Submitted by Just when I thought the company I once admired greatly couldn’t sink any lower. “Over the last two years, Apple has been engaged in vicious legal battles over smartphone patents, many of which are aimed at squelching (or squeezing money out of) manufacturers of devices running Android. And now, for some reason, it has given valuable patents to a patent troll – which is using them to sue many of the top technology companies in the world.”
Another possibility is that Digitude is merely a front company for Apple.
What amazes me is that there’s always been this fan club for Apple, made up of people who hate evil Microsoft. Yeah, Apple makes lots of neat consumer products. But their corporate behavior has always been like any other company. This became apparent to me back in the 90’s, when I couldn’t open one of their laptops because of the proprietary screw-heads they use. Closed, closed, closed.
Voted +1.
I’m amazed that people are fans of any company. No company is an angel.
I mean I can see being a fan of some hypothetical developer whom focuses on privacy, creating an amazingly awesome music player and whom on top of everything donates any money left over to charity.
But not a for-profit company.
Maybe this is just a new tactic used by the new heads of Apple now when SJ is gone? I am expecting some kind of change in tactics, but could this be it? I sure hope not…
Yes, if you manifest some companies into a single living person it would be a heartless psychopath intend in killing the competition and destroying others livelyhoods.
Blinded idolatry is not a good thing.
I wish I could vote you up as both funny and insightful. Maybe even a little bit informative.
I agree but … they are not all equal on one hand we have Apple, MS on the other Red Hat, Canonical. Lets judge companies by what they do not what they are.
Of course there are companies and there are companies. No doubt. One would be foolish to think everyone is the same.
However, I still think that the “extreme” levels of fanboyism isn’t very good for anyone except perhaps stockholders.
Actually, the issue is even larger than just corporate fans. One should never follow anything blindly without second thoughts or any level of analysis or criticism. (Not even my mind-bogglingly astounding project.
)
Propaganda and blinded followers are the very core of the threats to society and democracy.
Oh snap, I just got out of hand. Sorry, back to the article. Apple and patents… Not good.
And it will happen to Google too eventually, as they started to show some evil side lately.
There aren’t any not-for-profit companies that succeed also. They get crushed by lobbies, etc.. and even fanbois usually.
Then I will be the first. Woohoo!
I owned one of their late 90s laptops, and the hardware was a joy to work with. Very accessible. The firmware and software was terrible, though, and Apple really really likes the idea of forced obsolescence.
They also like to keep things just incompatible enough with everything else so that you can’t really use both a Mac and some other thing. In that way, they really are more Microsoft than Microsoft, which I think was the reason for both their (relative) lack of success and the rabidness of their cult: cultists need to convert people to their side since, well, using a Mac kind of sucks in the real world. But using something else in a Mac world would be a thousand times worse.
In general you might be right. I’ve only ever come upon one ethical computer company. Sadly they don’t exist any more.
Re Apple.
It is strange that my MacBook finds ‘Windows shares’ easier than Windows (All versions).
It also works OOTB with more printers than Windows.
It also reads more types of hdd filesystem OOTB than Windows does.
Funny that.
They might be the devil incarnate but some of their products are pretty good.
MS was the devil and their (IMHO) products are Devilish and sometimes pretty poor in comparison to Apples.
MS’s saving grace is IMHO, Office for Mac. I can use it far more efficiently than Office 2010 for Windows.
However it is probably the devil in sheeps clothing.
If you are implying that Apple is easier to use and manage in an enterprise network then a windows box, I’ll have to ask you if you are jesting perhaps?
Probably true, but a non issue
MS was the devil until Apple de-throned them by being THE worst and most un=ethical company there is! As for the quality of products, they target different segments. In consumer type products Apple has made some quality products, but they try to control way too much for my liking, where as in the enterprise grade products MS is still waaayy ahead of Apple.
DISCLAIMER
MS used to be No1 in my dislike list but it has been overtaken by Apple with no possibility of catching up
If you guys want to argue about which one of these large corporations is ‘most evil’, I have a movie recommendation for you:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1335986
Edited 2011-12-10 18:30 UTC
Perhaps, but they have made some recent moves in that direction. Adding a binding mandatory arbitration clause to their LIVE ID TOS for example.
This shows you’re either lying, or simply have never had to deal with a mixed network. Windows 7’s networking stack and discovery features are *amazing*. I can’t count how many times my Macs refused to recognise anything in the network – be they Linux or Windows. Windows <-> Linux has never been an issue.
There may be something funny about Windows 7 networking. In the small company I work for, the people running Windows 7 are always complaining about the long delays when browsing to other computers, even ones they accessed recently. This is an all-Windows office.
It could be a configuration problem, but the sys admin can’t seem to make any headway on it. (I still run XP, and I don’t have as much of a problem.)
We’ve had to disable Windows 7’s TCP/IP auto-tuning network feature. The speed difference was amazing for us.
Use this command in a command window with administrator rights:
netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disable
While I agree that Windows has come a long way when it comes to sharing stuff over the network there’s still some issues I have with it.
First it seems that when you enable the built in firewall of Win7 Homegroup will stop working.
Secondly, sharing between wired and wireless has always been problematic for me. I have tried with two routers (Linksys and Belkin) and both seem to have a firewall or some obstacle between these two interfaces, preventing Homegroup computers from reaching each other.
All in all, network sharing on Windows is a lot neater than it was back in the days, there’s still kinks to work out.
I have no experience of Mac sharing as I’ve never owned a Mac.
The obstacle is your router can only route IPv4 packets between wired and wireless, and Homegroup requires IPv6. Since the wired ports are all hooked up to a switch, IPv6 traffic should work between wired computers. Same with wireless traffic, but not between wireless and wired. Note that this would also apply to IPX.
As for the firewall blocking Homegroup traffic, that’s what firewalls are for. Homegroup traffic is handled over the default SMB/CIFS ports, which get blocked by default on networks labeled as “public”. Try disabling the firewall for private networks (They should be behind a firewall already). This should be the default, but for some reason it isn’t always the case.
I’m gonna reverse your post for the sake of a nice ending.
Yeah, I disabled it since I have a firewall in the router. But couldn’t Homegroup use UPnP? Or maybe Microsoft could at least offer to add exceptions to Homegroup if the user is using it. I mean this technology is aimed for the average Joe.
Interesting. It really helps to know some more about the underlying problem. Still, it doesn’t offer a viable solution. I don’t want to go all in on either wired or wireless. I don’t buy new routers very often so I might stay with this one for a while.
Besides, routers and IPv6 is a bit of a hassle still. I tried to find something good here at the local retailers that supported IPv6 on the outside (those that support v6 only offer it on the inside).
Anyway, I would gladly accept some tips on a router which would solve this Homegroup issue as well as offer me full IPv6 support (both inbound and outbound).
Buffalo with DDWRT.
In my personal experience in using Macs in mixed networks along with Win 7, you are simply wrong!! Period!
Which tells us more about your lack of experience, then anything else EXCLAMATION MARK, EXCLAMATION MARK, QUESTION MARK
You know absolutely nothing re my ‘experience.’
You’ve already said Apple is on the top of your hate list, with no chance of that changing. You can’t really expect anyone to take your points seriously after that.
I definately wouldn’t want to be taken seriously by you. Or any other iFan for that matter. I am taken seriously by the people that matter … nuff said
In my personal experience in using Macs in mixed networks along with Win 7, you are simply wrong!! Period! [/q]
Gotta love Thom’s reasoning here. “Your experience is different than mine! You must be lying!” Ridiculous.
I’ve finally transitioned to Windows 7 at work (from XP pro) and Lion at home. Lion is a little quirky, but on the whole I’ve yet to have a “way the heck?” moment. Windows 7, on the other hand, is heavy and clunky. The networking configuration is a car crash compared to XP, or even the Mac OS X.
While Windows7 works well when it gets connected to a network, it’s a total PITA when it has issues with connecting to a network.
They still have a LOT to do in the networking area, but I can’t say it’s not better than previous releases.
The sugar on top of networking looks nice, but functionally it leaves much to be desired.
Network stacks in Mac and Linux seem to be still way ahead of Windows(at least from perspective of a user).
samba and cups would like a word with you.
And since Apple is transitioning from Samba, they will defenitely loose a lot of interoperability with Windows networks.
‘Proprietary’ screw heads are usually a terrible example to choose. First, they’re rarely ‘proprietary’ – what people mean when they say ‘proprietary’ is ‘not like the two century-or-more old designs everyone has drivers for’. Few of the slightly-more-unusual designs are actually proprietary, many of them are actually internationally standardized, and it’s usually trivially easy to buy a driver for any of them off eBay or in any good hardware store for a couple of dollars.
Second, there are entirely legitimate reasons to choose screw head designs other than slot or cross-head which have nothing to do with preventing people accessing the inside: the name of the most popular ‘weird’ screw style, Torx, may give you a clue. They’re designed to be more reliable in automated processes: Torx screws are much harder to over-torque than slot or cross-heads, and most of the ‘weird’ designs can be driven by robots with less chance of slippage. That’s why they’re used, it’s not really about ‘locking you out’ of the system. If the manufacturer wants to do that, they’ll either just weld/glue the thing shut, or stick a ‘WARRANTY VOID’ sticker over the seal. Or both.
Apple is creating future problems for itself with this kind of behaviour.
Osnews did’nt report on it and about everyone know about it already but Motorolla has won a case against Apple in Europe and this all because Apple is forcing other companies hand. The patent is a pretty crucial piece of cellular technology involving packet data transfer i think.
If the regulators permit companies to “donate” patents to patent trolls to suppress the competition there is nothing prohibiting the competition of doing the same with Apple.
Apple is working themselves into a corner here and waisting money on expensive legal battles that should have gone to their shareholders.
If the competition create/shore’s up there own patent troll fences Apple will have no leg to stand on.
Apple’s products is good enough, and it’s following large enough to peacefully coexists with Android.
They did report this yesterday: http://osne.ws/jlv
comment deleted (by me)
Edited 2011-12-10 21:00 UTC
This is just pathetic. The fanboys will be thinking able is right bla bla. But this is just a joke. Apple has no innovation (left) so they are going through the scare tactics. Just pathetic! and it is sad, i liked the stuff they made,
I think apple should patent this technology: hiring a puppet troll company to sue competitors in order to keep image(*). The next big thing is here people!
*: If i’m not mistaken some other company (M$) used this tactic also. But noo it does not matter, Apple invented it. I should even go and pay royalties to apple cause I used something they invented in this post.
.
What makes HTC or Motorola or Samsung any different from a patent troll?
They make stuff. Duh.
And they only sue in counter attacks.
I know that it is futile to try and have a reasonble discussion with you … but … please I beg you don’t try to portray yopurself for what you are not.
When you state that apple and MS are comparable when it comes to networking it becomes self evident that you are newbies in IT and have not dealt with an enterprise network …. nuff said
1995 is calling and wants you to return your IT-challenged mgt team. Mixed networks work very well these days when the infrastructure is properly configured and managed. We see it on a daily basis here in 2011.
Appletalk!!
Yeah, things are far more standardized than they used to be, but it’d be nice if Windows would include other sharing technologies, like NFS. I do mean out of the box support.
SMB is kind of a pain either way, hopefully SMB4 gets released at some point to start replacing some Active Directory servers.
Not surprised. Apple being a patent troll with experience might want to offload some of the trolling activities to other shadow parties.
There is an other possibility.
Here is a quote from the article:
“Digitude is a new kind of patent investment vehicle because it seeks to team up with strategic players that can invest in Digitude not with money, but by contributing patents. The contributing entity would then get a license for all of Digitude’s patents, [Digitude Chairman Robert] Kramer says.”
So Apple gets access to other patents.
Good for them… Except that you can only sue for patents you own, the license only prevent them to be sued.
Why would they need to sue ? The company they have this deal with is probably already doing that.
Maybe they’ll go after Microsoft.