Posts by Steve Todd 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
If you want a bloody parallel printer port then what exactly is wrong with buying a PCI or PCX-e adapter card for a desktop PC? They'll support all the funny ECP/EPP modes that USB adapters won't. If your OS won't support PCI-x then it won't support a modern motherboard with a parallel port, so why the heck should we all pay for a port that we don't want and won't use?
Most users only need that subset. Why should they pay more and carry around extra weight for something they don't want. YOU may need the capabilities of an ultrabook, and notebooks aren't going to die out any time soon so you don't have to panic, but this is about the mass market not you.
The Star interface was quite a lot different to Mac OS. It didn't do things like redrawing uncovered parts of a window and it had no concept of a file system. On top of the changes that Apple made so they could run on hardware costing less than 1/10th of the Xerox system they literally wrote the book on how to design GUI apps on top of that, so no they didn't just take what was there and invent nothing.
in the quality of some of the posts here.
Firstly there are those who blame the judge or the legal system. For the most part they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - settling commercial disputes based on evidence and the law. Sometimes they come down in favour of one side, sometimes the other. If a particular decision comes down against your side of choice that doesn't imply bias, mostly it implies that you're not in possession of the full facts and/or bias of your own.
Secondly the patent system. While it is far from perfect, it doesn't let you do things like take an existing invention, slap the words "on a mobile device" on the end and call it your own. There has to be an inventive step of your own that makes it work on a mobile device (it's actually ONLY that bit that's covered, the previous inventor(s) own the prior bits). A patent that references many others doesn't make it invalid, it just limits what is being claimed. It is saying "we acknowledge this prior art, we are doing something patentable above any beyond what it covers".
Next bothering to check the detail of a patent. The number of commenters who don't bother to check what it patented, or who scan it only briefly and come up with a ridiculously simplified view of what's covered. This patent is a prime example. It actually covers how to take the results from multiple search sources and, using heuristic methods, filter and order them to give the most likely results first.
Finally failing to realise that most patents can be worked around. Companies can find other ways of solving a problem (some actually better than the patented method). Many of the best invention of the past were work-arounds for other people's patents, so no, they don't stifle invention, quite the opposite.
At the very most patents last for 25 years. That's the whole point of a patent. The deal is that a company provides full details of how an invention works in exchange for a limited time, government backed monopoly in the use and/or licensing of the invention. The data detectors patent that Apple has used against HTC has only 4 more years of life for example.
"No longer must they submit to the pretence that the network operator actually had something to do with making the handset"
What, like the Orange San Fransisco for example? Or the Vodafone Smart II? HTC may have gone up in the world, but the cell companies are still branding lower tier manufacturers hardware as their own.
Apple's DESIGN patent says that their device is a thin, rectangular shape, with corners of a defined radius, a glass screen covering the whole front surface, having a thick black bezel of certain proportions. The rear surface is plain with the edges curving at a certain radius to form the sides. The UI isnt even mentioned in the design patent, and it's the design patent that got the ban.
That's just a cut down description BTW, there are MANY ways in which an Android tablet may be a flat rectangular shape with rounded corners and still not infringe on Apple's design.
Samsung went out of their way to make the Galaxy Tab look like the iPad, even down to hurredly redesigning it when Apple showed off the iPad 2. If they could have avoided the blatant copying they wouldn't have reached this point.
As for the UI, once again it's Samsung's TouchWiz skin that goes out of its way to look like iOS. Stock Android builds and other skins are much more dissimilar.
Apparently you haven't read the patent description at all. The design patent covers far more elements in combination than you claim (all or a large proportion needing to be copied in order to infringe), and it's perfectly possible for other manufacturers to design tablets that won't fall foul of it (indeed many have).
That claim is even more feeble than Zodd's contention that the iPad had to look the way it did because it contained some Samsung manufactured parts.
Have you ever USED windows 3.1? About the only thing it had in common was that it used icons. The desktop wasn't laid out in a grid, you didn't even launch apps from there. You had to open Program Manager, which contained folders, which in turn contained apps that could be launched.
It's well known that Samsung went out of their way to make their TouchWiz skin look as close as possible to ios, right down to the icons. Stock Android 3 and 4 is nowhere near as similar.
You seem to have failed to grasp the difference between a design patent and a regular patent. It seems to be a common problem among the fandroids.
A DESIGN patent is about the ornamental design of a thing, what makes its shape distinctive. The classic example is the coke bottle shape. People have been making bottles for centuries, you say, how dair Coke patent the shape of a bottle. What Coke had was a long list of shapes and curves which went to make up the completed shape of their bottle. Providing their competitors changed enough of those parameters they were free to make bottles of their own, they just couldn't make them look like Coke's design.
Just like this Apple have a long list of elements that in combination make their design unique. Samsung skated too close for Apples comfort in the number of elements that they copied and found themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Later Samsung designs reduced their similarity and aren't at issue here. The Galaxy SIII for example appears to have been designed by their legal department to look as little as possible like an IPhone. Prior to the iPad no tablet PC looked like the iPad (pointing at digital photo frames that looked a bit like the iPad from one side isn't relevant), and neither do many tablet designs today so the "form follows function" argument is bogus also.
You appear to have failed to understand the difference between a retail mark-up and patent fees. There are a known set of mark-ups between the factory gate and a retail shelf. You pay them every day and they can add up to 2/3rds of the retail price of an electronic device.
Modern electronic devices embody 100's if not 1000's of patented technologies. If each patent holder were to demand 1% of the RETAIL price of a device in royalties then not only would they be asking for part of the shippers, wholesalers and retailers margin, they'd also be asking for a total in excess of the retail price of the device.
Its for this reason that most patent fees are fixed amounts so they can be included in the factory gate price.
If they've committed their patents as FRAND as part of a standard then they are most certainly NOT allowed to charge what they like. A patent that is part of a standard garantees income, but at the cost of limiting what can be charged. If a patent isn't committed as FRAND then the standards body will find another way of doing things that doesn't infringe.
Motorola were part of the 3G standards setting body and thus committed to reveal and license any relevant patents under FRAND. They've being trying to move the goalpost over what FRAND means, and trying to claim that one of their patents applies to h.264 after the fact.
The problem is that "Speak for Yourself" was designed by people who had been trained by Prentke on their system to mimic the way the Prentke system worked. Bad start. They were warned that it infringed the patent and offered licensing terms. Having refused they then found themselves involved in a court case (big surprise).
The possible outcomes are :-
1) they agree licensing terms and the case is dropped
2) the court finds that they don't infringe the patent or that it is invalid
3) the court finds the patent to be valid and infringed. They pay damages and a license fee
4) ditto, but instead the app is modified to prevent it infringing and no fee is payable.
5) ditto, but SfY goes broke.
In only 1 of these cases are the current users in any trouble.
There seems to be some confusion going on here. There are TWO versions of the surface tablet. One is a Tegra 3 powered WinRT machine, which is expected to sell for the same kind of money as an iPad. Being Arm powered it won't be able to run any of the back catalog of Windows code.
The second tablet is Core i5 powered and is likely to be priced like an Ultra Book. It is large and more powerful than its sibling, and WILL be able to run old code, allong with providing a digitiser pen. it will however be unlikely to run for more than 5 hours on battery as its only got 40w hours of capacity.
Both are of course still vapourware and subject to change.
The big mistake is in using a 16:9 screen.
More often than not tablets are used in portrait mode. In this case 16:9 is not pretty (you could reasonably argue the only case it IS useful is for watching video, in which case it seems a bit steep compared to a dedicated video device). MS, like ASUS are trying to force you to use the device in landscape mode (where's the portrait kickstand?) and it's not always a good fit.
The result is that these machines are competing against thin and light laptops rather than living fully in the tablet marketplace.
I think you'll find that someone has been pulling your plonker. $10/per copy may pay for downgrade rights (7/Vista to XP for example) or to put a standard corporate build on a PC that came with a Windows license already. VLK licensing is also rather different to OEM licenses (you get only one key for the whole company that can be invalidated if you misbehave).
The big OEMs are reconned to pay $30-40 per OEM license. Win 8 RT will include Office so MS are trying to get away with charging $80-90 for the bundle. That's what the OEMs are saying, not a guess BTW.
He actually addressed the DCMA issue in his original blog post. From his lawyers response :
"His post highlighted the fact that sending a takedown notice underthe Digital Millennium Copyright Act was not likely to solve the problem, given the quantity ofcomics found on Funny Junk’s site and the fact that users constantly upload new material"
or to quote directly : "I realize that trying to police copyright infringement on the internet is like strolling into theVietnamese jungle circa 1964 and politely asking everyone to use squirt guns."
So Mr O, other than spending his life searching for uploaded content from his site and sending takedown requests, what exactly was he supposed to do?
There are many other apps in the Apple app store that do a similar job. NONE of them are being sued by PRC because they don't use their patented UI.
This isn't a case of disabled children being deprived of software that could help them, it's about one manufacturer being sued by another for copying a specific design. Having decided that they're probably not going to win in court the offending company seems to be trying to win in the court of public opinion instead.
Firstly it's never been just a case of dropping an app into the app store and waiting for the money to roll in. You have to market it, and word-of-mouth is a time-honoured way. Facebook is an extension of that, but there are plenty of review sites, magazines, columns on el Reg etc that do the same job.
Secondly the top 10 lists have never been the only way to discover apps. Searching by name/keyword/phrase, then looking at user reviews and ratings is a method used by many if not most folks.
If authors havn't done their homework, got the word out about their program and got some decent reviews then they're going to struggle to be seen among the crowd. How is this Apple's fault?
and you're going to fit that lot in an AIO case with propper cooling and ventilation just how?
If you want a fully modular system with standardised components it's always going to be bigger and clunkier than will fit into what is basically a monitor case. Live with that or buy a mini tower, your choice.
Try going to DELL or HP's website and doing so. By the time you've reached a spec roughly equivalent to even the current ageing Mac Pro you'll have blown more than £4K
Oh, and there are many Pro software packages for the Mac that business and academia make good, practical use of. People who think otherwise are demonstrating their own ignorence.
Here we go again.
The patent in question dates back to 1996 and covers two related things :
1) recognising types of data (be that a phone number, email address etc.)
2) providing a context sensitive menu based on the type of data (do you want to call the number, send a text etc)
If you can find prior art (I.e. before 1996) that does both of these things then I'm sure that HTC would be interested to hear from you. As they've been through a whole legal process and not found anything that counts then HTC have to find a way around step 2, though they could provide direct actions (for example tapping a number dials it).
Only if you are a complete idiot. There's the "Brightness and Wallpaper" tab in the Settings app, you can double tap the home button and swipe right to access the volume and brightness controls from within an app, or apps themselves have access to an API for setting brightness and can present their own brightness control.
Of course only a complete idiot would suggest Flash as a way forward or the Playbook as a good choice for schools.
So you want to buy a million tablets (costing what? £200 million for something robust and with a decent spec?) hoping that this will encourage developers to write software that will be ready, tested and approved in a year or two. At the same time the developers know there's a market more than 50 times that size where they are less likely to get pirated.
Good luck with that.
If the market opens and there are huge gains then the stock was under priced (that extra cash could have gone to the company not investors).
If the market opens and the stock plummets then the stock was over priced (and you have cross investors).
If it sticks at about its offer price (up 5% on the day according to the article) then they've got the price spot on. Where's the problem?
Given this is mostly about data detectors (highlighting and hot linking telephone numbers in emails, texts etc), and HTC were given a 3 month extension to sort their kit out so that it didn't infringe (just like Apple had to disable push email in Germany), then screw HTC if they can't prove in short order that their kit is compliant.
Small world. My family comes from Teesside and I learned to fly there. Leeds is an interesting field to land at as, from memory, the 32 end stops at a cliff. It tends to make for tricky winds on approach. It was however part of the qualifying triangular route and, as my instructor used to say, on a good day you could see Leeds Bradford from Teesside.
If you need to island hop to cross the Atlantic then your aircraft is way too small for Heathrow anyway. It's a major hub catering for the big airlines and people with their own airforces.
For GA you're looking at Biggin Hill, London City etc, and the paperwork isn't trivial for any international flight.
Apple have never reported Mac sales as including iPads, iPhones or iPod touches. The argument over whether or not to include tablets in the PC numbers is one between the analyst community, not Apple, so trying to blame them for how a 3rd party company chooses to interpret the data is the height of stupidity.
Subsequently trying to claim that this wasn't what you meant, that you were talking about some other story, that 10Ks somehow mix up the numbers (they don't), and that yar boo sucks I must be stupid for thinking otherwise does you no favours.
I don't still have it, but I built one in kit form. The NS8060 (SC/MP) CPU it used was dreadful. It was pretty much a 4 bit chip with 8 bit extensions. It had no subtract command, instead you had to set the carry bit and issue a compliment and add instruction. It didn't have a stack pointer (you had, by convention, to load one of the index registers with the return address of a sub routine) and the instruction pointer only had a 12 bit adder so it would roll over at 4k boundaries.
Man was it slow. One of the sample programs that came with it was MINIL (miniature interpretive language). I recoded it in 6502 assembler and got several orders of magnitude better performance. It's amazing that it didn't put you off of the whole idea of computing.
You've got that the wrong way around. The ITU moved the goalposts. Legally 4G is HSPA+ or faster because that's what they say it is. LTE doesn't meet their original definition either, so THERE ARE NO CURRENT 4G DEVICES OR NETWORKS if you try to enforce the original meaning.
They created a new name for the original 4G definition. That's now IMT-Advanced, so when we finally get LTE-Advanced the marketeers can use that label.
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