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Comment Re:Obj-C (Score 3, Informative) 316

Nobody said Java was useless. I just can't think of why I'd use it over another language unless I had to. I'd either pick C/C++/objC for speed, or I'd pick Ruby/Python for efficiency, or I'd pick Groovy or Haskell if I was leaning functional... depending on my needs. I can't think of why I'd go in the middle. Seems like the worst of all worlds.

Rust and Swift are very on par languages attempts, with the exception that Swift also has a very nice compile time JIT and hot-coding environment. However, and this is crucial: Swift is beating Rust to the punch - and that is an important factor in languages. Swift had 200,000 devs download the language spec in the 1st 24 hours. That is probably 10x more than have ever downloaded the Rust spec.

Rust is still listed as experimental, as Swift is being rolled out to developers. The Rust team is still arguing over implementation, in an unfortunate design-by-committe kind of way. Rust has no killer-application driving it. Swift does. Swift is Driven by Chris Lattner, who has probably done more for the compiler world in the last 10 years than the next 25 guys put together (LLVM, Clang, OpenCL, etc). And Swift is backed by a huge amount of Apple dollars. Even the Original developer behind Rust has tipped his hat to the project. So Yeah, I expect Swift to rocket to the Top 5 languages in the next 2 years while Rust stays a academic plaything for many years to come.

Comment Re:Obj-C (Score 4, Insightful) 316

Anyone who says 'X' language is crap, can safely be ignored.

Unlike our previous poster, though My opinion is that Java, is actually one of the least useful languages out there. It doesn't provide a higher level syntax than objC or C++, like the "better languages" Ruby, Python, etc. Nor does it provide the performance or memory footprint of systems languages like C, C++ or objC. It is bound by a runtime, that is meant to make it run-anywhere. Yet ironically the universal crown is going to javascript+HTML5, not java. Java in many ways is the new pascal, it is largely an educational language with a strong base in corporate intra-net applications.

You can use c, objC & C++ for decades to come. However Swift is very exciting (and I'm a embedded guy). It is the first serious language to come along that can challenge the C family of systems languages that I can remember. It has all of the native performance of C, the memory footprint advantages of reference counting, all of the syntactical goodness of ruby or python, the inherent parallelism of groovy and haskell, yet can morph into a JIT language in development with a very enticing hot-coding environment. With Chris Lattner & Apple backing it, it will be successful. I can't wait till it filters down to the open source space so I can use it in embedded systems.

Comment Re:How it happened? Easy: PATENTS expired. (Score 4, Insightful) 69

Watching this space, what I think is interesting is how the open source community has helped proliferate the technology, the result has been an explosion of a very wide but shallow market (lots of companies each with a handful of not very perfected features, each with only a few customers). However only in the last year have those products been refined into printers that could be consider something that may make it into consumers hands.

It is a replay of the 1970 computer hobbyist scene. We are waiting for a few companies like an Apple, Microsoft or IBM to narrow the market again and get deeper penetration. This isn't a bad thing, as the expectations congeal around a minimum feature set (multicolor, automatic dissolvable scaffolding, WYSIWYG software, variable resolution to improve speeds, improved detail using feed-back loops, etc), only a few companies will be able to compete with the kind of hit-a-button-and-get-a-perfect-print-everytime experience that will take this from a garage experiment to a practical user experience. Those companies will get more mindshare, and be able to sell deeper into the market at a mass-produced price point.

Still most of the printer has pretty variable results. It turns out it takes a while to perfect the little details. It is the normal arc of technology, not just patents expiring.

Comment Re:Bjarne Stroustrup (Score 1) 636

I think you are missing the real point. It isn't about control, it is about next generation systems languages.

Python isn't a systems language, nor is ruby. They cannot compete with C, C++, or objC. I've got a project right now that I'd love to use a more modern language, but performance, RAM footprint, flexibility... I just can't get out of using C. Complex problems are 200 times slower in python. But what if you have a python-ruby like language that was C performance and footprint... and real time JIT as you write the code in a live-box. Its a pretty important problem to solve.

Transportation

Intel Wants To Computerize Your Car 191

cartechboy writes: 'Google just unveiled its cute self-driving car prototype, and now Intel is the next tech company looking to get in on the rapid digital change coming in cars — a potentially lucrative area for expansion. Intel is releasing what it's calling an "in-vehicle solutions platform" — processors, an operating system and developer kits Intel is hoping automakers and others would use to build in-vehicle infotainment systems. From the developer perspective, there is a chance the Intel release makes building easier and cheaper. But is it good for automakers to be building these systems instead of Google and Apple? So far, no automaker has done so well on software, and some have seriously damaged their reputation (ex: MyFord Touch and Sync, Cadillac CUE).'

Comment Re:Apple is crap (Score 1) 268

Not only do they contribute significantly, they have created many pivotal open source projects. I'd say apple has perhaps contributed more than almost any company, especially in moving the state of the art forward in a practical and immediately usable way, while at the same time getting little recognition for its efforts. In contrast google gets lots of recognition, while not really deserving it.

We are developing embedded Linux system that relies on Webkit, LLVM, Clang, OpenCL, libdispatch & C blocks (grand central dispatch).... which are all Apple sourced open projects.

Comment Re:Curiouser and curiouser (Score 1) 397

Seriously I do not understand people like you. Apple clearly make very good products which are exceptionally popular. They are extremely skilled at giving things a slick well integrated feel, good visual design and good usability. All of those are very important and useful skills. Apple's skill is doing something formerly unpopular better than the first movers and making it popular.

But why pretend that their expertise lies elsewhere? It doesn't but that does not in any way detract from their products.

Again really good technological sythensis is very innovative in itself, and a rare type of innovation. What is the bigger invention, inventing something fundamental, or figuring out how to do something really well that can make that fundamental invention useful? Lots of people have ideas, those only take an hour or a few minutes. The hard work is the thousands of hours in perfecting an idea, not the spontaneous "concept" moment. Few companies have the wherewithal to do product design really well.

For example, I just got a quad-core Nexus 7 for software testing. I was amazed that even though it has 5-10x the processing power of the 1st generation iPad, the user interface is 5x slower. Now this device has one primary job: to be a user interface. Google is full of smart people and has had years to get it right. But they haven't. This is just one of the serious flaws in this device, and point to lack innovation of concept synthesis.

If you remember 10 years back, apple was a small underdog company... not popular. They became popular on the back of their products, their quality, and innovation - not marketing as you present. Their Ad budget is surprisingly small, like 1/4 of Samsungs. Google is going to spend 1/2 of Apples whole budget on just the Moto X.

Comment Re:Strangely... (Score 1) 397

How about this: Design a really great UI and industrial design made up of a 100 little mini-innovations or signature graphic design elements. Now try to decompose your product into a bunch of design patents to keep others from cloning your invention. You will end up with a bunch of 50 page patents that refer to the intricacies of rectangles and rounded corners.

When referring to the simplest elements of a single claim, every patent sounds reductionist and silly... That doesn't mean the patent as a whole isn't innovative or at least the describe signature design style of your company.

Nobody thought of the collection of details that make up the iPhone's design before Apple showed it to the world. Only after, does it seem obvious.

Comment Re:Curiouser and curiouser (Score 2) 397

Your link points to Apples patents which samsung violated, not the SEP patents that Samsung is holding Apple hostage for. I see nothing pointing to Apple refusing to pay FRAND terms for SEP patents. Neither 'SEP' or 'FRAND' are even referred to in those articles.

Apple is in the right here, and is even being backed by competitors like Microsoft (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/microsoft-and-intel-back-apple-in.html). Any serious commentator seems to agree that this is nothing more than Samsung blackmailing Apple: Samsung takes extortionate position against Apple in new ITC filing (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/07/wheres-doj-samsung-takes-extortionate.html). Samsung wants a cross license to use Apple design patents that define what make an Apple product unique, whereas Apple wants to use SEP patent than every phone must have... And Samsung is trying to gouge them outside of FRAND terms to try and black-mail Apple to use their non-SEP patent portfolio.

To quote Forbes:

"To the surprise of almost no one the Obama Administration has overturned the looming ITC ban on the imports of certain of Apple older products... The particular reason used was that the patent in question was a standards essential one... The Policy Statement expresses substantial concerns, which I strongly share, about the potential harms that can result from owners of standardsessential patents (“SEPs”) who have made a voluntary commitment to offer to license SEPs on terms that are fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (“FRAND”) gaining undue leverage and engaging in “patent holdup”, i.e., asserting the patent to exclude an implementer of the standard from a market to obtain a higher price for use of the patent than would have been possible before the standard was set, when alternative technologies could have been chosen... This seems reasonable enough: the EU also has a similar policy that violation of SEPs, that should be available on FRAND terms, cannot be used to ask for product or sales bans... Florian Mueller of Foss Patents, who has been following Apple and Samsung’s case before the ITC, called today’s veto “a victory for consumers and fair competition... It’s possible to be rather cynical about this. Apple is the largest single taxpayer in the US and it’s sorta unlikely that an administration would ban the products of said largest taxpayer. But I think such cynicism would be misplaced here. The important point being that it is indeed all about a standards essential patent. And the general movement in patent cases seems to be that SEP violations should not lead to product bans. So, given that this is an SEP violation, no product ban."

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/08/04/links-4-aug-of-course-apples-imports-were-not-going-to-be-banned/)

Comment nonsense... this is about anti-trust not apple (Score 2) 397

Please actually read the source articles out there.

Fosspatents:
"Florian Mueller of Foss Patents, who has been following Apple and Samsung’s case before the ITC, called today’s veto “a victory for consumers and fair competition.”"

Forbes:
"To the surprise of almost no one the Obama Administration has overturned the looming ITC ban on the imports of certain of Apple's older products...The particular reason used was that the patent in question was a standards essential one... This seems reasonable enough: the EU also has a similar policy that violation of SEPs, that should be available on FRAND terms, cannot be used to ask for product or sales bans... It’s possible to be rather cynical about this. Apple is the largest single taxpayer in the US and it’s sorta unlikely that an administration would ban the products of said largest taxpayer. But I think such cynicism would be misplaced here. The important point being that it is indeed all about a standards essential patent. And the general movement in patent cases seems to be that SEP violations should not lead to product bans. So, given that this is an SEP violation, no product ban":

Comment Re:Curiouser and curiouser (Score 1) 397

According to the IEEE review of portfolios, Apple Has the Most Powerful Patent Portfolio in Consumer Electronics, based on quality, originality, generality, and innovation.

Google, nor samsung are in the top 20.

Just because you don't understand how design patents work, "bullshit" i think you call them, doesn't mean you know what you speak of.

Apple has a very innovative talent of seeing the big-picture and putting together technologies in ways that other people didn't imagine, with a keen eye of how to make it useable to the average person. In so doing they have blazed the trail on many fundamental product categories that spawned whole industries (the personal computer, the GUI computer, the portable music player, the modern smart phone, the tablet, etc). Did they do something that was a category first, or the first use of a technology? Not often, but Apple's ability to synthesizing ideas into a well-honed product is an important type of innovation. It It is not fundamental science, but it is no less important or valuable, and should not be underestimated.

For example, even if multi-touch has been around in labs for 20 years, but nobody could figure out what to do with it. And cell phones had been around for 20 years, but had horrible interfaces and couldn't be used as real web devices. It is no less innovative to bringing together the two, with all the small details of those "bullshit" design patents to make it into a package that really works for an end user. Was it innovative? Based on the fact that *every* phone manufacture is has followed suit with a variation of the iPhone, and that this stuff is hard to do, and google is still struggling 5 years later to make quad-core tablets that are as responsive the to users touch as Apples 1st generation iPhone with 10x less resources. Is it Innovative? You bet cha!

(http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/apple-has-the-most-powerful-patent-portfolio-in-consumer-electronics)

Comment Re:Strangely... (Score 2) 397

You are mis-informed (or a astroturfer, as samsung seems to be paying a army of these),

Samsung is not offering FRAND terms. They are trying to do a armed robbery stick-up. Read fosspatents.com (http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/07/wheres-doj-samsung-takes-extortionate.html)

Samsung is trying to use SEP patents as a weapon to get Apple to cross-license their design patents, which are the most valuable patents in tech right now according to the IEEE's survey of patent quality and innovation. Apple feels that Samsung should do its own design innovation, and not try to ride their coat-tails as a product copy-cat, and has no desire to turn over its design patent portfolio.

Whereas, Samsung has some SEP REQUIRED to be 3G compatible, that they won't license under FRAND terms, apple has to choice but to use 3G... and yet apple is refraining from using their Nortel SEP patents against samsung.

Comment Re:Curiouser and curiouser (Score 1) 397

Nobody is saying that they don't have value. They are saying the need to be licensed on FRAND terms. And because they patent standards, coming up with non-infringing alternatives is impossible, because it wouldn't be compatible. To use SEPs as a weapon could be detrimental to the economy, because we need standards.

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