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All these patents start off with "a method and system for blah".

But where's the method?

All this is, is a bland description of how such a system might work. It's not a system or method itself.

This is so pathetic the lawyer$ didn't even bother to create complete sentences:

[0048] Till date presently available web technologies and other communication media are more or less passive in nature. The concept of blogging providing an effective active medium for knowledge sharing. Still is restrictive and lacks organizer and other management mechanisms to derive most relevant as well as real time knowledge through active dialog.

Is that a sentence?

If this is the state of tech patents today, it's truly pathetic. This is nothing more than a UserLand-esque rant in legalese on current and future possibilities in e-mail.

Also see here.

Streaming is irrelevant. The patent is about downloading and managing subscriptions to audio files. It covers fetching new files when they're updated and making room on local storage by deleting older files.

Come to think of it, the best prior art for this is Usenet. Audio newsgroups contained audio files that were subscribed to by the user and news server software would make room for new files by deleting the old.

Yep, I think that'd about do it.

Also, the RSS standards history can probably point to some earlier implementations of client-side file management if you follow it down the rabbit hole far enough.

I too played with Kai's Power Tools a long time ago, it looked pretty, and I was impressed. However, those days I never did any serious work, I just played with the program's GUI widgets and saw how that influenced the final picture. Nowadays I wouldn't pay attention to this program, because I need to get things done, rather than play with an application.

Such a GUI may be a good thing when the user is interacting with the program for the first time. But when you need to seriously do something, eye-candy won't increase productivity.

For the past two days I've been reading a lot of info about GUI design guidelines, and here's a doc by Joel Spolsky; the funny thing is that he uses Kai's tool as an example of how not to do things

It's a fact that Dave Winer did not invent RSS. Even he admits it.

It's a fact that Apple published namespace and DTD for their podcasting extensions, and wrote their software to understand standard RSS (or at least one of the many mutually incompatible RSS standards, a mess which Dave Winer can take the credit for).

As such, I maintain that it's reasonable to assume that the lack of same for iPhoto is due to resource constraints or error, rather than deliberate malice.

I mean, we know that Steve Jobs insists on a new rev of iLife every year at MacWorld, whether the code is ready or not--we've seen it in past years, with early flaky code not being usable until Q2 point releases.

You forgot the mail client. Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.. PS: GNU Hello World includes a mail client. No kidding.

ha.. while I'm sure you are just joshing about the Emperor's New Clothes metaphor, you should be aware there is a naked Winer pic floating around, something Winer himself posted. I saw it via the old Winerlog:
http://static.userland.com/images/llamas/naked.jpg
And there's a symbol of the whole problem with geek bloggers like Winer. They think the whole world is so entranced with everything they do, they think people even want to see their ugly, fat, hairy, naked body. But most people (including me), having seen it, want to wash out their eyeballs with Drano.

Everything that Roland blogs about is just hyped psuedo-scientific BS. He only gets his articles published here by the hundreds becuase he has some special deal with the editors so that he gets alot of money from ad impressions from people cliking his links becuase his stories get posted here.

I checked out his blog (with advertising blocking enabled), and I noticed that someone seems to be running a denial of service attack on comments sections. This is one of the only times that I can think of such an attack being legitimate and warranted.

"Anybody know if 1. the code to WorldWideWeb is still around..."

http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementa tion/

"if it works on OS X?"

This says no.

"Which is based upon NeXTStep."

My understanding is that MacOS X isn't really so-much "based on" NeXTStep (in terms of re-using the same implementation pieces), but rather makes use of many of the same ideas and interfaces. So "inspired by" might be a better term.

Are you sure about that?

There's a scripting component for Python called OSA Python, and one for Javascript called Javascript OSA.

Frontier's UserTalk language is another implementation.

http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments?u=10591 0&p=1001&link=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F010 5910%2F2004%2F10%2F20.html%23a1001
Spam his blog!

That'll learn the motherfucker!

http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/ads.html

I prefer this one:
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads5/Apple Win95.jpg

or this one:
http://static.userland.com/manilasites/images/MMan ilaSitesCom/welibm.jpg

Also Radio Userland, and an open-source clone PyDS. The usual Open Source/Commercial software applies; technically PyDS may do more but requires more maintenance and is harder to use :-)

I'm not sure either product can split the feeds by category, but I usually just read them all at once; I'm one of the people who swears by the "feed" approach to newsreading. Both products can split out your website by category, though, creating an "everything" main page, and seperate pages for categories which are basically weblogs-in-weblogs, with independent pinging, templates, upload points, etc.... or not, if you just want them to use the same template and go to subdirectories by default. I often use this for focused feeds, for people who just want to know about one of my software projects and not my "real" weblog.

If you're handy with a scripting language, I'd recommend AmphetaDesk or Radio Userland. Both run as HTTP daemons so any browser can connect. And both can be hacked to present the list any way you want (AmphetaDesk via Perl and Radio via UserTalk). Search for the free Radio 7 if you don't feel like paying for the non-free Radio 8.

Dated June 1999

Manila (the software used on weblogs.com) has an export feature for exactly this purpose. (I just backed up my site right now. Luckily it wasn't on weblogs.com.)

Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data: "So since we're going to have competition, I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost."

What about Radio Userland and Manila?

Manila can host thousands of sites and Radio is a really clever application that requires little more than FTP or WebDAV to host - so you can use your Mac.com account or somesuch. Mac/Windows only, though, but it can so some really amazing things that you'd be hard pressed to do with PHP/MySQL.

What about Radio Userland and Manila?

Manila can host thousands of sites and Radio is a really clever application that requires little more than FTP or WebDAV to host - so you can use your Mac.com account or somesuch. Mac/Windows only, though, but it can so some really amazing things that you'd be hard pressed to do with PHP/MySQL.

I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.

Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.

After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.

We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).

Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.

It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.

One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.

Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.

I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.

Some useful links to information on ethical and anti-war licensing issues:

Slashdot thread

Open Source Software License discussion list thread

Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement: an example of a license which takes ethical issues in to consideration

Freshmeat thread

Advogato thread

UserLand thread

Yahoo group to discuss open source ethics

~ but when you search for the article in Google news, you can get right to the article?

The best opt-in I've ever seen is an RSS feed.

• If you put it in your aggregator, you want it.
• If you remove it from your aggregator, you don't want it.

Mass-mailers/mail-mergers/automated-mailers (including my-cowardly-self) can deal with the fact that people are simply friggin' overwhelmed with inbox influx. I'm not an AOL user, but I've dealt with lousy unsubscribe procedures by crying "spam" to CloudMark etc... Go cry to mommy that they accidentally marked your carefully crafted newsletter as spam. Get over it.

Spread the word, RSS doesn't suck. Overload of inbox crap, opted-in or not, in the inbox does suck.

Thank you MS for making Outlook 2003 not download e-mail images by default! Thank you SpamCop and SpamHaus! Thank you Netscape engineers and Dave Winer for RSS!

While I'm on a roll. What the F is up with the national do-not-call list? Shouldn't it be a national call-me-i'm-an-idiot list instead?

Google search on "and see how many copies there are" returns one result. Not much and the phrase was quite common, not even 8 words. In my experience, Google produces much fewer results than there actually are in long phrases, because in many pages newlines obstruct positive hits.

I'm not sure if MS aren't talking about something different from what most of this discussion thinks they are. Rather than showing the thread of discussion of whole emails (which we're all used to in other clients) it might be they mean something more like this old discussion of what e-mail discussions should look like by Ka Ping-Yee..

In case you manage to /. that, the idea is that it shows the responses to pieces of your email - the kind where someone says "see my responses inline" and responds to each of your points piecemeal, then you do the same to their responses, and so on.

I've often thought it would be cool to write something to parse emails the KPY way, but the heuristics would have to be pretty damn clever to deal with supercite. Specifically what I wanted was something that combined KPY's ideas with text-autosummarization , and some 'author ranking' information to produce mailing list summaries from gmane which are like Kernel Traffic and Cousins, or the now-defunct Eclectic.

Oh well, I can always wait until MS put this in Outlook 2010 ;)

redtail1's point and attitude is sadly a bit rare. Learning, exploring, sharing; while understanding those who "just want to get [var.thing] done". But I'd say the former is more central to the open source way, than the latter.

Pride in one's accomplishments is fine, but--and I'm not saying that's what the grandparent (jargoone) is doing--the bashing and negativity is so unuseful (unless very witty); stop energy as Dave Winer calls it. I mightn't like Winer very much, but I've learned plenty from him and his code.

There are things to learn, and to improve upon, everywhere. (Even stuff out of fortress Redmond ..once in a blue moon.) We should concentrate on finding all-the-possible-(GPL-or-BSD-compliant)-uses-under -the-sun for all this open source.

Good post, redtail1. Power to you. Sorry to go OT on y'all.

No, the ultimate fate of every computing device is to become a mail reader.

FWIW, I'm using Radio Userland for my weblog, and publishing it via my own domain and webspace, both supplied by 1&1 Internet here in the UK. All the content (posts, stories, pictures, etc) are held on my PC, and pushed out to the website (thankfully, I have a broadband connection) when I do updates. The other stuff (comments, trackback information) is held on the Userland 'cloud'. In theory, I should be able to transfer my weblog to a new domain and keep everything intact.

MT.

Here's a link to some info about Nutch, an open source search engine project that Tim O'reilly, amongst others, is involved with.

Wallowing in narcissism has nothing to do with weblogs, although the mass media have been propagating that slur since the earliest days.

Does having a popular weblog somehow give _you_ the right to define what weblogging is or should be, what is included and excluded? Or are you basing this on some survey of weblogs out there?

I certainly don't consider your non-personal blog any more authentic than things like this that were exploring personal topics eight years ago. Dave Winer has been posting psuedo-diary entries on Scripting News and DaveNet since the mid-1990s.

How dare you try to define weblogging for the rest of us.

Wallowing in narcissism has nothing to do with weblogs, although the mass media have been propagating that slur since the earliest days.

Does having a popular weblog somehow give _you_ the right to define what weblogging is or should be, what is included and excluded? Or are you basing this on some survey of weblogs out there?

I certainly don't consider your non-personal blog any more authentic than things like this that were exploring personal topics eight years ago. Dave Winer has been posting psuedo-diary entries on Scripting News and DaveNet since the mid-1990s.

How dare you try to define weblogging for the rest of us.

Wallowing in narcissism has nothing to do with weblogs, although the mass media have been propagating that slur since the earliest days.

Does having a popular weblog somehow give _you_ the right to define what weblogging is or should be, what is included and excluded? Or are you basing this on some survey of weblogs out there?

I certainly don't consider your non-personal blog any more authentic than things like this that were exploring personal topics eight years ago. Dave Winer has been posting psuedo-diary entries on Scripting News and DaveNet since the mid-1990s.

How dare you try to define weblogging for the rest of us.

Use Radio Userland. Your blog and archives reside on your hard drive, plus you can blog offline to your heart's content (then upstream it later).

This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .

I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:

1. Background. In 1998, the United States sued Microsoft, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Microsoft had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems ("OSs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for internet browsers, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer ("IE") browser. The court ordered Microsoft to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an OS business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 45.

1. Background. In 2006, the United States sued Google, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Google had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for personal content management systems ("blogs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for search engines, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its search engine and its journaling ("blog") software. The court ordered Google to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an search engine business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Google, 253 F.3d at 45.

The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.

I'm using my karma bonus to get this noticed, so don't mod me up if you don't want to (not trying to karma whore, don't need more karma anyways):

They started a new set of comments related to the Darl McBride open letter response after the first one mentioned in the parent post filled up.

Hopefully insightful or informative /.-ers will contribute.

Over at Groklaw there is a large set of comments forming in the hopes of drafting an open letter response to McBride's. It is my hope when they are finished that the /. editors will publish the text of said letter in an effort to debunk his claims and outright lies and misquotes.

I tried to post my comment on there but for some reason it wouldn't take. I offer my services to mirror a PDF or HTML copy of the response once it is finished. I hope others would follow suit, and perhaps some of the readers here with connections can get it published on high-profile sites or even pass it along to CIO/CEO/CTO type people in an effort to dispel SCO FUD.

More readable, human, translations of various articles and references to this story are available in the comments section of the write-up at Groklaw.

That's a good idea, now go write an RSS aggregator that supports HTTP auth,

You mean like this?

and then go convince everyone to support it in their servers.

No, only people who want private RSS files need to support it in their servers. And it's not like HTTP autentication is some sort of mystery, all reasonable web servers support it out of the box. After all, guess what, it's part of HTTP/1.0.

But first, you might want to think about how auth will interfere with RSS discovery (which is already screwed up enough).

Easy, it doesn't. Either you can get to the RSS feed or you can't, either way the aggregator has to handle it (people type in wrong URLs all the time, for instance, so any real aggregator has to handle errors).

You seriously overestimate the difficulty of this. Unusual, usually people underestimate difficulties. I hope you aren't a professional coder.

The original post can be found at groklaw

I just wrote to Mr. Varghese about who SCO's statements apply to and got a reply. He states that:

"All their statements - plus the interviews which I did with their US officials - have come through the same source so it represents the company's stance.

See this and this for earlier material.

I have reported their statements and also provided earlier statements as one should in a news story. The reader can draw his/her own conclusions about the seeming contradictions.

Cheers, Sam"

Not terribly helpful I'm afraid. As to Mr. Varghese's attitude toward SCO, he seems reasonable. At the very least he was willing to print a very long letter I sent detailing their misbehavior and the letter stayed on theage.com for a long time. He's on my list of friendlies.

Alex

Scripting News was most probably the first true blog, with Userland Frontier as the backend system [Aretha!]. Weblogs.com came shortly after but, I don't see an exact date. But I do believe it pre-dated Blogger and Pitas.

Very interesting article referenced in discussions at Groklaw by quartermass, IBM announced after buying Sequent that they planned on adding NUMA to Linux, and it was already running with NT and (eventually) 64-bit NT.

Why all the fuss now?

Why is it that when it comes to OS, everyone is bitching and screaming how bad monoculture created by Microsoft Windows is, but otherwise feeling warm and fuzzy and swear to god Google is and always be the only search engine they use?

The point is, are you really comfortable to have one, and only one, effective search engine? No matter how well it searches?

O'Reilly put it best :

Actually, Nutch has no ambitions to dethrone Google. It's just trying to provide an open source reference implementation of search to help keep Google and other search engines honest, by letting people compare the results of an engine whose algorithms and methodologies are transparent and accessible. It also aims to give a platform for people outside of the search heavyweights to research new search algorithms.

Lucene and Nutch are related:

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/2003/08/13#When: 12:20:53PM

Paul Nakada, via email: "It appears that the coding muscle for Nutch is Doug Cutting, the author of Lucene, an Apache Project open source search engine. We use it here at salesforce and have a huge amount of respect for Doug's coding."

For what it's worth, the above link was posted in a comment on the Groklaw page

See comment by Anthony Awtrey at 8/7/03; 7:24:38 PM

There is also a link to the documents in TIFF format.

I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]

Mono is always going to be on shaky ground legally

Why? Because it's a clone of a proprietary technology? In that case, Linux will be on shaky ground, as well, given that it's a clone of UNIX. And so will KDE and GNOME, since they both clone other proprietary UIs.

it will let people begin their critical application development on Linux before deciding that for safety they need to move to Windows.

I thought the main advantage of Linux was preventing lock-in to a particular system or vendor. Why the hell shouldn't people be able to choose to move to whatever system they please, including Windows? The only alternative to your example is that people will develop on Windows and deploy on Windows. How is that any better?

If they wrote their application for Java instead

Java doesn't do half of what .NET does. For example, you can't mix different languages together in one app, which is one of the main features of Mono/.NET.

they would have less need to move off Linux, and should they wish to, a far greater choice of hardware and operating system environments to move to.

Mono is as portable as Java. And Java still enables people to move to Windows.

Nothing prevents a full free software port of Java

In that case, what prevents a full free software port of .NET? Wouldn't such a port be 'on shaky ground', given that Linux is Sun's main competitor?

Just face it, .NET is a major breakthrough that is not going away any time soon. Yes, Microsoft does innovate once or twice every 20 years (or at least hires smart people who do). Furthermore, .NET really learns from the mistakes Java made. Ask anyone who uses .NET, and they will tell you that it dramatically increases programmer productivity. That single advantage is enough to cause most companies to keep using Windows and dump Linux. Just one more fact: many, if not most, of the people developing Mono use Windows. So I don't think the switch will be happening in the direction you predict.

Finally, please realize that Mono has the potential to dramatically improve Linux applications. C++ is a kludge and Java is slow as molasses, so people use regular C when a more modern language is appropriate. .NET solves this problem, which is why Ximian and Miguel de Icaza are embracing it. Please, read this, this, and this.

http://davenet.userland.com/2001/06/07/mossbergOns martTags

google search

Microsoft Aims At Google, and MSNbot

Microsoft Aims At Google, and MSNbot

e3609e352afba37683c47ce60f9086bb for the waste-setup.exe

554cfa7350333aa4e6eb3b6e24201d80 for the waste-source.zip
5645d0378b5bca6d2cf337686dca9a4d for the waste-source.tar.gz
115d1a2554db4490bdf97b9862df5 a24 for the waste.zip

The Technical Overview for the W.A.S.T.E. package has been coverted into HTML, courtesy of Mr. Lucas Gonze , and it is available at http://gonze.com/waste/WASTE_Design.html

A sourceforge project site has also been set up for the W.A.S.T.E. package. The project site is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/waste/ . It may be empty for the moment, but something will be cooked up very soon.

Below is just a partial list of mirrors for the W.A.S.T.E. package that are currently in operation:

Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package
Kindly please click here to find out more about the W.A.S.T.E. package

"exactly how can AOL plan to pull that?"

They can't. Dave Winer has posted the source.

I've got a copy of the install if someone wants to host it.