It's good to hear the US government isn't fighting the courts tooth and nail whenever there's a judgement against them. I with the same were true in Canada. The Harper government is hell bent on getting around a number of court orders on a variety of policies. They have their vision, and nothing will stop them -- not the will of the people, not the recommendations of scientists and experts, not statistics, and certainly not the objections of people in foreign nations (including the US. Thanks to the Texas conservatives for supporting the Canadian public's view that a prison state is not the way to go.)
The Harper government thinks a majority is a dictatorship.
I refuse to call it the Canadian government because there is nothing Canadian about the way it's treating the farmers, the stewardesses, the postal union, the medical cannabis patients,...
It's illegal in many districts, but the law is ignored by many. Their personal convenience is more important.
One of the most shameless examples is the mayor of Toronto, who has been repeatedly been caught by the citizens of Toronto yapping on his cell phone while driving. You'd think he would lead by example and avoid the bad publicity, but he's too narcissistic to learn his lesson.
Look at that. A successful and profitable cooperative venture coming to an end, and not a lawsuit in sight.
Now if the rest of the business community could only learn from this and stop with the patent lawsuits and market trolling, and get back to selling great competitive products.
Having seen people swerving from lane to lane while talking or texting, there's no doubt in my mind cell usage while driving should be banned.
But I'm amazed that Abu Dhabi and Dubai have such a high penetration of Blackberries in their country that the outage could actually make a difference in road safety statistics. That's just amazing to me.
I wonder what would happen to the safety stats if all cell phones were disabled for a day as an experiment? (Not that it'll ever happen.)
The current system is very unfair to a defendant without a budget to maintain a defense, so the current system isn't fair, either. The fact that it lets the corporate legal team stomp all over the individual for the vast majority of cases should be far more worrysome than not giving the legal trolls the option of using trumped up charges to rape people with out-of-court settlements.
See RIAA, MPAA, etc. for thousands of examples of such abuse.
Oh, yes, I could see how that would be good for business -- block every product from being marketed based on the unproven allegations of a patent holder or troll without any proof whatsoever.
Maybe you'd like to see everyone held in jail until their court case is heard instead of allowing bail hearings, too?
Actually I expect to see a patent licensing exchange with little or no money changing hands. Don't forget Apple is suing Samsung, too. In the end, the whole thing will probably be settled out of court after they're done their patent-waving contest.
Time will tell whether this is enough to appease the Blackberry user and enterprise communities, or whether they continue to lose customer base to other, newer platforms. I suspect the consumers will continue to abandon them in favour of the iPhone, Android, and Win7 phones. But there still isn't much competition at the enterprise level. Even for those platforms that have some form of enterprise management, I haven't heard of any that provide the device data encryption that RIM does.
In the meantime, pro-RIM slashdotters will gloat over their "free" premium apps, while the anti-RIM slashdotters will greedily demand more (most likely including a few impossible demands.)
Personally, I'd rather see companies just stop promising the impossible. The only reason the telcos can offer genuine five nine's service is their hardware and software has undergone much more rigorous testing, has simpler requirements, and hasn't had significant updates in years (just patches.) Don't forget that there is a very smal handful of providers servicing the telco's landline, DSL, and cell hardware and software needs, so they can concentrate the testing expenses and share it out amongst the telcos.
Despite that rigorous testing, even the telcos have had some outages (I remember a cascading update failure of AT&T SS7 hardware a number of years ago in particular.)
In the vast majority of cases, five-nines is only a marketing ploy, with outages covered by blanket clauses that excuse planned downtime from the calculations. It doesn't mean you'll actually get the uptime the contract states, it just gives you a contractual rebate when they inevitably fail to deliver.
For those enterprises affected by the outages: tough. It's your responsibility as risk mangers to plan for outages of critical systems, and have backup plans in place.
It's also worth noting that I've never met a smart phone user that relied on their smart phone's email services exclusively. Rather, they forward other email accounts to the smart phone, so for those risk-managing users, they could still use those other service providers while RIM was down.
The patents are standards-essential, which means they are incorporated in internationally accepted technology standards -- in this case 3G. Standards-essential patents are licensed under so-called Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms, which is what Samsung has to offer Apple.
Not that it means the article or the judge were necessarily using the right terminology.
The judge says Samsung didn't go through FRAND negotiations properly. I'm confused by this. Isn't it Apple that refused to negotiate? If so, it would seem Samsung has done their part to come to an agreement, rendering the judgement invalid.
There doesn't appear to be any question of whether Apple infringed the patents or not -- the article clarifies that the patents are for essential technology, which means you can't actually build such devices without infringing the patent.
Trademarks actually require that you be that specific about the colouration and such of your logo. For example, there is a "Pepsi Blue" colour coordinate that specifies precisely what shade of blue is used by the Pepsi logos. That's why they don't use the same shape/glyph with different colours for their different products.
Due to the failure of government to block an unending stream of bank mergers, leading to ever more greater concentrations of financial risk and power, that's true.
But it doesn't excuse the fact that a year later the banks turned obscene profits, offshored those profits, and paid virtually NOTHING in taxes. The bailouts should have been LOANS -- every single bank financial statement I've seen for the year shows they made enough money to pay back their bailout funds, but not ONE offered to do so.
One thing the TEA party and Occupy definitely seem to agree on is that corporate bailouts need to stop. No business should be allowed to grow so large and powerful that it's failure can bring down the economy of an entire nation. Allowing it to get to that point was insanity; government's refusal to correct the issue is criminal.
You mean wearing black turtlenecks for umpteen years in a row? I think it was Einstein who suggested buying a closet full of identical suits so you wouldn't have to waste time deciding what to wear, but I do think Jobs took that to an extreme.
I'm genuinely confused by NeXT's failures. Their APIs were clean, they had a system well in advance of what was available from other companies at the time, and proprietary hardware was still the norm when they were around.
NeXT lives on in OS/X GUI, heavily adapted and updated, so at least the best of NeXT's technology was salvaged.
But you're right -- Jobs had a whole team assisting him with Apple. I'm not sure he was forced to take advice from a team at NeXT.
By the way, I do think Jobs was a great business man who did a tremendous job of leading Apple to where they are today.
But I am disappointed to see that the fanboism has infected society to the degree that a state would declare a memorial day for a business man who did little if anything for society itself. Shipping shiny toys may be profitable, but it does not change the world in the same way as philanthropy and political activism do.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to hear the US government isn't fighting the courts tooth and nail whenever there's a judgement against them. I with the same were true in Canada. The Harper government is hell bent on getting around a number of court orders on a variety of policies. They have their vision, and nothing will stop them -- not the will of the people, not the recommendations of scientists and experts, not statistics, and certainly not the objections of people in foreign nations (including the US. Thanks to the Texas conservatives for supporting the Canadian public's view that a prison state is not the way to go.)
The Harper government thinks a majority is a dictatorship.
I refuse to call it the Canadian government because there is nothing Canadian about the way it's treating the farmers, the stewardesses, the postal union, the medical cannabis patients, ...
It's illegal in many districts, but the law is ignored by many. Their personal convenience is more important.
One of the most shameless examples is the mayor of Toronto, who has been repeatedly been caught by the citizens of Toronto yapping on his cell phone while driving. You'd think he would lead by example and avoid the bad publicity, but he's too narcissistic to learn his lesson.
Look at that. A successful and profitable cooperative venture coming to an end, and not a lawsuit in sight.
Now if the rest of the business community could only learn from this and stop with the patent lawsuits and market trolling, and get back to selling great competitive products.
Having seen people swerving from lane to lane while talking or texting, there's no doubt in my mind cell usage while driving should be banned.
But I'm amazed that Abu Dhabi and Dubai have such a high penetration of Blackberries in their country that the outage could actually make a difference in road safety statistics. That's just amazing to me.
I wonder what would happen to the safety stats if all cell phones were disabled for a day as an experiment? (Not that it'll ever happen.)
'nuff said.
The current system is very unfair to a defendant without a budget to maintain a defense, so the current system isn't fair, either. The fact that it lets the corporate legal team stomp all over the individual for the vast majority of cases should be far more worrysome than not giving the legal trolls the option of using trumped up charges to rape people with out-of-court settlements.
See RIAA, MPAA, etc. for thousands of examples of such abuse.
A good editor is the critical difference between a hack and a best seller. Very, very few writers produce a polished work right out of the gate.
But if Amazon wants to go this way, why not take it a step further and eliminate the distributor entirely?
Oh, yes, I could see how that would be good for business -- block every product from being marketed based on the unproven allegations of a patent holder or troll without any proof whatsoever.
Maybe you'd like to see everyone held in jail until their court case is heard instead of allowing bail hearings, too?
To be fair, the free apps are being offered to the consumer market. The enterprise is being given a month of free tech support.
Doesn't matter if it's baseless and would get tossed out of court -- eventually. The former database maintainer didn't have the budget to fight back.
If you want to blame someone, blame the "justice" system that allows frivolous lawsuits to be filed in the first place.
Actually I expect to see a patent licensing exchange with little or no money changing hands. Don't forget Apple is suing Samsung, too. In the end, the whole thing will probably be settled out of court after they're done their patent-waving contest.
On the bright side, if artists are living 150 years and producing for most of them, the copyright laws will finally seem sane again.
Time will tell whether this is enough to appease the Blackberry user and enterprise communities, or whether they continue to lose customer base to other, newer platforms. I suspect the consumers will continue to abandon them in favour of the iPhone, Android, and Win7 phones. But there still isn't much competition at the enterprise level. Even for those platforms that have some form of enterprise management, I haven't heard of any that provide the device data encryption that RIM does.
In the meantime, pro-RIM slashdotters will gloat over their "free" premium apps, while the anti-RIM slashdotters will greedily demand more (most likely including a few impossible demands.)
Personally, I'd rather see companies just stop promising the impossible. The only reason the telcos can offer genuine five nine's service is their hardware and software has undergone much more rigorous testing, has simpler requirements, and hasn't had significant updates in years (just patches.) Don't forget that there is a very smal handful of providers servicing the telco's landline, DSL, and cell hardware and software needs, so they can concentrate the testing expenses and share it out amongst the telcos.
Despite that rigorous testing, even the telcos have had some outages (I remember a cascading update failure of AT&T SS7 hardware a number of years ago in particular.)
In the vast majority of cases, five-nines is only a marketing ploy, with outages covered by blanket clauses that excuse planned downtime from the calculations. It doesn't mean you'll actually get the uptime the contract states, it just gives you a contractual rebate when they inevitably fail to deliver.
For those enterprises affected by the outages: tough. It's your responsibility as risk mangers to plan for outages of critical systems, and have backup plans in place.
It's also worth noting that I've never met a smart phone user that relied on their smart phone's email services exclusively. Rather, they forward other email accounts to the smart phone, so for those risk-managing users, they could still use those other service providers while RIM was down.
From the article:
Not that it means the article or the judge were necessarily using the right terminology.
Thanks. Sounds as bad as RAMBUS.
So really his achievement is uptime, not science or R&D.
Have you got a reference link confirming that? I've never heard that claim before and want to read up on it.
The judge says Samsung didn't go through FRAND negotiations properly. I'm confused by this. Isn't it Apple that refused to negotiate? If so, it would seem Samsung has done their part to come to an agreement, rendering the judgement invalid.
There doesn't appear to be any question of whether Apple infringed the patents or not -- the article clarifies that the patents are for essential technology, which means you can't actually build such devices without infringing the patent.
The calculation was commissioned by an anonymous group known as Occu-Pi.
Trademarks actually require that you be that specific about the colouration and such of your logo. For example, there is a "Pepsi Blue" colour coordinate that specifies precisely what shade of blue is used by the Pepsi logos. That's why they don't use the same shape/glyph with different colours for their different products.
Due to the failure of government to block an unending stream of bank mergers, leading to ever more greater concentrations of financial risk and power, that's true.
But it doesn't excuse the fact that a year later the banks turned obscene profits, offshored those profits, and paid virtually NOTHING in taxes. The bailouts should have been LOANS -- every single bank financial statement I've seen for the year shows they made enough money to pay back their bailout funds, but not ONE offered to do so.
One thing the TEA party and Occupy definitely seem to agree on is that corporate bailouts need to stop. No business should be allowed to grow so large and powerful that it's failure can bring down the economy of an entire nation. Allowing it to get to that point was insanity; government's refusal to correct the issue is criminal.
"stylish dresser"?
You mean wearing black turtlenecks for umpteen years in a row? I think it was Einstein who suggested buying a closet full of identical suits so you wouldn't have to waste time deciding what to wear, but I do think Jobs took that to an extreme.
Thanks for the best laugh I've had today.
Gotta pick up a new keyboard here, too. Sticky keys make it look like I can't spell sometimes. *LOL*
Danged things only last 6 months to a year. Having learned to type in the days of manual typewriters, I'm pretty hard on them.
I'm genuinely confused by NeXT's failures. Their APIs were clean, they had a system well in advance of what was available from other companies at the time, and proprietary hardware was still the norm when they were around.
NeXT lives on in OS/X GUI, heavily adapted and updated, so at least the best of NeXT's technology was salvaged.
But you're right -- Jobs had a whole team assisting him with Apple. I'm not sure he was forced to take advice from a team at NeXT.
By the way, I do think Jobs was a great business man who did a tremendous job of leading Apple to where they are today.
But I am disappointed to see that the fanboism has infected society to the degree that a state would declare a memorial day for a business man who did little if anything for society itself. Shipping shiny toys may be profitable, but it does not change the world in the same way as philanthropy and political activism do.