Yes, but NetGear's stock doesn't plummet every time its CEO takes a leave. Apple may have been a good investment years ago, but at this very moment, their stock has reached a very rocky plateau.
With what I just read NetGear's stock will rise when their CEO leaves.
So what, because he's ill now it's forbidden to discuss his actions of the past as a CEO? Illness is some kind of immunity?
I wonder what alternative universe you are living in. Steve Jobs' actions in the past as CEO of Apple have lead to the company having more revenue than Microsoft, being the second largest company of the world in market caps, and making about 50 billion dollars of profit so far.
The Netgear CEO, on the other hand, seems to be talking without using his brains. What about doing something useful instead, like creating a NAS device that is compatible with Time Machine out of the box?
This was discussed before, and again there is a deep misunderstanding what is going on.
This is about people suing a company, for example after an accident, to get compensation. This turns into a court case, and in a court case we have discovery. In discovery, both sides have to turn over relevant information. Whether that information is private or not doesn't matter one bit. What matters is whether it is relevant to the case or not. If you went to a restaurant, and claimed that you became impotent after eating their food and sue them for damages, then some very, very private photos could be relevant to the case and would have to turn over.
If you claim that you are unable to walk because of an accident, then the company you sue can rightfully demand that you turn over private videos that show you playing beach volleyball in the nude after the accident because it is relevant to the case. That's when the evidence is in your possession. If the evidence is in someone else's possession, then they still can rightfully demand the evidence. You have the right to refuse to help them; in that case for example Facebook wouldn't turn over such evidence, and the court would assume that the evidence that you withheld would speak against you.
MacDonalds have sold an estimated 245 Billion Hamburgers. Granted at brick and mortar stores. Granted not over as short a timeframe. But we're talking physical product not digital download. I guess that's 24.5 times as impressive and we're in the wrong business. That's it I'm quitting and practicing my "Would you like fries with that?"
That's because you can't buy a hamburger once and eat it as often as you like. You can't even buy one hamburger and give one to every family member. If mum, dad and four children want an iPhone app, they download it once. If they want to eat one hamburger each, they have to buy six. And if they want another one tomorrow, they have to buy another six. Must be some evil scheme that McDonald's is running there.
My concern with the patents on WebM boil down to the simple fact that Google won't indemnify users. They're flogging their pet standard, but it seems they're not confident enough in it to say, "and we'll help you if anybody comes after you." If they're not confident enough in their patent status to say that... why should anybody else be? It's a pretty huge risk they're asking everybody else to take.
It is an even bigger risk for open source software. You need only _one_ patent that WebM infringes on, and where the patent owner cannot be convinced or bribed or paid to allow use in any open source software, and no legal GPL v.3 implementation is possible. And since WebM is substantially similar to h.264, there can be no doubt whatsoever that it will be infringing on some h.264 patents.
And since this is all not about "free software", but about the fight between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, I can't feel sorry for them.
A small correction. The NP-Complete problem is "Is there any input for what it evaluates to true?". NP problems are exclusively yes/no ones.
Now, if you solve the SAT problem, you can derive an algorithm for calculating the solution space. It will probably take exponential time. You can also derive an algorithm for finding an input that evaluates to true in polynomial time.
Only because the number of possible solutions can grow exponentially. But assume there are only 100 solutions, and you have a fast algorithm for checking whether a solution exists. Check whether a solution exists with false substituted for the first variable, and whether one exists with true substituted for the first variable. Drop any cases where there is no solution, follow those with solutions further. If there are only 100 solutions you can never follow more than hundred paths, so this lets you find all solutions effectively. If you can check whether there is a solution in O (N) where N is the problem size, and there are m variables and k solutions, then you can find all solutions in O (N * m * k).
The federal prosecutor disagrees. If you follow the link in TFA, you'll find:
So its like he claims: "I wanted to point out your security failures, so I opened your safe". And the federal prosecutor says: "You actually opened the safe and took the money out". While the first is possibly illegal, but let's us argue that no harm was actually done, the second is pure and simply theft.
Try reading TFA. They claim that being online can save an average of over £500 per year. This includes online shopping, paying utility bills online, and so on. A person on minimum wage takes home about £10K/year. Being online saves them about 5% of their income, which works out as a massive increase in their disposable income.
If people don't want to do this, that's fine and no one is forcing them to.
You missed that this is about the UK. If you are on minimum wage, you won't qualify for any of these things that are for the "poor and needy". You have to be unemployed. In the UK, moving from unemployment to minimum wage means you lose your benefit income, which is tax free, and get an income from employment which can be less, and you have to pay tax on it. So you have less money, and then you will notice that your kids will have to pay for a school trip, while your neighbour who was clever enough not to get a job will have his kids going for free. You will also not get one of these free computers, while your unemployed neighbour will.
If Apple didn't want to have their bottom-line affected by the vagaries of an irrational stock market, they shouldn't have gone public. Simple as that. Public companies know the risks they take - it isn't all IPOs and piles of investor cash; sometimes investors are going to take advantage of your weaknesses.
Apple's bottom line isn't affected by the stock market at all. The only time when the stock price affects the bottom line is when the company needs to borrow money, and a high share price makes that easier than a low share price. There have been many occasions in the past where Apple has made announcements that predictably made the share price go down. For a short time. Like saying "we just had a record quarter, but the next quarter will likely not be quite as good".
Steve Jobs breathed life back into a dying Apple. It was his management that turned the company from a third-rate HW vendor into a juggernaut of ideas, concepts, products, and customer satisfaction. Sculley, Amelio, and the rest never could have done that.
But if Steve goes, whence Apple? I'm sure he has a large cadre of lieutenants who can make good decisions in his stead, but can they get along? Can they drive the teams and call BS on half-assed engineering like Jobs? Do they have his business acumen?
It is not so much the person of Steve Jobs, it is the direction the company is taking. When Sculley threw Steve Jobs out, the company then went _intentionally_ into a different direction than Steve Jobs wanted. That's why he had to go. We also may assume that the Steve Jobs who left back then was less experienced and less good at what he was doing than the Steve Jobs that returned many years later. Amelio on the other hand did an excellent job. He came to an Apple company that was in deep shit and figured out exactly what to do to make it survive and make it great again: Some emergency measures to keep the ship from sinking, hiring Steve Jobs back, and getting himself fired in the process. Nobody could have handled the situation better than he did. He did what was best for Apple, not what was best for his reputation.
Anyway, the difference between back then and today is that Apple today knows that Steve Jobs' direction is exactly the direction they should be aiming at. So whether Steve Jobs is there or not, they won't change their direction this time.
And you are supposed to short a stock before it drops, not after.
No. But they have tons and tons of patents on h.264, and h.264 and WebM are very, very similar. So we can quite safely assume that WebM is infringing on a substantial number of patents. At least we can assume that there are tons of patents where a claim that WebM infringes is not unreasonable. And you don't even need a _reasonable_ claim to sue for patent infringement.
That may be, but standards shouldn't require you to pay for them.
You are paying for WebM. First, Google paid a few hundred million dollars for it. They paid many times more for WebM than Microsoft and Apple paid together to make h.264 available on 99% of all personal computers, and the majority of all high end phones and tablets. Now ask yourself: Why would Google do that? Out of the goodness of their heart? No, because they will turn it into cash. And _you_ pay for it by delivering your data, your history on the web, to Google who monetizes it.
I'd rather pay a small amount of money to watch videos than letting some creeps know what I'm doing on the internet. Those who give up their freedom for a non-paid video codec deserve neither.
I don't know what the issues would be with submitting the code as open-source and into the kernel but whatever. I assume GPL is a big reason regardless of whatever it's code into the kernel, binary blobs, changes within the API, whatever.
I think the problem is that when you turn the code into open source then anyone can see it. And the companies might not like that. It could be that there are trade secrets that wouldn't be secret anymore, it could be that there are skeletons in the code that nobody must ever, ever see, or it could be that the code is just too embarassing:-)
That's for example why Apple bought Cups. If you make printers, you can now use Cups to create open-source drivers as you always could, but the manufacturers don't seem to like the idea, or you have the right to create closed-source drivers for MacOS X using Cups (because Apple as the copyright holder allows it) so you can sell your hardware to MacOS X users. On the other hand, any manufacturer doing this will now have a driver that _would_ work on Linux with probably minimal changes, except it has to be open sourced to be allowed to run on Linux.
Well, I sure hope all of the girls who took pictures of themselves got child pornography charges against them too.
Why would you hope that? Are you yourself into hacking computers, and hoping that some victims would be afraid to be witnesses against you in a court? I cannot imagine any other reason.
The only way you're going to get screwed is that if Amazon decides having your application priced in an uncompetitive way is going to maximize their return on another app. This is more of a danger than anything, because they might raise the prices of all competing apps to make one in particular seem like a "bargain" at the same time they advertise the hell out of it.
And that is exactly what can happen. Say you figured out that an end user sale price of $9.99 is optimal. You sell on the App Store, you get $7 per copy sold, Apple gets $3. Now lets say your contract with Apple was slightly different, they pay you $7 per copy but can charge less than $10. They might use your product as a loss leader and sell it for $5, but that would be actually good for you, because there will be more sales, and you still get $7 per sale. Apple can sell it for $2, even better for you because there are even more sales.
With the Amazon contract, Amazon can decide to use your product as a loss leader as well. But if they sell it for $2, you only get $2, not $7. So maybe instead of selling 10,000 copies at $10 and paying you $70,000, Amazon sells 20,000 copies at $2 and gives you $40,000. They make money because lots of people go to their store and buy other stuff at full price. By the way, your sales on the Apple App Store, where you also sold 10,000 copies at $7 profit each drop down to zero because nobody pays $10 when they can get it at Amazon for $2.
This kind of agreement allows Amazon to undercut any competitor. If you have a contract with one seller that the suggested price is $10, and you get $7 for each copy sold, and you have a contract with Amazon, where the suggested price is $10, but they can sell it for less and pay you less, then Amazon can drop the price to $7 and they still make $2.10 on each sale, while their competitor will make nothing at that price.
And I am missing the comments that came up on the Apple Store, that 30% of the retail price is robbing developers.
"iPhone is more secure than Android because being an open-source platform lets attackers know more about the underlying architecture."
And that guy is the chairman of a computer security company?
Yes, the chairman who wants to sell his security software. If he had security software for the iPhone then we wouldn't hesitate one second to say "Android is more secure than iPhone because being an open-source platform lets everyone know more about the underlying architecture and fix security problems." If you asked him "Which is more secure, iPhone or Android", he'd ask you "what phone do you have?" and your phone would be the one that is less secure and needs his software.
Google claims that as far as they know, there are no patents on WebM other than those owned by Google. There are others who have looked at the codec and agree that it's probably unencumbered.
The last thing I read was "this thing is so similar to h.264 in many parts, that it is totally unconceivable that it is not covered by some h.264 patents".
Yet, you are not free to make an open implementation, you are absolutely not permitted to re-distribute binary copies of said implementation or use it for any purpose.
That's because GPL v.3 shot itself in the foot, making it impossible to create GPL v.3 licensed software that implements something that is patented. Which, by the way, increases the danger of damage inflicted by patent trolls significantly. If only one patent that covers Google's codec is found valid, then you can say goodbye to any open source implementation.
I actually thought that they might just have been having a bit of a play on words, with "app" also being the first 3 letters of "apple".
"app" is a shortcut for application, it is a new name for small applications, heavily used by Apple in its advertisements, it is a shortcut for "Apple", making clear where the app comes from, and it is a shortcut for "approved" telling the customer they can expect quality. It is quite clever on multiple levels.
Microsoft is free to call a store "exestore" or "micstore" or "softstore". They can start a marketing campaign for their Windows phones "there is a soft for that" and put the word into everyone's mind. They have lots of very well-paid marketing people who surely should come up with something more clever than I do in two minutes.
But if we ask ourselves: Why does Microsoft want this name to be judged as "generic"? Because they want to use it. There are tons of generic names the could use. "Software source" - the source where all your applications come from. "Software Store". "Program Store". "Software Distribution Centre". I bet Apple can, with a bit of hard work, come up with a list of fifty generic names that you could use. But they want to use "App Store". I'd say the fact alone that they want to use "App Store" out of all these names proves that the name is _not_ generic.
3. As per UK contract legislation all T-mob customers who are affected now have 30 days to terminate the contract if they do not like it. Very few will do though - most phones on T-mob are subsidised so to terminate the contract one has to pay the balance on it (at the outrageously inflated "not-locked-in price).
My understanding is that if they change the contract in a way that is significantly detrimental to you, you have the right to cancel the contract without any cancellation charges. See the link below about details. Summary: You have the right to cancel without charges. They may disagree. Cancel your direct debit and pay the last payment by cheque. And NEVER give anyone the right to take money out of your credit card.
What am I missing, if anything? What exactly is it that blocks GPL on the App Store?
The problem is that one of the copyright holders has told Apple that making this application available for downloading would infringe on his copyright.
We have here three different parties: The copyright holder, the developer, and Apple. If Apple is told by the copyright holder that the copy is infringing, then in most cases outside GPL we would assume that the copyright holder should know whether someone has the right to put an application on the store or not. Here we have the rare situation where the question is reasonably open. But Apple will not want to get involved in this copyright fight, which is why they drop the application.
I think the only way to get this application onto the store would be to sue the developer to declare that this would not be copyright infringement.
We feel free to hate Apple for setting up terms for their app store which are incompatible with the GPL.
They are not. Just because one jerk claims they are (and if you read his comments about the developers of VLC for the iPhone, he makes it quite clear that he is a jerk), that doesn't make it so.
FI have the right to download the source for VLC for windows, modify it, and install it on my iPhone. It is obviously a lot of work to do that. And Apple makes me buy a Macintosh to run the development software, and makes me pay $99 for the tools to actually install it on my iPhone. But that has nothing to do with the VLC software at all; Apple doesn't affect my rights what to do with VLC for windows at all. Now I could give the complete source code to you. You don't have to do the development work that I had to do, you still have to buy a Macintosh and $99 for the tools. But that is not between me and you; I am not restricting your rights in any way, exactly as the developers for VLC for windows don't restrict your rights (except the jerk).
Now some people developed a version of VLC that does work on the iPhone. These people install it not just on their own phones, and don't just give the source code to others, but they made it available through the Apple Store so that anyone can download it and use it. And anyone who downloads it can get the source code. And once they have the source code for the iPhone version, they have exactly the same rights as someone who has the source code for the windows version, or someone who received source code from me that will actually compile and then run on the iPhone. The developer gives them exactly the same rights. And Apple makes it just as hard for them as it does with the windows version, but that is Apple and it has nothing to do with the developer of the software.
When you want to install software on an iPhone, there are easy ways and hard ways to do it. The easy way is downloading from the App Store, the hard way is getting the source code, get a Macintosh, pay $99 for deployment tools, and install it on 200 iPhones of your choice or put it on the App Store and install it from there. Apple has some limitations on the "easy" method. But there is no license contract between you and Apple about using the software; that contract is between you and the developer. The developer does _not_ in any way restrict your rights.
Now in a practical sense, if I put some GPL'd software on my phone, and you want it as well, then you can get it very easily. And if you want the source code, you can get that as well. And if you want to modify the app, you can do that and have the right to do that as well. So in practice, the end user can do all the things that GPL wants them to be able to do. Except there is this jerk who tries his hardest to prevent everyone from doing so.
There was Richard Stallman, who had a printer, and a printer driver that didn't quite work, and he thought he should have the right to make the driver work with his printer. And there are these guys with iPhones, and there is the VLC software, and these guys think they should have the right to make the software work on an iPhone. And there is the jerk who in the name of "free software" tries to take this freedom away from them.
The GPL is to blame. It's fundamentally incompatible with the app store's terms of service. The app store terms forbid you from sharing apps you downloaded from it, even if they are free. The GPL does not recognize pointing people to a free download on the app store as the re-distribution that it wants to enforce to be possible.
No, the GPL isn't to blame at all. What is to blame is a developer who has apparently developed a hatred against Apple (which may be related to his employer being Nokia), making legal threats, and claiming that his copyright is infringed.
Apple makes very, very clear that any GPL software in the app store is distributed under the GPL license, and that any legal relationship is between the developers submitting the software and the end user receiving the software. Apple just provides a service to allow users to download software. That service has limitations. And it isn't easy for the end user to distribute further, but it is possible, and Apple doesn't disallow it.
However, the spirit of the GPL software is that anybody should be able to get the source code, adapt it, and use the modified software. Here we have a developer who actively prevents people from doing just that. You can argue all you want about app store rules and walled gardens and so on, but this guy clearly does not want people to have the freedom to modify software that he participated in developing and to make it work on the device that they want it to work on.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but NetGear's stock doesn't plummet every time its CEO takes a leave. Apple may have been a good investment years ago, but at this very moment, their stock has reached a very rocky plateau.
With what I just read NetGear's stock will rise when their CEO leaves.
So what, because he's ill now it's forbidden to discuss his actions of the past as a CEO? Illness is some kind of immunity?
I wonder what alternative universe you are living in. Steve Jobs' actions in the past as CEO of Apple have lead to the company having more revenue than Microsoft, being the second largest company of the world in market caps, and making about 50 billion dollars of profit so far.
The Netgear CEO, on the other hand, seems to be talking without using his brains. What about doing something useful instead, like creating a NAS device that is compatible with Time Machine out of the box?
This was discussed before, and again there is a deep misunderstanding what is going on.
This is about people suing a company, for example after an accident, to get compensation. This turns into a court case, and in a court case we have discovery. In discovery, both sides have to turn over relevant information. Whether that information is private or not doesn't matter one bit. What matters is whether it is relevant to the case or not. If you went to a restaurant, and claimed that you became impotent after eating their food and sue them for damages, then some very, very private photos could be relevant to the case and would have to turn over.
If you claim that you are unable to walk because of an accident, then the company you sue can rightfully demand that you turn over private videos that show you playing beach volleyball in the nude after the accident because it is relevant to the case. That's when the evidence is in your possession. If the evidence is in someone else's possession, then they still can rightfully demand the evidence. You have the right to refuse to help them; in that case for example Facebook wouldn't turn over such evidence, and the court would assume that the evidence that you withheld would speak against you.
MacDonalds have sold an estimated 245 Billion Hamburgers. Granted at brick and mortar stores. Granted not over as short a timeframe. But we're talking physical product not digital download. I guess that's 24.5 times as impressive and we're in the wrong business. That's it I'm quitting and practicing my "Would you like fries with that?"
That's because you can't buy a hamburger once and eat it as often as you like. You can't even buy one hamburger and give one to every family member. If mum, dad and four children want an iPhone app, they download it once. If they want to eat one hamburger each, they have to buy six. And if they want another one tomorrow, they have to buy another six. Must be some evil scheme that McDonald's is running there.
My concern with the patents on WebM boil down to the simple fact that Google won't indemnify users. They're flogging their pet standard, but it seems they're not confident enough in it to say, "and we'll help you if anybody comes after you." If they're not confident enough in their patent status to say that... why should anybody else be? It's a pretty huge risk they're asking everybody else to take.
It is an even bigger risk for open source software. You need only _one_ patent that WebM infringes on, and where the patent owner cannot be convinced or bribed or paid to allow use in any open source software, and no legal GPL v.3 implementation is possible. And since WebM is substantially similar to h.264, there can be no doubt whatsoever that it will be infringing on some h.264 patents.
And since this is all not about "free software", but about the fight between Google, Microsoft, and Apple, I can't feel sorry for them.
A small correction. The NP-Complete problem is "Is there any input for what it evaluates to true?". NP problems are exclusively yes/no ones. Now, if you solve the SAT problem, you can derive an algorithm for calculating the solution space. It will probably take exponential time. You can also derive an algorithm for finding an input that evaluates to true in polynomial time.
Only because the number of possible solutions can grow exponentially. But assume there are only 100 solutions, and you have a fast algorithm for checking whether a solution exists. Check whether a solution exists with false substituted for the first variable, and whether one exists with true substituted for the first variable. Drop any cases where there is no solution, follow those with solutions further. If there are only 100 solutions you can never follow more than hundred paths, so this lets you find all solutions effectively. If you can check whether there is a solution in O (N) where N is the problem size, and there are m variables and k solutions, then you can find all solutions in O (N * m * k).
The federal prosecutor disagrees. If you follow the link in TFA, you'll find:
So its like he claims: "I wanted to point out your security failures, so I opened your safe". And the federal prosecutor says: "You actually opened the safe and took the money out". While the first is possibly illegal, but let's us argue that no harm was actually done, the second is pure and simply theft.
Try reading TFA. They claim that being online can save an average of over £500 per year. This includes online shopping, paying utility bills online, and so on. A person on minimum wage takes home about £10K/year. Being online saves them about 5% of their income, which works out as a massive increase in their disposable income. If people don't want to do this, that's fine and no one is forcing them to.
You missed that this is about the UK. If you are on minimum wage, you won't qualify for any of these things that are for the "poor and needy". You have to be unemployed. In the UK, moving from unemployment to minimum wage means you lose your benefit income, which is tax free, and get an income from employment which can be less, and you have to pay tax on it. So you have less money, and then you will notice that your kids will have to pay for a school trip, while your neighbour who was clever enough not to get a job will have his kids going for free. You will also not get one of these free computers, while your unemployed neighbour will.
If Apple didn't want to have their bottom-line affected by the vagaries of an irrational stock market, they shouldn't have gone public. Simple as that. Public companies know the risks they take - it isn't all IPOs and piles of investor cash; sometimes investors are going to take advantage of your weaknesses.
Apple's bottom line isn't affected by the stock market at all. The only time when the stock price affects the bottom line is when the company needs to borrow money, and a high share price makes that easier than a low share price. There have been many occasions in the past where Apple has made announcements that predictably made the share price go down. For a short time. Like saying "we just had a record quarter, but the next quarter will likely not be quite as good".
Steve Jobs breathed life back into a dying Apple. It was his management that turned the company from a third-rate HW vendor into a juggernaut of ideas, concepts, products, and customer satisfaction. Sculley, Amelio, and the rest never could have done that.
But if Steve goes, whence Apple? I'm sure he has a large cadre of lieutenants who can make good decisions in his stead, but can they get along? Can they drive the teams and call BS on half-assed engineering like Jobs? Do they have his business acumen?
It is not so much the person of Steve Jobs, it is the direction the company is taking. When Sculley threw Steve Jobs out, the company then went _intentionally_ into a different direction than Steve Jobs wanted. That's why he had to go. We also may assume that the Steve Jobs who left back then was less experienced and less good at what he was doing than the Steve Jobs that returned many years later. Amelio on the other hand did an excellent job. He came to an Apple company that was in deep shit and figured out exactly what to do to make it survive and make it great again: Some emergency measures to keep the ship from sinking, hiring Steve Jobs back, and getting himself fired in the process. Nobody could have handled the situation better than he did. He did what was best for Apple, not what was best for his reputation.
Anyway, the difference between back then and today is that Apple today knows that Steve Jobs' direction is exactly the direction they should be aiming at. So whether Steve Jobs is there or not, they won't change their direction this time.
And you are supposed to short a stock before it drops, not after.
Are the h.264 people offering indemnity?
No. But they have tons and tons of patents on h.264, and h.264 and WebM are very, very similar. So we can quite safely assume that WebM is infringing on a substantial number of patents. At least we can assume that there are tons of patents where a claim that WebM infringes is not unreasonable. And you don't even need a _reasonable_ claim to sue for patent infringement.
That may be, but standards shouldn't require you to pay for them.
You are paying for WebM. First, Google paid a few hundred million dollars for it. They paid many times more for WebM than Microsoft and Apple paid together to make h.264 available on 99% of all personal computers, and the majority of all high end phones and tablets. Now ask yourself: Why would Google do that? Out of the goodness of their heart? No, because they will turn it into cash. And _you_ pay for it by delivering your data, your history on the web, to Google who monetizes it.
I'd rather pay a small amount of money to watch videos than letting some creeps know what I'm doing on the internet. Those who give up their freedom for a non-paid video codec deserve neither.
I don't know what the issues would be with submitting the code as open-source and into the kernel but whatever. I assume GPL is a big reason regardless of whatever it's code into the kernel, binary blobs, changes within the API, whatever.
I think the problem is that when you turn the code into open source then anyone can see it. And the companies might not like that. It could be that there are trade secrets that wouldn't be secret anymore, it could be that there are skeletons in the code that nobody must ever, ever see, or it could be that the code is just too embarassing :-)
That's for example why Apple bought Cups. If you make printers, you can now use Cups to create open-source drivers as you always could, but the manufacturers don't seem to like the idea, or you have the right to create closed-source drivers for MacOS X using Cups (because Apple as the copyright holder allows it) so you can sell your hardware to MacOS X users. On the other hand, any manufacturer doing this will now have a driver that _would_ work on Linux with probably minimal changes, except it has to be open sourced to be allowed to run on Linux.
Well, I sure hope all of the girls who took pictures of themselves got child pornography charges against them too.
Why would you hope that? Are you yourself into hacking computers, and hoping that some victims would be afraid to be witnesses against you in a court? I cannot imagine any other reason.
Where are the lawsuits?
If you had any patents that you believe WebM is infringing on, suing _now_ build be totally stupid. You would wait until WebM is a lot, lot bigger.
The only way you're going to get screwed is that if Amazon decides having your application priced in an uncompetitive way is going to maximize their return on another app. This is more of a danger than anything, because they might raise the prices of all competing apps to make one in particular seem like a "bargain" at the same time they advertise the hell out of it.
And that is exactly what can happen. Say you figured out that an end user sale price of $9.99 is optimal. You sell on the App Store, you get $7 per copy sold, Apple gets $3. Now lets say your contract with Apple was slightly different, they pay you $7 per copy but can charge less than $10. They might use your product as a loss leader and sell it for $5, but that would be actually good for you, because there will be more sales, and you still get $7 per sale. Apple can sell it for $2, even better for you because there are even more sales.
With the Amazon contract, Amazon can decide to use your product as a loss leader as well. But if they sell it for $2, you only get $2, not $7. So maybe instead of selling 10,000 copies at $10 and paying you $70,000, Amazon sells 20,000 copies at $2 and gives you $40,000. They make money because lots of people go to their store and buy other stuff at full price. By the way, your sales on the Apple App Store, where you also sold 10,000 copies at $7 profit each drop down to zero because nobody pays $10 when they can get it at Amazon for $2.
This kind of agreement allows Amazon to undercut any competitor. If you have a contract with one seller that the suggested price is $10, and you get $7 for each copy sold, and you have a contract with Amazon, where the suggested price is $10, but they can sell it for less and pay you less, then Amazon can drop the price to $7 and they still make $2.10 on each sale, while their competitor will make nothing at that price.
And I am missing the comments that came up on the Apple Store, that 30% of the retail price is robbing developers.
"iPhone is more secure than Android because being an open-source platform lets attackers know more about the underlying architecture." And that guy is the chairman of a computer security company?
Yes, the chairman who wants to sell his security software. If he had security software for the iPhone then we wouldn't hesitate one second to say "Android is more secure than iPhone because being an open-source platform lets everyone know more about the underlying architecture and fix security problems." If you asked him "Which is more secure, iPhone or Android", he'd ask you "what phone do you have?" and your phone would be the one that is less secure and needs his software.
Google claims that as far as they know, there are no patents on WebM other than those owned by Google. There are others who have looked at the codec and agree that it's probably unencumbered.
The last thing I read was "this thing is so similar to h.264 in many parts, that it is totally unconceivable that it is not covered by some h.264 patents".
Yet, you are not free to make an open implementation, you are absolutely not permitted to re-distribute binary copies of said implementation or use it for any purpose.
That's because GPL v.3 shot itself in the foot, making it impossible to create GPL v.3 licensed software that implements something that is patented. Which, by the way, increases the danger of damage inflicted by patent trolls significantly. If only one patent that covers Google's codec is found valid, then you can say goodbye to any open source implementation.
I actually thought that they might just have been having a bit of a play on words, with "app" also being the first 3 letters of "apple".
"app" is a shortcut for application, it is a new name for small applications, heavily used by Apple in its advertisements, it is a shortcut for "Apple", making clear where the app comes from, and it is a shortcut for "approved" telling the customer they can expect quality. It is quite clever on multiple levels.
Microsoft is free to call a store "exestore" or "micstore" or "softstore". They can start a marketing campaign for their Windows phones "there is a soft for that" and put the word into everyone's mind. They have lots of very well-paid marketing people who surely should come up with something more clever than I do in two minutes.
But if we ask ourselves: Why does Microsoft want this name to be judged as "generic"? Because they want to use it. There are tons of generic names the could use. "Software source" - the source where all your applications come from. "Software Store". "Program Store". "Software Distribution Centre". I bet Apple can, with a bit of hard work, come up with a list of fifty generic names that you could use. But they want to use "App Store". I'd say the fact alone that they want to use "App Store" out of all these names proves that the name is _not_ generic.
3. As per UK contract legislation all T-mob customers who are affected now have 30 days to terminate the contract if they do not like it. Very few will do though - most phones on T-mob are subsidised so to terminate the contract one has to pay the balance on it (at the outrageously inflated "not-locked-in price).
My understanding is that if they change the contract in a way that is significantly detrimental to you, you have the right to cancel the contract without any cancellation charges. See the link below about details. Summary: You have the right to cancel without charges. They may disagree. Cancel your direct debit and pay the last payment by cheque. And NEVER give anyone the right to take money out of your credit card.
http://www.bitterwallet.com/want-to-cancel-your-t-mobile-contract-heres-how-to-do-it/18286
What am I missing, if anything? What exactly is it that blocks GPL on the App Store?
The problem is that one of the copyright holders has told Apple that making this application available for downloading would infringe on his copyright.
We have here three different parties: The copyright holder, the developer, and Apple. If Apple is told by the copyright holder that the copy is infringing, then in most cases outside GPL we would assume that the copyright holder should know whether someone has the right to put an application on the store or not. Here we have the rare situation where the question is reasonably open. But Apple will not want to get involved in this copyright fight, which is why they drop the application.
I think the only way to get this application onto the store would be to sue the developer to declare that this would not be copyright infringement.
We feel free to hate Apple for setting up terms for their app store which are incompatible with the GPL.
They are not. Just because one jerk claims they are (and if you read his comments about the developers of VLC for the iPhone, he makes it quite clear that he is a jerk), that doesn't make it so.
FI have the right to download the source for VLC for windows, modify it, and install it on my iPhone. It is obviously a lot of work to do that. And Apple makes me buy a Macintosh to run the development software, and makes me pay $99 for the tools to actually install it on my iPhone. But that has nothing to do with the VLC software at all; Apple doesn't affect my rights what to do with VLC for windows at all. Now I could give the complete source code to you. You don't have to do the development work that I had to do, you still have to buy a Macintosh and $99 for the tools. But that is not between me and you; I am not restricting your rights in any way, exactly as the developers for VLC for windows don't restrict your rights (except the jerk).
Now some people developed a version of VLC that does work on the iPhone. These people install it not just on their own phones, and don't just give the source code to others, but they made it available through the Apple Store so that anyone can download it and use it. And anyone who downloads it can get the source code. And once they have the source code for the iPhone version, they have exactly the same rights as someone who has the source code for the windows version, or someone who received source code from me that will actually compile and then run on the iPhone. The developer gives them exactly the same rights. And Apple makes it just as hard for them as it does with the windows version, but that is Apple and it has nothing to do with the developer of the software.
When you want to install software on an iPhone, there are easy ways and hard ways to do it. The easy way is downloading from the App Store, the hard way is getting the source code, get a Macintosh, pay $99 for deployment tools, and install it on 200 iPhones of your choice or put it on the App Store and install it from there. Apple has some limitations on the "easy" method. But there is no license contract between you and Apple about using the software; that contract is between you and the developer. The developer does _not_ in any way restrict your rights.
Now in a practical sense, if I put some GPL'd software on my phone, and you want it as well, then you can get it very easily. And if you want the source code, you can get that as well. And if you want to modify the app, you can do that and have the right to do that as well. So in practice, the end user can do all the things that GPL wants them to be able to do. Except there is this jerk who tries his hardest to prevent everyone from doing so.
There was Richard Stallman, who had a printer, and a printer driver that didn't quite work, and he thought he should have the right to make the driver work with his printer. And there are these guys with iPhones, and there is the VLC software, and these guys think they should have the right to make the software work on an iPhone. And there is the jerk who in the name of "free software" tries to take this freedom away from them.
The GPL is to blame. It's fundamentally incompatible with the app store's terms of service. The app store terms forbid you from sharing apps you downloaded from it, even if they are free. The GPL does not recognize pointing people to a free download on the app store as the re-distribution that it wants to enforce to be possible.
No, the GPL isn't to blame at all. What is to blame is a developer who has apparently developed a hatred against Apple (which may be related to his employer being Nokia), making legal threats, and claiming that his copyright is infringed.
Apple makes very, very clear that any GPL software in the app store is distributed under the GPL license, and that any legal relationship is between the developers submitting the software and the end user receiving the software. Apple just provides a service to allow users to download software. That service has limitations. And it isn't easy for the end user to distribute further, but it is possible, and Apple doesn't disallow it.
However, the spirit of the GPL software is that anybody should be able to get the source code, adapt it, and use the modified software. Here we have a developer who actively prevents people from doing just that. You can argue all you want about app store rules and walled gardens and so on, but this guy clearly does not want people to have the freedom to modify software that he participated in developing and to make it work on the device that they want it to work on.
Imagine Stallman had bought an iPhone.