I'd just like to point out with some minor amusement that for those RMS followers who love to prepend "GNU/" to the front of the Linux OS's name, this is one case in which it's inappropriate no matter which side of that fence you fall. We're talking about Linux kernel contributions.
This makes it sound like there was a decline in GPL3 projects, which isn't the case.
It's probably not the case, but it's hard to say. How many GPLv3 projects get abandoned per month? Without that statistic, it's impossible to estimate the change in the total number of GPLv3 projects.
Software is a machine. It executes in a virtual mathematical environment, but in its domain it's every bit as much a constructed machine as a lever, airplane, or telephone. Giving physical machines some sort of exclusive status as "patentable" while rejecting the patentability of software makes no sense to me. Yes, it executes on mathematical principles, but so do all the physical machines that have been patented.
Try doing this in the UK and hit the data protection act, this is personal data and so would have to be requested (and justified) for each specific user...
Except that in the UK the government would already have been tracking everyone and wouldn't need to get it from a third party.
I thought that multi-touch interfaces and embedded computing were the next big thing!
Seriously-- we've had enough computing power for the average desktop tasks for a long time. Instead of putting 8 CPUs on a die and bottling up all the processing power on the desktop, put 8 CPUs in 8 separate different domain-specific embedded devices sitting around you...
ATI's drivers were still awful through the year 2000. The biggest problem, though, was that ATI sold most of the "high end" laptop graphics chips at the time, then left it up to the laptop manufacturer to upgrade drivers to fix bugs. This usually meant that you had to work around every bug that any ATI driver in the history of the chipset ever had, because you could never depend on the customer having a driver upgrade path that worked. As nVidia branched out into the low-power laptop chipset market, they started running into some of the exact same issues.
The article completely lacks any discussion of methodology nor does it include actual data, as well. If you make a blanket statement like "any buffer overrun bug in an included package is a 'serious' vulnerability", which I suspect is likely, but Apple doesn't run the service by default and/or has another layer of protection behind it then it's unlikely that the vulnerability would turn into an actual exploit. Another OS with the exact same package might run it by default in an easily exploitable configuration, yet have exactly the same "seriousness" rating.
Now that Apple has nontrivial market share, especially in the US non-business markets, security researchers are going to have to come up with some reason besides "obscurity" that there's not a single virus in the wild for MacOS X... despite articles like these claiming Apple has more serious vulnerabilities that they patch slower.
I'd say Edison clearly retains the title for playback and the Martinville clearly holds the new title for recording.
That's like saying that someone invented some hard disk backup software... except that it was impossible to restore anything backed up with it.
Edison was the first to reproduce sound mechanically. Separating it out into recording and playback makes little sense except as an academic exercise. I know the French have a need to claim prior invention on everything (by the way, Ader never had a practical flying machine, either), but it's getting kind of ridiculous.
Software patents "being silly" ISN'T common sense. It's an opinion. And it's perfectly valid to disagree about these things without insulting people, thank you.
Many people with many years in the software industry still see software patentability as valid, so please stop being condescending.
Considering Microsoft has, in the past, been accused of artificially bundling components together (IE+Windows, DirectX10+Vista, etc), I'm going to remain skeptical on this plan. It seems like Microsoft can get much higher revenue from a several-hundred-dollars major upgrade than a pick-n-choose bundle of features. The only way I see them breaking it apart is if their monopoly really does begin to be challenged and they have to start selling in a truly competitive market.
One key difference is that Apple and Google's products have always been best-of-breed, while Microsoft has always been the lowest-common-denominator. When you say "quality", Microsoft isn't the company that jumps to mind. (Perhaps "cheap", but now Linux is eating them from below on that, so I'm not exactly sure what Microsoft's "core" is anymore.)
Thus the entire premise of the article is a bit of a straw-man: Apple's corporate goals don't appear to include even TRYING to gain a majority of the market share. Their phone only competes in the "smart" market which is 1% of the total market; their computers have no low-end offerings whatsoever; the iPods, despite having some of the best margins in the industry, are consistently undercut on price-per-feature.
Forget the patents. Just placing the standard in the open domain and fully specifying all the parts that essentially say "Do whatever Microsoft products do here" would have gotten them in. I'm sure plenty of folks would have licensed the patents at an agreed-upon fixed price and the world would be a better place for having the biggest company in the world using a well-documented file format.
The end goal of every DARPA project is a final report. Thus, every DARPA project ends in "success" as long as someone writes the thing. That being said, in the final stages of most DARPA projects things usually come down to Earth and everyone starts considering what short-term benefits an actual program might see from it.
Our DARPA project, by the way, was fielded and transitioned to a program office (CPOF). So it can happen.
Winning the hearts and minds is completely orthogonal to the technology. Technology won't rescue you from awful strategies or misguided goals. But it still helps save lives, and I'm sure there are a lot of soldiers out there who are glad to be alive and owe it to some of the technology that's come out of DARPA.
The very fact that it accurately repeats back a series of nonsense syllables is pretty suspicious in itself. Plus, after the third or fourth "I'm sorry, I've never heard of X" response you realize it's the equivalent of "SYNTAX ERROR".
A better nonsense test may be to do some nonsense rhymes, akin to Dr. Seuss' "Wocket in my Pocket". I'll bet a human will continue the game, while a computer will give a response similar to the one you suggest.
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."...
Emotional response testing is one avenue, but actually, I think an interesting avenue might be to ask: "What is the last barfgaggle you've mfffitzersnatched?" or "I think gnunglebores are instruffled, don't you?"
I think the manner in which these systems have tried to deal with garbage is very different than how humans deal with garbage input.
I agree that the term "obvious to a practitioner in the art" needs to be more narrowly defined, but the problem with basing obviousness on what seems obvious later is that a lot of things seem obvious after-the-fact that were in fact fairly innovative. In addition, once a patent is published it's very hard to prove independent invention, since the knowledge is now "out there". The whole point of patents is to make openly publishing more attractive than keeping trade secrets so the industry can move forward faster.
I think the biggest problem with software patents is that the software industry is too new. Everything seems patentable. In a decade or so all the low hanging fruit will be gone and everything will have prior art published in the patent database. Things should settle down.
My personal solution is some combination of making "obvious" a little stricter and requiring a patent holder to monetize the patent themselves, sell it at an independently appraised value, or lose it.
I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
What I find interesting here is that being a cop is far from the most dangerous job you can do. Mining, construction, fishermen, loggers, small-plane pilots, farmers, truck and taxi drivers, and electrical repairmen all have higher death rates than police officers. The interesting thing about police is that they are far, far more likely to be killed by another person than the others, and that they do it while directly confronting other people as part of their job.
I think ratemycop is pretty useless, though. It's a way of venting, I guess. But IMHO it should be monitored for people likely to take some kind of retribution. With all the "don't snitch" morons out there who like to undermine our country I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep tabs on the site and serve up warrants whenever anyone crosses the line.
IntelliJ IDEA is my IDE of choice. Its warning system, auto-completion system, close tie-ins with version control, refactorings, quick navigation, easy configurability, easy modularization, etc., all run rings around XCode. XCode has added some of those capabilities with the last two versions, but is still years behind IntelliJ. Some of that is because of its gcc roots-- gcc has many limitations in its infrastructure and settings systems that don't lend themselves to an elegant UI. Some of it is due to Objective-C being a harder language to pre-parse than Java. Some of it appear to be NIH syndrome because old NeXTies like things similar to their old Project Builder.
And I know IntelliJ costs hundreds of dollars while XCode is free, but if I wanted to pay hundreds of dollars for a better Objective-C/Mac development environment-- too bad. None is available. Objective-C is such an infinitesimal market compared to Java that it doesn't make sense to build a world-class toolset for it.
I have never seen an SDK that so blatantly locks users out of common usage like this, have you? Maybe I've managed a decade and a half in this industry without noticing that it's normal practice to use legal force to ensure that an SDK is only used a particular way?
Which industry? This isn't atypical in the embedded industry at all. It is very unusual in the general computing industry. I think the issue here is that the iPhone and iTouch span that divide moreso than any device that came before it.
If you wanted to develop for the PlayStation, for instance, you had to sign all kinds of agreements. And they were relatively open compared to some embedded device makers.
There are a LOT more Java developers out there than there are Objective-C developers, and a lot more people learning Java every year than are learning Objective-C. While the SDK is pretty reasonable, as someone who's coded on both platforms I have to say that not only is Java significantly nicer, but the IDE's are dramatically better than XCode.
Mac developers love to poo-poo Java, but Objective-C will probably never be as popular as Java is. And if/when Java disappears, it'll probably be at the hands of C# combined with scripting languages or something akin to that instead of Objective-C.
If Apple really wanted to open their platform up to innovation, they'd open it up to Java.
Ever since I got an iPod Touch I'm a lot more aware of who does and doesn't have wireless. Starbucks' wireless usually extends hundreds of feet from their actual location, most of the airports I go to have free wireless (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh... Newark costs a lot for theirs) , and as you say even bars have it. But it's really nice checking email, directions, sports scores, or wikipedia anytime, anywhere.
As long as Apple's selling more and more iTouches, wifis only going to get more popular.
Music companies wouldn't have lost those billions to those commie pirates, CDs would be flying off the shelves, and those poor record companies would have the money to pay the artists everything they deserve every time! Right? Right?
Perhaps the most common type of people that use Linux are now the ones that don't play games much anymore.
I do think there's something to the argument that Linux users have already self-selected themselves into a group who don't prioritize games highly (or they probably would have stuck with Windows). It's harder to justify that as a group to spend a lot of time and money publishing games to.
I think there's also the perception that a lot of Linux users don't like to pay for things. That their reaction to something that's cool and innovative is to say "gosh, I hope someone creates a free version of that!" I know it's not completely true, but it's a perception that would have to be fought to get more titles on the platform.
And then there's the fact that Linux is in third place in desktop market share behind Win32 and MacOS X. If a gaming company is going to go risk the money, they'll probably go to the Mac first. By the time they get to Linux few will care.
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I'd just like to point out with some minor amusement that for those RMS followers who love to prepend "GNU/" to the front of the Linux OS's name, this is one case in which it's inappropriate no matter which side of that fence you fall. We're talking about Linux kernel contributions.
This makes it sound like there was a decline in GPL3 projects, which isn't the case.
It's probably not the case, but it's hard to say. How many GPLv3 projects get abandoned per month? Without that statistic, it's impossible to estimate the change in the total number of GPLv3 projects.
Software is a machine. It executes in a virtual mathematical environment, but in its domain it's every bit as much a constructed machine as a lever, airplane, or telephone. Giving physical machines some sort of exclusive status as "patentable" while rejecting the patentability of software makes no sense to me. Yes, it executes on mathematical principles, but so do all the physical machines that have been patented.
Try doing this in the UK and hit the data protection act, this is personal data and so would have to be requested (and justified) for each specific user ...
Except that in the UK the government would already have been tracking everyone and wouldn't need to get it from a third party.
I thought that multi-touch interfaces and embedded computing were the next big thing!
Seriously-- we've had enough computing power for the average desktop tasks for a long time. Instead of putting 8 CPUs on a die and bottling up all the processing power on the desktop, put 8 CPUs in 8 separate different domain-specific embedded devices sitting around you...
ATI's drivers were still awful through the year 2000. The biggest problem, though, was that ATI sold most of the "high end" laptop graphics chips at the time, then left it up to the laptop manufacturer to upgrade drivers to fix bugs. This usually meant that you had to work around every bug that any ATI driver in the history of the chipset ever had, because you could never depend on the customer having a driver upgrade path that worked. As nVidia branched out into the low-power laptop chipset market, they started running into some of the exact same issues.
The article completely lacks any discussion of methodology nor does it include actual data, as well. If you make a blanket statement like "any buffer overrun bug in an included package is a 'serious' vulnerability", which I suspect is likely, but Apple doesn't run the service by default and/or has another layer of protection behind it then it's unlikely that the vulnerability would turn into an actual exploit. Another OS with the exact same package might run it by default in an easily exploitable configuration, yet have exactly the same "seriousness" rating.
Now that Apple has nontrivial market share, especially in the US non-business markets, security researchers are going to have to come up with some reason besides "obscurity" that there's not a single virus in the wild for MacOS X... despite articles like these claiming Apple has more serious vulnerabilities that they patch slower.
I'd say Edison clearly retains the title for playback and the Martinville clearly holds the new title for recording.
That's like saying that someone invented some hard disk backup software... except that it was impossible to restore anything backed up with it.
Edison was the first to reproduce sound mechanically. Separating it out into recording and playback makes little sense except as an academic exercise. I know the French have a need to claim prior invention on everything (by the way, Ader never had a practical flying machine, either), but it's getting kind of ridiculous.
Software patents "being silly" ISN'T common sense. It's an opinion. And it's perfectly valid to disagree about these things without insulting people, thank you.
Many people with many years in the software industry still see software patentability as valid, so please stop being condescending.
Considering Microsoft has, in the past, been accused of artificially bundling components together (IE+Windows, DirectX10+Vista, etc), I'm going to remain skeptical on this plan. It seems like Microsoft can get much higher revenue from a several-hundred-dollars major upgrade than a pick-n-choose bundle of features. The only way I see them breaking it apart is if their monopoly really does begin to be challenged and they have to start selling in a truly competitive market.
One key difference is that Apple and Google's products have always been best-of-breed, while Microsoft has always been the lowest-common-denominator. When you say "quality", Microsoft isn't the company that jumps to mind. (Perhaps "cheap", but now Linux is eating them from below on that, so I'm not exactly sure what Microsoft's "core" is anymore.)
Thus the entire premise of the article is a bit of a straw-man: Apple's corporate goals don't appear to include even TRYING to gain a majority of the market share. Their phone only competes in the "smart" market which is 1% of the total market; their computers have no low-end offerings whatsoever; the iPods, despite having some of the best margins in the industry, are consistently undercut on price-per-feature.
Forget the patents. Just placing the standard in the open domain and fully specifying all the parts that essentially say "Do whatever Microsoft products do here" would have gotten them in. I'm sure plenty of folks would have licensed the patents at an agreed-upon fixed price and the world would be a better place for having the biggest company in the world using a well-documented file format.
The end goal of every DARPA project is a final report. Thus, every DARPA project ends in "success" as long as someone writes the thing. That being said, in the final stages of most DARPA projects things usually come down to Earth and everyone starts considering what short-term benefits an actual program might see from it.
Our DARPA project, by the way, was fielded and transitioned to a program office (CPOF). So it can happen.
Winning the hearts and minds is completely orthogonal to the technology. Technology won't rescue you from awful strategies or misguided goals. But it still helps save lives, and I'm sure there are a lot of soldiers out there who are glad to be alive and owe it to some of the technology that's come out of DARPA.
The very fact that it accurately repeats back a series of nonsense syllables is pretty suspicious in itself. Plus, after the third or fourth "I'm sorry, I've never heard of X" response you realize it's the equivalent of "SYNTAX ERROR".
A better nonsense test may be to do some nonsense rhymes, akin to Dr. Seuss' "Wocket in my Pocket". I'll bet a human will continue the game, while a computer will give a response similar to the one you suggest.
Yes, because you don't benefit whatsoever by having a reasonably educated community.
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping." ...
Emotional response testing is one avenue, but actually, I think an interesting avenue might be to ask:
"What is the last barfgaggle you've mfffitzersnatched?"
or "I think gnunglebores are instruffled, don't you?"
I think the manner in which these systems have tried to deal with garbage is very different than how humans deal with garbage input.
I agree that the term "obvious to a practitioner in the art" needs to be more narrowly defined, but the problem with basing obviousness on what seems obvious later is that a lot of things seem obvious after-the-fact that were in fact fairly innovative. In addition, once a patent is published it's very hard to prove independent invention, since the knowledge is now "out there". The whole point of patents is to make openly publishing more attractive than keeping trade secrets so the industry can move forward faster.
I think the biggest problem with software patents is that the software industry is too new. Everything seems patentable. In a decade or so all the low hanging fruit will be gone and everything will have prior art published in the patent database. Things should settle down.
My personal solution is some combination of making "obvious" a little stricter and requiring a patent holder to monetize the patent themselves, sell it at an independently appraised value, or lose it.
I just think of pulling someone over at 3 AM and wondering, every single time, if you're going to walk up to that window and get shot.
What I find interesting here is that being a cop is far from the most dangerous job you can do. Mining, construction, fishermen, loggers, small-plane pilots, farmers, truck and taxi drivers, and electrical repairmen all have higher death rates than police officers. The interesting thing about police is that they are far, far more likely to be killed by another person than the others, and that they do it while directly confronting other people as part of their job.
I think ratemycop is pretty useless, though. It's a way of venting, I guess. But IMHO it should be monitored for people likely to take some kind of retribution. With all the "don't snitch" morons out there who like to undermine our country I think it's perfectly reasonable to keep tabs on the site and serve up warrants whenever anyone crosses the line.
IntelliJ IDEA is my IDE of choice. Its warning system, auto-completion system, close tie-ins with version control, refactorings, quick navigation, easy configurability, easy modularization, etc., all run rings around XCode. XCode has added some of those capabilities with the last two versions, but is still years behind IntelliJ. Some of that is because of its gcc roots-- gcc has many limitations in its infrastructure and settings systems that don't lend themselves to an elegant UI. Some of it is due to Objective-C being a harder language to pre-parse than Java. Some of it appear to be NIH syndrome because old NeXTies like things similar to their old Project Builder.
And I know IntelliJ costs hundreds of dollars while XCode is free, but if I wanted to pay hundreds of dollars for a better Objective-C/Mac development environment-- too bad. None is available. Objective-C is such an infinitesimal market compared to Java that it doesn't make sense to build a world-class toolset for it.
I have never seen an SDK that so blatantly locks users out of common usage like this, have you? Maybe I've managed a decade and a half in this industry without noticing that it's normal practice to use legal force to ensure that an SDK is only used a particular way?
Which industry? This isn't atypical in the embedded industry at all. It is very unusual in the general computing industry. I think the issue here is that the iPhone and iTouch span that divide moreso than any device that came before it.
If you wanted to develop for the PlayStation, for instance, you had to sign all kinds of agreements. And they were relatively open compared to some embedded device makers.
using java which is all but a dead language.
There are a LOT more Java developers out there than there are Objective-C developers, and a lot more people learning Java every year than are learning Objective-C. While the SDK is pretty reasonable, as someone who's coded on both platforms I have to say that not only is Java significantly nicer, but the IDE's are dramatically better than XCode.
Mac developers love to poo-poo Java, but Objective-C will probably never be as popular as Java is. And if/when Java disappears, it'll probably be at the hands of C# combined with scripting languages or something akin to that instead of Objective-C.
If Apple really wanted to open their platform up to innovation, they'd open it up to Java.
Ever since I got an iPod Touch I'm a lot more aware of who does and doesn't have wireless. Starbucks' wireless usually extends hundreds of feet from their actual location, most of the airports I go to have free wireless (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh... Newark costs a lot for theirs) , and as you say even bars have it. But it's really nice checking email, directions, sports scores, or wikipedia anytime, anywhere.
As long as Apple's selling more and more iTouches, wifis only going to get more popular.
Music companies wouldn't have lost those billions to those commie pirates, CDs would be flying off the shelves, and those poor record companies would have the money to pay the artists everything they deserve every time! Right? Right?
Perhaps the most common type of people that use Linux are now the ones that don't play games much anymore.
I do think there's something to the argument that Linux users have already self-selected themselves into a group who don't prioritize games highly (or they probably would have stuck with Windows). It's harder to justify that as a group to spend a lot of time and money publishing games to.
I think there's also the perception that a lot of Linux users don't like to pay for things. That their reaction to something that's cool and innovative is to say "gosh, I hope someone creates a free version of that!" I know it's not completely true, but it's a perception that would have to be fought to get more titles on the platform.
And then there's the fact that Linux is in third place in desktop market share behind Win32 and MacOS X. If a gaming company is going to go risk the money, they'll probably go to the Mac first. By the time they get to Linux few will care.