This is where organisations should be signing agreements with local governments and utilities ensuring that they have a guaranteed rate, with a maximum yearly price adjustment, for a given period of time. If the local government reneges on the agreement, then there should be a penalty in the contract, which was signed.
This is why a good QA team is always worth having. Sure it won't isolate you from every issue, but it should protect you from some of the obvious stuff.
Sometimes the problem isn't even to do with software, but with information policy and what can be placed on a server that is on the outside of a firewall.
Does anyone know whether the new protocol will be undocumented or if it is documented, if there is any resemblance to xmpp? Hopefully Google will allow xmpp bridges.
I am just worried that Google is trying to do more to force us to use their tools, rather than allowing us to use our favourite messaging clients., but with their service.
Why should, say, the marching cubes algorithm, which transforms bitmap data into polygonal surface data, not be worthy of a patent when the set of instructions for turning bauxite into aluminum is? Because one uses a silicon chip and electricity and the other uses a pressure vessel and electricity?
The computer is a general purpose machine that will run whatever program you write for it. That program is copyrightable, and thus already protected. It doens't need any more protection than that.
The machine you build for processing bauxite has one function. And instructions to build the processing plant are not copyrightable (in the same way recipes are not copyrightable). Therefore, the process is patentable.
There is also a notion of relative cost. The machine for turning bauxite into aluminium probably cost millions of dollars and years to develop, which is an investment that needs to be protected. Software costs are often no more than tens of thousands of dollars and took months to develop, possibly even weeks. The relevance of the first investment is probably more than ten years, while the the relevance of the software investment is probably in the order of 2-5 years.
Also, in the first case there is no incentive to replace the technology quickly whereas there is incentive for software - software gets replaced either because the is a commercial incentive or a bunch of geeks just had an urge to prove something could be done.
When we do comparisons of investment, development periods and how long something is useful we can can see that we can't apply the same rule book and carrot in both cases.
As stated, copyright provides sufficient protection in the world of software.
This where "hosted services" have an advantage, if you are trying to protect your code. Since the code runs on the server, there is nothing really that can be decompiled by the client, other than the UI portion and the communicated data packets - the rest of the logic can remain server side.
At the same time, given the rate at which the software industry evolves, anything more than five years old is probably good for a refresh anyhow. If a company hasn't made an effort to keep their software relevant, then they shouldn't have anything that would allow them to keep an artificial competitive advantage.
The other thing is that individual software concepts don't usually take years to develop and millions of dollars to develop, so why a 20 year patent on something like that. From my experience most software concepts are evolutionary and often have multiple ways of being implemented. For example a 'shopping cart' is a mere concept with plenty of different implementations, so why should the notion of an electronic shopping cart be patentable?
In certain ways embedded devices have actually become a bit more mainstream. First there is the Arduino and then there is the legion of boards using ARM based SoCs, which include the RaspberryPi and the Beagle Bone. And now you can write your code in a language such as Python. Embedded devices are a lot more capable than than they used to be.
There are certainly more out there and the market seems to be developing. The problem I find is that it isn't always easy finding what is going in in the market.
Linux Devices started to feel a bit forgotten about and didn't seem to have created a thriving community. The new owners probably couldn't monetize the site, couldn't understand the site and if the small number of people there were blocking ads, then that probably did not help either (sites have been hurt by this). In many ways the death of Linux Devices just means there is now a void to be filled, possibly with something better?
From my experience, Google has quite good customer support. But only for their customers!
Customers, remember? That are those people that pay someone for goods or service.... And that service basically is the main selling point for their pro-grade services.
For all others, they offer at least user to user help forums.
It really depends where you are. In many places a customer is someone you provide a service to. The fact you chose to charge $0 for that service is immaterial.
The German government may be going overboard, but they are following the letter of their law. Google is a big company and they also want to be sure they look good while making money. Google also has lawyers and business guys who will work out how to follow the law without costing too much to them. I am just curious though if they would go as far as charging a base fee for accounts in Germany to cover costs?
One thing I would say though, is that many online-only companies do need to improve ways of handling customer feedback. Often enough the service user is presented with a long FAQ without any clear way of getting answer which aren't documented.
But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition.
Not on Mars, there's no oxygen and no bacteria. Perfect match for the Curiosity rover, but noooo, they *had* to use flash memory and now their toy is broken. Don't make me say "I told you so".
I am just imagining how different the mars rover would be using punch cards as storage. Maybe that's getting too weird.
One thing that I see as causing some people to delay updating their Flash, despite an update being available, is that the installer requires you to restart your browser or anything else Flash think is using it. Many people take the attitude "I am working and don't want to be bothered restarting my apps, for something I rarely use".
Is there any other way Flash could install its updates, without requiring browsers to be restarted?
If we took this attitude for everything, then we would still be banging rocks, because they work fine.
At this point let the guys demonstrate their concept and see how well it works. A compromise could be simply to keep a minimal set of TTY devices for situations where userspace royally failed. It should be noted that for a good number of cases if userspace royally screwed up, then it is time for a reboot anyhow.
If the patent troll has stated exactly what patent they are exerting and on what equipment, then I would be tempted to contact the manufacturer of said equipment, since if the license is valid, then they are likely already licensees of said patent. If not, then you know you need to work out if the patent is valid
I would suggest pinging te EFF and see what thy have to say. The sad truth is thar due to the way the US legal system works, only the lawyers are likely be the winners. Patent trolling is a current form of legal extortion, where few people in power want accept something is broken.
Laws are probably also different in Canada, so forcing on customers something they didn't agree to may not be an option. In Canada you can be 'grand-fathered' into a plan and the only things they seem to be able to do is trying to up-sell you and increasing the price of your current plan.
If you have issues with these policies and the law allows them to get away with it, then I would talk to your local representative and also ensure a mass petition to get law adjusted. If 'customers' spend too much time complaining idly in corners and not massing together to push for change, then corporations clearly have the advantage.
If ISPs are turning to carrier grade NAT, then they are in a desperate situation. The current approach will only buy time for an ISP who has run out or will soon run out of IPv4 addresses, but they should still have a parallel IPv6 strategy in place. Without support for IPv6, customers won't be able to access new services which are only IPv6 accessible, and as hosting services can't get acces to new IPv4 blocks this will be the case.
As IT professionals we should all be asking our ISPs, and even our employers, when they plan to be IPv6 ready. This is similar to the Y2K issue, except the cut off date is a little bit more fuzzy. If the work is done, then your average user shouldn't notice anything. If it isn't then they are going to be complaining of connectivity problems.
I really don't think it is so clear cut. If you bully someone into a corner, with 30 years of imprisonment, which is effectively a life sentence (the guy wouldn't be out until 56), then from a certain perspective committing suicide doesn't seem such like a bad alternative.
I would love to see the prosecutors to be disbard for inappropriate behavior that turned what was otherwise a minor of offence into something that was treated as was worse than murder. I would love to have the prosecutors and judge interviewed to understand why they had such a large axe to grind.
Justice should be about fair and appropriate punishment and not something used to make prosecutors feel like rock stars.
Google Fibre is an enabler. This is part of the reason I believe in government funded internet infrastructure, which is leased out to private entities. The format I would imagine is each company leasing would pay for a access to a frequency band, and would have their own hardware in the main hub, so that they aren't impacted by data usages of other competing companies.
This reduces the risk for the private entities, encourages competition and gets them to compete with better prices and services. The only people that this can be bad for is the monopolies, for everyone else a healthier market develops.
It's about choice. We all have different motivitations and priorities in what we buy and use. Apple and Lenevo may appear overpriced, but there are people who see value in the products they sell. This is no different to whatever you choose, except your value is that of money saved, but still having a product that fulfills your needs. As long as people are clear to the choices they are making, then they have made the right choice for themselves.
I like to see choice, and a good broad market, where everyone gets something that suits them. It would be boring if we were all using the same brand.
Yea, I had this problem with my mazda as my wife didn't have a remote and was always setting it off. You need to put your manual key in and turn the car off and on 3 times to reset it. Might be different for your ford. Then I read that there was an alarm "reset" button in the fusebox. So I found it, and taped it down... no more alarm. So I ripped out the stupid button and soldered the leads together so I'd never have to bother with it again. You want to steel my car? I'll give you my friggen address.
Was there a happy dance to do too? I know the need for security, but that borders on the ridiculous. All that is missing is the ctrl-alt-delete key.
I read a few articles showing benefits of intestinal flora transplants from one individual to another. For example, this article discusses how it was shown to ease Parkinson's in certain cases (just the abstract, sorry):
Slashdot Mirror
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
Uh, are we talking imperial hogsheads or metric hogsheads? Myself, I prefer the precambrian hogshead, for sentimental reasons.
From what I've read, it's still XMPP, but they've just severed server-server communications so you can only talk to Google+ accounts over XMPP.
I suppose with the lack of big names federating, there probably wasn't much to lose with this action?
This is where organisations should be signing agreements with local governments and utilities ensuring that they have a guaranteed rate, with a maximum yearly price adjustment, for a given period of time. If the local government reneges on the agreement, then there should be a penalty in the contract, which was signed.
This is why a good QA team is always worth having. Sure it won't isolate you from every issue, but it should protect you from some of the obvious stuff.
Sometimes the problem isn't even to do with software, but with information policy and what can be placed on a server that is on the outside of a firewall.
Does anyone know whether the new protocol will be undocumented or if it is documented, if there is any resemblance to xmpp? Hopefully Google will allow xmpp bridges.
I am just worried that Google is trying to do more to force us to use their tools, rather than allowing us to use our favourite messaging clients., but with their service.
Why should, say, the marching cubes algorithm, which transforms bitmap data into polygonal surface data, not be worthy of a patent when the set of instructions for turning bauxite into aluminum is? Because one uses a silicon chip and electricity and the other uses a pressure vessel and electricity?
The computer is a general purpose machine that will run whatever program you write for it. That program is copyrightable, and thus already protected. It doens't need any more protection than that.
The machine you build for processing bauxite has one function. And instructions to build the processing plant are not copyrightable (in the same way recipes are not copyrightable). Therefore, the process is patentable.
There is also a notion of relative cost. The machine for turning bauxite into aluminium probably cost millions of dollars and years to develop, which is an investment that needs to be protected. Software costs are often no more than tens of thousands of dollars and took months to develop, possibly even weeks. The relevance of the first investment is probably more than ten years, while the the relevance of the software investment is probably in the order of 2-5 years.
Also, in the first case there is no incentive to replace the technology quickly whereas there is incentive for software - software gets replaced either because the is a commercial incentive or a bunch of geeks just had an urge to prove something could be done.
When we do comparisons of investment, development periods and how long something is useful we can can see that we can't apply the same rule book and carrot in both cases.
As stated, copyright provides sufficient protection in the world of software.
This where "hosted services" have an advantage, if you are trying to protect your code. Since the code runs on the server, there is nothing really that can be decompiled by the client, other than the UI portion and the communicated data packets - the rest of the logic can remain server side.
At the same time, given the rate at which the software industry evolves, anything more than five years old is probably good for a refresh anyhow. If a company hasn't made an effort to keep their software relevant, then they shouldn't have anything that would allow them to keep an artificial competitive advantage.
The other thing is that individual software concepts don't usually take years to develop and millions of dollars to develop, so why a 20 year patent on something like that. From my experience most software concepts are evolutionary and often have multiple ways of being implemented. For example a 'shopping cart' is a mere concept with plenty of different implementations, so why should the notion of an electronic shopping cart be patentable?
In certain ways embedded devices have actually become a bit more mainstream. First there is the Arduino and then there is the legion of boards using ARM based SoCs, which include the RaspberryPi and the Beagle Bone. And now you can write your code in a language such as Python. Embedded devices are a lot more capable than than they used to be.
There are certainly more out there and the market seems to be developing. The problem I find is that it isn't always easy finding what is going in in the market.
Linux Devices started to feel a bit forgotten about and didn't seem to have created a thriving community. The new owners probably couldn't monetize the site, couldn't understand the site and if the small number of people there were blocking ads, then that probably did not help either (sites have been hurt by this). In many ways the death of Linux Devices just means there is now a void to be filled, possibly with something better?
From my experience, Google has quite good customer support. But only for their customers!
Customers, remember? That are those people that pay someone for goods or service....
And that service basically is the main selling point for their pro-grade services.
For all others, they offer at least user to user help forums.
It really depends where you are. In many places a customer is someone you provide a service to. The fact you chose to charge $0 for that service is immaterial.
The German government may be going overboard, but they are following the letter of their law. Google is a big company and they also want to be sure they look good while making money. Google also has lawyers and business guys who will work out how to follow the law without costing too much to them. I am just curious though if they would go as far as charging a base fee for accounts in Germany to cover costs?
One thing I would say though, is that many online-only companies do need to improve ways of handling customer feedback. Often enough the service user is presented with a long FAQ without any clear way of getting answer which aren't documented.
But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition.
Not on Mars, there's no oxygen and no bacteria. Perfect match for the Curiosity rover, but noooo, they *had* to use flash memory and now their toy is broken. Don't make me say "I told you so".
I am just imagining how different the mars rover would be using punch cards as storage. Maybe that's getting too weird.
Weird. While reading this story I just barely updated Flash (on Windows XP) with both IE 8 and Firefox open. No restart at all.
I was on a Mac, so maybe Flash goes by different rules here?
You mean "There's life Jim, but not as we know it"?
One thing that I see as causing some people to delay updating their Flash, despite an update being available, is that the installer requires you to restart your browser or anything else Flash think is using it. Many people take the attitude "I am working and don't want to be bothered restarting my apps, for something I rarely use".
Is there any other way Flash could install its updates, without requiring browsers to be restarted?
What I meant, is that given certain usage scenarios, such as with a desktop, the user may opt for what is easier to them: a reboot.
If we took this attitude for everything, then we would still be banging rocks, because they work fine.
At this point let the guys demonstrate their concept and see how well it works. A compromise could be simply to keep a minimal set of TTY devices for situations where userspace royally failed. It should be noted that for a good number of cases if userspace royally screwed up, then it is time for a reboot anyhow.
If the patent troll has stated exactly what patent they are exerting and on what equipment, then I would be tempted to contact the manufacturer of said equipment, since if the license is valid, then they are likely already licensees of said patent. If not, then you know you need to work out if the patent is valid
I would suggest pinging te EFF and see what thy have to say. The sad truth is thar due to the way the US legal system works, only the lawyers are likely be the winners. Patent trolling is a current form of legal extortion, where few people in power want accept something is broken.
BTW which patent are they refererring to?
Laws are probably also different in Canada, so forcing on customers something they didn't agree to may not be an option. In Canada you can be 'grand-fathered' into a plan and the only things they seem to be able to do is trying to up-sell you and increasing the price of your current plan.
If you have issues with these policies and the law allows them to get away with it, then I would talk to your local representative and also ensure a mass petition to get law adjusted. If 'customers' spend too much time complaining idly in corners and not massing together to push for change, then corporations clearly have the advantage.
Are there any laws in the US that allow you to break contract for free if you don't agree with the newly enforced 'contract', that you didn't sign?
I am sure there should be laws anyhow on changing terms of service if the customer didn't agree to them?
If ISPs are turning to carrier grade NAT, then they are in a desperate situation. The current approach will only buy time for an ISP who has run out or will soon run out of IPv4 addresses, but they should still have a parallel IPv6 strategy in place. Without support for IPv6, customers won't be able to access new services which are only IPv6 accessible, and as hosting services can't get acces to new IPv4 blocks this will be the case.
As IT professionals we should all be asking our ISPs, and even our employers, when they plan to be IPv6 ready. This is similar to the Y2K issue, except the cut off date is a little bit more fuzzy. If the work is done, then your average user shouldn't notice anything. If it isn't then they are going to be complaining of connectivity problems.
I really don't think it is so clear cut. If you bully someone into a corner, with 30 years of imprisonment, which is effectively a life sentence (the guy wouldn't be out until 56), then from a certain perspective committing suicide doesn't seem such like a bad alternative.
I would love to see the prosecutors to be disbard for inappropriate behavior that turned what was otherwise a minor of offence into something that was treated as was worse than murder. I would love to have the prosecutors and judge interviewed to understand why they had such a large axe to grind.
Justice should be about fair and appropriate punishment and not something used to make prosecutors feel like rock stars.
Google Fibre is an enabler. This is part of the reason I believe in government funded internet infrastructure, which is leased out to private entities. The format I would imagine is each company leasing would pay for a access to a frequency band, and would have their own hardware in the main hub, so that they aren't impacted by data usages of other competing companies.
This reduces the risk for the private entities, encourages competition and gets them to compete with better prices and services. The only people that this can be bad for is the monopolies, for everyone else a healthier market develops.
It's about choice. We all have different motivitations and priorities in what we buy and use. Apple and Lenevo may appear overpriced, but there are people who see value in the products they sell. This is no different to whatever you choose, except your value is that of money saved, but still having a product that fulfills your needs. As long as people are clear to the choices they are making, then they have made the right choice for themselves.
I like to see choice, and a good broad market, where everyone gets something that suits them. It would be boring if we were all using the same brand.
Yea, I had this problem with my mazda as my wife didn't have a remote and was always setting it off. You need to put your manual key in and turn the car off and on 3 times to reset it. Might be different for your ford. Then I read that there was an alarm "reset" button in the fusebox. So I found it, and taped it down... no more alarm. So I ripped out the stupid button and soldered the leads together so I'd never have to bother with it again. You want to steel my car? I'll give you my friggen address.
Was there a happy dance to do too? I know the need for security, but that borders on the ridiculous. All that is missing is the ctrl-alt-delete key.
I read a few articles showing benefits of intestinal flora transplants from one individual to another. For example, this article discusses how it was shown to ease Parkinson's in certain cases (just the abstract, sorry):
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927962.600-faecal-transplant-eases-symptoms-of-parkinsons.html