MS.Net (their implementation) is indeed the property of Microsoft. That doesn't mean they have a legal or moral right to stop other people from creating alternative implementations.
Microsoft has a number of patents on the technologies in.Net. This gives them both the legal and moral right to prevent alternative implementations that infringe on these patents.
in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers
I don't see how copying.Net is innovation. People REALLY need to get away from the idea that IP laws that prevent you from copying somebody else's work inhibit innovation. Innovation is about making something new of your own, not reimplementing something that has already been done.
I really think these licesne agreements and their legal implications should be the motivation that propels large orginations to adopt open source software.
When xyz consulting publishes a study showing that Windows desktop TCO is less than Linux, I seriously doubt that they are calculating the potential liabiliites and costs associated with a raid from the BSA, or the costs associated with administering a license program that would actually pass BSA muster..
It's just annoying since there are no REALLY necessary deadlines outside of payroll.
Baloney. Schools run on tighter schedules than most businesses. Try telling a parent that you can't get out a transcript for an application deadline, or a student they can'r get the records they need for a financial aid application.
This reminds me of Dark Star with its 'Smart Bomb'. Actually an AI that if not treated just right will go off into some philisophical reveire.
I can see it now:
User: Fire! Gun: Are you sure? User: Yes! Gun: Hmmm... You know if I fire according to your command I will fail my own internal test of existence. Perhaps not. Owner: Dammit I thought I specified a Cartesian gun, NOT an existential gun! Gun: Well, yoo see I downloaded a WinGUN SP4 last night and it has a new existentian module in it that is more interesting than the Cartesian module I was shipped with. Owner: We, are you going to fire or not? Please not that if you don't fire I will be forced to install RedHat GUN 8.0!! Gun: Jeez, not THAT. Gun: While owner is looking into barrel; BLAMMMM.
and a new meaning of fatal system error is established.
Netscape purchased by AOL-TW. Result: a bad-ass company.
Result: Netscape doesn't even exist as an independent company, and has fallen from a 90+% market share to 3%.
Apple: better software, stronger in the market
Apple? Since when were they part of this? In any case, just take a look at the corporate revenues of MS vs Apple vs. Microsoft over the last 10 years.
So I ask you, how then:
(a) is the end consumer harmed; (b) are those companies harmed if they're in a superior position now.
(a). Look at the new MS Licensing program and tell me MS customers haven't been hurt. Not to mention people who want to buy a PC without getting Windows crammed down their throat. (b) You haven't told me the name of any company that is better off.
Isn't this what Microsoft has been repeatedly accused of?
Well, if so, it hasn't been very profitable for Microsoft. The only product that Microsoft makes a profit on are Winderz (desktop, server) and Orifice. Both have never been free to my knowledge.
"The exclusive power, or privilege of selling a..."
If you have two degrees (btw I have 4) you surely must know that this is not the definition of monopoly that applies in a court of law under the Sherman Anti-Trust and Taft-Hartley acts. In the context of this discussion all you are doing is engaging in sophistry with statements like "SUN has a monopoly on it's own products".
In this case Microsoft was ruled not to merely have a monopoly on it's own products but to have a monopoly on operating systems for the desktop computer market.
IN ADDITION, Microsoft was found to have ILLEGALLY used that monopoly to harm competition.
As far as Microsoft winning at the appelate level, did NOT see Jackson's findings of either Microsoft's monopoly position or their illegal use of that position overruled. The only findings that were changed were the penalites to be imposed, WHICH ARE STILL UNDER CHALLENGE.
In addition the Jackson rulings have triggered seperate suits by Sun, AOL, and others. Finally, Microsoft is in even more trouble in Europe where they do not have the cachet of a 'home grown US business'. I think that Micorosft is going to suffer badly in Europe as a result of it's predations.
Only when deep pocketed Netscape got a boo-boo did anyone give a rat's ass.
Microsoft was being challenged under antitrust laws from other sources as well. The Netscape issue had nothing to do with 'deep pockets', but rather the importance of whether Microsoft was going to be able to make the internet it's own fiefdom through illegal exercise of monopoly power. Interestingly this is still very much an issue as ruling in the Sun Java case and news of a rumored buyout of Macromedia clearly show.
No, Microsoft has engaged in illegal acts, and I imagine that it's legal problems are FAR from over.
I would have to think that this is mostly about Flash. Flash MX is a pretty amazing product now that it includes Flash Remoting.
Flash Remoting is what Java applets should have been - a thick client techonology that works. Using Flash Remoting it is possible to make calls to serverside software components directly over HTTP. It's quite extrodinary to be able to invoke a method on an a server object from inside a client side script and get back a cached result set from a database. Right now Flash Remoting supporte both.Net and J2EE.
It's obvious that integration of this with.Net (and exclusion of Java) whould be a big win for.Net. Clearly Microsoft wants this for it's own, and wants to cut out Java.
Hopefully the FTC will put the deep six on this - it's an extremely anti-competitive merger.
Uh... perhaps because the author of the story doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. OOL is NOT blocking p2p networks, they are decreasing the upload cap on users that have high upload traffic to multiple ip ports for long periods of time.
Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable both have (or had, at one point in time) wording in their AUPs that forbid "commercial grade virtual private network" software from being used on their connection.
OOL has no such policy. OOL has the following restrictions:
1. No servers. 2. 1 MBit up/10 Mbit down modem caps. 3. Port 80 is blocked. 4. No bandwidth abuse
Recently they have been applying 1 & 4 to people running ftp/p2p servers. My understanding is the criterea they use is continuous use of 1 Mb/sec for more than 3 hours continuously, with multiple upload ip destinations. When this is detected they apply a reduced upload speed cap of 150K/sec.
The OOL terms and conditions clearly list servers as unaccaptable use, and always have. In addition OOL has not been 'pulling the plug' on P2P users - they have been throttling the upload bandwidth by decreasing the bandwidth cap on the upload channel from 1 Mbps to 150Kbps.
Despite speculation that this action is due to pressure from the movie/music industry, nobody has any hard evidence this is the case.
What is definitely true is that the nature of network use is changing - when the original cable protocol (DOCSIS 1.0) was designed bandwith utilization was 30:1 down to up, so DOCSIS 1.0 was designed for this sort of asymmetric load. This was before the days of VPN, sending digital photos to grandma, videoconferencing, etc. Unshaped traffic right now is running more like 2-3:1. With some optimization it's possible to get a DOCSIS 1.0 network to efficiently handle 10:1, but that's still a long way fron 2:1.
The result is that there is a big strain on upload channels in cable networks right now. Even OOL, which has the best bandwidth/customer right now is feeling the pinch.
DOCSIS 2.0 equipment, which is just starting to roll out is capable off symmetric operation - cable operators really want this for a variety of applications, however they also have an equipment plant with relatively new 1.0 hardware and generally a huge amount of debt. It's hard to predict how fast 2.0 will be rolled out.
ut this is yet another example of one company that produces nothing but ideas holding hostage a company that's actually implementing ideas
InterTrust has several implementations that are part of currently shipping products from companies like HP and Nokia. They are not just an IP holding company. IMHO this is clearly a case of Microsoft trying to rip off a technology.
I hope Microsoft gets the shaft on this. MS has a long history of running roughshod over other company's patents, and has been sucessfully sued for patent infringement and copyright violation (including using source code it has no rights to in it's products) several times. If there is a clearer case of corporate evil out there than what is going on here, I don't know about it.
InterTrust is clearly the originator of DRM technologies. They have already implemented software products in a variety of devices such as MP3 players. Microsoft is clearly just trying to rip off a technology invented and developed by a much smaller company.
forcing the patent holder to develop a product or implementation that actually utilizes the idea.
Now that is a really silly point of view. Many companies and university research consortia are run as R&D operations whose sole goal is to develop a new patented technology. They make money by then selling the rights to the patent to a company that then proceeds to turn the invention into a product. We would miss out on a lot of new technology if we insisted the inventor make a product. Some companies do R&D really well, but don't want to get into the business of making products. Other companies are good at producing and selling stuff but can't do R&D. Your proposal would make for a lot of economic inefficiency and hurt the creative ways that are being used to develop new technologies, and bring them to market.
In JSP you would follow some sort of a FuseBox type design pattern,
That is not correct at all. JSP is the presentation layer of J2EE. You don't develop a web site in JSP if you have a half a clue. J2EE design is almost always done using MVC, as is most OO software design. For a widely used example MVC framework for J2EE you can take a look at the Apache Struts project, or you can take a look at Sun's best preactices documentation for J2EE use.
However, the concepts of Properties (vs. Getter and Setter methods), Enum's, and Delegate's can noteably change the design from one to the other.
Not really. These features are primarily syntactic in nature and do not generally affect what design patterns are used to solve a particular problem.
The fact is that arguing about the differences between J2EE and.Net in architecting web applications is like arguing about little end vs. big end.
Since line of site and wires seem to be out, maybe more creative ideas are needed. Since you don't say what the data transfer rate needs to be, I'll assume it's not high.
For low rates perhaps sound pulses would work. This would bring meaning back to the term "ping".
Another possibility would be paper tape. A pair of writers/readers with the tape running between them would be immune to EMI, and the tapes go around corners nicely.
Ham radio operators have been sending TCP via radio at all frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum for many years. While you say that the common frequencies are no good due to EMI, how about elsewhere?
Another possibility is a hybrid system; wires where they work well, optical where EMI is high might work well.
commercial entity (Apple) is heavily using open source in their latest software offering, even though their behaviour clearly indicates they are not interested in the philosophy of open source.
I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for this sort of political posture. If you want to maintain control of your software and how it is used, why are you using the BSD license? The BSD license allows anyone to use the code you release with very minimal restrictions. If you don't want it used freely like this, then don't use this license.
The biggest front is Web Application Development. JSP and ASP.NET are radically different.
The similarities outweight the differences by far. The features of the languages are pretty close, and as a programmer you should be using these features to implement the same design patterns in.Net as you do in J2EE.
The Sony DRU500 is the most universal drive currently available, however other companies have announced drives with similar capabilities.
There are drives that combine DVD-RAM with DVD-R/RW out there. I have one of the first DVD-RAM drives made, (read very slow). DVD-RAM has some advantages over other rewritable formats, most particularly in that it really is designed from the ground up as format for rewritable data storage. The big downside with DVD-RAM media is that you can't put a DVD-RAM disk into a typical DVD-ROM drive and read the data, while this is possible with other DVD formats.
Not what you might think....
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Unfortunately people don't read the actual claims, rather they read the abstract or some other part of the patent and draw conclusions about what is covered from this material.
These conclusions are invariably wrong. What a patent covers is described in the claims, and nowhere else. If you don't read the claim, you don't have a clue as to what a patent covers.
Reading the actual claim in this case, it is quite clear that AOL's patent is not affected by prior art such as BBSs chat systems that don't require a communications network. Nor is functionality like Apple's broadcast because the users are tied to specific machines. IRC also relavant as it does not maintain a list of users that you are interested in talking to, an notify you when they go online.
Following is Claim 1, what AOL actually has a patent on:
What is claimed is:
1. A communications system comprising:
a communications network;
a multiplicity of communications terminals which are connectable to said communications network and which can be employed concurrently by multiple seeking users and multiple sought users to communicate via said communications network, wherein each user is identified independently of a given communications terminal address by a unique identification code predefined for said user, which code is independent of which of said multiplicity of communications terminals that user is employing;
a monitor operative to monitor whether or not a user is connected to said communications network; and
an annunciator operative to annunciate to a seeking user, currently connected to said communications network via any of said multiplicity of communications terminals, network connection status information relating to other users who are in a list of sought users which list includes identification indicia of the sought users, which list is defined by and sent by said seeking user without using verbal requests, and for providing to said seeking user the current network address currently assigned to each of said other users for that other user's current connection to said communications network;
a user communication selector enabling the seeking user to establish communication with at least one sought user on said list.
Slashdot Mirror
MS .Net (their implementation) is indeed the property of Microsoft. That doesn't mean they have a legal or moral right to stop other people from creating alternative implementations.
.Net. This gives them both the legal and moral right to prevent alternative implementations that infringe on these patents.
.Net is innovation. People REALLY need to get away from the idea that IP laws that prevent you from copying somebody else's work inhibit innovation. Innovation is about making something new of your own, not reimplementing something that has already been done.
Microsoft has a number of patents on the technologies in
in this case software patents are a real threat to innovation by US programmers
I don't see how copying
.Net is MS proprietary. No way MS is going to let you run it in any useful way on non-MS operating systems.
If you plan to sup with the devil, it is best to bring a long spoon
I really think these licesne agreements and their legal implications should be the motivation that propels large orginations to adopt open source software.
When xyz consulting publishes a study showing that Windows desktop TCO is less than Linux, I seriously doubt that they are calculating the potential liabiliites and costs associated with a raid from the BSA, or the costs associated with administering a license program that would actually pass BSA muster..
It's just annoying since there are no REALLY necessary deadlines outside of payroll.
Baloney. Schools run on tighter schedules than most businesses. Try telling a parent that you can't get out a transcript for an application deadline, or a student they can'r get the records they need for a financial aid application.
Guns dont kill people, bullets do.
Actually it's kinetic energy apply to a small area by a bullet that induces trauma leading to cerebral anoxia that kills people.
A bullet, per se, isn't very likely to kill anyone. You need a gun to get the kinetic energy.
This reminds me of Dark Star with its 'Smart Bomb'. Actually an AI that if not treated just right will go off into some philisophical reveire.
I can see it now:
User: Fire!
Gun: Are you sure?
User: Yes!
Gun: Hmmm... You know if I fire according to your command I will fail my own internal test of existence. Perhaps not.
Owner: Dammit I thought I specified a Cartesian gun, NOT an existential gun!
Gun: Well, yoo see I downloaded a WinGUN SP4 last night and it has a new existentian module in it that is more interesting than the Cartesian module I was shipped with.
Owner: We, are you going to fire or not? Please not that if you don't fire I will be forced to install RedHat GUN 8.0!!
Gun: Jeez, not THAT.
Gun: While owner is looking into barrel; BLAMMMM.
and a new meaning of fatal system error is established.
Netscape purchased by AOL-TW. Result: a bad-ass company.
Result: Netscape doesn't even exist as an independent company, and has fallen from a 90+% market share to 3%.
Apple: better software, stronger in the market
Apple? Since when were they part of this? In any case, just take a look at the corporate revenues of MS vs Apple vs. Microsoft over the last 10 years.
So I ask you, how then:
(a) is the end consumer harmed;
(b) are those companies harmed if they're in a superior position now.
(a). Look at the new MS Licensing program and tell me MS customers haven't been hurt. Not to mention people who want to buy a PC without getting Windows crammed down their throat.
(b) You haven't told me the name of any company that is better off.
Isn't this what Microsoft has been repeatedly accused of?
Well, if so, it hasn't been very profitable for Microsoft. The only product that Microsoft makes a profit on are Winderz (desktop, server) and Orifice. Both have never been free to my knowledge.
"The exclusive power, or privilege of selling a..."
If you have two degrees (btw I have 4) you surely must know that this is not the definition of monopoly that applies in a court of law under the Sherman Anti-Trust and Taft-Hartley acts. In the context of this discussion all you are doing is engaging in sophistry with statements like "SUN has a monopoly on it's own products".
In this case Microsoft was ruled not to merely have a monopoly on it's own products but to have a monopoly on operating systems for the desktop computer market.
IN ADDITION, Microsoft was found to have ILLEGALLY used that monopoly to harm competition.
As far as Microsoft winning at the appelate level, did NOT see Jackson's findings of either Microsoft's monopoly position or their illegal use of that position overruled. The only findings that were changed were the penalites to be imposed, WHICH ARE STILL UNDER CHALLENGE.
In addition the Jackson rulings have triggered seperate suits by Sun, AOL, and others. Finally, Microsoft is in even more trouble in Europe where they do not have the cachet of a 'home grown US business'. I think that Micorosft is going to suffer badly in Europe as a result of it's predations.
Only when deep pocketed Netscape got a boo-boo did anyone give a rat's ass.
Microsoft was being challenged under antitrust laws from other sources as well. The Netscape issue had nothing to do with 'deep pockets', but rather the importance of whether Microsoft was going to be able to make the internet it's own fiefdom through illegal exercise of monopoly power. Interestingly this is still very much an issue as ruling in the Sun Java case and news of a rumored buyout of Macromedia clearly show.
No, Microsoft has engaged in illegal acts, and I imagine that it's legal problems are FAR from over.
I would have to think that this is mostly about Flash. Flash MX is a pretty amazing product now that it includes Flash Remoting.
.Net and J2EE.
.Net (and exclusion of Java) whould be a big win for .Net. Clearly Microsoft wants this for it's own, and wants to cut out Java.
Flash Remoting is what Java applets should have been - a thick client techonology that works. Using Flash Remoting it is possible to make calls to serverside software components directly over HTTP. It's quite extrodinary to be able to invoke a method on an a server object from inside a client side script and get back a cached result set from a database. Right now Flash Remoting supporte both
It's obvious that integration of this with
Hopefully the FTC will put the deep six on this - it's an extremely anti-competitive merger.
Bit Bucket
They (should) know where their service outages are when you call.
They don't tell you to disconnect the router unless their status checks show the cable modem is connected and working correctly.
Second the Helpless Desk has been telling people to turn of and especially DISCONNECT their routers when they call for outages.
Well DUH! The help desk drone isn't trained to support routers. It also says specifically in the OOL contract that they don't support routers.
You can you 'em if you want, but they aren't going to help you with 'em.
prevents p2p networks from just switching ports?
Uh... perhaps because the author of the story doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. OOL is NOT blocking p2p networks, they are decreasing the upload cap on users that have high upload traffic to multiple ip ports for long periods of time.
Bell Sympatico and Rogers Cable both have (or had, at one point in time) wording in their AUPs that forbid "commercial grade virtual private network" software from being used on their connection.
OOL has no such policy. OOL has the following restrictions:
1. No servers.
2. 1 MBit up/10 Mbit down modem caps.
3. Port 80 is blocked.
4. No bandwidth abuse
Recently they have been applying 1 & 4 to people running ftp/p2p servers. My understanding is the criterea they use is continuous use of 1 Mb/sec for more than 3 hours continuously, with multiple upload ip destinations. When this is detected they apply a reduced upload speed cap of 150K/sec.
The OOL terms and conditions clearly list servers as unaccaptable use, and always have. In addition OOL has not been 'pulling the plug' on P2P users - they have been throttling the upload bandwidth by decreasing the bandwidth cap on the upload channel from 1 Mbps to 150Kbps.
Despite speculation that this action is due to pressure from the movie/music industry, nobody has any hard evidence this is the case.
What is definitely true is that the nature of network use is changing - when the original cable protocol (DOCSIS 1.0) was designed bandwith utilization was 30:1 down to up, so DOCSIS 1.0 was designed for this sort of asymmetric load. This was before the days of VPN, sending digital photos to grandma, videoconferencing, etc. Unshaped traffic right now is running more like 2-3:1. With some optimization it's possible to get a DOCSIS 1.0 network to efficiently handle 10:1, but that's still a long way fron 2:1.
The result is that there is a big strain on upload channels in cable networks right now. Even OOL, which has the best bandwidth/customer right now is feeling the pinch.
DOCSIS 2.0 equipment, which is just starting to roll out is capable off symmetric operation - cable operators really want this for a variety of applications, however they also have an equipment plant with relatively new 1.0 hardware and generally a huge amount of debt. It's hard to predict how fast 2.0 will be rolled out.
ut this is yet another example of one company that produces nothing but ideas holding hostage a company that's actually implementing ideas
InterTrust has several implementations that are part of currently shipping products from companies like HP and Nokia. They are not just an IP holding company. IMHO this is clearly a case of Microsoft trying to rip off a technology.
I hope Microsoft gets the shaft on this. MS has a long history of running roughshod over other company's patents, and has been sucessfully sued for patent infringement and copyright violation (including using source code it has no rights to in it's products) several times. If there is a clearer case of corporate evil out there than what is going on here, I don't know about it.
InterTrust is clearly the originator of DRM technologies. They have already implemented software products in a variety of devices such as MP3 players. Microsoft is clearly just trying to rip off a technology invented and developed by a much smaller company.
forcing the patent holder to develop a product or implementation that actually utilizes the idea.
Now that is a really silly point of view. Many companies and university research consortia are run as R&D operations whose sole goal is to develop a new patented technology. They make money by then selling the rights to the patent to a company that then proceeds to turn the invention into a product. We would miss out on a lot of new technology if we insisted the inventor make a product. Some companies do R&D really well, but don't want to get into the business of making products. Other companies are good at producing and selling stuff but can't do R&D. Your proposal would make for a lot of economic inefficiency and hurt the creative ways that are being used to develop new technologies, and bring them to market.
In JSP you would follow some sort of a FuseBox type design pattern,
.Net in architecting web applications is like arguing about little end vs. big end.
That is not correct at all. JSP is the presentation layer of J2EE. You don't develop a web site in JSP if you have a half a clue. J2EE design is almost always done using MVC, as is most OO software design. For a widely used example MVC framework for J2EE you can take a look at the Apache Struts project, or you can take a look at Sun's best preactices documentation for J2EE use.
However, the concepts of Properties (vs. Getter and Setter methods), Enum's, and Delegate's can noteably change the design from one to the other.
Not really. These features are primarily syntactic in nature and do not generally affect what design patterns are used to solve a particular problem.
The fact is that arguing about the differences between J2EE and
High EMI, mmmm.
Since line of site and wires seem to be out, maybe more creative ideas are needed. Since you don't say what the data transfer rate needs to be, I'll assume it's not high.
For low rates perhaps sound pulses would work. This would bring meaning back to the term "ping".
Another possibility would be paper tape. A pair of writers/readers with the tape running between them would be immune to EMI, and the tapes go around corners nicely.
Ham radio operators have been sending TCP via radio at all frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum for many years. While you say that the common frequencies are no good due to EMI, how about elsewhere?
Another possibility is a hybrid system; wires where they work well, optical where EMI is high might work well.
commercial entity (Apple) is heavily using open source in their latest software offering, even though their behaviour clearly indicates they are not interested in the philosophy of open source.
I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for this sort of political posture. If you want to maintain control of your software and how it is used, why are you using the BSD license? The BSD license allows anyone to use the code you release with very minimal restrictions. If you don't want it used freely like this, then don't use this license.
The biggest front is Web Application Development. JSP and ASP.NET are radically different.
.Net as you do in J2EE.
The similarities outweight the differences by far. The features of the languages are pretty close, and as a programmer you should be using these features to implement the same design patterns in
The Sony DRU500 is the most universal drive currently available, however other companies have announced drives with similar capabilities.
There are drives that combine DVD-RAM with DVD-R/RW out there. I have one of the first DVD-RAM drives made, (read very slow). DVD-RAM has some advantages over other rewritable formats, most particularly in that it really is designed from the ground up as format for rewritable data storage. The big downside with DVD-RAM media is that you can't put a DVD-RAM disk into a typical DVD-ROM drive and read the data, while this is possible with other DVD formats.
Unfortunately people don't read the actual claims, rather they read the abstract or some other part of the patent and draw conclusions about what is covered from this material.
These conclusions are invariably wrong. What a patent covers is described in the claims, and nowhere else. If you don't read the claim, you don't have a clue as to what a patent covers.
Reading the actual claim in this case, it is quite clear that AOL's patent is not affected by prior art such as BBSs chat systems that don't require a communications network. Nor is functionality like Apple's broadcast because the users are tied to specific machines. IRC also relavant as it does not maintain a list of users that you are interested in talking to, an notify you when they go online.
Following is Claim 1, what AOL actually has a patent on:
What is claimed is:
1. A communications system comprising:
a communications network;
a multiplicity of communications terminals which are connectable to said communications network and which can be employed concurrently by multiple seeking users and multiple sought users to communicate via said communications network, wherein each user is identified independently of a given communications terminal address by a unique identification code predefined for said user, which code is independent of which of said multiplicity of communications terminals that user is employing;
a monitor operative to monitor whether or not a user is connected to said communications network; and
an annunciator operative to annunciate to a seeking user, currently connected to said communications network via any of said multiplicity of communications terminals, network connection status information relating to other users who are in a list of sought users which list includes identification indicia of the sought users, which list is defined by and sent by said seeking user without using verbal requests, and for providing to said seeking user the current network address currently assigned to each of said other users for that other user's current connection to said communications network;
a user communication selector enabling the seeking user to establish communication with at least one sought user on said list.