This is fairly meaningless. Look at it from the perspective of someone trying to find music out there for which you own the copyrights. You don't want to look for just any old mp3s, because you'll waste time going through music that you don't own the rights to. You obviously don't want to search for every damn thing you own the rights to. So instead, you just pick 5-10 things that you own the rights to, at random, and search for those. Once you find those, you then look for other songs you own the rights to from the same user.
That's almost certainly what's happened here. The high frequency songs are either completely random, or perhaps chosen to find a spread of users. Either way, the particular songs chosen mean little.
I can never define any sort of function pointer in one line
Yeah, me too, and I've been doing C/C++ since 1985.
All the style manuals say to limit yourself to one decl per line, and many say to prefer "int* foo" to "int *foo". Sometimes I think we'd be better off if the language enforced both.
BSD would have no protection from either. First, just being "open source" yourself gives you no protection from patented technology. None. Zip. If someone has a patent on X, and you go write "GnuX", you'll get your ass sued. (I'm not saying that's how it should be. I'm saying that's how it is.)
If something is copyrighted, and not licensed with an open source license, you can get your ass sued for using it. This is exactly with SCO is suing over. If IBM had contributed to BSD instead of Linux, the lawsuit would be no different. (Of course, the fact that the SCO suit is almost certainly frivolous makes a huge difference.)
This is not going to be "the coffin of DRM" by any means, as InterTrust is backed by really big companies like Sony and Phillips. What it means is that Microsoft is on the short end of the patent stick and therefore can't monopolize DRM like they'd dearly love to.
Gee, I must be such a numbnuts that I just imagined the cash I made on "INTR" in the year before Sony and Phillips bought them out, taking them of the market. (A year in which their stock value went up by a factor of four.)
Intertrust's suit could hardly prompted by SCOs as it has been wending its way through the court system for two years now. It's a company that was trying to sell DRM "technology" but could not because of Microsoft's fun competitive tactics. It currently has no assets other than patents because it essentially ran out of money (at which point Sony and Philips bought it to keep this lawsuit going.)
This lawsuit is one of the things that is causing investors to be so pro-SCO. People have made a bundle on Intertrust stock as this lawsuit made its way through the system. This gave people the idea that they could make a bundle buying into tiny little companies trying to enforce patents on corporate giants.
Unfortunately, your average investor isn't clued in enough to realize that InterTrust has a very good case while SCO has a very bad one. Thus, the recent runup in SCO stock.
That depends on the volume you play it at. The piers are fairly far apart, so you'd only be in trouble if you played loudly enough to be heard on the next pier over.
I mostly agree with your point as long as we are clear that the "trade secret" aspect has nothing at all to do with the copyright.
In essence, the fact that they aren't willing to display copyrighted code is suspicious, as they lose no legal protection at all by displaying it. The only reason to refuse to display a "trade secret" would be if they were using some sort of algorithm that was not otherwise known, or if they were trying to hide some sort of undocumented API. In other words, if they were trying to hide something that they could lose merely by a programmer looking at the code. That seems highly unlikely here.
The truth of the matter is that if SCO had a good case, they would have publically displayed the copied code, and demanded that it immediately be removed from the Linux kernel, and then sued IBM for damages. (Note that they are suing over copying of copyrighted materials, not for spreading trade secrets.) That's the way 99% of all copyright violation cases go. First comes the "cease and desist" order.
You do not correctly understand the difference between closed source and open source. I could post a 100k lines of source on my website, get it slashdoted so that a 100,000 coders read it, and still make it "closed source". The difference between "open source" and "closed source" is that people are allowed to publish changes to open source software and not closed source software.
Most books are published with something like a "closed source" license. It doesn't prevent you from seeing it. It prevents you from publishing changes to it.
I don't know for sure. I know for a fact that both California and New York allow "at-will" employment because of various jobs I've worked.
And yes, it is definitely to prevent legal hassles. Otherwise, a company would have to prove that they fired someone for "good cause", which basically means having to drag their company discipline policies out into the courtroom.
In the case I watched, the plaintiff had no case, not on grounds 1-3 (nor on the fourth one you mention.)
I didn't mean to say that "at-will" avoided all wrongful termination suits. Only that if you are "at-will", you have to prove a very narrow set of circumstances. (Either discrimination or whistle-blowing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Translation-unit this algorithm perfectly works! Deutsch this was typed and translation-unit to English makes this was!
This is fairly meaningless. Look at it from the perspective of someone trying to find music out there for which you own the copyrights. You don't want to look for just any old mp3s, because you'll waste time going through music that you don't own the rights to. You obviously don't want to search for every damn thing you own the rights to. So instead, you just pick 5-10 things that you own the rights to, at random, and search for those. Once you find those, you then look for other songs you own the rights to from the same user.
That's almost certainly what's happened here. The high frequency songs are either completely random, or perhaps chosen to find a spread of users. Either way, the particular songs chosen mean little.
Yeah, me too, and I've been doing C/C++ since 1985.
All the style manuals say to limit yourself to one decl per line, and many say to prefer "int* foo" to "int *foo". Sometimes I think we'd be better off if the language enforced both.
And it's probably all a crafty plan to meet chix0rs.
They're not on the market anymore. I got the wrong symble. It was "ITRU".
It's the DRM components in .NET. I don't believe Java and J2EE contain the same sorts of things.
You think Sony is going to sell a patent to Microsoft!? I suppose you figure Sony'll just sell them the rights to the Playstation 3 next...
If something is copyrighted, and not licensed with an open source license, you can get your ass sued for using it. This is exactly with SCO is suing over. If IBM had contributed to BSD instead of Linux, the lawsuit would be no different. (Of course, the fact that the SCO suit is almost certainly frivolous makes a huge difference.)
This is not going to be "the coffin of DRM" by any means, as InterTrust is backed by really big companies like Sony and Phillips. What it means is that Microsoft is on the short end of the patent stick and therefore can't monopolize DRM like they'd dearly love to.
Gee, I must be such a numbnuts that I just imagined the cash I made on "INTR" in the year before Sony and Phillips bought them out, taking them of the market. (A year in which their stock value went up by a factor of four.)
To all the slashdot readers jerking their knees with statements like "they say the SCO suit and..." need to look here first.
Intertrust's suit could hardly prompted by SCOs as it has been wending its way through the court system for two years now. It's a company that was trying to sell DRM "technology" but could not because of Microsoft's fun competitive tactics. It currently has no assets other than patents because it essentially ran out of money (at which point Sony and Philips bought it to keep this lawsuit going.)
Unfortunately, your average investor isn't clued in enough to realize that InterTrust has a very good case while SCO has a very bad one. Thus, the recent runup in SCO stock.
That depends on the volume you play it at. The piers are fairly far apart, so you'd only be in trouble if you played loudly enough to be heard on the next pier over.
(Though with the three batteries I've gone through being completely non-functional, it's had less opportunity.)
I mean, it's 2003, for God's sakes.
Since no one expects him to live for 30,000 years, the actual damage award is more on the order of $500 * 12 * 60, or $360,000.
Almost since it's inception, my site has absolutely dominated the "sites about ucblockhead" niche.
Is making money the only important thing?
The nice thing about the web is that you can publish things even when you don't care about making money. Try that with a physical book.
Time to add this:
User-agent: MSNBot
Disallow: /
I mostly agree with your point as long as we are clear that the "trade secret" aspect has nothing at all to do with the copyright.
In essence, the fact that they aren't willing to display copyrighted code is suspicious, as they lose no legal protection at all by displaying it. The only reason to refuse to display a "trade secret" would be if they were using some sort of algorithm that was not otherwise known, or if they were trying to hide some sort of undocumented API. In other words, if they were trying to hide something that they could lose merely by a programmer looking at the code. That seems highly unlikely here.
The truth of the matter is that if SCO had a good case, they would have publically displayed the copied code, and demanded that it immediately be removed from the Linux kernel, and then sued IBM for damages. (Note that they are suing over copying of copyrighted materials, not for spreading trade secrets.) That's the way 99% of all copyright violation cases go. First comes the "cease and desist" order.
You do not correctly understand the difference between closed source and open source. I could post a 100k lines of source on my website, get it slashdoted so that a 100,000 coders read it, and still make it "closed source". The difference between "open source" and "closed source" is that people are allowed to publish changes to open source software and not closed source software.
Most books are published with something like a "closed source" license. It doesn't prevent you from seeing it. It prevents you from publishing changes to it.
I don't know for sure. I know for a fact that both California and New York allow "at-will" employment because of various jobs I've worked.
And yes, it is definitely to prevent legal hassles. Otherwise, a company would have to prove that they fired someone for "good cause", which basically means having to drag their company discipline policies out into the courtroom.
In the case I watched, the plaintiff had no case, not on grounds 1-3 (nor on the fourth one you mention.)
I didn't mean to say that "at-will" avoided all wrongful termination suits. Only that if you are "at-will", you have to prove a very narrow set of circumstances. (Either discrimination or whistle-blowing.)
Employee quits.
Managers panic. "We'll never finish now!".
Managers offer ex-employee a rate equal to twice his old salary to work as a "short-term contractor". With paid overtime.
Employee now rakes in the bucks as mismanaged company can never manage to clear the schedule enough to terminate his contract.
I once saw a shop with twenty employees turn into a shop with twenty contractors in exactly this fashion.
Now this is a good troll. Clearly none of the moderators thought about how the date of "1938" relates to the text.