Submitted by I missed this one:
The 2012 patent trial that grabbed the most headlines was Apple’s $1 billion win (since reduced) against Samsung. But Apple also suffered a major patent setback of its own last year when a patent-holding company called VirnetX won a $368 million verdict against the tech giant.
The consequences of Apple’s loss are now starting to become clear. This month, testimony in a court hearing showed that not only is Apple facing royalty payments that could cost it many millions more, but it has already made changes to one of its premiere products, FaceTime – changes that reportedly have degraded the service’s quality.
While I won’t shed a tear for Apple losing a patent lawsuit, this does illustrate once more why the system is broken.
I forgot Facetime was a thing.
I remember when it came out, and Apple promised to make it an open protocol.
Oh, well, I guess I’ll just have to keep Skyping…
Aren’t the cool kids moving to WebRTC?
No, cool kids stay with closed protocols/codecs. Smart ones switch to open web API.
Edited 2013-09-25 06:42 UTC
Because Skype is an open protocol?
No, because Skype is available for pretty much every platform. Facetime is not.
Who apart from career lecturers, career educators and students ACTUALLY give a flying purple fish if it’s open sores or not!?!
People who don’t subscribe to the floss-tard bull (bascially anyone over the age of 24 who isn’t wearing socks with sandals) REALLY don’t care. They want something that actually works, is available on just about everything, and we don’t care if it costs money either.
“I smiled and introduced myself as I sat down beside her. She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it. I^aEURTMve been mistaken for a technician enough times to recognise the expression.
^aEUR~I^aEURTMll need to be quick. I^aEURTMve got a lesson to teach in 5 minutes,^aEURTM I said. ^aEUR~You teach?^aEURTM
^aEUR~That^aEURTMs my job, I just happen to manage the network team as well.^aEURTM
She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She^aEURTMd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can^aEURTMt display her PowerPoint on the IWB she^aEURTMll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with.”
http://coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-computers/
Fuck off, asshole.
Typical intelligent response from an open source fandroid. Thanks for confirming everything the OP said.
None of this makes any sense.
One person goes on a totally irrelevant, inaccurate and hate filled rant about OSS.
This is replied to with an anecdote from the IT offices, punctuated with an expletive which strangely was the only bit of the text which seems related to it’s parent.
What does this confirm?
The only thing I can confirm is that:
^aEURc I’m confused
^aEURc People shouldn’t be so emotional about their technology choices
^aEURc We should at least try to think about the audience before leaving a permanent mark on the net.
PS: I’m not perfect.
While I basically agree with you, in this one case your anger is misdirected. The OP mentioned Apple’s promise to make FaceTime an “open” protocol. Not an open *source* protocol, an open protocol as in allowing FaceTime to be available on other platforms perhaps by licensing said protocol. He then mentioned Skype in the same post, and made a flawed comparison. Skype is not an open protocol, however Skype themselves make apps for all their supported platforms. The end result is the same, but is achieved in a different way. The OP made a flawed comparison, was called on it and then you jumped in with a knee-jerk response. Open and open source are not synonymous, no matter what some zealots would like you to believe.
Wait a minute, here we are talking about open protocols, which is a different issue from open source entirely.
To illustrate the difference : only geeks care about whether their TV set runs open-source software, but pretty much every sane person likes to be sure that when they buy a new TV, they will be able to plug video devices from any manufacturer into it, no matter what their relationship with the TV manufacturer is.
Open protocols may or may not help open-source software depending on their redistribution conditions : anything whose licence does not feature a “spec may be used freely for non-commercial use” clause is as good as a closed protocol as far as open-source software development is concerned.
Edited 2013-09-25 15:51 UTC
Skype/Microsoft also changed it’s model in the same way Facetime did. It’s a centralized model where all the traffic used to be handled P2P now all traffic flows through central servers.
Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if NSA is involved, because the company where the patent originated was some kind of security company that developed the ‘patented technology’ when it was a subcontractor for the NSA.
Nothing to be ashamed of. No-one remembers Facetime.
.
Facetime is used by a lot of people. The rest don’t remember it exists because it wasn’t made available like they said it would be because of the patent lawsuit and its aftereffects. Protecting patents you own is fine and legitimate if you produce a product related to that patent. If the sole purpose of the company owning a patent is to sue companies that actually produce products, then the patents they own should be invalid. It’s quite simple but will never happen. Either produce a product or give up the right to sue.
I’ve been using facetime regularly since the day it came out (kids, family, etc) both on my laptop and phone. I can’t say i’ve noticed any degradation in quality at any point. Erm, that’s not to say the quality is great or anything.
PS: I don’t know if I belong to the cool kids or not..