Murdock [the current owner] said in a statement that selling Lanai [the sixth-largest Hawaiian island] was not an impulsive decision, but he has been looking for a buyer who would have the right enthusiasm, commitment and respect for the island's residents.
...so he decided to sell to freaking Ellison?!? Yeah, that'll end well.
First, to clarify: I'm 100% opposed to software patents. I'm not saying I think Apple should be patenting things like this for the reasons I gave, merely that they might be.
That out of the way, it should be easy enough to implement this patent for demonstration purposes and then permanently shelve it.
You mean where you could "squirt" a song at the other Zune in your city and they could listen to it for up to three days or three plays, whichever came first? I'd be hard pressed to describe that as "very significant".
I think it will follow the Zune, because of the Zune. We bought an iPad right after the new version came out because it was such an easy choice: it runs all the apps we'd already purchased or used heavily on our iPhones (and on our iPods before that). We "upgraded" our phones to a faster device with a larger screen when we were ready for it.
Where's that upgrade path for the Surface? What cheap music player or subsidized phone can I buy that lets me jump into that ecosystem without investing in the full-price option right from the start? It's easy to say "you already like your iPhone; wouldn't you like a bigger, faster one?". After killing Zune, MS has no way to test the waters. I think they should have a Windows RT Zune around if for no other reason than that.
When these seemingly-weird patents come out, why does someone always assume they're meant to be used? I'm betting that Apple wants the legal clout to prevent other companies from using the techniques they've patented, even if they don't want to use them themselves. For example, suppose you were granted a watertight patent on spamming. That might be a nice tool to beat spammers up with in court: "hey, judge, they're violating my government-granted monopoly on the techniques I described! I offered to license them for only $2,000 per email but they refused. I want triple damages."
This patent is a far cry from stopping spam, but maybe that preemptive principle is what they're aiming for?
And - BGR has taken paticular interest in finding news about rim and turning into a negative thing.
OK, so how would you spin that as a positive? Yes, recent news stories about RIM and Nokia are consistently negative. Maybe that's because there's not a lot of positive to report about either company at this time.
Then they send-round the lawyers to *invade* the man's property, confirm such a machine exists, and start issuing cease-and-desist letters (presumption of guilt just because he saves his seed).
How does that even work? I recently moved from a farming state, and I say with very little exaggeration: a corporate employee found invading a farmer's privacy like that would likely never be seen again. If parts of them were later recovered, it would almost certainly be chalked up to 1) a farming accident, 2) wildlife attack, or 3) self-defense as circumstances direct.
I'm not talking about the stereotypical backwoods hillbillies who are protectin' their still from the revenuers, either. I know a guy who's in the process of rolling out GPS-enabled, self-driving tractors that can automatically adjust the amount of fertilizer they spray depending on what the latest satellite pictures show that a particular patch of field needs. One of my coworkers would routinely call me on his cell phone from the cab of his air-conditioned tractor when he got bored with watching TV. A modern farm is a surprisingly high-tech operation, often steered by college graduates who work other highly technical jobs during the winter months. With all that said, though, these guys are extremely protective of their farms, their families, and their livelihoods. I'll be damned if I'd want to get caught sneaking around on their property. How do Monsanto employees manage to do stuff like that without dying of acute lead poisoning?
So a high-numbered user who has never commented on a single story posts exactly one story submission about how a widely ignored niche platform is much better than the competition, has it accepted, then doesn't bother to come back and reply to it. And that story contains gems like:
I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP.
as though Windows Phone is the app market leader and those toy Android and iPhone systems just don't have the same broad application base.
Did you ever feel that "emacs -nw" takes a while to start?
No, because emacsclient is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Launch an Emacs server at startup and then instantly attach to it when you want to edit something.
I never liked the implementation of Nepomuk and Akonadi, but I like the concept. Since switching to a Mac desktop and experiencing integrated search that actually works, I have to admit that it's a pretty neat idea when done well.
Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?
I have a $120 2TB drive in my computer. I'd gladly allocate $0.008 worth (128e6/2e12*120) of that space to a working indexing system that helps me access my files faster. Why would I not want that?
These people do not understand the Unix philosophy and are trying for an all-integrated bloated monster a la MS Windows.
I think KDE understands it supremely well. They try to provide a collection of single-purpose components that get put together in cool ways. For example, KIO slaves provide filesystem-like interfaces to various protocols like HTTP, SFTP, Samba, etc. KHTML (and later WebKit) provides a HTML renderer, DOM, and JavaScript environment. Glue them together one way and you have the Konqueror web browser. Combine them another way and you have KMail. Neither of those are "all-integrated bloated monsters", but sets of components working together to perform a larger job. Isn't that The Unix Way?
I signed up with Comcast a month ago. When I got home last night, I configured my Airport Extreme to work as an autoconfigured IPv6 router. After rebooting it, my laptops had native IPv6 addresses. I was kind of embarrassed of how geekily excited that made me.
AMD also doomed us all to a few more decades of x86 brain damage.
Such as...? I'm not a huge fan of the x86* ISAs, but they've been incredibly successful and few of us have to deal with their peculiarities by hand. So the instructions are harder to decode than on, say, Power. But what portion of the die is involved in the decode units, especially compared to huge blocks like the built-in 3D accelerated graphics on modern Intel CPUs? It also turns out that those hard-to-decode variable-length instructions are smaller - hence more easily cacheable - than their fixed-length counterparts.
But again, what does it really matter? Any language from C on up will hide almost all of the architectural details from programmers. Does x86-64's weird ISA affect the Java or Python code running on it? Nah. x86* may be crufty and inelegant, but it gets the job done.
IPv6 is hierarchical in a way that lets routing table become much, much smaller. It's a huge win in the complexity department, especially with its fixed-length headers that make hardware acceleration vastly easier to implement.
It sounds like Oracle probably has some contractual obligations to live up to, and if so, HP deserves for them to uphold their end of the bargain. That said, I can understand Oracle's lack of desire to throw good money after bad. Itanic might not be dead, but it's comatose in a hospice with friends and family gathered around. Who'd want to spend much time and effort on a system that almost nobody wants?
There is also historical evidence to shows many examples of professions that were once predominately male then began to see an influx of women in the profession,
So the supply doubled while demand remained the same, and the price dropped? That's unsurprising.
I've been running ZFS on FreeBSD for a few years and it's lived up to its promises, but I think I'll be migrating off of it. The problem is that I trusted Sun. They did some goofy things, but you knew where you stood with them. They release ZFS under an Open Source license? You could take them at face value and know that you were allowed to use it. But now that Oracle holds the reins, I have no desire to depend on any Sun-borne projects anymore. Yes, ZFS is Open Source. So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.
Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?
More telling, religions don't deal with formal proofs and require that you show your work.
That's not really true, but it's a risky proposition. I grew up in a religious family, and the last church I attended as an adult was wonderfully logic-driven. The preacher was fantastic, and he presented every sermon almost like a mathematical proof. He'd start with some basic axioms from the belief system ("the Bible is literally true", "Jesus is a real person and said everything credited to him exactly like the Bible says, barring negligible translation mismatches", etc.). Then he'd present a premise and build a formal proof for it based upon facts derived from those axioms. Sometimes he reached some surprising conclusions, but as in math class, if you accept the axioms then you can't really disagree with results that come from them.
But that works both ways. By presenting an effectively bulletproof belief framework, it's left open to disproof by formal methods. In my case, that was disproof by counterexample, where the premises were "the world is 6,000 years old" and "God loves us", and the counterexample was "there's a vast amount of hard evidence that the Earth and universe are billions of years old". Given that "the Earth is more than 6,000 years old" is roughly as demonstrable as "the sky is blue", that led to at least one of two conclusions: either God hates us and wants to trick us for some sociopathic reason known only to Him, or one of those axioms was invalid. And once you reach that point, what axiom do you throw out? "The Bible is literally true" is the obvious choice. But there's a huge amount of other conclusions predicated upon that axiom's validity, and once it disappears...
Ever had everything you know yanked out from under you in an instant? It sucks. But that's the risk of rigorous examination of religious beliefs. If you examine them closely enough to "prove" that your beliefs are true, then you run the very real risk of demonstrating that they're not.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
...so he decided to sell to freaking Ellison?!? Yeah, that'll end well.
so you could browse the social
There is no way you could have said that with a straight face without being on the Zune dev team.
First, to clarify: I'm 100% opposed to software patents. I'm not saying I think Apple should be patenting things like this for the reasons I gave, merely that they might be.
That out of the way, it should be easy enough to implement this patent for demonstration purposes and then permanently shelve it.
the sharing
You mean where you could "squirt" a song at the other Zune in your city and they could listen to it for up to three days or three plays, whichever came first? I'd be hard pressed to describe that as "very significant".
I think it will follow the Zune, because of the Zune. We bought an iPad right after the new version came out because it was such an easy choice: it runs all the apps we'd already purchased or used heavily on our iPhones (and on our iPods before that). We "upgraded" our phones to a faster device with a larger screen when we were ready for it.
Where's that upgrade path for the Surface? What cheap music player or subsidized phone can I buy that lets me jump into that ecosystem without investing in the full-price option right from the start? It's easy to say "you already like your iPhone; wouldn't you like a bigger, faster one?". After killing Zune, MS has no way to test the waters. I think they should have a Windows RT Zune around if for no other reason than that.
When these seemingly-weird patents come out, why does someone always assume they're meant to be used? I'm betting that Apple wants the legal clout to prevent other companies from using the techniques they've patented, even if they don't want to use them themselves. For example, suppose you were granted a watertight patent on spamming. That might be a nice tool to beat spammers up with in court: "hey, judge, they're violating my government-granted monopoly on the techniques I described! I offered to license them for only $2,000 per email but they refused. I want triple damages."
This patent is a far cry from stopping spam, but maybe that preemptive principle is what they're aiming for?
And - BGR has taken paticular interest in finding news about rim and turning into a negative thing.
OK, so how would you spin that as a positive? Yes, recent news stories about RIM and Nokia are consistently negative. Maybe that's because there's not a lot of positive to report about either company at this time.
Then they send-round the lawyers to *invade* the man's property, confirm such a machine exists, and start issuing cease-and-desist letters (presumption of guilt just because he saves his seed).
How does that even work? I recently moved from a farming state, and I say with very little exaggeration: a corporate employee found invading a farmer's privacy like that would likely never be seen again. If parts of them were later recovered, it would almost certainly be chalked up to 1) a farming accident, 2) wildlife attack, or 3) self-defense as circumstances direct.
I'm not talking about the stereotypical backwoods hillbillies who are protectin' their still from the revenuers, either. I know a guy who's in the process of rolling out GPS-enabled, self-driving tractors that can automatically adjust the amount of fertilizer they spray depending on what the latest satellite pictures show that a particular patch of field needs. One of my coworkers would routinely call me on his cell phone from the cab of his air-conditioned tractor when he got bored with watching TV. A modern farm is a surprisingly high-tech operation, often steered by college graduates who work other highly technical jobs during the winter months. With all that said, though, these guys are extremely protective of their farms, their families, and their livelihoods. I'll be damned if I'd want to get caught sneaking around on their property. How do Monsanto employees manage to do stuff like that without dying of acute lead poisoning?
So a high-numbered user who has never commented on a single story posts exactly one story submission about how a widely ignored niche platform is much better than the competition, has it accepted, then doesn't bother to come back and reply to it. And that story contains gems like:
as though Windows Phone is the app market leader and those toy Android and iPhone systems just don't have the same broad application base.
Right.
That seems perfectly legitimate.
Did you ever feel that "emacs -nw" takes a while to start?
No, because emacsclient is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Launch an Emacs server at startup and then instantly attach to it when you want to edit something.
Grab a chunk of natural, untreated wood and leave it in water for a few months.
Like the driftwood that continually washes up on the beach?
It's not going to be carrying passengers across an ocean, unlike treated everything-proof wood you'd use on a ship or a dock.
Would those passengers be likely to tolerate the CCA or other treatments over the trans-ocean journey?
I never liked the implementation of Nepomuk and Akonadi, but I like the concept. Since switching to a Mac desktop and experiencing integrated search that actually works, I have to admit that it's a pretty neat idea when done well.
Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?
I have a $120 2TB drive in my computer. I'd gladly allocate $0.008 worth (128e6/2e12*120) of that space to a working indexing system that helps me access my files faster. Why would I not want that?
These people do not understand the Unix philosophy and are trying for an all-integrated bloated monster a la MS Windows.
I think KDE understands it supremely well. They try to provide a collection of single-purpose components that get put together in cool ways. For example, KIO slaves provide filesystem-like interfaces to various protocols like HTTP, SFTP, Samba, etc. KHTML (and later WebKit) provides a HTML renderer, DOM, and JavaScript environment. Glue them together one way and you have the Konqueror web browser. Combine them another way and you have KMail. Neither of those are "all-integrated bloated monsters", but sets of components working together to perform a larger job. Isn't that The Unix Way?
My mouse lacks a ctrl+space+"fi"+enter button.
Airport Extreme supports it out of the box, and routes IPv6 over Wi-Fi.
I signed up with Comcast a month ago. When I got home last night, I configured my Airport Extreme to work as an autoconfigured IPv6 router. After rebooting it, my laptops had native IPv6 addresses. I was kind of embarrassed of how geekily excited that made me.
That was quick.
AMD also doomed us all to a few more decades of x86 brain damage.
Such as...? I'm not a huge fan of the x86* ISAs, but they've been incredibly successful and few of us have to deal with their peculiarities by hand. So the instructions are harder to decode than on, say, Power. But what portion of the die is involved in the decode units, especially compared to huge blocks like the built-in 3D accelerated graphics on modern Intel CPUs? It also turns out that those hard-to-decode variable-length instructions are smaller - hence more easily cacheable - than their fixed-length counterparts.
But again, what does it really matter? Any language from C on up will hide almost all of the architectural details from programmers. Does x86-64's weird ISA affect the Java or Python code running on it? Nah. x86* may be crufty and inelegant, but it gets the job done.
Because Oracle+Solaris+x86 is known to be utterly worthless and unstable compared to Oracle+HPwhatever+ia64?
IPv6 is hierarchical in a way that lets routing table become much, much smaller. It's a huge win in the complexity department, especially with its fixed-length headers that make hardware acceleration vastly easier to implement.
It sounds like Oracle probably has some contractual obligations to live up to, and if so, HP deserves for them to uphold their end of the bargain. That said, I can understand Oracle's lack of desire to throw good money after bad. Itanic might not be dead, but it's comatose in a hospice with friends and family gathered around. Who'd want to spend much time and effort on a system that almost nobody wants?
I'll also make shirts that have equations, too, so it'll be something like 32523136136 minus 1.
Without verifying, I'm fairly sure that's not prime.
There is also historical evidence to shows many examples of professions that were once predominately male then began to see an influx of women in the profession,
So the supply doubled while demand remained the same, and the price dropped? That's unsurprising.
I've been running ZFS on FreeBSD for a few years and it's lived up to its promises, but I think I'll be migrating off of it. The problem is that I trusted Sun. They did some goofy things, but you knew where you stood with them. They release ZFS under an Open Source license? You could take them at face value and know that you were allowed to use it. But now that Oracle holds the reins, I have no desire to depend on any Sun-borne projects anymore. Yes, ZFS is Open Source. So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.
Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?
More telling, religions don't deal with formal proofs and require that you show your work.
That's not really true, but it's a risky proposition. I grew up in a religious family, and the last church I attended as an adult was wonderfully logic-driven. The preacher was fantastic, and he presented every sermon almost like a mathematical proof. He'd start with some basic axioms from the belief system ("the Bible is literally true", "Jesus is a real person and said everything credited to him exactly like the Bible says, barring negligible translation mismatches", etc.). Then he'd present a premise and build a formal proof for it based upon facts derived from those axioms. Sometimes he reached some surprising conclusions, but as in math class, if you accept the axioms then you can't really disagree with results that come from them.
But that works both ways. By presenting an effectively bulletproof belief framework, it's left open to disproof by formal methods. In my case, that was disproof by counterexample, where the premises were "the world is 6,000 years old" and "God loves us", and the counterexample was "there's a vast amount of hard evidence that the Earth and universe are billions of years old". Given that "the Earth is more than 6,000 years old" is roughly as demonstrable as "the sky is blue", that led to at least one of two conclusions: either God hates us and wants to trick us for some sociopathic reason known only to Him, or one of those axioms was invalid. And once you reach that point, what axiom do you throw out? "The Bible is literally true" is the obvious choice. But there's a huge amount of other conclusions predicated upon that axiom's validity, and once it disappears...
Ever had everything you know yanked out from under you in an instant? It sucks. But that's the risk of rigorous examination of religious beliefs. If you examine them closely enough to "prove" that your beliefs are true, then you run the very real risk of demonstrating that they're not.