Yes and no... There IS a price for Torque- it's $100 for an indie license, and if you're actually being successful, it's $400. This is per developer.
Now, say you're someone who'd like to get a game out. Say you've never done this sort of thing before- and can't really swing even the $100. Torque is good, don't get me wrong. It's a more sophisticated engine from the fact that it was designed for large open-air levels combined with indoors portions or all indoors. I don't know how Q3:A would deal with that part. However, if you're on a tight budget, you have a choice of not doing anything or at least making a try with something like Q3:A or a host of other GPL/LGPL licensed game engines. Q3:A has the distinction of being battle proven in a commercial product over the others.
A suit of this stuff will shrug that sort of thing off like water off a duck's back. It's conductive. If done right, it'll act like a Faraday Cage and the RF will never impinge on your tissues except where you've got exposure out of the suit's confines...
That's a HUGE swath of the HF bands. That stuff's used for emergency services in a disaster (Think FEMA and their ilk...), HAM, and Military commo- it has global propagation characteristics. That's FLATLY not acceptable- nobody's business models or broadband access is worth that one right now because there's really no comparable block on the bands for this sort of thing.
Which is sad, really. It doesn't HAVE to be this way...
Corridor Systems has an answer that is very workable and doesn't trash any service that's critical (2.4 GHz or 5GHz...), works over power lines (yes, you read that right...), and is comparable in cost to the crap they are fielding- and handles much, much more bandwidth than the other BPL offerings.
And it's in service. If it's not modern, it's likely to NOT have driver support in Windows 2003- that doesn't make it any less usable in a server.
Better yet, Windows 2003 only works on x86 or x86_64 (in 32-bit mode...)- I can take this hardware and put it on PPC, Sparc, MIPS, etc. and expect it to work. Nice try, but it's a swing and a miss on your part.
A weak signal right on top of an antenna will swamp a powerful one at a distance if the power levels are equal at the reciever. I can cripple a Ham or CB setup by simply leaving a little 9v powered transmitter (in the case of CB, a walkie-talkie dead-keyed on the channel of most offense...) nearby. You won't be able to hear ANYTHING on the reciever wherever you do this to- it was a common fix for some idiot running a Linear being a problem on the CB band- they could get out, but they couldn't recieve over the little walkie-talkie on their fav channel. They'd think there was something wrong with their rig and quit doing it typically.
What the real big problem is that the BPL systems are largely interfering with a piece of spectrum that has really good propagation characteristics. It's used by everyone for emergency communications worldwide in the case of a disaster; not just Hams have a problem with this- FEMA and other orgs like them does too.
What pisses me off about all of this is that there's no real need for this BS- BPL can be done, done well, and it won't interfere with any critical services when it's done.
Corridor Systems has developed signal launchers and repeater systems to allow them to transform each line on a pole into a 10+ Mbit segment using 802.11 technology. This is accomplished by turning each of the lines on a power pole into a G-line waveguide (yes, you CAN do that sort of thing) that propagates the microwaves from an 802.11 system along the surface of the wires...
Corridor Systems works pretty much better than all the other BPL offerings and brings higher overall bandwidths (as in 10Mbit per line used and they can use all three lines of a three-phase system...) and it only might interfere with 802.11 systems.
How do they accomplish this? Something called a G-line (Look for it in the link...), which is a waveguide turned inside-out.
They're not certified to work with 2003 Server. Only XP. Unless you're an Enterprise customer, if you have those in place, MS won't help you because their use isn't supported with THAT OS.
In this light, there's probably more driver support in most Linux distributions than 2003 Server provides in an officially supported manner.
Because there might just be some jobs for which Solaris on x86 is the better tool.
Considering that I was hard-pressed to find Solaris to be at all useful except on Sparc and on the extreme high-end for some time now, I find it very, very difficult to imagine a job that Linux or even *BSD wouldn't be the better choice. Now, your mileage may vary from mine, but I just don't see Solaris on x86 bringing anything to the table except Sun's support on Sun's hardware. Really, now, I can pick and choose from HP, IBM, Penguin Computing, etc- and I can have code that it will be reasonable to expect to have an API that will be present on any CPU architechture that would be typically used, ranging from x86 all the way to ARM and everything in between. Solaris on x86 brings me Sparc and ONLY Sparc as an option choice.
Tell me again what might someone be missing on Linux that Solaris brings to the table? It's not NUMA. It's not really CPU scaling. It's not Journalling filesystems. It's not clustered filesystems. It's not clustering- HA or HP. What is it, actually?
I'd be pleasantly surprised with an actual advantage to x86 Solaris that's not contrived. Can you come up with one?
...there seems to be a preponderance of Patents that appear on their face to be just simply rubber-stamped. All one needs to do is look at over 50% of the stuff out there these days and see that it fails on prior-art (as in nobody bothered to verify there wasn't any...), obviousness, or general principles (i.e. You shouldn't be able to patent nature, genetics (the processes you use to accomplish a GMO can be patented, but they shouldn't be able to patent the GMO itself...), etc.). I've issues about patenting software in general; there's notable exceptions that MIGHT be arguable that they should be Patented- but overall software is little more than a mathematical formula, which can't be Patented per the current messed up ruleset for them.
They're perfectly happy to bounce other patents on these grounds, but if you're someone like Amazon or Microsoft, they seem to get the silliest damn Patents granted to them.
While YOUR experience and knowlege doesn't map to the "rubber-stamping" comments directed at the USPTO, the outside experience that everyone sees shows something different.
And, before you comment about my not knowing what I'm talking about, I've got one Patent pending, one more about to be applied for and budget pending three to four more after that. I'm filing for what I consider to be mostly legitimate things (Nothing like this BS Microsoft or Amazon seems to get accepted...)- and I'm seeing this from the pathway. No, not all of them are being rubber-stamped, but there's enough silly things getting through that lend to the impression that there is a lot of that going on in the USPTO- one that's really hard to shake.
...that the BSD license is more often than not the wrong tool for the job as is the MIT/X11 and Artistic Licenses.
So many proponents of the BSD license seem to think that it's a magic bullet for everything and insist in BSDing all the code. For example, in the case of the discussion here, someone suggested that they BSD the stuff from IBM and Sun- because it was a better license for everything so that people wouldn't have their hands tied with use.
This is so dead wrong it's tragic.
In this case, you'd want to GPL or LGPL the stuff in question because of the VERY thing you said in your comment- control over the source code is much more important than re-inventing the wheel for most of that stuff. But there goes someone suggesting that we BSD it- again.
In another case, while I don't 100% agree with the decision, I do believe that it's a valid rationale for doing a BSD license- Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis. In this instance, these are only reference implementations of a transport format and an audio and video codec respectively. In order to proliferate the formats in question, the stuff's licensed under the BSD to encourage people to USE the format in question. That's cool so long as people don't do a bait and switch like MS is so wont to do- because it's better than most and it's a little harder a sell with an LGPLed reference implementation (because so many idiots want to prohibit reverse engineering in their license or because someone legitimately needs to statically link the libraries in question...). That's a legitimate use of the BSD license on something.
And lest it be said that I'm biased, I've willingly released code under the MIT/X11 license when I worked on the Utah-GLX codebase. It's not a license snobbery issue- it's an issue of so many people insisting on using the "wrong" license in so many cases.
But does NOTHING to prohibit proprietarization. People can USE your programs under the GPL all they want- they don't have their hands tied. It's when they modify it that they might, and I say MIGHT have their hands tied. As far as I'm concerned, they can have their hands tied in that regard- namely if you use this as the base for your stuff, you need to be able to give your stuff back. That's the price of admission- pure and simple.
Sadly so many BSD advocates just don't get this concept. It's not that your hands are tied per se, it's that you can't just arbitrarily go and reuse the code without paying up by way of your sharing. In my book this is just fine- and it's how most of the work I do in the FOSS world is licensed- either GPL or LGPL.
Indeed. There's several someones I know of that kept copies of the stuff they were working on that would provide nice n' nasty GPL violation proof. It would be a shame if any of it got loose to prove unclean hands amongst other things- not for any of us that worked there for them, just anybody that's party to this little litigation machine they've made of the carcass.
Oh, that's right, you got nailed in the first reduction pass. You do know that the "Sign it or Else" was illegal as hell and they shouldn't have done that- but that doesn't surprise me. Very little about epicRealm surprises me anymore (save that they couldn't make what could have been one of those "perfect" Internet businesses- even after the bubble burst- work and be profitable...).
Indeed. And the Internet seems to make it smaller from time to time. Yeah, I survived after a fasion; I have to wonder who all succeeded in hitting the ground running from that implosion epicRealm underwent.
After reading the Patent application that Keith fielded, I too, understood where a mis-understanding might arise- but it's still a misunderstanding and hoping the poor verbiage that the USPTO let go would fool someone into buying into this bunk and capitulating. The problem lies in the fact that they're guilty of multiple instances of Copyright Infringement- enough to swallow most of the settlements and licensing whole.
I don't know, John wasn't solely to blame; I'd say it was a total lack of vision by the management from the CEO on down. Marketing couldn't get their damn act together. Sales didn't ride the asses of their sales people (I'd have fired those jokers for their playing ping-pong all the time...). We kept selling the dynamic caching abilities when we should have simply went after Akamai with a vengeance. We shouldn't have rolled out the service offering with some of the egregious design flaws that I ended up fixing a day late, dollar short (there was this nasty little bottleneck with expiry that took a million hit per second performant rack down to a couple of thousand hits per second- they'd made the damn thing blocking instead of async like the rest of Squid...).
Sigh... So much potential. So much waste.
It's a textbook case on how NOT to run a business.
Understood. I don't know what's up with that one- only the ones I've got direct coding contact with. Still don't know what to do about your complaints about Majesty. I'll check into it- please place more contact info in the comments section of my journal.
They dropped off the face of the earth sometime in 2003... They were first an app server company (InfoSpinner) who sold the bulk of the tech to IBM as a relabeled by IBM product (WebSphere). They then decided, because of a downturn in fortunes caused by an severe glut of better competitors in that arena, to go into the content delivery network business (epicRealm). Keith patented the "invention" in question during that timeframe. However, I don't know for certain, but I doubt that Keith or the others came up with it all on their own- I think Sanjay might have had a hand in this whole thing and I'm kind of surprised that he's not listed on the patent. Anyhow, with this in hand and roughly $90 million in private placement money, they moved forward in the year of 2000 to offer the first CDN that could manage dynamic content delivery, in other words, they could handle caching requests for things like stock updates, etc. for thousands of people and know when the caches should immediately expire. This was impressive in and of itself. The problem with all of this is that they couldn't seem to hire any sales people that could sell their way out of a wet paper bag- of which, the sales staff always seemed to have time to play ping-pong or fooseball in the break room on the fourth floor. They were too enamored with the ability to do the dynamic website delivery and couldn't just mop the floor up with Akamai with a better product- so in the end, they burned 75 of the 90 mil placement funds in less than a year's time.
Now, they seem to be a litigation bottom feeder like TSG- sad, really.
It is PRECISELY that. I know, I worked on part of their hacked up Squid engine. Combine the mods to Squid with some DNS hackery and you've got a CDN to die for- if you sell the services for it (epicRealm couldn't for some reason beyond me at that and this time...).
In the context of this patent application, Page Server refers to a caching proxy that resides "local" to the server instead of the clients and has several modifications to it to allow it to be a vast pool of dumb bit shovels amplifying the app server and web server plant of a given site.
If you hack the Squid to accept expiry requests against the cache by a remote transponder network (one of my mods..) including wildcard removals (another one...), tell Squid to never expire content unless the cache is full or on a given timed event per domain or even URL (another one of my mods...), stack a raftload of them on a peering point, and have a DNS server network that points someone when they ask for say, http://www.dell.com/ for example, to the Squid rack nearest to the caller and then let the Squids in the rack look up normally, you have a CDN that's easier to use than Akamai ever was- and these stupid idiots couldn't even sell it to people; they were so enamoured with the ability to handle "dynamic" content that they forgot that the bulk wasn't even close to that and that they could have mopped the floor with Akamai with the static abilities of the whole system.
Burned through 70-80 million of private placement funds in less than a year they did. Now they've resorted to bottom feeding. Keith, how low can you stoop, man?
You completely missed the point- because you are looking solely at the patent and naught else because you apparently think you know more than someone who WORKED for these people in the past.
You don't know how they accomplished what they did- you couldn't have, dude. It was the patents that covered epicRealm's content delivery network- and it was Squid that was used to accomplish the same. By the way, they're not patenting dynamic page generation per se, only cached thereof- and as such, you'd need a cobbled up Squid or something similar to accomplish it along with a hacked together DNS server network and telemetry transponder network.
I know, I was one of the people working on the modifications they made to accomplish it. As for unlicensing things, you don't get to re-license the stuff if you breach the agreement, they were substantively in breach of the licensing grant given by the GPL in 2000. They continued to distribute systems that included this code throughout at least 2001 and 2002 before apparently ceasing operations (They pulled the signs from the building they were operating out of and their website went black around that timeframe...)
Unless they want to face the music for a GPL violation of epic proportions (apt, their choice of corporate names...) by way of their resale and distribution to numerous people their modified NLANR Squid engine code- they need to back off NOW.
It existed before this BS was fielded to the USPTO.
As for InfoSpinner/epicRealm, the game is on. Prior art mucks up what they've tried to claim and they're guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl of IP infringement themselves. If I have to, I'll cut loose with my own pain as I never signed the waiver to not sue them for 3 extra months worth of insurance when they did the 150 person mass-layoff back nearly five years ago.
You mean to tell me that those SOB's are still a going concern after all this time? Worse, they've turned to litigation. Nice. Very nice. Someone needs to tell Keith (if he's still even there and it's not Lawyers running the show...) that he's not at all lilly-white pure in the IP violations game and he'd be better off trying to make product instead of litigating money out of people.
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Yes and no... There IS a price for Torque- it's $100 for an indie license, and if you're actually being successful, it's $400. This is per developer.
Now, say you're someone who'd like to get a game out. Say you've never done this sort of thing before- and can't really swing even the $100. Torque is good, don't get me wrong. It's a more sophisticated engine from the fact that it was designed for large open-air levels combined with indoors portions or all indoors. I don't know how Q3:A would deal with that part. However, if you're on a tight budget, you have a choice of not doing anything or at least making a try with something like Q3:A or a host of other GPL/LGPL licensed game engines. Q3:A has the distinction of being battle proven in a commercial product over the others.
A suit of this stuff will shrug that sort of thing off like water off a duck's back. It's conductive. If done right, it'll act like a Faraday Cage and the RF will never impinge on your tissues except where you've got exposure out of the suit's confines...
Try this one on for size...
Try this link...
That's a HUGE swath of the HF bands. That stuff's used for emergency services in a disaster (Think FEMA and their ilk...), HAM, and Military commo- it has global propagation characteristics. That's FLATLY not acceptable- nobody's business models or broadband access is worth that one right now because there's really no comparable block on the bands for this sort of thing.
Which is sad, really. It doesn't HAVE to be this way...
Corridor Systems has an answer that is very workable and doesn't trash any service that's critical (2.4 GHz or 5GHz...), works over power lines (yes, you read that right...), and is comparable in cost to the crap they are fielding- and handles much, much more bandwidth than the other BPL offerings.
And it's in service. If it's not modern, it's likely to NOT have driver support in Windows 2003- that doesn't make it any less usable in a server.
Better yet, Windows 2003 only works on x86 or x86_64 (in 32-bit mode...)- I can take this hardware and put it on PPC, Sparc, MIPS, etc. and expect it to work. Nice try, but it's a swing and a miss on your part.
A weak signal right on top of an antenna will swamp a powerful one at a distance if the power levels are equal at the reciever. I can cripple a Ham or CB setup by simply leaving a little 9v powered transmitter (in the case of CB, a walkie-talkie dead-keyed on the channel of most offense...) nearby. You won't be able to hear ANYTHING on the reciever wherever you do this to- it was a common fix for some idiot running a Linear being a problem on the CB band- they could get out, but they couldn't recieve over the little walkie-talkie on their fav channel. They'd think there was something wrong with their rig and quit doing it typically.
What the real big problem is that the BPL systems are largely interfering with a piece of spectrum that has really good propagation characteristics. It's used by everyone for emergency communications worldwide in the case of a disaster; not just Hams have a problem with this- FEMA and other orgs like them does too.
What pisses me off about all of this is that there's no real need for this BS- BPL can be done, done well, and it won't interfere with any critical services when it's done.
Corridor Systems has developed signal launchers and repeater systems to allow them to transform each line on a pole into a 10+ Mbit segment using 802.11 technology. This is accomplished by turning each of the lines on a power pole into a G-line waveguide (yes, you CAN do that sort of thing) that propagates the microwaves from an 802.11 system along the surface of the wires...
Corridor Systems works pretty much better than all the other BPL offerings and brings higher overall bandwidths (as in 10Mbit per line used and they can use all three lines of a three-phase system...) and it only might interfere with 802.11 systems.
How do they accomplish this? Something called a G-line (Look for it in the link...), which is a waveguide turned inside-out.
They're not certified to work with 2003 Server. Only XP. Unless you're an Enterprise customer, if you have those in place, MS won't help you because their use isn't supported with THAT OS.
In this light, there's probably more driver support in most Linux distributions than 2003 Server provides in an officially supported manner.
Considering that I was hard-pressed to find Solaris to be at all useful except on Sparc and on the extreme high-end for some time now, I find it very, very difficult to imagine a job that Linux or even *BSD wouldn't be the better choice. Now, your mileage may vary from mine, but I just don't see Solaris on x86 bringing anything to the table except Sun's support on Sun's hardware. Really, now, I can pick and choose from HP, IBM, Penguin Computing, etc- and I can have code that it will be reasonable to expect to have an API that will be present on any CPU architechture that would be typically used, ranging from x86 all the way to ARM and everything in between. Solaris on x86 brings me Sparc and ONLY Sparc as an option choice.
Tell me again what might someone be missing on Linux that Solaris brings to the table? It's not NUMA. It's not really CPU scaling. It's not Journalling filesystems. It's not clustered filesystems. It's not clustering- HA or HP. What is it, actually?
I'd be pleasantly surprised with an actual advantage to x86 Solaris that's not contrived. Can you come up with one?
...there seems to be a preponderance of Patents that appear on their face to be just simply rubber-stamped. All one needs to do is look at over 50% of the stuff out there these days and see that it fails on prior-art (as in nobody bothered to verify there wasn't any...), obviousness, or general principles (i.e. You shouldn't be able to patent nature, genetics (the processes you use to accomplish a GMO can be patented, but they shouldn't be able to patent the GMO itself...), etc.). I've issues about patenting software in general; there's notable exceptions that MIGHT be arguable that they should be Patented- but overall software is little more than a mathematical formula, which can't be Patented per the current messed up ruleset for them.
They're perfectly happy to bounce other patents on these grounds, but if you're someone like Amazon or Microsoft, they seem to get the silliest damn Patents granted to them.
While YOUR experience and knowlege doesn't map to the "rubber-stamping" comments directed at the USPTO, the outside experience that everyone sees shows something different.
And, before you comment about my not knowing what I'm talking about, I've got one Patent pending, one more about to be applied for and budget pending three to four more after that. I'm filing for what I consider to be mostly legitimate things (Nothing like this BS Microsoft or Amazon seems to get accepted...)- and I'm seeing this from the pathway. No, not all of them are being rubber-stamped, but there's enough silly things getting through that lend to the impression that there is a lot of that going on in the USPTO- one that's really hard to shake.
...that the BSD license is more often than not the wrong tool for the job as is the MIT/X11 and Artistic Licenses.
So many proponents of the BSD license seem to think that it's a magic bullet for everything and insist in BSDing all the code. For example, in the case of the discussion here, someone suggested that they BSD the stuff from IBM and Sun- because it was a better license for everything so that people wouldn't have their hands tied with use.
This is so dead wrong it's tragic.
In this case, you'd want to GPL or LGPL the stuff in question because of the VERY thing you said in your comment- control over the source code is much more important than re-inventing the wheel for most of that stuff. But there goes someone suggesting that we BSD it- again.
In another case, while I don't 100% agree with the decision, I do believe that it's a valid rationale for doing a BSD license- Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis. In this instance, these are only reference implementations of a transport format and an audio and video codec respectively. In order to proliferate the formats in question, the stuff's licensed under the BSD to encourage people to USE the format in question. That's cool so long as people don't do a bait and switch like MS is so wont to do- because it's better than most and it's a little harder a sell with an LGPLed reference implementation (because so many idiots want to prohibit reverse engineering in their license or because someone legitimately needs to statically link the libraries in question...). That's a legitimate use of the BSD license on something.
And lest it be said that I'm biased, I've willingly released code under the MIT/X11 license when I worked on the Utah-GLX codebase. It's not a license snobbery issue- it's an issue of so many people insisting on using the "wrong" license in so many cases.
But does NOTHING to prohibit proprietarization. People can USE your programs under the GPL all they want- they don't have their hands tied. It's when they modify it that they might, and I say MIGHT have their hands tied. As far as I'm concerned, they can have their hands tied in that regard- namely if you use this as the base for your stuff, you need to be able to give your stuff back. That's the price of admission- pure and simple.
Sadly so many BSD advocates just don't get this concept. It's not that your hands are tied per se, it's that you can't just arbitrarily go and reuse the code without paying up by way of your sharing. In my book this is just fine- and it's how most of the work I do in the FOSS world is licensed- either GPL or LGPL.
Seems to me with all the "quality" tech journalism that comes from and has come from ZDNet to date shows that they've not a single clue.
This cute little stunt just simply adds another log to the fire...
Indeed. There's several someones I know of that kept copies of the stuff they were working on that would provide nice n' nasty GPL violation proof. It would be a shame if any of it got loose to prove unclean hands amongst other things- not for any of us that worked there for them, just anybody that's party to this little litigation machine they've made of the carcass.
Oh, that's right, you got nailed in the first reduction pass. You do know that the "Sign it or Else" was illegal as hell and they shouldn't have done that- but that doesn't surprise me. Very little about epicRealm surprises me anymore (save that they couldn't make what could have been one of those "perfect" Internet businesses- even after the bubble burst- work and be profitable...).
Indeed. And the Internet seems to make it smaller from time to time. Yeah, I survived after a fasion; I have to wonder who all succeeded in hitting the ground running from that implosion epicRealm underwent.
After reading the Patent application that Keith fielded, I too, understood where a mis-understanding might arise- but it's still a misunderstanding and hoping the poor verbiage that the USPTO let go would fool someone into buying into this bunk and capitulating. The problem lies in the fact that they're guilty of multiple instances of Copyright Infringement- enough to swallow most of the settlements and licensing whole.
I don't know, John wasn't solely to blame; I'd say it was a total lack of vision by the management from the CEO on down. Marketing couldn't get their damn act together. Sales didn't ride the asses of their sales people (I'd have fired those jokers for their playing ping-pong all the time...). We kept selling the dynamic caching abilities when we should have simply went after Akamai with a vengeance. We shouldn't have rolled out the service offering with some of the egregious design flaws that I ended up fixing a day late, dollar short (there was this nasty little bottleneck with expiry that took a million hit per second performant rack down to a couple of thousand hits per second- they'd made the damn thing blocking instead of async like the rest of Squid...).
Sigh... So much potential. So much waste.
It's a textbook case on how NOT to run a business.
Understood. I don't know what's up with that one- only the ones I've got direct coding contact with. Still don't know what to do about your complaints about Majesty. I'll check into it- please place more contact info in the comments section of my journal.
They dropped off the face of the earth sometime in 2003... They were first an app server company (InfoSpinner) who sold the bulk of the tech to IBM as a relabeled by IBM product (WebSphere). They then decided, because of a downturn in fortunes caused by an severe glut of better competitors in that arena, to go into the content delivery network business (epicRealm). Keith patented the "invention" in question during that timeframe. However, I don't know for certain, but I doubt that Keith or the others came up with it all on their own- I think Sanjay might have had a hand in this whole thing and I'm kind of surprised that he's not listed on the patent. Anyhow, with this in hand and roughly $90 million in private placement money, they moved forward in the year of 2000 to offer the first CDN that could manage dynamic content delivery, in other words, they could handle caching requests for things like stock updates, etc. for thousands of people and know when the caches should immediately expire. This was impressive in and of itself. The problem with all of this is that they couldn't seem to hire any sales people that could sell their way out of a wet paper bag- of which, the sales staff always seemed to have time to play ping-pong or fooseball in the break room on the fourth floor. They were too enamored with the ability to do the dynamic website delivery and couldn't just mop the floor up with Akamai with a better product- so in the end, they burned 75 of the 90 mil placement funds in less than a year's time.
Now, they seem to be a litigation bottom feeder like TSG- sad, really.
DITTO. I didn't think his patent was all that special when I read it back when I worked for them.
It is PRECISELY that. I know, I worked on part of their hacked up Squid engine. Combine the mods to Squid with some DNS hackery and you've got a CDN to die for- if you sell the services for it (epicRealm couldn't for some reason beyond me at that and this time...).
In the context of this patent application, Page Server refers to a caching proxy that resides "local" to the server instead of the clients and has several modifications to it to allow it to be a vast pool of dumb bit shovels amplifying the app server and web server plant of a given site.
If you hack the Squid to accept expiry requests against the cache by a remote transponder network (one of my mods..) including wildcard removals (another one...), tell Squid to never expire content unless the cache is full or on a given timed event per domain or even URL (another one of my mods...), stack a raftload of them on a peering point, and have a DNS server network that points someone when they ask for say, http://www.dell.com/ for example, to the Squid rack nearest to the caller and then let the Squids in the rack look up normally, you have a CDN that's easier to use than Akamai ever was- and these stupid idiots couldn't even sell it to people; they were so enamoured with the ability to handle "dynamic" content that they forgot that the bulk wasn't even close to that and that they could have mopped the floor with Akamai with the static abilities of the whole system.
Burned through 70-80 million of private placement funds in less than a year they did. Now they've resorted to bottom feeding. Keith, how low can you stoop, man?
You completely missed the point- because you are looking solely at the patent and naught else because you apparently think you know more than someone who WORKED for these people in the past.
You don't know how they accomplished what they did- you couldn't have, dude. It was the patents that covered epicRealm's content delivery network- and it was Squid that was used to accomplish the same. By the way, they're not patenting dynamic page generation per se, only cached thereof- and as such, you'd need a cobbled up Squid or something similar to accomplish it along with a hacked together DNS server network and telemetry transponder network.
I know, I was one of the people working on the modifications they made to accomplish it. As for unlicensing things, you don't get to re-license the stuff if you breach the agreement, they were substantively in breach of the licensing grant given by the GPL in 2000. They continued to distribute systems that included this code throughout at least 2001 and 2002 before apparently ceasing operations (They pulled the signs from the building they were operating out of and their website went black around that timeframe...)
Unless they want to face the music for a GPL violation of epic proportions (apt, their choice of corporate names...) by way of their resale and distribution to numerous people their modified NLANR Squid engine code- they need to back off NOW.
WebObjects.
It existed before this BS was fielded to the USPTO.
As for InfoSpinner/epicRealm, the game is on. Prior art mucks up what they've tried to claim and they're guilty as a cat caught in a goldfish bowl of IP infringement themselves. If I have to, I'll cut loose with my own pain as I never signed the waiver to not sue them for 3 extra months worth of insurance when they did the 150 person mass-layoff back nearly five years ago.
You mean to tell me that those SOB's are still a going concern after all this time? Worse, they've turned to litigation. Nice. Very nice. Someone needs to tell Keith (if he's still even there and it's not Lawyers running the show...) that he's not at all lilly-white pure in the IP violations game and he'd be better off trying to make product instead of litigating money out of people.