This isn't an Apple problem, this is a patent problem.
Why do you feel that the problem is mutually exclusive? If there was a loophole in law that allowed me to murder people, wouldn't I still be a major asshole if I abused the loophole to kill as many people as possible? The patent problem is a legal problem and the Apple problem is a moral problem. Please stop conflating the two.
Google and Motorolla would enforce this patent on Apple if they happened to own it.
There is a reason why they don't own many software patents and it isn't because they're not innovating in their software. It's because they know it's a dick move to spend so much money and energy patenting trivial concepts that shouldn't be patentable in the first place.
So someone published pictures on a PUBLIC FACING web server and made no effort to secure that data with an actual password. Instead, they thought they could just use an obscure name and no one would stumble onto the pictures. It is not clear from the article, but it sounds like the uploader was not a rightsholder of the pictures. If that is true, then they certainly committed copyright infringement by making the files available on a public server, even if they thought they could control distribution by using an obscure name. But how does publishing a link to these images constitute infringement? How was the person who created the link supposed to know that the uploader was not a rightsholder of those images? This sounds like a slippery slope and I'm very disappointed in the decision.
That could very well be true, but I would hope that stock price is only one of many factors that determines the amount of money and the interest rate that the company could get. In fact, I would hope that the stock price is not valued much at all in that decision since a large group of idiots with more money than brains could buy into a company for much more than it is worth. If I was lending money, I would much rather see that the company I was lending to has actual assets that could be used for collateral as well as a steady trend of growth showing that they will likely be able to pay back the loan. But that's probably why I am not a banker.
The stock market is about people being able to buy and sell securities that allows businesses to raise additional capital.
That was the original purpose of the stock market, but I'm not so sure that it actually plays out that way, at least for stocks. The primary reason for my skepticism is that once a company has sold its stock through an IPO, the company itself has little to gain through an increased share price. A higher share price means more money for the people who have stock options, but the company itself only benefits from the money originally raised through the IPO. After the IPO, most of the trading is done between investors and the company has little to no involvement. The stock basically becomes gambling chips with a corporate logo that you use to play a giant game of poker to attempt to win money from the other gamblers at the table.
That is not necessarily the key question since it's not just the speed of the trades that is the problem. The problem is that companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build data centers to host applications that are responsible for high-frequency trading. These applications are unregulated and have already caused at least one flashcrash. In addition to that, the software is also responsible for a mistake to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars and the investment firm actually got that money back when your average investor would not have gotten anything back. In addition to that, there have been suspicions and allegations that companies are performing highly questionable and possibly illegal actions hidden in these blink-of-an-eye manipulations.
I'll admit that I don't know exactly what these companies are doing with HFT and that's precisely the problem. All I know is that they wouldn't be collectively spending billions of dollars on it if it wasn't expected to be extremely lucrative. What I do know is that at any given point in time there is a finite amount of money in the stock market. And if HFT gets trading companies more money, then that money has to come from somewhere and if it's not coming from other trading companies, then it must be coming from the investors. That is why I have recently stopped trading and I refuse to start until there is a serious investigation and possible regulations against HFT. Without such oversight, at the very least I feel that the game is being rigged against me and at the worst, they could make a bigger mess of this than the mortgage-backed securities debacle that contributed to the last crash.
Recently I have been thinking about causes of piracy and I believe a big factor that contributes to piracy is the fixed retail prices of goods. In many countries today, haggling is common and it allows the buyer and seller to come to an agreement on price based on the interest of a single buyer acquiring the item and a single seller collecting money for the item. However, in many western countries, goods are available at a single price and you can take it or leave it. For those who do not believe that a digital item is worth what stores are charging, they are more likely to resort to piracy despite the fact that they may have been willing to pay for the item had the price been closer to what the buyer thinks it is worth. A system like this could allow retailers more flexibility in pricing so that they could sell items to people based on their interest. Such a flexible pricing system is easy to do in person, but much more difficult to do online.
It will be interesting to see how Google's system pans out if they decide to actually use it, especially considering how similar systems have failed. And while I support their attempt at such a system, I feel it is worth stating that I detest the fact that they are patenting the software algorithm that accomplishes the task.
The crime described in this story is truly horrific, bu as a supporter of personal rights I would only submit such evidence in one form and it would involve me standing up, the officers on their knees, and would require at least four tissues to wipe away the excess.
My initial reaction was that maybe I would start buying their games again since they finally made the right decision and I wanted to show my support for that decision. But then I thought back at the level of greed that drove them to treat their paying customers like criminals. They went through a ton of trouble to set up some of the most restrictive DRM of any game publisher and made resale of their PC games completely impossible. Just read the Controversy section on Wikipedia to see how far they went. This leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't imagine buying any of their crap. There are just way too many games from publishers who cater to their fans rather than beat them down for me to end my boycott of Ubisoft.
Due to their past transgressions, I will still never buy an Ubisoft game. I'm sure they will consider my lack of purchasing as piracy instead of voting with my wallet, but I don't care. Companies need to learn that years of treating your paying customers with contempt will take a LONG time for people to get over, even when the company finally starts to do the right thing.
More to the point, there is less and less requirement to sync to a PC at all. Photos auto-sync via Skydrive. Email is all cloud-based. Podcasts are directly synched without requiring a PC to download them. Music comes directly from your Xbox Music Pass. Apps are directly downloaded. Files can be shared via dropbox or Skydrive.
So as long as just about everything you need is in the Microsoft ecosystem, then you won't really need to sync. Great!
There are obviously still cases where you would like to sync directly with a computer, but they are becoming really infrequent.
Speak for yourself. I transfer files to my Android phone over Wifi all the time. And I'm not alone - my mom just got a phone and she wanted to be able to pull pictures from relatives' phones without requiring both phones to have the same obscure transfer app. I told her she could do this natively on Android over Bluetooth, but it may only work with other Android phones since Apple likes to lock down Bluetooth (probably to make the record labels happy). So even non-techies are looking to do things that are not possible with these locked-down platforms.
And software is implemented in the source code, not a vague description with some useless diagrams in a patent. The source code is not protected by patents but is protected by copyright. Therefore, the software implementation is already protected under copyright law and there is no need for software patents.
These physicists should get private funding instead of expecting the U.S. government to keep bailing them out. I'm sure there would be plenty of private companies looking to put money towards a project that would benefit humanity without ever making a profit. And if not, then that means there was nothing valuable to be gained and we haven't wasted any more money on such nonsense, right?
This is interesting because the judge banned all phones and tablets from both companies except the current generation of their products. From a legal perspective, this ruling does not make sense. The "bounce back" patent Samsung violated has been fixed in the Galaxy S2 and possible the Galaxy Tab, but they got banned anyway. And Apple's iPad 3 and iPhone 4S still use the communication technologies patented by Samsung yet they weren't banned.
From a financial perspective, the ruling makes sense. Many of the components in Apple's products are made by Samsung, so banning the current generation of popular Apple devices would potentially hurt Samsung more than help it. At least the judge seemed reasonable in its explanation of why Samsung's designs did not copy Apple's designs.
Samsung can expect a new lawsuit from Apple after copying the "look and feel" of Apple stores. I say that as a joke, but I'm sure at this very moment Apple's lawyers are looking into the possibility of securing IP that covers elements of their store layout.
Apple has taken technology from something that only geeks used to something that is fashionable, but the fashion industry is driven by trends. Right now Apple is setting many of these trends, but it can't stay that way forever - trends are fickle by nature and someone else is bound to come up with something people want more. It will be very interesting to see how Apple and its fans react when Apple is no longer the trendsetter.
And this is a particularly risky move for Apple. While shifting from a mix of professionals and consumers to just consumers is paying off very well right now, it could prove to be a horrible long-term decision. Consumers are much more fickle than professionals. Professionals need to have domain knowledge of their hardware and software which makes switching platforms for them much more difficult. However, with two years of no updates for the Mac Pro, the huge debacle over Final Cut Pro X, and the removal of pro features of the Macbook Pro (no 17" screen, no Firewire or DVD drive on the Retina model), Apple has given professionals plenty of reasons to make that switch. The professionals kept Apple alive when it was crumbling apart, but they might not be around the next time that it's no longer fashionable to be carrying an Apple product and then Apple could be in serious trouble. I wouldn't expect this to happen for quite some time, so there's still a good chance for Apple to turn this around, but all current indications point to continued abandonment of their most loyal customers.
Every time I hear arguments like this, I can't help but think of adults whining in children's voices like those Subway commercials. "He copied my drawing!", "she keeps repeating everything I say and do!". Just shut the fuck up already. I hope one day we are able to look back on this and realized just how childish our species is acting. Nothing is created in a vacuum, so get the fuck over yourselves and get back to making products!
I don't even know where to begin with this shit. First of all, rights of unlimited duration would be unconstitutional in the United States since the Article I Section 8 of the Constitution specifically calls for limited rights. Second of all, this would give broadcasters greater rights over the content that they broadcast than the actual content creators! This is what the big broadcasters want since they likely produce their own content, but this would screw all of the independent content creators that depend on broadcasters to distribute their works.
While I don't normally support the repeal of copyright laws, at the rate we're going I could see myself going in that direction. If these greedy fucks want to act like children and keep changing the rules to tip them further in their favor, then I'm all for taking all of their toys away for a little while. That would let me them see just how good they had it when their only protection over content was a "measly" copyright of 120 years.
We think that Microsoft’s launch of its own-brand products is negative for the whole PC industry.
Is it really a negative "for the whole PC industry" or just a negative for Acer and the other OEM partners?
The company is reportedly considering whether or not they want to keep relying on Microsoft's software products.
And do what? Write their own OS and take on Microsoft head-to-head? Release only products with Linux on them? I love Linux, but let's be realistic. Acer obviously isn't happy about Microsoft's entry into the hardware side of tablets, but they have few other options, so they will whine about it and continue selling Microsoft products all the while.
And on the other hand, if NASA's site had become so overloaded with users as everyone in the world attempted to watch this historic event, then NO ONE would have been able to watch the video. How is having the choice of watching the video in a familiar environment with advertisements worse than having no other option? Isn't it fairly well established that the dissemination of popular content is more effective and reliable when it is supplemented through the use of many sources (peers)?
I'm all for shitting on the cable companies and their overpriced services, but I don't get the math in this article. The author claims the following companies lost customers: 52,000 (DirecTV), 169,000 (Time Warner), 176,000 (Comcast), and 10,000 (Dish) for a total of 407,000. The author also admits that Verizon and AT&T have added a combined 275,000 customers. Doesn't this mean that the number of people who have actually cut the cord is more in the neighborhood of 132,000. That's about a third of the number the article claims.
Perhaps, but would you risk going up against a company capable of spending millions of dollars on lawyers who are going to be much better than any you can afford and potentially owing the company that out-lawyered you those millions? I think there needs to be some kind of limit. Perhaps there should be a cap in which the most you can owe to the case's winner is the same amount that you paid to your own lawyer(s).
I can't speak for the game developer community, but most of the senior projects people chose to do for their bachelors in Computer Science were basic 3d games. In their design reviews, a majority of the groups chose to use DirectX over OpenGL. They stated that the reasons for this were due to the way DirectX offered a standardized way of delivering sound and processing input devices (and possibly networking, although don't hold me to that). Since then, OpenAL has gained traction and it probably isn't that difficult to write a standardized library for input devices (if such libraries haven't already been released under a reasonable license). Perhaps some game devs who have used both technologies could shed some light on their advantages and disadvantages.
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Why do you feel that the problem is mutually exclusive? If there was a loophole in law that allowed me to murder people, wouldn't I still be a major asshole if I abused the loophole to kill as many people as possible? The patent problem is a legal problem and the Apple problem is a moral problem. Please stop conflating the two.
There is a reason why they don't own many software patents and it isn't because they're not innovating in their software. It's because they know it's a dick move to spend so much money and energy patenting trivial concepts that shouldn't be patentable in the first place.
So someone published pictures on a PUBLIC FACING web server and made no effort to secure that data with an actual password. Instead, they thought they could just use an obscure name and no one would stumble onto the pictures. It is not clear from the article, but it sounds like the uploader was not a rightsholder of the pictures. If that is true, then they certainly committed copyright infringement by making the files available on a public server, even if they thought they could control distribution by using an obscure name. But how does publishing a link to these images constitute infringement? How was the person who created the link supposed to know that the uploader was not a rightsholder of those images? This sounds like a slippery slope and I'm very disappointed in the decision.
Better yet, Mountain View...
4-inch screen, 16:9 aspect ratio, LTE, maps... Menlo Park, start your copiers!
That could very well be true, but I would hope that stock price is only one of many factors that determines the amount of money and the interest rate that the company could get. In fact, I would hope that the stock price is not valued much at all in that decision since a large group of idiots with more money than brains could buy into a company for much more than it is worth. If I was lending money, I would much rather see that the company I was lending to has actual assets that could be used for collateral as well as a steady trend of growth showing that they will likely be able to pay back the loan. But that's probably why I am not a banker.
That was the original purpose of the stock market, but I'm not so sure that it actually plays out that way, at least for stocks. The primary reason for my skepticism is that once a company has sold its stock through an IPO, the company itself has little to gain through an increased share price. A higher share price means more money for the people who have stock options, but the company itself only benefits from the money originally raised through the IPO. After the IPO, most of the trading is done between investors and the company has little to no involvement. The stock basically becomes gambling chips with a corporate logo that you use to play a giant game of poker to attempt to win money from the other gamblers at the table.
That is not necessarily the key question since it's not just the speed of the trades that is the problem. The problem is that companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build data centers to host applications that are responsible for high-frequency trading. These applications are unregulated and have already caused at least one flashcrash. In addition to that, the software is also responsible for a mistake to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars and the investment firm actually got that money back when your average investor would not have gotten anything back. In addition to that, there have been suspicions and allegations that companies are performing highly questionable and possibly illegal actions hidden in these blink-of-an-eye manipulations.
I'll admit that I don't know exactly what these companies are doing with HFT and that's precisely the problem. All I know is that they wouldn't be collectively spending billions of dollars on it if it wasn't expected to be extremely lucrative. What I do know is that at any given point in time there is a finite amount of money in the stock market. And if HFT gets trading companies more money, then that money has to come from somewhere and if it's not coming from other trading companies, then it must be coming from the investors. That is why I have recently stopped trading and I refuse to start until there is a serious investigation and possible regulations against HFT. Without such oversight, at the very least I feel that the game is being rigged against me and at the worst, they could make a bigger mess of this than the mortgage-backed securities debacle that contributed to the last crash.
Recently I have been thinking about causes of piracy and I believe a big factor that contributes to piracy is the fixed retail prices of goods. In many countries today, haggling is common and it allows the buyer and seller to come to an agreement on price based on the interest of a single buyer acquiring the item and a single seller collecting money for the item. However, in many western countries, goods are available at a single price and you can take it or leave it. For those who do not believe that a digital item is worth what stores are charging, they are more likely to resort to piracy despite the fact that they may have been willing to pay for the item had the price been closer to what the buyer thinks it is worth. A system like this could allow retailers more flexibility in pricing so that they could sell items to people based on their interest. Such a flexible pricing system is easy to do in person, but much more difficult to do online.
It will be interesting to see how Google's system pans out if they decide to actually use it, especially considering how similar systems have failed. And while I support their attempt at such a system, I feel it is worth stating that I detest the fact that they are patenting the software algorithm that accomplishes the task.
The crime described in this story is truly horrific, bu as a supporter of personal rights I would only submit such evidence in one form and it would involve me standing up, the officers on their knees, and would require at least four tissues to wipe away the excess.
My initial reaction was that maybe I would start buying their games again since they finally made the right decision and I wanted to show my support for that decision. But then I thought back at the level of greed that drove them to treat their paying customers like criminals. They went through a ton of trouble to set up some of the most restrictive DRM of any game publisher and made resale of their PC games completely impossible. Just read the Controversy section on Wikipedia to see how far they went. This leaves such a bad taste in my mouth that I can't imagine buying any of their crap. There are just way too many games from publishers who cater to their fans rather than beat them down for me to end my boycott of Ubisoft.
Due to their past transgressions, I will still never buy an Ubisoft game. I'm sure they will consider my lack of purchasing as piracy instead of voting with my wallet, but I don't care. Companies need to learn that years of treating your paying customers with contempt will take a LONG time for people to get over, even when the company finally starts to do the right thing.
So as long as just about everything you need is in the Microsoft ecosystem, then you won't really need to sync. Great!
Speak for yourself. I transfer files to my Android phone over Wifi all the time. And I'm not alone - my mom just got a phone and she wanted to be able to pull pictures from relatives' phones without requiring both phones to have the same obscure transfer app. I told her she could do this natively on Android over Bluetooth, but it may only work with other Android phones since Apple likes to lock down Bluetooth (probably to make the record labels happy). So even non-techies are looking to do things that are not possible with these locked-down platforms.
And software is implemented in the source code, not a vague description with some useless diagrams in a patent. The source code is not protected by patents but is protected by copyright. Therefore, the software implementation is already protected under copyright law and there is no need for software patents.
These physicists should get private funding instead of expecting the U.S. government to keep bailing them out. I'm sure there would be plenty of private companies looking to put money towards a project that would benefit humanity without ever making a profit. And if not, then that means there was nothing valuable to be gained and we haven't wasted any more money on such nonsense, right?
This is interesting because the judge banned all phones and tablets from both companies except the current generation of their products. From a legal perspective, this ruling does not make sense. The "bounce back" patent Samsung violated has been fixed in the Galaxy S2 and possible the Galaxy Tab, but they got banned anyway. And Apple's iPad 3 and iPhone 4S still use the communication technologies patented by Samsung yet they weren't banned.
From a financial perspective, the ruling makes sense. Many of the components in Apple's products are made by Samsung, so banning the current generation of popular Apple devices would potentially hurt Samsung more than help it. At least the judge seemed reasonable in its explanation of why Samsung's designs did not copy Apple's designs.
Samsung can expect a new lawsuit from Apple after copying the "look and feel" of Apple stores. I say that as a joke, but I'm sure at this very moment Apple's lawyers are looking into the possibility of securing IP that covers elements of their store layout.
Apple has taken technology from something that only geeks used to something that is fashionable, but the fashion industry is driven by trends. Right now Apple is setting many of these trends, but it can't stay that way forever - trends are fickle by nature and someone else is bound to come up with something people want more. It will be very interesting to see how Apple and its fans react when Apple is no longer the trendsetter.
And this is a particularly risky move for Apple. While shifting from a mix of professionals and consumers to just consumers is paying off very well right now, it could prove to be a horrible long-term decision. Consumers are much more fickle than professionals. Professionals need to have domain knowledge of their hardware and software which makes switching platforms for them much more difficult. However, with two years of no updates for the Mac Pro, the huge debacle over Final Cut Pro X, and the removal of pro features of the Macbook Pro (no 17" screen, no Firewire or DVD drive on the Retina model), Apple has given professionals plenty of reasons to make that switch. The professionals kept Apple alive when it was crumbling apart, but they might not be around the next time that it's no longer fashionable to be carrying an Apple product and then Apple could be in serious trouble. I wouldn't expect this to happen for quite some time, so there's still a good chance for Apple to turn this around, but all current indications point to continued abandonment of their most loyal customers.
Every time I hear arguments like this, I can't help but think of adults whining in children's voices like those Subway commercials. "He copied my drawing!", "she keeps repeating everything I say and do!". Just shut the fuck up already. I hope one day we are able to look back on this and realized just how childish our species is acting. Nothing is created in a vacuum, so get the fuck over yourselves and get back to making products!
I don't even know where to begin with this shit. First of all, rights of unlimited duration would be unconstitutional in the United States since the Article I Section 8 of the Constitution specifically calls for limited rights. Second of all, this would give broadcasters greater rights over the content that they broadcast than the actual content creators! This is what the big broadcasters want since they likely produce their own content, but this would screw all of the independent content creators that depend on broadcasters to distribute their works.
While I don't normally support the repeal of copyright laws, at the rate we're going I could see myself going in that direction. If these greedy fucks want to act like children and keep changing the rules to tip them further in their favor, then I'm all for taking all of their toys away for a little while. That would let me them see just how good they had it when their only protection over content was a "measly" copyright of 120 years.
Is it really a negative "for the whole PC industry" or just a negative for Acer and the other OEM partners?
And do what? Write their own OS and take on Microsoft head-to-head? Release only products with Linux on them? I love Linux, but let's be realistic. Acer obviously isn't happy about Microsoft's entry into the hardware side of tablets, but they have few other options, so they will whine about it and continue selling Microsoft products all the while.
And on the other hand, if NASA's site had become so overloaded with users as everyone in the world attempted to watch this historic event, then NO ONE would have been able to watch the video. How is having the choice of watching the video in a familiar environment with advertisements worse than having no other option? Isn't it fairly well established that the dissemination of popular content is more effective and reliable when it is supplemented through the use of many sources (peers)?
I'm all for shitting on the cable companies and their overpriced services, but I don't get the math in this article. The author claims the following companies lost customers: 52,000 (DirecTV), 169,000 (Time Warner), 176,000 (Comcast), and 10,000 (Dish) for a total of 407,000. The author also admits that Verizon and AT&T have added a combined 275,000 customers. Doesn't this mean that the number of people who have actually cut the cord is more in the neighborhood of 132,000. That's about a third of the number the article claims.
Perhaps, but would you risk going up against a company capable of spending millions of dollars on lawyers who are going to be much better than any you can afford and potentially owing the company that out-lawyered you those millions? I think there needs to be some kind of limit. Perhaps there should be a cap in which the most you can owe to the case's winner is the same amount that you paid to your own lawyer(s).
I can't speak for the game developer community, but most of the senior projects people chose to do for their bachelors in Computer Science were basic 3d games. In their design reviews, a majority of the groups chose to use DirectX over OpenGL. They stated that the reasons for this were due to the way DirectX offered a standardized way of delivering sound and processing input devices (and possibly networking, although don't hold me to that). Since then, OpenAL has gained traction and it probably isn't that difficult to write a standardized library for input devices (if such libraries haven't already been released under a reasonable license). Perhaps some game devs who have used both technologies could shed some light on their advantages and disadvantages.
I'm gonna wait for the 3DSi XL Lite Super Turbo Hyperfighting Edition to be released.