Re: Really?
the amount of PhD's that argued against the monty hall problem really put into perspective how little touting having a PhD means to me.
Apple is accused of deliberately shafting people who didn't upgrade their iPhones and iOS, in a class action lawsuit over its FaceTime video-conferencing software. This week, US district judge Lucy Koh allowed [PDF] a class-action lawsuit against the tech giant to move forward after she rejected Apple's argument that it can do …
"the amount of PhD's that argued against the monty hall problem really put into perspective how little touting having a PhD means to me."
The Littlewood-Richardson rule is an important combinatorial rule in the theory of symmetric functions. In the original article by the authors, the rule was correct but the proof was wrong. Not only that, but the example they gave illustrating the rule was also wrong.
The Monty Hall problem is subtle, and if you aren't comfortable with prior and posterior probabilities you are likely to make a mistake.
"But I given your all embracing description I really am an idiot and my PhD in Non-linear Control Engineering means nothing. Time to retire the idiot tax banner?"
I have a D.Phil. in really difficult mathematics. That doesn't stop me being an idiot sometimes. Although not as much of an idiot as to buy an iPhone (or, indeed, any flagship phone. Or a brand new car on a lease).
I cannot fathom how utterly amazing the latest feature would have to be for me to move 1000 notes from my wallet to the Cayman Islands to receive a phone.
Was that a court actually upheld a patent for peer to peer networking of video conferencing between phones written in such a general way that the only choice Apple had to avoid ultimately paying billions in royalties was to route the communication through an intermediary!
They handled the transition in a crappy way, and should have been honest that the reason they were making the change was because of a patent troll - not a bug. Then some of that anger would have been directed in the right place.
"the reason they were making the change was because of a patent troll - not a bug."
I feel I have to disagree here. For me a patent troll is a company that uses crap patents to extort money out of companies who can't afford to fight the case in court. If *Apple's* lawyer's couldn't get the patent thrown out (and indeed had their penalty payout *increased* on appeal), that's a strong indication that the patents were actually worth something, and that Apple WAS in fact using someone else's invention without paying.
The reason Apple made the change wasn't because of a patent troll, it's because they didn't want to pay to license a technology that provided a key selling point to millions of their customers, and (once they had developed their own peer-to-peer technology) they didn't want to pay a 3rd party supplier to continue to provide their customers with a service that the customers had already paid for.
As has been widely noted, something that is an obvious solution to a problem is not _supposed_ to be patentable, and if a particular technique is the only sensible way of doing something, then it clearly fails that test. How this patent failed to get thrown out is a mystery, and has nothing to do with the size of the award.
By what definition of "obvious", because it seems no one thought of the idea until someone did, and ONLY after the fact did it become noticeable. By my standard, that's not obvious (obvious should be that the average Joe should be able to think it up spontaneously, which apparently didn't happen here).
Of course it is obvious. This had been done by more than one communication product that communicated via text or voice rather than video - VOIP phones in a VOIP to VOIP call for instance. The only difference between that older technology and what Apple was doing with Facetime was that Facetime was passing video instead of text/voice, and the endpoints were smartphones instead of PCs/desk phones.
I mean, are you seriously going to argue that if you were designing a video conferencing system where two people could see/talk to each other on their smartphones, that your first instinct wouldn't be "have phone A send IP packets directly to phone B, and vice versa". That such an innovation is worthy of a patent? If you do believe that, are you currently a patent attorney or patent examiner?
The encryption is still peer to peer, so even going through an intermediary it isn't going to be any easier to snoop. They WOULD however, be able to tell which pairs of IP addresses are talking, which would otherwise be impossible - i.e. if I Facetime someone who lives in the same town and uses the same ISP, if I had true peer to peer communication it would stay pretty local and the spooks would need taps pretty much everywhere.
Going through Akamai's servers as an intermediary the way Apple is forced to do by the bogus patent, the spooks only need taps for the traffic going to/from them and they could tell who I'm talking to. That's not the same as listening in, but if they were trying to prove criminal conspiracy and had other evidence against us, just proving we talked would be worth almost as much as proving what we said.
" if a particular technique is the only sensible way of doing something, then it clearly fails that test. "
Apple reworked iOS 7 to have their 'own-brand' peer-to-peer facetiming that didn't violate the patent. Ergo the patent was not the only sensible way of doing something, and specific enough that Apple fell foul of it with their 1st implementation but not with their second
@DougS - "That "reworking" involves going through an intermediary - it is no longer directly peer to peer. "
That's not how I read the article. The reworking for iOS 6 had to go through an intermediary so as not to violate the patent. iOS 7 had an Apple-brand (non-patent-infringing) peer-to-peer reworking. Apple first tried to force its users to upgrade to iOS 7 so they could use the new Apple peer-to-peer feature rather than the intermediary (which Apple had to pay for). When many Apple users stuck to iOS 6, Apple didn't want to keep paying the intermediary and so pulled the plug on Facetime for iOS 6.
So the patent clearly does not cover all instances of peer-to-peer videocalling since iOS 7 version is non-infringing
So why couldn't the feature be added to the FaceTime on iOS 6? That doesn't make sense, as even if FaceTime uses parts of iOS itself, can't the FaceTime app or part of it have the new code added on somehow? I mean, that's how Android system apps are updated (by being downloaded as user apps), why can't Apple?
According to the last link in the original article (about the increase in the judgement amount), Apple was attempting to have the VirnetX patent invalidated. Don't know if they were successful, I assume it's still ongoing. That would make any judgement moot, but would probably not affect this particular case.
"Of course, this being Apple, if it does lose, it will appeal the decision to the ends of the earth so don't expect that money any time soon"
Also, this being a class action suit in California, I quite expect that if Apple lose, the lawyers will argue that it's too expensive to locate and pay a tiny amount to each of the individual class action members, so let's instead pay the whole sum to some advocacy groups / think thanks that promote better corporate social responsibility to avoid this sort of thing in the future.
Coincidentally, said advocacy groups / think thanks will be linked to the alma maters of the lawyers on either or both sides and/or the judge
Usually it isn't the defendant that makes that argument, but rather the plaintiffs - or more to the point the plaintiff's attorneys. The lawyers representing plaintiffs in a class action don't want to spend a lot of money and more importantly time trying to figure out who the class members are, contacting them, cutting them each a tiny check or whatever. That means waiting to buy your new Ferrari.
They want something quick and cheap, so the case can be closed and they can get tens of millions of dollars for doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work, and move on to the next class action suit.
Like to think I was an early adopter of Apple kit - £1300 at educational discount for a Mac SE with twin floppies in 1987 on which to write my PhD thesis - but the forced iOS7 upgrade to my iPad was the last straw.
To be told in the Apple Store that I had no right to roll back to iOS6 despite having "bought" the hardware did things to my blood pressure that I really don't want to recall :-)
So now it's Android all the way - which means Google's own kit basically. I love to pick up last year's model on eBay just after the latest bit of bleeding edge tech is released. Nexus 6P phone does me very well thank you, even with Oreo.
Sorry to all the script kiddies out there, but I'm not willing to give up the last few decades of UI design for something that could be rendered on a 256 colour VGA adapter and looks like a 5 year old with a set of crayons designed it.
Which is one factor in why I'll be jumping from Windows 7 to Mint - don't even get me started on the abomination that is the Windows 10 UI!
(Lights blue touchpaper and retires)
You might want to look up virtual machines some day.
The point of jumping *from* Windows is surely so that you avoid all future contact with it. Running Windows in a VM so you can get away from running Windows doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Disclaimer. I have an unnecessarily large pile of computers at home, and they mostly run Windows, except the pair of RPis that run Raspbian. (Getting Win10 IoT Core running seemed like way more work than I wanted to expend, but even then one of them would be running Raspbian anyway.)
Yes, indeed, it's a "last refuge". But it _will_ allow you to stay windows-free 99.x% of the time, except when that specific recalcitrant piece of software is involved. If truly nothing else can run it, there's no other way after all. But it's still better than staying 100% under Windows for just this one annoying exception, is it not?
Unless that Windows-ONLY software ALSO runs custom (read: unable to be virtualized) hardware, too. Read the notes about the computer-controlled lathe forced to stay on XP because it runs a custom proprietary card on an ISA bus (ISA dropped with Vista, and custom card can't be virtualized) yet MUST be accessible from a network AND the computer can't be replaced without replacing the entire six-figure machine (which was still shortly into its amortization).
Can't fault apple redesigning Face Time to avoid stepping on someones tech.
If the complainant wins, I hope she gets awarded an iPhone 5c rather than a gazillion bucks for her discomfort, upset and ruined life. What a waste of time and effort to even resort to litigation - someone needs their priorities realigning.
IMHO, natch
...and Joni Ive’s obsession/insistance that all iPhones be subjected to it because he loves users so much he wants them to get crosseyed or get seizures from the animations and parallax effects.
Of course older phones couldn’t cope with the imagined amount of eye-candy, and Timmy “The Beancounter” Cook was of course more than happy with the concept of forced update/upgrade cycles, so it was made so.
Where normally Apple licenses all kinds of tech from all kinds of companies, and/or buys the company that supplies it, and/or cerates a new version of a piece of software that includes a workaround, this time around they decided to stick it out, because of sweet sweet upgrades. And don’t tell me an entire operating system has to be rewritten just to ping an app off a server - that's just PHB talk. A quiet payoff and an update to Facetime would have been enough.
Bitten because I made the mistake of installing iOS 7 on my iPhone, turning what once was a nicely usable piece of kit became someone else’s toy for me to look at and wait for stuff to happen.
I ran into a similar problem with a 1st edition Microsoft Surface. It was something I purchased for development testing but soon became useless. Having a new granddaughter on the west coast I started using it as a dedicated Skype device. One day Skype was no longer supported and even the web version failed. I now use it as a dedicated photo frame. Ani is so cute. :)
Interestingly, it wasn't long before someone gave me an iPhone 4(ios 9.3.5) which wasn't supported by their new carrier. I didn't need it for a phone but I've been able to use Facetime via my home wifi. It works great.
That's not quite what happened here. Apple stopped using the infringing tech, and updated Facetime to work via an intermediary server. At the time it worked on iOS 6. Everyone was reasonably happy (except Apple, who had to pay for the server farm.)
Later, Apple came up with a non-infringing version of the peer-to-peer tech that didn't require a server, and updated Facetime to use it. iOS 6 was now out of support, so it didn't get the update.
Now Apple was in a situation where they were running a chat server ONLY for iOS 6 users. The courts didn't force them to shut that down; they decided to themselves, in order to save money. In hindsight they probably should have fessed up to this instead of trying to make excuses, but this is a frequent Apple problem. (Their update that slowed down devices with crap batteries to stop them from spontaneously rebooting was similarly well-meaning, but poorly communicated.)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm generally anti-planned-obsolescence, but I don't think it's realistic to expect a company to keep running a service in perpetuity just because they sold a device that used it. If this is upheld I expect future suits against IoT companies who end-of-life products, and game developers that shut down multiplayer servers for old games.