I agree with most of your statements, but not with, "The only chance Apple has in fighting this with counter-cases is if it can find patents that everyone but Nokia licenses from them..."
Other companies may feel threatened, but that has no bearing on THIS case. If Nokia is infringing on one of these patents then that is bad for them. Possible infringement by other parties has no relevance. Even if it did, Apple could always create a simple licensing agreement with those third parties to assuage other cell companies.
Since Nokia has not stated WHICH patents Apple has infringed, exactly how do either of you know if they are for physical or business method patents? Next you both start calling each other names? Really?
If you do have a list of which patents are involved I would love to go over them. However I was unable to find any source for that information. Nokia's official response on that question (for all sources I could check) was to the effect of, "we don't comment on the details of pending litigation."
The real matter at hand is that Nokia makes the items it patents, therefor they are not a patent troll.
The devil is in the details however, as the two companies start legal proceedings who ever is more wrong will end up paying the other in some way. Notice I said, "more wrong." My guess is that both companies do in fact, infringe upon each others patents.
"OTOH, contracts can and routinely do include clauses to the effect that you cannot disclose the terms of the contract. Whether an employment agreement is a contract at best varies by state, but I'm aware of no reason they couldn't contain confidentiality agreements regardless."
Great, but of course not binding on any 3rd parties.
The value of such clauses also vary greatly state by state. In my home state they cease to have any value a short time after your contract terminates (or so is my understanding). In this regard California has even greater employee protections.
According to the Anandtech article, only the pretty much end-of-life Windows XP is out of luck. Linux, OS X and modern Windows versions all work... Non news?
According to many estimates that is 3 out of 5 computer users have XP as their OS. That is pretty big. The lowest estimate that I have seen is that XP is only running on 1 out 5 daily use computers. Another way of looking at it is that there more XP users than there are, Unix, Linux, Mac OS (any version) and any other non-Windows OS combined.
This what comments are for. Good source code consists of good commands that are self readable and good comments where the code is not self readable.
After updating a few hundred 20+ year old software modules written by "clever programmers" I will insist that if your code is not readable then you have written bad code. Some of original authors wrote quite fast and quite efficient code, but the sheer amount of time to repair even a small issue in one of these programs, far out weighs the cost of writing a 2 line explanation of what is happening and more importantly, why.
Some of my most "productive" days have resulted in a net deletion of many hundreds of lines of code. Mostly this is cleaning horrendous cut & paste jobs, and refactoring APIs to dump buggy, unnecessary functionality. That one day of effort probably saves weeks of bug-hunting and spaghetti-unwinding further down the road. It would appear to be negatively productive by any naive metric.
I'd argue coder pay should be proportional to productivity. It's just that there's no shortcuts to measuring a coder's productivity.
On behalf of who ever has to maintain that code after you, THANK YOU.
=P
The other item that almost everyone overlooks is that an Uber-coder writes READABLE code. If you look at what a really good programmer writes you will be able to understand what is going on, even 10 or 20 years after it was written. Unfortunately, most people suck...
It's different because users of paid merchandise or services can seek legal remediation if something goes terribly wrong. Unless, of course, the license agreement specifically states that there is no guarantee of the program's fitness for any specific purpose. Except, of course, when/where the law states that there is an automatic guarantee and automatic liability.
I had this same issue. It is Comcast, but it is because they gave you a faulty modem (either crappy, broken or misconfigured). File a complaint, then demand a new modem.
Also make sure to get a new modem directly from Comcast. Many of the at-home technicians are outsourced to other companies. At least in my area, most of these companies just take defective modems from one location and then use it at the next house call (this was verified by two Comcast employees). If you get it directly from a Comcast location you are more likely to get a non-defective modem.
How do you know "nobody" has heard of Bing. Microsoft has offices in the same city (MS has offices in St. Louis which is where Bing Info is located) and the company in question has been around since at least 2000. From the companies web site:
Our work has appeared in projects for Time magazine, The Ford Motor Company, The National Geographic Society, America West Airlines, GlaxoSmithKline, The New York Times Company, Young & Rubicam, Chevron and Sprint.
So it sounds like they have had a fair amount of exposure. Just because "YOU" have not heard of them does not mean they are not known.
Now when this Bing Info company gives out there cards, the first thing the person is going to say is, "oh you guys work for Microsoft." That sounds pretty much like a legitimate issue to me.
That is one of the reasons why I really enjoyed Planescape Torment (contemporary of baluder's Gate using the same engine). You can play through the entire game with only I think three fights if you really want to.
I also always enjoyed MMO's like Ultima Online because there were so many non-combat things to do that were fun. I knew several people that hardly ever did any combat game play and played for quite a while. That game is also a good example of a balanced game that doesn't use the tank/healer/dds concept.
The issue is that we are broadcasting real time battlefield info to our opponents.
Yeah, but the battlefield info is a picture of them getting blown up.
To use a Civil War (US) reference, it would be the equivalent of having the Confederate army cavalry give copies of their reports to the Union army.
No, it would be the equivalent of the Confederates giving General Grant a picture of himself.
Except it is not. It is the entire video of all surveillance of hundreds of drones as they take off, fly THROUGH US army bases, patrol a vast area of territory, then return THROUGH the US army base. The video includes positions of US troops on base, images of US equipment and defense positions. It also includes all pictures of US troops on the ground where ever the drones fly over.
You are right though, it would be like the Confederates giving General Grant pictures. But it would be pictures of everything from leaving the Confederate encampment to there objective (which since many of these are non-attack recon drones is all over the place) and back to the encampment.
The only thing lessons this issue is that to get the data, you have to be in broadcast range and looking.
I also should say that I do take this one a bit personally. My best friend is a UAV crew chief currently stationed in Iraq. When you have a conversation with someone who says, "It was kind of scary to find out that the guys we just captured out side of the base, had pictures from my UAV of ME on it," you might start taking this a bit more seriously.
You are talking about option 1, I'm talking about option 2.
You also didn't specify. On top of that, in this case the encoding is the same. They used a different encoder and compression system but at least according to the BBC blog postings the encoding is the same. Your possibility 2 may still apply if the new compression scheme requires more processing power than the old system.
However, my point is that there is no difference between analog and digital DATA. The way a device behaves is entirely on how it is built. My TV for example behaves the same regardless of what data receives. If I send it random crap (random 1's and 0's for digital data but still in the correct packet sizes) it will still display an image, that image will just happen to be random . (I have tested this.)
Again, what happens is device dependent. If my computer can't handle the decoding speed I don't get a blank screen, I get choppy video and audio. I can't say I have tested this with my TV but my guess (an educated guess as I do write software for a living) is that if the decoding takes too long, the last image is left on the screen and the audio stops. The reason behind this is that you have to change the data in the image buffer before the image is written. If you have no new data and the processor is spending all of its time decoding then you have no new data for the image buffer.
Despite what many people claim, when you get a garbled digital signal, most systems will give you garbled artifacts on the screen. This is because in any broadcast situation you expect a certain percentage of interference and have to design to deal with that. If you only ever displayed images on a tv if the signal was perfect, you would be amazed at how often your display would blank out.
On my TV at home I have changed the settings to turn off the "blue screen/bad signal screen". The TV does its best to figure out what it is receiving. I still can get a signal loss if there is enough interference, but for the most part I just get warped images and garbled sound if something happens. (I have a very nice HD tv with tuner built in.) I am at the very edge of two stations in my area and on both of those I have to fiddle with the antenna to have them come in clear. (Plus my cat moves the antenna onto the floor pretty often...)
The technical details are trivial and not really the story. The issue is that we are broadcasting real time battlefield info to our opponents.
Think of it as having someone photocopy 50% of all espionage (spy) reports and then faxing them to every foreign power. To use a Civil War (US) reference, it would be the equivalent of having the Confederate army cavalry give copies of their reports to the Union army.
What is the D.o.D. response to this? "We didn't think they would find out..." (paraphrased)
The range of "teenage" is either 10-19, 11-19 or 13-19. The range of years are 10, 9 and 7 years.
The person in question is 29. At most she is 363 days away from her next birthday. So if we compare the difference in age verses the total range of values for "teenage" we have:
Almost the same.
Greater than.
Greater than.
So depending on where you are (teenage is 13-19 here) the difference in age is greater than the entire range of being "teenage." To use a gun metaphor, if i were trying to shoot a barn, missed by a gap of at least the same length as the entire barn, I would then say I, "almost" hit it...
I would hazard a guess that the songs used for Guitar Hero and Rock Band were licensed in such a way as to include the performance rights as well.
I was at PAX a few months ago and there were huge performance stages. There are dozens of live play events as part of the advertisements for the games. On top of that, the whole game play is a performance. I would *HOPE* that the legal teams for these games were smart enough to think about this aspect when negotiating with the artist/studios.
The amusing part to me here is that they SHOT IT. While I am far from an explosives expert I am fairly certain that many types of explosives will not be set off if a bullet hits them. That is assuming the bullet didn't just pass by where the explosive was. I have always been under the impression that if you were worried that there might be an explosive in an object, you would use other explosives to detonate/destroy the item.
It's hard to believe that the former Bush Administration edited 22 million emails.
That would mean at least 7,500 emails per day including weekends and holidays; and at least 5 emails per minute.
Now, just tell me who in Bush's administration was spewing such an amount of email.
There are approx. 1,700 White House staff. This is not counting OEOB staff that works across the street or other Executive branch personnel that most likely would have there email grouped with the White House archives.
If you use your figures (approx. 7,500 emails per day) then with just the White House staff that is about 4.5 emails per person per day that were lost.
Now my understanding is that these emails were "lost" in only a couple years and not over the whole 8 years so the above figures would be a higher per person per day count than that. I do think you will agree that 5 emails per day is relatively easy to write/receive/edit/delete or what ever else you want to do.
Having said all that, I think that most likely issue here is that the IT staff were incompetent and didn't know A) where the emails were being stored, B) how to access them.
Your basically online with that story forever now. Not much you can do about that.
Instead you could try to put more of you out there. If this story is only one of a hundred and the others are more recent and show you in a better light then the old story will matter less.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with most of your statements, but not with, "The only chance Apple has in fighting this with counter-cases is if it can find patents that everyone but Nokia licenses from them..."
Other companies may feel threatened, but that has no bearing on THIS case. If Nokia is infringing on one of these patents then that is bad for them. Possible infringement by other parties has no relevance. Even if it did, Apple could always create a simple licensing agreement with those third parties to assuage other cell companies.
Since Nokia has not stated WHICH patents Apple has infringed, exactly how do either of you know if they are for physical or business method patents? Next you both start calling each other names? Really?
If you do have a list of which patents are involved I would love to go over them. However I was unable to find any source for that information. Nokia's official response on that question (for all sources I could check) was to the effect of, "we don't comment on the details of pending litigation."
The real matter at hand is that Nokia makes the items it patents, therefor they are not a patent troll.
The devil is in the details however, as the two companies start legal proceedings who ever is more wrong will end up paying the other in some way. Notice I said, "more wrong." My guess is that both companies do in fact, infringe upon each others patents.
Maybe they are a software company or a tech company. I work for a software company. 1/3 of our employees are programmers/IT staff.
The value of such clauses also vary greatly state by state. In my home state they cease to have any value a short time after your contract terminates (or so is my understanding). In this regard California has even greater employee protections.
According to many estimates that is 3 out of 5 computer users have XP as their OS. That is pretty big. The lowest estimate that I have seen is that XP is only running on 1 out 5 daily use computers. Another way of looking at it is that there more XP users than there are, Unix, Linux, Mac OS (any version) and any other non-Windows OS combined.
Sources: (62.2%): http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
(69.05%): http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10
(48.47%): http://gs.statcounter.com/press/encouraging-start-for-windows-7
(70.48%): http://gizmodo.com/5398689/reality-check
Also the expected end of life is no earlier than April 8, 2014, four years from now...
1) You link to the comments at the bottom of the article.
2) Here is the one page, print version: http://www.networkworld.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi?pagetosend=/export/home/httpd/htdocs/news/2009/122309-layer8-nasa-iss-astronauts.html&pagename=/news/2009/122309-layer8-nasa-iss-astronauts.html&pageurl=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/122309-layer8-nasa-iss-astronauts.html&site=printpage
+1 funny.
This what comments are for. Good source code consists of good commands that are self readable and good comments where the code is not self readable.
After updating a few hundred 20+ year old software modules written by "clever programmers" I will insist that if your code is not readable then you have written bad code. Some of original authors wrote quite fast and quite efficient code, but the sheer amount of time to repair even a small issue in one of these programs, far out weighs the cost of writing a 2 line explanation of what is happening and more importantly, why.
Some of my most "productive" days have resulted in a net deletion of many hundreds of lines of code. Mostly this is cleaning horrendous cut & paste jobs, and refactoring APIs to dump buggy, unnecessary functionality. That one day of effort probably saves weeks of bug-hunting and spaghetti-unwinding further down the road. It would appear to be negatively productive by any naive metric.
I'd argue coder pay should be proportional to productivity. It's just that there's no shortcuts to measuring a coder's productivity.
On behalf of who ever has to maintain that code after you, THANK YOU.
=P
The other item that almost everyone overlooks is that an Uber-coder writes READABLE code. If you look at what a really good programmer writes you will be able to understand what is going on, even 10 or 20 years after it was written. Unfortunately, most people suck...
It's different because users of paid merchandise or services can seek legal remediation if something goes terribly wrong. Unless, of course, the license agreement specifically states that there is no guarantee of the program's fitness for any specific purpose. Except, of course, when/where the law states that there is an automatic guarantee and automatic liability.
There, fixed that for ya.
I had this same issue. It is Comcast, but it is because they gave you a faulty modem (either crappy, broken or misconfigured). File a complaint, then demand a new modem.
Also make sure to get a new modem directly from Comcast. Many of the at-home technicians are outsourced to other companies. At least in my area, most of these companies just take defective modems from one location and then use it at the next house call (this was verified by two Comcast employees). If you get it directly from a Comcast location you are more likely to get a non-defective modem.
How do you know "nobody" has heard of Bing. Microsoft has offices in the same city (MS has offices in St. Louis which is where Bing Info is located) and the company in question has been around since at least 2000. From the companies web site:
So it sounds like they have had a fair amount of exposure. Just because "YOU" have not heard of them does not mean they are not known.
Now when this Bing Info company gives out there cards, the first thing the person is going to say is, "oh you guys work for Microsoft." That sounds pretty much like a legitimate issue to me.
That is one of the reasons why I really enjoyed Planescape Torment (contemporary of baluder's Gate using the same engine). You can play through the entire game with only I think three fights if you really want to.
I also always enjoyed MMO's like Ultima Online because there were so many non-combat things to do that were fun. I knew several people that hardly ever did any combat game play and played for quite a while. That game is also a good example of a balanced game that doesn't use the tank/healer/dds concept.
Except it is not. It is the entire video of all surveillance of hundreds of drones as they take off, fly THROUGH US army bases, patrol a vast area of territory, then return THROUGH the US army base. The video includes positions of US troops on base, images of US equipment and defense positions. It also includes all pictures of US troops on the ground where ever the drones fly over.
You are right though, it would be like the Confederates giving General Grant pictures. But it would be pictures of everything from leaving the Confederate encampment to there objective (which since many of these are non-attack recon drones is all over the place) and back to the encampment.
The only thing lessons this issue is that to get the data, you have to be in broadcast range and looking.
I also should say that I do take this one a bit personally. My best friend is a UAV crew chief currently stationed in Iraq. When you have a conversation with someone who says, "It was kind of scary to find out that the guys we just captured out side of the base, had pictures from my UAV of ME on it," you might start taking this a bit more seriously.
You also didn't specify. On top of that, in this case the encoding is the same. They used a different encoder and compression system but at least according to the BBC blog postings the encoding is the same. Your possibility 2 may still apply if the new compression scheme requires more processing power than the old system.
However, my point is that there is no difference between analog and digital DATA. The way a device behaves is entirely on how it is built. My TV for example behaves the same regardless of what data receives. If I send it random crap (random 1's and 0's for digital data but still in the correct packet sizes) it will still display an image, that image will just happen to be random . (I have tested this.)
Again, what happens is device dependent. If my computer can't handle the decoding speed I don't get a blank screen, I get choppy video and audio. I can't say I have tested this with my TV but my guess (an educated guess as I do write software for a living) is that if the decoding takes too long, the last image is left on the screen and the audio stops. The reason behind this is that you have to change the data in the image buffer before the image is written. If you have no new data and the processor is spending all of its time decoding then you have no new data for the image buffer.
Despite what many people claim, when you get a garbled digital signal, most systems will give you garbled artifacts on the screen. This is because in any broadcast situation you expect a certain percentage of interference and have to design to deal with that. If you only ever displayed images on a tv if the signal was perfect, you would be amazed at how often your display would blank out.
On my TV at home I have changed the settings to turn off the "blue screen/bad signal screen". The TV does its best to figure out what it is receiving. I still can get a signal loss if there is enough interference, but for the most part I just get warped images and garbled sound if something happens. (I have a very nice HD tv with tuner built in.) I am at the very edge of two stations in my area and on both of those I have to fiddle with the antenna to have them come in clear. (Plus my cat moves the antenna onto the floor pretty often...)
The technical details are trivial and not really the story. The issue is that we are broadcasting real time battlefield info to our opponents.
Think of it as having someone photocopy 50% of all espionage (spy) reports and then faxing them to every foreign power. To use a Civil War (US) reference, it would be the equivalent of having the Confederate army cavalry give copies of their reports to the Union army.
What is the D.o.D. response to this? "We didn't think they would find out..." (paraphrased)
The range of "teenage" is either 10-19, 11-19 or 13-19. The range of years are 10, 9 and 7 years.
The person in question is 29. At most she is 363 days away from her next birthday. So if we compare the difference in age verses the total range of values for "teenage" we have:
Almost the same.
Greater than.
Greater than.
So depending on where you are (teenage is 13-19 here) the difference in age is greater than the entire range of being "teenage." To use a gun metaphor, if i were trying to shoot a barn, missed by a gap of at least the same length as the entire barn, I would then say I, "almost" hit it...
Almost 30 is very far from almost teenage. You have a whole decade there.
I would hazard a guess that the songs used for Guitar Hero and Rock Band were licensed in such a way as to include the performance rights as well.
I was at PAX a few months ago and there were huge performance stages. There are dozens of live play events as part of the advertisements for the games. On top of that, the whole game play is a performance. I would *HOPE* that the legal teams for these games were smart enough to think about this aspect when negotiating with the artist/studios.
The amusing part to me here is that they SHOT IT. While I am far from an explosives expert I am fairly certain that many types of explosives will not be set off if a bullet hits them. That is assuming the bullet didn't just pass by where the explosive was. I have always been under the impression that if you were worried that there might be an explosive in an object, you would use other explosives to detonate/destroy the item.
There are approx. 1,700 White House staff. This is not counting OEOB staff that works across the street or other Executive branch personnel that most likely would have there email grouped with the White House archives.
If you use your figures (approx. 7,500 emails per day) then with just the White House staff that is about 4.5 emails per person per day that were lost.
Now my understanding is that these emails were "lost" in only a couple years and not over the whole 8 years so the above figures would be a higher per person per day count than that. I do think you will agree that 5 emails per day is relatively easy to write/receive/edit/delete or what ever else you want to do.
Having said all that, I think that most likely issue here is that the IT staff were incompetent and didn't know A) where the emails were being stored, B) how to access them.
That is not entirely true. I have seen several rental listings that include all utilities (electricity, water, trash, recycling) in the rent.
Granted this is not a offering from the power company, but it amounts to the same thing.
Your basically online with that story forever now. Not much you can do about that.
Instead you could try to put more of you out there. If this story is only one of a hundred and the others are more recent and show you in a better light then the old story will matter less.