Sun has been groping for a way to compete with Microsoft for over 10 years. Well, "groping" might be too harsh, considering the strategy consisted mainly of denial about the fact that Windows on commodity hardware could run serious applications.
Ubuntu showed the way in both how to do it and the right business model, and Sun has done absolutely the right thing by directly imitating the Ubuntu way by becoming, effectively, a downstream Debian distro. Heck, they hired Ian Murdock to make sure you get it right. At Sun, this is probably necessary because corporate conservatism about cannibalizing revenues would have watered down a purely internal initiative.
Sun could still screw it up. There are plenty of weasel words like "two tier" in this article. But if Sun gets it right and "dissolves" Solaris into a number of userland projects and a kernel alternative to Linux (the way GNU Hurd theoretically is), and executes an a la carte support model like Canonical, they deserve to win a big slice of the business.
Saying there are "too many" distros implies there has to be some negative consequence. There isn't. The article is completely devoid of any mention of a down side, specific or general.
What will happen if there are more distros? Fewer? Nothing! At least the author has no ideas on this topic.
Moreover, the article is naive: The number of distros matters less than the number of kernels, userlands, large application projects, and package management systems. There are less than a handful of widely used alternatives in each of these categories, and added choices are usually a positive development. For example, if Sun succeeds in turning Solaris into an alternative kernel in the Debian repositories or something like that, it would be a Very Good Thing.
And on top of all that, the article misses substantive issues such as the reach across CPUs for each distribution.
This is an article without a point, without research, and with such atrociously bad writing as "a giant hairball" without a single word about what that means, to whom, or why. If this article were turned in as a J school homework assignment, it would get a D-, only for being spelled correctly.
Americans tend to mistakenly think in terms of rights granted by their federal constitution.
This is an especially ironic error since the U.S. Constitution was written in terms that make it clear that rights do not come from a constitution. You have rights, period. The U.S. Constitution does not list your rights. It lists the legitimate powers of government.
So, when someone says, "You have no constitutional right to privacy." they are making a fundamental mistake. They are suggesting that your rights are enumerated, when, both implicit in the structure of the U.S. Constitution and explicitly stated in Amendements IX and X: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Privacy is a natural right. Without it, many other rights become a nullity.
Don't get a false sense of security thinking that "billions" or even "trillions" of emails would make it difficult to keyword-scan them all.
If your ISP has a good spam filter, they are performing non-trivial processing of every email bound for their mail servers. There is no insurmountable scaling problem for drift-net monitoring of e-mail, SMS, and other text message traffic.
Sun should not be hugging Solaris like it is some great asset. Maintaining an OS is expensive, and thankless as far as revenue is concerned.
It's too late for Solaris to attract an open source developer community by itself. What Sun must do now in order for Solaris not to slide into an untenable position of being too expensive to maintain, but not worth paying to get, is to merge it with the Linux family tree: Make the parts of Solaris, including ZFS, upstream projects of any distribution that wants them, and make Solaris itself a downstream distribution of, e.g., Debian or other distribution that is upstream of several popular Linux distributions.
Sun should be able to make revenue-neutral changes to support and maintenance contracts as open source Solaris becomes the current supported version. Counting conquests from other Linux distributions and other OSs, they should be able to grow revenues.
Sun has a market value one fifth of Apple's, about half the revenue, and twice the employees. Sun is still acting like they are a big swinging deal. They need to get over that and start acting like they need to catch up to an industry that has passed them by.
The assignee, ZLand, was supposedly an ASP. They had a novel business model: franchising. It didn't work out for them, and some googling around (using the assignee's and inventors' names) reveals the company may have been just the slightest bit sketchy. So the patent's origins may turn out to be troubled.
Also, both the abstract and the claims don't describe a modern location-based services system or the main functions of an LBS system. It looks like they patented a hierarchical Web directory (like Yahoo!, circa 1996, the year this patent was filed) that uses geography for categories. Gee! I wonder if Yahoo! had geographic categories back then?
How so? 99% of the audience won't care if it runs Linux, Unix, Windows, etc. Just as long as it works and is easy to use."
Above all else, that is just wrong.
Of course people care, otherwise why would this be news?
The whole point of my comment is that people now care about this, and you can add value through the use of open source software, or you can try to smother it in a layer of crud and end up subtracting value.
This is a great illustration of how to use Linux correctly in creating a commercial product. That is, not just correctly license-wise, but in getting the most market benefit out of using Linux. Wizpy offers power users and opinion leaders a useful, attractive, and powerful tool. Surely a lot of Wizpys will be sold to this specific audience, and that will give Wizpy a leg up on all the other contenders in the media player business.
Or, look at it this way: When someone asks "Why buy a Wizpy?" there is a specific answer. SanDisk's and Creative's players are nice, too. But what is the answer to "Why buy a SanDisk, or a Creative?"
In contrast, Palm's Foleo is a huge missed opportunity. It runs Linux, but only incidentally, and only in service to a weird product formulation that manages to subtract value from what could have been a nifty Linux subnotebook. Even on blogs that generally welcome new Linux-based products, the questions about Foleo is "Why does this even exist?"
In fact, it might have been better received as a inexpensive ultra-light laptop that takes advantage of the ability of Linux to run on ARM SoCs. Why do I want the Palm mail reader when I rely on Thunderbird plug-ins for calendar sync, gmail, hotmail, etc. They picked the wrong way to try to add value to Linux.
You can buy a Compaq 440 for $399. If I wanted a cheap portable device for communicating, that would do the job, and a few other things too. And, being a standard laptop, would give me a wide choice of Linux distros and add-on apps, straight out of the distros' repositories. The Foleo has to deliver benefits over and above the commodity PC solution. Is the light weight and fast boot-up really worth hassling with a non-standard machine, plus $100 more?
In theory, you are right. Most people are not power users, so most people would benefit from metered bandwidth.
Seemingly paradoxically, most people prefer to pay a higher price for unlimited service.
This isn't a paradox, nor is it irrational. People know they can't predict how their Internet use will change. Nor do they have good visibility into bandwidth used by various applications. So they "insure" themselves against unexpected costs by buying unlimited bandwidth.
Rightly, they are calling their ISPs frauds for selling "unlimited" and delivering only the illusion of unlimited. Kind of like flood insurance that excludes being flooded by water. "Well, had you been flooded by beer, at night, (excluding the foam, of course), you would have been covered."
Ron Paul, among all candidates, takes the founding documents of the United States most seriously.
Most of our problems can be traced to divergence from the founding principles, exemplified by engaging in an undeclared war.
This "constitutionalism" use to be considered a quaint preoccupation. It is now apparent we should have read the operating instructions for our nation more carefully.
You are complaining about bugs in a beta. File any bug reports?
I had the same annoyance with upgrading the Feisty beta. That's a valid complaint, since a beta should be easily installable, if not bug-free.
However, installing the Ubunty Feisty release on a Compaq laptop was a breeze. No tweaks necessary. And very stable.
The only squishy spot with Linux on laptops that remains is dual monitors. Using the proprietary drivers and TwinView is not ideal, but it is good enough for now.
You have to wonder what management is thinking: On the heels of having to announce that AMD must go back to competing based on significantly lower prices because they have lost a performance advantage, they announce a new DRM technology that subtracts value from their products. Derrr.
Nokia sold 50 million of their high-end N Series phones last year. Clearly people have money to splash out for fancy phones. I wonder if the author of the article did even some cursory research on the high-end phone market, or a comparison of what you get with an iPhone compared to a high end Nokia. Not everyone buys a basic silver painted plastic phone.
One phone with a comparable amount of technology content and bling is the Nokia N93, and you have to add as large a memory card as is currently available to even get within 1/2th the memory that comes in an iPhone. The off-plan list price for this phone is about $900. I haven't heard anyone question Nokia's sanity in pricing this phone.
Apple is taking some risks, like using a new OSX variant for a mobile device. But, for the most part, Apple simply provided a high-end product, with several unique and desirable features, for a large and established high-end market.
Why did the music industry think consumers would accept DRM?
The obvious and total failure of DRM'ed e-books should have warned them: Take a medium that consumers view as a tangible product, that they can buy and sell in an aftermarket, and try to turn it into a limited, licensed, revocable, non-transferable right-to-use at a not particularly attractive price - and it should succeed?
No, actually, it was collapsing prices that ended widespread toll fraud.
When blue-boxing became obsolete, phreakers would hack into PBXs with out-dial capability, or they would hack into conference bridges with toll-free access. Toll fraud was alive and well into the mobile age when cell phones were being "cloned" to sell overseas calls on New York City street corners.
Now you can just Skype nanna back in the Olde Country. Toll fraud is like stealing pebbles off the beach.
So, toll fraud prevention technologies never prevented much toll fraud. Just like DRM is a waste of time and money.
Only a price collapse in digital media will make p2p swapping economically insignificant.
iTunes was critical for iPod to become dominant and fend off challengers, but now that both iPod and iTunes dominate in media players and media downloads, iTunes is more of a limitation than a defense for iPod.
Apple will greatly benefit from the destruction of the iTunes "one price, everything DRM'ed" model for music. As Jobs pointed out in his essay, only a tiny fraction of music on iPods is bought from iTunes. If iPod is to continue to grow as fast as it is now, ripping CDs will become a bottleneck. A multi-supplier, competitively priced, flexible, compatible, user-friendly download business is needed for the media-player business to reach the next level of expansion.
What will prevent piracy? The same thing that made phone phreaking obsolete: Music, like long distance phone service, will become too cheap to steal. $0.10 to get a high quality digital recording vs. swapping sketchy rips with sketchy people - the choice is easy. The other side of the coin is that $0.10 is too little money to support the customer service required when people migrate a DRM'ed music collection from one computer to another or one player to another.
I really hate to be the devil's advocate here, but a delete option for Windows really is fairly complex for Dell to administer.
If, like many PC OEMs they bundle software that they are paid to place, removing the OS also means removing these paid placements. To be fair, the delete option would have to subtract the baksheesh they would otherwise be getting for bundling the anti-virus and whatnot from your savings.
It isn't an impossible task, however. Shop online for a Dell server and the prices are right there, plain as day: delete Windows and take off $799. Substitute SUSE and a 1 year support subscription and the savings comes to $519.
It would be difficult to make a case that this pricing flexibility is harder to do for consumer PCs than for servers. Consumer PCs come with numerous options already. It also puts the lie to any assertion that a PC is "useless" without an operating system, or Dell would be pretty cheeky to sell $10,000 doorstops.
To me, this smells like a security company drumming up business.
First, as with every technology outside the Windows desktop monoculture, viruses are not easy to spread: A variety of CPUs and OSs make it less likely the next machine a virus encounters will be able to run the virus code.
Second, the hypothetical attack depends on a combination of two attacks: A virus plus phishing. That is an uncommonly sophisticated combination. Is there any basis in current experience with attacks that shows this is likely to happen?
Third, the culture and user experience in voice communications is converging with IM: permission based, filtered based on a list of known contacts. VoIP users will talk mainly to people they know - others go to voicemail. Is there any study that shows a virus/trojan/phishing attack could spread in that type of community?
Not too long ago, Apple failed to ship OS 8, and drifted sideways until their mindshare among developers was near zero. At roughly the same time, Microsoft shipped Win95 and some pretty decent developer tools. Believe it or not, for a while, many of the people who would have dreamed of working for Apple - and who now dream of working for Google, dreamed of Working for Microsoft.
Microsoft was a bigger success than Apple. Microsoft still has nearly twice the market capitalization of Google. And yet, it is evident that Microsoft is no longer a "dream company" to work for.
What is the moral of that story?
When a Bad Idea, like favoring content publishers over your own paying customers, becomes ingrained in a company, it is incredibly difficult to excise that mistaken point of view. Bad ideas require smart people to develop intellectual blind spots, otherwise the Bad Idea glares too much. The Bad Idea becomes a kind of passive-aggressive ogre everyone tries to avoid talking about. So nobody does, until the company is in crisis.
The really scary thing is that Microsoft is so big and so profitable, that to mention "crisis" and "Microsoft" in the same breath sounds a little incomprehensible. GM and Ford were destined to have a crisis from the moment they bought labor peace at the expense of future customers. But they didn't really feel it until, 20 years later, their customer were gone and they had to sell their finance divisions to buy a few quarters more time to find a solution. Microsoft could go on into what are now unforeseeable futures without figuring out that DRM and "Trusted" computing are antithetical to personal computing.
The answer is, at least in part, podcasts. Especially free podcasts.
I'm learning Chinese and keeping up with Java news using podcasts. This didn't substitute for iTunes purchases in my case, but I'd bet it does for a large number of people.
OLPC is an important project: If OLPC achieves the number of units they want to put out in the field, they will tip the balance in operating system market share and mind-share in the field of personal computers.
Microsoft has a minority share of servers. While Windows Mobile is a worthy effort, Linux, Symbian, RIM, Palm OS, and other RTOSs dominate the mobile handset business. Linux straddles a large number of embedded application categories and has dominant mind-share in the embedded space, overall.
A world where ubiquity is no longer a good argument for choosing Microsoft would be a calamity for Microsoft. They didn't gain dominance in servers, or game consoles, or mobile OSs, or media devices, or handhelds. Microsoft cannot count on Linux developers or Apple to have an OS 9-like failed development cycle. The conditions for Microsoft gaining dominance in desktop OSs was unique.
On the contrary, luck doesn't seem to be shining on Microsoft, even in markets like game consoles where issues like proprietary code and DRM are mostly moot. Sony stumbles badly. XBOX 360 is a fine product. And Nintendo comes charging back into the market with a relatively underpowered console, quirky games, a difficult balance of competing with game developers, and sells out millions of units in a perfectly times Christmas blitz.
If Microsoft loses a dominant position in PCs, the odds they can get it back before there is the next big unforeseen shift in the business are not so good.
You are right that it is the claims that matter. In the case, the claims appear to cover a case where the softphone sends key presses and hook-state to a PBX. It seems like a pretty narrow claim since SIP softphones and IP PBXs don't do that. It would be a rather oddball system that was implemented in a way that infringed.
That said, the oddball nature of the claims is also pretty retro. PBX phones worked this way when 8 bit CPUs were hot stuff, and you wanted to minimize what was going on in the phone. It is difficult to believe there is no prior art for something this old-school.
So what is going on here? I bet most of the original claims were rejected, leaving the description badly out of sync with the claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun has been groping for a way to compete with Microsoft for over 10 years. Well, "groping" might be too harsh, considering the strategy consisted mainly of denial about the fact that Windows on commodity hardware could run serious applications.
Ubuntu showed the way in both how to do it and the right business model, and Sun has done absolutely the right thing by directly imitating the Ubuntu way by becoming, effectively, a downstream Debian distro. Heck, they hired Ian Murdock to make sure you get it right. At Sun, this is probably necessary because corporate conservatism about cannibalizing revenues would have watered down a purely internal initiative.
Sun could still screw it up. There are plenty of weasel words like "two tier" in this article. But if Sun gets it right and "dissolves" Solaris into a number of userland projects and a kernel alternative to Linux (the way GNU Hurd theoretically is), and executes an a la carte support model like Canonical, they deserve to win a big slice of the business.
Saying there are "too many" distros implies there has to be some negative consequence. There isn't. The article is completely devoid of any mention of a down side, specific or general.
What will happen if there are more distros? Fewer? Nothing! At least the author has no ideas on this topic.
Moreover, the article is naive: The number of distros matters less than the number of kernels, userlands, large application projects, and package management systems. There are less than a handful of widely used alternatives in each of these categories, and added choices are usually a positive development. For example, if Sun succeeds in turning Solaris into an alternative kernel in the Debian repositories or something like that, it would be a Very Good Thing.
And on top of all that, the article misses substantive issues such as the reach across CPUs for each distribution.
This is an article without a point, without research, and with such atrociously bad writing as "a giant hairball" without a single word about what that means, to whom, or why. If this article were turned in as a J school homework assignment, it would get a D-, only for being spelled correctly.
Americans tend to mistakenly think in terms of rights granted by their federal constitution.
This is an especially ironic error since the U.S. Constitution was written in terms that make it clear that rights do not come from a constitution. You have rights, period. The U.S. Constitution does not list your rights. It lists the legitimate powers of government.
So, when someone says, "You have no constitutional right to privacy." they are making a fundamental mistake. They are suggesting that your rights are enumerated, when, both implicit in the structure of the U.S. Constitution and explicitly stated in Amendements IX and X: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." and "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
Privacy is a natural right. Without it, many other rights become a nullity.
Don't get a false sense of security thinking that "billions" or even "trillions" of emails would make it difficult to keyword-scan them all.
If your ISP has a good spam filter, they are performing non-trivial processing of every email bound for their mail servers. There is no insurmountable scaling problem for drift-net monitoring of e-mail, SMS, and other text message traffic.
Sun should not be hugging Solaris like it is some great asset. Maintaining an OS is expensive, and thankless as far as revenue is concerned.
It's too late for Solaris to attract an open source developer community by itself. What Sun must do now in order for Solaris not to slide into an untenable position of being too expensive to maintain, but not worth paying to get, is to merge it with the Linux family tree: Make the parts of Solaris, including ZFS, upstream projects of any distribution that wants them, and make Solaris itself a downstream distribution of, e.g., Debian or other distribution that is upstream of several popular Linux distributions.
Sun should be able to make revenue-neutral changes to support and maintenance contracts as open source Solaris becomes the current supported version. Counting conquests from other Linux distributions and other OSs, they should be able to grow revenues.
Sun has a market value one fifth of Apple's, about half the revenue, and twice the employees. Sun is still acting like they are a big swinging deal. They need to get over that and start acting like they need to catch up to an industry that has passed them by.
The assignee, ZLand, was supposedly an ASP. They had a novel business model: franchising. It didn't work out for them, and some googling around (using the assignee's and inventors' names) reveals the company may have been just the slightest bit sketchy. So the patent's origins may turn out to be troubled.
Also, both the abstract and the claims don't describe a modern location-based services system or the main functions of an LBS system. It looks like they patented a hierarchical Web directory (like Yahoo!, circa 1996, the year this patent was filed) that uses geography for categories. Gee! I wonder if Yahoo! had geographic categories back then?
Above all else, that is just wrong.
Of course people care, otherwise why would this be news?
The whole point of my comment is that people now care about this, and you can add value through the use of open source software, or you can try to smother it in a layer of crud and end up subtracting value.
This is a great illustration of how to use Linux correctly in creating a commercial product. That is, not just correctly license-wise, but in getting the most market benefit out of using Linux. Wizpy offers power users and opinion leaders a useful, attractive, and powerful tool. Surely a lot of Wizpys will be sold to this specific audience, and that will give Wizpy a leg up on all the other contenders in the media player business.
Or, look at it this way: When someone asks "Why buy a Wizpy?" there is a specific answer. SanDisk's and Creative's players are nice, too. But what is the answer to "Why buy a SanDisk, or a Creative?"
In contrast, Palm's Foleo is a huge missed opportunity. It runs Linux, but only incidentally, and only in service to a weird product formulation that manages to subtract value from what could have been a nifty Linux subnotebook. Even on blogs that generally welcome new Linux-based products, the questions about Foleo is "Why does this even exist?"
It's a pity this product is only half-baked.
In fact, it might have been better received as a inexpensive ultra-light laptop that takes advantage of the ability of Linux to run on ARM SoCs. Why do I want the Palm mail reader when I rely on Thunderbird plug-ins for calendar sync, gmail, hotmail, etc. They picked the wrong way to try to add value to Linux.
You can buy a Compaq 440 for $399. If I wanted a cheap portable device for communicating, that would do the job, and a few other things too. And, being a standard laptop, would give me a wide choice of Linux distros and add-on apps, straight out of the distros' repositories. The Foleo has to deliver benefits over and above the commodity PC solution. Is the light weight and fast boot-up really worth hassling with a non-standard machine, plus $100 more?
In theory, you are right. Most people are not power users, so most people would benefit from metered bandwidth.
Seemingly paradoxically, most people prefer to pay a higher price for unlimited service.
This isn't a paradox, nor is it irrational. People know they can't predict how their Internet use will change. Nor do they have good visibility into bandwidth used by various applications. So they "insure" themselves against unexpected costs by buying unlimited bandwidth.
Rightly, they are calling their ISPs frauds for selling "unlimited" and delivering only the illusion of unlimited. Kind of like flood insurance that excludes being flooded by water. "Well, had you been flooded by beer, at night, (excluding the foam, of course), you would have been covered."
Ron Paul, among all candidates, takes the founding documents of the United States most seriously.
Most of our problems can be traced to divergence from the founding principles, exemplified by engaging in an undeclared war.
This "constitutionalism" use to be considered a quaint preoccupation. It is now apparent we should have read the operating instructions for our nation more carefully.
You are complaining about bugs in a beta. File any bug reports?
I had the same annoyance with upgrading the Feisty beta. That's a valid complaint, since a beta should be easily installable, if not bug-free.
However, installing the Ubunty Feisty release on a Compaq laptop was a breeze. No tweaks necessary. And very stable.
The only squishy spot with Linux on laptops that remains is dual monitors. Using the proprietary drivers and TwinView is not ideal, but it is good enough for now.
You have to wonder what management is thinking: On the heels of having to announce that AMD must go back to competing based on significantly lower prices because they have lost a performance advantage, they announce a new DRM technology that subtracts value from their products. Derrr.
Nokia sold 50 million of their high-end N Series phones last year. Clearly people have money to splash out for fancy phones. I wonder if the author of the article did even some cursory research on the high-end phone market, or a comparison of what you get with an iPhone compared to a high end Nokia. Not everyone buys a basic silver painted plastic phone.
One phone with a comparable amount of technology content and bling is the Nokia N93, and you have to add as large a memory card as is currently available to even get within 1/2th the memory that comes in an iPhone. The off-plan list price for this phone is about $900. I haven't heard anyone question Nokia's sanity in pricing this phone.
Apple is taking some risks, like using a new OSX variant for a mobile device. But, for the most part, Apple simply provided a high-end product, with several unique and desirable features, for a large and established high-end market.
Why did the music industry think consumers would accept DRM?
The obvious and total failure of DRM'ed e-books should have warned them: Take a medium that consumers view as a tangible product, that they can buy and sell in an aftermarket, and try to turn it into a limited, licensed, revocable, non-transferable right-to-use at a not particularly attractive price - and it should succeed?
What are they snorting? Oh. Right. Never mind.
No, actually, it was collapsing prices that ended widespread toll fraud.
When blue-boxing became obsolete, phreakers would hack into PBXs with out-dial capability, or they would hack into conference bridges with toll-free access. Toll fraud was alive and well into the mobile age when cell phones were being "cloned" to sell overseas calls on New York City street corners.
Now you can just Skype nanna back in the Olde Country. Toll fraud is like stealing pebbles off the beach.
So, toll fraud prevention technologies never prevented much toll fraud. Just like DRM is a waste of time and money.
Only a price collapse in digital media will make p2p swapping economically insignificant.
iTunes was critical for iPod to become dominant and fend off challengers, but now that both iPod and iTunes dominate in media players and media downloads, iTunes is more of a limitation than a defense for iPod.
Apple will greatly benefit from the destruction of the iTunes "one price, everything DRM'ed" model for music. As Jobs pointed out in his essay, only a tiny fraction of music on iPods is bought from iTunes. If iPod is to continue to grow as fast as it is now, ripping CDs will become a bottleneck. A multi-supplier, competitively priced, flexible, compatible, user-friendly download business is needed for the media-player business to reach the next level of expansion.
What will prevent piracy? The same thing that made phone phreaking obsolete: Music, like long distance phone service, will become too cheap to steal. $0.10 to get a high quality digital recording vs. swapping sketchy rips with sketchy people - the choice is easy. The other side of the coin is that $0.10 is too little money to support the customer service required when people migrate a DRM'ed music collection from one computer to another or one player to another.
I really hate to be the devil's advocate here, but a delete option for Windows really is fairly complex for Dell to administer.
If, like many PC OEMs they bundle software that they are paid to place, removing the OS also means removing these paid placements. To be fair, the delete option would have to subtract the baksheesh they would otherwise be getting for bundling the anti-virus and whatnot from your savings.
It isn't an impossible task, however. Shop online for a Dell server and the prices are right there, plain as day: delete Windows and take off $799. Substitute SUSE and a 1 year support subscription and the savings comes to $519.
It would be difficult to make a case that this pricing flexibility is harder to do for consumer PCs than for servers. Consumer PCs come with numerous options already. It also puts the lie to any assertion that a PC is "useless" without an operating system, or Dell would be pretty cheeky to sell $10,000 doorstops.
To me, this smells like a security company drumming up business.
First, as with every technology outside the Windows desktop monoculture, viruses are not easy to spread: A variety of CPUs and OSs make it less likely the next machine a virus encounters will be able to run the virus code.
Second, the hypothetical attack depends on a combination of two attacks: A virus plus phishing. That is an uncommonly sophisticated combination. Is there any basis in current experience with attacks that shows this is likely to happen?
Third, the culture and user experience in voice communications is converging with IM: permission based, filtered based on a list of known contacts. VoIP users will talk mainly to people they know - others go to voicemail. Is there any study that shows a virus/trojan/phishing attack could spread in that type of community?
Not too long ago, Apple failed to ship OS 8, and drifted sideways until their mindshare among developers was near zero. At roughly the same time, Microsoft shipped Win95 and some pretty decent developer tools. Believe it or not, for a while, many of the people who would have dreamed of working for Apple - and who now dream of working for Google, dreamed of Working for Microsoft.
Microsoft was a bigger success than Apple. Microsoft still has nearly twice the market capitalization of Google. And yet, it is evident that Microsoft is no longer a "dream company" to work for.
What is the moral of that story?
When a Bad Idea, like favoring content publishers over your own paying customers, becomes ingrained in a company, it is incredibly difficult to excise that mistaken point of view. Bad ideas require smart people to develop intellectual blind spots, otherwise the Bad Idea glares too much. The Bad Idea becomes a kind of passive-aggressive ogre everyone tries to avoid talking about. So nobody does, until the company is in crisis.
The really scary thing is that Microsoft is so big and so profitable, that to mention "crisis" and "Microsoft" in the same breath sounds a little incomprehensible. GM and Ford were destined to have a crisis from the moment they bought labor peace at the expense of future customers. But they didn't really feel it until, 20 years later, their customer were gone and they had to sell their finance divisions to buy a few quarters more time to find a solution. Microsoft could go on into what are now unforeseeable futures without figuring out that DRM and "Trusted" computing are antithetical to personal computing.
The answer is, at least in part, podcasts. Especially free podcasts.
I'm learning Chinese and keeping up with Java news using podcasts. This didn't substitute for iTunes purchases in my case, but I'd bet it does for a large number of people.
OLPC is an important project: If OLPC achieves the number of units they want to put out in the field, they will tip the balance in operating system market share and mind-share in the field of personal computers.
Microsoft has a minority share of servers. While Windows Mobile is a worthy effort, Linux, Symbian, RIM, Palm OS, and other RTOSs dominate the mobile handset business. Linux straddles a large number of embedded application categories and has dominant mind-share in the embedded space, overall.
A world where ubiquity is no longer a good argument for choosing Microsoft would be a calamity for Microsoft. They didn't gain dominance in servers, or game consoles, or mobile OSs, or media devices, or handhelds. Microsoft cannot count on Linux developers or Apple to have an OS 9-like failed development cycle. The conditions for Microsoft gaining dominance in desktop OSs was unique.
On the contrary, luck doesn't seem to be shining on Microsoft, even in markets like game consoles where issues like proprietary code and DRM are mostly moot. Sony stumbles badly. XBOX 360 is a fine product. And Nintendo comes charging back into the market with a relatively underpowered console, quirky games, a difficult balance of competing with game developers, and sells out millions of units in a perfectly times Christmas blitz.
If Microsoft loses a dominant position in PCs, the odds they can get it back before there is the next big unforeseen shift in the business are not so good.
Are there any cases where loose lips actually sank a ship? Or was the phrase just propaganda?
This makes me all verklempt thinking about the first time I learned to block Slashdot articles.
You are right that it is the claims that matter. In the case, the claims appear to cover a case where the softphone sends key presses and hook-state to a PBX. It seems like a pretty narrow claim since SIP softphones and IP PBXs don't do that. It would be a rather oddball system that was implemented in a way that infringed.
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fs rchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7012997.PN.&OS=PN/70129 97&RS=PN/7012997
That said, the oddball nature of the claims is also pretty retro. PBX phones worked this way when 8 bit CPUs were hot stuff, and you wanted to minimize what was going on in the phone. It is difficult to believe there is no prior art for something this old-school.
So what is going on here? I bet most of the original claims were rejected, leaving the description badly out of sync with the claims.
Contrast this with another patent filed in 2000 and issued in 2006 (one that I am very familiar with):
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
In this patent, all the claims went through, so the claims match up much better with the description.