bkkcanuck

dysamoria said:

bkkcanuck said:

gatorguy said:

The argument Google was making in this latest appeal was pretty thin, since they were relying in part on arguing "interoperability" being a rationale. In actual practice there was limited interoperability. I expected they'd lose this particular court case, but do not expect monetary damages from a follow-up retrial anywhere near the $9B that Ellison would like. He couldn't have expected that level of profit when he bought Sun years after Google introduced Android anyway which is why Sun sold so cheap. So in reality Ellison suffered no loss at all from Google not paying a licensing fee to the previous owner.

I have been in the industry for close to 35 years... and although things have changed -- early on it was always understood generally that languages themselves could not be protected IP -- only the implementation of the compiler.  

As far as I am concerned this is a very slippery slope since protecting languages, protecting APIs only leads to death of competition.  I have worked on projects that probably contains huge numbers of lines of code (some of it good, much of it bad and duplicated) and protecting a language and protecting an API would only lead to both the compiler being made a violation of IP, but also language translators, and things like Wine, of course, would be illegal since it implements APIs to run Windows Applications on Linux...  

I don't have much love for Google - but I am worried about the long-term consequences.

The death of competition is already a state we've mostly passed by. Unless you mean the death of competition between the few monstrous corporations playing with 99% of the wealth and all of the market. Sure, they're still struggling to get each other's piece of the pie.

Competition is alive and well -- regardless of the size of the individual corporations.  I have no problem with the size of a corporation as long as it does not restrict competition -- which is unfortunately what has been happening with regulation.  It is not a problem directly related to the size of a corporation -- it is problem created by the corruption of the democratic and regulatory system (one vote per citizen was supposed to prevent this) - but the blame has to be laid squarely at the citizens of the country for letting it happen.  People don't get rid of the bad actors, only tend to try to get rid of the "others point of view" actors -- their guy is great (whether he is morally and literally corrupt).

The issue with "intellectual property" is a modern creation of government (first royalty, then it's replacement) and while it does some good, it is unfortunately massively abused.  A patent or copyright is a government-issued monopoly (early on it was part of the monopolies act in Great Britain - codified to prevent royal abuse)... not much different than a salt monopoly, or a tea monopoly or many other monopolies.  It was implemented to encourage research (not necessarily development of a product) but inventions.  20 years protection for these "new" inventions.  It is not about ownership of property, it is just a monopoly issued by the government.  Copyrights (the other "intellectual property" monopoly is about protecting artists works basically for the duration of their life basically) -- it is not there to protect ideas -- it is about protecting the whole creation.  It was never meant to protect an author from someone basically taking a similar storyline and writing their own version - as long as the implementation itself is not copied.  At the core of it, a monopoly is the antithesis of a market economy, but it was seen as a reasonable compromise.   Unfortunately, the compromise has become more about legalized extortion than about encouraging investment in research.  

Extending "intellectual property" monopolies to languages do more harm than good -- since it is foundational.  The investment of people writing code on top of that foundation and being locked into a specific ecosystem with no ability to move from it without a complete reinvestment in rewriting the entire system (translators would not be legal since they would be infringing).  In the end ideas and development should not be protected, only the research and the implementation.   If the API is part of the foundation of the language (standard library) it really is inseparable from the language itself and it should not be protected -- it cannot and does not stand alone.    Most languages are for the most part substantially copied from one another, names of functions are often reused, the overall structure really falls into substantially very few major differences.  

Effectively what Google did was effectively allow for people to develop their applications with 3rd party products which were originally developed around the java ecosystem and test and complete the system.  The deployment of the application though is effectively translated to a different platform for use.   Facebook developed a lot of their framework in PHP, but the deployment often translated into C++ for compilation and deployment.  There effectively is not much difference between the two.   The only real legitimate question as far as I am concerned is whether the Davik "vm" substantially infringes on Oracles jvm.  

gatorguy said:

The argument Google was making in this latest appeal was pretty thin, since they were relying in part on arguing "interoperability" being a rationale. In actual practice there was limited interoperability. I expected they'd lose this particular court case, but do not expect monetary damages from a follow-up retrial anywhere near the $9B that Ellison would like. He couldn't have expected that level of profit when he bought Sun years after Google introduced Android anyway which is why Sun sold so cheap. So in reality Ellison suffered no loss at all from Google not paying a licensing fee to the previous owner.

I have been in the industry for close to 35 years... and although things have changed -- early on it was always understood generally that languages themselves could not be protected IP -- only the implementation of the compiler.  

As far as I am concerned this is a very slippery slope since protecting languages, protecting APIs only leads to death of competition.  I have worked on projects that probably contains huge numbers of lines of code (some of it good, much of it bad and duplicated) and protecting a language and protecting an API would only lead to both the compiler being made a violation of IP, but also language translators, and things like Wine, of course, would be illegal since it implements APIs to run Windows Applications on Linux...  

I don't have much love for Google - but I am worried about the long-term consequences.

I went from very wary of all-in-one computers to again ... no way.  

Linus (of Linus Tech Tips - 5 million youtube subscribers) bought a low end iMac Pro, and knowing Linus he probably tinkered with it -- and broke it.  He took it to the Apple store to get it fixed and they quoted him to replace the power supply and the monitor (both of which were broken).  Linus gave the ok on the repair costs and Apple (HQ) said no to repairing the computer.  Now I know they consider that abuse, but to be fair -- both a blown power supply (line spikes) and a broken monitor are possible due to normal issues with the computer and I would think that as long as the computer is not vintage and obsolete that Apple would repair it and charge if not under warranty or it was negligence....  If it were a Mac Pro I could get a replacement for the power supply from any Apple service station and do that repair myself, if it was the monitor I would just get a new monitor... but the fact that both of these normally serviceable components would have Apple refusing to repair....  buyer beware.

1st said:

ireland said:

And people wondered why Apple didn’t bid on Tesla? You can ram two cultures together just because one builds a car.

with Musk bad mouth Apple, no wonder Chris didn't last very long...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/09/elon-musk-apple-graveyard-fired-tesla-staff

6 months ago I mentioned I thought Chris Lattner's new position at Tesla was likely a poor fit which drove some Apple fanboys to go nuts -- they could not believe that any of their gods could maybe not be suited for everything and anything.  From what I can figure out from his education and experience his experience of course is more in the area of compilers and tools.... and no real experience in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.  The person in charge should be able to weigh in on the issues at hand (at least on the development side) and while they don't necessarily have to get down and dirty, they have to have some authority when it comes down to settling internal design conflicts etc.  He was entering the position without necessarily having a #2 that he know would be the "to go" person if he needed backup -- so it would be just as easy to make the wrong choice of who to pick.   

It is now 6 months later and things did not work out.  It does not mean that Chris Lattner is not talented.  I have always been very impressed with the LLVM stuff.... Found Swift a big improvement on their existing tools, but found that he was a little hard headed when it came to future Swift direction....  I understand it to a certain point, but found a lack of understanding of certain functional programming paradigm suggestions - a little disheartening.  

Returning to Apple is of course probably an option, but maybe not to the location he was and not to the Machine Learning / AI to a level he might feel his experience demands.  When you enter a new field, it is best to enter behind others that are more knowledgeable in that area and trust that your ability to learn and become invaluable quickly will pull you back up to the position that you feel your experience would afford you.   People have been moved up -- and they are for all we can see from the outside doing just as good a job at this point than before... as such he might not come back and wield exactly the same iconic status as before.  

It is really up in the air as to whether he can find a position that suits both him and Apple.

Now he is a smart person with very valuable experience in areas of interest to many companies -- so I have no doubt he will land on his feet and excel in the future.... it might just be immediate since there are some adjustments that will have to be accepted and internalize.  I expect him to have received a fairly nice a cushy package -- as he was a VP position and he was actively poached.... but we will never know.

tallest skil said:

bkkcanuck said:
What will happen is that computers will move towards having more DIMM slots for a combination and there will be changes in how the operating system decides to use what for what.

I guess I don’t know of any technical reason this couldn’t happen, but can non-volatile memory be used across DIMMs? I remember reading once about the opposite: a specialized card being made into which RAM could be plugged such that the system would recognize it as a hard drive. This was to increase data transfer and access speeds, of course, but required that the card include a battery to keep the RAM powered should the computer be turned off.

There’s probably a reason it didn’t catch on. 

Not sure if they will have to have two banks for different speeds if they mix DDR memory and Optane DIMMS since they will have the same.... and there will of course have to be a new memory controller to handle it when it was introduced last year the results (numbers) that were mentioned were for the Optane based SSD / NVMe modules.... but the plans included releasing Optane DIMMS this year as well.  If you look at the Intel pyramid in the back they have a performance pyramid.