Actually, if you bother to read the majority opinion, they addressed this issue. Basically they said that when copyright was first granted, it was granted both to existing works and newly created ones. It seems a bit tenuous to me, bu IANAL.
OTOH, the only good thing about the ruling is that Congress could (ha, ha, dream on) shorten term back to 14 years and it would apply retroactively, too.
Even more irony. Walt Disney was trying to capitalize on the success of Felix the Cat. He and Ub Iwerks (his star aninimator and the real artist behind the designs) created Oswald the Rabbit, a near-look alike to Felix.
By 1928, Oswald was a hit, but Walt clashed with his corporate masters when he asked for more pay, they booted him and hired other animators (eventually Walter Lantz) to produce Oswald cartoons.
Disney (and Iwerks) bailed from Universal Studios and created a cartoon replacement for Oswald. Since cats and rabbits had been done, they created Mickey (ne Mortimer) Mouse.
So not only is Mickey a copy of a copy, he sprang from a designer/corporate dispute!
I gotta believe that part of the problem is the current economy. The chipmakers are desparate to find someone to buy the chips. The feel if the suck up to the music and video industry behemoths, that there'll be a new market.
I bet if the economy hadn't tanked, we wouldn't be seeing so much of this.
Actually, Googles response is quite similar to this. They claim that page rank is an "opinion" and can't be proved true or false and is therefore free (protected) speech.
They reference a court decision where a school district's bond rating changed, causing financial difficulty to the district. The court ruled that the organization issuing the ranking had a right to change it based on it's own techniques or rationales.
Well, creating a horrible example that proves your point hardly enhances your position.
If the implementation is truly opaque, then you can't create a subclass with attribute length, you can only add a new method 'getLength' which calls getString and returns it's length.
In due time it will be realized how horrible the original code was and the entire thing will be rewritten.
I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version to "...."
Sorry, you're going to have to find outrageousness elsewhere. A footnote for Jan 1 reads, This is the first of too many censored passages marked by "...." wherin Mr. Wheatly determines (in this unabridged edition) that some of the words of Pepy's are too raw for our eyes.
I never claimed what Rowling did was easy, but that doesn't make it great literature, either. A lot of what happens is very predictable and draws upon a number of a number of children's book and fantasy conventions. A much more interesting children's book writer won the Whitbread last year, Phillip Pullman.
Is Heaney's Beowulf the definitive translation, I don't know, of the four I've read, it's certainly far better than a couple, though I like some of Burton Raeffle's version, too.
Personally, I think you could make a case for Bob Dylan as the better poet, it works for me, but comparing Rowling and Heaney doesn't work.
Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.
Not many literature buffs here, I guess. The Booker Prize is given for new fiction, and so Heaney's Beowulf isn't even eligible.
However, the two books did go head to head in 1999 for a somewhat less influential award, the Whitbread Prize. Both Heaney and Rowling won in their respective categories (poetry and children's), but the Whitbread judges go on to pick a "book of the year" from all the winners, and they did pick Beowulf as the book of the year.
That aside, I really don't think you can make a case that Rowling writes better than Heaney.
Re:Prevent SPAM instead of trying to deal with it.
on
Spam Conference in Boston
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email...
Not true. The simplest solution is economic. If raise the cost of sending e-mail by as little as one penny / thousand e-mails, most spam becomes uneconomical. Poof, the spammers go out of business.
In the CS business they have this weird fetish for youth.
This is primarily the fault of those who work in the industry. I once worked for a very large chipmaker and they loved hiring new college grads. It was way better for them than competing for existing engineers in the job market.
Why? 1) NCGs tend to be single, so they don't have as much of a social life to pull them away from work after 5pm. 2) NCGs tend to be still be in that "obsessed about the computer" phase of their lives and would work longer hours just for "fun."
Those two items, plus the "go public" gold rush led to a burn-em-up-and-spit-em-out mentality. As long as we in the industry allow it, both as hiring entities and as employees it's not going to change.
What can you do? Leave a 5pm. Say "no". Don't sign on to schedules that can't be achieved without overtime. Don't expect work to be your life. If you're a manager, kick people out when they work late too often, and make them use their vacation time.
Believe me, if everyone in the industry went home after 8 hours of work, the industry would change.
The idea of "regulated" monopolies tends to work much better in theory than in practise. As the article said, 95% of viewers have no choice in their cable viewing. This leads to cable companies having the old AT&T attitude, "We don't care, we don't have to."
If there were bodies regulating these companies with the consumer interests in mind, they might "have to care," but they don't. They have the bucks to buy access to governmnet officials that the average consumer does not. And of course, no one in government would dare do anything so anti-capitalist as threaten to take away the cable companies wire and turn it over to the public, which is about the only kind of threat that could make them sit up and listen.
Ah, but those pages include links to the docs for the manuals, which include APIs plus links to code snippets, tech notes, Q&A's, etc.
Now I'll grant you that's perhaps not the most convenient form, but such is the nature of hypertext. Non-linearity has both pluses and minuses.
The one thing they are missing is sample code. It would be nice to see a couple of examples like Paint and NotePad (or equivalents) in both Win32 and OS X incarnations.
It's not comparable, since a) it's not a question of a newer technology bypassing an obsolete one, and, more importantly b) Microsoft signed a contract that they chose not to honor. That's something like signing a check when you've got no money in the bank to cover it.
Here's a clue. 1) Microsoft is a monopoly. This is legal as long as they don't abuse their position of power. 2) Turn back to the mid-90s. Netscape owns the browser market. In their attempt to crush Netscape, MS needs a competitive browser, i.e., one that supports Java. They sign a deal with Sun. 3) By the late 90's Netscape is toast. MS says, man this platform-neutral stuff is bad news, Let's pull out the old "embrace and extend" technique and get the drone developers using our Java "enhancements." 4) Sun says, "Hey, we define Java, and that's not Java anymore. Meet us in court." 5) Judge determines MS is using the fact they own the desktop to attempt to kill Java (not to mention the fact that they never released a VM beyond 1.1). This is an abuse of monopoly power. This being the third time or so that MS has been convicted, the judge actually does something about it.
Cyberiad is one of SF's few works of literature. Unfortunately, it's probably doomed to relative obscurity because the language is highly mathematical.
On a side note, it was amusing to see (in the Globe article) the true colors of cold warrior hack Jerry Pournelle come to light. His characterizations of Lem as "boring" and someone who "embraces communist egalitarianism" says far more about him than about Lem.
Sorry, if you say that the Lampoon 'Bored of the Rings' is "perhaps the funniest work penned in English" you clearly haven't read enough to be critiquing literature.
It does have it's moments, to be sure, but funniest ever?
Re:Is this a good thing? Nigerian Miss World Riots
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Mobs don't need no steenkin cell phones. When the Tutsi genocide took place in Rwanda, the calls to go out and kill came over the radio.
If you looked at the commercials, it always said "Steven Speilberg presents." If you know how to read thst, you know it could mean as little as having him stand up at the beginning of the show and say "And now, here's Taken...".
Yes, they are capitalizing on his name, but you need to bring your intelligence to bear as well.
Re:Just to remind people why more bits is good..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A nit. Orders of magnitude is generally thought of in the decimal realm. Thus 2^64 which is a 20 digit number is only 10 orders of magnitude greater than 2^32 (a 10 digit number).
I wouldn't be to sure about the 100 years part either. But it out to be good for at least 10.
There's a reason why his enthusiasm is tempered. It's because the software is little better than what was available 10 years ago. He knows, he worked on the software then.
You can bring tears to the eyes of any Newton user by asking them to imagine what kind of softare and hardware they'd have today if the technology hadn't been strangled. (Thanks in large part to MS itself.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, if you bother to read the majority opinion, they addressed this issue. Basically they said that when copyright was first granted, it was granted both to existing works and newly created ones. It seems a bit tenuous to me, bu IANAL.
OTOH, the only good thing about the ruling is that Congress could (ha, ha, dream on) shorten term back to 14 years and it would apply retroactively, too.
Even more irony. Walt Disney was trying to capitalize on the success of Felix the Cat. He and Ub Iwerks (his star aninimator and the real artist behind the designs) created Oswald the Rabbit, a near-look alike to Felix.
By 1928, Oswald was a hit, but Walt clashed with his corporate masters when he asked for more pay, they booted him and hired other animators (eventually Walter Lantz) to produce Oswald cartoons.
Disney (and Iwerks) bailed from Universal Studios and created a cartoon replacement for Oswald. Since cats and rabbits had been done, they created Mickey (ne Mortimer) Mouse.
So not only is Mickey a copy of a copy, he sprang from a designer/corporate dispute!
I gotta believe that part of the problem is the current economy. The chipmakers are desparate to find someone to buy the chips. The feel if the suck up to the music and video industry behemoths, that there'll be a new market.
I bet if the economy hadn't tanked, we wouldn't be seeing so much of this.
Actually, Googles response is quite similar to this. They claim that page rank is an "opinion" and can't be proved true or false and is therefore free (protected) speech.
They reference a court decision where a school district's bond rating changed, causing financial difficulty to the district. The court ruled that the organization issuing the ranking had a right to change it based on it's own techniques or rationales.
Well, creating a horrible example that proves your point hardly enhances your position.
If the implementation is truly opaque, then you can't create a subclass with attribute length, you can only add a new method 'getLength' which calls getString and returns it's length.
In due time it will be realized how horrible the original code was and the entire thing will be rewritten.
Nonsense. That's what documentation is for. If you're really paranoid about having your methods overridden, do this:
Then your method is safe but you give the user a hook in. Usually, it's not necessary to be so paranoid, though.
I hope Gyford will deviate from Gutenberg's 1893 version to include some of Pepys's more outrageous sexual adventures, reduced by the 1893 version to "...."
Sorry, you're going to have to find outrageousness elsewhere. A footnote for Jan 1 reads, This is the first of too many censored passages marked by "...." wherin Mr. Wheatly determines (in this unabridged edition) that some of the words of Pepy's are too raw for our eyes.
"And do you pronounce it Fro-der-ick Frahnk-en-steen?"
"No, it's Frederick. Why do you ask?"
"I don't know."
"Let's go, Igor."
"That's Eye-gor."
...or model/view/controller, was invented by Trygve Reenskaug, and first appeared in Smalltalk at Xerox Parc.
By what measure?
How about the Nobel Prize?
I never claimed what Rowling did was easy, but that doesn't make it great literature, either. A lot of what happens is very predictable and draws upon a number of a number of children's book and fantasy conventions. A much more interesting children's book writer won the Whitbread last year, Phillip Pullman.
Is Heaney's Beowulf the definitive translation, I don't know, of the four I've read, it's certainly far better than a couple, though I like some of Burton Raeffle's version, too.
Personally, I think you could make a case for Bob Dylan as the better poet, it works for me, but comparing Rowling and Heaney doesn't work.
Unfortunately Heaney's translation got involved with a fixup by the booker prize committee which put off a lot of people.
Not many literature buffs here, I guess. The Booker Prize is given for new fiction, and so Heaney's Beowulf isn't even eligible.
However, the two books did go head to head in 1999 for a somewhat less influential award, the Whitbread Prize. Both Heaney and Rowling won in their respective categories (poetry and children's), but the Whitbread judges go on to pick a "book of the year" from all the winners, and they did pick Beowulf as the book of the year.
That aside, I really don't think you can make a case that Rowling writes better than Heaney.
It appears that the only solution to eliminating SPAM is to develop a completely new architecture for handling email...
Not true. The simplest solution is economic. If raise the cost of sending e-mail by as little as one penny / thousand e-mails, most spam becomes uneconomical. Poof, the spammers go out of business.
In the CS business they have this weird fetish for youth.
This is primarily the fault of those who work in the industry. I once worked for a very large chipmaker and they loved hiring new college grads. It was way better for them than competing for existing engineers in the job market.
Why? 1) NCGs tend to be single, so they don't have as much of a social life to pull them away from work after 5pm. 2) NCGs tend to be still be in that "obsessed about the computer" phase of their lives and would work longer hours just for "fun."
Those two items, plus the "go public" gold rush led to a burn-em-up-and-spit-em-out mentality. As long as we in the industry allow it, both as hiring entities and as employees it's not going to change.
What can you do? Leave a 5pm. Say "no". Don't sign on to schedules that can't be achieved without overtime. Don't expect work to be your life. If you're a manager, kick people out when they work late too often, and make them use their vacation time.
Believe me, if everyone in the industry went home after 8 hours of work, the industry would change.
The idea of "regulated" monopolies tends to work much better in theory than in practise. As the article said, 95% of viewers have no choice in their cable viewing. This leads to cable companies having the old AT&T attitude, "We don't care, we don't have to."
If there were bodies regulating these companies with the consumer interests in mind, they might "have to care," but they don't. They have the bucks to buy access to governmnet officials that the average consumer does not. And of course, no one in government would dare do anything so anti-capitalist as threaten to take away the cable companies wire and turn it over to the public, which is about the only kind of threat that could make them sit up and listen.
Ah, but those pages include links to the docs for the manuals, which include APIs plus links to code snippets, tech notes, Q&A's, etc.
Now I'll grant you that's perhaps not the most convenient form, but such is the nature of hypertext. Non-linearity has both pluses and minuses.
The one thing they are missing is sample code. It would be nice to see a couple of examples like Paint and NotePad (or equivalents) in both Win32 and OS X incarnations.
Perhaps you didnt notice there were links to additional pages?
* 2D graphics
* 3D graphics
* User Interface
* Text
* Networking
* Multiprocessing
It's not comparable, since a) it's not a question of a newer technology bypassing an obsolete one, and, more importantly b) Microsoft signed a contract that they chose not to honor. That's something like signing a check when you've got no money in the bank to cover it.
Here's a clue.
1) Microsoft is a monopoly. This is legal as long as they don't abuse their position of power.
2) Turn back to the mid-90s. Netscape owns the browser market. In their attempt to crush Netscape, MS needs a competitive browser, i.e., one that supports Java. They sign a deal with Sun.
3) By the late 90's Netscape is toast. MS says, man this platform-neutral stuff is bad news, Let's pull out the old "embrace and extend" technique and get the drone developers using our Java "enhancements."
4) Sun says, "Hey, we define Java, and that's not Java anymore. Meet us in court."
5) Judge determines MS is using the fact they own the desktop to attempt to kill Java (not to mention the fact that they never released a VM beyond 1.1). This is an abuse of monopoly power. This being the third time or so that MS has been convicted, the judge actually does something about it.
...that a supposedly "futuristic" movie has to devolve into car chases?
Hollywood...we blow things up.
Cyberiad is one of SF's few works of literature. Unfortunately, it's probably doomed to relative obscurity because the language is highly mathematical.
On a side note, it was amusing to see (in the Globe article) the true colors of cold warrior hack Jerry Pournelle come to light. His characterizations of Lem as "boring" and someone who "embraces communist egalitarianism" says far more about him than about Lem.
Sorry, if you say that the Lampoon 'Bored of the Rings' is "perhaps the funniest work penned in English" you clearly haven't read enough to be critiquing literature.
It does have it's moments, to be sure, but funniest ever?
Mobs don't need no steenkin cell phones. When the Tutsi genocide took place in Rwanda, the calls to go out and kill came over the radio.
If you looked at the commercials, it always said "Steven Speilberg presents." If you know how to read thst, you know it could mean as little as having him stand up at the beginning of the show and say "And now, here's Taken...".
Yes, they are capitalizing on his name, but you need to bring your intelligence to bear as well.
A nit. Orders of magnitude is generally thought of in the decimal realm. Thus 2^64 which is a 20 digit number is only 10 orders of magnitude greater than 2^32 (a 10 digit number).
I wouldn't be to sure about the 100 years part either. But it out to be good for at least 10.
There's a reason why his enthusiasm is tempered. It's because the software is little better than what was available 10 years ago. He knows, he worked on the software then.
You can bring tears to the eyes of any Newton user by asking them to imagine what kind of softare and hardware they'd have today if the technology hadn't been strangled. (Thanks in large part to MS itself.)