It says that by implementing Google Wave, as long as you don't sue other people for patents relevant to it, Google won't sue you for patents relevant to it.
There is the implication -- though certainly not explicit or required -- that if you do start suing people, Google could sue you. But so long as you don't, you're safe.
According to TFA, which finally seems to be up, they actually considered this, and ran the entire thing on an NFS mount from a non-virtualized host.
What's particularly odd is that they don't actually mention trying a local, virtualized disk first -- they just rejected it out of hand. I would imagine NFS carries its own overhead...
BSD jails are actually sounding kind of cool, though.
New alternatives are popping up constantly but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQL is going to be around for a long time.
That's pretty much guaranteed. COBOL is still around.
There absolutely are better alternatives, for almost every situation. No one in their right mind starts a new system in COBOL, when they have a choice.
Yet COBOL is still around, and will be still around for awhile. So will SQL.
The only question is whether SQL will be like COBOL or like C. I could make a similar case for C being obsolete, and there are certainly many cases where a performance penalty is well worth it to get some other desired feature -- for instance, there are things I can imagine doing in Erlang that I'd never attempt in C. But people do anyway, and even modern high level languages seem to start as interpreters written in C.
Personally, I'd rather see CouchDB mature, and see SQL become more like COBOL, but that doesn't seem likely to happen soon.
But very soon. You're the new generation, and they're not for you. And my mom -- even my grandmother -- can read things online.
Now, she'd *love* an Internet with not just guardrails but tracks like some vast trolly you can never get off of and do bad things to her indentity and computer files.
Unfortunately, the tradeoff is unacceptable. I bet she'd also love a world in which no one uses naughty language, but when you think about what's needed for that to happen, it's not worth it.
Once newspapers and TV reported that the Internet was scary and difficult to remain as unknown as someone picking a newspaper out of a newspaper box she ran for the hills... with her paper.
Funny, most people I know get the paper delivered. So she's afraid people will be able to see... that she reads the news?
Yeah, I know, it's not you I need to convince. My point stands, though -- newspapers are obsolete, and it's really only a matter of time until they die entirely.
HDMI is also HDCopyProtection encumbered, For HD signals.
*facepalm*
No, it is not. HDMI, at least the kind we use today, is DVI plus Audio. That's it.
HDCP works just as well over DVI as it does over HDMI. Similarly, I currently use an HDMI cable to hook my laptop up to a second monitor -- and that does not use HDCP, as far as I can tell. (It'd be strange if it did, as I am running Linux.)
If you want HD content it has to be HDCP while traveling from source to display.
That depends entirely on where you're getting it from. If I get mine from BitTorrent, or from a video game, no, it doesn't have to be HDCP'd. And I don't have a Blu-Ray drive.
In other words, you should expect the same amount of enjoyment out of a 99 cent game that you would out of a $1.98 cheeseburger, when a 99 cent cheeseburger would've provided similar nutritional value, without that taste?
But, fine, let's look at the shirt. You'll spend $15 for a shirt that says "No, I will not fix your computer," or something like that, but 99 cents on a game is too much? Yes, you have to clothe your body, but I'm guessing you had enough shirts.
Granted, you could just copy/paste from that page, or find a library to do it for you. But validating it with a regex, in a meaningful way, is non-trivial.
And I'm guessing that's without compression. Well, libbz2 is 70k and libz is 95k, so that might reduce the 2 megs by quite a bit, if he's concerned about download bandwidth.
If he's doing this for an embedded system, I imagine static linking would save him quite a bit.
I do, however, find it quite annoying when people write C in other languages. It would probably look fine in Perl, but it'd stand out like a sore thumb in Ruby.
If I'm reading this right, it looks like patent MAD. Basically, Google is saying, "If you sue anyone for patent infringement about this spec, you give us the right to sue you. If you don't sue anyone, we're cool."
The implicit threat is, of course, that Google will own as many patents regarding this spec as anybody, but as long as nobody exercises them, it doesn't matter -- they're still allowed, for this spec.
Which is both very cool, and raises some interesting questions -- like, what if I implement the spec as part of a much larger app, and someone sues me for infringement of a different part of the app? Or, what if I want to create a modified version of the spec, or create a wholly unrelated application that infringes on patents related to this spec -- do I open myself up to lawsuits then?
But I can't set up my own private facebook or twitter server,
Twitter -- I see no reason why this couldn't be just Jabber to some sort of broadcast channel.
Facebook -- XFN, OpenID, and friends.
even if I do, there's not support for my server to let people befriend and network with people on the real Facebook and Twitter.
That's the real problem.
There's a whole set of open standards that pretty much covers all of what social networks do for the user. But for some reason, most users are still in the gated community of Facebook, so even though the open communities could theoretically be bigger, better, and freer, right now they're smaller, because they're not Facebook.
But what makes you think this will be different, other than the Google branding?
Here's hoping they actually take a clue from existing systems designed for this, and at least support them. That way, at least they might start to do for other systems what they've done for Jabber... Of course, I have maybe three or four contacts who use Gtalk (and they use it only from Gmail), whereas I have more like 50 who use Yahoo, MSN, or AIM. So the same problem applies.
Registrant:
Michael Sharp
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-08
Expires on: 05-Dec-09
Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08
Administrative Contact:
Sharp, Michael rdcpro@hotmail.com
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
(877) 788-8066 Fax --
Technical Contact:
Sharp, Michael rdcpro@hotmail.com
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States
(877) 788-8066 Fax --
Domain servers in listed order:
NS61.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS62.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
Hmm. A quick google doesn't reveal anything useful about this guy. Does he work for Asus? I honestly can't tell if this looks like a residential address...
If your ads are annoying enough that people are willing to write code to block them, your business model sucks. Give me tasteful ads, or I'll remove them.
The real question is, would you rather have me view your page without ads, or not view your page at all?
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Those who haven't adapted have found themselves seriously harmed, much as buggy-whip manufacturers were seriously harmed by the automobile.
That is: The fact that he included newspapers makes it quite clear just how out of touch he is. Newspapers are obsolete.
Similar criticisms could be leveled against those other categories -- for instance, Sony Music may have been hurt, but music in general, and especially indie music, has an unprecedented opportunity in the Internet.
But why bother, when he clearly doesn't get it about newspapers? He's writing a blog, and he doesn't get it about newspapers?
Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy.
Yes, I'm sure newspapers have been harmed by piracy. Can you cite a single example?
I am no Luddite.
Then it would be a good idea to have some balls and retract your statement saying that nothing good comes from the Internet. You sure as hell sound like a Luddite to me.
that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.
Copyright does not disappear on the Internet. But just what are you suggesting here?
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
This coming form the CEO of a company which deliberately put DRM on CDs that strongly resembled spyware, that made their legitimate customers' computers slower, less secure, and occasionally did things like broke their drivers...
Buddy, it's not the Internet that needs guidelines. It's Sony, and other large corporations which seem to subscribe to the view that when you're big enough, you can do whatever you want.
I'm not talking here about censorship, taxation or burdensome government restrictions. I'm talking about reasonable boundaries, "rules of the road," that can help promote the many positive attributes of Internet technology while curtailing its hugely damaging effects.
Please explain how you can provide one without the other.
In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation's history -- the creation of the Interstate Highway System.
Sounds like someone took the "Information Superhighway" analogy a bit too far.
But unlike the Internet, the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines. Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed.
Officers of the law don't have to violate privacy or other fundamental rights in order to do so. And the results save lives, not dollars. More, they save our lives, not the dollars of Sony.
Because actually I'm a guy who wants to see lots of good things come from the Internet.
Ah, there's the retraction. How about a little mea culpa?
I mean, I know it's hard. I know you, as a CEO, have a mental block against this. But just repeat after me: I. Was. Wrong.
But it's not going to happen the way it should if we do not act now to safeguard the fruit of our world's most imaginative and talented minds.
It is already happening quite the way it should -- open source software is a great example of this -- precisely because there aren't r
For instance, Java does not have an ideal use. PHP may have, once, but now that most major languages have associated templating systems -- most of which are better -- PHP really doesn't have an ideal use anymore.
Of course, every language has an "ideal" use if you count maintaining old crap written in that language...
Slashdot Mirror
It's more than just that... read it again.
It says that by implementing Google Wave, as long as you don't sue other people for patents relevant to it, Google won't sue you for patents relevant to it.
There is the implication -- though certainly not explicit or required -- that if you do start suing people, Google could sue you. But so long as you don't, you're safe.
According to TFA, which finally seems to be up, they actually considered this, and ran the entire thing on an NFS mount from a non-virtualized host.
What's particularly odd is that they don't actually mention trying a local, virtualized disk first -- they just rejected it out of hand. I would imagine NFS carries its own overhead...
BSD jails are actually sounding kind of cool, though.
New alternatives are popping up constantly but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQL is going to be around for a long time.
That's pretty much guaranteed. COBOL is still around.
There absolutely are better alternatives, for almost every situation. No one in their right mind starts a new system in COBOL, when they have a choice.
Yet COBOL is still around, and will be still around for awhile. So will SQL.
The only question is whether SQL will be like COBOL or like C. I could make a similar case for C being obsolete, and there are certainly many cases where a performance penalty is well worth it to get some other desired feature -- for instance, there are things I can imagine doing in Erlang that I'd never attempt in C. But people do anyway, and even modern high level languages seem to start as interpreters written in C.
Personally, I'd rather see CouchDB mature, and see SQL become more like COBOL, but that doesn't seem likely to happen soon.
Newspapers are for my mom. Not really gone yet.
But very soon. You're the new generation, and they're not for you. And my mom -- even my grandmother -- can read things online.
Now, she'd *love* an Internet with not just guardrails but tracks like some vast trolly you can never get off of and do bad things to her indentity and computer files.
Unfortunately, the tradeoff is unacceptable. I bet she'd also love a world in which no one uses naughty language, but when you think about what's needed for that to happen, it's not worth it.
Once newspapers and TV reported that the Internet was scary and difficult to remain as unknown as someone picking a newspaper out of a newspaper box she ran for the hills... with her paper.
Funny, most people I know get the paper delivered. So she's afraid people will be able to see... that she reads the news?
Yeah, I know, it's not you I need to convince. My point stands, though -- newspapers are obsolete, and it's really only a matter of time until they die entirely.
HDMI is also HDCopyProtection encumbered, For HD signals.
*facepalm*
No, it is not. HDMI, at least the kind we use today, is DVI plus Audio. That's it.
HDCP works just as well over DVI as it does over HDMI. Similarly, I currently use an HDMI cable to hook my laptop up to a second monitor -- and that does not use HDCP, as far as I can tell. (It'd be strange if it did, as I am running Linux.)
If you want HD content it has to be HDCP while traveling from source to display.
That depends entirely on where you're getting it from. If I get mine from BitTorrent, or from a video game, no, it doesn't have to be HDCP'd. And I don't have a Blu-Ray drive.
In other words, you should expect the same amount of enjoyment out of a 99 cent game that you would out of a $1.98 cheeseburger, when a 99 cent cheeseburger would've provided similar nutritional value, without that taste?
But, fine, let's look at the shirt. You'll spend $15 for a shirt that says "No, I will not fix your computer," or something like that, but 99 cents on a game is too much? Yes, you have to clothe your body, but I'm guessing you had enough shirts.
That, or there actually was an error in the results... maybe 83% of the votes were thrown away?
Unlikely, but I'm just saying...
It's harder than you'd think.
Granted, you could just copy/paste from that page, or find a library to do it for you. But validating it with a regex, in a meaningful way, is non-trivial.
Well, it comes back to being well-informed.
Without the web, you've got TV and newspapers. Papers are slowly dying, and it's difficult to find unbiased TV outside of The Daily Show.
However, on the Internet, you're almost automatically better informed. Anything you don't know, Google does, or Wikipedia does.
I suspect they take issue with Creation science being correctly filed under Pseudoscience.
And, Conservapedia... where to begin... using the American flag on that page seems almost a blasphemy in itself.
RTFS, wow.
Problem is, by the time you make JSON a 1:1 mapping of the XML, you lose some of the advantages of JSON, I would think.
Or does SVG always use elements, instead of attributes?
Either way, a new standard would probably help in other ways.
Satellite, anyone?
Yes, some people are on the wrong side of a mountain, but I am guessing the number is significantly smaller.
And I'm guessing that's without compression. Well, libbz2 is 70k and libz is 95k, so that might reduce the 2 megs by quite a bit, if he's concerned about download bandwidth.
If he's doing this for an embedded system, I imagine static linking would save him quite a bit.
It's not so much the Rails bashing, but the fact that Rails has existed since 2004. What was special about 2008 relating to Rails?
I do, however, find it quite annoying when people write C in other languages. It would probably look fine in Perl, but it'd stand out like a sore thumb in Ruby.
If I'm reading this right, it looks like patent MAD. Basically, Google is saying, "If you sue anyone for patent infringement about this spec, you give us the right to sue you. If you don't sue anyone, we're cool."
The implicit threat is, of course, that Google will own as many patents regarding this spec as anybody, but as long as nobody exercises them, it doesn't matter -- they're still allowed, for this spec.
Which is both very cool, and raises some interesting questions -- like, what if I implement the spec as part of a much larger app, and someone sues me for infringement of a different part of the app? Or, what if I want to create a modified version of the spec, or create a wholly unrelated application that infringes on patents related to this spec -- do I open myself up to lawsuits then?
Here: http://www.fireflywiki.org/Firefly/CortexLexicon
Scroll down to "wave".
But I can't set up my own private facebook or twitter server,
Twitter -- I see no reason why this couldn't be just Jabber to some sort of broadcast channel.
Facebook -- XFN, OpenID, and friends.
even if I do, there's not support for my server to let people befriend and network with people on the real Facebook and Twitter.
That's the real problem.
There's a whole set of open standards that pretty much covers all of what social networks do for the user. But for some reason, most users are still in the gated community of Facebook, so even though the open communities could theoretically be bigger, better, and freer, right now they're smaller, because they're not Facebook.
But what makes you think this will be different, other than the Google branding?
Here's hoping they actually take a clue from existing systems designed for this, and at least support them. That way, at least they might start to do for other systems what they've done for Jabber... Of course, I have maybe three or four contacts who use Gtalk (and they use it only from Gmail), whereas I have more like 50 who use Yahoo, MSN, or AIM. So the same problem applies.
Judging by the tags, and because it would be awesome, I'm going to say it's more like Firefly.
Hmm. A quick google doesn't reveal anything useful about this guy. Does he work for Asus? I honestly can't tell if this looks like a residential address...
Color me skeptical.
If your ads are annoying enough that people are willing to write code to block them, your business model sucks. Give me tasteful ads, or I'll remove them.
The real question is, would you rather have me view your page without ads, or not view your page at all?
Most people also don't use ad-blocking.
And most people, when they try Firefox with Adblock installed, never go back.
...after this little gem:
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Those who haven't adapted have found themselves seriously harmed, much as buggy-whip manufacturers were seriously harmed by the automobile.
That is: The fact that he included newspapers makes it quite clear just how out of touch he is. Newspapers are obsolete.
Similar criticisms could be leveled against those other categories -- for instance, Sony Music may have been hurt, but music in general, and especially indie music, has an unprecedented opportunity in the Internet.
But why bother, when he clearly doesn't get it about newspapers? He's writing a blog, and he doesn't get it about newspapers?
Some of that damage has been caused by changing business models (the FTC just announced an inquiry into the impact of new media on the newspaper industry). But the primary culprit is piracy.
Yes, I'm sure newspapers have been harmed by piracy. Can you cite a single example?
I am no Luddite.
Then it would be a good idea to have some balls and retract your statement saying that nothing good comes from the Internet. You sure as hell sound like a Luddite to me.
that the Internet should be left to develop entirely unfettered and unregulated.
Copyright does not disappear on the Internet. But just what are you suggesting here?
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
This coming form the CEO of a company which deliberately put DRM on CDs that strongly resembled spyware, that made their legitimate customers' computers slower, less secure, and occasionally did things like broke their drivers...
Buddy, it's not the Internet that needs guidelines. It's Sony, and other large corporations which seem to subscribe to the view that when you're big enough, you can do whatever you want.
I'm not talking here about censorship, taxation or burdensome government restrictions. I'm talking about reasonable boundaries, "rules of the road," that can help promote the many positive attributes of Internet technology while curtailing its hugely damaging effects.
Please explain how you can provide one without the other.
In the 1950's, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation's history -- the creation of the Interstate Highway System.
Sounds like someone took the "Information Superhighway" analogy a bit too far.
But unlike the Internet, the highways were built and operated with a set of rational guidelines. Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed.
Officers of the law don't have to violate privacy or other fundamental rights in order to do so. And the results save lives, not dollars. More, they save our lives, not the dollars of Sony.
Because actually I'm a guy who wants to see lots of good things come from the Internet.
Ah, there's the retraction. How about a little mea culpa?
I mean, I know it's hard. I know you, as a CEO, have a mental block against this. But just repeat after me: I. Was. Wrong.
But it's not going to happen the way it should if we do not act now to safeguard the fruit of our world's most imaginative and talented minds.
It is already happening quite the way it should -- open source software is a great example of this -- precisely because there aren't r
I wouldn't agree with that.
For instance, Java does not have an ideal use. PHP may have, once, but now that most major languages have associated templating systems -- most of which are better -- PHP really doesn't have an ideal use anymore.
Of course, every language has an "ideal" use if you count maintaining old crap written in that language...