Yeah there is this guy I have the misfortune to be working with. Once in a code review he insisted that all my code be double spaced (one blank line between every line) because he was having trouble reading it. I said why don't you configure your editor accordingly. He said in his team they do pair programming so every workstation has to be set up exactly the same way...
The guy is completely illogical. Next you review some of his code, and you insist that all his code should be single spaced (no blank lines between lines of code) because you have trouble understanding the code if it doesn't fit on a single screen. What is he going to do then?
Wasn't there a bug in lots of Twitter applications a while ago, where they used a 32 bit number to store a 64 bit sequential message ID? And many of those apps had been created when the message count exceeded a billion already.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
There are plenty of them in Britain - they are called roundabouts and don't need any actual signs, but they work like 4-way stop.
And the 4-way stop signs in the USA work very well, in my experience as a European driving in the USA. It's kind of automatic. Just like collision detection in Ethernet, it just works fine. Sometimes two people start at the same time, one hits the breaks a bit earlier than the other, so the other one continues, problem solved.
Doesn't matter what Nokia's assets are worth, share price is share price. And Apple's $34bn cash is enough to buy more than 50 percent of the shares and at that point Nokia does what Apple says.
The only Ipod at the low end is the Shuffle, which is a joke. No options other than random play, and only offering 1GB to say the Sandisk Sansa's 8GB (which also has an expandable microSD slot).
The expandable microSD slot actually reduces the number of purchasers. To most people, it is something that they don't understand, and that they fear, and that they expect to cause trouble. They also expect to pay money for it, so the music player itself without the unwanted feature must be worth less than the asking price.
So, really, you believe the whole industry operates as a trade of cross-licensing without placing dollar values on any of it?
I have a hard time believing that Sony and Nokia and HTC and Palm all agree that these five patents and these seven patents and these thirteen patents each have equivalent values without at some point having said, "The cost for this license is $x; I'll waive it for this list of patents of yours".
When you want a standard, which is necessary to make that whole phone business working (because if every phone manufacturer had their own little proprietary protocol, nobody would buy any mobile phones), then all the patent holders have to come together and agree to _something_. Since everyone was developing stuff, it is likely that they developed independently incompatible technologies and patented them. But they need a standard, so they have to agree which technology to use. Obviously nobody would agree to include the competitors patented technology into a standard and make their own patented technology worthless if that gave the competitor an advantage. That's why you end up with standards where all relevant patents are available to everyone at a fair price. If Nokia hadn't agreed to this, then Nokia patents would not have been part of the GSM standard, and we would be using some slightly different methods.
Apple is not the big guy in this battle, Nokia is. Apple has, what, four variations of the same phone? Nokia has thousands. They have been in the business long enough that they may well have a case against Apple computers as well, since a phone is really nothing more than a small computer anyway.
That may be true, but Apple has enough cash to buy a majority in Nokia.
Seems to be just a front-end for LLVM. And if it is just a front-end for LLVM, then why doesn't it support ATI graphics cards? That would actually make it useful; there is no need for a second CUDA compiler for NVidia cards.
I always thought Duke Nukem Forever was one of this long standing jokes, like the "I copied 17 Megabytes on my Macintosh and it took 20 minutes" one that comes up again and again. Never realised it was real vapourware.
You guys are saying there were real people trying to actually write this software? Seriously?
In Germany they have a law voiding any EULA not displayed outside the package of a product, so PearC [pearc.de] seems to be going along OK.
There are consumer protection laws, and there are laws applying to companies, and there is a hell of a lot of a difference.
In Germany, for a company a contract is a contract. If a company can't be bothered to find out what Apple's license terms are, they are still bound by them. There is this magical invention called "phone" where they can call Apple and ask for the license terms. Or the newer magical invention called "Google" where you type "MacOS X license" into your computer and get a link to Apple's latest licenses. And if a company is too lazy or too stupid to do either, then they better not enter the risk of being bound by a license they've never read.
As far as I can tell, PearC is run from a home in a residential area; they don't even have a phone number. If they are still in existence then not because they have any rights, but because Apple cannot be bothered.
Apple is engaging in anti-competitive behavior by tying its OS to its hardware. This behavior should be illegal for any OS, Windows, or OSX.
I don't know what idiots modded this up as insightful, and I don't know why there is no moderation {-1 clueless].
You could have read a court decision several months ago that clearly stated you are wrong. Judge Alsup said back then that Apple is entirely in their rights to sell MacOS X (with a market share of maybe 5% in the operating system market) with any conditions attached that Apple wants, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I think yours is a typical case of not having the brains to see the difference between competitive and anti-competitive.
Even more fun would be arranging the signals via OFDM so that they could be multiplexed and decoded using shared channel space. Sigh. Something will happen someday when enough people scream about the crappy, supposedly high definition displays.
That is what Freeview HD is supposed to do. From what I read, every multiplex has 30 MBit/second for four channels, with bandwidth adjusted at runtime. So when one channel shows a static picture or one otherwise needing little bandwidth, the other channels can use a bit more. That could work out quite well if you have say one action movie and three programs having less movement on the screen.
There is still room for Psystar 2 to do things the right way that may take longer (as they will not use a image) but is in the law.
There is no way to get around contributory copyright infringement (because the SLA makes installation of MacOS X on a non-Apple computer copyright infringement), and DMCA violation (because there is some rather rubbish DRM in MacOS X that prevents it from being installed on a non-Apple computer unless you do something to get around the DRM).
Since you seem to have read the Groklaw article you'll note that the judge's order had nothing to do with licensing and everything to do with copyright and the DMCA. Allow me to quote Groklaw for you:
Allow me to quote Judge Alsup's decision: "In sum, customers were contractually precluded from: (1) installing and running Mac OS X on any non-Apple computer system, (2) enabling others to install or run Mac OS X on any non-Apple computer system, (3) modifying or creating derivative works of the software, and (4) transferring the software to others except as expressly authorized by the license agreement."
And please explain to me why _I_ should buy a copy of MacOS X that I don't need, open it, reject the license, go back to the store when it is _you_ who makes the wrong assertion that you wouldn't get a refund?
Microsoft says it is licensed, and when the Indian Inland Revenue heard that Microsoft had found a tax loophole that meant they didn't have to pay tax anywhere for the copies of Windows they sold in India, they reminded Microsoft that Windows is actually licensed, not sold, and therefore tax had to be paid in India.
Wasn't the whole Microsoft thing getting fined because Microsoft were telling vendors they couldn't sell their OS if those vendors also sold Linux on the same machines? How is this any different with Apple telling vendors they can't sell OSX on machines? The judge is saying Apple can sell their OS on only their machines, while telling Microsoft they can't?
Basic copyright law. Copyright law allows you to tell people what they can do with _your_ software. Microsoft tried to prevent people from installing Linux. Linux is not Microsoft software. Microsoft has no right to tell anyone what they can do with their Linux software. Apple told people what they can do with MacOS X, which is Apple's software. Apple has every right to tell you what you can do with Apple's software. And Apple allows and even supports installation of Windows and Linux on Apple computers.
They may claim its a license but do you sign a licensing agreement at the time of the transaction? No. Do you ever sign a licensing agreement? No. If you bought the software, opened it, and refused the license would they allow you to return it? No.
This is what happens from a legal point of view: Apple proposes to sell a box with a DVD, plus the right to install the DVD on a single Apple computer, and asks you in return for some money plus the acceptance of the software license. You either agree to this contract or you don't. If you don't, then contrary to what you claim, Apple _will_ refund your money. And contrary to what you say, signing a license agreement is not necessary; you agree to it by installing and using the software.
Of course you could have just hopped over to groklaw.net and read the court decision, where Judge Alsup states very clearly that the license is part of the contract between Apple and their customers.
In other news, thousands of corporate gpl users reevaluate their use of gpl software. I know... Many gpl advocates are ecstatic at the idea of corporations not using gpl code.
Any sane corporate user of software knows that software comes with a license, and at a price. If the software you use is licensed under GPL, the price is the cost and the effort of putting the source code on your web site for anyone to download. If the people responsible for software licensing are too stupid to read the GPL license, they deserve all that they get. Nobody wants corporate users who use GPL software because they are too stupid to read a license. And certainly nobody wants corporate users who use GPL'd software because they think they can rip off GPL software.
But any corporate user with more than half a braincell understands what the GPL is about and either uses GPL software or they don't, based on the quality and the cost.
I'd suggest that "incorporating small parts of a motion picture in the video recording of a birthday party" is not the same as "unauthorized video recording of a motion picture". Note that it says "a motion picture", not "small parts of a motion picture". And recording a party while a motion picture is visible in the background is not a "video recording of a motion picture".
This hole in the DMCA is trivial for businesses to circumvent. All the company has to do is include a copyrighted image in memory on the print cartridge, then have the printer refuse to recognize print cartridges without the copyrighted image. It was done on the original Game Boy, and probably before that.
Something like that is what Lexmark tried. It doesn't work. DMCA makes it illegal for you to access the copyrighted image without permission if it is protected with DRM, but that is not what is happening. The DRM tries to prevent access to some other manufacturer's printer cartridges. Clearly the printer manufacturer has no standing to sue anyone trying to access _someone else's_ printer cartridges.
In both cases, once you patent something, there is a net loss in the number of people doing it. We have observed this time and time again in the industry.
Which is in the case of a patent for spamming really beneficial for society (so it is a shame that this patent hasn't been granted, these patent trolls could do something good once in their life by suing a successful spammer), but quite the opposite of what patents are supposed to achieve.
I honestly don't understand why so many people think he shouldn't be extradited. The way most extradition treaties work is if you commit a crime in or against a country with which you have an extradition treaty, and if that crime is also a crime in your home country, then you are extradited.
In German law, there are the following requirements:
1. It must be a crime according to German law. (Check)
2. It must happened in the country that asks for extradition. (Check. The hacking would be assumed to happen where it took effect, that is in the USA).
3. There must be a guarantee for a fair trial (Definitely not. He'll do time not for hacking, but for embarrassing the US military).
4. No cruel or unusual punishment (50 years for hacking would be considered both cruel and unusual).
5. No extradition if the extradition itself is worse than a reasonable punishment. (There is a strong argument for that)
Looks like very good reasons to not extradite. Of course in the UK there is this "special relationship" between Tony Blair and George Bush which overrides everything else.
He didn't "break in to a highly sensitive military computer network". He leaned against the door and found it opened. If he actually got into any sensitive areas, then the ones that belong into court are the incompetent idiots who couldn't even keep an amateur with two much time on his hands out of their networks.
What he did didn't cause much damage at all. The guy was an amateur whose only way to break into computers was guessing passwords. No tools, just guessing. Any account that he broke in had a password that was so weak it could be _guessed_. And since these accounts belonged to the US Army, the thing is embarrassing beyond belief to the US Army. His crime wasn't hacking into computers, his crime was embarrassing the US Army.
The "huge damages" he caused where the fact that the US Army had to change their ridiculous unsafe passwords to something safe. The US Army just cannot admit that an amateur looking for UFOs didn't hack into their computers, but just managed to _guess_ dozens of passwords. So they have to throw the book at him to safe face.
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Yeah there is this guy I have the misfortune to be working with. Once in a code review he insisted that all my code be double spaced (one blank line between every line) because he was having trouble reading it. I said why don't you configure your editor accordingly. He said in his team they do pair programming so every workstation has to be set up exactly the same way...
The guy is completely illogical. Next you review some of his code, and you insist that all his code should be single spaced (no blank lines between lines of code) because you have trouble understanding the code if it doesn't fit on a single screen. What is he going to do then?
Wasn't there a bug in lots of Twitter applications a while ago, where they used a 32 bit number to store a 64 bit sequential message ID? And many of those apps had been created when the message count exceeded a billion already.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
There are plenty of them in Britain - they are called roundabouts and don't need any actual signs, but they work like 4-way stop.
And the 4-way stop signs in the USA work very well, in my experience as a European driving in the USA. It's kind of automatic. Just like collision detection in Ethernet, it just works fine. Sometimes two people start at the same time, one hits the breaks a bit earlier than the other, so the other one continues, problem solved.
Doesn't matter what Nokia's assets are worth, share price is share price. And Apple's $34bn cash is enough to buy more than 50 percent of the shares and at that point Nokia does what Apple says.
The only Ipod at the low end is the Shuffle, which is a joke. No options other than random play, and only offering 1GB to say the Sandisk Sansa's 8GB (which also has an expandable microSD slot).
The expandable microSD slot actually reduces the number of purchasers. To most people, it is something that they don't understand, and that they fear, and that they expect to cause trouble. They also expect to pay money for it, so the music player itself without the unwanted feature must be worth less than the asking price.
So, really, you believe the whole industry operates as a trade of cross-licensing without placing dollar values on any of it? I have a hard time believing that Sony and Nokia and HTC and Palm all agree that these five patents and these seven patents and these thirteen patents each have equivalent values without at some point having said, "The cost for this license is $x; I'll waive it for this list of patents of yours".
When you want a standard, which is necessary to make that whole phone business working (because if every phone manufacturer had their own little proprietary protocol, nobody would buy any mobile phones), then all the patent holders have to come together and agree to _something_. Since everyone was developing stuff, it is likely that they developed independently incompatible technologies and patented them. But they need a standard, so they have to agree which technology to use. Obviously nobody would agree to include the competitors patented technology into a standard and make their own patented technology worthless if that gave the competitor an advantage. That's why you end up with standards where all relevant patents are available to everyone at a fair price. If Nokia hadn't agreed to this, then Nokia patents would not have been part of the GSM standard, and we would be using some slightly different methods.
Apple is not the big guy in this battle, Nokia is. Apple has, what, four variations of the same phone? Nokia has thousands. They have been in the business long enough that they may well have a case against Apple computers as well, since a phone is really nothing more than a small computer anyway.
That may be true, but Apple has enough cash to buy a majority in Nokia.
Seems to be just a front-end for LLVM. And if it is just a front-end for LLVM, then why doesn't it support ATI graphics cards? That would actually make it useful; there is no need for a second CUDA compiler for NVidia cards.
Just for good measure, I still refuse to use XML in any application I design. I have no intentions of changing that any time soon either.
If you insist on XML for exchanging information, you have greatly decreased stupid, ignorant Windows programmers' chances to mess it up.
I hope that is not the reason why you refuse to use XML.
I always thought Duke Nukem Forever was one of this long standing jokes, like the "I copied 17 Megabytes on my Macintosh and it took 20 minutes" one that comes up again and again. Never realised it was real vapourware.
You guys are saying there were real people trying to actually write this software? Seriously?
In Germany they have a law voiding any EULA not displayed outside the package of a product, so PearC [pearc.de] seems to be going along OK.
There are consumer protection laws, and there are laws applying to companies, and there is a hell of a lot of a difference.
In Germany, for a company a contract is a contract. If a company can't be bothered to find out what Apple's license terms are, they are still bound by them. There is this magical invention called "phone" where they can call Apple and ask for the license terms. Or the newer magical invention called "Google" where you type "MacOS X license" into your computer and get a link to Apple's latest licenses. And if a company is too lazy or too stupid to do either, then they better not enter the risk of being bound by a license they've never read.
As far as I can tell, PearC is run from a home in a residential area; they don't even have a phone number. If they are still in existence then not because they have any rights, but because Apple cannot be bothered.
Apple is engaging in anti-competitive behavior by tying its OS to its hardware. This behavior should be illegal for any OS, Windows, or OSX.
I don't know what idiots modded this up as insightful, and I don't know why there is no moderation {-1 clueless].
You could have read a court decision several months ago that clearly stated you are wrong. Judge Alsup said back then that Apple is entirely in their rights to sell MacOS X (with a market share of maybe 5% in the operating system market) with any conditions attached that Apple wants, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
I think yours is a typical case of not having the brains to see the difference between competitive and anti-competitive.
Even more fun would be arranging the signals via OFDM so that they could be multiplexed and decoded using shared channel space. Sigh. Something will happen someday when enough people scream about the crappy, supposedly high definition displays.
That is what Freeview HD is supposed to do. From what I read, every multiplex has 30 MBit/second for four channels, with bandwidth adjusted at runtime. So when one channel shows a static picture or one otherwise needing little bandwidth, the other channels can use a bit more. That could work out quite well if you have say one action movie and three programs having less movement on the screen.
There is still room for Psystar 2 to do things the right way that may take longer (as they will not use a image) but is in the law.
There is no way to get around contributory copyright infringement (because the SLA makes installation of MacOS X on a non-Apple computer copyright infringement), and DMCA violation (because there is some rather rubbish DRM in MacOS X that prevents it from being installed on a non-Apple computer unless you do something to get around the DRM).
Since you seem to have read the Groklaw article you'll note that the judge's order had nothing to do with licensing and everything to do with copyright and the DMCA. Allow me to quote Groklaw for you:
Allow me to quote Judge Alsup's decision: "In sum, customers were contractually precluded from: (1) installing and running Mac OS X on any non-Apple computer system, (2) enabling others to install or run Mac OS X on any non-Apple computer system, (3) modifying or creating derivative works of the software, and (4) transferring the software to others except as expressly authorized by the license agreement."
And please explain to me why _I_ should buy a copy of MacOS X that I don't need, open it, reject the license, go back to the store when it is _you_ who makes the wrong assertion that you wouldn't get a refund?
Is Windows sold or licensed?
Microsoft says it is licensed, and when the Indian Inland Revenue heard that Microsoft had found a tax loophole that meant they didn't have to pay tax anywhere for the copies of Windows they sold in India, they reminded Microsoft that Windows is actually licensed, not sold, and therefore tax had to be paid in India.
Wasn't the whole Microsoft thing getting fined because Microsoft were telling vendors they couldn't sell their OS if those vendors also sold Linux on the same machines? How is this any different with Apple telling vendors they can't sell OSX on machines? The judge is saying Apple can sell their OS on only their machines, while telling Microsoft they can't?
Basic copyright law. Copyright law allows you to tell people what they can do with _your_ software. Microsoft tried to prevent people from installing Linux. Linux is not Microsoft software. Microsoft has no right to tell anyone what they can do with their Linux software. Apple told people what they can do with MacOS X, which is Apple's software. Apple has every right to tell you what you can do with Apple's software. And Apple allows and even supports installation of Windows and Linux on Apple computers.
They may claim its a license but do you sign a licensing agreement at the time of the transaction? No. Do you ever sign a licensing agreement? No. If you bought the software, opened it, and refused the license would they allow you to return it? No.
This is what happens from a legal point of view: Apple proposes to sell a box with a DVD, plus the right to install the DVD on a single Apple computer, and asks you in return for some money plus the acceptance of the software license. You either agree to this contract or you don't. If you don't, then contrary to what you claim, Apple _will_ refund your money. And contrary to what you say, signing a license agreement is not necessary; you agree to it by installing and using the software.
Of course you could have just hopped over to groklaw.net and read the court decision, where Judge Alsup states very clearly that the license is part of the contract between Apple and their customers.
In other news, thousands of corporate gpl users reevaluate their use of gpl software. I know... Many gpl advocates are ecstatic at the idea of corporations not using gpl code.
Any sane corporate user of software knows that software comes with a license, and at a price. If the software you use is licensed under GPL, the price is the cost and the effort of putting the source code on your web site for anyone to download. If the people responsible for software licensing are too stupid to read the GPL license, they deserve all that they get. Nobody wants corporate users who use GPL software because they are too stupid to read a license. And certainly nobody wants corporate users who use GPL'd software because they think they can rip off GPL software.
But any corporate user with more than half a braincell understands what the GPL is about and either uses GPL software or they don't, based on the quality and the cost.
I'd suggest that "incorporating small parts of a motion picture in the video recording of a birthday party" is not the same as "unauthorized video recording of a motion picture". Note that it says "a motion picture", not "small parts of a motion picture". And recording a party while a motion picture is visible in the background is not a "video recording of a motion picture".
This hole in the DMCA is trivial for businesses to circumvent. All the company has to do is include a copyrighted image in memory on the print cartridge, then have the printer refuse to recognize print cartridges without the copyrighted image. It was done on the original Game Boy, and probably before that.
Something like that is what Lexmark tried. It doesn't work. DMCA makes it illegal for you to access the copyrighted image without permission if it is protected with DRM, but that is not what is happening. The DRM tries to prevent access to some other manufacturer's printer cartridges. Clearly the printer manufacturer has no standing to sue anyone trying to access _someone else's_ printer cartridges.
In both cases, once you patent something, there is a net loss in the number of people doing it. We have observed this time and time again in the industry.
Which is in the case of a patent for spamming really beneficial for society (so it is a shame that this patent hasn't been granted, these patent trolls could do something good once in their life by suing a successful spammer), but quite the opposite of what patents are supposed to achieve.
I honestly don't understand why so many people think he shouldn't be extradited. The way most extradition treaties work is if you commit a crime in or against a country with which you have an extradition treaty, and if that crime is also a crime in your home country, then you are extradited.
In German law, there are the following requirements:
1. It must be a crime according to German law. (Check)
2. It must happened in the country that asks for extradition. (Check. The hacking would be assumed to happen where it took effect, that is in the USA).
3. There must be a guarantee for a fair trial (Definitely not. He'll do time not for hacking, but for embarrassing the US military).
4. No cruel or unusual punishment (50 years for hacking would be considered both cruel and unusual).
5. No extradition if the extradition itself is worse than a reasonable punishment. (There is a strong argument for that)
Looks like very good reasons to not extradite. Of course in the UK there is this "special relationship" between Tony Blair and George Bush which overrides everything else.
He didn't "break in to a highly sensitive military computer network". He leaned against the door and found it opened. If he actually got into any sensitive areas, then the ones that belong into court are the incompetent idiots who couldn't even keep an amateur with two much time on his hands out of their networks.
What he did didn't cause much damage at all. The guy was an amateur whose only way to break into computers was guessing passwords. No tools, just guessing. Any account that he broke in had a password that was so weak it could be _guessed_. And since these accounts belonged to the US Army, the thing is embarrassing beyond belief to the US Army. His crime wasn't hacking into computers, his crime was embarrassing the US Army.
The "huge damages" he caused where the fact that the US Army had to change their ridiculous unsafe passwords to something safe. The US Army just cannot admit that an amateur looking for UFOs didn't hack into their computers, but just managed to _guess_ dozens of passwords. So they have to throw the book at him to safe face.