Groklaw pointed out that David Boies is one of the three Lawyers listed on the Oracle filings. He also represented SCO in that fiasco, so, yes it appears we will be seeing the same sort of bullshit we saw there. He is a lawyer, and has represented many clients including some we would side with (such as arguing the DOJ's case against Microsoft). But his methods are similar regardless of the client; a no-holds-barred fight claiming anything they can think of regardless of the merit of the claims or how it affects Oracle's reputation with their customers.
The JDK that ships with Android is just a subset of Harmony, which is released under the Apache license. All improvements made by Google have been folded back into the project. The additional non-standard libraries they ship with android, are also opens source.
This has nothing to do with how much data the company serves. It is a measure of how much content flows over the company's pipes. AFAIK, Akamai doesn't have it's own pipes - they buy transit just like everyone else. Google on the otherhand purchased large amounts of dark fiber after the dot-com bust, and use it to decrease their bandwidth costs.
It has always been part of the HTML standard that browsers should ignore any tags they don't recognize. Every browser I have tested that doesn't have HTML 5 video support (or has it but doesn't support the codec given), properly falls back on flash in the above example.
Those older vehicles were not light. The bodies were made from cold rolled steel, with solid I-beam construction.
That was my first reaction too, but I looked it up. The VW Golf debuted at under 1900 lbs, and stayed under 2200 through the mid 80s. The current Golf weights over 2900 lbs. Older economy cars were definitely lighter than the current ones, which is what he was talking about.
They got similar or better fuel mileage due to the lack of restrictive emission add-ons
I don't buy that. The emissions add-ons were the worst in the 70's right after they were first required, and have gotten better since then. My parents got 50% better gas millage by removing the air-to-exhaust-injection system and catalytic converter on their Jeep J-10 pickup. Loosing the catalytic converter on a current Toyota Tacoma had negligible affect on fuel efficiency.
Furthermore, newer cars aren't "safer". They handle better and are more controllable due to innovations in suspension and steering, and have a safer compartment resulting in better safety, but the vehicles themselves are less likely to survive even a 'mild' fender bender without thousands of dollars in a rebuild.
In other words they are safer in every way, but they sacrifice durability to obtain it.
When you click on any link on any site, the browser sends the URL that the link was found as part of the HTTP request for the linked page. This is useful to webmasters as they can see who is linking to them. This becomes a problem, however, if the URL contains private information encoded into it.
For example, when you are logged into facebook, the URL of the site contains your user id. Thus any* website that is linked from your facebook page will see your user id when you click on their links. To avoid this, sites shouldn't contain sensitive information in their URLs. Alternately many sites use redirectors that cause all links go first to the redirector, and then to the final destination, so the linked site sees the redirector as the referer, not the original URL. *Facebook has implemented a redirector for links that users post, but conveniently forgot to apply it to advertisers.
And yes, after being pushed on this issue for over a year, they are finally talking about hashing user ids in URLs.
RTFA. Yes there is a procedure in place to replace them if lost, but that does no good when the aid who lost the codes doesn't tell anyone and lies when asked about them.
Except that if you sell the car after 5 years, then the amount you get for it should be included when determining the total cost/benefit, but the study left that out. Hybrids generally have higher resell value than comparable vehicles, which could have very well changed the conclusion if considered.
Slashdot has posted several articles from greencarreports.com (all submitted by thecarchik), many of which have been pretty poor, including the one about cambered tires improving efficiency while completely neglecting the fact that it ruins handling, a study showing that hyrid cars don't save enough gas to cover extra cost by conveniently only looking at the first 5 year of the cars use.
I have mod points that I wanted to use in this thread, but I decided I'd rather comment.
From a legal perspective, your grandad was right as far as I am concerned. I don't see anything in the constitution that grants the government the authority to enforce non-discrimination laws. The interstate commerce clause is laughable, as most of the discriminatory behavior is related to intrastate commerce. Application of the 14th amendment argument is also limited, as it only applies to cases where certain actions against minorities or women would be illegal of they they were committed against white males (or any other subset of the population).
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have these rights, it means that the founding fathers weren't perfect. It means the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should have included a constitutional amendment, not just a law.
As far as net neutrality goes, the government is not restricting anyone's speech, so it isn't a first amendment issue. Period. That doesn't mean that net neutrality is a bad idea. Furthermore, since the internet is pretty much the definition of interstate commerce, and throttling it would be a restriction of interstate commerce, net neutrality is an example of what the interstate commerce clause was original intended for. So congress does have the authority to regulate in this manner if they so chose, the same way they regulated the telcom industry before it.
When I graduated Microsoft was one of two organizations courting me. I decided that working at a nuclear weapons complex was the more ethical decision:)
Joking aside, there was more than one person I knew in college who were platform agnostic when I knew them, but they all became complete MS fanboys after working there. It was pretty strange to me. I had never been a fan of the company, and I didn't want to be sucked into that. The job I have now is just that - a job. I'm not doing anything I think is wrong, and I'm not changing the world. I'm simply making life easier for the small group of people that use my software. I'm happy with that.
The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead.
As someone who has used Linux for 13 years now, I agree with that statement completely. There is no reason to expect that Linux will ever become a major OS in developed countries. That said I disagree with the reasons given.
The biggest issue is that Windows is good enough. People aren't going to change what OS they use, as well as all the applications they use, spend time learning something new, and deal will all the hassle of incompatibilities unless they see it as a major improvement over what they have now. This isn't the 90's when Windows crashed multiple times a week and had to be reinstalled from scratch once a year to clean up it's cruft. Viruses and botnets are still a problem, but not as much as they used to be, and there is good free antivirus software available to all but eliminate those problems.
Even if linux was flawless - if it just worked all the time without thinking and was easy to learn, the improvement it offered over Linux still wouldn't be worth the hassle to change for most people. I do still hold some hope of Linux becoming more popular in developing countries, where the cost is a significant advantage, as well as nationalism. However, even they seem to prefer to pirate windows for various reason rather than use free software.
There is also the issue of support. People are going to have problems with any computer system, and when they do who are they going get help? Not from the company that made it, and unless they are especially self-resourceful they aren't going to go to the internet to find it. They are going to ask their friends or family. If those people are using windows, it makes their life a lot easier if they are too.
So it isn't just a matter of someone coming up with a way to make it work - there needs to be a radical change that really improves the way people interact with their computer. And if that happened it wouldn't really be linux on the desktop in the way we think of it. We probably wouldn't even call it linux because it would eschew the entire "linux desktop" software landscape the same way that android does on the phone. The desktop is a mature (or stagnant depending on your bend) concept, and there isn't much refining to be done.
That said there is a good deal of movement in the mobile sector. That is an area where people aren't as locked in, and aren't yet set in their ways when it comes to how we interact with these devices. It is like the early PC market, and at this point it is still anyone's game. Free software (which is what we are really talking about here, not just linux) has a good chance of being a major player in that field, and we may also see more people ditching the traditional desktop for spin offs from the mobile segment (ala the iPad).
However, the desktop is a dead end as far as market share goes. And I'm fine with that. There are lots of good bands that never made it big. There are lots of good products that didn't win in the market place. The linux community is large enough to support itself, and as long as it remains a useful tool for myself and others it is a success in my eyes.
I'll be the first to admit that I was misinformed about the actual damage caused by wikileaks' first batch of leaked Afghanistan documents, and now that I know the truth it does change my opinion somewhat.
I was initially supportive of wikileaks, as I am of responsible whistle blower groups in general. When the government and Fox news attacked wikileaks, it didn't phase me a bit - that was expected, and provided zero credible information. However, when Amnesty International and others rights groups came out and criticized wikileaks for not doing a good job protecting Afghan informants, that caught my attention. Those are groups that I trust to put the well being of the Afghans above politics, and I assumed that they had done their homework. That was followed by other wikileaks members publicly distancing themselves from Assange because they felt he was not doing enough to redact the documents before publishing them.
Even if I wasn't working or going to school I wouldn't have had time to personally review 700,000 pages of documents for myself. We are all dependent on others to provide information to us, and have to be careful who we trust. Given these independent sources it seemed reasonable to me to conclude that Assange wasn't being responsible in disclosing the documents the way he did. Now that report has been leaked, however, I am more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that he will do the right thing with the next batch of documents.
But go ahead and assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a "patriotic tool" who only gets their news from FOX. Calling people names is a great way to change people's mind and strengthen support for your cause.
Did they really do that? Idiots. It isn't hard to get a list of IP blocks allocated an ISP.
To me this brings up another example of how the general idea of net neutrality is simple, while the details are not. Most of us would agree that this behavior is anti-competitive, but where do you draw the line? Many sites block entire countries, because they don't have the legal right to serve the same content in all regions. Many sites ban entire countries or IP blocks due to spamming and/or other malicious behavior that has come from those blocks. Is that acceptable? If so, given that you can find malicious behavior coming just about every IP block (botnets), does that mean that it could be used an excuse to ban whoever you wish?
For some reason, I don't think they got to be Fortune 500 companies by being generous with their benefit packages. Number 1 on that list is Walmart, and they don't offer any benefits to the vast majority of their employees.
Sun/Oracle holds several patents on Java technology. They will only issue licenses to these patents to implementations that pass their compatibility tests. Without this license, the source code is freely distributable, but you risk being sued if you actually use it. Harmony and other java reimplementation have struggled with being in this legal grey area for some time. The trick is you have to pay a big chunk of money to Sun/Oracle for this compatibility test. Furthermore, Android's implementation wouldn't pass because they only ship a subset of the standard library, and because they compile to a different bytecode format. Furthermore, Sun has not been as open when it comes to J2ME. Android is cutting into J2ME revenue, and Oracle are greedy bastards in general, so they would like for everyone who runs Android to pay them patent royalties.
I would like to reiterate the octave suggestion. They made a ton of progress in the 3.x branch, and now the language and core libraries are all pretty much compatible with Matlab. However, there are still a bunch of functions in the various toolboxes that are not implemented, or partially implemented, or not compatible the Matlab version. I run into these on a weekly basis, and while I have spent some time fixing things, I just don't have to fix everything I find, and often fall back to using Matlab on my university account.
Most of this will be implemented in the matlab language itself, and not C++, but other than that it is right down your alley. All applied math. The functions needing implementation are small enough for a beginner to handle and the requirements are documented fairly well by looking at online matlab help files. Since you are a student you probably have access to matlab through your university so you can test if you implementation is compatible, and check corner cases not described in the help files.
This would be a very valuable contribution from someone in your position.
So tell me, where it the summary or article does it explain why they needed that particular acre of land, as opposed to the other thousands of acres nearby? I'm sure there is a good reason, but it doesn't say. This is why I stopped paying attention to the news. Those "hard-hitting journalists" are too fucking stupid to ask even the most obvious of questions.
It is only supposed to be rendered when the word is split across multiple lines.
For example if your text was "super­cali­fragilistic­expialidocious" then all of the following are valid rendering depending on where the render decides to start a new line:
I won't defend the lawsuits against Apple, and Qualcomm, as I think they are crap, but the graph does seriously misrepresent the situation against Nokia.
Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others not on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. Government probes have found those companies guilty of doing so, and it is perfectly legitimate for Nokia to seek damages as a result of those.
I have no idea what the lawsuit against Motorola is. The closest thing I can find is Motorola is suing a previous exec who took a job at Nokia.
Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. It has nothing to do with patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Oracle trying to pull a SCO here?
Groklaw pointed out that David Boies is one of the three Lawyers listed on the Oracle filings. He also represented SCO in that fiasco, so, yes it appears we will be seeing the same sort of bullshit we saw there. He is a lawyer, and has represented many clients including some we would side with (such as arguing the DOJ's case against Microsoft). But his methods are similar regardless of the client; a no-holds-barred fight claiming anything they can think of regardless of the merit of the claims or how it affects Oracle's reputation with their customers.
The JDK that ships with Android is just a subset of Harmony, which is released under the Apache license. All improvements made by Google have been folded back into the project. The additional non-standard libraries they ship with android, are also opens source.
This has nothing to do with how much data the company serves. It is a measure of how much content flows over the company's pipes. AFAIK, Akamai doesn't have it's own pipes - they buy transit just like everyone else. Google on the otherhand purchased large amounts of dark fiber after the dot-com bust, and use it to decrease their bandwidth costs.
It has always been part of the HTML standard that browsers should ignore any tags they don't recognize. Every browser I have tested that doesn't have HTML 5 video support (or has it but doesn't support the codec given), properly falls back on flash in the above example.
Those older vehicles were not light. The bodies were made from cold rolled steel, with solid I-beam construction.
That was my first reaction too, but I looked it up. The VW Golf debuted at under 1900 lbs, and stayed under 2200 through the mid 80s. The current Golf weights over 2900 lbs. Older economy cars were definitely lighter than the current ones, which is what he was talking about.
They got similar or better fuel mileage due to the lack of restrictive emission add-ons
I don't buy that. The emissions add-ons were the worst in the 70's right after they were first required, and have gotten better since then. My parents got 50% better gas millage by removing the air-to-exhaust-injection system and catalytic converter on their Jeep J-10 pickup. Loosing the catalytic converter on a current Toyota Tacoma had negligible affect on fuel efficiency.
Furthermore, newer cars aren't "safer". They handle better and are more controllable due to innovations in suspension and steering, and have a safer compartment resulting in better safety, but the vehicles themselves are less likely to survive even a 'mild' fender bender without thousands of dollars in a rebuild.
In other words they are safer in every way, but they sacrifice durability to obtain it.
It is the old HTTP referer leakage problem.
When you click on any link on any site, the browser sends the URL that the link was found as part of the HTTP request for the linked page. This is useful to webmasters as they can see who is linking to them. This becomes a problem, however, if the URL contains private information encoded into it.
For example, when you are logged into facebook, the URL of the site contains your user id. Thus any* website that is linked from your facebook page will see your user id when you click on their links. To avoid this, sites shouldn't contain sensitive information in their URLs. Alternately many sites use redirectors that cause all links go first to the redirector, and then to the final destination, so the linked site sees the redirector as the referer, not the original URL. *Facebook has implemented a redirector for links that users post, but conveniently forgot to apply it to advertisers.
And yes, after being pushed on this issue for over a year, they are finally talking about hashing user ids in URLs.
RTFA. Yes there is a procedure in place to replace them if lost, but that does no good when the aid who lost the codes doesn't tell anyone and lies when asked about them.
Except that if you sell the car after 5 years, then the amount you get for it should be included when determining the total cost/benefit, but the study left that out. Hybrids generally have higher resell value than comparable vehicles, which could have very well changed the conclusion if considered.
Slashdot has posted several articles from greencarreports.com (all submitted by thecarchik), many of which have been pretty poor, including the one about cambered tires improving efficiency while completely neglecting the fact that it ruins handling, a study showing that hyrid cars don't save enough gas to cover extra cost by conveniently only looking at the first 5 year of the cars use.
I've added them to my ignored links list.
I have mod points that I wanted to use in this thread, but I decided I'd rather comment.
From a legal perspective, your grandad was right as far as I am concerned. I don't see anything in the constitution that grants the government the authority to enforce non-discrimination laws. The interstate commerce clause is laughable, as most of the discriminatory behavior is related to intrastate commerce. Application of the 14th amendment argument is also limited, as it only applies to cases where certain actions against minorities or women would be illegal of they they were committed against white males (or any other subset of the population).
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have these rights, it means that the founding fathers weren't perfect. It means the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should have included a constitutional amendment, not just a law.
As far as net neutrality goes, the government is not restricting anyone's speech, so it isn't a first amendment issue. Period. That doesn't mean that net neutrality is a bad idea. Furthermore, since the internet is pretty much the definition of interstate commerce, and throttling it would be a restriction of interstate commerce, net neutrality is an example of what the interstate commerce clause was original intended for. So congress does have the authority to regulate in this manner if they so chose, the same way they regulated the telcom industry before it.
When I graduated Microsoft was one of two organizations courting me. I decided that working at a nuclear weapons complex was the more ethical decision :)
Joking aside, there was more than one person I knew in college who were platform agnostic when I knew them, but they all became complete MS fanboys after working there. It was pretty strange to me. I had never been a fan of the company, and I didn't want to be sucked into that. The job I have now is just that - a job. I'm not doing anything I think is wrong, and I'm not changing the world. I'm simply making life easier for the small group of people that use my software. I'm happy with that.
The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead.
As someone who has used Linux for 13 years now, I agree with that statement completely. There is no reason to expect that Linux will ever become a major OS in developed countries. That said I disagree with the reasons given.
The biggest issue is that Windows is good enough. People aren't going to change what OS they use, as well as all the applications they use, spend time learning something new, and deal will all the hassle of incompatibilities unless they see it as a major improvement over what they have now. This isn't the 90's when Windows crashed multiple times a week and had to be reinstalled from scratch once a year to clean up it's cruft. Viruses and botnets are still a problem, but not as much as they used to be, and there is good free antivirus software available to all but eliminate those problems.
Even if linux was flawless - if it just worked all the time without thinking and was easy to learn, the improvement it offered over Linux still wouldn't be worth the hassle to change for most people. I do still hold some hope of Linux becoming more popular in developing countries, where the cost is a significant advantage, as well as nationalism. However, even they seem to prefer to pirate windows for various reason rather than use free software.
There is also the issue of support. People are going to have problems with any computer system, and when they do who are they going get help? Not from the company that made it, and unless they are especially self-resourceful they aren't going to go to the internet to find it. They are going to ask their friends or family. If those people are using windows, it makes their life a lot easier if they are too.
So it isn't just a matter of someone coming up with a way to make it work - there needs to be a radical change that really improves the way people interact with their computer. And if that happened it wouldn't really be linux on the desktop in the way we think of it. We probably wouldn't even call it linux because it would eschew the entire "linux desktop" software landscape the same way that android does on the phone. The desktop is a mature (or stagnant depending on your bend) concept, and there isn't much refining to be done.
That said there is a good deal of movement in the mobile sector. That is an area where people aren't as locked in, and aren't yet set in their ways when it comes to how we interact with these devices. It is like the early PC market, and at this point it is still anyone's game. Free software (which is what we are really talking about here, not just linux) has a good chance of being a major player in that field, and we may also see more people ditching the traditional desktop for spin offs from the mobile segment (ala the iPad).
However, the desktop is a dead end as far as market share goes. And I'm fine with that. There are lots of good bands that never made it big. There are lots of good products that didn't win in the market place. The linux community is large enough to support itself, and as long as it remains a useful tool for myself and others it is a success in my eyes.
I'll be the first to admit that I was misinformed about the actual damage caused by wikileaks' first batch of leaked Afghanistan documents, and now that I know the truth it does change my opinion somewhat.
I was initially supportive of wikileaks, as I am of responsible whistle blower groups in general. When the government and Fox news attacked wikileaks, it didn't phase me a bit - that was expected, and provided zero credible information. However, when Amnesty International and others rights groups came out and criticized wikileaks for not doing a good job protecting Afghan informants, that caught my attention. Those are groups that I trust to put the well being of the Afghans above politics, and I assumed that they had done their homework. That was followed by other wikileaks members publicly distancing themselves from Assange because they felt he was not doing enough to redact the documents before publishing them.
Even if I wasn't working or going to school I wouldn't have had time to personally review 700,000 pages of documents for myself. We are all dependent on others to provide information to us, and have to be careful who we trust. Given these independent sources it seemed reasonable to me to conclude that Assange wasn't being responsible in disclosing the documents the way he did. Now that report has been leaked, however, I am more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt that he will do the right thing with the next batch of documents.
But go ahead and assume that everyone who disagrees with you is a "patriotic tool" who only gets their news from FOX. Calling people names is a great way to change people's mind and strengthen support for your cause.
Did they really do that? Idiots. It isn't hard to get a list of IP blocks allocated an ISP.
To me this brings up another example of how the general idea of net neutrality is simple, while the details are not. Most of us would agree that this behavior is anti-competitive, but where do you draw the line? Many sites block entire countries, because they don't have the legal right to serve the same content in all regions. Many sites ban entire countries or IP blocks due to spamming and/or other malicious behavior that has come from those blocks. Is that acceptable? If so, given that you can find malicious behavior coming just about every IP block (botnets), does that mean that it could be used an excuse to ban whoever you wish?
For some reason, I don't think they got to be Fortune 500 companies by being generous with their benefit packages. Number 1 on that list is Walmart, and they don't offer any benefits to the vast majority of their employees.
Sun/Oracle holds several patents on Java technology. They will only issue licenses to these patents to implementations that pass their compatibility tests. Without this license, the source code is freely distributable, but you risk being sued if you actually use it. Harmony and other java reimplementation have struggled with being in this legal grey area for some time. The trick is you have to pay a big chunk of money to Sun/Oracle for this compatibility test. Furthermore, Android's implementation wouldn't pass because they only ship a subset of the standard library, and because they compile to a different bytecode format. Furthermore, Sun has not been as open when it comes to J2ME. Android is cutting into J2ME revenue, and Oracle are greedy bastards in general, so they would like for everyone who runs Android to pay them patent royalties.
I would like to reiterate the octave suggestion. They made a ton of progress in the 3.x branch, and now the language and core libraries are all pretty much compatible with Matlab. However, there are still a bunch of functions in the various toolboxes that are not implemented, or partially implemented, or not compatible the Matlab version. I run into these on a weekly basis, and while I have spent some time fixing things, I just don't have to fix everything I find, and often fall back to using Matlab on my university account.
Most of this will be implemented in the matlab language itself, and not C++, but other than that it is right down your alley. All applied math. The functions needing implementation are small enough for a beginner to handle and the requirements are documented fairly well by looking at online matlab help files. Since you are a student you probably have access to matlab through your university so you can test if you implementation is compatible, and check corner cases not described in the help files.
This would be a very valuable contribution from someone in your position.
So tell me, where it the summary or article does it explain why they needed that particular acre of land, as opposed to the other thousands of acres nearby? I'm sure there is a good reason, but it doesn't say. This is why I stopped paying attention to the news. Those "hard-hitting journalists" are too fucking stupid to ask even the most obvious of questions.
It is only supposed to be rendered when the word is split across multiple lines.
For example if your text was "super­cali­fragilistic­expialidocious" then all of the following are valid rendering depending on where the render decides to start a new line:
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
or
supercalifragilistic-
expialidocious
or
supercali-
fragilistic-
expialidocious
others NOT on this graph
I won't defend the lawsuits against Apple, and Qualcomm, as I think they are crap, but the graph does seriously misrepresent the situation against Nokia.
Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others not on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. Government probes have found those companies guilty of doing so, and it is perfectly legitimate for Nokia to seek damages as a result of those.
I have no idea what the lawsuit against Motorola is. The closest thing I can find is Motorola is suing a previous exec who took a job at Nokia.
Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. It has nothing to do with patents.
The caption of the graph is somewhat misleading as half of Nokia's lawsuits are suing companies for LCD price-fixing, not patent disputes.
And then you have NTP who is suing everybody.
Hehe. My first reaction was "That's a strange way to spell Onions, is this some reference from LOTR that I have forgotten?"