I looked at as much press as I could find about this, and I cannot find anything that says exactly what IP Android infringes on. I smell a rat.
Has anybody seen anything that names the protected IP? What is it in Android that infringes on Microsoft's IP? And if Android does infringe, why aren't they going after Motorola?
If you accepted new receivers from them, then they extended your contract, possibly without your knowledge and/or consent.
They came out to my house because I told them that their installation (done by their contractor) was not compliant with the national electric code (no ground on outside antenna) and they tried to extend my contract from that date. That did not go over well.
In my opinion, they are thieves and criminals, and they get away with it because they have an unlimited budget for litigation. I expect that the State of Washington will be delayed and appealed ad infinitum, and I expect that the judgement will reflect that.
As far as your bill goes, if it gets too high, you can always switch -- if you can get out of your contract. (See paragraph 2, above.) Good luck with that.
Having recently experienced the 2nd happiest day of a directv consumer, I can say I hate those bastards.
Their contract is written such that they can change the any of the terms (including channel lineup) without notice, and you are stuck. Never again will I buy their service.
Sure, I have no love for Comcast, and I think their service is somewhat more expensive, but they are reasonably up-front about the costs, and you can cancel at any time.
I wish great success for the State of Washington's lawsuit, and not only for the good of the customers in that state, but also hoping there are some large punitive damages awarded, too.
Many years ago, a very smart man explained to me that my customer is not the compiler. My customer is the next poor slob who has to work on the source code. Software maintenance is a fact of life. Someday, somebody is going to need to read and understand what is in your code.
Ignore maintainability at your peril. If people on my team ignore maintainability, they become unemployed.
Do you even know who Donald Knuth is? I'll take his advice over yours, any day.
Back in the day, DEC (RIP) would pay us salaried engineers 1 hour of pay rate for every 8 hours of standby. If you were on call 24x7, you would get paid for 7 days instead of 5. Then, if you had to go in to the office, there was $100 for that.
People in my group were lined up to carry the on-call pager.
I had another job, where the on-call pager was a two-way type, and it would acknowledge the page. There was no on-call pay there. I would put that pager into a metal ammo can when I got home from work. Curiously, it could not receive (or acknowledge) pages while in the ammo can.
Perfectly working, syntactically and logically correct code can be utter crap if it is not maintainable.
Years ago, a very smart man told me that I was not writing code for the compiler, I was writing code for the next poor slob that had to work on it. Let's face it, most source code is going to be subject to rework or maintenance over its life span, so let's do what we can to make that next developer productive. The key to this is reasonable commenting.
One of the best ways I know of to teach developers to write maintainable code is to have them do support and maintenance for a while. Developers learn quickly which styles work for maintenance, and which ones don't.
As far as I am concerned, source code needs to look good as well as compile. So I would go one step beyond TFA to say that style, indentation, proper symbol names, use of constants where appropriate, and (yes) proper commenting are all good indicators of quality in source code.
My HDTV has no digital inputs. Yes. It is old. It only has analog component video. It *is* 1080i, though, and I don't feel like I should have to replace it because the MPAA is worried I will try to copy their crappy content through analog video cables. It also renders my friend's fancy video projector obsolete for the same reason. This move is totally anti-consumer.
There is a seriously large digital hole. Its called making a 1 for 1 copy of a DVD. Yes, I know that does not affect broadcast programs, but it is most likely the biggest piracy issue the movie studios face. Saving broadcast television through the "analog hole" will suffer loss of resolution due to noise and non-linearity of the analog path, not to mention the loss when the content is re-encoded to MPEG or whatever. It's not like a digital (read "lossless") copy at all.
There is little or nothing the studios can do to block wholesale piracy & bootlegging, which is their biggest exposure. Recording of broadcast television for one's personal, private use is completely reasonable and definitely should be allowed, just the same as we have been able to record and timeshift television programming with VCR and DVR technology for the last 30 years.
Spoken like somebody who has never coded for a highly pipelined processor.
None of those you mentioned (8048, VAX, etc.) meet that requirement. They are all antiques.
The AC's statement was completely true. I'm not a compiler jock (though I know a few), but I can tell you that most modern high-end processors need more smarts than a traditional "assembler" can support to get best performance out of the hardware. A good example is the macro-assembler for the Alpha AXP and Itanium processors. It is technically a optimizing compiler. You could write assembler, and use an actual assembler to target these processors, but the performance and maybe operation of your code would suffer due to details of the processor architecture. These problems are understood and worked around by compiler writers.
You could hand optimize that assembly code. Sure. It's possible. And it is even done. But not very often. I don't think anyone in their right mind would want to hand-optimize an entire OS worth of assembler to run on a modern processor.
Carefully coded C (or some other high-level languages) can approach (though not meet) the performance of carefully coded assembler, and is much more portable and maintainable. Your DEC VAX had its operating system (VMS) mostly coded in BLISS.
Spoken like somebody who has never coded for a highly pipelined processor.
None of those you mentioned (8048, VAX, etc.) meet that requirement. They are all antiques.
The AC's statement was completely true. I'm not a compiler jock (though I know a few), but I can tell you that most modern high-end processors need more smarts than a traditional "assembler" can support to get best performance out of the hardware. A good example is the macro-assembler for the Alpha AXP and Itanium processors. It is technically a optimizing compiler. You could write assembler, and use an actual assembler to target these processors, but the performance and maybe operation of your code would suffer due to details of the processor architecture. These problems are understood and worked around by compiler writers.
You could hand optimize that assembly code. Sure. It's possible. And it is even done. But not very often. I don't think anyone in their right mind would want to hand-optimize an entire OS worth of assembler to run on a modern processor.
Carefully coded C (or some other high-level languages) can approach (though not meet) the performance of carefully coded assembler, and is much more portable and maintainable. Your DEC VAX had its operating system (VMS) mostly coded in BLISS.
I used to work for a very large computer manufacturer. There were times when we tech folk were expected to be available 24x7. The company had a way of dealing with that -- "standby pay". For every 8 hours you carried the pager, you got one hour of your regular rate. This applied to exempt as well as non-exempt employees. If you got paged, and you had to go in to the office, you got an additional $100.
Now, that was almost 20 years ago, and sadly that large computer manufacturer is no more, but it was not the "standby pay" that did them in. (Completely missing the boat was what did them in.) But I can tell you, my manager had to make rules about who could carry the pager, and how often, because everybody wanted to have it, especially around the holidays. If you carried the pager for a week, you got paid for 7 days instead of 5.
As far as pagers and smart phones, TURN THE DAMN THINGS OFF if you want to have a life. If your employer wants you available 24x7, then negotiate that into your wages, or find something else do to. Another employer of mine gave us two-way pagers that would acknowledge the page when it was received -- but it could not receive anything when dumped into an steel ammo can. "My pager never went off" and "my phone has no signal at home" do not have to be lies. Control your own life.
There are legitimate reasons why you may wish to "circumvent" the copy-protection on your game console. For instance, suppose you have a XBox, and you want to run the XBox Media Center (xmbc.org) on it. Guess what! The XBox won't run unsigned code. XBMC is not signed. The only way to run XBMC (the "award winning free and open source software") on the XBox (which you **own**) is to either install a modchip, or use a "softmod" -- both of which actually do "circumvent" the copy-protection scheme in the XBox. A Federal Crime. That's a sad state of affairs, and why the DMCA is bad.
Modding your console for your own personal use to run F/OSS software (or something else) is not going to attract the attention of the feds.
Running a business (that's the "for personal financial gain" in the complaint) modifying game consoles so people can run bootleg (or other stolen) games -- well, that is criminal behavior. This guy had it coming to him.
I have resisted buying into BluRay because my TV has only analog (component video) inputs. No DVI. No HDMI. I have expected this move for quite some time. What TFH does not say is that even existing BluRay players with analog outputs can have the analog outputs disabled by the content. So why should I risk buying a movie that would not play on my setup?
I'm not going to replace my perfectly good HDTV with one that has the broken HDMI interface -- no way. So no BluRay for me.
To my knowledge, the FCC has never gone door kicking without other federal law enforcement agencies present, and there was always a warrant, and it was always for egregious violations.
The FCC might come around your home or business, and politely ask to see some of your gear if there is a reported interference or regulatory compliance issue. They do have the right to do this, and it is certainly reasonable. If you do not cooperate and let them finish their interference or compliance investigation, they may take legal action against you, and in severe cases, could result in the SWAT team at your door. But that would not be without warning and due process, including registered letters, attempted service of legal notices, etc.
I've read about FCC enforcement actions, and they definitely prefer the carrot to the stick...
kinda hard to confiscate the phone when the offender stuffs it into her underwear!
Sadly, these days many high schools have these "resource officers" because the school administrators are afraid to administer discipline for risk of immediate violence from the student, or legal action taken by the parent.
I remember the "good old days" when I was paddled (!) by the principal for being a little shit. When I told my dad about it, he paddled me more.
The student was not arrested for texting. The student was arrested for refusing to turn over the phone and lying to the instructor and the police officer about it.
Had this student turned over the phone to the instructor, there likely would have been a small punishment, perhaps confiscation of the phone and detention. Now this kid gets a juvenile record (purged at 18), a court appearance, and will perhaps learn a lesson...
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I looked at as much press as I could find about this, and I cannot find anything that says exactly what IP Android infringes on. I smell a rat.
Has anybody seen anything that names the protected IP? What is it in Android that infringes on Microsoft's IP? And if Android does infringe, why aren't they going after Motorola?
More Linux FUD from Microsoft and friends.
Dice!
free clothing! bonus!
Hmm. Sounds suspiciously like the droud in Death By Ecstasy
Me, I want a tasp.
You haven't been given squat.
If you accepted new receivers from them, then they extended your contract, possibly without your knowledge and/or consent.
They came out to my house because I told them that their installation (done by their contractor) was not compliant with the national electric code (no ground on outside antenna) and they tried to extend my contract from that date. That did not go over well.
In my opinion, they are thieves and criminals, and they get away with it because they have an unlimited budget for litigation. I expect that the State of Washington will be delayed and appealed ad infinitum, and I expect that the judgement will reflect that.
As far as your bill goes, if it gets too high, you can always switch -- if you can get out of your contract. (See paragraph 2, above.) Good luck with that.
Having recently experienced the 2nd happiest day of a directv consumer, I can say I hate those bastards.
Their contract is written such that they can change the any of the terms (including channel lineup) without notice, and you are stuck. Never again will I buy their service.
Sure, I have no love for Comcast, and I think their service is somewhat more expensive, but they are reasonably up-front about the costs, and you can cancel at any time.
I wish great success for the State of Washington's lawsuit, and not only for the good of the customers in that state, but also hoping there are some large punitive damages awarded, too.
Many years ago, a very smart man explained to me that my customer is not the compiler. My customer is the next poor slob who has to work on the source code. Software maintenance is a fact of life. Someday, somebody is going to need to read and understand what is in your code.
Ignore maintainability at your peril. If people on my team ignore maintainability, they become unemployed.
Do you even know who Donald Knuth is? I'll take his advice over yours, any day.
I used to read Salon a fair bit, but after their paywall went up, never.
as far as I am concerned, they fucked themselves. And even if it's free now, the mindshare has been lost, there's better content on boing boing.
Back in the day, DEC (RIP) would pay us salaried engineers 1 hour of pay rate for every 8 hours of standby. If you were on call 24x7, you would get paid for 7 days instead of 5. Then, if you had to go in to the office, there was $100 for that.
People in my group were lined up to carry the on-call pager.
I had another job, where the on-call pager was a two-way type, and it would acknowledge the page. There was no on-call pay there. I would put that pager into a metal ammo can when I got home from work. Curiously, it could not receive (or acknowledge) pages while in the ammo can.
Perfectly working, syntactically and logically correct code can be utter crap if it is not maintainable.
Years ago, a very smart man told me that I was not writing code for the compiler, I was writing code for the next poor slob that had to work on it. Let's face it, most source code is going to be subject to rework or maintenance over its life span, so let's do what we can to make that next developer productive. The key to this is reasonable commenting.
One of the best ways I know of to teach developers to write maintainable code is to have them do support and maintenance for a while. Developers learn quickly which styles work for maintenance, and which ones don't.
As far as I am concerned, source code needs to look good as well as compile. So I would go one step beyond TFA to say that style, indentation, proper symbol names, use of constants where appropriate, and (yes) proper commenting are all good indicators of quality in source code.
It's one thing to build product.
It's another to build quality product.
The Chinese are doing well on the first, not so well on the second.
I expect that these turbines will be cheap, and I don't mean only inexpensive.
As always, you get what you pay for.
Tomato appears to be free (as in beer), and at my house runs for *months* at a time on a WRT54G hardware version 3.
This is the most stable and reliable nat/wifi/router setup I have run in a long time.
I guess I did not care that much that the GUI code is not completely free as in FSF free. The Linksys firmware it came with was certainly less free...
My HDTV has no digital inputs. Yes. It is old. It only has analog component video. It *is* 1080i, though, and I don't feel like I should have to replace it because the MPAA is worried I will try to copy their crappy content through analog video cables. It also renders my friend's fancy video projector obsolete for the same reason. This move is totally anti-consumer.
There is a seriously large digital hole. Its called making a 1 for 1 copy of a DVD. Yes, I know that does not affect broadcast programs, but it is most likely the biggest piracy issue the movie studios face. Saving broadcast television through the "analog hole" will suffer loss of resolution due to noise and non-linearity of the analog path, not to mention the loss when the content is re-encoded to MPEG or whatever. It's not like a digital (read "lossless") copy at all.
There is little or nothing the studios can do to block wholesale piracy & bootlegging, which is their biggest exposure. Recording of broadcast television for one's personal, private use is completely reasonable and definitely should be allowed, just the same as we have been able to record and timeshift television programming with VCR and DVR technology for the last 30 years.
Paypal is operating as an unlicensed bank. I am amazed that the Feds have not already come down on them. And don't get me started on Ebay...
Spoken like somebody who has never coded for a highly pipelined processor.
None of those you mentioned (8048, VAX, etc.) meet that requirement. They are all antiques.
The AC's statement was completely true. I'm not a compiler jock (though I know a few), but I can tell you that most modern high-end processors need more smarts than a traditional "assembler" can support to get best performance out of the hardware. A good example is the macro-assembler for the Alpha AXP and Itanium processors. It is technically a optimizing compiler. You could write assembler, and use an actual assembler to target these processors, but the performance and maybe operation of your code would suffer due to details of the processor architecture. These problems are understood and worked around by compiler writers.
You could hand optimize that assembly code. Sure. It's possible. And it is even done. But not very often. I don't think anyone in their right mind would want to hand-optimize an entire OS worth of assembler to run on a modern processor.
Read about the hazards of pipelined processors here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(computer_architecture)
Carefully coded C (or some other high-level languages) can approach (though not meet) the performance of carefully coded assembler, and is much more portable and maintainable. Your DEC VAX had its operating system (VMS) mostly coded in BLISS.
Spoken like somebody who has never coded for a highly pipelined processor.
None of those you mentioned (8048, VAX, etc.) meet that requirement. They are all antiques.
The AC's statement was completely true. I'm not a compiler jock (though I know a few), but I can tell you that most modern high-end processors need more smarts than a traditional "assembler" can support to get best performance out of the hardware. A good example is the macro-assembler for the Alpha AXP and Itanium processors. It is technically a optimizing compiler. You could write assembler, and use an actual assembler to target these processors, but the performance and maybe operation of your code would suffer due to details of the processor architecture. These problems are understood and worked around by compiler writers.
You could hand optimize that assembly code. Sure. It's possible. And it is even done. But not very often. I don't think anyone in their right mind would want to hand-optimize an entire OS worth of assembler to run on a modern processor.
Read about the hazards of pipelined processors here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_(computer_architecture)
Carefully coded C (or some other high-level languages) can approach (though not meet) the performance of carefully coded assembler, and is much more portable and maintainable. Your DEC VAX had its operating system (VMS) mostly coded in BLISS.
I used to work for a very large computer manufacturer. There were times when we tech folk were expected to be available 24x7. The company had a way of dealing with that -- "standby pay". For every 8 hours you carried the pager, you got one hour of your regular rate. This applied to exempt as well as non-exempt employees. If you got paged, and you had to go in to the office, you got an additional $100.
Now, that was almost 20 years ago, and sadly that large computer manufacturer is no more, but it was not the "standby pay" that did them in. (Completely missing the boat was what did them in.) But I can tell you, my manager had to make rules about who could carry the pager, and how often, because everybody wanted to have it, especially around the holidays. If you carried the pager for a week, you got paid for 7 days instead of 5.
As far as pagers and smart phones, TURN THE DAMN THINGS OFF if you want to have a life. If your employer wants you available 24x7, then negotiate that into your wages, or find something else do to. Another employer of mine gave us two-way pagers that would acknowledge the page when it was received -- but it could not receive anything when dumped into an steel ammo can. "My pager never went off" and "my phone has no signal at home" do not have to be lies. Control your own life.
Pets are not "glorified livestock".
Livestock has a purpose, which is usually to provide food, and/or to provide labor.
Pets (in this case dogs) have a different purpose, which is to provide companionship, comfort, entertainment, and, yes, friendship.
There are legitimate reasons why you may wish to "circumvent" the copy-protection on your game console. For instance, suppose you have a XBox, and you want to run the XBox Media Center (xmbc.org) on it. Guess what! The XBox won't run unsigned code. XBMC is not signed. The only way to run XBMC (the "award winning free and open source software") on the XBox (which you **own**) is to either install a modchip, or use a "softmod" -- both of which actually do "circumvent" the copy-protection scheme in the XBox. A Federal Crime. That's a sad state of affairs, and why the DMCA is bad.
Modding your console for your own personal use to run F/OSS software (or something else) is not going to attract the attention of the feds.
Running a business (that's the "for personal financial gain" in the complaint) modifying game consoles so people can run bootleg (or other stolen) games -- well, that is criminal behavior. This guy had it coming to him.
I have resisted buying into BluRay because my TV has only analog (component video) inputs. No DVI. No HDMI. I have expected this move for quite some time. What TFH does not say is that even existing BluRay players with analog outputs can have the analog outputs disabled by the content. So why should I risk buying a movie that would not play on my setup?
I'm not going to replace my perfectly good HDTV with one that has the broken HDMI interface -- no way. So no BluRay for me.
This is patently ridiculous, and it is a troll.
To my knowledge, the FCC has never gone door kicking without other federal law enforcement agencies present, and there was always a warrant, and it was always for egregious violations.
The FCC might come around your home or business, and politely ask to see some of your gear if there is a reported interference or regulatory compliance issue. They do have the right to do this, and it is certainly reasonable. If you do not cooperate and let them finish their interference or compliance investigation, they may take legal action against you, and in severe cases, could result in the SWAT team at your door. But that would not be without warning and due process, including registered letters, attempted service of legal notices, etc.
I've read about FCC enforcement actions, and they definitely prefer the carrot to the stick...
I guess I mis-read the title.
I thought it said "Judge Orders Record Company Execs to Death."
Damn.
You mean you used to watch Hulu on XBMC. No more.
kinda hard to confiscate the phone when the offender stuffs it into her underwear!
Sadly, these days many high schools have these "resource officers" because the school administrators are afraid to administer discipline for risk of immediate violence from the student, or legal action taken by the parent.
I remember the "good old days" when I was paddled (!) by the principal for being a little shit. When I told my dad about it, he paddled me more.
The student was not arrested for texting. The student was arrested for refusing to turn over the phone and lying to the instructor and the police officer about it.
Had this student turned over the phone to the instructor, there likely would have been a small punishment, perhaps confiscation of the phone and detention. Now this kid gets a juvenile record (purged at 18), a court appearance, and will perhaps learn a lesson...