I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.
Actually, it's more like PageRank is an excellent application to the web of citation analysis, a long-established area of research that looks at documents and references between them.
Poor people buy older cars. Older cars get worse gas mileage, therefore poor people pay more taxes.
There are plenty of older, fuel-efficient cars. The Honda Civic HF got 50 mpg in 1986, without fancy hybrid technology. There are plenty of other fuel efficient vehicles as well. Fuel efficiency has actually gotten worse over the last few years.
It's a chicken and the egg problem
Not really. If you gradually raise gas prices and stop building large numbers of new roads, the problem takes care of itself without causing any big problems: people will gradually and slowly switch to other technologies and pick more sensible places to live (closer to work, etc.).
That's why we should keep the current system of gas taxes and actually increase gas taxes: the poor can drive fuel efficient cars and get whereever they need to get, while the rich can drive whatever they want to.
$ Mail Subject: Achieve powerful e__e_r_ct|ons in seconds Subject: Cheap Som@, X(a)n@x, ValX(u)m, Viagr@ Di3t Pills Subject: laUnch ur missil ov luv Subject: Improves kidney function Subject: US gonna kill you dead Subject: Anti-aging Subject: Dynamite d*ck exploding Subject: The Med To Cure Ur Illness Subject: S_u_per V|@grg@ Subject: Give your partner more pleasure -- 137 more messages (hit q to stop) --
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence [...]
That's a good thing. Eyewitness accounts and outright confessions are among the least reliable "evidence" you can have. If CSI has raised awareness among the public of this fact, it has indeed done a public service.
I'm not sure about this but if Y! licensed a sub-licensable patent to party A, and A licensed it to B - how can Y! revoke B's license? There have been no contracts between Y! and B.
In any case, I don't know what happens in that case, you don't know what happens in that case, so it is therefore something that the contract should clarify.
Dedicating the patents would be ideal from an outsider's point of view; but who knows what's going on with executives and lawyers? Fiduciary responsibility, investor lawsuits - IANAL to know all the factors.
I don't doubt that it may be politically hard for people inside Yahoo! to sell this to management. But Yahoo!'s internal politics don't change what may be necessary for the community to accept this as a standard. And the people caught by corporate politics right now could have avoided the whole issue by just not patenting and publishing instead, which would have been for the good of the community and the good of Yahoo! Because a patent on a technique that nobody uses because of legal concerns is just a waste of money for them.
Robin Miller asks the question and makes the case for starting a business to sell a self-updating networked Linux system for small business. Any takers?
Imagine the rate of adoption if the OO team got off their dead asses and make OO behave exactly like MSO? I'm talking about duplicating the same shortcuts, toolbars, and menus.
OO already duplicates MSO quite closely. I suspect that if they get any closer, they may face copyright problems.
Furthermore, OO's purpose is not to duplicate MSO misfeature for misfeature. Many OO users are first-time users of any office suite and they really don't need to be burdened with all the things MSO gets wrong. OO tries to strike a balance.
Adding a "remove hyperlink" to the context menu is perhaps OK, but many other differences are there for a reason. If anything, OO could improve considerably if it weren't hamstrung by MSO compatibility.
1.1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract.
Probably. But lawyers have the term "irrevocable" to make that clear. If that term isn't being used, it's either an oversight that should get fixed, or it's a potential problem.
Also, a page of text posted on a web page isn't a legal agreement, so these terms only apply to people who do something more than just look at a web page.
Really the safest thing to do would be for Yahoo! to officially dedicate the patent to the public domain through the USPTO. I trust Yahoo! current management, but their management can change.
Perhaps, but then you may have to bug the providers of those browsers and devices to implement javascript sanely?
Even if they implemented JavaScript, it wouldn't help. What GMail is trying to do with JavaScript just doesn't work well on those devices anyway. In general, if you build a web GUI using JavaScript, all sorts of things stop working because proxies and other tools simply can't reliably interpret anymore what your GUI is trying to do.
Please tell me why it wouldn't be the sensible thing to do?
Because Google has lots of things they could be spending their limited time and resources on. An XUL client would appeal only to a small percentage of their users, and it probably makes more sense to direct their efforts elsewhere. If they really thought they wanted a web-based mail reader, standard DHTML, Java, or even ActiveX (yuck) would be more sensible business choices.
Nevertheless, reaching orbit is a goal of this program:
"This flight is a key milestone and a major step toward the future possibilities for producing boosters for sending large and critical payloads into space in a reliable, safe, inexpensive manner,"
The scramjet may be used as an efficient booster, halfway between liftoff and full orbit.
When their competitor comes out with a new product, Microsoft places pre-emptive calls to the media trying to preemptively kill their competitor:
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows who never writes or calls, told News.com that he and his team were "sharpening pencils" in efforts to get the word out about IE's new security features in the Windows XP Service Pack 2 release.
That sort of thing is maybe OK for a small startup; it's not OK for Microsoft or other large companies. The only difference to their past behavior is that Microsoft incorrectly thought they had won this battle already. Well, they killed Mozilla, but Mozilla is back from the dead, and once dead, there's no more dying then.
Microsoft is rather late. Smart card authentication is widely used already, even on Windows. Sun has been trying the same thing with JavaCard. Experience shows that it works in some environments and it doesn't work on others. And along with the security problems it solves, it also introduces new ones.
You cannot assume that information is right just because it was written down by supposedly "reputable" authors. You need to check every piece of information for internal consistency and consistency with many other sources. That's true whether you read the Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Between the two, I have found the Wikipedia to be the more useful. And I wouldn't trust the EB editors any more than the Wikipedia authors--EB has biases, too, they are just different.
It's not an open source approved license until it has been approved. For now, any Solaris source code you look at puts you at risk.
Furthermore, given their recent history, Sun will probably just talk to OSI for a while, then announce that there are some difficulties but that they have come up with a license on their own "that's just as good" (in their opinion at least), and publish Solaris under that. Sun's public statements about what they are and are not going to do with respect to opening APIs or source code simply can't be trusted anymore
Re:maybe it's just bloated?
on
How Tomcat Works
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, and also - all this reminds of when I herd ESR say in a talk that the markets cry for java was really a cry for FOSS.
It's ironic, though, that Java is anything but FOSS...
ANd, also I think it was a mistake to force the java solution to be a high level language.
I don't think that was necessarily bad. What was bad that they completely forgot about their original mission: lightweight clients. A decade later, we have another bloated server-side platform we don't need (Java), and we still don't have a decent, sandboxed client-side language (only Flash).
IMHO, the whole direction had completely thrown KISS out the window - either me or them are going insane.
The problem is with Sun and Sun's direction: they couldn't make thin clients work within a couple of years, so they changed course. If Microsoft had been in Sun's place, they would have pushed harder and longer, and they would have made it work.
maybe it's just bloated?
on
How Tomcat Works
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You should consider yourself lucky (or very brilliant) if you can understand how the system works in less than 3 months by browsing through its millions of lines of code.
If that's true, it sounds like it is bloated and not very well designed.
Out of curiousity, what makes opensource.org's definition any more "correct" than any other definition of "open source"?
They coined and popularized the term.
Many people on the web seem to have the idea that the term "open source" used to be a commonly used term synonymous with "source code is available under some conditions" before it got hijacked by the Open Source community; do a little research and you'll see that that is false.
Whatever the history, these days, if you apply the term "open source" to something that doesn't meet the opensource.org definitions, people are likely going to misinterpret what you are saying. And if a company deliberately uses the term "open source" to describe a restrictive source license in hopes that people will confuse their use with the opensource.org use, it's a deceptive use of the term. A less confusing term for software that is not open source but for which source code is available is "available source" or "software with source code available under license".
I fully expect Sun software like Java and Solaris is encumbered by design: it is encumbered because Sun management wants it to be.
The question you have to ask yourself is whether you are willing to live with Sun's onerous licenses or not. In particular, until they are released under a truly open source license, looking at either Java or Solaris source code may be a career limiting move, and it will certainly limit your ability to participate in similar open source projects.
AFAIK, OpenOffice.org is covered by the GPL, so it is safe. It is also a valuable contribution to the open source community.
Ultimately, the question is not to determine whether Sun is a "nice" company, but whether every single piece of software, on its own, comes with a license that is safe and effective. For OpenOffice.org, the answer is "yes". For Java and Solaris, the answer seems to be "no".
The term "free software" has a specific, well-defined meaning, and it looks like Sun is deliberately misusing the term in order to dilute it. This is on the heels of their arguments that "open source" can mean many different things, not just what opensource.org says it means.
No matter whether you believe that those terms are ambiguous, this is still bait and switch: Sun wants to have the good-will and recognition of "free" and "open source" software without actually delivering it.
One should also be suspicious of Sun promises to release something as "open source later". Sun has made several such promises in the past and later renegged on them. Sun is not trustworthy when it comes to such promises.
Until Sun releases software under a recognized open source or free software license, do not look at it unless you know exactly what you are doing: not only is it a waste of time trying to do their software engineering for them, if you are working on a competing proprietary or open source product (e.g., the Linux kernel), looking at the Solaris code may taint you. Source releases that are not under a recognized open source license are a legal mine field. This is true both for Solaris and for Java (and anything else from Sun or any other company.)
Yes, and that's a good thing: ftp is one of the few command line programs on Windows that a UNIX geek can relate to because it still behaves a little like one is used to. If 95% of Windows were built that way, Windows would be a much better OS.
How much would they get paid WITHOUT a patent system, though?
Just about the same as before, since these people already have productive jobs: usually, they are software developers, engineers, or academics. If they didn't, Myhrvold wouldn't be able to hire them for just a day.
How does it "encourage creative development"? How much do you think the company is paying their academic idea generators? I doubt the people who come up with the ideas can do well on that kind of money.
Slashdot Mirror
I also noticed that Google Scholar lists how many times a paper is cited by other works. This seems like an excellent use of PageRank technology.
Actually, it's more like PageRank is an excellent application to the web of citation analysis, a long-established area of research that looks at documents and references between them.
Poor people buy older cars. Older cars get worse gas mileage, therefore poor people pay more taxes.
There are plenty of older, fuel-efficient cars. The Honda Civic HF got 50 mpg in 1986, without fancy hybrid technology. There are plenty of other fuel efficient vehicles as well. Fuel efficiency has actually gotten worse over the last few years.
It's a chicken and the egg problem
Not really. If you gradually raise gas prices and stop building large numbers of new roads, the problem takes care of itself without causing any big problems: people will gradually and slowly switch to other technologies and pick more sensible places to live (closer to work, etc.).
That's why we should keep the current system of gas taxes and actually increase gas taxes: the poor can drive fuel efficient cars and get whereever they need to get, while the rich can drive whatever they want to.
prosecutors throughout the country now worry about juries that refuse to accept eyewitness accounts or even outright confessions, and instead exclusively demand the kind of forensic evidence [...]
That's a good thing. Eyewitness accounts and outright confessions are among the least reliable "evidence" you can have. If CSI has raised awareness among the public of this fact, it has indeed done a public service.
I'm not sure about this but if Y! licensed a sub-licensable patent to party A, and A licensed it to B - how can Y! revoke B's license? There have been no contracts between Y! and B.
In any case, I don't know what happens in that case, you don't know what happens in that case, so it is therefore something that the contract should clarify.
Dedicating the patents would be ideal from an outsider's point of view; but who knows what's going on with executives and lawyers? Fiduciary responsibility, investor lawsuits - IANAL to know all the factors.
I don't doubt that it may be politically hard for people inside Yahoo! to sell this to management. But Yahoo!'s internal politics don't change what may be necessary for the community to accept this as a standard. And the people caught by corporate politics right now could have avoided the whole issue by just not patenting and publishing instead, which would have been for the good of the community and the good of Yahoo! Because a patent on a technique that nobody uses because of legal concerns is just a waste of money for them.
Robin Miller asks the question and makes the case for starting a business to sell a self-updating networked Linux system for small business. Any takers?
Yes
Imagine the rate of adoption if the OO team got off their dead asses and make OO behave exactly like MSO? I'm talking about duplicating the same shortcuts, toolbars, and menus.
OO already duplicates MSO quite closely. I suspect that if they get any closer, they may face copyright problems.
Furthermore, OO's purpose is not to duplicate MSO misfeature for misfeature. Many OO users are first-time users of any office suite and they really don't need to be burdened with all the things MSO gets wrong. OO tries to strike a balance.
Adding a "remove hyperlink" to the context menu is perhaps OK, but many other differences are there for a reason. If anything, OO could improve considerably if it weren't hamstrung by MSO compatibility.
1.1. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, DomainKeys Developer hereby grants You, a royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable, non-exclusive license under its rights to the Yahoo! Patent Claims to make, use, sell, offer for sale, and/or import Implementations.
IANAL, but to me it means that once I obtain this license, I can sub-license it to someone else without Yahoo! being involved in the contract.
Probably. But lawyers have the term "irrevocable" to make that clear. If that term isn't being used, it's either an oversight that should get fixed, or it's a potential problem.
Also, a page of text posted on a web page isn't a legal agreement, so these terms only apply to people who do something more than just look at a web page.
Really the safest thing to do would be for Yahoo! to officially dedicate the patent to the public domain through the USPTO. I trust Yahoo! current management, but their management can change.
Perhaps, but then you may have to bug the providers of those browsers and devices to implement javascript sanely?
Even if they implemented JavaScript, it wouldn't help. What GMail is trying to do with JavaScript just doesn't work well on those devices anyway. In general, if you build a web GUI using JavaScript, all sorts of things stop working because proxies and other tools simply can't reliably interpret anymore what your GUI is trying to do.
Please tell me why it wouldn't be the sensible thing to do?
Because Google has lots of things they could be spending their limited time and resources on. An XUL client would appeal only to a small percentage of their users, and it probably makes more sense to direct their efforts elsewhere. If they really thought they wanted a web-based mail reader, standard DHTML, Java, or even ActiveX (yuck) would be more sensible business choices.
The scramjet may be used as an efficient booster, halfway between liftoff and full orbit.
Large companies generally don't do patent searches for the same reasons: it isn't worth the cost and it actually worsens their legal exposure.
The term "due dilligence" doesn't really apply here anyway; "due dilligence" is something that matters in professional investment decisions.
That sort of thing is maybe OK for a small startup; it's not OK for Microsoft or other large companies. The only difference to their past behavior is that Microsoft incorrectly thought they had won this battle already. Well, they killed Mozilla, but Mozilla is back from the dead, and once dead, there's no more dying then.
Microsoft is rather late. Smart card authentication is widely used already, even on Windows. Sun has been trying the same thing with JavaCard. Experience shows that it works in some environments and it doesn't work on others. And along with the security problems it solves, it also introduces new ones.
You cannot assume that information is right just because it was written down by supposedly "reputable" authors. You need to check every piece of information for internal consistency and consistency with many other sources. That's true whether you read the Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Between the two, I have found the Wikipedia to be the more useful. And I wouldn't trust the EB editors any more than the Wikipedia authors--EB has biases, too, they are just different.
It's not an open source approved license until it has been approved. For now, any Solaris source code you look at puts you at risk.
Furthermore, given their recent history, Sun will probably just talk to OSI for a while, then announce that there are some difficulties but that they have come up with a license on their own "that's just as good" (in their opinion at least), and publish Solaris under that. Sun's public statements about what they are and are not going to do with respect to opening APIs or source code simply can't be trusted anymore
Oh, and also - all this reminds of when I herd ESR say in a talk that the markets cry for java was really a cry for FOSS.
It's ironic, though, that Java is anything but FOSS...
ANd, also I think it was a mistake to force the java solution to be a high level language.
I don't think that was necessarily bad. What was bad that they completely forgot about their original mission: lightweight clients. A decade later, we have another bloated server-side platform we don't need (Java), and we still don't have a decent, sandboxed client-side language (only Flash).
IMHO, the whole direction had completely thrown KISS out the window - either me or them are going insane.
The problem is with Sun and Sun's direction: they couldn't make thin clients work within a couple of years, so they changed course. If Microsoft had been in Sun's place, they would have pushed harder and longer, and they would have made it work.
You should consider yourself lucky (or very brilliant) if you can understand how the system works in less than 3 months by browsing through its millions of lines of code.
If that's true, it sounds like it is bloated and not very well designed.
Out of curiousity, what makes opensource.org's definition any more "correct" than any other definition of "open source"?
They coined and popularized the term.
Many people on the web seem to have the idea that the term "open source" used to be a commonly used term synonymous with "source code is available under some conditions" before it got hijacked by the Open Source community; do a little research and you'll see that that is false.
Whatever the history, these days, if you apply the term "open source" to something that doesn't meet the opensource.org definitions, people are likely going to misinterpret what you are saying. And if a company deliberately uses the term "open source" to describe a restrictive source license in hopes that people will confuse their use with the opensource.org use, it's a deceptive use of the term. A less confusing term for software that is not open source but for which source code is available is "available source" or "software with source code available under license".
I fully expect Sun software like Java and Solaris is encumbered by design: it is encumbered because Sun management wants it to be.
The question you have to ask yourself is whether you are willing to live with Sun's onerous licenses or not. In particular, until they are released under a truly open source license, looking at either Java or Solaris source code may be a career limiting move, and it will certainly limit your ability to participate in similar open source projects.
OpenOffice.org?
AFAIK, OpenOffice.org is covered by the GPL, so it is safe. It is also a valuable contribution to the open source community.
Ultimately, the question is not to determine whether Sun is a "nice" company, but whether every single piece of software, on its own, comes with a license that is safe and effective. For OpenOffice.org, the answer is "yes". For Java and Solaris, the answer seems to be "no".
The term "free software" has a specific, well-defined meaning, and it looks like Sun is deliberately misusing the term in order to dilute it. This is on the heels of their arguments that "open source" can mean many different things, not just what opensource.org says it means.
No matter whether you believe that those terms are ambiguous, this is still bait and switch: Sun wants to have the good-will and recognition of "free" and "open source" software without actually delivering it.
One should also be suspicious of Sun promises to release something as "open source later". Sun has made several such promises in the past and later renegged on them. Sun is not trustworthy when it comes to such promises.
Until Sun releases software under a recognized open source or free software license, do not look at it unless you know exactly what you are doing: not only is it a waste of time trying to do their software engineering for them, if you are working on a competing proprietary or open source product (e.g., the Linux kernel), looking at the Solaris code may taint you. Source releases that are not under a recognized open source license are a legal mine field. This is true both for Solaris and for Java (and anything else from Sun or any other company.)
Yes, and that's a good thing: ftp is one of the few command line programs on Windows that a UNIX geek can relate to because it still behaves a little like one is used to. If 95% of Windows were built that way, Windows would be a much better OS.
How much would they get paid WITHOUT a patent system, though?
Just about the same as before, since these people already have productive jobs: usually, they are software developers, engineers, or academics. If they didn't, Myhrvold wouldn't be able to hire them for just a day.
How does it "encourage creative development"? How much do you think the company is paying their academic idea generators? I doubt the people who come up with the ideas can do well on that kind of money.