Viewing profile — riferguson

...which won a Grammy last year for "Best Bluegrass Album", and for which he is actively touring right now. So, yeah, his point is "here are the royalty riches you can expect when …

"Easy", as in least effort on your part, or "easy", as in highest probability of success? Not at all the same thing.

Judge Learned Hand: "Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not…

I stand corrected. Apple has one patent in the H.264 pool, US 7292636, and one in the MPEG-4 Systems pool, US 6134243. I have no idea if either of these would be relevant to Theora…

Presumably it would be the holders of the putatively infringed patents that would be assembling the "pool". I don't think Apple is in the Video Codec patent-holding business. As a …

Once again, Gabe and Tycho have the important insight: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

If the job involves writing code, you're going to be asked to write code in the interview. The "reverse-a-linked-list" question is an attempt at "minimal coding question that anyon…

Three things: First, those are questions for a variety of different positions all mixed together. Product manager candidates get asked different questions than engineering candidat…

I have absolutely no opinion about the validity of this particular patent, but I want to forestall a bunch of random griping. Please, please don't post commentary that involves "ju…

Every reference to the GPL in the article is to version 3 of the license, which does not contain the language you reference. Care to try again?

You're missing mine, I'm afraid: I've made no claim about anyone having to do anything. Indeed, if I was in Charlie's shoes, I wouldn't be working on spec. Let me put it another wa…

I will go and read the paper. Thanks for the pointer.

[Let's use "Alice" as the name of our hypothetical security researcher.] If the Bad Guys can get the exploit from someone else, then Apple equally could pay someone other than Alic…

I have no problem with you, Charlie, or anyone else being paid top dollar for his or her work, particularly in an important field like security research. Indeed, I think it's a gre…

Miller says that the bugs have a market value beyond $5000 -- indeed, he claims that an IE8 exploit has a "market value" of over $50k. But that market value exists only if you're w…

Dude, Google is your friend. Mike was being coy when he described himself as a "former Microsoft employee", but dismissing him as a "random investor from Texas" is silly. http://pe…

It's not clear from the video, but the utility power number probably includes environmental stuff like cooling and lights. Just dividing one number by the other isn't going to give…