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Well no as MS didn't acquire the patents. They got the device and services part of Nokia. Nokia still retains their patent portfolio.

Yes, Microsoft did buy design patents. But I probably used a poor choice of words when I said that they received the patent portfolio. What they did get was "...8,500 of Nokia’s design patents"

You are right in one respect, they didn't buy ALL of Nokia's patents

"It bought the design patents outright but will license Nokia's 30,000 utility patents patents for 10 years. By not acquiring the entirety of Nokia's patents, Microsoft was able to keep the acquisition cost of the Devices and Services down while preserving future assets for Nokia"

https://readwrite.com/2013/09/...

I imagine some people use Facebook only for the "Connect with Facebook" buttons on other websites. When Spotify first entered the United States market, it outsourced its login for that market to Facebook. The comment section on HuffPost also uses Facebook login.

I forgot! THAT is why I didn't use Spotify. Now I remember!

I watch Netflix exclusively on my PS3 and yet Pornhub shows me ads on my laptop based on what I watched on my PS3. I'm not logged into my Netflix account on my laptop. In fact, the only account that's shared between the two is Amazon. Netflix must be sharing my viewing habits by IP address to an advertiser who has a relationship with Pornhub. Does that strike anyone as unexpected and creepy?

This leaves only a couple options for privacy on the Internet:
1. Use TOR to do all your browsing.
2. Demand regulations that prohibit sharing with 3rd parties without opt-in consent that isn't a condition of accessing a service.

I imagine some people use Facebook only for the "Connect with Facebook" buttons on other websites. When Spotify first entered the United States market, it outsourced its login for that market to Facebook. The comment section on HuffPost also uses Facebook login.

Right, but a small mention of "Entire family wiped out in car crash" pales in comparison to the news coverage that a Tesla just scraped a parked car .

This shows the the level of media attention does not correlate to the appropriate levels of concern. Just like the terrorist attacks. Tobacco companies kill far more Americans than terrorists. Do not ramble on on the argument that smokers choose to risk their health and life, I'm talking about second hand smoke.

Tesla's autopilot will save many lives on the motor ways. It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be statistically better than you or I. Even though this technology is in its infancy, it is already a better than you are, statistically.

Irrelevant. APIs can not be copyrighted, period. End. Of. Discussion.

According to the Federal Appeals Court-- whose opinion is the only one that matters (since the Supreme court declined the case)-- you are wrong. APIs can be copyrighted. End of discussion.

You may not agree, you may not like it, but that's irrelevant.

http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/...
http://readwrite.com/2015/06/2...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

In US, this is not at all a given. In fact, this is exactly what this case is all about - and so far the courts have favored the notion that APIs are copyrightable, unfortunately.

http://readwrite.com/2015/06/2...

Technically the cloud is fun tech, but remember the good old days when you would rent a non-scalable server, stick it in a server room and hope you did and didn't get slashdotted?

Problem with the cloud is you never know what your monthly bill is going to be. You can get a real shock and it is hard to budget because of that. Understanding those bills is itself a major drama and you forever have to keep running and checking nothing is ratcheting up costs. Even keeping a few gig of hard drive space adds up, even though Google can offer you gigs for "free" no problems. http://readwrite.com/2013/10/1... http://searchcloudcomputing.te... http://insights.wired.com/prof...

So why don't AWS offer fixed billing? For the same reason your cellular company doesn't. :-(

Sigh. How many would choose this option? Very few. Yet you call it stupid when they don't offer an option that few people would choose. I see.

What evidence do you have that "very few" people would choose to pre-roll the stream if that feature were available? I have actual numbers that favor the proposition that people would use it.

Consider that the average household in the United States has a connection that's "rated" at 11.4 Mbps or less (source: http://readwrite.com/2014/10/0... - October 2014, so maybe it's 12 Mbps by now?). Given that the actual throughput delivered on most connections is between 60 and 80% of what's advertised (for many, only 40% of what's advertised during prime time), that means most people can expect to get around 7 Mbps, optimistically. And that's before you take into account the overhead of hundreds of TCP connections -- per computer/device in the household -- that maintain background services, checking for updates, other tabs open in the web browser, etc. -- which can use up a significant portion of that overhead. So to get your average 7 Mbps, you need to go around to every room in the house and instruct everyone to stop what they're doing, stop using the Internet entirely and shut down their computers so you can watch a video at 720p with your 7 Mbps connection.

And then once you get rolling, it will still drop down to 480p or 360p fairly often when other subscribers on your oversold ADSL or cable connection try to download stuff at the same time as you. A consistent 720p stream needs a steady throughput of at least 4 Mbps, but it's very, very easy to get a lot less than that unless your connection is basically fiber to the premises.

How is that not the same thing as simple buffering? The problem is that you want control over a feature that very few people want but it's stupid that programmers didn't offer it to you. But to answer your very specific feature set, YouTube offers it from select studios.

"Simple" buffering on most streaming video players is designed to only buffer ahead a few seconds if you pause the video. It will only continue to buffer more than that if you are actually playing the video, or if your connection is so slow that it can't even keep up with the lowest available quality setting (often 240p or lower).

It's nice to know that one service out there supports what I want "from select studios", but that hardly solves the problem when the majority of the content I want is on other services. I can also download the free movies produced by the Blender Foundation and watch them in 1080p in VLC over and over, but Big Buck Bunny gets old after a while, as entertaining as he is.

Content Cartels meaning the legal copyright holders? Yes, they have control over content they own. But that's what copyright means.

The problem is that the Content Cartels deploy policies that are actively harmful to the majority of their customers, and do so knowingly, for reasons that I frankly struggle to understand. I believe that they would actually make MORE profit from their content if they would allow people to download it in 1080p and/or pre-roll the stream, because this would enable people with slower connections -- remember, a majority of the US population -- to enjoy the content in the highest quality.

My working thesis is that people who are unable to enjoy the content at a lower quality will eventually become frustrated with the service and stop using it. If this means they resort to RedBox, then maybe that's not a net loss for the Content Cartels, since they're paying as much or more for the rental compared to an online streaming subscription; but it's still a practice that's extremely anti-consumer.

Do they have the legal right to be asshats to their customers and make their lives harder? Sure. But not everything that's legal

GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner specifies, only "Atom core" code will be closed source, while "all the existing MIT-licensed repos under the Atom org will remain so forever." The reasons are purely commercial, as he notes: "Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere in-between, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works."

Keep your wallets handy, peeps.

The whole was open-sourced in May 2014!
See http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/05/07/1245259/github-open-sources-atom-their-text-editor-based-on-chromium or http://blog.atom.io/2014/05/06/atom-is-now-open-source.html

GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner specifies, only "Atom core" code will be closed source, while "all the existing MIT-licensed repos under the Atom org will remain so forever." The reasons are purely commercial, as he notes: "Atom won't be closed source, but it won't be open source either. It will be somewhere in-between, making it easy for us to charge for Atom while still making the source available under a restrictive license so you can see how everything works."

Keep your wallets handy, peeps.

I'm sorry, I apologise for my recent civility. I assumed that the word "surprising" was used by someone other than you. It's not in the article and it's not in the PDF, so it's something you made up right out of your ass. I should have checked that before I replied. So I'll correct that here, again my apologies for not posting this first.

To start off, this isn't "Surprises for nerds dot com", it's News. And News is things that are new. And I don't remember seeing it here before, so I'm kinda sure it qualifies as new.

Could the data be correlated be because people mostly search for Wikipedia entries using Google?

NO SHIT, SHERLOCK HOMOS AND TWATSON. Google frequently puts Wikipedia at the top, especially for mobile users in my experience. So a lot of searches never see even the full results page, they just click on the first link (and a lot of users do that because that's how they think search works)*

I know that if I'm looking for info on an unfamiliar topic, I search for it on Google, and will usually check the Wikipedia entry if there is one.

No one cares what you do, this is science. More people just click on the first link, which is frequently Wikipedia to be redundant.

I'm not sure why anybody finds the statistic even slightly remarkable.

And yet you are about to remark on it. But before that, we have more. Did you think up this idea? No? If you had, do you think you would have made some remark to someone? Do you routinely read the studies of University of Prague economist Ladislav KriÅtoufek and try, as good scientists would, to replicate his results?

Or to put it another way, did you know of a way prior to reading this that you could guess what the Google Trends hot topics would be? Because if so, you should have remarked on it sooner, you selfish asshole. Otherwise you shut up and let people do science you selfish asshole.

Or even better, The article literally says "We found remarkably high correlations between them for frequently searched keywords." Why not ask those researchers at three Japanese universities why they bothered to remark, instead of wasting our time here?

The only thing that's surprising to me is that it's not higher than 75%.

There, you remarked. Why did you find that remarkable? Or remarkably low? I'd like to see your study, I really would. Let me paraphrase , "Anything that seems obvious in retrospect, I feel that I should have come up with first, so I'm going to shit on it."

*ReadWriteWeb had a day when an article on Facebook hit the top result, and the comments for that article were along the lines of "I hate the new facebook look. Where's all my pictures? Change it back." Because that's how stupid people use the internet.

http://readwrite.com/2010/02/10/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login

In 2010, the site didn't require JavaScript, so you could see the article. Then you have to enable discus which I'm not going to, but look at the disclaimer. I'll copy it here because you seem to be lacking in very basic thinking skills.

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type "facebook.com" into your browser address bar or enter "facebook" into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

Yes, people are that stupid. Which is why we need science to study what they do and how they do it, because people like you and me, well at least

Progressive stack or "the more xyz you are down the scale, the more your opinions count." Whites are at the top according to that, so your opinion counts for zero. And you can't forget the part in their CoC that states they won't go after any form of reverse racism, cisphobia(actual word used or in a common word 'hetrosexual'), sexism against particular groups of people and so on.

Github has turned to shit ever since they tossed meritocracy out the window.

Hear hear.

One of the most eloquent expressions of this came from (of all places) the founder of 4Chan, Chris Poole at a "Web 2.0" conference a few years back:

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror, but in fact, we're more like diamonds." (eg, multi-faceted).

Source

Use the NOKIA patent portfolio to threaten every phone maker into paying royalties...WHILE ALSO WRITING IT OFF!

Great strategy M$. From an old article:

Microsoft also bought the rights to license Nokia’s robust patent portfolio for 10 years. Microsoft is specifically buying 8,500 of Nokia's design patents, and will also make its patents available to Nokia for its HERE Maps unit. Nokia will also transfer its patent licensing agreements, including its big one with chipmaker Qualcomm, to Microsoft. Other patent agreements transferred to Microsoft includes those with IBM, Motorola Mobility (owned by Google), Motorola Solutions. Nokia also passes on patent agreements with Apple, LG, Nortel and Kodak to Microsoft.

Ah I see you're talking about Randi Harper and her harassment against the Free BSD community for someone daring to have a different opinion then her. Yes, that Harper, the one who claims to have an anti-harassment group called "OPAI" and engages in harassment.

The problem of course, is that the FOSS community operates on merit, to SJW's and radical feminists merit and meritocracy are verboten. They'd rather have racial and sex based quotas. If people want to see how bad it's gotten look at Github, and their removal of the meritocracy rug. They're also the ones pushing for codes of conduct, that take peoples feelings into account. And at least in the projects I've started working for they've instituted a no-code-of-conduct policy.

Did PHP kill your mother? What is the metric for being horrible? Is it based on lack of adoption or is it some score or is it something you only know when you see it?

> PHP is a significant barrier for existing projects.
> Look at the pile of crap that is Wordpress or any PHP CMS for that matter.

WP is confusing, unmaintainable code, except for the brave few who do. Those outliers aren't really important in the grand scheme. I have encountered many proprietary CMS systems that were maintainable and maintained for years. I implemented diff in PHP in 1999. It was incomprehensible but it was used as an internal visual tool. The language is for facilitating a functional program and later for other programmers to understand and change. In this way, the projects of WP and my diff were horrible (they failed half their purpose). I cannot attribute your outrage to the language.

> Ask Facebook how much money and time they have spent trying to hack around PHP's many warts.

FB rewrote the JIT (which allowed for language changes) but it wasn't to get around the warts. They have explicitly said it was for performance reasons - http://readwrite.com/2010/02/0...

Your friends and family would already know which social network you hang out on, and how to contact you. Think about it - what better way is there to use the same social network where you already are regularly in contact with each other? A completely different system used *only* during emergencies? That makes zero sense.

Also, how do you figure real friends and family are somehow different from Facebook friends? You're suggesting that real-life friends and family don't use Facebook to keep in touch with each other? The data says otherwise.

Anyhow, the fact that people are actually using these features to good effect sort of proves their value. Sorry, I just don't see it as anything but a good thing for social networks to have this system in place.

we're talking about bricking here

It's not like Apple has dome that recently or anything, is it?

also on this thread i learned that google's upgrade cycle is, at least de facto, 18 months

Except that the N4, released November 2012, got this update. 27 months and still supported. A damn sight better than Apple's support for the first-gen iPad paperweight I have sitting in a box, for sure. Their excuse is that the older hardware isn't capable of running the new OS; Google also used that excuse when they released Jellybean, but worked on the system requirements for KitKat so that those older devices were once again supported; Lollipop seems to be carrying on that tradition, as well.

But, of course, if hardware capability was a valid excuse for Apple to drop support for older hardware, shouldn't we allow Google to use it, as well?

Six of one, half dozen of the other, really. Decide which ecosystem you prefer and run with it. In my case, it's Android on the phone, iOS on the tablet, making me a daily user of both platforms and, therefore, qualified to compare them in this manner.

Actually KitKat does run on devices with less than 512M (it requires only 340MB), and it claimed to be more efficient than previous versions of Android ("project svelte").

For those slashdotters who dont cough up the ransom fee, the New York Times should be categorically banned from a citeable source for stories pertaining to news for nerds or stuff that matters as it takes free information, namely legislation proposed by the president, and turns it into content for the cloistered elite.
http://readwrite.com/2015/01/1... for the unwashed.

I really do hope with childlike glee that this legislation becomes something but to those naysayers who insist congress or the senate will not support this legislation, you're correct. They rolled back the dodd frank act in the last omnibus spending bill, and if the historic trend of Republican shutdowns and sequesters are any indication of a future course of action, this legislation will die a quick death as well. Obama is proposing populist legislation because hes a lame duck, which is a bit of a controversial label. On the one hand, he has the power to veto bullshit from the republican party like rolling back the Affordable Care Act, but on the other it means meaningful things like banking and tax reform arent going anywhere if republicans have any say. Interestingly enough, the legislation also proposes to restrict technology companies from selling the data they collect from students who use their products and services.

The only reason they did that is because Amazon beat them to it and was taking their customers away. If not for competition, Apple never would have removed DRM.

2/6/2007
http://macdailynews.com/2007/0...

"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."

  "Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly."

5/30/2007

Apple starts selling DRM free music

https://www.apple.com/pr/libra...

9/25/2007
Amazon starts selling DRM free music,
http://readwrite.com/2007/09/2...

As you were saying?

Steve Jobs himself was anti-DRM (on music, at least): http://readwrite.com/2007/02/0...

It's a shame the original page isn't even on Apple's own website anymore.

No article about a sitting President of the US is published without the aim of either helping or hurting his image and objectives. If the article puts positive light on him, then it was meant to help him and it is therefor perfectly legitimate for his opponents (like myself) to harp at the failures.

It's akin to saying someone is very skilled and more creative at using toilet paper -- and then bemoan that they're a pretty poor plumber.

That may be a valid analogy, but you should've used it years ago (2008) — when the slickness of Obama's "use of social media" was lauded (and perceived!) as the indicator of his technological savvy — something for the GOP to "catch-up" on. OMG, he uses Blackberry!..

Also:

"under a corporate aegis"

Depending on how the company manages the open source project, this can strongly discourage community members. Even if the company TRIES to encourage community development, a combination of licensing and other behaviors of the company might cause issues.

See http://readwrite.com/2013/08/0... - I once saw another article (can't find link) where one of the MariaDB guys said that with the new org structure of MariaDB, they have FAR more community contributions than MySQL ever did, even before getting purchased by Oracle.

Another example was the Cyanogen Focal relicensing incident. Cyngn's founders tried to use their CLA to obtain MySQL-style dual licensing (and the founders cite MySQL's business model as their inspiration despite the fact MySQL never had a vibrant community behind it) caused a nasty forking event, and also caused other community projects in the AOSP-derivatives space to reduce their cooperation with CyanogenMod. I keep on hearing/seeing evidence that implies numerous people on the "community" side of things that stayed with the project are pretty unhappy, only staying because it's still (for now) the dominant and most well known project in that space. Cyngn leads have even found themselves having to bribe people with devices to get them to stay.

(Disclaimer: I was one of those who left CM after the Focal relicensing dispute.)

And around the same time, The Zuck went on record saying that the age of privacy is dead.

And geeks and nerds shouted about how we should all have an expectation of complete privacy and anonymity on the web, because freedom and stuff.

But now, apparently, when you're a celebrity, and you do something risque, and it ends up splashed all over the web by a bunch of geeks and nerds, it's YOUR FAULT for expecting privacy on the web.

Hey nerds, guess what? When the government starts cracking down on all your TOR sites and other "supar sekrit" clubs, you'll hear the same fucking response: It's YOUR FAULT for expecting anything you do on the web to remain private. What? You were behind nine proxies? LOL, still your fault.

Victim Blaming is bullshit - always has been, always will be. For all the people arguing that it's like "leaving something expensive in an unlocked car," that's also bullshit - these photos WERE secured behind passwords and encryption, but some criminal went to the time and effort of figuring out how to bypass it. If your house and your car is locked up, and your shit is still stolen, then what other precautions, other than living in a completely sealed environment, can you take?

You people will bitch about privacy whenever your taste for tranny porn might get exposed, but the moment some celebrity's tits are possibly photographed, you seem to think no activity is UN-justifiable. Shame on you. Shame on all of you. Fuck Slashdot. Fuck nerds. Fuck Bennett for making an argument that even REMOTELY suggests that victim blamers "kind of have a point."

If their first project with Internet.org is an indication, only after you pay up. The "free internet" project in Zambia gives people only access to 13 websites (including Facebook, of course) for free, and if they want to exit the walled garden (e.g. by clicking on a link in Facebook), they have to pay. Also, Facebook didn't invest money in the project, the local (private) operator pays for this so they can get more paying customers later on.

Cities like Chicago are installing cellphone tracking devices to monitor pedestrian traffic. http://readwrite.com/2014/09/0... http://articles.chicagotribune... There's one at the top of a light pole in front of the Board of Trade on Jackson St. It looks like a small, black, round trash can.

Matt Asay says there is more certain money when you develop apps for enterprise. "[D]evelopers who target the enterprise are twice as likely to make $5,000 per app per month and 3 times as likely to earn over $25,000 per app per month."

I really know nothing about how Amazon works internally, so perhaps you can enlighten me.

how do they manage to do such great things with software?

By ripping off Android for their mobile platform and then screwing developers who sign their awful agreement?

How do they manage to operate such a huge warehousing and logistics operation?

By allegedly exploiting and shorting their employees and having soulless fulfillment centers/neo-sweatshops?

The arguments in favor of R boil down to this: R is more widely used by statisticians and has a much larger library of statistical packages. But R is not a very good programming language, is difficult to learn, and is not well suited to integrate with or be used for more general purpose programming tasks.

Python, on the other hand, has a vast library of packages but does not yet have nearly as many packages specialized for the statistical computing domain. The arguments in favor of Python are, in essence, that it's very easy to learn and easy to use and easy to integrate with other general purpose programming tasks. Python is also gaining a lot of momentum in the scientific computing community. For many statistical analysis applications (most?), the packages that do exist for Python are more than adequate. Some folks even suggest that R's lead over Python is evaporating fast.

Yeah, no one tested it with the source before going against the binaries. Are you fucking high?

No, I merely read the account written by the folks who found heartbleed. It was automated testing of a live system. Closed or open source happens to be irrelevant for this particular discovery.

"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

How funny that Wired is complaining that "wasn't github supposed to be meritocracy?" It was, until some feminist groups complained enough about it. ref http://readwrite.com/2014/01/2...

Personally, I'm just waiting for Skynet to activate. At least it would hate both men and women equally.

Didn't that make a mockery of all the "many eyes" arguments oft touted in favor of Open Source?

Nope. Once the bug was noticed it was fixed very quickly: i.e. it was a shallow bug. If you think than phrase means OSS is bug free, you have misunderstood it.

The quote is often misunderstood, its hyperbole. It illustrates a point nicely but in reality few users are developers and few developers are qualified readers.

More importantly the bug was not discovered by eyeballs on source code. The techniques used seem to be the same applied to proprietary closed source code. They were testing the binary.
"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

The irony behind the argument that "many eyes" didn’t work here, is that the code was only tested so thoroughly because it was open source. We've no idea how many bugs like heartbleed there might be in proprietary libraries that simply hasn't been found yet (outside the NSA)

The visibility doesn't make it so bugs don't exist. It makes them more likely to be found. This one existed and was found.

After two years in the wild. And apparently *not* by eyeballs on source code. Proprietary or open seems irrelevant to this discovery.

"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

The quote is "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." That's a clear admission that open software, like all other software, contains bugs; that's why you want the many eyeballs. Any claim otherwise is a symptom of not understanding plain English. Eric's whole point was that the bugs in open software will be found and fixed faster than the bugs in other software, due to the population of interested people who will study it, looking for the bugs.

Perhaps it is not being stated clearly but the point that you are missing is the fact that this bug in some of the most critical network software in use had been around for 2 years. This fact demonstrates the hyperbole of the quote. Its a well crafted quote, illustrates a concept well, but people read way too much into it. Few FOSS users are developers, few developers are qualified readers. Eyeballs are a plus, but not a panacea. The gap between proprietary and open exists but it is exaggerated.

A second and more important fact is that the bug was not discovered by eyeballs on source code. The techniques used seem to be the same applied to proprietary closed source code.
"“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” Chartier said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”"
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/1...

Nothing in that quote implies (to anyone with reasonable understanding of English and basic logic) that open software doesn't have bugs.

Straw man.

The bug was found by code review, twice independently in a short period of days.

Codenomicon didn't discover the bug due to a code review (source). I can't find any information on how Neel Mehta discovered the bug, though.

Except that someone did discover the bug, when they were looking at the code because it was open source.

I don't know how Google's Neel Mehta discovered the bug, but Codenomicon didn't discover it by looking at the code.

“We developed a product called Safeguard, which automatically tests things like encryption and authentication,” [Codenomicon's CEO, David Chartier] said. “We started testing the product on our own infrastructure, which uses Open SSL. And that’s how we found the bug.”

Source

What would be interesting would be to bring the spirit of these old systems into the modern age rather than just replicate them wholesale. Boot into a system which allows you immediate programming (preferably with a modern OO syntax) and access to video, sound and peripherals. If there's anything that has suffered over the past three decades, it's easy access to I/O.

hmmm, if only there was something like that already under our noses.

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/2...

GL HF, hope you learn how to use Google soon.

Julie Horvath complained and had removed a rug at GitHub which she objected to because of the word "meritocracy". As that would imply that the fact there were so few women in IT and in GitHub in general was because women were not as good as men.

She also headed-up a female-only lecture project within GitHub.

Take these facts into consideration when considering her claims of hula-hoop-sexism.

Source: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/2...

Maybe she was really bad worker and used 'discrimination' card each time to defend her work?

The articles seem to refer to her as Influential developer.

I don't think that "really bad worker" is likely.

And her story isn't incredible. There is a lot of sexism in the industry.

Problem is that GitHub is at lost position. However bad she was, they will be always painted bad boys for throwing dirt on her, so they will probably keep silent...

Their response (linked by others) is probably the best they could do. But also it looks like they are taking her allegations seriously themselves.

Or if you read another site, they say Lenovo is getting 2000 patents and cross licensing the rest. I think this is a lot more consistent with the public statements from the horse's mouth, in addition to the higher trust I have for native sources.

For large enterprise apps Java beats C & C++. And it is in this area I claim Java is King.

For some things C and/or C++ is superior, but I suspect many commercial Apps written in C & C++ would have been better off in Java. As Java eliminates most problems associated with managing memory & dangling pointers etc. which consume a lot of time chasing in C & C++ projects.

No one sane would attempt to write a production O/S in Java! Also anything that is usually running for less than a few seconds, and is time critical, are better written in C or C++ than Java. For programs that run for many minutes, the Java JIT will usually make the Java App run more efficiently than a carefully coded C or C++ App.

I have used C, and have taught C to experienced programmers (it was fun!). Actually my first languages I got paid to write programs in were FORTRAN & COBOL.

Do have any references to back the claim that C usage is gaining faster than Java usage? I know that some projects (like gcc) have switched to using C++. This http://readwrite.com/2014/01/0... claims that there are at least 4 times as many job opportunities for Java than for C.

Ceylon is a language to watch (runs in both JVM's & JavaScript engines), I suspect it will overtake Java in the longer term.

Not volunteers but paid developers. This is a common misconception. Check this post for a quick summary of the contributors to the Linux kernel. Linux and many big open source projects started as volunteers's efforts and eventually turned into joint ventures between companies ruled by FOSS licenses instead of by thousands of pages of contracts. Shared development is a major money saver for all parties involved and is a very efficient way to invest resources.

The same applies to distributions, which are ofter owned or substantially backed by for profit companies (Canonical, Red Hat, etc).

/rant-mode Nevertheless even paid developers have schedules. I just wonder why nobody's schedule includes this 2007 Thunderbird bug. Well, maybe I'll have to wait for the 12th year or learn the relevant technologies and fix it myself (won't happen, i got other stuff to do.) /end-of-rant

What I appreciate with Linux and open source in general is that they have public bug trackers. I can open bugs, vote them up, contribute information, see how fixes progress. Bugs in closed source programs and OS are usually managed in a very opaque way. Those money you pay don't buy you any insight unless you pay really big money and get into some special support program.

No, it was redletterdave, as noted in the header.

I might have included this bit.

.... Chinese officials have begun wiretapping each other’s bedrooms and showers out of distrust. Even China’s president was wiretapped by a member of the country’s own Communist Party. -- Meet COS

Yeah, I don't think it's ridiculously unreasonable that a site meant to host software projects has a requirement that hosted projects actually be software projects.

But it doesn't. "Meet the projects that prove GitHub is a collaboration tool for all stripes". Well, all stripes except for collaborative satire against the wrong group of people.

Just look at Gitmo.

You mean the POW camp that's hosting people captured on foreign battlefields? Is there a single person there of any nationality who was captured on American soil?

The Federal Government has all manner of ways to compel you to assist with a warrant and/or NSL. Gitmo isn't one of them. This guy didn't go to Gitmo, in spite of his refusal to cooperate with the Feds. He hasn't even gone to regular Federal prison, even though he arguably refused to enforce a valid court order, one issued after judicial review, not some NSL letter issued in the middle of the night by a faceless DOJ bureaucrat.

I'm not a fan of Gitmo and would like to see it shuttered sooner rather than later, but let's at least confine our discussions about it to reality. Reality: Nobody has been admitted in Gitmo in years, and none of those who were got sent there after being captured for crimes (real or alleged) on American soil.

The US is at the very brink of being a police state

I don't think you know what a real police state is. Stand outside the White House with a sign stating that BHO is an authoritarian asshat. Now try the same exercise in Pyongyang with a sign directed at the Supreme Leader. Repeat the exercise but replace the current leaders with George Washington and Kim Il-sung. What do you suppose the difference in outcomes will be for you?

Want a less extreme example? Hold a LGBT rally in Washington, wherein you call out the current political establishment for being spineless on the issue of LGBT rights. Now fly to Moscow and repeat the exercise. You won't end up in the Gulag like you would in North Korea, but you're going to be "encouraged" not to continue with your activities.

Point being, there are varying degrees of "police state", and on a scale of 1 to 10 the United States might score a 2.5 on our worst day. We're not perfect, but the rhetoric that you're using is unproductive and clearly not grounded in reality.

Baseband hacking article: "Baseband Hacking: A New Frontier for Smartphone Break-Ins"

http://readwrite.com/2011/01/18/baseband_hacking_a_new_frontier_for_smartphone_break_ins#awesm=~on54yB5zHMVt93

Apparently, the firmware in baseband processors don't get updated a lot because of certification requirements, vendor laziness, etc, and certain well-funded attackers have swags of exploits for phones that can crack phones from over-the-air through the baseband processor itself.