I've just read the Patent Policy WG FAQ and I have grave concerns about the
world wide web consortium pursuing this avenue.
The value of the W3C is dependent on the value of the standards it
promulgates. The value of those standards depends on their widest adoption by
the global internet community. Adoption by the internet community is
dependent on the ease and value of implementing those standards.
As a member of the internet community since 1984, I've seen a few standards
come and go.
As an inventor with a few patents, I know exactly what the value of patents
are. Companies and individuals do not go through the work of obtaining
patents because it is fun, or inexpensive. They do so with the intention of
profiting from them before they expire.
Allowing patented technologies to become w3c standards will benefit no one
except the patent holder. Having the internet community given the choice of
supporting w3c standards and paying license fees or developing non-patented
pseudo-standards will result in a plethora of divergent and redundant
standards in use. The value of the w3c will go into the toilet.
I urge you to disband the working group and abandon this policy from
consideration.
regards,
Dr. Andrew E. Mossberg,
Chief Technical Officer, Asoki Corporation
Chief Information Officer, CruisExcursions.com
President, Inicom, Inc.
Director, Fuzzy Theory LLC.
I agree with the writers who point out that many of the pilot episodes were of similar ilk - the actors have not had a lot of opportunity to flesh out their characters, the sets and props are still version one, and so on. I think this, like TNG, will come around and develop into one of the better ST properties.
Personnel-wise, Commander whats-his-name is the weakest of the apparently planned-for-longevity characters, but so was Commander Riker - and he grew into a brief period of acting skill before his demise into obseity and caricature.
Set/prop-wise, I would've been happier with a more 50's space-ship style. The ship they're on looks more futuristic than the original series. In one of the original episodes, wasn't there models of the previous iterations of the starship? They should have used the "oldest" of those as the model.
As an viewer of the original series during its first season broadcasts with my grandfather, I thought it was very very cool to watch this premiere with my 4-mo old son!
The analogy with the attack on Pearl Harbour is completely unfair and inaccurate. The attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour was an attack on an exclusively military target, during wartime, shortly after declaration of war against the US.
As a side note, the US and Gerrmany were already at War, and the Pacific theatre, while not the center of action, did have German vessels.
In short, Pearl Harbour, while a surprise and disaster to the US, was not a terrorist attack.
Todays horrific attacks were terrorist in nature, apparently without advance warning, and against predominantly civilian targets.
Today's attacks were not by brave but misguided soldiers, but perpetrated by cowards.
Personally, I preferred erector sets and the ability to build real devices. It wasn't really until mindstorms that lego had similar abilities.
Erector sets have had the same struggles to remain a presence in the household. They and their european counterpart Meccano are still somewhat alive though: www.meccano.com
I've had HP95LX, HP100LX, HP200LX, HP320LX, Palm IIIx, Agenda VR3 and now a Yopy.
None have the functionality that I want out of the box: reliable, syncable, contacts and calendar, email, web browser, easy-to-use notepad, and some means of always on internet access.
So far, the closest to what I need has been the HP100/200. Wireless slow access was available, as was a text-only web browser. The Palm 3x is in second place.
At this point (having had a yopy for 2 hours ) I'd say that the agenda vr3 is in last place. The best handwriting recognition was the palm, followed by the yopy.
None of them fully meet my basic needs, let alone offer the nice-to-haves like support for the handykey, or a wireless retina head mounted display.
In my own hiring, CS students from local community colleges with no experience and little understanding of real world programming scoff at positions offering less than $25/hr.
Meanwhile, I can hire foreign graduate students who've finished their masters degree under the Practical Training provision of their student visa for less than $15/hr. And these are people who typically worked for years in the field in their home countries before coming to the US for their masters.
Unless I've had a brain embolism, my memory is that when EB was first on the web, they were NOT FREE. They were charging for access (and their CD set was significantly more expensive than it is now).
Then they announced free access, and their web site melted down. It stayed down for several weeks I believe, with a placeholder page announcing their triumphant return at some point.
When it was restored, it was free, and since then there has been a steady increase in the number of ads on article pages including the oh-so-lovely x10 pop-ups.
So their current switch to a subscription is not a unprecedented change, it is a return to the original EB charging for access.
Personally, I don't have a problem with $5/month for EB access, if I needed it. EB articles are generally well-written, and it would cost me at least $3 to go to the library plus my time to see a 2 to 5 year old version of the EB. On the other hand, for most research purposes, my 18-year-old copy of EB still suffices.
the l engine found it in a couple places.
rotational clue is/banc/fpbQ/ohc/gra.hqrbe.gfrenupho.anzveun//:cggu
windows and linux and viewer at that one.
my experience is that during the boom some tech employees jumped from job to job based on whoever offered the best salary or perks that week. A good and reasonable non-compete (say, 3 months) discourages job hopping.
On the other hand, companies refusing to hire people with a history of job hopping is even better.
If your superiors either in the contract agency or the military agreed to let you use the GPL, without them understanding what that meant, chances are their permission is arguably invalid.
If you have a contract with the contract agency, or they have one with the military, chances are that there are terms in those contracts regarding intellectual property and work-for-hire that supercede your desire to license the code you worked on under the GPL.
You may not have any say in distribution of the code.
Excellent comment, and it points out the lack of historical accuracy in Hubert's statement. Linus did not take GNU and change the kernel. There was no friggin Gnu kernel. Hurd was a (mere) concept at the time, not an actual working kernel. [side note: Linus might've been able to take a shortcut if he had used the Mach kernel as a springboard like OSF and Hurd eventually did!] "GNU" consisted of a respectable collection of tools, and that's all.
If anything, the comment could have been re-phrased better as Linus+Minix+(gnu tools)=Linux, but (apologies to Andy Tannebaum) I don't believe Linus ever used any of the minix source on his development path, since he says just that in the initial announcement of his plans.
I used to use APL on a Univac 1100. Not only was it a pretty cool language to code in because of the cryptic symbols, I had a teleterm-1030 APL portable printing terminal with a dual apl/ascii keyboard. Just being able to identify all of the symbols was an accomplishment, and serious programs only took up a few lines of code.
IMHO, it was more fun than lisp, and less parenthesis-counting. But a completely different programming paradigm than any other language I ever used.
aem
Gopher was a very limited system, in protocol and navigation capabilities. It was superceded because http/html was vastly superior. The whole basis of the web is in hyperlinks! I think the whole idea of gopher was to make text document retrieval marginally easier for people unable to grok ftp.
I ran a gopher server in oct/nov 1991, and a wais server in dec 1992. Wais had potential and true utility, but gopher was a complete waste of time.
that Nader was a contender, but unfortunately given the electoral college, only Gore and Bushy are. Given the choice become a hazy amti-internet nebulican or a conservative neo-libertarian, I think that any semi-conscious person must choose Gore. Tipper, while cute, it *way* too conservative, and Bush (is he even married, other than to the bottle?) scares even reactionary cubo-intellectuals.
Bind has not been around "ever since the net was made". Back in the old days when the web was just an experiment in another type of hypertext, and X10 was recent history, the arpa hosts table defined every site on the net that mattered. And any site that mattered peridocially downloaded the whole hosts table and updated their/etc/hosts.
I got DSL from BellSouth since they were the only ones offering residential adsl 10 or so months ago. Relatively few problems (~40hours of down time in 10 months). But, right after I got it, they switched from bridged-adsl to pppoe, and *everyone* with pppoe in miami has continual problems. Bellsouth.net provides the dsl service, but they have to deal with bellsouth the phone company for the dsl connection to the home, and uunet for the internet connection. Just because it is sold under the "BellSouth" umbrella doesn't mean it is any easier to get problems corrected.
FWIW, The fewest problems any of my friends have had have been with mindspring adsl in miami.
Another post had a good point too: I used to manage a System/34. The thing was huge, power hungry, had a rubber belt that came off the disk drive ocassionally, and had WIRE-WRAPPED circuit boards.
It was up for months between reboots, and was a real workhorse. It did the jobs that the BUSINESS needed, and did them reliably. And that's what you want in a business environment.
If Linux gets ported to more proven hardware platforms, that's good for Linux. It may not impress those of us who enjoy the bleeding edge, but it helps CUSTOMERS sleep at night.
Unfortunately, it has a learning curve and I haven't had time to get proficient. It also has the current drawbacks of requiring special drivers, and it uses the serial port instead of the keyboard port.
"Real Soon Now" HandyKey is supposed to come out with the Twiddler 2, which will connect to and use for I/O the keyboard and mouse ports.
You'll still have the learning curve, but at least you won't have to deal with the bad existing Linux drivers out there.
Slashdot Mirror
According to that site It is not available for the north american market.
aem
My comments as send to the PPWG:
Hello,
I've just read the Patent Policy WG FAQ and I have grave concerns about the
world wide web consortium pursuing this avenue.
The value of the W3C is dependent on the value of the standards it
promulgates. The value of those standards depends on their widest adoption by
the global internet community. Adoption by the internet community is
dependent on the ease and value of implementing those standards.
As a member of the internet community since 1984, I've seen a few standards
come and go.
As an inventor with a few patents, I know exactly what the value of patents
are. Companies and individuals do not go through the work of obtaining
patents because it is fun, or inexpensive. They do so with the intention of
profiting from them before they expire.
Allowing patented technologies to become w3c standards will benefit no one
except the patent holder. Having the internet community given the choice of
supporting w3c standards and paying license fees or developing non-patented
pseudo-standards will result in a plethora of divergent and redundant
standards in use. The value of the w3c will go into the toilet.
I urge you to disband the working group and abandon this policy from
consideration.
regards,
Dr. Andrew E. Mossberg,
Chief Technical Officer, Asoki Corporation
Chief Information Officer, CruisExcursions.com
President, Inicom, Inc.
Director, Fuzzy Theory LLC.
I agree with the writers who point out that many of the pilot episodes were of similar ilk - the actors have not had a lot of opportunity to flesh out their characters, the sets and props are still version one, and so on. I think this, like TNG, will come around and develop into one of the better ST properties.
Personnel-wise, Commander whats-his-name is the weakest of the apparently planned-for-longevity characters, but so was Commander Riker - and he grew into a brief period of acting skill before his demise into obseity and caricature.
Set/prop-wise, I would've been happier with a more 50's space-ship style. The ship they're on looks more futuristic than the original series. In one of the original episodes, wasn't there models of the previous iterations of the starship? They should have used the "oldest" of those as the model.
As an viewer of the original series during its first season broadcasts with my grandfather, I thought it was very very cool to watch this premiere with my 4-mo old son!
aem
The analogy with the attack on Pearl Harbour is completely unfair and inaccurate. The attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour was an attack on an exclusively military target, during wartime, shortly after declaration of war against the US.
As a side note, the US and Gerrmany were already at War, and the Pacific theatre, while not the center of action, did have German vessels.
In short, Pearl Harbour, while a surprise and disaster to the US, was not a terrorist attack.
Todays horrific attacks were terrorist in nature, apparently without advance warning, and against predominantly civilian targets.
Today's attacks were not by brave but misguided soldiers, but perpetrated by cowards.
Personally, I preferred erector sets and the ability to build real devices. It wasn't really until mindstorms that lego had similar abilities.
Erector sets have had the same struggles to remain a presence in the household. They and their european counterpart Meccano are still somewhat alive though: www.meccano.com
(before erector sets, I played with Lincoln Logs)
I've had HP95LX, HP100LX, HP200LX, HP320LX, Palm IIIx, Agenda VR3 and now a Yopy.
None have the functionality that I want out of the box: reliable, syncable, contacts and calendar, email, web browser, easy-to-use notepad, and some means of always on internet access.
So far, the closest to what I need has been the HP100/200. Wireless slow access was available, as was a text-only web browser. The Palm 3x is in second place.
At this point (having had a yopy for 2 hours ) I'd say that the agenda vr3 is in last place. The best handwriting recognition was the palm, followed by the yopy.
None of them fully meet my basic needs, let alone offer the nice-to-haves like support for the handykey, or a wireless retina head mounted display.
Meanwhile, I can hire foreign graduate students who've finished their masters degree under the Practical Training provision of their student visa for less than $15/hr. And these are people who typically worked for years in the field in their home countries before coming to the US for their masters.
Then they announced free access, and their web site melted down. It stayed down for several weeks I believe, with a placeholder page announcing their triumphant return at some point.
When it was restored, it was free, and since then there has been a steady increase in the number of ads on article pages including the oh-so-lovely x10 pop-ups.
So their current switch to a subscription is not a unprecedented change, it is a return to the original EB charging for access.
Personally, I don't have a problem with $5/month for EB access, if I needed it. EB articles are generally well-written, and it would cost me at least $3 to go to the library plus my time to see a 2 to 5 year old version of the EB. On the other hand, for most research purposes, my 18-year-old copy of EB still suffices.
aem
the l engine found it in a couple places. rotational clue is /banc/fpbQ/ohc/gra.hqrbe.gfrenupho.anzveun//:cggu
windows and linux and viewer at that one.
On the other hand, companies refusing to hire people with a history of job hopping is even better.
If you have a contract with the contract agency, or they have one with the military, chances are that there are terms in those contracts regarding intellectual property and work-for-hire that supercede your desire to license the code you worked on under the GPL.
You may not have any say in distribution of the code.
"GNU" consisted of a respectable collection of tools, and that's all.
If anything, the comment could have been re-phrased better as Linus+Minix+(gnu tools)=Linux, but (apologies to Andy Tannebaum) I don't believe Linus ever used any of the minix source on his development path, since he says just that in the initial announcement of his plans.
aem
I used to use APL on a Univac 1100. Not only was it a pretty cool language to code in because of the cryptic symbols, I had a teleterm-1030 APL portable printing terminal with a dual apl/ascii keyboard. Just being able to identify all of the symbols was an accomplishment, and serious programs only took up a few lines of code. IMHO, it was more fun than lisp, and less parenthesis-counting. But a completely different programming paradigm than any other language I ever used. aem
Gopher was a very limited system, in protocol and navigation capabilities. It was superceded because http/html was vastly superior. The whole basis of the web is in hyperlinks! I think the whole idea of gopher was to make text document retrieval marginally easier for people unable to grok ftp.
I ran a gopher server in oct/nov 1991, and a wais server in dec 1992. Wais had potential and true utility, but gopher was a complete waste of time.
aem
We're six months behind you in our first release, tentively named Thor, or maybe Naiad.
-aem
that Nader was a contender, but unfortunately given the electoral college, only Gore and Bushy are. Given the choice become a hazy amti-internet nebulican or a conservative neo-libertarian, I think that any semi-conscious person must choose Gore. Tipper, while cute, it *way* too conservative, and Bush (is he even married, other than to the bottle?) scares even reactionary cubo-intellectuals.
In Florida, Bush has run ads saying he will implement MANDATORY INTERNET CONTENT FILTERS to protect our families.
My site was MTHVAX
Curious that no one has listed the links for the Page, Company, or Source Code. Let alone the Forum or associated presentation. Maybe this will help: http://www.networkice.com/altivore/
i did, but not until circa 85
aem
Asoki Total System Care
Inicom, Inc.
aem
FWIW, The fewest problems any of my friends have had have been with mindspring adsl in miami.
aem
Another post had a good point too: I used to manage a System/34. The thing was huge, power hungry, had a rubber belt that came off the disk drive ocassionally, and had WIRE-WRAPPED circuit boards.
It was up for months between reboots, and was a real workhorse. It did the jobs that the BUSINESS needed, and did them reliably. And that's what you want in a business environment.
If Linux gets ported to more proven hardware platforms, that's good for Linux. It may not impress those of us who enjoy the bleeding edge, but it helps CUSTOMERS sleep at night.
aem
Unfortunately, it has a learning curve and I haven't had time to get proficient. It also has the current drawbacks of requiring special drivers, and it uses the serial port instead of the keyboard port.
"Real Soon Now" HandyKey is supposed to come out with the Twiddler 2, which will connect to and use for I/O the keyboard and mouse ports.
You'll still have the learning curve, but at least you won't have to deal with the bad existing Linux drivers out there.
Andrew Mossberg
Inicom, Inc.