Both sides are already taking damage by not being able to sell their goods in certain areas, and they're spending fortunes on lawyers. It's only going to get worse - I can envision these legal cases going on for years (it's taken *how* long to nearly kill SCO?)
So Apple's more threatened. That means they're more likely to do something stupid and desperate. You think they'd try to block them from being manufactured, by getting involved with the Chinese judicial system? That would be a near-instant kill - you can't sell what you can't make, and without China it's hard to manufacture mass products cheaply.
Best-case scenario, of course, is that the War causes so much damage that patent reform becomes a pressing issue even for those who thought they were benefiting from it.
I think we should start calling this whole thing "the 2011 Patent War". That's basically what it is - a war, just fought in global courtrooms instead of global hills and fields, and fought with lawsuits and injunctions instead of artillery and carpet-bombing.
And, eventually, one of them is going to get majorly destroyed. Especially if international court cases can be taken as precedent - once one case is decided, they'd all fall in line. IANAL, so I don't know if that's the case.
I still question what Facebook's worth will be in 3 years.
For anyone thinking Facebook will necessarily still be significant in three years, I have one word to say:
MySpace
Sure, maybe Facebook will remain a massive success and control most of the social-media market. Then again, maybe it won't be anything more than an old, burnt-out, irrelevant website inhabited mainly by bands that haven't been successful in years (if ever) and teenagers.
No, they're even slow at taking power for themselves. Not quite as slow, but "snail's pace", while faster than "glacial", is still pretty slow.
I mean, if I was in charge, I'd have conquered two continents within my first year of power and declared myself dictator-for-life, with legislation in progress to declare myself a deity. Congress can't even lose a war properly, let alone win one, in that amount of time.
It was the one who never accomplished anything useful, spent most of his presidency fighting stupid political battles over inconsequential shit, and will be remembered by history books mainly for the magnitude of his failures. That's the one, right?
Must be an election year coming up, because the government's actually doing shit about stuff we've been complaining about for the past... two, three years?
Well, my code does, and wouldn't crash, but I've seen some of my classmates'. Their understanding of "input" is rather poor, let alone "sanitized input".
Java is one of the languages currently used by students (along with VB.net and sometimes C++ or C#). I would not be surprised if the high relative bug count is due primarily to the number of inexperienced programmers working in Java.
Ah, fuck, who am I kidding. Microsoft's inevitably going to misuse this. Anyone would. Hell, you could hand me the big remote (that's how they do it, right? Giant remote control?) and I'd probably misuse it.
You need an economic disincentive to do so, besides "it pisses off consumers and we'll lose business". "Pulled apps are refunded" is a good disincentive - at the very least, they'd have to make a lot of money by pulling an app in order to use it. That's pretty unlikely.
I can understand a company wanting, or needing, to provide a way to remove malware or illegal content. I can't say I fully agree with it, but I can understand the need. So the existence of such a system, in and of itself, isn't a particularly Bad Thing.
But this had better not be misused. Unless it's actively and secretly causing damage to the system (sending out spam or whatnot), it had better have a court order to be forcibly removed from users' computers. Maybe even then.
No deleting people's apps just because the seller removed it. No deleting people's apps because of some vague DMCA request. It had better be a legitimate, legally-validated removal.
I think a good way to ensure this would be that, if it is ever used, both Microsoft and the seller have to refund the cost to the user. That won't help much for free apps, but it would really help make sure regular apps aren't pulled back for no real reason.
This is (generally) true - at highway speeds, the vast majority of the sound is either aerodynamic or from the tires impacting the road. Even at 25mph/50kmph, you'll get more than enough sound from that to warn pedestrians.
The problem is at parking lot speeds. You don't get much noise at all just moving at 5mph/10kmph. Even with a gas engine, it's mostly the acceleration that provides the noise, the engine revving up, not the engine just running.
Since the main time pedestrians and cars are maneuvering near each other and have significant risk of collision is in precisely those situations, I think the "electric engines don't make enough noise" problem could actually be a legitimate problem. By no means a showstopper or a product-killer - after all, a car is usually a pretty large object, and I for one tend to notice large objects in motion. The solution could be just a simple "noise generator used when moving below X speed" - that would handle the pedestrian problem, without increasing noise in areas where noise is an issue and pedestrians are not.
Yes, but the question is, does the consumer benefit from that?
I doubt it. I'd much rather prefer having all fiction mixed together (the nonfiction books can easily be sorted by category), and for people who don't know what they want, have well-educated, intelligent staff that can recommend something. I'd even take a slight price markup for having someone who can say "oh, you liked ____? Have you tried ____? And I see the sequel to ____ is out in two weeks, and I know you liked that one, you want me to reserve you a copy?"
If the customer perceives better service somewhere else, the customer will go there. Most customers will tolerate bullshit like that as long as there's no other option. Once there is, though, they'll leave.
When was the last time you went to a store and searched for a specific book?
It's tough. I'm doing a research project on digital distribution vs. physical retail, focusing on product availability and pricing. As part of that, I physically went to several stores and checked against a list of products.
The Barnes & Noble was terribly organized. Books were sorted vaguely by genre, then author - except teen literature, which goes in a separate set of shelves, and bestsellers are only up at the front, and "classics" go on yet another shelf. And then how do you classify certain things? Is Stephen King "horror" or just general "fiction"? Is C. S. Lewis "kid's", "teen" or "general" (as well as under "religious", "fantasy" or "general" within that)? And with Chinese names, do you go by the last name, or the actual family name?
I literally could not find several books without the aid of an employee. And they were still missing three books, all bestsellers of some sort (one was on last week's NYT list, the other two were lifetime, international bestsellers). If you can't even find books that are popular, I can only imagine how hard it would be to find an obscure, or even uncommon book. And even if the book is there, you may not be able to find it.
And yet the Nook site, run by the very same company, I can find everything I can think to look for. Ancient Greek plays? Check. Medieval poetry translated from Latin into German? Check. How-to guide for OS/2? They don't have the eBook, but they're willing to point me to a paperback.
Even if they could print books for free and teleport them into the store, I think I would still do my book shopping online. It's simply not worth the hassle to try to find an actual specific book in their stores.
(I did, for comparison's sake, check the Wal-Mart books section. If you were to judge solely by that, you could legitimately declare literature dead - it had not a single one of the all-time bestsellers like "A Tale of Two Cities" or "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Lord of the Rings". They probably got rid of that to make room for an entire row dedicated to Twilight, Twilight documentaries, Twilight biographies, and Twilight magazines.)
They tend to take inspections more seriously when it involves anything nuclear. They're definitely up-to-spec when built. Standards may laxen over time (see: TEPCO), maintenance becomes more shoddy, but a steel-reinforced, meter-thick concrete wall doesn't really need much maintenance. If it was built right in the first place, it pretty much takes active sabotage to weaken it.
Neither laziness nor budget cuts can cause that sort of damage, and the timescales are insufficient. So unless someone is going around bribing people to actively weaken massive structures, not much is going to make that "is" different from "must be".
I recall seeing that the top Bulldozer only had 8MB L3 cache, which seemed a bit low - Intel's equivalent top-of-the-line desktop models reach 15MB, and the server models 30MB.
At first, I just figured they were targeting the middle price bracket, but then they priced against the high-end. So I would not be surprised if much of the missing (or disabled, if that rumor turns out to be true) transistors belong to the cache.
After 2038, when everything is still working despite dire predictions, we will have to wait a bit for the next opportunity, when the 64 bit epoch runs out . ..
64-bit Unix time will run out on December 4, precisely at 3:30:08 PM, 292,277,026,596 AD. It will be a Sunday.
By then I fully expect computers will already have migrated well into the gigabytes-per-machine-word range, or will no longer be using bits as we know them. Either that, or we'll have encountered the heat death of the universe, so it will be irrelevant.
It's about not keeping all your eggs in one basket. What happens if ARM suddenly dies? Or say Intel finally comes out with a 1W, quad-core, 2gHz x86 processor that kicks absolutely every ass ever known. Being able to immediately use that gives them an edge over Apple and the rest.
Besides, Android is Linux-based. The effort to make it run on x86 is probably not too significant, certainly not as hard as porting from scratch. It's a case of "why not?".
Clock speed != performance. Especially not between such divergent systems as x86 and ARM. Even comparing clocks between Atoms and Cores is an unreliable indicator of relative performance, let alone comparing different fundamental architectures.
- Hire fake audience to represent your audience in your poor shows, and make them laugh when you need (remember Pavlov ?).
Oddly, I seem to have developed Pavlovian conditioning such that, anytime I hear canned laughter, I push the off button on the remote. Wonder how that developed...
I'd argue with that, but I haven't played it (and half-suspect you haven't either). I'll just say that, from what I've seen, Sweet Home lacks the atmosphere and immersion needed to be a true survival horror game.
In any case, we can call Pathways the first American survival horror game, and both be happy.
I remember, several years ago when I first played the Marathon trilogy, that a project was under way to recreate Pathways Into Darkness, Bungie's earlier project. I just tried to check up on it, it seems to have pulled a Black Mesa: Source on us and stopped progress at an old beta (hasn't updated since 2009, it seems).
Sort of a shame - PiD had some very interesting ideas. While comparable to Wolfenstein 3D technologically, it acted much more like a primitive survival horror, practically inventing the genre (it came out in '93, a year before Alone in the Dark and 3 years before Resident Evil invented the term). Since Bungie lost the source to PiD, even getting it to run is extremely difficult. A remake would be very well appreciated, if only for the historic value of the game.
Anybody know if the Pathways remake is still coming along?
In terms of membership, it passed the Green Party in December 2008, the Left Party in February 2009, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats in April 2009,[4][5] and the Centre Party in May 2009, making it, for the time being, the third largest political party in Sweden by membership.
Slashdot Mirror
Both sides are already taking damage by not being able to sell their goods in certain areas, and they're spending fortunes on lawyers. It's only going to get worse - I can envision these legal cases going on for years (it's taken *how* long to nearly kill SCO?)
So Apple's more threatened. That means they're more likely to do something stupid and desperate. You think they'd try to block them from being manufactured, by getting involved with the Chinese judicial system? That would be a near-instant kill - you can't sell what you can't make, and without China it's hard to manufacture mass products cheaply.
Best-case scenario, of course, is that the War causes so much damage that patent reform becomes a pressing issue even for those who thought they were benefiting from it.
I think we should start calling this whole thing "the 2011 Patent War". That's basically what it is - a war, just fought in global courtrooms instead of global hills and fields, and fought with lawsuits and injunctions instead of artillery and carpet-bombing.
And, eventually, one of them is going to get majorly destroyed. Especially if international court cases can be taken as precedent - once one case is decided, they'd all fall in line. IANAL, so I don't know if that's the case.
IIRC, most space burials are sub-orbital - they re-enter and burn up after 90 days or so, becoming a pollution non-hazard.
I still question what Facebook's worth will be in 3 years.
For anyone thinking Facebook will necessarily still be significant in three years, I have one word to say:
MySpace
Sure, maybe Facebook will remain a massive success and control most of the social-media market. Then again, maybe it won't be anything more than an old, burnt-out, irrelevant website inhabited mainly by bands that haven't been successful in years (if ever) and teenagers.
Give the lexicon a few years to catch up, and it could mean that in English as well.
Or they liked the alliteration.
Although "Malaysia Mulls Mandatory Registration" would've been better.
No, they're even slow at taking power for themselves. Not quite as slow, but "snail's pace", while faster than "glacial", is still pretty slow.
I mean, if I was in charge, I'd have conquered two continents within my first year of power and declared myself dictator-for-life, with legislation in progress to declare myself a deity. Congress can't even lose a war properly, let alone win one, in that amount of time.
Wait wait, I know this one.
It was the one who never accomplished anything useful, spent most of his presidency fighting stupid political battles over inconsequential shit, and will be remembered by history books mainly for the magnitude of his failures. That's the one, right?
Must be an election year coming up, because the government's actually doing shit about stuff we've been complaining about for the past... two, three years?
Well, my code does, and wouldn't crash, but I've seen some of my classmates'. Their understanding of "input" is rather poor, let alone "sanitized input".
Java is one of the languages currently used by students (along with VB.net and sometimes C++ or C#). I would not be surprised if the high relative bug count is due primarily to the number of inexperienced programmers working in Java.
Now, now, just because they can doesn't mean...
Ah, fuck, who am I kidding. Microsoft's inevitably going to misuse this. Anyone would. Hell, you could hand me the big remote (that's how they do it, right? Giant remote control?) and I'd probably misuse it.
You need an economic disincentive to do so, besides "it pisses off consumers and we'll lose business". "Pulled apps are refunded" is a good disincentive - at the very least, they'd have to make a lot of money by pulling an app in order to use it. That's pretty unlikely.
I can understand a company wanting, or needing, to provide a way to remove malware or illegal content. I can't say I fully agree with it, but I can understand the need. So the existence of such a system, in and of itself, isn't a particularly Bad Thing.
But this had better not be misused. Unless it's actively and secretly causing damage to the system (sending out spam or whatnot), it had better have a court order to be forcibly removed from users' computers. Maybe even then.
No deleting people's apps just because the seller removed it. No deleting people's apps because of some vague DMCA request. It had better be a legitimate, legally-validated removal.
I think a good way to ensure this would be that, if it is ever used, both Microsoft and the seller have to refund the cost to the user. That won't help much for free apps, but it would really help make sure regular apps aren't pulled back for no real reason.
This is (generally) true - at highway speeds, the vast majority of the sound is either aerodynamic or from the tires impacting the road. Even at 25mph/50kmph, you'll get more than enough sound from that to warn pedestrians.
The problem is at parking lot speeds. You don't get much noise at all just moving at 5mph/10kmph. Even with a gas engine, it's mostly the acceleration that provides the noise, the engine revving up, not the engine just running.
Since the main time pedestrians and cars are maneuvering near each other and have significant risk of collision is in precisely those situations, I think the "electric engines don't make enough noise" problem could actually be a legitimate problem. By no means a showstopper or a product-killer - after all, a car is usually a pretty large object, and I for one tend to notice large objects in motion. The solution could be just a simple "noise generator used when moving below X speed" - that would handle the pedestrian problem, without increasing noise in areas where noise is an issue and pedestrians are not.
Yes, but the question is, does the consumer benefit from that?
I doubt it. I'd much rather prefer having all fiction mixed together (the nonfiction books can easily be sorted by category), and for people who don't know what they want, have well-educated, intelligent staff that can recommend something. I'd even take a slight price markup for having someone who can say "oh, you liked ____? Have you tried ____? And I see the sequel to ____ is out in two weeks, and I know you liked that one, you want me to reserve you a copy?"
If the customer perceives better service somewhere else, the customer will go there. Most customers will tolerate bullshit like that as long as there's no other option. Once there is, though, they'll leave.
I have one additional argument against print:
When was the last time you went to a store and searched for a specific book?
It's tough. I'm doing a research project on digital distribution vs. physical retail, focusing on product availability and pricing. As part of that, I physically went to several stores and checked against a list of products.
The Barnes & Noble was terribly organized. Books were sorted vaguely by genre, then author - except teen literature, which goes in a separate set of shelves, and bestsellers are only up at the front, and "classics" go on yet another shelf. And then how do you classify certain things? Is Stephen King "horror" or just general "fiction"? Is C. S. Lewis "kid's", "teen" or "general" (as well as under "religious", "fantasy" or "general" within that)? And with Chinese names, do you go by the last name, or the actual family name?
I literally could not find several books without the aid of an employee. And they were still missing three books, all bestsellers of some sort (one was on last week's NYT list, the other two were lifetime, international bestsellers). If you can't even find books that are popular, I can only imagine how hard it would be to find an obscure, or even uncommon book. And even if the book is there, you may not be able to find it.
And yet the Nook site, run by the very same company, I can find everything I can think to look for. Ancient Greek plays? Check. Medieval poetry translated from Latin into German? Check. How-to guide for OS/2? They don't have the eBook, but they're willing to point me to a paperback.
Even if they could print books for free and teleport them into the store, I think I would still do my book shopping online. It's simply not worth the hassle to try to find an actual specific book in their stores.
(I did, for comparison's sake, check the Wal-Mart books section. If you were to judge solely by that, you could legitimately declare literature dead - it had not a single one of the all-time bestsellers like "A Tale of Two Cities" or "The Catcher in the Rye" or "The Lord of the Rings". They probably got rid of that to make room for an entire row dedicated to Twilight, Twilight documentaries, Twilight biographies, and Twilight magazines.)
They tend to take inspections more seriously when it involves anything nuclear. They're definitely up-to-spec when built. Standards may laxen over time (see: TEPCO), maintenance becomes more shoddy, but a steel-reinforced, meter-thick concrete wall doesn't really need much maintenance. If it was built right in the first place, it pretty much takes active sabotage to weaken it.
Neither laziness nor budget cuts can cause that sort of damage, and the timescales are insufficient. So unless someone is going around bribing people to actively weaken massive structures, not much is going to make that "is" different from "must be".
I recall seeing that the top Bulldozer only had 8MB L3 cache, which seemed a bit low - Intel's equivalent top-of-the-line desktop models reach 15MB, and the server models 30MB.
At first, I just figured they were targeting the middle price bracket, but then they priced against the high-end. So I would not be surprised if much of the missing (or disabled, if that rumor turns out to be true) transistors belong to the cache.
After 2038, when everything is still working despite dire predictions, we will have to wait a bit for the next opportunity, when the 64 bit epoch runs out . . .
64-bit Unix time will run out on December 4, precisely at 3:30:08 PM, 292,277,026,596 AD. It will be a Sunday.
By then I fully expect computers will already have migrated well into the gigabytes-per-machine-word range, or will no longer be using bits as we know them. Either that, or we'll have encountered the heat death of the universe, so it will be irrelevant.
It's about not keeping all your eggs in one basket. What happens if ARM suddenly dies? Or say Intel finally comes out with a 1W, quad-core, 2gHz x86 processor that kicks absolutely every ass ever known. Being able to immediately use that gives them an edge over Apple and the rest.
Besides, Android is Linux-based. The effort to make it run on x86 is probably not too significant, certainly not as hard as porting from scratch. It's a case of "why not?".
Clock speed != performance. Especially not between such divergent systems as x86 and ARM. Even comparing clocks between Atoms and Cores is an unreliable indicator of relative performance, let alone comparing different fundamental architectures.
- Hire fake audience to represent your audience in your poor shows, and make them laugh when you need (remember Pavlov ?).
Oddly, I seem to have developed Pavlovian conditioning such that, anytime I hear canned laughter, I push the off button on the remote. Wonder how that developed...
I'd argue with that, but I haven't played it (and half-suspect you haven't either). I'll just say that, from what I've seen, Sweet Home lacks the atmosphere and immersion needed to be a true survival horror game.
In any case, we can call Pathways the first American survival horror game, and both be happy.
I remember, several years ago when I first played the Marathon trilogy, that a project was under way to recreate Pathways Into Darkness, Bungie's earlier project. I just tried to check up on it, it seems to have pulled a Black Mesa: Source on us and stopped progress at an old beta (hasn't updated since 2009, it seems).
Sort of a shame - PiD had some very interesting ideas. While comparable to Wolfenstein 3D technologically, it acted much more like a primitive survival horror, practically inventing the genre (it came out in '93, a year before Alone in the Dark and 3 years before Resident Evil invented the term). Since Bungie lost the source to PiD, even getting it to run is extremely difficult. A remake would be very well appreciated, if only for the historic value of the game.
Anybody know if the Pathways remake is still coming along?
Quoth Wikipedia:
In terms of membership, it passed the Green Party in December 2008, the Left Party in February 2009, the Liberal Party and the Christian Democrats in April 2009,[4][5] and the Centre Party in May 2009, making it, for the time being, the third largest political party in Sweden by membership.