cico71

It's there, number 94

This. Anyway, we are not the target of these messages to legitimize the status quo of the ads business (or, even worse, that want to expand the influence on regulatory matters). We are too old, well past the point where ads may have had a significant impact on our choices, and where media could change radically our point of view. In other words, we are irrelevant to them and we can continue happily blocking everything, but younger people needs to be brainwashed to keep the current model and to mold the internet into its final form.

Can't really comment as I'm still on 8.0. For me it's enough that it's still there and can be scheduled as a PowerShell command (for files history I use Crashplan anyway) but I agree that if this is the case, it's pretty much hostile for consumer users.

The GUI for system image is back in the final RTM version http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-81-tip-use-system-... (also confirmed by multiple friends already on RTM)

Unfortunately it didn't really took off, but it's a shame because it's a good, polished and complete implementation that allows for some advanced scale-out topologies (it can also be used as a foundation for data dependent routing and map/reduce scenarios).

<rant>I guess it's not much used because people like to reinvent the wheel every time (by manually implementing queues using tables with all the traditional concurrency problems) instead of learning something a bit more complex.</rant>

Anyway, it's not going to be thrown away anytime soon as it's used in other parts of the engine (e.g. SMTP mail integration, Server Events and Query Notifications).

Last time that I decided to shell out more money investing in the "aluminium factory" I bought an mp3 player and found out rather quickly that they break as any other cheap player.

I also found out that the sustainable model of the "aluminium factory" is to make me pay almost the same price of a new player to replace a shattered display.

In the end I was lucky enough to find on ebay some companies madly working against the sustainability of the free market that sold me a replacement display for 20£.

I ever since bought only cheap, plastic players. They still even let you change batteries...

It's anecdotal at best. Not only it can't be generalized, at different ages the outcome may be a lot different. Kids need a certain level of maturity to understand properly conflicts and learn conflict resolution otherwise they simply feel them as a crack in their world. There are not fast and hard rules here, every kid/situation may be quite different...

Indeed. Even if there was such a contract, who fixed the price for it? In other words: who said that the right price/service in exchange for an incredibly precise audit trail of my behavior is targeted ads or some pretty lame free articles?

I paid my Navigon app, I pay for my Office 365 e-mail, I pay for the music I get, I pay for the local newspaper I read, I pay to access academia papers (i.e. ACM), I pay for a lot of tools many of which on a donor contract.

I don't even have a problem to pay a fee for a social site if I believe it gives me value in exchange.

Let's forge the contract in a different way: you want my data, you offer something in exchange, I decide if that's a good deal for me. If not, I may still decide to give you my data, but you pay.

Can't find the original HN submission, but someone posted this interesting article about it a few days ago: http://rainypixels.com/words/the-story-of-the-new-microsoft-...

At least it doesn't have a logo with lens flares....

Well, their lawyers apparently thought to know well the laws about warranty around Europe and they got fined...

Then again you could also make it complex with interleaved colors up to more than a hundred :)

You should simply be able to do it by: logging in into your hotmail account and going to http://outlook.com while still logged in. After that, go into mail "More mail settings" (click on the upper-right gear) and choose "Create a Outlook alias" if you want to add e-mail aliases @outlook.com

But now that you already signed up for a new account it may not work straight away...

I agree, especially sad.

The most productive and efficient mean for discussions is now pretty much just a binary deposit for porn and copyrighted material.

I still can't believe everyone got away with non-threaded forums vs. newsgroups when the Internets became mainstream.

Also, Google had its own share when they acquired Dejanews and broke the search.

I was about to prepare the query without ties and yes it is a lot harder than necessary and, more important IMO, much less readable/intuitive for people than have to maintain the code and that is exactly why different SQL dialects introduced ORDER BY/LIMIT/OFFSET/TOP/RANK etc.

But let me be a little bit picky about this and Date's view on ORDER BY.

The relational model deals just with the algebra/calculus without getting into the details of a language based on the model.

In the book pointed out by Matt, Date explicitly states he's not saying ORDER BY is not useful, just that it doesn't return a relation and thus it's not included in the algebra.

However a language based on the relational model, like Tutorial D, can include such an operator. To be double sure, I checked on The Third Manifesto V2 and a LOAD operator with an ORDER specification is defined in the context of the "special cased" support for arrays.

You can see a couple of paragraphs if you go here http://books.google.it/books?id=X85QAAAAMAAJ&dq=editions... and search for ORDER and LOAD (page 118).

TBH I'm not even sure it's a good idea to introduce arrays for ordering, but, anyway, back to the quota queries: we agree that regular aggregation operators are enough although the query becomes very complex.

In the same book referenced by Matt there's an exercise (7.14) showing how to do a quota query and you can see that even in Tutorial D it's complex.

However, in the solution, Date & Darwen also propose something else: to add a more specific RANK operator which is really just syntactic sugar to simplify this kind of queries. With the important difference, compared to ORDER, that it still returns a relation and not an ordered sequence of tuples.

Unfortunately the whole solution to the excercise is not available through Google Books preview, and the operator is formally defined elsewhere, but you can see how such RANK operator would work here http://books.google.it/books?id=WuZGD5tBfMwC&lpg=PA163&#...

Just a final comment about Date being reluctant to analyze the matter, unfortunately his work is disseminated in a lot of books (and he changed his position on quite several matters throughout the years).

I love the "SQL and Relational Theory" one but, having red all of his books, I would be hesitant to suggest it unless one already knows Date. I think the latest edition (8th) of "An Introduction to Database Systems" is still the best book to start with.

I'm not sure what you mean by fit poorly in the relational model.

ORDER BY, LIMIT/OFFSET have to do with presentation of data. So, although it's highly desired that a language based on the relational model supports them, they have nothing to do with the model per se.

As for opaque keys, I thought the old debate about surrogate/artificial and natural keys was over years ago. The relational model has nothing to say about it, that would be like trying to make a model understand if facts are true in the real world or not. A key is a key.

Moreover, last time I've checked transitive closure operators were defined for the relation model (people should not stop ad Codd papers, Date and Darwen wrote a lot of books, e.g. The Third Manifesto, extending on the original ideas).

NULL is a completely different beast and this is the only real thing one can consider problematic.

In some cases NULL just means the predicate for the relation is different because values for an attribute don't apply, so this is not really a problem, in some other cases we simply don't know the value when we are collecting information, and this is indeed a problem.

Date follows Wittgestein that said we should remain silent about things we can't speak about i.e. we shouldn't collect incomplete information, Codd came up with I-marks, A-marks and n-valued logic, SQL collapsed everything into NULLs and 3-valued logic.

FWIW Most Valuable Professional http://mvp.microsoft.com

(there used to be a Most Valuable Partner program in the middle of the nineties I believe, this program basically started on Compuserve forums and there was a time where the two programs' names overlapped)

I'm not sure what you mean here. Consoles and smartphones are general computing devices and are clearly marketed as such. Consoles are not only used for games/audio/video and smartphones are definitely not used for phone calls.

I guess it all depends on how picky one want to be.

Before the generation of consoles that includes the xbox, I can't remember of any real attempt to lock them down by preventing unsigned code the be run (and I don't consider not releasing an SDK really a walled garden).

I also don't remember Windows Mobile preventing people to run homebrew code and Symbian enforced signed-only code roughly when Nokia N82/N95 came around.

Anyway, locking some API/functionalities is different from requiring all code to be signed which in turn is different from requiring that all code must be distributed by a single entity (that can apply arbitrary terms of conditions to distribute it).

Although In logic "slippery slope" reasoning is a fallacy, in -real-life, it happens all the time. Draconian rules are introduced one step at a time so I still think that was about the right time to vote with your wallet.

Probably nothing.

I strongly believe that Microsoft was already trying to become a gatekeeper a decade ago setting the stage with Hailstorm. Only the fear for anti-trust authorities blocked them IMO.

Now Apple cleared the way and Microsoft already has a much stronger infrastructure in place to become a gatekeeper. I'm pretty sure they will fail at becoming THE gatekeeper, but I think they will still become A pretty large gatekeeper.

People should have voted with their wallet back when the walled garden xbox and iphone were released. But we are talking about the huge mass of consumers that simply don't give a damn.

Consumers swallow pretty much everything, just think about DRM and e-books. We were lucky enough that the industry got caught pants down by Apple with music but they learnt immediately from that.

Besides, both Microsoft and Apple were smart enough to let people think that, after all devices, can't really be locked down. The first xbox was a joke with a very convenient place to insert mod chips and the iphone was immediately jail-broken. But we all know this can be fixed by their side.

Unless things changed, the xbox 360 has very limited hacks to run game backups, but can't run unsigned code (it certainly can't run XBMC which was the reason why I bought the original version).

Apple TV, if rumors materialize in something real, will be the next big appliance following this path. Then, when times will be mature, jail-breaking (hacks in general) will magically become useless and that's it.

Also: Apple has been a little bit more evil by tricking a whole generation of developers (and developers wannabee) that they can make the ultimate app and become uber-rich while we know from numbers that for the vast majority of them income is ridiculous.

As I said, I'm not sure something can be done by us. Of course states should be there to prevent exactly this kind of behaviors but we all know how it works with politics and lobbies.

"Did you read the judgement yet? There's no point discussing anything without knowing the facts of the case."

I know it's nice and quick to dismiss arguments by presuming someone didn't read something, but yes, I read the article and I think the two photos are different enough. Mo matter what the judge wrote.

If anything, I'd say that the second photo (although aesthetically worse IMO) captures better the iconic landmarks by focusing just on the Parliament, the Big Ben and the Bus.

Yes, is missing, the bridge, but look at how busy is the first photo with the lampost and the bus covering the parliament and the people on the bridge. It also captures a wider area, loosing focus on the main icons.

The first is, overall, a better photo, but if I had to choose one to put on kitsch mugs, I find the second one more iconic (maybe cropping more on the right).

"If that's all it had been, the judgement makes it clear that the result would not have been infringing."

That was an extremization. Still, if I think I can do a better job at capturing a similar photo, I'm now barred from doing it and use the photo commercially unless I demonstrate that I did it either by canche, or that I didn't know about previous work (or more generally that my intent was not to take a photo not to pay the licence to someone else).

There are plenty of photo spots around the world were everyone go to make similar photos and plenty of well-known techniques that can be applied in post-processing. Yet, there are very few really original (creative) photos taken in such places.

Ok, bad wording, what I meant is that this is a typical photo taken during an overcast day where you don't expose for the sky: low contrast (you can see it from the buildings and flat shadows in the original photo) and blown up sky.

So may guess is that the original one was taken on an overcast day but the sky was not blown up enough to make the buildings pop up more so it was removed in post processing. Nothing much creative or new here.

The photos are too small to make a good evaluation, but to me it seems that the second photo was not even taken on a overcast day (shadows on the building are more harsh).

These are just speculations and it may as well be that also the first photo was taken on a sunny day and the photgrapher simply lowered the contrast in post processing (the judgement describes only the manipilations "In summary").

Anyway, this doesn't change a single thing in my opinion. I would go as far as to say that white sky is not only a common technique, but it's also iconic in this case (i.e. it was notthat much of a creative idea to express something unique).

The judgement is full of notes taken about the several differences between the photos, among which composition itself is the most prominent, yet the sky becomes so important??

Really, I believe the whole thing is much simpler that all what is written in the judgement: a) the two parties involved already had problems in the past (see point 2) and b) the judge was biased by the fact that the second photo was done in a similar way on purpose (Point 10 "He clearly knew about the claimant's work when the second image was produced because the whole point of the exercise was to produce a non-infringing image given the complaint about the first image the defendants had used")

Following the judgement, this painting is also infringing on the idea, composition and so on: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/03/03/article-0-0D74781D...

Or maybe not, because there's also a car in this one, so maybe it doesn't hit the similarness threshold...

Well, we may discuss about the "closely as possible without infringing". To me composition seems a lot different (with the second one being much worse, but I must say I'm also not impressed by the original one).

Red bus in black&white with overcast sky?

Give me a break... what are the chances to shoot with an overcast sky in London?

Besides, isolating a (mostly) single color object in a B&W photo is so popular (and abused) that you can even have it in new point&shoot cameras.

Go, figure: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonynex5n/page10.asp search for "Partial Color (R)" and click on the link.

Seems quite obvious that if you find yourself in that photo spot, and a red bus passes by, you immediately think to make it pop out with such a post processing trick.

I also don't buy the "clearly produced with the intent to evoke the same expression" argument. For example: how many pictures of the Matterhorn (with or without the lake in the composition) are taken and evoking the same expression?

This is simply a very bad judgement.

(Just to be clear: I see your point and my tone is not directed at you)

I think directive 1999/44/EC introduced that law, you can search on the EU site or here's a quick link with further info: http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/move/64/index_en.h...