With the age of their lift system, you'd think the Russians would have the kinks ironed out by now. I can understand something new like their Mars mission failing, but five commercial launches in a year?
Those payloads are far too expensive and time consuming to trust to a lift provider with such a poor track record.
More to the point, they expect to be paid as experienced developers as soon as they learn a technology well enough to claim they know it. Experience is more than syntax and toolkits -- it's knowing all the subtleties and tricks to wringing performance out of the technology involved and knowing how to work around "gotchas" in the systems.
Typical greedy impatient ADHD kids. They're not professionals in my book, and would never be considered for any position I have a say in hiring for.
The GPLv2 violations are the least of your worries -- they're laying claim to owning your work. That's blatant copyright theft, regardless of the license the software was provided under.
Was this something that they were able to do in a day after getting the idea?
A week?
A year?
I got my original idea of inverting a LALR parser in late 1986 in a 400-series compiler course. I remember discussing it with my lab partner, who's now a professor with Queen's University, specializing in (what else) compiler theory.
That was the inception, the spark, the egg-gets-knocked-up moment.
Gestation lasted 25 years for it to grow into something worthy of being turned into a product or service.
Ideas cannot be stopped or prevented; the risk of an idea being used by a terrorist depends on how much effort and luck is required to go from idea to implementation.
Just because the drug cartels are building custom narco-subs and fielding entire cell phone networks doesn't mean even they have the funding and tenacity to do bioweapons research on this scale or level of complexity, so I don't feel at ALL threatened by terrorists because of this research or it's publication.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
Perhaps most importantly, I believe their is risk to everything you choose to do, including the risk of your work being abused. No amount of legislation, threat, or outrage will prevent it, so I believe the benefits of open R&D far outweigh the risks of "terrorists might figure it out."
The United States of Dumberica: Home of Chicken Little Security Politics since 9/11
You fools -- you let the terrorists win. You let them change you at the heart and soul of what the country used to be about.
That Apple has a miraculous epiphany of industry leadership and publishes their patented gestures and behaviours as part of a tablet UI standard in memory of the CUA, royalty free and open for any tablet vendor to use
Yes, I naively harken back to the days of coopetition.
Considering she's been retired since I read the last of her books, I don't know what you're talking about.
I never claimed it was a miracle of plot and characterization, only that her writing style is so vivid it's like watching a movie when you read her writing. Books are entertainment, and if you expect too much out of them, you'll always be disappointed.
And as per usual, the American's can't deal with the truth and vote down anything that reminds them that their idealistic and naive view of what their country used to be about has long been abandoned.
In retrospect, I'm glad I never succeeded in getting my permanent residency in the US. It stopped being a place I wanted to call home when they over-reacted to the terrorist attack on 9/11, and has only gone downhill since.
May the American people wake up to what their legislators and businesses are doing to a once great nation.
Only Americans, once the land of the free protected by their constitutional rights, are now willing slaves to corporatism. The rest of the world does not suffer CEO's who get paid 800% of what their employees do. The rest of the world does not allow EULAs and such to override constitutional rights.
Sorry, but the US is screwed. Big time. Your nation has gone so far off it's ideals and once shining examples that it's literally scary to the rest of the world, because you're trying to shove your fucked up legal approaches on the rest of us.
We won't have it. Screw the american system -- you DO NOT rule the world.
At least they're comparable series -- both were headed by men who can't act.
Let's face it, although William Shatner has had a long and illustrious career, he's always played Shatner. No one has ever forgotten who he is, how he inflects, or how he makes fun of his own career and himself. He's never played a role so well that the audience suspended their belief and believed he was anyone but Bill Shatner.
A good actor takes on a new persona, and hauls the audience along for the ride.
I don't understand what the big deal is. Most of the ideas and algorithms for voice recognition and knowledge processing were already tabled and researched back when I was in 4th year University, in 1986. We just didn't have the compute power to IMPLEMENT anything back then.
It's good to see such technology coming to the forefront, but it's not new ideas. While specifics of the algorithms may be patentable, the concepts pre-date any attempts to patent the ideas, with loads of published research papers and proposals existing as prior art.
Here's a tidbit for you: I first had the idea of inverting a LALR compiler to produce code in 1986 while working on my compiler project for a 400 series class. I worked at it for years, with different tools and technologies, failing time and time again. It wasn't until 1997-1998 that I came up with an approach that was workable, with MSIsa 1.0 in the Java 1.1 era. It took until now to bring it from the conceptual "It can work" implementation to something production worthy for 2012.
But even if I'd patented the idea when I had it, the patent would have expired before I produced a marketable product.
I have another question for you: What is it about Americans that they can't resolve differences without a judge, jury, and obscene settlement involved?
Is it so horrible to just do the honourable thing and resolve issues and differences without being forced to?
It's really a shame that Majel herself isn't still alive to provide the core voice work for the product. People would have swarmed in droves to have the actual Star Trek computer voice at their beck and call.
Then again, who knows how much audio tape and footage there is of her locked away? Maybe there's enough of a phoneme and phrase collection out there that they could resurrect her voice. Couldn't be any more difficult than extracting the phonemes from someone else's voice, provided there's enough data to do the job.
A window manager is the portion of code that deals with things like resizing and positioning of windows.
A desktop is the full-screen application that implements the window-manager functionality in the Gnome/KDE era; with Motif and CDE, the window manager only managed windows and did NOT include a desktop -- the X display server was left "blank".
I am NOT using the term incorrectly. The definition of how window managers are implemented have changed from being a window manager alone to being a combination of a window manager and a desktop.
I've been programming GUIs a hell of a lot longer than the desktop metaphor has been around.
Directed emails addressed to a specific individual that explain how and why a potential partner or provider is contacting them are not only legal, but necessary as the "cold call" of the internet age.
Broadcasting to purchased mailing lists using BCC addressing or mailing list processors are spam, and a completely different scummy approach to advertising that smacks of the door to door salesman who won't take "No" for an answer. It's intrusive, it's rude, and the only thing spammers do is guarantee that I will never, ever, ever buy a product from the spaming vendor.
Maybe KDE was a "Windows rip-off" for 1.0, but the latest releases look nothing like Windows. Microsoft did not and never claimed to have created the concept of the window-based GUI -- even they credit Xerox/PARC with that.
I'm not a fan of KDE myself, but I am a HUGE fan of the Qt approach to applications development, having spent almost 15 years working with an older commercial product called Neuron Data Open Interface that had the same goals back when portability meant X/11 for Unix, Apple, and Microsoft implementations of the abstract widgets using the native widgets of the platforms in question.
On a side note, Java's JFC is similarly a Java-based implementation of a Qt-style widget framework, with Java itself providing the "OS API" portability. JFC has native windowing systems renderings of it's widgets, adapting it's look and feel to the native platform as best it can.
A key characteristic of Neuron Data like systems is their use of graphics primitives by the toolkit to support fully custom cross-platform widget development. You are NOT restricted to the set of common primitive widgets that are available across all platforms, but instead have the tools to implement ports of uncommon and new widgets using the graphics primitives. This slows down the rendering a bit, resulting in occasionally sluggish performance for JFC, but I haven't found native widget binding approaches used by Eclipse to perform better enough to be willing to sacrifice the ability to develop fully custom cross-platform widgets.
Neuron Data was good to me. They kept me profitably employed doing custom applications for almost 15 years of my early career. I learned a LOT about applications portability through the Neuron Data headers and macros, far more than I ever did from any other approaches I've seen to source code portability.
Yes, I'm a fan of the macro hell that some portable application programmers despise. I spent too many years working with such technology to slough it off as being a bad idea; it's a GREAT idea.
Qt is a full application portability toolkit, not just a collection of widgets. It's Neuron Data's Open Interface concept reworked as open source and delivered on steroids. Not a new concept, but a very powerful one, and not to be confused with a basic widget library like Motif of GTK+ that only deal with widgets and have no concern for portability at their heart.
A completely different animal, despite it's lineage.
As to people claiming this new GUI is a KDE rip-off: KDE is a collection of applications and a desktop/window manager based on Qt. KDE is not the underlying Qt technology on which it's built, but an application of that technology.
Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.
These are nations which have seen families divided by an artificial border for decades. If it's put to a vote, I think their hearts will win out over the economics, and they'll want to see their own families again.
Some things aren't about money. Nationalism and family are among those "not money" things.
You know, in all the years since '96 when I bought my first computer with a hard drive, I've had ONE drive go bad on me -- many years ago when IBM got burned by the overheating control card problem.
I've used pretty much every vendor's devices, and they all worked flawlessly under some pretty seriously abusive workloads for up to 10 years. I scrapped drives because they were too small to waste a drive slot any more with newer hardware, not because they failed on me.
A fat cache, good rotation speed, and standard SATA/PATA logic. The only thing that's less differentiated is the memory market.
Maybe there's one looking in your window right now, and if so, there's no law that says it shouldn't.
No? How about the laws used to restrain peeping toms? The placement of surveillance cameras by unauthorized personelle in places like bathrooms has been upheld as a privacy violation in many nations, and is illegal.
Or the (victorious!) claims against Google's street view "surveillance" of homes that violated their right to privacy by mounting their cameras higher than "normal" pedestrian or vehicle traffic views the street from?
Just because the US FBI likes to place GPS trackers on people without warrants doesn't mean that behaviour has been found legal, either.
Why do so many privacy advocates go around screaming like Chicken Little about the falling sky of government intrusion and oppression, instead of creatively explaining how current law can be used to leash the hounds!
Read the article. The photos were not published to a "select group", they were PUBLIC in Facebook terms.
This case involved someone complaining that their publicly published photos were publicly redistributed by the media, and the judge rightly said that if it's on Facebook and tagged as public, it is fair game for anyone.
I say again: if you don't want it being publicly accessed, why would you post it to a public web service? Send it as an email, host it on your own secure server requiring logins to view the images, etc. You wouldn't post it as a Slashdot journal entry/attachment and then claim "but I said the links were to my private photos -- you shouldn't have been clicking on my links!"
The judge's argument is very rational: if no attempt is made to protect the media from access, it cannot be considered "private" under the law.
Thanks for the explanation, but I don't think there's actually a section of IP law called "trade secrets", is there? They're a construct of employment contracts and vendor agreements, not something with official protection all their own under the law as with patents or copyrights.
Motif is a window manager. Gnome is a window manager. KDE is a window manager.
Or rather, to be pedantic, each of those GUI toolkits includes a "desktop" application that provides their window manager functionality.
I'm not misusing the term; you don't know what it means, historically. There was a time when window managers and widget kits didn't come with a bazillion canned applications as KDE and Gnome do nowadays.
Slashdot Mirror
With the age of their lift system, you'd think the Russians would have the kinks ironed out by now. I can understand something new like their Mars mission failing, but five commercial launches in a year?
Those payloads are far too expensive and time consuming to trust to a lift provider with such a poor track record.
More to the point, they expect to be paid as experienced developers as soon as they learn a technology well enough to claim they know it. Experience is more than syntax and toolkits -- it's knowing all the subtleties and tricks to wringing performance out of the technology involved and knowing how to work around "gotchas" in the systems.
Typical greedy impatient ADHD kids. They're not professionals in my book, and would never be considered for any position I have a say in hiring for.
The GPLv2 violations are the least of your worries -- they're laying claim to owning your work. That's blatant copyright theft, regardless of the license the software was provided under.
Sue.
Sue hard.
Sue fast.
Show no mercy.
Was this something that they were able to do in a day after getting the idea?
A week?
A year?
I got my original idea of inverting a LALR parser in late 1986 in a 400-series compiler course. I remember discussing it with my lab partner, who's now a professor with Queen's University, specializing in (what else) compiler theory.
That was the inception, the spark, the egg-gets-knocked-up moment.
Gestation lasted 25 years for it to grow into something worthy of being turned into a product or service.
Ideas cannot be stopped or prevented; the risk of an idea being used by a terrorist depends on how much effort and luck is required to go from idea to implementation.
Just because the drug cartels are building custom narco-subs and fielding entire cell phone networks doesn't mean even they have the funding and tenacity to do bioweapons research on this scale or level of complexity, so I don't feel at ALL threatened by terrorists because of this research or it's publication.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
Perhaps most importantly, I believe their is risk to everything you choose to do, including the risk of your work being abused. No amount of legislation, threat, or outrage will prevent it, so I believe the benefits of open R&D far outweigh the risks of "terrorists might figure it out."
The United States of Dumberica: Home of Chicken Little Security Politics since 9/11
You fools -- you let the terrorists win. You let them change you at the heart and soul of what the country used to be about.
Yes, I naively harken back to the days of coopetition.
Considering she's been retired since I read the last of her books, I don't know what you're talking about.
I never claimed it was a miracle of plot and characterization, only that her writing style is so vivid it's like watching a movie when you read her writing. Books are entertainment, and if you expect too much out of them, you'll always be disappointed.
And as per usual, the American's can't deal with the truth and vote down anything that reminds them that their idealistic and naive view of what their country used to be about has long been abandoned.
In retrospect, I'm glad I never succeeded in getting my permanent residency in the US. It stopped being a place I wanted to call home when they over-reacted to the terrorist attack on 9/11, and has only gone downhill since.
May the American people wake up to what their legislators and businesses are doing to a once great nation.
The world's best author. Her words flow like video for me, they're so descriptive.
C. J. Cherryh's website
It's illegal in Canada, too.
Only Americans, once the land of the free protected by their constitutional rights, are now willing slaves to corporatism. The rest of the world does not suffer CEO's who get paid 800% of what their employees do. The rest of the world does not allow EULAs and such to override constitutional rights.
Sorry, but the US is screwed. Big time. Your nation has gone so far off it's ideals and once shining examples that it's literally scary to the rest of the world, because you're trying to shove your fucked up legal approaches on the rest of us.
We won't have it. Screw the american system -- you DO NOT rule the world.
If you want to do business with me, come to Canada. I'm not setting foot in the legal nightmare that is the US with my business.
At least they're comparable series -- both were headed by men who can't act.
Let's face it, although William Shatner has had a long and illustrious career, he's always played Shatner. No one has ever forgotten who he is, how he inflects, or how he makes fun of his own career and himself. He's never played a role so well that the audience suspended their belief and believed he was anyone but Bill Shatner.
A good actor takes on a new persona, and hauls the audience along for the ride.
I don't understand what the big deal is. Most of the ideas and algorithms for voice recognition and knowledge processing were already tabled and researched back when I was in 4th year University, in 1986. We just didn't have the compute power to IMPLEMENT anything back then.
It's good to see such technology coming to the forefront, but it's not new ideas. While specifics of the algorithms may be patentable, the concepts pre-date any attempts to patent the ideas, with loads of published research papers and proposals existing as prior art.
Here's a tidbit for you: I first had the idea of inverting a LALR compiler to produce code in 1986 while working on my compiler project for a 400 series class. I worked at it for years, with different tools and technologies, failing time and time again. It wasn't until 1997-1998 that I came up with an approach that was workable, with MSIsa 1.0 in the Java 1.1 era. It took until now to bring it from the conceptual "It can work" implementation to something production worthy for 2012.
But even if I'd patented the idea when I had it, the patent would have expired before I produced a marketable product.
I have another question for you: What is it about Americans that they can't resolve differences without a judge, jury, and obscene settlement involved?
Is it so horrible to just do the honourable thing and resolve issues and differences without being forced to?
It's really a shame that Majel herself isn't still alive to provide the core voice work for the product. People would have swarmed in droves to have the actual Star Trek computer voice at their beck and call.
Then again, who knows how much audio tape and footage there is of her locked away? Maybe there's enough of a phoneme and phrase collection out there that they could resurrect her voice. Couldn't be any more difficult than extracting the phonemes from someone else's voice, provided there's enough data to do the job.
Ok, let's clarify a bit.
Qt is the GUI toolkit.
KDE is the applications built using that toolkit.
A window manager is the portion of code that deals with things like resizing and positioning of windows.
A desktop is the full-screen application that implements the window-manager functionality in the Gnome/KDE era; with Motif and CDE, the window manager only managed windows and did NOT include a desktop -- the X display server was left "blank".
I am NOT using the term incorrectly. The definition of how window managers are implemented have changed from being a window manager alone to being a combination of a window manager and a desktop.
I've been programming GUIs a hell of a lot longer than the desktop metaphor has been around.
Directed emails addressed to a specific individual that explain how and why a potential partner or provider is contacting them are not only legal, but necessary as the "cold call" of the internet age.
Broadcasting to purchased mailing lists using BCC addressing or mailing list processors are spam, and a completely different scummy approach to advertising that smacks of the door to door salesman who won't take "No" for an answer. It's intrusive, it's rude, and the only thing spammers do is guarantee that I will never, ever, ever buy a product from the spaming vendor.
Maybe KDE was a "Windows rip-off" for 1.0, but the latest releases look nothing like Windows. Microsoft did not and never claimed to have created the concept of the window-based GUI -- even they credit Xerox/PARC with that.
I'm not a fan of KDE myself, but I am a HUGE fan of the Qt approach to applications development, having spent almost 15 years working with an older commercial product called Neuron Data Open Interface that had the same goals back when portability meant X/11 for Unix, Apple, and Microsoft implementations of the abstract widgets using the native widgets of the platforms in question.
On a side note, Java's JFC is similarly a Java-based implementation of a Qt-style widget framework, with Java itself providing the "OS API" portability. JFC has native windowing systems renderings of it's widgets, adapting it's look and feel to the native platform as best it can.
A key characteristic of Neuron Data like systems is their use of graphics primitives by the toolkit to support fully custom cross-platform widget development. You are NOT restricted to the set of common primitive widgets that are available across all platforms, but instead have the tools to implement ports of uncommon and new widgets using the graphics primitives. This slows down the rendering a bit, resulting in occasionally sluggish performance for JFC, but I haven't found native widget binding approaches used by Eclipse to perform better enough to be willing to sacrifice the ability to develop fully custom cross-platform widgets.
Neuron Data was good to me. They kept me profitably employed doing custom applications for almost 15 years of my early career. I learned a LOT about applications portability through the Neuron Data headers and macros, far more than I ever did from any other approaches I've seen to source code portability.
Yes, I'm a fan of the macro hell that some portable application programmers despise. I spent too many years working with such technology to slough it off as being a bad idea; it's a GREAT idea.
Qt is a full application portability toolkit, not just a collection of widgets. It's Neuron Data's Open Interface concept reworked as open source and delivered on steroids. Not a new concept, but a very powerful one, and not to be confused with a basic widget library like Motif of GTK+ that only deal with widgets and have no concern for portability at their heart.
A completely different animal, despite it's lineage.
As to people claiming this new GUI is a KDE rip-off: KDE is a collection of applications and a desktop/window manager based on Qt. KDE is not the underlying Qt technology on which it's built, but an application of that technology.
Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.
These are nations which have seen families divided by an artificial border for decades. If it's put to a vote, I think their hearts will win out over the economics, and they'll want to see their own families again.
Some things aren't about money. Nationalism and family are among those "not money" things.
FOX Sports made a shambles of hockey with their lazer light highlighting of the puck for people too lazy to pay attention to the game.
Maybe they can have the football leave tracers now, too. :p
Technology has no place in some arenas, and playing games is one of them. Games should not be such a serious business. They're games.
You know, in all the years since '96 when I bought my first computer with a hard drive, I've had ONE drive go bad on me -- many years ago when IBM got burned by the overheating control card problem.
I've used pretty much every vendor's devices, and they all worked flawlessly under some pretty seriously abusive workloads for up to 10 years. I scrapped drives because they were too small to waste a drive slot any more with newer hardware, not because they failed on me.
A fat cache, good rotation speed, and standard SATA/PATA logic. The only thing that's less differentiated is the memory market.
No? How about the laws used to restrain peeping toms? The placement of surveillance cameras by unauthorized personelle in places like bathrooms has been upheld as a privacy violation in many nations, and is illegal.
Or the (victorious!) claims against Google's street view "surveillance" of homes that violated their right to privacy by mounting their cameras higher than "normal" pedestrian or vehicle traffic views the street from?
Just because the US FBI likes to place GPS trackers on people without warrants doesn't mean that behaviour has been found legal, either.
Why do so many privacy advocates go around screaming like Chicken Little about the falling sky of government intrusion and oppression, instead of creatively explaining how current law can be used to leash the hounds!
Read the article. The photos were not published to a "select group", they were PUBLIC in Facebook terms.
This case involved someone complaining that their publicly published photos were publicly redistributed by the media, and the judge rightly said that if it's on Facebook and tagged as public, it is fair game for anyone.
I say again: if you don't want it being publicly accessed, why would you post it to a public web service? Send it as an email, host it on your own secure server requiring logins to view the images, etc. You wouldn't post it as a Slashdot journal entry/attachment and then claim "but I said the links were to my private photos -- you shouldn't have been clicking on my links!"
The judge's argument is very rational: if no attempt is made to protect the media from access, it cannot be considered "private" under the law.
Thanks for the explanation, but I don't think there's actually a section of IP law called "trade secrets", is there? They're a construct of employment contracts and vendor agreements, not something with official protection all their own under the law as with patents or copyrights.
Motif is a window manager. Gnome is a window manager. KDE is a window manager.
Or rather, to be pedantic, each of those GUI toolkits includes a "desktop" application that provides their window manager functionality.
I'm not misusing the term; you don't know what it means, historically. There was a time when window managers and widget kits didn't come with a bazillion canned applications as KDE and Gnome do nowadays.