It's a misleading headline.
It was an ex parte proceeding. It was not a "win". There was no one else in court. No one to oppose it.
Did the university have any way to oppose this? Could they have, say, filed some kind of restraining order to force the RIAA to bring a proceeding against the university on the matter of uncovering John Doe identities?
Sure, some of it, at least a little, can be blamed on various artist's stupidity. Put a clause in your recording contract that says there will be bowls of all green M&Ms available at all times on the soundstage, and you can expect to pay very dearly for it. Fair enough, but not nearly all the artists are that stupid. Which seems more likely, that there are so many artists too stupid to realize the risks, or that many of them do know they are going to get screwed, but feel like all better alternatives are closed off to them, and hope to be the one who isn't screwed too badly.
I don't see how these are bad deals. Going by the deal Negativland posted on their web site as proof of pure evil, the record label takes a bet on an unproven band, distributes their sound through channels that the band could never develop on their own (pre-internet), pays all of the band's production and travel expenses, does some promotion, etc. All the band has to do is show up.
If the band sucks ass, the record label writes off the loss and the band never says a word on how unfair it was that they didn't get to participate in the losses. If the band does well, while it's true the record label enjoys most of the profits (since they bore most of the risk), the band is the one that has proven themselves and can set the terms when their contract comes up for renewal. The record label is just a commodity at that point and the band can shop around for better deals.
(And they really have no one to blame but themselves if they can't see down the line and sign obscenely long contracts with unfavorable terms.)
As for the rest of the Western world, I actually don't think most people do rely on GPS in any significant manner: most of their travel is to and from work and around town, in a place where they know the way. Modern civilian GPS systems, generally used for travel and trips and such, are as much used for their give-me-directions capabilities as they are for the you-are-here capabilities. If they stopped working, they'd be replaced by visits to Google Maps and such...
You know, maybe not even then.
My car's navigation system still works even when I drive into a deep full concrete parking garage with many sub-levels. It shows my car moving around inside a sea of gray and never seems to lose track of where I am. I'm shocked by how bad hand-held GPS receivers are in comparison when inside buildings or tunnels.
So what's my car doing different?
I suspect the navigation system is cheating by using a look at the odometer and a compass to maintain position. I would think the error margin is much higher on this, but even after considerable weaving around in parking lots or tunnels there's no discernible position adjustment made when I re-surface much later. In fact, if I have the status indicator figured out, it's flying this way most of the time and only sanity checking GPS once a day, if that.
So why use GPS at all? Because probably the sum of hundreds of imperceivable slips or one big perceivable slip would totally b0rk your position until recalibrated.
Microsoft and any other legitimate technology company must be decidedly anti-patent. While Microsoft could benefit from collecting tolls on dumb patents, they're at far greater risk of paying out on dumb patent violations. The moment they try to enforce a patent claim against someone else they legitimize every jerk who patents a link-list and sues them for $100 trillion. Their position must be decidedly anti-software patent.
Isn't it time for a technology patent defense network? Every technology company could enter into the network and hereby agree never to bring a patent infringement claim against any other member company. In exchange, each participant receives a license to claim each member company's patents in its own defense if ever sued for patent infringement. With the membership fees in place a board representing the network could busily proceed patenting every ridiculous thing under the sun to strengthen the defense network.
Heck, while we're living in fantasy land, lets go all out: eventually the software patent system goes away and the government will acknowledge what a terrible mistake it was and refund everyone's patent application fees.
As game systems become more powerful developers try ever harder to recreate reality. This is unfortunate.
One problem with reality is that it's insanely complex and the harder you try to resemble it, the more the human mind can find fault with it. There was an article awhile back about how people relate better to abstract humanoid robots than they do robots that are meant to look human, since the human-looking ones look akin to pale sickly zombies. Same deal goes on with games, no doubt.
Another problem with reality is that it's boring. Would the cracked-out shit in Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros ever have been thought of it the designers didn't have so little to work with? The whole light-world vs. dark-world thing and how they interact is so brilliant a concept that, even given the explosion of the market over 20 years, no other developer seems interested in exploring. Floating bricks that you smash with your hands and a mushroom pops out that makes you 3x bigger? That's retarded. But players accepted it face value.
Super awesome technology should have made twisted fantasies like Mario and Zelda more vivid, but instead developers are working hard on making reality less vivid.:(
Copying code without permission is the worst possible offense in open source land. His righteous indignation is absolutely justified. The appropriate response is "Our deepest and most sincere apologies. The code has been removed. Thank you for deciding not to seek any further retribution."
Arguing over not being nice about calling out this offense is cowardly and sociopathic. e.g. playing politics.
No elected official is going to support a move to just invalidate every patent ever granted unless their campaign platform is How Much They Hate America(TM)
No one's going to spend the time/effort reviewing existing patents for validity under new guidelines.
The only way to fix the system is to let anyone patent everything and have the system collapse in on itself. A decade of courts being clogged in patent-litigation carnage ought to let a more reasonable standard emerge.
Small claims court? $6k in attorney fees is under the $10k limit in NYC.
RIAA would have to spend even more money, all to argue that they shouldn't have to pay defendant's fees after they filed suit against him and quickly withdrew it when they responded with force.
Just last week I took down the CD tower that I'd had for the last 5 years. I threw it straight out, took all of the CDs in it, tossed their jewel cases and booklets, and just crammed the discs into a Caselogics book. Even that feels like a fantastic waste of space -- the binder-sized volume could all fit on a cubic centimeter of a disk
in my computer, probably less if I were inclined to rip them all (which I'm not).
It took awhile for it to sink in, but the idea of paying even $5 for an album on a disc strikes me as a reckless waste of money, actually worse than just burning the $5 because I'd be introducing the inconvenience of managing a baroque artifact into my life.
Music albums are worthless and it's finally penetrating the popular psyche. It's no surprise their sales are dropping like a stone.
Read the book, get excited about what's possible
on
Pro Java ME MMAPI
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...and start developing that great app for your mobile phone. Maybe you too have wondered why no one has developed that killer app, but gosh darnit, you'll just have to be the first!
Soon you come to realize you weren't the first. The more you look, the more rotting corpses you find. Thousands have come before you and died. What the fuck?
The sad realization finally sets in: the mobile industry is tightly locked up by manufacturer/carrier imposed DRM, and terms like "net neutrality" are just distant memories. They are the gatekeepers and they don't want just anybody playing inside of their garden.
Slifter, a mobile local product search. We search real store inventory near you, nationwide. If we're thin on the local results, we shove in online results.
Available interfaces
J2ME, hit slifter.com from your mobile browser. Redirects to XHTML MP if we don't think it'll work.
XHTML MP, hit slifter.com from your mobile browser. Force by viewing http://slifter.com/mp/
PC web browser, hit slifter.com from your web browser. Force by viewing http://slifter.com/pc/
SMS text keywords plus zip code to 75438.
We can deliver some kind of experience to nearly every mobile device. Give it a try.
This would no longer be "Dell" in any significant way. It'd be a beige-box vendor specializing in Linux systems. Doesn't that exist? What problem does that solve for Dell? What problem does that solve for Dell's customers?
Well, that's one way to do it.
Another, possibly more successful way, is for Dell to find a few of the big Linux cheerleaders in Dell, have them incorporate a startup, e.g. Dell Linux, Inc., give them an exclusive license to use the Dell brand where it relates to Linux, and have a few directors from Dell, other companies sit on its advisory board. Also $3M seed money. Dell retains 51% ownership, allocates the remaining 49% to the founders.
Dell Linux, Inc. runs exactly like a startup with a handful of people. EVERY order is important. Tech support can be escalated to the founders. They feel out the landscape and explore the marketplace. If they earn $1M in their first year, for Dell that's negligible, but for Dell Linux, Inc. that's an enormous success.
6 years from now if Linux is a major cash cow and Dell Linux, Inc. is earning $500M a year, a few people with a vision got rich and Dell re-integrates the spin-off into its parent company. If it takes much longer, well, Dell at least still has an answer to the Linux question and doesn't have to annoy the rest of the broader company with Linux troubles. If it goes nowhere, Dell kills it or sells it off.
Every time Sun has announced that they've open sourced Java (which has been more times than you have fingers and toes), I've done apt-get install java(c) [unstable or testing, it doesn't matter] and it has NOT installed Sun's JVM, JDK, and J2SE class libraries.
Maybe one day in the future it will. For now it's vaporware.
There's a good reason for your vexation at the Mac's holistic approach to user experience: You don't speak its language. Remember that the Mac was designed by artists, for artists, be they poets, musicians, or avant-garde mathematicians.
I am skeptical of such a claim, namely because the group you describe is not a worthwhile market for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
After Carpenter's termination, the investigations into the Titan Rain group appear to have gone nowhere, said Winkler, a former National Security Agency analyst. He added that while the Carpenter award is welcome, it would ultimately be paid with taxpayer money.
"This whole thing is costing them nothing," Winkler said. "Whatever legal fees they are running up is just being passed back to the U.S. government," he said.
Their contracts with the government allow them to pass court awarded punitive damages to the government? On TV doctor dramas, punitive damages are awarded if there is evidence of gross negligence. For what possible reason would the government enter such an agreement?
And unless you recently finished a CS class, then remembering a good implementation of any random C function is not going to be on the top of your head. So, it's all but guaranteed that the MS interviewer will rip apart the answer because it wasn't very good because it came about through a completely bad process. Big surprise.
I'm sorry, but this is a perfect interview question.
Any developer, assuming they should be familiar with C and are applying for a C programming position who couldn't do this given a full specification of what the function does and a reasonable amount of time to do it in should not be hired. Period.
The interviewer isn't looking for you to answer right off the top of your head. It would be fucking surreal if you asked someone to implement malloc() and they implemented a full featured runs fast version suitable for inclusion in glibc. It also wouldn't teach you anything about the interviewee other than they have a photographic memory.
You want them to scratch their head, think aloud about the problem, re-state it in their terms, ask you questions, ask you if they can take shortcuts. Etc.
Lets say I asked the candidate that they need to implement malloc().
Lets say instead of flipping out. the candidate responds, quite comfortably, "you want the entire standard C implementation of malloc() on the white-board? We'll need a bigger whiteboard and maybe a day or two?"
You say "Why is that?"
They tell you about malloc(). How ideally it would manage memory appropriately, request it from the OS, maintain a list of allocated blocks, how it might involve recursion, tuning for various loads, etc.
You say "Oh, yeah, we don't need all that stuff."
They go "Huh?"
You explain it's for an embedded system, the caller will never call free(), and you can statically allocate a 1MB buffer for the task. If the caller needs more than 1MB it's a bug.
The candidate, after a few backs-and-forths, implements this:
#define MEMBUFSIZ 1024*1024 #define BALIGN 4
void *malloc(unsigned long size) { static char buf[MEMBUFSIZ]; static unsigned long boff = 0;
void *p = buf+boff;
boff += size + (BALIGN - (size % BALIGN));
return p; }
Mission accomplished. You learned something about this guy. Even if it doesn't work, it shows they thought about the problem. Maybe they even say "you're a moron, why don't you call it something like getmem() so as not to give people the wrong idea". Even better, they're not afraid of the manager's stupid authority.
You also learned a lot about the candidate who gets livid at the sheer audacity of your request and storms out of the interview. Or becomes so petrified with fear that they won't answer at all.
Against my better judgment, I skimmed the article, code.
Two observations:
Why no analysis of impact on memory usage? 10x speed-up, but at what cost? Omitting this detail makes it difficult to weigh the utility of the algorithm.
Not an Apples to Apples comparison. In the source, the "BitFast" sort converts the entire link-list into an array before performing the sort. Without even considering the merits of the actual algorithms, the Mergesort has no chance of being faster given the more complicated data structure used.
As others pointed out, this sounds like the Radix sort, but I was too disgusted to step through the source in detail and even verify this. Maybe someone else will have a stronger constitution.
Next time you have access to 100,000 hard drives, can analyze patterns of failure among them, can use those failures as a benchmark against which to measure analysis tools, and can come up with better recommendations for predicting failure than this study, then by all means let us know. But if you're looking for Microsoft or Western Digital or Seagate or Yahoo to perform and publish this kind of study for free, I think you may be waiting a good long while.
I'm glad to see this kind of information come out of Google. But I don't expect it to last.
These charitable acts aren't a big deal while Google is the darling of Wall Street. Once the honeymoon's over their shareholders are going to punish them for peeing away company trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
Did the university have any way to oppose this? Could they have, say, filed some kind of restraining order to force the RIAA to bring a proceeding against the university on the matter of uncovering John Doe identities?
I don't see how these are bad deals. Going by the deal Negativland posted on their web site as proof of pure evil, the record label takes a bet on an unproven band, distributes their sound through channels that the band could never develop on their own (pre-internet), pays all of the band's production and travel expenses, does some promotion, etc. All the band has to do is show up.
If the band sucks ass, the record label writes off the loss and the band never says a word on how unfair it was that they didn't get to participate in the losses. If the band does well, while it's true the record label enjoys most of the profits (since they bore most of the risk), the band is the one that has proven themselves and can set the terms when their contract comes up for renewal. The record label is just a commodity at that point and the band can shop around for better deals.
(And they really have no one to blame but themselves if they can't see down the line and sign obscenely long contracts with unfavorable terms.)
You know, maybe not even then.
My car's navigation system still works even when I drive into a deep full concrete parking garage with many sub-levels. It shows my car moving around inside a sea of gray and never seems to lose track of where I am. I'm shocked by how bad hand-held GPS receivers are in comparison when inside buildings or tunnels.
So what's my car doing different?
I suspect the navigation system is cheating by using a look at the odometer and a compass to maintain position. I would think the error margin is much higher on this, but even after considerable weaving around in parking lots or tunnels there's no discernible position adjustment made when I re-surface much later. In fact, if I have the status indicator figured out, it's flying this way most of the time and only sanity checking GPS once a day, if that.
So why use GPS at all? Because probably the sum of hundreds of imperceivable slips or one big perceivable slip would totally b0rk your position until recalibrated.
Microsoft and any other legitimate technology company must be decidedly anti-patent. While Microsoft could benefit from collecting tolls on dumb patents, they're at far greater risk of paying out on dumb patent violations. The moment they try to enforce a patent claim against someone else they legitimize every jerk who patents a link-list and sues them for $100 trillion. Their position must be decidedly anti-software patent.
Isn't it time for a technology patent defense network? Every technology company could enter into the network and hereby agree never to bring a patent infringement claim against any other member company. In exchange, each participant receives a license to claim each member company's patents in its own defense if ever sued for patent infringement. With the membership fees in place a board representing the network could busily proceed patenting every ridiculous thing under the sun to strengthen the defense network.
Heck, while we're living in fantasy land, lets go all out: eventually the software patent system goes away and the government will acknowledge what a terrible mistake it was and refund everyone's patent application fees.
As game systems become more powerful developers try ever harder to recreate reality. This is unfortunate.
One problem with reality is that it's insanely complex and the harder you try to resemble it, the more the human mind can find fault with it. There was an article awhile back about how people relate better to abstract humanoid robots than they do robots that are meant to look human, since the human-looking ones look akin to pale sickly zombies. Same deal goes on with games, no doubt.
Another problem with reality is that it's boring. Would the cracked-out shit in Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros ever have been thought of it the designers didn't have so little to work with? The whole light-world vs. dark-world thing and how they interact is so brilliant a concept that, even given the explosion of the market over 20 years, no other developer seems interested in exploring. Floating bricks that you smash with your hands and a mushroom pops out that makes you 3x bigger? That's retarded. But players accepted it face value.
Super awesome technology should have made twisted fantasies like Mario and Zelda more vivid, but instead developers are working hard on making reality less vivid. :(
OH
That was so smooth. Good show.
Say what?
Where is that determined?
Copying code without permission is the worst possible offense in open source land. His righteous indignation is absolutely justified. The appropriate response is "Our deepest and most sincere apologies. The code has been removed. Thank you for deciding not to seek any further retribution."
Arguing over not being nice about calling out this offense is cowardly and sociopathic. e.g. playing politics.
No elected official is going to support a move to just invalidate every patent ever granted unless their campaign platform is How Much They Hate America(TM)
No one's going to spend the time/effort reviewing existing patents for validity under new guidelines.
The only way to fix the system is to let anyone patent everything and have the system collapse in on itself. A decade of courts being clogged in patent-litigation carnage ought to let a more reasonable standard emerge.
Small claims court? $6k in attorney fees is under the $10k limit in NYC.
RIAA would have to spend even more money, all to argue that they shouldn't have to pay defendant's fees after they filed suit against him and quickly withdrew it when they responded with force.
Just last week I took down the CD tower that I'd had for the last 5 years. I threw it straight out, took all of the CDs in it, tossed their jewel cases and booklets, and just crammed the discs into a Caselogics book. Even that feels like a fantastic waste of space -- the binder-sized volume could all fit on a cubic centimeter of a disk in my computer, probably less if I were inclined to rip them all (which I'm not).
It took awhile for it to sink in, but the idea of paying even $5 for an album on a disc strikes me as a reckless waste of money, actually worse than just burning the $5 because I'd be introducing the inconvenience of managing a baroque artifact into my life.
Music albums are worthless and it's finally penetrating the popular psyche. It's no surprise their sales are dropping like a stone.
...and start developing that great app for your mobile phone. Maybe you too have wondered why no one has developed that killer app, but gosh darnit, you'll just have to be the first!
Soon you come to realize you weren't the first. The more you look, the more rotting corpses you find. Thousands have come before you and died. What the fuck?
The sad realization finally sets in: the mobile industry is tightly locked up by manufacturer/carrier imposed DRM, and terms like "net neutrality" are just distant memories. They are the gatekeepers and they don't want just anybody playing inside of their garden.
Run.
It's called government. But not before it's called organized crime.
(look it up)
Ahhh yes, the Napster defense.
How'd that go for them? I wasn't paying attention.
Everything that could be invented already has been!
Slifter, a mobile local product search. We search real store inventory near you, nationwide. If we're thin on the local results, we shove in online results.
Available interfaces
J2ME, hit slifter.com from your mobile browser. Redirects to XHTML MP if we don't think it'll work.
XHTML MP, hit slifter.com from your mobile browser. Force by viewing http://slifter.com/mp/
PC web browser, hit slifter.com from your web browser. Force by viewing http://slifter.com/pc/
SMS text keywords plus zip code to 75438.
We can deliver some kind of experience to nearly every mobile device. Give it a try.
Well, that's one way to do it.
Another, possibly more successful way, is for Dell to find a few of the big Linux cheerleaders in Dell, have them incorporate a startup, e.g. Dell Linux, Inc., give them an exclusive license to use the Dell brand where it relates to Linux, and have a few directors from Dell, other companies sit on its advisory board. Also $3M seed money. Dell retains 51% ownership, allocates the remaining 49% to the founders.
Dell Linux, Inc. runs exactly like a startup with a handful of people. EVERY order is important. Tech support can be escalated to the founders. They feel out the landscape and explore the marketplace. If they earn $1M in their first year, for Dell that's negligible, but for Dell Linux, Inc. that's an enormous success.
6 years from now if Linux is a major cash cow and Dell Linux, Inc. is earning $500M a year, a few people with a vision got rich and Dell re-integrates the spin-off into its parent company. If it takes much longer, well, Dell at least still has an answer to the Linux question and doesn't have to annoy the rest of the broader company with Linux troubles. If it goes nowhere, Dell kills it or sells it off.
Every time Sun has announced that they've open sourced Java (which has been more times than you have fingers and toes), I've done apt-get install java(c) [unstable or testing, it doesn't matter] and it has NOT installed Sun's JVM, JDK, and J2SE class libraries.
Maybe one day in the future it will. For now it's vaporware.
I am skeptical of such a claim, namely because the group you describe is not a worthwhile market for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
I think I've just been trolled.
If this is true, how come I can't ``apt-get install java'' and get the SUn Java on Debian default install?
Their contracts with the government allow them to pass court awarded punitive damages to the government? On TV doctor dramas, punitive damages are awarded if there is evidence of gross negligence. For what possible reason would the government enter such an agreement?
I'm sorry, but this is a perfect interview question.
Any developer, assuming they should be familiar with C and are applying for a C programming position who couldn't do this given a full specification of what the function does and a reasonable amount of time to do it in should not be hired. Period.
The interviewer isn't looking for you to answer right off the top of your head. It would be fucking surreal if you asked someone to implement malloc() and they implemented a full featured runs fast version suitable for inclusion in glibc. It also wouldn't teach you anything about the interviewee other than they have a photographic memory.
You want them to scratch their head, think aloud about the problem, re-state it in their terms, ask you questions, ask you if they can take shortcuts. Etc.
Lets say I asked the candidate that they need to implement malloc().
Lets say instead of flipping out. the candidate responds, quite comfortably, "you want the entire standard C implementation of malloc() on the white-board? We'll need a bigger whiteboard and maybe a day or two?"
You say "Why is that?"
They tell you about malloc(). How ideally it would manage memory appropriately, request it from the OS, maintain a list of allocated blocks, how it might involve recursion, tuning for various loads, etc.
You say "Oh, yeah, we don't need all that stuff."
They go "Huh?"
You explain it's for an embedded system, the caller will never call free(), and you can statically allocate a 1MB buffer for the task. If the caller needs more than 1MB it's a bug.
The candidate, after a few backs-and-forths, implements this:
Mission accomplished. You learned something about this guy. Even if it doesn't work, it shows they thought about the problem. Maybe they even say "you're a moron, why don't you call it something like getmem() so as not to give people the wrong idea". Even better, they're not afraid of the manager's stupid authority.
You also learned a lot about the candidate who gets livid at the sheer audacity of your request and storms out of the interview. Or becomes so petrified with fear that they won't answer at all.
Against my better judgment, I skimmed the article, code.
Two observations:
Why no analysis of impact on memory usage? 10x speed-up, but at what cost? Omitting this detail makes it difficult to weigh the utility of the algorithm.
Not an Apples to Apples comparison. In the source, the "BitFast" sort converts the entire link-list into an array before performing the sort. Without even considering the merits of the actual algorithms, the Mergesort has no chance of being faster given the more complicated data structure used.
As others pointed out, this sounds like the Radix sort, but I was too disgusted to step through the source in detail and even verify this. Maybe someone else will have a stronger constitution.
Federal reserve system collapses on Lucent's deposit of Microsoft check.
I'm glad to see this kind of information come out of Google. But I don't expect it to last.
These charitable acts aren't a big deal while Google is the darling of Wall Street. Once the honeymoon's over their shareholders are going to punish them for peeing away company trade secrets.