millerc

You are discussing the impossibility of a simple relicensing due to components owned by a third party. I am pointing out that the FSF has a history of going to great lengths rewriting software, or pressuring people to do so, just so the resulting product falls under a license they find acceptable. Can you explain how am I being nonsensical?

There's the problem right there: "as long as". If I give you candy, I should have no say who gets to eat it - or even cook with it if he fancies. I don't like gifts with strings attached, so I don't cause others to suffer them.

You seem to forget the primary reason why the GPL came to be, the principle that caused RMS to rewrite EMACS as an open source product in the first place: if a piece of software is closed, or in this case "not open enough", they want it rewritten under a new license.

This story only seems to be a case of political pressure to do so, regardless of the effort a rewrite may cause. In this regards, FSF is clearly putting the value of the license above the value of the software itself.

This is why I can't endorse the GPL: it is mainly motivated and designed to deny authority over software ownership, not for actual openness. If somebody really want to open up a piece of software, Public Domain is the way to go.

Stating an opinion, not looking to debate logistics. Feel free to share the opinion or not.

I'd like to propose a different perspective into this.

In a respectable aerospace organization, a typical effort into such an optimization project would be in the order of 3 mid-to-senior staff, for a duration of 6 months. Consider a loaded rate of $200k/year (remember, overhead makes it much more expensive), and you'll be looking at about $300k for a single tentative. Let's suppose they probably tried no more than 3 to 5 approaches already, that's $1.5M of taxpayer's money they already put on that. And they still can't figure out a way to keep a good configuration of shadows on the longerons when they push it for a little more power.

If I came up with an optimal solution to this problem, I'd be miffed to be let go with $10k (or $30k as they seem to have updated) and a nicely worded letter. I would hope my carreer to be guaranteed✝ for a few years, instead of being thrown back on my own into the void.

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✝ No, the letter is not a guarantee of employment elsewhere. If anything, it might very well scare off "normal" employers from hiring a prospect.

Using the "Significant economic or community impact" clause, one could easily have enlisted the secret services into that investigation, saying the downloaded material represents thousands of man-years of work from the nation's top researchers. That statement is entirely true, however it has nothing to do with the zero-sum game it leads the uneducated eye to believe.

The secret services should have been apt enough to figure out from the start that the reported "crime" was no worse than having a kid loose in the library of Congress taking pictures of every public documents. They should never have equated it to stealing - removing - the material.

Tutorial video and app download at this address:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.eightpen.a...

Definitely won't take the place still in my heart for Graffiti ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS) ).

Despite the irony, I'm not arguing it should be less of a concern.

Recent mishandling of user accounts by Sony Entertainment and LinkedIn gave us a glimpse of how much damage an intrusion can cause, even though (?) their management thought their intended purpose couldn't lead to any serious liability (speaking through my hat here).

Surely this is a giant target painted on Facebook or Gmail's servers for any blackhat out there who wants to intercept a whole lot of traffic.

"At the peak of your game" after 5-10 years might be true. How would be the market for a "senior" software engineer of 20+ years experience?

I have a feeling such a candidate would be deemed "too technical to manage, too senior to be managed".

FWIW, that article has very little more information than you could find on bookshelves for the past 20 years. http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Drugs-Nutrients-Intelligence-Neu...

Besides Piracetam having become only one in a class of nootropics, you can find the same information in that book.

There used to be a large subculture around nootropics on the Net, but most of the discussions were based on anectdotal evidence. It seems not much have changed since then.

I would be MUCH more interested to get some insight as to WHY a binary numbering system, which can't represent accurately a number so trivial as 0.1, have ever become ubiquitous for general-purpose floating-point applications. Or why it's no worse than any other system.

Any taker?

The original article in itself is pretty interesting, but of very limited appeal to the HN crowd. The visitors here being mostly technical types, anyone with a Comp. Sci. or Comp. Eng. degree has already gone through those computations many times over during their career.

With all the hate going on about WakeMate, I have to give my 2 cents.

I bought the product immediately after seeing the power adapter fiasco, and still use my WakeMate to this day. At times it does feel like you have to be an engineer to know what you're doing and keep the thing running (I can attest to timing issues leaving the bluetooth transmitter blaring full power at night and the battery dead in the morning), but as with any "bleeding edge" product you have to respect it if you want it to respect you.

Seeing the company at the end of its funds even though they have an awesome product, cries of marketing mistakes. Seeing WakeMate's marketing manager take off with the mailing list, confirms to me that Greg was a poor fit, and not the best person to watch over WakeMate's interests.

Arun if you're reading this, I sincerely hope you'll send an email along the lines of "the previous announcement was sent by one of our previous employees, WakeMate does not endorse that product". My mailbox still thinks WakeMate and Greg are "taking it to the next step", and seeing what I see here, it does not leave a good taste in my mouth. Best of luck to you.

> this is too little too late.

Think so? I would be surprised if Google, so full of smart people and with enough marketing skills that they took over digital advertizing, really were so inept at negotiation.

It doesn't seem a coincidence to me, that this price change comes not even 2 weeks after their major competitor in the mobile market has committed to a different maps platform.

Yes. Tell me the algorithm you use and the bits from your decryption key, and we can decrypt everything.

By the same token, the lock on your door is security by obscurity. Tell me the type of lock and the position of the 5 pins, and you're in. Take 5 seconds to communicate that over the phone, if you know what you're talking about.

Stories like this make me reflect on woes that I've been suffering for a couple of years. As founders (whatever the scale), shouldn't we pay more attention to the loyalty of the people we take under our wing? It seems a fairly common occurence - in my career and at large - to see a good thing taken over by the people we bring for help.

Personally, I wish I had paid attention to that 10 years ago, and I have a feeling that Tetzchner too.

It doesn't have to be "extortion", as the article puts it. It can simply be that the patent owners are building a court precendent. They don't need to care about settlement/penalty money (although there's no harm in recouping some expenses), it would be useful even even just to build a case by winning enough small battles, and later go after the big boys.

I've been turned down by Google after the infamous day of interviews; passed all of them with flying colours except the last one, given by an arrogant kid whose every question seemed like entrapment. Recalling the warnings i got from my HR recruiter in the first minute of the day, i have a feeling she knew what i was in for.

I too had an extremely bad vibe about the campus. The ambiance on the whole premises is the same as school : careless playful youth (even coming from the senior engineers), toys everywhere, and the implicit deal that Google will give you everything if you give it everything. I felt a perverse temptation to give in to this, although i knew very well this attitude generates a dependence relation in the employee.

After working in the austere world of avionics for over 10 years, i found it absolutely shocking. But from their point of view, this is a winning combination. It is just not conductive of hiring senior employees, of which they probably have plenty supply anyway.

I haven't seen this point mentioned anywhere yet, but...

How many of you are willing to bet Sony will use the intrusion as an argument for material damages in court against GeoHot, somehow linking his exploit with the mode of intrusion?

This is pure speculation of course. But I'm willing to bet serious money that Sony's "outside, recognized security firm" has been "requested (hint-hint, wink-wink)" to be on special lookout for any sign the exploit was a vector for the intrusion.

Shouldn't this month be a wake-up call to drive the point that Cloud Services, SaS and all variations of "Live" content serve nobody else than the people selling us their projects? Amazon EC2, Sony PSN, Google's GMail outage last month and God knows who next should be made into poster children for this issue.

We spent the last 30 years migrating away from mainframes towards decentralized PC computing; only to have the centralized version shoved back in our throats for no better reason than helping monetization.

It's time people start realizing how much control they're giving away when they exchange a local product for a remote service, and for vendors to adapt to their user's well-being.

How is the incentive a blunder? Google employees can voluntarily devote a large portion of their paid time to any project of their choosing. By announcing this incentive, Larry is actually focusing the efforts of whole company into the market he thinks they need to grab.

I say the move is genious. There might be a little fewer tomato gardens on the campus at the end of the year, but he'll be leveraging the ideas and strength of the whole workforce into that single market. Zuck might very well have something to worry about now.

It's not as technically difficult as it seems - see this discssion somewhere else in the thread. Definitely no crooked supply chain needed, except for the "don't ask, don't tell" mindset.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419303

IIRC from my time playing with Norton Utilities back when it was a real hacker tool, you only need to format the disk as usual then hand-modify the disk size in the MSDOS (2nd, logical drive's) boot sector. The FAT will contain all the entries needed for keeping parts of the file in correct order, and Windows will happily report the drive size from that field. Assuming the flash drive's firmware/circuit doesn't report errors but rather uses the low bits to address the sectors (laziest way to build a flash controller), explains how "only the last part of the file" gets preserved (i.e. not overwritten).

For the FAT to stay non-corrupt I would assume that Windows writes a full copy from its cache right after writing the file, that would not be an unreasonable assumption.

All in all: extremely easy to reproduce, no special controller needed. Probably just a guy that realized how Windows behaves after changing a couple bytes on the disk, and another that said "hey, we can make money off that!"

If you have to ask why TeX is still used as a tool, then you don't understand what TeX is. You should not view it as a program or a fad that gets outdated when the latest version of BozOS Release 9 comes out. TeX is a theoretical solution to the problem of computer typesetting. As an article ages but still remains a reference until the science has advanced, TeX stays the same until somebody discovers something that makes it a footnote in history.

The fact that you can install a program called TeX on your computer is marginally irrelevant.

The question you want to ask is: after Knuth has solved to the best of his ability the general problem of computer typesetting, why hasn't anyone bridged his theory with the front-ends that everyone uses? My take is: the shiny tools that exist were good enough for most people to toy with.

I despise them with all my soul. But I agree to be bound to my word, and signing a contract is as much "giving your word" as can be.

About time we see consequences for signing a non-compete agreements, if you ask me. Everyone I know signs these without giving it more consideration than running a yellow light, and expect to run away free the day after they leave.

Same here. For $40 for pro software, i'll buy even i I don't need it. By the same token, if I see a board game on sale for $10, I take it and figure out later if I like it or not.

I like the idea; i'll leave them figure out if it makes business sense. One thing certain: if their retail price had been $100 on special to $40, I would not even have clicked.

After 30 years, no wonder I feel dirty.

If you tell me that sites who chronically scrape content elsewhere get a "pull-down weight" attached to the whole of their content, you've made my day.

Beautiful, technically and visually. The only reason for (business) failure would be if you released it 20 years too soon. I sincerely hope you're the one to make the tipping point.