Telephone number portability is just as bad. Not that you can't do it, but it's really hard and expensive. Every phone call becomes a database dip. Consider the size and speed of that distributed database.
The database required already exists, local number portability has been in effect for landlines for years.
The calls handled by the telephone system are a small fraction of the number of Internet accesses. The DNS chugs along without major problems even though it is continuously under attack from hackers.
There is simply no technical reason not to do local number portability, the switching system already exists. All the telcos have to do is pay for the database dips.
This has nothing to do with technical difficulty. The issue is purely making is a bit more inconvenient for customers to switch.
It's because they aren't some benevolent charity, they are a corporation. I realize some of you slept through business class, but the point of a corporation is to make money, not to help the customer.
It is because the government is corrupt. To take a look at how legislation is made read this story in the Washington Post.
Bascially DeLay and three cronies charged a company $56,000 to Republican campaign funds in return for exceptions from regulations. The company saw the payments as bribes - "we have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table". And so does every other company being shaken down buy GOP thugs.
Bush did not raise all that money in the last Presidential election from benificent philanthropists. He collected it form companies like Enron who wanted specific favors like being allowed to rig the California energy market.
To see if Verizon is going to get another delay (or maybe a De Lay) just take a look at how much money they give to Billy Tauzin, Tom Delay and co. The going tarif for that sort of favor would be about $500,000 or so.
The reason they do not want local number portability has nothing to do with capital cost. The systems are run by outsourcing companies and are simply a mondification of the existing SS7 system configuration. The reason they don't want to allow portability is that their customers are more likely to switch companies if there is a free market.
One thing that is irritating me is that just as interesting CompactFlash peripherals are starting to become available the handheld manufacturers are abandoning the format in favor of Secure Digital.
If all I wanted was memory that would not be a biggie, but I want to have a handheld with a GPS unit for the car. i don't want to pay Garmin $2000 for their vastly overpriced crap. You might think you can buy a Garmin unit for $100 but it does not navigate, the navigating units cost $$$ and you have to buy the maps at rip off prices.
Or I can get a PocketPC with a GPS card for $500 and then buy Microsoft streets for $20. If I can get a big enough memory card I should be able to get the entire US onto the device.
I agree with that. I'd rather pay the tax on the gas
That is almost certainly the point. Voters won't raise existing taxes so the way to get them to do that is to propose something they are going to like even less.
This tax makes no sense at all, the cost of retrofitting cars with the GPS systems will be horrendous, remember that they will have to be fraud proofed GPS systems that have yet to be invented, using expensive wireless data connections that probably don't exist in much of the state. Oregon is not California, it is not big enough for state adoption to drive economies of scale.
They will be lucky to get the meters for less than $400 per vehicle. So how long does it take to get that back in taxes? I spend about $35 buying a tank of gas every other week, or about $900 a year. That is for the state, federal tax and the cost of delivering the gas. Say the state tax is $200, that means it will be two years before I pay them the cost of the stupid meter.
When politicians propose something that does not add up they have a hidden agenda. The trick is you give them a choice between your preferred policy and eating broken glass. So Clinton gave the country a choice between tax cuts and 'saving social security' guess who won? The Bush plan is to give the country a choice between continuing deficits and eliminating social security.
People don't like paying taxes, but see what happens if they are told the consequences. We keep being told that the voters are not going to allow the Bush tax cuts to be repealled, lets see what happens when the Baby Boomers are living off social security. The inheritance taxes will be back sooner than you can say 'Enron' - BTW isn't it nice to see Martha Stewart taking the rap for the Enron mess?
So tell your SUV driver that they have a choice of a new tax plus a spy in the cab reporting their movements to John Ashcroft and slightly higher rates for an existing tax and you will get the answer higher taxes. Ask them the question higher taxes or crappy roads and they will say 'oh I'll take the crappy roads so I can use my four wheel drive'.
You may be able to get a 256Meg Compact flash from costco, but in order to get 1.5 gigs of memory, you would have to stick 6 of them together and also have 6 compact flash interfaces.
Or wait a short while until the larger cards get cheaper. 1Gb cards already exist and it is probable that they will be the same price as the 256Mb cards are today in a short while, particularly if the new drive is significant competition.
For a technology like this to have a significant impact it has to be radically better than the alternative. I don't see how having to swap out a CF card is a major issue for many applications. I don't see the capacity of this drive being close to a significant breakthrough mark. It is still too small to be relevant for video, it is not even large enough to store a whole CD collection, so there will be switching required.
The impact of the article comes from comparing the wholesale price of the new drive with the retail price of the existing drives. Guess what, that is not a very useful measure! I doubt that the chips inside of a 1Gb flash rom card cost more than $64 in quantities of 10K or more.
Already exists since the 1st of june 2003 when ARCHOS offcialy launched the new AV300 series :
Yeah and it weighs a ton. You would not want to have an archos device built into a set of noise cancelling headphones. This drive should be lightweight enough to do that. 20Gb or 40Gb is not that big a deal, I find the critical size threshold is about 1Gb, thats the point at which I can get a decent selection of CDs on the device, enough for a plane trip. It is nice to be able to hold a complete collection of CDs, but I will happily trade that for a major saving in weight.
Hey manufacturers are you listening? Stick an MP3 player with a card slot in a pair of noise cancelling headphones, repeat C-A-R-D S-L-O-T, N-O-I-S-E C-A-N-C-E-L-L-I-N-G H-E-A-D-P-H-O-N--S
The bit I don't quite get is that the article implies that this is for embedding on a motherboard rather than for sale in a compactflash format. And the price advantage looks like it disappears when you get it in a removable format - $200 for a 1.5 Gb drive is not exactly an amazing advance. FlashRom is about the same price. I can get a 256Mb CompactFlash from Costco for $60.
The microdrive takes more power than flash rom is less mechanically robust and is available in more compact formats (like SD format). This does not sound like it will be much cheaper, so what is there to be excited about? [My statement on power is based on conversations with owners of Nikon D1 cameras who tell me that the microdrive tends to flatten the battery quicker than flash rom]
About the only area where this might be a big win is handheld PDAs, but even there the gap to compact flash may not be enough to be interesting.
If you had published said work, there would not be a problem with some patent covering it. There could be a problem with a patent that incorporates it, but that is another matter.
Tell me about it, even when you have really good prior art fighting a patent case is hideously expensive. It costs about $2 million to fight a patent case, even with the cast iron prior art.
Vampire patent lawyers know that, which is why so many try it on. There are real costs to the USPTO's negligence.
I want to again stress that lawyers are mere advocates for their clients. Clients are the ones who file the suits and the general public makes the decisions regarding those suits. More than lawyers are involved in the process.
That is a cop out. I have no respect for lawyers who represent known mob members in civil lawsuits designed to protect their mob businesses. There are plenty of lawsuits that are brought in the US which no self respecting lawyer should ever file. In most countries a lawyer who intentionally files a vexatious case on behalf of their client for tactical reasons can face sanctions, in the US they give themselves awards.
The ebay patent thing is not quite at that level, there is after all a patent issued by the USPTO.
The problem here is that the USPTO is sloppy, negligent and only faces the threat of legal action from an applicant who is refused, there is no sanction for issuing a bogus patent. Worse the USPTO has conspired to set the threshold for novelty ridiculously low, 'obviousness' is no longer any sort of bar for getting a patent from the USPTO.
It is not just the victims of vampire patents who suffer as a result. Holders of legitimate and genuinely novel patents also suffer. The reaction of most companies when a patent right is offered for sale is to return the documents unread.
I have no objection to paying a genuine inventor a significant sum for a real invention, but I am not going to pay someone for filing a patent on work I did much earlier - which is very common.
Not realy. AOL isn't really AOL anymore, its back to being Time Warner. AOL is the division that the Time Warner folk are willing to give away for free to anyone who will take over the debt.
This is about Time Warner getting back into its core business and looking to the strategic alliances it will need after the AOL division is jettisoned. At this point the Time Warner execs realize they were completely taken for a ride. They effectively gave away half their equity for a company with a zero, possibly even negative actual value.
Going forward Time Warner wants to be able to sell their stuff over all the distribution networks. They have now worked out that AOL is a busted flush, it is a dialup play in a broadband world. AOL does not have content, never has, it is an aggregator, not a creator.
Ok, so what, exactly, are they planning to sue him for?
In other news John Ashcroft announced that terrorism charges might be brought against both motherhood and apple pie under the Patriot act. David Boies, representing the administration stated on behalf of his client, "These people have to learn that their actions have consequences".
"One of the advantages we have is that the entire community is involved," said Judge
No comment. None at all.:)
Ah, maybe you are another of the people Paul has identified as a competative threat and ejected from the group.
Basically the ASRG has become just a PR machine for Ciphertrust. All but one of the competing anti-spam vendors found that their email was being 'moderated'. As a result the ASRG now consists of essentially five people.
One of the members of the group basically set out from the start to make sure it would fail. He is well known in the anti-spam world and does not want a rival to his own scheme. So every proposal that anyone made was attacked on any and all grounds, repeatedly in pretty unpleasant terms. People were called liars and worse. So Judge decided to moderate the folk who were being attacked but not the person deliberately trolling, why?
ASRG does not have the whole community involved, it does not even have a single one of the major ISPs, let alone a major software vendor involved at this point.
The ASRG has from start to finish been nothing but a vehicle for ciphertrust's publicity interests. No research has been allowed, that would risk an idea being proposed that competed with ciphertrust's product.
The IRTF chair is aware of the situation and the group is probably going to be terminated or radically re-organized in the near future.
The IEEE has a voting system where votes are assigned to individually that have attended 3 consecutive meeting (held about every 2 months). This is supposed to make the standards process more egalitarian. But what really happens is that it is only the large corporations that can afford to send someone to a meeting every 2 months. Lots of the people in this meeting just come, sign the book, get out their laptop and start working on something else. So the standards are strongly corporate driven, and the votes are therefore usually driven by issues other than technical merit.
I don't think the problem there is the voting system, its the corporations that are involved, or rather the parts of the corporations. IEEE has been most successful in setting standards at the hardware level, the nearest they get to protocol is link layer protocols.
This makes a difference because the consequences of a competing standard are different. Everyone knows that at the hardware level your think simply won't work at all if it does not meet the standard. It is not very easy to add useful features unless there is widespread support.
It is very different at the application level, most protocols are designed with the option for extensibility - both proprietary and open. Anyone can define their own DNS record types for example, if you have a standards document you can even get a reserved code for it.
So the game is very different. Some people do go into an Internet standards process with the aim of stopping an idea, but that rarely works because there is always the option of going it alone.
There is sometimes a corporate angle, but not the one people expect. Companies tend to be responsive to their customers needs, they want to create new products. So it simply isn't in a company's interest to block useful ideas most of the time, I have seen it tried and the result has usually been bad for all the companies involved.
Academics and independent consultants can be a much bigger problem. Academics are quite often more interested in architectural purity than utility. The reason IPSEC does not work through a NAT box without horrible kludges by the NAT box vendors is that there was a faction that wanted to kill NAT by making IPSEC unfriendly to it. I remember a very big name making essentially that point in an IPSEC WG meeting. There were lots of complaints when Microsoft modified Kerberos to work with WNT, but the actual change they made was a no-brainer when you look at the WNT security model. Instead of making a reasonable response to a legitimate commercial need the WGs tried to strong arm the companies to their will - pretty stupid tactic when you don't have the leverage to do that.
The big problem the IETF has is not the corporate/academic divide however, it is the young turks vs the old farts. Very few of the original architects of SMTP, IP etc. are actually still arround. Those people are easy to work with, they are engineers who want to get stuff done. Most times they want to go back and fix bugs in their own stuff. There are a few of these people still round the IETF but most of the people who are on the AD or IESG are early adopters rather than the pioneers. The result is that the IETF has a constitution that was designed to keep power in the hands of the pioneers and it is now being run by others whose influence now comes from their position rather than their engineering reputation.
The result is that the IETF is no longer a can-do place. The standards process is now completely broken. It takes years to get the simplest thing done. The IESG is trying to act as quality control but simply can't cope with the work load of approving specs that get WG consensus.
The sad part of all this is that the standards process has been forced to find other venues and in the process it has become much harder to get independent consultants and open source people involved in the groups that are actually having rel influence. The future of the Web is now being decided in OASIS and W3C. T
Funny how even the part of the quote you posted (in apparent support of your claim that Bush called for a boycott) doesn't call for a boycott.
Come off it, the intention was transparent. Its like when Trent Lott goes off to have tea with his chums at the CCC or praise Strom Thurmond, everyone knows what the message is. You just have to read the not very subtle code.
The right of Bush partisans to boycott the Dixie Chicks was not an issue. Why suggest that there is a right to boycott unless that was the intention.
SCO, of course, wants it to sound like "copy" as in "we ripped off SCO's trade secrets to make it." Some credibility they give themselves with pages like this!
Well I started the political comparison because that type of tactic is used regularly by both sides and they mostly get away with it. Misquoting and even deliberate fabrications have somehow become business as usual.
Plenty of folk believe that Quayle actually did actually say that he had expected people in latin america to speak latin. Lots of people still repeat the Gore invented Internet quote even though it has been exposed as a deliberate smear plenty of times.
So the sad fact is that SCO would quite likely have got away with this little scheme. The chances are quite high that they would find a lazy journalist willing to report the quotes verbatim or use them to interrogate someone in an interview.
The probability of them succeeding is much less now the scheme has been exposed on slashdot first.
The Dixie Chicks "can say what they want to say.... And they shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out. You know, freedom is a two-way street."
So are you going to admit that by your own criteria the statement was 'pathetic' or are you going to continue to bluster like right wing reactionaries always do when their bubble gets pricked?
Liberal cries of McCarthyism have sounded pretty dumb for this reason. What *is* scary is when Ashcroft accuses critics of the DOJ's incompetence of aiding terrorists, or when the GOP Congressional leadership accused Daschle of treason.
Well you are certainly in with a good chance of breaking free of the GOP brainwashing here. Ashcroft is scary, Poindexter is scary as all hell. Bandying arround accusations of treason was McCarthy's favorite trick.
But, he added, that the Chicks "shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out. You know, freedom is a two-way street."
Of course it is much easier to call people liars than to look up the quote on Google. Most of the mainstream media did not report the quote in full, not a great idea to publish stories that make Bush look a jerk when you want the FCC to allow you to create a monopoly - another story they have not been reporting on.
I think the SCO quotes page makes SCO look bad rather than Linux. It is the sheer desperation of the tactic. The quotes are clearly taken out of context.
Attacking minor figures inevitably makes you look small. Whether justified or not, Bush made a major error calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks, it made him look like a small minded bully. He should have laughed it off. A President with real class would have called them up and talked to them in person.
I think the problem here is that SCO has burned its boats on this one. They have no future in the Open Source world and probably little future in the Unix world either. It seems pretty certain that there will be only Linux and OS-X left as viable O/S in the UNIX world in ten years time. Every other UNIX will be a legacy platform on minimal life support. Eventually they will become Linux subsystems the way VMS is becomming a Windows NT subsystem.
The problem SCO has with its litigation strategy is that the Linux world is global. Most EU countries have pretty severe penalties for false allegations of copyright infringement. It is pretty easy to put a party on notice to substantiate its claim or shut up. It is not that hard to do in the US either. It takes a minimum of two years to get a civil case to trial, but there are evidentiary hearings before then and the courts do everything they can to get matters disposed of without a trial. So while it will be two years before the case gets to trial, SCO is going to have to be specific about its claims very soon, it may even be a condition of getting to discovery.
I'd be interested to know if this kind of thing constitutes libel. This is a page that SCO has posted that tries to make Stallman and Perens look bad. The use it to back up their "case".
I took a look at the statements, they are quotes from Perens and Stallman. It is not likely that a libel suit could succeed unless the quotations are false. But it is a somewhat odd tactic, Perens and Stallman are hardly the core of the Linux project. OK so they certainly have a connection, but they are not spokesmen for either Linus or Linux.
Why is Apple responsible for defending 802.11g, and why is anyone attacking Apple for the shortcomings (if any) of 'g?
They just got their PR people to OK the release first, and they are a more or less neutral party.
They only said what I and several others said in the first thread, raw performance and measured are apt to be very different. TCP/IP and an application layer protocol add quite a bit of overhead, as do the collision system and so on.
There are a lot of 802.11a companies who would like to see 802.11g sunk with FUD.
I asked my broker at Merrill Lynch to purchase $15,000 in Microsoft stock, and he said they had been advised that Redhat, etc. will take over the server market in about 4 years, so he advised me not to purchase the Microsoft stock.
Last recomendation on MSFT from ML was NT Buy. I would not take a broker's recommendation too seriously, particularly on this type of call. Take a look at who is paying large fines to the SEC for giving bogus advice... Technology changes are very hard to predict, the server market is not Microsofts only market or even its most important.
I suspect this is not advice from ML it is the kind of specious authority claim that comes up on stock boards all the time.
Balmer is making a pretty smart move, he has a fortune invested in a pretty solid company. There are a lot of big opportunities out there for an investor who can put down a significant amount of risk capital. There are a lot of companies trading for less than their cash position. If you have the cash and can afford to lose it you have a chance for a huge payoff.
Consider the problems that United Airlines is in at the moment. There is nothing dramatically wrong with the business, but they have a major cash flow problem. If they can survive the next two years they are likely to be back at a large fraction of their old marketcap. If you put your pension fund into UAL you would likely lose your shirt.
True, but we should also be able to move beyond tribal politics and recognise that we can support someone on one issue, and oppose them on another.
The economic model that Stelios is trying is called penetration pricing. You sell at a loss, capture the market and then you jack up the prices once there is no competition. In the US where antitrust law is weak that is legal unless you are a monopoly. In the UK it is illegal regardless.
There is a lot of ownership overlap between distributors and cinemas, but that has been invesigated by the monopolies and mergers commission and ok'd.
It is not very likely that a UK court is going to decide that the distributors have no rights over the type and quality of the venues where their films are shown.
This used to be true ten years ago, but you are way out of date.
Yeah and vi can do everything emacs can, especially if you use it in the ultra powerful line mode.
Learning a new runtime to learn a new language is not a good tradeoff. With dotNET you learn one runtime, it works for every language.
More importantly you don't have to wait for the runtime to catch up with the code you want to write. It does not matter how great the graphics library is if what you are doing is writing X.509 cert handling code.
C++ is not a second-class citizen under.Net. In fact, Managed C++ is one of the best-supported languages.
If you talk to the Microsoft engineers about dotNET you will find that they consider C++ a legacy language at this point, along with Cobol and Fortran.
OK they still have to use it - most of their existing code is written in C++, but the plan is clearly to transition to C# over time.
This is precicely why SCO does not divulge exactly what's in question: it would be too easy for IBM et al to say "Oh. So sorry. Many regretti." and recode it, thus deflating any hope they have for the Home Run.
If so its a poor strategy, SCO will be forced to specify the exact code chunks in dispute during discovery.
Also the fact that the capabilities are not in dispute, only the code means that damages are likely to be small, if any should SCO win. The fact that
Linus was wrong, the Raelians had far more credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
The database required already exists, local number portability has been in effect for landlines for years.
The calls handled by the telephone system are a small fraction of the number of Internet accesses. The DNS chugs along without major problems even though it is continuously under attack from hackers.
There is simply no technical reason not to do local number portability, the switching system already exists. All the telcos have to do is pay for the database dips.
This has nothing to do with technical difficulty. The issue is purely making is a bit more inconvenient for customers to switch.
It is because the government is corrupt. To take a look at how legislation is made read this story in the Washington Post.
Bascially DeLay and three cronies charged a company $56,000 to Republican campaign funds in return for exceptions from regulations. The company saw the payments as bribes - "we have a plan for participation to get a seat at the table". And so does every other company being shaken down buy GOP thugs.
Bush did not raise all that money in the last Presidential election from benificent philanthropists. He collected it form companies like Enron who wanted specific favors like being allowed to rig the California energy market.
To see if Verizon is going to get another delay (or maybe a De Lay) just take a look at how much money they give to Billy Tauzin, Tom Delay and co. The going tarif for that sort of favor would be about $500,000 or so.
The reason they do not want local number portability has nothing to do with capital cost. The systems are run by outsourcing companies and are simply a mondification of the existing SS7 system configuration. The reason they don't want to allow portability is that their customers are more likely to switch companies if there is a free market.
If all I wanted was memory that would not be a biggie, but I want to have a handheld with a GPS unit for the car. i don't want to pay Garmin $2000 for their vastly overpriced crap. You might think you can buy a Garmin unit for $100 but it does not navigate, the navigating units cost $$$ and you have to buy the maps at rip off prices.
Or I can get a PocketPC with a GPS card for $500 and then buy Microsoft streets for $20. If I can get a big enough memory card I should be able to get the entire US onto the device.
Anyone tried this sort of thing?
That is almost certainly the point. Voters won't raise existing taxes so the way to get them to do that is to propose something they are going to like even less.
This tax makes no sense at all, the cost of retrofitting cars with the GPS systems will be horrendous, remember that they will have to be fraud proofed GPS systems that have yet to be invented, using expensive wireless data connections that probably don't exist in much of the state. Oregon is not California, it is not big enough for state adoption to drive economies of scale.
They will be lucky to get the meters for less than $400 per vehicle. So how long does it take to get that back in taxes? I spend about $35 buying a tank of gas every other week, or about $900 a year. That is for the state, federal tax and the cost of delivering the gas. Say the state tax is $200, that means it will be two years before I pay them the cost of the stupid meter.
When politicians propose something that does not add up they have a hidden agenda. The trick is you give them a choice between your preferred policy and eating broken glass. So Clinton gave the country a choice between tax cuts and 'saving social security' guess who won? The Bush plan is to give the country a choice between continuing deficits and eliminating social security.
People don't like paying taxes, but see what happens if they are told the consequences. We keep being told that the voters are not going to allow the Bush tax cuts to be repealled, lets see what happens when the Baby Boomers are living off social security. The inheritance taxes will be back sooner than you can say 'Enron' - BTW isn't it nice to see Martha Stewart taking the rap for the Enron mess?
So tell your SUV driver that they have a choice of a new tax plus a spy in the cab reporting their movements to John Ashcroft and slightly higher rates for an existing tax and you will get the answer higher taxes. Ask them the question higher taxes or crappy roads and they will say 'oh I'll take the crappy roads so I can use my four wheel drive'.
Or wait a short while until the larger cards get cheaper. 1Gb cards already exist and it is probable that they will be the same price as the 256Mb cards are today in a short while, particularly if the new drive is significant competition.
For a technology like this to have a significant impact it has to be radically better than the alternative. I don't see how having to swap out a CF card is a major issue for many applications. I don't see the capacity of this drive being close to a significant breakthrough mark. It is still too small to be relevant for video, it is not even large enough to store a whole CD collection, so there will be switching required.
The impact of the article comes from comparing the wholesale price of the new drive with the retail price of the existing drives. Guess what, that is not a very useful measure! I doubt that the chips inside of a 1Gb flash rom card cost more than $64 in quantities of 10K or more.
Yeah and it weighs a ton. You would not want to have an archos device built into a set of noise cancelling headphones. This drive should be lightweight enough to do that. 20Gb or 40Gb is not that big a deal, I find the critical size threshold is about 1Gb, thats the point at which I can get a decent selection of CDs on the device, enough for a plane trip. It is nice to be able to hold a complete collection of CDs, but I will happily trade that for a major saving in weight.
Hey manufacturers are you listening? Stick an MP3 player with a card slot in a pair of noise cancelling headphones, repeat C-A-R-D S-L-O-T, N-O-I-S-E C-A-N-C-E-L-L-I-N-G H-E-A-D-P-H-O-N--S
The bit I don't quite get is that the article implies that this is for embedding on a motherboard rather than for sale in a compactflash format. And the price advantage looks like it disappears when you get it in a removable format - $200 for a 1.5 Gb drive is not exactly an amazing advance. FlashRom is about the same price. I can get a 256Mb CompactFlash from Costco for $60.
The microdrive takes more power than flash rom is less mechanically robust and is available in more compact formats (like SD format). This does not sound like it will be much cheaper, so what is there to be excited about? [My statement on power is based on conversations with owners of Nikon D1 cameras who tell me that the microdrive tends to flatten the battery quicker than flash rom]
About the only area where this might be a big win is handheld PDAs, but even there the gap to compact flash may not be enough to be interesting.
Tell me about it, even when you have really good prior art fighting a patent case is hideously expensive. It costs about $2 million to fight a patent case, even with the cast iron prior art.
Vampire patent lawyers know that, which is why so many try it on. There are real costs to the USPTO's negligence.
That is a cop out. I have no respect for lawyers who represent known mob members in civil lawsuits designed to protect their mob businesses. There are plenty of lawsuits that are brought in the US which no self respecting lawyer should ever file. In most countries a lawyer who intentionally files a vexatious case on behalf of their client for tactical reasons can face sanctions, in the US they give themselves awards.
The ebay patent thing is not quite at that level, there is after all a patent issued by the USPTO.
The problem here is that the USPTO is sloppy, negligent and only faces the threat of legal action from an applicant who is refused, there is no sanction for issuing a bogus patent. Worse the USPTO has conspired to set the threshold for novelty ridiculously low, 'obviousness' is no longer any sort of bar for getting a patent from the USPTO.
It is not just the victims of vampire patents who suffer as a result. Holders of legitimate and genuinely novel patents also suffer. The reaction of most companies when a patent right is offered for sale is to return the documents unread.
I have no objection to paying a genuine inventor a significant sum for a real invention, but I am not going to pay someone for filing a patent on work I did much earlier - which is very common.
Not realy. AOL isn't really AOL anymore, its back to being Time Warner. AOL is the division that the Time Warner folk are willing to give away for free to anyone who will take over the debt.
This is about Time Warner getting back into its core business and looking to the strategic alliances it will need after the AOL division is jettisoned. At this point the Time Warner execs realize they were completely taken for a ride. They effectively gave away half their equity for a company with a zero, possibly even negative actual value.
Going forward Time Warner wants to be able to sell their stuff over all the distribution networks. They have now worked out that AOL is a busted flush, it is a dialup play in a broadband world. AOL does not have content, never has, it is an aggregator, not a creator.
In other news John Ashcroft announced that terrorism charges might be brought against both motherhood and apple pie under the Patriot act. David Boies, representing the administration stated on behalf of his client, "These people have to learn that their actions have consequences".
It is implemented in Windows XP SP1 and Windows 2003
No comment. None at all.
Ah, maybe you are another of the people Paul has identified as a competative threat and ejected from the group.
Basically the ASRG has become just a PR machine for Ciphertrust. All but one of the competing anti-spam vendors found that their email was being 'moderated'. As a result the ASRG now consists of essentially five people.
One of the members of the group basically set out from the start to make sure it would fail. He is well known in the anti-spam world and does not want a rival to his own scheme. So every proposal that anyone made was attacked on any and all grounds, repeatedly in pretty unpleasant terms. People were called liars and worse. So Judge decided to moderate the folk who were being attacked but not the person deliberately trolling, why?
ASRG does not have the whole community involved, it does not even have a single one of the major ISPs, let alone a major software vendor involved at this point.
The ASRG has from start to finish been nothing but a vehicle for ciphertrust's publicity interests. No research has been allowed, that would risk an idea being proposed that competed with ciphertrust's product.
The IRTF chair is aware of the situation and the group is probably going to be terminated or radically re-organized in the near future.
I don't think the problem there is the voting system, its the corporations that are involved, or rather the parts of the corporations. IEEE has been most successful in setting standards at the hardware level, the nearest they get to protocol is link layer protocols.
This makes a difference because the consequences of a competing standard are different. Everyone knows that at the hardware level your think simply won't work at all if it does not meet the standard. It is not very easy to add useful features unless there is widespread support.
It is very different at the application level, most protocols are designed with the option for extensibility - both proprietary and open. Anyone can define their own DNS record types for example, if you have a standards document you can even get a reserved code for it.
So the game is very different. Some people do go into an Internet standards process with the aim of stopping an idea, but that rarely works because there is always the option of going it alone.
There is sometimes a corporate angle, but not the one people expect. Companies tend to be responsive to their customers needs, they want to create new products. So it simply isn't in a company's interest to block useful ideas most of the time, I have seen it tried and the result has usually been bad for all the companies involved.
Academics and independent consultants can be a much bigger problem. Academics are quite often more interested in architectural purity than utility. The reason IPSEC does not work through a NAT box without horrible kludges by the NAT box vendors is that there was a faction that wanted to kill NAT by making IPSEC unfriendly to it. I remember a very big name making essentially that point in an IPSEC WG meeting. There were lots of complaints when Microsoft modified Kerberos to work with WNT, but the actual change they made was a no-brainer when you look at the WNT security model. Instead of making a reasonable response to a legitimate commercial need the WGs tried to strong arm the companies to their will - pretty stupid tactic when you don't have the leverage to do that.
The big problem the IETF has is not the corporate/academic divide however, it is the young turks vs the old farts. Very few of the original architects of SMTP, IP etc. are actually still arround. Those people are easy to work with, they are engineers who want to get stuff done. Most times they want to go back and fix bugs in their own stuff. There are a few of these people still round the IETF but most of the people who are on the AD or IESG are early adopters rather than the pioneers. The result is that the IETF has a constitution that was designed to keep power in the hands of the pioneers and it is now being run by others whose influence now comes from their position rather than their engineering reputation.
The result is that the IETF is no longer a can-do place. The standards process is now completely broken. It takes years to get the simplest thing done. The IESG is trying to act as quality control but simply can't cope with the work load of approving specs that get WG consensus.
The sad part of all this is that the standards process has been forced to find other venues and in the process it has become much harder to get independent consultants and open source people involved in the groups that are actually having rel influence. The future of the Web is now being decided in OASIS and W3C. T
Come off it, the intention was transparent. Its like when Trent Lott goes off to have tea with his chums at the CCC or praise Strom Thurmond, everyone knows what the message is. You just have to read the not very subtle code.
The right of Bush partisans to boycott the Dixie Chicks was not an issue. Why suggest that there is a right to boycott unless that was the intention.
Well I started the political comparison because that type of tactic is used regularly by both sides and they mostly get away with it. Misquoting and even deliberate fabrications have somehow become business as usual.
Plenty of folk believe that Quayle actually did actually say that he had expected people in latin america to speak latin. Lots of people still repeat the Gore invented Internet quote even though it has been exposed as a deliberate smear plenty of times.
So the sad fact is that SCO would quite likely have got away with this little scheme. The chances are quite high that they would find a lazy journalist willing to report the quotes verbatim or use them to interrogate someone in an interview.
The probability of them succeeding is much less now the scheme has been exposed on slashdot first.
But he did say it, here is the CNN report of the quote:
The Dixie Chicks "can say what they want to say. ... And they shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out. You know, freedom is a two-way street."
So are you going to admit that by your own criteria the statement was 'pathetic' or are you going to continue to bluster like right wing reactionaries always do when their bubble gets pricked?
Liberal cries of McCarthyism have sounded pretty dumb for this reason. What *is* scary is when Ashcroft accuses critics of the DOJ's incompetence of aiding terrorists, or when the GOP Congressional leadership accused Daschle of treason.
Well you are certainly in with a good chance of breaking free of the GOP brainwashing here. Ashcroft is scary, Poindexter is scary as all hell. Bandying arround accusations of treason was McCarthy's favorite trick.
Actually that is exactly what he did, only the media chose to only report part of what he said.
In an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, Bush said "The Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind."
But, he added, that the Chicks "shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out. You know, freedom is a two-way street."
Of course it is much easier to call people liars than to look up the quote on Google. Most of the mainstream media did not report the quote in full, not a great idea to publish stories that make Bush look a jerk when you want the FCC to allow you to create a monopoly - another story they have not been reporting on.
I think the SCO quotes page makes SCO look bad rather than Linux. It is the sheer desperation of the tactic. The quotes are clearly taken out of context.
Attacking minor figures inevitably makes you look small. Whether justified or not, Bush made a major error calling for a boycott of the Dixie Chicks, it made him look like a small minded bully. He should have laughed it off. A President with real class would have called them up and talked to them in person.
I think the problem here is that SCO has burned its boats on this one. They have no future in the Open Source world and probably little future in the Unix world either. It seems pretty certain that there will be only Linux and OS-X left as viable O/S in the UNIX world in ten years time. Every other UNIX will be a legacy platform on minimal life support. Eventually they will become Linux subsystems the way VMS is becomming a Windows NT subsystem.
The problem SCO has with its litigation strategy is that the Linux world is global. Most EU countries have pretty severe penalties for false allegations of copyright infringement. It is pretty easy to put a party on notice to substantiate its claim or shut up. It is not that hard to do in the US either. It takes a minimum of two years to get a civil case to trial, but there are evidentiary hearings before then and the courts do everything they can to get matters disposed of without a trial. So while it will be two years before the case gets to trial, SCO is going to have to be specific about its claims very soon, it may even be a condition of getting to discovery.
I took a look at the statements, they are quotes from Perens and Stallman. It is not likely that a libel suit could succeed unless the quotations are false. But it is a somewhat odd tactic, Perens and Stallman are hardly the core of the Linux project. OK so they certainly have a connection, but they are not spokesmen for either Linus or Linux.
They just got their PR people to OK the release first, and they are a more or less neutral party.
They only said what I and several others said in the first thread, raw performance and measured are apt to be very different. TCP/IP and an application layer protocol add quite a bit of overhead, as do the collision system and so on.
There are a lot of 802.11a companies who would like to see 802.11g sunk with FUD.
Last recomendation on MSFT from ML was NT Buy. I would not take a broker's recommendation too seriously, particularly on this type of call. Take a look at who is paying large fines to the SEC for giving bogus advice... Technology changes are very hard to predict, the server market is not Microsofts only market or even its most important.
I suspect this is not advice from ML it is the kind of specious authority claim that comes up on stock boards all the time.
Balmer is making a pretty smart move, he has a fortune invested in a pretty solid company. There are a lot of big opportunities out there for an investor who can put down a significant amount of risk capital. There are a lot of companies trading for less than their cash position. If you have the cash and can afford to lose it you have a chance for a huge payoff.
Consider the problems that United Airlines is in at the moment. There is nothing dramatically wrong with the business, but they have a major cash flow problem. If they can survive the next two years they are likely to be back at a large fraction of their old marketcap. If you put your pension fund into UAL you would likely lose your shirt.
The economic model that Stelios is trying is called penetration pricing. You sell at a loss, capture the market and then you jack up the prices once there is no competition. In the US where antitrust law is weak that is legal unless you are a monopoly. In the UK it is illegal regardless.
There is a lot of ownership overlap between distributors and cinemas, but that has been invesigated by the monopolies and mergers commission and ok'd.
It is not very likely that a UK court is going to decide that the distributors have no rights over the type and quality of the venues where their films are shown.
Yeah and vi can do everything emacs can, especially if you use it in the ultra powerful line mode.
Learning a new runtime to learn a new language is not a good tradeoff. With dotNET you learn one runtime, it works for every language.
More importantly you don't have to wait for the runtime to catch up with the code you want to write. It does not matter how great the graphics library is if what you are doing is writing X.509 cert handling code.
If you talk to the Microsoft engineers about dotNET you will find that they consider C++ a legacy language at this point, along with Cobol and Fortran.
OK they still have to use it - most of their existing code is written in C++, but the plan is clearly to transition to C# over time.
If so its a poor strategy, SCO will be forced to specify the exact code chunks in dispute during discovery.
Also the fact that the capabilities are not in dispute, only the code means that damages are likely to be small, if any should SCO win. The fact that
Linus was wrong, the Raelians had far more credibility.