until recently as it didn't provide NTLM proxy support (am I saying that right?). I've tried it in a couple environments that used some MS proxy server, and Opera couldn't authenticate. Who's fault is that? Opera 9 *does* support that authentication, but considering it's only a few weeks old, I hardly expect a massive uptake to Opera in the corporate world.
Opera may support a lot of tech standards, but that was a pretty big business standard they didn't support.
I've been thinking about putting together a similar service for quite a long time. I've got a mixed reaction seeing this service, as it's not quite what I was envisioning. A few thoughts:
Using a 'standard' IM client may not be the best way - trying to do too much with 'tags' and what not instead of a dedicated/custom interface may not provide enough of a useful interface for helpers. I may be wrong tho - using just jabber opens up a lot of possibilities, and has reduced their dev time.
NOT allowing helpseekers to use IM doesn't seem right. This was always a big part I'd got stuck on in mapping something like this out. If you want to make it dead easy, let anyone use MSN/AIM/YAHOO/etc to post their questions immediately. Roundrobin those questions to another IM 'helper' until someone 'takes' the question.
Reputation - this would really be key to helping people determine whether the quality of the person they are getting help from is worthwhile or not.
Value - what benefit do I as a helpseeker get? One benefit I foresaw was revenue sharing - the more questions you'd answer, the more credits you'd earn, which would directly translate in to profit sharing based on whatever ads were run on the 'answer' site. By collecting all these Q&A, and publishing them, the system would be able to grow organically, and tossing adsense or something in there would give everyone a way to share in some money (just rotate people's adsense code in the site - don't try to collect and parcel out money directly - too much work).
If the resulting Q&A database was 'open' in the sense of publishing under a GPL or similar license, this would be a great service. If people are donating all their free time to add to a closed database without the chance of being able to use it themselves for whatever purpose, this isn't such a great service.
The flip side of contractors not knowing anything about a business is companies with internal software developers who don't know how to develop. I've been on both sides of the fence, and there's no simple answer to the issue of corporate software development. I can tell you that I've worked in some places where the existing software was put together so poorly that it was little more than a deck of cards waiting to fall. "But it addresses the business needs!" is a valid point, to be sure, but when small enhancement requests which should take a day start taking >1 week solely because the original software was put together so poorly, you've got bigger problems than whether someone understands the unique business needs or not. The first core business need is that the software needs to be available and known to be functioning properly - you need to have confidence in it. Without skilled developers with a track record of proven success, that trust is harder to come by.
The best middle ground is to have hybrid people - people who have thought and can think from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. When contractors are brought in, if there's no one who can explain the business requirements at *any* level (and I've been in some places like that over the years), it's not the outside contractor's fault.
That's a shame. I've got a lot of domains with godaddy.com but am testing out other registrars and will be migrating more away. It's not just these sorts of reports, but also their switch to Microsoft IIS for parked domains that bothers me some.
The sad thing is that this sort of thing on their part really won't hurt all that much. How much money would they have made on each of your domains for the next *10* years? $30? I'm basing this on $3 profit ($9 - $6 wholesale cost - maybe it's different for them?) By forcing you to leave they've almost doubled that, and they don't have any work to do to service you for the next 10 years either!
If they could simply extract $50 from every single domain-name-only customer to transfer away they would be *far* more profitable than they are now because there'd be less overhead and work to do.
Looks to be a bit visually snazzier than wikicalc, a wiki/spreadsheet combo idea from Dan Bricklin. I first read about his project last autumn. I wonder if he was involved in this at all, or if the Google guys were inspired by his project or if there's absosmurfly no relation at all?
(*: Which seems to be what PHP copied itself from, which actually explains a lot about PHP.)
PHP was *not* copied from ASP. PHP was originally started in (late?) '94, and was growing in popularity by 1996, when MS introduced their HTC stuff. IIRC "ASP" wasn't in real use until some time in 1997, by which time PHP was widely used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages says ASP 1.0 was out in Dec 1996. IIRC Rasmus has mentioned that some Microsoft engineers were on an early PHP dev mailing list soliciting input on what people liked/wanted in a web scripting system. However, I can't find any reference to that story anymore, and I might have just made it up in my head.:)
I don't have the one from today, but downloaded a live CD last week. Couldn't install it on the drive trying to do a manual partition because the partition editor was broken. Was this remedied in the last week? Did anyone else see this problem?
Mine's a compaq v5000 laptop - same problems. This is why Apple is winning the hearts and minds of people looking for unixy hardware - the stuff just works.
The biggest hurdle linux will face in the next couple years (and is facing now) is laptop support. You *can't* just go swap out your network or video card for one that is 'linux compatible', and trying to look for 'linux compatible' hardware when you're buying requires more effort than most people can go through. Sites http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ are a nice idea, but hopelessly out of date. Probably a full 95% of the hardware listed on that site is not available in retails stores, relegating you to ebay and other used hardware sources.
What mandriva, ubuntu, redhat and others need to do is put a bit of money in to testing/verifying their software, setup and detection systems with new hardware. Given the potentially high adoption rate of RHEL (for example) if people could get basic stuff like wireless working easily, it would be cost-justified for Redhat to send people to best buy and pick up 1-2 laptops a month and test/fix/patch their stuff to work with the latest hardware, then contribute that back. Or ubuntu - they're touted as having money to 'invest' in linux.
Making sure ubuntu works with a 4 year old abandoned network card isn't going to get as many people to switch/adopt a distro as making sure it'll run on current hardware.
Sorry, but I have to give it to someone other than Microsoft. While they did essentially invent the tech behind Ajax, the only major project they used it on was basically something that was closed. I don't mean source, but not open to the public. You only saw it if you had an organization using Outlook/Exchange in the first place, which still excluded a huge majority of people using the web. Had they ported hotmail to the OWA interface, that would have been a major revolution far greater than google maps or anything else. But they didn't.
I agree with someone else that the Yahoo UI (yui) toolkit seems to get ignored a bit, but I think this plays to a different crowd.
1) This is a java-based thing only it seems. People writing.net can use atlas for most of these features, people using Ruby or other scripting langauges probably have bindings to scriptaculous and other libraries to handle most of this. There were/are probably Java bindings already for scriptaculous, but this makes it easier for java people already used to swing/awt stuff.
2) The YUI stuff was more javascript oriented, and, from my experience, difficult to use in some settings. I had a hard time getting the slider stuff to work as needed based solely on their code and one example page, for example. Perhaps that makes me not as l33t as some others who can debug others' javascript in their sleep - I dunno. I do know that if Google makes this easy for people to adopt, it'll take off. Partially because there's a lot of google love amongst early-adopters in the tech community, and partially because making things easy is just a good way to attract people.:)
3) With the YUI stuff, Yahoo was/is seeming to cater to the scripting crowd more (witness the native serialized PHP responses you can get back). If google is going after the "I write Java apps" crowd, they may be able to bring in a new set of people to web-app development who before now were not in the web space.
I interviewed one of the Yahoo engineers who worked on the YUI widgets release at my podcast - http://webdevradio.com - you can get some more perspective on what Yahoo was/is doing and trying to achieve with that move.
Most places I've worked have had their fair share of people who were not good writers. My own set of criteria for making that call center around the following few points:
* Does the person consistently write documents which have a high number of ambiguities, requiring extended clarification and 'back and forth' time?
* Do the documents from this person raise more questions than answers?
* Do the documents generally lack a traditional 'beginning-middle-end' flow?
I've lost track of the number of docs I've received from people over the years which, spelling mistakes aside, were logically contradictory, or so ambiguous that they were effectively useless.
This is not a trait monopolized by the engineering/development crowd. I used to think developers/engineer-types had more ability to critically review their own written work, and to be able to read it from the vantage point of the person who would be reading it. For example, things like being able to anticipate nuanced interpretations and rework things accordingly, I had assumed engineers would be better at. They're not, but not any worse than management or any other group of people in a company you'd like to label.
No one was watching a program from the same media they were recording to with a VCR. You might have been watching one program 'live' and recording to a VCR from another input, or something like that, perhaps.
Tivo's patent is for a specific method of doing this sort of juggling with one media device (a hard drive) which was non-obvious at the time (what? 8-9 years ago?) Patent's are not supposed to be just for an 'idea' but a specific implementation of an idea, which Tivo's is.
if Tivo dies because of competition then sorry but that's irrelivant.(sic)
What if Tivo dies or is harmed because of competition who are breaking the law? Where do you draw the line? What Tivo did *was* innovative and 'non-obvious' to people when they developed it. If you followed the trial and read some of the testimony, you'd know that Echostar had far greater resources to throw at the DVR space, and were working on products before Tivo, yet weren't able to deliver the functionality that Tivo did. If Echostar violating the law is the only way *they* can compete, they will get struck down eventually, and this is the first blow.
I say all this as a Tivo shareholder, but before that was someone who used Tivo, Dish, DirecTV's R15 unit, and have used or tested other DVR-ish 'solutions' from cable companies and Tivo competitors. No one is close to Tivo in terms of breadth of functionality and usefulness, but that's not even what the trial was about. Tivo *is* competing in the market with greatly innovative features and functions - they did feel that competitors were unlawfully appropriating their technology, giving them an unfair advantage, and that needed to be addressed in the courts.
I commented here already, but wanted to reiterate this. It was the 'time warp' feature which this patent trial was about - the ability to perform simultaneous functions, such as recording live TV *and* watching something that was prerecorded (while also being able to pause/rewind/ff/skip-ahead in that program).
What came out at the trial was that echostar's original products did *not* have that functionality. They only incorporated that after getting their hands on a tivo system (which Tivo rather naively or stupidly left with them after a meeting).
Patents are to reward 'non-obvious' or 'novel' inventions. If Tivo functionality was 'non-obvious', why did the companies which had DVRs out well before Tivo (and has far more resources to throw at these projects) *not* include such 'obvious' functionality? Why did they not patent it first, considering they were apparently working in the digitial media field before Tivo? Because, as hard as it is to believe, some of this really *was* non-obvious at the time. Yes, today it all seems obvious, and there are a dozen posts here talking about how their Dish DVRs (or anyone else's) have dual tuners, can record/playback simultaneously, have 'record all programs'-type functions, and so on. Most of these functions are copying the original pioneering work of Tivo, and they don't deserve to have all that R&D ripped off by others too cheap/greedy/stingy to pay the licensing costs.
Had echostar been able to prove they'd had similar stuff under development simultaneously, I might hold a different view of this trial's outcome, but nothing I read (admittedly, there wasn't much reporting direct from the courtroom) indicated echostar had any innovative work going on which would have matched the tivo work/patents. I wrote a little more on this here.
In many ways it doesn't matter. There are people that patent things with only prototypes. Especially in the 90's, everything in the world relating to software was being patented, even if it was trivially obvious. Something else that came out in trial, from what I gathered (trying to read a bit in to what quotes I managed to read) was that Echostar developers didn't even *try* to put that feature in. If they had tried, and had any documentary evidence (meeting notes, prototypes, etc) that would have been produced as evidence that they'd been working on 'obvious' functionality like that before Tivo. None of that came out, because it was not, in fact, that obvious how to do this.
Tivo has numerous other patents from what I understand, but this was the one at the heart of this trial, and hopefully will be upheld. The only way I can see it being overturned would be if echostar introduces new evidence (which I'm not sure they can do at this stage of the process).
As a Tivo stockholder, I've been following the trial as closely as I could. The patent focused on what they called the 'time warp' aspect. What came out in testimony was that the original echostar dish stuff could *not* let you watch a prerecorded program *and* simultaneously be recording a new program. It seems this functionality only made its way in to dish products *after* they had access to a Tivo which the Tivo dev team left them during a licensing/partnership meeting. Bad move on Tivo's part to leave equipment in a potential competitor's hands, obviously. What seemed to come out is that it was true the original echostar dish products *didn't* infringe on the Tivo patents, but that's not what they've been selling for a long time - they've been selling products that infringe on the patent.
So, given that such a large company had a 'similar' product on the market *before* Tivo, and it didn't have anywhere close to the functionality which Tivo patented, it would seem to be that the 'non-obvious' or 'novel' aspects of the patent got a significant boost. If it was such an 'obvious' way of performing this trick, the people with an earlier technology would have indeed developed the 'obvious' technique and used it in their product.
making relying on backups far less useful (pointless, perhaps?). I've talked with people before about having Windows viruses that don't sap resources (at first) or kill the machine, but which quietly change data in files. Modify a "3" to a "7" in a few Excel files. Change meeting times in Outlook by 10 minutes here or there. Eventually, get more malicious and start changing other bits of data in files (mainly MS Office files for maximum compatibility/reach).
A good virus won't be found out for awhile, and without knowing when it infected the system, you won't easily be able to tell how far back to go in the backups to pull 'clean' files.
This would have a devastating effect on the trust people have in any part of the system. What good is 'rebuilding' the system if you can't trust the data backups either?
Excellent info! I consider myself rather knowledgeable about most things Beatles, but had not run across this particular aspect of the publishing side of things. Thank you for posting this! If it was from blender, this is probably the article you're talking about, but they only have part of it up. Does anyone have any more info on this?
Re:Not available anywhere, not just on iTunes
on
On Apple vs Apple
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I thought that would come up - the production. It's a mixed bag, really. In some (many!) ways the production techniques (initially or primarily down to George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and others) *were* very advanced (artificial double tracking, for example).
I probably misspoke, in that the Beatles themselves probably would have preferred 8 track recording earlier than they got it. Had they made it more of a cause earlier on, they probably would have convinced EMI to install 8 track equipment, but instead didn't press that issue (I can't imagine that by 1966 they didn't know it was equipment that was available!)
I wouldn't say "Apple" or "The Beatles" cash in on Lennon's name/image much - Yoko does that herself. I don't mean "cash in" in a particularly bad way (though it seems you did!). She's just doing good business. The Beatles themselves as a group have 4 good names to cash in on. I would argue that trying to cash in on the names of just one of them simply doesn't work very well - they were very much bigger than the sum of their individual names/contributions, and that's why "The Beatles" as an entity will continue to be a big draw for a long time.
Will they continue to sell millions per year? Probably not over the long haul, but it's damn impressive that much of their music still sounds fresh today (good production and equipment used all those years ago), and that many of the songs still are able to speak to new generations.
Not available anywhere, not just on iTunes
on
On Apple vs Apple
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· Score: 4, Informative
Most record companies have welcomed iTunes, because -- unlike pirate music sites -- it protects their copyright and collects a fee. But the Apple vs. Apple dispute means that no Beatles music is available on iTunes.
"We haven't unfortunately been able to persuade Apple Corps in relation to their Beatles catalogue," said Grabiner. "But we have persuaded everybody else."
This dispute has nothing to do with Beatles music being on iTunes. The Beatles music is not available via any digital store, iirc. Yes, a few of the German Tony Sheridan tracks, and 'interview' tracks, but that's about it. The major catalog is not available through any digital download means, not just iTunes. If the Beatles were trying to get back (heh) at Apple Computer, they'd license their material to Napster, or MSN, or Yahoo, or some competing network.
The Beatles have historically been 'behind the times' technologically, what we might call 'late adopters'. For example, their catalog wasn't available on CD until 1987 - years after CDs were accepted as mainstream. Even going back to the 60's, they were one of the last major bands to 'upgrade' to 8 track recording, having recorded practically their entire career on 4 track recording, even though 8 track recording was certainly available earlier.
As an aside, I find it a bit funny that people accuse the Beatles of 'cashing in' every so often. While I certainly feel that way myself occasionally, I have to remind myself there's a lot of opportunity they're sitting on which they could still release and all the hardcore fans and baby boomers would still eat it up. I think they've shown a fair amount of restraint so far. I'm thinking of the hours of live concert footage which is available, for example - there's probably another DVD or two which could be put out, plus remastering all the old albums . Witness the Yellow Submarine remaster - *much* better sounding than the original CD - they could reissue all the original CDs and make still millions more, but haven't (yet?) done so. Maybe they never will?
I wrote a small piece about some gmail gripes - does the hosted version behave exactly like gmail.com, or is it slightly different?
Can I search and have it find 'close' words? Google is all about "search", and pretty much forces you in to this as the primary way of finding things, but can't find something you've misspelled.
To be fair, unless you're a mod_perl ninja, most mod_perl apps are pretty difficult to set up. Compare this to most PHP-based apps - mod_perl apps require much more work to set up, especially in a development environment.
Slashdot Mirror
http://fosterburgess.com/kimsal/?p=89
Can anyone here help with this? Yes, it's a bit offtopic, but I can't be the only one with this problem!
Thanks!
until recently as it didn't provide NTLM proxy support (am I saying that right?). I've tried it in a couple environments that used some MS proxy server, and Opera couldn't authenticate. Who's fault is that? Opera 9 *does* support that authentication, but considering it's only a few weeks old, I hardly expect a massive uptake to Opera in the corporate world.
Opera may support a lot of tech standards, but that was a pretty big business standard they didn't support.
I've been thinking about putting together a similar service for quite a long time. I've got a mixed reaction seeing this service, as it's not quite what I was envisioning. A few thoughts:
Using a 'standard' IM client may not be the best way - trying to do too much with 'tags' and what not instead of a dedicated/custom interface may not provide enough of a useful interface for helpers. I may be wrong tho - using just jabber opens up a lot of possibilities, and has reduced their dev time.
NOT allowing helpseekers to use IM doesn't seem right. This was always a big part I'd got stuck on in mapping something like this out. If you want to make it dead easy, let anyone use MSN/AIM/YAHOO/etc to post their questions immediately. Roundrobin those questions to another IM 'helper' until someone 'takes' the question.
Reputation - this would really be key to helping people determine whether the quality of the person they are getting help from is worthwhile or not.
Value - what benefit do I as a helpseeker get? One benefit I foresaw was revenue sharing - the more questions you'd answer, the more credits you'd earn, which would directly translate in to profit sharing based on whatever ads were run on the 'answer' site. By collecting all these Q&A, and publishing them, the system would be able to grow organically, and tossing adsense or something in there would give everyone a way to share in some money (just rotate people's adsense code in the site - don't try to collect and parcel out money directly - too much work).
If the resulting Q&A database was 'open' in the sense of publishing under a GPL or similar license, this would be a great service. If people are donating all their free time to add to a closed database without the chance of being able to use it themselves for whatever purpose, this isn't such a great service.
The flip side of contractors not knowing anything about a business is companies with internal software developers who don't know how to develop. I've been on both sides of the fence, and there's no simple answer to the issue of corporate software development. I can tell you that I've worked in some places where the existing software was put together so poorly that it was little more than a deck of cards waiting to fall. "But it addresses the business needs!" is a valid point, to be sure, but when small enhancement requests which should take a day start taking >1 week solely because the original software was put together so poorly, you've got bigger problems than whether someone understands the unique business needs or not. The first core business need is that the software needs to be available and known to be functioning properly - you need to have confidence in it. Without skilled developers with a track record of proven success, that trust is harder to come by.
The best middle ground is to have hybrid people - people who have thought and can think from both sides of the aisle, so to speak. When contractors are brought in, if there's no one who can explain the business requirements at *any* level (and I've been in some places like that over the years), it's not the outside contractor's fault.
That's a shame. I've got a lot of domains with godaddy.com but am testing out other registrars and will be migrating more away. It's not just these sorts of reports, but also their switch to Microsoft IIS for parked domains that bothers me some.
The sad thing is that this sort of thing on their part really won't hurt all that much. How much money would they have made on each of your domains for the next *10* years? $30? I'm basing this on $3 profit ($9 - $6 wholesale cost - maybe it's different for them?) By forcing you to leave they've almost doubled that, and they don't have any work to do to service you for the next 10 years either!
If they could simply extract $50 from every single domain-name-only customer to transfer away they would be *far* more profitable than they are now because there'd be less overhead and work to do.
No but, yeah but, no but...
I **SO** can't believe you just said that!!!
Looks to be a bit visually snazzier than wikicalc, a wiki/spreadsheet combo idea from Dan Bricklin. I first read about his project last autumn. I wonder if he was involved in this at all, or if the Google guys were inspired by his project or if there's absosmurfly no relation at all?
(*: Which seems to be what PHP copied itself from, which actually explains a lot about PHP.)
:)
PHP was *not* copied from ASP. PHP was originally started in (late?) '94, and was growing in popularity by 1996, when MS introduced their HTC stuff. IIRC "ASP" wasn't in real use until some time in 1997, by which time PHP was widely used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Server_Pages says ASP 1.0 was out in Dec 1996. IIRC Rasmus has mentioned that some Microsoft engineers were on an early PHP dev mailing list soliciting input on what people liked/wanted in a web scripting system. However, I can't find any reference to that story anymore, and I might have just made it up in my head.
I don't have the one from today, but downloaded a live CD last week. Couldn't install it on the drive trying to do a manual partition because the partition editor was broken. Was this remedied in the last week? Did anyone else see this problem?
I've got a v5120, if that helps.
Mine's a compaq v5000 laptop - same problems. This is why Apple is winning the hearts and minds of people looking for unixy hardware - the stuff just works.
The biggest hurdle linux will face in the next couple years (and is facing now) is laptop support. You *can't* just go swap out your network or video card for one that is 'linux compatible', and trying to look for 'linux compatible' hardware when you're buying requires more effort than most people can go through. Sites http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ are a nice idea, but hopelessly out of date. Probably a full 95% of the hardware listed on that site is not available in retails stores, relegating you to ebay and other used hardware sources.
What mandriva, ubuntu, redhat and others need to do is put a bit of money in to testing/verifying their software, setup and detection systems with new hardware. Given the potentially high adoption rate of RHEL (for example) if people could get basic stuff like wireless working easily, it would be cost-justified for Redhat to send people to best buy and pick up 1-2 laptops a month and test/fix/patch their stuff to work with the latest hardware, then contribute that back. Or ubuntu - they're touted as having money to 'invest' in linux.
Making sure ubuntu works with a 4 year old abandoned network card isn't going to get as many people to switch/adopt a distro as making sure it'll run on current hardware.
Sorry, but I have to give it to someone other than Microsoft. While they did essentially invent the tech behind Ajax, the only major project they used it on was basically something that was closed. I don't mean source, but not open to the public. You only saw it if you had an organization using Outlook/Exchange in the first place, which still excluded a huge majority of people using the web. Had they ported hotmail to the OWA interface, that would have been a major revolution far greater than google maps or anything else. But they didn't.
The oft-copied 'google suggest' dropdown stuff. It's not something demoed in the 'kitchensink' app they provide at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/documentation/ex amples/kitchensink/.
.net can use atlas for most of these features, people using Ruby or other scripting langauges probably have bindings to scriptaculous and other libraries to handle most of this. There were/are probably Java bindings already for scriptaculous, but this makes it easier for java people already used to swing/awt stuff.
:)
I agree with someone else that the Yahoo UI (yui) toolkit seems to get ignored a bit, but I think this plays to a different crowd.
1) This is a java-based thing only it seems. People writing
2) The YUI stuff was more javascript oriented, and, from my experience, difficult to use in some settings. I had a hard time getting the slider stuff to work as needed based solely on their code and one example page, for example. Perhaps that makes me not as l33t as some others who can debug others' javascript in their sleep - I dunno. I do know that if Google makes this easy for people to adopt, it'll take off. Partially because there's a lot of google love amongst early-adopters in the tech community, and partially because making things easy is just a good way to attract people.
3) With the YUI stuff, Yahoo was/is seeming to cater to the scripting crowd more (witness the native serialized PHP responses you can get back). If google is going after the "I write Java apps" crowd, they may be able to bring in a new set of people to web-app development who before now were not in the web space.
I interviewed one of the Yahoo engineers who worked on the YUI widgets release at my podcast - http://webdevradio.com - you can get some more perspective on what Yahoo was/is doing and trying to achieve with that move.
Just some random thoughts...
Most places I've worked have had their fair share of people who were not good writers. My own set of criteria for making that call center around the following few points:
* Does the person consistently write documents which have a high number of ambiguities, requiring extended clarification and 'back and forth' time?
* Do the documents from this person raise more questions than answers?
* Do the documents generally lack a traditional 'beginning-middle-end' flow?
I've lost track of the number of docs I've received from people over the years which, spelling mistakes aside, were logically contradictory, or so ambiguous that they were effectively useless.
This is not a trait monopolized by the engineering/development crowd. I used to think developers/engineer-types had more ability to critically review their own written work, and to be able to read it from the vantage point of the person who would be reading it. For example, things like being able to anticipate nuanced interpretations and rework things accordingly, I had assumed engineers would be better at. They're not, but not any worse than management or any other group of people in a company you'd like to label.
No one was watching a program from the same media they were recording to with a VCR. You might have been watching one program 'live' and recording to a VCR from another input, or something like that, perhaps.
Tivo's patent is for a specific method of doing this sort of juggling with one media device (a hard drive) which was non-obvious at the time (what? 8-9 years ago?) Patent's are not supposed to be just for an 'idea' but a specific implementation of an idea, which Tivo's is.
if Tivo dies because of competition then sorry but that's irrelivant.(sic)
What if Tivo dies or is harmed because of competition who are breaking the law? Where do you draw the line? What Tivo did *was* innovative and 'non-obvious' to people when they developed it. If you followed the trial and read some of the testimony, you'd know that Echostar had far greater resources to throw at the DVR space, and were working on products before Tivo, yet weren't able to deliver the functionality that Tivo did. If Echostar violating the law is the only way *they* can compete, they will get struck down eventually, and this is the first blow.
I say all this as a Tivo shareholder, but before that was someone who used Tivo, Dish, DirecTV's R15 unit, and have used or tested other DVR-ish 'solutions' from cable companies and Tivo competitors. No one is close to Tivo in terms of breadth of functionality and usefulness, but that's not even what the trial was about. Tivo *is* competing in the market with greatly innovative features and functions - they did feel that competitors were unlawfully appropriating their technology, giving them an unfair advantage, and that needed to be addressed in the courts.
I commented here already, but wanted to reiterate this. It was the 'time warp' feature which this patent trial was about - the ability to perform simultaneous functions, such as recording live TV *and* watching something that was prerecorded (while also being able to pause/rewind/ff/skip-ahead in that program).
What came out at the trial was that echostar's original products did *not* have that functionality. They only incorporated that after getting their hands on a tivo system (which Tivo rather naively or stupidly left with them after a meeting).
Patents are to reward 'non-obvious' or 'novel' inventions. If Tivo functionality was 'non-obvious', why did the companies which had DVRs out well before Tivo (and has far more resources to throw at these projects) *not* include such 'obvious' functionality? Why did they not patent it first, considering they were apparently working in the digitial media field before Tivo? Because, as hard as it is to believe, some of this really *was* non-obvious at the time. Yes, today it all seems obvious, and there are a dozen posts here talking about how their Dish DVRs (or anyone else's) have dual tuners, can record/playback simultaneously, have 'record all programs'-type functions, and so on. Most of these functions are copying the original pioneering work of Tivo, and they don't deserve to have all that R&D ripped off by others too cheap/greedy/stingy to pay the licensing costs.
Had echostar been able to prove they'd had similar stuff under development simultaneously, I might hold a different view of this trial's outcome, but nothing I read (admittedly, there wasn't much reporting direct from the courtroom) indicated echostar had any innovative work going on which would have matched the tivo work/patents. I wrote a little more on this here.
In many ways it doesn't matter. There are people that patent things with only prototypes. Especially in the 90's, everything in the world relating to software was being patented, even if it was trivially obvious. Something else that came out in trial, from what I gathered (trying to read a bit in to what quotes I managed to read) was that Echostar developers didn't even *try* to put that feature in. If they had tried, and had any documentary evidence (meeting notes, prototypes, etc) that would have been produced as evidence that they'd been working on 'obvious' functionality like that before Tivo. None of that came out, because it was not, in fact, that obvious how to do this.
Tivo has numerous other patents from what I understand, but this was the one at the heart of this trial, and hopefully will be upheld. The only way I can see it being overturned would be if echostar introduces new evidence (which I'm not sure they can do at this stage of the process).
As a Tivo stockholder, I've been following the trial as closely as I could. The patent focused on what they called the 'time warp' aspect. What came out in testimony was that the original echostar dish stuff could *not* let you watch a prerecorded program *and* simultaneously be recording a new program. It seems this functionality only made its way in to dish products *after* they had access to a Tivo which the Tivo dev team left them during a licensing/partnership meeting. Bad move on Tivo's part to leave equipment in a potential competitor's hands, obviously. What seemed to come out is that it was true the original echostar dish products *didn't* infringe on the Tivo patents, but that's not what they've been selling for a long time - they've been selling products that infringe on the patent.
So, given that such a large company had a 'similar' product on the market *before* Tivo, and it didn't have anywhere close to the functionality which Tivo patented, it would seem to be that the 'non-obvious' or 'novel' aspects of the patent got a significant boost. If it was such an 'obvious' way of performing this trick, the people with an earlier technology would have indeed developed the 'obvious' technique and used it in their product.
making relying on backups far less useful (pointless, perhaps?). I've talked with people before about having Windows viruses that don't sap resources (at first) or kill the machine, but which quietly change data in files. Modify a "3" to a "7" in a few Excel files. Change meeting times in Outlook by 10 minutes here or there. Eventually, get more malicious and start changing other bits of data in files (mainly MS Office files for maximum compatibility/reach).
A good virus won't be found out for awhile, and without knowing when it infected the system, you won't easily be able to tell how far back to go in the backups to pull 'clean' files.
This would have a devastating effect on the trust people have in any part of the system. What good is 'rebuilding' the system if you can't trust the data backups either?
Excellent info! I consider myself rather knowledgeable about most things Beatles, but had not run across this particular aspect of the publishing side of things. Thank you for posting this! If it was from blender, this is probably the article you're talking about, but they only have part of it up. Does anyone have any more info on this?
I thought that would come up - the production. It's a mixed bag, really. In some (many!) ways the production techniques (initially or primarily down to George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and others) *were* very advanced (artificial double tracking, for example).
I probably misspoke, in that the Beatles themselves probably would have preferred 8 track recording earlier than they got it. Had they made it more of a cause earlier on, they probably would have convinced EMI to install 8 track equipment, but instead didn't press that issue (I can't imagine that by 1966 they didn't know it was equipment that was available!)
I wouldn't say "Apple" or "The Beatles" cash in on Lennon's name/image much - Yoko does that herself. I don't mean "cash in" in a particularly bad way (though it seems you did!). She's just doing good business. The Beatles themselves as a group have 4 good names to cash in on. I would argue that trying to cash in on the names of just one of them simply doesn't work very well - they were very much bigger than the sum of their individual names/contributions, and that's why "The Beatles" as an entity will continue to be a big draw for a long time.
Will they continue to sell millions per year? Probably not over the long haul, but it's damn impressive that much of their music still sounds fresh today (good production and equipment used all those years ago), and that many of the songs still are able to speak to new generations.
Most record companies have welcomed iTunes, because -- unlike pirate music sites -- it protects their copyright and collects a fee. But the Apple vs. Apple dispute means that no Beatles music is available on iTunes.
"We haven't unfortunately been able to persuade Apple Corps in relation to their Beatles catalogue," said Grabiner. "But we have persuaded everybody else."
This dispute has nothing to do with Beatles music being on iTunes. The Beatles music is not available via any digital store, iirc. Yes, a few of the German Tony Sheridan tracks, and 'interview' tracks, but that's about it. The major catalog is not available through any digital download means, not just iTunes. If the Beatles were trying to get back (heh) at Apple Computer, they'd license their material to Napster, or MSN, or Yahoo, or some competing network.
The Beatles have historically been 'behind the times' technologically, what we might call 'late adopters'. For example, their catalog wasn't available on CD until 1987 - years after CDs were accepted as mainstream. Even going back to the 60's, they were one of the last major bands to 'upgrade' to 8 track recording, having recorded practically their entire career on 4 track recording, even though 8 track recording was certainly available earlier.
As an aside, I find it a bit funny that people accuse the Beatles of 'cashing in' every so often. While I certainly feel that way myself occasionally, I have to remind myself there's a lot of opportunity they're sitting on which they could still release and all the hardcore fans and baby boomers would still eat it up. I think they've shown a fair amount of restraint so far. I'm thinking of the hours of live concert footage which is available, for example - there's probably another DVD or two which could be put out, plus remastering all the old albums . Witness the Yellow Submarine remaster - *much* better sounding than the original CD - they could reissue all the original CDs and make still millions more, but haven't (yet?) done so. Maybe they never will?
I wrote a small piece about some gmail gripes - does the hosted version behave exactly like gmail.com, or is it slightly different?
Can I search and have it find 'close' words? Google is all about "search", and pretty much forces you in to this as the primary way of finding things, but can't find something you've misspelled.
To be fair, unless you're a mod_perl ninja, most mod_perl apps are pretty difficult to set up. Compare this to most PHP-based apps - mod_perl apps require much more work to set up, especially in a development environment.