That's one reason, but what's most concerning to me is Google's abysmal customer service record. If there's a problem with this service or some fraudulent charges, I don't want to be stuck waiting to talk to a real person for months while getting the runaround from their automated response systems. Even if they were to ensure that my purchase history will not be available to anyone but me, I wouldn't touch their service until they can show that they're able to deal with their customers in a timely and adequate fashion.
Perhaps if everyone were aware that civilian death was likely and inevitable consequence of war, we'd be a lot less likely to ever start one again. That these games leave out a lot of the real tragedies of war is a shame. We have a generation of kids growing up playing these games that only paint part of the picture. If their perception of wars and battle fields are ones where innocent lives aren't lost and civilians don't factor in at all, I can only think that their sins will be more grave than our own.
Google would pay. The amount of information that they can collect through these devices is too valuable for them to toss in their cards. Either that or they remove the infringing bits of code, some of which aren't vital to Android, as best they can or find ways to get around them. Additionally, they could just buy some patents of their own, grouping with whomever else they need to and use that to strengthen their position.
One way or another, though, they're going to need to pay something to someone. Hell, they've probably already wasted more in legal fees with Oracle than if they would have just worked out a licensing deal with Sun. They might as well cut their losses and make the deals that they need to now.
Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else. If there's one thing that stands out about the American economy as a whole, it's the inability for a large number of people to save money. That $100 is just going to be spent somewhere else. In some cases the ability to use FOSS will allow people to improve their business, where they might not have been able to do otherwise. The money that they can potentially save with FOSS products, whether it's an OS, web server, or productivity software can go towards other parts of the business.
The ability to do things in a more cost-effective manner is what drives business as a whole forward. No one is sitting around crying about the woes of the blacksmith whose enterprise was destroyed with the advent of the automobile. We're too busy using our cars and other vehicles to enhance our own lives and make things which were impossible before the automobile, e.g. long commutes, largely trivial. If Microsoft's business model is less viable, I won't lose any sleep over it. Either than can adopt, or die at the feet of progress. If they don't, the world in one hundred years will care no more than we care about the buggy makers of a hundred years past.
It really depends on what amount of management needs to be done and wether or not developers will use sane project management practices themselves. In smaller groups, things will generally work well assuming that group of developers in that group is well disciplined and are able to identify what needs to be done. Once the group size increases, so does the communication overhead, while the contribution of any one person decreases. At that point you need someone looking at the big picture and providing some guidance.
Project management is only a tool, and like most tools it can misused and produce horrible results. In my own opinion, anyone who's been put into the position of project management should be able to jump in and provide help in area that they're overseeing. If they're not capable of doing it themselves, they'll only have a flawed conception of the problem, diminishing their ability to make good management decisions.
I think you've misconstrued the meaning of his post and made a mountain out of a glass house. Perhaps you're trolling, or perhaps you just suffer from some condition rendering you unable to discern the original poster's intent. Either way the result is the same. Food, or food for though? Who can tell.
There's too much emphasis on having a Bachelor's degree these days so it's driving people to get a Masters as some way of differentiating themselves to perspective employers.
I know a few people who are working jobs that have nothing to do with their college degree, but many jobs want experience or a degree from applicants. One of my relatives also just started his own landscaping business, despite having a Chemistry degree. Why he needed to pour nearly $100,000 into a degree that he'll never use is beyond me, but it seems that even the village idiot needs to have a degree these days.
You completely missed his point. His comments are not so much about software patents, but about how people perceive the various justice systems in the world, and the consequences of those perceptions. The whole post could be boiled down to Europeans continually hearing that the US system is such a mess (whether or not it always is) and assume that their own system is better, when in some cases it can be just as bad or worse than the US system. To better illustrate, after the Pirate Bay trials and the whole debacle involving Assange, many people on Slashdot who had blindly assumed that the Swedish legal system was immune to the problems for which the US system is criticized were forced to reassess their beliefs.
First, it's possible to create your own disc or USB stick containing the Lion installer, so that's hardly a problem. Secondly, if you absolutely need some blessed install media, Apple will be selling an official install on a USB drive in a month. This is something that has been discussed on Slashdot so I don't see why glaring inaccuracies like this should get through.
But we don't need to keep every single book.
In college I had to take a Chemistry class that used a book so large that barely a third of the material was covered. Since I'm not a chemist and almost anything I really want to know about the subject can be found on Wikipedia or some other part of the web, there was no real reason to keep that book, especially when it cost well over a hundred dollars and I could get most back from reselling it.
We should focus on making a lot of this knowledge freely available. There's no reason kids should be paying hundreds of dollars for math text books when they're really only a collection of homework exercises. We could make education much accessible and less expensive for many students by applying open source concepts to areas outside of computer science. Give them a large set of problems, some explanation of how to apply the necessary mathematical techniques to solve them, and some step-by-step examples. Make it accessible form the internet and format it so that it can be put on any e-reader out there.
Considering that with the Playbook they added the ability to support apps written for Android, they could essentially decide to do the same for their phones. The experience may be diminished, but they'll still be able to provide access to a large amount of apps.
This also raises the question of whether or not RIM's decision to allow Android apps to be ported to the Playbook has further influenced developers to abandon creating native applications as they believe that in the future this capability might be extended to BlackBerry's phones.
This in stark contrast to Apple's decision to limit third party development platforms on iOS to a large extent should make for an interesting comparison several years down the road when we can see how these choices have impacted developers and their choices regarding whether to develop native applications for RIM devices.
Nothing. It's Techcrunh. They just grab slips of paper out of a giant bag and arrange them to make a story. I'd read the article to actually see if it has any semblance of thought put into it, but I'd prefer not to give them ad impressions.
I'm not even sure if most/any of patents that Apple is suing over are relevant now that Nokia has decided to use Windows Phone 7 instead of their own work that's been done on Maemo, etc. If that's the case, Apple would have to go after Microsoft too, and any damages caused to Apple by sales of Maemo devices would be laughable given the low sales figures. Apple probably got the same price as everyone else in the end and had to give up some of their own technology for it, but I don't think they care all that much now that Nokia is going to be using Microsoft's OS instead of their own (or expects Nokia's downwards spiral to continue for several more years, making them irrelevant).
The original trilogy actually had interesting characters, a decent plot, and good special effects.
The second trilogy really only had good special effects, but they wore thin as the plot became increasingly asinine and the characters unlikable.
The point is that good special effects alone can't make a good movie. Hell, there's a decent amount of science fiction that doesn't invest heavily in special effects, but because the characters and story are so compelling we as a community still enjoy them.
He still doesn't get it. For whatever reason, he continues to equate incredible special effects with incredible results. Even if he were to spend that massive budget for each episode, I strongly doubt the result would be anywhere near as good as something like Battlestar Galatica, Babylon 5, etc.
If Google were less likely to defend than Apple, why wouldn't Lodsys go after Android developers first? If Apple gets involved, they'll probably bury Lodsys with so much legal red tape that it becomes too costly to keep up with the lawsuit, which while sounding evil is basically what Lodsys hopes to do to the app developers.
Also, if Apple initiates a defense, it's likely that Google, Microsoft, and several other companies will also aid in the defense because should Apple lose, they're probably next.
Global warming will disrupt living conditions worldwide, and people won't be around to have an economy that won't be able to afford internet or phone service.
It's legal maneuvering. If you just throw three at them to start with, even if they are actually infringing, their lawyers can make a better defense against those three. It's better to throw some that are more ambiguous in there as well. It might just happen that the opposition spends most of their time building defenses for the ones you didn't care all that much about anyway and be caught of guard for your most solid patents. Most likely this will never actually see a jury verdict as eventually the outcome will be clear to lawyers on both sides long before the trial would reach a natural end. At that point both sides decide to settle as the outcome is obvious and there's no point in running up more legal fees.
I think that price, more than anything else, is going to allow this tablet to succeed where other Android tablets have failed. The only question is how many other tablet manufacturers are eager to turn this new market space into a cut-throat race to the bottom?
I would disagree. At the rate they're going, they'll have as much cash on hand as their market cap within a few years assuming the stock price doesn't go up. Also, unless the tablet market withers to nothing, they'll continue to have room to grow. Their PC market share also continues to slowly rise, adding even more growth.
They will be solid for the next three years at the very least, even if Steve Jobs were to retire as CEO. Eventually they will reach a point where they need another massively successful product line in order to continue growing, but the smart phone and tablet markets are still incredibly young and it will be many years before they become saturated.
I see a fairly safe bet rather than a gamble. Android isn't hurting Apple's sales much if at all, as Apple is selling all that it can produce. If Android were to vanish from the market overnight, Apple's sales would not likely see a large increase. If there's cause for concern, it might be supply chain disruption due to the disaster in Japan, but with Apple's massive cash reserve, they can easily acquire the parts they need. In a certain sense, the tsunami is probably much worse for Apple's competitors than it is for Apple.
Even more strange. Just last month he wanted to amend the constitution and give an iPad or similar device to every kid in school in the country. Wonder what made him change his mind.
Sorry, but you can't be completely open and completely without fragmentation. Look at Linux. There's fragmentation, or if you want to look at it another way, diversity and choice. Some people want to use Gentoo; others, Ubuntu. You can't have it both ways. Open is accepting that some people won't agree with your decisions and letting them take what you've done and build their own solution.
If Google wants to be open they need to actually be open. Otherwise they'll end up being supplanted by something like MeeGo, which is actually open. Alternatively, anyone can fork existing versions of Android and make a more open version that's not dependent on one entity. I wouldn't classify Android as closed, but it's certainly not open. Exactly what shade of gray it is, I'm not sure.
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That's one reason, but what's most concerning to me is Google's abysmal customer service record. If there's a problem with this service or some fraudulent charges, I don't want to be stuck waiting to talk to a real person for months while getting the runaround from their automated response systems. Even if they were to ensure that my purchase history will not be available to anyone but me, I wouldn't touch their service until they can show that they're able to deal with their customers in a timely and adequate fashion.
Perhaps if everyone were aware that civilian death was likely and inevitable consequence of war, we'd be a lot less likely to ever start one again. That these games leave out a lot of the real tragedies of war is a shame. We have a generation of kids growing up playing these games that only paint part of the picture. If their perception of wars and battle fields are ones where innocent lives aren't lost and civilians don't factor in at all, I can only think that their sins will be more grave than our own.
Google would pay. The amount of information that they can collect through these devices is too valuable for them to toss in their cards. Either that or they remove the infringing bits of code, some of which aren't vital to Android, as best they can or find ways to get around them. Additionally, they could just buy some patents of their own, grouping with whomever else they need to and use that to strengthen their position.
One way or another, though, they're going to need to pay something to someone. Hell, they've probably already wasted more in legal fees with Oracle than if they would have just worked out a licensing deal with Sun. They might as well cut their losses and make the deals that they need to now.
Here's the thing, though. If someone saves $100 on a license for Windows, that's $100 that they can spend somewhere else. If there's one thing that stands out about the American economy as a whole, it's the inability for a large number of people to save money. That $100 is just going to be spent somewhere else. In some cases the ability to use FOSS will allow people to improve their business, where they might not have been able to do otherwise. The money that they can potentially save with FOSS products, whether it's an OS, web server, or productivity software can go towards other parts of the business.
The ability to do things in a more cost-effective manner is what drives business as a whole forward. No one is sitting around crying about the woes of the blacksmith whose enterprise was destroyed with the advent of the automobile. We're too busy using our cars and other vehicles to enhance our own lives and make things which were impossible before the automobile, e.g. long commutes, largely trivial. If Microsoft's business model is less viable, I won't lose any sleep over it. Either than can adopt, or die at the feet of progress. If they don't, the world in one hundred years will care no more than we care about the buggy makers of a hundred years past.
It really depends on what amount of management needs to be done and wether or not developers will use sane project management practices themselves. In smaller groups, things will generally work well assuming that group of developers in that group is well disciplined and are able to identify what needs to be done. Once the group size increases, so does the communication overhead, while the contribution of any one person decreases. At that point you need someone looking at the big picture and providing some guidance.
Project management is only a tool, and like most tools it can misused and produce horrible results. In my own opinion, anyone who's been put into the position of project management should be able to jump in and provide help in area that they're overseeing. If they're not capable of doing it themselves, they'll only have a flawed conception of the problem, diminishing their ability to make good management decisions.
I think you've misconstrued the meaning of his post and made a mountain out of a glass house. Perhaps you're trolling, or perhaps you just suffer from some condition rendering you unable to discern the original poster's intent. Either way the result is the same. Food, or food for though? Who can tell.
There's too much emphasis on having a Bachelor's degree these days so it's driving people to get a Masters as some way of differentiating themselves to perspective employers.
I know a few people who are working jobs that have nothing to do with their college degree, but many jobs want experience or a degree from applicants. One of my relatives also just started his own landscaping business, despite having a Chemistry degree. Why he needed to pour nearly $100,000 into a degree that he'll never use is beyond me, but it seems that even the village idiot needs to have a degree these days.
You completely missed his point. His comments are not so much about software patents, but about how people perceive the various justice systems in the world, and the consequences of those perceptions. The whole post could be boiled down to Europeans continually hearing that the US system is such a mess (whether or not it always is) and assume that their own system is better, when in some cases it can be just as bad or worse than the US system. To better illustrate, after the Pirate Bay trials and the whole debacle involving Assange, many people on Slashdot who had blindly assumed that the Swedish legal system was immune to the problems for which the US system is criticized were forced to reassess their beliefs.
If they manage to get more out of Google than they paid for Sun, how are they squandering their investment?
It's better to assume that Oracle cares more about money than the future of some language.
First, it's possible to create your own disc or USB stick containing the Lion installer, so that's hardly a problem. Secondly, if you absolutely need some blessed install media, Apple will be selling an official install on a USB drive in a month. This is something that has been discussed on Slashdot so I don't see why glaring inaccuracies like this should get through.
But we don't need to keep every single book. In college I had to take a Chemistry class that used a book so large that barely a third of the material was covered. Since I'm not a chemist and almost anything I really want to know about the subject can be found on Wikipedia or some other part of the web, there was no real reason to keep that book, especially when it cost well over a hundred dollars and I could get most back from reselling it. We should focus on making a lot of this knowledge freely available. There's no reason kids should be paying hundreds of dollars for math text books when they're really only a collection of homework exercises. We could make education much accessible and less expensive for many students by applying open source concepts to areas outside of computer science. Give them a large set of problems, some explanation of how to apply the necessary mathematical techniques to solve them, and some step-by-step examples. Make it accessible form the internet and format it so that it can be put on any e-reader out there.
Considering that with the Playbook they added the ability to support apps written for Android, they could essentially decide to do the same for their phones. The experience may be diminished, but they'll still be able to provide access to a large amount of apps.
This also raises the question of whether or not RIM's decision to allow Android apps to be ported to the Playbook has further influenced developers to abandon creating native applications as they believe that in the future this capability might be extended to BlackBerry's phones.
This in stark contrast to Apple's decision to limit third party development platforms on iOS to a large extent should make for an interesting comparison several years down the road when we can see how these choices have impacted developers and their choices regarding whether to develop native applications for RIM devices.
No, it's a group of people born in late June or the first two-thirds of July.
Nothing. It's Techcrunh. They just grab slips of paper out of a giant bag and arrange them to make a story. I'd read the article to actually see if it has any semblance of thought put into it, but I'd prefer not to give them ad impressions.
I'm not even sure if most/any of patents that Apple is suing over are relevant now that Nokia has decided to use Windows Phone 7 instead of their own work that's been done on Maemo, etc. If that's the case, Apple would have to go after Microsoft too, and any damages caused to Apple by sales of Maemo devices would be laughable given the low sales figures. Apple probably got the same price as everyone else in the end and had to give up some of their own technology for it, but I don't think they care all that much now that Nokia is going to be using Microsoft's OS instead of their own (or expects Nokia's downwards spiral to continue for several more years, making them irrelevant).
The original trilogy actually had interesting characters, a decent plot, and good special effects.
The second trilogy really only had good special effects, but they wore thin as the plot became increasingly asinine and the characters unlikable.
The point is that good special effects alone can't make a good movie. Hell, there's a decent amount of science fiction that doesn't invest heavily in special effects, but because the characters and story are so compelling we as a community still enjoy them.
He still doesn't get it. For whatever reason, he continues to equate incredible special effects with incredible results. Even if he were to spend that massive budget for each episode, I strongly doubt the result would be anywhere near as good as something like Battlestar Galatica, Babylon 5, etc.
If you somehow haven't seen them, I recommend Red Letter Media's review of the Star Wars: Episodes 1-3, which does a better job of explaining why those films are miserable piles of crap than I could ever hope to do myself. Also relevant clip from an episode of South Park.
If Google were less likely to defend than Apple, why wouldn't Lodsys go after Android developers first? If Apple gets involved, they'll probably bury Lodsys with so much legal red tape that it becomes too costly to keep up with the lawsuit, which while sounding evil is basically what Lodsys hopes to do to the app developers.
Also, if Apple initiates a defense, it's likely that Google, Microsoft, and several other companies will also aid in the defense because should Apple lose, they're probably next.
Global warming will disrupt living conditions worldwide, and people won't be around to have an economy that won't be able to afford internet or phone service.
It's legal maneuvering. If you just throw three at them to start with, even if they are actually infringing, their lawyers can make a better defense against those three. It's better to throw some that are more ambiguous in there as well. It might just happen that the opposition spends most of their time building defenses for the ones you didn't care all that much about anyway and be caught of guard for your most solid patents. Most likely this will never actually see a jury verdict as eventually the outcome will be clear to lawyers on both sides long before the trial would reach a natural end. At that point both sides decide to settle as the outcome is obvious and there's no point in running up more legal fees.
I am NOT Sparticus!
I think that price, more than anything else, is going to allow this tablet to succeed where other Android tablets have failed. The only question is how many other tablet manufacturers are eager to turn this new market space into a cut-throat race to the bottom?
I would disagree. At the rate they're going, they'll have as much cash on hand as their market cap within a few years assuming the stock price doesn't go up. Also, unless the tablet market withers to nothing, they'll continue to have room to grow. Their PC market share also continues to slowly rise, adding even more growth.
They will be solid for the next three years at the very least, even if Steve Jobs were to retire as CEO. Eventually they will reach a point where they need another massively successful product line in order to continue growing, but the smart phone and tablet markets are still incredibly young and it will be many years before they become saturated.
I see a fairly safe bet rather than a gamble. Android isn't hurting Apple's sales much if at all, as Apple is selling all that it can produce. If Android were to vanish from the market overnight, Apple's sales would not likely see a large increase. If there's cause for concern, it might be supply chain disruption due to the disaster in Japan, but with Apple's massive cash reserve, they can easily acquire the parts they need. In a certain sense, the tsunami is probably much worse for Apple's competitors than it is for Apple.
Even more strange. Just last month he wanted to amend the constitution and give an iPad or similar device to every kid in school in the country. Wonder what made him change his mind.
Sorry, but you can't be completely open and completely without fragmentation. Look at Linux. There's fragmentation, or if you want to look at it another way, diversity and choice. Some people want to use Gentoo; others, Ubuntu. You can't have it both ways. Open is accepting that some people won't agree with your decisions and letting them take what you've done and build their own solution.
If Google wants to be open they need to actually be open. Otherwise they'll end up being supplanted by something like MeeGo, which is actually open. Alternatively, anyone can fork existing versions of Android and make a more open version that's not dependent on one entity. I wouldn't classify Android as closed, but it's certainly not open. Exactly what shade of gray it is, I'm not sure.