So... buy the Apple product, and be sure to let them know that IPv6 support is why you did it. Vote with dollars. The Apple wireless hardware is actually some of the best ones out there anyway feature-wise, they're just a little hard to configure without the special client admin software.
When I read this article, my first thought was, "That's good! That'll make them a lot easier to trace!" If all they do is talk to each other it'd be insanely difficult to get the whole cell once you've gotten one. But now... geez, just check their Facebook account and start piling up the evidence for an arrest. While we don't (officially) have guilt by association, it would sure be a good indicator of where to look. Plus, search for anyone with "terrorism" in their interests list!
I compared it with Mac gaming by saying it was orders of magnitude more lucrative. And the comparison was because it's easier to port games from MacOS X to iPhone since the OS is basically the same and the tools are the same.
It seems apparent, though, that with an installed base well over 10M units and an easy path to publication, marketing, and revenue collection that any small games house not considering the iPhone are leaving money on the table.
I'm not sure why you say "and maybe the iPhone". Anecdotal evidence suggests that the iPhone is the premiere platform for independent game developers right now. At least one small Mac game developer said that their first iPhone release generated more money in the first 3 months than all the Mac games they'd ever produced in the history of the company. And it's easy to develop for and deploy for, and the limited size and scope of the games make the smaller and more focused games sellable. The Apple Store makes a lower price viable.
Yes, Apple gets to approve or disapprove your game. To my knowledge, Apple has never rejected a game, although I could foresee a "Postal" kind of thing having some trouble down the road. In any case, Apple is doing a lot more good than evil when it comes to the small game developer.
Without trying to be too snarky or anything, it might help to Google for a few seconds before posting FUD.
Here are all the details for the MacBook Air, and I would expect them to be very similar for the new MacBook (that is, $125 for same-day service with appointment at an Apple Retail Store and 3-4 days + shipping time by mail). The price could conceivably be higher because of the new technology, but even 2x the price isn't that bad if the battery really lasts 5+ years as is claimed.
Nevermind, you're right. I stand corrected. According to Wikipedia, besides the official BSD UNIX, the following systems meet the UNIX certification: AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64 (formerly "Digital UNIX"), A/UX, Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel platforms,[13] and a part of z/OS.
If you're looking for non-BSD kernel contributions there are huge numbers of open source contributions Apple makes, from their CalDAV and Quicktime Streaming Server to contributions to many of the tools they use. I was just referring to changes to FreeBSD-derived sources.
Most is using the restrictive APSL that is not BSD compatible.
Just barely "most". A significant amount of it is "other" which is often some derivation of BSD, GPL, or custom license. And a lot of it is, from what I've read, offered back to the originating projects under their own license. And while APSL is not BSD compatible, it is hardly "restrictive"-- it's an Open Source license that has some provisions closer to the GPL than BSD.
I'm sure it won't force you to get a new computer. First of all, the new battery is supposed to last much, much longer, so it'll be more like 5 years before you're in the same boat. And if you still want to keep this machine 5 years from now, you can probably take it to a service location to have the battery changed, like Apple does with iPods.
They were referring to the battery, not the laptop. Although it's not removable by the end-user, it has 60% more capacity per charge and degrades 3x slower than the industry average batteries, as well as being the right shape for a super-slim laptop.
I know a lot of folks are going to gripe about the lack of removability, but I've never actually hot-swapped a battery and would much rather have a 7 hour usable life on a 17" laptop. Wow.
This isn't a very good description of how digital TV degrades, at least in my experience. When I was in the south SF bay tuning in stations from San Francisco (lots of multi-path), what would tend to happen is that I'd get 10 seconds of crystal clear video, then severe pauses and macroblocking and-nnk-bff-ah-gn-rp sound issues for a couple seconds, then it would snap back to crystal clear for another 10 seconds. Yes, it degrades badly at any moment in time, but that doesn't mean you don't get lots of snippets of useful picture. And that was with the decoders from 6 years ago-- algorithms improve.
I think these days the code only goes one way (to Apple) but if some Apple fanboy wants to point me to their recent BSD contributions, I'd be interested in seeing them.
I'm not sure what official contribution Apple makes these days in 7.x, but I think the entire FreeBSD 5.x release was mostly centered around what Apple brought back to FreeBSD after the first few MacOS X releases, including quite a bit of SMP work. According to Trollaxor, though, there continues to be significant bi-directional work on file system journaling, gcc modifications, and DTrace.
I'm not sure whether you're referring to BSD "fanboys" or Apple ones. But MacOS X isn't pure BSD it *is* UNIX. It passed official UNIX certification, as did most of the BSDs. Linux, of course, isn't UNIX. So UNIX fanboys as opposed to BSD ones are happy:).
Isn't FreeBSD a good chunk of the core of the BSD layer in Apple's XNU (Darwin) kernel and some of the user-space utilities? I'm not sure if it's still true, but my understanding was that a substantial amount of code went in both directions between MacOS X and FreeBSD.
There are two kinds of nuclear bomb-- Uranium and Plutonium. In order to get a Uranium bomb, you have to have highly enriched Uranium (a high U-235 to U-238 ratio). These reactors don't have anywhere near the U-235 ratio for that. The second option is Plutonium which is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is the by-product of some kinds of fission, and can be made in a specially designed nuclear reactor. These aren't those kinds of reactors, so you're not going to get enough Plutonium to be useful in weapons development.
Thus, one of these things wouldn't be much of a head-start over just mining some Uranium ore.
Apple's App Store is a revolution in easily adding functionality to a cell phone. If Google can replicate it it will be huge for them. If not, it will be a major impediment.
Having 10,000+ apps, many of them free or $0.99, all available in a trusted, easy-to-access, categorized, searchable and peer-reviewed place is valuable. Sure, there are now a dozen or more "fart sound" and "flashlight" apps, but there are also some really innovative things (like "please name the song that's playing in this restaurant right now" and others).
I've bought a lot of phones with a lot of gadgets from a lot of vendors over the years. The iPhone is the most expensive one I've ever bought, but also the first time I felt I've been getting my money's worth.
I'm certainly not going to defend this patent. But I did read it, and I don't see how any of the terminal-based MUD-like games apply. The very first claim specifies a client process and a server process, and the client process receiving positional information of a subset of the users in the world and the client determining what is to be displayed, then displaying avatars for users.
In addition, simple technologies like VRML and Flash, without an avatar and virtual world built on them, wouldn't be prior art.
I don't know how UO or EQ were implemented, but they'd be the obvious candidates for prior art on many if not all of the claims. Everquest, though, was first released in 1999 and their inventions may not predate the patent's. Ultima Online, though, released in 1997 is probably the best bet.
I've seen similar issues with specific outlets in my house. CFLs last about 2 months and incancesdents a year or two. The problem appears to be fluctuating power supplies. Our house's power isn't very stable... the vacuum cleaner, dryer, and other devices cause lights to slightly dim or flicker. I've solved most of it by separating the circuits, but the CFLs seem to be VERY sensitive to fluctuating electricity.
A CFL on its own circuit seems to last a long time.
Re:Posted Anonymously for Obvious Reasons.
on
Penny Arcade On NPR
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, no humor appeals to everyone. You're allowed to dislike their comics. I'm allowed to think libertarianism would never work. You're still allowed to post.:)
The point is that they were one of the first independent internet comics that managed to make a living at their work, and have used their success for good instead of evil. Kudos to them.
One of these standards is novelty. A patentable invention or process cannot (legally) be merely an assemblage of other items or processes already in common use. For example, a bottle opener welded to a pry bar is not eligible for a utility patent as a new kind of carpenter's tool. It is merely the combination of two already existing, common tools.
Actually, I'm no lawyer but I'm fairly sure that's not the definition of novelty. Although the standards are different from country to country (some countries patent devices for a particular purpose, others patent only the device itself no matter what it's used for), generally novelty can be proved in a variety of ways, the most common being whether the resulting product is commercially successful. It is presumed (in the United States, at least), that if you're being successful due to a patented product that the product must in some way be novel or someone else would have been making that money.
This a primary reason why books are not patentable.
A book is also not a process and generally doesn't claim to be for a specific purpose.
As for your music example, I disagree there as well. Music accomplishes a very well-defined purpose: that of entertainment.
You are right that "music" in general accomplishes entertainment, but a particular piece of music is rarely warranted to produce a specific effect. Thus individual songs are not methods and lack specific purpose. If one found a sequence of notes, however, that, say, induced vomiting in everyone who heard it one could conceivably patent that piece of music played over a device of certain specifications as a cure for certain types of poisoning. That's the sort of thing that happens every day when you write software, and why novel software is, IMHO, patentable.
My problem with the system as it stands is not that creative, novel, purposeful methods encoded in software are patentable, but that the standards for "novel" are so low.
The problem with a libertarian government is that it can generally only react after the fact-- The free market can only punish after damage is done. A libertarian modern society will rapidly fall victim to millions of melamine and lead poisoned products, an under-educated populace who can never escape their parents' limitations, and/or have no way to damp wild economic fluctuation. Basically, I don't feel like libertarianism can form a properly damped, self-propagating system. I don't think it's coincidence that the 20th century belonged to the United States mostly after the government became a major consumer of goods and services.
Not quite Vista's WDDM abilities in dealing with GPU RAM, but a nice start that people other than MS are actually taking GPU RAM allocation seriously beyond simple context swtiching.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your assertion, but hasn't MacOS X had universal GPU RAM management for many years? I don't think MS has any monopoly on this... it was my impression that it was just Linux that was on Microsoft's heels playing catch-up.
I was curious about your assertion, so I (gasp!) looked it up. From the best sources I can find, if you're expecting to have to stop the average person's reaction time (including visual, decision-making, and movement to brake) is about 0.7 seconds. Unexpected but with some lighted indicator (brake lights up ahead) is about 1.25 seconds. Surprise stopping is about 1.5 seconds. That's after the signal from the driver in from of you reaches his brake lights and the lights' filament heats up enough to glow (assuming incancesdents).
So using a 2 second rule seems pretty reasonable for your average safe driving. If you decide to cut below it you may be right that you can handle it, but it will be harder to make a case if something goes wrong.
The same holds for written vs. compiled software: there is no fundamental difference between the results of software that is run in realtime by an interpreter (which reads the source code directly), and the results produced by the same program when compiled. If the interpreter and compiler are constructed properly, the output is identical. Therefore there is no legal (or moral, or ethical, or logical) difference. For all practical purposes they are the SAME.
That is where we disagree. While there are isomorphisms between source code and instructions running through a state machine, I hold that the instructions + state machine form its own patentable process. The source code, and even the binary code, is copyrightable, as you say. But the algorithms and approach are almost by definition a methodology, and when they run on a machine to accomplish some purpose they are a novel invention.
The problem with music is that it is very difficult to prove that it accomplishes a purpose, or that the approach of any given piece is novel. Therefore I disagree that any decision on the patentability of music is precedent.
Properly, software, as a written work, should be covered by copyright and not patents anyway.
Actually, it's source code as a written work should be (and is!) covered by copyright. Once it's compiled and running through a particular state machine to accomplish certain transformations of data, it's most certainly a method and apparatus. There's no particular reason in my mind why a machine has to be physical to somehow magically be patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
So... buy the Apple product, and be sure to let them know that IPv6 support is why you did it. Vote with dollars. The Apple wireless hardware is actually some of the best ones out there anyway feature-wise, they're just a little hard to configure without the special client admin software.
When I read this article, my first thought was, "That's good! That'll make them a lot easier to trace!" If all they do is talk to each other it'd be insanely difficult to get the whole cell once you've gotten one. But now... geez, just check their Facebook account and start piling up the evidence for an arrest. While we don't (officially) have guilt by association, it would sure be a good indicator of where to look. Plus, search for anyone with "terrorism" in their interests list!
I compared it with Mac gaming by saying it was orders of magnitude more lucrative. And the comparison was because it's easier to port games from MacOS X to iPhone since the OS is basically the same and the tools are the same.
It seems apparent, though, that with an installed base well over 10M units and an easy path to publication, marketing, and revenue collection that any small games house not considering the iPhone are leaving money on the table.
I'm not sure why you say "and maybe the iPhone". Anecdotal evidence suggests that the iPhone is the premiere platform for independent game developers right now. At least one small Mac game developer said that their first iPhone release generated more money in the first 3 months than all the Mac games they'd ever produced in the history of the company. And it's easy to develop for and deploy for, and the limited size and scope of the games make the smaller and more focused games sellable. The Apple Store makes a lower price viable.
Yes, Apple gets to approve or disapprove your game. To my knowledge, Apple has never rejected a game, although I could foresee a "Postal" kind of thing having some trouble down the road. In any case, Apple is doing a lot more good than evil when it comes to the small game developer.
Without trying to be too snarky or anything, it might help to Google for a few seconds before posting FUD.
Here are all the details for the MacBook Air, and I would expect them to be very similar for the new MacBook (that is, $125 for same-day service with appointment at an Apple Retail Store and 3-4 days + shipping time by mail). The price could conceivably be higher because of the new technology, but even 2x the price isn't that bad if the battery really lasts 5+ years as is claimed.
Nevermind, you're right. I stand corrected. According to Wikipedia, besides the official BSD UNIX, the following systems meet the UNIX certification: AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64 (formerly "Digital UNIX"), A/UX, Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel platforms,[13] and a part of z/OS.
If you're looking for non-BSD kernel contributions there are huge numbers of open source contributions Apple makes, from their CalDAV and Quicktime Streaming Server to contributions to many of the tools they use. I was just referring to changes to FreeBSD-derived sources.
Most is using the restrictive APSL that is not BSD compatible.
Just barely "most". A significant amount of it is "other" which is often some derivation of BSD, GPL, or custom license. And a lot of it is, from what I've read, offered back to the originating projects under their own license. And while APSL is not BSD compatible, it is hardly "restrictive"-- it's an Open Source license that has some provisions closer to the GPL than BSD.
I'm sure it won't force you to get a new computer. First of all, the new battery is supposed to last much, much longer, so it'll be more like 5 years before you're in the same boat. And if you still want to keep this machine 5 years from now, you can probably take it to a service location to have the battery changed, like Apple does with iPods.
They were referring to the battery, not the laptop. Although it's not removable by the end-user, it has 60% more capacity per charge and degrades 3x slower than the industry average batteries, as well as being the right shape for a super-slim laptop.
I know a lot of folks are going to gripe about the lack of removability, but I've never actually hot-swapped a battery and would much rather have a 7 hour usable life on a 17" laptop. Wow.
This isn't a very good description of how digital TV degrades, at least in my experience. When I was in the south SF bay tuning in stations from San Francisco (lots of multi-path), what would tend to happen is that I'd get 10 seconds of crystal clear video, then severe pauses and macroblocking and-nnk-bff-ah-gn-rp sound issues for a couple seconds, then it would snap back to crystal clear for another 10 seconds. Yes, it degrades badly at any moment in time, but that doesn't mean you don't get lots of snippets of useful picture. And that was with the decoders from 6 years ago-- algorithms improve.
I think these days the code only goes one way (to Apple) but if some Apple fanboy wants to point me to their recent BSD contributions, I'd be interested in seeing them.
Since all the code is downloadable from http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/, the FreeBSD team is free to take whatever they like.
I'm not sure what official contribution Apple makes these days in 7.x, but I think the entire FreeBSD 5.x release was mostly centered around what Apple brought back to FreeBSD after the first few MacOS X releases, including quite a bit of SMP work. According to Trollaxor, though, there continues to be significant bi-directional work on file system journaling, gcc modifications, and DTrace.
I'm not sure whether you're referring to BSD "fanboys" or Apple ones. But MacOS X isn't pure BSD it *is* UNIX. It passed official UNIX certification, as did most of the BSDs. Linux, of course, isn't UNIX. So UNIX fanboys as opposed to BSD ones are happy :).
Isn't FreeBSD a good chunk of the core of the BSD layer in Apple's XNU (Darwin) kernel and some of the user-space utilities? I'm not sure if it's still true, but my understanding was that a substantial amount of code went in both directions between MacOS X and FreeBSD.
There are two kinds of nuclear bomb-- Uranium and Plutonium. In order to get a Uranium bomb, you have to have highly enriched Uranium (a high U-235 to U-238 ratio). These reactors don't have anywhere near the U-235 ratio for that. The second option is Plutonium which is not a naturally-occurring substance. It is the by-product of some kinds of fission, and can be made in a specially designed nuclear reactor. These aren't those kinds of reactors, so you're not going to get enough Plutonium to be useful in weapons development.
Thus, one of these things wouldn't be much of a head-start over just mining some Uranium ore.
Apple's App Store is a revolution in easily adding functionality to a cell phone. If Google can replicate it it will be huge for them. If not, it will be a major impediment.
Having 10,000+ apps, many of them free or $0.99, all available in a trusted, easy-to-access, categorized, searchable and peer-reviewed place is valuable. Sure, there are now a dozen or more "fart sound" and "flashlight" apps, but there are also some really innovative things (like "please name the song that's playing in this restaurant right now" and others).
I've bought a lot of phones with a lot of gadgets from a lot of vendors over the years. The iPhone is the most expensive one I've ever bought, but also the first time I felt I've been getting my money's worth.
Maybe that's an indicator that something's wrong [with Slashdot]?
Clarified that for you...
I'm certainly not going to defend this patent. But I did read it, and I don't see how any of the terminal-based MUD-like games apply. The very first claim specifies a client process and a server process, and the client process receiving positional information of a subset of the users in the world and the client determining what is to be displayed, then displaying avatars for users.
In addition, simple technologies like VRML and Flash, without an avatar and virtual world built on them, wouldn't be prior art.
I don't know how UO or EQ were implemented, but they'd be the obvious candidates for prior art on many if not all of the claims. Everquest, though, was first released in 1999 and their inventions may not predate the patent's. Ultima Online, though, released in 1997 is probably the best bet.
I've seen similar issues with specific outlets in my house. CFLs last about 2 months and incancesdents a year or two. The problem appears to be fluctuating power supplies. Our house's power isn't very stable... the vacuum cleaner, dryer, and other devices cause lights to slightly dim or flicker. I've solved most of it by separating the circuits, but the CFLs seem to be VERY sensitive to fluctuating electricity.
A CFL on its own circuit seems to last a long time.
Well, no humor appeals to everyone. You're allowed to dislike their comics. I'm allowed to think libertarianism would never work. You're still allowed to post. :)
The point is that they were one of the first independent internet comics that managed to make a living at their work, and have used their success for good instead of evil. Kudos to them.
One of these standards is novelty. A patentable invention or process cannot (legally) be merely an assemblage of other items or processes already in common use. For example, a bottle opener welded to a pry bar is not eligible for a utility patent as a new kind of carpenter's tool. It is merely the combination of two already existing, common tools.
Actually, I'm no lawyer but I'm fairly sure that's not the definition of novelty. Although the standards are different from country to country (some countries patent devices for a particular purpose, others patent only the device itself no matter what it's used for), generally novelty can be proved in a variety of ways, the most common being whether the resulting product is commercially successful. It is presumed (in the United States, at least), that if you're being successful due to a patented product that the product must in some way be novel or someone else would have been making that money.
This a primary reason why books are not patentable.
A book is also not a process and generally doesn't claim to be for a specific purpose.
As for your music example, I disagree there as well. Music accomplishes a very well-defined purpose: that of entertainment.
You are right that "music" in general accomplishes entertainment, but a particular piece of music is rarely warranted to produce a specific effect. Thus individual songs are not methods and lack specific purpose. If one found a sequence of notes, however, that, say, induced vomiting in everyone who heard it one could conceivably patent that piece of music played over a device of certain specifications as a cure for certain types of poisoning. That's the sort of thing that happens every day when you write software, and why novel software is, IMHO, patentable.
My problem with the system as it stands is not that creative, novel, purposeful methods encoded in software are patentable, but that the standards for "novel" are so low.
The problem with a libertarian government is that it can generally only react after the fact-- The free market can only punish after damage is done. A libertarian modern society will rapidly fall victim to millions of melamine and lead poisoned products, an under-educated populace who can never escape their parents' limitations, and/or have no way to damp wild economic fluctuation. Basically, I don't feel like libertarianism can form a properly damped, self-propagating system. I don't think it's coincidence that the 20th century belonged to the United States mostly after the government became a major consumer of goods and services.
Not quite Vista's WDDM abilities in dealing with GPU RAM, but a nice start that people other than MS are actually taking GPU RAM allocation seriously beyond simple context swtiching.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your assertion, but hasn't MacOS X had universal GPU RAM management for many years? I don't think MS has any monopoly on this... it was my impression that it was just Linux that was on Microsoft's heels playing catch-up.
I was curious about your assertion, so I (gasp!) looked it up. From the best sources I can find, if you're expecting to have to stop the average person's reaction time (including visual, decision-making, and movement to brake) is about 0.7 seconds. Unexpected but with some lighted indicator (brake lights up ahead) is about 1.25 seconds. Surprise stopping is about 1.5 seconds. That's after the signal from the driver in from of you reaches his brake lights and the lights' filament heats up enough to glow (assuming incancesdents).
So using a 2 second rule seems pretty reasonable for your average safe driving. If you decide to cut below it you may be right that you can handle it, but it will be harder to make a case if something goes wrong.
The same holds for written vs. compiled software: there is no fundamental difference between the results of software that is run in realtime by an interpreter (which reads the source code directly), and the results produced by the same program when compiled. If the interpreter and compiler are constructed properly, the output is identical. Therefore there is no legal (or moral, or ethical, or logical) difference. For all practical purposes they are the SAME.
That is where we disagree. While there are isomorphisms between source code and instructions running through a state machine, I hold that the instructions + state machine form its own patentable process. The source code, and even the binary code, is copyrightable, as you say. But the algorithms and approach are almost by definition a methodology, and when they run on a machine to accomplish some purpose they are a novel invention.
The problem with music is that it is very difficult to prove that it accomplishes a purpose, or that the approach of any given piece is novel. Therefore I disagree that any decision on the patentability of music is precedent.
Properly, software, as a written work, should be covered by copyright and not patents anyway.
Actually, it's source code as a written work should be (and is!) covered by copyright. Once it's compiled and running through a particular state machine to accomplish certain transformations of data, it's most certainly a method and apparatus. There's no particular reason in my mind why a machine has to be physical to somehow magically be patentable.