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This is Netscape not Mozilla. They are the same thing. Is it going to be buggy? Yup so is any other piece of software when it first comes out. I don't have it yet but I do know that on my Debian box at home I prefer 4.x to the current builds of Mozilla but I might try it again it has been a few months.

Regardless of which principality chooses to enforce copyrights, large corporate copyright holders have taken the initiative by employing "coded-in" architecture. Hence, traditional allowances that have kept the privelages of the copyright holder balanced with the public interest -- i.e. Fair Use-- may be hardwired out of the copyrighted product.

Take, for example, several MPEG layers currently in design. MPEG 21 (and I believe 4) comes with a nifty "Intellectual Property Management Layer" for "digital rights management."

Guess who's been busy championing this brand of fine-tuned copyright control?

Leonardo Chiariglione, executive director of the Secure Digital Music Initiative and a leader in the MPEG group, has been a main proponent of the MPEG-21 concept. SDMI is developing a generic architecture to handle security and digital rights management for Internet audio.
(from Electronic Engineering Times article)

I think Lawrence Lessig's book Code (link to O'Reily review) clearly explains the consequences of allowing powerful, corporate copyright holders to create their own copyright policy through soft/hardware architecture.

Sincerely,
Vergil

I haven't had a lot of time to study the UDDI spec, but I have been pondering the topic of Open Services for quite some time and my feeling is they will. I like the term Open Services, as Tim O'Reilly calls them, over Web services because this concept is applicable beyond HTML and just the Web.

I think the biggest hurdle at the moment for this concept, is the perception that Microsoft invented this concept (therefore there must be something sinister and evil behind it!) and its tied to just their technology which is just plain off.

The idea of open services where around before SOAP. I haven't done an in-depth genealogy of the concept, but I can tell you Dave Winer at Userland has been evangelizing it for a couple of year now. There is also Allaire's WDDX and in a looser sense RSS and ICE.

Microsoft did initiate the SOAP spec, but have put they have opened it up and submitted to the W3C. They incorporated IBM's feedback which garnered IBM whole-hearted support. IBM released their Java implementation on AlphaWorks and then donated the code to Apache. Even Sun conceded it was a good idea and gave as much of an endorsement as they could stomach for something Microsoft had initiated.

I would even argue that IBM is excelling beyond Microsoft. Well... at least in the developer community. They've yet to release anything commercially or articulated a product strategy that utilizes it. (Typical them.) Microsoft does seem to be betting quite a bit on SOAP/Open Services and going from there.

What I love about this concept (and why I think it will succeed) is that its fairly easy and straight forward to work with. It also is a more concrete way to get all of these different platforms that are deployed to talk to each other. It will just makes developing easier, better and smarter.

The way I read it, UDDI is just a progression in making solutions built on this concept more robust.

For all of those interested in this topic, here are some good background links on the topic that aren't so Microsoft-rah-rah.

• The Network Really Is The Computer
• XML: A Disruptive Technology
• AGENCY.CO M's Flexitecture Methodology
• Meerkat: An Open Wire Service
• XMethods: Web Service Listing
• SOAP::Lite (A lightweight SOAP server written in Perl)
• xml-rpc.com
• soap.weblogs.com
• Apache SOAP

I haven't had a lot of time to study the UDDI spec, but I have been pondering the topic of Open Services for quite some time and my feeling is they will. I like the term Open Services, as Tim O'Reilly calls them, over Web services because this concept is applicable beyond HTML and just the Web.

I think the biggest hurdle at the moment for this concept, is the perception that Microsoft invented this concept (therefore there must be something sinister and evil behind it!) and its tied to just their technology which is just plain off.

The idea of open services where around before SOAP. I haven't done an in-depth genealogy of the concept, but I can tell you Dave Winer at Userland has been evangelizing it for a couple of year now. There is also Allaire's WDDX and in a looser sense RSS and ICE.

Microsoft did initiate the SOAP spec, but have put they have opened it up and submitted to the W3C. They incorporated IBM's feedback which garnered IBM whole-hearted support. IBM released their Java implementation on AlphaWorks and then donated the code to Apache. Even Sun conceded it was a good idea and gave as much of an endorsement as they could stomach for something Microsoft had initiated.

I would even argue that IBM is excelling beyond Microsoft. Well... at least in the developer community. They've yet to release anything commercially or articulated a product strategy that utilizes it. (Typical them.) Microsoft does seem to be betting quite a bit on SOAP/Open Services and going from there.

What I love about this concept (and why I think it will succeed) is that its fairly easy and straight forward to work with. It also is a more concrete way to get all of these different platforms that are deployed to talk to each other. It will just makes developing easier, better and smarter.

The way I read it, UDDI is just a progression in making solutions built on this concept more robust.

For all of those interested in this topic, here are some good background links on the topic that aren't so Microsoft-rah-rah.

• The Network Really Is The Computer
• XML: A Disruptive Technology
• AGENCY.CO M's Flexitecture Methodology
• Meerkat: An Open Wire Service
• XMethods: Web Service Listing
• SOAP::Lite (A lightweight SOAP server written in Perl)
• xml-rpc.com
• soap.weblogs.com
• Apache SOAP

The existence of certain patents would tend to suggest otherwise. The fact is someone was able to patent making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Ralph Bear patented Television Gaming Apparatus and Method". Basically all videogames had to be licensed from Sanders Associates, Inc (Mr. Baer's company). The fact that this was allowed can be chalked up to ignorance. No one person or group should be blamed, there was enough ignorance to go around. While everyone could understand saucer shaped crafts that fly, this was not the case with videogames. No one, not even Mr, Bear himself, had a clue how prevalent videogames would become and no one else knew what they were.

As I understand it, the court case involving pong (just one of the things I mentioned) was not so much about any specific games (Hockey vs Pong) but rather Mr. Baer's 'videogame patent' was being defended. The similarity between hockey and pong was just a damaging bit of evidence against Mr. Bushnell and supported the claim that he deliberately stole the idea as opposed to the claim that any resemblance between Magnavox's product and Atari's was purely coincidental. I do admit I have not read the entire court transcripts from beginning to end but I'm pretty sure I got the important details right.

I'm not bitching that PONG was second hand, just stating the facts. Willy Higinbotham invented it, Ralph Bear patented it, Nolan Bushnell successfully marketed it. Magnavox took Atari to court, where the name Willy Higinbotham was never mentioned. Nolan Bushnell technically lost, but managed a slick licensing deal out of the mess. Videogames began their rise to total entertainment domination. That leads to the present, where many people continue to think Nolan Bushnell invented videogames and don't hesitate to pass on this false rumor, often in credible forums.

Intel did a crap job of organizing the working group. Instead of a decentralized, standards-based organizatiion Intel tried to make it an old-line "scratch our back" hierarchy. P2P developers rejected it.
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DigitalContent PAC

First, read the O'Reilly interview with them. Some decent ideas there.

Second, after downloading it and playing around a little bit it has some intriguing features. I'm going to play more. I'm reccomending to other people to try playing with it too.

Ignoring the obvious stuff about hax0red antivirus updates...

Groove looks pretty cool. First the bad news: Right now it's Windows-only, the protocols are undocumented, and there may be patents involved. But the good news is that these guys seem to have a good attitude. They're definitely in it for the long haul, actually thinking their design through (unlike Napster, Gnutella, etc.), and putting in security that would make a cypherpunk proud. And they're promising to release protocol docs so that other apps can interoperate with it.

This interview at the O'Reilly Network seems to have some interesting technical bits.

I just picked up a lucent Orinoco base station. It's basically the same core as the Airport (at the same price), and will happily interact with an Airport. It supports 64bit encryption (a 128 bit model is a bit more). Lucent will also support their cards and base station under Windows AND Linux. When asked about PC support, apple said something basically like "If you want wireless, use a Mac." Oriellynet has a piece on getting PC's to talk to airports.

webchick

Should also be Mach microkernel, a CMU research project. There was lots of discussion re. this in this 1999 /. story.

For a real nerdly analysis (what more could a true hacker want :) try Inside Mac OS X: Kernel Environment, a PDF document at Apple's web site which reveals some of the details. (This stolen from a nice article on the O'Reilly Network.

A "mock" microkernel would be an alpha release indeed!

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In a hundred-mile march,

umm..you cant port the palm OS to X dimwit.
Why go to the effort, you can just run native binaries under emulation :)

There are already supported emulators for Windows, Mac and Linux. Unofficially one for CE, too. For those that care, an O' Reilly article describes the Linux Palm emulator. Download from Palm's own download area. You need a Palm ROM file to get this to run, however. And you're supposed to extract it from your own real Palm.

its a non multitasking OS with virtually no screen management..hell its doesnt have any memory management either and treats memory like a database

Its simplicity and low end hardware requirements also happen to make it really easy to emulate. The PalmOS runs thousands of useful little programs tuned to run on a tiny screen. Typically these programs perform stand alone functions, they're unaware of and don't interoperate with any other programs that are installed on the Palm.

Reusing these in an emulated environment on a Linux PDA might be a worthwhile effort. The IPaq surely must have the CPU oomph.

A law firm (Oppedahl & Larson LLP) owns patents.com. There is actually some good stuff there. And of course, there is always Freepatents.org, IBM's Gallery of Obscure Patents, and O'Reilly's list of Controversial Patents.

I just read an article about using user style sheets to deconstruct web pages and easily determine table alignments, find web bugs and transparent shims, images missing alt attributes and more. Very useful to anyone debugging someone else's layout or for finding stuff that isn't readily apparent on the page.

Actually Damian Conway wrote a module that allows programming in a Latin version of Perl, complete including inflexions, order-free syntax and replacement of punctuation by the appropriate latin words.

When Bill Atkinson was adding scripting to his Rolodex program (and yes, he did get in trouble for using the name Rolodex) and turning it into Wildcard (which unfortunatly was someone elses trademark. Eventually Apple picked Hypercard because it was such a dumb name, it wasn't taken yet.) At first he was planning on just some action parameters to the program, and was figuring on one "accumulator" like location to hold info. When they scope of Wildcard grew from flatfile database to hypertext authoring system the scope of the scripting language changed, named local and global variables were needed, and the accumulator turned into the variable it.

Signal 11 was at least on the right track, even if he had some of the facts a bit off. There were certain things that would only modify the contents of it, so put it into|before|after destination was probably the most frequent statement in Hypertalk scripts. Certain noise words like the and to were allowed in order to help readability, but it was difficult to remember which constructs allowed them and which did not. (The statement delete word 3 of field "high score" worked but delete the third word of the field "high score" didn't) This tended to make Hypertalk easy to read, but harder to write. Not the ideal for a natual language style CLI, like we are discussing, but not bad for a programming language designed to foster cut-and-paste ad-hoc development.

The syntax style lives on in the Applescript (and a bit in MacroMedia Director, but they seem to be moving away from that with their "javascript-style" language.) Maybe the verbose "english style" language was a good choice for AppleScript. User scripting of desktop applications probably does have a lot of cut-and-paste style of code reuse. And someone is probably going to be able to figure out what is going when seeing a snippet of Applescript over VBSCript (one of WSH's choice of languages.)

The people who chose to use Hypertalk-style languages were really missing the point of what made Hypercard such a great development environment. The best thing about it was the lack of destinction between development mode and running mode. It was kind of like a baby-smalltalk or baby-lisp environment. So many people are enamored with interpreted language that cut the edit-compile-link-run down to edit-run, or with IDE's that hide the compile-link phases down to a single keypress or menu-selection, that they don't realize that even edit-run isn't a distinction that needs to be there. At the Perl conference Damian Conway and Aaron Wigley gave a talk about Llamacard, a Hypercard-like environment written in Perl and extensible with perThis l. It looks like something I really want to play around with.

June 30, 2000: MP3 Summit Ian at MP3 Summit webcast
You can find Ian's hour long talk at the MP3 Summit about 1 hour 8 minutes into the Wednesday webcast.

June 16, 2000: Guardian Free market fight for music moguls
Interesting article in a British national newspaper.

May 27, 2000: LA Weekly Genie 1, Bottle 0
Very amusing article on Freenet and copyright. Highly recommended.

May 24, 2000: Channel 4 News Hackers stay one step ahead
A very cool news item talking about recent attempts by the British government to censor the Internet and how Freenet will make this very difficult. Includes text and streaming video of the item.

May 23, 2000: Libération L'anarchie est au bout du clavier
An interesting French article about Freenet, concentrating on the freedom of information aspects of the system rather than just copyright.

May 12, 2000: National Post Napster secured page in Internet history
Interesting description of why Freenet is not vulnerable in the same way that Napster is, although I must say that their "final thought" is slightly perplexing!

May 12, 2000: O'Reilly Network Gnutella and Freenet represent true technological innovation
A nice article concentrating, for a change, on the technical side of Freenet and Gnutella. Reasonably accurate, although it understates the efficiency improvement that Freenet should provide (describing it as of comparable efficiency to the WWW where it should be much more efficient).

May 12, 2000: Het Nieuwsblad Vrijheid van downloaden
A Belgian article about Freenet.

May 10, 2000: Houston Chronicle Software developer pledges to foil all intellectual property watchdogs
A version of the article below, doesn't require that you register.

May 10, 2000: New York Times The Concept of Copyright Fights for Internet Survival
One of the better articles; concentrates on the copyright issue. Requires free registration.

April 27, 2000: PCFormat Daily FreeNet
A brief article on Freenet.

April 27, 2000: Heise News-Ticker World Wide Anarchy: Netz ohne Kontrolle
A German article on Freenet.

April 26, 2000: CNET.com Free, anonymous information on the anarchists' Net
Entertaining article with some nice quotes.

April 17, 2000: The Irish Times Anarchy Rules Alternative Web
A rather amusing article on Freenet.

April 16, 2000: Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
An interesting article discussing distributed systems and how systems like Freenet are actually in a similar spirit to the original Internet.

April 13, 2000: El País Freenet propone una red sin censuras, alternativa a la WWW
A Spanish article about Freenet.

April 10, 2000: Slashdot.org FreeNet's Ian Clarke Answers Privacy Questions
A very informative interview conducted by the readership of SlashDot.org, probably the closest thing to a FAQ, aside from our faq.

March 25, 2000: ABC News Freedom on the Net?
A rehash of the New Scientist article below, but likely to reach a much larger audience.

March 25, 2000: New Scientist Out of control
A "big bad Internet"-style article, but it is reasonably well researched and seeks the opinions of those who might be considered Freenet's opposition.

March 23, 2000: Heise.de Ein Netzwerk, das Zensur unmöglich machen soll
A German article on Freenet.

March 14, 2000: OLinux Freenet, a polemic concept to deal with WWW
An English translation of a Brazilian interview with Ian Clarke. Focuses on the technical aspects of Freenet, and goes into a reasonable amount of detail as to how the system works.

March 10, 2000: Webwereld Anoniem Freenet ultieme schuilplaats voor piraten
A Dutch article on Freenet. My Dutch is a little rusty but it looks like it is primarily inspired by the Wired article below.

March 8, 2000: no spoon FreeNet : le réseau anonyme distribué qui supplantera le Web
An excellent French article on Freenet, draws an interesting parallel between Freenet and the writings of Neal Stephenson.

March 3, 2000: Need To Know sufficiently advanced technology: the gathering
A brief but excellent article again approaching Freenet from a pro-freedom standpoint.

February 24, 2000: PigDog Journal Get in on the Ground Floor of Freedom
A very positive little article describing Freenet and why they think it is interesting using some rather "colorful" language.

August 14, 1999: Brave Gnu World FreeNET
One of the first articles about Freenet back when it was 100% theory. Still an excellent introduction to the way Freenet works.

(Even Mozilla isn't looking good.)

Bzzzzt. Wrong. Have you used any recent builds? Mozilla's rendering speed is spectacularly good now. It's rendering everything I throw at it, even broken Frontpage stuff. (I've heard there *are* pages out there that don't render properly but I haven't personally run across one yet.) O'Rei lly waxes poetic about Mozilla's extensibility. (the idea of extending Mozilla's wsiwyg xml/html editor is particularly intriguing.) Mozilla skins are hot. Mozilla still does crash - though not as much - and there are still a few features missing. But to say Mozilla isn't looking good... just shows you missed the cluetrain. Try not to be late for the next one please. ;-)
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If you're aware of prior art out there that invalidates a patent that is existing, file a re-examination.

and

If you've got those documents now, and you believe a patent is issued that those documents in any way implicates or invalidates -- as I say, we've got several mechanisms for sending it on in. Send it on by re-exam, you can even just put it in the file if you want. We have a process for putting it in an individual file so that if anybody goes to enforce that patent, then they would have a major problem. You could send it to the patent owner and say, "I would warn you not to try to enforce this because you run a risk of --" [my emphasis]

Go read the debate between Tim O'Reilly and the Patent Office Director, or the comments in the Slashdot story. The thing is the rule called "Rule 56", basically saying that the patent applicant is required "to supply to the office all the prior art of which they're aware that's material to the examination of that application" which leaves the giant loop hole of "Ooops, we didn't know that at the time of our application, we're so sorry" and thereby leaves a lot of room for the patent to still be considered valid (if you don't have hard evidence that the patent applicant knew about it before they filed their patent application).

I also question your comments about other countries' patent laws. I know for example that the Swedish system most probably will invalidate a patent if there is later presented evidence that there was prior art before the patent application.

The exponential spread of requests opens up the most likely source of disruption: denial-of-service attacks caused by flooding the system with requests. The developers have no solution at present, but suggest that clients keep track of the frequency of requests so that they can recognize bursts and refuse further contact with offending nodes.

Furthermore, the time-to-live imposes a horizon on each user. I may repeatedly search a few hundred sites near me, but I will never find files stored a step beyond my horizon. In practice, information may still get around. After all, Europeans in the Middle Ages enjoyed spices from China even though they knew nothing except the vaguest myths about China. All they had to know was some sites in Asia Minor, who traded with sites in Central Asia, who traded with China.

Some relevant material from the article The Value of Gnutella and Freenet:

The spread of MP3 files, and their centrality to Napster, skew the debate over free and copyrighted content. Lots of people are willing to download free music files from strangers, because if they find out that the sampling quality is lousy or the song breaks off halfway through, nothing has been lost. They can go back to Napster and try another site.

Matters would be entirely different if you tried to get free software from strangers, especially in binary form. You'd never know whether a Trojan Horse was introduced that, two years later, would wipe your hard disk clean and send a photo of a naked child to the local police chief. (And you thought UCITA's self--help provision was as bad as it could get!)

Has every body seen this article where Time O'Reilly dismantles Patent Office Director Q. Todd Dickinson?

Here's an exchange that really says it all:

Tim: Are you a lawyer by training?

Dickinson: Yes, I am.

Tim: How would you feel if a lawyer was able to patent an argument?

Dickinson: If it was new and non-obvious, I wouldn't have a problem with it at all.

Tim: And the ability to basically extract a royalty from other lawyers for using that same legal argument?

Dickinson: As I say, if it's new, and if it met the statutory standards for patentability (and that's the key question here), and it was incorporated into software in some form, that wouldn't be a problem.

Tim: No, not in software. Just in actual, in court.

Dickinson: Well, I don't want to deal in hypotheticals. The courts haven't dealt with that question.

Now, even when this guy was completely snookered by Tim he couldn't bring himself to concede the point. It was at this moment that every shred of confidence I have in the PTO evaporated completely. It went on...

Tim: Well, how about a basketball player invents a new move. Should that be patentable?

Dickinson: Moves aren't patentable subject matter.

It continues in this vein. Eventually the moderator steps in to rescue him from embarrassing himself further. Read the entire article.

In my opinion, this man is the problem.
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I was surprised by the Tim O'Reilly / Patent Office interview posted yesterday. Dickinson's attitude was outrageous in that he felt the current system is adaquate.

I remember reading editorials 10 years ago, month after month in DDJ declairing software patent office to be totally inept regarding technology patents.

A few years later, I ran into a problem implementing a self-service banking application due to a DC-based company's patent on finacial transactions originated from a consumer's home and secured with a password! "PIN-based transactions" originating from a home as opposed to a bank-run system like an ATM.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

btw, for anyone who only read the interview, i recommend you listen to the real audio stream--you can't appreciate the full humor of Dickinson's arguments without hearing his tone of voice..

high bandwidth real audio stream
low bandwidth real audio stream
mp3 of interview

the best part is when tim points out that very new subjects are being raised that need to be dealt with and Dickinson responds "Bah!" (unfortunately translated to "Nah." in the text version..)

but what does everyone think about patenting a lawyer's argument? could a defense lawyer patent the (albeit obvious) argument that the prosecution is going to make, and thereby the prosecution couldn't make that argument? of course, patents take a while to go through the system, but what about a situation where a trial was being delayed greatly (to go to the supreme court or whatever)--could one side in the intervening time patent the other side's argument?
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I'm surprised by how many posters discount LC's basic business model. The fact is we are in the very early stages of the adoption curve for Open Source technologies (and that's probably even true of Apache, whose 62% market share could easily climb to >90% in the next five years.) In the future there are going to be tons of companies who want (need) some legal entity to stand behind their systems. The fact that the source is open and HOWTOs are plentiful only means that the support will be easier to provide than for proprietary apps, so customer satisfaction should slowly rise. Unfortunately, LC has bungled the whole thing.

I hate to quote scrip-cha but I think Eric Raymond and Tim O'Reilly are right on regarding the viability of the business model. (Granted, TOR is arguing for a much more expanded services offering, but it's still a services offering.)

Also check out my review of the RHCE along with additional Linux cert articles at the O'Reilly Network. jd

See also Keith Bostic's interview at O'Reilly's FreeBSD DevCenter. He is one of the BSDi founders and runs Sleepycat Software (BerkeleyDB - the base for Perl's DB_File Module).




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Tim O'Reilly and others have been drawing attention to the possibility that web-hosted applications such as MapQuest and Hotmailreduce the demand for free software.

There seems to be less incentive to open the source when it all sits in one centralized server farm controlled by one company. Or is there?

One other question. Where are all the Slashdotters who spend half of each patent discussion criticising Coble? He made a useful, coherent sensible arguement, which is actually the norm. Oh well.

I'm certain I have no idea who/what you are talking about.

What is the argument for coputter programs deserving a different sort of protection

Ahem.

http://www.oreillynet.com/patents/
http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/amazon.html