The great Hunter S. Thompson created the notion of Gonzo Journalism as a mean to expose the inherent bias of any journalist as part of the story. Pretending to be unbiased is at worst a best a lie, at worst a sneaky means for a mega-rich media conglomerate to sway public opinion.
Understanding of Bias is the key here. The bias of the average poster on Slashdot isn't hidden... this is a major outlet of the Open Source (aka, FREE software) movement. I would not expect a great deal of community support here for a pro-censorship article. On the other hand, we'll probably have more respect for IP than, say, a similar forum on a Pirate Party site.
And we know from where the RIAA/MPAA folks get their money.. they have an just as much bias, but it's directed very strongly in a different direction. The typical representative of this crowd will have no problem with the idea that a few accidental censorships are no big deal if the end result is protecting their IP better. Personally, I liken that to other aspects of the law: it should be totally unacceptable to suggest convicting a small number of innocents is a proper price to pay for getting more bad guys.
I have not done studies, but I would bet that most/. readers would agree with Blackstone's formula: it is better to let ten guilty men go free, than let one innocent suffer. That's the problem with the RIAA/MPAA/etc. written laws that our highly lobbied legislators are selling here... they don't care one iota how many innocents get punished, as long as the guilty are stopped.
I'm an engineer, writer, and musician... I have the utmost respect for rational IP laws. But as such a person, I value freedom even higher. As in all things, I won't trade even a small bit of freedom for a large bit of additional security. This is exactly the argument that these pro SOPA/PIPA/censorship agencies are selling... your freedom isn't that important, our IP is more so.
Yup.. Slashdot is inherently biased toward intelligence and freedom. Amazing as it may seem, many Slashdot readers actually understand the technologies under discussion at a very deep level. And many of us understand that the best laws err on the side of freedom; my ability to maintain control of my IP is important, but not as important as ensuring that some uninvolved entity can't use my copyright as an excuse for site-level censorship. The needs (and rights) of the many must always triumph, regardless of the size of their bank accounts.
And in fact, there are plenty of smart guys at the RIAA and MPAA. And they're looking at these laws as a power grab, not just a way to protect their IP. Unfortunately, the legislators really don't seem to understand any of the issues... heck, there are plenty of Congresscritters who've demonstrated an abject ignorance about all things digital and connected. So they can't really tell a law designed to be effective against piracy (which many Slashdot readers would support, myself included) versus a law designed to give media companies unprecedented powers of censorship, but do virtually nothing to actually stop piracy.
Fortunately, the tech community spoke up this time.
Good match... most of us on the Amiga team at Commodore weren't all that well socialized, either. We had a habit of throwing marketing people into any nearby body of water, and generally, raising hell. Fun times, good computers, good memories.
I was actually overseeing the last version of the Commodore 64, Rev E, though most of the cost-reduction work was done in Japan back then. They had nearly everything but the CSG (formerly MOS Technology) chips on a big gate array. The cost of a C64, boxed for retail, was supposedly as low as $35.00 near the end. Little wonder Commodore kept selling these long into the Amiga era.
And that's exactly what they do. I visited IBM's patent office in Boca Raton, FL, back in the late 1980s. The office was larger that those of many medium sized companies, and they worked over anything IBM did. They learned to game the patent system, and so generated patents on anything that could be patented. This is how, for example, IBM got a patent, applied for in early 1984, on cut and paste (in a text editor... Emacs violated this patent, even the original TECO Emacs from the 70s). Not every large company did or does this, but there's certainly the cash for it if they want it. This was an IBM profit center.
The problem is, software patents don't really cover ideas. They actually cover specific implementations. In theory, anyway, they're no different than any other kind of patent.
In practice, they have been what amounts to an exemption from the need to include the actual preferred embodiment of the invention. So software patents have intentionally vague descriptions, flow charts, block diagrams, etc. that, while covering the preferred embodiment of the invention (one would hope), will also cover thousands of variations that would not infringe a properly written patent. Because of its complexity, and large companies pushing hard to not have to include source code, the software patent is really a mutant form of patent these days, very, very different than others. They need to go. Or judges need to be much more critical of vaguely written patents. There was never any intent for a software patent to be able to cover an idea, but that's the way they're flung around by the patent trolls these days.
It's also the goal of the patent writer (I've written a number of them) to seemingly claim nothing when writing the patent, and then be able to claim the world once the patent's granted. This is enhanced in software patents by the fact that the patent only loosely describes the invention, as mentioned above. But it's a flaw in all patents that there are two standards. When a patent is examined by the PTO, the examiner's main focus is on the description of the invention. They look over the claims, only to (hopefully) ensure they're backed up by the described invention. Once granted, the claims are what becomes interesting... an infringement suit will tell you (eventually.... they do like to play games) what claims you're actually supposed to be violating.
Software is fundamentally different. You may have one or two fundamentally original ideas in a typical hardware system. Something really complex, maybe a few dozen. Any non-trivial piece of software is likely to have thousands. If I really did have to pay a 1% license fee on a thousand patents just to release my application... well, you can see the problem.
And on the other hand, software is already treated different than other technologies, and that only to make patents easier to get. In a hardware patent, you have to describe the preferred embodiment in very fine detail, including circuit diagrams. Software patents get away with increasingly abstract block diagrams. They were at one time required to include source code, but these days, not to much. So you really don't even know if your program infringes on a patent, because you never really know the preferred embodiment. This is why so many software patents seem to claim ideas, which are of course not even slightly patentable. My design only infringes your invention if I'm doing the same exact thing you're doing in the same way, not simply the same general kind of thing.
This also violates the basic premise of patents. Patents exist to give the inventor a temporary monopoly on a specific invention in return for the details of that invention being revealed. The goal is one of general benefit to society; the side effect is specific benefit to an individual. When the patent is no longer able or necessary to advance the state of engineering, it shouldn't exist.
It's not actually as bad as the pundits and iPhone fanbois suggest. Yet.
For one, to a real software applications engineer (which the part that really matters), fragmentation means "my stuff doesn't run on some units". That's possible, but it's pretty rare. The primary reason for restricting a device from running a particular application is resources ("it just wouldn't work here") and politics ("we're restricting this for absolutely no reason the user will every understand, but trust us, it's good for you... and have your tried our equivalent"). That latter one is the very definition of Apple's iTunes store. Not really hurting Apple. The former is progress.
The UI "fragmentation" is not an actual problem. Sure, if you buy a device with Motoblur or some other shell enhancement, there's a little adjustment to do. Not as much necessarily as adjusting to iOS, Windows Phone, or even moving from Android 2.0 to 3.0 or 3.0 to 4.0. This is usually what the pundits whine about, and it's meaningless.
Google isn't "giving the carriers control".. Google is releasing a free OS. Everyone wants freedom for themselves, but they get all bent out of shape when it's freedom for the other guy. Yeah, these telcos can mess with Android all they want. That's precisely why Android has 60% or whatever of the smartphone market... they have things on Android they'll never have elsewhere. To an extent, it's Google's job to make stock Android so good that no one bothers with alternate shells or anything like that, and just bloats you with unused apps. And at least 4.0/ICS deals with that -- you can't deleted a ROMed app, but you can "disappear" it. Good enough, methinks.
That same freedom that the carriers have is available to everyone. No, I'm probably not going to build a custom Android ROM for my phone. But I could. On the other hand, the fact my tablet has Honeycomb rather than Foyo on it is entirely due to the fact it's all open.. even though the Honeycomb sources were never independently released (you can actually build Honeycomb from the ICS sources now, if you must). It's either free or it's not. I'll take freedom, even knowing that includes the freedom to do evil.
Google could solve this all.. I've been advocating an improved version of the way the PC worked. As horrible as the PC was, IBM's taking the CP/M notion of the BIOS into ROM on the PC changed everything. This let Microsoft, not IBM, release new versions of MS-DOS and Windows. True, there were issues... like missing drivers.
Google should build a modern hardware abstraction layer (HAL) standard for Android. This would contain micro-drivers for every hardware device in an Android computer. Motorola, Samsung, etc. would write their own HALs for their phones, update them at will (and independently of Android)... this abstracts everything you need to know about the phone's hardware.
Android would then plug into this HAL. And this is a huge win for everyone involved.
HTC and Motorola and Samsung could still make their own custom builds, with whatever they want to put in there. But they'd only need one per generation of software, not a separate build for each device. This wouldn't just make their job easier, it would make support of older devices much, much easier -- as long as you have the resources to run the new version, it just works. Sure, they'd have to test it on the older systems to deliver their level of quality. Still, much less work than a new custom build.
These guys could push their new OS direct, but they could also distribute via the Android Market. So could Google... they could release a generic Android build for each new version, which would work on any HAL-based Android device. For business purposes, Google could allow the OEMs a window to provide support of their own before Google did... that's just a flag for your particular device in Market.
And of course, the community developers like Cyanogen(mod) would have a much easier time. No need to worry about zillions of different full builds containing all drive
Yup. I spent enough time working with legal folks to understand the whole patent thing. This was originally reading them to help lawyers decide if the patents actually read on our stuff, then working on patent applications.
Part of the fragility of many patents is simply due to the way they're written. It's not uncommon that the patent is simply not an accurate description of the "preferred embodiment" of the invention (eg, the thing you actually built), because the lawyers didn't understand it very well, and the engineers were too busy to fix these problems.
Sometimes the claims are bogus. The PTO actually approves a patent based on the description of the invention, not the claims. They are supposed to reject it if there is a claim not properly supported in thst description, but the claims are secondary in the approval process. One granted, the claims are what they "read" on you stuff to determine infringment. Snarky lawyers try to write these so they seem to cover way more than described in that actual invention.
And so on. And that's even before you get to prior art. That alone is a mess, because the PTO usually only looks at prior patents. Before 2007, they weren't even functionally allowed to use "coommon sense" as a test of obviousness, and particularly for software patents from the 80s and 90s, pretty much any one can and should be challenged, simply because the PTO didn't have software engineer examiners on staff. The Constitutional basis for patents requires a test of obviousness by one "skilled in the art".
I think Microsoft's main point here was to use fees on Android as a means to push Windows Phone. Thus, their going after the Windows Phone mfgs first, leaving the other Android suppliers to what should have been a relatively simple clean-up effort.
It's possible they have more in reserve, which could be applied in a new suit if this one is lost.
In general, they company with the patents is after money. They don't want to go to court, so they try to make the licensing easy, and the costs of fighting it high. I was a technical advisor for Commodore, when IBM went after the Amiga systems with a big stack of patents. And most were total garbage.. typical of early 80s software patents, the prior art was so thick you'd need a chainsaw to cut it. For example, IBM had a 1984 patent on cut and paste between text buffers! The thing was, IBM wanted money but also cross licensing. So their fees changed for 1, 2, or 3 or more patents. If we had fought off 24 of the first 25, it was pretty clear they'd be back with another stack of 25. It was ultimately cheaper to pay.
But if MS has put all their cards on the table, this is an even larger problem for them, particularly in today's climate. If done right by MS's legal team, these things are never supposed to go to court. If a couple of these patents are shown to have crazy and obvious prior art, the court these days might put them all up for review, rather than the individual cases you might have expected in the past. And if the patents are struck down, that kills all existing licenses, all that money, and may generate a backlash against Microsoft at the current liscensees. So they really structure things to get each company approached to be quiet, first, then roll over. B&N right now is doing pretty much everything that gives these kind of lawyers nightmares. Makes me want to put a nook on my Christmas list.
For Microsoft, I think it's change for the sake of !PANIC!
They pretty much missed the big move to mobile devices. Apple pretty much lead the way, Android made it cool, and Micro... who?
Probably because their Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called last week) was terrible, and not compelling at all. So they shifted things to Windows 7 Phone, aka, the Zune Phone. And had the brilliant idea of posing it as the smartphone for people who don't like smartphones.
As a result, Microsoft is still falling in sales percentage, even with Win7Phone being out for just over a year now.
That's a big problem for Microsoft. Perhaps an epic, ELE problem. As more people embrace mobile devices as the center of their computing experience, the PC itself drops in importance. So does Microsoft, unless they're the guys powering the mobile devices. Which they're not right now. But it's worse than that... if mobile OS dominate enough, Microsoft could lose on the desktop, too. After all, if I spend 90% of my computing time on an iPhone, what's compelling about Windows. This is the obvious reason that Apple's slowing turning MacOS into iOS for the desktop. That's critical for Apple, anyway, given that, while they lose pro users, they're gaining consumers... folks riding in on the iPhone's coattails.
So what does Microsoft do? I think the Windows 8 plan is clear -- force-feed regular Windows user a tablet-friendly experience, while there are still Windows users around. This will taste like horrible medicine, but what are they going to do... leave? This is also going to let Microsoft copy Apple again... they can sell Metro apps in the Zune store, get you locked into their ecosystem like Apple does, etc.
Once you have been assimilated, the Microsoft-powered tablets and phones will all-of-a-sudden seem reasonable, and you'll question that goofy, PalmOS-looking UI on the iPhone and Android.
Or not.. but I think that's Microsoft's strategy -- drag Windows into the phone/tablet world in order to make those phones and tablets sellable some day. Otherwise, people just keep moving away from MS. One big reason I think this is the current plan... I was in a discussion with some of the Windows 8 developers online. They have all kinds of studies and all that claim things in Windows 8, like the App Screen replacing the App Menu, are just more efficient for users. I pointed out that navigating the Start Menu in Windows today is very fast, particularly with a wheel mouse (which they didn't seem to have considered), particularly when stored by application class (eg, I have hundreds of applications, and may not recall the name, but I know it's for Multimedia... Video... Rendering... ah, TMPGenc Mastering Suite 5!)... it's all small motor movements. But searching the whole screen, across two or more monitors... that's relatively very slow, and there's no way to categorize it at present.
The answer is always: the Start Screen is better. And no, Windows 7 UI won't be an option. It currently is, in the Windows 8 betas, so maybe it's a subject for debate still at MS. Though it sounds to me that the decision has already been made, for the reasons outlined. Not for any possible improvements in use on the desktop.
Hopefully this time they also properly account for all of the relavitistic effects due to using GPS satellites as a time base. In the first experiment, they apparently did not account for shortening of distances on earth from the satellite's reference frame. They could prove they have properly corrected for this by sending the neutrions both E->W and W-> East. If the numbers don't match, there's still a problem.
Yeah, there are a bunch of Android media players, but they're all using essentially the same low-level code at some point. This is obvious because they're all essentially flawed.
Start with a video file that's just at the edge of the system's ability to play. I was messing around with AVC in 720p, and found that on my Android tablet (nVidia Tegra 2), the system ran into trouble playing 1280x720/24p at around 6Mb/s, depending on the encoder used.
When a player can't always decode every frame, the proper thing to do is to drop frames as necessary to maintain visual sync to audio. However, on Android, in a dozen or so players, I found that's not what happens. In fact, the players work very hard to decode every video frame, effectively running the video in slow motion. However, the audio keeps going in realtime. So before long, the audio has significantly walked in front of the video. Result: unwatchable video.
This ought to be an easy fix enough fix, there are decades of historically doing this right on PCs. Windows Media Player has even done this correctly... pretty much any PC media player will (try a 1080/60p video file on a typical laptop if you doubt this... it'll generally play jerkey, and VLC is pretty bad at playing such a file, but it does maintain A/V sync, as will pretty much any other Windows or Linux media player, even when the PC isn't fast enough to actually play the video).
On the other hand, VLC is terribly inefficient on PCs. Most of the time, they don't care, and there are nice things about VLC as well -- it plays practically anything, does transcoding, and all without crapifying your system with hundreds of useless CODEC plug-ins. But on mobile devices, efficiency is the most critical thing. And you're not getting AVC and other heavy CODECs decoding on the ARM alone -- VLC can skip the latest video acceleration on PCs and get away with it. It can't on mobile devices.
Incorrect, prior art means just as much in a first to file country (which is most of the world) as in a first to invent world. The only real difference is in the race to turn your top secret stuff into a patent before the other guys turns his top secret stuff into a patent. In the past, here in the USA, it was "first to invent"... you patent gets in after the other guy's, but you can prove, via engineering notebooks or other trade secret stuff that you did it first, you can get the patent. Now, whoever files first gets the patent.
Prior art is still prior art -- if it read on the patent before the "America Invents" Act, it'll read on the patent afterwards. The only real difference is for the above scenario. If you're the second to file, your work may or may not read on the other guy's work. Under the old system, YOU get the patent if that's the case and you can prove you came up with it first. Under the new system, either he gets the patent, or your work is accepted as prior art and no one gets the patent.
Published, or already on sale, already in common use, or otherwise already available to the public.
The basic distinction is that, if you're already working on a patent for the same thing, and someone else gets their application in first, you can't win the patent, even if you can prove you invented it first. You may or may not be able to invalidate their patent application on the basis of prior art, depending on just how your technology is already being used compared to the other guy's.
Except, Windows 8 on tablets won't run a real OS. It's not WIndows, it's just the Metro apps. Everything written in Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Silverlight... much like WebOS, except for that Silverlight part. In fact, MS has been all over the WebOS developers, getting them to switch to Metro.
Microsoft's had their Mobile Moment here, like they did with the Internet. After years of denying that computing was centered around anything but the PC, Microsoft has noticed that it's actually moving to mobile devices. And that they're hopelessly behind. Their shot a keeping is this market is the same shot they always have -- extend the desktop. Only, the desktop won't work on mobile devices -- regular Windows apps are hopelessly large, CPU intensive, and mouse-based. So the key is, create a whole new class of lightweight, mobile-friendly apps for the desktop, tablet, or phone. That's Metro. And it's not the same as Windows... though it will be. Since Windows is, of course, whatever Microsoft says it is.
RIM has echoed Nokia in more ways than one. First of all, their phones, like Nokia's SymbianOS phones, look like Android or iOS phones from a few years back. This is pretty typical of a company that doesn't think they can be challenged, and can't react to the reality that they are. After all, if SymbianOS is the only choice, or your company mandates a Blackberry, there's no need to compete. But in the fact of competition and consumer choice, they both lose.
The other way RIM has echoed Nokia is by "Osborning" themselves. Nokia announced last Spring that, basically, every smartphone product they had would soon be obsolete, they wouldn't have replacements until 2012, and they're all be Windows 7 Phone. So is it any great shock that no one wants a Nokia smartphone this year? RIM did similarly... they announced that the current BlackberryOS was going away, to be replaced next year by something based on QNX, with support for Android apps. So maybe that's good.. but who wants a Blackberry this year?
The Playbook is a decent piece of hardware, and QNX is a great basis for a reliable, portable OS. But they shipped so that it's close to useless, unless you're a Blackberry user. What's that all about?
However, Windows 7 Phone is hardly one of "the big three" yet... all Windows phone sales are still dropping, at least as of last quarter -- Windows 7 Phone sales haven't offset the mass exodus from Windows Mobile. Yet, anyway. Certainly, Microsoft has the money to push this for years if they like, just as they did with the X-Box. But they haven't won yet.
And Android "fragmentation" is really something people say when they're iOS or other platform supporters and can't think of any other FUD to report about Android. It's largely a non-issue... and take this from someone jumping between phone and tablet all the time. It just works.
No one sells 64-bit applications? I disagree -- most of my professional applications are 64-bit. Most still have 32-bit versions. But some in the same areas (Adobe Premiere, for example.. I use Sony Vegas) are now 64-bit only.
What you're going to see is a tier of applications. Not every x86 application needs to be 64-bit. If you don't need more than 2GB RAM, there's not much point.
Similarly, there will be Metro apps. These are not compiled, they're built in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight. They'll work on any version of Windows, but no heavy lifting.
I think they're strongly suggesting that the Metro stuff: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight, is the way you build not only Metro-interface apps, but everything that runs on Windows ARM, Windows Tablet for x86, or Windows Phone. I mean, even if you could run Office or Photoshop on an x86 tablet, how do you control it without a mouse? Fingers won't cut it. And full modern Windows applications are too large for a machine with 16-32GB of storage, and possibly no expansion capability.
Metro apps, I think, are not x86 or ARM, not 32-bit or 64-bit either. They're interpreted... Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Silverlight only. They're light weight, intended for apps, not applications. They'll fit on phones and tablets just dandy, but also run on the "looks like a tablet" version of the desktop.
If it doesn't make sense, I think it's because this is kind of a desperation move by Microsoft. They see computing walking away from being desktop centric. If they don't follow, then take these new platforms over, Microsoft ceases to be the powerhouse they have been. And it's already too late to just launch a tablet OS... who's going to buy a not-Windows WIndows OS for the tablet, when you have Android or iOS to chose from, with thousands and thousands of apps? Look at the phone so far.. lots of good reviews. I'm not a fan, but non-geeks seem to like it. And yet, Microsoft is still losing market share in the smartphone market. Maybe they'll start gaining -- still a bunch of SymbianOS and RIM customers to steal, even if they can't get the iOS or Android users.
But desktop is their strength, and I'm certain Metro is their way of moving apps from the desktop to the smaller devices, en masse. Because developers will support the desktop, some even the new programming interfaces. MS may even have rules about when you're allowed to use the old APIs, and when you must build with Metro. I don't think they're looking at Photoshop in Metro, but other stuff, certainly. You probably have to build in Metro to get into the Microsoft Appstore, which is also a way to get traction with desktop users.
Microsoft has apparently had their Google Moment. Or maybe their Internet Moment, again.
Back in 2005 or so, Google decided that search -- their bread and butter -- was moving off the desktop and onto mobile devices. That should have been a signal that PERSONAL COMPUTING was doing this, particularly given how web-centric the average Joe has become lately. But I digress. The big problem was ownership of that desktop: while they couldn't control the web, at the time, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia controlled the handset. It was all proprietary, and default search could change instantly, kicking Google off the mobile device overnight. So they bought Android, with the intent to put Android out there free and easy, preventing any mass defection to some other search engine on the handset.
Like Microsoft's discovery of the internet after everyone else was already wading knee deep, I think they have discovered that handheld devices are going to be significant. And that doesn't mean the PC dies. But look at it this way: Apple has 5% of the PC desktop. Linux, maybe a percent or two, Windows owns the rest. If that's the only personal computing platform, Microsoft has it pretty good.
But now enter handhelds. If 25%, 50%, 75% or whatever of personal computing moves to the handheld, it's not simply Microsoft not being there. It means that all of a sudden, the desktop is in the game again. If I have Android 5.0 on my phone and my tablet, maybe I'll want it on my desktop, too. Not a problem... the Linux roots were born on the desktop, it already runs there today (well, Android 2.x or 3.x). This is already happening, a little, with PCs... the iPhone and iPad have had a small coattail effect in the USA, boosting Apple's consumer market PCs to the extent that they're actually building volume, even as they drop some of the pro market stuff (the servers are dead, and the high-end Mac PCs are looking threatened -- Apple seems to want everything to be based on common laptop hardware: that's notebooks, iMacs, and Mac Minis alike).
But you can't put Windows on a tablet. Oh, sure, you can... they've been doing it for over a decade. But you need a stylus, a hard drive, and lots of money... like small notebooks before the netbook, classic Windows tablets are overpriced and underpowered.
But to live on an iPad/Android style tablet, whether its x86 or ARM powered, you have some issues. Like, 16-32GB of storage, tops. A CPU that's no more powerful than the Atom. Smaller displays. Touch interface. None of that stuff is going to support existing Windows applications.... particularly not ARMs, which would need recompiles for any native-code application (most of them). And complete rewrites for the ARM anyway.
So it looks like Microsoft's taking a different tack. They'll keep the x86 apps on the desktop and notebook PC, pretty much. The whole "Metro" interface comes with a totally new API, same thing more or less they run on the phone. That means you build applications, or more properly I guess, apps, in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight. Which ought to run on ARM, x86 and 64-bit x86 all alike, maybe even PCs to phones. That's actually not Microsoft's original strategy -- that's just what HP was talking about doing with WebOS... which is also based on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Imagine that.
So MS is inflicting the touch-like interface on PC users to leverage the vast market for PCs onto the tablet, I guess. People will buy new PCs, and as Vista taught us, they will buy them with any old OS Microsoft tossed onto them, eh? MS isn't yet worried about desktop survival, so angering a few desktop users doesn't matter if that facilitates a whole scale migration of the Windows ecosystem to smaller devices. I bet they include a Zune Store or something similar for Windows apps written Metro-style... maybe even go all Apple on us and make that the only place you can buy them. These would potentially run on all your devices, from phone to desktop. None of the hardcore desktop stuff is involved -- they're really have two completely independent application environments for the desktop systems, but only the one for tablets and phones.
There are no laws against copying ideas. Legit patents, sure, but not ideas. And given all the prior art, it's clear the only reason Apple has any design patents on the iPad is that the shape had so much obvious non-patent prior art, and was so simple, no one bothered to try before Apple did it.
It does seem that stupid sells, in the Republican Primary anyway.
I wonder how this all shakes out. There have got to be some old-timey behind-the-scenes guys, like Cheney and that crowd, who are looking at 2012 right now as a real chance to re-take the White House, and these nut jobbers as the only thing likely to keep them out.... other than an actual economic recovery in the next 14 months. Given all those jobs that simply don't exist here anymore, and the state of Congress, I wouldn't put money on that.
On the other hand, anyone who does win in 2012 would have the same basic problem Obama had: things are so messed up, no one's got a clue how to fix them. Being screwed up, both fiscally and politically, is no longer a reaction to something (unfunded wars, the bank collapse, the auto industry collapse, etc) but simply the new norm. But boom times, at least, if you're in political comedy.
The big difference: I think Obama had some idea he didn't know how to fix things, but naively believed he could work with Congress and advisers to get there, and was open to the challenge anyway. I think the vast majority of these Republican wing-nuts haven't the slightest clue how the US economy functions. It's the typical social conservative mode: what you don't know is fully explained by dogma. In this case, the dogma of St. Reagan... tax cuts cure all. Even a Federal income problem. I'm not sure Obama and the Democrats have much of a clue either, and I'm pretty sure if they had THE ANSWER, and maybe the cures for Aids, Cancer, Heart Disease, and Aging, they'd still manage to conceed all relevant parts of those plans to the Republicans even before negotiations began. But this crop of Republicans (also not sure about Huntsman)... their child-like under-understanding of real world issues is not going to provide any help here.
And I wouldn't count Perry out just yet in that race to idiocy. I think he's got a better political machine in place than Bachmann... and after the whole Palin debacle, any of these folks who doesn't have their candidate on a short leash deserves the public ridicule they'll inevitably face. Bush without intellect, indeed.
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BIAS isn't BAD. Not even remotely.
The great Hunter S. Thompson created the notion of Gonzo Journalism as a mean to expose the inherent bias of any journalist as part of the story. Pretending to be unbiased is at worst a best a lie, at worst a sneaky means for a mega-rich media conglomerate to sway public opinion.
Understanding of Bias is the key here. The bias of the average poster on Slashdot isn't hidden... this is a major outlet of the Open Source (aka, FREE software) movement. I would not expect a great deal of community support here for a pro-censorship article. On the other hand, we'll probably have more respect for IP than, say, a similar forum on a Pirate Party site.
And we know from where the RIAA/MPAA folks get their money.. they have an just as much bias, but it's directed very strongly in a different direction. The typical representative of this crowd will have no problem with the idea that a few accidental censorships are no big deal if the end result is protecting their IP better. Personally, I liken that to other aspects of the law: it should be totally unacceptable to suggest convicting a small number of innocents is a proper price to pay for getting more bad guys.
I have not done studies, but I would bet that most /. readers would agree with Blackstone's formula: it is better to let ten guilty men go free, than let one innocent suffer. That's the problem with the RIAA/MPAA/etc. written laws that our highly lobbied legislators are selling here... they don't care one iota how many innocents get punished, as long as the guilty are stopped.
I'm an engineer, writer, and musician... I have the utmost respect for rational IP laws. But as such a person, I value freedom even higher. As in all things, I won't trade even a small bit of freedom for a large bit of additional security. This is exactly the argument that these pro SOPA/PIPA/censorship agencies are selling... your freedom isn't that important, our IP is more so.
Yup.. Slashdot is inherently biased toward intelligence and freedom. Amazing as it may seem, many Slashdot readers actually understand the technologies under discussion at a very deep level. And many of us understand that the best laws err on the side of freedom; my ability to maintain control of my IP is important, but not as important as ensuring that some uninvolved entity can't use my copyright as an excuse for site-level censorship. The needs (and rights) of the many must always triumph, regardless of the size of their bank accounts.
And in fact, there are plenty of smart guys at the RIAA and MPAA. And they're looking at these laws as a power grab, not just a way to protect their IP. Unfortunately, the legislators really don't seem to understand any of the issues... heck, there are plenty of Congresscritters who've demonstrated an abject ignorance about all things digital and connected. So they can't really tell a law designed to be effective against piracy (which many Slashdot readers would support, myself included) versus a law designed to give media companies unprecedented powers of censorship, but do virtually nothing to actually stop piracy.
Fortunately, the tech community spoke up this time.
Nuff Said.
Good match... most of us on the Amiga team at Commodore weren't all that well socialized, either. We had a habit of throwing marketing people into any nearby body of water, and generally, raising hell. Fun times, good computers, good memories.
I was actually overseeing the last version of the Commodore 64, Rev E, though most of the cost-reduction work was done in Japan back then. They had nearly everything but the CSG (formerly MOS Technology) chips on a big gate array. The cost of a C64, boxed for retail, was supposedly as low as $35.00 near the end. Little wonder Commodore kept selling these long into the Amiga era.
And that's exactly what they do. I visited IBM's patent office in Boca Raton, FL, back in the late 1980s. The office was larger that those of many medium sized companies, and they worked over anything IBM did. They learned to game the patent system, and so generated patents on anything that could be patented. This is how, for example, IBM got a patent, applied for in early 1984, on cut and paste (in a text editor... Emacs violated this patent, even the original TECO Emacs from the 70s). Not every large company did or does this, but there's certainly the cash for it if they want it. This was an IBM profit center.
The problem is, software patents don't really cover ideas. They actually cover specific implementations. In theory, anyway, they're no different than any other kind of patent.
In practice, they have been what amounts to an exemption from the need to include the actual preferred embodiment of the invention. So software patents have intentionally vague descriptions, flow charts, block diagrams, etc. that, while covering the preferred embodiment of the invention (one would hope), will also cover thousands of variations that would not infringe a properly written patent. Because of its complexity, and large companies pushing hard to not have to include source code, the software patent is really a mutant form of patent these days, very, very different than others. They need to go. Or judges need to be much more critical of vaguely written patents. There was never any intent for a software patent to be able to cover an idea, but that's the way they're flung around by the patent trolls these days.
It's also the goal of the patent writer (I've written a number of them) to seemingly claim nothing when writing the patent, and then be able to claim the world once the patent's granted. This is enhanced in software patents by the fact that the patent only loosely describes the invention, as mentioned above. But it's a flaw in all patents that there are two standards. When a patent is examined by the PTO, the examiner's main focus is on the description of the invention. They look over the claims, only to (hopefully) ensure they're backed up by the described invention. Once granted, the claims are what becomes interesting... an infringement suit will tell you (eventually.... they do like to play games) what claims you're actually supposed to be violating.
Software is fundamentally different. You may have one or two fundamentally original ideas in a typical hardware system. Something really complex, maybe a few dozen. Any non-trivial piece of software is likely to have thousands. If I really did have to pay a 1% license fee on a thousand patents just to release my application... well, you can see the problem.
And on the other hand, software is already treated different than other technologies, and that only to make patents easier to get. In a hardware patent, you have to describe the preferred embodiment in very fine detail, including circuit diagrams. Software patents get away with increasingly abstract block diagrams. They were at one time required to include source code, but these days, not to much. So you really don't even know if your program infringes on a patent, because you never really know the preferred embodiment. This is why so many software patents seem to claim ideas, which are of course not even slightly patentable. My design only infringes your invention if I'm doing the same exact thing you're doing in the same way, not simply the same general kind of thing.
This also violates the basic premise of patents. Patents exist to give the inventor a temporary monopoly on a specific invention in return for the details of that invention being revealed. The goal is one of general benefit to society; the side effect is specific benefit to an individual. When the patent is no longer able or necessary to advance the state of engineering, it shouldn't exist.
It's not actually as bad as the pundits and iPhone fanbois suggest. Yet.
For one, to a real software applications engineer (which the part that really matters), fragmentation means "my stuff doesn't run on some units". That's possible, but it's pretty rare. The primary reason for restricting a device from running a particular application is resources ("it just wouldn't work here") and politics ("we're restricting this for absolutely no reason the user will every understand, but trust us, it's good for you... and have your tried our equivalent"). That latter one is the very definition of Apple's iTunes store. Not really hurting Apple. The former is progress.
The UI "fragmentation" is not an actual problem. Sure, if you buy a device with Motoblur or some other shell enhancement, there's a little adjustment to do. Not as much necessarily as adjusting to iOS, Windows Phone, or even moving from Android 2.0 to 3.0 or 3.0 to 4.0. This is usually what the pundits whine about, and it's meaningless.
Google isn't "giving the carriers control".. Google is releasing a free OS. Everyone wants freedom for themselves, but they get all bent out of shape when it's freedom for the other guy. Yeah, these telcos can mess with Android all they want. That's precisely why Android has 60% or whatever of the smartphone market... they have things on Android they'll never have elsewhere. To an extent, it's Google's job to make stock Android so good that no one bothers with alternate shells or anything like that, and just bloats you with unused apps. And at least 4.0/ICS deals with that -- you can't deleted a ROMed app, but you can "disappear" it. Good enough, methinks.
That same freedom that the carriers have is available to everyone. No, I'm probably not going to build a custom Android ROM for my phone. But I could. On the other hand, the fact my tablet has Honeycomb rather than Foyo on it is entirely due to the fact it's all open.. even though the Honeycomb sources were never independently released (you can actually build Honeycomb from the ICS sources now, if you must). It's either free or it's not. I'll take freedom, even knowing that includes the freedom to do evil.
Google could solve this all.. I've been advocating an improved version of the way the PC worked. As horrible as the PC was, IBM's taking the CP/M notion of the BIOS into ROM on the PC changed everything. This let Microsoft, not IBM, release new versions of MS-DOS and Windows. True, there were issues... like missing drivers.
Google should build a modern hardware abstraction layer (HAL) standard for Android. This would contain micro-drivers for every hardware device in an Android computer. Motorola, Samsung, etc. would write their own HALs for their phones, update them at will (and independently of Android)... this abstracts everything you need to know about the phone's hardware.
Android would then plug into this HAL. And this is a huge win for everyone involved.
HTC and Motorola and Samsung could still make their own custom builds, with whatever they want to put in there. But they'd only need one per generation of software, not a separate build for each device. This wouldn't just make their job easier, it would make support of older devices much, much easier -- as long as you have the resources to run the new version, it just works. Sure, they'd have to test it on the older systems to deliver their level of quality. Still, much less work than a new custom build.
These guys could push their new OS direct, but they could also distribute via the Android Market. So could Google... they could release a generic Android build for each new version, which would work on any HAL-based Android device. For business purposes, Google could allow the OEMs a window to provide support of their own before Google did... that's just a flag for your particular device in Market.
And of course, the community developers like Cyanogen(mod) would have a much easier time. No need to worry about zillions of different full builds containing all drive
Yup. I spent enough time working with legal folks to understand the whole patent thing. This was originally reading them to help lawyers decide if the patents actually read on our stuff, then working on patent applications.
Part of the fragility of many patents is simply due to the way they're written. It's not uncommon that the patent is simply not an accurate description of the "preferred embodiment" of the invention (eg, the thing you actually built), because the lawyers didn't understand it very well, and the engineers were too busy to fix these problems.
Sometimes the claims are bogus. The PTO actually approves a patent based on the description of the invention, not the claims. They are supposed to reject it if there is a claim not properly supported in thst description, but the claims are secondary in the approval process. One granted, the claims are what they "read" on you stuff to determine infringment. Snarky lawyers try to write these so they seem to cover way more than described in that actual invention.
And so on. And that's even before you get to prior art. That alone is a mess, because the PTO usually only looks at prior patents. Before 2007, they weren't even functionally allowed to use "coommon sense" as a test of obviousness, and particularly for software patents from the 80s and 90s, pretty much any one can and should be challenged, simply because the PTO didn't have software engineer examiners on staff. The Constitutional basis for patents requires a test of obviousness by one "skilled in the art".
I think Microsoft's main point here was to use fees on Android as a means to push Windows Phone. Thus, their going after the Windows Phone mfgs first, leaving the other Android suppliers to what should have been a relatively simple clean-up effort.
It's possible they have more in reserve, which could be applied in a new suit if this one is lost.
In general, they company with the patents is after money. They don't want to go to court, so they try to make the licensing easy, and the costs of fighting it high. I was a technical advisor for Commodore, when IBM went after the Amiga systems with a big stack of patents. And most were total garbage.. typical of early 80s software patents, the prior art was so thick you'd need a chainsaw to cut it. For example, IBM had a 1984 patent on cut and paste between text buffers! The thing was, IBM wanted money but also cross licensing. So their fees changed for 1, 2, or 3 or more patents. If we had fought off 24 of the first 25, it was pretty clear they'd be back with another stack of 25. It was ultimately cheaper to pay.
But if MS has put all their cards on the table, this is an even larger problem for them, particularly in today's climate. If done right by MS's legal team, these things are never supposed to go to court. If a couple of these patents are shown to have crazy and obvious prior art, the court these days might put them all up for review, rather than the individual cases you might have expected in the past. And if the patents are struck down, that kills all existing licenses, all that money, and may generate a backlash against Microsoft at the current liscensees. So they really structure things to get each company approached to be quiet, first, then roll over. B&N right now is doing pretty much everything that gives these kind of lawyers nightmares. Makes me want to put a nook on my Christmas list.
For Microsoft, I think it's change for the sake of !PANIC!
They pretty much missed the big move to mobile devices. Apple pretty much lead the way, Android made it cool, and Micro... who?
Probably because their Windows Mobile (or whatever it was called last week) was terrible, and not compelling at all. So they shifted things to Windows 7 Phone, aka, the Zune Phone. And had the brilliant idea of posing it as the smartphone for people who don't like smartphones.
As a result, Microsoft is still falling in sales percentage, even with Win7Phone being out for just over a year now.
That's a big problem for Microsoft. Perhaps an epic, ELE problem. As more people embrace mobile devices as the center of their computing experience, the PC itself drops in importance. So does Microsoft, unless they're the guys powering the mobile devices. Which they're not right now. But it's worse than that... if mobile OS dominate enough, Microsoft could lose on the desktop, too. After all, if I spend 90% of my computing time on an iPhone, what's compelling about Windows. This is the obvious reason that Apple's slowing turning MacOS into iOS for the desktop. That's critical for Apple, anyway, given that, while they lose pro users, they're gaining consumers... folks riding in on the iPhone's coattails.
So what does Microsoft do? I think the Windows 8 plan is clear -- force-feed regular Windows user a tablet-friendly experience, while there are still Windows users around. This will taste like horrible medicine, but what are they going to do ... leave? This is also going to let Microsoft copy Apple again... they can sell Metro apps in the Zune store, get you locked into their ecosystem like Apple does, etc.
Once you have been assimilated, the Microsoft-powered tablets and phones will all-of-a-sudden seem reasonable, and you'll question that goofy, PalmOS-looking UI on the iPhone and Android.
Or not.. but I think that's Microsoft's strategy -- drag Windows into the phone/tablet world in order to make those phones and tablets sellable some day. Otherwise, people just keep moving away from MS. One big reason I think this is the current plan... I was in a discussion with some of the Windows 8 developers online. They have all kinds of studies and all that claim things in Windows 8, like the App Screen replacing the App Menu, are just more efficient for users. I pointed out that navigating the Start Menu in Windows today is very fast, particularly with a wheel mouse (which they didn't seem to have considered), particularly when stored by application class (eg, I have hundreds of applications, and may not recall the name, but I know it's for Multimedia... Video... Rendering... ah, TMPGenc Mastering Suite 5!)... it's all small motor movements. But searching the whole screen, across two or more monitors... that's relatively very slow, and there's no way to categorize it at present.
The answer is always: the Start Screen is better. And no, Windows 7 UI won't be an option. It currently is, in the Windows 8 betas, so maybe it's a subject for debate still at MS. Though it sounds to me that the decision has already been made, for the reasons outlined. Not for any possible improvements in use on the desktop.
Hopefully this time they also properly account for all of the relavitistic effects due to using GPS satellites as a time base. In the first experiment, they apparently did not account for shortening of distances on earth from the satellite's reference frame. They could prove they have properly corrected for this by sending the neutrions both E->W and W-> East. If the numbers don't match, there's still a problem.
Yeah, there are a bunch of Android media players, but they're all using essentially the same low-level code at some point. This is obvious because they're all essentially flawed.
Start with a video file that's just at the edge of the system's ability to play. I was messing around with AVC in 720p, and found that on my Android tablet (nVidia Tegra 2), the system ran into trouble playing 1280x720/24p at around 6Mb/s, depending on the encoder used.
When a player can't always decode every frame, the proper thing to do is to drop frames as necessary to maintain visual sync to audio. However, on Android, in a dozen or so players, I found that's not what happens. In fact, the players work very hard to decode every video frame, effectively running the video in slow motion. However, the audio keeps going in realtime. So before long, the audio has significantly walked in front of the video. Result: unwatchable video.
This ought to be an easy fix enough fix, there are decades of historically doing this right on PCs. Windows Media Player has even done this correctly... pretty much any PC media player will (try a 1080/60p video file on a typical laptop if you doubt this... it'll generally play jerkey, and VLC is pretty bad at playing such a file, but it does maintain A/V sync, as will pretty much any other Windows or Linux media player, even when the PC isn't fast enough to actually play the video).
On the other hand, VLC is terribly inefficient on PCs. Most of the time, they don't care, and there are nice things about VLC as well -- it plays practically anything, does transcoding, and all without crapifying your system with hundreds of useless CODEC plug-ins. But on mobile devices, efficiency is the most critical thing. And you're not getting AVC and other heavy CODECs decoding on the ARM alone -- VLC can skip the latest video acceleration on PCs and get away with it. It can't on mobile devices.
And Mach (kernel developed at CMU, used in NeXT and MacOS).
Incorrect, prior art means just as much in a first to file country (which is most of the world) as in a first to invent world. The only real difference is in the race to turn your top secret stuff into a patent before the other guys turns his top secret stuff into a patent. In the past, here in the USA, it was "first to invent"... you patent gets in after the other guy's, but you can prove, via engineering notebooks or other trade secret stuff that you did it first, you can get the patent. Now, whoever files first gets the patent.
Prior art is still prior art -- if it read on the patent before the "America Invents" Act, it'll read on the patent afterwards. The only real difference is for the above scenario. If you're the second to file, your work may or may not read on the other guy's work. Under the old system, YOU get the patent if that's the case and you can prove you came up with it first. Under the new system, either he gets the patent, or your work is accepted as prior art and no one gets the patent.
Published, or already on sale, already in common use, or otherwise already available to the public.
The basic distinction is that, if you're already working on a patent for the same thing, and someone else gets their application in first, you can't win the patent, even if you can prove you invented it first. You may or may not be able to invalidate their patent application on the basis of prior art, depending on just how your technology is already being used compared to the other guy's.
Except, Windows 8 on tablets won't run a real OS. It's not WIndows, it's just the Metro apps. Everything written in Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Silverlight ... much like WebOS, except for that Silverlight part. In fact, MS has been all over the WebOS developers, getting them to switch to Metro.
Microsoft's had their Mobile Moment here, like they did with the Internet. After years of denying that computing was centered around anything but the PC, Microsoft has noticed that it's actually moving to mobile devices. And that they're hopelessly behind. Their shot a keeping is this market is the same shot they always have -- extend the desktop. Only, the desktop won't work on mobile devices -- regular Windows apps are hopelessly large, CPU intensive, and mouse-based. So the key is, create a whole new class of lightweight, mobile-friendly apps for the desktop, tablet, or phone. That's Metro. And it's not the same as Windows... though it will be. Since Windows is, of course, whatever Microsoft says it is.
RIM has echoed Nokia in more ways than one. First of all, their phones, like Nokia's SymbianOS phones, look like Android or iOS phones from a few years back. This is pretty typical of a company that doesn't think they can be challenged, and can't react to the reality that they are. After all, if SymbianOS is the only choice, or your company mandates a Blackberry, there's no need to compete. But in the fact of competition and consumer choice, they both lose.
The other way RIM has echoed Nokia is by "Osborning" themselves. Nokia announced last Spring that, basically, every smartphone product they had would soon be obsolete, they wouldn't have replacements until 2012, and they're all be Windows 7 Phone. So is it any great shock that no one wants a Nokia smartphone this year? RIM did similarly... they announced that the current BlackberryOS was going away, to be replaced next year by something based on QNX, with support for Android apps. So maybe that's good.. but who wants a Blackberry this year?
The Playbook is a decent piece of hardware, and QNX is a great basis for a reliable, portable OS. But they shipped so that it's close to useless, unless you're a Blackberry user. What's that all about?
However, Windows 7 Phone is hardly one of "the big three" yet... all Windows phone sales are still dropping, at least as of last quarter -- Windows 7 Phone sales haven't offset the mass exodus from Windows Mobile. Yet, anyway. Certainly, Microsoft has the money to push this for years if they like, just as they did with the X-Box. But they haven't won yet.
And Android "fragmentation" is really something people say when they're iOS or other platform supporters and can't think of any other FUD to report about Android. It's largely a non-issue... and take this from someone jumping between phone and tablet all the time. It just works.
No one sells 64-bit applications? I disagree -- most of my professional applications are 64-bit. Most still have 32-bit versions. But some in the same areas (Adobe Premiere, for example.. I use Sony Vegas) are now 64-bit only.
What you're going to see is a tier of applications. Not every x86 application needs to be 64-bit. If you don't need more than 2GB RAM, there's not much point.
Similarly, there will be Metro apps. These are not compiled, they're built in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight. They'll work on any version of Windows, but no heavy lifting.
I think they're strongly suggesting that the Metro stuff: HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight, is the way you build not only Metro-interface apps, but everything that runs on Windows ARM, Windows Tablet for x86, or Windows Phone. I mean, even if you could run Office or Photoshop on an x86 tablet, how do you control it without a mouse? Fingers won't cut it. And full modern Windows applications are too large for a machine with 16-32GB of storage, and possibly no expansion capability.
Metro apps, I think, are not x86 or ARM, not 32-bit or 64-bit either. They're interpreted... Javascript, HTML, CSS, and Silverlight only. They're light weight, intended for apps, not applications. They'll fit on phones and tablets just dandy, but also run on the "looks like a tablet" version of the desktop.
If it doesn't make sense, I think it's because this is kind of a desperation move by Microsoft. They see computing walking away from being desktop centric. If they don't follow, then take these new platforms over, Microsoft ceases to be the powerhouse they have been. And it's already too late to just launch a tablet OS... who's going to buy a not-Windows WIndows OS for the tablet, when you have Android or iOS to chose from, with thousands and thousands of apps? Look at the phone so far.. lots of good reviews. I'm not a fan, but non-geeks seem to like it. And yet, Microsoft is still losing market share in the smartphone market. Maybe they'll start gaining -- still a bunch of SymbianOS and RIM customers to steal, even if they can't get the iOS or Android users.
But desktop is their strength, and I'm certain Metro is their way of moving apps from the desktop to the smaller devices, en masse. Because developers will support the desktop, some even the new programming interfaces. MS may even have rules about when you're allowed to use the old APIs, and when you must build with Metro. I don't think they're looking at Photoshop in Metro, but other stuff, certainly. You probably have to build in Metro to get into the Microsoft Appstore, which is also a way to get traction with desktop users.
Microsoft has apparently had their Google Moment. Or maybe their Internet Moment, again.
Back in 2005 or so, Google decided that search -- their bread and butter -- was moving off the desktop and onto mobile devices. That should have been a signal that PERSONAL COMPUTING was doing this, particularly given how web-centric the average Joe has become lately. But I digress. The big problem was ownership of that desktop: while they couldn't control the web, at the time, Palm, Microsoft, RIM, and Nokia controlled the handset. It was all proprietary, and default search could change instantly, kicking Google off the mobile device overnight. So they bought Android, with the intent to put Android out there free and easy, preventing any mass defection to some other search engine on the handset.
Like Microsoft's discovery of the internet after everyone else was already wading knee deep, I think they have discovered that handheld devices are going to be significant. And that doesn't mean the PC dies. But look at it this way: Apple has 5% of the PC desktop. Linux, maybe a percent or two, Windows owns the rest. If that's the only personal computing platform, Microsoft has it pretty good.
But now enter handhelds. If 25%, 50%, 75% or whatever of personal computing moves to the handheld, it's not simply Microsoft not being there. It means that all of a sudden, the desktop is in the game again. If I have Android 5.0 on my phone and my tablet, maybe I'll want it on my desktop, too. Not a problem... the Linux roots were born on the desktop, it already runs there today (well, Android 2.x or 3.x). This is already happening, a little, with PCs... the iPhone and iPad have had a small coattail effect in the USA, boosting Apple's consumer market PCs to the extent that they're actually building volume, even as they drop some of the pro market stuff (the servers are dead, and the high-end Mac PCs are looking threatened -- Apple seems to want everything to be based on common laptop hardware: that's notebooks, iMacs, and Mac Minis alike).
But you can't put Windows on a tablet. Oh, sure, you can... they've been doing it for over a decade. But you need a stylus, a hard drive, and lots of money... like small notebooks before the netbook, classic Windows tablets are overpriced and underpowered.
But to live on an iPad/Android style tablet, whether its x86 or ARM powered, you have some issues. Like, 16-32GB of storage, tops. A CPU that's no more powerful than the Atom. Smaller displays. Touch interface. None of that stuff is going to support existing Windows applications.... particularly not ARMs, which would need recompiles for any native-code application (most of them). And complete rewrites for the ARM anyway.
So it looks like Microsoft's taking a different tack. They'll keep the x86 apps on the desktop and notebook PC, pretty much. The whole "Metro" interface comes with a totally new API, same thing more or less they run on the phone. That means you build applications, or more properly I guess, apps, in HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Silverlight. Which ought to run on ARM, x86 and 64-bit x86 all alike, maybe even PCs to phones. That's actually not Microsoft's original strategy -- that's just what HP was talking about doing with WebOS... which is also based on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Imagine that.
So MS is inflicting the touch-like interface on PC users to leverage the vast market for PCs onto the tablet, I guess. People will buy new PCs, and as Vista taught us, they will buy them with any old OS Microsoft tossed onto them, eh? MS isn't yet worried about desktop survival, so angering a few desktop users doesn't matter if that facilitates a whole scale migration of the Windows ecosystem to smaller devices. I bet they include a Zune Store or something similar for Windows apps written Metro-style... maybe even go all Apple on us and make that the only place you can buy them. These would potentially run on all your devices, from phone to desktop. None of the hardcore desktop stuff is involved -- they're really have two completely independent application environments for the desktop systems, but only the one for tablets and phones.
At least, that's where I see it all going.
There are no laws against copying ideas. Legit patents, sure, but not ideas. And given all the prior art, it's clear the only reason Apple has any design patents on the iPad is that the shape had so much obvious non-patent prior art, and was so simple, no one bothered to try before Apple did it.
It does seem that stupid sells, in the Republican Primary anyway.
I wonder how this all shakes out. There have got to be some old-timey behind-the-scenes guys, like Cheney and that crowd, who are looking at 2012 right now as a real chance to re-take the White House, and these nut jobbers as the only thing likely to keep them out.... other than an actual economic recovery in the next 14 months. Given all those jobs that simply don't exist here anymore, and the state of Congress, I wouldn't put money on that.
On the other hand, anyone who does win in 2012 would have the same basic problem Obama had: things are so messed up, no one's got a clue how to fix them. Being screwed up, both fiscally and politically, is no longer a reaction to something (unfunded wars, the bank collapse, the auto industry collapse, etc) but simply the new norm. But boom times, at least, if you're in political comedy.
The big difference: I think Obama had some idea he didn't know how to fix things, but naively believed he could work with Congress and advisers to get there, and was open to the challenge anyway. I think the vast majority of these Republican wing-nuts haven't the slightest clue how the US economy functions. It's the typical social conservative mode: what you don't know is fully explained by dogma. In this case, the dogma of St. Reagan ... tax cuts cure all. Even a Federal income problem. I'm not sure Obama and the Democrats have much of a clue either, and I'm pretty sure if they had THE ANSWER, and maybe the cures for Aids, Cancer, Heart Disease, and Aging, they'd still manage to conceed all relevant parts of those plans to the Republicans even before negotiations began. But this crop of Republicans (also not sure about Huntsman)... their child-like under-understanding of real world issues is not going to provide any help here.
And I wouldn't count Perry out just yet in that race to idiocy. I think he's got a better political machine in place than Bachmann... and after the whole Palin debacle, any of these folks who doesn't have their candidate on a short leash deserves the public ridicule they'll inevitably face. Bush without intellect, indeed.
And I think Mr. Murdoch may have actually been that fossil in question...