It doesn't matter if Webcrawler indexed pages long before the patent was issued if they never described the technology in public.
Good point. However Webcrawler was a project from the University of Washington which was very public about their aims and methods, as academia usually is.
When I was presented with a non-compete, I requested a meeting and pointed out the parts which were unacceptable (non-compete for two years).
A non-compete agreement is very asymmetric. They ask you not to work for X years after you quit, for which you pay a price by not being able to work in your main area of competence. The employer on the other hand has an interest in making the period as long as possible and has little or no cost in doing so.
So to ensure that the non-compete agreement was symmetric and that time was really justified I told them that six months were ok, and that beyond that they would have to pay me a thousand dollars for every month they wanted me to not-compete.
They verbally agreed to it, but in the end I was never asked to signed anything...
I did a quick search on the patents database, and I came up with this beauty a full two years after webcrawler the first crawl and index search engine, went live. Webcrawler went live on April 1994, Lycos went live on July 20, 1994. (IANAL but notice that date of discovery is at most one year before date of filling...)
Title: Method for Parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages.
"Inventor": Burrows, Michael
Applicant: Digital Equipment Corp.
Filed: August 9, 1996
A system indexes Web pages of the Internet. The pages are stored in computers distributively connected to each other by a communications network. Each page has a unique URL (universal record locator). Some of the pages can include URL links to other pages. A communication interface connected to the Internet is used for fetching a batch of Web pages from the computers in accordance with the URLs and URL links. The URLs are determined by an automated Web browser connected to the communications interface. A parser sequentially partitions the batch of specified pages into indexable words where each word represents an indexable portion of information of a specific page, or the word represents an attribute of one or more portions of the specific page. The parser sequentially assigns locations to the words as they are parsed. The locations indicates the unique occurrences of the word in the Web. The output of the parser is stored in a memory as an index. The index includes one index entry for each unique word. Each index entry also includes one or more location entries indicating where the unique word occurs in the Web. A query module parses a query into terms and operators. The operators relate the terms. A search engine uses object-oriented stream readers to sequentially read location of specified index entries, the specified index entries correspond to the terms of a query. A display module presents qualified pages located by the search engine to users of the Web.
Issued: Jan 26, 1999
You do realize that Bill Clinton holds the record for the most troops deployed during his term as President -
right?
Do you have any numbers to back this up? I would be very interested in seeing them as considering how massive the gulf war operation was, and that the Somalia mission was started by Bush it seems to me that Bush should be the all time winner....
GWB probably w
Can anyone point to the best online apologia favoring software patents, or perhaps
suggesting higher thresholds for them?)
Many moons ago I collected what I thought were particularly cogent articles both in favour or against software patents. Here are the two best ones in favour of software patents:
How could someone write a news story about this and not include a picture???
Which IMHO means that some content creation companies still don't get the web.
Just recently President Clinton pardoned 500 or so criminals. None of the web news items contained the whole list of names...
In a newspaper you must certainly wouldn't print the whole list. On the web you must certainly include a link to the whole list.
I'm interested only because of a friend...really...;-)
Please note that those countries and companies that spent very little on "Y2K compliance" had about as many problems as the USA and Canada and those banks and airlines that went through all the nonsense.
At the same time, note that countries that spent little money on Y2K are substantially less computerized than the US. For example Russia spent very little in y2k compliance for their nuclear reactors...because they are not computer controlled!!!
Nothing happened thanks to his warnings. I have friends who work in banks, and according to them software did not run in the first "set-the-clock-forward and see-what-happens" tests.
A nuclear power plant in Ontario failed the tests after the initial set of y2k bug fixes had been made.
Yes a lot of people who were worrying about the y2k shouldn't have. A friend of mine sells research lab microscopes, which are computer controlled. He was getting calls about y2k compliance. His answer was "try it on the new year, and if it doesn't we'll replace it, what's the big f*****g deal? your lab experiment might get delayed a few days!?"
As you can expect the microscopes worked without a hitch.
To sum up, banks, utilities, telcos and airlines were well advised to head y2k warnings, all others were a bit hysterical.
I had head so many great things about cast away from the critics that I ended up not enjoying it.
I think if I had walked in the theatre with no expecations whatsoever, I would have walked out thinking "not a bad movie at all". Instead I walked out thinking "what is all the big fuzz about?".
I mean the movie is interesting, entertaining and well acted, but performances never tower like Hopkins and Foster in Silence of the Lambs. The plot never goes far from a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets a girl back. The movie goes nowhere with its basic premise (a man driven by time and gadgets who is placed off-line for a few years), almost as if Zemeckis had changed his mind half way through filming.
Listen up: machine code and assembly code are synonyms, no ifs, ands, or buts.
You are wrong. Here's a reference:
The simplest kind of programming language is assembly language which
usually has a one-to-one correspondence with the resulting machine code instructions but allows the use of mnemonics
(ASCII strings) for the "op codes" (the part of the instruction which encodes the basic type of operation to perform) and
names for locations in the program (branch labels) and for variables and constants.
The keyword is usually. If it said always then assembler and machine code would be the same. But it doesn't. Go back to school, collect $200...
Modern assemblers (macro-assemblers) do memory allocation of variables for you, as well as subroutine calling. If you care about data alignment in some arcane subroutine or some weird speed up when calling a subroutine (such as leaving data on registers) then you need to write directly in machine code.
Tim misunderstood SGML's goals and mangled them in the creation of HTML, but mightn't it have been a more pragmatic thing? He wanted something usable, and he created it, and it worked.
It definetely works. My point is that it wasn't a systematic process of fixing SGML what made HTML work. Rather it was his misunderstanding of SGML goals what happen to made HTML good.
One can't and shouldn't judge people like Tim and their achievements from a purely software-theoretic point of view. Rather, he made something usable for the rest of us, and raised the bar for those coming after him.
Don't get me wrong. There are many things right with HTML... but for better or for worse (and it can certainly be argued) it simply does not reflect a proper understanding of what SGML was....
XHTML was not split from XML; it uses XML as a base for ease of parsing.
That is not how it happened.
When XML was presented with great fanfare in the 1997 World Wide Web conference the designers claimed it was the end of HTML. A while later, when nothing of the sort seemed likely, they shifted gears and by 1999, the same group of designers were saying "let's face it XML won't replace HTML".
I know 'cuz I was there...
XSLT is not a rendering/formatting mechanism. It is a schema transform mechanism. The fact that most people use it to transform to XHTML is incidental.
Once again you lack the historical context. XSL was proposed to do formatting. In the process of implementing this formater, people realized that what we call formating is actually two things (1) a transformation and (b) page layout.
So they split the project into two XSLT and XSL
the first with transformation primitives and the second with formating objects.
This is (mostly) not a W3C power-play. This is common sense trying to climb over the dung-heap of data known as the web. C'mon! Who better than a Swiss to get things organized?
A power play is the wrong term. This is more like an ongoing technical debate between the SGMLers and the rest of the world. The SGMLers believed that SGML was the end all (I think it is only a good beginning) and aimed to destroy the impure HTML with XML. In the process SGMLers learned a lot about simplicity of design, predefined tags, formating and linking. All issues that had been neglected by SGML.
As part of that learning process came the realization that there was a need for XHTML.
I'm always amazed at how wrong Tim Berners-Lee got SGML and how for exactly that reason HTML was successful where SGML had failed miserably.
XML is an effort from the SGMLers to retake the lead and bring HTML back to the purity of markup languages.
Originally XML was a simplified SGML aiming to replace HTML. So much for that one. Many of the original SGML problems were still there (in a nutshell too powerfull and general for the average web page).
However SGMLers learned in the process, split the original XML proposal into many subcomponents, including XHTML. They also learned that rendering/formating is important and should be part of a tagging standard (thus XSLT)...
We'll see if the world finally follows them in this third attempt to take over text management...
I was a few years ahead of my classmates, so what follows is from my own personal experience. I don't know if it applies to your kid:
have the kid meet other people in his mental age group. Somebody who is equally excited about a science project as he is..
sometimes obvious social skills go over the head of child prodigies because they are so illogical and arbitrary. The social rules of backstabbing for one are among the most complicated social construct he will ever encounter (it ain't called backstabbing for nothing).
teach him how to get a girl.
he's a kid, find ways for him to have fun. He won't enjoy GI Joe, he's too smart for that, but he can still enjoy some other form of role playing that involves more imagination.
breadth rather than depth. Rather than making him an expert in some arcane part of electronics teach him about all the natural sciences, social sciences and the arts.
teach him leadership skills. He's likely to end up managing people (peterson principle) so teach how to do it.
listen to the kid and adjust your schedule accordingly.
In many circumstances today 64-bit processors are a waste... especially in a desktop. 64-bit (and wider) data paths are certainly a big help even on a consumer desktop.
Having optimized a software app for 32 and 64 bit architectures, this is true enough.
Enter VLIW... The main reason why iTanium implements VLIW is that if you don't need 64 bits of data you can pack four (I think) independent instructions in a single word...
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned this in the responses. Am I missing something?? Has Intel withdrawn the VLIW design from itanium and I missed the announcement??
I don't know if it is fame what drives people to participate on the Obfuscated C contest. I mean, who remembers the name of the winners?
For me it is more the challenge of it all. I have never submitted an entry to the contest, but quite a few times I have started on that path, just for the fun of it....
On the other hand, Open source hackers do get more recognition as well they should. Paul Vixie, Bill Joy, Henry Spencer, Vinton Cerf, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvald, Miguel de Icaza. Those names stick like glue to my memory cells...
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. However Webcrawler was a project from the University of Washington which was very public about their aims and methods, as academia usually is.
A non-compete agreement is very asymmetric. They ask you not to work for X years after you quit, for which you pay a price by not being able to work in your main area of competence. The employer on the other hand has an interest in making the period as long as possible and has little or no cost in doing so.
So to ensure that the non-compete agreement was symmetric and that time was really justified I told them that six months were ok, and that beyond that they would have to pay me a thousand dollars for every month they wanted me to not-compete.
They verbally agreed to it, but in the end I was never asked to signed anything...
Title: Method for Parsing, indexing and searching world-wide-web pages.
"Inventor": Burrows, Michael
Applicant: Digital Equipment Corp.
Filed: August 9, 1996
A system indexes Web pages of the Internet. The pages are stored in computers distributively connected to each other by a communications network. Each page has a unique URL (universal record locator). Some of the pages can include URL links to other pages. A communication interface connected to the Internet is used for fetching a batch of Web pages from the computers in accordance with the URLs and URL links. The URLs are determined by an automated Web browser connected to the communications interface. A parser sequentially partitions the batch of specified pages into indexable words where each word represents an indexable portion of information of a specific page, or the word represents an attribute of one or more portions of the specific page. The parser sequentially assigns locations to the words as they are parsed. The locations indicates the unique occurrences of the word in the Web. The output of the parser is stored in a memory as an index. The index includes one index entry for each unique word. Each index entry also includes one or more location entries indicating where the unique word occurs in the Web. A query module parses a query into terms and operators. The operators relate the terms. A search engine uses object-oriented stream readers to sequentially read location of specified index entries, the specified index entries correspond to the terms of a query. A display module presents qualified pages located by the search engine to users of the Web. Issued: Jan 26, 1999
Not at all. Lycos and Open Text were there first. If memory doesn't fail me, Lycos by about a year, Open Text by about six months....
Do you have any numbers to back this up? I would be very interested in seeing them as considering how massive the gulf war operation was, and that the Somalia mission was started by Bush it seems to me that Bush should be the all time winner.... GWB probably w
Many moons ago I collected what I thought were particularly cogent articles both in favour or against software patents. Here are the two best ones in favour of software patents:
Which IMHO means that some content creation companies still don't get the web.
Just recently President Clinton pardoned 500 or so criminals. None of the web news items contained the whole list of names... In a newspaper you must certainly wouldn't print the whole list. On the web you must certainly include a link to the whole list.
I'm interested only because of a friend...really... ;-)
At the same time, note that countries that spent little money on Y2K are substantially less computerized than the US. For example Russia spent very little in y2k compliance for their nuclear reactors...because they are not computer controlled!!!
A nuclear power plant in Ontario failed the tests after the initial set of y2k bug fixes had been made.
Yes a lot of people who were worrying about the y2k shouldn't have. A friend of mine sells research lab microscopes, which are computer controlled. He was getting calls about y2k compliance. His answer was "try it on the new year, and if it doesn't we'll replace it, what's the big f*****g deal? your lab experiment might get delayed a few days!?"
As you can expect the microscopes worked without a hitch.
To sum up, banks, utilities, telcos and airlines were well advised to head y2k warnings, all others were a bit hysterical.
I think if I had walked in the theatre with no expecations whatsoever, I would have walked out thinking "not a bad movie at all". Instead I walked out thinking "what is all the big fuzz about?".
I mean the movie is interesting, entertaining and well acted, but performances never tower like Hopkins and Foster in Silence of the Lambs. The plot never goes far from a boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets a girl back. The movie goes nowhere with its basic premise (a man driven by time and gadgets who is placed off-line for a few years), almost as if Zemeckis had changed his mind half way through filming.
In short: an ok movie overhyped by the critics.
Penicillin was invented in 1920's. It wasn't introduced or widely used until the mid 40s, when it was rediscovered by british army doctors...
You are wrong. Here's a reference:
The simplest kind of programming language is assembly language which usually has a one-to-one correspondence with the resulting machine code instructions but allows the use of mnemonics (ASCII strings) for the "op codes" (the part of the instruction which encodes the basic type of operation to perform) and names for locations in the program (branch labels) and for variables and constants.
The keyword is usually. If it said always then assembler and machine code would be the same. But it doesn't. Go back to school, collect $200...
No they ain't.
Modern assemblers (macro-assemblers) do memory allocation of variables for you, as well as subroutine calling. If you care about data alignment in some arcane subroutine or some weird speed up when calling a subroutine (such as leaving data on registers) then you need to write directly in machine code.
Yes I do. I was there...
Go back and read the archives. (Say for example the emails between Dan Connolly and Tim).
For XML a good source is:
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/quotes1999.html
It definetely works. My point is that it wasn't a systematic process of fixing SGML what made HTML work. Rather it was his misunderstanding of SGML goals what happen to made HTML good.
One can't and shouldn't judge people like Tim and their achievements from a purely software-theoretic point of view. Rather, he made something usable for the rest of us, and raised the bar for those coming after him.
Don't get me wrong. There are many things right with HTML... but for better or for worse (and it can certainly be argued) it simply does not reflect a proper understanding of what SGML was....
That is not how it happened.
When XML was presented with great fanfare in the 1997 World Wide Web conference the designers claimed it was the end of HTML. A while later, when nothing of the sort seemed likely, they shifted gears and by 1999, the same group of designers were saying "let's face it XML won't replace HTML".
I know 'cuz I was there...
XSLT is not a rendering/formatting mechanism. It is a schema transform mechanism. The fact that most people use it to transform to XHTML is incidental.
Once again you lack the historical context. XSL was proposed to do formatting. In the process of implementing this formater, people realized that what we call formating is actually two things (1) a transformation and (b) page layout.
So they split the project into two XSLT and XSL the first with transformation primitives and the second with formating objects.
This is (mostly) not a W3C power-play. This is common sense trying to climb over the dung-heap of data known as the web. C'mon! Who better than a Swiss to get things organized?
A power play is the wrong term. This is more like an ongoing technical debate between the SGMLers and the rest of the world. The SGMLers believed that SGML was the end all (I think it is only a good beginning) and aimed to destroy the impure HTML with XML. In the process SGMLers learned a lot about simplicity of design, predefined tags, formating and linking. All issues that had been neglected by SGML.
As part of that learning process came the realization that there was a need for XHTML.
XML is an effort from the SGMLers to retake the lead and bring HTML back to the purity of markup languages.
Originally XML was a simplified SGML aiming to replace HTML. So much for that one. Many of the original SGML problems were still there (in a nutshell too powerfull and general for the average web page).
However SGMLers learned in the process, split the original XML proposal into many subcomponents, including XHTML. They also learned that rendering/formating is important and should be part of a tagging standard (thus XSLT)...
We'll see if the world finally follows them in this third attempt to take over text management...
Death of Microsoft, Film at Eleven!
Over Steve Jobs objections and without his knowledge, as he never approved it...
Just trying to set the Urban Legend straight.
Fb. Bill Gates never said such a thing.
T. Steve Jobs refused to make the Mac expandable beyond 512k.
T. The Mac is expandable because of skunk works from the Mac engineers.
And since the facts in this case turn out to be beneficial for Bill Gates, I'll surely lose karma over this...
Having optimized a software app for 32 and 64 bit architectures, this is true enough.
Enter VLIW... The main reason why iTanium implements VLIW is that if you don't need 64 bits of data you can pack four (I think) independent instructions in a single word...
Surprisingly nobody has mentioned this in the responses. Am I missing something?? Has Intel withdrawn the VLIW design from itanium and I missed the announcement??
THINK ABOUT ALL THE BITS WE COULD SAVE BY NOT HAVING TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN A LITTLE "c" AND A LARGE "C".
n.b. Cool a troll started by Hemos himself...
For me it is more the challenge of it all. I have never submitted an entry to the contest, but quite a few times I have started on that path, just for the fun of it....
On the other hand, Open source hackers do get more recognition as well they should. Paul Vixie, Bill Joy, Henry Spencer, Vinton Cerf, Eric Raymond, Linus Torvald, Miguel de Icaza. Those names stick like glue to my memory cells...
Strictly speaking SAX is just an API, however its author, David Megginson has made Java code for SAX available under the pacakge org.xml.sax.
This publicly available, widely used implementation is what I had in mind when I wrote about a universally tested SAX.