Of course having a patent on something that is blindingly obvious and not at all original (even back in the time it was filed) is that nobody can then build on and improve it. For instance recognising if the number has the correct amount of digits for a phone number, checking if it is a mobile or fixed prefix and tagging it as such, detecting the origin of the sms and if necessary inserting the correct international dial code in front, etc.
Let this post be prior art for the following:
Detecting a date and turning it into a link or an area of the screen whereupon selecting or touching it triggers an action. The date may be descriptive, eg 'tomorrow', contain a time either in 12hr or 24hr format, or may follow a date convention such as 'dd/mm/yy'. Trigger actions may include bringing up a calendar event, the contents of the message may be included if there is a "Description" or "Comments" field, be passed through as an argument to an external application or url, or changing the selected text for example to a predefined date format.
I hereby understand the above paragraph to be published in the public domain on 20th December 2011. Any patent application filed subsequent to this date will be deemed invalid if the above is critical to its novelty or inventiveness.
Just an off-the-cuff thought, but maybe we could categorise GPL as "want to be paid" and BSD/MIT as "already been paid". With the former, it tends to be coders writing pet projects in their spare time. They want to contribute to the world but resent being exploited for free. Hence the GPL means they will be paid in code or if corporate they need to pay cash for a commercial license. With BSD/MIT the work has been funded by academia/corporations hence has already been paid for, meaning less barrier to releasing it into the wild even if plagiarized for no return. The growing percentage of corporate contributions will of course be reflected in the percentage change in licensing terms.
Sorry but your post does not make any sense. If Google decide to use GPL code then that is fine. If they improve it internally but do not give it back then they can do that but they will either have to permanently fork it and lose any improvements to the GPL version or they will have to continually patch their modifications back against the GPL source tree. Even then they don't 'own' their code which can have legal ramifications down the road, for example if they decide to release a version in Android. The fact you think it locks users into their services is clueless, do you know anything at all about software?
Your example is incredibly poor. Open sourcing the client makes sense as then it can be ported to different platforms. They may not open source the server side code but the data is encrypted using standard RSA asymmetric and AES symmetric algorithms. As they keys will be stored client side you have all you need to prevent lock-in of your data. If you register for services using an email address then, er, yes, those services will expect you to have that email address. If you wish to change then simply create a new email address, and log into each service and change the registered email address. But you are obviously too lazy to do this.
That's interesting. Shenzhen trademarks the iPad back in 2000, then Apple launches the iPad in 2010 and promptly tries to sue Shenzhen for trademark infringement. Apple now cannot even call their tablet the iPad in one of the world's largest markets China. Their wildly illogical lawsuits, turning them into one of the world's most hated companies, are really starting to backfire everywhere.
Definitely depending on what needs to be calculated. ARM is quicker than x86 at the same ghz in general. ARM is 1 instruction per cycle. x86 may do more per instruction but an instruction may take many cycles (up to 88 from memory, but that was from Comp Sci many years ago). Where x86 always had the edge was an onboard FPU, with ARM you tend to work around this using fixed point arithmetic. For running an Android display the ARM would be far superior, but for MP3 playback the x86 would be.
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right.
Hardly. Why wouldn't a company be able to promote its own products? Even if they did reserve some advertising space for themselves, they are not censoring their rivals from appearing.
They can put out anyone they want out of business.
Is Facebook out of business yet? Last time I read people were still using it.
They push Google+ to every that comes to Google.
One of the initial reasons people loved Google is how unintrusive it was. The front page was just their logo, the search results had ads in plain text tucked away to the right. If they start getting too pushy they will lose users.
How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that?
Are you saying G+ is responsible for the current failure of Diaspora?
Now with Google+, they're tieing all their products together too.[...] Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse...
Why? *tries doing a search in Google* Sorry don't see what you're talking about.
Ultra-capitalist Apple left behind their rebel years a long time ago. They have more important things to do like stifling competition with law suits. All it would take is for a couple of guys at wikileaks to use the app and it would be yanked in a heartbeat. Cupertino have deaf ears to anything except what will maximise profits. Of course they would invent some transgression in the ToS of the app to make it appear their hands were tied and they would release a press statement soundly condemning bloodthirsty tyrants.
So the dissident first has to jailbreak out of his cell, only to have to jailbreak his cell? Why would they want to rely on an app that can be remote wiped by Apple at a moments notice? Not only are the Android phones more free, the faster processors will speed up encryption/decryption. Poor choice of phone.
You should try Ubuntu, Mint, or Pinguy. Dual-monitor and sound "just works". And you are definitely running the wrong distro if you are getting coredumps, you shouldn't be getting ANY let alone filling your HD. You shouldn't be browsing/usr/bin in a file manager, that's not what it's there for. Apps should auto-add to the Gnome menu, sounds like another distro problem.
You should apply for "Hell's Cubicle", where the winner gets to run a top software house. Steve Ballmer gets nine contestants to compete, and as things start to heat up you can expect chairs to fly. In the first episode you have to write some original code with your own special pgp signature. If you get through then you'll need to get your passion back as you struggle to interface your modules in time with the rest of the team. At some point you will need to lead the team as Project Manager, I hope you're Q&A is up to scratch as Steve will try to catch you out by introducing bugs into some modules being uploaded. Apply now, and get ready to shout out "YES CTO!"
The patent abuse that has been turning Apple from one of the world's most loved companies into the most hated won't have been such a good gamble if they start losing all these cases. Still, they have enough cash in the bank to outlast SCO. All us neutrals that were recommending Apple to avoid Microsoft are now regretting our decisions:-(.
Looking at my computer, I've had Firefox 4.01 running overnight with a single window just a couple of tabs open, and it takes 1.4GB (plus 3GB of virtual). It normally takes 30-40% CPU at idle. Sounds like I should upgrade to Firefox 7.
Coin operated arcade games have been out since 1971. The Atari 2600 came out in 1976. The PCs started coming out in 1981, eg the ZX81 and BBC Micro. Computer graphics have been common throughout both the 1970s and the 1980s.
First, it's a 30% cut of the gross. Profit is the money left after you subtract the cost of making the sale from the gross. It sounds like you think 100% of the price of an app is profit. This is naive.
The overheads are negligible in digital distribution. Your major costs are software development, advertising, followed by the cut the merchant takes from payments.
Second, Apple runs its app store at slightly above breakeven (documented in their SEC filings)
Is that another way of saying it makes a small profit?
They must employ a horde of app reviewers - doesn't help me, I can write my own detailed description of what the app does and provide screenshots support iOS developers, - aren't you paying an extra $99/year for that even if you don't use it? provide hosting - which is nothing do credit card billing - so 2% out of the 30% accounted for
Real professional developers think the App Store's 30% / 70% split is amazing
They would have to be a little naive. They provide an expensive service, and there is nothing wrong with that if you had a choice of whether to use it or not. I use an accountant to do my accounts even though they are simple enough to do myself. I would rather spend the time writing software which I enjoy more. There will be developers that will take the easy option no matter how much Apple cream off.
Apple is taking care of all the hard work involved in distributing their app and collecting the money, and is basically charging breakeven prices for it. That's a sweet deal.
If they are taking a whopping 30% of all your money, have the largest app store in the world, and still can't make a profit... well they don't really care. They can blow it all internally on whatever they want because as you say they make huge margins selling cheap hardware for a high price.
Did you know that the developer's share of the gross in traditional brick & mortar software sales is horrible?
Yes I've had software published via traditional brick and mortar. The retailer really takes a huge cut but then they have high overheads too. The whole system is incredibly inefficient. Then came along this new medium called "the Internet".
If I published an app for $0.99 I would go with using the Apple and Android stores because, as you mentioned above, merchants take a larger cut on smaller payments. Anything over $5 and I would consider going my own route.
Most web hosts include SSL, online shop, etc all for free. Try Bluehost which does all these and more for $6/month. The online card processors take around 3%. However some have a set fee plus percentage, eg Paypal takes 20p + 3.4% which will take it up to a whopping 23.4% on a 99p app, almost Apple proportions.
Apple and Android Market both take 30% which is a massive cut of the profits. With Apple you are pretty screwed, but there are plenty of Android apps where you Paypal the author the fee and he sends a reg code. If it's a fun app and any profit is a nice bonus then probably best go with the default stores, but if there are any development costs and the price is non-trivial then it is probably worth by-passing.
No that seems correct to me. The dashboard is showing the real free space excluding redundancy, ie 3.58TB. This is because data is repeated across the drives to give redundancy, so you don't lose any data if any one drive fails. It's like a custom raid 5. However the free space is shown as 17TB as you have to format the drive to a certain size so this is the default, though you can probably change it. This way when you add another drive you don't have to reformat the whole RAID array. If you added another 1TB drive the dashboard space would change to eg 4.2TB, but the OS would still see 17TB. If you go over the 3.58TB then it will warn you that you are losing redundancy and need to add another drive.
I know all this and don't even own a Drobo. I got it from the first online review I read. Did you read the manual?
Definitely a tactical withdrawal. The Zetas have made it clear the only viable path is their extermination, so Anon will have to help with that. Either helping rival gangs or gov't black ops. Such a sad situation:-(
Your flawed logic was trying to lump patents and copyright together. Nobody said software should not be copyrightable.
"That logic completely ignores the creativity, art, knowledge, assumptions, engineering, and inventiveness that went into creating the product"
And only the last one of those 6 are applicable. Patents are there to protect inventiveness, not hard work.
Video compression is math. Einstein had to understand physics, astronomy, make assumptions, yet his embodiment in the formula for relativity is still math. Copyright is applicable because it protects an implementation, the part where "the programmer must reduce the process to a specific set of instructions". Patents are not correct for software.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course having a patent on something that is blindingly obvious and not at all original (even back in the time it was filed) is that nobody can then build on and improve it. For instance recognising if the number has the correct amount of digits for a phone number, checking if it is a mobile or fixed prefix and tagging it as such, detecting the origin of the sms and if necessary inserting the correct international dial code in front, etc.
Let this post be prior art for the following:
Detecting a date and turning it into a link or an area of the screen whereupon selecting or touching it triggers an action. The date may be descriptive, eg 'tomorrow', contain a time either in 12hr or 24hr format, or may follow a date convention such as 'dd/mm/yy'. Trigger actions may include bringing up a calendar event, the contents of the message may be included if there is a "Description" or "Comments" field, be passed through as an argument to an external application or url, or changing the selected text for example to a predefined date format.
I hereby understand the above paragraph to be published in the public domain on 20th December 2011. Any patent application filed subsequent to this date will be deemed invalid if the above is critical to its novelty or inventiveness.
Phillip.
Just an off-the-cuff thought, but maybe we could categorise GPL as "want to be paid" and BSD/MIT as "already been paid". With the former, it tends to be coders writing pet projects in their spare time. They want to contribute to the world but resent being exploited for free. Hence the GPL means they will be paid in code or if corporate they need to pay cash for a commercial license. With BSD/MIT the work has been funded by academia/corporations hence has already been paid for, meaning less barrier to releasing it into the wild even if plagiarized for no return. The growing percentage of corporate contributions will of course be reflected in the percentage change in licensing terms.
Phillip.
Sorry but your post does not make any sense. If Google decide to use GPL code then that is fine. If they improve it internally but do not give it back then they can do that but they will either have to permanently fork it and lose any improvements to the GPL version or they will have to continually patch their modifications back against the GPL source tree. Even then they don't 'own' their code which can have legal ramifications down the road, for example if they decide to release a version in Android. The fact you think it locks users into their services is clueless, do you know anything at all about software?
Your example is incredibly poor. Open sourcing the client makes sense as then it can be ported to different platforms. They may not open source the server side code but the data is encrypted using standard RSA asymmetric and AES symmetric algorithms. As they keys will be stored client side you have all you need to prevent lock-in of your data. If you register for services using an email address then, er, yes, those services will expect you to have that email address. If you wish to change then simply create a new email address, and log into each service and change the registered email address. But you are obviously too lazy to do this.
Phillip.
90% compared to 1% is 90-1 rather than 100-1, but then you make up your math as much as you do your figures.
Phillip.
That's interesting. Shenzhen trademarks the iPad back in 2000, then Apple launches the iPad in 2010 and promptly tries to sue Shenzhen for trademark infringement. Apple now cannot even call their tablet the iPad in one of the world's largest markets China. Their wildly illogical lawsuits, turning them into one of the world's most hated companies, are really starting to backfire everywhere.
Phillip.
You could try looking at GLBasic (Microsoft Windows only). She can run them on her PC, and then when working run it on her iDevice.
Phillip.
Definitely depending on what needs to be calculated. ARM is quicker than x86 at the same ghz in general. ARM is 1 instruction per cycle. x86 may do more per instruction but an instruction may take many cycles (up to 88 from memory, but that was from Comp Sci many years ago). Where x86 always had the edge was an onboard FPU, with ARM you tend to work around this using fixed point arithmetic. For running an Android display the ARM would be far superior, but for MP3 playback the x86 would be.
Phillip.
They're using their huge market share to unfairly promote their other products left and right.
Hardly. Why wouldn't a company be able to promote its own products? Even if they did reserve some advertising space for themselves, they are not censoring their rivals from appearing.
They can put out anyone they want out of business.
Is Facebook out of business yet? Last time I read people were still using it.
They push Google+ to every that comes to Google.
One of the initial reasons people loved Google is how unintrusive it was. The front page was just their logo, the search results had ads in plain text tucked away to the right. If they start getting too pushy they will lose users.
How is Diaspore or other smaller social networks ever going to challenge that?
Are you saying G+ is responsible for the current failure of Diaspora?
Now with Google+, they're tieing all their products together too.[...] Because of their market share that is blatant monopoly abuse...
Why? *tries doing a search in Google* Sorry don't see what you're talking about.
Phillip.
Ultra-capitalist Apple left behind their rebel years a long time ago. They have more important things to do like stifling competition with law suits. All it would take is for a couple of guys at wikileaks to use the app and it would be yanked in a heartbeat. Cupertino have deaf ears to anything except what will maximise profits. Of course they would invent some transgression in the ToS of the app to make it appear their hands were tied and they would release a press statement soundly condemning bloodthirsty tyrants.
Phillip.
So the dissident first has to jailbreak out of his cell, only to have to jailbreak his cell? Why would they want to rely on an app that can be remote wiped by Apple at a moments notice? Not only are the Android phones more free, the faster processors will speed up encryption/decryption. Poor choice of phone.
Phillip.
You should try Ubuntu, Mint, or Pinguy. Dual-monitor and sound "just works". And you are definitely running the wrong distro if you are getting coredumps, you shouldn't be getting ANY let alone filling your HD. You shouldn't be browsing /usr/bin in a file manager, that's not what it's there for. Apps should auto-add to the Gnome menu, sounds like another distro problem.
Phillip.
You should apply for "Hell's Cubicle", where the winner gets to run a top software house. Steve Ballmer gets nine contestants to compete, and as things start to heat up you can expect chairs to fly. In the first episode you have to write some original code with your own special pgp signature. If you get through then you'll need to get your passion back as you struggle to interface your modules in time with the rest of the team. At some point you will need to lead the team as Project Manager, I hope you're Q&A is up to scratch as Steve will try to catch you out by introducing bugs into some modules being uploaded. Apply now, and get ready to shout out "YES CTO!"
Phillip.
The patent abuse that has been turning Apple from one of the world's most loved companies into the most hated won't have been such a good gamble if they start losing all these cases. Still, they have enough cash in the bank to outlast SCO. All us neutrals that were recommending Apple to avoid Microsoft are now regretting our decisions :-(.
Phillip.
Looking at my computer, I've had Firefox 4.01 running overnight with a single window just a couple of tabs open, and it takes 1.4GB (plus 3GB of virtual). It normally takes 30-40% CPU at idle. Sounds like I should upgrade to Firefox 7.
Phillip.
Coin operated arcade games have been out since 1971. The Atari 2600 came out in 1976. The PCs started coming out in 1981, eg the ZX81 and BBC Micro. Computer graphics have been common throughout both the 1970s and the 1980s.
Phillip.
First, it's a 30% cut of the gross. Profit is the money left after you subtract the cost of making the sale from the gross. It sounds like you think 100% of the price of an app is profit. This is naive.
The overheads are negligible in digital distribution. Your major costs are software development, advertising, followed by the cut the merchant takes from payments.
Second, Apple runs its app store at slightly above breakeven (documented in their SEC filings)
Is that another way of saying it makes a small profit?
They must employ a horde of app reviewers - doesn't help me, I can write my own detailed description of what the app does and provide screenshots
support iOS developers, - aren't you paying an extra $99/year for that even if you don't use it?
provide hosting - which is nothing
do credit card billing - so 2% out of the 30% accounted for
Real professional developers think the App Store's 30% / 70% split is amazing
They would have to be a little naive. They provide an expensive service, and there is nothing wrong with that if you had a choice of whether to use it or not. I use an accountant to do my accounts even though they are simple enough to do myself. I would rather spend the time writing software which I enjoy more. There will be developers that will take the easy option no matter how much Apple cream off.
Apple is taking care of all the hard work involved in distributing their app and collecting the money, and is basically charging breakeven prices for it. That's a sweet deal.
If they are taking a whopping 30% of all your money, have the largest app store in the world, and still can't make a profit... well they don't really care. They can blow it all internally on whatever they want because as you say they make huge margins selling cheap hardware for a high price.
Did you know that the developer's share of the gross in traditional brick & mortar software sales is horrible?
Yes I've had software published via traditional brick and mortar. The retailer really takes a huge cut but then they have high overheads too. The whole system is incredibly inefficient. Then came along this new medium called "the Internet".
If I published an app for $0.99 I would go with using the Apple and Android stores because, as you mentioned above, merchants take a larger cut on smaller payments. Anything over $5 and I would consider going my own route.
Phillip.
You should buy an Android phone where they care about user experience, and everything just works out-of-the-box.
Phillip.
Most web hosts include SSL, online shop, etc all for free. Try Bluehost which does all these and more for $6/month. The online card processors take around 3%. However some have a set fee plus percentage, eg Paypal takes 20p + 3.4% which will take it up to a whopping 23.4% on a 99p app, almost Apple proportions.
Apple and Android Market both take 30% which is a massive cut of the profits. With Apple you are pretty screwed, but there are plenty of Android apps where you Paypal the author the fee and he sends a reg code. If it's a fun app and any profit is a nice bonus then probably best go with the default stores, but if there are any development costs and the price is non-trivial then it is probably worth by-passing.
Phillip.
No that seems correct to me. The dashboard is showing the real free space excluding redundancy, ie 3.58TB. This is because data is repeated across the drives to give redundancy, so you don't lose any data if any one drive fails. It's like a custom raid 5. However the free space is shown as 17TB as you have to format the drive to a certain size so this is the default, though you can probably change it. This way when you add another drive you don't have to reformat the whole RAID array. If you added another 1TB drive the dashboard space would change to eg 4.2TB, but the OS would still see 17TB. If you go over the 3.58TB then it will warn you that you are losing redundancy and need to add another drive.
I know all this and don't even own a Drobo. I got it from the first online review I read. Did you read the manual?
Phillip.
Definitely a tactical withdrawal. The Zetas have made it clear the only viable path is their extermination, so Anon will have to help with that. Either helping rival gangs or gov't black ops. Such a sad situation :-(
Phillip.
That sounds about right. What exactly is the problem?
Phillip.
Your flawed logic was trying to lump patents and copyright together. Nobody said software should not be copyrightable.
"That logic completely ignores the creativity, art, knowledge, assumptions, engineering, and inventiveness that went into creating the product"
And only the last one of those 6 are applicable. Patents are there to protect inventiveness, not hard work.
Video compression is math. Einstein had to understand physics, astronomy, make assumptions, yet his embodiment in the formula for relativity is still math. Copyright is applicable because it protects an implementation, the part where "the programmer must reduce the process to a specific set of instructions". Patents are not correct for software.
Phillip.
including the moving visual slider under the finger as you slide
So something anybody has been able to do a couple of decades ago running Windows 95 with a touchscreen over their computer monitor?
Phillip.
No-one cares too much about software being patented
Apart from every single software developer. Our work is currently protected by copyright law, and can see no advantage to software patents.
Phillip.
Just because it is physical does not imply it not simply an algorithm
Yes it does.
Phillip.