If the source code is available on the same server as the binary distribution, that counts as "accompany" for the purposes of clause (a).
Providing a web link is sufficient, but only as a "written offer" (the link is the specific means of fulfilling that offer). That means that specific source snapshot must be made available for at least three years.
The easiest way to comply is to simply make sure the sources are available, directly, at the same time, from the same server, as the binary, at the time the binary is distributed (i.e. downloaded).
That does mean that someone who downloads the binary without having snagged a copy of the corresponding source is not allowed to re-distribute the binary (unless it also came with a "written offer"), since they can't comply with clause (c) in that case. That is fairly deliberate on the part of the FSF, to avoid having a glut of random versions of binaries without matching source.
You can sell your program for any price you can get people to pay for it.
If you aren't distributing the source along with the binary, then you must provide the source (that specific version of it) to anyone who asks, for the (physical) cost of distributing it, for a period of three years.
It seems like it's more hassle than it's worth to verify that someone has bought the app before sending them a copy of the source code, especially since you can't control what they do with that source code afterwords. Just put it up someplace and leave it there for three years, then remove it. Include a link to where you can download the source (in the program you sell), seems like it would be much less of a hassle for you, and isn't going to result in any fewer sales of your app (in fact, may lead to higher sales, and less of a chance someone will take your version and sell a competing version just to punish you).
You could say that the person who won't pay the (low) price of your app in order to get you to send them a copy of the source is being cheap and silly, since they can then re-post the source code for everyone else in the world who wanted a copy but didn't want to pay you anything, but not having an official copy of the source code is actually an issue from a "software freedom" standpoint - someone who gets a copy of the app and wants to get a copy of the source code (whether to extend it, fix a bug, move it to a new platform, whatever) might not be able to find that specific version somewhere else, and certainly shouldn't HAVE to.
Google OUGHT to have an option, for open source software, to allow you to download the source code at the same time as the binary is purchased. Then the distribution clause (a) is satisfied and you don't have to worry about maintaining a specific snapshot of source code and keep it available for three years.
The reference to PLATO using vertical touch screens is mostly irrelevant. Yes, they were touch screens. Very low resolution, a 16 x 16 grid on a 512 x 512 resolution monochrome plasma display. No dragging. No double-tapping or holding. No "multi-touch". Simply a single touch at a single location, using infrared sensors.
As there was no mouse at the time, it was the only way to directly interact with the screen. Touch or keyboard. It also wasn't really used that much except for instructional material aimed at younger kids who couldn't type very well or public display terminals, and occasionally as an alternate input method (e.g. tap the line OR hit a number key).
Using a vertical display touch screen is fine if it's very low resolution like that, especially the frequency of use is fairly low. I find that with my iPad on the dock, the two biggest problems are trying to do ANY sort of gestural control (dragging, two-finger squeeze/compress/rotate, double-tap, etc) and that often it's my fingernail that's the only thing actually able to hit the screen, and that often doesn't provide enough to register. Trying to bend my finger backwards, or rotate my finger so the pad points upwards, is very awkward and unnatural and fatiguing.
The way to handle this at the link layer is to have a way to indicate that a packet should be given a higher level of effort to deliver it correctly (i.e. that if the link layer can't deliver it, the layers above it will be retransmitting it anyway, so go ahead and spend whatever extra resources are appropriate given that hint).
Why would you think mental fitness isn't part of what's being talked about? Of COURSE that has to be part of what it means. It's about eliminating aging, which includes mental decline as well as other health issues.
So, the proper question is: how long do you want to live, in good physical and mental health?
Sign me up for at least 500 years, please, then ask me again in 400.
Calibre is wonderful, it converts between many different e-book formats (and manages them, i.e. you have ONE entry for a book, even if there are multiple formats), it is VERY flexible, and it knows about a whole heck of a lot of different e-readers and how to transfer to them. Just plug your reader into your computer, select what you want to transfer and click one button.
On my Nook, it knows about both the built-in memory and the microSD card (if you have one installed) and can transfer to either one. It will also show you which books are already on the device or card.
I got a Nook, in part because I get great service from B&N in a real store nearby, but I just recently took a look at the Kobo e-ink reader. The reader appears to be very similar to the Nook Simple Touch, and I like Kobo's philosophy of being able to read your books on whatever device you want. They seem to have a very good catalog of books as well, including a lot of free books. They have a mix of DRM-free and DRM-encumbered books.
While B&N doesn't explicitly have read-anywhere as a philosophy, as a practical matter you can read them with a wide variety of devices and apps. Besides the Nook app available for iOS, Android, PC and Mac, they can also be read on e-book readers that support third-party Adobe DRM, an example is the Bluefire reader on iPad. B&N also has an extremely large catalog.
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but as a practical matter we have to live with it for now, and Adobe is the de facto standard. Both Kobo and B&N use Adobe DRM, in slightly different ways. One thing this allows is borrowing books from the library, it's relatively simple to do for my Nook, and should be just as easy to do for the Kobo e-reader.
My Nook will easily go for a month between charges reading for a couple hours a day; a bit less if a lot of that is with the Glow Light on, but enough that I don't need to bring a charger along on vacation.
I have a Nook, which I love. It also doesn't do PDFs very well.
However, there's a great free app, Calibre, which will manage your e-book collection on your computer and does a great job of converting between formats. I just convert PDFs to epub format and then I don't have any problems with them any more (though it probably wouldn't work very well if the PDF is just a scanned image).
The advantage of the Nook Simple Touch, the Kindle e-ink reader, or the Kobo reader is that a battery charge lasts forever. Even the new Nook Glowlight doesn't chew up the battery (and you only turn the light on when you need it; it's very effective even at very low setting).
I like the Nook because it has a microSD slot (I think it takes up to 32GB), and it will boot off the external card without having to modify the firmware at all. You can also easily replace the built-in firmware, then restore it later (assuming you backed it up!). It's also VERY light.
Not sure of the others, but the Nook has 802.11b/g/n (only does the 2.4GHz n though).
It's MY router, I bought it. and it's not some quasi-goods digital product. This is a physical item.
The firmware remains the property of the company. It's software. Therefore, you don't own it. Of course, without firmware, it's useless, but I doubt you'll get many judges to sign on with the idea that you own the firmware too. Thank you copyright law.
No, but you do own a COPY of that firmware. You OWN it, just as you own a book. You don't own the software itself, just as you don't own the words in the book, but you own the copy.
I don't see anywhere in copyright law that says they're allowed to change my hardware (which includes the specific configuration of atoms, electrons and protons that form the firmware) without permission. A lock company may own the patents on a lock, but that doesn't give them the right to sneak in some day and modify your lock, perhaps re-keying it to allow for a master key that they control.
In the Apple App Store or iTunes, they show a Cloud to mean you've purchased something but it isn't on your computer, so you can download it from "The Cloud". Now, what the heck some curly lines have to do with a server farm connected over a network that eventually gets to me through a complex radio-wave system I'm not sure...wait, aren't clouds obsolete yet?
I've also seen a "cloud with arrow pointing to it" to mean "Save". Wait, an "arrow"? Weren't those pointy things that were used to kill animals and people and win archery contests? What do those have to do with "Save"? In 10 years, when the whole concept of "The Cloud" has been dead for a while, will such an icon even make any sense at all (maybe it will make more sense to put up a square with grid marks in it, to represent "The Matrix").
Let's get rid of arrows completely while we're at it, how many people still use arrows in every day life, and what do they have to do with directions anyway?
Maybe HE doesn't work on his car, but plenty of people do, and plenty of people work on other stuff that requires wrenches and other tools (that's what I take that to mean, "tools" to adjust things with). Gears? Ok, you got me, not sure what that has to do with settings, but then it NEVER made sense, why change now, it's a fairly recent bit of iconography.
Bookmarks? They're marks. You make them in books. Even E-books. Ok, maybe they don't need to look like ribbons. Then again, I've rarely used an actual ribbon as a bookmark in a real book anyway, it's usually a strip of cardboard with some advertising on it. A ribbon is just fine, thank you. Maybe you could make them look like brass points (I know someone who still uses those to mark pages). As for using "bookmark" to mean a URL you want to save, that never really made any sense either, other than in a very generic "place holder" sense. The Internet isn't a book, and you aren't marking anything, you're saving a URL in a list.
Radio buttons? Only programmers call them "radio buttons", who cares? Call them mutex-dots for all I care. How about "button"? You going to stop calling graphical areas where you activate something a "button"? At some point, the thing becomes the icon, it's called a button because that's what a button is, and what it has to do with keeping your shirt on and your pants up, I don't know.
And calendars. As long as we have days grouped as weeks, months and years, you'll have calendars to help you figure it out, and it's probably going to continue to remain looking pretty similar to the way a paper calendar has always looked, so an icon representing it represents the electronic version just as much as it represents the paper version.
We talk about someone's e-mail address all the time, isn't that what you store in an address book? Again, the thing becomes the symbol. I mean, the Apple icon for Address Book is a pretty generic looking book with an @ on the cover. Ok, it has little tabs sticking out. Oh, wait, so does the actual program, maybe the icon represents THE PROGRAM, not an "obsolete" physical address book.
Might as well stop calling it e-mail if you're that anti-old-fashioned, i never did like that term, anyway. We called them "pnotes" on PLATO, for "Personal Notes" (as opposed to gnotes, General Notes, for a forum file, which were stored in "notesfiles". We also had "votefiles" for doing polls and such, just like Slashdot Polls, only 15-20 years earlier).
Actually, records were called "records" because they were used to record sound. The word "record" (both as a verb and noun") has been around a lot long than the phonograph (which literally means to "write sounds"). Oh, wait, "write"? An icon of a pen or pencil? What's that?
Well, "Save" in MacOS Lion now generally means "Save your work here, mark this as a version", i.e. checkpoint it. If you quit an application, it auto-saves, but previous versions are still available. Heck, if you shut down while apps are open, it doesn't ask you if you want to quit or save, it just auto-saves it, since you can always revert to an earlier version (or bring up both versions to compare them). It then auto-reopens everything when you start back up.
Actually, many places ARE starting to use a "cloud" symbol to mean various things. In the Apple App Store or iTunes, they show a Cloud to mean you've purchased something but it isn't on your computer, so you can download it from "The Cloud". Now, what the heck some curly lines have to do with a server farm connected over a network that eventually gets to me through a complex radio-wave system I'm not sure...wait, are clouds obsolete too?
I've also seen a "cloud with arrow pointing to it" to mean "Save". Wait, an "arrow"? Weren't those pointy things that were used to kill animals and people and win archery contests? What do those have to do with "Save"? In 10 years, when the whole concept of "The Cloud" has been dead for a while, will such an icon even make any sense at all (maybe it will make more sense to put up a square with grid marks in it, to represent "The Matrix").
Let's get rid of arrows completely while we're at it, how many people still use arrows in every day life, and what do they have to do with directions anyway?
Not really. The article is emphasizing that a "mistake" is what lead to human intelligence. ALL changes to the genome are "mistakes", it's not some exciting new concept.
Now, if the article was emphasizing that a SINGLE change to a gene was responsible for changing the brain so significantly that it enabled all the other smaller changes that are responsible for what we are now, then you might have a point, but you have to get more than halfway through the article before they even start to get on track with what the referenced paper was really about, not this breathless "oooh, mistakes were made, and they were GOOD, isn't that amazing?".
I was thinking about this as I read the claims. Is there a difference between a system that has a velocity threshold that, when exceeded, does something different, and a system that has a velocity threshold that, when not exceeded does something different? Logically, they're the same thing, legally I'm not so sure.
Specifically, the behavior of any reasonable touchscreen behavior that includes dragging at all is that movement below a certain threshold is a touch, not a drag, anything else is a drag, not a touch. In addition, that threshold could be either magnitude or velocity, and probably works better if it isn't velocity anyway.
I haven't seen any Apple products that behave the way the claims are written. Dragging, then releasing while moving, imparts some momentum to the motion, but there's no threshold to that velocity. Dragging something so that part of it (whether part of an object or a frame in a hierarchy, as the patent references) has been around a lot longer than this patent.
Any prior art that allows moving a pane around inside a more limited space would be applicable, and any prior art that has any kind of momentum to scrolling would also, since that's what Apple's products are actually doing.
Whether it's with a mouse, touch interface, trackpad, touchpad, really doesn't make any difference. It's well known in the field ("patently obvious") that such devices are all equivalent in basic behavior, even if some allow different types of modifiers (left and right clicks on a mouse; multi-touch on a touch interface, for example). This patent doesn't go beyond the simple use of a pointing device, and that's been around since the 60's at least, including the idea of dragging versus activating based on movement of the "activated" pointer.
It wasn't called "e-mail" (nor even EMAIL), but PLATO's electronic mail system (called pnotes, for Personal Notes, as opposed to the forum-style General Notes, which the Unix "notes" program was modeled after) certainly had a "graphical user interface". I first saw it in 1974.
The problem is that they're trying to sell the "print" books for only a slight discount as an e-book.
So you end up with two completely separate sets of books: overpriced e-books, so not very many sales in that format compared to print format; and inexpensive e-books that aren't even available in print because they figure it isn't worth printing them. Of course you're going to get completely different titles selling in the two formats.
I'd get Reamde for Nook but it's too expensive. I'd pay maybe $4-5 at most for something that I can't re-sell and is tied to a device that may not be available in a few years, locked to a company that may go out of business some day. In 50 years, will I be able to pull out my copy of it and say "oh yeah, that was a fun read, maybe I'll read it again."... ? But they want $15 for it. No way.
It isn't Netflix or Microsoft paying for the higher bandwidth, it's the end user.
It sounds like the API is to allow the program to specify which packets are higher priority since each packet delivered at high priority will cost a bit more. Anyone can build the ability into their programs, and it's the end user who will end up paying more on their bill (which means the program ought to have the higher priority as an option).
I want to see fair queuing algorithms used by ISPs, and stop charging by the amount of data. Give higher priority (without charging extra) for a short burst when there's been little or no traffic from a device for a while (a few minutes), throttle down normal priority traffic only if needed. Throttle to a specific threshold such that around 80% of available bandwidth is being used, and so that anyone using less than that threshold doesn't see any effect at all.
Well, if the firmware upgrade process is looking for a CD or DVD drive, it seems unlikely you can trigger it based on what file system you put on some other device, and it might even work if you had a FAT-32 file system on the CD.
That's why this article doesn't make any sense, why would a format of choice be an ISO file system image? Apple's disk-image format allows for a (optionally compressed and/or encrypted) file system image using any file system the OS supports, so you can mount an ISO, UFS, FAT (of various flavors), HFS (of various flavors) and probably NTFS and a few other formats.
A disk-image file has been the standard way of distributing software for Mac OS X since practically the beginning. Most of them open up a disk window with the application and an alias to the Applications folder, with a folder image with an arrow showing you to drag the application to the Application folder. That's all it takes to install something (and a lot of stuff works just by double-clicking the application ON the mounted disk). Stuff that needs a more complicated install process typically has an installer package, possibly a Readme file.
Practically anything you can do with a real device you can do with a disk image, simply using the standard Disk Utility program, e.g. repartition or repair a file system, restore to or from, etc. All it does is create a loop device and use that.
There's nothing special about an ISO file system, certainly nothing that makes it desirable as an installation method. There's no reason you can't put a standard partition map (of your choice, MBR, GUID, Apple Partition Map) and any file system you want on a CD or DVD, and any reasonable operating system will be happy to mount it (and any reasonable firmware will allow you to boot off of it, including the firmware update process).
The only time that would cause a problem is if the rules for DST change between when you set the alarm and when it goes off (and part of the process of changing the rules would be to go through future date/times and flag ones that would change so someone can determine if they should be modified - they could also be stored with the original time value (i.e. what specific timezone was indicated on entry, whether it was implicit or explicit).
When you set an alarm for a future date, the interpretation of the time zone would be based on the date of the alarm, not on the current time, same for displaying times where the DST state of the future date is different from the current date.
How you display times in different time zones is something for a user preference setting - should they be shown using your own timezone (including DST rules based on the date of the time), or should they be shown as local time for the other time zone. Both make sense for different reasons and circumstances.
Remember, you can always set your default time zone to be UTC if you want to completely eliminate time zones and DST for yourself.
DST really isn't that difficult either. Internally, everything should simply run on UTC, display time is a simple offset from that. Whether that offset is fixed for a specific geographic location or changes by an hour is mostly irrelevant to the issue. The ONLY problem it causes is the one hour that's impossible and the one hour that's ambiguous for any particular time zone at the switch time.
I'd have no problem with DST going away, I think people should just adjust their schedule (e.g. schools can change start times depending on the season, if that's important), and not having everyone go to work from 8AM to 5PM would be a good thing overall. All of the conventions of "lunch hours" and such are fairly arbitrary anyway, few people care when local high noon is for basing when their meals are.
But local time zones are going to always make sense as long as people have circadian rhythms that adjust to the daylight cycle. Calculating that people tend to get up at 4am UTC, have lunch around 9am-11am, and that it's too late to call at 7pm, is no more difficult than figuring out that at 7am your time it's 6pm their time. In fact, without a timezone, you'd still have to identify the time difference somehow. You'd probably call them "time zones".
If you think time zones and DST are confusing, wait until we have interplanetary travel. Just HOPE we don't ever get instantaneous communications, the different day and year cycles alone will drive everyone crazy.
That's why Best Buy sells it as a bundle, with the software pre-loaded onto a microSD card. If you're clued in, you could buy the raw device, buy the storage cards, download the software and save yourself $100. Otherwise Best Buy makes an extra $50 or so.
There are plenty of Linux distributions that have essentially automatic software updating mechanisms, as well as managing what software you want on it (including automatic download/install of the ones you want to add). Someone could probably make some money selling inexpensive subscriptions to a store/update service for people who don't want to bother learning about other sources.
I don't think a loss-leader hardware platform is going to work at this point, unless it's so cheap it's practically free ( $50), or the supplied software is absolutely fantastic and locked to the hardware.
I don't think the touchpads would have flown off the shelves as fast if they couldn't have other software loaded on them. With no support from HP, no one is going to buy something with no support, no upgrades, no bug fixes, unless they're pretty confident they can put something else on it fairly easily.
Give me a tablet with GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, multi-touch hi-res screen, 802.11n, bluetooth, perhaps an infrared interface, a dock/USB connector for anything else (perhaps including external video), a microSD slot for boot/system software, and two standard SD slots (one for user data, including all settings; the other for importing data (e.g. camera card) or doing backups). No built-in storage, microSD stores all the system software plus whatever apps you want to put there. I guarantee you that there will be software to put on it if you sell the raw device (only firmware needed is what's necessary for initial boot off of the microSD card).
If you can sell the raw device for $200 or less, with no software development, no software support costs, I think it will sell like crazy. You'll be able to buy a microSD card pre-loaded with a system for it, add in another SD card and you're ready to go - Best Buy could sell it as a package for $300, make money off of it, and still sell tons of them.
Slashdot Mirror
If the source code is available on the same server as the binary distribution, that counts as "accompany" for the purposes of clause (a).
Providing a web link is sufficient, but only as a "written offer" (the link is the specific means of fulfilling that offer). That means that specific source snapshot must be made available for at least three years.
The easiest way to comply is to simply make sure the sources are available, directly, at the same time, from the same server, as the binary, at the time the binary is distributed (i.e. downloaded).
That does mean that someone who downloads the binary without having snagged a copy of the corresponding source is not allowed to re-distribute the binary (unless it also came with a "written offer"), since they can't comply with clause (c) in that case. That is fairly deliberate on the part of the FSF, to avoid having a glut of random versions of binaries without matching source.
You can sell your program for any price you can get people to pay for it.
If you aren't distributing the source along with the binary, then you must provide the source (that specific version of it) to anyone who asks, for the (physical) cost of distributing it, for a period of three years.
It seems like it's more hassle than it's worth to verify that someone has bought the app before sending them a copy of the source code, especially since you can't control what they do with that source code afterwords. Just put it up someplace and leave it there for three years, then remove it. Include a link to where you can download the source (in the program you sell), seems like it would be much less of a hassle for you, and isn't going to result in any fewer sales of your app (in fact, may lead to higher sales, and less of a chance someone will take your version and sell a competing version just to punish you).
You could say that the person who won't pay the (low) price of your app in order to get you to send them a copy of the source is being cheap and silly, since they can then re-post the source code for everyone else in the world who wanted a copy but didn't want to pay you anything, but not having an official copy of the source code is actually an issue from a "software freedom" standpoint - someone who gets a copy of the app and wants to get a copy of the source code (whether to extend it, fix a bug, move it to a new platform, whatever) might not be able to find that specific version somewhere else, and certainly shouldn't HAVE to.
Google OUGHT to have an option, for open source software, to allow you to download the source code at the same time as the binary is purchased. Then the distribution clause (a) is satisfied and you don't have to worry about maintaining a specific snapshot of source code and keep it available for three years.
That's a design patent, which really has little to do with "real" patents. It's closer to a trademark than a normal patent.
The reference to PLATO using vertical touch screens is mostly irrelevant. Yes, they were touch screens. Very low resolution, a 16 x 16 grid on a 512 x 512 resolution monochrome plasma display. No dragging. No double-tapping or holding. No "multi-touch". Simply a single touch at a single location, using infrared sensors.
As there was no mouse at the time, it was the only way to directly interact with the screen. Touch or keyboard. It also wasn't really used that much except for instructional material aimed at younger kids who couldn't type very well or public display terminals, and occasionally as an alternate input method (e.g. tap the line OR hit a number key).
Using a vertical display touch screen is fine if it's very low resolution like that, especially the frequency of use is fairly low. I find that with my iPad on the dock, the two biggest problems are trying to do ANY sort of gestural control (dragging, two-finger squeeze/compress/rotate, double-tap, etc) and that often it's my fingernail that's the only thing actually able to hit the screen, and that often doesn't provide enough to register. Trying to bend my finger backwards, or rotate my finger so the pad points upwards, is very awkward and unnatural and fatiguing.
The way to handle this at the link layer is to have a way to indicate that a packet should be given a higher level of effort to deliver it correctly (i.e. that if the link layer can't deliver it, the layers above it will be retransmitting it anyway, so go ahead and spend whatever extra resources are appropriate given that hint).
See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2597 and its follow up http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3260 for example.
This type of handling is just another type of QoS and needs to be handled at each link, making it end-to-end is inappropriate.
You continue aging, you're still susceptible to injury and disease, you simply can't die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithonus
Why would you think mental fitness isn't part of what's being talked about? Of COURSE that has to be part of what it means. It's about eliminating aging, which includes mental decline as well as other health issues.
So, the proper question is: how long do you want to live, in good physical and mental health?
Sign me up for at least 500 years, please, then ask me again in 400.
Calibre is wonderful, it converts between many different e-book formats (and manages them, i.e. you have ONE entry for a book, even if there are multiple formats), it is VERY flexible, and it knows about a whole heck of a lot of different e-readers and how to transfer to them. Just plug your reader into your computer, select what you want to transfer and click one button.
On my Nook, it knows about both the built-in memory and the microSD card (if you have one installed) and can transfer to either one. It will also show you which books are already on the device or card.
I got a Nook, in part because I get great service from B&N in a real store nearby, but I just recently took a look at the Kobo e-ink reader. The reader appears to be very similar to the Nook Simple Touch, and I like Kobo's philosophy of being able to read your books on whatever device you want. They seem to have a very good catalog of books as well, including a lot of free books. They have a mix of DRM-free and DRM-encumbered books.
While B&N doesn't explicitly have read-anywhere as a philosophy, as a practical matter you can read them with a wide variety of devices and apps. Besides the Nook app available for iOS, Android, PC and Mac, they can also be read on e-book readers that support third-party Adobe DRM, an example is the Bluefire reader on iPad. B&N also has an extremely large catalog.
I'm not a big fan of DRM, but as a practical matter we have to live with it for now, and Adobe is the de facto standard. Both Kobo and B&N use Adobe DRM, in slightly different ways. One thing this allows is borrowing books from the library, it's relatively simple to do for my Nook, and should be just as easy to do for the Kobo e-reader.
My Nook will easily go for a month between charges reading for a couple hours a day; a bit less if a lot of that is with the Glow Light on, but enough that I don't need to bring a charger along on vacation.
I have a Nook, which I love. It also doesn't do PDFs very well.
However, there's a great free app, Calibre, which will manage your e-book collection on your computer and does a great job of converting between formats. I just convert PDFs to epub format and then I don't have any problems with them any more (though it probably wouldn't work very well if the PDF is just a scanned image).
The advantage of the Nook Simple Touch, the Kindle e-ink reader, or the Kobo reader is that a battery charge lasts forever. Even the new Nook Glowlight doesn't chew up the battery (and you only turn the light on when you need it; it's very effective even at very low setting).
I like the Nook because it has a microSD slot (I think it takes up to 32GB), and it will boot off the external card without having to modify the firmware at all. You can also easily replace the built-in firmware, then restore it later (assuming you backed it up!). It's also VERY light.
Not sure of the others, but the Nook has 802.11b/g/n (only does the 2.4GHz n though).
It's MY router, I bought it. and it's not some quasi-goods digital product. This is a physical item.
The firmware remains the property of the company. It's software. Therefore, you don't own it. Of course, without firmware, it's useless, but I doubt you'll get many judges to sign on with the idea that you own the firmware too. Thank you copyright law.
No, but you do own a COPY of that firmware. You OWN it, just as you own a book. You don't own the software itself, just as you don't own the words in the book, but you own the copy.
I don't see anywhere in copyright law that says they're allowed to change my hardware (which includes the specific configuration of atoms, electrons and protons that form the firmware) without permission. A lock company may own the patents on a lock, but that doesn't give them the right to sneak in some day and modify your lock, perhaps re-keying it to allow for a master key that they control.
In the Apple App Store or iTunes, they show a Cloud to mean you've purchased something but it isn't on your computer, so you can download it from "The Cloud". Now, what the heck some curly lines have to do with a server farm connected over a network that eventually gets to me through a complex radio-wave system I'm not sure...wait, aren't clouds obsolete yet?
I've also seen a "cloud with arrow pointing to it" to mean "Save". Wait, an "arrow"? Weren't those pointy things that were used to kill animals and people and win archery contests? What do those have to do with "Save"? In 10 years, when the whole concept of "The Cloud" has been dead for a while, will such an icon even make any sense at all (maybe it will make more sense to put up a square with grid marks in it, to represent "The Matrix").
Let's get rid of arrows completely while we're at it, how many people still use arrows in every day life, and what do they have to do with directions anyway?
Maybe HE doesn't work on his car, but plenty of people do, and plenty of people work on other stuff that requires wrenches and other tools (that's what I take that to mean, "tools" to adjust things with). Gears? Ok, you got me, not sure what that has to do with settings, but then it NEVER made sense, why change now, it's a fairly recent bit of iconography.
Bookmarks? They're marks. You make them in books. Even E-books. Ok, maybe they don't need to look like ribbons. Then again, I've rarely used an actual ribbon as a bookmark in a real book anyway, it's usually a strip of cardboard with some advertising on it. A ribbon is just fine, thank you. Maybe you could make them look like brass points (I know someone who still uses those to mark pages). As for using "bookmark" to mean a URL you want to save, that never really made any sense either, other than in a very generic "place holder" sense. The Internet isn't a book, and you aren't marking anything, you're saving a URL in a list.
Radio buttons? Only programmers call them "radio buttons", who cares? Call them mutex-dots for all I care. How about "button"? You going to stop calling graphical areas where you activate something a "button"? At some point, the thing becomes the icon, it's called a button because that's what a button is, and what it has to do with keeping your shirt on and your pants up, I don't know.
And calendars. As long as we have days grouped as weeks, months and years, you'll have calendars to help you figure it out, and it's probably going to continue to remain looking pretty similar to the way a paper calendar has always looked, so an icon representing it represents the electronic version just as much as it represents the paper version.
We talk about someone's e-mail address all the time, isn't that what you store in an address book? Again, the thing becomes the symbol. I mean, the Apple icon for Address Book is a pretty generic looking book with an @ on the cover. Ok, it has little tabs sticking out. Oh, wait, so does the actual program, maybe the icon represents THE PROGRAM, not an "obsolete" physical address book.
Might as well stop calling it e-mail if you're that anti-old-fashioned, i never did like that term, anyway. We called them "pnotes" on PLATO, for "Personal Notes" (as opposed to gnotes, General Notes, for a forum file, which were stored in "notesfiles". We also had "votefiles" for doing polls and such, just like Slashdot Polls, only 15-20 years earlier).
Actually, records were called "records" because they were used to record sound. The word "record" (both as a verb and noun") has been around a lot long than the phonograph (which literally means to "write sounds"). Oh, wait, "write"? An icon of a pen or pencil? What's that?
Well, "Save" in MacOS Lion now generally means "Save your work here, mark this as a version", i.e. checkpoint it. If you quit an application, it auto-saves, but previous versions are still available. Heck, if you shut down while apps are open, it doesn't ask you if you want to quit or save, it just auto-saves it, since you can always revert to an earlier version (or bring up both versions to compare them). It then auto-reopens everything when you start back up.
Actually, many places ARE starting to use a "cloud" symbol to mean various things. In the Apple App Store or iTunes, they show a Cloud to mean you've purchased something but it isn't on your computer, so you can download it from "The Cloud". Now, what the heck some curly lines have to do with a server farm connected over a network that eventually gets to me through a complex radio-wave system I'm not sure...wait, are clouds obsolete too?
I've also seen a "cloud with arrow pointing to it" to mean "Save". Wait, an "arrow"? Weren't those pointy things that were used to kill animals and people and win archery contests? What do those have to do with "Save"? In 10 years, when the whole concept of "The Cloud" has been dead for a while, will such an icon even make any sense at all (maybe it will make more sense to put up a square with grid marks in it, to represent "The Matrix").
Let's get rid of arrows completely while we're at it, how many people still use arrows in every day life, and what do they have to do with directions anyway?
Not really. The article is emphasizing that a "mistake" is what lead to human intelligence. ALL changes to the genome are "mistakes", it's not some exciting new concept.
Now, if the article was emphasizing that a SINGLE change to a gene was responsible for changing the brain so significantly that it enabled all the other smaller changes that are responsible for what we are now, then you might have a point, but you have to get more than halfway through the article before they even start to get on track with what the referenced paper was really about, not this breathless "oooh, mistakes were made, and they were GOOD, isn't that amazing?".
It's just poor writing.
I was thinking about this as I read the claims. Is there a difference between a system that has a velocity threshold that, when exceeded, does something different, and a system that has a velocity threshold that, when not exceeded does something different? Logically, they're the same thing, legally I'm not so sure.
Specifically, the behavior of any reasonable touchscreen behavior that includes dragging at all is that movement below a certain threshold is a touch, not a drag, anything else is a drag, not a touch. In addition, that threshold could be either magnitude or velocity, and probably works better if it isn't velocity anyway.
I haven't seen any Apple products that behave the way the claims are written. Dragging, then releasing while moving, imparts some momentum to the motion, but there's no threshold to that velocity. Dragging something so that part of it (whether part of an object or a frame in a hierarchy, as the patent references) has been around a lot longer than this patent.
Any prior art that allows moving a pane around inside a more limited space would be applicable, and any prior art that has any kind of momentum to scrolling would also, since that's what Apple's products are actually doing.
Whether it's with a mouse, touch interface, trackpad, touchpad, really doesn't make any difference. It's well known in the field ("patently obvious") that such devices are all equivalent in basic behavior, even if some allow different types of modifiers (left and right clicks on a mouse; multi-touch on a touch interface, for example). This patent doesn't go beyond the simple use of a pointing device, and that's been around since the 60's at least, including the idea of dragging versus activating based on movement of the "activated" pointer.
It wasn't called "e-mail" (nor even EMAIL), but PLATO's electronic mail system (called pnotes, for Personal Notes, as opposed to the forum-style General Notes, which the Unix "notes" program was modeled after) certainly had a "graphical user interface". I first saw it in 1974.
The problem is that they're trying to sell the "print" books for only a slight discount as an e-book.
So you end up with two completely separate sets of books: overpriced e-books, so not very many sales in that format compared to print format; and inexpensive e-books that aren't even available in print because they figure it isn't worth printing them. Of course you're going to get completely different titles selling in the two formats.
I'd get Reamde for Nook but it's too expensive. I'd pay maybe $4-5 at most for something that I can't re-sell and is tied to a device that may not be available in a few years, locked to a company that may go out of business some day. In 50 years, will I be able to pull out my copy of it and say "oh yeah, that was a fun read, maybe I'll read it again." ... ? But they want $15 for it. No way.
It isn't Netflix or Microsoft paying for the higher bandwidth, it's the end user.
It sounds like the API is to allow the program to specify which packets are higher priority since each packet delivered at high priority will cost a bit more. Anyone can build the ability into their programs, and it's the end user who will end up paying more on their bill (which means the program ought to have the higher priority as an option).
I want to see fair queuing algorithms used by ISPs, and stop charging by the amount of data. Give higher priority (without charging extra) for a short burst when there's been little or no traffic from a device for a while (a few minutes), throttle down normal priority traffic only if needed. Throttle to a specific threshold such that around 80% of available bandwidth is being used, and so that anyone using less than that threshold doesn't see any effect at all.
Well, if the firmware upgrade process is looking for a CD or DVD drive, it seems unlikely you can trigger it based on what file system you put on some other device, and it might even work if you had a FAT-32 file system on the CD.
That's why this article doesn't make any sense, why would a format of choice be an ISO file system image? Apple's disk-image format allows for a (optionally compressed and/or encrypted) file system image using any file system the OS supports, so you can mount an ISO, UFS, FAT (of various flavors), HFS (of various flavors) and probably NTFS and a few other formats.
A disk-image file has been the standard way of distributing software for Mac OS X since practically the beginning. Most of them open up a disk window with the application and an alias to the Applications folder, with a folder image with an arrow showing you to drag the application to the Application folder. That's all it takes to install something (and a lot of stuff works just by double-clicking the application ON the mounted disk). Stuff that needs a more complicated install process typically has an installer package, possibly a Readme file.
Practically anything you can do with a real device you can do with a disk image, simply using the standard Disk Utility program, e.g. repartition or repair a file system, restore to or from, etc. All it does is create a loop device and use that.
There's nothing special about an ISO file system, certainly nothing that makes it desirable as an installation method. There's no reason you can't put a standard partition map (of your choice, MBR, GUID, Apple Partition Map) and any file system you want on a CD or DVD, and any reasonable operating system will be happy to mount it (and any reasonable firmware will allow you to boot off of it, including the firmware update process).
The only time that would cause a problem is if the rules for DST change between when you set the alarm and when it goes off (and part of the process of changing the rules would be to go through future date/times and flag ones that would change so someone can determine if they should be modified - they could also be stored with the original time value (i.e. what specific timezone was indicated on entry, whether it was implicit or explicit).
When you set an alarm for a future date, the interpretation of the time zone would be based on the date of the alarm, not on the current time, same for displaying times where the DST state of the future date is different from the current date.
How you display times in different time zones is something for a user preference setting - should they be shown using your own timezone (including DST rules based on the date of the time), or should they be shown as local time for the other time zone. Both make sense for different reasons and circumstances.
Remember, you can always set your default time zone to be UTC if you want to completely eliminate time zones and DST for yourself.
DST really isn't that difficult either. Internally, everything should simply run on UTC, display time is a simple offset from that. Whether that offset is fixed for a specific geographic location or changes by an hour is mostly irrelevant to the issue. The ONLY problem it causes is the one hour that's impossible and the one hour that's ambiguous for any particular time zone at the switch time.
I'd have no problem with DST going away, I think people should just adjust their schedule (e.g. schools can change start times depending on the season, if that's important), and not having everyone go to work from 8AM to 5PM would be a good thing overall. All of the conventions of "lunch hours" and such are fairly arbitrary anyway, few people care when local high noon is for basing when their meals are.
But local time zones are going to always make sense as long as people have circadian rhythms that adjust to the daylight cycle. Calculating that people tend to get up at 4am UTC, have lunch around 9am-11am, and that it's too late to call at 7pm, is no more difficult than figuring out that at 7am your time it's 6pm their time. In fact, without a timezone, you'd still have to identify the time difference somehow. You'd probably call them "time zones".
If you think time zones and DST are confusing, wait until we have interplanetary travel. Just HOPE we don't ever get instantaneous communications, the different day and year cycles alone will drive everyone crazy.
That's why Best Buy sells it as a bundle, with the software pre-loaded onto a microSD card. If you're clued in, you could buy the raw device, buy the storage cards, download the software and save yourself $100. Otherwise Best Buy makes an extra $50 or so.
There are plenty of Linux distributions that have essentially automatic software updating mechanisms, as well as managing what software you want on it (including automatic download/install of the ones you want to add). Someone could probably make some money selling inexpensive subscriptions to a store/update service for people who don't want to bother learning about other sources.
I don't think a loss-leader hardware platform is going to work at this point, unless it's so cheap it's practically free ( $50), or the supplied software is absolutely fantastic and locked to the hardware.
I don't think the touchpads would have flown off the shelves as fast if they couldn't have other software loaded on them. With no support from HP, no one is going to buy something with no support, no upgrades, no bug fixes, unless they're pretty confident they can put something else on it fairly easily.
Give me a tablet with GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, multi-touch hi-res screen, 802.11n, bluetooth, perhaps an infrared interface, a dock/USB connector for anything else (perhaps including external video), a microSD slot for boot/system software, and two standard SD slots (one for user data, including all settings; the other for importing data (e.g. camera card) or doing backups). No built-in storage, microSD stores all the system software plus whatever apps you want to put there. I guarantee you that there will be software to put on it if you sell the raw device (only firmware needed is what's necessary for initial boot off of the microSD card).
If you can sell the raw device for $200 or less, with no software development, no software support costs, I think it will sell like crazy. You'll be able to buy a microSD card pre-loaded with a system for it, add in another SD card and you're ready to go - Best Buy could sell it as a package for $300, make money off of it, and still sell tons of them.