It helps to understand that AT&T is actually the old SBC. The AT&T name was sold to SBC.
SBC, which was originally "Southwest Bell", one of the "baby bells" created by the breakup of AT&T, and which had purchased several other baby bells in the intervening period, in 2005 also purchased AT&T (not just the AT&T name), and applied the AT&T name to the whole post-merger organization.
So, the new AT&T is, very much, the old (pre-1984) AT&T, even more than the 1984-2005 AT&T was.
The first part of it discusses the existence of the rumors, doesn't mention the outright denial, mentions a few features of Google Voice (all of which work with the iPhone without any special app), states someting untrue about Apple and iTunes (says it works "exclusively with iPhones and iPods", which is kind of odd because it also works with computers, both Windows and Mac OS) in a way that it doesn't tie to the Google Voice decision, and tosses out some things about AT&T that it likewise doesn't tie to the Google Voice decision at all.
After that, it goes on to make a generalized attack on the FCC without pointing to any concrete examples, and move on to posting a vague wish list of things that a "national data policy" should focus on, with nothing about how to actually do most of it.
Its also, one might note, an opinion piece (not a news article), on technology-related policy from "a former hedge-fund manager".
AND... using Groovy on the fly means compiling straight to Java bytecode.
True enough, the Groovy interpreter is actually, from the descriptions I've seen, essentially just an AOT compiler that then runs the compiled code. This is essentially identical to using the JRuby AOT compiler and then running the result.
[WIth Practical Common Lisp free & from Apress] O'Reilly might not want to bother...
Right, because if there is one book available free that addresses a language, there's no reason to bother having any more books covering that language.
Isn't it supposed to be observe, *then* theorize? I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that with most string theories, they are doing the opposite.
Actually, its supposed to be observe, theorize (or, more precisely, create hypotheses) to explain observations, conduct structured tests of hypotheses, observe results, rinse, repeat.
Where the existing models work for most things, but have known gaps or inconsistencies, its perfectly acceptable in science to propose new models for the existing observations to resolve those issues, though to be useful they have to ways that they can be, via testing, distinguished from the existing models, even if they reduce to the existing models for the conditions in which previous observations were conducted.
String theory fits into that, though often the hypotheses are difficult to test in practice.
Anyway, people tend to confuse and correlate the words "Open Source" with specific licenses (GPL, FSF)
The FSF is not a license, it is the organization ("the Free Software Foundation") that produces the GPL, among other things.
and organizations (FOSS, GNU).
FOSS is not an organization. Its an abbreviation for "Free and Open Source Software" a combination of "Free Software" and "Open Source", two terms for essentially the same thing that are each individually problematic but are less ambiguous when combined in that way -- "Free Software" (note caps) is confusing because it can be confused with "free software", e.g., software that has no financial cost to acquire but may be burdened by restrictive licenses, and "Open Source" (again, note caps) because it may be confused with software whose source is merely available, without liberal usage rights, i.e., "open source". Often, a third term for the same concept ("Libre") is incorporated to produce FLOSS.
The article clearly states, Open Source, assuming we use the definition, "of or relating to or being computer software for which the source code is freely available"
Which, while it might be reasonable to describe as "open source" (though misleading, which is why that phrase has rarely been used that way except by makers of non-FLOSS products trying to cash in on the appeal of Open Source without actually providing it), is not and never has been a definition of "Open Source".
We shouldn't try to fit the referred software in one or more of today's definitions of Open Source
The things your calling "today's definitions" are the original definitions. Software with source code available, but not under the kind of licenses now called Open Source, wasn't called "Open Source", or even "open source", until after the modern Open Source movement created the term.
Whens the last time you can think advertisters have footed the bill?
Free-as-in-beer broadcast TV? Much of the free-as-in-beer content on the internet? A number of free-as-in-beer local newsweeklies? The vast majority of the cost of not-free print daily newspapers?
But a business application, which involves e-commerce, sales, etc., several offices, a server-client model by my experience, not exhaustive certainly, is the only working solution.
Client-server is probably the dominant model for the user-facing front-end, but distribution of all kinds of backend function between nodes which are functionally peers (whether its called P2P or server-server) has been common for some time in all kinds of business environments, is a major use for asynchronous messaging-based middleware, and as best I can tell is increasingly common in a wider range of applications, because they enable richer interaction between separated components than client-server does.
I still don't get it. Terabyte drives cost as much as my bi-weekly beer budget, and less every day. Computing power is off of Moore's Law, but is still increasing with multicore and multiprocessors. My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work, nor does it require a subscription to some website to keep rolling. If I want access to the web, I can get it, but that's only a few times a day when I need it. So, what exactly does "cloud computing" bring to the table for me?
Cloud computing lets you leverage all those things you mention on your own computers by separating the logical "computers" from the physical CPUs (e.g., using the cloud computing software available with the most recent Ubuntu Server release); remotely hosted cloud computing services like those from Google, Amazon, and others do that, too, but with the usual trade-offs of remote hosting. Some remotely hosted cloud computing services also include custom cloud applications, access to which is either exclusive to, discounted with or leveraged specially by the cloud computing service, (Google's login, storage, and other services with AppEngine; Amazon SQS and S3 with EC2, etc.)
None of those may not be relevant for the things you need, and so maybe it doesn't bring anything to you. And, guess what, no one is forcing you to use them.
Thank you for pointing it out. I certainly meant server-client application for remote users, not P2P distributed application.
So, what you meant when you said that client-server architecture was the only way to make "distributed applications" work, what you really meant was that client-server architecture was the only way to make cleint-server applications work?
That's obviously and trivially true, of course, but not all that meaningful.
In my case, I had to explain over telephone where to type URL address in browser to a user who had been using this web application for several months. It was just his start page and after the OS re-installation he was lost.
Still I could explain him what is the address bar in browser (white horizontal line at the top of the window). To explain how to install P2P EXE and configure it would be impossible.
Of course, if P2P application hosting capabilities were built in to browsers, "installing and configuring" a node of a distributed P2P application could, potentially, be made nearly as easy as accessing a web page.
You could just as easily reverse that silly logic and ask "How are these 'aliens' that people see today NOT angels?"
Well, no; while "angels" are conceived as a kind of living entities that are not native to Earth (and, thus, are within the scope of the phrase "off-planet aliens"), the reverse is not true; just as all New York Yankees players are Major League Baseball players, but all MLB players are Yankees players.
I'm not so sure about that. Once the ground has been trod by Google, the Authors Guild should be looking at anyone else who wants to do this as "extra cash", that should make it easier to get a follow up deal with them.
The Author's Guild can't make the same deal with people; the deal is only possible via a class-action settlement, because that's the only means by which a deal affecting the right to sue over a potential claim can be put into place where the unknown individual affected parties have to opt out to be excluded, rather than opt in to be included.
The theory is inaccurate. I'm sure to some extent they do, but they also get a much better assurance that the money will be paid than they would otherwise.
They certainly don't get better assurance than merchants that only take cash (yes, they still exist), or that take payments by any variety of non-credit-card means but don't deliver goods or services until a non-cash payment has cleared. Either of those merchants has 100% certainty that they will be paid, with no risk of charge backs.
But distributed business network application can realistically exist only via server-client model.
A distributed P2P model certainly works better for distributed business applications; server-client is inherently highly centralized rather than distributed. "Centralized applications serving remote users" and "distributed applications" are two very different problem domains.
ISPs do not allow a home user to set up a web server
Some ISPs don't allow those things. Those ISPs suck.
how is your browser going to access a Database like mysql with php, local on your machine?
Many browsers already embed databases to do HTML5 local storage or perform other functions (admittedly, that's a database more like -- and often exactly -- SQLite than MySQL.) If there's a demand for it, of course, browsers could provide drivers for external databases or provide hooks for them to be pluggable.
Well, if they're filing an amicus curiae brief, those tend more towards telling than asking.
Its not telling the court to apply Bilski narrowly, its telling the court its opinion of what the best approach to the law is. It is asking the court to act on that understanding, though the request is implicit in an amicus brief, whereas it would be explicit in filing by a party.
Yeah, that's a technicality, but "telling" is the correct word, even if the summary isn't great.
"Telling" is the correct verb, if its followed by "the Court that it believes Bilski should be applied narrowly".
"Asking" is the correct verb, if its followed by "the Court to apply Bilski narrowly".
I've wondered recently how come we can't get a protocol like HTTP, but 1) not based on 'pages' but arbitrarily small/large and recursively nestable chunks of data
HTTP isn't built around pages. HTTP can already do that.
2) not pull and client-driven but publish/subscribe and persistent, where you'd attach to a data chunk and then be notified with the new value whenever that chunk changes.
That's a pretty simple application of any asynchronous messaging protocol (most such protocols aren't built around that particular use case, but it would be trivial to support it in any of them.)
If you want a browser to be able to send and receive asynchronous messages, rather than work on a request/response model, why not just build browsers that use a protocol designed for that use (like XMPP), rather than trying to torture HTTP into serving in that role? Its not like HTML, XML, JSON, or anything other data the browser might need to handle cares what protocol its transported over.
Under the prosecutorial rules (I don't think this is a matter of law, so much as procedure) in some jurisdictions, the victim (of a crime for which there is a distinct victim) of a misdemeanor must support charges for them to be pursued by the government, which is all "pressing" charges is. It doesn't do you any good when the government chooses not to pursue charges.
Verizon should not be punished.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. But, in fact, employers are, in many cases, legally responsible for acts by their employees (without absolving employees of their responsibility); while normally that does not extend to assaults, an exception to that is when employees are employed in positions where friction with the public is forseeable (the premise being that, where this is forseeable, the employer as an obligation to assure the employees appropriate behavior when that forseeable friction occurs.)
Simply stating your belief that Verizon shouldn't be held responsible isn't making an argument for that position.
Verizon does not have a reason at the moment that would hold up in court.
Verizon doesn't have a reason for what? The words all make sense, and the sentence is grammatically correct, but its completely incoherent.
If they fired this man, and he sued, then they'd be in the same boat.
In most jobs, in most jurisdictions, you can be fired for assaulting a customer or a member of the public without being convicted of any crime first. I'd be interested in hearing your argument supporting your assertion that Verizon would be liable for anything if they fired this employee.
Costing them money is a good way to get investors angry. Throwing them in jail is a good way to get a few officials on the damn ball. The rich fellows sitting at the top aren't even going to feel a bump with this suit, but if they were getting dragged into criminal court?
Yeah, well, our system of law doesn't generally hold employers criminally liable for the actions of their employees (and certainly generally doesn't generally hold individual officers of a corporation, who are legally distinct from the corporation itself, criminally liable for the actions of the corporation's employees.) However, you are free to lobby for expanding the degree to which employers (and those employers executive employees) are responsible for crimes by employees, although some might find that hard to reconcile that with your earlier argument that employers shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of their employees.
Which seems more like an argument against the JVM than an argument about which language to use on the JVM. But even, among JVM languages, that's not an argument against JRuby, in any case.
Groovy is native Java.
Groovy is compiled to Java bytecode, which is the "machine" languge of the JVM, correct.
JRuby is an interpretter converting Ruby TO Java
JRuby is a package of related software. It includes a Ruby-to-Java bytecode compiler (jrubyc), which -- just like or javac does for Java source -- converts Ruby source code to the "native" bytecode language of the JVM. It also includes an interpreter that does per method JIT compilation.
this "poor victim" was really only out for justice, he should be making criminal charges
(1) Only the government can "make criminal charges". (2) The government, in this case, decided to let the tech off of criminal charges, as long as he doesn't do anything else wrong (this sounds, superficially, pretty stupid, but remember that law enforcement has a limited budget, criminal trials cost money, and then imprisoning someone if they are convicted costs money; LE has to prioritize.) (3) Costing a company money when is the only way to get them to take steps to prevent recurrence. If it doesn't affect their cost of operation, they don't care that it happened.
Want to know why medical costs are so high? Because hospitals pay out their ass for malpractice suits.
Not only is that irrelevant to the case, its not true; regional and temporal differences, in actual malpractice payouts, or in legal limits on malpractice payouts, have no demonstrated link to overall medical costs, nor even to malpractice insurance rates.
Sure, it's sad you lost your leg, but you wouldn't have made ten million in ten life times.
If you make the median personal income of persons over 25 in the United States, you'll make $1 million in right about 30 years, which is considerably less than a "lifetime"; of course, lost income isn't the only harm from losing your leg.
Verizon tech? I don't believe Verizon company policy involves punching customers. Why is Verizon paying for a stupid employee's action?
Well, for one thing (for reasons which should be obvious) the liability of employers for the actions of employees assigned to work where friction with the public is foreseeable often extends to cover employees' actions when they deal with that friction poorly.
More to the point though is this is a cry for money when verizon is not the person who snapped. He should be going after the tech guy for any damages.
Employers, particularly of employees employed in fields where there is a likelihood of friction with members of the public, have a responsibility to assure that their employees do not, among other things, do not harm others in the course of their employment.
He should be going after the tech guy for any damages.
Probably, but the tech's responsibility is not (neither, in fact, legally nor, IMO, morally) exclusive of Verizon's.
Slashdot Mirror
SBC, which was originally "Southwest Bell", one of the "baby bells" created by the breakup of AT&T, and which had purchased several other baby bells in the intervening period, in 2005 also purchased AT&T (not just the AT&T name), and applied the AT&T name to the whole post-merger organization.
So, the new AT&T is, very much, the old (pre-1984) AT&T, even more than the 1984-2005 AT&T was.
The first part of it discusses the existence of the rumors, doesn't mention the outright denial, mentions a few features of Google Voice (all of which work with the iPhone without any special app), states someting untrue about Apple and iTunes (says it works "exclusively with iPhones and iPods", which is kind of odd because it also works with computers, both Windows and Mac OS) in a way that it doesn't tie to the Google Voice decision, and tosses out some things about AT&T that it likewise doesn't tie to the Google Voice decision at all.
After that, it goes on to make a generalized attack on the FCC without pointing to any concrete examples, and move on to posting a vague wish list of things that a "national data policy" should focus on, with nothing about how to actually do most of it.
Its also, one might note, an opinion piece (not a news article), on technology-related policy from "a former hedge-fund manager".
True enough, the Groovy interpreter is actually, from the descriptions I've seen, essentially just an AOT compiler that then runs the compiled code. This is essentially identical to using the JRuby AOT compiler and then running the result.
Right, because if there is one book available free that addresses a language, there's no reason to bother having any more books covering that language.
Actually, its supposed to be observe, theorize (or, more precisely, create hypotheses) to explain observations, conduct structured tests of hypotheses, observe results, rinse, repeat.
Where the existing models work for most things, but have known gaps or inconsistencies, its perfectly acceptable in science to propose new models for the existing observations to resolve those issues, though to be useful they have to ways that they can be, via testing, distinguished from the existing models, even if they reduce to the existing models for the conditions in which previous observations were conducted.
String theory fits into that, though often the hypotheses are difficult to test in practice.
Well, a number of companies tried to redefine it to mean that once "open source" became popular.
But, no, it doesn't.
The FSF is not a license, it is the organization ("the Free Software Foundation") that produces the GPL, among other things.
FOSS is not an organization. Its an abbreviation for "Free and Open Source Software" a combination of "Free Software" and "Open Source", two terms for essentially the same thing that are each individually problematic but are less ambiguous when combined in that way -- "Free Software" (note caps) is confusing because it can be confused with "free software", e.g., software that has no financial cost to acquire but may be burdened by restrictive licenses, and "Open Source" (again, note caps) because it may be confused with software whose source is merely available, without liberal usage rights, i.e., "open source". Often, a third term for the same concept ("Libre") is incorporated to produce FLOSS.
Which, while it might be reasonable to describe as "open source" (though misleading, which is why that phrase has rarely been used that way except by makers of non-FLOSS products trying to cash in on the appeal of Open Source without actually providing it), is not and never has been a definition of "Open Source".
The things your calling "today's definitions" are the original definitions. Software with source code available, but not under the kind of licenses now called Open Source, wasn't called "Open Source", or even "open source", until after the modern Open Source movement created the term.
Free-as-in-beer broadcast TV? Much of the free-as-in-beer content on the internet? A number of free-as-in-beer local newsweeklies? The vast majority of the cost of not-free print daily newspapers?
Client-server is probably the dominant model for the user-facing front-end, but distribution of all kinds of backend function between nodes which are functionally peers (whether its called P2P or server-server) has been common for some time in all kinds of business environments, is a major use for asynchronous messaging-based middleware, and as best I can tell is increasingly common in a wider range of applications, because they enable richer interaction between separated components than client-server does.
Cloud computing lets you leverage all those things you mention on your own computers by separating the logical "computers" from the physical CPUs (e.g., using the cloud computing software available with the most recent Ubuntu Server release); remotely hosted cloud computing services like those from Google, Amazon, and others do that, too, but with the usual trade-offs of remote hosting. Some remotely hosted cloud computing services also include custom cloud applications, access to which is either exclusive to, discounted with or leveraged specially by the cloud computing service, (Google's login, storage, and other services with AppEngine; Amazon SQS and S3 with EC2, etc.)
None of those may not be relevant for the things you need, and so maybe it doesn't bring anything to you. And, guess what, no one is forcing you to use them.
So, what you meant when you said that client-server architecture was the only way to make "distributed applications" work, what you really meant was that client-server architecture was the only way to make cleint-server applications work?
That's obviously and trivially true, of course, but not all that meaningful.
Of course, if P2P application hosting capabilities were built in to browsers, "installing and configuring" a node of a distributed P2P application could, potentially, be made nearly as easy as accessing a web page.
Well, no; while "angels" are conceived as a kind of living entities that are not native to Earth (and, thus, are within the scope of the phrase "off-planet aliens"), the reverse is not true; just as all New York Yankees players are Major League Baseball players, but all MLB players are Yankees players.
The Author's Guild can't make the same deal with people; the deal is only possible via a class-action settlement, because that's the only means by which a deal affecting the right to sue over a potential claim can be put into place where the unknown individual affected parties have to opt out to be excluded, rather than opt in to be included.
They certainly don't get better assurance than merchants that only take cash (yes, they still exist), or that take payments by any variety of non-credit-card means but don't deliver goods or services until a non-cash payment has cleared. Either of those merchants has 100% certainty that they will be paid, with no risk of charge backs.
A distributed P2P model certainly works better for distributed business applications; server-client is inherently highly centralized rather than distributed. "Centralized applications serving remote users" and "distributed applications" are two very different problem domains.
Some ISPs don't allow those things. Those ISPs suck.
Many browsers already embed databases to do HTML5 local storage or perform other functions (admittedly, that's a database more like -- and often exactly -- SQLite than MySQL.) If there's a demand for it, of course, browsers could provide drivers for external databases or provide hooks for them to be pluggable.
Its not telling the court to apply Bilski narrowly, its telling the court its opinion of what the best approach to the law is. It is asking the court to act on that understanding, though the request is implicit in an amicus brief, whereas it would be explicit in filing by a party.
"Telling" is the correct verb, if its followed by "the Court that it believes Bilski should be applied narrowly".
"Asking" is the correct verb, if its followed by "the Court to apply Bilski narrowly".
HTTP isn't built around pages. HTTP can already do that.
That's a pretty simple application of any asynchronous messaging protocol (most such protocols aren't built around that particular use case, but it would be trivial to support it in any of them.)
If you want a browser to be able to send and receive asynchronous messages, rather than work on a request/response model, why not just build browsers that use a protocol designed for that use (like XMPP), rather than trying to torture HTTP into serving in that role? Its not like HTML, XML, JSON, or anything other data the browser might need to handle cares what protocol its transported over.
Which the victim here did.
Under the prosecutorial rules (I don't think this is a matter of law, so much as procedure) in some jurisdictions, the victim (of a crime for which there is a distinct victim) of a misdemeanor must support charges for them to be pursued by the government, which is all "pressing" charges is. It doesn't do you any good when the government chooses not to pursue charges.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. But, in fact, employers are, in many cases, legally responsible for acts by their employees (without absolving employees of their responsibility); while normally that does not extend to assaults, an exception to that is when employees are employed in positions where friction with the public is forseeable (the premise being that, where this is forseeable, the employer as an obligation to assure the employees appropriate behavior when that forseeable friction occurs.)
Simply stating your belief that Verizon shouldn't be held responsible isn't making an argument for that position.
Verizon doesn't have a reason for what? The words all make sense, and the sentence is grammatically correct, but its completely incoherent.
In most jobs, in most jurisdictions, you can be fired for assaulting a customer or a member of the public without being convicted of any crime first. I'd be interested in hearing your argument supporting your assertion that Verizon would be liable for anything if they fired this employee.
Yeah, well, our system of law doesn't generally hold employers criminally liable for the actions of their employees (and certainly generally doesn't generally hold individual officers of a corporation, who are legally distinct from the corporation itself, criminally liable for the actions of the corporation's employees.) However, you are free to lobby for expanding the degree to which employers (and those employers executive employees) are responsible for crimes by employees, although some might find that hard to reconcile that with your earlier argument that employers shouldn't be held responsible for the actions of their employees.
Which seems more like an argument against the JVM than an argument about which language to use on the JVM. But even, among JVM languages, that's not an argument against JRuby, in any case.
Groovy is compiled to Java bytecode, which is the "machine" languge of the JVM, correct.
JRuby is a package of related software. It includes a Ruby-to-Java bytecode compiler (jrubyc), which -- just like or javac does for Java source -- converts Ruby source code to the "native" bytecode language of the JVM. It also includes an interpreter that does per method JIT compilation.
Asking, you mean.
(1) Only the government can "make criminal charges".
(2) The government, in this case, decided to let the tech off of criminal charges, as long as he doesn't do anything else wrong (this sounds, superficially, pretty stupid, but remember that law enforcement has a limited budget, criminal trials cost money, and then imprisoning someone if they are convicted costs money; LE has to prioritize.)
(3) Costing a company money when is the only way to get them to take steps to prevent recurrence. If it doesn't affect their cost of operation, they don't care that it happened.
Not only is that irrelevant to the case, its not true; regional and temporal differences, in actual malpractice payouts, or in legal limits on malpractice payouts, have no demonstrated link to overall medical costs, nor even to malpractice insurance rates.
If you make the median personal income of persons over 25 in the United States, you'll make $1 million in right about 30 years, which is considerably less than a "lifetime"; of course, lost income isn't the only harm from losing your leg.
Well, for one thing (for reasons which should be obvious) the liability of employers for the actions of employees assigned to work where friction with the public is foreseeable often extends to cover employees' actions when they deal with that friction poorly.
Employers, particularly of employees employed in fields where there is a likelihood of friction with members of the public, have a responsibility to assure that their employees do not, among other things, do not harm others in the course of their employment.
Probably, but the tech's responsibility is not (neither, in fact, legally nor, IMO, morally) exclusive of Verizon's.