isn't going to persuade Mum and Dad to ditch Windows
It happens in increments. Take my place of work, for instance. Most of their Windows boxes have been chucked, replaced by Ubuntu. For what it is worth to the end user, there are a few niggling differences, but basically OpenOffice is a lot like Microsoft Office (so long as you understand what you are doing and didn't learn it like "Format menu, third option down").
They have just installed a fancy (Ubuntu-again) touchscreen based thing for stock control in a production area. It looks to be a basic point-and-squeeze style barcode reader. Not sure if it is USB or serial. The computer? A micro ATX Dell jobby. Placed into a small sealed metal box. I had a chance to peek inside at this stuff when it was being switched off at the end of the day. My God, you could feel the heat blasting off of it. There's a fan in the enclosure to circulate air, but there's no actual "cooling". I would be surprised if it hasn't cooked itself in a month.
Which leads me to recall this article. It's a UI, it's a touchscreen, it's Ubuntu, it's a barcode reader, it jacks in to the LAN to talk to the central stock computer. You can't need that much processing power to make that work, surely it would work just fine on today's Beagleboards, IGEPv2s, and - if the necessary connectors are there - the RPis and VIA boards. It would require an enclosure half the size, heat and cooling would be negligible, and power consumption likewise.
In short - the business world is starting to realise that there are options other than Windows. Maybe, in some circumstances (as outlined above) they might soon start to realise that there are options other than big chunky power hungry x86 boxes.
And then, then the little ARM boards will be ready with their - frankly ridiculous - levels of processing in a bit of plastic smaller than a beer cap and no heatsink in sight. There are applications where quad cores at multi-GHz is necessary. But there are also plenty of applications where some delays are acceptable as the machine will spend a lot of time doing practically nothing so it doesn't need to be OTT spec-wise. Welcome to the world of the ARM SoC.
"it's actually the SD card method - perfect for tinkering and repeated tweaking"
Not to mention, you aren't tied to picking your OS of choice. Some devices (Beagleboard xM) have a button so u-boot can load different operating systems (RISC OS & Angstrom Linux, for example). In the absence of a button, it's still not a problem, just swap the card and power up. Android, RISC OS, regular Linux, etc etc - the SD card method makes it stupidly easy to choose what you want when you want, with zero risk of bricking the hardware. Now that this stuff is available, and boot times are pretty fast (remember, the OS is probably copied into RAM, not executed directly from Flash, so there's little Flash can do that an SD card can't), I don't see why anybody who wants to use their device would stick with Flash. Maybe an embedded industrial application, it makes sense. A device like this? No. Flash is so last-decade..
...please throw in the arbitrary nonsense that is region locking. Not just DVDs, but on-line stuff too. I would pay for a Crunchyroll sub to get my animé fix (subbed in English). Instead I get a couple of options and an apology about the good stuff not being licenced in my area. Where does this fit in to a free market economy model? I have cash, I have a want, somebody else is making arbitrary obstacles. So I pursue alternative options.
But the biggest pile of cack is digital downloads from Amazon. The various Amazon's I frequent (.fr, .com and .co.uk (not found mp3s on .co.jp yet?)) actually manage to hold rather different selections when it comes to the less popular artists. So I find a track I like that .co.uk has. But I live in France, so .co.uk will absolutely not permit me to pay and then download. I can, however, buy the CD without a problem. I could also take myself to the UK, pay, download, and go back to France. What the hell? Where's the logic in that. I'm the customer, they are the provider. If I should choose to buy from here rather than there, what does it matter? All this regional licencing stuff is bollocks, can you imagine if Tesco started buying the rights to town centres and refusing access to people holding Asda bags? No, you go and shop where it suits you (for all manner of reasons, financial, psychological, or just 'cos you think the checkout girls are cuter - it doesn't matter). Thus to digital music. Why are we still existing in an arcane system with arbitrary limitations? Last week I bought a furoshiki from Japan, a book from England, and a set of DVD-Rs from Germany. No hassle whatsoever. But digital music and video? That's a whole different proposition. Even more ridiculous when the company that refuses to sell me music in digital format (and, sadly, it is not just Amazon) will happily sell DVDs and CDs of the exact same stuff. It's nonsense.
No, that's not correct, the merger is officially "ITV plc". However ITV as a name has been around since the sixties or somesuch (before my time), so I doubt that fruity-loops will have much luck claiming to own it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV
...in that it can usually be relied upon to play stuff nothing else will touch (though I find the transcode to be rather flakey), however the UI is horrible. I prefer SMPlayer, though it seems like later MPlayers are more finicky in what it'll play.
+1 for Avast, the sandbox does work in the free version, you just need to be running the file off a removable drive. Yes, it hassles you to renew each year. It is dead easy, just find the renew button, click it, and give an email address.
What I would appreciate is something that can join up multipart RAR files. It seems 7zip can't do that. Yet?
There's more than just SFR you know. A Brit friend of mine, barely speaks any French, picked up a Virgin Mobile SIM from a boutique in a train station. Took around five minutes from "I'll have that" to texting me.
You might like to look at the French "free" operator, and the effect it is having on traditional monopolies. Sure, the operator can jack up prices, but all it takes is somebody to stand up willing to take a lower profit, offer a better price, and customers will jump ship en masse. Just ask Orange France...
"We'll be top dog for years, Otellini tells investors" - of course, what CEO is going to say "we suck, we'll be bust in a year". CEOs...They're going to smile until the bitter end, it's their job. Well, that and blaming anything else.
"We have incumbency, legacy support, and the capabilities of Intel for scale and power - and yet you don't have the ability to deliver that to a device that'll run for a day off a battery the size of a two euro coin...
...we start by making the content matching system actually WORK? Like in order for an organisation (hello Universal, is anybody there!?) to place something on the content match list, they have to swear on perjury (as with DMCA notices) that they are the actual rights holder of the article in question. Penalty for false filing - ALL of their content is removed from the content matching database - that might help them focus on what they actually do and do not own.
Then fix the system so that if the content match says "it's a match" and you say "no it isn't" and the rights holder says "yes it is", it doesn't fall into some mysterious black hole. Hell, you get more of a say through the boring (costly) legal process.
As it stands, the setup is fundamentally flawed, and suck-ups to appease Big Media aren't going to fix it unless primary concerns are dealt with - namely who owns what. This is doubly worse when you consider advertising applied to popular things nets income for the false content match instead of the original creator. And, yet, we're supposed to have sympathy and believe that copyright "theft" is a terrible thing? Please...
there are 2 holes on a human being and one of the hole returns shit
There are many more I/O interfaces on a human than you give credit for!
*Caffeine/cookie input hole
*Music input holes (balanced pair)
*Cooling/ventilation holes (pair, side by side, odd design)
*Spent cookie exit hole
*Forked process exit hole
There is also the spent caffeine liquid exit, though I'm not certain that counts as a "hole". In half of the available models, it is combined with the forked process hole, perhaps as a cost-cutting measure? There is also the cute-person-detector input (balanced pair), however those are not holes when the sensors are in place.
Can you think of any other industry where the raw materials of the product you're buying cost 5p but they ask you to pay 2000 times that to purchase it?
The property market? Okay, materials are a little more than 5p, but the markup is surely on par?
Now that the ISP has taken steps to block access to TPB, they are no longer just a dumb pipe that data (or shit, depending on outlook) goes in one end and falls out the other. As a result of this, can we hold them liable for stuff we do not wish to view? You know, "you block TPB but you allow kiddieporn through?" sort of argument.
I know it is a largely symbolic gesture; but one, I wonder, that could have a number of interesting consequences.
1. Patents are valid for a term of three years. It can, of course, be renewed if relating to something that is still being actively produced by the patent holder; and...
2. Patents are null and void if applied to something you don't actually make, produce, or subcontract. I think the patent on slide-to-unlock is ridiculous, but it is a patent for an actual thing on an actual product made by the patent holder. However there are a number of organisations that produce nothing but look to extort money for "infringed" patents. What is their worth in fostering innovation?
3. Patents can be shared between companies (i.e. if Samsung and Nokia, say, have something in common, they can pool their patents between them), so long as it does not fall foul of rule 2.
The concept of patents is not a bad one, per se, it is just the current implementation is set up as little more than a grossly corrupt capitalist cash cow (as in, screw the validity of this patent, walk it to court and pay a lot of money to bloodsucking leeches to argue the point). Notwithstanding, also, the requirement to enforce a patent - thus meaning you have to take it to court. Was this whole shebang set up by lawyers, perchance?
That's because they are robots...from another planet...not here to kill us, exactly, as that would leave a mess to clean up, but rather to make us all nice and compliant for when the time comes for their creators to land on this planet and engage in widespread practice of naughty tentacles...
The cash machines around here have a little magnetic sensor that only opens the card slot if you insert a card with a magnetic strip in the right place.
Oh, and the cash machines read the mag-strip, not the chip. I had to get money from my account when I left my card at home (sitting on my keyboard, having used it to buy something online). The bank guy took a "blank" card, passed it through the mag reader/writer on his desk, then handed it to me. It put it in the machine and money came out instantly...
I suppose it would be possible to legitimately recreate some video provided it was implemented entirely independently using nothing more than the description of what the thing was about (note: not "reproduce the sounds/pixels" as that is COPYING).
If you doubt me, "Snakes on a Plane" -> "Snakes on a Train" (and pretty much everything else by The Asylum is a "reimplementation" of a big screen movie). Similarities? Yes. Copy? No.
So to take the example of software - function xyzzy() takes two parameters which are memory addresses, and it returns a CRC-32 of the contents between those addresses. Your function xyzzy() is therefore to take two addresses and CRC-32 the contents. How you do this is up to you.
Likewise, for the movie - there's an enclosed mode of transport, and a lot of snakes. Pretty much make up the rest (but, sorry Asylum, the "real" movie has Samuel L. F***in' Jackson - how can you hope to compete?).
tl:dr - not a loophole at all, implementing the same functionality is NOT copying; pirating stuff is (unless it's "Be Kind Rewind").
The arrangement for the personal details of suspected nutjobs flying into Europe FROM the US are?
Don't forget, guys, in the rampant desire to pander to every terrorist's wish, that the flights that caused so much damage in 9/11 were not inbound international. It, logically, works both ways and terrorist acts occur all over (Lockerbie may have been an American plane, but it blew up over Scotland). So either data on air passengers is shared, or it isn't. This EU->US concept is little more than a farce to appease an increasingly paranoid nation.
FAIL icon, for the EU really should have laid down "both ways or take a hike".
So this guy wants to appeal to the lesser (in IT) gender, doesn't want to be patronising, and wishes to show that either gender can pursue a career as a bona fide geek...
...has anybody considered the potential IPR and exploitable ideas that students are now being requested to upload to a server someplace? I understand plagarism is a problem, but is this the best solution?
My current self is worried that we might be on the way to that sort of scenario. After all, how often do you receive an email with two screenfuls of disclaimer/terms/licence at the end? That rubbish doesn't hold water.......yet.
Started with a Beeb, played with Econet at school. Moved to RISC OS...
I now use a PC for my day to day stuff, but in the corner is an Econet file server, a Beeb, a RiscPC, and three other RISC OS machines. They see less action than they used to, sadly. Though I hope that the port to the RaspberryPi will be ready by the time I order mine.
I wonder if part of the problem is that the old machines invited you to enjoy them. The circuits were easy to understand, the processors weren't a nightmare, the API was fairly well exposed, and they all came with a language built in. Even the Speccy and the Oric had dialects of BASIC.
As opposed to modern stuff where the box itself can't do anything without some sort of OS to load. Linux contains programming tools, but installing and setting up an entire OS is a world different to a '>' prompt. Windows? There's pretty much nothing "out of the box". Game consoles? I picked up a dead XBOX for a euro and I now understand that I'll need to modchip it simply to replace the broken harddisc. Things these days are aimed at providing a consumer-oriented service, and as such try to keep you out of the machine instead of welcoming you in.
Once upon a time, instruction manuals told you the processor instruction set in one of the appendices. Now? You probably need to Wiki to find out what processor it actually uses...
It seems somewhat illogical to me that a wonky light fitting is the responsibility of the employer, rather than the hotel. Job-related or otherwise, it is on somebody else's premises.
What concerns me more, however, is the potential precedent that this might raise. If it has been ruled that having sex with a colleague/friend in a hotel room can be counted as a normal occurrence under the remit of "work" because she was on a business trip, does this not suggest that it would be equally acceptable to have nookie in the photocopier room?
Alternatively, if your employer is liable, does this give him rights to control what you do and how you behave when on business trips, even when not on waged time?
...if your idea of sex is some sort of schoolgirl fantasy that would otherwise be illegal (hmmm, and probably still would be), but surely there is a lot more to a relationship than sex? What do you have to care about for a robot except making sure "she" is charged and wiped over with a j-cloth once in a while? I suppose it could also be a great novelty item - your iPhone 20 is so yesterday, check out my iChick... However anything beyond that would suggest that humanity is screwed.
And...I'm perhaps overthinking this, but wouldn't there be whirring clicking noises from the mechanics? That could be offputting...
If my friend takes a picture, it is his picture and his copyright. If I take a copy of his picture, I am infringing his copyright. If, however, I stood beside him and took my own picture, which is practically identical, that's my picture that I can exercise copyright over.
Oracle might have a case for infringement of the API being copied as no doubt that has copyright status, but if Google's JVM is a clean room version based upon the API, surely it is no different to my taking the same photo as my friend?
The problem, and it is such a far cry from copyright that I'm surprised you even bothered to shoehorn that into the article, is that privacy is defined more by what is actually done with collected data.
You see, as EU citizens we have certain rights. We can find out who is recording data on us, obtain copies of said data, and offer corrections in case of error (which may involve legal issues in cases like incorrect credit ratings). On the internet, it is a wildly different story with dozens of companies looking to profile you (yes, even from El Reg), there is no real way to access, modify, or delete this. I'm sure Google has a reasonable profile of me by now, but given my mother looks up crochet and stuff in Google off the same IP address, is it smart enough to work out there are two people or is my profile screwed up? If somebody borrows my computer to look for something pervy, will my profile be tweaked to note this? Can I untweak it?
This, I believe, is why people worry about their privacy. Because 33% of it will be scarily accurate, while 66% will be bollocks. And only you, the commodity, will know which is which. Meanwhile, other organisations will base opinions on you on the results of this so-called analysis. Your involvement is zero. Your options to see the collected data, to modify it, etc, also zero.
.
This is different to whether or not you "own" your profile or can complain if Google "copies" it. This isn't a matter of copying, it is a matter of corrupting.
You thought too hard about how to make a terrible movie. As a result, you've just pitched something that sounds more amusing than Epic Movie, and has "cult" written all over it.
Small screen? Check. Lowish memory? Check. SD card four times larger than the internal drive? Check.
But on the other hand, it fits into a backpack, it runs for ages, and I don't panic if it experiences shock (bad roads etc) while it is running. I guess a real PC is cool if you have an office and a designer chair. Some of us are a little more...bohemian. Just last week (when it was warm!) I wrote code sitting in a reclining chair with cherry blossom falling around and nothing above my head but the sky. The screen was a little hard to see in the sunlight, but I wouldn't have traded it for a cubicle for anything.
Got Windows 3.1 running on my Android phone. It is kinda useless (DOSbox seems to try to read the keyboard directly, so it doesn't understand the symbol key, plus it is squishing VGA into 480x320), but it does work, and seems about as fast as I remember a 386 box to have been...
While ClearType is aimed specifically to optimising the display for LCDs, it isn't that unlike the sub-pixel hinting that RISC OS is capable of. That, plus the slightly more recent ability to take into account background patterns (instead of a solid colour as in the mid 80s) plus the ability to render legible text at silly-small sizes makes it a good combination. Readable 4pt text on top of a picture of Alyson Hannigan? No problems. I recently used a simple BASIC program to place text (signs, t-shirt logos and such) into a PlayMobile photo. The hard part was working out the rotations, but I'm a dunce at maths anyway. Results? Subjective, but I believe better than my PhotoShop-alike (on the PC) could have managed...
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1579 posts • joined Sunday 20th December 2009 13:24 GMT
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Re: Spec Creep
isn't going to persuade Mum and Dad to ditch Windows
It happens in increments. Take my place of work, for instance. Most of their Windows boxes have been chucked, replaced by Ubuntu. For what it is worth to the end user, there are a few niggling differences, but basically OpenOffice is a lot like Microsoft Office (so long as you understand what you are doing and didn't learn it like "Format menu, third option down").
They have just installed a fancy (Ubuntu-again) touchscreen based thing for stock control in a production area. It looks to be a basic point-and-squeeze style barcode reader. Not sure if it is USB or serial. The computer? A micro ATX Dell jobby. Placed into a small sealed metal box. I had a chance to peek inside at this stuff when it was being switched off at the end of the day. My God, you could feel the heat blasting off of it. There's a fan in the enclosure to circulate air, but there's no actual "cooling". I would be surprised if it hasn't cooked itself in a month.
Which leads me to recall this article. It's a UI, it's a touchscreen, it's Ubuntu, it's a barcode reader, it jacks in to the LAN to talk to the central stock computer. You can't need that much processing power to make that work, surely it would work just fine on today's Beagleboards, IGEPv2s, and - if the necessary connectors are there - the RPis and VIA boards. It would require an enclosure half the size, heat and cooling would be negligible, and power consumption likewise.
In short - the business world is starting to realise that there are options other than Windows. Maybe, in some circumstances (as outlined above) they might soon start to realise that there are options other than big chunky power hungry x86 boxes.
And then, then the little ARM boards will be ready with their - frankly ridiculous - levels of processing in a bit of plastic smaller than a beer cap and no heatsink in sight. There are applications where quad cores at multi-GHz is necessary. But there are also plenty of applications where some delays are acceptable as the machine will spend a lot of time doing practically nothing so it doesn't need to be OTT spec-wise. Welcome to the world of the ARM SoC.
Re: Soldered-on flash
"it's actually the SD card method - perfect for tinkering and repeated tweaking"
Not to mention, you aren't tied to picking your OS of choice. Some devices (Beagleboard xM) have a button so u-boot can load different operating systems (RISC OS & Angstrom Linux, for example). In the absence of a button, it's still not a problem, just swap the card and power up. Android, RISC OS, regular Linux, etc etc - the SD card method makes it stupidly easy to choose what you want when you want, with zero risk of bricking the hardware. Now that this stuff is available, and boot times are pretty fast (remember, the OS is probably copied into RAM, not executed directly from Flash, so there's little Flash can do that an SD card can't), I don't see why anybody who wants to use their device would stick with Flash. Maybe an embedded industrial application, it makes sense. A device like this? No. Flash is so last-decade..
Re: Compared to Raspberry Pi
Who really needs a VGA connector these days?
How about anybody who does not have an HDMI monitor and would like something a little better than composite video? Hell, even S-video is a step up!
While they're discussing this hokum...
...please throw in the arbitrary nonsense that is region locking. Not just DVDs, but on-line stuff too. I would pay for a Crunchyroll sub to get my animé fix (subbed in English). Instead I get a couple of options and an apology about the good stuff not being licenced in my area. Where does this fit in to a free market economy model? I have cash, I have a want, somebody else is making arbitrary obstacles. So I pursue alternative options.
But the biggest pile of cack is digital downloads from Amazon. The various Amazon's I frequent (.fr, .com and .co.uk (not found mp3s on .co.jp yet?)) actually manage to hold rather different selections when it comes to the less popular artists. So I find a track I like that .co.uk has. But I live in France, so .co.uk will absolutely not permit me to pay and then download. I can, however, buy the CD without a problem. I could also take myself to the UK, pay, download, and go back to France. What the hell? Where's the logic in that. I'm the customer, they are the provider. If I should choose to buy from here rather than there, what does it matter? All this regional licencing stuff is bollocks, can you imagine if Tesco started buying the rights to town centres and refusing access to people holding Asda bags? No, you go and shop where it suits you (for all manner of reasons, financial, psychological, or just 'cos you think the checkout girls are cuter - it doesn't matter). Thus to digital music. Why are we still existing in an arcane system with arbitrary limitations? Last week I bought a furoshiki from Japan, a book from England, and a set of DVD-Rs from Germany. No hassle whatsoever. But digital music and video? That's a whole different proposition. Even more ridiculous when the company that refuses to sell me music in digital format (and, sadly, it is not just Amazon) will happily sell DVDs and CDs of the exact same stuff. It's nonsense.
Re: iTV?
No, that's not correct, the merger is officially "ITV plc". However ITV as a name has been around since the sixties or somesuch (before my time), so I doubt that fruity-loops will have much luck claiming to own it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV
VLC is nice...
...in that it can usually be relied upon to play stuff nothing else will touch (though I find the transcode to be rather flakey), however the UI is horrible. I prefer SMPlayer, though it seems like later MPlayers are more finicky in what it'll play.
+1 for Avast, the sandbox does work in the free version, you just need to be running the file off a removable drive. Yes, it hassles you to renew each year. It is dead easy, just find the renew button, click it, and give an email address.
What I would appreciate is something that can join up multipart RAR files. It seems 7zip can't do that. Yet?
An idea
Publish an SDK, document the APIs, stop treating hackers and customers like shit, and hope it isn't too late.
Some Sony kit is pretty decent, it's the attitude that sucked.
Re: Still stupidly pricey...
There's more than just SFR you know. A Brit friend of mine, barely speaks any French, picked up a Virgin Mobile SIM from a boutique in a train station. Took around five minutes from "I'll have that" to texting me.
@ Shardik
You might like to look at the French "free" operator, and the effect it is having on traditional monopolies. Sure, the operator can jack up prices, but all it takes is somebody to stand up willing to take a lower profit, offer a better price, and customers will jump ship en masse. Just ask Orange France...
Blah blah blah...
"We'll be top dog for years, Otellini tells investors" - of course, what CEO is going to say "we suck, we'll be bust in a year". CEOs...They're going to smile until the bitter end, it's their job. Well, that and blaming anything else.
"We have incumbency, legacy support, and the capabilities of Intel for scale and power - and yet you don't have the ability to deliver that to a device that'll run for a day off a battery the size of a two euro coin...
How about...
...we start by making the content matching system actually WORK? Like in order for an organisation (hello Universal, is anybody there!?) to place something on the content match list, they have to swear on perjury (as with DMCA notices) that they are the actual rights holder of the article in question. Penalty for false filing - ALL of their content is removed from the content matching database - that might help them focus on what they actually do and do not own.
Then fix the system so that if the content match says "it's a match" and you say "no it isn't" and the rights holder says "yes it is", it doesn't fall into some mysterious black hole. Hell, you get more of a say through the boring (costly) legal process.
As it stands, the setup is fundamentally flawed, and suck-ups to appease Big Media aren't going to fix it unless primary concerns are dealt with - namely who owns what. This is doubly worse when you consider advertising applied to popular things nets income for the false content match instead of the original creator. And, yet, we're supposed to have sympathy and believe that copyright "theft" is a terrible thing? Please...
http://fairusetube.org/youtube-copyfraud and http://dishingtech.blogspot.fr/2012/03/false-copyright-claims-on-youtube.html for starters. There are plenty of others...
What!?!
My little regional newspaper (Ouest-France) reported this last week.
Re: How long before they start offering vacations?
WestWorld - yes! Exactly what came to my mind. Well, that and the "isn't there an economic meltdown in progress?" question...
Re: WTF? Thanks El Reg...Not
Dude, any nerd knows, if it ain't on ElReg, it ain't worth knowin.
Oh look, yet another schoolboy-level error
(as subject)
Re: The Oracle cannot be all knowing then.
there are 2 holes on a human being and one of the hole returns shit
There are many more I/O interfaces on a human than you give credit for!
*Caffeine/cookie input hole
*Music input holes (balanced pair)
*Cooling/ventilation holes (pair, side by side, odd design)
*Spent cookie exit hole
*Forked process exit hole
There is also the spent caffeine liquid exit, though I'm not certain that counts as a "hole". In half of the available models, it is combined with the forked process hole, perhaps as a cost-cutting measure? There is also the cute-person-detector input (balanced pair), however those are not holes when the sensors are in place.
Re: Where's my refund?
Can you think of any other industry where the raw materials of the product you're buying cost 5p but they ask you to pay 2000 times that to purchase it?
The property market? Okay, materials are a little more than 5p, but the markup is surely on par?
Random thought
Now that the ISP has taken steps to block access to TPB, they are no longer just a dumb pipe that data (or shit, depending on outlook) goes in one end and falls out the other. As a result of this, can we hold them liable for stuff we do not wish to view? You know, "you block TPB but you allow kiddieporn through?" sort of argument.
I know it is a largely symbolic gesture; but one, I wonder, that could have a number of interesting consequences.
Re: Hey Heyrick
Really? I thought "Nothing happens".
"further essential step to foster innovation"
While you are at it, can you please stipulate:
1. Patents are valid for a term of three years. It can, of course, be renewed if relating to something that is still being actively produced by the patent holder; and...
2. Patents are null and void if applied to something you don't actually make, produce, or subcontract. I think the patent on slide-to-unlock is ridiculous, but it is a patent for an actual thing on an actual product made by the patent holder. However there are a number of organisations that produce nothing but look to extort money for "infringed" patents. What is their worth in fostering innovation?
3. Patents can be shared between companies (i.e. if Samsung and Nokia, say, have something in common, they can pool their patents between them), so long as it does not fall foul of rule 2.
The concept of patents is not a bad one, per se, it is just the current implementation is set up as little more than a grossly corrupt capitalist cash cow (as in, screw the validity of this patent, walk it to court and pay a lot of money to bloodsucking leeches to argue the point). Notwithstanding, also, the requirement to enforce a patent - thus meaning you have to take it to court. Was this whole shebang set up by lawyers, perchance?
Re: Have you ever seen a virus up close?
That's because they are robots...from another planet...not here to kill us, exactly, as that would leave a mess to clean up, but rather to make us all nice and compliant for when the time comes for their creators to land on this planet and engage in widespread practice of naughty tentacles...
"The dodgy drives put fanboys' data at risk, Apple said in its recall notice."
Really? They said that? Word for word?
The cash machines around here have a little magnetic sensor that only opens the card slot if you insert a card with a magnetic strip in the right place.
Oh, and the cash machines read the mag-strip, not the chip. I had to get money from my account when I left my card at home (sitting on my keyboard, having used it to buy something online). The bank guy took a "blank" card, passed it through the mag reader/writer on his desk, then handed it to me. It put it in the machine and money came out instantly...
Re: What does "function" mean?
I suppose it would be possible to legitimately recreate some video provided it was implemented entirely independently using nothing more than the description of what the thing was about (note: not "reproduce the sounds/pixels" as that is COPYING).
If you doubt me, "Snakes on a Plane" -> "Snakes on a Train" (and pretty much everything else by The Asylum is a "reimplementation" of a big screen movie). Similarities? Yes. Copy? No.
So to take the example of software - function xyzzy() takes two parameters which are memory addresses, and it returns a CRC-32 of the contents between those addresses. Your function xyzzy() is therefore to take two addresses and CRC-32 the contents. How you do this is up to you.
Likewise, for the movie - there's an enclosed mode of transport, and a lot of snakes. Pretty much make up the rest (but, sorry Asylum, the "real" movie has Samuel L. F***in' Jackson - how can you hope to compete?).
tl:dr - not a loophole at all, implementing the same functionality is NOT copying; pirating stuff is (unless it's "Be Kind Rewind").
I sense an EU-US battle on the horizon
Bloke's right, though. A clean room implementation can't be subject to the copyright of the original code as it isn't...the original code.
t they don’t have the ability to completely control and prioritize system resources
Excuse me - isn't that the entire point of any half-decent OS?
Re: Ice Cream?! Ice Cream?!
Melt in your hand? Mess in your pocket?
You do know you're holding it wrong, right?
And....?
The arrangement for the personal details of suspected nutjobs flying into Europe FROM the US are?
Don't forget, guys, in the rampant desire to pander to every terrorist's wish, that the flights that caused so much damage in 9/11 were not inbound international. It, logically, works both ways and terrorist acts occur all over (Lockerbie may have been an American plane, but it blew up over Scotland). So either data on air passengers is shared, or it isn't. This EU->US concept is little more than a farce to appease an increasingly paranoid nation.
FAIL icon, for the EU really should have laid down "both ways or take a hike".
Whoa...
This "fanboi" is just bait swinging on the line. Must resist... must resist!
Eh?
So this guy wants to appeal to the lesser (in IT) gender, doesn't want to be patronising, and wishes to show that either gender can pursue a career as a bona fide geek...
...and he does this by calling women "girls"?
Just a random thought...
...has anybody considered the potential IPR and exploitable ideas that students are now being requested to upload to a server someplace? I understand plagarism is a problem, but is this the best solution?
Re: My view
My younger self would have laughed hysterically.
My current self is worried that we might be on the way to that sort of scenario. After all, how often do you receive an email with two screenfuls of disclaimer/terms/licence at the end? That rubbish doesn't hold water.......yet.
Shame...
...there isn't a smaller bounty for bugs in Google apps etc. Even a piddly $50 per bug would be appreciated.
As a French resident...
...the worst annoyance about HADOPI is that, as far as I know, the levy on blank media has not been repealed.
Let me then ask you - who are the freetards NOW?
Re: Ahhh....
Started with a Beeb, played with Econet at school. Moved to RISC OS...
I now use a PC for my day to day stuff, but in the corner is an Econet file server, a Beeb, a RiscPC, and three other RISC OS machines. They see less action than they used to, sadly. Though I hope that the port to the RaspberryPi will be ready by the time I order mine.
I wonder if part of the problem is that the old machines invited you to enjoy them. The circuits were easy to understand, the processors weren't a nightmare, the API was fairly well exposed, and they all came with a language built in. Even the Speccy and the Oric had dialects of BASIC.
As opposed to modern stuff where the box itself can't do anything without some sort of OS to load. Linux contains programming tools, but installing and setting up an entire OS is a world different to a '>' prompt. Windows? There's pretty much nothing "out of the box". Game consoles? I picked up a dead XBOX for a euro and I now understand that I'll need to modchip it simply to replace the broken harddisc. Things these days are aimed at providing a consumer-oriented service, and as such try to keep you out of the machine instead of welcoming you in.
Once upon a time, instruction manuals told you the processor instruction set in one of the appendices. Now? You probably need to Wiki to find out what processor it actually uses...
<nostalgic sigh!>
Precedent?
It seems somewhat illogical to me that a wonky light fitting is the responsibility of the employer, rather than the hotel. Job-related or otherwise, it is on somebody else's premises.
What concerns me more, however, is the potential precedent that this might raise. If it has been ruled that having sex with a colleague/friend in a hotel room can be counted as a normal occurrence under the remit of "work" because she was on a business trip, does this not suggest that it would be equally acceptable to have nookie in the photocopier room?
Alternatively, if your employer is liable, does this give him rights to control what you do and how you behave when on business trips, even when not on waged time?
Simple solution
Let everybody go.
Then the crap coders can either learn, or at least get their asses kicked by Those Who Can.
I suppose this makes sense...
...if your idea of sex is some sort of schoolgirl fantasy that would otherwise be illegal (hmmm, and probably still would be), but surely there is a lot more to a relationship than sex? What do you have to care about for a robot except making sure "she" is charged and wiped over with a j-cloth once in a while? I suppose it could also be a great novelty item - your iPhone 20 is so yesterday, check out my iChick... However anything beyond that would suggest that humanity is screwed.
And...I'm perhaps overthinking this, but wouldn't there be whirring clicking noises from the mechanics? That could be offputting...
Oddites of copyright
If my friend takes a picture, it is his picture and his copyright. If I take a copy of his picture, I am infringing his copyright. If, however, I stood beside him and took my own picture, which is practically identical, that's my picture that I can exercise copyright over.
Oracle might have a case for infringement of the API being copied as no doubt that has copyright status, but if Google's JVM is a clean room version based upon the API, surely it is no different to my taking the same photo as my friend?
Nice.
Nice. (^_^)
Privacy?
The problem, and it is such a far cry from copyright that I'm surprised you even bothered to shoehorn that into the article, is that privacy is defined more by what is actually done with collected data.
You see, as EU citizens we have certain rights. We can find out who is recording data on us, obtain copies of said data, and offer corrections in case of error (which may involve legal issues in cases like incorrect credit ratings). On the internet, it is a wildly different story with dozens of companies looking to profile you (yes, even from El Reg), there is no real way to access, modify, or delete this. I'm sure Google has a reasonable profile of me by now, but given my mother looks up crochet and stuff in Google off the same IP address, is it smart enough to work out there are two people or is my profile screwed up? If somebody borrows my computer to look for something pervy, will my profile be tweaked to note this? Can I untweak it?
This, I believe, is why people worry about their privacy. Because 33% of it will be scarily accurate, while 66% will be bollocks. And only you, the commodity, will know which is which. Meanwhile, other organisations will base opinions on you on the results of this so-called analysis. Your involvement is zero. Your options to see the collected data, to modify it, etc, also zero.
.
This is different to whether or not you "own" your profile or can complain if Google "copies" it. This isn't a matter of copying, it is a matter of corrupting.
Err...
Not the comments part of the article itself? [I mean here]
FAIL, Reg, just fail...
You thought too hard about how to make a terrible movie. As a result, you've just pitched something that sounds more amusing than Epic Movie, and has "cult" written all over it.
Try again.
I get real work done on an eeePC 901
Small screen? Check. Lowish memory? Check. SD card four times larger than the internal drive? Check.
But on the other hand, it fits into a backpack, it runs for ages, and I don't panic if it experiences shock (bad roads etc) while it is running. I guess a real PC is cool if you have an office and a designer chair. Some of us are a little more...bohemian. Just last week (when it was warm!) I wrote code sitting in a reclining chair with cherry blossom falling around and nothing above my head but the sky. The screen was a little hard to see in the sunlight, but I wouldn't have traded it for a cubicle for anything.
Mobile frolics
Got Windows 3.1 running on my Android phone. It is kinda useless (DOSbox seems to try to read the keyboard directly, so it doesn't understand the symbol key, plus it is squishing VGA into 480x320), but it does work, and seems about as fast as I remember a 386 box to have been...
Re: ClearType? @ Eddie
Hey Eddie, long time no see! ;-)
While ClearType is aimed specifically to optimising the display for LCDs, it isn't that unlike the sub-pixel hinting that RISC OS is capable of. That, plus the slightly more recent ability to take into account background patterns (instead of a solid colour as in the mid 80s) plus the ability to render legible text at silly-small sizes makes it a good combination. Readable 4pt text on top of a picture of Alyson Hannigan? No problems. I recently used a simple BASIC program to place text (signs, t-shirt logos and such) into a PlayMobile photo. The hard part was working out the rotations, but I'm a dunce at maths anyway. Results? Subjective, but I believe better than my PhotoShop-alike (on the PC) could have managed...
@ CD001
+1 for the awesome use of fadeout.
Re: ClearType?
RISC OS has done that for nigh on a quarter century... If you ask me, Windows still doesn't do it right.
Dear Land Of Liberty...
...are you actually trying to devise reasons to convince tourists to go elsewhere?
Eh?
" on the basis of the evidence available, no crime had been committed "
So, what, there's no law stating you can't expose kiddies to porn? Damn, the moral bridge must have missed that opportunity...first time around...
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