I think a better reason than "not wanting to play fair" is that the Apple implementation preserves the correct operation of the mic even while the remote is being pressed. Apple does it using a custom chip within the remote that superimposes an ultrasonic tone on the mic signal which can be cleanly filtered out, whereas resistor-based signalling works by shorting the mic signal to ground which either mutes or attenuates the mic (depending on the specific button and resistance involved).
Patenting something like that is basically the definition of "not wanting to play fair": to make a compatible device, you have to indulge Apple's rent-seeking. Patents on standards tend to cause more standards to spring up, which overall increases both consumer confusion (wait, is this one compatible with my device?) and costs for manufacturers (either by requiring extra hardware to detect what it's plugged into, or extra SKUs that hurt economies of scale).
I'm certainly not an "all patents are bad" kind of person, but this one is definitely a bad patent that Apple filed for anti-competitive purposes that ends up hurting everyone but them.
I disagree - a simple solution exists, which means you cannot use the mic and a button at the same time. Apple invested time and money to solve this problem in a non-trivial way; it seems perfectly reasonable to me that headset manufacturers wanting to use Apple's solution should pay royalties
I can't believe the time and money they "invested" was at all significant, certainly not enough to justify any non-trivial amount of royalties.
But frankly I just don't care about Apple's costs: I'm far more interested in the broader economic effects of moves like this, and it's clear to me that both consumers and device-ecosystem manufacturers are harmed economically by patents like this.
So who "wins"? Do we grant the monopoly because Apple is oh so clever (they're really not, in this case), and allow Apple to enrich itself at the detriment of others, or do we look out for the greater good? I argue the latter is the correct choice in a civilized society.
>Patenting something like that is basically the definition of "not wanting to play fair": to make a compatible device, you have to indulge Apple's rent-seeking.
Either you don't believe in patents at all, or this is a fair patent. Apple did find that workaround, others had lots of time until's Apple entry to find it, patent it themselves or open it up.
> Either you don't believe in patents at all, or this is a fair patent.
Completely false dichotomy. Patents are there to promote innovation, not to fracture technology choices, make things difficult and confusing for consumers, and disproportionately raise costs for manufacturers. There's a balance to be found between the economic pluses granted to the patent holder and the minuses inflicted on everyone else due to the patent, and in this case I feel the balance is all wrong.
One way to look at this is that Apple used a broken patent system to achieve an unfair result. There is no way an arbitrary assortment of resistances should be patentable.
The fact that someone else could potentially do a bad thing does not absolve you of the responsibility for doing that bad thing.
I guess Apple's approach makes sense if one expect someone to want to listen to music while also using the mic to talk to someone. Otherwise the advent of a conversation will preclude the use of the music, and thus any need to use the controls.
When we talk in real life, or on the phone, we don't have to stop listening to the others when we speak. So this isn't about just music, but also voip, conferences (Facetime, Skype, etc).
I very often need to change the volume while speaking to someone, I'm not certain but I think the play/pause button acts as a mute button while in a conversation as well.
Although this far predates Siri and dictation and such, there is are now valid reasons when you want to use the mic and listen to music at the same time.
Not quite the same thing, although they do have some similarities.
The Selective Availability "feature" of GPS worked by fuzzing the time readings output by the GPS satellites. The fuzz was time-varying but only changed every few seconds. Because it affected nearby receivers with similar amounts of error, if you had access to two receivers in the same area you could quite accurately measure their positions relative to each other.
The Chinese map obfuscation scheme is basically a secret map projection (it's not a constant offset, it varies over locations). GPS coordinates go into a black box and out come obfuscated coordinates, which you then use to plot on the map. Because there wouldn't be much point to GPS receivers that constantly show your location on the wrong point on the map, receivers sold in China actually incorporate the algorithm, and it probably wouldn't be too difficult to reverse engineer.
I'm trying to figure out if you are serious about "Chinese Map Obfuscation Schemes". Your description of SA and DGPS is spot on, but I can't think of any reason that China would want to obfuscate their maps now that satellites have mapped their country.
Interestingly, the Retina MBP has a combo Ethernet MAC/PHY + memory card reader chip of which they're only using the latter function. I would guess that either the decision to drop the Ethernet port was made pretty late in the process or the board designers were kept in the dark about the mechanical design until it was too late to pick a different part.
Also, a PCI-E lane actually is 4 pins :)
Edit: reply to dead - standalone memory card reader ICs are standard components. The USB SD ICs they used in earlier models would have been easier to route (than the PCI-E combo chip) and probably cheaper.
I note from Anandtech's review that there were serious problems with the SD reader in earlier models, so perhaps they were deliberately avoiding those ICs?
It's not an RFC, it's an Internet Draft (which anyone can submit without review), and anyway it's offensive and incoherent enough that nobody will take it seriously, and it certainly won't make it as an actual RFC.
Proposals to fragment the Internet generally do not go down well, for obvious reasons.
The proposal is needlessly complicated, notwithstanding the poor quality of writing. The authors' rationale is to "realize autonomy", yet AIP suffixes are globally namespaced and still need IANA assignment, which is really no different to the current situation in relation to TLDs. It breaks backwards compatibility when applications need to cross AIP networks and also introduces the issue of conflicting AIP network-internal names. The authors make no attempt to discuss these obvious issues or any others, and also blindly wave off security considerations, saying "there is no additional security requirement".
Also, the authors are on Yahoo/QQ free webmail addresses, which isn't very professional.
Phone number style email addresses are quite common in China.
I assume it's because you can't have unicode email address? (can you?) And there are only a hundred or so different names (in pinyin without tone marks)...
>And there are only a hundred or so different names (in pinyin without tone marks)...
My instinct tell me that's not correct. So I did the calculation:) From the ancient Chinese surname document "百家姓" [1], there're more than 500 hundreds surnames listed. And by removing the tone marks, I got 295 unique surnames in pinyin. But these are just surnames commonly used thousand years ago. Multiple by thousands unique first names, I believe that there're at least hundreds of thousands different names in pinyin.
Of course this is still far less than the number of different names in western countries. But it's not the main reason that some people in China use number style email addresses.
I can't speak to the offensive end, but it is an RFC draft proposal, and the author seems to be missing a lot of in/definite articles in his writing. It does make parts of it less coherent.
At least they took the time to write it in English. Considering how much effort the inventors and maintainers of the DNS put into supporting non-ASCII languages like Chinese I think that's pretty good, even if they missed a few articles.
Sure the motivation is may be imposed by politics, but if it were your job to implement such network segmentation then this is a reasonably rational way to go about it.
It is, of course, contrary to the fundamental principle of the internet.
thanks for the clarification, I was unsure about the intentions of the authors and their capability to implement this proposal. however this doesn't rule out the possibility that China does in fact implement such a system.
Yes, this is actually what they meant by "no glass layer".
The integrated display isn't really a miracle of engineering. In my opinion it's more a miracle of business that they convinced their display manufacturer to make the retina display modules in the shape of the MBP's display assembly. This sort of thing has actually shown up in smartphones for a while but this is the first time we've seen it in a notebook computer.
No, it's true. The possible geometry of visible GPS satellites at any given moment (namely that they're all above you and none are below) means that the vertical error is pretty bad in comparison to the horizontal error.
It has much more to do with how GPS receivers calculate a horizontal position when they have limited satellites in view.
I don't understand the math but essentially you are trying to solve four unknowns. Latitude, longitude, elevation, and the time offset between the satellite and device clocks. If only three satellites are in view the only way to solve latitude and longitude is to assume a value for elevation based on previous results. Without a forth satellite the GPS simply doesn't know what the altitude is. But that estimated value is sufficient to give a good estimate of horizontal position.
It's true that this makes the VDOP generally higher than the PDOP, which leads to lower precision in the vertical direction. The 10-25m figure is a complete nonsense, though. It's more like 3-5m.
WAAS uses a network of ground-based reference stations, in North America and Hawaii, to measure small variations in the GPS satellites' signals in the western hemisphere. Measurements from the reference stations are routed to master stations, which queue the received Deviation Correction (DC) and send the correction messages to geostationary WAAS satellites in a timely manner (every 5 seconds or better). Those satellites broadcast the correction messages back to Earth, where WAAS-enabled GPS receivers use the corrections while computing their positions to improve [3D] accuracy.
And if you need even higher resolution (centimeter resolution), use use NOAA CORS sites (either with post-processing, or real time with their experimental datafeed)
