271–280 of 437 posts
This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382 ). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness. Refer here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... - "One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean, they stopped trying to compete? Are you implying that Jony Ive and Scott Forstall are sitting on their butts right now thinking "good thing we won, we won't have to compete any more?" What evidence do you have that they've stopped competing? Anyway, maybe you should have waited until the new iPhone and iPad come out before selling your stock.
It's quite simple. If you sue your competition to win - you will lose because the reason for your success is not protecting your IP rights (which can and will be abused as soon as you succeed - relentlessly) - but by making new IP. Disney rocks not because of Mickey Mouse - it rocks because of Pixar. Google rocks not because of PageRank - but because of pushing the edge of search and AI. Tesla rocks not because of th…
This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…
Trade dress is about what the average consumer sees and perceives? First to market matters here because even with a lot of patents covering the outside of the product there's so much more involved in trade dress. Therefore it doesn't matter that Apple copies, they were first to market and were copied in the market in a way that would be considered similar by laymen. Lawyers would have a much higher/harder standard of…
A lot of what apple was calling "trade dress" was arguably just the best most obvious, or cheapest way of doing something--bezel etc...
Apple does not copy. It's against their "values". Apple steals. Starting with Xerox PARC and continuing to this day. What do they steal? User interface design and code. Why do they steal? Because Apple is a _hardware_ company who aims to compete with (and now aims to control) software developers. It started with trying to compete with Microsoft and it continues to this day. To discover where Apple's interfaces come f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Touch means finger touches. According to who, you? Feel free to argue around the technological improvements Apple have brought, but to argue that everything everybody has always called "touchscreen" isn't that... makes no sense. And even by your strange definition of a "touch based UI", were Apple the first company to create capacitive touch screens? Hell, I don't think they were even the first to create phones usi…
Of course touch means finger touches. Writing with a pencil or stylus isn't called touching. This is pretty basic stuff, it just seems as though you have some axe to grind with this poster and want to nit pik at semantics, but in doing to it just looks rather childish.
Yes it is. The user is touching the screen with the stylus.
This definition specifically includes pen and pencil: (http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/touch)
The wikipedia article has a variety of touch screens which respond to objects, or fingers, or both: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History)
Apple refined existing concepts.
Why are PDAs suddenly that weird uncle you never talk about and only see at birthdays? Because they ultimately failed in the market. There was a reason that the Blackberry and Treo type devices became popular. They worked better than the early touchscreen devices. Those early deficiencies left manufacturers gunshy about creating more touchscreen devices. It was combination of hardware issues (resistive, single touch)…
They floundered for a while, but the iPod Touch is very successful today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's quite simple. If you sue your competition to win - you will lose because the reason for your success is not protecting your IP rights (which can and will be abused as soon as you succeed - relentlessly) - but by making new IP. Disney rocks not because of Mickey Mouse - it rocks because of Pixar. Google rocks not because of PageRank - but because of pushing the edge of search and AI. Tesla rocks not because of th…
So how does this philosophy square with Google's recently filed lawsuit against Apple via Motorola's patents?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.
Microsoft developed the "old" Surface (now called PixelSense) at the same time Apple was working on the iPhone. Both were released in very early 2007 after years of R&D work. Both had multitouch UIs of the type you seem to think are so innovative. Both arrived at these solutions at the same time because the wide availability of capacitive touchscreens (which neither MS nor Apple invented, mind you -- capacitive and m…
There are many errors in this claim.
Capacitive Touchscreens were not widely available at that time at all, which is why the early iPhone ripoffs used resistive screens.
This is also why the Microsoft PixelSense used CAMERAS.
Quoting from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PixelSense "It is a 30 in (76 cm) 4:3 rear projection display (1024x768) with integrated PC and five near-infrared (IR) cameras that can see fingers and objects placed on the display."
For emphasis: "and five near-infrared (IR) cameras"
>"For someone who seems to have so little grasp on the real history behind all this stuff you should be careful about calling other HN readers out as you do in a post below this one."
I think its hilarious that people would accuse me of having "so little grasp on the real history" when you just claimed that the Microsoft PixelSense used "widely available" "capacitive touchscreens".
So, which is it, did you know that it actually used cameras and thought you could lie and get it by me? Or were you genuinely ignorant of the "history behind this stuff" and just repeating what you'd heard from someone else because it fits your ideology and you live in the Reality Distortion Field where Apple never invented anything?
Seriously. 9/10 of the "rebuttals" I see on Hacker News are of the quality of the one you just posted... and not only were you blatantly and obviously wrong in a way that you wouldn't have been if you'd ever bothered to research any of this, but you accused me of not knowing my history based on a made up claim of your own.
The bottom line is you're following an ideology, and because that ideology has supplanted reasoning for you, you believe-- with the conviction of a religious zealot-- what you hear that fits your reality distortion field. And thus it is inconceivable to you that I might actually know what I am talking about.
IF you'd just said "Didn't the microsoft surface use a capacitive touch screen?" that would be very excusable. But even then-- and even if it HAD-- it wouldn't support the claim that Apple never invented anything, or specifically never invented a UI for iOS.
Unless you're also claiming that somehow the iOS UI is the same as the microsoft one... which would again be absurd and easily disproven.
See the thing is, you aren't even arguing on the topic-- you're just throwing out (false) claims to try and create cover!
If you were the outlier it would be one thing, but on any of these threads you can find hundreds of people posting this kind of easily disproven nonsense that doesn't even address the issue.
This level of discourse is just terrible. Please make arguments, please make them to the actual point. Even if you'd been factually right, you wouldn't have been addressing my point at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple didn't invent touch UI. Ever been to a restaurant in the last decade?
Who is saying that Apple invented the touch UI? This is a false argument. Apple's patent is on a very specific type of touch interface and the interactions with it. Apple-style multi-touch interfaces did not exist before the iPhone. And if they did, you could be damn sure that whoever did invent it would have been suing Apple left and right.
But to address your point: multi touch OS
iPhone - 2007
Minority Report - 2004 (design ideas, not working implementation)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Groklaw has been a pretty reliable source for years now. Its disappointing that them presenting an opinion means they are labeled as "biased."
Groklaw has been a very reliable source for information, but to call them unbiased is naive. Groklaw has always taken an editorial viewpoint. SCO vs IBM? Oracle vs Google? Apple vs Samsung? They always have their favorites, so their analysis tends to skew that way. They don't try to hide it, and their reputation is top notch, but don't claim they aren't biased. Normally, their viewpoint is right in line with most of…