However, since Mobile browsers are not really in the same competitive field, that means you need to remove a large percentage of safari and chrome/android browsers from the statistics.. otherwise you're not comparing apples and oranges
Chrome is not the default browser on android except in the unreleased 4.1 (jelly bean); it's available as a optional (buggy) beta on 4.0, but since 4.0 is only on 10% of android devices, I imagine it's a pretty small percentage of a small percentage. Ergo the chrome stats are effectively entirely desktop users. Safari on the other hand is both iOS and OSX (and whatever few poor fools run safari under windows).
To address your main point though - why shouldn't mobile browsing be part of the equation? I wouldn't be at all surprised if safari's percentage is more from iOS than OSX, especially iPads. From what I've seen of users of ipads in particular, it has replaced browsing on a laptop or desktop. That 'sofa computing' has become their dominant choice of internet browsing at home. IE is declining not least because it doesn't have a viable alternative to apple on the tablet, though maybe surface will claw them back a few points when it eventually comes out.
If you've lost someone's browser usage to a competitor, you can't really complain that it's because they're using a tablet and you don't have one that anyone wants, they're still not using your platform.
In a more general sense, IE losing its dominant position and becoming one of many browsers is good, as long as no one company replaces it - it means web standards are important, and prevents any one player from being able to ignore standards and force through essential proprietary extensions which only they support. Which also means web-based apps can continue to challenge locked in platform specific apps. While browser-based apps certainly aren't ideal for everything, there are plenty of things they can do that are accessible to any one on any OS with a modern browser. Which is a good thing.
All of your issues seem to stem from poor design and religious choice rather than anything technical.
Well thanks for the insight into my setup and that we made the choices we did due to zealotry. That must have been easy since you don't know me, or my network, or the numerous discussions I've had with management and trials we've run over the last year to pick a new solution. But obviously it's because I'm allergic to 'best-of-breed' commercial solutions, by which I assume you mean Exchange.
We do run AD, Windows, and windows servers where it makes sense. We also run linux servers where it makes sense. We even have osx clients and ipads - where it makes sense. All solutions are considered on my end for technical merit, and management for cost if I can make the case for it.
What we don't have is a large budget - because we're a school. Any licencing costs come out of something else. Let's say I pay $10 a year per user for spam filtering via a commercial externally-hosted mail filter, which is on the cheaper end from what I've seen. That's $20,000 a year. That's a new suite of computers. A year. Or almost our entire microsoft budget. Hell, that's more than my annual server budget. We did consider it, but it was quickly dismissed as not value for money.
Yes, it might save my time, but my time is 'free' because I'm already paid for and on site as far as management is concerned.
It's no surprise you'r having issues managing spam, I never seen it done effectively in-house, I wonder why anyone even tries to do this
Money. In house is cheaper than out of house in visible costing. You know how much we were quoted for exchange hosting, another option we looked at? Around £5 a user a month was the cheapest from one of our existing suppliers, with a bulk discount that took us to just over £100,000 a year. I think my bursar nearly had a heart attack when he saw that - he tried to get them down to £2000 a year!! They struggled very hard not to laugh in his face when he said that in the meeting.
So instead, I can get the whole thing hosted on a commercial-grade service for free via google apps for education. That IS the best of breed cost/benefit as far as I'm concerned. It's not a panacea, there will still be end-user issues, and other headaches. But it's a hell of a lot better - and cheaper - option than outsourcing to a hosted exchange service.
And don't try to sell Google Docs as a solution. It may work in mum and dad shops or education where your users are kids who have no productivity requirement,
Well, good thing we ARE in education then! And the main thing the members of senior management that were part of the trial group leapt on? Google calendars. Loved it. Loved that it was sharable outside the school, and trivial to embed into a website, as well as personal ones and in-house private ones. Go figure. We already have a commercial VLE for document sharing etc, so I don't see google docs getting much use to be honest. But staff managed publishable calendars? Best thing since sliced bread apparently.
Personally, I'm quite fond of shared Google Docs editing; simultaneous live editing is surprisingly useful when you have the team bashing away on a piece of documentation and we can all tune it at once without conflict.
Be prepared for dealing with such stuff on Google Apps too. A couple of years ago I moved an institution to Google Apps. Overall, it has been a positive experience, but it took them awhile to understand that I can't do much if "this email is gone that I swear was there a minute ago" or stuff like that.
Heh, that's true. But on the bright side, the trial period we've been running with a small subset of users went very well, and they were positive about the significant reduction in spam. Google have a much wider net for bayesian filtering and spotting bulk email runs as they happen, so that probably helps. We are also going to be cloning all incoming email into my own dump server for a while at least, so I'll have an independent copy of mail for emergency recovery. Given it's not going to be hooked up to 'live' use, I can use our much cheaper storage and infrastructure for it. It's not perfect, but it's a better solution than I can manage entirely inhouse.
Outlook doesn't like their POP server (or it doesn't like any POP servers?) so make sure you only use IMAP for local clients.
Far as I can tell, outlook doesn't really like any mail server that isn't Exchange, but yeah, POP is especially bad. We've been using IMAP exclusively mainly for that reason for years, though most users will carry on using webmail so shouldn't be an issue.
Google's passwords are thrown around a lot and I had bad experience with Chinese "hackers" getting into people's mail. E.g. some sites may claim they support OpenID or will log you in with your Google account. Instead, they just harvest your email / password. Also, many people will sign up for a random website using user@gmail.com and then giving the website the same password they use on Google. That's just too easy to exploit!
I'm pretty sure that's how we've had some of our spammer break-ins on our own smtp relay server with legit accounts; it is a problem. We'll just have to cross our fingers and stick to user education as we've already been doing. That and change passwords every so often; we'll be syncing google apps to our AD accounts, so our existing periodic change on the school systems should cover it.
Cheers for the tips. That hotmail one is an odd one!
I'm in the process of shifting our 2000 accounts from our own mail server to google apps for education.
Running your own mail server is a pain in the ass these days. With the massive torrent of spam - including pornographic spam - that gets ever harder to filter, without also blocking legitimate mail. RBLs on SMTP, greylisting, bayesian filters, image-to-text converters to then run bayesian analysis on... it's not even close to enough. Then you have virus infected laptops stealing credentials from the legit mail client and trying to send spam, finding a decent web-mail client that doesn't suck and keeping it updated (roundcube, BTW, is miles better than squirrelmail), the headmaster getting his password stolen so a spammer starts using his legit account to access our external access relay and send a bunch of spam for a few hours before we shut it down, still dealing with being on random blacklists for two weeks afterwards; but the ISP relay smtp server gets blacklisted even more often, setting up SPF and domain keys so some staff members email to a parent doesn't get randomly blocked because of yet another new anti-spam standard you have to adhere to...
Dealing with user complaints of why this was marked with spam when it shouldn't be, why this wasn't, why I can't send this 40MB powerpoint, where's this email gone that I swear was there a minute ago, making sure the VM server doesn't run out of drive space, neither does the backup server, making sure the backups don't slow the system down, making sure the backups work; keeping the system up 100% of the time and still doing maintenance, updates and changes to work around yet another 'email bounced' problem, making sure the various cluster boxes keep in sync, debugging why the logging server has choked this time...
I have a 100 other systems jobs to do. Babysitting the multiple postfix, dovecot and nginx servers to keep mail service up and running reliably spam free (ish) takes up a lot of my time that could be more profitably spent improving and add new services/software. Thank god we never met the cost/benefit pass-grade of exchange to add that too and only had to have simple IMAP support.
Instead, I can move the entire system to google apps, ad free, for free because we're education, and google have obviously learned from microsoft that catching students early means they'll end up a customers themselves later. And I'm fine with that. They have far better spam filtering than I can ever hope to achieve on my own even with my battery of different open-source tools. They have far more engineers. They have coverage round the clock, so I'll hopefully stop getting phone calls on christmas morning about the bloody email system. They can store 25GB a user without stressing me out about whether we're going to hit the limits of our budget on FC SAN storage. They have a nice web interface; and shared docs, calendars and contact lists thrown in for free. I can clone all mail live, so I can still backup everything off site.
All in all, I'm going to be _very_ glad to see the back of running my own mail server.
There are three transformer models already; the original transformer (which I have), the prime which replaced it with better specs (tegra 3 vs tegra 2, better camera, more storage), and the transformer pad which is the cheaper version of the prime with a plastic case rather than aluminium. I think they all use virtually the same keyboard dock, though they're available in different colours to match the finish of the tablet.
Given the prime infinity is basically a prime with much higher res screen, it's not hard to speculate what using the prime infinity will be like.
Personally, I much prefer my original gen transformer to the ipad 2 we have in the office now it's running ICS. Adding the dock makes it a real netbook - ideal for holding in one hand and typing with the other, and plugging in standard usb-serial adapters for configuring old switches over serial with. And then I take the dock away, and it's a tablet for taking meeting notes with.
You know what - I've decided to actually post a more-detailed reply because posts like yours - and the modding it receives - highlight why Slashdot is becoming less and less valuable. How your post gets modded +5 Informative is beyond me when it shows a gross ignorance that is simply astounding.
Well I'm glad you've decided to actually participate instead of just slinging insults. Not least because it demonstrates that you yourself are wrong. I did read the judgment, by the way.
They went to court because they felt Nokia was demanding an inappropriate rate. Which is what I said. They refused to pay nokia's standard rate between 2007 and 2011. That's 4 years. Nokia took them to court to make them pay, and then settled before judgement was reached. Both back payments, and approximately 1.5% of final device cost on every device. Apple could have paid up years earlier, but decided the same rate everyone else paid was too high.
You say 2.5% is "fairly standard" yet simple math would highlight that is an impossibility and Judge Posner characterizes such an effort as "going for broke", making it clear that Motorola's demands for 2.25% was well beyond the norm for a FRAND patent.
Motorola charge 2.25% (typoed 2.5% in GP post) for their entire FRAND patent portfolio as the standard rate - as it can involve 75 or 100 patents. What they failed to do is show the value of this one specific patent that the judge required them to reduce the case to.
From Motorola's evidence:
"One patent is 1 percent of 100 patents and 1 per-cent of $700 million is $7 million. But according to Donohoe’s declaration, the license fee for that single patent, if licensed on its own rather than as part of a package deal that comprised the entire portfolio, would be “up to” 40 to 50 percent of the royalty for the entire portfolio—that is, up to $350 million."
Because motorola don't licence the patents individually, but as part of a large pool; and some of the patents are worth more than others. But in this case, they didn't break down the precise value of the one patent left out in the case as ordered by the judge. (And neither did Apple present usable evidence as to the actual value of their patents)
"How to pick the right non-linear royalty? Donohoe’s declaration does not answer that essential question, and there is no suggestion that any other witness can answer it."
And also from the judgment:
"A FRAND royalty would provide all the relief to which Motorola would be entitled if it proved infringement of the ‘898 patent, and thus it is not entitled to an injunction. In fact neither party is entitled to an injunction. Neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy. True, neither has presented sufficient evidence of damages to with-stand summary judgment—but that is not because damages are impossible to calculate with reasonable certainty and are there-fore an inadequate remedy; it’s because the parties have failed to present enough evidence to create a triable issue. They had an adequate legal remedy but failed to make a prima facie case of how much money, by way of such remedy, they are entitled to. That was a simple failure of proof."
FRAND patents are still worth money. How much money one specific FRAND patent was worth as opposed to the whole pool was not proven in the case, and thus, dismissed. Apple's patents were not properly quantified in value either, so also were dismissed.
I stand entirely by my original post. There's no reason that you can't sue over FRAND patents if a company refuses to pay the same licence fees you charge everyone else - and it's up to the court to decide if that value is fair or not. It doesn't doom the entire industry if a company does so, but it does waste a vast amount of time, money and harm customers when one or two software companies want into the phone business, but don't want to pay the companies that literally invented the hardware chips that made it possible.
I'm not going to quote portions of your post and refute them. What I'm simply going to say is that YOU ARE WRONG. Go read Judge Posner's opinion and judgement and learn something. You are wrong. Some of your fundamental beliefs about (F)RAND patents are outright, incredibly, over-the-top wrong.
I did read the judgment. Feel free to argue why I'm wrong instead of just stating it like you're the font of all knowledge, and being a bit of a tit about it.
Posner dismisses Motorola's request for an injunction; as being a FRAND patent essential to the UTMS standard that would defacto grant too much power to enforce whatever fee they liked. However he doesn't dismiss that Apple are still required to pay for FRAND licences, and could be required by a court to do so. In this case though, Motorola said that they charge 2.25% (typoed 2.5% in GP post) as a percentage of final device price as standard, regardless of the number of FRAND patents, as different cases could involve 75 or 100 FRAND patents. Given that Posner required both sides to reduce their claim to the smallest number of key patents, Motorola then failed to prove the specific value of that one patent they kept in the trial.
From the judgment:
A FRAND royalty would provide all the relief to which Motorola would be entitled if it proved infringement of the ‘898 patent, and thus it is not entitled to an injunction. In fact neither party is entitled to an injunction. Neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy. True, neither has presented sufficient evidence of damages to with-stand summary judgment—but that is not because damages are impossible to calculate with reasonable certainty and are there-fore an inadequate remedy; it’s because the parties have failed to present enough evidence to create a triable issue. They had an adequate legal remedy but failed to make a prima facie case of how much money, by way of such remedy, they are entitled to. That was a simple failure of proof.
He dismissed Apple's injunction because it would cause more harm to Motorola than Apple would gain, and because it was more harm than the patents were worth. He thought that Apple's claims of costs workarounds for their patents were unproven.
So since neither side was entitled to an injunction, and neither side had proven what those specific patents left were worth in either losses to the plaintiff, or benefit to the defendant, he dismissed the lot.
He certainly didn't say that, in general, failure to pay FRAND licence fees could not be corrected through court assessment and order of payment, he said the exact opposite - which was the main thrust of my post.
Motorola has licenced its FRAND patents to many companies, and the price is their standard one. Many other companies in the mobile phone space have reached agreements on those terms - Nokia, Ericsson, RIM, Samsung, LG, and HTC have all done so, for example. However, those companies also have relevant FRAND patents, so everyone cross-licences their patents to each other, allowing them all to operate. They all bring their patents to the table, share them with each other, and crack on with making phones. Those with small patent pools may end up paying the larger players under FRAND terms - anything up to 5% is standard.
Apple doesn't have such radio patents - they haven't been involved in inventing the essential standards for wireless comms, phones etc. So the normal process would be either to pay the standard patent licence fees which FRAND standards involve to 'buy in', or cross-licence some of their own software patents in exchange.
Apple doesn't want to pay any fees at all, let alone a fairly standard 2.5%. They see FRAND and think 'free'. Nor do they want to cross-licence any software patents, as they want to drive all android phones from the marketplace. Apple sued motorola and sought injunctions to stop them selling phones. Same with samsung.
Apple spent years trying to avoid paying nokia's patent licence fees for FRAND patents, and eventually settled the lawsuit - they ended up paying £700m lump sum plus £7 an iphone in licencing costs last year.
It's doubly ironic that Apple castigates samsung for stealing their unique patents which amounts to a black rounded rectangle shape with icons in a grid on it, yet don't see why they should have to pay up to licence FRAND patents that literally are what makes the phone capable of being a phone.
And FRAND doesn't mean you can't sue. It just means you have to offer the same licencing price to everyone first - if they pay that, they're safe. The licencing fee can't be too high - which isn't defined - but up to 5% is standard in the industry. But if someone refuses to licence, and then sues you first? That's hardly a dangerous precedent to sue right back, and motorola is far from the first to do so.
Remember who declared "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.
Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.
BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.
Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.
If you were principled you'd boycott BT.
Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.
If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.
Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?
Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.
I like how you picked low-status jobs where height and upper body strength are a definite advantage - carrying shit, wielding big tools, tightening and untightening tight bolts, building walls etc. Of course men are going to dominate those fields because they have a physical advantage at them.
I note however that men aren't pushed into those fields either. You don't see careers advisors telling bright kids on track to become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist that they should give up that track and go be a builder instead. They're jobs you do because you're not suited for whatever reason to follow a more intellectually demanding (and hopefully better paid) career. In other crappy low status jobs where upper body strength doesn't make much difference; checkout person, shop assistant, office drone, the gender breakdown is much more equal.
And some fields, such as cleaner - cleaning toilets literally full of shit - are much more often women, so it's not like they don't get to do shitty jobs too.
I don't know about your country, but in mine we're actively trying to recruit more male young-schooling teachers precisely because it's not great that young kids can spend the first few years without a single male role model teaching them.
So your premise - that women are somehow getting special treatment - is frankly, a load of bollocks.
Women aren't being pushed into IT. Those of us who see them as equals see the inequalities in the field, see the way that women are treated like crap by men, see the way that women are actively pushed away from IT at every opportunity, and see how women are constantly assumed to be crap at it, unsuited to it, and sexualised by nerds every time they dare to speak; we think that it's unfair, unreasonable and we should take our peers to task when they engage in that kind of behaviour.
So that women who show an aptitude for what is a complex, challenging and hopefully decently compensated career that is crying out for more skilled people are not driven away from it into other fields because of the subtle and not so subtle sexism that's so often demonstrated.
My wife has been going through codecademy, and recently we've been working on porting a family paper and dice game to javascript so she can play it remotely with her family. I've been helping answering questions, but the design and the vast bulk of the code is hers. She's previously dabbled in python on her own, and she's pretty damn good at fixing her own laptop. We met in a online MUD. I'm fairly sure her IQ is higher than mine, and I'm no slouch.
Her day job? She's a language teacher. My day job? Sysadmin.
Despite her interest in science and maths at school, she was very heavily pushed towards the humanities track instead, because girls don't do well in science. I, on the other hand, expressed an interest in becoming a lawyer when I was younger, but was firmly pushed back onto the engineering track because that suited my strengths in maths etc.
I firmly believe she would have been a kickass CS grad or engineer. But after a decade of teacher training in two countries (she's french, I'm english, she's fluent and can teach the other in both languages) she's pretty much tied into that path. And she's very good at it.
My older sister has done a number of jobs involved in science, she worked directly at CERN for several years managing a web developer team as part of their giant data transmission system.
I knew several women in uni who definitely had the capability, but were doing science or engineering instead (chemistry, biology, EE in case you were wondering)
Women certainly can get bitten by the bug, and certainly have the capability to be coders.
But they're pushed away from the field at every opportunity in school. The peer pressure - being the only girl surrounded by boys, and looked down on by other girls - is tough. At uni, they have to work twice as hard to be seen as good as a guy.
And then there's the way guys act towards women. Go read fatuglyorslutty.com. Go look at how Anita Sarkeesian was treated on kickstarter. To put it bluntly, women who try to get involved in men-only areas such as CS and gaming have to have a very very thick skin from the constant stream of utter bile and bullshit directed their way from a huge number of dickheads.
If a woman asks a question on a forum that's IT related, she's likely to be told the problem is because she's a girl and couldn't possibly understand it, asked for 'pics', and another stream of offensive crap completely unrelated to the problem.
You want to know why women rarely get into coding? Because many men in our field are absolute fuckwads towards women and act like a 10 year with tourettes whenever they're around. It's a constant stream of vitriol, misogyny and gender based denigration. And mixed in with that are constant attempts to try and chat her up, get a date, offers to help if they'll help the guys out with their other 'problem' - scarily, sometimes the two are mixed into a single post. I've witnessed all of this first hand.
And until we take our peers to task on it every time, kick out those men who do it from our communities and make it unacceptable - in short, create more spaces that are prepared to accept women as equals and not constantly denigrate or sexualise them or just say they're not suited to it because they're a woman - women will continue to be unwilling to get into IT fields, and who can blame them. And ultimately, we're the ones losing out as there are definitely women who would have have been outstanding coders and designers and network nerds, but who ended up in a less hostile field instead.
Yes. relenting to a bunch of bastards who don't want to buy the full version sure is a start.
Because open-source developers who don't make any money from their software were going be to effectively blocked from supporting their existing apps on windows 8? With windows 7, you got the compiler in the SDK, so you could at least compile your own apps written in another IDE. Windows 8 doesn't have that any more, the only compiler and standard header libraries are part of Visual Studio 2012; so unless the non-profit making open source dev wanted to cough up $500 for the full version of VS2012 pro out of their own pocket (that included a bunch of crap they didn't need), they couldn't support windows 8.
Never mind that VS 2012 has a much faster compiler than the older version, microsoft tend to tweak APIs and such - and when they release a new OS, only the new VS gets it integrated.
And how were new students going to learn to code for windows? Most people start with CLI coding, not fully blown graphical UI versions, ala metro.
Plenty of people need Visual Studio Express to write code for windows, because it is so tightly integrated and designed to go together. Nerfing the express version wouldn't force developers to write more metro apps - it would just kill off existing apps for Windows 7 from 8, cut down on new people learning to write software for windows, and kill off future open source apps on windows.
I'm amazed they thought that making the free compiler for windows metro-only was a good idea in the first place. At least they've overturned what would have been a big self-inflicted foot wound.
It's ubuntu, which is basically polished debian, without the seriously buggy 'I'm suited for touch screens, honest guv' new Unity interface. I tried out 12.04 the other day - I used to use SuSE/KDE then gentoo then debian as my primary desktop for a number of years; gave up after the KDE4 migration disaster and went to windows, and fairly recently to OSX; I tried it on a clean drive on my hackintosh (I have a real mac in the office, a somewhat elderly mac mini, and my own copy of Lion) which is a fairly bog-standard core i3 gigabyte system.
I got as far as getting dual screen working with X.org tweaks via the closed nvidia driver (have a geforce 210 in that rig) though it wouldn't stick past a reboot, which takes me back, then fixed sound as per usual. Then I discovered that clicking on a side-launcher button doesn't raise an active window up to the top; it just spawns a new one. In fact, I couldn't find anyway to bring a window to the top of the stack without manually shifting everything else off the top of it and gave up, it just wasn't worth the effort. So based on my admittedly short trial, Ubuntu isn't ready for the novice user any more. It's as hard as hacking OSX to work on my PC, and while the UI is pretty, it's just not very, well, functional.
So Mint is basically Ubuntu where they don't hate the user, and have stuck with gnome but with a decent amount of polish. I used to really like ubuntu, and still use their server platform as the LTS approach is a bit more modern than good old debian (so I get updated supported packages like node.js and nginx and php-fpm) while still offering a known long timeframe for support. But the new unity UI makes windows 8 look good, and that's saying something. You basically have a choice of the stable aka old gnome 2 MATE version, or the new shiny but not necessarily rock-solid gnome 3 Cinnamon version.
give it a try, and see how it copes with your hardware...
I do, however, know what can get me back on track, and that's financial stability. Sadly, my employer treats me like shit and I'm spiraling down because I ceased trying to look happy and shit when going to job interviews.
Your situation sounds awfully familiar. Too familiar. I've been being treated for chronic depression for the last 2.5 years - and looking back, I've been suffering from it much longer than that. I'm not going to offer any magic solution, because I don't have any. For me, depression is like living in a grey fog. You only have two emotions; totally flat, and angry. Most of the time, you just feel numb. You fake it because you have to, but a lot of the time you wish everyone would just go away and leave you alone. You do repetitive simple things like watch a lot of TV, play games obsessively, try to be Right On The Internet, eat crappy food. Doing any major is a massive effort, and you procastinate a lot. At work, it's never enough - I do my best, but there's always more work to do than I have time to do, so you end up staying ever later at the office to try and keep up. You feel like a failure at life. It's your fault. It's all your fault. And then there's the angry phase. Your boss is a moron, your coworkers are useless. Your pay sucks, you do a great job and nobody cares. Fuck em all.
But here's two things I have learned.
1) Depression screws with your head. It really does. You can't trust your own judgment. It's really hard to accept, and I still regularly catch myself making the mistake of thinking that I'm being rational. But I'm not. My own mind is screwing with me, all the time. For the longest time, I didn't think I was depressed; it's just I was the failure, and should learn to suck it up. It's the most insidious thing, and for someone like me who's only asset has been my brain (I'm very good at what I do, sysadmin) to realize that was quite a shock. But it eventually got so bad where it was a huge struggle to do anything at all, that I finally looked for help. The point is, my emotions are real, how I feel (or when I don't care) is real, and it's a response to long-term heavy stress - but it's an emotional response to my problems, not an objective one. And I can't tell the difference. It feels like I'm making rational decisions, that how I feel is due to the pressures of family and work and money - but they're not. Which leads onto
2) It can, and does get better. Medication for me helps me with the symptoms. It's not a cure by any stretch, but it does give me space and time and a relief from the pressure. They're not happy pills. They're 'give me some perspective' pills. I'm still working with the docs to try and unscramble my head, and its very much a work in progress. CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - has the same statistically benefit for Depression as medication for mild cases, and I recommend it, though medication is still better for more severe depression. Finding the one that works best for you though is basically experimentation. It's not an area that's particularly well understood (since society frowns on experimenting too much with living brains directly) so meds are a bit of a potluck. They also have significant side effects. Though for me, the benefits of not feeling like I just want the whole world to go away - which is a short step from thinking of ways to exiting the problem - outweight the cost.
The last thing is - I was talking to my colleagues the other day that I've been friends with for years, and they were saying they loved their job, that it's the best they've ever had, which rather drew me up short. I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate my pay, it's a daily struggle to go in. I hope in part that that makes me a good supervisor; strictly speaking, I'm their boss, though I consider myself more of a department lead than a boss per-se. That I'm the one taking the stress, so they don't have to. But it made me realise, again, that my reaction to my workload (which admittedly is insane; 1500 users, 600 fixed computers in the
Funny that you should mention dropbox. Did you know that apps were being blocked from the iOS app store because they used dropbox integration recently? Turns out, it's because the dropbox SDK could take you to a sign-up page in safari for the free 5GB if you didn't have a dropbox account. It didn't offer you paid upgrade choices at sign-up, but if you really tried you could get to the paid upgrades page via links.
So Apple blocked all apps using the dropbox SDK with no given reason why; turns out, Apple consider that because its possible in safari to get to the paid upgrade page from the dropbox sign in, it violates their 'no external links to spend money in apps that don't go through the app store in-app mechanism and give apple their 30% cut'. So that's apps, using a 2nd app, that violates a rule because it's 'possible' to get to a spend money page in safari, getting blocked from the appstore.
After trying a few variants - as Apple don't say whether given changes will work or not for approval - they hit on a process by which if you don't have the dropbox app installed, it fires up an in-app window to login with; and no prompt or safari link to create a new account. So you have to manually find your way to the dropbox site and sign up for there.
Of course, developers could just use iCloud document sharing, and shift their whole infrastructure into the warm, loving, friendly embrace of Apple and give them their 30% cut across the board and not deal with the risk that their app update will one day get blocked because an SDK you use suddenly falls foul of an arbitrary rule interpretation. Much safer.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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Diablo III Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Pre-ordered a copy a couple of weeks because a bunch of friends are also going to play it, despite me normally avoiding always-on DRM for single player games like the plague. Retail copy arrived today, get home to play. Had already preinstalled the game, put my retail code in via the website... And have spent literally the last hour (6.30 to 7.30pm UK time) trying to login to the bloody thing to play single player, nothing but error 37 and error 75.
Fuck Blizzard for requiring always-on DRM, and then cheaping out on enough servers to meet demand. Fuck em right up the arse.
And in our modern economy, where it's the first interview you've had in months and your unemployment funds have long since been spent paying the necessary bills; you'll choose facebook privacy over putting food on the table for your family? Now imagine you're not some highly paid code wizard who gets to pick and choose employers, but an ordinary shop floor worker doing a blue collar job who has to take what you can get.
Being able to exercise your rights when you're wealthy and in a position to pick and choose between jobs is one thing. When you're in modern serfdom employment and the employers hold all the cards, federal or state government regulation and enforcement is about the only thing that can protect the workers from ridiculous abuses like this. Even more so when it's local government (such as police) doing it.
From what I've seen from libertarian supporters it generally actually means:
1. very low to no taxes. Keep the government out of my wallet. 2. very few regulations. Keep the government out of my business/gun collection/telling me who and who I can't serve in my own shop. 3. very little redistribution. See 1. I keep mine, you keep yours.
These combine to mean that if you're born poor, you'll stay that way; and vice versa if you're rich. It ignores that those with money find it much easier to make more money. When people don't want to pay taxes, it means that education and healthcare especially suffers for the poor and middle classes. The wealthy can afford good schools and healthcare, so entrenching their advantage, while the poor are effectively locked into being poor, while the middle class disappears as they now have to compete for their jobs with the cheapest possible workers, often overseas. Remember, no government regulation of business. The environment suffers, as businesses can pollute away, and the commons has no protector. Racism, sexism and other 'isms proliferate, as again, the existing wealthy land and business owners entrench their positions of privilege, and there's no one telling them 'no'.
Oddly enough, it's the wealthy, white business owners who are most likely to be libertarians.
Government is not meant to protect the rich and strong elite. It's meant to protect the vast majority of the population against the predations of those powerful, wealthy men. Government by the people, FOR the people. Libertarianism is entrenching their power and privilege, not challenging it. Of course, the easiest way to stop the government doing that is for the selfish members of the wealthy elite to slowly take over the media, then the government, and use both platforms to tell the population over and over that the best way to improve their lot is to get rid of meddling government and their infernal taxes...
Yet MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.
The problem for them doing that is that they'd be a third entrant to the market, with an even more dominant leader - the iPad - to beat than they face in the smartphone market. And we've all seen how that's working out for them. Their biggest problem is the lack of killer apps. Well, that and the memory of the stinker windows mobile 6.5. And they're bleeding users to macbook airs, ipads, iphones, and android phones. The fat desktop is in slow decline, and more and more people are realising they don't need office, or even a PC.
They don't have time for windows tablet to hang around in the market for a couple of years, and only pick up a single digit userbase. Not unless they want to continue their slide into irrelevence.
So windows 8 is a bold/suicidal move. They're working on the basis that by using their many millions of current desktop users as a trojan horse to get the windows app store - and metro apps - out there very widely, they'll attract developers to metro, and get some real killer apps which will then give people a reason to actually WANT a windows 8 tablet or phone. That windows 8 sucks pretty hard for desktop users doesn't really matter, as they'll buy whatever comes pre-installed on their OEM computer, and as long as it runs their current apps, they'll live with it.
The ipad and iphone is demonstrating that IT isn't in charge of corporate devices any more. Management bring whatever random consumer shit in they like, and it's IT problem to change the network to make it work like 'it does at home'. And once the managers have them, they're 'cheap' to get for workers too, instead of desktop upgrades. Only nerds care about feature lists any more, it's ease of use and shiny shiny that's all important now.
Microsoft can see the writing on the wall, and are desparate to get metro out as far as possible, as wide as possible, in the hope that that will stem the tide and keep them relevant 5 years from now. It's gutsy, I've gotta give them that.
I'd rather simply disclaim it to the public domain.
While I understand this, and agree that it would be nice to do so, in reality anything with no licence attached at all, yet inside the expiry date of copyright material may well lead people to thinking it's just an abandoned or owner-unknown copyrighted work, and not available for use.
Using something like the CC0 licence - which you mention in another comment - you make it explicitly clear that you disclaim all rights, and that makes it clear that it's free to use, while still having the handy advantage of making sure you're still associated as the author for others to cite with confidence, and it doesn't end up claimed as someone else's work, nor will you see your name being used to endorse someone else's position without permission.
For those who don't know the CC0 licence:
"The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
In no way are the patent or trademark rights of any person affected by CC0, nor are the rights that other persons may have in the work or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. Unless expressly stated otherwise, the person who associated a work with this deed makes no warranties about the work, and disclaims liability for all uses of the work, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. When using or citing the work, you should not imply endorsement by the author or the affirmer."
Well there's a dead easy way to avoid your code becoming 'contaminated' by the GPL. Don't leech off other people's code and write your own damn stuff.
Libraries and other dynamically linked material are usually under the LGPL, so you can avoid reinventing the wheel for low level stuff without risking your own code coming under the GPL or LGPL.
But what you're complaining about is that commercial coders can leech off of MIT licenced stuff etc, but not GPL code. Which is what the author of the GPL code intended - if you want to take their code, and use it, then you need to share your own improvements back to your customers as source code, and not lock it away where you profit from the author's work without giving anything back.
Try including someone else's commercially licenced source code in your project sometime without abiding by the licence or paying the fee, and you'll very quickly find out how viral commercial code is at polluting the rest of your code base and making the whole thing liable for civil suit.
Just because GPL is free monetarily, doesn't mean it doesn't have worth. If the price is too high for you, don't pay it; just as you wouldn't insert commercial licence code in your project without paying.
Or you know, go to the developer and offer some actual cash. Many developers will be happy to provide you an alternative licenced version of their code that you can use without GPL requirements, if you're willing to pay for it.
Symantec have admitted their 140,000 was too low. The trojan uses DNS generation partly based on date on where to look for C&C servers. AV companies are building honeypots on those DNS names to 'capture' infected machines - and then use that to estimate how many machines in the wild are still infected. Turns out, some ISPs are also blocking the DNS names from resolving at all - so not only don't they connect to the dodgy C&C controllers, they don't connect to honeypots either. On top of that, the infected machines don't keep attempting to connect after a DNS fail, they get stuck till the next round. So a good way to help protect infected machines, but it means AV companies such as symantec are having trouble estimating how many macs are still infected; current estimates are that the numbers haven't really fallen much from peak infection, so new macs are getting infected almost as fast as ones are cleaned up.
Which implies people aren't applying security updates, and/or aren't getting them in the first place as they're leopard or older. Though if apple hadn't sat on the patches for months in the first place, they could have prevented it spreading so much.
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However, since Mobile browsers are not really in the same competitive field, that means you need to remove a large percentage of safari and chrome/android browsers from the statistics.. otherwise you're not comparing apples and oranges
Chrome is not the default browser on android except in the unreleased 4.1 (jelly bean); it's available as a optional (buggy) beta on 4.0, but since 4.0 is only on 10% of android devices, I imagine it's a pretty small percentage of a small percentage. Ergo the chrome stats are effectively entirely desktop users. Safari on the other hand is both iOS and OSX (and whatever few poor fools run safari under windows).
To address your main point though - why shouldn't mobile browsing be part of the equation? I wouldn't be at all surprised if safari's percentage is more from iOS than OSX, especially iPads. From what I've seen of users of ipads in particular, it has replaced browsing on a laptop or desktop. That 'sofa computing' has become their dominant choice of internet browsing at home. IE is declining not least because it doesn't have a viable alternative to apple on the tablet, though maybe surface will claw them back a few points when it eventually comes out.
If you've lost someone's browser usage to a competitor, you can't really complain that it's because they're using a tablet and you don't have one that anyone wants, they're still not using your platform.
In a more general sense, IE losing its dominant position and becoming one of many browsers is good, as long as no one company replaces it - it means web standards are important, and prevents any one player from being able to ignore standards and force through essential proprietary extensions which only they support. Which also means web-based apps can continue to challenge locked in platform specific apps. While browser-based apps certainly aren't ideal for everything, there are plenty of things they can do that are accessible to any one on any OS with a modern browser. Which is a good thing.
All of your issues seem to stem from poor design and religious choice rather than anything technical.
Well thanks for the insight into my setup and that we made the choices we did due to zealotry. That must have been easy since you don't know me, or my network, or the numerous discussions I've had with management and trials we've run over the last year to pick a new solution. But obviously it's because I'm allergic to 'best-of-breed' commercial solutions, by which I assume you mean Exchange.
We do run AD, Windows, and windows servers where it makes sense. We also run linux servers where it makes sense. We even have osx clients and ipads - where it makes sense. All solutions are considered on my end for technical merit, and management for cost if I can make the case for it.
What we don't have is a large budget - because we're a school. Any licencing costs come out of something else. Let's say I pay $10 a year per user for spam filtering via a commercial externally-hosted mail filter, which is on the cheaper end from what I've seen. That's $20,000 a year. That's a new suite of computers. A year. Or almost our entire microsoft budget. Hell, that's more than my annual server budget. We did consider it, but it was quickly dismissed as not value for money.
Yes, it might save my time, but my time is 'free' because I'm already paid for and on site as far as management is concerned.
It's no surprise you'r having issues managing spam, I never seen it done effectively in-house, I wonder why anyone even tries to do this
Money. In house is cheaper than out of house in visible costing. You know how much we were quoted for exchange hosting, another option we looked at? Around £5 a user a month was the cheapest from one of our existing suppliers, with a bulk discount that took us to just over £100,000 a year. I think my bursar nearly had a heart attack when he saw that - he tried to get them down to £2000 a year!! They struggled very hard not to laugh in his face when he said that in the meeting.
So instead, I can get the whole thing hosted on a commercial-grade service for free via google apps for education. That IS the best of breed cost/benefit as far as I'm concerned. It's not a panacea, there will still be end-user issues, and other headaches. But it's a hell of a lot better - and cheaper - option than outsourcing to a hosted exchange service.
And don't try to sell Google Docs as a solution. It may work in mum and dad shops or education where your users are kids who have no productivity requirement,
Well, good thing we ARE in education then! And the main thing the members of senior management that were part of the trial group leapt on? Google calendars. Loved it. Loved that it was sharable outside the school, and trivial to embed into a website, as well as personal ones and in-house private ones. Go figure.
We already have a commercial VLE for document sharing etc, so I don't see google docs getting much use to be honest. But staff managed publishable calendars? Best thing since sliced bread apparently.
Personally, I'm quite fond of shared Google Docs editing; simultaneous live editing is surprisingly useful when you have the team bashing away on a piece of documentation and we can all tune it at once without conflict.
Be prepared for dealing with such stuff on Google Apps too. A couple of years ago I moved an institution to Google Apps. Overall, it has been a positive experience, but it took them awhile to understand that I can't do much if "this email is gone that I swear was there a minute ago" or stuff like that.
Heh, that's true. But on the bright side, the trial period we've been running with a small subset of users went very well, and they were positive about the significant reduction in spam. Google have a much wider net for bayesian filtering and spotting bulk email runs as they happen, so that probably helps. We are also going to be cloning all incoming email into my own dump server for a while at least, so I'll have an independent copy of mail for emergency recovery. Given it's not going to be hooked up to 'live' use, I can use our much cheaper storage and infrastructure for it. It's not perfect, but it's a better solution than I can manage entirely inhouse.
Outlook doesn't like their POP server (or it doesn't like any POP servers?) so make sure you only use IMAP for local clients.
Far as I can tell, outlook doesn't really like any mail server that isn't Exchange, but yeah, POP is especially bad. We've been using IMAP exclusively mainly for that reason for years, though most users will carry on using webmail so shouldn't be an issue.
Google's passwords are thrown around a lot and I had bad experience with Chinese "hackers" getting into people's mail. E.g. some sites may claim they support OpenID or will log you in with your Google account. Instead, they just harvest your email / password. Also, many people will sign up for a random website using user@gmail.com and then giving the website the same password they use on Google. That's just too easy to exploit!
I'm pretty sure that's how we've had some of our spammer break-ins on our own smtp relay server with legit accounts; it is a problem. We'll just have to cross our fingers and stick to user education as we've already been doing. That and change passwords every so often; we'll be syncing google apps to our AD accounts, so our existing periodic change on the school systems should cover it.
Cheers for the tips. That hotmail one is an odd one!
I'm in the process of shifting our 2000 accounts from our own mail server to google apps for education.
Running your own mail server is a pain in the ass these days. With the massive torrent of spam - including pornographic spam - that gets ever harder to filter, without also blocking legitimate mail. RBLs on SMTP, greylisting, bayesian filters, image-to-text converters to then run bayesian analysis on... it's not even close to enough. Then you have virus infected laptops stealing credentials from the legit mail client and trying to send spam, finding a decent web-mail client that doesn't suck and keeping it updated (roundcube, BTW, is miles better than squirrelmail), the headmaster getting his password stolen so a spammer starts using his legit account to access our external access relay and send a bunch of spam for a few hours before we shut it down, still dealing with being on random blacklists for two weeks afterwards; but the ISP relay smtp server gets blacklisted even more often, setting up SPF and domain keys so some staff members email to a parent doesn't get randomly blocked because of yet another new anti-spam standard you have to adhere to...
Dealing with user complaints of why this was marked with spam when it shouldn't be, why this wasn't, why I can't send this 40MB powerpoint, where's this email gone that I swear was there a minute ago, making sure the VM server doesn't run out of drive space, neither does the backup server, making sure the backups don't slow the system down, making sure the backups work; keeping the system up 100% of the time and still doing maintenance, updates and changes to work around yet another 'email bounced' problem, making sure the various cluster boxes keep in sync, debugging why the logging server has choked this time...
I have a 100 other systems jobs to do. Babysitting the multiple postfix, dovecot and nginx servers to keep mail service up and running reliably spam free (ish) takes up a lot of my time that could be more profitably spent improving and add new services/software. Thank god we never met the cost/benefit pass-grade of exchange to add that too and only had to have simple IMAP support.
Instead, I can move the entire system to google apps, ad free, for free because we're education, and google have obviously learned from microsoft that catching students early means they'll end up a customers themselves later. And I'm fine with that. They have far better spam filtering than I can ever hope to achieve on my own even with my battery of different open-source tools. They have far more engineers. They have coverage round the clock, so I'll hopefully stop getting phone calls on christmas morning about the bloody email system. They can store 25GB a user without stressing me out about whether we're going to hit the limits of our budget on FC SAN storage.
They have a nice web interface; and shared docs, calendars and contact lists thrown in for free. I can clone all mail live, so I can still backup everything off site.
All in all, I'm going to be _very_ glad to see the back of running my own mail server.
There are three transformer models already; the original transformer (which I have), the prime which replaced it with better specs (tegra 3 vs tegra 2, better camera, more storage), and the transformer pad which is the cheaper version of the prime with a plastic case rather than aluminium. I think they all use virtually the same keyboard dock, though they're available in different colours to match the finish of the tablet.
Given the prime infinity is basically a prime with much higher res screen, it's not hard to speculate what using the prime infinity will be like.
Personally, I much prefer my original gen transformer to the ipad 2 we have in the office now it's running ICS. Adding the dock makes it a real netbook - ideal for holding in one hand and typing with the other, and plugging in standard usb-serial adapters for configuring old switches over serial with. And then I take the dock away, and it's a tablet for taking meeting notes with.
You know what - I've decided to actually post a more-detailed reply because posts like yours - and the modding it receives - highlight why Slashdot is becoming less and less valuable. How your post gets modded +5 Informative is beyond me when it shows a gross ignorance that is simply astounding.
Well I'm glad you've decided to actually participate instead of just slinging insults. Not least because it demonstrates that you yourself are wrong. I did read the judgment, by the way.
They went to court because they felt Nokia was demanding an inappropriate rate. Which is what I said. They refused to pay nokia's standard rate between 2007 and 2011. That's 4 years. Nokia took them to court to make them pay, and then settled before judgement was reached. Both back payments, and approximately 1.5% of final device cost on every device. Apple could have paid up years earlier, but decided the same rate everyone else paid was too high.
You say 2.5% is "fairly standard" yet simple math would highlight that is an impossibility and Judge Posner characterizes such an effort as "going for broke", making it clear that Motorola's demands for 2.25% was well beyond the norm for a FRAND patent.
Motorola charge 2.25% (typoed 2.5% in GP post) for their entire FRAND patent portfolio as the standard rate - as it can involve 75 or 100 patents. What they failed to do is show the value of this one specific patent that the judge required them to reduce the case to.
From Motorola's evidence:
"One patent is 1 percent of 100 patents and 1 per-cent of $700 million is $7 million. But according to Donohoe’s declaration, the license fee for that single patent, if licensed on its own rather than as part of a package deal that comprised the entire portfolio, would be “up to” 40 to 50 percent of the royalty for the entire portfolio—that is, up to $350 million."
Because motorola don't licence the patents individually, but as part of a large pool; and some of the patents are worth more than others. But in this case, they didn't break down the precise value of the one patent left out in the case as ordered by the judge. (And neither did Apple present usable evidence as to the actual value of their patents)
"How to pick the right non-linear royalty? Donohoe’s declaration does not answer that essential question, and there is no suggestion that any other witness can answer it."
And also from the judgment:
"A FRAND royalty would provide all the relief to which Motorola would be entitled if it proved infringement of the ‘898 patent, and thus it is not entitled to an injunction. In fact neither party is entitled to an injunction. Neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy. True, neither has presented sufficient evidence of damages to with-stand summary judgment—but that is not because damages are impossible to calculate with reasonable certainty and are there-fore an inadequate remedy; it’s because the parties have failed to present enough evidence to create a triable issue. They had an adequate legal remedy but failed to make a prima facie case of how much money, by way of such remedy, they are entitled to. That was a simple failure of proof."
FRAND patents are still worth money. How much money one specific FRAND patent was worth as opposed to the whole pool was not proven in the case, and thus, dismissed. Apple's patents were not properly quantified in value either, so also were dismissed.
I stand entirely by my original post. There's no reason that you can't sue over FRAND patents if a company refuses to pay the same licence fees you charge everyone else - and it's up to the court to decide if that value is fair or not. It doesn't doom the entire industry if a company does so, but it does waste a vast amount of time, money and harm customers when one or two software companies want into the phone business, but don't want to pay the companies that literally invented the hardware chips that made it possible.
I'm not going to quote portions of your post and refute them. What I'm simply going to say is that YOU ARE WRONG. Go read Judge Posner's opinion and judgement and learn something. You are wrong. Some of your fundamental beliefs about (F)RAND patents are outright, incredibly, over-the-top wrong.
I did read the judgment. Feel free to argue why I'm wrong instead of just stating it like you're the font of all knowledge, and being a bit of a tit about it.
Posner dismisses Motorola's request for an injunction; as being a FRAND patent essential to the UTMS standard that would defacto grant too much power to enforce whatever fee they liked. However he doesn't dismiss that Apple are still required to pay for FRAND licences, and could be required by a court to do so. In this case though, Motorola said that they charge 2.25% (typoed 2.5% in GP post) as a percentage of final device price as standard, regardless of the number of FRAND patents, as different cases could involve 75 or 100 FRAND patents. Given that Posner required both sides to reduce their claim to the smallest number of key patents, Motorola then failed to prove the specific value of that one patent they kept in the trial.
From the judgment:
A FRAND royalty would provide all the relief to which Motorola would be entitled if it proved infringement of the ‘898 patent, and thus it is not entitled to an injunction. In fact neither party is entitled to an injunction. Neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy. True, neither has presented sufficient evidence of damages to with-stand summary judgment—but that is not because damages are impossible to calculate with reasonable certainty and are there-fore an inadequate remedy; it’s because the parties have failed to present enough evidence to create a triable issue. They had an adequate legal remedy but failed to make a prima facie case of how much money, by way of such remedy, they are entitled to. That was a simple failure of proof.
He dismissed Apple's injunction because it would cause more harm to Motorola than Apple would gain, and because it was more harm than the patents were worth. He thought that Apple's claims of costs workarounds for their patents were unproven.
So since neither side was entitled to an injunction, and neither side had proven what those specific patents left were worth in either losses to the plaintiff, or benefit to the defendant, he dismissed the lot.
He certainly didn't say that, in general, failure to pay FRAND licence fees could not be corrected through court assessment and order of payment, he said the exact opposite - which was the main thrust of my post.
Motorola has licenced its FRAND patents to many companies, and the price is their standard one. Many other companies in the mobile phone space have reached agreements on those terms - Nokia, Ericsson, RIM, Samsung, LG, and HTC have all done so, for example. However, those companies also have relevant FRAND patents, so everyone cross-licences their patents to each other, allowing them all to operate. They all bring their patents to the table, share them with each other, and crack on with making phones. Those with small patent pools may end up paying the larger players under FRAND terms - anything up to 5% is standard.
Apple doesn't have such radio patents - they haven't been involved in inventing the essential standards for wireless comms, phones etc. So the normal process would be either to pay the standard patent licence fees which FRAND standards involve to 'buy in', or cross-licence some of their own software patents in exchange.
Apple doesn't want to pay any fees at all, let alone a fairly standard 2.5%. They see FRAND and think 'free'. Nor do they want to cross-licence any software patents, as they want to drive all android phones from the marketplace. Apple sued motorola and sought injunctions to stop them selling phones. Same with samsung.
Apple spent years trying to avoid paying nokia's patent licence fees for FRAND patents, and eventually settled the lawsuit - they ended up paying £700m lump sum plus £7 an iphone in licencing costs last year.
It's doubly ironic that Apple castigates samsung for stealing their unique patents which amounts to a black rounded rectangle shape with icons in a grid on it, yet don't see why they should have to pay up to licence FRAND patents that literally are what makes the phone capable of being a phone.
And FRAND doesn't mean you can't sue. It just means you have to offer the same licencing price to everyone first - if they pay that, they're safe. The licencing fee can't be too high - which isn't defined - but up to 5% is standard in the industry. But if someone refuses to licence, and then sues you first? That's hardly a dangerous precedent to sue right back, and motorola is far from the first to do so.
Remember who declared "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
It wasn't Motorola or Samsung.
Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.
Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.
BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.
Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.
If you were principled you'd boycott BT.
Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.
If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.
Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?
Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.
I like how you picked low-status jobs where height and upper body strength are a definite advantage - carrying shit, wielding big tools, tightening and untightening tight bolts, building walls etc. Of course men are going to dominate those fields because they have a physical advantage at them.
I note however that men aren't pushed into those fields either. You don't see careers advisors telling bright kids on track to become a doctor or a lawyer or a scientist that they should give up that track and go be a builder instead. They're jobs you do because you're not suited for whatever reason to follow a more intellectually demanding (and hopefully better paid) career. In other crappy low status jobs where upper body strength doesn't make much difference; checkout person, shop assistant, office drone, the gender breakdown is much more equal.
And some fields, such as cleaner - cleaning toilets literally full of shit - are much more often women, so it's not like they don't get to do shitty jobs too.
I don't know about your country, but in mine we're actively trying to recruit more male young-schooling teachers precisely because it's not great that young kids can spend the first few years without a single male role model teaching them.
So your premise - that women are somehow getting special treatment - is frankly, a load of bollocks.
Women aren't being pushed into IT. Those of us who see them as equals see the inequalities in the field, see the way that women are treated like crap by men, see the way that women are actively pushed away from IT at every opportunity, and see how women are constantly assumed to be crap at it, unsuited to it, and sexualised by nerds every time they dare to speak; we think that it's unfair, unreasonable and we should take our peers to task when they engage in that kind of behaviour.
So that women who show an aptitude for what is a complex, challenging and hopefully decently compensated career that is crying out for more skilled people are not driven away from it into other fields because of the subtle and not so subtle sexism that's so often demonstrated.
My wife has been going through codecademy, and recently we've been working on porting a family paper and dice game to javascript so she can play it remotely with her family. I've been helping answering questions, but the design and the vast bulk of the code is hers. She's previously dabbled in python on her own, and she's pretty damn good at fixing her own laptop. We met in a online MUD. I'm fairly sure her IQ is higher than mine, and I'm no slouch.
Her day job? She's a language teacher.
My day job? Sysadmin.
Despite her interest in science and maths at school, she was very heavily pushed towards the humanities track instead, because girls don't do well in science. I, on the other hand, expressed an interest in becoming a lawyer when I was younger, but was firmly pushed back onto the engineering track because that suited my strengths in maths etc.
I firmly believe she would have been a kickass CS grad or engineer. But after a decade of teacher training in two countries (she's french, I'm english, she's fluent and can teach the other in both languages) she's pretty much tied into that path. And she's very good at it.
My older sister has done a number of jobs involved in science, she worked directly at CERN for several years managing a web developer team as part of their giant data transmission system.
I knew several women in uni who definitely had the capability, but were doing science or engineering instead (chemistry, biology, EE in case you were wondering)
Women certainly can get bitten by the bug, and certainly have the capability to be coders.
But they're pushed away from the field at every opportunity in school. The peer pressure - being the only girl surrounded by boys, and looked down on by other girls - is tough. At uni, they have to work twice as hard to be seen as good as a guy.
And then there's the way guys act towards women. Go read fatuglyorslutty.com. Go look at how Anita Sarkeesian was treated on kickstarter.
To put it bluntly, women who try to get involved in men-only areas such as CS and gaming have to have a very very thick skin from the constant stream of utter bile and bullshit directed their way from a huge number of dickheads.
If a woman asks a question on a forum that's IT related, she's likely to be told the problem is because she's a girl and couldn't possibly understand it, asked for 'pics', and another stream of offensive crap completely unrelated to the problem.
You want to know why women rarely get into coding? Because many men in our field are absolute fuckwads towards women and act like a 10 year with tourettes whenever they're around. It's a constant stream of vitriol, misogyny and gender based denigration. And mixed in with that are constant attempts to try and chat her up, get a date, offers to help if they'll help the guys out with their other 'problem' - scarily, sometimes the two are mixed into a single post. I've witnessed all of this first hand.
And until we take our peers to task on it every time, kick out those men who do it from our communities and make it unacceptable - in short, create more spaces that are prepared to accept women as equals and not constantly denigrate or sexualise them or just say they're not suited to it because they're a woman - women will continue to be unwilling to get into IT fields, and who can blame them. And ultimately, we're the ones losing out as there are definitely women who would have have been outstanding coders and designers and network nerds, but who ended up in a less hostile field instead.
Yes. relenting to a bunch of bastards who don't want to buy the full version sure is a start.
Because open-source developers who don't make any money from their software were going be to effectively blocked from supporting their existing apps on windows 8?
With windows 7, you got the compiler in the SDK, so you could at least compile your own apps written in another IDE. Windows 8 doesn't have that any more, the only compiler and standard header libraries are part of Visual Studio 2012; so unless the non-profit making open source dev wanted to cough up $500 for the full version of VS2012 pro out of their own pocket (that included a bunch of crap they didn't need), they couldn't support windows 8.
Never mind that VS 2012 has a much faster compiler than the older version, microsoft tend to tweak APIs and such - and when they release a new OS, only the new VS gets it integrated.
And how were new students going to learn to code for windows? Most people start with CLI coding, not fully blown graphical UI versions, ala metro.
Plenty of people need Visual Studio Express to write code for windows, because it is so tightly integrated and designed to go together. Nerfing the express version wouldn't force developers to write more metro apps - it would just kill off existing apps for Windows 7 from 8, cut down on new people learning to write software for windows, and kill off future open source apps on windows.
I'm amazed they thought that making the free compiler for windows metro-only was a good idea in the first place. At least they've overturned what would have been a big self-inflicted foot wound.
Mint has a fairly good 'data and software package list backup, then do a fresh install from livecd' approach for upgrades.
More here.
It's ubuntu, which is basically polished debian, without the seriously buggy 'I'm suited for touch screens, honest guv' new Unity interface. I tried out 12.04 the other day - I used to use SuSE/KDE then gentoo then debian as my primary desktop for a number of years; gave up after the KDE4 migration disaster and went to windows, and fairly recently to OSX; I tried it on a clean drive on my hackintosh (I have a real mac in the office, a somewhat elderly mac mini, and my own copy of Lion) which is a fairly bog-standard core i3 gigabyte system.
I got as far as getting dual screen working with X.org tweaks via the closed nvidia driver (have a geforce 210 in that rig) though it wouldn't stick past a reboot, which takes me back, then fixed sound as per usual. Then I discovered that clicking on a side-launcher button doesn't raise an active window up to the top; it just spawns a new one. In fact, I couldn't find anyway to bring a window to the top of the stack without manually shifting everything else off the top of it and gave up, it just wasn't worth the effort. So based on my admittedly short trial, Ubuntu isn't ready for the novice user any more. It's as hard as hacking OSX to work on my PC, and while the UI is pretty, it's just not very, well, functional.
So Mint is basically Ubuntu where they don't hate the user, and have stuck with gnome but with a decent amount of polish. I used to really like ubuntu, and still use their server platform as the LTS approach is a bit more modern than good old debian (so I get updated supported packages like node.js and nginx and php-fpm) while still offering a known long timeframe for support. But the new unity UI makes windows 8 look good, and that's saying something. You basically have a choice of the stable aka old gnome 2 MATE version, or the new shiny but not necessarily rock-solid gnome 3 Cinnamon version.
give it a try, and see how it copes with your hardware...
And dear god, there's a lot of missed words/grammar errors in there. Should have proofed it before hitting submit, but I gotta get to work...
I do, however, know what can get me back on track, and that's financial stability. Sadly, my employer treats me like shit and I'm spiraling down because I ceased trying to look happy and shit when going to job interviews.
Your situation sounds awfully familiar. Too familiar. I've been being treated for chronic depression for the last 2.5 years - and looking back, I've been suffering from it much longer than that. I'm not going to offer any magic solution, because I don't have any. For me, depression is like living in a grey fog. You only have two emotions; totally flat, and angry. Most of the time, you just feel numb. You fake it because you have to, but a lot of the time you wish everyone would just go away and leave you alone. You do repetitive simple things like watch a lot of TV, play games obsessively, try to be Right On The Internet, eat crappy food. Doing any major is a massive effort, and you procastinate a lot. At work, it's never enough - I do my best, but there's always more work to do than I have time to do, so you end up staying ever later at the office to try and keep up. You feel like a failure at life. It's your fault. It's all your fault. And then there's the angry phase. Your boss is a moron, your coworkers are useless. Your pay sucks, you do a great job and nobody cares. Fuck em all.
But here's two things I have learned.
1) Depression screws with your head. It really does. You can't trust your own judgment. It's really hard to accept, and I still regularly catch myself making the mistake of thinking that I'm being rational. But I'm not. My own mind is screwing with me, all the time. For the longest time, I didn't think I was depressed; it's just I was the failure, and should learn to suck it up. It's the most insidious thing, and for someone like me who's only asset has been my brain (I'm very good at what I do, sysadmin) to realize that was quite a shock. But it eventually got so bad where it was a huge struggle to do anything at all, that I finally looked for help.
The point is, my emotions are real, how I feel (or when I don't care) is real, and it's a response to long-term heavy stress - but it's an emotional response to my problems, not an objective one. And I can't tell the difference. It feels like I'm making rational decisions, that how I feel is due to the pressures of family and work and money - but they're not. Which leads onto
2) It can, and does get better. Medication for me helps me with the symptoms. It's not a cure by any stretch, but it does give me space and time and a relief from the pressure. They're not happy pills. They're 'give me some perspective' pills. I'm still working with the docs to try and unscramble my head, and its very much a work in progress. CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy - has the same statistically benefit for Depression as medication for mild cases, and I recommend it, though medication is still better for more severe depression. Finding the one that works best for you though is basically experimentation. It's not an area that's particularly well understood (since society frowns on experimenting too much with living brains directly) so meds are a bit of a potluck. They also have significant side effects. Though for me, the benefits of not feeling like I just want the whole world to go away - which is a short step from thinking of ways to exiting the problem - outweight the cost.
The last thing is - I was talking to my colleagues the other day that I've been friends with for years, and they were saying they loved their job, that it's the best they've ever had, which rather drew me up short. I hate my job, I hate my boss, I hate my pay, it's a daily struggle to go in. I hope in part that that makes me a good supervisor; strictly speaking, I'm their boss, though I consider myself more of a department lead than a boss per-se. That I'm the one taking the stress, so they don't have to. But it made me realise, again, that my reaction to my workload (which admittedly is insane; 1500 users, 600 fixed computers in the
Funny that you should mention dropbox. Did you know that apps were being blocked from the iOS app store because they used dropbox integration recently? Turns out, it's because the dropbox SDK could take you to a sign-up page in safari for the free 5GB if you didn't have a dropbox account. It didn't offer you paid upgrade choices at sign-up, but if you really tried you could get to the paid upgrades page via links.
So Apple blocked all apps using the dropbox SDK with no given reason why; turns out, Apple consider that because its possible in safari to get to the paid upgrade page from the dropbox sign in, it violates their 'no external links to spend money in apps that don't go through the app store in-app mechanism and give apple their 30% cut'. So that's apps, using a 2nd app, that violates a rule because it's 'possible' to get to a spend money page in safari, getting blocked from the appstore.
After trying a few variants - as Apple don't say whether given changes will work or not for approval - they hit on a process by which if you don't have the dropbox app installed, it fires up an in-app window to login with; and no prompt or safari link to create a new account. So you have to manually find your way to the dropbox site and sign up for there.
Of course, developers could just use iCloud document sharing, and shift their whole infrastructure into the warm, loving, friendly embrace of Apple and give them their 30% cut across the board and not deal with the risk that their app update will one day get blocked because an SDK you use suddenly falls foul of an arbitrary rule interpretation. Much safer.
Pre-ordered a copy a couple of weeks because a bunch of friends are also going to play it, despite me normally avoiding always-on DRM for single player games like the plague. Retail copy arrived today, get home to play. Had already preinstalled the game, put my retail code in via the website... And have spent literally the last hour (6.30 to 7.30pm UK time) trying to login to the bloody thing to play single player, nothing but error 37 and error 75.
Fuck Blizzard for requiring always-on DRM, and then cheaping out on enough servers to meet demand. Fuck em right up the arse.
There are many forms of entertainment that are arguably better for mental health and demonstrably less expensive than video gaming.
Your hand doesn't count.
And in our modern economy, where it's the first interview you've had in months and your unemployment funds have long since been spent paying the necessary bills; you'll choose facebook privacy over putting food on the table for your family? Now imagine you're not some highly paid code wizard who gets to pick and choose employers, but an ordinary shop floor worker doing a blue collar job who has to take what you can get.
Being able to exercise your rights when you're wealthy and in a position to pick and choose between jobs is one thing. When you're in modern serfdom employment and the employers hold all the cards, federal or state government regulation and enforcement is about the only thing that can protect the workers from ridiculous abuses like this. Even more so when it's local government (such as police) doing it.
From what I've seen from libertarian supporters it generally actually means:
1. very low to no taxes. Keep the government out of my wallet.
2. very few regulations. Keep the government out of my business/gun collection/telling me who and who I can't serve in my own shop.
3. very little redistribution. See 1. I keep mine, you keep yours.
These combine to mean that if you're born poor, you'll stay that way; and vice versa if you're rich. It ignores that those with money find it much easier to make more money. When people don't want to pay taxes, it means that education and healthcare especially suffers for the poor and middle classes. The wealthy can afford good schools and healthcare, so entrenching their advantage, while the poor are effectively locked into being poor, while the middle class disappears as they now have to compete for their jobs with the cheapest possible workers, often overseas. Remember, no government regulation of business. The environment suffers, as businesses can pollute away, and the commons has no protector. Racism, sexism and other 'isms proliferate, as again, the existing wealthy land and business owners entrench their positions of privilege, and there's no one telling them 'no'.
Oddly enough, it's the wealthy, white business owners who are most likely to be libertarians.
Government is not meant to protect the rich and strong elite. It's meant to protect the vast majority of the population against the predations of those powerful, wealthy men. Government by the people, FOR the people. Libertarianism is entrenching their power and privilege, not challenging it. Of course, the easiest way to stop the government doing that is for the selfish members of the wealthy elite to slowly take over the media, then the government, and use both platforms to tell the population over and over that the best way to improve their lot is to get rid of meddling government and their infernal taxes...
Yet MS felt that they needed to spend development to shove the tablet model into Windows and label it as Windows 8. If MS focused on creating a new OS just for the tablet, they might have worked out all the enterprise features instead.
The problem for them doing that is that they'd be a third entrant to the market, with an even more dominant leader - the iPad - to beat than they face in the smartphone market. And we've all seen how that's working out for them. Their biggest problem is the lack of killer apps. Well, that and the memory of the stinker windows mobile 6.5. And they're bleeding users to macbook airs, ipads, iphones, and android phones. The fat desktop is in slow decline, and more and more people are realising they don't need office, or even a PC.
They don't have time for windows tablet to hang around in the market for a couple of years, and only pick up a single digit userbase. Not unless they want to continue their slide into irrelevence.
So windows 8 is a bold/suicidal move. They're working on the basis that by using their many millions of current desktop users as a trojan horse to get the windows app store - and metro apps - out there very widely, they'll attract developers to metro, and get some real killer apps which will then give people a reason to actually WANT a windows 8 tablet or phone. That windows 8 sucks pretty hard for desktop users doesn't really matter, as they'll buy whatever comes pre-installed on their OEM computer, and as long as it runs their current apps, they'll live with it.
The ipad and iphone is demonstrating that IT isn't in charge of corporate devices any more. Management bring whatever random consumer shit in they like, and it's IT problem to change the network to make it work like 'it does at home'. And once the managers have them, they're 'cheap' to get for workers too, instead of desktop upgrades. Only nerds care about feature lists any more, it's ease of use and shiny shiny that's all important now.
Microsoft can see the writing on the wall, and are desparate to get metro out as far as possible, as wide as possible, in the hope that that will stem the tide and keep them relevant 5 years from now. It's gutsy, I've gotta give them that.
I'd rather simply disclaim it to the public domain.
While I understand this, and agree that it would be nice to do so, in reality anything with no licence attached at all, yet inside the expiry date of copyright material may well lead people to thinking it's just an abandoned or owner-unknown copyrighted work, and not available for use.
Using something like the CC0 licence - which you mention in another comment - you make it explicitly clear that you disclaim all rights, and that makes it clear that it's free to use, while still having the handy advantage of making sure you're still associated as the author for others to cite with confidence, and it doesn't end up claimed as someone else's work, nor will you see your name being used to endorse someone else's position without permission.
For those who don't know the CC0 licence:
"The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.
In no way are the patent or trademark rights of any person affected by CC0, nor are the rights that other persons may have in the work or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
Unless expressly stated otherwise, the person who associated a work with this deed makes no warranties about the work, and disclaims liability for all uses of the work, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
When using or citing the work, you should not imply endorsement by the author or the affirmer."
Well there's a dead easy way to avoid your code becoming 'contaminated' by the GPL. Don't leech off other people's code and write your own damn stuff.
Libraries and other dynamically linked material are usually under the LGPL, so you can avoid reinventing the wheel for low level stuff without risking your own code coming under the GPL or LGPL.
But what you're complaining about is that commercial coders can leech off of MIT licenced stuff etc, but not GPL code. Which is what the author of the GPL code intended - if you want to take their code, and use it, then you need to share your own improvements back to your customers as source code, and not lock it away where you profit from the author's work without giving anything back.
Try including someone else's commercially licenced source code in your project sometime without abiding by the licence or paying the fee, and you'll very quickly find out how viral commercial code is at polluting the rest of your code base and making the whole thing liable for civil suit.
Just because GPL is free monetarily, doesn't mean it doesn't have worth. If the price is too high for you, don't pay it; just as you wouldn't insert commercial licence code in your project without paying.
Or you know, go to the developer and offer some actual cash. Many developers will be happy to provide you an alternative licenced version of their code that you can use without GPL requirements, if you're willing to pay for it.
Symantec have admitted their 140,000 was too low. The trojan uses DNS generation partly based on date on where to look for C&C servers. AV companies are building honeypots on those DNS names to 'capture' infected machines - and then use that to estimate how many machines in the wild are still infected. Turns out, some ISPs are also blocking the DNS names from resolving at all - so not only don't they connect to the dodgy C&C controllers, they don't connect to honeypots either. On top of that, the infected machines don't keep attempting to connect after a DNS fail, they get stuck till the next round. So a good way to help protect infected machines, but it means AV companies such as symantec are having trouble estimating how many macs are still infected; current estimates are that the numbers haven't really fallen much from peak infection, so new macs are getting infected almost as fast as ones are cleaned up.
Which implies people aren't applying security updates, and/or aren't getting them in the first place as they're leopard or older. Though if apple hadn't sat on the patches for months in the first place, they could have prevented it spreading so much.