Unless something major changes, Android is on a race to the bottom.
In a sense you are right. However, I see Android as something equivalent to Windows 3.11. It's not quite at the level of IOS, but it's as close as is needed. Almost anything RIM (or for that matter anyone else) does at this point is doomed to fail; However, if they did go with Android a) It's true that Windows PCs are more or less commodity, but companies like Panasonic still manage to sell premium versions like the Toughbooks. b) The inevitable commoditisation of Android hardware is going to mean that nothing else can come close to competing on cost.
Manufactures really SHOULDN'T be screwing with Android, so its consistent to users, so they can't compete based on OS..
RIM needs to get into two different parts of the market. High end consumer Android phones and business. The consumer division should be there mostly to keep up the image and give a reference for what a non messed up RIM device looks like; their profit pressure should be lower. The business division is there as the primary profit driver; they should be putting in things which allow corporate IT people to mess with the function of the RIM phones. They still shouldn't mess with the user interface of course, but they should be putting encryption, remote locking erasing and disabling, full backup and a bunch of other "corporate" features in place.
That means they have to compete based on hardware. In every situation in history like this, the race is a race to the cheapest, most easily mass produced with the largest possible margins.
Again think back to the PC wars. It's true that the more expensive manufacturers lost out to the cheaper for the most part. However, that took a long time coming and plenty of profit made. In the meantime, those like Atari, Acorn, Amstrad, Commodore, IBM, MSX, Sinclair etc. who refused to follow the trend simply got crushed. The reason is simple. The biggest standard gets the most sales; with the most sales there are the most competing component producers and they produce the most components; that leads to the cheapest components. The cheapest components lead to the best margins with the lowest price and that leads in turn to the most sales.
[...] Now, if you're belief is that RIM doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, then sure, throw android on all their devices and milk it out as long as you can. I'd say you'd probably be right, RIM clearly doesn't get it. They never really did, they just happen to be the option that sucked less than the non-existent option before them. Lets face it, RIM devices have always sucked ass, its just that they were slightly more usable than Windows Mobile devices. When the iPhone came out and set a reasonable standard for 'smart phones', RIM suddenly doesn't even really look like a 'dumb phone' anymore, its more like your inbred daughter of your third cousin who married her grandpa. They had a usable (not GOOD, just usable) email client on a phone while everyone else was dicking around being morons about it. No web browser, no HTML email, hardly presentable text even, but you could actually read it, and they came quickly, so it was good. Once you started seeing a web browser that didn't look like ass and pretty graphics on a phone that could be had for less than $500 (I'm ignoring other ridiculously over priced smart phones before the iPhone, which were $500-600 WITH a contract.), you know, an acceptable device for todays world, then the realization came out that RIM devices are actually really shitty. So they made new models... and in those new models, in there effort to look like Apple, they threw out the only things people actually liked about them and also utterly failed to understand why Apple devices are liked.
They thought that Monkey See, Monkey Do would work
The most interesting thing to me is how the rise of RIM's overseas sales is cloaking their weakness in the North America market. Every time there's a criticism of RIM, they do the same thing they've done here: respond with a laundry list of their strong financials. That response completely misses the point.
I think you are totally right, RIM looks like Nokia two years ago or Ericsson around 1999. There's an entire new platform type which has been developed. Only Apple has it and only Google understands what it is and is ready to compete with it. Making a great looking new user interface like Microsoft's and a new app store is still going to leave you five years behind. RIM needs to get their key features ported onto Android and make a telephone based on that or they will die. The only other chance would be to find a big group of other companies with serious cash to establish a proper open standard. Maybe take MeeGo and get Oracle to build an Android source compatible JVM system on top of that. Probably Oracle and Intel combined have enough patents to defend such a platform.
Two weeks from now, there will be a deal between this consortium and Google that licences all of those patents. Just watch.
I doubt a blanket license is up for sale here.
They need to recoup all that money from somewhere
Look at the list of companies there. This is pocket change. Several of those companies have much more than this just in cash on hand.
The aim here is not to get license money from Google. The aim is to isolate them. I hope Google has a counter strategy. The only possible one I can imagine at this point is getting software patents declared unconstitutional, which sounds like a big challenge to me. Alternatively, maybe Google knows of another big telecomms portfolio which is going to come up for sale soon?
This is a news site. Which of the following is new:
Microsoft won't give you a discount if it has 100% service.
Microsoft might give you a little discount if you have some outage.
If you have 18 days outage in one year, you'll still have to pay 50%
If they deliver almost no service you won't have to pay for it
And come on. I'm not submitting the story because I feel it's my journalistic duty. I'm submitting it becuase I think it's interesting what Microsoft thinks it can get away with. Being a pundit is not 100% separable from being a "reporter". What you have to do is separate the facts (you can have 18 days of outage and still have to pay for it) from the opinion (that's rediculous; who the hell do they think they are). This I did by clearly using the personal pronoun, "I am looking...".
Google promises 99.99% uptime as what they deliver, but, as clearly stated in the links that were included in the article, they start paying for outage time from the very first minute. It's a commitment to keep working towards 100% uptime and that's a pretty clear difference compared to Microsoft. Maybe you can't read?
The honest truth is that the Slashdot submission form cuts off half way across. So I can only ever read half of the sentence I wrote. So in fact I did do exactly what you said, and treated it as write once / read never. Except that I couldn't even write it in one go. But I had to decide, which was more valuable; my time moving the text in and out of the edit box or yours (and that of a few hundred thousand other Slashdot readers) trying to piece together the text. According to Dogbert's principles and the knowledge that Slashdot has paid editors, the answer was obvious.
rtfa-troll@ubuntu:~$ bc -l bc 1.11.28 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. 365 * 0.95 346.75 365 - 347 18
And yes, when dealing with Microsoft, I do try to work out what is the worst possible interpretation of their contract. It's not sufficient to understand how they will screw me, but it's a start. Anyway, you were pretty close.
Think of situations where you actually walk around using it. E.g. doctors doing a round of patients. I think the biggest problem is that this is exactly the original set of tablet use cases that failed with Microsoft and company.
This is not just a person who happens to get money from somewhere. This is a person who lied to the US senate about where they were getting money. There is a big difference here and trying to make the two issues equivalent just makes me think you are pushing an agenda.
My theory is that the idiots are using Facebook, and to some extent other social/instant media so that's where the spam is moving. (not saying that all Facebook users are idiots, in fact some of my more friendly than not acquaintances are Facebook users, just saying that most idiots are Facebook users).
Well, we could argue about the definition of "original" and get nowhere because the dictionaries use it one way and you use it a different one and you will never agree. Or, we could go and look at the actual rules of the competition which say:
Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details.
Where the "derived from or including" pretty clearly applies to putting two engines together. Which means that your definition is irrelevant becuse he hasn't made the needed declaration.
It's true that there are many source variants that will come to the same binary. However there are also many many more variants which do not. That's why the reports have lots of detail about this. Think, for example, about a simple ordering choice, first move file A then rename file B or first rename file B then move file A. Even if, as you suggested, the code for the two acts becomes the same, there are now two different possible binaries. Add simply one more choice and your possible number of binaries rises quadratically. Add a few arbitrary constants to the mix and you very rapidly come to a situation where the chance of two identical programs recurring randomly even if the entire universe is used for storage, becomes effectively zero. For a very small program this choice is limited, but for something the size of a chess position evaluator there are so many possible choices that a strong similarity is already very strong evidence of copying.
Let's see, should we take the word of Ken Thompson (yes that one), who according to the fine article seems to have been on the investigative panel, or the word of a random slashdot troll? Duhhh...
Actually neither. We should Read The Fine Reports.
Beyond the plain expression of the program, there are lots if artifacts which come through from source to binary. Even if two progammers start in the same language to develop the same algorithm to solve the same problem they will normally end up with great differences. The exceptions are the stuff of legends, and we are talking about 20 line long assembly programs. One programmer will choose an integer because it's big enough, another a long because the variable will mostly be used with other longs. This choice will not be optimised out of existence.
Looking at the report, it seems they used various different artifacts and clearly showed similarity between the programs.
Except, as you would know if you had just RTFA, he agreed not to plagiarize when entering the competition and there's pretty solid evidence he plagiarized, and he also agreed to deliver source code if needed, which he seems to be refusing to do. A completely separate issue from his licensing status.
If you had READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE PROPERLY you would know that he agreed to a bunch of rules which meant that a) his source had to be available and b) his code had to be original. The fact that the other engines are or aren't public domain is irrelevant to whether he should be excluded.
Right, except if you RTFA and in particular the investigation report, that isn't what happened here. Please see the many other posts in this article. Large parts of his functions match byte for byte.
Why the hell do things like this bring out all the Slashdot loonies? You people could have read the article, but you don't even have to do that. canajin56 has done it for you. They didn't just compare some moves. They actually analysed the binaries. Their case is 100% watertight. The only parallel I see with the DHS is you and a bunch of other Slashdot posters accusing them of ignorance before you have even read anything about their report.
We have a story of an AC about a single instance modded informative. We have an incident involving a pair of serial killers (raped and killed 12 people remember) being shot with a hunting rifle, yet the closest stories google can find are a snopes false granny story and a real robbery incident with a handgun (described by the NRA, who should know, as "among the more dramatic"), so somehow the story of shooting two serial killers doesn't fit in. Now, there are lots of people reading Slashdot, and it's possible that this is a true story, but there is no way it should be modded up without at least an account name to back it up. The advice given is extremely dangerous. If people stop helping each other then the "bad people will win".
Now, to the original AC, and assuming that this was a true story; Please think again about how you say what you say. Your sister may have made a misjudgement, but you have to come to terms with that and realise that what she did was the right thing and most of what happened to her was bad luck. There are ways she could have been more careful; but in the end everybody has to get involved, we have to take some risk and 99.9% of the time it works out fine. If we don't do that then horrible things happen:
It's not enough to just say "call the cops". There aren't enough cops to investigate every possible strange situation, they won't be able to come reliably if they to. Call the cops means that most of the time people will do nothing. Worse, we end up with a passive society of afraid people who can't act on their own and expect "the authorities" to do everything for them. And even worse, with media hysteria stories like this, we get a culture where those that intervene are considered abnormal or even begin to believe they will get into trouble.
You say:
The world has changed. If you are nice, you will be taken advantage of by those who aren't.
The rate of reported rape among women decreased by 10% from 1990 to 1995 (80 per 100,000 compared to 72 per 100,000) (Greenfeld, 1997). In 1995, 97,460 forcible rapes were reported to the police nationwide, representing the lowest number of reported rapes since 1989.
Instead, we have to teach people a bit of a different lesson. Be extremely careful about interactions which are initiated by the other side. Make a visible call to a friend; give the license plate and description of the car that you are going to help. Single women don't help groups of men on their own without first making a call. Single men (who are actually most subject to violence) are careful too. Use judgement. But in the end, most of the time you just have to take some risk in life.
No. Bruce is right. The problem is different. The problem is that a USB port is supposed to have things plugged in to it but is not designed to accept that.
The entire aim of having a USB pen drive is to exchange data. That means that, by definition, you have to be able to accept other people plugging their pen drive into your computer. Since you cannot trust your friend's computer knowledge, that means your computer cannot trust your friend's pen drive. That means that there is no effective difference between a "trusted" and an "untrusted" USB device. Neither of them can be "trusted" by your operating system.
An idiot would be a person who designs an operating system where plugging a keyboard can be automatically detected and start working on the same port as someone would have to connect an untrusted data device.
An idiot would also be a person who designed a USB interface that could be damaged by voltages which could be reasonably (I'm not including sophisticated voltage multipliers like in a camera flash as reasonable here) generated by a passive device connected to that USB interface.
A dangerous person would be a person who blames the victim (the innocent USB user) for the idiocy inflicted on them by their OS and computer designers.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be a dumb idea.
Unless something major changes, Android is on a race to the bottom.
In a sense you are right. However, I see Android as something equivalent to Windows 3.11. It's not quite at the level of IOS, but it's as close as is needed. Almost anything RIM (or for that matter anyone else) does at this point is doomed to fail; However, if they did go with Android a) It's true that Windows PCs are more or less commodity, but companies like Panasonic still manage to sell premium versions like the Toughbooks. b) The inevitable commoditisation of Android hardware is going to mean that nothing else can come close to competing on cost.
Manufactures really SHOULDN'T be screwing with Android, so its consistent to users, so they can't compete based on OS. .
RIM needs to get into two different parts of the market. High end consumer Android phones and business. The consumer division should be there mostly to keep up the image and give a reference for what a non messed up RIM device looks like; their profit pressure should be lower. The business division is there as the primary profit driver; they should be putting in things which allow corporate IT people to mess with the function of the RIM phones. They still shouldn't mess with the user interface of course, but they should be putting encryption, remote locking erasing and disabling, full backup and a bunch of other "corporate" features in place.
That means they have to compete based on hardware. In every situation in history like this, the race is a race to the cheapest, most easily mass produced with the largest possible margins.
Again think back to the PC wars. It's true that the more expensive manufacturers lost out to the cheaper for the most part. However, that took a long time coming and plenty of profit made. In the meantime, those like Atari, Acorn, Amstrad, Commodore, IBM, MSX, Sinclair etc. who refused to follow the trend simply got crushed. The reason is simple. The biggest standard gets the most sales; with the most sales there are the most competing component producers and they produce the most components; that leads to the cheapest components. The cheapest components lead to the best margins with the lowest price and that leads in turn to the most sales.
[...] Now, if you're belief is that RIM doesn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, then sure, throw android on all their devices and milk it out as long as you can. I'd say you'd probably be right, RIM clearly doesn't get it. They never really did, they just happen to be the option that sucked less than the non-existent option before them. Lets face it, RIM devices have always sucked ass, its just that they were slightly more usable than Windows Mobile devices. When the iPhone came out and set a reasonable standard for 'smart phones', RIM suddenly doesn't even really look like a 'dumb phone' anymore, its more like your inbred daughter of your third cousin who married her grandpa. They had a usable (not GOOD, just usable) email client on a phone while everyone else was dicking around being morons about it. No web browser, no HTML email, hardly presentable text even, but you could actually read it, and they came quickly, so it was good. Once you started seeing a web browser that didn't look like ass and pretty graphics on a phone that could be had for less than $500 (I'm ignoring other ridiculously over priced smart phones before the iPhone, which were $500-600 WITH a contract.), you know, an acceptable device for todays world, then the realization came out that RIM devices are actually really shitty. So they made new models ... and in those new models, in there effort to look like Apple, they threw out the only things people actually liked about them and also utterly failed to understand why Apple devices are liked.
They thought that Monkey See, Monkey Do would work
The most interesting thing to me is how the rise of RIM's overseas sales is cloaking their weakness in the North America market. Every time there's a criticism of RIM, they do the same thing they've done here: respond with a laundry list of their strong financials. That response completely misses the point.
I think you are totally right, RIM looks like Nokia two years ago or Ericsson around 1999. There's an entire new platform type which has been developed. Only Apple has it and only Google understands what it is and is ready to compete with it. Making a great looking new user interface like Microsoft's and a new app store is still going to leave you five years behind. RIM needs to get their key features ported onto Android and make a telephone based on that or they will die. The only other chance would be to find a big group of other companies with serious cash to establish a proper open standard. Maybe take MeeGo and get Oracle to build an Android source compatible JVM system on top of that. Probably Oracle and Intel combined have enough patents to defend such a platform.
I'm against monopoly. Why isn't everybody else?
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Two weeks from now, there will be a deal between this consortium and Google that licences all of those patents. Just watch.
I doubt a blanket license is up for sale here.
They need to recoup all that money from somewhere
Look at the list of companies there. This is pocket change. Several of those companies have much more than this just in cash on hand.
The aim here is not to get license money from Google. The aim is to isolate them. I hope Google has a counter strategy. The only possible one I can imagine at this point is getting software patents declared unconstitutional, which sounds like a big challenge to me. Alternatively, maybe Google knows of another big telecomms portfolio which is going to come up for sale soon?
"Sorry gov; I didn't realise my right hand was photoshopping the image".
This is a news site. Which of the following is new:
And come on. I'm not submitting the story because I feel it's my journalistic duty. I'm submitting it becuase I think it's interesting what Microsoft thinks it can get away with. Being a pundit is not 100% separable from being a "reporter". What you have to do is separate the facts (you can have 18 days of outage and still have to pay for it) from the opinion (that's rediculous; who the hell do they think they are). This I did by clearly using the personal pronoun, "I am looking...".
Google promises 99.99% uptime as what they deliver, but, as clearly stated in the links that were included in the article, they start paying for outage time from the very first minute. It's a commitment to keep working towards 100% uptime and that's a pretty clear difference compared to Microsoft. Maybe you can't read?
The honest truth is that the Slashdot submission form cuts off half way across. So I can only ever read half of the sentence I wrote. So in fact I did do exactly what you said, and treated it as write once / read never. Except that I couldn't even write it in one go. But I had to decide, which was more valuable; my time moving the text in and out of the edit box or yours (and that of a few hundred thousand other Slashdot readers) trying to piece together the text. According to Dogbert's principles and the knowledge that Slashdot has paid editors, the answer was obvious.
No no, it was my freudian slip. See the comment I made immediately after the submission. I guess my subconscious just gives Microsoft more of the benefit of the doubt than I would.
And yes, when dealing with Microsoft, I do try to work out what is the worst possible interpretation of their contract. It's not sufficient to understand how they will screw me, but it's a start. Anyway, you were pretty close.
762de5375ca1550f2c0cd61ee898260c81a342dd62071023af0a53c076f6e76d
Think of situations where you actually walk around using it. E.g. doctors doing a round of patients. I think the biggest problem is that this is exactly the original set of tablet use cases that failed with Microsoft and company.
This is not just a person who happens to get money from somewhere. This is a person who lied to the US senate about where they were getting money. There is a big difference here and trying to make the two issues equivalent just makes me think you are pushing an agenda.
My theory is that the idiots are using Facebook, and to some extent other social/instant media so that's where the spam is moving. (not saying that all Facebook users are idiots, in fact some of my more friendly than not acquaintances are Facebook users, just saying that most idiots are Facebook users).
Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details.
Where the "derived from or including" pretty clearly applies to putting two engines together. Which means that your definition is irrelevant becuse he hasn't made the needed declaration.
This happens every time someone takes existing OSS code and does something worthwhile with it. The community vilifies them.
Ah yes, of course. Except that
So the question is, why are you posting these canned posts? Are your masters at Microsoft really so stupid that they pay you by the post?
Is it in the rules of these competitions that entries shall conform to the terms of software licenses?
I don't know. Maybe we could Read The Finite Article to find out? Oh gosh it's in the middle of the page in italics. Too complex.,
It's true that there are many source variants that will come to the same binary. However there are also many many more variants which do not. That's why the reports have lots of detail about this. Think, for example, about a simple ordering choice, first move file A then rename file B or first rename file B then move file A. Even if, as you suggested, the code for the two acts becomes the same, there are now two different possible binaries. Add simply one more choice and your possible number of binaries rises quadratically. Add a few arbitrary constants to the mix and you very rapidly come to a situation where the chance of two identical programs recurring randomly even if the entire universe is used for storage, becomes effectively zero. For a very small program this choice is limited, but for something the size of a chess position evaluator there are so many possible choices that a strong similarity is already very strong evidence of copying.
Let's see, should we take the word of Ken Thompson (yes that one), who according to the fine article seems to have been on the investigative panel, or the word of a random slashdot troll? Duhhh...
Actually neither. We should Read The Fine Reports.
Beyond the plain expression of the program, there are lots if artifacts which come through from source to binary. Even if two progammers start in the same language to develop the same algorithm to solve the same problem they will normally end up with great differences. The exceptions are the stuff of legends, and we are talking about 20 line long assembly programs. One programmer will choose an integer because it's big enough, another a long because the variable will mostly be used with other longs. This choice will not be optimised out of existence.
Looking at the report, it seems they used various different artifacts and clearly showed similarity between the programs.
there is nothing wrong with what was done
Except, as you would know if you had just RTFA, he agreed not to plagiarize when entering the competition and there's pretty solid evidence he plagiarized, and he also agreed to deliver source code if needed, which he seems to be refusing to do. A completely separate issue from his licensing status.
If you had READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE PROPERLY you would know that he agreed to a bunch of rules which meant that a) his source had to be available and b) his code had to be original. The fact that the other engines are or aren't public domain is irrelevant to whether he should be excluded.
Right, except if you RTFA and in particular the investigation report, that isn't what happened here. Please see the many other posts in this article. Large parts of his functions match byte for byte.
Why the hell do things like this bring out all the Slashdot loonies? You people could have read the article, but you don't even have to do that. canajin56 has done it for you. They didn't just compare some moves. They actually analysed the binaries. Their case is 100% watertight. The only parallel I see with the DHS is you and a bunch of other Slashdot posters accusing them of ignorance before you have even read anything about their report.
We have a story of an AC about a single instance modded informative. We have an incident involving a pair of serial killers (raped and killed 12 people remember) being shot with a hunting rifle, yet the closest stories google can find are a snopes false granny story and a real robbery incident with a handgun (described by the NRA, who should know, as "among the more dramatic"), so somehow the story of shooting two serial killers doesn't fit in. Now, there are lots of people reading Slashdot, and it's possible that this is a true story, but there is no way it should be modded up without at least an account name to back it up. The advice given is extremely dangerous. If people stop helping each other then the "bad people will win".
Now, to the original AC, and assuming that this was a true story; Please think again about how you say what you say. Your sister may have made a misjudgement, but you have to come to terms with that and realise that what she did was the right thing and most of what happened to her was bad luck. There are ways she could have been more careful; but in the end everybody has to get involved, we have to take some risk and 99.9% of the time it works out fine. If we don't do that then horrible things happen:
It's not enough to just say "call the cops". There aren't enough cops to investigate every possible strange situation, they won't be able to come reliably if they to. Call the cops means that most of the time people will do nothing. Worse, we end up with a passive society of afraid people who can't act on their own and expect "the authorities" to do everything for them. And even worse, with media hysteria stories like this, we get a culture where those that intervene are considered abnormal or even begin to believe they will get into trouble. You say:
The world has changed. If you are nice, you will be taken advantage of by those who aren't.
Yes; according to the US Department of Justice, the world has changed; it's much safer than it used to be.
Instead, we have to teach people a bit of a different lesson. Be extremely careful about interactions which are initiated by the other side. Make a visible call to a friend; give the license plate and description of the car that you are going to help. Single women don't help groups of men on their own without first making a call. Single men (who are actually most subject to violence) are careful too. Use judgement. But in the end, most of the time you just have to take some risk in life.
No. Bruce is right. The problem is different. The problem is that a USB port is supposed to have things plugged in to it but is not designed to accept that.
The entire aim of having a USB pen drive is to exchange data. That means that, by definition, you have to be able to accept other people plugging their pen drive into your computer. Since you cannot trust your friend's computer knowledge, that means your computer cannot trust your friend's pen drive. That means that there is no effective difference between a "trusted" and an "untrusted" USB device. Neither of them can be "trusted" by your operating system.
An idiot would be a person who designs an operating system where plugging a keyboard can be automatically detected and start working on the same port as someone would have to connect an untrusted data device.
An idiot would also be a person who designed a USB interface that could be damaged by voltages which could be reasonably (I'm not including sophisticated voltage multipliers like in a camera flash as reasonable here) generated by a passive device connected to that USB interface.
A dangerous person would be a person who blames the victim (the innocent USB user) for the idiocy inflicted on them by their OS and computer designers.