Email In Oracle-Google Case Will Remain Public 114
itwbennett writes "When last we left the Oracle/Google patent infringement saga, Oracle had been ordered by Judge William Alsup to lower its claim for damages to $100 million, give or take. Today Judge Alsup denied Google's attempt to get a potentially damaging e-mail redacted. 'What we've actually been asked to do by Larry and Sergey is to investigate what technology alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome,' Google engineer Tim Lindholm wrote in the Aug. 2010 e-mail. 'We've been over a hundred of these and think they all suck. We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java.'"
2010 is pretty late in the game (Score:5, Insightful)
It fits if google were thinking oh shit oracle have their hands on java we are screwed get us out, but its not like right at the start they were rubbing their hands with glee we know we have to pay for a license but we are not going to.
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If it's no big deal, why did Google want it redacted, and why did the judge say it would be a blow to their case?
Not incriminating (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not incriminating (Score:5, Informative)
... In fact, all this email was sent just 2 days before Oracle filed their lawsuit [cio.com].
Or maybe not sent. from TFA:
Oracle also implied that Lindholm's e-mail had actually been sent, but in fact it was an incomplete draft, Google added.
. Probably someone thought "oh shit Oracle have brought Sun", started to suggest that they got a license when someone else pointed out to them that they didn't need to.
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Following the story thus far I'd guess that's probably about what happened.
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Since I'm not a Google basher, I read that to mean, "Hey, we've been looking at technology ever since we started this business. There are hundred of alternatives to Java - but they all SUCK!" I don't see a "smoking gun" showing that Google was avoiding licensing Java. In fact - that blog posting by Sun's CEO, congratulating Google for using Java seems to imply that no license was needed.
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If it's not incriminating, why did Google try to have it redacted? I guess all the Slashdot lawyers are going to tell us.
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Lots of things can be taken wrong. That's why you have the right to remain silent -- you might say something that incriminates yourself when you don't intend to.
If you have something that can look to be bad, even if you know it wasn't intended that way, you'd still want it off the record.
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ZING! But there's an NDK for Android as well, so it's not like you have to use Java anyway. There's even a way to write apps in Ruby now. Oh, and apparently you can sell AIR apps through the Android market as well. Realistically at this point Android doesn't really need Java at all, but it's too late for them to take it out. I personally think they should have done all the base components native, made an X11 like protocol for communication between widgets and apps and whatever, and then just told everyone t
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I'm a VIM/Makefile kind of guy so the whole IDE thing still puts me off
I'm doing android development with nedit and an xterm for compilations. Still using ant though. There is a howto for that. Also in my day job I have to work on this horrible monstrosity through eclipse. Its fucking awful and blame eclipse for many of the developers design decisions.
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I can easily understand that. I haven't tried to do it in VIM with Makefiles etc. because the whole thing is so tied into Eclipse I doubt it would be easy to do at all. Can you get the debug feed outside of Eclipse?
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There seem to be command line and GUI debugging tools in the developer kit, but I don't use them.
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Yeah, I was too vague when I said that. The integration in Eclipse is well done. Eclipse itself (editing) is awful. Things like Eclipse automatically adding random lines (like imports) whenever I copy and paste between files? Yeah, that's a terrible feature. Panes/splitting and pane management is very obscure as well. Oh, and tabs are characters, not 4 spaces - seriously fucking stop with the tab conversion.
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It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
As for the comment "Things like Eclipse automatically adding random lines (like imports) whenever I copy and paste between files? Yeah, that's a terrible feature." is very telling. It screams "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO USE THESE TOOLS!" Not only can all these behaviors be customized to your particular liking, with a simple cl
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Some of us juggle all that stuff in our heads and have a complete map of our code, which becomes difficult to track when we have to deal with automagic shit or go make amendments or deletions from one side or the other.
There is no automagic. There never is. There are IDE-assisted automatic features (the majority of which is useful), the configuration and behavior of which are not rocket science, and which we either understand or we do not.
Others write bits of business logic and string it together, and hope it works; often these people rely on development environments to take care of some of the stringing together.
False dichotomy between the previous case and the later ones. It might surprise to some, there is people out there who understand the code and intelligently use automated tools for integrating it. We don't get paid to show off our l33t hax0r skills, but to intelligently use tools availab
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False dichotomy between the previous case and the later ones. It might surprise to some, there is people out there who understand the code and intelligently use automated tools for integrating it. We don't get paid to show off our l33t hax0r skills, but to intelligently use tools available for coding to our employer's benefit.
If you are completely crippled by your tools not being available, you are not "intelligently using tools available." Many developers are baffled by things like memory management or reference counting, and want the language to figure out when memory is no longer in use and garbage collect it because they simply can't wrap their head around the idea of tracking data; many others sit down and design a program before writing spaghetti code, and occasionally cause implementation bugs. While you can be compete
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If you are completely crippled by your tools not being available, you are not "intelligently using tools available."
This is an absolutely true statement... when you take it all by itself, just like saying "the sky is typically blue in the desert". Great, good for you. You are still re-iterating the extreme, negative case on a false dichotomy. You don't prove that a dichotomy exists by reiterating one side of it. You do so by showing that there is nothing in between the extremes. It is not an inevitability to become completely crippled by the tools at your disposal just because of their prevalence.
Many developers are baffled by things like memory management or reference counting, and want the language to figure out when memory is no longer in use
Non-sequitor. What you a
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Spending more of my waking hours in a building with an entire floor of developers I have to work directly with, I can competently say that my opinions of modern programmers stems from a tiny, tiny glimpse into the real world of programming.
Also, you seem to be intensely afraid of manual memory tracking, for reasons I can't fathom. at the worst I've used reference counting, which I find nice, but which has corner cases I specifically avoid. Python uses implicit reference counting. Some Java/.NET implemen
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> It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Except that, outside of the M$ world, IDEs are worthless pieces of shit. I tried, I really tried, like for days, to use Eclipse when I started Android development. But the tools sucked. There was no end to time sucking bugs I encountered, most of which I found lots of others complaining about in forums, but most of which
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It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Actually, it may just be more experience speaking. I've experimented with a bunch of IDEs, and found that all of them are pretty good at speeding up the initial stages of development. They can save time that I'd spend looking up templates and typing boilerplate code. They can also warn me when I've done something stupid (which all programmers do now and then ;-).
Where they fall down is later, when you think you've got it all working, you've done all the unit tests, and you try it out on a "real word"
Explain this one to me. (Score:2)
Yeah, I was too vague when I said that. The integration in Eclipse is well done. Eclipse itself (editing) is awful. Things like Eclipse automatically adding random lines (like imports) whenever I copy and paste between files?
If by "random" you mean the actual imports needed for the things you copy and paste...
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Calm down, I just like VIM out of familiarity and I tend to not like IDE's in general (I use a combination of GVIM and Byobu/Screen to do just about everything, dealing with all the code in GVIM and having things like debuging and logging and a general purpose terminal in Byobu). I've used Eclipse so little that the little things that bothered me about it I didn't even bother to look up how to change - and I probably never will if I know how to get the debug terminal running separately and how to wrap it al
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Yeah, I was too vague when I said that. The integration in Eclipse is well done. Eclipse itself (editing) is awful. Things like Eclipse automatically adding random lines (like imports) whenever I copy and paste between files? Yeah, that's a terrible feature. Panes/splitting and pane management is very obscure as well. Oh, and tabs are characters, not 4 spaces - seriously fucking stop with the tab conversion.
C'mon man, this is 2011.
1. Window/Preferences/Editors/Text Editors/Insert spaces for tab (uncheck)
2. Windows/Preferences/Java/Code Style/Formatter/Active Profiler/Edit/Indentation Tab/Tab Policy: Use spaces to indent wrapped lines (uncheck)
You find those two in a most trivial manner. JFGI Eclipse style. Simply enter "tab" in the search box in the Windows/Preference window, and voila, it shows you how to control tab expansion. This is a capability present in any modern IDE or code editor. It is somethin
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Fair enough, I haven't used it long enough to even be bothered to personalize that. My main question would be WHY are tabs not characters? Why should having to hit backspace 4 times to knock down indentation one level be a default? What benefit is there?
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Fair enough, I haven't used it long enough to even be bothered to personalize that. My main question would be WHY are tabs not characters? Why should having to hit backspace 4 times to knock down indentation one level be a default?
Because your default way of doing is highlight/shift+tab? Not counting the fact that auto-indentation in Eclipse is 1) highly configurable (you can tell it to auto-format brackets, spaces and what-not with just a few clicks); 2) it is automatic; and 3) it is very efficient. It ain't rocket science. Well, it might have looked like that back in the day when we had nothing but vim (or ed or some archaic crap like that) over a VT-100 terminal with they keyboard mappings all fucked up. But now, in 2011? I mean,
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Way to totally mis the point of tab characters.
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... for all the abuse Microsoft gets, at least you can do stuff like change the program counter in the IDE to re-run a piece of code.
Don't know whether the Java VM API (JVMTI) would allow setting the PC, but you can use "drop to frame" to start the current method again.
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I think he was referring to that feature in VS where, while debugging and paused, you can right-click a line of code and say "Set next statement" [microsoft.com] - and then when you step or run that's where it'll continue. It doesn't quite let you do it with any line, especially in release builds, and the results can sometimes be hilarious, since you can skip initialization or break loop invariants very easily. Still, it can be handy.
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Jruby and Jython are still Java. Air isn't, but it's kind of a turd.
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I haven't tried it myself but what I heard about was this: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ [google.com] . Looks like other than Ruby those are native? Weather or not they're usable is a different question entirely...
Personally I really like Ruby, but if it runs like mud and can't really do anything through JRuby then I'll have to pass on it.
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Oh wait, that's not what I had heard of. Apparently you can wrap Ruby scripts in a package with JRuby and run them as apps. Still not so great but I guess it's something?
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I like ruby too, and google uses python in-house, but for android's purposes yes they both suck.
The NDK is a wrapper around the Java API, so no. (Score:2)
> ZING! But there's an NDK for Android as well, so it's not like you have to use Java anyway.
Oh how naive you are... the NDK are C wrappers for the Java API. Yes, you heard me correctly... the C API wraps the Java API and not the other way around like it *should* be.
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Geez, I didn't know that.
Looks like a case of severe javatarditis...
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...! Wow.
I just...
I ...
WHY!?
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No, the NDK is not a wrapper around Java. Some of the recently added parts of the NDK (the stuff that enables you to write a fullscreen app without a single line of Java code) are wrappers, yes. But OpenGL is 100% native, and so are all the available ANSI C or POSIX calls.
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ZING! But there's an NDK for Android as well, so it's not like you have to use Java anyway.
yes you have. Yes, it's only a stub, and probably the launch menu, but still.
I personally think they should have done all the base components native, made an X11 like protocol for communication between widgets and apps and whatever, and then just told everyone to go for it. If that were the case using a VM based language would spare you some headaches, but even then you wouldn't be tied to Java as Ruby, Python, AIR/AS3, and a whole bunch of others would work just the same.
On a side note, I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but the SDK for Android running in Eclipse is really really nice and they've streamlined all the Java stuff and added enough libraries that things are pretty easy to understand and work with. I would have preferred something other than Java, and in general I'm a VIM/Makefile kind of guy so the whole IDE thing still puts me off but still I have to admit they did a great job.
One more thing: Fuck you Oracle!
The main problem is not the VM, but that google picked Java and Java libs. I mean, how are going to say 'it's not java' to the Judge!? Yes, they have great lawyers, etc, but still...
But yeah, technically, I agree on the whole (except for the X11 part, I'm not sure Android even uses X11)
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You can't patent a programming language. The patent is on Just in Time compilation.
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X11 has this internal networking protocol to pass information back and fourth between objects/processes/whatever. If Google had used something like that to say, communicate with widgets etc. you could code widgets and apps in totally different languages and as long as there was an interface to that internal networking protocol there would be no issue. I believe the Wayland project set out to make a better version of that X11 protocol, perhaps Google should have done something with that?
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Somehow, breathlessly bubbling that There's even a way to write apps in Ruby now, which implies you're a luvva of Ruby (a bad thing) and then stating I would have preferred something other than Java which implies you don't enjoy Java (a good thing) and I'm a VIM/Makefile kind of guy which implies you're a decent, honest and all-round wholesome GNU/C/C++ kind of guy, and doing it all in what seems to be a single breath, just leaves me feeling confused.
Still, -1 + 1 + 1 == 1, so there's hope for you yet :)
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If you ever write anything server-side you'll understand how nice Ruby can be. I've honestly never written an application in it though. Seriously though, the way Ruby deals with data is incredible. Especially when it comes to things like complex strings and string literals and combining them with things and character sets and on and on I'd take Ruby over C++ and every String related C++ library ever made. Just trying to pull off some of the things you can do in a few characters in Ruby with C++ String Strea
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I hear you. Honestly, I've never taken the time or felt the need to try Ruby -- Perl/C/PHP/Bourne (and C++ if I have to, and JS if I'm required) do everything I need... It's the same with Python: I'm sure it's great, I just don't have a burning need.
That's the beauty of what we do - we have a choice.
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Tim Lindholm ".. was the Architect of the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) and co-author of the Java Virtual Machine Specification.".
Perhaps he had a slight bias towards Java.
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yup, it sounds like the email is a nerd's response to being asked to choose something other than his favourite technology... "we've been over a hundred of these" and the *only* one that I think is good enough is Java, of course. Just be thankful it wasn't someone who thought C# was the ultimate in all language technologies.
My position: C (maybe C++) would have been ideal for a low-level API that you then build on top of. In whatever language/technology you like once you have that API library established.
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Java tends to accept... well, just Java. Maybe LLVM instead of CIL...
Just because there's only one "official" language that runs on the Java VM doesn't mean there aren't others, such as JRuby, Jython, etc... Wikipedia has a list [wikipedia.org].
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possibly CIL or LLVM, but the point is that any new device still has to have a load of dev work done to allow Dalvik to run on it, a C based API wouldn't require much in the way of additional work for the manufacturer, and none for the app-developer.
With a C based API, you get to run anything on top of it. With Java you only get java-based stuff (ie Java) to run and that just annoys me :)
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The point of a VM is that only the VM changes to accommodate the physical architecture. The thousands of apps already available would not have to be recompiled.
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If the only reason for VM is to not be locked into a particular architecture, then LLVM is by far the best choice. No need for JIT, either, just compile to native when app is installed from the .apk. CIL is more complicated - in particular, it introduces a common object model, which only makes sense if you need languages to interoperate on a higher level (but then you have to either map model to whatever languages offer, or add language extensions to accomodate the model, like C++/CLI).
Of course, using LLVM
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Exactly
Geez, if they think "we think they all suck" this screams 'Javatard' to me. The kind of people that think that everything has to be XML.
Do they think Python sucks? Go sucks? JS sucks? Ruby sucks? Groovy sucks?
If they had said "analyzing the several alternatives we think running a JVM is the best option" I would probably agree with them.
Guess what, Apple made the right bet. Not with iPhone, not with MAC OS X, but back there when it was still NEXT. Objective-C
Larry and Sergey, learn the lesson, if you
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The brackets in Obj-C are cleanliness itself compared to the multitude of uses for most characters in e.g. C++.
Its not an email - its a saved draft (Score:2)
Given that there are no recipient - this is a draft for an email that was never sent.
So its nothing more then a private note written by one person.
As for the damages the 100 million figure was for the whole java plattform - given that this is only for a couple of patent in the java plattform the final figure should be significant less then that given that the patents is only a small portion of the java plattform. Its looks like this will become another case where
the only winner will be the lawyers since th
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So?
Oracle are the good guys here (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I'm serious. This is not about emails and licenses but about whether we tolerate monopoly ownership of ideas, i.e. software patents (or patents at all). Up until recently Google has been deliberately naive about the problem, shrugging it off and allowing others to take the hit. It's allowed Microsoft and Apple to accumulate large patent portfolios intended to stop free competition.
Google need to get hit, and they need to see software patents as a real threat to their plan of world domination. They need to realize that $100M buys a lot of lobbyists, and they need to spend that money in Washington to end the software patent system. Oracle is doing us a favour by forcing Google into court here. They're greedy enough to not want a nominal settlement, and they're smart enough to win their case.
So despite the fact that I'd rather stab myself with a blunt fork than install a piece of Oracle software on any machine I own, I'm rooting for them in this case, and I hope they win big.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Then Google and and whatnot should take every last single penny and buy the congress...
Or maybe buy a bunch of patent trolls and 'unleash the kraken' agains MS and Oracle, it's probably cheaper.
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It'd be cheaper to buy the media industry...but then they'd risk running seriously afoul of antitrust issues.
Re:Oracle are the good guys here (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen this suggested before. The media industry is *small* compared to Google et al. It's amazing that they have so much control in Congress. Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc. should each just buy one or two media companies and be done with it.
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They have so much control in Congress because they are willing to bribe Congresscritters and Presidents with enormous amounts of cash, plus favourable depictions of them in movies/TV/news programs.
Assuming, of course, that the congresscritters/presidents were favourably inclined towards them, either economically or politically.
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Please list examples of these bribes.
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http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/industry.php?txt=B12&cycle=2012 [opensecrets.org]
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623&cycle=2010 [opensecrets.org]
http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00323048 [opensecrets.org]
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Yup, media industry has a HUGE amount of power. Far disproportionate to their actual earnings, since they influence how the masses think. They pay everybody from singers to actors to newscasters.
Maybe if Google starts a movie/music studio...
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You realize that Google has close ties to the Obama administration, right? Schmidt is a technology adviser for Obama, and Andrew McLaughlin is the U.S. deputy chief technology officer. Marissa Mayer even held a fundraiser at her mansion, where Obama made a personal appearance (less than a week before the FTC dismissed its inquiry into the Street View debacle). I wouldn't
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and they need to spend that money in Washington to end the software patent system.
Rather, they'll buy some patent portfolios from random failing tech companies and they will jump in the bandwagon of software patents. It is a much easier route to safety for them.
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Up until recently Google has been deliberately naive about the problem, shrugging it off and allowing others to take the hit. Google need to get hit, and they need to see software patents as a real threat to their plan of world domination.
Google is a licensee of three MPEG LA patent pools:
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC/H.264
I haven't the least doubt that it licensees other technoogies on the same scale.
Google is a business. Its core competence is search. All that licensing the patent portfolio really means iin business s that you can't afford to be the first or the best in everything.
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Please give examples where Microsoft and Apple have been stopping "free competition" through patent portfolios. The reason for having them is primarily defensive; e.g., it was Nokia who sued Apple first, not the other way around.
I realize this is Slashdot, and patents have become the new hip cause, following Linux-on-the-desktop, copyright reform, and various other online movements that didn't actually a
Remain public? (Score:2)
Once something is 'out there' its kinda impossible to make it 'private' again.
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that's not how patent litigation works, i'm afraid.
if it did work like that and the jurys were free to do research on their own, then majority of patent litigation cases would end up with both parties patents being stamped with "obvious shit". because very few patents end up being groundbreaking or so innovative that they'd be worthy of a patent, and that's the world we're living in now.
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Your post has no connection to its parent. In fact, I can't figure out what your point is at all, much less how it might be related.
Re:What did we learn - saving /. (Score:1)
Never put down your actual thoughts in an e-mail (draft, or sent). Voice communications only. If you have to write an e-mail, don't speculate.
Exact same things regarding posts on the Internet.
People think we ACs are posting crap, gibberish, offtopic posts, flamebate, and troll but in fact we are protecting ourselves and the Slashdot community from lawsuits such as these.
I mean really, someone posts something like a trade secret and then an AC posts a GNAA flamebait and TADA! instant get out of lawsuit! The plaintiffs lawyers will just bypass the post because of the troll!
We ACs are very under appreciated here! I'm sure we've saved many people f
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Never put down your actual thoughts in an e-mail (draft, or sent). Voice communications only. If you have to write an e-mail, don't speculate.
Sounds like something a young Richard Nixon would say. Worked out well for him
the end of java (Score:1)
'What we've actually been asked to do by Larry and Sergey is to investigate what technology alternatives exist to Java for Android and Chrome,'
LOLCODE!
Lindholm probably worked for Sun before (Score:1)
Something interesting to note: take a look at who the writers of the Java VM specification are. One of them is Tim Lindholm.
Google should have bought SUN (Score:2)
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Or why doesn't Google buy Oracle NOW
Google can't afford Oracle.
You may think Google is some super huge corporation, but Oracle is a super huge corporation as well.
Not only that, but Oracle makes more money per year than Google does. Of course, they have less equity (thanks in part to them buying companies willy-nilly).
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Oracle is trading [google.ca] at around $30 a share with a market cap of ~ $153 billion.
Google is trading [google.ca] at around $600 a share with a market cap of ~$194 billion.
That is to say, Oracle isn't small, and while Google's bigger, it would have to use nearly half its own net worth to gain a controlling share of Oracle.
Lisp (Score:2)
Actually i'm willing to pay top-dollar for ANY of todays tablets that can run an optimized Lisp(common lisp preferred), any suggestions?
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Please, please, why can't they just use lisp? I'd pay extra for a tablet optimized for lisp. It's just so clean and expressive, and if people wanted they could build they're own complicated DSL's and frameworks on top of it.
Actually i'm willing to pay top-dollar for ANY of todays tablets that can run an optimized Lisp(common lisp preferred), any suggestions?
Lisps and DSLs seem like they would go together well.
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i can't even look at it since my laptop died. which is why i'd give almost anything for a tablet i could do onboard development with. Pretty soon i'll probably just settle for a tablet with a large screen, my n900 doesn't cut it for reading technical docs or hardcore surfing.
I seriously hope all this legal nonsense steers google in this dir
You heard it from a Google engineer! (Score:2)
We've been over a hundred of these and think they all suck.
Even Google's version of the Go Programming Language?
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Go does not run in a VM - it's compiled directly to native code in the existing implementation. I assume they were looking at alternatives to JVM there.
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How about a small translation project? (Score:2)
The obvious suggestion is that they simply (;-) translate all their java code to python or perl. Or a mixture of both, for even more fun. I'm sure that Guido and Larry would be happy to help google out with that.
Seriously, all three languages have very similar properties and implementations. There have been a number of proposals for merging their VMs, and packaging all three languages on top of the result. Sorta like the flock of different source languages that have first-stage parsers that spit out