Once they start scrubbing the data to "improve the relevance of targeted advertising" I might start worrying. I'm not cool with advertisers being able to bid on my screen real-estate based on what I write in private messages. MS, Google, Yahoo filtering scam and spam? That is perfectly expected behavior.
Actually, that isn't quite right. The patent itself would cover the entire business case to be made for such an invention, that is the whole car, or any possible way in which the engine might be used.
The INDEPENDENT CLAIMS in the patent would include all of the things you listed. A solid, enforceable patent will have independent claims specific enough to exclude as much prior art as possible, but that doesn't mean any prior art would invalidate the patent. Your super efficient engine design, for example, could include components like a fuel injector that people have been putting into engine designs for decades, but that doesn't mean it isn't patentable. Your patent should at least reference the prior art, however.
Here is where lawyers like to get general. A super efficient engine is novel, but it is a useless novelty, unless you put it into a machine, such as a car, that performs a useful function. That is where DEPENDENT CLAIMS come into play. You want your dependent claims to be big, broad, sweeping and general to cover as many business cases as possible. This process invariably invokes big giant buckets of prior art. All of which you need to reference, of course.
I think it is high time for
There is a task switcher (hold down the back button and a list pops up with thumbnails from your open app). Also, with WP8, any app can run in the background as long as it conforms to certain rules about resource utilization. Not many apps use the feature yet, but the key ones like Skype do, where you want the app to do something even if the app is running in the background.
Microsoft encourages you to use their billing system, but it is by no means required. You can give your program to users as crippled trialware if you wish and then just distribute the key for the full version via an in-app purchase. Microsoft only charges you for the in-app purchase if you use their built-in billing API, but you are free to use any billing service you wish and cut Microsoft out of the game completely. At this point, you have basically obtained free hosting for your binaries from Microsoft, in exchange for the contribution of your app to augment their ecosystem.
Last I checked, Apple put an explicit ban on the sale of digital content through iOS apps in a way that cuts Apple out of the gravy train.
No guarantee that Microsoft won't turn into Apple when/if it finally does gain a more entrenched ecosystem, but hey, that's business for you.
Sure were a lot of mod points that went in to getting this metaphor right.
In the history of software, I can think of no major OS releases that hit the market without major issue, much less something as high-profile as a new Windows version. Not Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Solaris, or pick-your-flavor of Linux. The larger your scale, the more beta-testers just don't cut it anymore. You can take Apple's approach and strictly control the hardware that your software can run on, but you can always fuck that up to. You always have to wait for the first round of updates (or in Apple's situation, a free carrying case for every user) and hope that fixes it.
until SP1.
This is insightful. Not sure why you got modded down but I was just thinking the exact same thing.
Mod parent up.
Admittedly, you SHOULD already know what the Stop Online Piracey Act is, but whoever modded you as flamebait obviously had an axe to grind.
And there is always a chance that the wind turbine in my yard could get struck by lightning and blown into my neighbors dying spruce tree, igniting the side of his house during a wind storm, in turn setting the connecting fence ablaze causing our entire town and the surrounding national forest to erupt in a giant hell-fire of death, moving across Northern Colorado in to the mountains where the fire-fighting capabilities of sparse municipalities are defensless against its firey rage.
Its just not a very good chance.
The only fair comparison is a measurement of deaths-per-Terawatt. And large scale nuclear has proven pretty good even after the contrived linear-no-threshold-model gymnastics that FUD spreaders like to use.
How much?
You sound like one of my PMs here. As long as it works right, the customer won't care right? Wrong.
The fallacy is this. The code WILL NOT WORK RIGHT on the first go. Your customers will often be willing to pay for more features than you planned for in the next version. Your QA testers will find as many bugs as they can, but the scale at which they can test is never close to what it will be in production. You WILL have to support the software, you WILL have to release patches, and someday, someone WILL want to reuse your code.
True, the cost of writing the code is heavily front-loaded and therefore seems larger. But the cost of maintanence is never ever trivial. A good developers will come to understand this, so long as they have to maintain their own code. A good developer will offer resistance to a PM that emphasizes cost of coding over the elegance and extensibility of the code. If theses developers in India are building a career, they will become good developers.
Yeah, terrible thing about what happened at Fukushima. HOW MANY MORE WILL HAVE TO DIE???
I think it's funny that whenever anti-nuclear people talk about nuclear, they bring up a reactor from 25 years ago, but whenever they talk about other alternatives to fossil fuels, its always some cutting-edge solar project or some future break through in energy storage that nobody nowhere has commercially implemented.
Ask them why, and its all, "you know, the Man and stuff, and the Banksters, and the you know, the Nuclear Industry with their corporate... uh... thought police and they have the world governments in their pockets."
Sweet Lord.
They have about 45B in cash. Their market cap is about 220B. Does this mean that if their share price dropped below $5.20 that Microsoft could potentially buy out Microsoft?
a lot of editorial comments, branding WP7 as Windows Mobile, and obvious misleading lines. The headers to the patents involved misled me to believe that the patents covered broad UI concepts with huge areas of scope with 15 years of prior art. Patent 5,889,522 for example was stated as claiming "putting known tab controls into an operating system for use by all applications rather than providing tabs on an application-by-application basis."
That sounds wicked general and its a really old UI concept that seems obvious to anyone who switched to Firefox back in the day for exactly that reason. Until you read the actual patent and discover that in reality they are claiming the implementation of the UI SDK framework that comes as part of the OS. Oh yeah, and the patent was filed back in 1994. I'm not sure how many operating systems offered tab-centric UI support in the SDKs for third party apps back then, but I'm thinking prior art will be a little hard to come by, and tabs sure as hell didn't seem like such a duh-concept back before they were ubiquitous, much less a specific object implementation of a tab control in a common UI SDK for the OS.
After reading a few of the actual claims from some of the patents, I stopped wasting my time and discarded the whole patent table. After the TFA came out and stated that Microsoft was pure evil, which was unfortunately at the very end, I felt dirty for having even clicked. What MS is doing may be wrong, and it certainly hinders innovation, but let us not pretend that one company serving its shareholders' interests is going to be evil while another company doing the same damn thing is going to be the Shining White Knight of our fantasy.
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
