No we don't. They are fine alternatives in that they are almost functional equivalents, but people aren't able to use them at work or school due to MS's monopoly position.
People prefer to spend the money to keep the status quo and not have to learn anything new than try something that MIGHT work well enough for them
People spent money on Office 2011 despite having to basically re-learn the program from scratch. OpenOffice requires almost no retraining from Office 2003. People buy Office because they have to if they want to interact with the outside world in an efficient way.
In a competitive environment, it would be. In a monopoly position, it simply is anti-competitive in an area where you'd like some competition. I agree it is not "bribery", though.
The UI responsiveness... are you sure that's not hardware? AnandTech has the PowerVR absolutely creaming the Tegra2. Of course, the Transformer also has more pixels to push, so...
But it wouldn't surprise me if Apple were a little better at putting together hardware in exactly the right way to get their own software to perform exactly the way they want. I mean, iOS is really just MacOS, which is really just NextStep, which is like 20 years old - and Apple has been making hardware customized for that OS for about a decade. I'm sure Asus's hardware guys and Google's software guys could sit in a room and get to the same level of proficiency, but they are from different companies and don't have a decade of history working together. And at the end of the day, Apple has a lot less work to do that Google - supporting only a handful of devices instead of this huge ecosystem. It took Windows about 10 years to catch up to MacOS on generic hardware, despite massive resources... I imagine that's analogous to Google catching Apple.
I've never used either device, except for playing a little bit with an iPad at the store. I'll take your word for it that the Transformer keyboard implementation is better.
But I was responding to you making a comment about Apple not even having a similar product... I don't see how they aren't "similar" since they both do almost the exact same thing, albeit a bit differently.
can you tell me how this [asus.com] is "redoing what apple has already done"?
I'm sorry - it's a cool product, but the only difference between it and an iPad in concept is that the Transformer keyboard is attached with wires instead of Bluetooth.
Furthermore, you're on the BUS. A BUS. Why do you need to watch video????
You're right, he'd be much better off driving for 45 minutes and just listening to the radio. Or sitting on his couch eating processed foods watching the video. Lord knows the only thing to be done on a bus is to sit quietly and stare.
Point out where I defended the offending officers?
You don't deserve nice talk. You deserve much worse talk than that.
No one "deserves" nice talk, but you should use it if you want to be regarded as a rational person.
Out of towner, stop pretending you have New Yorker cred when you're just a pigfucker.
I don't have to pretend because I lived there. If you have no argument, that is fine - I tried to give you a chance to behave like someone who's opinion matters rather than a raving reactionary. I'm still here if you want to actually discuss something.
I'm no lawyer, but from what I can make of it a descriptive term has to meet much more strict criteria for trademark protection than a nonsense word. "Multitouch" is so descriptive that it was used in academia without further explanation.
...But this is more like trying to trademark "4 wheel drive"
Exactly! That is the perfect car analogy. "4 wheel drive" is way too descriptive to patent.
it is just the terminology in the industry
That probably doesn't matter much, depending on what you are getting the trademark for. Just because researchers use a term, does not make it common usage. However, it's probably a moot point, since anything "descriptive" is also likely to be common in research.
Pretty hilarious, this intellectual property stuff, huh?
I think it is actually NoTouch and OneTouch. Neither "no" nor "one" is a generally accepted prefix to a word, so those two words are nonsensical unless they are a product name. You could still advertise your product as "backup with just one touch" and be okay, whereas if you said "backup with OneTouch", you'd be in trouble.
the streets are full of pedestrians and jaywalkers,
Jaywalkers generally aren't a traffic impediment. I lived there - jaywalking is normal. Blocking traffic is not.
That doesn't provoke the police, and it certainly never should provoke mace.
The fence was fine. The mace was not, given what I've seen of the girls' behavior on the video.
You just stay in whatever province you found your own level instead of here and congratulate your local police on their iron fist.
Who congratulated the police? I think the overreaction from the police was just as much a part of the problem as the protestors provoking them. I mean, if a kid is teasing a strange dog and the dog bites him, sure we may put the dog down but we also blame the kid.
Here in NYC we demand better, though we usually don't get it.
The police do a generally good job in NYC. Certainly better than their pay scale would lead you to expect. Some of them suck, some of them have some kind of mental issues, but most of them are on the level.
You just stay in whatever province you found your own level
You're right that I couldn't cut it in NYC - it was too damn expensive. Loved it, though.
I didn't say the girls deserved to get maced - did you miss the part where I said that there were some cops at fault?
They were being "netted" because they wouldn't stay out of the street. You can't just drive into NYC and plop your ass down on the street - people live and work there.
You have a handful of weirdos who wouldn't get attention if they didn't provoke the police into some kind of action.
You have some number of police who are willing to cross the line, or who have too short a fuse for this kind of work.
You have people only posting the interesting bits of video, such that observers get a skewed view of the scene.
If you actually live in NYC and venture through these "protests", you see a bunch of people standing around and you wonder what all the fuss is about on the national news.
As an aside, I no longer live in NYC, so I haven't been to this particular protest. Also, if this is an "occupy Wall St" protest, what the heck are they doing in Union Square? Let the dog molester and peepers get back to work!
What can't be patented is the bit of code that says "if (time > 120 seconds) motor.stop();"
Can an electrical circuit that does the same thing be patented? I'd say no, it's not novel and not advancing the state of the art in any way - it's an extremely obvious way to implement a desired function.
So yes, the example you picked of a line of code that does something trivial and obvious should not be patent-able. But then neither should it's analog or mechanical equivalent.
Since trademarks are about protecting punters from being confused by similar but confusing branding
Since when does trademark require the products be different? Is a Chiquita banana different from other bananas?
PS isn't it a little two-faced for Apple Computers who used a logo *confusingly similar* to that of Apple Records, agrees to restrict themselves to computers so that their trademarks don't clash, then moves into the music label business and now is claiming trademark on everything that anyone else is doing?
I'm not going to let Apple's corporate behavior change my opinion of how trademarks should work.
Buying a faster CPU isn't a patentable improvement.
What about switching to a smaller CPU because I found a way to program it more efficiently?
I agree that most of the "software" patents are terrible, but there's no sense pretending that software is always separable from hardware. It would be silly to have rules where two otherwise-identical products have different rules depending on their "guts". An electric toothbrush with a motor speed controlled by resistors should be no more or less patentable than an electric toothbrush that uses a firmware controller.
Exactly! If someone tried to get a trademark on tyrosine kinase inhibitor it would be shot down because it is too descriptive, not because it is in general use. It's almost the perfect analogy, except for the obvious lack of being a car analogy:)
But someone could easily get a trademark for "Tyro-Kin", even though it's a place in Kazakhstan.
The point of trademark is commercial use, not whether a word existed or not. Singer is a person who sings, a sewing machine brand, and a big food service company. Even if our best and brightest sewing machine researchers called sewing machines "singers", it would not necessarily get denied a trademark unless the name was in common use.
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We're got alternatives - Linux and LibreOffice.
No we don't. They are fine alternatives in that they are almost functional equivalents, but people aren't able to use them at work or school due to MS's monopoly position.
People prefer to spend the money to keep the status quo and not have to learn anything new than try something that MIGHT work well enough for them
People spent money on Office 2011 despite having to basically re-learn the program from scratch. OpenOffice requires almost no retraining from Office 2003. People buy Office because they have to if they want to interact with the outside world in an efficient way.
They do have a huge market share though
Yeah, a 94% market share - a monopoly.
I did quite well buying Apple stock. Didn't do as well with my Dell stock, but that's why you diversify.
Sounds more like clever business to me.
In a competitive environment, it would be. In a monopoly position, it simply is anti-competitive in an area where you'd like some competition. I agree it is not "bribery", though.
Has anyone ever told you that you have a lot of toys? :)
Again, I'll have to rely on your opinion :)
The UI responsiveness... are you sure that's not hardware? AnandTech has the PowerVR absolutely creaming the Tegra2. Of course, the Transformer also has more pixels to push, so...
But it wouldn't surprise me if Apple were a little better at putting together hardware in exactly the right way to get their own software to perform exactly the way they want. I mean, iOS is really just MacOS, which is really just NextStep, which is like 20 years old - and Apple has been making hardware customized for that OS for about a decade. I'm sure Asus's hardware guys and Google's software guys could sit in a room and get to the same level of proficiency, but they are from different companies and don't have a decade of history working together. And at the end of the day, Apple has a lot less work to do that Google - supporting only a handful of devices instead of this huge ecosystem. It took Windows about 10 years to catch up to MacOS on generic hardware, despite massive resources... I imagine that's analogous to Google catching Apple.
I've never used either device, except for playing a little bit with an iPad at the store. I'll take your word for it that the Transformer keyboard implementation is better.
But I was responding to you making a comment about Apple not even having a similar product... I don't see how they aren't "similar" since they both do almost the exact same thing, albeit a bit differently.
can you tell me how this [asus.com] is "redoing what apple has already done"?
I'm sorry - it's a cool product, but the only difference between it and an iPad in concept is that the Transformer keyboard is attached with wires instead of Bluetooth.
Furthermore, you're on the BUS. A BUS. Why do you need to watch video????
You're right, he'd be much better off driving for 45 minutes and just listening to the radio. Or sitting on his couch eating processed foods watching the video. Lord knows the only thing to be done on a bus is to sit quietly and stare.
Because I could be one of those things someone decides to blow up.
You could also be one of those killed when someone doesn't objectively determine that something needs to be blown up before it does greater harm. :)
The cops are not strange dogs.
No, it was meant to be an analogy.
You are defending the police.
Point out where I defended the offending officers?
You don't deserve nice talk. You deserve much worse talk than that.
No one "deserves" nice talk, but you should use it if you want to be regarded as a rational person.
Out of towner, stop pretending you have New Yorker cred when you're just a pigfucker.
I don't have to pretend because I lived there. If you have no argument, that is fine - I tried to give you a chance to behave like someone who's opinion matters rather than a raving reactionary. I'm still here if you want to actually discuss something.
People without vaginas often have a hard time remembering the whole rape thing, but women do get raped.
Aside from that, there is always the good ol' cheating spouse. You can be a Good Christian(tm) and still get AIDS from your fallen-from-grace spouse.
I'm no lawyer, but from what I can make of it a descriptive term has to meet much more strict criteria for trademark protection than a nonsense word. "Multitouch" is so descriptive that it was used in academia without further explanation.
Archos has some real promise when they can get their hands on a tablet OS.
Good points - maybe they should have been granted it, or maybe those others should have been denied. Like I said, this IP stuff is pretty funny :)
...But this is more like trying to trademark "4 wheel drive"
Exactly! That is the perfect car analogy. "4 wheel drive" is way too descriptive to patent.
it is just the terminology in the industry
That probably doesn't matter much, depending on what you are getting the trademark for. Just because researchers use a term, does not make it common usage. However, it's probably a moot point, since anything "descriptive" is also likely to be common in research.
Pretty hilarious, this intellectual property stuff, huh?
I think it is actually NoTouch and OneTouch. Neither "no" nor "one" is a generally accepted prefix to a word, so those two words are nonsensical unless they are a product name. You could still advertise your product as "backup with just one touch" and be okay, whereas if you said "backup with OneTouch", you'd be in trouble.
the streets are full of pedestrians and jaywalkers,
Jaywalkers generally aren't a traffic impediment. I lived there - jaywalking is normal. Blocking traffic is not.
That doesn't provoke the police, and it certainly never should provoke mace.
The fence was fine. The mace was not, given what I've seen of the girls' behavior on the video.
You just stay in whatever province you found your own level instead of here and congratulate your local police on their iron fist.
Who congratulated the police? I think the overreaction from the police was just as much a part of the problem as the protestors provoking them. I mean, if a kid is teasing a strange dog and the dog bites him, sure we may put the dog down but we also blame the kid.
Here in NYC we demand better, though we usually don't get it.
The police do a generally good job in NYC. Certainly better than their pay scale would lead you to expect. Some of them suck, some of them have some kind of mental issues, but most of them are on the level.
You just stay in whatever province you found your own level
Again with the nice talk.
You're right that I couldn't cut it in NYC - it was too damn expensive. Loved it, though.
I didn't say the girls deserved to get maced - did you miss the part where I said that there were some cops at fault?
They were being "netted" because they wouldn't stay out of the street. You can't just drive into NYC and plop your ass down on the street - people live and work there.
Or police tolerating a peaceful protest for a week, at which point they find or make excuses to turn the protest into a riot?
Why assume the police are the provocateur? It could be anyone from local pissed-off store owners to some random pro-death-penalty guy.
You have a couple of things going on.
You have a handful of weirdos who wouldn't get attention if they didn't provoke the police into some kind of action.
You have some number of police who are willing to cross the line, or who have too short a fuse for this kind of work.
You have people only posting the interesting bits of video, such that observers get a skewed view of the scene.
If you actually live in NYC and venture through these "protests", you see a bunch of people standing around and you wonder what all the fuss is about on the national news.
As an aside, I no longer live in NYC, so I haven't been to this particular protest. Also, if this is an "occupy Wall St" protest, what the heck are they doing in Union Square? Let the dog molester and peepers get back to work!
No, it is you that have been trolled! Ahahahahahaha! Oh wait, maybe you were just trolling me with your troll accusation! Damn you, AC, damn you!
What can't be patented is the bit of code that says "if (time > 120 seconds) motor.stop();"
Can an electrical circuit that does the same thing be patented? I'd say no, it's not novel and not advancing the state of the art in any way - it's an extremely obvious way to implement a desired function.
So yes, the example you picked of a line of code that does something trivial and obvious should not be patent-able. But then neither should it's analog or mechanical equivalent.
Since trademarks are about protecting punters from being confused by similar but confusing branding
Since when does trademark require the products be different? Is a Chiquita banana different from other bananas?
PS isn't it a little two-faced for Apple Computers who used a logo *confusingly similar* to that of Apple Records, agrees to restrict themselves to computers so that their trademarks don't clash, then moves into the music label business and now is claiming trademark on everything that anyone else is doing?
I'm not going to let Apple's corporate behavior change my opinion of how trademarks should work.
Buying a faster CPU isn't a patentable improvement.
What about switching to a smaller CPU because I found a way to program it more efficiently?
I agree that most of the "software" patents are terrible, but there's no sense pretending that software is always separable from hardware. It would be silly to have rules where two otherwise-identical products have different rules depending on their "guts". An electric toothbrush with a motor speed controlled by resistors should be no more or less patentable than an electric toothbrush that uses a firmware controller.
Exactly! If someone tried to get a trademark on tyrosine kinase inhibitor it would be shot down because it is too descriptive, not because it is in general use. It's almost the perfect analogy, except for the obvious lack of being a car analogy :)
But someone could easily get a trademark for "Tyro-Kin", even though it's a place in Kazakhstan.
The point of trademark is commercial use, not whether a word existed or not. Singer is a person who sings, a sewing machine brand, and a big food service company. Even if our best and brightest sewing machine researchers called sewing machines "singers", it would not necessarily get denied a trademark unless the name was in common use.