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Judge to Oracle: A High Schooler Could Write rangeCheck
mikejuk writes with an update on the Oracle vs Google Trial. From the article: "One month into the Oracle v Google trial, Judge William Alsup has revealed that he has, and still does, write code. Will this affect the outcome? I think so! After trying to establish that the nine lines in rangeCheck that were copied saved Google time in getting Android to market the lawyer making the case is interrupted by the judge which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch: 'rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it — ' And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Perhaps every judge should be a coding judge — it must make the law seem a lot simpler..."
From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch. Groklaw, continuing its detailed coverage as always, has the motions filed today.
From yesterday; the Oracle lawyer was attempting to argue that Google profited by stealing rangeCheck since it allowed them to get to market faster than they would have had they wrote it from scratch.
Because 5 seconds make all the difference.
Obviously this competent, experienced jurist should have recused himself because of this conflict of interest.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Apparently, you are stupid enough to take a Judge's dismissive comment to the plantiffs as an absolutely specific assessment on the population's programming skills. Perhaps you are the moron here?
Pretty much this. Half the people on slashdot could have written it when they were in Elementary School.
AccountKiller
So was I, and I'm an American. Also, how old are you?
Can you say everyone, or even the majority, of those in your country started programming at seven? What about in older age groups? ... No? How stupid are people in your country?
If you don't need to, or aren't interested in it, not being able to program isn't a bad thing. There are reasons for the whole 'justice is blind [and ignorant]" in the US. In some cases, it certainly will bite us, but in others, it also helps because it prevents bias from preconceptions (which can be very wrong).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I think I'm beginning to understand why Oracle has chosen to sue, rather than innovate, they're idiots and lazy to boot! :)
How much slower would it really have been, one day? Even less? rangeCheck from the sounds of it is a quick sit down, sip coffee, program it up and walk away method. I'm not sure that the act of copying it saved any amount of time that in the true sense of a marketing would matter. If they had copied a method which computed the inverse matrix of an image that then could be used to unlock a phone I would see the point.
Calling rangeCheck into question is like bringing a student to court for using compair() in C, anyone could write it but it's so simple no one does.
For those interested: (from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683)
From OpenJDK:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
From Google:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
}
If all judges, lawyers, and legislators knew how to write maintainable code, the law would be much simpler.
The refactoring sessions would be amazing.
The people rejoiced!
Here's a news flash for you: complete idiots can (and do) program. The ability to code is a piss poor measurement of intelligence.
Wow, fuck you dude. Just fuck you.
FC Closer
Thanks, but slashcode ate your <
Has nothing to do with age. I had my first PC when I was 16. First computer course in school was at 17 ( no programming just basic stuff ). I officially started coding during my second year of university, I was 19! But if I ever knew it existed when I was younger and had access to a PC I would have coded at that age. Some people simply don't have access or don't know!
Reading that summary made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. So many mixed tenses. Could someone clean that shit up for readability?
A lawyer will likely handle similar cases over their career. In doing so, they will very likely reuse some of all of documents over and over. The initial version of these documents were created for a specific client. Is the lawyer stealing from his previous clients?
The same thing could be said about a technical writer. If they write for multiple clients in the same domain, it is likely the intentionally or not, their work will share some sentences, paragraphs or more.
I know that you don't sign a "work for hire" contract with your lawyer so they (as always) have the upper hand. But it does seem that in professions where writing in some form is part of the work output, it is very likely that remnants of previous work will show up in future work. Whether intentionally or not.
In for loops, and anyone who uses it has to pay me lots of money. I'll let them use it and as soon as they start making money I'll show up at their door to collect their soul.
This is good news: Because obviously Oracle hired mentally challenged lawyers.
Not only is what their lawyer said obvious hyperbole, but it is totally irrelevant. I don't care how much time it would take for a non-programmer to do it: how long does it take a real programmer to do it.
The answer to that is of course on the order of seconds, since validating input is something every programmer has done thousands of times.
I did not even have access to a computer until I was 11; it is not always a question of stupidity. That being said, I am pretty sure that some time shortly after I started programming, I wrote a function like rangeCheck (although in C, so using return values instead of exceptions). This is not an issue of age; someone with two weeks of programming experience could have written that function.
Palm trees and 8
Fore chrissakes, anyone who has been writing any degree of code for more than a few years has implemented a range check function, and whatever the language C, C++, Java, C#, BASIC, 80x86 assembler, they all basically look the same. If this is truly what Oracle's case boils down to, then they literally have nothing, and this comes out looking no different than what SCO's claims against Linux ended up being. It's fucking ludicrous. To claim that somehow a nine line range check function gave Google some vast market edge to my mind breaks credibility. I'm guessing this is pointing pretty heavily towards Oracle being handed their balls on a platter over this.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?
I tried to submit this over the weekend but it wasn't selected. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/google-oracle-decompile/
As someone who really likes Java and Google I don't like this lawsuit one bit.
Sun created Java and mostly gave it away for free except for the mobile part which they were licensing to create revenue. Sun and Google couldn't come to terms regarding licensing and Google decided to just make it themselves.
Sun didn't seem to care, or didn't have the money/will to fight it. Then comes Oracle.
Please resolve this amicably soon. I don't like it when mommy and daddy fight.
What a colossal waste of money !
Oracle and Google waste money on lawyers on such silly functions instead of spending the money on building more useful technology.
We as users are the only losers in this non-sensical fight.
And you wrote that comment without once referring to PHP. Bravo!
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yea :(
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683
It's a range check function. They all look largely the same.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The great thing about having an Android smart phone is I can follow these events from the comfort of the company throne thus killing two birds with one stone! Thanks Google and HTC.
Hello. By posting this, you have violated the copyrights of my company. Because of this, and the profits you will no doubt receive from this theft, we demand reparations of the sum of $1,250,000.51.
Please await your court summons in the mail.
Please have a pleasant day!
Of course it's an exact 1:1 copy - the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android. And if you've been following the trial, Sun never registered a copyright on that specific function.
Oracle is *SO* screwed.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
I mean if it is so easy to write then why copy it?
There were no personal computers around when I was a kid. I was in high school before the first personal computers not to mention access to mainframe computers were given to me. So this judge says "high school" and you go half cocked acting like computers have been around since the stone age. Get a real life and think outside the box every once in a while.
I probably couldn't have written this in 5 seconds, but 7-10 minutes would be reasonable, including all design, compiling, plus all unit testing causing the two exceptions to throw and a sample that doesn't throw either exception.
It's pretty obvious they copied it (variable names are exactly the same). Now the question is whether or not, as a matter of law, this small piece of code should fall under copyright. The method is so simple, and has such a limited scope that there aren't really any other ways to write this.
Ok, let's have a contest. Gather a bunch of high schoolers who have some idea how to program in Java, give them the spec for rangeCheck, and see how long it takes them to write it. The winner takes the prize equal to the damages Oracle is asking for. Bonus points if completed in less than 15 minutes.
No. Not even a little.
If the judge's statement is even a half-truth, the code in question checks a number, and passes it somewhere if it's a good number.
That is what all goddamn code does. A dumb American high schooler could accomplish that in about twenty minutes if you refused to let them leave until they did, because if you aren't doing that, you haven't written a program! A seven year old could probably do it faster; they haven't "learned" yet that they're dumb.
The lawyer is a disingenuous jackass who assumed that the judge, like him, would see a piece of code and assume it's an arcane fucking ritual without even trying to parse it. He deserves derision.
This. As PJ points out on Groklaw, although the judge alledgedly does code, he still seems to be having a hard time deciding whether APIs can be copyrighted. I wonder if he "does coding" on Basic... :-P
You don't need to register copyright. That is only for patents. Since the guy was working for Sun, all his work belongs to Sun/Oracle (unless otherwise stated in contract).
You idiot! You just caused $2.6bn of harm to Oracle!
Nowadays the recommended method of coding is to use variable names and function names that are self-descriptive. Given that, it seems to me that the code is pretty much the natural way anyone might write it. Google did say that they copied it, but really, how else might one write it? It's definitely the level of a first year programming course. The only interesting bits are (IIRC) the use of a ToIndex that is one more than the length, to eliminate a bit of arithmetic in the loop. So were they inclined to dissemble, Google could have claimed that it's just a coincidence.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid.
However, equating them means you're ignorant and arrogant.
Even if true, the question becomes, "how much did those nine lines unjustly benefit Google?" Based on the judge's commentary, it seems he is leaning toward "not much." I tend to agree: the function is not some absurdly complex bit of logic that would have required millions of dollars in R&D to produce, and any infringement is simply the result of a lazy coder who copied/pasted instead of spending fifteen minutes writing the function out him/herself.
Oracle may have a valid case on its merits, but their valuation of damages is insane. They should have taken Google's settlement offer, because this judge is going to destroy their position.
You haven't had to register copyrights in the US for decades. Ever heard of the Berne Convention?
Slashcode ate that all up. F you /. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized. Fix that, right after you fix UTF-8 mkay? I checked the link, in psuedocode its:
fromIndex has to be from 0 to toIndex
toIndex has to be from fromIndex to arrayLength
Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.
Lets make up moron array
index 0 is first value
index 1 is second value
index 2 is third value
array length is 3, don't believe me, count the lines. I see 3 lines so thats a 3 long array.
Set fromIndex to 1 and toIndex to 3.
Does it pass fromIndex GT toIndex? Yes, indeed 1 GT 3 is false so no exception.
Does it pass fromIndex LT 0? Yes indeed 1 LT 0 is false so no exception is thrown.
Does it pass toIndex GT arrayLen? Yes indeed 3 GT 3 is false so no exception is thrown
I'm imagining the next step, something somewhere accesses index 3, runtime says WTF are you doing we're only defined up to 2 here, kaboom.
Now I don't do java so I donno if GT LT are actually impled GTE LTE in java, or there is some extra code or purpose of this such that array(toIndex) will never be accessed, or there is some extra error code detection that handles out of bounds array access.
I just thought it was pretty funny looking when looked at completely out of context.
Like when you see something like lparen x LT 2 vbar vbar x GT 10 rparen and you just know thats a bug because its obviously supposed to be AND not OR and they were probably trying to check an interval.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The issue of whether or not an API can be copyrighted has nothing to do with whether or not the judge is a programmer. APIs can be complex, and a lot of design may go into an API (what patterns to expose to programmers, etc.). Some programmers would not even object to APIs being copyrightable; many people use proprietary languages that are implemented by a single vendor, and would not even be affected by such a ruling (unless they also use Java).
Palm trees and 8
So, they're claiming they have a patent on range checking?
"A highscooler could code that" does not imply "anyone younger than a highschooler cannot code that"
COPYRIGHT belongs to the author.
SAME PERSON WROTE BOTH and shared them with SUN and Android.
Sun didn't move the copyright from the author.
How would it not be?
There is nothing creative there. If you had a 100 people do it you would probably get lots of exact copies.
This guy was working at google when he wrote both by the way. Can you now steal your own copyright?
I started programming when I was in high school. It was the first time in my life I had access to a computer. About a half dozen of us worked together to figure out how to program the computers, since there were no classes for it and nobody at the school had any idea how use them either. If you are wondering why I didin't just google it, Google.com didn't exist. For that matter, neither did the internet, and aarpanet wasn't available to civilians, much less curious teenagers.
You either forget that access to computers as a fairly ubiquitous thing is very very new. If you want to look at anyone 30+ there is a distinct possibility that they didn't have the opportunity to play with computers until they were adults. There are still plenty of school districts that don't have computers available for the students to use, much less an actual class. And even if they do have computers available for the students, it may be less than would be required for a single class, much less the entire student body.
I think you should re-evaluate your question. You've had an opportunity that many people don't, and that in no way makes them stupid. Though your ignorance of those circumstances, or your out of hand dismissal of that reality, in way shows signs of intellect on your part. Though I can say it shows a distinct lack of critical thinking skills and manners.
Let's weigh the merits of this case. Say we have a developer who gets paid $40/hr, and Oracle is suing for $2.6bn...
rangeCheck(40,0,2600000000);
Employing more Indian/Phillipino/Mexican/Chinese coders than Americans.
Title says implies that the judge made the statement about the code being trivial. The judge makes no such claim -- instead, he says that a previous Google witness made that claim. This is a world of difference!
Google did not copy it. Their contractor reverse engineered Sun/Oracle's code - despite being told by Google explicitly not to do so!
Google used Noser to provide additional resources and accelerate the completion(?) of Android.
On March 28, 2007, Google hired Noser to deliver a package of Java libraries. /See/ TX 30 (Statement of Work between Google and Noser, dated March 28, 2007)
On April 19, 2007, Andy Rubin wrote to Alan Eustace regarding the "Noser agreement": "This is our final java solution — consultants to take our java libraries as a starting place, and bring our java classes up to J2SE spec, in a clean room environment. They have signed up to a pretty aggressive schedule for quite a bit of work. This deal replaces the $18M approved acquisition that we decided to pass on. Barring any unforeseen surprises, I think this is our last big deal ($4M)." (TX 438.)
I am an American. I could have written this when I was 8 or 9 when I started playing with QBasic and all that shit. Not all Americans are stupid. Just the vast vast majority.
Many of whom would realize there is no such thing as a vast vast (or even vast) majority. A programmer should realize majority is a binary state, either a 1 (it is) or 0 (it is not).
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
If slide to unlock is patentable, I damn sure bet range checking will be...
There is zero inventive value in that function. It is a completely standard approach that everybody writing containers has used hundreds of times.
This Judge seems to get it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A truly exceptional lawyer.
'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm a complete retard, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.'
Because this is the only way that statement is true, even I could figure this out in quicker than 6 months.
Glad to see the judge called this guy on his BS.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
For those of you who don't want to read all the transcript, this is what the judge said:
Oracle: I think the law with respect to infringer's profits, rather than damages, only requires us to show that there was a product that contained infringing material and that the product produced revenue, and then the burden shifts to the other side. If I'm wrong about that, I still think it's possible to demonstrate a nexus by showing that speed was very important to Google in getting Android out, and by copying they accelerated that.
Judge: We heard the testimony of Mr. Bloch. I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?
Oracle: I want to come back to rangeCheck.
Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--
Cosplayers.net - The Cosplayers Network
Drat, my keyboard is dropping stuff, the battery is low. And yeah, rangecheck is nothing special, we were doing those same things back in the 80s. We wrote them ourselves in less than 10 minutes since they were simply on requirement our programs were required to do when we got our daily assignments. Also, the smaller any chunk of code is, the more it tends to resemble any other small chunk of code that does the same task. (It's like asking a group of people to write a sonnet, each will be very different. Then asking those same people to write a list of vowels, most of them will look exactly alike.)
Because it goes directly to the claims that it infringing it was the source of a substantial quantity of Google's profits.
The decompiled files are a different issue than rangeCheck. Google didn't decompile them, Noser -- a contractor for Google -- did, against the express prohibition in the Google-Noser contract, which required all original work or open-source code, and expressly prohibited copying or decompiling proprietary code.
I tried to submit this over the weekend but it wasn't selected. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/google-oracle-decompile/
"Judge William Alsup ruled that evidence presented during the trial had shown that Google infringed on Oracleâ(TM)s copyrights by decompiling eight Java files and copying them in their entirety for use with Android."
Calm down Grandpa, go take a nap. We all know you had to fight the dinosaurs to get to the mainframe and make punch cards out of leaves of now long extinct flora. These days though this really is the sort of thing a little kids has access too, not everyone on earth can always remember what life was like at such a primitive time.
Espically when you consider that the programmer who "copied it" for Google is the programmer who originally wrote it for Sun....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think he picked out his /. user name at the same time.
You cannot copyright logic or match. Range check is pretty much what it is. The function/method exist before Java was first created. If someone don't know how to write code similar to this (at least in a simpler function) they shouldn't be holding a programming job.
How much coke did you snort before you wrote that post?
Because that sort of code is so complex...
Maybe if we're talking about Carmack's Magic Number*, yes, you'd have something
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overview_of_the_code )
But this?
I could do this in pseudo code in seconds and something that would actually compile and run in 10 minutes, tops. (I'm way rusty on language specifics these days...)
*Ok, it's not personally Carmack's magic number, but he's who you'd most likely associate it with
Oracle's lawyers are being brilliant at what most lawyers do well: make insanely stupid arguments in order to run their clock as long as possible. It's not about justice. It's about that new yacht Oracle's head lawyer is saving up for. Those nine lines of code might be worth only $20, but the lawyers are making a killing.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Google pretty much admitted it was copied - claiming it was accidental (the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google). It has since been replaced. The jury - completely reasonably - found that it infringed. This is no longer in debate
The question is whether it is worth anything.
Google says no. Oracle's own expert witnesses said no. The judge - who has apparently revealed he is a programmer - says no. Oracle are arguing it's worth millions.
Someone is desperate here, and its not Google
That "Oracle lawyer" is none other than David Boies.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Not a syntax checker, an error checker, but instead, a code judge, which parses your language before use or compilation, and tells you what an idiot you are.
Where you ticked off by his ageism or racism?
Either way; when the troll or flame bait is that obvious, isn't better to just ignore it and let it be filtered away? It's not like your contribution adds anything to the discussion.
Wouldn't these miss the case of negative indices? rangeCheck(5,-3,2) will not throw. Now, a C++ programmer would use unsigned types, as everyone ought to do unless the variable can be negative, but this is Java, so I guess you're screwed ;)
I've been following the Oracle vs Google trial on other websites. Not sure why /. hasn't been covering it routinely. It's a pretty big deal not just to Google , but there are some issues being judged which may affect the programming community in general, down the road.
Alsup seemed to be a little perturbed with some of Oracle's ploys to captialize on the assumed "programming ignorance" of the jury. I haven't seen the RangeCheck code, but from Alsups statement it sounds like Oracle is trying to make a case from egregiously far-reaching evidence. One which basically means Oracle doesn't, and never had, much of a case to begin with.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
If slide to unlock is patentable, I damn sure bet range checking will be...
Patents & copyright are completely different things.
What's logical and what's legal per the law ain't ever exactly been similar.
You must register copyrights if you wish to sue for punitive damages (eg: damages that are in excess of your loss because the intent of the damages is to send a message to anybody else who infringes on your copyright). If you have not registered your copyright, then you are only allowed to sue for compensatory damages (eg: the damages that have affected you directly).
In this case, Oracle has apparently not registered the copyright yet (there is nothing stopping them from doing so now or in the future and suing again), so they can only sue Google for compensatory damages, which in this case, as the judge pointed out, is over a rangeCheck function that literally every programmer that has ever done any non-negligible work has done. That means that the losses Oracle suffered as a result of Google's alleged infringement (9 obvious lines of an obvious function, to me, is not infringement) are likely zero or not worth suing over (being next to zero).
The only complications are that those 9 lines were written for Sun, and then for Google, by the same person. That is the only infringement theory available, because in the US you have to use clean-room reverse engineering; you cannot just hire somebody to reimplement something they did for your competitor (unless you're Microsoft and you are reimplementing the NTFS filesystem and the WinNT kernel as "brand new" and "original" technology). So, once Oracle registers the copyright, Google will need to hire somebody to clean-room reverse engineer the rangeCheck function, which should consist of the guy who originally wrote it staring at his code on one side of a wall and talking to another engineer (who has never seen the rangeCheck function code) writing code on another computer about the purpose of the function, possible tests and results for the function, and basically describing the function in every way except going through the algorithm explicitly.
So, once Oracle registers for the copyright, Google will do this (it would take, literally, more time to setup the clean room than to actually implement the function appropriately), and the Dalvik code, including the rangeCheck function will be available to anybody and everybody under whatever license Android is under (read: free to use and modify by anybody in the world). In other words, Oracle is damned if they do sue, and damned if they don't sue. They are losing, and will lose, this fight completely, but they will have shot themselves in the foot because now companies are afraid to use Oracle's Java over patent and copyright concerns (because Oracle is an asshole company run by an asshole). It's a good day to be IBM, Google, and Microsoft because your platforms are looking more legally bulletproof by the minute.
Having lived in a lot of places in the world, I can assure you that Americans are no stupider than people anywhere else.
Nowadays the recommended method of coding is to use variable names and function names that are self-descriptive. Given that, it seems to me that the code is pretty much the natural way anyone might write it.
It seems like someone would copy something like this because it's so simple enough that you would end up writing the same thing, so instead of spending the minute to do that you might as well just copy it and move on. Sort of like how Javascript lacks an Array.indexOf method to find a certain item in the array. I could spend the minute or two to write and test that loop myself, or I could spend 30 seconds looking it up on Google and using what I find there. Either way it's going to be the same thing, a loop that runs through the array looking for the item. The rangeCheck function is just a pair of if statements that compare one number with 2 others. As G.W. Bush would say, this isn't rocket surgery.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Yup, I wrote that exact same function 15 years ago in my intro to C class. The whole point of the exercise was to demonstrate "garbage in, garbage out" with regards to math functions. The prof assigned a program that would return sine() of some input value. If that input fit within type int, the output was useful. If it didn't you got garbage. Unfortunately, he had been beating into us from the very first day "Make sure the input is valid!!!" So the very first thing I did after getting the input was feed it into a range check... if the input angle was outside +360 to -360, modulo 360 and return the result to the sine() function. Defeated the whole point, I suppose, but he did (reluctantly) give me full credit for having paid attention to his screeds about stupid users.
well, they'll certainly be very similar, they would probably end up the same if you instructed them to follow certain code conventions on variable names and the like.
Not really. Mechanisms are patentable, algorithms aren't.
In this case slide to unlock is a mechanism with a clear description and such, while range checking is (as far as I can see) something too abstract to become a patent.
Most of America is stupid.
That's an argument over a measuring stick, and could take a lifetimes to make.
To tell you the true, this gives us a clear hint about Oracle's future.
SCO did exactly the same thing in the past - but, honestly, I think SCO's lawyers did a better job.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
IMHO, Oracle's lawyers were plain stupid in this issue.
HOW IN HELL they didn't run a background check on the judge? Books are public information!
Common! Know your enemy! the more basic rule in any conflict management!
I would mark carefully the names involved in this process. This is lawyer that I would *never* hire.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
You're wrong. You can have degrees of majority. For example you can have a 1% majority, which is a smaller majority than a 42% or a 69% majority. Using a synonym of 'large' in describing a majority is perfectly valid.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
Where exactly is the spark of creativity that is required for a copyright in this snippet of code?
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
If this is truly what Oracle's case boils down to
The part that boiled away is that Google killed Sun's Java income from phones and such by cloning Java and giving it away for free (the trial presents evidence of J2ME licensees not renewing due to Android). But killing a decent company like Sun by copying their software isn't illegal.
Google being the lessor of two evils isn't saying much when the other one is Oracle.
It's used like for(; index < hi; index++), same as with for(; index < array.length; index++). Other use is nRemaining = lo - hi; to decide if array is small enough for simpler sort algorithm. With inclusive range you'd have to write <= hi and lo - hi + 1 all around the place
No need to be so pedantic. Regardless of the binary-ness of the situation, there is still always an analog component. For something to become binary there needs to be a threshold, a majority has it's threshold set to 50%. If one then passes the threshold, but barely, then one could say that there is "barely a majority". This concept can be extended to vast majority (i.e. ~75%) and what I meant with vast vast majority is that some percentage (well over 50%) of Americans fall into that category. Probably asymptotically approaching 100% given the way the World populace is headed...
Btw, not all programmers are computer science/information theory types. There are those of us who are real electrical engineers who realize that a transistor has infinite states and it is only a simplification that we see it as binary; greatly reducing the complexity of computer style circuit design.
timeo Danaos, et dona ferentis
This looks more like Oracle using the courts to drive competitors from the market than to redress any kind of injury to itself. I think it's time for consumers to start suing corporations for anti-competitive behavior that customers end up paying for.
It's an exact 1:1 copy of something so retardedly basic one could easily accidentally handcraft. It's practically just providing a canonical example of exception handling.
I mean... seriously. This is what Oracle is wasting everyone's time with. And they're allowed to. FTGE.
The racism (although I hesitate to call it racism as it's not targeted to my ethnicity, but my national heritage).
No, it didn't add anything to the discussion, but /. shows I got +3 on that post (not counting my bonus) , strangely. Not that I need it ;)
FC Closer
the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android.
Um.. not sure who your "guy" is. Noser is the alleged contracting company who allegedly worked with the rangeCheck code, even after getting explicit specs. this is the crux of the argument;
"Bornstein stated that he removed some elements of Java from Android last year after Oracle filed their case in court. He explained that the Java elements came from a Swiss contractor called Noser Engineering AG, who helped them built Android. He also stated that the contracter was given instructions as to what they can and cannot use for Android. Bornstein also stated that the only thing they copied from Java are those available for public use and do not require any license from Oracle. He also admitted that he is being paid $400 per hour by Google for his time in court."
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Between 1 and 3 lines....
bool rangeCheck(int value, int lowerBound, int upperBound)
{
return value >= lowerBound && value <= upperBound;
}
So, Oracle is suggesting that Google would rather copy something like this to save time than spend the thirty seconds to type it out themselve? OK, sure, the Java one is 9 lines long, not one line long, because it has some exception handling, but seriously...
Copying that sentence verbatim from some other source into your new technical document wouldn't be copyright infringement. The amount of material is too small, the creativity involved is negligible, and the economic harm to the original writer is nil.
If the parent to your reply is correct that "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android" then Sun did need to register that it owns the copyright and could somehow limit the rights of the author to distribute the code.
high school then why does goolge want PHD's for tech jobs?
If "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android", who owns it depends on what rights were transferred. Yet another chance for the attorneys to argue here...
No, the code posted above was eaten by filters. The actual code in question may be found here. You can see clearly that there is a check to verify that "fromIndex" is greater than or equal to zero, that "toIndex" is greater than or equal to "fromIndex" and that "toIndex" is less than "arrayLength". In sum, a basic range check function easily recreated by any geeky child and something that would have taken Google engineers an equal amount of time write as it would to copy/paste.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
It's well within the grasp of most middle schoolers, and it wouldn't take long to find an elementary school child who could write it ;-)
Not really. Mechanisms are patentable, algorithms aren't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkar's_algorithm#Patent_controversy
I'm glad someone did...
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
how else might one write it?
Different indentation maybe?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And the other half coulda banged out the code in binary using a toy xylaphone in pre-school.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Back in my day, young one, keyboards didn't run on batteries...
Gotta love all these "smart" posters biting on a FP troll.
I know right.
Why I bet that half of the population of America is below average even.
I wanna know whether David Bowie could programs those nine lines faster than David Boies.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You sir, are incorrect. By copying this software that would have taken a lawyer 6 months to write, they were able to gain an unfair 32 seconds on the rightful coder Oracle.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
IMHO, Oracle's lawyers were plain stupid in this issue.
HOW IN HELL they didn't run a background check on the judge? Books are public information!
Common! Know your enemy! the more basic rule in any conflict management!
I would mark carefully the names involved in this process. This is lawyer that I would *never* hire.
He checked out Range Checking for Dummies.
Obviously not enough; he's still breathing!
J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java. It certainly was never going to be suitable on the mid to high end smartphones. Pretty much every smartphone out there now is perfectly capable of running the full-blown JRE out of the box. In other words, with or without Dalvek, mobile Java editions are a fading proposition.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
SCO had the same lawyer.
The code that did the actual speed-up (TimSort) wasn't written by a sun employee - it was ported - by the original author - from python.
Also, rangecheck isn't eligible for copyright on its own - it's purely functional, no originality, no "advancing the state of the art" - even the JUDGE could (and did) write it. Yo can't copyright something that is purely functional, no matter how much "sweat of the brow" may have been involved. Don't argue with me - take it up with the Supremes, because that's their take on it post-Feiss.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
You *cannot* register a copyright for something that is purely functional, a "scene a faire", or otherwise not creative. The rangecheck function is not eligible for copyright, any more than the linux headers were when RMS tried to make some stupid anti-android fud to try to promote the GPLv3.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Little kids may not have access to computers that they can run their own programs on...
Palm trees and 8
Noser didn't write rangecheck - they decompiled the class file (a fact that both sides now stipulate). However, rangecheck isn't even eligible for copyright protection - it is neither creative nor original, being purely functional. The judge in this case "gets it."
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
There's not much to argue - rangecheck isn't eligible for copyright by anyone. It's purely functional, there's really only one way to do it, it lacks the element of creativity necessary for copyright protection, and Oracle is grasping at straws. The judge made this quite clear when he told them that they were making a mistake not just accepting an offer of statutory damages and dropping it.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
60% of the time they're below average all the time
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
lame troll attempt? patents have to describe a process that isn't obvious. range checkers for any language have a very limited number of ways they could be implemented efficiently, and are thus obvious.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
You don't need to register copyright. But you do need to register before you sue, or you can't win things like "infringer's profits".
Also, IIRC, the range check code was contributed to Java with Sun receiving an irrevocable license to use it and the contributor retaining his copyright. (It's possible, though, that that could be wrong; I read it on the internet and am too lazy/busy to look it up again at work)
To tell you the true, this gives us a clear hint about Oracle's future.
SCO did exactly the same thing in the past - but, honestly, I think SCO's lawyers did a better job.
In what way? Oracle is the 2nd biggest software house on the planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literally hundreds of products. Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
Yep, and here's something even funnier (this time on purpose): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EWD475.html
I mean I'm not saying people always make good decisions.
Array indexOf method
dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethnicity
noun, plural ethnicities. 1. ethnic traits, background, allegiance, or association. 2. an ethnic group
Are you associated with America?
Do you have allegiance to America?
Is your background most recently in America?
If yes to any of the above then your ethnicity is American.
If yes to any of the above but you believe your ethnicity to be other than American then you're doing it wrong, or digging too deep into history to claim your ethnicity.
As for "race", see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29#Modern_debate
Today, all humans are classified as belonging to the species Homo sapiens and sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens. However, this is not the first species of homininae: the first species of genus Homo, Homo habilis, are theorized to have evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago
If you're using "homo sapiens" as your race and American as your ethnicity then you're doing it right. Alternatively you can argue we are all Africans. Any other use is wrong. There is no black or white race. Only a person seeking to justify positive or negative treatment of another based on skin color (ie:a bigot) argues otherwise.
No smarter either, which is a huge problem when living in a technological society.
It is an exact 1:1 copy. Google is screwed.
Oracle still needs to show damages, they have none, or that Google created by virtue of this copying, a commercial advantage. Again there is none. End result, they copied a trivial function rather than spending 5 minutes writing it. Its a non-issue.
If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
..are no more stupid...
there fixed that for you.
Larry Ellison doesn't need to save up for yachts.
I do not believe that that is related to range check. I believe Noser had to do with the test files that were unnecessarily included in the distribution of Android and are no longer present.
There are all kinds of majorities defined for things like voting for laws in parlament. Some types of laws require bigger majority, one could say a vast majority, to be approved. A programmer should be aware of these real-world situations and code appropiately.
Mod parent up
GP isn't talking about Larry. He is talking about Larry's lawyers, whom Larry is paying (in GP's case it is by the hour).
so is this in the public domain now? Will I get sued for using it or should I forget I even saw it and come up with a really original way to do a range check to be safe?
you should have been out learning how to function in a social world.
As I am reading this, I just remembered I reviewed someone's code today that included a range check.
Fortunately it wasn't the same as it wasn't the same programming language.
I'd guessing by my co-worker's salary, it was worth about $9, plus $2 for me to review it.
That is all that should be said about this case. The guy cannot seem to help finding himself on the wrong side of a technological argument. Why do they keep hiring him ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Why not?
Not like they need kernel access, just user space programs, and only needs to be installed in their own user stuff.
If the parent bought a device that requires signing of code, then I am sure they can afford the $99/ year. I always hear on slashdot that it is such a low price it will never hinder anyone.
Which is exactly why Boies says he couldn't program it in 6 months. He needs more billable hours than that! Only chumps like poor high schoolers would write it more quickly.
Actually, its not the "the same guy wrote it for Oracle and later, Google". It wasn't written twice.
Its that the Google employee who wrote it on his own time both included it in the Android source tree and contributed to to the OpenJDK (including the required copyright assignment.)
Actually, Oracle's pretty much given up on that, too. In a joint stipulation filed today, Oracle has agreed to waive both jury trial and its claim for actual damages and infringers profits on the copyright claims for which liability has already been found if the API SSO issue isn't resolved in its favor, and accept statutory damages for rangeCheck and the decompiled files.
There are plenty of other ways it could have been written, some of them would have been better.
Google could have used a ternary operator instead of two if checks.
Or, which would have been a durn sight more helpful for debugging, when they threw the exception for a mismatch between the fromIndex and arrayLen values they could have included those problem values in the exception data. Instead the only value thrown with the ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException was the only one that wasn't a problem. That's the kind of programming mistake that strongly supports a conclusion that the Google programmer was blindly copying from the Oracle code instead of thinking about the task.
Much like an example I heard yesterday from a teacher: "you would think when someone looks up several words in the English/Spanish dicionary and all of them were 'sustantivo' or 'proposicion' that they'd realize that was the part of the speech and not the translation of the word".
His parents named him "Haskell". It was inevitable.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have the feeling that the judge may even order them run though a meat grinder before returning them to Oracle on said platter.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Never hire?
Oracle's lawyer is David Boies, who is widely reputed to be the best lawyer around today. He did Microsoft vs United States, he did Justice Department vs IBM, he did Bush vs Gore (!!!!!!!!!!!!).
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
Pretty much every smartphone out there now is perfectly capable of running the full-blown JRE out of the box. In other words, with or without Dalvek, mobile Java editions are a fading proposition.
You might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of mobile phones in the USA and the world are not smart phones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone
Mobile java is going to be around for a looong time, mostly because 70% of global cell phone purchasers can't afford smart phones.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I believe a negative index would throw an out of bounds exception
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException
Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid. But if you really can't write a range checking code within a day, even if you have no programming background, it's pretty bad xd
Exactly. If Americans aren't any smarter on average than Zimbabweans or Bolivians or Paraguayans or Somalians or Burmans, then they're going to have a hard time trying to maintain a technological society and an economy so much stronger than those countries. And with the way things seem to be going in America these days, it looks like they're not going to succeed in that for much longer.
Seven? Talk about a late start!
What did they teach you in kindergarten, long division? *snicker*
I know absolutely jack shit about programming, but I am fairly certain that if I went to school for six months to learn how to program that it would be trivial for me to write that function.
The concept is just so simple that even I get it.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
They copied the API so I presume the parameter names are listed right there in the API and they just used that. The exception names are of course spelled out in the API as well. So you really only have two ways to write this function, differing only in which conditional you check first. Even the line breaks seem to be based upon standard coding rules of a max 60 to 80 chars per line.
RTFA.
He learned to code during the trial.
FTFY
I could write it with exceptions in 5 lines in Python including the definition of RangeError.
Are you sure about that?
Josh Bloch, who wrote rangeCheck, testified that “[a]ny competent high school programmer could write” that method. RT 815:13-16 (Bloch). Even Oracle’s expert Dr. Mitchell conceded that “a good high school programmer” could write rangeCheck with guidance. RT 1316:24-25 (Mitchell).
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120516083919975&query=rangecheck
To quote Google's lawyer in court today:
[PJ: Let me remind everyone that the testimony was that a contractor, Noser, did it, and it did it contrary to specific instructions from Google.]
Let me come back to rangeCheck. Every time I talk about this, I feel like I'm either saying it's important or it's not important. That's a false dichotomy. No one can say it's a big thing. But it was something that was copied, and it was important to TimSort, which had a significant performance advantage.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120515120106322&query=rangecheck
P.S. I admit that I could be wrong, I'm not following the case that closely, but this does seem clear cut?
It does both more (checks more numbers) and less (doesn't deal with actually passing the numbers anywhere) than that: it actually checks two numbers against an array, and throws an exception if either of the numbers is a bad number. Passing the numbers somewhere else is the responsibility of the calling code.
Luckily it ate it from both code snippets so no damage done :)
Except this sort of thing doesn't require being able to code.
It doesn't even require being aware of the existence of computers.
That's one of the fun things about computing. A lot of it is pure math and some of it isn't even that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
A seven year old could probably do it faster; they haven't "learned" yet that they're dumb.
High schoolers are educated stupid. It will be impossible for your educated stupid brain to know that 4 different corner harmonic 24 hour Days rotate simultaneously within a single 4 quadrant rotation of a squared equator and cubed Earth.
Man invented his God in man's character - Stupid Oneism and Singularity in Universe of Opposites. God BELIEF succumbs to The Cubic Law of Nature.
Yes, I'm aware that it has been added to more recent versions of Javascript. Assume for a moment you wanted to support IE8 though.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
i thought i was making a joke, but since i am rated zero, i either went completely past funny and hit insane, or people have lost their sense of humor
hello mods... no one sees the possibility that my post above is a joke?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
He knows. I know. Everybody knows.
The point is that if Orible lose, Larry's armada will sally forth and sink the shyster's new toy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Implemented in JavaScript 1.6
IE 5.5 through IE 8 use JavaScript 1.5.
So you can only depend on it if you are willing to shut out close to 20% of your target market (that's why we do something like if (typeof Array.prototype.indexOf == 'undefined') { Array.prototype.indexOf = function(needle) { ... } })
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
It doesn't even do "checks a number, and passes it somewhere if it's a good number."
It does a couple of checks, and while doing so, throws an appropriate exception if any of those checks fail. If none of the checks fail, it simply returns.
If the parent bought a device that requires signing of code, then I am sure they can afford the $99/ year. I always hear on slashdot that it is such a low price it will never hinder anyone.
First of all, I do not know who you hear that from -- that price could be more than someone is willing to pay just to give their kids a chance to write some programs.
More importantly, a young child may never express a desire to program if their computer is designed to stop them from doing so. A lot of people, myself included, broke into programming by experimenting with our computers. Yet a locked-down computer that tries to extract fees from people who want to program is something will discourage kids who are not absolutely determined to learn -- which is going to be quite a few kids. A parent may not spend the money to let their child write programs if their kid does not even ask.
When I think back to my early days of learning to program, here is what I remember: downloading GCC only any computer I could get my hands on, and using it to compile C programs (I did not actually own my first computer until I was 13). Most of the people whose computers I was using did not seem to mind -- they were mystified by programming but did not want to discourage my curiosity. I wonder how much longer such a thing will be possible, with the current trends in computing. Will an 11 year old in 2015 or 2020 be able to sit down and write programs on whatever computer he can find, or will he only be able to find app stores and locked down computers? Will school computers allow students to write their own programs, or will that only be allowed on computers dedicated to programming classes?
I am sure that there will always be hackers in the world, kids who learn to program outside of the assigned curriculum and whose parents do not try to discourage their curiosity. What I fear is that the number will shrink, that it will only be wealthy kids who can be hackers (particularly if they must buy a second computer in order to write programs -- like they must with an iPad), and that they will be surrounded by restrictions and demands for money. It is easy for an adult, especially one who works in a technical job, to forget that kids have no income, that they cannot just buy a high end workstation, and that they must often make due with whatever the adults around them are willing to give them (or throw away). Many adults will not stop to think that the children they care for will be restricted by the "easy to learn" computer they bought, or that those restrictions might be detrimental.
Palm trees and 8
You don't need to register copyright, but if you do go through the motions of copyright registration you can (in America) claim statutory damages. Depending on the situation, statutory damages can be more than actual damages and also can count per infringement. If you are having a hard time proving actual loss of sales or trying to come up with a number representing how much the copyright infringement has damaged your ability to earn money from the copyrighted work, you can seek statutory damages instead which sets a minimum amount where all you need to prove is that copyright infringement happened in the first place.
At the very least such damages can help pay for a competent lawyer and certainly can cause somebody doing willful infringement to pause and take notice about the situation. As an insurance policy, I'd even suggest that open source projects consider every once in awhile to "pass the hat" to collect the fees and take the extra step of formally registering copyright with the Library of Congress (especially for a 1.0 version release or other major updates) if only to discourage anybody stupid enough to engage in willful copyright infringement. It also shows that you are being serious about copyright enforcement if you go through that step and it also makes the government as a part of your archival process as well by storing as a "backup" repository and date stamping your code base if somebody wants to be real stupid and file a software patent claim against your project. For $50 (or whatever the fee is at the moment) it is a cheap form of legal insurance.
Sort of like wml. Before it could fix bayonets and form a defensive square Moore's cavalry had ridden right over it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So what you're saying is that he probably feels pretty ashamed making the outrageously retarded argument he's making, or possibly that he was hit by a brick and is now actually retarded.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You hear expressions like a 'small minority' or a 'tiny minority' all the time. Given that a minority is the complement of a majority why can't it too have degrees?
Speaking of minorities, are you perhaps a nigger? Your limited intelligence would appear to suggest you are.
Most modern IDEs have some sort of code-formatter that would end up making it the same. Also, having similar coding standards would make you end up with the same indentation.
Yes, it seems you are correct, The Verge has a better summary.
Bloch testified that he wrote the original rangeCheck code, present in a file called Arrays.java, back in 1997. In court documents, Sun claims a copyright date of 2004 in connection with the rangeCheck code. Block began working for Google in 2004.
The exact same nine lines are also present in an Android file named Timsort.java, which Bloch testified he wrote in 2007.
When asked if he had copied the copyrighted Sun code directly for Timsort.java, Bloch initially responded "I don't recall." In a playback of his 2011 deposition, however, Bloch states that "the same order and same name is a strong indicator that it is likely that I did."
However, he noted that it was a good engineering practice to use the same method, and that he not only contributed the code to Android, but to the Java Development Kit as well (Timsort.java is now part of Java SE 7).
J2ME is a pretty feature-limited version of Java
Well, having spent a number of years watching J2ME, I'd say the problem wasn't that J2ME was feature limited. I had things I could do even in MIDP that were quite useful, to say nothing of the Personal Basis Profile.
As an early app developer, we had two concerns with J2ME: how to get our app in our users' hands, not getting tied to a particular carrier (and thus losing access to corporate customers who used different carriers) or even handset. You got your J2ME SDK from the handset vendor and the handset vendors were the mobile carriers' slaves. The same phone would have different capabilities on different carriers because they deleted features the carriers didn't want (for price positioning or because the features conflicted with the carriers' laughable ambitions to become content companies).
When Apple came along with the iPhone, they did three important things. First, they didn't take any crap from the carrier (AT&T), they defined the product themselves. Second, they made it possible to run an app on any iOS device (originally just the iPhone, but later the iPod Touch too). Third, they had a simple mechanism for getting your app into the customer's hands. That made it possible to create a successful product for iOS in a way it had never been possible in J2ME.
I believe the fact that it Apple made it easy to sell apps for iOS is what is responsible for the success of attracting developers to the platform early on. It wasn't some kind of Apple UI secret sauce, although touch screens standard was a big advance. J2ME could have been an entrenched mobile standard years before the iPhone came out, if Sun had only taken steps to create a market (not necessarily an app store) for developers to target.
Then Android came along, and it was everything I'd ever hoped for: well thought out, robust, open source, feature-rich, vendor independent, even *app store* independent. But by then I was out of the business.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not even then (as long as they have internet access).
If all you want is learn a bit of programming, all the sites like ideone, jsfiddle, repl.it, tryruby/tryhaskell/... will let you do that if you have a browser. There also was some basic IDEs in the appstore, IIRC.
And on desktop with recent Windows by default you have Powershell, .Net Framework is preinstalled and comes with csc/vbc/jsc (C#/Visual Basic/JScript compilers), Mac OS X has AppleScript (and Python as optional component on the disc), Linux usually has a bunch of interpreters and often gcc out of the box. And of course all of them also have browsers, so you only need ability to save and open .html files to write JS.
TL;DR: if you're willing to learn programming, all the tools are at arn's length, just as it was since home computers of yore.
Yes, you actually DO have to register Copyright. You can prohibit someone from publishing the same content without a registration- but you're VERY limited in what damages you can ask for when you do that (And we won't get into having to PROVE that you do actually own the Copyright on an un-registered work...). The most you can ever get under those circumstances is statutory... Nothing like the claimed amount- the statutory damages won't get Oracle more than a minuscule fraction of the costs they've incurred up to this point.
Next time... Do a little research on the IP laws...you're wrong in several ways.
If you register copyright after it becomes an issue, you can't sue over previous copyright infringement in terms of seeking statutory damages, but you can use a copyright registration for prohibiting further copyright infringement and raising the specter of seeking statutory damages over future infringement. Often that is enough to convince somebody to stop messing with you, if that is your goal.
If you perform the registration earlier, it documents that you have been serious about enforcing copyright on a particular work. It also makes the task of seeking damages much, much easier as you don't even need to worry about how much actual damage has been caused due to copyright infringement... in other words you don't need to give a judge some sort of list of how much you lost in sales due to the copyright infringement. All you have to show is that the infringement happened in the first place so you are on the hook for damages as spelled out under the law as passed by Congress. This is the law that the MPAA is using to go after folks who copy movies as illegal torrents as all they have to prove is that you copied their content.... how much money you made or how much money they lost is irrelevant.
This law does tend to help ordinary folks though, as the statutory damages for most people are substantially higher than anything you can typically prove as "actual" damages, such as how much money you might have lost if your applet on the iPad store was copied by somebody else and they took credit for your work. You might only prove a couple thousand dollars worth of actual damages, but with copyright registration you can claim a substantially larger amount of money from the statutory damages.
It bites for Oracle though, because they are choosing to dismiss the statutory damages and are going for actual damages on the grounds that they think they will get more money from Google by using the computation for actual damages instead... with the risk of "winning" and potentially still getting nothing if the judge looks through and sees that no actual damage happened other than minor copyright infringement.
The Mythical Man Month suggests it won't get much faster no matter how many David Boies you throw at a problem, and at a certain point you'd actually be slowing the process down.
Thanks, that made me smile. If I had mod points I'd give you a +1 funny.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
out of the HOW MANY total? sounds pretty inconsequential to me for something likely found in multiple forum/news postings and libraries that is freely usable by anyone.
Please. Boies was the lead lawyer in the Microsoft monopoly trial - against Microsoft. He was one of the best trial lawyers to break up illegal monopolies then.
Lawyers argue for the side that is paying for them. Just like everyone else - you do the work you're paid to do.
Anybody can register a copyright on anything. All it takes is just filing a $50 fee to the Library of Congress along with whatever you want to register. They don't even really look at what you have sent them other than to try and catalog what you've sent to them and your content (computer software, novel, painting, whatever you are trying to register) simply goes into the heap of other stuff being registered and makes the library get a bit larger with its collection.
As for if a court would recognize that copyright registration, that is something else completely different. The rangecheck function may be eligible for copyright nor not (that is a legal question), and for trivial stuff you are generally correct that it would be a dismissed claim. In other words, if you were trying to sue somebody for copyright infringement over a function like rangecheck, an intelligent judge would throw the case out as soon as you filed the case and perhaps even seek barratry charges against you for filing the lawsuit.
If only oracle, google would fight until they are complete death!!
To-Hell JAVA !!
I've ALWAYS HATED java language! It is NOT a language! It is a coffee brand!!! POINT!
No he isn't. Homo sapiens is a species.
Race is a subset of the species, i.e. the equivalent of "breed" in domestic animals.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
For example you can have a 1% majority
I think that word does not mean what you think it means.
On the contrary, they could be negatively affected if all those proprietary languages which are locking them in cannot be re-implemented under the force of law. Those proprietary languages right now have to stay competitive knowing that high prices would encourage an alternative to enter the market. To put it another way, if Microsoft doubled the price of Windows, they might retain enough users to make more money, but they'd also risk a flight to WINE, and I guarantee you a lot of those potential customers, particularly large businesses, would look at moving away from a dependency on Win32/Windows. Now imagine if Microsoft didn't have to worry about the competitive pressure of WINE, and no one else could legally duplicate Win32?
Now, of course, Microsoft has other competitive pressures, and their price choice is probably not dominated by the potential for competition, but for niche programming languages and environments, I would guess they are. My friend, an economics major, was faced with the potential of having to spend $500 for a single user license for some very niche regression analysis software that had a particular API and programming language. If they can get away with charging college students and academics $500, they must not be overly concerned with competition. A ruling on the copyrightability of APIs in favor of Oracle would make it so they wouldn't have to worry about any competitors claiming "compatibility" with their software.
But 70% of American drivers are above average!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
"I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months."
I'm not an expert on math -- this is my second case on math, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't add 2 plus 2 in six months.
I'm not an expert on physics -- this is my second case on physics, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't throw a ball in six months.
I'm not an expert on astronomy -- this is my second case on astronomy, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't find the moon in six months.
I'm not an expert on language arts -- this is my second case on language arts, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't speak my own name in six months.
I'm not an expert on medicine -- this is my second case on medicine, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't produce a bowel movement in six months.
I'm not an expert on aerospace engineering -- this is my second case on aerospace engineering, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't make a paper airplane in six months.
Frankly, I'm a little concerned that this is his SECOND case on Java. I hope it's his last.
It gets worse. The judge even reminded the Oracle lawyers that if they sought actual damages instead of statutory damages, that the amount he may award them might end up being $0 instead of the hoped for millions or even billions that Oracle wants even if infringement is found as a finding. Oracle chose to go for actual damages, giving the judge an easy out to find infringement but still award $0. It could even backfire for Oracle if infringement doesn't happen as they could even be liable for legal fees and other damages.
The problem is not how to check of a range is between bounds. Rather the problem is knowing you need to range check at that point. After all a higher subroutine might have already range checked it. Unnecessary range checks on every subroutine entrance would be inefficient. Thus this is a global design issue and takes a comprehensive knowledge to know. It's that knwoeledge that google stole by copying the pattern from oracle. Other design issues are, how do you pass in or obtain the bounds? Those are data structure issues. What exception to call? how do you make sure it does not break legacy code depending on some behaviour?
The problem here is the Lawyers are too simple minded to understand it's not the code itself but how the code affects the design that matters. And the judge knows just enough to understand that code itself is trivial but not enough to look beyond what the lawyers say is important.
since car analogies are obligate: It's like the guy that goes to the mechanic with a mysterious clunking noise. The mechanic listens for 5 seconds then pulls out a ball peen hammer and whacks the side of the alternator one time. The noise goes away. The guy gets his bill and it says $100. He says it only took the mechanic 5 seconds to do the job. The mechanic takes the bill and itemizes it.
tapping the alternator: 1$
knowing where to tap: 99$.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Bzzt. Wrong.
No, not at all. Josh Bloch worked for Google as Chief Java Architect (not for Noser) when he wrote rangeCheck (and still works for Google in the same role.) You seem to be confusing rangeCheck with the 8 decompiled files, which were done by Noser Engineering AG. Those are the two independent issues on which copyright infringement has been found in Oracle v. Google.
Can you imagine the bill if you used lawyers to write code. No wonder they estimated a billion dollars of infringement.
Because of the complexity of the case and the amount of time being spent on discussing programming concepts, the judge decided to take some personal time and learn how to program. In other words, he learned how to code while he was adjudicating the case.
I am impressed by somebody in a position like his taking that effort, and it shows not only the intelligence of the judge but that he was trying to apply the principles he was learning about in the course of the trial. I don't think there is any indication that the judge had studied or knew much about coding prior to the trial, but it does show that he is trying to make extra effort to understand the issues involved.
I admired the extra effort that Judge Jackson did with the DOJ v. Microsoft case where he went out of his way to explicitly try to remove Internet Explorer from his computer and noted how difficult Microsoft had made the task. I could name a few other examples but it is a rare judge to make that kind of effort.
Wow, way to show your ignorance of copyright.........better go do some research before you look even dumber by your lack of knowledge.
A copyright is not a patent.
Java developers can't be trusted to indent properly, your code will be formatted post check in.
ummm...I wouldn't submit this for peer review just yet.
He checked out Range Checking for Judges.
I also believed that, but the i$THING folks here tell me that there exists no such danger.
I was actually making a satirical remark about this exact topic. Sorry it was unclear.
Hint:
Palm trees and 8
On the contrary, they could be negatively affected if all those proprietary languages which are locking them in cannot be re-implemented under the force of law.
That is the risk one assumes with a proprietary language, regardless of whether or not APIs can be copyrighted. People who use proprietary languages do not generally view this as being a problem, or at least they consider the risk to be acceptable.
Palm trees and 8
I implemented range check functions in about half the programs I wrote in my first programming class. It is quite trivial to do so.
No fragmentation? A friend was just bitching about his Word With Friends. Apparently some of the buttons are simply not accessible because the UI was created on one phone, and whatever that phone is, had a bigger screen resolution than his phone, so some buttons disappear off screen.
Oracle's lawyers are most likely salaried employees, they do not get paid by the hour.
You are confusing a copyright claim with patent claim. Copyright doesn't cover the usefulness of the code, that is for a patent. Google's revenue would only be attributable to Oracle if Google was trying to sell that copied code in a picture frame, a book, or maybe sing it in a song or something. In this case the words are meaningless and have no part of what google is selling/giving away.
Technically, it's NOT patentable (in re Bilski nuked that from orbit...). And this is Copyright we're talking about right at the moment...and...it's NOT Copyrightable. Purely functional content isn't Copyrightable.
Yes, but in most other places, they're not particularly proud of that quality. Most of those people seek to better themselves by become better educated, more spiritual, etc. (not say the net outcome is necessarily positive).
Here, people like to assert their own superiority even when there is none. They feel that somehow, because they are themselves, it automatically means they are superior to everyone else. It's not just that mentality though. As a consequence of this thinking, it automatically implies that everyone else should be more like them.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I recall implementing a range check in my Pascal class in high school. I mean, we're talking bare bones, first year programming here. The idea that somehow you could claim any kind of copyright over such a function is so ludicrous that I almost pity the lawyer, who must realize just how wildly idiotic the claim is. I guess his compensation is that it is his inept client actually making the claim, but still, this is a very basic concept that goes right back to sanity checks on input, and I'd have a hard time holding my head up after having made that kind of an argument for a client.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The stupids are out in force today. (yes, I mean you).
Unless you register the copyright, you can only ask for actual damages, not statutory damages.
Oracle didn't present any evidence that they registered copyright to rangecheck and/or timsort. All they presented was a registration for the collective work, as a compilation - and a blank dvd with the "source."
Realizing how much trouble they're in, and that even if the judge decides that they're allowed statutory damages, their damages are now limited to $750 to $30,000.
While it can be adjusted upward to as much as $150,000 if the infringement was willful, Oracle hasn't presented any proof that it was willful, and Google has presented proof that it was a 3rd party contractor - the people at Noser - who decompiled rangecheck, contrary to Google's orders, so in the case of accidental infringement, the damages can be as low as $200.
And that's dependent on the judge first finding that there's no fair use argument, and that the particular elements are in fact eligible for copyright - which in the case of rangecheck is not the case (purely functional elements with no creativity are not eligible for copyright).
So that leaves timsort - which was written by Tim Peters for Python, then ported to Java by Joshua Bloch while he was a Google employee.
http://www.java-frameworks.com/java/openjdk/java/util/TimSort.java.html
Notice who has the copyright? Hint - it's not Oracle.
Now notice the license? GPLv2.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
- Ok, so we have this two myths about rangeCheck to bust: first is that high schooler can write it and second is that lawer can't write it in six month.
And of course we should try it ourselves too!
What's even worse is that the judge warned Oracle's lawyers a few days ago that they were on a perilous course over all of this. Oracle has to have known for some time that this was going to end in humiliation. I just can't figure out why Ellison doesn't just instruct Oracle's lawyers to ask for some moronically low settlement just to prevent the inevitable punishment. There's a point at which you have to look at the top guy's motives and ask "Does this really have anything to do with the company's interests any more?"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A programmer should realize majority is a binary state, either a 1 (it is) or 0 (it is not).
A politician would realise that you don't even need a majority, just a plurality.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
For example you can have a 1% majority
I think that word does not mean what you think it means.
Sure it does, if you have more than 100 competing choices.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Those numbers are outdated (Sep 1, 2011); smartphones surpassed feature phones in the US this year: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Smartphone-Update-2012/Findings.aspx
In any case, current numbers are not nearly as important as future growth, and the feature phone sales have actually declined while smartphones are growing like crazy.
Dilbert RSS feed
You're completely wrong - you cannot get statutory damages if you haven't registered the work. All you can get is provable damages. And Oracle has not presented any proof that any consumer purchased any android device because of rangecheck or timsort (which the judge has been ragging them on), never mind that the judge also said that rangecheck was trivial (it's also purely functional, so not eligible for copyright), and timsort has an "interesting" copyright notice
Timsort was written by Tim Peters for Python, then ported to Java by Joshua Bloch while he was a Google employee. Do you really expect the judge to award monetary damages for infringement?
BTW: Oracle just caved on the issue. They've agreed to let the judge rule, rather than waste time going to the jury, because they know there's not enough money to be had there to even compensate for the time to argue it, and they want to save the time remaining on their clock (the judge is keeping both sides on a tight leash time-wise) for the patents phase of the trial.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Wait, I meant plurality. Darn. Elections are hard.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
In the UK and other places, they use majority for plurality and "absolute majority" for majority.
Dilbert RSS feed
Just like everyone else - you do the work you're paid to do.
He is being paid to fight for Oracle. He is not being paid to make stupid arguments that have a high probability of biting them in the ass. He has made things worse for Oracle not better.
Patent lawsuit is DOA, copyright lawsuit is also not going very well, at least in damages.
Oracle's only "hope" now is that API's are declared copyrightable and ask for injuction against Android, then shamelessly blackmail Google for billions.
What Google should do: port OpenJDK to Android and rewrite Dalvik as a variant of JVM. Since Sun is licensed as GPLv2 + classpath extension, this makes it perfectly suitable to be used in the same way as the java reimplementation in Android is now (except for calling it "Java").
Then they should settle for some moderate amount just to prevent harm that can come out of this ruling. Here Oracle is also in danger from shooting themselves in the foot (i.e. get sued by SCO kind of companies because of Unix API's in Solaris, not to mention the damage to Linux, on which many of their customers run DB's).
But maybe Larry is going to sacrifice this just to win and cause irrepairable harm.
Although I doubt that this crap is going to go beyond the appeal.
Let's copy-paste this a couple more times until they are in the red ink!
Slashcode ate that all up. F you /. my reply looks like shite also because of that and I can't be bothered to figure out how to post code without it being de-htmlized.
You want <ecode>
Anybody else see a bug? I donno their array implementation, but it looks like they are zero indexed arrays while also allowing a "array's length" equal to the to index value. Classic noob array out of bounds mistake staring at me.
It has been a de facto standard convention in languages with 0-based indexing to use [from; to) ranges, i.e. with exclusive upper bound. Java is not an exception there.
yes, it did a rangecheck of the input characters and... oh wait, Slashdot is using it! Lawyers, come to me!
Why use an elif after raising an exception? Just use if!
If you had a 100 people do it you would probably get lots of exact copies.
I'm pretty sure you would not.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Yeah, I guess that rules it out seeing as Java doesn't have any code conventions that developers are expected to adhear to or an easy to use tool to check for them.
Only after having them removed by way of bricking them off...
That's just poor UI programming. Don't use static layouts.
.: Semper Absurda
Mobile Java is not going to be a growth market. Sure, it will still persist for several years, but as even low end phones begin to gain, processor power and memory, there will be no need for J2ME, as these phones will be able to use the full blown stack anyways. Of course, what's likely to happen is that it will be Dalvik, rather than Java, because Oracle is not only extraordinarily greedy, but also has shown itself just as inept at handling Sun's products as Sun was. This all started because Sun was stupid and shortsighted. If they could have cut a deal with Google, even as we speak, Java would be the major smart device platform.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is a half-truth:
Its true that copyright exists upon creation and doesn't require registration, but you do have to register them prior before instituting almost any civil action for infringement of copyright, see 17 USC Sec. 411.
So, registration isn't required to have a copyright, but it is required to sue someone to recover damages for violation of a copyright.
Thats not fragmentation, that's just a damn small screen... ever try opening Gimp/Photoshop on a first gen notebook? It's craptacularly impossible to use, not even a single pane fits in the screen and there are 3+ of them, that does not mean PCs are fragmented. Just as on the PC you could code it to suit all screen sizes... but it's a hell of a lot of work!
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
He's also SCO's lawyer. He doesn't actually give a damn about the tech, its about the money. Which is why he made SCO pay millons up front. That way, he gets rich no matter how stupid he has to look in court. Seriously - subscribe to groklaw and you'll be amazed how US law works. Much like constant code refactoring by idiots.
C|N>K
It's not brilliant to make insanely stupid arguments. Among other things, a judge will eventually lose patience with those arguments, and they will cost the client and the reputation of the attorney. It's brilliant to make insanely creative arguments that sound rational and only slightly creative when you only have really bad arguments to make that you know will lose. There's a difference.
Neither one is exactly happening here. The arguments were probably just very stupid, not insanely stupid.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Not being able to write code doesn't mean you're stupid.
However, equating them means you're ignorant and arrogant.
Ah, but if I *know* I'm arrogant, I'm not ignorant.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That way you could tell if someone copied it so you could sue them, of course.
I can't find the reference at the moment and I'm too lazy to search further but once upon a time, Brian Kerningham and Dennis Ritchie were working on UNIX. There was a misunderstanding of who was supposed to write a little routine and they both wrote it--identically, down to the character.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
What is quite concerning however, is being a legal representative over something for which you have no knowledge. Those with knowledge of programming see this short 9 line subroutine as a very trivial thing to program. There isn't anything very technical going on. Its all very straightforward. It could be used as an example for students who are just learning to program, as it is very short, simple and straightforward. I don't expect my doctor to be a baseball player, but if he is treating athletes while working for a professional sports team, he should have knowledge of sports related injuries --more so than the average general practitioner. As someone who has a degree in Computer Science, I see businesses who want their IT people to have "business knowledge". They want more than just someone who knows CS. If they can expect more (and really, they demand more), why should we give free rides going the other way? A lawyer dealing with software issues should have some knowledge of computers, programming and software. *I demand*.
it really came off more as a rant than anything else...
Reputed by whom? The best? I strongly beg to differ. He still has a good reputation, but he's also got a fairly long string recently of high-profile failures and mess-ups. He lost badly to MoFo in SCO v Novell, lost in Bush v Gore, managed to barely win against MS when they were doing everything they could to shoot themselves in the foot, looks likely to lose in SCO v IBM and Oracle v Google, and was recently sanctioned in Florida.
He was certainly one of the greatest once-upon-a-time, but he's a little too fond of ambush tactics that don't work well with modern discovery practice, and of trying to find novel legal theories to shape precedent, which doesn't sit well with judges who don't like the idea of "legislating from the bench" (the whole "APIs are copyrightable" thing just has the stench of Boies all over it). His style simply no longer works as well as it once did.
Personally, if money were no object, I'd try to get MoFo or the Nazgul long before I'd consider B&S, unless I thought I was so guilty that only really sleazy, weasely, sideways tactics would give me even half a chance. And even then, I'd have my fingers crossed the whole time, hoping his funky tactics wouldn't actually end up making things worse (as they arguably may have done in SCO v IBM).
I think you can get a blue pill for that.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Depends, is it a meter stick or a yard stick?
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Google is leasing two evils?
I would have thought that Google has enough money to buy as many evils as they want. Is there some tax benefit to leasing evil as opposed to buying?
Surely
if (fromIndex arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
Needs to be
if (toIndex >= arrayLen) throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
Anyway, this is TRIVIAL code. If this is all Oracle have I would assess damages at $0.01 or less.
the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android
How can Sun/Oracle claim copyright on something it did NOT create, but they simply used?
By other slashdot comments the judge should have laughed and then tossed this case out when it was filed. It shows arrogance on the goon judges or other powers, who allowed this to go to court in the first place.
Not even the Creator of the code can register a copyright because the work, does not meet requirements. If he did get it registered and then was to sue, lawyers would look the copyright over, and show it fails requirements and the registered copyright would be invalid.
This is from reading the comments to this point, from the ones that seem to know more about this.
RTFA again. He learned to code Java during the trial. He did have experience coding in other languages before that.
I think it does. Let's say there are two candidates, A & B. A got 50.5% of the votes. B got 49.5% of the votes. So we say that A has a 1% majority over B.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
A 1% majority (at least informally) means that the winner is 1% greater than the loser.
That is, the majority has 100%/2.01 and the minority is 100%/1.99.
51% is a slight majority. 99% is a vast majority.
And when you're losing the fight, you throw everything against the wall, and hope something sticks.
OH MY GOD ! A JUDGE WHO CAN WRITE CODE ! LOL AWESOME !
This is the funniest lawsuit ever ! I am very glad this judge can write code... at least he is not being fooled.
And I totally agree with it... those 9 lines of code are a joke and way too simple ! and highly likelyhood of somebody writing the exact same thing ! ;) :)
fromIndex > ArrayLen is not checked.
Assuming a zero-based array the code is also flawed; since toIndex could equal arrayLen and not trigger an exception, while it would still be out of bounds.
So both programmers sucked balls hahahahahahaha.
I know absolutely jack shit about programming, but I am fairly certain that if I went to school for six months to learn how to program that it would be trivial for me to write that function.
The concept is just so simple that even I get it.
I'm sure you'll get there in a few days, no need for month. That is, if you have an IQ over 80 of course.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The Mythical Man Month suggests it won't get much faster no matter how many David Boies you throw at a problem, and at a certain point you'd actually be slowing the process down.
I think that point would be where you added the first David Boies seeing as it would take him 6 months to write a simple bounds-check routine.
yep, complete idiots can develop entire programming languages too.
Do you think one day kids will swap lawyer cards - with stats like number of clients fleeced, amount of bullshit spoken etc (I'm sure we could all add one or two) - like they do now with baseball ones?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Pre-School??? I was writing RangCheck's before I was out of diapers.
P.S. I don't have any bladder problems, and was out of diapers at around the normal age (sheesh).
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton
Casteism
And the lawyer reveals he doesn't: 'I'm not an expert on Java — this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.' Just handling 2 cases on Java does not make you a Java programmer nor you are making a living as a programmer. I would say: "Iam not a expert on Law - this is my second book on such a law and I probably couldn't write such a similar law in six months"..yeah make that 5 years.
Which of these things in even a remote way, describes SCO?
The FUD.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Well., so he probably shouldn't had fired that clever trainee. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Damnit. I will bite the bait.
So your follow up is that Oracle is the "2nd biggest software house on planet, the clear leader in several verticals and makes and/or sells literrally hundred of products".
Ok. So do Microsoft and IBM (Microsoft is the first, and IBM is bigger than all to them). And this does not makes the three look the same, does?
Oh, wait! Microsoft funded SCO in order to jeopardize the Open Source products, didn't? Well,. these ones looks the same to me.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Hunh ? Sorry, getting sidelined into making up a curse about the "one foreskin of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the donkey!" That's a fertile field of oaths and epithets that your typo has opened up.
FTFY
Seriously, anyone who is getting some sort of formal training in programming, should be being taught to validate his input pretty much as soon as they've learned enough of the syntax of their language of choice to be able to handle user input. That would be weeks at most. Maybe a couple of months for someone teaching themselves out of a book.
In the same exercises they should also be being told "You as a programmer, MUST write descriptive, helpful prompts for the user. The user will never READ or OBEY the instructions, but if you don't Write The Friendly M-prompt, that is your fault ; if they don't Read The Friendly M-prompt, that is their fault."
The depressing fact that users don't read manuals in no way obviates the programmers (development team more widely) from the duty to write the fucking things.
(Sorry ; wrote a Work Instruction last night ; handed it over ; discussed it ; answered questions. Back on shift, it's not been followed. SIGH.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Infinite states? Doesn't the universe have a finite resolution?
Also, doesn't quantum uncertainty and noise mean that regardless of the large number of states the transistor is capable of, only a far smaller number of states are actually distinguishable or matter in a working system.
"You might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of mobile phones in the USA and the world are not smart phones."
Ah, no. Smartphones are now more common than "dumb" phones. To quote CNN, "For the first time, more than half of all American mobile customers own a smartphone, according to a report released Wednesday by Nielsen. That's up from 38% a year ago."
Someone at some point in time probably made the argument that the majority of people were not going to be able to afford expensive mobile phones as well. Or that most people wouldn't have $10,000 "personal" computers sitting at home. Or that there would never be a market for $400 pocket calculators.
Thing is, those devices got cheaper. Smartphones will get cheaper. Soon that's all that will be made.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
yes, ask John Fogerty