We don't need to rehash the stupidity of these patents. Let's assume for now that is an accepted point.
We do need to rehash prior art. The companies populated by lawyers are fully aware that their patents likely have prior. Give them some credit.
The first folks they will chase down are mom and pop shops. If they've been keeping up with their industry best practices they won't send out too many notices at once as they will realize they will risk having the group band together, at which point they may be able to defend themselves.
What small org has the $100,000 - $200,000 to see this kind of thing all the way through to conclusion against a group of aggressive lawyers. Who has the time to manage the lawsuit?
They could charge $250 and I promise you, despite all the raving of prior art on slashdot, the VAST majority of folks, myself probably included will pay, even if we KNOW it is totally bogus.
Our only hope is they go after a small company that is actually owned by a big bad company who has enough lawyers of their own to bludgen them into submission.
Or that we get the IP laws changed so that folks like this stand a much smaller chance of success.
Or that a rich benefactor be willing to put $1 million or so into a fund designed to have a "chilling effect" on their operations. I would volunteer to run such a fund.
Any further info on when these are coming out? These really hit the sweet spot for me. Good design, nice phone.
T-Mobile is by far the friendliest provider I've dealt with, and after spending a few hours of my life over the year with other providers (Sprint PCS ehem) I'm willing to have that count for something.
They have some good plans and let you unlock your phone after a bit.
There is an important point here for universities.
Having served on a comittee that heard some of these cases come up, the RIAA generally asks that the school shut down the site, cut of network access, and turn over the students name.
The fully cooperating university must be aware of what this last step means. It means the RIAA has the power to bypass any intermediate sanctions and sue a (usually poor) college student directly.
You would be surprised, but losing dorm room internet access for a year is considered a pretty significant sanction. This raises the issue to whole new level, one that is rarely seen on a college campus in another context.
The schools involved need to jump into this with their eyes wide open. It doesn't seem they were that aware in this case.
Given that companies are made up of people can you please tell us who looks in the mirror every morning and comes up with this crap? How does it feel to work for them?
Do the people of SCO, when out of their cubby holes and over a glass of suds with friends hail your graspingly false principles or feel a touch of shame?
How do you, the person answering these questions feel explaining what you are doing to your children? What exactly do you say? Daddy is a scumlord? Don't forget, they'll be growing up and reading about all this soon enough.
What I love about children is how they can get the essence of things when 500 lawyers couldn't. For example,
"Enron has 500 offshore trusts, are they evading taxes?"
A: Prbly, can I have some candy?
"We want to give turkey $30 billion, and won't if they don't allow us into their country. Fleisher ( a very important man) denies this is a quid-pro-go. Is he lying?"
A: Obviously, are we there yet?
So, what do you tell your children? Good luck, and remember we've got only one life to live, and it is worth living as a human.
However, I think it is a mistake to throw in DRm at the end. It bears only passingly on the issues at end and is controversial in its own right even within the open source community. The facts are strong and stand on their own.
that distributions are doing precisely what open source software was designed to permit.
Shock is expressed that all users of apache do not bow down to the demands of pencil pansies everywhere but that a free flowing and open marketplace of ideas expressed in different software variations exists.
In good news however, software users can find software that doesn't have many variations or 'dubious patches' at their local Office Depot in boxes produced by Microsoft.
I canceled my EFF membership long ago and support many of the causes as directly as I can.
Got a nicely petty response from them as well when I canceled.
The EFF are the folks that want to fight to allow folks to spam like their was no tomorrow. Next thing you know they'll be fighting to allow folks to spam my pager and my cell phone. In all cases, I pay for the messages I receive.
They manage to hitch on some good causes, but let's get some alternatives out there who can clearly speak to what we all care about. If nothing else it'll give folks a broader set of choices to support.
I was very impressed with some of the comments coming out of the fatwallet case for example.
When you say "reference" I am assuming you mean the WHQL certified non-branded, non-enhanced drivers available from the nvidia site.
That means none of the OEM/manufacturer specific customizations that cards that would ship with the cards were part of the driver, not even a simple logo change. There is clearly a chance for added problems in this step.
I know a lot of gamers don't care about driver stability since they enjoy fooling around with their system hours on end.
However, rock solid drivers are nvidia's underrated asset. You don't know how much you miss stability until it's gone. Love to see them get more props on this.
It seems that having high powered lasers in space would be great for a space-junk cleanup. Turn the beam to wide angle, fire it up, and incinerate or knock down (heat up one side of an item, let it outgass on that side and it may go down) the little bits... voila, clean space.
And the military would justify this by calling it weapons testing.
I understand, but to get the electricity to perform the hydrolysis you have to generate it, usually using some pretty dirty fuel. I think it is clear that cheap usable hydrogen is not going to becoming from hydrolysis. Some of these other methods look excellent.
Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.
So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale). The advant of a clean and cheap way to get massive amounts of hydrogen is I understand a ways off.
Totally true... It's funny, but now most microsoft languages are just different syntactic mappings on top of C#. Even VB has by and large made the leap.
Since I'm not familiar with how one would design a CLR that was able to function languages, or even stuff like prolog nicely, is there a significant overhead in being so multipurpose or would it have been reasonably possible?
Yes, I'm clearly a MS serf... Take a look at userid's you idiot.
Java zealots like to pull out the name calling instead of actually addressing points. This "MS serf" BS. What about supporting your "arrogance" charge? Arrogant about what exactly?
"The CLR and C# are largley useless from a cross-platform development point of view without all that."
Ahh, since CLR and C# are useless, that explains why go-mono.net is going gangbusters to develop an implementation on Linux.
Have you actually developed large cross platform client side java apps? I don't want to start a flame war, but I'd suggest you start following some mailing lists in the Java and mono communities. Sign up for a sourceforge account and contribute to some projects. It will help your credibility when you start calling folks "MS serfs" and you'll also have a better grasp of the technology side of things.
Since I've been part of the community since 1999 (aka when SF opened) I hope you'll understand if I take your claims of "MS serf" with a grain of salt. I think you notice soon that the folks who are the first to yell "MS serf" are often the folks who talk a lot but have contributed little if anything to anyone.
How is what I say BS? I say C# is a standard. You say C# -AND- the CLR are have been submited. Listen, all of this is light years beyond what Sun has submitted to standards bodies, despite their incessant promises to submit.
And the point of standards is not that Microsoft port their.NET tools to any platform, the point is that I can implement on any platform.
Just because someone doesn't make C++ tools for your favorite platform doesn't mean C++ is a closed language. Microsoft's willingness to put Visual Studio.NET on a Palm Pilot has zero bearing on whether C# is a standard or not.
The FACTUAL errors of java zealots are always incredible.
I call it fooling the folks like you by writing a book on a language which is not an open standard.
If I write a book on Rebol / Visual Basic does that makes them open standards? If I write a book on the Windows API specification does that make Windows and open standard?
Write once run anware is a load of bull. The syntax of java and C# are very close, true, but the underlying CLR has some real distinctions (and I'd argue improvements).
API's? I think you forget Microsoft is a huge company. What's to stop you from using the Microsoft Speech component from C#? Nothing. In fact, C# is meant to take advantage of exisiting components. And though Java zealots hate to admit it, that means that there are more than zero API's that C# can use.
Every time a read a Java zealots arguments I'm struck by how FACTUALLY wrong they are, and how STUPID they like to think Microsoft is. You call C# a bet.
Visual Studio.Net is certainly not a beta. In fact. I look at the first Java SDK and I look at the first Visual C# SDK and I think, wow, if this is what Java zealots call beta (despite the fact that it is shipping) then those first Java SDK's should be called alpha alpha.
The point of the article is that Java zealots like to ignore the facts, and that that may come back to bite them. I think your note proves the point.
There are couple of key points that are interesting about this.
C# really is a standard. Microsoft's decision to go the standards route really validates the competitive advantage true open standards generate.
The HUGE question is if Microsoft will try and pull some patent / IP protection / royalty stunt with C#. We need to have some lawyer go over the C# license, standards doc, patent agreement to see if Microsoft has given up it's rights to sue for patent infrignment if people develop competing implementations.
My feeling is that if it becomes clear that C# is a truely open standard, that it will be suprisingly succesfull. Despite what Java zealots like to claim, the underlying technology is good. And while I initially was a member of the Java lobby, their eternal harping on the "eventual" standardization of Java turned me off. Java is not an open standard, and for an underlying technology that every company can feel comfortable going with (including Microsoft) that fact is problamatic. And Sun has already pulled a couple of students with Java and royalties on the enterprise level etc. We're getting competing implementations already with go-mono.net for C#.
The problem Microsoft faces is that they really need to totally convince folks (aka with binding legal agreements) that they are making this a real open standard and aren't going to pull a patent protection bogosity on anyone. They face in this case the facts of their history, which is horrible. I'm frankly concerned a bit less about the embrace and extend side of things, though it would be nice if they didn't pull stunts in that area either.
Anyways, if Microsoft does it well, C# could really take off. The key is schools. Java is the it language now, and that matters more than people think. If you start with java you become familiar with Java IDE's, you become familiar with other Java projects, and when the time comes to whip up your first website you'll pick java which means when you deceide to make a big website, you'll probably choose Java as well. People will choose whats comfortable, not what is necessarily technically superior and the decisive moment for comfort is what you are forced to learn in high school and college.
Um, doesn't it say you can do something with it, or did I miss a statement about personal use somehow?
I suspect that, despite the outcry and outrage from some quarters, they're not simply going to give away their entire search engine API connected to their search farm. Perhaps they'll limit it, meter it, and even charge for it. All would be more then fair.
Upgrades are a little early unless PHP starts compiling in, especially statically. (A la mod_php without DSO). They're getting close, php 4.2.0 should work I suspect, whenever it or any other previewish release comes out.
Also, be nice to get some good benchmark numbers. Speed / SSL / Dynamic Content seem to be things just about everyone relies on, and it'd be great to have a nice case to move from 1.3. I know the Apache team has made a lot of progress on this, be great to see it validated.
Slashdot Mirror
I called in and was given a new phone number.
800-946-0719
they then ask for a code after a bit of a wait and will not connect without it.
Code is 728441
Enjoy the call!
We don't need to rehash the stupidity of these patents. Let's assume for now that is an accepted point.
We do need to rehash prior art. The companies populated by lawyers are fully aware that their patents likely have prior. Give them some credit.
The first folks they will chase down are mom and pop shops. If they've been keeping up with their industry best practices they won't send out too many notices at once as they will realize they will risk having the group band together, at which point they may be able to defend themselves.
What small org has the $100,000 - $200,000 to see this kind of thing all the way through to conclusion against a group of aggressive lawyers. Who has the time to manage the lawsuit?
They could charge $250 and I promise you, despite all the raving of prior art on slashdot, the VAST majority of folks, myself probably included will pay, even if we KNOW it is totally bogus.
Our only hope is they go after a small company that is actually owned by a big bad company who has enough lawyers of their own to bludgen them into submission.
Or that we get the IP laws changed so that folks like this stand a much smaller chance of success.
Or that a rich benefactor be willing to put $1 million or so into a fund designed to have a "chilling effect" on their operations. I would volunteer to run such a fund.
Any further info on when these are coming out? These really hit the sweet spot for me. Good design, nice phone.
T-Mobile is by far the friendliest provider I've dealt with, and after spending a few hours of my life over the year with other providers (Sprint PCS ehem) I'm willing to have that count for something.
They have some good plans and let you unlock your phone after a bit.
There is an important point here for universities.
Having served on a comittee that heard some of these cases come up, the RIAA generally asks that the school shut down the site, cut of network access, and turn over the students name.
The fully cooperating university must be aware of what this last step means. It means the RIAA has the power to bypass any intermediate sanctions and sue a (usually poor) college student directly.
You would be surprised, but losing dorm room internet access for a year is considered a pretty significant sanction. This raises the issue to whole new level, one that is rarely seen on a college campus in another context.
The schools involved need to jump into this with their eyes wide open. It doesn't seem they were that aware in this case.
Given that companies are made up of people can you please tell us who looks in the mirror every morning and comes up with this crap? How does it feel to work for them?
Do the people of SCO, when out of their cubby holes and over a glass of suds with friends hail your graspingly false principles or feel a touch of shame?
How do you, the person answering these questions feel explaining what you are doing to your children? What exactly do you say? Daddy is a scumlord? Don't forget, they'll be growing up and reading about all this soon enough.
What I love about children is how they can get the essence of things when 500 lawyers couldn't. For example,
"Enron has 500 offshore trusts, are they evading taxes?"
A: Prbly, can I have some candy?
"We want to give turkey $30 billion, and won't if they don't allow us into their country. Fleisher ( a very important man) denies this is a quid-pro-go. Is he lying?"
A: Obviously, are we there yet?
So, what do you tell your children? Good luck, and remember we've got only one life to live, and it is worth living as a human.
Does anyone have any feedback or pointers to the technical quality of these projectors? In terms of resultion, refresh, color etc?
Why do I feel like I'm going to be watching 1024x768 on a screen 100 times larger than my computer monitor.
Feedback much appreciated.
Wonderful writup.
However, I think it is a mistake to throw in DRm at the end. It bears only passingly on the issues at end and is controversial in its own right even within the open source community. The facts are strong and stand on their own.
that distributions are doing precisely what open source software was designed to permit.
Shock is expressed that all users of apache do not bow down to the demands of pencil pansies everywhere but that a free flowing and open marketplace of ideas expressed in different software variations exists.
In good news however, software users can find software that doesn't have many variations or 'dubious patches' at their local Office Depot in boxes produced by Microsoft.
Give me a break. This is news how?
The rocketcam only stuff:
: //66.111.35.100/delta-iv-mpeg-hi.mpg
http://66.111.35.100/delta-iv-mpeg-lo.mpg
http
http://66.111.35.100/d4_launch_2002-11-20.mov
I canceled my EFF membership long ago and support many of the causes as directly as I can.
Got a nicely petty response from them as well when I canceled.
The EFF are the folks that want to fight to allow folks to spam like their was no tomorrow. Next thing you know they'll be fighting to allow folks to spam my pager and my cell phone. In all cases, I pay for the messages I receive.
They manage to hitch on some good causes, but let's get some alternatives out there who can clearly speak to what we all care about. If nothing else it'll give folks a broader set of choices to support.
I was very impressed with some of the comments coming out of the fatwallet case for example.
Just lost my mod points...
When you say "reference" I am assuming you mean the WHQL certified non-branded, non-enhanced drivers available from the nvidia site.
That means none of the OEM/manufacturer specific customizations that cards that would ship with the cards were part of the driver, not even a simple logo change. There is clearly a chance for added problems in this step.
I know a lot of gamers don't care about driver stability since they enjoy fooling around with their system hours on end.
However, rock solid drivers are nvidia's underrated asset. You don't know how much you miss stability until it's gone. Love to see them get more props on this.
It seems that having high powered lasers in space would be great for a space-junk cleanup. Turn the beam to wide angle, fire it up, and incinerate or knock down (heat up one side of an item, let it outgass on that side and it may go down) the little bits... voila, clean space.
And the military would justify this by calling it weapons testing.
- AZ
I understand, but to get the electricity to perform the hydrolysis you have to generate it, usually using some pretty dirty fuel. I think it is clear that cheap usable hydrogen is not going to becoming from hydrolysis. Some of these other methods look excellent.
Despite folks who see hydrogen as free, current process require significant amounts of energy to get at hydrogen.
So you are in some senses shifting pollution to a different location (and hopefully reducing it through scale). The advant of a clean and cheap way to get massive amounts of hydrogen is I understand a ways off.
Love to get links / info to the contrary.
- August
Totally true... It's funny, but now most microsoft languages are just different syntactic mappings on top of C#. Even VB has by and large made the leap.
Since I'm not familiar with how one would design a CLR that was able to function languages, or even stuff like prolog nicely, is there a significant overhead in being so multipurpose or would it have been reasonably possible?
Yes, I'm clearly a MS serf... Take a look at userid's you idiot.
Java zealots like to pull out the name calling instead of actually addressing points. This "MS serf" BS. What about supporting your "arrogance" charge? Arrogant about what exactly?
"The CLR and C# are largley useless from a cross-platform development point of view without all that."
Ahh, since CLR and C# are useless, that explains why go-mono.net is going gangbusters to develop an implementation on Linux.
Have you actually developed large cross platform client side java apps? I don't want to start a flame war, but I'd suggest you start following some mailing lists in the Java and mono communities. Sign up for a sourceforge account and contribute to some projects. It will help your credibility when you start calling folks "MS serfs" and you'll also have a better grasp of the technology side of things.
Since I've been part of the community since 1999 (aka when SF opened) I hope you'll understand if I take your claims of "MS serf" with a grain of salt. I think you notice soon that the folks who are the first to yell "MS serf" are often the folks who talk a lot but have contributed little if anything to anyone.
How is what I say BS? I say C# is a standard. You say C# -AND- the CLR are have been submited. Listen, all of this is light years beyond what Sun has submitted to standards bodies, despite their incessant promises to submit.
.NET tools to any platform, the point is that I can implement on any platform.
.NET on a Palm Pilot has zero bearing on whether C# is a standard or not.
And the point of standards is not that Microsoft port their
Just because someone doesn't make C++ tools for your favorite platform doesn't mean C++ is a closed language. Microsoft's willingness to put Visual Studio
The FACTUAL errors of java zealots are always incredible.
- August
I call it fooling the folks like you by writing a book on a language which is not an open standard.
If I write a book on Rebol / Visual Basic does that makes them open standards? If I write a book on the Windows API specification does that make Windows and open standard?
How you got modded as informative is beyond me.
Write once run anware is a load of bull. The syntax of java and C# are very close, true, but the underlying CLR has some real distinctions (and I'd argue improvements).
.Net is certainly not a beta. In fact. I look at the first Java SDK and I look at the first Visual C# SDK and I think, wow, if this is what Java zealots call beta (despite the fact that it is shipping) then those first Java SDK's should be called alpha alpha.
API's? I think you forget Microsoft is a huge company. What's to stop you from using the Microsoft Speech component from C#? Nothing. In fact, C# is meant to take advantage of exisiting components. And though Java zealots hate to admit it, that means that there are more than zero API's that C# can use.
Every time a read a Java zealots arguments I'm struck by how FACTUALLY wrong they are, and how STUPID they like to think Microsoft is. You call C# a bet.
Visual Studio
The point of the article is that Java zealots like to ignore the facts, and that that may come back to bite them. I think your note proves the point.
There are couple of key points that are interesting about this.
C# really is a standard. Microsoft's decision to go the standards route really validates the competitive advantage true open standards generate.
The HUGE question is if Microsoft will try and pull some patent / IP protection / royalty stunt with C#. We need to have some lawyer go over the C# license, standards doc, patent agreement to see if Microsoft has given up it's rights to sue for patent infrignment if people develop competing implementations.
My feeling is that if it becomes clear that C# is a truely open standard, that it will be suprisingly succesfull. Despite what Java zealots like to claim, the underlying technology is good. And while I initially was a member of the Java lobby, their eternal harping on the "eventual" standardization of Java turned me off. Java is not an open standard, and for an underlying technology that every company can feel comfortable going with (including Microsoft) that fact is problamatic. And Sun has already pulled a couple of students with Java and royalties on the enterprise level etc. We're getting competing implementations already with go-mono.net for C#.
The problem Microsoft faces is that they really need to totally convince folks (aka with binding legal agreements) that they are making this a real open standard and aren't going to pull a patent protection bogosity on anyone. They face in this case the facts of their history, which is horrible. I'm frankly concerned a bit less about the embrace and extend side of things, though it would be nice if they didn't pull stunts in that area either.
Anyways, if Microsoft does it well, C# could really take off. The key is schools. Java is the it language now, and that matters more than people think. If you start with java you become familiar with Java IDE's, you become familiar with other Java projects, and when the time comes to whip up your first website you'll pick java which means when you deceide to make a big website, you'll probably choose Java as well. People will choose whats comfortable, not what is necessarily technically superior and the decisive moment for comfort is what you are forced to learn in high school and college.
Um, doesn't it say you can do something with it, or did I miss a statement about personal use somehow?
I suspect that, despite the outcry and outrage from some quarters, they're not simply going to give away their entire search engine API connected to their search farm. Perhaps they'll limit it, meter it, and even charge for it. All would be more then fair.
Upgrades are a little early unless PHP starts compiling in, especially statically. (A la mod_php without DSO). They're getting close, php 4.2.0 should work I suspect, whenever it or any other previewish release comes out.
Also, be nice to get some good benchmark numbers. Speed / SSL / Dynamic Content seem to be things just about everyone relies on, and it'd be great to have a nice case to move from 1.3. I know the Apache team has made a lot of progress on this, be great to see it validated.
Bravo all around of course.
- August