Another example: the GNU project has required contributers to sign copyright waivers on the code their contribute, or have their employers do it if necessary. If Torvalds had done this from the start, half of the things SCO were complaining about to the press would have been more readily rebutted and easier to face in court. But Torvalds didn't bother with this until it was too late either.
So far as I know, Linus still doesn't have such a requirement. But in any event, you can only call one way right and one way wrong if you have something to measure them against. The rational for the FSF is that it would give them legal standing in court. IANAL, but I would imagine that just about any Kernel contributor could, alone, have some standing in court - it would be another hearing, sure - and might be a problem if another hacker is on the other side. But any event, the claim wouldn't just be ignored.
The FSF have the requirement because they think they know best, and they want the ease any potential legal burden on them. Linux doesn't have that requirement, first because Linus was just a pragmatic undergrad, but Im sure he would say now, because he wants it that way. He wants there to be confusion, and mob rule. He wants it to be decentralized and loosely associated. One might potentially sue the FSF, they are a solid target. You cant sue "the Linux kernel". You sue, as you said, IBM. But IBM has lots of lawyers, so they can take care of themselves.
The FSF is a political group with political goals surrounding software. Controlling the software, and giving it away under very specific conditions, is a means for their political goals. The Linux kernel is a software project, with the goal of producing the Linux kernel. That goal seems to be well met under the current system of very loose political/legal structure.
As for these wavers helping the SCO case, the SCO case needs little help. Its taking a long time, because thats just how fast the legal system works. IBM would have had the tightest code-release policies of anyone, their internal and existing controls are much stricter then anything that the FSF may want. The allegation was - in short - that IBM released code belonging to SCO into the Linux kernel. IBM having papers filed somewhere saying "We own this code, and we give it to you" would have stopped that not at all. And besides, all the source files are explicitly or implicitly marked as "We own this, and give it to you under the GPL". Either way, its exactly the same to SCO.
Words have spaces between them. A tag may have multiple words and be an independent thought. Store it as English demands, with spaces. The Space, NoSpace question is only relevant if you are using an encoding scheme that is broken. Verb/Noun is a different question, but space/nospace, quotes, and BS like that is quickly solved with existing technology.
Well, not quite. Reading the blog post the problem lies with two areas: technology and linguistics.
For technology, as an example, how do you quote things? How do you separate tokens? Do you use StudlyCaps and spaces? "Quoted words", and commas? If the later, what about nested quotes?
Bullshit question. The question is solved. Use XML. (Yeah, well, it is the web). We don't need Yet Another CSV "standard". Tags may be presented as lists, in spans, or WTF ever. But if you are talking about storage and transmission, then store the tokens separately, and transmit them in an unambiguous format; in 2007, on the web, the solutions are implementation-specific and XML, respectively.
For linguistics, thats harder. Nouns or verbs? Talk to a librarian, Im sure there are volumes of information on the right way. But I don't care, as I'm still disgusted that the technology problem even exists.
Right now it seems there is little discussion on the problem. Right now, if implementations are trying to reinvent data encoding schemes either the implementations are totally brain dead (and need a kick in the ass from an outside force), or are completely oblivious to the problems they are encoding into there core features (and thus still need a kick in the ass). This is so bad, its worse then wrong. You have to try to get to the point of being wrong.
Of course, I don't care because tags are stupid. OTOH, perhaps I would care if they at least were implemented in a potentially useful way.
A web browser and a OS Desktop are very different things, and require very different reasons to switch. Perhaps most importantly, whereas many users have noticed that IE began to suck (with viruses, popups, et al), Windows just is; for non-Windows users, its always sucked. For Windows users it just has been; and 95-98-XP, it has gotten better. The Firefox marketing campaign has been "Take back the web", not "Get a brand new web that you don't know about".
The effort to implement a switch to FF, from IE is 5 minutes. And to become just as proficient as a user, from a couple of hours to a couple of days. For Windows to some other Desktop, days and months. The "undo" time for FF is 0, IE is still installed. Undo Linux may be 0, or as much as a few days too.
To repeat myself: browsers and Desktops are very different things; users annoyance with them is different, the effort to switch is different. Comparing the relative "success" of OSS versions of these different things is blatantly wrong, and a disservice to hackers on both teams.
Then run it in VESA mode. That will work with anything. Oh, you don't get super-acceleration? Well, save your pennies for a month and get a card made this century.
Still, that doesn't negate the point that right now there seems to be a somewhat artificial interest in producing N-CD distros. Both of those use-cases, one would get the full CD set, period. If you are not making CDs, then it doesn't matter how many CDs the X-flavor distro takes. And if you are making CDs, then you are making the full set.
They live in the wild for as long as the product has been shipping, of course. Unfortunately, thats not a useful number. Products ship with bugs, known and unknown to their developers. A "secure" product may eventually become "insecure" because new techniques were developed. (Yes, differing companies/groups have different methodologies/standards/reputations for producing and shipping secure products, but thats a separate discussion all together)
A theoretically useful number would be the number of days from when an exploit was exploited until it was patched, except we would never know this first number. Sure, we may eventually track down through legal means when a petty criminal first used an exploit. But the real worry isn't the punks skimming for CC numbers, its the foreign powers, corporate espionage, SPECTRE agents and the like. And they get away with it without it ever being public. So you just can't get this number.
The only two possible numbers that we ("we" being "the good guys", or at least "the general public") can reasonably come up are the number of days that publicly-known problems are unresolved, and the number of days before a vendor is notified of a problem, before it is resolved. The later would be hard, if possible at all, to get with any level of reliability and consistency. "When were we notified? When the message was sent? When our systems received it? When our lawyers reviewed it? When a developer reviewed it? When the CAB came out with a recommendation?"
The only date measuring the beginning-of-badness that can be developed independently, and consistently, is the date of public notification.
I wasn't aware with that particular product, though I have read some of the briefs on Netflow/cflowd/IPFIX. Without thinking about it very hard, I think I would go with that, less the low-level monitoring of possibly:1042, but at least not things I know are going through centrally managed proxies (web, mail) - for the external traffic for a generally leaf enterprise, I mean. ISP wise, I think I would absolutely go with PPPoE, be it over cable or DSL for consumer traffic. I would be very careful about which logs I don't need to keep, which would be as much as possible.
All logs of what? "All logs" could mean "all logs you keep now", which could mean exactly 0 logs. Or "all logs" could mean "log everything", which on a, say, OC-48 would be only the trivial amount of 2405.376 Mbit/s.
Which is about 4500 terabytes for 6 months.
But lets be reasonable and say that they are only averaging 20% utilization down to a more reasonable 900 terabytes.
Which is a minimum of of 1800 drives, assuming you are using drive manufacturers math, and no redundancy. So lets say 2500 drives.
In 12 bay, 4U enclosures, you get 208 enclosures, which would require a rack 47' high. Or more likely, 7 8' racks. With 8 racks full of drives, the UPS itself has size measured in cubic meters, not rack-units, so Ill ignore that for rack space. And Ill ignore servers, too.
The enclosures are about $1100/USD each, but lets say you get a deal when you by 208 of them, and they come in a $200,000 even. The drives would be about $200/ea, in volume. So about $500,000. Good racks would be about $1k each. $8k
The enclosures suck 350W each, so just about 72kW. But you never turn them on all at the same time, so lets be kind and say only half that: 36kW. Still, that would require two APC InfraStruXure 20kW UPSen, which are $33,900USD. Im sure they have 50kW model, but I can get a price on the 20kW, and Im not counting APC approved powerbars. $65,800USD
In other words, "all logs" could be kept for the low-low price of $773,800 USD. For drives, racks, and UPSs. No computers to drive the drives, people to get it up and running, let alone maintaining it. No ongoing power or cooling costs. And they would look pretty silly sitting in your parking lot outside (but I suppose that might cut down on the cooling requirements).
Clearly, if what you say is true, I need to get into the hard drive, drive enclosure, rack, and UPS importing business in the Czech republic.
Details? Across how may boxes? Was it partitioned data? How many tables in a typical query? With mostly-reads, I just cant believe that MySQL was at the bottom of the list. Oh, yeh. What version of MySQL?
MySQL is fast. If the queries you are doing on it now it can handle, "correctly" (i.e. with indexes.. use EXPLAIN SELECT....) then MySQL will almost definitely be as fast or faster then anything else for reads. Well, on a single machine. And Ill cover even money bets on when there is clustering, when all the data is everywhere. The likes of DB2 and Oracle may be able to do something with complex clustering, e.g. partitioning the data up on different machines. Without knowing about your app, I would think that the working data of any client is going to be about the same as any other client. (Well, the non-reporting parts, anyway). That, and your somewhat confused use of "different databases" indicates to me that you are not talking about that level of clustering.
Again, for reads across a reasonable number of tables, MySQL is blazingly fast. Your app doesn't seem like it would be beyond these current MySQL limits. Some analysis, testing, optimization, and a resulting good design, MySQL will beat the "enterprise" systems. With a shitty design, the enterprise systems will be shit, too.
Is there a problem with MySQL now? Or do you just have an (irrational) fear that it wont scale up to your level of requirements"?
I was trying to get an [unnamed] thing working (one from a family of things that I dont understand).
I spent days looking for a solution for this problem.
There were many comments negative about this thing
and it's sub thing. I was mostly attempting to use
"workaround" with a variety of workarounds, all the while not understanding any of them.
Hint: Test your solution against itselfJust the net-new component. Just yourself. Not the integration with your complex environment.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions
of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will
be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to
address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program
specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any
later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions
either of that version or of any later version published by the Free
Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of
this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software
Foundation.
If you are going to be commenting on licenses, it may be a good idea that you actually read them.
On the other hand, in a discussion at a place "For Nerds", it possible that one might give the person who claimed to write some 25k of code for one project (which is a lot, for anyone, in any language) the benefit of the doubt as to them understanding the True Meaning Of Technical Terms. You know, the point of this season[1].
Yes, because yelling "help", without any indication of the severity of the problem, or your location, on a medium that could have you and your receiver on opposite sides of the planet, is really going to get you help. You might as well start a fire.
Their products suck. For any given MSFT product, they have entered the market late, and behind the leading (and most of the trailing competitors). At version 3 or 4, they finally catch up, kill off the other guy, and then slow down to about one tenth of their speed of development, or half the speed of innovation as the market was moving before them. If that fast. Look at IE.
Their products, once achieving superficial comparability to others, continue to lack depth. By depth, I mean both features and security. Compare NT/Server and AD vs Netware and NDS. 90% of the time, MSFT stuff is good enough. But ask it to do something slightly non-obvious and it frequently just cant be done.
But even more to the point of having half-assed products, is that they a) take a very arrogant attitude to... defending their virtue. "Security flaw? How dare those hackers!" and b) that they get them in production not just via aggressive marketing methods (as does everyone), but through the strength of their monopoly, through aggressive partnerships ("Going to a meeting with Microsoft is like going on a date with Mike Tyson: you should expect to get raped").
Well, thats all and good except that lawyers specializing in tort law work on contingency as a matter of course. While I'm sure that its possible that you might find an IP lawyer willing to do so, the list is now doubly short.
Assuming you could find an IP lawyer who might ever work on contingency, this would not be the case they would take. First, its unclear if they could win (At least, it would be very hard (read: time consuming)). And if they did win, its unclear what they would win. Cease and desist? Forcing the manufacturer to open the drivers? Damages? How do you calculate the financial damages here? Do they even award punitive damages in IP cases? Or legal fees? So lets say that you do win, and force the mfg to open the drivers, plus legal fees. So the lawyer gets paid, in two years, at his given hourly rate. Woop-de-doo. He could have been working for someone else for two years, and billing monthly. The cost/benefit to take a case like this on contingency just isn't there; its not going to happen.
That argument works both ways. The third-party developers only develop against the "sanctioned" (or at least, documented) interfaces. The documented interfaces are the ones well tested (and designed, and hardened). The MSFT internal game devs dont necessarily have the same documents. (Or only the same documents). Or they have only the official docs, but when they run into problems they go down the hall to the kernel hackers and say "WTF, dude?", and get back "Oh, ya. That doesn't work. What you need to do is XYZZY-A-B-A-B-UP-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT, and you get right in. Beer me!"
And we all know that it doesnt cost anything to defend against patents that are absurd.
Yeh, right. Welcome to the real world.
It doesn't matter if you will eventually win or not, or even when you do win that you may even be able to get coin out of the accusers. You've tied up yourself (if its just you), or lots of senior management (if a corporation), and most likely taken a big hit in the marketplace, too.
Slashdot Mirror
So far as I know, Linus still doesn't have such a requirement. But in any event, you can only call one way right and one way wrong if you have something to measure them against. The rational for the FSF is that it would give them legal standing in court. IANAL, but I would imagine that just about any Kernel contributor could, alone, have some standing in court - it would be another hearing, sure - and might be a problem if another hacker is on the other side. But any event, the claim wouldn't just be ignored.
The FSF have the requirement because they think they know best, and they want the ease any potential legal burden on them. Linux doesn't have that requirement, first because Linus was just a pragmatic undergrad, but Im sure he would say now, because he wants it that way. He wants there to be confusion, and mob rule. He wants it to be decentralized and loosely associated. One might potentially sue the FSF, they are a solid target. You cant sue "the Linux kernel". You sue, as you said, IBM. But IBM has lots of lawyers, so they can take care of themselves.
The FSF is a political group with political goals surrounding software. Controlling the software, and giving it away under very specific conditions, is a means for their political goals. The Linux kernel is a software project, with the goal of producing the Linux kernel. That goal seems to be well met under the current system of very loose political/legal structure.
As for these wavers helping the SCO case, the SCO case needs little help. Its taking a long time, because thats just how fast the legal system works. IBM would have had the tightest code-release policies of anyone, their internal and existing controls are much stricter then anything that the FSF may want. The allegation was - in short - that IBM released code belonging to SCO into the Linux kernel. IBM having papers filed somewhere saying "We own this code, and we give it to you" would have stopped that not at all. And besides, all the source files are explicitly or implicitly marked as "We own this, and give it to you under the GPL". Either way, its exactly the same to SCO.
Words have spaces between them. A tag may have multiple words and be an independent thought. Store it as English demands, with spaces. The Space, NoSpace question is only relevant if you are using an encoding scheme that is broken. Verb/Noun is a different question, but space/nospace, quotes, and BS like that is quickly solved with existing technology.
Well, not quite. Reading the blog post the problem lies with two areas: technology and linguistics.
For technology, as an example, how do you quote things? How do you separate tokens? Do you use StudlyCaps and spaces? "Quoted words", and commas? If the later, what about nested quotes?
Bullshit question. The question is solved. Use XML. (Yeah, well, it is the web). We don't need Yet Another CSV "standard". Tags may be presented as lists, in spans, or WTF ever. But if you are talking about storage and transmission, then store the tokens separately, and transmit them in an unambiguous format; in 2007, on the web, the solutions are implementation-specific and XML, respectively.
For linguistics, thats harder. Nouns or verbs? Talk to a librarian, Im sure there are volumes of information on the right way. But I don't care, as I'm still disgusted that the technology problem even exists.
Right now it seems there is little discussion on the problem. Right now, if implementations are trying to reinvent data encoding schemes either the implementations are totally brain dead (and need a kick in the ass from an outside force), or are completely oblivious to the problems they are encoding into there core features (and thus still need a kick in the ass). This is so bad, its worse then wrong. You have to try to get to the point of being wrong.
Of course, I don't care because tags are stupid. OTOH, perhaps I would care if they at least were implemented in a potentially useful way.
Is not to tag everything like 13 year old cheerleaders.
Thats not clear, at all.
A web browser and a OS Desktop are very different things, and require very different reasons to switch. Perhaps most importantly, whereas many users have noticed that IE began to suck (with viruses, popups, et al), Windows just is; for non-Windows users, its always sucked. For Windows users it just has been; and 95-98-XP, it has gotten better. The Firefox marketing campaign has been "Take back the web", not "Get a brand new web that you don't know about".
The effort to implement a switch to FF, from IE is 5 minutes. And to become just as proficient as a user, from a couple of hours to a couple of days. For Windows to some other Desktop, days and months. The "undo" time for FF is 0, IE is still installed. Undo Linux may be 0, or as much as a few days too.
To repeat myself: browsers and Desktops are very different things; users annoyance with them is different, the effort to switch is different. Comparing the relative "success" of OSS versions of these different things is blatantly wrong, and a disservice to hackers on both teams.
Then run it in VESA mode. That will work with anything. Oh, you don't get super-acceleration? Well, save your pennies for a month and get a card made this century.
Still, that doesn't negate the point that right now there seems to be a somewhat artificial interest in producing N-CD distros. Both of those use-cases, one would get the full CD set, period. If you are not making CDs, then it doesn't matter how many CDs the X-flavor distro takes. And if you are making CDs, then you are making the full set.
An annual pre-Christmas event at a local university, for all the IT staff, is the ring toss. With the little plastic rings from 9 track tapes.
Please read up on the obscure English words "layers" and "abstraction".
They live in the wild for as long as the product has been shipping, of course. Unfortunately, thats not a useful number. Products ship with bugs, known and unknown to their developers. A "secure" product may eventually become "insecure" because new techniques were developed. (Yes, differing companies/groups have different methodologies/standards/reputations for producing and shipping secure products, but thats a separate discussion all together)
A theoretically useful number would be the number of days from when an exploit was exploited until it was patched, except we would never know this first number. Sure, we may eventually track down through legal means when a petty criminal first used an exploit. But the real worry isn't the punks skimming for CC numbers, its the foreign powers, corporate espionage, SPECTRE agents and the like. And they get away with it without it ever being public. So you just can't get this number.
The only two possible numbers that we ("we" being "the good guys", or at least "the general public") can reasonably come up are the number of days that publicly-known problems are unresolved, and the number of days before a vendor is notified of a problem, before it is resolved. The later would be hard, if possible at all, to get with any level of reliability and consistency. "When were we notified? When the message was sent? When our systems received it? When our lawyers reviewed it? When a developer reviewed it? When the CAB came out with a recommendation?"
The only date measuring the beginning-of-badness that can be developed independently, and consistently, is the date of public notification.
XP, Office, possibly SMS, plus some other things. At least, thats what they were comparing it too (i.e. the things SUSE comes with).
I wasn't aware with that particular product, though I have read some of the briefs on Netflow/cflowd/IPFIX. Without thinking about it very hard, I think I would go with that, less the low-level monitoring of possibly :1042, but at least not things I know are going through centrally managed proxies (web, mail) - for the external traffic for a generally leaf enterprise, I mean. ISP wise, I think I would absolutely go with PPPoE, be it over cable or DSL for consumer traffic. I would be very careful about which logs I don't need to keep, which would be as much as possible.
All logs of what? "All logs" could mean "all logs you keep now", which could mean exactly 0 logs. Or "all logs" could mean "log everything", which on a, say, OC-48 would be only the trivial amount of 2405.376 Mbit/s.
Which is about 4500 terabytes for 6 months.
But lets be reasonable and say that they are only averaging 20% utilization down to a more reasonable 900 terabytes.
Which is a minimum of of 1800 drives, assuming you are using drive manufacturers math, and no redundancy. So lets say 2500 drives.
In 12 bay, 4U enclosures, you get 208 enclosures, which would require a rack 47' high. Or more likely, 7 8' racks. With 8 racks full of drives, the UPS itself has size measured in cubic meters, not rack-units, so Ill ignore that for rack space. And Ill ignore servers, too.
The enclosures are about $1100/USD each, but lets say you get a deal when you by 208 of them, and they come in a $200,000 even. The drives would be about $200/ea, in volume. So about $500,000. Good racks would be about $1k each. $8k
The enclosures suck 350W each, so just about 72kW. But you never turn them on all at the same time, so lets be kind and say only half that: 36kW. Still, that would require two APC InfraStruXure 20kW UPSen, which are $33,900USD. Im sure they have 50kW model, but I can get a price on the 20kW, and Im not counting APC approved powerbars. $65,800USD
In other words, "all logs" could be kept for the low-low price of $773,800 USD. For drives, racks, and UPSs. No computers to drive the drives, people to get it up and running, let alone maintaining it. No ongoing power or cooling costs. And they would look pretty silly sitting in your parking lot outside (but I suppose that might cut down on the cooling requirements).
Clearly, if what you say is true, I need to get into the hard drive, drive enclosure, rack, and UPS importing business in the Czech republic.
Details? Across how may boxes? Was it partitioned data? How many tables in a typical query? With mostly-reads, I just cant believe that MySQL was at the bottom of the list. Oh, yeh. What version of MySQL?
MySQL is fast. If the queries you are doing on it now it can handle, "correctly" (i.e. with indexes.. use EXPLAIN SELECT....) then MySQL will almost definitely be as fast or faster then anything else for reads. Well, on a single machine. And Ill cover even money bets on when there is clustering, when all the data is everywhere. The likes of DB2 and Oracle may be able to do something with complex clustering, e.g. partitioning the data up on different machines. Without knowing about your app, I would think that the working data of any client is going to be about the same as any other client. (Well, the non-reporting parts, anyway). That, and your somewhat confused use of "different databases" indicates to me that you are not talking about that level of clustering.
Again, for reads across a reasonable number of tables, MySQL is blazingly fast. Your app doesn't seem like it would be beyond these current MySQL limits. Some analysis, testing, optimization, and a resulting good design, MySQL will beat the "enterprise" systems. With a shitty design, the enterprise systems will be shit, too.
Is there a problem with MySQL now? Or do you just have an (irrational) fear that it wont scale up to your level of requirements"?
I was trying to get an [unnamed] thing working (one from a family of things that I dont understand). I spent days looking for a solution for this problem. There were many comments negative about this thing and it's sub thing. I was mostly attempting to use "workaround" with a variety of workarounds, all the while not understanding any of them.
Hint: Test your solution against itself Just the net-new component. Just yourself. Not the integration with your complex environment.
Words to live by.On the other hand, in a discussion at a place "For Nerds", it possible that one might give the person who claimed to write some 25k of code for one project (which is a lot, for anyone, in any language) the benefit of the doubt as to them understanding the True Meaning Of Technical Terms. You know, the point of this season[1].
[1] Or something.
Yes, because yelling "help", without any indication of the severity of the problem, or your location, on a medium that could have you and your receiver on opposite sides of the planet, is really going to get you help. You might as well start a fire.
The best part of your post is that you think that 10AM is "the middle of the night". Rock on!
Their products suck. For any given MSFT product, they have entered the market late, and behind the leading (and most of the trailing competitors). At version 3 or 4, they finally catch up, kill off the other guy, and then slow down to about one tenth of their speed of development, or half the speed of innovation as the market was moving before them. If that fast. Look at IE.
Their products, once achieving superficial comparability to others, continue to lack depth. By depth, I mean both features and security. Compare NT/Server and AD vs Netware and NDS. 90% of the time, MSFT stuff is good enough. But ask it to do something slightly non-obvious and it frequently just cant be done.
But even more to the point of having half-assed products, is that they a) take a very arrogant attitude to... defending their virtue. "Security flaw? How dare those hackers!" and b) that they get them in production not just via aggressive marketing methods (as does everyone), but through the strength of their monopoly, through aggressive partnerships ("Going to a meeting with Microsoft is like going on a date with Mike Tyson: you should expect to get raped").
No, but dollar bills don't have good aerodynamics, allowing for customer "target practice", as do 1 and 2 dollar coins.
Well, thats all and good except that lawyers specializing in tort law work on contingency as a matter of course. While I'm sure that its possible that you might find an IP lawyer willing to do so, the list is now doubly short.
Assuming you could find an IP lawyer who might ever work on contingency, this would not be the case they would take. First, its unclear if they could win (At least, it would be very hard (read: time consuming)). And if they did win, its unclear what they would win. Cease and desist? Forcing the manufacturer to open the drivers? Damages? How do you calculate the financial damages here? Do they even award punitive damages in IP cases? Or legal fees? So lets say that you do win, and force the mfg to open the drivers, plus legal fees. So the lawyer gets paid, in two years, at his given hourly rate. Woop-de-doo. He could have been working for someone else for two years, and billing monthly. The cost/benefit to take a case like this on contingency just isn't there; its not going to happen.
That argument works both ways. The third-party developers only develop against the "sanctioned" (or at least, documented) interfaces. The documented interfaces are the ones well tested (and designed, and hardened). The MSFT internal game devs dont necessarily have the same documents. (Or only the same documents). Or they have only the official docs, but when they run into problems they go down the hall to the kernel hackers and say "WTF, dude?", and get back "Oh, ya. That doesn't work. What you need to do is XYZZY-A-B-A-B-UP-DOWN-LEFT-RIGHT, and you get right in. Beer me!"
And we all know that it doesnt cost anything to defend against patents that are absurd.
Yeh, right. Welcome to the real world.
It doesn't matter if you will eventually win or not, or even when you do win that you may even be able to get coin out of the accusers. You've tied up yourself (if its just you), or lots of senior management (if a corporation), and most likely taken a big hit in the marketplace, too.