I have a Nexus 4 that has been getting major updates for about 3 years now. If you look at Apple's compatibility chart for iOS 9 you'll see that it supports devices about as old as the Nexus 4. So it looks like they are maintaining status quo with Apple.
Perhaps a bit better in that Google is committing to updates for a defined duration. Apple has done a good job with deploying updates to older devices, but they don't actually make any promises about what they'll do in the future, as far as I can tell.
I'm hoping Google's move here will start an industry trend to specific support commitments, across and perhaps even beyond the Android ecosystem.
Pretty much everything you know about Google's work environment is wrong:-)
Oh, I should mention the "large, open work environment" is NOT wrong. Google thinks that facilitates communication. I'm not so sure, but they give everyone a nice set of headphones, so you can isolate when you need to. Within Google culture it's mildly unacceptable to talk to someone without messaging them first, even if they sit right next to you, which also helps with being able to reduce interruption (it's acceptable to say "no, I can't talk now").
Pretty much everything you know about Google's work environment is wrong:-)
I did feel a little shorted on vacation when I first started. They gave me three weeks to start. Three years in it jumped to four, which was better. When I hit my five-year anniversary in a few months I'll have five, which is pretty comfortable. You can also go up to one week in the hole on vacation time, which provides a little more flexibility. I don't think it's so bad.
I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
I'm not sure it's quite as bad as the article paints it, at least at Google. I can't speak for the rest of Silicon Valley.
Google recruited and hired me at age 42 (I'm also 46), and my first team had a large percentage of older guys, including many in their 50s and a few in their 60s. That team actively sought out more experienced engineers because of the nature of the work it did. In other teams, including my current team, I see no evidence of any active age bias, for or against. I'm older than most of my colleagues, but not all.
I think at Google the age structure arises primarily because Google tends to do most of its recruiting at universities. Combine that with extremely rapid growth and you get a heavily youth-biased demographic, though it's gradually aging. Google's recruiters do seek out experienced people, but the volume seems to be lower.
One aspect that might tilt the scale is that Google doesn't really look for experience, AFAICT. Recruiters and interviewers consider it a minor plus when evaluating candidates, but the major emphasis is on how candidates perform in the interviews. On the job, experience far more than offsets the minor cognitive decline that comes with age, so under-weighting experience may produce a subtle bias against older candidates. (Note that after the hiring decision is made, experience is factored in when determining initial level on the career ladder and pay scale, and teams do consider experience when deciding which already-hired engineers they want.)
One thing I don't see the slightest evidence of is age discrimination after hiring. Nor is there any expectation that you'll work insane hours which might drive out people who have a life outside of work.
At the beginning they didn't have the patent portfolio, so instead they had to try to invalidate everyone else's patents--even aggressively, taking the offensive by suing first (as I showed in the first example).
Umm, what part of "suing to invalidate a patent is not offensive" do you not get?
Now that they have the portfolio, they can push folks around.
Then you should be able to show some evidence of them doing that. Why haven't you?
The first two examples I gave I think are pretty illustrative of the issue here, and Google is a major player.
Ummm, the first example was purely defensive, and you just said was because Google wasn't a major player (didn't have patents). The second example was merely Google filing for a patent, not actually doing anything to anyone... not filing a lawsuit, not even telling anyone about their patent application.
I did read the links. The first was an example of Google taking the offensive in a patent lawsuit
How in the world is invalidating someone's patent an offensive use of patents? You can't get any more defensive than invalidating a patent that you think might be used against you... and you're doing the world a public service as well, because if the patent is invalidated it can't be used against anyone else, either.
The second was Google using patents to stifle innovation and bring down smaller developers.
Nonsense. It was about Google *applying* for a patent, not using a patent. Those are entirely different things. Obtaining lots of patents is perfectly consistent with Google's defensive stance. You can't defend with what you don't have. The fact that the author of the article called the filing "patent trolling" proves only that he doesn't know what trolling is.
Your third exmple is a classic defensive patent use. Apple had already filed suit against Google over patents Apple alleged Google had infringed, so Google filed a countersuit alleging infringement of Google-owned patents. That's how you use patents defensively in court, by filing a countersuit. Another way to use them defensively is in posturing before you get to court, or with cross-licensing agreements.
Google is just like any other large tech company; they're playing the patent game.
If so, you're completely unable to provide any evidence of it, and it would be easy to find evidence if it were true.
What you have proved is that there are bloggers who (a) don't know anything about how patents are created, used and defended and (b) really want to find evidence that Google isn't living up to its claims about only using patents defensively.
I've never understood why people bother with posts like that one. I suppose I should thank you for letting me know that I should just ignore you in the future.
There are these things called applications. You can start them and run them. They can even connect to other computers over the internet. We used to use them for things like email and word processing before all the hipsters started trying to do everything in a web browser. You should try it. It's "retro".
Oh, it also occurs to me that if you really prefer that, you shouldn't be using slashdot. USENET with a dedicated NNTP reader app would be much better for you. If you're too young to know what those acronyms mean, Google 'em. Sorry, I don't have a non-web recommendation for searching the web.
There are these things called applications. You can start them and run them. They can even connect to other computers over the internet. We used to use them for things like email and word processing before all the hipsters started trying to do everything in a web browser. You should try it. It's "retro".
Bah. BTDT, the web is more convenient, which is why it has taken over and relatively few people use local applications for inherently-connected operations like e-mail.
It's interesting to me that on mobile devices we've been going the opposite direction, though much of that is probably driven by performance. Web apps are very convenient, but not terribly efficient compared to local native binaries. On laptops and desktops that performance differential doesn't matter much. On mobile devices, it does. Today. In a few years that will likely change.
Google doesn't sell your information to spammers, they instead provide detailed demographic information for better ad targeting.
Google doesn't provide detailed demographic information. Advertisers can provide some targeting information in their requests, but Google mostly serves ads to the people it believes might be interested in those ads. If you want to see how this works, sign up for an AdWords account and take a look at what you can do as an advertiser.
Yes, selling off a database to shady ass internet marketers is 100% totally equal to spamming you themselves. Clearly I have been living a lie.
Google doesn't sell user data. Their business model is in using that data to advertise on behalf of marketers, but never to give your data to the marketers.
You should leave Google out of that list. Google has never filed a non-defensive patent lawsuit, and seems pretty sincere about not using patents in the way you describe. I'm not sure about Samsung. MS and Apple definitely use patents as offensive weapons, regularly and aggressively.
Bullshit, Google has used Motorola to file lawsuits against the others as well.
Nope.
There was one Motorola suit which is commonly cited as a counterexample... which Motorola filed before Google acquired Motorola. By the time Google got involved, the defendant had filed a countersuit which left Google with no choice but to defend.
My web browser is my e-mail client, appointment calendar, instant messaging app, social media client and a lot more.
And all of those functions take place in the Google Mothership because you're a GoogleBot who lives on nothing but the kool-aid. You can seek out and turn these little features on yourself so that you don't get lonely outside of Google's protective gaze.
Or it could be that they're useful and more convenient than using multiple separate apps and doing the work needed to get the data synchronized to my phone... the same reason that hundreds of millions of other people use them.
It's worse than that, unfortunately. Google had a CEO with very strong feelings about patents, but after Google and its partners got sued repeatedly and were able to do nothing about it, Page finally realized that the lawyers were right. Given the patent system we have, Google had to have a patent war chest.
You should read your links, they don't say what you think they say. In fact, they say what I said. If Google has acted offensively, much less trollishly, it should be easy to find examples. So why didn't you?
And if you don't want to leave the tab, or even the window open, but still want to be notified when e-mail arrives, then you can answer "yes" when the site asks if you want notifications. The default on the current notification center, and almost certainly on the coming standardized versionl, is to ask on a per-site basis whether or not you want to allow that site to notify you. So, there is no pushing "a bunch of crap on you that you don't want". If you don't want it, you click "no", and you don't get it.
Notifications are a useful feature, and totally under user control.
There are other notification methods available in standard HTML.
But only if the tab is open. The idea with the notification center (and the W3C standardized version Google is switching to) was to enable notifications even when you've closed the relevant tab.
My web browser is my e-mail client, appointment calendar, instant messaging app, social media client and a lot more. And for many of those things I actually *do* want notifications. Of course, because my web browser is all of those things I don't actually need notifications when the browser is closed, because the browser is never closed.
But if I had realized I could get notifications even when the browser isn't running, maybe I would close the browser. Probably not.
Apple has somewhere around $200 billion in cash. If they have to pay $823 million they still will have around $200 billion in cash.
If you buy something for around $200, do you care if it's $200 or $200.80? Do you really miss the extra 0.80?
I don't see the relevance.
When setting punitive fines for corporate actions, it makes sense to scale the fine against the company's income and assets, because the goal is to make it hurt. But patent litigation isn't about punishment, it's supposed to be about making the owner of the patent whole, giving them the money that they were supposed to have gotten, so the amount should be set at the amount they lost, plus possibly some interest and maybe cash to cover court costs. $823M seems, if anything, a bit high. Sure the patent made Apple's CPUs a bit more efficient, but did that added efficiency really result in $823M more in profit? Would Apple have sold many fewer devices if their CPUs had been a few percent slower? I doubt it. On the other hand, would Apple have been willing to pay, say, 75 cents per device to license the patent? Maybe they would.
In any case, I can't see a legitimate argument for the number being much higher, and the fact that Apple could afford more doesn't change anything.
No you only do the not looking for patents thing if you are a startup... If you are Apple you do due diligence and freedom to operate processes on any new tech area you operate in because you aren't going to get away with flying under the radar. They probably have in house lawyers who trawl patents checking for this stuff.
All big corporations I'm aware of counsel engineers not to go looking for patents and I think you're equally wrong in your assertion that they have lawyers pre-emptively looking for potential infringements.
I've had numerous discussions with corporate counsel about patents that may apply to my work, but they have always begun with a patent-holder alleging infringement. It's only after the allegation comes that anyone really starts digging to see if the patent applies. And then, the first step is to ask engineers to review the details of the allegedly infringed patent and make an initial determination of whether or not it applies. The reason that engineers are asked to do that review, not lawyers, is because the lawyers aren't able to do it. That indicates to me that lawyers are also unlikely to be able to evaluate applicability of patents before the allegation of infringement comes in, either, because it's the same process. So... if lawyers are pre-emptively examining potentially-infringed patents, they'd also have to be asking engineers. In 25 years in the business, most of it at big corporations, I've never seen that happen.
I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.
You should leave Google out of that list. Google has never filed a non-defensive patent lawsuit, and seems pretty sincere about not using patents in the way you describe. I'm not sure about Samsung. MS and Apple definitely use patents as offensive weapons, regularly and aggressively.
However, you're not at all wrong about the effect of the system. Google discovered this. Google tried to ignore the patent game for years and then realized that you can't play in this space without a patent war chest to defend yourself. Being a multi-billion dollar corporation with lots of disposable cash, Google could and did buy such a war chest. Small players can't.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Nexus 4 that has been getting major updates for about 3 years now. If you look at Apple's compatibility chart for iOS 9 you'll see that it supports devices about as old as the Nexus 4. So it looks like they are maintaining status quo with Apple.
Perhaps a bit better in that Google is committing to updates for a defined duration. Apple has done a good job with deploying updates to older devices, but they don't actually make any promises about what they'll do in the future, as far as I can tell.
I'm hoping Google's move here will start an industry trend to specific support commitments, across and perhaps even beyond the Android ecosystem.
Pretty much everything you know about Google's work environment is wrong :-)
Oh, I should mention the "large, open work environment" is NOT wrong. Google thinks that facilitates communication. I'm not so sure, but they give everyone a nice set of headphones, so you can isolate when you need to. Within Google culture it's mildly unacceptable to talk to someone without messaging them first, even if they sit right next to you, which also helps with being able to reduce interruption (it's acceptable to say "no, I can't talk now").
Pretty much everything you know about Google's work environment is wrong :-)
I did feel a little shorted on vacation when I first started. They gave me three weeks to start. Three years in it jumped to four, which was better. When I hit my five-year anniversary in a few months I'll have five, which is pretty comfortable. You can also go up to one week in the hole on vacation time, which provides a little more flexibility. I don't think it's so bad.
I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
I'm not sure it's quite as bad as the article paints it, at least at Google. I can't speak for the rest of Silicon Valley.
Google recruited and hired me at age 42 (I'm also 46), and my first team had a large percentage of older guys, including many in their 50s and a few in their 60s. That team actively sought out more experienced engineers because of the nature of the work it did. In other teams, including my current team, I see no evidence of any active age bias, for or against. I'm older than most of my colleagues, but not all.
I think at Google the age structure arises primarily because Google tends to do most of its recruiting at universities. Combine that with extremely rapid growth and you get a heavily youth-biased demographic, though it's gradually aging. Google's recruiters do seek out experienced people, but the volume seems to be lower.
One aspect that might tilt the scale is that Google doesn't really look for experience, AFAICT. Recruiters and interviewers consider it a minor plus when evaluating candidates, but the major emphasis is on how candidates perform in the interviews. On the job, experience far more than offsets the minor cognitive decline that comes with age, so under-weighting experience may produce a subtle bias against older candidates. (Note that after the hiring decision is made, experience is factored in when determining initial level on the career ladder and pay scale, and teams do consider experience when deciding which already-hired engineers they want.)
One thing I don't see the slightest evidence of is age discrimination after hiring. Nor is there any expectation that you'll work insane hours which might drive out people who have a life outside of work.
Actually, Page wasn't CEO at the time, though it was still Page and Brin that drove the no-patents decision.
No patents, ehh? https://www.google.com/patents...
Are you being intentionally obtuse? A handful of patent filings don't constitute a corporate patent strategy.
At the beginning they didn't have the patent portfolio, so instead they had to try to invalidate everyone else's patents--even aggressively, taking the offensive by suing first (as I showed in the first example).
Umm, what part of "suing to invalidate a patent is not offensive" do you not get?
Now that they have the portfolio, they can push folks around.
Then you should be able to show some evidence of them doing that. Why haven't you?
The first two examples I gave I think are pretty illustrative of the issue here, and Google is a major player.
Ummm, the first example was purely defensive, and you just said was because Google wasn't a major player (didn't have patents). The second example was merely Google filing for a patent, not actually doing anything to anyone... not filing a lawsuit, not even telling anyone about their patent application.
I don't see how you don't get this.
And via numerous trade agreements, the rest of the world.
Sure, but that has no bearing on the meaning of the ruling in the United States.
I did read the links. The first was an example of Google taking the offensive in a patent lawsuit
How in the world is invalidating someone's patent an offensive use of patents? You can't get any more defensive than invalidating a patent that you think might be used against you... and you're doing the world a public service as well, because if the patent is invalidated it can't be used against anyone else, either.
The second was Google using patents to stifle innovation and bring down smaller developers.
Nonsense. It was about Google *applying* for a patent, not using a patent. Those are entirely different things. Obtaining lots of patents is perfectly consistent with Google's defensive stance. You can't defend with what you don't have. The fact that the author of the article called the filing "patent trolling" proves only that he doesn't know what trolling is.
Your third exmple is a classic defensive patent use. Apple had already filed suit against Google over patents Apple alleged Google had infringed, so Google filed a countersuit alleging infringement of Google-owned patents. That's how you use patents defensively in court, by filing a countersuit. Another way to use them defensively is in posturing before you get to court, or with cross-licensing agreements.
Google is just like any other large tech company; they're playing the patent game.
If so, you're completely unable to provide any evidence of it, and it would be easy to find evidence if it were true.
What you have proved is that there are bloggers who (a) don't know anything about how patents are created, used and defended and (b) really want to find evidence that Google isn't living up to its claims about only using patents defensively.
I've never understood why people bother with posts like that one. I suppose I should thank you for letting me know that I should just ignore you in the future.
There are these things called applications. You can start them and run them. They can even connect to other computers over the internet. We used to use them for things like email and word processing before all the hipsters started trying to do everything in a web browser. You should try it. It's "retro".
Oh, it also occurs to me that if you really prefer that, you shouldn't be using slashdot. USENET with a dedicated NNTP reader app would be much better for you. If you're too young to know what those acronyms mean, Google 'em. Sorry, I don't have a non-web recommendation for searching the web.
There are these things called applications. You can start them and run them. They can even connect to other computers over the internet. We used to use them for things like email and word processing before all the hipsters started trying to do everything in a web browser. You should try it. It's "retro".
Bah. BTDT, the web is more convenient, which is why it has taken over and relatively few people use local applications for inherently-connected operations like e-mail.
It's interesting to me that on mobile devices we've been going the opposite direction, though much of that is probably driven by performance. Web apps are very convenient, but not terribly efficient compared to local native binaries. On laptops and desktops that performance differential doesn't matter much. On mobile devices, it does. Today. In a few years that will likely change.
Google doesn't sell your information to spammers, they instead provide detailed demographic information for better ad targeting.
Google doesn't provide detailed demographic information. Advertisers can provide some targeting information in their requests, but Google mostly serves ads to the people it believes might be interested in those ads. If you want to see how this works, sign up for an AdWords account and take a look at what you can do as an advertiser.
Yes, selling off a database to shady ass internet marketers is 100% totally equal to spamming you themselves. Clearly I have been living a lie.
Google doesn't sell user data. Their business model is in using that data to advertise on behalf of marketers, but never to give your data to the marketers.
You should leave Google out of that list. Google has never filed a non-defensive patent lawsuit, and seems pretty sincere about not using patents in the way you describe. I'm not sure about Samsung. MS and Apple definitely use patents as offensive weapons, regularly and aggressively.
Bullshit, Google has used Motorola to file lawsuits against the others as well.
Nope.
There was one Motorola suit which is commonly cited as a counterexample... which Motorola filed before Google acquired Motorola. By the time Google got involved, the defendant had filed a countersuit which left Google with no choice but to defend.
My web browser is my e-mail client, appointment calendar, instant messaging app, social media client and a lot more.
And all of those functions take place in the Google Mothership because you're a GoogleBot who lives on nothing but the kool-aid. You can seek out and turn these little features on yourself so that you don't get lonely outside of Google's protective gaze.
Or it could be that they're useful and more convenient than using multiple separate apps and doing the work needed to get the data synchronized to my phone... the same reason that hundreds of millions of other people use them.
Actually, Page wasn't CEO at the time, though it was still Page and Brin that drove the no-patents decision.
It's worse than that, unfortunately. Google had a CEO with very strong feelings about patents, but after Google and its partners got sued repeatedly and were able to do nothing about it, Page finally realized that the lawyers were right. Given the patent system we have, Google had to have a patent war chest.
You should read your links, they don't say what you think they say. In fact, they say what I said. If Google has acted offensively, much less trollishly, it should be easy to find examples. So why didn't you?
Because there aren't any.
So leave the tab open.
And if you don't want to leave the tab, or even the window open, but still want to be notified when e-mail arrives, then you can answer "yes" when the site asks if you want notifications. The default on the current notification center, and almost certainly on the coming standardized versionl, is to ask on a per-site basis whether or not you want to allow that site to notify you. So, there is no pushing "a bunch of crap on you that you don't want". If you don't want it, you click "no", and you don't get it.
Notifications are a useful feature, and totally under user control.
There are other notification methods available in standard HTML.
But only if the tab is open. The idea with the notification center (and the W3C standardized version Google is switching to) was to enable notifications even when you've closed the relevant tab.
But how are they going to monetize all of the revenue streams if they can't push a bunch of crap on you that you don't want?
Also, how are your e-mail, calendar and instant messaging web apps going to notify you of messages and appointments?
I just want a damned web browser. That's it.
What's a web browser?
My web browser is my e-mail client, appointment calendar, instant messaging app, social media client and a lot more. And for many of those things I actually *do* want notifications. Of course, because my web browser is all of those things I don't actually need notifications when the browser is closed, because the browser is never closed.
But if I had realized I could get notifications even when the browser isn't running, maybe I would close the browser. Probably not.
Apple has somewhere around $200 billion in cash. If they have to pay $823 million they still will have around $200 billion in cash.
If you buy something for around $200, do you care if it's $200 or $200.80? Do you really miss the extra 0.80?
I don't see the relevance.
When setting punitive fines for corporate actions, it makes sense to scale the fine against the company's income and assets, because the goal is to make it hurt. But patent litigation isn't about punishment, it's supposed to be about making the owner of the patent whole, giving them the money that they were supposed to have gotten, so the amount should be set at the amount they lost, plus possibly some interest and maybe cash to cover court costs. $823M seems, if anything, a bit high. Sure the patent made Apple's CPUs a bit more efficient, but did that added efficiency really result in $823M more in profit? Would Apple have sold many fewer devices if their CPUs had been a few percent slower? I doubt it. On the other hand, would Apple have been willing to pay, say, 75 cents per device to license the patent? Maybe they would.
In any case, I can't see a legitimate argument for the number being much higher, and the fact that Apple could afford more doesn't change anything.
No you only do the not looking for patents thing if you are a startup... If you are Apple you do due diligence and freedom to operate processes on any new tech area you operate in because you aren't going to get away with flying under the radar. They probably have in house lawyers who trawl patents checking for this stuff.
All big corporations I'm aware of counsel engineers not to go looking for patents and I think you're equally wrong in your assertion that they have lawyers pre-emptively looking for potential infringements.
I've had numerous discussions with corporate counsel about patents that may apply to my work, but they have always begun with a patent-holder alleging infringement. It's only after the allegation comes that anyone really starts digging to see if the patent applies. And then, the first step is to ask engineers to review the details of the allegedly infringed patent and make an initial determination of whether or not it applies. The reason that engineers are asked to do that review, not lawyers, is because the lawyers aren't able to do it. That indicates to me that lawyers are also unlikely to be able to evaluate applicability of patents before the allegation of infringement comes in, either, because it's the same process. So... if lawyers are pre-emptively examining potentially-infringed patents, they'd also have to be asking engineers. In 25 years in the business, most of it at big corporations, I've never seen that happen.
I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi ... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.
You should leave Google out of that list. Google has never filed a non-defensive patent lawsuit, and seems pretty sincere about not using patents in the way you describe. I'm not sure about Samsung. MS and Apple definitely use patents as offensive weapons, regularly and aggressively.
However, you're not at all wrong about the effect of the system. Google discovered this. Google tried to ignore the patent game for years and then realized that you can't play in this space without a patent war chest to defend yourself. Being a multi-billion dollar corporation with lots of disposable cash, Google could and did buy such a war chest. Small players can't.