Everyone here seems to talk about "just build your own WiFi network with your friends," but that's got serious problems with it, too. A low-cost, non-profit ISP is the next logical step up from a loose group of geeks with 802.11 equipment and a full-out, for-profit, telecomm-owned company.
This is being done as we type in Leesburg, VA. I don't know how close you are (it sounds as if you're somewhere in Loudoun Co.), but if you are interested, drop a line.
IBM espouses so much about being an open company and promoting open things. And then they go and pull something like this. I seriously don't get this company. I really want to like them but more and more I can't.
If you own their stock, you have to love them. Their patents are very likely what kept IBM from disappearing in the mid- to late '80's.
What you probably don't realize is that IBM has formalized the process of patenting just about everything their engineers do. So much so that they talk about their "Patent Factory" inside the company.
In 1982, IBM was generating less than $20 million a year in patent license revenue. Over the course of the next 10 years, they made a concerted effort to formalize their patenting process. The result is now an engine that flings off patents and licenses them to the tune of $1.7 billion per year, and that's 95% cash.
IBM has mastered the art of manipulating the industry via patents. Their standard tactic has been to quietly file a patent, publicly discuss the technology through their technology journals, generate a huge adoption for this seemingly public technology, then 3 years later drop the granted patent on the rest of the industry. Sun, Intel, and others work directly from IBM's playbook now, too.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, IBM has simply become very good at working the process that the government has put in place to protect intellectual property. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy their stock or their products. If you don't like the way the Patent and Trademark Office works, talk to your Congressman.
But don't bitch out IBM for working the system. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. That they wring it out of competitors to the tune of $1.7 billion a year is a credit to their foresight and the lack of initiative on the part of their competitors. It's not that they're smarter than everyone else. It's just that most people don't play the game well. And if you don't like the game, you can either stop playing or get someone to change the rules. The current rules don't say that IBM has to be nice to people who aren't smart enough to create their own patent portfolio.
And finally, for those who think that patents are evil or somehow inappropriate for software, processes, and "obvious" inventions, consider this. There is a 100% direct correlation to a country's GDP, the strength of its intellectual property protections, and the number of patents filed by its citizens. If you want to rot in some Third World hovel while you and your buddy take turns pedaling the generator that powers your '386 laptop while you tweak the latest kernel hacks, then see what happens if you overturn the US system for protecting innovation. In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the fruits of an economy created by companies that work and a government that protects their work.
Had this been introduced in 2000, the dot-com crash might have been averted.
A charitable view of this product, but a seriously naive view of what caused the dot-com crash. First, not every dot-com had its business model predicated on ad revenue. But the real reason that the dot-coms crashed is a simple one. They weren't creating any value. In an economy that rewards profits, very few of the dot-coms' business plans actually recognized this simple fact. Many were predicated on some Ponzi-like exit strategy (if they had one at all), be it an IPO, acquisition, or the holy grail, viral adoption.
The reality is that there was simply too much venture capital and too few experienced investors. In '98, you could write a business plan on a piece of toilet paper and get it funded by someone. Now, if you don't have a clear path to profitability with 24 months, a shipping product, near break-even revenues, and a seasoned management team, don't even bother wasting the trees to print your plan. The VCs don't want to see it. They're still trying to dig their way out of billions in failed companies and trying to save the companies they still have.
These guys would probably have ruled the dot-com world, if they'd gotten their act together and released this when it might have been useful.
Probably not. Most likely, they'd have gone the same way as all of the other companies who were part of the failed VC food chain. Once the capital dried up, it would have only been a matter of time before companies stopped buying their software. This is the secondary fall-out that killed all the companies with products and sales that were geared towards dot-com infrastructure. These guys would have been no different. As it stands now, this one shouldn't even be let out of the gate.
Go do a TESS search for "battlebots" and look at the very earliest filing, 2397203. This was a filing by the event organizer that ran the first BattleBots contest. That organization is the predecessor of the one claiming the mark and responded to by the squatter's daddy.
There is no way the subsequent applications would have been allowed by the USPTO unless the original filer had either assigned that mark to BattleBots, Inc. or the latter's filing clearly indicated that they were the same organization.
So, it is quite safe to infer that the earliest filing will be the one that any judge looks at, and I'd bet it's also the one that BattleBots, Inc.'s lawyers are referencing.
Find someone who will fight for them pro-bono (as they have a strong case) or get someone like the EFF involved (for funding)
Bull. They have no case. BattleBots was a registered trademark 16 months before this guy squatted on the domain. Even the EFF wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. The guy's best hope is to get them to pay for his original domain registration, because the registrar is going to snatch that domain name away from this kid in a heartbeat.
Blaming BattleBots for going after this squatter shows an incredible ignorance of how trademarks work. If you hold a trademark and do not vigorously defend it, you run the risk of having the mark declared generic (e.g., Kleenex, Xerox, Thermos) or reverted to the public domain.
As a corporation, BattleBots has no choice but to defend its mark or lose it. Since it has every right, established through a date of first use that is 16 months earlier than the IRC kid, how can you fault them?
The best thing that could come of your call for a boycott of the show is that you might get some pale, pasty nerd boys off the sofa and out into the sunlight for a change.
As TheSHADOW points out, the event, show, and initial trademark filing for "BattleBots" predates the "battlebots.org" DNS registration by over a year. Here are the actual details from the USPTO site:
Word Mark BATTLEBOTS Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: entertainment in nature of competitive events featuring robots. FIRST USE: 19990630. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19990630 Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number 75681165 Filing Date April 12, 1999 Filed ITU FILED AS ITU Published for Opposition August 1, 2000
People need to understand that priority in the DNS registration system in no way provides priority over a US Trademark filing unless you can clearly demonstrate a legitimate use and that there will be no confusion in the marketplace. IMO, this guy watched the TV show and decided it'd be a cute (though thoroughly non-original) name for his IRC service. That's misappropriation of a trademark in its simplest form.
There are dozens of these sites. VersionTracker.Com is one of my favorites, since it covers all of the major operating systems and lets you formulate your own queries.
Seems that the biggest problem was that the "reviewer" simply made the mistake of trying to play the game on a PC. The game seems to be very dependent on Quicktime VR, so whining about your graphics card is pretty irrelevant. The fact that your CD player can't read the CD comes as no surprise since there are, oh, 2000 different CD mechanisms, plus or minus 500, that a software designer has to plan for when releasing a PC title.
That said, the game ran fine when I tried it on every PC and every Mac at my disposal. Perhaps the "reviewers" negative perception of the game was influenced by his own facility (or lack thereof) with computers? Granted, a game shouldn't make it a challenge to install and run the product. But maybe you should look at the quality of the platform you are running it on before you cast stones.
That's because Apple did give the necessary info to Linux developers.
And the BeOS developers couldn't read the Open Source code to LinuxPPX and MKLinux? They didn't support Mac hardware because there was precisely ZERO revenue to be derived from doing so. It was convenient to paint Apple as the bad guy, but Be is a public company and wasting money on what was a dead end platform for them isn't usually something that endears you to your shareholders.
Dont just HELP. He should file his OWN patents on the crawlers, make them usable by everyone BUT Altavista, sue altavista, get rich, give it to charity.
You should read up a bit on patent law. Just because you did something first doesn't mean you can have a patent on it. In this case, the "invention" has been available far too long to be patentable. Sorry, but after a point the invention becomes common practice and common knowledge. By failing to file for the patent early on in a timely fashion, the inventor relinquishes the right to do so later.
The practice of limiting sites to access by a single browser is a self-correcting problem. Companies that undertake deployment of these sorts of sites will get precisely what they deserve. Here's why.
First, it's safe to assume that sites deployed to support a single browser are a result of a conscious choice. And that choice was likely driven by a technical inability on the developers' part to create a site that was functional across multiple platforms. If it was my site, I'd get new developers because there's no technical excuse of any substance to argue for single browser support.
Second, companies that deploy sites like this are relegating themselves to something on the order of only 25% of the potential market they'd otherwise reach. Here's the logic that escapes people who limit sites to IE5, for example.
Assume that Microsoft platforms account for 80% of the hosts connected to the Internet. Furthermore, assume that the 65-35 split between Microsoft and Netscape browsers persists and that of the remaining approximately 52%, only about half are OS versions or CPUs capable of running IE5 with the others being out of date, running AOL, etc.
Making a conscious decision to exclude 75% of the Internet seems absurd when you do the math. But a room full of lame Web developers can convince non-technical management of a lot of things. Apparently, writing a single browser web site is one of them. Fortunately, companies that pull this stunt probably won't last long in the marketplace.
You could see this coming a mile away. The Linux community prides itself in doing things for free. The source is free, the support is free, 99% of the applications are free. The culture is set up in such a way that there is virtually no commercial incentive for a company to try to make money off of anything but a shipping a Linux distribution. (Duh, that's why there are so many competing distributions!)
To those that complain that Quake's disappointing sales and tough support issues are a result of multiple distributions, you only have yourselves to blame. Had the Linux community adopted a less extreme stance that allowed for the concept of people being paid for their labors, you'd see a lot of commercial software (beyond the Tower of Babel set of distros out there).
As it stands now, the vast majority of the Linux community would never consider paying a single penny for something as non-mission critical as Quake 3. Sure, there are plenty of corporations using Linux that pay big bucks for enterprise software based on Linux. But these are companies in the business of business, not a bunch of hobbyists and hackers who are doing it for fun.
So don't pout when yet another commercial company wakes up to the failed promise of Linux as a viable market. If you care to correct this problem, then go BUY some software. If not, then you get what you pay for. In the meantime, don't expect Linux to mature as a viable, consumer-oriented operating system. The software will never materialize given the current market realities.
Plus, there's no concept of a "keel" with a solar sail, so there's no "tacking" and you can really only go downwind.
This is not true. There have been several solar sail prototypes flown that demonstrated this exact concept. A gyroscopically stabilized spacecraft can use an angled solar sail to change orbits around the earth just as well as it could in solar orbit.
Your implication is that solar sails are little more than dandelion seeds blowing on the solar wind. They're much more useful (and navigable) than that.
This is an amazingly narrow vision of life in a technology culture. To think that the worlds' view of technology is even remotely affected by some pimply kids twitching and flicking themselves into early carpal tunnel syndrome in front of a TV is absurd.
What will prevent this from being adopted is that the VM itself seems to be proprietary. I wasn't able to find the source code to it anywhere, and given all the talk on the site about investors, it doesn't look like they have an incentive to open it up.
It's likely you could reverse engineer one based on the development tools' source and output. But this is only going to work if it's ported to every OS and CPU type possible. Keeping the VM locked up will definitely hamper this.
One of the other things in my CueCat box that came from Forbes was a "Convergence Cable". This little insidious piece of hardware hasn't gotten as much notice as the wonderfully hackable barcode reader and has just as much potential to wreak privacy havoc.
If you're not familiar with this, the Convergence Cable is essentially an audio cable you're supposed to run from your TV's audio source into your line input jack on your PC. Their CueCat software will then pick up audio cues associated with TV shows and commercials and automatically drive your browser to an associated Web site.
Now, not only do they know what magazines you're reading (and scanning), they know what TV shows you're watching. The utter lack of concern for and shameless exploitation of the technology illiterate in our society shown by this company is inexcusable. I sleep better at night knowing that since their cheesy little scheme has been unmasked, we won't have to wait long before they're out of business.
One of the problems here is that people are confusing WAP, WML, and HDML. 99% of the time, people say "WAP" when what they really mean is "HDML" or "WML".
WAP is the protocol equivalent to HTTP. WML and HDML are the equivalent of HTML. When most people say their Web sites are "WAP compatible", what they mean to say is that they serve up "WML or HDML formatted content."
For instance, does Slashdot REALLY run a WAP server/gateway, or do they just have some of their content in HDML (or WML) format, a la the RSS version?
Most content providers could care less about (and don't need to care about) WAP. It's not their problem. The cell phone manufacturers and the PCS service providers are the only people that have to care because they have the only devices that need to talk "WAP". Everything else is just gatewayed HTTP requests for WML or HDML content.
So what is it that people are really complaining about? WAP or WML?
Let's say that you're correct, and that in general, there is far more money to be made in Mac software. Does this even more so raise the barier of entry to open source software on the Mac?
This has always been my theory on why there is so little Mac open source. Specifically, if you've invested the time and effort to learn to program a Mac, the ease with which you can obtain a commanding marketshare makes it quite tempting to take any and every piece of Mac software commercial.
I wrote the MacHTTP web server in my spare time in early 1993. It was originally given away for free and most of the source code was easily obtained as well. But as time went on, the increasing demands on my time, the addition of significant features, and the market demand for the software made it a certainty that the product would become commercial.
After a year of free distribution, it became a shareware product (the first "commercial" web server on the Internet). After a year, the product was making over $250,000 a quarter as shareware and turning it into a commercial product (WebSTAR) was a no-brainer. StarNine turned that into a $15M run rate and 98% market share in 6 months.
From the perspective of even the most altruistic of developers, passing up that kind of cash is hard. In the context of the Mac marketplace, where good software is rewarded with high margins, high purchase rates, and loyal users, it's impossible to pass up. I think all the really good Mac programmers are just too busy making money at it to do open source justice on the Mac platform.
Making stuff freely available falls into the mythic category of "if you build it, they will come" on the Mac. We have several open source Mac projects and while there are interested parties, we've failed to reach critical mass on any of them. (Check out our open source pages for specifics.)
I'd have to attribute this to two causes, which share equal parts of the blame. The first is the somewhat esoteric nature of these products. In our case, they're all Web server related add-ons, testing tools, applets, etc. Second, I'd have to say that the relative shortage of Mac programmers contributes significantly to the dearth of Mac open source projects.
The amount of arcana you have to master to be a successful Mac programmer greatly outweighs the relatively small set of APIs you have to conquer to write code in the Unix/Linux universe. And these aren't usually taught in university environments which breed the bulk of the open source aficianados. Coupled with a relatively small marketshare afforded Mac applications and the smaller number of engineers required to satisfy those needs and you end up with a pretty small collection of developers able to work on any Mac application. Ask them to do it essentially for free and you've got a smaller number yet.
I'd have to guess that the tiny number of Mac engineers out there with an interest in working on an open source project probably spend it working on their own stuff instead of someone elses' (or a collaborative effort with multiple engineers.)
The "FilterTop" project was one of the few long-lived Mac open source projects that ultimately produced a useful product, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of that exercise anywhere on the net today. It's weird and ultimately depressing, because I'd love to have a cooperative group of open source Mac developers to work with. We had something like that with the Macintosh Internet Developers Association that was formed in late '97, but even it evaporated in the wake of Apple's '97-'98 crash.
Moderate the previous post up. It's precisely the issue.
An additional note, contributory copyright infringement can be mitigated if there is a legitimate, non-infringing use for the same content/data/service. Not having seen the sites in question, it's hard to tell if there is a legitmate, alternate use for the content of that site.
An absurd example might be for a site with a list of illegal MP3s to label them as "Illegal MP3 sites that should be avoided if you don't want to get in trouble with RIAA." Then there is clearly an alternate purpose to the page beyond simply distributing (or providing access to) copyrighted content.
I can definitely confirm the problems referenced in the article. I had almost the same set-up, with a Sony 2.4 gHz phone, a BreezeCom wireless LAN, and the X10 Video Sender.
The short answer is that the X10 Video Sender is a piece of ca-ca and was the source of all of the problems. The other 2 devices do frequency hopping and spread spectrum transmissions to avoid (and compensate for) interference. The cheesy X10 device just blasts away on a fixed frequency with a very low quality transmitter that spills all over adjacent frequencies.
The best answer I found was to stick to 900 mHz phones and run a wire for video. I boxed up the Video Sender and gave it to my Dad. It was just a bad idea all around.
4) Not only does Linux continue its proven growth pattern, but MacOS and Windows continue theirs. FUD is smeared liberally by both Win *and* Mac as MacOS finds that being BSD-like works both ways: they borrowed a large body of work, but cannot do anything BSD cannot rapidly learn to do, due to the similarity in underlying platform.
In a nutshell, what it sounds like you're saying is that there's no particularly high barrier to entry in what Apple has done with a core BSD system -- that the open source organization could duplicate it in a matter of months.
Please explain to me then why it hasn't happened yet. The Mac has been around for 16 years. BSD has been around in various forms just as long (and 10 years longer in its antecedents). If it's so darned easy to do, then explain where the easy to use, user friendly, robust User Interface is for Linux/BSD/etc.
The fact that there ISN'T one flies in the face of your contention that a loosely organized collection of open source hackers can outperform a highly motivated, focused, and well-organized team of commercial O/S developers. It's a nice dream, but the mythical man-month still prevails. 500 part-time Linux hackers will never outperform 50 dedicated commercial O/S engineers because they simply cannot organize and motivate themselves to the same degree.
And the ultimate issue is this. Perhaps the Linux community CAN organize itself and produce just such a product (compressing 14 years of UI R&D into 24 months). But in a couple of years, how much market share is irretrievably gone? And now Linux (in 2002) is where mainstream operating systems were in 1995 in terms of usability. Do the lines ever cross again or is Linux doomed to be perpetually behind the innovation curve?
Today's not as bad as tommorow going to be... Tommorow he has to decide where he wants to go to work...:)
It's even worse than that. What Judge Jackson has done is essentially levy a $15 billion fine on Bill Gates if he chooses to stay involved with one of the 2 companies.
Under the terms of the decision, no officer or director of one of the companies can hold stock in the other. That means that he has to divest himself of 50% of his stock (assuming an equal asset split between the two companies) and then plunk down some serious capital gains taxes on that essentially 100% gain he'll have. Given what will surely be a top-tier tax bracket for Mr. Gates, he's looking at $15B in taxes based on a MSFT stock price of $65/share.
I'd say this is large hint from the judge that he wants the current Microsoft management gone.
If you deploy Linux across a 500 seat network, you'll not only save the company over a quarter million dollars in licencing fees, but you'll be leveraging the devlopment effort of programers around the world to make sure your network is at the forfront of the shift.
And if it takes those 500 users a couple of months to get up to speed on the new platform before they can start doing the same level of work they were doing before, it just cost me 500 man-months of lost productivity. At $10,000/man-month, do the math.
People need to learn that the cost of software is generally irrelevant to business. It only matters to people earning minimum wage in the campus bookstore who don't want to buy software in the first place. Acquisition costs of software are miniscule compared to the overhead associated with productive (or non-productive) employees. If more people looked at the whole Linux universe from the perspective of a business owner, there'd be a lot less stress here when it comes to wondering why people are slow to adopt "free" software.
"free" vs. commercial doesn't matter when you're talking about such relatively small amounts of money to organizations with enormous people costs. What matters are other much more expensive issues like productivity, support, interoperability, and ease of use.
Slashdot Mirror
This is being done as we type in Leesburg, VA. I don't know how close you are (it sounds as if you're somewhere in Loudoun Co.), but if you are interested, drop a line.
If you own their stock, you have to love them. Their patents are very likely what kept IBM from disappearing in the mid- to late '80's. What you probably don't realize is that IBM has formalized the process of patenting just about everything their engineers do. So much so that they talk about their "Patent Factory" inside the company.
In 1982, IBM was generating less than $20 million a year in patent license revenue. Over the course of the next 10 years, they made a concerted effort to formalize their patenting process. The result is now an engine that flings off patents and licenses them to the tune of $1.7 billion per year, and that's 95% cash.
IBM has mastered the art of manipulating the industry via patents. Their standard tactic has been to quietly file a patent, publicly discuss the technology through their technology journals, generate a huge adoption for this seemingly public technology, then 3 years later drop the granted patent on the rest of the industry. Sun, Intel, and others work directly from IBM's playbook now, too.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, IBM has simply become very good at working the process that the government has put in place to protect intellectual property. If you don't like their business practices, don't buy their stock or their products. If you don't like the way the Patent and Trademark Office works, talk to your Congressman.
But don't bitch out IBM for working the system. They have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. That they wring it out of competitors to the tune of $1.7 billion a year is a credit to their foresight and the lack of initiative on the part of their competitors. It's not that they're smarter than everyone else. It's just that most people don't play the game well. And if you don't like the game, you can either stop playing or get someone to change the rules. The current rules don't say that IBM has to be nice to people who aren't smart enough to create their own patent portfolio.
And finally, for those who think that patents are evil or somehow inappropriate for software, processes, and "obvious" inventions, consider this. There is a 100% direct correlation to a country's GDP, the strength of its intellectual property protections, and the number of patents filed by its citizens. If you want to rot in some Third World hovel while you and your buddy take turns pedaling the generator that powers your '386 laptop while you tweak the latest kernel hacks, then see what happens if you overturn the US system for protecting innovation. In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the fruits of an economy created by companies that work and a government that protects their work.
A charitable view of this product, but a seriously naive view of what caused the dot-com crash. First, not every dot-com had its business model predicated on ad revenue. But the real reason that the dot-coms crashed is a simple one. They weren't creating any value. In an economy that rewards profits, very few of the dot-coms' business plans actually recognized this simple fact. Many were predicated on some Ponzi-like exit strategy (if they had one at all), be it an IPO, acquisition, or the holy grail, viral adoption.
The reality is that there was simply too much venture capital and too few experienced investors. In '98, you could write a business plan on a piece of toilet paper and get it funded by someone. Now, if you don't have a clear path to profitability with 24 months, a shipping product, near break-even revenues, and a seasoned management team, don't even bother wasting the trees to print your plan. The VCs don't want to see it. They're still trying to dig their way out of billions in failed companies and trying to save the companies they still have.
These guys would probably have ruled the dot-com world, if they'd gotten their act together and released this when it might have been useful.
Probably not. Most likely, they'd have gone the same way as all of the other companies who were part of the failed VC food chain. Once the capital dried up, it would have only been a matter of time before companies stopped buying their software. This is the secondary fall-out that killed all the companies with products and sales that were geared towards dot-com infrastructure. These guys would have been no different. As it stands now, this one shouldn't even be let out of the gate.
There is no way the subsequent applications would have been allowed by the USPTO unless the original filer had either assigned that mark to BattleBots, Inc. or the latter's filing clearly indicated that they were the same organization.
So, it is quite safe to infer that the earliest filing will be the one that any judge looks at, and I'd bet it's also the one that BattleBots, Inc.'s lawyers are referencing.
Bull. They have no case. BattleBots was a registered trademark 16 months before this guy squatted on the domain. Even the EFF wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. The guy's best hope is to get them to pay for his original domain registration, because the registrar is going to snatch that domain name away from this kid in a heartbeat.
Blaming BattleBots for going after this squatter shows an incredible ignorance of how trademarks work. If you hold a trademark and do not vigorously defend it, you run the risk of having the mark declared generic (e.g., Kleenex, Xerox, Thermos) or reverted to the public domain.
As a corporation, BattleBots has no choice but to defend its mark or lose it. Since it has every right, established through a date of first use that is 16 months earlier than the IRC kid, how can you fault them?
The best thing that could come of your call for a boycott of the show is that you might get some pale, pasty nerd boys off the sofa and out into the sunlight for a change.
Word Mark BATTLEBOTS
Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: entertainment in nature of competitive events featuring robots.
FIRST USE: 19990630.
FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19990630
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 75681165
Filing Date April 12, 1999
Filed ITU FILED AS ITU
Published for Opposition August 1, 2000
People need to understand that priority in the DNS registration system in no way provides priority over a US Trademark filing unless you can clearly demonstrate a legitimate use and that there will be no confusion in the marketplace. IMO, this guy watched the TV show and decided it'd be a cute (though thoroughly non-original) name for his IRC service. That's misappropriation of a trademark in its simplest form.
The domain name shouldn't be his.
There are dozens of these sites. VersionTracker.Com is one of my favorites, since it covers all of the major operating systems and lets you formulate your own queries.
Seems that the biggest problem was that the "reviewer" simply made the mistake of trying to play the game on a PC. The game seems to be very dependent on Quicktime VR, so whining about your graphics card is pretty irrelevant. The fact that your CD player can't read the CD comes as no surprise since there are, oh, 2000 different CD mechanisms, plus or minus 500, that a software designer has to plan for when releasing a PC title. That said, the game ran fine when I tried it on every PC and every Mac at my disposal. Perhaps the "reviewers" negative perception of the game was influenced by his own facility (or lack thereof) with computers? Granted, a game shouldn't make it a challenge to install and run the product. But maybe you should look at the quality of the platform you are running it on before you cast stones.
And the BeOS developers couldn't read the Open Source code to LinuxPPX and MKLinux? They didn't support Mac hardware because there was precisely ZERO revenue to be derived from doing so. It was convenient to paint Apple as the bad guy, but Be is a public company and wasting money on what was a dead end platform for them isn't usually something that endears you to your shareholders.
According to the real time tracking page at the site, the flight was terminated shortly after launch.
You should read up a bit on patent law. Just because you did something first doesn't mean you can have a patent on it. In this case, the "invention" has been available far too long to be patentable. Sorry, but after a point the invention becomes common practice and common knowledge. By failing to file for the patent early on in a timely fashion, the inventor relinquishes the right to do so later.
First, it's safe to assume that sites deployed to support a single browser are a result of a conscious choice. And that choice was likely driven by a technical inability on the developers' part to create a site that was functional across multiple platforms. If it was my site, I'd get new developers because there's no technical excuse of any substance to argue for single browser support.
Second, companies that deploy sites like this are relegating themselves to something on the order of only 25% of the potential market they'd otherwise reach. Here's the logic that escapes people who limit sites to IE5, for example.
Assume that Microsoft platforms account for 80% of the hosts connected to the Internet. Furthermore, assume that the 65-35 split between Microsoft and Netscape browsers persists and that of the remaining approximately 52%, only about half are OS versions or CPUs capable of running IE5 with the others being out of date, running AOL, etc.
Making a conscious decision to exclude 75% of the Internet seems absurd when you do the math. But a room full of lame Web developers can convince non-technical management of a lot of things. Apparently, writing a single browser web site is one of them. Fortunately, companies that pull this stunt probably won't last long in the marketplace.
To those that complain that Quake's disappointing sales and tough support issues are a result of multiple distributions, you only have yourselves to blame. Had the Linux community adopted a less extreme stance that allowed for the concept of people being paid for their labors, you'd see a lot of commercial software (beyond the Tower of Babel set of distros out there).
As it stands now, the vast majority of the Linux community would never consider paying a single penny for something as non-mission critical as Quake 3. Sure, there are plenty of corporations using Linux that pay big bucks for enterprise software based on Linux. But these are companies in the business of business, not a bunch of hobbyists and hackers who are doing it for fun.
So don't pout when yet another commercial company wakes up to the failed promise of Linux as a viable market. If you care to correct this problem, then go BUY some software. If not, then you get what you pay for. In the meantime, don't expect Linux to mature as a viable, consumer-oriented operating system. The software will never materialize given the current market realities.
This is not true. There have been several solar sail prototypes flown that demonstrated this exact concept. A gyroscopically stabilized spacecraft can use an angled solar sail to change orbits around the earth just as well as it could in solar orbit.
Your implication is that solar sails are little more than dandelion seeds blowing on the solar wind. They're much more useful (and navigable) than that.
This is an amazingly narrow vision of life in a technology culture. To think that the worlds' view of technology is even remotely affected by some pimply kids twitching and flicking themselves into early carpal tunnel syndrome in front of a TV is absurd.
It's likely you could reverse engineer one based on the development tools' source and output. But this is only going to work if it's ported to every OS and CPU type possible. Keeping the VM locked up will definitely hamper this.
One of the other things in my CueCat box that came from Forbes was a "Convergence Cable". This little insidious piece of hardware hasn't gotten as much notice as the wonderfully hackable barcode reader and has just as much potential to wreak privacy havoc. If you're not familiar with this, the Convergence Cable is essentially an audio cable you're supposed to run from your TV's audio source into your line input jack on your PC. Their CueCat software will then pick up audio cues associated with TV shows and commercials and automatically drive your browser to an associated Web site. Now, not only do they know what magazines you're reading (and scanning), they know what TV shows you're watching. The utter lack of concern for and shameless exploitation of the technology illiterate in our society shown by this company is inexcusable. I sleep better at night knowing that since their cheesy little scheme has been unmasked, we won't have to wait long before they're out of business.
WAP is the protocol equivalent to HTTP. WML and HDML are the equivalent of HTML. When most people say their Web sites are "WAP compatible", what they mean to say is that they serve up "WML or HDML formatted content."
For instance, does Slashdot REALLY run a WAP server/gateway, or do they just have some of their content in HDML (or WML) format, a la the RSS version?
Most content providers could care less about (and don't need to care about) WAP. It's not their problem. The cell phone manufacturers and the PCS service providers are the only people that have to care because they have the only devices that need to talk "WAP". Everything else is just gatewayed HTTP requests for WML or HDML content.
So what is it that people are really complaining about? WAP or WML?
This has always been my theory on why there is so little Mac open source. Specifically, if you've invested the time and effort to learn to program a Mac, the ease with which you can obtain a commanding marketshare makes it quite tempting to take any and every piece of Mac software commercial.
I wrote the MacHTTP web server in my spare time in early 1993. It was originally given away for free and most of the source code was easily obtained as well. But as time went on, the increasing demands on my time, the addition of significant features, and the market demand for the software made it a certainty that the product would become commercial.
After a year of free distribution, it became a shareware product (the first "commercial" web server on the Internet). After a year, the product was making over $250,000 a quarter as shareware and turning it into a commercial product (WebSTAR) was a no-brainer. StarNine turned that into a $15M run rate and 98% market share in 6 months.
From the perspective of even the most altruistic of developers, passing up that kind of cash is hard. In the context of the Mac marketplace, where good software is rewarded with high margins, high purchase rates, and loyal users, it's impossible to pass up. I think all the really good Mac programmers are just too busy making money at it to do open source justice on the Mac platform.
I'd have to attribute this to two causes, which share equal parts of the blame. The first is the somewhat esoteric nature of these products. In our case, they're all Web server related add-ons, testing tools, applets, etc. Second, I'd have to say that the relative shortage of Mac programmers contributes significantly to the dearth of Mac open source projects.
The amount of arcana you have to master to be a successful Mac programmer greatly outweighs the relatively small set of APIs you have to conquer to write code in the Unix/Linux universe. And these aren't usually taught in university environments which breed the bulk of the open source aficianados. Coupled with a relatively small marketshare afforded Mac applications and the smaller number of engineers required to satisfy those needs and you end up with a pretty small collection of developers able to work on any Mac application. Ask them to do it essentially for free and you've got a smaller number yet.
I'd have to guess that the tiny number of Mac engineers out there with an interest in working on an open source project probably spend it working on their own stuff instead of someone elses' (or a collaborative effort with multiple engineers.)
The "FilterTop" project was one of the few long-lived Mac open source projects that ultimately produced a useful product, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find evidence of that exercise anywhere on the net today. It's weird and ultimately depressing, because I'd love to have a cooperative group of open source Mac developers to work with. We had something like that with the Macintosh Internet Developers Association that was formed in late '97, but even it evaporated in the wake of Apple's '97-'98 crash.
Anyone up for trying it again?
An additional note, contributory copyright infringement can be mitigated if there is a legitimate, non-infringing use for the same content/data/service. Not having seen the sites in question, it's hard to tell if there is a legitmate, alternate use for the content of that site.
An absurd example might be for a site with a list of illegal MP3s to label them as "Illegal MP3 sites that should be avoided if you don't want to get in trouble with RIAA." Then there is clearly an alternate purpose to the page beyond simply distributing (or providing access to) copyrighted content.
The short answer is that the X10 Video Sender is a piece of ca-ca and was the source of all of the problems. The other 2 devices do frequency hopping and spread spectrum transmissions to avoid (and compensate for) interference. The cheesy X10 device just blasts away on a fixed frequency with a very low quality transmitter that spills all over adjacent frequencies.
The best answer I found was to stick to 900 mHz phones and run a wire for video. I boxed up the Video Sender and gave it to my Dad. It was just a bad idea all around.
In a nutshell, what it sounds like you're saying is that there's no particularly high barrier to entry in what Apple has done with a core BSD system -- that the open source organization could duplicate it in a matter of months.
Please explain to me then why it hasn't happened yet. The Mac has been around for 16 years. BSD has been around in various forms just as long (and 10 years longer in its antecedents). If it's so darned easy to do, then explain where the easy to use, user friendly, robust User Interface is for Linux/BSD/etc.
The fact that there ISN'T one flies in the face of your contention that a loosely organized collection of open source hackers can outperform a highly motivated, focused, and well-organized team of commercial O/S developers. It's a nice dream, but the mythical man-month still prevails. 500 part-time Linux hackers will never outperform 50 dedicated commercial O/S engineers because they simply cannot organize and motivate themselves to the same degree.
And the ultimate issue is this. Perhaps the Linux community CAN organize itself and produce just such a product (compressing 14 years of UI R&D into 24 months). But in a couple of years, how much market share is irretrievably gone? And now Linux (in 2002) is where mainstream operating systems were in 1995 in terms of usability. Do the lines ever cross again or is Linux doomed to be perpetually behind the innovation curve?
It's even worse than that. What Judge Jackson has done is essentially levy a $15 billion fine on Bill Gates if he chooses to stay involved with one of the 2 companies.
Under the terms of the decision, no officer or director of one of the companies can hold stock in the other. That means that he has to divest himself of 50% of his stock (assuming an equal asset split between the two companies) and then plunk down some serious capital gains taxes on that essentially 100% gain he'll have. Given what will surely be a top-tier tax bracket for Mr. Gates, he's looking at $15B in taxes based on a MSFT stock price of $65/share.
I'd say this is large hint from the judge that he wants the current Microsoft management gone.
And if it takes those 500 users a couple of months to get up to speed on the new platform before they can start doing the same level of work they were doing before, it just cost me 500 man-months of lost productivity. At $10,000/man-month, do the math.
People need to learn that the cost of software is generally irrelevant to business. It only matters to people earning minimum wage in the campus bookstore who don't want to buy software in the first place. Acquisition costs of software are miniscule compared to the overhead associated with productive (or non-productive) employees. If more people looked at the whole Linux universe from the perspective of a business owner, there'd be a lot less stress here when it comes to wondering why people are slow to adopt "free" software.
"free" vs. commercial doesn't matter when you're talking about such relatively small amounts of money to organizations with enormous people costs. What matters are other much more expensive issues like productivity, support, interoperability, and ease of use.