I have a question, perhaps it does not pertain to this situation... but where do you draw the line about code being stolen?
For example, if lets say I stole a simple 3 line chunk of code that converts a date from one format to another, and threw it in my multi-thousand line project (which is all original except for those 3 lines), would it really be breaking the GPL? I understand that it of course technically is.. but at what point would the 'borrowing' of code be of such basic elements that really, there is no other way to solve a particular problem?
Sure my above example sucks (it's friday afternoon, brains already gone)... but what amount of code warrants a "you're stealing you son of a b*tch" title, and what warrants a "meh... it's not rocket science, hell, there's no other way to do it, even if he hadn't looked at the code, this is the logical solution anyone with half a brain would come to..."...???
Government intervention?
on
NARAS vs. the RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist.
And the sky is blue... That conclusion is obvious. What I want to know is why the government hasn't stepped in against the RIAA... Microsoft had anti-trust against them... The RIAA has got to have something... Isn't having more than half the US population hating you enough? Any lawyers out there care to elaborate... Is there some legal thing I'm missing that we could use to finally hurt the RIAA?
I honestly hope these people end up suffering. Not only do they interfere with the investigation by removing debris, but they put other people's saftey at risk by transporting hazardous materials without the proper equipment. And to top it all off, they're violating EBAY's terms...
Ok, having the worked with many Real time OS's and embedded OS's... what I want to know is why the hell do they need Windows? It's bloated, the interface is not suitable for a driver (as in car driver)...
Develop your own RTOS... hell, grab any simple Real Time OS, be it VxWorks for example, add a display driver and an input driver (which can be developed at a very reasonable cost (Take a look at what the military uses..) Then from there add routines to communicate with your 70 or so embedded processors and voila, a stable, easy to maintain, not full of useless crap, system. Don't want to invest in an RTOS? (They can be pricey...:P ) Stick to a modified version of Linux. I don't recall the exact build name, but there is a mod (or more than one) out there that make Linux practically realtime... and that's all you need for these gizmos... operating a phone, changing seat positions, etc... There you go... cheap, damned reliable (be it stripped down linux, or some other RTOS), no crap to mess up the functionality, since the only thing in the code is the bare minimum OS and drivers to control the devices you need to control (nothing more, nothing less), and a simple UI.
Ok... Someone care to tell me how much Microsoft paid to get BMW to use their WinCE for something that it clearly is not good for? Dealing with lots of unique and independent devices is not Microsoft's strong suit. To get WinCE to be reliable (as the previous poster put it), you would need to strip it to nothing more than a damned memory manager and a Task scheduler, and write custom drivers for EVERYTHING. Why bother? It's easier to start with just a bare bones OS. There are SOOOOO many other, BETTER, choices out there... There had to be one hell of a good bribe on Microsoft's part... Either that, or some dumbass making decisions at BMW don't know dick all about embedded device programming...
That's my $0.02... And no, I'm not a microsoft hater... I just don't agree with what WinCE is meant to be used for...
After returning it to APC, they claimed it had failed because it wasn't designed for a United States voltage. Evidently this unit should have gone to Russia, but somehow it ended up in my lap.
Ok, ignoring the fact that you missed all the likely signs, such as, it came in a Russian box, with russian instructions, with russian branding, etc...
Explain to me how the hell you plugged it into your wall? THE PLUGS ARE DIFFERENT IN EUROPE. You wouldn't have been able to plug it in. You are full of CRAP!
Come on, Microsoft has listed these problems for years now... in the form of Service packs and hot fix descriptions... Sure it wasn't in a bullet form list... but each description had at least one thing from the list...
The real problem is lack of time to properly test code. Somehow in modern businesses, very little time is allocated to GOOD, extensive, useful testing for vulnerablities in apps.
Most users don't give a fuck about the Back button. They use once in a while. Hell if you took the back button out most users wouldn't even know it was gone. And when they do use the back button, it's not to go back 10 or 20 times but maybe 1 or 2.
Do you have proof to back up your claim? I'm not disputing your observation, but without proof, it's just an opinion. If you actually got data to show as proof of your 'opinion', then you have just conducted research (gathering data). So even though the actual research is on a subject that appears very narrow, possibly with little to gain from the results, it is still data gathered to help show usage patterns, and is used by this group to attempt to modify the functionality, thus changing, and hopefully optimizing the general usage patterns.
Waste of time? No. Revolutionary? Hell no. Necessary? Yes, at the very least we can use their research to help disprove your 'opinion', that the average user wouldn't even notice the back button was missing.
How exactly is that research? It seems to be a pretty trivial piece of code to write. Hell it could be done in Visual Basic in 20 minutes I bet.
Ok, first, ignoring your ignorant claim that it can be done in 20 minutes (it would need at least 2 days of QA testing, not to mention tonnes of time in beta), the research is not regarding the code, its regarding the user experience. I can clone the start menu from Windows XP with relatively little effort, but had I actually had to design the Windows XP start menu from scratch, it would have taken a crap load of research. Sure the code is easy, it's the design, and more importantly the human element that is important. If people don't find the menu intuitive they won't use it. Same goes for this 'new' back functionality. Obviously you are thinking about this from the point of view of a code monkey. If everyone were to think like that, computers would still be hard to use for the masses.
So to answer your question, it is research because they are researching how people use the existing back button, what users want the back button to do, what they actually do with it, and how to change the back button to make the majority of internet users happier with it's functionality.
An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit...
17,232th? What the hell? No, no, no... you see this is the reason that Microsoft didn't want java included in the first place... stupid syntactical errors like the above can be generated quite easily using java, but asp libraries prevent such mistakes, and would have genereated '17,232nd' as the proper response.
Well, unless of course a human wrote that... in which case, shame on you... proof read dang it!
But on a serious note (to help save my karma), putting aside that this is microsoft, and they are evil, doesn't imposing the will of SUN onto microsoft violate something? or at the very least lower them to the same level? Microsoft wasn't preventing java from running on their os, they simple did not BUNDLE a competing product. What the hell? I don't see the problem. What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives? I think not! Although MS deserves it... as a whole, this is not the right thing to do.
will someone hurry up and patent spamming? And then sue the bastards for royalty? that should put an end to it... If these stupid people at amazon get away with their patent, we have a strong case for the spamming patent, sure it's been done before, sure it's done by most everyone, sure they didn't enforce their IP... I still want the patent dang it!
And in other news, DMCA2 is now being drafted... sounds like they're pluggin the legal holes... and what's this paragraph about? 'We the RIAA and MPAA reserve the right to f*$@ you up the...'...
I've just changed my mind... what if you can skin it to LCARS (star trek OS)
You call yourself a Star Trek fan? LCARS is the Star Trek UI, not OS... sheesh...
What next? Are you going to compare anti-neutrinos to anti-tachyons? Refute the warp 10 speed barrier with some whacked out trans-warp space folding argument?
I thought not.:P
and on a totally offtopic (as if this post wasn't off topic enough), What marketing genius would say 'as good as star wars' in a commercial for Star Trek:Nemesis? Piss off as many die hard fans as you can Paramount!
I can't see myself playing a first person shooter on this thing... Or a racing game... Heck, this thing just doesn't lend itself to games.... And that means that there is no reason for people like me (who make up most of the 'blow lots of money on new toy' market) to buy these things.
I hate this... why do we have to register with the NYTimes to read these articles? I don't give my info to RadioShack when I buy my batteries, and I damn well ain't gonna give my info to NYTimes for some article.
Why not post a google link? Why support the NYTimes campaign to identify all us anonymous cowards?
ahhh nuts, I forgot to check 'Post Anonymously'... gooodbye precious Karma!
DirecTivo is the best... it has a satellite decoder built right in... now show me how to build one of those, and I'll be impressed... but until then, I can't easily change channels on my sat reciever with my pc, and I don't feel like forking out huge amounts of money for two tv tuner cards and two sat receivers just so I can watch one channel and record another...
Tivo still has a place in the market... shrinking yes, but it's not cost effective to try and replace it's functionality... at least not yet...
Seriously.. Nothing interesting is said in this story... the guy ripped apart an x10 camera and threw it in a model train... I've ripped apart many things, mostly old robot toy type things, and stuffed motors, speakers, microphones, etc in them, but then again so has countless other people... and it's not interesting enough to post to the world... just like this article...
I used to spend days tweaking my settings, getting the latest drivers, etc... SCREW IT!
The only way to really get performance is to get good hardware. No amount of tweaking your old Geforce 2mx is going to get the same performance as a Geforce 4 ti4200 even with the worst system settings... Prove me wrong people!
Sorry, I was misleading in my original post. I use visual studio.net for C++ programming. VB and C#, though sufficient for App programming, really leave a lot to be desired when it comes to driver development... But thanks for the link, it does seem like a nice project...:)
I wonder if this works if you threaten to pirate their software? Seriously... I need Visual Studio.Net... I can't find an open source alternative that meets my needs... but if I threaten to pirate, will they give me a discount???
Slashdot Mirror
I have a question, perhaps it does not pertain to this situation... but where do you draw the line about code being stolen?
For example, if lets say I stole a simple 3 line chunk of code that converts a date from one format to another, and threw it in my multi-thousand line project (which is all original except for those 3 lines), would it really be breaking the GPL? I understand that it of course technically is.. but at what point would the 'borrowing' of code be of such basic elements that really, there is no other way to solve a particular problem?
Sure my above example sucks (it's friday afternoon, brains already gone)... but what amount of code warrants a "you're stealing you son of a b*tch" title, and what warrants a "meh... it's not rocket science, hell, there's no other way to do it, even if he hadn't looked at the code, this is the logical solution anyone with half a brain would come to..."...???
Skinner: "Ok, now chew through my ball-sack"...
The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist.
And the sky is blue... That conclusion is obvious. What I want to know is why the government hasn't stepped in against the RIAA... Microsoft had anti-trust against them... The RIAA has got to have something... Isn't having more than half the US population hating you enough? Any lawyers out there care to elaborate... Is there some legal thing I'm missing that we could use to finally hurt the RIAA?
Individuals are prohibited from selling government property.
:P
Screw federal law... Ebay terms, man... EBAY TERMS!!!
I honestly hope these people end up suffering. Not only do they interfere with the investigation by removing debris, but they put other people's saftey at risk by transporting hazardous materials without the proper equipment. And to top it all off, they're violating EBAY's terms...
Those Jack Asses!
Ok, having the worked with many Real time OS's and embedded OS's... what I want to know is why the hell do they need Windows? It's bloated, the interface is not suitable for a driver (as in car driver)...
:P ) Stick to a modified version of Linux. I don't recall the exact build name, but there is a mod (or more than one) out there that make Linux practically realtime... and that's all you need for these gizmos... operating a phone, changing seat positions, etc... There you go... cheap, damned reliable (be it stripped down linux, or some other RTOS), no crap to mess up the functionality, since the only thing in the code is the bare minimum OS and drivers to control the devices you need to control (nothing more, nothing less), and a simple UI.
Develop your own RTOS... hell, grab any simple Real Time OS, be it VxWorks for example, add a display driver and an input driver (which can be developed at a very reasonable cost (Take a look at what the military uses..) Then from there add routines to communicate with your 70 or so embedded processors and voila, a stable, easy to maintain, not full of useless crap, system. Don't want to invest in an RTOS? (They can be pricey...
Ok... Someone care to tell me how much Microsoft paid to get BMW to use their WinCE for something that it clearly is not good for? Dealing with lots of unique and independent devices is not Microsoft's strong suit. To get WinCE to be reliable (as the previous poster put it), you would need to strip it to nothing more than a damned memory manager and a Task scheduler, and write custom drivers for EVERYTHING. Why bother? It's easier to start with just a bare bones OS. There are SOOOOO many other, BETTER, choices out there... There had to be one hell of a good bribe on Microsoft's part... Either that, or some dumbass making decisions at BMW don't know dick all about embedded device programming...
That's my $0.02... And no, I'm not a microsoft hater... I just don't agree with what WinCE is meant to be used for...
After returning it to APC, they claimed it had failed because it wasn't designed for a United States voltage. Evidently this unit should have gone to Russia, but somehow it ended up in my lap. Ok, ignoring the fact that you missed all the likely signs, such as, it came in a Russian box, with russian instructions, with russian branding, etc...
Explain to me how the hell you plugged it into your wall? THE PLUGS ARE DIFFERENT IN EUROPE. You wouldn't have been able to plug it in. You are full of CRAP!
Come on, Microsoft has listed these problems for years now... in the form of Service packs and hot fix descriptions... Sure it wasn't in a bullet form list... but each description had at least one thing from the list...
The real problem is lack of time to properly test code. Somehow in modern businesses, very little time is allocated to GOOD, extensive, useful testing for vulnerablities in apps.
Most users don't give a fuck about the Back button. They use once in a while. Hell if you took the back button out most users wouldn't even know it was gone. And when they do use the back button, it's not to go back 10 or 20 times but maybe 1 or 2.
Do you have proof to back up your claim? I'm not disputing your observation, but without proof, it's just an opinion. If you actually got data to show as proof of your 'opinion', then you have just conducted research (gathering data). So even though the actual research is on a subject that appears very narrow, possibly with little to gain from the results, it is still data gathered to help show usage patterns, and is used by this group to attempt to modify the functionality, thus changing, and hopefully optimizing the general usage patterns.
Waste of time? No. Revolutionary? Hell no. Necessary? Yes, at the very least we can use their research to help disprove your 'opinion', that the average user wouldn't even notice the back button was missing.
How exactly is that research? It seems to be a pretty trivial piece of code to write. Hell it could be done in Visual Basic in 20 minutes I bet.
Ok, first, ignoring your ignorant claim that it can be done in 20 minutes (it would need at least 2 days of QA testing, not to mention tonnes of time in beta), the research is not regarding the code, its regarding the user experience. I can clone the start menu from Windows XP with relatively little effort, but had I actually had to design the Windows XP start menu from scratch, it would have taken a crap load of research. Sure the code is easy, it's the design, and more importantly the human element that is important. If people don't find the menu intuitive they won't use it. Same goes for this 'new' back functionality. Obviously you are thinking about this from the point of view of a code monkey. If everyone were to think like that, computers would still be hard to use for the masses.
So to answer your question, it is research because they are researching how people use the existing back button, what users want the back button to do, what they actually do with it, and how to change the back button to make the majority of internet users happier with it's functionality.
An anonymous reader was the 17,232th person to submit...
17,232th? What the hell? No, no, no... you see this is the reason that Microsoft didn't want java included in the first place... stupid syntactical errors like the above can be generated quite easily using java, but asp libraries prevent such mistakes, and would have genereated '17,232nd' as the proper response.
Well, unless of course a human wrote that... in which case, shame on you... proof read dang it!
But on a serious note (to help save my karma), putting aside that this is microsoft, and they are evil, doesn't imposing the will of SUN onto microsoft violate something? or at the very least lower them to the same level? Microsoft wasn't preventing java from running on their os, they simple did not BUNDLE a competing product. What the hell? I don't see the problem. What next? DVD manufacturers have to bundle competing (free) DVD player software with their drives? I think not! Although MS deserves it... as a whole, this is not the right thing to do.
will someone hurry up and patent spamming? And then sue the bastards for royalty? that should put an end to it... If these stupid people at amazon get away with their patent, we have a strong case for the spamming patent, sure it's been done before, sure it's done by most everyone, sure they didn't enforce their IP... I still want the patent dang it!
can I be put on the DO-NOT-SPAM-ME list????
What do you mean it's only for telephones?
I'd like you to know Mr. Politician, I voted for the other guy.
And in other news, DMCA2 is now being drafted... sounds like they're pluggin the legal holes... and what's this paragraph about? 'We the RIAA and MPAA reserve the right to f*$@ you up the...'...
Oh my...
I've just changed my mind... what if you can skin it to LCARS (star trek OS)
:P
You call yourself a Star Trek fan? LCARS is the Star Trek UI, not OS... sheesh...
What next? Are you going to compare anti-neutrinos to anti-tachyons? Refute the warp 10 speed barrier with some whacked out trans-warp space folding argument?
I thought not.
and on a totally offtopic (as if this post wasn't off topic enough), What marketing genius would say 'as good as star wars' in a commercial for Star Trek:Nemesis? Piss off as many die hard fans as you can Paramount!
I can't see myself playing a first person shooter on this thing... Or a racing game... Heck, this thing just doesn't lend itself to games.... And that means that there is no reason for people like me (who make up most of the 'blow lots of money on new toy' market) to buy these things.
So, just one question... what does this package do any different than what I have with my regular distro's?
I hate this... why do we have to register with the NYTimes to read these articles? I don't give my info to RadioShack when I buy my batteries, and I damn well ain't gonna give my info to NYTimes for some article.
Why not post a google link? Why support the NYTimes campaign to identify all us anonymous cowards?
ahhh nuts, I forgot to check 'Post Anonymously'... gooodbye precious Karma!
DirecTivo is the best... it has a satellite decoder built right in... now show me how to build one of those, and I'll be impressed... but until then, I can't easily change channels on my sat reciever with my pc, and I don't feel like forking out huge amounts of money for two tv tuner cards and two sat receivers just so I can watch one channel and record another...
Tivo still has a place in the market... shrinking yes, but it's not cost effective to try and replace it's functionality... at least not yet...
The real question is, was life seeded from an object from space carrying single celled life? Has this been disproven/proven yet?
Everyone is thinking it, so I gotta say it...
WTF???
Seriously.. Nothing interesting is said in this story... the guy ripped apart an x10 camera and threw it in a model train... I've ripped apart many things, mostly old robot toy type things, and stuffed motors, speakers, microphones, etc in them, but then again so has countless other people... and it's not interesting enough to post to the world... just like this article...
I used to spend days tweaking my settings, getting the latest drivers, etc... SCREW IT!
The only way to really get performance is to get good hardware. No amount of tweaking your old Geforce 2mx is going to get the same performance as a Geforce 4 ti4200 even with the worst system settings... Prove me wrong people!
What they will finally admit that the royal family is actually from some distant star system? I knew it!
Sorry, I was misleading in my original post. I use visual studio.net for C++ programming. VB and C#, though sufficient for App programming, really leave a lot to be desired when it comes to driver development... But thanks for the link, it does seem like a nice project... :)
I wonder if this works if you threaten to pirate their software? Seriously... I need Visual Studio .Net... I can't find an open source alternative that meets my needs... but if I threaten to pirate, will they give me a discount???