The submission commentary is completely inaccurate, so I can see how you mistakenly formed that opinion. In fact, the cheapest Blu-Ray player is already half the "$1000" mentioned in the submission, and you get a game player compatible with PS2 games (the most popular selling console today) and great HD games with it as well. The PS3 has sold millions of units already, so even if Wal-Mart sells all 2 million of the players mentioned in the article, HD DVD will still have quite a challenge to move ahead of Blu-Ray.
I understand it's cool to hate Sony lately on SlashDot, but come on. There's almost no practical difference between the standards except: 1. Blu-Ray stores more, 2. Blu-Ray has a higher max data rate, 3. Microsoft and Toshiba control the HD DVD interactive format instead of it being based on an open-source language (BD-J is based on Java), 4. Blu-Ray has more support for recordable media. HD DVD can be a little cheaper, but not all that much, and not enough to lock us in to more Microsoft dominance.
Not quite... natural selection will still be at work, but now it will be the folks that have some fundamentalist belief or physical inhibition to having this done to them will be slowly selected out. For instance, I'd put money that if the human race survives a few thousand more years, that antibiotic allergies will be selected out of the gene pool.
While it's actually something akin to "Display PDF", your point is valid. It's pretty trippy turning on cursive Zapfino in an IM application and having it get all the ligatures right, including the ending y that flows under the preceeding word. You could even set a font with ligatures for web sites, eliminating the complaint posed here, but since most web sites these days specify an explicit font and depend on it for sizing, it would be frustrating.
This is pretty close to what Yahoo News has been doing for years. They have the Most Emailed, Most Read, and Most Recommended sections, with tooltips that show the first paragraph of the article. It seems to work pretty well, so I'm not surprised MySpace is copying it.
1) Everyone who makes the same invention independently loses.
A lot of things seem pretty obvious once the idea is "out there" and people know what's possible. Proving independent invention is pretty hard.
Because they cannot make a profit from their investment, which they deserve as much as the other guy who just ran to the patent office a bit faster.
In the United States, it's not who files first, but who can show they invented first. Running faster makes no difference.
Now both of these problems would be tolerable with a patent office that only grants patents for significant technical improvements. Which seems not to work anymore these days thanks to sloppy reviews and ridiculously low standards for patent applications. As a result, patents are becoming a tool for sabotaging the competition rather than protecting innovation.
Theoretically, a patent is not viable if it's "obvious to one trained in the art". This is also extremely hard to prove, since a lot of things seem obvious in retrospect. One test that courts have used is that if a business has made substantial money selling a product based on the patent, then the patent is assumed to be innovative because otherwise someone else would have made that money.
No. Software can be described using mathematics, just like radio, an internal combustion engine, and a host of other inventions can. But software is a set of instructions that form a virtual mechanism, not a set of equations. Abstract mathematical equations are not patentable because they are not a device with a purpose, while software is.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I call shennanigans... the "community" is going to fragment itself more with GPLv3 than anything Microsoft could have dreamed of. (Maybe Microsoft has been subliminally encouraging Stallman to push GPLv3 in his sleep?) If fragmentation is your worry, open source seems to encourage it anyway.
Re:The value of good user interface design...
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
First off, the way music is store and sorted on the device is nothing different than programs like RealPlayer Jukebox and WMP did before the iPod existed.
Or SoundJam, which Apple bought and turned into iTunes and existed long before the iPod.
You can also find the court references that show that creative was using this type of organizational interface long before the iPod.
No. You can find court documents that show that Creative *patented* this organizational interface before Apple introduced the iPod. It's unclear who would have won had the case not been settled out of court, but Apple/NeXT has used the same style interface as that for 20+ years in its file browser, so it's unlikely much of the patent would have survived.
The second part is the user controls, and these were not Apple, but originating concepts that are a combination of what Tony Fadell had demonstrated prior to working with Apple and what PortalPlayer had demonstrated to IBM in hopes of getting IBM to pick up on an MP3 device.
Citation? The click-wheel, which is one of the defining characteristics of the iPod, was added to the device by Apple according to all the "how the iPod came to be" stories I could find. The UI for the iPod was also highly refined by Apple, as was the physical fit and finish. Jobs was said to have spent almost 100% of his time on this project for a substantial duration to get it just right. And I suspect if Tony Fadell had wound up at a different company, his product would have become "just another MP3 player". Apple really worked their magic on that product and I don't think any other company could have done it.
what they didn't rip off, they bought. PERIOD.... It is said that on SlashDot you find tons of iPod fans
Actually, most slashdotters (like yourself) love to minimize Apple's contribution to the iPod, and pretend the 20-30 engineers and designers they had working on it just sat on their hands all day. They love to hate the front-runner, and are willing to go through convoluted logic to convince themselves that everything would have happened magically if Apple hadn't stepped up to the plate.
Your discussion of "features" makes it pretty obvious to me that you're someone who confuses technology and products. Who cares about the features if the iPod does what you want conveniently? People buy the iPod not because they think Apple invented it, but because it's a good user experience that has persevered. Who knows when the next guy will go out of business, but Apple's there to stay. In many ways, this is the same reason people DIDN'T buy from Apple in the 90's, so it's nice to see.
There is quite a lot of software that won't run on Windows 2000 that will run on XP. And that's the main reason to upgrade an OS anyway-- not any particular feature or pre-packaged application bundled with the OS itself.
Re:The value of good user interface design...
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I looked it up. Tony Fadell, according to the information I've found, was a contractor hired by Apple and assigned 20-30 Apple employees, who then worked with Apple and PortalPlayer to come up with a prototype. Apple took the prototype, put on the UI, designed the outside of it, and also added the scroll wheel.
So yes, PortalPlayer had a reference design, a chipset, an OS, and a lot of engineers. Apple had almost all the design influence. So I still think the parent poster is assigning far too much credit to PortalPlayer (which, after all, has driven MP3 players other than the iPod) and not enough to Apple. A lot of people love to hate Apple lately, so I'm not surprised.
It's not even THAT simple. A camera with a 100x100 CCD can easily resolve 200x200 pixels of resolution as long as it's got motion on it... since you can measure the sub-pixel features as they transition from one pixel to the next you can derive more information than is in a single snapshot. So the actual content being displayed might make a significant difference as to whether 1080p is "worth it".
Re:The value of good user interface design...
on
100 Million iPods
·
· Score: 1
Why do you include "Software" in there, when Apple did that? And how do you explain that iPods are still selling well despite Apple having switched suppliers away from PortalPlayer? Or that SanDisk also used PortalPlayer?
PortalPlayer supplied some of the early chipsets and the low-level operating system. The thing that makes the iPod the killer product was produced by Apple. Like many geeks, you seem to be confusing technology with product.
Some cell phones can definitely affect some on-board instruments on aircraft. Probably not your typical modern Airbus 321 or Boeing 777 with GPS navigation, but on the little Piper Archer I used to fly it could definitely mess with the VOR and ADM every once in awhile-- especially the GSM phones. In the end, though, airplane manufacturers and companies must take the approach that anything may cause serious harm unless proven otherwise. So until extensive (expensive) testing is done on each aircraft type and configuration, it'll most likely stay banned by the manufacturers, airlines, and insurance companies. And why do the testing when it seems to be something that most passengers don't really care about anyway?
Software itself is obviously (to anyone but greedheads) copyright, not patent, material.
Please open your mind a little bit. Software *is* copyrighted, but there is also an argument that the mechanism encoded into the software is itself a virtual device that is patentable. I happen to agree with that decision, and think the biggest problem with software patents is that the bar for "obviousness" is set far too low. But in the end, patents should be enough to allow companies to feel comfortable in investing in R&D without the risk that some open source group will say "I don't want to pay for that-- someone please write a GPL version of that software that the company spent a lot of time and money inventing and give it away for free." Since it's a lot cheaper to copy than to invent, that type of thing can be destructive to innovation.
"A citizen of the United States" is one of the correct definitions for "American" in the English language. Learn the language, please, before you try to correct others.
Not in the United States. Although I think you're right in most countries, the United States uses a first-to-invent, not first-to-file system. Thus, Google still would be the sole entity able to patent this idea if they can show they used it before the other guy.
I think their analysis is fundamentally flawed once they put MacOS X and UNIX into separate buckets. Almost everything they tested on MacOS X is based on the UNIX underpinnings of MacOS X, and at that level MacOS X *is* UNIX (with 10.5, they even went through the trouble of getting it certified as such). It's not like they were testing Cocoa or the GUI.
Any remote network vulnerability that treats MacOS X as anything other than another UNIX distro has built-in bias.
The article submitter paints a bit rosier picture than the article and quotes actually support:
Torvalds: "The current draft makes me think it's at least a possibility in theory, but whether it's practical and worth it is a totally different thing," he said. "Practically speaking, it would involve a lot of work to make sure everything relevant is GPLv3-compatible even if we decided that the GPL 3 is OK."
Basically, GPLv3 makes it go from "impossible" to "maybe someday". I doubt Linux is moving off of GPLv2 anytime soon, though. I doubt most GPLv2 projects are, and suspect those that do will fork instead of go completely to GPLv3. This will more or less be the open source community shooting itself in the foot.
It's this R&D that brings us the new products, techniques, practices and knowledge
R&D tends not to directly produce products. That's generally the job of some combination of marketing, sales, or explicit product managers. Confusion between a "product" and a "technology" is a pretty common problem at many high-tech companies, so I just wanted to clarify things here. Scientists, engineers, and other researchers do produce techniques, practices, and knowledge, though. Turning those into products, customers, and money is the job of marketing, sales, and the lawyers.
To draw an analogy, why should a country spend any money on defense? It could all be better spent improving the GNP, education, building roads, etc. Until the Grand Duchy of Fenwick comes along, invades, and wins.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, it always seems like it's the gun-toting Red state folk that get to meet the aliens anyway. And their cows.
The submission commentary is completely inaccurate, so I can see how you mistakenly formed that opinion. In fact, the cheapest Blu-Ray player is already half the "$1000" mentioned in the submission, and you get a game player compatible with PS2 games (the most popular selling console today) and great HD games with it as well. The PS3 has sold millions of units already, so even if Wal-Mart sells all 2 million of the players mentioned in the article, HD DVD will still have quite a challenge to move ahead of Blu-Ray.
I understand it's cool to hate Sony lately on SlashDot, but come on. There's almost no practical difference between the standards except: 1. Blu-Ray stores more, 2. Blu-Ray has a higher max data rate, 3. Microsoft and Toshiba control the HD DVD interactive format instead of it being based on an open-source language (BD-J is based on Java), 4. Blu-Ray has more support for recordable media. HD DVD can be a little cheaper, but not all that much, and not enough to lock us in to more Microsoft dominance.
Blu-Ray is less "proprietary" than HD-DVD, so I'm not clear on your point.
Benefit: Russia won't have to build that multi-billion dollar tunnel to ship its electricity to Alaska after all. Just float it over.
Goodbye, Darwin. Hello, future.
Not quite... natural selection will still be at work, but now it will be the folks that have some fundamentalist belief or physical inhibition to having this done to them will be slowly selected out. For instance, I'd put money that if the human race survives a few thousand more years, that antibiotic allergies will be selected out of the gene pool.
While it's actually something akin to "Display PDF", your point is valid. It's pretty trippy turning on cursive Zapfino in an IM application and having it get all the ligatures right, including the ending y that flows under the preceeding word. You could even set a font with ligatures for web sites, eliminating the complaint posed here, but since most web sites these days specify an explicit font and depend on it for sizing, it would be frustrating.
This is pretty close to what Yahoo News has been doing for years. They have the Most Emailed, Most Read, and Most Recommended sections, with tooltips that show the first paragraph of the article. It seems to work pretty well, so I'm not surprised MySpace is copying it.
1) Everyone who makes the same invention independently loses.
A lot of things seem pretty obvious once the idea is "out there" and people know what's possible. Proving independent invention is pretty hard.
Because they cannot make a profit from their investment, which they deserve as much as the other guy who just ran to the patent office a bit faster.
In the United States, it's not who files first, but who can show they invented first. Running faster makes no difference.
Now both of these problems would be tolerable with a patent office that only grants patents for significant technical improvements. Which seems not to work anymore these days thanks to sloppy reviews and ridiculously low standards for patent applications. As a result, patents are becoming a tool for sabotaging the competition rather than protecting innovation.
Theoretically, a patent is not viable if it's "obvious to one trained in the art". This is also extremely hard to prove, since a lot of things seem obvious in retrospect. One test that courts have used is that if a business has made substantial money selling a product based on the patent, then the patent is assumed to be innovative because otherwise someone else would have made that money.
Nah, the right pretends to care about the bill of rights.
Where have you been living for the last six years?
The right cares about only one amendment in the bill of rights (the 2nd), and only 50% of the text of that amendment, at that.
Ask a Republican what they think of the ACLU and you'll find out how much they support individual freedom.
Software is mathematics
No. Software can be described using mathematics, just like radio, an internal combustion engine, and a host of other inventions can. But software is a set of instructions that form a virtual mechanism, not a set of equations. Abstract mathematical equations are not patentable because they are not a device with a purpose, while software is.
The latest Java VM's are flaky on W2K, so everything my company produces is no longer supported on that platform.
MS' plan to fragment the community
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I call shennanigans... the "community" is going to fragment itself more with GPLv3 than anything Microsoft could have dreamed of. (Maybe Microsoft has been subliminally encouraging Stallman to push GPLv3 in his sleep?) If fragmentation is your worry, open source seems to encourage it anyway.
First off, the way music is store and sorted on the device is nothing different than programs like RealPlayer Jukebox and WMP did before the iPod existed.
... It is said that on SlashDot you find tons of iPod fans
Or SoundJam, which Apple bought and turned into iTunes and existed long before the iPod.
You can also find the court references that show that creative was using this type of organizational interface long before the iPod.
No. You can find court documents that show that Creative *patented* this organizational interface before Apple introduced the iPod. It's unclear who would have won had the case not been settled out of court, but Apple/NeXT has used the same style interface as that for 20+ years in its file browser, so it's unlikely much of the patent would have survived.
The second part is the user controls, and these were not Apple, but originating concepts that are a combination of what Tony Fadell had demonstrated prior to working with Apple and what PortalPlayer had demonstrated to IBM in hopes of getting IBM to pick up on an MP3 device.
Citation? The click-wheel, which is one of the defining characteristics of the iPod, was added to the device by Apple according to all the "how the iPod came to be" stories I could find. The UI for the iPod was also highly refined by Apple, as was the physical fit and finish. Jobs was said to have spent almost 100% of his time on this project for a substantial duration to get it just right. And I suspect if Tony Fadell had wound up at a different company, his product would have become "just another MP3 player". Apple really worked their magic on that product and I don't think any other company could have done it.
what they didn't rip off, they bought. PERIOD.
Actually, most slashdotters (like yourself) love to minimize Apple's contribution to the iPod, and pretend the 20-30 engineers and designers they had working on it just sat on their hands all day. They love to hate the front-runner, and are willing to go through convoluted logic to convince themselves that everything would have happened magically if Apple hadn't stepped up to the plate.
Your discussion of "features" makes it pretty obvious to me that you're someone who confuses technology and products. Who cares about the features if the iPod does what you want conveniently? People buy the iPod not because they think Apple invented it, but because it's a good user experience that has persevered. Who knows when the next guy will go out of business, but Apple's there to stay. In many ways, this is the same reason people DIDN'T buy from Apple in the 90's, so it's nice to see.
There is quite a lot of software that won't run on Windows 2000 that will run on XP. And that's the main reason to upgrade an OS anyway-- not any particular feature or pre-packaged application bundled with the OS itself.
Ok, I looked it up. Tony Fadell, according to the information I've found, was a contractor hired by Apple and assigned 20-30 Apple employees, who then worked with Apple and PortalPlayer to come up with a prototype. Apple took the prototype, put on the UI, designed the outside of it, and also added the scroll wheel.
So yes, PortalPlayer had a reference design, a chipset, an OS, and a lot of engineers. Apple had almost all the design influence. So I still think the parent poster is assigning far too much credit to PortalPlayer (which, after all, has driven MP3 players other than the iPod) and not enough to Apple. A lot of people love to hate Apple lately, so I'm not surprised.
It's not even THAT simple. A camera with a 100x100 CCD can easily resolve 200x200 pixels of resolution as long as it's got motion on it... since you can measure the sub-pixel features as they transition from one pixel to the next you can derive more information than is in a single snapshot. So the actual content being displayed might make a significant difference as to whether 1080p is "worth it".
Why do you include "Software" in there, when Apple did that? And how do you explain that iPods are still selling well despite Apple having switched suppliers away from PortalPlayer? Or that SanDisk also used PortalPlayer?
PortalPlayer supplied some of the early chipsets and the low-level operating system. The thing that makes the iPod the killer product was produced by Apple. Like many geeks, you seem to be confusing technology with product.
Some cell phones can definitely affect some on-board instruments on aircraft. Probably not your typical modern Airbus 321 or Boeing 777 with GPS navigation, but on the little Piper Archer I used to fly it could definitely mess with the VOR and ADM every once in awhile-- especially the GSM phones. In the end, though, airplane manufacturers and companies must take the approach that anything may cause serious harm unless proven otherwise. So until extensive (expensive) testing is done on each aircraft type and configuration, it'll most likely stay banned by the manufacturers, airlines, and insurance companies. And why do the testing when it seems to be something that most passengers don't really care about anyway?
Software itself is obviously (to anyone but greedheads) copyright, not patent, material.
Please open your mind a little bit. Software *is* copyrighted, but there is also an argument that the mechanism encoded into the software is itself a virtual device that is patentable. I happen to agree with that decision, and think the biggest problem with software patents is that the bar for "obviousness" is set far too low. But in the end, patents should be enough to allow companies to feel comfortable in investing in R&D without the risk that some open source group will say "I don't want to pay for that-- someone please write a GPL version of that software that the company spent a lot of time and money inventing and give it away for free." Since it's a lot cheaper to copy than to invent, that type of thing can be destructive to innovation.
"A citizen of the United States" is one of the correct definitions for "American" in the English language. Learn the language, please, before you try to correct others.
Funny, the Wikipedia article on "Prior Art" contradicts this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
Not in the United States. Although I think you're right in most countries, the United States uses a first-to-invent, not first-to-file system. Thus, Google still would be the sole entity able to patent this idea if they can show they used it before the other guy.
I think their analysis is fundamentally flawed once they put MacOS X and UNIX into separate buckets. Almost everything they tested on MacOS X is based on the UNIX underpinnings of MacOS X, and at that level MacOS X *is* UNIX (with 10.5, they even went through the trouble of getting it certified as such). It's not like they were testing Cocoa or the GUI.
Any remote network vulnerability that treats MacOS X as anything other than another UNIX distro has built-in bias.
The article submitter paints a bit rosier picture than the article and quotes actually support:
Torvalds: "The current draft makes me think it's at least a possibility in theory, but whether it's practical and worth it is a totally different thing," he said. "Practically speaking, it would involve a lot of work to make sure everything relevant is GPLv3-compatible even if we decided that the GPL 3 is OK."
Basically, GPLv3 makes it go from "impossible" to "maybe someday". I doubt Linux is moving off of GPLv2 anytime soon, though. I doubt most GPLv2 projects are, and suspect those that do will fork instead of go completely to GPLv3. This will more or less be the open source community shooting itself in the foot.
It's this R&D that brings us the new products, techniques, practices and knowledge
R&D tends not to directly produce products. That's generally the job of some combination of marketing, sales, or explicit product managers. Confusion between a "product" and a "technology" is a pretty common problem at many high-tech companies, so I just wanted to clarify things here. Scientists, engineers, and other researchers do produce techniques, practices, and knowledge, though. Turning those into products, customers, and money is the job of marketing, sales, and the lawyers.
To draw an analogy, why should a country spend any money on defense? It could all be better spent improving the GNP, education, building roads, etc. Until the Grand Duchy of Fenwick comes along, invades, and wins.