"New Jersey Federal Judge" means a Federal Judge whose district or circuit is in New Jersey. A little Googling will confirm that "{state} Federal Judge" is a pretty common idiom. Nobody who's not a lawyer (and thinking you know all about the law doesn't count) really cares about which specific district.
Which is not to defend sloppy summaries. Though I must point out that as Slashdot summaries go, this one is not all that bad, even with getting the state wrong.
And there's no point in complaining about submitters. Of course most submission are going to have errors of fact. That's the nature of crowdsourcing. What we need to ask is why the editors never edit really sloppy submissions.
OK, bad spelling and grammar, that's traditional, I can live with it. But Slashdot has come to reflect the Telephone Game aspects of the blogosphere to a painful degree.
You don't know it, but you're arguing a legal theory here. It goes something like, "A haiku is a complete poem that is very short, complete poems are copyrightable, therefore not all short texts are public domain."
You might be right. I simply wouldn't know. I do know that you have cited any precedents or statutes to back up your theory. Your premise ("complete poems are copyrightable") might or might not have have some basis in law. You simply don't know.
Why do you lack a printer? A low-end device goes for as little as $50. And "low end" doesn't mean low quality output (I've seen cheap printers that do a decent job with color photos) or inconvenience (some would fit in a shoebox). It does mean they're bound to be slow, like all night to print out that 100 page paper.
Though is that an issue? It's been a very long time since I was in college. Do most professors take electronic homework these days?
I'm not an expert on copyright law (possibly I'm the only Slashdot user who doesn't consider himself a universal legal expert) but it's my understanding that brief utterances are not copyrightable. Recall that tweets are a maximum of 140 characters. For example:
I'm not an expert on copyright law (possibly I'm the only Slashdot user who doesn't consider himself a universal legal expert) but it's my
You seem to be referring to ABC's horrific website streaming model, which often brings up a separate website to show you the ad, and then makes you click after a determined amount of time to start the show again.
Yeah, cause clicking a "resume" button every 10 minutes is so much work.
What you see as horrific, I see as a step in the right direction. Most advertising, especially TV advertising, is audio/visual spam. They shoot it out to as many eyeballs and ears as they can, and hope that some if it goes to their target audience. So you end up watching a lot of commercials that are lame, repetitive, and trying to sell you stuff you would never, ever buy.
ABC has tried a more creative approach, and I think it's too their credit. They've replaced simple passive ads with more interesting web pages that invite interaction. If you're not interested, you're no worse off than if you were watching "ba ba bup da da, I'm loving it" for the one millionth time. If you are interested, you interact, and that resume button you hate so much makes sure that your show doesn't continue without you.
This works out better for everybody (except, of course those who believe mass content should magically appear without cost). Advertisers will know what kind of advertising is engaging their viewers, and the lameness factor will go down. Media providers will be able to charge more for less advertising, because they'll be able to guarantee that adds will reach the people they're actually aimed at. And viewers will be able to get all those earworms out of their heads.
I'd rather a simple purchase/rent model myself (as in Amazon or iTunes), and the minimum of middlemen between the content producer and the purchaser.
Well, I guess paying $2/hour for Amazon or iTunes content beats paying $100/month for cable. But not by much.
I used to watch a lot of TV via the network web sites. It was great: didn't have to remember to set a recorder, didn't have to remember to go to the TV at a particular time, got shows that aren't available in my area without cable or a rooftop antenna (refuse to pay for one, landlord doesn't provide the other). Plus ABC shows were in a fancy widescreen mode that I can't get on my klunky old analog TV.
Then all the networks started switching to an evil software stack from Move Networks. Don't know the motivation (DRM? Outsourcing streaming infrastructure?) but it effectively cut me off from the sites that use it. The Move player requires more CPU bandwidth than my wimpy little tablet can handle. (So no more watching "Lost" in bed.) And even if I switch to my more powerful desktop machine, I get endless network. These might go away if I upgraded my DSL, but that's just not worth it.
Fortunately, a lot of the shows that I watch are also available on Hulu. And they still use a simple flash-based player. The rest I watch the old-fashioned way or do without.
Gotta wonder how much business Hulu has picked up this way.
What? You want tactile feedback? What are you, Amish?
Touch screens are often useful (PDAs wouldn't exist without them) but too many products have them just to have them. I mean, the iPhone has a touch screen, and the iPhone is cool, therefore anything with a touch screen is cool, right?
Even worse, some products have replaced buttons with touch tensors. Cowon used to make the best MP3 players (for the features I was looking for) but all their latest models are impossible to use, because instead of just pressing a button, you have to do weird finger gestures I just can't master. This change adds no functionality to the product, unless you count that it's now more like an iPod Touch. Not a lot more...
I thought we hated the ACLU because they're a bunch of fuzzy-headed liberals. Are we supposed to like them now just because they're against stupid laws?
Most of us developers don't even think about Sun as developing hardware. Most of the SysAdmins don't seem to think of Sun as the controlling force behind Java.
You're on the right track when you talk about how people see Sun based on how it affects them. But your picture of the company is still too superficial.
First of all, hardware and software are not equal "facets" of Sun. The hardware business is much bigger. After all, the company only exists because a Stanford grad student couldn't persuade any existing hardware company's to license his killer workstation design.
Second, Java is important in the software side of things, but it's not dominant. There's development tools, application servers, web servers (Sun basically took over what used to be Netscape's http server business) databases (MySQL and Java DB) so-called thin client technology (remember Tarantella? Now part of Sun) and more.
Sun failing would be fine for the market. Lots of small companies would jump in to take its place.
Like who? Most of Sun's customers are big corporate and research entities that have no interest in dealing with anybody who doesn't have a huge sales, distribution, and support operation. If they can't buy from Sun, they won't turn to a white box company. They'll turn to IBM, HP, or Dell.
Java. Sun had a pretty good idea there, and thoroughly destroyed it. Oversold it and pushed it out the door before it was really ready to do all the things it was supposed to do.
To this day, Java has a reputation it doesn't deserve for running slow. This happened because early Java virtual machines were primitive beasts with minimal optimization, and because early Java compilers were hastily hacked out from C++ compilers.
This last bit of nonsense resulted in Java applications that were full of memory leaks. Bad in any platform, but positively evil in a platform that's supposed to eliminate the horrors of manual memory management!
Unless Windows 7 is doing a lot better than Vista or XP, a lot of devices won't come with 64-bit drivers. If you have one of these devices, running the 64-bit version of Windows isn't an option. And if you run the 32-bit version, you're can't address more than 3.5 GB.
Even if you have the 64-bit Windows, most of the apps you're running won't have 64-bit versions. So no single app can use all that extra RAM. If you have a lot of big apps running at once (say, 8 GB total) you'll see a lot less VM thrashing. But that's the only benefit you'll see.
In other words, even though Windows is famous for being bloatware, you can't really utilize all the RAM the newer chips support.
What's that sound I hear? Sort of sounds like a million Linux fanboys going "LOL!"
Neither does Sun. This kind of shock-and-vibe testing is actually routine for their products — I've been in the lab where it's done. That lab can't handle anything bigger than a rack, hence the outsourcing of this particular test.
Well, there's lots of netbooks on the horizon that replace x86 with ARM in order to conserve power. And while Linux has been ported to ARM (along with everything else!) Windows hasn't, and probably won't be.
But don't get encouraged until you actually see people buying lots of ARM netbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody please link an article with more technical detail. I'm guessing that it involves a special circuit manufactured using Thiotimoline.
As we all know (unless you've been asleep for years)...
Or you're good at selectively quoting the evidence.
Macroeconomic phlogistics and heuristic raillectics dictate that unsyllogistic ventures be launched on the first day of the second calendar quarter.
And yes, those are all real words!
I was fucking responding to the fucking statement
Also note that there is no such thing as a "New Jersey federal judge"
Fucking apology accepted.
"New Jersey Federal Judge" means a Federal Judge whose district or circuit is in New Jersey. A little Googling will confirm that "{state} Federal Judge" is a pretty common idiom. Nobody who's not a lawyer (and thinking you know all about the law doesn't count) really cares about which specific district.
Which is not to defend sloppy summaries. Though I must point out that as Slashdot summaries go, this one is not all that bad, even with getting the state wrong.
And there's no point in complaining about submitters. Of course most submission are going to have errors of fact. That's the nature of crowdsourcing. What we need to ask is why the editors never edit really sloppy submissions.
OK, bad spelling and grammar, that's traditional, I can live with it. But Slashdot has come to reflect the Telephone Game aspects of the blogosphere to a painful degree.
Which I refuted. See above.
You don't know it, but you're arguing a legal theory here. It goes something like, "A haiku is a complete poem that is very short, complete poems are copyrightable, therefore not all short texts are public domain."
You might be right. I simply wouldn't know. I do know that you have cited any precedents or statutes to back up your theory. Your premise ("complete poems are copyrightable") might or might not have have some basis in law. You simply don't know.
Why do you lack a printer? A low-end device goes for as little as $50. And "low end" doesn't mean low quality output (I've seen cheap printers that do a decent job with color photos) or inconvenience (some would fit in a shoebox). It does mean they're bound to be slow, like all night to print out that 100 page paper.
Though is that an issue? It's been a very long time since I was in college. Do most professors take electronic homework these days?
I'm not an expert on copyright law (possibly I'm the only Slashdot user who doesn't consider himself a universal legal expert) but it's my understanding that brief utterances are not copyrightable. Recall that tweets are a maximum of 140 characters. For example:
I'm not an expert on copyright law (possibly I'm the only Slashdot user who doesn't consider himself a universal legal expert) but it's my
You seem to be referring to ABC's horrific website streaming model, which often brings up a separate website to show you the ad, and then makes you click after a determined amount of time to start the show again.
Yeah, cause clicking a "resume" button every 10 minutes is so much work.
What you see as horrific, I see as a step in the right direction. Most advertising, especially TV advertising, is audio/visual spam. They shoot it out to as many eyeballs and ears as they can, and hope that some if it goes to their target audience. So you end up watching a lot of commercials that are lame, repetitive, and trying to sell you stuff you would never, ever buy.
ABC has tried a more creative approach, and I think it's too their credit. They've replaced simple passive ads with more interesting web pages that invite interaction. If you're not interested, you're no worse off than if you were watching "ba ba bup da da, I'm loving it" for the one millionth time. If you are interested, you interact, and that resume button you hate so much makes sure that your show doesn't continue without you.
This works out better for everybody (except, of course those who believe mass content should magically appear without cost). Advertisers will know what kind of advertising is engaging their viewers, and the lameness factor will go down. Media providers will be able to charge more for less advertising, because they'll be able to guarantee that adds will reach the people they're actually aimed at. And viewers will be able to get all those earworms out of their heads.
I'd rather a simple purchase/rent model myself (as in Amazon or iTunes), and the minimum of middlemen between the content producer and the purchaser.
Well, I guess paying $2/hour for Amazon or iTunes content beats paying $100/month for cable. But not by much.
I used to watch a lot of TV via the network web sites. It was great: didn't have to remember to set a recorder, didn't have to remember to go to the TV at a particular time, got shows that aren't available in my area without cable or a rooftop antenna (refuse to pay for one, landlord doesn't provide the other). Plus ABC shows were in a fancy widescreen mode that I can't get on my klunky old analog TV.
Then all the networks started switching to an evil software stack from Move Networks. Don't know the motivation (DRM? Outsourcing streaming infrastructure?) but it effectively cut me off from the sites that use it. The Move player requires more CPU bandwidth than my wimpy little tablet can handle. (So no more watching "Lost" in bed.) And even if I switch to my more powerful desktop machine, I get endless network. These might go away if I upgraded my DSL, but that's just not worth it.
Fortunately, a lot of the shows that I watch are also available on Hulu. And they still use a simple flash-based player. The rest I watch the old-fashioned way or do without.
Gotta wonder how much business Hulu has picked up this way.
Or own an old-fashioned VCR (mine has a "skip 30 seconds" button), a mute button, or the simple ability to tune out the repetitive crap.
What? You want tactile feedback? What are you, Amish?
Touch screens are often useful (PDAs wouldn't exist without them) but too many products have them just to have them. I mean, the iPhone has a touch screen, and the iPhone is cool, therefore anything with a touch screen is cool, right?
Even worse, some products have replaced buttons with touch tensors. Cowon used to make the best MP3 players (for the features I was looking for) but all their latest models are impossible to use, because instead of just pressing a button, you have to do weird finger gestures I just can't master. This change adds no functionality to the product, unless you count that it's now more like an iPod Touch. Not a lot more...
I thought we hated the ACLU because they're a bunch of fuzzy-headed liberals. Are we supposed to like them now just because they're against stupid laws?
Most of us developers don't even think about Sun as developing hardware. Most of the SysAdmins don't seem to think of Sun as the controlling force behind Java.
You're on the right track when you talk about how people see Sun based on how it affects them. But your picture of the company is still too superficial.
First of all, hardware and software are not equal "facets" of Sun. The hardware business is much bigger. After all, the company only exists because a Stanford grad student couldn't persuade any existing hardware company's to license his killer workstation design.
Second, Java is important in the software side of things, but it's not dominant. There's development tools, application servers, web servers (Sun basically took over what used to be Netscape's http server business) databases (MySQL and Java DB) so-called thin client technology (remember Tarantella? Now part of Sun) and more.
Where did I even mention OpenGL?
Uh, where do you get stop motion == cardboard cutouts? In fact, all Henry Selick movies use elaborate models.
I share your dislike of mergers, but...
Sun failing would be fine for the market. Lots of small companies would jump in to take its place.
Like who? Most of Sun's customers are big corporate and research entities that have no interest in dealing with anybody who doesn't have a huge sales, distribution, and support operation. If they can't buy from Sun, they won't turn to a white box company. They'll turn to IBM, HP, or Dell.
Java. Sun had a pretty good idea there, and thoroughly destroyed it. Oversold it and pushed it out the door before it was really ready to do all the things it was supposed to do.
To this day, Java has a reputation it doesn't deserve for running slow. This happened because early Java virtual machines were primitive beasts with minimal optimization, and because early Java compilers were hastily hacked out from C++ compilers.
This last bit of nonsense resulted in Java applications that were full of memory leaks. Bad in any platform, but positively evil in a platform that's supposed to eliminate the horrors of manual memory management!
Google is your friend.
The dawn of time called. It wants its argument back: "I don't have a problem, therefore there is no problem."
Yes, some people have no trouble finding drivers for their 64-bit Windows systems. Many more do.
Unless Windows 7 is doing a lot better than Vista or XP, a lot of devices won't come with 64-bit drivers. If you have one of these devices, running the 64-bit version of Windows isn't an option. And if you run the 32-bit version, you're can't address more than 3.5 GB.
Even if you have the 64-bit Windows, most of the apps you're running won't have 64-bit versions. So no single app can use all that extra RAM. If you have a lot of big apps running at once (say, 8 GB total) you'll see a lot less VM thrashing. But that's the only benefit you'll see.
In other words, even though Windows is famous for being bloatware, you can't really utilize all the RAM the newer chips support.
What's that sound I hear? Sort of sounds like a million Linux fanboys going "LOL!"
But fully half of them are quoted by people whose intelligence is below median.
Neither does Sun. This kind of shock-and-vibe testing is actually routine for their products — I've been in the lab where it's done. That lab can't handle anything bigger than a rack, hence the outsourcing of this particular test.
Well, there's lots of netbooks on the horizon that replace x86 with ARM in order to conserve power. And while Linux has been ported to ARM (along with everything else!) Windows hasn't, and probably won't be.
But don't get encouraged until you actually see people buying lots of ARM netbooks.