Fedora doesnt just fuck half the system up every release just to be new and flashy...
1) The newest release of Ubuntu is an LTS release, meaning it will be supported for at least 3 years.
2) Fedora seems to royally fubar my machine when upgrading to the next release. I've had to install as new each and every time. This is why I keep my data in a separate partition.
CBS is trying to be "edgy" by pulling this stunt. They could have called it "Crap My Dad Says" but instead did this because they knew it would be controversial and therefore raise awareness of the new show. Those clever CBS execs got this show mentioned on Slashdot.
The PTC is right that everyone knows what "$#.!" really means because of the "... My Dad Says" at the end. Sure it appears harmless, but I don't think it sends the right message to children who are too young for the show in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the show existing on regular television. However, knowing how CBS operates this show will be promo'd during "family friendly" shows via those damn "pop ups" and 15 second commercials.
What if CBS made a show called "The @#&^%#$ of Harlem"? Wouldn't the PTC be right to protest such a title for a show? It doesn't explicitly say the word, but I bet you know what it may mean. It could mean "The Princes of Harlem", but they would be counting on people interpreting it as something controversial (and racially offensive).
In the end, this will probably bite CBS in the ass. The show will suck (most do) and the advertisers won't like the negative attention the group can organize toward their brands.
Actually the legal jargon may be necessary, but it doesn't always come from the field for which the patent originates. I've seen a couple of WTF? moments when a draft patent application comes from the legal department.
I agree that the patent isn't a step-by-step instruction, however it SHOULD be concise enough to allow other inventions from unintentionally violating the patent.
How many patent trolls have taken advantage of the vagueness of their patent?
I don't think you can generally patent an invention that already existed solely because you were the first to mass produce it inexpensively enough to make it a viable consumer product.
Actually I believe you can patent an improvement on a previous patent or work.
The point wasn't the mass production. The point was the multi-touch smartphone. The previous works are the ingredients but not the actual concept of a multi-touch smartphone. The fact that it's mass producible makes the patent more valuable and therefore relevant.
The inventors lawyer saw a potential to make some money off the inventor would seem more likely.
I didn't know that lawyers had this psychic ability to discovered undisclosed inventions. I can see them standing outside their offices concentrating as hard as they can and come to the conclusion that Mr Smith two blocks over has just invented a widget. I better run over there and convince him to let me patent it for him before another psychic patent lawyer does...
I don't think it's impossible to reimplement a patent from the patent document, but I don't think it's easy either.
I also believe the more obfuscated the patent document, the least likely it's really deserves a patent.
Unfortunately, patent lawyers like their obfuscated writing so it's hard to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. I think this is a well tested strategy on the part of the larger patent firms, since the patent office will probably consider the firm's reputation when granting the patent especially when the bureaucrat feels the need to "fake" that he understands the patent (eg. Well the last few hundred valid patents from that firm were written this way, therefore chances are good that this patent is also valid).
Well yes, seeing as software patents are artificial monopolies on mathematical functions they are being used to prevent a competitor from releasing a different technology that performs the same function. They haven't patented the specific code (design), rather the function of the code (otherwise you could just change variable names and get around the whole thing)
Interesting. While I do not agree that all software is patentable, I do see the need for software patents for very complex algorithms or concepts that cost a small fortune to develop. I also think your use of mathematical functions is a stretch. I know you're using math to argue that:
Software is a mathematical function.
Math can not be patented.
Therefore, Software can't be patented. (yawn)
The problem with that argument is software does not fit into what people consider traditional math. To the majority of people, there is a significant difference between f(x) = x^2 + 2*x + 2 and the Windows operating system.
Technically math is involved in all computer programs, since the computer performs work based on the interpretation of instructions whose sequence is based on the current state of variables that are assigned values that correlate to some real world phenomenon. But couldn't the same be said of mechanical gears whose ratios are based on a mathematical function that allows the maximum torque for a given range of rotational speed?
What attribute makes an automatic transmission patentable, and not a computer algorithm that converts speech into text? An even more interesting question is what is the attribute that makes a bi-metal coil that expands and contracts with temperature being used with a mechanical switch to interrupt the flow of current when a preset maximum temperature is reached, and not reading the voltage across a thermistor, converting that voltage to a temperature and using an if statement that will turn off a switch when temperate is greater than max temperature? Disregard that thermometers are old and obvious now...
This discussion gets really complicated when FPGAs are considered. Discrete components are patentable but not VHDL code?
Anyway, I think the "attribute" is a hard thing to define but I do believe that there are software algorithms that are complex enough to be patentable.
I know I'm rambling now, but let's get back to Apple since it is the basis of this thread. Apple took a huge risk in entering the already crowded cell phone market. Apple gambled that the money spent to develop a multitouch cellphone would be rewarded by providing a unique and useful phone to the consumer. They took this gamble despite the fact that PDA phones and Windows CE phones were performing poorly in the marketplace. Apple's gamble paid off, and they should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Now that Apple demonstrated that money can be made with a touch tablet phone, the other companies are trying to mimic the attributes of the iPhone in hopes of increasing their marketshare. Even Google is trying to get a piece of the action.
Shouldn't Apple get a return on its investments? An investment the other companies did not make or risk? I happen to think that yes Apple should be granted patent protection. If the iPhone turned out to be a flop and consumers showed dislike towards the multitouch phone would people discuss the merits of Apple's patents? Probably not.
Sigh. No need to bring that in to it and gloss over the real people involced. HCI researchers have been researching multitouch since the early 80s, or even before.
You can't argue with the facts. Prior to FingerWorks in 1998 (which Apple bought), you had multitouch on touch tablets of different shapes and sizes. Most were separate from the display like a traditional keyboard, some had a projector that projected the screen onto the front of the touch pad, and some had the image projected from behind the surface. There even was an early monochromatic LCD phone that had a touch tablet embedded in front of it (I do not believe it was multi-touch).
However using the technology, purchased from FingerWorks, Apple was able to combine a multitouch UI with a color LCD screen on a handheld portable device that was a functional cell phone. At great risk, since other touchscreen PDA and smartphones were suffering from poor sales.
I don't think anyone thinks that Apple created their multitouch phone inside a vacuum, however Apple did see market potential in providing multitouch on a cell phone and patented their implementation of it, as well purchasing the IP of FingerWorks.
So unless you are suggesting that anybody could take academic papers that discusses a single quantity method of using physically large off the shelf parts, and piece all those separate works together into creating a very thin handheld device that can be mass produced inexpensively enough to make it a viable consumer product, I don't know what point you were trying to make.
Incidentally, Bill Buxton does not criticize the iPhone or Apple and just talks about the "long nose of innovation".
It is almost like inventions happen because the right prerequisites are there, and not because of some monetary incentive.
True most inventions are created to solve a particular problem and not because of some monetary incentive. However, the reason YOU know that the invention exists is because the inventor saw a potential to make some money off of his idea, and acquired a patent to protect his investment.
If that's true, then isn't it interesting that Android doesn't have a problem with battery preservation or task management? Android devices have comparable battery life to the iPhone, and tasks are managed automatically and transparently.
What? You can say that with a straight face?
With each Android update Google has been trying to improve battery life by allowing the user to monitor application battery use and manually kill the applications that uses the most power.
I found that downloading a 3rd party utility named "Task Manager" has improved my battery life by allowing me to kill all my applications that insist on being in the background even though I'm not using them.
Another handy widget is "Power Control" that allows me to turn of the GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth when I'm not using them without having to traverse the Android settings menu.
Before I found these very handy apps, my battery would last about a day. Now I can get about 2.5 days.
If Android actually managed these applications "automatically and transparently" for me, I wouldn't need these applications to save battery life.
The CPUs used in android phones have hardware acceleration for java. The apps themselves are tiny and they use barely any memory. Java may have been slow a few years ago, and some java apps you may have used might be badly written, but I think you need to adjust your prejudices. In any case, Android itself isn't written in java, and any java calls into the API will run native code. I doubt this has much impact (if any) on the performance of the OS. Android 2.2 will feature a JIT which will make it even faster, so maybe we need to revisit in a few weeks and see how slow this java thing is again...
Actually my main problem with Android is that it uses Dalvik as its VM and not actual Java. Sure it is registered based instead of stack based and this is suppose to be designed more for the limited resources of the phone. Too bad it doesn't have JIT compiler like real Java does. Good thing we have that hardware accelerator that speeds up the interpretation, otherwise imagine how slow this thing could be.
I think you should've said "perceived" shortcomings because you didn't mention any area where android needs to catch up. It does everything the iphone does + more. It is now the iphone that needs to catch up - and I agree the 4G will do that.
Actually I can say observed shortcomings. I own a T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, I have a colleague with an iPhone. My phone runs at 528Mhz with 192 MB RAM, his iPhone runs (underclocked) at 412Mhz with 128 MB RAM. I currently using cupcake 1.6 and not the Cyanogen port.
Our phones are of similar age. His phone is more responsive. His virtual keyboard works better than mine. His selection of apps dwarf mine, and one more cool thing about iTunes is that all of the apps he can buy are listed in US dollars, where my Google market has multiple currencies... Yen and Euros really? Google couldn't even offer to convert to US dollars?
The only thing that my phone excelled at, and it proved to be the most important, my phone was unlocked by T-Mobile and I was able to use a standard GSM SIM Vodaphone prepaid card to avoid roaming charges during my almost 3 month stay abroad... He does not have that luxury.
He just paid $40 for a nice slide phone with $40 credit to use... Which only shows how much the phone companies overcharge for headsets in the US.
Well actually I was talking about saving money on per-seat runtime licenses, or not having to roll their own boot strap.
I never mentioned patents, since I thought it was pretty much obvious to anyone that just because they used open source tools and/or operating systems for their products, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can't use patented technology. Hence my comment about not forcing the manufacturer to be open.
However, this is rarely a problem with hardware manufacturers because they're in the business to sell hardware.
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowering the production costs and lessens the need to offset very large initial investments during the production run with secondary revenue streams.
You seem to misunderstand how people use their iPhones--and any smartphone--nowadays. And I'm talking about regular consumers, not geeks. If they have invested in their dozens of $1.99 apps, and purchased their music through iTunes Music Store, and gotten used to syncing the device with iTunes, they will certainly consider all of this when their two-year contract is up and they are contemplating buying a new phone. Should I throw away all my favorite, paid for apps and games? Does it even connect to my iTunes to sync my playlists? Or should I get the new iPhone model with even more shiny goodness?
In this regard, the choice of smartphone is very much like the choice of personal computers.
You are correct about iPhone users and their investment. But I wouldn't call the number of iPhone users as being enough to be called an average smartphone user yet.
The majority of the phone use still appears to be email, twitter, sms, and browsing the web. Not to mention music from iTunes is not longer DRM and consequently not locked to the iPhone.
Also, Rhapsody, Amazon, Walmart and others do provide similar services and other handset manufactures are still able to make it easier for the consumer to use these competitors and offset any advantage iTunes may have.
Face it, the iPhone has fallen behind it's competitors.
So does that mean we now have a another clear leader in the smart phone market? Or are people including yourself going to continue to measure other smart phones to the iPhone?
To me as long as everyone is comparing their wares to the iPhone, the iPhone is still the one to beat...
Apple will start worrying when people no longer feel the need to measure up to the iPhone or better yet when iPhone versus some other phone no longer generate large number of web traffic.
The leaked iPhone 4G looks like Apple is just trying to catch up with the Nexus One, and not even succeeding at that.
Wishful thinking? Or do you have a 4G now?
The big question is when "multitasking" is no longer the major difference between platforms what will be the next Android marketing slogan?
I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple. I don't call bringing out a much larger phone with a faster CPU to make up for the poor performance of Google's bastardized Java language anything to cheer about much less as being ahead of Apple. As if that mattered.. What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.
I don't care how the latest fastest CPU Android phone measure up against Apple's iPhone. What I do care about is how Android is progressing and operating in phones that I would like to carry with me and in my pocket.
Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings or care about the world versus Apple. However, if Apple is the benchmark that everyone measures themselves against then I need to ask myself why am I sticking with a phone that is similar to an iPhone when I can easily just go get an actual iPhone?
Slashdot Mirror
You can always stay at 8.04 LTS until it's safe to update. In fact, you can wait a couple of more years before making the move. Is that stable enough?
One more thing...
The majority of us went to school when we were young, and we KNOW we learned curse words during recess.
There is a huge difference between knowing what $#.! means, and thinking that since it's on television, it's socially accepted language.
What do parents know? They're old and television opens my eyes to the way it really is...
Bleeping curse words is not censorship. Preventing a documentary that questions current government policy is censorship.
If you don't like the beeps... There's always cable.
1) The newest release of Ubuntu is an LTS release, meaning it will be supported for at least 3 years.
2) Fedora seems to royally fubar my machine when upgrading to the next release. I've had to install as new each and every time. This is why I keep my data in a separate partition.
I agree.
CBS is trying to be "edgy" by pulling this stunt. They could have called it "Crap My Dad Says" but instead did this because they knew it would be controversial and therefore raise awareness of the new show. Those clever CBS execs got this show mentioned on Slashdot.
The PTC is right that everyone knows what "$#.!" really means because of the "... My Dad Says" at the end. Sure it appears harmless, but I don't think it sends the right message to children who are too young for the show in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind the show existing on regular television. However, knowing how CBS operates this show will be promo'd during "family friendly" shows via those damn "pop ups" and 15 second commercials.
What if CBS made a show called "The @#&^%#$ of Harlem"? Wouldn't the PTC be right to protest such a title for a show? It doesn't explicitly say the word, but I bet you know what it may mean. It could mean "The Princes of Harlem", but they would be counting on people interpreting it as something controversial (and racially offensive).
In the end, this will probably bite CBS in the ass. The show will suck (most do) and the advertisers won't like the negative attention the group can organize toward their brands.
Actually the legal jargon may be necessary, but it doesn't always come from the field for which the patent originates. I've seen a couple of WTF? moments when a draft patent application comes from the legal department.
I agree that the patent isn't a step-by-step instruction, however it SHOULD be concise enough to allow other inventions from unintentionally violating the patent.
How many patent trolls have taken advantage of the vagueness of their patent?
Yawn.
You have all the ingredients, it's how you use those ingredients that matter.
Sorry I hit Submit instead of continue editing:
Actually I believe you can patent an improvement on a previous patent or work.
The point wasn't the mass production. The point was the multi-touch smartphone. The previous works are the ingredients but not the actual concept of a multi-touch smartphone. The fact that it's mass producible makes the patent more valuable and therefore relevant.
I didn't know that lawyers had this psychic ability to discovered undisclosed inventions. I can see them standing outside their offices concentrating as hard as they can and come to the conclusion that Mr Smith two blocks over has just invented a widget. I better run over there and convince him to let me patent it for him before another psychic patent lawyer does...
I don't think it's impossible to reimplement a patent from the patent document, but I don't think it's easy either.
I also believe the more obfuscated the patent document, the least likely it's really deserves a patent.
Unfortunately, patent lawyers like their obfuscated writing so it's hard to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. I think this is a well tested strategy on the part of the larger patent firms, since the patent office will probably consider the firm's reputation when granting the patent especially when the bureaucrat feels the need to "fake" that he understands the patent (eg. Well the last few hundred valid patents from that firm were written this way, therefore chances are good that this patent is also valid).
Interesting. While I do not agree that all software is patentable, I do see the need for software patents for very complex algorithms or concepts that cost a small fortune to develop. I also think your use of mathematical functions is a stretch. I know you're using math to argue that:
Software is a mathematical function.
Math can not be patented.
Therefore, Software can't be patented. (yawn)
The problem with that argument is software does not fit into what people consider traditional math. To the majority of people, there is a significant difference between f(x) = x^2 + 2*x + 2 and the Windows operating system.
Technically math is involved in all computer programs, since the computer performs work based on the interpretation of instructions whose sequence is based on the current state of variables that are assigned values that correlate to some real world phenomenon. But couldn't the same be said of mechanical gears whose ratios are based on a mathematical function that allows the maximum torque for a given range of rotational speed?
What attribute makes an automatic transmission patentable, and not a computer algorithm that converts speech into text? An even more interesting question is what is the attribute that makes a bi-metal coil that expands and contracts with temperature being used with a mechanical switch to interrupt the flow of current when a preset maximum temperature is reached, and not reading the voltage across a thermistor, converting that voltage to a temperature and using an if statement that will turn off a switch when temperate is greater than max temperature? Disregard that thermometers are old and obvious now... This discussion gets really complicated when FPGAs are considered. Discrete components are patentable but not VHDL code?
Anyway, I think the "attribute" is a hard thing to define but I do believe that there are software algorithms that are complex enough to be patentable.
I know I'm rambling now, but let's get back to Apple since it is the basis of this thread. Apple took a huge risk in entering the already crowded cell phone market. Apple gambled that the money spent to develop a multitouch cellphone would be rewarded by providing a unique and useful phone to the consumer. They took this gamble despite the fact that PDA phones and Windows CE phones were performing poorly in the marketplace. Apple's gamble paid off, and they should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Now that Apple demonstrated that money can be made with a touch tablet phone, the other companies are trying to mimic the attributes of the iPhone in hopes of increasing their marketshare. Even Google is trying to get a piece of the action.
Shouldn't Apple get a return on its investments? An investment the other companies did not make or risk? I happen to think that yes Apple should be granted patent protection. If the iPhone turned out to be a flop and consumers showed dislike towards the multitouch phone would people discuss the merits of Apple's patents? Probably not.
You can't argue with the facts. Prior to FingerWorks in 1998 (which Apple bought), you had multitouch on touch tablets of different shapes and sizes. Most were separate from the display like a traditional keyboard, some had a projector that projected the screen onto the front of the touch pad, and some had the image projected from behind the surface. There even was an early monochromatic LCD phone that had a touch tablet embedded in front of it (I do not believe it was multi-touch).
However using the technology, purchased from FingerWorks, Apple was able to combine a multitouch UI with a color LCD screen on a handheld portable device that was a functional cell phone. At great risk, since other touchscreen PDA and smartphones were suffering from poor sales.
I don't think anyone thinks that Apple created their multitouch phone inside a vacuum, however Apple did see market potential in providing multitouch on a cell phone and patented their implementation of it, as well purchasing the IP of FingerWorks.
So unless you are suggesting that anybody could take academic papers that discusses a single quantity method of using physically large off the shelf parts, and piece all those separate works together into creating a very thin handheld device that can be mass produced inexpensively enough to make it a viable consumer product, I don't know what point you were trying to make.
Incidentally, Bill Buxton does not criticize the iPhone or Apple and just talks about the "long nose of innovation".
True most inventions are created to solve a particular problem and not because of some monetary incentive. However, the reason YOU know that the invention exists is because the inventor saw a potential to make some money off of his idea, and acquired a patent to protect his investment.
This is how patents work.
What a coincidence, thanks to the TSA - so am I!
What? You can say that with a straight face?
With each Android update Google has been trying to improve battery life by allowing the user to monitor application battery use and manually kill the applications that uses the most power.
I found that downloading a 3rd party utility named "Task Manager" has improved my battery life by allowing me to kill all my applications that insist on being in the background even though I'm not using them.
Another handy widget is "Power Control" that allows me to turn of the GPS, WiFi, and Bluetooth when I'm not using them without having to traverse the Android settings menu.
Before I found these very handy apps, my battery would last about a day. Now I can get about 2.5 days.
If Android actually managed these applications "automatically and transparently" for me, I wouldn't need these applications to save battery life.
I plan on giving that a try when I return to the states this weekend. I hope I have the same luck.
Actually my main problem with Android is that it uses Dalvik as its VM and not actual Java. Sure it is registered based instead of stack based and this is suppose to be designed more for the limited resources of the phone. Too bad it doesn't have JIT compiler like real Java does. Good thing we have that hardware accelerator that speeds up the interpretation, otherwise imagine how slow this thing could be.
Actually I can say observed shortcomings. I own a T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, I have a colleague with an iPhone. My phone runs at 528Mhz with 192 MB RAM, his iPhone runs (underclocked) at 412Mhz with 128 MB RAM. I currently using cupcake 1.6 and not the Cyanogen port.
Our phones are of similar age. His phone is more responsive. His virtual keyboard works better than mine. His selection of apps dwarf mine, and one more cool thing about iTunes is that all of the apps he can buy are listed in US dollars, where my Google market has multiple currencies... Yen and Euros really? Google couldn't even offer to convert to US dollars?
The only thing that my phone excelled at, and it proved to be the most important, my phone was unlocked by T-Mobile and I was able to use a standard GSM SIM Vodaphone prepaid card to avoid roaming charges during my almost 3 month stay abroad... He does not have that luxury.
He just paid $40 for a nice slide phone with $40 credit to use... Which only shows how much the phone companies overcharge for headsets in the US.
Well evidently someone's making money. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a story to comment on...
Well actually I was talking about saving money on per-seat runtime licenses, or not having to roll their own boot strap.
I never mentioned patents, since I thought it was pretty much obvious to anyone that just because they used open source tools and/or operating systems for their products, it doesn't necessarily mean that they can't use patented technology. Hence my comment about not forcing the manufacturer to be open.
However, this is rarely a problem with hardware manufacturers because they're in the business to sell hardware.
Video graphic cards are the exception...
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Of course, this works better if you only expect revenue from the sale of hardware units and don't rely heavily on revenue from providing some form of subscription service or software sales.
I believe this is a good thing. Hardware *should* be open. I long for the old days when we could come up with new ways to use our bare hardware.
Open source improves this not by "forcing" manufacturers to be open, but by lowering the production costs and lessens the need to offset very large initial investments during the production run with secondary revenue streams.
You are correct about iPhone users and their investment. But I wouldn't call the number of iPhone users as being enough to be called an average smartphone user yet.
The majority of the phone use still appears to be email, twitter, sms, and browsing the web. Not to mention music from iTunes is not longer DRM and consequently not locked to the iPhone.
Also, Rhapsody, Amazon, Walmart and others do provide similar services and other handset manufactures are still able to make it easier for the consumer to use these competitors and offset any advantage iTunes may have.
So does that mean we now have a another clear leader in the smart phone market? Or are people including yourself going to continue to measure other smart phones to the iPhone?
To me as long as everyone is comparing their wares to the iPhone, the iPhone is still the one to beat...
Apple will start worrying when people no longer feel the need to measure up to the iPhone or better yet when iPhone versus some other phone no longer generate large number of web traffic.
Wishful thinking? Or do you have a 4G now?
The big question is when "multitasking" is no longer the major difference between platforms what will be the next Android marketing slogan?
I have an Android phone, and I can't wait for Google to catch up with Apple. I don't call bringing out a much larger phone with a faster CPU to make up for the poor performance of Google's bastardized Java language anything to cheer about much less as being ahead of Apple. As if that mattered.. What matters is Android approaching the performance levels of Apple iPhone OS on similar hardware.
I don't care how the latest fastest CPU Android phone measure up against Apple's iPhone. What I do care about is how Android is progressing and operating in phones that I would like to carry with me and in my pocket.
Believe it or not, some people don't buy a smartphone to compensate for some shortcomings or care about the world versus Apple. However, if Apple is the benchmark that everyone measures themselves against then I need to ask myself why am I sticking with a phone that is similar to an iPhone when I can easily just go get an actual iPhone?