Once again I offhandedly discovered that my comments were going to a great bit bucket.
Why?
Who the fuck knows but some pedarest at HN who for some reason decided to flag me. They were more insightful and of better quality than the raging set of movie references and pun-threads that have overcome this place. Extraordinarily few ever went negative.
So once again - FUCK YOU PAUL GRAHAM you overrated chimp. Fuck you idiots at HN.
I have to second a comment on the very article linked -- it is disturbing how you see a theme appear one day, and the next day hundreds of individual commentators are parroting exactly the same line. Maybe two days ago I saw the facetious, thin-as-toilet-paper "Google is using their search engine monopoly to try to undercut these poor [making billions of dollars quarterly with insane profit margins unlike any other industry in the history of mankind] companies". Now it makes a showing, multiple times, in every single discussion.
Android isn't free for anyone.
Android isn't free for Samsung. Android isn't free for Motorola.
I will bet a pretty $100 bill that each of them are spending more equipping their handsets with Android than they ever spent on Windows Mobile licenses. As software developers we should all appreciate the fact that each of those makers has had to man up with large teams of mobile software development experts, and each has made significant (although debatable) contributions to the field. Quite a difference from the days when Motorola had a couple of hardware devs run a vanilla development kit build of Windows Mobile, customizing a couple of stdefs, and that was it -- they had their MotoQ software.
My Galaxy S II cost me $700 of cold, hard cash. Where's my free product?
The free thing is, failing to find a better term, dumb. Motorola, HTC and others didn't adopt Android because it was free (which, as I mentioned, is hardly free anyways. Go ahead and sell computers with Ubuntu, undercutting Microsoft. See how that works out for you). They adopted it because it was a concerted response to the overwhelming dominance of Apple.
"flood the market with cheap Android phones "
Everyone who parrots this talking point is an idiot.
The top selling Android devices, by far, are on par with iPhone 4 costs (you know the device that you can now get for $0 at many telcos). Android has never been about "cheap", no matter how many times people like you repeat that trope.
Apple is desperately trying to keep the Galaxy S II from achieving wide availability. I guess they really want to stop those $700 "cheap" phones.
Not at all. Microsoft and Apple simply want to make sure that Google has nothing to counter their patent attacks with. They don't want Google to have them. Now Google sharing them with its two biggest antagonist...even footing a part of the bill...no surprise that they don't mind that.
>I wouldn't be surprised if Google paid $1M each for the 1,000 IBM patents they bought.
A billion dollar transaction does not happen quietly, and IBM would have no reason to keep it quiet. This was strategic for IBM (which is actually a bizarrely responsible corporation): They have a strategic interest in seeing Google empowered.
Came out and said what? This is just providing more detail to exactly what Google said before. Discount whatever second hand noise you've read elsewhere: Google has been very consistent thus far (they derode patents when they made their $900 bid on the Nortel patents, for instance. They didn't learn to hate patents after losing), and this inside detail does in no way change or undermine what they said yesterday.
Microsoft and Apple don't want Google to have defensive patents (patents that both of them know that they infringe on in droves, otherwise they wouldn't be concerned about them).
They should have worked to remove all of these patents off the table as cheaply as possible. The available cash that MS+Apple simply dwarfs what Google has.
Dwarfs is a gross exaggeration. Further both Apple and Microsoft have shareholder responsibility. Microsoft has already made questionable judgment calls to maintain the upper hand -- billions of dollars in patents to make a few hundred million a year in extortion fees, while empowering their own primary competitor (Apple)? It's extraordinary. Apple shareholders are going to start demanding their cash back if it looks like one giant ego pile.
And Google can't quietly buy patents because the people selling want to get as much as possible for it. Well except for IBM who just wanted to stick a gank in Oracle.
The fact that their current IP strategy seems to be to buy IP is absurd.
Many of the patents that Microsoft and Apple are using against Android precede the mobile explosion. They are older companies, having had a long time of big profits to pay people to sit around submitting patent applications.
Would you mind pointing out where Google made that argument?
Because Google didn't make that argument, no matter how terribly M G Sielger may misinterpret it.
"They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them;"
That's what Google actually said. Google partly owning them in concert with Apple and Microsoft does nothing given that Apple and Microsoft are the primary antagonists of Android.
>I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.
You made this claim yesterday as well. It is so ridiculous that I find it hard to take the rest of your comment seriously.
The iPhone most certainly showed consumer acceptance of a touchscreen. It was a consumer test that demonstrated that the lack of a physical keyboard and minimal physical buttons is acceptable if not preferable by customers. Did any patent application teach anything technical, though? That is laughable.
>People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.
Most patents are on ideas.
There have been a tremendous number of misunderstandings or outright lies about patents on here-
-patents are not some great mystery only known by a few, and are overwhelmingly boilerplate. Every single independent claim stands on its own and can be infringed.
-some have posited that patents are highly specific and no one is qualified to comment on them save super experts. Any criticism of a patent will yield a "you have to look at the specific claims!". Yet here's Apple's own patent lawyers description of why HTC Android handsets violate their patent-
"the Nexus One includes Android's "Linkify" functionality, which "take[s] a piece of text and a regular expression and turns all of the regex matches in the text into clickable links. This is particularly useful for matching things like email addresses, web urls, etc. and making them actionable". That is the meat of it. The rest of the text is boilerplate expanding on the concept of "on a computer".
-patents do not need a working implementation. As others have pointed out, people have patented perpetual motion motions, among other hilarious patents.
I don't think that Gruber was making a case for software patents.
But he was. He is arguing that only a small handful of patents -- those used to attack Apple and/or app store developers -- are the problem with the patent system. That is directly in the section quoted.
His argument seemed to be that instead of Google lobbying to rid the world of software patents, they seemed to be playing the same game as MS, Apple & Oracle by bidding on the Nortel patents.
Google is essentially the bitch of the patent world right now, simply because they're a younger company and a land claim occurred. They can both appeal for changes -- which that very blog entry does in droves -- while preparing for the reality that nothing is going to change overnight.
Google will likely acquire a lot of ammunition (the IBM purchase puts them in a very interesting position relative to Oracle, threatening Oracle's entire platform), make life painful for its competitors, and then will be in a position to call for change without everyone declaring, as they are now, that it is merely convenience.
He recently posted a link to a story about Amazon removing the various buy bits from their app, which the snarky commentary "That wasn't hard, was it?"
A few hours later he completely changed position to one where he was mildly critical of Apple for making the app less user friendly. I suspect his overwhelming bias just became too strong for even him to bear.
Perhaps, but it is entirely pertinent. Many of these pro-patent positions, I suspect, are entirely rooted in the feeling of belonging to a certain community. See Gruber's bizarrely hypocritical piece which mirrors that public sentiment.
I believe that software patents are overwhelmingly farce, whether they support Microsoft in attacking Apple, Apple against Samsung, Samsung against Apple, or any of various IP ventures against App Store developers. It is not a position that varies based upon the actors.
The pro-Apple lobby, however, has a position that essentially holds Apple's patents as legitimate and righteous to enforce, but everyone else's as illegitimate for various reasons. It is farce to criticize lodsys and others for entirely legal IP protections -- as the system supposedly encourages -- while supporting Apple and their like behaviors. Whether a company is open to counter-attacks is irrelevant to the legitimacy of patents.
Virtually everyone who interacts with HN relies upon Linux (for instance as the foundation of their startup). Linux infrgines on countless Microsoft patents. Thus far Microsoft has treaded lightly, but I don't think it's tough to imagine how sentiments would change if they started laying the hammer down, shutting down every cloud host, etc. The simple love of a gadget has many supporting an incredibly dangerous position.
But sentiments are changing. I argue for the exercise of it, but there is no doubt that dramatic software patent changes are coming due.
>Maybe go look at the actual patent lawsuits against HTC, Samsung et al., they aren't hard to find.
You say so much while saying so little.
Apple's assault on HTC is a perfect demonstration of the failure of the patent system. Dozens of trivial, laughable patents such as "recognize an email address in a string of text", patented decades after such techniques were commonplace. Do you want to show one with actual value, instead of alluding to some great argument foundation that you don't actually have?
Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open. Yuk yuk. What relevance does that have, beyond just partisan posturing? Who cares?
You know thousands of patent holders are realizing the potential value of their patents, looking longingly at Apple's $75 billion dollar cash pile (poor guys. Everyone is stealing their stuff). It will be interesting to see how positions change after Apple comes under constant, unrelenting assault. I already see people like Gruber trying to differentiate patents by their holders, which is so ignorant and fanboy-driven that it should embarrass him.
>The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go
While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.
Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.
To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.
>But Android OS doesn't resemble an iPaq, it resembles iOS.
Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc. The iPaq was a "PDA", however, which somehow differentiates it. I owned one. I know how they are similar.
>You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.
No, I'm not inferring that whatsoever. I am arguing whether its uniqueness is patentable. We've seen with various iterations of iOS that it is borrowing from its competitors as well. That's how the world works.
You spend a good 90% of each of your posts saying nothing of value but instead offending me and pandering to the crowd, desperately trying to drag yourself to some higher ground where your complete lack of facts is overlooked. I hope no one falls for it.
>That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.
Again, what did Apple invent? The concept of multitouch? No, not at all. The screen itself? No, not at all. The interface rudiments? I will say it again that most of them were demonstrated in Minority Report. Specific algorithms to detect movement?
You are the one claiming that Android stole this grand invention, so I ask again - what did Android steal? We know it wasn't the idea, or the physical sensor...and I highly doubt they stole the algorithm...so what?
The RIM thing was a giant lie. Remarkable that anyone ever thought it was true, much less would be referencing it now. The random message board commentator, seeking aggrandizement among their fellow fanboys, quickly disappeared and erased their history from the net, worried that their fiction would hold legal consequences.
As to Android, it is entirely possible that it went from being a Blackberry clone to instead being an iPaq clone. You know, the iPaq circa 2000 or even earlier. The one that was all screen. Sure it used a stylus, but that was courtesy of the limits of the resistive touchscreen technology.
Surface was unveiled in 2007, with the final hardware design being completed two years prior. The project itself started based upon, humorously, Minority Report.
"Well, where I come from, that means you lost buddy, and I have no further need to rebut you."
Yeah you've said that a couple of times now. Kind of funny, really.
>You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art".
I know exactly what the multitouch patent covers, and yes the basic principals are almost entirely demonstrated in the movie Minority Report. Apple did not invent or have anything to do with multitouch sensors, nor were they close to the first to implement such a sensor.
But you're sure that Android "stole it" (or apparently that they learned great insights from Apple's patent application), which is PERVERSELY wrong on so many levels.
When people say "I'm not going to debate this", it's because they have nothing to debate. You've said nothing of value beyond alluding to a laughable patent example while making absurd claims about the insights gained from patents.
Once again I offhandedly discovered that my comments were going to a great bit bucket.
Why?
Who the fuck knows but some pedarest at HN who for some reason decided to flag me. They were more insightful and of better quality than the raging set of movie references and pun-threads that have overcome this place. Extraordinarily few ever went negative.
So once again - FUCK YOU PAUL GRAHAM you overrated chimp. Fuck you idiots at HN.
Die in a fire. Out.