I suspect that one of the reasons many firms are not complying with this is that the job seems so overwhelming, they don't know where to start. "Old tech" documents were created and saved (or not) under a kind of natural discipline, stemming from the fact that the cost of creating them was obvious and non-trivial. You might make off-the-cuff smart-ass comments at the water cooler or in the lunchroom, but you weren't likely to put them in a memo.
E-mails and IMs give the illusion of being almost costless (although the key cost component, someone's time, is still there); consequently, things get "written down" in E-mail that would never get put on paper. You might have written them on a sticky note, but those never officially existed as far as the formal records were concerned. The ticky thing about E-mail is that it can keep a record of all those formerly off-the-record bits: so you either have to keep everything (costly as well as potentially embarrassing), or you have to try to devise a defensible standard for what's relevant. And, of course, the constant torrent of spam doesn't make it any easier.
On his blog, Freedom to Tinker, Prof. Ed Felten at Princeton has two more reviews of early versions of the XO laptop, the
B2 and the
B4, both (very well) written by a 12-year-old neighbor.
There is a
Groklaw page
that has a pretty good summary of the law (in the USA) regarding trademarks.
As others have said, you have to use the name in a trade or business in order to claim it as a trademark, although you do not have to register it with the USPTO; registering the trademark does provide you with some additional legal advantages.
The Groklaw page has a number of useful links that provide more in-depth information.
... the government has steadfastly maintained that either confirming or denying this would compromise national security.
One of the things that is so ridiculous -- almost surreal -- about the government's position on this is that they seem, on the one hand, to attribute almost mystical powers to potential terrorists (they can blow up a plane with 4 ounces of nail polish remover !!!), and on the other hand to assume that they're dumber than rocks.
The administration has said they're snooping on phone calls and E-mail; I don't think it takes a terrorist Einstein to figure out that they might be getting assistance from folks like AT&T.
To take another example, the administration claimed, a while back, that national security was threatened by a story that they were monitoring international funds transfers through SWIFT.
Of course, various members of the government had given speeches urging that financial links to potential terrorists be blocked.
And, the last time I looked, SWIFT
(the international body that develops standards and procedures for funds transfers) had
8,000+ member banks.
Its existence is hardly a closely-guarded secret, and I don't think it would take too many Nobel Prize winners to figure out that transfers through SWIFT might be monitored.
Not too long ago, Qualcomm, the publisher of the Eudora E-mail client, announced that future Eudora versions would be based on Thunderbird.
Back in the bad old days when I still had to use Windows, I used Eudora for E-mail -- it was streets ahead of MS Outhouse. Perhaps Mozilla can cook up a deal with Qualcomm.
There are some pretty obvious reasons why there are still mainframes around: there's lots of "legacy" applications out there (in a US context, consider the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or the FAA).
And there are systems with BIG databases (something like SABRE, or the IRS and SSA again). Mainframe technology has been running those for a while.
To replace those with an unproven (in a similar context) new technology is not likely to be a career-enhancing move for the IT Director.
More to the point, though, is that in the rush to embrace the newest and coolest, some of the genuine virtues of the mainframe environment were overlooked.
Back in the early 1980's, I was the head of IT, and a partner, in an investment management firm, the subsidiary of a larger financial services corporation.
Our investment analysis process was pretty quantitative: we used statistical valuation models and optimization methods to build our portfolios.
We ran all our internal applications on our IBM 4341 under VM/SP, and were linked into our parent's big iron running VM and MVS.
We also were linked to fund custodians and to DTC [Depository Trust Co.] for trade confirmations, and got data transmissions from various exchanges to get prices for fund valuations.
Every person in the firm had an IBM 327x terminal, or the equivalent, on her/his desk.
(The clerical staff had IBM DisplayWriters with 327x emulation.)
I just pulled out a "Getting Started" guide from 1985: it has a terse synopsis of how to send and receive E-mail, how to use the scheduling system
for things like conference rooms and overhead projectors, how to access our internal client and research data bases (including a small but growing index of technical documentation), and how to use our portfolio management application.
Using these facilities was routine for the most non-technical people in the firm.
(Part of that was by design.
For example, we made it nearly impossible for a portfolio manager to do a trade without using the portfolio management application.
There was a bypass, for emergencies, but it was designed to be highly visible.)
Now, I am not claiming this was Nirvana. It was expensive, and I spent a lot of time negotiating with IBM, and other near-monopoly suppliers, to get better terms.
And having what we had was entirely dependent on the fact that we were 100 percent an IBM shop.
I'm not arguing for going back to those days at all; I do think, though, that sometimes people may have, as one of my colleagues memorably put it, "thrown the baby out with the dishwater".
I still, for example, haven't seen a "virtualization" solution that is as elegant as VM on IBM hardware.
As a practical matter, I have always assumed that anything that I submitted to a Web site was public, or close to being so. At most, it might be secured with what my grandfather called "the kind of locks that keep honest people out."
After all, I chose to submit the information -- and if I were really paranoid, nothing forced me to tell the truth.
The one obvious exception is payment data for E-commerce transactions, which I do think reputable sites (e.g., Amazon) take care over, despite a few highly-publicized lapses.
As far as a relationship goes, I would say that if the parties are fishing around for each others' correspondence and Internet accounts, the relationship already has some pretty serious problems with trust.
As others have already pointed out, this announcement really isn't about Open Source at all.
Nonetheless, for some of us who are old enough to have done business with IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, having them talk about avoiding "vendor lock-in" is a useful test to see if the old irony detector is still working.
You're right. After all, they found the time to shoot this down, right when they're so busy whining that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick will be harmful to competition. As PJ at Groklaw put it, "my irony meter just exploded."
I made the reverse-split comment with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I agree, that is almost always a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. Generally, the stock is tanking because the business is collapsing, and changing the units of measure ain't gonna fix that.
Given the real danger of privacy concerns, identity theft, and uptime, will web-based applications ever truly replace locally hosted software?
There are two different issues being conflated here:
Can an application system, in which most of the processing and data storage is done on a central host, using a Web browser as the user interface, replace conventional desktop PC applications?
If so, will organizations and users be willing to have the hosting done by an external provider?
I would say that the answer to the first question is very probably "yes". After all, people used mainframe applications successfully for many years ; some still do. We have routinely run workstation networks with "dataless" clients (think a Unix/Linux box with only the OS, X, and swap on the local disk) precisely because we could control security and reliability more effectively. (Possibly, some users will bitch, because they want to control "their" data. If the data, as it usually does, belongs to the firm, I will punch their sympathy ticket, but otherwise -- tough.)
On the other hand, I would be wary of entrusting all my data storage and/or processing to an external provider. That raises all the same sorts of questions that any outsourcing deal does.
Unfortunately for them, SCO is in no position to do this, since (at least the last time I looked) their legal expenses were eating away at their cash reserves, even though their lawyers have essentially taken an equity position in their lawsuits. So, unless one of their "secret admirers" ponies up again, they have a real problem. Their ostensible business (the part that isn't frivolous lawsuits) isn't making any money.
LinuxWatch has an article by Steven Vaughn-Nichols about the March 2007 SCO conference call reporting their
quarterly financials. They're doing a bit better, due to cost-cutting, but they still show no evidence of having a real business. I suppose they could do a 1:50 reverse stock split...
From what I've read, and learned from talking to a couple of former colleagues (I worked in IT on Wall Street for 20+ years), your note is almost but not quite right. You correctly point out that the Dow's decline was, for a time, seriously out of line with the decline in other market indices, such as the S&P 500. However, you went on to say:
It was clear that the NYSE's computers were woefully behind on reporting a much more orderly and steady drop.
In fact, the problem appears to have been that the systems at Dow-Jones -- which owns the DJIA index and calculates it -- could not keep up with the volume. When the backup system came online, the reported index showed a significant drop in a very short time. In actuality, the decline was real, but it had already happened over a longer period of time. As it says in the original article:
"The market's extraordinary trading volume caused a delay in the Dow Jones data systems," said Dow Jones spokeswoman Sybille Reitz. "We decided to switch over to the backup system, and the result was a rapid catch-up in the published value of the Dow Jones industrial average."
There's no indication that there was a problem with trade reporting by the NYSE, which would be a much more serious problem. But the data feed from the exchange reports prices trade-by-trade as they occur. So, if an external system like Dow-Jones's gets behind, it usually has to plow through the update stream to get current, which can result in a sort of "compressed time" effect.
In the commercial market, the gaming industry uses camera systems that can detect facial features, according to Bordes. Casinos use their vast banks of security cameras to hunt cheating gamblers who have been flagged before.
The tests of facial recognition technology in which the results have been made available (e.g., in airport security trials) have been failures.
I'm pretty skeptical that there's anything of substance to this until I see some evidence.
The intelligent student will readily observe that the casinos have a strong interest in having people believe that the technology can do this.
What we are seeing here, actually, is that Economics 101 works. In a free, competitive market, the theory says that the equilibrium market-clearing price of X is equal to the marginal cost of supplying X. It seems likely that the (small) marginal cost of producing an OpenOffice CD is about the same as that of producing an MS Office CD. So it's really not at all surprising that they sell for the same price.
The "business model" of MS Office (as well as that of DRM'd music, for example) is based on attempting to engineer a way around this reality -- trying to create an economic perpetual motion machine.
Aargh. I copied the wrong URL. The link in my post above is to a PDF version of the Web page for a non-technical audience. The original paper [PDF] is
here.
Just for clarification, the last two paragraphs in the parent (from "This overview..." through "... stop online fraud.") are quoted from the abstract at 'bbaad.com'. The "original paper" referred to is available
here, as a PDF.
One point bears repeating. The articles refer to Bank of America, but this applies to all sites that use similar
mechanisms, such as Vanguard (mentioned above) and Yahoo!.
It's also worth noting that the large majority of users in the experiment ignored the absence of the SSL "padlock" indicator.
Those of us who have been in the IT arena for a while remember installing our favorite OS, network client, power application, etc. by feeding the computer what seemed an endless supply of 5.25" soft floppy disks.
Humph. Those of us who have really been in the IT arena for a while remember when real geeks had 8-inch floppies.
Personally, I think a four-year-old precocious enough to read and understand all the warning labels hidden all over a product probably doesn't need those labels.
About twenty years ago, I bought an electric pencil sharpener for my office.
It came with a set of safety warnings, prominently including "Do not attempt to sharpen ball-point pens."
My thought at the time was that someone stupid enough to do that most likely had a problem that wasn't going to
be solved by reading warning labels.
Groklaw now has up a redacted version of
IBM's reply memo to SCO's motion, which lays out numerous reasons why SCO is yet again full of what my
grandfather called "condensed canal water".
If you have followed this case on Groklaw since the early days, as I have, you'll remember that PJ has been the target of considerable mud-slinging from SCO: she was just a paid shill for IBM, that sort of thing.
You may also remember that, early on, there were quite a few self-styled "analysts" (the apparently tireless, and certainly tiresome, Ms. Laura Didio comes to mind) who expressed their confidence in the validity of SCO's case.
I'll give PJ a pass on the self-congratualation.
The District Judge has now affirmed the order originally given by the Magistrate Judge, which tossed out most of SCO's claims, basically for a more or less complete lack of evidence.
However, IBM's counter-claims, including tortious interference, violation of NY business law, and violation of the Lanham Act are still alive and well.
As PJ at Groklaw points out, IBM seems determined to present these claims in front of a jury.
If they do, the likely outcome is a large, smoking crater in Lindon, Utah.
As PJ puts it: "In short, IBM intends to skin SCO alive at trial."
From the judge's order: the court finds that, even under a de novo standard of review, the Magistrate Judge's June 28, 2006 Order is correct.
The judge reviewed the material under appeal de novo, to be extra careful, even though he was not required to do so.
This is consistent with a feeling I've had for some time: he's decided SCO's case is a complete crock, and is working on creating a trial record that will be bullet-proof on appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
E-mails and IMs give the illusion of being almost costless (although the key cost component, someone's time, is still there); consequently, things get "written down" in E-mail that would never get put on paper. You might have written them on a sticky note, but those never officially existed as far as the formal records were concerned. The ticky thing about E-mail is that it can keep a record of all those formerly off-the-record bits: so you either have to keep everything (costly as well as potentially embarrassing), or you have to try to devise a defensible standard for what's relevant. And, of course, the constant torrent of spam doesn't make it any easier.
On his blog, Freedom to Tinker , Prof. Ed Felten at Princeton has two more reviews of early versions of the XO laptop, the B2 and the B4, both (very well) written by a 12-year-old neighbor.
As others have said, you have to use the name in a trade or business in order to claim it as a trademark, although you do not have to register it with the USPTO; registering the trademark does provide you with some additional legal advantages.
The Groklaw page has a number of useful links that provide more in-depth information.
One of the things that is so ridiculous -- almost surreal -- about the government's position on this is that they seem, on the one hand, to attribute almost mystical powers to potential terrorists (they can blow up a plane with 4 ounces of nail polish remover !!!), and on the other hand to assume that they're dumber than rocks. The administration has said they're snooping on phone calls and E-mail; I don't think it takes a terrorist Einstein to figure out that they might be getting assistance from folks like AT&T.
To take another example, the administration claimed, a while back, that national security was threatened by a story that they were monitoring international funds transfers through SWIFT. Of course, various members of the government had given speeches urging that financial links to potential terrorists be blocked. And, the last time I looked, SWIFT (the international body that develops standards and procedures for funds transfers) had 8,000+ member banks. Its existence is hardly a closely-guarded secret, and I don't think it would take too many Nobel Prize winners to figure out that transfers through SWIFT might be monitored.
Not too long ago, Qualcomm, the publisher of the Eudora E-mail client, announced that future Eudora versions would be based on Thunderbird. Back in the bad old days when I still had to use Windows, I used Eudora for E-mail -- it was streets ahead of MS Outhouse. Perhaps Mozilla can cook up a deal with Qualcomm.
There are some pretty obvious reasons why there are still mainframes around: there's lots of "legacy" applications out there (in a US context, consider the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or the FAA). And there are systems with BIG databases (something like SABRE, or the IRS and SSA again). Mainframe technology has been running those for a while. To replace those with an unproven (in a similar context) new technology is not likely to be a career-enhancing move for the IT Director.
More to the point, though, is that in the rush to embrace the newest and coolest, some of the genuine virtues of the mainframe environment were overlooked. Back in the early 1980's, I was the head of IT, and a partner, in an investment management firm, the subsidiary of a larger financial services corporation. Our investment analysis process was pretty quantitative: we used statistical valuation models and optimization methods to build our portfolios. We ran all our internal applications on our IBM 4341 under VM/SP, and were linked into our parent's big iron running VM and MVS. We also were linked to fund custodians and to DTC [Depository Trust Co.] for trade confirmations, and got data transmissions from various exchanges to get prices for fund valuations.
Every person in the firm had an IBM 327x terminal, or the equivalent, on her/his desk. (The clerical staff had IBM DisplayWriters with 327x emulation.) I just pulled out a "Getting Started" guide from 1985: it has a terse synopsis of how to send and receive E-mail, how to use the scheduling system for things like conference rooms and overhead projectors, how to access our internal client and research data bases (including a small but growing index of technical documentation), and how to use our portfolio management application. Using these facilities was routine for the most non-technical people in the firm.
(Part of that was by design. For example, we made it nearly impossible for a portfolio manager to do a trade without using the portfolio management application. There was a bypass, for emergencies, but it was designed to be highly visible.)
Now, I am not claiming this was Nirvana. It was expensive, and I spent a lot of time negotiating with IBM, and other near-monopoly suppliers, to get better terms. And having what we had was entirely dependent on the fact that we were 100 percent an IBM shop. I'm not arguing for going back to those days at all; I do think, though, that sometimes people may have, as one of my colleagues memorably put it, "thrown the baby out with the dishwater". I still, for example, haven't seen a "virtualization" solution that is as elegant as VM on IBM hardware.
I suspect it states that conflicts must be resolved by arbitration. "Arbitrage" is primarily an economics term; my dictionary defines it thus:
Both words do ultimately come from the same Latin root, though ('arbitrari', to render a judgment).As far as a relationship goes, I would say that if the parties are fishing around for each others' correspondence and Internet accounts, the relationship already has some pretty serious problems with trust.
Nonetheless, for some of us who are old enough to have done business with IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, having them talk about avoiding "vendor lock-in" is a useful test to see if the old irony detector is still working.
You're right. After all, they found the time to shoot this down, right when they're so busy whining that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick will be harmful to competition. As PJ at Groklaw put it, "my irony meter just exploded."
I made the reverse-split comment with my tongue firmly in my cheek. I agree, that is almost always a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. Generally, the stock is tanking because the business is collapsing, and changing the units of measure ain't gonna fix that.
There are two different issues being conflated here:
I would say that the answer to the first question is very probably "yes". After all, people used mainframe applications successfully for many years ; some still do. We have routinely run workstation networks with "dataless" clients (think a Unix/Linux box with only the OS, X, and swap on the local disk) precisely because we could control security and reliability more effectively. (Possibly, some users will bitch, because they want to control "their" data. If the data, as it usually does, belongs to the firm, I will punch their sympathy ticket, but otherwise -- tough.)
On the other hand, I would be wary of entrusting all my data storage and/or processing to an external provider. That raises all the same sorts of questions that any outsourcing deal does.
LinuxWatch has an article by Steven Vaughn-Nichols about the March 2007 SCO conference call reporting their quarterly financials. They're doing a bit better, due to cost-cutting, but they still show no evidence of having a real business. I suppose they could do a 1:50 reverse stock split ...
The tests of facial recognition technology in which the results have been made available (e.g., in airport security trials) have been failures. I'm pretty skeptical that there's anything of substance to this until I see some evidence. The intelligent student will readily observe that the casinos have a strong interest in having people believe that the technology can do this.
Did they check that closet in the cellar where J. Edgar Hoover kept his frocks ?
The "business model" of MS Office (as well as that of DRM'd music, for example) is based on attempting to engineer a way around this reality -- trying to create an economic perpetual motion machine.
Sorry about that.
One point bears repeating. The articles refer to Bank of America, but this applies to all sites that use similar mechanisms, such as Vanguard (mentioned above) and Yahoo!.
It's also worth noting that the large majority of users in the experiment ignored the absence of the SSL "padlock" indicator.
Humph. Those of us who have really been in the IT arena for a while remember when real geeks had 8-inch floppies.
About twenty years ago, I bought an electric pencil sharpener for my office. It came with a set of safety warnings, prominently including "Do not attempt to sharpen ball-point pens." My thought at the time was that someone stupid enough to do that most likely had a problem that wasn't going to be solved by reading warning labels.
Groklaw now has up a redacted version of IBM's reply memo to SCO's motion, which lays out numerous reasons why SCO is yet again full of what my grandfather called "condensed canal water".
If you have followed this case on Groklaw since the early days, as I have, you'll remember that PJ has been the target of considerable mud-slinging from SCO: she was just a paid shill for IBM, that sort of thing. You may also remember that, early on, there were quite a few self-styled "analysts" (the apparently tireless, and certainly tiresome, Ms. Laura Didio comes to mind) who expressed their confidence in the validity of SCO's case. I'll give PJ a pass on the self-congratualation.
The District Judge has now affirmed the order originally given by the Magistrate Judge, which tossed out most of SCO's claims, basically for a more or less complete lack of evidence. However, IBM's counter-claims, including tortious interference, violation of NY business law, and violation of the Lanham Act are still alive and well. As PJ at Groklaw points out, IBM seems determined to present these claims in front of a jury. If they do, the likely outcome is a large, smoking crater in Lindon, Utah. As PJ puts it: "In short, IBM intends to skin SCO alive at trial."
From the judge's order:
The judge reviewed the material under appeal de novo, to be extra careful, even though he was not required to do so. This is consistent with a feeling I've had for some time: he's decided SCO's case is a complete crock, and is working on creating a trial record that will be bullet-proof on appeal.the court finds that, even under a de novo standard of review, the Magistrate Judge's June 28, 2006 Order is correct.
That's an aspect I hadn't thought of. It's a fair point, but that's another niche market.