And haven't they sued before for things just a frivilous.
Apple, like any major corporation has a long history of such legal actions. Pineapple Computers (an Apple II clone). Apple Records suing Apple Computers. Etc.
I think that if you look at IBM, Microsoft, Intel etc. they all have a long history of this sort of stuff.
The patent system was screwed up since inception. It is a flawed idea that can never be perfected.
Yes. But that could be said of every single thing man has attempted throughout all of history.
The issue is not whether the patent system is perfect, or can be perfected. The issue is whether or not the result is an improvement over the available alternatives.
Now, what do you propose as an alternative, and what are the benefits and drawbacks compared to the current system?
My feeling is that unless you take the trouble of building a prototype
There used to be a requirement for a prototype of the invention which was dropped around 1880 for a variety of reasons. There is even a museum preserving some of these models.
http://www.patentmodel.org/models.html
The fact is that this requirement would not solve any problems related to blocking patents etc. - all the patent applicant would have to do is to build something that demonstrated his idea.
There is nothing wrong with obtaining a patent on something you have no intention of producing. The fact of the matter is that there are many great sources of legitimate innovation that operate exactly this way. Biotechnology companies that build a new drug and then sell it to pharmaceuticals to manufacture and market. Universities that obtain patents on technologies invented in their labs, and then sell the patents to industrials to realize their commercial potential. Research consortia set up to develop new technologies and then license them back to the companies who fund the consortia.
The list of these sorts of operations is long, and quite distinguished. There is a tremendous amount of legitimate innovation that results from companies and individuals being able to patent results of research and development, and license the patents to companies whose strength is manufacturing, not innovation.
The real issue with the 'inventions' described in the article is that they are really not inventions, but rather obvious combinations of technologies already released to the public. Most of these patents should have never been granted.
Patents exist for the sole purpose of encouraging technological development by rewarding innovation.
To some extent that is true, however from a legal perspective a patent is really an agreement to publish a description of your invention in exchange for a right to bar others from practicing the invention for a period of time.
Note that owning a patent does not necessarily give you the right to practice it - your patent could be an improvement on a technology patented by somebody else.
The headlines and the first few paragraphs of the news articles about the investigations certainly implied that...
I would certainly like to see an actual link that states this. As far as I can determine the NORC report (which is the most thorough post-mortem investigation I have seen) clearly states that Bush would have won under Florida election law in place at the time of the election in either a selective recount in Democratic precincts OR in a statewide recount.
NORC makes comments about ballot design errors and so on that probably cost Gore the election, and what would have happened under different counting scenarios, etc., and I will buy the idea that more Floridians intended to vote for Gore than Bush, and maybe a recount process that included a change in Florida law to include overvotes would have happened, but that's a different argument.
So now you want to move into the realm of market cap?
Oh, excellent - flamebait AND ad-hominem attacks. Not to mention you failed to notice that the original post regarding market cap wasn't from me, and was BEFORE your rebuttal on share price.
Your posting style is probably the MOST OBNOXIOUS I have ever seen on Slashdot.
That certainly would be interesting since the scaling from 4 -> 32 CPUs was pretty much linear. The scaling past 32 CPUs would have to be really abysmal for the Linux machine to fail to exceed 707k TPM on a 64 CPU machine.
It is also very interesting to see that Intel got a lot of improvement from their own compiler rather than GCC.
actually, post-mortem recounts of the entire state show that Gore would have won had the entire state been recounted
I don't think that is correct. The most creditable study I have seen is the NORC report which shows that a statewide recount under then operating Florida law would have resulted in Bush still winning.
That doesn't take into account stuff like butterfly ballot problems, claims of other irregularities, etc. that may have given the election to Gore if things had been different. Those are factors that didn't turn into countable votes and thus would not have shown up in a recount.
what good is the Centrino being just as fast at 2/3 the clockspeed if the P4 still has enough headroom to (say) quadruple it's clockspeed and the Centrino only has enough headroom to double it ?
A lot of good given issues like power consumption and heat generation.
You also have to take into account share dillution too.
Depends on your perspective. If you are interested in the market cap of the company, total number of shares x market price indicates the valuation of the company is 12x what it was in 1987. If you are interested in shareholder return, then the number is 4x.
Either way it shows that the original post is totally off-base.
AAPL currently sits at a price it first set in 1987!
Yah, if you neglect the fact that AAPL split twice during this period of time, the price is the same. In actuality the value of a share of stock purchased in 1987 is 4 times higher today.
but at a certain point wouldn't you want clock speed over architecture ?
No. Intel has shown that you can sacrifice too much chasing clock speed in the case of the P4. Look at the Centrino - the same performance of the P4M at 2/3 the clock speed.
With the G5 we are talking about a 64 bit CPU with clock speeds in the 1.2 - 1.8 GHz range. This is in fact quite competitive just on a clock speed basis with current 64 bit designs from AMD and Intel.
Didn't the Microsoft case collapse? And didn't Al Gore loose his case?
If you look at the part of the Microsoft case that Boies was involved in, Boies clearly won. Microsoft was found to be a monopoly, and have acted illegally. The judge in the case went so far as to recommend that Microsoft be broken up. Even more telling he clearly embarrassed Microsoft's attorneys a number of times during the trial. Of course, the settlement turned out to be far less than a breakup, but that was more due to the DofJ caving during negotiations with MS than anything Boies did. And that finding of MS being a monopoly is going to affect MS for a long time in a variety of ways in other litigation.
In the case of Al Gore's electiion challenge, Boies did lose. While I am not at all a fan of Dubya I think that in retrospect it was a reasonable outcome to a very difficult situation. Certainly post-mortem investigations showed that Bush probably did actually win the plurality of votes in Florida. Of course the fact that justice seems to have been served is purely accidental, and should be a warning that election processes are not robust enough in these close races.
To me the disappointing result was the Napster result. I would have thought that things like the Betamax case would have provided a good base to win this one. I do not at all agree with the idea that a particular technology should be blamed for the way it is used.
The other area of criticism of Boies that bears some scrutiny is that he was unethical during the Gore matter. This to me is the most severe issue of all. Of ourse I am sure SCO doesn't care about this.
The choice of lawyer for SCO may well have come down to the fact that they need someone to handle a very high profile technology/IP case on a contingency basis. It may have boiled down to Boies being the best available.
Anyone know what a metric buttload is in English/Imperial units?
Well, if you extrapolate from other similar naming conventions, i.e. 1.5 km = metric mile, 1000 kg = metric ton, the English/Imperial equivalent to the metric buttload would be..... the buttload.
According to my table of weights and measures the next largest weight is the shipload, which is about a million pounds.
You're right, Java can't compete with stuff like C++ for overall power.
The problem with C++ is that it cost twice as much to develop the same program in it, and it is far more likely to have memory leaks, double frees, stack overflows and so forth when you are done. Clearly the correct solution is to go low level only when you need max performance through external libraries that are hand optimized mixtures of assembly/C.
I find your argument regarding orthogonality to be unconvincing.
Operator overloading is not present in Java because of a design decision based on a pragmatic observation that operator overloading is a feature that does considerable damage to the the readability of source code. This is not some theoretical argument. It is based on real-world experience. You may make an argument that this is 'not the way it should be' and languages should not be designed to accomadate bad programmers, but the fact is that it is indeed the way it is.
Leaving out a feature because it is more misused than used properly is a quite defensible design decision.
The fact is that all languages contain compromises to accomodate 'bad programmers'. In fact you could argue that any language other than machine language is a compromise that accomodates bad programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Close examination of the giant black wave that was observed breaking over SCO headquarters Friday revealed that it was made up of billions of lawyers.
one fell swoop
No, no, NO! The phrase he is intending to use is
One Swell Foop.
And haven't they sued before for things just a frivilous.
Apple, like any major corporation has a long history of such legal actions. Pineapple Computers (an Apple II clone). Apple Records suing Apple Computers. Etc.
I think that if you look at IBM, Microsoft, Intel etc. they all have a long history of this sort of stuff.
Let's just fire the whole department and move/outsource our IT to India for 1/10th the cost!"
Right now the company I work for can get reasonable programming contractors on site for $30/hr. The Indian outsourcing firms want $25/hr.
Given the improved communications with the onsite programmers, we feel that outsourcing to India is too expensive.
The patent system was screwed up since inception. It is a flawed idea that can never be perfected.
Yes. But that could be said of every single thing man has attempted throughout all of history.
The issue is not whether the patent system is perfect, or can be perfected. The issue is whether or not the result is an improvement over the available alternatives.
Now, what do you propose as an alternative, and what are the benefits and drawbacks compared to the current system?
My feeling is that unless you take the trouble of building a prototype
There used to be a requirement for a prototype of the invention which was dropped around 1880 for a variety of reasons. There is even a museum preserving some of these models.
http://www.patentmodel.org/models.html
The fact is that this requirement would not solve any problems related to blocking patents etc. - all the patent applicant would have to do is to build something that demonstrated his idea.
There is nothing wrong with obtaining a patent on something you have no intention of producing. The fact of the matter is that there are many great sources of legitimate innovation that operate exactly this way. Biotechnology companies that build a new drug and then sell it to pharmaceuticals to manufacture and market. Universities that obtain patents on technologies invented in their labs, and then sell the patents to industrials to realize their commercial potential. Research consortia set up to develop new technologies and then license them back to the companies who fund the consortia.
The list of these sorts of operations is long, and quite distinguished. There is a tremendous amount of legitimate innovation that results from companies and individuals being able to patent results of research and development, and license the patents to companies whose strength is manufacturing, not innovation.
The real issue with the 'inventions' described in the article is that they are really not inventions, but rather obvious combinations of technologies already released to the public. Most of these patents should have never been granted.
Patents exist for the sole purpose of encouraging technological development by rewarding innovation.
To some extent that is true, however from a legal perspective a patent is really an agreement to publish a description of your invention in exchange for a right to bar others from practicing the invention for a period of time.
Note that owning a patent does not necessarily give you the right to practice it - your patent could be an improvement on a technology patented by somebody else.
The headlines and the first few paragraphs of the news articles about the investigations certainly implied that...
I would certainly like to see an actual link that states this. As far as I can determine the NORC report (which is the most thorough post-mortem investigation I have seen) clearly states that Bush would have won under Florida election law in place at the time of the election in either a selective recount in Democratic precincts OR in a statewide recount.
NORC makes comments about ballot design errors and so on that probably cost Gore the election, and what would have happened under different counting scenarios, etc., and I will buy the idea that more Floridians intended to vote for Gore than Bush, and maybe a recount process that included a change in Florida law to include overvotes would have happened, but that's a different argument.
So now you want to move into the realm of market cap?
Oh, excellent - flamebait AND ad-hominem attacks. Not to mention you failed to notice that the original post regarding market cap wasn't from me, and was BEFORE your rebuttal on share price.
Your posting style is probably the MOST OBNOXIOUS I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Maybe Linux scales poorly beyond 32 CPUs?
That certainly would be interesting since the scaling from 4 -> 32 CPUs was pretty much linear. The scaling past 32 CPUs would have to be really abysmal for the Linux machine to fail to exceed 707k TPM on a 64 CPU machine.
It is also very interesting to see that Intel got a lot of improvement from their own compiler rather than GCC.
actually, post-mortem recounts of the entire state show that Gore would have won had the entire state been recounted
I don't think that is correct. The most creditable study I have seen is the NORC report which shows that a statewide recount under then operating Florida law would have resulted in Bush still winning.
That doesn't take into account stuff like butterfly ballot problems, claims of other irregularities, etc. that may have given the election to Gore if things had been different. Those are factors that didn't turn into countable votes and thus would not have shown up in a recount.
what good is the Centrino being just as fast at 2/3 the clockspeed if the P4 still has enough headroom to (say) quadruple it's clockspeed and the Centrino only has enough headroom to double it ?
A lot of good given issues like power consumption and heat generation.
You also have to take into account share dillution too.
Depends on your perspective. If you are interested in the market cap of the company, total number of shares x market price indicates the valuation of the company is 12x what it was in 1987. If you are interested in shareholder return, then the number is 4x.
Either way it shows that the original post is totally off-base.
AAPL currently sits at a price it first set in 1987!
Yah, if you neglect the fact that AAPL split twice during this period of time, the price is the same. In actuality the value of a share of stock purchased in 1987 is 4 times higher today.
Whether or not this one is Firewire 800
It is not Firewire 800. Now, where are the Intel mobos with Firewire 800 and a 64 bit CPU, and 8x AGP?
Intel procs are all multi-proc capable/aware, so that data point is a bit behind.
Since when is a P4 multi-cpu capable?
but at a certain point wouldn't you want clock speed over architecture ?
No. Intel has shown that you can sacrifice too much chasing clock speed in the case of the P4. Look at the Centrino - the same performance of the P4M at 2/3 the clock speed.
With the G5 we are talking about a 64 bit CPU with clock speeds in the 1.2 - 1.8 GHz range. This is in fact quite competitive just on a clock speed basis with current 64 bit designs from AMD and Intel.
It's written in perl.
Then Linux is really scewed. No two perl programmers would write the same code to solve the same problem.
Didn't the Microsoft case collapse? And didn't Al Gore loose his case?
If you look at the part of the Microsoft case that Boies was involved in, Boies clearly won. Microsoft was found to be a monopoly, and have acted illegally. The judge in the case went so far as to recommend that Microsoft be broken up. Even more telling he clearly embarrassed Microsoft's attorneys a number of times during the trial. Of course, the settlement turned out to be far less than a breakup, but that was more due to the DofJ caving during negotiations with MS than anything Boies did. And that finding of MS being a monopoly is going to affect MS for a long time in a variety of ways in other litigation.
In the case of Al Gore's electiion challenge, Boies did lose. While I am not at all a fan of Dubya I think that in retrospect it was a reasonable outcome to a very difficult situation. Certainly post-mortem investigations showed that Bush probably did actually win the plurality of votes in Florida. Of course the fact that justice seems to have been served is purely accidental, and should be a warning that election processes are not robust enough in these close races.
To me the disappointing result was the Napster result. I would have thought that things like the Betamax case would have provided a good base to win this one. I do not at all agree with the idea that a particular technology should be blamed for the way it is used.
The other area of criticism of Boies that bears some scrutiny is that he was unethical during the Gore matter. This to me is the most severe issue of all. Of ourse I am sure SCO doesn't care about this.
The choice of lawyer for SCO may well have come down to the fact that they need someone to handle a very high profile technology/IP case on a contingency basis. It may have boiled down to Boies being the best available.
Anyone know what a metric buttload is in English/Imperial units?
Well, if you extrapolate from other similar naming conventions, i.e. 1.5 km = metric mile, 1000 kg = metric ton, the English/Imperial equivalent to the metric buttload would be..... the buttload.
According to my table of weights and measures the next largest weight is the shipload, which is about a million pounds.
You're right, Java can't compete with stuff like C++ for overall power.
The problem with C++ is that it cost twice as much to develop the same program in it, and it is far more likely to have memory leaks, double frees, stack overflows and so forth when you are done. Clearly the correct solution is to go low level only when you need max performance through external libraries that are hand optimized mixtures of assembly/C.
For me Pocket PC is totally off the map because I can't use it in conjunction with platforms other than Windows.
I find your argument regarding orthogonality to be unconvincing.
Operator overloading is not present in Java because of a design decision based on a pragmatic observation that operator overloading is a feature that does considerable damage to the the readability of source code. This is not some theoretical argument. It is based on real-world experience. You may make an argument that this is 'not the way it should be' and languages should not be designed to accomadate bad programmers, but the fact is that it is indeed the way it is.
Leaving out a feature because it is more misused than used properly is a quite defensible design decision.
The fact is that all languages contain compromises to accomodate 'bad programmers'. In fact you could argue that any language other than machine language is a compromise that accomodates bad programmers.
I can just see it now. pr0n and spam delivered right to my helmet.