Posts by tp2

C++'s type checking is better than you think

C++ when used correctly gives good guarantees of the correctness of the software. In large c++ projects, because of the type checking, doing a 2000 line change to code is possible without breaking the logic, since type checking catches all the small mistakes. It's this ability to declare 2000 lines of code broken and rewrite the whole area that makes c++ in large systems special. C does not have this property, since types are not used in the same way as in large c++ programs. So if you think linux kernel as example of how it works, it's not the right approach.

I forecast that web will be turned to 3d with meshpage.org's technology stack.

Anyone remembers the jokers who wanted "eat your own dogfood" -license, so that open source folks would get open source license, free software people would get free software license, commercial folks would get commercial license, microsoft would get their own microsoft store license etc..

Recardless to say, all these attempts that making incompatible licenses acceptable by the community are kinda failures. The software that tried the eat your own dogfood license have turned their license specification adventures to choosing one of the existing ones and went with LGPL/GPL combination. But every developer needs to try their skills in legal area, given that it's important parameter for selling software to customers.

your planetkilling death star seems to be broken a little. it's not reddit where the jedis are hiding at. Emperor should take his death star and move it away from our parking spaces.

Guess my software product has this exact problem too. Basically I offer researchers ability to create artist's impression images based on research abstracts, but the software I have created cannot detect if the "scientist" is using the software for artist impression images or generating fake research images. Real researchers will find it out early enough when they put a reference to a tool called "GameApi Builder" that the tool wasn't meant for research purposes, but the research modules has failed during implementation of the software. Thus it's only useful for artist's impression images. The reason for the failure is that c++ compilers are breaking the module which was supposed to be used for research -enabling piece/there's a compiler or cpu dividing line that our programmers couldn't avoid while writing the software. => guess c++ programmers are not welcome in research area according to c++ compiler vendors.

I'm already way beyond that...

> code can be developed on a modular basis with clearly defined interfaces between modules,

Looks like they have the same design than what I use for my 3d engine...

MS Store policies were always discriminating against open source

Microsoft store policies didn't accept software that was built with gnu compilers, given that the only way to sign packages according to store filtering policy was to install microsoft's development tools. Basically it also required compiling the software with visual studio which simply isn't working well with open source development.

the executable packages were easy to create and .msi package nicely implemented the needed stuff for installing the package. But to get access to MS Store, you need additional signing steps which couldnt be done for software built with gnu compilers...

AI has significant problems...

The requirement for users to train a AI network is simply too much for normal users. Basically, the necessary data sets are not available for ordinary people, and thus user's only possibility is to pirate the large databases needed to train their AI.

=> Thus AI is not suitable technology for us.

=> you need people who are more criminal to actually purchase your AI technology

=> I know that didn't stop the tech vendors in previous technology wave, but we've already had enough of technologies that goes against the laws

=> once you invent AI that doesn't need to clone other people's databases for training the network, return back with the refined technology

=> but current state of AI is simply impossible for ordinary people to use legally.

Well, if unity's user interface and edit-compile-debug-edit -loop is slow...

Basically, I have a solution to that problem. https://meshpage.org/ has some gameapi builder tool which has nicely working user interface that doesn't slow down when plugins insert their code to key event handlers and thus it's not possible for a plugin to slow down the tool's key presses. :-)

Copyright trolls....

When will authors of copyrighted works get compensation for the time they spend creating those works? It seems there exists huge underground group of people who spend time creating copyrighted works, but without any money flowing to their direction associated with the works. While this can be considered a side-effect of competition, it also has a copyright aspect in it. While it has been known for long time in copyright industry that money is outdated concept, the food industry disagrees, putting forwarrd-looking people into poverty.

These copyright-trolls figured out how to turn their copyrighted works into good use and extract settlement money from the users. This kind of innovation is what copyright area needs, clear business models that have chance of getting enough money from the users that authors can make a living out of it. Sadly their reasons of why the trolls are entitled their money wasn't exactly good enough for the courts, and the extortion business model was slightly illegal, but still these kinds of nice money-making schemes are needed in the copyright area.

This ruling has two significant problems clearly visible. First these prenda law folks clearly had trouble getting end users to actually use their copyrighted work. Their smut films was clearly positioned for certain kinds of end users, so their decision to distribute it in pirate sites themselves was clearly obvious solution to the problem of finding new end users. Their decision to sue the end users if settlement money is not received early enough, had obvious flaw that end users could invoke "implicit license" keywords to get past their copyright lawsuit and receive lawyers fees from the prenda plaintiffs.

The full scheme these trolls invoked had all the elements of a classic criminal organisation. The money was being shuffled between differrent companies to hide the original source of the moeny was their illegal extortion business of copyrighted works that they had filmed themselves. The lawyers spend significant amount of time to make it appear as if they were just executing orders that their clients had commissioned, but it turned out the clients didn't exist and the whole operation was ran by the lawyers themselves.

Guess the courts had tons of fun untangling this operation. Their patience in spending years for this is the real giveaway in this story.

Magnet for lawsuits

They seem to have several factors contributing to it:

1) their product is sold in usa

2) they collect premium price from the market

3) they don't accurately represent product quality in marketing material

All these contribute to the fact that the product is a magnet for class action lawsuits.

Notch...

Shuoldn't minecraft fame sue these people for using valuable notch brand?

my view to webassembly

check http://meshpage.org

it has some wasm modules for opengl stuff

Camera tricks...

This promo isn't a real anyway, just cheap camera tricks. It's possible to use a timer to change a picture in the phone, and thus you get nice camera shots where phone supposedly does amazing decisions, when in reality they're just showing images on the phone screen via timer. We used these same tricks in high school videos already in 1993 when video equipment become available. But it's cheap trick.

But at least huawei has accurately described the delays that happen in such regognition app. If it takes 5 seconds to detect a hotdog, it's completely useless for driving a car..

Well, it's clear infringement

Here's one good test:

1) is google freeriding someone elses market

If you consider that java is used in 2 billion devices according to oracle, and google's android is another ecosystem, this doesnt seem to be overlapping.

But the devices isn't the right market to consider. The whole issue with java apis is about development tools provided for application developers. There google is clearly freeriding on java's market. Noone would write applications to android, unless java programmers were _already familiar_ with java programming language and the apis. Oracle spent tons of money and effort getting whole market to use their technology instead of other available languages and apis.

Now google got that access for free. Clearly freeriding oracle's java programmers market.

Final issue is just whether software compability issues are significant enough that it should be allowed.

easier way

Windows have some key presses with altgr+cursor keys which is kinda interesting for upsidedown stuff. Even rebooting doesnt fix the problem and only way to fix it is pressing the keys again. Accidentally pressing it while typing something is kinda interesting.

Finally there is peace in the galaxy

All the common aspects of darkness and the light, when you put two former enemies to the same room, they need a reason why peace in the galaxy is supposedly a good thing, after all this fighting. Some minor movement of these green pieces of paper cannot ever make this kind of peace happen, so there must be some greater plot behind all this. Intellectual property and lawyers can get all the credit for creating this new peace chapter in our story. The companies are clearly paying significant sums to the lawyers, if they can make this significant decisions happen without extended legal paperwork being spread all around the internet, consuming tons of popcorn from the punters, eating valuable work time. Sadly the whole internet will be bored with this decision, all this fighting and plot twists are over and we must find our entertainment from somewhere else.

Competing against youtube?

Does this article mean that youtube has to follow different rules than everyone else on the planet? If I made a competitor to youtube, different rules would apply? I mean, I have web page up at http://meshpage.org/ which can compete with youtube, but is the rules for this web site somehow different than what youtube is enjoying?

Pear's logo is clearly broken

Well, Pear deserved to lose this time. The logo is clearly ripoff of apple logo. The 2nd logo is so blatant ripoff, since everyone (and their mother) knows that apple has claim on rounded rectangles, so using a fruit and rounded rectangles together is already combinatory infringement of apple's trademark. If that doesn't get lawyers screaming for your money, nothing will. The first logo is actually better than the 2nd one, but both of them combined, gives clear indication that they wanted to ride in apple's popularity and cash in the money..

Web sites are publishers anyway...

Terrorist or pedo content doesn't need to go through the publisher-filter, when it is handled by different legislation.

But considering facebook somehow "not a publisher" is kinda wrong. Right way to handle it is via licensing - users would license their content whenever they press "submit" button. Automatic or implicit licensing is how it should be handled, and web site operators would need to prove that they have license to publish that content.

Money is important enough

Pretty much everyone needs to get money one way or another. Rejecting people's opportunities to get some of it flowing towards that person should not be done for poor reasons. Some of the reasons cited by the companies are explicitly forbidden by the rules, mostly related to race, religion, health issues, your neighbour's conflict with your cat, whether you're pregnant or got kids in bad age, if you won the lottery last week, whether you're currently homeless; all usually related to stuff that people have no or little control over. Criminal records/financial status are kinda different since it's expected that people can control those aspects of the life, but even financial status can sometimes be outside of the control of ordinary people.

On the other hand, companies are expected to make their own decisions who are the persons who can become employees of the company. Companies get this decision by the significant amount of money they can pay to their employees, and a promise to keep the money flow stable enough that their employees can build a career and get a living after spending significant amount of time with the company. While this decision belongs to the company executives, it should be used carefully. There needs to be significant conflict with the stability of the money source before they can properly make these decisions. For example, if the company doesn't have money source stable enough to hire more than 2 persons, it's not expected that they hire 120 people... So there are significant good reasons to make this decision against a person looking for a job. Or if company can't provide good working environment for their new employees for lack of suitable apartments, this can be used as a valid reason. But if this happens alot, the company gets bad reputation in the market for not keeping their system stable enough that they can grow and hire more people. Newspapers are supposed to report when companies blatantly reject black africanamerican people or fire people who got married to a person they don't approve.

So my position is that companies should only use this decision to reject people, if making it otherwise somehow breaks their money source stability. Criminal records and other such issues can in some situations do that. But it requires case-by-case analysis when this is the case. Passing issues in this area to be resolved by tribunal is a risky move by the emploee, since it indicates that the person is a troublemaker and unable to make this process work without resorting to strict following of the rules to the letter. It also wastes their time, if the company and the tribunal needs to spend time resolving the conflict. So there should be a good reason before this is done. People with criminal records generally can't expect other people to follow the rules to the letter, since they're known not to follow the same rules themselves.

But there are obviously cases where these powerful positions are absolutely necessary. Widespead discrimination of certain class of people in employment opportunities clearly sounds like a good reason. Criminals are clearly belonging to this group. There's clear statistics showing that criminals have hard time getting good jobs. There's clear statistics that more criminals are out of job than ordinary people. These statistics can be used to your benefit, if there's clear conflict and the system is not providing opportunities to make a living. It just needs to be done for the right reason. Not because you want to harm the companies that rejected you, but only because you feel their decisions were done for the wrong reasons. This element must exist before passing it further down the line is warranted.

Sounds like russian's don't know how copyright works...

So, these researchers spent their whole life studying some aspects of the universe, and this guy thinks he can take the results and publish them to the world? Maybe there's reasons why these researchers chose elsevier to publish their work? This arrogant guy thinks that "information should be free", and uses it as his reason to violate copyright of the works? He just dig himself to a huge hole, and will need to pay huge sums of copyright infringement money as a result. No amount of "developing countries need the information" is going to help in this. This is why we have money -- if you want something, you spend your money to receive it. Using that money, the system is kept running -- publishing papers to large section of the scientific world is not cheap. This is why elsevier gets the money, not the researchers. They're doing the hard work. If he thinks he can compete against elsevier, he shouldn't ripoff elseview's database of papers, but try to attract researchers to publish in his publishing platform. Elseview spent large sums of money to gain their position in that market, and some random researchers shouldn't be let break this system by publishing the papers in some random website. Information shouldn't be free for everyone. There's reason why these papers are kept hidden. But this guy can't seem to understand this. If someone spends their whole life studying something, the resulting information is so powerful that reinventing it will be impossible. If you build some system using that information, you lose reproducability of the system. Next guy who needs to "reinvent" the same stuff, doesn't have that information available, and he fails to implement the same system. This is the reason why this information shouldn't be spread around without restrictions. Soon we'll be all using products built using impossible-to-reproduce information, and next year this information will be gone. Then suddenly the products stop working, since noone knows how to build them. People who relies on the products will lose that feature, after learning how it works. This kind of practises are causing large amounts of damage. Some day the information to build our products are no longer available and the world will suffer as a result. (think what happens if they forgot how to do agriculture, and fail to produce food for the people... This kind of problems can happen, if information is spread without restrictions...)

Nice picture?

What's with the doctor who ripoff picture on an article about copyright? Are you saying that you have a permission to use images from doctor who tv series in your article? I doubt it. But it kinda fits the theme...

On the govt asking for dmca comments -- I'm sure this will be useless, they get flooded with comments, and the real issues will get swamped under huge volume of "Please get rid of DMCA immediately" -style comments.

FaceBook is right about this

Facebook is right about this. Using security loophole to collect confidental information from facebook's servers is clearly illegal. It's the same as trying to login to secure system without having proper authorisation, i.e. trying to guess passwords. There's invisible legality line in such places, and anyone crossing that border is doing something illegal.

However, denying internship is pretty harsh consiquence for such actions. He could be simply not understanding where the legality line is located at... Finding loopholes in security is dangerous exactly for this reason -- it's easy to cross the authorisation -line -- Once the actions are not authorised, and it somehow skips proper authorisation mechanism, it is by default illegal action.

Burning platforms memo essential

The burning platforms memo in 2011 february was absolutely essential. Platform change is so difficult thing to execute, that it caused a gap in Nokia's ability to produce phones. Half year with no new phones shipped is a huge catastrophy to a market which constantly expects millions of phones arriving from a factory. They definitely needed drop in demand to deal with the gap. Windows phone shipments still has not ramped up to produce enough phones, and it's been years trying to do it.

Everything you see in the marketplace has been designed half year beforhand, and I expect burning platforms memo to be no different. Switching platforms under constant demand of new devices is not an easy task, Drop in demand was necessary part of the process. Elop took the blame for killing the phone business. Real problem was that they couldnt produce _any_ phones during platform transition process. Moving from millions of phones to no phones available is a big change.

Windows phone devices are completely different from old symbian phones. Almost every aspect of it changed -- different kind of cpu, the whole phone internals has been redesigned, and the software stack is completely changed. It's amazing they managed to do it in such small distruption in the production process. And the windows phone quality was amazingly good, compared to the fact that they started from scratch. Fresh start is definitely something they needed.