So we have a giant asshole who has no trouble with letting his party infringe upon the copyrights of others, while pushing 3-strikes laws for everyone else. If he wants us to go along with that, he should ban his own political party from the internet on principle.
> the problem was she couldn't handle the media and was eaten alive.
Yeah, the media was REALLY tricky when pressing her for answers on all those nasty questions like,"What magazines do you read?" What kind of jerk wouldn't take, "All of them," as an answer? I'm sure that if she were president right now, we'd be having news stories like this one, discussing the depth of her thinking.
Running a country isn't all that hard, after all. Everyone knows that all you have to do is hire a bunch of people who agree with your politics and let them work everything out.
> Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.
Be that as it may, their intent was clear. They could have done it the normal way, but they went out of their way to make a crappier product. And, frankly, if I catch anyone pulling crap like this (sabotaging their own products in the name of "competition"), I go out of my way to harm their business by any legal means possible. Granted, there's not much I can do against a giant company like Intel, but I'll still try. And I can hold a grudge like that for quite a while, unless they do an about-face. And even though I can only do so much, I don't think I'm the only person who does this.
In other words, even if you think that businesses can or should be able to do this, make damn sure you don't pull crap like this yourself. Because if enough customers like me find out, we can and will try to drive you out of business. Heck, I go one further. I'll shaft even the businesses of those who think it's their right to do something like this, because I believe that they would feed me intentionally crippled products given the opportunity.
That AC below has it exactly right: "The accusation is that the compiler probed to see if the CPU was AMD based and if it was it stopped all optimizations, not for user safety or reliability but just to fuck over AMD."
That's what I came here to say. If you're afraid of public speaking, they can help. Only warning is that, if you have a small enough group (mine was ~20 people), you WILL end up talking. They're nice, though, and they'll help you start thinking on your feet, which is great for any time you're unexpectedly asked to address a crowd for ~5 minutes.
In terms of giving a longer speech, though, you really have to think about your goals. I used to teach basic internet use & word processor use to old people at the library in structured classes. I'd come up with a short list of goals for things I wanted them to know or be able to do and work from there.
For example, basic internet use might have a list of goals like this: * Learn what a URL is & how to navigate to one. * Learn to search the internet. * Learn what email addresses look like & how to get one. * Avoid common scams (419, etc.) * Choose decent passwords (the "four food groups" for a balanced password are lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols)
And for the word processor class, I might have a list like this: * Learn to make a new document * Learn to save it somewhere you can find it again * Learn to cut & paste * Make text bold/itallic/underlined * Double space & add page numbers * Print
Those lists existed entirely in my head. I had no slides, no PowerPoint. Just a whiteboard and I only really used it to write out URLs and a few other things. I'd start out by introducing myself ("I may be half your age, but I've been using computers for over 20 years now"), but there was no set order in which to cover those goals. As I went along, I started to get into a routine for some things (e.g. the "four food groups" for a good password), but mostly I tailored things to the class. Sometimes, I covered more than I did in other classes. Each of them was a one-shot deal, so it all depended on the class.
What you have to do is focus on getting through the material. It's sort of like crossing a suspension bridge. If you're afraid and someone tells you "don't look down!" all you will think about is "looking down" which will make you more afraid. Instead, focus on the other side of the bridge, as it were. So I always worried about not having the class run late and about covering as much as I could and after a little practice, it wasn't so bad. You always get a little nervous (at least, I do), but you learn to worry about the class instead of how worried you are.
They very well might have. If you check out their web page, you'll find that they're a luxury theater that does a lot of events like that. The bad thing is that the wretched site is made out of Flash, so it's almost unviewable.
Frankly, I wish I could install Flashblock & NoScript on every marketing executive & webdesigner's PC. Then maybe they'd understand just how bad ugly sites like that look.
We should contact the people at Muvico and let them know that the managers of the theater in Rosemont, IL were being total bastards about this. Here's the contact information I was able to dig up in about 5 minutes:
We know who decided to press charges because of TFA:
But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that’s not what she was doing — she was actually taping parts of her sister’s surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont. [...] Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped “two very short segments” of the movie — no more than four minutes total, he said.
Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said.
(emphasis added)
Muvico is a chain of 9 luxury theaters, as you can read on their about page:
Muvico Entertainment, L.L.C. (“Muvico” or “the Company”) is a growing chain of premium, megaplex motion picture theaters in the United States. The Company currently operates 154 screens in 9 locations located in Florida, California, and Illinois. The Company’s theaters have developed a reputation as true entertainment destinations — attracting patrons from as far as 25 miles away.
The damn site is full of flash & images, but here are the corporate officers who should hear about what the managers of the Rosemont, IL theater's actions:
President & CEO - Hal Cleveland General Counsel & CAO - Neil F Bretan VP of Finance - Alan Rainbeau VP of Operations - James E. Herd, Jr.
CONTACT US
MUVICO THEATERS 3101 N. Federal Hwy. 6th Floor Fort Lauderdale, FL 33306-1042
It's not the computers which suck at math, it's us! We all learn real or complex arithmetic, but computers only work with a subset of the rational numbers (and *which* subset they work with depends on the machine and perhaps even the compiler if it changes floats and doubles around).
The two aren't the same at all and you get a lot of crazy errors if you don't know what to avoid. That said, your link is a very good one. Lots of people think there's nothing wrong with if (a == b) where a & b are some kind of float...
> It's all speculation propagated by the AT&T Artificial Turf(TM) fanclub.
You're absolutely right, but you didn't give any citations. So I'll dig up a few of them for you. It seems like getting people to call something "racist" or to claim that it will "harm the disabled" are some of the most popular current lobbyist tactics. Why? Because no politician wants to be branded a racist.
Here are some places where corporate lobbyists have pulled this exact same trick:
* Critics of Rep. Conyers called "racist"... because they're against radio performance royalties which "exploit black musicians" even though the RIAA types pushing for these royalties are going to pocket most of them and exploit the artists far more than anyone else. (citation) This was in an NAACP resolution, incidentally.
* Lobbyists fearing a loss of Microsoft leverage stir up a bunch of disabled people who don't even know the difference between a file format and an application to protest ODF as harmful to the disabled. They also create a bogus story calling Peter Quinn "corrupt" (with the retraction to be printed later, in a place most people won't see it). (It's harder to find good links any more, but try this and this).
As you can see, this is a common trick being used by lobbyists. These groups aren't, incidentally, usually controlled by the lobbyists directly. They just get told what to think about some issue they don't fully understand by someone who happens to donate money to them. If you tell people that somebody is out to screw them, they'll be biased against it no matter what.
And it's funny on Net Neutrality, because if you remember, the one thing that everyone from the ACLU to the Christian Coalition protested was the idea that an ISP (I think it was AT&T) could pick any high-traffic website and say to them "we're going to throttle access to your website unless you pay up." Nowadays, people are all saying "what IS Net Neutrality, anyhow?" because they've forgotten what we're all against. Or they're worried that the government will try to create some rule against doing exactly what I just said and end up banning QoS, end-user traffic shaping, etc.
Part of the "confusion" is due to highly-paid lobbyists. Suppose there's some popular outcry against something a business wants to do. As with smoking and laws banning it in public. Then you do a few things:
* Find people who are naturally against this law (e.g. smokers) and convince them their rights are being "trampled." These are your allies. Fund them if need be. Create them if need be.
* Find out why people oppose smoking (it's deadly) and counter this with disinformation. First, they said that smoking hadn't been "proven" to cause anything, it was only "linked" to dozens of diseases, cancer, etc. but not "proven." After that failed, they did exactly the same thing with second-hand smoke. There's no doubt in the scientific community that cigarette smoke is harmful, even if you're not actually smoking. Someone will probably show up shortly to claim otherwise.
* Lobby politicians. As seen with Mr. Quinn, if you can find alleged dirt, even if it's bogus, you can use that to threaten them by "exposing" them to the press. You can also get your allies, especially if they're groups of minorities/disabled/whoever, to decry the move as somehow racist/homophobic/whatever if there's any possible way to make this mistake. No politician wants to be a racist or to have a group of disabled people protesting them.
There's more, but if you look around, you'll see the same fact pattern. The advice to "follow the money" has always been golden. It works on tobacco lobbyists, Microsoft lobbyists, RIAA lobbyists... ever
> If I'd been the TA, I would have given you 98% too despite your misreading of the spec, even without your "fix". Come on, a 0 for getting it 98% right? With a trivial fix?
There are a lot of people who care more about the test than the purpose it's supposed to serve. At work, we have a safety guy who gives us safety tests.
Some of the questions are absurd and do nothing to keep us safer. They could easily be changed to focus on the actual important safety issues we face. But he won't do it. He doesn't want to make the test "easier" even though he's asking people questions that simply aren't relevant to them.
Our last test was on fire extinguishers. There are four classes of fire: A (solid fueled fires), B (liquid fueled fires), C (electrical fires) and D (metal fires, e.g. from burning magnesium).
We have absolutely nothing that could case a class D fire at work. We have no fire extinguishers that can extinguish class D fires ANYWHERE. Half of the test was about class D fires.
We have lots of huge drums of highly flammable liquids (class B fires). There were only two questions about them, and one was "What kind of fire is a class B fire?" There was NO discussion about why you don't pour water on them (because you spread the fire). They did have a question asking what kind of fire water is good for, but it was so indirect it hardly made a point. Because the tests are mainly for the factory workers (but are given to everyone), I don't think that most of them understand why you don't pour water on a gas fire.
But all of them now know more than they ever cared to about metal fires, because that's the way the test was constructed.
To be fair to the TA, I believe we were allowed to tell them how to build & execute the program.
Mind you, these were incredibly simple Java programs, so 99% of them would have been something on the order of:
javac Prog.java java Prog
There was no need for anything more complex than that, unless you had to pull a fast one like I did. Fortunately, the point of that assignment wasn't to learn about file I/O (we'd already done that), so I don't think they cared too much, and I'm not really sure if they knew what I was doing or not.
> Once I had an assignment due and at the last minute before being evaluated, realized I had made a huge mistake, even though the code looked OK...
I once did almost the same thing, except that I wrote the entire assignment the first day we got it, during class. But I couldn't turn it in yet. And nearly forgot about it. So I turned it in at the last minute...
Except that I had misread the specification! Oh, the program worked just fine, but it printed everything to the screen. It was *supposed* to go to output.txt. That would've been trivial to change, if I actually had any time. But now I was out of time and couldn't change the code I had submitted...
With a bit of quick thinking, I actually managed to convince the TA that the problem was that you were supposed to execute the program as: java MyProg > output.txt
So instead of getting a zero, I got 98%, because I had failed to document this.
> Wait, isn't the world supposed to end in 2012? I can see it now: SCO will win the trial and the resulting warping of reality will cause pigs to fly, hell to freeze over, Linus to switch to Windows, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Nah. SCO will never win. They just plan to keep this case going so long that the world ends before the case does.
Well, to be fair, Microsoft didn't just come up with customXML on its own, they "partnered" with i4i, learned all about their product, then copied what they wanted from it and shafted i4i. While I do NOT like software patents and think they should be abolished, I'm not really going to defend Microsoft here. They're getting a bit of poetic justice, IMHO.
Granted, I would like this lawsuit to instead concern whatever contracts Microsoft had with i4i instead of patent law (claims which aren't worth pursuing when you can get $300 million judgments from patent claims), but I honestly think that this case is, overall, a good thing because it:
A) Highlights how ridiculously overpowered software patents--even those for fairly trivial "inventions"--have become. B) Punishes one of the biggest proponents of software patents, proving that they were lying when they talked up how much they "respect" IP.
So make no mistake: I still want to abolish software patents completely. They're patents on mathematics (and there's mathematical proof of their equivalence available) and they shouldn't exist. But as long as they do exist, I can think of nothing better to happen than for their biggest proponents to get shafted by one of the patents.
Not only is software math, there's an equivalence theorem relating the two. If that were not the case, the people over at MetaMath wouldn't be able to get very far.
In other words, that statement isn't just wrong, it's provably wrong and you'll have to prove the Curry-Howard correspondence wrong before you can claim otherwise. One of the weird properties of a correspondence is that you can turn software back into math.
I know that people think that math is all arithmetic and integrals or something, but that's just not true.
> What about our obesity problem, which is causes by diet and lack of exercise (in most cases)?
Other countries, like Canada, have obesity problems, too. He said that our *higher* death rates are due to it. So if you have the same problem with obesity in both countries, it's irrelevant (even though it does, in fact, cause lots of deaths).
Their habit has been to take what they want, rather than to buy out their smaller partners.
At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after seeing all the lawsuits brought by former partners, each of which alleges something along the lines of, "Microsoft said they wanted to work with us, copied all of our technology, then built their own product out of our ideas and kept all the money."
I admit, I have no way to verify any of those facts, but I remember there being several companies like that who successfully sued (or settled with) Microsoft, and because of that, I believe that's just the way Microsoft operates.
> I don't think anyone has ever sold writing analysis as a unique identifier. But it can be useful.
One problem with that is the human tendency to be overconfident as to how good these tests are. This happens everywhere. Court, business, whatever.
Say you have some metric at work (e.g. lines of code) that's easy to measure. If it's the only measure management has, it's what they'll use to measure how good you're doing. This applies even if the results are absurd, because they would rather believe that they have *some* idea what's going on than to accept the fact that they have no idea what's going on.
In summary, sometimes NO information is better than bad information, but people are very reluctant to accept that fact.
i4i's patent is here. customXML is just the name of the infringing feature in Microsoft Word, which is why it's referenced as such in the judgment. It's part of the OOXML specification, as well (not that anyone but Microsoft uses that).
In other words, 'customXML' is just a name for a particular way of using XML. It does NOT mean that every way of customizing XML has been patented (though I'm sure there are people trying to do that...).
In a related note, I wish that people would stop saying that Microsoft can't sell Word. They can sell Word. They just have to remove the custom XML feature from it first. The permanent injunction even spells out how to go about removing the feature.
Well, the term lawyers use isn't "patent troll" but NPE (non-practicing entity).
Under that term, i4i is, in fact, a practicing entity. That is to say, i4i makes an actual product using something like custom XML. No, i4i does not make a word processor, but Microsoft hasn't been barred from selling MS Word, only from incorporating custom XML into it. So the injunction only exists to prevent Microsoft from cannibalizing i4i's product.
Now, I do think their patent is a bit obvious and I don't like software patents in general. But if Microsoft had any sense, they would do an about-face and recant their amicus brief on Bilski, asking the Supreme Court to strike down all software patents, reducing their potential legal liability tremendously. Of course, I know they won't do that. And I don't know what deadlines are involved, so it's possible that it's too late for them to do that. But they might not be in this mess if they had seen the light and lobbied against software patents a long time ago.
And on a side note, I can't believe that there are Microsoft "partners" in this day and age who don't expect to get screwed. I wouldn't have done business with them to begin with. I can't name a single partner they haven't screwed over when given the incentive.
Slashdot Mirror
This is talking about a two-player mode. You need to press SELECT before you press START.
Don't be too sure about that! President Sarkozy just got his third strike as a party to copyright infringement!
So we have a giant asshole who has no trouble with letting his party infringe upon the copyrights of others, while pushing 3-strikes laws for everyone else. If he wants us to go along with that, he should ban his own political party from the internet on principle.
> the problem was she couldn't handle the media and was eaten alive.
Yeah, the media was REALLY tricky when pressing her for answers on all those nasty questions like,"What magazines do you read?" What kind of jerk wouldn't take, "All of them," as an answer? I'm sure that if she were president right now, we'd be having news stories like this one, discussing the depth of her thinking.
Running a country isn't all that hard, after all. Everyone knows that all you have to do is hire a bunch of people who agree with your politics and let them work everything out.
> Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.
Be that as it may, their intent was clear. They could have done it the normal way, but they went out of their way to make a crappier product. And, frankly, if I catch anyone pulling crap like this (sabotaging their own products in the name of "competition"), I go out of my way to harm their business by any legal means possible. Granted, there's not much I can do against a giant company like Intel, but I'll still try. And I can hold a grudge like that for quite a while, unless they do an about-face. And even though I can only do so much, I don't think I'm the only person who does this.
In other words, even if you think that businesses can or should be able to do this, make damn sure you don't pull crap like this yourself. Because if enough customers like me find out, we can and will try to drive you out of business. Heck, I go one further. I'll shaft even the businesses of those who think it's their right to do something like this, because I believe that they would feed me intentionally crippled products given the opportunity.
And, incidentally, it's not their "right" anyhow. Read chapter 15 of the US Code, in particular the section Intel is accused of violating, per the FTC complaint.
That AC below has it exactly right: "The accusation is that the compiler probed to see if the CPU was AMD based and if it was it stopped all optimizations, not for user safety or reliability but just to fuck over AMD."
That's what I came here to say. If you're afraid of public speaking, they can help. Only warning is that, if you have a small enough group (mine was ~20 people), you WILL end up talking. They're nice, though, and they'll help you start thinking on your feet, which is great for any time you're unexpectedly asked to address a crowd for ~5 minutes.
In terms of giving a longer speech, though, you really have to think about your goals. I used to teach basic internet use & word processor use to old people at the library in structured classes. I'd come up with a short list of goals for things I wanted them to know or be able to do and work from there.
For example, basic internet use might have a list of goals like this:
* Learn what a URL is & how to navigate to one.
* Learn to search the internet.
* Learn what email addresses look like & how to get one.
* Avoid common scams (419, etc.)
* Choose decent passwords (the "four food groups" for a balanced password are lowercase, uppercase, numbers and symbols)
And for the word processor class, I might have a list like this:
* Learn to make a new document
* Learn to save it somewhere you can find it again
* Learn to cut & paste
* Make text bold/itallic/underlined
* Double space & add page numbers
* Print
Those lists existed entirely in my head. I had no slides, no PowerPoint. Just a whiteboard and I only really used it to write out URLs and a few other things. I'd start out by introducing myself ("I may be half your age, but I've been using computers for over 20 years now"), but there was no set order in which to cover those goals. As I went along, I started to get into a routine for some things (e.g. the "four food groups" for a good password), but mostly I tailored things to the class. Sometimes, I covered more than I did in other classes. Each of them was a one-shot deal, so it all depended on the class.
What you have to do is focus on getting through the material. It's sort of like crossing a suspension bridge. If you're afraid and someone tells you "don't look down!" all you will think about is "looking down" which will make you more afraid. Instead, focus on the other side of the bridge, as it were. So I always worried about not having the class run late and about covering as much as I could and after a little practice, it wasn't so bad. You always get a little nervous (at least, I do), but you learn to worry about the class instead of how worried you are.
> I hope they rented out the whole theater
They very well might have. If you check out their web page, you'll find that they're a luxury theater that does a lot of events like that. The bad thing is that the wretched site is made out of Flash, so it's almost unviewable.
Frankly, I wish I could install Flashblock & NoScript on every marketing executive & webdesigner's PC. Then maybe they'd understand just how bad ugly sites like that look.
We should contact the people at Muvico and let them know that the managers of the theater in Rosemont, IL were being total bastards about this. Here's the contact information I was able to dig up in about 5 minutes:
We know who decided to press charges because of TFA:
(emphasis added)
Muvico is a chain of 9 luxury theaters, as you can read on their about page:
The damn site is full of flash & images, but here are the corporate officers who should hear about what the managers of the Rosemont, IL theater's actions:
President & CEO - Hal Cleveland
General Counsel & CAO - Neil F Bretan
VP of Finance - Alan Rainbeau
VP of Operations - James E. Herd, Jr.
It's not the computers which suck at math, it's us! We all learn real or complex arithmetic, but computers only work with a subset of the rational numbers (and *which* subset they work with depends on the machine and perhaps even the compiler if it changes floats and doubles around).
The two aren't the same at all and you get a lot of crazy errors if you don't know what to avoid. That said, your link is a very good one. Lots of people think there's nothing wrong with if (a == b) where a & b are some kind of float...
> Each pirated song is worth $80000
Actually, the maximum statutory damages are $150,000. So they'll go bankrupt almost twice as fast!
It's a nice idea and all, but their lawyers would probably discover how much they have in common, quit fighting, and team up against the rest of us...
> It's all speculation propagated by the AT&T Artificial Turf(TM) fanclub.
You're absolutely right, but you didn't give any citations. So I'll dig up a few of them for you. It seems like getting people to call something "racist" or to claim that it will "harm the disabled" are some of the most popular current lobbyist tactics. Why? Because no politician wants to be branded a racist.
Here are some places where corporate lobbyists have pulled this exact same trick:
* Critics of Rep. Conyers called "racist" ... because they're against radio performance royalties which "exploit black musicians" even though the RIAA types pushing for these royalties are going to pocket most of them and exploit the artists far more than anyone else. (citation) This was in an NAACP resolution, incidentally.
* Lobbyists fearing a loss of Microsoft leverage stir up a bunch of disabled people who don't even know the difference between a file format and an application to protest ODF as harmful to the disabled. They also create a bogus story calling Peter Quinn "corrupt" (with the retraction to be printed later, in a place most people won't see it). (It's harder to find good links any more, but try this and this).
As you can see, this is a common trick being used by lobbyists. These groups aren't, incidentally, usually controlled by the lobbyists directly. They just get told what to think about some issue they don't fully understand by someone who happens to donate money to them. If you tell people that somebody is out to screw them, they'll be biased against it no matter what.
And it's funny on Net Neutrality, because if you remember, the one thing that everyone from the ACLU to the Christian Coalition protested was the idea that an ISP (I think it was AT&T) could pick any high-traffic website and say to them "we're going to throttle access to your website unless you pay up." Nowadays, people are all saying "what IS Net Neutrality, anyhow?" because they've forgotten what we're all against. Or they're worried that the government will try to create some rule against doing exactly what I just said and end up banning QoS, end-user traffic shaping, etc.
Part of the "confusion" is due to highly-paid lobbyists. Suppose there's some popular outcry against something a business wants to do. As with smoking and laws banning it in public. Then you do a few things:
* Find people who are naturally against this law (e.g. smokers) and convince them their rights are being "trampled." These are your allies. Fund them if need be. Create them if need be.
* Find out why people oppose smoking (it's deadly) and counter this with disinformation. First, they said that smoking hadn't been "proven" to cause anything, it was only "linked" to dozens of diseases, cancer, etc. but not "proven." After that failed, they did exactly the same thing with second-hand smoke. There's no doubt in the scientific community that cigarette smoke is harmful, even if you're not actually smoking. Someone will probably show up shortly to claim otherwise.
* Lobby politicians. As seen with Mr. Quinn, if you can find alleged dirt, even if it's bogus, you can use that to threaten them by "exposing" them to the press. You can also get your allies, especially if they're groups of minorities/disabled/whoever, to decry the move as somehow racist/homophobic/whatever if there's any possible way to make this mistake. No politician wants to be a racist or to have a group of disabled people protesting them.
There's more, but if you look around, you'll see the same fact pattern. The advice to "follow the money" has always been golden. It works on tobacco lobbyists, Microsoft lobbyists, RIAA lobbyists... ever
> If I'd been the TA, I would have given you 98% too despite your misreading of the spec, even without your "fix". Come on, a 0 for getting it 98% right? With a trivial fix?
There are a lot of people who care more about the test than the purpose it's supposed to serve. At work, we have a safety guy who gives us safety tests.
Some of the questions are absurd and do nothing to keep us safer. They could easily be changed to focus on the actual important safety issues we face. But he won't do it. He doesn't want to make the test "easier" even though he's asking people questions that simply aren't relevant to them.
Our last test was on fire extinguishers. There are four classes of fire: A (solid fueled fires), B (liquid fueled fires), C (electrical fires) and D (metal fires, e.g. from burning magnesium).
We have absolutely nothing that could case a class D fire at work. We have no fire extinguishers that can extinguish class D fires ANYWHERE. Half of the test was about class D fires.
We have lots of huge drums of highly flammable liquids (class B fires). There were only two questions about them, and one was "What kind of fire is a class B fire?" There was NO discussion about why you don't pour water on them (because you spread the fire). They did have a question asking what kind of fire water is good for, but it was so indirect it hardly made a point. Because the tests are mainly for the factory workers (but are given to everyone), I don't think that most of them understand why you don't pour water on a gas fire.
But all of them now know more than they ever cared to about metal fires, because that's the way the test was constructed.
To be fair to the TA, I believe we were allowed to tell them how to build & execute the program.
Mind you, these were incredibly simple Java programs, so 99% of them would have been something on the order of:
javac Prog.java
java Prog
There was no need for anything more complex than that, unless you had to pull a fast one like I did. Fortunately, the point of that assignment wasn't to learn about file I/O (we'd already done that), so I don't think they cared too much, and I'm not really sure if they knew what I was doing or not.
> I was glad to hear that, but it still feels wrong that part of our finance system is handling complex number of dollars, whatever that means.
What? I'm sure most finance guys are adept enough at counting both real and imaginary dollars, so having complex dollars isn't really that complex...
> Once I had an assignment due and at the last minute before being evaluated, realized I had made a huge mistake, even though the code looked OK...
I once did almost the same thing, except that I wrote the entire assignment the first day we got it, during class. But I couldn't turn it in yet. And nearly forgot about it. So I turned it in at the last minute...
Except that I had misread the specification! Oh, the program worked just fine, but it printed everything to the screen. It was *supposed* to go to output.txt. That would've been trivial to change, if I actually had any time. But now I was out of time and couldn't change the code I had submitted...
With a bit of quick thinking, I actually managed to convince the TA that the problem was that you were supposed to execute the program as:
java MyProg > output.txt
So instead of getting a zero, I got 98%, because I had failed to document this.
> Wait, isn't the world supposed to end in 2012? I can see it now: SCO will win the trial and the resulting warping of reality will cause pigs to fly, hell to freeze over, Linus to switch to Windows, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Nah. SCO will never win. They just plan to keep this case going so long that the world ends before the case does.
That's why their lawyers get the big bucks.
Well, to be fair, Microsoft didn't just come up with customXML on its own, they "partnered" with i4i, learned all about their product, then copied what they wanted from it and shafted i4i. While I do NOT like software patents and think they should be abolished, I'm not really going to defend Microsoft here. They're getting a bit of poetic justice, IMHO.
Granted, I would like this lawsuit to instead concern whatever contracts Microsoft had with i4i instead of patent law (claims which aren't worth pursuing when you can get $300 million judgments from patent claims), but I honestly think that this case is, overall, a good thing because it:
A) Highlights how ridiculously overpowered software patents--even those for fairly trivial "inventions"--have become.
B) Punishes one of the biggest proponents of software patents, proving that they were lying when they talked up how much they "respect" IP.
So make no mistake: I still want to abolish software patents completely. They're patents on mathematics (and there's mathematical proof of their equivalence available) and they shouldn't exist. But as long as they do exist, I can think of nothing better to happen than for their biggest proponents to get shafted by one of the patents.
> Software is just a step-by-step instruction list. It's is no more a form of math than is a cookbook.
You might want to look up Curry-Howard correspondence someday.
Not only is software math, there's an equivalence theorem relating the two. If that were not the case, the people over at MetaMath wouldn't be able to get very far.
In other words, that statement isn't just wrong, it's provably wrong and you'll have to prove the Curry-Howard correspondence wrong before you can claim otherwise. One of the weird properties of a correspondence is that you can turn software back into math.
I know that people think that math is all arithmetic and integrals or something, but that's just not true.
> What does this article even mean?
People who write exploits know how to prevent themselves from getting exploited? (i.e. Don't use IE.)
Of course, it's not as simple as merely choosing a good browser, but that's a starting place.
> I'm surprised it's not just a room full of prostitutes and an all you can eat plan for a week.
What? No blackjack!?
> What about our obesity problem, which is causes by diet and lack of exercise (in most cases)?
Other countries, like Canada, have obesity problems, too. He said that our *higher* death rates are due to it. So if you have the same problem with obesity in both countries, it's irrelevant (even though it does, in fact, cause lots of deaths).
Their habit has been to take what they want, rather than to buy out their smaller partners.
At least, that's the conclusion I've come to after seeing all the lawsuits brought by former partners, each of which alleges something along the lines of, "Microsoft said they wanted to work with us, copied all of our technology, then built their own product out of our ideas and kept all the money."
I admit, I have no way to verify any of those facts, but I remember there being several companies like that who successfully sued (or settled with) Microsoft, and because of that, I believe that's just the way Microsoft operates.
> I don't think anyone has ever sold writing analysis as a unique identifier. But it can be useful.
One problem with that is the human tendency to be overconfident as to how good these tests are. This happens everywhere. Court, business, whatever.
Say you have some metric at work (e.g. lines of code) that's easy to measure. If it's the only measure management has, it's what they'll use to measure how good you're doing. This applies even if the results are absurd, because they would rather believe that they have *some* idea what's going on than to accept the fact that they have no idea what's going on.
In summary, sometimes NO information is better than bad information, but people are very reluctant to accept that fact.
i4i's patent is here. customXML is just the name of the infringing feature in Microsoft Word, which is why it's referenced as such in the judgment. It's part of the OOXML specification, as well (not that anyone but Microsoft uses that).
In other words, 'customXML' is just a name for a particular way of using XML. It does NOT mean that every way of customizing XML has been patented (though I'm sure there are people trying to do that...).
In a related note, I wish that people would stop saying that Microsoft can't sell Word. They can sell Word. They just have to remove the custom XML feature from it first. The permanent injunction even spells out how to go about removing the feature.
Well, the term lawyers use isn't "patent troll" but NPE (non-practicing entity).
Under that term, i4i is, in fact, a practicing entity. That is to say, i4i makes an actual product using something like custom XML. No, i4i does not make a word processor, but Microsoft hasn't been barred from selling MS Word, only from incorporating custom XML into it. So the injunction only exists to prevent Microsoft from cannibalizing i4i's product.
Now, I do think their patent is a bit obvious and I don't like software patents in general. But if Microsoft had any sense, they would do an about-face and recant their amicus brief on Bilski, asking the Supreme Court to strike down all software patents, reducing their potential legal liability tremendously. Of course, I know they won't do that. And I don't know what deadlines are involved, so it's possible that it's too late for them to do that. But they might not be in this mess if they had seen the light and lobbied against software patents a long time ago.
And on a side note, I can't believe that there are Microsoft "partners" in this day and age who don't expect to get screwed. I wouldn't have done business with them to begin with. I can't name a single partner they haven't screwed over when given the incentive.