I think you are confusing patent protection with copyright protection. Software is still covered by copyright law, and the licensing agreements you choose to put on your software product is still what defines how people can use your software product, and what their access to that software is.

If I write a program and release it under a license that does not allow access to the source code, and does not allow users to distribute it further, that is still perfectly valid. But if someone decides that they want to write their own software that does the same thing, as long as they do not use anything from my product, they are well within their rights to do so.

UNIX platforms have been around for 50 years and the model they use has become essentially a standard. But until recently, UNIX was costly and the licensing was rather prohibitive. So in the 1980s, this man decided that he'd like to write his own version of a UNIX-like platform, and release it freely and openly for everyone to use. That platform was GNU and the man that started it was Richard Stallman. GNU is now one of the most widely used platforms on the market. Even some UNIX vendors use some of the GNU utilities themselves. It also became the system that sits on top of the Linux kernel.

But while GNU replicates a lot of the functionality from UNIX utilities, it uses absolutely none of the code from UNIX. It was written independently to ensure that it was freely available to everyone.

That hasn't stopped UNIX platforms from continuing to be sold, or continuing to be innovative. But it has pushed UNIX vendor to improve their platform significantly to differentiate themselves from the free platforms.

Software Patents would not have allowed GNU to exist at all. Software patents are, without exception, patenting ideas rather than implementation. This means that if one entity holds a patent for an idea, no other entity can come up with an alternate way of achieving the same/similar end result. This gives the patent holder an extended monopoly on an idea and stifles innovation in the software industry.

Software copyrights allow you to release and protect your software from blatant copying, while still allowing people to improve upon and innovate beyond your original idea. Software patents do not.

Completely pedantic of me, but relevant. In New Zealand a Bill is always a draft. There is no difference between a "draft bill" and a "bill." Once the Bill passes its 3rd and final reading in the House, it becomes an Act at which point it is law.

In regards to your comment about "Big Money," New Zealand is very small, but it doesn't really have the same problems with lobbyists that the US or other large nations do. In fact, the majority of lobbyists in New Zealand are Greenies and Climate Change doomsayers trying to save each and every tree, bug or animal. Well, them and media companies trying to get nasty copyright law changes made.

Fortunately, while NZ is based on the Westminster model of Parliament, but with Europe's MMP, its sufficiently different enough that its not quite so easy to game. And with only 120 Members of Parliament, lobbyists tend to have to convince an entire political party rather than just a few members with seats in the Parliament.

The whole reason Sun opened up Solaris in the first place was to try and get it a wider audience and more of a community around it. Linux was encroaching on Solaris as much as it was on any other Unix, if not faster.

Oracle will probably find that the only way they can sell Solaris is to bundle it as a database appliance OS or something stupid like that. Include the cost of Solaris with the cost of whatever software runs on top of it.

Solaris wasn't the healthiest until the OpenSolaris project gave it a significantly greater audience that allowed anyone to use it and get familiar with it. OpenSolaris sold Sun hardware and the proprietary Solaris. It is what kept Solaris from dead ending and stagnating.

Oracle will either realise this soon, or wait till its too late. This is essentially the first nail in the Solaris coffin after Sun managed to get it off life support.

Fare thee well, old friend.

Microsoft do exactly the same. Microsoft's contract with Facebook allows them more access to info than Google's does, so they can flood your bing.com results with even more social crud than Google does at the moment. Both have similar or equivalent access to Twitter's stream. Both have similar access to LinkedIn. Google has slightly better access to MySpace than Microsoft, but no where near AOL in that regard.

But in the end, everyone is doing it. Bing, Google, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else that has products in the search result market. And to my knowledge, Google and Microsoft both allow you to disable live/social results in your search queries quite easily (and I'm guessing the others must also.)

My, how quickly people forget. IE really won because Netscape 4 sucked. Sure, IE stagnated after that and it's hard to forgive MS for that, but let's not pretend that IE6 was an inferior browser that came to dominance simply through underhanded techniques despite superior offerings from competitors.

Hmmm... I think your memory is slightly misleading there. Netscape losing the Browser War had nothing to do with Netscape Navigator being inferior to IE6.

IE4 bundled with Windows 95C was the beginning of the end for Netscape. Up until that point, IE3 had been a separate entity and most people had no idea how to get it installed, let alone that it existed. Windows 95C included IE4 as a "bonus" CD on OEM distributions and if you wanted a lot of the new features tht made 95C "better" you needed to install it. If an OEM left it off, their version of Windows 95C was seen as being "inferior" when compared with those that did install it.

It was at this point that Microsoft started releasing builds if Memphis (later known Windows 98) that had IE built into the core of the OS by default. All the new features, such as active desktop, nice looking folder browsers, CHM Help and so on, relied on IE being left on the machine. By the time Windows 98 was released, the browser wars were essentially over. Why? Because people got IE4 for free when they bought a new computer that had Windows 95C on it, and when Windows 98 was available, the OEM didn't even need to make the effort to install it any more.

Netscape lost their browser war, not because their browser sucked (and I agree that it did) but because they could not compete with Microsoft's strategy of tying the browser to the operating system on desktop releases of the Windows platform. This is partly what started the whole anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft. People no longer felt compelled to pay for the shareware Netscape Navigator when they get Internet Explorer and Outlook Express for free with their new computer. Why spend the hour downloading Netscape at dialup speeds (which the majority of the internet user base still had back then) when something just as good was already installed.

The OEM contracts that Microsoft had with the majority of the OEM companies was also another factor, but irrelevant here. Maybe in another BeOS discussion it might prove pertinent.

IE6 wasn't released until 2001, a few months before Windows XP was released in August. It was available for all versions of Windows, from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. It was a free upgrade. But IE6 in no way had any effect on Netscape. It was all over by then for Netscape. The Mozilla engine had already been released as open source by then and the Phoenix browser project was already in its infancy.

This is a little surprising to me. Why would they go after the end user companies that produce computers rather than the much bigger fish that rely on this technology for their core bread and butter?

Cisco, Foundry, Juniper, F5 and so on all make a lot more sense to go after given that they're less likely to want to risk the chance of losing and more likely to settle the issue out of court.

Companies like Dell, Apple, Acer, HP and the beige box boys can simply just ignore the patent and say "Talk to Intel/nVidia/chipset vendor X" or simply not include onboard NIC machines and switch to using PCI/USB cards instead.

Theres not a lot of hope for this suit even at the best of circumstances, but the companies its going after are potentially shielded by the fact they themselves are not likely to produce the chips that handle Ethernet. Merely include chips from someone else (such as Intel) in their products.

Or am I completely missing something?

No more likely to bite you than a bumble bee will bite you. Just don't piss them off and you can handle them without issue. Problem is they look pretty scary to most people. Huge grasshopper type bug with huge thorns over its legs and body that lives in dark places like caves and hollowed trees. Still, as long as you don't piss them off, you can pick them up without fear. Just hope no one before you came along and pissed it off before you got there. ;-)

Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.

NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.

The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.

http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.

As a work around, Google has said they are going to release an iPhone Safari specific version to run as a webapp on the iPhone. The different Google Voice apps (across all platforms) are just a significantly improved and platform-native GUI to the service.

The GV app is still just an app. It doesn't replace any of the Apple apps. They're still there and still fully functional. What it does do is make them redundant.

Instead of giving people your cell number, you give them your Google number. At that point, all your voicemail is kept on the Google service, all your calls are routed through the Google service to whatever phone(s) you choose to have the calls go to. You are no longer tied to Apple's Visual Voicemail (which by most people's accounts hasn't worked properly in quite a while anyway) nor are you limited to AT&T's network anymore. The same applies to SMS and so on as well. Use your Google number instead of your iPhone number and you can get the messages on any/all your phones rather than just your iPhone.

The GV app also allows you to make calls out through Google's network. Your phone dials Google, then dials out from Google to where ever. With the apps on the various platforms, this is essentially transparent. You just use the dialer in the GV app instead of the Apple dialer. It doesn't sync your contacts to the Google servers as such. Like all apps on an iPhone, it has access to your contacts directly, so doesn't need to store them on the server. Not that it matters much given you can use Google Sync to do it, or even us iTunes itself.

Having said all that, the Apple phone apps are still all there and you can use those as well if you want. But if you do, CallerID will show your cell # instead of your Google number. If people call that number, you lose things like voicemail transcription features and so on.

I am basing this on the functionality in the applications on other platforms such as Android and Blackberry. I doubt the app for the iPhone would be any different in functionality, only in appearance.

But no, the app doesn't replace the Apple ones. It merely supersedes them and essentially makes them redundant.

I agree... I had a similar issue at a school a few years back. Windows + Mac clients on the network. Rather than try to run two directories, we just used Novell eDirectory with (then available) Novell dirXML which allowed all the clients to use a single directory without realising they weren't native Active Directory or OpenDirectory platforms they were talking to. It saved a lot of effort down the line and proved extremely scalable. Also had the benefit of allowing the network to integrate other platforms in the future without much effort if the school wanted to. I'm sure there are plenty of great FOSS solutions out there, but eDirectory make it so much easier and reduced the cost of implementation significantly, even taking into account licensing costs. Sometimes you do just have to weigh up all the angles.

Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.

I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.

The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.

There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.

Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.

Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.

Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.

The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.

All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.

You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.

Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.

There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.