That's why "gold plating" is rarely just gold over the base metal. Gold over copper has reactions and wear issues, but gold over nickel over copper is fine.
Electronics will typically use nickel plating between the copper and gold. Brass musical instruments that are gold plated usually use silver plating between the brass base metal and the gold plating.
For most any combination of base metal and plating there's a map of what bonds well with which. This is also why you'll see the gold plate quickly flake off some cheap gold plated jewelry...they were too cheap to bother with the proper metallurgy. Conversely I have nearly century old gold plated brass saxophones that have only lost plating in very heavy wear locations (thumb rests, etc).
most Linux users will undderstand that a company might have to sell at higher margings since the user base numbers are smaller.
What's the technical term? Oh yes, "Mahahaha!"
Linux users aren't accustom to paying anything for software, much less a premium. If they want something similar to your product they'll either find a free project that does the same thing, or failing that they'll start their own free project that does the same thing. That mentality has spurred the growth of a tremendous amount of quality free software, but it hasn't been without a cost: Making for-profit companies rightly cautious about investing in software for Linux.
The counter has always been, "Just sell support instead, give the software away for free! Embrace the business model of the future!" But it's not the business model of the future...it's the business that incentivizes crappy software and bad documentation. The better the software is designed and built, the clearer and more comprehensive the documentation, the less support is needed (ideally, none). Conversely the more confusing and error prone the software is, the less helpful or informative the documentation is, the more you can't even use the software without turning to support.
A few companies have worked out business models that work ok for enterprise level software, but not so much with end users.
That's something Android (although more so the iPhone AppStore, I hate to admit) has really brought new to the table. A valid, easy to implement, reproducible business model for marketing software to Linux (via Android) end users. For commercial end user Linux software to really take off, it really needs to follow the lead of Valve (with Steam), Apple (with AppStore for Mac), Amazon (digital downloads), etc and come up with a major AppStore for Linux. Or partner with Amazon, Valve, etc and get them to support a Linux client. But it'd probably easier to build your own from scratch, as the real players see neither paying customers nor product yet from Linux.
The only reason foreign sugar is so expensive in the US is do to artificial inflation from tariffs.
I'm normally a died-in-the-wool-treehugging-birkenstock-wearing-liberal, but if there was ever a time that government manipulation caused far, far greater problems while solving nothing...it's in agriculture policy.
End the US farm subsidies, most especially corn. A large number of our biggest health problems are directly linked to highly processed corn products (HFCS, etc), which only exist at all because we've subsided the hell out of corn and artificially inflated the cost of imports with tariffs (cane sugar, ethanol).
End the absurd market manipulation in agriculture. It's destroying our own health, it's starving the 3rd world due to sky rocketing inflation on food, it's disincentive alternative energy research (why spend money on alternative energy sources when market manipulation will always insure ethanol will artificially win?). It's a lose, lose, lose policy.
"The first part seems simple enough, until I discovered that every county in California has a different sales tax, and I'm responsible for knowing what county somebody is in and applying the right sales tax formula."
Which seems overwhelming, until you find out current and comprehensive sales tax rate tables are published by the state in easily read electronic formats (csv, excel). Coding against a simple lookup table to find the tax rate is beyond trivial.
Capitalists didn't make cars safer...bureaucracy (safety regulation) did. Capitalists fought safer cars at every turn and still do today. Seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, mandatory safety tests, etc, etc, etc. All of it pure government bureaucracy keeping you and yours safe on American highways.
From the article these Sony lenses are retrofits to existing hardware.
The assumption then is that the original lenses were not meant to be regularly changed, which makes sense: Traditionally a theater projector lenses is selected and calibrated for the throw and screen size of the venue...then effectively never touched again. In that situation there's no reason not to have the entire projector effectively "locked down". It's both a DRM issue but also a "don't let the local moron theater manager goof up the finely calibrated projector settings".
3D caught them off guard. Replacing those projectors entirely would be ungodly expensive. There already existed an ability to replace the lens, which technically was all that is required to show 3D. The method to do so was never designed to be easy, however.
So the choices: 1) Scrap hundreds of millions of dollars worth of almost new projection equipment for a completely new "Now with 3D!" design. 2) Supply a replacement lens and instructions (albeit complex instructions).
From a business perspective it's an easy choice. Don't blame Sony, blame the non-sense that is the 3D fad.
How about this: Send Grandma to a Computers 101 class. I'm sure there's some local senior's club or jr college that offers classes. That really is the best solution, because there is NO POSSIBLE WAY any UI design is going to be able to make up for lacking an entire lifetime of computer experience and training.
This is a simple training issue, not a UI issue. Pretending it's a UI issue will result in nothing but a fast race to the bottom.
Using something like MD5 is very common...and very dumb. It might as well be cleartext for all the real world protection it offers. You can brute force tens of thousands of password attempts a second on modest hardware, and that's before we even talk about reverse lookup databases.
In particular Bourne shell makes gluing other programs together far easier, cleaner, and more reliably then can be done with any of the languages you list...and I say that even given that I'm extremely fluent in at least two of them.
Correctly and reliably handling even a simple "foo | bar | baz" construct in the languages you list can be done, but you're talking about an LOT of non-trivial systems level programming to do it, effectively "coding C inside perl/python/ruby". No, really. Sure, it's very easy to do it wrong and fragile (just call system(), what's so hard right?), but if you actually want to handle it as correctly and reliably as Bourne does out of the box...it's going to take a hell of a lot more code and detailed systems programming knowledge then even most "Sr" Unix sysadmins tend to have. Almost without fail ever attempted I've ever seen in the industry gets it wrong...typically very, very wrong.
Bourne is built to run other programs, to manage the interactions between them, programming logic being the exceptional use. All of the languages you list are built to be self-contained, programming logic being the primary task and communicating with external programs a very secondary use.
Now of course...if your script/program is self-contained and not just wrapping a bunch of exec()s of other programs, then sure Bourne shell is one of the least favorable options.
There's also nothing saying you can't freely mix and match. Most anyone worth their salt does so all the time. To do otherwise would be like saying a web coder could only work in HTML or only work in JavaScript or only work in PHP. We're talking about complimentary languages here, with some overlap.
A) None of the major IP video services use a single hub. They all run through massive proxy systems like Akamai. Content already lives very close to its end point.
C) AT&T isn't much more "inside" their own network then the likes of Netflix and Hulu already are via Akamai and such.
B) You can't get "inside" AT&T's network in the way you're talking about, at least not without paying extremely huge fees to AT&T that'd verge on a protection racket. And again, the difference isn't technically much different then what the major video streaming companies are doing today via Akamai. There is no big win there; The REAL issue is the last mile, which is exactly the same for AT&T as it is for Netflix et al.
AT&T isn't doing this to encourage competition to move to more efficient methods, nor are they doing it to address their own peering costs (already bought and paid for). It's an overt move to use their position as bandwidth provider to promote their content business...by disenfranchising the competition.
I listen to the radio if one of my coworkers puts it on,
BZZZT! Your company must ASCAP for a public performance license if anyone at your work is playing a radio that can be heard by anyone besides themselves (your office is not a "a small circle of a family or its social acquaintances"). If that isn't acceptable, listeners are welcome to use headphones.
Indeed, the download is also very BROKEN and has been since they launched it...at least for anyone whos profile size is over ~1GB (easy to do with a few HD video uploads).
Only the first 1GB of the backup.zip will actually download...no error or "failed download", it'll just stop at about 1GB resulting in an incomplete and thus corrupt and unusable zip archive. Any browser, any OS (I've tried IE, FF, Chrome, and wget on Win7, Mac, and FreeBSD), it fails if it's larger then 1GB.
Because you don't get the same thing. By your logic it would be valid to say of class instances, "You get the same thing with struct pointers. What's with the buzzword?"
At best class instances offer a very limited subset of functionality that true closures provide. Worse still, even the attempt at replicating the basic functionality of a closure using class instances requires much more (and far less clear) code. In many languages the attempt implies spaghetti coding.
The smart market knows he is the messiah, and that Apple will very likely crash and burn without him.
It has little to do with what he tangibly brings to the company and its products. Most of his value is in how and what Apple customers (and by extension, investors) perceive the man to be. Apple products are 90% myth and deception, supported almost entirely on the legend of the man known as Steve Jobs. As Jobs fades, so will fade the myths....and the reality of Apple products just isn't pretty.
Apple's corporate life and Steve's actual life are eternally intertwined, like a overused fantasy fiction plot element.
And arbitrarily cutting random classes of workers only distorts the very variables you are so worked up over.
As a company, as a business model, as a management strategy, however you'd like to word it Valve unquestionably produces greater revenue and profits per human head used then Apple.
The fact Apple chooses to use some of those heads for retail work is simply that; Their choice. And it's the entire point; Apple's business choices, including human resources, affect their profits and revenues per-capita.
When your service account has complete access to do anything with that service, it's effectively "root". So much is offloaded to services at this point the "real" host system is barely touched for anything, thus little need for "real" root. You can feel macho for schooling people about using sudo for root, but you're still a fool.
If you've offloaded all the important bits to a service account, you haven't accomplished much but changing the effective name of the "root" user. Most all the power and just as much ability to effectively wreck havoc is now in the hands of the "service account".
The host is irrelevant, thus root is irrelevant. Service accounts are the new root.
The Nokia execs and some tech writers make the case that Nokia thrives by selling very low end, but very robust phones in the hundreds of millions to the 3rd world where a modern smart phone wouldn't survive a day. They make the case that the Internet will be brought to developing nations via cell phones...low end cell phones, not high end smart phones.
It's a failed vision.
It is the vision of yesterday and today, but not of tomorrow. The "low end" of today won't exist tomorrow. Smart phones are advancing at such a pace that in the very near future none of the drawbacks they have today for developing nations (not rugged, very low battery life, high cost, etc) will still hold true. The market for low end voice/text-only cell phones will get taken over by low end smart phones....and chances are they'll be running Android, not Windows 7.
Nokia will be dead in ten years, quite possibly five.
That would be easy...if only a given person's packets only ever traversed a single company's network.
But that's not the Internet.
To reach practically anywhere your packets will be carried by a half dozen or more independently owned and operated networks. How does each network track your specific bandwidth allocation to know when they should drop your priority? Why should they care anyway, they aren't your direct ISP? And we haven't even gotten into tracking this with non-static IPs that are most frequently used.
And even once that's all done, how do you train users to micro-manage all their internet applications such that their email gets low priority, games get high, etc?
I'd love for my WoW and Counter-Strike packets to get top priority over other peoples p0rn torrents and Facebook refreshes, but humans are just too naturally selfish for that to ever be the case. The only practical answer is to not prioritize anything.
"It seems to me that Facebook itself rose to prominence after MySpace became overpopulated and polluted with spam."
There was that, sure, but the real problem MySpace had was much more fundamental then that.
MySpace had no actual, real-world use. It wasn't to keep in touch or keep up with your friends' lives; None of the features they provided made any of that possible...mostly because they were so badly implemented such as the "bulletins".
MySpace was a place to waste time making "your page" (that no one else ever looked at) and collect "friend trading cards".
Keeping up with your friends lives was mostly done on LiveJournal via the "friends view".
The only reason MySpace existed was simply because Friendster got too popular too quickly and so their servers couldn't handle the traffic. It wasn't that MySpace worked better...it's that MySpace servers worked at all. But after a while everyone got bored with # of friends pissing contests and endless hours tweaking the look of a profile page no one ever visited.
There was then a gap of time where no one really "used" MySpace, but they didn't really use anything else either (except LiveJournal). There was a need for something that no one was providing (although others tried...does anyone remember Google's Orkut?)
Facebook came to prominence as soon as they added the News Feed (effectively a rip-off of LiveJournal's "friend view") and people started to realize that Facebook was actually useful, combining the best of MySpace (not much...but hey) with the best of LiveJournal, and enough UI polish to make it easy for casual users (something LiveJournal never did).
Your first link is an App that requires that you jailbreak your phone to install it...and even then there are significant limitations. The second is a computer-side app that attempts to hack around Apple's proprietary protocols.
These are your example of Apple being "open"? Really?
Keep in mind that it is in their own interest to drag the patent approval process out as long as legally possible.
Protection effectively begins the day of the filing, however it ends based upon the day it's approved. That means all that time spent in "patent pending" limbo is effectively bonus protection time. 6 or 7 years to get approved you say? Awesome, they just added 6 or 7 years of protection. Additionally patents in pending state are not published, effectively cloaking the minefield of IP rights. This is a huge advantage for two reasons:
1) With an active patent a competitor can read your specs in detail and use that as free R&D to come up with their "own" version of it...just changed barely enough to not run afoul of the patent. With it still in pending state, they've got nothing to start from. End result, it's harder to copy.
2) The only way for a competitor to even know what about the thing has had a patent filed is to copy the idea and wait for a lawsuit. Legally they are operating blind...there is nothing to guide them around what is or is not legal to do. You've effectively added protection not just for everything you wrote down...but implicitly for everything about the product. Sure, you can't back it up in court...but your competitors have no idea what you can and can't back up in court, which makes touching any of it treacherous. End result, it's much more risky to copy.
If companies could they'd keep their patents in pending state indefinitely.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why "gold plating" is rarely just gold over the base metal. Gold over copper has reactions and wear issues, but gold over nickel over copper is fine.
Electronics will typically use nickel plating between the copper and gold. Brass musical instruments that are gold plated usually use silver plating between the brass base metal and the gold plating.
For most any combination of base metal and plating there's a map of what bonds well with which. This is also why you'll see the gold plate quickly flake off some cheap gold plated jewelry...they were too cheap to bother with the proper metallurgy. Conversely I have nearly century old gold plated brass saxophones that have only lost plating in very heavy wear locations (thumb rests, etc).
most Linux users will undderstand that a company might have to sell at higher margings since the user base numbers are smaller.
What's the technical term? Oh yes, "Mahahaha!"
Linux users aren't accustom to paying anything for software, much less a premium. If they want something similar to your product they'll either find a free project that does the same thing, or failing that they'll start their own free project that does the same thing. That mentality has spurred the growth of a tremendous amount of quality free software, but it hasn't been without a cost: Making for-profit companies rightly cautious about investing in software for Linux.
The counter has always been, "Just sell support instead, give the software away for free! Embrace the business model of the future!" But it's not the business model of the future...it's the business that incentivizes crappy software and bad documentation. The better the software is designed and built, the clearer and more comprehensive the documentation, the less support is needed (ideally, none). Conversely the more confusing and error prone the software is, the less helpful or informative the documentation is, the more you can't even use the software without turning to support.
A few companies have worked out business models that work ok for enterprise level software, but not so much with end users.
That's something Android (although more so the iPhone AppStore, I hate to admit) has really brought new to the table. A valid, easy to implement, reproducible business model for marketing software to Linux (via Android) end users. For commercial end user Linux software to really take off, it really needs to follow the lead of Valve (with Steam), Apple (with AppStore for Mac), Amazon (digital downloads), etc and come up with a major AppStore for Linux. Or partner with Amazon, Valve, etc and get them to support a Linux client. But it'd probably easier to build your own from scratch, as the real players see neither paying customers nor product yet from Linux.
Why so hell-bent on local production then?
The only reason foreign sugar is so expensive in the US is do to artificial inflation from tariffs.
I'm normally a died-in-the-wool-treehugging-birkenstock-wearing-liberal, but if there was ever a time that government manipulation caused far, far greater problems while solving nothing...it's in agriculture policy.
End the US farm subsidies, most especially corn. A large number of our biggest health problems are directly linked to highly processed corn products (HFCS, etc), which only exist at all because we've subsided the hell out of corn and artificially inflated the cost of imports with tariffs (cane sugar, ethanol).
End the absurd market manipulation in agriculture. It's destroying our own health, it's starving the 3rd world due to sky rocketing inflation on food, it's disincentive alternative energy research (why spend money on alternative energy sources when market manipulation will always insure ethanol will artificially win?). It's a lose, lose, lose policy.
"The first part seems simple enough, until I discovered that every county in California has a different sales tax, and I'm responsible for knowing what county somebody is in and applying the right sales tax formula."
Which seems overwhelming, until you find out current and comprehensive sales tax rate tables are published by the state in easily read electronic formats (csv, excel). Coding against a simple lookup table to find the tax rate is beyond trivial.
This is a complete non-problem.
Flawed analogy.
Capitalists didn't make cars safer...bureaucracy (safety regulation) did. Capitalists fought safer cars at every turn and still do today. Seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, mandatory safety tests, etc, etc, etc. All of it pure government bureaucracy keeping you and yours safe on American highways.
From the article these Sony lenses are retrofits to existing hardware.
The assumption then is that the original lenses were not meant to be regularly changed, which makes sense: Traditionally a theater projector lenses is selected and calibrated for the throw and screen size of the venue...then effectively never touched again. In that situation there's no reason not to have the entire projector effectively "locked down". It's both a DRM issue but also a "don't let the local moron theater manager goof up the finely calibrated projector settings".
3D caught them off guard. Replacing those projectors entirely would be ungodly expensive. There already existed an ability to replace the lens, which technically was all that is required to show 3D. The method to do so was never designed to be easy, however.
So the choices:
1) Scrap hundreds of millions of dollars worth of almost new projection equipment for a completely new "Now with 3D!" design.
2) Supply a replacement lens and instructions (albeit complex instructions).
From a business perspective it's an easy choice. Don't blame Sony, blame the non-sense that is the 3D fad.
How about this: Send Grandma to a Computers 101 class. I'm sure there's some local senior's club or jr college that offers classes. That really is the best solution, because there is NO POSSIBLE WAY any UI design is going to be able to make up for lacking an entire lifetime of computer experience and training.
This is a simple training issue, not a UI issue. Pretending it's a UI issue will result in nothing but a fast race to the bottom.
What hash algorithm, specifically?
Using something like MD5 is very common...and very dumb. It might as well be cleartext for all the real world protection it offers. You can brute force tens of thousands of password attempts a second on modest hardware, and that's before we even talk about reverse lookup databases.
In particular Bourne shell makes gluing other programs together far easier, cleaner, and more reliably then can be done with any of the languages you list...and I say that even given that I'm extremely fluent in at least two of them.
Correctly and reliably handling even a simple "foo | bar | baz" construct in the languages you list can be done, but you're talking about an LOT of non-trivial systems level programming to do it, effectively "coding C inside perl/python/ruby". No, really. Sure, it's very easy to do it wrong and fragile (just call system(), what's so hard right?), but if you actually want to handle it as correctly and reliably as Bourne does out of the box...it's going to take a hell of a lot more code and detailed systems programming knowledge then even most "Sr" Unix sysadmins tend to have. Almost without fail ever attempted I've ever seen in the industry gets it wrong...typically very, very wrong.
Bourne is built to run other programs, to manage the interactions between them, programming logic being the exceptional use. All of the languages you list are built to be self-contained, programming logic being the primary task and communicating with external programs a very secondary use.
Now of course...if your script/program is self-contained and not just wrapping a bunch of exec()s of other programs, then sure Bourne shell is one of the least favorable options.
There's also nothing saying you can't freely mix and match. Most anyone worth their salt does so all the time. To do otherwise would be like saying a web coder could only work in HTML or only work in JavaScript or only work in PHP. We're talking about complimentary languages here, with some overlap.
Use the right tool for the job.
A) None of the major IP video services use a single hub. They all run through massive proxy systems like Akamai. Content already lives very close to its end point.
C) AT&T isn't much more "inside" their own network then the likes of Netflix and Hulu already are via Akamai and such.
B) You can't get "inside" AT&T's network in the way you're talking about, at least not without paying extremely huge fees to AT&T that'd verge on a protection racket. And again, the difference isn't technically much different then what the major video streaming companies are doing today via Akamai. There is no big win there; The REAL issue is the last mile, which is exactly the same for AT&T as it is for Netflix et al.
AT&T isn't doing this to encourage competition to move to more efficient methods, nor are they doing it to address their own peering costs (already bought and paid for). It's an overt move to use their position as bandwidth provider to promote their content business...by disenfranchising the competition.
I listen to the radio if one of my coworkers puts it on,
BZZZT! Your company must ASCAP for a public performance license if anyone at your work is playing a radio that can be heard by anyone besides themselves (your office is not a "a small circle of a family or its social acquaintances"). If that isn't acceptable, listeners are welcome to use headphones.
http://www.ascap.com/licensing/licensingfaq.html
Indeed, the download is also very BROKEN and has been since they launched it...at least for anyone whos profile size is over ~1GB (easy to do with a few HD video uploads).
Only the first 1GB of the backup .zip will actually download...no error or "failed download", it'll just stop at about 1GB resulting in an incomplete and thus corrupt and unusable zip archive. Any browser, any OS (I've tried IE, FF, Chrome, and wget on Win7, Mac, and FreeBSD), it fails if it's larger then 1GB.
Why can't I mod the parent, [citation needed]?
Because you don't get the same thing. By your logic it would be valid to say of class instances, "You get the same thing with struct pointers. What's with the buzzword?"
At best class instances offer a very limited subset of functionality that true closures provide. Worse still, even the attempt at replicating the basic functionality of a closure using class instances requires much more (and far less clear) code. In many languages the attempt implies spaghetti coding.
The smart market knows he is the messiah, and that Apple will very likely crash and burn without him.
It has little to do with what he tangibly brings to the company and its products. Most of his value is in how and what Apple customers (and by extension, investors) perceive the man to be. Apple products are 90% myth and deception, supported almost entirely on the legend of the man known as Steve Jobs. As Jobs fades, so will fade the myths....and the reality of Apple products just isn't pretty.
Apple's corporate life and Steve's actual life are eternally intertwined, like a overused fantasy fiction plot element.
And arbitrarily cutting random classes of workers only distorts the very variables you are so worked up over.
As a company, as a business model, as a management strategy, however you'd like to word it Valve unquestionably produces greater revenue and profits per human head used then Apple.
The fact Apple chooses to use some of those heads for retail work is simply that; Their choice. And it's the entire point; Apple's business choices, including human resources, affect their profits and revenues per-capita.
When your service account has complete access to do anything with that service, it's effectively "root". So much is offloaded to services at this point the "real" host system is barely touched for anything, thus little need for "real" root. You can feel macho for schooling people about using sudo for root, but you're still a fool.
If you've offloaded all the important bits to a service account, you haven't accomplished much but changing the effective name of the "root" user. Most all the power and just as much ability to effectively wreck havoc is now in the hands of the "service account".
The host is irrelevant, thus root is irrelevant. Service accounts are the new root.
The Nokia execs and some tech writers make the case that Nokia thrives by selling very low end, but very robust phones in the hundreds of millions to the 3rd world where a modern smart phone wouldn't survive a day. They make the case that the Internet will be brought to developing nations via cell phones...low end cell phones, not high end smart phones.
It's a failed vision.
It is the vision of yesterday and today, but not of tomorrow. The "low end" of today won't exist tomorrow. Smart phones are advancing at such a pace that in the very near future none of the drawbacks they have today for developing nations (not rugged, very low battery life, high cost, etc) will still hold true. The market for low end voice/text-only cell phones will get taken over by low end smart phones....and chances are they'll be running Android, not Windows 7.
Nokia will be dead in ten years, quite possibly five.
That would be easy...if only a given person's packets only ever traversed a single company's network.
But that's not the Internet.
To reach practically anywhere your packets will be carried by a half dozen or more independently owned and operated networks. How does each network track your specific bandwidth allocation to know when they should drop your priority? Why should they care anyway, they aren't your direct ISP? And we haven't even gotten into tracking this with non-static IPs that are most frequently used.
And even once that's all done, how do you train users to micro-manage all their internet applications such that their email gets low priority, games get high, etc?
I'd love for my WoW and Counter-Strike packets to get top priority over other peoples p0rn torrents and Facebook refreshes, but humans are just too naturally selfish for that to ever be the case. The only practical answer is to not prioritize anything.
So now instead of saying "Free, as in beer", everyone's going to start saying "Free, as in p0rn"...
"It seems to me that Facebook itself rose to prominence after MySpace became overpopulated and polluted with spam."
There was that, sure, but the real problem MySpace had was much more fundamental then that.
MySpace had no actual, real-world use. It wasn't to keep in touch or keep up with your friends' lives; None of the features they provided made any of that possible...mostly because they were so badly implemented such as the "bulletins".
MySpace was a place to waste time making "your page" (that no one else ever looked at) and collect "friend trading cards".
Keeping up with your friends lives was mostly done on LiveJournal via the "friends view".
The only reason MySpace existed was simply because Friendster got too popular too quickly and so their servers couldn't handle the traffic. It wasn't that MySpace worked better...it's that MySpace servers worked at all. But after a while everyone got bored with # of friends pissing contests and endless hours tweaking the look of a profile page no one ever visited.
There was then a gap of time where no one really "used" MySpace, but they didn't really use anything else either (except LiveJournal). There was a need for something that no one was providing (although others tried...does anyone remember Google's Orkut?)
Facebook came to prominence as soon as they added the News Feed (effectively a rip-off of LiveJournal's "friend view") and people started to realize that Facebook was actually useful, combining the best of MySpace (not much...but hey) with the best of LiveJournal, and enough UI polish to make it easy for casual users (something LiveJournal never did).
...now there's a useless tool if there ever was one.
Your first link is an App that requires that you jailbreak your phone to install it...and even then there are significant limitations. The second is a computer-side app that attempts to hack around Apple's proprietary protocols.
These are your example of Apple being "open"? Really?
Keep in mind that it is in their own interest to drag the patent approval process out as long as legally possible.
Protection effectively begins the day of the filing, however it ends based upon the day it's approved. That means all that time spent in "patent pending" limbo is effectively bonus protection time. 6 or 7 years to get approved you say? Awesome, they just added 6 or 7 years of protection. Additionally patents in pending state are not published, effectively cloaking the minefield of IP rights. This is a huge advantage for two reasons:
1) With an active patent a competitor can read your specs in detail and use that as free R&D to come up with their "own" version of it...just changed barely enough to not run afoul of the patent. With it still in pending state, they've got nothing to start from. End result, it's harder to copy.
2) The only way for a competitor to even know what about the thing has had a patent filed is to copy the idea and wait for a lawsuit. Legally they are operating blind...there is nothing to guide them around what is or is not legal to do. You've effectively added protection not just for everything you wrote down...but implicitly for everything about the product. Sure, you can't back it up in court...but your competitors have no idea what you can and can't back up in court, which makes touching any of it treacherous. End result, it's much more risky to copy.
If companies could they'd keep their patents in pending state indefinitely.
Seriously, comment mod points are..umm...pointless, when the stories themselves should be modded -1.
How does this half-assed amateur blog nonsense make it to the front page of /. anyway? Is it really that slow of a news day for tech? Sheesh...