True, its $10/mo for Photoshop (FTFA: "For those who don't want the entire suite, Adobe offers subscriptions to individual programs. And now they're cheaper, down from $20 a month to $10 a month, Morris said.")
it's almost £50/month (about US$75) for the suite, and that's today when they're trying to convince us all to switch to renting our software.
$50/mo is the full-suite subscription price without the discount for CS licensees. The people they are trying to convince to make the switch (as opposed to new purchasers) pay even less for the full suite.
FTFA: "The subscription costs $50 a month for those who sign up for a year's commitment, though Adobe has discounted the monthly price to $30 for those with earlier versions of CS and has just added a $20 price for those with the newest CS6 version that Adobe released last year."
Gates continued to toe the party line insofar as he praised the benefits of Microsoft's tablets and Windows 8 while explaining that iPad users are frustrated because they have trouble typing and creating documents.
On what planet is this even approximately true? I can type and create documents on my iPhone (the only iOS device I own, but not the only one I've used.) Its, obviously, a rather cramped form factor for that, but the functionality is there. On an iPad, particularly with one of the many keyboards, this is even easier -- just as easy as it would be on a PC (or, presumably, a Windows-based tablet with external keyboard, like the Surface.)
They don't have Office there.
That's more of a problem for Microsoft than for the users.
Even in companies where you aren't even spending your own money, people won't necessarily spend money as if they never had to earn it. The willingness of corporations to latch onto old versions of Windows and Office are a testament to this.
I think that the willingness of corporations to do that is that upgrading Windows and Office tend to be particularly disruptive, with substantial non-license-related costs to either upgrade the whole organization or to maintain parallel versions across the organization when doing a phased roll-out.
Presumably, companies maintaining a subscription model (whether with cloud-based on locally-installed software) will be much more inclined to make frequent incremental, non-disruptive changes than the less-frequent, more-disruptive changes that come when you are trying to motivate people to purchase an upgrade.
What exactly would this "Premium Content" be? What do they have in that crappy little window that is so wonderful and "Premium" that I will gladly pay them for it?
Instead, car companies intend to offer software upgradable vehicles through 4G connectivity and data storage and entertainment streaming through the cloud, which means they have to worry less about onboard hardware reliability and standardization.
Making a device "software upgradeable" to add features it wasn't originally intended to have makes hardware reliability and robustness more, not less, important.
It cannot log the specifics of the information, since that defeats the entire point of avoiding a discoverable record of evil.
Contrary to the summary, the point of the invention isn't avoid "a discoverable record of evil", its enabling organizations to prevent, detect, and address threats to the organization in the form of policy or legal violations by people within the organization. Logging is not inconsistent with that function.
I think the key new thing that most people are missing is the first phrase after "comprising" in claim 1: "detecting a context of the electronic document", and the fact that pretty much everything in the patent (including the identification of whether particular phrases are problematic) depends on the detected context. Its not simple blind phrase checking.
The patent system is patently rotten if Google is granted this patent, and they actually succeed in using it to limit competition.
The patent system is patently rotten independently of that, but most of the arguments being used to dismiss the novelty of this invention in this thread appear to be missing the key point in the method.
I didn't read the patent application but examining emails and other documents for risky content that increase liability seems to have been long-since done and fairly run-of-the-mill considering that it is already in use and has been for some time.
That's the purpose (which isn't patentable even if it is novel), not the method (which is what is patented). The fact that the purpose is served by some existing solution doesn't mean that a new method to acheive the purpose isn't patentable.
That's the idea of this patent. The system will let you know if what you wrote in an email about shady dealings will be incriminating, so you can re-word it. It's a lawyer in a box helping you facilitate shady actions with minimal discoverable evidence.
Equally, it can be used to not do it; how it is used depends on the users intent, it isn't inherent in the patented method. (Although "violations of company policy", called out in the patent as well as violations of the law, are most interesting for users who are trying to control what is done to align with policy and less useful -- actively harmful to the company, in fact -- if individual email users use it for concealment.)
Certainly, I know in many jobs I've had there would have been less cleanup for other people to do if staff that were innocently ignorant of details of company policy and/or controlling law had something reading their email that caught potential problems and pointed them in the right direction before they sent out emails to customers, contractors, etc.
If a product dies without an extended warranty, you eat one-way shipping and the manufacturer eats one-way shipping. You pay for the repair parts and labor at a significantly inflated price.
Or, save money and buy a new, current product.
For example, a single logic board or display panel replacement from Apple costs more than AppleCare.
Yes, it does.
And in the term of an AppleCare contract, the vast majority of purchasers will not need a single logic board or display panel replacement.
On many laptops, I got several times as much out of AppleCare as I paid in, once you add up the numbers.
If this is really true, you are way out in a tail of the statistical distribution; this is good for you, of course, but still not something to generalize from.
But if you know you are accident prone, or have kids that break everything, or something to that effect that is covered, and the warranty company does not know that, you can still have an expected positive return.
Which is why warranties only cover manufacturer's defects, and accident protection programs are charged more than warranties (and still include coverage limitations and other procedural hurdles designed to trip people up that actually try to make claims) to make a significant profit margin after accounting for the fact that only the most accident prone are likely to buy into them.
If FourSquare wants to offer cheaper, better extended warranties paired with accident protection, more power to them, but that's a very different thing than an extended warranty alone.
Economically, its the same thing. The only way it can a third-party product warranty can be a good deal for both the firm offering it and the customer is if the warranty-offering firm can get substantial discounts on service/replacement that are not available to the public. Otherwise, its mathematically impossible for it to be both profitable and, on average, a good deal for the consumer, and given that there aren't the catastrophic cost issues with most products that exist with health insurance or automobile liability insurance, the consumer is better off taking the amount the insurance would cost and sticking it in the bank, and paying for service or replacement as needed.
(Also, in addition to the financial savings, the consumer ends up with more flexibility of choice than under a warranty plan this way.)
I've actually (at CompUSA, when it was still in business) had salespeople not backpedal, even when I made it clear that I was either buying without the extended warranty or taking my business elsewhere. Hard sells on extended warranties are often due to the salesperson (or their boss) getting an incentive to sell extended warranties (or, worse yet, an incentive based on the percentage of extended warranty eligible sales that include an extended warranty). This may be a firm, direct incentive or an indirect incentive in the form of the statistic being gathered and being used in evaluations, either way it amounts to the same thing -- a microoptimization that motivates behavior which is, in net, bad for the firm (unless they are actually losing money on base unit sales and making it up on extended warranties).
with product warranties you're out no more that what you've already paid.
Its probably better to look at it as being out the lesser of the use value or replacement cost of the product, which, unless it was discontinued with no equivalent substitute or you purchased it on some kind of wild promotional deal, is probably less than "what you've already paid".
Which just makes the case even stronger against them.
If you still have a plugin, how does that make it easier to develop DRM'd apps? It seems like you're arguing both sides.
If there is a standard mechanism for interfacing the plugin with non-DRM web content, it makes it easier to build systems that leverage open-web technologies for everything except the content that the owner demands be protected by DRM.
If you have to use not only a different plugin, but a different method of interfacing with the plugin, and a different mechanism for delivering the plugin, and maybe not even have plugin capability on some HTML-supporting platforms, it makes it much more attractive to not even bother trying to build your app on standard web technologies, but rely entirely on something like Flash or platform-specific native apps.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the sense that Android is an OS - both really describe a family of related OSes
Wrong.
Android is an OS in the sense that Kubuntu or Windows is an OS; its a particular OS with a specifically-defined feature set controlled by a particular distributor.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the almost the same way that "things in someway derived from the Android Open Source Project" are an OS -- in short, its not an OS at all.
And those content producers can either write their own damn browser plugin
Which is exactly what the standardized provision for DRM in HTML5 supports. It just allows it to be done in a way which segregates support for DRM plugins from any other plugin support. The main motivation is not to enable DRM (which is already possible, and widely implemented, using existing plugin mechanisms) but to standardize the plugin mechanism for this use case (which is one use case of plugins that browser vendors aren't aiming to replace with non-plugin web technologies.)
But if it's possible for people of all races and genders to live their lives without discrimination, then we, as a society, don't have a racism problem.
This is not true in any sense in which it is relevant to the real world. Certainly, there are senses of "possible" for which I would agree with that statement, but they aren't senses of "possible" for which the premise of the hypothetical presented is true in the real world.
As long as the real world experience of a significant subset of the population involves experiencing race-based discrimination, we have a racism problem. (Gender is irrelevant, of course, to racism, but replace "race" with "gender" and "racism" with "sexism" and the same is true.)
Zero tolerance rules were instituted because application of penalties was uneven. So for example, a black student doing science experiments would get a felony charge whereas a white student who kills a sibling is not charged. So what do we have here? We have people complaining the application of penalties from the prosecutor are uneven AND complaining that zero tolerance from the school is wrong. It's like people flipping a coin and getting upset with heads or tails.
"Misusing discretion" (the problem that motivated institutions that kept getting sued because they kept misusing the discretion to adopt zero tolerance) and "removing discretion so that the circumstance of particular cases can't be considered appropriately" (zero tolerance) aren't the only choices.
The first can be the result of either malice or incompetence, the second the result of a deliberate choice not to permit competence.
Being upset at both is not people flipping a coin and getting upset with heads or tails, its people being told "Heads I win, tails you lose" and being upset at either choice.
But I would have preferred if it was worded as here are some edge case bugs that need fixing before BTRFS is used in our scenario, rather than that these were show stoppers...
I don't see how that's any different: "Show stoppers" means "things that are unacceptable in our scenario".
Not all "20%"'s are created equal. For instance, if the temperature outside increases from 5C to 6C
5C to 6C is less than a 1% increase in temperature.
(Celsius isn't a ratio scale where 0 of the quantity measured is 0 on the scale; Kelvin is -- 5C to 6C is 278K to 279K; at the range of 5000C to 6000C, the difference between C and K is small and doesn't effect ratios much, but at 5-6C that's not true.)
I haven't said throw away HTML - I've said stop standardizing it.
If by "stop standardizing it" you mean "stop developing new standards", then, well, just no. No one is stopping you from using the existing standards and ignoring new ones, if that's what you want to do, but there are lots of good reasons for standardizing new functionality. (Most of which, you will notice, even when it is called part of "HTML5", isn't in the HTML standard proper anyway, but in separate standards that are maintained by the same groups.)
None of this is difficult. It all works in browsers today.
And its not likely to stop working with interoperable standards that eliminate the need to use nonstandard hacks to accomplish commonly-desired behaviors.
Admittedly, people whose primary skills are focussed around building those non-standard hacks will need to update their skills or find them obsolete, but that's not a reason to stop improving the common platform provided by web standards.
Last but not least: enough with the XML hatred. XHTML5, with proper XML syntax, should be the focus instead of an afterthought. XML syntax compliance isn't that hard or time consuming. Markup languages are for machine consumption, not human readability.
Markup languages are for both, that's what distinguishes markup languages from, say, binary data formats. And HTML5 has parsing rules that are just as unambiguous for machine reading as XMLs, defined in the standard, and don't need the verbosity of XML to acheive it.
But isn't it part of the beauty of the web delivery model that it works across different devices and OS's without having to target them separately/distribute a new runtime environment (repeating Java/Flash..)?
The beauty is that there is a useful set of core technologies that are widely implemented, but that set of core technologies is delivered in a form of a fairly heavyweight runtime environment (called a "web browser"); if you want people to use your content, you have to still have to make sure they have the right runtime environment. (That's also why the standard feature set of the open web keeps growing, too; there is a constant tension between proprietary browser extensions -- either external or browser-specific internal extensions to standardized functionality -- or non-browser platforms providing new technologies, and those getting subsumed into the standard so that you don't need a proprietary runtime or particular browser to use them.)
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True, its $10/mo for Photoshop (FTFA: "For those who don't want the entire suite, Adobe offers subscriptions to individual programs. And now they're cheaper, down from $20 a month to $10 a month, Morris said.")
$50/mo is the full-suite subscription price without the discount for CS licensees. The people they are trying to convince to make the switch (as opposed to new purchasers) pay even less for the full suite.
FTFA: "The subscription costs $50 a month for those who sign up for a year's commitment, though Adobe has discounted the monthly price to $30 for those with earlier versions of CS and has just added a $20 price for those with the newest CS6 version that Adobe released last year."
On what planet is this even approximately true? I can type and create documents on my iPhone (the only iOS device I own, but not the only one I've used.) Its, obviously, a rather cramped form factor for that, but the functionality is there. On an iPad, particularly with one of the many keyboards, this is even easier -- just as easy as it would be on a PC (or, presumably, a Windows-based tablet with external keyboard, like the Surface.)
That's more of a problem for Microsoft than for the users.
I think that the willingness of corporations to do that is that upgrading Windows and Office tend to be particularly disruptive, with substantial non-license-related costs to either upgrade the whole organization or to maintain parallel versions across the organization when doing a phased roll-out.
Presumably, companies maintaining a subscription model (whether with cloud-based on locally-installed software) will be much more inclined to make frequent incremental, non-disruptive changes than the less-frequent, more-disruptive changes that come when you are trying to motivate people to purchase an upgrade.
Quite possibly nothing.
You aren't the whole market.
Making a device "software upgradeable" to add features it wasn't originally intended to have makes hardware reliability and robustness more, not less, important.
Contrary to the summary, the point of the invention isn't avoid "a discoverable record of evil", its enabling organizations to prevent, detect, and address threats to the organization in the form of policy or legal violations by people within the organization. Logging is not inconsistent with that function.
I think the key new thing that most people are missing is the first phrase after "comprising" in claim 1: "detecting a context of the electronic document", and the fact that pretty much everything in the patent (including the identification of whether particular phrases are problematic) depends on the detected context. Its not simple blind phrase checking.
The patent system is patently rotten independently of that, but most of the arguments being used to dismiss the novelty of this invention in this thread appear to be missing the key point in the method.
That's the purpose (which isn't patentable even if it is novel), not the method (which is what is patented). The fact that the purpose is served by some existing solution doesn't mean that a new method to acheive the purpose isn't patentable.
Equally, it can be used to not do it; how it is used depends on the users intent, it isn't inherent in the patented method. (Although "violations of company policy", called out in the patent as well as violations of the law, are most interesting for users who are trying to control what is done to align with policy and less useful -- actively harmful to the company, in fact -- if individual email users use it for concealment.)
Certainly, I know in many jobs I've had there would have been less cleanup for other people to do if staff that were innocently ignorant of details of company policy and/or controlling law had something reading their email that caught potential problems and pointed them in the right direction before they sent out emails to customers, contractors, etc.
Or, save money and buy a new, current product.
Yes, it does.
And in the term of an AppleCare contract, the vast majority of purchasers will not need a single logic board or display panel replacement.
If this is really true, you are way out in a tail of the statistical distribution; this is good for you, of course, but still not something to generalize from.
Which is why warranties only cover manufacturer's defects, and accident protection programs are charged more than warranties (and still include coverage limitations and other procedural hurdles designed to trip people up that actually try to make claims) to make a significant profit margin after accounting for the fact that only the most accident prone are likely to buy into them.
Patching zero holes also won't keep it from sinking, and, indeed, is pretty much guaranteed to do less to delay the sinking than patching one hole.
Economically, its the same thing. The only way it can a third-party product warranty can be a good deal for both the firm offering it and the customer is if the warranty-offering firm can get substantial discounts on service/replacement that are not available to the public. Otherwise, its mathematically impossible for it to be both profitable and, on average, a good deal for the consumer, and given that there aren't the catastrophic cost issues with most products that exist with health insurance or automobile liability insurance, the consumer is better off taking the amount the insurance would cost and sticking it in the bank, and paying for service or replacement as needed.
(Also, in addition to the financial savings, the consumer ends up with more flexibility of choice than under a warranty plan this way.)
I've actually (at CompUSA, when it was still in business) had salespeople not backpedal, even when I made it clear that I was either buying without the extended warranty or taking my business elsewhere. Hard sells on extended warranties are often due to the salesperson (or their boss) getting an incentive to sell extended warranties (or, worse yet, an incentive based on the percentage of extended warranty eligible sales that include an extended warranty). This may be a firm, direct incentive or an indirect incentive in the form of the statistic being gathered and being used in evaluations, either way it amounts to the same thing -- a microoptimization that motivates behavior which is, in net, bad for the firm (unless they are actually losing money on base unit sales and making it up on extended warranties).
Its probably better to look at it as being out the lesser of the use value or replacement cost of the product, which, unless it was discontinued with no equivalent substitute or you purchased it on some kind of wild promotional deal, is probably less than "what you've already paid".
Which just makes the case even stronger against them.
If there is a standard mechanism for interfacing the plugin with non-DRM web content, it makes it easier to build systems that leverage open-web technologies for everything except the content that the owner demands be protected by DRM.
If you have to use not only a different plugin, but a different method of interfacing with the plugin, and a different mechanism for delivering the plugin, and maybe not even have plugin capability on some HTML-supporting platforms, it makes it much more attractive to not even bother trying to build your app on standard web technologies, but rely entirely on something like Flash or platform-specific native apps.
Wrong.
Android is an OS in the sense that Kubuntu or Windows is an OS; its a particular OS with a specifically-defined feature set controlled by a particular distributor.
GNU/Linux is an OS in the almost the same way that "things in someway derived from the Android Open Source Project" are an OS -- in short, its not an OS at all.
Which is exactly what the standardized provision for DRM in HTML5 supports. It just allows it to be done in a way which segregates support for DRM plugins from any other plugin support. The main motivation is not to enable DRM (which is already possible, and widely implemented, using existing plugin mechanisms) but to standardize the plugin mechanism for this use case (which is one use case of plugins that browser vendors aren't aiming to replace with non-plugin web technologies.)
This is not true in any sense in which it is relevant to the real world. Certainly, there are senses of "possible" for which I would agree with that statement, but they aren't senses of "possible" for which the premise of the hypothetical presented is true in the real world.
As long as the real world experience of a significant subset of the population involves experiencing race-based discrimination, we have a racism problem. (Gender is irrelevant, of course, to racism, but replace "race" with "gender" and "racism" with "sexism" and the same is true.)
"Misusing discretion" (the problem that motivated institutions that kept getting sued because they kept misusing the discretion to adopt zero tolerance) and "removing discretion so that the circumstance of particular cases can't be considered appropriately" (zero tolerance) aren't the only choices.
The first can be the result of either malice or incompetence, the second the result of a deliberate choice not to permit competence.
Being upset at both is not people flipping a coin and getting upset with heads or tails, its people being told "Heads I win, tails you lose" and being upset at either choice.
I don't see how that's any different: "Show stoppers" means "things that are unacceptable in our scenario".
5C to 6C is less than a 1% increase in temperature.
(Celsius isn't a ratio scale where 0 of the quantity measured is 0 on the scale; Kelvin is -- 5C to 6C is 278K to 279K; at the range of 5000C to 6000C, the difference between C and K is small and doesn't effect ratios much, but at 5-6C that's not true.)
If by "stop standardizing it" you mean "stop developing new standards", then, well, just no. No one is stopping you from using the existing standards and ignoring new ones, if that's what you want to do, but there are lots of good reasons for standardizing new functionality. (Most of which, you will notice, even when it is called part of "HTML5", isn't in the HTML standard proper anyway, but in separate standards that are maintained by the same groups.)
And its not likely to stop working with interoperable standards that eliminate the need to use nonstandard hacks to accomplish commonly-desired behaviors.
Admittedly, people whose primary skills are focussed around building those non-standard hacks will need to update their skills or find them obsolete, but that's not a reason to stop improving the common platform provided by web standards.
Markup languages are for both, that's what distinguishes markup languages from, say, binary data formats. And HTML5 has parsing rules that are just as unambiguous for machine reading as XMLs, defined in the standard, and don't need the verbosity of XML to acheive it.
The beauty is that there is a useful set of core technologies that are widely implemented, but that set of core technologies is delivered in a form of a fairly heavyweight runtime environment (called a "web browser"); if you want people to use your content, you have to still have to make sure they have the right runtime environment. (That's also why the standard feature set of the open web keeps growing, too; there is a constant tension between proprietary browser extensions -- either external or browser-specific internal extensions to standardized functionality -- or non-browser platforms providing new technologies, and those getting subsumed into the standard so that you don't need a proprietary runtime or particular browser to use them.)