Agreed. The "not enough apps" conversation/excuse is a dumb one. 95% of the apps people are installing never get used. They just sit there for epeen measuring and "just in case I need it". If you disagree I dare you to actually count the number of apps you use in a day.
This is so; so horribly wrong. 99.9% of the time I don't care about having an up to date Stuttgart travel planner app in Android. It's the one time that I need it; that I'm late for my plane; that I can't get a taxi. That one time I manage to get my flight because my Android phone knows how to do it for me can be worth more than the entire phone and all the software on it. The magic app which saves you can be a simple ruler application which lets you call for the right screw to fix your car. It can be a medical app which tells you how to resuscitate your kid. Not everybody needs every app, but nobody knows exactly which app it is that they will need.
In any case, what's wrong with Windows Phone is not so much the lack of apps; that's a problem, but one you can plan around by having an Android or iOS tablet as well. It's more that, most of the apps were just brought in as the initial version required to get Microsoft's developer bounty and abandoned. With the lack of users everything is untested and there is no incentive for developers to update them after that first upload. The store is now even more dated than they were before WP8 launched. This means that you launch an app, hope it will work and find it doesn't actually do what you need. A bad tool may well be worse than no tool and no self respecting person should be caught out with one.
Key features of this are things like a sapphire display which is much better than and much much more expensive than gorilla glass. The other thing is the "I am rich" button - to call your conceierge. This is to an iPhone as an iPhone is to a really cheap Android phone. Which is to say, on a cheap Android phone you will get a bunch of features that the iPhone doesn't have, such as the ability to side load applications, but your iPhone geek will just say "don't want" and point at his better display. This is the reason why top end Android phones devices to outclass the iPhone on display technology. Everybody knows the iPhone fans have to grit their teeth as they pretend not to care.
The other thing is that this is very clearly saying that their customers are wanting something that integrates with their surroundings properly. "You need to be part of an ecosystem," is the key quote in the BBC article in explaining why they avoided WP8. Coming from a former Nokia person, and almost directly a quote from Steven Elop on why they chose Windows, I think that could be a sign that Windows Phone will be abandoned sooner rather than later. Possibly with Elop going with it. It's certainly a pretty direct hint to the board members of his former employer.
You want to remember that and bring that up at the point they sue someone over this patent. If they get sued and use it for counter defence, you might consider not remembering..
Yeah; it's interesting that this has already attracted multiple negative mods ("overrated / troll") even though it's a quite careful and well linked comment. I guess we know exactly what Microsoft doesn't want people noticing.
What better place for people to exposed to needless cancer risk from ionizing radiation concentrated just below the surface of their skin than the place that voted for this?
HTC's problems werent from Microsoft.. HTC was the target of the opening salvo of mobile patent lawsuits, initiated by Apple.
N.B. I'm not saying that Microsoft's patent attacks directly went against HTC. HTC's poblems seem to be largely from redirecting R&D in the direction Windows Phone. Have a look at exactly when the competitiveness of their phones went down and it's exactly the time when they must have been directing a large effort to porting Windows to their hardware. What I'm saying is that it was partnering with Microsoft that damaged HTC. That at least partly will have
When the first wave of the mobile lawsuit armageddon geared up, the three companies distinctly absent from either end of these lawsuits were Google, Palm, and Microsoft (citation.)
A long time ago Microsoft even opposed patents. That attitude, however changed much earlier than people realise. Please remember that Microsoft v. TomTom took place in 2009 noticably before Apple started suing HTC.
To accuse Microsoft of being somehow a big offender is ignoring the history of these battles. Patent lawsuits wasn't how Microsoft operated, and to a large extent still isn't because nearly every lawsuit that targets Microsoft or is initiated by Microsoft ends in a (cross)licensing deal rather than a judgment and that includes Microsoft taking the short end of it (ex: licensing from Acacia Research.)
Microsoft has repeatedly spun off or supported companies like intellectual vendors which are archetypal patent trolls. Microsoft funded SCO in several direct and indirect ways (see groklaw.net for details) and it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that soon after Microsoft funding SCO started talking of patents. Microsoft claimed in 2007 that "Linux violated 235 of their patents" and it took years to prove that they were lying. They are circumspect; they do attempt to do most of their patent extortion behind NDAs. However that does not make things better. The opposite in fact. Microsoft is trying to use patents to set up a system where it alone has control of all software. Companies like Google which stand up to this should be seen as heroic.
I do understand that Microsoft is one of the only companies that have gone after Linux, and its probably unforgivable, but that doesnt make them one of the big offenders in mobile patent lawsuits. Making that claim just doesnt hold up to reality.
Microsoft extorted more from Android vendors than they charged for Windows 7. Most of this action was done under NDA and it wasn't until Barnes & Noble exposed this that it was clear how outrageous and ridiculous Microsoft's patent claims that they managed to get away with elsewhere are. Even then, Barnes & Noble were forced into selling off part of their E-reader business to Microsoft and investigating windows for tablets. Where Apple is a street punk, Microsoft is a mafia don. You hear more noise from Apple's legal action than Microsofts simply because the level of intimidation is lower and so people are more likely to stand up to them.
1a. Stop wasting money on patent based acquisitions.
This entire war was started by Apple and Microsoft setting out to block other companies from exactly the strategy the grandparent post proposed and who were exactly failing to buy patents. Microsoft's stupid FAT patents; Apple's stupid "rounded corners" design patents; patents on obvious gestures in a user interface. The companies which were trying the strategy of "just give the consumer what they want" were being sued to hell. The lawyers were making it very clear that if you attempt to opt out of the patents protection racket then their friends, the judges, will make you pay more than you can afford.
At one point, it looked as if Microsoft might honestly have frightened the device manufacturers away from Android. Spineless companies like HTC rolled over and let Microsoft tickle their tummy. Only after Google started acquiring large patent portfolios did some of those manufacturer's get a bit of guts. HTC, on the other hand, will likely never recover.
If you look at the history of this, it's very clear that Google is only succeeding by buying their way through the US legal system. It's very hard then to argue that their investment in "patent based acquisitions" was a waste of money. Just like a certain level of bribery is the cost of doing business in Russia and your people may die if you don't pay it, in the corrupt US justice system you have to be seen to be paying your protection money to the patent barons.
If the problems are already solved, then it's more difficult to be the one who solves them. If the solutions are already extremely optimized then it's more difficult to be the person who provides a better solution. Sometimes you want to repeat other people's work, but sometimes it's worth trying to be the first person to do something. A less tuned OS like ReactOS might be good for teaching on.
I'd be more concerned about the question "why use a complex OS like ReactOS rather than a simple one like Minix" since lots of the key teaching points could get lost in the arcane details, but again, there's also plenty to be said for showing the real world from time to time rather than just academic theory and using one thing doesn't stop you using the other.
The most important thing is probably the quality of the teaching and if ReactOS motivates the professor to be interested in what his students are doing then it's probably going to give them a better course than they could ever have otherwise.
The crucial mistake you have made is to read the whole patent. The whole patent is typically a major misdirection. It talks of the glorious complex new idea they had and looks, to the layman, like something valuable. However, that's not what they are attempting to patent. What you want to read is claim 1 or more generally each of the "independent claims". Each of these things stands alone as a system that they are claiming a patent over and if you do what is stated in any one of the "independent claims" then you would be considered to be infringing. Almost nothing else in the patent, apart from, possibly, places where they define the meaning of words which occur in claim 1, has any real importance whatsoever. The courts will interpret your patent to cover even completely unrelated systems which use the same 'idea'.
Claim 1 in this case basically says, 'an automatic order system where you can change the items in the order and then it rebuilds the order'. Please note that it does not actually give any specifics about how that is done in terms of specific algorithms.
There are later "dependent claims" as in "the system of claim 1 where the xxxx is a yyyy". These do not in any way influence what the patent claims (since they would already be covered by claim 1). They just make it more difficult to get rid of the patent as overbroad and obvious, especially if you actually did more or less the same thing as Amazon is doing.
As I understand, they patented their subscribe and save feature which has been around for years.
Note that this patent has been around for years. It was "Filed: November 2, 2009". Yet another example how patents which might be reasonable when applied to mechanical objects are completely stupid when applied to computer software. Even if this patent might have taught someone something when it was first filed (which looks extremely dubious; I suspect IBM mainframe automatically delivered supplies from the 1960s will be prior art), four years is a lifetime in internet computing. There is no way this could ever be a useful idea on it's date of publication.
If you are going to force transparency on others you had better be open with your own life.
Forcing transparency on large institutions and governments is a correct thing because those institutions rely on public acceptance in order to function and wield inordinate power. Companies are created because people choose to forgive the personal liability of the shareholders for the actions of the company in return for public supervision. This means that the public must be allowed to supervise. The same goes for the government.
Giving privacy to individuals is also a good thing for exactly the same reason. It moves power from the government and large companies who could use the fact that they know more about people than those people know about themselves for blackmail and manipulation.
Privacy should apply to every organisation, such as a family, where the members are generally fully responsible for their actions in that position.
Transparency should apply to every organisation, such as a government or company, where someone might be doing an action for a reason that they personally don't understand.
Wikileaks, despite it's stupid publicity seeking and overblown sense of self importance, is a private group of people who are treated as fully responsible for what they have done when they get caught.
The governments Wikileaks publishes information about have outrageous things like "sovereign immunity" and generally dissipated responsibility. The certainly don't get punished when caught doing bad things.
back when i was in the army i worked in the command group of a 2 star general. i was in the office down the hall and next to the chief of staff. when they needed computer help i saw their email. it was the most boring crap you can imagine.
And that is the secret. How many Slashdotters do you think will go to join the army cybercorps now they know this?
It's just a "lover's spat" till she kicks you out and changes the locks. When you also see she's taken the local mafia enforcer psycho into bed, you better be looking for a new girlfriend. Knowing Microsoft they will be waiting with a cleaver when HP tries to come back in through the window.
Apart from the way Microsoft is entering the hardware market in all the areas where the PC makers could grow (tablets and phones), there are already rumours of Microsoft buying out Dell. This would match other markets that they have come into, e.g. in databases they partly bought out Sybase and then destroyed everyone else who wasn't prepared for total war. Presumably part of the aim is to reduce the apparent value of Dell so that they get it cheap. The others like Acer, HP and Nokia that are trapped with Microsoft are in deep trouble.
Yes, except your nuclear power plant is completely useless and crap for domestic power generation. It will generate that 1.5GW of power just the same in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep with the electricity off as it generates it in the middle of the day. Even wind generators can be feathered back to stop generating power when there is too much already. With nuclear this comes back to needing pumped storage in any case. Suddenly that 70% efficiency isn't looking too bad.
I'm no engineer, but it seems like you would spend more energy pumping the water out, than you would get back from the turbines, so wouldn't this be not very efficient?
Sure, pumped storage is typically below 80% efficient and this may even fall below the 70% efficiency of the worst schemes. However that doesn't matter. The thing is that sometimes the value of electricity even becomes negative. This happens e.g. because Nuclear power plants are very inflexible and can't stop producing power. At night, in warmish weather (too warm to heat, too cool for aircon) you easily end up with almost no energy used so you have to dump that power somewhere. In those circumstances getting back even a little of the power at another time when it is worth something is a great deal. The great thing is that power from pump storage is very flexible. You can switch it on or off in seconds. That is well worth paying an efficiency penalty for.
A challenge of wind power is that the wind varies, and transmission is a quite expensive. You can solve this by building extra turbines which mean that even in reasonably light wind you can provide enough power for normal times. However, that means that in strong winds or at night you end up with plenty of excess capacity which is bringing nothing. If you have a scheme like this you can use that extra capacity for something useful.
Are batteries out of the question when it comes to storing this much energy?
They are mostly too expensive, however people definitely trying to develop reasonably priced batteries. There were ideas about using batteries in electric cars where they would already have been paid for.
I know you are trying to be funny, but you are just showing that you are ignorant racist.
Ignorant yes; racist we don't have much evidence for. Nobody makes jokes about cheap Taiwanese batteries even though Taiwan is largely ethnically Chinese. By the time Japan had recovered to the level that China is at today it already had a reputation for quality. The reason is simple. Taiwan is a democracy with proper freedom of speech and so the quality of things made there has gone up massively. Japan mostly the same. If someone tried things like they get away with in China then someone would speak up. Things like the crap that goes on in China - deadly chemicals in baby milk - failing to buy properly made signalling equipment from Siemens to save a few euros and then trying to bury a train full of dead people - would never go on if Chinese people in China had control of their own destiny instead of a bunch of party plutocrats.
The racists are the people who say things like "democracy isn't suitable for China".
The Microsoft Surface RT comes with a cover/keypad that includes a touchpad; they offer both inputs. And with the USB port, I use a mouse all the time.
I really don't see anything wrong with that. The normal keyboard is crap but you could leave it at home so it doesn't take anything away. There have been Android tablets that come with keyboards for ages and they are perfect for certain strange niche markets. The difference here is that, 99.5% of the time you use the surface without its keyboard and so direct pointing works fine. On the 0.5% of the time when you a) want to use a keyboard b) have it with you and c) aren't sitting next to a PC anyway the inconvenience of getting gorilla arm from using direct touch on a device which is far from you is probably worth it to avoid having to carry a separate mouse with you.
The problem with touch comes only when you have a fixed screen separated from you by a keyboard such as a laptop or desktop monitor. You either mount the screen in a position which causes neck strain or you mount it in a position which causes ergonomic problems. Either way people are going to hate it. When this was tried last time, the solution developed was to separate the screen from the tablet interface (look up Wacom Bamboo). Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, it seems.
As far as using a mouse with a surface RT, seems a bit perverse, but each to their own. How long did it take you to learn to avoid all the various gestures whilst dragging items around the screen?
I like the form factor and the fact that the touchscreen eliminates the need for a touchpad
This is the fundamental design mistake that Microsoft has made which is what went wrong with Windows 8. A touchscreen and a touchpad are quite different and incompatible and one does not replace the other. One is suitable for tablet mode where you are interacting with the whole screen and picking it up, moving it into the correct ergonomic position for direct control. The other, which allows relative motion, is suitable for office / desk working situations where you want to manipulate a screen that should be some distance from you.
All touchscreen computers should have a second input device such as a mouse. In a laptop that means a touchpad equivalent.
If they assert ownership of the code, and decline to release it under an open source licence then they can pretty much kill the fork as well.
a) Fortunately not because VMWare and Red Hat have already made a posting otherwise.
b) Fortunately not because this is a public project and has been explicitly and openly discussed by a number of people from VMWare over a long time. In general, companies are liable for the things their employees do as part of their work. Especially if they knew about it or should have known about it. The only comeback they have is disciplinary action against the employee. Judges sometimes come down really hard on companies which try to wriggle out of this kind of thing.
c) Just think about it. If what you said was true, wouldn't Barings bank just have said "no; sorry, rogue trader; give us back our stolen dollars". Don't think the tech industry will manage tricks the financial industry has never thought of.
Nokia used to sell 4million smartphones every two weeks, not every three months.
The current major competitors typically sell more than that on launch day
RIM, which is just before it's new OS launch, and is clearly in trouble sold 6.9 Million phones; almost without any marketing.
Nokia and Microsoft are putting down billions of Euros in subsidies for these phones and more in terms of marketing
150% of nothing is still nothing. A "significant rise" would behave been an increase of 15 to 30 million. That would still not put Nokia near the big league, but would suggest that they have a real chance of getting back.
If you take into account the fact that a huge proportion of these phones were bought by Nokia and Microsoft employees and partners for testing, what you come up with is an App market which has no prospect of expanding to become something close to an "eco system" within the next two to five years.
It likely could be thrown out of court by the defense...I forget the term but something like "Chain of authority" in the handling of evidence.
"Chain of custody" is what you are looking for. The thing about things like this is that you don't use them in the final court case. You use them to force the email provider to recover the same emails from their backup tape. Or to get a confession. Or in a hundred other ways any competent cop (and yes, you should assume that the cop in your case will be competent) will tell you.
On it's own this is probably not enough evidence to prosecute. It's certainly enough to raise reasonable suspicion.
Spoken as a COMPLETE fool independent of version control.
In other words, an out-of-control fool.
Out of all the code you're working on, HOW WOULD YOU KNOW THERE'S DELETED INFORMATION IN A PREVIOUS VERSION OF ONE OF THE MANY FILES?
...
There are two scenarios that I can see here
A) the code was deleted correctly; it didn't cause a bug.
B) the code was deleted incorrectly; it did cause a bug.
In case B, I will know the code was deleted by comparing first version with the bug with the last version without the bug. This seems trivial.
In case A, the code was adding no functionality whatsoever to the program. I'm trying to work out why you would want to look up some code which was so useless that was in your program without adding anything? Wouldn't it be better to spend your time looking at random code samples on the internet, let alone using a Google search to see if there's a library related to your problem?
If that was true; Nobody would have any objection. The fact is, however, that if you do copy their software without a license or having lost the evidence of that license then Microsoft definitely do things like sending in the BSA and trying to put you in prison. Yes, I agree, it's a bad mistake to choose to use Microsoft software. Nobody should ever do that. However, at the point that you realise that you need to make copies for a friend, when it's too late and the first decision was already made that's the point where the come in and steal your freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The "not enough apps" conversation/excuse is a dumb one. 95% of the apps people are installing never get used. They just sit there for epeen measuring and "just in case I need it". If you disagree I dare you to actually count the number of apps you use in a day.
This is so; so horribly wrong. 99.9% of the time I don't care about having an up to date Stuttgart travel planner app in Android. It's the one time that I need it; that I'm late for my plane; that I can't get a taxi. That one time I manage to get my flight because my Android phone knows how to do it for me can be worth more than the entire phone and all the software on it. The magic app which saves you can be a simple ruler application which lets you call for the right screw to fix your car. It can be a medical app which tells you how to resuscitate your kid. Not everybody needs every app, but nobody knows exactly which app it is that they will need.
In any case, what's wrong with Windows Phone is not so much the lack of apps; that's a problem, but one you can plan around by having an Android or iOS tablet as well. It's more that, most of the apps were just brought in as the initial version required to get Microsoft's developer bounty and abandoned. With the lack of users everything is untested and there is no incentive for developers to update them after that first upload. The store is now even more dated than they were before WP8 launched. This means that you launch an app, hope it will work and find it doesn't actually do what you need. A bad tool may well be worse than no tool and no self respecting person should be caught out with one.
Key features of this are things like a sapphire display which is much better than and much much more expensive than gorilla glass. The other thing is the "I am rich" button - to call your conceierge. This is to an iPhone as an iPhone is to a really cheap Android phone. Which is to say, on a cheap Android phone you will get a bunch of features that the iPhone doesn't have, such as the ability to side load applications, but your iPhone geek will just say "don't want" and point at his better display. This is the reason why top end Android phones devices to outclass the iPhone on display technology. Everybody knows the iPhone fans have to grit their teeth as they pretend not to care.
The other thing is that this is very clearly saying that their customers are wanting something that integrates with their surroundings properly. "You need to be part of an ecosystem," is the key quote in the BBC article in explaining why they avoided WP8. Coming from a former Nokia person, and almost directly a quote from Steven Elop on why they chose Windows, I think that could be a sign that Windows Phone will be abandoned sooner rather than later. Possibly with Elop going with it. It's certainly a pretty direct hint to the board members of his former employer.
You want to remember that and bring that up at the point they sue someone over this patent. If they get sued and use it for counter defence, you might consider not remembering..
Yeah; it's interesting that this has already attracted multiple negative mods ("overrated / troll") even though it's a quite careful and well linked comment. I guess we know exactly what Microsoft doesn't want people noticing.
What better place for people to exposed to needless cancer risk from ionizing radiation concentrated just below the surface of their skin than the place that voted for this?
HTC's problems werent from Microsoft.. HTC was the target of the opening salvo of mobile patent lawsuits, initiated by Apple.
N.B. I'm not saying that Microsoft's patent attacks directly went against HTC. HTC's poblems seem to be largely from redirecting R&D in the direction Windows Phone. Have a look at exactly when the competitiveness of their phones went down and it's exactly the time when they must have been directing a large effort to porting Windows to their hardware. What I'm saying is that it was partnering with Microsoft that damaged HTC. That at least partly will have
When the first wave of the mobile lawsuit armageddon geared up, the three companies distinctly absent from either end of these lawsuits were Google, Palm, and Microsoft (citation.)
A long time ago Microsoft even opposed patents. That attitude, however changed much earlier than people realise. Please remember that Microsoft v. TomTom took place in 2009 noticably before Apple started suing HTC.
To accuse Microsoft of being somehow a big offender is ignoring the history of these battles. Patent lawsuits wasn't how Microsoft operated, and to a large extent still isn't because nearly every lawsuit that targets Microsoft or is initiated by Microsoft ends in a (cross)licensing deal rather than a judgment and that includes Microsoft taking the short end of it (ex: licensing from Acacia Research.)
Microsoft has repeatedly spun off or supported companies like intellectual vendors which are archetypal patent trolls. Microsoft funded SCO in several direct and indirect ways (see groklaw.net for details) and it doesn't seem to be a coincidence that soon after Microsoft funding SCO started talking of patents. Microsoft claimed in 2007 that "Linux violated 235 of their patents" and it took years to prove that they were lying. They are circumspect; they do attempt to do most of their patent extortion behind NDAs. However that does not make things better. The opposite in fact. Microsoft is trying to use patents to set up a system where it alone has control of all software. Companies like Google which stand up to this should be seen as heroic.
I do understand that Microsoft is one of the only companies that have gone after Linux, and its probably unforgivable, but that doesnt make them one of the big offenders in mobile patent lawsuits. Making that claim just doesnt hold up to reality.
Microsoft extorted more from Android vendors than they charged for Windows 7. Most of this action was done under NDA and it wasn't until Barnes & Noble exposed this that it was clear how outrageous and ridiculous Microsoft's patent claims that they managed to get away with elsewhere are. Even then, Barnes & Noble were forced into selling off part of their E-reader business to Microsoft and investigating windows for tablets. Where Apple is a street punk, Microsoft is a mafia don. You hear more noise from Apple's legal action than Microsofts simply because the level of intimidation is lower and so people are more likely to stand up to them.
AC-130U?
1a. Stop wasting money on patent based acquisitions.
This entire war was started by Apple and Microsoft setting out to block other companies from exactly the strategy the grandparent post proposed and who were exactly failing to buy patents. Microsoft's stupid FAT patents; Apple's stupid "rounded corners" design patents; patents on obvious gestures in a user interface. The companies which were trying the strategy of "just give the consumer what they want" were being sued to hell. The lawyers were making it very clear that if you attempt to opt out of the patents protection racket then their friends, the judges, will make you pay more than you can afford.
At one point, it looked as if Microsoft might honestly have frightened the device manufacturers away from Android. Spineless companies like HTC rolled over and let Microsoft tickle their tummy. Only after Google started acquiring large patent portfolios did some of those manufacturer's get a bit of guts. HTC, on the other hand, will likely never recover.
If you look at the history of this, it's very clear that Google is only succeeding by buying their way through the US legal system. It's very hard then to argue that their investment in "patent based acquisitions" was a waste of money. Just like a certain level of bribery is the cost of doing business in Russia and your people may die if you don't pay it, in the corrupt US justice system you have to be seen to be paying your protection money to the patent barons.
If the problems are already solved, then it's more difficult to be the one who solves them. If the solutions are already extremely optimized then it's more difficult to be the person who provides a better solution. Sometimes you want to repeat other people's work, but sometimes it's worth trying to be the first person to do something. A less tuned OS like ReactOS might be good for teaching on.
I'd be more concerned about the question "why use a complex OS like ReactOS rather than a simple one like Minix" since lots of the key teaching points could get lost in the arcane details, but again, there's also plenty to be said for showing the real world from time to time rather than just academic theory and using one thing doesn't stop you using the other.
The most important thing is probably the quality of the teaching and if ReactOS motivates the professor to be interested in what his students are doing then it's probably going to give them a better course than they could ever have otherwise.
The crucial mistake you have made is to read the whole patent. The whole patent is typically a major misdirection. It talks of the glorious complex new idea they had and looks, to the layman, like something valuable. However, that's not what they are attempting to patent. What you want to read is claim 1 or more generally each of the "independent claims". Each of these things stands alone as a system that they are claiming a patent over and if you do what is stated in any one of the "independent claims" then you would be considered to be infringing. Almost nothing else in the patent, apart from, possibly, places where they define the meaning of words which occur in claim 1, has any real importance whatsoever. The courts will interpret your patent to cover even completely unrelated systems which use the same 'idea'.
Claim 1 in this case basically says, 'an automatic order system where you can change the items in the order and then it rebuilds the order'. Please note that it does not actually give any specifics about how that is done in terms of specific algorithms.
There are later "dependent claims" as in "the system of claim 1 where the xxxx is a yyyy". These do not in any way influence what the patent claims (since they would already be covered by claim 1). They just make it more difficult to get rid of the patent as overbroad and obvious, especially if you actually did more or less the same thing as Amazon is doing.
As I understand, they patented their subscribe and save feature which has been around for years.
Note that this patent has been around for years. It was "Filed: November 2, 2009". Yet another example how patents which might be reasonable when applied to mechanical objects are completely stupid when applied to computer software. Even if this patent might have taught someone something when it was first filed (which looks extremely dubious; I suspect IBM mainframe automatically delivered supplies from the 1960s will be prior art), four years is a lifetime in internet computing. There is no way this could ever be a useful idea on it's date of publication.
If you are going to force transparency on others you had better be open with your own life.
Forcing transparency on large institutions and governments is a correct thing because those institutions rely on public acceptance in order to function and wield inordinate power. Companies are created because people choose to forgive the personal liability of the shareholders for the actions of the company in return for public supervision. This means that the public must be allowed to supervise. The same goes for the government.
Giving privacy to individuals is also a good thing for exactly the same reason. It moves power from the government and large companies who could use the fact that they know more about people than those people know about themselves for blackmail and manipulation.
Privacy should apply to every organisation, such as a family, where the members are generally fully responsible for their actions in that position.
Transparency should apply to every organisation, such as a government or company, where someone might be doing an action for a reason that they personally don't understand.
Wikileaks, despite it's stupid publicity seeking and overblown sense of self importance, is a private group of people who are treated as fully responsible for what they have done when they get caught.
The governments Wikileaks publishes information about have outrageous things like "sovereign immunity" and generally dissipated responsibility. The certainly don't get punished when caught doing bad things.
back when i was in the army i worked in the command group of a 2 star general. i was in the office down the hall and next to the chief of staff. when they needed computer help i saw their email. it was the most boring crap you can imagine.
And that is the secret. How many Slashdotters do you think will go to join the army cybercorps now they know this?
Right, except that Chris Suh, Microsoft's general manager of Investor Relations has confirmed it. Which kind of suggests that the Register was right and you should go back to your master and discuss a bit about keeping up to date with the talking points.
It's just a "lover's spat" till she kicks you out and changes the locks. When you also see she's taken the local mafia enforcer psycho into bed, you better be looking for a new girlfriend. Knowing Microsoft they will be waiting with a cleaver when HP tries to come back in through the window.
Apart from the way Microsoft is entering the hardware market in all the areas where the PC makers could grow (tablets and phones), there are already rumours of Microsoft buying out Dell. This would match other markets that they have come into, e.g. in databases they partly bought out Sybase and then destroyed everyone else who wasn't prepared for total war. Presumably part of the aim is to reduce the apparent value of Dell so that they get it cheap. The others like Acer, HP and Nokia that are trapped with Microsoft are in deep trouble.
Yes, except your nuclear power plant is completely useless and crap for domestic power generation. It will generate that 1.5GW of power just the same in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep with the electricity off as it generates it in the middle of the day. Even wind generators can be feathered back to stop generating power when there is too much already. With nuclear this comes back to needing pumped storage in any case. Suddenly that 70% efficiency isn't looking too bad.
I'm no engineer, but it seems like you would spend more energy pumping the water out, than you would get back from the turbines, so wouldn't this be not very efficient?
Sure, pumped storage is typically below 80% efficient and this may even fall below the 70% efficiency of the worst schemes. However that doesn't matter. The thing is that sometimes the value of electricity even becomes negative. This happens e.g. because Nuclear power plants are very inflexible and can't stop producing power. At night, in warmish weather (too warm to heat, too cool for aircon) you easily end up with almost no energy used so you have to dump that power somewhere. In those circumstances getting back even a little of the power at another time when it is worth something is a great deal. The great thing is that power from pump storage is very flexible. You can switch it on or off in seconds. That is well worth paying an efficiency penalty for.
A challenge of wind power is that the wind varies, and transmission is a quite expensive. You can solve this by building extra turbines which mean that even in reasonably light wind you can provide enough power for normal times. However, that means that in strong winds or at night you end up with plenty of excess capacity which is bringing nothing. If you have a scheme like this you can use that extra capacity for something useful.
Are batteries out of the question when it comes to storing this much energy?
They are mostly too expensive, however people definitely trying to develop reasonably priced batteries. There were ideas about using batteries in electric cars where they would already have been paid for.
I know you are trying to be funny, but you are just showing that you are ignorant racist.
Ignorant yes; racist we don't have much evidence for. Nobody makes jokes about cheap Taiwanese batteries even though Taiwan is largely ethnically Chinese. By the time Japan had recovered to the level that China is at today it already had a reputation for quality. The reason is simple. Taiwan is a democracy with proper freedom of speech and so the quality of things made there has gone up massively. Japan mostly the same. If someone tried things like they get away with in China then someone would speak up. Things like the crap that goes on in China - deadly chemicals in baby milk - failing to buy properly made signalling equipment from Siemens to save a few euros and then trying to bury a train full of dead people - would never go on if Chinese people in China had control of their own destiny instead of a bunch of party plutocrats.
The racists are the people who say things like "democracy isn't suitable for China".
The Microsoft Surface RT comes with a cover/keypad that includes a touchpad; they offer both inputs. And with the USB port, I use a mouse all the time.
I really don't see anything wrong with that. The normal keyboard is crap but you could leave it at home so it doesn't take anything away. There have been Android tablets that come with keyboards for ages and they are perfect for certain strange niche markets. The difference here is that, 99.5% of the time you use the surface without its keyboard and so direct pointing works fine. On the 0.5% of the time when you a) want to use a keyboard b) have it with you and c) aren't sitting next to a PC anyway the inconvenience of getting gorilla arm from using direct touch on a device which is far from you is probably worth it to avoid having to carry a separate mouse with you.
The problem with touch comes only when you have a fixed screen separated from you by a keyboard such as a laptop or desktop monitor. You either mount the screen in a position which causes neck strain or you mount it in a position which causes ergonomic problems. Either way people are going to hate it. When this was tried last time, the solution developed was to separate the screen from the tablet interface (look up Wacom Bamboo). Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it, it seems.
As far as using a mouse with a surface RT, seems a bit perverse, but each to their own. How long did it take you to learn to avoid all the various gestures whilst dragging items around the screen?
I like the form factor and the fact that the touchscreen eliminates the need for a touchpad
This is the fundamental design mistake that Microsoft has made which is what went wrong with Windows 8. A touchscreen and a touchpad are quite different and incompatible and one does not replace the other. One is suitable for tablet mode where you are interacting with the whole screen and picking it up, moving it into the correct ergonomic position for direct control. The other, which allows relative motion, is suitable for office / desk working situations where you want to manipulate a screen that should be some distance from you.
All touchscreen computers should have a second input device such as a mouse. In a laptop that means a touchpad equivalent.
If they assert ownership of the code, and decline to release it under an open source licence then they can pretty much kill the fork as well.
a) Fortunately not because VMWare and Red Hat have already made a posting otherwise.
b) Fortunately not because this is a public project and has been explicitly and openly discussed by a number of people from VMWare over a long time. In general, companies are liable for the things their employees do as part of their work. Especially if they knew about it or should have known about it. The only comeback they have is disciplinary action against the employee. Judges sometimes come down really hard on companies which try to wriggle out of this kind of thing.
c) Just think about it. If what you said was true, wouldn't Barings bank just have said "no; sorry, rogue trader; give us back our stolen dollars". Don't think the tech industry will manage tricks the financial industry has never thought of.
The key numbers you have to know are that
150% of nothing is still nothing. A "significant rise" would behave been an increase of 15 to 30 million. That would still not put Nokia near the big league, but would suggest that they have a real chance of getting back.
If you take into account the fact that a huge proportion of these phones were bought by Nokia and Microsoft employees and partners for testing, what you come up with is an App market which has no prospect of expanding to become something close to an "eco system" within the next two to five years.
It likely could be thrown out of court by the defense...I forget the term but something like "Chain of authority" in the handling of evidence.
"Chain of custody" is what you are looking for. The thing about things like this is that you don't use them in the final court case. You use them to force the email provider to recover the same emails from their backup tape. Or to get a confession. Or in a hundred other ways any competent cop (and yes, you should assume that the cop in your case will be competent) will tell you.
On it's own this is probably not enough evidence to prosecute. It's certainly enough to raise reasonable suspicion.
Spoken as a COMPLETE fool independent of version control.
In other words, an out-of-control fool.
Out of all the code you're working on, HOW WOULD YOU KNOW THERE'S DELETED INFORMATION IN A PREVIOUS VERSION OF ONE OF THE MANY FILES?
...
There are two scenarios that I can see here
In case B, I will know the code was deleted by comparing first version with the bug with the last version without the bug. This seems trivial.
In case A, the code was adding no functionality whatsoever to the program. I'm trying to work out why you would want to look up some code which was so useless that was in your program without adding anything? Wouldn't it be better to spend your time looking at random code samples on the internet, let alone using a Google search to see if there's a library related to your problem?
They aren't 'taking' anything, .....
If that was true; Nobody would have any objection. The fact is, however, that if you do copy their software without a license or having lost the evidence of that license then Microsoft definitely do things like sending in the BSA and trying to put you in prison. Yes, I agree, it's a bad mistake to choose to use Microsoft software. Nobody should ever do that. However, at the point that you realise that you need to make copies for a friend, when it's too late and the first decision was already made that's the point where the come in and steal your freedom.