When you can't come up with a better product, it's time to call in the lawyers.
Patent protection is valid even if you are not the most qualified or successful at implementing your ideas. indeed that's the point. it is supposed to stifle the competition so that you can be completive yourself or force them to pay you.
How can "outmoded" and "inessential features" be considered a defense against a patent? Isn't that the whole point of a patent? doesn't it describe a feature whose duration of being protected is exactly prescribed? It can't be outmoded during this time by definition. And if the feature is inessential then why did android choose to include it. The whole point of a patent is the right to say "no you can't include that way of doing something".
They don't seem to be arguing that the patent was obvious and incorrectly awarded. Instead they seem to be arguing designs can't be patented because designs are arbitrary. Which again is the whole point of the "design" patent. Unlike a concept patent, a design patent is much narrower protection of arbitrary features.
B&N seems instead to be arguing against patents. Better to make that argument when you are not being sued for violating one.
For the love of sanity, please let Amazon win this one. I don't know if I want to live in a country where justice is so blind that it allows trademarking the name of the category a thing belongs to as the proper name of that thing.
Do you mean a proper name line say "Amazon" or a generic name like "apple"?
Amazon and Apples are both objects, and thus generic terms right? Windows is obviously too generic. But, as Lindows found out, the judges have ruled that it's not generic to the field of operating system names. I think Amazon would make the same argument about Amazon not being generic when it comes to online stores.
Apple should start a new store and call it the Apple Amazon store.
saving a few dollars by eating day old bread or brown bananas is not a savings. paying $7 more to get new movies is not a lot to pay. And for those months when you don't watch many cause you are busy or there's nothing but crap, you get back some compared to the monthly drain.
That's the magic of $2.99. If we were talking $6.99 a movie then for me it would start to matter. but at $2.99 the amount extra I might save over netflix is not worth what I lose.
$2.99 can compete against netflix in two ways. First netflix does not get streaming disks as early. At best they get physical disks at the same time. if you calculate how may physical disks you can run through in a month, then this is perhaps about 2 a week or less for mere mortals. Sure you can possibly get more if you are reasonably diligent about watching and returning them quickly. But most people don't watch that many or return them that quickly. so $2.99 is a fine deal to get what you want. the nice part is you don't have to wait. you just get what you want when you are in the mood for it. For anyone who is married or has kids you know that the determining mood is not neccessarily your own.
Second, even when netflix does have physcial media all the popular ones are marked "long wait". so the streaming service is better than netflix again.
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the thing I wonder about is how sustainable the bussiness model is for streaming. in 5 years will it still be difficult to set up an on-demand streaming service? could anyone replicate this? Why would the studios themselves not form their own hub to do this?
It's not the same as on-line shopping in general. Amazon moves a lot of physcial media. it bridges a lot of independent sellers. it deals with returns. it makes suggestions based on your buying habits. None of those are the case for movies.
thus I wonder if netflix and amazon movies are viable in the next decade. On the other hand there's no reason they can't out compete some upstart. The catch will be if the upstart is from the movie studios themselves. Can you say "restrain of trade"?
I find I'm watching more and more movies on Amazon because I can get the new releases and see them when I want to.
"The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.
"Approximately one-third of the JTF-GTMO detainees that were captured with these models of watches have known connections to explosives, either having attended explosives training, having association with a facility where IEDs were made or where explosives training was given, or having association with a person identified as an explosives expert."
More than 50 detainee reports refer to the Casio timepieces. The records of 32 detainees refer to the black Casio F-91W, while a further 20 make reference to the silver version, the A-159W.
It's not silly at all. But it's not the reason they arrested them either.
Okay. But then why would they need more than the last couple data points? Or if it is going to iterate over a list of gueses of past history (to uses likely seeds), why time stamp them?
There is no reason to panic, actually. Short term solution: turn off location services. Long term solution: Apple reduces the time cached data stays on the phone. There's apparently a good reason for the cache, otherwise Android wouldn't do it, too. I can't see a reasonable cause for it to be cached ad infinitum, though.
Right. That's my thinking too. But i'm scratching my head to think of what that good reason is. Maybe the developers figured it could be useful so they didn't want to rule it out with an explicit cache clear.
I can even concoct ideas for applications of it: e.g. if you are looking for hardware stores in San Francisco, you'd probably like it if it ranked them in order of proximity to your daily commute. The ones one the other side of the bay might be a lot less interesting. And for that you need more than just knowing your present position.
But that's sort of reaching. maybe not. google thinks in terms of search so that's plausible.
Also if you look at it from a security point of view, for someone to access this they need to either have physical possession of your device or access to the computer you backup your user account. In either case you probably have more problems to worry about than your position data.
Here's another future app for that data: when these devices get near-field point of sale payment then you might feel better if it requested some extra authentication if you are in a place you have never been before.
So maybe the developers were thinking ahead???
In any case this should be easy to solve with a user choice. In the case of apple, they loath adding yet-another user configurable option. for most people they are a nuiscance.
They built a network of a certain size based on some rate structure that a lot of people can afford. Then they see and 8000% increase in traffic. It might not take 80x the cost to increase capacity by 80%. And a lot of this is peak load. But it's reasonable to assume that the cost of expanding require to handle the capacity at the same margins would be at least as expensive as the network they alreayd built. If they doubled the price, people would leave. if the just increced the price for the ipad owners it would not be viable.
So they are wedged and have to degrade their service to maintain a workable price point.
Competition is a bitch.
But it's not simply them being a douche to rake in profits. It's a situation where even if they erased the profit margin it would take them more than 4 years to build capacity.
On the other hand if you merger with someone with that capacity and a revenue stream to that sustains it you can expand much faster.
Were are the usual voices that argue piracy is okay because games want to be free. And they argue that piracy does not hinder game development. But now that games are cheaper it looks like it may be killing the big-tim gaming market. Defend thyself hypocrites!
On another note, it may be that we simply have more small games with more people earning more money in total. it may be an expansion in gaming. But it may come at a loss of the concentration of capital that enabled the "big time" games of high polish. i.e rabbits farting versus CGI masterworks.
A Snappy answer is that it failed because there are no Apple computers with blue ray built in. Sony tried to keep this proprietary from day one. It got into a pissing contest with Toshiba that delayed it. They didn't cut deals with other makers early. They didn't get them early into Apple or IBM or Toshiba computers (which is where the high end customers lurk). Just into Sony products early.
I think they drank their own Koolaide on the PS3s technical superiority and assumed that bundle pricing would make people buy that to get a blue ray, and a Bravia to get whatever HDTV standard sony wanted, and then buy Sony Pictures movies in blue ray.
So you are saying no one should do ergonomic research or if they do there will be no return on investment for it? By the way how is your chair feeling? What about can openers used by people with arthritis? Driver alert systems. The shape of a shoe. none of this has any patentable value?
Design is a form of value added. Arguing it's not won't work simply because other people see it as value and therefore it has value.
Instead of reading the summary, which provokes the thought you deride (rounded corners?) . Have a look at the photos.
The photos show the samsung is a slavish copy. they also show that the features it copies so slavishly are exactly the ones captured in the apple design illustrations they patented.
I agree that just saying rounded corners and black borders makes this seem idiotic. Compare the photos and you will see this phone is a lot closer to the iphone in outward appearance than the HTC or Nexus phones.
Samsung can easily make other phone designs but chose to make a carbon copy. They asked for it.
I think that there is going to come at some point a next generation of touchless pads. These will be able to sense the positions of fingers above the pad. THis will give a more rich potential for gestures.
While it obviously enlarges the potential pallette I think it will actually lead to a simplification. This is because you will be able to use these gestures on vertically oriented desktop screens and also because gestures can be less abstract and more like what they are gesturing about. That is whole hand positions not just finget tips.
I would bet that is about 5 years away then a few years for market penetration. so there may be time to create 2-D touch gesture sets now but they will be gone in 10 years.
eludedpast participle, past tense of elude (Verb) 1. Evade or escape from (a danger, enemy, or pursuer), typically in a skillful or cunning way: "he managed to elude his pursuer". 2. (of an idea or fact) Fail to be grasped or remembered by (someone).
Try running bash without grep and awk some time. bash is smaller because it calls other programs. that makes it fragile if those other programs change.
Maybe because bash is installed by default on most Linux/UNIX systems and is portable across all yoru installed base.
perhaps they exist but in 20 years I've not see a Linux distro without Perl.
Or maybe your security requirements disallow python, or ruby or whatever to be installed.
if they disallow perl then shell needs to be disallowed too
Or that running shell scripts using many built-ins run faster than the interpreted languages?
this is patently false. Perl is vastly faster than shell even taking into account load times when you do anything significant. Bash scripts that do anthing important generally are calling things like awk and grep and sed to parse things and these invocations are dramatically slower in a loop than a single invocation of perl. Additionally, perl I/O is in many case faster than standard unix operations that move large blocks of data.
finally invoking and disposing a command like awk many times in a row makes for very poor memory management and system resource utilization compared to keeping one program like perl resident.
So don't try to argue this on speed or system resource utilization.
Bash scripting features seem to stay more stable over time vs. other scripting languages that are constantly changing.
huh? perl is very static and backward compatible. moreover, it's the helped commands that bash needs like grep and awk and so many other system resource introspection calls that one cannot count on being present or taking exactly the ame arguments.
even a braindead command like "cp" is not only different on Linux and BSD but it's command arguments have changed over time. Whereas is perl the commands needed to copy files have not changed in 20 years.
The app teams within your company may want to constantly upgrade the installed version that might break you scripts/programs.
the only time i've seen broken perl was the 5.8 to 5.10 switch changed the timing of a few things.
And bash is dirt simple to learn and implement for non-programmers.
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When you can't come up with a better product, it's time to call in the lawyers.
Patent protection is valid even if you are not the most qualified or successful at implementing your ideas. indeed that's the point. it is supposed to stifle the competition so that you can be completive yourself or force them to pay you.
How can "outmoded" and "inessential features" be considered a defense against a patent? Isn't that the whole point of a patent? doesn't it describe a feature whose duration of being protected is exactly prescribed? It can't be outmoded during this time by definition. And if the feature is inessential then why did android choose to include it. The whole point of a patent is the right to say "no you can't include that way of doing something".
They don't seem to be arguing that the patent was obvious and incorrectly awarded. Instead they seem to be arguing designs can't be patented because designs are arbitrary. Which again is the whole point of the "design" patent. Unlike a concept patent, a design patent is much narrower protection of arbitrary features.
B&N seems instead to be arguing against patents. Better to make that argument when you are not being sued for violating one.
Where do you think the data in consolidated.db came from?
Just what flavor is the kool-aid?
It's "windowpane" actually.
Apple should open an Apple store in Belem do Para (Brazil) which is a major city at the mouth of the Amazon. It would be the Apple Amazon store.
For the love of sanity, please let Amazon win this one. I don't know if I want to live in a country where justice is so blind that it allows trademarking the name of the category a thing belongs to as the proper name of that thing.
Do you mean a proper name line say "Amazon" or a generic name like "apple"?
Amazon and Apples are both objects, and thus generic terms right? Windows is obviously too generic. But, as Lindows found out, the judges have ruled that it's not generic to the field of operating system names. I think Amazon would make the same argument about Amazon not being generic when it comes to online stores.
Apple should start a new store and call it the Apple Amazon store.
Finally you get to know what those svchosts are actually doing.
Master beta ing?
I have some day old sushi I'd like to sell you.
saving a few dollars by eating day old bread or brown bananas is not a savings. paying $7 more to get new movies is not a lot to pay. And for those months when you don't watch many cause you are busy or there's nothing but crap, you get back some compared to the monthly drain.
That's the magic of $2.99. If we were talking $6.99 a movie then for me it would start to matter. but at $2.99 the amount extra I might save over netflix is not worth what I lose.
$2.99 can compete against netflix in two ways. First netflix does not get streaming disks as early. At best they get physical disks at the same time. if you calculate how may physical disks you can run through in a month, then this is perhaps about 2 a week or less for mere mortals. Sure you can possibly get more if you are reasonably diligent about watching and returning them quickly. But most people don't watch that many or return them that quickly. so $2.99 is a fine deal to get what you want.
the nice part is you don't have to wait. you just get what you want when you are in the mood for it. For anyone who is married or has kids you know that the determining mood is not neccessarily your own.
Second, even when netflix does have physcial media all the popular ones are marked "long wait". so the streaming service is better than netflix again.
-----
the thing I wonder about is how sustainable the bussiness model is for streaming. in 5 years will it still be difficult to set up an on-demand streaming service? could anyone replicate this? Why would the studios themselves not form their own hub to do this?
It's not the same as on-line shopping in general. Amazon moves a lot of physcial media. it bridges a lot of independent sellers. it deals with returns. it makes suggestions based on your buying habits. None of those are the case for movies.
thus I wonder if netflix and amazon movies are viable in the next decade. On the other hand there's no reason they can't out compete some upstart. The catch will be if the upstart is from the movie studios themselves. Can you say "restrain of trade"?
I find I'm watching more and more movies on Amazon because I can get the new releases and see them when I want to.
The thing I won
If you read the article:
"The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.
"Approximately one-third of the JTF-GTMO detainees that were captured with these models of watches have known connections to explosives, either having attended explosives training, having association with a facility where IEDs were made or where explosives training was given, or having association with a person identified as an explosives expert."
More than 50 detainee reports refer to the Casio timepieces. The records of 32 detainees refer to the black Casio F-91W, while a further 20 make reference to the silver version, the A-159W.
It's not silly at all. But it's not the reason they arrested them either.
It's just a "Budgeton". these things appear whenever funding gets shaky.
Okay. But then why would they need more than the last couple data points? Or if it is going to iterate over a list of gueses of past history (to uses likely seeds), why time stamp them?
There is no reason to panic, actually. Short term solution: turn off location services. Long term solution: Apple reduces the time cached data stays on the phone.
There's apparently a good reason for the cache, otherwise Android wouldn't do it, too. I can't see a reasonable cause for it to be cached ad infinitum, though.
Right. That's my thinking too. But i'm scratching my head to think of what that good reason is. Maybe the developers figured it could be useful so they didn't want to rule it out with an explicit cache clear.
I can even concoct ideas for applications of it: e.g. if you are looking for hardware stores in San Francisco, you'd probably like it if it ranked them in order of proximity to your daily commute. The ones one the other side of the bay might be a lot less interesting. And for that you need more than just knowing your present position.
But that's sort of reaching. maybe not. google thinks in terms of search so that's plausible.
Also if you look at it from a security point of view, for someone to access this they need to either have physical possession of your device or access to the computer you backup your user account. In either case you probably have more problems to worry about than your position data.
Here's another future app for that data: when these devices get near-field point of sale payment then you might feel better if it requested some extra authentication if you are in a place you have never been before.
So maybe the developers were thinking ahead???
In any case this should be easy to solve with a user choice. In the case of apple, they loath adding yet-another user configurable option. for most people they are a nuiscance.
They built a network of a certain size based on some rate structure that a lot of people can afford. Then they see and 8000% increase in traffic. It might not take 80x the cost to increase capacity by 80%. And a lot of this is peak load. But it's reasonable to assume that the cost of expanding require to handle the capacity at the same margins would be at least as expensive as the network they alreayd built. If they doubled the price, people would leave. if the just increced the price for the ipad owners it would not be viable.
So they are wedged and have to degrade their service to maintain a workable price point.
Competition is a bitch.
But it's not simply them being a douche to rake in profits. It's a situation where even if they erased the profit margin it would take them more than 4 years to build capacity.
On the other hand if you merger with someone with that capacity and a revenue stream to that sustains it you can expand much faster.
Incredibly 80% of their profits come just from apps for middle managers, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
Were are the usual voices that argue piracy is okay because games want to be free. And they argue that piracy does not hinder game development. But now that games are cheaper it looks like it may be killing the big-tim gaming market. Defend thyself hypocrites!
On another note, it may be that we simply have more small games with more people earning more money in total. it may be an expansion in gaming. But it may come at a loss of the concentration of capital that enabled the "big time" games of high polish. i.e rabbits farting versus CGI masterworks.
Hey, now that you mentiona it, isn't april 19th the duke nukem release date?
A Snappy answer is that it failed because there are no Apple computers with blue ray built in. Sony tried to keep this proprietary from day one. It got into a pissing contest with Toshiba that delayed it. They didn't cut deals with other makers early. They didn't get them early into Apple or IBM or Toshiba computers (which is where the high end customers lurk). Just into Sony products early.
I think they drank their own Koolaide on the PS3s technical superiority and assumed that bundle pricing would make people buy that to get a blue ray, and a Bravia to get whatever HDTV standard sony wanted, and then buy Sony Pictures movies in blue ray.
So you are saying no one should do ergonomic research or if they do there will be no return on investment for it? By the way how is your chair feeling? What about can openers used by people with arthritis? Driver alert systems. The shape of a shoe. none of this has any patentable value?
Design is a form of value added. Arguing it's not won't work simply because other people see it as value and therefore it has value.
Instead of reading the summary, which provokes the thought you deride (rounded corners?) . Have a look at the photos.
The photos show the samsung is a slavish copy. they also show that the features it copies so slavishly are exactly the ones captured in the apple design illustrations they patented.
I agree that just saying rounded corners and black borders makes this seem idiotic. Compare the photos and you will see this phone is a lot closer to the iphone in outward appearance than the HTC or Nexus phones.
Samsung can easily make other phone designs but chose to make a carbon copy. They asked for it.
I think that there is going to come at some point a next generation of touchless pads. These will be able to sense the positions of fingers above the pad. THis will give a more rich potential for gestures.
While it obviously enlarges the potential pallette I think it will actually lead to a simplification. This is because you will be able to use these gestures on vertically oriented desktop screens and also because gestures can be less abstract and more like what they are gesturing about. That is whole hand positions not just finget tips.
I would bet that is about 5 years away then a few years for market penetration. so there may be time to create 2-D touch gesture sets now but they will be gone in 10 years.
eludedpast participle, past tense of elude (Verb)
1. Evade or escape from (a danger, enemy, or pursuer), typically in a skillful or cunning way: "he managed to elude his pursuer".
2. (of an idea or fact) Fail to be grasped or remembered by (someone).
Interestingly this almost reverses the meaning.
Try running bash without grep and awk some time. bash is smaller because it calls other programs. that makes it fragile if those other programs change.
Maybe because bash is installed by default on most Linux/UNIX systems and is portable across all yoru installed base.
perhaps they exist but in 20 years I've not see a Linux distro without Perl.
Or maybe your security requirements disallow python, or ruby or whatever to be installed.
if they disallow perl then shell needs to be disallowed too
Or that running shell scripts using many built-ins run faster than the interpreted languages?
this is patently false. Perl is vastly faster than shell even taking into account load times when you do anything significant. Bash scripts that do anthing important generally are calling things like awk and grep and sed to parse things and these invocations are dramatically slower in a loop than a single invocation of perl. Additionally, perl I/O is in many case faster than standard unix operations that move large blocks of data.
finally invoking and disposing a command like awk many times in a row makes for very poor memory management and system resource utilization compared to keeping one program like perl resident.
So don't try to argue this on speed or system resource utilization.
Bash scripting features seem to stay more stable over time vs. other scripting languages that are constantly changing.
huh? perl is very static and backward compatible.
moreover, it's the helped commands that bash needs like grep and awk and so many other system resource introspection calls that one cannot count on being present or taking exactly the ame arguments.
even a braindead command like "cp" is not only different on Linux and BSD but it's command arguments have changed over time. Whereas is perl the commands needed to copy files have not changed in 20 years.
The app teams within your company may want to constantly upgrade the installed version that might break you scripts/programs.
the only time i've seen broken perl was the 5.8 to 5.10 switch changed the timing of a few things.
And bash is dirt simple to learn and implement for non-programmers.
Perl is very very very close to bash in syntax