Let me guess? Approved in the app store. And that ease of use that's touted by Apple means that it's helluva hard for the average person to get under the hood. Imagine grandma looking at this:
Parallels software is _not_ available on the App Store. If you look at what this software does, there is not a chance in hell that it would be allowed on the App Store. So your little rant is completely missing the point. So when you say it is "the problem with the walled garden", you are completely wrong: This app is _not_ inside the walled garden. It does things that the "walled garden" would protect you from.
Apple's phones have persistent drawbacks that they have maintained over 5 generations now:
1. To charge an iPhone, you take an iPhone charging cable and plug it into any old USB charger. Fits into a Samsung USB charger without any problems.
2. iPhone does cloud backup and syncing without any problems. No need for any computer with iTunes anywhere near it.
3. Contacts and calendar syncing with commonly used products (Contacts and calendar on the Mac) works great.
4. Control of what applications can be put on your phone is counted as a positive by the majority of users.
5. I haven't seen any users calling the iOS user interface "clumsy", and "not much customisability" is seen as a positive by the majority of users.
I have a good job, but I'm simply not willing to spend 40GBP a month on an iPhone (plus 200 upfront costs) when a 20 a month Android phone will let me make calls and check Facebook just as well.
You can get an iPhone for £20 a month with no upfront payment. At least that's what they display in the shop windows. Not top of the range, but that Android phone you mention isn't top of the range either.
And, the argument being made by Microsoft and Apple is that patents on rounded corner or bouncing when you slide for a page, or any number of other non-SEP patents should cost more than the patents for the standard and that when a patent is contributed to a standard under FRAND terms that holder loses there ability to enforce that patent via injunction when others choose not to even negotiate a royalty rate. The end result is no patents being contributed to standards, and ending the standard process entirely because the standards can't avoid patents.
First, Apple doesn't have a patent on rounded corners. Apple has a design patent for a design that has, among many other things, rounded corners. Guess what: Samsung has a design patent for the design of the Galaxy 3 phone, which has, among other things, rounded corners.
Second, the difference between standard essential patents and non-standard essential patents is that you can live without the non-standard essential patents. Your device works just fine without them.
Third, if a patent is licensed under FRAND terms, then the patent holder agreed to license under "fair and reasonable" terms.There may be disagreement about the amount of payment, but since the patent holder agreed to license, any damage to the patent holder can be fixed by determining the correct amount of payment and making the company using the patent pay that amount; an injunction is unreasonable. When not licensed under FRAND terms, the patent holder might not want to license a patent at all. Under FRAND terms, the patent holder already agreed to allow licensing.
This can be a little more complicated - they can't impose FRAND terms on patents, so what they do is if the company refuses to accept FRAND licensing they don't put it in the standard. FRAND terms tend to be widespread enough to balance out the lower fees.
imagine there is some bit where a standard has to make a decision: Something could be done using method A, or method B; none is really better than the other but you have to decide. And company X has a patent on A, while company Y has a patent on B. Without FRAND neither company would ever agree on the other's patent to enter the standard, and we would all be stuck.
Please, if you haven't followed the previous patent stories here, just google florian mueller. That guy has already admitted being on the payroll of both Oracle and Microsoft. He was debunked several times by Groklaw - here is one of them - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103 [groklaw.net]. His "articles" have as much value as microsoft PR.
Here's a curious thing. I often heard when someone complains about groklaw that no matter how biased their opinions might be, they are reporting facts. But then when Florian Müller writes something (and I have called him an idiot in an exchange with him on Slashdot when his interpretation of something was totally wrong in my opinion), he is biased and facts that he reports don't count because he is biased.
There was a lot of debunking on groklaw that was only debunking if you believed it. And a lot of analysis that was entirely based on the goals of the analysis.
Yes, if only Groklaw still existed and was covering this.
They do and they are
No. They did and they were. Unfortunately groklaw is not updated anymore. Maybe PJ changes her mind, I would hope so.
On the other hand, I think that some groupthink had developed on groklaw where somehow the merits of patents very much depended on who was owning them. There were the good people who only used patents to defend themselves against evil people, and there were the evil people who were evil to use patents to fight back against the good people.
Not sure of the European situation but in the UK if you attempted to sue without some level of negotiation first your case would be thrown out as vexatious.
On the other hand, in Europe Samsung has been threatened with major fines if they didn't stop trying to get money for FRAND patents.
The moral of the story is to never license your patents as FRAND. Or, you know, fix the patent system.
A few years ago, a group working on the next html standards got a message from Apple, with Apple saying that they owned a patent that they believed would be infringed by the standard. There was a huge uproar against Apple back then for daring to own this patent.
Four things could have happened reasonably: 1. The planned standard gets changed. 2. The feature gets changed not to infringe the patent. 3. Apple is convinced by the working group that their patent isn't infringed. 4. Apple is convinced by the working group to donate the patent or offer it under FRAND terms. If Motorola was right method, in the last case Apple could now demand 2.25% from any product including a web browser. Seems very, very excessive.
Every single smartphone (although this is not about smartphones) will be using many hundreds of standard essential patents. Even if a company has been in the business for a long time and has lots of patents itself, it will still be using many hundreds of standard essential patents of others. Now multiply "several hundred" by 2.25%, and if everyone made the same demands, then everyone would have to pay a few thousand percent of their revenue to the patent holders.
Now is this exorbitant?
As _some_ evidence that the demands were exorbitant: Whether you agree with the judge or not, any fines should be related to the value of the patents. Motorola / Google demanded billions, the judge gave them a fine of $14.5 million.
Basically they are saying: the information we have on you is nothing but crap, so please keep using our cookies, and stop questioning our privacy-intruding advertisement business-model.
I ordered some stuff on Amazon once as a birthday present for my daughter. It was something that she was interested in at that time, but possibly not anymore. Anyway, she isn't going to buy this again, because I bought it for her as a Christmas present. And I'm not going to buy it for myself, because I'm not interested in it and never was. Amazon bombarded me with adverts to things related to this product for years. Absolutely annoying.
Now if my wife wants anything from Amazon, I buy it. It's all the same bank account, so it doesn't matter whose card is used. So if you look at my purchase history at Amazon, it will look distinctly weird. If you look at the records I bought at iTunes, or my eBay purchases, that's just as weird. Where this is really a violation of privacy is when I open my Mac, go to Amazon, and it shows me everything my wife has been looking at, and vice versa.
News flash, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, Google, and others apply for and receive patents for literally THOUSANDS of concepts every year. It really isn't news-worthy. Sorry. Let me know when they (and I don't just mean Apple - I mean anyone) actually IMPLEMENTS the patent or decides to otherwise use the patent. Otherwise, it amounts to "company came up with an idea that the lawyers were able to write up into a patent so they did as lawyers do and patented it".
This one sounds quite useful, so I would think that Apple is going to implement it. It might even be novel, because I haven't seen anyone doing it before. On the other hand, I surely disagree with the USPTO on the meaning of "obvious".
A $40k job doesn't pay $40k of taxes every year. To get a million dollar in taxes, you need a lot more work done.
The statistics site that you linked to said 4,600 people died on the job, but also about 50,000 died from occupational diseases. You'd also have to add people driving to work and dying in road accidents and so on. So I would think that the tax revenue per fatality is a lot lower than your estimate.
Your last point is a claim that lots of tax dollars are spent well. Yes, absolutely. If generating X million dollars in tax money costs one life, then surely there are things that can be done with X million dollars that save much more than one life. On the other hand, there are things that can be done with X million dollars that don't. So trying to save a life, no matter what the cost, is stupid once the cost is high enough.
Assume you spend x million tax dollars. Doesn't matter on what. People had to work to make that money. When people work, accidents happen and people day. Someone good at statistics will probably be able to figure out X in the statement "when X million tax dollars are spent, on average one person will die in the effort of making that money". I don't think the number is very large.
But that means spending X million dollars to save one life is pointless because you will kill - in a completely unpredictable way - one life to get the money!
Not documenting is a more or less conscious technique developers and projects use to increase their market value. In those projects where the business model is consulting , you better believe that unless it's a public API , it's got zero documentation.
Is that why the openssl documentation stinks?
I tell you how bad it is. There's a method to get a string for the subject common name from a certificate. The documentation says it gives you characters and number of characters. It conveniently doesn't tell you that the data could be in any number of different formats, and there is no way to find out which format from the results of the function call.
It takes long hunting down in the code to find a method that returns the same data in Utf-8 format. How well is that documented? So badly that _both_ calls to the function from the openssl source code itself contain bugs.
If documentation were free, then implementing all the suggestions would not be an issue. In the real world, however, time and resources are always constrained, so documentation is a balancing act between utility and achievability.
That's why the author advised you to take a typing course if you haven't already, because then writing your documentation takes about as long as thinking what you should write.
Can that support books without bowing? I'm under the impression that IKEA sells meatballs and compressed sawdust, but that's just from hearsay, they don't have them around here.
IKEA sells cheap stuff for cheap money. They also sell excellent quality products for a lot more than the cheap rubbish.
There's more harm here than mere latency. Now all communications go through known relays. The NSA must be dancing in the streets. Before they'd actually have to tap the actual IPs.
How big does a "relay" have to be? Maybe Apple can get a patent for a "relay" that can be installed very cheaply at any ISP and just passes everything through. Like two inch of copper cable:-) Then every ISP installs one of these and all traffic that can't be transmitted directly for patent infringement reasons goes through this "relay".
Whole companies aren't immune from the plague, either. I worked at a firm where the annual employee evaluation form had checkboxes in the "reason for salary increase" section that included the option: "Merrit". I think everyone would agree with me that that's a bit of a red flag.
Surely when you are merrit you need more money for your family?
On modern superhighways, it is tough to have a high-speed collision. Thus, most of the speed related accidents occur on the slower speed city roads. After you get past the drunk/impaired/crazy driver issue, most people don't drive very fast on city roads. However, a pedestrian or a cyclist can easily be hurt or killed in a low-speed accident.
UK statistics: 4 percent of fatalities in road traffic happen on motorways. Of these, 20 percent are pedestrians. Yes, 20% of all people killed on the motorway are pedestrians.
According to the Spanish general traffic department (DGT), excessive speed was a factor in 37% of all fatalities in traffic accidents between 1999 and 2003. Roughly 20.000 deaths every year only in Spain.
"Excessive speed" is not the same as "speed exceeding the speed limit". If there is a curve in the road that is impossible to drive through safely at the speed limit, you'll often have warning signs, but no change in the speed limit. Driving 20mph less than the speed limit could be "excessive speed" that leads to an accident.
And most report elevation in terms of a perfect sphere, and calculate your elevation offset from the center of the Satellites orbit.
But Earth isn't a sphere, so most cell phone GPSs will show you at minus 15 feet while dipping your toes in the ocean.
Absolutely not. Only a bloody idiot would use a model where the earth is a perfect sphere. At the very least you would use a model where the shape is an ellipsoid, because earth deviates from a spere by about 20 km. And a better model is a geoid, like the WGS 84 geoid.
If you crash at 70mph you're just as likely to be dead as crashing at 80mph making whether you were speeding irrelevant.
Fucking stupid rubbish. If there is a sudden jam on the motorway due to some minor mishap, and you approach that jam at 70mph, even if you see it too late, you will still slam your brakes and crash into the stopped cars at a much lower speed. If you approach at 80mph, your crash speed will be dramatically higher. In the same space where you slow down from 70mph to 30mph (where seatbelt + airbag + crumbling car should keep you reasonably safe), you slow down from 80mph to 50mph.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to http://www.blockmrecords.org/bach/ for the complete Bach organ works.
Let me guess? Approved in the app store. And that ease of use that's touted by Apple means that it's helluva hard for the average person to get under the hood. Imagine grandma looking at this:
Parallels software is _not_ available on the App Store. If you look at what this software does, there is not a chance in hell that it would be allowed on the App Store. So your little rant is completely missing the point. So when you say it is "the problem with the walled garden", you are completely wrong: This app is _not_ inside the walled garden. It does things that the "walled garden" would protect you from.
Apple's phones have persistent drawbacks that they have maintained over 5 generations now:
1. To charge an iPhone, you take an iPhone charging cable and plug it into any old USB charger. Fits into a Samsung USB charger without any problems.
2. iPhone does cloud backup and syncing without any problems. No need for any computer with iTunes anywhere near it.
3. Contacts and calendar syncing with commonly used products (Contacts and calendar on the Mac) works great.
4. Control of what applications can be put on your phone is counted as a positive by the majority of users.
5. I haven't seen any users calling the iOS user interface "clumsy", and "not much customisability" is seen as a positive by the majority of users.
I have a good job, but I'm simply not willing to spend 40GBP a month on an iPhone (plus 200 upfront costs) when a 20 a month Android phone will let me make calls and check Facebook just as well.
You can get an iPhone for £20 a month with no upfront payment. At least that's what they display in the shop windows. Not top of the range, but that Android phone you mention isn't top of the range either.
And, the argument being made by Microsoft and Apple is that patents on rounded corner or bouncing when you slide for a page, or any number of other non-SEP patents should cost more than the patents for the standard and that when a patent is contributed to a standard under FRAND terms that holder loses there ability to enforce that patent via injunction when others choose not to even negotiate a royalty rate. The end result is no patents being contributed to standards, and ending the standard process entirely because the standards can't avoid patents.
First, Apple doesn't have a patent on rounded corners. Apple has a design patent for a design that has, among many other things, rounded corners. Guess what: Samsung has a design patent for the design of the Galaxy 3 phone, which has, among other things, rounded corners.
Second, the difference between standard essential patents and non-standard essential patents is that you can live without the non-standard essential patents. Your device works just fine without them.
Third, if a patent is licensed under FRAND terms, then the patent holder agreed to license under "fair and reasonable" terms.There may be disagreement about the amount of payment, but since the patent holder agreed to license, any damage to the patent holder can be fixed by determining the correct amount of payment and making the company using the patent pay that amount; an injunction is unreasonable. When not licensed under FRAND terms, the patent holder might not want to license a patent at all. Under FRAND terms, the patent holder already agreed to allow licensing.
This can be a little more complicated - they can't impose FRAND terms on patents, so what they do is if the company refuses to accept FRAND licensing they don't put it in the standard. FRAND terms tend to be widespread enough to balance out the lower fees.
imagine there is some bit where a standard has to make a decision: Something could be done using method A, or method B; none is really better than the other but you have to decide. And company X has a patent on A, while company Y has a patent on B. Without FRAND neither company would ever agree on the other's patent to enter the standard, and we would all be stuck.
Please, if you haven't followed the previous patent stories here, just google florian mueller. That guy has already admitted being on the payroll of both Oracle and Microsoft. He was debunked several times by Groklaw - here is one of them - http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120419070127103 [groklaw.net]. His "articles" have as much value as microsoft PR.
Here's a curious thing. I often heard when someone complains about groklaw that no matter how biased their opinions might be, they are reporting facts. But then when Florian Müller writes something (and I have called him an idiot in an exchange with him on Slashdot when his interpretation of something was totally wrong in my opinion), he is biased and facts that he reports don't count because he is biased.
There was a lot of debunking on groklaw that was only debunking if you believed it. And a lot of analysis that was entirely based on the goals of the analysis.
Yes, if only Groklaw still existed and was covering this.
They do and they are
No. They did and they were. Unfortunately groklaw is not updated anymore. Maybe PJ changes her mind, I would hope so.
On the other hand, I think that some groupthink had developed on groklaw where somehow the merits of patents very much depended on who was owning them. There were the good people who only used patents to defend themselves against evil people, and there were the evil people who were evil to use patents to fight back against the good people.
Not sure of the European situation but in the UK if you attempted to sue without some level of negotiation first your case would be thrown out as vexatious.
On the other hand, in Europe Samsung has been threatened with major fines if they didn't stop trying to get money for FRAND patents.
The moral of the story is to never license your patents as FRAND. Or, you know, fix the patent system.
A few years ago, a group working on the next html standards got a message from Apple, with Apple saying that they owned a patent that they believed would be infringed by the standard. There was a huge uproar against Apple back then for daring to own this patent.
Four things could have happened reasonably: 1. The planned standard gets changed. 2. The feature gets changed not to infringe the patent. 3. Apple is convinced by the working group that their patent isn't infringed. 4. Apple is convinced by the working group to donate the patent or offer it under FRAND terms. If Motorola was right method, in the last case Apple could now demand 2.25% from any product including a web browser. Seems very, very excessive.
"Exhorbitant demands"? Really?
Every single smartphone (although this is not about smartphones) will be using many hundreds of standard essential patents. Even if a company has been in the business for a long time and has lots of patents itself, it will still be using many hundreds of standard essential patents of others. Now multiply "several hundred" by 2.25%, and if everyone made the same demands, then everyone would have to pay a few thousand percent of their revenue to the patent holders.
Now is this exorbitant?
As _some_ evidence that the demands were exorbitant: Whether you agree with the judge or not, any fines should be related to the value of the patents. Motorola / Google demanded billions, the judge gave them a fine of $14.5 million.
Basically they are saying: the information we have on you is nothing but crap, so please keep using our cookies, and stop questioning our privacy-intruding advertisement business-model.
I ordered some stuff on Amazon once as a birthday present for my daughter. It was something that she was interested in at that time, but possibly not anymore. Anyway, she isn't going to buy this again, because I bought it for her as a Christmas present. And I'm not going to buy it for myself, because I'm not interested in it and never was. Amazon bombarded me with adverts to things related to this product for years. Absolutely annoying.
Now if my wife wants anything from Amazon, I buy it. It's all the same bank account, so it doesn't matter whose card is used. So if you look at my purchase history at Amazon, it will look distinctly weird. If you look at the records I bought at iTunes, or my eBay purchases, that's just as weird. Where this is really a violation of privacy is when I open my Mac, go to Amazon, and it shows me everything my wife has been looking at, and vice versa.
News flash, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC, Google, and others apply for and receive patents for literally THOUSANDS of concepts every year. It really isn't news-worthy. Sorry. Let me know when they (and I don't just mean Apple - I mean anyone) actually IMPLEMENTS the patent or decides to otherwise use the patent. Otherwise, it amounts to "company came up with an idea that the lawyers were able to write up into a patent so they did as lawyers do and patented it".
This one sounds quite useful, so I would think that Apple is going to implement it. It might even be novel, because I haven't seen anyone doing it before. On the other hand, I surely disagree with the USPTO on the meaning of "obvious".
A $40k job doesn't pay $40k of taxes every year. To get a million dollar in taxes, you need a lot more work done.
The statistics site that you linked to said 4,600 people died on the job, but also about 50,000 died from occupational diseases. You'd also have to add people driving to work and dying in road accidents and so on. So I would think that the tax revenue per fatality is a lot lower than your estimate.
Your last point is a claim that lots of tax dollars are spent well. Yes, absolutely. If generating X million dollars in tax money costs one life, then surely there are things that can be done with X million dollars that save much more than one life. On the other hand, there are things that can be done with X million dollars that don't. So trying to save a life, no matter what the cost, is stupid once the cost is high enough.
Assume you spend x million tax dollars. Doesn't matter on what. People had to work to make that money. When people work, accidents happen and people day. Someone good at statistics will probably be able to figure out X in the statement "when X million tax dollars are spent, on average one person will die in the effort of making that money". I don't think the number is very large.
But that means spending X million dollars to save one life is pointless because you will kill - in a completely unpredictable way - one life to get the money!
Not documenting is a more or less conscious technique developers and projects use to increase their market value. In those projects where the business model is consulting , you better believe that unless it's a public API , it's got zero documentation.
Is that why the openssl documentation stinks?
I tell you how bad it is. There's a method to get a string for the subject common name from a certificate. The documentation says it gives you characters and number of characters. It conveniently doesn't tell you that the data could be in any number of different formats, and there is no way to find out which format from the results of the function call.
It takes long hunting down in the code to find a method that returns the same data in Utf-8 format. How well is that documented? So badly that _both_ calls to the function from the openssl source code itself contain bugs.
If documentation were free, then implementing all the suggestions would not be an issue. In the real world, however, time and resources are always constrained, so documentation is a balancing act between utility and achievability.
That's why the author advised you to take a typing course if you haven't already, because then writing your documentation takes about as long as thinking what you should write.
Can that support books without bowing? I'm under the impression that IKEA sells meatballs and compressed sawdust, but that's just from hearsay, they don't have them around here.
IKEA sells cheap stuff for cheap money. They also sell excellent quality products for a lot more than the cheap rubbish.
There's more harm here than mere latency. Now all communications go through known relays. The NSA must be dancing in the streets. Before they'd actually have to tap the actual IPs.
How big does a "relay" have to be? Maybe Apple can get a patent for a "relay" that can be installed very cheaply at any ISP and just passes everything through. Like two inch of copper cable :-) Then every ISP installs one of these and all traffic that can't be transmitted directly for patent infringement reasons goes through this "relay".
Whole companies aren't immune from the plague, either. I worked at a firm where the annual employee evaluation form had checkboxes in the "reason for salary increase" section that included the option: "Merrit". I think everyone would agree with me that that's a bit of a red flag.
Surely when you are merrit you need more money for your family?
On the other hand, it would seem pretty idiotic to anyone that a woman who has a visa that allows her to enter the USA as the fiancé of a US citizen with the intent to marry him and to to stay in the USA wouldn't be allowed to enter the USA because she is already married to the exact same person. Absolutely reasonable if she turned out to be married to a different person, but not when it's the same person.
On modern superhighways, it is tough to have a high-speed collision. Thus, most of the speed related accidents occur on the slower speed city roads. After you get past the drunk/impaired/crazy driver issue, most people don't drive very fast on city roads. However, a pedestrian or a cyclist can easily be hurt or killed in a low-speed accident.
UK statistics: 4 percent of fatalities in road traffic happen on motorways. Of these, 20 percent are pedestrians. Yes, 20% of all people killed on the motorway are pedestrians.
According to the Spanish general traffic department (DGT), excessive speed was a factor in 37% of all fatalities in traffic accidents between 1999 and 2003. Roughly 20.000 deaths every year only in Spain.
"Excessive speed" is not the same as "speed exceeding the speed limit". If there is a curve in the road that is impossible to drive through safely at the speed limit, you'll often have warning signs, but no change in the speed limit. Driving 20mph less than the speed limit could be "excessive speed" that leads to an accident.
And most report elevation in terms of a perfect sphere, and calculate your elevation offset from the center of the Satellites orbit. But Earth isn't a sphere, so most cell phone GPSs will show you at minus 15 feet while dipping your toes in the ocean.
Absolutely not. Only a bloody idiot would use a model where the earth is a perfect sphere. At the very least you would use a model where the shape is an ellipsoid, because earth deviates from a spere by about 20 km. And a better model is a geoid, like the WGS 84 geoid.
If you crash at 70mph you're just as likely to be dead as crashing at 80mph making whether you were speeding irrelevant.
Fucking stupid rubbish. If there is a sudden jam on the motorway due to some minor mishap, and you approach that jam at 70mph, even if you see it too late, you will still slam your brakes and crash into the stopped cars at a much lower speed. If you approach at 80mph, your crash speed will be dramatically higher. In the same space where you slow down from 70mph to 30mph (where seatbelt + airbag + crumbling car should keep you reasonably safe), you slow down from 80mph to 50mph.