It was introduced in response to Apple's huge success with their iPhone App Store. Too late really, was an attempt to keep their Phone OS at least somewhat viable until they managed to release their new "competitive" phone OS..
My understanding is they didn't arrive at Apple until much later and those where the ones that saw the overlapping windows implemented and were shocked.
I can't remember exactly but it was partially covered in Steve Jobs biography, at least the part of the overlapping regions was.
I won't argue the patent war claims, but to be honest: patents themselves are counter to the interest of technological progress. They should not exist, as they stand their sole purpose is to squash competition.
"patent troll" is still not the word, but this is not me trying to defend Apple, just trying to use the term where it belongs (Lodsys was a patent troll, for instance.)
BTW, patents are not meant to be used in a "defensive way" at all. The only "defensive" use of patents is to sue the hell out of anyone that stepped over your patent (and that's what Apple is doing from a legal standpoint, never mind the patents themselves are ridiculous.)
Actually, the use of patents as a defense is an even bigger scam than suing people over patents. Here is how patents are used "defensively":
IndieCompanyA has a patent. BigCompanyB infringes on the patent. IndieCompanyA sues. BigCompanyB says "I have a gazillion patents, you are likely to somehow infringe at least vaguely on one, so drop the case, give me free access to your patent and go home crying or we will sue you to bankruptcy."
At the end of the day there is no good use of patents, they serve only to make wealthy companies stronger and the small guy weaker.
I quoted the first site I found to get out of it quick, but if you need an alternate source here is a link to This American Life's podcast "When Patents Attack!" where they interview the man that originally coined the allegoric patent troll term based off bridge trolls that bully people to pay money to pass.
Have posted the link 3 times already replying to others, and yea I should have posted it on the first post but was not figuring some people would go writhing a thesis on why wikipedia was wrong, or at least figured anyone that would also would google up the term and face many other sources on the origin of the term.
An interesting side story to this is that Apple engineers went crazy implementing overlapping windows because they were shown such a feature at Xerox. Xerox engineers were shocked since they never actually implemented the feature and thought it to be impossible to do.
At the end of the day the only thing Apple got out of Xerox were ideas, nothing else. Implementation details were almost all home grown and some of those details were shared with Microsoft. Those were the details Apple sued Microsoft over.
Go listen to "When Patents Attack" by This American Life. They not only talk about the origin of the term "Patent Troll" but also talk to the guy that coined it up and he explains it's an allegory to the bridge trolls in fantasy, that will pop up as soon as you try to cross a bridge and just demand money.
The whole point of the patent system is to encourage cross licensing, sharing, and development of ideas while ensuring that real inventors can be paid for their creations.
I'm sorry but you are living in fantasy land. The whole point of the patent system is to encourage people to invent things and have a legal resort to make sure no one steals their invention, that way they can justify the time and money invested to invent since now they can actually profit from the invention.
I do accept the patent system is broken and sucks, and should be abolished or heavily revamped, but patents were always about roadblocks and restrictions.
As for the origin of the name "patent troll" listen to This American LIfe's coverage on the topic. They talk to the guy that originally coined the term and the reason: fantasy trolls that live under bridges and bully you to pay money if you want to use the bridge. Unlike some users like to think, patent trolls are not named after the forum variety that is there just to bother and annoy.
The common accepted definition of "patent troll" is:
Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company who buys and enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered by the target or observers as unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to further develop, manufacture or market the patented invention.
Another trait of patent trolls is they want to make sure you stay in business, albeit with low margins, since you going out of business means you cant pay licenses.
Apple's patent wars have never been done with the goal of get licensing fees from anyone. Their goal is almost always to kill products they despite (for one reason or another, but are mostly motivated by personal company grudges.)
I'm not saying Apple is a nice kid playing by the rules, but they are far from being a patent troll.
As for the article itself... what retard wrote that, and how am I not shocked it's posted in Forbes? Yes, Apple (not jobs, the lawsuits had been going for years and Jobs had just returned) was running a legal battle against Microsoft at the time, but as Jobs said, Apple was going to go under way before they were able to win or lose. And to be honest, Microsoft had the money to even pay if they ever won.
Losses were not what was in Gate's mind at the time. The reason Gates actually bailed Apple out was that Apple going out of business would had been horrible for Microsoft's defense in their anti-trust monopoly abuse case since Apple's competition was one of the points that was constantly brought up by the defense during the case.
If I make a company on another state, and my equipment belongs to said company... not only that but the equipment is constantly "broadcasting" to a datacenter (so deletions are never actually possible)... can a savy journalist get the FBI involved since it's a cross-state crime where the local state officer tempred with property of an out-of-state company?
Most of the time they do. A lot of developers just went XBox, XBox first, or dual release with the PS3 going out "however the hell it turns out I won’t bother optimize for that mess".
THAT backlash, plus the fact that all that amazing specialized R&D resulted in a chip that just got outperformed by an off the shelf Intel CPU (a year before the PS3 ended launching) likely made Sony realize it was a waste of time to keep pushing proprietary CPU architectures.
Don't worry, it's just a start in their baby step program to entirely avoid all land based disasters. Once japanese citizens are used to the idea of their homes not being stuck to the ground, they will be ready for stage 10 (there will be many more baby steps:) Flying Tokyo
I am not sure if this is the direction EU is going by, but I can see an issue with telling your customers "don’t worry, all our services keep data separated" and then years later change things on you, merging all data even if you for any reason didn’t agree or disregard the warnings (like not logging into G services since they started letting users know or accidentally missing the message) versus just telling you from day one that your data will be merged across all services.
With the Google's approach, I may have decided to use their services because of their separation only to now be angered by the change. With Microsoft's approach, that mentality would have just made me never use the services.
Actually sounds like similar mentality to the French case about Google Maps, where they claimed Google would offer maps free, drive everyone out of business and then start charging (something Google did.)
Note I’m not taking any side on this. I opted not to delete my data from Google search history as I found it more valuable for me to keep it than to delete it, but I can see how some others may feel the change may be intrusive, especially if you are running a business with Google services and intentionally avoiding other services due to competitive reasons.
Only way this will concern me is if they suddenly pull a Buzz again and automatically use my “consolidated data” to make me a Google+ page without my authorization.
Although a super awesome idea, I don't think book publishers would had allowed it since it would had meant that the store would not only be in a position to demand a bigger slice of the sale but also to print it's own classic literature books on demand, cutting off publishers of that business.
Go back and reread GP carefully. You are confusing Google with Google+ (or asking a question about a claim that was never made in GP.)
The GP said: "G+ fits my desire for social-networking perfectly"
He specifically was talking about G+.
Google (or, at least, the subset of services and features which rely on or are enhanced when used with Google Accounts) is Google's social network. G+ is just branding on a couple of the new features, some of which have their own set of pages, some of which are features embedded in existing services.
Comparing the G+specific pages (whether by time spent on them or by any other metric) against the whole of a competing social networking offering is missing the point in a pretty big way.
G+ is a social networking. Google is search. They are not the same, there is no overlap (other than the enabling of G+ page ads in search results.)
If you don't see Google+ as Google's social network, you are alone on that one. Google calls it a social network. The press calls it social network. The frigging wiki calls it a social network (although you can go and edit it if you will.)
What social features in G+ predates it? The closest thing there is their timeline/twitter hybrid with Buzz but it was built from scratch with Buzz still running... although it got killed without preservation shortly after G+ opening up.
Circles, Hangouts and their timeline (the core of G+'s site) are all new features designed as part of G+.
IF we are talking the same profit ratios, this means 90 million users * (3/60) * 4c = 180,000 a month.
Thats absolutely nothing for a company like Google.
Also keep in mind Facebook is capitalizing heavily on in-game currency for games like FarmVille, something I dont think Google is doing, so the average may be even lower than 4 cents for Google. This means that G+ is running at..
Only reason I find to use a social network other than Facebook is privacy concerns. But lets be honest, Google is not the first company you look at when you ask yourself "who will take my privacy more seriously?"
Only alternative for social networking, in my eyes, is Twitter since (to my knowledge, they may be very good at hiding it) they only care about my posts and hash tags, not about tracking my every move in the web.
NOES!!!! I'm sure all here watch the Daily Show!!! These political news are a great glimpse at what Colbert and Stewart will be making fun off tonight!!!!
Can't wait for Stewart to mock a candidate claiming "he is a big boy and can take it"... man that can go so many ways!!!
I would say Yahoo. In any argument where someone bring patents into bullying with some crazy timing (like IPO timing... for stuff they pursued others years ago...) the bully loses.
Also, although I personally dislike Facebook and their disregard for privacy settings, and obsession with tracking, at least there is a bit I admire from them and it's their independence. They are only pursuing the IPO because they are forced to, but Zuckerberg has attempted to keep things indie (huge indie but still indie) all this time.
Their issue was in granting some... not sure how you call it... profit share? Ownership share? â¦to many early employees that sold all or part of them. As soon as too many people own shares, you must legally do an IPO and go public. So for that at least Zuck has my support even if I refuse to use the services he provides.
Yahoo is just trying to make it look bad for investors that they are getting into patent trouble. If Zuck refuses to settle and decides to take it to the court, and counter sues for any potential damages, he will get bonus points in my book.
I donâ(TM)t know what to say about this post... for one, you can print digital photos in the same quality you were able to develop film.
Also, if my house is in fire, I donâ(TM)t have to worry about my photos. They are either in my cellphone (the first thing I'll reach for) or held in some cloud storage space.
Digital is very little "fleeting" about digital media. Film and developed photos, though, are extremely flammable and rather heavy. I dare you walk out of your house with 100 thousand photos in film format under a fire without getting burnt yourself, having to leave many behind, and having any damaged by fire or smoke. I'll be waiting outside with my internet connected cellphone.
Kodak could had survived the same way as Canon and Olympus have so far, if they had not been overburdened by sustaining a dying film business (and axing that business was not acceptable at the time.)
But donâ(TM)t take Canon or Olympus side yet. Cellphone cameras are killing the point and shoot camera market and all current manufacturers are feeling that. It wonâ(TM)t be long before those are also gone.
Slashdot Mirror
It was introduced in response to Apple's huge success with their iPhone App Store. Too late really, was an attempt to keep their Phone OS at least somewhat viable until they managed to release their new "competitive" phone OS..
And it still means the same, unless you are attempting to shoehorn apple into the definition, that is. Then squares also fit in triangles.
My understanding is they didn't arrive at Apple until much later and those where the ones that saw the overlapping windows implemented and were shocked.
I can't remember exactly but it was partially covered in Steve Jobs biography, at least the part of the overlapping regions was.
I won't argue the patent war claims, but to be honest: patents themselves are counter to the interest of technological progress. They should not exist, as they stand their sole purpose is to squash competition.
"patent troll" is still not the word, but this is not me trying to defend Apple, just trying to use the term where it belongs (Lodsys was a patent troll, for instance.)
BTW, patents are not meant to be used in a "defensive way" at all. The only "defensive" use of patents is to sue the hell out of anyone that stepped over your patent (and that's what Apple is doing from a legal standpoint, never mind the patents themselves are ridiculous.)
Actually, the use of patents as a defense is an even bigger scam than suing people over patents. Here is how patents are used "defensively":
IndieCompanyA has a patent.
BigCompanyB infringes on the patent.
IndieCompanyA sues.
BigCompanyB says "I have a gazillion patents, you are likely to somehow infringe at least vaguely on one, so drop the case, give me free access to your patent and go home crying or we will sue you to bankruptcy."
At the end of the day there is no good use of patents, they serve only to make wealthy companies stronger and the small guy weaker.
I quoted the first site I found to get out of it quick, but if you need an alternate source here is a link to This American Life's podcast "When Patents Attack!" where they interview the man that originally coined the allegoric patent troll term based off bridge trolls that bully people to pay money to pass.
Have posted the link 3 times already replying to others, and yea I should have posted it on the first post but was not figuring some people would go writhing a thesis on why wikipedia was wrong, or at least figured anyone that would also would google up the term and face many other sources on the origin of the term.
An interesting side story to this is that Apple engineers went crazy implementing overlapping windows because they were shown such a feature at Xerox. Xerox engineers were shocked since they never actually implemented the feature and thought it to be impossible to do.
At the end of the day the only thing Apple got out of Xerox were ideas, nothing else. Implementation details were almost all home grown and some of those details were shared with Microsoft. Those were the details Apple sued Microsoft over.
Go listen to "When Patents Attack" by This American Life. They not only talk about the origin of the term "Patent Troll" but also talk to the guy that coined it up and he explains it's an allegory to the bridge trolls in fantasy, that will pop up as soon as you try to cross a bridge and just demand money.
The whole point of the patent system is to encourage cross licensing, sharing, and development of ideas while ensuring that real inventors can be paid for their creations.
I'm sorry but you are living in fantasy land. The whole point of the patent system is to encourage people to invent things and have a legal resort to make sure no one steals their invention, that way they can justify the time and money invested to invent since now they can actually profit from the invention.
I do accept the patent system is broken and sucks, and should be abolished or heavily revamped, but patents were always about roadblocks and restrictions.
As for the origin of the name "patent troll" listen to This American LIfe's coverage on the topic. They talk to the guy that originally coined the term and the reason: fantasy trolls that live under bridges and bully you to pay money if you want to use the bridge. Unlike some users like to think, patent trolls are not named after the forum variety that is there just to bother and annoy.
The common accepted definition of "patent troll" is:
Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company who buys and enforces patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered by the target or observers as unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to further develop, manufacture or market the patented invention.
(Taken from wikipedia)
Another trait of patent trolls is they want to make sure you stay in business, albeit with low margins, since you going out of business means you cant pay licenses.
Apple's patent wars have never been done with the goal of get licensing fees from anyone. Their goal is almost always to kill products they despite (for one reason or another, but are mostly motivated by personal company grudges.)
I'm not saying Apple is a nice kid playing by the rules, but they are far from being a patent troll.
As for the article itself... what retard wrote that, and how am I not shocked it's posted in Forbes? Yes, Apple (not jobs, the lawsuits had been going for years and Jobs had just returned) was running a legal battle against Microsoft at the time, but as Jobs said, Apple was going to go under way before they were able to win or lose. And to be honest, Microsoft had the money to even pay if they ever won.
Losses were not what was in Gate's mind at the time. The reason Gates actually bailed Apple out was that Apple going out of business would had been horrible for Microsoft's defense in their anti-trust monopoly abuse case since Apple's competition was one of the points that was constantly brought up by the defense during the case.
Hmmm I ponder...
If I make a company on another state, and my equipment belongs to said company... not only that but the equipment is constantly "broadcasting" to a datacenter (so deletions are never actually possible) ... can a savy journalist get the FBI involved since it's a cross-state crime where the local state officer tempred with property of an out-of-state company?
Most of the time they do. A lot of developers just went XBox, XBox first, or dual release with the PS3 going out "however the hell it turns out I won’t bother optimize for that mess".
THAT backlash, plus the fact that all that amazing specialized R&D resulted in a chip that just got outperformed by an off the shelf Intel CPU (a year before the PS3 ended launching) likely made Sony realize it was a waste of time to keep pushing proprietary CPU architectures.
Don't worry, it's just a start in their baby step program to entirely avoid all land based disasters. Once japanese citizens are used to the idea of their homes not being stuck to the ground, they will be ready for stage 10 (there will be many more baby steps:) Flying Tokyo
I am not sure if this is the direction EU is going by, but I can see an issue with telling your customers "don’t worry, all our services keep data separated" and then years later change things on you, merging all data even if you for any reason didn’t agree or disregard the warnings (like not logging into G services since they started letting users know or accidentally missing the message) versus just telling you from day one that your data will be merged across all services.
With the Google's approach, I may have decided to use their services because of their separation only to now be angered by the change.
With Microsoft's approach, that mentality would have just made me never use the services.
Actually sounds like similar mentality to the French case about Google Maps, where they claimed Google would offer maps free, drive everyone out of business and then start charging (something Google did.)
Note I’m not taking any side on this. I opted not to delete my data from Google search history as I found it more valuable for me to keep it than to delete it, but I can see how some others may feel the change may be intrusive, especially if you are running a business with Google services and intentionally avoiding other services due to competitive reasons.
Only way this will concern me is if they suddenly pull a Buzz again and automatically use my “consolidated data” to make me a Google+ page without my authorization.
Disclaimer: Webcam installation will require full body Xray scan.
That sounds like TSA logic!
Although a super awesome idea, I don't think book publishers would had allowed it since it would had meant that the store would not only be in a position to demand a bigger slice of the sale but also to print it's own classic literature books on demand, cutting off publishers of that business.
Go back and reread GP carefully. You are confusing Google with Google+ (or asking a question about a claim that was never made in GP.)
The GP said: "G+ fits my desire for social-networking perfectly"
He specifically was talking about G+.
Google (or, at least, the subset of services and features which rely on or are enhanced when used with Google Accounts) is Google's social network. G+ is just branding on a couple of the new features, some of which have their own set of pages, some of which are features embedded in existing services.
Comparing the G+specific pages (whether by time spent on them or by any other metric) against the whole of a competing social networking offering is missing the point in a pretty big way.
G+ is a social networking. Google is search. They are not the same, there is no overlap (other than the enabling of G+ page ads in search results.)
If you don't see Google+ as Google's social network, you are alone on that one. Google calls it a social network. The press calls it social network. The frigging wiki calls it a social network (although you can go and edit it if you will.)
What social features in G+ predates it? The closest thing there is their timeline/twitter hybrid with Buzz but it was built from scratch with Buzz still running... although it got killed without preservation shortly after G+ opening up.
Circles, Hangouts and their timeline (the core of G+'s site) are all new features designed as part of G+.
Myspace users spend 8 minutes a month, not 7 hours. Facebook users spend 7 hours.
So maybe its users *do* use it for fewer minutes a month -- but isn't that okay? Is there not a market for that?
Not really. Social networks are not cheap to run, and they barely can gain any ad revenue if all you do is go in and out once a day.
I know Qudora is not the best source of info but this Q&A seems to have some logic behind it (and the numbers match):
http://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Facebook-make-from-a-single-user-using-the-site-for-1-hour
How much money does Facebook make from a single user using the site for 1 hour?
4 cents/user per hour of usage, with the following assumptions:
$2b in revenue in 2010, 540m unique monthly users, average usage of 7 hours per month per user.
IF we are talking the same profit ratios, this means 90 million users * (3/60) * 4c = 180,000 a month.
Thats absolutely nothing for a company like Google.
Also keep in mind Facebook is capitalizing heavily on in-game currency for games like FarmVille, something I dont think Google is doing, so the average may be even lower than 4 cents for Google.
This means that G+ is running at..
Only reason I find to use a social network other than Facebook is privacy concerns. But lets be honest, Google is not the first company you look at when you ask yourself "who will take my privacy more seriously?"
Only alternative for social networking, in my eyes, is Twitter since (to my knowledge, they may be very good at hiding it) they only care about my posts and hash tags, not about tracking my every move in the web.
NOES!!!! I'm sure all here watch the Daily Show!!! These political news are a great glimpse at what Colbert and Stewart will be making fun off tonight!!!!
Can't wait for Stewart to mock a candidate claiming "he is a big boy and can take it"... man that can go so many ways!!!
I would say Yahoo. In any argument where someone bring patents into bullying with some crazy timing (like IPO timing... for stuff they pursued others years ago...) the bully loses.
Also, although I personally dislike Facebook and their disregard for privacy settings, and obsession with tracking, at least there is a bit I admire from them and it's their independence. They are only pursuing the IPO because they are forced to, but Zuckerberg has attempted to keep things indie (huge indie but still indie) all this time.
Their issue was in granting some... not sure how you call it... profit share? Ownership share? â¦to many early employees that sold all or part of them. As soon as too many people own shares, you must legally do an IPO and go public. So for that at least Zuck has my support even if I refuse to use the services he provides.
Yahoo is just trying to make it look bad for investors that they are getting into patent trouble. If Zuck refuses to settle and decides to take it to the court, and counter sues for any potential damages, he will get bonus points in my book.
I donâ(TM)t know what to say about this post... for one, you can print digital photos in the same quality you were able to develop film.
Also, if my house is in fire, I donâ(TM)t have to worry about my photos. They are either in my cellphone (the first thing I'll reach for) or held in some cloud storage space.
Digital is very little "fleeting" about digital media. Film and developed photos, though, are extremely flammable and rather heavy. I dare you walk out of your house with 100 thousand photos in film format under a fire without getting burnt yourself, having to leave many behind, and having any damaged by fire or smoke. I'll be waiting outside with my internet connected cellphone.
Kodak could had survived the same way as Canon and Olympus have so far, if they had not been overburdened by sustaining a dying film business (and axing that business was not acceptable at the time.)
But donâ(TM)t take Canon or Olympus side yet. Cellphone cameras are killing the point and shoot camera market and all current manufacturers are feeling that. It wonâ(TM)t be long before those are also gone.
DSLR may survive until someone starts making zoom lenses for cellphones, and that is already starting to happen.