Steve Jobs RIP

See Apple web site

Apple web site

BBC News Obituary

http://www.pcworld.com/article/241233/apple_chairman...

A sad day. He was a great innovator, communicator and business man. The world is a poorer place now.

Innovator? No. Apple has stifled innovation for years with its vexatious patent claims and aggressive attitude to competitors. Its only innovation was very early on when it made the transition from CLI to GUI.

Xerox PARC's GUI?

Exactly what innovations have been stifled?

What is the point in spending millions of dollars developing ideas when people can just come along and copy them. Patents protect developers and innovators, without them they wouldn't bother.

Yeah as without patents Apple certainly wouldn't have ripped off Creative and have go to court.

Oh wait it did and they had to settle out of court.

Great innovation that Apple.

Apple have never done that. They've spent millions patenting and then copying others. They stopped being true inovators years ago. Like many in the current oligopoly, they spend their time destroying upstarts and stealing ideas, because they have the power to do so and if they don't they would go out of business.

Oh, anonymous chicken, the hideously broken US patent system is hardly Apple's fault - all US corps face the same problem and it is now seen as an unpleasant cost of business.

Of course, if Creative had worried more about making a decent product and less about patenting the screamingly obvious it might still be relevant in the media player business.

Oh.

Look up "pyrrhic victory".

12, you are just making yourself look a bit of an ass now,

You should probably stop while you still have some dignity.

They've spent millions patenting and then copying others

This sentence makes no sense at all.

Only found out about 3 hours ago from the little tribute at the bottom of Google.

R.I.P Steve Jobs!

In reply to a post by ian_c:

Exactly what innovations have been stifled?

Hackintosh.

In what way is a hackintosh an innovation?

In what way are they stifled?

In reply to a post by ian_c:

In what way is a hackintosh an innovation?

So you can run Mac software on a PC.

In what way are they stifled?

Apple took the manufacturers to court and stopped them.

So you can run Mac software on a PC.

Macintoshes are PCs

Apple took the manufacturers to court and stopped them.

That didn't stifle innovation, it prevented copying.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

So you can run Mac software on a PC.

Macintoshes are PCs

lol

Apple took the manufacturers to court and stopped them.

That didn't stifle innovation, it prevented copying.

Nonsense - things can still be copied.

Nonsense - things can still be copied.

Things can also still be stolen. That's not legal either.

In reply to a post by ian_c:

This sentence makes no sense at all.

That shows how little you know of the patent system. Patents can be filled before there is a working prototype, and you if you are the first to patent an idea (even if another company invented it) you get rights to it. So apple spend their time patenting other peoples ideas (often taken from OSS), then stealing them, then suing everyone else for doing the same.

Actually, in the US "first to file" has only just become law, in the past couple of weeks. Up until now us law has been "first to invent".

You clearly haven't been following patent law and the many patent disputes or the general fact that US patent law is broken on an epic scales something no-one of any note disputes. The real problem, of course, is that software can be patented at all (when MS copy-and-pasted Quicktime code into Video for Windows, it was still a copyright dispute).

But, of course, I'm sure you can supply many specific examples of how things work the way you describe. So go on.

No probs: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=apple+patent+dispute

And you point is?