Simply put, VR headsets (displays mounted in such a way as to be placed in front of a person's eyes) have been visualized and built for decades.

Sure, but that's not what's being patented here. What's being patented here is a frame that you can slot an existing mobile device into to be used as a headset, where the headset detects the insertion and notifies the phone to switch to VR mode. That's not something that has been built for decades.

Lawnmower Man anyone?

Lawnmower Man didn't include a device like this. This is not a patent on any and all VR displays, it's a patent on a specific type of frame for mobile devices.

Yep. At that time Microsoft were still running Hotmail on FreeBSD because they were struggling to migrate it to Windows.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, on Slashdot of all places. How many times have you seen a shitty submission here and comments correcting it? It's practically Slashdot's unofficial slogan: "yeah, the stories are awful, but I come for the comments".

I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal.

In theory, yes. In practice, the DMCA can be used to squash interoperable implementations. Look at bnetd, for example. Despite it being a completely separate implementation of the protocol, Blizzard used the DMCA to successfully sue the project maintainers.

Although Apple has never officially acknowledged issues surrounding Yosemite and Wi-Fi connectivity, the company is clearly aware of the problem: Leading off the improvements offered in the update 10.10.2 update released Tuesday was 'resolves an issue that might cause Wi-Fi to disconnect,' according to the release notes.

So basically, you said that Apple haven't acknowledged the problem, then quoted them acknowledging the problem?

It is broke though. Look at the SendFile bug, for example. It's been there for years, it bites a tonne of people who try to virtualise web servers, and there has been seemingly no attempt whatsoever to fix it. Its kernel drivers on OS X and Linux aren't particularly stable either.

the functionality of the devices is about the same

It's very different. On Android, you have to decide whether to grant permission before you've ever run the application, and it's all or nothing. On iOS, you run the application before deciding whether or not to grant it permission. You have the ability to deny permission while still running the application. You can also allow permission for some things but not others.

This functionality is partially available to Android users who root their phones and install the right tools, but that's far from the common case.

It's true that the majority of the profits in App Store sales is focused at the extreme top, but it's not true that 99.999% of the rest make "near 0". This analysis estimates that the top 3,175 applications earn at least the average annual income for a US household per year, and applications that rank about number 6000 still earn $25K/yr.

And that's only counting App Store revenue. I've earned a lot more than average since I started developing for iOS, and most of the applications I've worked on are free. You don't see things like banking applications earn revenue directly, but the developers responsible certainly profit from it. The Facebook application is free, but you don't think its developers are working on it for free do you? I've been paid to built plenty of enterprise applications that will never appear in the App Store.

There is a huge amount of profit in the "app economy" that will never be accounted for merely by looking at App Store profits. The "app economy" is much bigger than the App Store.

It wasn't impossible to write cross platform browser stuff in the late 1990s, when most corporations started this whole "We'll standardize on browser X" policy making, but it required a discipline that had most developers throwing their hands up in the air in disgust.

I had these arguments many times back then. It was laziness more than anything else. We were writing cross-platform web applications without problems at that time. We were trying to convince other developers to follow the same route, but their attitude was mainly "IE has 90%+ market share, why bother?" They didn't believe a time would come when proprietary IE code wouldn't work - even if other browsers caught on, they were expecting them to copy the IEisms. They certainly didn't believe that even later versions of Internet Explorer wouldn't support their crappy code.

- IE4+ was the most standard. Yes, really. Those versions had a relatively complete implementation of CSS.

Let's not overstate things. Netscape bet on JSSS and when the W3C selected CSS as the standard instead, they scrambled to fix Netscape 4 to convert from CSS to JSSS on the fly. So Netscape 4 was exceptionally bad at CSS. Internet Explorer 4 was merely very bad at CSS. Opera was ahead at that time. I don't think you can call IE4 "relatively complete" unless you only compare it to Netscape 4, which was unusually bad.

reverse engineering is allowed, and could be opening themselves up to legal action.

Just because reverse engineering is legal, it doesn't mean WhatsApp are legally obligated to provide their services to third-party clients.

The legal matter here is the blatant trademark infringement by WhatsApp Plus.

I prefer Apple to keep iMessage to themselves. It will make sure its adoption never become widespread.

It's already widespread. Several billion iMessages are sent per day.

he doesn't give a single example of any of that. He just makes the unsubstantiated claim.

Because the point of the blog post wasn't to prove that this was the case, but to offer an opinion on how bad it's gotten and why it may be happening. His audience is very familiar with Apple gear, spelling everything out from first principles is unnecessary and a distraction from the meat of the article. Know your audience.

Gigaom's Carmel DeAmicis reports that brands pay Twitter to falsely appear in your following list

This isn't true. This was a bug that has already been fixed.

I'm not complaining that you aren't being charitable. I'm pointing out that you misspoke then blamed me for it. If you misspoke, then own your words and just say "whoops, I didn't mean those guys" instead of looking for somebody else to shift blame to.

I'm talking about Facebook and Google, two of the companies explicitly listed in the article. You did RTFA right? Or are you one of those tards who manufactures the least charitable interpretation of what someone says and goes to town on them with a straw man?

The title of this submission: Google and Apple. The summary: Google and Apple. The article: Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo. You said "both companies". Only two companies were singled out, Google and Apple. So yeah, to a reasonable person, it looks very much like you started off talking about Google and Apple, then expanded your point by talking about Facebook, and then to the other companies. Don't call me a "tard" because you fucked up what you were saying and I interpreted it in the most reasonable manner.

They are like google

The two companies have entirely different business models. Analytics is central to Google's business model. It's barely a blip on Apple's radar, and is insignificant compared with the way they use it as a differentiator.

Sure, Apple has business lines that generate income from hardware sales

That's so understated it's downright misrepresentative. They make billions of dollars a quarter from hardware sales. Even the amount of money they could theoretically make from analytics would be a drop in the bucket compared with that, let alone any earnings they might actually have. The potential chilling effect on their real business is far more relevant than any theoretical profits there. And you mention it like "oh yeah, they make money from hardware too"? Come on.