Taking bets on how soon someone posts a kickstarter project scam that promises nothing more then pairing a free OS to some POS handset and how many thousands of fools will pay $100 for a free T-Shirt and empty promises.
If you RTFA you would realize in this case this is different then every other patent story posted on Slashdot.
This story is about the legal equivalent of you being sued because you wipe your ass with your left hand. Sure someone could in fact hold a legitimate patent for the process of left handed ass wiping but there is no legal precedence for suing people because they use their left hand for wiping their asses. Spend a second and think about the stupidity of someone claiming $1000 in damage per person that uses their left hand for wiping their asses. Now spend another second thinking about how stupid it is for people in an office using the technology that exists in the office to scan and email a document and someone asking $1000 per person.
The only valid complaint this patent holder could have is to sue printer or scanner manufactures that offer scan to email features. Users of an idea do not violate patent law, period. You don't have to be a patent attorney to realize something is very wrong, this is not some example of a legitimate patent holder collecting their dues, this is outright extortion. You don't have to be an expert to have a comment about common sense.
You bitch about people flying off the handle before reading the story, but obviously you couldn't wait for the first patent story of the day to hit Slashdot before releasing your stupid rant without reading the article or applying any thought about it.
Try and contribute something to Ubuntu Phone OS, pretty sure your content is not going in there.
Now take the Ubuntu Phone OS code, create your own version, then what. Use it on one device? Not like you are going to create a competing phone OS platform based on Ubuntu Phone OS.
So what exactly is open about Ubuntu Phone OS vs Android vs iOS vs Windows vs Firefox OS, vs, whatever?
People throw the Open card around as being better then closed proprietary source, but I call bullshit on that. There is no "real" open community development, its a gated community where you can only get in once you pass the gatehouse, and they just don't let any riff-raff through those gates.
99.99999% of all Slashdot readers that claim open source is superior to closed source have not contributed one line of code to any open source project. What's the point then other then a smug superiority complex.
Considering the top selling laptop on Amazon is the Chromebook, which is basically a cellphone with larger screen and attached keyboard, it appears there is still a market for shitty low powered laptopish kinda computers. However I think that market will now be dominated by Windows RT.
Getting rid of partners like Samsung will hurt them in the long run. The only reason why Samsung became one of the top suppliers of parts for Apple is due to Apple's long history of problems and failures with smaller partners unable to produce significant quantities with the quality expected by Apple. Of course TSMC is not a small company, but Apple dropping Samsung for parts is about pride not intelligent planning or business strategy. Why drop a relationship that works for something less predictable?
Apple is going to have a very tough year in 2013. They blew their wad last year for product updates and except for minor product revisions will not offer anything interesting until at least the fall if Apple TV is not actually a myth. In the meantime news like this will only scare investors at a time when there had already been a loss in faith with Apple's business strategy.
I think the problem with Apple is they are still trying to follow in Steve Jobs' footsteps. It's only Steve Jobs that had a hate on for Android, Google, and anything connected to them, so pursuing this prideful vendetta against Samsung is like Steve's dying wish. The problem is that Apple is going to have to eventually start making their own decisions and continuing a strategy to remove Google and Samsung as business partners is not in their best interests.
Another reactionary bunch of bullshit to point fingers are everything but the people actually at fault here. The mother had the guns available, trained a child with some mental issues how to use them, and then everybody scratches their head wondering if violent video games had anything to do with the guy going ballistic on his mom and unfortunate bystanders.
Why can't bad parenting simply be the problem. Why can't studies start up to improve the quality of parenting? Why is it impossible to for many parents to accept they suck at raising children?
Guns exist, period. Even if every new gun is bio metrically tied to a person that has undergone intensive psychiatric testing and thousands of hours of training, the fact is old guns exist and if someone wants to get a hold of a gun, they can. Also consider that making a gun from scratch isn't rocket science. If someone wants to use a device that can fire off projectiles that can cause death, they will find a way to do so.
Also, stupid people exist, you know, the kind of people that have an arsenal of guns in the presence of their mentally disturbed children.
Instead of gun control, focus on why there exists a society where people feel the need to draw a weapon to solve their problems. Also figure out why people are too stupid to not be able to lock up their guns or exercise common sense on whether their children are responsible enough to have access to a gun.
I think this is pretty much going to be a first come first serve kind of thing. I don't think anybody on earth should have the ability to declare property rights on something in space, unless they can walk right up to it and stick a flag in it (and, of course, the means to protect the flag). You can sit on earth and pay to have a bunch of lawyers claim rights on some space rock, but if someone else lands their spaceship on it you just look like a moron.
John seems to say a lot more then he does these days. At least Gabe put his money where his mouth is and actually developed a game console. Maybe John could come out with a game that most gamers don't actually hate.
Everybody is reactionary. Shooting at schools, we demand gun control. Nuclear meltdown after worst natural disaster to hit area, we demand shutting down the reactors.
So the problem here is Japan's insatiable need for energy vs the alternatives to nuclear power, and quite frankly the alternatives do not stack up.
Everybody wants solar power, and wind power, and power from fluffy rabbits nibbling on carrots, and all other kinds of nice Utopian ideas that make use sleep well at night. Hell, why not just tap into Gaia for all our energy needs. But these alternatives do not produce the amount of power required to power cities and nations, period.
The only thing I could hope for out of Japan's nuclear crisis is that if a nation of highly technological perfectionists started focusing on alternative energy, maybe, just maybe, they could find viable solutions for alternative energy to ween themselves off of fossil or nuclear energy that the rest of us could use eventually.
But, in the short term, they need the energy and nuclear energy is just too far attractive a source of real amounts of energy spite of all their woes.
Every person that says to just switch to solar or wind or other green energies is clueless of the amount of energy required for cities and nations. Every person claiming that using nuclear energy is about greed and contempt for human safety is being sensational and reactionary. The only viable short term solution to avoid nuclear energy is to burn fossil fuels and so not turning them back on will cause greater global damage then the potential of having them on.
While I agree people are becoming more self-absorbed while driving, I tire of the bitching about safety heard from cyclists.
Driving a bike in busy congested traffic is what kills bikers. No bikers on the road, no biker deaths. Grow up and drive a car or take public transportation to work and stop blaming people driving 2 ton moving vehicles for killing people who opt to drive around with nothing more then spandex and a bit of plastic on their heads to protect them from a collision.
I mean really, you risk your life every day riding a bike to work because of the environment or your health? Grow up. Even if car drivers become responsible and diligent to avoid hitting bikers you are still at huge risk of injury or death simply because of the physics involved in a large heavy object potentially striking a small light object. And lets not forget the number of idiot cyclists who are just as self absorbed as car drivers feeling that the rules of the road specifically do not apply to them. Know how many times I see a cyclist blow a red light because they don't believe they should wait like all the other cars?
And I live in a Canadian city where I see grown adults drive their bikes in the middle of winter, with streets covered in slush and snow. I mean I have absolutely no sympathy when I hear about some cyclist that got creamed on the radio in the middle of winter because a car slid into them. There is simply no reason for it, the cyclist was a self righteous fucktard for thinking they are safe driving on slippery congested roads, at night, in the middle of winter. Its the equivalent of someone getting into a car pissed drunk, you might get lucky most of the times, but eventually your time will come.
You want to loose weight, go to the gym, or cycle on paths or dedicated parks. You want to save the environment, take a bus or carpool. But get over the idea you should commute to work on a bike and blame everyone else because you don't feel safe.
But I am seen more and more the "Lets take open source hardware and software, bundle it up, and then make millions doing nothing more then giving away T-Shirts" model in Kickstarter.
For years I was part of the cult that would invest $1000's upgrading or building my own PC game box, buying the best video card, researching the best CPU and RAM that could be overclocked, even matching the exact spec's of a system bench marked on an enthusiasts sight.
After the many hours of building and tweaking and break in I finally would get a hold of the most popular game at the time and then try to run it will all the graphic's features cranked to the max because every website I reviewed said I could.
And then the game would stutter, hesitate or crap out randomly.
Usually the response on forums I posted on was that I obviously didn't apply the heat sink paste correctly so my CPU was overheating, or I didn't match the RAM serial numbers appropriately, or my CPU overclocking was not correctly configured, or I didn't burn in the CPU long enough or didn't have the exact correct experimental build of some video driver or I would have to turn off many Windodws services.
Ultimately, a long tirade of UTTER BULLSHIT to hide the fact that that PC game sucked on a video card that was rushed out the door with crappy beta drivers.
It is extremely fucking disappointing that 10 years since my last time I wasted time and money trying to built the perfect build box that consumers are still plagued by shitty hardware, drivers and game development that ruin the PC gaming experience. I would have expected by now that AMD, nVidia, Intel, and everyone else involved could have figured out how to build a game system with silky smooth graphics that pin games at a stable 120 FPS at any resolution and could get rid of the necessity of "turning off" game features in order for better performance.
You know, the way game consoles have been doing for decades.
Instead its the same old shit. Invest thousands into a game box and find out your favorite game performs poorly for whatever reason. I can guarantee that if I went through it all again, whether using nVidia or AMD, the same results would be achieved, utter dissapointment.
I really don't care who's fault it is, the fact that a game can't run smoothly on a PC in the 21st century is EXACTLY the reason why PC gaming and PC's in general are dying.
The BBC will report that the reason behind global warming stems from the use of pixels instead of vectors because of the added energy overhead of processing millions of pixels instead of only thousands of endpoints.
If you have ever thrown an exception to indicate a success condition, you fail.
This is just plain wrong because if another developer ever implements an interface without a try...catch, you just caused the application to crash because of successful operation.
My experience with Exceptions, and API's that are full of them, is that the developers are pretty much saying they don't know what the hell is going on, so TRY everything and respond accordingly. There is this thing called Unit Testing, which means you build tests for both success and failing conditions for an interface and ensure the application will not crash and recover for failing conditions. An app should always succeed, so constantly trying interface calls is overhead. I only TRY calls to external API's because I cannot clearly know they will succeed, I didn't build unit testing in 3rd party tools therefore I don't trust them.
I mean, what the fuck does Exception stand for? Its an Exception to the known state of an app. If you throw for ALL known states including success, you fail.
At first I was going to make a light hearted quip about the intelligence of Australians, but then this isn't like someone in Britain driving into a lake because their GPS told them to (or killing themselves because of a prank). Driving across many regions in Australia is not something to be taken lightly, and if a Map app puts you stuck in the middle of a desert, 100's of kilometers away from your destination, this is clearly a huge issue.
I don't think software companies should allow a EULA claiming they have no responsibility for injury or death caused by the use of a Map application. If Map applications cannot offer 100% correct directions then they should be yanked from use, period.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking bets on how soon someone posts a kickstarter project scam that promises nothing more then pairing a free OS to some POS handset and how many thousands of fools will pay $100 for a free T-Shirt and empty promises.
If you RTFA you would realize in this case this is different then every other patent story posted on Slashdot.
This story is about the legal equivalent of you being sued because you wipe your ass with your left hand. Sure someone could in fact hold a legitimate patent for the process of left handed ass wiping but there is no legal precedence for suing people because they use their left hand for wiping their asses. Spend a second and think about the stupidity of someone claiming $1000 in damage per person that uses their left hand for wiping their asses. Now spend another second thinking about how stupid it is for people in an office using the technology that exists in the office to scan and email a document and someone asking $1000 per person.
The only valid complaint this patent holder could have is to sue printer or scanner manufactures that offer scan to email features. Users of an idea do not violate patent law, period. You don't have to be a patent attorney to realize something is very wrong, this is not some example of a legitimate patent holder collecting their dues, this is outright extortion. You don't have to be an expert to have a comment about common sense.
You bitch about people flying off the handle before reading the story, but obviously you couldn't wait for the first patent story of the day to hit Slashdot before releasing your stupid rant without reading the article or applying any thought about it.
I might be a sucker, but I ain't no fool.
You failed physics didn't you.
Define "openness"?
Try and contribute something to Ubuntu Phone OS, pretty sure your content is not going in there.
Now take the Ubuntu Phone OS code, create your own version, then what. Use it on one device? Not like you are going to create a competing phone OS platform based on Ubuntu Phone OS.
So what exactly is open about Ubuntu Phone OS vs Android vs iOS vs Windows vs Firefox OS, vs, whatever?
People throw the Open card around as being better then closed proprietary source, but I call bullshit on that. There is no "real" open community development, its a gated community where you can only get in once you pass the gatehouse, and they just don't let any riff-raff through those gates.
99.99999% of all Slashdot readers that claim open source is superior to closed source have not contributed one line of code to any open source project. What's the point then other then a smug superiority complex.
....kinda backfired on us didn't it.
Considering the top selling laptop on Amazon is the Chromebook, which is basically a cellphone with larger screen and attached keyboard, it appears there is still a market for shitty low powered laptopish kinda computers. However I think that market will now be dominated by Windows RT.
Yes Steve Jobs, Apple has been blowing it since you left the world.
Getting rid of partners like Samsung will hurt them in the long run. The only reason why Samsung became one of the top suppliers of parts for Apple is due to Apple's long history of problems and failures with smaller partners unable to produce significant quantities with the quality expected by Apple. Of course TSMC is not a small company, but Apple dropping Samsung for parts is about pride not intelligent planning or business strategy. Why drop a relationship that works for something less predictable?
Apple is going to have a very tough year in 2013. They blew their wad last year for product updates and except for minor product revisions will not offer anything interesting until at least the fall if Apple TV is not actually a myth. In the meantime news like this will only scare investors at a time when there had already been a loss in faith with Apple's business strategy.
I think the problem with Apple is they are still trying to follow in Steve Jobs' footsteps. It's only Steve Jobs that had a hate on for Android, Google, and anything connected to them, so pursuing this prideful vendetta against Samsung is like Steve's dying wish. The problem is that Apple is going to have to eventually start making their own decisions and continuing a strategy to remove Google and Samsung as business partners is not in their best interests.
Another reactionary bunch of bullshit to point fingers are everything but the people actually at fault here. The mother had the guns available, trained a child with some mental issues how to use them, and then everybody scratches their head wondering if violent video games had anything to do with the guy going ballistic on his mom and unfortunate bystanders.
Why can't bad parenting simply be the problem. Why can't studies start up to improve the quality of parenting? Why is it impossible to for many parents to accept they suck at raising children?
Guns exist, period. Even if every new gun is bio metrically tied to a person that has undergone intensive psychiatric testing and thousands of hours of training, the fact is old guns exist and if someone wants to get a hold of a gun, they can. Also consider that making a gun from scratch isn't rocket science. If someone wants to use a device that can fire off projectiles that can cause death, they will find a way to do so.
Also, stupid people exist, you know, the kind of people that have an arsenal of guns in the presence of their mentally disturbed children.
Instead of gun control, focus on why there exists a society where people feel the need to draw a weapon to solve their problems. Also figure out why people are too stupid to not be able to lock up their guns or exercise common sense on whether their children are responsible enough to have access to a gun.
I think this is pretty much going to be a first come first serve kind of thing. I don't think anybody on earth should have the ability to declare property rights on something in space, unless they can walk right up to it and stick a flag in it (and, of course, the means to protect the flag). You can sit on earth and pay to have a bunch of lawyers claim rights on some space rock, but if someone else lands their spaceship on it you just look like a moron.
Game complexity and FullHD graphics?
John seems to say a lot more then he does these days. At least Gabe put his money where his mouth is and actually developed a game console. Maybe John could come out with a game that most gamers don't actually hate.
Everybody is reactionary. Shooting at schools, we demand gun control. Nuclear meltdown after worst natural disaster to hit area, we demand shutting down the reactors.
So the problem here is Japan's insatiable need for energy vs the alternatives to nuclear power, and quite frankly the alternatives do not stack up.
Everybody wants solar power, and wind power, and power from fluffy rabbits nibbling on carrots, and all other kinds of nice Utopian ideas that make use sleep well at night. Hell, why not just tap into Gaia for all our energy needs. But these alternatives do not produce the amount of power required to power cities and nations, period.
The only thing I could hope for out of Japan's nuclear crisis is that if a nation of highly technological perfectionists started focusing on alternative energy, maybe, just maybe, they could find viable solutions for alternative energy to ween themselves off of fossil or nuclear energy that the rest of us could use eventually.
But, in the short term, they need the energy and nuclear energy is just too far attractive a source of real amounts of energy spite of all their woes.
Every person that says to just switch to solar or wind or other green energies is clueless of the amount of energy required for cities and nations. Every person claiming that using nuclear energy is about greed and contempt for human safety is being sensational and reactionary. The only viable short term solution to avoid nuclear energy is to burn fossil fuels and so not turning them back on will cause greater global damage then the potential of having them on.
No, you are wrong.
While I agree people are becoming more self-absorbed while driving, I tire of the bitching about safety heard from cyclists.
Driving a bike in busy congested traffic is what kills bikers. No bikers on the road, no biker deaths. Grow up and drive a car or take public transportation to work and stop blaming people driving 2 ton moving vehicles for killing people who opt to drive around with nothing more then spandex and a bit of plastic on their heads to protect them from a collision.
I mean really, you risk your life every day riding a bike to work because of the environment or your health? Grow up. Even if car drivers become responsible and diligent to avoid hitting bikers you are still at huge risk of injury or death simply because of the physics involved in a large heavy object potentially striking a small light object. And lets not forget the number of idiot cyclists who are just as self absorbed as car drivers feeling that the rules of the road specifically do not apply to them. Know how many times I see a cyclist blow a red light because they don't believe they should wait like all the other cars?
And I live in a Canadian city where I see grown adults drive their bikes in the middle of winter, with streets covered in slush and snow. I mean I have absolutely no sympathy when I hear about some cyclist that got creamed on the radio in the middle of winter because a car slid into them. There is simply no reason for it, the cyclist was a self righteous fucktard for thinking they are safe driving on slippery congested roads, at night, in the middle of winter. Its the equivalent of someone getting into a car pissed drunk, you might get lucky most of the times, but eventually your time will come.
You want to loose weight, go to the gym, or cycle on paths or dedicated parks. You want to save the environment, take a bus or carpool. But get over the idea you should commute to work on a bike and blame everyone else because you don't feel safe.
Its funny until a group of humorless Slashdot readers will mod it down and state the obvious. LOL, read down the list, its already been done.
Wow, an after all these years basic humor still escapes some readers.
There is SERIOUS need for a "Woosh" moderation.
But I am seen more and more the "Lets take open source hardware and software, bundle it up, and then make millions doing nothing more then giving away T-Shirts" model in Kickstarter.
For years I was part of the cult that would invest $1000's upgrading or building my own PC game box, buying the best video card, researching the best CPU and RAM that could be overclocked, even matching the exact spec's of a system bench marked on an enthusiasts sight.
After the many hours of building and tweaking and break in I finally would get a hold of the most popular game at the time and then try to run it will all the graphic's features cranked to the max because every website I reviewed said I could.
And then the game would stutter, hesitate or crap out randomly.
Usually the response on forums I posted on was that I obviously didn't apply the heat sink paste correctly so my CPU was overheating, or I didn't match the RAM serial numbers appropriately, or my CPU overclocking was not correctly configured, or I didn't burn in the CPU long enough or didn't have the exact correct experimental build of some video driver or I would have to turn off many Windodws services.
Ultimately, a long tirade of UTTER BULLSHIT to hide the fact that that PC game sucked on a video card that was rushed out the door with crappy beta drivers.
It is extremely fucking disappointing that 10 years since my last time I wasted time and money trying to built the perfect build box that consumers are still plagued by shitty hardware, drivers and game development that ruin the PC gaming experience. I would have expected by now that AMD, nVidia, Intel, and everyone else involved could have figured out how to build a game system with silky smooth graphics that pin games at a stable 120 FPS at any resolution and could get rid of the necessity of "turning off" game features in order for better performance.
You know, the way game consoles have been doing for decades.
Instead its the same old shit. Invest thousands into a game box and find out your favorite game performs poorly for whatever reason. I can guarantee that if I went through it all again, whether using nVidia or AMD, the same results would be achieved, utter dissapointment.
I really don't care who's fault it is, the fact that a game can't run smoothly on a PC in the 21st century is EXACTLY the reason why PC gaming and PC's in general are dying.
I am sure there is way more involved then "she just wanted to buy too many iPhones and got tased" even without RTFA.
I forgot about Dell...
The BBC will report that the reason behind global warming stems from the use of pixels instead of vectors because of the added energy overhead of processing millions of pixels instead of only thousands of endpoints.
If you have ever thrown an exception to indicate a success condition, you fail.
This is just plain wrong because if another developer ever implements an interface without a try...catch, you just caused the application to crash because of successful operation.
My experience with Exceptions, and API's that are full of them, is that the developers are pretty much saying they don't know what the hell is going on, so TRY everything and respond accordingly. There is this thing called Unit Testing, which means you build tests for both success and failing conditions for an interface and ensure the application will not crash and recover for failing conditions. An app should always succeed, so constantly trying interface calls is overhead. I only TRY calls to external API's because I cannot clearly know they will succeed, I didn't build unit testing in 3rd party tools therefore I don't trust them.
I mean, what the fuck does Exception stand for? Its an Exception to the known state of an app. If you throw for ALL known states including success, you fail.
At first I was going to make a light hearted quip about the intelligence of Australians, but then this isn't like someone in Britain driving into a lake because their GPS told them to (or killing themselves because of a prank). Driving across many regions in Australia is not something to be taken lightly, and if a Map app puts you stuck in the middle of a desert, 100's of kilometers away from your destination, this is clearly a huge issue.
I don't think software companies should allow a EULA claiming they have no responsibility for injury or death caused by the use of a Map application. If Map applications cannot offer 100% correct directions then they should be yanked from use, period.
if it got on slashdot.