Didn't you enjoy The Matrix? 3-d textscreen interface, reading overlapping streams of characters from the back or sideways, texturing them across polygonal humanoid models...
To be fair, I think they were supposed to be prisoners and were exiled to that region of space.
And then in the expansion-pack sequel "Brood War", when the original humans showed up, they were much more polite, huh?
Being in space won't turn us into a Star Trek utopia, we'll still have all our problems and emotions.
Ironically, if space colonization becomes practical in a short time (200 years or so), it will actually preserve the current bad-habits of humanity.
Those aggressive, exploitive, destructive behavioral patterns were evolved in the context of a world bounded on all sides by the unknown. Where new terrain and new resources was always just beyond the horizon, waiting for men brave enough to claim it.
But today, that thought-patterns of the pioneer and conquistador are obselete. There are no frontiers left on earth; all the valuble land is claimed already. We're stuck with each other now, and it's going to get more and more crowded.
Maybe in time we'll learn to get along better- survival could depend on it. But if spaces colonies open up as a quick escape-valve and "new frontier", then the old-fashioned domineering, expansionists attitudes can be given a new playground to grow across.
(For a science fiction take on this, read "A Mote in God's Eye")
I think the best argument for manned space exploration is that it
You've got a technical error of word choice there. Manned space "exploration" will do nothing to protect from a catastrophy. Extra-terrestrial "colonization" could help.
Yes, exploration is a prerequisite for colonization, but does the explorer have to be a human? No.
We should, for instance, not send people to Mars until an automated power + life support station has already been chugging there for a year without maintenannce.
Yes, the astronauts volunteer. In the big pictures, the deaths of 7, 20, or 100 brave, adventurous people don't really matter.
But because those astronauts ride spaceships, the cost of each vehicle is multipled enormously beyond what it would've been otherwise.
All of the experiments conducted by the final shuttle mission, for example, could've been achieved with a single $140 million rocket launch. Instead, $600 million was spent launching the shuttle (not counting the $2000 million to purchase that vehicle in the first place)
For the price of one manned flight, 3 autonomous probes could accomplish triple the scientific work.
There is a popular lie spread by the government that astronauts somehow contribute to science. To some extent, this lie might be encouraging astronauts to volunteer. Is it right that they're going to their deaths for a false cause?
At the risk of sounding like an Enviro-Nazi, I'm not sure that everyone would agree in hindsight that cutting all the virgin timber, unfettered mining, hunting thousands of species to extinction or nearly so was such a good idea.
Only if they're irrational. Lets take a survey of the existing 6 billion humans... no, lets just ask those 5.8 billion of them who wouldn't even exist if North America hadn't been exploited, and see if they're willing to immediately suicide.
Exploiting the environment for resources is what humans DO.
I think we can say that Native Americans are not entirely glad that they welcomed the first settlers.
Maybe because they missed out on a chance to cut virgin timber, unfetterly mine, and hunt species to extinction? There was nothing different about the social direction of the aboriginal Americans to suggest they would've behaved differently towards the environment in the long run. They simply hadn't enough time yet.
(Alternatively, not enough resources to jump-start industrialism... that's a separate question)
Dinosaurs? Life forming in other star systems? Have you been paying attention to that Bible? Read the first 2 chapters again to correct your misconceptions.
For example, Xerox is a private company- they do(did) tonnes of research, only some of which lead to profitable commercial enterprise.
Most all of Xerox's reserach was profitable- just not to them.
As a company, then, Xerox is either irrational or plain stupid. The only reason that research was pursued was money. The scientists saw that the computer innovations would be hugely popular, and their supervising managers agreed. But the company couldn't follow through on commercialization.
If they had, Xerox would today be filling the combined roles of both Microsoft and Apple.
Now witness the nascent India/China space race, and ask yourself if the United States can afford NOT to have an established, manned presence in orbit and on the Moon.
Militarily, a self-interested US doesn't need a presence on the Moon. All they need is the ability to deny other nations such a presence, which is a trival job for existing missile technology.
Before the Chinese lunarnauts even get their mass-driver uncrated, the pre-emptive atom-bombs will be on the way.
This is patently false. Going to Mars will teach us untold amounts of information about how planets are formed and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life formation.
And xeno-geological trivia will excite the "general public" how?
How would one keep track of when a copyright expires?
Copyright expires? I'm not sure those words go together. Must be some suspicious commie thing they got in Europe. In the good ole US of A, we don't stand for no copyright expiring! The Senator from Disney took care o' that.
Microsoft would never have been able to dominate the market without exploiting the overly complex, ambiguous system of law (including but not limited to IP law) created by government.
Laws (including mostly IP law) already exist which Google might exploit to become a monopoly. No further government action would be required for them to achieve this.
they will never have the right to adopt force as a business model. They must abide by the rules of voluntary association like everyone else
It is concievable that in a few years, without any changes to law, that Google will be in the same monopoly-force position enjoyed by Standard Oil and AT&T before their breakups. That position is achieved when a monopolist can select any individual company from a wholely unrelated industry and issue an ultimatum: "Sell out for pennies on the dollar, or be shut down".
In 1900, any major company could be destroyed if Standard Oil discriminately withheld railroad service for 1 month. In 1975, AT&T could turn off anyone's phone service for the same effect. In 2000, Microsoft could smash a company by stating "Remember how the license terms on those EULAs can be withdrawn by any party? Consider this notice of termination". In all those cases, of course, the monopolist exercises some restraint so as to not anger the government too quickly.
Against that background, is it possible that in a few years, google.com websearches will be the prime way that customers find companies? It might happen. And if it does, what will be the fate of a corporation that is catastrophically de-listed from the One, True Search Engine?
The author is wrong, because there is no lock-in effect.
The author is still right, but "lock-in effect" is mostly a red herring. Ebay has lock-in because the seller only has one physical product to deliver. Digital music files have no "conservation of mass" restriction to them.
When/if compulsory licensing happens, the best way to search for a file will be on a centralized server-cluster. That requires software development and a big capital investment, two things Google has been mastering over the past 5 years.
Meanwhile, Kazaa (and other, even less-viable P2P companies) have been squandering their efforts on distributed searches to evade legal responsibility. If that legal danger is removed, then their investment will have been worthless, and they'll never catch up with "Google Share" for finding files.
Now, it's true that we can't accurately predict that compulsory licensing will make Google the winner of the P2P war, or even that there will be only one winner. But the clear observation is that the victorious companies will be taken from the existing web-search market, not the P2P-services space. The "P2P United" tradegroup is truely working to obselete themselves.
The average person's ISP forbids her from recieving inbound HTTP requests on port 80. She cannot be called a peer to slashdot, or any major website, until consumer-targeted TCP/IP access services become fully bidirectional.
Why do you think that Kazaa is more popular that Gnutella.
Because Kazaa is a company and Gnutella is a protocol. One of them has marketers, publicists, lawyers, and user-interface designers. The other was written by a single programmer over a three-day weekend and then dumped to the world.
The one who are going to win are the ones who are going to make filesharing part of their OS or services.
Too late, it's already happened. Any new install of Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux comes with web-server tools. If music trading is legalized (it'll take at least 2 years to happen), Apache on every desktop plus Google to catalog the files is all anyone will need.
Let's assume that the big public support for fileswapping pushes the US Congress to take a compulsory-licensing approach to legalization. There are two paths it can take:
Canada style: All citizens pay a tax which goes to buy content. This can be either per-capita, fraction of income tax, or a charge added to the sale/lease of fileswapping equipment/service. The government totals up all that money, and doles it out to performers in proportion to a statistically-estimated measure of their work's popularity.
We can all imagine problems with this scheme- the overwhelming financial success of pornography is the only the most cringeworthy of the drawbacks. But I can imagine a nation experimenting with this scheme, if various controls are added to keep it "clean". Of course that leads to ways for the gov to softly censor creative thought, by withholding funds on obscenity grounds...
US style: Taking a cue from the existing compulsory licensing of sheet-music from one performer to another, this system would permit anyone to duplicate copyrighted content, as long as he paid the author. That fee would be determined by a 3rd party, and the author would have no chance to forbid duplication by declining the fee. (Well, it's likely that works won't be subject to compulsory licensing until being published in some way. Privacy of rough-drafts won't be destroyed. But no "artist" can make a living without publication at some point)
This would be the system that P2P United lobbyists will prefer, as it gives their companies a reason to get paid in the future. Somebody has to monitor what files are duplicated, and transfer the set-fee to the deserving author, and some Napster-like system could handle the job. Oddly enough, this shift responsibility for punishing unauthorized filetrading to Kazaa.com and its ilk- users are only allowed to trade through official channels, so passing files by email or floppy-disk will have to be punished!
The funny part about this style of licensing is that once the system gets established, it'll look just like a mature, micropayment economy. Listeners download from Kazaa, Kazaa records what they took and each month prints out some cumulative paperwork: a bill for each subscriber, and a check for each musician. They'll take on exactly the business niche that micropayment middlemen want to occupy.
You are confusing restrained user-interface design with lack of features. Google already has special searches for pictures, mass-media news, USENET news, and shopping sites. Oh, and Linux. If the legal minefields were cleared, adding a separate "P2P" tab to their search interface would be perfectly in line with Google's established growth pattern.
it's not merely tricky, it's computationally hard--I belive there's exponential or factoral big O's involved
Yes, although in the one example I gave (the etherape screenshot), there's only 24 nodes and 13 links. A brute force approach could sort them into a neat, nonintersecting strand. Even if the runtime is exponential, geometric, or worse- with N=24, the work is tractable.
If you want real-time, you can't do serious graph optimization.
One important note is that optimizing real-time can actually degrade the user's experience, depending on the application (where the data comes from and how fast it changes). If you had a magical way to re-optimize the graph in 1 millisecond, that might cause the image to jump around. One new link could tilt a balance and move nodes all over the screen.
A human viewer reading information from the graph will prefer that the node positioning be relatively static, unless there have been big changes so that the current layout is signifcantly more tangled than another.
The picture you reference (the white and yellow boxes in a big circle) is a classic example of a computer algorithm mistake: naive connectivity graph generation.
What happens is a programmer notices that some set of data has relationships between the elements, so he decides to draw them onscreen for the user as boxes connected by lines.
But it turns out it can be quite tricky to construct a graph layout that'll be easy for a human to understand. You'd want to minimize both the length of connecting lines, and the times they cross each other, which is a tough problem. So programmers tend to skip working on it and just space the boxes around the edge of a circle, completely ignoring linkage for purposes of placement.
Here is another bad example of this lazy graph-layout in action. At least using a circle is better than putting the nodes on a 2d grid!
1) Providing reinforcement Yes, it gives reinforcement. But there are other ways to do that- color change, make it bounce or vibrate, etc. But any change which alters the size of their area sensitive to mouse-clicks should be a big no-no.
2) Fitt's law - the button you're trying to click on gets bigger when you get near it, so it's easier to hit.
That doesn't really work... it's circular reasoning. After all, the computer doesn't know which button you want to hit. Some button gets bigger and easier, but not necessarily the right one. If it knew which button you wanted, it could be large all the time.
Changing the size or position of GUI elements in response to mouse motion should generally be avoided (unless you've moved to a whole other paradigm than the regular "windows, buttons, and scrollbars" layout. OSX has made no drastic transition like that. Besides the Dock and Apple menu, it's all the same).
The user should feel assured that moving the mouse doesn't do anything- only clicking (or drilling) it has an effect. The GUI should partially emulate a consistent, physical world- predictable cause/effect, etc.
eliminating, among others, *Flash*, *Quicktime, the *Acrobat Reader Plugin*, and *Java Applets*
Quicktime and acrobat won't be hurt by this. In fact, the end-user experience will be improved. Having a quicktime movie embedded in a web-page just makes it harder for the user to control the size and playback he wants. (Many web designers like to embed movies in pages, so they can protect "branding", enforce adveritisement display, and make it a little harder to save a local copy to disk. But those are user-hostile actions...)
For PDFs, people will hardly notice or care if it pops up in a separate Acrobat window, rather than in the Internet Explorer frame.
Some Flash and Java Applets will also be enhanced if they appear only in separate windows. In fact, it will be the truely useful ones that continue to look good. The silly decorative doodads that flash and blink to embed interactive ads in the top, bottom, and margin of "free" websites are what will disappear. (Full-page movies or interactive applications will function OK in a separate window. And those are the few examples of Flash or Java that a user is likely to actually want to view)
From a web-user perspective, losing the patent doesn't sound half-bad. But publishers wishing to profit from the web should fear it. (And Microsoft still hopes MSN will profit, right?)
If you'd read the patent, you'd see it actually covers "placing an order over a with one press of a button". Using the word "click" as a shorthand for "button press" was a convenience for headline writers, but the patent is equally absurd either way.
and I walked out of that room with half my butt chewed off, and a greater understanding of the patent process.
Surprise surprise, a lawyer who argues that his entire professional field isn't ridculous! And he convinced you of it, too. Well, he'd have to be able to do that to stay in business.
Patent attorneys dislike the USPTO every bit as much as geeks do.
Just because a man complains about his job doesn't mean he'll be happy to be obseleted.
At the risk of nit-picking, it's not "infringing", just "potentially infringing". Neither Opera nor Mozilla have lost in court. Until ordered by a judge, it's an open question.
it could affect Citrix as well (Metaframe software)
Only if Citrix first "parses a hypermedia document" before giving you the application. All the claims chain back to claim #1, which requires a hypertext document to kick off the whole process.
Is Microsoft(tm) overlooking something here? Or are they still in knee-jerk dollar-miser mode?
How great would it be for Microsoft if they could BUY the Eolas(tm) patent, and then bar competing browsers from implementing seamless content displays?
Microsoft is currently spreading plans on how to alter web pages to work around the patent- they shouldn't do that! They're blowing a big chance to head off any future browser competition. (Like the long-rumored AOL-branded settop Linux box). Web publishers are currently reluctant to code for any target but IE- the only way to encourage them to edit pages to dance around the patent is if Microsoft demands it.
If Microsoft owned the patent, IE wouldn't need changes, and the bulk of web pages wouldn't need editing. Then Microsoft could sue AOL (or anyone connected to Mozilla) to destroy the #2 web browser. Apple would be next- they'd have no choice but to beg for the return of Mac IE.
Microsoft should hurry and buy the patent now, before the upcoming case (which has the risk of strengthening the patent and increasing the price into the $ billions). They also need to stop any effort by web publishers to work around the patent, so that Mozilla will appear maximally bad when their next revision drops plugin support.
Then again, prehaps Microsoft wants to hold off on anything resembling monopolist behavior until the next US President is picked out...
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't you enjoy The Matrix?
3-d textscreen interface, reading overlapping streams of characters from the back or sideways, texturing them across polygonal humanoid models...
To be fair, I think they were supposed to be prisoners and were exiled to that region of space.
And then in the expansion-pack sequel "Brood War", when the original humans showed up, they were much more polite, huh?
Being in space won't turn us into a Star Trek utopia, we'll still have all our problems and emotions.
Ironically, if space colonization becomes practical in a short time (200 years or so), it will actually preserve the current bad-habits of humanity.
Those aggressive, exploitive, destructive behavioral patterns were evolved in the context of a world bounded on all sides by the unknown. Where new terrain and new resources was always just beyond the horizon, waiting for men brave enough to claim it.
But today, that thought-patterns of the pioneer and conquistador are obselete. There are no frontiers left on earth; all the valuble land is claimed already. We're stuck with each other now, and it's going to get more and more crowded.
Maybe in time we'll learn to get along better- survival could depend on it. But if spaces colonies open up as a quick escape-valve and "new frontier", then the old-fashioned domineering, expansionists attitudes can be given a new playground to grow across.
(For a science fiction take on this, read "A Mote in God's Eye")
I think the best argument for manned space exploration is that it
You've got a technical error of word choice there. Manned space "exploration" will do nothing to protect from a catastrophy. Extra-terrestrial "colonization" could help.
Yes, exploration is a prerequisite for colonization, but does the explorer have to be a human? No.
We should, for instance, not send people to Mars until an automated power + life support station has already been chugging there for a year without maintenannce.
Yes, the astronauts volunteer. In the big pictures, the deaths of 7, 20, or 100 brave, adventurous people don't really matter.
But because those astronauts ride spaceships, the cost of each vehicle is multipled enormously beyond what it would've been otherwise.
All of the experiments conducted by the final shuttle mission, for example, could've been achieved with a single $140 million rocket launch. Instead, $600 million was spent launching the shuttle (not counting the $2000 million to purchase that vehicle in the first place)
For the price of one manned flight, 3 autonomous probes could accomplish triple the scientific work.
There is a popular lie spread by the government that astronauts somehow contribute to science. To some extent, this lie might be encouraging astronauts to volunteer. Is it right that they're going to their deaths for a false cause?
At the risk of sounding like an Enviro-Nazi, I'm not sure that everyone would agree in hindsight that cutting all the virgin timber, unfettered mining, hunting thousands of species to extinction or nearly so was such a good idea.
Only if they're irrational. Lets take a survey of the existing 6 billion humans... no, lets just ask those 5.8 billion of them who wouldn't even exist if North America hadn't been exploited, and see if they're willing to immediately suicide.
Exploiting the environment for resources is what humans DO.
I think we can say that Native Americans are not entirely glad that they welcomed the first settlers.
Maybe because they missed out on a chance to cut virgin timber, unfetterly mine, and hunt species to extinction? There was nothing different about the social direction of the aboriginal Americans to suggest they would've behaved differently towards the environment in the long run. They simply hadn't enough time yet.
(Alternatively, not enough resources to jump-start industrialism... that's a separate question)
Dinosaurs? Life forming in other star systems? Have you been paying attention to that Bible? Read the first 2 chapters again to correct your misconceptions.
For example, Xerox is a private company- they do(did) tonnes of research, only some of which lead to profitable commercial enterprise.
Most all of Xerox's reserach was profitable- just not to them.
As a company, then, Xerox is either irrational or plain stupid. The only reason that research was pursued was money. The scientists saw that the computer innovations would be hugely popular, and their supervising managers agreed. But the company couldn't follow through on commercialization.
If they had, Xerox would today be filling the combined roles of both Microsoft and Apple.
Now witness the nascent India/China space race, and ask yourself if the United States can afford NOT to have an established, manned presence in orbit and on the Moon.
Militarily, a self-interested US doesn't need a presence on the Moon. All they need is the ability to deny other nations such a presence, which is a trival job for existing missile technology.
Before the Chinese lunarnauts even get their mass-driver uncrated, the pre-emptive atom-bombs will be on the way.
This is patently false. Going to Mars will teach us untold amounts of information about how planets are formed and the possibilities of extraterrestrial life formation.
And xeno-geological trivia will excite the "general public" how?
How would one keep track of when a copyright expires?
Copyright expires? I'm not sure those words go together. Must be some suspicious commie thing they got in Europe. In the good ole US of A, we don't stand for no copyright expiring! The Senator from Disney took care o' that.
Microsoft would never have been able to dominate the market without exploiting the overly complex, ambiguous system of law (including but not limited to IP law) created by government.
Laws (including mostly IP law) already exist which Google might exploit to become a monopoly. No further government action would be required for them to achieve this.
they will never have the right to adopt force as a business model. They must abide by the rules of voluntary association like everyone else
It is concievable that in a few years, without any changes to law, that Google will be in the same monopoly-force position enjoyed by Standard Oil and AT&T before their breakups. That position is achieved when a monopolist can select any individual company from a wholely unrelated industry and issue an ultimatum: "Sell out for pennies on the dollar, or be shut down".
In 1900, any major company could be destroyed if Standard Oil discriminately withheld railroad service for 1 month. In 1975, AT&T could turn off anyone's phone service for the same effect. In 2000, Microsoft could smash a company by stating "Remember how the license terms on those EULAs can be withdrawn by any party? Consider this notice of termination". In all those cases, of course, the monopolist exercises some restraint so as to not anger the government too quickly.
Against that background, is it possible that in a few years, google.com websearches will be the prime way that customers find companies? It might happen. And if it does, what will be the fate of a corporation that is catastrophically de-listed from the One, True Search Engine?
The author is wrong, because there is no lock-in effect.
The author is still right, but "lock-in effect" is mostly a red herring. Ebay has lock-in because the seller only has one physical product to deliver. Digital music files have no "conservation of mass" restriction to them.
When/if compulsory licensing happens, the best way to search for a file will be on a centralized server-cluster. That requires software development and a big capital investment, two things Google has been mastering over the past 5 years.
Meanwhile, Kazaa (and other, even less-viable P2P companies) have been squandering their efforts on distributed searches to evade legal responsibility. If that legal danger is removed, then their investment will have been worthless, and they'll never catch up with "Google Share" for finding files.
Now, it's true that we can't accurately predict that compulsory licensing will make Google the winner of the P2P war, or even that there will be only one winner. But the clear observation is that the victorious companies will be taken from the existing web-search market, not the P2P-services space. The "P2P United" tradegroup is truely working to obselete themselves.
You're a peer. Welcome to peer to peer.
The average person's ISP forbids her from recieving inbound HTTP requests on port 80. She cannot be called a peer to slashdot, or any major website, until consumer-targeted TCP/IP access services become fully bidirectional.
Why do you think that Kazaa is more popular that Gnutella.
Because Kazaa is a company and Gnutella is a protocol. One of them has marketers, publicists, lawyers, and user-interface designers. The other was written by a single programmer over a three-day weekend and then dumped to the world.
The one who are going to win are the ones who are going to make filesharing part of their OS or services.
Too late, it's already happened. Any new install of Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX, or Linux comes with web-server tools. If music trading is legalized (it'll take at least 2 years to happen), Apache on every desktop plus Google to catalog the files is all anyone will need.
We can all imagine problems with this scheme- the overwhelming financial success of pornography is the only the most cringeworthy of the drawbacks. But I can imagine a nation experimenting with this scheme, if various controls are added to keep it "clean". Of course that leads to ways for the gov to softly censor creative thought, by withholding funds on obscenity grounds...
This would be the system that P2P United lobbyists will prefer, as it gives their companies a reason to get paid in the future. Somebody has to monitor what files are duplicated, and transfer the set-fee to the deserving author, and some Napster-like system could handle the job. Oddly enough, this shift responsibility for punishing unauthorized filetrading to Kazaa.com and its ilk- users are only allowed to trade through official channels, so passing files by email or floppy-disk will have to be punished!
The funny part about this style of licensing is that once the system gets established, it'll look just like a mature, micropayment economy. Listeners download from Kazaa, Kazaa records what they took and each month prints out some cumulative paperwork: a bill for each subscriber, and a check for each musician. They'll take on exactly the business niche that micropayment middlemen want to occupy.
to not crowd their search engine with extra features that not everyone wants
Welcome to planet earth, 2003, where Google is the most featureful search engine ever. "Hey, Google! What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything... TIMES two, plus PI?"
You are confusing restrained user-interface design with lack of features. Google already has special searches for pictures, mass-media news, USENET news, and shopping sites. Oh, and Linux. If the legal minefields were cleared, adding a separate "P2P" tab to their search interface would be perfectly in line with Google's established growth pattern.
it's not merely tricky, it's computationally hard--I belive there's exponential or factoral big O's involved
Yes, although in the one example I gave (the etherape screenshot), there's only 24 nodes and 13 links. A brute force approach could sort them into a neat, nonintersecting strand. Even if the runtime is exponential, geometric, or worse- with N=24, the work is tractable.
If you want real-time, you can't do serious graph optimization.
One important note is that optimizing real-time can actually degrade the user's experience, depending on the application (where the data comes from and how fast it changes). If you had a magical way to re-optimize the graph in 1 millisecond, that might cause the image to jump around. One new link could tilt a balance and move nodes all over the screen.
A human viewer reading information from the graph will prefer that the node positioning be relatively static, unless there have been big changes so that the current layout is signifcantly more tangled than another.
How is this easier to use than this?
The picture you reference (the white and yellow boxes in a big circle) is a classic example of a computer algorithm mistake: naive connectivity graph generation.
What happens is a programmer notices that some set of data has relationships between the elements, so he decides to draw them onscreen for the user as boxes connected by lines.
But it turns out it can be quite tricky to construct a graph layout that'll be easy for a human to understand. You'd want to minimize both the length of connecting lines, and the times they cross each other, which is a tough problem. So programmers tend to skip working on it and just space the boxes around the edge of a circle, completely ignoring linkage for purposes of placement.
Here is another bad example of this lazy graph-layout in action. At least using a circle is better than putting the nodes on a 2d grid!
1) Providing reinforcement
Yes, it gives reinforcement. But there are other ways to do that- color change, make it bounce or vibrate, etc. But any change which alters the size of their area sensitive to mouse-clicks should be a big no-no.
2) Fitt's law - the button you're trying to click on gets bigger when you get near it, so it's easier to hit.
That doesn't really work... it's circular reasoning. After all, the computer doesn't know which button you want to hit. Some button gets bigger and easier, but not necessarily the right one. If it knew which button you wanted, it could be large all the time.
Changing the size or position of GUI elements in response to mouse motion should generally be avoided (unless you've moved to a whole other paradigm than the regular "windows, buttons, and scrollbars" layout. OSX has made no drastic transition like that. Besides the Dock and Apple menu, it's all the same).
The user should feel assured that moving the mouse doesn't do anything- only clicking (or drilling) it has an effect. The GUI should partially emulate a consistent, physical world- predictable cause/effect, etc.
eliminating, among others, *Flash*, *Quicktime, the *Acrobat Reader Plugin*, and *Java Applets*
Quicktime and acrobat won't be hurt by this. In fact, the end-user experience will be improved. Having a quicktime movie embedded in a web-page just makes it harder for the user to control the size and playback he wants. (Many web designers like to embed movies in pages, so they can protect "branding", enforce adveritisement display, and make it a little harder to save a local copy to disk. But those are user-hostile actions...)
For PDFs, people will hardly notice or care if it pops up in a separate Acrobat window, rather than in the Internet Explorer frame.
Some Flash and Java Applets will also be enhanced if they appear only in separate windows. In fact, it will be the truely useful ones that continue to look good. The silly decorative doodads that flash and blink to embed interactive ads in the top, bottom, and margin of "free" websites are what will disappear. (Full-page movies or interactive applications will function OK in a separate window. And those are the few examples of Flash or Java that a user is likely to actually want to view)
From a web-user perspective, losing the patent doesn't sound half-bad. But publishers wishing to profit from the web should fear it. (And Microsoft still hopes MSN will profit, right?)
The patent was NOT "one click shopping"
If you'd read the patent, you'd see it actually covers "placing an order over a with one press of a button". Using the word "click" as a shorthand for "button press" was a convenience for headline writers, but the patent is equally absurd either way.
and I walked out of that room with half my butt chewed off, and a greater understanding of the patent process.
Surprise surprise, a lawyer who argues that his entire professional field isn't ridculous! And he convinced you of it, too. Well, he'd have to be able to do that to stay in business.
Patent attorneys dislike the USPTO every bit as much as geeks do.
Just because a man complains about his job doesn't mean he'll be happy to be obseleted.
At the risk of nit-picking, it's not "infringing", just "potentially infringing". Neither Opera nor Mozilla have lost in court. Until ordered by a judge, it's an open question.
it could affect Citrix as well (Metaframe software)
Only if Citrix first "parses a hypermedia document" before giving you the application. All the claims chain back to claim #1, which requires a hypertext document to kick off the whole process.
X predates the patent by almost a decade
X's remote display ability does not resemble the patent's claims. (In fact, the patent includes references to X as supporting material)
You'd have a better shot at published prior art by looking at something like Smalltalk, Microsoft(tm) OLE (on SMB), or even emacs (on nfs).
Is Microsoft(tm) overlooking something here? Or are they still in knee-jerk dollar-miser mode?
How great would it be for Microsoft if they could BUY the Eolas(tm) patent, and then bar competing browsers from implementing seamless content displays?
Microsoft is currently spreading plans on how to alter web pages to work around the patent- they shouldn't do that! They're blowing a big chance to head off any future browser competition. (Like the long-rumored AOL-branded settop Linux box). Web publishers are currently reluctant to code for any target but IE- the only way to encourage them to edit pages to dance around the patent is if Microsoft demands it.
If Microsoft owned the patent, IE wouldn't need changes, and the bulk of web pages wouldn't need editing. Then Microsoft could sue AOL (or anyone connected to Mozilla) to destroy the #2 web browser. Apple would be next- they'd have no choice but to beg for the return of Mac IE.
Microsoft should hurry and buy the patent now, before the upcoming case (which has the risk of strengthening the patent and increasing the price into the $ billions). They also need to stop any effort by web publishers to work around the patent, so that Mozilla will appear maximally bad when their next revision drops plugin support.
Then again, prehaps Microsoft wants to hold off on anything resembling monopolist behavior until the next US President is picked out...