I did not judge Sony's patent filing either way. However, if what you say is true, then the patent should not have been granted on the grounds that the specification is not detailed enough for "persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention".
In other words, the answer to your question is: yes, it does matter, the existing criteria for patentability is sufficient if properly enforced.
So, we're back at the conclusion that enforcement is the problem, not lack of rules.
I think you're right. There was a requirement for prototypes in the US some time about 200 years ago or so. I stand corrected. However, it is my understanding that this was specific to the US only.
In my opinion, US congress is overstepping their authority by extending the duration of those copyrights over and over again because the US constitution clearly says "for limited times". Extending that limit everytime it is about to expire constitutes for all practical purposes a perpetual copyright and thus goes against the spirit of the US constitution.
Not only that, but extending anything retroactively is pretty much without any parallel in legal matters.
If any of us was trying to be such a smart ass in court, no judge would go along with that. In fact, the chance is we would be held in contempt of the court for even trying.
In terms of copyright we are basically still in a period the patent system was in the 16th century when the issuing of perpetual letters of patent got so much out of hand that King James I replaced it for a strictly 14 years only system.
The duration did eventually get extended to 20 years and 25 years for pharmaceutical patents (because of the long time it takes to get approval for drugs) but it seems everybody has learned the lesson history teaches us.
I believe that at some point the same will happen to copyrights. It will become so ridiculous that a modern King James I will step in eventually and make a clean sweep where copyrights will strictly be limited to -say- 20 or 25 years without any possibility to extend. Not sure whether this will happen in our lifetime though.
yes of course that is correct, but I understood the OP's mentioning of "latency (jitter)" to mean that one is just another name for the other.
The term latency is usually understood to mean as much as "constant delay" and the term jitter as much as "rapidly varying delay" to put it in very broad terms.
I am not sure if a load balancing router is the only thing that could cause jitter. It may well be that multi threaded packet processing on some router along the way might also cause jitter.
Re:Does anybody know if this is open or proprietar
on
AOL Enters the VoIP market
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· Score: 2, Interesting
But that might only refer to the backbone, not the "last mile" between AOL's POPs and AOL customer premises.
If they use SIP for the last mile, that would mean you could use your own SIP phone to connect to the network. I am kind of skeptical about AOL using a standard protocol, though.
The article doesn't say anything about what protocol AOL's service will be using. Does anyone know? Is it SIP or yet another incompatible derivative of SIP (like Skype and Apple's iChat) or something else?
VOIP doesn't mean that your computer becomes a phone. All it means is that voice is encapsulated into IP packets. Period.
In fact, a software that allows you to use your computer as a phone, a so called softphone is a very bad compromise.
You will always get far superior quality if you use a real VOIP phone, that is, a device that looks just like an old fashioned telephone, but instead of a phone jack (RJ-11) it has got an ethernet jack (RJ-45) at its back and circuitry to convert between analog voice and IP packet encapsulated digitised voice.
Latency is not jitter. Latency is when packets get delayed. Jitter is when packets arrive out of order.
Latency is not generally a problem. Cell phone services tend to have rather heavy latency. Typically you don't even notice latency up to about 500 to 600 ms.
Jitter can be a problem if out of order packets aren't dealt with properly, that is, in most cases, they should be discarded, or more precisely, the longer they have been overdue the more likely they should be discarded for VoIP.
However, there are codecs that can deal with jittery connections and as long as your service provider is using open standards where it is up to the end user equipment or client software to negotiate the best codec for a given connection, you generally don't have to worry about jitter impacting your call quality to the point where you would notice.
1) the invention has to be novel 2) the invention must not be ovious, there has to be an inventive step 3) the specification has to be detailed enough for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention, that is to say, build the apparatus
These requirements are perfectly sufficient if they are properly enforced.
requirement 1 means, no patent is to be granted if there is prior art
requirement 2 means, no patent is to be granted for something that is obvious
requirement 3 means, no patent is to be granted for concepts or ideas, nor for applications that are too fuzzy to be pinned down to an actual implementation
The problem with the patent system today is that the patent offices are hopelessly understaffed to ensure that these requirements are actually enforced and consequently there are too many patents which are not novel, obvious or fuzzy or any combination thereof.
If a requirement to produce a working prototype was introduced, it would make things even worse because the already overworked patent examiners would now also have to examine the prototype and there would likely follow a tendency to grant any application as long as the prototype appears to do what the specification says it does. The result would be even more non-novel and obvious patents.
That's not quite right. The original purpose of patents was for greedy monarchs to enrich themselves by granting monopolies in return for bribes. This was eventually getting out of hand and had a negative impact on economies in Europe. In 1610 King James I of Britain abandoned the system of favourist patents and introduced a new law by which patents were only to be granted for inventions deemed to be in the public interest, only to the first inventor and strictly limited to 14 years. This was the birth of the modern patent system.
The duration was eventually extended to 20 years as it remains today, but there was never any requirement to provide a prototype nor was the idea to aid fund raising for a prototype.
Instead, the patent system is based on the concept of a bargain between the public interest and an inventor. The bargain is for the inventor to receive a time limited monopoly in return for not keeping his invention secret and have it published. In fact, when the patent expires after 20 years, the invention become public domain.
It does not matter whether the invention actually works or not. The public interest is served by the disclosure of the invention. Any such disclosure will enrich the public domain, which is the only reason why a patent is granted in the first place.
If the invention is flawed and doesn't work, in most cases, there is still something to be learned from its disclosure for others to fix the flaw or not make the same mistake and instead come up with a better idea. This is what enrichment of the public domain is all about.
Consequently, it doesn't matter if an invention works or not. If there was any such requirement as to produce a working prototype, it would actually limit the enrichment of the public domain.
What is far more important is that the rules of patentability, ie novelty and non-obviousness are strictly enforced. Too many patent applications for inventions which are not novel or which are obvious get rubberstamped these days. That is where the problem of the patent system lies today.
That's all fair enough and I am doing quite a bit of GUI front end programming just to make features otherwise "hidden in the BSD core" reachable to ordinary users because I am myself a believer in the "just works" philosophy.
However, the original poster was taking the viewpoint that there was something wrong with using third party GUI tools to configure features not (yet) reachable from within Apple supplied preference panes. It is that viewpoint I have a big problem with. We cannot and should not expect Apple to do all the work at once. Some of the work Apple hasn't done (yet), whatever the reason for that may be, can and should be done by somebody else and if only as an interim solution.
It is not helpful if such third party work is then classified as somehow improper. If a third party tool has bugs, send a bug report so they can be fixed. Otherwise, third party tools can be just as good as the ones coming directly from Apple.
You are taking my post out of context. I was replying to somebody who seemed to argue that there were some technical issues which make a bluetooth based network interface somehow incompatible with the way OSX routes packets. My response was that this is very unlikely because OSX' TCP/IP stack treats all network devices the same way as long as there is a driver for them, or in other words, that the physical layer is a black box when it comes to routing packets.
Consequently, if a working bluetooth device is not included as a shareable option in the network preference panel, this does NOT mean that OSX lacks the feature. OSX does have this feature built-in already. The reason that Apple chose to not include bluetooth as an option in the GUI must be a different one. Whatever that reason may be,
- if it is technical, it must be something trivial only related to the GUI and thus it's likely to be included in a future release/upgrade
- likewise, if it is a resource issue, ie not enough time for testing before a relase, then it's also likely to show up in the near future
- however, if it is political, it is unlikely to show up in the GUI anytime soon and you will have to rely on third party GUI front ends to enable it, or make your own.
I can't speak for Apple nor do I know their motives, so I won't get involved in any speculation. My message however is this...
1) There is nothing "wrong" or "dirty" or "not supposed to be" with/about using OSX's BSD subsystem tools to configure things not yet configurable through Apple's GUI front ends.
2) There is nothing "wrong" or "dirty" or "not supposed to do" with/about using a third party front end tool to configure things not yet configurable through Apple's own front ends.
In fact, I would encourage everybody to use such third party front ends and tell everybody else about it. By doing so, those tools will become popular and thereby show Apple that there is a demand which is a good way to get Apple to make it their own priority to make the respective features configurable through their own preference panes.
As far as what would seem to be personal attacks against me are concerned, I think you are completely off base.
Nowhere did I make any judgement as to the completeness or incompleteness of Apple's preference pane collection and the options available therein.
All I did was to provide information that can help overcome the lack of the particular option the OP said was missing. I do think that the possibility to configure things yourself on the command line is indeed a good thing. I also think that sites like afp548.com publishing easy to follow HOWTOs do a great service to the Mac community.
However, this doesn't mean that I think Apple shouldn't include more options into their preference panes. I am just being realistic here. There are so many things you can do with BSD, many of them useful enough to deserve a preference pane, indeed, but it takes time to put all this in a consistent way into the GUI and Apple has to make some compromises while they are progressing with OSX. Sometimes, we don't mind those compromises, sometimes we do. In any event, we have to live with those compromises and make the best of the situation.
Last but not least, contrary to what you say, I am a Mac user and I am all for making things easy for end users. However, unlike yourself I do know how much work it is to write well integrated and easy to use GUI front ends. I have written a few HOWTOs and GUI front ends for Mac users to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do and I have contributed all that work to the Mac community for free without getting any payment for it. I take it as an insult when people like yourself make statements like you did to discredit me. I certainly don't think I deserve this.
Instead of attacking me, why don't you go ahead and write a preference pane that does what you say is missing and release it for free as open source to the community? That
I don't think it is as complicated as you seem to describe it.
What stops you from starting natd and adding two rules to ipfw to route all packets between the interface associated with your WAN connection, eg. eth0 and whichever interface is associated with your bluetooth device, eg. ppp0.
I did this back in the day of OSX 10.1 when there was no internet sharing option in the network preference panel and it worked just fine.
The guys as afp548.com still have the HOWTO article online from the time when there was no internet sharing option in the GUI...
Since packet routing is a generic feature built-in to the BSD core of OSX it will work no matter what your ethernet interfaces are. It shouldn't matter if it's ultimately sitting on a physical bluetooth layer or not.
I am not trolling either when I point out GENUINELY BAD moderation. It would seem that the offtopic rating has now been removed from my original post, which only goes to proof that I was right. By extension that also means that I wasn't trolling.
Bad moderation is one of the biggest problems Slashdot is facing these days. And censoring those who point this out doesn't do any good either.
I wonder what the story was behind Panther originally being called "Pinot" internally. Apparently, Apple didn't feel like continuing with the big cat theme before eventually returning to it.
Maybe they will launch the grape/wine theme when they run out of big cats.
It is NOT offtopic. It is called a response to another post. Did you rate the post I responded to "offtopic" too? No, you didn't?! Ah well, that shows you didn't pay attention. Bad moderation, indeed.
"...a feature that it should have been there in the first place in the pref panels."
With all due respect, that is patent nonsense. Apple will have had a reason why they didn't make this built-in feature available in their preference pane. Perhaps there was a bug in their pane code that didn't get fixed in time and was thus removed, perhaps something else. In any event, the feature of routing packets between any given network interfaces is built-in to OSX.
There are tons of built-in features for which there are no preference panes and which are thus only accessible on the command line. In such a situation, you can always write your own preference pane to enable and disable those features.
Apple's developer documentation shows you how to write your own preference panes...
Apple has even included a template in Xcode for creating preference panes to make this as easy as possible. They certainly wouldn't be doing this if non-Apple preference panes were discouraged.
The only convention on Apple vs. 3rd party preference panes is that Apple supplied panes live in/System/Library and third party panes live in/Library.
Besides, Apple are doing these things in exactly the same way. They use the built-in features of the BSD subsystem where available and write a preference pane to enable and configure those features which are already there.
Apple would not be able to use Wolverine for any software product unless they buy out Vortech who have a common law trademark on the name, etablished by many years of marketing their Firewall/VPN Linux distro.
Keep in mind though that British Telecom would not have been able to defend their Yellow Pages trademark if there had been no overlapping of trademark categories.
For example, if you were a pharmaceutical company and you wanted to market a new drug under the name "Toyota Pills" or "Ford Antiseptic" etc, it would be difficult for the car companies to fight you, that is unless they also filed their marks in the pharma category.
First, people who call other people asshats are automatically wrong, no matter what they may say. It's like shouting - if you shout, you're wrong, as simple as that.
But even without self-disqualification from civilised discussion, you are still wrong.
Anything can be used as a trademark, as long as it is not already used for any other product falling into the same category including common use by convention.
Thus, if you wanted to trademark the greek letter zeta for a product, then you can do that, as long as there is no other product in the same category which has been marketed using a mark that resembles the greek letter zeta.
No other company would then be allowed to use a symbol in their advertising for a product in the same category which resembles the greek letter zeta.
However, if there was a convention for a certain product that the greek letter zeta is synonym for in the category you apply for, then your application would be rejected. An example of this would be a mark resembling the staff of asclepius, ie. two intertwined snakes, the symbol for medicine if you are a pharmacy, or a hospital or a pharmaceutical company.
But in the absence of any such impediment, there is nothing that stops you from using a glyph of a foreign character set for a trademark.
Keep in mind though that if you have a trademark for the symbol that doesn't mean you also have a trademark for the pronounciation of that symbol.
If you wanted to trademark zeta, the glyph of the greek letter, and Zeta, the latin transliteration as a word, that would be two separate and independent trademarks.
Don't give up before you even know what the legal situation actually is.
The most important thing is to get professional legal advice so you know that your rights are. Get a qualified lawyer to issue a written opinion. This shouldn't cost you more than a few hundred Euros.
Depending on what that written opinion says, you can make an _informed_ decision what you want to do.
It is quite possible that the legal situation is so clear cut in your favour that it doesn't take more than a nice letter to them asking them to verify for themselves the legal advice you have been given while at the same time making clear that you intend to resolve the matter amicably.
They would then check with their lawyer and get the same kind of advice, that in fact they are in trouble if you decided to become nasty. Since they seem to be big spenders of TV campaigning, it should not be such a big issue for them to change their branding.
Alternatively, if they are so attached to the name, they may want to consider paying you guys for renaming your business, ie to pay a branding agency to find a nice new name and corporate identity for you, including all the administrative cost involved with a company name change.
If you know for a fact that you have been trading for longer than they have, you may want to apply for a registered trademark "Zeta" in the software category in Germany now. It costs something like 150 USD per year per trademark per category per country.
You should also take into account that there is a risk attached to doing nothing. Do you have anything in writing that they won't come after you in the future? What if they release other software for their OS that they will also call Zeta This and Zeta That, some of which may be the kind of software your company has spent 10 years building a reputation for? If their strategy becomes more agressive you could be up for a nasty surprise at the worst possible moment. You better deal with this while you still can.
You probably know the UK airline EasyJet and their other EasyThis and EasyThat ventures. In the beginning they were just a budget airline, nothing to worry about by any other businesses using the word "easy" in their name. But as the Easy Group were expanding into other markets, they have been bullying other companies out of their long established legitimate "easy" brands. Who knows, those Yellow Tab folks may one day send you a C&D bullying you into changing your name.
I know Germany is not a common law country, so I am not sure if the following applies there, but in common law countries (mostly the anglo-saxon world) you could get an injunction against Yellow Tab forcing them to change the name due to the fact that there are two kinds of trademarks: common law trademarks and registered trademarks.
A registered trademark is quite obviously something you have to register with the trademark registry.
A common law trademark is established through using a mark persistently. You don't have to register it.
Needless to say, registered trademarks are easier to enforce, but common law trademarks are just as valid.
Another important fact about trademarks is that there are 40+ different categories. Two companies can hold the same trademark for their products in the same country as long as they are in different categories. Since you are a software company and Yellow Tab's ZetaOS is a software product, there can be no doubt that both companies' products fall into the same category, the one for computer software.
Now, assuming that German trademark law does acknowlegde common law trademarks, then you have established such a common law trademark by trading as Zeta Software. If you can show that you have been trading for longer than Yellow Tab has been marketing ZetaOS, then you stand a very good chance that you can get an injunction to force them to change the name. The fact that you have those errant calls will actually help you to go after them.
Even if German trademark law doesn't help you, I am sure that German company law will have various clauses that protect a registered company's name from other companies in the same sector using the name.
Don't have pity for them. They should have done their homework before launching their OS. They should have never picked that name in the first place. A simple check with the company registry would have revealed that you guys exist.
On the other hand, if your company has been founded after Yellow Tab have started to market their OS under the Zeta name, then the blame would go to you guys.
In any event, you should get some legal advice from a lawyer dealing in such matters and see what your options are.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not judge Sony's patent filing either way. However, if what you say is true, then the patent should not have been granted on the grounds that the specification is not detailed enough for "persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention".
In other words, the answer to your question is: yes, it does matter, the existing criteria for patentability is sufficient if properly enforced.
So, we're back at the conclusion that enforcement is the problem, not lack of rules.
Well, they may be forgiven for wanting to create a name out of Mandrake and Conectiva, but why they went about this so badly is beyond me.
Couldn't they have just split Man/drake and Conec/tiva to yield Mantiva instead?
At least that doesn't seem to bring all kinds of words with negative connotations to mind.
Wonder how long that name will last.
I think you're right. There was a requirement for prototypes in the US some time about 200 years ago or so. I stand corrected. However, it is my understanding that this was specific to the US only.
Indeed.
In my opinion, US congress is overstepping their authority by extending the duration of those copyrights over and over again because the US constitution clearly says "for limited times". Extending that limit everytime it is about to expire constitutes for all practical purposes a perpetual copyright and thus goes against the spirit of the US constitution.
Not only that, but extending anything retroactively is pretty much without any parallel in legal matters.
If any of us was trying to be such a smart ass in court, no judge would go along with that. In fact, the chance is we would be held in contempt of the court for even trying.
In terms of copyright we are basically still in a period the patent system was in the 16th century when the issuing of perpetual letters of patent got so much out of hand that King James I replaced it for a strictly 14 years only system.
The duration did eventually get extended to 20 years and 25 years for pharmaceutical patents (because of the long time it takes to get approval for drugs) but it seems everybody has learned the lesson history teaches us.
I believe that at some point the same will happen to copyrights. It will become so ridiculous that a modern King James I will step in eventually and make a clean sweep where copyrights will strictly be limited to -say- 20 or 25 years without any possibility to extend. Not sure whether this will happen in our lifetime though.
yes of course that is correct, but I understood the OP's mentioning of "latency (jitter)" to mean that one is just another name for the other.
The term latency is usually understood to mean as much as "constant delay" and the term jitter as much as "rapidly varying delay" to put it in very broad terms.
I am not sure if a load balancing router is the only thing that could cause jitter. It may well be that multi threaded packet processing on some router along the way might also cause jitter.
But that might only refer to the backbone, not the "last mile" between AOL's POPs and AOL customer premises.
If they use SIP for the last mile, that would mean you could use your own SIP phone to connect to the network. I am kind of skeptical about AOL using a standard protocol, though.
The article doesn't say anything about what protocol AOL's service will be using. Does anyone know? Is it SIP or yet another incompatible derivative of SIP (like Skype and Apple's iChat) or something else?
You are mistaken.
VOIP doesn't mean that your computer becomes a phone. All it means is that voice is encapsulated into IP packets. Period.
In fact, a software that allows you to use your computer as a phone, a so called softphone is a very bad compromise.
You will always get far superior quality if you use a real VOIP phone, that is, a device that looks just like an old fashioned telephone, but instead of a phone jack (RJ-11) it has got an ethernet jack (RJ-45) at its back and circuitry to convert between analog voice and IP packet encapsulated digitised voice.
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-VOIP+Phones
It's http://www.asterisk.org/ and the name is Asterisk, not asterix.
Latency is not jitter. Latency is when packets get delayed. Jitter is when packets arrive out of order.
Latency is not generally a problem. Cell phone services tend to have rather heavy latency. Typically you don't even notice latency up to about 500 to 600 ms.
Jitter can be a problem if out of order packets aren't dealt with properly, that is, in most cases, they should be discarded, or more precisely, the longer they have been overdue the more likely they should be discarded for VoIP.
However, there are codecs that can deal with jittery connections and as long as your service provider is using open standards where it is up to the end user equipment or client software to negotiate the best codec for a given connection, you generally don't have to worry about jitter impacting your call quality to the point where you would notice.
The requirements for patentability are simple ...
1) the invention has to be novel
2) the invention must not be ovious, there has to be an inventive step
3) the specification has to be detailed enough for persons skilled in the art to carry out the invention, that is to say, build the apparatus
These requirements are perfectly sufficient if they are properly enforced.
requirement 1 means, no patent is to be granted if there is prior art
requirement 2 means, no patent is to be granted for something that is obvious
requirement 3 means, no patent is to be granted for concepts or ideas, nor for applications that are too fuzzy to be pinned down to an actual implementation
The problem with the patent system today is that the patent offices are hopelessly understaffed to ensure that these requirements are actually enforced and consequently there are too many patents which are not novel, obvious or fuzzy or any combination thereof.
If a requirement to produce a working prototype was introduced, it would make things even worse because the already overworked patent examiners would now also have to examine the prototype and there would likely follow a tendency to grant any application as long as the prototype appears to do what the specification says it does. The result would be even more non-novel and obvious patents.
That's not quite right. The original purpose of patents was for greedy monarchs to enrich themselves by granting monopolies in return for bribes. This was eventually getting out of hand and had a negative impact on economies in Europe. In 1610 King James I of Britain abandoned the system of favourist patents and introduced a new law by which patents were only to be granted for inventions deemed to be in the public interest, only to the first inventor and strictly limited to 14 years. This was the birth of the modern patent system.
The duration was eventually extended to 20 years as it remains today, but there was never any requirement to provide a prototype nor was the idea to aid fund raising for a prototype.
Instead, the patent system is based on the concept of a bargain between the public interest and an inventor. The bargain is for the inventor to receive a time limited monopoly in return for not keeping his invention secret and have it published. In fact, when the patent expires after 20 years, the invention become public domain.
It does not matter whether the invention actually works or not. The public interest is served by the disclosure of the invention. Any such disclosure will enrich the public domain, which is the only reason why a patent is granted in the first place.
If the invention is flawed and doesn't work, in most cases, there is still something to be learned from its disclosure for others to fix the flaw or not make the same mistake and instead come up with a better idea. This is what enrichment of the public domain is all about.
Consequently, it doesn't matter if an invention works or not. If there was any such requirement as to produce a working prototype, it would actually limit the enrichment of the public domain.
What is far more important is that the rules of patentability, ie novelty and non-obviousness are strictly enforced. Too many patent applications for inventions which are not novel or which are obvious get rubberstamped these days. That is where the problem of the patent system lies today.
That's all fair enough and I am doing quite a bit of GUI front end programming just to make features otherwise "hidden in the BSD core" reachable to ordinary users because I am myself a believer in the "just works" philosophy.
However, the original poster was taking the viewpoint that there was something wrong with using third party GUI tools to configure features not (yet) reachable from within Apple supplied preference panes. It is that viewpoint I have a big problem with. We cannot and should not expect Apple to do all the work at once. Some of the work Apple hasn't done (yet), whatever the reason for that may be, can and should be done by somebody else and if only as an interim solution.
It is not helpful if such third party work is then classified as somehow improper. If a third party tool has bugs, send a bug report so they can be fixed. Otherwise, third party tools can be just as good as the ones coming directly from Apple.
You are taking my post out of context. I was replying to somebody who seemed to argue that there were some technical issues which make a bluetooth based network interface somehow incompatible with the way OSX routes packets. My response was that this is very unlikely because OSX' TCP/IP stack treats all network devices the same way as long as there is a driver for them, or in other words, that the physical layer is a black box when it comes to routing packets.
...
Consequently, if a working bluetooth device is not included as a shareable option in the network preference panel, this does NOT mean that OSX lacks the feature. OSX does have this feature built-in already. The reason that Apple chose to not include bluetooth as an option in the GUI must be a different one. Whatever that reason may be,
- if it is technical, it must be something trivial only related to the GUI and thus it's likely to be included in a future release/upgrade
- likewise, if it is a resource issue, ie not enough time for testing before a relase, then it's also likely to show up in the near future
- however, if it is political, it is unlikely to show up in the GUI anytime soon and you will have to rely on third party GUI front ends to enable it, or make your own.
I can't speak for Apple nor do I know their motives, so I won't get involved in any speculation. My message however is this
1) There is nothing "wrong" or "dirty" or "not supposed to be" with/about using OSX's BSD subsystem tools to configure things not yet configurable through Apple's GUI front ends.
2) There is nothing "wrong" or "dirty" or "not supposed to do" with/about using a third party front end tool to configure things not yet configurable through Apple's own front ends.
In fact, I would encourage everybody to use such third party front ends and tell everybody else about it. By doing so, those tools will become popular and thereby show Apple that there is a demand which is a good way to get Apple to make it their own priority to make the respective features configurable through their own preference panes.
As far as what would seem to be personal attacks against me are concerned, I think you are completely off base.
Nowhere did I make any judgement as to the completeness or incompleteness of Apple's preference pane collection and the options available therein.
All I did was to provide information that can help overcome the lack of the particular option the OP said was missing. I do think that the possibility to configure things yourself on the command line is indeed a good thing. I also think that sites like afp548.com publishing easy to follow HOWTOs do a great service to the Mac community.
However, this doesn't mean that I think Apple shouldn't include more options into their preference panes. I am just being realistic here. There are so many things you can do with BSD, many of them useful enough to deserve a preference pane, indeed, but it takes time to put all this in a consistent way into the GUI and Apple has to make some compromises while they are progressing with OSX. Sometimes, we don't mind those compromises, sometimes we do. In any event, we have to live with those compromises and make the best of the situation.
Last but not least, contrary to what you say, I am a Mac user and I am all for making things easy for end users. However, unlike yourself I do know how much work it is to write well integrated and easy to use GUI front ends. I have written a few HOWTOs and GUI front ends for Mac users to do things they otherwise wouldn't be able to do and I have contributed all that work to the Mac community for free without getting any payment for it. I take it as an insult when people like yourself make statements like you did to discredit me. I certainly don't think I deserve this.
Instead of attacking me, why don't you go ahead and write a preference pane that does what you say is missing and release it for free as open source to the community? That
I don't think it is as complicated as you seem to describe it.
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t ml
What stops you from starting natd and adding two rules to ipfw to route all packets between the interface associated with your WAN connection, eg. eth0 and whichever interface is associated with your bluetooth device, eg. ppp0.
I did this back in the day of OSX 10.1 when there was no internet sharing option in the network preference panel and it worked just fine.
The guys as afp548.com still have the HOWTO article online from the time when there was no internet sharing option in the GUI
http://www.afp548.com/articles/system/natserver.h
Since packet routing is a generic feature built-in to the BSD core of OSX it will work no matter what your ethernet interfaces are. It shouldn't matter if it's ultimately sitting on a physical bluetooth layer or not.
I am not trolling either when I point out GENUINELY BAD moderation. It would seem that the offtopic rating has now been removed from my original post, which only goes to proof that I was right. By extension that also means that I wasn't trolling.
Bad moderation is one of the biggest problems Slashdot is facing these days. And censoring those who point this out doesn't do any good either.
I wonder what the story was behind Panther originally being called "Pinot" internally. Apparently, Apple didn't feel like continuing with the big cat theme before eventually returning to it.
Maybe they will launch the grape/wine theme when they run out of big cats.
It is NOT offtopic. It is called a response to another post. Did you rate the post I responded to "offtopic" too? No, you didn't?! Ah well, that shows you didn't pay attention. Bad moderation, indeed.
"...a feature that it should have been there in the first place in the pref panels."
...
r ience/Conceptual/PreferencePanes/Tasks/Creation.ht ml
/System/Library and third party panes live in /Library.
With all due respect, that is patent nonsense. Apple will have had a reason why they didn't make this built-in feature available in their preference pane. Perhaps there was a bug in their pane code that didn't get fixed in time and was thus removed, perhaps something else. In any event, the feature of routing packets between any given network interfaces is built-in to OSX.
There are tons of built-in features for which there are no preference panes and which are thus only accessible on the command line. In such a situation, you can always write your own preference pane to enable and disable those features.
Apple's developer documentation shows you how to write your own preference panes
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExpe
Apple has even included a template in Xcode for creating preference panes to make this as easy as possible. They certainly wouldn't be doing this if non-Apple preference panes were discouraged.
The only convention on Apple vs. 3rd party preference panes is that Apple supplied panes live in
Besides, Apple are doing these things in exactly the same way. They use the built-in features of the BSD subsystem where available and write a preference pane to enable and configure those features which are already there.
Wolverine is already in use for an embedded Linux distro customised for Firewall and VPN server use.
o lverine
http://www.coyotelinux.com/products.php?Product=w
Apple would not be able to use Wolverine for any software product unless they buy out Vortech who have a common law trademark on the name, etablished by many years of marketing their Firewall/VPN Linux distro.
it's actually attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister in the 1860s and 1870s ...
r aeli
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Benjamin_Dis
http://www.britannia.com/bios/disraeli.html
Keep in mind though that British Telecom would not have been able to defend their Yellow Pages trademark if there had been no overlapping of trademark categories.
For example, if you were a pharmaceutical company and you wanted to market a new drug under the name "Toyota Pills" or "Ford Antiseptic" etc, it would be difficult for the car companies to fight you, that is unless they also filed their marks in the pharma category.
First, people who call other people asshats are automatically wrong, no matter what they may say. It's like shouting - if you shout, you're wrong, as simple as that.
But even without self-disqualification from civilised discussion, you are still wrong.
Anything can be used as a trademark, as long as it is not already used for any other product falling into the same category including common use by convention.
Thus, if you wanted to trademark the greek letter zeta for a product, then you can do that, as long as there is no other product in the same category which has been marketed using a mark that resembles the greek letter zeta.
No other company would then be allowed to use a symbol in their advertising for a product in the same category which resembles the greek letter zeta.
However, if there was a convention for a certain product that the greek letter zeta is synonym for in the category you apply for, then your application would be rejected. An example of this would be a mark resembling the staff of asclepius, ie. two intertwined snakes, the symbol for medicine if you are a pharmacy, or a hospital or a pharmaceutical company.
But in the absence of any such impediment, there is nothing that stops you from using a glyph of a foreign character set for a trademark.
Keep in mind though that if you have a trademark for the symbol that doesn't mean you also have a trademark for the pronounciation of that symbol.
If you wanted to trademark zeta, the glyph of the greek letter, and Zeta, the latin transliteration as a word, that would be two separate and independent trademarks.
Don't give up before you even know what the legal situation actually is.
The most important thing is to get professional legal advice so you know that your rights are. Get a qualified lawyer to issue a written opinion. This shouldn't cost you more than a few hundred Euros.
Depending on what that written opinion says, you can make an _informed_ decision what you want to do.
It is quite possible that the legal situation is so clear cut in your favour that it doesn't take more than a nice letter to them asking them to verify for themselves the legal advice you have been given while at the same time making clear that you intend to resolve the matter amicably.
They would then check with their lawyer and get the same kind of advice, that in fact they are in trouble if you decided to become nasty. Since they seem to be big spenders of TV campaigning, it should not be such a big issue for them to change their branding.
Alternatively, if they are so attached to the name, they may want to consider paying you guys for renaming your business, ie to pay a branding agency to find a nice new name and corporate identity for you, including all the administrative cost involved with a company name change.
If you know for a fact that you have been trading for longer than they have, you may want to apply for a registered trademark "Zeta" in the software category in Germany now. It costs something like 150 USD per year per trademark per category per country.
You should also take into account that there is a risk attached to doing nothing. Do you have anything in writing that they won't come after you in the future? What if they release other software for their OS that they will also call Zeta This and Zeta That, some of which may be the kind of software your company has spent 10 years building a reputation for? If their strategy becomes more agressive you could be up for a nasty surprise at the worst possible moment. You better deal with this while you still can.
You probably know the UK airline EasyJet and their other EasyThis and EasyThat ventures. In the beginning they were just a budget airline, nothing to worry about by any other businesses using the word "easy" in their name. But as the Easy Group were expanding into other markets, they have been bullying other companies out of their long established legitimate "easy" brands. Who knows, those Yellow Tab folks may one day send you a C&D bullying you into changing your name.
Whatever you do, get professional legal advice!
I know Germany is not a common law country, so I am not sure if the following applies there, but in common law countries (mostly the anglo-saxon world) you could get an injunction against Yellow Tab forcing them to change the name due to the fact that there are two kinds of trademarks: common law trademarks and registered trademarks.
A registered trademark is quite obviously something you have to register with the trademark registry.
A common law trademark is established through using a mark persistently. You don't have to register it.
Needless to say, registered trademarks are easier to enforce, but common law trademarks are just as valid.
Another important fact about trademarks is that there are 40+ different categories. Two companies can hold the same trademark for their products in the same country as long as they are in different categories. Since you are a software company and Yellow Tab's ZetaOS is a software product, there can be no doubt that both companies' products fall into the same category, the one for computer software.
Now, assuming that German trademark law does acknowlegde common law trademarks, then you have established such a common law trademark by trading as Zeta Software. If you can show that you have been trading for longer than Yellow Tab has been marketing ZetaOS, then you stand a very good chance that you can get an injunction to force them to change the name. The fact that you have those errant calls will actually help you to go after them.
Even if German trademark law doesn't help you, I am sure that German company law will have various clauses that protect a registered company's name from other companies in the same sector using the name.
Don't have pity for them. They should have done their homework before launching their OS. They should have never picked that name in the first place. A simple check with the company registry would have revealed that you guys exist.
On the other hand, if your company has been founded after Yellow Tab have started to market their OS under the Zeta name, then the blame would go to you guys.
In any event, you should get some legal advice from a lawyer dealing in such matters and see what your options are.
Good luck.