So, if we could build an ARM-powered human, it could solve the Rubik's Cube in 2-3 seconds?
Yes, but if you wanted to you could probably build a high speed, high precision tool to solve it in way less than a second. It's Lego after all, it's cool but it's not exactly built for performance.
- Have all variables initialize to known values. I mostly program in C++/Qt and QString, QByteArray etc. don't need initialization. All numbers should initialize to 0, all pointers to NULL. - Don't make the difference between assignment and comparison be a simple typo. If I were to design a language, "=" would not be a valid operator. ":=" for assignment, "==" for comparison. (You could keep all the "+=" etc. but not plain "=") - Smarter scoping hints, like letting you call a function and *pass* the variable, which ends its scope.
Keep functions less than 1 page long. If you can't see the entire function on a single editor page, it is too long.
In my experience that is not practical and leads to too many artificial functions. But you should try reducing the complexity of how many different variables get involved. It's easy to read a three page function if only things are scoped out properly so only the important variables stay in scope. E.g.
void longFunction() { int foo = 0; {// 10 lines of code to calculate foo, some various temp variables etc. }// Here only foo is left in scope }
I guess it comes down to the difference between DLC and expansion packs, that have been around forever. DLC gives me the feeling of being nickel and dimed, expansions doesn't. I might buy a some kind of "ultimate" edition when that hits the bargain bin though.
Long story short, Stargate SG1 held longer than any singlø run of Star Trek. They eventually succumbed to their own inflation of the stakes, nothing external. After defeating "gods" there is very little left to achieve....
This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia resources, as has been increasingly happening with mainstream ISPs, the ISPs end up introducing fair usage policy/caps/throttling/traffic management (sometimes not revealing this last until a few technically minded people demonstrate it).
If the norm for what is "normal" to use on an unlimited line changes, then the company should change their oversubscription, not add more (*) conditions. This whole thing is created by having one product, even though we know the profitability varies greatly and trying to "clamp" it so the unprofitable ones can't actually use it as advertised. If you want a "Value" subscription that isn't like the "Unlimited" subscription, then go for it.
They've tried that here, everyone went for the cap-free subscriptions so that the others eventually died off. You might argue that the market is acting irrational in subsidizing the bandwidth hogs, but there you are. What's funny is that here the Norwegian companies are free market, and the US ISPs are socialist. Yes, that's what they are. "Please use only what you need, restrain yourself, be fair to the rest" is pretty much one half of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". For corporate profits of course, but that is the appeal.
So far the problem with DSL has been that the longer from the central you is, the lower the speeds and it drops quite rapidly once you're more than a couple km from the central. I would think it is the same for cable, since that too is based on electrical signals. With fiber you don't need a repeated more than every 70-150 km, meaning you can lay FTTH almost anywhere without worrying about it.
1) The OSS heads didn't appreciate how damn complex a graphics driver is. You have people who'd written SCSI drivers or something and said "Well that isn't that hard." They forget that a binary SCSI driver is around 20k or something, you are dealing with a simple device. The main ATi Windows driver is 7.6MB and that is just the central driver, never mind all the support files it needs to work right. It is a major job, and the hardware changes fast.
The biggest and foremost reason Linux support has been slow is that the graphics stack was very poor. Before AMDs announcement the only open source player was Intel who honestly nobody used for more than getting a picture. Since neither nVidia or AMD gave out any detail on their hardware and instead rolled their own closed source drivers, the open mesa stack basically still worked on a model from the 90s. If it had only been to drop AMD support into a modern 3D stack, we'd be much further than we are. Pretty much every aspect like 3D (classic -> gallium3d), memory management (classic -> KMS), modesetting (classic -> KMS), rendering interface (dri -> dri2), 2D acceleration (??? -> EXA) has changed.
Even though AMD is making certain things open source, they are walking on eggshells with regards to other things, particularly giving away business information and DRM. Many of the things that have been given in code drops have been "code first", things that are only documented afterwards and often in very terse ways you couldn't write the code from. That also effectively bars a lot of code sharing between the drivers. Sitting on the outside it's been pretty tough to understand what is going on, and for the same reason many things happen in unpublished branches that are still waiting for AMD IP review. It's very much an one-way street because it's not the real "master" branch with the work in progress, it's more like wrapped up releases.
That said, there is a lot that could be done on mesa itself. Anyone who could get full OpenGL 3/4 compatibility in the open source drivers would be a hero.
In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL. Since clicking I disagree will refuse to install the app which is an additional restriction (section 10).
I consider those a little bit like the reading of your Miranda rights, they're not *given* to you by the reading. They're rights you already have, it's just giving you a summary of them. Same with the GPL, the part about not accepting is basically a short reading of copyright law. Perhaps the acknowledgement that you have been given notice of this should be slightly different than "I agree", but you're nitpicking on something no judge would substantially care about.
Zynga seems to be doing fairly well with their "I don't f***ing want innovation, you're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." policy.
Ultimately a lot of things are done right and they just need copying. If I were to build a car, I don't want a new braking paradigm for my semantic car. I'd like a pedal that stops the car when I push it, and it has to do so reliably and consistently. And it doesn't matter if you have a new and innovative seat that gives me a back rub while driving until that is working.
A lot of the things people struggle with are not some form of design choices. It's things that don't work, plain and simple. Of course a lot of people will tag this WORKS4ME, so the problem doesn't exist. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu is making any progress on their papercut project, but the name is at least good. It's not massive missing blocks of functionality, technical users get by. But it's full of crazy little hacks and workarounds and tweaks that kill it for the normal user.
If you have good karma, your posts will get an extra +1 and start at 2. Or maybe I should say those with bad karma start at 1, most people have good karma. If you click the "score" link of a post you will see all modifiers.
The difference is that most workplaces I've seen have a little system to set you up, show you the ropes and so on. Need not be more than an experienced developer but someone who can explain a bit of the hows and whys, and most importantly someone who you can usually get a little attention from. I've been trying to get "into" a project now for some time, but it's damn hard code to understand and in the beginning I am more of a bother than a help asking all these questions, trying to wrap my head around the code, parsing the logs and how everything hangs together. Many OSS projects aren't willing to make that effort, if you're not able to jump in and contribute from day one you go largely ignored, while nobody will let a new employee sit there burning money in the same way. If workshops like these will keep you from having to ask the most n00bish questions and getting RTFMs slapped in your face, it's good for everyone.
Running KUbuntu 10.10, and it fails right now. Every time I rebooted it'd return to clone mode, even though I've set it up as two monitors next to each other. Even with that hardcoded in Xsetup, half the time it seems to not put the main panel on my primary monitor so I have to go into panel settings and drag it back where it belongs. It also has substantial trouble waking up both monitors from sleep, sometimes only waking one leaving me with half a desktop while the other half still says no signal. A simple disable/enable cycle doesn't work, but I've found setting it back to clone mode will make the other monitor wake so I can set it back. Maybe some of this is KUbuntu specific but it's not very impressive at least.
So what? The people you talk about are never the kind of people that like to tinker, to program up a little tool to scratch an itch. They're not the people likely to contribute something after a long day of studying or work - not that all open source must be volunteer work, but much is. The vast, vast majority of the population can't code and it's not really important how many CS students can't either, the hit ratio is probably roughly as good as it's going to get. Consider it a bit like searching for rare earth minerals - no matter where you search it's likely you won't find large pure blocks of it. It's still worth doing...
The fact that Fair Use must often be defended in court comes from the fact-intensive nature of the doctrine, making it difficult to decide a priori whether Fair Use applies or not.
For the most part, nobody tries because the giant game of whack-a-mole going on between pirates and copyright holders. The pirates put up copies, the studios issue DMCA takedowns and no one fights them, the whole point is just to exploit the period between upload and takedown. So the first you'll see is the takedown in one of these mass sweeps. Then you got to decide whether you want to fight it or not, and most people simply wouldn't even if they think it's fair use. I'd certainly have a hard time justifying the risk and cost of going to court over some quote or audio track or clip I used for a YouTube gag.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it. You are dealing with people that mostly wouldn't remember what an "ion" is. When you say "smashing iron", they think of banging two iron bars together. And how exactly is iron atoms related to the creation of the universe, really? Answer: It isn't, but they will have skipped to some other headline long before you got to explain it to them.
Do you think think this is related to science journalism in particular? There's so many wildly misleading titles all over the places. Like right now in the sports section is one "The coach didn't like their celebration" as if there was a conflict between the coach and the team. If you read the article he just think there's too many flashy gimmicks, spraying of champagne etc. and it's just not his style. Everything is fluff like that there days.
So you are saying the United States economy would suck even more if we went more protectionist. Hmm, China seems to be doing great, even though they have hyper-protectionist laws and practices.
Their primary protectionism is keeping their currency artificially low, which makes exports cheaper ahd imports more expensive. The US could do the same, which would help the domestic economy but it would lower the value of the almighty dollar. When you have a huge foreign debt, that would also make the interest much harder to pay. I suppose other interventionist steps might work, but if you heard anger about the bailouts I'd love to see how this would not become corporate welfare.
It'd be a pretty crazy world if the patent office could grant every patent Microsoft filed and deny everything Apple filed on a whim. It seems perfectly reasonable that all claims are valid unless they specifically fail to be in a patentable domain or any of the requirements to be a patentable invention, I don't see many other ways to get equality before the law. Not that I'm very fond of patent law in general and US law in particular...
Royal Warrants are only awarded to tradesmen. The professions, employment agencies, party planners, the media, government departments, and "places of refreshment or entertainment" (such as pubs and theatres) do not qualify.
I doubt Facebook qualifies as a tradesman. Facebook instead seems to qualify on several of the excluded categories like party planners and "places of entertainment". If you got the Queen an iPhone that might qualify though.
The rest of the world is evolving rapidly into highly educated, highly industrialized, highly technological countries that resemble the west - in certain parts and certain ways, anyway. The more similar their productivity is, the more similar standards of living they can demand but for a long time a series of favorable conditions and network effects have kept the US in a solid lead. The balance is shifting, but to say that it actually flows from one country to the other is fairly misleading. You could halt trade but it wouldn't halt these countries from modernizing, and they would also retaliate.
The US currently has a very negative trade balance, meaning it imports far more than it exports. If it were to close the borders, the US would hurt the most. Medium to long term that could mean opportunity for domestic industry, but the short term would be a substantial drop in the standard of living as many goods become expensive or even unavailable. There was a time when a trade boycott with the US would be dire but today if you can maintain trade with the EU, Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Russia and so on most countries would do fine. Alternate suppliers of almost everything now exist outside the US.
In short, the US is no longer in a position where they would have anything to gain from going protectionist. They'd be their own little isolated market of 300 million people while the world market - even subtracting the billions that are too poor to really participate - is much larger and would simply outpace the US. That's the nastier parts of the free market, once you've let it loose you might in the end become the victim of it, having to adjust your wages and standard of living to fight for jobs just like everyone else. But if there's one country that has no right to complain, it would be the US...
May I inquire how you might "karma whore" as an Anonymous Coward? It is my understanding that it generally involves appealing to the slashdot groupthink for the purpose of obtaining karma that may later be used to post various forms of unpopular posts starting at high moderation (aka "burn karma") or gain moderator points. As ACs may not gather karma, I submit that no AC may engage in this practice though they may parttake in "trolling". And by responding, you lost.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it.
I don't really think so. I think that a significantly reformed copyright system could still produce a net social benefit, but abolition is a valid option, and should be on the table if there really is no better choice.
Broken in the sense that I think there's nothing that could stop people from sharing copies as computers and the Internet make it trivial to mass distribute perfect copies. If you use any other method that doesn't depend on the exclusive right to make copies, I suppose you could call it reformed copyright but it's really not "copyright" anymore.
No, but you have companies that take the physical assets like office chairs and tables and liquidates those. Unless Oracle wants to go into that line of business, they ought to have some good plans for what to do with the business assets. I get it that some things you cut and some you keep and those you cut you monetize. Like if you bought a farm with corn and livestock but want to focus on corn, you send the livestock to the slaughterhouse. But so far I've seen nothing but slaughter in the software assets, and I really can't believe the Solaris hardware/OS is that valuable. They got serious high-end mainframe competition by IBM mainframes with DB2, strong hardware competition from Intel and AMD and strong software competition from Linux. Granted, they did stop MySQL but on the whole that's a rather expensive price to pay.
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So, if we could build an ARM-powered human, it could solve the Rubik's Cube in 2-3 seconds?
Yes, but if you wanted to you could probably build a high speed, high precision tool to solve it in way less than a second. It's Lego after all, it's cool but it's not exactly built for performance.
Some simple things that languages can do:
- Have all variables initialize to known values. I mostly program in C++/Qt and QString, QByteArray etc. don't need initialization. All numbers should initialize to 0, all pointers to NULL.
- Don't make the difference between assignment and comparison be a simple typo. If I were to design a language, "=" would not be a valid operator. ":=" for assignment, "==" for comparison. (You could keep all the "+=" etc. but not plain "=")
- Smarter scoping hints, like letting you call a function and *pass* the variable, which ends its scope.
Keep functions less than 1 page long. If you can't see the entire function on a single editor page, it is too long.
In my experience that is not practical and leads to too many artificial functions. But you should try reducing the complexity of how many different variables get involved. It's easy to read a three page function if only things are scoped out properly so only the important variables stay in scope. E.g.
void longFunction() // 10 lines of code to calculate foo, some various temp variables etc. // Here only foo is left in scope
{
int foo = 0;
{
}
}
I guess it comes down to the difference between DLC and expansion packs, that have been around forever. DLC gives me the feeling of being nickel and dimed, expansions doesn't. I might buy a some kind of "ultimate" edition when that hits the bargain bin though.
Long story short, Stargate SG1 held longer than any singlø run of Star Trek. They eventually succumbed to their own inflation of the stakes, nothing external. After defeating "gods" there is very little left to achieve....
This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia resources, as has been increasingly happening with mainstream ISPs, the ISPs end up introducing fair usage policy/caps/throttling/traffic management (sometimes not revealing this last until a few technically minded people demonstrate it).
If the norm for what is "normal" to use on an unlimited line changes, then the company should change their oversubscription, not add more (*) conditions. This whole thing is created by having one product, even though we know the profitability varies greatly and trying to "clamp" it so the unprofitable ones can't actually use it as advertised. If you want a "Value" subscription that isn't like the "Unlimited" subscription, then go for it.
They've tried that here, everyone went for the cap-free subscriptions so that the others eventually died off. You might argue that the market is acting irrational in subsidizing the bandwidth hogs, but there you are. What's funny is that here the Norwegian companies are free market, and the US ISPs are socialist. Yes, that's what they are. "Please use only what you need, restrain yourself, be fair to the rest" is pretty much one half of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". For corporate profits of course, but that is the appeal.
So far the problem with DSL has been that the longer from the central you is, the lower the speeds and it drops quite rapidly once you're more than a couple km from the central. I would think it is the same for cable, since that too is based on electrical signals. With fiber you don't need a repeated more than every 70-150 km, meaning you can lay FTTH almost anywhere without worrying about it.
1) The OSS heads didn't appreciate how damn complex a graphics driver is. You have people who'd written SCSI drivers or something and said "Well that isn't that hard." They forget that a binary SCSI driver is around 20k or something, you are dealing with a simple device. The main ATi Windows driver is 7.6MB and that is just the central driver, never mind all the support files it needs to work right. It is a major job, and the hardware changes fast.
The biggest and foremost reason Linux support has been slow is that the graphics stack was very poor. Before AMDs announcement the only open source player was Intel who honestly nobody used for more than getting a picture. Since neither nVidia or AMD gave out any detail on their hardware and instead rolled their own closed source drivers, the open mesa stack basically still worked on a model from the 90s. If it had only been to drop AMD support into a modern 3D stack, we'd be much further than we are. Pretty much every aspect like 3D (classic -> gallium3d), memory management (classic -> KMS), modesetting (classic -> KMS), rendering interface (dri -> dri2), 2D acceleration (??? -> EXA) has changed.
Even though AMD is making certain things open source, they are walking on eggshells with regards to other things, particularly giving away business information and DRM. Many of the things that have been given in code drops have been "code first", things that are only documented afterwards and often in very terse ways you couldn't write the code from. That also effectively bars a lot of code sharing between the drivers. Sitting on the outside it's been pretty tough to understand what is going on, and for the same reason many things happen in unpublished branches that are still waiting for AMD IP review. It's very much an one-way street because it's not the real "master" branch with the work in progress, it's more like wrapped up releases.
That said, there is a lot that could be done on mesa itself. Anyone who could get full OpenGL 3/4 compatibility in the open source drivers would be a hero.
In fact a case can be made that apps that include a click-through EULA of the GPL violate the GPL. Since clicking I disagree will refuse to install the app which is an additional restriction (section 10).
I consider those a little bit like the reading of your Miranda rights, they're not *given* to you by the reading. They're rights you already have, it's just giving you a summary of them. Same with the GPL, the part about not accepting is basically a short reading of copyright law. Perhaps the acknowledgement that you have been given notice of this should be slightly different than "I agree", but you're nitpicking on something no judge would substantially care about.
Zynga seems to be doing fairly well with their "I don't f***ing want innovation, you're not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers." policy.
Ultimately a lot of things are done right and they just need copying. If I were to build a car, I don't want a new braking paradigm for my semantic car. I'd like a pedal that stops the car when I push it, and it has to do so reliably and consistently. And it doesn't matter if you have a new and innovative seat that gives me a back rub while driving until that is working.
A lot of the things people struggle with are not some form of design choices. It's things that don't work, plain and simple. Of course a lot of people will tag this WORKS4ME, so the problem doesn't exist. I'm not sure whether Ubuntu is making any progress on their papercut project, but the name is at least good. It's not massive missing blocks of functionality, technical users get by. But it's full of crazy little hacks and workarounds and tweaks that kill it for the normal user.
If you have good karma, your posts will get an extra +1 and start at 2. Or maybe I should say those with bad karma start at 1, most people have good karma. If you click the "score" link of a post you will see all modifiers.
The difference is that most workplaces I've seen have a little system to set you up, show you the ropes and so on. Need not be more than an experienced developer but someone who can explain a bit of the hows and whys, and most importantly someone who you can usually get a little attention from. I've been trying to get "into" a project now for some time, but it's damn hard code to understand and in the beginning I am more of a bother than a help asking all these questions, trying to wrap my head around the code, parsing the logs and how everything hangs together. Many OSS projects aren't willing to make that effort, if you're not able to jump in and contribute from day one you go largely ignored, while nobody will let a new employee sit there burning money in the same way. If workshops like these will keep you from having to ask the most n00bish questions and getting RTFMs slapped in your face, it's good for everyone.
Running KUbuntu 10.10, and it fails right now. Every time I rebooted it'd return to clone mode, even though I've set it up as two monitors next to each other. Even with that hardcoded in Xsetup, half the time it seems to not put the main panel on my primary monitor so I have to go into panel settings and drag it back where it belongs. It also has substantial trouble waking up both monitors from sleep, sometimes only waking one leaving me with half a desktop while the other half still says no signal. A simple disable/enable cycle doesn't work, but I've found setting it back to clone mode will make the other monitor wake so I can set it back. Maybe some of this is KUbuntu specific but it's not very impressive at least.
Smashing Irons is what occurs when two WOW players forget to remove their belts of chastity.
I'd ask how you reached that association, but I'm afraid the answer would be too much information. Besides, isn't that rather redundant?
So what? The people you talk about are never the kind of people that like to tinker, to program up a little tool to scratch an itch. They're not the people likely to contribute something after a long day of studying or work - not that all open source must be volunteer work, but much is. The vast, vast majority of the population can't code and it's not really important how many CS students can't either, the hit ratio is probably roughly as good as it's going to get. Consider it a bit like searching for rare earth minerals - no matter where you search it's likely you won't find large pure blocks of it. It's still worth doing...
Those are the kind of people we don't want coming to Slashdot anymore
Do you think BBC News target the slashdot demographic? If so, you may leave your card at the door...
The fact that Fair Use must often be defended in court comes from the fact-intensive nature of the doctrine, making it difficult to decide a priori whether Fair Use applies or not.
For the most part, nobody tries because the giant game of whack-a-mole going on between pirates and copyright holders. The pirates put up copies, the studios issue DMCA takedowns and no one fights them, the whole point is just to exploit the period between upload and takedown. So the first you'll see is the takedown in one of these mass sweeps. Then you got to decide whether you want to fight it or not, and most people simply wouldn't even if they think it's fair use. I'd certainly have a hard time justifying the risk and cost of going to court over some quote or audio track or clip I used for a YouTube gag.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it. You are dealing with people that mostly wouldn't remember what an "ion" is. When you say "smashing iron", they think of banging two iron bars together. And how exactly is iron atoms related to the creation of the universe, really? Answer: It isn't, but they will have skipped to some other headline long before you got to explain it to them.
Do you think think this is related to science journalism in particular? There's so many wildly misleading titles all over the places. Like right now in the sports section is one "The coach didn't like their celebration" as if there was a conflict between the coach and the team. If you read the article he just think there's too many flashy gimmicks, spraying of champagne etc. and it's just not his style. Everything is fluff like that there days.
So you are saying the United States economy would suck even more if we went more protectionist. Hmm, China seems to be doing great, even though they have hyper-protectionist laws and practices.
Their primary protectionism is keeping their currency artificially low, which makes exports cheaper ahd imports more expensive. The US could do the same, which would help the domestic economy but it would lower the value of the almighty dollar. When you have a huge foreign debt, that would also make the interest much harder to pay. I suppose other interventionist steps might work, but if you heard anger about the bailouts I'd love to see how this would not become corporate welfare.
It'd be a pretty crazy world if the patent office could grant every patent Microsoft filed and deny everything Apple filed on a whim. It seems perfectly reasonable that all claims are valid unless they specifically fail to be in a patentable domain or any of the requirements to be a patentable invention, I don't see many other ways to get equality before the law. Not that I'm very fond of patent law in general and US law in particular...
Royal Warrants are only awarded to tradesmen. The professions, employment agencies, party planners, the media, government departments, and "places of refreshment or entertainment" (such as pubs and theatres) do not qualify.
I doubt Facebook qualifies as a tradesman. Facebook instead seems to qualify on several of the excluded categories like party planners and "places of entertainment". If you got the Queen an iPhone that might qualify though.
You're arguing with this guy ;)
The rest of the world is evolving rapidly into highly educated, highly industrialized, highly technological countries that resemble the west - in certain parts and certain ways, anyway. The more similar their productivity is, the more similar standards of living they can demand but for a long time a series of favorable conditions and network effects have kept the US in a solid lead. The balance is shifting, but to say that it actually flows from one country to the other is fairly misleading. You could halt trade but it wouldn't halt these countries from modernizing, and they would also retaliate.
The US currently has a very negative trade balance, meaning it imports far more than it exports. If it were to close the borders, the US would hurt the most. Medium to long term that could mean opportunity for domestic industry, but the short term would be a substantial drop in the standard of living as many goods become expensive or even unavailable. There was a time when a trade boycott with the US would be dire but today if you can maintain trade with the EU, Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Russia and so on most countries would do fine. Alternate suppliers of almost everything now exist outside the US.
In short, the US is no longer in a position where they would have anything to gain from going protectionist. They'd be their own little isolated market of 300 million people while the world market - even subtracting the billions that are too poor to really participate - is much larger and would simply outpace the US. That's the nastier parts of the free market, once you've let it loose you might in the end become the victim of it, having to adjust your wages and standard of living to fight for jobs just like everyone else. But if there's one country that has no right to complain, it would be the US...
May I inquire how you might "karma whore" as an Anonymous Coward? It is my understanding that it generally involves appealing to the slashdot groupthink for the purpose of obtaining karma that may later be used to post various forms of unpopular posts starting at high moderation (aka "burn karma") or gain moderator points. As ACs may not gather karma, I submit that no AC may engage in this practice though they may parttake in "trolling". And by responding, you lost.
The problem is not copyright, it's that technology has broken it.
I don't really think so. I think that a significantly reformed copyright system could still produce a net social benefit, but abolition is a valid option, and should be on the table if there really is no better choice.
Broken in the sense that I think there's nothing that could stop people from sharing copies as computers and the Internet make it trivial to mass distribute perfect copies. If you use any other method that doesn't depend on the exclusive right to make copies, I suppose you could call it reformed copyright but it's really not "copyright" anymore.
No, but you have companies that take the physical assets like office chairs and tables and liquidates those. Unless Oracle wants to go into that line of business, they ought to have some good plans for what to do with the business assets. I get it that some things you cut and some you keep and those you cut you monetize. Like if you bought a farm with corn and livestock but want to focus on corn, you send the livestock to the slaughterhouse. But so far I've seen nothing but slaughter in the software assets, and I really can't believe the Solaris hardware/OS is that valuable. They got serious high-end mainframe competition by IBM mainframes with DB2, strong hardware competition from Intel and AMD and strong software competition from Linux. Granted, they did stop MySQL but on the whole that's a rather expensive price to pay.