OK - Maybe I'm just a cynical b----rd, but at least half the patent refers to storing the HTML and then reading it back. I didn't realise they were hiring MUPPETS at the USPTO.
Read the file, check it is HTML. If so, then turn in into a bunch of rendering instructions. Otherwise, don't. (seriously - that's 1(a)-(iv))
Claim 2 is claim 1 - nothing to see here.
A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing the method recited in claim 2.
See above, only for claim 1.
Identical to claim 1, more or less. Only this time its an "apparatus", not a "method". Whoopdy-freaking-do.
Claims 7-9: Continue based on what this computer or another computer says. Sometimes write data to a storage medium.
The BULK of the patent is the idea that HTML can contain Javascript that does stuff. Doesn't everyone and their kitten have prior art on this?
As if it isn't obvious enough, Claims 1-6 are covered by HTML 2.0. Claims 7-9 are covered (and this is a trivial example, others will surely find better ones) by HTML 4.0 and cousins. And the only reason I don't have earlier references is that they're so bleeding obvious!
Ummmmm.... Not really: That depends entirely on the people you hire and (more specifically) where they live. In many non-developed-world countries, $100,000 would go a long long way.
You could hire in the region of 5 full-time programmers at pretty competitive rates here in South Africa, and they'd be earning a lot more than most. Part of the appeal of this system is that it is per task, and thus challenges people to pick the best way to do it, and get on with it - none of this to distort the picture:)
Hmmmm... Not as unlikely as that - lots of people host on virtual-machines (e.g. Verio) or with managed hosting companies (e.g. Rackspace, which is why I'm nervous;) ). That means that latency is very low, and fairly consistent.
I am as fervent an opposer to the BSA as the next Slashdot Sheep, but...
A brief note about economics is probably in order. The cost of making a physical CD is not what you are paying for when you buy a CD. You are paying for the cost of developing, testing, marketing, researching both that program and future programs.
That means that pirating software costs the developer the chance to recover the costs of making that software in the first place.
And before anyone mods this Flamebait, give a moment's thought to what this means for the (non-BSA member) Linux companies out there: companies with (as a rule) very good chances of going out of business each year. They spend time researching, fixing, improving the OSS software that you use regularly... but since most people download this without actually paying a penny for it, they have to find alternative routes to make money.
Now I think that there are lots of arguments for OSS, but it does make the economics much more complicated for all involved.
Probably "Yes" to the fact that GNOME is more enterprise support, but "No" to Ximian-based support. I think a large part of the decision is based on the fact that GNOME and GTK are LGPL, and thus "friendlier" to ISV's who want to write proprietary apps using them.
And (IANAKDEU) but think GNOME's accessibility support _may_ have had something to do with it.
Actually, the Russians have an extraordinary safety record on their systems, most of which seem "primitive" because, well, they work. They always have worked. And theirs no point fixin' it if it ain't broke.
The examples are endless: space-pens (vs. Russian pencils), the US exercise bike on ISS (which borked in the first month of flight only to be replaced by Mir's 15-year-old bike, which is... still working), etc.
The Americans are paranoid about their craft - have been ever since Challenger - but the Shuttle:
doesn't have an escape mechanism - the Soyuz does (two, in fact)
is much more fragile than the Soyuz (can only withstand 3g, while Soyuz can push it all the way up)
and many other little facts I can't remember. Russian space-tech is not shiny, high-tech (visually) and uber-modern, but it is some of the best tech around.
And for those who doubt that they can handle the tonage during lift-off, get onto Google and look up the Energia launcher: cancelled at the end of Communism due to finance problems, but still the largest-lift rocket ever built...
There is a distinction that can be (automatically) drawn between closed and open source software: you have the opportunity to do something about a problem with OSS. blah blah blah do-one reads the code blah blah blah - I can't hear you...
The point is that: if you buy a car, don't read the manual and then it fails because you didn't do something you could have (viz. find out that the brake pedal is in an unusual place) then its your fault. You (if it really mattered to you) could have checked the problems out yourself. You could have hired someone else to do the checking. You could have followed any number of paths to ensure that the given problem does not exist.
Not doing that is your fault. Now the problem that Microsoft faces is this: by keeping the source closed, and by taking money for that, they are saying "you don't have to worry about security - pay us to do that for you."
They then ship software with insecure defaults, and have it come back and bite them.
An OSS developer, on the other hand, sends his handiwork into the world saying "this won't work". If it does work, then congratulations: you got something cool for free. If it doesn't work, get someone to make it work.
The advantage of OSS is that everyone's contribution to the "it works" field and "its secure" can be shared around between those who go to the effort of making it secure (in the interests of version 2.0 still being secure).
So if Microsoft wants to take your money for something, they are saying that its worth your money: in security, in quality, in (your adjective here). An OSS developer does none of these things, because you get the source.
In the intersts of this post not being 12 pages long, I won't go into how RedHat, Mandrake, OpenBSD, etc. are different (e.g. they take money, but for a different service than MS) - but a little logic on your part should end in the same eventual conclusion...
Before we start, I must confess I'm a 3rd year pure Maths major, so I'm probably biased, but...
At the end of the day, very few people will (directly) use a lot of the mathematics which they are taught. Basic things are useful, but for the most part people have no need for complex integration / graphing / (your maths topic here) in their everyday lives. Of course, if you're into hardcore financial derivatives or are working on a fluid-flow problem in Chemical Engineering, you will need these, but then... that's not the majority of people, is it?
The value of mathematics (just like the value of most schooling) is entirely tangential to the course being studied: the learning lies in the art of learning - not the actual material covered. When you are doing maths you are learning to be methodical and to see different problems as resolving to the same base issue. Whether you can do that using numbers like 1 and 2 or can do it with e^0.1683 is irrelevant.
Similarly, I was horrified to discover that some high schools place ridiculous emphasis on nitty-gritty error calculation in science experiments - learning science (and many other scientific disciplines) at school is about understanding models, in a variety of shapes and forms.
Using a calculator removes step 1: actually visualising the problem. While on school exchange to the US in 1997 (I'm South African) I failed a Maths test because, in the words on my teacher, "I appreciate that you can solve the quadratic equation manually, but the calculator is faster". Needless to say, I dropped Maths (there) the next day. Ditto for Physics, English - the only courses I was doing by the end were History, Computer Science and the Theory of Music. These courses didn't have a "learn this or you are useless" attitude - the question was about learning, not regurgitating...
But then, I study Metric Spaces for fun - so my opinion probably doesn't count;)
Ummmm... As a current South African I think a counter-comment is in order here. Yes, South Africa is a country with big divides, most of them economic, some of the racial. But there are two schools of thought on the way forward: either you do something, or you sit around going "oh dear, look, we have problems, noooooo...."
No prizes for guessing which school of thought is actually going to help.
Who cares about Open Source? Everyone should: schools do (because they can barely afford the computers), libraries do (see schools) and companies should (because, frankly, it gives you an economic advantage over people forking out money for licenses).
Why do schools care? Because an awful lot of people can't speak/read/learn in English. How does Open Source help? Read the document, and look at the translation project. All of a sudden people who had to battle through arcane English ideas to use a computer can do it in their own language. Read about the TSF and its schooltool project, library projects and so on. OpenSoure can make a huge difference to a lot of people.
And before anyone says "ooooh, we've got so many problems" read a history book - every "1st world" country once had a Genie co-efficient that would make an economist blanch. How did they change that? By giving everyone the (a) opportunity and (b) tools to make a difference in their lives and the community around them.
OpenSource, who cares? I care. Students everywhere care. And anyone who believes that acting to benefit a community is worthwhile cares.
I wonder how the "no narcotic substances" aspect ties into the ESA (European Space Agency) - in Holland its legal to use certain "restricted substances". Would these substances (e.g. Marijuana) then begin to fall under the less onerous "must not have a history of abuse" aspect?
Or would Dutch astronauts have to *never* have experimented with what is actually legal in their own country?
More amusingly, in Britain (I *think*) they are considering allowing Marijuana for combatting nausea - could be useful, given the kind of sea-sickness a rocket-ride must provoke.
"er...Houston...we have a purple elephant on board..."
Why would this be anti-sun? Just because Microsoft started the whole thing doesn't auto-magically mean that everyone will hate it. The idea of Mono is that.NET is fully available to everyone - this is something SUN would probably jump at.
Another chance to beat Microsoft at their own game? Sounds like something Sun would love to do...
There is a subtle difference: that's like saying "oracle write good apps, right, why don't they just run off a cool office suite".
The problem is that the problems are completely different - they have expertise in translating DirectX code into SDL/X and OpenGL. That is a totally different story to working out how to move Enterprise onto Gtk/Qt/Motif/Your-flamewar-riddled-Toolkit-here.
Gnome VFS is similar (IANADeveloper, though - this is from reading too many mailinglists). The basic idea is that it allows anything which can be shoehorned into the task to be a "filesystem" when using the library.
From the gnome-vfs GNOME2 branch documentation:
GnomeVFS is a filesystem abstraction library allowing applications
plugable transparent access to a variety of "real" filesystems, from
WebDAV to digital cameras, to the local filesystem. It also contains
a number of other convenient file utilities such as a comphrehensive
MIME database / Application registry, and a copy engine. Use of GnomeVFS
ensures that an application or component will be usable by Nautilus
or other GnomeVFS applications for handling the display of data from
various URIs, as well.
The idea goes slightly further too (if memory serves) - anything which can be treated as a tree with linking/unlinking a'la a filesystem can be hidden inside Gnome-VFS. I believe there were even mutterings about making the menu-system a part of this (with a menu:// URI)...
There is one fundamental difference between dragging Microsoft into court for security problems that they don't/won't fix and hauling Linus into a similar court:
Microsoft has artificially created a single point of failure in security.
That means that Microsoft is a single point of blame - something which cannot exist in the OSS world. This is more fundamental than "many eyes make all bugs shallow" - if there's a hole then you are as responsible for fixing it as the original maintainer. You have the chance to do something about it even if the maintainer isn't interested.
In that way, an opensource project (even one with just one developer) is, in theory, a collaboration between every user of that system. They have a choice whether to take the good with the bad - they can fix the bad (given time and effort). But Microsoft, through proprietary liscencing of sourcecode has taken all the profit and with it all the risk.
Perhaps the funniest (and most tragic) part of the entire "national ID card" movement - not just that seen in the US, but anywhere its brought up - is that it never has any bearing on the problem at hand.
Central to the entire proposition is a big, fat non-sequitur: that knowing who the person in front of you is tells you anything about that person's motives. Even if we blithely ignore the problems in standardisation and expense, the core problem is the same:
why should a terrorist / criminal to be appear any different to you or me (in terms of the information linked to the card)?
Consider: Joe Bloggs, a disgruntled Nuclear Plant worked, has nefarious (sp?) intentions. How does this register on his card? What possible difference can that make to the businesses who (in terms of the article) are crucial to the success of the system? Can people believe that Joe will have a "terrorist risk" label attached to him (and if so, how in heaven's name does it get there)?
So the prospect of "demand[ing] a swipe to weed out terrorists" is assinine in the extreme.
Finally there is one other belief: that this will make it easier to retrospectively track the actions of terrorist. Wow. The FBI can know that Joe (having now destroyed the plant) was a big fan of Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Congratulations. Everyone with those tendencies gets "flagged" as dangerous.
Also, the rate of finding new NEO's is decreasing, so that means that we've (humans) found most of the asteroids that can endanger us.
Hmmmm. That's not necessarily true: look at the discovery of planets for example - this happens in spurts as people consider new ways of looking, find a lot of objects, and then run out of similar cases, and then find a new method (rinse, lather, repeat until you run out of cool places for aliens to live =p)
Hah! While the pessimist in all of us says "oh d'mn, more of that old plot", always bear in mind one thing: people don't copy something that doesn't work, especially when doing it costs lots of moo-lah.
The very act of spawning derivative drivel marks a bizarre coming-of-age ritual for CG - just as Doom / Wolfenstein spawning billions of rip-offs (in its own way) meant that the FPS was now ready, and ditto for Populous and "god-games".
But please don't take this as a validation of pulp-novel-writing (or dotComs...) - every good hypothesis has a counterexample:)
Slashdot Mirror
Tiny nitpick: "Ubuntu" means "people" or "community". Other than that, right on :)
The patent basically covers: (from the claims)
The BULK of the patent is the idea that HTML can contain Javascript that does stuff. Doesn't everyone and their kitten have prior art on this?
As if it isn't obvious enough, Claims 1-6 are covered by HTML 2.0. Claims 7-9 are covered (and this is a trivial example, others will surely find better ones) by HTML 4.0 and cousins. And the only reason I don't have earlier references is that they're so bleeding obvious!
Sigh. Muppets from space.
You could hire in the region of 5 full-time programmers at pretty competitive rates here in South Africa, and they'd be earning a lot more than most. Part of the appeal of this system is that it is per task, and thus challenges people to pick the best way to do it, and get on with it - none of this to distort the picture :)
Not exactly. More likely, Michigan was probably equatorial at some stage - remember that plate techtonics move parts of the world around.
Hmmmm... Not as unlikely as that - lots of people host on virtual-machines (e.g. Verio) or with managed hosting companies (e.g. Rackspace, which is why I'm nervous ;) ). That means that latency is very low, and fairly consistent.
Just a thought.
A brief note about economics is probably in order. The cost of making a physical CD is not what you are paying for when you buy a CD. You are paying for the cost of developing, testing, marketing, researching both that program and future programs.
That means that pirating software costs the developer the chance to recover the costs of making that software in the first place.
And before anyone mods this Flamebait, give a moment's thought to what this means for the (non-BSA member) Linux companies out there: companies with (as a rule) very good chances of going out of business each year. They spend time researching, fixing, improving the OSS software that you use regularly... but since most people download this without actually paying a penny for it, they have to find alternative routes to make money.
Now I think that there are lots of arguments for OSS, but it does make the economics much more complicated for all involved.
Probably "Yes" to the fact that GNOME is more enterprise support, but "No" to Ximian-based support. I think a large part of the decision is based on the fact that GNOME and GTK are LGPL, and thus "friendlier" to ISV's who want to write proprietary apps using them.
And (IANAKDEU) but think GNOME's accessibility support _may_ have had something to do with it.
Ahhhhh.
I see. When all else fails, bash the "Ruskies".
Actually, the Russians have an extraordinary safety record on their systems, most of which seem "primitive" because, well, they work. They always have worked. And theirs no point fixin' it if it ain't broke.
The examples are endless: space-pens (vs. Russian pencils), the US exercise bike on ISS (which borked in the first month of flight only to be replaced by Mir's 15-year-old bike, which is ... still working), etc.
The Americans are paranoid about their craft - have been ever since Challenger - but the Shuttle:
- doesn't have an escape mechanism - the Soyuz does (two, in fact)
- is much more fragile than the Soyuz (can only withstand 3g, while Soyuz can push it all the way up)
and many other little facts I can't remember. Russian space-tech is not shiny, high-tech (visually) and uber-modern, but it is some of the best tech around.And for those who doubt that they can handle the tonage during lift-off, get onto Google and look up the Energia launcher: cancelled at the end of Communism due to finance problems, but still the largest-lift rocket ever built...
There is a distinction that can be (automatically) drawn between closed and open source software: you have the opportunity to do something about a problem with OSS. blah blah blah do-one reads the code blah blah blah - I can't hear you
The point is that: if you buy a car, don't read the manual and then it fails because you didn't do something you could have (viz. find out that the brake pedal is in an unusual place) then its your fault. You (if it really mattered to you) could have checked the problems out yourself. You could have hired someone else to do the checking. You could have followed any number of paths to ensure that the given problem does not exist.
Not doing that is your fault. Now the problem that Microsoft faces is this: by keeping the source closed, and by taking money for that, they are saying "you don't have to worry about security - pay us to do that for you."
They then ship software with insecure defaults, and have it come back and bite them.
An OSS developer, on the other hand, sends his handiwork into the world saying "this won't work". If it does work, then congratulations: you got something cool for free. If it doesn't work, get someone to make it work.
The advantage of OSS is that everyone's contribution to the "it works" field and "its secure" can be shared around between those who go to the effort of making it secure (in the interests of version 2.0 still being secure).
So if Microsoft wants to take your money for something, they are saying that its worth your money: in security, in quality, in (your adjective here). An OSS developer does none of these things, because you get the source.
In the intersts of this post not being 12 pages long, I won't go into how RedHat, Mandrake, OpenBSD, etc. are different (e.g. they take money, but for a different service than MS) - but a little logic on your part should end in the same eventual conclusion...
Before we start, I must confess I'm a 3rd year pure Maths major, so I'm probably biased, but ...
At the end of the day, very few people will (directly) use a lot of the mathematics which they are taught. Basic things are useful, but for the most part people have no need for complex integration / graphing / (your maths topic here) in their everyday lives. Of course, if you're into hardcore financial derivatives or are working on a fluid-flow problem in Chemical Engineering, you will need these, but then ... that's not the majority of people, is it?
The value of mathematics (just like the value of most schooling) is entirely tangential to the course being studied: the learning lies in the art of learning - not the actual material covered. When you are doing maths you are learning to be methodical and to see different problems as resolving to the same base issue. Whether you can do that using numbers like 1 and 2 or can do it with e^0.1683 is irrelevant.
Similarly, I was horrified to discover that some high schools place ridiculous emphasis on nitty-gritty error calculation in science experiments - learning science (and many other scientific disciplines) at school is about understanding models, in a variety of shapes and forms.
Using a calculator removes step 1: actually visualising the problem. While on school exchange to the US in 1997 (I'm South African) I failed a Maths test because, in the words on my teacher, "I appreciate that you can solve the quadratic equation manually, but the calculator is faster". Needless to say, I dropped Maths (there) the next day. Ditto for Physics, English - the only courses I was doing by the end were History, Computer Science and the Theory of Music. These courses didn't have a "learn this or you are useless" attitude - the question was about learning, not regurgitating...
But then, I study Metric Spaces for fun - so my opinion probably doesn't count ;)
No prizes for guessing which school of thought is actually going to help.
Who cares about Open Source? Everyone should: schools do (because they can barely afford the computers), libraries do (see schools) and companies should (because, frankly, it gives you an economic advantage over people forking out money for licenses).
Why do schools care? Because an awful lot of people can't speak/read/learn in English. How does Open Source help? Read the document, and look at the translation project. All of a sudden people who had to battle through arcane English ideas to use a computer can do it in their own language. Read about the TSF and its schooltool project, library projects and so on. OpenSoure can make a huge difference to a lot of people.
And before anyone says "ooooh, we've got so many problems" read a history book - every "1st world" country once had a Genie co-efficient that would make an economist blanch. How did they change that? By giving everyone the (a) opportunity and (b) tools to make a difference in their lives and the community around them.
OpenSource, who cares? I care. Students everywhere care. And anyone who believes that acting to benefit a community is worthwhile cares.
Hmmm. Does the term "nerd" also include a clause insisting that the person must have enough cash to own/control free online space?
Looks like I need a new dictionary.
I wonder how the "no narcotic substances" aspect ties into the ESA (European Space Agency) - in Holland its legal to use certain "restricted substances". Would these substances (e.g. Marijuana) then begin to fall under the less onerous "must not have a history of abuse" aspect?
Or would Dutch astronauts have to *never* have experimented with what is actually legal in their own country?
More amusingly, in Britain (I *think*) they are considering allowing Marijuana for combatting nausea - could be useful, given the kind of sea-sickness a rocket-ride must provoke.
"er...Houston...we have a purple elephant on board..."
Why would this be anti-sun? Just because Microsoft started the whole thing doesn't auto-magically mean that everyone will hate it. The idea of Mono is that .NET is fully available to everyone - this is something SUN would probably jump at.
Another chance to beat Microsoft at their own game? Sounds like something Sun would love to do...
There is a subtle difference: that's like saying "oracle write good apps, right, why don't they just run off a cool office suite".
The problem is that the problems are completely different - they have expertise in translating DirectX code into SDL/X and OpenGL. That is a totally different story to working out how to move Enterprise onto Gtk/Qt/Motif/Your-flamewar-riddled-Toolkit-here.
The i386 Release notes give me a 404. Anyone know what's been updated (other than TCP and NFS)?
Originally by ChaoWei (won't give email here) in reference to a Chinese font-hinting problem.
Well, actually, teeny-weeny-little iron systems ... =p
From the gnome-vfs GNOME2 branch documentation: The idea goes slightly further too (if memory serves) - anything which can be treated as a tree with linking/unlinking a'la a filesystem can be hidden inside Gnome-VFS. I believe there were even mutterings about making the menu-system a part of this (with a menu:// URI)...
What is more, there is a new file-select dialog coming thanks to Chris at Ximian (at some point) - Michael Meeks has the screenshot
There is one fundamental difference between dragging Microsoft into court for security problems that they don't/won't fix and hauling Linus into a similar court:
Microsoft has artificially created a single point of failure in security.
That means that Microsoft is a single point of blame - something which cannot exist in the OSS world. This is more fundamental than "many eyes make all bugs shallow" - if there's a hole then you are as responsible for fixing it as the original maintainer. You have the chance to do something about it even if the maintainer isn't interested.
In that way, an opensource project (even one with just one developer) is, in theory, a collaboration between every user of that system. They have a choice whether to take the good with the bad - they can fix the bad (given time and effort). But Microsoft, through proprietary liscencing of sourcecode has taken all the profit and with it all the risk.
Forget having a T-Shirt with the DeCSS code on it, plug a DVD into one sleave and the Computer into the other ... =p
Central to the entire proposition is a big, fat non-sequitur: that knowing who the person in front of you is tells you anything about that person's motives. Even if we blithely ignore the problems in standardisation and expense, the core problem is the same:
why should a terrorist / criminal to be appear any different to you or me (in terms of the information linked to the card)?
Consider: Joe Bloggs, a disgruntled Nuclear Plant worked, has nefarious (sp?) intentions. How does this register on his card? What possible difference can that make to the businesses who (in terms of the article) are crucial to the success of the system? Can people believe that Joe will have a "terrorist risk" label attached to him (and if so, how in heaven's name does it get there)?
So the prospect of "demand[ing] a swipe to weed out terrorists" is assinine in the extreme.
Finally there is one other belief: that this will make it easier to retrospectively track the actions of terrorist. Wow. The FBI can know that Joe (having now destroyed the plant) was a big fan of Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Congratulations. Everyone with those tendencies gets "flagged" as dangerous.
I feel safer already.
Hmmmm. That's not necessarily true: look at the discovery of planets for example - this happens in spurts as people consider new ways of looking, find a lot of objects, and then run out of similar cases, and then find a new method (rinse, lather, repeat until you run out of cool places for aliens to live =p)
Hah! While the pessimist in all of us says "oh d'mn, more of that old plot", always bear in mind one thing: people don't copy something that doesn't work, especially when doing it costs lots of moo-lah.
:)
The very act of spawning derivative drivel marks a bizarre coming-of-age ritual for CG - just as Doom / Wolfenstein spawning billions of rip-offs (in its own way) meant that the FPS was now ready, and ditto for Populous and "god-games".
But please don't take this as a validation of pulp-novel-writing (or dotComs...) - every good hypothesis has a counterexample