There was an interesting sidebar to an article in Scientific American about a year ago describing a technique to hide data on a screen so that the user could not detect it's presence, yet the data could be picked up by Van Eck freaking.
Microsoft was funding a project to use this to put product serial numbers on the screen so they could drive a truck through an office park and pick out software pirates. Honest.
Re:Seriously hoping they perfect the installations
on
iBook boots Linux
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· Score: 2
They shafted Mac owners who should have been able to upgrade a G3 to a G4. Through a crippling OS upgade no less.
I wish people here would get over the misleading headlines on some of the stories here. The FACT of the matter is that there are already two companies that have workarounds for Apple's firmware G4 cripple, with more coming.
See http://www.powerlogix.com/ for more details.
Re:Consistency: Where's The Specs?
on
iBook boots Linux
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· Score: 2
Trust.
Trust is nice but I think many more people are going to like versions of Microsoft Office and Photoshop that run on top of a BSD based OS.
Re:Consistency: Where's The Specs?
on
iBook boots Linux
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· Score: 2
What I am interested in knowing is why anyone who had Mac OS X would have any interest in running Linux anyway. Soon after release people will start porting the open source stuff to Mac OS X, plus they will have Carbon plus all the legacy Mac apps. What does Linux offer? Just the open source stuff. The cost of OS X will be irrelevent because of the bundling that will go on.
So just what is the benefit of running Linux on a Mac after Mac OS X is out, anyway???
The thought that Apple's software interests(OSX) are causing specifications to be hidden about their hardware products(mmm...G4...) is mildly disturbing, to say the least.
What a load of crap. Just because Apple hasn't released the Technotes on the G4 hardware yet doesn't mean they won't. Nor does it have anything to do with OS X - all the G3s, iMac and iBook tech notes are out - these machines are just as likely to run OS X as the G4s.
Complaining about Microsoft becomes much more disturbing when you realize what any number of other software companies would do in their place...
What pipe were you smoking when you came up with that one? Apple is not a software company. Apple is in fact, a hardware company. If they were a software company they wouldn't care about clones and in fact would encourage them. But they can't because almost all their revenues and profits come from selling - hardware.
Can somebody explain to me why these things are so damn popular?
Not everybody needs 20 GB of hard disk space, a 15" LCD, a CPU that requires 3 fans, asbestos pants and a fuel cell to keep going more than 20 minutes. Not to mention the hassle of dealing with Winwhatever or GeekOS-es like Linux.
These things are competitively priced with hardware you would get from other major vendors, have plenty of horsepower for what most people use a computer for, have interesting styling, and are much easier to setup and use than the Wintel equivalents. They also have some very nice features that you won't find anywhere else, like a 6 hour battery life, and the Airport.
The fact that most slashdotters don't 'get it' as far as the iBook and iMac is concerned is no surprise. These machines aren't intended for the slashdot market.
What amazes me is how chauvanistic the response here is. Many people here can't seem to grasp the idea that because a computer doesn't statisfy their needs, it can't POSSIBLY be a good choice for anyone else, either.
The iMac and iBook are popular for the simple reason that they fit the needs of a lot of people. And don't listen to that BS about only Mac loyalists buying these things. Something over 50% of iMac buyers are first time Apple owners. I would expect for the iBook that percentage would even be higher.
Will I buy one? No. They don't fit my needs. But I am in the asbestos pants crowd. I'm one of the people who doesn't mind doing a Linux install on a state-of the art laptop, and all that implies - hacked X-Server+twiddling VGA modes in LILO.conf to get framebuffers to work, no sound support, kludging my way around BIOS and CardBus/PCMCIA compatability problems, etc. But is Jill the English major going to do this? No. She is going to buy an iBook.
is there even an altivec-enhanced version of mac os x server out yet?
I am not sure what an Altivec enhanced version of Mac OS X server would do any differently than a non-enhaced version.
How much code that would benefit from a vector processor is there in an OS anyway?
there isn't an altivec-enhanced gcc out yet, is there? why not? isn't apple using egcs for mac os x?
See my first comment.
now we just have to wait for G4 support to show up
There were a number of posting here a couple of weeks ago indicating that Linux was up and running on the G4 Macs.
As far as applications that take advantage of Altivec, (Photoshop, Halo, Quicktime) I imagine that they are being compiled with either a Motorola or Metrowerks compiler. If gcc/egcs support for Alitvec is going to come from someplace I imagine it would come from Motorola rather than Apple. AFAIK Apple hasn't done any compiler writing in a while.
It would be interesting to ask Moto if they have a gcc/ecgs compiler that supports Alitvec.
Google uses a new type of algorithm to rank the relevancy of pages based on how many other pages link to it. It's not just the fact that it runs under Linux - it's the result of a some pretty sophisticated new ideas on how to best search the web.
Check this out for more information in what is going on with search engines.
Every damn year, sometimes every damn quarter, some greed-impaired schmuck regurgitates the idea of conning users into perpetually paying for software.
How the hell is this any different from what M$ is doing now. Upgrade treadmill baby. To me this is the big advantage of Linux. I AM OFF THE TREADMILL!!
Amazingly, even end users recognize the scam for what it is and reject it every freaking time.
Yeah, but PHB's are vulnerable to the sales pitch.
Upgrades notwithstanding, you can buy MS Word and use it until the last x86 processor releases the magic smoke.
Interesting theory, but file format changes make this impractical. Buy MS and you are on the treadmill baby. No getting off until you fdisk.
Why the press and investors keep falling for this crap is beyond me.
The main reason is support costs. The initial cost of a PC with software is trivial compared to the support costs. The first guy who comes up with a way to eliminate support costs is going to end up MUCH richer than Bill Gates. Some people think remote hosted software is the way to do this.
In a case like this it might be worth filing a provisional patent application. This is an application without claims that can be filed at minimal cost in order to establish a record in the patent office. This can be later turned into a real patent application if you desire.
Provisional patents are rather new - perhaps since 1995 so many patent lawyers may not have experience with them. But it sonds like something that might be useful in this case.
Search engines may be getting smarter but by no means do they cover the net completely. Even worse, there is no control of the keywords. A PROFESSIONAL index will include controlling the list of keywords so you will know how to find something. There is no way this can be done on the web.
As far as scope, you have to realize that the goal of the EB is to cover a general body of knowledge completely as possible. With the internet there are large holes where there is no information at all. The Internet contains a tremendous amount of information on matters related to computers, however once you get off that topic and start looking at, say a comparison of greek language dialects you are very likely to come up with zilch on the internet.
What I do say is that along with all the crap out there, you can find primary sources
I think that the internet is very poor for anything to do with primary sources, or even high quality secondary sources. Very few scholarly journals are available on the internet, and certainly even fewer early sources.
The web has some serious flaws as a source of information. It is quite haphazard rather than being carefully reviewed for scope and completeness, it has terrible indexing, and most of the surces are not authorataive or reviewed.
It's going to be a long, long time before the web will replace a good library.
I'd point out the saga of G4 tends to show that a good PR show doesn't always lead to a successful product launch.
The G4 is a successful product launch, according to pre-order volume. How the 'reconfiguration' will affect this is anyone's guess. The iBook and new iMacs are also doing very well.
Apple Financial Results show a steady decline in international sales for the last 3 quarters.
Unfortunately your basis of comparison does not take into account the seasonal nature of the computer business.
If you do a year to year comparison Apple's international revenues have been up three out of the last four quarters.
Don't get me wrong, it's an important development. But the market which would benefit from OS X is the one Apple retreated from a long time ago.
Clearly the G4 boxes are not aimed at the consumer market, so it appears that Apple has in fact not retreated from all non-consumer markets. The actual fact of the matter is that Apple does have market niches that are still very performance demanding. For these users Mac OS X is very important.
The point of the build-to-order model is two-fold.
1) Minimize inventory to free up working capital. 2) Minimize delivery time
Apple has achieved objective 1 at the cost of failing objective #2. Not a successful story, I think.
Hmmm. I am not sure you can do both if you are revamping the product line as extensively as Apple is. To meet large initial demand you would need to build up large inventories, or have a large manufacturing capacity that would otherwise be idle. It seems to me that you may be asking for something that is impossible.
I remember the good old days, when if something appeared in academic literature, you were safe using it. This is really going to kill research.
One of the things that Biotech really changed is the appreciation by Universities of the value of their intellectual property. Nowadays universities are making a lot of money from patent licensing. When I was in school nobody cared about the potential commercial uses for your R&D. If you see an academic result in the literature now, you can bet that some university IP department examined it for patent potential, probably before that article was published.
Your statement about this killing research bothers me. Research isn't about copying somebody else's work; it's about finding a better way to do something, and to encourage it you must reward those that do find that way. Without patents all we would have is copying. You wouldn't be looking for a different algorithm for web page searching, you would just copy what Google did. And Google would have no protection for their invention, so they would have no incentive to invest money in the research process, or the process of bringing it to the web. And if they did commercialize it, you can bet they wouldn't be going around publishing in places like Scientific American how they did it.
Patents are essential to building the technology base. Without patents companies would never publish anything, restricting the free flow of ideas in society. Patents are a device to get inventors to reveal their technology in exchange for exclusive rights to that technology for 20 years. The value of this has been well established over the 200 year history of patents in the US - a patent system modeled after that of Great Britain, which was the home of the industrial revolution.
However this is not the same as stating that the Patent process we currently have is anywhere near perfect. I think that it is too easy to get a patent. Patent examiners are overworked, and not paid enough to attract real experts. Real reform is needed.
I know that you have invested in hardware already, but if I was going to do this I would have looked at something like WebTV and one of these dedicated word processors. The fact is you want appliances here, not a full blown computer. Computers of any type are unstable (yes, even Liunx - the first power failure that comes along could put the Linux box flat on it's ass). Second choice IMHO would have been an iMac. These things may crash once in a while but they have the best user interface, and don't suffer from registry corruption or fsck failures.
IANAL, but I do hold 10 patents so I have a bit of knowlwedge of how it works. From your description it sounds to me like Microsoft has a good patent. If nobody had used Bayesian networks in help systems before, they have at least two of the basic requirements to get a patent covered.
As far as Google goes, yes, they can patent the use of an algorithm to rank web pages. You can't patent an algorithm any more than you can patent any other natural law (i.e. gravity), but an application of an algorithm seems to me to be a pretty good topic for a patent. In reality it's the same idea as the Microsoft patent - you have a tricky technical problem, and come up with a slick way to solve it. In principle it's no different than the patent that was awarded for those little ramps that show down the bowling balls when they return to you at the front of the lane. Just because gravity is a well known phenomena doesn't mean the ramps aren't an invention.
If you look at patents, at the heart they describe a new application of an existing, well known scientific or mathematical principle. After all, this is what technology is. My first patent came from applying the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to a vapor-liquid equilibrium to develop a very sensitive temperature controller. I didn't invent Clausius Clapeyron, certainly, but I did invent a very effective temperature control system for a very difficult to handle situation.
The way patents are used in the late 90's is nothing like the way patents have been used over the previous 200 years. We are now facing patents on life forms, patents on business models, and patents on algorithms.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
As far as setting license fees at levels just short of the costs of litigation, this is nothing remarkably new. It was certainly common practice 25 years ago when I entered private industry.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes.
I think that is patently nonsense. The software industry was able to do without because opportunities were so huge and nothing was established at the start. Other industries live and die on patents. Biotech startups don't get funding without a patent review. Large consortia like Unipol are formed for the sole purpose of exploiting patent positions. Huge companies like UOP exist based on one thing - selling patented technology that they develop.
It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
The industrial revolution started in about 1730 with the invention of the cotton mill in England. One of the most famous US inventions, the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney around 1790.
Where do people get this stuff? Doesn't anyone have a clue as to how technology businesses in the US have operated for the past 200 years?
Dammit, For many years companies like Texas Instruments and UOP have gotten more of their profits by developing technologies and licensing them to other companies. Giant conglomerates like Unipol exist primarily to take advantage of patents developed in large consortia.
The idea that anything has changed in the hardware area over the past 20 years is ludicrous. The only thing that is different is that we have a new set of PHB's fresh out of Stanford Business School that need to be educated, and a bunch of impressionable journalists that have no education in this area.
Software patents are another ballgame altogether. The patent office is being far to lenient when it grants these things.
Go figure. Like in everything else related to Apple, their stock trends are REALLY weird.
It only looks weird because people here are focusing on what is really only a small part of what is going on at Apple:
1. Apple introduces several new lines of kick-butt products; iBook, iMac DTV, G4 Professional Boxes.
2. Apple announces higher than expected earnings and projections and that because of massive backorders they are going to have a blowout fourth quarter.
3. Apple announces unit shipments are targetted to be 40% higher next year, thus increasing market share.
4. Apple announces G4 supply problems - cannot deliver as many machines as users want to buy.
5. Apple announces Mac OS X preview due in spring.
6. Apple annonces inventory pipeline averaged TWO DAYS in 1999. Best in industry, better than even Dell.
The only one of these that is remotely negative is No. 4, and even that is a problem most businesses would really like to have.
Motorola knew that they weren't quite ready for full production, and warned Apple of that
Ummmm No, A lot of what Apple is doing is because of increased DRAM prices and the fact that Motorola sprung the 500 MHz bug on them. Niether of these are under Apple's control.
1. Apple will sell fewer of it's high margin machines thus lowering margins
Pure speculation. Most analysts feel that it will have no significant effect. See http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991016/tc/tech_a pple_2.html
"Wall Street analysts were mostly unfazed, saying they did not expect a big drop in customers or orders."
2. DRAM prices will hurt margins
DRAM prices were known at the time these estimates were made.
3. Finally, the $0.86 per share earnings is only a 60% increase over reduce estimates. Apple was originally projecting $0.76 per share earnings for Q4 '99.
That is still a nice increase in earnings estimates. My point remains - Apple will have a strong Christmas.
Christmas won't be as merry as expected in Cupertino, CA.
Not bloody likely. Apple has had big delivery problems this quarter with introducing three new product lines, the iBook, iMac TNG, and the G4's. There is TREMENDOUS pent up demand for these machines. Well over 500,000 back orders. As a result analysts are predicting that the Christmas season will be a huge blow out quarter for Apple despite some of the advertising and other expenses.
If you don't believe me take a look at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/z/a/a/aapl.html
Analysts are estimating 0.86 per share earnings, vs. net of 0.51 this quarter. This is a 60% INCREASE.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an interesting sidebar to an article in Scientific American about a year ago describing a technique to hide data on a screen so that the user could not detect it's presence, yet the data could be picked up by Van Eck freaking.
Microsoft was funding a project to use this to put product serial numbers on the screen so they could drive a truck through an office park and pick out software pirates. Honest.
They shafted Mac owners who should have been able to upgrade a G3 to a G4. Through a crippling OS upgade no less.
I wish people here would get over the misleading headlines on some of the stories here. The FACT of the matter is that there are already two companies that have workarounds for Apple's firmware G4 cripple, with more coming.
See http://www.powerlogix.com/ for more details.
Trust.
Trust is nice but I think many more people are going to like versions of Microsoft Office and Photoshop that run on top of a BSD based OS.
What I am interested in knowing is why anyone who had Mac OS X would have any interest in running Linux anyway. Soon after release people will start porting the open source stuff to Mac OS X, plus they will have Carbon plus all the legacy Mac apps. What does Linux offer? Just the open source stuff. The cost of OS X will be irrelevent because of the bundling that will go on.
So just what is the benefit of running Linux on a Mac after Mac OS X is out, anyway???
The thought that Apple's software interests(OSX) are causing specifications to be hidden about their hardware products(mmm...G4...) is mildly disturbing, to say the least.
What a load of crap. Just because Apple hasn't released the Technotes on the G4 hardware yet doesn't mean they won't. Nor does it have anything to do with OS X - all the G3s, iMac and iBook tech notes are out - these machines are just as likely to run OS X as the G4s.
Complaining about Microsoft becomes much more disturbing when you realize what any number of other software companies would do in their place...
What pipe were you smoking when you came up with that one? Apple is not a software company. Apple is in fact, a hardware company. If they were a software company they wouldn't care about clones and in fact would encourage them. But they can't because almost all their revenues and profits come from selling - hardware.
Can somebody explain to me why these things are so damn popular?
Not everybody needs 20 GB of hard disk space, a 15" LCD, a CPU that requires 3 fans, asbestos pants and a fuel cell to keep going more than 20 minutes. Not to mention the hassle of dealing with Winwhatever or GeekOS-es like Linux.
These things are competitively priced with hardware you would get from other major vendors, have plenty of horsepower for what most people use a computer for, have interesting styling, and are much easier to setup and use than the Wintel equivalents. They also have some very nice features that you won't find anywhere else, like a 6 hour battery life, and the Airport.
The fact that most slashdotters don't 'get it' as far as the iBook and iMac is concerned is no surprise. These machines aren't intended for the slashdot market.
What amazes me is how chauvanistic the response here is. Many people here can't seem to grasp the idea that because a computer doesn't statisfy their needs, it can't POSSIBLY be a good choice for anyone else, either.
The iMac and iBook are popular for the simple reason that they fit the needs of a lot of people. And don't listen to that BS about only Mac loyalists buying these things. Something over 50% of iMac buyers are first time Apple owners. I would expect for the iBook that percentage would even be higher.
Will I buy one? No. They don't fit my needs. But I am in the asbestos pants crowd. I'm one of the people who doesn't mind doing a Linux install on a state-of the art laptop, and all that implies - hacked X-Server+twiddling VGA modes in LILO.conf to get framebuffers to work, no sound support, kludging my way around BIOS and CardBus/PCMCIA compatability problems, etc. But is Jill the English major going to do this? No. She is going to buy an iBook.
is there even an altivec-enhanced version of mac os x server out yet?
I am not sure what an Altivec enhanced version of Mac OS X server would do any differently than a non-enhaced version.
How much code that would benefit from a vector processor is there in an OS anyway?
there isn't an altivec-enhanced gcc out yet, is there? why not? isn't apple using egcs for mac os x?
See my first comment.
now we just have to wait for G4 support to show up
There were a number of posting here a couple of weeks ago indicating that Linux was up and running on the G4 Macs.
As far as applications that take advantage of Altivec, (Photoshop, Halo, Quicktime) I imagine that they are being compiled with either a Motorola or Metrowerks compiler. If gcc/egcs support for Alitvec is going to come from someplace I imagine it would come from Motorola rather than Apple. AFAIK Apple hasn't done any compiler writing in a while.
It would be interesting to ask Moto if they have a gcc/ecgs compiler that supports Alitvec.
Google uses a new type of algorithm to rank the relevancy of pages based on how many other pages link to it. It's not just the fact that it runs under Linux - it's the result of a some pretty sophisticated new ideas on how to best search the web.
Check this out for more information in what is going on with search engines.
How many programs will require more then 1Ghz?
I am sure gamers will want these. Ditto anyone using software like Mathematica.
Which are two of my favorites.
Every damn year, sometimes every damn quarter, some greed-impaired schmuck regurgitates the idea of conning users into perpetually paying for software.
How the hell is this any different from what M$ is doing now. Upgrade treadmill baby. To me this is the big advantage of Linux. I AM OFF THE TREADMILL!!
Amazingly, even end users recognize the scam for what it is and reject it every freaking time.
Yeah, but PHB's are vulnerable to the sales pitch.
Upgrades notwithstanding, you can buy MS Word and use it until the last x86 processor releases the magic smoke.
Interesting theory, but file format changes make this impractical. Buy MS and you are on the treadmill baby. No getting off until you fdisk.
Why the press and investors keep falling for this crap is beyond me.
The main reason is support costs. The initial cost of a PC with software is trivial compared to the support costs. The first guy who comes up with a way to eliminate support costs is going to end up MUCH richer than Bill Gates. Some people think remote hosted software is the way to do this.
Now my favorite search engine is /.'ed!!! Criminy!! I depend on this to get work done!
In a case like this it might be worth filing a provisional patent application. This is an application without claims that can be filed at minimal cost in order to establish a record in the patent office. This can be later turned into a real patent application if you desire.
Provisional patents are rather new - perhaps since 1995 so many patent lawyers may not have experience with them. But it sonds like something that might be useful in this case.
Search engines may be getting smarter but by no means do they cover the net completely. Even worse, there is no control of the keywords. A PROFESSIONAL index will include controlling the list of keywords so you will know how to find something. There is no way this can be done on the web.
As far as scope, you have to realize that the goal of the EB is to cover a general body of knowledge completely as possible. With the internet there are large holes where there is no information at all. The Internet contains a tremendous amount of information on matters related to computers, however once you get off that topic and start looking at, say a comparison of greek language dialects you are very likely to come up with zilch on the internet.
What I do say is that along with all the crap out there, you can find primary sources
I think that the internet is very poor for anything to do with primary sources, or even high quality secondary sources. Very few scholarly journals are available on the internet, and certainly even fewer early sources.
The web has some serious flaws as a source of information. It is quite haphazard rather than being carefully reviewed for scope and completeness, it has terrible indexing, and most of the surces are not authorataive or reviewed.
It's going to be a long, long time before the web will replace a good library.
I'd point out the saga of G4 tends to show that a good PR show doesn't always lead to a successful product launch.
The G4 is a successful product launch, according to pre-order volume. How the 'reconfiguration' will affect this is anyone's guess. The iBook and new iMacs are also doing very well.
Apple Financial Results show a steady decline in international sales for the last 3 quarters.
Unfortunately your basis of comparison does not take into account the seasonal nature of the computer business.
If you do a year to year comparison Apple's international revenues have been up three out of the last four quarters.
Don't get me wrong, it's an important development. But the market which would benefit from OS X is the one Apple retreated from a long
time ago.
Clearly the G4 boxes are not aimed at the consumer market, so it appears that Apple has in fact not retreated from all non-consumer markets. The actual fact of the matter is that Apple does have market niches that are still very performance demanding. For these users Mac OS X is very important.
The point of the build-to-order model is two-fold.
1) Minimize inventory to free up working capital.
2) Minimize delivery time
Apple has achieved objective 1 at the cost of failing objective #2. Not a successful story, I think.
Hmmm. I am not sure you can do both if you are revamping the product line as extensively as Apple is. To meet large initial demand you would need to build up large inventories, or have a large manufacturing capacity that would otherwise be idle. It seems to me that you may be asking for something that is impossible.
I remember the good old days, when if something appeared in academic literature, you were safe using it. This is really going to kill research.
One of the things that Biotech really changed is the appreciation by Universities of the value of their intellectual property. Nowadays universities are making a lot of money from patent licensing. When I was in school nobody cared about the potential commercial uses for your R&D. If you see an academic result in the literature now, you can bet that some university IP department examined it for patent potential, probably before that article was published.
Your statement about this killing research bothers me. Research isn't about copying somebody else's work; it's about finding a better way to do something, and to encourage it you must reward those that do find that way. Without patents all we would have is copying. You wouldn't be looking for a different algorithm for web page searching, you would just copy what Google did. And Google would have no protection for their invention, so they would have no incentive to invest money in the research process, or the process of bringing it to the web. And if they did commercialize it, you can bet they wouldn't be going around publishing in places like Scientific American how they did it.
Patents are essential to building the technology base. Without patents companies would never publish anything, restricting the free flow of ideas in society. Patents are a device to get inventors to reveal their technology in exchange for exclusive rights to that technology for 20 years. The value of this has been well established over the 200 year history of patents in the US - a patent system modeled after that of Great Britain, which was the home of the industrial revolution.
However this is not the same as stating that the Patent process we currently have is anywhere near perfect. I think that it is too easy to get a patent. Patent examiners are overworked, and not paid enough to attract real experts. Real reform is needed.
I know that you have invested in hardware already, but if I was going to do this I would have looked at something like WebTV and one of these dedicated word processors. The fact is you want appliances here, not a full blown computer. Computers of any type are unstable (yes, even Liunx - the first power failure that comes along could put the Linux box flat on it's ass). Second choice IMHO would have been an iMac. These things may crash once in a while but they have the best user interface, and don't suffer from registry corruption or fsck failures.
IANAL, but I do hold 10 patents so I have a bit of knowlwedge of how it works. From your description it sounds to me like Microsoft has a good patent. If nobody had used Bayesian networks in help systems before, they have at least two of the basic requirements to get a patent covered.
As far as Google goes, yes, they can patent the use of an algorithm to rank web pages. You can't patent an algorithm any more than you can patent any other natural law (i.e. gravity), but an application of an algorithm seems to me to be a pretty good topic for a patent. In reality it's the same idea as the Microsoft patent - you have a tricky technical problem, and come up with a slick way to solve it. In principle it's no different than the patent that was awarded for those little ramps that show down the bowling balls when they return to you at the front of the lane. Just because gravity is a well known phenomena doesn't mean the ramps aren't an invention.
If you look at patents, at the heart they describe a new application of an existing, well known scientific or mathematical principle. After all, this is what technology is. My first patent came from applying the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to a vapor-liquid equilibrium to develop a very sensitive temperature controller. I didn't invent Clausius Clapeyron, certainly, but I did invent a very effective temperature control system for a very difficult to handle situation.
Recently I managed to get my name taken off of a software patent application my company is paying for.
It surprises me that you could this. A patent must list all the inventors to be valid.
The way patents are used in the late 90's is nothing like the way patents have been used over the previous 200 years. We are now facing patents on life forms, patents on business models, and patents on algorithms.
Life forms in the form of plant patents have been around far longer than genetic engineeering. I don't know when the first plant patent was issued, but I bet it was in the 19th century to somebody like George Washington Carver.
As far as setting license fees at levels just short of the costs of litigation, this is nothing remarkably new. It was certainly common practice 25 years ago when I entered private industry.
And I think you overestimate the importance of patents in the technology business in the US. All of the current big software companies grew up in an environment where software patents didn't exist for practical purposes.
I think that is patently nonsense. The software industry was able to do without because opportunities were so huge and nothing was established at the start. Other industries live and die on patents. Biotech startups don't get funding without a patent review. Large consortia like Unipol are formed for the sole purpose of exploiting patent positions. Huge companies like UOP exist based on one thing - selling patented technology that they develop.
It isn't even anything like the patent system that we have had until the 90's.
It only appears that way to people who haven't studied the history of technology.
You flunk history.
The industrial revolution started in about 1730 with the invention of the cotton mill in England. One of the most famous US inventions, the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney around 1790.
Where do people get this stuff? Doesn't anyone have a clue as to how technology businesses in the US have operated for the past 200 years?
Dammit, For many years companies like Texas Instruments and UOP have gotten more of their profits by developing technologies and licensing them to other companies. Giant conglomerates like Unipol exist primarily to take advantage of patents developed in large consortia.
The idea that anything has changed in the hardware area over the past 20 years is ludicrous. The only thing that is different is that we have a new set of PHB's fresh out of Stanford Business School that need to be educated, and a bunch of impressionable journalists that have no education in this area.
Software patents are another ballgame altogether. The patent office is being far to lenient when it grants these things.
Go figure. Like in everything else related to Apple, their stock trends are REALLY weird.
It only looks weird because people here are focusing on what is really only a small part of what is going on at Apple:
1. Apple introduces several new lines of kick-butt products; iBook, iMac DTV, G4 Professional Boxes.
2. Apple announces higher than expected earnings and projections and that because of massive backorders they are going to have a blowout fourth quarter.
3. Apple announces unit shipments are targetted to be 40% higher next year, thus increasing market share.
4. Apple announces G4 supply problems - cannot deliver as many machines as users want to buy.
5. Apple announces Mac OS X preview due in spring.
6. Apple annonces inventory pipeline averaged TWO DAYS in 1999. Best in industry, better than even Dell.
The only one of these that is remotely negative is No. 4, and even that is a problem most businesses would really like to have.
Motorola knew that they weren't quite ready for full production, and warned Apple of that
Ummmm No, A lot of what Apple is doing is because of increased DRAM prices and the fact that Motorola sprung the 500 MHz bug on them. Niether of these are under Apple's control.
Your points
a pple_2.html
1. Apple will sell fewer of it's high margin machines thus lowering margins
Pure speculation. Most analysts feel that it will have no significant effect. See
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19991016/tc/tech_
"Wall Street analysts were mostly unfazed, saying they did not expect a big drop in customers or orders."
2. DRAM prices will hurt margins
DRAM prices were known at the time these estimates were made.
3. Finally, the $0.86 per share earnings is only a 60% increase over reduce estimates. Apple was originally projecting $0.76 per share earnings for Q4 '99.
That is still a nice increase in earnings estimates. My point remains - Apple will have a strong Christmas.
Christmas won't be as merry as expected in Cupertino, CA.
Not bloody likely. Apple has had big delivery problems this quarter with introducing three new product lines, the iBook, iMac TNG, and the G4's. There is TREMENDOUS pent up demand for these machines. Well over 500,000 back orders. As a result analysts are predicting that the Christmas season will be a huge blow out quarter for Apple despite some of the advertising and other expenses.
If you don't believe me take a look at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/z/a/a/aapl.html
Analysts are estimating 0.86 per share earnings, vs. net of 0.51 this quarter. This is a 60% INCREASE.