Opening an API that was already open to pretty much anyone who asked != opensource. The correct title of the article would be: Bloomberg opens part of market data API to non-clients and tries to pass it off as open source. There is no new source to be gotten and recompiled here.
Whatever you do, think about it on a case by case basis. Sure, a one-click patent is bad, and a patent on a method and apparatus for keeping count of the number of steps in a loop (the i in for(i=a;ib;i++) is bad.
But actually, when you (or I at least) think about it, a patent that covers some very complicated very specific software work, while possibly not very open-source friendly, is a lot less bad. If your company spends a lot of money developing something truly original and very useful, patenting it might make sense, and you might want to reconsider leaving your cool job where you get to do truly innovative software work.
In the same vein, you should also consider why your company patents their software work. The place I work mainly patents stuff for defensive reasons. If we don't patent some of the stuff we invent somebody else might, and might possibly be a litigious bastard and try to sue us over the stuff we've been doing for years. I personally think that type of patenting is ok, and as soon as my company starts using our patents to go after companies that are not obviously copying our work I'd leave.
What I'm saying is that you should consider not just the fact that they're patenting software, but also what type of software they're patenting, why, and what they're doing with the patents.
No no no, the meant to say that they care so much about the environment that they will give you one of these UltraSparc T1 based systems if you turn in two of your devices capable of serving web pages.
"We at Sun find that we are unable to produce cheap fast processors so we label this expensive slow one as eco friendly and hope for the Prius effect. Perhaps Cameron Diaz will buy some?"
MS checks for wine and only refuses to function if it is present. This is a tad more extreme than refusing support. I'd call it restricting fair use.
How would you feel if your car stopped working the moment you crossed the state border because it's gps navigation system actively checks for the border and shuts down the car if you cross it? How would you feel if mcdonalds forced you to sit inside their restaurant until you have digested their foodstuffs and left them in the toilet?
imo these are more valid analogies than your toaster powered one.
with 25% of the worlds' CO2 production but only a few percent of the worlds' population I'd say the US already has a few thousand powerplants more than it needs. Perhaps the US could reduce its power consumption a bit and sell the excess power to China and India so that they don't need so many new powerplants?
So child labor is not a problem with you as long as the resulting product is good?
Both child labor and forcing people to work insane hours of unpaid overtime are against the law. The law is there to protect the weak (i.e. children and programmers with a family to support and a mortgage to pay) against the bullying of third- and first- world sweatshop owners.
In the first world laws against Child labor were enacted just a few short decades before laws against unpaid forced overtime were. Think about that before you accuse me of making a false comparison.
Different needs different gadgets.. indeed. I have no mp3 player (I borrow My friends iHP from time to time though). I ripped all my CD's to.ogg so I'd need something like an iHP or a very very good reason to re-rip my cd's. And I guess I'm prepared to accept a crappy UI for that.
I think I was implicitly accusing the other replies to the post I originally replied to of blind iPod fanboyism. At least in your case that wasn't justified. So please accept my sincere appologies.
6 years ago or so they where working on this type of system here at the university. I had the pleasure of trying it out (after signing a disclaimer of course:). At the time is was red only, but very very cool. They couldn't focus the beam depending on what distance you were focussing on. So the images they projected where sharp only at one fixed "focus distance" for your eyes.
They could produce a low resolution overlay image over what you were actually looking at. They could only produce very simple line drawings floating in the air. But still.. you had your own private (head ache inducing) lasershow.
Again, the only response is to a small error in the post rather than to the message in the post (i.e. iHP is better than iPod in a lot of ways).
But you're right, I should have checked my facts.. with the iHP supporting ogg, mp3 and some others and the iPod supporting "only" mp3 and some others I automatically assumed the iHP's "some others" would be greater than or equal to the iPod's "some others". So I'll restate my erroneous statement as follows: "more useful supported file formats".
instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like Lotus Notes?"
Oh please please please anything but lotus notes!
Calling lotus notes a proprietary dinosaur is an insult both to dinosaurs and to wonderfull proprietary stuff like the MS Word 95 file format.
Dinosaurs have not been extinct as long as lotus notes should have been.
The person who once started development on Notes probably knows how Karl Marx fealt when he saw Stalin in action with his idea (yeah, I know he never did actually). The only good Lotus Notes database is a deleted Lotus Notes database. Running Lotus Notes on a 15 year old packard bell pc is a waste of perfectly good hardware. Running Domino server on a 20 year old Casio calculator is abuse of computational resources. More usefull exchange of ideas occurs over a campfire made from just one Lotus Notes CD than during the first year after a company wide deployment of Lotus Notes. Hastily written notes on soggy napkins in a safe on the bottom of the ocean are a more accessible form of documentation than anything in a Lotus Notes database. It's easier to retrieve information from the bin underneath the office shredder than it is to retrieve information from a Notes Database.
Too bad you made a faulty statement about the iPod that pissed some people off. You should have kept yourself to the subject and the first line. The iRiver iHP players stomp the iPod in every area except maybe looks (depends on who your asking). Cheaper, longer battery life, lighter, better headphones, more supported file formats etc. Usefull accessories such as in car chargers are probably a lot cheaper and they supply more accessories with the thing too.
All responses to your post are about your claim that the iPod converts everything to.aac (which it doesn't). But no-one is really attacking your actual claim that the iRiver iHP series players are better than iPods. (which they are).
volkswagen Lupo 3L. 3L means it does 100km on 3 litres of diesel. My limited knowledge of ancient measurement systems indicates that that is around 20% more efficient than a smart. It costs a bit more though.
Well further research on the steam site shows that their own writeup is faulty: Check out the results of the "Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey". More than half a million respondents have taken part so far.
And you'd have to be a statistics nut to notice the "unique samples:" line on the survey results page. I guess the steampowered editor did it on purpose to get his job:-)....
Sure it might be easier on the administration side to use just one tool. But in the end a language is just that, a tool. You don't see carpenters throwing away all their tools except the hammer just to keep their tool-shed clean...
Uhm... I think you woke up a bit too late...
The trend up untill two years ago was that work weeks would drop to 36 hours. A lot of government agencies all over europe have 36 hour weeks, and in some countries there are laws forcing companies to allow 36 hour weeks if employees want them (for less pay of course).
But now the trens is upwards again because we can't compete with the rest of the world if we only work 36 hours a week (or so they say).
See: this story about siemens increasing the work week of it's german workforce.
If you're going into negotiations with your employer now I'd pray he had his head in the sand the last few months.
I don't know about "the majority of users" but my screen resolution has increased quite a bit over the years (800x600 to 1024x768 to 1152x864 to 1280x1024) while the sizes of the windows (especially browser windows) I use have remained relatively constant. The size of the browser window I'm most comfortable with is around 1000x750. If it gets larger I have trouble following a line of text from one side of the window to the other. My OS has this very advanced thing called a "windowing system" that allows me to have multiple windows visible on screen (partially) behind one another. And no window needs to be full screen! In fact, most are smaller! So why on earth should designers relate the design of their website to the resolution of the entire monitor? Make something that scales to fit the window size your visitors use and leave it at that.
[rant] Slightly related to the "what size should you design for" discussion are the abominations that are webpages that try to fit the window size to the size of their design. I'd like to see webdesigners that include such offensive resizing in their sites to be strapped to a rack that resizes them to every room they enter. [/rant]
That law was implemented a long time ago already. Ham can only be named Prosciuto di Parma (ham from parma in Italy) if it is made in Parma, Champagne can only be called champagne if it is made in the champagne region (and adheres to a pile of other standards of production) Port wine can only come from the Douro valley in Portugal, Gouda cheese van only come from the region around Gouda (the Netherlands) etc. etc. etc.
It's more of a brand protection law than an intellectual property law.
That's why we now have danish blue. The danes were making roquefort cheese untill this law came around and they had to name it something else. Now danish blue is just as strong a brand name as Roquefort.
The idea behind the law is that even though it is not one entity producing something (i.e. coca cola) but a region where something is produced the brand is still vitally important to the local producers. Typically the local producers watch each other (either informally or through some government body) to maintain a certain quality of product. If someone not in the region could just start selling shitty product under their precious brand name their brand name would be destroyed. This law just recognises that the name of a region can be a brand name, and the law only applies to a set of typical local products. You can still call something champagne, as long as it's not bubbly wine, and you can still produce and sell all the crappy bubbly wine from China you want, you just can't call it Champagne. Just as you can produce and sell a sweet brown bubbly drink as long as you don't call it coca cola.
Slashdot Mirror
Opening an API that was already open to pretty much anyone who asked != opensource. The correct title of the article would be: Bloomberg opens part of market data API to non-clients and tries to pass it off as open source. There is no new source to be gotten and recompiled here.
Just google it:
http://www.google.com/search?&q=audio+captcha+broken+2006&btnG=Search
Whatever you do, think about it on a case by case basis. Sure, a one-click patent is bad, and a patent on a method and apparatus for keeping count of the number of steps in a loop (the i in for(i=a;ib;i++) is bad.
But actually, when you (or I at least) think about it, a patent that covers some very complicated very specific software work, while possibly not very open-source friendly, is a lot less bad. If your company spends a lot of money developing something truly original and very useful, patenting it might make sense, and you might want to reconsider leaving your cool job where you get to do truly innovative software work.
In the same vein, you should also consider why your company patents their software work. The place I work mainly patents stuff for defensive reasons. If we don't patent some of the stuff we invent somebody else might, and might possibly be a litigious bastard and try to sue us over the stuff we've been doing for years. I personally think that type of patenting is ok, and as soon as my company starts using our patents to go after companies that are not obviously copying our work I'd leave.
What I'm saying is that you should consider not just the fact that they're patenting software, but also what type of software they're patenting, why, and what they're doing with the patents.
No no no, the meant to say that they care so much about the environment that they will give you one of these UltraSparc T1 based systems if you turn in two of your devices capable of serving web pages.
"We at Sun find that we are unable to produce cheap fast processors so we label this expensive slow one as eco friendly and hope for the Prius effect. Perhaps Cameron Diaz will buy some?"
Drag and drop letters from the character map?
MS checks for wine and only refuses to function if it is present. This is a tad more extreme than refusing support. I'd call it restricting fair use.
How would you feel if your car stopped working the moment you crossed the state border because it's gps navigation system actively checks for the border and shuts down the car if you cross it?
How would you feel if mcdonalds forced you to sit inside their restaurant until you have digested their foodstuffs and left them in the toilet?
imo these are more valid analogies than your toaster powered one.
with 25% of the worlds' CO2 production but only a few percent of the worlds' population I'd say the US already has a few thousand powerplants more than it needs.
Perhaps the US could reduce its power consumption a bit and sell the excess power to China and India so that they don't need so many new powerplants?
So child labor is not a problem with you as long as the resulting product is good?
Both child labor and forcing people to work insane hours of unpaid overtime are against the law. The law is there to protect the weak (i.e. children and programmers with a family to support and a mortgage to pay) against the bullying of third- and first- world sweatshop owners.
In the first world laws against Child labor were enacted just a few short decades before laws against unpaid forced overtime were. Think about that before you accuse me of making a false comparison.
So who would get stuck with pink then?
Badarnik or Nader?
My +1 Sane moderation of the day goes to you sir.
.ogg so I'd need something like an iHP or a very very good reason to re-rip my cd's. And I guess I'm prepared to accept a crappy UI for that.
Different needs different gadgets.. indeed. I have no mp3 player (I borrow My friends iHP from time to time though). I ripped all my CD's to
I think I was implicitly accusing the other replies to the post I originally replied to of blind iPod fanboyism. At least in your case that wasn't justified. So please accept my sincere appologies.
6 years ago or so they where working on this type of system here at the university. I had the pleasure of trying it out (after signing a disclaimer of course :). At the time is was red only, but very very cool. They couldn't focus the beam depending on what distance you were focussing on. So the images they projected where sharp only at one fixed "focus distance" for your eyes.
They could produce a low resolution overlay image over what you were actually looking at. They could only produce very simple line drawings floating in the air. But still.. you had your own private (head ache inducing) lasershow.
Again, the only response is to a small error in the post rather than to the message in the post (i.e. iHP is better than iPod in a lot of ways).
But you're right, I should have checked my facts.. with the iHP supporting ogg, mp3 and some others and the iPod supporting "only" mp3 and some others I automatically assumed the iHP's "some others" would be greater than or equal to the iPod's "some others". So I'll restate my erroneous statement as follows: "more useful supported file formats".
instead of the proprietary dinosaurs like Lotus Notes?"
Oh please please please anything but lotus notes!
Calling lotus notes a proprietary dinosaur is an insult both to dinosaurs and to wonderfull proprietary stuff like the MS Word 95 file format.
Dinosaurs have not been extinct as long as lotus notes should have been.
The person who once started development on Notes probably knows how Karl Marx fealt when he saw Stalin in action with his idea (yeah, I know he never did actually).
The only good Lotus Notes database is a deleted Lotus Notes database.
Running Lotus Notes on a 15 year old packard bell pc is a waste of perfectly good hardware.
Running Domino server on a 20 year old Casio calculator is abuse of computational resources.
More usefull exchange of ideas occurs over a campfire made from just one Lotus Notes CD than during the first year after a company wide deployment of Lotus Notes.
Hastily written notes on soggy napkins in a safe on the bottom of the ocean are a more accessible form of documentation than anything in a Lotus Notes database.
It's easier to retrieve information from the bin underneath the office shredder than it is to retrieve information from a Notes Database.
[breathes deeply]
I'll get back to work now..
Too bad you made a faulty statement about the iPod that pissed some people off. You should have kept yourself to the subject and the first line.
.aac (which it doesn't). But no-one is really attacking your actual claim that the iRiver iHP series players are better than iPods. (which they are).
The iRiver iHP players stomp the iPod in every area except maybe looks (depends on who your asking). Cheaper, longer battery life, lighter, better headphones, more supported file formats etc. Usefull accessories such as in car chargers are probably a lot cheaper and they supply more accessories with the thing too.
All responses to your post are about your claim that the iPod converts everything to
volkswagen Lupo 3L.
3L means it does 100km on 3 litres of diesel. My limited knowledge of ancient measurement systems indicates that that is around 20% more efficient than a smart. It costs a bit more though.
Well further research on the steam site shows that their own writeup is faulty:
:-)....
Check out the results of the "Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey". More than half a million respondents have taken part so far.
And you'd have to be a statistics nut to notice the "unique samples:" line on the survey results page. I guess the steampowered editor did it on purpose to get his job
Writeup:
...more than half a million responded.
...Unique Samples: 293423...
Article:
So that would be: "...more than a quarter of a million."
Sure it might be easier on the administration side to use just one tool. But in the end a language is just that, a tool. You don't see carpenters throwing away all their tools except the hammer just to keep their tool-shed clean...
Uhm... I think you woke up a bit too late... The trend up untill two years ago was that work weeks would drop to 36 hours. A lot of government agencies all over europe have 36 hour weeks, and in some countries there are laws forcing companies to allow 36 hour weeks if employees want them (for less pay of course).
But now the trens is upwards again because we can't compete with the rest of the world if we only work 36 hours a week (or so they say).
See:
this story about siemens increasing the work week of it's german workforce.
If you're going into negotiations with your employer now I'd pray he had his head in the sand the last few months.
I don't know about "the majority of users" but my screen resolution has increased quite a bit over the years (800x600 to 1024x768 to 1152x864 to 1280x1024) while the sizes of the windows (especially browser windows) I use have remained relatively constant. The size of the browser window I'm most comfortable with is around 1000x750. If it gets larger I have trouble following a line of text from one side of the window to the other.
My OS has this very advanced thing called a "windowing system" that allows me to have multiple windows visible on screen (partially) behind one another. And no window needs to be full screen! In fact, most are smaller! So why on earth should designers relate the design of their website to the resolution of the entire monitor? Make something that scales to fit the window size your visitors use and leave it at that.
[rant]
Slightly related to the "what size should you design for" discussion are the abominations that are webpages that try to fit the window size to the size of their design. I'd like to see webdesigners that include such offensive resizing in their sites to be strapped to a rack that resizes them to every room they enter.
[/rant]
Time to ditch that bible ....
That law was implemented a long time ago already. Ham can only be named Prosciuto di Parma (ham from parma in Italy) if it is made in Parma, Champagne can only be called champagne if it is made in the champagne region (and adheres to a pile of other standards of production) Port wine can only come from the Douro valley in Portugal, Gouda cheese van only come from the region around Gouda (the Netherlands) etc. etc. etc.
It's more of a brand protection law than an intellectual property law.
That's why we now have danish blue. The danes were making roquefort cheese untill this law came around and they had to name it something else. Now danish blue is just as strong a brand name as Roquefort.
The idea behind the law is that even though it is not one entity producing something (i.e. coca cola) but a region where something is produced the brand is still vitally important to the local producers. Typically the local producers watch each other (either informally or through some government body) to maintain a certain quality of product. If someone not in the region could just start selling shitty product under their precious brand name their brand name would be destroyed. This law just recognises that the name of a region can be a brand name, and the law only applies to a set of typical local products. You can still call something champagne, as long as it's not bubbly wine, and you can still produce and sell all the crappy bubbly wine from China you want, you just can't call it Champagne. Just as you can produce and sell a sweet brown bubbly drink as long as you don't call it coca cola.
I just drop something on either my left mouse button or the return key on my keyboard with my monitor turned off.
They'll never get me!!!!!
A piece of copper wire of about 10 cm should do the trick.