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Can Lotus Notes R3 Prior Art Save The Browser?
theodp writes "Apparently stunned by the implications of Eolas vs Microsoft, Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove fame offers up Notes R3 as prior art for the notorious Eolas patent. To bolster his argument, Ozzie used the Notes R3 feature set to recreate a scenario close to what was described in the patent. After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay, it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel."
I was really hoping this suit would make for a better IE.
This could be good for Microsoft, which in some ways is a bummer. But if Eolas was intending to carry over this suit to other browsers, than it could be good for everyone. Although in the end I was still hoping to see Microsoft crash and burn for something.
A thousand or so of these half million dollar lawsuits are all that is needed to take down such a large corporation.
Given current trends, I wonder how unlikely this is...
Like the apes say, "oh shit, spaceballs, there goes the planet"
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
It's a half BILLION dollar lawsuit.
$500M, not $500k.
Specifically, 521 million dollars.
Something tells me Eolas broke out the champagne after that verdict...
Keep in mind, that if Microsoft is screwed over with abuse of a patent, you might be next.
Same thing with the abuse of any right or law. Keep in mind when the law is abused or a right trampled on, even for a good cause, the next time it may not be a good cause or it could be you that is being abused.
Fight Spammers!
"it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel"
He really needs to get laid.
Only in a limited number of circumstances would a case be re-opened to present newly discovered evidence. The fact finding stage of this case is over. I doubt this information will be of any use now.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
One thing good about this entire issue of Eola patent is that it is likely to expose the danger of software patents and more people would become aware of it. Since microsoft, not any free software project is the victim, even PHBs would find it easy to understand
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
There's prior art for a lot of what's been awarded a software patent. Besides that, a patent should only be awarded for a process or design that is non-obvious. The test for that is supposed to be a committee of highly credentialed people in the field to agree that its non-obvious. Few software "inventions" are non-obvious. The committee is filled with DeVry dropouts who donated enough to a campaign or two to get a committee seat. Hence the utterly stupid patents that have been awarded.
Well, what now, MS can try and invalidate the patent if this "discovery" is upheld in court, will that change MS for the better?. So morally what should we do?
1. The patent is outrageous, and demonstrate with a "GO MICROSOFT"
or should we wait until MS gives us a hint by replacing its index page with "in protest against software patents"?
He has valid licenses for DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 and Excel! Otherwise, he could be in some trouble with Microsoft.
I don't think a court would consider this a very good example of prior art. Consider that most any software patent would have been implementable in your favorite programming language ten years ago, if you'd thought of it. Whether the building blocks were lines of low-level code or statements in Notes is irrelevant. Now, if a copy of a Notes app that used that particular technique way back when could be found, it'd be a different story.
I strongly dislike software patents (I dislike patents, period), but that's no excuse to be sloppy in attacking one.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't like a lot of what Microsoft does and that I have issues with a lot of their software, particularly Internet Explorer. With that said... this is very much a good thing.
Eolas could easily proceed to sue the Mozilla Foundation, Opera, and anyone else who writes a browser with plugin technologies. That would be devastating for developers, users, and web designers. The News.com article linked in one of the previous articles on this topic points out that not only would the browser have to be revised, but far too many web pages as well.
Would I like to see Microsoft set back a bit, or at least forced to mess with IE some? Yeah. But this is a case that would affect all of us negatively, not just Microsoft. We owe Ray Ozzie some thanks for bringing this to light.
Mark Erikson
I'm beginning to wonder..... perhaps a community "Prior Art" effort, somewhat comparable to the open source community, is needed.
Identify, research and debunk such absurd/greedy patents (and perhaps eventually much or all of the software patents nonsense) so as to get the patents withdrawn/cancelled.... and/or reassigned to some "open source" holder.
Might eventually be able to deconstruct much of the current software patent farce.
Or perhaps the "open source" community could get some showstopper patents of its own, to use as leverage against overreaching/absurdist patent holders holders to. Perhaps even get other altruistic patent holders to donate their patents to a pool of such patents held by an "open source" protector, so as to grow them and increase the leverage.
People are going to mod you (and probably me) down as being flamebait, but I was surprised at the outrage surrounding this lawsuit.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better. Some sites are unusable WITHOUT having Flash. That's not the way we should be going. Accessibility, backwards compatability, and speed, are all important issues. Demanding people use Flash doesn't help with that. Slashdot recently linked to a hardware site that used Flash for its benchmark graphs.. no animation there, just blatantly unnecessary use of Flash.
Plugins encourage people to just throw plugins into their old crappy non-standards compliant browser rather than get a new one. There are people using Netscape 4 with Flash who are still perfectly happy.. they're like the elderly drivers in their 30 year old 'danger on the road' Chevys.
Plugins are like offering 'plugin upgrades' for cars. When your car gets slow, plug in a 'turbo' upgrade.. sure, it makes the car fast again, but your engine was busted up anyway, and you should just get a new one.
Without plugins we can rely on more integral browser support for proper standards like SVG, CSS, and the DOM.
You might argue that Flash is an open standard, but it's not. Macromedia updates it at such a fast pace that new features and methods are thrown in every few months. And, worse, Macromedia's Flash plugins and player take over 99.9% of the Flash playing marketplace.. meaning you're forced to follow their standard.
Let's kill all these plugins, and have support for open standards within the browser. If SVG, DOM, and CSS2 were implemented fully and perfectly, we wouldn't need proprietary formats like Flash at all, and accessibility would be improved.
Give me XML and the SSL protocol and screw the rest. Cookies, too! They just create privacy and security hazards anyway. Like I need Flash? I don't even have it installed and it's an annoyance that some sites don't have HTML alternatives or a dumb Flash menubar that could easily be HTML with, if truly necessary, a javascript drop down.
Java applets, too, need not be in web pages and I'd live fine tomorrow if I had to download them and run them as normal applications. Any worthwhile ones are too big to run in a browser anyway.
I wish dillo had better rendering otherwise I'd abandon Mozilla, much less IE which I have no reason to use now that I can copy over Firebird on foreign Win machines and use without installation.
Even though the fact-finding portion of the case is over, these facts may be admissible in a new case when Eolas goes after the next guy.
As a result, MS may still have to pay the $500M, but Mozilla et al may be spared from similar judgement. Sadly this could go to court and could be expensive if Eolas wants to pursue it with others... has anyone from the OSS browser community contacted Eolas? As others have suggested, they might be amenable to licensing it to that community and then a court proceeding might be avoidable altogether.
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you have questions about this, please email me at tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
If ms doesnt win we will not only have to recode tons of webpages, but we will have be shelling external viewers for every form of media on a website.
While I have no love for Microsoft, this will be a good thing if it results in the defeat of this patent suit.
Software patents have the potential for destroying the software industry.
In 1972, the Supreme Court of the US ruled that you couldn't patent an Algorithm, it had to be a "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter." But then in 1981, they sort of reversed themselves to allow patent protection for algorithms that were part of a patented process.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
Software patents could push the price of everyday software, even Open Source software, to astronomical levels. You think the SCO situation is bad? Imagine if all those ancient IBM, Burroughs, DEC, Sperry, NTT, AT&T, etc, patents got dug up and enforced. Try writing software without using some of the algorithms that were developed from the 1930s and on. But, on the other hand, imagine if those companies (or the companies who now own the rights to their work) were to use all that prior art to clobber companies like SCO or Eolas who want to scorch, burn, and pillage.
StdDisclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, lawyer, or legal professional. These are opinions and facts as I understand them.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I don't think this is the right thing to be attacking Microsoft for.
Ray Ozzie's a bright man. He might be a bit too much into bed with Microsoft for my tastes, but he can see how Eolas getting its way here is a B-A-D thing. It'd be like someone holding a patent on HTML.
>copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay,
Does that mean that Microsoft did refuse to send any free copy of an obsolete software to anybody who may spare them half a billion dollars?!
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
AC comments get piped to
Lots of it in fact, from Microsoft's minority stake in Groove. With his old-school geek roots, it's probably just the principle of the thing that's motivating him here.
For a good summary of the case, check out this page. Read the whole thing for a good summary of all the mitigating facts that make this a totally non-frivolous lawsuit.
..wayne..
I hate MS, but hopefully this thing can be beat. (Did I sum up the first 50 posts properly?)
He woulda sold that to Microsoft (or let MS pay up and sold it to any other party he wanted to side with in the near-future).
Note capitalism eating capitalism.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Just how far should this be pulled? I wonder if I will ever again be able to drive any make of car with a radio, CD player, handsfree for my cell phone and a small refridgerator hooked to the lighter output in the back. Or will one make claim the right to such "plug ins"? Sheesh. . .
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
One of the components of patenting something is that it should have a commercially valuable application or manifestation.
If Lotus had the capability to do this, but had no commercial app or app that could be used commercially, then it just existed as a theoretical possibility. The prior art doesn't nullify the patent, but the classification of the patent changes from something equivalent of new-method to something equivalent of new-use. But, the thing is still patentable.
Now, if an invento sees that theoretical possibility, and identifies it with a commercially valuable functionality, that manifestation of method or machine is patentable. I believe it should be, and believe that the Patent Office follows that guideline too.
So,if my understanding of the method and use patents is not flawed, Ozzie's work, if it holds up, merely says the concept is unpatentable under one classification - but, it can still be patented under another classification.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
From the article:
These documents, applications and solutions are hosed on a server analogous to today's "Web application servers".
That's a true assessment of Lotus Notes if I ever saw one.
After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay...
Heh.. I got all that on the shelf over the 'puter nicely sorted and in colourcoded diskette-boxes (DOS and WIN in the green one, apps in the red, games in the blue), and if I look in the closet, I got a nice, fast 486DX33 with a whopping 8Mb RAM to run it on. So if setting up a ten year old system is the hard part, the actuall programming must be really, really easy - as I could have that system up in ten minutes.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
The only good thing about such patents is that they expire in 20 years, and you only have 1 year after you publish the idea to apply for a patent. So ancient stuff is fortunately rulled out.
The Raven
$$$$$$$$$ That's how and why, and it makes laugh and cry both at once.
/rant
...if this proves to be the thing that lets us keep plugins in the public domain.
As a Flash developer, the idea that users would have to take some convoluted route to access a movie I made just so some fat jerk can get rich really ticks me off.
The U.S. Patent Office needs to get up to speed and stop issuing patents on trivial systems features. I mean, using sub-programs in programs is something I have done in C++ since the late 80s. WTF Why is a Web browser supposed to be so special a thing that someone can issue a patent on a standard engineering process?
M
Besides that, a patent should only be awarded for a process or design that is non-obvious. The test for that is supposed to be a committee of highly credentialed people in the field to agree that its non-obvious.
Maybe one could even demonstrate that an algorithm is obvious:
One could submit to a group of programmers the problem that a proposed patent is going to solve.
- If they can outline or even implement the very same solution to the problem, the patent is rejected because it's obvious.
- If they come up with a different solution, the patent can be assigned but the equivalent solution becomes unpatentable, because it's obvious. So if the patented solution has some peculiarities, the inventor can make the deserved money out of it, without posing a great danger, there is a free alternative.
- If they can't come up with a solution, the problem can be submitted to the committee of "gurus" (this way they are employed only when really needed): no solution, the patent is awarded.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I just didn't get the "commercially valuable" part. It was (and still is) an important part of Notes. We the consultants used embedding Excel into Notes in many projects for our customers.
---
Support Mozilla. Buy the CD.
I thought BBS's and RIP graphics would be prior art.
Patenting plugins is like patenting the idea of DIY home improvement - ludicrous (although I wouldn't be surprised if someone has already patented the latter...)
Does Microsoft garner enough of a gain from patent law to offset potential $500M losses?
If not, simple economics argues it will (not could, not should, but will) join the Open Source community in opposition to software patents.
The swipe against IBM, which *does* accrue such gain, is just gravy.
Maybe the folks who overflashify websites will get a clue that they need to do something else. I sure don't want that garbage when I browse the web. Floating adverts that have no close button, and are so loud that I have to browse with the sound turned completely off. The result of this suit means they are going away? Say it isn't so! Oh, please do not throw me in that briar patch.
Exactly.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
If you did use it for customers in the disputed time frame, then your use has satisfied the commercially valuable part.
Basically patents are instruments in commerce. Something was allowed to be patented, i.e. denied to rest of society, if it was shown to have a commercial value, and hence an incentive for the patent holder or agents thereof. It was believed that the benefits from an inventor implementing a patent dwarfed the negatives of denying the rest of the society from being able to freely build upon it.
Your using it for cutomers means that the patent cannot be claimed under new-use as there is nothing "new" about it, and Ray's whole article shows that the patent can't be claimed under "new" method as neither is the method new.
Guess, it means that the patent should be busted.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Especially the Cookies thing.
Without them, there is absolutely no way for web based applications to maintain state across pages, meaning that there's hardly a web application in the world that would still work.
Sheesh...
There's also some real compelling java applets too - like a Library catalogue I rememeber using once.
And Flash... Well, I tend to mostly agree with you, but oh well.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Then how do you post?
The pdf standard is completely free and open. Adobe does not charge any fees or in any way restrict you from using pdf, not only that but they have the complete spec available for download on their site (as well as all of the past iterations of the standard!) That is why Ghostscript ps2pdf and all those other tools are allowed to exist.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
microsoft wouldn't crash and burn for this, they've got plenty cash to buy top lawyers to defend them.
If Microsoft truely were the evil bastards we believe them to be, they would run the trial to completion and then obtain an exclucive license to the patent for, say one billion dollars. This would lock up the browser market for Microsoft and Windows. Netscape was worth over 3 billion dollars at one point, so a signle billobuck seems like a bargain.
Yeah, so are the users, especially if they're still using Notes!
IANAL (nor are probably 99% of the other people commenting), but this may not count as prior art. The important thing about prior art is that it is made up PRIOR to the patent in question. If someone patented the wheel, and I then read the patent (think blueprint) for it, I too could take a hammer, saw, chisel, etc. and scream "Look how obvious this is!"
In this case, if someone can prove they created a similar combination of program(s) prior to October 17, 1994, that would stand a much better chance of invalidating the patent. A mockup done in 2003 likely will not.
even PHBs would find it easy to understand
Hee, hee!
Moi: This patent will make Mozilla illegal.
Boss: I don't understand. I'll have to schedule a meeting with the IP guys sometime next year.
Moi: This patent makes Internet Explorer illegal.
Boss: Horrors! I'll get the lawyers digging for prior art right now!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If Microsoft needs prior art to disprove these patents perhaps they should have a look at X Windows and any version of Unix circa 1993. I used to do exactly what these patents claim using a threaded news reader called xrn. In addition to being obvious and therefore not patentable it was common practice in a variety of applications including Framemaker to name just one commercial application that did this. I certainly hate to be the one to help out M$ but some of these software patents are debilitating.
Umm, no.
It doesn't matter that he could have.
Of couse it f'ing does. The patent is on a plugin system not a specific plugin. The point is that Lotus Notes R3 had a plugin system which meets all of the requirements of the patent before the patent was granted. In other words the patents methods had already been invented and used commercially before the patent was even submitted. With a patent this broad that will generally invalidate the patent or at least limit its scope significantly.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Um...how about this little idea. Store the state information in a database on the server. Pass a unique id string in the URL, and when each page is generated, all links have that unique id so that the server knows who is who.
I mean, really...
Blar.
But what's wrong with reading PDF files in the Acrobat viewer externally from the browser? If you download an MP3 from the Web, you don't really want it playing in your browser, you want it over in Winamp (or whatever you use). Ditto for PDF. A Web browser isn't meant to be an 'everything browser', no matter what Microsoft thinks.
Please cease and desist in promoting this notion as it is in volation of my 1997 patent #0987612345 "A mechanism for the establishment of peer review bodies to determine the existence of prior art with regards to patent applications and patent disputes".
Thank You.
AT&ROFLMAO
Ultimately, all the technically adept -> sexually undesirable propaganda among the nerd community is self-defeating. Girls like guys who talk big, not guys who commiserate about being losers.
For a counter-example, take a look at the Jews. They have managed to tie male intelligence into sexual desirability for thousands of years. Torah scholars get some serious action. And all of is based on a concerted propaganda effort by those same Torah scholars. You should read the stuff they write. It is a constant barage of "study the Bible and get women hanging all over you."
Sure, that sort of eugenics program has not resulted in too many Jewish supermodels, but damn if they don't make great physicists, doctors, and lawyers.
I don't know who first came up with, say, binary tree data structures or A* tree search algorithms. I don't know who first came up with code for virtual memory, case-insensitive string comparisons, hierarchical filesystems, or text string templating. But say that in each of these cases, the inventor had patented whatever application they had, and the patents were to include the algorithms... where would computers be today?
It's a shame not everybody sees it that way. Try to read this story in the mindset of a litigious businessman instead of a programmer for a minute, however, and the first thing you'll think is no longer "Thank God Eolas will be challenged on this" but rather "Ray Ozzie should have filed the patent instead so he could have earned half a billion dollars!"
No matter how obvious or broad a new idea is, somebody has to be the first to think of it, and whomever does has a chance to patent it, milk it for cash, and incidentally set the progress of software back 20 years in the process. Litigious individuals have a huge advantage over actual productive inventors in this process, too, because they can simply give a vague description of the idea while a productive person would be "wasting time" implementing it.
It's not that I don't think there should be any intellectual property laws surrouding software, just that the laws are sufficient without patents getting involved. You can't copyright a design for a particular gearbox or drill bit, so you have to patent it. And, once you've done so, your competitors are just prevented from copying that particular part, not from "using gears to transmit torque" or "drilling to reach oil". With software patents (at least of the egregious kind we see on Slashdot) nobody seems to care if the patent application is so unspecific or obvious that it wouldn't help anyone else to solve the problem at hadn, or even if it is so broad as to prevent people from solving related problems. I'm not sure why, either. Is it because mechanical engineering is so much older than software engineering that everything obvious has prior art which predates the current patent system? Is it because mechanical engineering seems more accessible to laymen and lawyers who are thus better equipped to throw the obvious ideas out?
Taken in another context, it's a bit like saying
If we dismiss the travesty that Eolas is trying to get away with because the victims are Microsoft and plug-ins, don't come bitching to me when you get sued off your ass for using a JPEG or GIF on your website.
The abuse of patent protections used not to inovate but to be supress them is necessary to point out the absurdity of our current patent laws. If judgements in suits like these were based on the actual value that had been created by the patent holder instead of the value created by the patent infringer, the protections provided by patents would make a lot more sense. This would prevent people creating patents as a direct revenue source instead of creating patents to protect actual products they're producing. A patent by itself would only be capable of preventing someone from infringing it but not as tool for extortion.
AFAIK, the prototypical GUI windowing system was the Xerox Star office automation system, ca 1981. As I recall, it's said that Jobs and Woz saw a demo at Xerox PARC, cost cut the design from a $25K office system to a $5K personal system, and begat the Macintosh of 1984.
Perhaps Lotus can now sue Eolas...
Finally something Lotus Notes is good at.... but given it's history of doing everything very poorly, it'll probably fail at being good prior art too.
Couldn't find prior art like this again!
Even though you demonstrated the d@mn thing once upon a time!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At a really fundamental level, how different is transparently running a plug-in on a web page different from a program written in C or C++ causing a DLL written in Assembler to execute?
Are printer (and other device) drivers all that different than plug-ins?
When I click the Print icon, aren't I in effect asking the operating system to transparently execute a separate ("plug-in") program, the printer driver, to perform a task for me?
Or am I missing the point here?
Read this!
It's a USA Today story from the cover (!) in 1996.
Important points:
Dr. Doyle (Eolas) isn't trying to squash Mozilla or anything like that. What he was hoping to do would be to force Microsoft, Sun, etc. to join an organization where they would standardize their architecture. He declared the current state of things then as a "hodgepodge", and it still is today (EJB vs. NET vs. DCOM vs. SOAP vs. agent archs). He claimed he would provide free licenses to anyone who would cooperate. He also thought maybe he'd get funding from some guy who was afriad of Microsoft or Oracle, and wanted his help to one-up what they had.
That ain't going to happen now.
I'm pretty sure he's cutting his losses and JUST going after the biggest fish in the pond.
You can also read his letter to the readership of DDJ (they had many of the same opinions as Slashdotters I've read so far).
Scroll down to the letters section. You may need to sign up for access. Alternatively, I will include a quote without permission.
This guy isn't the bad guy. He's just a dude who tweaked up his web browser for medical imageing, and had a bright idea. The University hired Townsend, Townsend and Crew to file the patent, and they couldn't come up with anything at the time. Maybe the weren't Lotus users?
In any case, since this guy wasn't a CS major (Biology), he probably wouldn't have been privy to Lotus. He was an academic Unix guy, and Lotus was big in business circles. I can't blame him, and think Ray Ozzie needs to get off his soapbox.
Lotus is dead man, don't give Microsoft any ammo. Doyle wants Microsoft to start playing nice, and you're undermining that. Great way to see your vision through Ozzie; they (Ozzie and Doyle) both had the same vision and I think he fails to realize how alike their thinking and motives are.
Microsofts' are less pure.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
/. readers must be slipping up... (either that, or its a Saturday :-) )I can't believe that no one else noticed that Eolas is just a "B" short of being Ebolas: one of the most deadly virii on the planet!!!
rotfl!
This was soooo funny! circa-1993!
I know someone (actually two companies, owners are related) still using windows for workgroups 3.11, ms-dos 6.22, novell 2.0, upnetone, older ms-dos, IBM PC-XT computers (8086-8088 processors) in some rooms, and a host of other oldies but goodies to run his business.
The hard drive the database is sitting on is larger and heavier than a brick, and measured in megabytes, not gigabytes.
Works for him, and he hasn't spent money on licensing in, get ready for this...decades!
Should've just come to Queens, instead of wasting time on ebay!
Did the inventor take several years to get around to sueing Microsoft? Or did they spend a couple of years in pointless un-negotiations? Many corporations will pretend to be negotiating while sending their legal beagles trying to break the patent instead. Some companies would rather spend $10,000,000 to break a patent that the inventor only wants $500,000 for. Some inventors want to stiff companies for $100,000,000 when their invention is worth $100,000. One can find cases to support any position you want. Which is what legal briefs are supposed to do.
Don't forget there was a far less than successful $10K Lisa system in-between.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why is Homestar runner always touted as the killer app for flash? It's a really well done website, provided you go in for the author's brand of humor. And, I must say, the programmer does manage to avoid some of the bugs that cause poorly coded flash sites not to run on the mac. But, I could live without homestar runner. If I had broadband, I could even live with mpegs.
Why couldn't he get away with it if it's true? Well, the bit about supermodels is somewhat subjective. By the way, I'm not Jewish and I have no idea if what he said is true.
Link to Townsend, Townsend and Crew website. These are also the guys who went up against Microsoft in the class action lawsuit in California.
Maybe it's the law firm who wants to tackle Microsoft more than Doyle. Food for thought?
^_^
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Everyone should know that to make coffee, you have to heat the water all the way to 100 degrees. The hotter it is, the faster it cools, but a cup of freshly-brewed coffee may well be hotter than 80 degrees. 70 degrees is hot enough to do damage to skin; but it is not only the temperature that is significant: we need to consider the specific heat capacity and duration of contact.
None of this changes the simple idea that eighty-degree-plus liquids probably don't belong in a flimsy container in a vehicle which is essentially a lethal weapon. But, unfortunately, that was what the punter asked for and that was what the punter got.
Sooner or later if not already, someone will sue McDonalds because their coffee is not hot enough, and the merry-go-round will start again.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Most individuals don't want,or need the ability to display chemcal structures.. But some users do. The plugin concept allows a small software developer to write a small library that handles interactive display, without having to persuade the mozilla or IE developers to incorporate the functionility in the main distribution.
Ideals aside -- and I believe in supporting the right thing even for questionable characters/companies -- it's pragmatic on every level to hope for a microsoft victory in this case.
You see, if they lose, they can actually turn this to their advantage. As others have observed, Microsoft can afford to pay licensing fees. Most developers of other browsers can't. Thus, if Microsoft were to lose or "settle," they'd simply be creating another barrier to entry in the browser market. Which is remarkably good for them in a time when their current browser is at a developmental dead end.
Tweet, tweet.
There is definitely value in PDF. In my day job, I write and maintain a program that generates reports in PDF format. But that's 'cause we're targeting printed output.
Viewing PDFs on the web isn't nearly as good as HTML though. HTML documents are easier and more comfortable to read. There's no concept of "the real page size", so you don't have different zoom levels and different page-layout modes. And fonts are hinted well.
I like the sound of this, but I feel it may well be doomed already as it seems to rely on many parties getting their s#!t together at the same time. Call me cynical, but in my experience, the greater the number of people required to co-operate, so the greater the probability of failure.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There used to be a site called BountyQuest.
. 013001/2103 00397.htm
Challenged the following patients for example;
"
-- A method for online music sampling, held by Intouch Group.
-- A method controlling access to an event venue through alterable tickets, held by Walker Digital.
-- Technology for database copying, held by Oracle.
-- Technology for single-chip network routers, held by Cisco Systems."
-http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw
"Democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Sorry, I had forgot about Lisa.
IIRC, Lisa ran about $10-12K, depending on options. As you note, a real dud in the market.
Probably a year or two before its time, too focused on secretarial tasks. It took the IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3 to open up the business market, to make the very idea of a small computer legitimate.
The problem with patents isn't that they're granted too easily. It isn't that patents are granted for obvious processes, or processes already in existence. It isn't even that patents can hide in a product for years, gaining in popularity, before the patent owner demands payment (though that particular aspect really disgusts me). The real problem with patents is that there's no financial cap on the "reward" the patent owner can demand.
In this case, Eolas got half a BILLION dollars. I can't imagine that even if this patent has merit (I don't think it does) that the staff at Eolas have truly produced something of that worth. There is no way Eolas invested anything like that into research for their patent. Even if Eolas had a rare genius on their staff who invented something truly unique and revolutionary, no single person can produce half a BILLION dollars of worth.
Oh sure, that's just "capitalism" somebody will say. The property owner gets to pick the price. Mysterious "market forces" will sort everything out. But in the case of patents there are no market forces. Patent owners enjoy a monopoly where nobody can legally compete. The patent owners can set their prices sky-high and nobody can undercut them.
Rather than putting the onus on the patent review process to "weed out" the bad patents - which I personally believe is an impossible task - there should instead be a financial valuation done of patents before they are granted. The patent owner can document their expected earnings from the patent. If the patent owner poorly estimates the expected earnings (claims a future earning of $1mill but collects half a BILLION dollars) then something is almost certainly wrong.
This way companies (incl. Microsoft) can easily identify any patents that may financially harm them in the future and invest more effort into disproving their merit. If the patent owner truly believes their patent is worthy then they can invest more time and money into defending the patent. This is pure self-interest at work, so I have every confidence that it will work.
The current patent system is like a lottery. The fix is to make it accountable. My idea might not be practical for reasons I cannot see, but I'm convinced that something similar to it will fix the patent system.
Here's a hint.
Whenever you order a hot cup of coffee, DON'T HOLD IT WITH YOUR KNEES IN A CAR.
"Sufferin' succotash."
But.... I don't remember any client machines having a half gig of RAM in those days, although this was simply an early example.
More power to him though. He should be able to winnow this down to some simple test cases, and prove his point. Possibly even with earlier releases.
Embedding of plugins or external applications is a feature that would take significant effort and testing to develop, and would consequently be a major feature of the software. It is extremely hard to imagine that nobody has ever exercised this major "embedding" feature of Notes before, even before the filing date of the patent.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
On my computer I see crazy shit:
%PDF-1.2
%aaIO
20 0 obj
>
endobj
xref
20 14
0000000016 00000 n
0000000627 00000 n
0000000898 00000 n
0000001052 00000 n
0000001210 00000 n
0000001704 00000 n
0000001891 00000 n
0000001993 00000 n
0000002187 00000 n
I mean wtf is tghat!!!!
Oh wait, it's the only copy of the article I could find in electronic form. SORRY! I won't ever post a portable document format link again. From now on, it's Word Documents all the way, baby, yeah!
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
But why do you need plugins for that? I have my browsers configured to launch xpdf for pdf files (I could do the same thing with acroread, but I like xpdf better, and I have fewer problems printing with it). And conversely I have xpdf setup to launch a browser window when I click a link. I don't see why a plugin is necessary.
He should get off his soapbox spouting off how the patent is bunk when he can't reasonably expect that Doyle would know about his particular product when it wasn't even targetted at his line of work (he would have been into TEX and HTML)... maybe he can blame the law firm, though.
He doesn't realize they are on the same team. Kinda sad.
(Article was good, but a little self-indulgant as well, I think)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
It doesn't matter if plugins are good are not in *your* opinion, what matters is that the software patent system allows for overly broad patents that have the ability to cripple the functioning of how people use the internet. Because of this, software patents must be fought at every turn.
It's enough of a hassle for a newbie to figure out which file to edit to disable flash. To repeatedly be asked if I want flash everytime I scroll down the tvguide page, or other pages is tiring.
Ah, but if said newbie reads the September 2003 issue of PC World, they'll see that they can get a small utility that does the registry-fucking for them. And undoes it at a click.
Funny you like PDF viewer to be a plugin. I'd much prefer PDFs be opened in a separate application according to it's MIME type, so that I have access to all the menu items, toolbar buttons, and can resize it independent of the browser window.
Obviously it won't help you see pages what REQUIRE you to use Flash, but if you use MSIE and don't wanna see all those Flash commercials all over the place, this bit will prevent Flash from loading.
e t Explorer0 00}
;)
tart regedit, find
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software
Microsoft
Intern
ActiveX Compatibility
{D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540
And add as a dword:
"Compatibility Flags"= 1024
This sets the "Kill bit" for Flash, meaning that MSIE won't install it if it isn't installed, and wont load it if it already is installed.
(if you don't have the {D27CDB6E-AE6D-11CF-96B8-444553540000} bit, then add it - but be sure to get all the numbers right. One digit wrong and you are casting a curse on something else)
If you don't trust the magic of others, don't click the button Luke *G*
Usual caveats reply; if you machine blows up, your harddrive fries, your wife leaves you... tough luck buddy
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
PDF sucks too. Too many sites just use it do display stuff instead of using HTML. And PDF *NEVER* reflows to fit the page (I know its not supposed to, but its bloody well supposed to on the web), so this gets fucking anoying. If you want to watch the whole line its so small you can't read it, and if you zoom in, you have to drag the page left and right to read all of it!
And what, pray tell, PDF plugins exsist for MSIE apart from Adobes junk?
(Note to adobe: I don't agree with your licensen junk! I just click the button to read some stuff in that format!)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
not HIS standard.
ANY STANDARD
Are you saying this is a bad thing?
I'm glad he's got this one by the balls and hasn't sold out yet. I was worried about by beloved Mozilla (or Konq or what-have-you) before, but some research into it paints a slightly rosier picture.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Why doesn't Gate's just buy Eolas. That would work for me. ;)
Well, with pdf you get:
Good typesetting. not crap like the html rendering
Mathematic formulas: Mathml isnt there yet, and looks crappy. People like to identify indeces without selecting bigger font sizes.
Vector charts: ditto for svg. not hear yet.
Also i can save a pdf on disk or print it. Try this with a web page. You may get dozens of gifs/jpegs/stuff, then there is a stylesheet missing, your other browser doesnt recognize the mathml, the font sizes are different and the ".gif" formulas dont match the rest of the text...
I wonder what problems everybody has with the page nature of pdf. I actually read a lot more text in books than on screen, and imho there is nothing wrong with defining a fixed lines per page relation or using the unit "page" to divide a bigger document in manageble portions.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Why does everyone have to incessantly shout
IANAL
IANAL
IANAL
over and fucking over again? Yes, we know that you are one of, I don't know, 5 and a half billion NONLAWYERS.
Christ, do people who sit around in the pub aruging politics and football routinely interject:
By the way guys, you might not want to listen to what I have to say next because--crap!--I just realized, I'm not a lawyer.
No, they don't. Now, will you people quit it already?. It is perfectly acceptable to make an observation without being a lawyer--if you're wrong, someone who knows better will inform you.
This meme, much like the people who use the word meme, ought to be shot.
Thank you and goodnight,
Anonymous Coward.
The defense ALWAYS has the right to bring up exculpatory evidence. If you are convicted of murder and sentenced to life, and 35 years later physical evidence turns up showing you to be innocent, you and your lawyer can use that in an appeal. Doesn't matter that it is years later and you've probably appealed many times before. Only the prosecution is restricted from later bringing new evidence. Once the jury says the words "not guilty" they are done. They can never charge you for that same crime again, even if they find irrefutable evidence. Of course they might charge you with another crime, or you might face a civil suit from teh victims (that's what happened to OJ), but you'll never again face criminal prosecution for that crime.
The difference with a civil case is that both the plantiff and the respondant can appeal, and there is a limit to how many appeals will be entertained. However it also depends on the kind of appeal. You can, and most large lawsuits do, appeal simply based on the ground they don't like the judgement. Sometimes both the winner and the looser appeal on those grounds at the same time. Well in the event of new evidence on either side, espically if it is a first appeal, there is almost no way that the appeal wouldn't be heard.
Plugins have made browsers worse, rather than better.
Look, I understand (and even sympathize with) your feeling about plugins... but the simple fact is this is an abuse of patents. Whether or not you have an axe to gind about the specific patented thing (browser plugins in this case) being distateful, I would hope that people can look past their nose to see the far reaching implications of a ruling like this! I hope you aren't modded to flamebait as you suggested, but come on... this is not a "+5 Insightful" stance on this issue!
That is why Ghostscript ps2pdf and all those other tools are allowed to exist.
But don't you have to install a multimegabyte Cygwin in order to use Ghostscript tools on Windows? Or has Ghostscript improved since I last saw it, to the point where its GUI installer is as slick as Adobe's?
Will I retire or break 10K?
and used it against a monopolistic company, would you complain then?
(keep in mind this guy is an academic, not a businessman. He's lucky the University went to bat for him)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Rather than go through the trouble of trying to phone up MS, locate a person who could even help you with something as odd as this, explain the situation, etc, etc, it is easier to just hop on to eBay and pick up a cheap copy.
Wow - so many "Flash is evil" postings.
/. - we need to be considerate of them too.
I have the Flash plugin installed in Linux and Windows. It's NO INCONVENIENCE AT ALL to download a file less than 700 KB in size and install it.
Of course there are places where Flash usage is excessive or relied on too much, but there are many places where it is appropriate.
As a web developer, I know how hard it is to mimick the interactivty and animation. Flash is a mature product, it has many features that are impossible/very difficult to implement using XHTML/DOM/CSS/JavaScript/SVG/DHTML/etc.
When I develop a web page where I am given Flash to embed, I also provide a plain text alternative - and I make a point of making it looking as simple/boring as possible. That way visually impaired visitors can still use the site, and those "Flash is evil" users can be punished with very un-appealing presentation. I mean these technologies have been around for years - designed to enrich our browsing experience. Why not accept it and get on with life?
Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in Flash. Some things just cant/shouldnt be done in W3C technologies. Flash vector animations are very small - higher quality and much smaller than the equivalent animated gif or DHTML.
The Flash plugin is quite cross browser/operating system friendly. Imagine the headaches accomplishing the same interactivty/animation using W3C code. Browsers don't adhere to standards perfectly.
Some tech users may find plugins evil or inconvenient - why? Think of the 100 times more people who aren't techies - think how they appreciate the simplicity of plugins. Just one or two "OK" clicks if they don't have the plugin - and they are viewing the plugin content.
The internet is a heterogenous store of many different forms of media - user friendly browsing is achieved by browsers capable of displaying multiple media formats IN THE BROWSER. This includes PDF, Flash and M$ Office files. The general internet population is not as savvy as many of us on
Mike
I one hundred percent wholeheartedly disagree with you. Flash is the best thing to have happened to the web. It's an actualizing technology that gives more power to less technologically inclined computer users and really creates an interactive experience for everyone.
I've seen everything on Flash from demos, to full fledged video games, to movies, etc. It's a great technology and its fully interactive. It's so much faster and cleaner than using some Java applet, the likes of which I have yet to see.
That's the difference between a scientist and an engineer... the scientist cares about what sounds best, but an engineer cares about what works best. For example, it's the classic Java Swing vs. SWT debate. In theory, having everything only support completely open standards is a great ideal but in the meantime, I'd rather use a technology that works fast and works well.
For someone with Ray's money, it's surprising that he didn't spend a little of it on consulting a patent lawyer before sticking his neck out like this, just to have it chopped off by the most basic tenets of patent law: it doesn't matter if you show, after the fact, that you could have made an invention way back when (assuming that Ozzie's demo replicates the process in the patent, which it doesn't appear to in this case). You actually have to have made the thing prior to the patent holder, and published something that showed the world exactly that thing you claim to have made and how it worked.
Ozzie's demo is no different than saying that, because a certain spreadsheet application existed before a certain patented method for financial data processing, and because you can show that today you can use that old spreadsheet application to replicate the patented process, then the patent must be invalid. The spreadsheet application isn't prior art because no one actually showed the public back then precisely how to use the spreadsheet to create all of the parts of the patented invention before the patent holder did.
He's probably actually exposing himself to legal liability from people who follow his erroneous advice to ignore the plug-in patent, and wind up getting sued for patent infringement as a result.
They plan to build their own operating system... well, they have balls. Not much room in the OS market these days, unless they plan to give it away for free.
- No more plugins in any browser - I would enjoy whole Internet using only official and open web stabdards;
- No more software patents - no comments on that as such befits are two obvious for all normal people;
But I'm afraid that IBM will come up right at the last moment with something from their huge patent library and say:Less is more !
Recently I have been on an anti-PDF crusade (as if I didn't have enough causes that I will never win!)
PDF's are just downright annoying. Anything designed to make it hard for people to be able to copy/paste and search should be banished!
Microsoft are the kings of this kind of behavior, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this kind of settlement.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
but you can't patent "hero comes along to overthrow the evil empire and save humanity".
That's because the novel is a mature art form, having been around long enough for prior art to accumulate. I'd bet that were a new literary form to be discovered in the next decade, you'd see all sorts of patents on "methods of writing literature" for the next couple decades, and then they'd die down after the prior art has become established.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Please, if you're going to complain, atleast aim it in the right direction--that being bad designers.
I'm sorry if you're forced to endure badly designed sites. But not all of us have to (or have to as oftern, I should say).
Tell me we wouldn't do a better job than the patent office...
One reference implementation of Djvu is OSS, so it is definitely an open format.
Glad to see you got modded down. Instead of taking a lawyer's word for it, perhaps you should know what you are talking about?
I remember this case because I was working in my family's deli when this incident happened and went to trial.
We served coffee to customers with a Bunn and a Cecilware coffee machine. When the McDonald's incident came out, I didn't take the lawyer's word for it, because I know lawyer's words are crocks of shit. I did my own testing.
The McDonalds coffee machines are set less than 5 degrees hotter than the Bunn and Cecilware machines. McDonalds is known for having hotter coffee than other places. But it's not by much. Bunn and Cecilware coffee machines are sold by the millions to restaurants and delis and grocery stores and offices and other locations that serve coffee.
Since we also cooked our own roast beef, roast pork, and other meats, food thermometers were mandated by Agriculture and Markets. One wasn't enough, since they cited us and fined us when the thermometer was ten feet away from the kitchen, in the food prep area, instead of the kitchen (it's basically a shakedown money maker can't win situation with the city and state when it comes to inspections). After that nasty little incident, we had thermometers up the wazoo. In the kitchen, in the food prep area, in the setting area, everywhere.
To make a long story short, I tested temperatures on coffee that came out of the machines. All were over what the lawyers were claiming was safe. We had regular customers that we were friends with. So without telling them, I kept a pot off the heater, to reach the lower "safe" temperature claimed by the lawyers for the woman. I sold one cup to one customer who bought coffee every morning, then walked across the street back to his home to get ready for work, then he would come back to our side of the street to wait for the bus to take him to work. He took his coffee black, which is perfect for testing temperature, as it is undiluted by milk. I did this with two other customers as well.
The first customer that lived across the street came back into the store after exiting his house to tell me there was something wrong with the coffee machine, the coffee was "cold". I gave him a free cup of coffee and told him what I did. It wasn't a surprise to him because he also worked in the industry (retail department manager) so he understood what I told him.
The next two customers were customers that took their coffee to go. They had to carry it about 1000 feet before settling into their offices to drink it. They never complained before about the temperature of the coffee. They did that day when they came back for lunch. They also got free cups of coffee the next morning. The little experiment was an eye opener for them. They were friends, so what I did wasn't an issue with them.
The bottom line is that the temperature that the lawyers were claiming was "safe" is not acceptable. Customers will simply not accept coffee that gets "cold" too quickly. I know, because I measured, using two thermometers normally used by inspectors. And I also know because I tasted the coffee myself repeatedly that day. And just after that, I went to work for a large union, where there were the mandatory coffee breaks, and workers would avoid certain coffee stands, and go specifically to others because the coffee got cold too fast in the winter while carrying it from some of the places. Since this was already on my mind, I noted that the places that were avoided were generally the places that used Mr Coffee and other consumer type coffee machines for their lower volume sales. The stands to get the coffee at were...Bunn or Cecilware!
While McDonald's coffee, at the time of the lawsuit, was hotter, it was only hotter by 5 degrees from coffee machines being sold by the millions across the country. Cecilware is an international brand, and I believe Bunn is also. Lowering the temperature 10 degrees from the Cecilware and Bunn settings was producing
Because, ya maroon, the concept of getting a sensible IP environment in place is more important than putting MS down at every opportunity. Hard to understand?
I think the biggest complaint has to do with the "hard" page layout. There's no option for word wrapping, so if the font is too small to read, you're forced to up the magnification and deal with both side- and vertical-scolling to read it.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The opposite argument is that there is one major difference between the 1950's and 60's and now: The Internet. As long as small software companies can orgainze on the internet, then they stand a chance of getting rid of software patents. All it is going to take it patents to be inforced enough to cause serious software development problems.
I'm beginning to wonder..... perhaps a community "Prior Art" effort, somewhat comparable to the open source community, is needed.
Identify, research and debunk such absurd/greedy patents (and perhaps eventually much or all of the software patents nonsense) so as to get the patents withdrawn/cancelled.... and/or reassigned to some "open source" holder.
I agree, except that the research for prior art should be done before the patent is issued, not after. This it the job of the US PTO, which IMO, they are doing poorly, as far as software is concerned. (If you want to help, go here and apply for a job.) The patent is supposed to be rejected unless it is "nonobvious to a person having ordinary skill in the area of technology related to the invention". Every software patent I've read has been pretty obvious.
US patent law clearly states, once the patent is issued, it is considered valid, unless prior art can be demonstrated in court. Patent lawsuits are one of the few trials where you are not considered "innocent until proven guilty". You are guilty unless proven innocent.
<soapbox> Which is why software patents should be outlawed in the US. Write your congressman, if you haven't already. The worst part of a software patent, is that it can be granted based on a description of the software, even in cases where the "inventor" didn't implement anything. Writing software is like writing a book. Copyright should apply, not Patent -- see this page. (At one time, I had plans to start my own software company, but now it appears too risky. There is no way that I could possibly know what patents I was infringing. <rant> Unless something changes, open source will cease to exist, and the only software developers left will be Microsoft and IBM, who will cross-license all of their patents to each other. </rant> ) </soapbox>
Wouldn't Apple's Hypercard (and 'hypertext' links) demonstrate much of the same?
Never pet a burning dog.
Also i can save a pdf on disk or print it. Try this with a web page.
And I get a nice, little self-contained .mhtml file.
I wonder what problems everybody has with the page nature of pdf.
You try reading pdf on a handheld device. Unlike HTML, PDF can't adapt one set of content to stylesheets customized for each medium. Maybe it can, but if so, I've never seen it used in any publicly distributed PDF file.
there is nothing wrong with defining a fixed lines per page relation
What about a fixed characters per line restriction? Either the text becomes too small to read comfortably, or reading each line of text requires horizontal scrolling. A column of text should never be wider than the viewport.
Will I retire or break 10K?
One thing is popular projects like Mozilla that might get some licences for free
Mozilla is licensed under the disjunction of the Mozilla Public License, the GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. The GNU licenses typically demand that the author license the patent for all uses in derivative programs.
but what about the smaller projects that don't have these ressources.
They'll probably just GPL their code and include a hundred or so lines of Mozilla code to get the patent license.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Who wants yet *another* window open?
What needs to happen is some opensouce product needs to pattent everything its developers think about. It needs to be done in a country where you don't get to pay for each claim. So someone will need to submit a half million claim patent and see what happens. The reason IBM doesn't get sued over patents is they have a huge database of prior art in their approved and rejected patents. MS hasn't been playing the patent game but I expect they are wakeing up to the idea.
Rational people don't "hate Microsoft", they "hate Microsoft's conduct"--anti-competitive business practices, vaporware, shoddy software development, aggressive purchases of startups, bundling deals, etc.
Eolas patent not only is a software patent, it is a bad software patent, and there is prior art. Microsoft is clearly getting a raw deal here and they are being wronged by Eolas. On this matter, the open source community should take Microsoft's side.
However, if you still like something to "hate" about Microsoft, it is that they keep bungling their legal cases. IANAL, but it really sounds like Microsoft got a much worse result than they should have. While prior art and other defenses often are apparently difficult to make during the first legal round, it seems like Microsoft managed to get potential prior art (the Viola browser) thrown out, and there were several other unfavorable rulings against them during the trial. For that, you can "hate" them, because with billions upon billions of dollars in the bank, Microsoft should be able to hire better lawyers. It seems, Microsoft's lawyers are as shoddy and inexperienced as their programmers.
The only good thing about such patents is that they expire in 20 years
Not if Eolas teams up with major drug companies and lobby Congress for something like the Cher Patent Term Harmonization Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Copyright can be reformed easily. Just make the copyright term 50 years, period.
And watch the United States get dropped from the World Trade Organization for violating the Berne Convention.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Post a link to the actual text (not just a paraphrase) of the deal
I'm assuming that the text of the contract between Apple Computer Inc. and Apple Corps Ltd. is a trade secret. Nobody who has a copy is authorized to disclose it to you.
Will I retire or break 10K?
But was this specific combination of software made, used, or sold publicly for the stated purpose prior to the patent filing? A patent can cover a new, useful, and non-obvious combination of existing methods.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sans plug ins, the whole standards based model of everything as proposed by the W3C is to have a massive browser that can essentially render everything.
This sucks.
The one hopeful thing about the internet is that operating sytems will now have to launch different browsers based on mime types. Is that such a huge drawback?
This is my sig.
When was Magellan, the mid 1980s?
Oh, and while we are at it, there was an Activision drawing program for the Atari 800 that let you load and save images... if it nested them would that not be prior art?
Would VB1 itself be prior art? The form itself could be thought of as a browser.
This is my sig.
Good typesetting. not crap like the html rendering
It's a flexibility tradeoff. Really, it's a microcosm of the difference between PDF and HTML. The whole difference is that PDF is designed to look exactly the same, no matter where you use it. While HTML was never meant to look the same everywhere-- it was meant to be rendered to suit the particular viewing environment. And I greatly prefer the hinted fonts I get from HTML documents to the fuzzy text that's always too big or too small in a PDF.
Vector charts: ditto for svg. not hear yet.
Lack of vector support isn't a fatal flaw. You're seeing bitmaps anyhow.
Also i can save a pdf on disk or print it
You can print web pages. I agree that saving them is problematic.
I wonder what problems everybody has with the page nature of pdf. I actually read a lot more text in books than on screen, and imho there is nothing wrong with defining a fixed lines per page relation or using the unit "page" to divide a bigger document in manageble portions.
I think PDF is an excellent way of transmitting documents for printing purposes. I read a lot of text in book form too. It's easier on the eyes, but it doesn't have hyperlinks or search facilities. On the web, there are better units than "page" for dividing information. For long articles, it's usually the "section". Since it divides the article into different topics, it makes more sense than divisions based on font metrics and page dimensions. PDF documents will often divide by section, but that means scrolling through a whole bunch of white space until the next page break.
an Active X control plugged into Word?
This is my sig.
This IS a mockup of stuff any competent Notes R3 developer was doing in 1993, in an environment typical of the time. I lead the creation of a suite of business apps on the same platform and using this linking and embedding technology, and was demoing this capability to customers that year.
To spell it out, the point is that it took them 15 minutes to re-create a demo that demonstrates the 1993 availability of the exact kind of features described in the patent.
No seriously, what are you implying? Did you reply to the wrong post?
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Amen to that buddy. Ever take apart flash content with swftools on Linux? You wouldn't believe the idiocy of some of these content makers. Example:
1. A clustered bunch of JPEGs to have a "slideshow" type presentation. Already covered by MNG.
2. Wrapping standard audio files. The now infamous "Black Nascar" prank call was just an MP3 wrapped in swf cruft.
3. Wrapping standard compressed video. The now infamous "M16 Mentos" spoof was just an MPEG movie wrapped in swf cruft.
I have no problem playing those with the latest Netscape, but it just pisses me off, because there is nothing wrong with the original format.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Your post is a troll. Mandrake distro does not support 486.
MySQL Error 1040: Can't return sig, Too many connections!
i think it's absurd that a one employee company with a single patent and no product or services can "rightfully" hold the web to ransome and cause as much havoc.
First of all, it would be reasonable to argue that there was "prior art", and i invite everyone to think up stuff like that to challenge the validity of that patent.
The other thing is that it really seems awfully "obvious", i really don't know what retard gave them that patent.
This is evidence that the patent law needs to be revised. It can not be said that a law that covered 19th century artifacts is well equipped to deal with the 21st century. There should truly be a law against patent squatting. I don't know how this can be implemented, since licensing sounds like a valid and reasonable business method. The law should really provide for chance to challenge a patent if it is reasonable to make an argument that it has been squatted. Though this might be difficult.
I don't buy this. The Eulos patent specifically talks about embedding within a document. Documents don't just magically appear out of nowhere - someone has to create them. So for them to demonstrate the functionality that they claim in the patent, they would have to go to the same effort as Ozzie did.
In the article, it specifically states that there was no 'code' written to demonstrate what he showed - this is out of the box functionality. It's what Notes was designed to do from the ground up - embedding of rich mutlimedia within documents explicitly as stated in the patent.
Of course, IANAL and haven't worked at the patent office, and I understand things are strange in the way things work there. But I think what you're saying is like somebody claiming to have a patent on a method of putting numbers in a docmument in cells that add up or do whatever with some mathematical formulae and then someone opening up a copy of Excel and creating a document that does exactly that and the patent office stating "well you had to create that document to do what was described in the patent, and therefore, it can't be considered". How could it possibly not be considered the same thing? Just because Ozzie has some training in "how" to use the tools? You don't need creativty to use Excel by any means, but I'm surprised at how many people lack the skills to be able to put a simple formula into a spreadsheet.
I just read my post; how disturbing, my style is starting to sound like people who post on slashdot!
is what you want, it rocks. Get it from
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/
"Adds an XBL binding to Shockwave Flash object tags that replaces them with a button you must click in order to play the animation. Quite nice for restoring sanity to your browsing session."
Mandrake wasn't around in 1993. At that time, the GNU project was still a collection of tools that you could use on other unix operating systems. Linus had just started writing his kernel for it.
I didn't try to sell it. You seem to think that either I intended to defend the patent or had any grudges against Ozzie ? No, he has done a good job. Most patent applicants don't.
What I was hinting at: Patents are granted irrespective of the amount of work involved. Irrespective of programming yes or no. They are rather granted on a notion, if someone actually *did* and *documented* this before or not.
Which exactly is why Software Patents are so bad ! You are the first to use a diagonal scroll-bar - a million lines of code or zero - and file for it. Diagonal Scroll-Bar is out of reach for anyone else.
Let's look at this diagonal scroll-bar: For the grant, the question if this diagonal scroll-bar was created by serious effort is irrelevant. The only thing that counts: Is there any literature publicly available or any program proposing exactly a diagonal scroll-bar or not. Only this would be considered 'destroying' the claim.
Though you might consider this as 'lecture', I add, though, that even a document suggesting a scroll-bar neither horizontally nor vertically oriented would probably not considered sufficient, because 'the individual always destroys the general'. Full stop. If their attorney has some brain left, he'll argue that 'neither horizontally nor vertically' doesn't imply diagonal at all. And this would probably pass.
Don't forget, the auspicious 'Man Skilled in the Art' (what a bloody expression !), has zero imagination ! So the patent examiner refusing on these grounds will ultimately fail: Diagonal instead of horizontal or vertical would have to be rejected on grounds of not being expressedly stated in the Prior Art.
And we're getting worse here: "So for them to demonstrate the functionality that they claim in the patent, they would have to go to the same effort as Ozzie did." There is no real need at all to demonstrate that anything that you apply for actually *works* !
To your last paragraph: For sure, "the patent office stating "well you had to create that document to do what was described in the patent, and therefore, it can't be considered" will happen ! As long as you don't find any literature published before the filing date doing something like what Ozzie did, you / we will fail.
Ozzie's approach - sorry, I appreciate it, just try to explain ! - is flawed seriously with respect to one aspect: He *proves* that it *could* have been done using R3, Excel 5, etc. This is - sorry again - completely irrelevant. The question: *Has* it been done ?? If we wanted to help the cause, we'd have to find that publicly available document that suggested this before the filing (Priority) date.
Since I have started lecturing, I permit myself to continue. Think of 'Invention of the wheel'. Someone files for it. Granted. Azzie comes about and proves that chisel, hammer, chainsaw, B&D, etc. had been available at date of filing. Only, nobody actually *cut* a tree into slices and drilled a central hole. Could have been done in 15 minutes. Right ! The Patent Office would ask: *Did* someone, actually do it ? No ? Granted !
A last point (sorry, I don't have the material around and am too lazy to look its formulation up on the web): There is one aspect to it that says something like: If you happen to get an unforeseeable, unexpected result from known settings / setups, these will be considered patentable. Only exclusion: 'natural laws', like gravity, etc.
Don't buy this, if you're not convinced. If only I could convince you that the Patent System - specially software patents - is highly debatable, I'll be happy !
Have a nice day !
As seen in many comments on solutions to this, more often than not software patents lead to people *avoiding* the technology and using alternatives (arguably worse ones), rather than paying for it. At the end of the day, who wins from this? Not Eolas, not Microsoft, and *certainly* not the end users.
Wow.
/Library/Internet Plugins - folder.
In Mac OS X, you can drag the Flash and QuickTime (which plays Flash, too) plugs out from the
But I admit, the ease-of-use in Windows is catching up with the Mac.
J
The problem here is that "joe the open-source patent debunker" is not a patent lawyer. The patents are written and targeted very specifically, and prior art must be shown precisely satisfy each and every claim to a 'tee' or else it does not invalidate anything.
In other words, I don't think the issue is lack of people with the desire or motivation, I think it's more a lack of enough people with the suitable background and training in patent law. Surely there are some patent lawyers out there that would be interested in reforming their field, but I must admit they are most likely in the minority, and that's a problem. "Why rock the boat?" and all.
I run Solaris. We don't /have/ any plugins.
yes this is wrong, but the only way the software patent issue will be changed is if such a hugely fucked up case like this goes through and is enforced, maybe Microsoft with its warchest of unimaginable proportions will change its lobbying efforts to be against instead of for software patents.
In Mac OS X, you can drag the Flash and QuickTime (which plays Flash, too) plugs out from the /Library/Internet Plugins - folder.
From Mircosofts internet explorer folder? If its another browser your reply is irrelevant.
You can remove them from the folder her as well, but they get reinstalled when you visit a page that needs flash, or at the very least you have to click NO to have it installed on every page.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
How about opening your mind instead.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
When Ray Ozzie was at Iris Associates, Microsoft was showing the power of Windows NT by running a Notes server on it. It does not all have to be about some holy OS war - it can be about the technology from time to time.
"Mandrake wasn't around in 1993. At that time, the GNU project was still a collection of tools that you could use on other unix operating systems. Linus had just started writing his kernel for it."
My point was <b>NOT</b> that mandrake existed in '93, (which it did not until '98), but that Linux still has major obsitcals to overcome if it desires to win over the uneducated masses from the MS platform. I am not against Linux in any way, after all an OS is an OS, and not a religion. As far as the guy who says that he does not use it for religious reasons, but just pretty much because he can, this is the smartest thing I have seen posted as a comment to this thread. It also re-affirms my statment. I belive in usage of new OSes because of the learning experience involved, not because I dislike a company's practices. After all, MS may not be the best company in the world as far as fair compitiion is concerned, but they have finally managed to produce a quality product that suits my needs (XP, 2000 WS 2003 EE).
I also use Mandrake 9.1 periodically, and the main reason I do not use it more often is because my modem is not suppoted, and I am not on a LAN. Yes, I have a USR6558B win modem, and I am too cheap to buy a Linux compatible one. If I had support for this modem, I wold use it more often than I do. (currently 1ce per week). Anymore, a computer without internet access is like a car without a heater. Not required, but sure missed if absent. The sad thing is, I have found a Win31 driver for my modem, but not a Linux Mandrake 9.1 compatible one.
Also the install process needs to resemble the one from Windows if you want to tout ease of use and user freindlyness. Yes "apt get install mozilla1.4stable" is pretty easy, but if one has no Linux (or command line) experience, how is one supposed to install anything? Thsy would not. Also consider the vast poputlation that is connected via 56k modem. Even if they do know the proper linux command, they do not have time to get 50 MB of OO.o 1.1 when they just want thier copy of Works 2000 to work like it does on thier Windows box.
Renember, most people only want thier computer to function as an appliance, they do not want to be bothered to update it, or care for its security. Stupid? Yes. It is like trying to drive your car without ever changing the oil, or flushing the coolant system. Works OK for a while, but then performance degrades, and finally the vehicle dies. Most people only want a computer because thier friends have it, and to get games that they see on TV. They do not care about the compexities of the OS underneath.
An easy way to get the population to buy a *nix setup with thier funds and not have to worry about learning a new interface is to give the consumer 3 options on first login to thier account. 1. Windows Clone, 2. Mac like interface, 3.Standard KDE, 4. Standard Gnome, 5.Custom UI. This would attract the greatest consumer base without infringing on user choice. The settings should also be customizable from the initial selected UI, in case the user wants to change the theme. But it must be similar to the Windows XP themes dialoqe to not intimidate the user. Don't you think that after MS spent a couple hundred million USD to develop and reserch a UI, that they would nearn somthing about what a consumer expects?
In short, use an OS because you want to, desire to learn, or because it suits your needs. Not to "stick it to the man." Bill Gates, and Microsoft Corporation could honestly give a shit less if only 3% of the desktop share use Linux as thier sole OS. Do it to expand your knowlade, or for any other reason to be a jackass wannabe loser bent on revenge.
There is much wrong with Windows also. Such as the virii problem. With 90%+ of the market share, virri would be a problem for any OS. Also the lack of command line history, and device compatibilty for XP.
Take the best of both OSes and roll them into one package. Combined with application support, a smooth U
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Glad you're an idiot. Thermometers, no thermometers, THE WOMAN NEEDED SKIN GRAFTS. Doctors don't give you skin grafts for pain. I'd take cold coffee every day of my life before I'd take skin grafts.
Oh well. I was hoping to find out how I could buy drugs online, increase my bust and genetalia size, refnance my mortgage, and meet someone in a chat room anyway.:)
Besides, there are plenty of folks on slashdot who sign me up for more spam anyway just because I talk about God here.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Scientists with SETI are convinced that if they could find one ordered pattern of information from space that they would have proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Today we know that DNA contains highly ordered sequences of information within the components of life itself. Naturalists depend on long spans of time combined with chance that provided this.
This only logically follows if one has an a priori commitment to naturalism - that nothing supernatural could ever occur.
I submit to you that it is far more likely that God created life in its full complexity than chance and time.
Ever see a tornado hit a junkyard and come up with a fully functional 747? The chances of even basic life forms existing as a result of naturalistic processes are far less likely than the 747.
Sorry that you're creeped out. Why be creeped out rather than just write me off as you would one of those "I was abducted by aliens, and had one of their babies!" kooks?
Is it perhaps because the idea of a relationship with God appeals to you in a way that bothers you?
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Under MacOSX, microsoft Internet explorer doesn't have its own folder. There's a bundle by that name in /Applications, but the plugins live in /Library/Internet Plugins/ and the preferences (which are stored as XML) in~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.explorer.pli st.
Now, some applications openly flout these simple rules, but most don't.
While I do not pretend to know the intimacy between Pei Wei and the Eolas group, I think you are misinterpreting the nature of prior art in the sense that the ideas that the Eolas group patented were obviously out in the open, and evinced by P.W.'s presentation of 'Viola', clearly not kept amongst the department that would later claim 'ownership' of said idea. I think Eolas' desire to 'tax' the public in such a way is more akin to SCO attempting to 'tax' the Linux community, and more importantly, the time-lapse between raising this question of infringment would seem to indicate an intentional attempt to entrap what is essentially a public property.
But hey, I'm just #193799...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Which sounds confusing and incomprehensible, but that's mac for you. And it doesn't answer the question everybody is dying to know: If you don't want to install flash, what happens when you encounter a page that wants it?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
PS: Of course, IANAL, so I could be wrong.
This has nothing to do with that kinda thing.
.Net framework.
It has to do with trying to get Microsoft to support a cross-platform framework for plugin architectures.
You know, anything besides ActiveX or poorly abstracted APIs of the
Christ, everyone's got their panties in a bundle about this. The only entity who needs to worry is Microsoft (and Sun, maybe, if they keep being assholes about Java interoperability standards)
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice