I have yet to find a restaurant that offers unlimited buffet diner *and* allows doggy bags.
You are right, of course, in saying that it's none of the providers business what you use the phone line for, and that they should change their pricing if they feel the costs they are incurring do not match the revenue they get from you.
This is precisely what the Dutch PTT did in the 1980's, when they realized they were building central office switches like there's no tomorrow for the sake of just a few users who spent all their days on BBS's. They scrapped the unlimited access. This was in the days when CO switches limited the number of open lines to seven per one hundred subscriber lines, so they had little option but to do *something*.
Of course, paid-for local access is an anachronism nowadays.
Another small observation about the way the decision was made then is that they made this change precisely to avoid having to raise monthly charges for the average user. Bad for nerds, good for grannies. Economy is about distribution of both wealth and costs, and politics is about what's the definition of "fair". It's funny to see the government owned juggernaut at the side of the consumer.
Sigh. These days, the Dutch government has all but took its hands off the telco's, which results in the weird situation that even though our montly charges are far less than in most other places in the world, it is now cheaper to call from my home to anywhere in the US than it is to call to Amsterdam, which is only 30 miles away, and that I *still* pay about US$.50 per hour for local Internet access.
Air interface and software protocol are seperate issues. CDMA is regarded more highly than GSM's air interface, but the software versatility of GSM is much better. So, why not pick CDMA's air interface (or one of its upgraded cousins), and GSM's software?
The entire mess came about because of infighting between US and European companies, which in turn was mostly determined by whose patents would prevail. Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm have been screwing over their users by this stupid fight. Both the US and European governments have been riding their own companies horses, rather than acknowledging that in the end it is cheaper to just pick the best bits from each standard and move forward. All the public bickering about upgrade costs is just to hide the monied interests behind it -- new infrastructure has to be rolled out anyway, new handsets will have to be purchased anyway.
As to the encryption troubles with GSM, well, 3G would be a nice starting point to fix those. As other posters have indicated, the communications can be tapped easily on the provider end anyway, so there is no excuse for an encyption that is weakened after following advise from US law enforcement agencies.
Mozilla is, in a way, a very succesful open source project, which attracted lots of really talented outside contributors. And indeed, a lot of attention is being paid to reducing bloat at the moment.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired (to Mozilla's defense, both Microsoft and Apple have gone down the tubes in this area as well, for example, I'm abhorred by Windows 2000's "browser like" clicking, where a single click will open a file rather than selecting it, and it isn't particularly obvious when it behaves the old way or the new).
Anyway, to be able to fix something in Mozilla requires a significant investment of time on the part of the contributor. In the first Mozilla releases, which were based on the 4.x user interface, I could usually locate something I want to fix in an acceptable amount of time. Now, with the overhaul and the complete switch to C++, I spend hours grovelling through the thing, usually without coming up with an answer.
So, open source or not, Mozilla's improvement still hinges in great part on the full time developers, who live and breath that code base. For me, and I think for a lot of other contributors, it has just become too complex.
I have high hopes for its evolution over time, but it won't be soon that it will be as fast as 4.x. It will be interesting to see how spinoffs like Galeon will handle leveraging functionality from Mozilla. Time will tell whether XUL will become a boon to browser extension development, or remain a drag on the UI performance...
Yeah, I sort of figured from the press coverage, even though I have a hard time believeing it. The process needs fixing. The technology to punch a hole in a piece of slick cardboard with authority has been around long enough to be actually usable around now:-)
Whether Gore or Bush wins the legal challenges, no voter will feel confident his vote has been counted anyway. Four years to fix it.
Heh... brings back memories. Display Postscript didn't catch on in the market place for precisely the licensing reason mentioned, but it sure spawned a nice little counterculture of itself, around the NeWS (or was that NEWS?) window system.
A lot of design concepts that came out of NEWS found their way back into Java, because both were designed by the same person. Unfortunately, the best bits died... For one, NEWS code on a (now ancient) SPARCstation 1 run circles around Java on my Pentium III performancewise...
The BSD's differ amongst each other, and from Linux in a number of ways.
One thing that has not been mentioned in this thread so far is that most source code will (with minor modifications at worst) just compile under any BSD as well as they would under Linux. People sometimes overstress the difference.
As to the differences that matter, well: that is mostly dependant on what's important to you.
I'm continually torn in my preference, and my preference is the only bit I can speak about with real authority.:-)
I'm running NetBSD on machines that more or less require it (the Sparc and the VAX -- and yes, I know Linux is an option on at least the Sparc). I'm running FreeBSD on a number of machines, because it is fast and free. I'm running BSDi's BSD/OS on machines where I can least afford to muck with the machines, because of the quality of the mods (comparable to Service Packs on Windows, or Jumbo Patches on Solaris, except that they cause less grief:-)
FreeBSD sort of requires the end user to be half a developer (if not a whole one). If you run into an issue, the solution more often than not is to update your sources to the stable CVS branch and install them. On the other hand, my laptop runs FreeBSD 4.0 so well I'm weary to upgrade it to 4.2.
At my workplace, we're pretty eclectic. We run BSD/OS, FreeBSD, Linux and the big commercial Unices, we maintain some BSD software packages with RPM, and every once in a while, we move services off one platform and onto another. Whatever works best in a particular situation.
In such a tight race, the final victor may as well be determined with a lottery. That said, it is about time the voting process gets brought into the 1980's (if not the current/next millenium).
I've handled over a million punched cards in my college days, and I have never ever encountered a mispunch that was attributable to the punch machine. Until this election, the word "dangling chad" was alien to my vocabulary.
I just can't believe either party approved of the voting machines. In my days, a card punch slammed a rectangular hole in the card, and if it didn't was serviced.
Whatsdown.net uses pings to see how well you can reach a whole bunch of sites, but it doesn't mention which route the packets take. They should at least mention which network they're hooked up to.
Anyway, to assess the icing conditions on the Internet, you should also look at the routing. One good starting point for locating so-called looking glasses is
Nanog.
...all three parties involved...collectively own the patents on it.
This is a dangerous statement. The reason patents (especially the ones on software) are so insidious is that seemingly unrelated patents might be infringed. For all we know, Rambus may have a patent on solder joints or bus buffers or some obscure aspect of timing, that could possibly be construed to apply to competitors products.
Even if you were aware of the patent on client/server interaction held by Techsearch, and posessed the legal mind to be able to grok it, would you be able to assess your exposure to it if you ran a web server?
Hey, you wouldn't be the guy behind bustpatents.com, wouldn you?:-)
The VESA story is one that should be known more widely. One of the problems with patents in the mind of the public is that there are no widely publicised cases like this, where not just the techies thought patents were abused, but the thing was actually overturned for being abused.
If I wasn't getting the facts from sites like Tom's Hardware but from CNN, I'd quite likely believe that Rambus had invented semiconductor memory. Getting mind share for deep technological issues will be a problem forever...
Hey, come off it! The Linux kernel is under a completely different management than the BSD kernels.
Linux *is* making astounding leaps in both functionality and quality. The BSD's *are* lagging in things like support for cutting edge (or real sick) hardware. Which is good and which is bad is a personal judgement issue.
Linux is pretty much an open development environment. BSD is more characterized by port maintainers who say Njet. Matter of fact, if Bill Jolitz had listened to all the critics who said that the i386 port was too ugly to touch with a ten foot pole, BSD would've been pretty much dead by now.
My personal view is that there is a continuum that runs from Linux, via FreeBSD, to OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSD/OS.
On the one side, there is a perfectly acceptable OS that may contain more stuff that idealists find ugly. On the other, there's a perfectly acceptable OS that is focused on correctness and security more than on features.
I'm running all of the above at home or at work, and all have their place. Sometimes you need products produced by people who say njet, and sometimes you need people like Bill Jolitz to produce something ugly that works and build on that.
We now return you to your regular schedule of Microsoft bashing.
Sigh... Your points are only too valid, but you need to have your World Domination goggles on to agree with the conclusion.
As long as BSD powers the systems I care about most, Linux powers a significant fraction of the rest, and the Evil Empire is way down on the list of systems *I* care about, life is good.
Really, the "my foobar is bigger than your foobar" comparisons are relevant only if you need to convince top brass that you're making the right choice based on the numbers. I use what I think is best for the job, and so I think should anyone. Choice is good.
... what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Let me reiterate why it doesn't matter a single bit whether you publish under BSD, Mozilla or GPL license. Money and stupidity.
You mention Microsoft. Point to *one* bit of code where the stole (errr... reused, it's legal after all) stuff under the BSD license. They insisted on implementing their own TCP/IP stack, rather than reusing the free BSD stack.
If the BSD license had been compatible with Linux's, Linux could have had a decent TCP/IP stack years before it did. Really, Linux is as hurt by the license rift as BSD is.
I don't care how many companies use my work for free. Obviously you do. So be it. Now go out and fight extortion, hoarding and abuse rather than bashing the other free software developers.
You forgot the most important adress!
on
Patent Warfare
·
· Score: 1
Their ICBM coordinates are 42.1255N, 87.8406W.
Please be responsible. Tactical nukes are not toys and may incur collateral damage.
The GIF issue is not at stake. The patent covers computing intensive actions initiated on request of the end user.
Of course the patent still is bogus. Prior art in any 80's book on what were then called "intelligent terminals". These days, we'd call them thin clients.
Now, to convince the judge or (shudder) a jury... We object to jurors 1 through 7 and juror 9, your honor. They've got no clue about protocols. They're not my peers.
Paying for trial cost doesn't hurt the bad guys
on
Patent Warfare
·
· Score: 1
The Netherlands has this system as well, with the same provision as mentioned earlier in the thread -- the judge can even allocate the trial costs to the winner of the trial.
Of course, you're always worse off than before if you're on the receiving end of a frivolous suit, even if the other party has to pay the costs. No lawyer will work for the money that you get awarded, and forget about getting your vacation day you had to take reimbursed. Etcetera.
The perceived advantages of any legal system over another are immaterial in patent law cases.
Obviously, the company that holds those frivolous patents is not going to be deterred from a pretty safe gamble just by the prospect of having to reimburse the opponent some costs, especially if from all appearances they're just out to nail the guy anyway.
I wouldn't mind a provision in patent law that outlaws using frivolous patents for extortion. I believe that a legal case could be made for that interpretation.
Remember the "unobvious to a craftsman skilled in the trade" requirement, and the obvious fact that none of the parties sued could reasonably have suspected that they used a patented procedure; also a point could be made of their total absence of an effort to reach a substantial portion of alleged infringers to negociate fees rather than sue, which would weaken the "vigorous defense" requirement.
Oh, and the kicker is that the court documents apparently make it clear that reimbursement for the usage of their "invention" is totally subordinate to getting back. I loved the Forbes coverage of this lawsuit; they're up two marks in my book now!
Oh well, I am not a patent attorney. I work for my money.
It contains some glue code that is very OS specific. It is not going to be easy to port that low level code to the BSD's.
It is not impossible, it's just a lot of hard work. I went through this years ago with Wine, had it working, and then the Wine requirements changed and the whole thing needed a re-port. I gave up there and then.
If Intel drops off as Rambus' sole supporter, expect Rambus to abuse their patent position even more. Hitachi (or was it Toshiba? I forget) already gave in and pays a Rambus tax on their RAM technology. Tom Pabsts hardware site has some scathing analysis on this topic. In particular, read
this article.
When Intel really drops out, it is in everyones interest that Rambus gets put out of its misery quick.
I hope that Intel, having gotten a taste of its own medicine in using patents as a tool to legally stifle competation, will help the community by stamping out some stupid patents.
I'm not a hardware engineer, but comments I heard about Rambus' patents from people I consider knowledgable made me wonder about how valid they are.
It is, after all, high time some big corporation wises up to the cost to everyone including themselves of patenting the obvious.
Way back when, Digital had a patent on the decoding logic of their 8600 memory boards. The patent was clearly frivolous: anyone with a card edge pin-out and an ASIC programmer could have designed the logic. But the thing wasn't beaten in court. A small company bought up used 8MB memory boards, used a saw to cut the card edge plus decoding ASIC off the 8MB board, glued a 32MB board onto it, re-fastened all circuit traces and sold the resulting board at a profit for prices well below DEC's. It's rather sick that this involved process can be cheaper than paying license fees, and it shows that even if the patent itself were not frivolous, DEC abused their position as patent holder.
Patent abuse is rampant, but only the big boys have the money, the lawyers and the engineers to make a case. I'm glad to see the table turned.
if you follow the Java community at all, you
know that the main gripes people have are platform support, and bug fixes.
Around the JDK 1.1.5 days, I took a look to see what it would take to port JDK 1.1.5 to BSD/OS. After all, working ports for FreeBSD and Linux existed at the time.
At first I was in shock to discover that everything that had been done for FreeBSD, I would have to redo. The code supported Win32 and Solaris and that was it. Obviously, not importing any portability fixes from outside developers (who have offered them to Sun for inclusion) is a surefire way to make sure that all other platforms will always play catch up, often involving non-trivial amounts of work to backport earlier fixes to a new release. Basing the BSD/OS version off the FreeBSD work looked like suicide for my spare time to me.
I discussed the situation with a few people who had dealt with these issues, and came to the conclusion that Sun just didn't have the infrastructure to support integrating platform patches. If you look at platform support in Mozilla, you'll notice that Netscape-the-company invests significant time in keeping the source tree in shape for their main platforms without unduly damaging the other platforms.
Sun will have to devote significant resources to the management of their external developer base as well: integrating patches, verifying their non-effect on the supported platforms, and resolving disputes. They will have to anyway: the model whereby they license the code to third parties and burden them with porting the fixes forward to new releases just won't fly in this day and age. The model where outside source trees blossom in the field (e.g., SourceForge) isn't attractive to them either: sooner or later a significant fork will drive a wedge between Sun-supported Java and the Other Java.
I never tracked Java closely after the 1.1.6 release so they may have built on this already, but given their track record for fixing bugs in Solaris or defining a "Community license", I don't think they're mentally ready yet to properly manage outside contributions.
Look at *any* GUI e-mail package. For that matter, look at Pine. They differ in how hard they make it for you to get to the headers (Netscape and Pine are my favorites; Netscape allows you to do a View Source on an e-mail, which not only shows the headers but also the MIME goop, and Pine has a very easy to use hide/show headers feature, but neither are very obvious to new users).
The problem is, unless you're knowledgeable in SMTP, it's hard to figure out what's going on.
Well, let me throw in my rant at Microsoft after all. Outlook makes it excruciatingly hard to look at the headers, but it still is possible. It's something like go the the Server Settings menu, click on the SMTP tab, and then click View Headers. I can never remember the exact sequence, but it is almost as stupid as I make it out to be.
A few years ago, you started out with computers. You bought one, with the software to go with it. But your company grew, and now you have tens of computers. But you may be in for a costly surprise, because no one told you that you need to pay for the software for all your new machines. Call Microsoft now for more information about licensing.
The ad irritates me big time, for a number of reasons. First, it ignores the Microsoft Tax. It is damn near impossible to buy a computer without Windows anyway. Second, it implies that all software is created with their business model in mind. It skirts the transferrability issue (their is none in their mind, but I'd like to see that one dealt with in court). It does not address upgrade costs. The whole tone of the ad suggests that they're the only game in town anyway.
Oh, and finally, the animation is offendingly ugly. Even the ads from our tax men show more imagination.
Anyway, the thing obviously targets small businesses and not consumers.
Sigh... All the evidence I've got is that routing is *the* bottleneck at the moment. The backbone routers already have a hard time keeping up with routing a few dozen 1Gbps lines. Sure, we can make even denser use of fiber, but I'm not convinced the switching capacity is there (yet).
Denser fiber is way cool for more or less local operations (think Video on Demand), but for what I use bandwidth for, there already is plenty to go around and the cables no longer are the bottleneck.
Personally I'm very happy with the personal E1 I have outside of office hours. Every time I tried to assess why I wasn't maxing out the line I found it was because of poor routing (i.e., poor peering on my providers part).
Slashdot Mirror
You are right, of course, in saying that it's none of the providers business what you use the phone line for, and that they should change their pricing if they feel the costs they are incurring do not match the revenue they get from you.
This is precisely what the Dutch PTT did in the 1980's, when they realized they were building central office switches like there's no tomorrow for the sake of just a few users who spent all their days on BBS's. They scrapped the unlimited access. This was in the days when CO switches limited the number of open lines to seven per one hundred subscriber lines, so they had little option but to do *something*.
Of course, paid-for local access is an anachronism nowadays.
Another small observation about the way the decision was made then is that they made this change precisely to avoid having to raise monthly charges for the average user. Bad for nerds, good for grannies. Economy is about distribution of both wealth and costs, and politics is about what's the definition of "fair". It's funny to see the government owned juggernaut at the side of the consumer.
Sigh. These days, the Dutch government has all but took its hands off the telco's, which results in the weird situation that even though our montly charges are far less than in most other places in the world, it is now cheaper to call from my home to anywhere in the US than it is to call to Amsterdam, which is only 30 miles away, and that I *still* pay about US$.50 per hour for local Internet access.
The entire mess came about because of infighting between US and European companies, which in turn was mostly determined by whose patents would prevail. Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia and Qualcomm have been screwing over their users by this stupid fight. Both the US and European governments have been riding their own companies horses, rather than acknowledging that in the end it is cheaper to just pick the best bits from each standard and move forward. All the public bickering about upgrade costs is just to hide the monied interests behind it -- new infrastructure has to be rolled out anyway, new handsets will have to be purchased anyway.
As to the encryption troubles with GSM, well, 3G would be a nice starting point to fix those. As other posters have indicated, the communications can be tapped easily on the provider end anyway, so there is no excuse for an encyption that is weakened after following advise from US law enforcement agencies.
Unfortunately, a number of design decisions were errrr less than optimal. The XUL user interface language seems to have a big impact on performance. And leaving aside whether one likes the UI or not, the fact that it behaves different than other apps on any given platform also leaves a lot to be desired (to Mozilla's defense, both Microsoft and Apple have gone down the tubes in this area as well, for example, I'm abhorred by Windows 2000's "browser like" clicking, where a single click will open a file rather than selecting it, and it isn't particularly obvious when it behaves the old way or the new).
Anyway, to be able to fix something in Mozilla requires a significant investment of time on the part of the contributor. In the first Mozilla releases, which were based on the 4.x user interface, I could usually locate something I want to fix in an acceptable amount of time. Now, with the overhaul and the complete switch to C++, I spend hours grovelling through the thing, usually without coming up with an answer.
So, open source or not, Mozilla's improvement still hinges in great part on the full time developers, who live and breath that code base. For me, and I think for a lot of other contributors, it has just become too complex.
I have high hopes for its evolution over time, but it won't be soon that it will be as fast as 4.x. It will be interesting to see how spinoffs like Galeon will handle leveraging functionality from Mozilla. Time will tell whether XUL will become a boon to browser extension development, or remain a drag on the UI performance...
Whether Gore or Bush wins the legal challenges, no voter will feel confident his vote has been counted anyway. Four years to fix it.
A lot of design concepts that came out of NEWS found their way back into Java, because both were designed by the same person. Unfortunately, the best bits died... For one, NEWS code on a (now ancient) SPARCstation 1 run circles around Java on my Pentium III performancewise...
One thing that has not been mentioned in this thread so far is that most source code will (with minor modifications at worst) just compile under any BSD as well as they would under Linux. People sometimes overstress the difference.
As to the differences that matter, well: that is mostly dependant on what's important to you.
I'm continually torn in my preference, and my preference is the only bit I can speak about with real authority. :-)
I'm running NetBSD on machines that more or less require it (the Sparc and the VAX -- and yes, I know Linux is an option on at least the Sparc). I'm running FreeBSD on a number of machines, because it is fast and free. I'm running BSDi's BSD/OS on machines where I can least afford to muck with the machines, because of the quality of the mods (comparable to Service Packs on Windows, or Jumbo Patches on Solaris, except that they cause less grief :-)
FreeBSD sort of requires the end user to be half a developer (if not a whole one). If you run into an issue, the solution more often than not is to update your sources to the stable CVS branch and install them. On the other hand, my laptop runs FreeBSD 4.0 so well I'm weary to upgrade it to 4.2.
At my workplace, we're pretty eclectic. We run BSD/OS, FreeBSD, Linux and the big commercial Unices, we maintain some BSD software packages with RPM, and every once in a while, we move services off one platform and onto another. Whatever works best in a particular situation.
I've handled over a million punched cards in my college days, and I have never ever encountered a mispunch that was attributable to the punch machine. Until this election, the word "dangling chad" was alien to my vocabulary.
I just can't believe either party approved of the voting machines. In my days, a card punch slammed a rectangular hole in the card, and if it didn't was serviced.
Anyway, to assess the icing conditions on the Internet, you should also look at the routing. One good starting point for locating so-called looking glasses is Nanog.
There are a lot of advantages to the plex86 approach (far better emulation, higher potential speed etc), but portability is not one of them.
This is a dangerous statement. The reason patents (especially the ones on software) are so insidious is that seemingly unrelated patents might be infringed. For all we know, Rambus may have a patent on solder joints or bus buffers or some obscure aspect of timing, that could possibly be construed to apply to competitors products.
Even if you were aware of the patent on client/server interaction held by Techsearch, and posessed the legal mind to be able to grok it, would you be able to assess your exposure to it if you ran a web server?
The VESA story is one that should be known more widely. One of the problems with patents in the mind of the public is that there are no widely publicised cases like this, where not just the techies thought patents were abused, but the thing was actually overturned for being abused.
If I wasn't getting the facts from sites like Tom's Hardware but from CNN, I'd quite likely believe that Rambus had invented semiconductor memory. Getting mind share for deep technological issues will be a problem forever...
Linux *is* making astounding leaps in both functionality and quality. The BSD's *are* lagging in things like support for cutting edge (or real sick) hardware. Which is good and which is bad is a personal judgement issue.
Linux is pretty much an open development environment. BSD is more characterized by port maintainers who say Njet. Matter of fact, if Bill Jolitz had listened to all the critics who said that the i386 port was too ugly to touch with a ten foot pole, BSD would've been pretty much dead by now.
My personal view is that there is a continuum that runs from Linux, via FreeBSD, to OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSD/OS.
On the one side, there is a perfectly acceptable OS that may contain more stuff that idealists find ugly. On the other, there's a perfectly acceptable OS that is focused on correctness and security more than on features.
I'm running all of the above at home or at work, and all have their place. Sometimes you need products produced by people who say njet, and sometimes you need people like Bill Jolitz to produce something ugly that works and build on that.
We now return you to your regular schedule of Microsoft bashing.
As long as BSD powers the systems I care about most, Linux powers a significant fraction of the rest, and the Evil Empire is way down on the list of systems *I* care about, life is good.
Really, the "my foobar is bigger than your foobar" comparisons are relevant only if you need to convince top brass that you're making the right choice based on the numbers. I use what I think is best for the job, and so I think should anyone. Choice is good.
Let me reiterate why it doesn't matter a single bit whether you publish under BSD, Mozilla or GPL license. Money and stupidity.
You mention Microsoft. Point to *one* bit of code where the stole (errr... reused, it's legal after all) stuff under the BSD license. They insisted on implementing their own TCP/IP stack, rather than reusing the free BSD stack.
If the BSD license had been compatible with Linux's, Linux could have had a decent TCP/IP stack years before it did. Really, Linux is as hurt by the license rift as BSD is.
I don't care how many companies use my work for free. Obviously you do. So be it. Now go out and fight extortion, hoarding and abuse rather than bashing the other free software developers.
Please be responsible. Tactical nukes are not toys and may incur collateral damage.
Of course the patent still is bogus. Prior art in any 80's book on what were then called "intelligent terminals". These days, we'd call them thin clients.
Now, to convince the judge or (shudder) a jury... We object to jurors 1 through 7 and juror 9, your honor. They've got no clue about protocols. They're not my peers.
Of course, you're always worse off than before if you're on the receiving end of a frivolous suit, even if the other party has to pay the costs. No lawyer will work for the money that you get awarded, and forget about getting your vacation day you had to take reimbursed. Etcetera.
The perceived advantages of any legal system over another are immaterial in patent law cases.
Obviously, the company that holds those frivolous patents is not going to be deterred from a pretty safe gamble just by the prospect of having to reimburse the opponent some costs, especially if from all appearances they're just out to nail the guy anyway.
I wouldn't mind a provision in patent law that outlaws using frivolous patents for extortion. I believe that a legal case could be made for that interpretation.
Remember the "unobvious to a craftsman skilled in the trade" requirement, and the obvious fact that none of the parties sued could reasonably have suspected that they used a patented procedure; also a point could be made of their total absence of an effort to reach a substantial portion of alleged infringers to negociate fees rather than sue, which would weaken the "vigorous defense" requirement.
Oh, and the kicker is that the court documents apparently make it clear that reimbursement for the usage of their "invention" is totally subordinate to getting back. I loved the Forbes coverage of this lawsuit; they're up two marks in my book now!
Oh well, I am not a patent attorney. I work for my money.
It is not impossible, it's just a lot of hard work. I went through this years ago with Wine, had it working, and then the Wine requirements changed and the whole thing needed a re-port. I gave up there and then.
When Intel really drops out, it is in everyones interest that Rambus gets put out of its misery quick.
I'm not a hardware engineer, but comments I heard about Rambus' patents from people I consider knowledgable made me wonder about how valid they are.
It is, after all, high time some big corporation wises up to the cost to everyone including themselves of patenting the obvious.
Way back when, Digital had a patent on the decoding logic of their 8600 memory boards. The patent was clearly frivolous: anyone with a card edge pin-out and an ASIC programmer could have designed the logic. But the thing wasn't beaten in court. A small company bought up used 8MB memory boards, used a saw to cut the card edge plus decoding ASIC off the 8MB board, glued a 32MB board onto it, re-fastened all circuit traces and sold the resulting board at a profit for prices well below DEC's. It's rather sick that this involved process can be cheaper than paying license fees, and it shows that even if the patent itself were not frivolous, DEC abused their position as patent holder.
Patent abuse is rampant, but only the big boys have the money, the lawyers and the engineers to make a case. I'm glad to see the table turned.
Thanks for the pointer, this is a usable recipy for when I get Outlook users on the phone and have to tell them how to send me the headers.
Around the JDK 1.1.5 days, I took a look to see what it would take to port JDK 1.1.5 to BSD/OS. After all, working ports for FreeBSD and Linux existed at the time.
At first I was in shock to discover that everything that had been done for FreeBSD, I would have to redo. The code supported Win32 and Solaris and that was it. Obviously, not importing any portability fixes from outside developers (who have offered them to Sun for inclusion) is a surefire way to make sure that all other platforms will always play catch up, often involving non-trivial amounts of work to backport earlier fixes to a new release. Basing the BSD/OS version off the FreeBSD work looked like suicide for my spare time to me.
I discussed the situation with a few people who had dealt with these issues, and came to the conclusion that Sun just didn't have the infrastructure to support integrating platform patches. If you look at platform support in Mozilla, you'll notice that Netscape-the-company invests significant time in keeping the source tree in shape for their main platforms without unduly damaging the other platforms.
Sun will have to devote significant resources to the management of their external developer base as well: integrating patches, verifying their non-effect on the supported platforms, and resolving disputes. They will have to anyway: the model whereby they license the code to third parties and burden them with porting the fixes forward to new releases just won't fly in this day and age. The model where outside source trees blossom in the field (e.g., SourceForge) isn't attractive to them either: sooner or later a significant fork will drive a wedge between Sun-supported Java and the Other Java.
I never tracked Java closely after the 1.1.6 release so they may have built on this already, but given their track record for fixing bugs in Solaris or defining a "Community license", I don't think they're mentally ready yet to properly manage outside contributions.
The problem is, unless you're knowledgeable in SMTP, it's hard to figure out what's going on.
Well, let me throw in my rant at Microsoft after all. Outlook makes it excruciatingly hard to look at the headers, but it still is possible. It's something like go the the Server Settings menu, click on the SMTP tab, and then click View Headers. I can never remember the exact sequence, but it is almost as stupid as I make it out to be.
A few years ago, you started out with computers. You bought one, with the software to go with it. But your company grew, and now you have tens of computers. But you may be in for a costly surprise, because no one told you that you need to pay for the software for all your new machines. Call Microsoft now for more information about licensing.
The ad irritates me big time, for a number of reasons. First, it ignores the Microsoft Tax. It is damn near impossible to buy a computer without Windows anyway. Second, it implies that all software is created with their business model in mind. It skirts the transferrability issue (their is none in their mind, but I'd like to see that one dealt with in court). It does not address upgrade costs. The whole tone of the ad suggests that they're the only game in town anyway.
Oh, and finally, the animation is offendingly ugly. Even the ads from our tax men show more imagination.
Anyway, the thing obviously targets small businesses and not consumers.
Denser fiber is way cool for more or less local operations (think Video on Demand), but for what I use bandwidth for, there already is plenty to go around and the cables no longer are the bottleneck.
Personally I'm very happy with the personal E1 I have outside of office hours. Every time I tried to assess why I wasn't maxing out the line I found it was because of poor routing (i.e., poor peering on my providers part).