Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon will likely eventually just cross license each other and keep the wannabes out, at least for the U.S. market (don't know about foreign patents issued).
I see a lot of bitching with respect to patents, but without patents we would not have seen the 19th & 20th century rise of the U.S. in mechanical and electrical and electronic invention.
A society where everything is kept a Trade Secret means that few people are willing to disclose or trade information. Patents only give you a limited time right to exclusive use IF, and only when, you disclose the invention in its entirety via the patent, so others can duplicate it, invent around it or improve it. It is a magically simple solution to the older age of "guilds" where you often had to be born into the guild to be a person who could become skilled in the trades.
SolidWorks, like a lot of other 3D CAD, CAM & FEM applications are almost exclusively Windows 7 at this point, though very high end goes UNIX.
When they cost $5k or more for the base package and go up from there (a lot) per seat it is obvious the developers with these super complicated applications and accessory programs aren't interested in supporting multiple platforms unless they absolutely must.
Microsoft locked in these heavy developers with Gates & Balmer personally promising the heavy hitters who were already on Unix workstations back in the early 90s that Microsoft would have THE BIG INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH OS with WindowsNT. Developers bought it and the rest is history.
But the group that sets the rules TELLS THE BANKS what they will do.
CRA, The Community Reinvestment Act demanded that banks make loans to low income areas regardless of meeting loan requirements or...the banks would be subject to having their approval to be a bank revoked by the Treasury Dept. or whoever oversaw the CRA.
The banks made the loans but said "We can't keep these marginal loans" so all the biggies agreed that FMae and FMac would take them...but then they said they couldn't hold them, so rules were made to allow them to sell into "mortgage pool securities".
The whole damned thing was pushed by the U.S. Congress.
On upper class student's projects, professor's research, with companies they know over summer break. Start talking to profs in the fall, so you get a job by next summer.
Learn how to use real world shop tools, because everything you design needs to be built...right. Tear apart and put back together everything you can to gain experience on "what works", why and how mistakes get made & then fixed.
Engineering is a profession where you never, ever stop learning...including the unsuccessful results which are just as much about learning as the things that work.
Eventually you start to form an internal order of design thinking for your field that gives you the ability to take a desired end result and sort the 50 variables down to the key defining elements that dictate what designs are reasonably possible, so you don't waste design, construction & testing time. The more quickly you can get to real world possibilities, the more quickly your work and career can progress.
"Human Caused Warming" is what some political groups want to imply.
Global warming cooling changes of large magnitude seem entirely due to the Sun & Earth orbit.
Every scientist knowing the record of the last 2 dozen great ice ages over the last 2.5 million years knows that global cooling and warming alternate and that it is such a massive change that humans will not have any effect on the magnitude of those large changes.
We are in a cooling period some solar scientists have speculated may last a decade or more.
I don't buy studies financed by dollars from governments given to the people doing the studies. That is very much like raises to teachers who then vote for more legislators who promise more raises and higher pensions, tenure and earlier retirement. Hello Greece.
Traveling fast, far & for a long future time span means your real chances of space ship surface collision, erosion & even catastrophic failure in contact with small rocky or icy objects only tens of grams in size are extremely high.
The chance of "seeing" a small object that weighs a pound when you are travelling at 1000-10,000 km/hr is remote and even more remote that you would have the energy or the strength of the vessel to rapidly change its direction in time to miss the object.
Surviving and then repairing all such encounters routinely is going to be a monumental task.
I can't wait to hear who decided to put the largest HD assembly operation in a flood plain where Asian Monsoons routinely flood out large areas every year.
It is not like this is unexpected.
Restart the plant and...it happens next year or the year thereafter.
I don't have any idea how this works, but one of the biggest problems facing any company is information that "migrates" outside the company and most of it is confidential files.
They seemed to talk of phones and pads/tablets in the article, but I wonder if it extends to laptops and other computer equipment. More info is needed.
Obviously a photo from any camera can not be locked down as there is no electronic connection to an isolated camera.
I am a design engineer/innovator who uses Apple hardware & I attempt to "do it all".
I don't limit myself, so I run XP, Win7 in VM and Boot Camp (W7) along with Mac OSX, so I can take on whatever tasks, like my W7 only 3D CAD, whenever and for whatever work reason I need to operate in at the moment.
The same sort of scenario might be imagined for a lot of "delivery systems".
A lot of these systems where the "paper is free" are trying to suck in users so they earn advertising dollars. Physical books and libraries are normally an exception, but even author's sites and libraries seem to have at least one ad on them.
It seems to be the price of progress that people are exposed to seductive forms of content with the intention of separating them from their cash. Sort of like the old yearly "Carnival" that arrived in town once a year. But it was obvious that the Carnival was out to get as much of our money as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
So let us get rid of tractors. Then if we get rid of horse teams, there will be lots of hand plowing jobs.
Wallah...no unemployment.
Sounds and Feels like the last gasp attempt of the great salesman (Developers, Developers, Developers).
Dedicated gaming consoles seem like they don't have inertia anymore given the evolution of devices over the last 3 years.
Sad...They will spend another couple billion dollars before Balmer is ousted.
Why is it hard for the Board of Directors at Microsoft to see this? Maybe because not hardly one of them uses games?
Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon will likely eventually just cross license each other and keep the wannabes out, at least for the U.S. market (don't know about foreign patents issued).
I see a lot of bitching with respect to patents, but without patents we would not have seen the 19th & 20th century rise of the U.S. in mechanical and electrical and electronic invention.
A society where everything is kept a Trade Secret means that few people are willing to disclose or trade information. Patents only give you a limited time right to exclusive use IF, and only when, you disclose the invention in its entirety via the patent, so others can duplicate it, invent around it or improve it. It is a magically simple solution to the older age of "guilds" where you often had to be born into the guild to be a person who could become skilled in the trades.
Better uses for $5000, so get a crapo bike or scooter off Craigs List.
They will steal a wheel anyway if they need a tire.
In fact buy 2 off Crags List.
SolidWorks, like a lot of other 3D CAD, CAM & FEM applications are almost exclusively Windows 7 at this point, though very high end goes UNIX.
When they cost $5k or more for the base package and go up from there (a lot) per seat it is obvious the developers with these super complicated applications and accessory programs aren't interested in supporting multiple platforms unless they absolutely must.
Microsoft locked in these heavy developers with Gates & Balmer personally promising the heavy hitters who were already on Unix workstations back in the early 90s that Microsoft would have THE BIG INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH OS with WindowsNT. Developers bought it and the rest is history.
Mobile is only one problem area. Flash has unexpectedly quits on wake from sleep on my MBPro.
How many years have these problems been going on?
So your company lost all its marketing, production & engineering documents for your trade secret widgets & it was due to a Microsoft bug.
Is Microsoft responsible for allowing a Word condition allowing executables in or the Windows OS for having holes?
Or is your company responsible for the total loss of its trade secret intellectual property?
Now who do the aggrieved shareholders sue?
Nothing new here!
Maybe they have to sell them at too low a price in order to try to keep volume up?
But the group that sets the rules TELLS THE BANKS what they will do.
CRA, The Community Reinvestment Act demanded that banks make loans to low income areas regardless of meeting loan requirements or...the banks would be subject to having their approval to be a bank revoked by the Treasury Dept. or whoever oversaw the CRA.
The banks made the loans but said "We can't keep these marginal loans" so all the biggies agreed that FMae and FMac would take them...but then they said they couldn't hold them, so rules were made to allow them to sell into "mortgage pool securities".
The whole damned thing was pushed by the U.S. Congress.
That was from an earlier study 1-2 years back by memory.
The indication seems strong that environment plays a big part in gene expression and it is absolutely fascinating.
It has happened in the past over thousands of years, and it will happen again and again.
Lesser Countries will never agree to stop doing anything to restrict population growth, as they want to be "bigger countries".
Hence, we run out of something and ...
On upper class student's projects, professor's research, with companies they know over summer break. Start talking to profs in the fall, so you get a job by next summer.
Learn how to use real world shop tools, because everything you design needs to be built...right. Tear apart and put back together everything you can to gain experience on "what works", why and how mistakes get made & then fixed.
Engineering is a profession where you never, ever stop learning...including the unsuccessful results which are just as much about learning as the things that work.
Eventually you start to form an internal order of design thinking for your field that gives you the ability to take a desired end result and sort the 50 variables down to the key defining elements that dictate what designs are reasonably possible, so you don't waste design, construction & testing time. The more quickly you can get to real world possibilities, the more quickly your work and career can progress.
"Human Caused Warming" is what some political groups want to imply.
Global warming cooling changes of large magnitude seem entirely due to the Sun & Earth orbit.
Every scientist knowing the record of the last 2 dozen great ice ages over the last 2.5 million years knows that global cooling and warming alternate and that it is such a massive change that humans will not have any effect on the magnitude of those large changes.
We are in a cooling period some solar scientists have speculated may last a decade or more.
I don't buy studies financed by dollars from governments given to the people doing the studies. That is very much like raises to teachers who then vote for more legislators who promise more raises and higher pensions, tenure and earlier retirement. Hello Greece.
The lack of knowledge exhibited by the above reply leaves me speechless.
Tell me how you measured this to confirm such a conclusion?
Thanks for more misleading information.
Traveling fast, far & for a long future time span means your real chances of space ship surface collision, erosion & even catastrophic failure in contact with small rocky or icy objects only tens of grams in size are extremely high.
The chance of "seeing" a small object that weighs a pound when you are travelling at 1000-10,000 km/hr is remote and even more remote that you would have the energy or the strength of the vessel to rapidly change its direction in time to miss the object.
Surviving and then repairing all such encounters routinely is going to be a monumental task.
I give it my PITS ranking: Pie in the Sky
Giant planning failure!
I can't wait to hear who decided to put the largest HD assembly operation in a flood plain where Asian Monsoons routinely flood out large areas every year.
It is not like this is unexpected.
Restart the plant and...it happens next year or the year thereafter.
I don't have any idea how this works, but one of the biggest problems facing any company is information that "migrates" outside the company and most of it is confidential files.
They seemed to talk of phones and pads/tablets in the article, but I wonder if it extends to laptops and other computer equipment. More info is needed.
Obviously a photo from any camera can not be locked down as there is no electronic connection to an isolated camera.
I am a design engineer/innovator who uses Apple hardware & I attempt to "do it all".
I don't limit myself, so I run XP, Win7 in VM and Boot Camp (W7) along with Mac OSX, so I can take on whatever tasks, like my W7 only 3D CAD, whenever and for whatever work reason I need to operate in at the moment.
Offering it all.
To that end I expect to see Macs continually improve in running VM and native OSs other than Mac OS X.
The more options you offer, the more customers you drag in & ...
I want an ANSWER Desk.
More than 50% of my calls do not get an answer from the foreign sounding "Tony" on the other end of the line.
Doesn't mean you should.
So,fewer sunspots Galileo observerved were from deforestation & depopulation?
The same sort of scenario might be imagined for a lot of "delivery systems".
A lot of these systems where the "paper is free" are trying to suck in users so they earn advertising dollars. Physical books and libraries are normally an exception, but even author's sites and libraries seem to have at least one ad on them.
It seems to be the price of progress that people are exposed to seductive forms of content with the intention of separating them from their cash. Sort of like the old yearly "Carnival" that arrived in town once a year. But it was obvious that the Carnival was out to get as much of our money as possible.