Thats not the point of the article. Its because Google and Amazon are subsidizing the cost of their tablets so much that the consumers are expecting other manufactures to do so. Apple can get away with it because of their market presence and the idea that they are a quality product.

Your right, the Nexus 7 will explode the tablet market but who OTHER than google/Amazon can subsidize the price point to 200 bucks? This is why Dell and other manufacture companies jumped ship. The OEM's sell hardware for a profit, they cannot compete with companies that don't care about the hardware cost when they make up for it on content distribution.

Hell, this is why Microsoft is giving the finger to all the OEM's when it comes to their tablet. They will either have to subsidize the tablet to make it a "cheaper" alternative OR spend the time (years) to keep it on the market and compete with Apple directly on features and not on price.

If you want a real example of this, look at the US Cell Phone market. People EXPECT free phones with a contract or pay just a little more for a higher quality phone. However, if you look at Japan or Europe, those same phones are bought at full price for cheaper service.

Humm. It might seem that Oracle's laywers are pulling at straws, but I think they had this argument as a backup. Right now they are trying to save face so they threw this in because they don't think the jury is going to rule in their favor on the first, so maybe throwing in a less technical argument and more "Goggle is evil" will work.

The argument is not about the 9 lines of code, the lawyer isn't a coder, the idea is that Google copied the original java to get an idea on how the VM worked. Like how a programmer reads other peoples code to improve his own skills. By doing so, while not specifically infringing, it spread up Android's development, making Google getting to the market faster. Essentially, their argument is, without the decompiled java code Google would not of released sooner, thus, not made "as much" money.

Its all a fishing expedition though. They are hoping the CEO will make some stupid comment. Even if he does, they have to prove a nexus. That is
1. Decompile Java code to get Android out faster
2. Nexus?
3 .Profit!

Otherwise, all that effort is in vain as even if they say it did speed up the Android to market, it doesn't matter if it didn't help Google any.

PS = IMNAL but IRTFA:P

I suspect he is doing some trickery with the display. That is, its not a true dot-matix display. Also this thing is using a sift BCD adder, I doubt he has more than 16 bytes in the entire thing. See the propagation delay in the final result? I don't even think he latches the registers. Also on 1:24 you see his decoder, He only has a single 5 row encoder (32 charters max). I suspect he has a shift register at the back of the display, the symble comes in, gets decoded and shifts onto the display. Remember, the atari 2600 could only draw one line at a time, this thing can only shift one digit at a time. The answer display looks attached to the adder directly however.

Got more on my response here: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2748105&cid=39485531 , but the jist is that its perfectly reasonable to say this guy did it. It just has NO CPU logic. At best, its like one of those cheap solar calculators you buy at walmart.

I've built some ALU's and prototypes of CPU's, here is some grandstanding of my TMS1000 clone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t82p-Ql8Djo The thing is though, while I am an older guy, I went from zero knowledge to this in under 6 months in minecraft. Binary logic is just not that hard. Its just really really repetitive.

After the hundreds of test projects I built, I have a good judge on the amount of logic you need and I have to say, the kid knows his shit. He is basically using 3 shift registers and a shift ALU. That is, he is only calculating one digit at a time with bits hold carry/overflow flags. Notice how he said it was a 6 bit BCD adder? That is JUST enough bits to calculate 9x9 with one bit over for carry. This is why those cheap 99 cent solar calculators are so cheap, it has about the same kind of logic in them. If you build your logic around needing to shift, everything is smaller and easier. It might be slower, but it properly takes longer to cycle the display than to multiply a number. Also, its so small is because he doesn't have a big ass ram bank. 9/10 cpu projects usually are big because of even a bank of 20 registers.

On the mine craft side of things, he uses pressure plates as they look a bit nicer and generally its an easier interface to wire. There is this is/was a big design stuff in the forms about dot matrix displays so I figure he put in his own display stuff there. The only thing I am not impressed with is the "graphing" part of his calculator. Lets face it, the entire core of the thing is a 6 BCD adder with shift logic. This thing is WAY to small and far to limited memory for it to have nothing but static formulas. Also, why didn't he put in a simple clock to just "draw" the grid instead of pressing a button?

But to be honest this is WAY better than that stupid HACK alu. I AM impressed with the original guy who made it, just not all the 100's of clones people have made of it. Very few people have made a 100% working cpu. Anyone can build an ALU, no one builds the state/decoding logic:P

Look at his older caculator, you can see how small the basic logic is there and how much you need for the display:P http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSC_YXuONZg

You laugh but I know people that are proud of their 500+ days /played. How about all those pets they grinned up and collected? the more than 12k achievement points that "don't mean anything"? Even baring the pets you can buy, alto of people sunk their kids and marriages into this game. They won't just scream, they will take to the streets.

As Tharsman said earlyer it wasn't that they couldn't, its that they couldn't admit that they lost. What do you tell investers, workers and even the world: "Thanks for hanging around and investing in us these 80 odd years but we are going to have to axe half of you."?

I am sure once the digital camera tech got high enough people in the board room were looking like zombies but there wasn't much they could do. Take a chance with a bunch of upstarts in California? Sell their silver mine for a foxcom like company in china? Anything they do sounds like they are losing badly or at worst, if any of these ideas fail, like their blatantly incompetent. I bet that's why we get these fancy CEO's in charge to take the fall when things go south.

Toy's R Us is still around because they did the hard decision to kill allot of the non profitable stores, But it took being bought out by hedge fund company and having THEM make the hard decisions rather than the board to get where they are today. Hopefully that will happen to Kodak and we might see them again.

As a dying printer company:P

Kind of saw it coming though. Windows 8 is kind of make or break for Microsoft right now in the phone/tablet market right now. No reason to have any other products to distract consumers with. I wonder if Windows 8 will have an emulation layer for x86 on the ARM.

lasers? seriously? I can tell you what space combat will be like with our level with tech.:

It will be jousting with big aluminum polls, ball bearings as dropped mines and tracking missiles with pikes at the end.

People can talk about all the offence ability they want (lasers, rail guns, etc) but the fact is that we don't have the engine or armor technology to move things fast in space. So we will be forced to make do with ships built like Russia pods or "cruisers" like what the shuttle is. We don't even have the scanning ability to track incoming fire if its not self powered. A long aluminum poll with a steel tip going 0.01c at a shuttle will destroy it just as much as a billion dollar rail-gun.

In space, inertia is the empire. We are just rebels trying to survive:P

Yea I heard of that. Never happened with me or the guys I worked in. I mean the instructions clearly tell us to unplug the battery FIRST. Its bloody obvious as you got live power running in that memory so you should unplug it before you do anything. Not saying other techs haven't done it though. Sigh. Even as a server tech I have been dispatched to fix other techs problems. You shouldn't need to replace everything in the chassis to fix a bad cpu. I will say one thing, I will never again use an ESD strap using a rack as ground. Half the people don't even tag it to ground. Getting the shock of my life from an ESD strap when ATTACHING it to a rack made me thing there was more than just a bad board going on in that case:P

"AHH! All the world is going to shit because ONE judge ruled in ONE case not even in my same country!"

Seriously, as some smarter posters had posted, the defendant is a moron. He didn't want to pay licence costs for it, got sued, THEN painted another Mona Lisa with a different hair color to get around said licencing fees. This ruling was about his intent. Had he commissioned the photo and claimed he had never seen the original it would of been different. There is a reason why clean room reverse engineering is so expensive but also so valuable here in the states:P

I am sure the judge knew the implications to it and I am sure everyone is going to go nutters about this once it reaches the 5th page of the news. But how else was he supposed to rule? The defendant was clearly trying to get around paying for the original work. Do you punish the photographer who made the original art or the guy who wants a free ride.

Please slashdot, tell me why I, Leonardo Polizzi can't charge $50 to look at my Mona Lisa

PS - Bad example as its just the original with some junk on it. But what if I painted it exactly as it was, strokes and all, even the same smile, but changed the hair color?

She is screwed. I am sure the case would win agents PayPal as you could say they didn't have the technical expertise to verify it was fake. IANAL, but I cannot believe a judge in small clams court would deny that Paypal was stupid in this case.

I am curious, any lawyers out there familiar with small clams? Would you sue the buyer, who lives out of country, because he is stupid and doesn't know a real from a fake or Paypal who ordered the destruction of the violin? If you do sue Paypal, do you just go to your local court for it, it doesn't seem like they would bother to send anyone there as it just be cheaper to pay her off.

It all could be bogus though. Someone paying 2500 for a violin, even an amateur, might understand something "Made in Japan" doesn't make it 100 years old.

That's a scary thought. Imagine all the permafrost melting in Russia. All of a sudden Russia has the most farm-able land in the world:P

You know I heard this one before. "I want to buy this off you so I could make sure I know what your destroying." Quote for Quote too. I guess its resonable, they can't just send lawyers at your because you will just say I destroyed it like the documentation said and its not like they can prove otherwise.

But then, their real objective is to "save their asses" as they lost the stuff in the first place. They can justify the cost to as its cheaper than getting lawyers involved and even the lawyers might just want the data destroyed for legal reasons.. It makes me wonder if world peace can never be achieved without all party's saving face.

Your reading the slashdot'ers wrong. Its not that the lawyers didn't get paid for their work, its that it cost SO much and took SO long for essentially nothing. I don't know who the plaintiffs are, but 20k for a few processing fees? Why they get 20k and the rest of us get a damn 1.50 coupon.

Seriously, why does this take 8 years?

Lets be fair to the standardization community.. When the USB standard was coming out they wanted everything to be as backward compatible as possible as well as making devices very easily, well as easy as you can make USB devices.

A proper pinterdriver handles fonts, bitmaps, placement of objects, etc. I bet the driver spec would of been as big as the USB 1.1 spec itself.