Umm, no. Trade secrets do this just fine, patents were created to induce holders of trade secrets to publish, so others could eventually improve upon the invention.
That's indeed also a reason for the usage of patents (I mentioned it as an aside later on). A patent is stronger than a trade secret though: if someone independently invents/discovers the same thing as you (or can reverse engineer your innovation), your trade secret advantage is gone.
and why is that exactly? the FAT code in the kernel is *not* microsoft's, it was written by the linux programmers themselves.
That's irrelevant as far as patents are concerned. This is a big difference between copyright and patents. You only infringe on someone's copyright, if it can be shown that what you wrote/created is very similar to what someone else did and if it can be proven that you have had access to this other person's work. I.e., if you, completely independent from someone else, come up with exactly the same thing and you can prove this, then you will not infringe on their copyright.
Otoh, patents do not make this discrimination. The only exception is that if you used a patented technique before it was patented (but you never published it, so your work cannot be considered as prior art), then you can continue to use this technique *for personal use* even after the patent has been granted (which excludes any commercial use afaik, though I'm not certain of this). If you independently came up with it after the patent was granted, you're completely out of luck.
The reasoning is that patents exist to protect big investments in R&D, which generally wouldn't have occurred if there was no way to safeguard the results from imitation with patents. So patents are considered as some kind of necessary evil (temporary monopolies), required to promote innovation and disclosure. Of course, in case of software patents this reasoning is almost never true and you are pretty much stuck with only the negative sides.
You CAN stream DRMd files across a subnet in iTunes. Only one machine has to be authorized host. That's one of its main features. DUH!
That's incorrect and the parent is right: you can only stream DRMd files to other authorised computers. See e.g. the third last paragraph of this article.
The European version can be found here . Looks identical at first sight, though I did not compare all the claims word for word yet. Another great patent waiting to be legalised. Act now!
The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with everything sitting on a Mach kernel I don't think MacOS X will ever achieve the low latency that Linux pulls off. Mach's cool but you pay a price.
Kernel latency and (gui) responsiveness two quite different things. Mac OS X actually scores very good on the latency front and has had similar features as what the low-latency and pre-emption patches added to linux quite a while before those patches existed. See this (now outdated) study comparing Mac OS X and Linux on latency during audio-processing (before those low-latency and pre-emption patches were integrated in the linux kernel).
The unresponsiveness was not due to the fact that they use a kernel based on Mach, but simply due to the fact that the GUI wasn't optimised very well. In Panther, they added tons of new special-purpose functions which are much faster than the general-purpose routines. You just have to take care the conditions for calling them are fulfilled.
Even now, there's still a lot more GUI processing going on in the Mac OS X window manager than in most (all?) XFree Window managers. I think your remark would be more appropriate if it said "The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with the whole GUI being based on pdf and vector graphics I don't think Mac OS X will ever be as responsive as bitmapped systems such as Mac OS 9 and current XFree and Windows versions".
And even that may prove to be false in the future, as until now the GUI has become more responsive with each version and Apple keeps telling its developers that performance is one of their primary goals. Also, giving the front-most application precedence for screen updates in the window manager/server has little to do with the kernel or pre-emption, but is more of a design choice.
They are also doing this thing called "prebinding" which I assume is equivalent to "prelinking" in the Linux world --
It's indeed similar to pre-linking.
performing dynamic linking a single time and saving the intermediate results so that applications can launch faster. If you look through the installation logs for Panther you see that it includes a new dynamic linker and there are many log messages of the ilk: "Prebinding xxx application."
Actually, they've been doing that since 10.0.1 (the 10.0.0 linker already had the feature, but they forgot to trigger it in the installer; that's the reason why installing the devtools sped up the system so much, because that installer script did do the prebinding)
If you look at the process list in top or with ps you see that there are FAR fewer system processes than before. I'm not sure whether this is because they really aren't running, or if the OS is somehow hiding them (which would be very un-UNIX-like).
They're not hiding anything, but more things are now only started on demand instead of by default at boot time.
Our university had two install 2 new mailservers just to be able to run all incoming mail through spamassassin. Do you think the spammers paid for that "small annoyance"?
Then go to the Internic problem report form and file a complaint. If all data is invalid and the owner cannot be contact the owner, the domain will be suspended.
No, this is a big difference between copyright and patents. You only infringe on someone's copyright, if it can be shown that what you wrote/created is very similar to what someone else did and if it can be proven that you have had access to this other person's work. I.e., if you, completely independent from someone else, come up with exactly the same thing and you can prove this, then you will not infringe on their copyright.
Otoh, patents do not make this discrimination. The only exception is that if you used a patented technique before it was patented (but you never published it, so your work cannot be considered as prior art), then you can continue to use this technique *for personal use* even after the patent has been granted (which excludes any commercial use afaik, though I'm not certain of this). If you independently came up with it after the patent was granted, you're completely out of luck.
I suggest that business method patents be eliminated by statute to reduce the workload on the patent examiners to improve the amount of time to devote to each patent application.
Recommendation 6 on pages 14-15 basically agrees with you. It talks about the problems caused by allowing software patents, patents on business methods and patents on living organisms, but at the same time does not propose any solution for them. They only say that in the future, further broadening of the scope of what can constitute patentable subject matter should be done with care, so that the constitutional intention of "promote the Progress of Science
and useful Arts" does not get ignored again.
Chapter 5 again notes all the problems caused by these kind of patents, and the only "solution" they propose is making it easier to challenge a patent. As someone else wrote in an email about this:
Right at the beginning FTC writes that "valid patents" are
good for innovation while "invalid" ones aren't, thus making the patent
establishment the judge of what is good for innovation instead of looking
at it independently.
Repeat after me: the goal is spurring innovation. Patents are a means which are intended to further that goal, but they do not do so inherently or per definition. They always have a positive and a negative side. The positive one is that it becomes easier for the innovator to recoup his investments and that the innovation is made public. The negative one is that other innovators are hindered by the monopoly granted to the person holding the patent, even if they devise new things completely independently.
Whether or not patents have a general positive or negative effect in a certain field, depends on the balance between those positive and negative effects. I have not yet seen one single study (even not by pro-swpat entities, such one by the Fraunhofer institute, holder of the MP3 compression patents) that shows a generally positive effect for software or business method patents. Why don't we ban such patents until someone proposes a way to handle them so that at least theoretically the net result will be positive?
Why is questioning the positive effect of patents in a certain field automatically denounced as "spreading misinformation", "open source zealotry" or "anti-globalism" by the pro-patent movement?
These aren't the same G4 chips you're used to in Powerbooks, they're IBM manufactured "PPC 750GX". Yes, that's a G3 with AltiVec.
How do you know? Personally, I doubt it. The last few generations of G3 iBooks had 512kb of L2 cache, and these iBooks only have 256kb.
This points more in the direction PPC7450/PPC7455 (i.e., the G4 used in the eMac/iMac and previous -not current- Powerbooks) than in that of a PPC750GX (successor of the PPC750FX used in previous iBooks, supposedly with up to 1MB of L2 cache and altivec support).
Hopefully, the European Parliament will be able to see through the dis-information spread by the FFII, the Eurolinux something or other, and pass meaningful legislation this time.
I think the main problem of pro-swpat lobby in Europe is that the politicians of the European institutions who are pro-software patents, keep on repeating that they are actually against software patents, but pro patents on computer-implemented inventions.
This forces those people to talk only about generalities and how much the industry depends on patents on "computer-implemented inventions", but they can never give any specific example. They are screaming bloody murder about the amendments voted by the European Parliament, but they have not yet given even one example of a patent on a "computer-implemented invention" (which is not a software patent) that will be invalidated by those amendments.
If they would outright admit they were pro-software patents, at least it would be possible to discuss with them about whether or not those are good for the economy, innovation and society at large. Right now, the discussion often gets stuck at finding the imaginary difference between "pure software" and a "computer-implemented invention".
Even though software patents are not yet enforceable in Europe, more than 30,000 have already been requested and granted. 75% of those are owned by US and Japanese companies. If the directive would legalise software patents, those would suddenly all become enforceable. Do the math...
There have been about 30,000 software patents granted until now. 75% of which are owned by US and Japanese companies, fwiw. I don't know how many software patents there are in the US.
3ivx is the only mpeg4 codec (apart from Apple's own probably, but I don't know how well it compares to the others) that is properly optimized for PPC, both with and without altivec. Its image quality is somewhat lacking compared to DivX though (don't know about XviD).
We had the same problem on our Beige G3. At the Apple discussion forums, someone said he fixed it by setting the Energy Saver settings so that the computer never goes to sleep and no separate setting for the screen (so it also never goes to sleep). We did that here at home (without rebooting, since those settings immediately go into effect), but it crashed again. Since rebooting afterwards, it has not yet crashed a single time yet though, so it does seem to help.
Spammers, so common opinion holds, are just there to make money - not to engage in any sort of crusade against anti-UCE groups. So what does one individual spammer have to gain?
You already forgot about this? And you never read the threats of spammers in nanae against known anti-spammers, or how they stalked some people and their families?
The reason that it is currently confusing, is that while most of the amendments necessary to fix the directive were passed, some weren't. For example, we have an airtight definition of "computer-implemented invention" (software cannot fulfill it), "technical contribution" (idem), "technical" and "field of technology" (idem). Those are in article 2.
Then there is article 4, supposedly excluding some things that conform to the definitions in article 2, but which should not be patentable. In the original proposal, pure software could pas both article 2 and 4 (although the proponents of swpats claimed that was not true), so in our counterproposal we changed both to prevent software patents in case we were only able to amend one of them (or both partially). Article 4 was only very slightly amended in the way we wanted, so indeed it still mostly includes those braindead exceptions that don't really exclude anything. However, since software cannot pass the definitions in article 2 anymore, the exceptions don't really matter anymore.
That is, until the European Commission screws it up again and when we can start amending in the second reading again, at least:)
The parliament is largely composed of MEPs who don't listen to the majority of their constituents, and who bitch and whine about "aggressive", "irrational" and even "improper" lobbying when we are only attempting to exercise our democratic rights and get their attention.
I actually only know two such whiners: Arlene McCarhty (reporter of the directive) and Elly Pliij-van Gorsel (reporter for the ITRE commission on this directive). I've also met a lot of MEPs which were happy that there's finally some European dossier the people actually seem to care about.
Since they complained that we were wrong to fight the directive because we didn't understand the facts, then let it be noted that they never made the slightest attempt to engage with us and explain their position properly. Not once. Despite the strength of protest, they just didn't care.
I think you really are over-generalising. This indeed hold true for some of the main proponents of software patents, but other proponents such as Anthony Howard and Joachim Wuermeling did go into discussion with us. We couldn't convince them entirely, but they did milder their tone near the end of the debate and made some concessions.
So, if I write a dataprocessing program that can be used by another piece of software to do something new....then I can patent it...or the other bit of software...or neither...
It's just an unclear translation. This is the voted text:
(a) "computer-implemented invention"
means any invention within the meaning
of the European Patent Convention the
performance of which involves the use of a
computer, computer network or other
programmable apparatus and having in its
implementations one or more nontechnical
features which are realised
wholly or partly by a computer program or
computer programs, besides the technical
features that any invention must possess;
So what it says is that a "computer-implemented invention" (note that this term is self-contradictory) is the same as any other invention. All the crap after it, is to make the people happy that were afraid that adding a computer program to a regular invention may turn this invention unpatentable (which is not the case, never has been the case and also not our intention).
In contrast to the "software is not patentable" we had beforehand, this is worse. Now each and every formerly illegal patent will have to be examined whether its maybe illegal?
Three remarks:
This was only the first reading. The directive is not yet adopted, it now goes back to the commission and then back to the parliament for a second reading. Not sure what happens after that.
The European Patent Convention (which says that computer programs can not be invented, and as such not be patented) is still in full effect
We managed to define "computer-implemented invention" like this:
"computer-implemented invention" means any invention in the sense of the European Patent Convention the performance of which involves the use of computer, computer network or other programmable apparatus and having in its implementations one or more non-technical features which are realised wholly or partly by a computer program or computer programs, besides the technical features that any invention must contribute;
What this basically says, is that a "computer-implemented invention" is the same as a regular invention (so it must pass all the same tests in the original intended sense of the European Patent Office) and which for some reason uses a computer in the claimed (=patented) application. There's a similar definition for the "technical contribution" term which was abused quite heavily by the Commission and JURI.
So I really don't see how the current proposal would suggest that software can be patentable. It would in fact prevent the EPO from claiming any longer that it can grant patents on computer programs if they have some technical effect, because in that case they are computer-implemented inventions according to them (since such a thing can never fulfill the above definition, and the computer program can no longer fulfill the definition of technical contribution.
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Otoh, patents do not make this discrimination. The only exception is that if you used a patented technique before it was patented (but you never published it, so your work cannot be considered as prior art), then you can continue to use this technique *for personal use* even after the patent has been granted (which excludes any commercial use afaik, though I'm not certain of this). If you independently came up with it after the patent was granted, you're completely out of luck.
The reasoning is that patents exist to protect big investments in R&D, which generally wouldn't have occurred if there was no way to safeguard the results from imitation with patents. So patents are considered as some kind of necessary evil (temporary monopolies), required to promote innovation and disclosure. Of course, in case of software patents this reasoning is almost never true and you are pretty much stuck with only the negative sides.
The European version can be found here . Looks identical at first sight, though I did not compare all the claims word for word yet. Another great patent waiting to be legalised. Act now!
The unresponsiveness was not due to the fact that they use a kernel based on Mach, but simply due to the fact that the GUI wasn't optimised very well. In Panther, they added tons of new special-purpose functions which are much faster than the general-purpose routines. You just have to take care the conditions for calling them are fulfilled.
Even now, there's still a lot more GUI processing going on in the Mac OS X window manager than in most (all?) XFree Window managers. I think your remark would be more appropriate if it said "The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with the whole GUI being based on pdf and vector graphics I don't think Mac OS X will ever be as responsive as bitmapped systems such as Mac OS 9 and current XFree and Windows versions".
And even that may prove to be false in the future, as until now the GUI has become more responsive with each version and Apple keeps telling its developers that performance is one of their primary goals. Also, giving the front-most application precedence for screen updates in the window manager/server has little to do with the kernel or pre-emption, but is more of a design choice.
It's indeed similar to pre-linking. Actually, they've been doing that since 10.0.1 (the 10.0.0 linker already had the feature, but they forgot to trigger it in the installer; that's the reason why installing the devtools sped up the system so much, because that installer script did do the prebinding) They're not hiding anything, but more things are now only started on demand instead of by default at boot time.Our university had two install 2 new mailservers just to be able to run all incoming mail through spamassassin. Do you think the spammers paid for that "small annoyance"?
Then go to the Internic problem report form and file a complaint. If all data is invalid and the owner cannot be contact the owner, the domain will be suspended.
No, this is a big difference between copyright and patents. You only infringe on someone's copyright, if it can be shown that what you wrote/created is very similar to what someone else did and if it can be proven that you have had access to this other person's work. I.e., if you, completely independent from someone else, come up with exactly the same thing and you can prove this, then you will not infringe on their copyright.
Otoh, patents do not make this discrimination. The only exception is that if you used a patented technique before it was patented (but you never published it, so your work cannot be considered as prior art), then you can continue to use this technique *for personal use* even after the patent has been granted (which excludes any commercial use afaik, though I'm not certain of this). If you independently came up with it after the patent was granted, you're completely out of luck.
Chapter 5 again notes all the problems caused by these kind of patents, and the only "solution" they propose is making it easier to challenge a patent. As someone else wrote in an email about this:
Repeat after me: the goal is spurring innovation. Patents are a means which are intended to further that goal, but they do not do so inherently or per definition. They always have a positive and a negative side. The positive one is that it becomes easier for the innovator to recoup his investments and that the innovation is made public. The negative one is that other innovators are hindered by the monopoly granted to the person holding the patent, even if they devise new things completely independently.Whether or not patents have a general positive or negative effect in a certain field, depends on the balance between those positive and negative effects. I have not yet seen one single study (even not by pro-swpat entities, such one by the Fraunhofer institute, holder of the MP3 compression patents) that shows a generally positive effect for software or business method patents. Why don't we ban such patents until someone proposes a way to handle them so that at least theoretically the net result will be positive?
Why is questioning the positive effect of patents in a certain field automatically denounced as "spreading misinformation", "open source zealotry" or "anti-globalism" by the pro-patent movement?
This points more in the direction PPC7450/PPC7455 (i.e., the G4 used in the eMac/iMac and previous -not current- Powerbooks) than in that of a PPC750GX (successor of the PPC750FX used in previous iBooks, supposedly with up to 1MB of L2 cache and altivec support).
This forces those people to talk only about generalities and how much the industry depends on patents on "computer-implemented inventions", but they can never give any specific example. They are screaming bloody murder about the amendments voted by the European Parliament, but they have not yet given even one example of a patent on a "computer-implemented invention" (which is not a software patent) that will be invalidated by those amendments.
If they would outright admit they were pro-software patents, at least it would be possible to discuss with them about whether or not those are good for the economy, innovation and society at large. Right now, the discussion often gets stuck at finding the imaginary difference between "pure software" and a "computer-implemented invention".
Even though software patents are not yet enforceable in Europe, more than 30,000 have already been requested and granted. 75% of those are owned by US and Japanese companies. If the directive would legalise software patents, those would suddenly all become enforceable. Do the math...
There have been about 30,000 software patents granted until now. 75% of which are owned by US and Japanese companies, fwiw. I don't know how many software patents there are in the US.
If that were true, how can you explain that we got such good amendments voted in the European Parliament?
3ivx is the only mpeg4 codec (apart from Apple's own probably, but I don't know how well it compares to the others) that is properly optimized for PPC, both with and without altivec. Its image quality is somewhat lacking compared to DivX though (don't know about XviD).
Jaguar does officially support beige g3's. Panther indeed doesn't anymore.
I really think you are mistaken. I got my iBook in February 2003 and it came with 10.2.1
We had the same problem on our Beige G3. At the Apple discussion forums, someone said he fixed it by setting the Energy Saver settings so that the computer never goes to sleep and no separate setting for the screen (so it also never goes to sleep). We did that here at home (without rebooting, since those settings immediately go into effect), but it crashed again. Since rebooting afterwards, it has not yet crashed a single time yet though, so it does seem to help.
The reason that it is currently confusing, is that while most of the amendments necessary to fix the directive were passed, some weren't. For example, we have an airtight definition of "computer-implemented invention" (software cannot fulfill it), "technical contribution" (idem), "technical" and "field of technology" (idem). Those are in article 2.
:)
Then there is article 4, supposedly excluding some things that conform to the definitions in article 2, but which should not be patentable. In the original proposal, pure software could pas both article 2 and 4 (although the proponents of swpats claimed that was not true), so in our counterproposal we changed both to prevent software patents in case we were only able to amend one of them (or both partially). Article 4 was only very slightly amended in the way we wanted, so indeed it still mostly includes those braindead exceptions that don't really exclude anything. However, since software cannot pass the definitions in article 2 anymore, the exceptions don't really matter anymore.
That is, until the European Commission screws it up again and when we can start amending in the second reading again, at least
There most definitely is pressure from the US: see this letter written by the USPTO in name of "the US" and this page on the USPTO's website.
So I really don't see how the current proposal would suggest that software can be patentable. It would in fact prevent the EPO from claiming any longer that it can grant patents on computer programs if they have some technical effect, because in that case they are computer-implemented inventions according to them (since such a thing can never fulfill the above definition, and the computer program can no longer fulfill the definition of technical contribution.