I was going to read the article (I know, GASP!), but then I noticed that it pointed to the BBC. Considering the BBC's reliance on Florian Mueller for its patent coverage, I have to assume that the article is largely make believe. I'll wait until Groklaw posts about it.
The major problem is choosing a word that accurately describes the encapsulated concept. The term, "cloud computing" implies something soft and harmless. The more correct term is, "crapshoot computing", because you're gambling with your future.
Many Linux users fondly recall Amarok 1.4 and have been waiting on the edge of our seats for years waiting for the 2.x series to live up to the former glory....
I thought I was the only one who thought 1.4 was awesome, but became largely pointless and unusable with the KDE 4 conversion (which is sad, because KDE 4 is awesome [except for Dolphin -ick- and Amarok 2.0]). 1.4 was user-friendly and largely intuitive. 2.0 was a confusing, unintuitive, jumbled mess, to the point that nothing of value will be lost if that entire code tree disappears.
It used to be a fantastic, pleasant piece of software, but stopped being so with 2.0.
The title should be, "How not having an, "I don't know" option on true/false research tests will cause people to guess, frequently invalidating the results of the research that would be quite different with the third option."
But then, that doesn't fit into a short title block.
...Samsung is denied the right to present the evidence is because their legal team was so dumb fuck stupid not to present the evidence [during Discovery].
I totally agree that Samsung dropped the ball.
Legal proceedings are very precise.
After watching SCO vs. The World, and Oracle vs. The World, I have to disagree. Legal proceedings are very malleable.
However, if they were precise, then Samsung would have been allowed to enter the same evidence when Apple opened the door to it. but this judge is very inconsistent and hormonal, and clearly has a bias against Samsung. At this point, Samsung is doing its best to preserve its options for appeal, and to hopefully get a more emotionally stable judge assigned to hear it.
With that out of the way, the SCO trial taught us that there is an answer already present in copyright law: Slander of Title.
If you think there are no penalties for falsely claiming ownership of a copyrighted work, try systematically going through YouTube and filing DMCA takedown notices against movie and music studio content, and see how fast you end up on the receiving end of a copyright lawsuit.
If it weren't for sports I think that number would be at least 10x higher.
And I find that to be terrifyingly mind-boggling. As America continues its slide into global obsolescence, the slide is being greased by addiction to mindlessness. Too many people would rather watch a bunch of grown men and women move a ball or puck from one end of a field to another than to better educate themselves so they can better their lives.
The women of both sexes on this site are going to mod me into oblivion, but I don't care. Someone has to point out the obvious:
The best way to ruin an enjoyable technical working environment is to add women to it. They are overly sensitive, lawsuit-happy, and generate an unending series of expensive, otherwise unnecessary overhead to even the leanest of operations.
The best way to keep tech jobs enjoyable: hope that women stay out of them. I keep reading about how few women are going into computer related fields, and I count my blessings.
Having said that, the best thing about winning this would be the pleasure of being able to say "no thanks"
I got that pleasure in 1999, when I got my degree. Microsoft called my house asking if I would be interested in interviewing, and I got to say, "No, I don't work for evil companies."
The caller genuinely didn't understand why Microsoft is evil, so I got to tell her she needs to pay more attention. It was quite the pleasant experience. I wish more people could share the experience.
I have grown suspicious of any company that advertises a Gartner award, immediately skeptical of any Gartner study, and completely discount anything they publish to bolster one trend or product over another. Maybe it's just me, but I've been bitten too many times by studies, ratings, and products carrying Gartner awards.
But that's because you exercise what is known in the industry as, "Common Sense." I have never known a Gartner prediction to be anything even remotely close to accurate, yet Gartner has found a way to make people stop exercising, "Common Sense", and to take what Gartner says seriously.
If only the world were populated with more people like you.
Or telling the teacher if someone is picking on you in school.
If someone is picking on you in school, you should tell the administration, and the administration should be legally required to investigate and reprimand the bullying student. The first offense should be suspension, and the second offense should be expulsion.
Our schools have turned into war zones rather than places of basic education (and no, having to deal with bullies is not a valid form of education), partly because we don't get rid of bullies.
Depending on which IDE you're using, you may already have that functionality. Netbeans, for example, has a "Tasks" tab which will show you all your commented notes that start with "TODO:" or "FIXME:" within your code. It obviates the need for a formal bug tracking system if your objective is to make simple notes about what doesn't work, and to keep those notes attached to the broken code.
This is following a similar arc that the mainframe to PC story followed. Sadly, the people who are old enough to remember it are retiring, and the younger people who have not studies computing history are too ignorant to see it.
The "cloud" nonsense is repeating history, and will have easily predictable outcomes. We will eventually be heralding the arrival of the "new" technology that allows us to have control over our own computing (but with laws that have to be circumvented or repealed due to Government totalitarianism).
Hosting is cheap, I don't see why you'd want to cancel it unless it's hurting the bank.
Simple: control.
I used pghoster for a while, because they provided PostgreSQL hosting. The service was fine until:
1) They switched my hosting from Linux to BSD. That unnecessarily broke all my cron jobs, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
2) They made another infrastructure change. That unnecessarily broke all my cron jobs, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
3) They made some other change which broke my PHP, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
The bottom line was that they did not seek my input about what to change and when to change it. And their business model probably doesn't allow them to do so. After all, they have a lot of different users with a lot of conflicting demands. It's just the nature of shared hosting. I have no bad will towards the service, but the requirements of shared hosting are just incompatible with the requirements I have on my time.
So I bought a cheap block of static IP addresses ($20 extra per month) that put me into the business class of customer; the class with the terms of service explicitly allowing me to run my own servers. I've been doing this for about six years now, and I would hate to ever have to return to shared hosting.
And for those wondering why I didn't use a dynamic DNS service: I did, and they suck, suck, suck. But more importantly, I didn't want to find my Internet access sporadically terminated for violating terms of service.
So yes, there are very good reasons for wanting to avoid the major hassles of shared hosting. For me, shared hosting's lack of of control was a deal killer.
I think it is funny that lessons learned years ago with mainframes are being presented as new by just changing the word mainframe to cloud.
I wish I could moderate you higher than +5. I got into computing in the mid 80's, when home computers were popular, and never had to deal with mainframes. However, I know enough about computing history to see exactly how absurd this entire "cloud" computing fiasco is becoming. And it is going to exactly follow the same curve that mainframes followed, until "suddenly" the concept of having your own computing resources is going to be "new and exciting" again.
The simplest thing for the government to do is say "We can't because we didn't write it." Then, it falls on the asker to prove they did.
Whether the Government wrote it doesn't matter. What matters is whether the Government distributed the binaries (not that I expect our Government to comply, but that's an entirely different issue).
Oracle is an evil company suing another evil company, but neither one is the good guy. Oracle's interests just happen to align with The Right Thing to Do on this occasion, so they are on the side of good by pure coincidence.
Don't cheer for Oracle, but cheer for the good thing Oracle just happens to be doing at this fleeting moment in time, for Oracle will still be evil at the next earliest opportunity.
Out of curiosity, If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does this mean they cannot also be covered by the GPL?
The GPL exists within copyright law, so yes, that's what it means.
This would seem to be a fairly major implication of the Oracle vs. Google case. (Speaking strictly about API definitions/header files.)
The judge's decision about API non-copyrightability merely continues the status-quo that has been in place for decades, and is little more than a footnote in computing history; a footnote that reads: "Nothing new happened. An evil company was unable to change decades of standard practice to fit its own warped agenda."
I laugh every time I hear someone say something like, "we can't upgrade because, despite all the warnings over the years about bad development practices, we coded our web infrastructure on non-standard misfeatures/bugs of a single browser and version, and now those misfeatures/bugs are fixed in subsequent versions in this browser. If we had designed around actual standards, we would have been fine, but that was just a little bit harder than sacrificing the future."
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to read the article (I know, GASP!), but then I noticed that it pointed to the BBC. Considering the BBC's reliance on Florian Mueller for its patent coverage, I have to assume that the article is largely make believe. I'll wait until Groklaw posts about it.
Isn't that so much nicer?
The major problem is choosing a word that accurately describes the encapsulated concept. The term, "cloud computing" implies something soft and harmless. The more correct term is, "crapshoot computing", because you're gambling with your future.
Many Linux users fondly recall Amarok 1.4 and have been waiting on the edge of our seats for years waiting for the 2.x series to live up to the former glory....
I thought I was the only one who thought 1.4 was awesome, but became largely pointless and unusable with the KDE 4 conversion (which is sad, because KDE 4 is awesome [except for Dolphin -ick- and Amarok 2.0]). 1.4 was user-friendly and largely intuitive. 2.0 was a confusing, unintuitive, jumbled mess, to the point that nothing of value will be lost if that entire code tree disappears.
It used to be a fantastic, pleasant piece of software, but stopped being so with 2.0.
The title should be, "How not having an, "I don't know" option on true/false research tests will cause people to guess, frequently invalidating the results of the research that would be quite different with the third option."
But then, that doesn't fit into a short title block.
...Samsung is denied the right to present the evidence is because their legal team was so dumb fuck stupid not to present the evidence [during Discovery].
I totally agree that Samsung dropped the ball.
Legal proceedings are very precise.
After watching SCO vs. The World, and Oracle vs. The World, I have to disagree. Legal proceedings are very malleable.
However, if they were precise, then Samsung would have been allowed to enter the same evidence when Apple opened the door to it. but this judge is very inconsistent and hormonal, and clearly has a bias against Samsung. At this point, Samsung is doing its best to preserve its options for appeal, and to hopefully get a more emotionally stable judge assigned to hear it.
There is an answer.
First the requisite: IANAL.
With that out of the way, the SCO trial taught us that there is an answer already present in copyright law: Slander of Title.
If you think there are no penalties for falsely claiming ownership of a copyrighted work, try systematically going through YouTube and filing DMCA takedown notices against movie and music studio content, and see how fast you end up on the receiving end of a copyright lawsuit.
I think, overall, that using any "cloud" is a terrible mistake.
There. Fixed that for you.
If it weren't for sports I think that number would be at least 10x higher.
And I find that to be terrifyingly mind-boggling. As America continues its slide into global obsolescence, the slide is being greased by addiction to mindlessness. Too many people would rather watch a bunch of grown men and women move a ball or puck from one end of a field to another than to better educate themselves so they can better their lives.
That's just astounding.
The women of both sexes on this site are going to mod me into oblivion, but I don't care. Someone has to point out the obvious:
The best way to ruin an enjoyable technical working environment is to add women to it. They are overly sensitive, lawsuit-happy, and generate an unending series of expensive, otherwise unnecessary overhead to even the leanest of operations.
The best way to keep tech jobs enjoyable: hope that women stay out of them. I keep reading about how few women are going into computer related fields, and I count my blessings.
There. Mod me down.
Having said that, the best thing about winning this would be the pleasure of being able to say "no thanks"
I got that pleasure in 1999, when I got my degree. Microsoft called my house asking if I would be interested in interviewing, and I got to say, "No, I don't work for evil companies."
The caller genuinely didn't understand why Microsoft is evil, so I got to tell her she needs to pay more attention. It was quite the pleasant experience. I wish more people could share the experience.
I have grown suspicious of any company that advertises a Gartner award, immediately skeptical of any Gartner study, and completely discount anything they publish to bolster one trend or product over another. Maybe it's just me, but I've been bitten too many times by studies, ratings, and products carrying Gartner awards.
But that's because you exercise what is known in the industry as, "Common Sense." I have never known a Gartner prediction to be anything even remotely close to accurate, yet Gartner has found a way to make people stop exercising, "Common Sense", and to take what Gartner says seriously.
If only the world were populated with more people like you.
The "here's what to do about it" teaser amounts to, "complain to your ISP." Thank you so much. If only we had thought of that.
The article is useless.
Or telling the teacher if someone is picking on you in school.
If someone is picking on you in school, you should tell the administration, and the administration should be legally required to investigate and reprimand the bullying student. The first offense should be suspension, and the second offense should be expulsion.
Our schools have turned into war zones rather than places of basic education (and no, having to deal with bullies is not a valid form of education), partly because we don't get rid of bullies.
Depending on which IDE you're using, you may already have that functionality. Netbeans, for example, has a "Tasks" tab which will show you all your commented notes that start with "TODO:" or "FIXME:" within your code. It obviates the need for a formal bug tracking system if your objective is to make simple notes about what doesn't work, and to keep those notes attached to the broken code.
This is following a similar arc that the mainframe to PC story followed. Sadly, the people who are old enough to remember it are retiring, and the younger people who have not studies computing history are too ignorant to see it.
The "cloud" nonsense is repeating history, and will have easily predictable outcomes. We will eventually be heralding the arrival of the "new" technology that allows us to have control over our own computing (but with laws that have to be circumvented or repealed due to Government totalitarianism).
I can't help by shake my head in disbelief.
But now I would like to see Romney win the presidency & appoint some limited-government constitutionists to the Court (and the lower level courts).
Do you realize that one of Romney's last acts as the Governor of Massachusetts was to require all state residents to have health insurance?
What ever happened to the public option?
The Republicans killed it.
Come and wake me up when they bag some REAL criminals...
And risk getting their funding cut?
Hosting is cheap, I don't see why you'd want to cancel it unless it's hurting the bank.
Simple: control.
I used pghoster for a while, because they provided PostgreSQL hosting. The service was fine until:
1) They switched my hosting from Linux to BSD. That unnecessarily broke all my cron jobs, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
2) They made another infrastructure change. That unnecessarily broke all my cron jobs, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
3) They made some other change which broke my PHP, which I fixed with a fair amount of grumbling about time I didn't have.
The bottom line was that they did not seek my input about what to change and when to change it. And their business model probably doesn't allow them to do so. After all, they have a lot of different users with a lot of conflicting demands. It's just the nature of shared hosting. I have no bad will towards the service, but the requirements of shared hosting are just incompatible with the requirements I have on my time.
So I bought a cheap block of static IP addresses ($20 extra per month) that put me into the business class of customer; the class with the terms of service explicitly allowing me to run my own servers. I've been doing this for about six years now, and I would hate to ever have to return to shared hosting.
And for those wondering why I didn't use a dynamic DNS service: I did, and they suck, suck, suck. But more importantly, I didn't want to find my Internet access sporadically terminated for violating terms of service.
So yes, there are very good reasons for wanting to avoid the major hassles of shared hosting. For me, shared hosting's lack of of control was a deal killer.
I think it is funny that lessons learned years ago with mainframes are being presented as new by just changing the word mainframe to cloud.
I wish I could moderate you higher than +5. I got into computing in the mid 80's, when home computers were popular, and never had to deal with mainframes. However, I know enough about computing history to see exactly how absurd this entire "cloud" computing fiasco is becoming. And it is going to exactly follow the same curve that mainframes followed, until "suddenly" the concept of having your own computing resources is going to be "new and exciting" again.
P.T. Barnum would be proud.
The simplest thing for the government to do is say "We can't because we didn't write it." Then, it falls on the asker to prove they did.
Whether the Government wrote it doesn't matter. What matters is whether the Government distributed the binaries (not that I expect our Government to comply, but that's an entirely different issue).
Whom do I cheer for now?
That's easy: neither.
Oracle is an evil company suing another evil company, but neither one is the good guy. Oracle's interests just happen to align with The Right Thing to Do on this occasion, so they are on the side of good by pure coincidence.
Don't cheer for Oracle, but cheer for the good thing Oracle just happens to be doing at this fleeting moment in time, for Oracle will still be evil at the next earliest opportunity.
Out of curiosity, If APIs cannot be copyrighted, does this mean they cannot also be covered by the GPL?
The GPL exists within copyright law, so yes, that's what it means.
This would seem to be a fairly major implication of the Oracle vs. Google case. (Speaking strictly about API definitions/header files.)
The judge's decision about API non-copyrightability merely continues the status-quo that has been in place for decades, and is little more than a footnote in computing history; a footnote that reads: "Nothing new happened. An evil company was unable to change decades of standard practice to fit its own warped agenda."
The GPL continues on as it always has.
...while those who do not understand it will simply be left behind.
Or worse, be elected to public office.
I laugh every time I hear someone say something like, "we can't upgrade because, despite all the warnings over the years about bad development practices, we coded our web infrastructure on non-standard misfeatures/bugs of a single browser and version, and now those misfeatures/bugs are fixed in subsequent versions in this browser. If we had designed around actual standards, we would have been fine, but that was just a little bit harder than sacrificing the future."
It's nice to see stupidity justly rewarded.