None of the above. It's
C. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
IBM can sit back and watch SCO's mouthpieces get increasingly shrill and make wilder and wilder claims, as SCO's legal bills get higher and higher... they have already issued a "see you in court" statement, so I don't expect to hear much from them until they file a discovery motion.
"The key difference is that you maintain a list online, and that list is automatically mailed to you up to your max amount of DVDs"
Subscription libraries sent catalogs of their holdings (current stock and planned purchases) to the subscribers, who could make up a list of what they wanted and send it to the library. Whatever was in stock and highest on the subscriber's list would be sent out whenever a return was made. This was a convenience for those who spent part of their time in the country.
Subscription prices varied: the lowest rate got you one volume at a time. Those who paid more could have more books in their possession at a time.
"I don't know of any flat rate rent-by-mail thing in existance" (snip) "There are many, many, ways to get a product to market most of which are methods that have been in place for centuries and will never be patentable."
A couple of centuries? "Subscription libraries" have been in existance since at least the 1750s (and were apparently still in existance in the 1950s). After the post office was invented, they delivered books to the subscribers by mail. It's the same marketing plan as used by NetFlix... you signed up, paid, and could check out and return as many books as you could read.
(from the news release)"Netflix allows customers to rent as many DVDs as they want for the monthly fee, with three movies out at a time. Customers can keep the DVDs as long as they like and they are delivered directly to the subscriber's address via first-class mail." Such innovation deserves a patent! Unfortunately, that business method is a couple of centuries old, and still viable today.
In the early days of mass media (books), printing was manual, and books were expensive. And many people of means lived in isolated places. Few could afford to buy as many books as they wanted to read.
To overcome this, "subscription libraries" were developed in the 1700s (one in Newport RI was founded in 1747). They charged an annual subscription fee, which went towards buying books and administrative costs. The city subscriber could stroll over to the library (or send a servant) and get a book to read, keep it for as long as they wanted, and get a new book when they brought back the previous one. Rural subscribers would request books by mail and get the books by mail. Fast readers could read as many as they wanted, with the restriction being that they had to return one to get another. (there may have been a multi-book quota... I've never had to discuss the administrative details)
How is this different than the NetFlix patent, allowing for advancements in technology allowing online subscribing and electronic payment. Whether it's an annual subscription, or a monthly one, you sign up, you pay, you borrow, you return, you borrow some more.
And subscription libraries still exist today... The one in Newport is sitll going strong, and I've seen some websites where you can subscribe to get access to their library of books or other non-web information.
To make effective use of wheels, you also need flat land for the roads, or some astounding engineering effort to get the grade of a mountainous pass down to something a wheeled vehicle can handle.
A llama is sure footed and can go up and down steep steps, something wheels don't do. The Incan engineering effort (and skill) in getting the llama paths installed, with rope bridges across the chasms, is mind-boggling. It's like hundreds of miles of Bright Angel Trail... with stone steps.
The decision to kill comes from the person who kills. They can decide to use a gun, knife, rope, or their bare hands... until they decide to do it, nothing happens. I don't fear that my knives will hurl themselves at me as I walk through the kitchen.
SPEWS is an anti-spam defense, but it has no mechanism to put itself into the hands of the ISP, no way to block sending of email, nor any way to place itself between the sender and recipient unless the recipient has actively sought it out. The decision to use or not use SPEWS to block spam is in the hands of the ISP.
If you find SPEWS blocks essential email, you don't use it. It's that simple.
The day your site validates without errors I may pay attention to your opinions about web site design. I ran eskimospy.com through the HTML validator at W3.org... and it flunked the basics so badly that their validator barfed....
"I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:
* The HTTP Content-Type field.
* The XML Declaration.
* The HTML "META" element.
And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.
Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.
"I found that the entire article consisted of obvious observations that anyone who has used the internet for any length of time (most/.ers fall into this category) would have made on their own."
You are obviously overlooking the obvious observation... Nielsen doesn't write for experienced designers whose sites are perfection in pixels, he writes for the clueless and confused who want to make their sites better, and in the process gives designers cluesticks to whack PHBs with. That article is a powerful weapon for a designer trying to talk a client or PHB out of creating a Swiss-Army-knife website when the company just needs a 3/32 hex driver.
Nielsen (and his associates) give away enough information on their sites to make anyone willing to give their methods a try into a better than average web designer.
There are two ways to hit the top ranks in the search engines... one is the way we've all been spammed about, with the hidden words, feeder pages, keyword cramming, etc. to make your web page "EXPLODE!!!!! with TRAFFIC!!!!" That is a desperation move for a me-too site selling the same products as 10,000 other sites who all fell for the same infomercial and became e-tailers.
And then there is the way Nielsen just revealed: find your niche, be the best in your niche, fill the pages with quality information about your specialized topic and don't worry about the big guys. You might only get 100 visitors a day, but they are exactly the visitors you wanted.
Something he hints at in other columns, but never states outright, something so obvious as to be ludicrous, but overlooked by herds of web designers... HTML is a markup language for structure. And my tedious slogging through the research behind the indexing robots' algorithms shows that they use the structure to assign relevance whenever they detect it. If you have a well-structured document with well-chosen text, you can blow your competitors out of the top search engine listings.
""The fear among artists is that the work of art they put together, the album, will become a thing of the past,""
"the album"... it's merely a way to deliver multiple songs, and few of them are a coherent musical concept. If they would put out an album stuffed with good songs instead of taking one or two songs they hope is Billboard chart-topper material and padding it out to fill an overpriced CD... they wouldn't have to worry, would they. But the usual CD by the usual mega-hit artiste is the musical equivalent of that WunderFluf white bread. Nothing but air.
Before LP albums became the accepted way to release music, artists and recording companies were doing well with 45 singles. They would produce the album only AFTER there was enough commercially popular to make it worthwhile.
"I can find a network listed with them, and send email to from a machine on that network (that has NEVER sent spam before) and spews will block it."
Mail may be blocked by ISPs referring to the SPEWS listings and deciding whether to let an email pass or not. But SPEWS itself does nothing to the stream of email. SPEWS does not block anything.
SPEWS publishes a listing of IP addresses that have been used to send spam to its bait addresses, and IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs. If someone spams SPEWS, they complain to the spammer's ISP. If an ISP doesn't respond to complaints about their spammer by making the spam stop, SPEWS increases the size of the listing. This may mean that IP addresses used by non-spammers is listed, but that's the whole idea - make the ISP's custome4rsaware that they are living in a bad neighborhood. If an ISP moves a spammer to evade the listing, the listing increases to include the new addresses. This goes on until the ISP's address space is either completely listed or it starts to notice complaints from its non-spamming customers in the blocked address space.
Listing only the IP addresses of spammers was tried (see MAPS), and it let the ISP keep the spammer without its non-spamming customers noticing... there was no incentive to get rid of them. Increasing the listing size until the ISP wakes up and smells the spam seems to be fairly effective, judging from the hysterical way the spammers attack SPEWS.
If greylisting were used, along with blacklisting of open relays known to have been abused by spammers, it could be extremely effective. You don't bother to listen to the known spambelching IP addresses, and give the others a chance to prove themselves.
If I understood the paper correctly, email from persons who regularly write to me would not be delayed, and email from persons writing me for the first time would only have a short delay. If their MTA didn't bother to retry... too bad.
Make sure you can SHOW the problem to a non-technical person. If you can show the problem, contact the ISP with your best concerned citizen attitude, as if you are doing them a BIG favor by giving them some time to get ready to be interviewed on TV.
You start with a call to the highest rated local TV station and ask to speak to the "assignment desk or assignment editor" (this is the person who sends out reporters to stories). Explain to this person that a local ISP has been hacked and that customer data, including passwords and financial data, is at risk and the ISP doesn't appear to care. Repeat until you find a TV station who takes the bait. Then take one or both of the courses of action below.
ONE: Call the ISP and ask to speak to the CEO. Tell them that their servers have been hacked, that their tech support was not interested in the potential for theft/abuse of customers personal data, and that you have reported it to the local media and will be running a demo of what is going on for the reporters. Ask them to be sure to have someone on hand for a phone interview with the TV reporters so they can explain why the hacking happened and what they have done to fix the situation. Get the name and number of the person the TV reporter should call.
TWO: Call the ISP and ask to speak to their legal staff. (repeat story you tell to CEO) Ask them who is the right person for the ISP customers to send damage claims to, and also ask them to have someone on hand for the reporters to interview to explain what laws have been violated and how the ISP intends to get the laws enforced.
Googles killer app is customer service, and their dedication to making it easy to find almost anything. Take a look at their other services like Froogle, catalog searching, etc. Microsoft would never think to do something like Froogle, which draws users and sells ad space for those fast-loading, non-annoying Google ads.
Google also has an ad delivery service for discussion forums (it was recently started on a forum I frequent). Google indexes the new threads extremely often, and based on the content of first couple of posts, a Google-style set of text ads (3 to 5) appears to one side of the thread space. It's far less annoying than popups, banners, interstitials or whatever other intrusive in your face delivery method the rest of the ad delivery services are pushing today. The targeting is usually spot-on or amusingly off-target, the site is making ad money without annoying the users, and the advertisers are getting precision delivery. Let's see MSN do that.
As a test, I searched the appropriate Froogle category for "mexican chocolate" and came up with several pages of results, all of them with a credible reason for being returned... New Mexican chocolate chile pecans, various Mexican produced cooking chocolates, etc. The same search on MSN, in their closest shopping category, returned one item... a Mexican poncho. Not chocolate. Not even food.
"even if they retain the rights, the fact they had them published publicly make the source open knowledge, no ?"
It effectively makes anything in them no longer a "trade secret", and also acts as "prior art" and precludes anyone patenting anything in that code after the date of publication.
It also effectively contaminates the developer pool with "source knowledge"... but they freely distributed it to world+dog, so the argument that resemblances between them and any other *NIX are deliberate and the result of illegal activity are going to be hard to make convincingly.
Yes they will be expected to have some similarities... which is why SCO is being VERY CAREFUL to only show the recent Linux code and their own code to the analysts. If they showed other code, and multiple vresions of their code, the similarities might show that what they thought was their code being copied was actually the Caldera/SCO programmers copying code from something that also contriubuted to Linux, or from Linux to SCO
If you did a full-scale code analysis starting with the early ATT code, BSD, MINIX, etc, tracking the "DNA" from release version to release version as bits got copied and mutated, it probably would show who copied from who.
Look at it from IBM's side: SCO is using up a lot of their money; ruining their relationships with their customers, distributors and resellers; approaching zero good will in the developer commiunity; and making a lot of incredibly stupid public statements that can be used against them later.
If you were IBM, would you want to interrupt these antics? Or would you quietly sit there and let them keep doing it?
"SCO is suing IBM, not Linus, and the issue of whether Linus is cavalier about patents has precisely nothing to do with the actual lawsuit."
True... but SCO is taking advantage of the lawsuit to take far-scattered potshots at parties that are not being sued, and their accusation that IBM put SCO's code into the Linux kernel affects Linus Torvalds and the rest fo the dev team.
" If I own IP rights to a technology what prevents me from licensing it under many different contracts?"
Nothing... as long as they are all "non-exclusive". If you wrote one as an exclusive contract after some non-eexclusive ones, that company could sue you for fraud for lying about the exclusivity, but would be unable to prevent the others from using thir licenses.
If you wrote the exclusive one first, then signed some others (exclusive or not) all but the first one would have a right to sue you for fraud because you were licensing rights you had licensed away. The first company could not sue the others, but probably cpould get them to cease and desist.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm soooo SCOverdosed!
C. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
IBM can sit back and watch SCO's mouthpieces get increasingly shrill and make wilder and wilder claims, as SCO's legal bills get higher and higher ... they have already issued a "see you in court" statement, so I don't expect to hear much from them until they file a discovery motion.
Subscription libraries sent catalogs of their holdings (current stock and planned purchases) to the subscribers, who could make up a list of what they wanted and send it to the library. Whatever was in stock and highest on the subscriber's list would be sent out whenever a return was made. This was a convenience for those who spent part of their time in the country.
Subscription prices varied: the lowest rate got you one volume at a time. Those who paid more could have more books in their possession at a time.
You had a limited number of objects in your possession at any time, and they replaced the ones you didn't want with fresh ones.
A couple of centuries? "Subscription libraries" have been in existance since at least the 1750s (and were apparently still in existance in the 1950s). After the post office was invented, they delivered books to the subscribers by mail. It's the same marketing plan as used by NetFlix ... you signed up, paid, and could check out and return as many books as you could read.
(from the news release)"Netflix allows customers to rent as many DVDs as they want for the monthly fee, with three movies out at a time. Customers can keep the DVDs as long as they like and they are delivered directly to the subscriber's address via first-class mail." Such innovation deserves a patent! Unfortunately, that business method is a couple of centuries old, and still viable today.
In the early days of mass media (books), printing was manual, and books were expensive. And many people of means lived in isolated places. Few could afford to buy as many books as they wanted to read.
To overcome this, "subscription libraries" were developed in the 1700s (one in Newport RI was founded in 1747). They charged an annual subscription fee, which went towards buying books and administrative costs. The city subscriber could stroll over to the library (or send a servant) and get a book to read, keep it for as long as they wanted, and get a new book when they brought back the previous one. Rural subscribers would request books by mail and get the books by mail. Fast readers could read as many as they wanted, with the restriction being that they had to return one to get another. (there may have been a multi-book quota ... I've never had to discuss the administrative details)
How is this different than the NetFlix patent, allowing for advancements in technology allowing online subscribing and electronic payment. Whether it's an annual subscription, or a monthly one, you sign up, you pay, you borrow, you return, you borrow some more.
And subscription libraries still exist today ... The one in Newport is sitll going strong, and I've seen some websites where you can subscribe to get access to their library of books or other non-web information.
Did they lose them under a filing cabinet or what? I thought there was a time limit between filing and granting ...
A llama is sure footed and can go up and down steep steps, something wheels don't do. The Incan engineering effort (and skill) in getting the llama paths installed, with rope bridges across the chasms, is mind-boggling. It's like hundreds of miles of Bright Angel Trail ... with stone steps.
SPEWS is an anti-spam defense, but it has no mechanism to put itself into the hands of the ISP, no way to block sending of email, nor any way to place itself between the sender and recipient unless the recipient has actively sought it out. The decision to use or not use SPEWS to block spam is in the hands of the ISP.
If you find SPEWS blocks essential email, you don't use it. It's that simple.
The day your site validates without errors I may pay attention to your opinions about web site design. I ran eskimospy.com through the HTML validator at W3.org ... and it flunked the basics so badly that their validator barfed ....
"I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:
* The HTTP Content-Type field.
* The XML Declaration.
* The HTML "META" element.
And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.
Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.
You are obviously overlooking the obvious observation ... Nielsen doesn't write for experienced designers whose sites are perfection in pixels, he writes for the clueless and confused who want to make their sites better, and in the process gives designers cluesticks to whack PHBs with. That article is a powerful weapon for a designer trying to talk a client or PHB out of creating a Swiss-Army-knife website when the company just needs a 3/32 hex driver.
There are two ways to hit the top ranks in the search engines ... one is the way we've all been spammed about, with the hidden words, feeder pages, keyword cramming, etc. to make your web page "EXPLODE!!!!! with TRAFFIC!!!!" That is a desperation move for a me-too site selling the same products as 10,000 other sites who all fell for the same infomercial and became e-tailers.
And then there is the way Nielsen just revealed: find your niche, be the best in your niche, fill the pages with quality information about your specialized topic and don't worry about the big guys. You might only get 100 visitors a day, but they are exactly the visitors you wanted.
Something he hints at in other columns, but never states outright, something so obvious as to be ludicrous, but overlooked by herds of web designers ... HTML is a markup language for structure. And my tedious slogging through the research behind the indexing robots' algorithms shows that they use the structure to assign relevance whenever they detect it. If you have a well-structured document with well-chosen text, you can blow your competitors out of the top search engine listings.
"the album" ... it's merely a way to deliver multiple songs, and few of them are a coherent musical concept. If they would put out an album stuffed with good songs instead of taking one or two songs they hope is Billboard chart-topper material and padding it out to fill an overpriced CD ... they wouldn't have to worry, would they. But the usual CD by the usual mega-hit artiste is the musical equivalent of that WunderFluf white bread. Nothing but air.
Before LP albums became the accepted way to release music, artists and recording companies were doing well with 45 singles. They would produce the album only AFTER there was enough commercially popular to make it worthwhile.
Mail may be blocked by ISPs referring to the SPEWS listings and deciding whether to let an email pass or not. But SPEWS itself does nothing to the stream of email. SPEWS does not block anything.
SPEWS publishes a listing of IP addresses that have been used to send spam to its bait addresses, and IP addresses of spam-friendly ISPs. If someone spams SPEWS, they complain to the spammer's ISP. If an ISP doesn't respond to complaints about their spammer by making the spam stop, SPEWS increases the size of the listing. This may mean that IP addresses used by non-spammers is listed, but that's the whole idea - make the ISP's custome4rsaware that they are living in a bad neighborhood. If an ISP moves a spammer to evade the listing, the listing increases to include the new addresses. This goes on until the ISP's address space is either completely listed or it starts to notice complaints from its non-spamming customers in the blocked address space.
Listing only the IP addresses of spammers was tried (see MAPS), and it let the ISP keep the spammer without its non-spamming customers noticing ... there was no incentive to get rid of them. Increasing the listing size until the ISP wakes up and smells the spam seems to be fairly effective, judging from the hysterical way the spammers attack SPEWS.
Congratulations! You have just re-invented SPEWS (spews.org).
And their ability to play hardball office politics and survive could be an asset to the IT department.
If I understood the paper correctly, email from persons who regularly write to me would not be delayed, and email from persons writing me for the first time would only have a short delay. If their MTA didn't bother to retry ... too bad.
You start with a call to the highest rated local TV station and ask to speak to the "assignment desk or assignment editor" (this is the person who sends out reporters to stories). Explain to this person that a local ISP has been hacked and that customer data, including passwords and financial data, is at risk and the ISP doesn't appear to care. Repeat until you find a TV station who takes the bait. Then take one or both of the courses of action below.
ONE: Call the ISP and ask to speak to the CEO. Tell them that their servers have been hacked, that their tech support was not interested in the potential for theft/abuse of customers personal data, and that you have reported it to the local media and will be running a demo of what is going on for the reporters. Ask them to be sure to have someone on hand for a phone interview with the TV reporters so they can explain why the hacking happened and what they have done to fix the situation. Get the name and number of the person the TV reporter should call.
TWO: Call the ISP and ask to speak to their legal staff. (repeat story you tell to CEO) Ask them who is the right person for the ISP customers to send damage claims to, and also ask them to have someone on hand for the reporters to interview to explain what laws have been violated and how the ISP intends to get the laws enforced.
Google also has an ad delivery service for discussion forums (it was recently started on a forum I frequent). Google indexes the new threads extremely often, and based on the content of first couple of posts, a Google-style set of text ads (3 to 5) appears to one side of the thread space. It's far less annoying than popups, banners, interstitials or whatever other intrusive in your face delivery method the rest of the ad delivery services are pushing today. The targeting is usually spot-on or amusingly off-target, the site is making ad money without annoying the users, and the advertisers are getting precision delivery. Let's see MSN do that.
As a test, I searched the appropriate Froogle category for "mexican chocolate" and came up with several pages of results, all of them with a credible reason for being returned ... New Mexican chocolate chile pecans, various Mexican produced cooking chocolates, etc. The same search on MSN, in their closest shopping category, returned one item ... a Mexican poncho. Not chocolate. Not even food.
It effectively makes anything in them no longer a "trade secret", and also acts as "prior art" and precludes anyone patenting anything in that code after the date of publication.
It also effectively contaminates the developer pool with "source knowledge" ... but they freely distributed it to world+dog, so the argument that resemblances between them and any other *NIX are deliberate and the result of illegal activity are going to be hard to make convincingly.
If you did a full-scale code analysis starting with the early ATT code, BSD, MINIX, etc, tracking the "DNA" from release version to release version as bits got copied and mutated, it probably would show who copied from who.
If you were IBM, would you want to interrupt these antics? Or would you quietly sit there and let them keep doing it?
Yes ... the US copyright office. But SCO has said that they hadn't gotten around to registering their code yet.
True ... but SCO is taking advantage of the lawsuit to take far-scattered potshots at parties that are not being sued, and their accusation that IBM put SCO's code into the Linux kernel affects Linus Torvalds and the rest fo the dev team.
Nothing ... as long as they are all "non-exclusive". If you wrote one as an exclusive contract after some non-eexclusive ones, that company could sue you for fraud for lying about the exclusivity, but would be unable to prevent the others from using thir licenses.
If you wrote the exclusive one first, then signed some others (exclusive or not) all but the first one would have a right to sue you for fraud because you were licensing rights you had licensed away. The first company could not sue the others, but probably cpould get them to cease and desist.