Oracle provide a state-of-the-art, GPL-licensed, 3 years old Java implementation that works and is secure. Google prefer to roll their own (inferior) virtual machine because they do not like GPL, and while doing so they copied in 2010 the behaviour of a 2006 implementation to be included into a 2011 product — and the fault is Oracle's?
(By the way, so much for “Android does not use Java and does not care about Java compatibility”.)
A future-proof data signal (e.g. Thunderbolt, which can carry a signal fast enough that it won't be obsolete within a couple of years of release), that doesn't need to be supported by endpoints but can be detected and used if it is.
Micro-USB has the USB 3 signals. If you plug a Micro-USB 2 cable into a Micro-USB 3 receptacle, it will work at USB 2 speeds.
A widely-supported legacy signal (e.g. USB) so that it works everywhere
A Micro-USB cable will work literally on every cell phone not made by Apple nowadays. On other kinds of hardware, like tablets and cameras, custom connectors are still found, but even there Micro-USB is still the most common connector.
A lightweight mechanism for negotiating power demands and capabilities between supply and device.
A physically sturdy connector, with a reference design of a socket that will stand at least 1,000 insertions and ideally 10,000 in normal use.
Compliant MicroUSB connectors are required to withstand 10,000 insertion/extraction cycles.
A connector that either has an orientation so obvious that no one could possibly plug it in the wrong way, or one that works in either orientation.
Here Micro-USB fails. It's even harder to figure out the correct orientation than it was for Mini-USB connectors. And that's a feat.
Any patents that cover the design must be licensed royalty free, so third parties can interface with it cheaply and easily.
That would be great, but seeing how cheap USB peripherals are nowadays, I doubt that USB royalties are the biggest concern of anybody entering the market of hardware manufacturing.
Is HDMI getting feature parity with 1980s SCART cables? Back then it was pretty common to daisy-chain set-top boxes. Well, now we only need bidirectional audio-video, although I have a feeling that DRM will get in the way of that.
It's anonymous. Google would have to do nothing less than an INNER JOIN between two tables of their database in order to associate your name with the identifier. Therefore you can assume that your privacy is 100% safe.
I for one hope that it never happens! To me Scala is a puzzler generator. I prefer complex, but readable code instead of shorter code whose complexity - and bugs, and unforeseen interactions - have been hidden away by the pantagruelic grammatical structure of a programming language.
Java generics, by the same author of Scala IIRC, were supposed to make our lives only simpler. They usually do. But then they also brought in type erasure; they introduced compiler warnings, their suppression mechanisms, and the concept of "unsafe" code into the language; we started to see confusing signatures such as Enum<E extends Enum<E>>...
That's the only reason they're making all this hand-waving: have their customers believe that their data is safe with them - even when obviously it isn't the case - in order to reduce the damage to their revenue. Google's core business model lies in harvesting, analysing and storing massive amounts of user data. This depends entirely on Google's ability to have access to that data unencrypted. NSA and the likes will always share that ability with Google - or be a piece of paper away from acquiring it - so talking about encrypting the "pipes" while retaining the key to the data is pure gimmick.
Words mean things, and in this case they don't mean the things you say they do.
Thank god vocabularies exist.
You are trying to find a way to paint Google "evil".
I speak concepts, and I do not question other people's motivations. The image of Google is painted by none other but Google themselves, with the actions they choose to take. You can't have a cake and eat it too.
You are playing to your audience alone. Actually, the further out there you guys go with the tinfoil hat thing the less credible you are.
Yes, resorting to personal attacks is the best-known sign of having good points.
Yes, they've put those words in the terms of services just for the fun of it. Because lawyers are such funny persons.
Google was born out of net neutrality, and now that they've grown into a position of power, they suddendly find themselves against it. What specific words they chose to use has only a secondary importance. The decision they've made is political: you can only be in favour or against net neutrality, and they chose to be against. They don't want you to choose what to do with your internet connection. They want to be in control. In geekspeak, they're evil.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. All current mainstream processors already have operating modes that allow the firmware to run code without the OS knowing (or having a way to know). But then no CPU vendor is, yet, in the market of collecting and analysing personal information.
It's the only way you can implement push email notifications, which once used to be something of Blackberry that people liked. Every other provider of such a service works in the same way.
Saying the things that one thinks is a quality, more so in a world where form is not only getting more important than substance, but it is also becoming antithetical to it. I have an uncomplicated nervous system and I much prefer people telling me directly what they think about me or the things that I do, rather than having to do social reverse-engineering in order to figure out what smiling, polite and necktie-wearing colleagues say when I'm not there.
(And by the way, being able to understand and potentially appreciate jokes is an important trait for social interaction, and the whole LKML thread we're talking about was clearly tongue-in-cheek.)
50 km/h is still too much in case of fog or blind curves. I'm thinking about the kinds of road where you can expect to find bicycles, not motorways.
You have no idea of the things I've found behind one of those curves: cows, landslides, drugged bikers... once even a wise man who deemed it a good idea to have a kid drive his car on one of those roads that have a stone wall on one side and a chasm on the other.
And no amount of driving skill can protect you from invisible stupid bicyclers.
Actually, it's quite easy, you just have to drive slow enough to be able to brake before hitting anything that is in front of you. That would have avoided most of the accidents I've seen.
Or they did not want to go to jail for 20 years for a no-fault accident.
A no-fault accident is when a biker appears from the side of the road and you can't manage to avoid hitting him. In this case, the biker was hit from behind, so the fault his the driver's, full stop. Moreover, when you have an accident, you don't get to decide whose fault it is. You stay there and help the victim. If you run, you're a criminal, no excuses.
Indeed it happens, and when it happens you go to jail for it, and justly.
I would venture to guess they probably do value human life, just not as much as their freedom, which is not 0.
People who give more value to anything than human life are criminals, what's your point? What if somebody values my life a lot, but just a bit less than taking all my money?
AGPLv3 is identical to GPLv3 with the following section added.
13. Remote Network Interaction; Use with the GNU General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software. This Corresponding Source shall include the Corresponding Source for any work covered by version 3 of the GNU General Public License that is incorporated pursuant to the following paragraph.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the work with which it is combined will remain governed by version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
there are a number of different projects that are going to be affected by this including Debian's package manager, apt
From the list:
Sorry for not checking apt license myself. Anyway... effectivelly relicensing apt to GPL-3 might not be a problem for apt
There's a lot of FUD on that list, too, by people who didn't even know what license BDB was under in the first place. They thought it was under the BSD license, while it was under the Sleepycat license instead, which is a strong copyleft, GPL-like license. Now I'm not saying that changing a license is an easy thing to manage, just that answers like "AGPL kills kittens" are unacceptable.
The people who initially created BDB (past tense) now work for Oracle, or have worked with Oracle as long as they've worked on BDB, and they're working there on further development of it.
Oracle paid the people who wrote it in order to acquire that software. Oracle is currently paying their wages while they continue to develop the software. Your sarcasm is completely out of place.
Your eyesight must be going because Oracle didn't build it
Oh, don't be pedantic, they bought the company that built it.
and the impact of a license change effects large numbers of non-commercial existing open-source projects.
If anything, it will impact closed-source adopters of those projects. Open-source projects, by definition, have no problem in distributing their source code.
So they develop a complex software project in-house, they give it away for free, they put it under a well-respected, user-friendly, open source, free software license, and we attack them because that might scare away commercial freeriders lest they'd have to provide a link to the source code in case they modify it and then use it on a web site?
Bah, I must be getting old, because this looks completely unreasonable to me.
Slashdot Mirror
(By the way, so much for “Android does not use Java and does not care about Java compatibility”.)
Micro-USB has the USB 3 signals. If you plug a Micro-USB 2 cable into a Micro-USB 3 receptacle, it will work at USB 2 speeds.
A Micro-USB cable will work literally on every cell phone not made by Apple nowadays. On other kinds of hardware, like tablets and cameras, custom connectors are still found, but even there Micro-USB is still the most common connector.
There's the USB 2.0 battery charging standard: http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/batt_charging_1_1.zip
Compliant MicroUSB connectors are required to withstand 10,000 insertion/extraction cycles.
Here Micro-USB fails. It's even harder to figure out the correct orientation than it was for Mini-USB connectors. And that's a feat.
That would be great, but seeing how cheap USB peripherals are nowadays, I doubt that USB royalties are the biggest concern of anybody entering the market of hardware manufacturing.
Is HDMI getting feature parity with 1980s SCART cables? Back then it was pretty common to daisy-chain set-top boxes. Well, now we only need bidirectional audio-video, although I have a feeling that DRM will get in the way of that.
It's anonymous. Google would have to do nothing less than an INNER JOIN between two tables of their database in order to associate your name with the identifier. Therefore you can assume that your privacy is 100% safe.
Wine does have an implementation of cards.dll.
Java generics, by the same author of Scala IIRC, were supposed to make our lives only simpler. They usually do. But then they also brought in type erasure; they introduced compiler warnings, their suppression mechanisms, and the concept of "unsafe" code into the language; we started to see confusing signatures such as Enum<E extends Enum<E>> ...
That's the only reason they're making all this hand-waving: have their customers believe that their data is safe with them - even when obviously it isn't the case - in order to reduce the damage to their revenue. Google's core business model lies in harvesting, analysing and storing massive amounts of user data. This depends entirely on Google's ability to have access to that data unencrypted. NSA and the likes will always share that ability with Google - or be a piece of paper away from acquiring it - so talking about encrypting the "pipes" while retaining the key to the data is pure gimmick.
Words mean things, and in this case they don't mean the things you say they do.
Thank god vocabularies exist.
You are trying to find a way to paint Google "evil".
I speak concepts, and I do not question other people's motivations. The image of Google is painted by none other but Google themselves, with the actions they choose to take. You can't have a cake and eat it too.
You are playing to your audience alone. Actually, the further out there you guys go with the tinfoil hat thing the less credible you are.
Yes, resorting to personal attacks is the best-known sign of having good points.
Google was born out of net neutrality, and now that they've grown into a position of power, they suddendly find themselves against it. What specific words they chose to use has only a secondary importance. The decision they've made is political: you can only be in favour or against net neutrality, and they chose to be against. They don't want you to choose what to do with your internet connection. They want to be in control. In geekspeak, they're evil.
My comment was tongue-in-cheek. All current mainstream processors already have operating modes that allow the firmware to run code without the OS knowing (or having a way to know). But then no CPU vendor is, yet, in the market of collecting and analysing personal information.
...that spy^H anonymously profile your behaviour at the microcode level? I'll pass, x86 SMM is already evil enough for me.
It's the only way you can implement push email notifications, which once used to be something of Blackberry that people liked. Every other provider of such a service works in the same way.
(And by the way, being able to understand and potentially appreciate jokes is an important trait for social interaction, and the whole LKML thread we're talking about was clearly tongue-in-cheek.)
You have no idea of the things I've found behind one of those curves: cows, landslides, drugged bikers... once even a wise man who deemed it a good idea to have a kid drive his car on one of those roads that have a stone wall on one side and a chasm on the other.
And no amount of driving skill can protect you from invisible stupid bicyclers.
Actually, it's quite easy, you just have to drive slow enough to be able to brake before hitting anything that is in front of you. That would have avoided most of the accidents I've seen.
Or they did not want to go to jail for 20 years for a no-fault accident.
A no-fault accident is when a biker appears from the side of the road and you can't manage to avoid hitting him. In this case, the biker was hit from behind, so the fault his the driver's, full stop. Moreover, when you have an accident, you don't get to decide whose fault it is. You stay there and help the victim. If you run, you're a criminal, no excuses.
Indeed it happens, and when it happens you go to jail for it, and justly.
People who give more value to anything than human life are criminals, what's your point? What if somebody values my life a lot, but just a bit less than taking all my money?
How does this violate freedom zero?
From the list:
There's a lot of FUD on that list, too, by people who didn't even know what license BDB was under in the first place. They thought it was under the BSD license, while it was under the Sleepycat license instead, which is a strong copyleft, GPL-like license. Now I'm not saying that changing a license is an easy thing to manage, just that answers like "AGPL kills kittens" are unacceptable.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2012-November/msg00044.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margo_Seltzer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Bostic
So Oracle have the past, the present and presumably the future of BDB within them, whether we like it or not.
Oracle paid the people who wrote it in order to acquire that software.
That is not even vaguely close to the same thing as developing it themselves, and no amount of wishing will make it so.
That, together with
Oracle is currently paying their wages while they continue to develop the software.
is the same thing as "developing it themselves", and no amount of changing the point of the discussion will make your initial answer any less wrong.
Oracle paid the people who wrote it in order to acquire that software. Oracle is currently paying their wages while they continue to develop the software. Your sarcasm is completely out of place.
Your eyesight must be going because Oracle didn't build it
Oh, don't be pedantic, they bought the company that built it.
and the impact of a license change effects large numbers of non-commercial existing open-source projects.
If anything, it will impact closed-source adopters of those projects. Open-source projects, by definition, have no problem in distributing their source code.
Bah, I must be getting old, because this looks completely unreasonable to me.
Did Google et al give data to the NSA or not? If they did, why should I care about what their disposition was when they did it?