Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: The only good thing about Bing

Nice. Carrying on the fine tradition of Gnu's Not Unix and Thing Without An Interesting Name.

Re: I fail to understand

They do it because allowing Google to control so many areas of the web leads to them being at a competitive disadvantage. Take YouTube for instance. It is by far the market dominant site for sharing video. MS wanted to build a YouTube app for Windows Phone. In fact they did, and complied with all Google's TOS and just wanted to make one feature equivalent to those on Android and iPhone. Google blocked them because YouTube is owned by Google and Google also control the mid and low-ends of the Smartphone market, where Windows Phone was trying to become a competitor. So Google were trying to squash it.

That's why MS try to establish themselves in this area and not rely on Google - because any dominant market player abuses their dominance to keep out competition in their affiliated areas. MS did it back in the day. Google are doing it now. Apple do it with their phones but aren't services orientated so it's limited in scope. It's just protecting yourself.

Typescript is licenced under the Apache 2 licence and is a standard. So there's no non-technical reason why they couldn't use it.

As to the technical reasons why you would use it... The annotations perhaps...? I'm struggling to see much if any need for Runtime Introspection in a language designed to run in the browser. I've seen some sophisticated client-side applications these days so... maybe? But I can't think of any real reason why you'd want it and I can see it mainly being used by some far too clever programmers to write code that everyone who inherits their project stares at and backs away from.

So chiefly I see its use being impregnable job security. No doubt and Objective C programmer will appear to tell me why it's actually useful here. ;)

Re: Poor Putin

Sodomy is anal intercourse. There are lots of ways of having sex that aren't procreative that aren't sodomy - from the rhythm method to hand jobs to oral.

MS only bought part of Nokia. As far as I'm aware, Nokia keep all of their patents. What MS get is a licence to use them for a fixed period.

Um, I think if there's one thing you can't argue, it's that MS have a dominant market position in mobile phones! : /

And Apple and MS are much "larger IP infringers" than Samsung? Good luck with that! You have some familiarity with Samsung, I hope? :D

Re: good faith and fair dealing

You know until you posted a link to groklaw, I genuinely didn't know which part you were referring to. Quite frankly, it could be either.

Re: nice move, Samsung

I don't know why you would champion Samsung in this other than if you have some axe to grind against Microsoft. Samsung have a very nasty history. They're bigger than both MS and Apple and have been convicted of

Here's a nice little article on them I posted a while back, which I'll share again: Link. They have an extensive history of unpleasant behaviour including price fixing, bribery of politicians, judges and prosecutors and habitual massive patent infringement on any one they think doesn't have the resources to go up against them. (And often against those who do, if they think the patent owner might cut their losses rather than risk Samsung's legendary litigiousness).

I'm also going to re-share something else from the last time this came up. In 2006 Samsung was sued by Pioneer for infringing their patents on Plasma TV technology. A memo from a Samsung engineer used as evidence showed that they knowingly infringed on the patents. Rather than agree a licencing fee however, Samsung counter-sued and buried Pioneer under suits and appeals. Pioneer was awarded $59million in damages, but got buried in punitive legal actions from Samsung and a few years later shut down the television division, in large part because of this. Ten-thousand people who worked in that division directly or indirectly, lost their jobs.

Samsung rip off other people's work routinely. The only thing different in this case is that the target is MS which some people hate and therefore naively support Samsung (a far larger monster that makes a lot more net profit per year than Microsoft does).

Re: Isn't that a bit risky?

"Perhaps, Samsung are now confident to prove in court that those are vapour and get them invalidated if Microsoft try challenging them"

This isn't about the patents validity (as people keep pointing out). Samsung are a huge corporation much larger than Microsoft and have a staggering reputation for disrespecting intellectual property and litigiousness. If they had spotted any way to invalidate the patents then that is something they could have used against the already existing agreement. What they are trying now is to find some loophole resulting from the Nokia acquisition to get them out of it. That has to do with whether MS are a competitor or not (and is a shaky argument even there). There is nothing about patent validity in this.

>>"When B&N challenged this vapour in court, MS didn't come crushing upon them with all their lawyers' power, but muffled and muted them with quite some lucrative incentives and struck a deal instead."

That's not true at all. MS did not provide Barnes and Noble with "lucractive incentives". They asked for and got a substantial settlement which involved MS getting a cheap deal on a huge bite of B&N's flagship ebook business which MS were very keen to get into. Why you think that B&N (net income of $68m and very limited experience in the technology sector and near-zero patent portfolio if any) would be able to casually invalidate MS's patents but Samsung ($30 BILLION and extensive experience with IP litigation and presence in the technology sector and large patent portfolio of its own) could not, I have no idea. But your story doesn't hold up.

Now the real risk could be for Microsoft's own house of cards, since if Samsung ends up victorious here it would create a bad legal precedent for MS

Not really as this doesn't have to do with patent validity, but a licencing agreement between Samsung and MS which they're trying to find a dubious loophole to get out of. If you think this is to do with patent validity you haven't understood the details at all.

Re: Blimey!

I got from their comment that the poster thinks there are no female economists.

>>"The patents can't be that solid and defensible. Note that when challenged on the Nook (which runs Android), Barnes and Noble came up with 20 pages of prior art, which led to them getting a nice deal from MS to shut them up."

This "nice deal" involved Barnes and Noble selling a very sizeable chunk (about a fifth) of their ebook / Nook business to Microsoft who was very keen to get an In to the sector at the time. It's also odd that you think a company B&N could easily come up with ways to shoot down the patents and get MS to back off but a company thirty times their size in total assets and over a hundred times the annual NET income of B&N (Samsung) would just roll over and comply. You haven't thought this through at all.

We don't even know that all of the same patents were involved! And the costs between the two companies are not at all comparable. "Twenty pages" that were never tested in court? A lawyer I saw produced more than that for a minor action I was involved with. It's meaningless without specifics. That could have been twenty pages of worthless drawings for all that we know. All that we do know is that B&N sold a large slice of a valuable and growing business to MS in response to the licence request.

Re: Remove the patent issue?

>>"The sooner that its known perhaps those bits can be "fixed" :)"

All the licencing phone manufacturers obviously know what they're licencing by necessity. And Google certainly know. If it were cheaper to work around the patents than to licence them, that would definitely have happened by now.

>>"Sure there is a load of patients, but how many were thrown in to make it seem more palatable in the horse trading?"

Throwing in weak patents would be counter-productive. You'd just delay payments whilst targeted companies got them thrown out and generally undermine your own case on the strong ones by association. You don't intimidate companies that are substantially larger than you (such as Samsung is to Microsoft) by throwing in a few extra items in the list that the larger company will immediately recognize as an exploitable point for tangling you up in court.

Re: I do wonder

>>"1. The lag between R&D spending and Patent granting is HUGE - it probably takes 10 years to realise the R&D spend in a granted payment."

Microsoft is rather more than ten years old. Founded in 1975 as it happens. And they've historically put a lot of resource into R&D. Not to mention they have a history of buying up competitors along with any IP that goes with that. I can't comment on Samsung's R&D budget as I don't know much about it, but the above counter-argument is wrong.

>>"2. Most of that $3.29 payment probably comes from 5, 10 or 20 year old Windows and Dos patents, and is no guide to what M$ is doing now."

Speculation. All we can reasonably say is that FAT is probably one of the patents. But we don't know about the rest of them.

>>"Its probably already been published, but how did Microsoft come to own patents on android?"

They wont be patents on Android per se. That's not really how patents work. They'll be things that were developed that Android infringed on. FAT filesystem is the popular suggestion but there's obviously more. It's been kept between the companies and MS so far.

And this whole story isn't about the validity of the patents. If it were, Samsung would have challenged on those grounds long ago. It's Samsung attempting to exploit a possible loophole in the Nokia acquisition. Patent validity is nothing to do with this.

Re: Separation of handset and OS

>>"I wonder how long it will be before we see a separation between handset and operating system?"

It's already happened. I had a Nokia phone some years ago that I pulled the existing OS off and put Maemo on there. It still works. Unfortunately never achieved mass-market. It could have been Android before Android was. And it wouldn't have been tied to a particular corporation.

Re: It's Dr Who

>>"Sorry, that rebuttal doesn't work. What part of "basic, secondary school level physics" allows for - well, any of the points in the post you replied to?"

It does work, actually. There's this recurrent and flawed attack on anyone who criticizes science flaws in a show like Doctor Who which goes something like: "It contains Time Travel and a box that's larger on the inside, so why criticize something like a solid gold arrow being shot hundreds of metres..." or so forth (drawing my example from the last episode I watched). Essentially the position is that it's already demonstrated it's not realistic so what does it matter?

It matters because Suspension of Belief is not a binary thing that you invest in utterly or turn off completely. Time travel is something that we've never encountered and doesn't contradict "basic secondary school physics". It may contradict very advanced physics but even Stephen Hawking didn't think so for a time so we can state that its presence is not going to clash with most people's understanding of science. It's a conceit that is allowable. But moons multiplying rapidly in mass, creatures laying eggs bigger than themselves a few minutes after being born... These things DO clash with our everyday knowledge. And thus more greatly damage our suspension of disbelief.

Generally in Science Fiction you're able to have one or two "impossible" things in your "what if", and get away with it. So Arthur C. Clarke can throw in Faster Than Light travel, or Peter Watts can have his alternate strain of hominids that passed undiscovered, and you can otherwise get away with it as "hard" sci-fi. But when the "What If" becomes "Why not?" it begins to pile up to levels that turn off ever more people.

And that's what's happening to Doctor Who. The writers aren't having the moon multiply rapidly in mass because they have a good grasp of science and an idea or conceit as to why it's not applying in this case. They're doing so because either they have such poor understanding of science that they don't know better or because they have simply ceased caring in their rush to produce whatever character moment pops into their head. Whether it's ignorance or laziness, neither is a positive quality.

Re: looks like no more Who for me...

I'm British and I can't be bothered with it anymore. I watched most of the Tennant and Smith era and whilst there was some rubbish in there, it also had some gems. And it was nice to have a pacifist, intellectual hero in amongst all those solve with their fist types. And after all that, the new series has managed to pretty much kill my interest in about three episodes. Didn't watch this one, didn't watch the last one. A pretty repugnant character in badly plotted nonsensical episodes. Even Clara is barely holding together as a believable character because the actress is so good,

The tragedy is, Peter Capaldi is a really good actor and I like him a lot.