"You don't believe that accomplishing the same thing faster isn't worthy of a patent? Before Visicalc, an account would create a large spreadsheet by hand. Then his boss would say, "what if we sold 3000 units instead of 2800" and the accountant would have to recalculate everything. With a spreadsheet, he enters in one figure and everything is re-calculated in an instant. Why isn't that useful and novel?"
Because they are not patenting a method to do it faster. They are patenting the ability to link together purchasing habits and make recommendations.
In any case making such a process faster is trivial nowadays. It just takes one programmer with some free time to implement it. And because of this simple fact, such an "invention" does not deserve a patent. It does not bring substantial technological advancement and does not solve any problem that was complex to solve before it's existance. After all that's what computers are for... automating tasks. Back when the Visicalc didn't exist it was quite different... they didn't really have a tool to achieve that goal.
"I work for a team developing technology for individuals who are blind and I have had the opportunity to use some screen reading software and while there have been leaps of progress it is still quite tedious to use, and not at all user friendly. One of my managers recently posed an interesting question for me: 'How would you design an OS from scratch that would target individuals who are blind and/or deaf?' What about inputs such as keyboards or refreshable braille devices?"
Back when I was studying at college I remember this guy with a small laptop attached on top of a black plastic device. The device was to the USB port of the computer. It was possible to pull out a sort of secondary keyboard out of this device that would have refreshable braile text.
I can also remember was that this guy was using Windows XP and headphones, so there ARE solutions out there that can be used as an example. I think the guy used headphones for voice feedback and the braile "keyboard" to read the last few lines he had written.
Not sure if this qualifies as an user friendly approach though. I think that it's always a really good idea to offer as many solutions as you can come up with to a group of possible end-users (in this case blind/deaf people) and see what they tell you. This way it should be easier for you to understand what their concept of user friendliness is.
"yes it is. piracy is denying the revenue from the good to the producer of the good. therefore theft."
It's killing products too, so I guess it makes it qualifies as homicide as well. Or something like that.
IMHO there is an undergoing lame attempt to try and make copyright infringement look like a really bad thing when common sense actually tells us that there's no big deal about it.
I'm not saying it's ok but please stop telling me it is like stealing. I may end up brainwashed.
"1. Microsoft (virri vulnerabilities) causes SPAM. Slashdot outraged. 2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged. Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.
I bet that if it was a story about Gmail then it would be a great idea, becasue Google never does evil."
Being a programmer doesn't make you a "hacker". "Hackers" are people who solve problems in creative and new ways. People that try to exceed the boundaries that have been set. Etc, etc, etc.
A "criminal hacker" is not a cracker. A cracker is someone capable of breaking into or modifying a program or a system. Some people will tell you it means other things as well, but a cracker is not a "criminal" by definition. For example, I may need to "crack" programs that I made and lost the source code of... which means that I would be a "good" cracker or something like that.
A "criminal non-hacker" is not a script kiddie. A script kiddie is someone who speaks of himself as a "hacker" (as in the popular evil word, not the one I descrived above) but actually relies on knowledge, scripts and programs created by other people to achieve their "evil" goals.
"That's a very naive statement. Sure, it's only a checkbox to compile a universal binary, but how do you know it will run properly on both platforms? Now you need to have duplicate QA departments. Basically double your testing staff because everything has to be tested on both platforms. Even years into the future, software developers will have to keep ancient PowerPC machines around just to do regression testing on."
Because your program will be running under the same system using exactly the same APIs. Saying that this would take a duplication of the QA department is a bit excessive. It would only need the same department to know about common problematics and eventually about a particular bug in one of the two systems. This will not be like porting an OS 9 application to OS X, so making such a comparison is really like talking about oranges when I was talking about apples.
As for the testing on both platforms, that's not really much different from testing your program on every possible PPC Mac model to know it will work. Nobody can claim that a program that runs on a Cube 450 Mhz will also run on a Cube 500 Mhz without problems unless they try it out. Intel Macs will be no different. They are meant to offer exactly the same APIs and OS compiled from the same source code. Unless you need to go low level with your coding, I really doubt that there will be problems running your app on Intel Macs. Any difference that comes up will be due to bugs in OS X. And Apple has shown that it is a priority for them to make the transition as smooth as possible.
"Due to market share alone, PowerPC will be around for at least 10 years. In fact, OS X only recently broke the 50% installed base of all Mac users. That's right, there's still over 10 million System 9 and older users out there... That gives you something to think about. So yeah, it might seem really easy for somebody to compile an app for the other platform, but that doesn't mean they've even had a chance to check it and see if it actually runs."
I fail to see what the number of OS 9 users means in this context. We are talking about the transition from PPC macs to Intel Macs, and it's nothing like the 9 to X transition we've seen before. The OS will be exactly the same on both platforms and the APIs will be the same. Basically they are preparing everything so that even new programs coming out for the Intel Macs in something like x years from now really take no effort whatsoever to port to PPC Macs.
Basically you are saying that it's impossible for Apple to offer 100% compatibility between Intel Macs and PPC Macs, while I think that it is quite feasible. Speculation vs speculation. How does that make my point of view naive?
"Batman's suit is a modified piece of infantry armor built by the applied sciences division of Wayne Enterprises. It's waterproof, bulletproof, knife-proof and temperature-regulating. Paired with an impact-resistant, graphite-composite cowl and spiked ninja-style gauntlets, it allows Batman to protect himself against everything from swords to machine guns."
Well, you can't get that kind of stuff on ebay can you?
"It's not compiling for PPC that will be difficult. It's testing it sufficiently to achieve release quality that is expensive. Very small vendors might just make a build and have users test it for them, but vendors with reputations usually need more assurance than "it compiles". I don't think Photoshop or Word will ever ship with "use at your own risk" PPC binaries."
Big companies (such as Adobe) won't have problems finding PPC computers to test their programs in. This is really a small investment in exchange for all of the advantages they get by building Universal binaries. Especially if people keeps buying PPC Macs for as long as they are sold.
Small companies will probably not have the same chance to test their software on both systems. But it's not such a big difference from the current situation where they are not able to test their programs in different PPC Mac models.
Apple is pushing developers a lot to build universal binaries, so I really think that they must have worked a lot to ensure this goal. This, of course, is only speculation... but when you realize how important it is for Apple for this transition to be as smooth as possible, you also get to see why it really makes sense for them to do the work correctly. IMHO it will take them a few minor new OS releases to get everything going once the new Macs are out.
"But as you said, it's not at all stupid to support the PPC. This is because even when the number of PPC Macs sold drops to zero, there is still a big installed base of PPC Macs to sell to. If you look at the MacOS 8/9 section of versiontracker.com, you'll see that there are at least five (on a Sunday!) software updates a day for the past five days, when MacOS 9 was discontinued in 2002 and and the last Mac that could boot MacOS 9 was discontinued in June 2004."
And on top of that, Apple never really offered as much support for the transition from 9 to X as they are offering for this transition. For example: back then they changed the APIs whereas the new Intel Macs will keep the same APIs. Developers will be able to compile their programs for both platforms with two checkboxes from an Xcode hosted in any of those two platforms.
I really think that we will be seeing universal binaries for a long time... and on top of that I also think that people will not really see much difference between Intel Macs and PPC Macs (as long as there are no hardware problems on the Intel Macs) when it comes to software. At least not for a few more years.
"Good point. Only the stupid, it would be insane. Developers will not care about the PPC, it'll be too much hassle. It's a lot easier to just get an Intel dev kit and in one year all the new computers are Intel so just produce Intel only binaries."
Building universal binaries takes only a checkbox. Only the insane would drop support for PPC when it's so easy to support it.
"While I think that Google and Yahoo can co-exist if they differentiat their offerings, the "winner" in this battle will be determined by marketing, not technical innovation. The average Joe User will not use Google's latest tool if it is not simple, and/or if the word does not get to Joe User."
The point you are missing though, is that in this particular scenario technical innovation may equal marketing. In fact Google has become what it is today because people likes to find what they are looking for. If Google was a crappy search engine with a massive marketing campaign it would probably not be half of what it is today.
If you ask people today how they found out about Google most of them answer that someone recommended it to them.
"These areas include iTunes' menu selection process to allow the user to select music to be played, the ability of the software to transfer music tracks to a portable music player, and search capabilities such as sorting music tracks by their genre, artist and album attributes."
Woah! Those are really neat inventions. Must have required a lot of intellect to bring that intellectual property to paper.
"How in the world does using the same protection method for books and music and software make sense?"
How in the world does using the same protection method for software and physical inventions make sense? You don't sit down and write an engine or a car or a rocket... etc, etc.
Basically the distinction you are making to argue that software should be patentable applies to show that it should not be patentable as well.
People should get real about this. No matter how incredibly good the theory behind patents is, it has been proven time and time again, especially with software, that they are just used as a way to control and reduce competition. I am still looking for a single software patent that I really consider to deserve to exist.
Otherwise why are most small developers against them and most big ones trying to promote them?
"Linux should be less worried. MS should be quaking in its' proverbial boots. Linux will remain because of its' use as a sever OS and the geek's premier OS. There might be a few people who make the switch from Linux to OSX, but I don't believe there will be a large shift. There will be a lot more people leaving Windows for the stability and look of OSX. The price point will be on par with any other Intel machine, and Apple could see a large increase in marketshare."
Not to mention that there are developers out there that actually work on Linux because they enjoy doing so. That is something that you can't easily replace, and that will ensure that Linux keeps evolving. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster... but it will not stop.
But OTOH this may turn out to be a good thing by actually making Linux distributions concentrate more on making easy to use OSes.
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
That is why I think free software is the way to go: it brings (IMHO) the most benefit to society as a whole. And normally I am also opposed to extremism, but I think RMS is one of the few (maybe even only one?) extremists that actually do good and cause progress in this world.
I think we (all of us people) should do our best to make 'everything better'; more or less a humanistic point of view. I think it is ethically better if all software were free. Knowledge should be shared. Software (algorithms) is knowledge and should thus be shared.
I don't disagree with what you're saying about all of us trying to make things better, but to do so you also have to make the money it's needed to dedicate your time and effort to what you are doing. For instance a doctor could visit all of his patients for free because that would be ethically correct, but how long would he be able to dedicate his full time to this purpose before he needs to find a different source of money?
I know we are talking about freedom in a different way, but for some developers, keeping the source to themselves makes the difference between making money and not making any money at all.
Small developers don't have the ability to compete with big software companies or groups of developers if he also has to make all of his source code public. Forget linux for a second and think about small utility programs. Small projects. Most of the times I find that if it wasn't because of the time and effort of single small developers we wouldn't be seeing much of the software that exist today. And I, as an end user, am glad to pay for their works.
I am just saying that there are some cases in which I really think that open source is not necessarily a good thing.
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1
Having access to the source code would make Windows an easier target of copyright infringement. And in any case, they are free to do as they wish.
The fact that you want to have access to something doesn't make it a right of yours to do so. And even if you think it's wrong that it's impossible to get Window's source code, it is still a right of the people that developed it to keep the code to themselves.
Basically freedom is important in every way, not just when it's convenient to talk about it.
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
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· Score: 1, Insightful
No. It is not because you do not edit and compile your own software; it is because you are PREVENTED to edit and compile your own software that you are not free......If you are PREVENTED from building your own computer, you are not free......If you are PREVENTED to crack your own molecules, then you are not free......If you are PREVENTED from generating your own electricity, you are not free......If you are PREVENTED to make your own video card, then you are not free...
First of all you should define what is yours and what isn't. If you are buying software from a developer who is only selling you the binaries or a license to use them, then the source code is hardly yours. Just like it happens with computers, TVs, and everything else. The blue-prints are not part of the deal when you buy those.
I never walk in protest marches. Does that mean I would agree with taking away the right for OTHER people to walk in protest marches? No, as that would take away their freedom directly (and mine indirectly). I never build my own TV set. Does that mean I would agree with legislation that would prevent OTHER people to build their own TV set (without broadcast flag checking)? No.
But I wouldn't accept a rule that tells me I should include my source code as part of the deal when I sell software either. That would take away my freedom, which is no less important than yours.
The key point in this discussion is that both the open source and closed source mentality have a reason to exist and none of them is inherently wrong.
Do I edit and compile the software I run? Sometimes. If I did not I would still see that someone preventing me from being able to edit and compile the software that I run is taking away my freedom.
Feel free to edit what is trully yours. If you need the source code then you are free to either go for open source software or buy the source code from the developer. Someone trying to gain ownership of my work without my permission would be taking away my freedom.
PS: this is not against open source, which is a wonderful thing, but against extremisms.
It would be enough to ask slashdotters which one is better to get a clear answer. Neither one wins. Both are good OSes. Either that or half of US is ignorant... = P
Slashdot Mirror
And the funniest part of this all is that there was a dupe story earlier today by timothy and now this story which is actually a dupe of a dupe.
A dupe followed by a dupe of a dupe!
Now what do you call that?
Because they are not patenting a method to do it faster. They are patenting the ability to link together purchasing habits and make recommendations.
In any case making such a process faster is trivial nowadays. It just takes one programmer with some free time to implement it. And because of this simple fact, such an "invention" does not deserve a patent. It does not bring substantial technological advancement and does not solve any problem that was complex to solve before it's existance. After all that's what computers are for... automating tasks. Back when the Visicalc didn't exist it was quite different... they didn't really have a tool to achieve that goal.
Back when I was studying at college I remember this guy with a small laptop attached on top of a black plastic device. The device was to the USB port of the computer. It was possible to pull out a sort of secondary keyboard out of this device that would have refreshable braile text.
I can also remember was that this guy was using Windows XP and headphones, so there ARE solutions out there that can be used as an example. I think the guy used headphones for voice feedback and the braile "keyboard" to read the last few lines he had written.
Not sure if this qualifies as an user friendly approach though. I think that it's always a really good idea to offer as many solutions as you can come up with to a group of possible end-users (in this case blind/deaf people) and see what they tell you. This way it should be easier for you to understand what their concept of user friendliness is.
And give up playing Doom 3...???
It's killing products too, so I guess it makes it qualifies as homicide as well. Or something like that.
IMHO there is an undergoing lame attempt to try and make copyright infringement look like a really bad thing when common sense actually tells us that there's no big deal about it.
I'm not saying it's ok but please stop telling me it is like stealing. I may end up brainwashed.
Maybe they are going to offer Googlecoins as the first form of virtual currency?
That's because Google never does evil.
Nope. Nope and nope again.
Being a programmer doesn't make you a "hacker". "Hackers" are people who solve problems in creative and new ways. People that try to exceed the boundaries that have been set. Etc, etc, etc.
A "criminal hacker" is not a cracker. A cracker is someone capable of breaking into or modifying a program or a system. Some people will tell you it means other things as well, but a cracker is not a "criminal" by definition. For example, I may need to "crack" programs that I made and lost the source code of... which means that I would be a "good" cracker or something like that.
A "criminal non-hacker" is not a script kiddie. A script kiddie is someone who speaks of himself as a "hacker" (as in the popular evil word, not the one I descrived above) but actually relies on knowledge, scripts and programs created by other people to achieve their "evil" goals.
Because your program will be running under the same system using exactly the same APIs. Saying that this would take a duplication of the QA department is a bit excessive. It would only need the same department to know about common problematics and eventually about a particular bug in one of the two systems. This will not be like porting an OS 9 application to OS X, so making such a comparison is really like talking about oranges when I was talking about apples.
As for the testing on both platforms, that's not really much different from testing your program on every possible PPC Mac model to know it will work. Nobody can claim that a program that runs on a Cube 450 Mhz will also run on a Cube 500 Mhz without problems unless they try it out. Intel Macs will be no different. They are meant to offer exactly the same APIs and OS compiled from the same source code. Unless you need to go low level with your coding, I really doubt that there will be problems running your app on Intel Macs. Any difference that comes up will be due to bugs in OS X. And Apple has shown that it is a priority for them to make the transition as smooth as possible.
I fail to see what the number of OS 9 users means in this context. We are talking about the transition from PPC macs to Intel Macs, and it's nothing like the 9 to X transition we've seen before. The OS will be exactly the same on both platforms and the APIs will be the same. Basically they are preparing everything so that even new programs coming out for the Intel Macs in something like x years from now really take no effort whatsoever to port to PPC Macs.
Basically you are saying that it's impossible for Apple to offer 100% compatibility between Intel Macs and PPC Macs, while I think that it is quite feasible. Speculation vs speculation. How does that make my point of view naive?
Well, you can't get that kind of stuff on ebay can you?
Big companies (such as Adobe) won't have problems finding PPC computers to test their programs in. This is really a small investment in exchange for all of the advantages they get by building Universal binaries. Especially if people keeps buying PPC Macs for as long as they are sold.
Small companies will probably not have the same chance to test their software on both systems. But it's not such a big difference from the current situation where they are not able to test their programs in different PPC Mac models.
Apple is pushing developers a lot to build universal binaries, so I really think that they must have worked a lot to ensure this goal. This, of course, is only speculation... but when you realize how important it is for Apple for this transition to be as smooth as possible, you also get to see why it really makes sense for them to do the work correctly. IMHO it will take them a few minor new OS releases to get everything going once the new Macs are out.
And on top of that, Apple never really offered as much support for the transition from 9 to X as they are offering for this transition. For example: back then they changed the APIs whereas the new Intel Macs will keep the same APIs. Developers will be able to compile their programs for both platforms with two checkboxes from an Xcode hosted in any of those two platforms.
I really think that we will be seeing universal binaries for a long time... and on top of that I also think that people will not really see much difference between Intel Macs and PPC Macs (as long as there are no hardware problems on the Intel Macs) when it comes to software. At least not for a few more years.
Building universal binaries takes only a checkbox. Only the insane would drop support for PPC when it's so easy to support it.
The point you are missing though, is that in this particular scenario technical innovation may equal marketing. In fact Google has become what it is today because people likes to find what they are looking for. If Google was a crappy search engine with a massive marketing campaign it would probably not be half of what it is today.
If you ask people today how they found out about Google most of them answer that someone recommended it to them.
Woah! Those are really neat inventions. Must have required a lot of intellect to bring that intellectual property to paper.
Go patents go!
How in the world does using the same protection method for software and physical inventions make sense? You don't sit down and write an engine or a car or a rocket... etc, etc.
Basically the distinction you are making to argue that software should be patentable applies to show that it should not be patentable as well.
People should get real about this. No matter how incredibly good the theory behind patents is, it has been proven time and time again, especially with software, that they are just used as a way to control and reduce competition. I am still looking for a single software patent that I really consider to deserve to exist.
Otherwise why are most small developers against them and most big ones trying to promote them?
Nope. More like making computers usable by people who actually doesn't give a damn about their command lines.
Seems to me like you missed the point of technology...
Not to mention that there are developers out there that actually work on Linux because they enjoy doing so. That is something that you can't easily replace, and that will ensure that Linux keeps evolving. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster... but it will not stop.
But OTOH this may turn out to be a good thing by actually making Linux distributions concentrate more on making easy to use OSes.
I don't disagree with what you're saying about all of us trying to make things better, but to do so you also have to make the money it's needed to dedicate your time and effort to what you are doing. For instance a doctor could visit all of his patients for free because that would be ethically correct, but how long would he be able to dedicate his full time to this purpose before he needs to find a different source of money?
I know we are talking about freedom in a different way, but for some developers, keeping the source to themselves makes the difference between making money and not making any money at all.
Small developers don't have the ability to compete with big software companies or groups of developers if he also has to make all of his source code public. Forget linux for a second and think about small utility programs. Small projects. Most of the times I find that if it wasn't because of the time and effort of single small developers we wouldn't be seeing much of the software that exist today. And I, as an end user, am glad to pay for their works.
I am just saying that there are some cases in which I really think that open source is not necessarily a good thing.
Having access to the source code would make Windows an easier target of copyright infringement. And in any case, they are free to do as they wish.
The fact that you want to have access to something doesn't make it a right of yours to do so. And even if you think it's wrong that it's impossible to get Window's source code, it is still a right of the people that developed it to keep the code to themselves.
Basically freedom is important in every way, not just when it's convenient to talk about it.
First of all you should define what is yours and what isn't. If you are buying software from a developer who is only selling you the binaries or a license to use them, then the source code is hardly yours. Just like it happens with computers, TVs, and everything else. The blue-prints are not part of the deal when you buy those.
But I wouldn't accept a rule that tells me I should include my source code as part of the deal when I sell software either. That would take away my freedom, which is no less important than yours.
The key point in this discussion is that both the open source and closed source mentality have a reason to exist and none of them is inherently wrong.
Feel free to edit what is trully yours. If you need the source code then you are free to either go for open source software or buy the source code from the developer. Someone trying to gain ownership of my work without my permission would be taking away my freedom.
PS: this is not against open source, which is a wonderful thing, but against extremisms.
It would be enough to ask slashdotters which one is better to get a clear answer. Neither one wins. Both are good OSes. Either that or half of US is ignorant... = P
Your point of view is as utterly intolerant as the point of view of those you are criticizing.
"Mac users are phanatix. They are insecure and utterly intollerant.. Mod me up for being reasonable!"
Are you kidding us?
OK, it's not possible to GPL the GPL. But following your logic it is possible to FDL the FDL, right?