What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment?
Android requires that you give consent, since it tells you what permissions the application needs prior to installing it. So by very definition, these data leakages on Android are not malware. The user said it was ok for that application to collect that data.
Does that mean that there can never be malware on an operating system like Windows which (AFAIK) doesn't have a mechanism for the user to "say that it's ok for an application to collect that data"?
Mueller is _not_ an employee of Oracle. His post says "...Oracle has very recently become a consulting client of mine." He has many clients, of which Oracle is one.
...and of which Google is none. No surprise there. It's not as if the fact that he has some more clients besides Oracle means that he couldn't be biased in favor of anyone. And MS, the other client FM has admitted he is working for, is on Oracle's side in the Oracle-Google legal dispute. Go figure.
Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.
You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.
Of course they can use the damn word if they refer to the language that you can write Android programs in. They just can't call their runtime in which they run the compiled programs "Java" or a "JVM". And they don't -- they call it "Dalvik". And they've written it themselves. And that's perfectly legal. Of course you don't have to pay license fees anytime you you the word "Java" in any technical sense. If you want, you can write a Java Framework for controlling a spacecraft or a coffee machine, brag "you can write programs for it in JAVA" in the documentation, sell it for thousands of dollars and not pay Oracle anything.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license
What? They didn't need one at all unless they wanted to provide a Java ME implementation, which would be a completely different thing. Do you even know what Java ME is? It's a spec defining a subset of J2ME plus lots of additional APIs, profiles and so on. Android doesn't contain any of that.
Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it.
What kind of warped statement is that? This is like saying the copyright on "Titanic" is impossible to work around because James Cameron wanted to make money. Knock it off, man.
I mean google might be concerned that not many people know it, but Apple took the exact same punt with objective C, but ultimately objective C's strengths as a rapid development platform won over a lot of coders who might otherwise be spooked away from it.
It wasn't really Apple that took that punt, it was NeXT, sometime around 1986. And yes, ObjC's dynamic, smalltalk-like OOP runtime helped a lot with designing a powerful and straightforward framework for application development. But the other main selling point was that ObjC was fully backward compatible with C, so all of your existing C code could be used. And these days, even C++ can be used. And C/C++ basically runs the world, even today. It has huge momentum. ObjC(++) at its core was just a small runtime on top of their libc. So if you wanted, you could just use (and continue writing) the backend/business code of your app in C/C++ and only write the UI (the part that, in many cases, has to be rewritten anyway) in ObjC. Such a thing can make switching to a new programming language ten times less risky.
Wait, so Myhrvold conceived an "iPhone-like device" by imagining some kind of gadget that had a clock, contacts, calendar and email? By that standard, Palm Inc. not only conceived, but actually designed and built an "iPhone-like device", called it "Palm Pilot" and sold it by the millions. Hooray.
Doesn't just being the deepest point in the ocean make it worth exploring?
Maybe not. I mean, yeah, I'll probably stare in awe at Cameron's video footage of the seafloor, thinking of the 10,900 meter water column above and of how this is the single patch of seafloor that endures a higher water pressure than any other patch of seafloor anywhere else. But from a scientific standpoint it might have been better if he'd visited some place that's only, say, 8,000 meters deep, but is located in the vicinity of some deep-sea volcano, hydrothermal vent or other geologically interesting feature, thus making it more likely to find many living creatures or other interesting things there.
Kinda interesting, but I understand he chose the spot of the seafloor he's visiting simply on the basis of it being the deepest point in the ocean, not because of something that's there and that's worth seeing/exploring. So chances are that all he'll find is... um, a seafloor, made of a lot of sand. I hope I'm wrong.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
If all it ultimately does is send some current to 16 or so places at the same time (the explosive charges around the sphere to be imploded) then that isn't hard to replicate.
When "at the same time" resolves to pretty much exactly the same wavefront within +/- femtoseconds (10e-15),
I don't think it's in the femtosecond range (that would mean that you would have to control the geometry and shockwave propagation speed of the conventional explosives with insane precision, and how would they have accomplished that in the 1940s anyway). What they probably do is deliberately use an asymmetric geometry for the explosive lenses (the outer shape as well as the shapes of the regions inside with varying wave propagation speeds), so that you have to ignite the charges in a very specific (and very secret) time sequence (rather than all simultaneously) to get a working nuclear explosion. That time sequence is programmed into the detonator, which is attached to the bomb only at the last moment (one would hope).
Not hard to replicate? What? There only a handful of nuclear powers today. It is not for a lack of trying.
Yeah, it's for a lack of access to the material (U-235 or Pu-239). Once you have that, the rest isn't so hard anymore, at least not for half-way functioning and wealthy nation states (terrorist organizations may be a different matter).
Didn't Obama repeatedly say in the past that he was going to increase NASA's budgets over the next five years? What became of that? Is it all going to be funneled into earthbound stuff? Or into that heavy-lift launcher that congress demanded?
I'm sure there are a half billion scripts out there that expect to see "64 bytes from foo.com (xx.xx.xx.xx):..." and will shit themselves when it becomes "64 bytes from foo.com [xxxx:xx::xxxx]:..."
I thought about that too. But then I think that there are probably more scripts out there that only want to check for the reachability of foo.com by issuing "ping foo.com" or "ping -c 1 foo.com" and just checking the exit code or scanning for "64 bytes from foo.com". And all those scripts would then fail for an IPv6-only foo.com, but would succeed if the ping tool supported v4 and v6.
You have things totally backwards. The operating system figures out whether a host should be reached via ipv6 vs ipv4 based on your systems IPv6 connectivity and DNS. You can't know it in advance.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
You're probably going to have scripts out there that issue ping -n host.com and expect output like "64 bytes from bla.bla.bla.bla", and will fail if the output would suddenly change to "64 bytes from blabla:blabla:blabla::blabla".
A search for Microsoft Linux Tax finds the majority of mobile manufacturers paying Microsoft for a license to use Linux. A search for Microsoft BSD Tax or Microsoft Solaris Tax or Microsoft Plan9 Tax or Microsoft FreeDOS Tax? Nah.
Yeah, because the BSDs' marketshare is too small. When MS "taxes" other OS vendors with patent licenses, they earn money and potentially diminish the other OS's influence, but they also pay a political price. So they don't do it against vendors who are irrelevant.
There's a reason Apple used FreeBSD as their basis for OSX and not Linux.
Yeah, and the reason is probably that Linux didn't exist when Next incorporated BSD code into what later became OSX. When Apple did the same thing again 10 years later, they may have had architectural reasons (essentially "merging" back the improvements that had been done in the BSD code in the meantime), I don't know. For every commercial vendor who uses BSD, you find two that use Linux, so your argument doesn't seem to hold water too well. And then there's the code sharing argument: It may well be that GPL code is harder to incorporate into commercial codebases, but that may be balanced by the fact that, since the GPL forces contributors to publicize their improvements, more code may become available to incorporate in the first place,
So either this is down to careful and well executed planning from the Iranians (which is scary), or total incompetence from the Americans who may have built a drone using civilian GPS (not likely and kind of scary) or lost their encryption keys (hopefully very unlikely and extremely scary).
..or the supposed "Iranian engineer" was just bullshitting.
Yeah, MS isn't bothered about SL implementations on non-MS patforms because they're irrelevant. As long as that's the case, MS can use them as showcases for proving how "open" they are. If you want to know what MS will do to non-MS patforms once they do become relevant, look at what they're doing to Android.
They rob pharmaceutical companies of revenue streams that are rightfully theirs.
Well, if cancer is found during the screening, chances are all kinds of products made by pharmaceutical companies will be unleashed onto the patient full-force.
We're lucky as hell that the extra billion people live in starving, uneducated, under-developed or developing countries. Because if they didn't, the planet would have gone to hell
Why would the planet have gone to hell with an extra billion non-hungry people living in rich, educated, developed countries?
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment?
Sounds like another dot-com bubble :-P
"don't give a fuck", I s'pose (not a native speaker).
Android requires that you give consent, since it tells you what permissions the application needs prior to installing it. So by very definition, these data leakages on Android are not malware. The user said it was ok for that application to collect that data.
Does that mean that there can never be malware on an operating system like Windows which (AFAIK) doesn't have a mechanism for the user to "say that it's ok for an application to collect that data"?
Mueller is _not_ an employee of Oracle. His post says "...Oracle has very recently become a consulting client of mine." He has many clients, of which Oracle is one.
...and of which Google is none. No surprise there. It's not as if the fact that he has some more clients besides Oracle means that he couldn't be biased in favor of anyone. And MS, the other client FM has admitted he is working for, is on Oracle's side in the Oracle-Google legal dispute. Go figure.
Sun basically said that anyone could use the code so long as they DIDN'T call it Java. It's like the IceWeasel / Firefox thing. They have no choice. So not illegal, and not really immoral.
You have to decide. Either they could not use the Java name, and in this case they are MASSIVELY infringing, as their code / documentation / web sites contain thousands of times the word "Java", including the Android frontpage, or they can use it, and your justification of Google's sneaky behaviour does not hold.
Of course they can use the damn word if they refer to the language that you can write Android programs in. They just can't call their runtime in which they run the compiled programs "Java" or a "JVM". And they don't -- they call it "Dalvik". And they've written it themselves. And that's perfectly legal. Of course you don't have to pay license fees anytime you you the word "Java" in any technical sense. If you want, you can write a Java Framework for controlling a spacecraft or a coffee machine, brag "you can write programs for it in JAVA" in the documentation, sell it for thousands of dollars and not pay Oracle anything.
The fact is, that they knew they needed a Java ME license
What? They didn't need one at all unless they wanted to provide a Java ME implementation, which would be a completely different thing. Do you even know what Java ME is? It's a spec defining a subset of J2ME plus lots of additional APIs, profiles and so on. Android doesn't contain any of that.
Java ME's licensing model is of course designed to be impossible to work around, as the company that created it had this crazy aspiration to make money out of it.
What kind of warped statement is that? This is like saying the copyright on "Titanic" is impossible to work around because James Cameron wanted to make money. Knock it off, man.
I mean google might be concerned that not many people know it, but Apple took the exact same punt with objective C, but ultimately objective C's strengths as a rapid development platform won over a lot of coders who might otherwise be spooked away from it.
It wasn't really Apple that took that punt, it was NeXT, sometime around 1986. And yes, ObjC's dynamic, smalltalk-like OOP runtime helped a lot with designing a powerful and straightforward framework for application development. But the other main selling point was that ObjC was fully backward compatible with C, so all of your existing C code could be used. And these days, even C++ can be used. And C/C++ basically runs the world, even today. It has huge momentum. ObjC(++) at its core was just a small runtime on top of their libc. So if you wanted, you could just use (and continue writing) the backend/business code of your app in C/C++ and only write the UI (the part that, in many cases, has to be rewritten anyway) in ObjC. Such a thing can make switching to a new programming language ten times less risky.
Wait, so Myhrvold conceived an "iPhone-like device" by imagining some kind of gadget that had a clock, contacts, calendar and email? By that standard, Palm Inc. not only conceived, but actually designed and built an "iPhone-like device", called it "Palm Pilot" and sold it by the millions. Hooray.
Doesn't just being the deepest point in the ocean make it worth exploring?
Maybe not. I mean, yeah, I'll probably stare in awe at Cameron's video footage of the seafloor, thinking of the 10,900 meter water column above and of how this is the single patch of seafloor that endures a higher water pressure than any other patch of seafloor anywhere else. But from a scientific standpoint it might have been better if he'd visited some place that's only, say, 8,000 meters deep, but is located in the vicinity of some deep-sea volcano, hydrothermal vent or other geologically interesting feature, thus making it more likely to find many living creatures or other interesting things there.
Kinda interesting, but I understand he chose the spot of the seafloor he's visiting simply on the basis of it being the deepest point in the ocean, not because of something that's there and that's worth seeing/exploring. So chances are that all he'll find is... um, a seafloor, made of a lot of sand. I hope I'm wrong.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
Absolutely nothing at all. Magnetic field drops off according to inverse _cube_ law.
The magnetic field strength (B) around an (infinitely long) conductor with constant current drops off with 1/R.
When "at the same time" resolves to pretty much exactly the same wavefront within +/- femtoseconds (10e-15),
I don't think it's in the femtosecond range (that would mean that you would have to control the geometry and shockwave propagation speed of the conventional explosives with insane precision, and how would they have accomplished that in the 1940s anyway). What they probably do is deliberately use an asymmetric geometry for the explosive lenses (the outer shape as well as the shapes of the regions inside with varying wave propagation speeds), so that you have to ignite the charges in a very specific (and very secret) time sequence (rather than all simultaneously) to get a working nuclear explosion. That time sequence is programmed into the detonator, which is attached to the bomb only at the last moment (one would hope).
Not hard to replicate? What? There only a handful of nuclear powers today. It is not for a lack of trying.
Yeah, it's for a lack of access to the material (U-235 or Pu-239). Once you have that, the rest isn't so hard anymore, at least not for half-way functioning and wealthy nation states (terrorist organizations may be a different matter).
Is that a fully assembled bomb, or just the core plutonium pit (or whatever they use these days)?
Didn't Obama repeatedly say in the past that he was going to increase NASA's budgets over the next five years? What became of that? Is it all going to be funneled into earthbound stuff? Or into that heavy-lift launcher that congress demanded?
NASA/JPL have already solved most of the problems that this project is trying to replicate, launch, descent, landing and roving.
Aren't those just means to solve the problems, and the problems are things like "finding life on Mars"?
I'm sure there are a half billion scripts out there that expect to see "64 bytes from foo.com (xx.xx.xx.xx): ..." and will shit themselves when it becomes "64 bytes from foo.com [xxxx:xx::xxxx]: ..."
I thought about that too. But then I think that there are probably more scripts out there that only want to check for the reachability of foo.com by issuing "ping foo.com" or "ping -c 1 foo.com" and just checking the exit code or scanning for "64 bytes from foo.com". And all those scripts would then fail for an IPv6-only foo.com, but would succeed if the ping tool supported v4 and v6.
You have things totally backwards. The operating system figures out whether a host should be reached via ipv6 vs ipv4 based on your systems IPv6 connectivity and DNS. You can't know it in advance.
If I browse to www.slashdot.org and it has an AAAA record and my computer has IPv6 I get to slashdot via IPv6. Having ping being the only utility left on the fricking operating system that does not work this way is more broken than any nastalga.
You're probably going to have scripts out there that issue ping -n host.com and expect output like "64 bytes from bla.bla.bla.bla", and will fail if the output would suddenly change to "64 bytes from blabla:blabla:blabla::blabla".
A search for Microsoft Linux Tax finds the majority of mobile manufacturers paying Microsoft for a license to use Linux. A search for Microsoft BSD Tax or Microsoft Solaris Tax or Microsoft Plan9 Tax or Microsoft FreeDOS Tax? Nah.
Yeah, because the BSDs' marketshare is too small. When MS "taxes" other OS vendors with patent licenses, they earn money and potentially diminish the other OS's influence, but they also pay a political price. So they don't do it against vendors who are irrelevant.
There's a reason Apple used FreeBSD as their basis for OSX and not Linux.
Yeah, and the reason is probably that Linux didn't exist when Next incorporated BSD code into what later became OSX. When Apple did the same thing again 10 years later, they may have had architectural reasons (essentially "merging" back the improvements that had been done in the BSD code in the meantime), I don't know. For every commercial vendor who uses BSD, you find two that use Linux, so your argument doesn't seem to hold water too well. And then there's the code sharing argument: It may well be that GPL code is harder to incorporate into commercial codebases, but that may be balanced by the fact that, since the GPL forces contributors to publicize their improvements, more code may become available to incorporate in the first place,
So either this is down to careful and well executed planning from the Iranians (which is scary), or total incompetence from the Americans who may have built a drone using civilian GPS (not likely and kind of scary) or lost their encryption keys (hopefully very unlikely and extremely scary).
..or the supposed "Iranian engineer" was just bullshitting.
Yeah, MS isn't bothered about SL implementations on non-MS patforms because they're irrelevant. As long as that's the case, MS can use them as showcases for proving how "open" they are. If you want to know what MS will do to non-MS patforms once they do become relevant, look at what they're doing to Android.
They rob pharmaceutical companies of revenue streams that are rightfully theirs.
Well, if cancer is found during the screening, chances are all kinds of products made by pharmaceutical companies will be unleashed onto the patient full-force.
We're lucky as hell that the extra billion people live in starving, uneducated, under-developed or developing countries. Because if they didn't, the planet would have gone to hell
Why would the planet have gone to hell with an extra billion non-hungry people living in rich, educated, developed countries?
Is there any level on which this decision makes sense in light of Nokia's direction?
Looks like different factions within Nokia competing/fighting against each other.