How about if they called it "L-Windows" or "Linux-Windows"?
In fact, windows is still used by many at least some of the time to refer to windows on the screen instead of Microsoft.
If they had named the company "Microsoft Lindows" then you might have a point. But "Lindows" by itself is not infringing, IMHO.
Also, note that prior to Lindows, Microsoft did not oppose all the companies creating software packages with the name Windows in it. One of the things that Lindows did prior to the original arguments in this was to ask for people to provide them examples of software packages that did not originate with Microsoft yet contained the word "Windows".
Microsoft couldn't have won a lawsuit earlier because it was clear that they did not originate the term.
My understanding is that if you have a trademark but don't actively defend it, you can lose the trademark as it enters into common usage. If Microsoft had originated the term instead of adopting a generic name for their product, their failure to actively defend that trademark might easily have been sufficient for it to slip into generic usage.
I read an article a few years ago that said that Italy allows anyone to open a radio or tv station that wishes to do so.
According to the article the results were pretty interesting. An enormous choice of things to listen to, some with really limited interest to most of us. One example the article gave was a 24 hour Hare Krishna station broadcasting nothing but chanting 24 hours a day.
I've long wished that the same rights were available in the U.S. If the law was changed tomorrow, I'd be in the market tomorrow for the equipment to set up my own radio station. If it could reach 20 miles, I'd be happy.
What we really need is a solution that is completely non-proprietary. A solution that no one company has any ability to control.
Can you imagine what the network would be like today if Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) had patents that allowed them absolute control over any of the common protocols (telnet, ftp, http, smtp, pop3, imap,... )?
With many proprietary seeds, you are not permitted to save some of the harvested crop and plant them the next year unless you have the permission of the company owning those rights.
More correctly, it should be bits/sec = bytes/sec * bits/byte since bits/byte is not canonically defined to be 8. In fact, there have been other computers that had other than 8 bits per byte.
For exmaple, the PDP-10 had 9 bits per byte and 4 bytes per word (36 bits).
I've also seen 7 bits per byte on some old 9-track tapes that came from, I think, a Honeywell computer.
What's to keep a big ISP from saying "It's not our problem. We're just the pipe and we aren't responsible for the contents."?
The way it is now, they are held somewhat responsible for the contents by the free market. Customers can easily switch to a competitor who does care about reducing/eliminating spam.
The only problem is that to check each message, you would have to connect to every server that allegedly sent a message.
By using a digital signature, you can cache the public key and verify future e-mails without the additional network traffic.
The real question, I guess, is which is the more expensive in terms of computation, bandwidth, and storing the messages while waiting for an answer. For many smaller ISPs and companies with limited bandwidth available, I think that using keys is preferable. For very large ISPs and companies with enormous numbers of users and who already have plenty of bandwidth available, it is quite possible that it may be preferable to trade bandwidth for computation.
Around here (small ISP in a rural area), the e-mail server is mostly idle but bandwidth is relatively expensive.
There would also be a problem with server failures. If you have three days of e-mail data on the computer and you have a drive failure, then all the e-mail that has not been verified would likely become undeliverable.
With a digital signature cached by the receiver, the amount of undeliverable e-mail in such a situation would be far less.
Why not have the e-mail server generate a PGP or GPG key to sign e-mail for authenitcated users who don't sign their own e-mail.
The purpose would be to prove to the recipient that the e-mail came from someone who authenticated themselves as the person listed as the sender. You couldn't use it for non-repudiation purposes.
You have a known e-mail server that can vouch for each e-mail that it sends on behalf of it's customers. It is far tighter than SPF.
The one problem with domainkeys (based on my understanding of it) is that it just verifies that the e-mail came from the domain. It doesn't verify that the sender is the real sender.
What I'd prefer is for the e-mail servers to generate a separate PGP or GPG key for each user for signing the e-mail and signing only those e-mail sent by an authenticated user on the machine.
And instead of providing the key by DNS, extend SMTP to handle a key request.
When your server received an e-mail, say from joeblow@example.com, it would check the signature. If the public key for that sender wasn't cached, it would connect to the host the e-mail would come from if it is legitimate and request the key for that user.
It could also be done via mail. Send a request to joeblow-publickey@example.com and the sender would automagically reply with the public key for joeblow@example.com.
And it would be possible for a user to provide his public key to the server for it to use. That way, he could sign his own message instead of the e-mail machine.
There is no need to limit e-mail to the big ISPs. Are you suggesting that all the corporations and smaller ISPs purchase e-mail services from the bigger companies? What would that accomplish?
The major source of spam are machines that are compromised is true. The vast majority of such machines are not mail servers at all. Shunning all the small providers and companies might help reduce spam somewhat, but at an enormous expense.
If you accept e-mail only from legitimate e-mail servers, regardless of the size of the ISP or company, you would accomplish pretty much the same thing.
By the way, if the big ISPs have the market cornered on e-mail services, what makes you think they would be anti-spam? The larger reason that they are anti-spam is because of being blocked by the vast numbers of smaller ISPs and companies who pioneered the use of blacklists. Take away that and the big ISPs would love spam because they would be able to collect more money from their captive audience based on the volume of mail handled for that company or smaller ISP.
I paid up when they offered two licenses (Linux and Windoze) for the price of one.
There is one thing that I don't like about Opera. At one time on the windoze version, you could change the directories of where the information is stored. Then they took away that capability.
On a windoze computer, I really like to keep the operating system and programs on a separate drive from the data. That way, I can rebuild the system drive at will without losing any data.
The directory selections you can make with Opera change from release to release. On 7.50, about all you can do is set what directory it uses for downloads.
The article fails to note that a large number of the developers of Free and Open Source Software are foreign.
In fact, remember that Linux was began in Finnland, not the U.S.
Does this mean that we are importing free IP?
In reality, I agree that it will reduce the IP value of some companies. It won't eliminate it, but it will reduce it.
Is that such a bad thing?
It seems to me that if we eliminated software patents, the hardest hit would be those leach companies who patent some nebulous idea and then wait for real companies to develop something similar so they can hit them with enormous lawsuits. Would it be so bad if these firms all went under?
There would still be plenty of IP around. Those maintaining most or all of their IP would be those who use that IP for legitimate, constructive purposes instead of leaching off the work of others.
A good friend of mine in grad school used to regularly set up the problem, but never solve it.
I asked him why he did it that way. He said that some profs who will take off half or more for a simple calculation error but won't take off anything if you set everything up right. So, at some point, he had quit doing calculations on tests.
My guess is that although the guy was brilliant, he was prone to making minor errors on simple calculations.
When I was teaching math, I would let the students decide whether or not calculators would be allowed.
But I made sure they understood that if calculators were allowed, there would be fewer problems that they would help on.
For a trivial example, instead of "If John and Mary have 13 apples and oranges... " it would be "If John and Mary have X apples and oranges.
Also, I was more concerned with how they were working the problem than the results. A simple calculation error was a minor deduction. Having the right answer without sufficient work to show they knew how they were doing would result in no credit at all for the problem.
I worked at one company where one of the new-hires started trying to mandate how many spaces to use for indents.
I couldn't believe it I showed up to a meeting one day and found out that the topic to be discussed at the meeting was why three spaces for indents was the one, true way.
Of all the best programmers I've known, only one doesn't have a strong math background.
Developing high quality software is a lot like proving a theorem -- you have to rigorously take care of every possibility.
Practice proving theorems also helps you structure your proofs so that they make sense.
For example, a non-mathemetician trying to show that A iff B is likely to just attempt one direction. If they do try to handle both, they're likely to merge the whole matter together into a mess that is nearly impossible to follow. And if you can't follow the proof because of the way it is presented, it is awfully hard to determine whether or not it is correct.
we have to know math because the math majors cant program,
Hahahahahahahahahahaah
There are some math majors who don't want to program, but just about every programmer or software developer I've ever met who had a math degree were well above average. Those with master's degrees have always been outstanding.
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From being exposed to the reaction?
It must have been the power to become a Texas Aggie.
(The Nuclear Science Symposium was at the University of Texas.)
I had a Xerox Star on my desk for a while in about 1982 or so. A local computer salesman loaned it to me for a couple of weeks for me to evaluate.
I wasn't too impressed with it since I could do anything much faster with a command line than by clicking a mouse.
Consequently, we bought DEC VT-180's instead.
How about if they called it "L-Windows" or "Linux-Windows"?
In fact, windows is still used by many at least some of the time to refer to windows on the screen instead of Microsoft.
If they had named the company "Microsoft Lindows" then you might have a point. But "Lindows" by itself is not infringing, IMHO.
Also, note that prior to Lindows, Microsoft did not oppose all the companies creating software packages with the name Windows in it. One of the things that Lindows did prior to the original arguments in this was to ask for people to provide them examples of software packages that did not originate with Microsoft yet contained the word "Windows".
Microsoft couldn't have won a lawsuit earlier because it was clear that they did not originate the term.
My understanding is that if you have a trademark but don't actively defend it, you can lose the trademark as it enters into common usage. If Microsoft had originated the term instead of adopting a generic name for their product, their failure to actively defend that trademark might easily have been sufficient for it to slip into generic usage.
Nothing to worry about.
I've stood within a couple feet of a fusion reaction. More precisely, within a couple feet of a small Tokamak during a reaction. That was in 1972.
There was a rather noisy pop that made me jump the first time, but that was about it.
I read an article a few years ago that said that Italy allows anyone to open a radio or tv station that wishes to do so.
According to the article the results were pretty interesting. An enormous choice of things to listen to, some with really limited interest to most of us. One example the article gave was a 24 hour Hare Krishna station broadcasting nothing but chanting 24 hours a day.
I've long wished that the same rights were available in the U.S. If the law was changed tomorrow, I'd be in the market tomorrow for the equipment to set up my own radio station. If it could reach 20 miles, I'd be happy.
Just one standard.
Microsoft, of course, follows their own non-standard, but they're going to do that anyway.
What we really need is a solution that is completely non-proprietary. A solution that no one company has any ability to control.
... )?
Can you imagine what the network would be like today if Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter) had patents that allowed them absolute control over any of the common protocols (telnet, ftp, http, smtp, pop3, imap,
Are they in any way responsbile for the portion of the crop they kill with the roundup?
I was wondering about that. Just how did they find out?
It's not only seeds of bioengineered plants.
With many proprietary seeds, you are not permitted to save some of the harvested crop and plant them the next year unless you have the permission of the company owning those rights.
Do a web search on "Plant Variety Protection Act"
More correctly, it should be bits/sec = bytes/sec * bits/byte since bits/byte is not canonically defined to be 8. In fact, there have been other computers that had other than 8 bits per byte.
For exmaple, the PDP-10 had 9 bits per byte and 4 bytes per word (36 bits).
I've also seen 7 bits per byte on some old 9-track tapes that came from, I think, a Honeywell computer.
How do we make it illegal to not be anti-spam?
What's to keep a big ISP from saying "It's not our problem. We're just the pipe and we aren't responsible for the contents."?
The way it is now, they are held somewhat responsible for the contents by the free market. Customers can easily switch to a competitor who does care about reducing/eliminating spam.
The only problem is that to check each message, you would have to connect to every server that allegedly sent a message.
By using a digital signature, you can cache the public key and verify future e-mails without the additional network traffic.
The real question, I guess, is which is the more expensive in terms of computation, bandwidth, and storing the messages while waiting for an answer. For many smaller ISPs and companies with limited bandwidth available, I think that using keys is preferable. For very large ISPs and companies with enormous numbers of users and who already have plenty of bandwidth available, it is quite possible that it may be preferable to trade bandwidth for computation.
Around here (small ISP in a rural area), the e-mail server is mostly idle but bandwidth is relatively expensive.
There would also be a problem with server failures. If you have three days of e-mail data on the computer and you have a drive failure, then all the e-mail that has not been verified would likely become undeliverable.
With a digital signature cached by the receiver, the amount of undeliverable e-mail in such a situation would be far less.
Why not have the e-mail server generate a PGP or GPG key to sign e-mail for authenitcated users who don't sign their own e-mail.
The purpose would be to prove to the recipient that the e-mail came from someone who authenticated themselves as the person listed as the sender. You couldn't use it for non-repudiation purposes.
I think it is far superior to SPF.
You have a known e-mail server that can vouch for each e-mail that it sends on behalf of it's customers. It is far tighter than SPF.
The one problem with domainkeys (based on my understanding of it) is that it just verifies that the e-mail came from the domain. It doesn't verify that the sender is the real sender.
What I'd prefer is for the e-mail servers to generate a separate PGP or GPG key for each user for signing the e-mail and signing only those e-mail sent by an authenticated user on the machine.
And instead of providing the key by DNS, extend SMTP to handle a key request.
When your server received an e-mail, say from joeblow@example.com, it would check the signature. If the public key for that sender wasn't cached, it would connect to the host the e-mail would come from if it is legitimate and request the key for that user.
It could also be done via mail. Send a request to joeblow-publickey@example.com and the sender would automagically reply with the public key for joeblow@example.com.
And it would be possible for a user to provide his public key to the server for it to use. That way, he could sign his own message instead of the e-mail machine.
There is no need to limit e-mail to the big ISPs. Are you suggesting that all the corporations and smaller ISPs purchase e-mail services from the bigger companies? What would that accomplish?
The major source of spam are machines that are compromised is true. The vast majority of such machines are not mail servers at all. Shunning all the small providers and companies might help reduce spam somewhat, but at an enormous expense.
If you accept e-mail only from legitimate e-mail servers, regardless of the size of the ISP or company, you would accomplish pretty much the same thing.
By the way, if the big ISPs have the market cornered on e-mail services, what makes you think they would be anti-spam? The larger reason that they are anti-spam is because of being blocked by the vast numbers of smaller ISPs and companies who pioneered the use of blacklists. Take away that and the big ISPs would love spam because they would be able to collect more money from their captive audience based on the volume of mail handled for that company or smaller ISP.
I paid up when they offered two licenses (Linux and Windoze) for the price of one.
There is one thing that I don't like about Opera. At one time on the windoze version, you could change the directories of where the information is stored. Then they took away that capability.
On a windoze computer, I really like to keep the operating system and programs on a separate drive from the data. That way, I can rebuild the system drive at will without losing any data.
The directory selections you can make with Opera change from release to release. On 7.50, about all you can do is set what directory it uses for downloads.
They could also use baffles to keep the water from sloshing around.
When I was in high school, I routinely hauled water to cattle in an old truck with a thousand gallon water tank.
The only time that it got dicey was if I used part of the water in one location and the rest in another.
With the tank half empty, the sloshing was unbelievable. If you weren't careful, it was entirely possible to turn the truck over.
There's also the T. Cullen Davis case.
Some people said that he was the first murder defendant in Texas that was richer than the state.
The article fails to note that a large number of the developers of Free and Open Source Software are foreign.
In fact, remember that Linux was began in Finnland, not the U.S.
Does this mean that we are importing free IP?
In reality, I agree that it will reduce the IP value of some companies. It won't eliminate it, but it will reduce it.
Is that such a bad thing?
It seems to me that if we eliminated software patents, the hardest hit would be those leach companies who patent some nebulous idea and then wait for real companies to develop something similar so they can hit them with enormous lawsuits. Would it be so bad if these firms all went under?
There would still be plenty of IP around. Those maintaining most or all of their IP would be those who use that IP for legitimate, constructive purposes instead of leaching off the work of others.
A good friend of mine in grad school used to regularly set up the problem, but never solve it.
I asked him why he did it that way. He said that some profs who will take off half or more for a simple calculation error but won't take off anything if you set everything up right. So, at some point, he had quit doing calculations on tests.
My guess is that although the guy was brilliant, he was prone to making minor errors on simple calculations.
When I was teaching math, I would let the students decide whether or not calculators would be allowed.
... " it would be "If John and Mary have X apples and oranges.
But I made sure they understood that if calculators were allowed, there would be fewer problems that they would help on.
For a trivial example, instead of "If John and Mary have 13 apples and oranges
Also, I was more concerned with how they were working the problem than the results. A simple calculation error was a minor deduction. Having the right answer without sufficient work to show they knew how they were doing would result in no credit at all for the problem.
I worked at one company where one of the new-hires started trying to mandate how many spaces to use for indents.
I couldn't believe it I showed up to a meeting one day and found out that the topic to be discussed at the meeting was why three spaces for indents was the one, true way.
Of all the best programmers I've known, only one doesn't have a strong math background.
Developing high quality software is a lot like proving a theorem -- you have to rigorously take care of every possibility.
Practice proving theorems also helps you structure your proofs so that they make sense.
For example, a non-mathemetician trying to show that A iff B is likely to just attempt one direction. If they do try to handle both, they're likely to merge the whole matter together into a mess that is nearly impossible to follow. And if you can't follow the proof because of the way it is presented, it is awfully hard to determine whether or not it is correct.
Hahahahahahahahahahaah
There are some math majors who don't want to program, but just about every programmer or software developer I've ever met who had a math degree were well above average. Those with master's degrees have always been outstanding.