Such cases are well know, such as RSA for encryption applications, and LZW for image compression. THESE ARE NOT PATENTS OF ALGORITHMS, MERELY AN APPLICIATION OF THE ALGORITHM you are perfectly free to use RSA or LZW algorithms in non-patented applications for the algorithms themselves are not the subject of the patent.
Here's a good test: give an example of a non-patented software application for lzw where you'd be "perfectly free" to use it. You can't. The basic problem here is that the USPTO and the courts have accepted the idea that software itself is an "application".
But there's such a fine line between the statement of an algorithm in mathematical symbols and the statement of an algorithm in computer language that for all intents and purposes the algorithm itself has been patented. 100 years ago, nobody would have seriously considered a patent for an algorithm's "implementation with pencil and paper", but the USPTO now regularly accepts patents for algorithms "implemented with an electronic digital device".
IAW, if you invented a better algorithm for some common mathematical process 100 years ago, clerks all over the world would use it immediately using the tools at hand, and some might improve it. But today you can effectively prevent that because clerks all use computers, and implementation with a computer is patentable.
Much of the slashdot-type thoughts on software patents come from the way software is viewed. Is software a concrete "thing" like hardware, or is it the virtual manipulation of symbols like math? The public, seeing only the final product, views software the first way, but most programmers see it the second way. The source code is the application; compiling it is only a detail.
The judge's injunction in this case is mostly based on relative harm. The idea being that if the MPAA is right then allowing distribution would cost them lots of money. OTOH, if the websites win the trial, then all they've lost is a few files for a few months; no monetary harm is done.
As much as I dislike this (for one thing, this rule means the big corps ALWAYS get the injunction; the etoy injunction seemed to be based on this as well), it's important to realize that this isn't necessarily a preview of the final decision. Parts of the judge's opinion point out some big problems with the MPAA case.
BTW, I'm sickened by the fact that the scientology case seems to be the major precedent available.
xanim/aktion plays these fine. Just remember to get the necessary codecs from the xanim site. The radius cinepack codec seems to be what you're looking for.
Because the codecs aren't open sourced, they often aren't included in stock distributions. (for redhat, untar the codec into/usr/lib/xanim).
Microsoft only writes applications for one platform. Yes, they have done a little work with the macs, but only as an afterthought.
Afterthought is probably the wrong word here. Office was a best-seller in the Mac world long before Windows 3 or Office for Windows came out. There was a time when Mac software sales accounted for the majority of MS's profits.
That's actually one thing that made Office so popular: much of its interface came from the Mac, and MS had lots of talented Mac programmers. Most of its competitors (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc.) were coming from the DOS world, and tried to keep some compatibility no matter how ugly the UI was
Oh, give me a break! Linux is not leading Windows 2000. Does linux have an MS Office 2000 clone?
Actually, Livingston is pretty clear about what he's saying here. The kinds of things that MS is pushing with NT2K are the kinds of things that Linux excels at: stability, no reboots, reliability, etc. Desktop applications are an area that OpenSource is currently weak in...but MS isn't selling NT2K by saying that it will run Office better.
When you see how MS is marketing NT2K, it's pretty obvious that they have one eye on Linux. And Livingston's main point is absolutely correct: Linux serves to make MS products much much better.
Does anyone here, even for a second, believe that Windows 2000 will not be a major software release and developers will scramble to support it?
Actually, I think there's a serious window of opportunity here. Nobody's going to implement NT2K in the corporate environment until 2001. NT isn't Win95, you aren't going to have huge sales on day 1.
And in that time, lots of medium-sized companies just might start seriously thinking about the amount they spend on downtime, software "upgrades", and admin. Linux can easily gain in the server area, and if we all get our act together, we can make some major inroads into the desktop area as well.
And I'll agree with you that Linux isn't ready to run the enterprise. But neither are all those NT servers sitting in large corporations. The *majority* of servers in corporations are doing fairly mundane tasks...I might not choose Linux to run the backend DB of a large bank, but I'd be perfectly happy using it as a departmental web/file server.
I'd say it's pretty transparently a reaction to Y2K.
The "computers are going to destroy us" articles sell a fair amount of newspapers. That space was well-filled with Y2K articles over the last few months, but since that whole issue obviously went nowhere, the space needs to be filled with something else. IOW, we're back to the hacker/cracker stories, except we can expect to see the focus on "professional hacker groups" rather than kids in their bedrooms.
The question you posed pretty much answers itself: the RIAA et. al. certainly isn't just trying to hold back technology. Why would they? They made a fortune off the LP and the CD.
While I feel that outlawing (or even trying to outlaw) mp3's is illegal and unethical, the record companies especially have a lot to fear from them. If digital distribution of music becomes easy, then their whole business model falls apart.
One thing I think should be understood: record companies for the most part don't really sell music, they sell marketing. It's a value-added business. Nobody really buys Britney Spears CD's because she's so talented; it's the whole marketing image that people buy.
And you can fool people into thinking that a second generation cassette tape isn't good enough; that they need to have the original. With digital copying, this pretty much flies out the window. If portable MP3 players catch on, this really will mean a huge drop in business for the record companies. Especially since their marketing has more and more focused on younger crowds.
The question as posed is the wrong question: they're not "scapegoating" anybody. Rather, the powers that be see a real danger to their bottom line, and are willing to play very very dirty to stop it. The question isn't whether they're facing a real danger: of course they are. The question is whether their actions are legal and ethical.
You're hooked on an argument I'm not making: the whole "innovation" thing. Read my post again.
Office integration should have been an obvious step, but the other office suites kept forgetting about consistency.
3) COM Again, you're hooked on the "innovation" thing. No other desktop OS company has commited themselves to a component object model as much as MS has. Look at Apple's failures in this arena.
4) Internet ready Sure, MS missed it initially. But it was breathtaking just how quickly they moved it into their entire product line.
5) VBA I never said revolutionary. But there's two main points here: a) consistency: the same scripting language or variant across the product line. and b) VB/VBA created a whole industry of in-house products. Compare this to Apple, who killed virtually all similar products (including Basic and HyperCard), and left themselves without a decent RAD DB tool.
Anyway, I assumed I'd run afoul of the "say no good about MS" crowd. So be it.
I realize this escapes all the MS-bashers here but Bill Gates is actually a *great* software designer at the conceptual level. If he manages to get MS focused on software again then Linux is in for a much harder battle.
By software designer, of course, I don't mean programmer, but rather the person who decides which projects to focus on and directs new development. And Gates has been incredible at that in the past.
The seamless integration of the Office Suite, Linking and embedding, the concept of COM everywhere, getting the entire product line Internet-ready in an amazingly short time, VBA across the product line, etc. Forget the silly flames: Gates has a very good knack of identifying the needs of the public and providing software for those needs.
This move has been rumored quite a bit over the last year as service packs kept getting recalled and NT2K kept getting pushed back. MS needs someone to get the development groups focused, and Gates is the perfect person for this. I'm not surprised he's tired of dealing with lawsuits all day long.
The MacOS is definitely not more stable than Windows NT (even though Apple has the proprietary hardware advantage, which helps), and as far as OS basics, it's way way behind (no real multitasking, goofy memory management, etc.) I'm a big fan of the MacOS, but let's view the company realistically.
Apple would likely have been much worse than MS had they become the monopoly OS. Doesn't anyone remember the FSF boycott of Apple products? There was a real reason for that.
The real question is: had Apple won, could Linux have even gotten started? An open and ubiquitous hardware spec was one of the most important aspects of early Linux. Look at how Apple was 10 years ago, not how they are today (when they're starting to slowly embrace open source).
Given their total control over both the software and hardware, and their eagerness towards lawsuits back then, I could easily imagine them crushing Linux back in '92 by setting the lawyers on them (like BSD).
2. Just because you've never heard of a Swiss company doesn't mean it isn't well known in Switzerland.
I assume it's well-known in Switzerland, it's a swiss company. The question is whether it's well-known internationally. And the fact that I've never heard of it suggests it's not well-known outside its own area (obviously, I don't think that's concrete evidence).
3. That's just begging the question. "Because they're evil, they shouldn't do this."
As far as trademark goes, consider this: if you were starting a Linux company in a country, and realized you were in danger of somebody evil trademarking the name, what could you do to protect yourself? Can you initiate a trademark in Linus' name? Probably not. *Somebody* has to own the trademark, otherwise all Linux businesses are in danger. Ideally, this would be a non-profit, but I don't know the details of Uruguayan trademark law, and I doubt you do either.
I haven't heard the LinuxTech side of this argument. I've heard the users' group side, and it isn't very well thought out. I'm just saying lets not shun and attack these folks until we actually have some real info.
Anybody can redistribute SuSE anywhere (well, most of it anyway), you just can't call it SuSE. Same thing for RedHat, Mandrake, etc.
Anyway, it seems like a perfectly reasonable distribution deal to me. To ensure distribution and advertising, SuSE granted exclusive distribution rights to somebody. Happens all the time.
This may indeed be an evil company, but the open letter just confuses things and makes some pretty dubious points IMHO. Some of this confusion might come from the English translation though.
1. The first point seems pretty unique to Uruguay, and I don't really understand it. How did they get exclusive representation to SusE? Through the gov't, or through SusE??
2. (they copied a "well known" swiss company's name) I've honestly never heard of the Swiss LinuxTech before. And I don't really see a problem with a Uruguayan company having the same name as a Swiss company.
3. (the name "LinuxTECH" contains "Linux") I see nothing wrong with the name LinuxTECH. That's just a silly complaint. Lots of company names contain the name Linux or even Windows. For example "Linux Today", "Linux Journal", etc. And notice how complaints about this totally contradict the previous point.
4. (they registered www.linux.com.uy, even though linux.org.uy existed). The same linux.org vs. linux.com exists in the root domain, and nobody cares. If I were starting a company down there, I'd certainly gobble up that domain.
They Uruguayan users group might have some real complaints, but their open letter doesn't help their argument any. OTOH, LinuxTECH could easily just be a decent company who somehow pissed off a few members of a small users group. There's really no way to tell from this info.
Also, trademarking "Linux" in a small country isn't evil in itself; they might just be protecting themselves against somebody else doing the same thing. It all depends on how they use it.
Are you actually suggesting the windowing patent is valid? Even the patent office pretty much admits they screwed that one up.
Sure, the article you quoted is absolutely correct that the level of inventiveness needed for a patent is very small, but it's precisely the nature of prior art that the USPTO is falling apart on right now. They didn't realize that windowing existed years before, and they seemed to have no clue exactly why the cookie spec was invented, or even exactly what a cookie was.
Those types of things are definitely issues about technical knowledge. Even with the current definition of patent law (which I don't agree with BTW, I understand the court cases but disagree with them), these patents should not have been granted.
While the basic premise here is true - techs generally don't know the law that well - on most issues this just isn't all that important.
The complaints haven't been about judges/lawyers getting the law wrong, but rather about them getting the technology wrong, which is something we *do* know about.
The complaints about the windowing patent, or the one-click patent aren't about the intricasies of patent law. The complaint is that the "advances" were obvious in their field, or that much prior art existed. That's a technological question, not a legal one.
Much of the DVD brouhaha focused on questions of fact, not questions of law. And we're quite right to complain when the facts are mis-stated by lawyers and judges.
There's also a larger issue brewing: the desire of large companies and their lobbyists (in the US at least) to institute laws and make decisions that go directly against the ideas that built the Net in the first place. This is where the real fight is going to be, and the question isn't "what is the law?", but rather "what law should we create/adapt for this situation".
Interpreting law is what lawyers and judges do; but making law is the right of citizens (at least in a democracy), and the responsibility of informed citizens. In the tech field, those informed citizens are us.
The difference here is that I can trigger a response much larger than the request. If I send an ICMP ping of 1000 bytes, the response is going to be 1000 bytes.
But with this attack, I can trigger a response of 1024 bytes by sending only 24 bytes. The idea being that I can fill the victims pipeline without filling my own.
But for the most part that's just bogus. The difference in size just isn't that great. A script kiddie will fill his own ppp bandwidth with the triggers long before whitehouse.gov gets overloaded with the payload. Also, much of the bottleneck is due to # of packets rather than # of bytes, and the # of packets is identical for attacker and victim.
Apple should fix the hole, but in the grand scheme of things this isn't huge security news, especially given the paucity of Mac servers on the Net (where this could really do some damage).
Linux has a cool name and a cool story. Folks (especially in the US) just eat up the whole Linus story.
a major goal in the early days of Linux was "let's write a driver for everything". BSD never really pushed that goal, and today Linux runs on a whole lot more popular hardware than BSD does.
Open development: Linus accepted patches from just about anyone. Kernel improvements on BSD always went "let's discuss it, and then one of the core developers will implement it". Linux discussions were always "send a patch in, and then we'll talk about it".
The lawsuit, of course. Linux owes much of its early success to the CD-ROM, which was just getting popular. At the time of yggdrasil and early slackware, I don't remember seeing any complete easy-to-install BSD CD-ROMs (did walnut creek have one maybe?)
Linus himself. He's directed the whole movement incredibly well, staying out of arguments when needed, and stepping in when necessary.
The proliferation of obvious patents (windowing, one-click shopping) is starting to make us lose sight of the core issue: software patents should never have been allowed.
Algorithms cannot be patented. No matter what you may think about that; that's the law. The idea that you can't patent an algorithm, but you can patent the concept of implementing that algorithm in software is simply absurd, and we won't get out of this mess until software patents are rejected.
If the algorithm behind google can't be patented, then it makes no sense to patent the implementation of the algorithm in software. The specific implementation can be protected by copyright law. The *idea* of implementing an algorithm in software is an obvious one.
So even if you think Google has done significant and non-obvious work here, that's irrelevant. The algorithm may be impressive, but that's not patentable. And the implementation may represent significant work, but that's protected by copyright. There's simply no place for patents here.
Now, I'm not really attacking google here. The law is a mess and Google has to play the game. But this madness has to stop soon. The Internet would never have come into being if this mess of patenting every idea in sight existed 25 years ago.
I've installed NT many many times, but I haven't looked at NT2K yet, which is what I assumed the article is pointing towards.
But if it's so simple, why have this article? Why have people boot linux to delete linux partitions if it's so simple to do during the NT install? Obviously, there's a problem here or else why suggest such a strange workaround? Any ideas?
I strongly suspect the NT2K installer has problems with Non-MS partitions.
Read this one carefully. The headline states that 25% of online transactions go bad, but the study doesn't show anything like that. The study shows that if you take 100 eCommerce sites (at random?), you'll have problems with a lot of them.
No surprise there, but 80-90% of online transactions probably occur at the top 50 or so sites right now. The fact that some random retailer's site still says "Under construction" doesn't mean that lots of people are getting failed transactions, it means that their online dollar is going elsewhere until that vendor get its act together.
They're ignoring delivery issues, so it looks like the main thing they're pointing out is that lots of retail outlets don't really have professional web sites yet. This is news?
Order a book from fatbrain. Now try to order a book from www.somerandomcompany.com. Did one fail? Does that mean that 50% of online transactions fail?
Personally, the fact that ridiculously conceived studies like this actually make news really annoys me.
What's really pathetic about this is that the NT installer apparently doesn't give you the opportunity to correctly repartition/reformat your drive. That would, of course, be the obvious way to handle this situation.
Screwing up the installer, and then hiding the fix in a very poorly written tech note is typical MS.
Inprise takes the Blackdown jdk port, adds the things they need to implement JBuilder and give it away, and gives the jdk back to Sun. Cool.
Sun totally disses blackdown by ignoring them in the press release, not giving them any info about what Inprise was doing, and so far at least not offering to share the code.
After years of promising an open java standard, Sun once again withdraws java from the standards process.
When RMS calls for an open source alternative, Sun proudly states that it can't be done because the current public spec doesn't describe enough of the system ( http://www.techweb.com/wire/stor y/TWB19991208S0022)
I'd say Sun as pretty much shown their true colors this week.
Sun owns the trademark and the original source code.
Why doesn't ECMA simply go ahead and standardize the same thing under another name
They're considering this, but the big problem is that everybody involved already has a license from Sun.
It's possible to write a jvm from scratch (e.g., kaffe), but most companies licensed the platform from Sun in order to port it. And with that license comes a lot of conditions.
If ECMA made changes without Sun, virtually nobody could implement those changes without violating the original contract with Sun. Remember, that's pretty much what they nailed MS for: using the licensed platform to implement something other than a Sun-approved java implementation.
By letting everyone see the source, Sun has actually manage to tighten the license even more. Proving a cleanroom implementation after your development staff has pored over the java code for a few years is not going to be easy.
Well, this is just my opinion, but do you need a review and comparison?
Personally, yes, I'd like one. I could find the time to test the installation programs on each distro, it would take maybe an hour each. But I'd like to know things like: how easy is it to script an install/upgrade, how clean is the upgrade path, are all the libraries stable, how easy is it to make changes in the source and re-install, is the default security reasonable, am I locked into the GUI admin tools, or are the.rc files arranged reasonably?
I'd have to spend a lot of time with each distro to figure those things out. The c/net review isn't bad just because it caters to newbies, but also because it's lazy. It's obvious they just read the docs and did a quick install of each; that doesn't tell what it would be like to live with that distro on 20 machines for the next two years.
Not that most Linux pubs are much better, though, admittedly. LJ is just as bad as c/net when it comes to quality of reviews, to be honest.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a good test: give an example of a non-patented software application for lzw where you'd be "perfectly free" to use it. You can't. The basic problem here is that the USPTO and the courts have accepted the idea that software itself is an "application".
But there's such a fine line between the statement of an algorithm in mathematical symbols and the statement of an algorithm in computer language that for all intents and purposes the algorithm itself has been patented. 100 years ago, nobody would have seriously considered a patent for an algorithm's "implementation with pencil and paper", but the USPTO now regularly accepts patents for algorithms "implemented with an electronic digital device".
IAW, if you invented a better algorithm for some common mathematical process 100 years ago, clerks all over the world would use it immediately using the tools at hand, and some might improve it. But today you can effectively prevent that because clerks all use computers, and implementation with a computer is patentable.
Much of the slashdot-type thoughts on software patents come from the way software is viewed. Is software a concrete "thing" like hardware, or is it the virtual manipulation of symbols like math? The public, seeing only the final product, views software the first way, but most programmers see it the second way. The source code is the application; compiling it is only a detail.
The judge's injunction in this case is mostly based on relative harm. The idea being that if the MPAA is right then allowing distribution would cost them lots of money. OTOH, if the websites win the trial, then all they've lost is a few files for a few months; no monetary harm is done.
As much as I dislike this (for one thing, this rule means the big corps ALWAYS get the injunction; the etoy injunction seemed to be based on this as well), it's important to realize that this isn't necessarily a preview of the final decision. Parts of the judge's opinion point out some big problems with the MPAA case.
BTW, I'm sickened by the fact that the scientology case seems to be the major precedent available.
xanim/aktion plays these fine. Just remember to get the necessary codecs from the xanim site. The radius cinepack codec seems to be what you're looking for.
/usr/lib/xanim).
Because the codecs aren't open sourced, they often aren't included in stock distributions. (for redhat, untar the codec into
Afterthought is probably the wrong word here. Office was a best-seller in the Mac world long before Windows 3 or Office for Windows came out. There was a time when Mac software sales accounted for the majority of MS's profits.
That's actually one thing that made Office so popular: much of its interface came from the Mac, and MS had lots of talented Mac programmers. Most of its competitors (WordPerfect, Lotus, etc.) were coming from the DOS world, and tried to keep some compatibility no matter how ugly the UI was
Actually, Livingston is pretty clear about what he's saying here. The kinds of things that MS is pushing with NT2K are the kinds of things that Linux excels at: stability, no reboots, reliability, etc. Desktop applications are an area that OpenSource is currently weak in...but MS isn't selling NT2K by saying that it will run Office better.
When you see how MS is marketing NT2K, it's pretty obvious that they have one eye on Linux. And Livingston's main point is absolutely correct: Linux serves to make MS products much much better.
Does anyone here, even for a second, believe that Windows 2000 will not be a major software release and developers will scramble to support it?
Actually, I think there's a serious window of opportunity here. Nobody's going to implement NT2K in the corporate environment until 2001. NT isn't Win95, you aren't going to have huge sales on day 1.
And in that time, lots of medium-sized companies just might start seriously thinking about the amount they spend on downtime, software "upgrades", and admin. Linux can easily gain in the server area, and if we all get our act together, we can make some major inroads into the desktop area as well.
And I'll agree with you that Linux isn't ready to run the enterprise. But neither are all those NT servers sitting in large corporations. The *majority* of servers in corporations are doing fairly mundane tasks...I might not choose Linux to run the backend DB of a large bank, but I'd be perfectly happy using it as a departmental web/file server.
I'd say it's pretty transparently a reaction to Y2K.
The "computers are going to destroy us" articles sell a fair amount of newspapers. That space was well-filled with Y2K articles over the last few months, but since that whole issue obviously went nowhere, the space needs to be filled with something else. IOW, we're back to the hacker/cracker stories, except we can expect to see the focus on "professional hacker groups" rather than kids in their bedrooms.
The question you posed pretty much answers itself: the RIAA et. al. certainly isn't just trying to hold back technology. Why would they? They made a fortune off the LP and the CD.
While I feel that outlawing (or even trying to outlaw) mp3's is illegal and unethical, the record companies especially have a lot to fear from them. If digital distribution of music becomes easy, then their whole business model falls apart.
One thing I think should be understood: record companies for the most part don't really sell music, they sell marketing. It's a value-added business. Nobody really buys Britney Spears CD's because she's so talented; it's the whole marketing image that people buy.
And you can fool people into thinking that a second generation cassette tape isn't good enough; that they need to have the original. With digital copying, this pretty much flies out the window. If portable MP3 players catch on, this really will mean a huge drop in business for the record companies. Especially since their marketing has more and more focused on younger crowds.
The question as posed is the wrong question: they're not "scapegoating" anybody. Rather, the powers that be see a real danger to their bottom line, and are willing to play very very dirty to stop it. The question isn't whether they're facing a real danger: of course they are. The question is whether their actions are legal and ethical.
You're hooked on an argument I'm not making: the whole "innovation" thing. Read my post again.
Office integration should have been an obvious step, but the other office suites kept forgetting about consistency.
3) COM
Again, you're hooked on the "innovation" thing. No other desktop OS company has commited themselves to a component object model as much as MS has. Look at Apple's failures in this arena.
4) Internet ready
Sure, MS missed it initially. But it was breathtaking just how quickly they moved it into their entire product line.
5) VBA
I never said revolutionary. But there's two main points here: a) consistency: the same scripting language or variant across the product line. and b) VB/VBA created a whole industry of in-house products. Compare this to Apple, who killed virtually all similar products (including Basic and HyperCard), and left themselves without a decent RAD DB tool.
Anyway, I assumed I'd run afoul of the "say no good about MS" crowd. So be it.
I realize this escapes all the MS-bashers here but Bill Gates is actually a *great* software designer at the conceptual level. If he manages to get MS focused on software again then Linux is in for a much harder battle.
By software designer, of course, I don't mean programmer, but rather the person who decides which projects to focus on and directs new development. And Gates has been incredible at that in the past.
The seamless integration of the Office Suite, Linking and embedding, the concept of COM everywhere, getting the entire product line Internet-ready in an amazingly short time, VBA across the product line, etc. Forget the silly flames: Gates has a very good knack of identifying the needs of the public and providing software for those needs.
This move has been rumored quite a bit over the last year as service packs kept getting recalled and NT2K kept getting pushed back. MS needs someone to get the development groups focused, and Gates is the perfect person for this. I'm not surprised he's tired of dealing with lawsuits all day long.
The MacOS is definitely not more stable than Windows NT (even though Apple has the proprietary hardware advantage, which helps), and as far as OS basics, it's way way behind (no real multitasking, goofy memory management, etc.) I'm a big fan of the MacOS, but let's view the company realistically.
Apple would likely have been much worse than MS had they become the monopoly OS. Doesn't anyone remember the FSF boycott of Apple products? There was a real reason for that.
The real question is: had Apple won, could Linux have even gotten started? An open and ubiquitous hardware spec was one of the most important aspects of early Linux. Look at how Apple was 10 years ago, not how they are today (when they're starting to slowly embrace open source).
Given their total control over both the software and hardware, and their eagerness towards lawsuits back then, I could easily imagine them crushing Linux back in '92 by setting the lawyers on them (like BSD).
2. Just because you've never heard of a Swiss company doesn't mean it isn't well known in Switzerland.
I assume it's well-known in Switzerland, it's a swiss company. The question is whether it's well-known internationally. And the fact that I've never heard of it suggests it's not well-known outside its own area (obviously, I don't think that's concrete evidence).
3. That's just begging the question. "Because they're evil, they shouldn't do this."
As far as trademark goes, consider this: if you were starting a Linux company in a country, and realized you were in danger of somebody evil trademarking the name, what could you do to protect yourself? Can you initiate a trademark in Linus' name? Probably not. *Somebody* has to own the trademark, otherwise all Linux businesses are in danger. Ideally, this would be a non-profit, but I don't know the details of Uruguayan trademark law, and I doubt you do either.
I haven't heard the LinuxTech side of this argument. I've heard the users' group side, and it isn't very well thought out. I'm just saying lets not shun and attack these folks until we actually have some real info.
Anybody can redistribute SuSE anywhere (well, most of it anyway), you just can't call it SuSE. Same thing for RedHat, Mandrake, etc.
Anyway, it seems like a perfectly reasonable distribution deal to me. To ensure distribution and advertising, SuSE granted exclusive distribution rights to somebody. Happens all the time.
This may indeed be an evil company, but the open letter just confuses things and makes some pretty dubious points IMHO. Some of this confusion might come from the English translation though.
1. The first point seems pretty unique to Uruguay, and I don't really understand it. How did they get exclusive representation to SusE? Through the gov't, or through SusE??
2. (they copied a "well known" swiss company's name)
I've honestly never heard of the Swiss LinuxTech before. And I don't really see a problem with a Uruguayan company having the same name as a Swiss company.
3. (the name "LinuxTECH" contains "Linux")
I see nothing wrong with the name LinuxTECH. That's just a silly complaint. Lots of company names contain the name Linux or even Windows. For example "Linux Today", "Linux Journal", etc. And notice how complaints about this totally contradict the previous point.
4. (they registered www.linux.com.uy, even though linux.org.uy existed).
The same linux.org vs. linux.com exists in the root domain, and nobody cares. If I were starting a company down there, I'd certainly gobble up that domain.
They Uruguayan users group might have some real complaints, but their open letter doesn't help their argument any. OTOH, LinuxTECH could easily just be a decent company who somehow pissed off a few members of a small users group. There's really no way to tell from this info.
Also, trademarking "Linux" in a small country isn't evil in itself; they might just be protecting themselves against somebody else doing the same thing. It all depends on how they use it.
Are you actually suggesting the windowing patent is valid? Even the patent office pretty much admits they screwed that one up.
Sure, the article you quoted is absolutely correct that the level of inventiveness needed for a patent is very small, but it's precisely the nature of prior art that the USPTO is falling apart on right now. They didn't realize that windowing existed years before, and they seemed to have no clue exactly why the cookie spec was invented, or even exactly what a cookie was.
Those types of things are definitely issues about technical knowledge. Even with the current definition of patent law (which I don't agree with BTW, I understand the court cases but disagree with them), these patents should not have been granted.
While the basic premise here is true - techs generally don't know the law that well - on most issues this just isn't all that important.
The complaints haven't been about judges/lawyers getting the law wrong, but rather about them getting the technology wrong, which is something we *do* know about.
The complaints about the windowing patent, or the one-click patent aren't about the intricasies of patent law. The complaint is that the "advances" were obvious in their field, or that much prior art existed. That's a technological question, not a legal one.
Much of the DVD brouhaha focused on questions of fact, not questions of law. And we're quite right to complain when the facts are mis-stated by lawyers and judges.
There's also a larger issue brewing: the desire of large companies and their lobbyists (in the US at least) to institute laws and make decisions that go directly against the ideas that built the Net in the first place. This is where the real fight is going to be, and the question isn't "what is the law?", but rather "what law should we create/adapt for this situation".
Interpreting law is what lawyers and judges do; but making law is the right of citizens (at least in a democracy), and the responsibility of informed citizens. In the tech field, those informed citizens are us.
The difference here is that I can trigger a response much larger than the request. If I send an ICMP ping of 1000 bytes, the response is going to be 1000 bytes.
But with this attack, I can trigger a response of 1024 bytes by sending only 24 bytes. The idea being that I can fill the victims pipeline without filling my own.
But for the most part that's just bogus. The difference in size just isn't that great. A script kiddie will fill his own ppp bandwidth with the triggers long before whitehouse.gov gets overloaded with the payload. Also, much of the bottleneck is due to # of packets rather than # of bytes, and the # of packets is identical for attacker and victim.
Apple should fix the hole, but in the grand scheme of things this isn't huge security news, especially given the paucity of Mac servers on the Net (where this could really do some damage).
The proliferation of obvious patents (windowing, one-click shopping) is starting to make us lose sight of the core issue: software patents should never have been allowed.
Algorithms cannot be patented. No matter what you may think about that; that's the law. The idea that you can't patent an algorithm, but you can patent the concept of implementing that algorithm in software is simply absurd, and we won't get out of this mess until software patents are rejected.
If the algorithm behind google can't be patented, then it makes no sense to patent the implementation of the algorithm in software. The specific implementation can be protected by copyright law. The *idea* of implementing an algorithm in software is an obvious one.
So even if you think Google has done significant and non-obvious work here, that's irrelevant. The algorithm may be impressive, but that's not patentable. And the implementation may represent significant work, but that's protected by copyright. There's simply no place for patents here.
Now, I'm not really attacking google here. The law is a mess and Google has to play the game. But this madness has to stop soon. The Internet would never have come into being if this mess of patenting every idea in sight existed 25 years ago.
No. The story has nothing to do with Dallas, it's an Andersen study after all, and the original byline is New York.
Now it could be that Dallas is playing it up a bit because of their mayor (probably true, since it's not much of a study), but that's another thing.
I've installed NT many many times, but I haven't looked at NT2K yet, which is what I assumed the article is pointing towards.
But if it's so simple, why have this article? Why have people boot linux to delete linux partitions if it's so simple to do during the NT install? Obviously, there's a problem here or else why suggest such a strange workaround? Any ideas?
I strongly suspect the NT2K installer has problems with Non-MS partitions.
Read this one carefully. The headline states that 25% of online transactions go bad, but the study doesn't show anything like that. The study shows that if you take 100 eCommerce sites (at random?), you'll have problems with a lot of them.
No surprise there, but 80-90% of online transactions probably occur at the top 50 or so sites right now. The fact that some random retailer's site still says "Under construction" doesn't mean that lots of people are getting failed transactions, it means that their online dollar is going elsewhere until that vendor get its act together.
They're ignoring delivery issues, so it looks like the main thing they're pointing out is that lots of retail outlets don't really have professional web sites yet. This is news?
Order a book from fatbrain. Now try to order a book from www.somerandomcompany.com. Did one fail? Does that mean that 50% of online transactions fail?
Personally, the fact that ridiculously conceived studies like this actually make news really annoys me.
What's really pathetic about this is that the NT installer apparently doesn't give you the opportunity to correctly repartition/reformat your drive. That would, of course, be the obvious way to handle this situation.
Screwing up the installer, and then hiding the fix in a very poorly written tech note is typical MS.
Inprise takes the Blackdown jdk port, adds the things they need to implement JBuilder and give it away, and gives the jdk back to Sun. Cool.
Sun totally disses blackdown by ignoring them in the press release, not giving them any info about what Inprise was doing, and so far at least not offering to share the code.
After years of promising an open java standard, Sun once again withdraws java from the standards process.
When RMS calls for an open source alternative, Sun proudly states that it can't be done because the current public spec doesn't describe enough of the system
( http://www.techweb.com/wire/stor y/TWB19991208S0022)
I'd say Sun as pretty much shown their true colors this week.
Sun owns the trademark and the original source code.
Why doesn't ECMA simply go ahead and standardize the same thing under another name
They're considering this, but the big problem is that everybody involved already has a license from Sun.
It's possible to write a jvm from scratch (e.g., kaffe), but most companies licensed the platform from Sun in order to port it. And with that license comes a lot of conditions.
If ECMA made changes without Sun, virtually nobody could implement those changes without violating the original contract with Sun. Remember, that's pretty much what they nailed MS for: using the licensed platform to implement something other than a Sun-approved java implementation.
By letting everyone see the source, Sun has actually manage to tighten the license even more.
Proving a cleanroom implementation after your development staff has pored over the java code for a few years is not going to be easy.
Well, this is just my opinion, but do you need a review and comparison?
.rc files arranged reasonably?
Personally, yes, I'd like one. I could find the time to test the installation programs on each distro, it would take maybe an hour each. But I'd like to know things like: how easy is it to script an install/upgrade, how clean is the upgrade path, are all the libraries stable, how easy is it to make changes in the source and re-install, is the default security reasonable, am I locked into the GUI admin tools, or are the
I'd have to spend a lot of time with each distro to figure those things out. The c/net review isn't bad just because it caters to newbies, but also because it's lazy. It's obvious they just read the docs and did a quick install of each; that doesn't tell what it would be like to live with that distro on 20 machines for the next two years.
Not that most Linux pubs are much better, though, admittedly. LJ is just as bad as c/net when it comes to quality of reviews, to be honest.