you to make this development as a hobby, forcing Open Source users to actually hire developers to implement features they need and were not able to find in the market.
And, ironically, that is the original goal of Open Source, not to make software free but to make it so that I am not tied by the original vendor should I want to expand it's functionality or address bug fixes. As some one that buys a product, I should expect to be able to hire any coder to improve or fix it, just as I can hire any mechanic to improve or fix my Toyota car.
Open source, unfortunately, has been redefined into FOSS, to the point where anyone charging or keeping the rights of their commercially available open source programs gets heavily criticized for not being "true" open source. This slowly is making it harder and harder for developers to make any money in that field, and in turn forces consumers to hire another contractor for the improvements and bug fixes, due to the nature of the developer working for free, you cant expect him to address bugs or add features you need, after all. Problem is that coders tend to be very expensive to hire. It comes the point where it's cheaper to just stick to closed source platforms like Windows and OSX.
The difference this time is that there's no substantial price differential. even the cheapest android is only a couple hundred less than the apple model.
The cheapest 3G iPad is 600. The only Honeycomb tablet, the Xoom, is 800. Worse, although announced for the future, right now thats the only model available. If you care not for the data plan and want to go pure Wifi, you still have to pay one month of data plan to activate your wifi, making it 820 for pure wifi Xoom vz 500 for pure wifi iPad.
Likely in the future cheaper Honeycomb tablets will show up, but so far, there is no cheaper alternative for the iPad.
If you bothered to use your brain for a 2#$!% minute, you would realize a few things:
1) Soldiers are not out there because they wanted to, they decided to serve their country so you could stay home and play your video games. If they did not sign up in enough numbers, they would force you to serve as soon as they run out of volunteers. Remember every time that a soldier gets killed or looses his legs because of a bomb, that it could had been you out there had he and many others not volunteered.
2) It is good to know military budget goes into medical research that can also be used to save civilians in, say, burning buildings and not entirely to develop new guns and bombs.
I mean, I am no doctor, but does not the Skin Gun covered by National Geographic recently already makes this entire process basically obsolete?
So... this prevents someone copying a BD disk with a VCR? Or a TV capture card?
Guess they dont want people to... ehm.... DVR those rented BlueRays?
but the guy’s at the top are two stupid (or afraid of getting fired) to stop it.
Yes, both of them are stupid.
Patents simply monopolize progress, and the worst part is very often is a monopoly only used to lock a door, not even to actually implement said progress.
What are you relying on when you say this?
What you yourself said (bolded)
Copyrights and patents function very differently. One difference is the so-called independent creation, where if two people write the same code, neither having seen the others, they both have rights to use that code and obtain copyright in it. This protection is very different from the monopoly granted by a patent , which prevents all second-comers, regardless whether they knew of the patent, from practicing the invention. So when comparing copyright and patent law, one does not supplant the other, and frequently they address different issues. Boiling that down, patents protect the idea/function achieved by the code (performed by a machine, of course), while copyright protects the expression of that idea/function (the individual lines of code).
If you refer to the "door lock" part, I refer to the flood of patent trolls that do just that.
That paragraph also happens to very clearly state some of the reasons I dislike patents (for one it is becoming more expensive to research if whatever you are doing is already patented than it is to develop anything in the software world.) I should not be able to redistribute some one else's code, I should not be able to clone some one else's software to the T, but I should have the freedom to come up with things on my own that happen to work the same way some other guy somewhere thought off first.
In the world of software, that is addressed by copyrights. Patents simply monopolize progress, and the worst part is very often is a monopoly only used to lock a door, not even to actually implement said progress.
All patents are in the way of progress, Google patents included.