Comment I know the war is over, but... (Score 1) 217
...I still think anytime a Dominion installation in the Alpha Quadrant closes, it's a good thing! ;)
Comment The key word there... (Score 1) 594
...being basically! As if a real I.T. genius would ever use basic!
Comment Re:Apple stifling innovation in lawsuit (Score 1) 1184
Game changers earn a short-term first-mover advantage, and given the revenues generated from Apple's iPhone division I don't think they've had any shortage of THAT.
Disagree, a game changer idea is just an idea. The product/theory serves as a vehicle for the diffusion of the concept. Products drive innovative ideas, not the other way around. How quickly and how far the idea spreads is dependent upon the quality of the product and the elegance of it's design.
Ultimately, nobody outside of the industry cares about the industry so a badly implemented idea is irrelevant to them.
Longer term, people will copy innovators and incrementally improve on their new technology, and everybody benefits as a result, in the form of accelerated innovation and lower prices.
Evidently somebody forget to tell that to Microsoft, because they've been ripping people off for years and making a shit ton of money doing so.
Businesses exist to make money, but in the absence of strong government regulation (and more importantly strong punitive action to back those regulations) businesses tend to take shortcuts by plagiarizing design to maximize profits and when this practice becomes widespread enough, there's no clear economic incentive for innovation amongst the industry.
As the law stands right now, competition is severely hindered in order to extract even more exorbitant revenue than what the Free Market(R) naturally has to offer. You can't have a competitive marketplace when you have to ask the incumbent's permission to compete with them.
I agree with you about how fucked up the US Patent system is, but I think in this case, Apple was more pissed about the infringements to it's design. Good visual design is not factually quantifiable, but the Patents have to be written so there are at least some guidelines for what companies can and can't do from a design standpoint to prevent what you're describing.
Incidentally I would say that I'm surprised that you're siding with Samsung given what they tried to pull: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/27/1748236/apple-says-samsung-3g-patents-violate-rand-requirements
Dictatorial control wrapped up in a shiny package, and the masses love it. It is the antithesis of the equalising power of technology that made the field so attractive to me in the first place.
Herein lies the problem: you are not everybody. I can't speak for the masses, but personally I'm only for open up to the point prior to having to run an anti-virus on my fucking phone. Openness is a good thing in the context of programming, but any halfway competent engineer will tell you that it makes for crap OS design.
Comment Re:Nineteen Eighty-Four (Score 1) 1365
Missing my mod points right now. Well played, sir. Well played.
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here...As long you're here, I'll always be here...;)
Comment Re:Nineteen Eighty-Four (Score 1) 1365
Nah, it's still the ending of 1984 that depresses me.
It's one thing for governments to be horrible to the people they're supposed to care for. I've come to terms with that.
It's when people are horrible to the people they care for that continues to surprise me.
The Government is made of people! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!
Comment Nineteen Eighty-Four (Score 4, Interesting) 1365
When I was young, I found it depressing because of the ending. Now that I'm older I find it depressing because I've seen it begin to grow in the world around me...:P
Submission + - BT: Almost Every Android Device Is Infected With Malware (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: British Telecom (BT) has made some rather eyebrow-raising statements about Google's mobile operating system. We all know Android malware is a problem, but a BT security expert speaking at the NetEvents Americas conference has just made it sound like an epidemic that is affecting everyone. "We analyzed more than 1,000 Android applications and found a third compromised with some form of active or dormant malware," said Jill Knesek. "Almost every device is compromised with some kind of malware, although often it's not clear if that code is active or what it is doing."
Submission + - 6 IT Projects are $8 Billion Over Budget at the Dept of Defense (federaltimes.com)
McGruber writes: The Federal Times has the stunning but not surprising news (http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20120723/DEPARTMENTS01/307230001/At-DoD-6-projects-8-billion-over-budget) that a new audit has found that Six Defense Department modernization projects are a combined $8 Billion — or 110 percent — over budget. The projects are also suffering from years-long schedule delays.
In 1998, work began on the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program (LMP). In April 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued their report "Actions Needed to Improve Implementation of the Army Logistics Modernization Program" (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-461) about the status of LMP. LMP is now scheduled to be fully deployed in September 2016, 12 years later than originally scheduled, and 18 years after development first began! (Development of the often-maligned Duke Nukem Forever (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever) only took 15 years.)
Prime contractors Computer Sciences Corp, Accenture, IBM and CACI obviously have learned the "If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" lesson! (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html)
In 1998, work began on the Army’s Logistics Modernization Program (LMP). In April 2010, the General Accounting Office (GAO) issued their report "Actions Needed to Improve Implementation of the Army Logistics Modernization Program" (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-10-461) about the status of LMP. LMP is now scheduled to be fully deployed in September 2016, 12 years later than originally scheduled, and 18 years after development first began! (Development of the often-maligned Duke Nukem Forever (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever) only took 15 years.)
Prime contractors Computer Sciences Corp, Accenture, IBM and CACI obviously have learned the "If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem" lesson! (http://www.despair.com/consulting.html)
Predicting Color Blindness, ADD, or Learning Disorders From Game Data 65
An anonymous reader tips a story at VentureBeat about a company that helps game developers analyze data gathered from their games to detect cheaters. But now, the company says this data can also be used to determine other traits of the players, like whether they're minors, or whether they like to gamble. Their CEO, Lukasz Twardowski, expects such analysis will soon be able to reveal even more traits, like whether a player is color blind, has a developmental disorder, or has Alzheimer's disease.
"'Games are the richest and the most meaningful form of human-computer interaction. ...By tracking how they play games, we can learn a lot about people,' Twardowski explained. Hesitatingly, he added: 'That will be a huge responsibility for us later on.' ... Academics have begun to take games more seriously, as a window into the human psyche. Games are addictive and immersive and are built to command hours of our time and attention. What better testbed for myriad psychological and medical conditions? A good game pushes us to our limits, challenging us to use both the analytical and intuitive sides of our brain.
GNOME: Staring Into the Abyss 535
New submitter zixxt writes "GTK+ Developer Benjamin Otte talks about the stagnation and decline of the Gnome Project. He describes how core developers are leaving GNOME development, how GNOME is understaffed, why GNOME is a Red Hat project and why GNOME is losing market and mind share. Is the Gnome project on its deathbed? Quoting: 'I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.'"
Microsoft: Surface Tablet May Alienate OEM Partners 164
HangingChad sends this excerpt from PCMag:
"Microsoft this week admitted that its upcoming Surface tablet might hurt its relationships with PC maker partners. As first noted by the New York Times, Redmond said in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that 'our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform.'"
The filing also made note of the difficulties in building up another app marketplace: "In order to compete, we must successfully enlist developers to write applications for our marketplace and ensure that these applications have high quality, customer appeal and value. Efforts to compete with these application marketplaces may increase our cost of revenue and lower our operating margins."
Is TV Over the 'Net Really Cheaper Than Cable? 285
jfruh writes "More and more people are joining the ranks of 'cord-cutters' — those who cancel their cable TV subscriptions and get their televisied entertainment either for free over the airwaves or over the Internet. But, assuming you're going to do things legally, is this really a cheaper option? It depends on what you watch. Brian Proffitt contemplated this move, and he walks you through the calculations he made to figure out the prices of cutting the cord. He weighed the costs of various a la carte and all-you-can-eat Internet streaming services, and took into account the fact that Internet service on its own is often pricier than it would be if bundled with cable TV."
Submission + - Microsoft Admits Surface Tablet Might Alienate Partners (pcmag.com)
HangingChad writes: "Microsoft this week admitted that its upcoming Surface tablet might hurt its relationships with PC maker partners. As first noted by the New York Times, Redmond said in a Thursday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that "our Surface devices will compete with products made by our OEM partners, which may affect their commitment to our platform.""
KWin Adds Support for QML Decorations 30
As part of a KDE-wide effort to prepare for Qt 5/QtQuick2, and a push to improve the window manager, KWin now sports QML decoration support. Currently, the C++ API for decorators is "...not very Qt like and requires a strong understanding of how the window decoration in KWin works ... [and] seems to be too difficult to be used." This complexity increases maintenance burden: "In 4.9 we ship four window decorations: the Aurorae theme engine, Oxygen, Plastik, b2 and Laptop. Together they are 10 kSLOC of C++ code and 1 kSLOC QML code (Aurorae). Before Aurorae got ported to QML the size of the decorations was 13 kSLOC. Overall that is about 10 per cent of the KWin source base, which is rather large." Basing his work on the QML version of the Aurorae engine, Martin Gräßlin set out to port Plastik to QML (the C++ version has already bitrotted, and was slated for removal): "After one and a half days of work I’m proud to say that writing decorations in QML is possible. ... In the current state the decoration consists of 370 lines of QML code and I expect to need an additional 100 lines to finish the buttons (they are already functional, that is the close button closes the window) and add some of the configuration options. The same API in C++ consists of 1500 lines of code. So we do not only get fewer lines of code but also a more readable and easier to maintain codebase. For something like a window decoration a declarative approach is much better suited than the imperative C++ way of painting elements."
Should Microsoft's Amdocs Deal Worry Data Center Operators? 32
On Tuesday, Microsoft signed a patent cross-license agreement with Amdocs Software Systems. They specifically noted in their press release that the agreement covered Amdocs' use of 'Linux-based servers in its data centers,' and noted that Amdocs paid them money for the privilege. In light of the current state of mobile device licensing, with Microsoft getting a cut from most Android device sales, should data centers operators worry about having to pay Microsoft for their use of Linux servers? From the article: "To date, Linux advocates have been hypersensitive to any move Microsoft has made against the open-source OS—which, to be fair, Microsoft has seen as a threat since its inception. It's certainly possible that Amdocs approached Microsoft for a patent cross-license for its own purposes; but if that's the case, Amdocs would likely have disclosed that fact. Amdocs representatives declined to comment on the deal, and the arrangement has been completely ignored on the Amdocs Website. ... The question, though, is whether Microsoft will begin eyeing data-center operators as a similar source of licensing revenue. The company has avoided directly challenging Linux developer/distributors such IBM or Red Hat, instead targeting partners and customers."
