So, if a company of Apple's size, brashness, and marketing muscle does it, it's "forward thinking", but when an innovative PC vendor does it that you happen not to know, then it doesn't count as "forward thinking"?
And now. . . A mass-produced CPU from a large manufacturer that comes with liquid cooling. Who else is doing that?
Actually, PC vendors are doing even better: the Hush PC not only uses heat pipes, it is completely silent and comes with up to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 in a sleek and compact, gorgeous looking metal package. And it's been shipping for a while. It looks to me like Apple is behind the curve rather than "forward thinking".
but they are bringing it to a large part of the market that never saw this before.
Isn't that kind of self-fulfilling? I mean, the only thing the Apple market ever sees is what Apple sells them.
Any pointers to support that statement? As far as I can tell, when you pick a G5 and an Opteron at clock speeds that give you comparable performance, they use comparable amounts of power. But Apple is unfortunately rather coy with SPEC results, so it's hard to tell for each and every chip.
There's a huge difference in noise level. You can't hear the G5s unless they're really working on something.
Well, you can get a completely fanless Hush PC (nice looking, too) with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 in it, so the Apple achievement doesn't seem all that impressive. And PCs with slow fans are even more common. If you choose to buy noisy Dell's, that's really your own doing.
What exactly is "innovative" about liquid cooling? It's been around for nearly as long as solid state computers, and it's widely used with PCs. So are variable speed cooling systems.
And talk about making lemonade out of lemons: Apple used to brag about how their chips dissipated less power and ran less hot, but now literally "sizzling performance" is supposed to be a selling point?
People have complained about bad patents from many sources, not just Microsoft.
As for IBM, complaining about IBM's bogus patents is of little interest to/. readers because, right now, it looks like IBM is using its patent portfolio to defend OSS rather than threaten it. OTOH, Microsoft may use these patents to threaten OSS and that is of special interest to the OSS community.
A patent is not invalid just because it's obvious.
You are quite mistaken: something that is "obvious to someone skilled in the art" is not patentable, even if it is novel.
The details are EVERYTHING.
And in the case of the button-press patents, Microsoft actually got a patent on something that was in common use in every detail, down to the specific device and use.
Microsoft's "double click" patent you all keep going on about does NOT patent the double click. It patents differentiating between different lengths of time holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
Yes, and what bothers people specifically about that is that that very technique, specifically used on PDAs, specifically for starting different applications, specifically to reduce the number of buttons needed, has been in common use for at least a decade. So, the patent should be invalid because there is prior art.
What bothers people about it in general is that using duration of button press to invoke different functions is a standard engineering technique. Even if there were no prior art specifically in this application, it belongs to a class of techniques that just ought not to be patentable. By analogy, there is no patent for connecting a power supply to an OLED screen using a set of wires, but that doesn't mean that I should be able to and get such a patent even though that technique happens not to be in common practical use yet.
Note that manually running "grep" does not act in real time as you type, display it in an IDE or generally do anything listed in the patent.
However, there is a well-recognized engineering principle by which we can transform any such on-demand functionality into real-time functionality. Therefore, Microsoft's patent is on the combination of a standard work practice with an obvious engineering practice, and that ought to make the entire subject of the patent obvious to anybody skilled in the art. The fact that nobody has, up to now, bothered to implement it is irrelevant--the patent should still not have been granted.
the current batch of MS patents are actually quite original thinking from people, and generally well thought-out well-defendable inventions.
No, they are not "original thinking". They are either attempts to patent techniques that are already in common use, or they are obvious and trivial combinations of existing techniques. Neither deserves a patent.
Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations.
That piece of advice does not survive a cost-benefit analysis, and clearly companies like Microsoft aren't following it either.
And another reminder to all software users - you are not immune from patent lawsuits if the software you are using (whether closed or open source) is violating other(s') patent(s) and neither you or your software vendor have a license to use or distribute the patented "technology."
You are also not immune from getting struck be meteorites. However, neither is something to worry about seriously.
Microsoft doesn't know when to stop, they don't see the virtue in keeping things simple, and they don't modularize their system well.
UNIX and Linux have a simple, stable core set of APIs and utilities. They were designed right once in the 1970's and they have held up to this day. And when featuritis strikes Linux implementors (as it does, from time to time), it is usually self-limiting: supposedly great new kernel features that nobody needs or wants don't get maintained and disappear quickly. That's the advantage of having the market decide what features should be in an OS.
Microsoft is on a constant quest trying to prove how "innovative" they are and adding new checklist items to their marketing brochures in order to justify selling upgrades. Windows has become a playground for "technologists" to keep pushing half-thought out and useless features onto a marketplace that neither needs nor wants them. And unlike Linux, the market has little say: what goes out with a Windows release is centrally planned at Microsoft, and Microsoft has enough technically meek customers that will start using something just because Microsoft tells them it's good for them, whether they actually need it or not. Finally, because Microsoft is under severe time-to-market pressures, stuff gets added in the quickest way possible and it doesn't usually get redone if it was done wrong the first time around.
(Well, there are also issues of cost, business practices, and stability with Windows, but those are secondary to the deep philosophical problems I have with Windows.)
Now, how much did you pay for that? $0. It is free.
Why are you changing the subject? I took issue with this claim:
No licensing agreement required.
But in order to practice the specification, you do need a licensing agreement, and a licensing agreement that imposes strong and specific conditions on who can implement Java and how they can implement it. It is those restrictions that create problems.
As for the term "free", you know full well that the term is (and has always been) ambiguous: it can mean "no cost" and it can mean "without restrictions". The main thing that is "free" about the Java specification is that you can read it at no cost, but the standard fails to be "free" in pretty much any other practically useful sense. It is your and Sun's responsibility to be unambiguous and clear when describing the terms under which the Java license can be practiced, but instead it looks like you are deliberately playing on the ambiguity of the term "free" in order to create the false impression that a proprietary standard is one that anybody can implement without restrictions.
Since you are so worried about the license being non-transferable, let me clue you in - that means you can't transfer your license to me on different terms.
No, it obviously means that I can't transfer the license at all, not even on the same terms. And that means that, in the future, other people may not be able to get the specification under the same license.
Furthermore, even if one were willing to accept the numerous restrictions the Java license imposes, the "license" as it is is pretty useless: nobody can sensibly base a major software implementation effort on something as ephemeral as an unsigned statement on some web site somewhere. Among other things, anybody seriously embarking on an implementation of Java would need signed statements from Sun guaranteeing a license to use Sun's numerous patents on Java.
God! I hate it when you have to correct people who obviously have never dealt with software licenses in their professional life.
You haven't "corrected" me, you have just given us more of the same marketing BS and misleading language that have come out of Sun for so long.
And cut the nonsense about "blabber"
I will, since you have made it clear that your statements about Java licenses are, in fact, calculated and deliberately misleading, rather than merely confused talk.
Well, there are a few significant differences between "Sun and its licensees" and Microsoft. I will leave you to learn these on your own.
That would amount to expending effort on discovering which of the two companies is slightly less deceptive, slightly less evil, and slightly less proprietary.
Why bother? I want to be tied to neither company's proprietary platform. Fortunately, we have other choices, choices that are actually free and non-proprietary in every sense of the words. And, given the sorry state that Java is in technically, those platforms are also technically preferable. At this point, the only thing Java has left going for it is a certain, moderate popularity.
Here is the specification for Java [link]. It has been online, free, and free to implement for at least the last 7 years. No licensing agreement required.
Well, great, now move your mouse a little and click on the Copyright link on the very same page you point to. On it, you will see that Sun gives people only a "limited license" to the specification and permits you to implement it only under specific circumstances. The license is also "non-transferable". Furthermore, Sun states that they may have patents on the contents of the specification. That is not a "free" specification, and it is certainly not "freely implementable".
My Java programs run on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, my cell phone, AIX, and that other OS, Win-something. That is what I call "platform independent". What's your definition?
If I write Java applications, I am dependent on Sun and/or its licensees, just like if I write Windows applications, I am dependent on Microsoft and/or Microsoft's licensees. All of your and Sun's marketing blabber about "platform independence" is just a smokescreen to hide this basic fact: using Java just replaces a dependency on Microsoft with a dependency on Sun.
Java version 1.5 comes out at the end of this month. [...] It has many features to speed up desktop programs and is well worth a look.
Well, I don't see what that has to do with the observation that Java is highly proprietary. But since you bring it up, in my opinion, the JDK 1.5 release also shows how far behind Java is technologically.
Try to look past the FUD of the ignorant.
People just need to look at Sun's licensing terms: they speak for themselves.
And you have some gall accusing people of FUD, given the statements that have been coming out of Sun's marketing machinery about open source, Microsoft, Gnome, and Linux.
What I can't figure out about people like you is whether you actually believe the nonsense you write about Java licensing or whether you are actively trying to deceive people. But after so many years, it really doesn't matter: at this point, neither you nor anybody else at Sun has any excuse anymore for misrepresenting Java's licensing terms, as you keep doing.
So, the conclusions of "people here" should outweigh the fact that the jury found RIM guilty of willful infringement? The opinions of "people here" should nullify the Appeals court upholding the ruling?
You seem to have trouble with the concepts of "debate" and "discourse" in a democratic society. People can debate legal opinions, and, over the course of years and decades, US courts will start to align with public opinion. That's, for example, how racial equality was achieved in the US: if it hadn't been for changes in public opinion as a result of debate over earlier legal decisions, the US would still be practicing apartheid today.
The fact that so many people here have made up their minds counter to the jury's and the court's decision strongly suggest that "most people" should definitely "feel the need" to revisit the issue.
Well, maybe if you had any kinds of new ideas or facts to contribute to the matter, people could revisit the issue. However, you just seem to take the authoritarian view that if the courts say it's so, they must be logically right. Sorry, but that's not the way things work in a democracy.
NTP, as the holding company for the inventor of the technologies, appears to have contributed everything to the "state of the art."
Maybe you haven't looked at the patents, but I have. Those patents are bogus. There is lots of prior art for them. The so-called "inventors" on those patents weren't the first to come up with these ideas and they weren't the first to disseminate them. They just happened to be the first to get a patent on them. However, prior-art challenges are very hard to get through, and obviousness challenges are essentially impossible to get through the courts, no matter whether a reasonable person who actually understand the technical matters would think the situation clear. It's a problem with our legal system.
Given the serious consequences --which you point out-- RIM should have quickly settled this matter for a large sum.
That might have been the prudent business decision, but that doesn't make it legally right, let alone logically correct. In any case, if RIM goes out of business over this, I'm happy: I think RIM is as sleazy as NTP.
The only explanation I can deduce for their assumptions, is that "most people" here have the mindset that all patents are "bogus."
Many people, and not just on Slashdot, believe that the US patent system is seriously broken. As someone who holds a number of patents myself and derives some financial benefit from them, I think the US patent system is seriously broken and that patents like the ones I got should not exist in a good patent system (however, unlike NTP's patents, I think my patents are actually in conformance with both the spirit and the letter of current patent law).
I do not, unfortunately, know as much as I would like to about X11. I didn't realize it had hardware acceleration. Does it, like Quartz, offload it's processing to the GPU, or is it just an option.
First of all, X11 is a protocol and standard implemented by many servers. Many of the X11 server codebases don't share any code. Some have hardware acceleration, others don't.
There are two kinds of acceleration and two kinds of imaging models: there is 2D acceleration and there is 3D acceleration. Many graphics cards provide both.
Apple's problem was that, with NeXT, they got a graphics model that was incompatible with the kind of 2D acceleration that hardware usually provides and that their old display server didn't yet use the 3D acceleration hardware. That's what they started fixing with "Quartz Extreme" (however, my impression is that the set of operations that are actually accelerated is still fairly limited).
X11 has a native graphics model that is good match to what has been available in terms of 2D hardware acceleration for a long time. That graphics model was also what almost all toolkits were based on. X11 also has supported OpenGL for a long time, which has provided hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics with a superset of the Postscript/Apple/NeXT/PDF imaging model, but it was mostly used for scientific visualization, not GUI toolkits, because it was so complex and hard to support without hardware acceleration.
For better or for worse, transparency and antialiasing have become fashions in GUIs, and to facilitate their use in X11, X11 added the "Render" API. Render's imaging model is largely the same as Quartz's, and Render can be supported both in pure software and accelerated. I don't know whether there are hardware-accelerated Render implementations yet, but there doubtlessly will be. However, the real importance of Render is not that it can be hardware accelerated, but that it is fast enough even if implemented in software alone. Therefore, unlike OpenGL, people can actually use it for writing regular GUIs, and that's what transparency and anti-aliasing features in desktops like Gnome and KDE are increasingly based on.
I Do think, however, that in the Windows/X11/Mac enviroment, the acceleration and power of Quartz is formitable, esspecially compared to Windows,
In my experience, Quartz doesn't perform all that well in terms of raw graphics performance. However, in certain common situations, it feels more responsive than other systems because it caches a lot of data in the server. You can actually enable similar features in X11, but most people don't bother because X11 is plenty fast without such tricks.
Don't get me wrong: Quartz isn't an awful system (except, perhaps, for the fact that it uses PDF rather than something more sensible)--it just isn't the revolutionary system Apple claims it to be. If they are betting that they'll gain market share because of Quartz and Cocoa, they are in for a rude surprise: Windows and Linux desktops are able to match Aqua's glitz feature for feature with less resource usage and with less development effort.
However, I think Quartz and Cocoa are actually just marketing gimmicks for Apple, kind of like Coke's "secret ingredient", or some other technical mumbo jumbo that manufacturers like to put in their marketing materials. Their real purpose is probably to make Macintosh different (not better, just different) and tie developers to the platform.
No matter what the accepted spelling may be these days (I don't know, the expression is not usually used in writing), I suspect that it refers to "quarter off", as in "a quarter less than", also found in expressions like "all sales 12% off".
What makes you think Blackberry won't survive? Leeches like NTP can only suck blood as long as the body they attach to lives and they know that. NTP will extract just the right amount of money from Blackberry and thenfocus their legal efforts on the next company and then the next and then the next. We are all going to pay for this in our legal bills.
time will tell whether the plaintiff will prevail at this point, but overreaching, after a full trial on the merits? you have got to be an ideologue even to ask the question.
Hopefully, the next company NTP picks on won't be quite as inept. NTP's patents have plenty of prior art and someone is going to show that sooner or later.
People here know what these patents are about and have already come to the conclusion that they are bogus. They were bogus when the first lawsuit was filed, and they are still as bogus today. Perhaps you should look at the patents yourself some time. If you come to the conclusion that they are defensible, maybe you can make an argument, but that is not an issue most people feel the need to revisit on their own.
The consequences? If these patents stand, they potentially threaten a lot of mobile text-based messaging and give NTP, a company that has contributed nothing to the state of the art, an enormous financial windfall.
Since Palm copied the Palm form factor and most of the technology used in the Palm from others, it would be kind of tasteless for them to sue anybody over making Palm-like devices. Mind you, not unprecedented, just tasteless.
For all the annoying and illegal business practices Microsoft engages in, to my knowledge, Microsoft hasn't had any big cases where Microsoft sued other people over stupid patents. After so long being on the receiving end of such lawsuits, they may start, but you really can't use them as a poster boy for a broken patent system.
Simple, really. They do one thing, e-mail, and do it well. Very well. Better than anyone else.
Danger's Hiptop also does e-mail really well, and it also does web browsing really well, and instant messaging, and it has a flat fee.
Smartphones like those from Palm also do e-mail really well.
The competion is clunkier and harder to use.
That's a matter of opinion, not fact. One thing that is not a matter of opinion, however, is that the competition is cheaper. And, unlike RIM, the competition hasn't sued other people over bogus patents either.
Its amazing. Government is just like every company, species, etc. It grows as fast as it can given the enviroment. We need Libertarian pricipals so that we can check this, cutting fat inefficient agencies. This is just as predators check the rabit population.
So, please tell us, what would the "libertarian" response to patents be? According to libertarians, should patents be abolished entirely? What about copyrights? And if libertarians want to keep patents and copyrights but reduce government, who gets to enforce them and to mediate disputes over the validity and scope of patents?
It's easy to complain about the size and complexity of government, but if you do, you have to present a credible alternative. Please do so.
Sun has simply figured out that it doesn't matter if they make some parts of the platform open source as long as they still control core portions of the platform.
And Sun does: not only is there no complete open source implementation of crucial components like Swing (although the SWT-Swing effort may be changing that), even if people should manage to make a credible and complete open source Java 2 implementation, Sun's licensing restrictions on the Java specifications and their Java-related patents would probably let them shut down or control any such implementation should it become a threat to their dominance.
Sun has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Java, including a number of open source Java apps in the Java Desktop System and developing new ones for it as well (Java System Updater)
Yes, and Microsoft has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Windows. That's because it is valuable for a company to popularize a platform that they control. Since Sun can't get a lot of commercial developers of desktop software for Java, they do the next best thing--they try to sweet-talk open source developers into using it.
But that's a bad idea for open source developers. Java is not "platform independent", as Sun likes to pretend, Java is a platform, a platform that is more tightly controlled and owned by Sun than Windows is controlled by Microsoft; you can't even take a look at the specifications for Java without a licensing agreement from Sun. Java does not augment Linux or Windows or OS X, it replaces them with itself--the fact that Linux is open source becomes irrelevant if you develop Java applications for Linux because Java so effectively insulates you from Linux.
You may also want to consider installing Linux on it. Linux requires less compute power than OS X and runs better on low-end machines. Also, distributions like Debian and YDL come with lots of pre-installed applications, including many educational apps, games, and office apps.
You are trying to convince tech-savvy readers that quartz extreme, a pretty powerful, video card powered graphics engine is equal to x11?
First of all, X11 has had hardware acceleration since the 1980's.
As for "Quartz Extreme", there is nothing particularly powerful or novel about it--it's just a stripped down, less featureful version of NeXT's DisplayPostscript from the 1980's--20 year old technology. Sun and IBM were pushing the same window system technology for a few years as well, but users voted with their feet and it failed miserably in the market.
You, my friend, must not own a mac.
I do, just like I own some Windows machines.
Based on my experience with it, Apple's claims for Quartz are marketing fluff. Gnome and KDE on the same hardware run better, give you the same visual glitz, and give you capabilities that you can't even get with Quartz (like seamless execution of remote applications). Not to mention that X11 actually runs on all major platforms, while DisplayPostscript and Quartz are niche technologies.
BTW: Apple offers a free, optimized and integrated version of X11, for running apps natively on a mac as well.
Yes, I know. It's usable, although they could be doing a better job with it.
We are not the primary reservoir of influenza. Or bubonic plague. Contrary to your statement, ebola is highly contagious. An antibiotic-resistant strain of bubonic plague would also be quite nasty. Mortality from bubonic plague is 50-90%
You are presenting an assemblage of facts out of context; let's not go into that again. All I am saying is that civilized human societies lived with those diseases in the past and that we can control them through public health measures.
I don't get your point. Are you saying that this makes natural diseases such as ebola, anthrax, and bubonic plague not a concern as bioterror weapons? From all accounts, previous pandemics of these diseases were pretty terrifying. Are or you suggesting that transgenic diseases are likely to have this property?
I'm saying that we are likely getting to the point where we can create diseases that are far more dangerous than influenza, bubonic plague, or ebola. We can create those through genetic engineering, through artificial evolution, and probably through other means. There is a significant risk that people create them deliberately as part of bioweapons research, and there is a small risk that we create them accidentally.
That doesn't mean that the existing diseases aren't frightening enough to people (and hence usable as weapons of terror), but the existing diseases don't threaten our survival as a species.
But an exaggerated notion of risk is an impediment to progress.
Risk, whether exaggerated or not, and speed of progress are always tradeoffs. You seem to take it as a given that we want to proceed scientifically as fast as we can possibly justify the risks. I don't see why.
The ecological hazards of laboratory created species--genetically identical, not optimized for the presence of a foreign gene--are certain to be much less than the hazards posed by domesticated or geographically transposed natural species.
I don't see where you get that "certainty" from. There is no physical or biological principle that says that introducing a foreign gene makes organisms significantly less fit.
In any case, when a virus or bacterium is not "optimized for the presence of a foreign gene", that means that it is likely to be more virulent and deadly than a disease that has been in a population for a while. For disease agents, higher virulence equals lower fitness, so by your own argument, if the introduction of foreign genes into diseases leads to lower fitness, one common way in which it may do so is through higher virulence.
And I don't understand why you keep talking about "geographically transposed natural species". Yes, they are a hazard. In fact, introduction of new diseases into humans by contact with exotic animals is probably a far greater risk than the accidental creation of new diseases through genetic engineering (whether it's a greater risk than the deliberate creation of biowarfare agents through genetic engineering I don't know and neither do you, I suspect--that depends on the state of the art in biowarfare research). But why do you keep repeating that comparison? Your chances of being killed in an automobile accident are also higher than dying from a terrorist attack--that doesn't mean that we don't do anything about terrorism.
Or, when talking about short generation microorganisms, a few months.
I'm sorry, but that is just naive. Sure, there are a lot of microorganisms around us, and they mutate and divide at an astounding rate. But the space of possible sequences is even bigger and the space of possibilities evolution explores is limited: it's limited by the actual environmental pressures and it's limited by the fact that mutations accumulate gradually and that intermediates between where the organism started and where the organism ended up generally can't be too deleterious. Even bacterial evolution only explores an astronomically small part of the space of all possible sequences; there are probably an enormous number of possible bacteria that would wipe out humans as a species--evolution just happens not to produce them. And viruses and eukaryotes are even more limited in what they can do.
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So, if a company of Apple's size, brashness, and marketing muscle does it, it's "forward thinking", but when an innovative PC vendor does it that you happen not to know, then it doesn't count as "forward thinking"?
And now. . . A mass-produced CPU from a large manufacturer that comes with liquid cooling. Who else is doing that?
Actually, PC vendors are doing even better: the Hush PC not only uses heat pipes, it is completely silent and comes with up to a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 in a sleek and compact, gorgeous looking metal package. And it's been shipping for a while. It looks to me like Apple is behind the curve rather than "forward thinking".
but they are bringing it to a large part of the market that never saw this before.
Isn't that kind of self-fulfilling? I mean, the only thing the Apple market ever sees is what Apple sells them.
They do dissipate less power and run cooler.
Any pointers to support that statement? As far as I can tell, when you pick a G5 and an Opteron at clock speeds that give you comparable performance, they use comparable amounts of power. But Apple is unfortunately rather coy with SPEC results, so it's hard to tell for each and every chip.
There's a huge difference in noise level. You can't hear the G5s unless they're really working on something.
Well, you can get a completely fanless Hush PC (nice looking, too) with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 in it, so the Apple achievement doesn't seem all that impressive. And PCs with slow fans are even more common. If you choose to buy noisy Dell's, that's really your own doing.
What exactly is "innovative" about liquid cooling? It's been around for nearly as long as solid state computers, and it's widely used with PCs. So are variable speed cooling systems.
And talk about making lemonade out of lemons: Apple used to brag about how their chips dissipated less power and ran less hot, but now literally "sizzling performance" is supposed to be a selling point?
People have complained about bad patents from many sources, not just Microsoft.
/. readers because, right now, it looks like IBM is using its patent portfolio to defend OSS rather than threaten it. OTOH, Microsoft may use these patents to threaten OSS and that is of special interest to the OSS community.
As for IBM, complaining about IBM's bogus patents is of little interest to
A patent is not invalid just because it's obvious.
You are quite mistaken: something that is "obvious to someone skilled in the art" is not patentable, even if it is novel.
The details are EVERYTHING.
And in the case of the button-press patents, Microsoft actually got a patent on something that was in common use in every detail, down to the specific device and use.
Microsoft's "double click" patent you all keep going on about does NOT patent the double click. It patents differentiating between different lengths of time holding a button on a PDA, in order to start different applications or application methods - for the sole purpose of reducing the need for 100 buttons on devices with crap input and no screen estate.
Yes, and what bothers people specifically about that is that that very technique, specifically used on PDAs, specifically for starting different applications, specifically to reduce the number of buttons needed, has been in common use for at least a decade. So, the patent should be invalid because there is prior art.
What bothers people about it in general is that using duration of button press to invoke different functions is a standard engineering technique. Even if there were no prior art specifically in this application, it belongs to a class of techniques that just ought not to be patentable. By analogy, there is no patent for connecting a power supply to an OLED screen using a set of wires, but that doesn't mean that I should be able to and get such a patent even though that technique happens not to be in common practical use yet.
Note that manually running "grep" does not act in real time as you type, display it in an IDE or generally do anything listed in the patent.
However, there is a well-recognized engineering principle by which we can transform any such on-demand functionality into real-time functionality. Therefore, Microsoft's patent is on the combination of a standard work practice with an obvious engineering practice, and that ought to make the entire subject of the patent obvious to anybody skilled in the art. The fact that nobody has, up to now, bothered to implement it is irrelevant--the patent should still not have been granted.
the current batch of MS patents are actually quite original thinking from people, and generally well thought-out well-defendable inventions.
No, they are not "original thinking". They are either attempts to patent techniques that are already in common use, or they are obvious and trivial combinations of existing techniques. Neither deserves a patent.
Just a reminder to every developer next time you try to implement a feature in your program, don't forget to search all existing patents and patent applications for possible violations.
That piece of advice does not survive a cost-benefit analysis, and clearly companies like Microsoft aren't following it either.
And another reminder to all software users - you are not immune from patent lawsuits if the software you are using (whether closed or open source) is violating other(s') patent(s) and neither you or your software vendor have a license to use or distribute the patented "technology."
You are also not immune from getting struck be meteorites. However, neither is something to worry about seriously.
Yes, and Emacs had it for, oh, 20 years. It's called "M-x grep".
Microsoft doesn't know when to stop, they don't see the virtue in keeping things simple, and they don't modularize their system well.
UNIX and Linux have a simple, stable core set of APIs and utilities. They were designed right once in the 1970's and they have held up to this day. And when featuritis strikes Linux implementors (as it does, from time to time), it is usually self-limiting: supposedly great new kernel features that nobody needs or wants don't get maintained and disappear quickly. That's the advantage of having the market decide what features should be in an OS.
Microsoft is on a constant quest trying to prove how "innovative" they are and adding new checklist items to their marketing brochures in order to justify selling upgrades. Windows has become a playground for "technologists" to keep pushing half-thought out and useless features onto a marketplace that neither needs nor wants them. And unlike Linux, the market has little say: what goes out with a Windows release is centrally planned at Microsoft, and Microsoft has enough technically meek customers that will start using something just because Microsoft tells them it's good for them, whether they actually need it or not. Finally, because Microsoft is under severe time-to-market pressures, stuff gets added in the quickest way possible and it doesn't usually get redone if it was done wrong the first time around.
(Well, there are also issues of cost, business practices, and stability with Windows, but those are secondary to the deep philosophical problems I have with Windows.)
Why are you changing the subject? I took issue with this claim:
But in order to practice the specification, you do need a licensing agreement, and a licensing agreement that imposes strong and specific conditions on who can implement Java and how they can implement it. It is those restrictions that create problems.
As for the term "free", you know full well that the term is (and has always been) ambiguous: it can mean "no cost" and it can mean "without restrictions". The main thing that is "free" about the Java specification is that you can read it at no cost, but the standard fails to be "free" in pretty much any other practically useful sense. It is your and Sun's responsibility to be unambiguous and clear when describing the terms under which the Java license can be practiced, but instead it looks like you are deliberately playing on the ambiguity of the term "free" in order to create the false impression that a proprietary standard is one that anybody can implement without restrictions.
Since you are so worried about the license being non-transferable, let me clue you in - that means you can't transfer your license to me on different terms.
No, it obviously means that I can't transfer the license at all, not even on the same terms. And that means that, in the future, other people may not be able to get the specification under the same license.
Furthermore, even if one were willing to accept the numerous restrictions the Java license imposes, the "license" as it is is pretty useless: nobody can sensibly base a major software implementation effort on something as ephemeral as an unsigned statement on some web site somewhere. Among other things, anybody seriously embarking on an implementation of Java would need signed statements from Sun guaranteeing a license to use Sun's numerous patents on Java.
God! I hate it when you have to correct people who obviously have never dealt with software licenses in their professional life.
You haven't "corrected" me, you have just given us more of the same marketing BS and misleading language that have come out of Sun for so long.
And cut the nonsense about "blabber"
I will, since you have made it clear that your statements about Java licenses are, in fact, calculated and deliberately misleading, rather than merely confused talk.
Well, there are a few significant differences between "Sun and its licensees" and Microsoft. I will leave you to learn these on your own.
That would amount to expending effort on discovering which of the two companies is slightly less deceptive, slightly less evil, and slightly less proprietary.
Why bother? I want to be tied to neither company's proprietary platform. Fortunately, we have other choices, choices that are actually free and non-proprietary in every sense of the words. And, given the sorry state that Java is in technically, those platforms are also technically preferable. At this point, the only thing Java has left going for it is a certain, moderate popularity.
Here is the specification for Java [link]. It has been online, free, and free to implement for at least the last 7 years. No licensing agreement required.
Well, great, now move your mouse a little and click on the Copyright link on the very same page you point to. On it, you will see that Sun gives people only a "limited license" to the specification and permits you to implement it only under specific circumstances. The license is also "non-transferable". Furthermore, Sun states that they may have patents on the contents of the specification. That is not a "free" specification, and it is certainly not "freely implementable".
My Java programs run on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, my cell phone, AIX, and that other OS, Win-something. That is what I call "platform independent". What's your definition?
If I write Java applications, I am dependent on Sun and/or its licensees, just like if I write Windows applications, I am dependent on Microsoft and/or Microsoft's licensees. All of your and Sun's marketing blabber about "platform independence" is just a smokescreen to hide this basic fact: using Java just replaces a dependency on Microsoft with a dependency on Sun.
Java version 1.5 comes out at the end of this month. [...] It has many features to speed up desktop programs and is well worth a look.
Well, I don't see what that has to do with the observation that Java is highly proprietary. But since you bring it up, in my opinion, the JDK 1.5 release also shows how far behind Java is technologically.
Try to look past the FUD of the ignorant.
People just need to look at Sun's licensing terms: they speak for themselves.
And you have some gall accusing people of FUD, given the statements that have been coming out of Sun's marketing machinery about open source, Microsoft, Gnome, and Linux.
What I can't figure out about people like you is whether you actually believe the nonsense you write about Java licensing or whether you are actively trying to deceive people. But after so many years, it really doesn't matter: at this point, neither you nor anybody else at Sun has any excuse anymore for misrepresenting Java's licensing terms, as you keep doing.
So, the conclusions of "people here" should outweigh the fact that the jury found RIM guilty of willful infringement? The opinions of "people here" should nullify the Appeals court upholding the ruling?
You seem to have trouble with the concepts of "debate" and "discourse" in a democratic society. People can debate legal opinions, and, over the course of years and decades, US courts will start to align with public opinion. That's, for example, how racial equality was achieved in the US: if it hadn't been for changes in public opinion as a result of debate over earlier legal decisions, the US would still be practicing apartheid today.
The fact that so many people here have made up their minds counter to the jury's and the court's decision strongly suggest that "most people" should definitely "feel the need" to revisit the issue.
Well, maybe if you had any kinds of new ideas or facts to contribute to the matter, people could revisit the issue. However, you just seem to take the authoritarian view that if the courts say it's so, they must be logically right. Sorry, but that's not the way things work in a democracy.
NTP, as the holding company for the inventor of the technologies, appears to have contributed everything to the "state of the art."
Maybe you haven't looked at the patents, but I have. Those patents are bogus. There is lots of prior art for them. The so-called "inventors" on those patents weren't the first to come up with these ideas and they weren't the first to disseminate them. They just happened to be the first to get a patent on them. However, prior-art challenges are very hard to get through, and obviousness challenges are essentially impossible to get through the courts, no matter whether a reasonable person who actually understand the technical matters would think the situation clear. It's a problem with our legal system.
Given the serious consequences --which you point out-- RIM should have quickly settled this matter for a large sum.
That might have been the prudent business decision, but that doesn't make it legally right, let alone logically correct. In any case, if RIM goes out of business over this, I'm happy: I think RIM is as sleazy as NTP.
The only explanation I can deduce for their assumptions, is that "most people" here have the mindset that all patents are "bogus."
Many people, and not just on Slashdot, believe that the US patent system is seriously broken. As someone who holds a number of patents myself and derives some financial benefit from them, I think the US patent system is seriously broken and that patents like the ones I got should not exist in a good patent system (however, unlike NTP's patents, I think my patents are actually in conformance with both the spirit and the letter of current patent law).
I do not, unfortunately, know as much as I would like to about X11. I didn't realize it had hardware acceleration. Does it, like Quartz, offload it's processing to the GPU, or is it just an option.
First of all, X11 is a protocol and standard implemented by many servers. Many of the X11 server codebases don't share any code. Some have hardware acceleration, others don't.
There are two kinds of acceleration and two kinds of imaging models: there is 2D acceleration and there is 3D acceleration. Many graphics cards provide both.
Apple's problem was that, with NeXT, they got a graphics model that was incompatible with the kind of 2D acceleration that hardware usually provides and that their old display server didn't yet use the 3D acceleration hardware. That's what they started fixing with "Quartz Extreme" (however, my impression is that the set of operations that are actually accelerated is still fairly limited).
X11 has a native graphics model that is good match to what has been available in terms of 2D hardware acceleration for a long time. That graphics model was also what almost all toolkits were based on. X11 also has supported OpenGL for a long time, which has provided hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics with a superset of the Postscript/Apple/NeXT/PDF imaging model, but it was mostly used for scientific visualization, not GUI toolkits, because it was so complex and hard to support without hardware acceleration.
For better or for worse, transparency and antialiasing have become fashions in GUIs, and to facilitate their use in X11, X11 added the "Render" API. Render's imaging model is largely the same as Quartz's, and Render can be supported both in pure software and accelerated. I don't know whether there are hardware-accelerated Render implementations yet, but there doubtlessly will be. However, the real importance of Render is not that it can be hardware accelerated, but that it is fast enough even if implemented in software alone. Therefore, unlike OpenGL, people can actually use it for writing regular GUIs, and that's what transparency and anti-aliasing features in desktops like Gnome and KDE are increasingly based on.
I Do think, however, that in the Windows/X11/Mac enviroment, the acceleration and power of Quartz is formitable, esspecially compared to Windows,
In my experience, Quartz doesn't perform all that well in terms of raw graphics performance. However, in certain common situations, it feels more responsive than other systems because it caches a lot of data in the server. You can actually enable similar features in X11, but most people don't bother because X11 is plenty fast without such tricks.
Don't get me wrong: Quartz isn't an awful system (except, perhaps, for the fact that it uses PDF rather than something more sensible)--it just isn't the revolutionary system Apple claims it to be. If they are betting that they'll gain market share because of Quartz and Cocoa, they are in for a rude surprise: Windows and Linux desktops are able to match Aqua's glitz feature for feature with less resource usage and with less development effort.
However, I think Quartz and Cocoa are actually just marketing gimmicks for Apple, kind of like Coke's "secret ingredient", or some other technical mumbo jumbo that manufacturers like to put in their marketing materials. Their real purpose is probably to make Macintosh different (not better, just different) and tie developers to the platform.
nonsensical way Americans use "quarter of"
No matter what the accepted spelling may be these days (I don't know, the expression is not usually used in writing), I suspect that it refers to "quarter off", as in "a quarter less than", also found in expressions like "all sales 12% off".
What makes you think Blackberry won't survive? Leeches like NTP can only suck blood as long as the body they attach to lives and they know that. NTP will extract just the right amount of money from Blackberry and thenfocus their legal efforts on the next company and then the next and then the next. We are all going to pay for this in our legal bills.
time will tell whether the plaintiff will prevail at this point, but overreaching, after a full trial on the merits? you have got to be an ideologue even to ask the question.
Hopefully, the next company NTP picks on won't be quite as inept. NTP's patents have plenty of prior art and someone is going to show that sooner or later.
People here know what these patents are about and have already come to the conclusion that they are bogus. They were bogus when the first lawsuit was filed, and they are still as bogus today. Perhaps you should look at the patents yourself some time. If you come to the conclusion that they are defensible, maybe you can make an argument, but that is not an issue most people feel the need to revisit on their own.
The consequences? If these patents stand, they potentially threaten a lot of mobile text-based messaging and give NTP, a company that has contributed nothing to the state of the art, an enormous financial windfall.
Clear enough?
Since Palm copied the Palm form factor and most of the technology used in the Palm from others, it would be kind of tasteless for them to sue anybody over making Palm-like devices. Mind you, not unprecedented, just tasteless.
For all the annoying and illegal business practices Microsoft engages in, to my knowledge, Microsoft hasn't had any big cases where Microsoft sued other people over stupid patents. After so long being on the receiving end of such lawsuits, they may start, but you really can't use them as a poster boy for a broken patent system.
Simple, really. They do one thing, e-mail, and do it well. Very well. Better than anyone else.
Danger's Hiptop also does e-mail really well, and it also does web browsing really well, and instant messaging, and it has a flat fee.
Smartphones like those from Palm also do e-mail really well.
The competion is clunkier and harder to use.
That's a matter of opinion, not fact. One thing that is not a matter of opinion, however, is that the competition is cheaper. And, unlike RIM, the competition hasn't sued other people over bogus patents either.
Its amazing. Government is just like every company, species, etc. It grows as fast as it can given the enviroment. We need Libertarian pricipals so that we can check this, cutting fat inefficient agencies. This is just as predators check the rabit population.
So, please tell us, what would the "libertarian" response to patents be? According to libertarians, should patents be abolished entirely? What about copyrights? And if libertarians want to keep patents and copyrights but reduce government, who gets to enforce them and to mediate disputes over the validity and scope of patents?
It's easy to complain about the size and complexity of government, but if you do, you have to present a credible alternative. Please do so.
Sun has simply figured out that it doesn't matter if they make some parts of the platform open source as long as they still control core portions of the platform.
And Sun does: not only is there no complete open source implementation of crucial components like Swing (although the SWT-Swing effort may be changing that), even if people should manage to make a credible and complete open source Java 2 implementation, Sun's licensing restrictions on the Java specifications and their Java-related patents would probably let them shut down or control any such implementation should it become a threat to their dominance.
Sun has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Java, including a number of open source Java apps in the Java Desktop System and developing new ones for it as well (Java System Updater)
Yes, and Microsoft has been a proponent of developing desktop apps in Windows. That's because it is valuable for a company to popularize a platform that they control. Since Sun can't get a lot of commercial developers of desktop software for Java, they do the next best thing--they try to sweet-talk open source developers into using it.
But that's a bad idea for open source developers. Java is not "platform independent", as Sun likes to pretend, Java is a platform, a platform that is more tightly controlled and owned by Sun than Windows is controlled by Microsoft; you can't even take a look at the specifications for Java without a licensing agreement from Sun. Java does not augment Linux or Windows or OS X, it replaces them with itself--the fact that Linux is open source becomes irrelevant if you develop Java applications for Linux because Java so effectively insulates you from Linux.
You may also want to consider installing Linux on it. Linux requires less compute power than OS X and runs better on low-end machines. Also, distributions like Debian and YDL come with lots of pre-installed applications, including many educational apps, games, and office apps.
You are trying to convince tech-savvy readers that quartz extreme, a pretty powerful, video card powered graphics engine is equal to x11?
First of all, X11 has had hardware acceleration since the 1980's.
As for "Quartz Extreme", there is nothing particularly powerful or novel about it--it's just a stripped down, less featureful version of NeXT's DisplayPostscript from the 1980's--20 year old technology. Sun and IBM were pushing the same window system technology for a few years as well, but users voted with their feet and it failed miserably in the market.
You, my friend, must not own a mac.
I do, just like I own some Windows machines.
Based on my experience with it, Apple's claims for Quartz are marketing fluff. Gnome and KDE on the same hardware run better, give you the same visual glitz, and give you capabilities that you can't even get with Quartz (like seamless execution of remote applications). Not to mention that X11 actually runs on all major platforms, while DisplayPostscript and Quartz are niche technologies.
BTW: Apple offers a free, optimized and integrated version of X11, for running apps natively on a mac as well.
Yes, I know. It's usable, although they could be doing a better job with it.
We are not the primary reservoir of influenza. Or bubonic plague. Contrary to your statement, ebola is highly contagious. An antibiotic-resistant strain of bubonic plague would also be quite nasty. Mortality from bubonic plague is 50-90%
You are presenting an assemblage of facts out of context; let's not go into that again. All I am saying is that civilized human societies lived with those diseases in the past and that we can control them through public health measures.
I don't get your point. Are you saying that this makes natural diseases such as ebola, anthrax, and bubonic plague not a concern as bioterror weapons? From all accounts, previous pandemics of these diseases were pretty terrifying. Are or you suggesting that transgenic diseases are likely to have this property?
I'm saying that we are likely getting to the point where we can create diseases that are far more dangerous than influenza, bubonic plague, or ebola. We can create those through genetic engineering, through artificial evolution, and probably through other means. There is a significant risk that people create them deliberately as part of bioweapons research, and there is a small risk that we create them accidentally.
That doesn't mean that the existing diseases aren't frightening enough to people (and hence usable as weapons of terror), but the existing diseases don't threaten our survival as a species.
But an exaggerated notion of risk is an impediment to progress.
Risk, whether exaggerated or not, and speed of progress are always tradeoffs. You seem to take it as a given that we want to proceed scientifically as fast as we can possibly justify the risks. I don't see why.
The ecological hazards of laboratory created species--genetically identical, not optimized for the presence of a foreign gene--are certain to be much less than the hazards posed by domesticated or geographically transposed natural species.
I don't see where you get that "certainty" from. There is no physical or biological principle that says that introducing a foreign gene makes organisms significantly less fit.
In any case, when a virus or bacterium is not "optimized for the presence of a foreign gene", that means that it is likely to be more virulent and deadly than a disease that has been in a population for a while. For disease agents, higher virulence equals lower fitness, so by your own argument, if the introduction of foreign genes into diseases leads to lower fitness, one common way in which it may do so is through higher virulence.
And I don't understand why you keep talking about "geographically transposed natural species". Yes, they are a hazard. In fact, introduction of new diseases into humans by contact with exotic animals is probably a far greater risk than the accidental creation of new diseases through genetic engineering (whether it's a greater risk than the deliberate creation of biowarfare agents through genetic engineering I don't know and neither do you, I suspect--that depends on the state of the art in biowarfare research). But why do you keep repeating that comparison? Your chances of being killed in an automobile accident are also higher than dying from a terrorist attack--that doesn't mean that we don't do anything about terrorism.
Or, when talking about short generation microorganisms, a few months.
I'm sorry, but that is just naive. Sure, there are a lot of microorganisms around us, and they mutate and divide at an astounding rate. But the space of possible sequences is even bigger and the space of possibilities evolution explores is limited: it's limited by the actual environmental pressures and it's limited by the fact that mutations accumulate gradually and that intermediates between where the organism started and where the organism ended up generally can't be too deleterious. Even bacterial evolution only explores an astronomically small part of the space of all possible sequences; there are probably an enormous number of possible bacteria that would wipe out humans as a species--evolution just happens not to produce them. And viruses and eukaryotes are even more limited in what they can do.