I honestly don't care what the "real" reasons are behind the acquisition. I think it's a good change to the patent landscape for Google and everyone else involved. Android needs a real patent portfolio to trade off against if it's to be a serious long-term contender.
I think the Nortel patents were "Plan A." Motorola is "Plan B." There's probably plans C, D, and E as well.
However, some governments would very much like to extend that to banning anyone who disagrees with public policy, banning anyone who has encountered difficulties with the government, in short, banning anything they personally don't take a liking to. That, my friend, is what I consider "censorship."
Exactly what constitutes "hate" literature is open to some debate in most societies.
Both legitimate and illegitimate censorship require the same technology tools, though.
Screw the artists! We want to keep making money off them in perpetuity.
We'll just say they're "employees", despite the fact no taxes were deducted from the "payroll", no hours reported to any employment agencies, or anything else to indicate they were anything but independant artists.
Feh. The RIAA and MPAA make me sick with their fraudulent accounting games. They're nothing but thieves who contribute NOTHING OF VALUE.
I'll second that. Zimbra has the best HTML interface of any web-based email system I've ever used, but still supports "traditional" email clients as well.
Given the ever increasing debt load and utter failure to come up with a plan that will even reduce the deficit, much less balance the budget, the US deserves to have it's credit downgraded. Sorry, but you can't keep spending more than you take in without it coming back to bite you -- no matter how self important you are.
Watching a video you downloaded for personal use is copyright infringement, but I think selling bootlegs is theft. After all, if you sell bootlegs, you're applying a monetary value and can no longer claim that it has no intrinsic value.
Trolls, frauds, spammers, etc. hate having to identify themselves. Most people are proud of who they are and have no need to hide.
No one said social media sites had to be safe for activists under repressive regimes. In fact, were I in that situation, Facebook and Google+ would be the last place I'd want to be posting.
Mono tried to provide an alternative platform environment, but as far as I know even that was limited to Intel/AMD architecture Linux boxen. Without support from mainframes, AS400, Macintosh, portable devices, etc. it never even approached being a "cross platform" tool.
And the Mono project was an abject failure, lacking even fundamental communications security implementations that are critical for securing business applications communication.
The C#/.Net world is very well suited to front-end applications in the business world. You wouldn't want to write a video game or OS tools with it, but for it's target market, it's very effective. I particularly like how clean the class libraries are compared to the old Win32 SDK APIs.
The C language is just a meta-assembler for the PDP instruction set that hung around a lot longer than the machine. It's not an abstract language, as anyone who coded for a PDP can tell you.
Poor guy. I guess sooner or later he's going to have to learn how to manage his memory and understand how the underlying physical hardware works. That must be a real toughie for anyone who learned to "program" in the Java/C# world.
I think the bigger point that's missed is that if a size field were used, you'd still have the same buffer overflow problem if someone simply specified a size that didn't match the allocated memory, same as strncpy will happily try to keep writing to a buffer if you give it bad size information. What you really want to do is use a higher level language like C++ with StringBuffer and MemoryBuffer objects that keep track of not only the in-use size, but the allocated size of a buffer.
They're not over priced, but they're not discounted. And they do have to pay for staff, rent, heat, A/C, etc. out of their profits.
To be honest, I haven't bought a book period in many years. I used to buy the occasional techie book, probably 2-3/year, but nowadays I find that print copies are woefully out of date compared to resources available on the internet.
I used to read a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy when I was younger as well, but I kind of outgrew the habit and find I'd rather work on a pet project that keeps my mind churning than read a book nowadays. My attention span isn't what it used to be, and I no longer have 3-4 hours per evening to just curl up with a good book like I used to.
Some say print is dead; I don't think we're at that point yet. But print has definitely moved online and is slowly moving to electronic copies of books, so print will die. The timing of the deaths of individual stores is just a question of how long they hold on to life, but sooner or later they will die.
Hang on to whatever books you have -- in your lifetime they're going to be collectors editions just because they're on paper.
Once upon a time, handheld and portable devices were extremely limited in power, necessitating a special-purpose cut-down OS.
But with the advent of gigahertz plus and dual core CPUs for portable and handheld devices, it's now possible to run the same core OS on virtually all devices, enabling that common code base that allows a truly modular operating system. Sure Linux has been doing that already for years, but it was designed that way -- Windows wasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Two big losses in one week. The iconic NDP politician Jack Layton in Canada, and now Rob's leaving SlashDot.
Baby's all grown up, Rob. Time to let 'er go and find that "trophy wife" job instead of futzing further with Slashdot. :)
I honestly don't care what the "real" reasons are behind the acquisition. I think it's a good change to the patent landscape for Google and everyone else involved. Android needs a real patent portfolio to trade off against if it's to be a serious long-term contender.
I think the Nortel patents were "Plan A." Motorola is "Plan B." There's probably plans C, D, and E as well.
Oh really? Here I thought Canada was quite civilized, yet we have anti-hate-speech laws.
Germany has laws against Nazi propaganda.
In fact the only part of the world that I know of where hate speech is legal is the US.
Restriction of speech is still necessary:
However, some governments would very much like to extend that to banning anyone who disagrees with public policy, banning anyone who has encountered difficulties with the government, in short, banning anything they personally don't take a liking to. That, my friend, is what I consider "censorship."
Exactly what constitutes "hate" literature is open to some debate in most societies.
Both legitimate and illegitimate censorship require the same technology tools, though.
There's one hiding on every street. Honest.
Just start spying on your neighbours and report them to the government as Pinkos^H^H^H^H^H^HTerrorists.
Screw the artists! We want to keep making money off them in perpetuity.
We'll just say they're "employees", despite the fact no taxes were deducted from the "payroll", no hours reported to any employment agencies, or anything else to indicate they were anything but independant artists.
Feh. The RIAA and MPAA make me sick with their fraudulent accounting games. They're nothing but thieves who contribute NOTHING OF VALUE.
I'll second that. Zimbra has the best HTML interface of any web-based email system I've ever used, but still supports "traditional" email clients as well.
Given the ever increasing debt load and utter failure to come up with a plan that will even reduce the deficit, much less balance the budget, the US deserves to have it's credit downgraded. Sorry, but you can't keep spending more than you take in without it coming back to bite you -- no matter how self important you are.
Watching a video you downloaded for personal use is copyright infringement, but I think selling bootlegs is theft. After all, if you sell bootlegs, you're applying a monetary value and can no longer claim that it has no intrinsic value.
Trolls, frauds, spammers, etc. hate having to identify themselves. Most people are proud of who they are and have no need to hide.
No one said social media sites had to be safe for activists under repressive regimes. In fact, were I in that situation, Facebook and Google+ would be the last place I'd want to be posting.
What has theoretical freedom of ideas have to do with a full-scale commercial piracy operation?
I like C#/.Net, but playing "catch up" on features that have been out for years is really a crippling hinderance.
Best of luck to the Mono team. I will continue trying the new releases in hopes that it matures enough to be a truly cross-platform environment.
Mono tried to provide an alternative platform environment, but as far as I know even that was limited to Intel/AMD architecture Linux boxen. Without support from mainframes, AS400, Macintosh, portable devices, etc. it never even approached being a "cross platform" tool.
And the Mono project was an abject failure, lacking even fundamental communications security implementations that are critical for securing business applications communication.
The C#/.Net world is very well suited to front-end applications in the business world. You wouldn't want to write a video game or OS tools with it, but for it's target market, it's very effective. I particularly like how clean the class libraries are compared to the old Win32 SDK APIs.
The C language is just a meta-assembler for the PDP instruction set that hung around a lot longer than the machine. It's not an abstract language, as anyone who coded for a PDP can tell you.
Poor guy. I guess sooner or later he's going to have to learn how to manage his memory and understand how the underlying physical hardware works. That must be a real toughie for anyone who learned to "program" in the Java/C# world.
I think the bigger point that's missed is that if a size field were used, you'd still have the same buffer overflow problem if someone simply specified a size that didn't match the allocated memory, same as strncpy will happily try to keep writing to a buffer if you give it bad size information. What you really want to do is use a higher level language like C++ with StringBuffer and MemoryBuffer objects that keep track of not only the in-use size, but the allocated size of a buffer.
Oh yeah, those objects do exist. Doh!
Maybe he should RTFM.
They're not over priced, but they're not discounted. And they do have to pay for staff, rent, heat, A/C, etc. out of their profits.
To be honest, I haven't bought a book period in many years. I used to buy the occasional techie book, probably 2-3/year, but nowadays I find that print copies are woefully out of date compared to resources available on the internet.
I used to read a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy when I was younger as well, but I kind of outgrew the habit and find I'd rather work on a pet project that keeps my mind churning than read a book nowadays. My attention span isn't what it used to be, and I no longer have 3-4 hours per evening to just curl up with a good book like I used to.
Some say print is dead; I don't think we're at that point yet. But print has definitely moved online and is slowly moving to electronic copies of books, so print will die. The timing of the deaths of individual stores is just a question of how long they hold on to life, but sooner or later they will die.
Hang on to whatever books you have -- in your lifetime they're going to be collectors editions just because they're on paper.
I imagine at the heyday of auto manufacturing in the US, people were saying the same things about Detroit.
Guess they haven't figured out how to retire without working. It's a common problem from what I've heard. :)
6502 and Z80 were both considered 8-bit processors, despite having 16-bit address spaces.
Funny thing. I don't remember any arguments at all when the shift was 8-bit to 16-bit. :)
Once upon a time, handheld and portable devices were extremely limited in power, necessitating a special-purpose cut-down OS.
But with the advent of gigahertz plus and dual core CPUs for portable and handheld devices, it's now possible to run the same core OS on virtually all devices, enabling that common code base that allows a truly modular operating system. Sure Linux has been doing that already for years, but it was designed that way -- Windows wasn't.
But most of what they've "cut" was just decommissioning obsolete designs, while creating newer, more accurate, and more powerful weapons.
Oh come on. You change the type of sensor used and that's supposed to make it patentable?!?!
Lame...
It's not the children. It's not the elderly. It's not the pregnant women.
It's the people.
Nobody deserves the kind of privacy invasion that the TSA imposes in the US.
I do not agree to be spammed by a bank. I'll go to another one if they start.