This is common practice among patent trolls. Often they will even acquire defunct product designs (cheaply) from other companies just so that they can say "see, we make a product that uses this IP". But if you scratch just past the surface you will see there is really no intention of selling that product. Case in point, you can't actually download this supposed product and there is no pricing information. They don't have a sales team, they don't issue press releases, the don't try in any way to market the product, it's all a facade.
If you're writing your application from scratch without using anybody else's libraries, you're free to release it under whatever license you like, even if it happens to talk to a GPL'd client plugin thingie, and even if you wrote that GPL'd client plugin thingie around somebody else's GPL'd library.
Which GPL are you reading that says this is OK? If the license doesn't permit it then it's a question for copyright law of whether you're making a derivative work. I would say that in this case you ARE, unless it's a bone fide plugin in the sense that it can be unplugged too.
The GPL is not explicit on this, it's just that linking is the established rule of thumb. Last I checked, the specifics of multiple processes vs linking are only mentioned in the FSF's FAQ, so it's only a guideline for interpretation.
I think a reasonable test would be to ask: is my program still mostly useful even if the GPLd helper/plugin is removed (modulo the specific removed function)?. If so, then I think it could be argued that your program is NOT a derivative work and that the GPL helper is governed the same as, say, a GPLd user application bundled with a commercial Unix/OSX distro. Personally I don't think it should matter how exactly it communicates with your code - what makes launching a process any different from a function call here?
Conversely: artificially doing contortions with your software to move essential libraries out to a separate app is not only in bad faith, but it doesn't work around the license at all. And if you ever had to argue otherwise, anyone turning up your slashdot story would not probably work in your favor.
IMHO the GPL, even v3, needs some work to clarify this question and also to close the hole for the software-as-a-service industry to modify GPL code without reciprocating.
He's right, if you were to ask a joe sixpack to calculate EBIT, they would probably not take into account "fictional" (purely accounting) costs. Moreover, EBITDA matches the "flow" idea of money more (going in the cashflow direction).
Sigh... then we're in agreement that it's NOT profitability, but cashflow. Do you know the difference? Does Joe Six Pack?
If I shut down a business and hold a liquidation sale, I could be "cashflow positive" for a while. That is not profit. It is grossly misleading to pretend you're "making money" because EBITDA was positive for a brief time. We can only read between the lines on this Tesla story but that seems to be the claim.
Furthermore based on TFA they are practicing some very questionable revenue rec given that the cars were ordered and built over the past year or two. So on both the expense AND the revenue sides they are wildly stretching the truth in order to squeak out some positive PR.
earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization
The latter two of which are absolutely huge for a brand new manufacturing operation that is not running at capacity. EBITDA always makes me chuckle a little. See it started as EBIT, then became EBITDA because the PHBs said no, really we need to look profitable so we can get this loan or whatever. Pretty soon it'll be EBITDAP (payroll) and then EBITDAPHAB (hookers and blow) etc.
Kind of like how the mortgage brokers in their heyday were allowed to use a modified credit rating, essentially calculated as "here's what your credit rating WOULD be if we overlooked all the negative stuff". I wish I was kidding.
I'm afraid Mr. Grimmelman has a severe English comprehension deficiency. The instructions are a single sentence, clear as day. It says paste the article text you want to use. Not " paste whatever you like, and if our javascript form counts the words for you then consider it assertion of copyright by us.".
This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and NOT the capital account. [applause] Thank you. Thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
The utilities want the government to foot the bill for them to have modern telemetry as well as a bunch of routine maintenance type of stuff - old transformers rebuilt, etc - stuff that improves their old, core business. Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work, when in fact, nothing could be further than the truth. Grid-interactive systems actually RELIEVE load on the grid, and they do it especially at peak hours when AC loads kick in. And it works just great on the plain old dumb grid we have today. They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something! It's a crock of shit - propaganda and political games to try and fleece us of money that should otherwise be spent on deploying modern technologies. Not saying the grid doesn't have its place, on the contrary: grid-interactive is a very elegant solution. But the supposed smart-grid is being pushed in a very underhanded way and it's not at all what people think it is.
Unless you are very experienced designing with TTL chips, you won't get far in HDL without first getting good coverage of logic theory. My experience may be a little dated as it was 10 years ago that I started learning programmable logic, but at the time I enjoyed the first edition of Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design. Not that logic theory has changed, but newer books might come with better examples or easier to use software. What I liked about that book was that it covered the theory in a very complete way while introducing the vhdl concepts at a manageable pace.
As far as development tools, they're overwhelmingly Windows based. You may have to run a VM so that you can use the most common tools (eg Xilinx WebPACK) until you're up to speed, then try a linux solution later. There are lots of hardware trainers out there - it's really not that important which one you use initially, although if whatever books you're reading have a recommended one, use that.
Your experience in the software world will help you somewhat, but be prepared for a vastly steeper learning curve than picking up a new programming language. There are not a lot of engineers who go very deep on both the software and hardware/logic sides - if you do you will end up with some valuable skills indeed. good luck!
This is just an gas powered electric generator, the likes of which rube goldberg would be proud of. You'd be better off siphoning a thimble of fuel from each car, selling it, and using the proceeds to buy electricity from the utility.
If they believed a few remained, why are they so surprised to find one of them?
It's a figure of speech. If lots of them remained, they would not have been surprised. But few remained, therefore they were surprised. Seriously, how hard was that?
The community in which a server farms is found surely has a need for what will be thousands of gallons a day. To the benefit of all, I'd suggest diverting a small amount of the heated water (hopefully near boiling) to another piping system in the building....
I'm sure it could be designed as a closed system with a heat exchange into the ground or outdoors. Indeed, it is the high temperature (relative to outdoors) at which the water is extracted straight off the CPU which makes this more efficient than air conditioning.
However if you wanted to let it feed into the building's hot water system, it turns out there is already a really elegant way to do that: a tempering valve. It's a mechnical device which chooses the right amount of hot and cold water (each of arbitrary, variable temperatures) to produce some fixed output temperature. So to make moderately hot water you can combine some warm water from the servers and some super hot water from the boiler. The "free" server heat offsets the amount of water that needs to be heated by conventional means.
The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.
I can't agree with you there - book publishers (with the help of Amazon) are playing this spectacularly well in comparison. For one thing, they have not launched legal attacks and propaganda campaigns against their most avid consumers. For another, books (both print and e/kindle) are priced fairly. And finally, it is much easier for the layman to find and purchase books online than to pirate them.
You have given us nothing to go on here as far as your business case, so I'll be brief:
Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want [...]
The first you will learn about money is that it lets you do exactly that. Make sure it's enough that in case things don't work out with Megacorp, you can get back to doing whatever it is you enjoy.
I have four SPARCstation4s in my attic. With one CPU each, I could switch away from all of them. I wonder if I could get $32,000 of software and services from IBM...
Sure, if you're going to buy four of their boxes at list price. But don't expect to sell those "software and services" on ebay for $32,000.
Slashdot Mirror
seriously, what the hell?
But my teacher told me it mean's "HERE COMES AN S"!
Immune? No. Reasonably secure by design, yes.
This is common practice among patent trolls. Often they will even acquire defunct product designs (cheaply) from other companies just so that they can say "see, we make a product that uses this IP". But if you scratch just past the surface you will see there is really no intention of selling that product. Case in point, you can't actually download this supposed product and there is no pricing information. They don't have a sales team, they don't issue press releases, the don't try in any way to market the product, it's all a facade.
You are extremely gullible.
If you're writing your application from scratch without using anybody else's libraries, you're free to release it under whatever license you like, even if it happens to talk to a GPL'd client plugin thingie, and even if you wrote that GPL'd client plugin thingie around somebody else's GPL'd library.
Which GPL are you reading that says this is OK? If the license doesn't permit it then it's a question for copyright law of whether you're making a derivative work. I would say that in this case you ARE, unless it's a bone fide plugin in the sense that it can be unplugged too.
I think a reasonable test would be to ask: is my program still mostly useful even if the GPLd helper/plugin is removed (modulo the specific removed function)?. If so, then I think it could be argued that your program is NOT a derivative work and that the GPL helper is governed the same as, say, a GPLd user application bundled with a commercial Unix/OSX distro. Personally I don't think it should matter how exactly it communicates with your code - what makes launching a process any different from a function call here?
Conversely: artificially doing contortions with your software to move essential libraries out to a separate app is not only in bad faith, but it doesn't work around the license at all. And if you ever had to argue otherwise, anyone turning up your slashdot story would not probably work in your favor.
IMHO the GPL, even v3, needs some work to clarify this question and also to close the hole for the software-as-a-service industry to modify GPL code without reciprocating.
He's right, if you were to ask a joe sixpack to calculate EBIT, they would probably not take into account "fictional" (purely accounting) costs. Moreover, EBITDA matches the "flow" idea of money more (going in the cashflow direction).
Sigh... then we're in agreement that it's NOT profitability, but cashflow. Do you know the difference? Does Joe Six Pack?
If I shut down a business and hold a liquidation sale, I could be "cashflow positive" for a while. That is not profit. It is grossly misleading to pretend you're "making money" because EBITDA was positive for a brief time. We can only read between the lines on this Tesla story but that seems to be the claim.
Furthermore based on TFA they are practicing some very questionable revenue rec given that the cars were ordered and built over the past year or two. So on both the expense AND the revenue sides they are wildly stretching the truth in order to squeak out some positive PR.
There are lies, damned lies, and accounting.
earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization
The latter two of which are absolutely huge for a brand new manufacturing operation that is not running at capacity. EBITDA always makes me chuckle a little. See it started as EBIT, then became EBITDA because the PHBs said no, really we need to look profitable so we can get this loan or whatever. Pretty soon it'll be EBITDAP (payroll) and then EBITDAPHAB (hookers and blow) etc.
Kind of like how the mortgage brokers in their heyday were allowed to use a modified credit rating, essentially calculated as "here's what your credit rating WOULD be if we overlooked all the negative stuff". I wish I was kidding.
The Jefferson quote helps him make the point.
He may as well have quoted Elmer Fudd, since Jefferson was talking about inventions (patents), not copyright.
I'm afraid Mr. Grimmelman has a severe English comprehension deficiency. The instructions are a single sentence, clear as day. It says paste the article text you want to use. Not " paste whatever you like, and if our javascript form counts the words for you then consider it assertion of copyright by us.".
I'm now four years from my bankruptcy and have 50% of my annual salary in unsecured revolving tradelines (i.e: credit cards)
Good luck with your next bankruptcy, and thanks for your contribution to society.
a normal office guy like me can't
Whether you think you can or you can't, you're right. - Henry Ford
This is my favourite. You see, we lease this back from the company we sold it to, and that way, it comes under the monthly current budget and NOT the capital account. [applause] Thank you. Thank you. We try to do our best. Well, do carry on.
http://www.geocities.com/pythoninsanity/Meaningoflife.html
The utilities want the government to foot the bill for them to have modern telemetry as well as a bunch of routine maintenance type of stuff - old transformers rebuilt, etc - stuff that improves their old, core business. Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work, when in fact, nothing could be further than the truth. Grid-interactive systems actually RELIEVE load on the grid, and they do it especially at peak hours when AC loads kick in. And it works just great on the plain old dumb grid we have today. They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something! It's a crock of shit - propaganda and political games to try and fleece us of money that should otherwise be spent on deploying modern technologies. Not saying the grid doesn't have its place, on the contrary: grid-interactive is a very elegant solution. But the supposed smart-grid is being pushed in a very underhanded way and it's not at all what people think it is.
Unless you are very experienced designing with TTL chips, you won't get far in HDL without first getting good coverage of logic theory. My experience may be a little dated as it was 10 years ago that I started learning programmable logic, but at the time I enjoyed the first edition of Fundamentals of Digital Logic with VHDL Design. Not that logic theory has changed, but newer books might come with better examples or easier to use software. What I liked about that book was that it covered the theory in a very complete way while introducing the vhdl concepts at a manageable pace.
As far as development tools, they're overwhelmingly Windows based. You may have to run a VM so that you can use the most common tools (eg Xilinx WebPACK) until you're up to speed, then try a linux solution later. There are lots of hardware trainers out there - it's really not that important which one you use initially, although if whatever books you're reading have a recommended one, use that.
Your experience in the software world will help you somewhat, but be prepared for a vastly steeper learning curve than picking up a new programming language. There are not a lot of engineers who go very deep on both the software and hardware/logic sides - if you do you will end up with some valuable skills indeed. good luck!
My swimmers weren't as eager and it saved me a lot of child support money.
So doing the dog saved you from screwing the pooch?
He's just asking what to use
This is just an gas powered electric generator, the likes of which rube goldberg would be proud of. You'd be better off siphoning a thimble of fuel from each car, selling it, and using the proceeds to buy electricity from the utility.
If they believed a few remained, why are they so surprised to find one of them?
It's a figure of speech. If lots of them remained, they would not have been surprised. But few remained, therefore they were surprised. Seriously, how hard was that?
There is a difference between religion and cult,
Do tell...
The community in which a server farms is found surely has a need for what will be thousands of gallons a day. To the benefit of all, I'd suggest diverting a small amount of the heated water (hopefully near boiling) to another piping system in the building ....
I'm sure it could be designed as a closed system with a heat exchange into the ground or outdoors. Indeed, it is the high temperature (relative to outdoors) at which the water is extracted straight off the CPU which makes this more efficient than air conditioning.
However if you wanted to let it feed into the building's hot water system, it turns out there is already a really elegant way to do that: a tempering valve. It's a mechnical device which chooses the right amount of hot and cold water (each of arbitrary, variable temperatures) to produce some fixed output temperature. So to make moderately hot water you can combine some warm water from the servers and some super hot water from the boiler. The "free" server heat offsets the amount of water that needs to be heated by conventional means.
The book publishing industry will go the way of the music and movie industries, just a bit slower since reading text on a monitor is still not quite as easy as a real book.
I can't agree with you there - book publishers (with the help of Amazon) are playing this spectacularly well in comparison. For one thing, they have not launched legal attacks and propaganda campaigns against their most avid consumers. For another, books (both print and e/kindle) are priced fairly. And finally, it is much easier for the layman to find and purchase books online than to pirate them.
You have given us nothing to go on here as far as your business case, so I'll be brief:
Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want [...]
The first you will learn about money is that it lets you do exactly that. Make sure it's enough that in case things don't work out with Megacorp, you can get back to doing whatever it is you enjoy.
I have four SPARCstation4s in my attic. With one CPU each, I could switch away from all of them. I wonder if I could get $32,000 of software and services from IBM...
Sure, if you're going to buy four of their boxes at list price. But don't expect to sell those "software and services" on ebay for $32,000.